From the first page, you can’t be sure what book you’re really reading, what the name of its protagonist may be, nor exactly where he’s from. (Quotes are from Samuel Putnam’s translation.) Cervantes begins, “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to recall.” It would have been easy to name a village, or invent a name, to assume the literary illusion of certainty, but Cervantes is setting off on a journey into “the midst of all this hubbub and labyrinthine chaos” of daily life, where certainty is both impossible and beside the point. His Don Quixote comes both from La Mancha and nowhere. Cervantes quickly reveals that he’s not even writing this book, not really; he claims he’s translating from an account in Arabic by “Cid Hamete Benegli.” So his is a kind of mirror image of a book. As for the name of his central character, Cervantes says that others “will try to tell you that his surname was Quijada or Quesada … but according to the most likely conjectures we are to understand that it was really Quejana. But all this means very little so far as our story is concerned, providing that in the telling of it we do not depart one iota from the truth.” But what truth? He tells us the most likely name is Quejana, but insists on using Quixote. And doesn’t say why. A mere two paragraphs have gone by and already we’re in a hall of mirrors.
Volume one presents Don Quixote (or whatever his name is), the Knight of the Mournful Countenance, a humble squire of the then-advanced age of 50-ish. The man has read so many books of knightly romance that he’s obsessed with the notion of embarking on a knightly quest, though the era of knights (real or imagined) is centuries past. Ah, but a knight must quest under the banner of the chaste honor of a great lady. There are none about, so Don Quixote invents one: Dulcinea del Toboso! “And so he went on, stringing together absurdities.” He will defend her honor in many a comic scrap, but he never claims that she really exists, saying, “God knows whether or not there is a Dulcinea in this world. … I contemplate her as she needs must be.” And, “I am content to imagine that what I say is so and that she is neither more nor less than I picture her and would have her be.” And: “I have never in all the days of my life laid eyes on the peerless Dulcinea. … God knows whether or not there is a Dulcinea in this world or if she is a fanciful creation. This is not one of those cases where you can prove a thing conclusively.” But the risks he takes are real (in the context of the story, of course); he will risk his life again and again for an ideal that he has pictured as a woman. If Dulcinea were “real” in any way, then Don Quixote is merely a madman, and not a very bright one, for his antics would in no way impress a great lady. But if she does not exist and he knows she does not exist �- as Cervantes makes clear �- then Don Quixote is a poet-in-action and a sacred clown, imparting mysterious gifts, not the least of which is the gift of laughter.
“Now,” Cervantes writes, “everything that this adventurer of ours thought, saw, or imagined seemed to him to be directly out of one of the storybooks he had read, and so, when he caught sight of the inn, it at once became a castle.” If he kept his fantasies to himself he would be harmless, but he treats the innkeeper like a duke, insists the serving girls are wronged ladies, tries to right their wrongs (which don’t exist), and, in the process, causes great chaos, mayhem, and comedy. Never does he fight anyone who’s actually a bad guy, never does he right a grievous wrong in the real world (of the novel) �- never, in fact, does he do anything but cause all in his vicinity a lot of hassles and laughter. He hardly ever wins a fight, always getting bested by unworthy beings (windmills, sheep, escaped convicts, drunks), and always blaming his defeats on magicians who have changed real giants into fake windmills. But it is he who is the true magician �- for wherever he goes, and as long he stays, life is livelier.
What is real is his courage and his goodness, his incorruptibility and his honesty. And, too, his intellect: “Have I not told you that I mean to imitate [the fictional knight] Amadis by playing the part of a desperate and raving madman?” “While the truth may run thin, it never breaks.” “Where the truth is, there is God.” “Fortune always leaves a door open in adversity as a means of remedying it.” “What one door closes another opens.”
And what of Sancho Panza, Don Quixote’s loyal squire, equaled for comic wisdom only by Shakespeare’s Falstaff and Fool? Sancho knows from the git-go that Don Quixote is trouble, but he doesn’t care because Don Quixote is also a lot of fun. To Sancho, who “doubts everything and believes everything,” fun counts. Together they endure the funniest vomiting and bowel movement scenes in literature, and many a misadventure. Says Sancho, “It’s a fine thing to go along waiting for what will happen next. … Nothing in life is certain.”
Though Spain’s intellectuals disparaged Don Quixote as pop drivel, people loved it, millions read it. (Mostly in pirated editions. In spite of his success, Cervantes lived and died poor.) Then one Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda wrote a spurious sequel in 1614. Infuriated, Cervantes wrote volume two in 1615. Now a hall of mirrors becomes a labyrinth of mirrors.Both volume one and Avellaneda’s imitation function as characters in Cervantes’ Don Quixote volume two. Our knight and Sancho set out on another quest, and everyone they meet has read either volume one or Avellaneda or both �- thus Don Quixote is the first “media hero,” and he meets his reflection in others wherever he goes. He must insist on his reality in the face of their images of him �- though his reality is also a dream. Prescient Cervantes anticipated the existential dilemmas of the 20th and 21st centuries �- in 1615. (So much for the “modern” in “postmodern.”) Our knight even goes into a bookstore in Barcelona where both previous books are for sale, infuriated that the “real” book and the “unreal” book are given equal value. And Sancho answers a question about their recent adventures, “That happened only six or eight days ago so it’s not in the story yet.”
Given the level of un-education in this country, I’m confident most Ph.D.s out there haven’t read Don Quixote, so I won’t reveal how he meets his end. Best you make that journey for yourselves. Suffice it to say that Dostoyevsky (another who would yawn at Derrida’s supposed innovations) called Don Quixote “the saddest of all books.” Also the funniest. And that is paradox. (Kierkegaard would and did chime in: “A philosopher without paradox is like a lover without passion �- a foolish fellow.”) Don Quixote said of the human enterprise: “Even though everything should go contrary to what I expect, the honor of having undertaken such an exploit is such as no malice could dim.” Ah, students, do not stand on politeness, but when you meet a Literary Theorist make swiftly for the nearest exit before he/she ruins your love of reading. You know or at least suspect that you’re living in a capital-T Trap. Measure a work of literature by one question: Does the book give you a key to unlock the Trap? Or the means to make or steal the key? A nail file, even? A ruse to con the guards? Does it do anything to get you out of the Trap? Or is it just a way of passing your time within the Trap? As Don Quixote says to a gaggle of his tormentors, “I know who I am, and who I may be, if I choose.”This article appears in 2004.