by Ilan Stavans
Sometimes when a father has an ugly, loutish son, the love he bears him so blindfolds his eyes that he does not see his defects, or, rather, takes them for gifts and charms of mind and body, and talks of them to his friends as wit and grace. I, however—for though I pass for the father, I am but the stepfather to Don Quixote—have no desire to go with the current of custom, or to implore thee, dearest reader, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, to pardon or excuse the defects thou wilt perceive in this child of mine.
Yet while Cervantes’s oeuvre at times overshadows him, he doesn’t suffer from an “authorship problem” the way Shakespeare does. (Theories abound that the “real” author of Shakespeare’s work was someone else, such as Christopher Marlowe; Francis Bacon; William Stanley, the sixth Earl of Derby; Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford; or even Queen Elizabeth I.) In the Bard’s case, the inquiries revolve around a number of issues, among them the mystery of how a provincial actor with a limited education in Stratford-upon-Avon could compose such an erudite, astonishingly diverse body of work. There’s no such disassociation with Cervantes. His known journeys through Spain, Italy, northern Africa, and the Mediterranean Sea are present, although tangentially at times, in the pages of El Quijote. And the style of the novel is consistent with that of his other works. Plus, in the preface and within his magnum opus there are references to La Galatea, Avellaneda, and other aspects of his own career.
In sum, Cervantes might not have left us many clues about his life, but no one believes he was a deceiver, a charlatan, a fraud. What about Don Quixote, though?
2
THE SO-CALLED NORMAL
No same-sex literary pair has ever been as famous, as emulated, or as quoted as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. One is a nobleman; the other, a villager, a peasant. One is a bachelor; the other, a married man. To the degree that they complement each other, the couple—and a rather odd one—might be taken to represent examples of the “soul mate” theory presented by Plato in the Symposium (ca. 385–380 BC), which argues that humans originally had four hands, legs, lungs, and a single head made of two faces, but that Zeus split humans in half, thus creating a person’s lifelong longing to find “the other half.” The knight-errant and his squire might be seen as one head with two faces, or as the complementing halves of a single soul. One is tall, thin, and bearded. He is an idealist, a dreamer, a full believer in liberty who refuses to accept things as they are, and eager to shape the world according to his own views. The other is short and overweight, down-to-earth as well as materialistic. He pretends to be a family man and is clumsy, unlearned, simpatico, with a tomato nose, a matted beard, and a limited vocabulary, his speech often defaulting into proverbs, folktales, and kitchen knowledge. In his view, things happen in the world for a purpose.
One wears shining armor; the other, plain clothes. One rides a horse, Rocinante; the other, a donkey, Rucio. What kind of relationship do the knight-errant and his squire have? Is it based on economics? On servitude, a feudal legacy? Lionel Trilling, author of The Liberal Imagination (1950), believed that in El Quijote the real conflict is between social classes, between those who have means to waste and those who don’t have enough and live in a constant state of dependency. In somewhat reductionistic fashion, Trilling claims that Cervantes’s novel is about how the acquisition of knowledge is achieved through the desire for capital. In other words, it is all about money: the hidalgo has it but doesn’t want it; the squire doesn’t have it and dreams of it. “Money,” Trilling says, is “the great solvent of the solid social fabric of the old society, the great generator of illusion.”
Maybe it isn’t money but control that is truly at the heart of the novel, controlling the narratives of our own lives. Don Quixote is the master, the owner, the manager of information, who dreams of making reality malleable in order to fit his own views; Sancho is a servant, a subaltern, the receiver of data, who realizes reality is what it is and there’s not much anyone can do to change it. Yet as these characters navigate the unsteady geography of Montiel, they become partners and even switch sides. Their conversations are often about interpretation: how to understand something they see or a story they hear. They are constantly arguing, which means control is a game played through language: we use words to make the world fit into the view we have of it.
