DON QUIXOTE ON DETECTING MODE: A MATTER OF MEMORY

Inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s statement according to which, with the invention of (modern) detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe has also created a new type of more alert reader, one that would address the first modern novel with a sceptical - even paranoid - attitude, the present article is a reading of Don Quixote as a narative of detection and discovery, with a focus on memory, as activated throughout a problematic reconfiguration of reality and a concern with the notion of truth and identity. Thus, the return of Don Quixotede la Mancha in narratives such as crime fiction is likely to have occured earlier than Chesterton’s invocation andunder more implicit circumstances that are worth investigating. The main directions of this retrospective reading of the Spanish novel, intersecting one at a time the theme of memory, are: the notion of doubt ranging from scepticism to paranoia, thepuzzlelike and fragmentary narrative structure, and representations of kindred justice figures as myths of (post)modern individualism. The study articulates around an anxiety of the age towards temporal distances and fading past heroism, asexpressed in fictional quests that merge memory and imagination in a superior form of active and ever-changing truth, of the (still intriguing) kind represented by the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance. The analysis exemplifies, with a magnifying gesture aimed at an already caricatured figure, the fictional potential of doubt, the alluring puzzlelike imagery of literature and its re-ordering claims, by setting the discussion to a suspicious – that is, radically hermeneutical – mode.