Don Quixote

While Don Quixote sleeps off his beating, his friends conduct a literary inquisition. The curate and barber enter his library—over a hundred volumes of chivalric romances, the source of all his madness—and begin judging which deserve death by fire. The housekeeper wants them all burned and brings holy water to protect against magician revenge. The niece supports total destruction. But the curate insists on examining each title, and here the chapter becomes fascinating: he and the barber aren't ignorant zealots. They're educated men who know these books well and have literary opinions. They debate which are well-written despite their ridiculous content. "Amadis of Gaul"—the founder of the genre—gets spared for being the best of its kind. "Palmerin of England" is praised and preserved. "Tirante el Blanco" makes the curate excited—knights who eat, sleep, and die in their beds, make wills before dying! Real details! The women keep interrupting: burn them all! But the men keep finding exceptions. The curate even saves "The Galatea" by his friend Miguel de Cervantes (the author making a cameo in his own work), noting Cervantes has had "more experience in reverses than in verses." Finally exhausted, the curate condemns the rest sight unseen. This chapter reveals the complexity of censorship. The curate genuinely believes these books have poisoned his friend's mind—and he's not wrong. But his solution is to remove the books rather than address why Quixote was so susceptible to them. He's treating symptoms, not causes. The debate over which books to spare also exposes a contradiction: if some chivalric romances are acceptable because they're well-written, then maybe the problem isn't the books themselves but how Quixote reads them. A healthy person can enjoy fantasy without living in it. The burning won't work because Quixote has already internalized the stories. You can't un-read what's been absorbed. But the curate doesn't understand this yet. He thinks removing the source will solve the problem. It's the eternal mistake of well-meaning censors: believing that controlling information controls behavior.