Cervantes,+Fuentes+essay

= Cervantes, or The Critique of Reading =

by Carlos Fuentes

I When I was a young student in Latin American schools, we were constantly being asked to define the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Modem Age. I always remembered a grotesquely famous Spanish play in which a knight in armour unsheaths his sword and exclaims to his astonished family: "I'm off to the Thirty Years' War!"

Did the modem age begin with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the discovery of the New World in 1492, or 'the publication by Copernicus of his Revolutions of the Spheres in 1543? To give only one answer is akin to exclaiming that we are off to the Thirty Years' War. At least since Vico, we know that the past is present in us because we are the bearers of the culture we ourselves have made.

Nevertheless, given a choice in the matter, I have always an- swered that, for me, the modem world begins when Don Quixote de la Mancha, in 1605, leaves his village, goes out into the world, and discovers that the world does not resemblwhat he has read about it.

Many things are changing in the world; many others are sur- viving. Don Quixote tells us just this: this is why he is so modem, but also so ancient, eternal. He illustrates the rupture of a world based on analogy and thrust into differentiation. He makes evident a challenge that we consider peculiarly ours: how to accept the diversity and mutation of the world, while retaining the mind's power for analogy and unity, so that this changing world shall not become meaningles

Don Quixote tells us that being modern is not a question ofsacrificing the past in favor of the new, but of maintaining, com- paring, and remembering values we have created, making them modern so as not to lose the value of the modern.

This is our challenge as contemporary individuals and, indeed, as present-day writers. For if Don Quixote, by its very nature, does not define the modern world but only an aspect of it, it does, I believe, at least define the central problems of the modern novel. I remember discussing the matter over luncheon one cold day in 1975 with Andre Malraux: he chose Madame de Lafayette's La

Princesse de Cleves as the first modern novel because, he said, it was the first psychological, interior novel, constructed around the reasons of the heart. Anglo-Saxon criticism would perhaps prefer, along with Ian Watt, to establish "the rise of the novel" in con- nection with the appearance of a middle class of affluent readers in England, politically emancipated and psychologically demand- ing of novelty in theme and characterization: Richardson, Fielding, Smollett.

Yet I shall not travel the road of Quixote's modernity alone. After all, as Lionel Trilling once wrote, "All prose fiction is a variation of the theme of Don Quixote: . . . the problem of appearance and reality." This all-encompassing fictitiousness in Cervantes is not at odds with Harry Levin's vision of its modernity: Don Quixote is seen by Levin as "the prototype of all realistic novels" ... for it deals with "the literary technique of systematic disillusionment." And its universality is not in contradiction to Alejo Carpentier's discovery in Cervantes of the imaginary dimen- sion within the individual: Cervantes invents a new I, says the Cuban novelist, much as Malraux said of Mme de Lafayette.

Wayne Booth's self-conscious narrator in Don Quixote; Marthe Robert's conception of Don Quixote as a novel in search of itself; Robert Coover's vision of Don Quixote in a world divided between reality and illusion, sanity and madness, the erotic and the ludi- crous, the visionary and the eschatological; all of these highly articulate and penetrating discussions on the modernity and rel- evance of Cervantes accompany me in my own search for Don Quixote. But it is, perhaps, Michel Foucault who has best described the displacement that occurs in the dynamic world of Cervantes: Don Quixote, writes Foucault in The Order of Things, is the sign of a modern divorce between words and things. Don Quixote is desperately searching for a new coincidence, for a new similitude in a world where nothing seems to resemble what it once resembled.

This same dynamic displacement, this sense of search and pil- grimage, is what Claudio Guillen calls the "active dialogue" in Don Quixote. A dialogue of genres, in the first place: the pica- resque, the pastoral, the chivalric, the byzantine, all the estab- lished genres stake their presence and have their say in Don Quixote. But the past and the present are also actively fused and the novel becomes a critical project as it shifts from the spoken tale to the written narrative, from verse to prose and from the tavern to the printing shop.

Don Quixote, it is true, bears all the marks of what it leavesbehind. If it is the first modern novel, its debt to tradition is enormous, since its very inception, as we all know, is the satire of the epic of chivalry. But if it is the last medieval romance, then it also celebrates its own death: it becomes its own requiem. If it is a work of the Renaissance, it also maintains a lively medieval carnival of games, puns, and references not far from Bakhtin's definition of festive humor in the novel, breaking down the frontiers between actors and audience. And finally, if it opens for all the adventure of modern reading, it remains a book deeply immersed in the society and the history of Spain.

Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547 and died in 1616. He published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, and the second part in 1615. So that everything I have said up till now happens historically within a contradiction. Cervantes's work is one of the great examples of Renaissance liberation. But his life occurs within the supreme example of the negation of that same liberation: the Spanish Counter-Reformation. We must judge Cervantes and Don Quixote against this background if we are to understand his achievement fully Caught between the flood tide of the Renaissance and the ebb tide of the Counter-Reformation, Cervantes clings to the one plank that can keep him afloat: Erasmus of Rotterdam. The vast influence of Erasmus in Spain is hardly fortuitous. He was correctly seen to be the Renaissance man struggling to conciliate the verities of faith and reason, and the reasons of the old and the new. Spanish Erasmism is the subject of Marcel Bataillon's monumental work Erasme et l'Espagne. The origins, influence, and eventual perse- cution of Erasmism in Spain are too important and lengthy a subject for this essay. Suffice it to remember that, as far as the formal education of Cervantes went, it was totally steeped in Erasmus, through the agency of his Spanish disciple, Juan Lopez de Hoyos, the early and ascertained tutor of the author of Don Quixote.

