It is through this ethical stance that Cervantes struggles to bridge the old and new worlds. If his critique of reading is a negation of the rigid and oppressive features of the Middle Ages, it is also an affirmation of ancient values that must not be lost in the transition to the modern world. But if Don Quixote is also an affirmation of the modern values of the pluralistic point of view, Cervantes does not surrender to modernity either. It is at this juncture that his moral and literary vision fuses into a whole. For if reality has become plurivocal, literature will reflect it only in the measure to which it forces reality to submit itself to plural readings and in multiple visions from variable perspectives. Precisely in the name of the polyvalence of the real, literature creates reality, adds to reality, ceases to be a verbal correspondence to verities unmovable, or anterior to reality. Literature, this new printed reality, speaks of the things of the world; but literature, in itself, is a new thing in the world.
As if he foresaw all the dirty tricks of servile literary naturalism, Cervantes destroys the illusion of literature as a mere copy of reality and creates a literary reality far more powerful and difficult to grapple with: the reality of a novel is its existence at all levels of the critique of reading. The moral message of Don Quixote, instead of being imposed from above by the author, thus passes through the sieve of the multiple readings of multiple readers who are reading a work that is criticizing its own artistic and moral propositions. By rooting the critique of creation in the creation itself, Cervantes lays claim to being one of the founders of the modern imagination. Poetry, painting, and music will later demand an equal right to be themselves and not docile imitators of a reality that they ill serve by reproducing it. Art will not reflect more reality unless it creates another reality.
Through his paper character Don Quixote, who integrates the values of the past with those of the present, Cervantes translates the great themes of the centerless universe and of individualism triumphant, yet awed and orphaned, to the plane of literature as the axis of a new reality. There will be no more tragedy and no more epic, because there is no longer a restorable ancestral order or a universe univocal in its normativity. There will be multiple levels of reading, capable of testing the multiple layers of reality.
IV
It so happens that this rogue, convicted galley slave, and false puppeteer, Ginés de Pasamonte, alias Ginesillo de Parapilla, alias Master Pedro, is writing a book about his own life. “Is the book finished?” asks Don Quixote. And Ginés answers him: “How can it be, if my life isn’t over yet?”
This is Cervantes’s last question: Who writes books and who reads them? Who is the author of Don Quixote? A certain Cervantes, more versed in grief than in verse, whose Galatea has been read by the priest who scrutinizes Don Quixote’s library, burns the books he dislikes in an immediate auto-da-fé, and then seals off the hidalgo’s library with brick and mortar, making him believe it is the work of magicians? A certain de Saavedra, mentioned by the Captive with admiration because of the acts he accomplished, “and all of them for the purpose of achieving freedom”?
Cervantes, like the character Don Quixote, is read by other characters of the novel Don Quixote, a book without an original author and, almost, a book without a destiny, a book that agonizes in the act of being born, reanimated by the papers of the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli, which are then translated into Spanish by an anonymous Moorish translator and which will be the object of the abject apocryphal version of Avellaneda … The endless circle of reading and writings winds itself anew: Cervantes, author of Borges; Borges, author of Pierre Ménard; Pierre Ménard, author of Don Quixote; Don Quixote, author of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
Cervantes leaves open the pages of a book where the reader knows himself to be read and the author knows himself to be written and it is said that he dies on the same date, though not on the same day, as William Shakespeare. It is further stated that perhaps both were the same man. Cervantes’s debts and battles and prisons were fictions that permitted him to disguise himself as Shakespeare and write his plays in England, while the comedian Will Shaksper, the man with a thousand faces, the Elizabethan Lon Chaney, wrote Don Quixote in Spain. This disparity between the real days and the fictitious date of a common death spared world enough and time for Cervantes’s ghost to fly to London in time to die once more in Shakespeare’s body. But perhaps they are not really the same person, since the calendars in England and Spain have never been the same, in 1616 or in 1987.
But then again, if not the same person, maybe they are the same writer, the same author of all the books, a wandering polyglot polygraphist named, according to the whims of the times, Homer, Vergil, Dante, Cide Hamete Benengeli, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Sterne, Defoe, Goethe, Poe, Dickens, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Proust, Kafka, Borges, Pierre Ménard, James Joyce … He is the author of the same open book which, like the autobiography of Ginés de Pasamonte, is not yet finished because our lives are not yet over, “With other words, Mallarmé will one day say the same thought as the rogue of Parapilla: “A book neither begins nor ends; at the most, it feigns to…”
Cervantes wrote the first open novel as if he had read Mallarmé. He proposes, through the critique of reading that seems to start with the hidalgo’s reading of the epics of chivalry and seems to end with the reader’s realization that all reality is multi-leveled, the critique of creation within creation. Don Quixote’s in temporal and, at the same time, immediate quality derives from the nature of its internal poetics: it is a split poem that converts its own genesis into an act of fiction: it is the poetry of poetry (or the fiction of fiction), singing the birth of the poem, narrating the origin of the very fiction we are reading.
Gaston Bachelard has written that all great writers know that the world wants literature to be everything and to be something else: philosophy, politics, science, ethics. Why this demand, asks the French thinker. Because literature is always in direct communication with the origins of the spoken being, at that very core of speech where philosophy, politics, ethics, and science themselves become possible.
But when science, ethics, politics, and philosophy discover their own limitations they appeal to the grace and disgrace of literature to go beyond their insufficiencies. Yet they only discover, along with literature itself, the permanent divorce between words and things: the separation between the representative uses of language and the experience of the being of language.
Literature is the utopian operation that would like to reduce that distance. When it simply disguises the divorce, it is called epic. When it reveals it, it is called novel or poetry. Such is the novel and the poem of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance in his struggle to make words and things coincide. Don Quixote finds out, as we all do in our lives, that things do not belong to all; but words do. Words are like air: they belong to all or to no one. Language is the first and most natural instance of common property. If this is so, then Miguel de Cervantes is only the owner of his words in the same measure that he is not Miguel de Cervantes but all men: like Joyce’s Dedalus, he is the poet, singing the uncreated conscience of his race, mankind. The poet is born after his act, the poem. The poem creates its author, much as it creates its readers. The final description of Cervantes’s critique of reading is this simple, lapidary statement: Don Quixote, written by everybody, read by everybody.