As a literary pair, Don Quixote and Sancho are legendary, their clones countless in highbrow and popular culture. For starters, the knight-errant is the acknowledged source of inspiration for the rapport between Arthur Conan Doyle’s armchair detective Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Holmes is stuffy, hyper-intellectual, and hard-headed, whereas Watson is pragmatic and flexible. From there on, the echoes in literature are countless. Famous imitations include Ernie and Bert of Sesame Street, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller in The Pickwick Papers (1836), Abbott and Costello, Roberto Bolaño’s Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima in The Savage Detectives (1998), Laurel and Hardy, Jacques and his master in Diderot’s philosophical novel, the dynamic duo Batman and Robin, Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting for Godot (1953), Tolkien’s Frodo and Sam Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings (1954–55), and, in a galaxy far, far away, R2-D2 and C-3PO.
In addition to serving as a model for future literary “odd couples,” the relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho is interesting in the influence each character exerts on the other. Salvador de Madariaga, in his book Don Quixote: An Introductory Essay in Psychology (1935), talks of two parallel transformations occurring in the novel: the Quixotization of Sancho and the Sanchification of Don Quixote. One becomes the other. John Updike agreed. “It is a stroke of Cervantes’ humane genius to see,” he stated in a review for the New Yorker collected in More Matter (1983), “that not only does Don Quixote need Sancho, but Sancho needs Don Quixote. The earthbound need the release and stimulation of the visionaries, high though the cost be in bruises and embarrassments.”
The Quixotization of Sancho is evident in Don Quixote’s attempts to correct Sancho’s many low-class misbehaviors. In the Second Part, chapter XLIII, the knight-errant gives him a series of recommendations on how to conduct himself once he becomes governor of his own island, Barataria. One of them has to do with having proper manners, in particular not belching in public. “Be temperate in drinking, bearing in mind that wine in excess keeps neither secrets nor promises,” the knight says. “Take care, Sancho, not to chew on both sides, and not to eruct in anybody’s presence.” Manners are an expression of his social status as a hidalgo. He uses them to “civilize” his squire, to make him suitable for power.
Not only does Don Quixote influence Sancho, but Sancho influences Don Quixote as well. At the beginning of the narrative, the knight-errant sees his squire as illiterate and childish. He constantly ridicules the abundance of dichos, popular sayings, in Sancho’s parlances and, in general, looks down at his capacity to articulate thought. But as the novel progresses, Don Quixote realizes the wisdom in the squire’s worldview and, in his own way, begins to shape his own self-image based on what he learns from his companion.
This is done softly, almost invisibly by Cervantes. At one point, after the incident in the Cave of Montesinos, the knight-errant, having attempted to convince his squire that what he saw is true, comes to terms with the fact that he needs concrete, tangible evidence to achieve his goal and doesn’t have any. It is at this point that he seems to conclude, to himself, that his subaltern’s mind is more methodical, less gullible than his own. And, although he doesn’t express it in as many words, Don Quixote distills both admiration and envy toward Sancho’s way of handling things.
Yet El Quijote isn’t only about these two men. It includes a cast of close to eighty important characters. And the couple at its center is really a triangle of sorts, since Don Quixote has an idealized lover, Dulcinea del Toboso, who is really a commoner known as Aldonza Lorenzo. She is often described by him as “my sweet enemy.”
Dulcinea’s presence in the novel is peculiar. She isn
’t a character per se since she never really shows up. Don Quixote needs her because every knight-errant has a lady-in-waiting. For instance, at one point (First Part, chapter XIII) he argues that “it is as natural and proper to be in love as to the heavens to have stars: most certainly no history has been seen in which there is to be found a knight-errant without an amour, and for the simple reason that without one he would be held no legitimate knight but a bastard, and one who had gained entrance into the stronghold of the said knighthood, not by the door, but over the wall like a thief and a robber.”
His attraction to her isn’t sexual but Platonic. This is the essence of courtly love: what matters is not the lover’s physical presence but its idealization.
Intriguingly, what the novel doesn’t have is an antagonist, a villain, someone with the gravitas of Inspector Javert in Les Misérables (1862), Bill Sikes in Oliver Twist (1836), Sauron in The Lord of the Rings, the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1900), or Iago in Othello (1604). The famous dictum “Every good story has a villain and every villain has a good story” is proved wrong.
