Don Quixote’s friends in the village, who are so hostile to literary romances that they make an Inquisition bonfire of his library, resort to fiction with the pretext of curing Don Quixote of his madness: they devise and enact scenes to return the Knight of the Sorry Face to sanity and the real world. But, in fact, they achieve the opposite: the fiction begins to devour reality. Bachelor Sansón Carrasco disguises himself twice as a knight errant, the first time with the pseudonym of the Knight of the Mirrors, the second, three months later in Barcelona, when he appears as the Knight of the White Moon. On the first occasion, the deception is counterproductive because it is Don Quixote who gets his way; the second time, however, he achieves his goal, defeats Don Quixote and makes him promise to give up arms for a year and return to his village. With this, the story moves towards its end.
This ending is a rather depressing and forced anticlimax, and perhaps for that reason Cervantes finished it off so quickly, in a few pages. For there is something untoward, even unreal, in the fact that Don Alonso Quijano relinquishes his ‘madness’ and returns to reality when that reality around him has been so largely transformed into fiction. The grieving Sancho Panza (the reality man) reveals as much when he pleads with his master, on his deathbed, not to die, exhorting him to get up so that they can go into the countryside dressed as shepherds and act out, in real life, the pastoral fiction that is Don Quixote’s final fantasy (II, 74).
This process of fictionalisation of reality reaches its climax with the appearance of the mysterious, unnamed Duke and Duchess who, from chapter 31 of the second part, accelerate and multiply the transformation of daily life into theatrical and fictional fantasies. Like so many other characters, the Duke and Duchess have read the first part of the novel, and when they come across Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, they are as bewitched by the novel as Don Quixote is by romances of chivalry. And then they arrange things in such a way that in their castle life becomes fiction, and everything in it reproduces the unreality that Don Quixote is living in. For many chapters, fiction takes over from life, turning it into fantasy, a dream become reality, literature lived as life itself. The Duke and Duchess do this for their own egotistical, even despotic reasons, so that they can amuse themselves at the expense of the madman and his squire; at least, that is what they think. What happens is that the game begins to take them over and absorb them to such an extent that, later on, when Don Quixote and Sancho Panza leave for Zaragoza, they do not accept this and send out their servants and soldiers to scour the vicinity until they find them and bring them back to the castle where they have staged the fabulous funeral ceremony and purported resurrection of Altisidora. In the world of the Duke and Duchess, Don Quixote is no longer an eccentric: he is quite at home because everything around him is a fiction, from the island of Barataria where Sancho Panza finally lives out his dream of becoming a governor, to the airborne flight on the back on the artificial horse, Clavileño, the air from large bellows creating the winds through which the great man of La Mancha gallops amid clouds of illusion.
Like the Duke and Duchess, another powerful figure in the novel, Don Antonio Moreno, who offers Don Quixote lodging in Barcelona and entertains him, also puts on shows that make reality unreal. For example, he has in his house an enchanted bronze head that replies to questions, since it knows people’s pasts and their futures. The narrator explains that this is an ‘artifice’ because the so-called fortune teller is a hollow machine with enough room inside to fit a student, who answers the questions. Is this not living a fiction, turning life into a theatrical performance, just as Don Quixote does, although here done with malice, and not with his naïveté?
During his stay in Barcelona, when his host Don Antonio Moreno is taking Don Quixote around the city (with his name in large letters on a sign stuck to his back), a Castilian comes up to the Ingenious Hidalgo and says: ‘You’re a madman…but you have the ability to turn everyone who has anything to do with you mad and stupid just like you’ (II, 62).14 Don Quixote’s madness — his hunger for unreality — is contagious, and he has given those around him his appetite for fiction.
This explains the blossoming tales, the dense thicket of stories and novels that comprise Don Quixote de La Mancha. It is not just the evasive Cide Hamete Benengeli, the other narrator of the novel, who boasts that he is the mere transcriber and translator of the novel (although he is also, in fact, the editor, and takes notes and offers commentary), who reveals this passion for the fantasy life of literature, incorporating into the main story of Don Quixote and Sancho adventitious stories such as ‘The man who was recklessly curious’ and the tale of Cardenio and Dorotea. The characters also share this narrative propensity or vice which leads them, like the beautiful Morisca, or the Knight of the Green Coat, or Princess Micomicona, to tell true or invented stories, which create, through the course of the novel, a landscape of words and imagination that becomes superimposed over, and at time blots out completely, the other world, that natural landscape that seems so unreal, so bound up in commonplace forms and conventional rhetoric. Don Quixote de La Mancha is a novel about fiction in which the life of the imagination is everywhere, in the character’s actions, in the words they utter and in the very air that they breathe.
A Novel of Free Men
Just as it is a novel about fiction, so Don Quixote is a song of freedom. We should pause a minute to reflect on that very famous statement that Don Quixote makes to Sancho Panza: ‘Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts bestowed by heaven on man; no treasures that the earth contains and the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, men can and should risk their lives and, in contrast, captivity is the worst evil that can befall them’ (II, 58).
Behind this sentence, and the fictional character that utters it, we find the shadow of Miguel de Cervantes himself, who knew very well what he was talking about. The five years that he spent in captivity by the Moors in Algeria and the three times that he was imprisoned in Spain for debts and for being found guilty of discrepancies in tax accounts when he was a tax inspector in Andalucía for the Navy, must have intensified his desire for freedom and his horror at any restrictions on freedom. This background lends authenticity and power to Don Quixote’s statement and gives a particular libertarian bias to the story of the Ingenious Hidalgo.
What idea of freedom is this? The same idea that, from the eighteenth century, the so-called liberals would formulate in Europe: that freedom is the sovereignty of the individual to decide his or her life without pressure or conditions, in accordance solely with their intelligence and their wishes. That is what, several centuries later, Isaiah Berlin would term ‘negative freedom’, to be free from interference and coercion when thinking, expressing oneself and acting. What is at the heart of this idea of freedom is a profound mistrust of authority, of the excesses that power, all power, can perpetrate.
Let us not forget that Don Quixote delivers this passionate eulogy to freedom just as he has left the estate of the anonymous Duke and Duchess, where he has been regally treated by the exuberant lord of the castle, the very incarnation of power. But in the midst of all the flattery and attention that he received, the Ingenious Hidalgo felt that his freedom was imperceptibly being threatened and constrained: ‘I could not enjoy such luxuries [the gifts and attention lavished on him] with the same freedom as if they had been my own’ (II, 58). This declaration implies that the foundation of freedom is private property, and that true pleasure is only complete when the people experiencing the pleasure do not feel that they cannot take any initiative, that their freedom to think and act are being curtailed. Because, ‘the obligation to repay the benefits and favours received is a bond that prevents the spirit from campaigning freely. Happy is he to whom heaven has given a crust of bread and who is under no obligation to thank anyone for it except heaven itself.’ What could be clearer? Freedom is individual and requires a minimum level of prosperity to be real. Because people who are poor and depend on gifts or charity to survive, can never be totally free. It is true that there was a time long since past, as Don Quixote recalls to the terrified goatherds in his speech on the Golden Age (I, 11), in which virtue and goodness held sway in the world, and that in this age of paradise, before private property, ‘men living in such times did not know those words, “yours” and “mine”’, and ‘all things were held in common’. But then history changed, and ‘our detestable times’ arrived in which, for security and justice to prevail, ‘the order of knights errant was founded to defend maidens, protect widows and succour orphans and the needy’.