Written by Eric Holzwarth*
We can easily imagine the shaded hues that sketched the landscape in the pre-dawn hours when Don Quixote first rode forth, newly christened, determined to revive the forgotten art of knight-errantry — an art now practiced only with pen and ink. It is a hazy morning, “one of those sweltering July days,” and the outlines of things vibrate with the portent of the oncoming heat, distorting their own edges, casting unanswered shadows in the uneven light. Quixote will never leave the blur of this morning, for he will insist upon meeting the ambiguity of the world with the clarity of his textual models — the romances of knight-errantry — and so will never truly meet it at all. Rather will he move through the world like the eye of a small, verbal hurricane, wreaking disorder on those around him, moving unmoved between a textual imagination and a skeptical world. As such, disorder is the state of Don Quixote’s life, and the novel that tells his story offers an account of the clash between his text and the world, between the Book and the Real.
The clarity of the disorder so well recounted in Don Quixote evokes a reciprocal image for us, and so we can also imagine the day upon which a thin and aging man, a retired soldier living on a meager government pension, takes up his new-found weapon in his remaining good hand to draft the outlines of a tale so subtle in complexity that it runs over the imagination’s empty page like clear, cool water. We can imagine this figure because the story he writes is the double of his own predicament as a writer, and the text he produces, standing at the threshold of a new, and for the first time, truly literary epoch, marks the beginning of a new genre of literature: the modern novel. His work can be said to structure the entire history of that genre, for it writes the disappearance of the clear outlines of easily available truth, of unequivocal, non-textual reality, of the verity of the spoken and written word and the pure immediacy of lived experience. With Don Quixote, life becomes a kind of escapade with language, and the attempt to achieve absolute clarity on its ironic cast will always appear, in all senses a Quixotic enterprise.
The novel can be read simply as a zany tale of a daft man’s wacky adventures. But we can also read more deeply. Don Quixote, that constant victim of “enchantment,” is the quintessential literary character, because he’s made of literature. He is literary through and through. Since Aristotle, we have become accustomed to viewing art as imitating life; this is the theory of “mimesis.” Don Quixote turns that assumption upside down and plays with it. Let’s see how. At first glance, Cervantes has written a story about a knight who needs to stop reading stories — stories about knights. But looking closely, we notice something odd. Quixote is a character in the novel who strives to be . . . a character in a novel. The book, Don Quixote, is often praised for its realism, and indeed much of the dialogue and action are wonderfully realistic, so much so that they draw us into the novel. And yet Quixote is “realistically” portrayed as a totally unreal figure – someone who wants to be in a book, who believes he is in a book. And frankly, we must admit that’s precisely where he is! For him, life imitates art.
He got into this situation by reading fiction. So the book prompts us to ask: Is fiction good or bad? “Fictions are bad,” the novel says, “they poisoned his mind.” But we enjoy reading the book, so is that really the answer? Maybe the answer is “don’t read unrealistic romances.” OK, fine; what should we read? “Well, read this (unrealistic) fiction” — clearly an ironic response.
Soon the levels of irony multiply. After all, is Quixote a real knight errant? No, he’s a pretend knight errant. To say that he’s a knight errant is to assert a fiction. He’s a fictional knight errant. Don Quixote is a fiction, a fiction of his own making. He is “caught” in fiction. He can’t escape it. In Part II he meets people who know him as a literary character in Part I! He encounters himself as a character – a fiction!
“Don Quixote is a fiction of his own making,”
So the lesson seems to be as follows: 1: to read fiction is to misread life; this is Don Quixote’s problem.
But, what are we readers doing? We are in a book club, constantly reading fiction. We do so because we believe that, in some way, novels are a guide to life; they help us explore and interpret life’s meaning.
So lesson 2 seems to be: don’t trust lesson 1!
Quixote’s deathbed “conversion” back to sanity and away from his literary madness is also ironic. After all, if we took it seriously, it would be like having the entire novel erase itself! Why go to all this trouble reading a 930-page novel if the point is to stop reading novels?
Imitation permeates the novel: The “author” cites it in the Prologue (“like begets like. . . [the author] only has to make use of mimesis in the writing, and the more precise, the better the writing will be,” and this is constantly referenced in the story. Imitation is obviously key to Quixote’s character: he imitates the knights of old, but also, he and Sancho imitate each other – they “take turns” at not being able to recognize Dulcinea; Sancho comes to display wisdom, and Quixote often devolves into cliché. More importantly: other characters imitate Quixote: they join in his game and play along, “pretending” to be characters in various stories — especially his friends and “the Bachelor” (who pretends to be a knight – twice) to get him to come home and retire from pretending. These characters become Quixote’s double, even if inadvertently. It’s no accident that the “Bachelor” calls himself “the Knight of Mirrors.” Everyone joins in Quixote’s imitative play.
Indeed, perhaps all modern readers are “children” of Don Quixote, imitating him in some way. That’s a broad claim. But consider: If you find meaning in fiction and seek to use that meaning to better understand, or even change, the world, you might be a child of Don Quixote, because that’s what he does. Perhaps the difference between chivalric romances —mere entertainments that no one takes seriously — and novels is that novels drew you into the story. They create in the reader a second self, the reading self who willingly suspends disbelief in order to believe and understand. They create in us “doubles” of Don Quixote, the man caught between literature and the world.
After reading Don Quixote, readers will likely fall somewhere between Quixote’s naïveté (believing in the extreme) and the savvy and literalist, Sancho. They may know what’s true or who choose not to know: that’s the reader’s, our self’s double. The genre “novel,” like Quixote himself, continually tests the relationship between the book and the world, occasionally erasing the boundary between the two. It’s a little mad when you think about it. Perhaps even enchanting. I welcome your comments in the dialogue box below:
Works Consulted
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton University Press, 1953)
Manuel Duran and Fay Rogg, Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006)
Marthe Robert, The Old and the New: From Don Quixote to Kafka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977)
Ilan Stavans, Quixote: The Novel and the World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2015)
Cover Image from Wikipedia Commons
- Eric Holzwarth holds a Ph.D. in Religion and Literature from the University of Chicago. He taught courses for the Religion Department at Syracuse University off and on during his 30-some years of administrative work, which included inaugurating and running the Syracuse Symposium lecture series, running the daily operation of the S.U Honors Program, and other administrative nonsense. In recent years, he has been teaching and taking courses at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Richmond and participating in the Classic Book Club near Richmond (VA).
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