The ambiguously complex authorial presence in Don Quijote de la Mancha remains one of the most intriguing inventions of the work, partially because the unique assemblage of shifting narrative footprints logically seems to promise the clearest, most direct acquaintance with Cervantes the creator.¹ For the reader, the narrative structure functions rather as a series of puzzles, tempting him or her forward in hopes of perceiving, or being granted, some final, “traditional” measure of illumination, if all elements have been judged properly. Excellent studies by John J. Allen, Ruth El Saffar, E. C. Riley, and Ramón Saldívar² have clarified many enigmatic or contradictory narrative features of the Quijote. I would propose that further light may be shed on the common roots and aim of various components of the authorial role if they are considered with regard to the attitude of classical Greek skepticism toward authority, as it was interpreted during the Renaissance.³ Although skepticism's presence in Spain at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century has not been thoroughly investigated, its presence is easily documented. Francisco Sánchez (1552?-1623)⁴ and Pedro de Valencia (1555-1620)⁵ published formal studies of the doctrine, it clearly figured in various works, such as Huarte de San Juan's Examen de ingenios, and several of Quevedo's Sueños and other essays, and it fused extremely well with Erasmism. Skepticism's presence in Cervantes' work has been suggestively noted by Américo Castro, Aubrey Bell, and Riley,⁶ but to date the possible role of skepticism in the Cervantine canon has received little serious, detailed investigation. I would here like to consider briefly the implications or influence which this attitude might have had in shaping the authorial role in the Quijote.

The basic classical skeptical stance holds that there seems to be no absolute authority or truth with regard to anything. While such an attitude is completely passive, the technique endorsed and utilized for demonstrating the validity of such an attitude—a technique recommended for use to the reader—is an active, aggressive, and clever one. Whatever opinion, argument, or authority might be proposed, the skeptic will offer a contradictory view which is only of sufficient weight to throw the original assertion into doubt, but not so strong as to destroy or supplant it. As the Renaissance skeptic Francisco Sánchez stated: “Si dudas todavía de esto, callaré, pero te exigiré a ti otra cosa; si lo concedieres, dudaré de lo tuyo, y así padecemos perpetua ignorancia.”⁷

This basic tenet, that there can be no absolute sureness of truth with regard to anything, places the skeptic into a most awkward position. By attacking and exposing the false authority of others, as he wishes to do and indeed must do, his own position, or “authority,” consequently becomes the superior fact, or “truth,” which he does feel to be the most reasonable one. But, his own philosophy rejects the validity of such a position. Faced with this situation, most skeptics attempt to ease over the contradiction by offering rather wooden disclaimers, encouraging the reader to accept the validity of their skeptical views, but still imploring him or her not to take these views or attitudes as “truth,” either. Thus, Sextus Empiricus claimed at the end of the first chapter of his Outlines of Pyrrhonism (the only extant work of a Greek skeptic) he was not affirming the truth of what he wrote, but only reporting, as would a chronicler, how things appeared to him at the moment. Montaigne made a similar statement in his Essays:

For likewise these are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed. … I have no authority to be believed, nor do I want it, feeling myself too ill-instructed to instruct others.⁸

Francisco Sánchez ended his treatise Que nada se sabe by directly requesting the reader to form a judgment rather than accept that of the author, and Huarte de San Juan also referred to his own limitations and lack of authority as he concluded the preface to his Examen de ingenios:

Y así concluyo, curioso lector, confesando llanamente que yo estoy enfermo y destemplado, y que tú lo podrás estar también, pues nací en tal región y que nos pudiera acontecer lo que a aquellos cuatro hombres que siendo el paño azul, el uno juró que era colorado, y el otro blanco, el otro amarillo y el otro negro, y ninguno accertó por la lesión particular que cada uno tenía en su vista.⁹

