Don Quixote
Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
THE LITERARY WORK
A novel set in Spain in the late 1500s and early 1600s; Part 1 published in Spanish (as El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha) in 1605, in English in 1612; Part 2 in Spanish (as Segunda parte del Ingenioso cavallero Don Quixote de la Mancha) in 1615, in English in 1620.
SYNOPSIS
After reading too many popular tales of chivalry, an idealistic, imaginative middle-aged gentleman goes mad, remakes himself as a knight, and, in imitation of his favorite fictional heroes, embarks on a series of adventures with his “squire,” an illiterate peasant.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was born in 1547 in the university town of Alcalá de Henares, Spain, to a struggling barber-surgeon’s family. Unable to afford enrollment in the university, Cervantes acquired a different sort of education by joining the military. He served with distinction against the Turks in the battle of Lepanto (1571; in Greece), permanently losing the use of his left hand in the process. On the voyage home, he and his brother were captured by Barbary Coast pirates and imprisoned for five years in Algeria. After being ransomed, Cervantes returned to Spain to find the country in economic peril and his job prospects slim. He applied for posts in Spain’s overseas colonies but, unable to secure one, took a job as a tax collector; when his accounts failed to balance, the job landed him in the Royal Prison of Seville. Cervantes has hinted that the seeds of Don Quixote (spelled Don Quijote in modern Spanish) took root during this imprisonment. At age 58, Cervantes experienced his first literary success by publishing Part 1 of this novel. He went on to write numerous poems, plays, and fictional works, most notably the Exemplary Tales in 1613 and Part 2 of Don Quixote in 1615. A parody of the chivalric romances popular in Cervantes’s day, Don Quixote informs as it entertains. The work is considered the first modern novel because of how its central characters interact and because of its general reflections on life in Counter-Reformation Spain.
Events in History at the Time of the Novel
Spain’s Golden Age—imperial pre-eminence
Cervantes was born 50 years into Spain’s ascension as a global empire. The nation rapidly achieved the rank of a world power after the union through marriage of Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469. In 1492 Columbus’s discovery of the New World gave Spain footholds in both Americas, lands occupied by indigenous peoples, whom Spain proceeded to conquer and colonize. Shortly thereafter, through war and marriage, Spain gained control of most of Western Europe, including much of Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria. The breadth of Spain’s achievement was awe-inspiring, prompting King Ferdinand to claim in 1514, “the crown of Spain has not for over seven hundred years been as great or resplendent as it now is” (Ferdinand in Kamen, p. 9). The “seven hundred years” harks back to Spain’s 1492 reconquest of the last of the Muslim hold-outs in Granada, after more than seven centuries of widespread Muslim rule. Also in 1492 the “Catholic Monarchs” Isabella and Ferdinand called for the expulsion or forced conversion of all Jews.
Isabella and Ferdinand pursued a policy of Catholicizing all the subjects within their vast domain. They used a tribunal of priests, the Holy Inquisition, to test the purity of the religious faith of their converted subjects. Their successor and grandson Charles I of Castile (reigned 1516–56), also known as Charles V of the Holy Roman Empire, held grander ambitions for the achievement of a universal monarchy or united “Christendom” under Spain’s direction. This conception of a Holy Roman Empire, a Christian version of the ancient Roman Empire, enjoyed favor among the Spanish nobility, the Spanish Catholic Church, and Spanish humanists with their esteem for classical learning. (Humanists favored a revival of Greek and Roman letters and an individualistic, critical bent that would manifest itself in art.) Spain’s achievements, indeed astounding, gave rise to an intense pride, which “revealed itself in a feeling of theological, and sometimes even of racial, superiority over others” (Kamen, pp. 193–94).
Whether or not Charles I himself sought world domination is debatable; however, his enemies—the French and the Ottoman Turks—took the threat seriously and became Spain’s chief rivals for power in Europe, embarking on a series of wars through the next century. Meanwhile, northern Europe saw the onset of movements to reform Christianity. The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus proposed disciplining the Catholic Church from within; reforms proposed by the German monk Martin Luther amounted to a disciplining from without, initiating in 1517 the Reformation, which divided Latin Christendom into Protestant and Catholic factions. Spain, for its part, continued to be a staunchly Catholic nation. But by 1550 its clergy was showing the same excesses common elsewhere in Europe: priests were notoriously absent from parishes; churchmen kept concubines and became famous for their illiteracy and ignorance. Such failings, along with the Reformation, led to the Counter-Reformation, a militant movement to reform the Church from within while opposing the Protestants and Erasmus. This militancy gave rise to some of the most unforgettable works of Spanish culture as well as to some of its most forgettable.
