AUTHOR: MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
DATE: 1605/1615
‘Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.’ So begins Don Quixote, published in two volumes a decade apart, considered a shining beacon of world literature and often cited as the first modern novel in the Western tradition. It is a complex work in terms of both content and style. Ostensibly a comedic parody of chivalric romances, its intertextuality lends it an air of post-modernism too, despite it being created centuries prior to the invention of that term. Its author, Cervantes, had a mastery of language that puts him at the very forefront of his profession, his prose being inventive and playful. But aside from its significance as an early example of the novel, Don Quixote continues to resonate as a rumination on the human condition and how we strive to reconcile our dreams with reality. Over four hundred years after its publication, it is a novel with a genuine claim to timelessness.
Cervantes’ own life story – much of it shrouded in some mystery and lacking in detail – has elements of the picaresque. Born in 1547 into a family that frequently found itself in debt, it seems he had to leave Madrid (where the family had settled) in 1569 after injuring another man in a duel. Following a stint working in the household of a Roman Catholic bishop, he served in the military and was involved in the 1571 naval battle of Lepanto against the Ottomans. He was given command of a skiff despite suffering from malaria at the time and received wounds that left him without the use of his left arm. Then, in 1575, he was captured by pirates and held to ransom for five years. Periods as a civil servant and tax collector followed, along with a number of short stays in prison over apparent financial irregularities. His first major literary work, La Galatea, appeared in 1585. It was only from the mid-1600s, once he had secured a wealthy patron – the Duke of Lamos – that he was able to afford to devote himself more fully to writing.
Given the nature of his own life, the episodic structure of Don Quixote perhaps came naturally to him. The book’s central figure is Alonso Quixano, a lean, idealistic, middle-aged hidalgo – or low-ranking nobleman – from La Mancha. Having feasted on literary chivalric romances (in the process, depriving himself of sleep, drying out his brain and sending himself mad), Quixano determines to revive the traditions of those tales and become a knight-errant, travelling the land in search of adventure and good deeds to do. He rebrands himself as Don Quixote for the purpose and appoints Sancho Panza, a thick-set, plain-speaking, unsophisticated farmer, to serve as his squire. They embark on their adventures, one with his head in the clouds and the other with his feet firmly on the ground, quickly establishing the mismatched pair as one of the great double-acts of history.
Cervantes presents the book as being based on real sources – items in the La Mancha archive and a translation of an Arabic text. One of the great enduring themes of the work is the tension between truth and fiction. Among the myriad characters Quixote and Panza encounter – from priests and prostitutes to soldiers, goat-herds and criminals – several have narratives that contain events from the real world. By contrast, Quixote himself struggles to discern what is true and what is the product of his imagination. Donning a suit of armour and having nominated an unwitting local farmgirl as his true love, his dislocation from reality accelerates, not least when he imagines windmills to be ferocious giants. (This episode, in which he ‘tilts’ at the windmills – attacking them with his lance – gave us a whole new idiom.) As Quixote battles with the world he encounters, the reader is left to wonder how much an individual can command their own destiny through free will and to what extent they are subject to fate.
THE ORIGINAL LOTHARIO
Don Quixote gifted us a good number of words and phrases – not least, the adjective ‘quixotic’, meaning one who is idealistic and impractical. It is sometimes said that English dramatist Nicholas Rowe gave us the original Lothario – a bounder who acts selfishly in his sexual interactions with women – in his 1703 play, The Fair Penitent. However, it seems we might fairly credit this to Cervantes too. In a story related in the first volume of Don Quixote, ‘The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious’, a figure called Lothario is called upon to seduce his friend’s wife in order to test her faithfulness. He may be an unwilling suitor but he surely has claim to be the original Lothario.
Quixote emerges from the first volume of the book as a hapless hero whose misjudgements and misfortunes result in all manner of calamity (with Panza frequently bearing the brunt). The second volume is a rather different beast, less joyously farcical but still concerned with the nature of reality. Published ten years after the first, volume two uses the dramatic conceit that Don Quixote is familiar with the fact that his story had been documented and widely read, and that a falsified ‘second volume’ is also in existence. This is meta-fiction early seventeenth-century style. After suffering assorted injuries and indignities, Quixote returns home and takes to what proves to be his deathbed. At the last, he regains his sanity and turns his back on his chivalric fantasy, shrugging off his identity as Don Quixote to become, once more, Alonso Quixano the Good.
In plundering and manipulating the form of the chivalric romance, Cervantes gave himself the tools to craft a new literary genre. One that brought multiple strands into a complex, unified narrative that speaks not only of events but of characters with complex psychologies and rich inner lives. He did the literary equivalent of a Renaissance artist, giving depth to his subjects where not so long before they had tended to serve rather as generic ciphers.
It is difficult to underestimate the literary influence of the work. To some extent, every novel since owes a debt to Don Quixote as the original trailblazer. It has been openly admired by a formidable number of other major authors, from Goethe and Flaubert to Dickens and Nabokov. Indeed, the novel is explicitly referenced in several major literary works, among them The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain), Cyrano de Bergerac (Edmond Rostand) and The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas).
Don Quixote is a work that itself challenges us as readers to examine the very nature of truth and virtue and to ponder how far we can mould our own lives. As such, it is a keystone of the Western literary canon. But as if that were not enough, Cervantes gifted us an entire literary form that has reached more people than any other in the centuries since he crafted his story.