Who They Are
The priest and the barber are the two friends of Don Quixote in the village: Father Pero Pérez, educated at Sigüenza, and Master Nicolás, the barber. They appear together from beginning to end, so that the book treats them as a single figure with two faces: when the gentleman is still only a reader, they argue with him over who was the better knight, Palmerín of England or Amadís of Gaul (ch. I of Part One); when he dies, the two are at his bedside, and it is the priest who hears his confession (ch. LXXIV of Part Two). In between, they are the domestic arm of the cure: they conduct the scrutiny of the library (ch. VI of Part One), wall up the room (ch. VII of Part One), go out to the Sierra Morena in disguise to bring him back (ch. XXVII of Part One), set up the cage and the prophecy (ch. XLVI of Part One), test his sanity (ch. I of Part Two), and agree with the bachelor on the plan for the third sally (ch. VII of Part Two). They want their friend's good and the order of the village; they fear a relapse; they know about books, trades, and the theater; and they are mistaken in curing one fiction with another, so that the cure reproduces the disease in the style of the books they want to burn.
Trajectory
In ch. V of Part One, they are in the house in an uproar when the gentleman is brought back; they hear from the housekeeper that he had been missing for three days and that it is the books of chivalry that turned his wits, and the niece asks that they be burned. The priest agrees and promises that the next day will not pass without the books being condemned in a public act:
Esto digo yo también -dijo el cura-, y a fee que no se pase el día de mañana sin que dellos no se haga acto público y sean condenados al fuego, porque no den ocasión a quien los leyere de hacer lo que mi buen amigo debe de haber hecho, I say so too, said the priest, and by my faith the next day shall not pass without a public act being made of them and their being condemned to the fire, so that they give no occasion to whoever reads them to do what my good friend must have done.
The priest does not suppose that his friend is sick from birth, but a victim of a reading, and the cure he proposes is to take the books away and make a spectacle of it. The reasoning, which gives the book the power to drive one mad, is the same as the gentleman's in reverse: both believe the text acts upon the world. In ch. VI of Part One, with the gentleman still asleep, they enter the room with the niece and the housekeeper and find more than a hundred large volumes in good binding. The priest wants to read at least the titles before condemning, and the barber hands the books over one by one. The first is Amadís of Gaul:
Parece cosa de misterio ésta; porque, según he oído decir, este libro fue el primero de caballerías que se imprimió en España, y todos los demás han tomado principio y origen déste, this seems a mysterious thing; for, as I have heard said, this book was the first of chivalry to be printed in Spain, and all the others have taken their beginning and origin from it.
The priest begins reading Amadís as the father of a sect and proposes to burn it for that, and it is the barber who recalls that it is said to be the best of its kind, and saves it for being unique in its genre. The priest yields, for now, and the father's absolution is of no use to the son: The Deeds of Esplandián fly out the window. The criterion of guilt and that of merit do not coincide. When a book falls by chance at the barber's feet, Tirant the White, the priest says:
Dígoos verdad, señor compadre, que, por su estilo, es éste el mejor libro del mundo: aquí comen los caballeros, y duermen, y mueren en sus camas, y hacen testamento antes de su muerte, con estas cosas de que todos los demás libros deste género carecen, I tell you the truth, my dear friend, that for its style this is the best book in the world: here knights eat, and sleep, and die in their beds, and make their wills before they die, with these things that all the other books of this kind lack.
The priest, who condemned the others for their excess, saves a book precisely because the knights eat, sleep, and make wills: his rule is the verisimilitude of the body. Soon after he says that the author deserved the galleys for the follies he wrote, so that praise and punishment walk together. When the barber opens the Galatea, the priest stops:
Muchos años ha que es grande amigo mío ese Cervantes, y sé que es más versado en desdichas que en versos. Su libro tiene algo de buena invención; propone algo, y no concluye nada, for many years that Cervantes has been a great friend of mine, and I know he is more versed in misfortunes than in verses. His book has something of good invention; it proposes something, and concludes nothing.
