by Ilan Stavans
I like Nabokov’s last point. Despite his aversion to El Quijote, he is sure the world would “not be real” without it, because in the end, fairy tales such as the one Cervantes gave us show that life isn’t what the eye can see but what our imagination makes with the raw material that surrounds us.
Another distinguished member of the ebullient bunch is Franz Kafka. With him, the Cervantes novel curiously enters a mystical realm. When Kafka died at the age of forty-one, among his manuscripts were found a series of unpublished parables, secular variations of the Hasidic tradition, in which a tale is retold to showcase the mechanics, irremediably mysterious, through which God rules the world. “Die Wahrheit über Sancho Panza,” or “The Truth about Sancho Panza,” proposes a different way of looking at Cervantes’s novel. The English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir reads:
Without making any boast of it, Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by feeding him a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from himself his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that this demon thereupon set out, uninhibited, on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.
From the title onward, Kafka suggests that readers up until now have failed to understand the actual place the squire plays in Cervantes’s novel: he is not just a servant; his responsibility is far greater. Sancho, Kafka announces, does not play the role of supporting cast, as we’ve been led to believe; instead, he is the lead protagonist, even more important than his master. A modest man (he does not “boast about” his own achievements), he is inhabited by a demon (the word in German is dämon, evil spirit). To free himself from it, he begets Don Quixote, to whom Sancho patiently feeds “a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours.” That way he manages to “divert the demon” from himself.
In Hasidism, an imprisoned demon seeking to emerge is called a dybbuk. But this demon is generally understood to have come from the outside, to have sought refuge in a person’s body in order to right a wrong. But in “The Truth about Sancho Panza,” Kafka’s imagery is more subtle. The demon is not an outsider. It might not even represent a negative attribute. Instead, Sancho’s demon might be a metaphor for an artist freeing himself from his personal hang-ups through invention. Still, the squire’s creation of Don Quixote requires a kind of exorcism. Allowing the demon out makes Sancho a free man. But it does not liberate him altogether. Rather, that liberation entails other types of submission: first, because Sancho becomes his master’s servant, dutifully following Don Quixote (“out of a sense of responsibility”), and is rewarded with merriment (“a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days”); and second, because he is bound to chivalry literature, using it as a sort of alchemy to form the figure of Don Quixote.
Kafka upsets the Don Quixote–Sancho equation, turning the relationship upside down. The parable makes the knight-errant a figment of the squire’s imagination. The master is a master not only because he has a servant—the master is the servant’s creation. The servant’s genius lies not in begetting a creation in which he is on top, but by remaining at the bottom where his power is deeper. In Kafka’s view, the ruled are actually in control of the rulers.
Walter Benjamin, who was fascinated with mysticism and befriended the Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem, the author of Kabbalah (1974), sums it up accurately: “It is highly revealing that Kafka was able to recognize (though unable to create) the figure of the supremely religious man, a man who is in the right. And where did he find him? In none other than Sancho Panza, who has freed himself from a promiscuous relationship with his demon by directing the demon toward another object than himself, so that he might pursue a peaceful life in which he has no need to forget anything.” To be sure, Kafka argues symbolically that freedom, as such, is impossible. He once outlined a sequel in which the knight-errant was scheduled to visit southern France and northern Italy. Fittingly for Kafka, who might be called “the master of defeat,” the enterprise came to nothing.
As for Borges, his own parable in the form of “Pierre Menard” is not his only writing on the novel. He also wrote poems, protests, and a dream inspired by El Quijote. In January 1955, he wrote “Parábola de Cervantes y el Quijote,” collected in his book El hacedor (1960). Sancho does not play a role in this parable. Instead, Borges imagines a dialectical relationship between Cervantes and Don Quixote. At first, these two entities are clearly defined. But time attenuates their differences until creator and creation become one and the same. This is my English translation:
Tired of his land in Spain, one of the king’s old soldiers sought solace in Ariosto’s vast geographies, in that valley of the moon where the time wasted by dreams is found and in Mohammed’s golden idol stolen by Montalbán.
In gentle mockery of himself, he devised a credulous man who, perturbed by his reading of marvels, gave in to searching prowess and enchantments in prosaic places called El Toboso and Montiel.
Defeated by reality, by Spain, Don Quixote died in his native village around 1614. He was survived but for a short time by Miguel de Cervantes.
For both of them, the dreamer and the dreamed one, this whole plot resulted from the opposition of two worlds: the unreal world of chivalry novels and the quotidian, common world of the seventeenth century.
They never suspected that the years would end up smoothing away their discord; they didn’t suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s lean figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad’s episodes or Ariosto’s vast geographies.
For in the beginning of literature is myth, and in the end too.
