THE REFINED DIALOGICALITY OF THE CELESTINA AND THE QUIJOTE


--Lea más vuestra merced--dijo Sancho--; que ya hallará algo que nos satisfaga.
Volvió la hoja don Quijote y dijo:
--Esto es prosa, y parece carta.
--¿Carta misiva, señor?--preguntó Sancho.
En el principio no parece sino de amores --respondió don Quijote.
Pues lea vuestra merced alto--dijo Sancho--; que gusto mucho destas cosas de amores.
Que me place--dijo don Quijote. (I.23; I, 285)
The fifteenth-century sentimental novels establish narrative innovations and a literary climate that lead inevitably to the benchmarks of "novelness" traditionally associated with the Celestina and the Quijote. Many suggestive links exist between the sentimental novel and the works of Rojas and Cervantes. Through application of the three levels of dialogue their significance can be fully brought to light. Both Dinko Cvitanovi_ (1973) and Marina Brownlee (1990) conclude their comprehensive studies of the fifteenth-century Spanish sentimental novels by relating the narrative innovations they have catalogued to Rojas' Celestina and Cervantes' Quijote. Close examination of the sentimental novels leads us inevitably to the conclusion that the instincts of these critics are both valid and significant.

The Celestina's Linguistic and Intertextual Dialogue

Marina Brownlee's treatment of the Celestina characterizes Rojas' work as heir to a narrative tradition that first acquired sharp definition in the sentimental novel. Her final conclusion is that the relationship between the corpus of fifteenth-century sentimental fiction and the Celestina argues against Rojas' radical break with that tradition posited by Gilman and others:
"the novela sentimental establishes the discursive originality that literary historians have traditionally accorded to La Celestina, first published in 1499. . . . neither literature in general nor Celestina in particular is created in the ex nihilo manner that Gilman claims ... To be sure, Rojas complicated the basic discursive framework of the novela sentimental, but his achievement stems from a quantitative rather than a qualitative inspiration. . . . he exploits several fundamental paradigms of novela sentimental composition, pushing each of them to further limits. (212)
Brownlee's assertion that Rojas' experimentation with the sentimental genre is innovative in quantity rather than quality, however, is undermined by her own identification of Celestina's innovative heteroglossia. She acknowledges that Rojas achieved an "intensification of the linguistic perception set forth in the novela sentimental by introducing a proliferation of discourses" (214), concluding "the discursive distinction between La Celestina and the novela sentimental is one of degree, not of kind" (214). Indeed, the key to understanding the Celestina 's innovative use of language lies in a distinction not of degree, but of kind, specifically the distinction between Bakhtinian polyglossia and heteroglossia. It is not different national languages that are implicitly played off each other as in the Arnalte, but different registers of Castilian that enter into open dialogue one with another in Celestina. Linguistically, the Celestina can find more common ground in Juan Ruiz' Libro de buen amor than in the sentimental canon from which it draws its thematic material and its preorchestration of reader instantiated intertextual dialogue.
There are five basic areas of concordance that Brownlee identifies between the Celestina and fifteenth-century sentimental novels: plot similarities with San Pedro's Cárcel de amor; setting in contemporary Spain analogous to that of the anonymous Triste deleytaçión; the discourse of "courtly" love as a thin veil to conceal lust; the word Gozo in the threefold sense of "divine love, human delight, and animal plazer"; and, the proliferation of discourse or play of multiple registers and ideologemes (212-14). It is this final strategy that most strongly marks the Celestina's innovative discourse, contributes to its sophistication of characterization and most clearly both links it to the sentimental canon as well as definitively sets it apart.
In the final analysis, it is the intertextual confrontation of two literary traditions, with each other and the quotidian chronotope instantiated in the Celestina and facilitated by linguistic dialogism that most clearly demonstrates how the Celestina represents both the culmination of the development of narrative that runs through the fifteenth-century sentimental novels and the development of a linguistic strategy, namely heteroglossia, that forges far beyond its thematic sources and points the way toward the modern novel in general and the Quijote in particular.
Brownlee reviews the striking plot similarities between the Celestina and San Pedro's Cárcel, ealier identified by Peter Earle. Both begin with a male protagonist overcome by love who, when initially rejected, seeks the help of a go-between who softens the beloved's heart by presenting the lover as mortally afflicted; moreover, Leriano and Melibea are both twenty-year-old suicides, each lamented by a parent of the opposite sex. To all of this, I would say that it is hardly surprising to find plot correspondences between these works since Cárcel represents the ideological consolidation of a genre that is brought into question and parodied by the Celestina.
