Fantasy in the Works of Cervantes

The salient facts of Cervantes's life are alluded to by virtually all critics of his writing. Born in 1547 in Spain, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra had a career as a soldier, galley slave, wanderer, quartermaster for the illfated Spanish Armada, and minor bureaucrat in the Spain of Philip II. Throughout what critics and biographers characterize as a checkered career (Duran refers to his "vagabond life"), which included a colorful household (one wife, one mistress, one illegitimate child) and a public life that ran afoul from time to time of the Inquisition, Cervantes nursed his ambition to be a writer. He was a poet, playwright, and writer of prose fiction, his most famous and contemporaneously successful work being Don Quixote, which appeared in two volumes published several years apart. Although he achieved a degree of recognition as a writer, he lived on the edge of poverty until he died, on the same day as William Shakespeare, in 1616.

To the degree Cervantes had and acted on a range of interests, he may be described as a Renaissance man. This may also partly explain his liberal use of fantasy elements in his writing. Broadly speaking, these elements emerge in two forms: farce and parody. T

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ting the novel form in a modern direction. Duran goes further, noting that for all its comic elements, the novel contains elements of a serious psychological identity crisis, which is in reality serious business but is consistent with the adolescent fantasy world, which in the story is fed by the main character's almost pathological attachment to chivalric romances.10 During the period of the Renaissance in which Cervantes wrote, as the printed word proliferated through literate society, one of the most popular forms of literature was the chivalric romance. Duran says that by the time Don Quixote appeared, "readers were becoming more sophisticated, more adult in their taste: they were beginning to see through the impossible and incredible situations offered by these books, and were also beginning to reject the demands for a 'suspension of disbelief' that such novels made continually on their public. . . . Cervantes states his intention in such a clear way that he leaves no doubt to his contemporary public as to what his aim is: he wants to expose once and for all the weaknesses of a hitherto admired literary genre."11 Alonso Quixana's mania for the romances seems not unlike the contemporary mania of the workingclass women who m
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Approximate Word count = 3011
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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