by Ilan Stavans
Mancha. The name is variously representable. Cervantes wrote it so that its known reality would lend weight to the unheard-of reality of his Don Quixote. The ingenious nobleman has paid back the debt with investment: if the nations of the world have heard of La Mancha, it is his doing.
Does this mean that La Mancha was nominated because it already was a landscape for the novelist’s contemporaries? I dare to assert the contrary: its reality was not visual, but sentimental: it was, irrevocably, irreconcilably, a dull provincial reality.
Borges’s exegesis is engaging. His objective was to reduce to its linguistic essence what is arguably the most famous sentence of the Spanish language. The part that Borges leaves out, however, and one that is quite important, isn’t conveyed in any of the words of the sentence. That is that the protagonist of El Quijote is devoid of a life story. In other words, the hidalgo has no history. Or if he does, that history isn’t conveyed to us. The reader doesn’t know anything about his birth, his parents, his education, the cathartic experiences that define him. . . . Instead, we get him in medias res: at midpoint, without antecedents, having come to life, in literary terms, fully formed.
ANOTHER FAMOUS CHARACTER without antecedents, coming from nowhere, is Gregor Samsa. It is possible that Kafka was trying to imitate Cervantes’s aesthetic strategy in his first sentence of Die Verwandlung (1915), in English The Metamorphosis. The similarity doesn’t appear to be coincidental given Kafka’s wholehearted admiration for Cervantes (discussed further in chapter 8, “The Ebullient Bunch”). One might say that Kafka, in his novel, is doing exactly what Cervantes does in his: simultaneously revealing and concealing. In German, The Metamorphosis reads:
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt.
This is Willa and Edwin Muir’s translation:
As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.
The reader doesn’t know who Gregor Samsa is, his age, his physical features, what prompted such mutation, why he suffers from uneasy dreams, or if the dreams are the cause of his transformation. Other questions remain similarly unanswered: Is the fact that he is in bed, waking up, significant? And what kind of self-discovery is involved in the act of finding himself transformed into the insect? Vladimir Nabokov, who also lectured on Kafka’s novel and who was a collector of Lepidoptera, added yet another question: what kind of insect does Samsa become?
As in The Metamorphosis, the protagonist of El Quijote is an individual without a past. That past is absent from the start and remains annulled in the entire narrative. The hidalgo who is soon to become a knight-errant comes to us already as a seasoned, mature man. Keeping him without a past is an intriguing device. In Cervantes’s time, individuals were to a large degree still defined by their family. Professions were passed from one generation to the next, which meant that everyone was a “son of” somebody. Not exploring the protagonist’s past might be a way to acknowledge a transitional moment in which identity began to shift in favor of one that individuals had to craft for themselves. But it might also be a nod by Cervantes to the role the Spanish Inquisition played in the early seventeenth century, persecuting those whose blood lineage was tarnished by either Jewish or Muslim ancestry.
It isn’t accidental that the town where the action of El Quijote takes place isn’t mentioned. Nor is it unintentional that when the hidalgo’s name is actually offered, in the paragraph that follows, its spelling is delivered in the most uncertain of terms. We are told that his surname (su sobrenombre) is Quijada, which in Spanish means “jaw,” or Quesada, but that some people accept the common spelling of his name to be Quejana.
In English translations, the surnames have undergone yet another layer of changes. John Ormsby, for instance, renders the sentence about onomastics, the science of names, thus: “They will have it his surname was Quixada or Quesada (for here there is some difference of opinion among the authors who write on the subject), although from reasonable conjectures it seems plain that he was called Quexana.”
On the topic of onomastics, being evasive—suggesting the narrative is authored by different individuals and being confusing about its concrete details—was a custom in chivalry novels. At the heart of this tradition was a myth, a heroic character whose qualities aren’t of this world. Myths cannot be accounted for in earthly, straightforward fashion, since they are subject to speculation.
