by Ilan Stavans
The Spanish Empire crumbled, its finances in disarray. The intellectuals of the Generación del ’98, and their heirs, immersed themselves in a soul-searching effort to understand what had gone wrong, why a once-powerful country was now in decline. José Martínez Ruiz (better known as Azorín), Ángel Ganivet, Miguel de Unamuno, Pío Baroja, and Ramiro de Maeztu, among others, wondered what the future held and looked for what one of them described as a way hacia la otra España, toward another Spain. They turned to El Quijote for clues about Spain’s future, finding the novel a kaleidoscope of psychohistorical interpretations.
In his essays Idearium español and El porvenir de España, translated into English as Spain: An Interpretation (1897), Ganivet debated the country’s view of history. He believed that at the end of the nineteenth century, Spain was in agony, directionless, in a state of depression, which he related to Alonso Quijano. He wanted Spaniards to reclaim their destiny, to become quixotic again, although he believed nihilism was too ingrained in the collective psyche for an entrepreneurial spirit to return. Maeztu, in his book Defensa de la hispanidad (1934), approached the knight-errant as the seed of la hispanidad, the collective character of the entire Spanish-speaking world. Pío Baroja wrote pessimistic novels like El árbol de la ciencia, published in 1911 and rendered into English in the United States as The Tree of Science. Some of his characters are gloomy, skeptical to the degree of becoming antisocial, even misanthropic. Infatuated with the knight-errant’s adventures, Azorín, in La ruta de Don Quijote, traced the route of Don Quixote during a trip commissioned in 1905 by the director of the newspaper El Imparcial. He not only explored the geographical sites Cervantes included in El Quijote but also reflected on the role the book played in the collective imagination, arguing that Spain needed to use idealism as an antidote to its current state of pessimism.
Arguably, no author has been as obsessed with El Quijote as Unamuno. In his deeply Catholic view, the novel was timeless, the best contribution by Spain to civilization, one holding a clue to understanding the Iberian spirituality: the nation, he thought, was made of dreamers whose desire to live, to change things, had stagnated over the centuries as a result of an oppressive, corrupt Catholic Church that killed all forms of individuality and freedom. He believed it to be everlasting, its author unworthy of having written it, for such magisterial achievement could not be the result of human action. Unamuno understood the knight-errant as a model of passion. He thought this was also Jesus Christ’s distinct characteristic. Passion, in his view, is what makes us believe in ourselves, what pushes us to fight for freedom and against injustice. He wanted people to be like Don Quixote and Jesus: to have faith in passion. Unamuno wrote, “The truth is that my work—I was going to say my mission—is to shatter the faith of men here, there, and everywhere, faith in affirmation, faith in negation, and faith in abstention in faith, and this for the sake of faith in faith itself; it is to war against all those who submit, whether it be to Catholicism, or to rationalism, or to agnosticism; it is to make all men live the life of inquietude and passionate desire.”
When the war broke out, Unamuno wrote an essay called “¡Muera Don Quijote!” in which he argued that the character was an expression of a Romantic idea that had died with the country’s disastrous military encounter. But Unamuno’s love for the novel persisted. However, Unamuno’s most famous book, one difficult to describe, is Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho, published in 1905 (it underwent successive editions, with prologues added in 1913 and 1928). Part autobiography, part novelistic disquisition, part guided tour of the novel, he used it to revive the spirit of the knight-errant as a collective force always pushing Spain forward.
