Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha, Part II - chapters 1 - 23 - donquijote.ufm.edu/en

Chapters 01 - 23

Lesson 21: Sancho’s political mantra 58

Lesson 23: “We’ve come up against the church, Sancho!” 65

Lesson 22: Sancho’s discourse on infamy 60

Lesson 24: The first encounter with Dulcinea 67

Lesson 25: Don Quijote, classic romantic lover 69

Lesson 1: Reason of State 7

Lesson 2: Don Quijote has the solution 9

Lesson 3: The barber tells the story of the madman of Seville 11

Lesson 4: The Order of Knight Errantry 13

Chapters 01 - 02

Lesson 5: Sancho wants to govern his isle 18

Lesson 6: Don Quijote wants to know what people are saying 21

Lesson 7: Sansón Carrasco has read the first part 23

Chapters 03 - 04

Lesson 8: Reflections on the first part of Don Quijote 25

Lesson 11: “The author’s interested in money and profit?” 31

Lesson 9: Cervantes and the definition of a good writer 27

Lesson 12: Sancho cites the war cry of Spain: “Charge for Santiago and Spain!” 33

Lesson 10: The perfect novel according to Cervantes 29

Chapters 09 - 12

Lesson 18: The feudal relationship between master and servant 51

Lesson 19: Don Quijote says better to be a thief than greedy 53

Lesson 20: El Toboso: the first adventure of the third sally 55

Lesson 26: Don Quijote and “The Assembly of Death” 71

Lesson 27: “My Lord, the Devil has made off with my gray 73

Lesson 28: The Knight of the Mirrors 78

Chapters 05 - 08

Lesson 13: Sancho is transformed 38

Lesson 15: The fantasies of Teresa and Sancho 42

Lesson 17: Don Quijote’s theory of the four lineages 46

Lesson 14: Sancho’s family 40

Lesson 16: Don Quijote and humanism 44

Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha

donquijote.ufm.edu/en

Part IIChapters 01 - 23

Index

Lesson 34: The identity of the Knight of the Mirrors 91 Lesson 48: The incredible adventure of the Cave of Montesinos 129

Lesson 41: The Knight of the Lions 111

Lesson 35: The conspiracy of the priest, the barber, and Sansón Carrasco 93 Lesson 49: Don Quijote, Fugger 131

Lesson 42: The fencing match of Corchuelo and the licentiate 113

Chapters 13 - 15 Chapters 20 - 23

Chapters 16 - 19

Lesson 29: The Knight of the Woods and his squire 81 Lesson 43: Camacho and Quiteria’s wedding 116

Lesson 36: The most intimate thoughts of Don Quijote 97

Lesson 31: Sancho Panza, sommelier 85 Lesson 45: The second part of Camacho and Quiteria’s wedding 123

Lesson 38: “The Adventure of the Lions” 101

Lesson 33: Sancho Panza, pacifist squire 89 Lesson 47: Don Quijote’s descent into the Cave of Montesinos 127

Lesson 40: The poetry of Lorenzo de Miranda 109

Lesson 30: “Knights and squires split up” 83 Lesson 44: Interest and Love battle for the affections of the damsel 118

Lesson 37: Don Quijote defends the interests of Miranda’s son 99

Lesson 32: The feats of the Knight of the Woods 87 Lesson 46: Don Quijote counsels Basilio 125

Lesson 39: The domestic life of Diego de Miranda 107

Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha


Part IIChapters 01 - 23

Course activities 135

“There’s only one difference between a crazy man and me. The crazy man thinks he’s sane; I know I’m crazy.”.

—Salvador Dalí

5 Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha


Part II Chapters 01-23: Introduction

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A lthough it was published in 1615, a full ten years after part one, the second part of DQ is clearly a continuation of the first, sharing most of its themes, symbols, and characters. Madness, desire, violence, and religion are again key issues, and the novel is still structured according to a basic conflict between chivalric fantasy and everyday realism. The symbolisms of

asses and inns also carry over from part one. Similarly, the priest, the barber, the housekeeper, and the niece are all present early on, and even Ginés de Pasamonte makes another cameo appearance.

But there are major differences. The second part sounds more natural than the first, more intimate, more immediate, as if Cervantes’s method of writing had become more spontaneous. Furthermore, its tone is darker, for DQ, instead of a buffoon and a general menace, becomes a more tragic and human figure. At the same time, part two contains even more innovative, almost postmodern textual moments, which constantly break traditional narrative boundaries: such as when SP questions the veracity of a vision that his master has while in the Cave of Montesinos, or when the knight attacks a puppet show that other characters are enjoying, or when DQ and SP learn that they are characters in a novel. Also, DQ and SP often switch roles in part two, with our hidalgo starting to accept reality and our peasant insisting on fantastical interpretations of the same phenomena. Another difference is that instead of heading south into the Sierra Morena, the pair head east, toward Zaragoza and Barcelona. And there are important new characters, such as the Duke and Duchess and Sansón Carrasco, who play major roles and interact with knight and squire in ways not seen in part one, because they aggressively participate in chivalric fantasies that they themselves construct around our hero. As another example, we will meet three different Dulcineas in part two, all of them making radical gestures toward DQ and requesting that he perform specific actions. Finally, part two of DQ is a more overtly political novel than part one. Indeed, chapter one announces this theme at the outset.



The tone of the second part is darker

In the very first words of part two, Cervantes acknowledges the original Moorish author: “According to Cide Hamete Benengeli, in the second part of this history.” This not only links part two to the end of part one, where the narrator alluded to a third adventure; it turns part one’s anxieties about the looming Expulsion of the Moriscos into bitter reflections on the fact that the policy was actually carried out during the five years prior to the publication of part two. Cervantes then employs the accepted medical discourse of the era when he informs us that DQ has been convalescing but that “his heart and his head” are still problems. In other words, the interconnected sources of his emotional and intellectual temperaments are still out of balance. It is difficult not to read DQ’s altered state as a metaphor for the Morisco policy.



Reason of State

P art two’s first scene takes shape when the priest and the barber visit our hero: “they decided to visit him and verify his improvement.” They agree not to mention anything related to DQ’s chivalric fantasy, which the narrator describes as a still tender wound: “they agreed not to touch on any threads related to knight errantry so as not to risk breaking the sutures

on his wounds, which were still so fresh.” After a description of DQ wearing a bodice, “a gilet of green flannel,” and a nightcap, “a red Toledan bonnet,” the narrator indicates that DQ is as dry as ever: “he seemed nothing less than a mummy.” These colors and this dryness allude to the era’s stereotypical image of a crazy man. Due to his initial presentation in part two, DQ still seems insane, yet he receives his friends “with very good judgment and many elegant words.”

After this brief exposition, the political theme erupts in full when the narrator tells us that, during their conversation, barber, priest, and hidalgo “began to discuss what is known as ‘reason of state.’” We must remember that political theory since the time of Plato always employs medical discourse. States and leaders are considered as if they were patients and in terms of their relative health. DQ’s insanity represents the political state of Habsburg Spain. Also, the explicit reference to “reason of state” connects the novel to one of the most popular genres of the Renaissance: the princely advice manuals penned by everyone from Machiavelli, Erasmus, and Bodin to Rivadeneyra, Mariana, and Hobbes. Cervantes is even more specific: DQ and his friends are profoundly utopian as they discuss different “modes of governance.” Note also how the verb “banishing” recalls the exile of the Moriscos, which was justified precisely in terms of “reason of state,” that is, as a necessary step for the preservation of the state: “correcting one abuse and condemning another, reforming this custom and banishing that, each of the three became a new legislator, a modern Lycurgus, a latter-day Solon, and they so transmuted the republic that it was as if they had placed it in a forge and removed one different from the original.”

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By describing all three men as classical law-givers and statesmen, Cervantes mocks the era’s overabundance of political pundits, the so-called arbitristas, who proffered reams of ridiculous advice on how to solve Spain’s domestic and foreign policy problems. The irony is that, although DQ appears to speak with such “discretion” that his friends as well as the housekeeper and the niece think he is cured –“completely well and with his sanity restored”–, the truth is that all three men suffer delusions political grandeur.



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A t this point the priest discards the plan of avoiding topics related to chivalry. He mentions that there is news at court “that the Turks were approaching with a powerful armada.” The news probes DQ’s particular madness because it relates to the numerous militia calls in the latter part of the sixteenth century, calls which justified the existence of the outmoded hidalgo

caste. Furthermore, the priest says that Philip III has reinforced Naples, Sicily, and Malta, this last island famously defended against the Turks by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem. Notice, too, how all this relates to Cervantes’s own heroism at the Battle of Lepanto.

DQ takes the bait and says he has the perfect solution. Here we get our first glimpse of a character’s inner thoughts in part two. The priest observes to himself that DQ has now fallen from “the high peak” of his insanity to “the deep abyss” of his foolishness. We also get part two’s first conflict as the barber says that DQ’s solution might join “the list of those many impertinent recommendations which are so often given to princes.” DQ is clearly upset, mocking the barber by calling him “Mister Shaver.” All pretense now drops as the priest even calls our hero by his chivalric name, DQ. When DQ says he did not want to share his solution with others who might steal his idea, the barber alludes to chess, swearing that he won’t divulge DQ’s idea “to neither the king nor the rook.” He also refers to a certain ballad about a thief who robs a priest of 100 “doblas” and “his mule with the wandering gate,” thereby recalling two major issues from part one: SP’s money and his missing ass. We also get our first case of bourgeois jargon in part two when the priest vouches for the barber using contractual language: “I vouch for him and guarantee his word.” When DQ asks who vouches for the priest, we get part two’s first case of blasphemy. The priest responds that he doesn’t need anybody to vouch for him. He alludes to the sacrament of confession, claiming that his profession is enough: “it’s all about keeping secrets.” DQ’s reaction mocks the phrase that accompanies the bread distributed during the Eucharist: “Here’s the body!”

Don Quijote has the solution



DQ argues that the King could destroy the Turk if he were to enlist only a handful of men like Amadís of Gaul and Don Belianís. However, since those men are no longer to be found, the job falls to him. DQ invokes God twice: “God will look after His people... and God understands me.” At these words his niece reacts in fear –“Kill me now if my Lord doesn’t want to be a knight errant again!”–, but DQ remains defiant: “I shall die a knight errant.”



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The barber tells the story of the madman of SevilleN ow we experience a beautiful reprise of Cervantes’s labyrinthical technique in part one: the mise en abîme or “Russian doll”

structure, the narrative within the narrative which reflects back on the original narrative. The barber asks the group to give him “license” to tell a story that took place in Seville, “because it fits perfectly here.” The story of the inmate who almost

escapes an insane asylum by pretending to be cured has folkloric origins, but Cervantes crafts it to suit his own ends. For example, because it takes place in the “Hospital of the Innocents,” it alludes to the medical discourse of the previous political discussion. It also cuts to the issues of philosophy and knowledge, because the insane man is a “licentiate” from Osuna, a minor university which the barber contrasts with Salamanca. The story also contains more of Cervantes’s criticisms of the Inquisition. He mocks the superficiality of differences between religions as if people of different faiths were choosing between Jupiter and Neptune. And he objects to the way that the Inquisition often stole and redistributed the property of people it accused of heresy. The inmate writes letters to the “archbishop” atop the Church hierarchy in which he explains that his relatives had him committed in order to take control of his “estate.” Note how this also alludes to DQ’s own situation at the beginning of part one, where his insanity had caused him to stop managing his affairs. Note, too, that there is something universally poignant about the plight of the second inmate who protests that he is not insane: “You’re free, you’re cured, and you’re sane? While I’m crazy, I’m sick, and I’m confined?”



“You’re free, you’re cured, and you’re sane? While I’m crazy, I’m sick, and I’m confined?”

The story’s own internal conclusion, as well as DQ’s reaction to it, underscore the power dynamics involved in laughter. When the chaplain sent by the archbishop has to acknowledge that the man he has come to free is indeed still insane –“Even so, Lord Neptune, it would not be a good idea to upset Lord Jupiter”–, he becomes the object of the laughter of the rector and his assistants who have warned as much. Moreover, the chaplain is clearly humiliated: “by whose laughter the chaplain was rather mortified.” As he was early in part one, DQ is angered by this laughter. He realizes full well that the barber has just compared him to an insane man pretending to be cured: “I, Lord Barber, am not Neptune, the god of waters, nor am I trying to persuade anyone that I am clever when I am not.” Also, DQ twice calls the barber “rapista,” a pejorative term meaning “shaver,” but which can also mean “thief.”



W hat follows is another of DQ’s energetic defenses of “the order of knight errantry.” Echoing Virgil and the Bible, he proclaims that knight errantry’s purpose is “the punishment of the proud and the rewarding of the humble.” He laments the lack of real knights and the modern surplus of courtly knights, and even launches into an impassioned

retelling of the Arthurian legend of the “enchanted boat.” After another nostalgic contrast between the Golden Ages of the past and the Iron Age of the present –“now, however, sloth triumphs over diligence, idleness over work, vice over virtue”–, DQ then praises a series of chivalric heroes. We find his usual favorites, Amadís of Gaul, Palmerín of England, Tirante el Blanco, and Don Belianís, and also the occasional contradiction, such as when he lauds both the Saracen warrior Rodomonte and the Christian Roland. Just when he seems to approach the peak of his insanity, DQ takes a final, sophisticated jab at the barber. He says that if the Philip III follows his advice “the Turk will be left tugging at beards,” meaning that the Turk will be left pulling out his beard in shame, but also that, upon his defeat, he will be turned into a barber.

This is funny, yes, but it’s also hostile: “I say this so that Lord Basin here will know that I understand him.” Telling and listening to stories are like combat. Is Cervantes revealing something about his art? The barber backs down, but the priest presses DQ about his obsessions in ways that recall part one: “I hold that these are all fictions, fables, and falsehoods, dreams retold by men who are awake, or, I should say, half-asleep.” DQ rejects the criticism as “another error” and he insists that chivalric knights were real because he has actually seen them. Hinting at the theme of race, he says Amadís had white skin, but a black beard, as opposed to the blonde ideal, and then he insists that he had “good physiognomy.” Nevertheless, DQ expresses doubts when the barber asks about giants. He indicates the Philistine Goliath as a biblical giant and brings up the archeological discovery of certain bones in Sicily, the geometry of which suggests that they belonged to huge beings. But in the end, and quite reasonably, he suspects that Morgante’s size was normal because he slept under a roof like everybody else.

The Order of Knight Errantry

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Confusion continues in DQ’s description of Reinaldos. Unlike his admiration in part one, now DQ sees Reinaldos as treacherous, “overly choleric, a friend of thieves and other degenerate people.” Similarly, his description of Roland makes him sound like a famous Ottoman pirate, “with a dark complexion and a red beard.” Finally, DQ returns to the problematic love triangle between Roland, Angélica, and the Moor Medoro, which we saw halfway through part one. At first DQ follows the priest’s lead, considering Angélica a whore –“a wanderer and somewhat capricious”– and suggesting that author Ariosto left her ruling in “Cathay” (China) because he did not want to go into more detail about her. But then DQ retreats, saying that libels and satires are beneath his chivalric code and he even cites a favorable poem about her by Lope de Vega. At this point, cries are heard in the patio and the chapter ends. Who could it be?



Chapter 01review



Part two begins with a dense review of major aspects of part one, but with a few twists. We have the immediate Arabic presence of Cide Hamete, then we get a review of DQ’s illness followed by one of the novel’s most explicit forays into Renaissance politics, especially the ongoing war against the Turk and the debate over “reason of state,” a popular excuse among the era’s tyrants. There are familiar notes of blasphemy, and very early in the novel we get another intense story within a story, one that destabilizes orthodox definitions of insanity and heresy. The loco cuerdo or “sane madman” anticipates the Romantic hero struggling against his oppressive society. Also, we note that laughter is already a major problem: truthful, yet also sadistic, both within the story and without. Finally, DQ’s angry defense of chivalry focuses on beards (a recurring theme in part two) and, of course, race: our knight once again contemplates the ethnic difficulties implied by the love triangle formed by Angélica, Roland, and Medoro. Textual and archeological data are doubtful. Biblical enemies like Goliath might have been giants and bones found in Sicily seem to confirm their existence, yet DQ points out that an attentive reader can rightly question the size of Morgante. Finally, in the middle of a meandering debate over Angélica’s relative purity, another character arrives at DQ’s house.

Let’s review

“The ass is funny!”

—Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina



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Sancho wants to govern his isleS ancho Panza’s arrival causes quite an interruption at the end of chapter one. The voices heard turn out to be those of the niece

and the housekeeper, who are militant in their defense of DQ’s house. The housekeeper insults SP, calling him a “vagabond” and accusing him of leading DQ astray. SP responds with equal vitriol, calling her “Housekeeper of Satan” and claiming that

it was DQ who lead him astray and that he has yet to receive the “isle” he was promised.

If part two is more political than part one, it is also more explicitly focused on economics. SP tells the housekeeper that she is off by “half the just price,” which alludes to the era’s hotly debated issue of whether prices should be determined according to the free market or, rather, according to the calculations of appointed regulators. The School of Salamanca generally argued in favor of the free market; monopolists and certain religious and government officials argued that they should set prices. Ironically, even though SP accuses the housekeeper of mispricing his relationship with DQ, he still has corrupt intentions. He hopes for more profit from ruling his island than “four court judges.” The housekeeper snaps back that he should be content with what he has: “Go and govern your own house and work your parcels of land.” Here is Cervantes’s novel in a nutshell: the contrast between chivalric adventurism and the simple, though apparently difficult, art of managing one’s own household.



Once they are alone, DQ chastises SP for mischaracterizing their relationship during his argument with the housekeeper. He uses medical and anatomical discourse in order to reassert a kind of natural, feudal bond between master and servant. Cervantes underscores this by having DQ begin with a Latin phrase: “You are deluded, Sancho... as the saying goes, quanto caput dolet, etcetera... I mean... that when the head aches, all the other members also ache; and seeing as I am your lord and master, I am your head, and you my member, for you are my servant; and for this reason, any evil that touches, or might touch, me will cause you pain, and yours will do the same to me.” SP’s response is brilliant and comical, but it also reestablishes an important tension between our heroes that we saw in part one. SP recalls the episode in DQ 1.17 when he was blanketed for refusing to pay the innkeeper: “but when they tossed me in the blanket like a member, my head was behind the fence, watching me fly through the air, not feeling any pain whatsoever.” DQ insists that he felt the squire’s pain in a spiritual sense and then he changes the topic.

“Go and govern your own house and work your parcels of land.”

“The ass is funny!”

—Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina



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Don Quijote wants to know what people are sayingP erhaps prompted by the barber’s story in the previous chapter, DQ wants to know what people are saying about him,

specifically, the masses, “the commoners,” the low nobility, “the hidalgos,” and the high nobility, “the gentlemen,” i.e., the caballeros. He also recalls the earlier theme of princely advice and mocks the corruption and flattery practiced by the political

class: “I want you to know, Sancho, that if the naked truth, unclothed by flattery, were to reach the ears of princes, the times would be different, other ages would be considered iron when compared to our own, which I have heard is considered golden among present nations.” Notice how complex this is. DQ recognizes that, compared to life in other countries, Spaniards are living a golden age, but he still insists that it is more corrupt than it should be.

SP is brutally honest. Commoners believe that DQ is simply insane, “a great madman”; the hidalgos think he has gone too far by calling himself “don,” or “Sir,” when all he owns are “four vine stumps and a couple of fields”; and the high gentry is offended that the low gentry dares to compete with them, especially since DQ is one of those who “polish their shoes with soot” and “mend their black stockings with green thread.” Notice how, like the beginning of part one, part two opens with detailed information about how both hidalgo and squire are dirt poor. Finally, SP reports that many people question DQ’s character, calling him “crazy, but amusing,” “brave, but unfortunate,” and “courteous, but impertinent.”

DQ either ignores or dismisses these criticisms and points out that slander has attended all great heroes: Julius Cesar was called overly ambitious, Alexander the Great a drunk, Hercules self-indulgent, Don Galaor too quarrelsome, and his brother Amadís of Gaul a crybaby. But when the knight asks the squire if there is anything else, the exposition of part two takes a radically absurd turn that once again displays Cervantes’s literary genius. Cervantes is not just the inventor of the modern novel; he is the inventor of the modernist



novel. Incredibly, SP reports that his neighbor Sansón Carrasco, who has just returned from his first year at the University of Salamanca, is currently reading a book about their adventures “called The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote of La Mancha.” Wow! Not only is the month between parts one and two not enough time for such a book to have been composed and published, SP is shocked because the author describes “things that happened when we were alone, which made me cross myself out of fear about how the historian who wrote them could have known about them.”

This hint of existentialist trauma is mitigated by a comedic discussion between knight and squire about the identity of the author of their story. DQ affirms that he must be a “wise enchanter,” as per the narrators of the books of chivalry, and SP reports that his name is “Cide Hamete Berenjena,” confusing the surname “Benengeli” with the Spanish word for “eggplant.” DQ notes that this name is Moorish and that “Cide” means “Lord” in Arabic, but when SP agrees because “the Moors are fond of eggplants,” the knight doubts that the squire is correct about the surname. Notice how Cervantes makes fun of racism here. At this point, SP rushes off to get the bachelor Carrasco who will tell DQ more.



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Sansón Carrasco has read the first partC hapter three opens with DQ meditating about the book mentioned by SP. The narrator underscores the temporal problem

while also giving us indirect access to DQ’s delusions of grandeur: “he could not persuade himself that such a history could exist, for the blood of the enemies he had slain was not yet dry on the blade of his sword, and yet they already

wanted his chivalric exploits to go about in print.” DQ is also disturbed by the Moorish status of the author: “from Moors one could not expect any truth whatsoever, because they are all tricksters, liars, and swindlers.” He worries the author might have written something against “the modesty of his lady Dulcinea of Toboso” or perhaps misrepresented his own faithful decorum. DQ has always kept “at bay the impulses of his natural passions.” Remember Maritornes? She can vouch for DQ’s ability to control his passions, right?

In the midst of these worries, Sancho and Carrasco are suddenly present. In spite of his name, Sánson (Samson) is described as small in stature, about twenty-four years old, and having a round face, snub nose, and large smile, “all signs that he was mischievous in nature and fond of pranks and jokes.” Carrasco immediately plays with our knight, throwing himself at his feet and swearing by his bachelor’s robe –“by the habit of Saint Peter that I wear”– that DQ is “one of the most famous knights errant that there ever was, or ever will be, anywhere on the face of the earth.” He also praises Cide Hamete Benengeli for having written down DQ’s “great deeds” as well as the Christian narrator for having taken care to “have them translated from Arabic into our vernacular Castilian.” Note that if DQ does not trust Moorish authors, his more immediate problem is a false neighbor.



In fact, Carrasco represents a range of problems. We are only at the beginning of chapter three and Carrasco’s commentary highlights the mindboggling mise-en-abîme structure of the narrative that we have seen elsewhere. We assume Cervantes is the author, but others are involved: Cide Hamete, the Christian narrator, and presumably another Morisco translator. To top it all off, we now have Carrasco, a character inside all of these narrative frames who claims to have already read the first part of the novel. He does more. He notes that the novel has been printed in Portugal, Valencia, Barcelona, and Antwerp; and he even anticipates the future when he observes that “there will be no nation or language that will not have its translation.” Evidently, as we can also gather from the dedication of 1615, by now Cervantes knew that he had written something amazing. There were already at least nine editions of DQ 1, and it had been translated into English and French in 1612 and 1614.



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Reflections on the first part of Don QuijoteT hroughout part two Cervantes will deploy this kind of self-reflection, whereby narrators and characters refer to the novel itself.

The result is comical and intellectual instability. In chapter three, the technique creates a full-blown crisis. Carrasco begins by praising the accuracy of both the Moorish author and the Christian translator of part one, and then he cuts straight to

DQ’s chief anxiety: “the modesty and continence of the Platonic love between your grace and my lady Doña Dulcinea of Toboso.” This reference to the era’s Neoplatonic theory of love suggests a complex philosophical aspect to the novel which most readers ignore (cf. León Hebreo). At the same time, this is Cervantes’s first response to certain errors that readers claim to have found in part one. SP says he has never heard anybody refer to Dulcinea with the title “don” and states “so the history’s already wrong on that account.” However, DQ referred to her with this title twice in part one, but SP was not present. Moreover, Carrasco dismisses SP’s criticism: “That’s not an important objection.” Really? Duclinea’s status is unimportant? The relative accuracy and sophistication of different readers’ understandings of part one are now a major issue.

Next, DQ asks Carrasco which of his adventures receive the most attention in this book. The bachelor recalls numerous episodes: the windmills, the fulling-mills, the battle with the sheep, the dead body adventure on the road to Segovia, the freeing of the galley slaves, the battle with the Basque, Rocinante’s adventure with the Galician mares, even SP’s blanketing. DQ observes that all true histories have their “ups and downs,” but Carrasco reports that, even so, some readers would have preferred that the author overlook “some of the infinite beatings given to Lord Quijote on various occasions.” Author Vladimir Nabokov made the same complaint over three hundred years later. SP quips that these beatings are the essence of the story: “That’s where the truth of the history comes in.” When DQ notes that Aeneas and Odysseus were not as perfect as Virgil and Homer described them, Carrasco makes a theoretical distinction between writing “as a poet” and writing “as an historian.” Apparently, Cide Hamete is an historian.



Now SP enters the discussion in big ways, asserting his own importance and quarrelling with both DQ and Carrasco about textual details. He says that if true history is the Moorish author’s goal, then “surely among my master’s beatings are to be found my own.” DQ is annoyed by SP’s refusal to forget certain events. The squire insists that he is one of the novel’s major “presonages” and Carrasco corrects his pronunciation: “Personages, not presonages, Sancho my friend.” Carrasco reports that some readers find SP too gullible regarding “the governorship of that isle offered by Lord Don Quijote.” Things get political again when SP insists he is qualified to be a governor and that there have been governors “who don’t measure up to the sole of my shoe.” Finally, SP warns that there would have been trouble if the author of the history had slandered his superior ethnic status: “if he had said things about me that did not suit the Old Christian that I am, even the deaf would have heard us.” Carrasco responds with an ironic jab: “That would be miraculous.” Making the deaf hear would be a miracle, but Carrasco insinuates that representing SP as a perfect Old Christian would be yet another.



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Cervantes and the definition of a good writerA t this point, SP frames a fundamental debate about creative writing: “Miracles or no miracles... each man should watch

what he says or writes about presons and not put down willy-nilly the first thing that pops into his noggin.” SP’s idiomatic expressions and his inability to pronounce “persons” make his warning sound casual, but it’s not. Whether or not

novelists should use fantastic events to spice up their plots, to what degree a character’s speech should correspond to her social status, and just how spontaneous an author should be while writing, are all major issues in Cervantes’s day and even our own. An author’s ability to coordinate the right mix of subplots while maintaining a coherent and plausible main story was also hotly debated. SP alludes to classical concepts, like Aristotle’s insistence on the unities of action, time, and place, or his emphasis on realism or mimesis.

Carrasco cuts to the chase by bringing up the first of three major objections to the first part of the novel. According to many readers, The Novel of the Curious Impertinent, the interpolated tale of DQ 1.33-35, does not have anything to do with DQ’s story. This is huge! Cervantes actually has characters discuss whether or not he is a bad writer. Ironically and paradoxically, DQ’s first reaction is to endorse the criticism: “the author of my history was no wise man but an ignorant gossiper who, groping and without any clear discourse, set himself to writing it.” Think about this: DQ has just called Cervantes an incoherent idiot. Next he makes a harsh analogy between Cervantes’s flimsy technique and that of a certain painter from Úbeda who was so improvisational that he had to label his works. After painting “Whatever comes out,” the painter would write “This is a cock” beneath what nobody could recognize as a cock. Still, DQ’s final comment suggests that Cervantes’s readers will need help to comprehend the true meaning of his art: “that must be how my history is: a commentary will be needed to understand it.” You will forgive me if I have to agree.



Carrasco then gives us specific information regarding just who was reading Cervantes’s novel: “there’s no antechamber in which a lord does not have his copy of Don Quijote.” Hmmm, apparently, the novel was read by an educated leisure class somewhere in between the intelligentsia and the masses. For those of us who read Don Quijote as a satire against the orthodoxy of ethnocentric imperialists, Carrasco’s subsequent praise of the novel sounds duplicitous: “in no place does it contain even a hint of immodest language or a less than Catholic thought.” Moreover, when DQ agrees, he refers to the problem of monetary debasement that we saw throughout DQ 1: “To write any other way... would not be to write truths, but lies, and historians who avail themselves of lies ought to be burned like those who make counterfeit money.” The heavy irony here is that DQ says that bad authors who produce lies for their readers are as despicable as counterfeiters who extract wealth from their fellow citizens. And for readers who realize that the Habsburg kings did this as much as anyone, Cervantes’s novel is neither simple nor harmless.

“in no place does it contain even a hint of immodest language or a less than Catholic thought.”



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The perfect novel according to CervantesD on Quijote and Carrasco now agree that writing requires wisdom and skill and that critics are usually ignorant and arrogant:

“to compose histories and books of whatever type, it is necessary to have great judgment and mature understanding.” When DQ emphasizes that this is especially true of humorous writing, he refers to the comic figures in the era’s theater: “the

most astute character in a play is the fool, because he who wishes to be taken for a simpleton cannot afford to be one.” Carrasco then says that those who write prose face an additional problem: “since printed works are taken in slowly, it is easy to spy their flaws.” Moreover, those who are not themselves writers should hold their tongue: “those who enjoy and take particular pleasure in judging the writings of others without having brought anything of their own into the light of the world.” Carrasco argues that critics miss the forest for the trees, for they pay too much attention “to the atoms of the bright sun of the work which they criticize.” Even Homer made errors, but then Carrasco points out that what some think are errors might actually be beauty marks: “it just might be that what seems wrong to them might be beauty marks which often increase the splendor of the face that has them.” Wow! Cervantes lets Carrasco argue that his so-called mistakes have made his novel even more perfect!

The chapter ends with a glance at the two other major complaints that readers had about part one. This passage is confusing, paradoxical even. Carrasco first quotes Eclesiastés 1.15, «stultorum infinitus est numerus», meaning “infinite is the number of fools,” but then he affirms that “infinite are those who have enjoyed this history.” Switching gears again, he gives voice to readers perplexed by SP’s missing ass and the 100 escudos that SP found in the suitcase in the Sierra Morena: “he forgets to tell who was the thief who stole Sancho’s gray” and “They also say that he forgot to include what Sancho did with those hundred escudos that he found in the valise in the Sierra Morena.” At this point Sancho gets nervous and excuses himself, complaining of “an upset stomach.” Before departing, however, he promises to respond to Carrasco and all the other critics: “I’ll come back and satisfy your grace and everybody else who wants to ask questions, regarding the loss of my ass as well as how I spent the hundred escudos.” After DQ and Carrasco finish their “banquet” and take a “siesta,” SP returns.



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“The author’s interested in money and profit?”I n chapter four SP returns to DQ’s house prepared to tell Carrasco about the theft of his ass and what he did with the 100 escudos.

His explanation of how someone robbed his ass from beneath him while he was sleeping is funny and absurd: “he took the opportunity to suspend me on four stakes which he placed at the four sides of my saddle in such a way that he left me

mounted on it and took my gray from underneath me without my even sensing it.” We are reminded of those figures propped up on crutches in Dalí’s paintings. SP also reminds us of his extreme emotional attachment to his ass: “tears welled up in my eyes, and I made a great lamentation.” He then tells how he recovered the animal while in the company of Princess Micomicona: “traveling with my lady Princess of Micomicón, I saw my ass, and on him I saw that Ginés de Pasamonte traveling dressed like a Gypsy.” Carrasco’s response focuses on a specific narrative inconsistency. It’s funny because it takes the wind out of SP’s sails: “The error doesn’t lie there... but in the fact that before the donkey reappeared the author says that Sancho was riding on that same gray.” SP has no explanation: “To that... I don’t know how to respond, except that the historian got confused or else the printer made a mistake.”

Carrasco presses SP harder on the matter of the 100 escudos: “what happened to the hundred escudos? Did they vanish?” Now Sancho gets defensive. He admits that he spent the money on his family and ultimately blames his wife: “if after so much time I had returned without a copper and without my ass, a black future would be waiting for me.” Still, he insists he has nothing to apologize for: “I’ll answer to the king himself in preson, and nobody has any reason to stick his nose into whether or not I took them or whether or not I spent them.” He even claims the escudos are a kind of payment for his many beatings in the company of his master, noting that they would not amount to half of what he is owed: “another hundred escudos wouldn’t amount to half what I’m owed.” And he protests again that nobody has a right to judge him: “let each man put his hand over his heart and not go judging white as black and black as white; for we are as God made us, and often much worse.” Note race.

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Carrasco makes clear that the errors he has mentioned are the main ones and then he notes that the author plans a sequel: “when he finds the history, which he seeks with extraordinary diligence, he will have it printed right away, motivated more by earnings than praise.” Sancho’s reaction recalls the third censor’s “approval” at the beginning of part two, which also highlighted Cervantes’s financial motives for writing: “The author’s interested in money and profit?” This is huge. Cervantes was indeed on the cusp of being able to make a living as an author. For SP, the idea of an author recording their exploits is the perfect excuse for another adventure: “if my master would take my advice, we’d already be out in those fields righting wrongs and undoing injustices, as is the habit and custom of good knights errant.” At these words by SP, the narrator tells us that “the neighing of Rocinante reached their ears, which neighing Don Quijote took as a very good omen.” So they plan a third sally.

a third sally



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Sancho cites the war cry of Spain: “Charge for Santiago and Spain!”C arrasco outlines the general plan: “it seemed to him that he should go to the Kingdom of Aragón and the city of Zaragoza,

where in a few days they would be holding the solemn jousts of the Festival of Saint George, in which he could win fame by vanquishing all the knights of Aragón, which would be like vanquishing all the knights of the world.” This

information is historically accurate: the only people more obsessed with chivalry than DQ were the Aragonese nobility. When Carrasco says that DQ should be more cautious because the world depends on him, SP agrees in very sophisticated terms, referring to Ecclesiastes 3.1-8 –“Yes, for there’s a time to attack and a time to retreat”– and alluding to a rallying cry from the days of the Reconquest: “yes, for it can’t always be ‘Charge for Santiago and Spain!’” Finally, he cites Aristotle’s dictum that virtue is found in the middle of extremes: “between the extremes of cowardice and recklessness lies the middle way of valor” (cf. in medio stat virtus).

As usual, SP wants nothing to do with violence: “to imagine that I have to raise my sword, even against lowborn scoundrels with caps and axes, is to imagine what will never happen.” The reason is that he wants to save himself for his governorship. But even on this topic, he reveals intellectual skepticism and senses his own tragic downfall: “my bread will taste as good, and perhaps better, ungoverned or as governor; and besides, how do I know whether or not the devil has set a trap for me that will make me stumble and fall and knock out all my teeth?” Carrasco is impressed –“you have spoken like a university professor”–, at which point SP recovers his courage: “I have taken my own pulse and I find myself healthy enough to rule kingdoms and govern isles.” But Carrasco’s final comment is ominous, insinuating that political power might corrupt SP: “offices can change behavior, and it could happen that when you see yourself governor, you won’t recognize the mother who bore you” (cf. honores mutant mores).



SP is offended and insists yet again on his good breeding. He has pure Christian blood and, as such, he would never disrespect anyone: “That’s the case... with those who are lowborn and not with those whose soul has four lines of the might of Old Christians, like mine. No, first know my character, which would never been ungrateful to anybody!” We should keep SP’s claims about his innate Christianity in mind as we read part two.

The chapter ends when DQ asks Carrasco to compose a farewell poem on his behalf to Dulcinea. He insists that the poem be written as an acrostic, that is, using the first letters of “Dulcinea del Toboso” at the beginning of each line. This way, Dulcinea will know that the poem is sincere and has been composed for her alone. Hello! Note how openly deceitful DQ is here. Is this the same DQ who would be put in a cage for his beloved? Carrasco cannot think of a viable poetic form given that Dulcinea’s name has seventeen letters, but he will find a way.

“Dulcinea del Toboso”



Chapter 02 - 04review



Let’s review: Most striking about chapters two, three, and four is the existentialist, self-referential nature of Cervantes’s composition, which reaches such a pitch that even SP becomes discombobulated and has to take a break when his tummy starts to hurt. First, SP reports that members of all social castes are critical of DQ. Then he relates the astounding news that a book has been written about their adventures. This is unsettling enough; then the idea that the author is a Moor is almost too much to handle. When Sansón Carrasco arrives, things get even more complicated, for he has been reading the book in question. Moreover, there appear to be serious errors in the narrative. Does Dulcinea deserve the title “Doña”? Is the interpolated Novel of the Curious Impertinent appropriate? And what about SP’s intermittent ass and the money he seems to have stolen from the suitcase in the Sierra Morena? At one point, DQ declares that his own author must be incompetent and ignorant. Most amazing of all, Carrasco suggests that all these supposed errors might actually be beauty marks. For his part, note how SP’s moral character is the real issue. He takes Carrasco’s inquiries personally and gets very defensive. Note also how SP twice insists on his ethnic purity, complains repeatedly about DQ’s previous mistreatment of him, and restates his interest in ruling his island. Cervantes is already having his way with us, and if Rocinante’s brays are any indication, we are in for a wonderful journey to Zaragoza.

Let’s review

“All those families that today shine according to their brilliant lineages had low and obscure beginnings.”

—Juan de Mariana, La dignidad real y la educación del rey



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Sancho is transformed

C hapters five and six of part two offer separate looks inside the respective households of SP and DQ. DQ’s speech to his niece on the meaning of lineage, or what we would call today “heredity,” is one of the most humanistic passages in all of Cervantes’s writings, and I would argue that it likely represents the author’s own values. Just as interesting is the dialogue

between SP and his wife Teresa, which deals with the same topic.

The first thing we note about chapter five is that the fictional narrator repeatedly interrupts SP’s discourse with critical comments made by the fictional translator: “When the narrator came to write this fifth chapter, he says that he thinks it’s apocryphal, because here Sancho Panza speaks in a style different from what one would expect from his limited intelligence and he says very subtle things which he doesn’t think it possible for him to know.” Thus, Cervantes achieves three effects: 1) he establishes the transformation of SP as a major theme; 2) he mocks the Aristotelian idea of mimesis as simplistic, too restrictive for his creativity; 3) he makes readers take note of his authorial presence and think critically about his fictional characters.

SP announces to his wife that he plans another adventure with DQ: “because of my need and the hope, which makes me happy, of imagining that I might find another hundred escudos like the ones we have already spent.” Not only does SP keep alive the issue of the missing 100 escudos, he again emphasizes the profit motive that we associate with both him and our author. When SP expresses his mixed feelings about his departure, he sounds like a cultured poet: “I’d be delighted not to be as happy as I appear.” Teresa doesn’t understand: “I don’t know how anybody can be happy not to be happy.” SP explains: “it makes me sad to have to leave you and my children; and if it were God’s will to give me food with my feet dry and in my own house, without dragging me through wastelands and crossroads, He could do it at little cost and just by willing it.” This is labyrinthical stuff, but if we read closely, it’s



not a paradox. SP doesn’t want to have to ramble, but since he needs money, he goes. This recalls the School of Salamanca’s insistence that it’s natural that man should be concerned with his own wellbeing.

But let’s not overlook the comedy here. SP’s expresses his usual obsession with his ass as if he were a crusader whose lady should tend his warhorse: “you take special care of the gray these next three days, so that he’s ready to carry weapons: double his feed, inspect the packsaddle and the other trappings, because we’re not going to a wedding.” SP also reiterates that he will soon be “governor of an isle.” Teresa is skeptical regarding his political ambitions. She puns on the word “government,” meaning political power but also “judgement” or “commonsense.” And if we listen closely, she even sounds anarchistic: “Oh please, no, husband of mine... just live your life, and let the devil take all the governments there are in the world; without government you were born from your mother’s womb, without government you have lived until now, and without government you will leave this world... There are many who live without government, and yet that doesn’t make them give up or stop counting themselves among the peoples of the earth.” Ironically, she then contradicts her skepticism, sensing a chance for personal gain: “But look here, Sancho: if you happen to find yourself in charge of some government, don’t forget about me and your children.” By the way, this is the first time that we learn Teresa’s real name. She was called “Juana Gutiérrez” in part one. Cervantes mocks perfectionist readers, but he’s also telling us what makes for an individual: self-interest and critical awareness of others.



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Sancho’s familyT he discussion now centers on the future of SP’s children. We learn that his family is pre-nuclear, composed of two parents

and two children: “Sanchico’s already fifteen,” and though he has not gone to school, he can expect help from “his uncle the abbot”; and “Mari Sancha” is old enough to marry. SP fantasizes about marrying her to a noble: “woman of mine, I’ll

marry Mari Sancha so high up that nobody will be able to reach her without calling her ‘your grace.’” Pragmatic, Teresa objects: “Oh please, no, Sancho... marry her to an equal.” She tells SP to focus on money: “You bring home the bacon, Sancho, and leave the matter of her marriage to me.” She doesn’t want to see her daughter “in those courts and in those great palaces, where they won’t understand her and she won’t even understand herself.” SP’s response is funny but also ominous. Technically, he makes himself analogous to the rebellious criminal famously freed in exchange for Christ: “Come here, beast, wife of Barabbas... Why would you want to stop me now, and for no good reason, from marrying my daughter to someone who’ll give me grandchildren they’ll call Lord and Lady?” (cf. Mk. 15.7).

Here the narrator again interrupts to note the implausible nature of SP’s discourse: “This manner of speaking, and what SP will say below, are why the translator of this history says that he considers this chapter apocryphal.” SP’s language also reveals his corrupt view of government as a means of obtaining wealth: “it will be good for me to land myself a lucrative governorship which will lift me out of the mud.” In other words, SP’s a rent seeker. We should also pay attention to SP’s choice of Arabic words for certain textiles when he imagines his wife’s wealthy future. He adopts the medieval perspective of a crusader who gets rich by reconquering the Moorish South: “you’ll see how they’ll call you ‘Doña Teresa Panza’ and you’ll sit in church on a carpet, with cushions and tapestries (alcatifa, almohadas y arambeles), all regardless of and in spite of the town’s hidalgas.” Note the social tension expressed by a peasant whose ambition is to compete with the hidalgo caste.



