Censorship In Don Quixote

of conversion will function as a tropological hinge between the unsettled (the ontological underdeterminacy of La Mancha) and the unsettling (its hauntology). Sheeps shall become bandits and giants will turn into windmills (or was it the other way around?) for the sake of offering a metaphorical displacement of the shortcomings of the State’s ontological plan. It is in this sense that as Henry Kamen observes, in Don Quixote I-II Cervantes presents us with “una perspectiva de una sociedad en que las cosas no parecen ser lo que son” (2005). Consequently, in this part of the essay my analysis of Cervantes’s magical rhetoric I will not be focusing on the State-enforced divine performatives (at the end the day, they have shown to be infelicitous).

Instead, I will delve into Cervantes’s artistic exploitation of its fallibility and into the way this maneuver takes shape through the articulation of La Mancha as the hauntological arena of the Unsettled Age.
(a) The Inquisitorial Censorship as the fuel for Cervantes’s ingenium and the use of conversion as a trope. The institutionalization of censorship was one of the main attributes of the Holy Office. In this sense, in his Sobre la Censura Literaria en el S. XVII (1991) Enrique Gato underlines the importance of distinguishing between the preventive (a priori) and the repressive (a posteriori) censorships. The latter was the focus of the Inquisition and encompassed a number of tasks: the receipt and handling of complaints, visiting the bookshops and the granting of the authorizations to end forbidden books. In order to enforce these tasks, the Inquisition was periodically endowed with decrees and edicts that reproduced the State-sponsored logic of lawfare as built upon the reliance on divine performatives. This assignment was carried out by prohibiting books, on the one hand, and by issuing indexes as well as catalogues of forbidden and censored books, on the other. The most important indexes of the Cervantean age were the Index of Forbidden (1583) and Censored Books (1584), both published by the Inquisitor Quiroga, plus further editions in 1612 (Sandoval y Rojas), 1632 (Zapata) and 1640 (Sotomayor). From 1583, these indexes also included general guidelines and criteria for the past and potential disapproval of some works that had appeared after each one of those indexes. The infamous lack of systematicity as to the directives that had to be followed apropos of these indexes testifies to the arbitrariness and impotency that lies at the heart of the inquisitorial endeavors:
Estas reglas son en su mayoría casuísticas e incompletas, y más que resultado de una reflexión apriorística que sentara las bases futuras de la censura, aparecen como cristalización de la experiencia anterior como una síntesis donde quedaba extractada la práctica que se había venido observando en etapas anteriores. Sólo a partir de 1640 es posible un cierto afán sistematizador. (Gato 13)
This indecidability, coupled with the inquisitorial emphasis on retrospective censorship, sheds some light on the relevance of self-censorship in Don Quixote I-II (cf.

Márquez, 1973). Indeed, the fact that even after having been granted publishing authorization from the Monarchy one's book could still be subjected to censorship with retroactivity is significant. Together with the overall openendedness of the inquisitorial criteria, it meant that the authors from this time and place were led to adopt a great deal of cautiousness before signing their own work. Hence the signature as a recurring motif in Don Quixote I-II, with the word <> (signature) and the verbs <> (to affirm, but also <>) and con-firmar (<>, but also <>) appearing a total of forty-seven times throughout the book. For instance, in I, 25 the ingenious Don Quixote refuses to sign two important documents (a pay order [<>] and a love letter to Dulcinea), whereas in I, 40 Cervantes points out that many renegades collected captives’ certificates (<> in the original version) to build their case for re-acceptance into the Christian communities and in I, 48 he remarks that no local magistracy should be allowed to be acted unless containing approval, seal and

