1st Edition
Don Quixote’s Impossible Quest for the Absolute in Literature Fiction, Reflection, and Negative Theology
This book offers a reading particularly of Part II of Don Quixote, a reading that is embedded in a philosophical reflection on the revelation of religious truth in and through literature. Part II of Don Quixote is the far richer part for its meta-literary reflection on the novel itself as a genre and on life as such seen through the lens of self-reflection. The author has treated the phenomenon of modern self-reflexivity as originally theological in nature in previous publications (notably Dante’s Paradiso and the Theological Origins of Modern Thought: Toward a Speculative Philosophy of Self-Reflection, Routledge, 2021). The present endeavor expands this overall intellectual project, extending it into detailed consideration of what is recognizably another nodal great work inaugurating unprecedented forms of self-reflection in the early modern period. Reading the founding texts of literary and cultural tradition in this negative-theological key proves crucial to allowing them to release the full force of their religious vision in the present age, despite its sometimes obstinate secularity.
This reading absorbs and reconciles the religious and secular readings of Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, two of Spain’s outstanding philosophical luminaries. Both thinkers based their entire philosophies and their analyses of the Spanish national character and destiny on their interpretations of the Quixote. Negative theology deploys critical reason that critiques the limits of reason itself and opens toward an unfathomable (un)ground of All. Such speculative interpretation performs a synthesis of the secularizing and sacralizing tendencies that are both sublimely operative in the text of the Quixote. It thereby enables the work to emerge in the fully parodic and paradoxical vitality that other interpretations, governed by one paradigm or the other, access only partially. Rather than falling into one camp or the other, the proposed approach combines and resources both heritages, sacred and secular, in their deepest synergisms. Spanish baroque mysticism and contemporary post-secular thought are made to converge in highlighting the blessed, even sacred, donation that literature like Don Quixote preserves and transmits as our most precious and saving cultural heritage.
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Prologue Concerning Apophatic Theology in Literary Representation and Reflection
Chapter 1 The Revelation of Laughter: Cervantes’s Comic Christian Muse
The Power of Laughter—The Wisdom of Folly
A Negative Theological Reading of Don Quixote
Fool for Christ as Universal Sage
Don Quixote’s Contemporaneity and Universality
The Holy Fool as Christian Saint and Crusader
Unamuno and Ortega: Dialectic of the Religious and the Secular
Chapter 2 Self-reflective Dynamics of Revelation in Literature
A. Self-subversive Mirroring Between and Among the Protagonists
The Knight of Mirrors and of the White Moon as Self-reflection of Don Quixote
Don Quixote’s Ideal Reflected in Sancho—and Inversely
Self-reflexivity as Self-fulfilling Ideal
Becoming a Book and Reading One’s Life
B. Self-reflection and Undermining the Authority of the Author
Self-reflective Questioning of Authorship
Cervantes’s Self-representations in the Prologues
Authorship and Originality
Self-reflexivity in the Narrative Structure of Fiction
Fictionalization of Author by Self-reflection—Kafka and Borges
The Dialectic of Self-reflection and Negative Theology
Chapter 3 Negative Theology of the Novel
The Novel as Breaking Down the Separation of Styles—Auerbach
Recognition Scenes: Epiphanies and Theophanies
The Novel as Subjective Reflective Medium and Genre Reflecting Concrete Reality
The Novel as Subjectively Lived Experience
The Novel as a New and Comprehensive Genre
Dialectics of Wholeness
The In-breaking of External Reality Into Fiction
Mutual Contamination of History and Fiction and Their Exposure to Externality
Maese Pedro’s Puppet Show and Unamuno’s Move Through Fiction to Reality
Ortega on Literary Genre: From Epic Myth to Novelistic Formal Reality
Novelistic Creation of Formal Reality—Ortega and Maese Pedro’s Puppet Theatre
Fiction and Realization of the Ideal
Chapter 4 Visionary Experience in the Cave of Montesinos as Revelation via Parody
The Vision of Montesinos, or the Part of Fiction in the Construction of Prophetic Revelation
The Question of Truth Raised by the Vision in the Cave
Artifice and the Limits of the Control of the Author
The Reality that Our Fictions Become
The Ontological Argument for Dulcinea’s Existence
Real Costs of One’s Fictive Inventions
Repetitions of Visionary Revelation following Montesinos
Sancho’s Perversion of Visionary Experience—Clavileño
Visionary Revelation After the Cave of Montesinos—Its Translation Into the Everyday
Chapter 5 Dialectic of Religious Truth and Its Secular Simulation
Religious and Anti-religious Interpretations of the Quixote: Religion Versus Secularity
Velázquez’s Las Meninas: Self-reflexivity and the Other
Camacho’s Wedding as Theatrical Artifice and Its Sacramental Transfiguration
Baroque Aesthetics of Contrast, the Grotesque, and Theatricalization of the World
Feminine Beauty as Ideal and as Simulation
Transvestism, Love of Artifice, and the Transhuman
Formal Dimension of Reality—Names as Revelation—Antonomasia
Archetypal Image and Primal Naming—Spitzer’s Linguistic Perspectivism
The Epistolary Novel and the Scriptural Ideal
Dialectic of Self-reflective Desengaño and Disinterested Dedication
Chapter 6 A Political Novel: Representation of an Idealized World Versus Contemporary Reality
The Baroque Age: Aesthetics of the Ideal, Realism, and the Unrepresentable
Barataria as Anti-utopia of a Perfectly Artificial State
Knowing One’s Limits and Becoming Oneself: Sancho in “Hell”
The Contemporary Expulsion Drama and the Apotheosis of Fiction
The Realistic Political Novel as an Overture to Modernity
Barcelona and the New Materialism
Chapter 7 The Passion of Sancho Panza and the Death of Don Quixote
The Wise Fool—Like Master Like Servant: Sancho’s Governance
Sancho’s Assuming the Lead Position in the Duo
Visionary Revisitations—Sancho in the Role of the Christ Figure
Altisidora’s Invention of a Visionary Revelation
Don Quixote’s Death and Bequest—The Heroism of the Common Person?
