by Ilan Stavans
Everyone is mad; the real question is what kind of madness each of us suffers.
The knight-errant is the most famous madman in literature. But what type of madness does he have? El Quijote, of course, doesn’t offer a diagnosis per se because the concept of “mental illness” as such is relatively recent, as is the idea of “normal” behavior. Its opposite is deviance, a fixture of the seventeenth century often represented as heresy, witchcraft, and sexual perversion, behaviors often described as demonic.
Since Cervantes left no correspondence, it is impossible to know the degree to which he himself was exposed to deviant behavior, although it is fair to assume that he was familiar with it. Most people lived in Spanish urban centers at the time, and mental illness was a rather public affair. People who didn’t conform were described as herejes, heretics, and were constantly targeted by the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the most prominent institution representing both religious and political authority, whose mission it was to make the citizenry conform to acceptable norms by publicly punishing those who did otherwise. It wasn’t until well into the Enlightenment that attitudes toward the mentally ill became more compassionate, viewing madmen and other deviants as individuals who could be rehabilitated through specific aid.
The earliest psychiatric hospitals—called lunatic asylums—were built in medieval Europe around the thirteenth century. Rather than institutions devoted to offering treatment, though, they were actually custodial wards. It is known that during Cervantes’s stay in Seville, there was an active asylum in the city. If he visited it, he would have seen a variety of individuals with diverse diagnoses. It is also documented that his father was a cirujano barbero, a surgical barber, which, in the Spanish lingo of the time, meant a surgeon.
El Quijote might be credited for humanizing madness, for making it about the search for freedom. Cervantes isn’t attracted to science as a method of understanding the world and to deviant behavior as a feature of that world. But he doesn’t dismiss madness as demonic. Nor does he categorize it as irrational. For in truth, Don Quixote is always rational in the way he explains what his motives are and how he wants to embrace them. He takes after Erasmus of Rotterdam, whose book In Praise of Folly (1511) was read as a critique of the pious and devout and of the Catholic Church as a corrupt institution.
A taste of Don Quixote’s purported madness is offered early on in El Quijote, in the First Part, chapter I, when the Narrator, ridiculing the style of novels of chivalry, quotes a far-fetched sentence he claims is typical of these types of noxious books: “La razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace, de tal manera mi razón enflaquece, que con razón me quejo de vuestra fermosura.” In Ormsby’s translation, the sentence reads: “The reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty.” It can’t be sheer coincidence that such a quote, placed in the novel for parodic purposes, also describes the protagonist’s own struggle with rationality.
In the late Renaissance, the brain was perceived to have a balance of water: too much of it was noxious; too little was conducive to madness. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) was released just six years after the publication of the First Part of El Quijote. While it didn’t reach Spain for a while, the aquatic imagery it proposed is useful for understanding Don Quixote. Burton argued that it is water that allows ideas to connect. He suggested that a baby shedding tears is employing a natural mechanism whereby the brain disposes of its excess of water, thus allowing the right balance for mature intellectual development.
It is said that Alonso Quijano’s “brain dried up,” as a result of his voracious reading. Here is Samuel Putnam’s version (1949):
In short, our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days from dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. He had filled his imagination with everything that he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a result had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.
Bizarrely, an English translator like John Ormsby obliterates this section. Ormsby renders it thus (1885):
In short, his wits being quite gone, he hit upon the strangest notion that every madman in this world hit upon, and that was that he fancied it was right and requisite, as well for the support of his own honour as for the service of his country, that he should make a knight-errant of himself, roaming the world over in full armour and on horseback in quest of adventures.
Not only is the element of water absent, but so is the entire reference to the brain, as well as to reading too much and sleeping too little. The result is rather flat: Don Quixote’s wits are gone. The beauty of Cervantes’s style is compromised. Worse, the character is simply seen as having lost his mind, whereas in the original, that process is described in loving detail.
Don Quixote’s madness has given rise to a full-fledged debate among psychologists, especially those who, in line with Sigmund Freud, are interested in literature as a kind of “dream sequence.” At the beginning of the twentieth century, literature faced an entirely new wave of close examination as Freud and his followers, including Carl Gustav Jung, Ernest Jones, and Alfred Adler, began applying a psychoanalytic lens to fictional characters as well as mythological figures.
