Mimesis (61 page)

Don Quijote’s wisdom is not the wisdom of a fool. It is the intelligence, the nobility, the civility, and the dignity of a gifted and well-balanced man—a man neither demonic nor paradoxical, not beset by doubt and indecision nor by any feeling of not being at home in this world, but even-tempered, able to weigh and ponder, receptive, and lovable and modest even in his irony. Furthermore he is a conservative, or at least essentially in accord with the order of things as it is. This comes out wherever and whenever he deals with people—especially with Sancho Panza—in the longer or shorter intervals during which his idée fixe is quiescent. From the very beginning—although more in part 2 than in part 1—the kindly, intelligent, and amiable figure, Alsonso Quijano el bueno, whose most distinguishing characteristic is his naturally superior dignity, coexists with the mad adventurer. We need only read with what kindly and merry irony he treats Sancho in part 2 chapter 7, when the latter, on the advice of his wife Teresa, begins to present his request for a fixed salary. His madness intervenes only when he justifies his refusal by referring to the customs of knights-errant. Passages of this kind abound. There is evidence everywhere that we have to do with an intelligent Don Quijote and a mad one, side by side, and that his intelligence is in no way dialectically inspired by his madness but is a normal and, as it were, average intelligence.

That in itself yields an unusual combination. There are levels of tone represented here which one is not accustomed to finding in purely comic contexts. A fool is a fool. We are used to seeing him represented on a single plane, that of the comic and foolish, with which, at least in earlier literature, baseness and stupidity, and at times underhanded malice, were connected as well. But what are we to say of a fool who is at the same time wise, with that wisdom which seems the least compatible
with folly, that is, the wisdom of intelligent moderation? This very fact, this combination of intelligent moderation with absurd excesses results in a multiplicity which cannot be made to accord altogether with the purely comic. But that is by no means all. It is on the very wings of his madness that his wisdom soars upward, that it roams the world and becomes richer there. For if Don Quijote had not gone mad, he would not have left his house. And then Sancho too would have stayed home, and he could never have drawn from his innate being the things which—as we find in delighted amazement—were potentially contained in it. The multifarious play of action and reaction between the two and their joint play in the world would not have taken place.

This play, as we think we have been able to show, is never tragic; and never are human problems, whether personal or social, represented in such a way that we tremble and are moved to compassion. We always remain in the realm of gaiety. But the levels of gaiety are multiplied as never before. Let us return once more to the text from which we set out. Don Quijote speaks to the peasant women in a style which is genuinely the elevated style of courtly love and which in itself is by no means grotesque. His sentences are not at all ridiculous (though they may seem so to many readers in our day), they are in the tradition of the period and represent a masterpiece of elevated expression in the form in which it was then alive. If it was Cervantes’ purpose to attack the romances of chivalry (and there can be no doubt that it was), he nevertheless did not attack the elevated style of chivalric expression. On the contrary, he reproaches the romances of chivalry with not mastering the style, with being stylistically wooden and dry. And so it comes about that in the middle of a parody against the knightly ideology of love we find one of the most beautiful prose passages which the late form of the tradition of courtly love produced. The peasant women answer with characteristic coarseness. Such a rustically boorish style had long been employed in comic literature (although possibly never with the same balance between moderation and verve), but what had certainly never happened before was that it should follow directly upon a speech like Don Quijote’s—a speech which, taken by itself, could never make us suspect that it occurs in a grotesque context. The motif of a knight begging a peasant woman to hear his love—a motif which produces a comparable situation—is age old. It is the motif of the
pastourelle
; it was in favor with the early Provençal poets, and, as we shall see when we come to Voltaire,
it was remarkably long-lived. However, in the
pastourelle
the two partners have adapted themselves to each other; they understand each other; and the result is a homogeneous level of style on the borderline between the idyllic and the everyday. In Cervantes’ case, the two realms of life and style clash by reason of Don Quijote’s madness. There is no possibility of a transition; each is closed in itself; and the only link that holds them together is the merry neutrality of the playful scheme of puppet-master Sancho—the awkward bumpkin, who but a short time before believed almost everything his master said, who will never get over believing some of it, and who always acts in accordance with the momentary situation. In our passage the dilemma of the moment has inspired him to deceive his master; and he adapts himself to the position of puppet-master with as much gusto and elasticity as he later will to the position of governor of an island. He starts the play in the elevated style, then switches to the low—not, however, in the manner of the peasant women. He maintains his superiority and remains master of the situation which he has himself created under the pressure of necessity but which he now enjoys to the full.