Alongside these intellectuals is José Ortega y Gasset, younger in age and thus an heir of the Generación del ’98, whose book Meditations on Quixote began articulating his theory that we’re all products of our own environment, encapsulated in the maxim “yo soy yo y mi circunstancia, y si no la salvo a ella no me salvo yo,” I am I and my circumstance, and, if I do not save it, I do not save myself. Reading his vast oeuvre, one is able to trace the dialogue he established—at times directly, at others obliquely—with Cervantes’s knight-errant as an archetype of the Spanish soul, from The Revolt of the Masses (1930) to his disquisitions on Diego Velázquez and Francisco Goya. In his opinion, El Quijote holds the secret to everything Spanish: its fatalism and intense faith. The novel, in the philosopher’s eyes, is a manual for life. In The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925), he cautioned against idées fixes, an approach that is connected to his view of Don Quixote as a character who gives up the superfluous, embraces sincerity, and acts with conviction: “There is truth only in an existence which feels its acts as irrevocably necessary,” Ortega y Gasset wrote. “There exists today no politician who feels the inevitableness of his policy, and the more extreme his attitudes, the more frivolous, the less inspired by destiny they are. The only life with its roots fixed in earth, the only autochthonous life, is that which is made of inevitable acts. All the rest, all that it is in our power to take or to leave or to exchange for something else, is mere falsification of life.” In short, Quijotismo was a double-edged weapon: it portrayed the idealism of the knight-errant as proof that Spain was delusional about its past, yet it implied that only idealism might help the country out of its depression.
The ideology morphed into a kind of sport: depicting the knight-errant and his friends in times of trouble. These depictions are particularly vivid in art. El Quijote was a favorite subject of Goya, the famous late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Spanish painter, whom a few of the Generation of ’98 intellectuals saw as a precursor. He drew the knight-errant on his horse, Rocinante, while Sancho is in the act of falling off his donkey, Rucio. The scene is reminiscent of Goya’s paintings of the disasters of the Napoleonic wars. Goya presents the knight-errant as an opponent of dogmatism and a friend of the freedom of the imagination.
Yet the most ubiquitous, symbolically charged image of all, Spanish and otherwise, is a silhouette Pablo Picasso drew for the cover of the French weekly magazine Les Lettres Françaises in August 1955, in commemoration of the 350th anniversary of the publication of the First Part. At the top of the cover, a text reads, “Don Quichotte, vu par Pablo Picasso,” El Quijote through Picasso’s eyes. Indisputably, no image of any novel is more famous.
In Picasso’s drawing, Don Quixote is seen in emaciated profile, wearing his suit of armor, his helmet and shield, holding his spear with pride. To his left and in the background is his squire atop his donkey. If the knight-errant is skeletal, the squire is a ball of matter: rounded, insect-like. Scattered through the hilly landscape are four small windmills more or less evenly positioned, some more clearly depicted than others. And on the top left corner is the Spanish sun, iridescent, accompanying our friends wherever they go. What Picasso sees is stunningly simple. There is something melancholic, pathetic, even childish in his silhouette, as it should be.
Drawing of Don Quixote and Sancho (1955) by Pablo Picasso, arguably the most iconic of all images inspired by Cervantes’s novel.
The silhouette has been appropriated by the government, as well as by corporations, as a logo for Spanish tourism. Since the 1970s it has often been reproduced on T-shirts, watches, posters, coffee mugs, dishes, and pencils, and even as tattoos. Today it is as ubiquitous as the iconography of Che Guevara, Eva Perón, Hugo Chávez, and other icons of the Hispanic world.
In 1915, to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the publication of the Second Part of El Quijote, and the death of Cervantes a year later, a contest was announced to create a large granite statue of the author, to be placed in the heart of Madrid, in the Plaza de España, at the western end of the Gran Vía. The winning team included architects Rafael Martínez Zapatero and Pedro Muguruza, as well as sculptor Lorenzo Coullaut Valera. Funds were raised not only in Spain but also across the Americas. Work didn’t begin until 1925, and the statue was first unveiled in unfinished form in 1929. The
figure of Cervantes was completed in 1930. Funding for various other elements was lacking, so they were added over time, with work done in 1947 and 1956 by Federico Coullaut-Valera Mendigutia, son of the original sculptor, who added statues of Don Quixote and Sancho, Aldonza Lorenzo, and Dulcinea del Toboso.
Monument to Don Quixote and Sancho in Plaza de España, Madrid, erected in 1927.
WHILE ARGUABLY THE MOST FAMOUS, the sculpture at the Plaza de España is just one of hundreds of statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza around the globe, especially in Spanish-speaking countries, where almost every major metropolis has them, either in public spaces or inside museums. This is because Quixotismo also extended across the Atlantic into the former Spanish colonies, known from the mid-nineteenth century onward under the name América Latina.