signature.
In sum, the menace of the inquisitorial censorship in Cervantes’s time was real and as such it affected his own work both as to what was written and what was kept in silence. To the above-referred “allá van leyes, etc y no digo más” which leaves the saying unfinished, Cervantes added sixty-two further cases featuring suspension points. A conspicuous instance can be found in the argument that breaks in I, 22 between the commissioner and Ginés de Pasamonte, where “las manchas que se hicieron en la venta” wonderfully encapsulates the hauntological power of what is left unsaid:
Ya le he dicho, señor comisario —respondió Pasamonte—, que se vaya poco a poco, que aquellos señores no le dieron esa vara para que maltratase a los pobretes que aquí vamos, sino para que nos guiase y llevase adonde Su Majestad manda. Si no, ¡por vida de...! ¡Basta!, que podría ser que saliesen algún día en la colada las manchas que se hicieron en la venta; y todo el mundo calle, y viva bien, y hable mejor y caminemos, que ya es mucho regodeo éste. (my italics [243-244])
These unfinished utterances interpellate (thus performatively re-creating) the hauntology of a political community of marginal subjects that understand all too well the continuation (as well as the actual meaning) of such sayings for it to be wholly disclosed at the risk of inquisitorial censorship: “Bien podría pensarse, en definitiva, que el Quijote es un texto que vocifera mudamente el escándalo de la conversión, una obra que dice, para quien quiera oír sordo, el poder del insulto y la exclusión” (Vila 526).
Although one might be tempted (as many scholars have been) to infer from this situation the picture of Cervantes as a plain victim of the Inquisition's persecution (and prosecution) policies, on closer inspection nothing could be further from the truth.

Rather than preventing the emergence of Cervantes's hauntological ingenium, in forcing Cervantes to circumvent its tight surveillance, the Inquisition actually facilitated his writing of Don Quixote I-II as we know it. For it forced Cervantes to sharpen his wits and develop his style by tapping into the full luster of his rhetorical palette. As a corollary, were it not for the influence of the Inquisition, Don Quixote I-II could have never been written as we know it. The result is a work much in the vein of Strauss’s “art of exoteric communication” (1952): exoteric enough to be noted, yet ingeniously crafted so as not to be (significantly) censored6 by the Inquisition while all the same exposing the latter’s failure as part of the State-enforced lawfare towards ensuring ontological

uniformity.
(b) Functioning and procedures of Cervantes’s literary condensation and the hauntology of La Mancha. As stated in the introduction, the Cervantean magical rhetoric draws upon a whole repertoire of semantic (at the level of the signified) and non-semantic (targeting the signifier) displacements across forms (notably novel and theatre, but also poetry) and genres (epic, comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, realistic fiction, romance and satire). But, one may ask, what is a displacement, after all?
In Freudian psychology, <> or <> (usually translated as <> or <>) stands for an unconscious defense mechanism that works as follows: the mind substitutes either a new aim or a new object for goals felt in their original form to be dangerous or unacceptable. When two or more displacements occur towards the same idea, the phenomenon is called <> (from the German <>). Lacan would subsequently link up such notion to the realm of literature by drawing in 1957 upon an article on metaphor and metonymy by linguistic Roman Jakobson. From this, Lacan came to the conclusion that the unconscious has the structure of a language, thus linking displacement to the poetic function of metonymy, and condensation to that of metaphor. As he himself put it, “in the case of Verschiebung, <>, the German term is closer to the idea of that veering off of signification that we see in metonymy, and which from its first appearance in Freud is represented as the most appropriate means used by the unconscious to foil censorship” (60).
(b.1) Across literary genres and forms. The author of Don Quixote I-II learned his craft within a context of a broad experimental effort cutting across them. Particularly salient is his early vocation for poetry and theatre, the latter being catalyzed by a parallel boom in the Spanish Theatre (especially ubiquitous during the second half of the sixteenth century) and resulting in his composition of plays from as early as 1580 to as late as 1615. Whereas in theatre he made a name for himself with his entremeses (as instantiated by the entremesic nature of Don Quixote’s first departure), his best poetry came under the form of romances. Nevertheless, his remarkable success on both fields was soon eclipsed by his novelistic exploits. As Martín Morán has noted,
Cervantes en el Quijote de 1605 se vale del mecanismo de la representación para dar cauce a las exigencias artísticas manieristas; en el de 1614 introduce la escenificación en la representación porque la nueva concepción barroca del arte y del mundo le sugiere un método, el teatro en el teatro, de construcción del relato muy acorde, por lo demás, con su connatural inclinación hacia el drama (46).
Such intractable link between narration and theatre is implicitly hinted at in numerous parts of Don Quixote I-II, but it is nowhere as clear as in the dialogue between the canon and the priest (I, 48). Rather than consisting in the mere overlapping of genres, the creative point of this combination lies in the fact that it crucially allows Cervantes’s to portray via his ingenium the paradoxes and contradictions of La Mancha as a literary displacement of Spain: “la marca de conflicto presente en todo su teatro breve se articula aquí mediante la relación dialéctica entre la parte enmarcante y la parte enmarcada, entre dos historias o intrigas que nos fuerzan a cavilar sobre las evidentes contradicciones históricas, psicológicas, políticas,