More significant than plot correspondence is the contemporary setting of the Celestina. Rojas' setting of his story in contemporary Spain is often considered an important protonovelistic innovation in the Celestina. Brownlee, nevertheless, astutely observes the claim of the Celestina's uniqueness as a "literature of immediacy" is debatable (213). It is precisely this "open-ended" feature that we find in both in the Arnalte to a lesser degree and as a fully developed protonovelistic chronotope in the Triste deleytaçión. The open-ended novel time of both Triste Deleytaçión and Arnalte, also a conspicuous feature of Celestina, inevitability contributes to the three texts' potential to be read as literary parody. It is when highly literary idioms come into direct contact with everyday reality that the absurdity of their convention is made manifest to the reader.
The exhaustive exploitation of linguistic dialogism is the Celestina's most significant and innovative feature. Brownlee's brief treatment of this issue does not clearly explore the ways in which this strategy is exploited by Rojas. For example, Brownlee's identification of "linguistic solipsism" in the tragicomedia obfuscates the influence addressees so transparently exert on the individual character's conscious and unconscious choice of register. Together with the strategy of parenthetical asides, register is employed by Rojas to show the multi-faceted nature of individual characters as well as the multi-faceted nature of society and language. The characters' choice of register actually changes according to their inscribed addressees and the contexts or situations.
In Celestina, there are literary and nonliterary, sacred and profane registers or ideologemes, variably employed by individual characters who also imitate each others' speech according to a complex three-variable paradigm: a character's imitation of another character's speech can be designed to be interpreted by the reader as: 1) more or less bookish (of purely literary inspiration); 2) more or less conscious; and finally, 3) more or less sincere, which is to say more or less motivated by self-interest. For example when Sempronio assumes a didactic register and echoes some of Calisto's "courtly" register in the first act, he openly mocks his master's language (and indirectly the ideology it represents) both in asides and directly to Calisto's face. This derisive imitation is inevitably interpreted as conscious. We can also intuit that Sempronio's motives are altruistic (at this point, at least), that is, that he is not interested in personal gain by his mocking of Calisto. Neither is his simultaneous instantiation of bookish didacticism motivated by self-interest, but by a desire to shake his master out of his highly literary trance by getting him to focus on the apparent absurdity of his own words and actions. What is effectively being argued in this short dialogue, is the debate between Will and Reason that informs nearly all of the sentimental novels:
Calisto. No me dejes.
Sempronio (De otro temple está esta gaita.)
Calisto. ¿Qué te parece de mi mal?
Sempronio. Que amas a Melibea.
Calisto. ¿Y no otra cosa?
Sempronio. Harto mal es tener la voluntad en un solo lugar cativa.
Calisto. Poco sabes de firmeza.
Sempronio. La perseverancia en el mal no es constancia; más dureza o pertinacia la llaman en mi tierra. Vosotros los filósofos de Cupido llamadla como quisieredes.
Calisto. Torpe cosa es mentir el que enseña a otro, pues que tú te precias de loar a tu amiga Elicia.
Sempronio. Haz tú lo que bien digo y no lo que mal hago. (60)
Here we begin to see just how far linguistic dialogism has been complicated by Rojas. A most extraordinary feature in the Celestina is the characters' own awareness of the register changes, nuances, and inconsistencies of themselves and of other characters. Calisto is not too distracted and befuddled in his "afflicted" state to realize that Sempronio himself uses the courtly register. The master does not hesitate to criticize openly his servant for this apparent "hypocrisy."
In the scene that follows the first exchange between Calisto and Sempronio, the reader realizes an important difference between the master and his servant's use of courtly register. When Sempronio comforts Elicia, who claims to have been concerned with his prolonged absence, with the same "courtly" language he scorns in his master, this sudden use of the courtly register is at once: 1) equally literary; 2) more conscious as well as less self-deluding; and, more self-interested.
Sempronio. ¡Hi, hi, hi ! ¿Qué has, mi Elicia? ¿De qué te congojas?
Elicia. Tres dias ha que no me ves. ¡Nunca Dios te vea, nunca Dios te consuele ni visite! ¡Guay de la triste que en ti tiene su esperanza y el fin de todo su bien!
