by Steven Moore
And if this is done in a pleasing style and with ingenious invention, and is drawn as close as possible to the truth, it no doubt will weave a cloth composed of many different and beautiful threads, and when it is finished, it will display such perfection and beauty that it will achieve the greatest goal of writing, which, as I have said, is to teach and delight at the same time. Because the free writing style of these books allows the author to show his skills as an epic, lyric, tragic, and comic writer, with all the characteristics contained in the sweet and pleasing sciences and rhetoric; for the epic can be written in prose as well as verse.
This rousing defense of the novel—elevating it to the status of the classical epic, and the novelist (not the protagonist) to the stature of an epic hero—is worth quoting at length to reinforce the point DQ1 is not “an invective against books of chivalry,” as Cervantes’ friend says in the prologue and which has been repeated ever since; it’s an invective against books that lack “a pleasing style and . . . ingenious invention”; the canon goes on to apply the same standards to the plays of his day, condemning them for their artlessness, not because they belong to one genre or another. By this point in the novel, of course, the canon is preaching to the choir, for any reader who has reached chapter 47 has ample evidence that even an old dog like the chivalric novel can be taught new tricks by a trainer as talented as Cervantes.
Along with the two bookend discussions of chivalric fiction (and a plug for them as popular entertainment in 1.32), DQ1 includes a cynical guide to slapping together a conventional novel (offered by Cervantes’ glib friend in the prologue), discussions of the art of literary translation, the importance of mimesis in writing, the relatively new picaresque novel (1.22), the damning compromises commercial writers make (1.53), and numerous instances of the paradox that fiction is a lie that tells the truth. In addition, there are many metafictional moments when Cervantes refers to himself (or his other writings) in the third person and comments on the fictionality of his fiction, which is one reason why he is the don of postmodernists like Jorge Luis Borges, John Barth, Robert Coover, and Julián Ríos. All of this makes DQ1 a veritable primer on creative writing.
Teaching by example, Cervantes includes several models of what he considers fine writing within DQ1, which creates one of the many cognitive dissonances in this brilliant but problematic novel. Five times Cervantes interrupts the “ingenious invention” of Don Quixote’s misadventures to insert a tale that has little more than “a pleasing style” to recommend it. There is the modern pastoral of Marcela and her suitors (1.12–14), Cardenio’s tale (scattered throughout chapters 23–36), the freestanding Novel of the Man Who Was Recklessly Curious (32–34), the autobiographical captive’s tale (39–41), and the cautionary tale of Leandra (51).4 A few of them are followed by self-congratulatory remarks—one auditor tells the former captive “the manner in which you have recounted this remarkable tale has been equal to the unusual and marvelous events themselves” (1.42)—but these interpolated tales are the most traditional and tedious sections of the novel. They are the first to go in any abridged edition of Don Quixote, and I’m guessing even those who love the novel enough to read it frequently—Faulkner claimed to read it once a year, Barth once a decade—probably skip these sections. They are well-made tales by the standards Cervantes’ surrogates lay out above, but the plots and sentiments are familiar from dozens of Renaissance novellas, and the heroines especially (with the exception of Marcela) are walking clichés, each praised as a peerless PGOAT until the next one comes along.5 This reaches a ludicrous point in chapter 42 when there is a four-PGOAT pileup at the same inn, somewhat to the narrator’s embarrassment. (Lately arrived Clara de Viedma “was so elegant, beautiful, and charming that everyone marveled at the sight of her, and if they had not already seen Dorotea and Luscinda and Zoraida at the inn, they would have thought that beauty comparable to hers would be difficult to find” [my italics].)
