Cervantes in the first person

The last History Debate of this academic year (but we'll meet again next term), will be dedicated to one of the great dead of 1616 : Miguel de Cervantes. It's fitting that we should meet him after having, last April, shared the company of Shakespeare, who also died in 1616. We'll be meeting him in the company of Jean Canavaggio, professor emeritus at the Université Paris X-Nanterre and former director of the Casa de Vélazquez. Jean Canavaggio is one of the world's leading specialists on Cervantes, to whom he has dedicated numerous works. I'd like to mention a few that have marked out his Cervantes journey. First, in 1986, a biography of Cervantes, considered the most important since that published in 1913 by Fitzmaurice-Kelly. It was republished by Fayard in 1997 and translated into many languages (including Spanish). In 2001, he edited the two volumes of Cervantes' Œuvres romanesques complètes, published by Gallimard in the Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, and translated Don Quixote himself. This translation has just been republished in a separate volume, which contains only the Quixote. In 2005, he published a fundamental book devoted to the history of the reception, interpretation and appropriation of Don Quixote. Published by Fayard, it is entitled Don Quichotte, du livre au mythe. Quatre siècles d'errance. These three works give only a meagre idea of the work of Jean Canavaggio, who has written on the theater of the Golden Age, Spain at the time of Quixote and Spanish literature - for which he coordinated a History published by Fayard in 1993 and 1994.

There's no better guide to unravel some of the threads of Cervantes' life. The first is the presence of the writer in his work. More than others, Cervantes practiced what Jean Canavaggio has called " autobiographisme ", either directly in the dedications or prologues to his works, or indirectly by making certain episodes from his life (for example, his capture by barbarian privateers and the five years he spent in the prisons of Algiers) the stuff of fiction - thus appears the story of the captive in Don Quixote or that of Ricaredo in The English Spaniard. Added to this presence in the work are the numerous documents about, or by, Cervantes (for example, his 1590 memorial requesting employment in America, which was refused).

A second thread that links life to books is that of Cervantes' geography. That of the author's travels, as a soldier, a captive, a munitions dealer and a tax collector. That of the spaces of fiction, expanded from the English Channel in the first part of Don Quixote to the Spains of the Second and New Exemplars and, even more, with The Works of Persiles and Sigismunda, Cervantes' great book (at least in his eyes), which takes the reader from a mythical North - that of icy seas, shipwrecks and islands, human sacrifices and lycanthropes - to a Mediterranean world traversed by characters who have become pilgrims on their way to Rome.

Third thread : Cervantes' religion. Was he the Christian humanist some have made him out to be, or a Catholic inspired by the devotions of the Counter-Reformation ? How can we reconcile his entry into the Congregation of the Slaves of the Blessed Sacrament and the Third Order of St. Francis with the religious tolerance attributed to some of his heroes ? Comparing the perception, in Don Quixote and Persilès, of the expulsion of the Moriscos (decided by the king in 1609), the relationship between Cervantes and the " conversos " or the Jews converted by force or by choice after the expulsion of 1492, are pieces to be added to this dossier.

Finally, we must ask ourselves why the " story " told in Don Quixote (as Cervantes calls his book) became the founding work of the modern novel. Is this because, as Francisco Rico points out, the work is written in the " domestic prose " of life, at a distance from the artificial style of the novels that Cervantes parodies or mocks : the novel of chivalry, the pastoral novel (a genre he tried his hand at with La Galatea in 1585) and the picaresque novel ? Or is this modernity to be found in a novel effect of the  text: the presence of characters and episodes outside the book, thanks to their early appropriation (starting as early as 1605) by aristocratic or religious carnivals, by playwrights all over Europe (including Shakespeare) and by painters, engravers and illustrators ? In any case, this was a unique feature of the book written by Cervantes until the ^18thcentury  ^{when, in their turn, Pamela, Paul and Virginie, or the Rousseau characters emerged from the printed pages.}