6

POSTMODERN COMMUNITIES IN PYNCHON AND CERVANTES

 

I know that you are a rational being, and I see you in the form of a dog, unless this is done through the art that they call Tropelia, which makes one thing appear to be another.

—CAÑIZARES IN “THE DOGS’ COLLOQUY”

We have met the enemy, and he is us.

—WALT KELLEY, POGO

My goal in this chapter is, by the art they call Tropelia, to make Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy” appear to be a postmodern narrative, if there is such a thing.1 I also want to view postmodern communities in fiction in the light of a comparison with Cervantes’s great “exemplary novel.” Why would I want to make such a comparison? It is partly because I want to explore my doubts about the utility of the term “postmodern” when applied to narratives, beyond its function as a purely chronological designation. It is partly, also, because my perspective on “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is, after all, that of a postmodern person, if there is such a thing. Or rather, to tell the truth, I think of myself as a post-postmodern person, that is, a person of the age of globalization, of universal terror, and of cyberspace, the time of worldwide tele-techno-communications and the universal surveillance they facilitate. We are no longer postmodern. As a post-postmodern person, I am likely to see ways Cervantes’s great short story fits my own time and my own presuppositions about narrative. I may be able to see things in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” that early seventeenth-century readers might not have noticed or seen as important. My slightly later temporal placement than the heyday of postmodernism may also give me some perspective on the so-called “postmodern condition.”

INTEGRATING “THE SECRET INTEGRATION”

What are the presumed distinguishing features of a postmodern narrative? I shall take Thomas Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration,” from his book of early stories, Slow Learner, as an exemplary early postmodern narrative.2 I am aware that so-called postmodern narratives are extremely numerous and diverse. Any claim that a given text is “exemplary” begs some questions, to say the least. That is true of Cervantes’s “Exemplary Novels” (Novelas ejemplares) as well. Of what are they exemplary? In spite of those problems, I propose to show that “The Secret Integration” exemplifies many of postmodern narratives’ features as scholars have identified them.

First, however, I must ask, “What is the postmodern condition?” This is the social condition, presumably, that postmodern narratives reflect or critique by bringing it to light in a story that deploys certain narrative techniques. A full bibliography would be extensive. I shall stick with some classic early books on the topic. For Jean-François Lyotard, the postmodern condition is characterized, among other things, by the absence or disqualification of any more or less universally accepted grand narrative.3 David Harvey stresses the political and economic changes from 1972 on, with concomitant changes in our experience of space and time.4 For Fredric Jameson, the postmodern condition is determined by economic factors and by concomitant cultural factors associated with late capitalism, or what he calls “the world space of multinational capital.”5 The postmodern condition, as the first sentence of his Postmodernism stresses, is also fundamentally a forgetting of history, while the “concept of the postmodern” is “an attempt to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”6 To think historically is to investigate empirically present ideologies, what people believe out there in the real social and political world, not to think philosophically, according to Kant’s distinction between “metaphysics” and “transcendental philosophy.”7 To think historically would include, apparently, thinking about how architecture expresses the ideologies of a given historical moment because architecture is, for Jameson, so important an example of the postmodern.

For Jameson, the postmodern condition is one thing; postmodernism as a cultural and intellectual style, is another. The latter is an attempt to bring the postmodern condition out of hiding, into awareness. It should come to light as a consciousness of history in the present, or as a way of thinking the present historically. The distinction between the postmodern condition and postmodernism as a style of thought or making is an important one. The postmodern condition is a mute and unthinking forgetting of history within global capitalism. Postmodernism as an intellectual and aesthetic style is a way of thinking about the postmodern condition or of representing it in the arts, in what passes for philosophy, in theory, and in criticism.

What, then, are the special features of postmodern narratives? I would alter Jameson’s categories a bit to list the following as the most salient and distinctive features of postmodern narrative: pastiche, that is, an incoherent mixture of styles from different periods; parody of previous styles; extravagant use of allusion; mixing of genres; depthlessness; lack of affect (or, I should prefer to say, a shift to that peculiar kind of ironic affect called “cool”); attenuation of the “omniscient narrator,” or, to put it more precisely, use of a telepathic narrator who does not pass judgment or proffer interpretation; discontinuity, that is, narration through short episodes separated by breaks; “preposterous” (in the etymological sense) time shifts by way of metalepsis, prolepsis, or analepsis, flashbacks and flashforwards; use of interpolated stories, usually told by one or another of the characters; abrupt changes or shifts in register or tone; a high degree of indirection, so that the real story is told offstage, as it were, by hints and innuendos, as a story beneath the story; a degree of hallucinatory anti-realism, or “surrealism,” or what has more recently been called “magic realism”: “magic” events are told in a straightforward “realistic” style; or, to put this in a slightly different way, an odd sort of half-ironic, but only half-ironic, persistence of the religious, the superstitious, the magical, the supernatural; an exuberant, hyperbolic use of comedy, farce, or anarchic social explosions; the use of one sort or another of a frame story that both controls, interprets, and at the same time ironically undercuts the story proper; a focus on the experience of outsiders or underdogs, the “wretched of the earth”; a sense of the community as turned against itself, self-sacrificially, or in a suicidal way, in what Derrida calls a process of autoimmune self-destruction; a problematic sense of what it means to make an ethical decision or to take ethical responsibility; some direct or indirect calling attention to problems of fictionality or virtuality, that is, a turning of the narrative back on itself to raise questions about its own mode of existence and its social function.

All these features, as I shall show, are present in Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration.” The problem with designating them as distinctively postmodern is exemplified by what happens when you look at Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy” in their light, as I shall also show. I am not denying that there are thematic and historical differences between the two stories. Each work is in a multitude of ways embedded in its own historical place and time. I am mindful of Jameson’s slogan: “Always historicize.” Nevertheless, if form generates meaning, as I think it does, big problems with the concept of “postmodern narrative” arise when you set the two stories side by side. Let me now demonstrate that as best I can, and then draw some conclusions.

Terrorism in “The Secret Integration”?

First, I shall offer a reading of “The Secret Integration,” taking it as an indubitably postmodern narrative that will establish, so to speak, a baseline, a measuring rod to set against “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” Lots of other examples could have been be adduced, for example Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Morrison’s masterwork exemplifies the features of the postmodern I have mentioned, but in somewhat different ways from Pynchon’s. Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration,” however, has the advantage of being shorter and simpler.

“The Secret Integration” was published in 1964, a time early in the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. It was a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963), four years before the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968) and the widespread riots and demonstrations protesting segregation that followed. These led to the Civil Rights legislation that has changed the United States markedly, though we still in 2014 have a long way to go. “Equal opportunities” for women, African Americans, and Hispanics are not yet fully available, to put it mildly. A recent Supreme Court decision will set voting rights for African Americans and other minorities back to where they were decades ago. Pynchon’s story was first published in The Saturday Evening Post. That was a widely circulated American family magazine of the time. My middle class professional parents subscribed to it when I was a child, back in the forties. I read the stories in it.

The frame story, if it can be called that, for “The Secret Integration” is Pynchon’s somewhat equivocal remarks about it in the Introduction of 1984 to Slow Learner. Pynchon is sharply and ironically critical of his early short stories in that Introduction, though he also gives them a historical context. Those stories, he says, were his envious response as a young university-trained writer to the wider experience and scope of the “Beat” writers. How could he match Ginsberg or Kerouac? Pynchon also has a lot of harsh things to say about the immaturity of style in these early stories, about the wooden dialogue, about what he calls his “tin ear” for the way people really talk in the United States, about his disastrous attempts to write about things concerning which he knew little, and so on. He also, somewhat surprisingly, to me at least, says he was influenced by a misunderstanding of surrealism, based on college courses on the topic. Pynchon was a Cornell University undergraduate, like Harold Bloom somewhat earlier. Imagine having either in a class you were teaching!

“A Secret Integration,” says Pynchon, was written somewhat later than the other four stories in Slow Learner. The latter were undergraduate apprentice efforts, while “The Secret Integration” was “journeyman” work. Pynchon admits to a grudging admiration for “The Secret Integration.” Nevertheless, he deplores the surrealist sequences and the decision to shift the locus from Long Island, where he grew up, to the Berkshires in Massachusetts. He had, even at the time of the Introduction, never even visited the Berkshires. He knew about them only through reading a volume put out in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project of the WPA. “WPA” stands for Work Projects Administration. This was a Roosevelt New Deal government entity of the Great Depression that put the unemployed to work. You should write about your personal life, says Pynchon, not about some place you have never visited: “[T]he fiction both published and unpublished that moved and pleased me then as now was precisely that which had been made luminous, undeniably authentic by having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live. I hate to think that I didn’t, however defectively, understand this. Maybe the rent was just too high. [I guess he means this was too difficult to do.] In any case, stupid kid, I preferred fancy footwork instead” (21). Pynchon’s commitment to “realistic representation” seems complete and unabashed.

In spite of these demurrers, Pynchon admits to a kind of grudging admiration for “The Secret Integration”: “… for the first time I believe I was … beginning to shut up and listen to the American voices around me, even to shift my eyes away from printed sources and take a look at American nonverbal reality.… [T]here are parts of it I can’t believe I wrote. Sometime in the last couple of decades, some company of elves must have snuck in and had a crack at it” (22). The effect of all this attractively self-deprecatory framing is that the reader of “The Secret Integration,” if she or he has read the Introduction first, approaches the story warily, from a distance, holding it at arm’s length as self-confessed “journeyman work.” I have mentioned the relatively straightforward commitment to mimetic realism in Pynchon’s introduction. You ought to reflect in words as accurately as possible your own experience of the world, of people and society. Note also that Pynchon carefully says nothing whatsoever about the subject matter or meaning of “The Secret Integration.” You are left entirely on your own as far as reading and judging the story goes.

“The Secret Integration” tells the story of an adolescent “gang” of four boys who meet in solemn secrecy in a hideout in the basement of an abandoned mansion in the Berkshires as the “Inner Junta” fomenting a complex plot against the “institutions” and “schemes” of the adults around them. Their leader is a “boy genius” named Grover Snodd who is already attending college. “It tickled Grover,” the narrator says, “any time he could interfere with the scheming of grownups” (144). He hates the Tom Swift books. He sees them as an adult conspiracy to indoctrinate him in the virtues of capitalism, which indeed they are.

The four boys are addicted to “practical jokes.” They especially have it in for the railroad, the school, and the PTA (Parent Teachers Association). They spend years meeting in secret, practicing “dry runs,” and planning. Their weapons are sodium stolen from the chemistry lab at school, which explodes on contact with water, and a diver’s suit with the aid of which one of the four has roiled up the water in the stream that feeds the local paper mill and shut down production for a week. One of the boys has also lobbed small bits of sodium by slingshot from a tree into a swimming pool at a big estate during a party there, with wonderfully satisfying results when the sodium explodes. They have succeeded in stopping a train by turning on green spotlights and having twenty-five kids in monster masks suddenly appear in the light to alarm the engineer when the train approaches. They are also recruiting grade school children to train for elaborately planned simultaneous attacks on the school, small “terrorists,” one might say. Their goal is to bring adult institutions to a halt.