Don Quixote makes reference to larger-than-life sorcerers, enchanters, monsters, and ghosts. He frequently tells Sancho about them when he’s about to engage in battle. In the knight’s eyes, they are the cause of the world’s maladies. But none materializes enough to become a full-fledged character. There are, indeed, some minor villains in El Quijote. One is Agi Morato in The Captive’s Tale, the father of Zoraida in Algiers. And there are pseudo-villains, like Samson Carrasco, who is actually a village friend of Alonso Quijano, and Roque Guinart, a Catalan bandit who is rather generous to Don Quixote and Sancho.
Without an antagonist, the novel is turned into a quest, a kind of road narrative. It isn’t about enlightenment, since Don Quixote isn’t searching for revelation; he already has had that revelation and is ready to act on it. What El Quijote is about, therefore, is an exploration of the place where our inner and outer worlds meet. Indeed, Cervantes’s narrative moves in two dimensions at once: within the hearts and minds of Don Quixote and Sancho, and through the physical world they actually traverse. They are equally important. Cervantes is meticulous in his realistic depictions. He describes inns and palaces, forests and highways, rivers and mountains. The knight and his squire interact with clerics and the police, attend weddings and funerals, pass through small villages, and arrive in big cities.
Such is the popularity of El Quijote that most people’s familiarity with the Spanish rural landscape comes as a result of their exposure to the novel, or at least to the endless number of artifacts (movies, paintings, operas, ballets, etc.) derived from it. Not surprisingly, the route of Don Quixote and Sancho is one of the country’s most popular tourist attractions today.
In 2007, the Conseil de l’Europe, an organization endowed with promoting Europe’s cultural heritage, gave its official stamp of approval to an itinerary that starts in the towns of El Toboso, Manzanares, Ossa de Montiel, and Torralba de Calatrava, then moves to Montiel, especially in the Sierra Morena, where the episode of the windmills takes place. Also set there are the burial of Grisóstomo, the battle with the sheep, the encounter with Cardenio and Dorothea, the episode with Princess Micomicona, and the arrival at the inn where Don Quixote and Sancho meet Lucinda and Don Fernando and hear the captive’s story. The journey includes a visit to Toledo as well as to the Cave of Montesinos and reaches as far as Barcelona.
This route has been the stuff of intense curiosity through the ages. The first quixotic effort to pinpoint it dates back to the late eighteenth century, when Tomás López, Spain’s royal geographer, published the first detailed map of Don Quixote’s travails, which was subsequently endorsed by the Real Academia Española as the authentic itinerary in 1780. The fact that the nation’s official land surveyor invested his energy in such a task speaks loudly to the status El Quijote was already achieving during the European Enlightenment. Cervantes was being turned into a compass, a guide, and, along the way, a source of pride, not only local but also continental.
The wanderings of Don Quixote and Sancho also inspired the itinerary of Azorín, also known as José Martínez Ruiz, the novelist and essayist who died in 1967 at the age of ninety-six and was the foremost Spanish literary critic of his day. For his book La ruta de don Quijote (1905), he embarked on a trek that included almost every stop Cervantes mentions. Many of them he found; others he was only able to imagine. That is because, in spite of its realistic bent, El Quijote isn’t geographically exact. This has been noticed by scores of readers who often find it difficult to connect the dots. Distances aren’t realistically conveyed, nor is the time it takes to go from one place to another. Of course, this is a novel, not a tourist guide: Cervantes didn’t have an obligation to be accurate. Plenty of locations are invented, such as—most prominently—Barataria, the island of which Sancho ends up becoming governor in the Second Part.
As an imaginary place, Barataria—and, through synecdoche, perhaps all of Quixote’s Spain—shares the chemistry of Oz, Middle Earth, Macondo, Yoknapatawpha County, and other nonexistent settings. Still, what makes it peculiar even at that level is that Barataria isn’t surrounded by water. It isn’t an island but a pseudo-island. Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi, in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980), describe it thus:
An island somewhere in La Mancha, Spain, in a place whose name does not wish to be remembered, the only island in the world surrounded by land instead of sea.
