Coda - Alonso Quijano’s Lyric Subjectivity:

Summary

The Coda engages prior theories of the novel which have unwittingly touched on lyric subjectivity as the motor of genesis in modern fiction qua the DQ. The Coda returns to Leo Spitzer’s seminal article “Linguistic Perspectivism in the DQ” (1948), in which the negotiation of lexicons also invokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s understanding of heteroglossia and polysemy in the Dialogic Imagination (1930s and 1940s, pub. 1975), and Gyorgy Lukács’ understanding of a rift between interiority and exteriority as transcendental homelessness in the Theory of the Novel (1915). While several of the insights found in their work hold true, their observations often unwittingly point towards the lyric, rather than epic, features of the novel as a modern literary genre. Their insights show that novelistic fiction is everywhere impossible without the lyric subjectivity at work in the practice of sixteenth-century Pastoral Petrarchism, in particular in the Galatea. In his conception of the modern novel, Cervantes preserves lyric subjectivity as narrative emplotment through the transformation of the figura of the poet into the modern madman (Alonso Quijano/don Quijote). This figura of the poet as modern madman is not particular to the DQ but inhabits the “center” of the modern subject.The DQ allows us to consider the foundational division of the modern subject: reason and madness.