Alternate Arbitrios: Status, Justice, and Decline in Chapters I-XVIII of The Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha
Petra Ellerby
Western Washington University
Keywords: Miguel de Cervantes, early-modern Spain, arbitristas, cultural history
Abstract
J.H. Elliott's seminal essay on "Self-Perception and Decline in Early Seventeenth-Century Spain" opens with a letter from the Count-Duke of Olivares, an impassioned rejoinder to the accusation by an elderly countryman that "se va todo a fonda—'the ship is going down.'" Enumerating a list of national successes to counter his compatriot's dire vision, Olivares seeks to frame Spain's foundering fortunes within actionable terms, serving as a proxy for the countless arbitristas (reformers) who composed "tracts and treatises, published and unpublished, which [aimed] to analyse and prescribe remedies for Castile's many woes." But as Elliott argues, Olivares' efforts were for naught. While the reformers' reactions to an approaching catastrophe can be considered both expected and understandable, they now function as a sort of intellectual archive for the circumscribed worldview that presaged Spain's progressive fall.
A similarly unsettling atmosphere of decay and disillusionment is introduced in the initial pages of Miguel de Cervantes' 1615 Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, although the novel's response to this disquieting shift does not conform to the historical choices catalogued within Elliott's study. On the part of several key characters, an awareness of decline is coupled with corresponding forays into cultural commentary, exercises in (more productive) argumentation which act to highlight critical questions involving status, stature, ethics and action. As is true of Quixote's first volume, the conduct of Don Quixote himself serves to structure these assorted explorations, though a number of incisive assessments also stem from each episode's more peripheral inhabitants.5 But while the text's core concerns are addressed via the words and deeds of disparate actors, introduced in a meandering, equivocal, and piecemeal manner, it is this essay's argument that there is a deep associative—and perhaps causal—relationship between decline/disenchantment, the re-evaluation of hierarchy/lineage/power, and a foregrounding of right behavior or just action on the part of Cervantes' cast.
In accordance with this overarching claim, close readings of a few critical passages will be combined with an inquiry into the opinions expressed by Cervantes (as narrator), Don Quixote, and the wife of Quixote's squire. Within each arena, an engagement with darkness or decline—via poverty/precarity for Cervantes and Teresa Panza, by means of Golden-Age desengaño for Quixote—engenders both a reckoning with extant status-systems and a corresponding re-articulation of personal integrity. These incidental efforts at ethical 'revision' cannot be directly tied with the work of "Self-Perception's" arbitristas, but their narrative effect does function to provide a modified mirror for Elliott's argument. In his dramatization of an alternate national reaction, an unchosen path of reform, Cervantes constructs an imaginary Spain that is made real within the lives and minds of Quixote's characters.
