Cervantes,+Llosa+essay

A Novel for the Twenty-First Century, Mario Vargas Llosa
Don Quixote de La Mancha, Cervantes' immortal novel, is first and foremost an image: a fifty-something gentleman in anachronistic armor and as bony as his horse, accompanied by a coarse and chubby peasant riding a donkey, a sometime squire, frozen in winter, burning in summer, crossing the plains of La Mancha in search of adventures. He is driven by a mad plan: to revive a long-eclipsed era (one, in fact, that never existed) of knights-errant, who traveled the world helping the weak, righting wrongs, and dispensing justice to those who would otherwise never know it-a plan which seizes him after reading chivalric romances to which he attributes the veracity of history.

This ideal is impossible to reach because everything in Don Quixote's reality refutes it. There are no knights-errant, no one professes the ideas or respects the values that once moved them, and war no longer consists of ritualistic duels between knights. Now, as Don Quixote laments in his discourse on arms and letters, war is no longer settled by swords and lances, that is,by the courage and dexterity of individuals, but rather by the thunder of artillery which, in the roar of death, has erased the codes of honor and heroic deeds that forged the mythic figures of an Amadis of Gaul, a Tirant lo Blanc and a Tristan de Leonis.

Does this mean that Don Quixote de La Mancha is a book focused on the past, that Alonso Quijano's madness comes from a desperate nostalgia for a world that is gone, from a profound rejection of modernity and progress? This would be true if the world for which Don Quixote yearns and which he is intent on reviving had ever had a place inhistory.In truth, it only ever existed in the imagination ,in legends and utopias created by men to escape the insecurity and barbarism of their lives-societies of order, honor, principles, fair and redeeming citizens, which compensated them for the violence and suffering of life in the Middle Ages.

The books of chivalry that incite Don Quixote's madness are not realistic, and the delirious feats of their paladins do not reflect reality. Yet they are an authentic and imaginative response, filled with dreams and wishes and, above all, denial, to a very real world-a dream of ceremony and elegance, of justice triumphant and evil punished, so different from the real world in which those who avidly read the chivalric romances (or listened to them in taverns and plazas) lived. Thus, the dream that transforms Alonso Quijano into Don Quixote de La Mancha does not constitute a reenactment of the past, but rather something much more ambitious: the realization of a myth, the transformation of fiction into living history.

This fantasy, which seems insane to those around Alonso Quijano, especially to his friends and acquaintances in his village-the priest, the barber Nicolas, the __house keeper__ and her niece, the bachelor Sanson Carrasco-gradually infiltrates reality, thanks to the fanatical conviction with which the Knight of the Sad Countenance imposes it on his surroundings, fearless of the thrashings and blows he receives and the misfortunes that befall him everywhere as a result. In his splendid interpretation of the novel, Para Leer a Cervantes (El Acantilado, 2003), Martin de Riquer insists that throughout his long adventure Don Quixote does not change, that he never loses his certainty that it is the enchanters who distort reality so that he appears mistaken when he attacks windmills, wineskins, sheep, or pilgrims, believing them to be giants or enemies. Undoubtedly, this is true. Yet, although Don Quixote does not change, imprisoned as he is in his rigid chivalric vision of the world, what does change are his surroundings, the people around him, and the very reality, which, as if infected by his powerful madness, becomes less and less real until as in a Borges storyit becomes pure fiction. This is one of the most subtle and most modern aspects of the great Cervantine novel.

Fiction and Life

The central theme of Don Quixote de La Mancha is fiction, its raison d'etre, and the way it infiltrates life, forming and transforming it. Thus, what would seem to many modern readers the Borgesian theme par excellence (from "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius") is actually a Cervantine subject, which, centuries later, was revived by Borges, giving it his own personal twist.

