This chapter is concerned with two aspects of Don Quijote and the picaresque: how the novels were intended and received in their historical context, and what posterity made of them.1 Though modern criticism has tended to treat the Quijote and the picaresque novel as virtually opposed fictional worlds, they are much more closely related.2 Indeed, in some ways, Don Quijote grows out of Alemán’s picaresque classic Guzmán de Alfarache (1599). Thus we should consider first the picaresque before Cervantes.
The genre was born in 1554 with the publication of the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes.3 Five years later, Lazarillo was blacklisted on the first Spanish Index because of its irreverence towards the church, but was allowed to recirculate in expurgated form from 1573. The Inquisition’s disapproval checked the development of the picaresque for the next forty years; but this genre, and comic/satiric writing in general, revived spectacularly with the publication in 1599 of the first part of Alemán’s novel and its wildfire editorial success. A spate of robustly comic fiction followed in the immediate wake of Guzmán de Alfarache, including Don Quijote, Part I (1605), together with several picaresque sequels or successors to Guzmán, like Quevedo’s El Buscón (written about 1605).
Thus the great formative period of Spanish fictional writing is concentrated in the space of just a few years, from 1599 to 1615, date of the publication of Don Quijote, Part II. This time span coincides with the zenith of the Spanish Golden Age: Góngora’s major poems circulate in Madrid around 1612; the drama of Lope de Vega is in full spate; Quevedo writes his satiric Sueños (dreams of hell and the afterlife) from 1606, projecting an image of Spain as corrupted by avarice, hypocrisy, social climbing, the loss of sober ancestral virtues, and incompetent government. Despite the growing awareness of political decadence that is typified by Quevedo, most Spaniards still saw their nation as a mighty European power, defender of the Catholic faith against Islam to the south and east and Protestantism to the north, and possessor of an empire which extended from the rising to the setting sun.
Lazarillo fixed the formula that would be exploited and freely varied by subsequent picaresque novelists: that is, the autobiography of a disreputable drifter, who tells of his ignominious parentage and upbringing, his employment as servant with a succession of twisters or charlatans, his acquisition of street wisdom and a ‘When in Rome . . .’ philosophy, and his efforts to scramble up the social ladder to some kind of security and respectability. In Lazarillo, these efforts are presented by the hero, Lázaro, as the success story of the little man made good; however, this claim of honorable achievement proves risibly ironic, especially in view of the conclusion, which shows him as having sunk even deeper into the mire, in the moral sense, than when he started. He ends up married to the servant girl of an archpriest, turning a blind eye and a deaf ear to the evidence of her concubinage with his benefactor for the sake of the material perquisites of the situation. These add nicely to the percentage accruing from his job as Toledo’s town crier, which includes crying – that is, advertising – its wines.
It is from this lowly position that Lázaro writes his memoirs, unfolding a career of ignominious mishaps, scrapes, and ruses: the public whipping of his black step-father and his mother as punishment for their immoral liaison and the step-father’s thefts from his master’s stable; the bashing of Lazarillo’s ear against the stone bull of Salamanca by his first master, the blind man, as a lesson in the need for wariness; the boy’s sadistic retaliation on the blind man for that trick and subsequent cruelties, which consists in making him run full tilt against a stone pillar; the subterfuges by which Lazarillo gets at the bread locked inside the chest of a stingy priest and covers up the theft. Most of the hoaxes and wisecracks that make up the action have a traditional ancestry – in proverbs, tales, comic theatre, and so on. Golden Age readers tended to see Lázaro’s career as a loose assembly of this funny material, and Lázaro himself as more function than personality: tricksy agent of burlas or naive victim of them.
Now in that society, obsessed with honor and status, the flaunting of so lowly and dishonorable a career could only have a hilarious effect, which is accentuated by two factors. First, since no author’s name appears on the title page, and since the writer of the prologue appears to be Lázaro himself, responding to the anonymous “Sir” (“Vuestra Merced”) who has requested the story, Lazarillo exhibits an ambiguous similarity to real autobiography. Memoirs in that age, such as Columbus’ accounts of his voyages, were customarily addressed to a noble patron; and Lázaro’s relationship to “Vuestra Merced,” resembling a letter writer’s to an addressee, parodically evokes that literary form, particularly in the prologue, which strikes – tongue-in-cheek – an exemplary and self-justificatory pose. Secondly, the story’s comicality is highlighted by the superbly droll and downbeat style in which it is told: understatement, euphemistic phrasing of shameful events, Biblical parody, plays on words and proverbs, mock-pathetic lamentation and other bogus solemnity.
