Don Quixote: “vanished into the shadows and smoke”

1/ The quote in the headline comes from chapter 53, when Cide Hamete Benengeli talks about the end of Sancho’s government, and about “the swiftness and instability of earthly life.” 

The last 100 or 150 pages of Don Quixote have some very sad moments. Part 2 is more inventive and complex than Part 1—it’s also more profound and sadder, especially towards the end. In Part 1, Don Quixote gets knocked down, beaten up, mocked… and yet doesn’t seem defeated. At the end of Part 2, things are different. Don Quixote says: 

“And just when I was expecting palms, triumphs, and crowns, earned by and deserved through my brave deeds, I find myself this very morning stepped on, trampled, and thrashed by the feet of filthy, vile animals.” (P.2, ch.59)

(translated by Tom Lathrop) 

It’s much worse after the battle with the Knight of the White Moon. 

“Don Quixote was in bed for six days, under the weather, sad, pensive, and in a bad mood.” (P.2, ch.65) 

This is especially sad, when Don Antonio comes in and mentions that Don Gaspar Gregorio (Ana Felix’s lover) is onshore:  

“… Don Quixote cheered up a bit and said: “In truth, I’m almost at the point of saying that I would be better pleased if it had turned out quite the opposite, because then I’d have to go to the Barbary Coast, where with the strength of my arm I would free not only Don Gregorio, but also all the captive Christians there are in Barbary. But what am I saying, wretch that I am? Am I not the vanquished one? Am I not the fallen one? Am I not the one who cannot take up arms for a year? What am I promising? What am I boasting about if I’m better suited to work a spinning wheel than to take up the sword?”” (ibid.) 

On Don Quixote, Dostoyevsky says: 

“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. He will point to the fact that humanity’s most sublime beauty, its most sublime purity, chastity, forthrightness, gentleness, courage, and, finally, its most sublime intellect – all these often (alas, all too often) come to naught, pass without benefit to humanity, and even become an object of humanity’s derision simply because all these most noble and precious gifts with which a person is often endowed lack but the very last gift – that of genius to put all this power to work and to direct it along a path of action that is truthful, not fantastic and insane, so as to work for the benefit of humanity! But genius, alas, is given out to the tribes and the peoples in such small quantities and so rarely that the spectacle of the malicious irony of fate that so often dooms the efforts of some of the noblest of people and the most ardent friends of humanity to scorn and laughter and to the casting of stones solely because these people, at the fateful moment, were unable to discern the true sense of things and so discover their new word – this spectacle of the needless ruination of such great and noble forces actually may reduce a friend of humanity to despair, evoke not laughter but bitter tears and sour his heart, hitherto pure and believing, with doubt…” (full post) 

That helplessness in Don Quixote is something we all feel. 

There are many ways of interpreting Cervantes’s novel—it’s such a rich, complex book—but I do like Dostoyevsky’s interpretation. 

2/ I like this speech from Sancho: 

“I only understand that while I’m sleeping, I have no fear, no hopes, no work, no glory. Blessed be the person who invented sleep, the cloak that covers all human thoughts, the food that takes away all hunger, water that drives away thirst, fire that warms you when you’re cold, coolness that tempers heat, and, finally, the money with which all things are bought, the scale that makes the shepherd equal to the king and the fool to the wise man...” (P.2, ch.68) 

Contrast that speech with Henry IV’s speech in Shakespeare:  

“How many thousands of my poorest subjects

Are at this hour asleep! O sleep, O gentle sleep,

Nature’s soft nurse, how have I frightened thee,

That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down,

And steep my senses in forgetfulness?

[…] Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose

To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude;

And in the calmest and most stillest night,

With all appliances and means to boot,

Deny it to a king? Then, happy low, lie down!

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” 

(Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3 scene 1) 

Now look at this speech from Don Quixote: 

““… I’d like for us, Sancho, to imitate them and become shepherds, just for the period of our seclusion. I’ll buy some sheep and all the other things needed to be a shepherd, and I’ll call myself ‘the Shepherd Quixotiz’, and you will be ‘the Shepherd Pancino’, and we’ll wander about the hills, woods, and meadows, singing here, lamenting there, drinking the liquid crystal from springs or clear creeks or sometimes from raging rivers. Oak trees will give us their sweet fruit with their generous hand; cork trees will provide a seat with their hard trunks; willows will furnish shade; roses, a sweet aroma; the broad fields, carpets of a thousand harmonizing colors; the stars and moon, light, in spite of the darkness of night; song will give us pleasure; weeping, happiness; Apollo, poetry; love, conceits with which we can become immortal and famous, not only in present times, but also in future ages.” (P.2. ch.67) 

His idealisation of the shepherd’s life makes me think of a speech in Henry VI, Part 3: 

“KING HENRY […] Would I were dead! if God’s good will were so;

For what is in this world but grief and woe?

O God! methinks it were a happy life,

To be no better than a homely swain

[…] Ah, what a life were this! how sweet! how lovely!

Gives not the hawthorn-bush a sweeter shade

To shepherds looking on their silly sheep,

Than doth a rich embroider’d canopy

To kings that fear their subjects’ treachery?

O, yes, it doth; a thousand-fold it doth.

And to conclude, the shepherd’s homely curds,

His cold thin drink out of his leather bottle.

His wonted sleep under a fresh tree’s shade,

All which secure and sweetly he enjoys,

Is far beyond a prince’s delicates,

His viands sparkling in a golden cup,

His body couched in a curious bed,

When care, mistrust, and treason waits on him.”

(Act 2 scene 5)

Neither Shakespeare nor Cervantes have any illusions about the shepherd’s life however. 

3/ Don Quixote is known as the first modern novel*, and also the first postmodern novel. 

I love that Don Quixote is a book about books, about reading and writing and being in a book. Some characters are readers, some are storytellers, some—like Don Quixote and Sancho—are both, but they’re also characters—in the book we’re reading and in the book some other characters have read. I love the different layers of the book, the multiple narrators, the metafiction. But the thing I especially love about the book, the equivalent of which I reckon the postmodern novels of the 20th century don’t have, is what Cervantes does with the fake Don Quixote written by Avellaneda, to whom he refers a few times as “the Aragonese”. He hates that book! 

(Apologies to other novelists, but Cervantes must be the wittiest, funniest, and most likeable of novelists). 

4/ At this point, I guess some bloggers may put out a spoiler alert, but could any reveal spoil a wonderful book such as Don Quixote? And it came out before Shakespeare’s death!

The death scene of Don Quixote—or I should say, Alonso Quixano—must be one of the most memorable deaths in fiction. Sancho’s speech is heartbreaking. 

I have now finished reading Don Quixote. Over 5 weeks for Part 2. About 8 weeks (not including the break) for the whole book. 

It is one of the greatest novels I’ve ever read. 

*: You know my stance on this.