The influence of Erasmian thought on Cervantes can be clearly perceived in three themes common to the philosopher and the novelist: the duality of truth, the illusion of appearances, and the praise of folly. Erasmus reflects the Renaissance dualism: under- standing may be different from believing. But reason must be wary of judging from external appearances: "All things human have two aspects, much as the Silenes of Alcibiades, who had two utterly opposed faces; and thus, what at first sight looked like death was, when closely observed, life" (In Praise of Folly). And he goes on to say: "The reality of things . . . depends solely on opinion. Everything in life is so diverse, so opposed, so obscure, that we cannot be assured of any truth."

Erasmus promptly gives his reasoning a comic inflection, when he smilingly points out that Jupiter must disguise himself as a "poor little man" in order to procreate little Jupiters. Comic debunking thus serves the unorthodox vision of double truth, and it is evident that Cervantes opts for this Aesopian short- cut in creating the figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, for the former speaks the language of universals, and the latter that of particulars; the knight believes, the esquire doubts; and each man's appearance is diversified, obscured, and opposed by the other's reality: if Sancho is the real man, then he is, nevertheless, a participant in Don Quixote's world of pure illusion; but if Don Quixote is the illusory man, then he is, nevertheless, a participant in Sancho's world of pure reality.

It is one of the most brilliant paradoxes in the history of thought that Erasmus, in an age enamored of divine reason, should write, of all things, a praise of folly. There was, however, method in this madness. It is as though Erasmus had received an urgent warning from reason itself: Let me not become another absolute, such as faith was in the past, for I will then lose the reason of my reason. The Erasmian folly is a doubly ironical operation: it detaches the fool, simultaneously, from the false absolutes and the imposed verities of the medieval order; yet it casts an immense doubt on reason itself. Pascal would one day write: "Les hommes sont si necessairement fous que ce serait etre fou par un autre tour de folie de n'etre pas fou."

This Pascalian turn of the screw of reason is precisely what Erasmus is driving at: if reason is to be reasonable, it must see itself through the eyes of an ironical madness, not its opposite but its critical complement; if the individual is to assert himself, then he must do so with an ironical conscience of his own ego, or he will flounder in solipsism and pride. The Erasmian folly, set at the crossroads of two cultures, relativizes the absolutes of both: this is a madness critically set in the very heart of Faith, but also in the very heart of Reason. The madness of Erasmus is a ques- tioning of man by man himself, of reason by reason itself, and no longer by God, sin, or the Devil. Thus relativized by critical and ironical folly, Man is no longer subjected to Fate or Faith; but neither is he the absolute master of Reason.

How do the spiritual realities reflected on by Erasmus translate into the realm of literature? Perhaps Hamlet is the first character to stop in his tracks and mutter three minuscule and infinite words that suddenly open a void between the certain truths of the Middle Ages and the uncertain reasoning of the brave new world of mo- dernity. These words are simply that: "Words, words, words . . ." and they both shake and spear us because they are the words of a fictional character reflecting on the very substance of his being. Hamlet knows he is written, represented, and represented on a stage, whereas old Polonius comes and goes in agitation, intrigues, counsels, and deports himself as if the world of the theater truly were the real world. Words become acts, the verb becomes a sword, and Polonius is pierced by Hamlet's sword: the sword of literature. Words, words, words, mutters Hamlet, and he does not say it pejoratively: he is simply indicating, without too many illusions, the existence of a thing called literature: a new literature that has ceased to be a transparent reading of the divine Verb or the es- tablished social order, but has been unable to become a sign reflecting a new human order as coherent or indubitable as the religious and social orders of the past.

Perhaps it is not fortuitous that Don Quixote, King Lear, and Macbeth should all bear the same date of birth, 1605: two old fools and a young assassin appear simultaneously on the stage of the world to dramatize this transition of two ages of the world. Macbeth, as G. Wilson Knight has observed, is a drama written with question marks, from the moment the Witches ask themselves, "When shall we three meet again?" to the moment when Macbeth prepares to die, "Why should I ... die on mine own sword?", passing through the central questions of the play, "Is this a dagger which I see before me?" and "Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood I

Clean from my hand?" And Lear is a drama of magnificent met- aphors derived from a tumultuous universe, where stars and eclipses, planetary influences and the government of our state by the heav- enly bodies mix with the images of the dislocated terrestrial ele- ments: drama of rain and fire, of fog and thunder. And in the center of this tempest of heaven and earth, accompanied only by a Fool, struts an abandoned old man, incapable of learning more than he knows already, assimilated to a sorrowful and solitary world of nature.

All the world's a stage, and the words spoken from it are, indeed, full of sound and fury; the state of the world is undone and the actor who struts his hour upon the stage speaks wandering, or- phaned words: we have lost our father, but we have not found ourselves. Words become the vehicle of ambiguity and paradox. "All is possible," says Marsilio Ficino. "All is in doubt," says John Donne. Between these two sentences, pronounced more than a century apart, the new literature appears as an opaque circle where Hamlet can represent his methodic madness, Robinson Cru- soe his optimistic rationalism, Don Juan of Seville his secular sexuality, and St. John of the Cross his celestial eroticism: in literature, all things become possible. In the medieval cosmos each reality manifested another reality, in accordance with symbols that were homologated in an unequivocal manner. But in the highly unstable and equivocal world that Copernicus leaves in his wake, these central criteria are forever lost.

