"Lighting out": Place, Space, And the Question of the Modern in Don Quijote‪.‬

IT HAS BEEN A commonplace of Cervantine criticism for many years to call Don Quijote the first modern novel, based on its apparent rejection of traditional narrative models such as romance and the pastoral as well as its metafictional concerns with the nature of literature and narrative themselves. A more recent trend, however, has christened the work a novel about modernity itself, and even one that "seems also to contain all the future possibilities of the genre" (Cascardi, "Romance, Ideology" 33). (1) Thus, Carroll Johnson, in Cervantes and the Material World (2000), sees in all of Cervantes' works "a recurrent preoccupation with the clash of two different economic systems, a reenergized feudalism and an incipient capitalism" (1). David Quint's 2003 study calls Don Quijote "Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times," and he argues that its various threads are" related by the similar stories they tell about the arrival of a modern world reshaped and increasingly dominated by money" (17). Part I, for example, therefore involves a "progressive unfolding ... that brings the novel from a nostalgic evocation of earlier social conditions and values ... to the conditions and values of modernity that supersede them" (18), ending in "the mentality and social arrangements of Cervantes's present-day Spain" (19) and even "the way that we live and love now, stories of modern desire" Roberto Gonzalez-Echevarria, in Love and the Law in Cervantes (2005), also emphasizes the modernity of its social, political, and economic concerns, and characterizes Don Quijote himself as "the first hero in the Western tradition to be a fugitive from justice, one whose life is defined by flight from the authorities of an organized state" (61). While it is certainly true that much of the comedy (and pathos) of Cervantes's masterpiece derives from the intersection, indeed, the (literal, in some cases) collision between the hero's anachronistic program to re-institute the values of chivalry and the hostility of the world in which he lives to such a project, privileging the latter over the former undermines the exquisite balance that makes Don Quijote the literary achievement that it is. For just as Dulcinea must, impossible as it may seem, be an enchanting princess, an earthy peasant girl, and a baseless fantasy all at the same time, (2) Don Quijote's world is both the space of chivalric adventure and that of something rather like Baroque Spain, for, as Jehenson and Dunn observe: "any text, because it is written at a specific historical moment, necessarily resonates with crises and contradictions of the historical moment that has produced it" (xiv). Given that the novel projects the hero's perspective at the same time that it parodies and burlesques it, we should not be surprised to find that to the extent that contemporary-like events occur in the novel, they do so in a space and in places that reflect Don Quijotes medieval frame of reference, even if that frame is challenged by those of the author and other characters.