Reconsidering Literary Criminality in Don Quixote

Abstract

While the picaresque has been studied extensively in Don Quixote, the use of a single literary genre to study a particular aspect of an author's production, namely criminality, can have its limitations. References to criminality are simply deemed 'picaresque', and the picaresque nature is confirmed by citing a picaresque work featuring a similar reference, and again we are led around in a somewhat circular investigation. This circularity can persist, even when sidestepping questions of genre by focusing on biographical information in an effort to obtain a different perspective on criminals and their behaviour in Cervantes's novel. References to criminals or prison life can be linked to the author's own experience, but these are in turn confirmed by adducing yet more of his own literary references, leading us critics around in the same vicious circle. These references are often framed within the picaresque, a tendency reinforced by the fact that Cervantes has written straightforward picaresque fiction elsewhere. This framing is guided by the notion that as much as three of his Novelas ejemplares 'should be considered as full participants in the genre', 1 and driven by the reasonable assumption that Cervantes's strictly picaresque writing must overlap considerably with different sections of his larger novel. While it is sensible and productive to use well-known biographical details and the picaresque genre as a lens through which to study criminal characters, actions, and themes in Don Quixote, there is also much to be gained by widening the scope of Cervantes's experience and by including criminality-themed genres other than the picaresque. A different approach is helpful since the topic of lawbreaking and law enforcement is difficult to avoid in the novel and is broached as early as the prologue to Part One: ¿qué podía engendrar el estéril y mal cultivado ingenio mío, sino la historia de un hijo seco, avellanado, antojadizo y lleno de pensamientos varios y nunca imaginados de otro alguno, bien como quien se engendró en una cárcel, donde toda incomodidad tiene su asiento y donde todo triste ruido hace su habitación? (i. Prólogo, 9). (And so what could my barren and poorly cultivated wits beget but the history of a child who is dry, withered, capricious, and filled with inconstant thoughts never imagined by anyone else, which is just what one would expect of a person