Fiction is the main issue of the novel because the gentleman from La Mancha has been "unhinged"- his madness is also an allegory or symbol, ahead of a clinical diagnosis-by the fantasies of chivalric romance. Believ- ing the world to be as it is described in the novels of Amadises and Palmerines, Don Quixote rushes at it in search of adventures in which he will participate parodically, provoking and enduring minor catastrophes. He will not learn the lesson of realism from these unfortunate experiences. With the unmoving belief of a fanatic, Don Quixote blames on the evil enchanters the fact that his feats are transformed into farces. In fact, in the end, Don Quixote triumphs; fiction infects true life and reality gives way to his fantasies. Sancho Panza, who has been introduced as a materialist and pragmatist, at last succumbs to the delights of the imaginary and, as governor of Barataria, accommodates himself to the world of falsity and illusion. His language, which at the beginning of the story is earthy, direct and populist, becomes refined and occasionally as pretentious as that of his master.

The stratagem by which Basilio prevents the beautiful Quiteria from marrying the wealthy Camacho so as to marry her himself-isn't that fiction? Basilio "commits suicide" amid preparations for the wedding, stabbing himself with a sword and bathing in blood. In agony as he dies, he asks Quiteria for her hand in marriage or he will die without confession. As soon as Quiteria agrees,Basilio returns to life, revealing that his suicide was pure theater and that the blood he shed came from a hidden pipe. The Hction, nonetheless, is effective and, with Don Quixote's help, becomes reality as Basilio and Quiteria unite in marriage.

The friends from Don Quixote's town-so opposed to the passion for reading novels that they bum Don Quixote's library on the pretext of curing Alonso Quijano's madness-also appeal to fiction by scheming to return the Knight of the Sad Countenance to his sanity and the real world. They actually achieve the opposite, however. The bachelor Sanson Carrasco dresses up twice as a knight-errant, first as the Knight of the Mirrors and later in Barcelona as the Knight of the White Moon. The first time the deception turns out to be counterproductive and Don Quixote has his own way. But the second time it achieves its aim, forcing Don Quixote to renounce his arms for a year and return to his village, bringing the story to its denouement.

The ending is a rather staged and depressing anti-climax and consequently, perhaps, Cervantes completed his work in a few more pages. There is something abnormal and even unreal in Alonso Quijano's decision to return to reality, when reality has become to a great extent fiction, as a weepy Sancho Panza indicates when he proclaims to his master from his deathbed that they should "be off to the country dressed as shepherds" to act out the pastoral fiction that is the last of Don Quixote's fantasies.

The fictionalization of reality reaches its peak with the appearance of the mysterious duke and duchess, who increase the pace and number of theatrical and fabulous changes. The duke and duchess have read the first part of the story, as have many other characters, and when they meet Don Quixote and Sancho Panza they are as seduced by the novel as Don Quixote is by the romances of chivalry. In their castle they arrange for life to become fiction and for the unreality in which Don Quixote lives to be reproduced in real life. The duke and duchess do this with the intention of laughing at the crazy gentleman and hissquire-or so they believe. But the game begins to corrupt them,for late, when Don Quixote and Sancho leave for Zaragoza, the duke and duchess round up their servants and soldiers to find the two and bring them back to the castle, where the fabulous funeral ceremony and supposed resurrection of Altisidora has been organized. In the world of the duke and duchess, Don Quixote is no longer an eccentric; he is right at home in these fictional surroundings, from the island of Barataria, where Sancho real izes his dream of being governor, to the flight aboard Clavilefi.o, the artificial quadruped on which the great Manchegan gallops through the clouds of illusion.

Another wealthy and influential man, Don Antonio Moreno, who lodges, wines, and dines Don Quixote in Barcelona, also stages some spectacles which break down reality. For example, in his house he has an enchanted bronze head, which answers questions posed to it, appearing to know the future and past of the other characters. The narrator explains that this is an "artifice," and that the supposed fortuneteller is in fact a hollow machine with a student who sits inside and responds to questions.Isn't this yet another manifestation of living fiction ,creating theater from life, as Don Quixote does, but with less ingenuity and greater malice?

During his __stay in Barcelona__, when his host Don Antonio Moreno is walking Don Quixote through the city, a Castilian emerges who calls out to the Ingenious Gentleman: "You are mad ... (and] you have the quality of turning into madmen and fools those who meet and speak with you." The Castilian is right: Don Quixote's madness, his thirst for unrea lity, is contagious and has fostered in others the appetite for fiction that possesses him.

