Thrust into history, Don Quixote is deprived of all opportunity for his imaginative action. He meets one Roque Guinart, an authentic robber, alive in the time of Cervantes. This Guinart, totally inscribed in history, was thief and contrabandist of the silver cargoes from the Indies and a secret agent of the French Huguenots at the time of the St. Bartholomew’s night massacre. Next to him and his tangible historicity, as when he sees (but does not partake in) a naval battle off Barcelona, Don Quixote has become a simple witness to real events and real characters. Cervantes gives these chapters a strange aura of sadness and disillusionment. The old hidalgo, forever deprived of his epic reading of the world, must face his final option: to be in the sadness of reality or to be in the reality of literature: this literature, the one Cervantes has invented, not the old literature of univocal coincidence that Don Quixote sprang from.
Dostoevsky calls Cervantes’s novel “the saddest book of them all”; in it, the Russian novelist found the inspiration for the figure of the “good man,” the idiot prince, Myshkin. As the novel ends, the knight of the faith has truly earned his sorrowful countenance. For, as Dostoevsky adds, Don Quixote suffers from a disease, “the nostalgia of realism.”
This phrase must give us pause. What realism are we talking about? The realism of impossible adventures with magicians, chivalrous knight-errants, and frightful giants? Exactly so. Before, everything that was written was true … even if it was a fantasy. There were no cracks between what was said and what was done in the epic. “For Aristotle and the Middle Ages,” explains Ortega y Gasset, “all things are possible that do not contain an inner contradiction. For Aristotle, the centaur is a possibility; not so for us, since biology will not tolerate it.”
And this is what Don Quixote feels such intense nostalgia for: this realism without inner contradictions. The new science, the new doubts, all the skepticisms that anachronize the faith of the knight of the unique reading, of the ambassador of the licit reading, cross Don Quixote’s path and undermine his illusions. But above all, what shatters the monolith of the old realism Don Quixote yearns for are the plural readings, the illicit readings to which he is subjected.
Don Quixote recovers his reason. And this, for a man of his ilk, is the supreme folly: it is suicide. When he accepts conventional “reality,” Don Quixote, like Hamlet, is condemned to death. But Don Quixote, thanks to the critical reading invented by Cervantes in the act of founding the modern novel, shall go on living another life: he is left with no resource but to prove his own existence, not in the univocal reading that gave him his original being, but in the multiple readings that deprived him of it. Don Quixote loses the life of his nostalgic, coincidental reality but goes on living, forever, in his book and only in his book.
This is why Don Quixote is the most Spanish of all novels. Its very essence is defined by loss, impossibility, a burning quest for identity, a sad conscience of all that could have been and never was, and, in reaction to this deprivation, an assertion of total existence in a realm of the imagination, where all that cannot be in reality finds, precisely because of this factual negation, the most intense level of truth. Because the history of Spain has been what it has been, its art has been what history has denied Spain. This is equally true of the mystic poetry of San Juan de la Cruz, the baroque poetry of Luis de Góngora, Velázquez’s Meninas, Goya’s Caprichos, and the films of Luis Buñuel. Art gives life to what history killed. Art gives voice to what history denied, silenced, or persecuted. Art brings truth to the lies of history.
This is what Dostoevsky meant when he called Don Quixote a novel where truth is saved by a lie. The Russian author’s profound observation goes well beyond the relationship of a nation’s art to its history. Dostoevsky is speaking of the broader relationship between reality and imagination. There is a fascinating moment in Don Quixote when the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance arrives in Barcelona and forever breaks the bindings of the illusion of reality. He does what Achilles, Aeneas, or Sir Lancelot could never do: he visits a printing shop, he enters the very place where his adventures become an object, a legible product. Don Quixote is thus sent by Cervantes to his only reality: the reality of fiction.
The act of reading, in this manner, is both the starting point and the last stop on Don Quixote’s route. Neither the reality of what he read nor the reality of what he lived were such, but merely paper ghosts. Only freed from his readings but captured by the readings that multiply the levels of the novel on an infinite scale: only alone in the very center of his authentic, fictional reality, Don Quixote can exclaim:
Believe in me! My feats are true, the windmills are giants, the herds of sheep are armies, the inns are castles and there is in the world no lady more beautiful than the Empress of La Mancha, the unrivaled Dulcinea del Toboso! Believe in me!
Reality may laugh or weep on hearing such words. But reality is invaded by them, loses its own defined frontiers, feels itself displaced, transfigured by another reality made of words and paper. Where are the limits between Dunsinane Castle and Birnham Wood? Where the frontiers that might bind the moor where Lear and his Fool live the cold night of madness? Where, in fact, does Don Quixote’s fantastic Cave of Montesinos end and reality begin?
Never again shall we be able to know, because there will never again be a unique reading of reality. Cervantes has vanquished the epic on which he fed. He has established the dialogue between the epic hero, Achilles, Lancelot, Amadis, and the pícaro, the rogue, the blind man’s guide, Lazarillo. And in doing so, he has dissolved the severe normativity of scholastic thought and its univocal reading of the world.
Of course, Cervantes is not alone in this task of demolition; he is, legitimately, a Renaissance man in this and many other aspects. But he is also a Spaniard caught between the flux of renewal and the stagnant waters of reaction. Where others can go perilously forward to instate reason, hedonism, capitalism, the unbounded optimism of faith in unlimited progress inscribed in lineal time and a future-oriented history, Cervantes must wrestle between the old and the new with far greater intensity than, say, Descartes. And he certainly cannot face the world with the pragmatic assurance of Defoe. Robinson Crusoe, the first capitalist hero, is a self-made man who accepts objective reality and then fashions it to his needs through the work ethic, common sense, resilience, technology, and, if need be, racism and imperialism.
Don Quixote is the polar opposite of Robinson. His failure in practical matters is the most gloriously ludicrous in recorded history (perhaps it is only paralleled by the great clowns of the silent screen: Chaplin, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy …). Robinson and Quixote are the antithetical symbols of the Anglo-Saxon and Hispanic worlds.
Américo Castro, the greatest modern interpreter of Spanish history, has defined it as “the story of an insecurity.” France, he goes on to say, has assimilated its past, at the price of maximal sacrifices, through the categories of rationalism and clarity; England, through those of empiricism and pragmatism. The past is not a problem for the Frenchman or the Englishman. For the Spaniard, it is nothing but a problem; the latent strains of its multiple heritages — Christian, Muslim, and Jewish — throb unresolved in the heart and mind of Spain. The Spanish ethos oscillates violently between exaltation and passivity, but always in relation to a transcendental mission which divorces and opposes the absolute values of life or death, the temporal or the eternal, honor or dishonor. Spain has been unable to participate in modern European values, defined by a rational articulation between the objective world and the subjective being. Her capacities for political and economic efficiency have been nil; her scientific and technical prowess, scarce; but her capacity for art has been absolute.