Don Quixote is irritated by Pedro’s clumsy narration of Marcela’s tale (1.12) and Sancho’s even clumsier attempt at storytelling (1.20)—clear models of how not to tell a story—but in a novel that seeks to rescue the distressed maiden of Spanish fiction from the evil giants of bad writing, it is puzzling why Cervantes would offer up such conventional tales as models of good literature. Although the interpolated tales do have some thematic relationship to the rest of the novel, especially the Man Who Was Recklessly Curious,6 there is the suspicion these are unpublished novellas Cervantes had written earlier and decided to salvage by sticking them in here (as is the case with many of the poems in the novel). Or it could be, as Borges suggests, “The Quixote is less an antidote for those fictions than it is a secret, nostalgic farewell.”7 The same kind of aesthetic schizophrenia can be found in his Exemplary Stories, which are intended to be exemplary models of writing as well as moral tales: several of them are indeed innovative and even aesthetically subversive, but most modern editors drop at least four of the novellas for the reasons Lesley Lipson politely gives: “Since they reflect the more traditional format of love and adventure, they are stylistically less adventurous than the rest. This also makes them less representative of Cervantes as an innovator.”8 Making matters worse, DQ1 is filled with minor errors and inconsistencies regarding names, chronology, events like the loss of Sancho’s donkey, and misplaced chapter headings—all of which Cervantes apparently pleads guilty to in DQ2 (2.3), blaming some errors on typesetters. Even the last line of the novel is a botched quotation. Such sloppy craftsmanship further compromises the novel’s alleged pedagogic value, and makes us question what he is really trying to teach us about writing.
While a full quarter of DQ1ostensibly preaches an orthodox approach to fiction and provides several models of such, the rest of it consists of highly unorthodox fiction and scenes of such stupendous, iconic power—Don Quixote tilting at windmills!—that they seem to belong to the timeless realm of myth. This formal contradiction, along with the tonal dissonance between the tragic interpolated stories and the comic main story, warns us the novel may be at cross-purposes with itself, even suggesting orthodox forms and beliefs are inferior to heterodox ones.
Second, we have to accept that Don Quixote is literally insane; he is not an idealist, an individualist marching to the beat of his own drum, a Walter Mittyesque daydreamer, a nostalgic conservative longing for the good old days, but loco, a victim of locura (madness). These are the Spanish words Cervantes repeats insistently, and while Alonso Quijana’s condition might be more accurately diagnosed as monomania, any interpretation of his speeches, acts, or beliefs must start from the realization he is a madman, and a dangerous one at that. He suffers from hallucinations and violent explosions of rage, which cause him to attack innocent people without warning, several times nearly killing them (including two attempts on Sancho’s life). Like the clinically insane, he can’t distinguish between fantasy and reality, the result of overdosing on novels of chivalry and convincing himself they are accurate historical chronicles, rather than escapist fiction. We should remember that in Cervantes’ day madmen were often objects of cruel fun, and in those scenes where other characters play along with (and even encourage) Don Quixote’s madness, we should picture some heartless kids today taunting a retarded boy. I laugh as loudly as anyone at some of Don Quixote’s antics, but I’m not proud of it.
The key indicator of his madness, of course, is his assumption that books of fiction are literally true. (In Spanish, historia can mean both “history” and “story,” a fuzziness Cervantes exploits.) But not only are the chivalry novels he reads wildly unrealistic, they contradict the historical record: knights in the Middle Ages were merely elite soldiers, and “chivalry” was just a poetic ideal—“indeed, an ideal that may have been only infrequently attained, and perhaps never in actual warfare,” as one authority informs us.9 Put bluntly, Don Quixote’s late-life career change is based on a compound lie: the heroes who inspire him never existed, their values are poetic inventions, and the texts tha
t enshrine these heroes and ideals are falsehoods. Though deluded in almost everything he sees, he self-righteously insists that he alone sees clearly and that everyone else walks in darkness. DQ1 is not about the power of the imagination to transform mundane reality, as some suggest, but about deluding yourself, getting your facts wrong, and then endangering others with your delusions. (Think of Don Quixote as a Christian Scientist parent who allows his sick child to die rather than seek medical assistance, confident in the power of prayer and the will of his god. Or think of him as a born-again Christian president willing to drag his country into a ruinous, unnecessary war in pursuit of a delusional political agenda.) As Guy Davenport notes, the adjective quixotic—a hopelessly idealistic notion or project—“should mean something like hallucinated, self-hypnotized, or play in collision with reality.”10 How then can any reader admire the actions of a lunatic so deeply lost in error and delusion, so alienated from the reality-based world? Perhaps because all readers live in cultures that tolerate, even admire such deludenoids.
