Read Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] Online
Authors: Miguel de Cervantes
Tags: #Fiction, #Classics, #Literary, #Knights and knighthood, #Spain, #Literary Criticism, #Spanish & Portuguese, #European, #Don Quixote (Fictitious character)
Hamlet subverts the will, while Falstaff satirizes it. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza both exalt the will, though the Knight transcendentalizes it, and Sancho, the first postpragmatic, wants to keep it within limits. It is the transcendent element in Don Quixote that ultimately persuades us of his greatness, partly because it is set against the deliberately coarse, frequently sordid context of the panoramic book. And again it is important to note that this transcendence is secular and literary, and not Catholic. The Quixotic quest is erotic, yet even the eros is literary. Crazed by reading (as so many of us still are), the Knight is in quest of a new self, one that can overgo the erotic madness of Orlando (Roland) in Ariosto’s
Orlando Furioso
or of the mythic Amadís of Gaul. Unlike Orlando’s or Amadís’s, Don Quixote’s madness is deliberate, self-inflicted, a traditional poetic strategy. Still, there is a clear sublimation of the sexual drive in the Knight’s desperate courage. Lucidity keeps breaking in, reminding him that Dulcinea is his own supreme fiction, transcending an honest lust for the peasant girl Aldonza Lorenzo. A fiction, believed in even though you know it is a fiction, can be validated only by sheer will.
Erich Auerbach argued for the book’s “continuous gaiety,” which is not at all my own experience as a reader. But
Don Quixote,
like the best of Shakespeare, will sustain any theory you bring to it, as well or as badly as any other. The Sorrowful Knight is more than an enigma: he seeks an undying name, literary immortality, and finds it, but only through being all but dismantled in part I and all but teased into real madness in part II:
Cervantes performs the miracle, nobly Dante-like, of presiding over his creation like a Providence, but also subjecting himself to the subtle changes brought about both in the Knight and in Sancho Panza by their wonderful conversations, in which a shared love manifests itself by equality and grumpy disputes. They are brothers, rather than father and son. To describe the precise way that Cervantes regards them, whether with ironic love or loving irony, is an impossible critical task.
6
Harry Levin shrewdly phrased what he called “Cervantes’ formula”:
This is nothing more nor less than a recognition of the difference between verses and reverses, between words and deeds,
palabras
and
hechos
—in short, between literary artifice and that real thing which is life itself. But literary artifice is the only means that a writer has at his disposal. How else can he convey his impression of life? Precisely by discrediting those means, by repudiating that air of bookishness in which any book is inevitably wrapped. When Pascal observed that the true eloquence makes fun of eloquence, he succinctly formulated the principle that could look to Cervantes as its recent and striking exemplar. It remained for La Rochefoucauld to restate the other side of the paradox: some people would never have loved if they had not heard of love.
It is true that I cannot think of any other work in which the relations between words and deeds are as ambiguous as in
Don Quixote,
except (once again) for
Hamlet.
Cervantes’s formula is also Shakespeare’s, though in Cervantes we feel the burden of the experiential, whereas Shakespeare is uncanny, since nearly all of his experience was theatrical. Still, the ironizing of eloquence characterizes the speeches of both Hamlet and Don Quixote. One might at first think that Hamlet is more word-conscious than is the Knight, but part II of Cervantes’s dark book manifests a growth in the Sorrowful Face’s awareness of his own rhetoricity.
I want to illustrate Don Quixote’s development by setting him against the wonderful trickster Ginés de Pasamonte, whose first appearance is as a galley-bound prisoner in part I, chapter XXII, and who pops up again in part II, chapters XXV–XXVII, as Master Pedro, the divinator and puppeteer. Ginés is a sublime scamp and picaroon confidence man, but also a picaresque romance writer in the model of
Lazarillo de Tormes
(1533), the
anonymous masterpiece of its mode (see W. S. Merwin’s beautiful translation, in 1962). When Ginés reappears as Master Pedro in part II, he has become a satire upon Cervantes’s hugely successful rival, Lope de Vega, the “monster of literature” who turned out a hit play nearly every week (whereas Cervantes had failed hopelessly as a dramatist).
