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Wednesday, November 9, 2011

All you need to know about class relations in Don Quixote

Posted yesterday on why Sancho Panza's donkey has no name - and last night read further into Miguel de Cervantes's "Don Quixote" and came upon an interesting section - SP and DQ are invited into the estate of a wealthy Spaniard whom they meet on their travels and he treats them as visiting celebrities, seating DQ at the had of the table, and so on - it's all part of a cruel trick, in that he and his family have read the first volume of DQ and are completely enthralled with his mad antics and with SP's naivete and homespun wisdom laced with proverbs and malaprops - another one of the meta-fictional elements of this novels, in which characters in the novel are recognized by others as literary figures - in other words, characters in the 2nd half of the novel have "read" the first half of the novel, which strangely makes the 2nd half of the novel more "real" in that the characters recognize the fictive quality of the first half - but then how do the fictive characters manage to infiltrate part 2? Anyway, what's striking about the visit to the estate: SP suddenly remembers that he forgot to take care of his donkey and asks a duenna (a rather regal older woman) if she could find someone to feed his donkey or maybe she could take care of him herself - of course she is morally outraged that someone would have the temerity to suggest she should take care of an animal. Here, again, we see the tender humanity and sympathy of SP, who worries about the comfort of his animal - he doesn't "name" the animal and anthropomorphize him but he appropriately cares about the animal's comfort and well-being; but the wealthy lady is appalled that anyone could ask her to look after an animal - that's something servants, or peasants, do. She probably names all her pets, but when it comes to taking care of them she wouldn't lift a finger. In a microcosm, in a few sentences, this tells you all you need to know about class relations in Cervantes's time - and still?

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