El Quijote y la violencia latinoamericana del siglo XX

La utilización de la figura quijotesca en dos textos de Jorge Franco y Carlos Gamerro

Abstract

This work is part of an ongoing project dedicated to the connections between
Cervantes’s Don Quijote and contemporary Latin American narrative dealing with political
violence in Latin America. The present study focuses on two texts published in 2004: the
novel La aventura de los bustos de Eva written by the Argentine author Carlos Gamerro, and
the story “Donde se cuenta cómo me encontré con Don Quijote de la Mancha en Medellín,
cuando la ciudad se llenó de gigantes inventados” [‘On how I found myself meeting Don
Quijote de la Mancha in Medellín while the city was flled with made-up giants’], written by
the Colombian author Jorge Franco. In both texts, the protagonists fnd themselves dealing
with a world maddened by violence, and in both texts Cervantes’s novel functions as a means
of representing the world, making sense ot of it, or simply surviving it. Concretely, the
analysis offered in this work explores two topics that bear a Quixotesque imprint and play a
central role in the works discussed: the protagonist who is also a reader and the
problematization of madness.