All is possible, but all is in doubt. All things have lost their concert. In the very dawn of his humanist affirmation, the indi- vidual is assailed by the very doubts, the very criticisms, the very questioning with which Copernicus and Galileo have set free the dormant forces of the universe, expanding it to a degree such that the dwarfed individual, in response, must gigantically display his unleashed passions, his unbridled pride, the cruel uses of his political power, the utopian dream of a new city of the sun, the hunger for a new human space with which to confront the new, mute space of the universe: the spatial appetite that is evident both in the discovery of the New World and in the frescoes of Piero della Francesca.

Nothing should be refused, writes Ficino; human nature contains all and every one of the levels of creation, from the horrendous forms of the powers of the deep to the hierarchies of divine intel- ligence described by the mystics; nothing is incredible, nothing is impossible; the possibilities we deny are but the possibilities we ignore. The libertine and the ascetic, Don Juan and Savonarola, Cesare Borgia and Heman Cortes, the tyrant and the adventurer, Marlowe's Faust and Ford's incestuous lovers, Machiavelli's Prince and Thomas More's Utopian traveller, rebellious intelligence and rebellious flesh, a chronophagic and omni-inclusive imagination: human faults no longer reestablish an ancestral order. They con- sume themselves in the self-sufficient fires of pride, passion, rea- son, pleasure, and power. But, even as they are won, these new realities are doubted by the critical spirit, since the critical spirit founded them.

All is possible. All is in doubt. Only an old hidalgo from the barren plain of La Mancha in the central plateau of Castile continues to adhere to the codes of certainty. For him, nothing is in doubt and all is possible. In the new world of criticism, Don Quixote is a knight of the faith. This faith comes from his reading, and his reading is a madness. (The Spanish words for reading and madness convey this association much more strongly: reading is lectura; madness is locura.)

Like Philip II, the necrophiliac monarch secluded at El Escorial, Don Quixote both pawns and pledges his life to the restoration of the world of unified certainty. He pawns and pledges himself, both physically and symbolically, to the univocal reading of the texts and attempts to translate this reading into a reality that has become multiple, equivocal, ambiguous. But because he possesses his readings, Don Quixote possesses his identity: that of the knight- errant, that of the ancient epic hero.

So, at the immediate level of reading, Don Quixote is the master of the previous readings that withered his brain. But at a second level of reading, he becomes the master of the words contained in the verbal universe of the book titled Don Quixote. He ceases to be a reader of the novels of chivalry and becomes the actor of his own epic adventures. As there was no rupture between his reading of the books and his faith in what they said, so now there is no divorce between the acts and the words of his adventures. Because, assimilated to Don Quixote, we read it but do not see it, we shall never know what it is that the goodly gentleman puts on his head: the fabled helm of Mambrino, or a vulgar barber's basin. The first doubt assails us: is Quixote right, has he discovered the legendary helmet where everyone else, blind and ignorant, sees only the basin?

Within this verbal sphere, Don Quixote is at first invincible. Sancho's empiricism, from this verbal point of view, is useless, because Don Quixote, each time he fails, immediately reestablishes his literary discourse, undiscouraged, the words always identical to the reality, the reality but a prolongation of the words he has read before and now enacts. He explains away his disasters with the words of his previous, epic readings, and resumes his career within the world of the words that belong to him.

Harry Levin compares the famous "play within the play" scene in Hamlet with the chapter on the puppet theater of Master Pedro in Don Quixote. In Shakespeare's drama, King Claudius interrupts the mummery because imagination starts to resemble reality too dangerously. In Cervantes's novel, Don Quixote assaults Master Pedro's "Moorish puppetry" because representation starts to re semble imagination too closely. Claudius desires that reality were a lie: the killing of Hamlet's father, the King. Don Quixote desires that fantasy were a truth: the imprisonment of the Princess Meli- sendra by the Moors.

The identification of the imaginary with the real remits Hamlet to reality, and from reality, naturally, it yields him to death:Hamlet is the envoy of death, he comes from death and goes toward death. But the identification of the imaginary with the imaginary remits Don Quixote to his books. Don Quixote comes from his readings and goes toward them: Don Quixote is the ambassador of readings. In his mind, it is not reality at all that interposes itself between his enterprises and reality: it is the magicians he knows through his readings.

We know this is not so; we know that only reality confronts the mad readings of Don Quixote. But he does not know it, and this ignorance (or this faith) establishes a third level of reading in the novel. "Look your mercy," Sancho constantly says, "Look you that what we see there are not giants, but only windmills." But Don Quixote does not see: Don Quixote reads and his reading says that those are giants.

