PTSD*: post-traumatic son Don Quixote (the post-traumatic son of Cervantes)

Before reading Jean Canavaggio’s French translation, I had read that of Jean Cassou, ¹ published in 1946. Cassou, one of the first to enroll in the Resistance, was arrested and later wounded. After the war, he became Director of the Modern Art Museum. He published La mémoire courte [Short Memory] (Cassou, 1953) the year when the last amnesty laws erased the sequels of collaboration. As Cervantes might have done, he attacked the “easy consensus, the blind consent to reconciliation” and, in true Quixotic fashion, he defined the action of the Resistance as “appalling evidence”. In his Preface to Don Quixote, Jean Canavaggio also draws attention to the solitude of the hero, the same solitude no doubt felt by anonymous Resistance fighters when their action was divested of its meaning in the interest of post-war politics.