This explains the flowering of stories, the forest of tales and novels, which is Don Quixote de La Mancha. Not only the elusive Cide Hamete Benengeli, the other narrator of the novel, who boasts of being merely its transcriber and translator (although he is really its editor, annotator, and commentator as well), reveals this passion for the imaginary life of literature, incorporating occasional tales-"The Man Who was Recklessly Curi- ous" and the tale of Cardenio and Dorotea, for example-into the main story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Characters like the beautiful Moorish woman, the Knight of the Green Coat, or the Princess Micomicona, also share this propensity or narrative vice, which leads them to tell tales, real or in vented, creating in the course of the novel a landscape of words and imagination which comes before, even at times abolishes, the other natural but not very realistic one of cliches and conventional rhetoric. Don Quixote de La Mancha is a novel about fiction in which imaginary life is everywhere, in the vicissitudes, the words, even the very air that the characters breathe.

A Novel of __Free__ Men

In addition to being a novel about fiction, Don Quixote is also a song to freedom. Let us pause for a moment to reflect on these very famous words of Don Quixote to Sancho Panza: "Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious of heaven's gifts. It cannot be compared to the treasures of the land or sea. For freedom, as for honor, one can and should risk one's life, while captivity is the worst evil which can come to men."

Behind these words, and the fictitious character who utters them, is the figure of Miguel de Cervantes, who knew well of what he spoke. The five years during which he was held captive by Moors in Algiers and the three times he was imprisoned in Spain for debt and mismanagement of his position in the purchasing bureaucracy of the Armada in Andalusia-these experiences must have whetted his appetite for freedom and spurred his horror of captivity, filling Don Quixote's words with authenticity and force and giving a libertarian slant to the story of our Ingenious Gentleman.

What, then, is Don Quixote's concept of freedom? Is it that of so-called European liberals from the eighteenth century onward: the sovereignty of the individual tochoose his life,without pressures or limitations, according to his intelligence and his will? This is what, several centuries later, Isaiah Berlin would define as"negative freedom,"freedom from interference and coercion to think, express oneself, and act. At the heart of this idea of freedom is a profound distrust of authority and of the crimes that those in power might commit.

Let us remember that Don Quixote pronounces this exalted praise of freedom as he leaves the domain of the anonymous duke and duchess, where he has been treated like royalty by the man of the castle, the very incarnation of power. Yet, even amidst this flattery and pampering, the Ingenious Gentleman perceives an invisible corset which threatens and diminishes his freedom-"because I did not enjoy it with the liberty that I would have if [the gifts and abundance heaped on me] were mine." The assumption is that the basis of liberty is private pwperty and that pleasure is only complete when one's capacity for initiative, one's freedom of thought and action, is not constrained. "Fortunate is he to whom the heavens have given bread without obliging him to thank anyone but the heavens themselves!"

It cannot be made clearer: freedom is individual and requires a mini- mum level of prosperity. He who is poor and depends upon charity to survive is never entirely free. It is true that there existed a time many years ago, as Don Quixote reminds the stunned goatherds in his speech on the Golden Age, when "virtue and goodness reigned in the world" and, in this heavenly era before private property, "those who lived did not even know the words yours and mine" and "all thingswerecommon property." But time passed and "our detestable centuries" arrived, wherein, so that there might be security and justice, "the order of knights-errant was instituted to defend maidens, to protect widows and to help orphans and the needy."

Don Quixote does not believe that justice, order, and progress are the responsibility of authority, but rather that of individuals who, like the knights-errant and himself, take it upon themselves to rid the world of injustice and bring freedom and prosperity. This is the knight-errant: one who, inspired by his calling, hurls himself out into the world to look for remediesfor all that ails it. Authority, when it appears, instead of easing the task, generally makes it more difficult.

Where is authority in the Spain that Don Quixote crosses in his three journeys? We must leave the novel to know that the king alluded to on several occasions is Philip III, because, in the fiction, except for a few fleeting appearances, such as that of the governor of Barcelona during Don Quixote's visit to that city's port, the authorities are notably absent. The institutions that embody them, such as the Saintly Brotherhood or rural Spain's judicial corps, which are mentioned during Don Quixote and Sancho's trips, are likewise viewed as something far away, dark, and dangerous.

Don Quixote does not hesitate to confront authority and challenge the law when it deviates from his own conception of justice. In his first sally he confronts the wealthy Juan Haldudo, a neighbor from Quintanar, who is beating one of his servants because he has lost some sheep-wh ich, according to the barbarous customs of the era, he has every right to do. But for our Manchega n th is is intolerable and he rescues the servant, righting what he sees as a wrong. (As soon as he departs, Haldudo flogs the servant to death, despite his promises not to mistreat him.) The novel is filled with episodes like this, in which the individualist vision of justice leads the bold gentleman to disrespect a uthority, law, and custom in the name of what is for him a superior moral imperative.

The adventure in which Don Quixote takes this libertarian spirit to a nearly suicid al extreme-suggesting that h.is idea of freedom also antici- pates in some respects the a narchist thinkers of two centuries later-is one of the most celebrated in the novel: the libera tion of the twelve delinquents, among them the sinister Gines de Pasamonte, the future Master Pedro who forces the Ingenious Gentleman, despite being perfectly aware that they are dealing with ruffians condemned for their misdeeds, to row the galleys of the king. The reason for his open challenge to au thority-"it is not right that honorable men are the hangmen of others"- hardly conceals Don Quixote's love of liberty, which, if he had to choose, he would place ahead of justice, or his profound mistrust of authority, which for him is no guarantee of what he ambiguously refers to as "distributive justice," an expression that implies an egalitarian counterweight to his libertarian ideals.

In this episode, in order to reiter(lte how insubordinate and free his thought is, Don Quixote praises the "trade of the procurer," as "very necessary in an orderly republic," and indignantly suggests that an elderly man who was sentenced to the galleys for the practice of procuring should instead have been "made general of them." He who dared to rebel so blatantly against political correctness and prevailing morals was a true madman who-not only when he spoke of the romances of chivalry-said and did things that questioned the roots of the society in which he lived.

Don Quixote's Homelands

What is the image of Spain that emerges from the pages of Cervantes' novel? It is one that is vast and diverse, without geographical borders, consisting of an archipelago of communities,villages,and towns, which the characters refer to as "homelands." It is an image similar to that of the empires or kingdoms of chivalric romance, the genre supposedly ridiculed in Don Quixote de La Mancha. Yet Cervantes pays it great homage and one of his literary feats is to modernize the romance of chivalry, recovering from it, through play and humor,all that could survive, and adjusting it to the social and artistic values of the seventeenth century, an era very different from that in which it had originated.

In the course of his three adventures, Don Quixote travels through La Mancha and part of Arag6n and Catalonia, but the origin of many of the characters and the many references to places and things make Spain appear a much vaster, geographically diverse space with imprecise borders, de- fined not in terms of territories and administrative demarcations, but in terms of religion. Spain ends in those vague coastal areas where the dominion of the Moot, the religious enemy, begins.

At the same time, Spain is the context and the horizon of the relatively limited geography that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza traverse, and what is displayed with color and affection is the "homeland," the concrete and human space that memory can span-a landscape, people, customs, which men and women save in their memories as a personal heritage and which constitute their credentials. The characters in the novel travel the world over, one might say, carrying their towns and villages with them. They identify themselves by referring to these details, their "homeland," and remember the small communities where they have left lovers, friends, families, homes, and animals with irrepressible nostalgia. When, at the end of the third trip after many adventures, Sancho Panza sees his village in the distance, he falls on his knees and exclaims: "Open your eyes, beloved homeland, and see that Sancho Panza, your son, has returned ..."

