For Sergio Fernandez
Miguel de Cervantes was never a situation "outside", ie was never binding motif public to comply. These young people joined the war first Gabino Barreda and his interest in taking the positivism of the National Preparatory School, then a desire to learn European painting, defending the legacy of Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera, giving lectures about what was cultural news in Mexico and Europe, read the Greeks and the Germans who considered themselves Hellenes (and grapple with Nietzsche, who gave them moral concerns). And we must accept that as a generation made enough to rediscover and John Ruiz Sor Juana de Alarcón. The third anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote passed over them, as is the storm water over a two waters, while speaking in good weather. The highest-Manuel José Othon, Salvador Diaz Miron, Amado Nervo and Francisco de Icaza, "they did pay attention to Cervantes, but for some reason, young people were far from their influence. (Susana Quintanilla in his recent book "We", only makes mention of Cervantes, Reyes met Torri Novelists talking book before Cervantes, Carlos Buenaventura Uribau.)
If I make this district is because I want wonder what is the reason why Cervantes appears only marginally in one of the leading humanists of Mexico. Because often assumed that Miguel de Cervantes is there a real and objective so as if it had always been with the same force. He said that inside the house talking and it was raining outside, and it could be a flood and the house to float above the immensity of the water, however, one is forced to move only one pair of each species inside to protect from flooding. And it has done enough readings census Ateneo (Goethe, Nietzsche, Anatole France, Góngora, Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Plato, Walter Pater, William James, Rodo, Poe, Azorín, d'Annunzio, Dario) to know that the encounter with Cervantes is a strictly personal matter that has to do with that "I" that makes the artist's work. And the man who claims to be national usefully opens the door to his house to flee their own circumstances and unexpectedly falls in a sea generously universal culture.
I am not my approach to Cervantes and his work is necessarily external, ie I see it in relationship with everything else. And generally I hear that Cervantes is a solved problem, that for certain reasons is the literature of which party all the modern conception of art. But why not, or at least it was not for Alfonso Reyes, who faced with another English literature "correlation of forces" (if I may use this expression) and had to start clearing your personally unknowns . Gongora give a site because he had to admire his work before its official discovery. And taking the time to the Archpriest of Hita, Gracian, the English picaresque. And a puzzle called Cervantes. A puzzle that is not there to make it right but to become part of the problem. A literary work in which the characters are unaware they are transformed into literature and literature for a character to imitate the ancient knights walking begins to turn his reality into a literary reality in a manner so convincing and voracious that fly the epicenter of a widespread conversion. And so that really it is successful, it must abolish the border between inside and outside of the work.
"Alfonso Reyes Cervantes is very marginal," wrote Manuel Alcala in 1966. If I return to this issue after something has been so categorical statement is only to extract a meaning to a series of texts and comments scattered throughout the extensive essays Kings, over fifty years. And a literary relationship that allegedly began in childhood: "My first reading of the huge folio data with magnificent illustrations of Dore that was my delight in the parental home. Volume I 'was great', and I was physically to sit on it to read "(" Don Quixote in hand "). A less close than he intended when he wrote to Henríquez Ureña in 1908: "Ah! I will also read the (Quixote) (which means X 4 th time) "A statement made at 19 years and who did not believe José Luis Martínez (" a presumption child, typical of the intellectual ambition ") and possibly not Henríquez Ureña who responded with a more or less hollow phrase: "The whip of satire is made fibers own broken heart. "
General Bernardo Reyes was wrong to claim happen to Porfirio Diaz, later it was proposed that the dictator was exiled from the country. Wrong again on the day of his death, when he tried to enter the National Palace on February 9, 1913, and was hit by a bullet. Alfonso fled Mexico after refusing to cooperate with the government of Victoriano Huerta. In Spain began the first references to the works of Cervantes, but are indirect and from reading the work of Azorin. In 1900, this author had written The English soul, two lyrical portraits of Castile, dedicated to the XVII and XVIII century, to reflect a continuity in time, a continuum known as "soul" that sought to give content to the problem of nationalism, and five years later, Route Don Quijote , commissioned Minilla Manuel Ortega, director of The fair, to Azorín travel to La Mancha and explain thoroughly the English reader what it was three hundred years after the people who visited Don Quixote and Sancho. (To be more precise, Ortega Minilla foresight gave a firearm to defend himself Azorín of highwaymen.) Throughout the villages, poor and abandoned, the author did or wanted to see reality as an extension of the Cervantes novel. Azorin, a custom he intended to build some Metaphysics of Morals, wrote at length about Cervantes provided in these terms. But his "English soul" was always Cervantes. Anahuac Vision (1917), the description alfonsina Mexico City at the time of the arrival of Cortes, claimed to be the first chapter of a series devoted to describing the Mexican character, century by century, how Azorín . By which I mean at that time was more significant Azorín Reyes Cervantes and the couple of notes he devoted to Cervantes in 1915 and 1916, were about the texts of Azorin Route of Don Quixote and a novel about the youth of the licensed Window.