What Sancho does in this case—assuming a role, transforming himself, and playing with his master’s madness—other characters in the book are perpetually doing. Don Quijote’s madness gives rise to an inexhaustible series of disguises and histrionics: Dorotea in the role of Princess Micomicona, the barber as her page, Sansón Carrasco as knight-errant, Ginés de Pasamonte as puppet-master—these are but a few examples. Such metamorphoses make reality become a perpetual stage without ever ceasing to be reality. And when the characters do not submit to the metamorphosis of their own free will, Don Quijote’s madness forces them into their roles—as happens time and again, beginning with the innkeeper and the whores in the first tavern. Reality willingly cooperates with a play which dresses it up differently every moment. It never spoils the gaiety of the play by bringing in the serious weight of its troubles, cares, and passions. All that is resolved in Don Quijote’s madness; it transforms the real everyday world into a gay stage. Here one should recall the various adventures with women which occur in the course of the narrative in addition to the encounter with Dulcinea: Maritornes struggling in Don Quijote’s arms, Dorotea as Princess Micomicona, the lovelorn Altisidora’s serenade, the nocturnal encounter with Doña Rodriguez (a scene which Cide Hamete Benengeli says that he would have given his best coat to see)—each
of these stories is in a different style; each contains a shift in stylistic level; all of them are resolved by Don Quijote’s madness, and all of them remain within the realm of gaiety. And yet there are several which need not necessarily have been thus restricted. The description of Maritornes and her muleteer is coarsely realistic; Dorotea is unhappy; and Doña Rodriguez is in great distress of mind because her daughter has been seduced. Don Quijote’s intervention changes nothing of this—neither Maritornes’ loose life nor the sad plight of Doña Rodriguez’ daughter. But what happens is that we are not concerned over these things, that we see the lot and the life of these women through the prism of gaiety, and that our consciences do not feel troubled over them. As God lets the sun shine and the rain fall on the just and the unjust alike, so Don Quijote’s madness, in its bright equanimity, illumines everything that crosses his path and leaves it in a state of gay confusion.

The most varied suspense and wisest gaiety of the book are revealed in a relationship which Don Quijote maintains throughout: his relationship with Sancho Panza. It is not at all as easy to describe in unambiguous terms as the relationship between Rocinante and Sancho’s donkey or that between the donkey and Sancho himself. They are not always united in unfailing loyalty and love. It frequently happens that Don Quijote becomes so angry with Sancho that he abuses and maltreats him; at times he is ashamed of him; and once—in part 2, chapter 27—he actually deserts him in danger. Sancho, for his part, originally accompanies Don Quijote because he is stupid and for the selfishly materialistic reason that he expects fantastic advantages from the venture, and also because, despite all its hardships, he prefers a vagabond life to the regular working hours and monotony of life at home. Before long he begins to sense that something must be wrong with Don Quijote’s mind, and then he sometimes deceives him, makes fun of him, and speaks of him disrespectfully. At times, even in part 2, he is so disgusted and disillusioned that he is all but ready to leave Don Quijote. Again and again the reader is made to see how variable and composite our human relationships are, how capricious and dependent on the moment even the most intimate of them. In the passage which was our point of departure Sancho deceives his master and plays almost cruelly on his madness. But what painstaking humoring of Don Quijote’s madness, what sympathetic penetration of his world, must have preceded Sancho’s conceiving such a plan and his being able to act his role so well! Only a few months earlier he had not the
slightest inkling of all this. Now he lives, after his own fashion, in the world of knightly adventure; he is fascinated by it. He has fallen in love with his master’s madness and with his own role. His development is most amazing. Yet withal, he is and remains Sancho, of the Panza family, a Christian of the old stock, well known in his village. He remains all that even in the role of a wise governor and also—and indeed especially—when he insists on Sanchica’s marrying nothing less than a count. He remains Sancho; and all that happens to him could happen only to Sancho. But the fact that these things do happen, that his body and his mind are put in such violent commotion and emerge from the ordeal in all their unshakable and idiosyncratic genuineness—this he owes to Don Quijote,
su amo y natural señor
. The experience of Don Quijote’s personality is not received by anyone as completely as it is by Sancho; it is not assimilated pure and whole by anyone as it is by him. The others all wonder about him, are amused or angered by him, or try to cure him. Sancho lives himself into Don Quijote, whose madness and wisdom become productive in him. Although he has far too little critical reasoning power to form and express a synthetic judgment upon him, it still is he, in all his reactions, through whom we best understand Don Quijote. And this in turn binds Don Quijote to him. Sancho is his consolation and his direct opposite, his creature and yet an independent fellow being who holds out against him and prevents his madness from locking him up as though in solitary confinement. Two partners who appear together as contrasting comic or semi-comic figures represent a very old motif which has retained its effectiveness even today in farce, caricature, the circus, and the film: the tall thin man and the short fat one; the clever man and his stupid companion; master and servant; the refined aristocrat and the simple-minded peasants; and whatever other combinations and variants there may be in different countries and under different cultural conditions. What Cervantes made of it is magnificent and unique.

