Don Quixote

In brief

A poor gentleman of about fifty, living somewhere in La Mancha, reads so many romances of chivalry that “with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits” (I, ch. 1). He renames himself Don Quixote, his old horse Rocinante and a farm girl he once admired Dulcinea del Toboso, and rides out to right wrongs. He takes inns for castles, flocks of sheep for armies and windmills for giants, and he is beaten for it, again and again, for two long volumes. Then he goes home, recovers his reason, and dies.

Cervantes said it was a parody to finish off the chivalry books. What he wrote is the book most often named as the first modern novel, because the joke keeps turning into questions. What is the difference between a madman and an idealist? Who decides what is real, the man who sees a giant or the crowd that sees a mill? And what happens to a fictional character when he finds out that he is in a book?

The argument

The surface argument is literary criticism. The curate and the barber put his library on trial and burn most of it (I, ch. 6), sparing a few books they judge well made. A canon of Toledo later delivers a long and sensible attack on the romances for their absurd plots and bad style (I, ch. 47). The last words of the whole work, given to the fictional historian, repeat the aim: “to deliver over to the detestation of mankind the false and foolish tales of the books of chivalry” (II, ch. 74).

But the book is far kinder to its reader than to his reading. Don Quixote is mad on one subject only. On others he is learned and often wise: his speech on arms and letters (I, ch. 38), his advice to Sancho before the governorship (II, ch. 42) and his talk with the Knight of the Green Gaban (II, ch. 16) could stand in any book of moral counsel. The novel never explains how; it shows the madness as a way of living by an ideal in a world that offers none. When a neighbour picks him up battered and tells him who he really is, he answers “I know who I am” (I, ch. 5), and the reply is both deluded and true.

The second argument is about fiction itself. Don Quixote’s error is to take stories for the world. The book then shows, more and more openly, that the world is full of stories: everyone he meets has a tale to tell, a role to play or a fiction to stage for him. By the end the sane characters are the ones acting out romances, and the madman is the only one who means it.

The shape of the book

It is two books, ten years apart. Part One (1605) has fifty-two chapters and two sallies. The first (ch. 2–5) is short: he is dubbed a knight by an innkeeper who humours him, and comes home beaten. On the second he takes a squire, a farm labourer “with very little wit in his pate” (ch. 7), promised an island to govern. Almost at once they meet the windmills (ch. 8). From the Sierra Morena onward the knight’s adventures give way to other people’s stories, which gather at an inn and are untangled there, until his friends carry him home in a cage on an ox-cart (ch. 47).

Those stories are the book’s strangest feature. The shepherdess Marcela, the lovers Cardenio, Luscinda, Dorothea and Don Fernando, the novella of “The Ill-Advised Curiosity” read aloud at the inn (ch. 33–35) and the captive’s escape from Algiers (ch. 39–41) are written in other genres, pastoral, courtly, Italianate, each a different kind of fiction set against the knight’s. In Part Two the narrator reports that Cide Hamete found writing “upon one single subject” intolerable drudgery and used such tales for relief (II, ch. 44); Part Two keeps its digressions close to the pair.

Part Two (1615) has seventy-four chapters and the third sally, the longest: to El Toboso, then towards Saragossa, a long stay with a duke and duchess, and on to Barcelona, where the Knight of the White Moon defeats him on the beach (II, ch. 64). Under the lance he still will not deny his lady: “Dulcinea del Toboso is the fairest woman in the world, and I the most unfortunate knight on earth.” Bound by his word to stay home for a year, he rides back, falls ill and dies.

The voice

The opening sets the tone of the whole: “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind” (I, ch. 1). Where a romance would begin with a kingdom and a lineage, this begins with a narrator who will not even name the village, and who is unsure of the hero’s surname, “Quixada or Quesada”, or perhaps “Quexana”.