Sempronio. Calla, señora mia; ¿tú piensas que la distancia del lugar es poderosa de apartar el entrañable amor, el fuego, que está en mi corazón? Do yo voy, conmigo vas, conmigo estás; no te afiijas ni me atormentes más de lo que yo he padecido. Mas di, ¿qué pasos suenan arriba?
Elicia. ¿Quién? Un mi enamorado.
Sempronio. Pues créolo. (69)
As we see in the dialogue between Sempronio and Elicia, although we have only heard Sempronio speak once before and have only reached the second auto, the possibilities for interpretation of Sempronio's words are further complicated by what we, as readers, already know about him. Furthermore, we can see that in his exchange with Elicia, Sempronio is actually nudged into the courtly register by Elicia's speech; she is the first to move into the idiom (en ti tiene su esperanza y el fin de todo su bien), and he dutifully follows her cue. Rojas' characters are so acutely aware of each others' use of tone and register that they are constantly questioning each other. As in Elicia's flippant response to Sempronio's question about the footsteps upstairs and his final response, Pues créolo, a whole range of character's intention --between serious and playful-- opens before the reader. It is as though the rediscovery of characters who speak in differing tones and registers, with varying degrees of reliability and for various motives, is a new narrative ploy that is being played in the Celestina from every possible angle, with an unprecedented degree of complexity and sophistication.
Although Rojas attains characterization of unparallelled complexity, the basic strategy of heteroglossia is new neither to Western narrative in general nor to Spanish literature in particular. It is the same play of differing registers of one language that we first identified in Petronius' Satyricon and that later appeared on the peninsula in much of Juan Ruiz' narrative verse in the Libro de buen amor. Heteroglossia was kept alive during the fourteenth and early fifteenth century as much in cancionero style, especially satirical, verse. It is conspicuously audible, for example, in the Serranillas where rustic women are often given a voice. Finally, heteroglossia in the Celestina is prefigured by: 1) the excessive practice of polyglossia; and, 2) the "psychological" and metaliterary concerns of earlier sentimental fiction. What better way of knowing what a person is feeling than through the way he speaks? What better way to parody a literary text than to imitate its style of language?
Heteroglossia is also brought into the service of a primary concern we have identified in the sentimental novels, namely, the juxtaposition of two literary norms. Again, the Celestina's heteroglossia proves a powerful tool toward deconstructing its literary targets. The styles of discourse in the Celestina echo virtually every identifiable literary "source" in the history of Western narrative: the Bible, the "Philosopher" (Aristotle), the Church Fathers, the pre- and post-humanist, courtly and misogynist discourses of love, Alonso Martínez, the Italian humanists, and so on. By contrast, linguistic dialogue in the sentimental novels was largely reliant on analogy to an extratextual norm -- how language was used in society as opposed to the style of language presented by the book. Here, in the Celestina, that dialogue has been fully interiorized.
Intertextual dialogue in the Celestina, inseparably conspires with heteroglossia to produce parodic, transtextual deformation of every subtext --both literary and nonliterary-- that we have identified in its pages. Intertextual dialogue is complicated in nearly every instance by its juxtaposition to, and its containment within, the often blatantly incongruous intentions of the speaking subject. We can find examples throughout the text of Celestina's verbal borrowings from the popular sermon and the Bible, Sempronio's use of courtly register, and Calisto's reappropriation of popular refrains.
In the Celestina 's heteroglossia we see the work's continuity of fifteenth-century Castilian literature, and its significant break with that tradition. The absence of a narrator in the Celestina is more than compensated by characters, each employing several distinct registers depending upon situation and motive. Calisto's register is highly literary throughout. In fact, consistency and "sincerity" are strongly linked to the notion of tragicomic self-deception in the Celestina in much the same manner as in the Quijote. Whether characters are involuntarily copying or overtly mocking each other's style of speech, a character's imitation of another character's speech is not the same as its intradiegetic or extradiegetic model, it is an imitation of an imitation, discourse in double quotation marks so to speak. Cervantes employs the same strategy; one of many examples of this complex use of heteroglossia in the Quijote would be when Sancho learns to imperfectly imitate Quijote's register. The Quijote implicitly underscores that the illiterate Sancho cannot have learned this bookish register by reading, he is rather imitating an imitation in much the style established by Rojas when Calisto's servants mock his speech.

Cervantes' Refined Dialogicality

Linguistic and intertextual dialogism such as characterizes the Celestina is but one of several narrative features that link the Quijote to the fifteenth-century sentimental novels. As Dinko Cvitanovi_ concludes:
Consideramos que la distancia entre el mundo sentimental de las novelas de Padrón, San Pedro y Flores y la novela de Cervantes ha quedado suficientemente clara. Es la distancia histórica que media entre la posibilidad y la realización. Es, también, la distancia biológica entre el origen o nacimiento y la madurez. (358)
Like Brownlee's discussion of the Celestina in the context of the novela sentimental, Cvitanovi_'s treatment of the link between fifteenth-century sentimental fiction and the Quijote implicitly privileges thematic concerns. Cvitanovi_ is primarily concerned with what he sees as the Quijote's refinement of the pronounced metaliterary and metalinguistic concerns that came to characterize narrative fiction in the fifteenth-century sentimental novels. As Cvitanovi_ speaks of the Quijote's unquestioned stylistic superiority, he focuses on Cervantes' treatment of the love theme, the point of contact he will use to establish continuity,
una continuidad dentro de la narrativa española que va desde la novela sentimental a Cervantes. En ella veremos la persistencia de algunos criterios retóricos y su superación en el mundo sentimental del Quijote. (italics mine; 336-37)
By concentrating on the sentimental "world" of the Quijote, Cvitanovi_'s work takes a decided turn. He focuses on the "sentimental" interpolated stories of the Quijote, particularly the interwoven tales of Dorotea, Fernando, and company in chapters 23 through 26 of Part One. While exploring the sentimental theme, Cvitanovi_ accords high praise to Cervantes' strategies for interrelating his embedded tales both to each other and to the primary narrative that surrounds them.
I identify five significant similarities between the Quijote and the fifteenth-century sentimental novels, each related to and revealed by our exploration of one of the three levels of dialogue: 1) the phenomenon of the author and his public in the work (as in San Pedro's Cárcel de amor); 2) the use of linguistic dialogue, specifically an heteroglossia analogous to that of the Celestina; 3) the embedding of tales; 4) the bringing together into dialogue of two or more textual "traditions" or sub-genres (a phenomenon I identify in all of the fifteenth-century sentimental novels); and, finally 5) the implicit warning against the dangers of fiction by the example of a reading character in the text, specifically the analogy we have suggested in the previous chapter between Juan de Flores' Gradissa and Cervantes' Alonso Quijano.

The Author and His Public in the Work
As Waley observes, Boccaccio is not named in Flores' Grimalte and Gradissa because he could not exist at the same narrative level as his characters (xxix). The narrative level at which the naming would take place would preclude Boccaccio's existence. Fiometa must be her own author, allowing Flores' characters access to both her world and her book in order to effect a continuation of the action. The phenomenon is very similar to Part Two's metafictive play in the Quijote. Both the discussion of the already published book (Part One) by Sancho, Sansón and Quijote (chapter 3, Part Two) and don Quijote's meeting with a character from Avellaneda's apocryphal Part Two (chapter 71, Part Two) are particularly revealing episodes. In neither episode is Cervantes named. Cervantes is named, however, as the author of another work, the Galatea, during the inventory of don Quijote's library by the priest and the barber:
--Pero ¿qué libro es ese que está junto a él?
--La Galatea, de Miguel de Cervantes --dijo el barbero.
--Muchos años ha que es grande amigo mío ese Cervantes, y sé que es más versado en desdichas que en versos. Su libro tiene algo de buena invención; propone algo, y no concluye nada: es menester esperar la segunda parte que promete, quizá con la enmienda alcanzará del todo la misericordia que ahora se le niega. (I, 6; 137)

The distinction that contemporary theoretical narratology makes between an historical and an implied author is particularly helpful to perhaps explain why Cervantes can be named as an author of other texts in the Quijote but not as the author of the Quijote itself. Briefly stated, each book has but one implied author and no two books can have the same implied author (Prince 42-43). Since both Part Two of the Quijote and Flores' Grimalte y Gradissa are presented to the reader as sequels, parts of a greater whole, their implied authors must continue to exist as such; they cannot yet be objectified by the act of naming until their tales have run their course.
San Pedro goes beyond the medieval topos of humility in his exordium; he puts a reader in the text who reports personal dissatisfaction with a previous work. Doña Marina, who is reported as criticizing the style of the Arnalte is not, however, a character in Cárcel de amor but merely an inscribed addressee. The self-critical remarks of Diego de San Pedro lead the way to Cervantes' more sophisticated device, particularly in Part II of the Quijote. Cervantes goes one step further when he actually has the characters in Part Two discuss the literary merits of the already published Part One, expressing as they do both their own opinions as well as reporting public opinion. I specifically refer to the conversation that takes place between don Quijote, Sansón and Sancho in the third chapter of the second part. Sansón explains the issue of authorship upon congratulating don Quijote for his newly acquired fame:
--Deme vuestra grandeza las manos, señor don Quijote de la Mancha; que por el hábito de San Pedro' que visto, aunque no tengo otras órdenes que las cuatro primeras, que es vuestra merced uno de los más famosos caballeros andantes que ha habido, ni aun habrá, en toda la redondez de la tierra. Bien haya Cide Hamete Benengeli, que la historia de vuestras grandezas dejó escritas, y rebién haya el curioso que tuvo cuidado de hacerlas traducir de arábigo en nuestro vulgar castellano, para universal entretenimiento de las gentes. (II, 6; 46)

At the primary narrative level, the fiction of Cide Hamete must be maintained. Cervantes cannot be named but only alluded to as the curioso. To name Cervantes at this point would establish identity between the historical and implied author, and maintaining the integrity of the implied author opens possibilities for narrative distancing essential to parody.
In San Pedro's case, where do we draw the line between an authorial "forward" and a fictionalized frame? The boundary lies precisely where the primary narrator "intentionally" joins the two, moves from one chronotope (the historical time of the writing) into the other, clearly fictionalized, world of his characters. As does Cervantes, San Pedro deliberately blurs this line, makes a conspicuous effort to tie the two times together as in his prologue to Cárcel. Having reported doña Marina's dissatisfaction, the voice of the narrator moves subtly but surely into a new and purely fictive time and space, specifically the chronotope of allegory:
Después de hecha la guerra del año pasado, viniendo a tener el inuiemo a mi pobre reposo, passando vna mañana, quando ya el sol quería esclarecer la tierra, por vnos valles hondos y escuros que se hazen en la Sierra Morena, vi salir a mi encuentro por entre vnos robledales do mi camino se hazía, vn cauallero assi feroz de presencia, como espantoso de vista, cubierto todo de cabello a manera de saluaie. (f.3r; 86-87)

So illusive is the actual point of the auctor 's transformation from the voice of the authorial forward to the voice of a fictional character that he carries the reality of his frame characters and his own identity into the fictional world of his story in which he will both serve as narrator and play an active role.

Refined Heteroglossia in the Quijote
Linguistic dialogue in the Quijote is the direct heir to the Celestina, and the indirect heir to the sentimental novels. Both works are dominated by two worlds, the world of quotidian reality and the world of literature. We have seen the phenomenon as well in Triste deleytaçión and the Arnalte.
Cervantes expands and refines this metaliterary synthesis of linguistic and intertextual dialogism to effect a dialogue between the literary worlds and the historical context of his text. While the romance of chivalry is the primary literary genre exploited, there are constant incursions by other easily recognizable sub-genres, particularly the pastoral (in part heir to sentimental romance) and the picaresque. By contrast, the two worlds of Triste deleytaçión are both medieval: prosaic reality and allegorical time played against each other. Of particular interest is Cervantes' use of the literary register associated with sentimental love stories, especially when it comes into conflict with the register of chivalric romance.
Don Quijote ultimately effects an amalgamation of the sentimental and chivalresque genres in the letter he writes to Dulcinea while in the Sierra Morena. Linguistic dialogism is at its apogee in this episode from chapter 25 of Part One, both within the letter (literary) and in the speech of don Quijote and Sancho.

CARTA DE DON QUIJOTE A DULCINEA DEL TOBOSO

Soberana y alta señora:
El ferido de punta de ausencia y el llagado de las telas del corazón, dulcísima Dulcinea del Toboso, te envía la salud que él no tiene. Si tu fermosura me desprecia, si tu valor no es en mi pro, si tus desdenes son en mi afincamiento, maguer que yo sea asaz de sufrido, mal podré sostenerme en esta cuita, que, además de ser fuerte, es muy duradera. Mi buen escudero Sancho te dará entera relación, ¡oh bella ingrata, amada enemiga mía!, del modo que por tu causa quedo. Si gustares de acorrerme, tuyo soy, y si no, haz lo que te viniere en gusto, que con acabar mi vida habré satisfecho a tu crueldad y a mi deseo.
Tuyo hasta la muerte,
EL CABALLERO DE LA TRISTE FIGURA. (I.25; 374)

As a highly impressionable "reader" of the discourse of others, don Quijote has incorporated into his letter to Dulcinea not only what Amadís has taught him of the appropriate pining behavior of knights errant and their language (fermosa, ferido), but also several features of the sentimental idiom that he could only have learned from Cardenio or the sentimental fiction to which, as we shall see, Cardenio belongs. For example, the antithesis "my beloved enemy" (amada enemiga mía) is typical of the cancionero-style laments, complaints to ungrateful ladies that appear again and again in fifteenth-century sentimental novels. Nonetheless, the sentimental commonplaces of cruelty have been softened, acquired a more figurative and acceptable "knightly" tone. The most incongruous sentimental commonplaces have been omitted altogether; Dulcinea is not, could not be, treacherous, false, adulterous or deceitful. Sancho's mission to deliver the missive is interrupted by the priest and the barber, and don Quijote is lured down to the inn where the sentimental novels begun by Cardenio will continue, but he is lured down from the mountains by more chivalresque fiction devised by his friends. I refer to the fiction of the princess Micomicona (suggested by the role of Briolanja in the Amadís).
In Part Two, Sancho again finds himself faced with the impossible mission of delivering a message to Dulcinea. Cervantes' use of the chivalresque literary register as it infects the speech of Sancho Panza raises heteroglossia to new levels of complexity although it is basically the same phenomenon we identified in the Celestina. Sancho's language, when he returns from his unsuccessful mission to the Lady Dulcinea and tries to convince his master that an unattractive peasant is his lady, reflects essentially the same dialogic linguistic strategy employed by Rojas' Sempronio. Cervantes effects in this scene a complete reversal of the usual register of his two principal characters. As Sancho tries to convince in a knightly register, don Quijote, using a quotidian style of speech, refuses to be convinced:
--Pues yo te digo, Sancho amigo --dijo don Quijote que tan verdad que son borricos, o borricas, como yo soy don Quijote y tú Sancho Panza; a lo menos, a mi tales me parecen.
--Calle, señor --dijo Sancho--; no diga la tal palabra, sino despabile esos ojos, y venga a hacer reverencia a la señora de sus pensamientos, que ya llega cerca.
Y diciendo esto, se adelantó a recibir a las tres aldeanas, y apeándose del rucio, tuvo del cabestro al jumento de una de tres labradoras, e hincando ambas rodillas en el suelo, dijo:
--Reina y princesa de la hermosura, vuestra altivez y grandeza sea servida de recibir en su gracia y buen talente al cautivo caballero vuestro, que allí está hecho piedra mármol, todo turbado y sin pulsos de verse ante vuestra magnífica presencia. Yo soy Sancho Panza su escudero, y él es el asendereado caballero don Quijote de la Mancha, llamado por otro nombre Caballero de la Triste Figura. (II.10; II 97)

Sancho's atypical knightly discourse is underscored by its juxtaposition to the common register of the supposed ladies.

Pero rompiendo silencio la detenida, toda desgraciada y mohina, dijo:
--Apártense nora en tal del camino, y déjenmos pasar; que vamos de priesa.
A lo que respondió Sancho:
--¡Oh princesa y señora universal del Toboso! ¿Cómo vuestro magnánimo corazón no se enternece viendo arrodillado ante esta sublimada presencia a la coluna y sustento de la andante caballería?
Oyendo lo cual otra de las dos, dijo:
--Mas ¡jo, que te estrego, burra de mi suegro! ¡Mirad con qué se vienen los señoritos ahora a hacer burla de las aldeanas, como si aquí no supiésemos echar pullas como ellos! Vayan su camino, e déjenmos hacer el nuestro, y serles ha sano. (II.10; II 97)

Heteroglossia in the Quijote contributes heavily to the implied author's agenda of literary parody, as was the case in the Celestina. Characteristic of the comic mode, the ironic juxtaposition of the courtly male lover's speech and the everyday speech of a common woman can be found in works prior to the Celestina, most notably Juan Ruiz' Libro de buen amor and the serranillas of the cancioneros. Cervantes has refined and intensified the irony by giving the reader a perfectly logical reason why Sancho would employ the courtly register, very far from his habitual style of speech.

Interpolation in the Quijote and in the Sentimental Novels
The extended interpolated and interwoven tale of Cardenio that I will examine next in this chapter is an outstanding example of Cervantes' ability to assimilate secondary and primary narrative. We have seen that many of the fifteenth-century sentimental novels were marked by their incorporation of embedded narrative, of stories within stories, a device refined and carried to its ultimate aesthetic consequences by Cervantes in the Quijote. The structural and thematic assimilation of metadiegetic narrative is first seen in Rodríguez del Padrón's Siervo de amor libre. There we identified a structural assimilation, justified by the Estoria 's presentation as the dream of the protagonist of the primary narrative, the Siervo. I further posit a thematic incorporation of the Estoria in which the Siervo's path to freedom is suggested by the disinterested love of the Princess Irena. Other fifteenth-century experiments worthy of note include don Pedro's use of glosses as narrative in Sátira de la felice e infelice vida, Diego de San Pedro's Arnalte who tells his own story, and Flores' unprecedented assimilation of Boccaccio's Elegia di madonna Fiammetta. In many sentimental novels we have identified a consequent play of the primary narrator's absence, distance, and sudden reappearance as a result of temporarily handing over control of the narrating to a storytelling character.
Narrative dialogue in the Quijote is marked by the primary narrator's appearance and disappearance as is also the case in Siervo, Triste deleytaçión, as well as with the narrators of Flores and San Pedro. In these sentimental novels and in the Quijote there is a certain relationship between the primary narrator (an "authorial" role partly usurped by the protagonist in the Quijote) and his metadiegetic narrators. The momentary disappearance of the primary narrator is one aspect of this relationship that we first identify in Siervo. The primary narrator's interruptions of action and sudden reappearance are features of both Rodríguez' and Cervantes' texts. For example, the role that don Quijote plays when Cardenio begins his tale is analogous to the role that the third-person narrator plays in relation to the primary narrative. In don Quijote's sudden reappearance to interrupt Cardenio, he is playing the same role that the primary narrator plays when he interrupts the action in the battle with the vizcaíno in chapters eight and nine of Part One.
Juan Rodríguez is credited by Cvitanovi_ with sentimental innovation of the novel within the novel. Cvitanovi_ feels, however, that Siervo's embedded Estoria is related to the frame narrative in a clumsy fashion. I feel that Rodríguez took steps that thematically incorporate the Estoria as a way of mirroring the frame plot and showing the inner world of his protagonist. Tied to the Estoria 's thematic incorporation, the tale has been structurally seamed to the main narrative in a way that does not challenge the verisimilitude of the frame, namely, by the strategy of telling the reader post factum that it was a dream.
Cvitanovi_ sees no real embedded story in San Pedro's works. Embedded narrative actually so dominates San Pedro's texts that it is easy to overlook it at first sight. San Pedro did not use short embedded stories; he did not need to because the function that these stories had served in earlier sentimental novels -- to show the inner feelings of characters -- has been effectively appropriated by other strategies such as the "confidential" discourse between the auctor and his characters. Much of Cárcel and virtually all of the Arnalte is embedded narrative, love stories told by their respective protagonists. In Cárcel, as soon as the story has been brought up to date with its frame, the action continues with the primary narrator as a key participant. The use of this innovative narrator, or auctor, in Cárcel is analogous to what Cervantes effects in the case of Cardenio and Dorotea. First the participants serve as intradiegetic narrators of their prior experiences, and then once the story has caught up to date with the frame, the action continues within the primary narrative of the Quijote, allowing the active participation of don Quijote and Sancho, who at first functioned as mere inscribed addressees.
Cvitanovi_ praises Flores' Grimalte y Gradissa for its elaborate weaving together of "dos historias intervinculadas, que corren paralelamente" (342). This is seen as a step closer to Cervantes. We must note, however, that Cervantes weaves together the embedded narratives and the primary narrative, two levels; in Flores' case the "two stories" of which Cvitanovi_ speaks are actually taking place at the same narrative level.
The Quijote's interpolated tales of love are a fertile ground for identification of the further refinement of heteroglossia, particularly its exploitation of purely literary registers. Suggestively significant is the paucity of Cervantes' explicit evocation of the sentimental genre. Of the many books mentioned in the inventory of Alonso Quijano's library, not one is a representative of the fifteenth-century sentimental genre as defined by Menéndez Pelayo. And yet, as Cvitanovi_ points out, the interpolated adventures of Dorotea et al, presents an exhaustive paradigm of the thematic potentials of the novela sentimental (341-58).
Cvitanovi_ cites two distinct areas of contact -- the use of pastoral and sentimental thematic in the interpolated tales and the very device of interpolation. Cvitanovi_ also implies a third area of common ground which is the synthesis of the two, that is, the sentimental thematic and the strategy of interpolation, stressing Cervantes' mastery of the technique of relating both narrative strategies and thematic to the primary narrative (334).
The tendency to explore the thematic links between the Quijote and the sentimental novel is irresistible due to the many suggestive points of contact that have barely been identified, much less thoroughly explored. They are significant, particularly those that bring the sentimental literary tradition into open conflict with the multi-genre bookish world of the Quijote whose protagonist's agenda is, in part, to make other literary idioms conform whenever possible to his chivalresque expectations. This creates a kind of intertextual dialogic between two (actually among several) literary sub-genres that exploits both dialogic narrative strategies and linguistic dialogism.

