Farhat Ben Amor
University of Kairouan, Tunisia
Abstarct
This paper sets
out to unearth the underlying reasons behind the spectacular success that the
seventeenth-century Spanish novelist, Cervantes, achieved in his humoristic
work, Don Quixote which has been translated into many languages, including
English. In this respect, I work to
demonstate the centrality of what the anthropologist Réné Girard called in his
book Deceit, Desire and the Novel (1961) ‘mimetic desire’ in sustaining the
lightness of the novel’s humor. A desire that is built on imitating others
does, actually, define Don Quixote, the protagonist of the novel. Yet, what is
special with him is that this desire leads him to generate a whole imagined
narrative about knight errantry and, more importatly, to live it out in a time
in which medieval chivalric codes of behaviour become outmoded and just part of
the fictional world. So, Don Quixote’s plight becomes comic, for he places what
he read about the knight Amadis of Gaul and other stories of chivalry as models
he irresistably strives to cult and copy from. Certainly, the sharp chasm
separating reality from fiction is enough to set the protagonist in a state of
confusion whereby he is made to appear to other characters and even to the
reader as veritably mad. Meanwhile, our laughable protagonist keeps clinging to
such a desire that helps him considerably overcome the heavy hazardous
adventures he comes across in his ludicrous and, at the same time, absurd
journey of what we may call ‘search for knighthood.’ It is precisely the waxing
and waning of this mimetic desire, galvanizing his courage, that this paper
seeks to chart and examine anthropologically.
Keywords :
anthroplogy, mimetic desire, humor, knight-errantry, mediation, parody, rivalry
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