This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Q — Quixote

In the figure of Don Quixote, Michel Foucault sees a symbol of the modern divorce between the word and the object. An emissary of the past, Don Quixote desperately searches for the place where the two may meet, as in the medieval order of things. The Quixotic pilgrimage is a search for similarities, and Foucault observes how Don Quixote rapidly recruits the weakest analogies: for him, everything is a latent sign that must be awakened to speak and to demonstrate the identity of words and objects: stocky peasant women are princesses, windmills are giants, inns are castles because such are the identities that words ascribe to objects in the books of Don Quixote.

But seeing as how flocks of sheep are really flocks of sheep and not armies, Don Quixote, orphan of the universe where words and objects no longer correspond, travels alone, the incarnation of the eternal dilemma of the modern novel that he inaugurates with his tale: How to achieve unity without sacrificing diversity? How to maintain the analogy damaged by impertinent humanistic curiosity as well as the difference threatened by the hunger for restored unity? How to fill the deep abyss between words and things through the divorce between analogy and difference?

Don Quixote contains both the question and the answer: the divorce between objects and words that previously corresponded cannot be fixed by a new setting or “placement” but rather by displacement. Set in his place by the static world of the knight errant, Don Quixote wants to destroy the paradox of an immobile adventure, prisoner to the old books in his library in the immutable village of La Mancha, and displace himself — that is, enter into movement. And that, in the age of antiquity, was how men distinguished themselves from gods: they displaced themselves. They moved. Don Quixote believes that he is traveling so that he may reestablish the unity of man and the faith that is his certainty, though in reality he travels only to find himself in a new physical space where everything has become a problem, beginning with the novel that Don Quixote inhabits.

The modern novel, a perpetual invitation to leave oneself and see oneself and the world as an unfinished problem, implies a kind of displacement similar to that of Don Quixote, although we may venture to say that no other novel — not even at its most experimental — has been able to propose displacements as radical as those of Cervantes. The radical displacement from purity to impurity and to the dissolution of genres, from classic narrative authority to the manifestation of multiple points of view, from the residual tradition of oral, tavern-oriented storytelling to the full Cervantine awareness that the novel is to be read by a reader and printed at a printing press, Don Quixote is a novel, to use the words of Claudio Guillén, that lives in “active dialogue” with itself. Its displacement of genres, authorities, and recipients of the verbal fact grant the novel an open destiny, forever unfinished, incessantly redefined: the novel is the art of displacement.

Don Quixote is the first modern novel, and its historical paradox is that it emerges from the Spanish Counter-Reformation, the Inquisition, the dogmas declaring purity of blood and Catholic orthodoxy. In the Spain that exiled half of itself when it expelled the Jews in 1492 and the Moors in 1603, Don Quixote is a paradox of the paradox. He is a reader of chivalric tales, a man who yearns to restore the medieval values of honor, justice, and courage, and to do this he leaves his home in the Castilian plain, mounted atop a feeble nag, accompanied by a plump little squire straddling a mule.

Don Quixote is a reader. But despite the nostalgia he feels for the Middle Ages, he is a modern reader who reads his books in printed form, thanks to the genius of the German editor Gutenberg. Mad about books, Don Quixote transforms his reading into madness and, possessed by both, wishes to take the things he reads about and turn them into reality. He wants to resuscitate a lost world, an ideal world. But when he leaves his village, he stumbles upon a world that is far from ideal, a world of bandits and chain gangs, goatherds, rogues, scullery maids of easy virtue, and unscrupulous innkeepers all too willing to ridicule him, batter him, and thrash him about in a blanket.

Nevertheless, despite his battles with reality, Don Quixote insists upon seeing giants where there are only windmills and armies where there are only flocks of sheep. He sees them because he has read about them. He sees them because the things he has read have told him to see them that way. His reading is his madness. Su lectura es su locura.

Cervantes’s genius lies in his ability to transform this fable of chivalric nostalgia into the foundational novel of critical modernism. Because while it emerges from a dogmatic world of certainty and faith, Don Quixote is itself the incarnation of the modern world and all its uncertainty.

