by Ilan Stavans
Premodern literary artifacts—including the novels of chivalry—were about heroes doing gallant deeds, exhibiting signs of courage, even superhuman qualities. Odysseus in The Odyssey, for instance, is less a person than a symbol, a representation of human will. Equally, the characters in The Divine Comedy are archetypes. Even Dante himself is an emblem of the spiritual seeker. And in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the assortment of Londoners creates a parade of stereotypes. In Spain, there is Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina (1499), about a procuress of an illicit love affair, and the anonymous Lazarillo of Tormes (1554), about a boy who serves various masters, among other medieval examples.
None of these works have the keen attribute of the modern work of literature, in which a character undergoes an inner transformation from the beginning to the end of the narrative. Don Quixote is mentally and physically in one place at the beginning and in another place at the end, and in the interim he undergoes a gamut of radical changes. These changes entail learning about his own frailties and, consequently, realizing he isn’t as stolid, as resistant as he originally thought. As a result, he loses his idealism. The quintessential modern novel is the bildungsroman, or coming-of-age plot, with growing up being human life’s most universal, relatable form of inner and outer change. Indeed, change is what modernity is about.
Modern literature also cares about being credible, reliable, even “authentic,” all the while aware of being an invention. Indeed, what Cervantes strives for in his depiction of Don Quixote and Sancho is verisimilitude. This aspect is studied with acumen by the German philologist Erich Auerbach in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1953), written in Turkey in 1935 while he was in exile because of the Nazi takeover in Germany. Chapter 14, called “The Enchanted Dulcinea,” looks at Don Quixote’s love for his lady. Auerbach meditates on the way fact and fiction, dreams and reality are juxtaposed in the novel. Aldonza Lorenzo has no clue that the knight-errant and his squire have turned her into an object of adoration. As a villager concerned with her own affairs, she rejects the knight’s passes whenever they take place. But Don Quixote is undeterred. For him she is the essence of authenticity. And he pursues her, his true love, without end. Her complete lack of affectation becomes a complement to his intellectual follies. Auerbach writes:
The theme of a mad country gentleman who undertakes to revive knight-errantry gave Cervantes an opportunity to present the world as play in that spirit of multiple, perspective, non-judging, and even non-questioning neutrality which is a brave form of wisdom.
That rare form of wisdom, for Auerbach, is expressed in El Quijote in another dimension: its attempt to depict reality—especially, in my view, the reality of the human body—as accurately as possible.
This surely isn’t a dirty novel. Eschatology is kept in check. Sex is nonexistent. No reference is given to erogenous zones. Yet El Quijote traffics in reliability: for better or worse, its characters feel real, like the rest of us. They stumble, become disoriented, make foolish mistakes. In short, they are imperfect. They even pass gas, as Cervantes tells us at hilarious length in chapter XX of the First Part. The episode is worth quoting in full. The knight and his squire are sitting around a campfire:
Just then, whether it was the cold of the morning that was now approaching, or that he had eaten something laxative at supper, or that it was only natural (as is most likely), Sancho felt a desire to do what no one could do for him; but so great was the fear that had penetrated his heart, he dared not separate himself from his master by as much as the black of his nail; to escape doing what he wanted was, however, also impossible; so what he did for peace’s sake was to remove his right hand, which held the back of the saddle, and with it to untie gently and silently the running string which alone held up his breeches, so that on loosening it they at once fell down round his feet like fetters; he then raised his shirt as well as he could and bared his hind quarters, no slim ones. But, this accomplished, which he fancied was all he had to do to get out of this terrible strait and embarrassment, another still greater difficulty presented itself, for it seemed to him impossible to relieve himself without making some noise, and he ground his teeth and squeezed his shoulders together, holding his breath as much as he could; but in spite of his precautions he was unlucky enough after all to make a little noise, very different from that which was causing him so much fear.
Don Quixote, hearing it, said, “What noise is that, Sancho?”
“I don’t know, senor,” said he; “it must be something new, for adventures and misadventures never begin with a trifle.” Once more he tried his luck, and succeeded so well, that without any further noise or disturbance he found himself relieved of the burden that had given him so much discomfort. But as Don Quixote’s sense of smell was as acute as his hearing, and as Sancho was so closely linked with him that the fumes rose almost in a straight line, it could not be but that some should reach his nose, and as soon as they did he came to its relief by compressing it between his fingers, saying in a rather snuffing tone, “Sancho, it strikes me thou art in great fear.”
“I am,” answered Sancho; “but how does your worship perceive it now more than ever?”
“Because just now thou smellest stronger than ever, and not of ambergris,” answered Don Quixote.
“Very likely,” said Sancho, “but that’s not my fault, but your worship’s, for leading me about at unseasonable hours and at such unwonted paces.”
