by Ilan Stavans
To my parents,
Ofelia and Abraham—
soñadores.
And to my siblings,
Darián and Liora.
CONTENTS
Preface
SECTION ONE
THE NOVEL
1 | IN HIS LIKENESS
2 | THE SO-CALLED NORMAL
3 | MADNESS AND METHOD
4 | A MODERN NOVEL
5 | THE CONJUROR OF WORDS
SECTION TWO
THE WORLD
6 | QUIJOTISMO AND MENARDISMO
7 | SHAKESPEARE’S QUIXOTE
8 | THE EBULLIENT BUNCH
9 | AMERICA’S EXCEPTIONALISM
10 | FLEMISH TAPESTRIES
Epilogue
Chronology
Credits
Acknowledgments
Sources
Index
CLASSIC: A book people praise but don’t read.
—Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)
PREFACE
Asteroid 3552 displays some bizarre, disassociated behavior. Astronomers describe it as a small body orbiting around the sun. Yet it acts like a comet and, for that matter, like an extinct one, meaning that the asteroid has expelled from its nucleus most of its volatile ice. Thus, it is lifeless, incapable of generating energy in its tail—a comet without force, a kind of impostor, pretending to be something it isn’t.
Aside from its number, astronomers have given it a name: Don Quixote. Greek myths are often used to name planets (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc.) as well as asteroids (Apollo, Trojan, Centaur, etc.). The names of other such chunks of space matter have also been drawn from writers’ names (Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut, for example) and literary characters (the moons orbiting Uranus are named after characters in Shakespeare’s plays). The asteroid known as Don Quixote was detected by Swiss astronomer Paul Wild in 1983. Measuring almost twelve miles in diameter (the width of San Francisco Bay), it has an inclined comet-like path, crosses the Mars orbit, and is frequently perturbed by Jupiter’s gravitational force. Its existence is tenuous: at some point, like other debris in the solar system, it might crash into the sun. But it could escape such a tragic end.
In other words, Don Quixote is likely to wander forever—whatever that word means in our vast, expanding universe. Isn’t that what the real Don Quixote, the character created by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, does too—wander around aimlessly in our imagination? Personally, I find it fitting to call Asteroid 3552 after what is arguably the most famous—and, in my view, the best—novelistic character of all time. He too is a kind of impostor, a migrating object faking his path through existence, an artifact passing for something he is not, dreaming of an alternative life.
We all dream of a different life. We all want to be someone else. Don Quixote is such an appealing character because he acts on that dream. As a result, he is seen as a fool, imprisoned in his own self-made universe. But contrary to common wisdom, foolishness isn’t the antonym of reason. One can be a wise fool as well as an insane genius. Reason and foolishness—call it madness!—are actually one and the same: to be who we want to be, we need to invent a self, complete with its own logic. To be free, we need to create our own definition of liberty.
Looking back, I realize that I have spent my entire adult life wanting to be Don Quixote. Or, rather, imitating him. I have created a self that feels appropriate, a sense of freedom I am comfortable inhabiting. I have sought to be a quixotic fool.
My admiration for Don Quixote of La Mancha has taken myriad forms. In my library, I have a large collection of Quixotalia—for example, versions of the novel in multiple languages (from Yiddish to Korean, from Quechua to Klingon). I also have an endless assortment of artifacts inspired by it: films and recordings of theater productions, action figures, picture books, lunch boxes, lithographs, advertisements, and postal stamps. Ironically, they all mimic a hero whose existence is spent as an impostor, pretending to be someone else.
Aside from collecting all sorts of tchotchkes, I’ve been rereading the novel, as William Faulkner often said he did: about once a year, forever learning from its protagonist. I have also taught it countless times to passionate, devoted students eager to find out why the darned book is so long and why it has remained a classic over so many centuries. Their research has pushed me in endless directions: What makes Picasso’s minimalist depiction of the knight-errant and his squire—no more than a handful of pencil lines—enduring? How do we explain Orson Welles’s fascination with it? Why did George Washington like the character so much? Did Cantinflas, the so-called Hispanic Charlie Chaplin, help to popularize the novel more than anyone else in the twentieth century? And is there a reason why translators like François Filleau de Saint-Martin dreamed of adding extra chapters to it?
