ABSTRACT
The "traditional" historicist critics of the Quixote—Diego Clemencín, Francisco Rodríguez-Marín, Menéndez Pidal—painstakingly pointed out various ways in which the details of contemporary Spanish history shed light on the reading and interpretation of Cervantes's text. The idealizations of romance are consistently set against an iconoclasm that will respect no idealizing power. The practice of ideology critique can claim this priority because it makes reference to a deep-structure narrative about society and its conflicts whose form is coextensive with the force of "necessity." And yet the practice of ideology critique is itself shadowed by a romance narrative that posits a moment in which conflict, contingency and reversal are brought to an end. Cervantes's historically inflected critique of romance is undertaken in full view of this dilemma; indeed, it foregrounds and stages it as the "untranscendable horizon" of novelistic discourse. The exigencies of history are neither more nor less authoritative than desire, and equally susceptible to irony.
