Though since the Romantic period most critics have tended to look far beyond Cervantes' anti-chivalric statements for signs of his true intentions, serious concern with those statements has made a recent comeback, most thoroughly developed in Anthony Close's The Romantic Approach to «Don Quixote» (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). (N. from the A.)

The question is one that began to receive considerable attention in the Renaissance, when philosophers first began to associate the faculty of imagination with poetry, and with an excess of hot and dry humors. Alfonso de Carvallo, for example, in his Cisne de Apolo, distinguishes clearly between imagination and intellect in the creation of poetry, deviating from the medieval idea that imagination was a source of danger requiring a censor. For more on the role of the imagination in poetic activity, see John Dagenais' «El amor y el proceso creador», op. cit.. (N. from the A.)

That the faculties were separate, if interrelated, was clear to the theorists who discussed the psychology of the soul. Huarte de San Juan, so influential in Cervantes, sees the difference among people in the development of the various faculties (imaginative, memorial, and intellectual) as indicators of differences in talent, taking as ideal the even balance of all three. The point here is that one can easily use more than one faculty, and not experience those faculties as in harmony with one another. See Examen de ingenios in Biblioteca de autores españoles 65 (Madrid: Atlas, 1953). Just as I was preparing this manuscript for press I came across C. Christopher Soufas, Jr.'s «Thinking in La vida es sueño», PMLA 100 (1985), 287-99, which takes up in some detail Renaissance notions regarding imagination and the intellect. (N. from the A.)

It is this profound, and I suspect, thoroughly iconoclastic insight that empowers such characters as Chirinos and Chanfalla in «El retablo de las maravillas» and Pedro de Urdemalas in Cervantes' play by the same name. Chirinos and Chanfalla are master-magicians because they draw out into the illusion of perceived reality images generated out of their subject's hidden prejudices and fears. (N. from the A.)

For a fuller accounting, see Arthur Efron's «Bearded Waiting Women, Lovely Lethal Female Piratemen: Sexual Boundary Shifts in Don Quixote, Part II», in Cervantes 2 (1982), 155-64. (N. from the A.)

The change comes not in an alternate, fantasy world, but out of the release made possible when the grip of one's lived «reality» is loosened enough for its contingent, provisional, and alterable quality to become apparent. Félix Martínez-Bonati explores in a profound and insightful way the liberating effects made possible through entry into the mock-communicative world of poetic discourse in Fictive Discourses and the Structure of Literature: A Phenomenological Approach (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1981). See also my discussion of the transforming effects of story-telling in Don Quixote in Beyond Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984). (N. from the A.)