Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

Like Philip II, the necrophiliac monarch secluded at El Escorial, Don Quixote both pawns and pledges his life to the restoration of the world of unified certainty. He pawns and pledges himself, both physically and symbolically, to the univocal reading of the texts and attempts to translate this reading into a reality that has become multiple, equivocal, ambiguous. But because he possesses his readings, Don Quixote possesses his identity: that of the knight-errant, that of the ancient epic hero.

So, at the immediate level of reading, Don Quixote is the master of the previous readings that withered his brain. But at a second level of reading, he becomes the master of the words contained in the verbal universe of the book titled Don Quixote. He ceases to be a reader of the novels of chivalry and becomes the actor of his own epic adventures. As there was no rupture between his reading of the books and his faith in what they said, so now there is no divorce between the acts and the words of his adventures. Because, assimilated to Don Quixote, we read it but do not see it, we shall never know what it is that the goodly gentleman puts on his head: the fabled helm of Mambrino, or a vulgar barber’s basin. The first doubt assails us: is Quixote right, has he discovered the legendary helmet where everyone else, blind and ignorant, sees only the basin?

Within this verbal sphere, Don Quixote is at first invincible. Sancho’s empiricism, from this verbal point of view, is useless, because Don Quixote, each time he fails, immediately reestablishes his literary discourse, undiscouraged, the words always identical to the reality, the reality but a prolongation of the words he has read before and now enacts. He explains away his disasters with the words of his previous, epic readings, and resumes his career within the world of the words that belong to him.

Harry Levin compares the famous “play within the play” scene in Hamlet with the chapter on the puppet theater of Master Pedro in Don Quixote. In Shakespeare’s drama, King Claudius interrupts the mummery because imagination starts to resemble reality too dangerously. In Cervantes’s novel, Don Quixote assaults Master Pedro’s “Moorish puppetry” because representation starts to resemble imagination too closely. Claudius desires that reality were a lie: the killing of Hamlet’s father, the King. Don Quixote desires that fantasy were a truth: the imprisonment of the Princess Melisendra by the Moors.

The identification of the imaginary with the real remits Hamlet to reality, and from reality, naturally, it yields him to death: Hamlet is the envoy of death, he comes from death and goes toward death. But the identification of the imaginary with the imaginary remits Don Quixote to his books. Don Quixote comes from his readings and goes toward them: Don Quixote is the ambassador of readings. In his mind, it is not reality at all that interposes itself between his enterprises and reality: it is the magicians he knows through his readings.

We know this is not so; we know that only reality confronts the mad readings of Don Quixote. But he does not know it, and this ignorance (or this faith) establishes a third level of reading in the novel. “ Look your mercy,” Sancho constantly says, “ Look you that what we see there are not giants, but only windmills.” But Don Quixote does not see: Don Quixote reads and his reading says that those are giants.

Don Quixote wants to introduce the whole world within his readings, as long as these are the readings of a unique and consecrated code: the code that, since the action at Roncesvalles, identifies the exemplary act of history with the exemplary act of books. Roland’s sacrifice defended the heroic ideal of chivalry and the political integrity of Christendom. His gest shall become ideal norm and ideal form of all the heroes of the fictions of chivalry. Don Quixote counts himself among their number. He, too, believes that between the exemplary gestures of history and exemplary gestures of books there can be no cracks, for above them all stands the consecrated code that rules both, and above the code rises the univocal vision of a world structured by God. Issued from these readings, Don Quixote, each time he fails, finds refuge in his readings. And sheltered by his books, he will go on seeing armies where there are only sheep, without losing the reason of his readings: he will be faithful unto them, because he does not conceive any other licit way of reading. The synonymity of reading, madness, truth, and life in Don Quixote becomes strikingly apparent when he demands of the merchants he meets on the road that they confess the beauty of Dulcinea without ever having seen her, for “the important thing is that without having seen her you should believe, confess, swear, and defend it.” This it is an act of faith. Don Quixote’s fabulous adventures are ignited by an overwhelming purpose: what is read and what is lived must coincide anew, without the doubts and oscillations between faith and reason introduced by the Renaissance.

But the very next level of reading in the novel Don Quixote starts to undermine this illusion. In his third outing, Don Quixote finds out, through news that the Bachelor Sansón Carrasco has transmitted to Sancho, that there exists a book called The Most Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. “They mention me,” Sancho says in marvelment, “along with our lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and many other things that happened to us alone, so that I crossed myself in fright trying to imagine how the historian who wrote them came to know them.” Things that happened to us alone. Before, only God could know them; only God was the final knower and judge of what went on in the recesses of our conscience. Now, any reader who can pay the cover price for a copy of Don Quixote can also find out: the reader thus becomes akin to God. Now the Dukes can prepare their cruel farces because they have read the first part of the novel Don Quixote. Now Don Quixote, the reader, is read.

On entering the second part of the novel, Don Quixote also finds out that he has been the subject of an apocryphal novel written by one Avellaneda to cash in on the popularity of Cervantes’s book. The signs of Don Quixote’s singular identity suddenly seem to multiply. Don Quixote criticizes Avellaneda’s version. But the existence of another book about himself makes him change his route and go to Barcelona so as to “bring out into the public light the lies of this modern historian so that people will see that I am not the Don Quixote he says I am.”

This is surely the first time in literature that a character knows that he is being written about at the same time that he lives his fictional adventures. This new level of reading is crucial to determine those which follow. Don Quixote ceases to support himself on previous epics and starts to support himself on his own epic. But his epic is no epic, and it is at this point that Cervantes invents the modern novel. Don Quixote, the reader, knows he is read, something that Achilles surely never knew. And he knows that the destiny of Don Quixote the man has become inseparable from the destiny of Don Quixote the book, something that Ulysses never knew in relation to the Odyssey. His integrity as a hero of old, safely niched in a previous, univocal and denotative epic reading, is shattered, not by the galley slaves or the scullery maids who laugh at him, not by the sticks and stones he must weather in the inns he takes to be castles or the grazing fields he takes to be battlegrounds. His faith in his epical readings enables him to bear all the batterings of reality. But now his integrity is annulled by the readings he is submitted to.