Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

I

When I was a young student in Latin American schools, we were constantly being asked to define the boundary between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age. I always remembered a grotesquely famous Spanish play in which a knight in armour unsheaths his sword and exclaims to his astonished family: “I’m off to the Thirty Years’ War!”

Did the modern age begin with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, the discovery of the New World in 1492, or the publication by Copernicus of his Revolutions of the Spheres in 1543? To give only one answer is akin to exclaiming that we are off to the Thirty Years’ War. At least since Vico, we know that the past is present in us because we are the bearers of the culture we ourselves have made.

Nevertheless, given a choice in the matter, I have always answered that, for me, the modern world begins when Don Quixote de la Mancha, in 1605, leaves his village, goes out into the world, and discovers that the world does not resemble what he has read about it.

Many things are changing in the world; many others are surviving. Don Quixote tells us just this: this is why he is so modern, but also so ancient, eternal. He illustrates the rupture of a world based on analogy and thrust into differentiation. He makes evident a challenge that we consider peculiarly ours: how to accept the diversity and mutation of the world, while retaining the mind’s power for analogy and unity, so that this changing world shall not become meaningless.

Don Quixote tells us that being modern is not a question of sacrificing the past in favor of the new, but of maintaining, comparing, and remembering values we have created, making them modern so as not to lose the value of the modern.

This is our challenge as contemporary individuals and, indeed, as present-day writers. For if Don Quixote, by its very nature, does not define the modern world but only an aspect of it, it does, I believe, at least define the central problems of the modern novel. I remember discussing the matter over luncheon one cold day in 1975 with André Malraux: he chose Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves as the first modern novel because, he said, it was the first psychological, interior novel, constructed around the reasons of the heart. Anglo-Saxon criticism would perhaps prefer, along with Ian Watt, to establish “the rise of the novel” in connection with the appearance of a middle class of affluent readers in England, politically emancipated and psychologically demanding of novelty in theme and characterization: Richardson, Fielding, Smollett.

Yet I shall not travel the road of Quixote’s modernity alone. After all, as Lionel Trilling once wrote, “All prose fiction is a variation of the theme of Don Quixote: … the problem of appearance and reality.” This all-encompassing fictitiousness in Cervantes is not at odds with Harry Levin’s vision of its modernity: Don Quixote is seen by Levin as “the prototype of all realistic novels” … for it deals with “the literary technique of systematic disillusionment.” And its universality is not in contradiction to Alejo Carpentier’s discovery in Cervantes of the imaginary dimension within the individual: Cervantes invents a new I, says the Cuban novelist, much as Malraux said of Mme de Lafayette.

Wayne Booth’s self-conscious narrator in Don Quixote; Marthe Robert’s conception of Don Quixote as a novel in search of itself; Robert Coover’s vision of Don Quixote in a world divided between reality and illusion, sanity and madness, the erotic and the ludicrous, the visionary and the eschatological; all of these highly articulate and penetrating discussions on the modernity and relevance of Cervantes accompany me in my own search for Don Quixote. But it is, perhaps, Michel Foucault who has best described the displacement that occurs in the dynamic world of Cervantes: Don Quixote, writes Foucault in The Order of Things, is the sign of a modern divorce between words and things. Don Quixote is desperately searching for a new coincidence, for a new similitude in a world where nothing seems to resemble what it once resembled.

This same dynamic displacement, this sense of search and pilgrimage, is what Claudio Guillén calls the “active dialogue” in Don Quixote. A dialogue of genres, in the first place: the picaresque, the pastoral, the chivalric, the byzantine, all the established genres stake their presence and have their say in Don Quixote. But the past and the present are also actively fused and the novel becomes a critical project as it shifts from the spoken tale to the written narrative, from verse to prose and from the tavern to the printing shop.

Don Quixote, it is true, bears all the marks of what it leaves behind. If it is the first modern novel, its debt to tradition is enormous, since its very inception, as we all know, is the satire of the epic of chivalry. But if it is the last medieval romance, then it also celebrates its own death: it becomes its own requiem. If it is a work of the Renaissance, it also maintains a lively medieval carnival of games, puns, and references not far from Bakhtin’s definition of festive humor in the novel, breaking down the frontiers between actors and audience. And finally, if it opens for all the adventure of modern reading, it remains a book deeply immersed in the society and the history of Spain.

Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547 and died in 1616. He published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, and the second part in 1615. So that everything I have said up till now happens historically within a contradiction. Cervantes’s work is one of the great examples of Renaissance liberation. But his life occurs within the supreme example of the negation of that same liberation: the Spanish Counter-Reformation. We must judge Cervantes and Don Quixote against this background if we are to understand his achievement fully.

II

Caught between the flood tide of the Renaissance and the ebb tide of the Counter-Reformation, Cervantes clings to the one plank that can keep him afloat: Erasmus of Rotterdam. The vast influence of Erasmus in Spain is hardly fortuitous. He was correctly seen to be the Renaissance man struggling to conciliate the verities of faith and reason, and the reasons of the old and the new. Spanish Erasmism is the subject of Marcel Bataillon’s monumental work Erasme et l’Espagne. The origins, influence, and eventual persecution of Erasmism in Spain are too important and lengthy a subject for this essay. Suffice it to remember that, as far as the formal education of Cervantes went, it was totally steeped in Erasmus, through the agency of his Spanish disciple, Juan López de Hoyos, the early and ascertained tutor of the author of Don Quixote.

The influence of Erasmian thought on Cervantes can be clearly perceived in three themes common to the philosopher and the novelist: the duality of truth, the illusion of appearances, and the praise of folly. Erasmus reflects the Renaissance dualism: understanding may be different from believing. But reason must be wary of judging from external appearances: “All things human have two aspects, much as the Silenes of Alcibiades, who had two utterly opposed faces; and thus, what at first sight looked like death was, when closely observed, life” (In Praise of Folly). And he goes on to say: “The reality of things … depends solely on opinion. Everything in life is so diverse, so opposed, so obscure, that we cannot be assured of any truth.”

Erasmus promptly gives his reasoning a comic inflection, when he smilingly points out that Jupiter must disguise himself as a “poor little man” in order to procreate little Jupiters.