In fact, it is in this gap between the author’s conscious intention (which may be merely incidental) and the deeper meaning of his work that the critic can find the only legitimate ground on which to exert his craft. Chesterton put it well, in one of the introductions he wrote to Dickens’s novels:
The function of criticism, if it has a legitimate function at all, can only be one function — that of dealing with the subconscious part of the author’s mind which only the critic can express, and not with the conscious part of the author’s mind, which the author himself can express. Either criticism is no good at all (a very defensible position) or else criticism means saying about an author the very things that would have made him jump out of his boots.
The closer a book comes to being a genuine work of art, a true creation with a life of its own, the less likely it is that the author had full control over and a clear understanding of what he wrote. D.H. Lawrence, who was an exceptionally perceptive critic, summed this up in a statement I have already quoted many times but which one should never tire of invoking: “Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.”
This urge “to save the tale from the artist who created it” has proved particularly strong with the critics of Don Quixote. In fact, some of these critics have developed a most peculiar attitude: it is as if the more they come to love Don Quixote, the more they come to resent Cervantes. At first this paradox may seem far-fetched, but there is a logic to it.
Last century, when theatrical troupes went on tour in the country, performing romantic melodramas for unsophisticated village audiences, it often happened that the actor who had impersonated the villain of the play had to be protected after the show, since the local toughs would be waiting for him in order to beat him up, in punishment for all the evil deeds he had just committed so convincingly on stage. Similarly, it is because Don Quixote has become so intensely alive and real for them that some readers cannot forgive Cervantes for subjecting their hero to such a foul and savage treatment.
Or again, you can find another instance of this same phenomenon illustrated in a popular contemporary thriller. In Stephen King’s Misery (I have not read the book; I only saw the film, which is horribly funny), a best-selling author is being held captive by a female fan; distressed and angered by the fictional death of her favourite heroine, this psychopathic reader tortures the hapless author and forces him to rewrite the ending of his novel.
Now, the four modern critics of Cervantes whose views I wish briefly to survey here rank among the best literary minds of our time, and therefore — needless to say — they should have very little in common with the psychotic freak in King’s story, or with the country bumpkins who used to beat up stage villains at the back door of the theatre. And yet, as we shall see, both the sophistication of the former and the crude naïveté of the latter bear witness to the operative virtue of the same magic: the reality of fiction.
The first of the critics I shall consider is Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov gave six lectures on Don Quixote when he was a visiting lecturer at Harvard during the early 1950s.[1] When preparing his course, at first he relied upon the memory he had retained of the novel, which he had enjoyed in his youth. Soon, however, he felt the need to go back to the text — but this time, he was appalled by the crudeness and the savagery of Cervantes’s narrative. In the words of Brian Boyd, his biographer: “He detested the belly-laughs Cervantes wanted his readers to derive from his hero’s discomfiture, and he repeatedly compared the vicious ‘fun’ of the book with Christ’s humiliation and crucifixion, with the Spanish Inquisition, with modern bullfighting.”
So much did he enjoy thundering against Don Quixote in front of a large student audience that he eventually upset a number of colleagues on the faculty, and he was solemnly warned: “Harvard thinks otherwise.” When, some years later, he applied for a chair at Harvard, his candidacy was rejected, which was a bitter blow for him. Other factors were probably more significant but the Don Quixote lectures may well have had some part in this fiasco.
Nabokov always found particular enjoyment in challenging received opinions. On the subject of Don Quixote, his taste for the unconventional helped him to formulate at least one original and important observation: contrary to what most readers believe, the narrative of Don Quixote is not made up of one monotonous series of disasters. After a careful check, episode by episode, Nabokov was able to demonstrate that the issue of each adventure was actually quite unpredictable, and he even compiled the score of Don Quixote’s victories and defeats as games in a tennis match, which remained full of suspense till the very end: “6–3, 3–6, 6–4, 5–7. But the fifth set will never be played. Death cancels the match.”
His distaste for Cervantes’s sadistic treatment of Don Quixote reached such a point that he eventually excluded the book from his regular lectures on foreign literature at Cornelclass="underline" he could not bear to dwell on the subject any longer. But the corollary of his virulent hostility towards the writer was a loving admiration for his creature, which he expressed in a moving tribute:
[Don Quixote] has ridden for three hundred and fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought — and he has gained in vitality and stature. We do not laugh at him any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish, and gallant.
The second critic I wish to evoke here is Henry de Montherlant.[2] Montherlant, one of the most remarkable French writers of our century (a novelist, playwright and essayist), was deeply imbued with Spanish culture. He spent much time in Spain (he even learned and practised bullfighting); his fluent knowledge of Spanish enabled him to read Don Quixote in the original text.
He re-read the book four times during his life, and he too experienced an increasing irritation at Cervantes’s coarse treatment of a sublime character. Besides, he felt that the book was much too long and that it contained too many tasteless and cruel jokes. But this objection could be turned against itself — is this not precisely a perfect definition of life itself? Come to think of it: a story that drags on much too long and is full of tasteless and cruel jokes… Note that the worst accusations that can be directed against Cervantes always point in the end to the unique and disquieting power of his book to conjure reality.
Finally, what irked Montherlant most — what he could not forgive Cervantes for — was that, through the entire book, not once does the author express one word of compassion for his hero, or one word of blame for the vulgar bullies who relentlessly mock and persecute him. This reaction — very similar to that of Nabokov — once again reflects a paradox, now familiar to us. What infuriates the critics of Cervantes is precisely the main strength of his art: the secret of its lifelikeness. Flaubert (who, by the way, worshipped Don Quixote) said that a great writer should stand in his novel like God in his creation. He created everything and yet is nowhere to be seen, nowhere to be heard. He is everywhere and yet invisible, silent, seemingly absent and indifferent. We curse him for his silence and his indifference, which we take as evidence of his cruelty.