by Steven Moore
Although one can find metafictional gestures in earlier novels, instances of a writer self-consciously commenting on his work within the work, Cervantes’ decision to have his characters comment on a novel in which they appear is a stunning innovation. Of course, he had deployed some metafictional devices in DQ1: the novel begins with poems from characters in chivalric literature addressed to characters in Cervantes’ novel (a section left out of most English translations), followed by a metafictional prologue about the writing of prologues. The novel proper features a sardonic first-person narrator who claims to be telling a story adapted from earlier “authors of this absolutely true history” (1.1), until he runs out of text mid-incident at the end of chapter 8. In chapter 9 the narrator searches for more of the novel until he discovers an Arabic version of Don Quixote’s story by a Muslim historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli, which he acquires for a song and then pays to have translated into Castilian. This is much more elaborate and playful than the older convention of discovering and publishing an old manuscript, and as a result we have Cervantes pretending to be an editor commenting (after chapter 9) on a translation—in which the translator occasionally departs from the original—from an Arabic recension of a Spanish story available in several versions, introduced by literary characters who “existed” long ago, all concerning a fictional character who is convinced other fictional characters are real. And if that were not enough to make the head spin, Cervantes ups the ante in DQ2 when he brings the published DQ1 into the game. This audacious ploy generates a mindbending expansion of the main theme of the first part, namely, the uses and misuses of fiction. Silly novels of chivalry inspired Don Quixote to act them out in the real world, and in part 2, DQ1 inspires several characters to act it out; for Don Quixote, part 1 is a tragedy, but for them, it’s a farce.
Sansón Carrasco, a mischievous grad student, is the first to tell the knight and his squire about the novel they’re in, and then dresses up as the Knight of the Mirrors to cut short Don Quixote’s third sally in search of adventures; unexpectedly defeated, Sansón recuperates and returns at the end as the Knight of the White Moon and defeats him, forcing Don Quixote to abandon knighthood for a year. Between the time of those two jousts, a number of readers of DQ1 and of the false Quixote encounter the knight and play along with his madness–“People know Don Quixote like a book,” quips critic Walter L. Reed (84)–none more so than the fun-loving duke and duchess whose elaborately staged deceptions occupy much of DQ2. Even Sancho deceives him about his lady-love Dulcinea (and is deceived in turn when made governor of an island). If part 1 is about the dangers of deceiving oneself, part 2 is about the dangers of being deceived by others, especially by those in positions of authority. “Cide Hamete goes on to say that in his opinion the deceivers are as mad as the deceived, and that the duke and duchess came very close to seeming like fools since they went to such lengths to deceive two fools,” says the narrator (or the translator) near the end of the novel (2.70), long after he exposed the duke and duchess as corrupt people not averse to using weapons of mass deception to further their own agendas.
Don Quixote is easily deceived because his condition is unchanged from DQ1; he is still loco, still armed, and dangerous. He almost kills both the “Knight of the Mirrors” and a puppeteer; tries to kill several cats; threatens to kill a man on hearsay evidence; attempts to whip Sancho; and again causes miscellaneous property damage. Chapter 9 opens with the warning “the madness of Don Quixote here reached the limit and boundaries of the greatest madnesses that can be imagined, and even passed two crossbow shots beyond them.” Making matters worse is his willingness to be deceived; first, he allows Sancho to convince him that an ugly, smelly, peasant girl is his beloved Dulcinea, maliciously transformed by enchanters (2.10). He is heartbroken he can’t see the beautiful princess Sancho describes, and wants so desperately to believe in her perfection that he ignores the evidence before his eyes (and the garlic smell in his nose). His yearning for her, which displaces his abstract desire for fame in DQ1, is so strong that he blames himself for her transformation and devotes himself to her disenchantment for the rest of the novel. Then it gets sadder: after his strange, beautiful dream in the Cave of Montesinos, and after Sancho lies about what he saw while pretending to ride the magic horse Clavileño through the skies, Don Quixote whispers to his squire: “Sancho, just as you want people to believe what you have seen in the sky, I want you to believe what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos. And that is all I have to say” (2.41). That is one of the most extraordinary moments in the entire novel, and I don’t know whether to laugh or to cry. When I hear religious people today call for ecumenical tolerance and respect for the religions of others, I hear the pathetic pact made by these two fools: I’ll believe in your fantasy if you’ll believe in mine.
Enabled by all the pranksters around him, Don Quixote still believes in the veracity of chivalric literature, and Cervantes continues to expose the not-so-deceptive similarities between the imaginary realms of chivalry and Catholicism. Don Quixote defends his belief in giants by citing Goliath in “Holy Scripture, which cannot deviate an iota from the truth” (2.1), insists “chivalry is a religion, and there are sainted knights in Glory” (2.8), mistakes a church for “the palace of Dulcinea,” his Virgin Mary (2.9), and consistently uses religious terminology to explain his acts of chivalry. When he encounters “approximately a dozen men dressed as farmers”—note that the narrator doesn’t call them farmers, but “men dressed as farmers,” wary of appearances in a way Don Quixote is not—who are transporting wooden images intended for an altarpiece, he regards them as fellow knights:
This was one of the best knights errant the divine militia ever had: his name was Don St. George, and he was also a protector of damsels. Let us see this one. . . . This knight [“it seemed to be St. Martin” (my italics)] was another Christian seeker of adventures, and I believe he was more generous than brave, . . . This one certainly is a knight, a member of the squadrons of Christ; his name is St. James the Moorkiller, one of the most valiant saints and knights the world has ever had, and that heaven has now. . . . This [St. Paul] was the greatest enemy of the Church of God Our Lord had at the time, and the greatest defender it will ever have; a knight errant in life, and a steadfast saint in death, . . . [T]he difference, however, between me and them [Don Quixote says of the wooden idols] is that they were saints and fought in the divine manner, and I am a sinner and fight in the human manner. They conquered heaven by force of arms, for “the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence” [Matt. 11:12], and so far I do not know what I am conquering by the force of my labors. . . . (2.58)
Although he doesn’t know it, valiant Don Quixote is conquering irrationality, superstition, and uncritical belief in the inerrancy of texts, whether chivalric or biblical. Though the censors let this passage stand (they insisted on changes in other arguably blasphemous ones), it’s hard to imagine a harsher condemnation of Catholicism. It highlights the religion’s tendency to resort to violence to enforce its doctrines, and equates some of its most famous saints with the imaginary heroes of third-rate novels, suggesting only a madman would hold them in esteem and believe in their legends. (The farmers “did not understand half of what he said.”) This isn’t routine anticlericalism; as fabulist Robert Coover explains, Cervantes “uses familiar mythic or historical forms to combat the content of those forms and to conduct the reader (lector amantísimo!) to the real, away from mystification to clarification, away from magic to maturity, away from mystery to revelation.”15
As DQ2 progresses, Don Quixote experiences fewer hallucinations and enjoys more moments of lucidity, conveniently so when Cervantes wants him to express one of his own opinions on a subject. He strikes one character as “a sane man gone mad and a madman edging toward sanity” (2.17), though he still has trouble distinguishing between fiction and reality, as in the hilarious scene where he gets so caught up in a puppet show that he attacks its villains (2.26). A medieval man, he still believes in the Ptol
emaic view of the universe and prefers prayer to perception. When confronted with the resemblance between “Countess Trifaldi” and the steward who impersonated her, Don Quixote advices Sancho “it would imply a very serious contradiction, and this is not the time to make such inquiries, for that would lead us into intricate labyrinths. Believe me, my friend, it is necessary to pray to Our Lord very sincerely to save both of us from evil wizards and wicked enchanters” (2.44). Sancho, a modern man blessed with the spirit of scientific inquiry, responds, “All right: I’ll be quiet, but I’ll stay on the alert from now on to see if I can find anything else that will prove or disprove what I suspect.”16 Nor does the knight embrace deductive reasoning: coming across a boat, he announces with what can only be called religious conviction, “You must know, Sancho, that this boat clearly and beyond any doubt is calling and inviting me to get in it and sail to assist a knight . . .” whereas Sancho relies on empirical evidence and reasoning: “it seems to me it belongs to some fishermen, because the best shad in the world swim this river” (2.29)—which turns out to be true. But Don Quixote insists, and nearly gets them both drowned. The narrator makes it clear which side he’s on—the religious or the scientific—by observing “the boat glided gently along in midstream, moved not by any secret intelligence or hidden enchanter, but by the current of the water itself. . . .”