Spain’s Golden Age—literary pre-eminence
Don Quixote is only one of the products of Spanish cultural pre-eminence from about 1550 to 1650. The era saw Spain produce some of the finest literature, thought, and painting in world history. The spread of Castilian, carried into the far reaches of the empire, as Spain’s dominant language, was one of the main developments, but, in the words of one historian, “this does not mean that the ‘Golden Age’ was exclusively a Castilian achievement. On the contrary, the development of creativity occurred only because there was a positive response to multiple internal and external influences—Arabic, Jewish, Italian, Flemish, American—that stimulated all corners of the peninsula” (Kamen, p. 193). Cervantes himself spoke of his Spain as the “common mother of all nations” (Cervantes in Kamen, p. 193). The country was ripe for cultural exchange and creativity, and its artists rose to the occasion, producing unparalleled works.
Spain reached a summit of its Golden Age in the poetry and prose of Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross (see Interior Castle and “Dark Night” and Other Poems , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times). Saint John (1542–91), often described as the finest lyric poet to emerge in Europe, wrote about the human soul’s quest for union with God. Much of the same mystic symbolism surfaces in the religious painting of El Greco (1541–1614). Another pre-eminent Golden-Age poet, Garcilaso de la Vega (1503?-1536) revolutionized Spanish verse, his posthumously published verse (1543) setting standards of refinement for subsequent lyric poets: Lope de Vega, Francisco de Quevedo, and Luis de Góngora. Also a playwright, Lope established a new way of writing theater in Spanish—a three-act play that mixes comic and tragic elements. Astoundingly prolific, he said he wrote 1,000 plays, (less than 400 are extant); not Lope, though, but his successor Pedro Calderón de la Barca, would write the most widely read play written in Spanish, the philosophical drama Life Is a Dream (also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times). Calderón was court playwright for King Philip IV. Philip’s court painter, Diego Velázquez, reached new heights in his medium, representing distant vision with short brushstrokes (as in his The Maids-in-Waiting), anticipating nineteenth-century impressionism. Like Cervantes in Don Quixote, Velázquez also used his art to debunk heroic myth, satirizing, for example, the debauchery of military life in his own times in his painting Mars; which depicts the Roman war-god Mars as an aging, mustachioed soldier, sitting helmeted but otherwise unclothed on a bed after he has presumably enjoyed erotic relations with Venus.
Plight of the hidalgo
The era’s ardent Catholicism, a legacy of the medieval Crusades (holy wars for Christian territory) and of the centuries of Reconquest, inspired a new chivalric spirit during the Golden Age. Much like medieval knights, Spain’s armed forces in Europe and conquistadores in the New World thought of themselves as “soldiers of God,” their numerous victories and seeming invincibility reinforcing this image of themselves. Men such as Hernaá Cortes, conqueror of Mexico, captured the imaginations of those around them as the knights-errant of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There was the possibility of wealth in the New World too. Many hidalgos (low-ranking members of the nobility who were often impoverished but nevertheless expected to keep up the appearances befitting their rank) sought to improve their fortunes as conquistadors in the New World. As already mentioned, Cervantes, who was himself an hidalgo, sought a post overseas, albeit unsuccessfully.
Whereas it had been possible in the Middle Ages for hidalgos to earn their fortune and glory by serving as knights in Europe, it was virtually impossible by the end of the 1500s. Most of Europe had already been conquered; and though Spain’s empire spanned the oceans, the country itself remained poor, offering soldiers low pay and little or no opportunity to fight as part of a private force for booty, as the medieval knights had. On the other hand, the New World offered similar opportunities. “The pioneers in America were not nobles but dispossessed Spaniards of all conditions, many of them soldiers and sailors unemployed
FROM MEDIEVAL KNIGHTS TO GOLDEN AGE HIDALGOS
Medieval knights fought as commissioned soldiers for specific kingdoms and lords, and later, during the Crusades, for the Catholic Church. They would be rewarded with spoils from victory, as well as land and noble titles, which elevated their status. A hidalgo in the sixteenth-century, Don Quixote had no such opportunity. Properly speaking, hidalgos refers to those Spaniards who have the status of nobles but no specific rank. They comprised the lowest category of the nobility. Don Quixote’s sole assets consisted of his status as an “old Christian” and “non-taxpayer.” While higher-ranking nobles received palace appointments and tax revenues, hidalgos were entitled to neither, and like the lower classes, could no longer augment their fortunes or elevate their status by becoming knights, as in the Middle Ages. In a word, the hidalgo in Spain became obsolete. Those who did not join the conquistadores found themselves stricken with the “subtle hunger of the hidalgo,” working in Spain at jobs they detested or aimlessly idling their lives away (Defourneaux, p. 41).
employed after the wars in Granada and Italy had come to an end, others young and hardy men of limited means, including many hidalgos and illiterate laborers who looked to America to better their fortunes” (Kamen, p. 91). To conquer the unknown, risking all to serve God and their king and to grow rich in the process became the credo of the conquistadores, who combined a spirit of militant Catholicism with personal aspirations, “their heads filled with fantastic notions, their courage spurred by noble examples of the great heroes of chivalry” (Schulte, p. 69).
The problem with novels of chivalry
From where did hidalgos get such fantastic notions?—in no small part, from the romances of chivalry. Throughout most of the sixteenth century, these works were bestsellers-Amadís de Gaula (1508; Amadis of Gaul) by Garci Ordónez de Montalvo set the standard. A romance in four volumes, the
PRINTING AND THE NEW READER
Poor literature proliferated after the 1450 invention of the printing press by the German Johann Gutenberg. Before Gutenberg’s time, manuscripts were reproduced by hand, a slow, painstaking process. As a result, books were rare and costly, and only a small fraction of the population—mainly clergy—could read or write. Moreover, most books were written in Latin—the universal language of educated Europe, but one unknown to most Europeans. With the advent of the printing press, the cost of books dropped precipitously and literacy rose dramatically. Despite the rise, the number of Spaniards who actually could have read the first part of Don Quixote in 1605 was probably no greater than 20 percent. But, even Spaniards who never learned to read were affected by the printing revolution. As the number of readers grew, the literate villager read aloud to neighbors. Scenes such as the one in Don Quixote that features a priest reading “The Story of III-Advised Curiosity” (otherwise called “The Tale of Foolish Curiosity”) to guests at an inn, were undoubtedly common in Spain at this time. The result was a new audience, less educated and of a lower class than before, traits that had a great effect on the types of texts produced. By the late 1500s, more European books were being published in Castilian Spanish and other dialects than in Latin. Also books accessible to those with limited reading skills began to outnumber complex, scholarly texts. Curious new readers snatched up miscellanies of proverbs and practical tidbits as well as longer prose fiction. In addition to chivalric romances, pastoral romances such as Jorge de Monte-mayor’s Diana (1559), a favorite of Don Quixote’s, became bestsellers.
work describes the adventures of a knight who personifies the chivalric code—single-minded devotion to one woman, loyalty to one’s superior, fanatic hatred of the infidel, absorption in the pursuit of idealistic justice, and defense of the oppressed. So successful was Amadís de Gaula that its publication generated many other novels of chivalry, which carried its elements to excess. The adventures conveyed no universal truth and strayed far from any consideration of verisimilitude. It is against these inferior chivalric romances that Cervantes directs his satire. Don Quixote reads so many bad chivalric novels that he loses his sanity and decides to restore chivalric ideals to a world gone amuck. As he pursues his quest, the story becomes a parody of the romance of chivalry, meanwhile conveying universal truths in a lifelike context.
Cervantes censures bad chivalric novels for their immorality, poor style, untruthfulness, and absurdities. The purpose of art, says a priest to Don Quixote, is to teach and delight at the same time, but the mediocre novels of chivalry do neither. The style of many of these novels is so obscure that they offer negative examples to writers and readers. The chivalric novels of the real-life writer Feliciano de Silva (1492?-1558?), a favorite of Don Quixote, are a frequent butt of Cervantes’s satire, which parodies their turgid style and overly complex sentences: “The heavens on high divinely drop your divinity down on you, the stars themselves bringing you strength, thus making you deserving of the high deserts which your immensity deserves” (Cervantes, Don Quijote, p. 9). “Specializing in obfuscation, the authors of inferior chivalry novels also confuse history with fiction. They do not know how to sustain the illusion that things are really happening, precisely because they have no clear purpose” (Riley, pp. 47–48). Cervantes reflects this confusion when his protagonist, grown mad from reading bad chivalric novels, believes fantastic characters like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table to be as real as Spanish historical figures like El Cid. Finally, bad chivalric novels were associated with immorality. They typically displayed excessive violence, eroticism, and sentimentality. The innkeeper in Don Quixote admires the hero of the novel Felixmarte de Hircania for slicing five giants in half like bags of beans; the chambermaid Maritornes, for her part, enjoys the sentimental eroticism of ladies embracing their knightly loves under orange trees while their duennas, spinster guardians, keep watch, filled with envy and anxiety.
