Reflections On Don Quixote

I read Don Quixote a few years ago. I was working as a mattress salesman at the time and had a lot of time on my hands. In the beginning of the job I started to understand the possibility for how much time I could be spending alone on a regular basis, and instead of being despaired about it, I quickly realized I could finally start to get in all the reading I had been meaning to do since college. I went to Barnes And Noble sometime shortly after and purchased a few books. I didn’t purchase Don Quixote at this time, but I started reading heavily, and eventually Don Quixote found its way into the mix. I might be trying to quickly make the point that I was reading a lot at the time, and had read a few longer books before picking up Don Quixote—in honor of Borges I might be referring to the book Don Quixote as The Quixote, which I seem to remember him doing liberally in one of his short stories dedicated to Don Quixote, the conceit of the stories being the intertwining of infinity with Don Quixote, and musing that it’s a story that’s always been written, or has been written multiple time by different people throughout history who didn’t know each other… I digress—such as Lost Illusions by Balzac, or The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann—I had tried re-reading Infinite Jest and given up about 700 pages in that time around—and by the time I had arrived at The Quixote, I was uniquely oiled, limbered up, and prepared to enjoy it in a way I might not have been able to years previously if I had just picked it up out of the blue and tried to enjoy it. By the time I picked up The Quixote, I had basically gone through multiple rounds of literary training in dense texts, and like a weightlifter, the density and tome-like qualities of some portions of the book felt far lighter, and I think I enjoyed them more than I would have if I hadn’t had all those reps to prepare beforehand. This all feels a little self-aggrandizing, but I don’t mean it to sound that way, I think I am implying that if you’re thinking about reading Don Quixote, working up to it isn’t a bad idea.

            Then there comes the question of which translation to read. If you’re an American trying to broaden your literary horizons and haven’t jumped over the pond looking for your next great read—or even anywhere below the border—you might not have had to reckon with this variable which can be so fundamentally vital to your experience of the work. I won’t go too much into translations here, as it’s a topic that once you engage with, you immediately realize it’s one of those aspects of the humanities that appears inexhaustible. In this case I’ll just say that I read—and was lucky enough to read, in hindsight, and in my opinion—the John Rutherford translation. I don’t have a plethora of examples to compare with besides my memories of reading excerpts that were probably from other older translations, and when I think about the experience of reading those, the austere and humorless nature of those translations does feel correct when I remember the experience of reading them. Rutherford, in his notes on the translation, specifically talks about preserving the humor of the original text, as well as the imperfections of the syntax, the kind of wavering nature of Cervantes’s voice that Rutherford interpreted he found during his reading, and for me as both a reader and writer, I found this approach to be highly commensurate with the things I enjoy and care about in good literature, or in any kind of highly technical art.

            There was an impression that was left on me by Don Quixote. Although it was at times a bit tedious, even the tedious portions to me added a kind of bedrock to the overall work, and that’s what it was, a work, a piece of art. I had the distinct sensation after finishing Don Quixote that what I had just experienced was something truly revolutionary.

          Now, I am putting the cart a little before the horse here. Usually I’m sure most Don Quixote reviews would go over the plot in detail, however, I titled this blog post “Reflections”, so in that sense I’m not really bound to any particular convention, I’m reflecting, which is a much freer, less predictable form of review, if it’s even a review at all. The beginning of the novel has a few famous portions. In particular the windmills scene—where the phrase tilting at windmills comes from—which you don’t know is the scene where a fully delusional Don Quixote—astride his horse, wearing his decrepit but albeit authentic knight’s armor, and carrying a lance—journeys with his neighbor-become-squire Sancho Panza and early on in those journeys comes across a set of windmills in the distance in full wind. Don Quixote reveals the depths of his psychotic break when he declares them giants, and then gallops towards them, attempting to lance to the rotating wind sails as they dip to the ground. Hilariously, he is struck by one of the rotating beams.