We expect an autobiographer, exposing his intimate past before us, to speak fondly of parents, to narrate family catastrophes with due gravity, to show reverence for consecrated texts and values. Here is how Lázaro goes about it in the first section (tratado) of his story:
When I was a boy of eight, they blamed my father for certain improper bleedings [sangrías] in the sacks of corn that people brought to the mill to be ground, on account of which he was arrested and confessed and denied not and suffered persecution for righteousness’s sake. I trust to God that he is in paradise, for the Gospel calls such people blessed.4
The word sangrías, apart from its allusion to the slits through which Lázaro’s father stole his clients’ corn, puns cleverly on another sense of ‘sangrías’, water channels: i.e., those through which the water ran to turn the mill-wheel. The whole passage ironically borrows the language of the Gospels (John 1.20; Matthew 5.10) in order to dress up crime and its humiliating punishment as heroic Christian virtue. This flippant, casual, matter-of-fact wrongfooting of the reader’s expectations is typical of the picaresque, and leaves a permanent imprint on the Spanish novel, particularly its brutal focus on life in its most drab and sordid aspects, which a later tradition of novelists – Galdós, Baroja, Cela, Juan Goytisolo – have recognized as their national brand of “realism.” One perceives this kind of realism clearly in the way in which the hero of Camilo José Cela’s La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942), writing his memoirs in the condemned cell, relates the uniformly ill-fated circumstances of his upbringing in a small village in Extremadura: his impulsive violence erupts for the first time when he shoots his own dog; his sister Rosario becomes a teenage prostitute; a pig chews off the ears of his mentally handicapped brother, who drowns in a vat of oil; his mother drinks; his father beats her and the children, dying eventually of the bite of a rabid dog. And all this is set forth with shoulder-shrugging resignation and laconic candor, in which the occasional gestures of polite attenuation merely intensify the macabre bathos.
This cynical tone, reflecting a sleazy life and viewpoint, was a great novelistic discovery, and the author of Lazarillo made two further ones. What makes a suitable plot for a long comic novel, as distinct from a short funny story? Before Lazarillo, the answer to that problem eluded Western European writers, with one notable exception, Apuleius, whose novel The Golden Ass, written in Latin in the second century AD, tells of what happens to Lucius after he is transformed by witchcraft into an ass. He suffers a hectic series of misadventures in the service of various masters until the goddess Isis reveals to him in a dream how he can recover human form. The author of Lazarillo borrows from Apuleius’ story the formula “wandering servant of many masters,” suppresses the supernatural and macabre aspects, and accentuates the comedy and possibilities of satire. Thus was born an indefinitely adaptable framework for a long comic novel, which has triumphantly persisted for four hundred and fifty years in innumerable variations and metamorphoses, from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair to Günther Grass’s The Tin Drum to American road movies. I mean the story of a lowly, accident-prone character, whose travels, ups-and-downs, occupations, and acquaintances provide an endless kaleidoscope of adventures and characters, all unified by their relation to his or her unfolding destiny. Amongst modern Spanish novelists, Baroja, with his rootless, marginalized protagonists searching for a meaning for their lives in a decadent Spanish society, exploits it repeatedly. For example, Andrés, in El árbol de la ciencia (1911), is a thoughtful, critical, and morose descendant of Lázaro, and more particularly, of Guzmán. The same pedigree is shared by Pedro, the young scientist of Luis Martín Santos’s Tiempo de silencio (1962), whose investigations into cancer-bearing mice bring him, directly or indirectly, into contact with the city’s sordid shanty town, its dingy boarding houses, its brothels. Obviously, modern Spanish novelists, when harking back to the old picaresque models, recreate them in accord with contemporary concerns. The theme of the individual’s quick-witted struggle for survival in an urban jungle, treated farcically in the picaresque classics, now acquires sombre, socially critical, and existentialist inflections.
Let me digress a moment to explain that word “existentialist,” starting with the other revolutionary discovery made by Lazarillo. Its author found a convincing means of representing fictionally a fundamental truth about human experience: the individual’s awareness, beginning in childhood, of his or her isolation in a hostile world, where adults are potential adversaries from whom insubordinate thoughts need to be concealed behind a polite face, and stratagems of survival must continually be improvised. The pícaro has, typically, a lonely and wary attitude to others; and, in Lazarillo, this is stylistically reflected in the frequency of passages consisting of the boy’s unspoken thoughts. He spends as much time in critical observation of others as in active involvement; from this process, he picks up lessons and learns from past mistakes, ending triumphantly – or so he claims – in a safe haven.
The picaresque novel, then, presents a perverted educational process, in which the individual learns the appropriate means of coping with a nasty world; and the two most influential critics of the picaresque in modern times, Rico (1970) and Lázaro Carreter (1972), have interpreted this process in a way that aligns it with the modern novel’s conception of the subject’s relation to society.5 For both these critics, each ingredient in the narrative of Lazarillo is designed by its narrator to explain, prefigure, and justify his present point of view, including his cynically marginalized outlook. The ragbag of traditional motifs that enters into the novel’s construction is transformed and unified by the theme of the forging of a dropout’s conscience, and by the perfect circular trajectory of a career whose conclusion returns us to the prologue and to the inception of the act of writing.
