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Discussing "Don Quixote" By Miguel De Cervantes

• Alex • Season 2 • Episode 67

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In this episode of Canonball we discuss "The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote Of La Mancha," which was written by Miguel De Cervantes and originally published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615.

A correction: Edith Grossman's translation is 940 pages.
 
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Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547, which happens to be the year that Henry VIII died. Cervantes was born in a city near Madrid called Alcala de Henares. In 1570, when he was about 23 years old, he enlisted in the Spanish Navy, and a year later he fought in the Battle of Lepanto, which was a major naval battle between the Ottoman Empire on one side, an alliance called the Holy League, which at that time comprised the Spanish Empire, the Papal States, the Republics of Venice and Genoa, the Knights of Malta, and then the Italian duchies, these little city-states of Tuscany, Savoy, Urbino, and Parma. So, it was this big alliance of Catholic powers from Southern Europe fighting the Ottoman Empire off the western coast of Greece. And this battle was significant for a number of reasons. It's thought to have been the largest naval battle at that time since antiquity. It involved something like 450 ships. It also involved a significant number of rowing ships. It's the last battle that was mostly fought using galleys, and it's been described as an infantry battle on floating platforms. So it was technically a naval battle in that it took place on ships, but the character of the battle involved a lot of guys moving across these ships the way that they would move across land. And the battle resulted in a victory for the Holy League, which was significant in that it slowed an Ottoman advance during a very tumultuous time in Europe. Remember in 1571, there's a lot going on. You have the Reformation in full swing, there are the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch Revolt or Eighty Years War, there's the Livonian War going on between Russia and a coalition of Northern European countries, and meanwhile you still have the Ottoman expansion coming into Southeast Europe. And the Battle of Lepanto did not end that expansion. There are other examples of history in which a battle really ended the movement of an army into a given area, not only in that particular war, but in the broader scope of history. In the history of Europe, there are a couple of these. One of them that people often point at is the 732 Battle of Tours, and another one is the 717 Second Siege of Constantinople. And both of these were against the Umayyads, a relatively early Muslim caliphate. And they were checked in their expansion in the west at Tours, it was actually closer to Poitiers, and then in the east at Constantinople. They were stopped and they never got any further than that. Now the Ottomans were a little bit more persistent, or at least at this time they were more energetic than the Umayyads were, and the Battle of Lepanto is not like that. In 1571 the Ottomans suffer this loss, their fleet is wiped out, but within six months they've basically built a new one. And they continue toward their high-water mark, which is still 112 years ahead of them in 1683, Second Siege of Vienna. But the Battle of Lepanto was a setback for them in that expansion into Europe. And Cervantes not only fought in this battle, but he was wounded, and he was wounded such that he lost the use of his left arm and hand for the rest of his life. I couldn't figure out exactly how he was wounded or what happened to his arm, but in Don Quixote he describes, at one point he talks specifically about the Battle of Lepanto, and I remember there's another passage where he's talking about the bravery of soldiers, and I don't remember if these are in the same passage or if it comes up separately, but it's clearly a reference to the Battle of Lepanto, whether he says it explicitly or not. And he's talking about how when the soldiers are moving between ships or they're fighting near the edge of a ship or trying to cross onto the other one, some guys will fall into the water and they're just going to die because they're in armor or whatever it is, and they're in the middle of the ocean. And he says immediately more take their place, they just fill in that gap to then try themselves to go across. So he was really in the thick of it. And in Don Quixote, the book at which we're going to be looking today, he makes a few mentions of Lepanto specifically and of warfare generally. There's at least one very long passage comparing arms to letters, a life of arms or a man of arms to a man of letters, and that's a very interesting passage as well. It's very long, so I don't think we'll get to it, but it's one of many very interesting things in this book. But before we get to that, we can talk a little bit more about his life. So he had enlisted in 1570, in 1571, he's in Lepanto, he loses the use of his arm, and then he spends another four years in the Navy. And then in 1575, he's captured by Barbary pirates. And that term Barbary refers to pirates coming out of the Barbary states, which were in North Africa, and they had varying degrees of autonomy from the Ottoman.empire. Not to let the Ottomans off the hook because there were definitely straight up Ottoman pirates. But in the case of the Barbary pirates, it seems that they were indirectly administered by the Ottomans. There was some level of nominal control that isn't