The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote

1. Discursive Hybridity: Don Quixote’s and Sancho Panza’s Utopias

    1 Discursive Hybridity Don Quixote’s and Sancho Panza’s Utopias It is a given of social theory that no discursive field is homogeneous. It produces different meanings and subjectivities, exposes conflicts and contradictions, and thereby enables new forms of knowledge and practice to emerge. Nowhere does this truism become more apparent than in the sixteenth century, when new realities exposed ancient discourses that were once held to be indisputable and not open to contradiction . Nicolaus Copernicus seemed literally to turn the Ptolemaic world upside down by moving the sun to the center of the universe: “In the middle of all sits the sun enthroned” (quoted in Boas 81); and Andreas Vesalius’s dissection of human bodies revealed systemic inaccuracies in Galen, the most respected of medical authorities. Already in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the views of ancient writers had begun to be challenged, but by the middle of the sixteenth century Vesalius could write, in 1542, that “those who are now dedicated to the ancient study of medicine, almost restored to its pristine splendour in many schools, are beginning to learn to their satisfaction how little and how feebly men have laboured in the field of Anatomy from the time of Galen to the present day” (quoted in Boas 129). The Jesuit José de Acosta, on passing the Torrid Zone and finding it cold and not, as Aristotle had said, scorching, would exclaim, “[w]hat could I do then but laugh at Aristotle’s Meteorology and his philosophy?” (quoted in Grafton 1). The Reformation had already shaken the roots of the Church’s certainties . And no less unsettling was the fact that many of these new realities had been discovered not by traditional Scholastics, nor by the hermeneutical tools of the Humanists, but often through empirical    The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote evidence. The invention of the printing press, which had furthered the acquisition of ancient knowledge, now became crucial in promulgating awareness of the contradictions between the old and the new. It also made available to a wider audience the early modern age’s challenges to ancient theories in mathematical geography and astronomical methods. The authority of revered books, then, seemed to be sharply challenged everywhere. And it is from this world of change that Don Quixote emerges still holding on to the same—the absolute truth of his treasured books. It would be incorrect to say, however, that the century’s “new” learning wholly supplanted the “old.” In fact, as Anthony Grafton points out, these scientific thinkers were “no intellectual radicals.” They “used classical precedents as well as modern evidence to support their iconoclastic enterprises” (Grafton 115). The same can be said of legists and reformists of the century. As we shall see below, Spanish theologians, philosophers, and lawyers will blend Biblical narratives, the tradition of the Church Fathers, pagan myths, and historical precedent in dealing with questions of legal theory, ethics, and history in the century. One of the issues that would be heavily impacted in this heady intellectual age was the ongoing question of the originary condition of humankind , which the discoveries of the Indies (as the Americas were then referred to) had intensified. Since the “barbari” were not civilized, how was their condition to be categorized? Were “barbari” natural slaves, as Aristotle had maintained, or were they “educable?” As such, could they be Christianized? This question spawned others. Since the “barbari” had never been exposed to civilization, could they be said to be living in a state analogous to the original condition of our first parents? Could the lost Eden itself, which scholars, theologians, and folklore never affirmed to have disappeared altogether, be found in this New World, as Columbus believed? Traces of these contemporary conflicts will be discernible in Don Quixote. The fact that they are often refracted and distorted in the discourse of a madman does not make them less relevant to our study. Don Quixote, then, is a product of an age of hybridity, in which the . We use the term “hybridity” as it is formulated by Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture. For Bhabha, the notion of “hybridity” constitutes the process of “remaking the boundaries” of a culture, of “exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference” (219). It is the “hybrid gap” (58), Discursive Hybridity    experience of practical men enlarged and challenged knowledge once restricted to scholars. It...