From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 14.1 (1994): 75-95.

Copyright © 1994, The Cervantes Society of America

ARTICLE

Don Quijote's Encounter with Technology

IVÁN
The Knight was right: fear and only fear
made Sancho see —makes the rest of us
simple mortals see— windmills where
impudent giants stand, spewing wickedness
about the world. Those mills milled bread,
and of that bread men confirmed in blindness
ate. Today, they no longer appear to us in the
form of windmills, but in the form of
locomotives, dynamos, turbines, steamships,
automobiles, telegraphs with wires and
without, machine guns, and instruments for
performing ovariotomies, all conspiring to
commit the same harm.

—Miguel de Unamuno, Vida de

don Quijote y Sancho (1928)1
1
Miguel de Unamuno, Our Lord Don Quixote: The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho
with Related Essays, trans. by Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1967), 57-58.

75
76 IVÁN Cervantes

n his El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, Miguel de

Cervantes Saavedra makes frequent reference to technological artifacts.2 Far
from being incidental, such references are central to both the novel and the main
character, Don Quijote. Not only do several episodes revolve around the
protagonist's confrontation with a variety of machines and technological
instruments, but also the entire book concerns Don Quijote's inability to come to
terms with a modern world increasingly characterized by technology.
Technology epitomizes the age which Don Quijote decides to call into question
and confront, and which, not coincidentally, he names “the iron age.”
 In this article, I will discuss Don Quijote's various encounters with
technological artifacts. I will also propose that his approach to life and epoch is
determined by the development of print, which provided the reading materials
and models that compelled him to adopt an anti-modern attitude. It is this
bookish learning, especially from romances of chivalry, that underlies his
identification with a past that has both classical and medieval elements. Indeed,
the fundamental tension in this major work involves the medieval-pastoral
mentality of Don Quijote, and the emergence of new values and economic
activities associated with the dawn of modern age. Spain had finished the eight-
centuries-long war of Reconquista in the late fifteenth century to find itself
suddenly thrust into the management of a worldwide empire, with all its
attendant dislocations in economics, society, and culture.3 Cervantes illustrates
the depth of this transition by creating a character who stumbles into the modern
world, and who seeks to impose on it the ethics of a bygone era.4
2
There is a vast literature on Cervantes' Don Quijote, but no specific study on the role of
the novel in underscoring the significance of technology for society and culture. See the
bibliographies by Dana B. Drake, Don Quijote (1894-1970): A Selective Annotated
Bibliography, vol. 1 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Department of Romance
Languages, 1974), vol. 2 (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1978), vol. 3 (New York and
London: Garland Publishing, 1980), and vol. 4 (Lincoln, NE: Society of Spanish and
Spanish-American Studies, 1984).
3
J. H. Eliot, Imperial Spain, 1469-1716 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1964).
4
The relationship between Cervantes' protagonist and modernity has been examined by
Leo Lowenthal in Literature and the Image of Man: Sociological Studies of the European
Drama and Novel, 1600-1900 (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1957), 20-56. José Ortega y
Gasset in his Meditaciones del Quijote [p. 77] (Madrid: Ediciones de la Universidad de
Puerto Rico, 1957) views Don Quijote as “un Cristo gótico, macerado en angustias
modernas” (p. 54). Other authors have emphasized the character's conscious adoption of a
new identity either in the form of defiance of reality or as a personal, independent choice.
See, in particular, José Echeverría, El Quijote como figura de la vida humana (Santiago:
Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile, 1965), and Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, Don Quijote
como forma de vida (Valencia: Fundación Juan March y Editorial Castalia, 1976).

14.1 (1994) Don Quijote's Encounter with Technology 77

José Antonio Maravall has demonstrated how Don Quijote's quest involves a
criticism of modern society, which he describes as characterized by the
development of a centralized state administration, the monetarization of the
economy, and the creation of large standing armies. Don Quijote seeks to revive
the deeds of chivalry in order to induce the modern world to adopt a more moral
and heroic model of human behavior. Cervantes, in Maravall's view, advanced
the ideal of reforming modern society but at the same time made it clear in his
novel that the revival of pastoral and chivalric myths represented little more than
utopian evasions. The modern world had to be understood and reformed, not
undone in the name of a mythical past.5 My own understanding of Cervantes'
aims builds on Maravall's work in order to emphasize how the larger
phenomenon of modernity is embodied in the technological artifacts Don Quijote
encounters in his sallies.
Cervantes dramatizes the tension between past and present by making use of
such technologies as windmills, water-powered grain mills, fulling hammers, and
firearms, among others. He associates these technologies with modernity, and
uses the anachronistic Don Quijote as a vehicle for illustrating the impact of
technology on human sensibility. Don Quijote wakes into a world he does not or
refuses to recognize and, armed with the values of chivalry, seeks to transform it.
Either through direct battle or through the attempt to translate machinery into the
terms of chivalry, the battered knight demonstrates how prosaic and removed
from human values technology can be. But he is an anti-modern hero who is
paradoxically a product of modernity. Not only does he become Don Quijote by
reading the books produced by a technological innovation, the printing press, but
he also dons armor carries swords, and displays a very modern individualism.
Cervantes, who had been a soldier himself and
5
José Antonio Maravall, Utopía y contrautopía en el Quijote (Santiago de Compostela:
Editorial Pico Sacro, 1976).

