Don Quixote does not believe that justice, social order and progress emanate from authority, but rather that they are the work of individuals who, like his models, the knights errant, and he himself, shoulder the task of making the world they live in less unjust, freer and more prosperous. That is the knight errant: an individual who, dedicated to a life of generosity, heads out on the highways to seek redress for all the evils on the planet. Authority, when it appears, hinders rather than aids this task.
Where is the authority in the Spain that Don Quixote travels around on his three sallies? We have to step out of the novel to know that the King of Spain who is alluded to on several occasions is Philip III, because within the fiction, except for a very few, fleeting appearances, such as the appearance of the governor of Barcelona when Don Quixote visits that city, the authorities are conspicuous by their absence. And the institutions that embody authority, like the Holy Brotherhood, which enforces law in the countryside, and which is alluded to on Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s journeys, are mentioned as something distant, dark and threatening.
Don Quixote has not the slightest qualm in standing up to authority and defying the laws when they go against his own conception of justice and freedom. On his first sally he confronts a rich man, Juan Haldudo, from Quintanar, who is whipping one of his servants for losing some sheep, something that, in keeping with the barbarous customs of the time, he was quite entitled to do. But the man from La Mancha considers this entitlement intolerable and he rescues the boy, thus righting what he considers to be a wrong (although, as soon as he leaves, Juan Haldudo, despite his promises to the contrary, starts beating Andrés again, leaving him half dead) (I, 4). The novel is full of episodes like this, where his individualistic and freedom-based view of justice leads the bold hidalgo to defy the established powers, laws and customs in the name of what for him is a superior moral imperative.
The adventure where Don Quixote takes his libertarian principles to almost suicidal lengths — demonstrating that his idea of freedom anticipates by some two centuries certain aspects of anarchist thinking — is one of the most famous in the novel. It is when he frees twelve criminals, including the sinister Ginés de Pasamonte, the future Master Pedro, despite the fact that the Ingenious Hidalgo is perfectly aware, from their own words, that they are all criminals, condemned to the king’s galleys (I, 22). The reasons he gives for his open defiance of authority — that it is not right that honourable men should be the executioners of other men — scarcely masks, in its vagueness, the real motivation for his behaviour which, in this regard, is utterly coherent throughout the novel. This motivation is his overwhelming love of freedom which, if he has to choose, he even places above the law, and his profound scepticism towards authority that, for him, offers no guarantee of what he calls, rather ambiguously, ‘distributive justice’, an expression that seems to imply a desire for equality, that sometimes counterbalances his libertarian ideals.
In this episode, as if to dispel even the slightest doubt as to how unbridled and free his thinking really is, he praises the office of the pimp: it is seen as an office for intelligent people, one that is very necessary in a well-ordered society. He is angry to hear that an old man has been sent to the galleys for this because, in his opinion, a pimp should have been sent there, not to row but to lead and to command. Anyone daring to rebel in such an open fashion against the political and moral correctness of the time was a unique kind of madman who, and not just when he spoke about romances of chivalry, said and did things that questioned the very roots of the society that he lived in.
The Homelands of Don Quixote
What image of Spain emerges from the pages of Cervantes’s novel? That of a vast and diverse world, without geographical borders, made up of an archipelago of communities, villages and towns, which the characters call their ‘homelands’. This is very similar to the way in which empires and kingdoms are described in romances of chivalry, even though Cervantes was supposedly ridiculing the genre in Don Quixote. (Instead, he paid them a magnificent homage, and one of his great literary achievements was to bring them up to date, preserving, through playfulness and humour, everything that could survive from the chivalric romances, and incorporating all of this into the social and artistic values of the seventeenth century, a very different period to the time when the romances had first appeared.)
On his three sallies, Don Quixote travels round La Mancha and parts of Aragon and Catalonia, but, since there are so many diverse characters and references to places and things throughout the novel, Spain appears to be much larger, united in its geographical and cultural diversity, with vague borders that seem to be defined not in terms of territories and administrative districts, but rather in terms of religious boundaries. Spain ends in those vague, specifically marine, boundaries where the dominions of the Moors, the religious enemies, begin. But while Spain provides the context, the varied and inescapable limits that encompass the relatively small area that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza move around in, what is described, with great vividness and warmth, is the ‘homeland’, that concrete, human space, bounded by memory, a landscape, certain people, certain habits and customs that men and women retain in their memory as their patrimony, as the thing that best defines them. The characters of the novel travel the world, we might say, with their towns and villages on their backs. They turn up with these credentials, their ‘homelands’, and everyone can remember, with irrepressible nostalgia, these small communities where they have left loved ones, friends, family, houses and animals. When at the end of the third journey, after so many adventures, Sancho Panza catches sight of his village, he falls to his knees, visibly moved, and exclaims, ‘open your eyes, my longed-for village, and see your son Sancho Panza returning’ (II, 72).
Because, with the passage of time, this idea of the homeland would gradually disintegrate and begin to meld instead with the concept of the nation (which does not appear until the nineteenth century), we should point out that the ‘homelands’ in Don Quixote have nothing to do with, indeed they sit uncomfortably with, this abstract, general, schematic and essentially political concept of the nation. This nation is at the root of all nationalisms, a collectivist ideology that purports to define individuals through their belonging to a human conglomerate marked out as different to others by certain characteristics such as race, language and religion. This concept is poles apart from the impassioned individualism shown by Don Quixote and those who accompany him in Cervantes’s novel, a world in which ‘patriotism’ is a generous and positive feeling, of love of the land and one’s own people, an adherence to memory and the family past, and not a way of setting oneself apart, becoming exclusive and erecting barriers against ‘others’. Don Quixote’s Spain does not have borders, and it is a diverse, multicoloured world, made up of innumerable homelands, which opens up to the outside world and merges with it, and opens its doors to people who come from other parts, so long as they come in peace and can overcome the hurdle (which was insurmountable in the Counter-Reformation mentality of the period) of religion (that is, by converting to Christianity).