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The Saddest Funny Story:
Four Centuries of Don Quixote
Reviewed by Steve Mentz
Cervantes’s Novel of Modern Times: A New
By David Quint
Princeton:
192 pp. 2nd
paperback printing 2005.
Imágenes del Quijote: Modelos de Representación en
las ediciones de los siglos XVII a XIX.
Patrick Lenaghan, ed.
Sevilla: Museo Nacional
del Prado, 2004.
“Of all tales ‘t is the saddest – and more sad,
Because it makes us smile.”
--Byron,
Don Juan
Some literary masterpieces did not make a splash
when they were first published – think of Walt Whitman reviewing Leaves of Grass under a pseudonym, or
Emily Dickinson’s poems sitting unpublished in her desk drawer – but four
hundred years ago Cervantes’s Don Quixote
was all the rage. Published in 1605
and quickly translated across the continent (an English version appeared in
1612), the adventures of the mad knight and his squire took early modern
“…because it is so clear
that there is nothing in it to cause difficulty: children look at it, youths
read it, men understand it, the old celebrate it, and, in short, it is so
popular and so widely read and so well-known by every kind of person that as
soon as people see a skinny old nag they say: ‘There goes Rocinante.’… There’s no lord’s antechamber where one does
not find a copy of Don Quixote: as
soon as it is put down it is picked up again; some rush at it, and others ask
for it. In short, this history is the
most enjoyable and least harmful entertainment ever seen, because nowhere in it
can one find even the semblance of an untruthful word or a less than Catholic
thought.”1
The year 2005 has seen a
variety of celebratory volumes and anniversary conferences, including several major
events in
Visitors to the fourth
floor of the
Quint’s study represents
close literary analysis at its clearest.
Taking the apparent disorder and episodism of Part 1 as a challenge, he
argues for the “artistic integrity” (ix) of the novel. The attempt to find aesthetic unity in a book
whose two parts were published 10 years apart and which contains episodes that
Cervantes’s own narrator calls “impertinent” seems properly quixotic, though
Quint is much more successful in his jousts against Cervantes scholarship than
the Don is against windmills. The larger
objective of the study, however, is not merely to show that the novel achieves
“formal unity” (ix) but to read that unity as having a representative content:
“Thus Don Quijote throughout tells
and retells a master narrative of early-modern Europe: the movement from
feudalism to the new order of capitalism that will become the realistic domain
of the modern novel, the genre this book does so much to invent” (x). Quint begins with a bravura reading of the
smallest and least well-known of the many episodes in Part 1, the story of
Leandra’s abortive romance with the outlaw Vicente de la Roca. He shows that this barely noticed episode,
told by the traveling goatherd Eugenio to Don Quixote and his party, serves as
a “kind of laboratory case…it picks up echoes and details of all the other interpolated tales that
precede it” (3, Quint’s emphasis). Building
from this point of maximum narrative humility, Quint demonstrates both the
artistic unity of Cervantes’s text and its structural analogues with cultural
transformation.
One particularly valuable
technique in Quint’s study is his exfoliation of Don Quijote’s complex narrative structure. He argues that the novel is best read through highlighting the intentional juxtaposition of
its narrative strains; to describe this technique, he uses the term “narrative
interlace,” which he adapts from studies of the same medieval romances of
chivalry that drove the Don mad. The
book’s schematic tables transform the myriad interlaced episodes into
comprehensible visual images. Perhaps
the most useful table is the first, which splits the episodes in Part 1 into
“Dulcinea” stories and “Princess Micomicona” stories (19). The distinction between these two kinds of
stories separates “Don Quijote’s ideal love for Dulcinea” from “his fantasy of
a rise to power and riches” – or, in larger analytical terms, it separates
feudal idealism from early modern capitalism.
Counting up the episodes suggests that the modern Princess gets one more
than the premodern Dulcinea (this sort of episode-counting has been a feature
of Cervantes criticism since Nabokov’s Lectures
on the Quixote, which famously concludes that the knight wins exactly one
more battle than he loses over the entire two-part novel), but Quint also
emphasizes that the novel’s heart (and its hero’s) seems firmly devoted to the
past. He reads Don Quijote Part 1 as an ambivalent representation of the arrival
of modernity; practical and even mercenary characters like Dorotea and Captain
Viedma represent a future that cannot be resisted, but the Don’s old-fashioned
ideals of service and bravery, and his mad commitment to them, remain powerful and
attractive.
