Suspended Judgments: Skepticism and the Pact of Fictionality in Cervantes’s Picaresque Novellas

Abstract

While Cervantes’s playfulness with perspectivism and his skepticism in Don Quijote have been abundantly noted, the skepticism of the Novelas ejemplares is equally striking. Examining the tension between exemplarity and skepticism—the one offering models for behavior that presume belief, the other encouraging instead a productive doubt—suggests that Cervantes advances a fully engaged fictionality as an alternative to the exemplary text. In particular, “Rinconete y Cortadillo” and the dyad of “El casamiento engañoso/El coloquio de los perros” show that the picaresque allows him to probe a broader readerly skepticism, extending beyond irony to epistemological questions of the truth of narratives and how they might be assessed.

Inherited Traditions of Narrative Framing in W. G. Sebald'sDie Ausgewanderten

“…Perhaps the most direct line of influence to Sebald in this case can be traced through the German Romantics’ and especially E. T. A. Hoffmann's fascination with Cervantes as a model of how to confuse readers (Tatar , 585). Cervantes inspires skepticism and “suspension of belief” rather than disbelief (Fuchs , 462). This is precisely the endeavor of Die Ausgewanderten , which finds inspiration in the many late eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century German authors who were already using the ambiguous and disconcerting effects of frame narratives to challenge readers to think about narrative believability and authenticity.…”