Mimesis (60 page)

In our study we are looking for representations of everyday life in which that life is treated seriously, in terms of its human and social problems or even of its tragic complications. The scene from Don Quijote with which we are dealing is certainly realistic. All the participants are presented in their true reality, their living everyday existence. Not only the peasant women but Sancho too, not only Sancho but also Don Quijote, appear as persons representative of contemporary Spanish life. For the fact that Sancho is playing a rogue’s game and that Don Quijote is enmeshed in his illusion does not raise either of them out of his everyday existence. Sancho is a peasant from La Mancha, and Don Quijote is no Amadis or Roland, but a little country
squire who has lost his mind. At best we might say that the hidalgo’s madness translates him into another, imaginary sphere of life; but even so the everyday character of our scene and others similar to it remains unharmed, because the persons and events of everyday life are constantly colliding with his madness and come out in stronger relief through the contrast.

It is much more difficult to determine the position of the scene, and of the novel as a whole, on the scale of levels between tragic and comic. As presented, the story of the encounter with the three peasant women is nothing if not comic. The idea of having Don Quijote encounter a concrete Dulcinea must certainly have come to Cervantes even when he was writing the first part of the novel. The idea of building up such a scene on the basis of a deceitful trick played by Sancho, so that the roles appear interchanged, is a stroke of genius, and it is so magnificently carried out that the farce presents itself to the reader as something perfectly natural and even bound to take place, despite the complex absurdity of all its presuppositions and relations. But it remains pure farce. We have tried to show above that, in the case of the only one of the participants with whom the possibility of a shift into the tragic and problematic exists, that is, in the case of Don Quijote, such a shift is definitely avoided. The fact that he almost instantaneously and as it were automatically takes refuge in the interpretation that Dulcinea is under an enchantment excludes everything tragic. He is taken in, and this time even by Sancho; he kneels down and orates in a lofty emotional style before a group of ugly peasant women; and then he takes pride in his sublime misfortune.

But Don Quijote’s feelings are genuine and profound. Dulcinea is really the mistress of his thoughts; he is truly filled with the spirit of a mission which he regards as man’s highest duty. He is really true, brave, and ready to sacrifice everything. So unconditional a feeling and so unconditional a determination impose admiration even though they are based on a foolish illusion, and this admiration has been accorded to Don Quijote by almost all readers. There are probably few lovers of literature who do not associate the concept of ideal greatness with Don Quijote. It may be absurd, fantastic, grotesque; but it is still ideal, unconditional, heroic. It is especially since the Romantic period that this conception has become almost universal, and it withstands all attempts on the part of philological criticism to show that Cervantes’ intention was not to produce such an impression.

The difficulty lies in the fact that in Don Quijote’s idée fixe we have
a combination of the noble, immaculate, and redeeming with absolute nonsense. A tragic struggle for the ideal and desirable cannot at first blush be imagined in any way but as intervening meaningfully in the actual state of things, stirring it up, pressing it hard; with the result that the meaningful ideal encounters an equally meaningful resistance which proceeds either from inertia, petty malice, and envy, or possibly from a more conservative view. The will working for an ideal must accord with existing reality at least to such an extent that it meets it, so that the two interlock and a real conflict arises. Don Quijote’s idealism is not of this kind. It is not based on an understanding of actual conditions in this world. Don Quijote does have such an understanding but it deserts him as soon as the idealism of his idée fixe takes hold of him. Everything he does in that state is completely senseless and so incompatible with the existing world that it produces only comic confusion there. It not only has no chance of success, it actually has no point of contact with reality; it expends itself in a vacuum.

The same idea can be developed in another way, so that further consequences become clear. The theme of the noble and brave fool who sets forth to realize his ideal and improve the world, might be treated in such a way that the problems and conflicts in the world are presented and worked out in the process. Indeed, the purity and ingenuousness of the fool could be such that, even in the absence of any concrete purpose to produce effects, wherever he appears he unwittingly goes to the heart of things, so that the conflicts which are pending and hidden are rendered acute. One might think here of Dostoevski’s
Idiot
. Thus the fool could be involved in responsibility and guilt and assume the role of a tragic figure. Nothing of the sort takes place in Cervantes’ novel.

Don Quijote’s encounter with Dulcinea is not a good illustration of his relationship to concrete reality, inasmuch as here he does not, as elsewhere, impose his ideal will in conflict with that reality; here he beholds and worships the incarnation of his ideal. Yet this encounter too is symbolic of the mad knight’s relationship to the phenomena of this world. The reader should recall what traditional concepts were contained in the Dulcinea motif and how they are echoed in Sancho’s and Don Quijote’s grotesquely sublime words.
La señora de sus pensamientos, extremo del valor que puede desearse, término de la humana gentileza
, and so forth—alive in all this are Plato’s idea of beauty, courtly love, the
donna gentile
of the
dolce stil nuovo
, Beatrice,
la gloriosa donna della mia mente
. And all this ammunition is expended
on three ugly and vulgar peasant women. It is poured into a void. Don Quijote can neither be graciously received nor graciously rejected. There is nothing but amusingly senseless confusion. To find anything serious, or a concealed deeper meaning in this scene, one must violently overinterpret it.

