Maximillian: a Mexican Quijote in Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del Imperio

Abstract

In Fernando del Paso’s Noticias del Imperio, the author constructs the historical characters of Emperor Maximillian and Blasio, his clerk, as Mexican adaptations of Quijote and Sancho Panza. Noticias del Imperio puts the process of its own creation in the spotlight, just as El Quijote does. Both are meta-textual texts, but with one difference: while Quijote’s character is the agent of his own construction and becomes an errant knight by his own choosing, Maximillian is shaped as a copy of the original Quijote by the narrator and the political climate. He becomes a puppet of power that the French aspire to in Mexico. Maximillian, the Mexican Quijote that del Paso constructs, is unaware of the fact that he is becoming Quijote and losing his reason. In his case, this craziness is not a product of an excess of reading, but rather a product of the politics of a chaotic country that is undergoing two simultaneous wars, where his principal allies have left him alone in a foreign country.