The windmills that Don Quixote mistakes for giants have something in common with the madeleine that makes Marcel’s memory buds salivate: both occur conveniently early in very long books that are, in English at least, more praised than read. And Cervantes may resemble Proust in another way. Both are comic writers, properly snagged in the mundane, whose fiction has too often been etherealized out of existence. Miguel de Unamuno, the relentlessly idealizing Spanish philosopher, considered “Don Quixote” a “profoundly Christian epic” and the true “Spanish Bible,” and correspondingly managed to write about the novel as if not a single comic episode occurred in it. W. H. Auden thought that “Don Quixote” was a portrait of a Christian saint; and Unamuno’s unlikely American supporter Harold Bloom, in his introduction to Edith Grossman’s marvellous new translation (Ecco; $29.95), reminds us that “Don Quixote,” though it “may not be a scripture,” nonetheless captures all humanity, as Shakespeare does—which sounds more like religious lament than like secular caution.
So it is worth reminding ourselves of the gross, the worldly, the violent, and, above all, the comic in “Don Quixote”—worth reminding ourselves that we are permitted the odd secular guffaw while reading it. If all of modern fiction comes out of the Knight’s cape, one reason might be that Cervantes’s novel contains the major comic tropes, from the farcical to the delicately ironic. First, there is the comedy of egotism—the “But enough about my work, what do you think of my work?” grand manner, brilliantly exploited by Tartuffe, and by Jane Austen’s Mr. Collins, who proposes to Elizabeth Bennet by listing all the ways in which he will benefit from marriage. Don Quixote is the great chivalric egotist, never more egotistical than when he appears to be most chivalrous. After he and poor Sancho Panza have suffered several adventures, including a beating by some drovers from Yanguas and being tossed in a blanket by a gang of men, Don Quixote has the nerve to tell his servant that these things are evil enchantments and so are not really happening to Sancho: “Therefore you must not grieve for the misfortunes that befall me, for you have no part in them.” This is the knight who, finding that he can’t sleep, wakes up his servant, on the principle that “it is in the nature of good servants to share the griefs of their masters and to feel what they are feeling, if only for appearance’s sake.” No wonder that Sancho elsewhere defines a knight adventurer as “someone who’s beaten and then finds himself emperor.”
The egotist is never very good at laughing at himself, laughable though he often is. Cervantes has a wonderfully undulating scene in which the Knight and his servant are riding in the hills and are stopped by a loud noise. Sancho Panza weeps with terror, and Don Quixote is moved by his tears. When they finally discover that the noise comes from “six wooden fulling hammers,” pounding away in a cloth mill, Don Quixote looks at Sancho, and sees that “his cheeks were puffed out and his mouth full of laughter, clear signs that he would soon explode, and Don Quixote’s melancholy was not so great that he could resist laughing at the sight of Sancho, and when Sancho saw that his master had begun, the floodgates opened with such force that he had to press his sides with his fists to keep from bursting with laughter.” Don Quixote gets cross with Sancho for laughing at him, and hits him with his lance, complaining, “In all the books of chivalry I have read, which are infinite in number, I have never found any squire who talks as much with his master as you do with yours.” As so often in “Don Quixote,” the reader travels, in a page or two, through different chambers of laughter: affectionate, ironic, satirical, harmonious.
Edith Grossman’s English sensitively captures these shifting registers, as we move from the Knight’s ornate, sometimes pompous diction, via the narrator’s fluent and funny recounting, to the earthy Sancho Panza and his muddier music. We are fortunate to have at present three excellent translations of “Don Quixote”: in addition to Grossman’s, there is John Rutherford’s recent version for Penguin Classics (which takes more liberties with Sancho Panza’s demotic Spanish than Grossman’s does), and Burton Raffel’s rendering for Norton. All are scholarly and elegant; in some places they are almost indistinguishable. But Grossman, who has translated García Márquez and Vargas Llosa, has produced the most distinguished, and the most literary, of them, and those qualities are amply displayed on every page.
“Don Quixote” is the greatest of all fictional inquiries into the relation between fiction and reality, and so a good deal of the novel’s comedy is self-conscious, generated when one or more of the characters seems to step out of the book and appeal either to a nonfictional reality or directly to the audience (a staple of pantomime performance and commedia dell’arte). The second volume of “Don Quixote,” published in 1615, ten years after the first, throws irony on irony, as the Knight and his sidekick set out once again on their adventures, only to discover that they have become celebrities, because, in the interim, a book about their escapades has appeared—the volume we have just been reading. Cervantes delights in the epistemological hornet’s nest into which Don Quixote and Sancho stumble in this second volume, as they assert their reality by recourse to a prior fiction whose culmination they are now enacting. But in the first volume, long before these complexities arise, Sancho, after being beaten by the drovers from Yanguas, pleads with his master, “Señor, since these misfortunes are the harvest reaped by chivalry, tell me, your grace, if they happen very often or come only at certain times.” Sancho, as it were, winks at the audience, as if to say, “I know that I and my master are playing a role.” The awful poignancy of the novel is that the Knight does not.
