But the very next level of reading in the novel Don Quixote starts to undermine this illusion. In his third outing, Don Quixote finds out, through news that the Bachelor Sansón Carrasco has transmitted to Sancho, that there exists a book called The Most Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha. “They mention me,” Sancho says in marvelment, “along with our lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and many other things that happened to us alone, so that I crossed myself in fright trying to imagine how the historian who wrote them came to know them.” Things that happened to us alone. Before, only God could know them; only God was the final knower and judge of what went on in the recesses of our conscience. Now, any reader who can pay the cover price for a copy of Don Quixote can also find out: the reader thus becomes akin to God. Now the Dukes can prepare their cruel farces because they have read the first part of the novel Don Quixote. Now Don Quixote, the reader, is read.
On entering the second part of the novel, Don Quixote also finds out that he has been the subject of an apocryphal novel written by one Avellaneda to cash in on the popularity of Cervantes’s book. The signs of Don Quixote’s singular identity suddenly seem to multiply. Don Quixote criticizes Avellaneda’s version. But the existence of another book about himself makes him change his route and go to Barcelona so as to “bring out into the public light the lies of this modern historian so that people will see that I am not the Don Quixote he says I am.”
This is surely the first time in literature that a character knows that he is being written about at the same time that he lives his fictional adventures. This new level of reading is crucial to determine those which follow. Don Quixote ceases to support himself on previous epics and starts to support himself on his own epic. But his epic is no epic, and it is at this point that Cervantes invents the modern novel. Don Quixote, the reader, knows he is read, something that Achilles surely never knew. And he knows that the destiny of Don Quixote the man has become inseparable from the destiny of Don Quixote the book, something that Ulysses never knew in relation to the Odyssey. His integrity as a hero of old, safely niched in a previous, univocal and denotative epic reading, is shattered, not by the galley slaves or the scullery maids who laugh at him, not by the sticks and stones he must weather in the inns he takes to be castles or the grazing fields he takes to be battlegrounds. His faith in his epical readings enables him to bear all the batterings of reality. But now his integrity is annulled by the readings he is submitted to.
It is these readings that transform Don Quixote, the caricature of the ancient hero, into the first modern hero, observed from multiple angles, scrutinized by multiple eyes that do not share his faith in the codes of chivalry, assimilated to the very readers who read him, and, like them, forced to re-create “Don Quixote” in his own imagination. A double victim of the act of reading, Don Quixote loses his senses twice. First, when he reads. Then, when he is read. Because now, instead of having to prove the existence of the heroes of old, he is up to a much, much tougher challenge: he must prove his own existence.
And this leads us to a further level of reading. A voracious, insomniac reader of epics he obsessively wants to carry over to reality, Don Quixote fails miserably in this, his original purpose. But as soon as he becomes an object of reading, he begins to vanquish reality, to contaminate it with his mad reading: not the reading of the novels of chivalry, but the actual reading of the new novel, Don Quixote. And this new reading transforms the world, for the world, more and more, begins to resemble the world contained in the pages of the novel Don Quixote.
In order to mock Don Quixote, the world disguises itself with the masks of Don Quixote’s obsessions. Yet, can anyone disguise himself as something worse than his own self? Do not our disguises reveal our reality with greater truth than our everyday appearance? The disguised world of those who have read Don Quixote within the pages of Don Quixote reveals the undisguised reality of the world: its cruelty, its ignorance, its injustice, its stupidity. So Cervantes need not write a political manifesto to denounce the evils of his age and of all ages; he need not recur to Aesopian language; he need not radically break with the strictures of the traditional epic in order to surpass it: he dialectically merges the epic thesis and the realistic antithesis to achieve, within the very life and logic and necessity of his own book, the novelistic synthesis. No one had conceived this polyvalent creation within a book before him; not Tasso’s mock heroics, not the picaresque’s stark documentary, not Rabelais’s gargantuan, insatiable, terrifying affirmation of the surfeit energy of the world pitted against the vacuum of heaven.
Don Quixote, the knight of the faith, meets a faithless world: both no longer know where the truth really lies. Is Don Quixote really mocked by Dorotea when she disguises herself as the Princess Micomicona, or by the Bachelor Carrasco when he defies Don Quixote disguised as the Knight of the Mirrors? Is Don Quixote really fooled by the Dukes when they stage the farces of the wooden horse Clavileño, the Sorrowful Lady with her twelve bearded duennas or the government of Sancho in the Island Barataria? Or is it really Don Quixote who has mocked them all, forcing them to enter, disguised as themselves, the immense universe of the reading of Don Quixote? Perhaps this is disputable matter for psychoanalysis. What is indisputable is that Don Quixote, the bewitched, ends by bewitching the world. While he read, he imitated the epic hero. When he is read, the world imitates him.
But the price he must pay is the loss of his own enchantment.
Prodigal writer that he is, Cervantes now leads us to a further level of reading. As the world comes to resemble him more and more, Don Quixote, more and more, loses the illusion of his own being. He has been the cipher of the act of reading: a black ink question mark, much as Picasso was to draw him. But by the time he reaches the castle of the Dukes, Don Quixote sees that the castle is actually a castle, whereas, before, he could imagine he saw a castle in the humblest inn of the Castilian wayside.
The incarnation of his dreams in reality robs Don Quixote of his imagination. In the world of the Dukes, it will no longer be necessary for him to imagine an unreal world: the Dukes offer him what he has imagined in all its reality. What, then, is the sense of reading? What is the sense of books? What is their use? From then on, all is sadness and disillusionment. Paradoxically, Don Quixote is bereft of his faith at the very moment when the world of his readings is offered to him in the world of reality. His crucial passage through the castle of the Dukes permits Cervantes to introduce a triple wedge in his critique of reading. One, he is stating, is Don Quixote’s idea of an epic coincidence between his readings and his life. It is a faith born from books and totally defined by the way Don Quixote has read those books. As long as this mental coincidence is supreme, Don Quixote has no trouble coexisting with what is outside his own universe: the very fact that reality does not coincide with his readings permits him, again and again, to impose the vision of his readings on reality. But when what only pertains to his univocal readings finds an equivalent in reality, the illusion is shattered. The coherence of epic reading is defeated by the incoherence of historical facts. Don Quixote must live through this historical reality before he reaches the third and definitive level proposed by Cervantes: the level of the novel itself, the synthesis between the past Don Quixote loses and the present that annuls him.