The three women are flabbergasted; they get away as fast as they can. This is an effect frequently produced by Don Quijote’s appearance. Often disputes result and the participants come to blows. People are apt to lose their temper when Don Quijote interferes in their business with his nonsense. Very often too they humor him in his idée fixe in order to get some fun from it. The innkeeper and the whores at the time of his first departure react in this way. The same thing happens again later with the company at the second inn, with the priest and the barber, Dorotea and Don Fernando, and even with Maritornes. Some of these, it is true, mean to use their game as a way of getting the knight safely back home, but they carry it much further than their practical purpose would require. In part 2 the
bachiller
Sansón Carrasco bases his therapeutic plan on playing along with Don Quijote’s idée fixe; later, at the duke’s palace and in Barcelona, his madness is methodically exploited as a pastime, so that hardly any of his adventures are genuine; they are simply staged, that is, they have been especially prepared to suit the hidalgo’s madness, for the amusement of those who get them up. Among all these reactions, both in part 1 and part 2, one thing is completely lacking: tragic complications and serious consequences. Even the element of contemporary satire and criticism is very weak. If we leave out of consideration the purely literary criticism, there is almost none at all. It is limited to brief remarks or occasional caricatures of types (for example the priest at the duke’s court). It never goes to the roots of things and is moderate in attitude. Above all, Don Quijote’s adventures never reveal any of the basic problems of the society of the time. His activity reveals nothing at all. It affords an opportunity to present Spanish life in its color and fullness. In the resulting clashes between Don Quijote and reality no situation ever results which puts in question that reality’s right to be what it is. It is always right and he wrong; and after a bit of amusing confusion it flows calmly on, untouched. There is one scene where this might seem doubtful. It is the freeing of the galley slaves in part 1, chapter 22. Here Don Quijote intervenes in the established legal order, and some critics will be found to uphold the opinion that he does so in the name of a higher morality. This view is natural, for
what Don Quijote says:
allá se lo haya cada uno con su pecado; Dios hay en el cielo que no se descuida de castigar al malo ni de premiar al bueno, y no es bien que los hombres honrados sean verdugos do los otros hombres, no yéndoles nada en ello
—such a statement is certainly on a higher level than any positive law. But a “higher morality” of the kind here envisaged must be consistent and methodical if it is to be taken seriously. We know, however, that Don Quijote has no idea of making a basic attack on the established legal order. He is neither an anarchist nor a prophet of the Kingdom of God. On the contrary, it is apparent again and again that whenever his idée fixe happens not to be involved he is willing to conform, that it is only through his idée fixe that he claims a special position for the knight-errant. The beautiful words,
alla se lo haya
, etc., are deeply rooted, to be sure, in the kindly wisdom of his real nature (this is a point to which we shall return), but in their context they are still merely an improvisation. It is his idée fixe which determines him to free the prisoners. It alone forces him to conceive of everything he encounters as the subject of a knightly adventure. It supplies him with the motifs “help the distressed” or “free the victims of force,” and he acts accordingly. I think it wholly erroneous to look for a matter of principle here, for anything like a conflict between natural Christian and positive law. For such a conflict, moreover, an opponent would have to appear, someone like the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoevski, who would be authorized and willing to represent the cause of positive law against Don Quijote. His Majesty’s commissary who is in charge of the convoy of prisoners is neither suited for the role nor prepared to play it. Personally he may very well be ready to accept the argument, “judge not that ye be not judged.” But he has passed no judgment; he is no representative of positive law. He has his instructions and is quite justified in appealing to them.

Everything comes out all right, and time and again the damage done or suffered by Don Quijote is treated with stoic humor as a matter of comic confusion. Even the
bachiller
Alonso Lopez, as he lies on the ground, badly mauled and with one leg pinned under his mule, consoles himself with mocking puns. This scene occurs in chapter 19 of book 1. It also shows that Don Quijote’s idée fixe saves him from feeling responsible for the harm he does, so that in his conscience too every form of tragic conflict and somber seriousness is obviated. He has acted in accordance with the rules of knight-errantry, and so he is justified. To be sure, he hastens to assist the
bachiller
, for he is a kind and helpful
soul; but it does not occur to him to feel guilty. Nor does he feel any guiltier when at the beginning of chapter 30 the priest puts him to the test by telling him what evil effects his freeing of the prisoners had produced. He angrily exclaims that it is the duty of a knight-errant to help those in distress but not to judge whether their plight is deserved or not. And that settles the question as far as he is concerned. In part 2, where the gaiety is even more relaxed and elegant, such complications no longer occur at all.

