First Publication: 1605-1615, by Juan de la Cuesta
Full Original Title: El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha
“Don Quixote stands at the head of a long line of fictions of which fictionality itself is the principal substance. Don Quixote has read himself into madness by reading too many books of chivalry, and so sets out to emulate the knights of old, first by getting himself some armour (out of pasteboard) and a steed (a broken down nag), and then by getting himself knighted. He goes to an inn, which he thinks a castle, meets prostitutes whom he thinks high-born laides, addresses them and the innkeeper, who is a thief, in language so literary that they cannot understand it, and then seeks to get himself knighted by standing vigil all night over his armour. Apart from the burlesque parody of romances of chivalry, the the ludicrous transformation of the sacred rituals and spaces of knighthood into their ad hoc material equivalent parallels a similar desacralizing going on Europe at the time.
In all this it is the knowing reader rather than the characters or the action that is the implied subject of address. Indeed, Cervantes here invents the novel from itself, by inventing the reader.
Reading begins with the Prologue’s address to the “idle” reader, and by implication extends throughout the first book, as Quixote’s friends attempt to cure his madness by burning his books to stop him reading. In the process we meet readers, and occasions for reading, of all kinds. In 1615, Cervantes published a second in which Don Quixote becomes not the character reading but the character read as many of the people he meets have read Book I know all about him and his non-reading sidekick Sancho Panza. Indeed this combination of the always already read and the force of perpetual reinvention is what continues to draw the reader in.” (JP)
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