Interruption and the fragment: Heliodorus and persiles

Interruption – as David Hillman and Adam Phillips note – can be meaningful by design – “ a fig-leaf covering the fragmentary state of things (selves, worlds, sentences)” (8). With this framework in mind, the present essay seeks to clarify how and to what degree Cervantes (in his famous boast) audaciously “competes” with Heliodorus and his Aethiopika in Persiles¹ by means of interruption (of genre, plot, and, more important, epistemology). He barely conceals (while systematically evoking) the Hellenistic auctor, whom he aims to surpass rather than merely to “emulate” in his own extravagant baroque experiment.²