Cervantes' Los trabajos de Persiles and Sigismunda is the involved tale of two royal lovers, Persiles and Sigismunda, who embark on a pilgrimage to Rome -not only to fulfill a holy vow, but also to prevent Sigismunda's marriage to Persiles' older brother. ' Pretending to be brother and sister, the two adopt the names Periandro and Auristela. Throughout the course of their journey, complicated by a series of disasters, they encounter many other pilgrims and adventurers, each of whom recounts his or her own story.
A careful analysis of the narration of the Persiles reveals that humor and irony are not limited to isolated elements of the work; rather, they pervade the text. A failure to recognize these important elements has led to various unfounded claims -among them, that the Persiles represents Cervantes' "escape into idealism" and his complete acceptance of the "realm of romance." Humor and irony cannot be considered "impertinent insertions," as Navarro Gonzalez suggests, for they serve to undermine the "idealism" of the work as can be seen in the treatment of the "hero."* A proper understanding of this subversive function is crucial for a valid interpretation of the Persiles and, thus, for the consideration of Cervantes' opus as a whole. If the Persiles is not a straightforward romance, then it cannot be argued that Cervantes' literary career moves from the realism of the novel to the blind idealism of romance for such a generalization would distort the true nature of the works involved.
To facilitate the analysis of the narrative levels and the crucial role of humor and irony in the work, I shall employ the theory set forth in Susan Sniader Lanser's The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction. Lanser bases her theory on the premise that literature, like all verbal discourse, "reflects a relationship between sender(s) and receiver(s), coalescing around responses to (or interactions with) a 'message' or text, and this relationship is the crux of textual point of view." 3 She agrees with Scholes and Kellogg that the essence of narrative art lies "'in the relationship between the teller and the tale, and between the teller and the audience"' (p. 12-13).
Lanser's "Poetics of Point of View" includes three major elements: status, contact, and stance. Status involves the relation of the speaker to the speech act, including such considerations as authority, competence, and credibility. Contact deals with the relationship of the speaker to the audience (the narrator to the reader). Stance is the narrator's relation to the discourse content ("the message") and the fictional world, including his opinions of and feelings about the fictional persons and events.
Lanser also states that: "The concept of levels of narration is structurally significant because it signals differences among narrative voices that must be clarified if we are to recognize the relations of subordination and Neophilologus 72 (1988) 218-226