Abstract
Similar to Don Quixote, which Cervantes dedicates to a “desocupado lector” (idle reader) (Cervantes Prologue), Exemplary Novels project an audience for whom reading is meant both as play and diversion. Analogous to the recreational game of billiards highlighted in the Prologue, play and diversion, however, become tricky occupations in a world of fictional games and surprising changes that challenge the status of the twelve stories as “exemplary.” My aim in this article is to focus on the “billiard table” (mesa de trucos) trope as a modus operandi underlying Cervantes’s volatile fiction which transcends the boundaries of gender, race, class, on the one hand, and those of what is familiar and conventional, on the other. I claim that the “billiard table,” which brings forth not only the idea of careful calculation but also the idea of chance and random ball-shooting, is a strategy whereby Cervantes mixes genres, transgresses codes of conduct and identities, making readers think through complex textual alterations of exemplarity, in pedagogical terms, and, more significantly, reflect on their own complicity in the vices depicted in the stories. Cervantes thus mingles fictional playfulness (authorial stratagems) with seriousness (the content of the stories) in accordance with the Aristotelian definition of eutrapelia as witty and temperate amusement experienced prior to the return to serious work and moral piety. In this light, I suggest that Exemplary Novels is a telling example of the Renaissance concept of serio ludere, in that the light-hearted subject matter of the tales is inextricable from the ethical issues they raise.