Description:

Publicada su segunda parte con el título de El ingenioso caballero Don Quijote de la Mancha en 1615, diez años después de la primera parte, durante los últimos años de vida del autor, en parte como respuesta a la falsa segunda parte del Quijote de Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda en 1614, acerca la cual Cervantes escribió irónicamente en el Prólogo. Es la obra literaria más influyente no solo de la Era de Oro de la Literatura Española, pero también de toda literatura en la lengua española. El Quijote es una obra fundadora de la Literatura Occidental, siendo parte del Canon Occidental, siendo considerada la novela moderna, además de ser la más leída después de la Biblia. Es la primera obra genuinamente desmitificadora de la tradición caballeresca y cortés por su tratamiento burlesco. Representa la primera novela moderna y la primera novela polifónica; como tal, ejerció un enorme influjo en toda la narrativa europea.

El título de esta fue El Ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha y consta de 74 capítulos. En el prólogo, Cervantes se defiende irónicamente de las acusaciones del lopista Avellaneda y se lamenta de la dificultad del arte de novelar: la fantasía se vuelve tan insaciable como un perro hambriento. En la novela se juega con diversos planos de la realidad al incluir, dentro de ella, la edición de la primera parte del Quijote y, posteriormente, la de la apócrifa Segunda parte, que los personajes han leído. Cervantes se defiende de las inverosimilitudes que se han encontrado en la primera parte, como la misteriosa reaparición del rucio de Sancho después de ser robado por Ginés de Pasamonte y el destino de los dineros encontrados en una maleta de Sierra Morena, etc.

Así pues, en esta segunda entrega don Quijote y Sancho son conscientes del éxito editorial de la primera parte de sus aventuras y ya son célebres. De hecho, algunos de los personajes que aparecerán en lo sucesivo han leído el libro y los reconocen. Es más, en un alarde de clarividencia, tanto Cervantes como el propio don Quijote manifiestan que la novela pasará a convertirse en un clásico de la literatura y que la figura del hidalgo se verá a lo largo de los siglos como símbolo de La Mancha.

La obra empieza con el renovado propósito de don Quijote de volver a las andadas y sus preparativos para ello, no sin la fiera resistencia de su sobrina y el ama. El cura y el barbero tienen que confesar la locura de don Quijote y urden, junto al bachiller Sansón Carrasco, un nuevo plan que les permita recluir a don Quijote por un largo tiempo en su aldea. Por su parte, don Quijote renueva los ofrecimientos a Sancho prometiéndole la ansiada ínsula a cambio de su compañía. Sancho reacciona obsesionándose con la idea de ser gobernador y cambiar de estatus social, lo que provoca la burla de su esposa Teresa Panza. Con conocimiento de sus convecinos don Quijote y Sancho inician su tercera salida.

Review

The hardest thing to say about Don Quixote is the thing most readers already think they know: that it is a book about a madman who mistakes windmills for giants. The phrase passes from hand to hand as a shorthand, a cultural token, and it makes the novel safe. But Cervantes did not write a safe book. He wrote a book in which the central question — whether a belief held sincerely enough becomes a kind of truth or remains delusion no matter how firmly held — is never settled, not after the windmills, not after the lions, not after the Knight of the White Moon throws the protagonist into the sand at Barcelona and exacts the vow of retirement that breaks the chivalric spell. The novel is a parodic machine built to destroy a genre, yes; the prologue says so openly, announcing the intention to topple "la mal fundada máquina destos caballerescos libros." But parody was the scaffolding, not the building. What Cervantes erected on that scaffold is a philosophical comedy in which the cruelty latent in spectatorship, the non-obligation of the beloved, the impossibility of verifying virtue without destroying it, and the dignity of a freely chosen vocation all receive sustained and unresolved interrogation. The mockers and the mocked, by the final page, "no estaban dos dedos de parecer tontos." Everyone is implicated, including the reader who has been laughing.

