Don Quixote, Part 1 by Miguel Cervantes
A middle-aged man, the owner of a lean stallion
and a bit of
land in a small country village, spends his free time reading bad
romance novels. He becomes so obsessed that he neglects his household
duties to spend whole days and nights
on these books, until, through his little sleep and much reading, he dried up his brains in such sort as he lost wholly his judgement.
He comes to believe himself a character in one of these novels -- a
knight-errant -- and he attempts to live out the adventures he's found
on the page. As he does, reality continually collides with the fanciful
notions in his books.
Don Quixote is what you might call a high-concept comedy-of-situation. Think Three's Company or Bosom Buddies.
Like any good sit-com, Cervantes' novel is linear and episodic in
structure; it can go on for as long as the Nielsens look good. Rather
than building one on the next, each episode ends more or less where it
begins. (Nabokov suggested that Cervantes might well have written Don Quixote, Part II, without a copy of Part I
on hand.) It has memorable characters who don't evolve much over time,
so we can tune out for a while and always come back to the same old Don
and Sancho we know and love. But there is a cruelty, too, which marks
the story as a bit edgy
and modern.
Larry David's Sienfeld mantra -- No hugging, no learning
-- applies quite well.
Inevitably, Don Quixote jumps the shark after a while -- in this case, somewhere around the third section of Part I -- and it stays off the tracks for almost two hundred pages. (The book makes a remarkable recovery in Part II, which -- for reasons deeper than limitations of space, I suspect -- is not included here.)
So why does Don Quixote still fascinate after 400 years, when we've already forgotten Family Matters?
The first and best answer is that middle-aged man, Alonso Quixada (or
perhaps it's Quesada, or maybe Quixana): the self-styled Don Quixote de
la Mancha. He is a man who does terrible things -- he frees criminals;
he subjects friends and strangers to beatings -- with the purest of
motives. As such, he is a type all too familiar to us, one whom we can
never be quite sure whether to pity or admire. We tell ourselves he is
merely an idealist, and yet we know that he is truly a madman, that
until he comes to terms with reality, he can only cause pain.
Occasionally, his madness is punctured by moments of sharp clarity, but
it is in these very moments that he believes himself enchanted.
Quixote is one of few literary characters who transcend the works that
give them life. (Ironically, it may be that the novel's very structural
slackness is part of what allows this to be so.)
The second obvious reason for Don Quixote's continued interest is its place in literary history as (arguably) the first modern novel. And yet historical precedence can hardly account for the book's cultural prominence. It wouldn't matter nearly so much if it didn't already contain so much of what would come to define the genre it helped to create. With the Knight of the Mournful Countenance, Cervantes found an ideal means for exploring the tension between illusion and reality, between the epic narratives we tell ourselves and the often less-inspiring facts on the ground. A case can be made -- in fact, I'm about to make it -- that this tension represents the major theme of the novelistic tradition.
For example, the great works of the 19th century -- the novel's
watershed -- are simply lousy with quixotic dreamers. Anna Karenina and
Emma Bovary are the daughters of Quixote, each of them brought to
tragic ends by the romance novels they read and their false ideas about
love. All of Tess's problems begin when her father, John Durbeyfield,
begins to fancy himself Sir John D'Urbervilles.
George Eliot introduces Middlemarch with a brief summary of the life of Saint Theresa, concluding, Many Theresas have been born who found themselves no epic life...
We are meant to understand that Dorothea Brooke is one such Theresa --
as are Lydgate and Casaubon in their own ways. And then there are
Stendhal's anti-heroes, who are perhaps closest to Quixote in the pain
the cause others through their romantic ideals.
In each of these cases, the collision of legend and truth creates the moral choices that may be said to be the real subject of these novels. But the collision itself comes more and more into the foreground as the novel evolves in the 20th century. The battle between the epic and the mundane is made explicit when Joyce transports the Odyssey to Dublin in Ulysses. The difference between books and life -- and the difficulty of capturing the latter within the former -- drive Proust's Search.
Which brings us to another point. To say that Don Quixote -- and the novel generally -- engages thematically with the conflict of illusion and reality is to say that the novel has been, from its beginnings, a self-conscious form. Cervantes plays reflexively with literary forms in ways we tend to think of as new, even though they have been part of the novel's DNA from its conception. Little wonder we aren't yet through with it: Don Quixoteis not just the first modern novel, but the first post-modern one. And one day, when we theorists lay out the dominant features of the post-post-modern novel (or whatever the hell they decide to call it), a little attention will likely prove that these features too can be found in these pages. And if it happens, as some suggest it will, that high-end serialized t.v. shows like The Sopranos and The Wire become the novels of the 21st century? Well -- Cervantes got there first, too.
-- CRB, April 16, 2007
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