78 IVÁN Cervantes

who was quite familiar with the technology of his time, understood that his
character would have a most powerful effect on his cultural milieu by purposely
exaggerating the newness of the technologies around him. By making Don
Quijote mad he secured the license to cross historical periods and selectively
highlight technological developments. In this way, he could call attention to the
enormous, cumulative changes brought about by technologies that had become so
familiar as to be taken for granted.
In any event, machinery and technology in Don Quijote provide the occasion
for the confrontation between two value systems, one rooted in the distant past
which privileges individual valor and morality, and the other rooted in the
modern present which privileges machinery and rationality. Don Quijote calls the
former “the golden age,” and the latter “the iron age.” “Sancho, my friend,” he
declares in I, 20, “you may know that I was born, by Heaven's will, in this our
age of iron, to revive what is known as the Golden Age” (p. 146).6 He defines the
golden age, which he plans to revive through the values and actions of knight-
errantry, as follows:
. . . In that blessed era all things were held in common . . . All then was peace, all
was concord and friendship; the crooked plowshare had not yet grievously laid
open and pried into the merciful bowels of our first mother, who without any
forcing on man's part yielded her spacious fertile bosom on every hand for the
satisfaction, sustenance, and delight of her first sons (I, 11, pp. 81-82).

The golden age clearly belongs to the pre-technological past, before plowshares
disrupted the fundamental unity of man and nature. After the introduction of
agriculture, or exploitation of nature, what follows is the fall into the corruption
of modernity. The drive for profit sets in. Women are no longer safe. The elderly
and sick are left to their own devices. In short, the eruption of technology wreaks
havoc on humanity. “It was for the safety of such as these,” Don Quijote
declares, “that the order of knights-errant was instituted, for the protection of
damsels, the
6
For the purposes of reference, I will use the widely available translation by Samuel
Putnam, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha, 2 vols. (New York: The
Viking Press, 1949). To refer to episodes in chapters without direct quotation I will use the
following format: Roman numerals indicate parts (I and II), and Arabic numerals indicate
chapters (52 in the first part, 74 in the second).

14.1 (1994) Don Quijote's Encounter with Technology 79

aid of widows and orphans, and the succoring of the needy” (I, 11, p. 82). The
medieval knights-errant seek to restore the golden age or otherwise alleviate the
consequences of the inhuman present.
It is well known how Don Quijote arms himself, drafts peasant Sancho Panza
as his squire, becomes knighted, commits himself to a maiden, Dulcinea del
Toboso, and sets out to confront the iron age. His first and most significant
confrontation occurs in I, 8, and involves the windmills, by which time he is
totally imbued in the universe of knight-errantry. He construes some thirty
windmills to be giants, who in the romances of chivalry were generally depicted
as evil creatures.7 He attacks one, suffers a severe beating, but refuses to call a
spade a spade. Sancho explains to him, both before and after the event, that these
are windmills and even describes their purpose and workings. For Sancho, who is
perfectly familiar with the increasing mechanization of agricultural activity,
windmills had long become part of the rural working environment. Don Quijote
concedes that these giants may indeed have become windmills, but only after a
magician turned them into machines in order to spoil his demonstration of
bravery.
This episode is extremely important because it illustrates the clash between
the two worlds mentioned earlier. By viewing the windmills as giants, Don
Quijote signals, on the one hand, that machinery is evil and, on the other, that his
view of the modern world is filtered through the lens of the past. Windmills have
no positive function to perform in his golden age, and are therefore pictured as
unwelcome manifestations of the present. There is such conviction in Don
Quijote's rejection of the windmills, and such violence in the physical encounter
between himself and the sails of the windmill, that Cervantes seems to have
chosen this
7
Fernand Braudel indicates that while windmills were not new to Europe, they certainly
were in Don Quijote's La Mancha. Hence, his reaction was “quite natural.” In this, he
follows Lynn White, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1962), p. 88. See his The Structures of Everyday Life: The Limits of the Possible, vol.
1 of Civilization and Capitalism in 15th-18th Century, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Row,
1979), p. 359. See also Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York and
Burlingame: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963), pp. 115-117. On the relationship between
giants and windmills, see Augustin Redondo, “Nuevo examen del episodio de los molinos
de viento (Don Quijote, I, 8)” in James A. Parr, ed., On Cervantes: Essays for L. A.
Murillo (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 1991), 189-205.

80 IVÁN Cervantes

early anecdote to set the tone for his description of the clash between past and
present, and, more specifically, man and machinery. The characteristics of Don
Quijote, a knight-errant out of context and place, serves to illustrate the
momentous transition from medieval to modern times. Don Quijote's
stubbornness shows how difficult that transition can be, especially when
technological instruments are involved. Machines cannot be readily understood
from the perspective of chivalry, and any attempt to subsume them under the
categories and values of the past ends in failure. Cervantes was clearly very much
concerned about how this transition occurred, and about the human costs
involved.
In another episode, a somewhat alarmed Don Quijote prepares for battle after
hearing “the sound of measured blows, together with the rattling of iron chains,
accompanied by so furious a thunder of waters as to strike terror in any other
heart than that of Don Quixote” (I, 20, p. 145). Although the pitch-dark night
prevents him from seeing what this is, Don Quijote is determined to strike,
believing such horrendous noises to be a challenge to the courage of a knight-
errant. Sancho Panza contrives to keep him occupied until dawn, when the light
of day reveals six fulling hammers (mazos de batán) instead of monsters or
giants. Upon seeing this, Don Quijote “was speechless and remained as if
paralyzed from head to foot” (p. 154). Unable to ascribe this event to a
magician's trick, Don Quijote begins to show signs of deep distress which will
ultimately undermine the very foundations of his adopted life.8
The romances of chivalry had taught Don Quijote that an entire substratum of
meaning existed under the crude manifestations of reality. A clever hero in such
literature could maintain his integrity and determination by decoding such
manifestations in order to reveal a deeper world of meaning and reality. Don
Quijote attempts to engage in such decoding, but increasingly finds himself
unable to translate technological artifacts into the world of chivalry.
The light of day prevented Don Quijote from seeing the fulling hammers as
something other than what they were, but there are other episodes in which he
insists that objects are really
8
The episode of the fulling hammers, especially the element of surprise in Don Quijote's
response, has been analyzed by Robert Brady in his “Don Quijote's Emotive Adventures:
Fulling Hammers and Lions,” Neophilologus 59 (1975), 372-381.