Cervantes puts himself in the scene as the author of a book that the priest spares, but with reservations, and the gesture is that of an author who judges himself through the voice of a character, with the same irony with which the priest judges others. The niece fears poetry as a second contagion, and the priest agrees in part: the remedy he chooses is to prune the Diana rather than burn it. In ch. VII of Part One, when the scrutiny is interrupted by the gentleman's shouts, for he has risen and brandishes blows at the air, the priest is taken for Turpin, the archbishop of the Twelve Peers, and the housekeeper burns the books in the courtyard that night. The two decide to wall up the room, so that he does not find them when he wakes, and they have it said that an enchanter carried them off. The housekeeper and the niece, well advised, repeat the lesson, and the niece embellishes it with the cloud, the serpent, and the sage who leaves by the roof; the gentleman adopts and fattens it, and the two are left sustaining the fiction they devised to cure him.
Otto Maria Carpeaux, in History of Western Literature - 5.3 - Pastorals, Epics, and the Picaresque Novel, records the bonfire of the priest and the barber as the fate of the horrible Spanish epics:
the horrible epics that the vicar and the barber, in the famous chapter VI of the first part of Don Quixote, condemn to the bonfire, the horrible epics that the vicar and the barber, in the famous chapter VI of the first part of Don Quixote, condemn to the bonfire, as Carpeaux recalls while cataloguing the worst Spanish epics.
In ch. XXVI of Part One, coming from the inn of the blanket, they meet Sancho, who is riding his master's horse, and the barber threatens to conclude that the squire has killed and robbed him; Sancho tells them where his master is, the penance and the letter to Dulcinea, and, without the little book, recites the wrong letter before them. The priest and the barber marvel at how strong the gentleman's madness was, which carried off the wits of that poor man, and they decide not to pull Sancho out of his error, for, if it does not harm his conscience, it is better to leave him in it and have the pleasure of hearing his nonsense. To pull the gentleman out of his pointless penance, the priest conceives a plan to his taste: to dress as a wandering damsel, with the barber as squire, and to ask of him a boon he cannot refuse. In ch. XXVII of Part One, the innkeeper lends a skirt and wimples, in pledge for a new cassock of the priest's, and the barber makes a long beard from an ox's tail. As soon as they set out, the priest notices that it looks unseemly for a priest to dress like that, even for a good cause, and proposes to swap the roles: the barber will be the damsel and he the squire. It is on this journey that they meet Cardenio, whom the priest wants to console. In ch. XXIX of Part One, with Dorothea ready to play the damsel, the priest tells Sancho the fiction with the air of one who says something of little account, and that is what convinces him:
es, como quien no dice nada, es la heredera por línea recta de varón del gran reino de Micomicón, is, as one who says nothing, the heiress in direct male line of the great kingdom of Micomicón.
The priest marvels to see how well the same absurdities of the master are fitted into the squire's fantasy. In ch. XXX of Part One he whispers to Dorothea the name she forgot, and comes up with the correction of Málaga when the gentleman notes that Osuna is not a port.
In ch. XXXII of Part One, at the inn, the priest, who condemned the gentleman's library to the bonfire, wants to burn it again, but only the Cirongilio and the Felixmarte, and then gives up the fire and argues. He tells the innkeeper that books of chivalry are tolerated like games:
así como se consiente en las repúblicas bien concertadas que haya juegos de ajedrez, de pelota y de trucos, para entretener a algunos que ni tienen, ni deben, ni pueden trabajar, así se consiente imprimir y que haya tales libros, just as it is allowed in well-ordered republics that there be games of chess, ball, and billiards, to entertain some who neither have, nor should, nor can work, so it is allowed to print and to have such books.
