Township of Wabash, Estados Unidos
Miguel de Cervantes está muerto, pero vive después de la muerte—en la ficción. En este ensayo se discuten seis novelas de ciencia-ficción/fantasía en las que Cervantes es resucitado, aparece misteriosamente al resucitado Don Quijote, es clonado, casi es vuelto zombi, es inmortal, o sale de su tumba como fantasma. Las obras discutidas son: Carlos Coello, El nuevo Lázaro (1890); Torcuato Miguel, La vuelta de don Quijote (1979); Miguel de María Luque, El romance de los clonados (2002); Házael González, Quijote Z (2010); Manuel Vilas, Los inmortales (2012); y Vicente Muñoz Puelles, El despertar de Cervantes (2016).
A number of my colleagues in the afterlife have taken to publishing additional words after their own deaths. [...]recently, I have abhorred this practice. Necessity compels me, however, to once again take up pen to further elucidate the nature of my gift to the world, one Alonso Quijana, who in madness pretended himself a valiant knight-errant, Don Quijote de La Mancha. Since my departure from mortality, my mad knight has been variously ballad-ed, poem-ed, opera-ed, theater-ed and even, God save us, adjectiv-ed: "quixotic, romantically chivalric, having high but impractical sentiments, aims, etc." The enthusiastic Congresistas join him in going to the Trinitarian Convent where Cervantes is buried, break in, discover the body,4 remove it back to their meeting place, and carry out the procedure of bringing Cervantes to life. At last, in the final four pages of the long novel, one night as Don Quixote goes to bed and falls asleep, he has a dream in which he talks with "el autor de esta obra" (419), who explains his three reasons for bringing Don Quixote back to life: to demonstrate that someone as great as he was in his own time would probably live unnoticed in the modern day,5 to allow him a chance to win a victory, and to experience true love.