I wish I had a dollar for every time the novel Don Quixote is mentioned and someone then has to make a remark about old fools charging at windmills.
In a 2002 survey of 100 authors around the world, who were asked to name the book they considered to be the “most meaningful of all time”, Miguel Cervantes and his Don Quixote came in first, well ahead of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Homer’s Iliad and/or Odyssey, and any of Shakespeare’s plays, the three closest runner-ups.
How is it, I have repeatedly asked myself, that this book, and especially its famous hero, found to be so important by those authors, is so misunderstood by most people?
Well, to start with, most people haven’t read it, at least outside of universities. It’s a mountain of a book, more or less a thousand pages, depending on the edition.
How I came to read it was unusual. In the 1980s I wrote an essay on Goethe’s Faust where I argued that the Devil is the central character in that story. My professor, returning the essay to me, asked if I’d read Don Quixote. When I replied that I hadn’t, she said, “Anyone who can write what you just wrote, needs to read Don Quixote.”
With this cryptic advice, I bought a copy of Quixote and began to read. Close to forty years later, I haven’t finished the book yet.
There is a kind of novel that I sometimes call a ‘Christmas tree’ book’. They have no real plot. What attracts readers are the many ornaments on the branches of the book’s large ‘tree’. A modern example would be Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Once you know you’re reading such a book (which happens within a couple of chapters), you don’t have to read the remainder in any order. You read randomly. Quixote is one of these. Once you know the two characters, Quixote and Sancho Panza, you can open the book anywhere and feel right at home.
That’s how I’ve been reading Quixote for decades now, and one reason why I haven’t finished. But I’ve read some chapters several times and I’m going to use a couple to show you just how much Quixote is misunderstood.
In her introduction to a report of the 100 author survey, Angelique Chrisafis writing for the UK Guardian on May 2, 2002, refers to the book as:
“the tale of a Spanish knight driven mad by reading too many chivalric romances”
Most writers would agree with that statement, though not me. But if you protest that premise, they’ll refer you to page 2, where Cervantes’ narrator, after explaining how Don Quixote sold off some of his land to acquire a large library of old books, particularly those about knights of older times, then says:
….he gave himself up so wholly to the reading of romances, that at nights he would pore on until it was day, and a-days he would read on until it was night; and thus, by sleeping little and reading much……at last he lost the use of his reason.
When you’re reading a story told by a narrator, don’t automatically assume that it’s the author speaking. Cervantes plays with us, his readers, from the beginning. Yes, he wants you to assume that Quixote has been driven out of his senses by books. Everyone in the story, Quixote’s housekeeper, his niece, his neighbors, the authorities, and even his faithful travel companion, Sancho, says so. But the truth is something else.
To start with, Cervantes never mentions that Quixote and Sancho are wandering through a world that has gone mad. He takes for granted that you know that.
The book was published in two parts, the first one in 1604, the beginning of the worst century of the Inquisition, and the just-as-bad counter-inquisition of the Protestant churches. Religious wars were fought back and forth in Europe, along with the bigger one against the encroaching Muslims. In the meantime, you could lose your life for saying the wrong thing as you walked down the street. Many Anabaptists were burned to death for saying children should not be baptized until they become adults. That’s all it took. If you recanted what you’d said, they would reward you by merely beheading you, the more humane way of execution.
Cervantes grew up wandering with his family in Spain, because his father was an itinerant doctor. Then he was a soldier for five years, and fought at the famous sea battle of Lepanto where he suffered two gunshot wounds to the chest and another injury that would render his left hand useless for the rest of his life. On his way home from that battle he was captured by pirates who sold him into slavery, which lasted another five years, despite several daring escape attempts that impressed his Muslim captors. Cervantes was well acquainted with the turmoil, dangers and collective madness of his time.
Something else to keep in mind – though he never went to university, Cervantes was an avid reader. Like Quixote, he loved books. Has there ever been an author who didn’t?
Early in the story, when Quixote is off on his first knightly adventures, the local curate, suspicious of Quixote’s reportedly large library, persuades the housekeeper to let him into the residence, where, assisted by his friend the local barber, they inspect the library.
Examining only the titles of the books, they judge each of them, then one by one toss most of them out the window onto a pile to be burned. One of the books is “Galatea” by Miguel Cervantes, a book that was more dear to the author than Don Quixote was.
Yes, in the late fifteenth century, and early sixteenth, they were burning books as well as people. Cervantes, who was struggling to make a living with his writing, must have been acutely aware of this.
Something else I should mention – in his wandering, Quixote does do some foolish things, but he is arguably a worthy enough knight. He has weapons, and he knows how to use them. He often intimidates people. In the clashes he gets into from time to time, he sometimes comes out the winner. In one where Sancho is involved and they come out badly beaten up, Sancho whines at length over his injuries, while Quixote takes his in stride, uncomplaining.