I first discovered Don Quixote when I was in my teens, still living in Mexico, where I grew up. My very first copy, a cheap Spanish-language paperback, ended up in the garbage. I must have tried reading it but found it untidy, unfocused, and monotonous—in short, impenetrable. Why keep an item you do not like? So I threw it away in the bathroom’s wastebasket. I can still see it at the bottom, amid used Q-tips, an empty toothpaste box, and Kleenex.
In 1980, I bought myself another single-volume copy (the First and Second Parts together in a hardcover edition). I know the exact year because I used to engrave my full name—Ilan Stavchansky—in my books using a special metal-press seal I had bought through the mail. The seal had a coat of arms I had designed, and under it, I signed in Hebrew and added the year.
Why such an obsession to claim this copy as my own? Perhaps because of the quick, miserable death the earlier Don Quixote had received. Released by the publisher Bruguera in Barcelona in 1974, my embossed copy was part of the sixth printing (in Spanish, printings are called editions) and was bound in a handsome black cover that looked like expensive leather. It was by no means a collector’s copy, although it proved durable. It came with me to New York when I emigrated, moving from one apartment to the next as I made my way through life.
Youth is both an illness and its cure. I was infatuated with the decaying state of the world and wanted to change it, while being perfectly aware of the impracticalities of my dream. For one thing, I wanted to one day become a writer. Writers spend their time in isolation, putting words on a page. How much more impractical might one be? Cervantes’s novel turns those impracticalities into a quest. Its protagonist is a hidalgo, a nobleman, who is around fifty years old and doesn’t do much except read escapist literature. Soon his brains dry up. He starts fashioning himself as a knight-errant eager to fight oppression, even though the “injustices” he encounters are imagined and his attempts to right them ineffective. Everything he does is pathetic.
That, precisely, is what I adored about the book: its vitality as well as its pathetic nature. Alonso Quijano, the hidalgo, concocts for himself a ridiculous name. He finds shining armor in the closet. He turns his skinny horse into Rocinante, a name befitting the illustrious horses of mythical stature that accompany adventurers like Amadis of Gaul and Tirant lo Blanc. And he identifies a humble village woman, Aldonza Lorenzo, as his beautiful and virtuous dame. His imagination alone launches him on an adventure that requires him to be courageous.
Isn’t that what we all do in life: find a purpose, a mission, to justify our days? As a young man, I admired Don Quixote because of his idealism. But as I’ve returned to the book time and again, I have found other sources of inspiration. Maybe the plot isn’t really about an idealist but instead a fool. After all, one doesn’t reach fifty and find nothing else to do but rectify all wrongs if insanity isn’t a part of it. As I myself have reached the age of Cervantes’s protagonist, I realize that this is the story of a middle-aged quest, as the body deteriorates, to retr
ieve the dreams we nurtured earlier in life.
In Spanish, the novel is affectionately referred to as El Quijote, and I shall also use that title here unless I’m referring to an English translation of it. The article el means “the”; in other words, this is it, the one and only, the novel of novels. The accolades it has received over the centuries are unparalleled. Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve called it “the Bible of humanity.” Lionel Trilling stated that “all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.” Tom Sawyer makes a reference to the enchantment at the heart of El Quijote in chapter 3 of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The novel argues that reality is a concoction, that what we see isn’t there but is what we want to see. Therefore, it is said that Cervantes legitimized subjectivity, that he endorsed a world where truth is no longer absolute. It has also been argued that Cervantes’s magnum opus gave traction to the Enlightenment, that it begat modernity, teaching us the meaning of anxiety, the sense of being adrift in the world, without direction, trapped in the prison of our own individual loneliness. Jorge Luis Borges argued that Cervantes raises his character to the status of “a demigod in our consciousness.” He added, “Don Quixote is the only solitude that occurs in world literature.”