Most of the references to Cervantes in the work of Reyes are the top ten book reviews he wrote for the Journal of Philology and two more for the daily El Sol, between 1916 and 1918. Which do not exceed 20 pages but it helps to know the ideas about Quixote began to circulate in Spain ninety years ago, the announcement of the Rodríguez Marín editions, the commentary in English literature Cervantes, Jose de Armas , which Reyes extracted the following paragraph: "With very justified satisfaction says this eminent hispanica (J. Fitzmaurice-Kelly) that his country was the first to translate the Quixote, first published in English in luxury, the first to make the comment of his book and the first to publish an edition criticism of his text, 1899. "And on Cervantes and the ballads of Chacón y Calvo, Reyes writes:" Cervantes, as it is on his mind all the English classics, was a folklorist, not only by the folklore in his profit, but by the construction process of his work. Even without sayings and dances, folk-inspired work would be, but understand this, make more sense all elements of a popular direct the work contains. "Most of the trials published at that time, there are two works that seem to be more interested in Reyes, the lecture on Don Quixote William Paton Ker and testing of Giovanni Papini" Don Quixote of Deception, "published in La Voce, Firenze, 1916. About English critic writes: "The Cervantes literary reviews ... offer a problem which has not always been well made: the Quixote sets out very long. And that book is so generous and so broad was written by a man who participated in all the superstitions of the precepts of his time. " "Neglect" technical Cervantes' Don Quixote makes one of the most neglected books, "if old, critics believed would find in it, as in the Iliad, several authors and several successive interpolator." Then the debate was whether this was appropriate reading "philosophically" Don Quixote (Enrique José Varona, according to Reyes, rejects that reading his book I should read Don Quixote). However, Ker suggests that it is impossible to read the novel following only one of the stated intentions of the book, as it reaches a dead end or a series of contradictions. The entire novel is "a jungle of inventions, but also intentions and artistic ideals. " In this context, the reading of Hegel: the book is essentially against the chivalrous knight in the person of Don Quixote.
Papini's interpretation, that Don Quixote is not a madman but a wannabe who pretends to be crazy and manages to fool everyone, including Cervantes, seems to have greater influence on Reyes. The protagonist's deep sense would: break the constraints of their environment pretending to be crazy to travel, since only crazy people have the privilege of wandering at will. The real fool is Sancho, who believes in Don Quixote, who in turn has no virtue, because it helps the weak by imitation, not by conviction. The other characters are suspicious of his sanity, to the point of calling it "a wise man mad." The Cave of Montesinos is the key to his deceit, and dry to Sancho, when he begins to invent: "If you want to believe you, believe me my story of the cave of Montesinos." Ker Papini and agree on the need to distrust the intentions expressed in the novel. Since it is a "miscellaneous" which appears burlesque poetry, novels inserted, literary criticism, either directly or as a parody, rhetorical pieces on medieval themes and common places or humanities. But amid all this opens up the fundamental issue, the trip, because the most profound book and popular are travel, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, La Commedia, Gulliver, Robinson, Sinbad, Fausto. "Every great book is a parody of the Last Judgement, and to judge men have to travel and meet them."