Despite its roots in primitive narrative forms, Lazarillo is strikingly modern by virtue of the realism, poised self-consciousness, and coherence of its conception of the subject. I quote Lázaro Carreter, who, in this context, treats Lazarillo as a shining exception to the kind of story that he has in mind: “The life of novelistic characters, however unusual and eventful, does not constitute a novel in the modern sense of the term unless those characters take conscious responsibility for their past life and act under its influence in each and every one of the decisive moments of their existence” (“Lazarillo de Tormes”, p. 216). “Taking responsibility for one’s life” is existentialist terminology. In Ortega y Gasset’s philosophy, the individual, “shipwrecked” in a world for which traditional morality and religion offer no meaning, is thrown back on his or her own resources, forges a personal “life-program,” and achieves authenticity by acting in accord with that individual set of beliefs. The novels of Azorín, Baroja, and Unamuno are full of “shipwrecked” survivors thrashing about in search of that kind of life-raft, a quest rendered more urgent by the decadence of the Spanish society in which they live. A more recent example of this existentialist perspective is Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás (1978), where the author, through the medium of fictional autobiography, narrates her struggle to create her own “Back Room,” an escapist playroom of fantasy and rebellious impulse that offers a private refuge from the penny-pinching drabness and the asphyxiating ideology of Franco’s regime. Whether the author of Lazarillo saw the hero in as heroically defiant a light as the critics do is doubtful, despite his attractive sympathy for the disadvantaged and his stinging ironies about the double standards of those higher up the social ladder. With Spanish Golden Age readers in general, he saw Lázaro essentially as a comic butt, whose acquiescence in his wife’s protestations of virtue is a sign of crass credulity, not cynicism.
Alemán, in Guzmán de Alfarache, while preserving Lazarillo’s essential comicality, gives the picaresque theme a sombrely moralistic and censorious twist. In the preliminaries to Part I, he explains that this is the autobiography of a contrite criminal with a university background, condemned to the galleys for his crimes. His hero, Guzmán, writes his life story on the benches of the galleys, interleaving the misadventures of his youth with a penitent gloss, which presents him as a universally applicable example of how anyone is led into sin. The pícaro’s levelling sense of the brutish nastiness and self-delusion of the human condition goes together with a passionate attack – “left-wing” in modern terms – on the institutional forms of sin, such as society’s respect for the “haves” rather than the “have-nots,” its enslavement to honor and saving face, the cynical abuse of power masquerading as justice. Alemán’s Christian and utopian objective, illustrated by negative examples, is nothing less than the building of the idea of a perfect man in a just, economically efficient society.
Guzmán’s story, as well as giving new depth to the pícaro’s career, vastly expands its scope. Geographically and vocationally, in Lazarillo, such a career pursued a parochial itinerary, from Salamanca to Toledo, and from one menial job to the next. By contrast, the action of Guzmán de Alfarache shuttles between the great political and commercial centers of Spain and Italy. The hero’s Protean vicissitudes justify the subtitle of the novel’s second part, “Atalaya de la Vida Humana” (‘Watch Tower of Human Life’), and lead him through a diverse range of occupations: inn servant, basket carrier, kitchen skivvy, thief, dandy, beggar, page, jester and go-between, confidence trickster, cardsharp, shady financial dealer, theology student, twice a husband, pimp of his own wife, majordomo, convict, and, of course, author of his own memoirs. The uniformly comic tonality of Lazarillo yields to a mix of jest and earnest, accentuated by Guzmán’s variation of the narrative of his own adventures with romantic and tragic interpolations. Thus, the squalid farce of his adventures at inns on the road from Seville to Madrid, a road which also takes this Jewish pariah away from God and honorable society, contrasts with the heroic, poignant, and devout interpolation of Ozmín and Daraja at the end of Book I, culminating in the integration of the Moorish lovers in the Christian court of the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabel.
The expansion of Lazarillo’s range also includes the style. Alemán tones down its flippancy, and assumes a causticity, sombreness, and learned elegance to which the precursor did not aspire, including a whole repertoire of devices derived from Renaissance rhetoric and didactic literature. Contemporaries of Alemán were dazzled by the ambitious sweep of the book and by its brilliantly paradoxical mingling of burlas and veras, jest and earnest. In a Latin epigram included in the preliminaries of Guzmán de Alfarache Part I, Vicente Espinel, author of the picaresque novel Marcos de Obregón (1618), asks Guzmán who has taught him to soar from dung to the stars, flit like a fly from clean food to putrid ulcers, teach and scold, heal and console, pass from the green groves of sacred Sophia to squalid and obscene jests. And Guzmán answers that these contradictions are explained by his function as an image of human life, encompassing its good and its misery.