Now let me take you into chapters V and VI, where they come upon an ongoing funeral for a young man, Chrysostom, whose body is “dressed in shepherd’s weeds all strewed over with flowers.” Quixote asks what has happened to him, and Ambrose, a close friend of the deceased, explains.
Chrysostom was in love with an acutely beautiful young woman of a rich family named Marcella. She wanted nothing to do with him, but he continued to pursue her, so she went into hiding, working as a shepherdess in the mountains. He found out about this, then contracted himself out as a shepherd so he could be near her. Exasperated, she confronted him and told him in no uncertain terms that she would never be his lover or wife. So he killed himself.
The funeral continues, the grave being dug, with laments and speeches, that go on for some time, with everyone agreeing that Chrysostom was a wonderful young man who didn’t deserve this end. Then someone appears unexpectedly.
“It was Marcella herself, who appeared at the top of the rock, at the foot of which they were digging the grave; but so beautiful that….those who had never seen her before, gazed on her with wonder….”
Ambrose calls out angrily,
“What makest thou there, thou fierce, thou cruel basilisk of these mountains! Comest thou to see whether the wounds of this murdered wretch will bleed afresh at thy presence? Or comest thou to glory in the fatal effects of thy native inhumanity, like another Nero at the sight of flaming Rome?”
She answers,
“I come not here to any of these ungrateful ends, Ambrose, but only to clear my innocence, and show the injustice of all those who lay their misfortunes and Chrysostom’s death to my charge: therefore I entreat you all….to hear me a little, for I shall not need many words to convince people of sense of an evident truth. Heaven, you are pleased to say, has made me beautiful, and that to such a degree you are…..compelled to love me, …..and for the sake of that love, you say I ought to love you again. Now…..I cannot conceive that what is loved for being handsome should be bound to love that by which it is loved, merely because it is loved. …..”
She goes on a bit more, then adds,
“I was born free, and that I might continue so I retired to these solitary hills and plains, where trees are my companions….. With the trees and with the waters I communicate my thoughts…..Those who I have attracted with my sight, I have undeceived with my words …..as I never gave any encouragement to Chrysostom, nor to any other, it may well be said it was rather his own obstinacy than my cruelty that shortened his life.”
Finally, she warns them against following her, then disappears into the woods. When he perceives that some of the young men in the party look ready to pursue her, Quixote intervenes with this speech:
“Let no man…..presume to follow the fair Marcella, under the penalty of incurring my furious displeasure. She has made it appear, by undeniable reasons, that she was not guilty of Chrysostom’s death; and has positively declared her firm resolution never to condescend to the desires of any of her admirers: for which reason, instead of being importuned and persecuted, she ought to be esteemed and honoured by all good men, as being perhaps the only woman in the world that ever lived with such virtuous reservedness.”
No one dares go after Marcella, but Ambrose, ignoring her words, puts in his epitaph on Chrysostom’s grave:
Here of a wretched swain
The frozen body’s laid,
Kill’d by the cold disdain
Of an ungrateful maid.
That’s just one of the countless, always enigmatic, ornaments on the branches of this ‘tree book’, so different from the windmill antics, etc. The above quotes are from the Wordsworth Classic 1993 edition, which I believe was translated by Peter Motteux, though my copy, which is falling apart, doesn’t say who did it.
Quixote often goes to the defence of people who need defending. In one episode, he meets a group of convict slaves working at the side of the road, interrogates some of them and learns that some have been imprisoned for minor infractions. He helps them to get free, then, after the convicts have overwhelmed their guards, they attack Quixote and Sancho too, rob them, and go on their way. Quixote has to put up with another “I told you so” from Sancho.
But I must admit that there’s a lot of slapstick humor in the book – the windmills, a battle with a herd of sheep etc. There’s a scene in an inn where Quixote and Sancho stop for the night, and, after the lights are out, a servant girl who has secretly contracted to spend the night with a mule team driver, gets into the wrong bed. It’s very funny, but this is only there to help sell the book.
There is more subtle humor in the endless conversations Quixote and Pancho engage in as they ride along, tossing popular sayings back and forth at each other. Those are one of the delights of the book. I’m restraining myself from quoting some, for I won’t want to stop.
If I ever finish reading Don Quixote, I may do a more detailed review of the book. For now, I just want to suggest to you that Quixote is not the fool so many think he is. His book-reading has left him as someone who no longer fits into the chaotic, cruel, callous and selfish world he’s in, and that almost everyone else accepts as reality. He is someone who still values things like honor and courage, honesty and compassion, which were in short supply then, as they are increasingly in our own.
In other words, Don Quixote is a one-eyed man traveling in the land of the blind. That’s what the story is about.
And that’s why this aging self-appointed knight has become a dear companion of mine, or maybe I should say I’ve become his companion, since we travel on and on, year after year, in his land and time, not in mine. The truth is, I’m not sure I ever want to finish reading Don Quixote.
Alan Conrad 