14.1 (1994) Don Quijote's Encounter with Technology 81

what he sees in them. In I, 21, for instance, he stubbornly claims that a barber's
shaving basin is Mambrino's Helmet, and refuses to accept any evidence to the
contrary. In I, 35, he takes the wineskins hanging over his bed at the inn for
giants, and slashes them open to the dismay of the innkeeper. Another significant
delusion concerns the watermills in II, 29, which Don Quijote takes for “the city,
castle, or fortress where they must be holding some knight in captivity, or some
sorely wronged queen, infanta, or princess, to rescue whom I am being brought
here” (p. 701). When Sancho protests that these are not castles, but watermills,
Don Quijote again responds that they only appear to be watermills after some
enchanter has transformed them. During this discussion, their boat heads towards
the millwheels, which causes the mill workers to come to their rescue. Don
Quijote takes them for “rogues and scoundrels” who seek to obstruct his deed.
Despite imminent danger, he addresses them as follows:

Lowborn and ill-advised rabble, set free and restore to liberty the person whom
you hold in durance vile in that fortress or prison, whether that person be of high
or low degree, whatever his station or walk in life; for I am Don Quixote de la
Mancha, otherwise known as the Knight of the Lions, for whom it is reserved, by
order of the highest heavens, to bring this adventure to a fortunate conclusion!”
(p. 702).

Don Quijote and Sancho nearly drown, and their boat is destroyed, but the knight
refuses to accept the reality of the watermills. Not surprisingly, the workers think
that he is totally mad. So does Sancho, who is shaken to the core by their near
encounter with death. What is striking about this episode is the total coherence of
Don Quijote's arguments, and the correspondence between his perception of
reality and his actions even in the face of self-destruction. For their part, the
actions and perceptions of the workers are just as coherent. They foresee the
consequences of the crash, and act accordingly to prevent it. Yet the two
rationalities do not meet, and each dismisses the other. The characters are so
immersed in the “reality” of their respective environments that they cannot
accept the perspective of someone outside it. Hence the references to “madness,”
and “rogues and scoundrels.” A frustrated Don Quijote concludes that “this world
is nothing but schemes and plots [máquinas y trazas], all working at cross-
purposes. I can do no more” (p. 703).

82 IVÁN Cervantes

New technological environments are more than machines. They involve a host
of social and economic interactions that do not fit into Don Quijote's adopted
universe. One example can be seen in the case of salary, which the knight abhors
as yet another instance of the wickedness of the iron age. The issue of salary
appears repeatedly at Sancho's insistence, for he feels that the promise of
an ínsula (governorship) should not prevent him from receiving a regular wage.
It has been frequently pointed out how Don Quijote and Sancho are like the two
sides of the same coin, and even how they are transformed during their journeys
and come to resemble each other.9 In the novel, Sancho constantly attests to the
reality of a modern world which Don Quijote is intent on dismissing. The issue
of salary is perhaps the most contentious, and serves as a reminder that knight
and squire really live in two different worlds. Salary means money, and money is
a technology of exchange, a technique of measuring value which Don Quijote
rejects strongly. On the eve of their third journey, Sancho demands a salary,
prompting the following response from Don Quijote:

Look, Sancho, I should be glad to give you a fixed wage if I could find in the
histories of knights-errant any instance that would afford me the slightest hint as
to what their squires used to receive by the month or by the year. I have read all
or most of those histories, and I cannot recall any knight who paid his squire such
a wage. Rather, they all served for the favors that came to them; and when they
least expected it, if things had gone well with their masters, they would find
themselves rewarded with an island or something else that amounted to the same
thing, or at least they would have a title and a seigniory . . . If for these hopes
and inducements, Sancho . . . you choose to return to my service, well and good;
but you are wasting your time if you think that I am going to violate and unhinge
the ancient customs of chivalry (II, 7, p. 552).

A knight-errant who pays no salary and who himself carries little or no money?
He is true to his ethics, and can cause much disturbance and confusion through
his actions, but he cannot function in a modern world unless he does so at the
margins of a rapidly expanding monetary economy. He certainly incurs expenses
during his travels, albeit minimal, but they are often covered
9
See Salvador de Madariaga, Don Quijote: An Introductory Essay in
Psychology (London: Oxford University Press, 1961).

14.1 (1994) Don Quijote's Encounter with Technology 83

by someone else. Don Quijote is not a swindler; he simply refuses to accept the
reality of money insofar as it reflects the modernity he rejects.
While he can do without money, to a certain extent, Don Quijote cannot
escape other manifestations of modernity. The ultimate of these manifestations is
gunpowder. Don Quijote faces a most difficult dilemma here, for he does not
question the centrality of military power and war in the society of his age. He
believes that the availability of force is more important than laws, for the latter
could not exist without the former. Moreover, he is by self-definition a knight, a
fighter who sets out to confront giants, scoundrels and armies in order to right
wrongs. He is always anxious to prove the might of his sword. But what can a
sword do in front of a firearm? This is how he sees the problem:

Happy were the blessed ages that were free of those devilish instruments of
artillery, whose inventor, I feel certain, is now in Hell paying the penalty for his
diabolic device —a device by means of which an infamous and cowardly arm
may take the life of a valiant knight, without his knowing how or from where the
blow fell, when amid that courage and fire that is kindled in the breasts of the
brave suddenly there comes a random bullet, fired it may be by someone who
fled in terror at the flash of his own accursed machine and who thus in an instant
cuts off and brings to an end the projects and the life of one who deserved to live
for ages to come . . . I could almost say that it grieves my soul that I should have
taken up the profession of knight-errant in an age so detestable as this one in
which we now live. For although no danger strikes terror in my bosom, I do fear
that powder and lead may deprive me of the opportunity to make myself famous
and renowned, by the might of my arm and the edge of my sword, throughout the
whole of the known world (I, 38, pp. 342-43).
Don Quijote had every reason to be concerned. Just as the use of iron cannon-
balls began to demolish the walls of the medieval city in the late fifteenth
century, the arquebus, which dominated light artillery in the sixteenth, severely
threatened his adopted profession. Don Quijote was painfully aware of this, for
the valor of a knight is rendered irrelevant in the unequal confrontation between a
sword and a gun. Moreover, a shot, a bullet have no face, no concrete or massive
presence that can be ascribed to a magician's trickery or reduced to any other
universe

84 IVÁN Cervantes

of meaning. A bullet can kill without the victim knowing “how or from where the
blow fell,” thus adding to the terrifying effect of both the specific technology and
the larger phenomenon of modernity.
More than any other episode, the speech on firearms reveals the extent of Don
Quijote's uneasiness about life in a modern world. It “grieves” him to live in such
a “detestable” age when a warrior's effectiveness is no longer defined by his
valor but rather by his firepower. Gunpowder forces him to conduct his deeds at
the margins and to fight battles that are not exactly the decisive ones of the
period. Such technologies as firearms irreverently sweep aside not just old
technologies but the very attitudes based on them. The sword and lance-wielding
Don Quijote is therefore widely perceived as anachronistic and mad not just on
account of his obsolete weaponry, but also on account of his worldview. This
anecdote exemplifies a larger point made by Cervantes concerning the clash
between old and new technological environments. As the latter prevail (although
not without resistance and struggle), they undermine not only the effectiveness of
older technologies, but also have an effect on attitudes and perceptions.
In another illustration of the same situation, Don Quijote, who makes much of
courage, finds himself scrambling for life when he and Sancho run into a militia
squad, an incident develops, and the knight sees that several guns are aiming at
him,

. . . he turned Rocinante's head and at the best gallop he could manage fled from
their midst, meanwhile praying to God with all his heart to deliver him from this
peril. He feared at every step that some [bullet]10 might pierce his back and come
out through his bosom, and he was constantly drawing in his breath to make sure
it had not failed him (II, 27, pp. 692-93).

Sancho, who is besides himself after being unceremoniously abandoned by Don

Quijote, must now bear his lukewarm explanation: “I admit that I retired, but not
that I fled,” claims Don Quijote, “and in this I have merely followed the example
of many brave men who have saved themselves for a more propitious time” (p.
694). An unconvinced Sancho berates the knight and even brings up the matter of
salary again. Faced with such
10
Putnam wrongly translates bala as “arrow,” just as he wrongly translates arcabuces as
“muskets.”

14.1 (1994) Don Quijote's Encounter with Technology 85

demands, and still shaken by the incident, Don Quijote begins to give up. During
the course of his travels he has been beaten, has mortgaged much of his
patrimony, has been the target of many jokes, well-intentioned or otherwise, and
has suffered numerous disappointments. But all along he has been sustained by
his belief in the righteousness of chivalry. After the firearms incident, his resolve
begins to falter. He even begins to consider a retreat into pastoral life.
Don Quijote's anti-modern attitude includes two phases: one involving direct
struggle with the technological expressions of modernity; the other involving
pastoralism, or retreat into a pre-technological form of existence.11 Unable to
adjust to the demands of the modern world, much less defeat it, he seeks refuge
in a timeless Arcadia.12 While he has been aided in this search for Arcadia by his
own promise to abandon knight-errantry for a year (after a fight staged by his
concerned friends), pastoralism has always represented an option for Don
Quijote, albeit a much less desirable one. Trying to make the best of a bad
situation, the knight tells his squire,

I will purchase some sheep and all the other things that are necessary to the
pastoral life, taking for myself the name of “the shepherd Quixotiz,” while you
will be “the shepherd Pancino.” Together we will roam the hills, the woods, and
the meadows, now singing songs and now composing elegies, drinking the
crystal water of the springs or that of the clear running brooks or mighty rivers.
The oaks will provide us with an abundance of their delicious fruit, the hardwood
trunks of the cork trees will furnish us a seat, the willows will give us shade, the
roses will lend their perfume, and the spacious meadows will spread a myriad-
colored carpet for our feet; we shall breathe the clean, pure air, and despite the
darkness of the night the moon and stars will afford us illumination; song will be
our joy, and we shall be happy even in our laments, for Apollo will supply the
inspiration for our verses and love will endow us with conceits and we shall be
11
José Antonio Maravall has argued that Cervantes made use of literary traditions which
advanced pastoral ideals, and combined them with the literature on chivalry, in order to
illustrate the utopian character of the opposition to modernity. See his Utopía y
contrautopía, p. 172.
12
On the subject of pastoralism, see Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce, La novela pastoril
española, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Ediciones Istmo, 1974). See also Américo Castro, El
pensamiento de Cervantes (Madrid: Imprenta de la Librería y Casa Editorial Hernando,
1925). 187-190.

86 IVÁN Cervantes

everlastingly famous —not only in this age but for all time to come (II, 67, p.
949).

Purchase his way into Arcadia? Clearly, toward the end of his third trip he has
made quite a few concessions to modernity. He agrees to pay Sancho a salary, he
even reimburses some fishermen for the destruction of their boat, and now talks
about purchasing sheep! But these concessions are also a symptom of impending
moral collapse. In fact, he will not be able to carry on much further. Ravaged in
body and soul, Don Quijote returns to his household to prepare for death.13
Death without redemption would have provided for a very depressing tale.
But Cervantes concludes his novel with an intriguing description of Don
Quijote's return to reason, and in the process identifies the sources of his
character's madness: the romances of chivalry. Shortly before his death, Don
Quijote states,

My mind now is clear, unencumbered by those misty shadows of ignorance that

were cast over it by my bitter and continual reading of those hateful books of
chivalry. I see through all the nonsense and fraud contained in them, and my only
regret is that my disillusionment has come so late, leaving me no time to make
any sort of amends by reading those that are the light of the soul (II, 74, p. 984).

This choice of ending is not casual, and shows the extent to which Cervantes was
aware of the impact of that major technological innovation of early modern
Europe, the printing press. For Don Quijote is, in fact, a product of the books
made widely available by the printing press.

Don Quijote and Print

The numerous references to books in general, and romances of chivalry in

particular, reveal Cervantes' awareness of the impact of technology on human
sensibility. He created a character
 13
On the subject of Don Quijote's decline, see Madariaga, pp. 173-185. See also A. J.
Close, Miguel de Cervantes: “Don Quijote” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990), 81-88, and Howard Mancing, The Chivalric World of “Don Quijote:” Style,
Structure, and Narrative Technique (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press,
1982), especially chapters 3 and 5, “Knighthood Defeated,” pp. 85-126, and “Knighthood
Denied,” pp. 167-215.

14.1 (1994) Don Quijote's Encounter with Technology 87

that became paradigmatic of the transition from Reconquista to modern times in

Spain, and in the process commented on the shock of the new as represented by
the technology of print. The presence of the book is so pervasive in Don
Quijote that without it one cannot understand either the motivations of the
character, or the purpose of the novel.14
Early in the novel, Cervantes describes the encounter of Don Quijote with the
romances of chivalry as follows:

. . . the aforesaid gentleman, on those occasions when he was at leisure, which

was most of the year around, was in the habit of reading books of chivalry with
such pleasure and devotion as to lead him almost wholly to forget the life of the
hunter and even the administration of his estate. So great was his curiosity and
infatuation in this regard that he even sold many acres of tillable land in order to
be able to buy and read the books that he loved, and he would carry home with
him as many of them as he could obtain . . . Our gentleman became so immersed
in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days
from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping
and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind
(I, 1, pp. 26-27).

It is based on these readings, from a library of about three hundred volumes, that
Don Quijote assumes a new identity and seeks to revive the deeds of chivalry.
These books constitute the entire stock of Don Quijote's considerable knowledge:
he not only knows the contents of each book, but he is also able to extrapolate
from their various narrations a value system, a code of behavior, and a means to
translate his surroundings under the terms of chivalry. Don Quijote is perfectly
coherent in what he does, but in the minds of family, friends, and anyone who
encounters him, he is mad. Moreover, they find a connection between his
readings and his madness.
14
Juan Bautista Avalle-Arce argues that the presence of the book is central to Don
Quijote. Without the books on chivalry, Don Quijote is “unthinkable and impossible” as a
novel. See the prologue to his edition of Don Quijote de la Mancha, 2 vols. (Madrid:
Editorial Alhambra, 1979), p. 8. Américo Castro has also emphasized the centrality of
books for Don Quijote in his Hacia Cervantes, 3rd ed. (Madrid: Taurus, 1967), especially
in the chapter entitled “La palabra escrita y el Quijote,” pp. 359-408. Carlos Fuentes has
emphasized the connection between books and Don Quijote's adoption of a worldview in
his Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura (Mexico: Editorial Joaquín Mortiz, 1976).