But onomastic evasiveness is also linked to La Convivencia, a period when people sought ways to hide their genealogy, to be elusive about their family tree, particularly when information might lead to questions of Jewish or Muslim ancestry. Indeed, it’s this obliqueness that makes some suspect Cervantes of being a converso.
In any case, Don Quixote’s identity would become so famous as to enter the global lexicon as a new word: quixotic. Indeed, if El Quijote has a total of 381,104 words, and if Cervantes’s lexicon was made up of 22,939 different words, there is one word alone, one frequently—and insidiously—attached to Cervantes’s novel but thoroughly absent from its pages. That word is quijotesco, an adjective that in English is taken to mean—erroneously—“quixotic.”
To understand the vicissitudes of the adjective, the life it has enjoyed across centuries, is to begin to appreciate the magisterial impact the novel has had in the entire world.
In The Devil’s Dictionary (1911), Ambrose Bierce, known for his acerbic humor, defines quixotic as “absurdly chivalric, like Don Quixote.” “An insight into the beauty and excellence of this incomparable adjective,” he adds, “is unhappily denied to him who has the misfortune to know that the gentleman’s name [in English] is pronounced Ke-ho-tay.” Bierce is of course being fanciful, for quixotic doesn’t mean “absurdly chivalric,” unless the expression is taken to mean “idealistic.” Quixotic, in fact, is an attribute of unreality, used not in derogatory terms but benevolently. It refers to the capacity to act against the current, to pursue one’s dreams against all odds, to be stubbornly impractical.
Etymologically, quijotesco has undergone an evolution easy to trace. It shows up in Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611), the second Spanish-language dictionary ever published. The first, by Antonio de Nebrija, was released in 1492, the same year Columbus crossed the Atlantic. Covarrubias was not only a lexicographer, but also a cryptographer, a mortalist, and a translator of Horace into Spanish. Not much is known about him, but judging from his haphazard definitions in the Tesoro (he defined sucio, dirty, in a single line as “he who isn’t clean,” whereas he devotes eleven pages to elefante, elephant), one can conclude that he wasn’t much of a consistent, stylized lexicographer, like Samuel Johnson was.
The Tesoro came out six years after the First Part of El Quijote. It records the word quijotes, but the definition Covarrubias gives has nothing to do with the novel, or almost nothing. He describes quijote as the part of a suit of armor covering the tights, suggesting that Cervantes took the word and made it into a proper name rather than the reverse—that is, that quijote was part of the vocabulary before Cervantes made use of it for his character. There is no record of Covarrubias having read Cervantes’s novel. If he did, he didn’t appear to find anything worthy of mention in it.
Published more than a century later, the Diccionario de autoridades (1737) lists the following items (my translation): quixotada: A ridiculously serious action, or to be determined to do something without having a purpose; quixote: A ridiculously serious man, or determined in doing what does not correspond to him; and quixotería: A ridiculous mode or demeanor, or determination to achieve a goal.
In other words, from Covarrubias to Autoridades, the adjective went from a word unrelated to El Quijote to a series of nouns making direct reference to it.
In its 2001 edition of Diccionario de la lengua española, the Real Academia Española listed a handful of other terms, among them quij
otescamente, an adverb; quijotil, a variation on the noun quijotesco; and quijotismo, the faculty of being quixotic.
A similar journey to the one I’m describing in Spanish is traceable in French (quixotic), Italian (donchisciottesco; the Italians, with their love of honorifics, add the “don”), Portuguese (quixotesco), Basque (quixotic), Catalan (quixotesc), Japanese (), Yiddish (), Polish (donkiszotowski), and Russian (), to name a few languages. The adjective is recorded in dictionaries in these languages at different points toward the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, as El Quijote became an international classic and its protagonist a household name among artists, intellectuals, and politicians.
In English, the vicissitudes of quixotic are just as emblematic. The Oxford English Dictionary claims that the word first appeared in print in Shakespeare’s tongue in 1648, that is, more than three decades after the First Part was translated by Thomas Shelton and published in London.