Worn down by disappointment and melancholy, and perhaps educated by Sancho’s rational approach to things (just as Sancho adopts some of his master’s fanciful notions), the former Alonso Quixano (Quixana in DQ1) eventually regains his senses after returning home, announcing, “My judgment is restored, free and clear of the dark shadows of ignorance imposed on it by my grievous and constant reading of detestable books of chivalry” (2.74), echoing a line he had uttered on a dark night of the soul a few weeks earlier: “Post tenebras spero lucem” (2.68): “after the darkness, I hope for the light,” the motto (derived from Job 17:12) of Cervantes’ publisher and printed on the original title pages of both volumes of Don Quixote. Quixano has left behind the darkness of madness, superstition, irrationality, subjectivity, and duplicitous writing (both secular and sacred) for the light of reason, objectivity, and sanity, and dies a good death. The transition is quietly noted in the final chapter when the narrator describes Quixano’s moment of death: he “gave up the ghost. I mean to say, he died”—rejecting Catholic superstition (“dio su espíritu”) for scientific fact (“el muerto”).
It’s a tribute to Cervantes’ artistic cunning that this sensible ending feels like a crushing defeat, for the harshest critic of the mad and dangerous Don Quixote must admit Alonso Quixano had the time of his life during that final summer vacation, living the dream. When Don Quixote confronts a fellow 50-year-old in 2.16, he sees in Don Diego de Miranda what he might have become had he led a saner life: a conventional man, married with children, hospitable, and utterly boring. Instead, Quixano spent a lifetime filling his head with books—his erudition indicates he read wider than novels of chivalry—and the only romantic feelings we’re told about resulted from a few glimpses over the last dozen years of a peasant girl named Aldonza Lorenza, “although she, apparently, never knew or noticed” (1.1). His devotion to his dreamgirl is moving, especially in DQ2 where it matures from a joke to a heartbreaking case of unrequited love. (And how brilliant of Cervantes to abstain from letting her appear in his pages, allowing us to wonder what he saw in the crude wench Sancho describes.) Never married, Quixano is a “virgin” to the real world, which is significant: most novels are about a young person’s transition from innocence to experience; it’s inherently comical for a 50-year-old man to undergo this transition (cf. the 2005 film The 40-Year-Old Virgin), but it’s also sad, which makes this loveless bookworm’s end-of-life blowout all the more endearing.
For Cervantes, writing Don Quixote was a similar late-life adventure, an occasional vacation from what he considered serious work (which we’ll get to next). That explains his flippant lack of concern for consistency and narrative logic, for the novel’s contradictions, discrepancies, and broken chronology, Sancho’s uncharacteristic elocution at times, and other aesthetic faults. (Don Quixote explains them all away as the work of malevolent magicians.) It also explains the ludic nature of the text: it is filled with snatches of songs and other pop-cultural references of the day, childish wordplay such as: “Don Quixote settled down at the foot of an elm, and Sancho at the foot of a beech, for these trees, and others like them, always have feet but not hands” (2.28), bursts of purple prose, parodies, and chapter titles that grow increasingly silly. (2.66: “Which recounts what will be seen by whoever reads it, or heard by whoever listens to it being read”; 2.70: “Which follows chapter LXIX, and deals with matters necessary to the clarity of this history.”) Due to negative feedback, Cervantes resisted inserting any previously written novellas into DQ2 as he had in DQ1, but he indulged his sweet tooth for old-fashioned tales with brief interludes like the story of Basilio and Quiteria (2.19–22) and that of the crossdressing woman who kills her lover under the mistaken assumption he has dumped her for another (2.60), another quixotic exemplum about acting violently under the delusion one is in the right. And throughout Cervantes uses the novel’s broad platform to express his opinions on a variety of topics, usually via his knight, whose feats of rhetoric grow more impressive than his feats of chivalry. Cervantes wasn’t the first to regard the novel as a carnival, where you can get away with anything (bearded ladies! fearsome lions! a puppet show for the kiddies!) as long as you keep your readers entertained, but his example expanded the possibilities for the genre as it entered the modern age.
