«To change the world»: justice or utopia?

Abstract

The essay plays, in an  ironic way, similarly to Jorge Luis Borges’ style, with the idea that the expression to change the world: justice or utopia, which is not found in Quixote, could undoubtedly have been excluded of it, or invented by an anonymous author, a habitual resource in the Middle Ages. It points out that we are in the presence of works that somehow mark the beginning of the concept of “author” and, paradoxically, question it, as Cervantes does deliberately, or as portrayed in the difficulties to establish the verisimilitude of the authorship of the works by the English bard. And this is done  in order to work not only with the coincidence of the dates of their deaths (which grants space for another Borges-like game), but also with their contribution to the formation of the Western cultural universe, which made Bloom exaggerate in the attribution to Shakespeare of “inventing the human”, but to formulate the opposition of two ethics between two emblematic characters, such as Quixote and Lady Macbeth: ethics, which we shall call “of duty”, from which the concept of utopia is built, present in Erasmus Of Rotterdam’s work (of great influence in the Spain of Cervantes) and of Thomas Morus; And the ethics that we will call pragmatic, the ethics of Lady Macbeth, who prescribes to her husband the advice of Nicholas Machiavelli. In short, this paper concludes that Cervantes and Shakespeare inaugurated modernity, and the ideas found in their works, which were present in the production of sense of their time, in turn altered it (given the performative effect of literature); And that their remarkable personalities, united by the invisible thread of “madness”, allowed us to see the two faces of the human, as the Sileni of Alcibiades.