Don Quixote wants to introduce the whole world within his readings, along as these are the readings of a unique and consecrated code: the code that, since the action at Roncesvalles, identifies the exemplary act of history with the exemplary act of books. Roland's sacrifice defended the heroic ideal of chivalry and the political integrity of Christendom. His gest shall become ideal norm and ideal form of all the heroes of the fictions of chivalry. Don Quixote counts himself among their number. He, too, believes that between the exemplary gestures of history and exemplary gestures of books there can be no cracks, for above them all stands the consecrated code that rules both, and above the code rises the univocal vision of a world structured by God. Issued from these readings, Don Quixote, each time he fails, finds refuge in his readings. And sheltered by his books, he will go on seeing armies where there are only sheep, without losing the reason of his read- ings: he will be faithful unto them, because he does not conceive any other licit way of reading. The synonymity of reading, madness, truth, and life in Don Quixote becomes strikingly apparent whenhe demands of the merchants he meets on the road that they confess the beauty of Dulcinea without ever having seen her, for "the important thing is that without having seen her you should believe, confess, swear, and defend it." This it is an act of faith. Don Quixote's fabulous adventures are ignited by an overwhelming pur- pose: what is read and what is lived must coincide anew, without the doubts and oscillations between faith and reason introduced by the Renaissance.

But the very next level of reading in the novel Don Quixote starts to undermine this illusion. In his third outing, Don Quixote finds out, through news that the Bachelor Sanson Carrasco has trans- mitted to Sancho, that there exists a book called The Most Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. "They mention me," Sancho says in marvelment, "along with our lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and many other things that happened to us alone, so that I crossed myself in fright trying to imagine how the historian who wrote them came to know them." Things that happened to us alone. Before, only God could know them; only God was the final knower and judge of what went on in the recesses of our conscience. Now, any reader who can pay the cover price for a copy of Don Quixote can also find out: the reader thus becomes akin to God. Now the Dukes can prepare their cruel farces because they have read the first part of the novel Don Quixote. Now Don Quixote, the reader, is read.

On entering the second part of the novel, Don Quixote also finds out that he has been the subject of an apocryphal novel written by one Avellaneda to cash in on the popularity of Cervantes's book. The signs of Don Quixote's singular identity suddenly seem to multiply. Don Quixote criticizes Avellaneda's version. But the existence of another book about himself makes him change his route and go to Barcelona so as to "bring out into the public light the lies of this modern historian so that people will see that I am not the Don Quixote he says I am."

This is surely the first time in literature that a character knows that he is being written about at the same time that he lives his fictional adventures. This new level of reading is crucial to deter- mine those which follow. Don Quixote ceases to support himself on previous epics and starts to support himself on his own epic. But his epic is no epic, and it is at this point that Cervantes invents the modern novel. Don Quixote, the reader, knows he is read, something that Achilles surely never knew. And he knows that the destiny of Don Quixote the man has become inseparable from the destiny of Don Quixote the book, something that Ulysses never knew in relation to the Odyssey. His integrity as a hero of old, safely niched in a previous, univocal and denotative epic reading, is shattered, not by the galley slaves or the scullery maids who laugh at him, not by the sticks and stones he must weather in the inns he takes to be castles or the grazing fields he takes to be battlegrounds. His faith in his epical readings enables him to bear all the batterings of reality. But now his integrity is annulled by the readings he is submitted to.

It is these readings that transform Don Quixote, the caricature of the ancient hero, into the first modern hero, observed from multiple angles, scrutinized by multiple eyes that do not share his faith in the codes of chivalry, assimilated to the very readers who read him, and, like them, forced to re-create "Don Quixote" in his own imagination. A double victim of the act of reading, Don Quixote loses his senses twice. First, when he reads. Then, when he is read. Because now, instead of having to prove the existence of the heroes of old, he is up to a much, much tougher challenge: he must prove his own existence.

And this leads us to a further level of reading. A voracious, insomniac reader of epics he obsessively wants to carry over to reality, Don Quixote fails miserably in this, his original purpose. But as soon as he becomes an object of reading, he begins to vanquish reality, to contaminate it with his mad reading: not the reading of the novels of chivalry, but the actual reading of the new novel, Don Quixote. And this new reading transforms the world, for the world, more and more, begins to resemble the world con- tained in the pages of the novel Don Quixote.

In order to mock Don Quixote, the world disguises itself with the masks of Don Quixote's obsessions. Yet, can anyone disguise himself as something worse than his own self? Do not our disguises reveal our reality with greater truth than our everyday appearance? The disguised world of those who have read Don Quixote within the pages of Don Quixote reveals the undisguised reality of the world: its cruelty, its ignorance, its injustice, its st upidity. So Cervantes need not write a political manifesto to denounce the evils of his age and of all ages; he need not recur to Aesopian language; he need not radically break with the strictures of the traditional epic in order to surpass it: he dialectically merges the epic thesis and the realistic antithesis to achieve, within the very life and logic and necessity of his own book, the novelistic synthesis. No one had conceived this polyvalent creation within a book before him; not Tasso's mock heroics, not the picaresque's stark docu- mentary, not Rabelais's gargantuan, insatiable, terrifying affirmation of the surfeit energy of the world pitted against the vacuum of heaven.

Don Quixote, the knight of the faith, meets a faithless world: both no longer know where the truth really lies. Is Don Quixote really mocked by Dorotea when she disguises herself as the Prin- cess Micomicona, or by the Bachelor Carrasco when he defies Don Quixote disguised as the Knight of the Mirrors? Is Don Quixote really fooled by the Dukes when they stage the farces of the wooden horse Clavileiio, the Sorrowful Lady with her twelve bearded duen- nas or the government of Sancho in the Island Barataria? Or is it really Don Quixote who has mocked them all, forcing them to enter, disguised as themselves, the immense universe of the read- ing of Don Quixote? Perhaps this is disputable matter for psycho- analysis. What is indisputable is that Don Quixote, the bewitched, ends by bewitching the world. While he read, he imitated the epic hero. When he is read, the world imitates him.

