Possibly is the first of four books in APHRODITE that employ “hypertexts,” the other three the evenly numbered Renewed (4), Divine (6) and This (8). Unlike Renewed, whose hypertext, Spenser and his Faerie Queene, is scarcely audible, Cervantes, the hypertextual figure of imitation here, constantly hovers above the in situ description of South America and Iberia, partly because Don Quijote, his comic masterpiece, bleeds into the narrative as intertext as well. (Such is also the case with Dante’s Commedia in the first part of Divine, all three of whose parts imitate the template of Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso.) MM tropes the double consciousness of the Don and Sancho and the capaciousness of their creator in describing his own journey through the Luso-Hispanic worlds of Miami (USA); Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Peru; Spain and Portugal. Despite its geographical and cultural retrospection from the New World to the Old, Possibly is about the future, about the world of possiblity (MM at one point quotes from a textbook on the theory of probability). Miami represents the Future, we might say, South America, the Present, Iberia, the Past. Thus, like Vergil’s larger epic, MM’s epyllion embraces past, present and future. Contradicting stereotypes, Spain, however, turns out to be more colorful than Brazil and more lively than Maimi.
On The Possible and The Probable
The full text of Possibly
Carlos Daghlian, "Possivelmente"