“Don Quixote”: A Synthesis of Genres of Renaissance Era

Abstract

The author's English summary from the article:

Key words: Cervantes, Renaissance, chivalric literature, parody, Ariosto, pastoral novel, picaresque fiction, manerism.

For a profound understanding of the Cervantes’ “The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha”, from the viewpoint of genre characteristics, it is necessary to trace the traditions of epic narrative leading to the formation of the main peculiarities of this classic of Western literature, considered to be the first modern European novel. The best approach to the Cervantes’ novel is when it is considered as an extremely heteroglossic text, as an organic synthesis of all the genres fashionable in late Renaissance or early Baroque era, including the carnivalized folkloric forms and motifs. Not only the world outlook and code of values of the Knight of the Sad Countenance but as well the whole fabric of Cervantes’ novel in closely interwoven in the intertext of Renaissance literary system.

The traditions of different genres, first of all chivalric and pastoral romance in prose and verse and picaresque novel are organically interrelated and linked to the central theme. The forms of parody and satire in Cervantes’ novel, demythologizing attitude to the chivalric can be regarded as a transformation and further culmination of the ironic tone first revealed in Matteo Boiardo’s romance “Orlando Innamorato” and much more evident in Ludovico Ariosto’s heroic-comic romance epic “Orlando Furioso”. Ariosto’s form and style inspired Cervantes by its play spirit, by constant hovering “between the mock-heroic and pathetic” (J. Huizinga. HOMO LUDENS.

A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. Redwood Burn Ltd , Trowbridge and Esher, 1980, p. 181). From the stylistic point of view “Don Quixote” can be regarded as an anti-genre by its negation of the ethos of the traditions composing the fabric of the novel. We should always remember that Cervantes not only fruitfully used the literary traditions of late Middle Ages and Renaissance era, including picaresque novels similar to the “Lazarillo de Tormes”; at the same time he attributed them a new function and new ethos or as Eric Auerbach indicates in his “Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature”, Cervantes is at the same time a great destroyer and a great continuator of the artistic traditions.

Published in the journal Sjani, vol. 15 (2014), pp. 21–28. Open the paper