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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Novel As Man Behind The Curtain
- The novel exposes the scaffolding behind apparent authenticity by turning the mechanisms of representation into the subject itself.
- Tom McCarthy frames this as a tension between the 'wizard' view and the man behind the curtain, where systems (money, machinery, mediation) make the fiction visible.
Don Quixote As Media Theory
- Don Quixote is used to elaborate both an aesthetics of imitation and a theory of media that shows how older media become content for newer ones.
- McCarthy compares Quixote's absorption in chivalric books to Zidane's childhood internal TV commentary to show media as trance-inducing.
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.
