by Ilan Stavans
And, of course, there are plenty of Spanish versions, among them Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón’s unbearably boring two-part film made for television: the segment based on the First Part was done in 1991, the one on the Second Part in 2002. The overall effect of these screen efforts is numbing: the right habitat for El Quijote, it seems, isn’t the moving image. Film tends to constrain Cervantes’s imagination, to make it pedestrian. In literature, the reader’s imagination flies because it is free to alternate between the real and the fantastical, between what the knight-errant sees and what others want him to visualize.
I have written about the Cantinflas versions, undoubtedly the most popular. But in the late twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, especially in the Spanish-speaking world, people also have access to El Quijote by other means: video games. During a period known as the Golden Age of the Spanish videojuego, Don Quijote (1987) had versions in ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MSX, Atari ST, and DOS. Other, more sophisticated Quixote-inspired video games included one in which he and El Cid fight zombies, yet this one caught the attention of the largest number of players. The game was divided into two parts. In the first one, Don Quixote needed to become a knight-errant, complete with his shining armor, in order to start his adventures. And in the second part, he needed to look for the ingredients of the Bálsamo de Fierabrás because, after suffering an accident, the elixir would be able to heal him so he could reunite with his beloved Dulcinea. It might be worth adding that while there are other video games based on classic literature (from Dante’s Inferno and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, not to mention the Bible), this, to my knowledge, is the only one based on a Spanish-language novel.
Despite the many artistic, musical, and technological adaptations of El Quijote, it is in literature where the biggest, most commanding fans of the novel are to be found. José Ortega y Gasset said, in Meditations on Quijote, that Emma Bovary is “un Don Quijote con faldas y un mínimo de tragedia sobre el alma,” a Don Quixote in skirts and a minimum of tragedy over the soul. The resemblance is clear from the novel’s plotline: Living a placid, countryside life near the town of Rouen in Normandy, Emma Bovary, the heroine of Flaubert’s 1856 novel, is a reader bored out of her wits. She reads in order to escape the reality that surrounds her. She is unhappy with her husband, Charles, a mediocre doctor. Her diet includes romances, women’s magazines, historic romances, and the novels of Eugène Sue, Balzac, and George Sand. So as to inject passion into her days, she engages in an affair with a landowner, Rodolphe Boulanger. The affair undergoes a series of ups and downs, passing through periods of intensity but ending in a breakup. She starts another affair with a lawyer, Léon Dupuis. Eventually he grows tired of her. At that point she begins buying luxury items on credit. The collapse of the affair and her monetary ruin drive her to commit suicide.
El Quijote transformed Flaubert when he first read it during his adolescent years. In a letter of 1832, written when he was still eleven years old, he says he’s making notes on the novel. A couple of decades later and four years before he published Madame Bovary, he told poet Louise Colet, with whom he engaged in an affair, “What is characteristic of great geniuses are their faculty of generalizing and their power of creation. They create types, each of which epitomizes a class, and by doing so they enrich the consciousness of mankind. Don’t we believe that Don Quixote is as real as Caesar?” By way of comparison, he added, “Shakespeare is formidable in this regard. He was not a man, he was a continent: he contained whole crowds of great men, entire landscapes.” A few weeks later, still in 1852, he told Colet that great books have a special quality: the more one contemplates them, the bigger they grow: “What is prodigious about Don Quixote,” Flaubert stated, “is the absence of art, and that perpetual fusion of illusion and reality which makes the book so comic and so poetic. All others are such dwarfs beside it!”
When around 1863 Flaubert corresponded with his friend Ivan Turgenev, he told him that El Quijote makes him “long to ride a horse along a road white with dust and eat olives and raw onions in the shade of a rock.” This passion never diminished. In a letter to George Sand dated some six years later, he mentioned he was rereading the Cervantes novel. “What a giant of a book! Is there anything more splendid?” But his most impressive assessments came as he declared his roots as a novelist: “Je retrouve mes origines dans le livre que je savais par coeur avant de savoir lire, Don Quichotte,” I rediscovered my origins in the book I knew by heart before knowing how to read, Don Quixote. In other words, Flaubert made El Quijote his own before he even read the book.
