Quixote Read online

  Section Two, “The World,” follows the vertiginous speed at which El Quijote became larger than life, a platform of arrival and departure, a center of gravity for all Western literature —the universe bounded in a nutshell, its readers counting themselves kings of infinite space. I use the military defeat Spain suffered against the British in 1588, almost two decades before Cervantes wrote the First Part, to explore the theme of loss for Spain of its colonies across the Atlantic Ocean, which El Quijote, for better or worse, has come to represent. I begin this section with a disquisition on how Cervantes’s book gave rise to an ideology known as Quijotismo and how that ideology played out during various historical periods in Spanish history, especially—through the works of Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset—at the end of the nineteenth century during the Spanish-American War of 1898, when the country ceded control of its satellites in the Caribbean Basin and the Philippines. The novel then inspired a series of homages in the Hispanic world, direct or otherwise, that culminated in what came to be known as Menardismo, the capacity to be creative in a landscape defined by unoriginality. In Latin America, it is a book for all seasons, which means everyone finds in it what they’re looking for, even if that find is apocryphal. For instance, a defiant line from it—“Ladran, Sancho, señal que cabalgamos,” They are barking, Sancho, proof that we’re still riding forward—has often been quoted by politicians like Eva Perón and Hugo Chávez, as well as writers and artists, even though it is nowhere to be found in the novel.

  The second section of this book then moves to an even larger stage. Quantitatively, the number of adaptations of El Quijote in literature, chess sets, and so on is endless. I first focus on the elements that unite Cervantes and Shakespeare, the two giants of the European Renaissance. I explore the way German Romantics, such as Goethe and Richard Strauss, idealized the story, and I address the countless ways the novel, as a popular icon in mass culture, inspired lithographers like Gustave Doré and Expressionist painters like Picasso. I then reflect on its adaptations into music, opera, theater, film, and even video games. I compare El Quijote to Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, talk about Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s infatuation with the novel, and discuss Franz Kafka’s famous parable in which Sancho is the actual creator of Don Quixote, as well as Jorge Luis Borges’s influential short story, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” in which a nineteenth-century French Symbolist attempts to rewrite—not copy but rewrite—Cervantes’s novel. I meditate on the vicissitudes of El Quijote in translation, concentrating on the knight-errant’s adventures in English, a language in which there are more than twenty full-fledged renditions, some of which I compare and contrast. And I pay special attention to the novel’s reception in the United States, from the Founding Fathers to William Cullen Bryant and James Russell Lowell, from Herman Melville to Mark Twain, from John Steinbeck to Susan Sontag. I talk about the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, especially about its theme song, “The Impossible Dream,” and even discuss an episode of The Muppet Show.

  There are travel agencies making their livelihood on El Quijote, as is a supermarket chain in Japan. Academic conferences have been devoted to a single word from the novel, cookbooks and clothing lines have been inspired by it, and political parties have built their gravitas on the knight-errant’s resilience. Along the way, I discuss Manuel de Falla, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and György Lukács, Georg Philipp Telemann and Michel Foucault, Erasmus of Rotterdam and George Balanchine, and José Guadalupe Posada.

  In spite of the collection of Quixotalia I have amassed through the years, this overabundance of novel-related stuff still seems rather implausible to me. Even more implausible is that Cervantes wasn’t far from his death when he completed the book’s final scene. That is, he could have died without finishing it, which means we would have been left without the source from which we drink every day. And yet, he managed to make Alonso Quijano repent his sins, refute his lifelong delusions of chivalric grandeur, and die peacefully in his own bed.

  The history of how El Quijote became an international sensation is also the history of how Western civilization came to terms with its artistic vision. This book, then, is an invitation to engage in cultural history that traces El Quijote’s path from the surprising success it became in early-seventeenth-century Spain to the global moneymaking machine it is now. My purpose is to explain how Cervantes, a second-rate poet and dramaturge of modest esteem, became, along with his contemporaries Shakespeare and Montaigne, the unlikely father of modernity.

