discover don quijote de la mancha, part ii - chapters 39 - 41 - donquijote.ufm.edu/en

Chapters 39 - 41

http://donquijote.ufm.edu

Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha

donquijote.ufm.edu/en

Part IIChapers 39 - 41

Index

Lesson 26: Don Quijote lifts the spell 9

Lesson 25: Trifaldi finishes the story of Antonomasia and Clavijo 4

Lesson 28: The Clavileño Adventure 13

Lesson 29: Don Quijote, liberator of maidens 15

Lesson 27: “Clavileño the Swift” 11

Chapters 36 - 39 review 7

Chapters 40 - 41 review 18

Course activities 19

“I stopped by just to tell you I love you, and since you’re not home, I’m writing it to you.”

—Elena Poniatowska, “The Message”

4 Discover Don Quijote de la Mancha


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Trifaldi finishes thestory of Antonomasiaand ClavijoI n chapter thirty-nine, Trifaldi finishes the story of Antonomasia and Clavijo. Queen Maguncia was so upset by her daughter’s

marriage “that within three days we buried her.” Here Cervantes makes comical use of understatement when SP responds: “Without a doubt, she must have died.” SP goes on to point out that Queen Maguncia had no reason to be upset. He adopts

DQ’s meritocratic and humanistic view that knights like Don Clavijo can become kings and emperors. DQ applauds his view: “You reason correctly, Sancho... for a knight errant, if given two fingers of luck, is very nearly qualified to be the greatest prince on earth.”

Trifaldi returns to her story by quoting an abbreviated verse from book two of Virgil’s Aeneid: “quis talia fando temperet a lacrimis,” which means “who, hearing such things, could hold back their tears?” This alludes to Aeneas’s telling of the fall of Troy at the court of Dido in Carthage, and it reminds the informed reader of the story of the Trojan horse. Next, Trifaldi tells how the giant Malambruno appeared at Maguncia’s funeral “atop a wooden horse,” and then transformed the respective lovers into “a bronze she-monkey” and “a frightful crocodile of an unknown metal.” He also placed between them a metal plaque inscribed with a prophecy: “They will not recover their original form until the valiant Manchegan comes to do battle with me in single combat.” This double metamorphosis, which awaits a prophetic act of heroism in order to be undone, recalls the basic plot device of Cervantes’s novella El coloquio de los perros. Note also that Malambruno is associated with the Moorish or Turkish enemy when he threatens to behead Trifaldi with an enormous cutlass, “a broad and enormous scimitar.”

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The final detail of Trifaldi’s story is hilarious, but also symbolic on a number of levels. First, Malambruno’s misogyny links him to SP. Trifaldi tells how the giant sorcerer “had brought before him all of the duennas of the palace, who were those you see here,” and she accuses him of “having exaggerated our guilt and reviled the character of duennas, their evil schemes and most wicked plots.” Malambruno then casts his ultimate enchantment which makes all the woman of the court of Candaya grow beards. Note how Trifaldi’s use of perspective makes everyone in her audience experience the sudden growth of a beard: “we all sensed that the pores of our cheeks opened and that we were being pricked all over by the points of needles. Then we raised our hands to our faces and we found ourselves in the manner that you will now see.”

On another level, these beards have a racial connotation, like Eugenio’s “spotted she-goat” at the end of DQ 1: “the Suffering Duenna and the other duennas lifted the veils that covered them, revealing faces completely covered by beards, some blond, some black, some white, and some of mixed race.” One last detail suggests that this story is an allegory for the Christian-Moor conflict. Trifaldi’s final lament echoes the Cid’s daughters when they pleaded for martyrdom in the epic poem of Spain: “would that Heaven had rather made him cut off our heads with his enormous scimitar.” Everyone is shocked and Trifaldi concludes with an hilarious hyperbole: “where can a bearded duenna go?... with her face turned forest?” The countess then appears to faint and the chapter ends.

“where can a bearded duenna go?... with her face

turned forest?”



