Don Quixote Read online

  4

  But does Don Quixote altogether believe in the reality of his own vision? Evidently he does not, particularly when he (and Sancho) is surrendered by Cervantes to the sadomasochistic practical jokes—indeed, the vicious and humiliating cruelties—that afflict the Knight and squire in part II. Nabokov is very illuminating on this in his Lectures on Don Quixote, published posthumously in 1983:

  Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty. From that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned. And its cruelty is artistic.

  To find a Shakespearean equivalent to this aspect of Don Quixote, you would have to fuse Titus Andronicus and The Merry Wives of Windsor into one work, a grim prospect because they are, to me, Shakespeare’s weakest plays. Falstaff’s dreadful humiliation by the merry wives is unacceptable enough (even if it formed the basis for Verdi’s sublime Falstaff). Why does Cervantes subject Don Quixote to the physical abuse of part I and the psychic tortures of part II? Nabokov’s answer is aesthetic: The cruelty is vitalized by Cervantes’s characteristic artistry. That seems to me something of an evasion. Twelfth Night is comedy unsurpassable, and on the stage we are consumed by hilarity at Malvolio’s terrible humiliations. When we reread the play, we become uneasy, because Malvolio’s socioerotic fantasies echo in virtually all of us. Why are we not made at least a little dubious by the torments, bodily and socially, suffered by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?

  Cervantes himself, as a constant if disguised presence in the text, is the answer. He was the most battered of eminent writers. At the great naval battle of Lepanto, he was wounded and so at twenty-four permanently lost the use of his left hand. In 1575, he was captured by Barbary pirates and spent five years as a slave in Algiers. Ransomed in 1580, he served Spain as a spy in Portugal and Oran and then returned to Madrid, where he attempted a career as a dramatist, almost invariably failing after writing at least twenty plays. Somewhat desperately, he became a tax collector, only to be indicted and imprisoned for supposed malfeasance in 1597. A fresh imprisonment came in 1605; there is a tradition that he began to compose Don Quixote in jail. Part I, written at incredible speed, was published in 1605. Part II, spurred by a false continuation of Don Quixote by one Avellaneda, was published in 1615.

  Fleeced of all royalties of part I by the publisher, Cervantes would have died in poverty except for the belated patronage of a discerning nobleman, in the last three years of his life. Though Shakespeare died at just fifty-two (why, we do not know), he was an immensely successful dramatist and became quite prosperous by shareholding in the actors’ company that played at the Globe Theater. Circumspect, and only too aware of the government-inspired murder of Christopher Marlowe, and their torture of Thomas Kyd, and branding of Ben Jonson, Shakespeare kept himself nearly anonymous, in spite of being the reigning dramatist of London. Violence, slavery, and imprisonment were the staples of Cervantes’s life. Shakespeare, wary to the end, had an existence almost without a memorable incident, as far as we can tell.

  The physical and mental torments suffered by Don Quixote and Sancho Panza had been central to Cervantes’s endless struggle to stay alive and free. Yet Nabokov’s observations are accurate: cruelty is extreme throughout Don Quixote. The aesthetic wonder is that this enormity fades when we stand back from the huge book and ponder its shape and endless range of meaning. No critic’s account of Cervantes’s masterpiece agrees with, or even resembles, any other critic’s impressions. Don Quixote is a mirror held up not to nature, but to the reader. How can this bashed and mocked knight errant be, as he is, a universal paradigm?

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  Hamlet does not need or want our admiration and affection, but Don Quixote does, and he receives it, as Hamlet generally does also. Sancho, like Falstaff, is replete with self-delight, though Sancho does not rouse moralizing critics to wrath and disapproval, as the sublime Falstaff does. Much more has been written about the Hamlet/Don Quixote contrast than about Sancho/Falstaff, two vitalists in aesthetic contention as masters of reality. But no critic has called Don Quixote a murderer or Sancho an immoralist. Hamlet is responsible for eight deaths, his own included, and Falstaff is a highwayman, a warrior averse to battle, and a fleecer of everyone he encounters. Yet Hamlet and Falstaff are victimizers, not victims, even if Hamlet dies properly fearing a wounded name and Falstaff is destroyed by Hal/Henry V’s rejection. It does not matter. The fascination of Hamlet’s intellect and of Falstaff’s wit is what endures. Don Quixote and Sancho are victims, but both are extraordinarily resilient, until the Knight’s final defeat and dying into the identity of Quixano the Good, whom Sancho vainly implores to take to the road again. The fascination of Don Quixote’s endurance and of Sancho’s loyal wisdom always remains.