Earlier writers shared this delight in earthy humor for sure; examples abound in the works of Rabelais, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and others. But the larger context of the humor differs. Significantly, while the Catholic Church plays an integral role in the society of Don Quixote and Sancho, Cervantes’s worldview is, for all intents and purposes, nonreligious. That is, his protagonist, the knight, doesn’t seek salvation through doctrinal faith. Indeed, El Quijote is arguably the first work of fiction in which living people debate their own fate and battle their own demons.
Another way that El Quijote differs dramatically from its premodern predecessors is in its self-referentiality and blurring of the boundaries between fiction and reality. Self-referentiality was a fixture of the Spanish Golden Age. The literature of this period, aside from works by Lope de Vega, included those of Francisco de Quevedo, Luis de Góngora, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, all of whom were fascinated with labyrinths, mirrors, and a style that called attention to itself (the Argentine man of letters Leopoldo Lugones said that “el estilo es la debilidad de Cervantes,” style is Cervantes’s weakness), to the point of becoming an artifice. That style, which also manifested itself in music, architecture, and painting, isn’t easy to define. Jorge Luis Borges, another Argentine hombre de letras, tried to do it in the prologue to his collection of essays Discusión (1938): “I should define the baroque as that style which deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) all its own possibilities and which borders on its own parody.”
Among the best examples of that style are Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656), a painting preoccupied with reflections, and Lope de Vega’s “Soneto de repente,” which is a sonnet about writing a sonnet. El Quijote, too, is a book about books, a book about itself, a book about the limits of literature. Its overall structure is that of reflections reflecting reflections. Harry Levin, a Harvard scholar (I will discuss his work in chapter 9, “America’s Exceptionalism”), said that “when Pascal observed that when true eloquence makes fun of eloquence, he succinctly formulated the principle that could look to Cervantes as its recent and striking exemplar.” Levin described that principle as “looking at life as a performance.” Lionel Trilling agreed: “Cervantes sets for the novel the problem of appearance and reality.”
It is hard to overstate what a huge leap it was for art to start referencing itself and thereby to blur its boundaries with reality. Carlos Fuentes and Milan Kundera credit El Quijote with opening up a postmodern viewpoint that paved the way to future self-referential
novels such as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) and philosophical works like Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist (1796).
THE GROUNDBREAKING PREOCCUPATION with appearance and reality of Cervantes’s novel is clear from the moment Alonso Quijano acts the role of Don Quixote. From there on, the game is constant. In the Second Part, several characters are said to be readers of the First Part. They have an exchange with the knight-errant and his squire about this—they are aware of themselves as literary characters. They complain about being misrepresented. They know they have been, in Spanish, literalizados, turned into literature. This happens in chapter III, as Don Quixote talks with Samson Carrasco:
Don Quixote made him rise, and said, “So, then, it is true that there is a history of me, and that it was a Moor and a sage who wrote it?”
“So true is it, senor,” said Samson, “that my belief is there are more than twelve thousand volumes of the said history in print this very day. Only ask Portugal, Barcelona, and Valencia, where they have been printed, and moreover there is a report that it is being printed at Antwerp, and I am persuaded there will not be a country or language in which there will not be a translation of it.”
“One of the things,” here observed Don Quixote, “that ought to give most pleasure to a virtuous and eminent man is to find himself in his lifetime in print and in type, familiar in people’s mouths with a good name; I say with a good name, for if it be the opposite, then there is no death to be compared to it.”
“If it goes by good name and fame,” said the bachelor, “your worship alone bears away the palm from all the knights-errant; for the Moor in his own language, and the Christian in his, have taken care to set before us your gallantry, your high courage in encountering dangers, your fortitude in adversity, your patience under misfortunes as well as wounds, the purity and continence of the platonic loves of your worship and my lady Dona Dulcinea del Toboso—”
“I never heard my lady Dulcinea called Dona,” observed Sancho here; “nothing more than the lady Dulcinea del Toboso; so here already the history is wrong.”
“That is not an objection of any importance,” replied Carrasco.
“Certainly not,” said Don Quixote; “but tell me, senor bachelor, what deeds of mine are they that are made most of in this history?”
“On that point,” replied the bachelor, “opinions differ, as tastes do; some swear by the adventure of the windmills that your worship took to be Briareuses and giants; others by that of the fulling mills; one cries up the description of the two armies that afterwards took the appearance of two droves of sheep; another that of the dead body on its way to be buried at Segovia; a third says the liberation of the galley slaves is the best of all, and a fourth that nothing comes up to the affair with the Benedictine giants, and the battle with the valiant Biscayan.”
“Tell me, senor bachelor,” said Sancho at this point, “does the adventure with the Yanguesans come in, when our good Rocinante went hankering after dainties?”
“The sage has left nothing in the ink-bottle,” replied Samson; “he tells all and sets down everything, even to the capers that worthy Sancho cut in the blanket.”
“I cut no capers in the blanket,” returned Sancho; “in the air I did, and more of them than I liked.”
