Miguel de Cervantes wrote a book about a mentally-ill old man who abandons his routines, acquires an equally aimless disciple, roams the countryside acting out his delusions, thrashing people as frequently as he gets thrashed, even slaughtering seven sheep at one point, before he finally returns home, broken in health but with sanity restored in some measure, and dies soon after, attended by the disciple who has come to love the old man. It’s a comedy in the same sense that bear-baiting is good fun for children. It is fair to say almost no one has read this book.
The story we have read is from a book Cervantes never wrote. This story is of a kind-hearted, impoverished old Spanish gent from La Mancha who has read too many chivalric romances. “Too many” in the sense that his screws have come loose, as his endearing, matter-of-fact, peasant sidekick often points out to him. But Don Quixote (immersed in the reading, we’ve forgotten his real name is Alonso Quijano) has lost his mental balance with such style, such magnificence, we come to see that in an unjust world, sanity is actually a kind of compliance with evil.
Don Quixote inspires us — we who are trapped in our cubicles and car payments and caterpillar lives — to also trust in our imaginations, our dreams, our apparent delusions, and to finally take wing. “ Yo sé quién soy, ” says Don Quixote at one point. I know who I am. So would we if only we were suitably mad.
Encyclopedia of cruelty
Which is the actual Don Quixote ? The book that Cervantes wrote but almost no one has encountered or the book almost all us have encountered but Cervantes never wrote?
Nabokov, who was a great reader in the sense that he used his own eyes to read and not someone else’s, thought it was the first. He found Don Quixote “a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty”. Nabokov’s own novels allow the reader to experience that terrifying all-too-human pleasure — and in Cervantes’ novel, he saw the cruelty of an age that laughed at dwarves, roasted heretics at the stake, and admired honour killing.
Cervantes’ Spain makes the Taliban’s Afghanistan seem a Nordic utopia. It’s into this world the book was born. Its parent was only a tiny bit more than the sum of his times. But that epsilon of excess was enough. In the fortunate destiny of a handful of books, readers made his book their own.
Some of these readers have been novelists, playwrights, poets and movie-makers. There is Ratan Nath Dhar Sarshar’s novel Fasana-e-Azad , Borges’ short story ‘Pierre Menard’, Dale Wasserman’s musical Man of La Mancha , Graham Greene’s novel Monsignor Quixote , Kathy Acker’s experimental fiction Don Quixote , Libba Bray’s dark comedy Going Bovine , Coetzee’s allegorical trilogy ending with The Death of Jesus , Salman Rushdie’s metafiction Quichotte , and many, many others.
A day will come, no doubt, when a critic will assert that one cannot claim to have read Don Quixote if it hasn’t been read in the original Klingon.
Glorious tediousness
Cervantes wrote other books. The author of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha also wrote Viaje del Parnaso , Novelas ejemplares and Trabajos De Persiles Y Sigismunda : Historia Setentrional . Naturally, nobody except Cervantes scholars and a few showoffs — they call themselves Cervantistas — care about these works. As far as the larger world is concerned, Cervantes is the author of Don Quixote and that is that.
Actually, there’s no need to read this book either. Everyone knows the story’s highlights. The tilt at the windmills, the freeing of the prisoners, the confusion of the village woman with Dulcinea: it comes as a surprise when we recall that we have never actually read the two volumes. The number itself comes as a surprise. There are two books?
Yes. Part II was published some 10 years after the first. The sequel is generally considered better than the first by those whose job it is to generally consider such things. That suggests the author was surprised by the success of his earlier slapdash effort. In Part II, there’s a clear effort to please the reader; Nabokov of course disapproved. However, Part II is as tedious as Part I.
Great books have a certain obligation to be tedious. The Old Testament has the First and Second Chronicles. The Ramayana has the Uttara Kanda. Moby Dick has all those bloody chapters on the whaling industry, including the most-skipped chapter in all of literature in any language since the invention of speech, namely: “Of Whales in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars”.
Don Quixote is a great book and it diligently discharges its obligation to be tedious. It spans 900 pages, give or take a hundred pages. It has enough bad poems to make us ache, like Aurangzeb allegedly did, that if only all poetic necks were one neck, then poetry could be executed with one stroke. Cervantes had apparently never heard of Chekhov’s gun, so beloved of MFA programs everywhere. He introduced characters and incidents for no reason other than, well, as Nabokov put it, “a secret sense of writing, the harmonizing intuition of the artist.” That’s an excuse, not an explanation.
Where retellings often go wrong is in trying to cure the story of its tediousness. Inevitably, the retelling becomes more logical, the scenes deliberately pointless, the digressions deliberately planted. The author is inspired, and unfortunately it shows. We learn that a copy, no matter how original, cannot hide the fact that it is an inspiration. Don Quixote wasn’t inspired by Don Quixote .
Mad enough
Strangely, one of the more intriguing interpretations is not from a full-time littérateur but a management theorist. The late James March, who taught at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, a guru’s guru and one of the founders of organisational science, turned the familiar interpretation of a charming, slightly comic, idealistic Don Quixote into a philosophy, perhaps even theory, of how one should make decisions in a world filled with misrecognition and unpredictability.
In a much-cited essay, ‘The Technology of Foolishness’ (1971), he outlined the need for a model of decision-making that didn’t confuse rationality with logic. Don Quixote was his model, and in a series of talks and papers, March tried to develop this idea.
“Quixote reminds us,” March wrote, in one such effort, “that if we trust only when trust is warranted, love only when love is returned, learn only when learning is valuable, we abandon an essential feature of our humanness.”
I suspect Cervantes’ Don Quixote didn’t set out to remind us of any such thing. But it does not matter. March’s Quixote is Quixote too. Like all great books, Don Quixote forever remains one reader short of completion. And like all great books, it’s mad enough to believe in our humanity, in us, the reader.
Author of Half Of What I Say, the writer has a collection of short stories forthcoming from Hachette .
