ERIC-CLIFFORD GRAF

Los cuatro objetivos de la Constitución son imponer el estado de derecho a fin de garantizar las libertades de los ciudadanos, mantener la competitividad inter e intra provincial y municipal, delinear la división del gobierno federal según sus tres departamentos y fomentar la creación de la riqueza para el mejoramiento de las vidas de las generaciones venideras. Los dos principios de la Constitución son el federalismo y la propiedad privada. La interpretación y aplicación de las leyes y los derechos contenidos en este documento deben conformarse a esos dos principios.

Don Jorge, también le debo reportar acerca de los límites políticos de nuestro laberinto. EE. UU. se ha convertido en una locura melancólica tras otra. Ud. y William F. Buckley estarían bastante disgustados. Lo vamos a reparar, y eso gracias al peso demográfico de los hispanos. En cuanto a su querida Argentina, no llore. Creo que ya ha tocado fondo. Hay un economista libertario tipo roquero; me parece una combinación monstruosa de Hayek y uno de los hermanos Ramone. Este hombre, Milei (no digo «mi ley», quien es otra, sino Milei, su apellido todo junto), ha sido como una explosión en una catedral. Espero que el cambio venga de allí.

La novela de Palafox es insólita, futurista, incluso profética. Eso se debe a que fue uno de los primeros europeos en percibir la extraña y a menudo trágica sociología de la extrema similitud demográfica en lo que sigue siendo el lugar más densamente poblado de la Tierra. De ahí su importancia para Jefferson y Tocqueville. El economista y filósofo político francés Guy Sorman, que ha escrito mucho sobre la China moderna (véase El año del gallo, 2006 y El imperio de las mentiras, 2008), insiste en que los chinos no son diferentes de cualquier otra nación. La lectura de Palafox nos obliga a matizar dos veces la afirmación de Sorman. Mejor dicho: Los chinos siempre serán el pueblo más parecido a cualquier otra nación.

Hamlet and Don Juan are beyond any shadow of a doubt the most universally recognized young male characters produced by each culture. Further, at the time they were written, Catholic Spain and Protestant England were tenuously consolidated antagonists in the last overtly religious conflagration of European history. For these reasons, the precision by which these two plays mirror each other merits our attention. They are the most salient dramas of the most militant stage of the clash between the Reformation and the Counterreformation--all while the formation of the first modern nation states was underway.

Esa cúpula alojada en la casa de Jefferson en Monticello señala la singular variable más importante en el meollo de su filosofía política: el individuo, es decir, la esfera inviolable de derechos personales frente a las esferas invasoras del gobierno y la sociedad.

Less should mean more for most students in high school and college. We need fewer humanists and books, albeit more serious ones. In what's left of the humanities, we should not just "mind" the campus but also "be" the campus. Here I attempt to cut fat off that most bloated part of academia by analyzing a text that all of us should read and discuss throughout our lives. Thucydides is the only work of history anyone needs to read.

"Die Hydra der Diktator" (1946) is a famous drawing by Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) finished about a decade before he went blind in 1955. Today Borges rests firmly in the pantheon of classical liberalism. His stories convey a complex, yet also mysteriously ordered vision of the cosmos. Javier Cercas, a leading figure among Spain's current generation of novelists, observed recently that Borges was not as liberal as many would have it. Fair enough. Let's look at his mood at the end of WWII.

Consideremos dos textos que se aprovechan del mismo mito griego y que a la vez son gestos políticos simbólicos en el Occidente moderno por antonomasia. El primero fue articulado por el fundador estadounidense Alexander Hamilton (1755-1804). En dos de sus ensayos para El federalista (1787-88), Hamilton compara a sus rivales políticos con la temible figura mitológica de la hidra (F29 y F80). El segundo caso es del escritor argentino Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). En el manuscrito de su ensayo “Nuestro pobre individualismo” (1946), Borges representó gráficamente el nacionalismo populista a nivel global como si fuese una hidra.

Differences in culture, language, and perspective are deadly to the culture, language, and perspective of those seeking intercourse at the frontiers between them. To understand other nations takes work, time, and sacrifice. Becoming culturally, linguistically, and politically competent enough to exchange communication across national borders has costs.