  Cervantes plays upon the human need to withstand suffering, which is one reason the Knight awes us. However good a Catholic he may (or may not) have been, Cervantes is interested in heroism and not in sainthood. Shakespeare, I think, was not interested in either, since none of his heroes can endure close scrutiny: Hamlet, Othello, Antony, Coriolanus. Only Edgar, the recalcitrant survivor who inherits the nation, most unwillingly, in King Lear, abides our skepticism, and at least one prominent Shakespeare critic weirdly has called Edgar “weak and murderous.” The heroism of Don Quixote is by no means constant: he is perfectly capable of flight, abandoning poor Sancho to be beaten up by an entire village. Cervantes, a hero at Lepanto, wants Don Quixote to be a new kind of hero, neither ironic nor mindless, but one who wills to be himself, as José Ortega y Gasset accurately phrased it.

  Hamlet subverts the will, while Falstaff satirizes it. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza both exalt the will, though the Knight transcendentalizes it, and Sancho, the first postpragmatic, wants to keep it within limits. It is the transcendent element in Don Quixote that ultimately persuades us of his greatness, partly because it is set against the deliberately coarse, frequently sordid context of the panoramic book. And again it is important to note that this transcendence is secular and literary, and not Catholic. The Quixotic quest is erotic, yet even the eros is literary. Crazed by reading (as so many of us still are), the Knight is in quest of a new self, one that can overgo the erotic madness of Orlando (Roland) in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso or of the mythic Amadís of Gaul. Unlike Orlando’s or Amadís’s, Don Quixote’s madness is deliberate, self-inflicted, a traditional poetic strategy. Still, there is a clear sublimation of the sexual drive in the Knight’s desperate courage. Lucidity keeps breaking in, reminding him that Dulcinea is his own supreme fiction, transcending an honest lust for the peasant girl Aldonza Lorenzo. A fiction, believed in even though you know it is a fiction, can be validated only by sheer will.

  Erich Auerbach argued for the book’s “continuous gaiety,” which is not at all my own experience as a reader. But Don Quixote, like the best of Shakespeare, will sustain any theory you bring to it, as well or as badly as any other. The Sorrowful Knight is more than an enigma: he seeks an undying name, literary immortality, and finds it, but only through being all but dismantled in part I and all but teased into real madness in part II: Cervantes performs the miracle, nobly Dante-like, of presiding over his creation like a Providence, but also subjecting himself to the subtle changes brought about both in the Knight and in Sancho Panza by their wonderful conversations, in which a shared love manifests itself by equality and grumpy disputes. They are brothers, rather than father and son. To describe the precise way that Cervantes regards them, whether with ironic love or loving irony, is an impossible critical task.

  6

  Harry Levin shrewdly phrased what he called “Cervantes’ formula”:

  This is nothing more nor less than a recognition of the difference between verses and reverses, between words and deeds, palabras and hechos—in short, between literary artifice and that real thing which is life itself. But literary artifice is the only means that a writer has at his disposal. How else can he convey his impression of life? Precisely by discrediting those means, by rep
udiating that air of bookishness in which any book is inevitably wrapped. When Pascal observed that the true eloquence makes fun of eloquence, he succinctly formulated the principle that could look to Cervantes as its recent and striking exemplar. It remained for La Rochefoucauld to restate the other side of the paradox: some people would never have loved if they had not heard of love.

  It is true that I cannot think of any other work in which the relations between words and deeds are as ambiguous as in Don Quixote, except (once again) for Hamlet. Cervantes’s formula is also Shakespeare’s, though in Cervantes we feel the burden of the experiential, whereas Shakespeare is uncanny, since nearly all of his experience was theatrical. Still, the ironizing of eloquence characterizes the speeches of both Hamlet and Don Quixote. One might at first think that Hamlet is more word-conscious than is the Knight, but part II of Cervantes’s dark book manifests a growth in the Sorrowful Face’s awareness of his own rhetoricity.