Since, in the course of time, this idea of homeland would begin to dematerialize, gradually approaching theidea of nation (whichonly emerges in the nineteenth century) until it becomes one with it, it should be noted that the homelands of Don Quixote have nothing to do with this abstract concept of nationhood, which is general, schematic, and essentially politi- cal, and is at the root of all nationalisms. This collectivist ideology, which claims to define individuals according to membership in a human con- glomerate distinguished by certain traits (race, language, religion) which impose on it a specific personality, is radically different from the exalted individualism that Don Quixote and others display. Theirs is a world in which "patriotism" is a generous and positive sentiment, a love of one's native land and peopie, of shared memories and a familiar past, and not a means of separating oneself or establishing borders against others. Don Quixote's Spain has no borders: it is a multicolored, pluralistic world of many homelands, open to the outside world and indistinguishable from it. It opens its doors to those who arrive from other parts, somehow avoiding the obstacle (insurmountable for the Counter-Reformation mentality of the time) of religion, that is, conversion to Catholicism.

A Modern Book

Don Quixote's modernity lies in its rebellious and avenging spirit, which permits the protagonist to assume that changing the world for the better is his responsibility, even when, while trying to put this into practice, he meets insurmountable obstacles, is throttled, ill-treated, and transformed into an object of derision. But it is also very much a novel of today, since Cervantes, in order to tell the exploits of Don Quixote, revolutionized the narrative forms of his time and created the basis of the modern novel. Although they may not know it, the contemporary novelists who play with form, distort time, shuffle and twist perspectives, and experiment with language, are all in debt to Cervantes.

This formal revolution which is Don Quixote has been studied and analyzed from all possible points of view and, yet, as with all paradigmatic masterpieces, it never runs dry, because, as with Hamlet or The Divine Comedy or The Iliad and The Odyssey,the work changes with the passage of time, recreating itself in terms of the aesthetics and values of each culture, revealing that it is a true Ali Baba cave whose treasures never end.

Perhaps the most innovative aspect of Don Quixote's narrative form is the way Cervantes approaches the problem of the narrator, the basic problem that should resolve everything a novel encompasses.Whois going to tell the story? Cervantes' answer introduces a subtlety and complexity in the genre that continues to enrich modern novelists today and was for its era what Joyce's Ulysses, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, or, in Latin American literature, Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude or Cortazar's Hopscotch was for ours.

Who tells the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? Two narrators: the mysterious Cide Hamete Benengeli,whom we never read direct}y as his manuscript is in Arabic, as well as an anonymous author who sometimes speaks in the first person, but most often from the last of three omniscient narrators who supposedly translate into Spanish and at the same time adapt, edit, and comment on the manuscript. This is a Chinese box struc- ture: the story that we read is contained within another earlier and broader one at which we can only guess. The existence of these two narrators introduces ambiguity into the novel and an element of uncertainty about the "other" story, that of Cide Hamete Benengeli. Their presence fills the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza with a subtle relativism, an aura of subjectivity, and contributes autonomy, sovereignty, and original personality.

But these other narrators, and their delicate dialectic, are not the only ones who matter in this novel of story writers and compulsive tellers of tales. Many characters substitute for them, as we have seen, referring to their own mishaps or those of others in episodes which constitute other, smaller Chinese boxes contained within the vast universe filled with private fictions that is Don Quixote de La Mancha.Making the most of the romances of chivalry (many of which were supposedly manuscripts found in exotic and outlandish places), Cervantes created Cide Hamete Benengeli as a device to introduce ambiguity and the game as central characteristics of the narrative structure. He also made transcendental innovations in another matter of capital importance to the novel's form: the narrative time.

Don Quixote's Time

In all novels, time, like the narrator, is an artifice, an intention, something created according to the needs of anecdote, and never merely a reproduc- tion or reflection of real time. In Don Quixote there are various times which, masterfully mixed, add to the novel that air of an independent world, that touch of self-sufficiency, that is crucial in giving it persuasive power. There is, on the one hand, the time in which the characters of the novel move, which covers a little more that half a year, since Don Quixote's three trips last, respectively, three days, a few months, and about four months. To this period we must add two intervals between trips (the second lasting a month), which Don Quixote spends in his village, and the last two days, until his death- altogether, then, around seven or eight months.

