Don Quijote: A Look Backwards, Or A Crazy Projection Of The Future?

It seems at once sensible and reasonable to keep 'locura' at the front of a lexicon being used to discuss Cervantes' Don Quijote. The madness of the text is undeniably embodied by its eponymous protagonist. Cervantes clearly made a conscious decision to centralise the theme of madness, and it is important to consider his reasons for doing so before attempting to place the book contextually between the literary works that precede it and indeed those that followed.

The scene where our hero comes across a farmer whipping a young boy (PI, Ch IV) is a rather fitting demonstration not only of Don Quijote's madness, but also of his (and perhaps of Cervantes') delusion. There is a notable relationship between the knight's belief that his interruption of the whipping will mean it will cease and Cervantes' belief that his destabilising the contemporary status quo of literature will change its course and format. Where Don Quijote was wrong, however, Miguel de Cervantes was right.

The prominence of the theme of 'locura' in the text strongly suggests that 'Don Quijote' could be placed within the often-misunderstood genre of parody. Surely much of the satisfaction a contemporary reader (or audience) would have derived from 'Don Quijote' is down to Cervantes' incomparable ability meticulously to integrate typical incidents, situations and turns of phrase in a new book that seems wholly unrelated to earlier romances of chivalry. Despite the temporal distance a modern reader suffers from the majority of examples of these familiarities, a few are apparent even to us: namely the retirement of the distraught Amadis to Peña Pobre, mirrored by Don Quijote in the Sierra Morena (PI, Ch XXV-XXVI). But a contemporary reader would have found amusingly familiar the knight's vigil over his arms (PI, Ch III), the fight with the Basque squire (PI, Ch VIII-IX), the letter to Dulcinea (PI, Ch XXV), the encounter with the lion (PII, Ch XVII), the boat on the River Ebro (PII, Ch XXIX), and many of the challenges, boasts and combats. Intertextuality, then, is something of a foundation of the novel. A question that here has to be asked is: "How far back does the text actually look?" I'm not convinced that the immediate target of 'Don Quijote' was Alemán and the picaresque. Ostensibly, its target is, in fact, Lope de Vega and his two most recently published romances, one of them ('El peregrino en su patria') published probably only a few weeks earlier. Cervantes was never as directly critical as we might like him to have been, but his criticism of contemporary literature's state can be redacted from countless hypotheses into one word: pretension. Lope is frequently taken to be the main offender that inspires Cervantes' literary indignation. While unmentioned throughout 'Don Quijote', Lope's 'Arcadia' (1598) flaunted gratuitous learning in a way that surely annoyed the righteous Cervantes. From the title page, it advertised an index of historical and poetic names, and the text itself - quite apart from being a barely-penetrable, saturated narrative - contains around 450 notes. The aforementioned 'Peregrino en su patria' is just as obnoxious and unsubtle in its name-dropping: its prologue has four Latin quotations in its first ten sentences, and references Seneca's 'Epistle 31'. Between the Valencia 1602 edition of 'Arcadia' and 'El Peregrino en su patria', there are 24 prefatory sonnets and other verses. Lope, seemingly concerned with giving the vulgo what it wanted, appeared to have gone somewhat off-track, and 'Don Quijote' could well be considered Cervantes' gentle reminder. In Cervantes' text, the aims are more wholesome than the apparent aims of Lope at the time: where Lope visibly sought to show off, Cervantes wanted only that "el simple no se enfade". Ridding his text of what E. C. Riley refers to as "snob appeal" (p33) makes for a more uncluttered, simple and - arguably - pleasurable reading. There are countless instances where Cervantes makes explicit reference to the literature that preceded his work. 'Don Quijote' appears to justify Pío Baroja's statement that the picaresque novel is "a bag that holds everything". The Canon of Toledo and I share interest in a specific question that stems from accepting the existence of these references: how important is the accuracy of these miradas para atrás? Cervantes appears to want historical accuracy to play an important role in his text: he certainly begins by claiming he will stay loyal to the events of the past. But oddly, he refuses to name Don Quijote's hometown. This is but one of many traps into which Cervantes wants the 'lector indiscreto' to fall. It is not Cervantes who wants his text considered historically authentic, and nor is it really Cervantes who punctuates the narrative with the periodic interjections (which seek to reinforce historical accuracy while actually having - ironically - an antithetical effect: they remind us the work is fictional). The confusion arises from Cervantes' clever blending of Author-God