At the present time of the story, the boys are planning for the third year of Operation Spartacus, named for the film, “the third dry run for the real uprising of the slaves, referred to only as Operation A” (155). Grover tells his uncomprehending fellow-conspirators that the “A” stands for “Abattoir” and, with chilling foresight, “Armageddon” (155). The adolescent gang that ran with such solemnity the United States during the George W. Bush regime, playacting as if they were adults, believed, some of them, that the end of the world was at hand. Such acts as the war in Iraq were, some people thought, benignly doing the Lord’s work and helping to bring on Armageddon, when the streets will run in blood and the saved will be rapt into heaven from a hilltop, preferably David’s mount in Jerusalem. Happily, we no longer hear much about these fantasies now, in 2014, though I doubt if they have vanished completely.

Today we would call, only half-ironically, a group such as Pynchon’s gang of four a “terrorist cell.” They would get in big trouble with the Department of Homeland Security. Pynchon is remarkably prescient in identifying the gleeful deadly adolescent destructiveness that, along with their religious beliefs, motivates today’s terrorist groups, suicide bombers, and those youths who kill their fellow students, as in the Columbine school massacre, or, later, the man who shot seven of his fellow worshippers and then himself at a church service, or, more recently still, a seventeen-year-old who shot his grandparents, seven people at his school, and then himself, or the even more recent Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. “Let’s see,” such a terrorist cell might say, “how can we bring down the World Trade Centers? That would be an attack on the prime symbol of global capitalism. How about using hijacked commercial airplanes? Great idea. Let’s start planning that.” After 9/11 Osama bin Laden was quoted as saying he was surprised the plot had worked so well.

The difference, and it is a big difference, is that Pynchon’s adolescent terrorists, according to the narrator, know that they will never be able to bring themselves to commit real acts of violence against their parents or parent surrogates such as teachers or policemen. The telepathic narrator says this explicitly, in so many words. Note that I do not say “omniscient narrator.” The narrator speaks in free indirect discourse for what the boys know without quite admitting it to themselves, but he or it does not pass all-knowing sovereign judgment:

They knew by now, their third year at it, that the reality would turn out to be considerably less than the plot, that something inert and invisible, something they could not be cruel to or betray (though who would have gone so far as to call it love?) would always be between them and any clear or irreversible step.… Because everybody on the school board, and the railroad, and the PTA and paper mill had to be somebody’s mother or father, whether really or as a member of a category; and there was a point at which the reflex to their covering warmth, protection, effectiveness against bad dreams, bruised heads and simple loneliness took over and made worthwhile anger with them impossible. (188–9)

So much for Pynchon’s adolescent junta as an effective terrorist cell! The passage also plausibly explains why most rebellious children are, in Pynchon’s view at that time, eventually assimilated into the adult community, for better or worse. What is different in these post-postmodern days is the frequency with which the “clear or irreversible step” is taken and another massacre or terrorist act occurs. Community belonging seems no longer to have the force it seemed to have even in the time of Pynchon’s early stories.

Just Who or What Is Secretly Integrated?

Matters are not quite so simple with this story, however. “The Secret Integration” can by no means be summed up as a story about growing up and joining the community. The title indirectly tells the reader that. The narration of the boys’ secret and ineffectual plotting against society is a cover for a quite different story about United States racism at that particular moment in its history. One episode, recounted as a flashback, narrates the boys’ encounter, in a hotel room, with an African American alcoholic jazz musician named Carl McAfee. The police eventually haul McAfee off to jail as a vagrant, even though he is sick from withdrawal symptoms. He has no money to pay for his hotel or for the bottle of whiskey he orders, in spite of the boys’ attempts to stop him. His story is a vivid example of the brutal and unjust treatment of African Americans by the police, then as now.

More central to the story, however, is Carl Barrington, an African American kid. This boy, so it seems, has recently moved into the neighborhood. He is immediately accepted on an equal footing into the gang. The other boys are shown to be without racial prejudice. They rather admire Carl’s color and associate it “with all color”: “When Tim thought about Carl he always saw him against blazing reds and ochres of this early fall” (162). The boys’ spontaneous tolerance is explicitly opposed to the racism of the Tom Swift books. Grover deplores that: “You know this colored servant Tom Swift has, remember,” he says to the other boys, “named Eradicate Sampson. Rad for short. The way he treats that guy, it’s disgusting. Do they want me to read that stuff so I’ll be like that?” (145).

The boys’ parents, on the contrary, along with almost all the other white middle class adults in the community, are frightened and appalled by the Barringtons’ arrival. They immediately start talking about “blockbusting” and “integration.” Tim overhears his mother making a violently abusive and threatening phone call to the Barringtons: “ ‘You niggers,’ his mother spat out suddenly, ‘dirty niggers, get out of this town, go back to Pittsfield. Get out before you get in real trouble’ ” (147). At the climax of the story, the boys walk Carl Barrington home after a junta meeting and find that their parents and other citizens have covered the Barringtons’ lawn with garbage. The boys identify the refuse as having come from their own homes.

At this point, just before the end, the meaning of “The Secret Integration” seems clear enough. Jacques Derrida affirms that it is a law of communities in general that they are victims of the disease called “autoimmunity.” The communities’ immune system, developed to keep the community safe and pure, immune from invasion by dangerous outsiders, turns against itself in suicidal self-destruction. Derrida asserts, in “Faith and Knowledge,” that “the auto-immunitary haunts the community and its system of immunitary survival like the hyperbole of its own possibility. Nothing in common, nothing immune, safe and sound, heilig and holy, nothing unscathed in the most autonomous living present without a risk of auto-immunity.… Community as com-mon auto-immunity: no community <is possible> that would not cultivate its own auto-immunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral sur-vival.”8

Suicidal autoimmunity exists in two registers in “The Secret Integration.” It exists in a parodic and ultimately harmless form as the relation of the secret community of children to the adult community they plot to deconstruct. It exists in a more deadly serious form as United States racism, inherited from the evil of slavery. This endemic racism turns the boys’ parents in hatred against their own neighbors and fellow citizens who happen to be African American. The boys’ hidden community within the adult community, the story seems to be saying, has escaped this racism. It offers a model of a democracy to come, beyond the autoimmunitary, in the “secret integration” of their brotherly affection for Carl Barrington.

Pynchon, in a characteristic play on words, draws an analogy between racial integration and the only meaning of the word integration the boy genius, Grover, at first knows. He knows it, as perhaps my readers do, as a term used in integral calculus for the division of a curve into infinitesimally small parts that can then be manipulated in various calculations:

“What’s integration mean?” Tim asked Grover.

“The opposite of differentiation,” Grover said, drawing an x-axis, y-axis and curve on his greenboard. “Call this the function of x. Consider values of the curve at tiny little increments of x”—drawing straight vertical lines from the curve down to the x-axis, like the bars of a jail cell—“you can have as many of these as you want, see, as close together as you want.”

“Till it’s all solid,” Tim said.

“No, it never gets solid. If this was a jail cell, and those lines were bars, and whoever was behind it could make himself any size he wanted to be, he could always make himself skinny enough to get free. No matter how close together the bars were.”

“This is integration,” said Tim.

“The only kind I ever heard of,” said Grover. (186–7)

Racial integration, according to this somewhat strange analogy, makes the bars of the barrier between blacks and whites permeable, so that black people can always come through that barrier and be integrated, just as the boys have let Carl Barrington become a full-fledged member of their gang. This makes their junta a kind of ideal, visionary, utopian, messianic, egalitarian, classless community. Pynchon’s message appears to be that we should all be like these boys: “Out of the mouths of babes!” They have spontaneously made the correct ethical decision by accepting Carl, whereas their elders have acted in a deeply unethical and suicidal autoimmunitary fashion by rejecting the black family that has moved into their community. The community has acted like a body that develops antibodies, destroying its own organs or tissues, as in diabetes or arthritis. Derrida uses a metaphor drawn from medicine that originally named a social relation. Criminals who take sanctuary in a church are immune from arrest. In a similar way, as Pynchon recognizes, the social relation of minority integration uses a term drawn from mathematics. Those lines in Grover’s graph, however, can be seen as bars of a jail cell, such as the one in which McAfee was imprisoned. Racial integration would allow him to slip through those bars. In both Derrida’s autoimmunitary and Pynchon’s integration a complex social structure is named, and perhaps can only be named, by way of a system of tropological displacements in which literal and figurative change places bewilderingly. This is a feature of ideologies, not of critical philosophy.

Another such figure is the trope of the organically unified body. This has been a powerful political metaphor since Plato and Aristotle, as in “body politic.” That figure comes up in this story when Grover explains to the other boys the meaning of the word “coordination”: “It means your arms and legs and head all work together in gym, and it’s the same for us, in this thing, for a gang like ours, as it is for the parts of your body” (154).

The Ghost in “The Secret Integration”

Matters are not quite so simple in “The Secret Integration,” however. I have said that some use of the supernatural, of ghosts and revenants, along with “magic realism,” is a feature of postmodern narrative. Initially, the most obvious use of the supernatural in “The Secret Integration” is the story of the spectral seven foot booted and spurred cavalry officer with a shotgun who haunts the woods the boys must go through to get to their hideout in the ruined mansion. This ghost was the “fiercely loyal aide” (160) of King Yrjö, a refugee from a “hardly real shadow state” (160) somewhere in Europe. King Yrjö had arrived in the middle thirties, that is, in the time of Stalin in Russia and the rise of Nazism in Germany. He had bought the woods with a bucketful of jewels, so the story went. The boys both believe and do not believe in the specter. This is the correct attitude, since, as Derrida says in a seminar, if you really believe, then it is no longer a ghost: “They’d since been all over the place and had seen no definite trace of him, though plenty of ambiguous ones. Which didn’t disprove his existence, but did mean that they’d found the perfect place for a hideout. Real or make-believe, the giant cavalryman became their protector” (161). It is easy to dismiss the seven foot cavalry officer as a harmless collective adolescent fantasy.

