Quixotic Times

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.