Don Quixote: “There’s much to be said as to whether or not the histories of knights-errant are fictional or not”

1/ Part 2 is even greater than Part 1. 

As written in the previous blog post, in Part 2, Cervantes plays more with the form, with unreliable narrators, with the Benengeli manuscript conceit. It is as though Cervantes, when he started writing Don Quixote, had the material and didn’t know what to do with it, so he played around and attempted different things, but by the time he got to Part 2, he had figured it out.

We see a similar thing with the characterisation—Cervantes had Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in rough outlines, but it took him some time to find their voices, their manners of speaking, especially for Sancho.

I love that scene where Pancho Panza tells someone else about his love for Don Quixote. Don Quixote is, in many ways, a madman, and the two of them are very different—we can see this very clearly at the wedding banquet, when the idealistic knight sides with Basilio and the pragmatic squire thinks it’s right for Quiteria marry the rich Camacho—but we can see why they have love for each other, and we love them both. 

The thing I find especially fascinating about the novel is that, at the most basic level, it’s about a madman who thinks chivalry romances are real, thinks fictional characters, such as Amadis de Gaula, are real, and wants to be a knight errant himself; but Cervantes has created these larger-than-life characters who feel so utterly real and who seem to exist beyond the novel itself. One cannot imagine Anna outside Anna Karenina, Natasha and Andrei and Pierre outside War and Peace, but one can imagine Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on the streets.

There is a Don Quixote Museum in Castilla–La Mancha, as though he’s real. There’s even a Dulcinea del Toboso House-Museum, when she doesn’t even exist in the novel itself. 

Cervantes raises interesting questions about our relationship with fictional characters. After all, in London there’s a Sherlock Holmes Museum, and people queue to take photos next to the 9 ¾ platform at Kings Cross. 

The quote in the post title comes from P.2, ch.16, said by the knight (translated by Tom Lathrop). 

2/ I like this speech from Sancho: 

““In truth, señor,” responded Sancho, “you don’t have to depend on the fleshless one. I mean Death, who eats lambs as well as sheep, and I’ve heard our priest say that she treads with equal feet in the high towers of kings as she does the humble huts of the poor. This lady has more power than reluctance, and she’s not at all squeamish. She eats everything and fills her saddlebags with people of all ages and rank. She’s not a reaper who takes siestas, because she reaps all the time, and she cuts dry grass as well as green, and it seems that she doesn’t chew, but just gorges and swallows everything placed before her, because she has the hunger of a dog, and they never stop eating. And though she has no stomach, she still swells up, and thirsts for the lives of all living creatures, just like a person would drink a jug of cold water.”” (P.2, ch.20) 

3/ Look at the moment when Don Quixote is pulled out of the Cave of Montesinos: 

“… But Don Quixote said nothing in response, and when they had taken him completely out, they saw that his eyes were closed, revealing that he was asleep. They stretched him out on the ground and untied him, yet with all this he didn’t wake up. But they turned him from side to side and shook him for a good while until he came to, stretching as if he’d been woken out of a very deep and heavy slumber. Looking all around as if he were distressed, he said: “May God forgive you, my friends, for you’ve plucked me from the most delicious and agreeable life and spectacle that any human being has ever seen or lived. Now I finally understand that all of the joys of this life are just shadows and dreams, or wither like a wildflower. Oh, unfortunate Montesinos! Oh, badly wounded Durandarte! Oh, unfortunate Belerma! Oh, tearful Guadiana and you unfortunate daughters of Ruidera, whose waters are the tears that your beautiful eyes cried!”” (P.2, ch.22) 

Where does the idea of life as a dream first come from?

Anyway, that moment made me think about Bottom’s soliloquy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: 

“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom. And I will sing it in the latter end of a play before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.” 

Don Quixote is such a rich, complex work of literature. I must delve into the writings about Cervantes’s book. 

4/ Cervantes plays some dazzling game with the layers of narrators in Don Quixote: 

“The person who translated this great history from the original that its first author, Cide Hamete Benengeli, wrote, says that when he got to the chapter about the adventure of the Cave of Montesinos, he found in the margin and in Hamete’s own handwriting, these words:

I cannot convince or persuade myself that what the previous chapter relates about what happened to the brave don Quixote really happened exactly as written. The reason is that all the other adventures met with so far have been possible and credible; but I can find no way I can accept this one about the cave as true because it’s so far beyond the bounds of reason. […] If this adventure seems apocryphal, I’m not to blame; I write it without confirming it as either true or false…” (P.2, ch.24) 

5/ Here is what Dostoyevsky wrote about Don Quixote: 

“I don’t know what is now being taught in courses of literature, but a knowledge of this most splendid and sad of all books created by human genius would certainly elevate the soul of a young person with a great idea, give rise to profound questions in his heart, and work toward diverting his mind from worship of the eternal and foolish idol of mediocrity, self-satisfied conceit, and cheap prudence. Man will not forget to take this saddest of all books with him to God’s last judgment. He will point to the most profound and fateful mystery of humans and humankind that the book conveys.”

Read the full thing here.

Much as I love Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky is a much more insightful reader and critic (Tolstoy’s comments on other writers were just revealing about himself).