9
AMERICA’S EXCEPTIONALISM
George Washington purchased a copy of El Quijote in Philadelphia on the very day the Constitution was adopted, September 17, 1787. It was the four-volume Tobias Smollett translation, which cost him, in Pennsylvania currency, twenty-two shillings, six pence. His presidential library at Mount Vernon still holds it, with Washington’s signature on the title page of each volume as well as an impression of his bookplate in the front pastedown endpaper. Earlier that same year, Washington had engaged in correspondence with Don Diego de Gardoqui, Spain’s ambassador. The topic was trade along the Mississippi River, which would be beneficial to Spain. On September 11, Gardoqui visited the future first president, and the conversation included the topic of Cervantes. Almost a couple of months later, the Spanish ambassador wrote to Washington, “requesting you would accept, and give a place in your library, to the best Spanish edition of Don Quixote [a copy published in Madrid in 1780].”
When Washington died in 1799, the eighteen-page inventory of his books described the English “Donquixote” as being “On the Table.” Its value then was assessed at three dollars.
El Quijote was one of Jefferson’s favorites, as many references to it in his letters attest. Benjamin Franklin owned a five-volume Spanish edition, which he prized as an outstanding example of the typographer’s art. He used the novel to teach himself Spanish and encouraged his children to do the same. In his correspondence, full of adulation for the book, he described himself also as “combat[ing] against windmills.” In addition, Franklin noted that while “Don Quixote undertook to redress the bodily wrongs of the world,” he, Franklin, recognized that the “redressment of mental vagaries” in the United States around 1822 “would be an enterprise more than Quixotic.” Still, he used Cervantes’s template to plow forward with a plan to make America “the Canaan of the New World.”
If the Spanish-speaking Americas have fostered an aesthetic philosophy called Menardismo that has been liberating in its capacity to cultivate a postcolonial mentality, in the United States, El Quijote is read altogether differently
: as a guidebook to exceptionalism. A profusion of English translations, five in the eighteenth century and four in the nineteenth, all of them produced in England (none would be published in America until the mid-twentieth century), made El Quijote ever popular on these shores.
The Founding Fathers were not the only devotees in the early Republic. Motifs and characters in El Quijote show up frequently in the realm of letters. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, an early American judge and writer, published a satirical novel, Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O’Regan, His servant, set on a western Pennsylvania farm, yet borrowing much from Cervantes’s book. Its protagonist, Captain John Farrago, sets out “to write about the world a little, with his man Teague at his heels, to see how things were going on here and there, and to observe human nature.” The first two parts appeared in 1792, the third in 1793, and the fourth in 1797, with a revised version in 1805. John Adams said Brackenridge’s book was “a more thoroughly American book than any written before 1833.” Equally significant is Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s novel Female Quixotism, Exhibited in the Romantic Opinions and Extravagant Adventures of Dorcasina Sheldon, released in 1801, a quarter of a century after the country became independent. A critique of romantic literature, this hilarious book, only loosely related to El Quijote, is a cautionary tale about the extent to which young ladies might damage their character by reading novels. It was the most popular novel in the United States before Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Both Brackenridge and Tenney saw Cervantes’s protagonist as the ancestor of the frontier American.
The Founding Fathers, in their eighteenth-century quest for a nation where everyone would be entitled to a decent life, where liberty and the pursuit of happiness would be the central tenets, saw in Cervantes’s hero an ideal. The belief that the United States needed to be a bastion of tolerance and individualism, a place where people would be free to engage in quests of the imagination, led these political leaders to embrace Don Quixote as their own advisor.
The nineteenth-century United States turned Don Quixote and his creator, Cervantes, into paragons of individualism, especially in New England. William Cullen Bryant, the romantic poet and longtime editor of the New York Evening Post, wrote a poem about “The Prince of Wits” in an April 23, 1878, edition commemorating the anniversary of Cervantes’s death. This is the opening statement:
As o’er the laughter-moving page
Thy readers, oh, Cervantes, bend,
What shouts of mirth, through age on age,
From every clime of earth ascend!
Bryant saw Don Quixote as an exemplar of human folly. He saw readers “honoring thee” in fighting the “shadow of a coming night.” Don Quixote’s struggle was that of dreams the world over.
AS THE CONCEPT OF “Manifest Destiny” became ingrained in the American mentality to justify the large territorial expansion toward the west (some of it involving the conquest of territories of Spain and Mexico), intellectuals, principally in New England but also in Texas and California, began to ardently admire Don Quixote for his bravery in embarking on a quest into the great unknown. His fans included Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Stephen Crane and William Dean Howells.
Washington Irving, a Hispanophile who authored A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) and served as minister to Spain under President John Tyler, was deeply influenced by the book. He frequently refers to El Quijote in his work. At one point in his History of New York (1809), told through the invented persona of Diedrich Knickerbocker, he described Peter Stuyvesant, a major figure in early New York history, as “a man who studied for years in the chivalrous library of Don Quixote.” And in Tales of the Alhambra (1832) there are ongoing references to the knight-errant’s madness as a key to understanding the Spanish psyche.
