Cervantes

Dynamic shifts in tonicity and tempo are numerous in Don Quixote. This chapter focuses, however, on a single action: Montesinos explains how he cleaned blood from Durandarte’s heart with a handkerchief. This narrated movement requires an analysis that takes into account the historical context in which Cervantes was writing, and the threat of censorship in early modern Spain. The text conveys a type of humor that overflows readers’ reception with sensorimotor over-specifications, thereby triggering perceptual simulations that implicitly debunk the validity of key social metaphors. Two such metaphors call for attention. The first is la limpieza de sangre, the name of an ideology relative to blood purity; the second is the metaphor of the stain, la mancha, prominent in the same ideology. A close analysis of reiterated lexical choices suggests that Cervantes was reclaiming in his work the pluricultural reality of the Spain in which he was living.