Chapter 36 - 39review



Chapters thirty-six through thirty-nine contain some of the novel’s most confusing passages related to gender. We learn that the last Dulcinea was a man; SP has composed a long letter to his wife, which is critiqued by the Duchess; the amazing Countess Trifaldi arrives accompanied by the other women of the court of Candaya, and all turn out to have been cursed with beards; and SP’s disrespect for women rises to the level of a major character flaw, which is heavily criticized by the Duchess and Doña Rodríguez. As they did in the Micomicón plot of DQ 1, symbols of racial miscegenation and allusions to the Morisco question linger throughout Trifaldi’s chivalric tale. Nevertheless, “the colloquy on duennas” and symbolic beards drive the new narrative. If SP’s slaver fantasy was the problem in the Micomicón plot, SP’s negative attitude toward women is the problem in the Trifaldi plot. On a purely psychological level, Cervantes once again anticipates the basic elements of Freud’s essay “Family Romance,” according to which the heroic oedipal child rescues his mother from his evil father. But Cervantes’s fantasies are more specific: Pandafilando represented the Spanish sin of the transatlantic slave trade; Malambruno represents the patriarchal exclusion of women from roles and decisions in politics and society. In both cases, however, chivalric fantasy is inseparable from the question of what kind of governor SP will be. Just like the shepherd boy Andrés in part one, in part two the Duchess, Doña Rodríguez, and perhaps even Teresa Panza have their doubts about our squire.

Let’s review

“...the earth itself appeared to me so small, that it grieved me to think of our empire, with which we cover but a point, as it were, of its surface.”

—Cicerón, The Dream of Scipio



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Don Quijote lifts the spell

C hapter forty offers a prelude to the Clavileño Adventure. The first thing we note is one of Cervantes’s famous narrative interruptions. A third-order narrator intervenes and argues that all who are enjoying this story “should give thanks to Cide Hamete, its first author, for his interest in telling us even its quarter-notes.” So we have another case of extreme mise-

en-abyme whereby we are forced to realize that we are reading a fiction within a second fiction, and that the Duke and the Duchess, who are themselves fictional characters, are performing a third kind of fiction internal to all the others.

But the narrator’s intervention is still more complicated. The term semínima, or quarter-note, makes Cervantes’s narrative analogous to a musical composition. Next, Cervantes even compares Hamete’s text to painting. Furthermore, he highlights the novel’s extraordinary multifaceted ability to: 1) access the interior thoughts of its characters, 2) describe things or ideas that might go unspoken, 3) reveal the minutia of the material world, 4) provide information that can clarify our doubts, 5) resolve arguments, and 6) address the most subtle points that our curiosity might want to know: “He paints thoughts, discloses imaginations, attends to details, clarifies concerns, resolves debates: finally, he manifests the very atoms of our most curious quests.” When the narrator praises Hamete –“Oh celebrated author!”–, he is surely praising Cervantes himself. Finally, he lets it be known that he knows that his art will entertain readers forever into the distant future of mankind, for his characters will live “infinite epochs, to the pleasure and general amusement of all who live.” This is bold stuff.

With an hilarious hyperbole, SP laments the fate of Trifaldi and her maidens: “Malambruno, couldst thou not have found a genre of punishment to pronounce upon these fallen maidens other than that of their bearding?” One of the damsels confirms the severity of the curse: “if we are not to be remedied by Don Quijote, then we’ll go bearded to our graves.” DQ’s response is equally hyperbolic: “I’d shave my own... and in the land of the Moors, if I could not remedy yours.” The hidalgo’s words also bring back into play the issue of Christians versus Moors, for to shave a man among Moors in, say, Algiers or Tunis, would be to mark him as a criminal.