The premise is simple enough that it fits in one sentence. An aging hidalgo of La Mancha — Cervantes refuses to name the village, that famous opening "de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme" — saturates himself with chivalric romances until "se le secó el celebro," his brain dries out, and he resolves to revive knight-errantry in the flesh. He refurbishes rusted armor, renames his nag Rocinante, elects a sturdy peasant girl as the lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and rides out to right wrongs in a world that contains no castles or enchanters, only inns, merchants, muleteers, and other people's indifferent bodies. The engine of the book is the collision between his romance-shaped perception and a stubbornly prosaic reality that consistently answers him with cudgels. But the deeper architecture is Cervantes's trick of folding the book's own making into its matter. The narrative breaks off mid-duel with a Basque in Part I and resumes only after the narrator claims to have bought Arabic "cartapacios" in the Toledo market — the history of Cide Hamete Benengeli, translated by a hired morisco, an intrusive chronicler who will periodically apostrophize his own poverty and complain of being confined to "una historia tan seca y tan limitada." By the time Part II opens and the Duke and Duchess receive Don Quixote and Sancho because they "habían leído la primera parte desta historia," the characters are aware of their own book, and the book is aware of its counterfeit — the apocryphal Second Part by the Aragonese of Tordesillas, which the genuine Don Quixote will denounce at an inn, reroute to Barcelona to discredit, and finally see pelted by devils in Altisidora's vision of hell. The boundary between fiction and the readers who consume it has collapsed entirely. What began as a parody of romance becomes a meta-fictional inquiry into the status of fictions, into what literature owes its reader — pleasure, truth, moral instruction — and into whether an authentic fiction can be distinguished from a counterfeit at all.

The early movement of the book is pure comic destruction. Don Quixote's first solitary sally ends with a beating by a merchant's mule-driver and a neighbor carrying him home reciting a ballad from the ground. The priest and barber's escrutinio of his library — a book-burning with commentary, one of the earliest and most enjoyable pieces of literary criticism in the language — spares only Amadís de Gaula, Palmerín de Inglaterra, and the wonderfully earthy Tirante el Blanco. On the second sally, with the peasant Sancho Panza recruited as squire by the promise of an ínsula to govern, the iconic misreadings arrive rapid-fire: windmills are giants ("non fuyades, cobardes y viles criaturas"), a barber's brass basin is Mambrino's helmet, two dust clouds are rival armies that resolve into flocks of sheep. But even here Cervantes is doing something stranger than slapstick. The windmill adventure, which occupies a single chapter, is immediately rationalized as the work of the sage Frestón, who transformed the giants to rob the knight of glory. The pattern is set: every disenchantment is absorbed into a new enchantment, every empirical defeat becomes a narrative victory, and the reader is forced to notice that Don Quixote's epistemology — his way of knowing the world through the categories of romance — is internally consistent. It explains everything, including its own failures, and no amount of evidence can falsify it. This is a radically modern insight dressed in rustic comedy.

The book deepens decisively when it begins admitting genuine pathos and ethical argument into the comic frame. The goatherd feast, with Don Quixote's discourse on the Golden Age — "Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquéllos a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados... entonces los que en ella vivían ignoraban estas dos palabras de tuyo y mío" — is more than nostalgia. It sets a classical philosophical standard against which the iron age of the inns and muleteers will be measured, and it is spoken by a madman. Then comes Marcela. At Grisóstomo's funeral, the shepherdess blamed for a student's death by love appears over his grave and delivers an oration that is the novel's central ethical statement. "Yo nací libre, y para poder vivir libre escogí la soledad de los campos. Los árboles destas montañas son mi compañía, las claras aguas destos arroyos mis espejos." She refuses the claim that her beauty obligates her to love anyone, argues that the beloved has no debt to the lover, and walks back into the wilderness unrefuted. The episode is a pastoral eclogue turned inside out — Petrarchan convention is made to answer to a free woman's reasoning — and it establishes a register the novel will return to whenever it needs to remind the reader that comedy and cruelty are neighbors. The Sierra Morena sequence intensifies this. Cardenio, the noble madman driven to intermittent grief-madness by a real betrayal, is set beside Don Quixote's bookish lunacy. His interrupted tale of Luscinda and Don Fernando joins with Dorotea's story of seduction and abandonment, and the two wronged lovers — one mad, one disguised — converge at the inn that Don Quixote insists is a castle. Dorotea, well-read in romance, willingly impersonates Princess Micomicona to lure the knight home, becoming an author of fictions rather than only their victim. Here the meta-literary and the ethical braid together: a woman wronged by a nobleman's "free" desire defends her honor by manipulating the same romance conventions that shaped the delusions of everyone at the inn.

The embedded novella of the Curioso impertinente, read aloud while Don Quixote sleeps, is the book's darkest philosophical chamber. Anselmo, a contented husband, insists on testing his wife Camila's virtue by having his best friend Lotario seduce her. Lotario's response is one of the most compressed moral arguments in the text: "Tú me tienes por amigo y quieres quitarme la honra, cosa que es contra toda amistad; y aun no sólo pretendes esto, sino que procuras que yo te la quite a ti." The test, as Lotario predicts, succeeds in destroying precisely what it sought to confirm. Camila falls, Anselmo dies of grief, and the story stands as an inquisition into the impossibility of verifying virtue without annihilating it. It is the inverse of Don Quixote's madness. Where the knight distorts reality by believing too much, Anselmo destroys it by refusing to trust what he already knows is true. Both are forms of the same epistemological hubris, and the novella sits inside the frame like a warning that the comedy outside is the bright side of a very dark coin.

