Cervantes And Mariana

Sancho Panza’s “por negros que sean, los he de volver blancos o amarillos” (DQ 1.29) and Juan de Mariana’s De moneta of 1605
_____________________________________________E. C. Graf

There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in amanner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace

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ver the past few decades, materialistic interpretations of Don Quijote have risen to prominence.1 The novel is now routinely viewed as the culmination of a host of carnal and monetary themes that can be traced back to decidedly down-to-earth texts like La Celestina (1499)and Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). Regardless of the ideological drift of emphasizing the novel’s worldly aspects, an approach “from below,” as it were, has the advantage of attending to

1 I use “materialistic” and “materialism,” in both broad and narrow senses, to indicate a general interest in money, wealth, and economic topics, on the one hand, but also a philosophy that turns away fromtheological speculation and focuses on the body and the physical world, on the other. While I am concerned with the ways in which material reality impacts a great work of art like Don Quijote, I do not want to imply a deterministic interpretation of authorship as purely a function of said reality. In my view, early modern authors like Niccolò Machiavelli, Miguel de Cervantes, and Thomas Hobbes areimportant agents in the Renaissance’s epistemological shift toward the primacy of matter and contingency when thinking about human affairs as opposed to traditions that emphasized divine intervention and moral scripture. Louis Althusser’s Machiavelli and Us and Jacques Lezra’s Unspeakable Subjects, which applies Lucretius’s De rerum natura to Cervantes, indicate the range of fruitful work in this area.For Cervantes’s direct influence on Hobbesian materialism, see Graf, Cervantes and Modernity.

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E. C. Graf

Cervantes

meanings that others overlook. Not only does it clarify some subtle details, it points up themes that have yet to be fully appreciated; it even suggests that Don Quijote plays a more vital role in the evolution of modern thought than is generally recognized. Avery mild sampling of this range: Donald McGrady has noted that the “sospiros” emitted by Sancho Panza’s donkey at the beginning of part two, chapter eight are in fact a euphemism for farts, which were interpreted as good omens by ancient authors like Aesop; Carroll Johnson has demonstrated that passages like the labor dispute between Andrés and Juan Haldudo in part one, chapter fourteen or SanchoPanza’s request for a salary in part two, chapter seven reflect the deeper problem of economic survival in a rural landscape devastated by poverty; and I myself have argued that the annihilation of phantoms in part one, chapter nineteen laid important metaphorical groundwork for the materialistic philosophy of Thomas Hobbes and by extension Karl Marx (Cervantes and Modernity 131-73). Indeed, astriking aspect of many Cervantine texts is the degree to which bodily and economic issues occur in proximity. Combining the interests of McGrady and Johnson above, we see that the promising gas of Sancho’s donkey comes hard on the heels of an attempt by the squire to get his knight to commit to a salario conocido (2.7:680). Similarly, after dispensing with ghosts in part one, chapter nineteen, whichturn out to be clerics escorting a dead body on a bier, knight and squire spend the night by some fulling mills in chapter twenty. The mechanical noise is so frightening that Sancho cannot leave Don Quijote’s side even when forced to relieve his bowels. At this turn from eschatology to scatology, Sancho inquires about compensation for his service: “querría yo saber, por si acaso no llegase el...