Don Quixote’s madness matched a real residue of medieval ritual worldview

Evidence

The precondition for the creation of Don Quixote was a social world in which secular rationality was still imperfectly disengaged from the superstitious and ritualistic world view of the Middle Ages, in which, therefore, Don Quixote’s madness was not capricious, but corresponded to a reality in the outside world itself. This reality is of course interiorized in the novel in the form of the romances and dreams of chivalry, so that the novel as a whole becomes not the unquestioned and degraded storytelling of these popular adventure stories, but a reflection on the very possibility of storytelling itself, a coming to self-consciousness of narration. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 361

Categorization

• XREF: The claim that a novel-form becomes possible only when history leaves residue — this is the historical-materialist grounding shared with Benjamin’s and Adorno’s genre theory. — connects to: Cervantes encoded sympathy for expelled Moriscos into Don Quixote — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1535

Broader Connections

• Cervantes encoded sympathy for expelled Moriscos into Don Quixote #expands (0.80) — L. P. Harvey, Muslims in Spain, 1500 to 1614, 1535