Given that a statue of Miguel de Cervantes was vandalized in the Golden Gate Park of San Francisco during the recent wave of protests against racism, colonialism, and capitalism in the United States, a brief reflection on the significance of slavery in the novelist's masterpiece seems appropriate. Cervantes weaves together so many perspectives on master-slave relationships in _Don Quijote de la Mancha_ (part one, 1605; part two, 1615) that he inevitably drifts toward abstract and speculative thinking about the topic. Even more consistently than a significant minority of thinkers of the School of Salamanca, Cervantes holds that slavery is essentially immoral; but one of his more remarkable insights anticipates Smith's utilitarian critique of slavery as less efficient than labor that is compensated.

No quisiera decir con eso que no haya graves problemas constitucionales en lugares como Nueva Zelanda o California, solo que los ciudadanos de esos lugares no se han atrevido a desatar una crisis constitucional con tantas posibilidades como la de Chile.

Los europeos tienen que volver a aprender la libertad como responsabilidad y autosuficiencia, no como dependencia de los EE. UU. Eso es lo mejor para Europa y EE. UU., e incluso para aquellos rusos, iraníes y chinos que buscan liberarse de sus propios regímenes autoritarios.

Letting literature go with the wind is a mistake for other reasons, too: (1) It’s entertaining. (2) We’re hardwired to understand and remember through stories. (3) It allows us to take the measure of what is universally human. (4) It often emerges from foreign canons to represent for us times, places, and cultures distinct from our own, encouraging us to respect both difference and wisdom. (5) It exposes the complexity of life by plumbing the depths of human folly, cruelty, kindness, and brilliance.

La democracia en América (1835/40) de Alexis de Tocqueville es una epopeya en sí misma y en casi todos los sentidos. Hay héroes, tribus enemigas y uniones sociales que se pactan a través de sacrificios nacionales. Incluso es una epopeya en el sentido místico de un manual o guía para las venideras generaciones de América. Nos ha legado Tocqueville dos tomos de tal modo que, para entender realmente la totalidad de la obra, el lector debería estudiar El federalista (1787–88) mientras lee el primer volumen y luego debería estudiar Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605/15) mientras lee el segundo.

Eric C. Graf considera que la privatización del subsuelo en Latinoamérica debe ser una prioridad y que esta medida ayuda a asegurar que la regulación se limite a la ciencia y la a ingeniería con el fin de evitar la tragedia de los comunes.

Disponible en ElCato.org: https://www.elcato.org/por-que-hay-que-privatizar-el-subsuelo-en-colombia

Esta lectura tiene antecedentes arcaicos. La más antigua constitución inglesa fue el resultado de un tenue acuerdo ocurrido en el año 1014, entre Etelredo II y unos nobles, y no es casual que coincidiera con el primer manuscrito de Beowulf, fechado en torno al año 1000. Decir que una constitución es como Beowulf por tanto implica admitir que tiene algo que ver con Gréndel.

Within liberal arts, the subfield of Hispanic literature is among the more unassailable strongholds of academic leftism. In the combative, but dialogically respectful, spirit of Ludwig von Mises, I suggest ways to respond to Marxist theory when thinking about Jorge Luis Borges and Miguel de Cervantes, two of the greatest creative writers in the Spanish language, as well as Juan de Mariana, arguably Spain’s greatest historian. I offer a basic analogy: Mises’s critique of early twentieth-century detective fiction helps us understand Borges’s “Death and the Compass”; likewise, Juan de Mariana’s criticisms of the Spanish Habsburgs help us understand Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha. I also attempt to explain why so much Western literature self-consciously focuses on commerce and foregrounds the functional and moral superiority of the bourgeois mentality.

It’s the danger of mobs that gets amplified by whimsical legal systems, especially in a democracy where majorities exert crushing influence. This is why a democratic social order must prioritize the antimajoritarian notion that nobody should be judged for going against the mob. Rule number one for juries in consequential cases: all votes are needed to convict. Rule number two: arguments can be made for as well as against that absolute majority.

Véase el primer ensayo de _DE REYES A LOBOS_: Sin evitar la ideología de _La Numancia_, recurriendo a su universalidad o sobrevalorando su estética indeterminada, nos acercaremos a las intenciones de Cervantes de manera menos partidista atendiendo a la especificidad histórica de la obra. _La Numancia_ expresa la nueva tradición de la 'philosophia cristiani' a través del antiguo género del 'regimentum principum': un aviso moral destinado no sólo a la nación, sino también al rey. Estas dos facetas aclaran de manera artificial temas que se consideraban inseparables en aquel entonces.