Let us see how this mix of burlas and veras works in Guzmán de Alfarache. After running away from his home and his mother’s care, Guzmán arrives at an inn, tired and famished after his first day’s hike, seeing the place with the rose-tinted expectation with which Columbus first sighted the Indies (Part I, Book i, Chapter 3). The violent disillusion that he suffers is preceded by a distinction between two types of affliction: first, those sent by divine providence to test and temper the soul, “most precious jewels covered with a thin layer of dust” (i, 107) from which God retrieves the faithful, spiritually enriched; secondly, those brought upon the sinner by his own folly, which bring only material and spiritual harm. This topic of pulpit oratory elicits a cluster of commonplace images reminiscent of the same discourse: the second kind of affliction is like green fields full of poisonous vipers, deceptive jewels concealing scorpions, eternal death which deceives with brief life. The imagery is coextensive with the physical circumstances of the burla that Guzmán now suffers, in which a seemingly tasty omelette is replaced by jewels, and its revolting ingredients by scorpions. The innkeeperess, an aged hag with fetid breath, sits the boy at a table set with filthy and dilapidated accessories: an oven rag for a tablecloth, an egg crock for a water jar, the broken base of a water pitcher for a salt cellar, a loaf blacker than the rag. She then serves him an omelette which he wolfs down “like a pig rooting for acorns,” undeterred by the bad taste and the splintering sensation of little bones between teeth and gums. Realization only dawns upon him when he has left the inn behind and vomits out all the contents of his stomach. In this adventure Alemán dramatizes a traditional joke, based on the diner’s discovery that his eggs are half-hatched, transforming it into a religious emblem with profound thematic repercussions in the story.
From the early eighteenth century onwards, posterity – translators of Guzmán de Alfarache, editors and abridgers of it, literary critics – have tended to react with sharp disfavor to Guzmán’s moralizing, treating it as an impertinently prolix intrusion into a racy comic story. In recent times, critics have given this historic tendency a new twist by interpreting the novel’s didacticism as a symptom of rancorous and subversive motives implicitly hostile to the ideology that it appears to promote. However, despite the modern age’s distaste for it, the kind of socially critical and philosophically reflective transformations of the picaresque that have been written in the modern age would be inconceivable without the precedent set by Alemán’s novel. While it would be quite misleading to suggest that it and Lazarillo adequately represent the rest of the Spanish picaresque, these are the genre’s two foundational novels and constitute the essence of its legacy.
Cervantes, though he never brings himself to say so, was as dazzled by Alemán’s novel as his contemporaries. Don Quijote, Part I (though not so much Part II) and the best-known novelas are indebted to it, more or less deeply, even though they pursue very different directions. For example, in Don Quijote Part I its imprint can be discerned in the importance of inns as primordial theatres of conflict between the hero’s illusions and base reality, the segregation of robust comedy from interpolated romance, the hero’s alternation between lucid rationality and anarchic folly, and the choice of priests as beacons of charitable enlightenment. Yet despite these similarities, the two novels basically diverge, due to the distinct motivations of the protagonists: in Guzmán’s case, an irresistible attraction to a hand-to-mouth life of cheating and scrounging; in Don Quijote’s, a crazy urge to imitate a life of fabulous literary heroism in the world of here-and-now.
Don Quijote is a parody of Spanish romances of chivalry, launched by the immensely popular Amadís de Gaula (1508). This genre, an offshoot of the medieval Lancelot about King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, presents an escapist version of the medieval code of chivalry, set in a remote era sometime after the death of Christ: a marvelous world of giants, enchanters, castles, forests, tourneys, battles, princesses, dwarfs, and dragons, through which heroic knights-errant roam in search of adventure and fame. Cervantes ridicules the genre primarily because of its implausibility, thus swelling a chorus of moralistic denunciations dating from the early sixteenth century. Yet his objections are more aesthetic than moral, being based on a neoclassical conception of what a prose epic should be, which is, in essence, that it should excite wonderment in the reader without infringing verisimilitude.6 This view is expounded by his spokesman, the Canon of Toledo, in Don Quijote, Part I, Chapter 47.
That theoretical critique of the romances is followed in the very next chapter by a stinging censure of the theatre of the contemporary school of Lope de Vega; and the conjunction of the two passages gives us a clue as to why Cervantes should have been so bothered about a genre – i.e. chivalry books – virtually defunct as regards composition, though not consumption, in Spain around 1600. Formerly a successful dramatist, he found himself ousted from public favor in the 1590s by Lope de Vega and his followers; and he attributes the setback not to his own deficiencies but to the commercially motivated philistinism of the actor-managers and their pandering to vulgar taste. From that bitter experience he derived a lesson relevant to the kind of epic story of love and adventure which he planned to write, and which he eventually brought to realization in his posthumously published romance Persiles y Segismunda (1617). Indeed, within the briefer compass of the novela or interpolated interlude, such as those included in Don Quijote Part I, he wrote stories of that kind throughout his career. He inferred that since they were akin to chivalric romances in heroic and prodigious tone, public taste needed to be taught through parody how to discriminate good romance from bad; otherwise, the rebuff in the genre of theatre would be repeated in prose fiction.