The argument supposes a reader who knows he is playing. The innkeeper, who repeats the deeds of Felixmarte by heart, shows that the public of the books is not that, and the priest does not answer this. The priest reads aloud The Curious Impertinent, and in ch. XXXV of Part One, at the end, he gives his verdict:
Bien -dijo el cura- me parece esta novela, pero no me puedo persuadir que esto sea verdad; y si es fingido, fingió mal el autor, porque no se puede imaginar que haya marido tan necio que quiera hacer tan costosa experiencia como Anselmo. Si este caso se pusiera entre un galán y una dama, pudiérase llevar, pero entre marido y mujer, algo tiene del imposible, this novella pleases me well, said the priest, but I cannot persuade myself that it is true; and if it is invented, the author invented it badly, for one cannot imagine a husband so foolish as to want to make so costly an experiment as Anselmo. If this case had been set between a suitor and a lady, it might pass, but between husband and wife it has something of the impossible.
The priest accepts the art of the novella and rejects the case, for the same reason that made him reject the books of chivalry: what cannot happen is not true history. The reservation is one of verisimilitude, not of morality. Whoever says this has just seen a man fight with wineskins as if they were a giant. In ch. XLV of Part One, the barber of the village, who knows his friend's humor, presses on with the folly and carries the joke forward so that all will laugh: he tells the other barber, owner of the basin, that the piece the gentleman holds in his hands is not a basin, and that, even if it is a helmet, it is not a whole helmet. The priest, who understood his friend's intention, confirms it. In ch. XLVI of Part One, the priest persuades the constables that the gentleman is lacking in judgment, as is seen by his deeds and words, and on the sly gives eight reales for the basin to the wronged barber, who writes him a receipt. They give orders to take the gentleman to the village without Dorothea and Don Fernando needing to accompany him, with the invention of the liberation of Queen Micomicona, and they arrange with an ox-cart driver who happens to pass by. The barber composes, in the style of the books the gentleman read, the prophecy that accompanies the cage:
la cual se acabará cuando el furibundo león manchado con la blanca paloma tobosina yoguieren en uno, ya después de humilladas las altas cervices al blando yugo matrimoñesco; de cuyo inaudito consorcio saldrán a la luz del orbe los bravos cachorros, que imitarán las rumpantes garras del valeroso padre, which will be fulfilled when the furious spotted lion and the white Tobosan dove lie together, once the high necks have been humbled under the gentle matrimonial yoke; from whose unheard-of union the brave whelps will come into the light of the world, to imitate the rending claws of their valiant father.
The tone rises and then falls, with such tenderness that the very accomplices are on the verge of believing. Whoever arranges the trick has chosen the prize that holds him: marriage with Dulcinea, which the gentleman reads at once as his own, with children for the glory of La Mancha. In ch. XLVIII of Part One, after agreeing with the canon on the books, the priest says that the canon has awakened in him an old grudge against the present comedies:
habiendo de ser la comedia, según le parece a Tulio, espejo de la vida humana, ejemplo de las costumbres y imagen de la verdad, las que ahora se representan son espejos de disparates, ejemplos de necedades e imágenes de lascivia, the comedy having to be, as it seems to Tullius, a mirror of human life, an example of customs, and an image of truth, those now performed are mirrors of absurdities, examples of foolishness, and images of lasciviousness.
Whoever burned books in the scrutiny now wants a censor for the theater, out of zeal for the truth and for the honor of Spanish talents. In ch. LII of Part One, in the procession of penitents, the priest is recognized by another priest who comes with the procession, and in two sentences explains who the gentleman is.
In Part Two, in ch. I of Part Two, they remain almost a month without seeing their friend, so as not to revive his memories, and visit him after asking the niece and the housekeeper to treat him with good foods for the heart and the brain. They agree not to touch on chivalry, and it is the priest who touches it, because the cure is proven only by forcing the weak point. When the gentleman proposes to the king that the knights-errant be summoned by public proclamation, the priest says to himself:
¡Dios te tenga de su mano, pobre don Quijote: que me parece que te despeñas de la alta cumbre de tu locura hasta el profundo abismo de tu simplicidad!, God hold you by the hand, poor Don Quixote: for it seems to me that you are plunging from the high summit of your madness into the deep abyss of your simplicity!
