What It Is
Thirty or forty windmills on a plain in La Mancha, which Don Quixote takes for giants and attacks with his lance couched, while Sancho Panza shouts behind him that they are windmills. It is the most cited adventure in the book and the one that became its emblem, but the novel treats it less as an isolated scene than as a model: the gentleman sees one thing, the squire names the parts of the other (sails, wind, millstone), the lance catches on a sail and the wind breaks it, and the defeat is explained by a wise enemy who turned the giants into windmills to deprive him of the glory. That explanation is the first use of the enchanter, the piece the book will reuse up to Part Two. After the scene, the windmills do not stand still: the bachelor puts them on the list of the most celebrated feats of the printed book, Sancho uses them as proof of his master's madness, and Don Quixote, before other watermills, concedes what he had denied before.
Where It Appears
The explanation is born before the scene. In chapter VII of Part One, when the housekeeper and the niece say that a sage carried off the study of books, the gentleman corrects the name of the magician and gives a reason: the enemy knows he will defeat him one day, and so he causes him every annoyance he can.
ése es un sabio encantador, grande enemigo mío, que me tiene ojeriza, porque sabe por sus artes y letras que tengo de venir, andando los tiempos, a pelear en singular batalla con un caballero a quien él favorece, y le tengo de vencer, sin que él lo pueda estorbar, y por esto procura hacerme todos los sinsabores que puede, that is a wise enchanter, a great enemy of mine, who bears me ill will because he knows by his arts and letters that I am to come, in the course of time, to fight a single combat with a knight whom he favors, and I am to defeat him, without his being able to prevent it; and for this reason he tries to cause me every vexation he can.
In chapter VIII of Part One, a few hours after the promise of the insula has put the squire at risk of gaining or losing by what his master sees, Don Quixote points at the windmills and says what he intends to do with them.
ves allí, amigo Sancho Panza, donde se descubren treinta, o pocos más, desaforados gigantes, con quien pienso hacer batalla y quitarles a todos las vidas, See there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or a few more outrageous giants appear, with whom I intend to do battle and take all their lives.
Sancho answers from what he knows of the trade, and his master does not dispute the facts: he says the squire knows nothing of adventures and tells him to say a prayer if he is afraid.
aquellos que allí se parecen no son gigantes, sino molinos de viento, y lo que en ellos parecen brazos son las aspas, que, volteadas del viento, hacen andar la piedra del molino, those that appear there are not giants, but windmills, and what seem to be arms on them are the sails, which, turned by the wind, make the millstone go.
Still in chapter VIII of Part One, fallen with his lance in pieces, he closes the system without correcting his vision: what refutes the knight is the enemy's doing.
aquel sabio Frestón que me robó el aposento y los libros ha vuelto estos gigantes en molinos por quitarme la gloria de su vencimiento: tal es la enemistad que me tiene, that wise Frestón who stole my room and my books has turned these giants into windmills to deprive me of the glory of their defeat: such is the enmity he bears me.
In chapter III of Part Two, in the first conversation with the bachelor Sansón Carrasco, the printed book appears as proof that the adventure has become famous: the windmills head the list of the most esteemed feats, before the fulling mills, the flocks, the dead man of Segovia, the galley slaves, the friars, and the Biscayan.
In chapter X of Part Two, while planning how to make his master believe a farm girl is Dulcinea, Sancho draws the lesson from the scene he himself witnessed: whoever takes windmills for giants, friars' mules for dromedaries, and flocks for armies will have no difficulty believing the peasant girl, and if he does not believe, Sancho swears it.
In chapter XVII of Part Two, before the lions' cage, that same Sancho measures the danger by what they have already been through: compared with this one, those of the windmills and of the fulling mills were a trifle, mere cakes and painted bread.
In chapter XXIX of Part Two, on the enchanted boat on the Ebro, the gentleman sees a castle where there are watermills, and Sancho says what they are and what they are for, as on the first day. The answer is no longer the same.
todas las cosas trastruecan y mudan de su ser natural los encantos. No quiero decir que las mudan de en uno en otro ser realmente, sino que lo parece, como lo mostró la experiencia en la transformación de Dulcinea, único refugio de mis esperanzas, enchantments transpose and change all things from their natural being. I do not mean that they change them from one being into another in reality, but that it only appears so, as experience showed in the transformation of Dulcinea, the sole refuge of my hopes.
What It Means
The windmills are the scene in which the book shows how Don Quixote's madness works before it says what it is. The two sides argue with different kinds of proof: the squire appeals to what is seen and to the use of things, the master appeals to a knowledge that only he has read, and the text makes clear which of the two is right about the windmills and which one commands. The enchanter's explanation adds to this mismatch the piece that makes it stable: if the fact refutes the knight, the refutation proves that the knight was worth enough to be feared, and nothing Sancho can see or say touches the belief.
Between chapter VIII of Part One and chapter XXIX of Part Two, the symbol changes position. In Part One, the master sees giants and the squire sees windmills, and the one who is wrong is the master. In Part Two, after Sancho invented the enchanted Dulcinea, appearance is granted to the squire and value is taken from her: it is a windmill, and that is exactly what the enchantment is. Sancho's proof turns into proof in the master's favor, and the theory comes to depend on the squire's lie to sustain itself, because the example the gentleman gives is the transformation of Dulcinea, which he has never seen. Two readings: the gentleman learned to defend himself against refutation and closed the system, or, by admitting that the watermills look like watermills, he took for the first time a step toward the squire. The text sustains both, and that is why the windmill scene keeps yielding meaning after the episode has ended.
Relationships
- The work: Don Quixote.
- Standard themes: Appearance and Reality, Madness.
- Themes of the work: Appearance and Reality, Madness.
- Characters: Don Quixote, Sancho Panza, Sansón Carrasco.
- Neighboring symbols: Mambrino's Helmet, which also only one of the two sees the way the other does, and the books of chivalry, from which comes the enchanter who explains the defeat.