Cómo Don Quijote viajó a las Américas. Metamorfosis del héroe nacional de España en textos de Rubén Darío, Carlos Fuentes y Kathy Acker

Abstract

Only a few fictional heroes symbolize a supposed national character in the way Cervantes’ Don Quijote does in the case of Spain. His adaptation to the ethnic, historical and cultural contexts of the Americas is discussed in this paper, focusing especially on the mechanisms of transtextualization in the short story D. Q. by Rubén Darío (1899), in Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes (1975), and in Kathy Acker’s «post-feminist» novel Don Quixote which was a dream from 1986. These three texts demonstrate that due to the elasticity of the mythologeme Don Quijote, this fictive figure is to function under different ideological and cultural circumstances. It is remarkable that all of the texts go beyond the 19th century version of Don Quijote, liberating the figure from all the false romantic chivalry and exposing the humanistic ideas of Cervantes’ novel which had been left behind following the enlightenment.