Sancho’s request is perfectly reasonable: if violence is to be cartoonish, the laws of the genre should be observed, and we should be given fair notice—the banana skin seen in advance on the sidewalk. And, certainly, many of the cartoon conventions appear in “Don Quixote.” The two heroes are never, it seems, seriously damaged, despite the thrashings they suffer. They always peel their flattened silhouettes off the ground. There is slapstick, too: at one moment, after Don Quixote has been attacked by the shepherds whose sheep he has attempted to kill, he asks Sancho to peer into his mouth to see how many teeth have been knocked out. As he is doing so, Don Quixote vomits in his face. Sancho promptly vomits back onto Don Quixote. There is plenty of such low comedy, including an inn that, like the cheese shop in the Monty Python sketch, is out of everything that is requested.
Nowadays, it can be tedious to wade through all the needlessly spilled blood: Don Quixote is pounded with a lance by a mule driver who beats him “as if he were threshing wheat”; another mule driver hits him so hard that his mouth is bathed in blood; “half an ear” is cut off by a Basque adversary; his ribs are crushed by the drovers from Yanguas; the shepherds knock his teeth out; and he is stoned by the convicts he tries to release. Vladimir Nabokov found it cruel, and never really reconciled himself to the novel. In a Tarantino-tainted age, when “reality” always seems to get the heavy sideburns of quotation marks, such violence seems less cruel than pointedly unreal, the guarantee of its unreality being the unkillability of its victims. Some of the hysterical realism of modern writers like Pynchon and Rushdie seems to take its cue from Cervantes, the violence having been replaced by perpetual motion.
But Cervantes’s violence makes another point, too. It is powerfully anti-idealizing. It shows us how the well-intentioned Knight ends up inflicting his good intentions on others. Near the beginning of the book, Don Quixote runs into Andrés, a boy who is being whipped by his master. Certain that his chivalric duty is to free the oppressed, he sends the master packing. Later, Andrés will turn up again, only to explain to Don Quixote and his friends that things turned out “very different from what your grace imagines.” The boy explains that the master returned and flogged him all the harder, with each blow exulting in how he was making a fool of Don Quixote. As Andrés leaves, he says to Don Quixote that if the Knight ever comes upon him again, even if he’s being torn to pieces, “don’t help me and don’t come to my aid.” In another incident, Don Quixote attacks a group of priests accompanying a corpse. Convinced that the corpse is that of a knight whose death he must avenge, he charges at the poor priests, breaking the leg of a young man. Quixote introduces himself as a knight whose “occupation and profession” is to “wander the world righting wrongs and rectifying injuries.” The young man tartly points out that this can hardly be the case, since he was fine until Don Quixote came along and broke his leg, which will be “injured for the rest of my life; it was a great misadventure for me to run across a man who is seeking adventures.”
Novel-writing has an entrepreneurial element: to invent a central story that can function at once as a plausible action and as an emblematic or symbolic one is akin to inventing a machine or product, a patent that will run and run. Think of Chichikov travelling around Russia buying up “dead souls” (Gogol warned a correspondent to keep the novel’s subject matter secret, afraid of giving away his invention), or of Bellow’s Herzog writing his mental letters to great thinkers and public figures. These are, above all, grand concepts. In “Don Quixote,” a moderately prosperous Spanish gentleman, “one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing,” becomes possessed, through reading the stories of chivalric adventures, by the idea that the knights-errant of folklore and fiction were real people; furthermore, it seems “reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight-errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures.”
When Cervantes invented Don Quixote’s madness, and propelled him out onto the Castilian plains to enact it, he set ticking a little hermeneutical clock, by which, miraculously, we are still trying to tell time. Don Quixote’s misreadings—his determination to read fiction as reality—license our millions of readings of him, because Cervantes kept the ambition of Don Quixote’s journeying as wide and unspecific as possible. We know what Don Quixote thinks he is doing, but what is he really doing? What do his strivings represent? Do his misreadings of the world represent the comic battle of the unsullied Idea doing its best to exist in the brute world of Reality? Or for Idea and Reality should we read Spirit and Flesh? (Poor Sancho, in this scheme, is always seen as Flesh.) Or Literature and Reality? Or is Don Quixote an absolutist artist, striving to shape the recalcitrant world into his vision of it?