The Novel in Focus
Plot summary
The first part of Don Quixote opens with Cervantes’s prologue, in which the author encourages readers to probe the novel for deeper meaning, indicating that he has written an entirely different type of chivalric tale. Using the device of a friend who rescues him from his writer’s block, Cervantes mocks the literary convention of writing flowery prologues, that of quoting ad nauseam every famous writer and philosopher from antiquity. His friend says he need not “because the whole tale is an attack on chivalry, which Aristotle never heard of, and St. Basil never mentioned, and Cicero never ran across” (Don Quijote, p. 6).
Chapter 1 sets up the parody of contemporary romances of chivalry. It opens with an introduction to a middle-aged country gentleman, Mr. Quixana (or Quijada, Quesada, or Quejana), who spends his idle hours—which are many because he is a hidalgo without much means or occupation—enraptured in chivalric prose. He marvels at the “pearl-like” wisdom of authors such as Feliciano de Silva who write such eloquent sentences as, “The ability to reason the unreason which has afflicted my reason saps my ability to reason, so that I complain with good reason of your infinite loveliness” (Don Quijote, p. 9). Trying to decipher the meaning of such prose causes poor Mr. Quixana to lose his sanity, for “even Aristotle couldn’t have comprehended if he’d come back to life for just that purpose” (Don Quijote, p. 10). Further, intoxicated by the fantastic exploits and seeming valor of the knightly existence—particularly as compared to his own empty life—he remakes himself as a knight and sets forth to “right every manner of wrong” and “cover himself with eternal fame and glory” (Don Quijote, p. 10).
Naming himself “Don Quixote,” a name apparently based on a word denoting a piece of armor for the thigh, he dusts off his great-grandfather’s suit of armor—rusted and in a state of disrepair—dons it, and mounts his trusty steed, a poor workhorse that he renames “Rocinante,” which means “old horse before,” because “an old horse was exactly what it had been, before, while now it had risen to be first and foremost among all the horses in the world” (Don Quijote, p. 11). Here Don Quixote’s idealistic qualities come to the fore, as does his vivid imagination. The world transforms itself in his mind’s eye. An old horse becomes the first and foremost in all the world, and he, Don Quixote de la Mancha, the noblest and most esteemed knight-errant straight out of the pages of Amadís de Gaula. His transformation nearly complete, Don Quixote invents Dulcinea del Toboso, a noble lady whose honor he will preserve and fight his battles for (for “a knighterrant without love entanglements would be like a tree without leaves or fruit” [Don Quijote, p. 12]). She is the transformation of a peasant woman with whom he has been secretly in love but has never addressed. In honor of Dulcinea, he embarks on his first chivalric expedition.
Don Quixote mistakes a decrepit country inn for a castle, two prostitutes for virtuous ladies, and a roguish innkeeper for a great lord. He requests the “lord” to dub him a knight in accord with the rituals performed in the novels of chivalry he has read, so that he may properly go about his knightly deeds. Amused by his madness, the innkeeper agrees to the ceremony and the ladies treat him kindly.
Upon leaving the inn, our hero performs his first knightly act, rescuing a servant he perceives to be blameless from a master’s beating. However, as soon as Don Quixote leaves, the master resumes the beating more savagely than before and fires the servant without pay, revealing the harmfulness of misguided acts of chivalry. After this, Don Quixote is beaten up by a mule driver who dares insult the honor of Dulcinea del Toboso. Luckily, he is rescued by a fellow villager and returned home.
When the knight Don Quixote sets out again, it is with his newfound “squire,” Sancho Panza—a peasant who speaks in prattling language and proverbs. With Sancho by his side, the knight fights windmills that he perceives to be giants, frees a chain gang of prisoners, who then rob him and his squire, and engages in similar adventures in the name of chivalry, doing more harm than good. In a series of elegant speeches, he makes the purpose of his adventures clear: to restore justice and virtue to the world by battling the forces of evil, thereby gaining fame and fortune. Sancho’s motives are initially slightly less admirable. He clings to the hope that Don Quixote will make good on the promise to grant Sancho his own island to rule.
Interspersed between the adventures of the knight and squire are intercalated novels in the guise of stories told by characters they meet, including miniature pastoral romances and the tale of a soldier held captive in Muslim North Africa (autobiographical, this tale contains information based on Cervantes’s own captivity in Algeria). The intercalated novels offer Cervantes the opportunity to experiment with different narrative possibilities suggested by the misadventures of his mad hero. Don Quixote’s comical situation sometimes is given a serious variation in an intercalated novel. For instance, what if a madman had been driven mad because of an actual love, as opposed to a feigned chivalric love (as in Don Quixote’s case)? Then there would be the intercalated novel of Cardenio of Part 1, Chapter 27.
While Don Quixote and Sancho listen to these stories and continue their exploits, the knight’s village friends—the priest and the barber—devise a plan to rescue Quixote from his chivalrous hallucinations and bring him home. In disguise, they convince Don Quixote that he is enchanted and enclose him in a cage. After being released from the cage, Don Quixote is beaten to near death—this time after attacking a religious procession whose statue of the Virgin Mary he takes to be an enchanted damsel in distress. Barely able to move, he is placed on a cart and wheeled home, ending his second round of exploits.
Throughout Part 1 of Don Quixote, the narrator reminds us that the author’s story is based on a translation of Don Quixote’s original history, written by a Moor, Cide Hamete Benengeli. Cervantes purposely identifies the historian as a Moor because as an outsider hardly given to being overly sympathetic to a Christian knight, the Moor may well stray from the truthful portrayal of Don Quixote’s adventures! Thus the reader must extrapolate the truth between Cide Hamete’s lines.
In the final pages of Part 1, it is implied that, after recuperating from his injuries, Don Quixote engages in further adventures. Because the author can find no records of these adventures, however, this part must end with a series of poetic epitaphs found in a lead box discovered in the ruins of an ancient hermitage. These epitaphs, written in mock-epic language to parody romances of chivalry, mourn the deaths of Don Quixote, Dulcinea, Don Quixote’s horse, Roci-nante, and Sancho. The one for the damsel reads in part: “She whose fat and flabby face you see, / tubby-breasted, looking down her nose so, is Dulcinea … / whose love inspired the great knight Don Quixote” (Don Quijote, p. 344).
In Part 2, however, these characters return to life. After a prologue in which Cervantes scolds Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, the author of an apocryphal sequel to Don Quixote, he picks up the action of the story only a few weeks after Don Quixote has returned home. There he is confronted by a neighbor, Sansón Carrasco, who has recently returned from the university, where he read Part 1 of Don Quixote. Carrasco explains to a pleased Don Quixote that his adventures are famous all over Europe. (This is in fact true at the point that Part 2 was written, ten years after Part 1). Inspired by this news, Don Quixote and Sancho soon set out again to right more wrongs.
Their first adventure is an encounter with the Knight of the Mirrors, who challenges Don Quixote to a duel on the condition that, if Don Quixote loses, he will comply with any honorable requests the winner may have. However, Don Quixote soundly defeats the Knight of the Mirrors, who turns out to be Sansón Carrasco in disguise. Though Carrasco’s intention was to lure Don Quixote back home again and keep him safe from more potentially harmful adventures, the neighbor gives up his plan for the time being and instead, noting the pain in his ribs, vows revenge.
After this victory, Don Quixote proudly resumes his exploits, which include an attack on puppets during a puppet-play. Since the play deals with a chivalric theme, he gets swept up into the illusion and thinks the puppets real. He embarks on a host of adventures, during which it slowly dawns on Don Quixote that he is not the hero he has deceived himself into believing. Disenchantment sets in during Chapter 10, which follows Don Quixote as he goes to the village of Toboso to greet his lady Dulcinea. When he commands Sancho to fetch her, his squire, hard-pressed to find a nonexistent lady, invents a chivalric fiction, though on a cruder, simpler plane than his master. To the credulous Don Quixote, he identifies an approaching peasant woman as Dulcinea. Don Quixote, shocked at this woman’s coarse appearance, believes the enchanters have changed Dulcinea’s form.
Chapter 23 marks the beginning of Don Quixote’s disillusionment with his own efforts to be a knight errant. He descends into Montesinos’s Cave—a symbol, perhaps, of his own unconscious. There he has a vision of Lady Belerma, figure of a chivalric tradition belonging to the legend of Charlemagne. She languishes, like his own Dulcinea, under an enchantment, for Belerma is a victim of the magician Merlin. Don Quixote also sees the enchanted Dulcinea in the cave, but, when one of her maidens asks him for a loan, he in unable to supply the cash his lady needs—a symbolic reference to his own impotence and inability to “disenchant” Dulcinea. In succeeding adventures he continues to harbor doubts about himself, about his efficacy as a hero, and about seeing the world as a place for chivalric adventure at all.
Meanwhile, Sancho Panza gradually undergoes a contrary development. His fantasy begins to run away with him. In Chapter 41, some pranksters set him and Don Quixote blindfolded on a hobbyhorse, and tell them they are flying through the air. While Don Quixote could swear they were still on the ground, Sancho has what amounts to a mystical experience, imagining himself playing in the constellation of the Pleiades (the Seven Sisters).
A series of elaborate pranks played on Don Quixote and Sancho comprise the middle section of Part 2, where knight and squire are taken in by a country duke and duchess. These nobles, who have read Part 1 of Don Quixote, fritter away their leisure to make life imitate art. They play along with the hero’s fantasy and, for their own amusement, carry it even further. The duke and duchess grant Sancho an island to govern, as if to fulfill the chivalric promise Don Quixote made to his squire in Part 1. Sancho plays his part as governor very seriously. By now he is accustomed to living in the framework of the chivalric novel. Within that framework, Sancho uses common sense to administer justice. He “decreed such wonderful things that, to this very day, his laws are still observed there, and are known as The Great Governor Sancho Panza’s Legal System” (Don Quijote, p. 623). (According to Howard Mancing, Sancho Panza occupies stage center here, as in all of Part 2. “He speaks more often [than Don Quixote] and more confidently directs the action to a greater degree”; the chapters devoted to his governership form the apex of his mental and psychological evolution [Mancing, p. 390].)
Don Quixote’s faith in himself as a hero meanwhile continues to deteriorate. During a visit to Barcelona, the knight meets his downfall. He gets defeated in a joust by the Knight of the White Moon—a vengeful Sansón Carrasco in disguise. Under the terms of the agreement he had accepted before fighting Carrasco, he must renounce knighthood and return home for a year. The sacrifice proves too great: Don Quixote falls ill, and on his deathbed gives up knighthood forever. He explains that he is once again in his “right mind”—no longer Don Quixote but Alonso Quijano—and declares to Sancho: “Forgive me, my friend, for having made you seem as mad as I was, by making you fall into the same error into which I had fallen, namely, that there were, and still are, knights errant in the world” (Don Quijote, p. 731). Sancho, by now a thorough convert to the ideology of Don Quixote, begs him to revert to his old idealistic self and resume his mission to right the world’s wrongs: “Don’t die … but take my advice and live a long, long time because the worst madness a man can fall into, in this life, is to let himself die, for no real reason” (Don Quijote, p. 731). But it is too late. Don Quixote has reverted back to “sanity” and dies, the implication being that it is now up to Sancho—and us, Cervantes’s “new readers”—to pick up where he left off.
The place of idealism
Role reversal takes place in Don Quixote on a scale previously unseen in any novel. Sancho Panza becomes quixoticized, caught up in the pursuit of impossible goals. Don Quixote grows to be ever more like Sancho Panza. Herein lies the great conscious innovation of the first modern novel: environment has impact on character change as the novelist explores in detail the meaning of life in general. This is the ultimate consequence of Cervantes’s application of Aristotle’s twin truths: it is a psychological fact—a historical truth—that Don Quixote’s madness is “contagious,” that ideals pass from one individual to another in ever widening circles; at the same time, it is a poetic truth that ideals should not last forever, lest society stagnate. The age of chivalry has disappeared, says this novel to its readers. The attitude of idealism, on the other hand, should last forever. The trick is to adopt attainable ideals. In Part 2 (Chapter 20), for example, the poor man Basilio adopts a reachable goal: scheming to marry the maiden Quiteria for love, he outwits her fiancé, the rich Camacho. Basilio feigns death, insisting that Quiteria marry him before he begs God’s forgiveness for his sins in his final hour. “For someone as badly wounded as this young man,” Sancho Panza murmured, “he certainly talks a lot” (Don Quijote, p. 461). Quiteria, who loves Basilio, gladly acquiesces, and the two get married at the very wedding intended for her and Camacho, her ideal suitor winning out over the practical choice.
HIDDEN MEANINGS—THE CRITICAL BENT
Woven through Don Quixote are various critiques of early-seventeenth-century Spanish society. For instance, there is implicit criticism of the excessive leisure characteristic of the high aristocracy in Cervantes’s day. In the novel, the duke and duchess play enormous practical jokes on an unsuspecting Don Quixote, concocting a surrogate damsel in distress (Altisidora) instead of his own Dulcinea, when they could be occupying themselves with something far more worthwhile. Sancho Panza, to take another example, has a friend Ricote, who is a Morisco, or christianized Moor. Ricote, who disguises himself as a German because the Moriscos were expelled from Spain in 1609, lives bereft, longing for his Spanish homeland, suffering mistreatment even in North Africa, where Muslims abound. Through Ricote, the novel finds fault with the 1609 expulsion, bringing its initial readers face-to-face with the consequences of Spain’s recent action.
