by Ilan Stavans
I recall very fully the moment and the place when I first heard of “Don Quixote,” while as yet I could not connect it very distinctly with anybody’s authorship. I was still too young to conceive of authorship, even in my own case, and wrote my miserable verses without any notion of literature, or of anything but the pleasure of seeing them actually come out rightly rhymed and measured. The moment was at the close of a summer’s day just before supper, which, in our house, we had lawlessly late, and the place was the kitchen where my mother was going about her work, and listening as she could to what my father was telling my brother and me and an apprentice of ours, who was like a brother to us both, of a book that he had once read. We boys were all shelling peas, but the story, as it went on, rapt us from the poor employ, and whatever our fingers were doing, our spirits were away in that strange land of adventures and mishaps, where the fevered life of the knight truly without fear and without reproach burned itself out. I dare say that my father tried to make us understand the satirical purpose of the book. I vaguely remember his speaking of the books of chivalry it was meant to ridicule; but a boy could not care for this, and what I longed to do at once was to get that book and plunge into its story. He told us at random of the attack on the windmills and the flocks of sheep, of the night in the valley of the fulling-mills with their trip-hammers, of the inn and the muleteers, of the tossing of Sancho in the blanket, of the island that was given him to govern, and of all the merry pranks at the duke’s and duchess’s, of the liberation of the galley-slaves, of the capture of Mambrino’s helmet, and of Sancho’s invention of the enchanted Dulcinea, and whatever else there was wonderful and delightful in the most wonderful and delightful book in the world. I do not know when or where my father got it for me, and I am aware of an appreciable time that passed between my hearing of it and my having it. The event must have been most important to me, and it is strange I cannot fix the moment when the precious story came into my hands; though for the matter of that there is nothing more capricious than a child’s memory, what it will hold and what it will lose.
Howell’s contemporary, James Russell Lowell, the American poet, critic, and diplomat, wrote a poem in which he imagined the author of El Quijote in chains yet as an exemplar of freedom. In Lowell’s “Prison of Cervantes,” Cervantes’s captivity in Algiers is a lesson about how the body might be compromised yet the mind is unbound. The poem reads in part:
In charmed communion with his dual mind
He wandered Spain, himself both knight and hind,
Redressing wrongs he knew must ever be.
His humor wise could see life’s long deceit,
Man’s baffled aims, nor therefore both despise;
His knightly nature could ill fortune greet
Like an old friend.
A lifelong reader of the novel, Lowell also delivered a lecture, circa 1885, at the Working Men’s College in London, in which he described this most engaging of books, comparing it to Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). In my mind, it is among the most eloquent reflections on El Quijote ever produced. Here is a section from the middle:
But Don Quixote, if less verisimilar as a narrative, and I am not sure that it is, appeals to far higher qualities of mind and demands a far subtler sense of appreciation than the masterpiece of Defoe. If the latter represents in simplest prose what interests us because it might happen to any man, the other, while seeming never to leave the low level of fact and possibility, constantly suggests the loftier region of symbol, and sets before us that eternal contrast between the ideal and the real, between the world as it might be and the world as it is, between the fervid completeness of conception and the chill inadequacy of fulfillment, which life sooner or later, directly or indirectly, forces upon the consciousness of every man who is more than a patent digester. There is a moral in Don Quixote, and a very profound one, whether Cervantes consciously put it there or not, and it is this: that whoever quarrels with the Nature of Things, wittingly or unwittingly, is certain to get the worst of it. The great difficulty lies in finding out what the Nature of things really and perdurably is, and the great wisdom, after we have made this discovery, or persuaded ourselves that we have made it, is in accommodating our lives and actions to it as best we may or can. And yet, though all this be true, there is another and deeper moral in the book than this. The pathos which underlies its seemingly farcical turmoil, the tears which sometimes tremble under our lids after its most poignant touches of humor, the sympathy with its hero which survives all his most ludicrous defeats and humiliations and is only deepened by them, the feeling that he is after all the one noble and heroic figure in a world incapable of comprehending him, and to whose inhabitants he is distorted and caricatured by the crooked panes in those windows of custom and convention through which they see him,—all this seems to hint that only he who has the imagination to conceive and the courage to attempt a trial of strength with what foists itself on our senses as the Order of Nature for the time being can achieve great results, or kindle the cooperative and efficient enthusiasm of his fellow-men. The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.