Every reader has her or his favorite episodes in
Don Quixote;
mine are the two misadventures the Knight inaugurates in regard to Ginés/Master Pedro. In the first, Don Quixote gallantly frees Ginés and his fellow prisoners, only to be beaten nearly to death (with poor Sancho) by the ungrateful convicts. In the second, the Knight is so taken in by Master Pedro’s illusionism that he charges at the puppet show and cuts the puppets to pieces, in what can be regarded as Cervantes’s critique of Lope de Vega. Here first is Ginés, in the admirable new translation by Edith Grossman:
“He’s telling the truth,” said the commissary. “He wrote his own history himself, as fine as you please, and he pawned the book for two hundred
reales
and left it in prison.”
“And I intend to redeem it,” said Ginés, “even for two hundred
ducados.
”
“Is it that good?” said Don Quixote.
“It is so good,” responded Ginés, “that it’s too bad for
Lazarillo de Tormes
and all the other books of that genre that have been written or will be written. What I can tell your grace is that it deals with truths, and they are truths so appealing and entertaining that no lies can equal them.”
“And what is the title of the book?” asked Don Quixote.
“The Life of Ginés de Pasamonte,”
he replied.
“And is it finished?” asked Don Quixote.
“How can it be finished,” he responded, “if my life isn’t finished yet? What I’ve written goes from my birth to the moment when they sentenced me to the galleys this last time.”
“Then you have been there before?” said Don Quixote.
“To serve God and the king, I’ve already spent four years on the galleys, and I know the taste of the hardtack and the overseer’s whip,” responded Ginés. “And I’m not too sorry to go there, because I’ll have time to finish my book, for I still have lots of things to say, and on the galleys of Spain there’s more leisure than I’ll need, though I don’t need much for what I have to write because I know it by heart.”
Ginés, admirable miscreant, is a demonic parody of Cervantes himself, who had served five years in Algerian slavery and whose total
Don Quixote
became nearly unfinishable. The death of Cervantes came only a year after the publication of the second part of the great saga. Doubtless, Cervantes regarded Lope de Vega as his own demonic shadow, which is made clearer in the magnificent assault upon Master Pedro’s puppet show. The picaroon Ginés follows the general law of part II, which is that everyone of consequence either has read part I or is aware that he was a character in it. Master Pedro evades identity with Ginés, but at the high cost of witnessing another furious assault by the Knight of the Woeful Face. But this comes just after Master Pedro is strongly identified with Lope de Vega:
The interpreter said nothing in reply but went on, saying:
“There was no lack of curious eyes, the kind that tend to see everything, to see Melisendra descend from the balcony and mount the horse, and they informed King Marsilio, who immediately gave orders to sound the call to arms; and see how soon this is done, and how the city is flooded with the sound of the bells that ring from all the towers of the mosques.”
“No, that is wrong!” said Don Quixote. “Master Pedro is incorrect in the matter of the bells, for the Moors do not use bells but drums and a kind of flute that resembles our flageolet, and there is no doubt that ringing bells in Sansueña is a great piece of nonsense.”
This was heard by Master Pedro, who stopped the ringing and said:
“Your grace should not concern yourself with trifles, Señor Don Quixote, or try to carry things so far that you never reach the end of them. Aren’t a thousand plays performed almost every day that are full of a thousand errors and pieces of nonsense, and yet are successful productions that are greeted not only with applause but with admiration? Go on, boy, and let them say what they will, for as long as I fill my purse, there can be more errors than atoms in the sun.”
“That is true,” replied Don Quixote.
When Don Quixote assaults the puppet show, Cervantes assaults the popular taste that had preferred the theater of Lope de Vega to his own:
And Don Quixote, seeing and hearing so many Moors and so much clamor, thought it would be a good idea to assist those who were fleeing; and rising to his feet, in a loud voice he said:
“I shall not consent, in my lifetime and in my presence, to any such offense against an enamored knight so famous and bold as Don Gaiferos. Halt, you lowborn rabble; do not follow and do not pursue him unless you wish to do battle with me!”
And speaking and taking action, he unsheathed his sword, leaped next to the stage, and with swift and never before seen fury began to rain down blows on the crowd of Moorish puppets, knocking down some, beheading others, ruining this one, destroying that one, and among many other blows he delivered so powerful a downstroke that if Master Pedro had not stooped, crouched down, and hunched over, he would have cut off his head more easily than if it had been so much marzipan. Master Pedro cried out, saying:
“Your grace must stop, Señor Don Quixote, and realize that the ones you are overthrowing, destroying, and killing are not real Moors but only pasteboard figures. Sinner that I am, you are destroying and ruining everything I own!”
