Don Quixote and last class

"'Listen, my dear brother,' the priest said again, ' there never was a Felixmarte of Hyrcania in this world, or a Don Cirongilio of Thrace, or any other knights like them that the books of chivalry tell about, because it is all fiction made up by idle minds, composed to create the effect you mentioned, to while away the time, just as your harvesters amuse themselves by reading them. Really, I swear to you, there never were knights like these in the world, and their great deeds, and all that other nonsense, never happened'

'Throw that bone to another dog!' responded the innkeeper."

Don Quixote pg. 270

Interestingly enough, during class on 9/29/08 we somehow ended up in the realm of reality verses fiction or the High Mimetic vs. Low thanks to our little discussion of Batman.  Now I'm more of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles person myself but the discussion was quite coincidental for me because only the night before I stumbled onto the above passage while reading.  It raised the question of reality vs. fantasy and the role played by the two states of mind in the life of literature and the life of "real."  I pondered this for a bit with no concrete success more just a internal struggle with tangent thoughts of true "reality."  Enter Northrop Frye into my internal dialogue.  The more I read Frye's theories of Archetypes the more literature seems to make sense.  If all literature is displaced myth or ritual then it seems that literature acts as the replacement for ceremonies our species developed over the course of evolution.  In the broad spectrum of time, humans evolved at an incredibly rapid pace especially from the cave dwelling era to now.  Like all species, humans have instincts and it seems hard to believe that instincts developed over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution completely disappeared over the last 15,000 years. The thought of humans dancing around fires chanting strange incantations towards the moon seems a bit outlandish during this day and age so maybe rather than continuing such ancient traditions, we developed a defence mechanism to satisfy these primal urges without actually performing them and therefore maintaining the instincts built into our DNA over the generations before recorded history.  It seems then that fiction may not be so fictitious after all.  Rather its a "real" extension of instincts from ancient history.  That being said, it becomes a bit harder to differentiate reality from fiction and completely defends both Don Quixote and the innkeeper's belief in the reality of the chivalric fiction.  Although I will note that Don Quixote takes the grey area between the two and crosses into another plane of lunacy altogether by acting out the fictions.  The innkeeper actually seems quite intelligent in challenging the priest to the true real nature of the books on Chivalry.  Because after all as the innkeeper points out a bit before the above quote how his harvesters sit around and "[. . .] listen to him read with so much pleasure that it save [them] a thousand grey hairs [. . .]"  They save the grey hairs not by listening to fiction but by actually acting upon a real instinct.  So where is the line between the two.  'Spose its hard to say really... or is it fictionally.