The Dog’s Legs

THERE IS a particularly deep-seated prejudice among Spanish critics nowadays, one that almost makes you think they must have been brought up on a diet of detective novels, and according to which—it’s assumed—every character, every episode, every detail must have a purpose, a meaning, or, to put it more clearly, must be a clue. (They also appear to have swallowed whole Chekhov’s famous and rather stupid dictum: if, at the beginning of a story, a nail appears, it should be the nail from which the protagonist hangs himself at the end.) The continual demand for every detail to be “necessary” it isn’t only a matter of his famous, much-criticized, and yet fundamental interpolation of “El curioso impertinente” (“The Man Too Curious for His Own Good”), for almost the same applies to all of the other adventures, which hardly ever add anything to the story as a whole or to our knowledge of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The best novels in the Western tradition, from Cervantes to Proust, from Sterne to Faulkner, from Conrad to Nabokov, are, on the contrary, highly digressive, full of detours and diversions and asides, or what those critics would call “gratuitous elements”; and yet far from being gratuitous, the digressions play a vital part in shaping those literary worlds. What is important in a novel is the flow, not how it ends or how the plot line leads the reader straight to that ending.