88 IVÁN Cervantes

At various parts of the novel, but especially in II, 17, Don Quijote himself
admits that his acts may be perceived as those of a madman, but he then proceeds
to explain that this is not so, that he is a knight-errant, just like those of the books
he cites as ultimate authority. In I, 6, twenty-seven romances of chivalry are
mentioned, including the classic Amadís de Gaula, Sergas de Esplandián,
Amadís de Grecia, and Don Olivante de Laura. These books constitute the model
world against which Don Quijote's surroundings must conform.15 In his
eagerness to encounter situations that resemble those of the romances of chivalry,
he falls easy prey to those who prefer to manipulate him rather than antagonize
him. “Is it not a strange thing,” a priest asks in I, 30, “to see how readily this
unfortunate gentleman believes all those falsehoods and inventions, simply
because they are in the style and manner of those absurd tales?” (p. 264).
A most telling argument on the matter of books occurs in I, 49, when the
frustrated canon asks Don Quijote, “Is it possible, my good sir, that those
disgusting books of chivalry which your Grace has read in your idle hours have
had such an effect upon you as to turn your head, causing you to believe that you
are being carried away under a magic spell and other things of that sort that are as
far from being true as truth itself is from falsehood?” The canon admits that he
finds enjoyment in some of these books, but that when he reflects on “their real
character” he finds them “deserving of the same punishment as cheats and
impostors, who are beyond the pale of human nature, or as founders of new sects
and new ways of life, for leading the ignorant public to believe and regard as the
truth all the nonsense that they contain” (pp. 437-38). An undeterred Don Quijote
responds “I find that it is your Grace who have had your head turned and have
been bewitched . . . For to endeavor to persuade anyone that Amadís never lived,
nor any of the other knightly adventurers that fill the history books, is the same as
trying to make him believe that the sun does not shine, that ice
15
Daniel Eisenberg has written extensively on sixteenth-century romances of chivalry,
as well as on the connection between these books and Don Quijote. In particular, see
his Romances of Chivalry in the Spanish Golden Age (Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta
Hispanic Monographs, 1982). See also Sir Henry Thomas, Spanish and Portuguese
Romances of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), and Edwin
Williamson, The Half-Way House of Fiction: “Don Quijote” and Arthurian
Romance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

14.1 (1994) Don Quijote's Encounter with Technology 89

is not cold, or that the earth does not bear fruit” (p. 439). Furthermore,

Do you mean to tell me that those books that have been printed with a royal
license and with the approval of the ones to whom they have been submitted and
which are read with general enjoyment and praised by young and old alike, by
rich and poor, the learned and the ignorant, the gentry and the plain people . . . do
you mean to tell me that they are but lies? Do they not have every appearance of
being true? Do they not tell us who the father, mother, relatives of these knights
were, the name of the country from which they came, their age, the feats that they
performed, point by point and day by day, and the places where all these events
occurred? Your Grace had best be silent and not utter such a blasphemy” (pp.
441-442).

There can be no doubt that for Don Quijote the events he seeks to relive are true,
and that in his own mind the romances of chivalry represent actual historical
events. The more intriguing question concerns Cervantes' purpose in describing
the effects of print on society and culture. How can the dawn of the modern age
create such an anachronistic character as Don Quijote? Can books contribute to
the creation of an identity as strong as that of the would-be knight? Is there
anything in the nature of print that might so drastically change perceptions of
truth and reality? Does the introduction of new technologies so fundamentally
affect human sensibility as to drive some people to anti-technological
confrontation or pastoral withdrawal?
These questions are of course interrelated. There was a virtual flood of books
in Europe after the invention of print, some fifteen to twenty million copies by
one reckoning, before the year 1500. Only a minority could read, but printing
ensured that anyone who could and wished to read had a variety of titles
available. The printing of books increased enormously during the sixteenth
century, to some 150-200 million copies.16 The fact that a substantial number of
these books dealt with the Middle Ages, has led one scholar to state that “The
sixteenth and seventeenth
16
Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of
Printing, 1450-1800, trans. by David Gerard and edited by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and
David Wootton (London: NLB, 1976), p. 262. These figures are based on average press
runs of 500 copies for the period before 1500 and 1000 copies during the sixteenth century.
This brings the number of titles to 30-35 thousand for the first period, and 150 to 200
thousand for [p. 90] the second. Febvre and Martin consider these to be conservative
figures. On the significance of the greatly increased number of copies of books, see
Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and
Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, vol. 1 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1979), p. 169. On the reading preferences of an expanded readership
made possible by print, see J. H. Parry, The Age of Reconaissance: Discovery, Exploration
and Settlement, 1450 to 1650 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), p. 34.

90 IVÁN Cervantes

centuries saw more of the Middle Ages, than had ever been available to anybody
in the Middle Ages. Then it had been scattered and inaccessible and slow to read.
Now it became privately portable and quick to read.”17 In Spain, the romances of
chivalry, many of them of Arthurian content, were particularly popular.
The Amadís de Gaula and its sequels went through more than sixty editions in
the sixteenth century alone.18 The abundance of books in general, and the
romances of chivalry in particular, reached the far corners of Europe, including
the obscure La Mancha in the heart of Spain, where Don Quijote owned a
sizeable library by sixteenth and early seventeenth-century standards. He read
many of these books in the privacy of his provincial home and became so
captivated by the courtesy, the valor, and the loyalty of the knights-errant, that he
decided to adopt these and other traits as his own. Although Cervantes presents
Don Quijote's acquisition of a new identity based on chivalry rather negatively
(“his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind”), he is above all
emphasizing the importance of books in providing the basis for individualistic
reading and choice of lifestyle.19 Despite his medieval armor and chivalric
outlook, Don Quijote is indeed a modern character in that he seeks and promotes
individual improvement regardless of one's station in life. He builds his own
identity on the basis of reading, and single-mindedly seeks to impose his recently
acquired values on reality.20
17
Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic
Man (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 142.
18
Febvre and Martin, p. 286.
19
Cervantes was not alone in perceiving the influence of print on individuals and
society. His contemporary Francisco de Quevedo (1580-1645) was also sensitive to the
social and cultural implications of print. See Steven M. Bell, “The Book of Life and Death:
Quevedo and the Printing Press,” Hispanic Review 5, no. 2 (Spring 1984), 7-15. For an
earlier period, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “The Body Versus the Printing Press: Media in
the Early Modern Period, Mentalities in the Reign of Castile, and Another History of
Literary Forms,” Poetics 14 (1985), 209-227.
20
Maravall, Utopía y contrautopía, pp. 84-85.
14.1 (1994) Don Quijote's Encounter with Technology 91