In chapter 8 the story stops in mid-air, the knight and a Biscayan frozen with swords raised, because the source has run out. In chapter 9 the narrator tells how he found the rest in a bundle of papers in the Alcana of Toledo, written in Arabic by “Cid Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian”, and paid a Morisco to translate it. From then on the book has at least three voices: Cide Hamete, whom the narrator distrusts because he is an Arab; the translator, who comments on doubtful chapters (II, ch. 5); and the narrator putting it all together. The chivalry books often claimed a lost ancient source; Cervantes makes the trick absurd by handing a Christian hero’s history to a Moorish chronicler.

The prologue plays the same game with the author. “Idle reader,” it begins, and soon Cervantes says that “though I pass for the father, I am but the stepfather to ‘Don Quixote’”, and that the book is “just what might be begotten in a prison”.

Most of all the voice is dialogue. The two men talk on the road, at night, after every beating, and their talk is the real action of the novel. Sancho’s speech is a flood of proverbs; Don Quixote’s is the elevated style of his books, which he can switch off at will. Each slowly starts to borrow the other’s.

Knight and squire

The name he chooses is a joke, since quijote is a piece of thigh armour, and his helmet is mended with pasteboard (I, ch. 1). He is brave beyond sense: in Part Two he opens a cage and challenges a lion, which looks round, turns its hind-quarters to him and lies down again (II, ch. 17), and he renames himself the Knight of the Lions. He is also generous, chaste and courteous, and his first act of justice shows the cost of all that. He frees the boy Andres from a beating, takes his master’s word that he will pay him, and rides on; when Andres turns up again (I, ch. 31) he says his master tied him up again as soon as the knight was out of sight and flogged him worse, and that the knight is to blame.

Sancho Panza

Sancho comes for the island and stays for the man. Greedy, cowardly and credulous, he is never fooled about the windmills: “what we see there are not giants but windmills” (I, ch. 8). In Part Two he learns to manage his master’s fantasy. Sent to fetch Dulcinea, he points to three peasant girls on donkeys and swears that one is the lady, enchanted (II, ch. 10). When the duke gives him the “island” of Barataria as a prank, he judges its cases with real shrewdness (II, ch. 45), then walks away after a staged invasion, saying “naked I was born, naked I find myself, I neither lose nor gain” (II, ch. 53). Late in the book he praises “him that invented sleep, the cloak that covers over all a man’s thoughts” (II, ch. 68).

Critics since Salvador de Madariaga have described the pair’s change as an exchange: the knight grows doubtful and sad as Part Two goes on, and the squire grows more hopeful. At the deathbed it is Sancho who begs him to get up and “take to the fields in shepherd’s trim as we agreed” (II, ch. 74), and Don Quixote who has given up the dream.

The others

Dulcinea never appears. She is Aldonza Lorenzo, a farm girl from El Toboso, and in Sierra Morena the knight admits that he pictures her “in my imagination as I would have her to be” (I, ch. 25). Samson Carrasco, the student who tells them their story is in print, tries to cure the knight by beating him at his own game, and fails as the Knight of the Mirrors (II, ch. 12–15) before succeeding as the Knight of the White Moon. The galley slave Gines de Pasamonte, freed by the knight and repaying him with stones, is writing his own life and says it cannot be finished “when my life is not yet finished” (I, ch. 22); he returns in Part Two as a puppet-master. Marcela, blamed for a shepherd’s death because she would not love him, defends herself at his grave with “I was born free” (I, ch. 14).

The duke and duchess are the darkest figures. Having read Part One, they stage romance after romance for the pair: a wooden flying horse, a bearded countess, a demand from “Merlin” that Sancho whip himself thousands of times to free Dulcinea. Cide Hamete himself says that he considers “the concocters of the joke as crazy as the victims of it” (II, ch. 70).

