ABSTRACT
In this paper my field of inquiry is the contest among discourses and representations in Don Quijote, Part Two. Part One has displayed this contest in a relatively uncomplicated form: there is a continual dialectic in which Don Quijote contests the world as it is represented to him by others, and Sancho Panza contests the world as it is represented to him by Don Quijote. These contests are politically charged, insofar as the chivalric discourse of Quijote is enforced by his superiority to Sancho in social rank and by the authority that he derives from participation in the universe of writing and of print, the world of the book, from which Sancho is excluded. If, conversely, we focus upon Sancho’s defensive ploys and his mode of resistance to Quijote’s authority—his recourse to folk-tale, to proverb, and to peasant experience—we see that Quijote’s discourse continually interrogates the always-already constructedness of that ‘universal’ discourse of commonsense. In Part Two, the confrontations are different and more complex. The narrative is less a string of adventures and personal histories than a series of encounters with figures whose social definition is foregrounded so as to put both Quijote’s make-believe persona as a knight and his real status as an hidalgo into contention. Fissures appear between the feigned caballero and the real hidalgo, and through them we may identify tensions in the hierarchical world in which Cervantes composed his book. These tensions and the coercive relations that structure that hierarchical world produce specific cultural meanings in Don Quijote.
