DWill wrote: Satire is, I suppose, somewhat in the eye of the beholder, but as I've said already, we can't read a text as satirical just because we prefer to. There needs to be a clear direction to do this given by the narrator or author.
The subtlety of the satire in Don Quixote derives from the sensitive political nature of his mockery of the ancient regime. Cervantes stands for modern reason against traditional obscurantism. Obscurity is exemplified by fallacious tales of chivalry which sought to convince readers of their truth through imagined pedigrees of text, handed on from the author to the narrator. (Funny where did I see a book about that?) Cervantes cannot give a clear direction to read Don Quixote as satire, in the manner I understand Swift wrote Gulliver’s Travels as social criticism, because Cervantes lacked the political position of a Swift to allow satire. The Roman Catholic Church was powerful in Spain in the 1600s, and did not look kindly on criticism. It is likely Don Quixote would have been suppressed and censored if Cervantes had taken his arguments to their logical conclusion. These conclusions are, from the observation that Don Quixote is a fool for believing imaginary dreams, that anyone who believes something without evidence is a fool. We can see how this attitude validated the emerging Protestant temper, and helped set the scene for Descartes’ belief that God validates the logic and evidence of our senses and minds. By sticking strictly away from politics, Cervantes is able to offer a far deeper and more subversive satire than he could possibly have achieved by direct statement.
As I've also said, I don't see any difference in attitude shown by Cervantes or his narrators from that shown by the characters themselves. Using piety as an example, whenever Don Q says something pious--even, in one case, explicitly Christian--we are supposed to view this as an indicator of his sanity and good sense. Cervantes continually has Sancho as well as other characters remarking after such statements how strange it is that the knight can speak such wisdom, in view of his obvious lunacy when it comes to knight errantry. He is mad only in this one particular, a fact that Cervantes emphasizes over and over.
You have drawn attention to this disjunction earlier Bill of a schizoid separation between sanity and madness in the personality and character of Don Quixote. The tragedy here is that you cannot be mad in one particular, one’s fundamental worldview, without that madness infecting everything about you. Don Quixote’s pious comments did not strike me as inherently sane, rather the reverse. Romantic chivalry has an internal rationality, and Don Quixote’s romantic fling at the world transforms this rationality into absurdity, mocking everything associated with chivalry. His rationality is all the more bizarre for being so coherent in his lucid moments. These lucid episodes are not boxed off from his madness, in the way some might make conceptual walls between ordinary life and their religion, but let us gaze into the eye of delusory thought processes.
The knight does, of course, have a moral code, that of doing good deeds in the process of winning himself renown. He is rather an egomaniac, in fact, obsessed with becoming the greatest knight of all time. Although he has this code, since the good deeds he seeks to do come from fantastic books and will not be evident in the real world, he really doesn't do many deeds that benefit people, rather causes more harm than good in his delusions. I don't think Cervantes, to his credit, really pushes on us this idea we've come to have about Don Q, that there is a nobility in his questing deserving of our imitation. Cervantes is affectionate toward his character and puts into his mouth some noble thoughts no doubt held by Cervantes himself, but in the end he is content to have his hero recant everything on his death bed. He doesn't mythologize Don Q in the end but rather brings him down to size.
Cervantes could not help but mythologise Don Quixote. I am not that familiar with Hispanic culture, but I understand Don Quixote is something of a Spanish icon. See
Don Quixote: From Text to Icon. The nobility of Don Quixote consists in the entrepreneurial spirit of one who is willing to follow his inner star wherever it may lead. Cervantes did not need to push in order to make Don Quixote a secular saint, patron of paths best avoided.
I continue to be surprised at Cervantes' narrative trickiness, and this provides some interest for me that the stories often don't. The business about the afflicted waiting woman, which is an elaborate trick the Duke and Duchess play on the knight, I find pretty tedious. But it's interesting that Cervantes can both praise his own writing by praising Cide Hamete, as well as address readers' objections to his book by creating commentary by the Moorish narrator, who objects to having to stick his source, which contains only stories about two characters. Here we are told that it was actually the translator who stuck in the stories in the first part, to relieve monotony. The translator's own views on this are conveyed to us by Cervantes/the narrator. What his source is for these views isn't clear, though at one other point we were told what the translator had written in a marginal comment on the manuscript of the translation. At any rate, the translator tells us that in this second part of the history, he will refrain from going off on tangents.
This multiple layering of authorial voice is a deliberate mockery of the chivalric claim that authenticity of a text was proven by a lineage of provenance, like the pedigree of a horse. Authors had incentive to lie in order to improve the credibility of their books, so I think your assessment that everyone knew the knightly tales were fiction is too quick. Cervantes provided a service to the gullible, reminding them to exercise doubt about things people told them. Many readers are gullible, and I can imagine these medieval romances formed a moral universe rather like those built around today’s shining knight movie stars.