But the price he must pay is the loss of his own enchantment. Prodigal writer that he is, Cervantes now leads us to a further level of reading. As the world comes to resemble him more and more, Don Quixote, more and more, loses the illusion of his own being. He has been the cipher of the act of reading: a black ink question mark, much as Picasso was to draw him. But by the time he reaches the castle of the Dukes, Don Quixote sees that the castle is actually a castle, whereas, before, he could imagine he saw a castle in the humblest inn of the Castilian wayside.

The incarnation of his dreams in reality robs Don Quixote of his imagination. In the world of the Dukes, it will no longer be nec- essary for him to imagine an unreal world: the Dukes offer him what he has imagined in all its reality. What, then, is the sense of reading? What is the sense of books? What is their use? From then on, all is sadness and disillusionment. Paradoxically, Don Quixote is bereft of his faith at the very moment when the world of his readings is offered to him in the world of reality. His crucial passage through the castle of the Dukes permits Cervantes to in- troduce a triple wedge in his critique of reading. One, he is stating, is Don Quixote's idea of an epic coincidence between his readings and his life. It is a faith born from books and totally defined by the way Don Quixote has read those books. As long as this mental coincidence is supreme, Don Quixote has no trouble coexisting with what is outside his own universe: the very fact that reality does not coincide with his readings permits him, again and again, to impose the vision of his readings on reality. But when what only pertains to his univocal readings finds an equivalent in reality, the illusion is shattered. The coherence of epic reading is defeated by the incoherence of historical facts. Don Quixote must live through this historical reality before he reaches the third and definitive level proposed by Cervantes: the level of the novel itself, the synthesis between the past Don Quixote loses and the present that annuls him.

Thrust into history, Don Quixote is deprived of all opportunity for his imaginative action. He meets one Roque Guinart, an au- thentic robber, alive in the time of Cervantes. This Guinart, totally inscribed in history, was thief and contrabandist of the silver car- goes from the Indies and a secret agent of the French Huguenots at the time of the St. Bartholomew's night massacre. Next to him and his tangible historicity, as when he sees (but does not partake in) a naval battle off Barcelona, Don Quixote has become a simple witness to real events and real characters. Cervantes gives these chapters a strange aura of sadness and disillusionment. The old hidalgo, forever deprived of his epic reading of the world, must face his final option: to be in the sadness of reality or to be in the reality of literature: this literature, the one Cervantes has invented, not the old literature of univocal coincidence that Don Quixote sprang from.

Dostoevsky calls Cervantes's novel "the saddest book of them all"; in it, the Russian novelist found the inspiration for the figure of the "good man," the idiot prince, Myshkin. As the novel ends, the knight of the faith has truly earned his sorrowful countenance. For, as Dostoevsky adds, Don Quixote suffers from a disease, "the nostalgia of realism."

This phrase must give us pause. What realism are we talking about? The realism of impossible adventures with magicians, chiv- alrous knight-errants, and frightful giants? Exactly so. Before, everything that was written was true ... even if it was a fantasy. There were no cracks between what was said and what was done in the epic. "For Aristotle and the Middle Ages," explains Ortega y Gasset, "all things are possible that do not contain an inner contradiction. For Aristotle, the centaur is a possibility; not so for us, since biology will not tolerate it."

And this is what Don Quixote feels such intense nostalgia for: this realism without inner contradictions. The new science, the new doubts, all the skepticisms that anachronize the faith of the knight of the unique reading, of the ambassador of the licit reading, cross Don Quixote's path and undermine his illusions. But above all, what shatters the monolith of the old realism Don Quixote yearns for are the plural readings, the illicit readings to which he is subjected.

Don Quixote recovers his reason. And this, for a man of his ilk, is the supreme folly: it is suicide. When he accepts conventional "reality," Don Quixote, like Hamlet, is condemned to death. But Don Quixote, thanks to the critical reading invented by Cervantes in the act of founding the modem novel, shall go on living another life: he is left with no resource but to prove his own existence, not in the univocal reading that gave him his original being, but in the multiple readings that deprived him of it. Don Quixote loses the life of his nostalgic, coincidental reality but goes on living, forever, in his book and only in his book.

This is why Don Quixote is the most Spanish of all novels. Its very essence is defined by loss, impossibility, a burning quest for identity, a sad conscience of all that could have been and never was, and, in reaction to this deprivation, an assertion of total existence in a realm of the imagination, where all that cannot be in reality finds, precisely because of this factual negation, the most intense level of truth. Because the history of Spain has been what it has been, its art has been what history has denied Spain. This is equally true of the mystic poetry of San Juan de la Cruz, the baroque poetry of Luis de GOngora, Velazquez's Meninas, Goya's Caprichos, and the films of Luis Buiiuel. Art gives life to _;!hat history killed. Art ives voice to what history- denied silenced or persecute. Art rings truth to the lies of history. This is what Dostoevsky meant when he called Don Quixote a novel where truth is saved by a lie. The Russian author's profound observation goes well beyond the relationship of a nation's art to its history. Dostoevsky is speaking of the broader relationship be- tween reality and imagination. There is a fascinating moment in Don Quixote when the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance arrives in Barcelona and forever breaks the bindings of the illusion of reality. He does what Achilles, Aeneas, or Sir Lancelot could never do: he visits a printing shop, he enters the very place where his adventures become an object, a legible product. Don Quixote is thus sent by Cervantes to his only reality: the reality of fiction.