In its 1971 edition, the OED included three words: Quixote, quixotic, and quixotry. It defined quixotic as “1. Of persons: resembling Don Quixote; hence, striving with lofty enthusiasm for visionary ideas.” Here the lexicon tones down its judgmental voice, connecting enthusiasm with vision but without criticizing such an attitude. And “2. Of actions, undertakings, etc. Characteristic of, appropriate to, Don Quixote.” Finally, the OED offers another word I’m unfamiliar with: quixotry. The lexicon fails to explain it. It might simply be a noun version of quixotic, that is, actions that are quixotic.
In contrast, the eleventh (1983) edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, which stands as the American response to the OED (less lofty and more practical), defines quixotic not as ridiculous but as “foolishly impractical,” “marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagant chivalrous action,” and “capricious, unpredictable.” It offers an adverb too: quixotically. And it gives several examples, among which is this one: “In this age of giant chain stores, any attempt at operating an independent bookstore must be regarded as quixotic.” The lexicon follows its statement with a handful of synonyms: idealistic, quixotical, romantic, starry, starry-eyed, utopian, and visionary. Some of these are as far-fetched in regard to Don Quixote’s character as Bierce’s definition and the indulgences of the OED. Merriam-Webster’s also includes quixotical, another word I haven’t a clue about.
This etymological history, in Spanish, English, and other languages, leads to a single, shocking fact: in all of the Western canon, no other novelistic character has ever been adjectivized. That is, neither in the Diccionario de la lengua española nor in the OED are there listings for odyssean, macbethian, kareninean, or buendían. On the other hand, famous authors’ surnames are frequently adjectivized: Brechtian, Kafkaesque, Joycean, Orwellian, and so on.
Cervantes, in English, has never given place to the Cervantean. But it has in Spanish: cervantesco and cervantino, a reference to a labyrinthine, perhaps even solipsistic approach to life. This means that Cervantes, for people in the Hispanic world, is a titan. He no doubt is important elsewhere, but it is El Quijote, and not its author, that matters most in other habitats.
By the way, there is ambiguity in Spanish between Quijote and Quixote, that is, between the x and the j. The same ambiguity is present in a handful of other words, including in Mexico. Until 1810 or thereabouts, when Mexico became an independent nation, the word was spelled with a j, as was Tejas. In the case of Mexico, the change resulted from a series of factors, including an effort to indigenize the country’s identity. Symbolically, that is, for aesthetic and psychosocial reasons, the x was seen as representing Aztec culture.
In his Tesoro, Covarrubias spells the word Quixotes, in plural and with an x, not with a j. When Covarrubias compiled his dictionary, at a time when Cervantes was contemplating the Second Part, spelling in the Spanish language was nothing if not anarchic. Letters like x and j, s and z, weren’t always stable. The Diccionario de la lengua española endorses Cervantes’s preferred j spelling, settling the issue for good.
Ambrose Bierce makes fun of the rather bizarre pronunciation in English, Ke-ho-tay, thus signaling the way translations of the novel exoticized the protagonist’s name by replacing the j with an x. The first translators of El Quijote sought to Anglicize the orthography of Spanish names in order to respect, to the degree possible, the original phonetics. To them, Quixote sounded better than Quijote because the j would have given place to Quiyote. (By the way, Burton Raffel, one of the twenty English-language translators of El Quijote, spells the name Don Quijote—with the j—throughout, to seek authenticity and to distinguish himself from the previous translators.)
By creating an adjective out of the name Don Quixote, the characteristics of Cervantes’s knight-errant acquired universal status. It is astonishing how malleable quixotic has become, used to describe almost anyone who battles an established order. I have seen it attached to famous figures like Columbus, Galileo, Spinoza, Marx, Freud, David Ben-Gurion, Mao Zedong, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and, most recently, Nelson Mandela. The adjective is also applicable to other literary creations. Huckleberry Finn is quixotic. Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin is too, as are Jacques le fataliste, Captain Ahab, and Emma Bovary. And maybe Hamlet.
