Layers of Reality

One of my favorite, if not my absolute favorite stories within stories found within the masterwork Don Quixote is The Tale of Innappropriate Curiousity, or as I may refer to it for the rest of the article, The Tale. I’m going to reflect on the story without reading it back, just purely basing my thoughts on how I recall feeling while I read it. The story is told by one of the characters—although I can’t remember who—at some point during the part one of the book. I also can’t remember if the story had any other consequences for the rest of the plot, although even if it did, I’m sure I either didn’t notice, or would have to read back to really remember. I say this because, well, we can get into this story’s place within the broader story of Don Quixote, because it’s one of many, and one which, if I’m recalling correctly, comes after the reader has already experienced a few other stories within stories.

                It’s this kind of Russian doll, tunnelling effect that Don Quixote has that is so remarkable even after hundreds of years. To me as a reader who’s grown up in the so-called “modern” era—an era of fossil fuels and electricity, and constant streams of sources of video and audio purportedly all from the real world and real situations—the question of what’s “real” has become somewhat complicated. It’s become very complicated, in fact. It’s probably not even appropriate to call our era the “modern” era, as we’ve certainly moved into some new paradigm that society has just failed to achieve a new term for. Terming eras might even be a “modern” thing, since I’m not aware if people in the Dark and Middle ages knew that those were the ages they were in, or if artists in the Romantic period called it such, and so on. The point I’m trying to get at is the internet has created a totalizing effect on most of society, and I’m certianly included in that. I engage with it every day. My job is actually on the internet, so I spend countless hours on it. This almost certainly has an effect on the mind, let alone the soul or the spirit, and it’s probably many effects. For our purposes, let’s focus back in on the question of what is “real” and not “real”, and what that means in our modern age.

                It’s safe to say that anyone reading this today will understand what I mean when I say that wondering about “what is real” is a fairly common activity for most modern people—I will elect to just continue to use the term “modern” to describe this era we’re living in, despite my reservations prior—because we’ve achieved a state of daily interaction through electric means that no iteration of humanity has ever achieved prior. Surely, although we understand in some abstract way how the internet works, and how audio and video seemingly—or even literally—flies through the air into our devices both large and small, we must all admit that if we were to show a person from the past what kind of technological capabilities we all possess as a matter of a routine today, that person from the past would think that we were wizards. Someone maybe ancient, perhaps, because people even back to the 16^th century may have been anticipating the kind of world that would exist today. An ancient person, perhaps a Roman, would be completely bewildered by our technological prowess that both old and young, rich and even poor possess.

                One of the results of this technological achievement writ large has been the proliferation of self-made videos. People document themselves and reality at a rate never before thought possible, at least not to our most recent past generations, like those from the personal radio era, for example. People document reality, but they also observe theirs and others documentations of reality on a daily basis. It’s practically part of many people’s current daily diet. While I can’t really describe how, I think everyone knows that to some extent this constant duplication of reality in two-dimensional format, piped into our devices in nearly realtime, has certainly had an effect on the way we see the world. It takes us out of our own places in time, both physicall and mentally. We’re constantly seeing videos from the present and past, intermingling at all times, often without context, all presented as if they’re happening now. There’s probably countless other examples of how the sea of amateur media we all now mentally exist in effects our day to day lives.

                To get back to Don Quixote and the brilliance of A Tale of Innappropriate Curiousity—or so titled by the translator John Rutherford, the title of the chapter may have different translations depending on which you’ve read, I’d recommend the Rutherford—Cervantes, the author of this splendid work, certainly did not contend with the same media landscape environment. To call everyone more sane than we are today would certainly be untrue and a stretch, but more bored, or less distracted, that’s almost certainly the case. Cervantes’s Quixote exists in a world without moving images, without reproduced audio, and yet the entire conceit of the book is that he’s read so many books that his mind has taken off on its own, and become commandeered by his own—or maybe the world of literature at that time's—own fantasies.

                This is why this nested tale is my favorite in the work. It comes, if I recall, a little more than halfway past the part one of the book, although I could be wrong, it could be later. By that point we’ve already been journeying with the characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for many pages, many words, and met more than a few different characters. The brilliance of Don Quixote in my opinion is in this dedication to this cumulative effect, the book is as much as about one central theme as it is about using the experience of the reader moving through the book, and therefore through the relative time within the book, but also moving through the physical, advancing through at the pace within their own actual timeline, and this synchronistic process is very consciously handled by Cervantes’s writing to produce the effect of building up not only the characters and their psychology, their personalities, and so on, but also the actual sensation of events within the book being either “real” or “unreal”.

                Take Don Quixote, for example, or even Sancho Panza along with him. The beginning of the book frames and presents these characters as not the fantasies that they will inhabit of their own accord, but the bedrock foundation of who they actually were as people. By this I mean of course as who they were as the literary characters, but then again this is the genius of Cervantes. He bases his work in a foundation of realism that permeates the rest of the work, constantly calling back to the idea that all of the rest of the events and the characters are both who they really are, but also, within the scope of the literary work, who Don Quixote envisions them to be. This created for me a constant motion in the book, in which I was taken along often by Don Quixote’s delusions, only to again and again marvel at the punchline of the central conceit clearly presented within the first pages—that Don Quixote is insane, that none of his actions done out of chivalry have any inherent meaning, other than how those actions effect and influence the actual world around him that creates any meaning thereafter.

                For example, after journeying off into the wilderness and generally causing chaos in the local countryside, the two main characters stumble upon a woman in the mountains. The woman tells them—and us—a story of how a local prince had taken advantage of her, bedding her, and then leaving her capriciously, leaving her honor in tatters and without a future in polite society. This story is presented as an idealized tale, without any real moral pretense, but as a drama, a reflection of the passions and selfishness of mortal creatures acted out in the world. Cleverly, though, this is one of many stories within stories in Don Quixote, and it comes far before The Tale. The main difference between these stories in the novel is that this first story actually continues to play out in the work—Quixote and Panza eventually run into all of the characters involved in the story at an inn, and a resolution is found between them, bringing us the reader, who Don Quixote has brought along, into the actual story of characters who’ve brought us all collectively into their story.

                It’s these techniques that create the context for The Tale to be told, and to be, in my opinion, so wonderfully engaging. At this point in the novel, we’ve already been subterfuged into the web of double-meanings and irony that the main characters and the world around them has produced. Although The Tale is perhaps the most like a fable or a parable, it’s also told in such a way as to elevate beyond that, to sound as if, real or not, it is being told by a real person, about real people who really lived. The pleasure in reading this chapter, however, comes from everything in the novel leading up to that point, in which reality is often tested by the main characters, but then also by the novelist himself, who challenges us to engage with stories of potential consequence to actual, real Castillians.

                The Tale is my favorite example of the central theme and my perceived purpose of the entire work of Don Quixote—the world is real, although our experiences of it must be entirely still our own. We do share things in the world, and share meaning, and yet meaning is still a combinatory effect, even a collaboration among all parties to arrive at stable whole. In this way the fantastically futuristic tools of the present era that deliver audio-visual versions of reality to us constantly—that purportedly look real, taken from the real world, and yet are intermingled with fantasy, fiction, and deceit—these tools and their effect on us, when compared against a work like Don Quixote, all of a sudden don’t seem so new. The modes and methods perhaps are, but their ultimate purpose in divining the truth of the reality around us are maybe not.