Lowell’s argument that someone perceived as a lunatic in his own time can gradually ignite the participation of others, and therefore be perceived as a visionary to future generations, seems particularly relevant to the American condition, after the Civil War, as leaders strove to fix—sometimes quixotically—what seemed to be a broken country.
IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICA, Don Quixote became a man for all seasons, a cornucopia of possibilities. For some he was a revolutionary figure, for others the emblem of social justice. John Dos Passos wrote a 1922 travel book on Spain called Rosinante [sic] to the Road Again, in which he uses the knight-errant’s horse as an excuse to wander—and wonder—what the laid-back Spanish people are like (in comparison with work-driven Americans) in the aftermath of the First World War. At one point, one of Dos Passos’s friends tells him that in Spain “we live from the belly and loins, or else from the head and heart: between Don Quixote the mystic and Sancho Panza the sensualist there is no middle ground.” Later on, Dos Passos turns that vision into a philosophy of Spain, one oscillating between two poles, the warp and the woof:
And predominant in the Iberian mind is the thought La vida es sueño: “Life is a dream.” Only the individual, or that part of life which is in the firm grasp of the individual, is real. The supreme expression of this lies in the two great figures that typify Spain for all time: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; Don Quixote, the individualist who believed in the power of man’s soul over all things, whose desire included the whole world in himself; Sancho, the individualist to whom all the world was food for his belly. On the one hand we have the ecstatic figures for whom the power of the individual soul has no limits, in whose minds the universe is but one man standing before his reflection, God. These are the Loyolas, the Philip Seconds, the fervid ascetics like Juan de la Cruz, the originals of the glowing tortured faces in the portraits of El Greco. On the other hand are the jovial materialists like the Archpriest of Hita, culminating in the frantic, mystical sensuality of such an epic figure as Don Juan Tenorio. Through all Spanish history and art the threads of these two complementary characters can be traced, changing, combining, branching out, but ever in substance the same. Of this warp and woof have all the strange patterns of Spanish life been woven.
As for John Steinbeck, he “discovered” El Quijote late in life. In a letter he wrote at the age of fifty to Pascal Covici, his Romanian Jewish American editor at Viking Press in New York, about writing a prologue to his new novel East of Eden (1952), Steinbeck states:
Miguel Cervantes invented the modern novel and with his Don Quixote set a mark high and bright. In his prologue, he said best what writers feel—the gladness and the terror.
“Idling reader,” Cervantes wrote, “you may believe me when I tell you that I should have liked this book, which is the child of my brain, to be th
e fairest, the sprightliest and the cleverest that could be imagined, but I have not been able to contravene the law of nature which would have it that like begets like—”
And so it is with me, Pat. Although some times I have felt that I held fire in my hands and spread a page with shining—I have never lost the weight of clumsiness, of ignorance, of aching inability.
Steinbeck also began a novel titled Don Keehan, resetting Cervantes’s classic in the American West, but he left it unfinished. As it happens, Roy Williams, an eccentric Texas millionaire obsessed with El Quijote, purchased the unpublished manuscript in 2010. Williams was unwilling to allow it to be published because he himself was planning on finishing Cervantes’s novel. As I show in the next chapter, this wasn’t the first or the last time an editor, translator, or entrepreneur took ownership of El Quijote.
