Cervantes’ Don Quixote: The Rebirth of Chivalry

Spain, at the time of Cervantes, was just emerging from the Middle Ages, later than, say, Italy. It was a time when tales of knights errant and the age of chivalry had just about glutted the market for those who cared about those things. So, Cervantes created Don Quixote, a “different” sort of knight, and one where the author could create his own opinions about society and the state of affairs in his native Spain.

Don Quixote was actually a gentleman named Alonso Quixano, who lived in a village in La Mancha. He spent his time hunting and tending to his estate. But, he becomes so obsessed with stories of knighthood and books about chivalry, that he becomes “mad” (or, does he?) and decides to abandon his former life, and wander the land as an errant knight, now calling himself Don Quixote.

He was accompanied by Sancho Panza, a peasant in Quixano’s village, who is convinced to come along as Don Quixote’s squire. Why would a simple peasant up and leave? Because the “knight” promised him the governorship of any island he conquered. What is somewhat strange is that, throughout the novel, Sancho plays tricks on his “master” but, often ignores his common sense to be Quixote’s faithful follower.

Don Quixote is a novel about the rupture between words and meaning, between names and identity. Reality depends on the ability to name, to identify, and to tell a story faithfully. The rupture evident in the novel suggests that there may be more than one reality. But, reality can be both serious (even tragic) as well as funny. In other words, to merely call this a comic novel would be as mistaken as to consider it a tragic one. There are elements of both, especially in the division between what is real (sane) and unreal or comic(insane).

One good example happens in Part I, Chapter 22, when Quixote and Panza come upon galley slaves, Cervantes pokes fun, though slyly, at the dislike of many in authority for intellectuals Quixote tells the young man he is trying to rescue “You seem a clever fellow…’And an unfortunate one….for misfortune always persecutes wit.” (p. 71) A funny line? On first reading, of course. But, when one reflects on it, there is truth in this exchange. Of course, what turns this scene into farce is when Quixote attempts to free the galley slaves, who cannot (maybe do not want) to go, because, being chained together, they would have no place to hide and would soon be caught again.

The humor in this scene is overshadowed, again upon reflection, when one realizes just how many prisoners there were in Spain and along the Barbary Coast 9Certantes serving time in prison himself). And it was not merely thieves or murderers who were jailed, but intellectuals as well, who may have been a threat to the monarchy. Reality countered here by humor. Yet, the aware reader can understand the plight of galley slaves and all others who are imprisoned, sometimes for very trivial “crimes”.

Perhaps the most memorable scene in the book is Don Quixote and his fighting the windmills. Even now, we often talk about someone fighting a losing cause or being irrational about his beliefs as “tilting at windmills”. “Fortune is arranging matters better for us than we could have shaped our desires ourselves…, for look….where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle..” (p. 18) Quixote will have none of this “they’re just windmills” explanation. They are giants, and knights must always do battle with giants.

Now, we see the comedy of this poor old man in his armor, swinging his lance against windmills. What does Cervantes see? Landowners having to fight giants- men of money and power, appointed by the royal court, as a favor, to take hereditary lands and put up structures and do with the land as they will. What can we modern readers see? The challenge of the “little guy” against impersonal corporations who intrude on our lives. Sure, the novel was written in 1604, but the beauty and genius of Cervantes was that you can read almost any sort of modern reality into something written nearly five hundred years earlier.

And then, we also come to a scene where Don Quixote is slashing those bags of red wine. “Stand, thief, brigand, villain” (p. 134) says the old Don. It is surely a humorous scene, seeing red wine, which the Don thinks is blood, running all down his shirtless body. But, again, we need to look at this farcical scene with a second, more penetrating look. Is Don Quixote, slashing wine skins, any different than the Prohibitionists of the early Twentieth Century, going in to taverns to smash bottles and casks, or the federal agents, smashing bootleg liquor in the Twenties? Again, modern reality intervenes with simple enjoyment of something that happened some five centuries earlier.

Was the Don mad and delusional, or did he slash that wine on purpose to keep some poor wretch from getting drunk and causing some sort of accident or commotion? We can only read into the scene what we will make of it, of course. Again, though, the many-layered scenes of this novel allows us to counter reality and farce, laughter and thoughtful questioning.

Now, in a number of scenes where Cervantes seems to want to make a rational point, prison, crime, hatred of people of a different race or color, the plight of peasants and the working class; all this might have been done with a straight narrative. But, in this time in Spain, when there was gold flowing in from the New World, but the Spanish Armada was crushingly defeated, Cervantes might have fared a lot worse than he did. So, he cloaked his comments in humor, and put words and deeds into the character of what many see as a demented, delusional old man.

Cervantes does a very unusual thing. Near the end of the book, he disowns the character, as if the “real” Don Quixote disapproved. ‘For that very reason’, said Don Quixote, ‘I will never set foot in Saragossa, and by that means I shall expose to the world the lie of this new history writer…” (p. 387) It is almost as if Cervantes himself is giving himself an “out”. If the king or government disapproves, now he has the “real” character also disown what has been written about him.

In a way it is like a magician showing you how he does a trick, and yet you can never duplicate what he has done, or is doing. Of course a lot of the content- the Barbary pirates, prison, the Algerian despot, Hassan Aga, were autobiographical. What Cervantes also managed to “sneak” into his novel was a mistrust of foreigners, a romantic glorification of soldiers and military heroism, and the fact that some of this glorification was misplaced.

Was, as some critics suggest, Cervantes trying to criticize the old-fashioned pomp of knighthood and the outdated reverence toward heroes? Or was he just trying to amuse his readers. Regardless, Don Quixote was popular then, and still remains a “classic”- comedy juxtaposed with harsh truths about chivalry, honor, and yes, respect due the aging.

WORK CITED:
Cervantes, Miguel de: Don Quixote Great Books of the Western World, Volume 29, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.