Understanding Cervantes’s artistic motives for writing Don Quijote helps us to appreciate how he managed to transform parody into something much less limited than what is normally meant by that term. Another motive that needs to be taken into account are his strong objections to the heavy didacticism of contemporary literature of entertainment, an offense, in his view, against the principle of decorum or fittingness. Guzmán de Alfarache is one of the examples that he has in mind. The objections are expressed with waspish wit in the prologue to Don Quijote Part I, which ends with the recommendations of Cervantes’s friend as to how he should write his novel. The friend tells him that since his purpose is simply the comic demolition of chivalry books, “about which Aristotle never took note, St. Basil was silent, and no news reached Cicero,” he has no need to go scrounging philosophical maxims, precepts of Holy Scripture, poetic fables, rhetorical orations, and miracles of saints; all he need do is write his story in a pleasing, plain, and merry style, concentrate on its argument, and observe verisimilitude, thus provoking the reader to sustained laughter. We might see this as a recipe for unremitting levity without the least concession to gravity or learning. This impression would be mistaken. In fact, since Cervantes shares his age’s taste for the display of eloquence, erudition, and moral sententiousness, and since it is essential to his novel’s design that the hero’s constantly frustrated attempts to live on an authentically heroic and romantic plane should be contrasted with interpolations that show characters successfully doing just that, Don Quijote contains plenty of “philosophical maxims.” However, Cervantes cannot be accused of incurring the faults that he condemns. This is because, in incorporating such material in his novel, he takes good care to ensure that it is genuinely integrated with the main comic theme by irony, thematic mirroring, idiosyncrasy of perspective, and other means.
A good example is Don Quijote’s speech on the Golden Age, which is both a “poetic fable” and a “rhetorical oration,” and forms a prelude to the pastoral episode of Grisóstomo and Marcela. This elegantly precious and learned rehearsal of a consecrated classical topos (Part I, Chapter 11), with echoes of scores of poets from Hesiod onwards, is presented as an aspect of Don Quijote’s eccentrically bookish character and chivalric mania. He is moved to deliver the oration, oblivious of the incomprehension of his hosts, the goat-herds, merely because he has a full belly after supper, feels in an expansive mood, and holds a bunch of shrivelled acorns in his hand, which puts him in mind of that vegetarian age. Also, he treats the decline of the mythic age of gold into that of iron as the “historic” circumstance that brought about the genesis of knight-errantry, required to protect wandering damsels from sexual predators. The speech thus forms a natural introduction to the story of the chaste and independent shepherdess Marcela, subjected to the pestering of her many male admirers, chief of whom, until his demise, was the shepherd Grisóstomo.
The story of Grisóstomo’s love for Marcela, and the drama of his burial and her eloquent intervention in it, are essentially treated seriously; yet they are harmonized with Don Quijote’s doings, first by being initially presented from the parochial viewpoint of the goat-herd Pedro, which brings the literariness of the behavior of Grisóstomo and his friends and rivals down to earth with a satiric bump, and secondly by the excesses of their amatory lamentations, reminiscent of those of Don Quijote for Dulcinea. In essence, Cervantes proceeds in the same sort of way with all the grave matter that he introduces into his novel – the trials and tribulations of Cardenio and Dorotea in the Sierra Morena (I: 23–4, 27–9, 36), Don Quijote’s counsels of government to Sancho (II: 42–3), and so on – and, in consequence, he endows it with a suggestive ambivalence. To what extent are Cardenio and Dorotea tarred with Don Quijote’s brush? How seriously are we meant to take those counsels, commonplaces of the statecraft of the age? How do we discriminate good romance from bad, one level of fiction from another, ‘inside’ the fictional world from ‘outside’?7 For Cervantes and his contemporaries, steeped in cultural presuppositions that allowed them to make such distinctions instinctively, those problems did not exist. Yet for readers of later ages, unfamiliar with those presuppositions, the ambivalence would become ironically mesmerizing. Cervantes appears to present in his novel all the learned styles and topics, the authoritative discourses, and the forms of talk of his age, and to hold all this ironically at arm’s length without taking sides. That at least is how his novel has been interpreted in the twentieth century, from Américo Castro to Leo Spitzer to Carlos Fuentes; and the interpretation has acquired a new lease on life in the post-modernist age, thanks to the pervasive influence of the ‘dialogic’ theory of Bakhtin.8 It draws strength from the notorious “metafictionality” of Don Quijote: that is, Cervantes’s practice of alluding within his novel to its own fictional status, which includes representing the process of creating, consuming, and criticizing fiction. We have an example of this in the Marcela/Grisóstomo episode. Don Quijote, the madman who believes he can live chivalric literature, hears from Pedro the story about the eccentric Grisóstomo and his party, who, for love of Marcela, live the life of literary shepherds. Then he observes Grisóstomo’s burial, a solemn literary masquerade, with the mourners, the funeral bier, and ceremony dressed up like a scene from Sanazzaro’s Arcadia. It is as though Don Quijote were reading a version of his own story.9
From the viewpoint of posterity, the same kind of ambivalence surrounds Don Quijote’s motivation. In the early chapters of Part I, it is ridiculously unproblematic. He goes mad as a result of reading too many chivalry books, loses the distinction between them and true history, and resolves to becomes a knight-errant in the Spain of around 1600. His behavior from that point on, as Sancho aptly observes (II: 10), involves interpreting black as white – windmills as giants, sheep as armies, basins as helmets – with chaotically farcical results. While this black/white dichotomy is basic to a series of centrally significant contrasts through the novel, it is progressively refined by two factors in particular.
