Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Novels and Reality: Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote
As far as genres go, the novel is a relatively young one. Poetry and drama stretch back to antiquity and beyond, but what is widely considered to be the first novel didn’t arrive on the scene until the Renaissance was starting to draw to its close. This is Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’ monumental work in both the Spanish and English literary traditions.
Published around the same time that Shakespeare was writing his last plays in England, its importance is not due merely to chronology. You’ll find no shortage of praise for the novel or insight about Cervantes’ influence as the grandfather of the modern novel. Milan Kundera stated, “The novelist need answer to no one but Cervantes,” and Lionel Trilling mused, “It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote.” One of these many themes is the nature of the relationship between fiction and reality, the limits between their likeness, and how we relate to the fiction we read. The novel is, at its core, a story about stories.
Don Quixote, né Alonso Quixano, is a character who wants to make himself into a character. So enamored of tales of noble knights and honor and quests, he decides to take this fiction and translate into the realm of his reality. Where the translation is rough, he bends and reinterprets the world around him to fit the preset narrative of the books in his library. Though a man nearing 50 in a Spain where knights and quests are relics of a distant past, he declares himself a knight-errant, Don Quixote of La Mancha, and leaves his home in search of quests and adventure. We the readers are in on the joke. Like other characters in the novel, we see reality for what it is. Dulcinea del Toboso, the Guinevere to Don Quixote’s Lancelot, is just a Spanish country girl. Rocinante the noble steed is nothing more than an exhausted nag. Our knight-errant’s shining armor is just an old, rusty suit he found in his house.
But Don Quixote either cannot or will not recognize the nature of the reality around him. Windmills are fearsome giants, inns are castles, their inhabitants are lords and ladies, prostitutes are princesses. Our knight gains his fame by pursuing his quests in spite of reality. Should anyone try to question him or tell him he is not a knight-errant, he will hear none of it and be on his way, secure in his fantasy. At the close of the first of the novel’s two parts, his fiction-steeped imagination seems to have won out against the reality around him.
I think it is fair to say that most people think of the first part of the novel when they think of Don Quixote. The first part contains the humor and the episodes, like the encounter with the windmills, that most people associate with Cervantes’ creation. Part II, on the other hand, offers a reversal of Don Quixote’s seeming victory over reality.
When we encounter Don Quixote at the beginning of the second part, his fame from Part I has spread. In reality, there was a span of about 10 years between Cervantes’ writing Parts I and II, in which time another author took up the character of Don Quixote in a kind of late-Renaissance/early-modern fan fiction. In the world of the novel, true tales about his exploits have spread thanks to the publication of Part I, but so have false tales based on the fraudulent sequel.
When Don Quixote encounters other characters, they already have a sense of who he is, some based on the true tales and others based on the falsehoods. Don Quixote has actually become a character, but the nature of this character is no longer fully under his control. Now, rather than try to live up to the characters he has revered in chivalric literature, he must live up to the character he himself has created but that others have appropriated.
This proves a much more difficult task; unlike the chivalric literature he had been using in Part I, Don Quixote’s full story hasn’t even been fully written yet. As Part I becomes the object of Part II and the story starts to fold in on itself, Don Quixote’s fantasy also begins to fold in on itself. As a result, Part II is noticeably different in tone; Part I’s levity remains, but it is tinged with something darker. We as readers can sense that Don Quixote’s fantasy beginning to break down, and reality beginning to intrude. He begins to doubt himself and see things as other characters see them: inns are just inns, and peasant girls are not princesses.
His final defeat comes at the hands of another knight-errant, who is, in reality, a man from his hometown who hatched a plot to force Don Quixote out of his madness. As a condition of defeat, Don Quixote must not take up arms for one year, an agreement he is bound to honor by his chivalric code. Shortly after his return, he is taken to his bed with a fever. His companions fear the cause may be melancholy and despair at his defeat. As he is dying, he proclaims that his judgment and sanity are restored and that he now despises his books of chivalry. His time as a knight-errant he renounces as a period of madness. He dies not as Don Quixote, but as Alonso Quixano, reality having finally won the day.