The aside is compassion and diagnosis at once, and it reads the relapse as a fall from a summit, not as an illness that returns. Two readings: the priest cares for his friend, or he needs the test to fail in order to confirm what he decided when he sent him home enchanted in the cage. In ch. VII of Part Two, the plan is arranged with the bachelor Sansón Carrasco; in ch. XV of Part Two, the narrator reveals that the bachelor came to an agreement with them on how to reduce the gentleman to staying at home. In ch. LXXIII of Part Two, the priest and the bachelor pray in a meadow at the entrance to the village and receive the gentleman and Sancho with open arms. In ch. LXXIV of Part Two, the priest is called for the confession: he has the people leave, remains alone with the gentleman and confesses him, and then says that truly one dies, and truly Alonso Quijano the Good is sensible. He asks the notary for a testimony that he died naturally, so as to remove the occasion for some other author, not Cide Hamete, to resurrect him falsely.
Themes Embodied
The priest and the barber are Madness seen from the side of the cure. Both treat reading as cause and the removal of books as remedy, and the fiction of the damsel, the prophecy, and the cage as method: madness is treated with a fiction it recognizes. The book shows that the method works whenever the gentleman recognizes the style (the enchanter, the damsel, the cage), and makes clear that the cure is a kind of contagion: they amuse themselves with the foolishness they hear (ch. XXVI of Part One), and the whole plan depends on their knowing as much about chivalry as he does.
The relation to Language and Narration is that of criticism. The scrutiny makes of two friends in the village the first literary tribunal of the book: Amadís saved for being the first, Tirant for being plausible, the Galatea for being a promise, the Diana pruned. The same priest who burns defends, at the inn, that books of chivalry are tolerated like games (ch. XXXII of Part One), and the demand for verisimilitude with which he judges the novella of The Curious Impertinent (ch. XXXV of Part One) is the one the book makes of itself.
Appearance and Reality places them in the place of Frestón: it is they who fabricate the enchantment to console, and that is why they remain caught in what they fabricated. The enchanter of ch. VII of Part One is the remedy the two decide on, adorned by the niece; the prophecy of the cage is the barber's work; and it is the gentleman who, recognizing the genre, returns the invention as proof (ch. VII of Part One, ch. XLVI of Part One).
Divergent Readings
The book itself places in the two friends the two readings of what they do. The priest, in ch. I of Part Two, sees the gentleman's fall as the fall from a summit, and compassion; the narrator, in ch. XV of Part Two, says that the bachelor's plan was agreed with them and ended in a beating. Two readings: the two are curing a friend, or they need a madman so that the world can go on having a village gentleman who can be visited.
The scrutiny has two readings in the text itself. Whoever reads it by the authority of the priest sees a tribunal that knows what it condemns and what it absolves, and that spares what the book will later defend, the verisimilitude of the body. Whoever reads it by the distance of the narrator sees that the tribunal is part of the joke: the housekeeper burns the rest at night, the righteous pay for the sinners, and the priest spares the books of his friend Cervantes with reservations. Against the first reading it is worth recalling that the criterion of guilt and that of merit do not coincide (ch. VI of Part One); against the second, that the priest is right when he separates the novella of The Curious Impertinent from the books of chivalry by the criterion Cervantes himself adopts (ch. XXXV of Part One).
Relationships
- Don Quixote: the friend they want to cure by removing the books (ch. VI of Part One), with the fiction of Micomicona (ch. XXIX of Part One), with the cage (ch. XLVI of Part One), and with the test of sanity (ch. I of Part Two), and who receives them, at the end, for the confession (ch. LXXIV of Part Two).
- Sancho Panza: the squire who finds them at the inn of the blanket (ch. XXVI of Part One), to whom he recites the wrong letter (ch. XXVI of Part One), and who recognizes them under the disguises of the cage (ch. XLVII of Part One).
- Cardenio and Dorothea: the two they meet in the sierra, who are part of the Micomicona fiction (ch. XXVII of Part One, ch. XXIX of Part One).
- Sansón Carrasco: the bachelor with whom they arrange the plan for the third sally (ch. VII of Part Two, ch. XV of Part Two).
- Cide Hamete Benengeli: the historian for whom the priest asks a testimony of the death, so that another author does not falsely resurrect the gentleman (ch. LXXIV of Part Two).