Of course, there is an anachronistic quality to this last comparison. Chronologically, Hamlet can’t be quixotic since Shakespeare’s play was written in 1599, six years before the First Part of El Quijote was published. But chronology is often the least of concerns for readers, for whom literature is timeless. All characters, regardless of their origin, exist in the dimension of the ever-present.
Ironically, the adjective quixotic doesn’t stick to Cervantes himself. Cervantesco and cervantino invoke specific characteristics connected with his work: a penchant for theatricality, a passion for irony, and an embrace of the various registers of language. In other words, he savored the ridiculous in life. But he wasn’t ridiculous himself.
The question—to be pondered in the following section, “The World”—is how the adjective quixotic became an ideology, originally in Spain but soon thereafter throughout the entire Hispanic world, and how that ideology mutated over time.
6
QUIJOTISMO AND MENARDISMO
In its full splendor, El Quijote not only has given birth to an adjective but also has become a doctrine, an ideology dictating the way people ought to live their lives. What exceptionalism and the American Dream are to the United States (more about that later), this ideology—Quijotismo—is to Spain and its former colonies across the Atlantic. Its central tenet is the implicit concept of rebellion: paraphrasing Montaigne, to sacrifice one’s life for a dream is to know its true worth.
Another doctrine in the Hispanic world derived from Cervantes’s novel is Menardismo, which is an outgrowth of Borges’s famous story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In this tale, written in the style of a book review, a nineteenth-century French Symbolist dreams of rewriting—not copying, but rewriting word by word—El Quijote. And he succeeds in his task: Cervantes’s original and Menard’s rewriting, when shown side by side, are identical; yet they are also different because the meaning of the words used by Cervantes and Menard has changed from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. The unnamed narrator in Borges’s story then argues not only that the two versions should be seen as having the same aesthetic value but also that they are—and here is Borges’s most astonishing, inventive point—equally original. And the narrator makes the case that, as Menard’s effort shows, the only way to read literature is contextually. By using Menard as an endorser of derivative art as authentic, Borges therefore announces that the former colonies known today as the Spanish-speaking Americas, while arriving late to the banquet of Western civilization, are as original in their derivative culture as Europe is.
To understand how Quijotismo evolved, it is necessary to understand the history of the novel’s reception in the Hispanic world. After the defeat of the Armada in 1588, the Spanish Empire, which was really a federation
of separate realms, underwent a period of decline. El Quijote might be said to have foreshadowed it in its exploration of the way that individuals, as well as an entire nation, are trapped in self-perpetuating delusions. V. S. Pritchett, the British novelist who had a lifelong fascination with Spain and wrote the book The Spanish Temper (1954), understood this conundrum. “Don Quixote has been called the novel that killed a country by knocking the heart out of it and extinguishing its belief in itself for ever,” he wrote in a review of Samuel Putnam’s translation of Don Quixote in the New Yorker. “The argument might really be the other way on. Don Quixote was written by the poor soldier and broken tax-collector with the hand maimed in his country’s battles because the Spanish dream of Christian chivalry and total power has passed the crisis of success. The price of an illusion was already being paid and Cervantes marked it down.”
In its first two centuries, the novel was seen as mere entertainment in Spain; its cast, as endearing types that represented different aspects of Spanish culture. While it was considered a classic, it hadn’t yet fostered the type of scholarly industry we are used to today. Nor was it used by politicians for rhetorical purposes. A radical break occurred shortly before 1905, the 300th anniversary of the publication of the First Part. In 1898 a catastrophic event took place, one that reshaped the fiber of Spain: in a war with the United States that came to be known in English as the Spanish-American War and in Spanish as the Guerra del ’98, Spain lost control of its colonies Cuba and Puerto Rico, in the Caribbean Basin, and the Philippines, in the Pacific.