and modern writer (scri ptor) . Cervantes creates a caricature of himself to write the book (who is Barthes' modern scri ptor), and he remains distant from the narrative, which in itself allows various complications to arise. Cervantes truly is the master of narratives of entrapment. Another question comes out of the first: is it important whether the stories that percolate the narrative of 'Don Quijote' are historically accurate in themselves? Don Quijote appears to agree with and prove correct Sir Phillip Sidney, who remarked: "A feigned example hath as much force to teach as a true example." To the knight, it is unimportant whether the sources of his inspiration were fact or fiction, and at the end of the discussion with the Canon of Toledo, he concludes thusly: "De mí sé decir que después que soy caballero andante soy valiente, comedido, liberal, biencriado, generoso, cortés, atrevido, blando, paciente, sufridor de trabajos, de prisiones, de encantos". Here, the knight unwittingly stumbles across some sound logic, later highlighted by Unamuno (1967), which is this: there is ultimately nothing whatsoever to distinguish a fictitious character from someone who once lived and is now dead and belongs to past history, as far as posterity is concerned. Indeed, there are fictitious characters - Hamlet, for example - who have meant far more to posterity than countless historical ones. Whether this is something of which Cervantes was aware or not, we cannot possibly know. Either way, it is undeniable that "miradas para atrás" feature (and play an important role) in 'Don Quijote'. It is their prominence, in fact, that pushes me to suggest that Don Quijote is the culmination of all the literary "locuras" that predate his creation. He is an extreme case in whom heroic emulation crosses a hazy line into lunacy; firstly, because he chooses preposterously fanciful heroes as models (superhuman men who defeat entire armies single-handedly, who sink fleets and decapitate ogres without breaking sweat); secondly, because he tries to imitate these unattainably whimsical characters far too literally and comprehensively. For him, it is not enough to convert their qualities and apply them to the world he lives in. This is, at best, impracticable. While there are times that reality can be strange enough to persuade a sufficiently eager mind that "anything's possible", it always hits back, and it is this reverberation that makes his imitation of romance the apogee of involuntary comic parody. This comedy is exacerbated by the care and deliberation with which he sets about each of his tasks in view of the outcomes. The effort he puts in is consciously artistic, even when it is childlike: a tendency Freud identified in the creative writer, who "does the same as the child at play. He creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously - that is, which he invests with large amounts of emotion - while separating it sharply from reality" . While Don Quijote's fixation with imitation is undeniably an indication of madness, it is also both artistic and heroic, and in this way, the narrative's eponymous protagonist acts as a microcosm for the text where he resides. It is hard to argue against Riley's saying that "it is always difficult to dispatch heroes of romance" : Ian Fleming is dead, but a new 'Bond' film is to come out within a month. But that is not why Don Quijote develops his obsession with the heroes of the past, or rather that is not why Cervantes developed in Don Quijote an obsession with them. The idea of putting art into living was well known to the age. Quijote's formal speeches are spectacular examples of self-conscious, rhetorical improvisation, clearly intended to be admired and recorded. And quite apart from his artistic eloquence, there existed an artistic quality to his penance, Don Quijote's most consciously artistic act, before which he debates whether to imitate Amadis or Roland (PI, Ch XXVI).

Ultimately, I feel inclined to agree with Gallego Moral's quote, but not with its current word order. I think 'Don Quijote' is a 'locura para atrás' and a 'mirada hacia delante': Cervantes belittles the literary status quo, and reinvents the textual wheel with 'Don Quijote'. His protagonist is laughably mad, and uniquely brilliant, and he is hewn out of the literary conventions that led to the creation of Cervantes' masterpiece. The book is a hilarious response to the formulaic romances of chivalry of the past, and unwittingly provides chillingly accurate insight into the literature of the future. That Quijote and Sancho add up to a whole far more exceptional than the sum of the two parts is astounding: the formula is now repeatedly trotted out in popular culture: from Laurel and Hardy to Asterix and Obelix, Quijote and Sancho to R2D2 and C3PO, the long gaunt figure and the short and fat one are now regarded as the staple pairing for comic relationships. With this relationship, Cervantes was giving contemporary Spain a "mirada hacia delante", and his text as a whole was just as prototypical and progressive.