After these brief notes on Cervantes, Reyes spoke of his work ever about any other issue. Always in a manner characteristic of his creative process, ie, writing daily, adding pages to organize a book, Cervantes' work can be said that hovered over the pages of Kings. Alicia Reyes Adolfo Castanon and 140 selected passages in which the essayist recalls a passage or set an example from the work of Cervantes. Certain passages were always present, as the burning of books made by the barber and the priest, which is given by Don Quixote to his enemy the wise enchanter Freston. For Reyes, Freston is a character with liberating aspects, since one can not undertake the adventure and heroism if you have in tow a library of 10 thousand volumes. So the heroes have no books. If only come Freston to do literary criticism of our libraries to lighten your life, because a book called more books. "Reading and writing are entitled to as the concave and convex flame reading writing, and this is the biggest and true evil that cause the books" ("Bad Book" in Calendar , 1924).
That burning books, Reyes takes the name of Antonio de Torquemada, as it is one of the authors sent to the stake, even though the Persiles, is taken as a model for the description of the northern regions. So the only trial over Cervantes issue is devoted to Torquemada, in 1957, which is a monograph of the books "censored" by Cervantes. Previously, only made a balance on your reading in the essay "Don Quixote in hand," 1947. Reyes took the face of this encyclopedic work attitude, because your comments are lexical observations, detailed aspects of the expression of Cervantes, and above all are signs passages that can serve as examples to accommodate the work itself. I think there is some disappointment on the part of Reyes before Don Quixote and Sancho before. Thirty years after his commentary on Papini, this theory still resonates in his mind, especially in the Italian essayist's assertion: "In the life of Don Quixote no drama because there is no seriousness." But Reyes tried to find "the drama", so he meditated on the relationship of the characters. And almost reached the conclusion that some-most-are unbelievers and only Don Quixote lives submerged in his hallucination. "Sancho Panza only lives in a pathetic swing. And certainly already believe, and Don Quixote follows his eyes closed, and he departs, sometimes ironic, others simply wary. This swing of Sancho Panza is the tragic dynamic of Don Quixote. At its heart, and only in his heart, the real tragedy occurs. Since Sancho enters into arrangements with Don Quixote, is condemned to live, literally, with a broken heart. "Reyes recalled that at the end of the book Sancho he was disappointed by his master when he agrees to let the cavalry. But in his reading of 1947, realized that Sancho pathetic takes no position with the imminent death of Alonso Quijano. On the contrary, Cervantes makes it known that "Sancho was rejoicing, that inheriting property wipes out or softens down in the heir of grief might be expected to leave the die. " "With these words casually," concludes Reyes, Cervantes has killed me to Sancho Panza that I had begun to take shape. Has taken its highest sense, his definitive and lasting artistic value, being the same person who escapes the tragic battle of the work. Sorry for the insolence. "
Alfonso Reyes did not novel theory, this omission is not an abandonment or a failure on their part. Reyes was also not likely to display their tragedy, if that was or if he suspected I had it. We would go out of our lives and see it from outside, but unfortunately much as we always stayed move away from "this side" on the side of I-we carry with us, stuck. Cervantes wandered the Mediterranean, may be wrong to choose the path of happiness. "Missed" in both senses, as her character. But no one gets it right with his own life. Reyes missed by embassies and by countries, felt the error of the death of his father, and wrong to distance themselves from Mexican politics, much as it can go astray to ingratiate himself with her. But none of them saw their lives, nor Reyes. Nothing I said was Truth, and should not conclude anything, and neither Reyes concluded his thoughts on Cervantes. But as that we turn over life, err. The path does not exist, the path will always remain behind, and runs it does not know whether did leave behind a tragedy or a comedy.
(Text read at the inauguration of the Miguel de Cervantes Chair of the Faculty of Arts of the UNAM. March 2009)
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