Sancho's quixotization and the self-organization of systems

Abstract

Sancho on the island rules like a Solomon, think the countrymen of him. And indeed, there is no doubt that in the Barataria episode the squire shows intelligence, insight and prudence, qualities that until then were not part of his personality. The explanation for such an extraordinary change should be sought, in the opinion of Madariaga and other critics, in the constant interaction with his master; the mutual influence of the two “andantes” would have restored Don Quixote to the reality of the everyday world and projected Sancho into spheres of social being previously unattainable for him. This vision of the relationship between master and squire, in my view, loses sight of the fact that both, in addition to relating to each other, have to do so with others and with the context that surrounds them; in a word, it does not consider them as elements of a system, conditioned by its changes and by its self-organizing processes in response to certain external stimuli. This paper accepts as a starting point precisely this assertion and proposes the resilience of the two characters, and by extension of Cervantes's novel, to the traumas of the external environment as the key to the establishment in 1615 of a new homeostatic balance of the narrative system from which even a new model of novel will emerge.