More difficult to account for, however, and more important, is the reader’s gradual (or sudden) discovery that Carl Barrington is also a fantasy, a phantom. I must admit that Pynchon fooled me. Carl is presented as much as a solid flesh and blood person as any of the other characters. That he turns out to be a ghost may remind the reader that the other boys are fantasies too, products of Pynchon’s imagination. The other three members of the gang go, out of curiosity, to look at the house into which the black family has moved. There they meet, “leaning against a steel street light,” a kid who “was kind of rangy and dark, and he was wearing a sweater.” He tells them, “snapping his fingers for it,” that his name is “Carl. Yeah, Carl Barrington” (187). Thereafter he acts like one of the gang, and is accepted by them as such. He has, for example, a sharp skill at dropping water balloons from an overpass so they hit right on the windshields of the cars beneath. He can manipulate Grover’s “ham” radio, and so on. Only at the end, in the scene when the four boys find the Barrington lawn covered with garbage, do the more or less covert previous hints climax in a revelation that Carl is a collective fantasy of the boys, a specter, a phantom. He is a fiction they have unconsciously made up. They let Carl go back alone in the rain to the hideout, realizing that they have broken the spell and will never see him again. They “took leave of Carl Barrington, abandoning him to the old estate’s other attenuated ghosts [such as that seven foot cavalry officer] and its precarious shelter” (193). Only as Carl leaves, at the very end of the story, does the narrator expose the deception on which the whole story turns:

Everything Carl said, they knew. It had to be that way. He was what grownups, if they’d known, would have called an “imaginary playmate.” His words were the kids’ own words, his gestures too, the faces he made, the times he had to cry, the way he shot baskets; all given by them an amplification or grace they expected to grow into presently. Carl had been put together out of phrases, images, possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from, repudiated, left out at the edges of towns, as if they were auto parts in Étienne’s father’s junkyard—things they could [not?] or did not want to live with but which the kids, on the other hand, could spend endless hours with, piecing together, rearranging, feeding, programming, refining. He was entirely theirs, their friend and robot, to cherish, buy undrunk sodas for, or send into danger, or even, as now, at last, to banish from their sight. (192)

This passage is a perfect description of the way ideological phantasms are created, that is, out of bits and pieces of the creators’ own imaginations and presumptions. An example would be the conservatives’ images, nowadays, of the lazy, good-for-nothing moocher or “taker” living on food stamps, unemployment insurance, and free medical treatment. Ghosts are intimately connected to ideology formations, as we know from Karl Marx’s The German Ideology and from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. An ideology formation is a ghost, something both there and not there. It is a spectral appearance that may nevertheless have decisive effects in the real social world, for example in votes to end food stamps or Medicaid for the poor.

The careful, though perhaps naïve, reader (like me) at this point may go back in disbelief to see whether anything earlier prepared for the revelation that Carl is a ghost. Not one word in the narration suggests that Carl is not tangible and active, a physical presence. He is not transparent, for example, nor given to fading away before your eyes. He does not at all behave as a true specter should. The narrator says nothing, or almost nothing, to give the secret away. Carl is described, for example, without any apparent irony, as sitting quietly in school “in a seat in the corner that had been empty,” though it may seem to little odd to the reader that “the teacher never called on him” (188). That is because, the reader belatedly realizes, Carl is not there at all for the adults. That also explains the “funny look” (190) the lady behind the counter at the drug store gives them when they order “four lemon-limes with water” (190). For her only three boys are sitting at the counter. The reader may then start putting two and two together, for example noticing the way the adults, including Mrs. Barrington herself, are quoted as saying the Barrington’s have no children.

An odd reported episode, in the string of achronologically presented episodes that may seem at first just a recounting at random of the wild things these adolescent boys have done, tells how two of the three boys, Tim and Étienne, the previous summer had hopped a freight to Pittsfield to go to a shop that sells the paraphernalia of practical jokes. There they bought two clip-on mustaches and two little tins of blackface makeup. Étienne, one of the gang, when asked why they were buying just those items, answered, “without thinking,” “We’re trying to resurrect a friend” (186).

At that point the reader may remember that Mr. McAfee, the black alcoholic “vagrant” jazz player the boys have encountered in a hotel room, is named Carl and has a small mustache. Carl Barrington, the reader realizes, is the successful resurrection of Carl McAfee. The boys have invoked him, called him into existence as a more manageable version of the real thing. The boys can imagine Carl Barrington in any they like and as doing anything they like. Carl is their “robot.” The real thing, however, is the unmanageable alienation and otherness of black people in America, their experience of a dispossession and humiliation that white people can never really understand. The narrator stresses the way the boys’ encounter with Carl McAfee is traumatic for them, since it gives them “a hint … of just how lost Mr. McAfee really was” (183). The result of Tim’s encounter with Mr. McAfee is that his “foot felt the edge of a certain abyss which he had been walking close to—for who knew how long?—without knowing. He looked over it, got afraid, and shied away” (183). The boys’ resurrection of Carl McAfee as Carl Barrington is the form that shying away takes.

Carl Barrington as Ideological Formation

What is the reader to make of his or her discovery that Carl Barrington is not real at all, but an imaginary playmate? Carl is a phantom only the boys can see, something made up out of “words, images, possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from, repudiated, left out at the edges of towns, as if they were auto parts in Étienne’s father’s junkyard.” Carl is the boys’ “friend and robot, to cherish, buy undrunk sodas for, or send into danger, or even, as now, at last, to banish from their sight.” Unlike Carl McAfee or the nasty, frightened, destructive, suicidal racial prejudices of their parents, Carl Barrington is entirely in the boys’ control. Carl, one might say, has only a verbal or ideological reality. The narrator stresses the mechanical way he is put together. He is fragmentary. He is a creature of bricolage. He is constructed as if from bits and pieces from a junkyard, things the adults have declared to be inassimilable debris, things that must be put outside the safe enclosure of the community, in order to keep the community pure, secure, immune, indemnified. The junk must be sacrificed, in a form of scapegoating. Black people in America are treated like such excluded and inassimilable debris or waste.

This junk, nevertheless, has a way of persisting beyond its exclusion and forgetting. It survives its banishment. It returns like a ghostly revenant to haunt those who have excluded it. The boys put Carl Barrington together as a virtual reality out of these fragments, traces. In being constructed out of discarded bits and pieces of words, images, and possibilities (one might call them “ideologemes”), Carl is something like “The Secret Integration” itself. The story is put together out of a seemingly random series of events presented out of proper temporal order. A meaning automatically or mechanically emerges from the juxtaposition. Of course Pynchon behind the scenes has cunningly constructed the story as a machine that will generate just that meaning in the right readers. So, however, have the boys’ “unconscious” secretly constructed Carl Barrington to satisfy certain desires.

Both the story, as words on the pages, and Carl Barrington, as a character within the story, exhibit what Jacques Derrida calls “survivance,” not “survival,” but “surviving,” a kind of active/passive living on. Both are made of traces in the Derridean sense, the printed words in whatever copy of Slow Learner happens to fall into my hands, and evidence remaining of the community’s discarded cultural fragment: “phrases, images, possibilities that grownups had somehow turned away from, repudiated, left out at the edges of towns.” That detritus, however, ineluctably survives as the means of manufacturing Carl or of putting together the words of the story. Both survive as “dead/alive,” as phantoms, as the living dead. These stand ready to be resurrected whenever any reader breathes the breath of life into the story.

Speaking, in the fifth of his last seminars, the second set on “The Beast and the Sovereign,” of the way Robinson Crusoe, the character, and Robinson Crusoe, the book, are buried alive and devoured alive, just as Robinson feared would happen to him, but nevertheless both survive, Derrida says:

Now this survival, thanks to which the book bearing this title (Robinson Crusoe) has come down to us, has been read and will be read, interpreted, taught, saved, translated, reprinted, illustrated, filmed, kept alive by millions of inheritors—this survival is indeed that of the living dead. As indeed is any trace, in the sense I give this word and concept, a book is living dead, buried alive and swallowed up alive. And the machination of this machine, the origin of all tekhnè, and in it of any turn, each turn, each re-turn, each wheel, is that each time we trace a trace, each time a trace, however singular, is left behind, and even before we trace it actively or deliberately, a gestural, verbal, written, or other trace, well, this machinality virtually entrusts the trace to the sur-vival in which the opposition of the living and the dead loses and must lose all pertinence, all its edge. The book lives its beautiful death.9

Or cette survie, grâce à laquelle le livre qui porte ce titre [Robinson Crusoe] nous est parvenu, a été lu et sera lu, interprété, enseigné, sauvé, traduit, réimprimé, illustré, filmé, maintenu en vie par des millions d’héritiers, cette survie est bien celle d’un mort vivant. Comme d’ailleurs toute trace, au sens que je donne à ce mot et à ce concept, un livre est un mort vivant, enterré vivant et englouti vivant. Et la machination de cette machine, origine de toute tekhnè, comme en elle, de tout tour, de chaque tour, de chaque re-tour, de chaque roue, c’est que chaque fois que nous traçons une trace, chaque fois qu’une trace, si singulière soit-elle, est laissée, et avant même que nous ne la tracions activement ou délibérément, une trace gestuelle, verbale, écrite ou autre, eh bien cette machinalité confie virtuellement la trace à la sur-vie dans laquelle l’opposition du vif et du mort perd et doit perdre toute pertinence, tout tranchant. Le livre vit de sa belle mort.10

This image of dead/alive survival of everything that has left its trace is incarnated these days in the Internet, as Derrida goes on to specify.11 He did not, however, anticipate explicitly the use now of the Internet and other meta-databases for wide-scale surveillance or spying, though he did recognize the power of the Internet for terrorist activities. It did not occur to him, apparently, that the United States might use that same power—for example, in the notorious use of computers to destroy Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges. Today, corporations and our National Security Administration can resurrect at will any one of the billions of emails, phone calls, and website transactions our citizens in the home of the free have sent, made, or performed. The NSA, in principle, needs the approval of a secret court, the misleadingly named Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA, to go from the metadata base to actually opening the digital file of an email or a phone conversation. FISA, however, is apparently a rubber stamp. It evidently has yet to see such a request that it does not like. Such a secret court, moreover, is not appropriate in a democracy.12 I say “apparently” and “evidently” because FISA is secret and classified. Only hints and leaks have made it into public space. July 2013 news reports in The Guardian assert that the NSA’s Prism program, in warrantless spying, monitors directly, for example, with the connivance of Microsoft, Skype video conversations, and information stored in Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud. Microsoft now owns Skype.

To read a story, or to open an email or website or recorded telephone call, is to raise a ghost, and to revivify, re-spiritualize, call back as revenants, all the imaginary characters within that story, or all the real people in those Internet records, even the ones that are, like Carl Barrington, within the fiction of the story imaginary, phantasmatic, ghostly. To use the Internet or to send an email is to become oneself a ghost, perpetually surviving as dead/alive in one or the other, or both, of the two enormous NSA database storage facilities.

Communities in “The Secret Integration”

What difference does it make to the meaning of “The Secret Integration” that Carl Barrington is a ghost, an unreal phantom or fantasy? Certainly, it seems to give the story a quite different meaning from the one I proposed earlier. Perhaps. I suggested that the story shows the boys as naturally without racial prejudice. They form a utopian community set against the autoimmunitary community of the adults. But does Carl’s unreality really disqualify that reading? “The Secret Integration,” I claim, is fundamentally duplicitous. It is open to being read in several contradictory ways. I do not see how the reader can make a choice among these readings that is unequivocally based on textual evidence. He or she can, however, and perhaps must, make an ethical choice or decision that one reading is more satisfactory than the others and ought to be promulgated, for the good of the community.

