ABSTRACT
Cervantes plays a very important role with regard to the concepts of the archive and the manuscript. He offers a ‘lost’ archive through Don Quixote. Don Quixote’s library is burned by the priest because it is believed that it is the source and the cause of his madness (Part 1, Chapter 6). Cervantes is not only the ‘founder’ of this ‘lost’ archive, which is damned by the priest, the barber and Don Quixote’s niece, but a raider of his own archive. Cervantes raids the archive by the presence of a non-originating Toledo manuscript (Part 1, Chapter 9), by displacing realities and appearances through tropelía and by the liberating and utopian discourse of the witch Cañizares. This foregrounds the importance of the feminine seductive text and the liberating female narrator in unsettling the originating and patriarchal centre of the archive. Certainly, Cervantes is aware of the dangers and violence of the archive. Raided by Cervantes, the archive is no longer complete, and totality is only an illusion. It is the victim of burning or fever, or in Wordsworth’s re-reading of Don Quixote and in García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, it is the victim of flooding. The archive is burning in two ways – the burning of the archive as in Don Quixote,1 and the burning inside the archive, as discussed in Derrida’s Archive Fever.