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Trifaldi regains consciousness and specifies what DQ, the “liberator” of the maidens, must do to lift the spell of their beards. He must ride a magical flying wooden horse to meet the giant Malambruno in Candaya and defeat him in combat. Funny here is Trifaldi’s Euclidian precision regarding distances: “if one goes by land, it’s five thousand leagues, give or take two; but if one goes by air and by a straight line, it’s three thousand, two hundred and twenty-seven.” More important is her description of the wooden horse’s trajectory of ownership and its relative value. It was fabricated by Merlin, who was always particular, even bourgeois, about who got to use it: “he lent him to Pierres,” a knight from one of the books of chivalry, but after that “he would not lend it to anyone other than those he loved dearly or those who paid him best.” Now, however, Malambruno has stolen it “with his arts.” Furthermore, DQ will find this horse to be better than many of the mules that populate our novel: “a mount that is way better and has fewer problems than those that are rentals.” Another curious economic detail appears when Trifaldi describes the wooden horse’s magical abilities: “today he’s here, tomorrow in France, and the next day in Potosí,” the latter being the mine in Perú that provided so much silver to the Spanish Empire. Finally, SP comically adds his subjective preference for his ass: “For a smooth and even ride, there’s nothing like my gray, even though he doesn’t fly through the air; but on land I’d match him against all the trotters in the world.”

“He must ride a magical flying wooden horse to meet the

giant Malambruno in Candaya and defeat him in combat”



S ancho Panza is curious about Clavileño. And we should be too, especially if we recall that the narrator says Rocinante “seemed made of wood” in DQ 1.43. SP asks how many can ride Clavileño. The Countess Trivaldi responds that it can carry two people, “and these two people

are usually knight and squire, that is when an abducted maiden is unavailable.” Note the gender confusion of the bearded maidens that now spreads to SP by placing him in the position of a damsel stolen away by DQ. When SP asks about the horse’s name, Trifaldi postpones our gratification by first giving a list of horses that it is NOT: it is not the hero Bellephon’s horse Pegasus, nor Alexander the Great’s Bucephalus, nor Orlando’s Brillador, etc. This list ends ominously with the last Visigothic King Rodrigo’s horse Orelia, atop which he lost Spain to the Moors.

Note that SP adds Rocinante to the list of epic horses. Moreover, once Trifaldi finally names “Clavileño the Swift,” SP asks her to repeat how this horse is steered, using language that hints at something political: “with what halter or bridle is he governed?” This emphasis on the bridle as the means of “governing” Clavileño recalls the curious bridle of SP’s ass in DQ 1. However, instead of a satire against slavery, Cervantes is advancing an ironical discourse on government. We saw this in chapter thirty-eight when Trifaldi referenced Plato’s Republic. Now she alludes to the moral theme of the “golden mean,” found in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (1,104a), Horace’s Odes (2.10), and Ovid’s Metamorphoses (2.137). She says that the horse should be steered midway between the sun and the earth: “by the middle way, which is what one should seek and must have in all well-regulated activities.” SP’s future rule is at issue. Does he have the balance of character and values to navigate the political labyrinth that awaits him?

“Clavileño the Swift”

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“he proposed in his heart to accompany his master to the very ends of the earth if that’s what’s needed to remove the wool

from those venerable faces.”

Underscoring his own importance, SP at first rejects the idea of accompanying his master atop Clavileño: “I can hardly stay atop my gray, and that’s on a saddle that’s softer than silk itself.” He also protests that he has enough to do lashing himself “for the disenchantment of my lady Dulcinea.” When pressed, SP twice calls sarcastically on the king’s justice: “In the king’s name!” In other words, he now withdraws his sympathy for the bearded ladies and once again provokes the ire of Doña Rodríguez and especially the Duchess: “You are biased against duennas, Sancho my friend... you remain tied to the opinion of that Toledan apothecary.” DQ puts an end to the discussion. His comparison of his sword to a razor recalls his somnambulant beheading of the giant Pandafilando in order to free Princess Micomicona in DQ 1.35: “I know that there’s no razor which would shave your graces as well as my sword would shave Malambruno’s head off his shoulders.” There follows another allusion to Troy, this time feminist in nature. Trifaldi says that even if damsels can trace their ancestry “by a straight line, from male to male, from the very Hector of Troy,” they will still be mistreated by pages, apothecaries, and squires. According to the narrator, this last speech puts SP back on track: “he proposed in his heart to accompany his master to the very ends of the earth if that’s what’s needed to remove the wool from those venerable faces.” SP shows humility and compassion again by embracing his master’s feminist perspective.