It is not only widely regarded as the best novel but also the most popular. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters asked a hundred writers from just about everywhere on the globe to name what in their estimation was the best novel. El Quijote won by a landslide: fifty respondents named it their favorite. Indeed, it is the runaway best seller in fiction, with millions of copies sold annually around the globe. Only the Bible outdoes it, but, then again, the Bible wasn’t written by a single author. And not all of us describe it as fiction.
Trilling’s view that “all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote” revolves around the fact that the novel as a genre makes an attempt at verisimilitude—the likeness or semblance of a narrative to reality—and that, in El Quijote, that verisimilitude is at once a triumph and a defeat because Cervantes delivers the adventures of a madman who thinks he isn’t actually mad. Indeed, everyone has a theory about what makes Cervantes’s book tick. Some argue that the novel is a psychiatric treatise in disguise. Others suggest it is a celebration of reason. Arguments have even been made that the novel is a cautionary tale against the excesses of religion and that Don Quixote is a doppelgänger of Jesus Christ. Furthermore, there are commentators who describe Cervantes’s approach to his characters as bullying, not to say condescending, whereas an army of defenders portray his approach as utterly humane.
Such is the magic El Quijote exerts on people that it forces us to consider what a classic is. Definitions abound: a classic is a book that defies the passing of time, or perhaps one confirming that time is never static; a book that is actually many books, as many as the number of readers it has; a book capable of shaping a nation; or a book whose obvious imperfections are kindly brushed aside in favor of its felicities, which are as substantial as they are enduring. There are other definitions of the classic I want to make: a book that is a mirror in which we see ourselves reflected; a book that accumulates interpretations; a book in which we meet readers not only from the present but also from the past and the future.
What is the color of Emma Bovary’s eyes? Depending on which chapter readers find themselves in, brown, black, or blue. How many daughters does Tevye the Dairyman have? Five, seven, twelve . . . Likewise, El Quijote is clumsy in a number of ways. Indeed, I sometimes imagine the manuscript, fresh from Cervantes’s pen, landing today on the desk of a New York City book editor. It is an entertaining game. For the fun of it, let’s say it arrives first in English translation. The editor pretends to read it, then dispatches this rejection letter:
Dear Señor Michael of Sirvientes:
We’ve now had the chance to read the long manuscript—a behemoth, really—you kindly sent us. While we appreciate your earnest attempt at developing the distinct personalities of the old chap and his fat servant, we’ve found the storyline to be problematic. You stuff the novel with one too many adventures that do little to advance the plot, which suffers, as a result, from lack of direction and cohesion. There are too many characters whose fate the reader gets attached to but who suddenly disappear never to be heard from again. Maybe another publisher will be willing to trim the book to approximately three hundred pages; we simply don’t have the staff to invest in such a task.
Plus, what is one to make of the fact that Cide Hamette Beneguelli is said to be the true creator of the book? Is this true? At times this seems like an ingenious device. However, our legal department forbids us to bring out a novel whose authorship is uncertain—we would be wide open to a lawsuit over copyright.
If you decide to revise the novel before submitting it elsewhere, we advise you to look closely at the style to avoid convoluted sentences, overreliance on a limited vocabulary, questionable use of adjectives, and other careless errors.
While Don Quixote is not really for us, we do wish you success in placing it elsewhere. Let me conclude by saying that should you have something substantially shorter, preferably with some elements of Magical Realism, please don’t hesitate to send it to us.
Yours sincerely,
This imaginary editor is right: El Quijote is at once long and long-winded. The author’s pen is often in overdrive, figuring, disfiguring, and reconfiguring the Spanish landscape in ways that verge on the unreliable. There are obvious inconsistencies. And the language is at times flat, even uninspired.