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Foucault should not be dismissed as pointless epistemological speculation because, beyond his crestfallen presentation of the shift toward modernity, there lurks the essence of a sociopolitical dilemma. As the remnants of theological consistency recede, an ordered and emanating universe disintegrates into an overabundance of fields. These are like so many rabbit holes, each requiring specific standards, methods, and training. This then creates radically distinct fields of knowledge that were previously subsumed by more unified categories. STEM sprouts infinitely more stems. This is beautiful but disorienting. There is now such a forest of flying buttresses that we can no longer find the cathedral. Conservative critics of education confront this structure.

Hamilton’s hydras in The Federalist Papers remain metaphorical; his liberalism can still claim to prefer dialogue over conflict. But the shift in tone between his two essays with hydras has turned the coming political contest into more than a philosophical spat. The judicial nature of the hydra in the symbolic threat at the close of The Federalist Papers suggests Hamilton already has in mind the goal of abolishing slavery in a majority of the original thirteen states, and from there everywhere.

In the early nineteenth century, anyone with a brain could see increasing rates of slaughter far into the future. This explains the change of tone between writers like Madison and Poe. Such spirals of magnitude also allow readers to experience the impression that the Charybdis transmits a secret form of knowledge from Homer to Thucydides to Poe.

There are professors, and then there are professors. Donald Leslie Shaw (1930-2017) was a titan in the field of Hispanic literature. He wrote two definitive books on the principal literary movements of modern Spain and Latin America: The Generation of 1898 in Spain (1975) and Nueva narrativa Hispanoamericana (1981). He also wrote what remains the best book on the second greatest Hispanic author of all time: Borges' Narrative Strategy (1992).

What is a constitution? In the very broadest sense, whether we refer to Moses's ten commandments (1450 BC), the Magna Carta (1215), or the Articles of Confederation (1777-89), a constitution is a document that defines and reflects the existence of a people or a nation. A constitution doesn't have to be a specific written event, but like a religion it suggests a singularity of some sort. Like the people who embrace it, a constitution emerges from some previous social order. There's a before and after to most constitutions. Oftentimes, a great war, revolution, or migration calls a constitution into existence. Still, some constitutions have evolved gradually, building up over time as a set of rules and practices that a society lives by. Even a written constitution carries a plethora of epiphenomena (procedures, terms, writs) that are all constitutional in nature but not necessarily recorded anywhere in the ruling document.

America is litigious. Many will roll our eyes at the thought of the creatures that make it that way. Jokes learned in childhood deprecate them in titanic fashion: "What do you call 100 lawyers at the bottom of the ocean?" Answer: "A good start." Alexis de Tocqueville claims that a free society emerges from its legal profession. A transduced aristocracy of lawyers assumes the role of opposing majority rule. Searching for civil society's new saviors, the French count and magistrate projects himself onto men like Jay, Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson.

CRT has matured into one of the main costs of doing business in the U.S. It works because its fictitious demons—racist boogeymen—can never be exorcized. It’s hard to prove the total absence of what once existed somewhere, and just one unconscious racist now tars us all. An inability to disprove something, however, doesn’t mean it exists in excess, so CRT advocates also work to transduce old racism into a “structural” problem, making it hard to find but deeply rooted. They therefore need perpetual funds to address it.

During the twentieth century in the United States, as it had in nineteenth-century Europe (see Dostoevsky’s Devils, 1870–71), the left did what political movements always do: it found its way into those social spaces available to it, especially academia. At the same time, tarred by the Great Depression, the Civil Rights movement, and protests against the Vietnam War, and frustrated by being driven into the corners of a growing number of universities, the right withdrew.

The first English translation of Juan de Mariana's 1605 essay on money, "De moneta." This is the introduction to an earlier edition published by the Universidad Francisco Marroquín. For the full translation of Mariana's text, see the appendix of _Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Mancha: Religion, Feminism, Slavery, Politics, and Economics in the First Modern Novel_ (Lexington Books, 2021).

Available at Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Liberty-Don-Quijote-Mancha/dp/1793601186

Abstract: This essay surveys and assesses the roles of asses in _Don Quijote de la Mancha_. I argue that their ultimate significance derives from the picaresque tradition, specifically Apuleius’s _The Golden Ass_ and the anonymous _Lazarillo de Tormes_. Cervantes deploys picaresque asses as symbolic markers of: 1) his own aesthetic prowess, 2) his criticism of racial and ethnic intolerance, 3) his vision of compensated labor and economic exchange as the proper means of avoiding social conflict among Old Christians, conversos, and Moriscos. As opposed to the light and casual school of interpretation represented by critics like Auerbach, Spitzer, and Russell, I approach Cervantes’s great novel as a very serious satire against the ethnocentric, orthodox, and appropriative tendencies of early modern Spain.


