Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

It is these readings that transform Don Quixote, the caricature of the ancient hero, into the first modern hero, observed from multiple angles, scrutinized by multiple eyes that do not share his faith in the codes of chivalry, assimilated to the very readers who read him, and, like them, forced to re-create “Don Quixote” in his own imagination. A double victim of the act of reading, Don Quixote loses his senses twice. First, when he reads. Then, when he is read. Because now, instead of having to prove the existence of the heroes of old, he is up to a much, much tougher challenge: he must prove his own existence.

And this leads us to a further level of reading. A voracious, insomniac reader of epics he obsessively wants to carry over to reality, Don Quixote fails miserably in this, his original purpose. But as soon as he becomes an object of reading, he begins to vanquish reality, to contaminate it with his mad reading: not the reading of the novels of chivalry, but the actual reading of the new novel, Don Quixote. And this new reading transforms the world, for the world, more and more, begins to resemble the world contained in the pages of the novel Don Quixote.

In order to mock Don Quixote, the world disguises itself with the masks of Don Quixote’s obsessions. Yet, can anyone disguise himself as something worse than his own self? Do not our disguises reveal our reality with greater truth than our everyday appearance? The disguised world of those who have read Don Quixote within the pages of Don Quixote reveals the undisguised reality of the world: its cruelty, its ignorance, its injustice, its stupidity. So Cervantes need not write a political manifesto to denounce the evils of his age and of all ages; he need not recur to Aesopian language; he need not radically break with the strictures of the traditional epic in order to surpass it: he dialectically merges the epic thesis and the realistic antithesis to achieve, within the very life and logic and necessity of his own book, the novelistic synthesis. No one had conceived this polyvalent creation within a book before him; not Tasso’s mock heroics, not the picaresque’s stark documentary, not Rabelais’s gargantuan, insatiable, terrifying affirmation of the surfeit energy of the world pitted against the vacuum of heaven.

Don Quixote, the knight of the faith, meets a faithless world: both no longer know where the truth really lies. Is Don Quixote really mocked by Dorotea when she disguises herself as the Princess Micomicona, or by the Bachelor Carrasco when he defies Don Quixote disguised as the Knight of the Mirrors? Is Don Quixote really fooled by the Dukes when they stage the farces of the wooden horse Clavileño, the Sorrowful Lady with her twelve bearded duennas or the government of Sancho in the Island Barataria? Or is it really Don Quixote who has mocked them all, forcing them to enter, disguised as themselves, the immense universe of the reading of Don Quixote? Perhaps this is disputable matter for psychoanalysis. What is indisputable is that Don Quixote, the bewitched, ends by bewitching the world. While he read, he imitated the epic hero. When he is read, the world imitates him.

But the price he must pay is the loss of his own enchantment.

Prodigal writer that he is, Cervantes now leads us to a further level of reading. As the world comes to resemble him more and more, Don Quixote, more and more, loses the illusion of his own being. He has been the cipher of the act of reading: a black ink question mark, much as Picasso was to draw him. But by the time he reaches the castle of the Dukes, Don Quixote sees that the castle is actually a castle, whereas, before, he could imagine he saw a castle in the humblest inn of the Castilian wayside.

The incarnation of his dreams in reality robs Don Quixote of his imagination. In the world of the Dukes, it will no longer be necessary for him to imagine an unreal world: the Dukes offer him what he has imagined in all its reality. What, then, is the sense of reading? What is the sense of books? What is their use? From then on, all is sadness and disillusionment. Paradoxically, Don Quixote is bereft of his faith at the very moment when the world of his readings is offered to him in the world of reality. His crucial passage through the castle of the Dukes permits Cervantes to introduce a triple wedge in his critique of reading. One, he is stating, is Don Quixote’s idea of an epic coincidence between his readings and his life. It is a faith born from books and totally defined by the way Don Quixote has read those books. As long as this mental coincidence is supreme, Don Quixote has no trouble coexisting with what is outside his own universe: the very fact that reality does not coincide with his readings permits him, again and again, to impose the vision of his readings on reality. But when what only pertains to his univocal readings finds an equivalent in reality, the illusion is shattered. The coherence of epic reading is defeated by the incoherence of historical facts. Don Quixote must live through this historical reality before he reaches the third and definitive level proposed by Cervantes: the level of the novel itself, the synthesis between the past Don Quixote loses and the present that annuls him.

Thrust into history, Don Quixote is deprived of all opportunity for his imaginative action. He meets one Roque Guinart, an authentic robber, alive in the time of Cervantes. This Guinart, totally inscribed in history, was thief and contrabandist of the silver cargoes from the Indies and a secret agent of the French Huguenots at the time of the St. Bartholomew’s night massacre. Next to him and his tangible historicity, as when he sees (but does not partake in) a naval battle off Barcelona, Don Quixote has become a simple witness to real events and real characters. Cervantes gives these chapters a strange aura of sadness and disillusionment. The old hidalgo, forever deprived of his epic reading of the world, must face his final option: to be in the sadness of reality or to be in the reality of literature: this literature, the one Cervantes has invented, not the old literature of univocal coincidence that Don Quixote sprang from.

Dostoevsky calls Cervantes’s novel “the saddest book of them all”; in it, the Russian novelist found the inspiration for the figure of the “good man,” the idiot prince, Myshkin. As the novel ends, the knight of the faith has truly earned his sorrowful countenance. For, as Dostoevsky adds, Don Quixote suffers from a disease, “the nostalgia of realism.”

This phrase must give us pause. What realism are we talking about? The realism of impossible adventures with magicians, chivalrous knight-errants, and frightful giants? Exactly so. Before, everything that was written was true … even if it was a fantasy. There were no cracks between what was said and what was done in the epic. “For Aristotle and the Middle Ages,” explains Ortega y Gasset, “all things are possible that do not contain an inner contradiction. For Aristotle, the centaur is a possibility; not so for us, since biology will not tolerate it.”

And this is what Don Quixote feels such intense nostalgia for: this realism without inner contradictions. The new science, the new doubts, all the skepticisms that anachronize the faith of the knight of the unique reading, of the ambassador of the licit reading, cross Don Quixote’s path and undermine his illusions. But above all, what shatters the monolith of the old realism Don Quixote yearns for are the plural readings, the illicit readings to which he is subjected.

Don Quixote recovers his reason. And this, for a man of his ilk, is the supreme folly: it is suicide. When he accepts conventional “reality,” Don Quixote, like Hamlet, is condemned to death. But Don Quixote, thanks to the critical reading invented by Cervantes in the act of founding the modern novel, shall go on living another life: he is left with no resource but to prove his own existence, not in the univocal reading that gave him his original being, but in the multiple readings that deprived him of it. Don Quixote loses the life of his nostalgic, coincidental reality but goes on living, forever, in his book and only in his book.