Don Quixote: “… it’s all made up, and fiction, created by idle minds”

1/ As I’m reading Don Quixote, it may be a good idea to examine the long-held view that Don Quixote is the first modern novel, and the recent claim that the first modern novel is The Tale of Genji from the 11th century. 

(Lots of people actually call The Tale of Genji the first novel, but it obviously wasn’t—there were ancient Greek novels). 

Personally, I have never bought the counter-argument that The Tale of Genji is a monogatari and the novel is a Western concept. The novel is a flexible form: Don Quixote, Clarissa, Tristram Shandy, Frankenstein, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, Bleak House, Ulysses, As I Lay Dying, One Hundred Years of Solitude… — very different in form and structure—are all novels.

The Oxford Dictionary defines the novel as “a fictitious prose narrative of book length, typically representing character and action with some degree of realism.” The Britannica definition is “an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting.” By these definitions, The Tale of Genji is undoubtedly a novel. It’s not an epic or heroic narrative. 

And if the modern novel is defined by psychological depth, in which characters are individualised, and characterised by thoughts as well as actions, The Tale of Genji too meets the condition. I’m starting this discussion, which I’m probably too ignorant to handle, not to say that East Asians beat Europeans, but to argue that the novel as a form developed independently along different paths around the world. 

Don Quixote is more modern though: there are multiple narrators, perhaps unreliable narrators; there are first-person narrators as well as third-person narrators; there are stories within the story; Cervantes reminds the readers that we are reading fiction (even before the metafiction in Part 2), etc.  

The quote in the headline comes from P.1, ch.32, said by the priest to the innkeeper about chivalry romances. 

2/ I think Shakespeare would have liked the story of Anselmo, Lotario, and Camilla in Don Quixote. It handles some of his favourite themes: male friendship, a woman’s purity, love, jealousy, betrayal, manipulation, pretence… It’s a story within the story of Don Quixote, but within it, the characters put on an act for an audience (Anselmo) as though performing onstage: when Camilla, knowing that her husband Anselmo is watching through a keyhole, speaks out loud to herself like a heroine in a tragedy, she is mimicking—but Cervantes is mocking or at least referencing—soliloquies in theatre. 

Anselmo asking Lotario to help him test Camilla’s loyalty reminds me of Posthumus’s wager with Iachimo about Imogen’s fidelity in Cymbeline. 

I also like the complex layers of Don Quixote: we follow Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, with the narrator sometimes interrupting to remind us of the other narrator Cide Mahamate Benengeli; Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet Cardenio, we get the Cardenio story and then get interrupted, and we get back to the main plot; at some point, the narrative leaves the main characters and follows the priest and the barber, who meet Cardenio, and he tells his story; the priest, the barber, and Cardenio then meet Dorotea, who tells her story; then Cardenio and Dorotea—so far subplots—join the main plot as they meet Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; but interestingly, they join the main plot by deceiving the knight and his squire and make up a story about Dorotea being Princess Micomicona; Cervantes then interrupts the main plot, giving us the story of Anselmo, Lotario, and Camilla; the inserted story is then interrupted by the main plot, as Sancho Panza runs in and yells that Don Quixote is fighting a giant; then the narrative returns to the Anselmo story; when it’s finished, new characters arrive, and now the plot of Cardenio, Luscinda, Don Fernando, and Dorotea gets resolved; and so on. You get the idea. 

What I’m saying is that Don Quixote has constant movements, constant interruptions, constant digressions. 

3/ I note that Don Quixote goes out in the world in armour seeking adventures and gets nothing but trouble and beatings, but some of the people he encounters have had adventures (like Ruy Perez, the captive) or colourful, dramatic experiences (Cardenio, Dorotea). 

Interestingly enough, Ruy Perez’s story must be inspired by Cervantes’s own experience as a soldier “sold into slavery in Algiers, the centre of the Christian slave traffic in the Muslim world.” Shakespeare’s life was rather boring in comparison. 

My Twitter friend Alok Ranjan has mentioned that he likes the interplay of Romance and Realism in Don Quixote, so I’ve been thinking about the differences: the main plot of Don Quixote is Realism, as he, inspired by chivalry romances, goes into the real world and gets beaten up; the subplots tend to be Romance, defined by Oxford English Dictionary as “a fictitious narrative, usually in prose, in which the settings or the events depicted are remote from everyday life, or in which sensational or exciting events or adventures form the central theme; a book”, or defined by Britannica as “sometimes marked by strange or unexpected incidents and developments.” 

At the same time, where do you draw the line? Isn’t Cervantes’s life full of adventures and strange incidents, like a romance?  

4/ I’ve noticed that so far, all the important female characters are beautiful, extremely beautiful: Luscinda, Dorotea, Zoraida. In the inserted story, Camilla is also beautiful. 

What about the ugly women, Miguel?  

5/ In my last blog post, I complained about Tom Lathrop’s translation, but except for a couple of odd words, I generally enjoy this edition. Generally speaking, the language is not really modernised, and it is funny. 

Some readers complain about the longueurs in Don Quixote, but I’ve enjoyed all of it so far.

Wonderful book!