But the greatest American tribute paid to El Quijote is also by one of the greatest nineteenth-century American novelists: Herman Melville. Melville called Don Quixote “the greatest sage that ever lived.” Traces of Cervantes are present throughout his oeuvre, for instance, in White Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War (1850), where one of the shipmates reads Don Quixote. And The Confidence-Man (1857), which Melville wrote while reading that book himself, includes a character similar to Cide Hamete Benengeli. Melville even wrote a poem, dated somewhere around 1870–76, about a lifetime of rereading Cervantes’s novel:
“THE RUSTY MAN”
BY A SOURED ONE
In La Mancha he mopeth,
With beard thin and dusty;
He doteth and mopeth
In Library fusty –
’Mong his old folios gropeth:
Cites obsolete saws –
Of chivalry’s laws –
Be the wronged one’s knight:
Die, but do right.
So he rusts and musts,
While each grocer green
Thriveth apace with the fulsome face
Of a fool serene.
Melville’s great novel (maybe the greatest of all American novels), Moby-Dick: or, The Whale (1851), might be read as an homage to his predecessors. The hunt for the white whale mimics another impossible task: Don Quixote’s battle against the forces of evil. Captain Ahab is stubborn, just like the knight-errant. His goal is to kill the white whale, just as Don Quixote’s quest is to expose the enchanters. Plus, his itinerant life resembles that of Cervantes’s protagonist: he travels a long, twisted path to find the meaning of his existence. The connection might even run deeper. Captain Ahab is visited by dreams. As the novel progresses, he is delusional. A couple of chapters in the novel are titled “Knights and Squires.” And the character of the harpooner Queequeg has traits of Sancho. Moreover, to me this novel is really Latin American in its encyclopedic spirit.
American critic Harry Levin, in a lecture called “Don Quixote and Moby-Dick,” delivered for Harvard’s commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’s birth in 1946, wrote, “Where Cervantes undermines romance with realism, Melville lures us from a literal to a symbolic plane. . . . The relation of Moby-Dick to Don Quixote is neither close nor similar; it is complementary and dialectical. One proposes worldly wisdom as the touchstone for an outworn set of ideals; the other, abandoning economic values, goes questing after a transcendental faith.”
Alongside Melville is another Cervantes aficionado: Mark Twain. Several of his books, including The Prince and the Pauper (1881), have quixotic ingredients. Twain probably read El Quijote when he was writing The Innocents Abroad (1869). He talks about Cervantes’s novel in Life on the Mississippi (1883), preferring Cervantes to Sir Walter Scott. And A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) is a satire of chivalric values. But his indisputable tribute to El Quijote is the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Establishing the centrality of this classic, Ernest Hemingway once said that “all modern American literature comes from it,” hailing it as “the best book we’ve had.”
George Santayana, a Spanish citizen who always perceived of himself as an American (he was raised in the United States and taught philosophy at Harvard), wrote an influential 1952 essay in which he connects The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to El Quijote, meditating on the extent to which Twain was in debt to Cervantes. Indeed, Tom Sawyer might be seen to be like Don Quixote: he reads books and wants life to fit into them. In chapter 3 of Huckleberry Finn, while he and his club are in a cave, plotting one of their ruckuses, Huck says:
I didn’t see no di’monds, and I told Tom Sawyer so. He said there was loads of them there, anyway; and he said there was Arabs there, too, and elephants and things. I said, why couldn’t we see them, then? He said if I warn’t so ignorant, but had read a book called “Don Quixote,” I would know without asking. He said it was all done by enchantment. He said there was hundreds of soldiers there, and elephants and treasure, and so on, but we had enemies which he called magicians, and they had turned the whole thing into an infant Sunday school, just out of spite. I said, allright, then
the thing for us to do was to go for the magicians. Tom Sawyer said I was a numskull.
Yet the true “Cervantean” pair is made up of Huck and the runaway slave Jim. Their journey along the Mississippi River resembles that of Don Quixote and Sancho. For “Nigger Jim,” their quest is suffused with the possibility of his escaping slavery in an abolitionist state, whereas the fourteen-year-old boy flees from his tyrannical father and, equally important, from an environment that limits his imagination. These two are also a rather odd couple, like Don Quixote and Sancho: short and tall, child and adult, free and enslaved, in school and unschooled, and, consequently, speaking radically different languages.
In the antebellum United States, accolades for El Quijote also came from Carl Schurz, the statesman and reformer (known for the saying “My country right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right”) who served as ambassador to Spain under Lincoln. Schurtz was often depicted as a quixotic character because of “his true Americanism,” even though he was born in Germany. Another enthusiast was William Dean Howells, who edited the Atlantic Monthly and authored The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Known as “the Dean of American Letters,” in his autobiography, My Literary Passions (1895), Howells describes how as a child he discovered El Quijote when his father told the family of “a book that he had once read” about “the fevered life of the knight truly without fear and without reproach”: