 So Cervantes is commonly considered the first modern novelist, but his influence is generally seen in comic and the pick a risk. I wanna argue that throughout Don Quixote, there is a profound engagement with social class, money, love, sex, and social isolation, which are all the themes that pervade the modern novel. And at the end, I wanna connect what Cervantes has to say about this to some observations of Henry James. But the first volume of Don Quixote can be divided into a series of metaphors for narrative itself. At the beginning of the novel, for example, Don Quixote is primarily traveling on a road and has encounters with other travelers. The road is a common metaphor for life and for narrative and it implies a linear account. The Sierra Morena provides a completely different metaphor for narrative. The topography is different. In place of the flat straight roads of La Mancha, we have a confused landscape in which it's easy to get lost. It's a labyrinth and the mountains are a good representation for Don Quixote's own madness, especially because they're also the place where another madman obsessed with novels of Chivalry, Cardeño also lives. In contrast to the linear account which the novel begins with, time in the mountains folds in on itself, stories are interrupted and resumed, Don Quixote and Sancho are separated, new characters are introduced, and it's hard to tell just how much time is going by. So those are two other metaphors. The one I wanna concentrate on is the in. And because of its relationship to travel, it has some resemblances to the road, it's a place where different life journeys intersect, people come together and then drift apart. But ins have a different relationship to the journey because they're also, they're the places where we have to interrupt our headlong journeys through life and be reminded of the necessity to conform with the cyclical demands of the body, the daily demands for food, rest, and sleep. While roads are associated with the day, ins are associated with the night with all the particular activities that that implies. The first in episode is in chapter two. During Don Quixote's first day on the road, he rode almost all that day and nothing worthy of note happened to him until he and his horse found themselves exhausted and half-dead with hunger. Looking for somewhere to spend the night, Don Quixote season in, which he interprets as a castle. The prostitutes standing in front are damsels who have come out to greet him and the coincidence of a swine herd blowing his horn is a dwarf, is to him a dwarf signaling the arrival of a famous knight. Talking to the maidens, Don Quixote says, flee not, dear ladies, fear no villainous act from me, giving them and us as readers for the first time an instance of his pseudo-archaic Spanish. But like uninitiated modern readers, my students the first time they run up against this, the maidens can't understand him, forcing the innkeeper to intervene. And by the time that the landlord has taken Rosinante to the stable, the girls have started to remove Don Quixote's armor which fulfills a fantasies that he has from his reading of other novels. Ordering a meal, Don Quixote says, the toil and weight of arms cannot be borne if one does not control the stomach. And he orders a meal of trout that turns out to be undersoked cod. During his dinner he's forced to drink through an improvised straw because he was unable to remove his helmet. The dinner is interrupted when he asks his host to promise to dub him a night and to allow him to pass the night in the castle chapel praying over his armor. The innkeeper, who's well versed in chivalry, replies appropriately saying that the castle doesn't have a chapel, but it's okay to pray in the courtyard. And the next time to bring money with which to pay for his food and lodging. Don Quixote agrees to spend the night outside to the amusement of the others, but he gets into an altercation with another guest, a mulleteer, a mule driver, who attempts to move the armor in order to reach the well and get water for his charges. Don Quixote gives the man a blow with his lance, his companions, the man's companions proceed to rain stones in Don Quixote, and the innkeeper fearing for the death of his guest intervenes and restores peace. Using an account book as a prop in Don Quixote's own sword, mumbling mumbo jumbo, he performs the ritual, nighting Don Quixote and sends him on his way. Now I've summarized this episode in some detail because it provides us with all of what will prove to be the principal features of the inn episodes. First, there's a concern with physical needs. Don Quixote needs to eat, drink, rest and sleep in this episode. And the biological nature of these wants is emphasized by his sharing them with his horse and the other animals that also need to eat, drink, sleep. For humans at least, night is also the primary time for coupling and the sexual theme is suggested by the prostitutes at the entrance to the inn who morph into damsels that suggestively undress the night. Courtly language and manners is another theme of this episode. This is the first encounter with Don Quixote's pseudo antique Spanish. And another common scene will be Don Quixote getting into a fight with someone who doesn't observe the rules of chivalry. In contrast to this is the innkeeper's ability because of his knowledge of novels to enter in and out of Don Quixote's world and therefore manipulate him. Finally, money comes up when the innkeeper gives Don Quixote the advice about that even knights need to have money. The next in the episode is in chapters 16 and 17. And I'm just going to cut to the chase of the important themes here. This happens after Marcela gives a speech about her devotion to chastity. And then immediately after that, Rocinante, Don Quixote, of course, tries to mate with some mares. And he's driven away by the owners of the mares who don't want their horses to get pregnant by such a bad looking sire. So there's three main incidents at this inn. And the first one is when Don Quixote is in bed asleep, there's, again, a military in the neighboring bed and he's made a deal with chambermaid, Maritornes, to come in during the night. Don Quixote thinks that Maritornes is coming in to seduce her, gives her him, gives her a big speech about why he can't be seduced because he has to remain faithful to Dulcinea. The military gets jealous. He thinks Don Quixote is trying to seduce Maritornes and there's a big fight ensues. The second memorable scene then is that the next morning, Don Quixote and Sancho are more injured than ever. And Don Quixote begs the ingredients to