Part II is a different book, and it knows it. The first part had already been printed and read; the Duke and Duchess have consumed it and stage an elaborate theatre of burlas precisely because they recognize Don Quixote as the protagonist of a popular fiction. The entertainment they mount — the Merlín-and-devil decree that Dulcinea can be disenchanted only by Sancho's 3,300 self-inflicted lashes, the Clavileño flight on a wooden horse propelled by bellows and lit tow while the riders never leave the garden, the Trifaldi episode with its twelve bearded dueñas, Sancho's appointment to the mock ínsula Barataria — is technically brilliant and morally appalling. The Duchess extracts from Sancho the confession that he knows Dulcinea is not enchanted, that he invented the peasant-girl story himself, and then deploys that knowledge to tighten the screws of the prank. The bell-and-cat fright leaves Don Quixote scratched and humiliated. Altisidora serenades him with feigned passion, undergoes an elaborate staged death and resurrection with Minos and Radamanto as judges and Sancho's pinches as the price of revival, and finally drops the pretense in a torrent of insults: "Todo lo que habéis visto esta noche ha sido fingido." The aristocrats are bored, rich, and cruel, and they are "tan locos como los burlados" — as mad as those they mock, and less innocent. Cide Hamete's closing verdict on the dukes is the book's verdict on a whole category of reader: the cultured spectator who enjoys the show without recognizing that the show implicates the spectator.

And yet the Ducal episodes also contain some of the book's most serious thinking. Don Quixote's defense of knighthood against the austere churchman who denounces him at the ducal table is a genuine piece of moral rhetoric. "Unos van por el ancho campo de la ambición soberbia; otros, por el de la adulación servil y baja; otros, por el de la hipocresía engañosa, y algunos, por el de la verdadera religión; pero yo, inclinado de mi estrella, voy por la angosta senda de la caballería andante." The man who tilts at windmills has a clearer sense of his own vocation — and a more honest account of the alternatives — than the cleric who sneers at him. Sancho's governorship of Barataria is the book's sustained engagement with the mirror-of-princes tradition, and it plays out as a vindication of rustic wisdom over learned theory. He adjudicates the tailor's caps, finds the gold hidden in a cane, dismisses the false-rape plaintiff, handles the bridge-juror paradox, and drafts sensible ordinances — all while Doctor Pedro Recio starves him under the guise of medical prudence. When he finally abandons the governorship — "Desnudo nací, desnudo me hallo: ni pierdo ni gano" — the formula he repeats is a piece of Stoic wisdom the book has earned. He is not defeated; he sees that office is a cage, and he walks out free. Don Quixote's meditation on liberty after leaving the ducal castle extends the theme: "La libertad, Sancho, es uno de los más preciosos dones que a los hombres dieron los cielos; con ella no pueden igualarse los tesoros que encierra la tierra ni el mar encubre; por la libertad, así como por la honra, se puede y debe aventurar la vida." The irony is that the Duke's hospitality felt like captivity, and the open road is the only freedom. The ethical core of the novel is a Renaissance-Stoic insistence on the self as the one thing that cannot be taken — except that in Don Quixote's case, the one thing that should perhaps be taken is precisely the self he has chosen.

The final movement toward Barcelona sharpens this dilemma to a point. The encounter with the apocryphal Second Part at an inn — two gentlemen reading the false history aloud, Don Quixote correcting its error about Sancho's wife's name — is Cervantes's most audacious meta-fictional gambit. The characters must assert that they are the "verdaderos" against a printed double. In Barcelona, Don Antonio Moreno stages the enchanted head that answers all questions — revealed by the narrator, but not to the characters, as a tin speaking-tube running to a hidden nephew — and parades Don Quixote through the city with a placard reading "Éste es don Quijote de la Mancha." The burla has migrated from the ducal estate to the public square, and the knight is now a civic attraction. Then, on the beach, Sansón Carrasco, disguised as the Knight of the White Moon, unhorses him and exacts the vow to retire from arms for a year. Don Quixote, from the ground, refuses even so to deny Dulcinea's beauty, speaking "como si hablara dentro de una tumba." Carrasco's aim is therapeutic — to restore a good man to sanity by force — but Don Antonio reproaches him: "Dios os perdone... en querer volver cuerdo al más gracioso loco que hay en él." The question of whether curing the madness is a benefaction or a theft is left open, and the novel never resolves it. Don Quixote, defeated, denies blind Fortune in favor of providence — "no hay fortuna en el mundo, ni las cosas que en él suceden... vienen acaso" — yet also insists "cada uno es artífice de su ventura. Yo lo he sido de la mía, pero no con la prudencia necesaria." Agency and determination, self-authorship and divine order, are held together without reconciliation. He proposes a pastoral year as "el pastor Quijotiz," with Sancho renamed "Pancino," and the prospect of an Arcadian retirement is already shadowed by the enforced sanity that awaits.

