"The Knight of the Sorrowful Face" : the face of the historian in "Don Quijote"

When I imagine Don Quijote's face, I do not imagine a perturbed face. I imagine a longish, noble face, rugged and melancholic [...] By the end of Part I of the Quijote, however, the knight's face is in very bad shape. Every time I read the Quijote I am, as Nabokov was, surprised by the intensity of the violence to which Don Quijote is subject in this sequence. That surprise is partly due to the thematic of brains withered by reading and the relentless humour of the story, both of which distract from the violence. It is due, as well, to my habits as a reader. My memory never accumulates injury after injury into a total image, as Doré's later images do [Figure 3]. In these images one can see the accumulation of this history of violence. This is a specific kind of perturbation. The hero’s face is not momentarily or temporarily perturbed at a moment of crisis, by an act of injustice he wants to rectify, or by a passing glimpse of the rift between the imaginary and the real that his character conventionally inhabits. It is not forgotten under the cover of a typical face. Rather, in a quite literal and direct way, Don Quijote's face continually records the damage done to it. My claim in this essay is that the nature of this recording has wide implications for the interpretation of the novel. Cervantes’ development of a post-epic mode of storytelling; his relation to his historical situation, and in particular to the expulsions; the nature, even, of Cervantine irony, are profoundly shaped by the recollection or the forgetting of the hero's face. This interpretation begins with this last disfigurer of Don Quijote's face, Ginés de Pasamonte. Don Quijote's disturbed face is related, in complex but fundamental ways, to the face of Ginés, and, through him, to the face of the novel's Arabic historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli, expelled from the iconography of the novel and from our memory of the story in a way that echoes his expulsion from Spain in the gap that separates the two Parts of his history. Recalling this history of violence will allow the novel to appear as a meditation on the structure and function of epic memory in the wake of expulsion.