Most people aren’t literally driven crazy by books and then inspired to act them out in the real world, with one obvious exception: religious nuts. Like Don Quixote, they immerse themselves in fanciful texts that they regard as factually true (the Bible, the Quran, the Book of Mormon, The Urantia Book, whatever), then sally forth into the world and try to impose the dictates of those fictions on others, resorting to violence when necessary in the belief they are doing their god’s work.11 Don Quixote is of course a devout Catholic and regards knight-errantry as a spiritual calling: “we are ministers of God on earth, the arms by which His justice is put into effect on earth” (1.13). But instead of being labeled crazy, such people are esteemed as moral guardians, pillars of the community, spiritual leaders, and in extreme cases martyrs in a righteous cause, even though the books they base their beliefs on are as unhistorical and contrived as The Exploits of Esplandián, Felixmarte of Hyrcania, The Knight Platir, and other foolish fictions in Don Quixote’s library.
As usual, we can count on Sancho Panza to point out the obvious: “What demons in your heart incite you to attack our Catholic faith?” he asks his master in DQ1’s final chapter, by which point a pattern should be clear. In dozens of instances Cervantes slyly associates chivalric novels with the Bible, beginning in the prologue when his friend advices him “if you name some giant in your book, make him the giant Goliath, and just by doing that, which is almost no trouble at all, you have a nice long annotation, because you can then write: The giant Goliath, or Goliat, was a Philistine whom the shepherd David slew with a stone in the valley of Terebint, as recounted in the Book of Kings.” In the book-burning chapter (1.6), the priest uses religious imagery to judge Don Quixote’s chivalry novels, as though he were the 2nd-century Irenaeus of Lyon separating orthodox gospels from heretical apocrypha. The canon likewise compares the authors of such novels to “the founders of new sects and new ways of life, . . . giving the ignorant rabble a reason to believe and consider as true all the absurdities they contain” (1.49); he goes on tell Don Quixote that if he still wishes “to read books about great chivalric deeds, read Judges in Holy Scripture, and there you will find magnificent truths and deeds both remarkable and real” (my italics).12 How sneaky of Cervantes to express these views wearing the camouflage of the priest and canon; verily, “as the saying goes, ‘The devil can hide behind the cross’ ” (1.6, repeated in 2.47). Throughout the novel, Don Quixote defends the discrepancies and contradictions in novels of chivalry with all the ingenuousness of a fundamentalist defending the inerrancy of the Bible. While it would be too reductive (but not wrong) to say Cervantes equates knight-errantry with religious belief, he does seem to insinuate a syllogism that goes: Chivalric novels are false; the Bible resembles those novels; therefore, the Bible is false. But Cervantes gleefully complicates matters by insisting repeatedly that Don Quixote is true, which he and everyone who reads it knows is untrue.
In the land of the Spanish Inquisition, Cervantes couldn’t come straight out and call the Bible untrue, and probably wouldn’t have gone that far even if he could. Like many people then and now, he probably felt its “spiritual truths” were independent of the Bible’s historical veracity; that is, the Bible is “true” if treated like a novel, offering ethical lessons and insights in fiction form. And in fact that’s what Cervantes means when he claims his novel, unlike unrealistic novels of chivalry, is “true”: it’s true to life and to human nature, though not literally true. But if you insist on the Bible’s veracity, you are as mad as Don Quixote, and potentially as dangerous. It’s difficult not to develop affection for the old coot, but we must not ignore his rap sheet: numerous vicious assaults on innocent citizens, several attempted murders, animal cruelty (he kills more than seven sheep, not to mention the hardships he imposes upon long-suffering Rocinante), aiding and abetting the escape of a chain-gang of criminals, extensive property damage, and much emotional distress for his niece and housekeeper. He considers himself above the law, hallucinates like a tripping hippie, and is the worst kind of meddling, holier-than-thou do-gooder. Don Quixote’s counterparts today range from self-appointed moral watchdogs who boycott theaters, television companies, and museums showing unorthodox art, to concerned but narrow-minded parents who try to remove Huckleberry Finn and the Harry Potter novels from school library shelves, to those who take such faith-based initiatives as assassinating abortion providers and committing acts of terrorism. Anyone who reads DQ1 carefully must regard Don Quixote as a madman, not a madcap, much less a model. I keep harping upon this point because Cervantes does; even in the concluding chapter of DQ1, Don Quixote tries to stab a goatherd, attacks a procession of penitents carrying a statue of the Catholic goddess Mary (under the assumption it is a gang of villains abducting a noble lady), and is once more designated by Cervantes an hombre loco. The author wants us to admire Don Quixote, not Don Quixote.
