Resumen de On the Shoulders of Giants: Social Fear and Male Self-Sufficiency in Cervantes and Gilliam
- español
Este artículo explora el papel de los gigantes en Don Quijote y dos películas de Terry Gilliam, Brazil (1985) y The Man who Killed Don Quixote (2019). Por una parte, la obra de Cervantes parece recurrir a los gigantes como símbolo de conflicto clasista entre la hidalguía y los no nobles. Es aquí donde Don Quijote evoluciona desde el miedo hacia una empatía pesimista, en la cual el hidalgo se rinde ante la imposibilidad de cambiar los abusos de su clase social. Gilliam, por otra parte, presenta una respuesta más esperanzadora al pesimismo. En conjunto, las obras cuestionan el peligro que suponen las fantasías de la auto-suficiencia individualizada
- English
After nearly thirty years in development with numerous setbacks that were chronicled in the 2002 documentary Lost in La Mancha, Terry Gilliam’s film The Man who Killed Don Quixote (starring Adam Driver and Jonathan Pryce) was released in 2019 to mixed reviews. The movie will doubtless foster critical discussions of Gilliam’s engagement with Miguel de Cervantes’ best-known work for years to come, as the director’s treatment of Cervantine themes offers new readings of Don Quixote. I explore one such reading here by tracing the use of giants in both works and the individualism that these giants bring out in the works’ protagonists. The two works provide complementary solutions to a common problem: what should a protagonist in a position of privilege do when confronted by people who are not privileged? As we shall see, both works portray the non-elites as giants. In a loose sense, these giants evoke Abraham Bosse’s frontispiece for Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, a single body composed of many smaller ones showing the power of the many, though, in our discussion here, they are not united under a single sovereign. Rather, the giants capitalize on the tension between the protagonist and society.
