Quixotic Adventures

DON QUIXOTE is the world’s most famous madman–or, at least, the most famous madman who everyone can agree was definitely mad. And one thing his example seems to prove is that much, perhaps too much, of our fate depends on the books we read and how we read them: Ingested without precaution, even the stories of knightly adventures with which Don Quixote was besotted are as destructive of sound thinking as repeated blows to the head.

Of course, that opens another question: What are we to make of the book that points out this fact about books? Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is a funny, occasionally hilarious, book. Yet this is comedy of the utmost seriousness: The laughs are played for the highest stakes. Not even Shakespeare’s greatest comedies possess Cervantes’s commanding ambition. He is out to re-map the known world and is not bashful about pointing out where his most illustrious predecessors have gone wrong. The recent–and excellent– translation by Edith Grossman provides the opportunity for the general reader to return to Don Quixote and think again about Cervantes.

Daft and ridiculous as Don Quixote is in his untimely vocation of knight-errantry, Cervantes for his own part cut a noble and dashing figure, at least as a young man. The eighteenth-century novelist Tobias Smollett, whose translation of Don Quixote remains supreme for brio and dark sparkle, writes that Cervantes “had a turn for chivalry: his life was a chain of extraordinary adventures, his temper was altogether heroic, and all his actions were, without doubt, influenced by the most romantic notions of honor.”

The son of a poor doctor, Cervantes was born in 1547 in the Spanish town of Alcalá de Henares, and little is known of his early years. In 1571, as a soldier of the Holy League, he took part in the celebrated victory over the Turks at the Battle of Lepanto; his taste of glory cost him his left hand, smashed by a shot from an arquebus. As Smollett puts it, with a peculiar mixture of reverence and what sounds to the sensitive twenty-first-century ear like malice, “This mutilation, which redounded so much to his honor, he has taken care to record on divers occasions; and, indeed, it is very natural to suppose his imagination would dwell upon such an adventure, as the favorite incident of his life.”

In 1574 he was aboard a ship that fell prey to Barbary pirates, who sold him to a Moor, or perhaps a Greek renegade, in Algiers; he spent five-and-a-half years in slavery, under the regime of Hassan Aga, a tyrant so savage that even the Turks goggled at his inhumanity. Impalement was Hassan’s favored trick, and Cervantes braced for an unpleasant end; yet he persisted in a course of brazen defiance, engineered a daring but unsuccessful plot to free himself and fourteen other Spanish captives, toughed out the aftermath, schemed at nothing less than the conquest of Algiers, barely eluded a grisly death on four occasions, and finally was released when a priest ransomed him for a thousand ducats.

Cervantes subsequently turned to more peaceable concerns: composing the Arcadian romance Galatea, writing some thirty plays, and establishing himself as the patriarch of the serious Spanish theater. Marriage brought financial responsibilities that his writing could not meet; he became a tax collector, got swindled, fell into debt, and wound up in prison. According to legend, Cervantes began to write Don Quixote while doing time; more likely, he waited until he got out to undertake his masterpiece. In any case, as Luigi Pirandello once suggested, the ignominy of this incarceration bred the mad fecklessness of Don Quixote, so unexpected from a writer who had been a sterling hero himself. It is a rare artistic master who does not pay dearly for his mastery, and from Cervantes’s wretchedness blossomed a work of genius. The first part of Don Quixote appeared in 1605, the second ten years later. Cervantes died a famous man in 1616, on the same day as Shakespeare, who reputedly wrote a play based on an episode in Don Quixote.

AS THE STORY OPENS, Alonso Quixano is a gentleman in the village of La Mancha, where he is esteemed as the most learned and clever man in town; he owns a library of three hundred books, all tales of chivalry, which are as familiar to him as his own life. Merely to read of knightly exploits leaves him breathlessly unsatisfied, as though he were but half a man: Adventure and romance summon him. Taking lance in hand, clapping a visorless helmet on his head, he hops aboard his skeletal nag, Rocinante (which he imagines a handsome steed), and dedicates his life to the service of his beloved Dulcinea del Toboso, a stumpy peasant trull with a shrewish tongue and garlic on her breath (whom he imagines the fairest of damsels).

Committing himself to the hand of Providence, which steers every knight-errant to his appointed destiny, “Don Quixote,” as he now calls himself, knows there has never been a knight more deserving of high glory than he. Soon enough he finds a local peasant, Sancho Panza, as round and earthy as Don Quixote is lean and ethereal, and convinces him to be his squire, enchanting him with the prospect of an island for him to govern, just as he pleases. They shall be companions in loneliness, pursuing dreams no one else can be expected to understand.

THE MODERN WORLD, Max Weber claimed, is a disenchanted one, shorn of the magic that once animated it, that filled it with spirits and gave it meaning; the seventeenth century stands on the cusp between medieval and modern, and Don Quixote is a man of the ancient sort forced to live in times that are becoming lethally uncongenial to souls like his. For him, enchantment is the ordinary state of being. Giants are as common as mushrooms. Demons troll for souls, and infect all they see. Sages and sorcerers patrol the night, seeking out worthy adventurers to aid on their quests. Necromancy is as natural as the sun is revolving around the earth, or the earth is revolving around the sun, and more readily explicable.

