Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

Comic debunking thus serves the unorthodox vision of double truth, and it is evident that Cervantes opts for this Aesopian shortcut in creating the figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, for the former speaks the language of universals, and the latter that of particulars; the knight believes, the esquire doubts; and each man’s appearance is diversified, obscured, and opposed by the other’s reality: if Sancho is the real man, then he is, nevertheless, a participant in Don Quixote’s world of pure illusion; but if Don Quixote is the illusory man, then he is, nevertheless, a participant in Sancho’s world of pure reality.

It is one of the most brilliant paradoxes in the history of thought that Erasmus, in an age enamored of divine reason, should write, of all things, a praise of folly. There was, however, method in this madness. It is as though Erasmus had received an urgent warning from reason itself: Let me not become another absolute, such as faith was in the past, for I will then lose the reason of my reason. The Erasmian folly is a doubly ironical operation: it detaches the fool, simultaneously, from the false absolutes and the imposed verities of the medieval order; yet it casts an immense doubt on reason itself. Pascal would one day write: “Les hommes sont si nécessairement fous que ce serait être fou par un autre tour de folie de n’être pas fou.”

This Pascalian turn of the screw of reason is precisely what Erasmus is driving at: if reason is to be reasonable, it must see itself through the eyes of an ironical madness, not its opposite but its critical complement; if the individual is to assert himself, then he must do so with an ironical conscience of his own ego, or he will flounder in solipsism and pride. The Erasmian folly, set at the crossroads of two cultures, relativizes the absolutes of both: this is a madness critically set in the very heart of Faith, but also in the very heart of Reason. The madness of Erasmus is a questioning of man by man himself, of reason by reason itself, and no longer by God, sin, or the Devil. Thus relativized by critical and ironical folly, Man is no longer subjected to Fate or Faith; but neither is he the absolute master of Reason.

How do the spiritual realities reflected on by Erasmus translate into the realm of literature? Perhaps Hamlet is the first character to stop in his tracks and mutter three minuscule and infinite words that suddenly open a void between the certain truths of the Middle Ages and the uncertain reasoning of the brave new world of modernity. These words are simply that: “Words, words, words…” and they both shake and spear us because they are the words of a fictional character reflecting on the very substance of his being. Hamlet knows he is written, represented, and represented on a stage, whereas old Polonius comes and goes in agitation, intrigues, counsels, and deports himself as if the world of the theater truly were the real world. Words become acts, the verb becomes a sword, and Polonius is pierced by Hamlet’s sword: the sword of literature. Words, words, words, mutters Hamlet, and he does not say it pejoratively: he is simply indicating, without too many illusions, the existence of a thing called literature: a new Literature that has ceased to be a transparent reading of the divine Verb or the established social order, but has been unable to become a sign reflecting a new human order as coherent or indubitable as the religious and social orders of the past.

Perhaps it is not fortuitous that Don Quixote, King Lear, and Macbeth should all bear the same date of birth, 1605: two old fools and a young assassin appear simultaneously on the stage of the world to dramatize this transition of two ages of the world. Macbeth, as G. Wilson Knight has observed, is a drama written with question marks, from the moment the Witches ask themselves, “When shall we three meet again?” to the moment when Macbeth prepares to die, “Why should I … die on mine own sword?”, passing through the central questions of the play, “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” and “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” And Lear is a drama of magnificent metaphors derived from a tumultuous universe, where stars and eclipses, planetary influences and the government of our state by the heavenly bodies mix with the images of the dislocated terrestrial elements: drama of rain and fire, of fog and thunder. And in the center of this tempest of heaven and earth, accompanied only by a Fool, struts an abandoned old man, incapable of learning more than he knows already, assimilated to a sorrowful and solitary world of nature.

All the world’s a stage, and the words spoken from it are, indeed, full of sound and fury; the state of the world is undone and the actor who struts his hour upon the stage speaks wanderings orphaned words: we have lost our father, but we have not found ourselves. Words become the vehicle of ambiguity and paradox. “All is possible,” says Marsilio Ficino. “All is in doubt,” says John Donne. Between these two sentences, pronounced more than a century apart, the new literature appears as an opaque circle where Hamlet can represent his methodic madness, Robinson Crusoe his optimistic rationalism, Don Juan of Seville his secular sexuality, and St. John of the Cross his celestial eroticism: in literature, all things become possible. In the medieval cosmos, each reality manifested another reality, in accordance with symbols that were homologated in an unequivocal manner. But in the highly unstable and equivocal world that Copernicus leaves in his wake, these central criteria are forever lost.

All is possible, but all is in doubt. All things have lost their concert. In the very dawn of his humanist affirmation, the individual is assailed by the very doubts, the very criticisms, the very questioning with which Copernicus and Galileo have set free the dormant forces of the universe, expanding it to a degree such that the dwarfed individual, in response, must gigantically display his unleashed passions, his unbridled pride, the cruel uses of his political power, the utopian dream of a new city of the sun, the hunger for a new human space with which to confront the new, mute space of the universe: the spatial appetite that is evident both in the discovery of the New World and in the frescoes of Piero della Francesca.

Nothing should be refused, writes Ficino; human nature contains all and every one of the levels of creation, from the horrendous forms of the powers of the deep to the hierarchies of divine intelligence described by the mystics; nothing is incredible, nothing is impossible; the possibilities we deny are but the possibilities we ignore. The libertine and the ascetic, Don Juan and Savonarola, Cesare Borgia and Hernán Cortés, the tyrant and the adventurer, Marlowe’s Faust and Ford’s incestuous lovers, Machiavelli’s Prince and Thomas More’s Utopian traveller, rebellious intelligence and rebellious flesh, a chronophagic and omni-inclusive imagination: human faults no longer reestablish an ancestral order. They consume themselves in the self-sufficient fires of pride, passion, reason, pleasure, and power. But, even as they are won, these new realities are doubted by the critical spirit, since the critical spirit founded them.

III

All is possible. All is in doubt. Only an old hidalgo from the barren plain of La Mancha in the central plateau of Castile continues to adhere to the codes of certainty. For him, nothing is in doubt and all is possible. In the new world of criticism, Don Quixote is a knight of the faith. This faith comes from his reading, and his reading is a madness. (The Spanish words for reading and madness convey this association much more strongly: reading is lectura; madness is locura. )