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364 Philosophy and Literature

Symposium: Cervantes

Diana de Armas Wilson

CERVANTES AND THE INDIES

C ervantes’s two major novels, Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and Persiles
and Sigismunda (1617), are substantially enriched when linked to
what the author himself called “the remote Indies” and, in a darker
mood, the “refuge and haven of all the desperate men of Spain.”1 In a
novel set in the same remote Indies centuries later, the Cuban writer
Alejo Carpentier describes a grain of rice, displayed in a provincial
museum in Venezuela, “on which several paragraphs of Don Quixote had
been copied.”2 I would propose the inverse of this minimalist fiction:
that Don Quixote itself contains many “grains of rice” on which the
Indies are inscribed, and that the posthumous Persiles contains even
more.
In the first chapter of this last novel, for example, Cervantes uses a
strange word—bejucos—for the “vines” tying up a raft somewhat implausibly
designed to sail in the North Sea.3 Instead of the conventional Castilian
signifiers available to him, Cervantes chooses a word of Caribbean
origins, specifically a taíno word, from a language assigned by linguists to
the Arawakan family and traced back to the middle of the Amazon Basin.
Cervantes may have accessed this term through various popular histori-
ographers of the Indies, Fernández de Oviedo or López de Gómara. In
Cervantes’s fiction, these Caribbean vines are used to construct rafts that

Philosophy and Literature, © 2000, 24: 364–376

 Diana de Armas Wilson 365

sail to and from a violent “Barbaric Isle” whose inhabitants trade in gold
and pearls, fight with bows and arrows, and communicate either by signs
or through a kidnapped female interpreter—all practices that strenu-
ously reference the New World. Cervantes’s islanders, whom the text
calls “barbarians,” also eat a suggestively American diet, including a
wheat-free bread. A century earlier, Peter Martyr had informed Europe
about a bread “made from the cooked flour cazabi, a bread better suited
to human stomachs than wheat bread.”4 Closer to Cervantes’s day,
Montaigne tasted what the inhabitants of Antarctic France (Brazil) used
“in place of bread,” which he pronounced “sweet and a little flat.”5
Aligning this New World “bread” with a suggestively American beverage,
Cervantes depicts his barbarians as ritually drinking the powdered ashes
of male human hearts for prophetic ends—a practice that might be
called “heart-ash cannibalism.”
Reading about this cannibal island may have moved Samuel Taylor
Coleridge to remark, in an 1818 lecture, that in Cervantes’s “Persilis
[sic] and Sigismunda, the English may find the germ of their Robinson
Crusoe”—a wholly ignored but by no means outrageous idea.6 It
complicates Ian Watt’s notorious claim, in 1957, that the rise of the
novel began with Defoe’s Crusoe —a claim recanted by Watt a decade
later but malingering in many American English departments.7 If we
think in terms of coevolutionary rather than evolutionary histories of
the novel, focusing less on historical “origins” than on geographical
events, we soon recognize that both the Spanish and English rises of the
novel were linked to European voyages to America. More remarkable
than Defoe’s debt to Cervantes may be the debt of both writers to the
Caribbean cannibals.
By comparison with the Persiles, allusions to the New World in Don
Quixote seem less strident. Passages in this novel sometimes gesture to
the New World directly, as in Don Quixote’s fevered homage to the
“very courteous Cortés” (2.8), or the Canon of Toledo’s concern about
the fourth act of plays being set in America (1.48), or Sancho Panza’s
comparison of the enchanted Dulcinea (the version of her that he’s
recycled) to a skilled Mexican horseman (2.10).8 But Don Quixote also
contains various oblique New World references, including the sly
imitation of Columbus in the Dedication to Part Two, where Cervantes
fictionalizes the arrival of a letter from “the great emperor of China,”
who begs him in Chinese [“en lengua chinesca”] for a copy of Don
Quixote, Part One. That the Chinese emperor wishes to learn more
about Castilian letters—even offering to found a college with Cervantes
366 Philosophy and Literature

himself as its rector—functions as a blatant parody of Columbus’s

fantasy, recorded at various points in his Diario, that some generic
“Great Khan” might wish to learn more about the Spanish Crown.
These and many more Cervantine quotations, allusions, and ventril-
oquisms shed light on two sets of related issues that, according to
B. J. Ife, invite further scholarly attention: “the birth of America in the
European consciousness, and the birth of the novel in Spain.”9 Al-
though the historical movements that Columbus inaugurated in the
Indies—exploration, conquest, and colonization—resonate through-
out Cervantes’s two novels, what is needed at this point is a more spatial
understanding of his achievement. Both novels were stimulated, far
more than criticism has acknowledged, by the geographical excitement
of a New World. In 1552, during Cervantes’s childhood, the king’s
official historiographer, López de Gómara, famously assessed “the
discovery of the Indies” as “the greatest event since the creation of the
world, excepting the incarnation and death of its Creator.”10 In a recent
book about mapping in early modern France, Tom Conley suggests that
“even Cervantes’s tales of a knight errant’s misinformed adventures”
were “born of a new cartographic impulse.”11
The “discovery of the Indies,” which gave Spain a whole continent to
conquer and castilianize, reverberates through Cervantes’s novels. Along
with the multiple targets of satire proffered for Don Quixote—pulp
fictions, bad readers, the ideals of knighthood, utopian evasionism, or a
penchant for living in the past—we might reassess the claim, by the
Peruvian scholar Raúl Porras Barrenechea, that Don Quixote is “a benevo-
lent satire” of the conquistador of the Indies.12 The modifier of benevo-
lence perfectly suits Cervantine satire, which is always more wry than
wounding, and which is generally directed at institutions rather than
individuals. But although Don Quixote abounds in satire of any or all of
the above, it is reductive to consider it only a satire. Almost four centuries
of criticism have made it abundantly clear that both of Cervantes’s novels
provide an encyclopedic context for their heroes, presenting their
respective errancies, whether out of La Mancha or Ultima Thule, in
terms of an astonishing range of classical and biblical, as well as
geographical, encounters. Like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus—whom at least
one critic has labeled “quixotic”13—Cervantes’s novelistic heroes journey
from home confident that “there is a world elsewhere” (3.3.135). In the
case of Don Quixote, that sense of “elsewhere” is too often eclipsed by
provincial and banalized portraits of the hero as a “Man of La Mancha.”
It is scarcely accidental that Cervantes’s novels appear at the close of
 Diana de Armas Wilson 367

Spain’s age of exploration, given that they arise—much as Bakhtin

claimed that novelistic discourse arose in antiquity—from a multilin-
gual imperial culture. Bakhtin saw ancient novelistic discourse as
developing on the peripheries of the Hellenistic world, “on the
boundary line between cultures and languages,” and constituting itself
as a genre out of a new polyglot consciousness.14 Cervantes’s novels are
also pervaded by this kind of consciousness, emerging from the “Babel”
of Algiers15 as well as from the “bar-bar” of the Indies. Still episodic in
Don Quixote, which represents some half-dozen languages—Spanish,
Basque, Arabic, German, Italian, and lingua franca—this polyglot
consciousness increases dramatically in the Persiles, whose characters
speak in, and translate from, a dozen different tongues: Spanish and
Portuguese, English, French, Italian, Norwegian, Polish, Valencian, a
lengua aljamiada (texts written in Spanish but in Arabic characters), and
a lengua bárbara (a “barbaric” language that requires an interpreter).
Cervantes’s use of not only Algerian lingua franca but also American
loan words from Caribbean, Mexican, or Peruvian languages (Taíno or
Nahuatl or Aymara)—may be described by a process Bakhtin calls
“hybridization”: the mixing of at least two linguistic consciousnesses
“within a single concrete utterance.”16 Such a mixture weakens the
conviction that a language is the specific property of any one nation. I
am calling the mixture of Spanish and native American languages in
Cervantes’s novels “hybridity”—a term that jostles at present with a
large cluster of related, and highly contested concepts, e.g., syncretism,
bastardy, in-betweenness, mongrelization, transculturation, and hetero-
geneity. Some Latin American scholars—at least those who have not
replaced hybridity with the anthropological term transculturation—are
returning to Bakhtin, claiming that his analysis of the novel as a hybrid
formation could provide “a fertile field” for the development of
hybridity by colonial studies.17 Many of the hybrid utterances in
Cervantes’s writings emerge from the great ensemble of lived and
fictional practices that we now call Spanish colonialism. If we are willing
to entertain the theatrical claim of one of Cervantes’s most recent
biographers, these colonial practices began in 1547—precisely the year
of Cervantes’s birth.18