Teresa wants wealth, but she insists that Sanchica should marry within her own rank. She will resist SP’s desire to climb the social ladder by ruling over a frontier province, and she does not care about titles: “I fear that if my daughter becomes a countess, it will be her ruin. You do what you want, whether you make her a duchess or a princess, but I say to you that it won’t be with my agreement or consent... They baptized me ‘Teresa,’ a modest and simple name, without any additions or decorations or trimmings of Dons or Doñas.” She also takes a swipe at DQ’s desire to transgress the social hierarchy: “You go with your Don Quijote... and, by the way, I don’t know who gave him a Don, because neither his parents nor his grandparents had one.”



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The fantasies of Teresa and Sancho S ancho Panza is stubborn. He continues to fantasize about enriching Teresa’s daughter: “I’ll put her on a pedestal and under a

canopy for you and up in a drawing room with more velvet shams than there were Moors in the line of the Almohashams of Morroco.” The pun here is on the word almohadas, meaning “pillows,” but SP’s error alludes to the Moorish almohades who

conquered Andalucía in the twelfth century. Note also how the presence of Moors complicates the issue of lineage. Racial identity is also highlighted by SP’s allusion to Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina, which revolves around prohibitions against marriage between Old Christians and Jewish conversos. When SP says that his wife is being unreasonable, as if he were asking that Sanchica “throw herself from a tower,” he refers to the suicide of Melibea in Rojas’s novel.

Still trying to convince his wife to let Sanchica marry above her station, SP now deploys a sophisticated philosophical argument, which again causes the narrator to cite the translator’s skepticism. SP becomes a Neoplatonist, arguing that what a person becomes in life trumps what she might have been in the past: “all things which are present before our eyes appear, are, and remain in our memory much more clearly and powerfully than things in the past... This gives rise to the fact that when we see a person who is well dressed and with fine vestments and with a train of servants, it seems that some force moves and induces us to have respect for him, even though in that instant our memory recalls for us some lowliness in which we once saw that person; and that disgrace, whether it be of poverty or lineage, since it is in the past, is no longer and what exists is only that which we see before us in the present.” This complex discourse on what defines a person’s identity from a man who mispronounces “persona” as “presona.” Note that SP’s moral point is that one’s racial heritage should not matter. Only “envious people” care about lineage, and who can avoid being envied?



The chapter concludes comically and ironically. Sage SP now corrects his wife’s pronunciation. Then, sounding corrupt again, and alluding to Spain’s fiscal problems under the Habsburgs, he promises to send money as soon as he’s a governor: “I’ll send you money, which I will have plenty of, because governors always have someone to lend it to them when they don’t have any.” When Teresa erupts in tears, saying that the day she sees her daughter become a countess will be the day her daughter dies, the narrator reports SP’s absurdly stubborn response: “Sancho consoled her by saying that even though he had to make her a countess, he would wait as long possible to do it.” Teresa surrenders, but her last comment contains a feminist jab: “we women are born with the obligation to obey our husbands even if they are idiots.” This is all ridiculous, of course: both parents are counting their olives and they don’t even have an orchard.

“I’ll put her on a pedestal and under a canopy for you and up in a drawing room with more velvet shams than there were Moors in the line of the Almohashams of Morroco.”



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T he header that summarizes chapter six, “Regarding what happened between Don Quijote and his niece and housekeeper, and which is one of the most important chapters in this entire history,” echoes the kind of ridiculous overstatement that we find throughout DQ. However, in the context of the racialist atmosphere of Inquisitional Spain, there’s a hint of sincerity

here. This is because the chapter features DQ’s most radically humanist speech about lineage. Humanist intellectuals, many of them self-taught, from Machiavelli to Erasmus, argued that personal virtue was not an inherited characteristic, a subversive idea in a caste society that placed so much emphasis on one’s ancestry.

Two points about the beginning of this chapter. Cervantes uses the adjective “impertinent” twice, recalling his supposed compositional indiscretion in part one’s Novel of the Curious Impertinent. Also, his tone is once again political. DQ’s comment, “if I were king,” recalls the theoretical musings of our three arbitristas in chapter one. When the housekeeper argues that DQ should be a courtly knight instead of a knight errant, he launches into a distinction that we have seen before (cf. DQ 1.7): “not all knights can be courtly, nor can or should all courtly knights be knights errant.” Again, DQ clearly despises decadent knights, i.e., courtly advisors who rule the world at a safe distance, “looking over a map” and fussing over “childish things” and “other ceremonies,” such as “whether or not one carries a shorter lance or sword.” DQ seems crazy because his examples of superior caballeros come from fantasy literature, but if we listen closely, he is criticizing the corruption of the modern political class.

Don Quijote and humanism

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Now the niece adds another layer of meaning to the discussion. Recalling the burning of the books in part one, she says that DQ’s chivalric novels are heretical and that if they are not to be put to death, then they should at least be made to dress like the victims of the Inquisition: “all that you say about knights errant is fake and false, and their histories, if they weren’t burned, deserve, every last one of them, to be clothed in a sambenito or some sign that would indicate their infamy.” Remember this image of the penitent heretic wearing his sambenito; it will appear again in important episodes. Continuing the theme, DQ labels his niece’s comment “blasphemy.” In his own peculiar way, and in reference to distinct categories of knights, he voices humanistic concern with personal virtue. Note also how his words lash out at courtly advisors who advocate monetary devaluation: “some are discourteous cowards; nor are those called knights all knights through and through; for some are gold and others are alchemical, and all appear to be knights, but not all can pass the test of the touchstone of truth.”

“all that you say about knights errant is fake and false, and their histories, if they weren’t burned, deserve, every last one of them, to be clothed in a sambenito or some sign that would indicate their infamy.”



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Don Quijote’s theory of the four lineagesT he niece counterattacks by bringing up yet another distinction, one that undercuts DQ’s vision of himself. She states that,

technically speaking, DQ cannot be a caballero because “although hidalgos can be knights, poor hidalgos never are.” In other words, DQ is too poor to be a knight. A true knight had to have enough income to support his military and political

lifestyle at court, whereas DQ’s inferior title only indicates that he is descended from hidalgos. Cervantes has prepared us well for the speech that follows. Precisely in this moment of sociological and psychological crisis, we get DQ’s passionate theory of lineage.

DQ says that there are four kinds of lineages: “some had humble beginnings and extended and expanded until they reached a great peak”; “others, which had great beginnings... conserve and maintain them”; “others, which, even though they had great beginnings, ended in a point, like a pyramid, having diminished and annihilated their beginnings until they came to nothing”; and finally, “the rest, which had neither a good beginning nor a reasonable middle, and thus will have no name in the end.” This dynamic range of possibilities is radical enough, but even more astonishing are the examples that DQ gives for each case. None other than the dreaded Ottoman Turks embody those who have transformed themselves from humble to great. The static nobility is represented by princes who manage to remain at peace with their neighbors, “remaining peacefully within the limits of their states.” The example DQ gives of dead-end lineages is striking. He indicates the Pharaohs and Ptolemies of Egypt, the Caesars of Rome, and then adds a phrase that mocks authorities everywhere: “that entire horde (if that name may be given to them) of infinite princes, monarchs, and lords.” The rest are simply the masses. In the end, the Pharaohs and the Caesars of the world would seem to amount to little more than the masses. Maybe they’re even worse.

Whereas Teresa sounded feminist in her debate with SP, DQ now sounds misogynistic in his final reply to the women of his household. He’s angered by their skepticism, but notice also that his final point discards the idea that virtue is something that can be inherited: “From all that I have said I want you to infer, my stupid girls, that there is great confusion regarding lineages, and that the only ones that are truly distinguished and illustrious are those that display these qualities by way of their virtue.” Make no mistake: this is a meditation on the nature and origins of virtue. The term occurs eight times. And DQ clearly adopts the more liberal, humanist point of view: “A poor knight has no other means of showing that he is a knight except by way of his virtue,” and those poor knights that manage to do so will be seen as “of good breeding, and not to be seen as such would be a miracle.”

Finally, recalling another topic we saw in part one, our hidalgo points out that there are two routes to glory: “letters” and “arms.” Recall that Cervantes himself gained his fame via both the sword and the pen. DQ underscores this combination when he quotes directly from “that great Castilian poet of ours,” that is, Garcilaso de la Vega, the great anti-imperialist Petrarchan poet from the era of Charles V. Note, however, that DQ recognizes that achieving greatness brings with it the responsibility of choosing wisely and acting morally: “I know that the road of virtue is quite narrow, and the road of wickedness, wide and spacious.” Very much like SP, DQ has essentially endorsed the possibility of attaining social stature regardless of heredity. Thus, when SP arrives at the end of chapter six, DQ’s gesture makes sense: “his lord Don Quijote came to great him with open arms.” And note the huge irony connecting parts one and two of the novel involved in the niece’s sarcastic response that on top of everything else he’s a poet: “Oh, woe is me... for my uncle’s also a poet. He knows all, he sees all. I’d wager that if he wanted to be a bricklayer, he’d know how to fashion a house as well as he does a cage.” This cage must remind us of the one used to transport DQ home at the end of part one.

There are two routes to glory: “letters” and “arms.”



Chapter 05 - 06 review



Although not immediately apparent, chapters five and six contain much philosophical thinking about individual self-worth. At the same time, there are numerous hints that Cervantes thinks many of his readers have overlooked the complexity and seriousness of his art. For example, if, like the translator, we dismiss SP’s speeches as implausible, we are unlikely to ponder their moral significance, their critique of hierarchical privilege. Similarly, if we think of DQ as an “impertinent” fool who dares to claim titles like “don” and “caballero,” which he does not legally deserve, then we risk missing an important political aspect of his quest. Now is a good time to ponder the subtle change in the title of Cervantes’s continuation: Second Part of the Ingenious Caballero Don Quijote de la Mancha. At the same time, we must remember that even Cervantes’s heroes have their blind spots: SP clings to a racist Reconquest mentality and he sees political power as a means of acquiring wealth; and DQ, at the height of his humanist defense of personal virtue, forgets momentarily that true caballeros value respect for women.

Let’s review

“...for a man’s labour also is a commodity exchangeable for benefit, as well as any other thing.”

—Thomas Hobbes, Leviatán



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The feudal relationship between master and ser vantA t the beginning of chapter seven, the housekeeper begs bachelor Carrasco to prevent her master from going on another

adventure. After a brief comical dialogue, Sansón tells her not to worry, that he will think of something: “you know that I am a bachelor from Salamanca, so all that’s needed is for me to produce some bachelor babble.” The misunderstandings

in their conversation, as well as the constant emphasis on Sansón’s academic status, provide context for yet another set of confusions that then take place between SP and DQ. Note also how, as he just did with his looks inside the respective households of SP and DQ, Cervantes narrates different events that are occurring simultaneously. He links these events via one of his favorite rhetorical figures, the “zeugma,” which deploys a term in one sentence but leaves that term implicit in another. Here, “time” is the linking term: “the bachelor went straightaway to find the priest, in order to communicate to him what will be related in due time. And during theirs alone, Don Quijote and Sancho had a conversation which the history recounts truthfully and in great detail.” This beautiful device serves many purposes. For one, it reveals the complex nature of Cervantes’s narrative universe and of reality in general. Can you think of others?

Let’s look at the conversation between SP and DQ. SP reports that he has convinced his wife to let him go on another adventure. But his word choice is wrong: “I’ve conwinced my wife to let me go with your grace.” DQ corrects him: “Convinced you mean to say.” The irony here is that DQ’s reducida means “convinced,” but SP’s relucida, which means “shined,” could also mean “severely whipped,” which would certainly be a more severe kind of convincing. The act of whipping an animal or a person will be a major theme of part two. SP responds that his master should not correct him so abruptly. If DQ would just wait a bit, then SP would be more open to criticism. But again his word choice is confusing: “for I’m so focile...” This could be a mispronunciation of focil, meaning “touchy” or “defensive,” or maybe SP meant to say fácil, meaning “easy to convince.” Note that this cuts straight to the nature of the relationship between master and servant: SP is either too sensitive or easily dominated. DQ prefers the more obedient option: “you mean to say that you are so docile, pliant and fainthearted.”

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This confusion is the perfect context for the true topic that SP wants to discuss: compensation for his services. Ironically, given that he claims to have controlled his wife, SP now says that Teresa has forced him to get serious with DQ, adding that any man who does not listen to a woman’s advice “is insane.” Also ironic, given that DQ has recently called the women of his household “stupid girls,” our knight wholeheartedly agrees with SP’s deference to women. SP gets up the nerve to ask for a salary: “that your grace should specify for me a fixed salary that you’ll give me for every month that I serve you, and that this salary should be paid to me from your estate, for I don’t want to depend on anybody’s promised favors.” This is huge! Cervantes’s novel is very modern on this point. SP rejects feudalism, which depends on his master’s generosity; he wants a contract. His logic is also interesting. His reasoning is grounded in the fact of Death. Because we are mortal beings, our time has value: “no one is guaranteed in this world any more hours of life than those that God decides to grant him.”

“no one is guaranteed in this world any more hours of life than those that God decides to grant him.”



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Don Quijote says better to be a thief than greedy

N ow we have another symbolic misunderstanding. SP says he is willing to discount the value of the promised island from his salary on a prorated basis: “I’m not so ungrateful... that I won’t want the rent from the isle to be totaled and deducted pro rat from my salary.” SP wants to say “prorated,” and DQ corrects him with a joke: “sometimes a rat is as good as a cat.”

There is another layer of irony here. The word gata, or “cat,” implies larceny or theft. DQ has said it is sometimes better to be a thief than a miser. Careful readers will hear a reference to SP’s theft of Cardenio’s 100 escudos in part one.

DQ rejects SP’s request. At a comedic level he does so because he cannot think of any squires who ever got salaries in the books of chivalry: “I do not recall having read that any knight errant ever specified a fixed salary for his squire.” The novel takes another modern turn when he adds that the labor market is competitive: “if you don’t wish to accompany me as my vassal and assume the same risks that I do, then go with God and may He turn you into a saint, for I will not lack squires more obedient, more considerate, and less crass and talkative than yourself.” At this, SP’s heart drops: “his sky filled with clouds and the wings fell from his heart.” To make matters worse, now Carrasco arrives and after praising DQ –“O honor and mirror of the Spanish nation!”– and proclaiming his hope that DQ go on another adventure and that his enemies never trap him “in the labyrinth of their desires,” he suddenly offers his own services: “and if anything is needed to bring this about, here am I to supply it with my person and my treasure; and if it is necessary for me to serve your magnificence as squire, I will consider it a blessed stroke of good fortune.”



This is funny, but it is also serious economic theory in action. It is the kind of natural philosophy that the late scholastic theologians of the School of Salamanca applied to their analyses of market relations: labor is also subject to the law of supply and demand. Cervantes lets us know this via two aspects of DQ’s response to Carrasco’s offer. First, he repeats that the labor market is competitive: “Did I not tell you, Sancho, that I would have plenty of squires from which to choose?” Second, he relates Carrasco’s subtle sophistication to the University of Salamanca, calling him “perpetual diversion and delight of the courtyards of the schools of Salamanca.”

SP knows that he has lost all leverage from which to negotiate and so he backtracks and agrees to serve DQ in the feudal manner. When he does so, he mangles some legalistic terminology, which the narrator tells us convinced Carrasco that SP is “one of the most solemn idiots of our time.” Carrasco then provides DQ with a “sallet helmet,” and DQ and SP depart. Our heroes travel in familiar fashion, with “Don Quijote on his good Rocinante, and Sancho on his same old ass,” but they have also made pragmatic adjustments. They take food and DQ provides a pool of money for future expenses: “Sancho’s saddlebags supplied with food and provisions, and his purse with money given to him by Don Quijote for any contingencies.” Also note that another zeugma describes their departure: “Sansón made his way back to his village, and the two men made theirs toward the great city of El Toboso.”

“Don Quijote on his good Rocinante, and Sancho on his same old ass,”



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El Toboso: the first adventure of the third sally

C hapter eight opens with what is probably the most overtly Islamic formulation in all of Cervantes’s writings: “‘Blessed be all powerful Allah!’ says Hamete Benengeli at the beginning of this eighth chapter. ‘Blessed be Allah!’ he repeats three times.” It’s easy to take this as mere playfulness regarding the problematic authorship of the novel. Nevertheless, these are

also the first words of the Koran, and as Francisco Rico notes, Spanish Moriscos traditionally sang this phrase three times at sunset. Note too that whereas DQ’s first sally began at dawn, part two’s adventure starts at dusk. And where are our heroes headed? El Toboso, a town that scholars think was home to many Moriscos relocated there after the Alpujarras War of 1568-71.

Next, we have an hilarious reminder of the good omens associated with the sounds made by Rocinante and SP’s ass: “scarcely had Sansón departed, when Rocinante began to neigh and the gray began to whisper, which both men, knight and squire, took to be a good sign and a happy omen.” The “whispers” of SP’s mount are a euphemism for farts, and these were indeed considered good omens since antiquity. But Cervantes pushes the meaning of the farts further: “although, if truth be told, the gray whispered and brayed more than the nag neighed, from which Sancho concluded that his good fortune would surpass and go beyond that of his master.”

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Now SP recalls the episodes of part one “in the heart of the Sierra Morena” and his embassy to Dulcinea. He anticipates that she will not now give her blessing to DQ unless she does so from the fences of her corral where he saw her when he delivered DQ’s letter. DQ rejects the image, saying that SP must have confused fences for “galleries, or corridors, or porticoes, or whatever they’re called, of rich and royal palaces.” This comical contrast between DQ’s chivalric fantasy and SP’s insistence on low reality also contains some sophisticated Neoplatonic theory about the ennobling effects of courtly love. According to DQ: “any ray of light that from the sun of her beauty reaches my eyes will illuminate my understanding and fortify my heart.” SP’s responds that he cannot recall any such solar perfection: “all the dust she was kicking up acted like a cloud in front of her face and darkened it.” Note the allusion to race.

At this point, DQ draws on Garcilaso’s notion of writing as a process of weaving threads together: “those verses by our poet in which he paints for us the labors performed in their crystal dwellings by those four nymphs who raised their heads from the beloved Tagus River and sat down in the green meadow to work those rich fabrics which the ingenious poet describes for us as all intertwined and interwoven with gold, silk, and pearls.” Ah, those pre-industrial textiles again! Given SP’s contrary descriptions, DQ fears that some enemy has distorted his woven reality, perhaps even altered the essence of his story: “the envy that some evil enchanter must have of my dealings changes and inverts all those that would give pleasure into figures quite different from what they are; and, thus, I fear that in that history of my deeds which they say goes about in print, if by chance its author was some sage sorcerer who is my enemy, he will have substituted certain things for others.” Who might this evil enchanter be? Regardless, note that envy, the emotional motive for social violence indicated by everyone from Virgil to Nietzsche, is the ultimate cause of DQ’s problem: “O envy, root of infinite evils and woodworm of virtues!”

—Thomas Hobbes, Leviatán

“...for a man’s labour also is a commodity exchangeable for benefit, as well as any other thing.”



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Sancho’s political mantraS ancho Panza’s egocentric response to this line of thinking is complex. First he says that he is too poor to be envied. Then

he defends his personal honor by insisting on his orthodoxy and his ethnic purity. Note how he expresses a certain moral contradiction: “I’ve always believed, firmly and truly, in God and in everything that is maintained and believed by

the Holy Roman Catholic Church, and then there’s my being a mortal enemy, as I am, of the Jews, and so the historians should take pity on me and treat me well in their writings.” SP asks for pity from the mysterious authors of his story while simultaneously bragging that he has none for Jews. Finally, SP affirms that no matter what anyone else says, he is always fair with everyone: “I was born naked, and I’m naked now: I neither lose nor gain a thing.” This will be SP’s mantra in part two. Cervantes is preparing us for a serious examination of SP’s character.

SP ends this already contradictory speech with a kind of paradox. He will accept infamy if it grants him fame: “although, seeing myself now rendered in books and passed about in the world from hand to hand, I don’t care one fig: they can say anything they want to about me.” At this, DQ launches into a labyrinthical speech of his own, focusing on famous examples of SP’s odd logic. Here he is pushing the limits of a common rhetorical exercise practiced by humanist scholars of the Renaissance. He mentions that certain women at court were offended at being left out of a vicious satire written about them. He recalls Erostratus, who set fire to the temple of Diana just so he could be famous. He mentions other figures who were daringly destructive, such as Caesar when he crossed the Rubicon and Hernán Cortés, “that most courteous Cortés,” when he burnt his ships at Veracruz. This is confusing, and quite funny. DQ slips casually from clear examples of idiots to examples of men that many consider to be heroes.



Even more confusing, other exemplars mentioned by DQ do not at all fit the paradoxical notion of doing something wrong for the sake of fame. Rather, they express the opposite: simple, heroic self-sacrifice. We have Horatius Cocles, who defended the oldest bridge of ancient Rome against invaders; Gaius Mucius Scaevola, who put his hand in a fire when threatened with torture; and most important of all, given DQ’s own profession, Marcus Curtius, a classical knight who threw himself and his horse into a “deep burning abyss” (profunda sima ardiente), which had threatened to destroy Rome after an earthquake in 362 BC.

However, the most fascinating example involves Charles V, who fashioned himself as a modern Caesar. The Holy Roman Emperor made a triumphant visit to Rome in 1536 after conquering Tunis the year before. He wanted to visit the Roman Pantheon, known in the sixteenth century as Santa Maria della Rotonda. This incredibly famous architectural wonder contains “a round skylight, which is at its peak,” that is, at the zenith (cima) of its dome, which is perfectly spherical, or as DQ says, “shaped like half an orange.” According to DQ, the Emperor took a tour of this building and was standing on the dome above this skylight looking down, after which his guide, “a Roman gentleman,” made a shocking confession: “A thousand times, Your Sacred Majesty, I have felt the urge to embrace Your Majesty and then hurl myself down from that skylight, in order that my fame should leave its eternal mark on the world.” The Emperor thanked him and ordered him to keep his distance. But DQ ultimately rejects the desire for fame, and his words emphasize the importance of not transgressing the limits of Christian morality: “Thus, O Sancho, our actions should not transcend the limits placed upon us by the Christian religion that we profess.” A lesson for an anti-Semitic Old Christian squire?



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Sancho’s discourse on infamyS ancho Panza takes the new topic, Christian morality, as a new line of inquiry. Once again, he mixes up his vocabulary: “I would

like your grace to absolve a doubt that has come to mind.” DQ corrects him: “Resolve, you mean to say.” SP asks about whatever became of all those Caesars. DQ says that the pagans are all in hell and that the Christians, “if they were good

Christians,” are in purgatory or heaven. This hints at the famous controversy over the fate of good pagans who died before Christ, but it also alludes to the modern debate over Purgatory, which distinguished Protestantism from Catholicism. Note how moral, theological even, this chapter has become.

But don’t miss the humor. SP pushes his master, asking specifically what happened to the actual body parts of the Caesars and whether or not they became sacred objects like those that now attract Christian pilgrims. DQ seems too mesmerized by History’s examples to understand the gist of SP’s question. With Caesars still on his mind, the knight muses that Julius Caesar’s ashes were placed “at the top of an extraordinarily large stone pyramid,” which is the obelisk known today as “St. Peter’s Needle.” He also mentions that Hadrian was buried in what is today the Castel Santangelo in Rome. By the way, this building served as a refuge for Pope Clement VII during the Sack of Rome by Charles V’s troops in 1527, an event which the Emperor’s triumphant tour in 1536 was supposed to have ameliorated. SP cuts to the chase: “which is the greater deed, to raise a dead man or to kill a giant?” DQ affirms: “to raise a dead man.”



Remember how, near the end of part one, SP got the supposedly enchanted DQ to admit that he had to release “major waters”? Well, here SP is again pleased with himself for managing to undercut DQ’s chivalric fantasy: “Now I’ve got you.” He suggests that they should try to be saints rather than knights, because the chains of a couple of tortured martyrs or two dozen self-lashings are more esteemed by God than two thousand lance thrusts by military heroes. DQ admits that SP is right, but he says that not all of us can be martyrs. Besides, he says: “chivalry is a religion, and there are mounted saints in the glory of heaven.” Which saints are these? Think about it. We’ll find out much later.

The heroes travel on without incident for a couple of days and then they arrive, once again “at nightfall,” at “the great city of El Toboso.” To tell the truth, El Toboso is not a great city but, rather, a tiny, insignificant town. Or is it? The chapter ends with DQ elated by the sight of El Toboso; but SP is depressed because now he has a serious problem: “Don Quijote’s spirit was joyful and Sancho’s was saddened, because he did not know which house belonged to Dulcinea, nor had he seen it in all his life.” Uh-oh.








This part of DQ is full of word games: “focile,” “docile,” “pro rat,” “cat,” “absolve,” “resolve.” Note how these hint at real themes: SP’s submissiveness, the difference between being a thief and being a servant, and the possibility of forgiveness for one’s sins. The salary discussion is radically explicit: the tension between knight and squire evolves before our eyes into that between employer and employee. And there are other matters: Cide Hamete sings major praise of Allah as his heroes approach El Toboso at night; the weird notion that farts are good omens gives way to another debate over Dulcinea’s relative purity; and SP’s anti-Semitism and ethnic pride are clearly on display. Note the densely woven historical anecdotes of chapter eight, which start as a meditation on heroism in contrast to seeking fame through criminal acts. DQ enthralls us with his architectural knowledge during his version of Charles V’s visit to Rome. Finally, we have SP’s interest in sainthood contrasted with Caesar’s ashes placed at the top of a pyramid. If I recall, according to DQ, in terms of lineage, pyramids are like dead ends. Are Caesars dead ends? Or can they hope to leave something behind? Another question: what’s the difference between a cima or zenith and a sima or abyss? If you are a Spaniard from La Mancha, you will insist that you can hear an obvious difference, but if you pronounce Spanish like an Andalusian or a Mexican... Let’s just say that one man’s zenith is another man’s abyss.

Let’s review

“You are an ass, and you will always be an ass, and you will end the course of your life as an ass, and, as far as I can tell, your life will reach its final day before you accept and realize that you are an animal.”

—Miguel de Cervantes,

Don Quijote de la Mancha



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C hapter nine starts with one of Cervantes’s most absurdly funny headers: “In which it is recounted what will now be seen.” That’s obvious, right? Or is it? How can one actually see what is narrated? And what if what’s narrated occurs in the dark? The first line of the chapter is also ridiculous. It’s exactly midnight, more or less: “It was the stroke of midnight, more or

less, when Don Quijote and Sancho left the hills and entered El Toboso.” As it turns out, there is moonlight: “The night was pretty clear.” The moon is the symbol of the goddess Diana, whom we saw in the previous chapter, and with whom we now begin to associate Dulcinea. The moon also figures prominently on Islamic flags beginning in the fourteenth century. Note also the sound of dogs barking, punctuated by the sounds of other animals that are symbolic in DQ: “Now and again an ass brayed, pigs grunted, cats meowed.”

DQ takes all this as a “bad omen,” but he still insists SP guide him “to Dulcinea’s palace.” SP’s response is blasphemous and establishes a conflict between our heroes regarding Dulcinea’s abode: “By Heaven, what palace am I supposed to guide you to... when the place where I saw her highness was nothing but a tiny house?” DQ insists SP must have seen her in “some apartment in her alcázar.” This Arabic term for castle appears seven times in this chapter, emphasizing the difference between the squire’s and the knight’s perspectives on Dulcinea.

Now DQ sees a massive shape in the night, which he says must be Dulcinea’s palace. SP says to guide on, but he expresses doubts as if he were Saint Thomas confronted by the resurrection of Christ: “that might be; although I’ll believe it when I see it with my eyes and touch it with my hands.” When Dulcinea’s citadel turns out to be a church, we read one of the most famous lines of the novel: “We’ve come up against the church, Sancho.” Today this is a proverb, indicating the danger and futility of contradicting an intractable authority. When SP assumes that DQ should recognize Dulcinea’s house, the knight’s anger extends the theme of religious orthodoxy:

“We’ve come up against the church, Sancho!”

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donquijote.ufm.edu/en66 Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha


“Come here, you heretic: Have I not told you a thousand times that in all the days of my life I have never seen the incomparable Dulcinea... that I am only in love with her according to what I’ve heard about her?” SP now gets himself into trouble: “well, if you have never seen her, then neither have I.” So did he lie to DQ about his embassy to El Toboso in part one? SP recovers with hilarious absurdity: “it’s also the case that I only heard about seeing her and about the answer that I brought to you.”

At this point a laborer appears: “there came to pass by them a man with two mules.” He is singing a famous ballad, one which hints at the north-south problem of Spanish identity: “A bad time you had, Frenchmen, / at that defeat at Roncesvalles.” When DQ asks for directions to Dulcinea’s palace, the man explains why he does not know –“I’m a stranger and I’ve only spent a few days in this town serving a rich peasant”–, but he suggests DQ contact the town’s religious authorities who have a register of all the inhabitants: “they have a list of everyone who lives in El Toboso.” All of this begs the question: just who lived in El Toboso at the beginning of the seventeenth century? Some say quite a few Moriscos who were relocated there after the Alpujarras War of 1568-71. That might have made local priests rather anxious, no?

SP now suggests that knight and squire retreat to a nearby woods. He offers to search for Dulcinea in the morning. DQ is pleased: “the advice you have just given me I appreciate and receive most willingly.” SP is relieved: “Sancho was anxious to get his master out of the town, so that he would not discover his lie about the response from Dulcinea that he had delivered to him in the Sierra Morena.” The narrator concludes the chapter with a strange phrase. He tells us the next chapter contains events that require attention and trust: “novel attention and renewed credit.”



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The first encounter with DulcineaT he great comparative literature scholar Erich Auerbach wrote an important essay on chapter ten in which he argued that

it exhibits the essence of Cervantes’s novel as a conflict between fantasy and reality. We notice a particular aspect of this conflict as SP goes off to find “the palaces or alcázares of my lady.” Auerbach did not consider this cultural contrast between

synonyms.

As SP heads toward El Toboso, he performs a private “soliloquy.” This is more than the kind of monologue that we might hear from Hamlet. SP actually carries on a conversation with himself: “‘Now, brother Sancho, let’s find out exactly where your grace is going. Are you going to look for a certain ass that’s been lost?’ ‘Absolutely not.’ ‘Well, then, what do you seek?’ ‘I am seeking –as if it were a simple thing to do– a princess, and in her the sun of beauty and the rest of heaven above.’ ‘And where do you hope to find all this, Sancho?’ ‘Where? Why, in the great city of El Toboso.’” Cervantes is not just a master of dialogue, he is now a master of interior dialogue, which reveals a character’s hidden anxieties. Why this particularly rare technique now? What does it tell us about SP?

SP’s immediate problem is how to find a woman who does not exist. He decides to improvise, relying on his master’s gullibility: “Being, then, crazy, which he certainly is, and with the kind of craziness that takes some things for others and judges white to be black and black to be white... it will not be all that difficult to make him believe that a peasant woman, the first one I come across around here, is the lady Dulcinea.” Then he sees just what he needs: “when he got up to mount the gray, he saw that riding out toward where he was from El Toboso were three peasant women on three jackasses, or she-asses, for the author does not specify.” Two aspects of the description that follows should interest us. First, there is much confusion about the sex of these women’s mounts, which as Francisco Rico notes, echoes the medieval debate over the sex of angels. Second, the narrator makes excessive

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excuses about why this should not interest us. Do we trust this narrator? There is more wordplay regarding the women’s asses. When SP goes to inform his master that he has found Dulcinea, he mistakenly deploys a biblical term, referring to the Canaanites of ancient Palestine, enemies of the Israelites: “She and her damsels... come mounted atop three spotted Canaanite Trotters.” DQ corrects his confusion regarding the breed of Dulcinea’s horses: “Arabian Canterers, you must mean, Sancho.” SP then echoes the narrator’s evasiveness: “There’s little difference... between Canaanites and Arabians; but, no matter what they’re riding, they’re the most beautiful ladies one could ever wish to see.” What would Canaanites be doing in El Toboso?

Regardless, DQ is overjoyed. Recalling the theme of SP’s salary, DQ offers his squire the spoils of future conquests, and then he adds a more realistic form of incentive: “I hereby grant you the best spoils that I shall win in the first adventure I have, and if that does not satisfy you, then I promise you the fillies that my three mares will give me this year, which, as you know, are about to give birth on the commons of our town.” SP wisely accepts the fillies because “it is far from certain that the spoils of our first adventure will be good.” Then again, just how good are horses raised on public lands likely to be? Juan de Mariana’s famous phrase comes to mind: “When an ass belongs to many, the wolves eat it.”

“Arabian Canterers, you must mean, Sancho.”



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Don Quijote, classic romantic lover N ow we have a conflict between SP’s and DQ’s points of view: “I don’t see, Sancho... but three peasant women atop three

donkeys.” SP plays a consciously deceptive role, describing what he sees according to the dictates of chivalric fantasy: “God save me now from the Devil!... Is it possible that three Arabians, or whatever you call them, white as the driven snow,

look like donkeys to your grace? God help us, and may my beard be plucked out if that’s true!” Weird, no? SP just bet his beard that he knows the truth. DQ insists on reality: “that they’re asses, or she-asses, is as true as I am Don Quijote and you Sancho Panza.” But wait! DQ and SP are fictional characters. SP addresses Dulcinea: “Queen and princess and duchess of beauty, may your highness and mightiness be served by receiving with your good graces and dispositions this your captive knight.” DQ is forced to follow SP’s lead, but he is visibly confused: “by now Don Quijote had kneeled down next to Sancho and with shocked eyes and disturbed vision he gazed at the woman whom Sancho was addressing as queen and lady.” The narrator tells us Dulcinea is ugly: “a peasant girl, and not a particularly attractive one, because she was round-faced and snubbed nose.” Moreover, she gets angry: “Get out of the way, dammit, and let us pass, for we’re in a hurry.”

Depressed, DQ explains to Dulcinea what has happened: “the evil enchanter who persecuteth me hath placed clouds and cataracts over my eyes, such that for them alone and not for others he hath mutated and transformed thy unequalled beauty and appearance into those of a lowly peasant.” But he insists he still loves her and begs her to understand: “ceaseth not to gaze upon me kindly and lovingly, taking note, in this submission and in this kneeling that I perform before your deformed beauty, the humility with which my soul adoreth thee.” Dulcinea attempts to escape, but the pain she inflicts on her ass becomes a problem: “since the jenny felt the spike of the prod, which irritated her more than usual, she started to buck, such that she threw the lady Dulcinea to the ground.” DQ wants to help Dulcinea back on her mount, but she refuses, for she can ride an ass as well as any man:



“taking a few steps back, she made a short run and, placing her hands on the donkey’s hind quarters, she threw herself, as agile as a hawk, right onto the saddle, landing astride it as if she were a man.” SP is amazed and lets fly with a curious exclamation: “By Saint Roque, the lady our mistress is as swift as a falcon! She could teach the most skilled Cordoban or Mexican how to ride!” By the way, Roque is the patron saint of dogs and of those who are falsely accused. SP also observes that Dulcinea’s mount is rather savage: “she makes her Arabian run like a zebra.”

In this scene DQ anticipates the classic nineteenth-century Romantic lover disillusioned by his loss. Meanwhile, SP gives a long speech about what he has just witnessed. It’s as if he wants to see how far he can push his master. He ends with an hilarious portrait of Dulcinea: “to tell the truth, I never saw her ugliness but, rather, only her beauty, which was caste all the greater by a mole that she had above her right lip, like a mustache, with seven or eight blonde hairs that hung like threads of gold and longer than a span.” DQ’s response is also hilarious. At first he is taken by SP’s story. He even claims that Dulcinea must have another mole on her inner thigh, but then he hesitates over the detail of the hairs: “those hairs you have mentioned are rather long for a mole.” Nevertheless, he believes: “I believe it, my friend... for nature has placed nothing on Dulcinea that is not perfect and well-fashioned.” Again, here we have DQ the Romantic: “I’m the most unfortunate man alive.” Our heroes depart El Toboso forever: “they remounted their animals and followed the road to Zaragoza.”

“I believe it, my friend...

for nature has placed nothing

on Dulcinea that is not perfect and well-fashioned.”





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Don Quijote and “The Assembly of Death”C hapter eleven functions like an allegorical review of chapter ten, except that it is even more dark and diabolical. DQ is in

such shock –“completely beside himself ”– that he has let Rocinante go free: “sensing the liberty that was granted him, he paused at every step to graze on the green grass which grew so abundantly in those fields.” The color green

dominates part two. What could it mean? SP tries to animate his master: “What the devil is this? What’s this moodiness? Are we here or in France? Let Satan make off with all the Dulcineas in the world.” DQ objects to SP’s blasphemy and takes full responsibility for Dulcinea’s transformation: “speak no blasphemies against that enchanted lady, for her disgrace and misfortune are all my fault: her evil tribulations arise from the envy those villains have for me.” He also continues to dismantle SP’s verbal portrait of Dulcinea: “you said she had eyes of pearls, but eyes that are like pearls are more properly those of a bream fish than a lady; and according to what I believe, the eyes of Dulcinea must be as green as emeralds, and almond-shaped, with two celestial arches for eyebrows.” In what is now a familiar tactic, SP’s reply is a kind of absurd jujitsu: “I was just as disturbed by her beauty as you were by her ugliness.”

SP says they should press ahead, and DQ is about to reply, but “he was prevented from doing so by a cart that appeared in the road, loaded with the most diverse and strange personages and figures that one could imagine.” There are six figures: 1) “the Devil,” who drives the cart, together with 2) “Death,” 3) “an angel with large painted wings,” 4) “an emperor with a crown, apparently of gold, on his head,” 5) “at the feet of Death was the god known as Cupid,” and finally, 6) “a knight in full armor... except wearing a hat with multicolored feathers” This reads like a complex version of Dürer’s famous woodcut, Knight, Death, and the Devil.

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“that woman, who is the director’s wife, plays the Queen.”

DQ confronts these figures, just as he would have done in part one. The Devil informs DQ that they are a theatrical troop headed to a nearby town to perform an “auto sacramental,” a one act play, “The Assembly of Death,” in celebration of a festival held eight days after the Feast of Corpus Christi. He also indicates that they work for a theater director named Angulo el Malo, a man who actually appears in Cervantes’s novella The Colloquy of the Dogs of 1605. Another curious detail here is the Devil’s reference to a woman, perhaps Angulo el Malo’s wife, which the narrator did not mention in his initial description of the troop: “that woman, who is the director’s wife, plays the Queen.” It would seem that there are really seven allegorical figures.

DQ accepts the explanation, repeating the theme of Saint Thomas: “as soon as I saw this wagon, I imagined that some great adventure was awaiting me, and now I say that it is necessary to touch appearances with one’s hands in order to allow for disillusionment.” Note that DQ is now a radically different character than he was in part one. He is easily disenchanted, that is, inclined to let reality trump his chivalric fantasies. By the way, disillusionment here, or desengaño, is the defining theme of the baroque period. By the way again, the term “baroque” derives from a Portuguese term for an imperfectly shaped pearl.



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“My Lord, the Devil has made off with my gray”T he subsequent carnivalesque sequence is a very strange. One of the troop, the figure of the fool or buffoon, taunts DQ and

Rocinante: “one of the company, who was dressed as a fool, wearing many bells and carrying a stick at the end of which were three inflated cow bladders... approached Don Quijote and brandished the stick like a sword, striking the ground

with the bladders and leaping high into the air.” Startled, Rocinante “took off across the field.” SP gets off his ass to assist his master, but both the knight and Rocinante are already flat on the ground. Now the narrator describes the fool as “the dancing demon with the bladders,” who then steals SP’s ass: “making him fly across the countryside toward the town where the festival was to be held.”

SP is traumatized: “every time he saw the bladders rise up in the air and fall down on his gray’s hind quarters he suffered the tortures and terrors of death, and he would have rather seen those blows come down on the pupils of his own eyes than touch a single hair of his ass’s tail.” Now SP reports something different from what the narrator has been describing: “My Lord, the Devil has made off with my gray.” DQ’s response echoes our own confusion: “What devil?” SP’s clarification specifies just whom we are talking about: “The one with the bladders.” So the fool turns out to be the Devil? The theft of SP’s ass is never a simple matter.



“let’s leave these phantoms and return to seeking better and more appropriate adventures.”

As fate has it, “the Devil, having fallen off the gray in imitation of Don Quijote and Rocinante, the Devil went on foot toward the town and the ass returned to his master.” Nevertheless, DQ promises revenge: “it would be well to avenge the transgression of that Devil by punishing someone in the wagon, even if it’s the Emperor Himself.” The troop is ready for him and prepare to shower him with stones. SP advises against the attack: “you should consider that there is more rashness than courage in a single man attacking an army which has Death in it and emperors fighting in person.” We might expect DQ to say something like “I am equal to a hundred.” Instead, he observes that since their enemies are not knights, it’s up to SP to attack them. SP refuses, using moral language: “There’s no reason, my Lord... to take revenge on anybody, since it’s not right for good Christians to avenge affronts... my desire... is to live peaceably all the days of life that heaven will bestow me.” DQ accepts this logic: “That being your decision... good Sancho, wise Sancho, Christian Sancho, and sincere Sancho, let’s leave these phantoms and return to seeking better and more appropriate adventures.” The narrator agrees: “thanks be given to the salutary advice offered by Sancho Panza to his master.”






In chapter nine, the nocturnal encounter with El Toboso becomes a physical encounter with the Church. Then, in chapter ten, we contemplate SP’s and DQ’s respective perspectives on the perfections and imperfections of Dulcinea. We should also have noticed an enormous variety of mounts in chapter ten, which range from all types of asses and horses, both male and female, to dromedaries and zebras. Finally, in chapter eleven we have some seriously allegorical ass play. Something diabolical threatens our heroes, and they almost go to war with an energetic and illusive army, which features an Emperor, Death, and a Devil, but also a Fool and a Queen. In the end, however, SP’s highly reasoned pacifism prevails. Al-hamdu lillāh! Or as we say in Spanish, “¡Gracias a Dios!”

Let’s review

“Woe is me! Consumed by fire,I fall, dragging my shadow to where I don’t now even recognize myself...”

—Pedro Calderón de la Barca

El gran teatro del mundo



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The Knight of the Mirrors

C hapters twelve through fifteen involve DQ and SP’s encounter with Sansón Carrasco and Tomé Cecial disguised as the Knight of the Mirrors –“the Knight of the Mirrors”– and his squire. Carrasco’s goal is to get DQ to return home by defeating him in combat. There are funny moments throughout, but the problematic nature of neighbors and friends is the issue. Here

Cervantes explores both what keeps a society together and what tears it apart. At the same time, these chapters are existentialist: the Knight of the Mirrors is literally a reflection of DQ, and DQ repeatedly insists that he exists, that he is who he is. Also, the encounters between knights and squires anticipate future episodes: SP will get drunk again with one of his neighbors; and DQ will do battle again with Carrasco.

Chapter twelve opens with another error-filled dialogue between DQ and SP regarding Angulo el Malo’s theater troop. DQ claims he would have defeated the troop and won “the gold crown of the Empress and the painted wings of Cupid.” The empress was not the figure described as having a crown, nor was it Cupid who had wings. SP’s reply recalls the novel’s theme of metallurgical impurity: “Never were the scepters and crowns of staged emperors... made of pure gold but, rather, of trumpery or tinplate.” DQ agrees and launches into a defense of the social utility of theater, arguing that actors as well as authors “are instruments that perform a great service to the republic, placing a mirror before every step we take.” If this also sounds like a defense of Cervantes’s art of the novel, it is. Using a popular analogy, DQ then compares theater to life (cf. Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage”). At the end of a play, “all the actors are equal”; at the end of life, “death removes all the clothes that distinguished them, and all are made equal in the grave.” SP then makes a familiar comparison between life and chess. But these are different views. Is life entertainment or contest?

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Is life entertainment

or contest?

DQ is impressed by his squire’s wisdom and SP says that his master has transformed him: “something of your grace’s discretion has to stick to me.” SP then reasons himself into a corner, making an hilarious analogy to farming: “for lands that are on their own dry and sterile, once you spread manure on them and cultivate them, they come to bear good fruits.” But this means DQ emits shit: “What I mean to say is that your grace’s conversation has been the manure which has fallen upon the sterile land of my dry wit.” Previously, this comment might have gotten SP a beating, but here DQ laughs.

“Woe is me! Consumed by fire,I fall, dragging my shadow to where I don’t now even recognize myself...”

—Pedro Calderón de la Barca

El gran teatro del mundo



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The Knight of the Woods and his squireN ext, the narrator describes the friendship between Rocinante and SP’s ass. According to the narrator the original author

dedicated many chapters to this topic, but, because this is an epic –“heroic history”–, decorum required that they be left out. Still, the narrator devotes many lines to the bestial friendship. He compares Rocinante and the gray to classical friends

–“Nisus and Euryalus, and Pylades and Orestes”–, and he affirms that their friendship is superior to that of humans: “one could observe, with universal admiration, how firm the friendship of these two peaceable animals must have been, and to the shame of human beings, who know so little about maintaining friendship among themselves.” Our Christian narrator even defends the excesses of Cide Hamete; for men can learn a lot from animals: “let not anyone think that the author digressed... for mankind has learned much from animals.” Note the love-hate between the narrator and Cide Hamete. Sometimes he derides him, others he praises him.

Squire and knight sleep, but they are awakened by another knight and his squire, who feed their horses and rest nearby. DQ and SP spy on them. Here we have two of Cervantes’s favorite narrative techniques. He describes acting and speaking as simultaneous events: “Saying this and lying down on the ground happened at the same time.” And he indicates that one character wishes to speak to another when he is interrupted by the actions of a third: “Sancho wanted to respond to his master, but the voice of the Knight of the Woods, which was neither extremely bad nor extremely good, prevented him from doing so.” The Knight of the Woods sings a sonnet about unrequited love, at the end of which he tells his lady to strike him: “I offer you my breast, be it hard or soft: Carve or imprint there whatever you please.” Like much of this episode, the sonnet draws on the poetry of Garcilaso de la Vega. Finally, the Knight of the Woods describes himself as a slave to his beloved –“this your captive knight”– and says that he has performed great deeds for her –“harsh and difficult labors”– and that he has defeated innumerable knights: “that you are the most beautiful woman in the world I have made to confess all knights,” among these “all the knights of La Mancha.”

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“Never have I seen a squire... who dares to speak when his master is speaking.”

When DQ objects –“I am from La Mancha and I have confessed no such thing”–, the Knight of the Woods hears him: “Who goes there? Who are you?” Recalling DQ’s encounter with Cardenio in part one, our knights have much in common, especially their suffering for love. They appear to be friends, although the narrator tells us they will soon fight: “in good company and at peace, as if at the break of dawn they did not have to break each other’s skulls.” This is all typical of encounters between knights in chivalric romances. It also reads like an allegory for the origins of civilization in a primeval forest, the kind of dialectic between two individuals that would drive the thinking of Rousseau and Hegel centuries later. Notice also that, when he objects to SP’s impertinence, the Knight of the Woods asserts the old hierarchical values of feudalism: “Never have I seen a squire... who dares to speak when his master is speaking.” At this point the squires move away from their masters. SP promises to tell his story to the other. He counts himself among “the most talkative squires” (hablantes escuderos), wordplay that echoes “errant knights” (andantes caballeros).



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“Knights and squires split up”C hapter thirteen’s first sentence emphasizes, and resolves, the narrative problem of separate, yet simultaneous events:

“Knights and squires split up, the latter recounting their lives and the former their loves, but the history relates first the discourse of the servants and then proceeds to that of the masters.” The squires commiserate together. The other

squire cites Genesis 3.19: “we eat our bread by the sweat of our brow.” Curiously, he leaves unspoken the ominous conclusion to that verse: “you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Next, they discuss their rewards. SP hopes for an island, whereas the other squire wants a cushy religious post. SP recalls when the priest had assured him that his master would be an emperor or at the very least an archbishop: “Your grace’s master.... must be a knight of the ecclesiastical variety... but mine is a lay knight... although I do recall when certain discreet persons, although they seemed malicious to me, tried to counsel him to become an archbishop, but he insisted on becoming an emperor” (cf. DQ 1.26). SP concludes by stating that he is incompatible with the Church: “although I seem a man, I’m an animal when it comes to joining the Church.”

When the other squire suggests they return to their farms where they have the means to live well enough (cf. DQ’s niece, Voltaire, and Ortega y Gasset), SP brags about the value of his ass: “I have an ass that is worth twice as much as my master’s horse.” And again: “Your grace will think I’m jesting about the value of my gray.” The other mentions his three children and SP says that he has two. Placing special emphasis on his daughter –“who I’m raising to be a countess”–, SP says she is “as fresh as an April morning.” The other’s response crosses the line: “O son of a whore’s whore, and how tough the little rascal must be.”

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Things just got very uncomfortable. SP is offended at the idea that his daughter or his wife are whores, although we should remember that he used the same phrase to describe Aldonza Lorenzo in part one (cf. DQ 1.25). The exchange also recalls the improper sexual relations of the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes, in which the hero’s wife is the concubine of a local priest. Remember, too, that SP’s son Sanchico has a suspicious uncle: “his uncle the abbot” (DQ 2.5).

The other squire backs away from a potentially explosive situation, insisting he meant praise: “Do you not know that... what seems to be an insult, in a certain context, is actually a noteworthy compliment?” But the relative impurity of SP’s family is still at issue. Similarly, SP now discusses his own immorality. He hopes to see his family again: “so that I’ll see them again I pray to God that He lead me away from mortal sin.” At this mention of God and mortal sin, SP suddenly confesses his original crime from part one: “a purse of one hundred ducats that I found one day in the heart of the Sierra Morena.” On the one hand, SP feels guilty; on the other hand, he brags. Note how his memory has inflated Cardenio’s money into ducados, a coin of slightly greater value than the escudos. SP even fantasizes about getting rich off income from financial instruments: “I hold leases and collect rents and live like a prince.”



A t this point the other squire hints at the identity of his master, who is meddling in the life of another knight: “‘Other people’s business kills the ass,’ and so that another knight might recover his lost sanity, he pretends to be crazy.” Careful readers now know that the other knight is Carrasco, and our negative impression of Carrasco grows when the squire

calls him “more of a rogue than a fool or brave.” SP’s feelings for his own master make for a tender contrast: “That’s not what mine’s like... I mean, he’s nothing like a rogue but, rather, he has the soul of an open jug: he doesn’t know how to harm anyone; he only does good to everybody... I love him like the strings on my heart.” The theme of personal morality is now front and center. Carrasco’s squire is skeptical and his warning to SP echoes an Evangelical parable as well as an important episode of Lazarillo de Tormes: “when the blind man leads the blind man, both risk falling into the hole.”

Next, the squires contrast their wealth. SP is poor: “I only carry a bit of cheese in my saddlebags.” The other squire is wealthy, but notice how his words hint at the threat of war: “I carry better provisions on my horse’s hindquarters than does a general when he goes on his marches.” Most importantly, however, the other squire is radically generous. He shares with SP “a large wineskin and a meat pie half a span in length.” When SP praises the wine –“O son of a whore, rascal, dammit if that’s not Catholic good!”–, his language alludes to the theme of racial and sexual impurity, and tops it off with the theme of religious identity. This also forces SP to make a moral confession to his neighbor: “I confess that I know it’s no dishonor to say ‘son of a whore’ to anyone when your intention is to compliment him.”

Sancho Panza, sommelier

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strings on my heart.”



“is this wine from Ciudad Real?”

What follows is an allegory of sorts, which relates the purity of wine to the purity of SP’s ancestry. Just by tasting it, SP recognizes the wine’s place of origin: “is this wine from Ciudad Real?” The other squire is impressed: “Good wine taster” (Bravo mojón), he says, although in Andalucía the term mojón also means “turd.” SP then claims that he has inherited a talent for tasting wine: “I had in my ancestry, on my father’s side, two of the most excellent wine tasters that La Mancha had seen in many years.”

Chapter thirteen ends with an expression of loyalty by SP: “I’ll serve my master until he gets to Zaragoza, and then we’ll figure something out.” This underscores again that the novel’s endpoint is Zaragoza, but it also indicates SP’s confident belief that he and his master will reach an understanding regarding his salary. Finally, note the increasingly casual and modern voice of the narrator: “they went to sleep, where we will leave them for now, in order to relate what happened between the Knight of the Woods and the one of the Sorrowful Face.”



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The feats of the Knight of the WoodsC hapter fourteen opens with the familiar north-south conflict of Spanish history. “Casildea de Vandalia,” that is “Casildea de

Vandalia,” has given the Knight of the Woods a series of Herculean tasks. He had to stop the Giralda, a famous weathervane of Seville. Echoing Ceasar’s “Veni, vidi, vici,” he says “I came, I saw her, I conquered her.” He had to weigh the Toros de

Guisando, a group of bull-shaped monoliths near Ávila. He had to explore the depths of “the chasm of Cabra” near Córdoba, which many regarded as an entrance to Hell. Note that all sorts of chasms have become a major theme of part two. The Knight of the Woods recalls Plato’s cave allegory: “I threw myself into the chasm and brought to light what was hidden in its abyss.” Finally, he claims to have defeated all the knights of Spain. He is particularly proud of having defeated DQ, quoting verses from Ercilla’s La Araucana: “and the victor is all the more honored / to the degree his victim is revered.”

At DQ’s request, the Knight of the Woods describes DQ perfectly. Furthermore: “If all these signs are not enough to give credit to the truth, here is my sword, which will force incredulity itself to give me my due.” This jargon echoes challenges in the books of chivalry, but it’s also the second major emphasis in part two on the economic term “credit” (cf. DQ 2.9). Remarkably, DQ shows restraint. He says he knows DQ –“I regard him as I do my own person”– and makes another reference to St. Thomas: “As I have seen with these eyes and touched with these hands, it is impossible that he is the same man.” Then he offers the explanation that some wizard must have tricked the Knight of the Woods into thinking that he fought DQ: “it might also be that, since he has many enemy enchanters, one in particular who pursues him constantly, one of them might have taken on his appearance and allowed himself to be defeated so as to cheat him of the fame his chivalric deeds have earned him.”

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“and the victor is all the more honored / to the

degree his victim is revered.”

Nevertheless, DQ’s final burst is aggressive: “And if all this is not sufficient to convince you of the truth that I speak, here is the one and only Don Quijote, who will sustain it with his arms, on foot or on horseback, or in any way you may please.” Here is our DQ from part one, standing up and making a violent gesture: “And so saying, he jumped to his feet and grasped his sword, waiting to see how the Knight of the Wood would react.” The knights agree to duel at dawn, which the narrator anticipates with chivalric hyperbole: “at sunrise they would have to undertake the most bloody, singular, and unequalled combat.” They also agree that the loser “will have to submit to the will of the victor” Notice the contrast between this violent turn and the sleeping squires, as well as the tranquility of all their mounts: “by this time all three horses and the gray had smelled one another and were standing together.”



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Sancho Panza, pacifist squireN ext, another hilarious conversation ensues between SP and the other squire, who insists, as per the customs of Andalucía

that “we, too, must fight and smash each other to pieces.” SP claims he is one of those “pacifist squires” and that he does not want to see his head “split and divided in two” (cf. DQ 1.9). Moreover, he is unarmed: “And there’s more: it’s

impossible for me to duel because I have no sword, for I’ve never worn one in all my life.” Recall, however, that SP did appear to have a sword in DQ 1.8. The other squire offers to fight with sacks, but SP rejects the idea: “let’s drink and live.” The other squire insists again: “Even so... we should fight for at least half an hour.” SP says this violates his personal code: “I’m not so ungrateful and discourteous as to have even the slightest quarrel with a man with whom I’ve shared food and drink.” Remember this: SP will eat and drink with another neighbor in the future. The other squire offers to offend him: “I’ll give your grace three or four slaps to the face, which will knock you down, and that will awaken your anger.” SP now gets angry: “I’m not a man who let’s anyone mess with his face.” Remember this, too: SP will become anxious about people touching his face in future episodes. Finally, SP’s moral pacifism wins the day: “the best thing would be to let everybody’s anger sleep, for nobody knows another man’s soul.”

As the knightly duel approaches, Cervantes offers us another parody of the classical dawn, tinged with oriental mysticism as multicolored birds sing diverse songs: “now thousands of differently colored birds began to warble in the trees; in their diverse and joyous songs they seemed to welcome and greet the fresh dawn, who, already, through the doors and balconies of the Orient, was revealing the beauty of her face.” The sky drips “an infinite number of liquid pearls,” and the plants “budded and rained down copious white seed pearls.” We saw aljófar, a homonym for dewdrops or tiny pearls, in The Captive’s Tale of part one.



But the exotic dawn is rudely interrupted by a carnivalesque passage. Now that he can see, something about the other squire’s nose provokes SP’s fear: “But scarcely had dawn’s clarity made it possible to see and distinguish one thing from another, when the first one that caught Sancho Panza’s eye was the Squire of the Wood’s nose, which was so huge that it almost cast a shadow over the rest of his body.” The nose’s size –“as big as an eggplant”– carries ethnic connotations, and SP’s convulsions are described via another Arabic term: “like a child with epilepsy” or alferecía. Similarly, the knightly duel that follows parodies an epic encounter between a Spaniard and an Arab. The Knight of the Woods is now revealed as the Knight of the Mirrors, his armor covered by “many tiny moons in the form of dazzling mirrors.” DQ asks to see his face, but the other knight says there will be time for that when the battle ends. DQ rises to the occasion: “if God, my lady, and my arm avail me, I shall see your face, and you shall see that I am not that vanquished Don Quijote you think I am.” Note the personal crisis here: DQ struggles against the negation of his self.

“if God, my lady, and my arm avail me, I shall see your face, and you shall see that I am not that vanquished

Don Quijote you think I am.”



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The identity of the Knight of the MirrorsW eaving different narratives together, Cervantes turns our attention back to the strange squire, whose nose now catches

the attention of DQ: “At this point the squire’s strange nose caught Don Quijote’s attention, and he was no less astonished to see it than Sancho: so much so that he judged him to be a monster or a new kind of man.” This last

phrase suggests the ethnic conflicts of early modern Spain. The term “new man” (hombre nuevo) alludes to conversos or Moriscos, that is, new as opposed to Old Christians. SP gets DQ to help him escape the other squire by lifting him into a tree. This affects the outcome of the joust. The Knight of the Mirrors pauses when he sees DQ occupied with SP. When DQ turns about, for the first time Rocinante actually runs: “this was the only time he was known to have galloped.” Thus DQ catches the Knight of the Mirrors off guard and knocks him unconscious onto the ground.

Now comes a major scene of “anagnórisis,” in which two sets of characters recognize each other. Lifting his enemy’s helmet, DQ is stunned to see “the very face, the very figure, the very appearance, the very physiognomy, the very effigy, the very incarnation itself of Bachelor Sansón Carrasco.” He suspects sorcery and SP has a brutal idea: “run your sword into the mouth of this man who seems to be Bachelor Sansón Carrasco: perhaps in him you’ll kill one of your enemy enchanters.” DQ agrees: “Good advice... the fewer enemies, the better.”



“Don Quijote and Sancho returned to the road to Zaragoza, where the history leaves them so as to account for who the Knight of the Mirrors and the nostrilant squire really were.”

Now the other squire rushes up to save his master: “that man at your feet is Bachelor Sansón Carrasco, your friend.” But the squire is without his nostrils and thus SP is shocked to recognize his own neighbor: “Mother of God! Is that Tomé Cecial, my neighbor and compadre?” Yes, he is! And the other knight is “Sansón Carrasco, our neighbor.” Remember the theme. What makes for a neighbor, a friend, or an ally? Is it ethnic identity or something greater still? When Carrasco regains consciousness, DQ insists that he declare the superior beauty of Dulcinea and, further, that “the knight that you vanquished was not, nor could he be, Don Quijote of La Mancha.” Carrasco must do all of this “that I may halt and temper the impetus of my anger and be mild in the assertion of my glory at your defeat.” In many ways, the pacification of DQ is the objective of the entire novel. And we still have a long way to go.

The chapter ends with another of Cervantes’s increasingly natural and informal transitions: “Don Quijote and Sancho returned to the road to Zaragoza, where the history leaves them so as to account for who the Knight of the Mirrors and the nostrilant squire really were.” Note the hilarious neologism “nostrilant squire” (narigante escudero), which dismantles “errant knight” (andante caballero), as well as the emphasis again on Zaragoza as the final destination.



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The conspiracy of the priest, the barber, and Sansón CarrascoA fter DQ and SP depart, chapter fifteen reveals that Carrasco has conspired with the priest and the barber “to convince Don

Quijote to stay quietly and peacefully at home.” The verb reducir, or “to convince,” which SP used earlier with respect to Teresa, alludes to the Inquisition. It also means “to convert,” that is, to turn sinners away from heresy. By implication, then,

DQ is not just a madman but an apostate. In any case, the plan was to let DQ venture forth and then for Carrasco to defeat him in combat and force him to stay home for two years. His squire would be Tomé Cecial, whom the narrator describes as “Sancho Panza’s compadre and neighbor.”

The most interesting part of chapter fifteen is Carrasco and Cecial’s discussion of insanity. Cecial points out the irony of Carrasco’s defeat: “So tell me now, who’s crazier: the man who’s naturally crazy or the man who chooses to be crazy?” Carrasco’s response is deeper than he intends: “The difference between those two madmen is that the one who can’t help but be crazy will be so for life, but the man who’s crazy by choice can cease to be so whenever he wants.” But what if one doesn’t want to be sane? As Spock once said, “In an insane society, the sane man must appear insane.” This paradox is why the Romantics of the nineteenth century worshipped Cervantes. But the phrase evinces not just philosophical trauma, like the barber’s story of “The Crazy Man of Seville,” it also anticipates the rest of the novel in which DQ gradually recovers his sanity. The chapter ends ominously, however, as Carrasco is now motivated not by friendship but revenge: “and he was left imagining his revenge.”

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Without even knowing it, DQ has met and defeated himself in the Knight of the Mirrors. There are existential implications, but there are also political ones. For example, surely the tyrannical kings and Inquisitorial priests of Spain also read DQ. Did they grasp Cervantes’s satire of their politics of ethnic and moral persecution? Is SP full of excellent wine or is he full of shit? Is DQ at war with Arabic sorcerers or is he just fighting his own neighbors, who are just like him? And what about Carrasco? At what point does wanting to help or convert a fellow human being become a violent act of revenge? Finally, once again, and in myriad ways, Cervantes’s novel is also a satire of ethnic conflict in Southern Spain. Is it okay to be afraid of someone because of the size of their nose? And to paraphrase Rodney King: can’t we all just get along like Rocinante and Sancho’s ass?

Let’s review

“There is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.”.

—Adam Smith

The Wealth of Nations



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The most intimate thoughts of Don QuijoteC hapter sixteen opens with DQ’s inner thoughts. He is so satisfied and proud of his victory over the Knight of the Mirrors that

he forgets all his previous beatings. Also, now he has a singular mission. He must free Dulcinea from sorcery: “he said to himself that if he could find an art, means, or manner by which to disenchant his lady Dulcinea, he would not envy

the greatest fortune that had been attained, or could ever be attained, by the most fortunate knight errant of times past.” SP interrupts DQ’s inner musings by recalling the nostrils of his neighbor: “Isn’t it strange, sir, that I still have before my eyes the oversized and boundless nostrils of my compadre Tomé Cecial?” Can you see the irony here? As our heroes debate the identities of the Knight of the Mirrors and his squire, SP notes the depth of his relationship with Cecial. Their houses share a wall over which Cecial’s face often appears: “that face, without the nostrils, was the same as Tomé Cecial’s, just as I have seen it many times in my village and over the wall between our houses.” Cecial’s ethnicity is suspect. His huge nose signifies Jewish lineage, a detail used by Old Christians to deride rival conversos, as in Francisco Quevedo’s anti-Semitic sonnet “There once was a man attached to a nose.” And thanks to SP, Cecial’s two faces, nosed and un-nosed, have now intruded on DQ’s thoughts about Dulcinea.

DQ cannot accept that the Knight of the Mirrors is Carrasco, his friend: “Have I been his enemy, by chance? Have I ever given him reason to be angry with me? Am I his rival?” He produces a familiar explanation. Sorcery is to blame: “All is artifice and illusion.” Moreover, his enemies used this trick because they knew he could not possibly kill his neighbor: “so that the friendship that I have for him would restrain the edges of my sword and the severity of my arm, and temper the just anger of my heart.” DQ voices a Christian ethic here. By contrast, he also claims victory over his enemy: “I am the conqueror of my enemy.”

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“I am the conqueror of my enemy.”

With the victory over the Knight of the Mirrors behind them, our heroes now meet another character: the hotly debated “Knight of the Green Coat.” He is a radically different kind of knight, a modern knight. To be precise, he is a gentleman whom the narrator describes as prudent and discrete. Note that the dominant color of his trappings is green, with royal touches of gold and purple. Note also that he has important adornments that have explicitly Arabic roots, especially a scimitar: “a Moorish scimitar hanging from a wide sword belt of green and gold.” Critics take this knight as an Erasmian figure, a kind of reasonable, humanistic alter ego to DQ. But his “Moorish scimitar” indicates the same ethnic conflict we have seen elsewhere.

Calm pervades this scene. The gentleman is polite: “he greeted them politely.” When he passes our heroes, DQ invites him to join them and the man agrees, excusing his rudeness by saying that he was worried that his mare might provoke Rocinante. We know from part one that this is a real possibility. Nevertheless, SP defends the horse’s reputation: “our horse is the most chaste and well-behaved on earth: on similar occasions he has never done anything base.” And the one time that Rocinante did misbehave, DQ and SP paid the price: “my lord and I paid for it sevenfold.” SP alludes to an ancient fine of seven times the cost of damages caused by the guilty party. The narrator further underscores the scene’s bourgeois tranquility by noting that DQ is not wearing his helmet: “riding without his sallet helmet, which Sancho carried hanging like a valise over the fore bow of his gray’s saddle.”

The fellow traveler stares at DQ in amazement, and so DQ introduces himself as a medieval knight, motivated by adventure and love. He quotes from a Spanish translation of Petrarch’s Triumph of Love: “I am a knight: ‘like the ones who the people say / sally forth on their adventures.’” He provides further details, admitting that he has pawned his property –“I mortgaged my estate”– and bragging that, thanks to a certain book, he is now famous worldwide: “I have earned the right to be published in nearly all or most of the world’s nations: thirty thousand volumes of my history have been printed, and there are plans to print thirty thousand times a thousand more, if heaven does not intervene.” DQ exaggerates the number of books about him that circulated at that time, claiming twenty editions, although he is certainly accurate about the future number of volumes.



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Don Quijote defends the interests of Miranda’s son

T he Knight of the Green Coat is confused but also impressed. On one hand, he finds this difficult to believe: “How can it be that there are knights errant in the world today and printed histories of true knightly deeds?” On the other hand, he shares DQ’s desire to assist “widows,” “damsels,” “married women,” and “orphans.” The Knight of the Green Coat’s final words of

praise hint at Cervantes’s idea of writing a more noble and moral type of chivalric fiction which might overcome the more violent and sexual aspects of chivalric fantasy. This voices perfectly the perspective maintained by Erasmus and his student Juan Luis Vives, both of whom were very much out of favor in Spain during the Counter Reformation: “with that history that your grace says has been printed about your noble and true deeds, countless stories will have been forgotten about those imaginary knights errant who have so filled the world, doing such damage to proper customs and causing such detriment and discredit to good histories.”

Of course, DQ objects. But “the man in green” responds with incredulity: “Well, is there anyone who doesn’t doubt... that such histories are not false?” Note, however, that DQ remains civil: “I hope God permits me to convince your grace that you have erred in accepting the popular opinion of those who are certain that they are not true.” The other knight now knows DQ is insane. Nevertheless, he invites his guests to his house to dine with him and then introduces himself in great detail. He is also an hidalgo, although far wealthier than DQ. His name is Don Diego de Miranda. He leads a modest life. He has a family, hunts and fishes, and boasts that he has a library of “around six dozen books.” These are in Spanish and Latin; some are histories and others devotional books. Note a crucial difference between the books in his library and those in that of DQ: “those of chivalry have yet to cross my threshold.” To repeat, Miranda appears to be a particular kind of reformed Catholic, Erasmian in nature. He is not interested in judging the private morality of others and he avoids public displays of his religion: “I do not examine the lives of others, nor am I a lynx regarding the acts of others; I hear Mass every day, I give alms to the poor without boasting of my good works so as not to allow vanity and hypocrisy to enter into my heart.” His piety is simple, elegant: “I am devoted to Our Lady and I trust always in the infinite mercy of the Lord our God.” SP’s response to all this is fascinating. He leaps from his gray and kisses Miranda’s feet: “your grace strikes me as the first saint with short stirrups that I have seen in all the days of my life.” Miranda denies being a saint, but SP’s gesture manages to bring DQ out of his melancholy state.



Next we learn that Miranda’s son has been studying Latin and Greek at the University of Salamanca, as well as lyric poetry. Miranda admits to being disturbed by his son’s interest in classical literature. He would have preferred that he study law or theology. By contrast, his son is now participating in a “literary joust,” i.e., a poetry competition. There is something deeply autobiographical about this passage, as if Cervantes were projecting his own life onto that of Miranda’s son. And it is DQ who defends the son’s interests, counseling that parents should be loving and patient with their children: “regarding forcing them to study this or that science, I do not think it is wise.” A child should be allowed to follow his passions: “it would be my opinion that they should let him pursue that science toward which they see he is most inclined.” He then offers an allegory for poetry, which at that time included all forms of creative literature, comparing it to “a tender young damsel,” which the other sciences should enrich with their knowledge. He also allows that poetry has the power to create a kind of metaphorical gold: “She is made according to an alchemy that is of such virtue that he who knows how to treat her will turn her into the purest gold of inestimable value.” Given the issue of writing for money in both parts of DQ, perhaps this gold is more than just a metaphor. Like Cervantes, DQ also objects to writing according to tastes of the vulgar man, but note how he defines this vulgar man in a democratic sense. Even kings and dukes can be commoners: “anyone who is ignorant, even if he be a lord or a prince, can and should be counted among the masses.”

Finally, in DQ’s discourse, we hear Cervantes making a vigorous defense of modern writers of “poetry in romance,” or modern Spanish. Modern writers should be just like Homer and Virgil, who wrote in their maternal tongues: “all the ancient poets wrote in the language of the milk of their mothers, and they did not go seeking foreign languages in which to declare the nobility of their ideas.” Then he again tells Miranda to be open-minded about his son’s interests: “that your grace should allow your son to travel wherever his star should lead him.” Perhaps revealing Cervantes’s vision of his own art, DQ quotes directly from Ovid, the great Latin author of The Metamorphoses: “Est Deus in nobis,” meaning “God inhabits us,” alluding to the divine and prophetic function of creative writing. He also cites Horace, who even deployed lyric poetry to write sophisticated social satires: “if he should compose sermons in the mode of Horace, in which general vices are so elegantly reprimanded, then praise him, because it is licit for the poet to write against envy.” Finally, referring to Ovid’s exile, DQ notes that creative writing can be political and thus dangerous for the writer: “there are poets who, for the sake of saying something malicious, will run the risk of being exiled to the Islands of Pontus.” Now, at this precise point, there is suddenly a royal presence: “raising up his head, Don Quijote saw that, down the road on which they were traveling, there came a wagon bearing royal banners.” In other words, DQ’s discourse on creative writing dovetails with the subsequent adventure and we must assume that it will be political and satirical.



C hapter seventeen tells the amazing and never sufficiently praised “Adventure of the Lions.” It’s one of my favorites. SP provides what at first appears to be a minor slapstick detail. He has just purchased curds from some nearby shepherds, and in his haste, he places them in DQ’s helmet. DQ requests his helmet as he prepares for combat. Meanwhile, Miranda thinks

DQ is about to attack a cart carrying King Philip III’s money: “he saw nothing but a wagon coming towards them, with two or three small banners, which led him to conclude that said wagon must have been carrying His Majesty’s money, and he said as much to Don Quijote.”

There is a multiple irony here that has to do with our different perceptions of reality. DQ responds to Miranda’s warning by observing that one should always be prepared for the worst: “A man forewarned has won half the battle.” He observes that threats are often invisible: “I know from experience that I have enemies both visible and invisible, and I do not know when, nor where, nor at what point, nor in what guise they will attack me.” At the same time, he places his helmet on his head and suddenly thinks that his brains are melting. When DQ accuses SP of treachery, the squire claims that he too has been the victim of secret enemies: “I too must have enchanters who pursue me, since I’m a member and cut from the same fabric as your grace.” This is hilarious, but Cervantes is also laying the grounds for another highly symbolic episode which has to do with brains in relation to combat, i.e., with cogitation as a means of preparing for unknown threats. Let’s look more closely at this threat.

“The Adventure of the Lions”

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DQ is prepared to do battle “with Satan himself in person.” The driver informs DQ that the wagon contains “two brave lions in cages, which the General of Orán is sending to court as a gift to His Majesty.” An autobiographical note here: Cervantes undertook a mysterious mission to Orán in 1581, which likely involved espionage or diplomacy. To continue, DQ is clearly confronting a symbolic extension of the royal personage: “the banners are those of our lord the King, a sign that what’s here is his.” But our mad hidalgo doesn’t back down: “You come at me with little lions?” Like “We’ve come up against the Church, Sancho,” this phrase is now a refrain that expresses determination in the face of danger. The Green Knight tries to stop DQ, but his words also reinforce the political nature of the conflict: “these lions are not challenging your grace, or even dreaming of doing so: they are gifts to His Majesty, and it’s not wise to detain them or impede their journey.” DQ refuses to let others determine what he knows: “I know whether or not these lordly lions are challenging me.”

What is the nature of this political conflict? We have already seen an allusion to money. Note that the poverty of the driver is also at issue: “I will be ruined for life; for I have no other property than this wagon and these mules.” The real issue here –what DQ knows that he knows– is that Philip III’s inflationary monetary policy is devastating to poor people, savers, and people on fixed incomes. DQ’s response contains a deeper level of meaning related to poverty and savings: “straightaway you shall see that you labored in vain and could have spared yourself the effort.” The episode’s monetary language continues when the lion keeper emphasizes the potential costs to DQ. He says that if DQ persists in his challenge, he will have to compensate him for his salary and his fees: “I protest to this gentleman that he is responsible and accountable for all harm and damage that these beasts might cause, as well as for my salaries and fees.” Again: “Don Quijote responded that he knew what he was doing.”

At this point Cide Hamete expresses his highest praise for DQ anywhere in the novel. It’s a long paragraph. Francisco Rico even notes a certain Hebraic hyperbole: “O most valiant and courageous knight, beyond all estimations!... With what words shall I relate this fearsome feat, what phrases can I use to make it credible for future generations, what praises can I find that will not suit and befit you, even if they be the most hyperbolic of all hyperboles?... Let your very deeds sing your praises, valiant Manchegan, for I shall leave them here in all their glory, for I lack the words with which to esteem them.” Why now? Why does this particular episode cause Cide Hamete to produce such inflated praise?

“the banners are those of our lord the King, a sign that what’s here is his.”



“two brave lions in cages, which the General of Orán

is sending to court as a gift to His Majesty”

Everyone flees in fear, but the lion is unfazed: “he displayed his hindquarters to Don Quijote, and with great serenity and calm he went back inside the cage.” DQ now urges the lion keeper to poke the lion. He refuses and DQ declares victory. Now DQ signals the others to return with the same white cloth that he had used to wipe the curds from his face. Paradoxically, this seems like a signal of surrender. This white cloth, in conjunction with the lion’s disinterest in engaging DQ, would seem to indicate that inflation is too subtle to be defeated. The King’s policy means he wins no matter what you do. Nevertheless, as the driver returns, DQ makes an impertinent gesture: “Sancho, give two gold escudos to the man, one for him and one for the lion keeper, in recompense for their delay on my behalf.” Make no mistake, this is a subversive sign toward Philip III. The lion keeper recognizes as much: “he promised him to relate that valiant deed to the King himself when he arrived at court.”

And DQ pushes his encounter with the monarch even further: “If, by chance, His Majesty should ask who performed this deed, tell him it was the Knight of the Lions.” This is the first time since leaving home that DQ gives himself a new moniker, replacing the “Knight of the Sorrowful Face” from part one. This alone should indicate the importance of this episode. The narrator then tells us that Miranda is amazed, even somewhat respectful toward DQ. Miranda’s perspective is a wonderfully Erasmian summation of DQ’s dual nature: “a sane madman and a madman on the brink of sanity.” The chapter ends with a long speech by DQ in which he belittles courtly knights again as inferior in comparison with knights errant: “But let the knight errant search all the corners of the earth; let him enter into the most intricate labyrinths.” When DQ observes that knights errant only seek fame –“seeking dangerous adventures, with the intention of bringing them to a happy and a fortunate end, his only purpose being to achieve glorious and lasting fame”–, he is citing Cicero, the greatest republican enemy of the Roman Emperors. It’s another sophisticated slap at Philip III and his advisors.






Noses are highly symbolic during DQ’s encounter with the Knight of the Mirrors and SP’s encounter with Tomé Cecial. The beginning of chapter sixteen reflects on this and allows us to continue to read the previous episode as a parable about Christians and Moors, about friends and enemies, and about what it means to be a neighbor in early seventeenth-century Spain. The knight that we meet soon after is also symbolic. The Knight of the Green Coat is a deeply Erasmian figure, i.e., contrasting with DQ’s militant fanaticism, Miranda is reasonable and moderate in his lifestyle and his beliefs. During his conversation with DQ about his son’s education at the University of Salamanca, we get another detailed glimpse at Cervantes’s own aesthetic principles. These include a strong defense of Spanish lyric poetry, but also a clear recognition that creative writing often takes the form of political satire. This explains the importance of Ovid, Horace, and Cicero in these two chapters. Next, in chapter seventeen, exemplifying Cervantes’s satire, we have DQ’s insanely heroic confrontation with Philip III’s lions. Here DQ is the classic romantic hero who impressed so many nineteenth-century readers with his passionate struggle in the face of certain failure: “Enchanters may well deprive me of good fortune, but never of spirit and courage.” But he is also a warrior against the invisible and sinister practice of monetary manipulation, which hurts the poor by stealing their wealth and giving it to the King and his courtly advisors, i.e., the State. Monetary inflation by ruling powers is a labyrinthical problem, and a universal one. This explains why DQ gives himself a new moniker, why Cide Hamete is here more impressed by the “Knight of the Lions” than anywhere else in the novel, and why the Erasmian figure represented by Miranda suddenly regains respect for our “madman on the brink of sanity.”

Let’s review

“The connexion between female beauty and male infatuation is one of the most regular sequences of cause and effect observable in everyday life.”

—E. H. Carr

What Is History?



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The domestic life of Diego de MirandaC hapter eighteen peers inside the household of Diego de Miranda and contains a couple of poems by his son Lorenzo. The

first thing we note is the chapter’s header, which does two things: 1) it recalls Don Quijote’s original madness by referring to “the castle or house of the Knight of the Green Coat,” suggesting a certain halfway point between the narrator’s

perspective and that of DQ; 2) it again mocks critics of Don Quijote part one by adding “with other extravagant things,” which means extraordinary events but also anything that might possibly distract from the traditional storyline.

After a brief description of Miranda’s house, which includes a “cave,” where the family’s food is stored, the chapter makes a subtle reference to the matter of Dulcinea’s ethnicity. When DQ sees a number of large earthen vessels –“clay jars”– from El Toboso, the knight recites some of Garcilaso’s most famous verses: “O sweet garments, found by me desperately, / so sweet and jubilant when God so wished.” This will strike some readers as an absurd parody, but given that Garcilaso’s verses vindicate the African Queen Dido when she was abandoned by Aeneas, and given that the earthen jars that DQ laments were fashioned by Tobosan Moriscos, and given the fact that Philip III had already expelled the Moriscos from Spain in the years prior to DQ 2, given all this, I say, there is something poignant about these verses. Cervantes reveals Garcilaso’s love poetry as having a trans-ethnic agenda and he signals the Expulsion of the Moriscos as an inhumane betrayal with solemn consequences for the domestic economy.

Cervantes continues to mock superficial readers by having the Morisco translator also avoid “cold digressions.” Just how this occurs is convoluted. The Christian narrator says the original author painted Miranda’s house in great detail, “but the translator of this history chose to pass over these and other similar minutiae in silence, because they did not accord well with the principal purpose of the history.” By ironic contrast, we read, also in great detail, that SP undresses DQ and that our mad hidalgo then washes himself: “he washed his head and face, and the water was left the color of whey,” the latter detail owing to Sancho’s purchase of “his black curds, which had turned his master so white.” The contrasting colors insinuate race.

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So we enter a bourgeois world: “the lady Doña Cristina wanted to show that she knew how and was able to regale those who visited her house.” The narrative also constantly alludes to the Erasmian theme of the oddly insightful insanity of DQ. This takes shape through a series of asides between Miranda and Lorenzo concerning their guest. For example, the father explains to his son that “I’ve seen him perform the craziest acts on earth and then say things so discreet that they erase and undo his acts.”

At the same time, the topic turns to poetry and education. DQ asks about Lorenzo’s poetry, and when the young man displays humility, our knight approves: “there is no poet who is not arrogant and does not think of himself as the greatest poet in the world.” But Lorenzo is magnanimous toward other poets: “There’s no rule without its exception... and there must be some who are great and do not think so.” DQ’s response is cynical: “Few.” The hidalgo then displays great wit by explaining to Lorenzo, who has entered a poetry competition, that he should strive for second place, because first place will be awarded unjustly either out of deference to a powerful person or due to a bribe. Lorenzo is intrigued and produces another aside: “So far... I cannot judge you as insane.”

DQ now launches into a long speech on the science of knight errantry. There are new topics here. A knight must be a legal expert –“a jurist”–, with knowledge of “distributive and commutative justice,” referring to the difficult balance between the rights of the community and those of individuals. Interestingly, DQ avoids the third category of classical justice, i.e., legal justice, which involves the State’s obligations to its citizens. He also says a knight must be a “theologian” as well as a “physician,” which he defines as “principally an herbalist.” Note this relatively scientific view of medicine. A knight must also be an “astronomer” and “he has to know mathematics.” DQ then cites the virtues of faith, hope, and charity as well as prudence, justice, fortitude, and moderation. He moves quickly between prosaic and transcendent virtues. A knight must know how to swim and how to shod horses. This is ironic given what we know of the decaying condition of Rocinante’s hooves. But he must also be faithful to God and his mistress, and above all else, he must defend the truth even if it costs him his life. This last comment sounds radical, but notice DQ’s physical moderation. Has visiting Miranda changed our hero?



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The poetry of Lorenzo de MirandaL orenzo doubts that there have ever been knights-errant. Again, DQ seems remarkably calm about this “error.” He says he will

“pray to heaven” for Lorenzo’s enlightenment. DQ transforms the actions of a knight into something more like a philosophical attitude. Thus, he sounds conservative at heart, expressing a cynical view of the current state of things: “nowadays what

triumphs, because of people’s sins, is sloth, idleness, gluttony, and hedonism.” Similarly, Lorenzo concludes that DQ is crazy, but he still acknowledges that he can learn from him: “Our guest has gone off... but even so, he’s a gallant madman, and I would be a weak-minded fool not to think so.” Notice the tranquility of the scene: “what made Don Quijote most content was the marvelous silence which reigned throughout the household.”

