173 diacritics / fall–winter 2003 ON THE SUBJECT OF FICTION ISLANDS AND THE EMERGENCE OF THE NOVEL SIMONE PINET Realms and islands were As plates dropped from his pocket. —William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra Bearings Drifting among the topoi the Middle Ages inherited from classical culture, islands held on to many of their characteristics throughout this long period and simultaneously nur- tured new paradigms, which led to multiple and profound transformations of the motif in early modern imaginaries. In the medieval period the island serves simply as a set- ting, as a site for the articulation of fiction and reality, to which many texts from dif- ferent traditions can attest, from philosophical debates to romances to clerical works, from northern Europe to the south of the Iberian peninsula. It is in the literature of late medieval Iberia, precisely, that a major shift in the use of insular geographies can be documented, one that bore profound consequences for the development of genres and, especially, for the consideration of fiction itself. When we reach the Renaissance, there occurs a discursive separation between fiction and reality. The shift to a clearer separation is conveyed in both Renaissance cartography and narrative in the form of the island as an ideal metaphor for such distancing. This shift has a major structural implication for the construction of new genres. By separating fiction from reality, the literary solutions that come forth give rise to the modern novel, of which Don Quijote (1605, 1615) is considered to be the first. In cartography, the result is the emergence of the atlas. 1 The use of the island is pervasive in the book of chivalry and is directly borrowed from this genre in Don Quijote. Through a process of metaphorization, the use of the island as a structure in Don Quijote is one of the traits marking the difference between the book of chivalry and the novel. 2 The distance established by the relocation of marvelous contents to an island and the metaphoric use of the motif in the modern novel reveal the configuration of a new concept of fiction. In fact, Spanish Golden Age literary theories elaborated the separa- tion of fiction and reality in great detail, and the book of chivalry, with its insistent use of the insular, became exemplary of what was then to be perceived, now in clearly neg- 1. See Lestringant. While he does not discuss libros de caballerías or the novel along with the atlas, his documentation and numerous insights on spatial articulations in (particularly French) literature and in the movement from isolario to atlas are relevant here. 2. I fully document and develop these ideas in my doctoral dissertation [see Pinet]. For an extensive documentation, especially in cartography and in French literature, see Lestringantʼs reflections on the enterprise of discovery and colonization of the Americas, as well as his writ- ings on Rabelais, of special interest to my analysis here. diacritics 33.3–4: 173–87