Resumen: En este ensayo examino la función de los asnos en _Don Quijote de la Mancha_. Sostengo que su significado se deriva de la tradición de la novela picaresca, específicamente _El asno de oro_ de Apuleyo y _El Lazarillo de Tormes_ de autor anónimo. Cervantes despliega asnos picarescos como marcadores simbólicos de: 1) su propia destreza estética, 2) su crítica de la intolerancia étnica y racial, 3) su visión del trabajo compensado y el intercambio económico como los medios adecuados para evitar el conflicto social entre cristianos viejos, conversos y moriscos. A diferencia de la escuela de interpretación ligera representada por críticos como Auerbach, Spitzer y Russell, yo leo la gran novela de Cervantes como una grave sátira contra las tendencias racistas, ortodoxas y despojativas de la España de la temprana edad moderna.

Keywords: Don Quijote, Dulcinea, Cervantes, Apuleius, Mendoza, The Golden Ass, Lazarillo de Tormes, ass, mule, donkey, picaresque novel, history of the novel, comparative literature, satire, metalepsis, miscegenation, racism, orthodoxy, commerce, economics, Auerbach, mimesis, Inquisition, Moriscos, conversos, Old Christians, Neoplatonism, School of Salamanca, Juan de Mariana, Bartolomé de las Casas, El Greco, Velázquez.

Palabras clave: Don Quijote, Dulcinea, Cervantes, Apuleyo, Mendoza, Asno de oro, Lazarillo de Tormes, asno, burro, mula, novela picaresca, historia de la novela, literatura comparada, sátira, metalepsis, mestizaje, racismo, ortodoxia, comercio, economía, Auerbach, mímesis, Inquisición, moriscos, conversos, cristianos viejos, neoplatonismo, Escuela de Salamanca, Juan de Mariana, Bartolomé de las Casas, El Greco, Velásquez.

_Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Mancha_ presents five major facets of liberty as they appear in the first modern novel. Analyzing the novelist’s attitudes towards religion, feminism, slavery, politics, and economics, Graf argues that Cervantes should be considered a major precursor to great liberal thinkers like Locke, Smith, Mill, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jefferson, Madison, and Twain. Graf indicates not only the medieval and early modern grounds for Cervantes’s ideas but also the ways in which he anticipated and influenced a wide range of modern articulations of personal freedom. Resistance to tyranny, freedom of conscience, the liberation of women, the abolition of slavery, and the principles of a free market economy are all still fundamental to Western Civilization, making _Don Quiijote de la Mancha_ extremely relevant to today’s world. _Anatomy of Liberty_ walks us through how Cervantes’s seminal work both foreshadowed and relates to contemporary society.

Available at Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1793601186

Spain and Guatemala lay claim to two of the world’s more remarkable epics. The _Poema de mio Cid_ (c.1200) and _Popol Vuh_ (c.1550) are intricate narrative poems that figuratively represent the origins of two nations: the Castilian people on the Meseta plateau of central Iberia and the Quiché-Maya people in the highlands above the Pacific coast south of Chiapas. In artistic, religious, geographic, ethnic, linguistic, military, and sociopolitical terms, these texts offer unique symbolic access to the emergence of collective consciousnesses that persist to this day. Further interest lies in the fact that versions of the groups on display in the PV and PMC collided with one another when Spanish conquistadors invaded Guatemala in the early sixteenth century.

_De reyes a lobos_ se centra en los tres textos de Miguel de Cervantes que resultan fundamentales para la comprensión de la evolución ideológica del autor de la primera novela moderna. A lo largo de seis ensayos separados, el profesor Graf presenta el arte de Cervantes como una serie de meditaciones disidentes sobre el poder y la gobernanza de los reyes Habsburgo. Comienza perfilando el humanismo erasmista del agresivo consejo principesco para Felipe II que se percibe en la temprana tragicomedia _La Numancia_ (c.1580); concluye desvelando el cinismo estoico y neoescolástico que sustenta lo que sigue siendo la narrativa más enigmática de Cervantes, _La novela y coloquio de los perros_ (c.1605). En el medio se encuentran cuatro análisis innovadores de su obra magna, _Don Quijote de la Mancha_ (primera parte, 1605; segunda parte, 1615), en los que Graf explica cómo fuentes clásicas como Apuleyo y Platón, junto con las ideas del filósofo jesuita Juan de Mariana, nos ayudan a comprender los significados generales del texto que inauguró la forma narrativa dominante de la civilización occidental.