            Now this one example may be enough for me to make my broader point about what my main takeaway and my now thesis is on Don Quixote. This thesis is not so easily summed up in a single sentence, but it might be something to the affect of claiming that Don Quixote, and the eponymous knight himself, continue to be perfectly relevant representations of the modern man. These days he might even be a more perfect representation of modern man and his relationship to media. Over the past few years I myself have found that on a daily basis—in a deluge of new forms of both print and electronic based mass media—there are times where my eyes close, where videos I have just seen play like their own video screens in the visions behind my eyelids. I have been left with the nagging sense after finishing Don Quixote that I myself must be at some risk of the same descent into a delusional misbegotten sense of identity in the same ways that the protagonist of Don Quixote ultimately succumbed to. Don Quixote read too many stories about knights, and then he believed that he was one, or was so taken by the romantic ideals found within the works that he read that eventually became convinced that he must become one. This is the haunting impression that Cervantes has left on me. What are my knight stories? What do I believe I am? Do I act that way without being fully conscious of such actions? Brilliantly in the second part of Don Quixote—the famed second act that was at first parodied by an imposter releasing their own version at some point before Cervantes could release his—there is a moment where Don Quixote lets Sancho Panza—and the reader—know that on some level, the effects of his unknown extended period reading chivalry stories are beginning to wear off, and that who Don Quixote really is is beginning to come to, in a sense. For those of us that have partaken in psychedelics, the experience seems so familiar. But this coming back to reality for Don Quixote, if it’s happening at all, is not happening all at once. Like a stupor he appears to fade in and out. I’m reminded now of a close family member who slowly succumbed to dementia, a condition that any who’ve witnessed will know holds some of the same patterns. Regardless, it’s been many years since I’ve read it, but the same ideas, the same questions, still haunt me to this day.

            There was one other section of Don Quixote that particularly levelled me, that I remember reading with a glee and an astonishment that I had never experienced before in a work of literature. The portion of the book I’m talking about is when Sancho Panza finally does receive his own island to govern. The lead up to this finally happening is so punctuated with half-truths and blatant lies from Don Quixote—lies to us the reader, but true to Sancho Panza, who appears to not be so stupid as to believe them, but rather, so pure of heart that something said so confidently and forthrightly to him must be taken as fact, and even if on quick introspection the veracity of the promises may have appeared quickly hollow, Sancho decides never to question them nonetheless. I couldn’t find myself faulting it. To fault Sancho would’ve been to claim that I had never gone along with promises made to me before in my life. At that time I was grappling with the implications of a large student debt bill for which I had no clear way to pay. The promises of a higher education—years of my life spent pursuing it—were at that time appearing as if they had always been equally as illusory as the promise of receiving my own populated island kingdom to be the ruler of. 

            These promises from Don Quixote—who throughout the novel promises Sancho this fictional island kingdom to be given to him to rule as payment for his help in The Quixote’s sojourns—are made frequently for hundreds and hundreds of pages. It becomes clear what Cervantes was doing when Sancho is finally given an island to govern—a gift given jokingly by two noble royals who in the novel are fans of the actual two characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza after having read and loved Cervante’s Part One—the amount of irony and verisimilitude created at that point cannot be understated. I was blown away by it. Cervantes’s labors in creating first the fantastical patina of a chivalarous story, drawing you in as the reader, and always steadfastly maintaining the underlying premise that this is all for nothing, that the acts of Don Quixote are meaningless, that these are not a knight and a squire but rather two variably insane men going off on an absurd adventure, these efforts by Cervantes begin to become compounded by his other stories, the weaving of seemingly real people who within the confines of the story appear to be more real than Don Quixote’s fantasies, and yet are experiencing extraordinary events in life that rise into the realm of true drama, and even at times, shades of epic. This movement from insane chaos slowly into the real world—like a firework explosion in slow motion—eventually culminates in what I felt was a stunning section of the book, in which the lovable but ultimately shallow character of Sancho Panza suddenly becomes the full dynamic image of a man. The contrast of Sancho’s lack of agency throughout most of the novel—intermingled with his wry observations and clearly evident wit—becomes all at once, in a height of literary irony, the most absurdly beautiful thing I have ever read. And all of it a credit to Cervantes.

            Those are some of my reflections on Don Quixote. I would highly recommend it, although as I mentioned above, a few difficult novels of less prominent length might be warranted beforehand. I will also say, just because I enjoyed it, but I could understand how somone might not, there is a very lengthy, verbose section in which Cervantes details a character’s experience in an Ottoman prison cell. I would recommend picking a copy with an introduction on the author, and reading that, because this section becomes much more enjoyable when you realize that being stuck for a long time in an Ottoman prison cell was something that Cervantes actually experienced. Knowing that, I think it infuses a life into that section which can otherwise drag. For me with that knowledge that section, while long and a bit boring at times, was fascinating in so much as it appeared to be Cervantes stepping into the novel himself, and taken in that way, it does reveal a lot about the man’s psychology, his experience of the passage of time locked away in a prison cell, and so on.