  El Quijote makes me proud of having been born into the Spanish language. In fact, I am convinced that the Spanish language exists in order for this magisterial novel to inhabit it. Hispanic civilization—its people, its culture, its politics—would not be what it is without El Quijote. Simultaneously, I counterargue that, against common perceptions, classics have no nationality. As the reader will find out, these two statements are not incompatible.

  1

  IN HIS LIKENESS

  When Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra died in Madrid at the age of sixty-eight on the evening of April 22, 1616, and his remains were buried in an unmarked grave at the Convent of the Barefoot Trinitarians (Trinitarias Descalzas), few—not even Cervantes himself, in spite of his reputation as the “Prince of Wits”—predicted that his work would have a secure place on the bookshelf of classics. It is true that the First Part of his magnum opus, El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha—in English The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote of la Mancha—had achieved a succès d’estime that reached far and wide. But in early-seventeenth-century Spain, the novel wasn’t considered as prestigious as other literary genres, such as the comedia, a favorite of theater-goers, or the sonnet, a poetic form that elicited obsessive devotion among lovers of prosody.

  This novel in particular was a spoof; that is, it was not considered a serious work of artistic expression. Plus, Cervantes was known as a playwright of modest talent, not as celebrated as Félix Arturo Lope de Vega y Carpio, who was known as the “Phoenix of Wits” and author of nearly eighteen hundred comedias and three thousand sonnets, few of which survive today. Nor did Cervantes’s sonnets or other poetic exercises, also seen as tame in comparison to those by such figures as Francisco de Quevedo and Luis de Góngora, grant him a secure place among his literary peers. Though today the Spanish government offers the annual Premio Cervantes to honor the lifetime achievement of an outstanding writer in the Spanish language, an award that frequently goes to figures whose work coheres with the intellectual status quo, it is unlikely that Cervantes himself would have been the recipient of such an award. It was Lope de Vega, in fact, who, commenting on the writers on whose oeuvre readers needed to keep an eye on the upcoming year (1604, though the date is debatable), mercilessly stated, “None is as bad as Cervantes.”

  The overall plot of El Quijote is rather easy to summarize, although any summary of it inevitably feels reductive, even stilted. A fiftyish hidalgo by the name of Alonso Quijano (also known as Quijana, Quijada, and Quesada), living in a hacienda in an unknown place in the region of La Mancha in central Spain, has been spending his days reading novels of chivalry, marvel-filled cycles of narratives, extremely popular among aristocratic readers, written in prose or verse and based on fantastic legends that featured a masculine hero, a knight-errant who embarks on a quest while usually declaring Platonic love for his dame. The word hidalgo comes from fidalgo. According to lore, it means hijo de algo, child of someone. In truth, it refers to a member of the lower nobility. It might also refer to someone whose ancestry was defined by purity of blood, that is, one who came from a family of old Christians.

  In Spain at the time, there were different kinds of hidalgos, as listed in the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (DRAE), including the hidalgo de ejecutoria, someone whose blood lineage makes him such, and the hidalgo de privilegio, a person whose position is acquired through money or privilege. The novel’s narrator doesn’t offer any further detail. The reader is simply told that the protago
nist is a hidalgo who lives with his niece, who is under twenty; a female housekeeper, who is past forty; and a lad who does the field work. That this hidalgo is on good terms with the town’s priest and barber. And that he doesn’t attend to the affairs of his hacienda because he spends all his time reading. Indeed, such is his habit that, in John Ormsby’s English translation (hereafter used, unless stated otherwise), published in London in 1885, we are told:

  He became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.

  Having “lost his wits,” Alonso Quijano suddenly convinces himself he is a knight-errant like Palmerin of England and Amadis of Gaul. Persuading himself that his mission in life is to correct all of the world’s ills, he comes up with the heroic name of Don Quixote of La Mancha, turns the beautiful village girl Aldonza Lorenzo into his lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and identifies a commoner known as Sancho Panza as his squire and loyal companion.

  All these events are conveyed in just a few early pages. The rest of the plot is composed of Don Quixote’s serendipitous adventures. He travels as far as Barcelona on the Mediterranean Sea. In total, he has three expeditions, from which he invariably comes back to his hacienda beaten up and in questionable health. In a famous episode, he fights against windmills, thinking they are giants. In another, he frees some prisoners, only to be beaten up by them. In another episode, he faces a fierce African lion being transported in a cage. In yet another, he enters a mysterious cave and watches a puppet show, only to destroy the whole set in a rage because one of the characters in the show is being abused and he wants to correct that wrong. Then, in reward for Sancho’s services, Don Quixote promises him the governorship of the fictional island Barataria, which becomes real toward the conclusion of the novel. And, in the longest episode in the Second Part, the knight-errant and his squire are hosted in a castle by the Duke and the Duchess, where, in carnivalesque fashion, they are ridiculed by everyone.

  There is no better way to describe El Quijote than as an intermittent, discontinuous series of adventures unified—at times rather tenuously—by the presence of Don Quixote and Sancho. I say tenuously because Cervantes’s novel is interrupted by small, novella-length subplots, some of which are told by secondary characters to the knight-errant and his squire, who become mere spectators, as disengaged as the book’s reader. Throughout the narrative, the tension between what is real and what is imagined, what the actual world presents and what Don Quixote sees, is the engine moving the action forward. In his desire to bring justice to a society marked by inequality, immorality, and corruption, the knight-errant is convinced that the world, his as well as ours, is controlled by enchanters, especially Friston the Magician, the most sneaky of them all. These magicians mean to undermine Don Quixote’s quest for justice. As the storyline progresses, various supporting characters, in order to subdue Don Quixote and appease his desire to subvert the status quo, pretend they too exist in his imaginary universe, being knights themselves, as well as princesses and other mythical types. In the end, Alonso Quijano surrenders his identity as Don Quixote and, on his deathbed, apologizes for the endless sequence of mishaps he put others through.

  In spite of its flaws, El Quijote, a parody of chivalry novels—those very novels that led Don Quixote to madness—gained popularity because it announced the dawn of a new era in which the hero was no longer superhuman. Instead, he was portrayed as vulnerable, imperfect, and, therefore, human in all his frailties. Novels of chivalry were to early modern Europe of the sixteenth century what thrillers are to our age. The Italian Espejo de caballerías, translated into Spanish by Pedro López de Santa Catalina, the Portuguese Palmerín de Inglaterra by Moraes, the native Iberian Belianís de Grecia by Fernández, and countless other chivalry titles, either imported or made for national consumption, fed an insatiable hunger. Cervantes opened his book with spin-off poems dedicated to some of these favorites, such as this sonnet supposedly written by Amadis of Gaul to Don Quixote:

  Thou that didst imitate that life of mine

  When I in lonely sadness on the great

  Rock Pena Pobre sat disconsolate,

  In self-imposed penance there to pine;

  Thou, whose sole beverage was the bitter brine

  Of thine own tears, and who withouten plate

  Of silver, copper, tin, in lowly state

  Off the bare earth and on earth’s fruits didst dine;

  Live thou, of thine eternal glory sure.

  So long as on the round of the fourth sphere

  The bright Apollo shall his coursers steer,

  In thy renown thou shalt remain secure,

  Thy country’s name in story shall endure,

  And thy sage author stand without a peer.

  Novels of chivalry adhere to a basic five-step formula: one, an open-ended structure, whereby a hero’s adventures are prolonged in book after book, similar to the Sherlock Holmes or James Bond series; two, the devotion to an idealized woman to whom the hero declares his Platonic love, expressed through his actions on the battlefield; three, a Christian concept of pride and honor against the infidels, who depend on enchantment to succeed in their treacherous tasks; four, the lost manuscript, through which the story of the extraordinary hero could be accessed directly, and without which the narrative resorts to an accumulation of indirect accounts; and five, the setting in an imaginary geography filled with enchanted castles, dragons, monsters, and other chimeras.

  Spanish civilization itself is built on the myth of a knight, Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, alias El Cid Campeador, an eleventh-century Christian crusader and emblem of valor on which the knight-errant tradition is based. El Cid is said to have fought against the Moors, his former allies, advancing a process that ultimately resulted in an attempt at the unification of Spain under the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand in 1492. Though El Cid’s odyssey is rooted in historical fact, he and the other knights of chivalry literature are invariably fictitious.

  Lord Byron said that El Quijote “smiled Spain’s chivalry away.” Parody was Cervantes’s way of giving new life to archetypical characters that had become stilted from overuse. The protagonists, the knight-errant and his squire, aren’t cartoonish; instead they are made of flesh and bone. Alonso Quijano lives with a niece and a housekeeper. At first he is portrayed as reclusive, with little interest in social interactions. His horse, Rocinante, is frail. Sancho Panza has a wife and children and is an uneducated villager who dreams of becoming the governor of an island. Neither he nor Don Quixote is fit for the road, let alone for battle. Unlike the characters created by Amadis of Gaul and other chivalry authors, Don Quixote and Sancho suffer inner doubts. El Quijote, after all, is a forerunner of the nineteenth-century bildungsroman, a novel of education, a novel about the quest for self-definition.

  Such comedic depiction of social affairs quickly became a favorite of readers worldwide because they saw in it a vivid assessment of human folly. In the first decade of the seventeenth century, the nation had just entered a new political era. Philip II, also called Philip the Prudent, a member of the House of Habsburg, died in 1598. He was an autocrat who negotiated the nation’s morisco (e.g., Christians of Moorish descent) problem by forcing the remaining Muslim population to convert to Christianity, which sometimes resulted in revolt. He further burdened the empire with debt and brought about astronomical inflation. The Armada had been magisterially defeated more than a couple of decades prior. The Spanish Empire was in disarray, and there was a general mistrust of the nation, its political quagmire, its economic gambles, in European circles. The roots of anti-Hispanism, a negative response to all things Iberian from Spain’s American colonies, were also established in this period.

  The person in charge of sending the manuscript to the printer was Francisco de Robles. The publisher was Juan de la Cuesta. The first printing of El Quijote, also known as the princeps,
considered by Cervantistas to be the official publication of the First Part of Cervantes’s novel, was of eighteen hundred copies in 1605. The printing took years to sell out. Still, it seems to have caught on because pirated editions quickly showed up in Valencia and Aragón in Spain, as well as in Lisbon, Portugal. It is known that copies of the novel also made it as a kind of samizdat to the New World, where the Holy Office of the Inquisition had banned novels—fiction in general—for dangerously promoting paganism. The knight and his squire soon became fixtures of festivals as costumed figures, effigies, and wooden sculptures paraded through the streets of Mexico and Peru. Yet Cervantes’s contract, in retrospect at least, appears to have been rather lousy. When he died, not long after the publication of the Second Part, his assets and those of his family were almost nonexistent.

  Likewise, neither the manuscript of El Quijote nor the proofs survived. This is unnerving to Cervantistas eager to understand the method the author used to compose the novel. Did he have a preconceived plan? Was there a journal he found helpful during the composition? Were there numerous drafts? Did he cross out words, lines, entire paragraphs? We don’t have manuscripts of any of his other books either, among them La Galatea (1585) and Voyage to Parnassus (1614), or his entremeses, his brief one-act theater pieces, often performed before a play.

  About a hundred typos were corrected in the princeps. But other problems weren’t as easily solvable since they relate to the novel’s structure and the author’s disposition. For instance, at several points the novel includes entire subplots—actually, autonomous novellas, such as The Ill-Conceived Curiosity and The Captive’s Tale—which, as readers frequently point out, have little connection to the novel’s central theme. The author, in a moment of laziness, seems to have taken these manuscripts out of a drawer and inserted them. Scholars do not take these to be full-fledged mistakes. They are more like detours, typical of premodern literature, where storytelling was not understood as a straight line between point A and point Z. These novellas have their charm. If pushed to find meaning in them, a savvy reader will intuitively link them to something in the overall narrative arc.