Yet what exactly does it mean “to make it one’s own”? How is Emma “a knight in skirts”? The commonalities are obvious: an existential disaffection, a refusal to follow social conventions, a rebellious spirit, and the compulsion to battle with one’s own demons. The real question is what differentiates the knight-errant from the rural housewife. The response might be plentiful (one is Spanish and the other French, this one is moneyless and thus belongs to a feudal culture while the other springs from a bourgeois environment and uses credit to enhance her delusions, etc.), but the basic divergence is that one is a man, the other a woman.
Flaubert once famously said, “Madame Bovary c’est moi.” Comparing Cervantes and Flaubert with their protagonists is thought-provoking. Is it more difficult for a male writer to create a female character than to produce one of his own gender? (The argument might also be made that female writers actually write male characters very well, because they observe them so closely, needing to anticipate their behavior, or perhaps for safety or survival.) Think of how few novelists are successful in this transgender odyssey: Henry James, E. M. Forster, and Naguib Mahfouz, but not Italo Calvino, Philip Roth, and Vargas Llosa. Actually, in El Quijote itself, the female characters, although abundant in number, are relatively minor: Dulcinea, Marcela, Dorothea, Leonor, Maritornes, Altisidora, Teresa Panza, Sanchita, Princess Micomicona, Zenaida, the Duchess, Alonso Quijano’s niece and housekeeper, among others. (Cervantes was married in 1584, at the age of thirty-seven, to nineteen-year-old Catalina de Salazar. But he had an out-of-wedlock daughter with another nineteen-year-old, the result of a night of passion at a tavern.) In contrast, Flaubert delves into his novel with a genuinely female viewpoint. This, in my estimation, is a truly quixotic achievement.
As for Dostoyevsky, his route to El Quijote is somewhat different. He heard Ivan Turgenev lecture in 1860 on the similarities and differences between Hamlet and Don Quixote. The lecture in Russian was titled “Gamet I Don-Kikhot.” In Turgenev’s view, Shakespeare’s prince is a man of reason, doubt, egotism, and skepticism, whereas Quixote is a man of belief, faith, devotion, and sacrifice. Turgenev thought that human psychology oscillated between these two poles, and he identified with Don Quixote. Dostoyevsky reacted with wonderment. He too identified with the knight-errant, whom he saw as a variation of Jesus Christ. He decided to turn that wonderment into literature, first—and loosely—in Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment (1866), then—emphatically—in The Idiot (1869), where the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, an outright variation on Don Quixote, symbolizes the most optimistic, benevolent, perhaps even naive aspects of human nature. In a letter to his niece Sophia Ivanova, written in Geneva on January 13, 1868, about the idea for a new novel, Dostoyevsky wrote:
There is only one positively beautiful person in the world, Christ, and the phenomenon of this limitlessly, infinitely beautiful person is an infinite miracle in itself. (The whole Gospel according to John is about that: for him the whole miracle is only in the incarnation, in the manifestation of the beautiful.) But I am going too far. I’d only mention that of all the beautiful individuals in Christian literature, one stands out as the most perfect, Don Quixote. But he is beautiful only because he is ridiculous.
Clearly, Dostoyevsky mixed his literary admiration with religious undertones. He once wrote in his diaries that “in t
he whole world there is no deeper, no mightier literary work. This is, so far, the last and greatest expression of human thought; this is the bitterest irony which man was capable of conceiving. And if the world were to come to an end, and people were asked there, somewhere: ‘did you understand your life on earth, and what conclusion have you drawn from it?’—man could silently hand over Don Quixote: ‘Such is my inference from life. Can you condemn me for it?’ ”
Elsewhere, Dostoyevsky admires Don Quixote’s capacity to believe in the unbelievable, to appreciate the irrational aspects of life. In September 1877, he elaborated on this theory in his personal diary. Although this is a long quote, it is worth looking at his meditation in full (in Kenneth Lantz’s translation):
Oh, this is a great book, not the sort that are written now; only one such book is sent to humanity in several hundred years. And such perceptions of the profoundest aspects of human nature you will find in every page of this book. Take only the fact that this Sancho, the personification of common sense, prudence, cunning, the golden mean, has chanced to become a friend and traveling companion of the maddest person on earth—he precisely, and no other! He deceives him the whole time, he cheats him like a child, and yet he has complete faith in his great intellect, is enchanted to the point of tenderness of the greatness of his heart, believes completely in all the preposterous dreams of the great knight, and the whole time he never once doubts that the Don will at last conquer the island for him! What a fine thing it would be if our young people were to become thoroughly steeped in these great works of world literature. I don’t know what is now being taught in courses of literature, but a knowledge of this most splendid and sad of all books created by human genius would certainly elevate the soul of a young person with a great idea, give rise to profound questions in the heart, and work toward diverting his mind from worship of the eternal and foolish idol of mediocrity, self-satisfied conceit, and cheap prudence. Man will not forget to take this saddest of all books with him to God’s last judgment. He will point to the most profound and fateful mystery of humans and humankind that the book conveys. He will point to the fact that humanity’s most sublime beauty, its most sublime purity, chastity, forthrightness, gentleness, courage, and, finally, its most sublime intellect—all these often (alas, all too often) come to naught, pass without benefit to humanity, and even become an object of humanity’s derision simply because all these most noble and precious gifts with which a person is often endowed lack but the very last gift—that of genius to put all this power to work and to direct it along a path of action that is truthful, not fantastic or insane, so as to work for the benefit of humanity! But genius, alas, is given out to the tribes and the people in such small quantities and so rarely that the spectacle of the malicious irony of fate that so often dooms the efforts of some of the noblest of people and the most ardent friends of humanity to scorn and laughter and to the casting of stones solely because these people, at the fateful moment, were unable to discern the true sense of things and so discover their new word—this spectacle of the needless ruination of such great and noble forces actually may reduce a friend of humanity to despair, evoke not laughter but bitter tears and sour the heart, hitherto pure and believing, with doubt. . . .
However, I wanted only to point out this most interesting feature which, along with hundreds of other such profound perceptions, Cervantes revealed in the human heart. The most preposterous of people, with a crackpot belief in the most preposterous fantasy anyone can conceive, suddenly falls into doubt and perplexity that almost shake his entire faith. . . . The preposterous man suddenly began yearning for realism! It wasn’t the appearance of sorcerers’ armies that bothered him: oh, that’s beyond any doubt; and how else could these great and splendid knights display all their valor if they were not visited by all these trials, if there were no envious giants and wicked sorcerers? The ideal of the wandering knight is so great, so beautiful and useful, and had so captivated the heart of the noble Don Quixote that it became utterly impossible for him to renounce his faith in it; that would have been the equivalent of betraying his ideal, his duty, his love for Dulcinea and for humanity. (When he did renounce his ideal, when he was cured of his madness and grew wiser, after returning from his second campaign in which he was defeated by the wise and commonsensical barber Carrasco, the skeptic and debunker, he promptly passed away, quietly, with a sad smile, consoling the weeping Sancho, loving the whole world with the mighty force of love contained in his sacred heart, and yet realizing that there was nothing more for him to do in this world.) No, it was not that: what troubled him was merely the very real, mathematical consideration that no matter how the knight might wield his word and no matter how strong he might be, he still could not overcome an army of a hundred thousand in the course of a few hours, or even in a day, having killed all of them to the last man. And yet such things were written in these trustworthy books. Therefore, they must have lied. And if there is one lie, then it is all a lie. How, then, can truth be saved? And so, to save the truth he invents another fantasy; but this one is twice, thrice as fantastic as the first one, cruder and more absurd: he invents hundreds of thousands of imaginary men having the bodies of slugs, which the knight’s keen blade can pass through ten times more easily and quickly than it can an ordinary human body. And thus realism is satisfied, truth is saved, and it’s possible to believe in the first and most important dream with no more doubts—and all this, again, is solely thanks to the second, even more absurd fantasy, invented only to salvage the realism of the first one.
Ask yourselves: hasn’t the same thing happened to you, perhaps, a hundred times in the course of your life? Say you’ve come to cherish a certain dream, an idea, a theory, a conviction, or some eternal fact that struck you, or, at least, a woman who has enchanted you. You rush off in pursuit of the object of your love with all the intensity your soul can muster. It’s true that no matter how blinded you may be, no matter how well your heart bribes you, still, if in the object of your love there is a lie, a delusion, something that you yourself have exaggerated and distorted because of your passion and your initial rush of feeling—solely so that you can make it your idol and bow down to it—then, of course, you’re aware of it in the depth of your being; doubt weighs upon your mind and teases it, ranges through your soul and prevents you from living peaceably with your beloved dream. Now, don’t you remember, won’t you admit even to yourself what it was that suddenly set your mind at rest? Didn’t you invent a new dream, a new lie, even a terribly crude one, perhaps, but one that you were quick to embrace lovingly only because it resolved your initial doubt?
The saddest book . . . While Miguel de Unamuno approached Don Quixote as a religious figure who helped us to see what was simple and authentic in a world that is a prisoner of deception (a connection that was used to explain the Spanish national character), Dostoyevsky’s faith was less nationalistic, sadder, and more raw. He saw El Quijote as the novel that explored the realm of our dreams. For him it was a book that went against institutionalized faith.
Interestingly, another Russian, Vladimir Nabokov, believed El Quijote was the cruelest of all novels. In a series of lectures delivered at Harvard in 1951–52, published posthumously in 1983, Nabokov wrote, “That in former times a reader could get a belly-laugh from every chapter of the work, seems incredible to the modern reader, who finds the implication of its humor brutal and grim.” He added, “The fun often sinks to the low level of the medieval farce with all its conventional laughing-stocks. It is sad when an author assumes that certain things are funny in themselves—donkeys, gluttons, tormented animals, bloody noses, et cetera—to stock in trade of ready-made fun.” Nabokov also disliked The Brothers Karamazov (which, he noted with pleasure, in some English editions was called “The Kalamazoo Brothers”) and thought Crime and Punishment to be a ghastly rigmarole (“No, I do not object to soul-searching and self-revelation,” he added, “but in those books the soul, and the sins, and the sentimentality, and the journa
lese, hardly warrant the tedious and muddled search”). About Cervantes’s novel, he wrote:
It is simply not true that as some of our mellow-minded commentators maintain—Aubrey Bell, for instance—that the general character that emerges from the national background of the book is that of sensitive, keen-witted folks, humorous and humane. Humane, indeed! What about the hideous cruelty—with or without the author’s intent or sanction—which riddles the whole book and befouls its humor? Let us not drag the national element in. The Spaniards of Don Quixote’s day were not more cruel in their behavior toward madmen and animals, subordinates and non-conformers, than any other nation of that brutal and brilliant era. Or, for that matter, of other, later, more brutal and less brilliant eras in which the fact of cruelty remains with its fangs bared.
El Quijote is, Nabokov says, “one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned.” He argues that in the novel everyone deceives everyone else and all make fun of Alonso Quijano/Don Quixote. They abuse animals, beat slaves, attack defenseless people, and stage plays with no other purpose than to insult, exploit, manipulate, and mistreat.
It is interesting to contrast these two Russians, Dostoyevsky and Nabokov. The first is passionate; the second brainy. One likes effusive, episodic novels; the other despises them. (For Nabokov, El Quijote was a “one-and-a-half track” novel, whereas Madame Bovary was a one-track narrative and Anna Karenina, which he spells Karenin, a multi-track.) One believes the novel to be a great work of world literature; the other finds its value over-hyped. Nabokov once stated, “Some critics, a very vague minority long dead, have tried to prove that Don Quixote is but a stale farce. Others have maintained that Don Quixote is the greatest novel ever written. A hundred years ago one enthusiastic French critic, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, author of Les Lundis (1851–1872), called it ‘the Bible of Humanity.’ Let us not fall under the spell of such enchanters.” Nabokov also declared that “Don Quixote is one of those books that are, perhaps, more important in eccentric diffusion than in their own intrinsic value.” He recommended that we “do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for so-called ‘real life’ in novels.” He added, “Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. Don Quixote is a fairy tale, so is Bleak House, so is Dead Souls. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales the world would not be real.”