The Endless Text: Don Quixote and the Hermeneutics of Romance by Edward Dudley (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS119 On some occasions, however, the verse translation can make the translator indulge in some awkward syntax, for example, the opening lines of Cligés. He who wrote Erec and Enide, Commandments Ovid once decreed and Art ofLove in French did write, and write about the shoulder bite, about King Mark and fair Isolde, the metamorphosis retold of hoopoe, swallow, nightingale, about a youth begins a tale who was in Greece, kin to King Arthur. On the whole, nevertheless, there is always a sincere attempt to find the balance between the original Old French and the modern English. So Alexander laments his new-found state of anxiety: I thought in Love thete could be shown nothing but good and good alone but find him wicked in his ways. Nobody knows what game Love plays until he enters in the fun. Fool he who plays with such a one; to harm his own in Love's sole care. Indeed, his game is not unfair; it's dangerous to play Love's game; I think my downfall is his aim. With a solid introduction to each romance, about eleven pages of textual notes, and a selective bibliography, Erec and Enide and Cligés are the worthy conclusion to a quarter-century of translation. DAVID STAINES University of Ottawa edward Dudley, The Endless Text: Don Quixote and the Hermeneutics ofRomance. SUNY Series: The Margins of Literature. Albany: suny Press, 1997. Pp. 316. isbn: 07914 -3526-1. S16.50. (hard); $21.95 (paper). Through a broad intertextual approach based on impressive theoretical background and erudition, Edward Dudley reveals the workings of the disguised and decayed mythic content inhabiting Romance discourse, from Chrétiens Percevalto Cervantes's Don Quixote and beyond, in his monograph The Endless Text, winner of the ipp8 Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Book Award. Among the arresting concepts incorporated within Dudley's methodology, his instinctual grasp of Romance as 'an informing force that underlies many. . .kinds ofstories' is pivotal. Although the purpose which he undertakes is ambitious, his substantial explication of such a discourse emerges as both absorbing and convincing. ARTHURIANA As both Celticist and distinguished Cervantes scholar, Dudley understands the defining qualities ofspecial knights and their literary functions. His deep analysis of the Perceval type, which predominates in the first half of The Endless Text, uncovers meanings ofsuppressed ritual energy, which, according to his argument, account for numinous undercurrents resonating in countless Arthurian and other stories. While acknowledging his indebtedness to the likes ofJessie Weston, Roger Sherman Loomis, D.D.R. Owen, Norris Lacy, John Darrah, Alwyn and Brinley Rees, Martin FIeidegger, I lans-Georg Gadamer, Frank Kermode, Northrop Frye, Ruth EI Saffar, Luis Murillo, Martin de Riquer, Harvey Sharrer and many other Arthurians, theorists, Celtists, and Hispanists, Dudley offers a highly original consideration ofsuch factors as story and character impetus, and the unsuspected ways in which myth can become dislocated without losing its impact. His argument on the irrepressible nature of this phenomenon, regardless of reader or even storyteller awareness, may prove controversial, even though a commanding body of story evidence and a keen interpretive acumen fully support his assertions. For instance, his preliminary contrast among the Quixote, JamesJoyce's Ulysses, and the Biblical Gospel ofMark demonstrates the functions of Romance features, and self-conscious hermcneutic dilemmas, found in all three of these seemingly unrelated texts. Furthermore, as suggested by this uncommon textual grouping, Dudley's work applies post-modernist concepts and meaningfully examines important contemporary issues such as that of the language ofwomen and other key questions pertaining to gender studies. From this basis, then, Dudley enters compellingly into the metaphysics oflanguage, meaning, truth, and fiction and also into the relationship between such issues and the history of ecclesiastical and feudal power. His commentary on the faith crisis arising from Renaissance Humanism, for example, shows that in exegetical terms the problem has been in train since at least the time of the Roman Empire, and that its political manifestations are integral to its literary ones. Drawing on these contexts, and pronouncing Cervantes's celebrated novel to be the 'supreme metatext of the Renaissance,' the author ofthe study uncovers a much richer fiction in Don Quixote than mere parody ofmedieval...