Poetic madness of Don Quijote

Abstract

This essay doesn’t pretends to get back to the subject of madness of El ingenioso Hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha, to keep sensing its pulse, like if it was the authentic core of Cervantes’ monumental work, because that means to go back to one of the most common fields of literary critic. Actually, the author tries to think in a possible poetic of language of “the mad one”, from the contradictions, metaphors, contradictions and flight of language, to show that the speech of the madness in El Quijote has a poetical structure and a modern critical function that gives order to the text. To arrive at it, in a first moment she will accompany the Spaniard knight during his adventures to approach us to a profile that allows, afterwards, to appreciate the contrast between poetic madness and the lineal, causal and “rational” speech. In a second moment after giving an outline of El Quijote, she will analyze the break of the book with the world of Renaissance, where writing stops being the prose of the world to surrender to the analogy which —as warns Octavio Paz— is an universal transparency that allows us to see in this, that. A poetic madness that introduces an original relation between language and things that creates the first Modern masterpiece of literature.