The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488-1539): A Renaissance Collector in Seville (review)
in the end Alonso Quijano, called “the good” by friends and neighbors, recognizes the need to compromise with money and mediocrity. Yet, having put up the good fight, we must continue to admire his tenacious resistance to the tyranny of the run-of-the-mill. As Américo Castro recognized some eighty years ago, Cervantes’s genius and his prodigious contribution to the origins of the modern novel lie in his discovery of the extraordinary qualities of ordinary lives. Laying the groundwork for Joyce three centuries later, who would trace with equal wit and blistering irony the epic resonances of the commonplace in his Ulysses, Cervantes understood that pathos and bathos could, in fact, coexist and that tedium could be the springboard to life, being every bit as interesting and as the epic deeds of Amadis or the dauntless wanderings of Homer’s heroes. Cervantes’s merit, and the magnificent leap of the imagination upon which his founding of the modern novels rests, can be located in his ability to find transcendence in the ordinary — in the here and now. Challenging the ancient norms and conventions of narrative, Cervantes learned to recite a new song, the epic of the commonplace, which we have come to call the novel. It is very satisfying to see the case made well in English for Don Quijote as a modern novel since, much to the chagrin of hispanists, the critical and theoretical perception and reception of the work as a novel has not fared well in the Englishspeaking world despite Stern’s and Fielding’s open admiration and early imitation of the book. Individuals of the stature of Nabokov, who failed to read Spanish and, hence, appreciate the work’s subtle verbal modulations, its ironies, transitions, and readerly manipulations, while admiring Cervantes’s flawed hero, trashed the book as anecdotal, violent, and crude. Although since the mid-nineteenth century Don Quijote has been widely viewed as a tragic figure comparable to Hamlet, few English speaking critics, save perhaps Harry Levin, could take stock of the work’s incisive, often imaginatively reiterative composition and juxtapositions, its wicked satire, and rapier-like wit. It is a pleasure to see Quint do justice to these in English and provide a soundly argued, clear presentation of them. E. MICHAEL GERLI University of Virginia