  I want to illustrate Don Quixote’s development by setting him against the wonderful trickster Ginés de Pasamonte, whose first appearance is as a galley-bound prisoner in part I, chapter XXII, and who pops up again in part II, chapters XXV–XXVII, as Master Pedro, the divinator and puppeteer. Ginés is a sublime scamp and picaroon confidence man, but also a picaresque romance writer in the model of Lazarillo de Tormes (1533), the anonymous masterpiece of its mode (see W. S. Merwin’s beautiful translation, in 1962). When Ginés reappears as Master Pedro in part II, he has become a satire upon Cervantes’s hugely successful rival, Lope de Vega, the “monster of literature” who turned out a hit play nearly every week (whereas Cervantes had failed hopelessly as a dramatist).

  Every reader has her or his favorite episodes in Don Quixote; mine are the two misadventures the Knight inaugurates in regard to Ginés/Master Pedro. In the first, Don Quixote gallantly frees Ginés and his fellow prisoners, only to be beaten nearly to death (with poor Sancho) by the ungrateful convicts. In the second, the Knight is so taken in by Master Pedro’s illusionism that he charges at the puppet show and cuts the puppets to pieces, in what can be regarded as Cervantes’s critique of Lope de Vega. Here first is Ginés, in the admirable new translation by Edith Grossman:

  “He’s telling the truth,” said the commissary. “He wrote his own history himself, as fine as you please, and he pawned the book for two hundred reales and left it in prison.”

  “And I intend to redeem it,” said Ginés, “even for two hundred ducados.”

  “Is it that good?” said Don Quixote.

  “It is so good,” responded Ginés, “that it’s too bad for Lazarillo de Tormes and all the other books of that genre that have been written or will be written. What I can tell your grace is that it deals with truths, and they are truths so appealing and entertaining that no lies can equal them.”

  “And what is the title of the book?” asked Don Quixote.

  “The Life of Ginés de Pasamonte,” he replied.

  “And is it finished?” asked Don Quixote.

  “How can it be finished,” he responded, “if my life isn’t finished yet? What I’ve written goes from my birth to the moment when they sentenced me to the galleys this last time.”

  “Then you have been there before?” said Don Quixote.

  “To serve God and the king, I’ve already spent four years on the galleys, and I know the taste of the hardtack and the overseer’s whip,” responded Ginés. “And I’m not too sorry to go there, because I’ll have time to finish my book, for I still have lots of things to say, and on the galleys of Spain there’s more leisure than I’ll need, though I don’t need much for what I have to write because I know it by heart.”

  Ginés, admirable miscreant, is a demonic parody of Cervantes himself, who had served five years in Algerian slavery and whose total Don Quixote became nearly unfinishable. The death of Cervantes came only a year after the publication of the second part of the great saga. Doubtless, Cervantes regarded Lope de Vega as his own demonic shadow, which is made clearer in the magnificent assault upon Master Pedro’s puppet show. The picaroon Ginés follows the general law of part II, which is that everyone of consequence either has read part I or is aware that he was a character in it. Master Pedro evades identity with Ginés, but at the high cost of witnessing another furious assault by the Knight of the Woeful Face. But this comes just after Master Pedro is strongly identified with Lope de Vega:

  The interpreter said nothing in reply but went on, saying:

  “There was no lack of curious eyes, the kind that tend to see everything, to see Melisendra descend from the balcony and mount the horse, and they informed King Marsilio, who immediately gave orders to sound the call to arms; and see how soon this is done, and how the city is flooded with the sound of the bells that ring from all the towers of the mosques.”

  “No, that is wrong!” said Don Quixote. “Master Pedro is incorrect in the matter of the bells, for the Moors do not use bells but drums and a kind of flute that resembles our flageolet, and there is no doubt that ringing bells in Sansueña is a great piece of nonsense.”

  This was heard by Master Pedro, who stopped the ringing and said:

  “Your grace should not concern yourself with trifles, Señor Don Quixote, or try to carry things so far that you never reach the end of them. Aren’t a thousand plays performed almost every day that are full of a thousand errors and pieces of nonsense, and yet are successful productions that are greeted not only with applause but with admiration? Go on, boy, and let them say what they will, for as long as I fill my purse, there can be more errors than atoms in the sun.”

