I use the term «romance» advisedly for this work which recounts how the hero, after many years of wandering and vicissitude, reaches a spiritual home. Even if we do have to put mental quotes about «hero» and «home» as we read, Alemán clearly intended that we remove them before we close his book. (N. from the A.)

ostraneniye. See the essay «Art as Technique» in Russian Formalist Criticism. Four Essays, trans. and ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: Univ of Nebraska Press, 1965), pp. 3-24; also, Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism. History-Doctrine (New Haven: Yale University Press, 3rd. ed., 1981), pp. 76-78; 176-180. (N. from the A.)

Ann Wiltrout, «Ginés de Pasamonte: The Pícaro and His Art», ACerv, 17 (1978), 11-17. (N. from the A.)

«Genre and Countergenre», in Literature as System, pp. 135-58. (N. from the A.)

I quote from the edition of John Jay Allen, (Madrid: Cátedra, 1978). (N. from the A.)

Cervantes' criminal may allude to the soldier Jerónimo de Pasamonte, captive in Algiers, whose path crossed that of Cervantes on various occasions; see Alois Achleitner, «Pasamonte», ACerv, 2 (1952), 365-67. Jerónimo was not a convict but a mutilated soldier. He writes as a righteous man upon whom unmerited suffering is visited, but none of this comes through in Cervantes' creation. Pasamonte's Vida is in BAE vol. 90; see also Randolph Pope, La autobiografía española hasta Torres Villarroel (Frankfurt: Lang, 1974), pp. 124-140. The most we can say of Ginés is that he has to steal another man's name before he can conceive and project himself into literature. As a descriptive name, of course, Pasamonte conveys well both senses of 'marauder, highwayman' and 'fugitive outlaw.' His given name Ginés delivers yet another Cervantine irony. The present captive and future puppeteer bears the name (and so invokes the spiritual patronage) of the Roman actor Genesius who, playing the role of a Christian martyr in the theater for the amusement of the Emperor Diocletian, was moved to a true conversion by the role he was playing. In his case, the feigned experience became truth, the fictional role became reality, the scoffer became Saint Genesius, martyr. (This story is the subject of Lope de Vega's play Lo fingido verdadero.) «Ginés» points to two referents and to the ironic distance between them. One is the man who steps through illusion into the truth, when he accepts the role as a «figure» of his destiny in the theater of the world. The other is the man who descends from his natural freedom to a self-mediated by a fiction, and finally shrinks to being a manipulator of puppets (Part II, Ch. 26-27). All saints are members of the same system of paradigmatic virtues, which the Christian is called to witness by the act of being named, and Christian tradition sees no accident in the fact that one is born on the day of a particular saint and is thereupon destined to adopt his name. If Ginés travesties the career of his saint, there is also a curious figural similarity between the pattern of the saint's life and that of Guzmán, which could invite further discussion. (N. from the A.)

Literature as System, p. 156. (N. from the A.)

E.g. Alfaro, p. 83; Sieber, pp. 25-26; Weber, p. 75. (N. from the A.)

Not that third person narrative is free from problems of this nature: witness the presentation of chivalric romances as if based on real documents, etc. (N. from the A.)

The problem of the credibility of the narrator is not confined to those who relate their own doings and thoughts. Any narrator who is given an identity separate from his discourse will create an unstable relation between reader and narrative, especially if he is granted opinions and judgments concerning his story or the people in it. Such is the case of Cide Hamete. (N. from the A.)