What did people read before the invention of the printing press? Manuscripts,
of course, but their reading was confined to a very small readership, usually in
cloistered clerical circles. The culture of Europe, much like the rest of the world
before printing, was an oral culture. The majority of people preserved patterns of
thought in the form of proverbs, aphorisms and poems that could be easily
recollected. Or people gathered to listen to someone who knew how to read.21 It
is in these older forms of communication, transmission of knowledge, and
entertainment that we find another clue to Don Quijote, for the main character
becomes a highly literate man who must function in a primarily oral
environment.
Cervantes scholars have in recent years emphasized the interplay of oral and
written traditions as a key to understanding Don Quijote. Maxime Chevalier, for
instance, convincingly argued in favor of connecting many of the novel's
episodes to the rich oral tradition of Spain, including the cuentecillos, burlas,
and consejas .22 Elias Rivers, who in his Quixotic Scriptures as well as in
previous work, viewed the entire Hispanic literary tradition in terms of the
oral/written duality, has shown how Don Quijote acquires his identity through the
process of reading, seeks to act out his bookish knowledge, and is challenged by
the predominant orality of his environment.23 More recently, James A. Parr has
demonstrated just how central the oral/written dichotomy is for understanding not
only Don Quijote, but Cervantes' purposes as well. As Parr has stated, it would
appear that Cervantes “as a writer of narrative, would privilege writing, and in a
sense he does. We have the book itself as good evidence. And yet orality is quite
literally there from the outset, informing writing, reading it aloud, invading its
domain, parodying it.”24 Based on these findings, it is now possible to explore the
role of the
21
On the practice of reading in early modern Europe, with some references to Don
Quixote, see Roger Chartier, “Leisure and Sociability: Reading Aloud in Early Modern
Europe,” trans. by Carol Mossman, in Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman,
eds., Urban Life in the Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 103-
120.
22
Maxime Chevalier, “Literatura oral y ficción cervantina,” Prohemio 5 (September-
December 1974), 161-196.
23
Elias L. Rivers, Quixotic Scriptures: Essays on the Textuality of Hispanic
Literature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983).
24
James A. Parr, “Plato, Cervantes, Derrida: Framing Speaking and Writing in Don
Quixote,” in James A. Parr, ed., On Cervantes: Essays for L. A. Murillo (Newark, DE: Juan
de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 1991), 171-72.
92 IVÁN Cervantes

printing press in exacerbating the tension between oral and written forms of
organizing perception and experience.
The contrast between oral and literate environments is personified by Don
Quijote and his squire Sancho. Don Quijote is engaged in the relentless pursuit of
a story line of chivalry in a richer oral context that is not based on single
purposes but rather on a reservoir of old wisdom. Sancho, for his part, has his
first exposure to literate culture through contact with Don Quijote. His use of
countless proverbs, maxims and epithets, which sometimes exasperate Don
Quijote, are indications of the predominance of orality in his language and
outlook.25 Sometimes Don Quijote reverts to orality himself, and both have some
hilarious verbal duels. But Don Quijote has adopted a visual, literate form of
knowledge that is characteristic of print culture, and which isolates him from his
still primarily oral environment. He has changed an ear for an eye, and suffers
under the strain of a major shift in sensibility. In I, 9, he physically loses half an
ear in his fight with the Biscayan. Other than the pain he suffers, Don Quijote
does not seem to give much importance to the loss. But when he retaliates, he
means far greater harm, as he “thrust the point of his sword into the Biscayan's
eyes” (p. 74). This episode exemplifies the predominance of visual over auditory
sense-experience in Don Quijote. However, his repeated complaints about pain in
pp. 74, 77, 78 and 85 indicate that the transition from one to the other carries a
major cost. Print, more than any other technology encountered by Don Quijote,
has a profound effect on human sensibility. He sees the things he reads in books.
They hold the ultimate truth in a world of many truths.26
25
Maxime Chevalier has indicated that some of Sancho's sayings come from literary
sources, and argues that Cervantes consciously made this choice in order to provide
complexity to the character. See his “Sancho Panza y la cultura escrita,” in Dian Fox, Harry
Sieber, and Robert TerHorst, eds., Studies in Honor of Bruce W. Wardropper (Newark, DE:
Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, 1989), 67-73.
26
The transition from oral to visual forms of perception, and the role of print in it, has
been discussed by Walter Ong in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the
Word (London and New York: Methuen, 1982); Rhetoric, Romance, and Technology:
Studies in the Interaction of Expression and Culture (Ithaca and London: Cornell
University Press, 1971), and The Presence of the Word (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1967). See also Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy, and Elizabeth
Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, p. 132. All three authors point out
that the transition [p. 93] from oral to literate was not sudden because of print. They
emphasize how old forms, even auditory patterns, remained or were even enhanced by
print. In the long term, however, print had a decisive influence in conforming new patterns
of thought.
14.1 (1994) Don Quijote's Encounter with Technology 93