Like Sainte-Beuve, William Faulkner believed El Quijote to be the source of all literary sources. In the Paris Review interview published in the spring of 1956, he said, “Cervantes, Don Quixote—I read that every year, as some do the Bible.” As several critics have noted, the comic aspects of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, the setting for a large portion of his oeuvre, spring from Cervantes’s fictionalized La Mancha. Closer to the fin de siècle, another American fan, Susan Sontag, in a 1985 essay called “España: Todo bajo el sol,” originally published as part of a National Tourist Board of Spain catalogue, talked about Cervantes’s novel as a narrative of habit, dependence, and obsession:
The first and greatest epic about addiction, Don Quixote is both a denunciation of the establishment of literature and a rhapsodic call to literature. Don Quixote is an inexhaustible book, whose subject is everything (the whole world) and nothing (the inside of someone’s head—that is, madness). Relentless, verbose, self-cannibalizing, reflexive, playful, irresponsible, accretive, self-replicating—Cervantes’ book is the very image of that glorious mise-en-abîme which is literature, and of that fragile delirium which is authorship, its manic expansiveness.
A writer is first of all a reader—a reader gone berserk; a rogue reader; an impertinent reader who claims to be able to do it better. Yet, justly, when the greatest living author composed his definitive fable about the writer’s vocation, he invented an early-twentieth-century writer who had chosen as his most ambitious work to write (parts of) Don Quixote. Once again. Exactly as is (was). For Don Quixote, more than any book ever written, is literature.
Likewise, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, and David Foster Wallace include references to it in their work. And novelist Kathy Acker wrote a punk, maddening female version in 1986, a rewriting called Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream, in which the knight is presented as a woman who, after an abortion scene at the beginning, embarks, along with her sidekick cowboy, Saint Simeon, on a journey where good becomes evil, searching for love “in a world in which love isn’t possible.” American critic William P. Childers, author of Transnational Cervantes (2006), has explored these and other literary resonances. He sees El Quijote as the ur-text of a generous portion of twentieth-century American fiction, from F. Scott Fitzgerald to Saul Bellow:
James Gatz’s reading of rags-to-riches dime novels leads him to transform himself into the enamored Jay Gatsby. His parties function like a knight’s heroic deeds; through them he hopes to win back Daisy, his Dulcinea. In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s Japhy Ryder is a counter-culture Quixote who dreams of a “rucksack revolution” that will replace postwar consumerism with an oppositional self fusing New England Transcendentalism and Zen Buddhism. Saul Bellow’s Moses Herzog, a Jewish-American existentialist on a quest for authentic selfhood, insists that he is no Quixote, for this is the “post-quixotic U.S.A.” But Bellow seems to view this declaration ironically. Whether getting beyond Quixotism is desirable or not, it may not be possible.
And in contemporary art, Barry Moser, known for The Pennyroyal Caxton Bible (1999), made a famous engraving of Don Quixote riding Rocinante, holding his spear in his right hand. He is proud yet lonesome.
Of course, the embrace of the quixotic in American life wasn’t only literary. William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate and the inspiration for Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), enjoyed portraying himself as quixotic. So did Cesar E. Chavez, the labor organizer. Obituaries of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. describe him as such, as do depictions—including self-descriptions—of Jack Kevorkian, who died in 2011 and was known as “Doctor Death” for encouraging the acceptance of euthanasia among terminally ill patients. Barack Obama, in turn, has been repeatedly criticized by his opponents—and, tellingly, by his supporters as well—as quixotic in his idealism, in his incapacity to look at windmills for what they are. What distinguishes them all is their commitment to a dream and their belief in their own exceptional qualities.
Quixote and Rocinante (2004), by Barry Moser.
Given all this, it is astounding that no Hollywood movie has ever been completed. Indeed, the history of film adaptations of Cervantes’s novel is rich in misbegotten ventures, among the most notorious of which is a multi-nation project lead by Orson Welles. In 1956, when he came up with the idea for an adaptation while on The Frank Sinatra Show, Welles had a penchant for complex projects and, because of his reputation as a difficult auteur, often encountered trouble as he sought to raise money in the United States.
