Christopher Britt Arredondo 148 ISSN 1540 5877 eHumanista/Cervantes 3 (2014): 148-170 Madariaga’s Quixotism: The Imperial Nostalgia of an Exiled Spanish Liberal Christopher Britt Arredondo (The George Washington University) “One ends up identifying with an enemy whose structure one does not understand”. –Giorgio Agamben I. The Dialectic of Disenchantment In his 1926 Guía del lector del Quixote, Salvador de Madariaga claims to find a reciprocal dualism at work in Cervantes’ Quixote. As an organizing principle, this dualism is supposed to inspire Cervantes’ self-conscious narrative style, to inform the episodic pairing of adventures and misadventures in the novel, and to shape the relationship between the novel’s two protagonists. Don Quixote and Sancho’s influence on each other forms what Madariaga calls a “fraternity of soul” that “unites” them in mutual enchantment (136). In this sense, Madariaga asserts that Sancho undergoes a process of Quixotization, which elevates him from his lowly world of bodily wants and desires into the heightened realm of Don Quixote’s chivalric ideals. Similarly, he insists that Don Quixote undergoes a reciprocal process of Sanchification. This process tends however to spiral downward, from the self-sacrificial spiritual ideals of Don Quixote to the self-serving material interests of Sancho; from Don Quixote’s yearning to achieve everlasting glory to Sancho’s worldly desire for power; and from the high-mimetic realm of epic and tragedy, in which Don Quixote imagines himself to be a noble knight, to the low-mimetic realm of comedy and satire, in which Sancho finds himself the mocked governor of a fake island kingdom. Beaten, humiliated, and scorned, knight and squire eventually return home to La Mancha, from whence they will never sally forth again. Thus the reciprocal enchantment that initially unites Don Quixote and Sancho in a “fraternity of soul” ultimately turns into a reversible dualism that leads to their shared disenchantment. This reversal of fortune expresses a psychology of defeat: the defeat, that is, of what Madariaga refers to as Don Quixote’s “moral authority” (119). Like Ganivet’s 1897 Idearium español, Unamuno’s 1905 Vida de Don Quixote y Sancho, and Ortega’s 1914 Meditaciones del Quixote, Madariaga’s 1926 Guía treats Don Quixote as an icon for the modern Spanish nation. Consequently, for Madariaga, the defeat of Don Quixote’s moral authority represents Spain’s loss of moral authority in the modern era. Written at the threshold of modernity, the Quixote expresses with melancholy the very same disenchantment that Madariaga felt with regard to the processes of modernization in Spain. As he understood it, modernity had ushered in a prolonged period of decadence. This decadence was punctuated by two crises: the final collapse of Spain’s empire in 1898 and the defeat of the Second Republic in 1939. The first had reduced Spain’s power and influence in the world to almost nil. The second had eliminated the sovereignty of the Spanish people. Madariaga believed that among other nations such as the English, the French, and the Americans, modernity had delivered on its promise to liberate men from the tyranny of pre-modern forms of thought and power; but, that among the Spanish it had achieved the opposite. Indeed, Madariaga’s disenchantment with modernity arises from the realization that in Spain modern democracy had converged with the primitive forms of thought and abusive practices of a totalitarian state. To the extent to which