Differences between Part 1
and Part 2 are a staple of Quijote criticism,
and here Quint’s analysis takes an unexpected turn. While he suggests early on that Part 2 will
“make peace with and discover positive worth in the conditions of modern
society” (20-1), he goes on to claim that Part 2 is the inferior half of the
novel: the hero’s “vision is gloomy” (94), he becomes less of a radical
challenge to the injustices of seventeenth-century Spain as well as “less
violent” (103), and in Quint’s view this “harmlessness and child-like
simplicity sentimentalize the hero” and lead to erroneous romanticized
interpretations of him as semi-secular saint (104). (Quint does not mention the moment early in
part 2 in which Sancho naively proposes that they abandon knight-errantry in
order “to be saints” [2.8], but of course when post-Romantic writers like Miguel
de Unamuno pledge allegiance to the figure he calls Our Lord Don Quixote they do not employ Cervantes’s pervasive irony.) Quint observes that in preferring the ornately
interlaced Part 1 to the more unified narrative of Part 2 he is working against
the grain of modern Quijote criticism
(178n), and he finally suggests that the novel’s resignation to “a debased
world ruled by money” (161) mirrors Cervantes’s recognition of how Spain was
changing: “The modern world of money is here to stay” (162). His structural analysis of the episodes of
Part 2 is no less illuminating than his reading of Part 1, and his table
outlining the ways Part 2 repeats the interlaced patterns of Part 1 (96) is
particularly helpful, but his heart does not seem comparably engaged. When exploring the novel’s perception of “a
general disenchantment of the world” (105), he relegates to a footnote the ways
in which the pervasive experience of desengaño
has been read as defining the modernity of the novel in criticism from
Lukács to McKeon (179n). If
disenchantment is a defining condition of modernity, as cultural critics from
Marx and Weber to Habermas argue, Cervantes’s wrestling with this phenomenon
may represent less a falling-off from the interlaced ironies of Part 1 than the
author’s conversion of feudal nostalgia into an ethical or philosophical response
to modern life. Quint’s skepticism about
a sentimentalized or Romantic Don Quixote animates his analysis throughout, but
disenchantment may have broader implications for Cervantes’s understanding of
post-feudal European culture than he acknowledges.
Quint’s pessimism about
Part 2 reflects his awareness of the novel’s increasing emphasis on mortality
and the limits of human power. By
contrast, the images collected in Imágenes
del Quijote trumpet myriad creative responses to the mad Don throughout
The illustrations provide
an extra-textual way to demonstrate the evolution of the hero. Another place to chart the progress of Don
Quixote after Cervantes’s death is the changing habits of translators. For example, the knight’s title, el caballero de la triste figura, was
first translated as a reference to physical ugliness:
In the twentieth century
Don Quixote towers over his literary peers.
Even more than Hamlet and Faust, he has been transformed by modern
writers and artists into a representation of modernity itself. Jorge Luis Borges’s story “Pierre Menard,
Author of the Quijote” imagines the ultimate modern literary work as a
word-for-word rewriting of the novel, “verbally identical” to Cervantes’s
version, but also “infinitely richer.”
Michel Foucault sees the Don’s transformative vision as the leading edge
of the modern crisis, in which “words” and “things” lose their ancient
unity. Ian Watt treats Don Quixote as
one of the four “heroes of modern individualism,” along with Faust, Don Juan,
and Robinson Crusoe. (Watt notes that of
these four, only Don Quixote is purely a creature of the human imagination; the
others have roots in folk narratives, historical personages, or both.) Critics like Lionel Trilling and Rene Gerard
claim that “All ideas of the Western novel are present in germ in Don Quixote,” and novelists like Carlos
Fuentes and Milan Kundera echo them. The
novel remains both a challenge to the ingenuity of literary critics and an
inspiration to artists and creative writers.
After four hundred years, perhaps the strangest thing about the
sorrow-faced caballero is how
contemporary his dilemma seems: his adventures rewrites the epic as a story
about reading, not fighting, and in a world saturated by texts of all kinds, his
madness remains the temptation always at our elbows. Quint’s portrait of a literary master’s
careful ambivalence about his own era’s cultural transformations, and the
evidence of later illustrations and translations that show Don Quixote engaging
with emerging capitalism (and the Romanticist revolt that capitalism incited)
underscore the dual legacy of Cervantes’s creation. Don
Quijote is at once a creature of the Renaissance and of the present, a
figure insanely tied to stories that are radically at odds with his own
experience and a literary symbol of our own efforts to make the narratives of
fiction and reality coincide.
Notes
1. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Edith Grossman, trans., (
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Steven Mentz is an
assistant professor of English at