What resulted were numerous studies suggesting that literary masterpieces, from the Bible to Greek myths, from the folktales and children’s stories collected by the German brothers Grimm to Sufism, hold a key to understanding our human desires and impulses. El Quijote, too, is part of this canon. There are psychological studies suggesting that El Quijote is a study in split personality, referred to in scientific parlance as “dissociative identity disorder,” like the half-man, half-beast protagonist in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The range of diagnoses doesn’t stop there. Other interpreters believe the knight-errant suffers from bipolar disorder, depression, melancholia, or schizophrenia.
Arguably the most influential of the scientists interested in Cervantes’s novel was Sigmund Freud. When he was a young man, Freud discovered Cervantes in Vienna and ended up reflecting psychoanalytically on him, just as he did on biblical characters and classic authors, such as Moses, Sophocles (Oedipus), Shakespeare (Hamlet), and Goethe (Faust). In his late teens and early twenties, while a student at the University of Vienna, Freud was a member of an impromptu club created among friends called Academia Española, which centered on Cervantes. They even signed their letters using the names of characters in Cervantes’s novella The Colloquy of the Dogs, about two talking dogs whose perspective offers a sarcastic portrait of human society. (The novella actually shares characters and motifs with another Cervantes work, The Deceitful Marriage [1613].) In their exchange, Freud assumed the role of Cipión, one of the dogs, and his Romanian friend Eduard Silberstein, the role of the other, Berganza. Significantly, one character in The Colloquy of the Dogs listens to and advises on the behavior of the other, forming a kind of proto-psychoanalytic relationship between therapist and patient.
Later in life, Freud explained how his infatuation with El Quijote persuaded him to learn Spanish, so he could read it in the original and better understand Cervantes’s intentions. After studying the novel, he diagnosed the knight-errant as suffering from paranoia, describing him as “the first such recorded case in Western literature.” He used the episode of the Cave of Montesinos as an example of Don Quixote’s delusions, explaining the knight-errant’s experience in the cave as a hallucinatory event.
For Freud, the knight-errant and his squire aren’t types but archetypes ingrained in the collective human unconscious. In part because of his fascination, and in part as a result of their own personal connection
with this European classic, some of Freud’s followers studied Cervantes’s novel as well. Jung read the novel to comment on themes like the animus-anima and androgyny. In Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Don Quixote (1983), Carroll B. Johnson, for instance, argued that the entire novel might be read as the story of a man undergoing a midlife crisis who has an incestuous attraction to his niece. In fact, Johnson argued that the entire novel rotates around the protagonist’s desire toward women.
The French psychoanalyst and semiotician Michel Foucault maintained in The Order of Things (1966) that everything in the book is part of a larger-than-life linguistic code superseding the characters, and that psychology needs to be superseded by linguistics. He thought Don Quixote was connected with this “interplay between resemblance and signs,” that he was not “a man given to extravagance, but rather a diligent pilgrim.”
In contrast, the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács, who in The Theory of the Novel (1920) declared El Quijote to be “the first great novel of world literature,” explored the psychological dilemma of Don Quixote not from the perspective of psychoanalysis but from that of Marxism. He perceived it as a crossroads where individual dreams and expectations clash with the larger forces of history. Lukács argued that in his madness, the knight-errant confuses what his mind sees with what it projects.
In the end, what makes the exploration of madness in El Quijote fascinating is its admirable coherence. Indeed, the plight of the knight-errant is reminiscent of Hamlet (1603), in which a depressed, delusional character gets stuck in machinations to the point of inaction. Shakespeare brings his viewers into Hamlet’s ordeal by enabling them to follow his philosophical ruminations through lucid soliloquies. But whereas Hamlet, in revenge for his father’s death, plots his uncle’s demise, ultimately causing his own death, Don Quixote is rather merry about his delusions. He doesn’t go inward but outward, hoping to help others through his knightly courage. Different as they are, both types of madmen are disciplined, meticulous, and systematic in the fulfillment of their goals. So much so that, in my view, they are united by one of Shakespeare’s play’s most famous lines: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it” (act II, scene 2).
