Migrating Characters: Metafiction in <em>Don Quijote</em> and the <em>Aeneid</em>

Abstract

Migrating Characters: Metafiction in Don Quijote and the Aeneid THOMAS RENDALL As is well known, when Cervantes was nearly finished with the second volume of Don Quijote, he discovered to his great irritation that an anonymous author who called himself Avellaneda had capitalized on the popularity of the novel’s first part by publishing a continuation. Rushing to complete his own Secunda parte, Cervantes took revenge by incorporating discrediting references to the pirated story throughout his remaining chapters. These attacks begin in Part II, Chapter 59, when the knight overhears fellow inn guests discussing a version of his adventures in which he is no longer in love with Dulcinea. After a brief conversation, the other lodgers acknowledge that the Don Quijote whose story they have been reading is purely fictitious and that the real knight is present before them. Since Avellaneda’s Don Quijote fulfills a prediction in Part I of Cervantes’ book that his hero will participate in jousts at Zaragoza, the authentic Don Quijote spitefully decides instead to travel to Barcelona. When the knight enters that city, he is welcomed as the real Don Quijote, not the false one whose adventures had recently been printed (507/867).1 After his defeat by the Knight of the Mirrors and promise to give up knight-errantry, Don Quijote is one last time entertained at the estate of the Duke and Duchess, where an elaborate trick is played in which an ostensibly love-stricken lady-in-waiting returns from the dead to report she had witnessed devils playing tennis using books for balls. One of these was the spurious continuation: “Quitádmele de ahí,” shouts one of the fiends, “Metedle en arion 28.1 spring/summer 2020 56 migrating characters los abismos del infierno,” and when another asks if it is so bad answers, “Tan malo . . . que si de propósito yo mismo me pusiera a hacerle peor, no acertara” (“Away with it . . . throw it into the pit of hell . . . so bad that if I were to set myself deliberately to make it worse I couldn’t,” 566/918). That Don Quijote and Sancho learn they have become famous through their exploits being published in a “chronicle,” that they examine this text (the first part of Don Quijote) and find it full of mistakes, that they become aware of the pirated continuation—all of these elements of self-reference have been hailed as modern and even post-modern.1 However, in Chapter 72 knight and squire actually meet a character from Avellaneda’s story, Don Alvaro Tarfe. Up to this point the porosity of the boundary between real and fictional has been surprising and entertaining. Fictional characters have been commenting on a situation in the real world—the publication of an apocryphal story which contains characters who resemble them. But Cervantes has reserved his most audacious metafictional masterstroke for last. As it turns out, the reader is not to imagine, as we might expect, that another author has created fictional characters having bogus adventures based on Cervantes’ “real” Don Quijote and Sancho, but rather that Avellaneda has been writing about equally real characters who have been going around Spain in the flesh pretending to be Cervantes’ knight and squire. Don Alvaro tells Don Quijote that the man impersonating him is a friend of his and is at present locked up in a Toledo insane asylum. In short, the characters of Avellaneda’s novel are revealed to be as “real” as those of Cervantes’, and Don Quijote and Sancho have become victims of what we today call “identity theft”! Following a lengthy discussion, Cervantes’ Don Quijote forces Don Alvaro to acknowledge that he has been deceived by imposters, and he agrees to make a sworn declaration that “no he visto lo que he visto, ni ha pasado por mí lo que ha pasado” (“I didn’t see what I did see, and that what happened to me didn’t happen” (578/928). Thomas Rendall 57 The hilarious absurdity of this situation has few parallels, even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Works in which fictional characters come alive and enter the world of the narrator or reader and in which the...