The relationship between the fiction of a novel and the reality of the world around us is a perennial source of inspiration for authors, and in this thematic aspect, Don Quixote looms large in subsequent literature. For example, in Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert’s heroine, Emma Bovary, similarly tries to make fiction into reality by fashioning herself after the heroines of Romantic literature, with even more disastrous consequences. T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock laments that his life cannot be as charged with meaning compared to the great figures of literature.
In her essay, A Room of One’s Own, a meditation on women and fiction and on writing fiction, Virginia Woolf describes novels and fiction more generally as being tied to reality, but lightly and at the four corners, like a spider’s web. Fiction and reality bear a certain likeness to each other, but are not and cannot be exactly the same. Don Quixote shows the truth of this analogy by showing what can happen when we blur the distinctions between the two and try too hard to make them meet.
Published in Group Writing
A very interesting perspective, both on this novel and on novels and novel writing in general. A story about stories? I suspect that not all novels are quite so self-reflective.
This conversation is part of our Group Writing Series on the theme of “novel.” We still have one date, November 26th, open under that theme as we move towards our December theme of Holiday Traditions and Treats. If you have holiday traditions, holiday treats, or grew up with either and would like to share the tale, you can sign up here for a date in December.
I’m always hesitant to acknowledge the great lacunae in my knowledge of literature, but I’ve so enjoyed your post that I want my “Like” to resonate a bit more. It comes from an old brain smiling with gratitude at encountering nuances that it otherwise would have missed :)
I took a class on Don Quixote at the University of MN in th early 80’s. I remember nothing like the detail you describe here unfortunately. But I do remember falling in love with the book because of those intricate depths. And also because my professor clearly was Sancho Panza. Maybe this is my next Audible download when I’m in mourning for having finally finished War & Peace.
That has got to be quite the story.
Just read aloud your introductory sentence to my husband. It’s been many years since either of us sat in a college classroom and find your style very engaging. I could PM you, but due to sheer laziness and the sunny notion that you’ll happily comply: Could you tell us a bit more about yourself than what is offered in you profile? (I’ll check it daily to see if my friendly nudge succeeded:)
I’ve always thought of Don Quixote as representing the arc that is Spain in that time period. The delusions of Philip II and the crash that is Philip III. There is the burning of the books, the Inquisition. The Moriscos. The splendor and the squalor.
For an awesome video adaptation, click here.
Thank you so much for the kind words! To be honest, I forgot my profile even had a bio section. I’ll get on updating that asap, but to expand a little on what’s already there, I’m a (relatively) recent college graduate (double majored in a great books/liberal arts program and French) currently working in the much more policy-oriented world of survey research/data analysis and consulting. This is why you’ll find me posting about things like Don Quixote: my liberal arts brain needs a new outlet!
Fine post, glad to see this pop up on Ricochet! Will come back to yack about the book soon.
Meanwhile: How about poetry? Do you ever discuss poetry?
As the Knight of the White Moon, Sampson Carrasco defeats Don Quixote and restores him to sanity, but does nothing to replace the values that he has deprived him of.
Maybe just a little romance is necessary.
Sure! Any poets/poems in mind?
L’Angevine,
Your treatment of Don Quixote and Cervantes seems very familiar. This is the usual treatment we have always heard and yet for me, there is a paradox. A brief look at Cervantes life doesn’t make him sound at all like a dreamer. His experiences, in fact, are all too real.
The giant in Don Quixote is the Windmill. This is a symbol of Protestant Holland. Might we imagine that a man of such broad and very real experience be commenting upon the Chivalric code of the middle ages and its new competitor the Protestant ethic? After his military experience, Cervantes had jobs as both a banker and a tax collector. Again not jobs for a dreamer.
What is Don Quixote about?
Regards,
Jim
The Audible recording of Don Quixote with George Guidall is excellent, if you’ve been meaning to read the book only to have the demands of reality continually intervene.