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C hapter forty-one tells the Clavileño Adventure. As evening approaches, DQ worries that the horse’s absence indicates that he might not be the knight designated for this adventure. But Clavileño is finally deposited in the garden by four savages, recalling the theatrical representations at Camacho’s wedding. One of the savages repeats Trifaldi’s explanation that the

knight, with his squire on Clavileño’s haunches, will be carried to meet Malambruno, pointing again to the peg on the back of the neck that should be turned to begin the flight. He adds that both riders must travel blindfolded in order to avoid vertigo. SP vacillates again, claiming he is happy where he is –“Saint Peter’s just fine in Rome”– and that he wants to focus on his governorship. It’s another allusion to religious orthodoxy. The Duke extends the theme of SP’s Christianity when he insists that the island will be ready for the squire no matter how or when he returns: “Whether you return atop Clavileño, as soon as his swiftness permits, or contrary fortune drags you back on foot, changed into a pilgrim, going from inn to inn and lodge to lodge, so long as you return somehow, you’ll find your isle right where you are leaving it.”

Note that this idea that our heroes might become pilgrims wandering from inn to inn reads like their actual situation. The novel is the story of DQ and SP’s modernized pilgrimage. Together our characters suffer a post-medieval crisis of religious and ethnic identity as they are forced to adapt to the new bourgeois reality. Two other details reinforce this idea. First, SP wonders if he can invoke God’s help regarding the magical powers of Clavileño: “cover these eyes of mine and entrust me to God, and tell me if, when we cross those celestial heights, I can entrust myself to Our Lord or invoke the angels for their assistance.” Amazingly, Trifaldi asserts that there is no problem, for the giant sorcerer is a Christian: “Malambruno, although an enchanter, is a Christian.” Second, when DQ expresses his gratitude to SP for agreeing to the flight –“although a simpleton, you are a veridical man”– the squire misunderestimates him and responds in a way that suggests racial mixing: “I am not verdant but, rather, brown... but even if I were a mix, I would keep my word.” Wow. Green and brown: the hopeful colors of a vibrant multiethnic culture between Europe and Africa. But this is fiction inside fiction, right?

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The Clavileño Adventure



Right before taking flight, DQ expresses doubts about Clavileño, making the episode’s most explicit allusion to the Trojan horse. He wants to check the horse’s insides: “I have read in Virgil about the Palladium of Troy, which was a wooden horse that the Greeks presented to the goddess Pallas, which was pregnant with armed knights, who were subsequently the complete ruin of Troy; and, thus, it would be good to first check what Clavileño carries in his stomach.” Trifaldi talks him out of this. Note that gender confusion continues as SP must ride “sidesaddle like a woman” in response to the discomfort of the wooden horse.

The scene is the tragic apotheosis of our characters. Like Icarus, as they reach great heights, they fall. This occurs on two levels, literal and political. Literally, DQ and SP think they soar above the earth, but the narrator lets us know that they are fools. Onlookers shout lies –“Now, now you fly through the air, moving through it faster than an arrow!”–, and the Duke, Duchess, and their assistant use “great bellows” to blow air on our heroes. Politically, signs of imperial power contrast with signs of failure. The narrator describes DQ, who rides without stirrups, as if he were a figure in a giant tapestry: “he seemed no less than a figure in a Flemish tapestry, painted or woven into some Roman triumph.” This alludes to the period’s most expensive art form which the Habsburgs used to spread imperial propaganda at court. By contrast, SP fears that things will go horribly wrong: “is it any wonder that I fear that a legion of devils roams these parts, and that they will land us in Peralvillo?” His reference to a “legion of devils” undoes the previous imperial vision, and his reference to a town in La Mancha famous for its arbitrary justice undercuts the possibility of any justice, that is, any righteous, divinely ordained rule by the Habsburgs.