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Graf tiene treinta años de experiencia en el estudio y la enseñanza de la literatura del Siglo de Oro en múltiples universidades de los Estados Unidos y, más recientemente, en Guatemala. Es autor de más de cuarenta ensayos sobre la cultura, la literatura y el arte hispánicos desde la España medieval hasta la América Latina contemporánea; es autor de dos cursos en línea de la Universidad Francisco Marroquín, _Descubre Don Quijote de la Mancha_ (www.donquijote.ufm.edu) y _La Escuela de Salamanca_ (www.salamanca.ufm.edu); y también es autor de otros dos libros, _Cervantes and Modernity_ (Bucknell UP, 2007) y _Anatomy of Liberty in Don Quijote de la Mancha: Feminism, Religion, Slavery, Politics, and Economics in the First Modern Novel_ (Lexington Books, 2021).

In _Cervantes and Modernity_, Graf argues that the doubts expressed by both historicists and postmodernists regarding the progressive nature of _Don Quijote_ are exaggerated. He also argues that interpretations that abstain from this debate by emphasizing authorial ambivalence or positioning the novel at a crossroads do not seem as responsible as they once did. Beyond these skeptical and neutral alternatives, there are key steps forward in Cervantes's worldview. These four essays detail _Don Quijote_'s anticipations of many of the same ideas and values that drive today's multiculturalism, feminism, secularism, and materialism. An important thesis here is that the Enlightenment remains the best vantage point from which to appreciate the novel's relation to the discourses of such movements. Thus Voltaire's _Candide_ (1759), Feijoo's "Defensa de las mujeres" (1726), and Hobbes's _Leviathan_ (1651) are each shown to be logical extensions of some of Cervantes's most fundamental propositions. Finally, this book will still be of interest to specialists immune to the ideological anxieties arising from debates over notions of modernity. Graf also explores the interrelated meaning of a number of _Don Quijote_'s symbols, characters, and episodes, pinpoints several of the novel's most important classical and medieval sources, and unveils for us its first serious English reader.

Available at Amazon.com: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00OM9MJJA/

I start our look at chapter four of _Don Quijote_, part one with an image that helps us reflect on the meaning of the previous chapter and many to come. _The Burghers of Calais_ is a bronze statue by Auguste Rodin sculpted in 1888. Like Don Quijote, Rodin focuses on the medieval past.

We can almost hear the gears turning in Sancho Panza’s head. His immediate reaction is to devise a get-rich scheme: “I renounce henceforth the government of the promised isle.” All he wants now is for Don Quijote to give him the recipe for the magical medicine and tell him how much it costs to produce it.

Marcela articulates her case with the accuracy of a lawyer and the profundity of a philosopher. She uses examples and makes observations about her own situation. Let’s listen to some of her arguments, which repeatedly undermine the Petrarchan logic of Grisóstomo and his friends.

This is another literary topic, a "locus amoenus" or "pleasant place," where master and servant eat and rest. Thus, we are still within the scope of the pastoral genre when the narrator reminds us of both the sexual theme and the southern trajectory of the preceding chapters.

Chapter twenty-one narrates "The Adventure of Mambrino's Helmet," followed by discussions between Don Quijote and Sancho Panza regarding their respective chivalric fantasies and certain social values that Cervantes will question repeatedly over the course of the novel.

The galley slaves episode is fiercely debated by critics. It’s easy to see why. For starters, the justice of the late sixteenth century will inevitably seem exaggerated and cruel to modern readers. But does Cervantes share our values? I think he might.

Early in his story, the young man establishes a rule: “You must promise me that you will not interrupt with any questions or anything else the thread of my sad story; because at the point you do so, whatever remains to be told will cease then and there.”

Here we have the Renaissance theme of “exemplarity.” A major moral-political strategy of the humanists was to cite “examples” from medieval, classical, or religious history as models of appropriate behavior or virtue which should be imitated by their students, particularly the princes and nobles at the courts of Western Europe.

The modern reader might not understand the extreme blasphemy of this act. We know that this passage offended ecclesiastical authorities because it was censored in the second edition of 1605. Just realize that the shirttail was used to wipe one’s hind quarters after doing what Sancho calls, with a humorous euphemism, “number two” (aguas mayores).

Consider the dark realism of Dorotea’s story, radically different, for example, from the pastoral world of Grisóstomo and that infinite number of “rich youths, hidalgos, and peasants” who took to the fields to lament Marcela’s rejections, throwing their sighs to the wind and carving her name into the bark of giant beech trees.