Spain around them

The road is crowded with the Spain of 1600: muleteers, friars, galley slaves, Moriscos, Catalan bandits. Ricote, Sancho’s Morisco neighbour, returns to Spain disguised as a pilgrim after the expulsion of the Moriscos of 1609–14, at the risk of his life (II, ch. 54). The idle hidalgo, with a title and nothing to do, was a familiar type. Cervantes does not argue; he lets a madman ride through it all.

How it was made

Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares in 1547. He fought at Lepanto in 1571, where a wound left his left hand useless, and was captured by corsairs in 1575 and held in Algiers for five years, trying to escape four times, until he was ransomed in 1580. The captive’s tale in Part One mentions “a Spanish soldier, something de Saavedra by name” (I, ch. 40), whose daring the jailer respected: a signature. In the scrutiny of the library the curate even finds a book by “Miguel de Cervantes”, the pastoral Galatea, and says its author “has had more experience in reverses than in verses” (I, ch. 6).

His writing had brought him little. He worked as a requisitioner for the Armada and a tax collector, and was jailed in Seville in 1597 over his accounts; the prologue’s prison may be that one. Part One came out in Madrid early in 1605 and was an immediate success. In 1614 a writer calling himself Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, never identified, published a spurious second part. Cervantes’s own Part Two attacks it from chapter 59, where the knight hears gentlemen discussing it and changes his route to avoid Saragossa, where the fake had sent him. Later he meets one of Avellaneda’s characters, Don Álvaro Tarfe, and has him swear before a magistrate that this is not the Don Quixote he knew (II, ch. 72). Part Two appeared in 1615. Cervantes died in Madrid in April 1616.

Readers and critics

The first readers laughed, and went on laughing for a century. In Part Two Samson Carrasco already claims that more than twelve thousand copies are in print (II, ch. 3). Thomas Shelton’s English version of Part One (1612) was the first translation into any language.

The Romantics changed it. German critics such as the Schlegels read the knight as a tragic idealist defeated by a prosaic world, and Byron lamented that “Cervantes smiled Spain’s chivalry away”. Turgenev’s lecture “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860) set him against Hamlet as the type of faith against the type of doubt. Against all this, Nabokov’s Harvard lectures, published in 1983, called it a cruel and crude book that invites us to laugh at a man’s pain.

Lukács and later Foucault treated it as the point where the novel begins: a hero searching a world that no longer matches the books. In 2002 a poll of about a hundred writers organised by the Norwegian Book Clubs named it the best work of fiction ever written.

Afterlives

The English novel grew out of it. Fielding called Joseph Andrews (1742) “written in imitation of the manner of Cervantes”; Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) gave a girl the same disease with French romances; Sterne’s Tristram Shandy takes its games with author and reader. Flaubert’s Emma Bovary is a Quixote of love stories, and Dostoevsky shaped Prince Myshkin in The Idiot with the knight in mind.

Gustave Doré’s illustrations (1863) and Picasso’s 1955 sketch fixed the gaunt knight and the round squire. Richard Strauss wrote a tone poem, Massenet an opera, and Man of La Mancha (1965) took him to Broadway. Orson Welles never finished his film; Terry Gilliam took nearly thirty years over his. The language kept “quixotic” and “tilting at windmills”.

How to read it

Choose a translation. John Ormsby’s (1885), the Gutenberg text quoted here, is accurate and plain. Edith Grossman’s (2003) is the modern favourite.
Read Part Two. Many readers stop after Part One. Part Two is the deeper book, and its jokes depend on the first.
Do not skip the captive’s tale (I, ch. 39–41). It is the one closest to Cervantes’s own life.
End with the will. The last chapter, where Alonso Quixano says “I was mad, now I am in my senses”, is short, and it changes everything before it.

Lazarillo de Tormes (1554). The anonymous first picaresque novel, the low-life road story Cervantes was writing beside and against.
Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742). The first English novel to take Cervantes as its model, with Parson Adams as an English Quixote.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857). The same diagnosis, reading as a disease of desire, without the comedy.
Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939). Ten pages on what it means to read and rewrite this book.