The “tremulous private body” has a different expression in the second prologue of Don Quijote. In this short but essential text, Cervantes grapples with topics of trauma, violence and subjection, evincing transatlantic parallels in the advent of the mechanization of labor, whose model is most fundamentally that of the indigenous mine worker, the broken indigenous body that subtends imperial production of the early modern.

While much ink has been spent on interpreting the prologue Miguel de Cervantes wrote for the first volume of Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605), fewer critical studies have been dedicated to the prologue of his Book II (1615), constructed as a defense by Cervantes against the spurious sequel to Book I circulated by his rival Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, the ostensible Segundo Tomo del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (1614). Nonetheless I will suggest that there is still more to be gleaned from this text, particularly if one takes to heart Américo Castro's assertion that Cervantes's prologues are more like epilogues whose meaning “No se revela sino a quien posea noticia muy cabal del libro” (Hacia Cervantes 231). As I hope to demonstrate, the second prologue is a window into the greater problem of the interaction of body and machine in Don Quijote, one in which different notions of the grotesque come into play.

Henry Sullivan has associated Book II of Don Quijote with the grotesque mode, portraying the cave of Montesinos episode as a descent into the grotto of the psyche, with Quijote's cure following a Christian pattern of purgation. He further argues that the grotesque, by evoking the terror of bodily fragmentation, contributes a “dark solemnity” to the novel which offsets its comic aspects (62–63, 59). As he writes of Book II: “It is the grotesque of the body subjected to pain, contextualized within a mock ceremonial order, that raises the uncertain smile” (66). I agree with Sullivan on these points but I will suggest a refinement of these arguments which incorporates more recent work in trauma theory as it has been applied to Cervantes's life experience. In Cervantes's figuration of the body as mechanism, the comedy of the satiric grotesque—in the Bakhtinian, carnivalesque sense much explored by critics—is shadowed by its darker side, the “estranged world”—in Wolfgang Kayser's more negative understanding of the fantastic grotesque3—of psychic trauma.