In its duplicity “The Secret Integration” is like all ghost stories, which is one of the genres the story parodies. The meaning of the story depends on whether or not you believe in ghosts. It is impossible, however, to affirm persuasively that one either believes or disbelieves. If I say, “I don’t believe in ghosts,” it is easy to accuse me of denegation. I mean I fervently hope no ghosts exist. If I say I do believe in ghosts, however, that is a contradiction, because it would make the ghosts a certainty, no longer ghostly, that is, duplicitous, a matter of simultaneous yes and no, or neither yes nor no, neither life nor death. I must in the end say what Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe said of ghosts: “I don’t know whether I believe or not, or whether ghosts exist or not.” That is the attitude of the boys toward the phantom cavalry officer with a shotgun. They neither quite believe nor quite disbelieve. They think, however, that it is better not to take any chances (a species of Pascal’s wager), and they feel protected in their hideout by this existing/non-existing spook.

During the time that the reader may still think that Carl is real, Tim, when he learns that “integration” means “white kids and colored kids in the same school,” says, “Then we’re integrated,” and Grover answers, “Yeah. They [the adults] don’t know it, but we’re integrated” (188). I suppose that is the meaning of the story’s title. Their integration of Carl into their gang is a “secret integration” because it exists only for them because the adults are not aware of Carl’s existence. That means the integration of Carl is, so it seems, entirely without purchase on the social order. It has no power to change anything. After the boys have “banished Carl from their sight,” Étienne asks Grover, “Are we still integrated?” and Grover answers, “Ask your father.… I don’t know anything” (192).

That is the big question. Are they still integrated? Are they still integrated if their integration was with a phantom of their own making and if they have now banished their homemade robot? It is hard to know. I don’t know anything. A secret integration does not seem to be anything like a real integration. The story ends with the boys going back to their separate homes, to “hot shower, dry towel, before-bed television, good night kiss, and dreams that could never again be entirely safe” (193). Except for that last phrase, it would appear that the story ends with the assimilation of the temporarily rebellious boys back into family life and into their places in the adult community they will soon join. That community’s prejudices they will soon come to share. Pynchon does not sentimentalize the challenges to overcoming white Americans racial prejudice against their fellow black citizens whose forebears they brought (and bought) as slaves from Africa. The conclusion that “The Secret Integration” culminates with that insight would make the story moving in its sadness about the resistance to change of the United States segregation system that was in place in 1964. The final sadness is that much of that system still remains operative today, in 2014, though often as somewhat more secret segregation.

The Last Word

The last phrase of all in the story, however, gives a final twist. That twist allows a quite different meaning and force for the story from the one I have just expressed. The boys return home to “dreams that could never again be entirely safe.” Though Carl Barrington is a fantasy, a phantom, he is made of bits and pieces of excluded words, images, possibilities that survive in the social junkyard outside the safe enclosure of the community. The boys have experienced and have become self-consciously aware of the reality of race relations in the United States both through their encounter with a victim of segregation, Carl McAfee, and through their witnessing of the rank racial prejudices and terror of their parents. Their secret integration, in its acceptance of Carl Barrington and spontaneous loving-kindness toward him, offers both the boys and the reader a model of the democracy to come, beyond race segregation and race prejudice. That is the goal toward which we all should work and toward which Pynchon’s story, in its own way, works. Even though Carl is an ideal construct, he is made of latent possibilities of amelioration still surviving at the edges of the community. The Civil Rights Movement and all the desegregation legislation and court decisions that followed have made the situation much better in the United States, though by no means yet perfect. Revelations of police brutality toward blacks in the United States have shown that, as has a recent Supreme Court decision (spring 2013) overturning a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. States will now be much freer to enact Voter Identification laws, move polling places, and perform racially motivated redistricting that will make it much harder for African Americans and other non-whites to vote or to have their votes count.

Who can say whether or not “The Secret Integration” contributed in its own small way, nevertheless, to the movements that have been made toward the infinitely receding horizon of the democracy to come? How would this work? How can a work of fiction function not as superficial amusement and not as just a constative description of imaginary characters and their doings, but as a felicitous performative, a speech act, as a way of doing things with words that contributes to good social change?

“The Secret Integration” itself gives clues to an answer. The story begins with an odd episode that does not seem to have much relevance beyond setting the stage for the antagonism between the boys and their parents. One of the boys, Tim, has a wart, which the doctor has treated by putting a red substance on it that glows bright green under ultraviolet light. He then tells Tim: “Ah, good … Green. That means the wart will go away” (142). Tim overhears the doctor in a lowered voice say that he has tried “suggestion therapy,” which “works about half the time” (142). He will use liquid nitrogen if suggestion therapy does not work. When Tim asks Grover what “suggestion therapy” is, Grover says it is “like faith healing” and that the treatment had no effect on the wart. “They’re trying to talk it away, but I just messed that up for them,” he says jubilantly.

The color green, coded to stand for an illusion or trick that may have real effects, reappears later in the story, in a way that is characteristic of Pynchon’s elaborately concocted fictions. When the boys and their twenty-five recruited agents stop the train with “sickly green spotlights,” Grover says “something curious”: “I feel different now and better for having been green, even sickly green, even for a minute” (185). Green is the color of suggestion therapy, and this odd detail seems to celebrate the power of fictive suggestion, such as that exercised by “The Secret Integration” itself, to do good in the world.

“The Secret Integration,” I argue, works by a species of suggestion therapy or faith healing. Just as the boys create the cavalry officer and Carl Barrington as virtual realities, phantoms, phantasms that are nevertheless effective in the boys’ world, so the words of the story on the pages of Slow Learner work as suggestion therapy to raise the ghosts of the characters, including Carl Barrington, in the minds of the story’s readers, just as do all works of fiction. The words survive the characters, or they are the means by which the characters indefinitely survive. The words make it possible for any reader to raise the ghosts of Tim, Grover, and the rest any time the book is opened by some reader and the story read again.

From this perspective, Carl Barrington is no different from any of the other characters. He, too, is a virtual reality made of words. When the reader realizes that Carl is a fiction concocted by the boys, no more than a virtual reality, that reader may realize at the same time that the other characters have exactly the same kind of virtual reality. It is a reality created out of all the cultural fragments Pynchon has cleverly assembled so that the characters seem like “real people.” These fictive realities are indirectly exposed as phantoms by the revelation that Carl Barrington is a ghost, just as real and unreal as the booted cavalryman with a shotgun. That, however, does not keep these ghosts from having such effects as they do have on readers in the real world. Just as Carl Barrington tests the boys’ capacity for “integration,” so the story challenges the reader to behave toward those of other races as the boys do in the story. “The Secret Integration” poses an ethical challenge to the reader. It demands that he or she choose how to act toward fellow citizens.

Conclusions

I claim to have shown how “The Secret Integration” exemplifies all the features of postmodern narrative I began by identifying. It has an ironically undercutting frame story. Its narrator does not, except rarely and ambiguously, exercise the right of authorial or narrational judgment. The supernatural or phantasmatic plays an essential role in the story. The story is to some degree about its own mode of existence and its own social function. It demands an ethical decision from its readers. The meaning of the story emerges from the juxtaposition of detached episodes presented out of their actual time sequence in the fiction. The story is a pastiche or parody of several different genres, all somewhat incoherently superimposed. It parodies beat narratives in the story Carl McAfee tells of his life. Pynchon’s introduction mentions the influence of surrealism as he misunderstood it at the time he wrote the story. Several other genres are explicitly alluded to. Several films are mentioned, Spartacus, John Wayne’s Blood Alley, and an unnamed World War II movie the boys hear as a re-run coming in incoherent (and very funny) bits and pieces from TVs in suburban houses they pass one night: “… (splash, comical yell) Oh, sorry, sir, thought you were a Jap infiltrator …”; “How can I be a Jap infiltrator when we’re five thousand …”; “I’ll wait, Bill, I’ll wait for you as long as …” (168).

“The Secret Integration” is a sophisticated ghost story, like Henry James’s “The Turn of the Screw.” “The Secret Integration” is a parody of boys’ books, such as the Tom Swift books that are explicitly mentioned. Though it appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, the story is to some degree a subversive parody of the sorts of stories I remember reading in that magazine as a child. The ones I remember were much more sentimental, much more ideologically conservative, much more straightforwardly dedicated to white middle class “family values,” and to a set of ideological values typified by the famous Norman Rockwell paintings that appeared periodically on the covers of the magazine. Pynchon, it may be, put something over on the editors of The Saturday Evening Post, or perhaps they knew what they were doing and wanted something with more than usual bite to it, and more stylistic sophistication, in their pages. “The Secret Integration,” finally, confirms my claim that postmodern narratives, at least this one, dramatize fictional communities that are characterized by what Derrida calls self-destructive autoimmunitary (il)logic. It is logical because it makes sense as an inevitable happening. It is illogical because what is meant to protect us from foreign invasion turns against us, with disastrous results.

“THE DOGS’ COLLOQUY” AS POSTMODERN NARRATIVE

I have apparently confirmed conclusively through investigation of one exemplary case that such a thing as postmodern narrative exists and that it has a set of distinctive, specifiable, stylistic, formal, and thematic features. The problem is that exactly the same set of features as characterize “The Secret Integration” can be found in Cervantes’s “exemplary novel,” “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” These features are no doubt present in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” in a somewhat different mix of quite different historical ingredients, but they are the same set nevertheless. “The Dogs’ Colloquy” was published in 1613, three years before Cervantes’s death and eight years after Don Quixote, Part I. Let me now show how the same features are present and how these determine the meaning and performative force of “The Dogs’ Colloquy.”

Like “The Secret Integration,” “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is a framed story. In the latter the frame is set up in the previous exemplary novel, “The Deceitful Marriage” (El casamiento engañoso). The narrator of that story, Ensign Campuzano, tells his auditor, the Licentiate Peralta, that he has an even stranger tale to tell than the one he has just told, one that he does not expect will be believed and that he does not know whether he himself believes or disbelieves. Nevertheless, he is ready to swear that it really happened. He does not believe he was dreaming or mad. The issue of a fiction’s mode of existence and of the way its survival or revival depends on a willing suspension of disbelief when you read it is raised even before the story is told. A story is like a ghost. You can neither believe in it nor disbelieve in it. The issue of belief or disbelief is also central within the story itself, for example the question of whether you should believe or not in witches.

“The Dogs’ Colloquy” then follows. It is presented as the manuscript that the ensign gives the licentiate to read for himself while the ensign rests. What is unbelievable in the story’s basic presupposition has already been identified in the frame narrative. Dogs do not talk and they do not have human intelligence. As Scipio, one of the two dogs, says, at the beginning of their colloquy, about their gift of speech: “[W]hat makes it all the more miraculous (milagro) is not only that we speak but also that we speak intelligently, as though we had minds capable of reason; yet we are so devoid of it that the difference between brute beasts and man consists in this, that man is a rational animal and the beast is irrational [el hombre animal racional, y el bruto, irracional].”13

This initial “miracle” is an aporia because, in this first of the complex echoes of classical wisdom that run all through “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” everybody since Aristotle knows that what distinguishes man from the other animals is that man has reason and speech, whereas the other animals do not. A dog, however, utters this piece of received wisdom. A dog ought not by nature be able to speak these words, much less understand them.

Derrida’s seminars on “The Beast and the Sovereign,” by the way, are devoted, among other things, to putting in question this piece of received wisdom. It is an ideologeme that has reigned even down to Jacques Lacan. Derrida wants to deconstruct it, and thereby to disqualify whatever thinking depends on it, for example Heidegger’s in The Fundamental Principles of Metaphysics (Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik). Heidegger says, over and over, as a leitmotif of these seminars, that the stone has no world, that the animal is poor in world, and that man is weltbilden, world-making.

In the case of “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” however, one can say that the ideologeme about animals’ lack of reason and speech is not only put in question by having as the chief characters two eminently reasonable, charming, and eloquent dogs, but also at the same time finessed by having this happen in a fiction that only masquerades as fact. In a fiction one can do almost anything with words and get away with it, as long as it is done plausibly and consistently, and as long as readers can be got to believe in the fiction. One can even have dogs speak. Animals speak in an immense number of fictional works from Aesop down to Pogo. To believe in a fiction! What does that mean? It is like believing in ghosts. That was certainly the case for me with “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” I became, for the moment at least, someone who believed that dogs can speak.

The frame story in both “The Secret Integration” and “The Dogs’ Colloquy” works to interpret the story for the reader, to undercut it ironically by “framing” it in more ways than one, and to raise questions about the nature and social function of fictions generally. If “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is an “exemplary tale,” one thing it is exemplary of is the way fictions work.

“The Dogs’ Colloquy” presents a long line of bits and pieces of received wisdom uttered by the dogs and often attributed to some classical source or to Christian theology and ethics. The dogs spend much time debating philosophical and theological questions, arguing about “backbiting” and hypocrisy, and discussing what makes a good story. These arise in a way that is more or less relevant to the episode in the second dog’s life that he (Berganza) happens to be telling at the moment. These early sixteenth-century ideologemes correspond to the bits and pieces of popular culture, children’s book, films, TV movies, and news broadcasts, which are echoed in Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration.” Just as in Pynchon’s story, because Cervantes is not anywhere to be seen as an unequivocal presence in his tale, it is impossible to know how much irony or lack of it there is in having two dogs utter the commonplace assumptions and opinions of an educated person of 1613 in Spain. If a dog can say it, it must be true, or, it may be, on the contrary, if a dog can say it, it must be no more than an ideological fantasy, a received idea. It must be a baseless illusion repeated mechanically thousands and thousands of times, over and over, from generation to generation. Even dogs say these things, in a mechanical way, like barking. These interpolations in Berganza’s presentation of his life story take up much of the text and function powerfully as ironic challenges to received opinion of the time, though Cervantes could always, if challenged, have claimed that he meant these commentaries “straight.” The dogs utter them with straight faces, so to speak. The reader can learn a lot from “The Dogs’ Colloquy” about early seventeenth-century Spanish cultural assumptions and ideology.

Postmodern Cervantes

I have said that a feature of postmodern narrative is the attenuation of the so-called “omniscient narrator” who can penetrate telepathically the minds and hearts of all the characters, speak for them, and pass judgment on them. Though such a narrator may be characteristic, for example, of Victorian fiction, for example work by George Eliot or Anthony Trollope, “The Dogs’ Colloquy” has no such narrator. The ensign has written down in dialogue or colloquy from what he heard the dogs say, but he did not have any direct access to their minds, nor do the dogs have such a telepathic or clairvoyant power. They pass judgment on the stories Berganza tells, but those judgments have no transcendent authority. No authority external to their intra-fiction judgments speaks. The dogs’ judgments may be right or they may be wrong. The reader is left, in the end, to judge for himself or herself, on the basis of somewhat contradictory or ambiguous evidence, as is the case with Pynchon’s story.

Another distinctive feature of postmodern narrative, I began by claiming, on Fredric Jameson’s authority, is its use of pastiche, parody, allusion, and a mixing of genres. “The Dogs’ Colloquy” already does all that with a vengeance. It is called a “colloquy,” El Coloquio de los perros, so it must belong to that genre. The word colloquio means conferencia or conversacion. In English, a colloquy is defined as “a conversation, especially one that is formal or mannered,” or as “a written dialogue,” from Latin colloquium, conversation. One thinks of Erasmus’s Colloquia, witty and entertaining fictional conversations by the great Dutch humanist of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The subtitle of “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” however, is given in Starkie’s English translation as “The Dialogue Between Scipio and Berganza.” The Spanish original is Novela y coloquio que pasó entre Cipión y Berganza (Story and colloquy that took place between Scipio and Berganza). Starkie has introduced a word, “dialogue,” not present in the original Castilian. A dialogue is not quite the same thing in connotation as a colloquy. “Dialogue” makes one think of Plato. Though Plato’s dialogues often have an informal conversational quality, at least some of the time, they are more seriously focused on philosophical argumentation than most colloquies are. To call “The Dogs’ Colloquy” a dialogue is somewhat to skew it away from what Cervantes named his “novela.”

“The Dogs’ Colloquy” is, in addition, a parody of a picaresque novel with a hilarious episode parodying pastoral romances. It is a supernatural story about witches, echoing Aesop’s beast fables, which are explicitly referred to in the frame narrative and again in the story itself (35/245, 58/260). It may be a covert prophetic allegory or Tropelia, saying one thing but meaning another. “The Dogs’ Colloquy” has elements of the confessional or of the testamentary, as picaresque novels, for example Lazarillo de Tormes, generally do. Lazarillo is before the court and must defend himself as best he can. That is the situation in which he recounts his life. Berganza’s narrative is a self-justifying, self-exculpating account of a dog’s life. “The Dog’s Colloquy” is also throughout a satire of the follies and wickedness of mankind.

The name for the instrument of Cervantes’s satire is a word repeated over and over in the story, deplored by both dogs, but spontaneously indulged in nevertheless: “backbiting.” “To backbite” is to slander someone behind his or her back. To backbite is difamar or murmurar in Spanish. Cervantes uses murmurar. A backbiter is a columniador or a murmurador. Spanish, alas, does not contain the marvelous pun in the English word “backbite.” The word sounds just like something a dog might do, bite back. The connection of the cynics with satire or with the expression of a generally dim view of mankind is made explicit at one point in “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” “Do you call slander philosophy?” Scipio asks Berganza. “So it goes. [¡Asi va ello!] Canonize, Berganza, canonize the accursed plague of backbiting [murmuración], and give it whatever name you please; it will cause us to be called cynics, which is the same as calling us backbiting dogs” (66/267). The cynics were a philosophical sect in ancient Greece founded by Antisthenes of Athens, who believed self-control to be the only means of achieving virtue. A cynic is someone who believes all men are motivated by selfishness, which the people in Berganza’s stories in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” certainly, for the most part, are. The word “cynic” comes from Latin cynicus, from Greek kunikos, “doglike, currish,” or, one might even dare to say, “given to backbiting.”

On top of all that mélange of genres, as if that were not enough, “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is the story of a metamorphosis. It is modeled on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, or, more closely, on Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. The dogs may be human beings who have been metamorphosed into dogs by witchcraft, by malign enchantment.

What a mixture! What a pastiche of various genres of the time! In this incoherent mixing of genres and parody of them, “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is no different from “The Secret Integration,” even though the genres that are mixed are different.

It is a feature of postmodern narrative, I began this chapter by saying, that such narratives tend to focus on marginal characters, on outcasts, on outsiders, on the wretched of the earth, on the disadvantaged, such as Toni Morrison’s American ex-slaves in Beloved, or Pynchon’s essentially powerless adolescents in “The Secret Integration.” Pynchon’s gang of boys thinks of their Operation Sparticus, the terrorist attack on adult institutions they plan, as the revolt of the slaves. To see and judge the normal, adult, dominant world from the perspective of ex-slaves or children is one version of what William Empson, in Some Versions of Pastoral, calls “pastoral.” Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, for example, is, for Empson, a version of pastoral, with “the child as swain.” In Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” the dogs are swains. Their perspective from the bottom of the social scale, or outside human society altogether, like the perspective of the picaresque hero, is essential to the dogs’ ability to expose and judge the cruelties, injustices, and hypocrisies of the human world. Just what form those bad behaviors take I shall shortly identify.

Postmodern narratives, I said, for example Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration” or Toni Morrison’s Beloved, are characteristically made of a series of discrete episodes strung together in a line that is sometimes a-chronological. The meaning of the whole emerges, “mechanically,” “automatically,” from the juxtaposition of separate stories. That meaning is never explicitly stated. It is left to the reader to identify and evaluate. The reader must do that in what I would call an autonomous ethical judgment. Such a judgment is not all that easy to verify by citations from the text. Once more, “The Dogs’ Colloquy” already has this episodic structure. I count at least sixteen separate stories Berganza tells as he runs, more or less chronologically, through his various adventures and the various masters he has served. The series is discontinuous in the sense that strongly marked breaks divide each episode from the next. These breaks are often a “colloquy” between the two dogs about the meaning of the episode just recounted. The episodes are not connected in any essential way. They just happen to follow one another in Berganza’s life, fortuitously. Most often, Berganza, for one reason or another, flees one master and takes up with another master in a setting disconnected from the first, in a parody of picaresque fiction.

The sequence, as Berganza narrates it, is driven by two recurrent motifs. The first is the dogs’ fear that when dawn comes they will lose the ability to speak, just as ghosts were, in Renaissance lore, said to fade at dawn, at cockcrow, as in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Hamlet is more or less exactly contemporary with “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” The second motif is Scipio’s repeated insistence that Berganza should stop digressing and get on with the straight and narrow line of his life-story, before dawn comes and he can speak no more. “I rather fear,” says Berganza at one point, “that when the sun rises we shall be groping in the dark, devoid of speech [faltándonos la habla]” (69/270). Scipio answers, “Heaven will arrange things better. Proceed with your story and do not stray from the path in needless digressions [impertinentes digresiones]. Only in that way will you quickly come to the end of it, no matter how long it may be” (69–70/270). The digressions are primarily those philosophical and cultural reflections I have identified already. “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is inhabited by a sense of urgency, as if the dogs were speaking against death, speaking to hold off death, like Cervantes himself, who died three years after publishing the Exemplary Novels, or like William Carlos Williams in “Asphodel That Greeny Flower,” or like Jacques Derrida in his final seminars, written when he may have known he had a mortal illness, or like all of us writers, who know that we are mortal, that we exist as Sein zum Tode, being toward death.

One of the longest and most important of the episodes that make up “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” the story of Berganza’s encounter with the witch Cañizares comes near the end, but, as Berganza says, probably should have been told first. It should have been first because it tells, perhaps, the story of Berganza’s birth: “What I now wish to relate to you should have been told at the beginning of the story [al principio de mi cuento], as we would then have had no reason to wonder at finding ourselves able to speak” (89/285). Here is one example of the preposterous, or the cart before the horse, that I said was a feature of postmodern narrative, in the otherwise more or less chronological sequence of “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” The witch Cañizares tells Berganza that his mother was the witch Montiela, whose malicious, envious enemy, the super-witch Camacha, had enchanted her unborn twins so they were born as puppies and grew up as the dogs Scipio and Berganza. This story contradicts Berganza’s initial assertion that his parents “must have been” two mastiffs who worked for the butchers at the slaughterhouse (44/250).

Autoimmunity in “The Dogs’ Colloquy”

As I have said, a distinctive feature of postmodern narrative is that it pictures the community as autoimmunity in action, therefore as self-destructive. The community turns the institutions meant to protect the community, to keep it safe, immune, self-enclosed, indemnified, and exclusionary, against the community itself, in the breakdown of community. In both Morrison’s and Pynchon’s narratives, whites turn self-destructively against blacks in the racist United States.

When a story is told as a string of unrelated episodes, such as Berganza’s recounting of his adventures with the various masters he has served, the reader looks for what the various episodes may have in common. The meaning of the story as a whole may emerge from this superimposition or sequential juxtaposition. This happens according to the narrative law that says what I tell you many times must be true or at least centrally important. What do the various episodes of “The Dogs’ Colloquy” share? What common pattern emerges when you superimpose them on one another, like figured transparencies? I answer that “The Dogs’ Colloquy” brilliantly anticipates the concept of the community as an “auto-co-immunity,” to borrow Derrida’s neologism in “Foi et savoir.” I said this was a distinctive feature of postmodern narrative, but here it is in 1613!

Let me exemplify this in a little detail, taking certain episodes as conspicuous dramatizations of this feature. The first episode tells how Berganza worked for a butcher in the slaughterhouse where he thinks he was born. The butchers should, one would think, be protecting the meat they slaughter, keeping it safe from thieves. Instead of that, they are the thieves. They steal the best cuts of meat for their mistresses or for selling it on the side.

The same motif reappears in the second episode. Berganza takes up with some shepherds and becomes a sheepdog. His job is to protect the sheep from wolves. The shepherds themselves also have that as their primary responsibility. Berganza discovers that the shepherds, not the wolves, are killing the sheep and stealing the meat. They are killing them in such a way that it looks as if the wolves have done it. “ ‘God help me,’ said I [Berganza] to myself; ‘who can ever put down this villainy? Who will be able to bring it home to the people that the defense is guilty, the sentinels sleep, the trustees rob, and he who protects you kills you? [el que os guarda os mata]’ ” (55/258).

In one of the digressive exchanges between the two dogs about backbiting, Berganza promises to bite his own tongue every time he is guilty of backbiting. Scipio says, “If that is the remedy you intend to use, I expect you will have to bite yourself so many times that you will be left minus a tongue and will thus find it impossible to slander [murmurar]” (61/263). This is a little miniature allegory of autoimmunitary (il)logic. The backbiter who bites others like a snarling cur ends up biting himself, just as the antibodies the immune system develops to protect the body from alien antigens turns, in autoimmune diseases, against itself. The biter bites herself or himself. The whole of “The Dogs’ Colloquy” manifests this logical illogic. Cervantes, in cynical and satirical backbiting, turns against the society of which he is a part, aiming to damage it by improving it, but endangering himself at the same time.

Another brief episode is a splendid example of this self-destructive autoimmunitary (il)logic. It tells the story from Diodorus of “Corondas, a Tyrian” (more correctly: “Charondas of Thurii”), “who passed a law that no one should enter the national assembly in arms, on pain of death [so pena de la vida]” (69/269). He forgot his own law and entered the assembly with his sword on. He then promptly plunged the sword into his own body, becoming “the first to make the law and the first to break it and suffer the penalty [pagó la pena]” (69/269). This story anticipates current laws in the United States permitting or prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons in various circumstances. By the time the reader reaches this little anecdote, he or she may begin to suspect that Cervantes’s real target is not injustice, selfishness, or dishonesty in general, but that specific form of it in which the community or some member of it turns self-destructively back on itself rather than toward some outsider or external enemy. “We have met the enemy, and he is us,” says Pogo, in one of my epigraphs for this chapter.

The rest of the novela is a cascade of further examples. Berganza takes up with a police officer who turns out to be in cahoots with thieves and prostitutes. The policeman cooperates with those he should arrest rather than protecting the community from these dangerous insiders/outsiders. Eventually, Berganza reveals the deception to his master’s superiors in a way that expresses the self-immunitary (il)logic in a physical action. When the “lieutenant corregidor,” or chief magistrate, orders him to run after a thief, Berganza turns on the real thief, his temporary owner: “I attacked my own master [mi proprio amo], and without giving him time to defend himself, I rolled him on the ground” (83/280).

Several of the episodes in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” involve racial or ethnic minorities or the theme of money. These are obscurely analogous themes, because both are permutations of the community’s autoimmunitary (il)logic. Let me explain how. Just as the butchers and the shepherd are guardians of the community who instead of keeping it safe, damage it, so the monetary tricks played by the crooked policeman and his ilk in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” destroy confidence in financial bargains, exchanges, and contracts, as well as belief that people are what they seem. The well-being of the community depends on the security of this confidence, just as the value of money depends on faith in the monetary system. Once the falling US dollar causes the Chinese to lose faith in all those billions in apparent worth of United States bonds they own, we in the States will be in deep trouble. The Chinese will, however, be reluctant to sell at a huge loss because that would be another case of autoimmunitary (il)logic, like biting your own tongue, It is in the Chinese interest to maintain the value of the US bonds they hold.

The policeman in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” makes money out of innocent strangers by pimping for his mistress and then arresting and fining the hapless man who has bought his mistress’s favors. In another episode, he makes a deal with some criminals to allow him to seem to defeat six of them at once in a sword fight, like John Wayne in a movie gun battle. This fraud increases his own prestige immeasurably, that is, the faith people have in his prowess. This intended effect is worth every penny he pays the bravos to pretend to be defeated.

In another anecdote, the crooked policeman is undone when two thieves in a complicated scheme sell the policeman a stolen horse. He is caught when the real owner appears. The policeman loses both his money and the horse.

In the episode of Berganza’s sojourn with the Gypsies, he tells how the Gypsies, through another complex trick involving an ass with a docked tail that is fitted out with a tail of false hair, get a peasant to pay for the same ass twice over.

All these stories involving financial cheating damage the community in an autoimmunitary way by destroying confidence in money transactions. This entails one form or another of an inflationary doubling that weakens the community by weakening its currency. One thinks of Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man, which is a subtle version of this theme. A lot of the people Berganza works for are confidence men. An example is the drummer who displays Berganza’s prowess as a circus performer and makes a lot of money from gullible citizens.

All these episodes involve the theme of belief that is so important in “The Dogs’ Colloquy,” for example in the initial question about whether the licentiate, the ensign, and, implicitly the reader, can believe this story about talking dogs. If you can believe that, you might be likely to believe that the same donkey is two donkeys, when he has been fitted with a false tail. Credulity makes the world go round, but it also may lead to a sudden deflation when confidence is lost.

The two episodes that deal with ethnic minorities in the Spain of that time exhibit autoimmunitary (il)logic in a different way. Berganza describes the Gypsies and Moors in ways that echo the most blatant racial and ethnic stereotypes. The Gypsies are portrayed as thieves and rascals, while the Moors are described in the same way as Jews are pictured in anti-Semitic stereotypes in, say, the United States today. Moors are portrayed as money-grubbers who starve themselves to save more money and will soon destroy the country by hoarding all its money.

The similarity between anti-Moor propaganda in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” and anti-Semitism today is fascinating and unexpected, by me at least. In the United States today that stereotype of miserliness is not at all part of the image of Muslims we are taught. Muslims are rather portrayed as likely to be Islamic fundamentalists, members of international terrorist organizations, willing to commit suicide in Allah’s name, but not as penny pinchers. It is difficult to know from the story itself whether Cervantes shared the prejudices against Gypsies and Jews his imaginary character Berganza expresses, or whether he was attacking these stereotypes by showing that even a dog could believe them. Apparently he did to a considerable degree share these prejudices.

Spain expelled the Jews in 1492, the year Columbus “discovered” America, so they were not around any more in 1613 to be hated and reviled. Cervantes, however, favored the expulsion of the Moors. They were expelled from Spain in 1609–11, just two years before the publication of Novelas Ejemplares. Were Jews, Moors, and Gypsies antigens or part of the native tissue of the body politic? These “ethnic minorities” were both inside Spanish culture, part of the larger national community, and at the same time outside it, other to it. In this they were a little like the dogs in “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” They were underdogs, one might say, like Cervantes himself, perhaps Spain’s greatest writer. Cervantes was a bankrupt jailbird who never escaped poverty, had experienced imprisonment in Spain and slavery under the Turks, and had wandered up and down Spain like Berganza or like a picaro.

Gypsies, Moors, and Jews contributed greatly to Spain’s cultural diversity and richness. They were, to a degree, fellow citizens, part of the community. Traces of the Moors’ extravagant skill as architects are still visible in many places in Spain. The Alhambra is an amazing cultural accomplishment. It is spectacularly beautiful, by any standards. Jacques Derrida’s name is a Spanish Jewish one. By expelling the Jews, one might argue, Spain lost the chance to have Derrida as one of its native sons. Who knows how many other men and women of genius it lost in that expulsion of 1492? Gypsy music, stories, and other cultural accomplishments are of high quality. Spain has never fully recovered from the autoimmunitary damage it did to itself by expelling the Jews and the Moors, as well as by burning so many supposedly heretic Christians in the autos-da-fé of the Inquisition. “Auto” in this case means “free act,” with an overtone of an act performed by the self, as in an autoimmune reaction. The heretics were supposed to condemn themselves in an “act of faith” that led to their public condemnation and burning at the stake.

The episodes involving ethnic minorities count, therefore, as yet more examples of the suicidal autoimmunitary pattern I claim all, or almost all, of the episodes of “The Dogs’ Colloquy” share. That pattern emerges from a comparison or superimposition of the episodes by a reader who asks, “What do they have in common? Why did Cervantes choose to have Berganza experience just this particular string of picaresque adventures?”