Perhaps it is not quite correct to speak of what Cervantes made of it. It may be more exact to say “what became of the motif in his hands.” For centuries—and especially since the romanticists—many things have been read into him which he hardly foreboded, let alone intended. Such transforming and transcendent interpretations are often fertile. A book like
Don Quijote
dissociates itself from its author’s intention and leads a life of its own. Don Quijote shows a new face to every age which enjoys him. Yet the historian—whose task it
is to define the place of a given work in a historical continuity—must endeavor insofar as that is still possible, to attain a clear understanding of what the work meant to its author and his contemporaries. I have tried to interpret as little as possible. In particular, I have pointed out time and again how little there is in the text which can be called tragic and problematic. I take it as merry play on many levels, including in particular the level of everyday realism. The latter differentiates it from the equally unproblematic gaiety of let us say Ariosto; but even so it remains play. This means that no matter how painstakingly I have tried to do as little interpreting as possible, I yet cannot help feeling that my thoughts about the book often go far beyond Cervantes’ aesthetic intention. Whatever that intention may have been (we shall not here take up the problems presented by the aesthetics of his time), it most certainly did not consciously and from the beginning propose to create a relationship like that between Don Quijote and Sancho Panza as we see it after having read the novel. Rather, the two figures were first a single vision, and what finally developed from them—singly and together—arose gradually, as the result of hundreds of individual ideas, as the result of hundreds of situations in which Cervantes puts them and to which they react on the spur of the moment, as the result of the inexhaustible, ever-fresh power of the poetic imagination. Now and again there are actual incongruities and contradictions, not only in matters of fact (which has often been noted) but also in psychology: developments which do not fit into the total picture of the two heroes—which indicates how much Cervantes allowed himself to be guided by the momentary situation, by the demands of the adventure in hand. This is still the case—more frequently even—in part 2. Gradually and without any preconceived plan, the two personages evolve, each in himself and also in their relation to each other. To be sure, this is the very thing which allows what is peculiarly Cervantean, the sum of Cervantes’ experience of life and the wealth of his imagination, to enter the episodes and speeches all the more richly and spontaneously. The “peculiarly Cervantean” cannot be described in words. And yet I shall attempt to say something
about
it in order to clarify its power and its limits. First of all it is something spontaneously sensory: a vigorous capacity for the vivid visualization of very different people in very varied situations, for the vivid realization and expression of what thoughts enter their minds, what emotions fill their hearts, and what words come to their lips. This capacity he possesses so directly and strongly, and in a manner
so independent of any sort of ulterior motive, that almost everything realistic written before him appears limited, conventional, or propagandistic in comparison. And just as sensory is his capacity to think up or hit upon ever new combinations of people and events. Here, to be sure, we have to consider the older tradition of the romance of adventure and its renewal through Boiardo and Ariosto, but no one before him had infused the element of genuine everyday reality into that brilliant and purposeless play of combinations. And finally he has a “something” which organizes the whole-and makes it appear in a definite “Cervantean” light. Here things begin to be very difficult. One might avoid the difficulty and say that this “something” is merely contained in the subject matter, in the idea of the country gentleman who loses his mind and convinces himself that it is his duty to revive knight-errantry, that it is this theme which gives the book its unity and its attitude. But the theme (which Cervantes, by the way, took over from the minor and in itself totally uninteresting contemporary work, the
Entremés de los romances
) could have been treated quite differently too. The hero might have looked very different; it was not necessary that there should be a Dulcinea and particularly a Sancho. But above all, what was it that so attracted Cervantes in the idea? What attracted him was the possibilities it offered for multifariousness and effects of perspective, the mixture of fanciful and everyday elements in the subject, its malleability, elasticity, adaptability. It was ready to absorb all forms of style and art. It permitted the presentation of the most variegated picture of the world in a light congenial to his own nature. And here we have come back to the difficult question we asked before: what is the “something” which orders the whole and makes it appear in a definite, “Cervantean” light?