Everything is uncertain in the Quixote. The authorship, uncertain. Who wrote the book? Cide Hamete Benengeli, the Arab scribe whose papers were translated into Spanish by an anonymous morisco writer? The author of the apocryphal version, Avellaneda, whose falsehoods lead Don Quixote to a printing press where he discovers that he is a character in a book? Some man named Cervantes? Somebody called De Saavedra? The adversity of the former? Or the liberty of the latter?

Uncertain name: Don Quixote is but one of the many names of a certain Alonso Quijano (or might it be Quezada, or Quixada?) who calls himself Quijote for a more epic effect, but who becomes Quijotiz for a more pastoral effect, or Azote for micomicomical effects⁴ in the castle of the Dukes. The names constantly change. Rocinante was Rocín antes: literally, “Rocín, before.” The idealized damsel Dulcinea is actually Aldonza, a common peasant woman. The names of the enemies change too. The enchanter Mambrino becomes the malevolent Malandrino. Even the authors of the book, already somewhat ambiguous, change names. In Sancho’s version, Benengeli becomes Berenjena — that is, “aubergine.”

Uncertain places: to start with, the very place from which Don Quixote emerges, “somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember.”⁵ And yet is there any doubt that this is the decadent Spain of Philip III, the Spain of rampant corruption, aristocratic whims, cities teeming with destitute souls, the Spain of rogues and violent assaults? The Spain of Roque Gunart, the real-life attacker and contraband smuggler who makes his appearance in the novel.

Uncertainty of the genre; Cervantes inaugurates the modern novel by breaking through every genre so that they all may have room to exist in a genre of genres, the novel. The epic tale of Quixote evolves, hand in hand, with the picaresque tale of Sancho. But Cervantes also gives a voice to the morisco story, the romantic novel, the Byzantine narrative, comedy and drama, philosophy and the carnival, as well as the novel within the novel.

His patent disregard for the purity of the genre is as remarkable as that of his great contemporary Shakespeare — so contemporary that they died on the same date, April 23, 1616, if not the same day, for Cervantes went by the Gregorian calendar, whereas Shakespeare lived by Julian hours. But purity was not what Shakespeare and Cervantes were after: what they cared about was poetic liberty, in its broadest possible form.

The modern uncertainty of Don Quixote does not, however, exclude the lasting values that modernity must save, or perpetuate, so as not to dissipate into moral ambiguity. One of these values is love, and on this point at least, Don Quixote does not delude himself. He idealizes Dulcinea but, in one surprising passage, admits that she is, in fact, Aldonza, the stocky country peasant woman. But doesn’t this quality of love possess the ability to transform the beloved into something incomparable, something above and beyond the considerations of wealth or poverty, vulgarity or nobility? “And therefore,” says Don Quixote, “it is enough for me to think and believe that my good Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and virtuous; as for her lineage, it matters little. . I depict her in my imagination as I wish her to be. . Let each man say what he chooses. . ”

The other value is honor, personal integrity, and on this point Don Quixote’s arrival at the castle of the Dukes is the most revealing episode of all. Until this moment, the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance has believed that the inns he has visited were castles and the servant girls, princesses. Now, when the Dukes offer him a real castle with genuine princesses (plus an island for Sancho to rule over), the Quixotic illusion falls apart. Reality robs him of his imagination. Love turns into something cruel: the farces of Clavileño and the Dolorous One. When Quixote’s dreams become reality, Quixote can no longer imagine.

He returns to his village. He emerges from his madness, though only to die. “There are no birds today in yesterday’s nests.” With good reason Dostoevsky said that Don Quixote is “the saddest book ever written, for it is the story of an illusion lost.”

Lost Illusions is the title that Balzac gives his magnificent series of Lucien de Rubempré novels, proving that Don Quixote is the founder of the modern world, bestowing upon it novels of tears and sadness, illusion and disillusion, the logic of madness, the madness of logic, the uncertainty of all things, and the certainty that all lasting reality is based firmly on the imagination.