Don Quijote Wins by a Nose

Abstract

DON Quijote's victory over the Caballero de los Espejos (Sanson Carrasco) has generally been considered the originating impulse for the adventures of Don II. Had Sanson been victorious, as he expected, he would have required that don honor his demand to return home as the price of defeat. In an essay of a few years ago, J. B. Avalle-Arce goes back a bit further and seeks to establish the initial thrust of the second part in Sanson Carrasco's broken promise to don Quijote. In effect, after the knight informs Sanson that he plans a third sally and asks him not to divulge such plans, the though he promises to keep the secret, actually confers with the barber and the curate in order to devise some means of bringing the knight back home. Avalle-Arce maintains that the fateful words '[t]odo lo prometio Carrasco' ... [es] de fundamental importancia en el desarrollo de los planes para la tercera salida de don Quijote (2), adding that this broken promise is the razon de ser de la segunda (2). I would add that this is true in a general sense, but that don had already clearly determined to sally forth (the curate and the barber guessed as much in chapter i). Sancho himself announces that he and his master will give Cide Hamete plenty to write about. Whereupon, as he hears Rocinante's neighing, don Quijote: determino de hacer de alli a tres o cuatro dias otra salida; y declarando su intento al bachiller, le pidio consejo por que parte comenzaria su jornada; el cual respondio que era su parecer que fuese al reino de Aragon, y a la ciudad de Zaragoza, adonde de alli a pocos dias se habian de hacer unas solenisimas justas por la fiesta de San Jorge, en las cuales podria ganar fama sobre todos los caballeros aragoneses, que seria ganarla sobre todos los del mundo. (482-83) Sanson Carrasco is here encouraging don merely out of mischievousness, since he hasn't as yet conferred with the priest and the barber on how to bring don back home. He is driven by deceit and the wish to have fun at the knight's expense. Actually, Sanson Carrasco is the first of several readers of Don I (including, extrafictionally, Avellaneda) who want to become authors of Don Quijote, but whose plans prove unequal to the protagonist's lability. By the time Sanson is successful in chapter lxiv (as the Caballero de la Blanca Luna), Dulcinea's tenacious enchantment has almost exhausted don Quijote's imaginative energies. As to the priest and barber, there is no mention of their having read the first part (it may not have reached the provinces; Sanson comes with the news of the book, but may not have a copy himself). Their conversation with don deals with his present condition and personal memories of the immediate past, i.e., their participation at the end of part I. Because the priest's wide-ranging reading was established in his escrutinio of don Quijote's library (1, 6), it would be natural for him to have read it. Don Quijote, of course, doesn't want to read it-he will also merely glance at Avellaneda's version, in chapter lix, just enough to point out some of its flaws-once he hears about it from Sancho and Sanson Carrasco. From a practical point of view, Cervantes may have wanted to move on and introduce Sanson as the new (initial and final) foil to don Quijote's madness (as the priest was in part I). Of course neither he, nor other readers of Part I, such as the duke and duchess, are capable of moving beyond don Quijote's armor to the shifting ambivalences within. Their reading does not allow for the negative capability now embodied by both don and Sancho, and which has been developing at least since the episodes of the Sierra Morena in part I. Both Avalle-Arce's view that part I originates in a broken promise and my own sense that a pall of deceit overshadows not only those exchanges but the entire beginning of the second part, including the episode of the Knight of the Mirrors, address a shift in how the text presents don Quijote. …