“There is no human history in the world, I suppose,” said Don Quixote, “that has not its ups and downs, but more than others such as deal with chivalry, for they can never be entirely made up of prosperous adventures.”
Then there is the section, in the Second Part, chapter XXVI, in which Don Quixote and Sancho come across a puppet show orchestrated by Master Pedro, who the reader eventually finds out is also the character of Ginés de Pasamonte. The story told through the puppets begins in France and takes place when Zaragoza (known in the story as Sansueña) was under Moorish rule. It pertains to the rescue of Melisendra, the alleged daughter of Charlemagne who is held captive by the Moors in the tower of the city’s castle. The theme, then, has strong religious as well as nationalistic undertones: it is about Catholic Spain fighting the infidels in order to free the country from oppression.
Melisendra’s husband, Don Gaiferos, crosses the Pyrenees to rescue her. As they escape, the city is in turmoil, with the bells in the minarets sounding the alarm. Don Quixote, while watching the show, occasionally interrupts with complaints about accuracy and other qualms. As the Moors pursue the Catholic lovers, the knight-errant becomes agitated. Using chivalric language, he tells the puppets to stop and then uses his sword to destroy the set and the puppets as Master Pedro watches in desperation.
The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, author of Meditations on Quixote (1914) and The Revolt of the Masses (1930), found this section intriguing. “The frame of the puppet show,” he argued, “which Master Pedro goes around presenting, is the dividing line between two continents of the mind.” He adds, “The puppet show itself represents the world of adventure. Outside is an audience, perhaps unsophisticated in its capacity to reflect on the puppet performance. And in between is a deranged man who believes he is a knight-errant. A puppet show is inside a puppet show that is inside a puppet show.”
Another episode that takes place at the Cave of Montesinos (Second Part, chapters XXII and XXIII) also erodes the boundaries between life and stage. The actual cave exists in La Mancha in the province of Ciudad Real, near the town of Ossa de Montiel. Entering alone, Don Quixote purportedly undergoes a mystical experience. When he comes out, he tells Sancho of his adventures, which appear to have taken place over several days. He describes wonder after wonder and even suggests having come across Dulcinea herself.
“I recognized her,” said Don Quixote, “by her wearing the same garments she wore when thou didst point her out to me. I spoke to her, but she did not utter a word in reply; on the contrary, she turned her back on me and took to flight, at such a pace that crossbow bolt could not have overtaken her.”
But the squire tells him he has been in the cave for only a few hours. This crucial episode is a decisive moment, for the squire finally contests Don Quixote’s authority, doubting the veracity of his words, creating a new balance of power between them:
“O blessed God!” exclaimed Sancho aloud at this, “is it possible that such things can be in the world, and that enchanters and enchantments can have such power in it as to have changed my master’s right senses into a craze so full of absurdity! O senor, senor, for God’s sake, consider yourself, have a care for your honour, and give no credit to this silly stuff that has left you scant and short of wits.”
“Thou talkest in this way because thou lovest me, Sancho,” said Don Quixote; “and not being experienced in the things of the world, everything that has some difficulty about it seems to thee impossible; but time will pass, as I said before, and I will tell thee some of the things I saw down there which will make thee believe what I have related now, the truth of which admits of neither reply nor question.”
What is meant to have actually happened in the Cave of Montesinos has generated much discussion among scholars. Salvador de Madariaga argued that it “comes in as a sort of ‘harmonic’ of the whole book, an illusion within the illusion, like the seed within the fruit. In it Don Quixote touches the fringes of reality and appears to us partly in the sunshine of sound sense, partly in the shadow of madness.”
This argument points to Don Quixote’s perspective: Is the reader supposed to even believe him as the conveyer of facts in the novel? Or is what he says always questionable? The reader ponders another dimension to the novel: the trust extended, or not, to the narrator of the story.
Actually, El Quijote doesn’t have one narrator but at least three. First is the omniscient, first-person Narrator (spelled here, though not in the novel, with a capital N, in order to identify him as a specific individual), whose name remains unmentioned; second, an Arab historian called Cide Hamete Benengeli; and third, the translator who makes that historian’s work available in Spanish. Often their interplay is contradictor
y. Added to these layers is an oral tradition from which the original storyline about Alonso Quijana appears to emerge.
The oral component is present from the beginning. In the First Part, chapter I, the Narrator says other versions of the life and times of Alonso Quijano are available in La Mancha but that incongruences reign among them. (There is speculation among literary historians that Cervantes might have based the character of Don Quixote on a person by the name of Domingo Pacheco, who lived in the town of Argamasilla de Alba, in the province of Ciudad Real.) In the face of such ambiguity, the Narrator, like an anthropologist, assumes an authoritative position, selecting the oral version that is most acceptable, or at least the one he is most comfortable with. He does so not only throughout the First Part but in the Second Part as well. Who this narrator is and what relationship he had with Cervantes as an author are never explained.