The Knight of the Sorrowful Face is such an extraordinary character that he seems capable of symbolizing a variety of things, but I would insist, contra much current critical theory, that only those grounded in the text are valid.13 For example, one can say he represents the man of faith in the process of being rendered ridiculous in the late 16th-century by the man of science, who relies on testing and empirical evidence to understand the world, not on venerable texts of dubious origin. This conflict is dramatized in a minor incident at the beginning of the novel: realizing he will need a sallet helmet for his adventures, Quijana makes a pasteboard visor to add to an old headpiece to make a complete helmet. He tests it with his sword and easily smashes it to pieces. So “he made another one, placing strips of iron on the inside so that he was satisfied with its strength; and not wanting to put it to the test again, he designated and accepted it as an extremely fine sallet” (1.1). “Not wanting to make any further experiments” (as Raffel translates the key clause), he retreats from the new world of science to the old world of faith, choosing to believe (rather than know) because it allows him to retain control over his world. This is the moment Alonso Quijana becomes Don Quixote of La Mancha. Once he puts the homemade helmet on, he is trapped in it and can’t get it off, “and so he spent all night wearing the helmet and was the most comical and curious figure anyone could imagine” (1.3), a brilliant metaphor for a solipsist trapped in his own private fantasy world, or for a true believer within the armor of faith. Needless to say, the visor shatters the first time it is put to the test.
How many of DQ1’s earliest readers noticed these subversive subtleties is difficult to say; most seem to have regarded the novel merely as an entertaining farce—which it certainly is—along the lines of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. In the sequel, Cervantes decided to give the crowd more of what they wanted, but he also pumped up the paradoxes, heterodoxies, and metafictional wizardry—something to make the cognoscenti think.
Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha appeared at the end of 1615, and begins a month after the concluding eve
nts of the first part. During that impossibly brief time, we are to believe DQ1 was typeset, printed, and distributed throughout Spain. Even Don Quixote, who will believe anything, “could not persuade himself that such a history existed, for the blood of the enemies he had slain was not yet dry on the blade of his sword and his chivalric exploits were already in print” (2.3). Not only that, DQ2 is set in the summer of 1614, meaning the events of DQ1 took place nine years after it was published, and which makes a mockery of the narrator’s earlier contention the story came from an old Arabic manuscript (1.9). This is further evidence either of Cervantes’ carelessness or his carefree attitude toward the conventions of novel-writing.
DQ2 finds Cervantes still in his self-appointed role as grand inquisitor of bad Spanish art (it’s disingenuous to insist on a strict distinction between Cervantes and his narrator): ridiculous novels of chivalry still come under fire, but he also discusses plays (2.12), poetry (2.16, 70), commercial writing (2.22), translations (2.62), and painting (2.71), as well as the ancillary fields of criticism and publishing. The art of the novel remains Cervantes’ principal concern, and the two novels that receive the most commentary are DQ1—Cervantes takes this opportunity to explain discrepancies and defend his artistic choices—and the unauthorized sequel the pseudonymous Alonso de Avellaneda published in 1614. Cervantes was outraged when the latter’s Segunda parte del ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha appeared, but he recognized it as a godsend that would allow him to complicate his metafiction further. Don Quixote begins running in to people who have read the false Quixote, which causes him to rail against it as yet another example of bad fiction and to act as though someone were out there imitating him as badly (unbeknownst to him) as he imitates the heroes of chivalric fiction. It’s worth noting that he never comes across a copy of DQ1, but he does read some of the false Quixote in Barcelona near the end of the novel (2.72)—“the first scene in literature in which a literary character visits a bookstore,” Mancing remarks (586).14 By this point, Don Quixote has become a Möbius strip of fiction imitating fiction imitating life imitating fiction imitating. . . .