The act of reading, in this manner, is both the starting point and the last stop on Don Quixote's route. Neither the reality of what he read nor the reality of what he lived were such, but merely paper ghosts. Only freed from his readings but captured by the readings that multiply the levels of the novel on an infinite scale; only alone in the very center of his authentic, fictional reality, Don Quixote can exclaim: Believe in me! My feats are true, the windmills are giants, the herds of sheep are armies, the inns are castles and there is in the world no lady more beautiful than the Empress of La Mancha, the unrivaled Dulcinea del Toboso! Believe in me! Reality may laugh or weep on hearing such words. But reality is invaded by them, loses its own defined frontiers, feels itself displaced, transfigured by another reality made of words and paper. Where are the limits between Dunsinane Castle and Bimham Wood? Where the frontiers that might bind the moor where Lear and his Fool live the cold night of madness? Where, in fact, does Don Quixote's fantastic Cave of Montesinos end and reality begin?

Never again shall we be able to know, because there will never again be a unique reading of reality. Cervantes has vanquished the epic on which he fed. He has established the dialogue between the epic hero, Achilles, Lancelot, Amadis, and the picaro, the rogue, the blind man's guide, Lazarillo. And in doing so, he has dissolved the severe normativity of scholastic thought and its uni- vocal reading of the world. Of course, Cervantes is not alone in this task of demolition; he is, legitimately, a Renaissance man in this and many other aspects.

But he is also a Spaniard caught between the flux of renewal and the stagnant waters of reaction. Where others can go perilously forward to instate reason, hedonism, capitalism, the unbounded optimism of faith in unlimited progress inscribed in lineal time and a future-oriented history, Cervantes must wrestle between the old and the new with far greater intensity than, say, Descartes. And he certainly cannot face the world with the pragmatic assur- ance of Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self- made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, tech- nology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.

Don Quixote is the polar opposite of Robinson. His failure in practical matters is the most gloriously ludicrous in recorded history (perhaps it is only paralleled by the great clowns of the silent screen: Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy . . . }. Robinson and Quixote are the antithetical symbols of the Anglo-Saxon and His- panic worlds. Americo Castro, the greatest modern interpreter of Spanish history, has defined it as "the story of an insecurity." France, he goes on to say, has assimilated its past, at the price of maximal sac- rifices, through the categories of rationalism and clarity; England, through those of empiricism and pragmatism. The past is not a problem for the Frenchman or the Englishman. For the Spaniard, it is nothing but a problem; the latent strains of its multiple heritages- Christian, Muslim, and Jewish-throb unresolved in the heart and mind of Spain. The Spanish ethos oscillates violently between exaltation and passivity, but always in relation to a trans- cendental mission which divorces and opposes the absolute values of life or death, the temporal or the eternal, honor or dishonor. Spain has been unable to participate in modern European values, defined by a rational articulation between the objective world and the subjective being. Her capacities for political and economic efficiency have been nil; her scientific and technical prowess, scarce; but her capacity for art has been absolute.

It is no wonder, then, that the greatest works of Spanish genius have coincided with the periods of crisis and decadence of Spanish society. The Arcipreste de Hita's Libro de Buen Amor saves and translates into Spanish the literary influences of the Caliphate of Cordoba after the brilliant world of the Omeya dynasty in Al Andalus has been destroyed by the Almoravide and ·Almohad inva- sions. Fernando de Rojas's La Celestina is the masterpiece of Jewish Spain: it coincides with the expulsion and persecution of the Spanish Hebrews nd of the conversos. The whole Golden Age of Spanish literature--Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Gon- gora, Calderon-flowers as the power of Spain withers. Velazquez is the painter of the crepuscular court of Philip IV, and Goya the contemporary of the blind and venal Bourbons, Charles IV and Fernando VII, who lose their crown to Joseph Bonaparte and their American empire to the rebellious creoles. And only when Spain lost the remnants of empire in the Spanish-American War did the dearth of her nineteenth-century culture give way to an extraor dinary assertion of thought, science, and art: Unamuno, Valle Inclan, Ramon y Cajal, Ortega y Gasset, Buiiuel, Miro, and the poetic generation of Garcia Lorca. The absolute value of art has always shone in Spain at its brightest when its political, economic, and technical fortunes have been at their lowest.

So Cervantes is no exception to a general rule. But what are the particular values he instates in the heart of reality, he, the orphan child of both the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation; he who cannot proceed to the rational clarity and self-contention of a Madame de Lafayette or the pragmatic efficiency of a Defoe? I have recalled the influence of Erasmus on Cervantes. Don Quixote, a Spanish extension of the Praise of Folly identical to the praise of Utopia, contains an ethic of Love and Justice. A moral reality occupies the center of Cervantes's imagination, since it cannot occupy the center of the society he lives in.