  “That is true,” replied Don Quixote.

  When Don Quixote assaults the puppet show, Cervantes assaults the popular taste that had preferred the theater of Lope de Vega to his own:

  And Don Quixote, seeing and hearing so many Moors and so much clamor, thought it would be a good idea to assist those who were fleeing; and rising to his feet, in a loud voice he said:

  “I shall not consent, in my lifetime and in my presence, to any such offense against an enamored knight so famous and bold as Don Gaiferos. Halt, you lowborn rabble; do not follow and do not pursue him unless you wish to do battle with me!”

  And speaking and taking action, he unsheathed his sword, leaped next to the stage, and with swift and never before seen fury began to rain down blows on the crowd of Moorish puppets, knocking down some, beheading others, ruining this one, destroying that one, and among many other blows he delivered so powerful a downstroke that if Master Pedro had not stooped, crouched down, and hunched over, he would have cut off his head more easily than if it had been so much marzipan. Master Pedro cried out, saying:

  “Your grace must stop, Señor Don Quixote, and realize that the ones you are overthrowing, destroying, and killing are not real Moors but only pasteboard figures. Sinner that I am, you are destroying and ruining everything I own!”

  But this did not keep Don Quixote from raining down slashes, two-handed blows, thrusts, and backstrokes. In short, in less time than it takes to tell about it, he knocked the puppet theater to the floor, all its scenery and figures cut and broken to pieces: King Marsilio was badly wounded, and Emperor Charlemagne’s head and crown were split in two. The audience of spectators was in a tumult, the monkey ran out the window and onto the roof, the cousin was fearful, the page was frightened, and even Sancho Panza was terrified, because, as he swore when the storm was over, he had never seen his master in so wild a fury. When the general destruction of the puppet theater was complete, Don Quixote calmed down somewhat and said:

  “At this moment I should like to have here in front of me all those who do not believe, and do not wish to believe, how much good knights errant do in the world: if I had not been here, just think what would have happened to the worthy Don Gaiferos and the beauteous Melisendra; most certainly, by this time those dogs would have overtaken them and committed some outrage against them. In brief, long live knight errantry, over and above everything in the world today!”
r />   This gorgeous, mad intervention is also a parable of the triumph of Cervantes over the picaresque and of the triumph of the novel over the romance. The downward stroke that nearly decapitates Ginés/Master Pedro is a metaphor for the aesthetic power of Don Quixote. So subtle is Cervantes that he needs to be read at as many levels as Dante. Perhaps the Quixotic can be accurately defined as the literary mode of an absolute reality, not as impossible dream but rather as a persuasive awakening into mortality.

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  The aesthetic truth of Don Quixote is that, again like Dante and Shakespeare, it makes us confront greatness directly. If we have difficulty fully understanding Don Quixote’s quest, its motives and desired ends, that is because we confront a reflecting mirror that awes us even while we yield to delight. Cervantes is always out ahead of us, and we can never quite catch up. Fielding and Sterne, Goethe and Thomas Mann, Flaubert and Stendhal, Melville and Mark Twain, Dostoevsky: these are among Cervantes’s admirers and pupils. Don Quixote is the only book that Dr. Johnson desired to be even longer than it already was.

  Yet Cervantes, although a universal pleasure, is in some respects even more difficult than are Dante and Shakespeare upon their heights. Are we to believe everything that Don Quixote says to us? Does he believe it? He (or Cervantes) is the inventor of a mode now common enough, in which figures, within a novel, read prior fictions concerning their own earlier adventures and have to sustain a consequent loss in the sense of reality. This is one of the beautiful enigmas of Don Quixote: it is simultaneously a work whose authentic subject is literature and a chronicle of a hard, sordid actuality, the declining Spain of 1605–1615. The Knight is Cervantes’s subtle critique of a realm that had given him only harsh measures in return for his own patriotic heroism at Lepanto. Don Quixote cannot be said to have a double consciousness; his is rather the multiple consciousness of Cervantes himself, a writer who knows the cost of confirmation. I do not believe that the Knight can be said to tell lies, except in the Nietzschean sense of lying against time and time’s grim “It was.” To ask what it is that Don Quixote himself believes is to enter the visionary center of his story.