As mentioned earlier, Don Quijote has endured one defeat after another in his
confrontation with modernity. But how long can he carry on like this? Towards
the end of his trek he is very vulnerable, and a visit to a printing house in
Barcelona does not help matters. There, he meets the world created by the
printing press, and faces a few unpleasant truths about publishing. For instance,
he learns that just about anything can be published when the happy combination
of printer, author, money and market occur. A prospective author tells him “I do
not have books printed to win fame in this world, for I am already well known
through my works; it is money that I seek, for without it a fine reputation is not
worth a cent” (II, 62, p. 924). In addition, cheap and not very well crafted
translations are being published. But worst of all, a book on his own life and
adventures is being printed, one that he knows to be highly inaccurate.27 He has
based his own life on chivalry books and has taken them as absolute truth. But
now he learns what really goes on at a printing house, especially its economics.
Not surprisingly, he leaves the shop “with signs of considerable displeasure” (p.
924).
There is certainly more than displeasure involved in Don Quijote's attitude: he
has gone so far into the logic of chivalry, to the point of re-living it, that he
cannot readily accept that the contents of books might be less important than the
host of other factors involved in publishing. In examining this episode, Carlos
Fuentes has indicated how Don Quijote comes face to face with the very source
of his identity and “forever breaks the bindings of the illusion of reality . . . He
visits a printing shop, he enters the very place where his adventures become an
object, a legible product. Don Quixote is thus sent by Cervantes to his only
reality: the reality of fiction.”28
27
In fact, a spurious second part of Don Quijote was published by Alonso Fernández de
Avellaneda (a pseudonym) in 1614. Cervantes was understandably quite upset about the
appropriation of his story. See Manuel Durán, “El Quijote de Avellaneda,” in Juan Bautista
Avalle-Arce and Edward C. Riley, eds., Suma Cervantina (London: Tamesis Books, 1973),
357-376.
28
Carlos Fuentes, “Cervantes, or The Critique of Reading,” in Carlos Fuentes, Myself
with Others: Selected Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988), p. 63.

94 IVÁN Cervantes

Indeed, the visit to the printing shop, combined with yet another chivalric
defeat in II, 64, are devastating enough to make him suspend his quest and return
home. There, he falls in a deep sleep and wakes up to face the truth about his
adopted identity. He recognizes that all he has done, to the detriment of self,
family and estate, is due to his reading of the romances of chivalry. He lives only
long enough to strongly condemn such books in front of friends and relatives. In
drawing up his will, he forbids his niece to marry anyone who has even heard
about stories of chivalry. Aware that there are books already circulating about his
life and exploits, he asks forgiveness for having contributed to the propagation of
“absurdities.” His last words are reserved for a final attack on the romances of
chivalry. He then dies peacefully.
Where does Cervantes stand with regards to the pernicious effects of books? It
would appear that he sides with Don Quijote in condemning the romances of
chivalry. However, he clearly distances himself from the protagonist by pointing
not just to the effects of specific books on a specific individual, but to the entire
range of issues associated with such technological revolutions as printing. Many
other characters in the novel read the romances of chivalry, along with other
books. Not all react in the same way: some enjoy them and reshelve them, some
abhor them, some burn them, some call for regulation under royal auspices so
that some form of quality control might be established. Cervantes presents the
full range of reactions, from a cross-section of society, in order to emphasize the
central role of printed books in the culture of early modern Spain.
Yet, beyond emphasizing the centrality of books in the culture of the period,
Cervantes does express concerns about the relationship between writing, in its
printed form, and reality. Printed books can quickly disseminate a story,
regardless of whether it is true, false, constructive, or deceptive. Books can create
reality, or, as Don Quijote demonstrates, can thrust individuals into identities that
ill-prepare them to deal with the complexities of the modern world. The potential
for manipulation, either for ideological or commercial reasons, motivated
Cervantes to point to the dangers of print culture. His exploration of the
oral/written duality, his framing of Don Quijote in terms of the encounter and
experience with books, allowed Cervantes to pose profound questions not just
about the social impact of print, but also about its implications for the
organization of

14.1 (1994) Don Quijote's Encounter with Technology 95

experience and the perception of reality. In his perceptive discussion of speaking

and writing in Don Quijote, James A. Parr has posed all the relevant questions in
this regard: “Is the immediacy of speech, the direct discourse of dialogue,
attenuated and displaced as diegesis intervenes to compete with and indeed coopt
its simulacrum of reality? Is the transcription of diegesis and mimesis through the
medium of writing a poison, a cure, a necessary evil —or all of these
simultaneously? And what of printing, a far more pernicious source of
indiscriminate dissemination, impossible for Socrates to have
foreseen?”29 Cervantes advocated the judicious use of printing, but warned his
readership about its limitations and dangers. Moreover, by fully exploring the
psychological consequences of reading and writing, he launched a
comprehensive view of life in a modern world.
In sum, this article has tried to demonstrate that the focus on the impact of
technology on human sensibility in Don Quijote provides an important
interpretive key to the novel. The printing press in particular, but also the
windmills, watermills and fire arms, burst into the scene and threaten to alter in
fundamental ways how humans view themselves and their environments. Don
Quijote shows that he cannot quite assimilate the introduction of these new
technologies. He tries to understand them with the concepts of a pastoral-
medieval past, but failure to do so leads him to either fight technological
instruments or withdraw from modernity altogether. Until shortly before his
death, he fails to see that the very pastoral-medieval identity that he has so
passionately embraced has been the product of a modern innovation, the printing
press. But is this not a recurring theme of modernity, as individuals struggle to
comprehend a rapidly changing technological environment? Perhaps our
fascination with Don Quijote, and its continued currency, has much to do with
the way our concepts and ideals are constantly challenged by technological
change.

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MILWAUKEE

29
Parr, “Plato, Cervantes, Derrida,” p. 174.