Sources and literary context
Spain’s Golden Age featured works that spanned a number of genres—pastoral romance, mystic poetry, cloak-and-dagger drama, picaresque novel. Reflecting the variety, Don Quixote contains elements of multiple genres. It is most obviously a parody of the chivalric romance of knightly misadventures written in a grandiose style. But it also includes stories of lovelorn unfortunates wandering the wilderness, in imitation of the pastoral romance, whose characters reject material concerns and escape to the countryside to commune with nature and lament their unrequited love. The novel is likewise a treasury of proverbs, sonnets, quotes from scripture, and debates about the nature of high quality literature. In one incident, for example, Don Quixote encounters a poor young man plodding off to war, which allows the novel, in the guise of his song, to include a contemporary Spanish literary form, a four-line folk-type verse known as the seguidillas.
I’m taking my nothing
off to war,
but if I had anything
I wouldn’t go far.
(Don Quijote, p. 478)
From the picaresque novel, Don Quixote borrows down-to-earth (sometimes slapstick) humor and characters such as the galley prisoner Ginés de Pasamonte. An often cynical response to romance literature, such novels focused on wretched antiheroes, usually poor young men forced to cheat and lie to survive in a cruel world (see Lazarillo de Tormes , also in WLAIT 5: Spanish and Portuguese Literatures and Their Times).
Although Cervantes relied on others before him for ideas about style, events, and form, the main characters in Don Quixote seem to be his own. Cervantes is consistently praised for his close attention to detail in portraying people from every corner of Spanish society. He gained keen insight into the lives of his fellow Spaniards—students, priests, dukes, soldiers, innkeepers, and peasants—from his wanderings. Many of his characters represent stages in Cervantes’s life. He was, at various times, a student, a cardinal’s assistant, a soldier, a captive in Algiers, a purveyor of food for the Spanish Armada, a prisoner, a tax collector, and, of course, a writer. Some of these jobs required frequent travel, which allowed Cervantes to form opinions not only about different classes of Spanish people, but about the different regions in which they lived. When Don Quixote battles a Basque, dines with a Barcelona gentleman, or discusses literature with the canon of Toledo, Cervantes draws on his own extensive knowledge of Spanish culture to render an authentic word-picture. Other fundamental sources on which Cervantes drew follow:
Some Sources of Ideas in Don Quixote Poetics by Aristotle.
Greek idea of universal (poetic) truth and historical truth.
Philosophia antigua poética by Alonso López Pinciano (1596; Ancient Poetic Philosophy).
Harmonization of Aristotle’s Poetics with contemporary Italian literature to preserve Greek aesthetics in light of innovations.
Ars Poetica by Horace (1800s-1700s b.c.e.; Art of Poetry).
Idea that the purpose of art is to delight and instruct.
Amadis de Gaula by Garci Ordóñez de Montalvo (1508; Amadis of Gaul).
Romance of chivalry whose hero, gathering superhuman strength from fidelity to his beloved, is emulated by Don Quixote in a number of adventures (e.g., the penance performed in Sierra Morena). Also contains a governor of an island (like the one promised to Sancho).
Amadís de Grecia by Feliciano de Silva (1530; Amadis of Greece).
Continuation of Amadis de Gaula, written in the convoluted style continually parodied by Cervantes; exemplifies only one of many mediocre chivalric novelists criticized in Don Quixote.
Tirant lo Blanch by joanot Martorell (1490; Tirant the White Knight).
One of the few chivalric novels respected by Cervantes for its veracity. It contains episodes with historical grounding and autobiographical elements, as does Don Quixote.
Examen de ingenios para las ciencias by Juan Huarte de San Juan (1575: Examination of Men’s Wits).
Very influential on Don Quixote, the treatise newly applies the ancient notion of four humors, analyzing personalities based on combinations of four body liquids—blood, lymph, black bile, yellow bile; contains ideas for compensating for strengths and weaknesses of each personality type.
Dialoghi d’amore by León Hebreo (c. 1502; Dialogues of Love).
A main source of Cervantes’s ideas on love and beauty.
Don Quijote de la Mancha by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda (1614).
A false continuation of Cervantes’s first part; influenced the final adventures in Part 2.
Orlando il Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto (1516; Roland the Furious).
Greatest Italian epic poem, affects the intercalated novel “The Curious Impertinent” as well as Don Quixote’s penance in Sierra Morena.
Diana by Jorge de Montemayor (1559).
Pastoral novel, affects the story of Grisostomo and Marcela in Part 1 as well as other pastoral episodes in Don Quixote.