really clear. And also you had the Sultanate of Morocco competing for influence in North Africa as well. So I think of the Barbary pirates as some kind of North African, unless you really try to drill down in any given case, it can be hard to figure out exactly where those pirates may have come from. But so Cervantes was captured by pirates and then he spent another five years in captivity until somebody pays his ransom and he was returned to Madrid. So between the Navy for five years and pirate captivity for five years, he spent at least 10 years abroad or most of the time he was probably at sea. Before coming back by 1580, he would have been about 33 years old. Then in 1585, he published his first well-known novel. It's called La Galetia, but it wasn't much of a success and he had to keep doing other jobs. He worked as a tax collector, as a buyer for the Navy, as an accountant. And then in 1605, he published part one of Don Quixote. That would have been when he was about 57 or 58 years old. And then he published part two in 1615, 10 years later. So then he would have been 67 or 68 years old. And that's something I didn't know going into this that Don Quixote was actually originally published as two books and it's now generally printed as one. But then Cervantes died the following year in 1616 in Madrid. So that brings us to Don Quixote, the book that we're going to be talking about today and the full title of which is The Ingenious Gentleman, Don Quixote of La Mancha. This book is usually taken as the first novel ever written. And to really get to the bottom of that, you'd have to define criteria of what you're saying makes a novel. And then you'd have to show that other books around this time didn't do that. But what it definitely is, is a very early novel. And it's also the most successful very early novel, if not the very first one. Because if you look at other fiction writing from around that time and earlier, it looks different somehow. It's not just that it's funny and it's not just that it's not written in verse, though those certainly contribute to it. It's something more about how the reader is able to relate to the characters in a closer way over a longer period of time. But since I don't have any clear thought about that, I won't deliver any judgment. It's enough to say that this book is taken to be so important in the history of literature that it is sometimes said that as English is the language of Shakespeare and French is the language of Moliere, that Spanish is the language of Cervantes. And the influence of this book in Anglophone culture maybe can be most clearly seen in the word quixotic, which is an adjective meaning resembling Don Quixote. And this word is most often used in the sense that if something is said to be quixotic, it means that it is overly romantic or hopeless in some way or nostalgic in a way that is not useful and looks silly or something that is generally aiming at a past that is both no longer accessible and not desirable. That's what I always took this word to mean before I read this book. And that gets you a lot of the way there. It won't be giving anything away to say briefly that Don Quixote, the titular character, is a guy who lives in ordinary 17th century Spain, but he thinks he is and or really wants to be a knight errant, a wandering knight of the middle ages, particularly in middle ages England. There's an aspect of foreignness to this that comes up a couple of times that makes me think that knight errantry was not only something of the past for 17th century Spain, but it was also something foreign in that it didn't exist in Spain in the same way that it did in England or France or Germany. But we don't need that part, whether it's true or not. It's enough to say that he's lost himself in some romantic vision of the past. And the book or books are by no means just a repetition of this premise for 600 pages. It gets into a lot of other stuff and there's a whole plot and everything. But that's the starting point and that's what's going on with the main character. And it's one of the main pillars that holds up the roof of this book. So given that, the normal use of the word quixotic is probably fair enough. That gets you a lot of what the story is about and it gives you a nice image to throw at a political opponent or whoever it might be. You can reference this character who typifies something that continues to appear in various forms. Now, the reason why it's not the whole story and why it's still certainly worthwhile to read this relatively large book is because I think the value of this image comes not only from looking at the type of person who will unduly romanticize the past,which is certainly one form that this can take. But it can be readily applied as a broader commentary about phenomenology in general, about the way things appear to us based on our worldview. And philosophically, you could almost look at this book as a horror story, because it's about a guy who becomes completely deranged. He becomes totally detached from reality by his worldview. He becomes unable to interpret almost anything correctly, and that's exactly the thing that we don't want to have happen in cultivating our philosophy. You want to be trying to develop a worldview that tracks more and more closely with objective reality, as much as that's possible. And the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha is about as far from that ideal as you can be. And one of the causes of this is that he has read too many books about chivalry. Very early in the book, it says that day and night he's reading these books on chivalry, to the extent that he neglects his estate. And it even says his brains have dried up from all the reading that he's done. So, this uncoupled view of the world that he has is actually created by reading too many books, which I think is a very serious danger as somebody who loves to read books. And one aspect of the story that wasn't clear to me before I read it is whether he was actually crazy or he was just a guy who wanted to be a knight, and so he permitted himself these imaginative flights. And that's a little bit ambiguous in the book, because there is a part relatively early on where he and Sancho Panza, his sidekick, are going to sleep in the woods somewhere. And it says that Don Quixote stayed up all night thinking of his beloved because he had read that that's what knights errant do. So, sometimes he is deliberately doing things in order to pose as this ideal of what he wants to be or what he thinks he ought to be. But other times, the most famous example is when he sees the windmills and he thinks that they're giants swinging their arms, and so he goes over and starts fighting them, but then he's fighting windmills. That's an expression that gets used sometimes in reference to this book. And that is pretty much the first example. It's a very early example of this in the book, but there are a dozen or so others. So, in that case, it doesn't seem like he's trying to be something exactly. It seems that his perception is actually skewed, that he actually sees these windmills as giants. And then another thing that comes up throughout the book is that he will often be very eloquent and rational on other topics. And I'm remembering one passage in general where he talks for a while, and then the people around him are even more sad because they see how this guy can be so intelligent and thoughtful and reasonable on any topic except knight errantry. And that when it comes to knight errantry, he's simply lost. So, it's a little ambiguous, but I do think that the character is supposed to be actually a little bit crazy. And early on in the book when it said that the books dried out his brain or something like that, it shows that pretty clearly. And by the way, I read a translation by Edith Grossman, which was published in 2003, and I found it very enjoyable and readable. It's the edition. You've probably seen it in bookstores. It's got a red cover and it shows a helmet. This is another book that I happen to be able to pick up at Goodwill. But it's one of the most common translations that I see in bookstores, and I found it to be very good. And as a side note, I wouldn't give this to a high schooler as a first classic book to read because it is kind of long, but both this translation and this story could be relatively early in introducing a young person to classic books, or an adult if you don't know where to start. This wouldn't be a bad place, not as a first book, but maybe as a fifth or sixth one. Only because on the one hand it is a little bit long, but this translation was very nice. And also, it is a book with a lot of funny stuff in it, a lot of action, a lot of interesting thoughts. This could be a relatively early section of trail on one's journey into classic literature. But getting back to Don Quixote and his skewed perceptions, for example, whenever he gets to an inn, he thinks it's a castle with lots of turrets and he thinks that the prostitutes there, I think the translation that I read said women of easy virtue are princesses, and a washbasin is really a shining helmet, and two flocks of sheep coming together are two armies about to do battle. And maybe most important to his worldview are that all around there are enchanters who are making things look other than they are in order to make him look foolish. Not that the enchanters are making the inn look like a castle, but just the opposite. If something happens such that he really can't explain it away anymore, that it's obvious that something wasn't as he thought it to be, then his explanation that he can always turn to is that there are enchanters who changed it so that now it looks like something mundane and ordinary. And all of this makes a nice anatomy of a certain kind of worldview, and this can be developed with or without books. It happens that this character got it through reading too many books, and that is one way to get this kind of worldview. But it's not the only way. You can get this without books as well. But this is why you have to takearguments against your position very seriously, because that might be the only off-ramp for you from this trap you've gotten yourself into. You can't always trust your senses, you can't always trust your reason. And so even when you're very certain of something, if somebody comes to you and says, well, what about this? This contradicts everything that you think, you have to take that seriously because it's possible for anyone that they have gotten themselves into a quixotic trap. And this is what I'm talking about when I say that the word has more meaning as taken from the story than it's usually given. That we could use it to refer to a kind of self-contained, self-perpetuating, and nonetheless irrational worldview. It's not falsifiable. On the one hand, there's a wrong perception, and on the other hand, there is not an easy way out of it, because the worldview includes explanations for what would otherwise disprove it. So the question to ask yourself is, in your worldview, do you have anything that resembles Don Quixote's assertion that there are enchanters making things look a certain way, so that even when it appears you're wrong, that's actually evidence that you are right. And if that sounds exhausting, or like it would take a lot of time, know that it will take less time to do that, to be somebody who habitually scrutinizes their own worldview. That will take less time than the time you could waste by spending decades in a bad worldview. And unfortunately, this is also not something that you can do once and then be done with it. It might be kind of like spring cleaning, or even just regular cleaning of your house, that you should make it a habit to always be looking at the arguments against your position, and maybe be even more familiar with them than you are with the arguments for your position. Though those maybe feel better and are more fun, Don Quixote also feels better when he imagines himself as a knight-errant, and the inn as a castle, and the washbasin as a helmet, but that doesn't mean it's true. It feels better to sit and think about the arguments in favor of our position, but avoiding Don Quixote's position requires looking very carefully at the arguments against one's position. And one of the reasons why this book remains popular 400 years after it was written, why it's been translated into so many languages and continues to be published, and read, and discussed, is in part because of the universality of this message. Apparently Mark Twain said of Don Quixote that the book, quote, swept the world's admiration for the medieval chivalry silliness out of existence, end quote. And that might be true, but if it were only a critique of medieval chivalry, which it certainly is, there are parts where it talks about how chivalry is kind of pagan rather than Christian, because knights before going into battle would commend their souls to their ladies instead of to God, which is a kind of idolatry. And he points out how knights in the old legends are never brought before a court of justice no matter how many people they kill. But if it were only that kind of historical critique that involves one time and place reflecting and commenting on a past time and place, then it would certainly still be valuable, but it wouldn't have this universal appeal that it does. This examination of a type of person that you can encounter in life and also that you can become to varying degrees if you're not careful. We might not be mistaking windmills for giants, but we might well be mistaking something harmless for something harmful, or something harmful for something harmless, our friends for our enemies, our enemies for our friends, or something else because of a worldview that we have or have been taught in one way or another. Don Quixote was taught by these books that frames them in that way. And all this is maybe encapsulated in Don Quixote saying at one point, I know who I am. And of all the characters in the book, he is the one who definitely does not know who he is. And of course, the second most important character in the story is Sancho Panza, who's interesting in that he is at least initially immune or more resilient to all the crazy things that Don Quixote is saying and doing because he is illiterate. He says at one point, I can't read or write. And because of that, he hasn't read all these books of chivalry and Don Quixote is often talking down to him, not in a really mean way, but he'll say, oh, how little you know. Don't you know that knights errant do this and that and haven't you read whatever? And Sancho Panza says, I can't read. And ironically, Sancho Panza has a better grip on reality because he can't read. And this is something that comes up again much later in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I'm thinking of Gustave Le Bon and Edward Bernays. And they're talking about it in the context of propaganda. And I can't remember which one of the two it is, but one of them says something like, mass literacy gave man a rubber stamp in place of a mind with which to simply approve things that were written and printed. And obviously that's not the only thing that mass literacy did. It gradually made the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution possible, but it shouldbe acknowledged that it also opens the way for a kind of confusion in that Don Quixote as a literate man is vulnerable to something that Sancho Panza as an illiterate one is not immune to, but it's harder for it to reach him. For it to get to him, somebody else has to read it and then tell him about it, which unfortunately that's what happens. Don Quixote convinces Sancho Panza that he himself is someday going to be an emperor and then as his squire, Sancho Panza will get a kingdom or whatever. And this tension between the relatively upper class Don Quixote and the relatively lower class Sancho Panza also opens the way for some interesting moral commentary. One of the things that's funny about Sancho Panza is he's a little bit more of a villager. He's a little bit rough around the edges. He sometimes says things that he shouldn't. Something that runs throughout two books is that he's often using too many sayings and sometimes in a way that doesn't have any application to the current situation. And Don Quixote is always telling him to stop using so many of these expressions. But at one point, Sancho Panza is talking about how God will be the judge and he sees the snares that have caught people. And he says, quote, who does worse me and not saying the right thing or your grace in not doing it end quote. And this line caught my attention because it's very easy to comment on somebody speaking badly or somebody saying the wrong thing. And this is also sort of a class oriented thing in that this uncouth character often says the wrong thing, but he's morally pretty stout. Here, he's drawing attention to this general contradiction that there's often criticism for people not speaking well and not as much for people not acting well, not doing the right thing. And there's just a couple more examples of the bits of wisdom we get from Sancho Panza. He later says, quote, each man is the child of his actions end quote. And he also says, quote, I'd rather go to heaven as Sancho than hell as a governor end quote. And that's after throughout the story, he's been daydreaming about being a governor of this or that kingdom. And this isn't the origin of the notion of the wheel of fortune. That's something that goes back to antiquity, but Sancho mentions it at one point. And this is an image that's so useful. It's not surprising that it lasted at least 2000 years and well into the 19th century. But I only learned this image of the wheel of fortune sometime in the last five years. I think most people associate it with the goofy game show. But Sancho says at one point, quote, the wheel of fortune turns faster than a water wheel. And those who only yesterday were on top of the world today are down on the ground end quote. So if you were to only interpret the wheel of fortune from the game show, you would think that it means something like chance that some people are lucky and some people are unlucky. And that's just how life goes. But if you turn the wheel vertically and you think of it like a water wheel or the wheel of a wagon, what you see is that it's not that some parts of the wheel are favorable and some are not. And you want to end up on a part of the wheel that's good, but rather every inch of the wheel will at one point be in the mud. And at one point it'll be at the top point of the rotation. And then soon it'll be in the mud again. And this is a different vision of human life. Now, this is not a perfect metaphor because there are people who are born in better circumstances than others. We're not all given an equal portion of pain and pleasure, but this is a better image of human life than we usually acknowledge. And noticing this can be helpful because if you're up today, you might be down tomorrow. So you should be humble and you should be ready for that. And if you're down today, you might be up tomorrow. So don't worry about it too much. And this thought, which I think should be in pretty much everybody's worldview is just one item in the big catalog of good stuff in this book. And another topic that doesn't come up a lot, but it's enough that it's interesting is Cervantes comments on writing. He makes some room for his thoughts about writing, about poetry, about publishing, about translation. And a number of interesting things come up. One is that he acknowledges in volume two, that in volume one readers had pointed out a couple of flaws. I think he's sort of ironically acknowledging that he messed up in a couple of spots, but he blames it on the printer. One is that a donkey is stolen, but then reappears later without explanation. And then another is that Sancho finds some money, but it's never explained what he does with it. The second one seems less important, but I think he pretty much acknowledges that he sort of messed up the first part. So long as I didn't misread that in some way, because it comes up a couple of times, but also early on, there's a section where some people are burning the books in Don Quixote's library, or they're deciding what to burn. And the priest wants to go through them and look at them all and see if there's anything worth saving, but they're reading off the titles and the priest is commenting on the author in the book. And some of them, that author is very brilliant. And the book is very nice. Give it to me. And other ones, he says, chuck that in the fire. And so it's an opportunity for a little bit of literary criticism from Cervantes because he's mentioning authors who are real people from history. And a couple of them are not really known other than in.this passage, which is a cool preservation of them. And others have extant writings, but they wouldn't have been read except by people who are really into Cervantes, and then they go read the stuff that are his influences, which is a fun thing to do if you have the time. I definitely would like to get into some of the writers he mentioned. Maybe we'll make time for that someday. But he says at one point, quote, the more truthful the fiction, the better it is. And the more probable and possible, end quote. And maybe that's one of the things that makes this a novel, is that there's pretty much no magic in it. I'm trying to think. It is very realistic. It's all probable. It pretty much all could happen. And not, of course, to say that a novel can't have anything fantastical in it. But that is something that's different from Canterbury Tales, from the Decameron, from the story of Tristan that Gottfried von Strasberg wrote. A lot of these medieval stories do have magic or unrealistic things in them in one way or another, and Don Quixote pretty much doesn't. I'm trying to think of an example, and nothing is coming to mind, of something that couldn't happen in real life that's in this book. And then later he says, quote, the greatest goal of any writing, and then skipping ahead a little bit, is to teach and delight at the same time, end quote. And he talks a lot about this tension where the crowd wants nonsense. The crowd wants wackiness and silliness and adventures. And this means that often the playwrights of that time would just give stories like that that were not useful in any way. But he says that a good writer can give both edification with entertainment. And this fits in with how we think of Shakespeare, for example. Shakespeare has the