Trial of Don Quixote, was his madness true or false?

by time news

twelve o’clock, 25 March 2021 – 18:09

The procedure in a volume with the theses of Carinci, Salvati and Carillo

of Vincenza Alfano

Picasso

How many discoveries can be made by processing a classic even just for fun. Madness or its simulation is under accusation, but it soon becomes clear that there is something much deeper. A world view is discussed. This time for the series of imaginary trials under indictment Don chisciotte. The novel of novels in which Cervantes invents and discusses the genre at the very moment in which he brings it into the world.

The idea of ​​imaginary processes, celebrated annually in Palmi in the National Festival of Law and Literature, gave rise to the birth of a real series of fiction from the publishing house Le Lucerne. The Trial of Don Quixote by Gennaro Carillo, Francesco Carinci, Antonio Salvati in bookstores from today. After Maradona, Pontius Pilate, Oscar Wilde, the turn of a new excellent defendant. Every year the Festival, born from a brilliant idea of ​​the Neapolitan judge Antonio Salvati, passionate about literature and used to handling the law, chooses a theme rather than a character. Each year the imaginary process is actually brought to the courtroom. The 2020 edition also challenged the pandemic. A very serious game – explains Salvati – which forces judges and lawyers to face the same problems of daily practice. Just because the game is serious, the mechanics are the same. all playfully serious.Don Quixote – says Salvati – an elusive character who constitutes an excellent problem of interpretation for a lover of law. In procedural practice, any prejudice must be overcome. If you already have an idea of ​​the accused – Salvati clarifies – you have to make an effort so that that idea does not change the facts. If the task of a judge is to “grasp”, faced with an elusive character, the judge is forced to give his best.

The accusation. The prosecutor Antonio Salvati has no doubts: Don Quixote guilty of pretending to be mad to escape his boredom and embody a glorious project of greatness. He has therefore intentionally deceived us and continues to do so for centuries by engaging us in one of the most complex challenges: discerning the true from the false, the fiction from reality. Don Quixote fills his life. Cervantes introduces him to us at the beginning with a masterly description subdued by a flat calm. The same days, even the same men. It occurred to me that such a brilliant man may have made fun of us. The thing that everyone likes about Don Quixote is that not just one novel but multiple novels that fit together. perfect as a charge.

The defence. In the role of the defender, Professor Franco Carinci rejects the accusation of simulating madness. Don Quixote truly and sincerely mad and immersed in his madness fulfills his heroic task. In fact, Carinci writes: The character lives on his madness, so much so that once he has recovered his mental health, with explicit renunciation of the previous life, he makes a completely banal death, duly accompanied by the will and the sacraments. The most fascinating part of the heartfelt defense is that which leads to a discovery with a new flavor: His crazy life – Carinci writes – continues to exude wisdom generation after generation. The antithesis of madness and wisdom seems to be recomposed in a dialectical relationship that contains in itself the flavor of a comforting truth, the breaking down of the boundary between disease and health, truth and fiction.

The judge. In this very serious game – says Gennaro Carillo, professor of Moral Philosophy at the Suor Orsola Benincasa University – we encountered an extraordinary novel much loved in the history of Western thought from Niestsche to Auerbach. Cervantes invents a genre that reflects on itself. a novel on many levels, a novel of novels, a meta-novel, which plays a lot on the relationship between fiction and reality. It seems that Cervantes wants to affirm that fictional literature is a formidable access key to reality. All the twentieth-century reflection says that there are various ways of understanding reality and the scientific approach cannot always offer all the answers.

Guilty or innocent – we will find out only in the last pages of the book – Don Quixote cannot, according to Carillo, be dismissed from his status as a hero. a hero – Carillo clarifies – because he continually puts his reputation on the line looking for the concrete demonstration on the field of the values ​​of chivalry. In the awareness of the fragility of his statute, Don Quixote feels the need to verify the words on the ground. an experimental man who experiences himself. In this extremely modern. Carillo thus leads us to the discovery of a fundamental connotation that the character carries within himself. If on the one hand – he says – Don Quixote seems to linger on the ancient values ​​of chivalry, on the other hand he proves to be hypermodern when he ennobles Sancho. He manages to reconcile the bourgeois code and the heroic one because both the bourgeois and the hero need the concrete demonstration of value. There are no rents, there are no privileges, whether we are talking about the affirmation of the bourgeois which will culminate in Balzac, or whether we are talking about the hero. For this reason Don Quixote takes action and gives himself to the errant cavalry. His delirium, the delusion of a subject who needs verification, must be experienced. This primacy of experience reveals a trait of extraordinary modernity.

March 25, 2021 | 18:09

© Time.News


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