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Dismantling Heroism: The Exhaustion of War in Don Quijote

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Barbara Fuchs
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Extract

      A la guerra me lleva
      mi necesidad;
      si tuviera dineros
      no fuera en verdad.
      My poverty takes me off to war;
      if I had money, believe me, I wouldn�t go.

War is everywhere and nowhere in don quijote. It consumes don quijote's thoughts but seldom appears in the guise he expects. War animates the protagonist's most elaborate, potent fantasy of self-aggrandizement and social climbing, in which he lends his strong arm to a king to help him fight his wars and is rewarded with the king's daughter (Cervantes, Don Quijote 211–15). Yet as Don Quijote sets about trying to make his name through daring feats, actual war seems both elusive and overwhelming. Instead, Cervantes gives us a series of fantasies that ironize the conventional representation of heroism in a romance key, registering the anachronism of the single knight in a world marked by the collective allegiances of epic. At the same time, through a series of burlesque battles, the text reflects on the incommensurability of humanist pieties about war and its actual experience. Finally, in its engagement with problems of religious and ethnic difference, Don Quijote registers the contrast between war as it might be and the conflicts Spain actually experienced both within and beyond its borders.

Type
Correspondents at Large
Information
PMLA , Volume 124 , Issue 5: Special Topic War , October 2009 , pp. 1842 - 1846
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2009

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References

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