In this pursuit of justice (which is the human way of seeking out truth) Don Quixote acts individually. Never, in his many adventures, does he lust for a position of power, a seat of government, a role in the world of politics. It is Sancho, his squire, who is offered (in the tradition of the novels of chivalry) the lordship of a realm as reward for his efforts. And it is Sancho to whom Don Quixote offers advice about public affairs: dress the part, know something of both arms and letters, show humility, avoid passion in judgment. Between irony and wisdom, Don Quixote’s recommendations define the role of the head of state — a role to which, clearly, he himself does not aspire.
Towards the end of all the adventures, returning home with Sancho after having been tortured and mocked by dukes and duchesses, Don Quixote has this to say to his native village: “Open your arms and welcome your son, Don Quixote, who though vanquished by a stranger’s hand, returns the victor of himself; and that, as has often been told, is the greatest victory that can be desired.” And here is perhaps part of the answer to my question. Maybe this is what Socrates meant when he said that “the true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.” Not to seek public victory or praise but merely a private victory over oneself, an honorable role in the intimate sphere, vanquishing the cowardly impulse to close one’s eyes to injustice and to remain silent about society’s wrongdoings.
This is Don Quixote’s underlying concern: not to ignore society’s atrocities, not to allow those in power to bear false witness, and, above all, to chronicle the things that happen. And if, to get to the truth, Don Quixote must retell reality in his own literary vocabulary, so be it. Better to see windmills as giants than to deny the existence of windmills absolutely. Fiction, in Cervantes’s case, is the way of telling the truth when Spain had decided to rebuild its own history on a lie, the lie of a pure, uncontaminated Christian kingdom, barely a century after the expulsion of the Jews and the Arabs, and at the time of the banishment of all Arab and Jewish converts. For that reason, in order to denounce the fictional reality, Cervantes invents an honest fiction and tells the reader that he is not the father but merely the stepfather of Don Quixote, that the real author is a certain Cide Hamete Benegeli, an Arab scholar, one of the supposedly disappeared people, so that credulous readers will believe that the book they hold in their hands is merely a translation from a tongue long banned in the realm. Fiction, Cervantes implies, must reveal the deceit of an identity in which Spanish history attempts to clothe itself, an identity cleansed of any Jewish or Arab influence, an identity that need not question or take itself to task because it is supposed to be cloaked in Christian purity. Innocent as the boy in Andersen’s tale, Don Quixote points his sword at that identity and shouts: “But it is naked!”
For Cervantes, history, the faithful account of what has happened, can be “translated” in many ways in order to be better told. It can be revealed in a novel, it can purport to be the words of a mysterious Arab author, it can be told as a story of magic and violence and wonder. But however put into words, it must, in the deepest sense, be true. History, Don Quixote tells Sancho early in the book, is the mother of truth, “rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness of the past, example and pattern of the present, a warning to all future ages.” And Spain is only now learning the lesson Cervantes tried to teach it four centuries ago — though even today it is unwilling to recognize its full import. Although the existence of a Jewish and Arab Spain is, these days, for the most part acknowledged, the question of a fake national identity has come up once again in Spain’s refusal to recognize the crimes of the Franco era. Unconscionably, Judge Baltazar Garzón has been denied the request to have Franco’s mass graves opened and an inquiry set up into the atrocities committed by both sides, Nationalists and Republicans. But like the invention of Spain’s identity in Cervantes’s time, this too may perhaps one day be deemed worthy of a story.
Like Spain then and now, collectively, we find it difficult to acknowledge murky moments in our society’s history. Through cowardice, through ignorance, through arrogance, and, in fewer cases, through shame, most societies have at times denied or attempted to change certain culpable events in their past. In the first half of the second millennium B.C., the priests of the Temple of Shamash in Mesopotamia faked the date on one of their newly erected monuments in order to lend it eight more centuries of existence, thus managing to increase the royal allowance to their venerable institution. The Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi, in 213 B.C., commanded that all the books in his realm be destroyed so that history could begin with his accession. During the Third Reich, to prove that no Jewish inspiration had ever contributed to German Kultur, the propaganda minister, Paul Joseph Goebbels, proclaimed that Heinrich Heine’s celebrated poem “Die Lorelei” was an ancient German ballad of anonymous authorship. Joseph Stalin ordered that party members who had fallen from grace be deleted from official photographs so that no record of their political existence remain for future historians. Closer to our time, the Chinese Communist Party refused to acknowledge that the massacre at Tiananmen Square had ever taken place. The examples, alas, are endless.
Sometimes, the event denied concerns one single individual wished into oblivion; sometimes millions of men, women, and children deliberately and systematically murdered. In every case, the denial is a society’s attempt to do the impossible, to do that which medieval theologians concluded was impossible even for God: to alter the past. Alice, in Through the Looking-Glass, explaining her intention to climb to the top of a hill, is interrupted by the Red Queen, who says that she could show her hills “in comparison with which you’d call that a valley.” “No, I shouldn’t,” Alice answers bravely. “A hill can’t be a valley. That would be nonsense —.” Indeed, that would be nonsense. Over and over again, our societies insist on such nonsense, arguing that hills are valleys and that whatever has evidently and painfully taken place never really happened.
In the thirteenth century, the Armenian poet Hovhannès d’Erzenga, known as Blouz, wrote that “only the true sun gives light: let us distinguish it from the untrue one.” This obvious injunction is not easy to carry out. Not because, in a few cases, it is hard to distinguish truth from falsehood, the true sun from the untrue one, but because to do so would imply that a public fault has been committed, an unjustifiable deed performed, and most societies have a limited vocabulary of apology and repentance.
Perhaps because of this, because of the difficulty of uttering a collective self-reproach to purge our troubled souls, most religions have ritualized the act of contrition. The Catholic mea culpa repeated three times during mass, the Jewish Day of Atonement in which forgiveness is asked from your friends and neighbors, the request for God’s pardon uttered in the five daily Muslim prayers are all attempts to recognize human frailty in our societies, and the terrible acts of which we are capable. These rituals pay homage to the victims, of course, but above all they offer the victimizers, if not oblivion for their sins, never oblivion, at least the chance to redeem themselves by acknowledging that they have done wrong. Words can be misused, can be forced to tell lies, to whitewash the guilty, to invent a nonexistent past in which we are told we must believe. But words can also have a curative, creative power. By allowing the misdeed to take shape first in the mouth of the victimizer and then in the ear of the victim, by transporting it from what happened to what is acknowledged to have happened, words effectively allow history to be, as Don Quixote proposed, the mother of truth.