There is, then, very little of problem and tragedy in Cervantes’ book—and yet it belongs among the literary masterpieces of an epoch during which the modern problematic and tragic conception of things arose in the European mind. Don Quijote’s madness reveals nothing of the sort. The whole book is a comedy in which well-founded reality holds madness up to ridicule.

And yet Don Quijote is not only ridiculous. He is not like the bragging soldier or the comic old man or the pedantic and ignorant doctor. In our scene Don Quijote is taken in by Sancho. But does Sancho despise him and deceive him all the way through? Not at all. He deceives him only because he sees no other way out. He loves and reveres him, although he is half conscious (and sometimes fully conscious) of his madness. He learns from him and refuses to part with him. In Don Quijote’s company he becomes cleverer and better than he was before. With all his madness, Don Quijote preserves a natural dignity and superiority which his many miserable failures cannot harm. He is not vulgar, as the above-mentioned comic types normally are. Actually he is not a “type” at all in this sense, for on the whole he is no automaton producing comic effects. He even develops, and grows kinder and wiser while his madness persists. But would it be true to say that his is a wise madness in the ironical sense of the romanticists? Does wisdom come to him through his madness? Does his madness give him an understanding he could not have attained in soundness of mind, and do we hear wisdom speak through madness in his case as we do with Shakespeare’s fools or with Charlie Chaplin? No, that is not it either. As soon as his madness, that is, the idée fixe of knight-errantry, takes hold of him, he acts unwisely, he acts like an automaton in the manner of the comic types mentioned above. He is wise and kind independently of his madness. A madness like this, it is true, can arise only in a pure and noble soul, and it is also true that wisdom, kindness, and decency shine through his madness and make it appear lovable. Yet his wisdom and his madness are clearly separated—in direct
contrast to what we find in Shakespeare, the fools of Romanticism, and Charlie Chaplin. The priest says it as early as chapter 30 of part 1, and later it comes out again and again: he is mad only when his idée fixe comes into play; otherwise he is a perfectly normal and very intelligent individual. His madness is not such that it represents his whole nature and is completely identical with it. At a specific moment an idée fixe laid hold on him; but even so it leaves parts of his being unaffected, so that in many instances he acts and speaks like a person of sound mind; and one day, shortly before his death, it leaves him again. He was some fifty years of age when, under the influence of his excessive reading of romances of chivalry, he conceived his absurd plan. This is strange. An overwrought state of mind resulting from solitary reading might rather be expected in a youthful person (Julien Sorel, Madame Bovary), and one is tempted to look for a specific psychological explanation. How is it possible that a man in his fifties who leads a normal life and whose intelligence is well-developed in many ways and not at all unbalanced, should embark upon so absurd a venture? In the opening sentences of his novel Cervantes supplies some details of his hero’s social position. From them we may at best infer that it was burdensome to him, for it offered no possibility of an active life commensurate with his abilities. He was as it were paralyzed by the limitations imposed upon him on the one hand by his class and on the other by his poverty. Thus one might suppose that his mad decision represents a flight from a situation which has become unbearable, a violent attempt to emancipate himself from it. This sociological and psychological interpretation has been advocated by various writers on the subject. I myself advanced it in an earlier passage of this book, and I leave it there because in the context of that passage it is justified. But as an interpretation of Cervantes’ artistic purpose it is unsatisfactory, for it is not likely that he intended his brief observations on Don Quijote’s social position and habits of life to imply anything like a psychological motivation of the knight’s idée fixe. He would have had to state it more clearly and elaborate it in greater detail. A modern psychologist might find still other explanations of Don Quijote’s strange madness. But this sort of approach to the problem has no place in Cervantes’ thinking. Confronted with the question of the causes of Don Quijote’s madness, he has only one answer: Don Quijote read too many romances of chivalry and they deranged his mind. That this should happen to a man in his fifties can be explained—from within the work—only in aesthetic terms, that is, through the
comic vision which came to Cervantes when he conceived the novel: a tall, elderly man, dressed in old-fashioned and shabby armor, a picture which is beautifully expressive not only of madness but also of asceticism and the fanatic pursuit of an ideal. We simply have to accept the fact that this cultured and intelligent country gentleman goes suddenly mad—not, like Ajax or Hamlet, because of a terrible shock—but simply because he has read too many romances of chivalry. Here again there is nothing tragic. In the analysis of his madness we have to do without the concept of the tragic, just as we have to do without the specifically Shakespearean and romantic combination of wisdom and madness in which one cannot be conceived without the other.