We now turn to Lorenzo’s poems. There’s something autobiographical about Lorenzo’s participation in a “literary joust.” Some of Cervantes’s earliest poetry is from such a competition, and in Zaragoza no less, the same site of the “jousts for the suit of armor” in which DQ hopes to participate. Lorenzo introduces his first poem with humility: “I wrote it solely to exercise my wit.” In this specific poetic form, a gloss, the last lines of the stanzas echo the lines of an initial stanza quoted from another poem. The topic here is the quickness of time: tempus fugit in Latin. Moreover, time’s relentlessness means that death is a great motivator: “life itself makes me fearful / of what will come after time.” DQ is thrilled and places Lorenzo in an academic tradition of great poetry from Athens to Paris to Bologna to Salamanca.

Lorenzo then recites a sonnet on Pyramus and Thisbe, tragic lovers made famous by Ovid. It’s a reworking of an imperialist sonnet by Diego Hernando de Acuña, and a beautiful example of the Manneristic style. But it also echoes the love story of Cardenio and Luscinda and alludes to the wall between families of SP and Tomé Cecial. Further, it anticipates the love story of Quiteria and Basilio in the next

chapter. In fact, that “straight so narrow” which love dares to cross –“for love tends to make shallow / and ease the way past most difficult things”– summarizes every love story in DQ, perhaps most especially that of Viedma and Zoraida, who crossed the ultimate “Straight of Gibraltar.” DQ is once again thrilled by “the artifice of this sonnet.”

DQ stays four days at Miranda’s house before departing for Zaragoza. There’s double meaning in the narrator’s description of his route: “until the day of the jousts at Zaragoza, which was that of his certain route.” The phrase derecha derrota means “secure route,” but also “legitimate rout.” The irony is Christian: DQ’s destiny is somehow his triumphant defeat. The narrator also anticipates the future episode of the Cave of Montesinos and DQ’s impending investigation of mythical origins of the Lakes of Ruidera. Then, DQ’s parting words to Lorenzo reiterate the mathematics theme. He alludes to the Pythagorean topic of life as a ‘Y’ which represents a path that forks between virtue and vice, except that in DQ’s case life forks between poetry and knight errantry. DQ then alludes to a famous line from Virgil’s Aeneid, one of Cervantes’s favorites, one he uses, for example, as the basis for his exemplary novel The Colloquy of the Dogs. The idea is that knights errant seek to elevate the humble and lower the proud: “they are obliged to pardon the wretched and subdue and crush the proud.” Miranda and his son remain in awe of DQ’s “mixed discourse.” As our heroes depart, the narrator echos DQ’s perspective: “with the kind permission of the lady of the castle, Don Quijote and Sancho, atop Rocinante and the gray, departed.”

“they are obliged to pardon the wretched and subdue

and crush the proud.”



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The Knight of the LionsC hapter nineteen is a philosophical preamble to the wedding of Camacho found in chapters twenty and twenty-one.

Confusion and contrasts throughout this chapter call us to pay attention to details. Out on the road, DQ encounters “four horsemen (caballeros), what seemed like two clerics or students, and two peasants, riding atop four ass-like beasts.”

These will be clarified: the clerics are students, and one of the farmers will actually turn out to have moderate legal training. Note the contrast between each of the students: one carries “two black fencing swords” and the other carries a series of textiles wrapped in “green buckram.” This cloth was also used to cover books, and its color echoes Miranda. Note also that the farmers have their own merchandise: “The peasants carried other things, which were a sign and indication that they were returning from some large city where they had bought them and were carrying them back to their village.” Cervantes’s emphasis on commerce seems particularly sharp here. Why? Because commerce counters violence (cf. Montesquieu, Smith, Elias, Ferguson, etc.).

As usual, the four men are amazed by DQ, who explains his profession and reveals himself as “the Knight of the Lions.” The students invite him to a great wedding: “one of the greatest and richest weddings which until now has ever been celebrated in La Mancha.” DQ asks if “some prince” is getting married. No, rather, the wedding involves “a peasant and a peasant-girl: he, the richest in the entire land, and she, the most beautiful a man has ever seen.” These are Camacho and Quiteria, known, par excellence, as “the rich one” and “the beautiful one.” Notice the essential elements of male and female desire. Camacho represents what women want; Quiteria represents what men want. But there’s more going on here than meets the eye. At its core, this is one of Cervantes’s typical love stories based on the contrast between the two basic forms of social status in sixteenth-century Spain: wealth and lineage.

Thus, there are hints that Camacho is of converso or Morisco origin and that he seeks the Old Christian status of Quiteria’s family, who for their part seek wealth: “certain gossipers who can recall all the world’s lineages claim that of the beautiful Quiteria supersedes Camacho’s; but nobody cares about that nowadays, for riches are powerful enough to close many rifts.” This idea of hiding racial origins is reinforced by the fact that the wedding will be celebrated in a field that Camacho has covered entirely by a bower in order to provide shade. Also, as usual in DQ, there’s a rival man: Basilio. We are not surprised to learn that Basilio and Quiteria

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were young lovers in the manner of Pyramus and Thisbe, complete with the proverbial wall between their respective houses and the proverbial father of the girl who intervenes in favor of the young man’s rival. This should recall Lorenzo’s sonnet, but also everyone from Cardenio and Luscinda to SP and Tomé Cecial.

If Basilio does not have the wealth of Camacho, he does have youth on his side. There is something phallic about the student’s lengthy description of Basilio’s physical prowess, which ends with a remark about his swordsmanship: “he handles his sword as well as any.” Acknowledging the sexual innuendo, DQ takes Basilio’s side and claims that the boy deserves “not only to marry the beautiful Quiteria but Queen Guinevere herself, if she were alive today, in spite of Lancelot and all those who might wish to obstruct it.” Note that DQ endorses adultery and recall that DQ frequently identifies with Lancelot. SP’s response is also sexual –“Try that on my wife!–, although he means that he wishes DQ could make Teresa understand his liberal view of marriage. Here, and later, there is confusion regarding DQ’s and SP’s opinions. DQ suddenly changes his mind and responds to SP with a conservative stand, arguing that parents should maintain a degree of “choice and authority” when it comes to marriage. His long detailed argument sounds rational. But we see that even DQ’s lucid moments indicate his instability. This is not what he maintained regarding Marcela, for example. DQ seems carried away by his discursive wit, not the actual rationale of his view.

In another of Cervantes’s reflexive maneuvers, the “Gordian knot” that appears in the debate over marriage now applies to the narrative itself. DQ asks the “licentiate” to continue the story of Basilio. But our actual narrator appears not to know the status of the student, referring to him as “the student bachelor, or licentiate, as Don Quijote called him.” The student goes on to tell of Basilio’s reaction to the news of Quiteria’s plan to marry Camacho. Basilio becomes the classic Romantic hero, a kind of Heathcliff two hundred years before Emily Brönte’s novel Wuthering Heights: “he goes about pensive and sad, talking to himself... he eats little and sleeps little... and he seems nothing less than a robed statue with his clothes fluttering in the wind.”

“four horsemen (caballeros), what seemed like two clerics

or students, and two peasants, riding atop four ass-like beasts.”



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The fencing match of Corchuelo and the licentiateS ancho Panza now unleashes a string of refrains about a woman’s fickle nature: “between the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ of a woman I

would not dare to place the point of a needle... love, according to what I have heard, gazes with such desire that it makes copper look like gold, poverty like wealth, and mucus like pears.” Note subjective value theory again; and just

like in DQ 1, the theme of monetary policy now parallels the theme of adultery. Also, SP seems to have experienced the infidelity of his own wife. Monetary and domestic problems mix when DQ gets annoyed by SP’s abuse of refrains, and SP, in turn, gets mad at DQ’s interventions: “your grace, my lord, is always so friscal with my sayings and even my deeds.” DQ corrects him: “Fiscal you should say.” SP now becomes roundly impertinent: “I did not grow up at court, nor did I study at Salamanca,” claiming that even some people from almighty Toledo are not so sharp.

Now the student intervenes in DQ and SP’s dispute. First, he specifies that he is a licentiate. Then he defends SP’s liberal approach to language. His words recall the marketplace of DQ 1.9: “those who grow up in Tanerías and in the Zocodover can’t speak as well as those who spend most of their days strolling about the cloister of the main cathedral, and yet they’re all Toledans.” The marginal worlds of the tannery and the marketplace also echo Rojas’s La Celestina, and there are hints of the picaresque when the student ironically brags about his own education: “I’m cocky enough (pícome algún tanto) to speak my thoughts with clear, plain, and meaningful words.” Now the other student confronts his friend, telling him that if he were to have paid more attention to rhetoric than to fencing, then he would have graduated first instead of last. The licentiate responds that the bachelor is wrong about fencing. Now we know the respective statuses of the two students, and the narrator’s previous uncertainty regarding their statuses has now been clarified by their dialogue. Note also that the narrator suddenly calls the bachelor by his name, Corchuelo. This happens out of the blue. The other student has not called him Corchuelo, and the narrator does not explain. Here Cervantes tells us something about his own art, which involves precision and the illusion of naturalness, and sometimes even the illusion of mistakes.



Corchuelo now challenges the licentiate to a fencing duel. Reworking the duel between the Knight of Mirrors and Don Quijote, fencing becomes focus of the remainder of chapter. And this is an intellectual dual as well as a physical one: even though he claims intellectual superiority over his friend, Corchuelo is still just a bachelor, not a licentiate. Corchuelo thinks fencing is a waste, mocking its status as a mathematical science: “pivot about your compass, deploy your circles, your angles, and your science, for I plan on making you see stars at noon.” The others can only watch as the “mortal tragedy” unfolds. Whose tragedy?

Cervantes describes the fencing duel with beautiful cinematography. The way the licenciate defeats the bachelor is comical. Corchuelo delivers a variety of strokes “infinite in number” and attacks “like an irritated lion,” but he gets nowhere. The licentiate then makes a fool of him, marking and shredding his clothes: “he accounted with stabs for all the buttons of the short cassock that he was wearing, turning its back part into the tails of an octopus.” By the way, stringing together “the tails of an octopus” is a metaphor for the art of writing in Cervantes’s picaresque novella The Colloquy of the Dogs. After the licentiate twice knocks Corchuelo’s hat off, the bachelor gives up. But his final gesture of surrender is both impressive and symbolic: “rabid, angry, and spiteful, the bachelor seized his sword by the hilt and hurled it into the air with such force that one of the farmers standing by, who was also a notary and went looking for it, later attested that he threw it almost three and a half leagues away.” Given this demonstration of Corchuelo’s strength, the moral expressed by the narrator is explicit and paradoxically ambivalent because it favors intelligence over strength but also surrender over victory: “which testimony serves and has served to confirm and illustrate in all truth how force is overcome by art.”

Hilariously, SP suggests that Corchuelo should not challenge anyone to fencing but, rather, to a throwing contest. Corchuelo’s response is that he has learned humility, which clarifies the narrator’s previous paradox: “I’m content... to have fallen off my she-ass and to have been presented by experience with the truth from which I was so far removed.” Now Corchuelo makes an amazing gesture, one we almost never see in DQ: “And, standing up, he embraced the licentiate, and they remained better friends than before.” Finally, we get another reference to mathematics when the licentiate makes another speech in defense of the art of fencing: “with such demonstrative logic and so many figures and mathematical proofs, that all were made to see the righteousness of that science and Corchuelo was converted from his obstinacy.” The last two terms indicate that Cervantes is again mocking the Inquisition, which “converted” its victims from the “obstinacy” of their heresy. The irony is that the Inquisition is a horrific science. There are better ways to demonstrate moral truth, such as writing or avoiding violence.

Our travelers arrive at the site of the wedding. They arrive at night, but there is light everywhere. The scene is “a sky filled with innumerable and resplendent stars,” all complemented by the music of “diverse instruments.” Then we learn that “the trees... at the entrance to the village were filled with holiday lights.” Note that joy and tranquility reign.

“The connexion between female beauty and male infatuation is one of the most regular sequences of cause and effect observable in everyday life.”

—E. H. Carr

What Is History?



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Camacho and Quiteria’s weddingC hapter twenty describes the first half of Camacho’s wedding. It begins with

the second mythological description of a dawn in DQ 2. Key here is DQ’s high rhetoric, contrasted by SP’s snoring. While SP sleeps, DQ reasserts his

feudalistic fantasy regarding the natural relationship between master and servant. DQ thinks he’s plagued by worldly concerns, whereas his servant labors in ignorant bliss. But readers know that SP has serious concerns and that DQ is actually a bad manager of his estate, so DQ’s speech is not only comic but problematic and thematic.

There is also another subtle critique of the Inquisition embedded in DQ’s speech. The line “with envy towards none and envied by none” echoes Fray Luis de León’s famous poem “Upon Leaving Prison.” The great poet and theologian, who taught at the University of Salamanca, spent four years in jail for supposed heresy. Given the previous chapter’s struggles, its allusions to the Inquisition, and its references to the University of Salamanca, the distorted logic of ethnic and religious persecution remains relevant in chapter twenty. Finally, there is an amazing double zeugma in DQ’s speech: “the extent of your desires does not attain to more than sustaining your ass, because that of your person remains atop my shoulders.” At an obvious level, “sustaining” means “feeding” in the first clause, and then “supporting” when it is reduced to the pronoun “that” in the second. But there’s another option. Since SP is

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“with envy towards none and envied by none”

often equated with his gray, “ass” can also be the word indicated by the pronoun “that.” Think about that one! And note how Cervantes relates all this back to the ethnic theme: SP does not awaken, so DQ pokes him with his lance, and SP smells “sides of roasted bacon.” Ham products are ethnic markers.

Contradicting his former speech in defense of arranged marriages, DQ is once again more interested in Basilio. And faced with the prospect of a wedding feast, SP also changes his mind and now supports Camacho: “I am of the opinion that the poor man should be happy with what he has and not go about asking for earth apples at sea.” Note how SP sounds downright capitalist here: “On a good foundation one can raise a good building, and money is the best groundwork and foundation in the world.” DQ tells SP to shut up, and SP suddenly refers to his contract with DQ, a contract of which we have absolutely no knowledge: “you should remember the articles of our agreement that we drew up before we left home this last time: one of them was that you were to permit me to talk all that I might want.” Like readers, DQ can’t recall this contract. We’ll return to employer-employee relations in future episodes.

At this point, the narrator offers us a cornucopia of diverse dishes prepared for the wedding feast. His details are hyperbolic, an accumulation of images that allows the feast to unfold before SP like a rhetorical exercise in excess. A big detail here is another allusion to the Morisco theme related to the same earthen jars from El Toboso that made DQ cite Garcilaso at the beginning of chapter eighteen: “and six pots that were around the bonfire were not made in the Turkish fashion like the rest, because these were six wide earthenware jars, each large enough to hold an entire slaughterhouse of beef.” Note the contrast between Turkish and Moorish styled urns. All of this is “so abundant that it could have fed an army.” Despite this allusion to war, the magnanimous feast produced by local wealth produces peace. Sancho begs for a taste and one of the cooks offers him all he can eat with a strangely legalistic phrase: “Brother, this day is not one of those over which hunger has any jurisdiction, thanks be to Camacho the rich.”



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A s festivities prior to the ceremony begin, DQ overhears praise for Quiteria: “the most beautiful woman in the world.” He is, of course, offended, but he wisely keeps his objection to himself: “he said to himself: ‘It would seem that these people have never seen my Dulcinea of Toboso.’” What follows is a performance of an allegory that takes place within the larger

allegory of Cervantes’s description. Like the fencing duel in the previous chapter, violent conflict, or war, is the contextual theme. Among the many dances, the narrator focuses on one that reads like a staged battle: “many and diverse dances, among which was one involving swords.” A bystander asks “if any of the dancers had been injured,” and the leader of the dance troupe responds: “So far, thanks be to God, no one has been hurt: we’re all well.” Next comes a more formal allegory. Two sets of dancers oppose each other, one lead by “Interest” (Money) and the other by “Love” (Passion). These clearly represent the struggle between Camacho and Basilio for the affections of Quiteria. Each figure leads its own retinue of symbolic figures. With “Interest” (Camacho) come “Liberality,” “Gifts,” “Treasure,” and “Peaceful Possession”; with “Love” (Basilio) come “Poetry,” “Discretion,” “Good Lineage,” and “Valor.” If these two could get together, the world would be a better place, no?

Next, four “savages” appear, dragging a wooden castle containing a “maiden” representing Quiteria. Love and Interest then take turns reciting poems that declare their respective powers. Interestingly, Love’s poem alludes twice to the cave theme we have seen throughout part two: he says he is a powerful god on land, in the air, and in the sea, but also “all that the abyss contains / in its horrific chasm (báratro).” “Báratro” is a deep chasm (sima) in Attica into which the Greeks threw people who were condemned to death. Cervantes continues to anticipate the upcoming Cave of Montesinos episode. Interest now responds that he has more power: “I am he mightier than Love.” He also makes a paradoxical reference to commerce, which is morally suspect, but without which normal life is impossible: “I’m Interest, according to whom / few ever labor as they should, / though without me they need miracles.”

Interest and Love battle for the affections of the damsel



The allegory ends with Interest and Love battling over the maiden in the castle. Interest pulls out a giant purse made from “the skin of a giant tabby cat,” which is filled with coins, and hurls it at the castle. His band attempts to drag off the maiden –“placing a great chain of gold around her neck”–, but Love intercedes. In the end, the savages re-establish peace between Interest and Love and the maiden returns to her castle. DQ notes that whoever composed the allegory “must be more of a friend to Camacho than to Basilio,” and he notes a satire in the performance. What do you think? Which is more important in modern society, Love or Money?

The chapter ends with another brief debate between SP and DQ. SP is now entirely on the side of Camacho: “My cock’s king,” he says, and he twice repeats that “I’m with Camacho.” DQ observes that SP sounds Machiavellian: “you’re a vile plebeian, like those who shout: ‘Long live whoever wins!’” SP maintains his defense of wealth: “There are only two lineages in the world, as one of grandmothers used to say, which are the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’” Then he references Apuleius’s The Golden Ass as well as DQ 1: “an ass covered in gold is still better than a horse with all its trappings.” Finally, he recalls the famous idea of death as the great equalizer, a phrase from Horace that Cervantes uses repeatedly: “she tramples the high towers of kings as well as the lowly huts of the poor.” There’s something political here, and DQ observes that SP sounds like a preacher. SP makes two final quips about his simple religious nature in which he echoes the peaceful tolerance of an Erasmian humanist: first, “He who lives well preaches well... and I know of no other thologies,” and then “I’m as much a God-fearing gentile as anybody else’s son.” DQ is impressed and the narrator leaves us with the ironically violent image of SP returning to the feast: “And so saying he once more launched an assault against the nearest pot.”

“The allegory ends with Interest and Love battling over the maiden in the castle.”






Calm and reason pervade the household of the Knight of the Green Coat. The duel between the licentiate and the bachelor rehearses violent rivalry but ends in reconciliation and Christian knowledge. SP’s vision of Camacho’s wedding feast is a cornucopia with heavy capitalist overtones sounded by SP. Like so many critics have done, our heroes vacillate in their allegiances. At first DQ favors Basilio’s natural talent, physical prowess, and love, all regardless of any differences between lovers. Likewise, SP says he prefers love and rejects his own wife Teresa’s concerns for social differences. Then DQ changes his mind and supports arranged marriages. Then, SP switches his allegiance in favor of Camacho and wealth. By the end of chapter twenty, after witnessing the staged allegory of Love vs. Interest, DQ changes his mind yet again and expresses support for Basilio. Notably, SP, who wants to govern an island nation, sounds pragmatic and Machiavellian. Nevertheless, the squire also voices simple principles related to peaceful coexistence. The extent of the irony of these views will become apparent in future episodes. For now, we should feast on the chaos that always accompanies love and desire. But what about those pesky complications caused by money and social status?

Let’s review

“Moses was an Egyptian”.

—Sigmund Freud,

Moisés y la religión

monoteísta



C hapter twenty-one relates the second half of Camacho’s wedding. It opens with SP’s hyperbolic description of the bride Quiteria, which focuses on her adornments as the means by which she transcends her peasant status: “By my faith, she’s dressed not like a peasant but an elegant lady.” His final vision of her layered beauty is a triple metaphor: “she’s a

beautifully gilded girl who could make it past the banks of Flanders.” The allusion to “the banks of Flanders” refers to dangerous sandbanks near Flanders, to bankers of Flanders, and to a bed made of Flanders pine. SP means that Quiteria can overcome the difficulties of marriage and conquer the heart of someone as rich as the merchants of Flanders. His comment suggests the love story might be an allegory for international –religious, military, and economic– relations.

At this point Basilio arrives and halts the ceremony. He wears a provocative black cassock with fiery red strips. He also wears a crown of funereal cypress and carries a large staff. He seems diabolic, or perhaps condemned. His jealousy and his deathliness recall lovers from part one, such as the doomed Grisóstomo or the agitated Cardenio. Basilio makes a dramatic speech in which he alleges that since Quiteria has married him in secret, as long as he is still alive, she cannot marry his rival Camacho. Then he sticks his staff in the ground and pulls off its top half, revealing a small sword. Finally, he shouts “long live rich Camacho, long and happy years with the ungrateful Quiteria; and death, death to poor Basilio.” Then he throws himself on the sword in an act of romantic suicide.

