Abstract
The present article attempts to illustrate the metaphorical use of an old symbol, the “world as book,” in Cervantes's final work, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. The novelist's playfulness is accompanied by profound meditations on the role of art and on the well established comparison, introduced by Renaissance treatises, of painting with poetry. Contemplating a contemporary polemic on behalf of the liberality of painting, Cervantes reflects on the novel, and on the exercise of novel-writing, with the metanarrative backing of history as rendered on canvas (painting), of pilgrimage become textual unwinding (embroidery), and of the narrative, “book of books,” as a simultaneous becoming of narrations and narrators (writing). The art of memory, emblematics, and the philosophical concept of the chain of Being crown this artistic allegory of the novel, as work and as genre, and of the human condition.
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