ABSTRACT
A consideration of Spanish phenomena alone would lead to an admission that Catholicism and a pre-modern economic setting could also give rise to the Novel. Like the ancient novel, the Cervantine novel—the Persiles even more than the Quixote—rises from the polyglot energies and positions itself on the border between multiple cultures and languages. Carroll Johnson wryly rehearses a clutch of typical evolutionary stances in Cervantine criticism: Don Quixote "is the first modern novel. Novelistic manifestations of hybridity as old as the Hellenistic era were theorized in the 1930s by Mikhail Bakhtin, who described the "hybrid culture and hybrid literary forms" of lower Italy, with its "bilingualism" and even "trilingualism". Within the Cervantine utterance of the Nahuatl word cacao as a coin of exchange—itself a nod to the multilingual consciousness-raising that occurred during the age of Iberian conquest—two marginal cultures encounter each other dialogically.