However, the doctrine took a divergent shape there. For a long time Spain had been the oppressor, the enemy, yet the melancholia generated by its downfall was felt in the emerging republics as well, leading artists and writers at times to lament its decline. Even as they celebrated the dawn of a new era in which Spain would no longer be exerting its control across the Atlantic Ocean, these intellectuals were attracted to quixotism, seen not as a synonym of melancholia but as a liberating force, a doctrine promoting idealism.
The first time El Quijote was printed in the New World was in 1833, in Mexico City, in the form of Mariano Arevalo’s five-volume edition. The novel’s impact on the intelligentsia was palpable before, yet it achieved a benchmark some fifty years later when members of an intellectual movement known as Modernismo used the Spanish-American War, among other incidents, to define the fragmented cultures of the Americas as a galaxy united by the gravitational center of Spanish origins, despite other important influences that came from France, the United States, England, Germany, and even the Far East. For the first time, writers from countries like Nicaragua (Rubén Darío), Cuba (José Martí, Julián del Casal), Mexico (Amado Nervo, Enrique González Martínez, Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera), Argentina (Alfonsina Storni, Leopoldo Lugones), Uruguay (Delmira Agustini, Manuel González Prada), Colombia (José Asunción Silva), and Peru (José Santos Chocano) perceived themselves as unified, not only in their language but also in their worldview. The majority of them were poets, although some published fiction and journalism as well.
For the Latin American Modernistas, Quijotismo was about looking for the authentic, freedom-loving, forward-looking side of the former colonies as they embarked on a journey of self-definition. In 1905, to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the publication of the First Part of El Quijote, Rubén Darío, the undisputed leader of the Modernistas, wrote a commemorative poem, “Letanía de nuestro señor Don Quijote,” litany for “our lord” Don Quixote. Published in Madrid, it asks the knight-errant to pray that the Spanish character endures. This is the most significant stanza:
Ruega generoso, piadoso, orgulloso;
ruega casto, puro, celeste, animoso;
por nos intercede, suplica por nos,
pues casi ya estamos sin savia, sin brote,
sin alma, sin vida, sin luz, sin Quijote,
sin piel y sin alas, sin Sancho y sin Dios.
Here is my own free translation:
Beg for us generously, piously, proudly;
beg chaste, pure, celestial, animated;
intercede for us, appeal for us,
for we’re almost without sap, without bud,
without soul, life, light, without Quixote;
without skin and wings, without Sancho and God.
If Darío is the leader of the Modernistas, the movement’s philosopher was the Uruguayan thinker José Enrique Rodó. In his book Ariel, he adopted—and adapted—Quijotismo for use in the Latin American context, never mentioning it directly yet using its essence to construct a view of the dialectics that shaped the temperament of the Americas.
The slim volume is structured as a letter to the youth of the Spanish Americas. He uses a central character from The Tempest, Shakespeare’s last play (and, as such, his farewell to his years on the London stage), as the proponent of the Latin American embrace of its idealistic—and, therefore, quixotic—side. Ariel is an ethereal spirit, Prospero’s ears and eyes. The counter-voice, a demon symbolizing brutishness, carnality, even materialism, is Caliban.
Ariel was published in 1900, two years after the end of the Spanish-American War and a year after another influential anti-imperialist work, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, appeared. The United States was now the hemispheric superpower, a force to reckon with in the Americas. In Rodó’s view, Ariel represented Latin America, the idealist side of the continent, whereas Caliban was the United States, its materialistic other side.
People talk of Arielismo as a genuine Latin American philosophy, an effort to look at the New World through the prism of idealism. As such, Arielismo is an outgrowth of Quijotismo: a dreamer’s dream.
