Reading a commentary on the work of Miguel de Cervantes some days ago, I came across one writer's way of identifying or categorizing the very slippery, ungraspable essence of the Spanish author's vast prose works, yes even his poetics and theatrical pieces. While a great majority of his Novelas Ejemplares (1613), Plays and Intermezzos (1615), and most certainly numerous chapters of the First Part (1605) and Second Part (1615) of Don Quixote de la Mancha, certainly fit into the classification of Realism -- the critic I am referring to spoke of the "varnish" or realism with which the Castillian author dresses his Fantasy.  Major examples of this are also found throughout his last work, published one year after his death in 1616: Persiles and Sigismunda -- an on-the-road novel of a young Scandinavian's vowed pilgrimage to Rome where the couple narrowly escapes being forever "disappeared" by a sect of Aryan-racist Messianics and after managing this getaway proceed navigating and walking to Rome and meeting a cast of characters both raw and commonplace and lofty or wizard-like--all of whom make the ho-hum story of conversion to Catholicism much more than that -- many times by recurring to fantasy and imagination, on the part of Cervantes.

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The episode of "Mambrino's Helmet" which I illustrated in the above pen & ink drawing of the early 2000's, as indicated, is found in the First Part of Don Quixote where an entire corpus of literary fantasy borrowed by Cervantes from Italian writers like Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and from popular Spanish ballads sung by bards and trouvadours in western Europe during the Middle Ages ... is anchored in the real "varnish" of the dry landscape of Spain's La Mancha region, where this and so many of the adventures and conversations of Sancho Panza take place. Indeed, Cervantes further grounds Quixote's seeing a Barber's shaving basin (carried by an actual barber that Q and Sancho cross paths with at this junction) as the Helmet of the knight mambrino from Ariosto's Orlando -- all of which is treated by Quixote's interlocutors as madness. In this way, a new realm of literary genre is delved into which has in it as much of the judgmental grounding of its being "madness" or unleashed fantasy as it does of fantasy itself, since the writing in this and so many other similar scenarios in Don Quixote manages to cast a sort of comic spell on readers, with a sort of "what if...?" resonance to the mad perceptions of the knightly hero, where even seeing him as a "knight" belies the same juxtaposition of fantasy and realism that opened this paragraph as a topic.