ABSTRACT
In the tenth chapter of the third book of Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, as Persiles, Sigismunda and company move across Spain, Cervantes stages a confrontation between truth and lies, history and fiction, as an illiterate alcalde probes the veracity of an account by two ‘students’ of their alleged captivity in Algiers. 1 Alban Forcione interprets the students as surrogate fiction writers, and reads the chapter as a further rehearsal of Cervantes’ concerns as a creative writer with the tensions and competing claims of artistic freedom (the students) and Aristotelian theory (the alcalde). 2 However, within the world of the narrative, they are not primarily surrogate fiction writers but, rather, failed historians, for whilst their account is a piece of fiction, they intend it to be taken literally as true, and it is the historical truth of their account that the alcalde assesses. 3 From the perspective of the novel, at least, the students do not seek to create ‘the ideal fábula’ as Forcione asserts. 4 Of course, on an extratextual level, the students’ tale can be interpreted, as Forcione interprets it, as a failed exercise in fiction writing. From different interpretative perspectives, therefore, their tale is historia in both seventeenth-century senses of the word, history (albeit false) and fiction. It is obviously also, depending on one’s perspective, a mentira in a double sense, the harmless lie of any fábula and a lie actively designed to deceive. It is the interplay between these terms brought about by various elements in the metatextual episode that I wish to explore here.