The first is Cervantes’s peculiarly internal and empathetic relation to the object of his parody, due to the fact that he ridicules chivalry books from the perspective of an ideal alternative to them. Consequently, though Don Quijote’s heroic conception of himself and of a consonantly prodigious world exists only in his fantasy, it stylishly and consistently replicates the original in many ways, while at the same time capriciously inflating, elaborating, and vulgarizing it. This continually improvised romance is made to absorb, with madly ingenious exuberance, a host of “purple” styles and learned topics, some more or less akin to the chivalric genre (pastoral, epic, history, ballads, Ariosto’s heroic romance Orlando furioso), and others quite unrelated to it (the Golden Age, the Bible, poetic theory, statecraft, legal jargon, etcetera). Don Quijote does not merely play a chivalric role, but lives it, confusing make-believe with reality; and the performance includes a thoroughgoing rationale of his vocation: its historical origins, its ethical principles, and so on. His enthusiastic and solemn immersion in a fictional world incites the reader, as Ortega y Gasset shrewdly pointed out,10 to identify with him; and in this the modern reader is assisted by a tendency to overlook a distinction that Cervantes takes for granted: that is, the difference between mad make-believe and really doing or being. We can observe this tendency in Erich Auerbach’s famous essay on “The Enchanted Dulcinea,” a commentary on the adventure in which Sancho deceives his master into thinking that three uncouth wenches, met by chance outside El Toboso, are Dulcinea and two ladies-in-waiting (Don Quijote, Part II, Chapter 10).
Before setting forth on his third sally, Don Quijote rides to El Toboso to seek Dulcinea’s blessing (II: 8); and Sancho is expected to lead his master to her palace, having supposedly gone there during the second sally to deliver a message to her. Sancho is put in a terrible pickle, for his account of his embassy to Dulcinea was all a pack of lies (I: 31). Quite apart from that, though Sancho is by now nitwittedly unclear on this point, the palace and Dulcinea’s noble status are pure figments of the knight’s imagination. After master and squire blunder fruitlessly about El Toboso in the dead of night (II: 9), Sancho is left to locate Dulcinea on his own, and he resolves on a ruse to get himself out of his jam. Reasoning that his master is mad, and habitually prone to take black for white, he decides to present to his master the first rustic wench that he meets, claiming that she is Dulcinea.
The encounter beween Don Quijote and the three girls is dramatically vivid in its oppositions of register, posture, and attitude, and the extremity of its irony. The knight, with bulging eyes and distraught gaze, confronts the moon-faced, snub-nosed “Dulcinea,” one of whose companions delivers a coarsely rustic brush-off to Sancho, intermediary of the meeting. At this, Don Quijote delivers a preciously wordy entreaty to “Dulcinea” – “And thou, O limit of desirable worth, ultimate term of human courtesy, only remedy of this afflicted heart that adores thee!” (II: 110) – begging her to look gently and amorously upon him, unless he too has been made hideous in her eyes, just as she has been grotesquely transformed in his. Auerbach characterizes the speech as lofty, beautiful, grandly periodic, overlooking its stilted literariness and the ridiculous misapprehensions on which it is based.11 Auerbach is able to take this view because, although Don Quijote overdoes the language of lovers’ adoration, he overdoes it marginally rather than crudely. For Cervantes, the speech’s absurdity consists not so much in the style as in the grotesque mismatch between style and addressee, a failure of decorum which he would not have considered extrinsic to the dignity of expression.12 Disregarding that, Auerbach assumes that the Don’s hyperbolical rhetoric is as noble as that of other, seriously portrayed Cervantine lovers, and worthily continues “the great epico-rhetorical tradition,” instead of degrading it. This assumption is facilitated by Cervantes’s characteristic lack of comment on Don Quijote’s motivation. Why, for example, does the knight fail to transform black into white in this scene, when in Part I, confronted by wenches quite as hideous as this one, his imagination invariably converts them into paragons of beauty? On this and other questions regarding his attitude to Dulcinea, Cervantes is silent. So the reader has to revert to Don Quijote’s own explanations, which have a crazy inconsequentiality combined with an outwardly stylish and emotive form. Hence many modern readers substitute “sublime” for “crazy,” including Auerbach, as the following quotation shows: “But Don Quijote’s feelings are genuine and profound. Dulcinea is really the mistress of his thoughts; he is truly filled with the spirit of a mission which he regards as man’s highest duty” (“The Enchanted Dulcinea,” p. 107). From premises like these, a long succession of twentieth-century critics has read this adventure and the ensuing process of the knight’s disillusionment as tragedy, not farce.
