Close Readings The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes
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Dec 31, 2025 Tom McCarthy, twice Booker-shortlisted novelist and artist, offers punchy literary and media-theory readings of Don Quixote. He traces narrative machinery, contagious fiction, staged spectacles and the novel’s tech and economic backdrops. Short, sharp takes on windmills, theatrical hoaxes, books as media and the trickery that exposes the authorial man behind the curtain.
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Quixote As A Belated Reader
- Cervantes sets Quixote's fantasies in a belated media context: chivalric romances are already out of fashion by 1555.
- McCarthy notes a 1555 petition to ban chivalric books and that Quixote becomes a knight at age 50, underlining his anachronism.
Books Produce Trance Not Knowledge
- Media create trance or transport rather than information; Cervantes shows books producing entrancement across society.
- McCarthy invokes Marshall McLuhan and Arjan Mulder to argue that Quixote's books are the content of the novelistic medium and induce hypnosis.
Sancho Between Matter And Belief
- Sancho Panza straddles materialism and enchantment, seeing both bodily needs and the lure of promised rewards like the governorship island.
- McCarthy highlights Sancho totalling debts and believing in an island to show mixed economic and imaginative motives.