Of course, often in literature, TV, and film, madness is seen as rebellious yet methodical. There is order to it, cause and effect. Looking at it as absolute chaos, as the triumph of disorder, is far more difficult—and it often doesn’t make for an appealing artistic representation. Most viewers are frightened by true unruliness. Besides, a work of art in Western civilization is defined as one with an internal logic, especially when it addresses the illogical.
According to German critic Walter Benjamin, Cervantes’s novel teaches us “how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the hopefulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote,” appear to others to be devoid of counsel, of roundedness, as if the novel didn’t contain “a scintilla of wisdom.” And yet it does. Benjamin hits on a valuable dichotomy: madness and wisdom go hand in hand. Lunatics might be seen as wise because, while lacking prudence and judiciousness, their wisdom is delivered in an unadulterated fashion: raw, visceral, and simple. In El Quijote, the knight-errant is erudite, even petulant in his rhetorical language, yet his charm is in telling things just as he sees them, not as convention or as others want them to be seen.
To prove Benjamin’s point, it is useful to compare Don Quixote to Jesus Christ, something done—as I will show in chapter 6, “Quijotismo and Menardismo,” and chapter 8, “The Ebullient Bunch”—by intellectuals such as Miguel de Unamuno and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. The message delivered by Jesus, as conveyed in the Gospels, is one that might easily be deemed unreasonable: God favors the poor and humble, the devout and unpretentious. Yet Jesus made his case through charisma and eloquence, persuading scores of people to follow him. Was he a lunatic? Perhaps, but the difference between a dreamer and a deranged man is to be found in the steadiness, the reliability of his lesson, against all odds. Jesus was consistent, and so was Don Quixote.
This becomes particularly clear when, after countless adventures, in the climactic moment of El Quijote (Second Part, chapter LXXIII), the knight-errant, defeated as he is, returns to his village in La Mancha and, on his deathbed, renounces his actions. It is at this point when Alonso Quijano appears to come back to his senses. But by now all the characters have fallen in love with Don Quixote. Those in attendance beg him not to give up:
When [they] heard him speak in this way, they had no doubt whatever that some new craze had taken possession of him; and said Samson, “What? Senor Don Quixote! Now that we have intelligence of the lady Dulcinea being disenchanted, are you taking this line; now, just as we are on the point of becoming shepherds, to pass our lives singing, like princes, are you thinking of turning hermit? Hush, for heaven’s sake, be rational and let’s have no more nonsense.”
Everyone wants Don Quixote not to revert to his previous persona of Alonso Quijano. Everyone wants him to go on inhabiting his dream, which by that point has also become theirs. Isn’t this proof that the knight-errant is not mad?
4
A MODERN NOVEL
The act of burning books is not new. It is well known that the first emperor of China, Shih Huang Ti, who ordered the building of the Great Wall of China, also commanded the destruction of all books that mentioned the past prior to his arrival. The destruction of books was a way for the emperor to erase memory and rewrite history. More than twenty centuries later, on the night of November 9, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, the Nazi government attacked Jews and their businesses throughout Germany and parts of Austria. Bonfires were made to destroy Jewish books.
Likewise, during the reign of Philip II in Spain, the Holy Office of the Inquisition began its infamous Index of Censored Books in 1551. The Catholic Church started keeping the list, meant to be a statement of prohibition against foreign ideas connected with the Reformation in England and with incipient manifestations of the Enlightenment. Among the forbidden books were In Praise of Folly by Erasmus and The Lazarillo de Tormes, a classic Spanish novella about the misfortunes of a pícaro, a young rogue, that began to circulate probably around 1552 but whose surviving first editions date to 1554. Reading those books meant being subjected to punishment. Ironically, that punishment made the books all the more alluring.
