The Grail Quest: Imagery and Motif in the Episode at the Cave of Montesinos in Don Quixote

From the title to Chapter XXII, Book II, of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote De La Mancha, the reader is told that the episode of the Cave of Montesinos takes place in the heart of La Mancha.1 Don Quixote's descent into the underworld is related to Sancho Panza and the cousin in Chapter XXIII in the form of a dream vision, which Cervantes tells us in the title is "to be regarded as apocryphal." The episode of the Cave has aroused much speculation in the criticism of Don Quixote, but it has retained its ambiguity and mystery for two main reasons: 1) The episode excludes Sancho and places Don Quixote in a passive posture, thus eliminating the regular portrayal of character through action and contrast; 2) the symbolic content of the vision (the actual scene of the crystal palace, the characters, and the artifacts) has been placed in the background and the figure of Dulcinea has been placed in the foreground, thus diverting our attention to Don Quixote's encounter with the lady of his heart. This paper proposes to establish the scene within Don Quixote's dream as analogous to, if not identical with, the scene of the Grail Quest, which has its literary genesis in the twelfth and thirteenth century French and German romances. No attempt is made to prove Cervantes' conscious familiarity with the Grail sources; but it is assumed that he would have known them either directly or indirectly through his wide reading of the chivalric romances which he ostensibly parodies in his novel. If it can be shown that he considered the Grail Quest as an important and usable motif in a novel which pretends to parody such motifs, then the pretension of satire must be viewed in an ironic light to the degree to which the Grail Quest is revived for serious, not just parodie, reasons. A brief sampling of the criticism will help to clarify for us the importance of the episode at the Cave, as well as to point out the interpretative confusion which continues to cluster around it. Miguel de Unamuno recognizes that the episode occurs "in the heart of La Mancha," and intimates that the event is meaningful in its projection of