The Christian Death of Alonso Quijano—and Sancho’s Passion to Live
Chapter 8 The Metaphysics of Fiction
The Force of Fiction
Real Tragedy in Fiction—Carl Schmitt
Ambiguity of Fictive Truth in Epic Tradition and Its Modern Parody
What Makes a Book of Poetic Literature Great—or Revelatory?
The Integration of Fiction into Reality and Vice Versa—Vargas Llosa
Self-reflection at the Juncture of Fiction and Ultimate Reality
The Apophatic in Literature—An Aesthetic Dimension of the Real
Chapter 9 Philosophies of Quixotism
Unamuno’s Quixotesque Turning of Philosophy into Religion
Ortega’s Cervantesque Philosophy of Desengaño as a Theory of Genres
Unamuno on Quixotism as the True Philosophy and Religion of the Spanish People
Unamuno’s Staging of the Battle Between Reason and Faith—Reason’s Self-undermining
The Novel as Philosophy, Don Quixote as Tragicomedy
Towards Ortega’s Philosophy of Relations as a Type of Secular Revelation
Maria Zambrano’s Mediation of Two Philosophical Masters
A Parting Reflection
Index
Biography
William Franke is Professor of Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. He is currently Francesco de Dombrowski Professor in Residence at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence (Villa I Tatti) and Senior Fellow of the International Institute for Hermeneutics. He has been Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Macao, Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Navarra, and Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religions at the University of Salzburg. His books include On What Cannot Be Said (2007); Poetry and Apocalypse (2009); Dante and the Sense of Transgression (2013); A Philosophy of the Unsayable (2014); The Revelation of Imagination (2015); Secular Scriptures (2016); A Theology of Literature (2018); The Universality of What is Not (2020); The Divine Vision of Dante’s Paradiso (2021); The Vita Nuova and the New Testament (2021); Dantologies (2024); and numerous others.
"This is one of the very best, most interesting studies of Cervantes’ Don Quixote that I have read in some time. . . . I consistently found myself engaged by the argument, fascinated by the detailed analyses, and impressed by the depth of thought in evidence in this work. It’s clear that Franke really “gets” the complexity and the importance of Don Quixote, and he does a superb job communicating this to the reader. . . .In a scholarly landscape that is littered with studies of Don Quixote that often fail to do justice to Cervantes’ text, Franke’s study stands out for the way in which it truly captures the profundity of the work."
-Anthony J. Cascardi, Sidney and Margaret Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley
A celebrated scholar of Dante and of the discipline known as apophatic theology or negative theology, William Franke in Don Quixote’s Impossible Quest for the Absolute in Literature offers us a tour-de force interpretation of how Cervantes searches for God’s revelation of truth in theologically diverse apophatic discourses. Franke’s exegetical reflections converse with Ortega’s, Unamuno’s, and Zambrano’s respective meditations on Cervantes’s masterpiece, allowing the reader to get a taste of the parodic laughter in Don Quixote, a mode of discourse that speaks (or rather un-speaks) of the impossible quest for the transcendent and the divine. Franke’s is a complex and excellent book that sheds insight upon Don Quixote’s experience of the divine around him.
-Antonio Cortijo Ocaña, Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara
William Franke’s Don Quixote’s Impossible Quest for the Absolute in Literature: Fiction, Reflection, and Negative Theology could hardly be a more ambitious project, and I believe that the results are brilliant. Professor Franke has analyzed Don Quixote using his unique and wide-ranging background in literature, culture, theology, and philosophy, not to mention his familiarity with the meta- offspring of Cervantes’s work. I find the framing of the theses and arguments to be superb. The critic lays the foundations for his particular readings, upon which readers can reflect and debate.
-Edward H. Friedman, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor in the Humanities, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
