Cervantes y la melancolía : ensayos sobre el tono y la actitud cervantinos

TLDR: Garcia Gibert as mentioned in this paper studied the relationship between genre and the enigmatic behavior of Don Quijote and found that the humor of the protagonist is rooted in the disproportion between desire and reality, as opposed to the impossibility of attaining what one wants.

Abstract: Cervantes y la melancolia: ensayos sobre el tono y la actitud cervantinos. By Javier Garcia Gibert. Valencia: Alfons el Magnanim, 1997. 299 pages. The first of Garcia Gibert's essays, "Entre triste y alegre," considers genre and the enigmatic behavior of Don Quijote. From a neoarisotelian perspective, this puzzling figure's adventures offered possibilities for mixing genres and styles-laughter, ridicule, the comic, and the tragic; and the synthesis of these modes gave direction to the openness of the modern novelistic form. But to explain the riddles of Don Quijote's demeanor, Garcia Gibert moves on to Bergson and Freud and points to the latter's belief that Don Quijote could not have been as amusing as his contemporary readers thought because the humor of the Quijote is rooted in the disproportion between desire and reality-the will as opposed to the impossibility of attaining what one wants. Further, Cervantes's own words, especially those of the autobiographical Viaje del Parnaso, where he claims, for example, to have desired much but to have accepted little, sustain Don Quijote's ambivalence. In the second essay, "Cervantes y la melancolia," Garcia Gibert builds upon the idea of desire developed in the first essay. He observes that despite melancholic moods, Don Quijote moves freely from one mission to the next using desire as a catalyst. Garcia Gibert surveys the transformations of the definition of melancholy throughout medical history. Although specifically defined before Cervantes' time (most notably by Ficino, who associated melancholy with creativity), melancholy obtained a broader meaning as an attitude or as a customary phase of life during the seventeenth century. Cervantes' melancholy, nevertheless, transcended that of his contemporaries. The text of the Quijote demonstrates, according to Garcia Gibert, that no writer had delved so deeply into the emotional substance of his character as Cervantes. Reacting to the words of 2.44, Don Quijote's most acute manifestations of melancholy, Garcia Gibert concludes that "El sentimineto melancolico, tan magistralmente expuesto por Cervantes en este capitulo, se extenders como una bruma ... hasta el final de la obra." The reader is now prepared for the last chapter, because Don Quijote's life becomes, like that of the symbolic swan (Viaje del Parnaso, 4), a descent into the depths of melancholy. But his renunciation of chivalry has a Humanistic coloring, since he does not fully reject the books but rather the deleterious effects they had on him and others. …