Barataria is famous for having been governed for a week with honourable rectitude by Sancho Panza, who accompanied the ingenious knight Don Quixote throughout his travels. Sancho Panza abandoned his governorship rather abruptly, after having repelled a fearful enemy invasion, armed only with two wooden tables tied to his waist. (His comments on the island’s cuisine were rather unfavorable—he compared it to a prison diet in time of want.)
Should the traveler visiting Barataria be invited to govern the island, it will be useful to bear in mind some of the advice Don Quixote gave Sancho Panza:
First fear God; for the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and a wise man cannot err.
A man should consider what he has been and endeavor to know himself, the most difficult knowledge to acquire.
A man should not be governed by the law of his own whim.
A man should let the tears of the poor find more compassion, but not more justice, than the representations of the rich.
If the scale of justice be at any time not evenly balanced, let it be by the weight of mercy and not by that of a gift.
It is said that if a governor follows these rules, his days will be long, his fame eternal, his recompense full and his happiness unspeakable.
Barataria might be a caricature—perhaps even a kind of Utopia—reflective of the countries founded by Spanish conquistadors across the Atlantic. When the Second Part of El Quijote was published, the Spanish Empire extended from what is the Southwest of the United States today to Patagonia at the tip of South America. In Spain, people envisioned those colonies as a land where quick fortunes were made, courage was tested, and corruption reigned rampant. The indigenous American population was seen as intrinsically inferior, unable to govern itself properly. Not that Spain had stable, dependable rulers, but the colonies were considered an open field where abuse and subjugation prevailed.
In El Quijote, the episode about Barataria allows Cervantes to delve into these political issues and fantasies. Sancho, as a peasant, doesn’t represent the American mind. Yet his experiment in government must have reminded readers at the time of what was likely to happen when the unprepared—call them the uneducated, even the primitive—take power. The results are likely to be disastrous, not only to them but to civilization in general, for in the end—and therein lies Cervantes’s message—rulers are born, not made. Of course, another approach to this section might see it as a political philosophy that endorses a democratic—and maybe even a populist—spirit, represented by the commoner Sancho
taking away the power tightly held by monarchists.
Cervantes likely knew as little about the New World as his contemporaries. After his return from Africa, his career as a soldier over, he worked as a tax collector and was accused of mishandling funds. Without a clear future and looking for a clean start, in 1582 he petitioned for an administrative position in New Spain, as Mexico was known at the time. Apparently, for people of his class, going abroad was a way out of difficulties. There is no record of the answer he received, but he never did travel abroad. He applied again in 1590, this time for a position in Colombia, Guatemala, or Bolivia. Once more, he was rejected.
It appears that, for whatever reasons, Cervantes could not escape his life in Spain. Perhaps, like Don Quixote, he escaped into fantasy instead: into a dream of the mind. His characters eat, drink, sleep, bathe, and go about their bodily functions and other daily activities of life, like the rest of us; he feels no need to hide the embarrassing aspects of human behavior. In pairing the idealist knight with a low-class materialist, El Quijote turned the fantastical novel of chivalry on its head and paved the way to the kind of psychological realism European literature embraced openheartedly, from Samuel Richardson to Honoré de Balzac, from Ivan Turgenev to Benito Pérez Galdós: the novel not as a distraction from reality but as an embrace of human ordinariness and contradictions; the novel, paraphrasing Haruki Murakami’s words, that proves that “what makes us normal is knowing that we’re not normal.”
3
MADNESS AND METHOD
Henry Fielding, the eighteenth-century British novelist and dramatist, who on the title page of his novel Joseph Andrews (1742) noted that it is “written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote,” said, in his play Rape upon Rape; or, The Justice Caught in His Own Trap and The Coffee-House Politician (1730), that “the greatest part of mankind labour under one delirium or other, and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in Madness, but in the species of it.”