The Devil in Don Quixote

Abstract

Cervantes' declared aim in Don Quixote was to ‘derribar la máquina mal fundada de estos caballerescos libros’. His use of the word ‘máquina’ indicates his awareness that the libros de caballerías conformed to a set of generic conventions, and he chose to destroy that ‘máquina’ through parody—the imitation of a model with the intention of distorting it in order to make it ridiculous. In doing so, however, he was also undermining the ideological scheme which the romances of chivalry were designed to sustain and vindicate. I argue that Cervantes became progressively aware of the implications of the parody he had set in train, which is why he made the Devil intervene at strategic junctures in the unfolding of the story of the mad knight. There are three such interventions: one in the first Part, and two in the second, and they are strategic because they unhinge key elements in the narrative system of chivalric romance and so finally render it inoperative.

Key words:

• Miguel de Cervantes
• Don Quixote
• libros de caballerías
• generic conventions
• parody
• imitation
• romances of chivalry
• Devil
• narrative
• chivalric romance

Notes

1 All page numbers refer to Don Quijote de La Mancha, ed. del Instituto Cervantes dirigida por Francisco Rico, 2 vols (Barcelona: Galaxia Gutenberg. Círculo de Lectores/Centro para la Edición de los Clásicos Españoles, 2005).

2 For a fuller account of these conventions, see Edwin Williamson, The Half-Way House of Fiction: Don Quixote and Arthurian Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 1–28.

3 See Williamson, The Half-Way House of Fiction, 21–23 and 34–35. The interpolation of tales in longer narratives also occurred in other genres, such as pastoral and Byzantine romances, Renaissance epic and, later, picaresque novels, but I am concerned here with entrelacement because Don Quixote is first and foremost a parody of the chivalric romances, even though it may draw here and there on other contemporary genres.

4 Raymond Immerwahr, ‘Structural Symmetry in the Episodic Narratives of Don Quijote, Part One’, Comparative Literature, 10 (1958), 121–33 (p. 129). Anthony Close, Cervantes and the Comic Mind of His Age (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2000), also argued that Cervantes' aim was to ‘co-ordinate’ these ‘romantic stories’ with the ‘comic doings of the mad hidalgo’ in order to ‘synthesize incongruous narrative strands’ (138). For a view consonant with mine, see David Quint, Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of ‘Don Quijote’ (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton U. P., 2003), where he argues that Cervantes promoted ‘novelization’ by using entrelacement to mix genres and create Bakhtinian ‘heteroglossia’ (76–85).

5 For an extended discussion of the insertion of these tales in both parts of the novel, see Edwin Williamson, ‘Romance and Realism in the Interpolated Stories of the Quixote’, Cervantes, 2:1 (1982), 43–67.

6 In The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard U. P., 1976), 46–47, Northrop Frye observed that ‘nineteenth-century writers of romance, or of fiction which is close to romance in its technique, sometimes speak in their prefaces and elsewhere of the greater “liberty” that they feel entitled to take. By liberty they mean a greater designing power, especially in their plot structures. [ … ] In displaced or realistic fiction the author tries to avoid coincidence. That is, he tries to conceal his design, pretending that things are happening out of inherent probability’.

7 Immerwahr, ‘Structural Symmetry’, 134; Javier Herrero, ‘Arcadia's Inferno: Cervantes’ Attack on Pastoral’, BHS, LV:4 (1978), 289–99 (p. 294).

8 I cannot agree with Anthony Close's view that Cervantes could not have intended ‘to create an effect of pathos’ in this scene, and that the ‘calamity [of Dulcinea's “enchantment”] is just a ridiculous misapprehension, born of mad credulity’; see A. J. Close, Miguel de Cervantes: ‘Don Quixote’ (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1990), 97. Already in Part One, the characters at the inn are said to feel ‘lástima’ (I.38, 491–92), and the Canon of Toledo ‘compasión’ (I.49, 615), when they witness the condition of an intelligent man trapped in an absurd madness. If Cervantes had discovered this potential for pathos by the second half of Part One, it is not unwarranted or anachronistic to find pathos in the episode of Dulcinea's enchantment. What we have in Part Two is a much more complex and ambivalent literary invention than allowed for in Close's somewhat dogmatic ‘anti-Romantic’ approach.

9 Salvador de Madariaga, Guía del lector del ‘Quijote’: ensayo psicológico sobre el ‘Quijote’, 2^nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1943 [1^st ed. 1926]), 161, perceived the importance of ambition in Sancho's motivation: ‘Como Dulcinea personifica la gloria para Don Quijote, la ínsula materializa el poder para Sancho’. He also recognized that this lust for power was fuelled by the peasant's greed, but he insisted on a continuing fraternal bond between knight and squire, and so he tried to ‘quijotizar’ Sancho's materialism: ‘No hay en Sancho más materialismo del indispensable al empírico para avanzar paso a paso por el camino de la experiencia, pues no deja de haber cierta elevación en el apetito de riquezas de quien sueña en echar censos, fundar rentas y vivir como un príncipe’ (my emphasis). The peasant's crude material greed (cf. ‘un talego lleno de doblones’) was therefore ‘elevated’ to a more abstract, hence supposedly loftier, ambition—the Quixotic ‘ilusión’ of power: ‘Y es que lo que verdaderamente desea no es riqueza, sino poder’. Madariaga's ‘elevación’ of Sancho in this respect shows how his theory of ‘quijotización’ and ‘sanchificación’ actually curtailed one of his most important critical insights—the rise of Sancho in Part Two.

10 Augustin Redondo, ‘Tradición carnavalesca y creación literaria. Del personaje de Sancho Panza al episodio de la ínsula Barataria en el Quijote’, Bulletin Hispanique, 80:1–2 (1978), 39–70, and Jean Cannavaggio, ‘Las bufonadas palaciegas de Sancho Panza’, in Cervantes: estudios en la víspera de su centenario, ed. Kurt Reichenberger, 2 vols (Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1994), I, 237–58, have compared the Duke's court to a ‘world upside-down’ fostered by a carnivalesque spirit. I broadly agree with this reading, but this ‘world upside-down’ persists within the relationship of the knight and squire well beyond the Duke's palace, thanks to the nature of Merlin's prophecy.

11 For a more detailed discussion of this clash and the subsequent degradation of the relationship, see Edwin Williamson, ‘The Power-Struggle between Don Quixote and Sancho: Four Crises in the Development of the Narrative’, BSS, LXXXIV:7 (2007), 837–58, and ‘La transformación de don Quijote y Sancho en la Segunda Parte’, in Cervantes y los cauces de la novela, ed. Emilio Martínez Mata (Madrid: Visor, 2013), 33–65.

12 Gethin Hughes, ‘The Cave of Montesinos: Don Quixote's Interpretation and Dulcinea's Disenchantment’, BHS, LIV:2 (1977), 107–13, demonstrated how money becomes an increasingly important issue between Sancho and Don Quixote in Part Two. Carroll B. Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World (Urbana/Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2000), 15–36, and Quint, Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times, 158–62, regard this issue as a sign of emergent capitalist relations.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.