However, there are episodes in the novel, which by their nature increase the narrative time considerably, both toward the past and toward the future. Many of the events we learn about in the course of the novel have happened before it begins; we hear of them through the testimonies of witnesses or protagonists and we see many of them conclude in what would be the present of the novel.

But the most notable and surprising aspect of the narrative time is that many characters in the second part of Don Quixote de la Mancha, the duke and duchess, for example, have read the first part. Thus we learn that other realities, other times, different from those in fiction, exist, in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza exist as characters in a book whose readers are either inside or outside the story, which is our situation, we contemporary readers. This small stratagem, in which one must see something far more daring than a simple game of literary illusionism, has important conse- quences for the structure of the novel. The time of the fiction expands and multiplies. The fiction remains enclosed within a greater universe,in which Don Quixote, Sancho, and the other characters have already lived and been converted into the heroes of the book and appeared in the hearts and memories of the readers of this other reality, which is not exactly the reality we are reading and yet contains it. This is just like a Chinese box, where the largest box contains a smaller one, and then a smaller and a smaller one,in a series that could, in theory, be infinite.

This is a game, which is both amusing and disturbing, and at the same time enriches the story with episodes like those with the duke and duchess (who are aware of Don Quixote's manias and obsessions from the book that they have read).It also has the virtue of graphically and pleasantly illustrating the complex relations between fiction and life-the way life produces fictions and these fictions, then, revert to life, brightening it, changing it, giving it color, adventure, emotion, laughter, passion, and surprises. The relation between fiction and life, a recurrent theme of classical and modern literature, is seen in Cervantes' novel in a way that anticipates the great adventures of the twentieth century in which the explorations of narrative form-language, time, characters, points of view, and the func- tion of the narrator tempt the very best novelists.

For these and many other reasons, the immortality of Don Quixote is due to the elegance and power of its style, in which the Spanish language reached oneof its highest peaks.One should speak perhaps not of one but of various styles in which the novel is written. There are two that can be clearly distinguished, and that, as novelistic material, correspond to the two sides or faces of reality through which the story unfolds: the real and the fictitious.

In the tales interspersed throughout the novel, the language is more rhetorical than in the central story in which Don Quixote,Sancho, the priest, the barber, and other villagers speak in a simpler and more natural way. In the added tales the narrator uses a more affected-more literary-laguage with which he achieves a distancing, almost fantastic effect. These differences are also to be seen in the words that come from the characters' mouths, according to their social position, level of education, and profession. Indeed, among the characters from the popular sector, the differences are evident: a humble villager would speak most transparently, while a slave, a city ruffian who defends himself in slang, would speak an argot at times totally incomprehensible to Don Quixote.

Don Quixote, in fact, does not have one single way of expressing himself. According to the narrator, he only exaggerates on chivalric themes, and speaks precisely and objectively when treating other issues. When focusing on the themes of chivalry, Don Quixote's speech becomes a grab bag of scholarly topics, erudite affectations, literary references, and fantastic ravings. No less variable is the language of Sancho Panza, whose manner of speaking changes over the course of the story, from a salty language, bursting with life and filled with refrains and sayings that express a wealth of popular knowledge, to a convoluted and ornamented mode of expression at the end which he has acquired from his master and which is like a smiling parody of the parody that is, in itself, the language of Don Quixote.Cervantes then, instead of Sanson Carrasco, should be called the Knight of the Mirrors, as Don Quixote de La Mancha is a veritable labyrinth of mirrors, where everything-the characters, the artistic forms, the anec dotes, the styles-unfold and multiply in images which express human life in all its infinite subtlety and variety.

For all of these reasons, then, this pair is immortal, and four centuries after entering the world through Cervantes' pen, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza continue to ride without interruption or despondency. In La Mancha, Aragon, Catalonia, Europe, America, the world.They are stili here, through rain, roaring thunder, burning sun or shining stars, in the great silence of the polar night, or in the desert, or in the tangled jungles, arguing, seeing, and understanding different things in all that they find and hear. Yet, despite their constant disputes, they need each other more and more, they are indissolubly joined in that strange union, which is the union of sleep.