Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

This is why Don Quixote is the most Spanish of all novels. Its very essence is defined by loss, impossibility, a burning quest for identity, a sad conscience of all that could have been and never was, and, in reaction to this deprivation, an assertion of total existence in a realm of the imagination, where all that cannot be in reality finds, precisely because of this factual negation, the most intense level of truth. Because the history of Spain has been what it has been, its art has been what history has denied Spain. This is equally true of the mystic poetry of San Juan de la Cruz, the baroque poetry of Luis de Góngora, Velázquez’s Meninas, Goya’s Caprichos, and the films of Luis Buñuel. Art gives life to what history killed. Art gives voice to what history denied, silenced, or persecuted. Art brings truth to the lies of history.

This is what Dostoevsky meant when he called Don Quixote a novel where truth is saved by a lie. The Russian author’s profound observation goes well beyond the relationship of a nation’s art to its history. Dostoevsky is speaking of the broader relationship between reality and imagination. There is a fascinating moment in Don Quixote when the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance arrives in Barcelona and forever breaks the bindings of the illusion of reality. He does what Achilles, Aeneas, or Sir Lancelot could never do: he visits a printing shop, he enters the very place where his adventures become an object, a legible product. Don Quixote is thus sent by Cervantes to his only reality: the reality of fiction.

The act of reading, in this manner, is both the starting point and the last stop on Don Quixote’s route. Neither the reality of what he read nor the reality of what he lived were such, but merely paper ghosts. Only freed from his readings but captured by the readings that multiply the levels of the novel on an infinite scale: only alone in the very center of his authentic, fictional reality, Don Quixote can exclaim:

Believe in me! My feats are true, the windmills are giants, the herds of sheep are armies, the inns are castles and there is in the world no lady more beautiful than the Empress of La Mancha, the unrivaled Dulcinea del Toboso! Believe in me!

Reality may laugh or weep on hearing such words. But reality is invaded by them, loses its own defined frontiers, feels itself displaced, transfigured by another reality made of words and paper. Where are the limits between Dunsinane Castle and Birnham Wood? Where the frontiers that might bind the moor where Lear and his Fool live the cold night of madness? Where, in fact, does Don Quixote’s fantastic Cave of Montesinos end and reality begin?

Never again shall we be able to know, because there will never again be a unique reading of reality. Cervantes has vanquished the epic on which he fed. He has established the dialogue between the epic hero, Achilles, Lancelot, Amadis, and the pícaro, the rogue, the blind man’s guide, Lazarillo. And in doing so, he has dissolved the severe normativity of scholastic thought and its univocal reading of the world.

Of course, Cervantes is not alone in this task of demolition; he is, legitimately, a Renaissance man in this and many other aspects. But he is also a Spaniard caught between the flux of renewal and the stagnant waters of reaction. Where others can go perilously forward to instate reason, hedonism, capitalism, the unbounded optimism of faith in unlimited progress inscribed in lineal time and a future-oriented history, Cervantes must wrestle between the old and the new with far greater intensity than, say, Descartes. And he certainly cannot face the world with the pragmatic assurance of Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.

Don Quixote is the polar opposite of Robinson. His failure in practical matters is the most gloriously ludicrous in recorded history (perhaps it is only paralleled by the great clowns of the silent screen: Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy …). Robinson and Quixote are the antithetical symbols of the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic worlds.

Américo Castro, the greatest modern interpreter of Spanish history, has defined it as “the story of an insecurity.” France, he goes on to say, has assimilated its past, at the price of maximal sacrifices, through the categories of rationalism and clarity; England, through those of empiricism and pragmatism. The past is not a problem for the Frenchman or the Englishman. For the Spaniard, it is nothing but a problem; the latent strains of its multiple heritages — Christian, Muslim, and Jewish — throb unresolved in the heart and mind of Spain. The Spanish ethos oscillates violently between exaltation and passivity, but always in relation to a transcendental mission which divorces and opposes the absolute values of life or death, the temporal or the eternal, honor or dishonor. Spain has been unable to participate in modern European values, defined by a rational articulation between the objective world and the subjective being. Her capacities for political and economic efficiency have been nil; her scientific and technical prowess, scarce; but her capacity for art has been absolute.

It is no wonder, then, that the greatest works of Spanish genius have coincided with the periods of crisis and decadence of Spanish society. The Arcipreste de Hita’s Libro de Buen Amor saves and translates into Spanish the literary influences of the Caliphate of Cordoba after the brilliant world of the Omeya dynasty in Al Andalus has been destroyed by the Almoravide and Almohad invasions. Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina is the masterpiece of Jewish Spain: it coincides with the expulsion and persecution of the Spanish Hebrews and of the conversos. The whole Golden Age of Spanish literature — Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Góngora, Calderón — flowers as the power of Spain withers. Velázquez is the painter of the crepuscular court of Philip IV, and Goya the contemporary of the blind and venal Bourbons, Charles IV and Fernando VII, who lose their crown to Joseph Bonaparte and their American empire to the rebellious creoles. And only when Spain lost the remnants of empire in the Spanish-American War did the dearth of her nineteenth-century culture give way to an extraordinary assertion of thought, science, and art: Unamuno, Valle Inclán, Ramón y Cajal, Ortega y Gasset, Buñuel, Miró, and the poetic generation of García Lorca. The absolute value of art has always shone in Spain at its brightest when its political, economic, and technical fortunes have been at their lowest.

So Cervantes is no exception to a general rule. But what are the particular values he instates in the heart of reality, he, the orphan child of both the Renaissance and the Counter-Reformation; he who cannot proceed to the rational clarity and self-contention of a Madame de Lafayette or the pragmatic efficiency of a Defoe? I have recalled the influence of Erasmus on Cervantes. Don Quixote, a Spanish extension of the Praise of Folly identical to the praise of Utopia, contains an ethic of Love and Justice. A moral reality occupies the center of Cervantes’s imagination, since it cannot occupy the center of the society he lives in.

Love and Justice. Don Quixote, the madman, is mad not only because he has believed all he has read. He is also mad because he believes, as a knight-errant, that justice is his duty and that justice is possible. Again and again, he proclaims his credo: “I am the valiant Don Quixote de la Mancha, undoer of wrongs and torts”: “The duty of my office is to correct injustices and fly to help the needy.” We know the sort of gratitude Don Quixote receives from those he succors: he is beaten and mocked by them. Cervantes’s social irony reaches a high pitch indeed in these scenes. The poor and miserable and wronged ones Don Quixote aids do not want to be saved by him. Perhaps they want to save themselves. This is an open question. In any case, there is not a shred of a Polyanna in Cervantes: he sees the common people capable of being every bit as cruel as their oppressors. But then, does this not pose the implicit commentary that an unjust society perverts all of its members, the mighty and the weak, the high and the lowly?