Cervantes and the Law, At Yale‪.‬

Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria's new book on Cervantes (1) is the published version of the spring 2002 DeVane Lectures, at Yale. The volume is organized into thirteen chapters, coinciding with a traditional thirteen-week semester. The first nine chapters deal with Don Quijote, ten and eleven with selected Novelas ejemplares, twelve with Persiles y Sigismunda, and the last with Cervantes' presence in Borges (the obligatory "Pierre Menard") and Carpentier. The audience at the lectures ranged from a devoted ten-year-old to "retirees looking for something to do on a Thursday afternoon" (x), as well as high-powered Yale academics. This is reflected in the simultaneous presence in the text of well-known facts and glib if not always accurate generalizations, alongside insightful observations and elegant arguments of major interest to card-carrying cervantistas. Gonzalez Echevarria studies the presence and function of the law and legal discourse in Cervantes, and by extension in the formation of modern narrative. Although the clash between the Law and Desire has been around, and generating stories, at least since Genesis, Gonzalez Echevarria argues that only in Spain, and only in the sixteenth century, the first modern nation-state and imperial bureaucracy spawned a proliferation of legal codes and legal discourse that fundamentally altered the character and the potential of narrative fiction. On the one hand, this focus on the law is a particular instance of what Bakhtin has taught us about the origin of novelistic discourse in general, and the law takes its place alongside the new discourses of commerce, of medicine, of science, and so on as a formative element. Gonzalez Echevarria suggests that the law influences narrative in the following ways: 1) style (the concrete legal terms); 2) plots (crime, punishment, revenge, or pardon); 3) the incorporation of subgenres from the legal world (confessions, depositions); 4) endings (resolution involves exculpation, punishment, pardon, or legitimation); 5) an increase in the number of stories dealing with marriage; 6) the proliferation of judges, lawyers, and bailiffs in fiction; and 7) the inclusion of or allusion to legal documents in fiction, with the fiction itself sometimes taking the form of a legal document, as in the picaresque (xviii). On the other hand, he further observes, only the law--that is, interdiction--intersects desire with such force that the potential is created for the construction of new kinds of characters and plots. As he states toward the end, his thesis is that "with the advent of the modern state, aided by the invention of the printing press, a new kind of narrative emerges--the novel--and this genre is about legal conflicts and their resolutions" (231). The novel arises in Spain, within the particular modernity of Cervantes' society and situation: the contamination of everyday language by legal jargon because of the litigious climate that the recent exponential growth of the judicial and penal bureaucracy had created; Cervantes' individual experience with the law, as a comisario requisitioning provisions for the Armada, "part of the new patrimonial bureaucracy and its convoluted legal mechanisms and record keeping" (xix), to which we might add his own experience of incarceration.