Iberian Peninsula

Abstract

Perhaps it is Mikhailbakhtin'sdefinition of the novel as an internally dialogized form of discourse that most usefully helps to discriminate between forms of narrative with a view to tracing something like a genealogy of the novel in the Iberian Peninsula. Nearly every other criterion seems inadequate. For instance, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's famous insertion of literary criticism in the second part ofDon Quixote(1605, 1615)—which Carlos Fuentes deemed the mark of the genre's modernity—hinges on self‐re‐flexivity and thus on the distinction betweenrealismand fantasy (seescience fiction), but only retrospectively did literary histories associate this “realist” work with the emergence of a new genre called “novel.” Cervantes merely distinguished between good and bad books, qualifying his statements by employing contemporary criteria of style as well as plausibility. There is no point in sketching a précis of the history of the various Iberian literatures in the vernacular, which is something that only ignorance would attempt. Nor is it possible to outline long‐term trends without great vagueness. The novel is a genre with many species and individuals. But, short of formulating a synthesis, it is possible, I believe, to recognize—in the various degrees of reality and fantasy, of object‐directed and consciousness‐directed discourse that make the long history of Iberian narrative—the novel's remarkable mastery of a universe of discourse, in short, its heteroglossia (Bakhtin's term for this genre's refraction of the author's intention through multiple voices). The basic form of this refraction, dialogism, anchors the narrative in someone else's discourse, breaking up the object into linguistically mediated points of view, which, when fully developed, give rise to a polyphony of voices (seenarrative perspective). The incidence and importance of this feature is my primary guide in selecting from the mass of narrative in five languages some landmarks of Iberian fiction in an unabashedly subjective manner, hoping to provideoneaccount of the vitality of the novel in the Iberian Peninsula.