Such presuppositions about the character of reality can land a man in some serious difficulty, and Don Quixote careens from one outlandish mischance to the next, gaining no wisdom, deepening only in haplessness as he proceeds. When Sancho, in a hungry pinch, fills his master’s helmet with curds and Don Quixote places the helmet on his head, the cagey squire protests that the mush must have been put there by some fiendish wizard out to do Sancho a bad turn. “All things are possible,” Don Quixote observes with portentous sonority, unwittingly encapsulating his essential misconception; then he cleans himself off, and declares himself ready to take on Satan himself. Satan never actually does make an appearance, but his minions are everywhere: Believing that he is doing battle with giants, Don Quixote jousts with the renowned windmills, cuts an innkeeper’s wineskins to pieces, assaults a pair of monks. When the error of his ways is pointed out to him, as it is after every fiasco, Don Quixote always has the same response: Enchanters have beguiled him once again. His mind is a perfect closed system, a psychotic fortress that reality cannot penetrate.

Reality hammers away at this impregnable bughouse, nevertheless. The new world is a relentlessly mercenary one; everybody worries about money above all, except for some desperate noble lovers and Don Quixote. The pie-eyed Don has no use for cash, because in his reading no knight ever has to pay for anything. He relies utterly on the world’s charity, or tries to; uncharitable innkeepers and such tend to complicate his innocent progress. Don Quixote and Sancho meet a page on his way to join the army, singing a woeful little jingle: I’m forced to go to the war / because I’m so poor; / if I had money believe / me I wouldn’t leave. To fortify the youth, who is consumed with thoughts of money, Don Quixote delivers a perfervid tribute to the soldierly life: the intoxicating smell of gunpowder, the cavalier indifference to death, the honor whose sweetness can be diminished by neither wounds nor poverty.

SPLENDID WORDS, but in the next chapter one sees the unglamorous, even disgustingly preposterous origins of popular violence: after two councilmen of a village went braying through the woods in search of a lost donkey, the men of nearby villages have taken to braying whenever they encounter the councilmen’s townsfolk. Don Quixote tries to head off the coming battle, instructing the angry men in the doctrine of just war, which is not to be conducted over trifles; but then Sancho in his enthusiasm starts braying, a villager attacks him, Don Quixote attacks the villager, a shower of stones pelts the knight and squire, and they retreat under the threat of crossbows and arquebuses.

Like Machiavelli in The Prince, Shakespeare in Richard III, and Francis Bacon in The New Organon, Cervantes plays seriously with the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Don Quixote expects every tradesman to practice charity toward him, out of courteous regard for his profession; he places his hope in the love of Dulcinea, even before he has ever seen her; his faith lies in force of arms and a heroic destiny inscribed among the stars. This mad faith in his nonexistent prowess and misdirected virtue assails his own considerable Christian faith, quite literally: Mistaking a procession of penitents bearing a draped image of the blessed Virgin for a gang of evildoers abducting a gracious lady, he draws his sword on the priests and peasants, and of course gets a drubbing for his trouble.

This episode might seem to indicate that Cervantes is as ardent a defender of the One True Faith as he is a detractor of the don’s aberrant faith in martial nerve and chaste eroticism. Yet in destroying the fancies of chivalric romance stories, Cervantes simultaneously mounts a sneak attack on Christianity itself, chipping subtly away at the faith based on yet another book–The Book. Indeed, Don Quixote insists on the literal truth of the Bible with the same force that he insists on the literal truth of the knightly adventures of romance literature. People disagree on whether giants ever walked the earth, he states, but Holy Scripture, “which cannot deviate an iota from the truth,” proves they did, in the story of Goliath. It is the sort of testimonial designed to make a Christian cringe.

SIMILARLY, there is Cervantes’s sympathetic treatment of Islam. There are Muslims good as any Christians in this book–though the best of these Muslims are converts to or friends of Christianity–and their official persecution in Spain is presented as a dire human tragedy. That is not to say that Islam holds the truth that Christianity does not. Early in the novel, after Don Quixote has been pulped by a muledriver he crossed, he consoles himself by recalling a ballad about Valdovinos, “a history known to children, acknowledged by youths, celebrated, and even believed by the old, and, despite all this, no truer than the miracles of Mohammed.”

This dismissal of the Koran acquires its full destructive significance only much later, when Don Quixote asserts the inviolable truth of the famous stories that he says everyone believes, but which the reader knows to be fictional. Cervantes leaves no orthodox religious hope untouched, and he operates with the cunning discretion of Machiavelli or Bacon, bold in what he discloses but far bolder in what he conceals. A definite chill underlies the warm geniality of Don Quixote; it is the breath of icy reason, threatening to blow the doors off revealed religion and the entire medieval world.

Although reason threatens, it also offers a new order of blessing to those willing to accept it. Reflecting on Sancho’s abdication from his island governorship–a joke concocted by a playful duke and duchess–Cervantes concludes, “only human life races to its end more quickly than time, with no hope for renewal except in the next life, which has no boundaries that limit. So says Cide Hamete, a Muslim philosopher, because an understanding of the fleeting impermanence of our present life, and the everlasting nature of the life that awaits us, has been grasped by many without the enlightenment of faith but only with the light of their natural intelligence.” The authority of Cide Hamete resides in the power of his mind–and it is not diminished by his being a Muslim, for native human reason is what Cervantes praises here.