staying power that he has because he has action and jokes and sexual innuendo that could keep the attention of the masses alongside some of this more high-flown philosophical stuff about human nature. And it seems that Cervantes was holding something like that as an ideal as well for his own writing. And I think he achieved that very well with Don Quixote. And he also talks about how to print a book is to expose yourself to danger because you can't please everyone. And something that was a little more surprising to me was that he actually advocates what we would today call a censor. He suggests that there should be somebody to whom writers submit their writings, and that person goes over them very carefully and make sure that there's nothing that would cause problems in it. But the angle that he's coming at it from is he's talking about how a playwright will write a play, and either there will be a direct reference or an indirect reference to a powerful family, or somebody might interpret it that way. And there was no such reference actually. And that then the playwrights and or the actors will actually be in physical danger because the family will then try to have the writer or the actors killed for some insult or whatever they perceive to be in the play. And Cervantes seems to say that having a censor, he doesn't call it that, but somebody who is going to go over things before they're published would have the dual benefit of, one, helping to avoid that problem. The censor's job would be to watch out for stuff like that and make the writer adjust things so that it doesn't happen. And then he says the writer would write more carefully if he thought that everything that he wrote was going to be scrutinized by somebody who knows the craft. He says something like that, that they would take their own work more seriously and produce better stuff if they thought that not only an audience, but another capable writer was going to be looking at it. Now, I personally completely oppose that kind of apparatus because I think it would be too easy and too tempting to abuse it for the people who are running it. And it would just very quickly become political censorship. But imagining the world that Cervantes lived in, it's easy to see why he would have thought that that was a good idea, especially because he didn't have as many historical examples readily in his mind of how that kind of thing can go south. And he mentions at one point, the difficulty of translating poetry specifically, but later he comments on the challenges of translation generally. And he says that translating quote is like looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side for, although the figures are visible, there are colors and threads that obscure them and they cannot be seen with the smoothness of the right side. End quote. And that's such a perfect metaphor for that, because when you're dealing with a translation, you can see what the figures are and what they're talking about, but something gets lost. The clarity gets lost and maybe the vividness. And this is also a nice metaphor because it refers to a piece of art, a tapestry, or at least something decorative made for people to enjoy. And you're looking at it from two sides. And from one side, it's more vivid. And from the other side, it's more obscure. And if you've ever done any translating, you know what can be lost. And it's exactly that kind of vividness that he's talking about. And again, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't translate writing and we shouldn't.read translated writing. But it will be useful to remember that that's often what we're dealing with. I have this example of the Tristan written by Gottfried von Strasberg in my mind because that's one of the books that I read during the four months that I was gone. And I found it very valuable and I made a bunch of notes about it. But that's a good example of something that feels like you don't quite have the vision of what the original readers and listeners of that story were experiencing. You feel like you have the backside of the tapestry. And this problem is exactly why a really nice translation like this translation by Edith Grossman. I don't speak Spanish so I can't say that it was perfectly loyal but presumably plenty of capable people who speak both 17th century Spanish and English went over it very carefully and found it to be suitably close to the original. But this translation does make you feel things. And since we're dealing both with a translation between languages and a distance in time there will without question be some distance. There are certain things about this book that readers of it in 1615 when it first came out really got that we can't get anymore either because we're reading it in English or because we're reading it four centuries later. But there's plenty there that is readily recognizable from our own lives today. And I personally love to see that. To see how across time and place there are constants in human experience and human nature that remain more or less the same. And how these people in the past though they might have articulated it differently from how we would today experience things that were very similar to a lot of the things that we experience. And that makes me feel a kind of connectedness to the grand picture of history that modern life does not actively emphasize. Those are some of my thoughts on The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes. I didn't even get through the notes I had taken even without any extended passages that I might have wanted to read. But I'll leave it there. Farewell until next time. Take care and happy reading.