A final anecdote told by DQ reinforces the Clavileño episode’s criticisms of Spanish Empire. When DQ tells SP to trust Malambruno’s advice to cover his eyes, he cites the case of a man named Torralba who claimed to have flown from Madrid to Rome in 1527 in order to witness the sack of the Sacred City by Charles V’s troops. This is a doubly damning story. First, DQ refers to one of the more shameful events of Spanish military history. Second, since Torralba confessed to the Inquisition that he was a sorcerer and that devils had flown him to Rome, the analogy does not flatter the knight and the squire who are also flirting with diabolical magic. Finally, SP’s odd reference to “Magellan” suggests again the global scope of Spanish Empire.

“Now, now you fly through the air, moving through it

faster than an arrow!”



T he flight of Clavileño comes to an end when the Duke and Duchess light firecrackers in the horse’s tail and belly. The explosion sends DQ and SP flying through the air and crashing to the ground. Everyone in the Duke and Duchess’s entourage pretends to be knocked unconscious, and DQ and SP find a final message from Malambruno: “toward one end of the garden they

found a great javelin stuck in the ground and hanging from it, and from two cords of green silk, a smooth white parchment.” The text’s “great letters of gold” state that DQ succeeded in the adventure “by merely attempting it,” that the Countess Trifaldi and her retinue are released from their bearded curse, and that Antonomasia and Don Clavijo have returned to “their pristine state.” Malambruno is “fully satisfied and content,” a phrase used in commercial bills of exchange to recognize that proper payment has been made. Once again, DQ’s medieval fantasy embraces modern bourgeois terms. Finally, Malambruno’s letter states that when SP completes his lashings, Dulcinea will be free: “the white dove will be free of the great pestiferous falcons that pursue her and in the arms of her beloved and cooing suitor.” DQ declares the end of the adventure as follows: “The adventure has been concluded without anyone being harmed by the bars, as can be clearly seen by what is written there on that standard.” This is reflexive commentary: Cervantes conceived of his satirical text as something like croquet or billiards, i.e., a game by which difficult matters could be addressed without bringing harm to the participants.

We have already seen how in part two of the novel Cervantes reflects back on the controversial details of part one, especially SP’s ass. SP’s hesitations before riding on the back of Clavileño, together with this final crash to the ground, make the episode an echo of the strange kick to the face that the barber received when trying to mount the priest’s mule in the Sierra Morena episode of DQ 1.29. Notice that the barber’s status as Micomicón’s squire and his momentary loss of his beard are repeated in the squires and beards of this new adventure. Cervantes defies his critics, saying: “You were not careful readers before, so here, I give it to you again.”

Don Quijote, liberator of maidens

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At a more sophisticated level the Clavileño episode is the final figurative prelude to SP’s reign. It highlights the impossibility of attaining any godlike perspective that could make for perfect governance. Cervantes uses a narrative strategy in classical literature known as “teichoscopia,” meaning “viewing from the walls,” according to which heroes ponder the political and military circumstances of their nations from on high. One of the origins of this strategy is Homer’s Iliad (2.121-244), when Helen is summoned by King Priam to point out the Greek heroes on the plain below Troy. Another instance of “teichoscopia” is Cicero’s description of Scipio’s walk with his great grandfather as they ponder Carthage “from a high place full of stars.” Cicero’s use of the trope is more overtly political and moral, following the tradition of Plato, who used the view from above to emphasize the vanity and smallness of human concerns.

Cervantes’s mockery of absolute perspective is highlighted by SP’s exchange with the Duke and Duchess at the end of chapter forty-one. SP claims that he peeked past his blindfold and gazed upon the earth: “next to my nose, I pulled away a bit of the handkerchief that was covering my eyes, and through there I looked down at the earth, and it seemed to me that all of it was no bigger than a mustard seed, and the men that walked upon it only slightly larger than hazelnuts.” The Duchess immediately points out his error: “it’s clear that if the earth seemed to you like a mustard seed and each man like a hazelnut, then a single man would cover all the earth.” SP dismisses her: “even so, I saw it from one side and I saw it all.” Again, given that the earth is round, as per Copernicus and Magellan, the Duchess rightly notes that it is impossible to behold the earth in its entirety: “from one side one does not behold the entirety of what one is viewing.”