That Don Quixote’s adventures have been so idealized, not to say Christianized, says more about the idealizing tendencies of Christianity than about Cervantes’s novel. It is as if those determined to see Don Quixote as some kind of saint or missionary of the spirit had simply closed their eyes to the mayhem and suffering he causes. Andrés, the flogged boy, is right: Don Quixote’s good intentions have perverse consequences. Perhaps Cervantes was interested, then, not only in the pious triumphs of his Knight but also in his pious defeats? And perhaps this interest, despite what may be said about Cervantes’s own Catholicism, has a secular, even blasphemous bent? Dostoyevsky, who was very interested in Don Quixote, surely saw this when he created the figure of Prince Myshkin, the Idiot, whose Christlike actions have a way of contaminating the world around him. Prince Myshkin is not just too good for the world; he is dangerously too good.
When the young man accompanying the corpse complains to Don Quixote about his broken leg, the two fall into a kind of theological argument, which is really an argument about theodicy—about the ways in which we try to justify God’s plan for the world. The young man is a skeptic. He alleges that the dead man was killed by “God, by means of a pestilential fever.” Don Quixote argues the conventional, orthodox position. “Not all things . . . happen in precisely the same way,” he says, defending his decision to charge at the priests. For a brief, weird moment, it is as if the young man were likening the Knight to God, to a God whose ways we cannot know, yet whose decisions seem to inflict incomprehensible suffering on us.
Cervantes’s novel bristles with little blasphemies like this; it is why the novel is the founder of secular comedy. Don Quixote is often said by his friends and acquaintances to resemble a preacher, a missionary, a holy man. He himself argues that he is doing Christ’s work. When he falls into conversation with a canon, the man rebukes the Knight for reading books about chivalry, which are all folly and falsehood. He should instead read the Scriptures. But the great stories of knight-errancy are not fictions, Don Quixote replies. Who could deny, for instance, that Pierres and the fair Magalona really existed? For to this day one can see in the royal armory “the peg, slightly larger than a carriage pole, with which the valiant Pierres directed the wooden horse as he rode it through the air.” The canon denies ever having seen this, but the damage is done. Blasphemy hangs like mirage heat. Don Quixote has just defended the reality of ostensible fiction by arguing from the existence of relics. And the logic is unavoidable: if mere fictions can be taken to be real on the basis of relics, then religious relics, commonly used to prove the veracity of religion, may be fictions, too. This, in a Catholic country in the midst of Counter-Reformation fervency! Later, Don Quixote will argue that the folkloric “giant Morgante” must have existed because we all believe—don’t we?—that the Biblical Goliath existed. Cervantes joins that select company of writers, including Milton, Montaigne, and Pierre Bayle, who delight in slipping blasphemy in through the tradesmen’s entrance while noisily welcoming divinity at the front gate.
This kind of epistemological teasing continues, as Don Quixote and Sancho find themselves having to prove that they are the legendary figures they claim to be. It is a shame that many readers never get to this second volume, which is both funnier and more affecting than the first. A rough analogy of its action might go like this: Jesus Christ is wandering around first-century Palestine, trying to convince people that he is the true Messiah. It is a difficult task, because John the Baptist, instead of preparing the way for the Messiah, has claimed that he is the true Messiah, and has gone and got himself appropriately crucified on Calvary. Since many people have heard of John’s death and resurrection, Jesus finds himself being skeptically tested by his audience: can he perform this and that miracle? Moreover, when Jesus hears that John has been crucified on Calvary, he decides to prove his authenticity by changing his plans: he will not now be crucified on Calvary, but will instead travel to Rome to be eaten by lions. Tired, and deeply saddened by the unexpected explosion of his greatest dreams, he sets out for Rome with his dearest disciple and right-hand man, Peter. But Peter, taking pity on him, gets together with some of the disciples and persuades Jesus to give up this Messiah lark, and retire to somewhere nice, like Sorrento. Jesus meekly obeys, arrives in Sorrento, and immediately falls sick and dies, but not before renouncing all claims to divinity and announcing his atheism.
