Citations expressing similar feelings and opinions to those just quoted could be multiplied.¹ Don Quixote is clearly not just another good novel, not even just one among the greatest; it is more than that, if for no other reason than it was the first among the greatest. It did something that no other novel had done before. And that, in itself, was extraordinary. It is therefore generally admitted today that Don Quixote inaugurates the modern novel and becomes its archetype. In some sense, every modern novel worthy of its name is written, as Henry Fielding said of his Joseph Andrews,...

The creative process we have just sketched cannot be easily reduced to a subjective experience of self-satisfaction and reassuring feelings of accomplishment. For Cervantes it must have been something rather ambivalent, a mixture of satisfaction at his artistic feat, and a sense of uneasiness, not so much about the fate of his novel after publication, but more deeply about the very meaning and significance of what his own story had taught him about himself and about the making of it. As we pointed out, in a novel so prophetic and defining of the new spirit of the novel, the fact...

In reference to the first picaresque novel (or the immediate precursor of the picaresque novel, in the view of some), Lazarillo de Tormes, it has been said that

[e]l personaje del pícaro . . . en su primera encarnación emerge, por supuesto, de un fondo de historietas populares. . . . Pero, a partir del momento en que Lázaro de Tormes dice “yo,” es decir, en el momento mismo en que nace a la literatura, cesa de pertenecer al folklore: rompiendo con su anterior existencia de personaje de chascarrillo, se convierte en el portavoz de una forma de pensar seria...

Opinions about Quevedo’s Buscon tend to be extreme.¹ Michael Holquist, editor of Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination, calls it “one of the most heartlessly cruel books ever written” (Bakhtin, 163, note). On the other hand, Fernando Lázaro Carreter, a leading Quevedo scholar, speaks of Quevedo’s artistic intention as one of sheer linguistic virtuosity and ingenious, clever manipulation of literary language for its own sake. His emotion is purely aesthetic:

Quevedo experimenta un sentimiento puro de creador; digámoslo sin rodeos: un sentimiento estético. El Buscón es una novela estetizante. Un ajusticiamiento, una profanación, un adulterio, son hechos que nos conmueven si nuestro...

The traditional fate of the fool in general, and the madman in particular, was no better than that of the rogue. In fact, it could be argued that it was much worse. Madness has usually been seen as a more radical form of marginal existence (in the sense of differentiation or distance from the social norm) than roguery. And in premodern society this deeper marginality automatically meant a deeper association with the old sacred. The process of desacralization that brings about modernity had to operate at an even deeper level.

In other words, if it was difficult enough to rescue...

That conversation took place in Barcelona, following the defeat of Don Quixote at the hands of the Knight of the White Moon, that is, Bachelor Sampson Carrasco. On his way back from Barcelona, Sampson stops by the Duke’s palace and explains to the court what had happened:

[He] said that Don Quixote was already on his way back to fulfill his pledge like a good knight errant, and retire to his village for a year, during which time, said the Bachelor, he might possibly be cured of his madness. It was that in fact which had caused him to assume...

Let us now turn to Unamuno, who is a much more complex case than Castro. Our own reading of Don Quixote from now on will be guided in part by our analysis of Unamuno’s quijotismo.

While Américo Castro appears to be totally impervious to the value of Don Quixote’s innocence, Unamuno was clearly quite sensitive to it. He spoke repeatedly of Don Quixote’s goodness and profound lack of malice. But that only served to make Don Quixote’s madness appear in his eyes even more heroic, because Don Quixote’s innocence—Unamuno thought—made his madness heroic in the eyes of God....

Don Quixote’s model is radiant Amadís, “the pole star, the morning star, the sun of all valiant knights and lovers.” However, his explanation should not fool anybody, nor should we make light of it and charge it all to Cervantine irony without further ado. Don Quixote’s imitation of Amadís clearly goes far beyond the limits of a master-apprentice relationship. In a genuine healthy relationship between master and apprentice there is a third element, the object of the imitation (the painting, in Don Quixote’s own example), with a reality of its own, independent from both master and apprentice. The latter imitates...

As we were saying before, as far as Unamuno, creator of Abel Sánchez, is concerned, the heroic sublimity of mad Don Quixote would shine with particular intensity in the eyes of his tragic Cain-like character Joaquín Monegro. Don Quixote is a hero not in the eyes of Abel (who, in Cervantes-like fashion, might even pretend to be sorry that Don Quixote is mad, without understanding a thing about the sublimity of his madness), but in the eyes of Cain. There is little doubt that Unamuno would be more than willing to accept an underlying similarity, a subterranean link, between his...

In the Italian passage quoted above from Pietro Bembo’s dialogues Gli Asolani, the character speaking, Perottino, is violently against love because he suffers grievously from it. Some other character will answer him by saying that what he feels is not love because love is rational and temperate. If he really loved, he would not suffer for things that have not happened, or desire and look for that which he cannot have. “Because . . . it is a most stupid thing and intemperate beyond measure to keep on looking for and desiring that which cannot be had as if it...

We return now to Don Quixote on the road. He is out in search of adventures. An adventure is a challenge, a challenging obstacle in his path. He is looking for challenges. Occasionally he may become impatient if he does not find one as quickly as he would like:

Almost all that day he rode without encountering anything of note, which reduced him to despair, for he longed to meet straightway someone against whom he could try the strength of his strong arm. (1.2.37)

And we know, of course, that most of these challenges end in failure. It is equally...

We have already alluded to the functional similarity—first noticed years ago by J. B. Avalle Arce—between the magical solutions that occur at sage Felicia’s palace in the pastoral Dianas, especially Montemayor’s Diana, and the accumulation of providential coincidences that occur in Juan Palomeque’s inn in the Quixote. These coincidences will provide the opportunity for the happy resolution of the problems in which Cervantes’s lovers Cardenio, Luscinda, Don Fernando, and Dorotea have become entangled. It could even be said that we are dealing with a deliberate response by Cervantes to that part of Montemayor’s Diana that he did not...

The baciyelmo episode is part of a larger pattern in the novel that becomes especially conspicuous in Part 2. As Don Quixote parades his peculiar kind of madness in the most diverse settings, it becomes increasingly clear that people who are attracted to him not as a person full of good sense in everything unrelated to knight-errantry, but as a madman, become contaminated by his madness. As “a certain Castilian” shouts at Don Quixote in the streets of Barcelona, “You’re a madman. . . . But you have the knack of turning everyone who has to do with you into...