My purpose here is not to rebut them but to explain why, since about 1800, there has been a fundamental shift in readers’ conception of Don Quijote’s mania, which is no longer seen as a ridiculous, albeit amiable, aberration, but as a paradigm of the human imagination’s struggle to transcend the pull of base reality, and thus to achieve some form of salvation, religious, artistic, or other. This, for Ortega y Gasset in his Meditaciones del Quijote, published in 1914, is the destiny of all human culture, and Don Quijote’s transformation of the windmills on the plain of Montiel symbolizes it. Since, among works of fiction, Don Quijote has been the single most important influence upon the development of the European novel since 1800 (Close, Don Quijote, pp. 109–25), Quixotic figures abound in the genre – the heroine of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Captain Ahab in Melville’s Moby Dick, Dickens’s Mr. Pickwick – and while their Quixotry is not always depicted in Ortega’s grandiose terms, it tends to be seen as heroic, tragic, or at least, pathetic, rather than funny. In Spain, Galdós and Unamuno are the most heavily indebted to this model, with the former taking Don Quijote as a basic pattern for the delineation of his characters (e.g., Maxi in Fortunata y Jacinta, Don Francisco in La de Bringas), and the latter seeing him as the personification of all that is noblest in the Spanish soul, a Christ adapted to the modern age, like the protagonist of Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, mártir (1931).
The second factor that refines the black/white dichotomy in Don Quijote is Cervantes’s conception of the kind of reality that he juxtaposes to his hero’s literary fantasies. Gray is often a more adequate symbol for it than black. One of the few chivalry books to be saved from the bonfire in the scrutiny of Don Quijote’s library is Tirant lo Blanc, about which the priest says enthusiastically: “Here knights eat and sleep and die in their beds, and make their wills before dying, with other such things lacking in all the rest of the genre” (I: 6). Here the priest pinpoints the stuff of humdrum, everyday life, which Cervantes habitually designates by the term menudencias, trifles. In focusing on menudencias, he opened up a whole new zone of the real world as an object of fictional representation, distinctively different from the kind of “realism” in which picaresque novelists specialized, and in dramatizing the interplay between menudencias and idealizing fantasy, he discovered a major theme – some would say the great theme13 – of the European novel from, shall we say, 1800 to 1930: Madame Bovary, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Clarín’s La Regenta, Galdós’s Doña Perfecta, Henry James’s The Ambassadors, Unamuno’s Niebla, Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.
A good example of Cervantes’s attention to menudencias is the last chapter of his novel, in which the priest’s words about knights dying in bed and making wills before dying are explicitly recalled and literally come true. In this, one of the great death-bed scenes in literature, Don Quijote takes up an option which he has hitherto consistently rejected: fulfilling the social, personal, and religious obligations incumbent on him as the person he really is, Alonso Quijano el Bueno. He recants his chivalric delusions, which all fly out of his head as though they had never existed, save one: the promise of the island made to Sancho. Why does he remember this particular promise? The answer points to how Don Quijote’s last will and testament specifically reflects the form and purpose of such documents in the Spain of Cervantes’s age. By means of them, the author of the will could envisage departing this world with conscience clear and all debts settled, the latter being a prerequisite of the former. And so it was normal for testators to make bequests to faithful retainers in a form of words somewhat similar to the following:
Item, it is my will that with regard to certain moneys held by Sancho Panza, treated by me in my madness as my squire, these moneys having been the subject of certain reckonings and argy-bargy between us, I do not want him to be held liable for them, nor asked to return any of them, but rather that if there should be any money left over after he has paid himself from what I owe him, and it can’t be much, good luck to him; and, remembering how in my madness I was the means of giving him an island, if I could now, in my sanity, give him a whole kingdom, I would do it, because the innocence of his character and loyalty of his service deserve it.