Cervantes does not directly, rather ineffectually, request such an attitude from his reader. Instead, using the customary skeptical tactics, he actively provokes the reader into a skeptical stance by raising the problem of truth, reliability, or criterion, with regard to his own creation. Richard Popkin, author of the groundbreaking study The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, has observed that “the problem of justifying a standard of true knowledge does not arise as long as there is an unchallenged criterion.”¹⁰ Authors and readers, most certainly those in the literary world of Cervantes' day and even to a large extent today, generally accept the unspoken premises that the author is the ultimate authority, the trustworthy holder of truth, for any account in question. And, in the opening pages of the Quijote, Cervantes would seem to have assumed the traditional position of omniscience; he even promises the reader clearly at the end of the first paragraph in Chapter One that the narration “no se salga un punto de la verdad.”¹¹ Such certainty, however, is short-lived. In Chapter II, his concern over authorial responsibility is picked up again when he interrupts the thread of narration to explain to the reader that what follows is perforce selected from several conflicting accounts:

Autores hay que dicen que la primera aventura que le avino fue la del puerto Lápice; otros dicen que la de los molinos de viento; pero lo que yo he podido averiguar en este caso, y lo que he hallado escrito en los anales de la Mancha, es que …

(I, 43).

Although his claim to selecting the true account still seems acceptable, the facts are beginning to feel less absolute to the reader. This feeling grows when the narration is broken again and actually curtailed in medias res in Chapter VIII, at the high point of the battle with the vizcaíno, because the “true” manuscript is discovered to be incomplete. Such systematic interruption of the narration, purposely done to involve the reader in backstage problems, does not invalidate or destroy authorial control, but it does initiate the process of stripping it of omniscience, of denying it a dogmatic apprehension of the truth. Although still willing to proceed, the reader can no longer automatically regard the text as truth.

Upon encountering the “true” manuscript again, and thereby returning to the position of being able to continue the account of Don Quijote's exploits, Cervantes immediately sows the seeds of yet another source which will actively challenge author omniscience to the end of the novel: namely, the multiple-author device, in which there is an original chronicler of the history, (as Sextus Empiricus wished to be considered) but he is a lying Arab, and to add insult, the history is being translated from Cide Hamete's original into castellano by a nameless morisco, obviously of equally suspicious reliability, and evidently unsupervised by any “true” Christian. The coexistence of these various “authorities,” all working independently, and all questionable in one way or another, transforms the narrative into a group effort where the reader copes not only with suspicious credentials but also with a sudden inability to locate “an authority” of truth responsible for the story. With tongue-in-cheek protestations of zealously selecting and preserving only the absolute truth of the matter, Cervantes, in accord with skeptical methods, has enumerated and balanced obstacles and difficulties so effectively, that the prudent reader soon reacts instinctively with precisely the critical distrust and lack of confidence recommended by skeptical writers. The reader listens and observes, but does not blindly accept or reject what is told. The issue of author control and the trustworthiness of the text is even more prominent in Part II than in Part I.

A sincere concern over these matters must have prompted Cervantes to allow these issues to take center stage again in the opening pages of the continuation where, in Chapters II-IV, Don Quijote and Sancho discuss Part I, and submit their own chronicler, Cide Hamete, to the “toque de la piedra de la verdad.” Sancho makes such specific corrections as:

nunca … he oído llamar con don a mi señora Dulcinea, sino solamente la señora Dulcinea del Toboso, y ya en esto anda errada la historia.

(II, 559)

and

En la manta no hice yo cabriolas … en el aire sí.

(II, 560)

and he also clarifies the problem of the stolen mount. Predictably, Don Quijote is less concerned with such omissions and errors of the particular; he is more distressed by the fact that the author was a Moor, as the text records how

desconsolóle pensar que su autor era moro, según aquel nombre de Cide; y de los moros no se podía esperar verdad alguna, porque todos son embelecadores, falsarios y quimeristas. …

(II, 558)

One might even argue that, by voicing the very prejudices commonly held by the seventeenth-century Spanish reader, Don Quijote may enjoy a slight, momentary gain in credibility by allying himself thus with the reader.

In the following chapter (Chapter V), the morisco translator, heretofore a silent partner, records a clear lack of confidence in what he is about to translate. To bring the mutual suspicion and lack of confidence in the text full circle, the reader soon encounters Cide Hamete reacting with disbelief to episodes such as the Cueva de Montesinos. Despite the obvious humor and/or tongue-in-cheek tone of many of these moments, all work to deny the existence of “a true, clear history.”