CIDE HAMETE BENENGELI (Cide meaning señor) is no marginal figure in the novel. In a curious moment, Don Quixote contains a discussion of itself–as, early in Part II, Don Quixote and Sancho discuss Part I, which a learned young graduate of the University of Salamanca, Sansón Carrasco, tells them about. And, it is claimed, Part I was written by Cide Hamete Benengeli–the “wise Moor” and “first author” of Don Quixote; the Castilian version of Cervantes is thus, supposedly, a Spanish translation from the original Arabic.

That the author of his story should be a Moor upsets Don Quixote; “one could not expect truth from the Moors, because all of them are tricksters, liars, and swindlers.” In particular, he worries the lascivious Moor has made something unclean of the knight’s spotless longing for Dulcinea. Sansón puts his fears to rest: The Moor writes not as a poet but as a historian, scrupulous with the truth. The captious Sancho frets that among the beatings his master got, his own might have been overlooked by Cide Hamete; Don Quixote tells him to be quiet so the main character can hear more about himself.

At Sansón’s admission that some readers have found Hamete’s workmanship a touch slapdash–there are stories inserted that have nothing to do with Don Quixote–the hero is incensed and fumes that a commentary will be needed so the reader can make sense of his story. Sansón assures him the tale is clear as the purest water: Everyone can read it, and everyone who reads it loves it.

The Moor’s authorship presents Don Quixote with a possibility he had not considered: The truth can come from an unauthorized source. The wise Moor may not subscribe to The Book, but he has written the book that Don Quixote regards as the greatest story ever told.

OF COURSE, the reader knows that Hamete never wrote the book, never existed at all: He is as much Cervantes’s invention as all the characters he purportedly wrote about. The historical truth about Don Quixote is that there can be no history of him, no truth; the book that appears to be the authoritative version of his life is a fiction within a fiction. True, there are flecks of the real world swimming in the brew: a copy of Cervantes’s romance Galatea is found in Don Quixote’s library; a character alludes to Cervantes’s boldness in Moorish captivity; the outraged Don savages the bastardized sequel to Part I that one Avellaneda really did write. These droplets of reality only further enrich the confusion.

This dizzying uncertainty is very much a seventeenth-century phenomenon. The sixteenth century had been much more confident in its exuberance. François Rabelais, for instance, was a monk who left the cloister to study medicine, and his vast Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534-1551) celebrates the passing of the medieval order and the birth of a novel, superior wisdom in matters human and divine. The book tells the tale of two giants, father and son, in love with life: scholars of cosmopolitan voracity, philosophers of celestial lucidity, worshippers of reason who also happen to be breakneck roisterers, guzzlers, feasters, brawlers, athletes, comedians, warriors, and fornicators.

Gargantua and Pantagruel are creatures of an epoch that produced men of such capacious mind and formidable body–Leonardo, Michelangelo, Leon Battista Alberti–that they must have seemed giants: The spectacle of living human greatness inspired Rabelais in the creation of these hulking comic virtuosi. “Do what you will” is Rabelais’s brash motto: He is confident that the anarchic monstrosities that explode into consciousness when the lid is removed–wild and sometimes foul energies embodied in Pantagruel’s roguish sidekick Panurge–will be contained by reason or laughed into moral inconsequence. The fully human can hold both lewd hilarity–this is a book heavy on rhapsodic obscene delirium–and the noblest aspiration without fatal distress to either.

It took a while for the consequences of this Renaissance daring and innovation to be appreciated, and Rabelais’s sixteenth century gives way to Cervantes’s seventeenth. Don Quixote and his comedy are of a radically different sort. Gargantua and son are larger than any men imagined before; Don Quixote is less than he imagines himself to be. Rabelais conceived of giants and made them live; Don Quixote sees giants, but they turn out to be windmills. Rabelais presents men equal to their marvelous world; Cervantes portrays a man at once too large and too small for the world he inhabits. The disparity between what the hero wants the world to be and what in fact it is provides the source at once of Cervantes’s antic humor and his profound sadness; Don Quixote is both a hilarious clown and the Knight of the Sorrowful Face, a man of sorrows for the really new dispensation.

Don Quixote represents a new condition for mankind which takes some getting used to, so that the mind of greatest sensitivity–a mind such as Cervantes’s–finds itself uncomfortably poised between piety and irreverence, lurching now and then into one or the other, yet generally keeping a wary eye on both, unwilling or unable to come down decisively for either side. Cervantes is of the first generation of great modern agnostics. His pained ambivalence illuminates Don Quixote’s glory and misery. He is superior to the unexceptional multitudes, who nevertheless point up his utter failure as a viable human specimen. His mad longing for the marvelous is shatteringly poignant, for the human arrangements of his time have no place for it. Neither do the human arrangements of ours.

Algis Valiunas is author of Churchill’s Military Histories.