prepare a potion that cures all illnesses, all injuries. And when he and Sancho drink this, they both vomit, they both get diarrhea, Don Quixote passes out. And then finally, when Sancho and Don Quixote say they can't pay, Sancho is put on a blanket and tossed up and down in the air and meanwhile the innkeeper steals something from Sancho's saddlebags as payment. So we have the themes of sleep, of Don Quixote's language, of a sexual episode which is interrupted. We have money. We have the opposite of controlling your stomach when Don Quixote and Sancho have diarrhea and vomit on one another. And these are, again, the themes that come up in all the in episodes. Now this brings us to the third in episode which takes 30% of the first part. And so we can't examine it in much detail, but we can follow the ways in which these themes are developed. So beginning with the question of language. In contrast to the earlier episodes in which Don Quixote was generally incomprehensible, here he's presented as a model of eloquence. And the earlier members of the inn's household who were not familiar with chivalry, it turns out that they're all readers of these novels too. The innkeeper likes the battle scenes. His daughter likes the love letters that knights write to their ladies. And even Maritornes, who can't read, but likes to hear these things read to her, likes the love scenes. To the degree that they all love the books of chivalry, they can all sympathize with Don Quixote, but with one crucial difference. They're not mad. They can distinguish the fantasy of what they read from the reality that they live in. Sleep also naturally plays an important part in this episode. And as soon as the travelers arrive at the inn, Don Quixote goes to bed and remains asleep throughout the entire episode, or much of the episode. But even a sleeping Don Quixote can be dangerous. And in the middle of the night, he wakes up and claims he's been fighting a giant. This turns out to be some wine skins that he has mistakes for a giant. And the wine that comes out of them, he interprets as blood. And it reminds us of all the earlier fights that he's had with giants. But desire is the most pervasive force at the inn, sublimated from the prostitutes of the earlier episode to a sentimental quadrangle represented by Cardenio, Dorotea, Fernando, and Lucinda. But these four sums are not the only lovers at the inn. No sooner have their relationship been resolved, their conflicts, than another pair of guests arrive, a Spanish soldier and his mysterious but beautiful Moorish companion. His story is not primarily one of love, but it's his account entirely to be trusted. Sorayda, the Moorish maid he travels with, her father thinks that she has fled to Christian lands because women there have more freedom. And then there's another pair of young lovers, Clara and Luis. And the entire episode is framed by the reading out loud of a very sexual story, that of the Curioso Impertinente. Thus the entire third in episode is permeated by suggestions of illicit sexual activity. But these are raised from the lower level of society, prostitutes and militeers, chambermaids, to the higher levels, noblemen. If sex pervades the episode, so too does money. The innkeeper is now well compensated for the cost of lodging Don Quixote, even for the destruction of the wine skins. Fernando, a Duke's son, is respected not just for his ancestors, social class, but also for his wealth. But the preoccupation with money also extends to the ideological level of the novel. Don Quixote gives a speech praising arms over letters and everyone agrees with him that the soldier is superior to the man of letters because the soldier sacrifices more. But in real life, they prefer the man of letters because of his potential to make money as a lawyer or a merchant. As the episode ends, we are left wondering, are Cardenio and Lucinda cured of their passivity? Fernando, the Duke's son of his philandering, will Dorotea find happiness as his wife? Will the captive settle down and prosper? Will Soraida, the Moorish woman, find spiritual satisfaction as a Christian? What will happen to the young lovers, Luis and Clara? We never know the answers to these questions because the resolutions offered by the coincidences at the end are merely temporary. The Serpentine universe is ultimately rather lonely and the sense of community always fleeting. This is reinforced by the final narrative metaphor. Don Quixote, who arrived at the end triumphantly as a knight errant, leaves it in a cage where in a cage where he nearly soils himself until he's finally allowed to leave so he can take care of his bodily functions. The cage is the ultimate physical symbol of isolation and anticipation of that final journey that no one can undertake for us. So the themes of the in episodes are significant because they elucidate its role in the genealogy of the novel. It's easy to think of Don Quixote as the ancestor of the comic novel or the modern pick-arrest novel or the adventure novel or even the modern self-conscious novel. Novels can indeed be written about many different things, about hunting for a great white whale, about floating down the Mississippi on a raft, about war, about sailing around the world, and so on. And we can see how Don Quixote could be related to each of these stories. But the privileged grounds for the novel from Richardson through Austin and Thackeray, Balzac, Flaubert, Zola, Galdos, Clarine, Hawthorne, Henry James, John Updike are the themes foregrounded in the in episodes of the Quixote, the intersections of love and sex, money and social class. And Cervantes gives us a poetics for the novel when the priest responds to the tale of the curioso impertinent by saying it's a nice story, but it's not believable. And when Fernando says of the captive story, certainly, señor capitán, the manner in which you have recounted this remarkable tale has been equal to the unusual and marvelous events themselves. The story is rare and strange, full of extraordinary incidents that astonish the listener. We have liked, we have so liked hearing it that we would enjoy listening to it all over again, even if it took until tomorrow morning. These comments were the Cervantes intended to or not, drive the nail into the coffin of epic and romance. The new basis for evaluating a novel is not the morality of a story, as even the priest concedes, or the absence of the supernatural. It's a new kind of believability, being true to character, a judgment about human nature, and it's telling a story well. So I'll stop here and turn this over to my good friend and colleague, Adrienne Martin.