With Basilio in the throes of death, the priest rushes to give him last rights, but he refuses unless Quiteria will grant him a last wish: “under no circumstances would he confess until Quiteria gave him her hand as his wife.” Quiteria is at first catatonic, stolid as a work of art: “harder than marble and motionless as a statue.” But at DQ’s insistence, as well as that of the priest and the crowd, she consents. Even Camacho gives his blessing. The motive is that if Basilio dies before confessing, he will be damned to hell: “giving every indication that he would die like a heathen and not like a Christian.” But as soon as they are pronounced husband and wife, Basilio springs to his feet and removes the sword from his body. At this the crowd is astonished and proclaims a miracle –“Miracle, miracle!”–, but Basilio rejects their metaphysical impulse and asserts his own ingenuity: “Not miracle, miracle, but resourcefulness, ingenuity!” This is one of the more emphatic exchanges in the entire novel, on par with that of Zoraida near the end of part one when she declared herself to be named “Mary.” It’s easy to imagine this passage inspiring the materialism of Hobbes and Hume.

The second part of Camacho and Quiteria’s wedding

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We now learn that Basilio faked his death by guiding the sword into a hollow metal tube filled with blood. By the way, we will see several other mysterious staffs in future episodes (cf. Governor Sancho of Barataria and Altisidora). When the “marriage” between Basilio and Quiteria is revealed to have been “deceitful,” the wedding risks becoming a civil war between rival bands. This recalls the recent battles between DQ and the Knight of the Mirrors and between and Corchuelo and the licentiate, as well as the allegory of the struggle between Love and Interest. Camacho’s and Basilio’s supporters face off: “Camacho and his party... took vengeance into their own hands, and, unsheathing numerous swords, they rushed toward Basilio, in whose defense in an instant were unsheathed almost as many more.” DQ immediately mounts Rocinante and brandishes his lance in favor of Basilio’s clan. Meanwhile, SP hides behind the giant earthen jars from which he has eaten his fill: “took refuge among the earthenware jars from which he had savored such agreeable broth; for the spot seemed so sacred to him that it must surely be respected.” Note the sacred power of jars produced by Moriscos at El Toboso.

DQ urges calm. He points out that all is fair in love and war, even drawing a classical equivalency between the two: “be advised that love and war are the same thing, and that just as in war it is legitimate and customary to use tricks and stratagems to defeat the enemy, so too in the struggles and competitions of love.” Finally, he challenges anyone who wants to oppose the marriage between Basilio and Quiteria: “he will first have to get past the tip of this lance.” The priest also reasons with Camacho’s clan, such that there now occurs a true miracle: “Camacho and those partial to him were calmed and pacified, and they signaled as much by returning their swords to their sheathes.”

When Basilio’s followers return to their village, they invite DQ, “esteeming him to be a tough and courageous man.” Only SP is dismayed. The narrator’s description of the squire’s sadness is a sophisticated allusion to the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, when they escaped slavery during the reign of the Pharaoh: “and thus he left the fleshpots of Egypt behind, although his soul carried them with him.” This makes for an ironic parallel between the Jewish nation of the Old Testament and SP, who is usually an Old Christian proud of his ethnic and religious purity.

“By my faith, she’s dressed not like a peasant but an

elegant lady.”



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Don Quijote counsels Basilio

C hapter twenty-two relates DQ’s descent into the Cave of Montesinos. This is a real cave, located between Ciudad Real and Albacete. For a man supposedly headed east to Zaragoza, DQ sure is spending a lot of time in the south of La Mancha as he did in part one. Before departing for the cave, Basilio and Quiteria make him their guest for three days. The narrator tells us

they were impressed by his rare combination of valor and discretion: “considering him another Cid in arms and another Cicero in eloquence.” DQ voices his approval of Basilio’s “ingenuity,” arguing that the ends of actions justify their means: “Those which seek virtuous ends... cannot, and should not, be called deceptions.” But then he has words of advice for Basilio about the importance of acquiring wealth to keep his wife content: “Lord Basilio should quit exercising his particular skills, for even though they were winning him fame, they won him no money, and he should attend to acquiring wealth by licit and industrious means.” There is irony in such advice coming from an hidalgo who cannot manage his own estate.

DQ then gives wise, if paradoxical, advice about how to avoid jealousy: “it was the opinion of a wise man, whose name I forget, that there was but a single chaste woman in all the world, and he advised that each man should think and believe that single chaste woman was his own, and in this way he would live happily.” He even says that to this end, a woman should keep her adulterous behavior private: “women’s honors are damaged much more by public indiscretions and liberties than by secret transgressions” (cf. María de Zayas). SP mutters to himself that his master is a know-it-all: “What a devil of a knight errant you are, for you know something about everything!” When DQ asks what he just said, SP claims he was just talking about his wife: “I was merely saying to myself that I wish I had heard what your grace has just said here before I got married.” On the one hand, this is a modern and funny exchange in which SP avoids responsibility for his insult by vocalizing another line of inquiry that distracts DQ. On the other hand, the insinuation is that Teresa has been unfaithful to SP. DQ confirms the latter idea: “Is your Teresa so bad!” SP then confesses: “she’s not as good as I would like.” WOW. Are SP’s children his own?

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Finally, DQ asks the “skilled licentiate” from the fencing duel in DQ 2.19 for a guide to the Cave of Montesinos. He provides DQ with “a cousin of his, a famous student who was quite fond of reading books of chivalry.” This curious figure will remain unnamed. He knows all about books and printing, and he is adept at dedicating his texts to important people. The narrator has the cousin describe himself as a humanist dedicated to composing “books for publication, all of great benefit, and no less entertaining, to the republic.” There are many theories regarding just who this figure is. On some level, however, he is a comedic parody of Cervantes himself. He composes seemingly useless and superfluous books. He is currently working on one called “The Metamorphoses, or the Spanish Ovid.” This echoes Cervantes’s description of himself in the fourth introductory sonnet of part one. Finally, hinting at both SP’s symbolic ass and Teresa’s infidelity, the cousin rides a meaningful beast with a multicolored saddle cloth: “a pregnant she-ass, whose packsaddle covered a brightly colored mat or sack.”

“they were winning him fame, they won him no money, and he

should attend to acquiring wealth by licit and industrious means”



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Don Quijote’s descent into the Cave of MontesinosW e see the frivolity of the humanist’s interests during conversations on the

road to Montesinos. His main project, which he also calls “my book of Transformations,” is a burlesque of Ovid. It contains allegorical stories about

the origins of Spanish natural and architectural wonders, including some we have already seen: the Giralda of Seville, the Bulls of Guisando, and even the Sierra Morena. His other project is a supplement to the Italian humanist Polydore Vergil’s famous book on the origins of things published in 1499. The cousin’s attention to the origins of things overlooked by his precursor makes for humorous dialogue. For example, he plans to declare who first contracted a cold and who first used mercury cream to cure syphilis: “who was the first man on earth to catch a cold, and the first to use ointments to cure himself of the French disease.” SP comically suggests that he include Adam as the first man to scratch his head, because he was the first man and he had a head, and then Lucifer as the world’s first acrobat, because when he was thrown out of Heaven: “he came tumbling down into the abyss.” The cousin and SP are mocking the rhetorical exercises of humanists and scholastics.

The Cave of Montesinos episode imitates a common event in classical epic known as katabasis, a descent into underworld, found in Homer, Virgil, and Dante. The term also means a voyage down to the coast, as in the opening scene of Plato’s Republic. DQ descends into the cave, but he also seeks access to the coast. Later, he will end up in Barcelona, and here he tries to explain the origin of the nearby Lakes of Ruidera, thought to be fed by the Guadiana River, which flows into the Atlantic at the border with Portugal. Of course,

Freudian critics also love this episode. As we approach the Cave of Montesinos, Cervantes ridicules intellectual quests for knowledge; but he also sets the stage for DQ’s encounter with the primordial past as well as with DQ’s own diabolical unconscious, his repressed desires, his id. There’s also something of an anxious return to the birth canal here. The opening of the cave is foreboding: “they arrived at the cave, which had a wide and spacious mouth, although it was covered with thick and intricate brambles, wild figs, blackberries, and brushes.”

DQ is tied to a long rope, an umbilical cord, and lowered into the abyss. Indicating anxiety about the origins of Spain, DQ quotes from a ballad about the Reconquista siege of Granada: “this kind of venture, Sancho my friend, was reserved for me alone.” He also makes a curious comment about having forgotten to bring “some small cow bell” to mark his position. Recall the bell on Eugenio’s “spotted she-goat” in DQ 1.50. Cervantes builds suspense magnificently. DQ evokes God and Dulcinea as he approaches “the abyss,” “the chasm,” “the mouth of the cave,” and suddenly there come flying out “crows and ravens” and “nocturnal birds, such as bats.” The descent is both eerie and hilarious, like a scene from Poe. The cousin and SP lower DQ using the entire rope, “one hundred spans” or about 170 meters. They wait half an hour and pull him out. Strangely, they do not sense DQ on the other end of the rope: “they went and pulled up the rope with great ease and no weight on it at all, which caused them to imagine that Don Quijote had remained within.” But then, “reaching, it seemed to them, a little more than eighty spans, they felt a weight.” If we do the math, twenty “spans” were simply slack and DQ must have touched the bottom of the cave at eighty “spans.”

Finally, at ten “spans” or seventeen meters, SP sees DQ and yells down to him: “Your grace is most welcome back, my lord, for we were thinking that you were going to remain down there and start a family.” Hilariously, however, when they take him out, DQ is sleeping: “his eyes were closed, with indications of being asleep,” and it takes them some time to wake him up. Then they spread the cousin’s multicolored saddle cloth “on the green grass” and eat a big meal together: “they supped and dined all at once.” Meals are meaningful in DQ, especially this one, which follows so closely that of Camacho’s failed wedding. They then refold the saddle cloth and sit on the grass to discuss what has happened. Note DQ’s insistence that the Cave of Montesinos is not an “inferno.” This suggests that the episode alludes to Protestantism’s rejection of the existence of Purgatory (cf. Sullivan on DQ and Greenblatt on Hamlet).



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The incredible adventure of the Cave of MontesinosI n chapter twenty-three, DQ relates what he saw in the Cave of Montesinos. At “twelve or fourteen yards of depth in this

dungeon,” he found the ledge of an opening. Note that DQ has changed to a slightly longer measurement than the “spans” used by the narrator. Cervantes plays with us, but this also indicates a problem. If DQ only descended about twenty meters, this leaves

about 140 meters of rope unaccounted for. Did DQ enter the opening and fall asleep? Or did he tumble off the ledge and end up further inside the cave? Are there other explanations? Like our origins, perhaps our umbilical cord is always a mystery.

Now DQ creates a paradox. He says he fell asleep but that everything he subsequently saw was real. After he awakes in a locus amoenus, he repeatedly checks to make sure he is not dreaming: “I felt my head and chest to make sure that I was the man who was there and not some hollow and conjured phantom; but my sense of touch, my feelings, and the ordered discourse I held with myself, all certified for me that I was, then and there, he who is here and now.” Is this proof? At this point DQ sees another of those ambivalent structures associated with Dulcinea: “a royal and sumptuous palace (palacio) or fortress (alcázar).” He then meets Montesinos, an old man with a flowing white beard dressed like a scholar. Montesinos tells DQ how all the inhabitants of the cave arrived there. They have all been enchanted by the evil wizard Merlin: “that French wizard whom they say was the son of the Devil.” I can believe it.

Once again, DQ’s chivalric fantasy centers on the Battle of Roncesvalles. Here Cervantes assembles Montesinos’s story from old French epic poems and from late medieval Spanish ballads. As he lay dying after the battle, Montesinos’s cousin Durandarte, whose name was originally that of Roland’s sword, made him promise to remove his heart with a dagger and take it to his beloved Belerma. But now, under Merlin’s spell in the cave, Montesinos and Belerma mourn Durandarte’s perpetual state of suspended animation, who lies in the middle of a crystal palace and repeatedly begs his cousin to take his heart to his beloved. Montesinos takes DQ to see Durandarte, who appears to be unaware of anyone’s presence.

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The humor of this chapter stems from the burlesque contrasts between melodramatic chivalric events that are described with high rhetoric and absurdly mundane details that are described with a modern register. For example, according to DQ, Montesinos is unarmed but carries a huge rosary: “in his hand a rosary with beads larger than medium-sized walnuts, and, smilarly, with decade beads as large as medium-sized ostrich eggs.” SP interjects that the dagger must be made by “Ramón de Hoces, the Sevillian,” but DQ objects that there are too many years between the present of Ramón de Hoces and the early medieval Battle of Roncesvalles. Another example: when Montesinos tries to tell Durandarte that he long ago left for France with his heart, he specifies that he cleaned it with a particularly modern piece of cloth: “I wiped it with a lace handkerchief.” He even salted it to preserve it: “leaving Roncesvalles, at the first place that I stopped, I sprinkled some salt on your heart, so that it would not smell bad and would arrive, if not fresh, at least as good as cured meat.”

Cervantes’s creative generic experimentation eventually folds chivalric fantasy into a modern parody of classical Ovidian metamorphosis. Notice also the extreme mise-en-abyme of all this: beyond Cervantes, the Christian narrator, the translator, and Cide Hamete, here DQ narrates a vision in which Montesinos narrates Durandarte’s story. Montesinos explains that among Durandarte’s mourners in the cave were once his squire Guadiana along with Doña Ruidera with her daughters and nieces. But Merlin transformed them into the Lakes of Ruidera and the Guadiana River. Finally, when Montesinos tells Durandarte that the great hero DQ has arrived to disenchant them, his cousin sighs and responds with a hilariously prosaic term used by card players: “and if it cannot be so, dear cousin!, then I say, shut up and shuffle.”

Another comical aspect here involves Freudian projections in DQ’s dream. Montesinos’s rosary recalls DQ’s in the Sierra Morena; Durandarte’s hand is similar to DQ’s in part one when he offered it to Maritornes; the fact that Durandarte is Montesinos’s cousin signals the cousin who listens with SP. Similarly, a general anxiety over Turks is visible in the clothes worn by Belerma and her retinue: “all dressed in mourning, with white turbans on their heads, in the Turkish fashion.” DQ describes Belerma as somewhat ugly, recalling the realistic Dulcinea that shocked him in DQ 2.10: “her eyebrows were one, and she was rather snub-nosed,” and her teeth “showed diastemas and were not well positioned.” Another comical contrast has Freudian implications for the cave as a birth canal. Montesinos tells DQ that Belerma’s decayed condition is not due to her menstrual cycle, which she has not had for many years, but, rather, her constant mourning for Durandarte.

“in his hand a rosary with beads larger than medium-sized walnuts, and, smilarly, with decade beads as

large as medium-sized ostrich eggs.”



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Don Quijote, FuggerD on Quijote is offended when Montesinos compares the beauty of Belerma to that of Dulcinea, and he produces another

prosaic interruption: “Hold on now... sir lord Montesinos: tell your story as you should, for your grace knows full well that all comparisons are hateful.” Note this intrusion of meta-literary reflection on the art of storytelling within DQ’s dream

inside the Cave of Montesinos. And now the criticism comes from outside the dream, too. SP recalls the old DQ: “I am astonished... that your grace did not jump on the old man and thrash all his bones with kicks, and then rip out his beard, leaving not a single hair.” DQ insists on civility: “No, Sancho my friend... because we are all obliged to respect our elders.” Then they debate the experience of time. The cousin objects that all this could not have happened “in such a small space of time.” SP informs DQ he was in the cave “A little over an hour.” DQ says he was down there for three whole days, and SP explains this as an effect of enchantment. Again, in part two SP is more prone to adopt DQ’s surreal perspective from part one. Note also that here we have the kind of metaphysical debate that anticipates Hobbes. The cousin asks if enchanted people eat. DQ’s response is hilarious: “They do not eat... nor do they have bowel movements.” He adds that they did not sleep for three days. SP now turns a moral refrain into something literal: “tell me the company you keep, and I’ll tell you who you are.” Translation: DQ is an enchanted character in a chivalric fantasy. What does this say about his companions?

But note how DQ still insists on realism. The theme of St. Thomas reappears: “what I have told I saw with my own eyes and touched with my own hands.” DQ says that there were “other infinite things and marvels that Montesinos showed me,” but now he turns to the most amazing part of the adventure. Suddenly, he sees “three peasant girls who came jumping and bouncing through those pleasing fields like nanny goats.” The reference is to The Three Graces, but, of course, they turn out to be Dulcinea and the two women whom SP and he had seen in DQ 2.10. DQ’s unconscious finally reveals his true anxiety. Montesinos remarks that these women must be other enchanted spirits, adding that he has even seen Lancelot down there. Recall that DQ has often identified with Lancelot.

“Hold on now... sir lord Montesinos: tell your story as you should, for

your grace knows full well that all comparisons are hateful.”

Now DQ argues with SP, who knows that these women are his own invention. The squire accuses his master of “telling the craziest nonsense that anyone could imagine.” DQ remains remarkably calm: “Since I know you, Sancho... I shall ignore your words.” Amazingly, as DQ asks Montesinos how he might disenchant Dulcinea, who refuses to talk to him and rides off, one of the other two maidens approaches with a specific request on behalf of her mistress: “she implores your grace with utmost urgency to be so kind as to lend her half a dozen reales, or however many your grace might have, accepting as collateral this new cotton underskirt that I have here, for she gives her word that she will repay you without delay.” So DQ is on the brink of obtaining Dulcinea’s underskirt, and all because she is in need of a loan!

DQ is shocked by the mundane needs of the enchanted: “Is it possible, lord Montesinos, that distinguished persons who are enchanted can suffer from need?” What follows echoes the era’s moral debates over financial instruments, especially regarding charity vs. profit in the motives of those who would loan money at interest. Montesinos insists Dulcinea’s request is real: “that which they call need is present in all places, and it extends to everyone everywhere, and it doesn’t even spare the enchanted; and since lady Dulcinea sends her servant to ask for those six reales, and since the pledged garment seems to be of good quality, then there’s nothing to do but to give them to her.” DQ won’t accept her collateral, but he still gives the maiden four reales, which is all he has, “which were the ones that you, Sancho, gave me the other day to give as alms to the poor whom I might come across on the road.” DQ remarks that he wishes he were a banker so that he could give her more: “My friend, tell your mistress that my soul is saddened by her troubles, and that I wish I were a Fugger so that I might remedy them.” All this alludes to Spain’s repeated bankruptcies at that time, but it’s also an important meditation on the thematic relation between commerce and enchantment.

DQ now says he will dedicate himself to disenchanting Dulcinea. SP is shocked and becomes aggressive toward his master: “Oh sir, sir, for God’s sake, let your grace look after himself and take back your honor, and don’t give credit to these vapidities which have dwindled and waned your good sense by half!” DQ is confident that with time, SP will come to accept the truth of what he has seen in the Cave of Montesinos.






In chapter twenty-one Camacho’s wedding approaches a violent outcome, but ends happily. Basilio’s “ingenuity” contrasts with the “miracle” that many present think they have witnessed. References to Egypt allude with heavy irony to the ethnic conflicts of Spain. Chapter twenty-two mocks of humanist and scholastic knowledge, but it also reflects on the significance of books in a well-ordered republic. Then comes the hilarious confusion regarding DQ’s descent into the mysterious Cave of Montesinos. In chapter twenty-three DQ encounters Montesinos, Durandarte, and even Dulcinea, who needs a loan. The contrasts between high chivalric rhetoric and lowly details are hilarious, and this remains among the most disputed episodes of part two. But by now we should recognize Cervantes’s ongoing contrast between the modern world of money and the outmoded world of chivalric fantasy, as well as that between our material world and metaphysical places like Purgatory and Heaven. Is the Cave of Montesinos Hell or just everyday life? After all, do enchanted people or spirits really need loans?

Let’s review

Instrucciones:

Here, you will find an illustration by Christopher Roelofs representing chapter 1 of the second part of Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes.

Ask interesting questions, formulate relevant comments, and, more than anything, respond to some of your classmates’ contributions:

Which characters appear in the image?

What is the symbolic significance of the shown elements, actions, and forms?



Course activitiesPart IIChapters 01 - 02

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UFM New Media productionUniversidad Francisco Marroquín

Project Management Stephanie FallaText Author Eric Clifford GrafCopy Editing Ainara Herrán Andrea M. Castelluccio Pedagogical Coordinator Lisa QuanIlustrations Gabriella Noriega Sergio Miranda Christopher RoelofsLayout Dagoberto GrajedaWebsite donquijote.ufm.eduDirection Calle Manuel F. Ayau (6ta Calle final), zona 10 Guatemala, Guatemala 01010Phone number (+502) 2338-7849

Guatemala, agosto 2016

This project has been possible thanks to a donationwe have received from John Templeton Foundation.

The opinions expressed by the author is his responsibility and donot necessarily reflect the John Templeton Foundation point ofview.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Copying, distribution and public communication is allowed,providing that the acknowledgement of the work is maintained and it is not used for business. If it is transformed or a secondary work is generated, it can only be distributed with an identical license.

CREDITS

http://donquijote.ufm.edu/

Education

Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha, Part II - chapters 1 - 23 - donquijote.ufm.edu/en