La construcción del personaje en Cervantes

Abstract

Human identity is not given and stable, but constantly under construction. Reality can only be known indirectly, through some form of representation. There is no essential difference between the categories of literary character (personaje) and real person (persona). Both are construed by a reader/observer, on the basis of observable, verifiable data (“text,” “discourse,” “signifier”) and reasonable inference of aspects not visible on the surface (“story,” “signified”). An unconscious dimension can be inferred (construed) for verisimilar literary characters as for real people. Literary characters are composed of properties of “discourse” and properties of “story” supplied by readers both within and outside the text. Within texts, characters are constructed by themselves, their fellow characters, and their narrators. Examples are Belica/Isabel and Pedro in Pedro de Urdemalas, and Cardenio in Don Quijote I, leading to Don Quijote himself and his overdetermined self-fashioning. Outside the text, characters are constructed by authors and then reconstructed by readers. Any reader's first mission is to reconstruct the “story” from the “discourse.” The author-textual person-reader relationship is studied in relation to Don Quijote (fiction) and “Serbantes” of the 1580 Información de Argel (fact).