Male Postpartum Preface: Cervantes and Lord Byron’s Prefaces to Don Quixote and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to attend to the preface as an important element in understanding the symbiotic relationship between author and text, especially when a male author assumes the female power of procreation. In the prefaces to Don Quixote Part I and II and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cervantes and Lord Byron, respectively, identify their main heroes as their 'child of the imagination/brain '. Nevertheless, in many instances we encounter moments of anxiety manifested in a dialectic of engagement and disengagement, owning and disowning, of denying and defending theirfictional personages. To Cervantes, Don Quixote is "child of his brain", the son, and yet hes also the stepson, who eventually ends up no more than a brave knight; to Byron, as well, Childe Harold was initially called Childe Burun, but later on is referred to as just a "fictitious character" from whom Byron tried to disengage throughout the poem. This equivocal and dialectical discourse ofembracement and abandonment could be better understood by extending the birthing metaphor to encompass postpartum anxiety. In the prefaces, both Cervantes and Byron Platonic male spiritual pregnancy is combined with the female physical and psychological symptoms of giving birth and its qftermath. Thus, the preface becomes a birth certificate not only legitimizing the hero, but also problematizing the parental relationship between father/author and son/text or hem, for it involves more than the ontological history Of the hem or the text.