One register the book opens and cannot close is the tragedy of belonging and exile. Ricote, Sancho's Morisco neighbor, appears on the road disguised as a German pilgrim, weeping for Spain as his "patria natural" while calling the expulsion "heroica resolución del gran Filipo Tercero." Grief and assent are held in the same voice, unresolved. His daughter Ana Félix, a devout Christian Morisca captured as a Turkish corsair, insists she is "cristiana... de las verdaderas y católicas" though born of Morisco parents, and her lover Don Gaspar Gregorio must be ransomed from Algiers. The episode admits historical tragedy into the comic frame — a Counter-Reformation Spain that expels its own children even as they profess the faith the expulsion claims to defend — and then the frame closes again, the galley visit ends, the knight and squire ride on. Cervantes does not resolve the contradiction because it is not resolvable. He simply places it beside the enchanted head and the speaking-tube, beside the Duke's marionettes and Altisidora's feigned death, and lets the reader register that some pranks are mounted by powers that do not take their victims' consent.

The novel belongs to several intellectual traditions at once, and its refusal to be confined to any one of them is part of what keeps it alive. The Erasmian praise-of-folly tradition is its deepest comic root — the inversion by which the fool exposes the worldly-wise, the suspicion of pedantry and vain curiosity, the prologue's satire of fake citations and noble sonnets. The Aristotelian-Horatian debate over verisimilitude runs through the canon of Toledo's critique, the innkeeper's defense of his books, and the print-shop insistence that "historias fingidas" must approach "la verdad o la semejanza della." The mirror-of-princes tradition is staged and tested in Barataria. The Petrarchan-Neoplatonic love tradition is the object of Marcela's demolition and Don Quixote's platonic fidelity to Dulcinea — a woman he admits is the coarse peasant Aldonza Lorenzo, and whom he loves "como conviene que sea," as she ought to be, a conviction the text refuses either to confirm or to mock. And the Neo-Stoic ethics of the free, self-governing soul runs from the Golden Age speech to Sancho's renunciation of office to the Barcelona meditations on liberty and providence. The novel is all of these things because it is a book about the act of reading itself — about what happens when texts colonize a mind, when a fiction is believed, when a counterfeit circulates alongside the genuine, and when the cure is, in its own way, as violent as the disease.

The weaknesses of the book are real and they are structural. The embedded tales, for all their individual power, slow the main narrative to a crawl in the middle of Part I, and the modern reader may feel the inn sequences — however brilliantly chaotic — overstay their welcome. The Ducal burlas in Part II are repetitive in conception even as they escalate in cruelty; the point about aristocratic spectatorship is made early and remade often. Cervantes's prose, in the original, is dense with constructions that can feel baroque to a reader accustomed to leaner narrative, and the sheer proliferation of minor characters — Eugenio the goatherd, Don Diego de Miranda, Claudia Jerónima, Tosilos the lacayo — sometimes threatens to dissolve the central dyad of knight and squire into a picaresque parade. But these are the costs of the method. The book is a polyphonic machine designed to admit every register, every voice, every genre it can absorb, and its sprawl is the condition of its depth. You cannot have Marcela's oration and Anselmo's catastrophe and Ricote's lament without the structural looseness that makes room for them.

What Don Quixote most distinctively is, beneath all the parody and meta-fiction, is an inquiry into the ethics of conviction. Don Quixote believes. The Duke and Duchess do not believe; they only stage belief for sport. Sancho believes just enough to follow, disbelieves just enough to survive, and ends by believing in his own capacity for justice. Sansón Carrasco believes in the cure, and Don Antonio believes the cure is worse than the disease. The reader is asked to decide where to stand, and the book supplies no answer. That is why it has outlasted every attempt to reduce it to a moral. It is a book for anyone who has ever wondered whether the sane are really saner than the mad, whether the cruel are really better than the foolish, and whether a fiction lived sincerely might be truer than a fact merely endured. It is, among other things, the funniest long novel ever written — but the laughter is a door, not a destination.