Charlton Heston, famous for his Bible movie The Ten Commandments, released that same year, was scheduled early on to play the leading role. But other commitments interfered, and Heston never quite got on board. Undeterred, Welles began filming in 1957, with Francisco Reiguera as the knight-errant and Akim Tamiroff as his squire. The black-and-white cinematography, as is frequently the case in his films, is wonderful.
Short of funds, Welles had the editing done (poorly) in Spain, where the voice-over was produced in Spanish. Then, having moved on to other projects, and after being pushed out by his own Hollywood studio from the editing of Touch of Evil (1958), Welles went to Mexico. There, using his own money, he filmed some more scenes for his Quixote narrative. Patty McCormack, who had just been part of the cast of El Cid (1961), was scheduled to play Dulcinea.
In 1964, Welles said the movie was almost done, yet no release was scheduled. Then, in the 1970s, Reiguera and Tamiroff died. A forty-four-minute clip was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. There are scenes of a cemetery, bullfighting, a movie theater. Apparently, the film was meant to begin with Welles reading the story of Don Quixote to a girl. Once the storytelling ends, Sancho Panza appears in person. At one point, Welles plays a director, looking to cast Sancho in a movie by Orson Welles.
Still, there is a version remixed by Jesús Franco (the Spanish director of the singularly awful B-movie, among others from him, titled The Awful Dr. Orloff [known in Spanish as Gritos en la noche, 1961]) and produced by the Spaniard Patxi Irigoyen. It is a dissatisfying hodgepodge with recognizably little connection to Welles’s original intentions. Aside from the fact that countless legal hurdles prevented them from getting all the available footage, Franco and Irigoyen were not the right match for Welles, who in any case was always weary of others re-editing his work. The movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1992 to a whimper of a response and was generally considered a flop. The scene of the windmills, however, is intriguing. As the knight-errant comes upon them, one windmill grows in size, and as Don Quixote begins his battle, macabre sounds play in the background while the scenes with Don Quixote are juxtaposed with stills from paintings by Goya. There’s also an exciting section in which the odd couple enters a movie theater. Sancho tries a lollipop Dulcinea gives him. The two watch the screen, but it is Don Quixote who is enthralled by the projections he sees. At some point, he jumps on stage and attempts to battle the images on the screen. Welles obviously was seeking an innovative, experimental approach, which might have been what caused the demise of his ill-fated enterprise. We shall never fully know what he envisioned for his adaptation of Don Quixote; it was still incomplete when he died in 1985.
Ironically, however, in the end he did complete Nella terra di Don Chisciotte (In the Land of Don Quixote), a nine-episode Italian documentary on Spain. It was shot in 1961, but it didn’t air until 1964. The entire series isn’t directly linked to Cervantes’s novel, but its atmosphere is inspired by it.
TERRY GILLIAM, THE AMERICAN-BORN British member of the Monty Python troupe, tried to make a free adaptation of El Quijote in 1998. It was supposed to feature a twenty-first-century marketing executive who is thrown back to the seventeenth century. The cast included Jean Rochefort as Don Quixote and Johnny Depp as Sancho Panza. Yet despite a budget of $32.1 million, the effort collapsed after a series of mishaps, including insurance issues, the destruction of equipment during a flood, and Rochefort’s illness. In 2002, directors Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe made a fascinating documentary called Lost in La Mancha, about Gilliam’s cinematic misadventure, in which they explored the calamities that befell the production. Over the years, Rochefort was replaced, first by Robert Duvall, then by Ewan McGregor, and a new attempt to make the film took place in 2008. Again, the movie failed to materialize. In 2014, word came out that Gilliam had secured new financing and that, with a new screenplay, the film would finally be concluded.
Fittingly, one of the most popular twentieth-century American artifacts connected with El Quijote is the schmaltzy song “The Impossible Dream,” known as “The Quest.” Composed by Mitch Leigh, with lyrics by Joe Darion, the song is the centerpiece of Dale Wasserman’s Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, which premiered in 1965.