II
Space constraints do not allow us to dwell here on the adversities of
Cervantes’s life: his vagabond and Dickensian childhood; his military
368 Philosophy and Literature

career in the Mediterranean; his participation at the Battle of Lepanto,

where a blunderbuss wound shattered his left hand; his capture en
route home by Turkish pirates; his five years of captivity as a prisoner of
war in an Algerian baño (dungeon); his ransom by Trinitarian friars and
his return to Spain, in 1580, as a maimed veteran whose postwar career
prospects were alarmingly bleak. During the lean years of the early
1580s, Cervantes seems to have joined the ranks of those “desperate
men of Spain” he would depict, some thirty years later, in his novella
The Jealous Extremaduran [El celoso extremeño]. Only two years home from
his Algerian captivity, he begins to consider the idea of emigrating to
the New World. A letter in his own hand—dated 17 February 1582—was
unearthed this century at Simancas, a state archive created by Charles V
as a kind of paper fortress for the countless documents generated by an
increasingly sprawling empire. Addressed to Antonio de Eraso, a
member of the Council of the Indies who appears to have backed his
application for a post in the New World, Cervantes’s letter laments that
His Majesty is, in fact, not going to fill the post.19 Although his marriage
in 1584 to Catalina de Salazar would tie him to the family circle of the
Quesadas, well known for their American connections, Cervantes was
still not tapped for any post in the Indies. He was obliged to accept
work, at home in Spain, as an itinerant tax collector, wandering from
one village to another across Andalusia, trying to wring out of grudging
villagers their assigned quotas of wheat, olive oil, and fodder—provi-
sions targeted for Philip’s “Invincible Armada.” During this decade
Cervantes also publishes his first book, the modishly pastoral La Galatea
(1585). The beginnings of his writing career, in short, coincide with
what Fernand Braudel sees as a new “physics of Spanish policy”: “In the
1580s the might of Spain turned towards the Atlantic. It was out there,
whether conscious or not of the dangers involved, that the empire of
Philip II had to concentrate its forces and fight for its threatened
existence. A powerful swing of the pendulum carried it towards its
transatlantic destiny.”20
Cervantes evidently wanted to share in that same destiny, as he tried
yet again to emigrate to America. In a petition to the Council of the
Indies on 21 May 1590, he begged to be considered for “a post in the
Indies” [“un oficio en las yndias”], one of the three or four managerial
posts—he names them all—that had been advertised as vacant: the
comptrollership of the New Kingdom of Granada [present-day Colom-
bia], the governorship of the province of Soconusco in Guatemala, the
post of accountant of galleys at Cartagena de Indias, or that of
 Diana de Armas Wilson 369

magistrate of the city of La Paz. This second and final petition was
rejected on 6 June 1590, when some functionary from the Council of
Indies curtly denied Cervantes his emigration papers. Dr. Núñez
Morquecho scribbled at the foot of the petition the laconic response,
“let him look around here for some favour that may be granted him.”21
It was clear that all colonial prospects were by now closed to Cervantes.
He would remain in Spain and write novels.

III
Spain’s New World enterprise, in short, informed both Cervantes’s
personal history and his writing projects. There is no doubt that he was
familiar with some of the Chronicles of the Indies, texts now under
intense investigation within colonial studies. We know, for instance, that
he read Fray Agustín Dávila Padilla’s 1596 history of the Dominican
missionary order in Mexico in order to write The Fortunate Pimp [El
rufián dichoso]. The play’s haunting references to an American “hurri-
cane” (“huracán”), to the dangerous transatlantic voyages to “Ber-
muda,” and to Florida as the “killer of a thousand bodies” show that
Cervantes was well aware of the dangers of the New World.22 Research
continues on Cervantes’s reading—what he had access to, what he was
indebted to—in the huge textual family known as the Chronicles of the
Indies (crónicas de Indias). It has become a distended family in recent
years, embracing everything from memos and letters, to theological
debates and papal bulls, to literary genres such as essays, epics, and
comedias (stage plays). Whether we see them as a “mass of texts”
covering America’s exploration, conquest, and colonization, or as “a
vast and inconsistent protocol,”23 we must take into account that the
Chronicles of the Indies anticipated, and in some cases coincided with,
the rise of the Cervantine novel. Over a dozen major contributors to
this vast protocol—from Amerigo Vespucci (c. 1507) to Inca Garcilaso
(1609)—published accounts of the New World before and during
Cervantes’s lifetime and, as recent inventories of peninsular libraries
show us, most of these accounts were available to him as a reader, some
in multiple editions and continuations.
Although earlier scholars have catalogued Cervantes’s references to
America—to Mexico and Peru, parrots and alligators, cannibals and
tobacco—the American connection has been seriously underestimated
and, until recently, undertheorized in Cervantine studies. There was no
dearth of inventories, in the style of a 1915 essay titled: “The Americanist
370 Philosophy and Literature

