I realised a lot of my longer posts lately have pretty much ended up all being very much on the same theme, so I decided I would come and write about something different and not end up with the same final paragraph. I want to tell you about the complexity of the novel Don Quixote.
You may recall, if you read this blog, that I last posted about Miguel de Cervantes’ masterpiece probably a good 6 months ago. I still haven’t finished the whole novel (it’s 900+ pages long – give me a break), but I did finish (and study) the first part a few months ago and am halfway through the second part. What’s so intriguing about this book it’s the interplay between history and fiction, real and imagined, truth and falsity, and I’m deeply indebted to Bruce Wardropper’s article “Don Quixote: story or history” for alerting me to it.
The thing is, if you very simply described what Cervantes’ novel is about, you would say it’s about an intelligent, middle-aged man who reads a heck of a lot of ‘chivalric’ novels, begins to believe they are all histories (not fictions), and then decides, in his odd form of insanity, to become a ‘knight errant’ himself, making up his own title, naming his ‘steed’, picking a squire and even inventing a Lady to be in love with. And he believes absolutely in the reality of the situation he has created. As he travels about Spain searching for adventures, his insanity continues and he mistakes windmills for giants, whores for damsels, inns for castle and criminals for unjustly imprisoned people. Hilarity ensues. You can more than enjoy the novel on this level.
But there’s more. Oh so much more. Firstly, Cervantes has called his fictional work a true history. This immediately creates a kind of paradox which actually reflects what was going on in literature and other writing in late medieval Europe. The classical division between poetry and prose had been broken down, raising questions about how readers know when prose is true or false. This was then played on relentlessly by the production of a heap of counterfeit histories. People actually started to believe them, so there was this huge practical and well as philosophical problem for scholars, who were trying to tie evidence to the claims of these histories.
That’s the context of Cervantes’ fictional ‘true history’. And within this context you can readily argue that the root cause of Don Quixote’s madness is his inability to distinguish the true from the false (the same struggle faced by the scholars of the day). This has become so much more obvious in the second part of the book. There are continual references to characters being bemused by Quixote’s ability to speak nonsense one moment (about knight errantry) but great wisdom the next (about pretty much anything else in life). In calling his fictional novel a ‘history’, Cervantes obliterates the line between the real and the imaginary, and this in turn thrusts the reader into the danger of sharing in Quixote’s madness themselves. What’s so cool about this is that Cervantes is satiring man’s gullibility not only through his portrayal of Don Quixote, but also through his readers. And I think this makes the theme much more universal, because you no longer point to a single ‘man’ – you end up seeing it in everyone who reads.
Again, this becomes even more intense and obvious in the second part of the novel. You begin to see how much fun Cervantes must have had playing with truth and fiction in his work. Firstly, apart from just labelling the novel a ‘true history’ Cervantes goes out of his way to try and convince you it’s real. He spins this yarn about the novel being a translation of an Arabic script he found which records the true events of Don Quixote’s life. Then in the second part, he has a great deal of fun. After he wrote the first part, someone else wrote their own ‘sequel’ to the novel, a fact that Cervantes addresses head on at the beginning of his own authentic sequel. Oh it’s just brilliant.
But again, that’s not all. It’s still more complex, because you can tell as you read that Cervantes isn’t writing solely to make fun of mankind. In the second part of the novel, other characters begin to indulge Don Quixote in his madness. I think I’m about to begin the best chapters on this, but it has already happened in part. Characters enjoy playing along with Quixote, seeing how far his madness goes, pretending to be what he believes they are. And I think this fits in with what Wardropper adds at the end of his article: that Cervantes blurs the line between true and false in order to protest against the dogma of the Counter-Reformation and instead represent the truth about man’s life. The truth that man doesn’t think categorically and that truth is complex – man can, in fact, only catch glimpses of partial truth. The fact that other characters delight in the madness or refuse to try and sort out Quixote’s madness from his great intelligence speaks to this fact that we don’t think categorically in terms of true and false. There is a fluidity, a complexity to the truth, because we all see the world in a slightly different way.
Oh man, so cool. OF course, there must be a plethora of other ways you can read this novel and other awesome themes present in it. But I love the complexity and richness of this true/false, real/imagined idea and what it says about humanity, that we’re not categorical, dogmatic beings, but people grasping at the complex, many-layered truth of life, seeing only glimpses.
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