A Sentimental-Chivalric Confrontation in the Sierra Morena
The area of the Quijote that most draws the attention of the reader of sentimental romance is the adventure of the Sierra Morena that begins in chapter 23 of the first part. It is here that don Quijote's chivalresque idiom, having just survived incursion by the picaresque, will come face to face with the world of sentimental fiction. The adventures in the Sierra Morena represent a blatant incursion by the sentimental genre and not, as the protagonist struggles to prove, the chivalresque.
After the adventure in which don Quijote frees the prisoners on their way to serve in the galleys (I.22), he and Sancho enter the Sierra Morena. Owing to Sancho's interpretation of the new direction of their travels as a much desired and prudent flight from the wrath of the Santa Hermandad, the reader at first does not realize that he is about to take an immediate locus in contemporary Spain as a point of departure into the highly literary world of sentimental fiction. This is due, in part, to the protagonist's reluctance to accept the possibility of his squire's suggestion that he would run away from any battle. Even before the appearance of the mysterious leather valise or Cardenio, the reader of sentimental fiction recognizes the familiar landscape of Diego de San Pedro's Cárcel de amor where the Sierra Morena, as well as the literary commonplaces of the "selva oscura" and the "wild man" come together, the latter a role in the Quijote soon to be filled by the appearance of Cardenio. San Pedro also begins his story in contemporary Spain before launching into the purely literary atemporal chronotope of allegory:
Después de hecha la guerra del año pasado, viniendo a tener el inuiemo a mi pobre reposo, passando vna mañana, quando ya el sol quería esclarecer la tierra, por vnos valles hondos y escuros que se hazen en la Sierra Morena, vi salir a mi encuentro por entre vnos robledales do mi camino se hazía, vn cauallero assi feroz de presencia, como espantoso de vista, cubierto todo de ca-bello a manera de saluaie. (italics mine; f.3r; 86-87)

San Pedro has accomplished a movement from every day reality to allegory, a movement that is analogous to the constant shifting between quotidian and bookish realities, the very backbone of the Quijote's multi-generic world. San Pedro marks the Sierra Morena as a threshold, an opening to the world of fiction, specifically sentimental fiction. Likewise, in the Quijote, the protagonist's thoughts predictably turn to literary models as he and Sancho enter the Sierra Morena:
Así como don Quijote entró por aquellas montañas, se le alegró el corazón, pareciéndole aquellos lugares acomodados para las aventuras que buscaba. Reducíansele a la memoria los maravillosos acaecimientos que en semejantes soledades y asperezas habían sucedido a caballeros andantes. Iba pensando en estas cosas, tan embebecido y transportado en ellas, que de ninguna otra se acordaba. (I.23; 283)

Is this, the reader wonders, the Peña Pobre where Amadís was overcome by ataraxia upon receiving Oriana's harsh letter of rejection? The remarks of the narrator above tell us that don Quijote tried to evoke the books of chivalry but the landscape alone is enough to suggest that it may be San Pedro's Cárcel and not the Amadís that is forcing its way into the text. When Cardenio appears as the wild man, there can be little doubt that our instincts were correct. Even before Cardenio appears, however, the sentimental genre will establish itself with the discovery of the leather valise, the saddle cushion and their mysterious contents.
Don Quijote seems strangely dissatisfied with the valise's contents. It is because they represent an intrusion of the sentimental idiom rather than the chivalresque. Amadís wrote neither sonnets nor love letters at the Peña Pobre, but as don Quijote himself later recalls, basically lived the life of a religious penitent and voluntarily entered into a deep, paralyzing, and tearful depression.
When the contents of the mysterious case are examined, and while Sancho is concerned with its more tangible assets, his master's attention is drawn, of course, to the notebook and its contents. He first finds a sonnet of complaint whose poet presents himself as a wronged and rejected lover. Although don Quijote praises the literary value of the sonnet, one cannot help but feel that he is somehow disappointed by it. He obviously would have preferred something more appropriate to the chivalresque code: a magic ring, an encoded message. He finds instead a sonnet that conspicuously presents several commonplaces of the suffering male lover of the sentimental genre, victims of their belles dames sans merci:
O le falta al Amor conocimiento,
o le sobra crueldad, o no es mi pena
igual a la ocasión que me condena
al género más duro de tormento.