Such a Biblical analogy might be the easiest way to decipher the densely subtle games Cervantes plays in the second volume. Don Quixote and his servant are now literary celebrities, because of the publication of Cervantes’s first volume, and people want to meet them, put them to the test. Of course, the famous duo have no idea in what light they were depicted by Cervantes, so, in effect, people are laughing behind their back. Since celebrities prompt mimicry, there is a rival Don Quixote now claiming that he is the real thing, and that our Knight—that is, Cervantes’s—is a pretender. But, in addition to all this, Cervantes’s novel did, in the real world, inspire an imitation, a book entitled “The Second Volume of the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha,” published in 1614 by one Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, about whom little is known. Cervantes was already well into the writing of his second volume when he heard about Avellaneda’s fraud, and he decided to incorporate it into his own novel. In Chapter 59, Don Quixote hears, through a bedroom wall, two men discussing Avellaneda’s book. He is outraged, and quizzes the men about it. When he learns that in Avellaneda’s account Don Quixote travels to Saragossa, he decides to travel not to Saragossa (where he had indeed been intending to go) but to Barcelona, “and in this way I shall proclaim the lies of this modern historian to the world, and then people will see that I am not the Don Quixote he says I am.”
Cervantes’s great ironies are false horizons, appearing one after the other. Two fictional characters, in order to prove their “reality,” must appeal to a prior fiction written by the same writer who has now created this second volume of fictional escapades. These fictional characters must then argue with other fictional characters that they are Cervantes’s characters and not Avellaneda’s. So there is the novel we are reading (Volume II); there is the novel that first created these figures (Volume I); and there is a rival novel about similarly named characters. These three books merge to rob “reality” of its empirical treasure. Reality is simply another broken wall, apparently protecting nobody from skepticism’s ravages.
Yet at the moment when Cervantes is at his most playful and self-referential, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are at their most real. This is the book’s great paradox. The second volume belongs to Sancho, who becomes wiser and funnier as the book progresses. His love for Don Quixote is tearfully manifest. And Don Quixote is fighting for his life—which is also to say that he is fighting for his fictionality. It is desperately important for Don Quixote that he be who he says he is, and that everyone believe him. When he gets a traveller, Don Álvaro Tarfe, to agree that he is the real Don Quixote and not Avellaneda’s, and forces him to sign a certificate to this effect, we laugh but we also shiver at the awfulness of it. Italo Svevo was perhaps thinking of this moment when he had his comic hero, Zeno, get his doctor to sign a certificate of sanity. Zeno presents it to his father, who, with tears in his eyes, says, “Ah, then you really are mad!” The reader, with tears in his eyes, says the same as Don Quixote flourishes his certificate.
A fantasy that seemed, in the novel’s first volume, sometimes a lark, sometimes tedious, often unfathomable becomes, in the second volume, something without which neither Don Quixote nor anyone else can live. All of us want Don Quixote to pursue his madness. We have come to believe in it, partly because, as in Shakespeare, we are made to believe in a character’s reality when he himself believes in it so strongly, and partly because we no longer know precisely what “belief” entails. By the end of the book, we have become little Quixotes, reared on a fictional account of a knight-errant’s escapades. We are willing fantasists, unsure of our ground.
It is a tremendous shock when Don Quixote decides to head for home—to retire from his adventuring and become a shepherd. It is an even greater shock when he suddenly dies. He has a fever, is in bed for six days. He sleeps, awakes, and announces himself cured of his madness. He denounces all the “profane histories of knight errantry.” In one of the greatest comic sentences in the whole book, Cervantes writes that those present, hearing this, “undoubtedly believed that some new madness had taken hold of him.” Don Quixote calls for Sancho Panza, and asks his forgiveness for “making you fall into the error into which I fell, thinking that there were and are knights errant in the world.” “Don’t die, Señor” is Sancho’s tearful response. Don Quixote makes his will, leaving some money to Sancho, lives on another three days, and then, “surrounded by the sympathy and tears of those present, gave up the ghost, I mean to say, he died.”
The poverty of the language here, its near-clumsiness and refusal to plume itself up into magnificence, is moving, as if Cervantes himself were overcome with grief at the passing of his creation. Don Quixote has become his own fiction of himself, and cannot live without it. As soon as he renounces it, he must wither away. Yet Sancho Panza remains. And who is Sancho? Earlier in the book, Don Quixote says of Sancho, admiringly, that “he doubts everything and he believes everything.” Isn’t this a fine description of the reader of this novel? Sancho is Don Quixote’s reader, who lives on as the book’s readers do, all-believing and all-doubting, made both faithful and skeptical by the novel’s fidelities and skepticisms, happy inheritors of the Knight’s last will and testament. ♦
