“And if this is done in a pleasing style and with ingenious invention, and is drawn as close as possible to the truth, it no doubt will weave a cloth composed of many different and beautiful threads, and when it is finished, it will display such perfection and beauty that it will achieve the greatest goal of any writing, which, as I have said, is to teach and delight at the same time. Because the free writing style of these books allows the author to show his skills as an epic, lyric, tragic, and comic writer, with all the characteristics contained in the sweet and pleasing sciences of poetry and rhetoric; for the epic can be written in prose as well as in verse.”
That is one of the characters in Don Quixote. Cervantes must have had a merry time writing that description of his own book and embedding it in the book as a description of a perfect book.
If you have never read Don Quixote, this is likely how you would summarize it: Crazy guy (Don Quixote) thinks he is a knight and goes and fights windmills thinking they are giants; he has a sidekick (Sancho Panza) who is not crazy. The book is 940 pages long. And that is why you never read it. Who wants to read a 940 page book about a guy fighting windmills?
The windmill episode, by the way, takes place on pages 58-60 (in the excellent Edith Grossman translation (the one in the picture (and Amazon link) above). That leaves another 937 pages.
Written in the early 17th century, Don Quixote is a contender for the first novel ever written. The debate is not about an earlier book, but whether this is actually a “novel.” It has so many interweaving stories within stories, it was published in two parts written ten years apart, and it, to put it mildly, wanders all over the place—the debate is whether it retains enough cohesion to be called a novel. The problem with the debate is that if it is not a novel, it is not clear what it is. (Well, other than a masterpiece; it is definitely a masterpiece.)
Have you ever had the pleasure of starting a jaunt on a mountain road and wandering aimlessly wherever the path takes you, picking branches of the trail at random, not really heading anywhere in particular, but admiring the scenery? That is how you should read Don Quixote. Forget what little you know or think you know about the book, and just set off. Embrace every lengthy short story within the larger story. Be thrilled when you keep arriving back at the same Inn, which for no obvious reasons turns out of be a cosmic magnet for curious characters. Simultaneously laugh at Don Quixote and be indignant when the characters in the novel mock him. Be delighted. It is easy to be delighted with this book one you lose the expectation of a linear narrative.
But, as Cervantes notes in the quotation reprinted above, delight is only one of Cervantes’ aims. He also wants to teach. What is the lesson?
We begin see the shape of the lesson by looking at Don Quixote. After a lifetime of being obsessed with stories of knights errant, Don Quixote decides that he will become one, dons his armor, picks a fair maiden he has never seen to be the lady for whom he is doing valiant deeds, hires Sancho Panza to be his page, and then sets off to do Great Things. He meets people on the road who are villains and he defeats them in battles, rescues people from cruel captors, joins massive battels between warring armies, fights giants, and visits castles. Well, at least that is how Don Quixote would describe his story. The narrator tells tales of Don Quixote attacking random travelers, fighting windmills, and visiting inns. Don Quixote’s world is a lot more exciting than the narrator’s (and your) world.
Eventually Don Quixote starts meeting a cast of characters all of whom have lengthy back stories or tell tales of themselves, some true, some invented. Before long, the reader is lost in this maze of stories. You can pause, if you would like, and untangle the web to try to recall which stories are true and which are fictions told by the characters to deceive Don Quixote even further, or you can just enjoy the journey.
Throughout the story, the question of Don Quixote’s madness keeps arising. On the one hand, dressing up in armor and roaming the countryside looking for villains and magical beasts to vanquish is a rather odd thing to do in the year 1600. Knight errantry died out long ago. On the other hand, when Don Quixote speaks, a remarkable thing slowly dawns on the people he meets (and the Reader):
Those who listened to him were overwhelmed again with pity at seeing that a man who apparently was intelligent and rational in all other matters could lose these faculties completely when it was a question of his accursed and bedeviled chivalry….But, as has been said so often in the course of this great history, he spoke nonsense only with regard to chivalry, and in other conversations he demonstrated a clear and confident understanding…
Is Don Quixote mad? Here we have someone who can speak calmly and rationally about every subject you bring up, but is convinced he is a knight errant. Does his delusion about that one thing render him insane?
Before you answer: what do you call someone who dresses up in armor and roams the countryside looking for wrongs to be righted? Isn’t that the very definition of a knight errant? When Don Quixote sets off on his journeys, doesn’t he, in fact, become a knight errant? Is he wrong about himself? Or is he simply wrong in thinking that windmills are giants?
Before you answer that: Suppose an educated person decides that there are great evils in the world and quits a steady, well-paying job in order to go out and right those wrongs. Is that mad? Are missionaries and social works and teachers all afflicted with madness when they believe they are making the world a better place?
Before you answer that: when I put on shoes and go into a classroom and tell 18-22 year olds about supply and demand curves thinking that by doing so I will help rid the world of those Demons called Ignorance and Sloppy Thinking, am I merely dressing up in a professional garb and tilting at windmills?
Don Quixote, c’est moi.
Am I excused because I know my own delusions? So, does Don Quixote:
“It seems to me,” said Sancho, “that knights who did these things were provoked and had a reason to do senseless things and penances; but what reason does you grace have for going crazy?” […]
“Therein lies the virtue,” responded Don Quixote, “and the excellence of my enterprise, for a knight errant deserves neither glory nor thanks if he goes mad for a reason. The great achievement is to lose one’s reason for no reason, and to let my lady know that if I can do this without cause, what should I not do if there were cause?”
One of the things that most fascinated me in reading the book was the constant undercurrent suggesting that Don Quixote was not deluded at all. What if he was choosing to embrace his delusion because it made for a better life than the one he was leading? If so, then how is he any different than everyone who has ever taken up an impossible task simply because the effort to do the Herculean is far better than rotting away in a cubicle or a back room somewhere?
Maybe, just maybe, there are more Don Quixotes in our midst than we care to admit. Maybe, just maybe, you are a Don Quixote too. Maybe the Don Quixotes of the world are indeed the real heroes because at least they are not standing off to the side mocking or ignoring those who are out to slay giants.
Is it better to spend our life slaying giants even if the giants are windmills or to simply trudge along the path of life occasionally briefly noticing the windmills by the side of the road? When the real giants show up, which type of person is going to be more ready for the challenge of facing them?
That is why you should read Don Quixote.
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