The Witch in “The Dogs’ Colloquy”

I shall now account for the most complex and most problematic example of the autoimmunitary in “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” This is the episode of Berganza’s encounter with the witch Cañizares. It is the longest episode and surely the greatest, from a purely literary point of view. It is an amazingly wild and exuberant stylistic tour de force. Berganza is taken up by the matron of the hospital in Montilla, where his master, the drummer, is staying and where the drummer puts on a show of Berganza’s tricks to make money from the credulous multitude. The hospital matron, Cañizares, turns out to be a witch. She claims to recognize Berganza as the son of her now dead sister-witch Montiela. Her name, however, with its doggy prefix “can,” as in canis and canine, and the way she addresses Berganza, suggest that she may be lying and that she may be Berganza’s mother herself. “Is that you, son Montiel? Is that you, perchance, son [hijo]?” (89/284–5) She goes on calling him “son” as she tells him the story of her life as a witch and those of her sister-witches, Montiela, whom she says is Berganza’s mother, and the great Camacha. Camacha was a kind of super-witch. She outdid all the others in diabolical knowledge and skill. Cañizares tells of witches’ Sabbaths and other forms of witches’ service to their master, the Devil. Her story is a tale within the main tale, an interpolated tale, such as those we still find today in Morrison’s Beloved or in Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration.”

After telling Berganza her story (and what she claims is also the story of Berganza’s origin as a human being enchanted into doggy form), Cañizares strips herself naked, anoints herself, and falls into a trance. Berganza drags her out into the courtyard, where all the people of the hospital can see her disgrace, though they disagree about whether she is a saint in rapture (“Look, the blessed Cañizares [la bendita Cañizares] is dead. See how her penances have reduced her to skin and bone” [100/294]), or an anointed witch. They disagree also about whether or not Berganza is “a demon in the form of [en figura de] a dog” (100/295) who is tormenting the saintly Cañizares. Berganza runs away to escape being beaten as a brutal form of exorcism. That is the end of this episode. Berganza next joins a band of Gypsies in Granada, where Gypsies live in the hills even today.

What is the reader to make of the Cañizares episode? It certainly shows that Cervantes had up-to-date knowledge about witches, including their punishment by the Inquisition. A footnote in the translation by Walter Starkie I am citing claims that Cervantes’s mention of the Inquisition’s treatment of witches is “a reference to the notorious Cave of Zugarramurdi in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa, where the aquelarre, or sabbat of witches, led to the celebrated auto-da-fé of Logroño in 1610” (319). “According to A. de Amezúa,” says Starkie, “Cervantes had read the famous Tratado de las Supersticiones y Medicinas by Maestro Pedro Ciruelo (Alcalá, 1530)” (319).

The Cañizares episode is another example, along with the basic fiction that dogs can talk, of supernatural themes in “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” These are presented in a style of surrealism or magic realism that I said was characteristic of postmodern narrative. Did Cervantes believe in witches? Should we believe in witches in order to be good readers of “The Dogs’ Colloquy”? What does it mean to believe or disbelieve anyway? Is not a statement of belief perhaps performative, a speech act, rather than a constative utterance, as it seems on the face of it to be? I say, “I believe, credo,” and, lo, I come to believe. Or I say, “I do not believe in ghosts (or witches, or talking, rational dogs),” and, whether this is a denegation or not, saying so tends to reinforce my belief that I do not believe. Is it not the case that if saying “I believe” were a constative statement, it could in principle be proved true or false? That, however, cannot be done in this case any more than the statement “I love you” (je t’aime), as Derrida argues, can be verified. It is a speech act, not a verifiable true or false statement.14

These questions are difficult to answer. The question of believing or not believing runs all through “The Dogs’ Colloquy” and in its frame story. In the latter, the ensign and the licentiate debate whether or not it is possible to believe that dogs can talk. Jesus says to Doubting Thomas: “Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (John 20:29). Certainly to believe in witches on the basis of Cervantes’s imaginary account of them in “The Dogs’ Colloquy” would be to have faith in things unseen, attested to only in words, and in the words of a fiction at that. Whether or not these words are true remains undecidable. The same thing can be said of the question whether Cervantes believes or does not believe in witches. It is impossible to tell one way or the other from the text of “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. One can know for sure, however, that he was fascinated by his national community’s belief in witches and by the question of whether or not we should believe in them.

The Supernatural in “The Dogs’ Colloquy”

The Cañizares episode, moreover, closely connects the theme of belief to the largest-scale version of the community structure that I have claimed, following Derrida, is subject to autoimmunitary (il)logic. Within Cañizares’s interpolated tale, speaking of the witches’ Sabbath, she says, “Some people believe [my italics; hay opinion que in the original Spanish] that we do not go to these assemblies except in imagination, wherein the demon represents images of all those things that we afterward say had happened to us. Others believe that, on the contrary [my italics; otros dicen que no] we actually go the sabbat in body and soul, and for my part I believe [tengo para mí] that both opinions are true, since we don’t know when we go in one manner or the other because all that happens to us in imagination is revealed with such intensity that it is impossible to distinguish between it and reality” (94/289).

This argument returns when Cañizares relates what happens when witches anoint themselves. The ointments are “so cold that they deprive us of all sense when we anoint ourselves with them, and we lie stretched out stark naked on the ground, and then they say we pass in imagination through all those things that we consider a real experience [nos parece pasar verdaderamente]. At other times, after we have finished anointing ourselves, we change our shape, as we believe [a nuestro parecer], and turn into cocks, owls, or ravens, and go to places where our master awaits us, and then we recover our own forms and enjoy pleasures that I shall omit describing, for they are of such a nature that I am ashamed to recall them, and my tongue shrinks from telling you about them” (97/292).

This statement obeys a truly weird logic, if you think about it a little. How could both opinions be true, that these are real and imaginary experiences at the same time? One thinks at this point of Don Quixote’s mad illusions, his tilting at windmills as the proverb says. If experiencing something with great intensity makes it true, then if I read “The Dogs’ Colloquy” with great intensity, giving myself heart and soul to the fiction, it becomes true. Experiencing is believing. Good reading is therefore something like being in a witch’s trance. The ethical and religious objections to reading novels voiced from Cervantes’s time to our own days by moral and religious people, somewhat echoing Plato’s objection to poetry, have been based on this suspicion that literary works, especially novels, are the work of the devil. They lead innocent readers out of the real world into a dangerous realm of enchanted fantasy.

What such critics miss, of course, is that almost every fiction contains the ironic deconstruction of its own enchanting power. Certainly that is the case with “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” Cañizares’s story contains an implicit reflection on this issue. Camacha, when she admitted on her deathbed that she had enchanted Montiela’s twins and turned them into dogs, also gave Montiela the prophetic recipe for how to disenchant them or for when they will be disenchanted. They “would return to their natural forms,” she said, “when it was least expected, but … this would not happen till their own eyes should see the following.” She then says:

The hour of their deliverance is nigh

And their true shape they’ll find when they behold

The proud brought low, the poor raised up on high,

By a speedy hand that acts with courage bold. (288)

Volverán en su forma verdadera

cuando vieren con presta diligencia

derribar los soberbios levantados,

y alzar a los humildes abatidos,

por mano poderosa para hacerlo. (92)

I give the Spanish because it is somewhat unlike the four-line rhyming translation. Like all millennial prophecies, this one seems at first to mean “never,” or “not until the world comes to an end.” It is like Derrida’s prophecy of “the democracy to come” in being always in a perpetually receding future. Camacha’s prophecy differs from Derrida’s formulation, however, in imagining not a totally equalitarian community, a true democracy, but a spin of the wheel of fortune that will do no more than reverse the hierarchy of high and low. Then the poor will be in charge, not the proud, in a fulfillment of the Biblical prophecy that the meek shall inherit the earth. That, however, as the dogs agree, has already happened. The wheel of fortune turns all the time in seventeenth-century Spain, and yet, as Scipio ironically observes, we are still dogs.

Just whose is “the speedy hand that acts with courage bold” (mano ponderosa para hacerlo) is not easy to decide. God? Some heroic tyrant-slayer who will reverse the social order with a violent revolution, but perhaps become a tyrant himself? Cervantes does not say. Camacha’s promise remains ironic, enigmatic. “The hour of their deliverance is nigh” (presta: This Spanish word means “quick,” “prompt,” “rapid,” “ready.”). How “ready” is deliverance? This is like millennial prophecies that say, “Get ready! The end of the world is at hand.” It is always at hand, so near you can almost touch it, but also always future, an “in a minute, but not quite yet.” “Jam yesterday and jam tomorrow, but never jam today,” as Lewis Carroll puts it in Alice in Wonderland.

Cervantes does not specify who will wield the “mano poderosa,” the powerful hand, or how ready we should be. What he does do, however, is to have the dogs comment on what is undecidable about this fortune telling and on the relation of that uncertainty to the issue of belief. The dogs also suggest, indirectly, how these uncertainties may tell the reader what sort of a text “The Dogs’ Colloquy” is and how the reader should perhaps read it. It is the one place in the text where the issue of genre comes up explicitly.

Scipio’s Judgment

After Berganza has finished his story of the witch Cañizares and is beginning to recount the episode of the Gypsies, Scipio interrupts him to pass judgment on the Cañazares episode, to “see if there can be any truth in this great lie [la grande mentira], which you seem to believe” (101/296). Scipio goes on to affirm unequivocally that “It would be very foolish to believe that Camacha could change men into brutes, or that the sacristan served her in the form of an ass for the number of years as she said he had. All these and similar tales are illusions, lies, or delusions of the devil [apariencias del demonio: ‘diabolical appearances’ might be a better translation]” (101/296).

This might be taken to suggest that “The Dogs’ Colloquy” itself, the story you are at that moment reading, is another diabolical appearance. We readers are lending, so to speak, the breath of life to those dogs, who are, after all, only words on the page. This is a highly equivocal act, perhaps even a diabolical one. Fictions have traditionally been suspected of being works of the devil. Reading romances leads innocent young women astray. If such stories most likely are delusions of the devil, Scipio has the task, nevertheless, of explaining why we should believe that Scipio and Berganza appear to be dogs, but can talk and have reason. “This is,” he says, “a strange and unparalleled case [caso espantoso y jamás visto]” (101/296). This is no explanation at all, since God, Cervantes might say, governs all, even the most singular event. Therefore this case too, strange as it is, must fall in some way under God’s providence.

Scipio, wise dog, then shifts to the question of Camacha’s soothsaying prophecy. An extremely strange but crucial paragraph follows. I find this paragraph essential to understanding the story as a whole, if the reader extrapolates a bit from what Scipio says to apply it to the entire novella. Scipio begins by energetically disqualifying the validity of the prophesying verses: “What seem prophecies to you,” he says to Berganza, “are nothing but a fable [palabras de consejas: a conseja is a fable, story, tale or legend; ‘fable talk’ might be a more literal translation], or one of those old wives’ tales, such as the headless horse or the magic wand, which are told by the fireside on long winter nights” (102/296). The oddness comes in his explanation of why the prophecies are fables. If they were genuine, he says, they would already have come true, “ready at hand” would have become “now,” “unless, indeed, it is to be taken in what I have heard called an allegorical sense [se llama alegórico]” (102/296).