As well as witnessing the above unresolved contradictions, the careful reader may also note certain usurpations of role among the various sources, such as that of the translator during the adventure of the Caballero del Verde Gabán. The text reads:

Aquí pinta el autor todas las circunstancias de la casa de don Diego, pintándonos en ella lo que contiene una casa de un caballero labrador, pero al traductor desta historia le pareció pasar estas y otras semejantes menudencias en silencio, porque no venían bien con el propósito principal de la historia; la cual más tiene su fuerza en la verdad que en las frías digresiones.

(II, 662)

The translator also comments on the arbitrary nature of Cide Hamete's work at times, as in Chapter LXVIII: “Don Quijote, arrimado a un tronco de una haya o de un alcornoque—que Cide Hamete Benengeli no distingue el árbol que era …” (II, 1032). The mutual suspicion and undermining efforts among various sources, all equally tainted as far as their claims to “the truth,” without any being fully undermined or discredited, combine to blur methodically the traditionally assumed claims of authorial omniscience, and the reader, whom Cervantes continually reminds with regard to the need to judge for himself, has been transformed into a critical, doubting but observant spectator, the very sort of reader skeptics so dearly sought.

As a final note, it is useful to recall the performance of the many other narrators in the Quijote. Some, such as Ginés de Pasamonte, Fernando, Anselmo, and probably Don Quijote, actively deceive at times. Most others, for example, Cardenio, Luscinda, and Ricote, attempt to provide truthful enough accounts, but their narrations are tainted by the very limited, and therefore inaccurate, nature of their knowledge. The total effect, I would contend, is not to make each point of view equally valid and truthful, but rather to demonstrate the inaccessibility of any such accuracy, or truth, for any narrator, to throw all into equal doubt, without fully destroying any, and to leave as the only possible “resolution” a skeptical suspension of judgment with regard to the ultimate truth of anything.

To conclude, Cervantes' treatment of the authorial role and the truth of the text, as well as his efforts to erode but not destroy the claim to truth of various conflicting sources, reflect and demonstrate with striking effectiveness the skeptical attitudes and tactics as interpreted during the Renaissance. As in the case of literary theories and precepts, rather than express directly the skeptical attitudes and techniques of his day, he chose to incorporate them into the very fabric of his masterpiece.

Notes

1. This paper is a summary of one aspect of skeptical influences discussed in my longer study, Skepticism in Cervantes (London: Tamesis Books, Ltd., 1982).

2. J. Allen, Don Quijote: Hero or Fool? (Gainesville, Florida: University of Florida Press, 1969); R. El Saffar, Distance and Control in “Don Quijote”: A Study in Narrative Technique (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, Department of Romance Languages, 1975); E. C. Riley, Teoría de la novela en Cervantes (Madrid: Taurus, 1966); Ramón Saldívar, “Don Quijote's Metaphors and the Grammar of Proper Language,” MLN, 95 (1980), 252-294.

3. For an excellent introduction to the impact of Sextus Empiricus on European thought of the Renaissance, see Richard Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).

4. Que nada se sabe, ed. and tr. M. Menéndez y Pelayo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Nova, 1944).

5. Academica sive de judicio erga verum (Madrid: n.p., 1596).

6. Aubrey Bell, Cervantes (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947), pp. 118-157; A. Castro, Pensamiento de Cervantes, 2nd ed. (1925; rpt. Barcelona: Noguer, 1972), esp. pp. 346-351; E. C. Riley, “Who's Who in Don Quijote? Or an Approach to the Problem of Identity,” MLN, 81 (1966), 113-130.

7. F. Sánchez, p. 64.

8. The Complete Essays of Montaigne, tr. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1971), pp. 108-109.

9. Examen de ingenios (Madrid: Jerarquía, 1948), p. 408.

10. Popkin, p. 3.

11. Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Martín de Riquer, 2 vols. (Barcelona: Juventud, 1971), I, 36. Future references to this work will be found in the text.