Such are the events that no doubt inspired the scene in El Quijote’s First Part, chapter VI, in which Alonso Quijano’s books are burned. In it, the priest and the barber enter Alonso Quijano’s library while Don Quixote is asleep, and comment on several of the volumes they find in it. Their objective is twofold: to diagnose the knight-errant’s madness based on the books found in his alter ego’s library; and to cleanse that library, eliminating the noxious books, in order to bring back Quijano, that is, to cure him. The priest and the barber condemn the books by throwing them out the window, where they are set on fire by Quijano’s niece. The scene is obviously about intolerance during Cervantes’s time. Yet it is humorous, almost endearing.
In the setting of seventeenth-century Spain, the size and the scope of Quijano’s library, as described in El Quijote, is rather extraordinary. In the First Part, chapter XXIV, the Narrator says it contains a hundred books, although later Don Quixote himself claims to have some three hundred. Either way, the amount suggests not only a committed reader but also a devoted collector.
Only twenty-nine books are mentioned by title, though. Obviously, the barber and the priest come across several novels of chivalry, including Amadis of Gaul, Espejo de caballerías, Palmerín de Inglaterra, Belianís de Grecia, and Tirant lo Blanc. These volumes are saved because the barber and the priest have a positive opinion of them, but other chivalry titles are thrown to their destruction. The two censors also come across pastoral romances and epic poetry, of which eleven books are spared and five are burned.
At one point, of course, the priest and the barber find Cervantes’s own La Galatea, about which they don’t have good things to say, although they find
its author promising and, thus, decide to save the book. Aside from being a charming moment of self-reflection, the scene showcases the extent to which El Quijote as a whole is also about literary criticism: it not only parodies novels of chivalry but also meditates on the redemptive value of fine writing in general.
Censorship, in short, is portrayed as a double-edged sword. It is a sign of intolerance, of repression. Yet, ironically, the whole affair has a positive effect, for the priest and the barber, in selecting what is worthy from what is trash, become unlikely agents of change. Their action suggests that censorship is the mother of metaphor, that to write in an atmosphere of fear means to give the imagination an alternative way out.
Though El Quijote, in part because of this scene, but also in general as a result of its protagonist’s indefatigable spirit to fight all forms of oppression, has become an exemplar against censorship, there is no indication that the early seventeenth century saw the novel as condemning censorship. No actual copies were ever burned. Like all writers of his time, Cervantes submitted his manuscript to a censoring committee. At the opening, he included a dedication to his benefactor, the Duke of Béjar. He used the occasion to offer, in passing, a backhanded critique of censors: they, he argues, “continiéndose en los límites de su ignorancia, suelen condenar con más rigor y menos justicia los trabajos ajenos,” containing themselves to the limits of their ignorance, often condemn other people’s work with more rigor and less justice. Their method isn’t about fairness but about allegiance to the ideology in power.
Even as the Catholic Church demonstrated its power, opposing forces had begun to emphasize individualism and reject the ubiquity of the church. A slew of influential late Renaissance works proved that a movement toward modernity was under way: Erasmus of Rotterdam’s In Praise of Folly (1511), Michel de Montaigne’s personal Essays (1580), Descartes’s Discourse on the Method (1637), Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1677), and the Shakespearean canon. In equal measure, the French intellectuals who surrounded the making of Encyclopédie pointed to an alternative to the static, religion-driven universe in which the postponement of reward was based on an accepted vision of the afterlife. Erasmus, a Dutch humanist and Catholic priest, as well as a friend of Thomas More, used the character of Folly to attack pious priests and celebrate madness. Descartes’s dictum cogito ergo sum—I think, therefore I am—placed the mind, the act—and the art—of thinking, at the center of human existence. Montaigne, through his que sais-je?—who am I?—looked at the self as the sole motor in human life. Spinoza critiqued the Bible as a bunch of children’s stories and suggested that God is the natural workings of the universe itself. Shakespeare looked at humans as fragile, ambitious, and driven by passion. And the French encyclopedists sought to codify the vastness of human knowledge, to tame it, to make it purposeful. What they all have in common is the angst that results from finding out that every person is nurtured by inner desires, and those desires—not the Almighty—are a driving force of human events. Angst is synonymous with doubt, confusion, and uncertainty. In the case of Cervantes, the novel as a literary genre could be a vehicle to fully express this predicament.