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.
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