Reception
First published in 1605, Don Quixote (Part 1) met with immediate popular and critical success. It was in such high demand that six new editions were issued in the next four years, and foreign editions began to be released as well. Cervantes’s instant celebrity helped him procure a generous patron, the Count of Lemos, whose financial assistance allowed him to finish the writing of Part 2 and several other works. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Cervantes must have felt dubiously flattered by the publication, only several months before Part 2, of the false sequel to Part 1 by a still unknown author, who used the pseudonym Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. The reception to Cervantes’s Part 2 was as enthusiastic as that to Part 1. Four hundred years later, in today’s world, Don Quixote is unanimously hailed as the greatest literary work in the Castilian language. Apart from its innovation of character change, it covers many of the loftiest themes known to humankind—liberty, poverty, fame, virtue, immortality, envy, work and leisure, and love—coverage of which usually appears in dialogues between Don Quixote and Sancho.
DON QUIXOTE AND SANCHO PANZA ON LOVE
SANCHO PANZA: I can’t imagine what this girl saw in you, your grace, to overpower and conquer her like that: I mean, what particularly choice part, what special charm, what display of wit, what feature of your face—which one of these, or what mixture of them all, made her fall in love with you? Because, truthfully, I often stop and look your grace over, from the point of your shoes to the very last hair on your head, and I see more things to frighten than to fire up love. …
DON QUIXOTE: Remember, Sancho, … that there are two kinds of love: there’s spiritual love, and then there’s bodily love; spiritual love walks, and shows itself, in the mind, in virtue, in honorable behavior, in generosity, and in good breeding, and these are all qualities that can occur and be found in an ugly man … a good man only has to be something other than a monster, to be well loved.
(Don Quijote, p. 653)
Although the novel has survived in Hispanic tradition as a model for a variety of writing styles, whether of elevated oratory, of pastoral love soliloquy, or of picaresque adventure narrative, Cervantes’s dialogue is so lively that much of it remains today in the form of expressions that have passed into current Castilian speech, in the same way that Shakespeare’s lines have entered present-day English. Examples of expressions from Cervantes used in Spanish today are, “Paciencia y barajar,” (Be patient and deal the cards while you wait [Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, p. 735; trans. N. Orringer]) and “Peor es menearlo” (When in an embarrassing situation, it is “worse to rub it in,” from [Don Quijotede la Mancha, p. 188; trans. N. Orringer].) Yet a fourth manifestation of the high quality of Don Quixote lies in its impact on world arts. As Mancing notes, the novel has inspired classical music (Germany’s Richard Strauss), ballet music (Austria’s Lén Minkus), and painting (Spain’s Salvador Dali). Finally the success of Don Quijote resounds in its impact on some of the world’s foremost writers, from Spain’s Benito Pérez Galdos to England’s Henry Fielding, France’s Gustave Flaubert, Russia’s Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Argentina’s Jorge Luis Borges, and America’s Joyce Carol Oates. One of the founders of the English novel, Henry Fielding, pays deference in Joseph Andrews (1742) to his Spanish model: “Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes”; Fielding’s Joseph Andrews was furthermore reviewed in comparison to the Spanish original: “The remarkable thing about this work is that just as Don Quixote is the picture of Spanish customs, the work at hand is the picture of English customs” (Paulson, pp. ix-x). This was already more than a century after the Spanish novel’s initial release, yet it was but the beginning. As the 1700s wore on, the novel would be much imitated by English writers, and German Romantics would begin to see profound philosophical implications in the work. Don Quixote had, in short, revolutionized world literature.
—Nelson Orringer and Diane Renée
For More Information
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote: The History of that Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote de la Mancha. Trans. Burton Raffel. New York: Norton, 1995.
_____. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Ed. Martín de Riquer. Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1955.
Defourneaux, Marcelin. Daily Life in Spain in the Golden Age. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1979.
Elliot, J. H. Imperial Spain: 1469–1716. New York: Penguin, 1963.
Gies, Frances. The Knight in History. New York: Harper and Row, 1984.
Goodman, David. Spanish Naval Power, 1589–1665: Reconstruction and Defeat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Jones, R. O. A Literary History of Spain: The Golden Age: Prose and Poetry, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971.
Kamen, Henry. Spain 1469–1714: A Society of Conflict. London: Longman, 1991.
Mancing, Howard. “Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de.” In Dictionary of the Literature of the Iberian Peninsula, A-K. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993.
McKendrick, Melveena. Cervantes. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.
Paulson, Ronald. Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
Riley, E.C. Teoria de la novela en Cervantes. Trans. Carlos Sahagún. Madrid: Taurus, 1966.
Schulte, Henry F. The Spanish Press. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1968.