Exaggerated claims have been made for Don Quixote over the centuries. Some call it the first novel, which it certainly is not, or the greatest novel ever written, though its many errors and inconsistencies disqualify it from that honor. (Is it too much to ask that the greatest novel be as technically accomplished as the greatest painting, the greatest symphony, etc.?) It can be considered the first modern novel, however; not in a chronological sense—novels were pouring off the presses all around the world at the beginning of the 17th century, or wherever you want to place the beginning of the early modern era—but in the sense that it marks the transition from the medieval worldview (unscientific, faith-based, Ptolemaic, tradition-bound, authoritarian, certain, static) to the modern. Cervantes was one of the brave few willing to enter the “intricate labyrinths” Don Quixote refused to enter, the modern age of uncertainty, relativism, and the deceptiveness of appearances (the novel’s nominal theme). It was published at a time when the master narrative that had sustained Christian Europe for over a millennium was unraveling like Don Quixote’s cheap stockings (2.44, the saddest chapter in the novel), and started to sound as contrived and unreliable as a novel of chivalry. Braving the wrath of the reactionary Church, a few strove to replace the old faith-based world with a fact-based one developed from scientific inquiry, and Don Quixote gleefully shows the indignities and mockery appropriate to those who didn’t get with the new program. It’s a less comforting world, a humbling one where one has to accept the fact the earth is not the center of the universe but one of many planets, “no larger than a mustard seed, and the men walking on it not much bigger than hazel nuts,” as the Copernican Sancho Panza puts it (2.41, lying through his teeth, but no matter). Cervantes evinces a lingering nostalgia for that comfortable old world he grew up in, but he was wise and disillusioned enough to know it was time for it to be tossed into the flames, laughed out of existence, desacralized, demythologized, disenchanted, desengaño—the Spanish word means “disillusioned” but also “disabused” of wrongful notions, freed from misconceptions.
Not everyone agreed, of course—even today there are billions of people who still possess a medieval worldview—and for many Don Quixote was and remains merely a comic novel about an Abbott-and-Costello act working the country-inn circuit of old Andalusia. Other medieval-minded people have regarded Don Quixote as a Christ figure; he is one all
right, but not in a positive way. He’s a parody of Christ, a mockery of him; his delusions imply that Christ was a similar madman, crazed by Old Testament prophecies into regarding himself as the messiah just as Quixana was duped by novels of chivalry into regarding himself as a glorious knight-errant. Only by ignoring all the ironic deflations in Cervantes’ text—as religious people ignore the inconvenient errors, prejudices, and barbarisms of their sacred texts—can one associate the loon of Spain with the Light of the World.17
More interesting than readers’ responses are those of the novelists who followed Cervantes. First, they took from him a tone and attitude (which Cervantes inherited from Petronius, Boccaccio, and Rabelais) more suitable for the skeptical modern age, which would later be praised by Nietzsche: “Objections, digressions, gay mistrust, the delight in mockery are signs of health: everything unconditional belongs in pathology.”18 We’ll hear that tone again in Scarron, Swift, Fielding, Sterne, Wieland, Stendahl, Melville, Flaubert, Twain, Wilde, Joyce, and most modernists and postmodernists. Second, they learned that a comic novel can deal with serious philosophical issues, that farce is not necessarily incompatible with profundity. And third, they saw the role of the novelist change from near-anonymous chronicler to center-stage performer, and the novel become an “opportunity for display” for “a good mind, providing a broad and spacious field where one’s pen could write unhindered,” as Cervantes’ canon says, “allow[ing] the author to show his skills. . . .” (1.47). Significantly, the closing scene of DQ2 is given not to Don Quixote but to his putative author, Cide Hamete Berenjena (Benengeli in DQ1), who hangs up his pen on a rack as though it were a knight’s lance. The author is the true hero of this double-decker novel, the “ingenious gentleman” of the title page. Not all novelists would don the barber’s basin and sally forth into the expanded field of fiction Cervantes opened up, but the modern novel is unthinkable without this revolutionary masterpiece.