El detalle de una "historia verdadera": Don Quijote y Bernal Díaz

Abstract

The emphasis of Don Quixote on the suppression of details in an “historia verdadera” is compared to that of the homonymous “relación de fechos” of Bernal Díaz —a report sent to Spain from Guatemala in 1575— within a combined approach of literary theory (“historicist narratology”) and historiographical contextualization. Both Bernal Díaz and Don Quixote are considered here as homodiegetic narrators (Genette). Though Cervantes's connections with the “Crónica Indiana” are examined, the focus is on Bernal's work, as a precedent to Cervantes's narratological experiments with the textual function of details (editorial interventions, discontinuity of narrative voices, and impending interruption of the narration —all studied through Prince's “disnarrated”). The detail's main function is shown to be that of pointing to the suppressions occurring on the diegetic level, rather than the enforcement of mimetic verisimilitude in the level of the events narrated.