Alfredo Palacios: Quixote documentary microseries 4/5

-You see,” replied Sancho, “that those that look like giants there are not giants, but windmills, and what look like arms on them are the blades, which, turned by the wind, make the millstone go.”[8]

Don Quixote, seeing Sancho so badly beaten, charged at the one who had struck him, spear in hand; but so many were in the way that it was not possible to avenge him, but, seeing that a cloud of stones was raining down upon him, and that a thousand crossbows and no fewer arquebuses were threatening him, he turned the reins to Rocinante, and as fast as he could gallop away from among them…. Part Two: “Chapter XXVII.”[16]

Learn how to draw Don Quixote step by step.

A fundamental characteristic of the methods of writing and revising the First Part of Don Quixote is the tension between the development of the main plot and the elaboration of individual episodes and intercalated stories. Some critics believe that Cervantes’ mental image of his story progressed unit by unit, episode by episode, especially from chapter 9 onwards. José Manuel Martín Morán has argued that Cervantes was materially incapable of imagining such an extensive plot as a coherent whole: through forms of oral composition, he would have employed a method close to collage, a loose juxtaposition of episodes and stories, with which he would have formed a continuous narrative. Cervantes’ imagination preferred the episode as the basic unit of composition rather than the unified plot; this would help to explain the proliferation, throughout the First Part, of intercalated stories, connected in a very slight way with the adventures of Don Quixote. Similarly, this hypothesis helps to account for Cervantes’ careless revision: simply put, when the writer was concentrating on writing or correcting a particular chapter, he was unable to retain a coherent and detailed picture of the whole story.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra Read-A-Thon, Don

He had many times competition with the priest of his place (who was a learned man graduated in Sigüenza), about which had been a better knight, Palmerín of England or Amadís de Gaula; But Master Nicolas, a barber of the same town, said that none of them could match the knight of Phoebus, and that if anyone could be compared to him, it was Don Galaor, brother of Amadis de Gaula, because he had a very good condition for everything; that he was not a squeamish knight, nor as tearful as his brother, and that in bravery he was not far behind him.

In fact, having now completed his judgment, he came to the strangest thought that ever gave madman in the world, and that was that it seemed to him convenient and necessary, both for the increase of his honor, and for the service of his republic, to become a knight-errant, and go around the world with his arms and horse to seek adventures, and to exercise in all that he had read, that knights-errant were exercised, undoing all kinds of grievance, and putting himself in occasions and dangers, where, finishing them, he would gain eternal name and fame.

Terry Gilliam The man who killed Don Quixote

In two terms is summed up everything that has been asked for our people, everything that almost all of us have asked for them, with more or less awareness of what we were asking for. Those two terms are: European and modern. “We have to be modern”, “we have to be European”, “we have to modernize”, “we have to go with the century”, “we have to Europeanize”; such are the clichés.

The term European expresses a vague idea, very vague, excessively vague, but the idea expressed by the term modern is much vaguer. And if we put them together, it seems as if two vaguenesses must be mutually concrete and limited, and that the expression “modern European” must be clearer than either of the two terms that compose it; but perhaps it is at bottom vaguer than them.

I have heard similar things said of Augustine, the great African, a soul of fire that poured out in waves of rhetoric, of twists of phrase, of antitheses, of paradoxes and ingenuities. St. Augustine was a Gongorian and a Conceptionist at the same time. Which makes me believe that conceptism and gongorism are the most natural forms of passion and vehemence.