But this did not keep Don Quixote from raining down slashes, two-handed blows, thrusts, and backstrokes. In short, in less time than it takes to tell about it, he knocked the puppet theater to the floor, all its scenery and figures cut and broken to pieces: King Marsilio was badly wounded, and Emperor Charlemagne’s head and crown were split in two. The audience of spectators was in a tumult, the monkey ran out the window and onto the roof, the cousin was fearful, the page was frightened, and even Sancho Panza was terrified, because, as he swore when the storm was over, he had never seen his master in so wild a fury. When the general destruction of the puppet theater was complete, Don Quixote calmed down somewhat and said:
“At this moment I should like to have here in front of me all those who do not believe, and do not wish to believe, how much good knights errant do in the world: if I had not been here, just think what would have happened to the worthy Don Gaiferos and the beauteous Melisendra; most certainly, by this time those dogs would have overtaken them and committed some outrage against them. In brief, long live knight errantry, over and above everything in the world today!”
This gorgeous, mad intervention is also a parable of the triumph of Cervantes over the picaresque and of the triumph of the novel over the romance. The downward stroke that nearly decapitates Ginés/Master Pedro is a metaphor for the aesthetic power of
Don Quixote.
So subtle is Cervantes that he needs to be read at as many levels as Dante. Perhaps
the Quixotic can be accurately defined as the literary mode of an absolute reality, not as impossible dream but rather as a persuasive awakening into mortality.
7
The aesthetic truth of
Don Quixote
is that, again like Dante and Shakespeare, it makes us confront greatness directly. If we have difficulty fully understanding Don Quixote’s quest, its motives and desired ends, that is because we confront a reflecting mirror that awes us even while we yield to delight. Cervantes is always out ahead of us, and we can never quite catch up. Fielding and Sterne, Goethe and Thomas Mann, Flaubert and Stendhal, Melville and Mark Twain, Dostoevsky: these are among Cervantes’s admirers and pupils.
Don Quixote
is the only book that Dr. Johnson desired to be even longer than it already was.
Yet Cervantes, although a universal pleasure, is in some respects even more difficult than are Dante and Shakespeare upon their heights. Are we to believe everything that Don Quixote says to us? Does
he
believe it? He (or Cervantes) is the inventor of a mode now common enough, in which figures, within a novel, read prior fictions concerning their own earlier adventures and have to sustain a consequent loss in the sense of reality. This is one of the beautiful enigmas of
Don Quixote:
it is simultaneously a work whose authentic subject is literature and a chronicle of a hard, sordid actuality, the declining Spain of 1605–1615. The Knight is Cervantes’s subtle critique of a realm that had given him only harsh measures in return for his own patriotic heroism at Lepanto. Don Quixote cannot be said to have a double consciousness; his is rather the multiple consciousness of Cervantes himself, a writer who knows the cost of confirmation. I do not believe that the Knight can be said to tell lies, except in the Nietzschean sense of lying against time and time’s grim “It was.” To ask what it is that Don Quixote himself believes is to enter the visionary center of his story.
It is the superb descent of the Knight into the Cave of Montesinos (part II, chapters XXII–XXIII) that constitutes Cervantes’s longest reach toward hinting that the Sorrowful Face is aware of its self-enchantment. Yet we never will know if Hamlet ever touched clinical madness, or if Don Quixote was himself persuaded of the absurd wonders he beheld in the Cave of Enchantment. The Knight too is mad only north-northwest, and when the wind blows from the south he is as canny as Hamlet, Shakespeare, and Cervantes.
By descending to the cave, Don Quixote parodies the journey to the underworld of Odysseus and Aeneas. Having been lowered by a rope tied around him, the Knight is hauled up less than an hour later, apparently in deep slumber. He insists that he has sojourned below for several days and describes a surrealistic world, for which the wicked enchanter Merlin is responsible. In a crystal palace, the celebrated knight Durandarte lies in a rather vociferous state of death, while his beloved, Belerma, marches by in tears, with his heart in her hands. We scarcely can apprehend this before it turns into outrageous comedy. The enchanted Dulcinea, supposedly the glory sought by Don Quixote’s quest, manifests as a peasant girl, accompanied by two other girls, her friends. Seeing the Knight, the immortal Dulcinea runs off yet sends an emissary to her lover, requesting immediate financial aid: