All the world’s a stage, and the words spoken from it are, indeed, full of sound and fury; the state of the world is undone and the actor who struts his hour upon the stage speaks wanderings orphaned words: we have lost our father, but we have not found ourselves. Words become the vehicle of ambiguity and paradox. “All is possible,” says Marsilio Ficino. “All is in doubt,” says John Donne. Between these two sentences, pronounced more than a century apart, the new literature appears as an opaque circle where Hamlet can represent his methodic madness, Robinson Crusoe his optimistic rationalism, Don Juan of Seville his secular sexuality, and St. John of the Cross his celestial eroticism: in literature, all things become possible. In the medieval cosmos, each reality manifested another reality, in accordance with symbols that were homologated in an unequivocal manner. But in the highly unstable and equivocal world that Copernicus leaves in his wake, these central criteria are forever lost.
All is possible, but all is in doubt. All things have lost their concert. In the very dawn of his humanist affirmation, the individual is assailed by the very doubts, the very criticisms, the very questioning with which Copernicus and Galileo have set free the dormant forces of the universe, expanding it to a degree such that the dwarfed individual, in response, must gigantically display his unleashed passions, his unbridled pride, the cruel uses of his political power, the utopian dream of a new city of the sun, the hunger for a new human space with which to confront the new, mute space of the universe: the spatial appetite that is evident both in the discovery of the New World and in the frescoes of Piero della Francesca.
Nothing should be refused, writes Ficino; human nature contains all and every one of the levels of creation, from the horrendous forms of the powers of the deep to the hierarchies of divine intelligence described by the mystics; nothing is incredible, nothing is impossible; the possibilities we deny are but the possibilities we ignore. The libertine and the ascetic, Don Juan and Savonarola, Cesare Borgia and Hernán Cortés, the tyrant and the adventurer, Marlowe’s Faust and Ford’s incestuous lovers, Machiavelli’s Prince and Thomas More’s Utopian traveller, rebellious intelligence and rebellious flesh, a chronophagic and omni-inclusive imagination: human faults no longer reestablish an ancestral order. They consume themselves in the self-sufficient fires of pride, passion, reason, pleasure, and power. But, even as they are won, these new realities are doubted by the critical spirit, since the critical spirit founded them.
III
All is possible. All is in doubt. Only an old hidalgo from the barren plain of La Mancha in the central plateau of Castile continues to adhere to the codes of certainty. For him, nothing is in doubt and all is possible. In the new world of criticism, Don Quixote is a knight of the faith. This faith comes from his reading, and his reading is a madness. (The Spanish words for reading and madness convey this association much more strongly: reading is lectura; madness is locura.)
Like Philip II, the necrophiliac monarch secluded at El Escorial, Don Quixote both pawns and pledges his life to the restoration of the world of unified certainty. He pawns and pledges himself, both physically and symbolically, to the univocal reading of the texts and attempts to translate this reading into a reality that has become multiple, equivocal, ambiguous. But because he possesses his readings, Don Quixote possesses his identity: that of the knight-errant, that of the ancient epic hero.
So, at the immediate level of reading, Don Quixote is the master of the previous readings that withered his brain. But at a second level of reading, he becomes the master of the words contained in the verbal universe of the book titled Don Quixote. He ceases to be a reader of the novels of chivalry and becomes the actor of his own epic adventures. As there was no rupture between his reading of the books and his faith in what they said, so now there is no divorce between the acts and the words of his adventures. Because, assimilated to Don Quixote, we read it but do not see it, we shall never know what it is that the goodly gentleman puts on his head: the fabled helm of Mambrino, or a vulgar barber’s basin. The first doubt assails us: is Quixote right, has he discovered the legendary helmet where everyone else, blind and ignorant, sees only the basin?
Within this verbal sphere, Don Quixote is at first invincible. Sancho’s empiricism, from this verbal point of view, is useless, because Don Quixote, each time he fails, immediately reestablishes his literary discourse, undiscouraged, the words always identical to the reality, the reality but a prolongation of the words he has read before and now enacts. He explains away his disasters with the words of his previous, epic readings, and resumes his career within the world of the words that belong to him.
Harry Levin compares the famous “play within the play” scene in Hamlet with the chapter on the puppet theater of Master Pedro in Don Quixote. In Shakespeare’s drama, King Claudius interrupts the mummery because imagination starts to resemble reality too dangerously. In Cervantes’s novel, Don Quixote assaults Master Pedro’s “Moorish puppetry” because representation starts to resemble imagination too closely. Claudius desires that reality were a lie: the killing of Hamlet’s father, the King. Don Quixote desires that fantasy were a truth: the imprisonment of the Princess Melisendra by the Moors.
The identification of the imaginary with the real remits Hamlet to reality, and from reality, naturally, it yields him to death: Hamlet is the envoy of death, he comes from death and goes toward death. But the identification of the imaginary with the imaginary remits Don Quixote to his books. Don Quixote comes from his readings and goes toward them: Don Quixote is the ambassador of readings. In his mind, it is not reality at all that interposes itself between his enterprises and reality: it is the magicians he knows through his readings.
We know this is not so; we know that only reality confronts the mad readings of Don Quixote. But he does not know it, and this ignorance (or this faith) establishes a third level of reading in the novel. “Look your mercy,” Sancho constantly says, “Look you that what we see there are not giants, but only windmills.” But Don Quixote does not see: Don Quixote reads and his reading says that those are giants.
Don Quixote wants to introduce the whole world within his readings, as long as these are the readings of a unique and consecrated code: the code that, since the action at Roncesvalles, identifies the exemplary act of history with the exemplary act of books. Roland’s sacrifice defended the heroic ideal of chivalry and the political integrity of Christendom. His gest shall become ideal norm and ideal form of all the heroes of the fictions of chivalry. Don Quixote counts himself among their number. He, too, believes that between the exemplary gestures of history and exemplary gestures of books there can be no cracks, for above them all stands the consecrated code that rules both, and above the code rises the univocal vision of a world structured by God. Issued from these readings, Don Quixote, each time he fails, finds refuge in his readings. And sheltered by his books, he will go on seeing armies where there are only sheep, without losing the reason of his readings: he will be faithful unto them, because he does not conceive any other licit way of reading. The synonymity of reading, madness, truth, and life in Don Quixote becomes strikingly apparent when he demands of the merchants he meets on the road that they confess the beauty of Dulcinea without ever having seen her, for “the important thing is that without having seen her you should believe, confess, swear, and defend it.” This it is an act of faith. Don Quixote’s fabulous adventures are ignited by an overwhelming purpose: what is read and what is lived must coincide anew, without the doubts and oscillations between faith and reason introduced by the Renaissance.