(II: 74)
These words nobly sum up the bond of affection between Don Quijote and Sancho; and they also mimic by their tortuous syntax the wording of real, historic wills. They match the substance too, with obvious differences, which reflect the partly burlesque nature of this testament. We could scarcely imagine a real scribe including in a legal document the idiosyncratic reference to madness and the concession of an island, still less using such colloquial, bread-and-butter expressions as “dares y tomares” (‘argy-bargy’), “buen provecho le haga” (‘good luck to him’). The whole passage typifies the constant tug in the novel between burlesque fantasy and fidelity to mundane particulars.
In the twentieth century, from Ortega’s seminally influential Meditaciones del Quijote onwards, attention has shifted from Don Quijote to Cervantes, from the book or the hero as archetypal symbol to the individual system of thought expressed in that book and other writings. The seed that Ortega planted in the Meditaciones bore fruit in Américo Castro’s El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925), whose influence, together with that of Castro’s later essays on Cervantes, extends far beyond the borders of Cervantine criticism.14 In that seminal book, reacting against the unproblematic image, encouraged by the great literary historian Menéndez Pelayo, of Cervantes as the artlessly inspired painter of nature, Castro gave an account of Cervantes’s outlook that was thoroughly in tune with the times, in which Ortega y Gasset’s vitalism and relativism were in the air, and the liberal Second Spanish Republic was in the offing.
Castro’s Cervantes is a deeply ironic, self-conscious, and ambiguous writer, abreast of the most innovative currents of Renaissance thought, aloof from the oppressive ideology of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, and imbued with something like a pre-Ortegan concept of the moral subject, which he expresses in novelistic rather than philosophic form, artfully insinuated in muted asides and suggestive overtones. Later, Castro rejected the intellectual and European orientation that he attributed to Cervantes in 1925.15 In the series of essays and books in which he developed his conception of Spanish history, expressed in La realidad histórica de España (1954), he identified its critical period as the sixteenth century, when the distinctive Spanish mindset took shape, formed through the interaction of the three castes which coexisted in the Spanish Peninsula after the Arab invasion: Jew, Moor, Christian. In that century, the Christians exerted repressive dominance over the other two races, seeking to destroy their cultures along with their religions and to assert their own caste-purity, without realizing how far they had assimilated the traits of their two neighbors. In Cervantes y los casticismos españoles (1966), Castro treats Don Quijote as a utopian political fable about how the tensions and insecurities of the Spanish life style can be overcome.16 With or without these racial overtones, the conception of Cervantes as key to the enigma of Spanish identity and cure for its strife, crystallized by the writers of the Generation of 1898 and by Ortega, has remained a commonplace of intellectual discourse in twentieth-century Spain, and, after the mid-century, is reflected in such novels as Martín Santos’s Tiempo de silencio (1962) and Juan Goytisolo’s Reivindicación del conde don Julián (1970).
1 M. de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote, ed. L. A. Murillo, 2 vols. (Madrid: Castalia, 1978); M. Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache, ed. S. Gili Gaya, 5 vols. (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1972).
2 F. Lázaro Carreter, “Lazarillo de Tormes” en la picaresca (Barcelona: Ariel, 1972), pp. 226–8.
3 Anon., Lazarillo de Tormes, ed. J. Cejador y Frauca (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1969).
4 Anon., Lazarillo de Tormes, ed. Julio Cejador y Frauca (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1969), p. 66. My translation.
5 F. Rico, La novela picaresca y el punto de vista (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1970).
8 L. Spitzer, “Perspectivismo lingüístico en el Quijote,” in Lingüística e historia literaria (Madrid: Gredos, 1955), pp. 161–225, and C. Johnson, “Cómo se lee hoy el Quijote,” in Cervantes (Alcalá de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 1995), pp. 335–48.
9 E. C. Riley, Don Quijote (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), pp. 124–32.
10 J. Ortega y Gasset, “Meditaciones del Quijote,” in Obras completas, 7th edn, 9 vols. (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1966), vol. 1, pp. 380–1.
11 E. Auerbach, “The Enchanted Dulcinea,” reproduced in Cervantes, ed. Lowry Nelson Jr. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), pp. 98–122. From Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. Willard Trask (Princeton University Press, 1953).
12 A. Close, Don Quijote (Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 96–7.
13 Harry Levin, “The Example of Cervantes,” in Contexts of Criticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 79–86.
14 A. Castro. El pensamiento de Cervantes, 2nd edn, ed. J. Rodríguez-Puértolas (Madrid: Noguer, 1972), pp. 87–8, 243–4.
15 A. J. Close, The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote (Cambridge University Press, 1978), pp. 228–39.
16 A. Castro, Cervantes y los casticismos españoles (Madrid: Alfguara, 1966).