Scipio then goes on to give a succinct and entirely accurate definition of allegory as it was understood from Dante and the scholastics on to Cervantes’s own time and beyond: “that is to say, a sense that is not the same as that which the latter [meaning the word of the prophecy] declares, but something else, which, though different, may resemble it” [el cual sentido no quiere decir lo que la letra (refiriéndose a la letra de la profecía) suena, sino otra cosa que, aunque diferente, la haga semejanza] (102/296).

What seems extremely odd, to me at least, is that the allegorical sense Scipio goes on to spell out looks like a more or less literal paraphrase of what Camacha has said. The paraphrase goes by way of an explicit reference to the commonplace image of the Wheel of Fortune. Those at the “summit of Fortune’s wheel” will be “beaten down at the feet of misfortune,” and low people will be “lifted up to the pinnacles of prosperity” (102/296–7). But this, says Scipio, has already happened and happens “at every step,” and yet we are still dogs. I do not see, for the life of me, how this differs from the straightforward, obvious, literal meaning of the prophecy, which says the dogs will become men when, as Starkie’s translation puts it, “they behold / The proud brought low, the poor raised up on high.” What is allegorical about this first reading Scipio proposes, taking allegory, as Scipio defines it, as “a sense that is not the same as that which the latter [the prophecy] declares, but something else, which, though different, may resemble it” (102/296)?

Scipio goes on to say that the non-fulfillment of the prophecy when taken in an allegorical sense means that “I conclude that Camacha’s verses are to be taken in the literal, not in the allegorical, sense [no en el sentido alegórico, sino en el literal]” (102/297). He then suggests that the literal meaning is just what he has finished saying is the allegorical sense, and that taking the verses literally “will not help us, for many times we have seen what they say, and we are still dogs, as you see” (102/297). I conclude that Cervantes is making fun of the distinction between literal and allegorical meaning. They come in the end to the same thing, and in either case what they prophesy was a deception: “Camacha was a false deceiver [burladora falsa], Cañizares an artful rogue, and Montiela a wicked and malicious fool” (102/207).

Scipio then gives his own interpretation of the true meaning. This meaning does seem to be allegorical or at least metaphorical, in the sense that it uses an ironic figure not found in Camacha’s verses: “I say, therefore, that the true meaning is a game of ninepins [un juego de bolos], in which those that stand up are quickly knocked down and those that have fallen are set up by a hand that knows how to do so. Consider whether in the course of our lives we have ever seen a game of ninepins, and if, as a result, we have seen ourselves changed into men, if we are men” (102–3/297).

It ought to take no more than a simple game of social nine-pins to change the dogs back into men, if the prophecy has prophetic force. Whatever meaning, literal, allegorical, or metaphorical is given to Camacha’s prophecy, it has not come true yet. That leaves in doubt even whether the dogs are actually enchanted men or not. So much for the great tradition of allegorical interpretation, as in medieval or Renaissance Biblical commentary, or in Dante’s “Letter to Can Grande,” or in Dante’s practice in La Divina Commedia! For the dogs, and perhaps for Cervantes too, the literal is the allegorical. The allegorical is the literal. The distinction breaks down.

Whichever way you take the prophecy (and, by implication, the text of “The Dogs’ Colloquy”), you get the same result: a disqualification of any power literature might be thought to have to predict a better time coming or to bring that better time about. The sequence I have just been following is a marvelous example of Cervantes’s destructive irony against the orthodox doctrines about witches and allegories and magic metamorphoses he may appear to be following. He makes wonderfully funny nonsense out of these doctrines. Neither I nor the reader, however, should forget Friedrich Schlegel’s warning that it is just those who think they understand irony who are, inevitably, its most helpless victims.15

The upshot of Scipio’s discussion about allegory, a little lesson in how to read, is, it appears, that we had better take “The Dogs’ Colloquy” at face value, as the fiction it manifestly is. We had better not make fools of ourselves by trying to apply to it the sophisticated tools of literary interpretation. It means what it says. It has no prophetic or apocalyptic value. It is a story about a couple of really nice talking dogs. Believe in it or not, as you wish.

What’s Exemplary About “The Dogs’ Colloquy”?

“The Dogs’ Colloquy” is an exemplary tale in that it exemplifies an apparent powerlessness of literary fictions. Cervantes’s pervasive irony would seem to suspend the possibility of giving the story a verifiable univocal meaning. That might lead a reader, mistakenly, to think this means the story can have no performative effect. It cannot be a way of doing things with words. Irony is, after all, as Friedrich Schlegel said, “permanent parabasis,” a perpetual suspension of univocal meaning all along the line. Or, it might be said, irony is the suspension of the willing suspension of disbelief that is necessary to breathe life into the words on the page.

It is important, however, at this point to distinguish between cognitive uncertainty and performative effect. Just because irony suspends cognitive certainty in a given literary text does not mean that text may not be performatively efficacious. The text’s cognitive uncertainty may even be the condition of its power as a felicitous speech act. “Irony,” says Paul de Man in a counter-intuitive promise/premise about irony, “also very clearly has a performative function. Irony consoles and it promises and it excuses. It allows us to perform all kinds of performative linguistic functions which seem to fall out of the tropological field, but also to be very closely connected with it.”16

The reader might take the gentleness with one another, the patient forbearance, the loving kindness toward one another of the two dogs, as exemplary of true friendship as it ought to exist in the human world. The ironic ethical superiority of these two dogs over their masters functions as a promise: “If we could just become like Scipio and Berganza .…” The tolerance and affection that the four boys in Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration” show one another, though one of them is an African American, illustrate another such powerful utopian model and ironic promise: “If we can just become like Grover’s gang of four .…” “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3). Cervantes’s dogs form an ideal community of two. They therefore serve as a model, an exemplum, of how we ought to behave in Mitsein, being together, with our neighbors. Their story promises that if we become like Scipio and Berganza an ideal community will ensue. Pynchon’s gang of boys is another such model. The two stories are allegorical after all.

I am not through even yet, however, with “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” I have claimed that the episode of Cañizares is the most extravagant example in the whole story of autoimmunitary community (il)logic. How is this? I answer that if you happen to believe in witches, the relation between the devil and his servants, wizards, witches, and heretics, on the one hand, and God, with his legions of angels and pious believers, on the other, is the largest and most inclusive version imaginable of autoimmunitary (il)logic.

Cervantes ascribes to Cañizares knowledge of a good bit of sound theological doctrine about the mystery of evil and about the possibility of “justifying the ways of God to man,” as Milton puts it, in spite of the power of the Devil and of evil generally. Like Gypsies, Moors, and other minorities within the Spanish national community, witches are both inside and outside the enormous community made of God’s whole creation. Why has God allowed these antigens into the worldwide body politic, so that they now form part of its intimate tissue? This issue includes the copresence of God and the devil in the created world. The answer is that God, in order to be properly worshipped and obeyed, that is, voluntarily, had to give angels and human beings freedom to obey or not. They had to have freedom to fall if they chose, while God foresaw that many would fall.

Witches are a good example of that cosmic situation. Cañizares says she knows perfectly well that she is doing wrong. She knows that she will most likely be damned for following her master the devil, but she chooses evil anyhow. “The habit of sinning,” says Cañizares, “becomes a second nature, and being a witch invades a woman’s flesh and bloodstream.… Thus the soul is unstrung and spiritless, and cannot rouse itself to embrace any good thought at all. It lets itself become engulfed in the abyss of its own misery [sumida en la profunda sima de su miseria] and does not care even to grasp the hand that God in His pity continually holds out to it. I have one of those souls that I have described to you. I see all, and I understand all, but as worldly delights keep my will chained, I have been, and shall always be, bad [siempre he sido y seré mala]” (97/291–2). Video melior, deterior sequor, as Ovid says in the Metamorphoses: “I see the better, I follow the worse.”

Though the devil is part of the total economy of creation, he is powerless to do any evil or to lead his followers to do evil without God’s permission. God remains omniscient and omnipotent. Since He has permitted human beings and the fallen angels to do evil, knowing beforehand that he will punish them with all the agonies of hellfire, one could say the whole creation obeys an autoimmunitary (il)logic. God turns against part of His own creation to punish it with damnation, just as antibodies in an autoimmune reaction turn against parts of the body itself to destroy it. This is the drama of those great Renaissance paintings of the Last Judgment, the division of the saved from the damned, the sheep from the goats.

Cañizares’s theological knowledge on this point is impeccable and entirely orthodox. The devil, we know, is good at quoting scripture. Speaking of the way witches are said to murder little children at the devil’s instigation, and the question of why the devil would do that, because the children, being sinless and baptized, will go straight to heaven, Cañizares says:

… he may do it for the sake of the untold grief he causes the parents by killing their children. But what is of more importance to him is to make us repeatedly commit such a cruel and unnatural crime. And all this God allows because of our sins, for without His permission, I have seen by experience, the devil cannot hurt an ant [no puede ofender el diablo a una vez hormiga]; and this is so true that when on one occasion I requested him to destroy a vineyard belonging to an enemy, he told me he could not even touch a leaf of it, for God would not allow him to. This will enable you to understand when you become a man that all the misfortunes that befall men, kingdoms, cities, and villages, and sudden deaths, shipwrecks, and falls—in fact all the losses termed disastrous—come from the hand of the Almighty and by permission of His sovereign will; and all the evils that are called crimes are caused by ourselves. God is without sin, from which we may gather that we are the authors of sin, framing it in thought, word, and deed; and God permits all this because of our sinfulness, as I’ve said before. (96/290–1)

God in His infinite wisdom and goodness permits sin, knowing beforehand that he must punish it. He must send to damnation one part of his creation. It is a spectacular example of autoimmunitary community (il)logic. Even at the largest scale this logic repeats itself, as though there could be no conception of community without it. It seems as if this logic constrains even God, or at least constrains the most profound and orthodox conceptions of God that the Bible and all the greatest Christian theologians have expounded through the centuries. For Cervantes to have the witch Cañizares express this orthodox doctrine is perhaps the ultimate irony of “The Dogs’ Colloquy.” Surely Cervantes did not mean the reader to believe what a self-proclaimed and self-condemned witch says? Or did he?

Conclusions

What conclusions may I now draw from my juxtaposition of Pynchon’s “The Secret Integration” and Cervantes’s “The Dogs’ Colloquy”? I draw three:

Definitions of postmodernism in literature by way of formal and structural features tend not to be valid because they can be shown to characterize earlier literary works, too. No doubt, an adept reader can easily tell, from thematic elements, from décor, from place names, and so on, whether he or she is reading Pynchon or Cervantes, even if Cervantes is read in English translation, but the repertoire of available narrative techniques is remarkably the same in both the exemplary tales I have interpreted.

It would follow that this set of narrative techniques has not changed all that much since Cervantes. One way to define Cervantes’s greatness is his mastery of those techniques already, at the very beginning of what today we call the history of the novel.

I conclude from this that definitions of period styles in literature, and even period names in literary history generally, are highly problematic, always to be interrogated and viewed with suspicion.