Love and Justice. Don Quixote, the madman, is mad not only because he has believed all he has read. He is also mad because he believes, as a knight-errant, that justice is his duty and that justice is possible. Again and again, he proclaims his credo: "I am the valiant Don Quixote de la Mancha, undoer of wrongs and torts": "The duty of my office is to correct injustices and fly to help the needy." We know the sort of gratitude Don Quixote re- ceives from those he succors: he is beaten and mocked by them. Cervantes's social irony reaches a high pitch indeed in these scenes. The poor and miserable and wronged ones Don Quixote aids do not want to be saved by him. Perhaps they want to save themselves. This is an open question. In any case, there is not a shred of a Polyanna in Cervantes: he sees the common people capable of being every bit as cruel as their oppressors. But then, does this not pose the implicit commentary that an unjust society perverts all of its members, the mighty and the weak, the high and the lowly?Don Quixote, in spite of his recurrent disasters as a do-gooder,never fails in his faith in the ideal of justice. He is a Spanish hero: the transcendent idea cannot be wounded by the accidents of ordinary reality. And what is the ideology that sustains Don Quixote's search for Justice? It is the utopia of the Golden Age:

A happy age, and happy centuries, those that the ancients called golden, and not because gold, so esteemed in our iron age, was to be found without any hardship in that felicitous age, but because those who then lived knew not these two words yours and mine. All things, in that holy age, were common ... The clear fountain and the flowing rivers offered men, in magnificent abundance, their tasty and transparent waters ... All was peace then, all friendship, all concord. . . Then were the loving concepts of the soul dressed in simplicity, as the loving soul conceived them ... Fraud and mendacity were unknown, malice did not then parade as truth and sincerity. Justice was faithful to its name, and men of favor and interest did not dare perturb what today they so discredit, disturb and persecute. . . None of this, Don Quixote ends by saying, is true "in our de- testable times," and so he has become a knight-errant in order to "defend young women, protect widows, and bring help to the or- phaned and the needy." Don Quixote's concept of Justice is thus a Concept of Love. And through Love, Don Quixote's abstract Justice achieves its full realization.

The power of Don Quixote's image as a madman who constantly confuses reality with imagination has made many a reader and commentator forget what I consider an essential passage of the book. In Chapter XXV of the first part of the novel, Don Quixote decides to do penance, dressed only in his nightshirt, in the craggy cliffs of the Sierra Morena. He asks Sancho to go off to the village of El Toboso and inform the knight's lady Dulcinea of the great deeds and sufferings with which he honors her. Since Sancho knows of no highly placed lady called Dulcinea in the miserable hamletof El Toboso, he inquires further. Don Quixote, at this extraor- dinary moment, reveals that he knows the truth: Dulcinea, he says, is none other than the peasant girl Aldonza Lorenzo; it is she Sancho must look for. This provokes gales of laughter in the roguish squire: he knows Aldonza well: she is common, strong as a bull, dirty, can bellow to the peasants from the church tower and be heard a league away; she's a good one at exchanging pleasantries and, in fact, is a bit of a whore.Don Quixote's response is one of the most moving declarations of love ever written. He knows who and what Dulcinea really is; yet he loves her, and because he loves her, she is worth as much as "the most noble princess in all the world." He admits that his imagination has transformed the peasant girl Aldonza into the noble lady Dulcinea: but is not this the essence of love, to transform the loved one into something incomparable, unique, set above all con- siderations of wealth or poverty, distinction or commonness? "Thus, it is enough that I think and believe that Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and honest; the question of class is of no consequence. . . I paint her in my imagination as I desire her . . . And let the world think what it wants."The social, ethical, and political content of Don Quixote is obvious in this reunion of Love and Justice. The myth of the Golden Age is its ideological core: a utopia of brotherhood, equality, and pleasure. Utopia is to be achieved not in a nihilistic sweeping away of the past and starting from scratch to build a brave new world, but in a fusion of the values that come to us from the past and those we are capable of creating in the present. Justice, Don Quixote insists, is absent from the present times; only Love can give Justice actuality, and the Love Don Quixote speaks of is a democratic act, an act surpassing class distinctions, a truth to be found in the lowliest of peasant girls. But to this love must be brought the constant, aristocratic values of chivalry, personal risk in the quest for justice, integrity, and heroism. In Don Quixote, the values of the age of chivalry acquire, through Love, a demo- cratic resonance; and the values of the democratic life acquire the resonance of nobility. Don Quixote refuses both the cruel power of the mighty and the herd instinct of the lowly: his vision of humanity is based not on the lowest common denominator but onthe highest achievement possible. His conception of Love and Justice saves both the oppressors and the oppressed from an oppres- sion that perverts both.It is through this ethical stance that Cervantes struggles to bridge the old and new worlds. If his critique of reading is a negation of the rigid and oppressive features of the Middle Ages, it is also an affirmation of ancient values that must not be lost in the transition to the modem world. But if Don Quixote is also an affirmation of the modem values of the pluralistic point of view, Cervantes does not surrender to modernity either. It is at this juncture that his moral and literary vision fuses into a whole. For if reality has become plurivocal, literature will reflect it only in the measure to which it forces reality to submit itself to plural readings and in multiple visions from variable perspectives. Precisely in the name of the polyvalence of the real, literature creates reality, adds to reality, ceases to be a verbal correspondence to verities unmovable, or anterior to reality. Literature, this new printed reality, speaks of the things of the world; but literature, in itself, is a new thing in the world.As if he foresaw all the dirty tricks of servile literary naturalism, Cervantes destroys the illusion of literature as a mere copy of reality and creates a literary reality far more powerful and difficult to grapple with: the reality of a novel is its existence at all levels of the critique of reading. The moral message of Don Quixote, instead of being imposed from above by the author, thus passes through the sieve of the multiple readings of multiple readers who are reading a work that is criticizing its own artistic and moral prop- ositions. By rooting the critique of creation in the creation itself, Cervantes lays claim to being one of the founders of the modem imagination. Poetry, painting, and music will later demand an equal right to be themselves and not docile imitators of a reality that they ill serve by reproducing it. Art will not reflect more reality unless it creates another reality.' Through his paper character Don Quixote, who integrates the values of the past with those of the present, Cervantes translates the great themes of the centerless universe and of individualism triumphant, yet awed and orphaned, to the plane of literature as the axis of a new reality. There will be no more tragedy and no more epic, because there is no longer a restorable ancestral order or a universe univocal in its normativity. There will be multiple levels of reading, capable of testing the multiple layers of reality.

