Roland Barthes, S / Z, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970, comments on such complicity: «le lecteur est complice, non de tel ou tel personnage, mais du discours lui-même en ce qu'il joue la division de 1'écoute, l'impureté de la communication: le discours, et non tel ou tel de ses personnages, est le seul héros positif de l'histoire» (p. 151). Cervantes already used grammatical means to suggest referential and perspectival ambiguity in the episode of Mambrino's helmet: «Mandó a Sancho que alzase el yelmo, el cual, tomándo la en las manos, dijo...» (p. 254, Murillo, my italics; la, in «tomándola», refers to «bacía»). (N. from the A.)

In Le Plaisir du texte, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975, Roland Barthes proposes as a texte de plaisir one that allows for a pleasant, easily accessible reading and a texte de jouissance (tr. as «text of bliss» by Richard Miller), or orgasmic pleasure, the demanding, interrupted, disturbing text. Don Quijote responds to both readings. (N. from the A.)

These interferences may range from the introduction of a new narrative line -as when the trio hear Dorotea's initial lament- to the interruption of narration -as when Don Quijote interrupts Cardenio's tale- to the drastic cessation of the historia -as in the vizcaíno episode, Chapters 8 and 9, when the very progress of the narrative base as well as its transmission are «endangered». (N. from the A.)

The instant of this interruption and the curate's very gesture and intent are reiterated almost verbatim: «y al tiempo que el cura se prevenía para decirle algunas razones de consuelo, le suspendió una voz que llegó a sus oídos, que en lastimados acentos...» (end of Chapter 27, p. 343); «así como el cura comenzó a prevenirse para consolar a Cardenio lo impidió una voz que llegó a sus oídos, que, con tristes acentos...» (beginning of Chapter 28, p. 344). (N. from the A.)

Cf. «Triangular Desire», first chapter of René Girard's Deceit, Desire and the Novel, tr. by Yvonne Freccero, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U. P., 1965), pp. 1-52. An aspect of the narrative interruption seems to conform to a triangular pattern -akin to Girard's scheme, and pointed out by Cesáreo Bandera, Mimesis conflictiva, (Madrid: Gredos, 1975), Chapter IV. In this instance we have Cardenio-Luscinda-Dorotea; other comparable incidents, though of a more radical nature as interruptions, are Don Quijote-Amadís-Cardenio and earlier Don Quijote-Cide Hamete-vizcaíno (here I use Cide Hamete as representative of the multiple persona of the text's transmitter -editor, translator, Arab sage, «second author». See note 4). (N. from the A.)

Cf. Roland Barthes, S / Z: «La beauté ne... peut vraiment s'expliquer: elle se dit, s'affirme, se répète en chaque partie du corps mais ne se décrit pas. Telle un dieu (aussi vide que lui), elle ne peut que dire: je suis celle qui suis. Il ne reste plus alors au discours qu'à asserter la perfection de chaque détail et à renvoyer 'le reste' au code qui fonde toute beauté: l'Art». (40); also: «Malice du langage: une fois rassemblé, pour se dire, le corps total doit retourner à la poussière des mots, à l'égrenage des détails, à l'inventaire monotone des parties, à l'émiettement: le langage défait le corps, le renvoie au fétiche. Ce retour est codé sous le nom de blason. Le blason consiste à prédiquer un sujet unique, la beauté d'un certain nombre d'attributs anatomiques: elle était belle quant aux bras, quant au cou, quant aux sourcils...» (120). Cervantes was working here within the tradition of Petrarchism, which had a fundamental impact on the Renaissance description of the female body. Cf. Nancy J. Vickers, «Diana Described», CI, 8, no. 2 (Winter 1981), 277, who quotes as follows from Elizabeth Cropper, «On Beautiful Women, Parmigianino, Petrarchismo, and the Vernacular Style», Art Bulletin, 58 (1976), 376: «Petrarch's figuration of Laura informs a decisive stage in the development of a code of beauty, a code that causes us to view the fetishized body as a norm and encourages us to seek, or to seek to be, 'ideal types, beautiful monsters composed of every individual perfection.' Petrarch's text, of course, did not constitute the first example of particularizing description, but it did popularize that strategy by coming into fashion during the privileged early years of printing, the first century of the widespread diffusion of words and images. It is in this context that Petrarch left us his legacy of fragmentation» (p. 277). (N. from the A.)

In a private communication Ruth El Saffar has suggested to me that Dorotea may anticipate Cervantes' later «androgynous» figures. (N. from the A.)

Dorotea's other readings, which she does not admit at this point, were romances of chivalry. This form of entertainment would be part of that not altogether avowed, turbulent inner self of the young woman, hinted at when she admits that she was not blind to Don Fernando's agreeable figure. (N. from the A.)

Cf. Herrero's article «The Beheading of the Giant: An Obscene Metaphor in Don Quijote» (note 7, above). Professor Herrero points out that Don Fernando is Pandafilando de la Fosca Vista. This identification is clearly confirmed by our reading of the text with the emphasis on sight as both the harbinger of Dorotea's erotic fault and the emblematic connotation of the entire episode. (N. from the A.)

Cf. Herrero once again. (N. from the A.)