Still, those who love El Quijote as I do love it beyond compare. We see it as a life manual, a variation on a quote by Terence—“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” becomes “Nothing human is alien to this book”—for, like Hamlet, it contains the universe in a nutshell and imagines itself covering infinite space. Coleridge recommended it to anyone who would listen.
El Quijote was published in two parts, the first in 1605 (referred to as princeps), the second in 1615. I am not fully of the opinion that a work of art is independent of its creator, although somehow that approach is alluring to me. There are a number of commentators—from Miguel de Unamuno to Jorge Luis Borges—who believe Cervantes is an ancillary player in the story of how the novel came to be, that without him we would still have this magnificent book. I’m in disagreement with this stance, yet I don’t want to push the opposite approach either: that this is an autobiographical novel. Sure, there are autobiographical elements in it. What matters to me, though, is what El Quijote delivers: the flux of the narrative, its durability.
IN THIS SHORT BOOK, I start with the local (stressing the universal) and move to the global (emphasizing the particular).
In Section One, “The Novel,” I look at the components that make El Quijote what it is: a self-reflective labyrinthine narrative. I start with Cervantes on his deathbed in Madrid on April 22, 1616 (the same year Shakespeare died). I then move on to what we know biographically about him, then meditate on his career, although I mostly focus on his magnum opus. I analyze Cervantes’s artistic concerns, the political, religious, and cultural tensions that shaped him. Spain during the corrupt monarchies of Philip II, king of Castile, and his inept son, King Philip III, was an intolerant place. I explore the role played by the Holy Office of the Inquisition as a tool against the Counter-Reformation and the mythology of Cervantes’s novel as a paragon of liberty and an instrument in the modern fight against censorship, which are, to some extent, accurate depictions, although El Quijote also naively suggests that censorship is good—that is, useful—to literature.
One of Cervantes’s lasting contributions is the plasticity of his language. I reflect on the development of Castilian, the language that defined the Spanish monarchy in 1492. I meditate on the aesthetics of “the baroque mind” that colored the arts in El Siglo de Oro, as the Spanish Golden Age is often referred to—a period encompassing a couple hundred years and devoted to the inves
tigation of the mind’s tricks, starting precisely the moment Columbus sailed the Atlantic Ocean and ending in 1681 with the death of its last famous practitioner, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, author of Life Is a Dream (1635). I ponder the concept of limpieza de sangre, purity of blood, among hidalgos. Cervantes, it is sometimes insinuated, might have had Jewish blood, although no clear evidence exists to prove it. Still, the provocative first line of El Quijote—“En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor,” In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing—hides as much as it reveals about the identity of the protagonist, Alonso Quijano, which might be a comment on the veil certain noblemen in the early seventeenth century used in order not to attract undue attention from the authorities: silence as a shield to protect privacy. I also discuss the role of Muslim culture in Cervantes’s time and his provocative use of a fictional Arab historian to joke about the twisted origins of Iberian ancestry.
At one point, seeking to map Cervantes’s affinities, I reduce the novel to a set of basic numbers: how many letters it contains, how many and what types of words. This allows me to consider the overall reach of Cervantes’s lexicon. In line with Sigmund Freud, I ask if it might be possible to diagnose Alonso Quijano’s illness from a psychiatric perspective. Is he schizophrenic or manic-depressive? I discuss the way Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are shaped as an odd couple; the “ghost-like” role played by Dulcinea del Toboso; the novel’s parody on chivalry; the mechanics of its famous first line; and the metafictional aspects overall that are built like Russian nesting dolls, one story within another story, and so on. In this regard I analyze how, along with a handful of other representative European works from the end of the fifteenth century, El Quijote is seen as an engine of the Enlightenment. I also talk about the route Don Quixote and Sancho take, physical and spiritual, and the creation of Barataria, the island Sancho is made governor of, as a conduit for Cervantes’s observations about the Spanish incursion into the New World. And I talk about the adjective quijotesco, which has become an essential component of the Hispanic worldview.