Given the region’s enthusiastic adoption and adaptations of Quijotismo, depictions of Don Quixote and Sancho, in popular as well as in highbrow culture, are as ubiquitous in Latin America as they are in Spain. My own favorite, also made in the early twentieth century, is José Guadalupe Posada’s Calavera Quijotesca (1907), which depicts Don Quixote and Rocinante as skeletons. Posada is credited for having created the skulls that have become ubiquitous during Día de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead, the celebrations of which start on the first day of November. He was active during the more-than-thirty-year-long Porfirio Díaz dictatorship, which collapsed with the revolution of 1910. Posada’s prophetic skeleton is an attempt at portraying the times he was living in as unreal and in desperate need of freedom to alleviate countless social ills.
Other representations abound, from cartoons and dances to television sketches and films. The most famous cinematic ones—and arguably the reason why millions of working-class people are familiar with El Quijote without having read it—are by Mario Moreno, the Mexican carpero comedian better known as Cantinflas. He played the lead in the slapstick comedy Don Quijote sin Mancha (1969), directed by his longtime collaborator Miguel M. Delgado, and played Sancho to Spanish lead actor Fernando Fernán Gómez’s knight-errant in Don Quijote cabalga de nuevo (1973).
Calavera Quijotesca (c. 1910–13), engraving by José Guadalupe Posada, an artist “of the people” in Mexico whose work inspired Diego Rivera.
It is interesting that, in contrast with Spain, adaptations of El Quijote in Latin America often come in the form of comedies. This might be because, at its core, the population uses humor, particularly in the twentieth century, as a way to confront disaster. In art, music, literature, and painting, laughter is seen as a medicine to combat the inclemencies of fate.
In the political realm, a number of legendary Latin American freedom fighters have modeled themselves after Don Quixote, chief among them Che Guevara, the Marxist rebel, who had read Cervantes’s novel assiduously since he was a young man. When, at the age of twenty-three, as a medical student, he, along with his friend Alberto Granado, decided to traverse South America on motorcycle, they saw themselves as a flesh-and-bones replica of Don Quixote and Sancho. After bidding farewell to his friend Fidel Castro and to Cuba, a country to which he had helped to bring communism, and opting to continue his armed struggle throughout Latin America, he decided to travel to Bolivia, where he was eventually killed. On April 1, 1965, he wrote a letter to his Argentine parents, in which he stated, “Once again I feel beneath my heels the ribs of Rocinante. Once more, I’m on the road with my shield on my arm.”
Similarly, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, the nom de guerre of Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente, who in 1994 led the rebel movement known as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation against the Mexican government and the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement, and who sought to reclaim the rights of indigenous people in the state of Chiapas, was an ardent Quixote fan. In an interview with Gabriel García Márquez and Roberto Pombo published in the Colombian magazine Cambio on March 25, 2001, El Sup, as he was
affectionately known, still involved in his utopian armed struggle, described the knight-errant as his hero. “I received a hard-cover book as a present when I turned twelve years old. It was Don Quixote of La Mancha,” he said. “I had already read it but in young-adult versions. It was an expensive volume, a special gift that must be waiting for me somewhere. Shakespeare arrived soon after.”
In regard to the literature of the region, Cervantes’s knight-errant has had an enormous impact. In the nineteenth century, a series of disquisitions and even a handful of rewritings of the novel appeared, among them—and most significantly—Capítulos que se le olvidaron a Cervantes, by the Ecuadorian writer Juan Montalvo. Published posthumously in 1895, it imagines a continuation of Don Quixote and Sancho’s third outing. An independent-minded anticlerical thinker, Montalvo had a remarkable ability to mimic Cervantes’s style and content. His narrative is the closest I know to a sequel that feels authentic. (Its title, in Spanish, suggests these to be the chapters—a total of sixty—Cervantes forgot to include when writing the Second Part.)
Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) is driven by the tension between the real and the imaginary. The influence of Quijotismo is everywhere apparent, from the presence of a palimpsest as a narrative device to the philosophical dichotomy that distinguishes the twins Aureliano and José Arcadio Buendía. In equal measure, other works by the Colombian author and Nobel Prize winner, such as No One Writes to the Colonel (1961), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and The General in His Labyrinth (1989), feature protagonists who are undoubtedly quixotic in the way they inhabit their own reality.