Il romanzo e la realtà. Una lettura del Chisciotte

The structure of the Don Quixote is well-known: a hidalgo, don Quijana, read too much romances of chivalry and goes crazy, and thinks to be himself a knight errant. So, he wanders around the countryside in search of some adventure, mistaking real objects, persons and situations for things belonging to the world of those romances, with often shattering and laughable outcomes. In this essay I hold that this reading is, at least partially, wrong, and that the Quixote is a meta-romance, in which the main story is written with the actions by Quijana who pretend to be Don Quixote. So, Quijana isn’t a madman, but maybe he has a fool idea: to write a romance in flesh and blood. And so, Quijana-Chisciotte takes his cue from reality to invent a novel reality on which to intervene, with the result that if in that reality he does justice in this one he often does nothing or even commits serious crimes. The law and the justice, always evoked, never really make their entrance. In the Quixote the two worlds intersect, but the law lives only in the world of the fiction.