Don Quixote, it is true, bears all the marks of what it leaves behind. If it is the first modern novel, its debt to tradition is enormous, since its very inception, as we all know, is the satire of the epic of chivalry. But if it is the last medieval romance, then it also celebrates its own death: it becomes its own requiem. If it is a work of the Renaissance, it also maintains a lively medieval carnival of games, puns, and references not far from Bakhtin’s definition of festive humor in the novel, breaking down the frontiers between actors and audience. And finally, if it opens for all the adventure of modern reading, it remains a book deeply immersed in the society and the history of Spain.
Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547 and died in 1616. He published the first part of Don Quixote in 1605, and the second part in 1615. So that everything I have said up till now happens historically within a contradiction. Cervantes’s work is one of the great examples of Renaissance liberation. But his life occurs within the supreme example of the negation of that same liberation: the Spanish Counter-Reformation. We must judge Cervantes and Don Quixote against this background if we are to understand his achievement fully.
II
Caught between the flood tide of the Renaissance and the ebb tide of the Counter-Reformation, Cervantes clings to the one plank that can keep him afloat: Erasmus of Rotterdam. The vast influence of Erasmus in Spain is hardly fortuitous. He was correctly seen to be the Renaissance man struggling to conciliate the verities of faith and reason, and the reasons of the old and the new. Spanish Erasmism is the subject of Marcel Bataillon’s monumental work Erasme et l’Espagne. The origins, influence, and eventual persecution of Erasmism in Spain are too important and lengthy a subject for this essay. Suffice it to remember that, as far as the formal education of Cervantes went, it was totally steeped in Erasmus, through the agency of his Spanish disciple, Juan López de Hoyos, the early and ascertained tutor of the author of Don Quixote.
The influence of Erasmian thought on Cervantes can be clearly perceived in three themes common to the philosopher and the novelist: the duality of truth, the illusion of appearances, and the praise of folly. Erasmus reflects the Renaissance dualism: understanding may be different from believing. But reason must be wary of judging from external appearances: “All things human have two aspects, much as the Silenes of Alcibiades, who had two utterly opposed faces; and thus, what at first sight looked like death was, when closely observed, life” (In Praise of Folly). And he goes on to say: “The reality of things … depends solely on opinion. Everything in life is so diverse, so opposed, so obscure, that we cannot be assured of any truth.”
Erasmus promptly gives his reasoning a comic inflection, when he smilingly points out that Jupiter must disguise himself as a “poor little man” in order to procreate little Jupiters.
Comic debunking thus serves the unorthodox vision of double truth, and it is evident that Cervantes opts for this Aesopian shortcut in creating the figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, for the former speaks the language of universals, and the latter that of particulars; the knight believes, the esquire doubts; and each man’s appearance is diversified, obscured, and opposed by the other’s reality: if Sancho is the real man, then he is, nevertheless, a participant in Don Quixote’s world of pure illusion; but if Don Quixote is the illusory man, then he is, nevertheless, a participant in Sancho’s world of pure reality.
It is one of the most brilliant paradoxes in the history of thought that Erasmus, in an age enamored of divine reason, should write, of all things, a praise of folly. There was, however, method in this madness. It is as though Erasmus had received an urgent warning from reason itself: Let me not become another absolute, such as faith was in the past, for I will then lose the reason of my reason. The Erasmian folly is a doubly ironical operation: it detaches the fool, simultaneously, from the false absolutes and the imposed verities of the medieval order; yet it casts an immense doubt on reason itself. Pascal would one day write: “Les hommes sont si nécessairement fous que ce serait être fou par un autre tour de folie de n’être pas fou.”
This Pascalian turn of the screw of reason is precisely what Erasmus is driving at: if reason is to be reasonable, it must see itself through the eyes of an ironical madness, not its opposite but its critical complement; if the individual is to assert himself, then he must do so with an ironical conscience of his own ego, or he will flounder in solipsism and pride. The Erasmian folly, set at the crossroads of two cultures, relativizes the absolutes of both: this is a madness critically set in the very heart of Faith, but also in the very heart of Reason. The madness of Erasmus is a questioning of man by man himself, of reason by reason itself, and no longer by God, sin, or the Devil. Thus relativized by critical and ironical folly, Man is no longer subjected to Fate or Faith; but neither is he the absolute master of Reason.
How do the spiritual realities reflected on by Erasmus translate into the realm of literature? Perhaps Hamlet is the first character to stop in his tracks and mutter three minuscule and infinite words that suddenly open a void between the certain truths of the Middle Ages and the uncertain reasoning of the brave new world of modernity. These words are simply that: “Words, words, words…” and they both shake and spear us because they are the words of a fictional character reflecting on the very substance of his being. Hamlet knows he is written, represented, and represented on a stage, whereas old Polonius comes and goes in agitation, intrigues, counsels, and deports himself as if the world of the theater truly were the real world. Words become acts, the verb becomes a sword, and Polonius is pierced by Hamlet’s sword: the sword of literature. Words, words, words, mutters Hamlet, and he does not say it pejoratively: he is simply indicating, without too many illusions, the existence of a thing called literature: a new Literature that has ceased to be a transparent reading of the divine Verb or the established social order, but has been unable to become a sign reflecting a new human order as coherent or indubitable as the religious and social orders of the past.
Perhaps it is not fortuitous that Don Quixote, King Lear, and Macbeth should all bear the same date of birth, 1605: two old fools and a young assassin appear simultaneously on the stage of the world to dramatize this transition of two ages of the world. Macbeth, as G. Wilson Knight has observed, is a drama written with question marks, from the moment the Witches ask themselves, “When shall we three meet again?” to the moment when Macbeth prepares to die, “Why should I … die on mine own sword?”, passing through the central questions of the play, “Is this a dagger which I see before me?” and “Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” And Lear is a drama of magnificent metaphors derived from a tumultuous universe, where stars and eclipses, planetary influences and the government of our state by the heavenly bodies mix with the images of the dislocated terrestrial elements: drama of rain and fire, of fog and thunder. And in the center of this tempest of heaven and earth, accompanied only by a Fool, struts an abandoned old man, incapable of learning more than he knows already, assimilated to a sorrowful and solitary world of nature.