Carlos Fuentes - Myself with Others - Selected Essays

Don Quixote, in spite of his recurrent disasters as a do-gooder, never fails in his faith in the ideal of justice. He is a Spanish hero: the transcendent idea cannot be wounded by the accidents of ordinary reality. And what is the ideology that sustains Don Quixote’s search for Justice? It is the utopia of the Golden Age:

A happy age, and happy centuries, those that the ancients called golden, and not because gold, so esteemed in our iron age, was to be found without any hardship in that felicitous age, but because those who then lived knew not these two words yours and mine. All things, in that holy age, were common … The clear fountain and the flowing rivers offered men, in magnificent abundance, their tasty and transparent waters … All was peace then, all friendship, all concord … Then were the loving concepts of the soul dressed in simplicity, as the loving soul conceived them … Fraud and mendacity were unknown, malice did not then parade as truth and sincerity. Justice was faithful to its name, and men of favor and interest did not dare perturb what today they so discredit, disturb and persecute …

None of this, Don Quixote ends by saying, is true “in our detestable times,” and so he has become a knight-errant in order to “defend young women, protect widows, and bring help to the orphaned and the needy.” Don Quixote’s concept of Justice is thus a Concept of Love. And through Love, Don Quixote’s abstract Justice achieves its full realization.

The power of Don Quixote’s image as a madman who constantly confuses reality with imagination has made many a reader and commentator forget what I consider an essential passage of the book. In Chapter XXV of the first part of the novel, Don Quixote decides to do penance, dressed only in his nightshirt, in the craggy cliffs of the Sierra Morena. He asks Sancho to go off to the village of El Toboso and inform the knight’s lady Dulcinea of the great deeds and sufferings with which he honors her. Since Sancho knows of no highly placed lady called Dulcinea in the miserable hamlet of El Toboso, he inquires further. Don Quixote, at this extraordinary moment, reveals that he knows the truth: Dulcinea, he says, is none other than the peasant girl Aldonza Lorenzo; it is she Sancho must look for. This provokes gales of laughter in the roguish squire: he knows Aldonza well: she is common, strong as a bull, dirty, can bellow to the peasants from the church tower and be heard a league away; she’s a good one at exchanging pleasantries and, in fact, is a bit of a whore.

Don Quixote’s response is one of the most moving declarations of love ever written. He knows who and what Dulcinea really is; yet he loves her, and because he loves her, she is worth as much as “the most noble princess in all the world.” He admits that his imagination has transformed the peasant girl Aldonza into the noble lady Dulcinea: but is not this the essence of love, to transform the loved one into something incomparable, unique, set above all considerations of wealth or poverty, distinction or commonness? “Thus, it is enough that I think and believe that Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and honest; the question of class is of no consequence … I paint her in my imagination as I desire her … And let the world think what it wants.”

The social, ethical, and political content of Don Quixote is obvious in this reunion of Love and Justice. The myth of the Golden Age is its ideological core: a utopia of brotherhood, equality, and pleasure. Utopia is to be achieved not in a nihilistic sweeping away of the past and starting from scratch to build a brave new world, but in a fusion of the values that come to us from the past and those we are capable of creating in the present. Justice, Don Quixote insists, is absent from the present times; only Love can give Justice actuality, and the Love Don Quixote speaks of is a democratic act, an act surpassing class distinctions, a truth to be found in the lowliest of peasant girls. But to this love must be brought the constant, aristocratic values of chivalry, personal risk in the quest for justice, integrity, and heroism. In Don Quixote, the values of the age of chivalry acquire, through Love, a democratic resonance; and the values of the democratic life acquire the resonance of nobility. Don Quixote refuses both the cruel power of the mighty and the herd instinct of the lowly: his vision of humanity is based not on the lowest common denominator but on the highest achievement possible. His conception of Love and Justice saves both the oppressors and the oppressed from an oppression that perverts both.

It is through this ethical stance that Cervantes struggles to bridge the old and new worlds. If his critique of reading is a negation of the rigid and oppressive features of the Middle Ages, it is also an affirmation of ancient values that must not be lost in the transition to the modern world. But if Don Quixote is also an affirmation of the modern values of the pluralistic point of view, Cervantes does not surrender to modernity either. It is at this juncture that his moral and literary vision fuses into a whole. For if reality has become plurivocal, literature will reflect it only in the measure to which it forces reality to submit itself to plural readings and in multiple visions from variable perspectives. Precisely in the name of the polyvalence of the real, literature creates reality, adds to reality, ceases to be a verbal correspondence to verities unmovable, or anterior to reality. Literature, this new printed reality, speaks of the things of the world; but literature, in itself, is a new thing in the world.

As if he foresaw all the dirty tricks of servile literary naturalism, Cervantes destroys the illusion of literature as a mere copy of reality and creates a literary reality far more powerful and difficult to grapple with: the reality of a novel is its existence at all levels of the critique of reading. The moral message of Don Quixote, instead of being imposed from above by the author, thus passes through the sieve of the multiple readings of multiple readers who are reading a work that is criticizing its own artistic and moral propositions. By rooting the critique of creation in the creation itself, Cervantes lays claim to being one of the founders of the modern imagination. Poetry, painting, and music will later demand an equal right to be themselves and not docile imitators of a reality that they ill serve by reproducing it. Art will not reflect more reality unless it creates another reality.

Through his paper character Don Quixote, who integrates the values of the past with those of the present, Cervantes translates the great themes of the centerless universe and of individualism triumphant, yet awed and orphaned, to the plane of literature as the axis of a new reality. There will be no more tragedy and no more epic, because there is no longer a restorable ancestral order or a universe univocal in its normativity. There will be multiple levels of reading, capable of testing the multiple layers of reality.

IV

It so happens that this rogue, convicted galley slave, and false puppeteer, Ginés de Pasamonte, alias Ginesillo de Parapilla, alias Master Pedro, is writing a book about his own life. “Is the book finished?” asks Don Quixote. And Ginés answers him: “How can it be, if my life isn’t over yet?”

This is Cervantes’s last question: Who writes books and who reads them? Who is the author of Don Quixote? A certain Cervantes, more versed in grief than in verse, whose Galatea has been read by the priest who scrutinizes Don Quixote’s library, burns the books he dislikes in an immediate auto-da-fé, and then seals off the hidalgo’s library with brick and mortar, making him believe it is the work of magicians? A certain de Saavedra, mentioned by the Captive with admiration because of the acts he accomplished, “and all of them for the purpose of achieving freedom”?