Cervantes: What He Said about the Men and Things of America.”24 As

Spanish colonial traditions of historiography became increasingly avail-
able, shedding light on what had seemed a shadowy partnership
between early modern Europe and America, J. H. Elliott’s admonition
that these two continents “should not be subjected to a historiographi-
cal divorce”25 began to resonate even in Cervantine literary studies.
Since the 1980s, a series of important essays has been connecting
Cervantes’s fictions with the American imperial process of which they
were manifestly a part, moving our New World readings of Cervantes
well beyond the inventories of Americana that opened the century.26 In
the wake of the 1992 Columbian Quincentenary, one critic even
considered the writing of Don Quixote as impossible “without the
Discovery”—although he never explained why.27 My own attempts to
move from inventory to interpretation focus on how Cervantes’s two
novels absorb and reply to the “enterprise of the Indies.” I am
interested in the impact on these novels of various genres of literature,
history, and colonial discourse affiliated with America. These last
discourses include such speech acts as naming New World territories, or
taking possession of Indian villages (the toma de posesión), or doling out
Caribbean islands to fellow conquistadores. I leave to others the monu-
mental study of how Cervantes’s novels are absorbed into, and inter-
preted by, the New World.

IV
The rise of the Cervantine novel, then—an achievement I see as
transnational, crosscultural, and multilingual—was intricately linked to
the New World colonial adventure, some of whose discourses were
codified into genres, sub-genres, or mixed genres that Cervantes would
incorporate into his writings. For both Don Quixote and the Persiles,
Cervantes ransacked a huge variety of recognized generic forms,
including epic and Ovidian poetry, the ancient Graeco-Latin novel,
Mennippean satire, proverbs, the Italian novella, topographical leg-
ends, the books of chivalry, criminal autobiography, critical treatises,
allegorical masques, and closet dramas. But he also internalized a
number of genres precipitated by, or affiliated with, the matter of
America. At least four kinds of literature that have pointed alliances
with Spain’s New World colonies found their way into his novels: the
books of chivalry, the utopias, the colonial war epic, and American
ethnohistory. Retrospectively understood as genres or subgenres, these
 Diana de Armas Wilson 371

four kinds were notably instrumental in the construction of the

Cervantine novel.
Discussions of the Spanish books of chivalry—those wildly popular
sixteenth-century Arthurian and Carolingian prose fictions—tend to
elicit the same kind of robust combativeness thematized in Don Quixote,
whose avowed aim is the destruction of the whole genre. Ritually vilified
by Spanish humanists as immoral and toxic reading, the books of
chivalry were classified as, among other things, “scorpion oil.” Classifi-
cation problems have shifted today from issues of morality to questions
of translation. Do we continue to translate the Spanish libros de
caballerías as “romances of chivalry,” e.g., or has the English distinction
between “romance” and “novel,” as Margaret Anne Doody argues,
“outworn its usefulness”?28 Although the books of chivalry were not
necessarily precipitated by the enterprise of the Indies, they were
deeply implicated in it. Ample evidence of this connection surfaces in,
for example, Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s well-known passage about the
conquistadores’ initial sighting of today’s Mexico City: “These great towns
and cues and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed
like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis.”29 Based on the codes
of the books of chivalry, critics have ritually described the conquest of
America as a chivalric enterprise and even romanticized it as “ocean
chivalry.”30 The books of chivalry had an enormous impact on Cervantes’s
age, both in Europe and America. One and the same genre gave to the
conquistadores their delirious dreams of El Dorado; to Spanish cartogra-
phers, American place names like “California” and “Patagonia”; to the
New World chroniclers, a “lying” genre against which to defend their
own “true histories”; to Cervantes, an exhausted genre he could revive
and parody; and to Don Quixote, an endearing case of bibliomania.
Many writers, from William Prescott down to the present, have de-
scribed the conquistadores as “quixotic”—a preposterous “cart-before-
the-horse” construction, of course, given that the conquistadores pre-date
Don Quixote, but a proof, nonetheless, of the affinities between them.
Cervantes’s generic contact with the utopias has its own New World
lineaments, in the tradition of Thomas More’s Utopia—whose Iberian
protagonist, Rafael Hythlodaeus, claims to have sailed with Amerigo
Vespucci on all four voyages to South America. On the historical front,
Don Quixote is classified as a “counterutopia” by José Antonio Maravall,
who claims that Cervantes intended the book to satirize the feckless
utopian values of Charles V’s inner circle (1991).31 My own focus on
Cervantine utopography is less historical than geographical, and more
372 Philosophy and Literature

transatlantic that peninsular. Cervantes created two dystopias set on

fictional islands that gesture to America: Barataria in Don Quixote and
the “Barbaric Isle” in the Persiles. Sancho’s governorship of Barataria
serves not only as a generic parody of the books of chivalry, in which
knights occasionally dispense islands as gifts to their squires, but also as
social satire of the territorial gifts often promised, and sometimes
delivered, by many of the conquistadores to their “vassals,” e.g., Columbus’s
notorious “gift” of the island of La Bella Saonese to Michele da Cuneo.
The less comic dystopia depicted in the opening chapters of the Persiles,
set on some insular “no-where” with multiple Caribbean hallmarks,
enacts the likely, and ultimately barbaric, effects of preparing for an
imperial world order.
Cervantes’s novels incorporate yet another New World genre with
America’s so-called “first epic,” Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569–89). A long
narrative poem about Spain’s conquest of Chile that Cervantes repeat-
edly quarries for his writings, La Araucana has also been called “the
losers’ epic.”32 Cervantes strategically places this epic in Don Quixote’s
library, where it is saved from the bonfire because it ranks among “the
richest jewels of Spain’s poetry” (1.6). But his various transactions with
this colonial war epic—often called “the Chilean Aeneid”—range from
the verbal to the structural to the thematic. Beyond providing the
language for Samson Carrasco’s invitation to a duel, Ercilla may have
furnished the cliffhanger closure to Chapter 8 of Don Quixote, i.e., the
topos of the interrupted duel described in Ariosto studies as “cantus
interruptus.”33 Ercilla’s vivid portrait of the Chilean Indians plotting to
conquer Spain and, after that, the whole world (8.16) uncannily
foreshadows Cervantes’s barbarians in the Persiles, figures who are also
plotting global conquest.
Another New World genre that Cervantes internalizes is American
ethnohistory, as found in selected passages of Inca Garcilaso’s Royal
Commentaries of the Incas [Comentarios reales], a text written in Spain by an
American mestizo called “the Herodotus of the Incas.” Published in
1609, the Commentaries is a kind of “remembrance of things lost” by the
ex-royals of the defeated Incas.34 Although the presence of Inca
Garcilaso in the Persiles has been sporadically noted throughout the
twentieth century, the role of the Inca as Cervantes’s main precursor in
“barbaric” scriptures needs to be further documented and augmented.
The central question posed at the threshold of Cervantes’s last novel—
a question also invoked in many virulent sixteenth-century European
debates—is “What constitutes a barbarian?” The unambiguous answer
 Diana de Armas Wilson 373

enacted in the text is “anyone harbouring aspirations of universal

empire.” This would incriminate conquistadors like Cortés, who shared
with members of the Imperial entourage a vision of universal monarchy
for Charles V, as well as all those peninsular Spaniards who until 1588
(the year of the Armada) subscribed to a kind of “messianic imperial-
ism.”35 Cervantes seemed ready, at the end of his life, to satirize any
figures aspiring to become what Anthony Pagden wryly calls, in the title
of a comparative study of three European empires, “lords of all the
world.”36
No work on Cervantes and the Indies would be complete without a
nod to the cluster of translators in his novels, which are themselves
presented as translations, Don Quixote from the Arabic, the language of
the defeated enemy, and the Persiles from a strategically unidentified
language (2.1). An activity that concerns much more than readability,
translation involves movements between perceptions, cultures, and
even empires (translatio imperii). The role of translators in the historio-
graphical tradition of New World encounters was both demanding and
crucial. In the second half of the sixteenth century, translators were
repeatedly called upon to transmit knowledge of voyages to and
explorations in the New World. The relative speed of this transmission,
at least in early modern terms, may be gauged by the English transla-
tion of Nicolás Monardes’s Spanish survey of American medicinal
plants, Historia medicinal de las Indias. First published in Seville in 1565,
the text appeared twelve years later in John Frampton’s 1577 English
translation Joyfull Newes out of the Newe Founde World.37 As the main
mechanism of European communication during the humanist recovery
of antiquity, translations—from Homer, Virgil, or Heliodorus—contrib-
uted significantly to Cervantes’s writings. But geographically as well as
chronologically distant materials must be factored into the rise of the
Cervantine novel. For the recovery of time would give way—precisely
during the age of Cervantes—to the expansion of space.
This spatial expansion is movingly depicted in Jorge Luis Borges’s
“Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote,” a text that portrays Cervantes
as “fed up with his Spanish homeland” and seeking comfort “in
Ariosto’s vast geographies.”38 Without denying the literary appeal of
oriental deserts and lunar valleys for both Cervantes and his mad
knight, I would extend those vast geographies westward to the Indies—
to the place where chivalry rode again, perhaps for the last time.

University of Denver
374 Philosophy and Literature
This article contains an overview of the arguments of my forthcoming Cervantes, the Novel and
the New World (Oxford University Press, 2000).
1. Cervantes’s two citations are, respectively, from La Galatea, 2 vols., ed. Juan Bautista
Avalle-Arce (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1968), II.189, and The Jealous Old Man from Extremadura,
Exemplary Novels III (Novelas ejemplares), gen. ed. B. W. Ife, trans. Michael and Jonathan
Thacker, 4 vols. (Warminster: Aris & Phillips Ltd, 1992), III.8.
2. Alejo Carpentier, The Lost Steps, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Bard/Avon,
1979), p. 66.
3. Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce (Madrid: Clásicos
Castalia, 1969), I.1. All citations to the Persiles are parenthetically documented in my text
by book and chapter number, and all translations are my own.
4. Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo: The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D’Anghera [1494–1526],
trans. Francis Augustus MacNutt, 2 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons., 1912), I.2.
5. Montaigne, “Of Cannibals,” The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), p. 154.
6. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Lecture VIII: Don Quixote, Cervantes,” Coleridge’s Miscel-
laneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor (London: Constable & Co., 1936), p.
110.
7. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957).
8. I have used the new edition of Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605 and 1615) edited by
Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Instituto Cervantes, 1998). All translations are mine, and all
citations are parenthetically documented in my text by book and chapter number.
9. Barry W. Ife, “The Literary Impact of the New World: Columbus to Carrizales,”
Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies 3 (1994): 66.
10. Francisco López de Gómara, Hispania victrix. Primera y segunda parte de la Historia
general de las Indias [1552], Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 22 (Madrid: Succesores
de Hernando, 1918), p. 156.
11. Tom Conley, The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p. 2.
12. Raúl Porras Barrenechea, El Inca Garcilaso en Montilla (1561–1614) (Lima: Editorial
San Marcos, 1955), p. 238.
13. Eduardo González, The Monstered Self: Narratives of Death and Performance in Latin
American Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), p. xvi.
14. M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans.
Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 50.
15. See Ottmar Hegyi’s elegant essay “Algerian Babel Reflected in Persiles,” in
Ingeniosa Invención: Essays on Golden Age Spanish Literature for Geoffrey L. Stagg in Honor of
His Eighty-fifth Birthday, ed. Ellen Anderson and Amy Williamsen (Newark, DE: Juan de la
Cuesta Press, 1999), pp. 225–39.
16. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, p. 429.
 Diana de Armas Wilson 375
17. Rita De Grandis, “Incursiones en torno a hibridación: una propuesta para
discusión. De la mediación linguística de Bajtin a la mediación simbólica de Canclini,”
in Memorias de JALLA Tucumán 1995 (Tucumán, Argentina: Proyecto “Tucumán en los
Andes,” 1997), I: 292–94.
18. Fernando Arrabal, Un esclavo llamado Cervantes (Madrid: Espasa Calpa, 1996), p.
152.
19. On this letter, see Jean Canavaggio, Cervantes, trans. J. R. Jones (New York: W. W.
Norton 1990), p. 102.
20. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,
trans. Siân Reynolds (London: Collins, 1972), p. 19.
21. For the whole text of Cervantes’s 1590 application, see Pedro Torres Lanzas,
Transcripción del Información de Miguel de Cervantes de lo que ha servido a S. M. y de lo que ha
hecho estando captivo en Argel . . . (Documentos) (Madrid: Ediciones El Arbol, 1981), pp. 11–
13. See also José Toribio Medina, “Cervantes americanista: Lo que dijo de los hombres
y cosas de América,” Estudios cervantinos (Santiago de Chile: Fondo Histórico y Bibliográfico
José Toribio Medina, 1958), pp. 535–36, and Canavaggio, p. 157.
22. Fray Agustín Dávila Padilla’s 1596 history of the Dominican order in Mexico
chronicled the life of Fray Cristóbal de la Cruz, who served as the provincial head of the
preaching order in Mexico before his death in 1565. See Cervantes’s El rufián dichoso, in
Obras completas, ed. Angel Valbuena Prat, 2 vols. (Mexico: Aguilar, 1991), I.415.
23. These phrases are found, respectively, in Walter D. Mignolo, “El metatexto
historiográfico y la historiografía indiana,” MLN 96 (1981): 359, and Antonio Benítez-
Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective, trans. James E.
Maraniss (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 88.
24. José Toribio Medina, “Cervantes americanista: Lo que dijo de los hombres y cosas
de América,” Estudios cervantinos (Santiago de Chile: Fondo Histórico y Bibliográfico José
Toribio Medina, 1958).
25. Sir J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New: 1492–1650 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970), p. 7.
26. See, among others, the important studies by Germán Arciniegas, “El hijo de don
Quesada,” Senderos, Publicación Semestral de la Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia, Vol.
IX, No. 33 (1998): 1246–51; Stelio Cro, “Cervantes, el ‘Persiles’ y la historiografía
indiana,” Anales de literatura hispanoamericana, vol. 4 (Madrid: Universidad Complutense,
1975): 5–25; Mary M. Gaylord, “The True History of Early Modern Writing in Spanish:
Some American Reflections,” MLQ 57 (1996): 213–35; James D. Fernández, “The Bonds
of Patrimony: Cervantes and the New World,” PMLA l09 (1994): 969–81; María E. Mayer,
“El detalle de una ‘historia verdadera’: Don Quijote y Bernal Díaz,” Cervantes 14 (1994):
93–118; and Daniel P. Testa, “Parodia y mitificación del Nuevo Mundo en el Quijote,”
Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 430 (1986): 63–71.
27. Pedro Acosta, rev. of El Quijote y el Almirante by Roa Bastos, El Tiempo, 4 July 1993,
“Lecturas dominicales”: 15.
376 Philosophy and Literature
28. Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1996), p. xvii.
29. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J. M. Cohen (London:
Penguin, 1963), p. 214.
30. William H. Prescott, History of the Conquest of Mexico, ed. John Foster Kirk, 3 vols.
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1873), I.21.
31. José Antonio Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia in the “Quixote,” trans. Robert W.
Felkel (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991).
32. Alonso Ercilla y Zúñiga, La Araucana, ed. Marcos A. Morínigo and Isaías Lerner, 2
vols. (Madrid: Clásicos Castalia, 1979). David Quint’s excellent reading of La Araucana as
a “loser’s epic” appears in Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 157–85.
33. Daniel Javitch, “Cantus Interruptus in the Orlando Furioso,” MLN 95 (1980): 66–80.
34. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales de los Incas, ed. Aurelio Miró Quesada,
2 vols. (Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1976).
35. On this “global vision of empire,” see Elliott, Old World and the New, pp. 84–87; on
“messianic imperialism,” see Marcel Bataillon, Erasmo y España: Estudios sobre la historia
espiritual del siglo xvi, trans. Antonio Alatorre (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
1950), pp. 226–36.
36. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and
France, 1492–1830 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
37. Elliott, Old World and the New, pp. 37–38.
38. Jorge Luis Borges, “Parábola de Cervantes y de Quijote,” in El hacedor (Buenos
Aires: Emecé, 1960), p. 38.