IT so happens that this rogue, convicted galley slave, and false puppeteer, Gines de Pasamonte, alias Ginesillo de Parapilla, alias Master Pedro, is writing a book about his own life. "Is the book finished?" asks Don Quixote. And Gines answers him: "How can it be, if my life isn't over yet?"This is Cervantes's last question: Who writes books and who reads them? Who is the author of Don Quixote? A certain Cer- vantes, more versed in grief than in verse, whose Galatea has been read by the priest who scrutinizes Don Quixote's library, burns the books he dislikes in an immediate auto-da-fe, and then seals off the hidalgo's library with brick and mortar, making him believe it is the work of magicians? A certain de Saavedra, mentioned by the Captive with admiration because of the acts he accomplished, "and all of them for the purpose of achieving freedom"?

Cervantes, like the character Don Quixote, is read by other characters of the novel Don Quixote, a book without an original author and, almost, a book without a destiny, a book that agonizes in the act of being born, reanimated by the papers of the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli, which are then translated into Spanish by an anonymous Moorish translator and which will be the object of the abject apocryphal version of Avellaneda ...The endless circle of reading and writings winds itself anew: Cervantes, author of Borges; Borges, author of Pierre Menard; Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote; Don Quixote, author of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

Cervantes leaves open the pages of a book where the reader knows himself to be read and the author knows himself to be written and it is said that he dies on the same date, though not on the same day, as William Shakespeare. It is further stated that perhaps both were the same man. Cervantes's debts and battles and prisons were fictions that permitted him to disguise himself as Shakespeare and write his plays in England, while the comedian Will Shaksper, the man with a thousand faces, the Elizabethan Lon Chaney, wrote Don Quixote in Spain. This disparity between the real days and the fictitious date of a common death spared world enough and time for Cervantes's ghost to fly to London in time to die once more in Shakespeare's body. But perhaps they are not really the same person, since the calendars in England and Spain have never been the same, in 1616 or in 1987.

But then again, if not the same person, maybe they are the same writer, the same author of all the books, a wandering polyglot polygraphist named, according to the whims of the times, Homer, Vergil, Dante, Cide Hamete Benengeli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Sterne, Defoe, Goethe, Poe, Dickens, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Proust, Kafka, Borges, Pierre Menard, James Joyce ... He is the author of the same open book which, like the autobiography of Gines de Pasamonte, is not yet finished because our lives are not yet over. With other words, Mallarme will one day say the same thought as the rogue of Parapilla: "A book neither begins nor ends; at the most, it feigns to . . ."

Cervantes wrote the first open novel as if he had read Mallarme. He proposes, through the critique of reading that seems to start with the hidalgo's reading of the epics of chivalry and seems to end with the reader's realization that all reality is multi-leveled, the critique of creation within creation. Don Quixote's intemporal and, at the same time, immediate quality derives from the nature of its internal poetics: it is a split poem that converts its own genesis into an act of fiction: it is the poetry of poetry (or the fiction of fiction), singing the birth of the poem, narrating the origin of the very fiction we are reading.

Gaston Bachelard has written that all great writers know that the world wants literature to be everything and to be something else: philosophy, politics, science, ethics. Why this demand, asks the French thinker. Because literature is always in direct com- munication with the origins of the spoken being, at that very core of speech where philosophy, politics, ethics, and science them- selves become possible.

But when science, ethics, politics, and philosophy discover their own limitations they appeal to the grace and disgrace of literature to go beyond their insufficiencies. Yet they only discover, along with literature itself, the permanent divorce between words andthings: the separation between the representative uses of language and the experience of the being of language.

Literature is the utopian operation that would like to reduce that distance. When it simply disguises the divorce, it is called epic. When it reveals it, it is called novel or poetry. Such is the novel and the poem of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance in his struggle to make words and things coincide. Don Quixote finds out, as we all do in our lives, that things do not belong to all; but words do. Words are like air: they belong to all or to no one. Language is the first and most natural instance of common property. If this is so, then Miguel de Cervantes is only the owner of his words in the same measure that he is not Miguel de Cervantes but all men: like Joyce's Dedalus, he is the poet, singing the uncreated conscience of his race, mankind. The poet is born after his act, the poem. The poem creates its author, much as it creates its readers. The final description of Cervantes's critique of reading is this simple, lapidary statement: Don Quixote, written by everybody, read by everybody.