Suddenly Don Quijote doubts his squire’s embassy. It would be miraculous for Sancho to have returned in just over three days because El Toboso is more than thirty leagues away, seventy-five miles or one hundred and twenty-five kilometers from where Don Quijote was in the Sierra Morena.

The Novel of the Curious Impertinent, the most baroque narrative in _Don Quijote_, functions like an intratextual commentary on the chaos among the lovers of the Sierra Morena episodes: the predominance of lust, the mimetic psychology of male lovers, and the concatenation of errors, jealousy, and poetic justice.

At first glance, The Captive’s Tale, which covers chapters thirty-nine to forty-one, is a military adventure. The Captive orients us by recalling the opening line of _Don Quijote_ 1.1, except that instead of referring to an unknown place in La Mancha, he begins in León and alludes explicitly to his bloodline: “Somewhere in the mountains of León my lineage had its beginnings.”

Cervantes is also an excellent comedic writer. At this point, he gives us a burlesque version of the stories that we have been witnessing among the Sierra Morena lovers, the Captive and Zoraida, and now Doña Clara and the mule boy. Don Quijote is outside the inn keeping watch, and like the mule boy, he laments his fate as a “captive knight” of his beloved.

In these chapters Cervantes’s baroque style reaches a crescendo: the events at the inn unfold rapidly in a series of actions and reactions, and the case of the “bashelmet” results in the chaos of a general brawl that breaks out among the guests. To top this all off, after a lull in the action brings a moment of peace, an officer of the Holy Brotherhood attempts to arrest Don Quijote for having freed the galley slaves, giving rise to yet another pitched battle.

Chapters forty-seven through forty-nine consist of a series of reflections on, and debates about, creative writing; for example, whether or not plays should be censored, whether or not readers' tastes can justify the existence of certain books, and whether the romances of chivalry contain "truths" capable of teaching us something or are merely filled with "lunacies" and "lies" that damage their readers.

In closing part one, Cervantes offers us three final stories, each with allegorical connotations: 1) "The Adventure of the Knight of the Lake" narrated by Don Quijote; 2) the story of Leandra and Vicente de la Roca told by the goatherd Eugenio; and 3) the battle between Don Quijote and the penitents carrying a statue of the Virgin.

If part two of _Don Quijote_ is more political than part one, it is also more explicitly focused on economics. Sancho Panza tells the housekeeper that she is off by “half the just price,” which alludes to the era’s hotly debated issue of whether prices should be determined according to the free market or, rather, according to the calculations of appointed regulators.

Although not immediately apparent, chapters five and six contain much philosophical thinking about individual self-worth. At the same time, there are numerous hints that Cervantes thinks many of his readers have overlooked the complexity and seriousness of his art. For example, if, like the translator, we dismiss Sancho Panza’s speeches as implausible, we are unlikely to ponder their moral significance, their critique of hierarchical privilege.

Chapter nine starts with one of Cervantes’s most absurdly funny headers: “In which it is recounted what will now be seen.” That’s obvious, right? Or is it? How can one actually see what is narrated? And what if what’s narrated occurs in the dark? The first line of the chapter is also ridiculous: “It was the stroke of midnight, more or less...”

The Knight of the Mirrors is literally a reflection of Don Quijote, and so Don Quijote is forced to insist repeatedly that he exists, that he is who he is. Also, the encounters between knights and squires anticipate future episodes: Sancho will get drunk again with one of his neighbors; and Don Quijote will do battle again with Carrasco.

The Knight of the Green Coat is named Don Diego de Miranda. He appears to be a particular kind of reformed Catholic, Erasmian in nature. He is not interested in judging the private morality of others and he avoids public displays of his religion.

As festivities prior to the ceremony begin, Don Quijote overhears praise for Quiteria: “the most beautiful woman in the world.” He is, of course, offended, but he wisely keeps his objection to himself: “It would seem that these people have never seen my Dulcinea of Toboso.”

The mysterious Cave of Montesinos offers contrasts between high chivalric rhetoric and lowly details. These also underwrite Cervantes’s ongoing contrast between the modern world of money and the outmoded world of chivalric fantasy, as well as that between our material world and metaphysical places like Purgatory and Heaven. Is the Cave of Montesinos Hell or just everyday life? And do enchanted people or spirits really need loans?

The narrator tells us that the translator tells us that Cide Hamete Benengeli, the original author, tells us, all in a handwritten note in the margin of the previous chapter, that he does not believe that Don Quijote could have experienced what he claims.