Not to sidetrack the thread, but what did you think of War and Peace? I listened to both that and Anna Karenina, and, even though Anna is supposed to be the greatest novel ever, I liked War and Peace better.
War & Peace is supposed to be the greatest novel. All human things are either war or peace. He’s got both!
Maybe modern poets would be easier to discuss–as opposed to Homer!–are there any American poets you like?
I’ve long been trying to talk about some Wallace Stevens poems, but it’s hard to find people interested in doing it…
Auden & Yeats would also be great.
There are two Frost poems that raise my eyebrow, too: Directive & Birches.
Seamus Heaney has lots of stuff worth thinking about, the most recent thing to pique my interest being Digging.
I could think of all sorts of other things in case you like European poets–Szymborska, Milosz, or Rilke or Celan.
We gotta find some things we both like.
& of course I could read & talk about Shakespeare or Dickinson any ol’day…
I had almost no background in literature but I saw a literature seminar available at a local school. I had recently read Pascal’s Pensees and the next class was on that book so I signed up. That was 2 years ago and I now know something about Brothers Karamazov, Lorca, Rimbaud, Bolano (Savage Detectives), Borges, Goethe’s Faust, Nicanor Parra, a fascinating little book called Tinkers, and many others. We just did the Schooner Flight by Derek Walcott.
Most of the others in the class are far more knowledgeable than I, but I have brought a fresh perspective as an outsider, and have become one of the best poets in the class. I love that Ricochet has discussions like this.
I promise. I was going to mention “Directive.”
And I’m smiling having just read his “Gathering Leaves” because I was fighting and losing the same battle this morning.
Just curious: When did you listen to Anna? I have this totally scientific theory–by which I mean a personal anecdote, with myself as the one and only experimental subject, of course–that Anna Karenina is basically unintelligible to a younger reader. S/he will either flat-out hate it, or like it because s/he walked away with the wrong message. I re-read Anna a few years ago and totally GOT it–and loved it. I simply could not have read the book properly when I was 18.
And I actually kinda feel like this is true of many, many great books–even though I teach the Great Books to high schoolers. ;)
It’s been within the last 6 months. I’m 66.
Fun poem about something not so fun. Who’s to know indeed–we do what we can even when we make ourselves ridiculous by the inadequacy of our work. Our attitude to autumn seems to be mocked here. Not unjustly, I don’t think. I taught my nephew, who’s going through existential despair, to sweep the alley in his backyard. Hardly adequate, but it does get the body moving…
Ooh, lots of good ideas here. Stevens is great (come for the titles and stick around for the poems). I’ve read a little of Rilke and Milosz. Yes to Auden and Yeats, too. Hölderlin (a bit earlier) is also good. Since I was a French major in college I’ve got a decent footing with some of the major French poets. I’m also a big fan of Hopkins and what I’ve read of John Ashbery (specifically the poem “Syringa” and a few others).
And yes, Shakespeare and Dickinson are always good options :)
I should have added French stuff, too–I noticed you’ve done work on that–worth bringing back, so to speak.
So I’ll write to you & maybe we can start doing some podcasts, what do you say?
Definitely! That sounds great.
I read The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World recently with great pleasure. Also Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote is worthwhile. One gives you an idea of Cervantes circumstances, the other gives you a working genius writer’s appraisal of another*. Nabokov was pretty much a New Critic (read the damn book–carefully–and forget everything else), but he did make the historical observation that 17th Spaniards apparently thought people being beaten with thick sticks was hilarious as all get-out. He also thought you couldn’t read Ulysses without a street map.
*Nabokov did think the character got away from the author, which you can see in the author’s changing attitude to the crackpot Don in the first chapters. There’s a lot of evidence that careful planning–or attention to what was previously written– is just not part of the book.
Nabokov just didn’t understand comedy.
Let me recommend also Rene Girard for a philosophical-Christian interpretation of the novel. Romantic lie & novelistic truth is the book’s name; it sounds clever in French: Mensonge romantique & verite romanesque.