But SP pushes the limits of his lie, claiming that he saw the constellation Pleiades, known in Spanish as “the seven nanny goats.” He even claims he dismounted Clavileño and played with these goats “about three-quarters of an hour.” These goats allow Cervantes to grant the adventure racial and political connotations. For example, echoing Eugenio’s “spotted she-goat” in DQ 1.50, SP describes their multiple colors: “They are... two of them green, two red, two blue, and one mixed.” Alluding to the alpha male, the Duke asks: “Did you see, among all those nanny goats, a great Billy goat?” But SP undercuts the Duke’s interest in authority, replying that no Billy goat has ever gone so far: “No, my lord... but I have heard it said that none goes as far as the horned Moon.” Like the colors, all these allusions to horns and Billy goats refer to sexual miscegenation. The episode ends ironically when DQ indicates that he is wise to SP’s fiction and hopes that SP will now accept his own version of what happened in the Cave of Montesinos: “Sancho, seeing as you want to be believed regarding what you saw in the heavens, I want for you to believe me regarding what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos. And I’ll leave it at that.” It’s an amazing moment. Are not all human relationships based on mutually respected lies? Oh, and one last point about these goats. Remember Zoraida near the end of DQ 1? In Arabic, her name means Pleiades. So SP is symbolically frolicking with Zoraida as DQ sits atop a Trojan horse. What does Cervantes mean by this?



Chapter 40 - 41 review



From the depths below with Montesinos to the skies above with Clavileño, we are now almost prepared for the more tangible political experiment on SP’s earthly island. Nothing is easy here, nothing is completely knowable. Cervantes reveals authority as a fiction, but does this mean that there are no threats, no Trojan horses in early modern Spain? Where is the real danger in this episode? The firecrackers in the belly of the warhorse allude to a crypto-Muslim population that still resides in Spain circa 1609. Sorry, but Cervantes is an ironist, not an absolute moralist. He can be critical of the policy of expulsion while also understanding that it might be the only logical recourse. Would Spain have been better off with a mixed citizenry? Perhaps not. Are modern cities like Brussels, Paris, London, and Malmö better off with large Muslim populations? But then what are we to make of SP’s joyous frolic with Zoraida? Before we think further about this problem, let’s read on and consider some sage words of princely advice for governor SP from DQ in chapters forty-two and forty-three.

Let’s review



Ilustration by Christopher Roelofs

Course activitiesPart IIChapters 39 - 41

Instructions:

Here, you will find an illustrationby Christopher Roelofs representingchapter 41 of the second part of DonQuijote de la Mancha by Miguel deCervantes.

Ask interesting questions, formulaterelevant comments, and, more thananything, respond to some of yourclassmates’ contributions:

Which characters appearin the image?

What is the symbolic significance of the shown elements, actions,and forms?

1

2

UFM New Media productionUniversidad Francisco Marroquín

Project Management Stephanie FallaText Author Eric Clifford GrafCopy Editing Ainara Herrán Andrea M. Castelluccio Pedagogical Coordinator Lisa QuanIlustrations Gabriella Noriega Sergio Miranda Christopher RoelofsLayout Dagoberto GrajedaWebsite donquijote.ufm.edu/enDirection Calle Manuel F. Ayau (6ta Calle final), zona 10 Guatemala, Guatemala 01010Phone number (+502) 2338-7849

Guatemala, January 2017

This project has been possible thanks to a donationwe have received from John Templeton Foundation.

The opinions expressed by the author is his responsibility and donot necessarily reflect the John Templeton Foundation point ofview.

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0.(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0) Copying, distribution and public communication is allowed,providing that the acknowledgement of the work is maintained and it is not used for business. If it is transformed or a secondary work is generated, it can only be distributed with an identical license.

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discover don quijote de la mancha, part ii - chapters 39 - 41 - donquijote.ufm.edu/en

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