Cervantes: Destructive Critic or Continuer of Old Traditions  Research Paper

Quijote

Cervantes' Don Quijote is, above all, the story of a reader. The real question of the novel perhaps is why more readers do not behave like Quijote himself, and attempt to act out the things that they find so engaging in print. I would like to explore the way in which the main character's status as a reader in Cervantes' novel gives some clue to us as readers as to how we ought to behave. It seems evident that Cervantes' strategy in the novel is largely rhetorical and ironic: he uses the language of the books Quijote reads, while imparting an ironic distance to how this language fits into the actual world where Quijote finds himself. But the ultimate result for Cervantes' reader is to get a deeper form of literary enjoyment than Quijote is capable of: we are inside and outside the satisfactions of the storytelling at the same time, while Quijote is trapped inside them.

The first area of Don Quijote's actions as reader that we must explore is that of pure rhetoric. In other words, Quijote's world is, to a large degree, constructed out of language -- he does not need to hallucinate when he can narrate his own passage through the world, and act as the recipient of his own rhetorical strategies. We can see this very clearly in his early invocation in the novel of the lady to whom he has chivalrously pledged his affections, Dulcinea:

"O Princess Dulcinea, mistress of this captive heart! Thou hast done me grievous harm in bidding me farewell and reproving me with the harsh affliction of commanding that I not appear before thy sublime beauty. May it please thee, Senora, to recall this thy subject heart, which suffers countless trials for the sake of thy love."

He strung these together with other foolish remarks, all in the manner his books had taught him and imitating their language as much as he could. As a result his pace was so slow, and the sun rose so quickly and ardently, that it would have melted his brains if he had any. (25)

What is worth noting immediately about this passage is the profound rhetorical disconnection between Quijote's own means of self-expression, and the narrator's way of telling the story. Quijote's language is high-flown and -- in Grossman's translation -- slightly archaic, with its use of "thy" and its rhetorical use of apostrophe to address Dulcinea who is not actually there. The narrator's language by contrast is earthy, but is also highly judgmental and moralistic: twice in two sentences we are reminded that the Don is an idiot. But is he? He is arguably capable of expressing himself in a higher rhetorical register than the narrator seems willing to attempt, which does not suggest stupidity. Instead the stupidity seems to come from the imitative element: this seems to be Cervantes' point in making…