A Modern Book
Don Quixote’s modernity can be found in the rebellious quest for justice that leads the main character to take on, as his personal responsibility, the task of changing the world for the better even when, as he attempts to put this into practice, he makes mistakes, comes up against insuperable obstacles and is beaten, ill-treated and turned into an object of derision. But it is also a contemporary novel because, in his account of Don Quixote’s exploits, Cervantes revolutionised the narrative forms of his time and laid the foundations for the modern novel. Even if they do not know it, contemporary novelists who play with form, distort time, mix up different points of view and experiment with language, are all indebted to Cervantes.
The revolution in form that is Don Quixote has been studied and analysed from every possible standpoint, and yet, as happens with these exemplary masterpieces, it is an inexhaustible source because, like Hamlet or The Divine Comedy or the Iliad and Odyssey, it evolves with the passage of time and recreates itself in accordance with the aesthetic values of each different culture, becoming in this way a real Ali Baba’s cave, whose treasures are never-ending.
Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the narrative form of Don Quixote is the way in which Cervantes dealt with the problem of the narrator, the basic problem that any novelist must first resolve: who is going to tell the story? The answer that Cervantes gave to this question brought a subtlety and complexity to the genre which modern novelists still benefit from, and which was the equivalent in its day to the impact in our times of Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, or, in the Latin American field, of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Cortázar’s Hopscotch.
Who is telling the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? Two narrators: the mysterious Cide Hamete Benengeli, whom we never read directly because his original manuscript is in Arabic, and an anonymous narrator, who sometimes speaks in the first person but most frequently in the third person of omniscient narrators, who, supposedly, translates Cide Hamete Benengeli’s manuscript into Spanish and, at the same time, adapts, edits and comments on it. This is a Chinese box structure; the story that we are reading is contained in another, earlier and much larger structure that we can only guess at. The existence of these two narrators introduces into the story an ambiguity and a sense of uncertainty about this ‘other story’, Cide Hamete Benengeli’s account, which lends a subtle relativism to the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a subjective aura that is a key component of the autonomy, sovereignty and originality of the work.
But these two narrators, and the delicate dialectic between them, are not the only ones in this novel of compulsive storytellers and narrators: many characters take over from them, as we have seen, recounting their own misfortunes, or the misfortunes of others, in episodes that comprise a number of smaller Chinese boxes nestling within this vast world of fiction full of individual fictions that we call Don Quixote de La Mancha.
Using what was a commonplace in romances of chivalry (many of them were supposedly manuscripts discovered in exotic and strange places), Cervantes used Cide Hamete Benengeli as a device to introduce ambiguity and playfulness as central elements of the narrative structure. And he also introduced important innovations into another fundamental aspect of narrative form: narrative time.
Time in Don Quixote
Like the narrator, time is also in every novel an artifice, an invention, something constructed to meet the needs of the plot, and never a mere reproduction or reflection of ‘real’ time.
In Don Quixote, various times are masterfully woven together, giving the novel its sense of being an independent, self-sufficient world, which makes it so persuasive a narrative. On the one hand there is the time in which the characters of the story move around, which comprises roughly six months since the three sallies that Don Quixote makes last firstly for three days, then a couple of months and lastly four months. We must then add the intervals between the journeys (the second is one month) which Don Quixote spends in his village, and the final days leading up to his death, a total of seven or eight months.
But there are also episodes that greatly extend the time-frame of the novel, back into the past and forward into the future. Many of the events that we hear about throughout the story have already happened before the story began, and we learn about them through the accounts of people who took part in or witnessed these events, and see the final outcome of many of them in the ‘present time’ of the novel.
The most notable and surprising aspect of narrative time, however, is that many characters in the second part of Don Quixote, like the Duke and Duchess, have read the first part. Thus we are made aware that another reality exists, other times, outside the novel, the fiction, in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza exist as characters in a book, and where some readers are inside and others ‘outside’ the story, as is our case as present-day readers. This little ploy, which must be seen as something much more daring than a simple literary conjuring trick, has far-reaching effects with regard to the structure of the novel. It expands and multiplies the time of the fiction, which is now enclosed — another Chinese box — in a wider world in which Don Quixote, Sancho and other characters have already lived, been turned into heroes of a book and affected the readers of this ‘other’ reality, which is not exactly the reality that we are reading, and which contains this reality; just as with Chinese boxes, the larger contains the smaller, and the smaller contains another box, in a process that could, in theory, be infinite.
It is an amusing and also an unsettling game, which allows the story to be enriched by events such as those planned by the Duke and Duchess (who know, through the book they have read, of Don Quixote’s obsessions and odd behaviour). And it also illustrates the complex relationship between fiction and life, the way in which life produces fictions and how they, in turn, affect life, enlivening it, changing it, adding to it colour, adventure, emotions, passions and surprises.
The relationship between fiction and life, a recurrent theme in classical and modern literature, is explored in Cervantes’s novel in a way that anticipated the great literary adventures of the twentieth century, in which the best novelists would be tempted to investigate the enchantments of narrative form: language, time, characters, point of view and the function of the narrator.
In addition to these and many other reasons, the lasting appeal of Don Quixote is also due to the elegance and power of its style, one of the pinnacles of writing in the Spanish language. We need to speak perhaps not of one but of many styles in which the novel is written. There are two that are clearly distinguishable, corresponding to the two sides of reality that the story develops: the ‘real’ and the ‘fictitious’. In the intercalated stories, the language is much more pompous and rhetorical than in the main story, in which Don Quixote, Sancho, the priest, the barber and the other people in the village talk in a much more natural and simple way. In the added stories the narrator uses a more affected — a more literary — language, through which he achieves a distancing effect, one of unreality. Similar differences can be detected in the language used by the characters, according to the social status, level of education and occupation of the speakers. Even the popular sectors speak very differently: simple villagers are very clear, while galley slaves or city thugs use slang, like the galley slaves whose criminal slang is completely incomprehensible to Don Quixote. He himself does not use just one form of expression. Since Don Quixote, according to the narrator, only exaggerated or began raving when he talked about issues of chivalric romance, he can talk about other issues quite precisely, objectively, sensibly and intelligently. But when the topic of chivalric romance arises, he becomes an unstoppable fount of literary matters, erudite allusions, literary references and delirious fantasies. Sancho Panza’s language is equally variable. As we have seen, he changes his way of speaking during the course of the novel, starting out with a spicy, lively turn of phrase, punctuated by refrains and sayings that express a whole heritage of popular wisdom, and ending with a convoluted, elaborate style that he has picked up from his master, which can be seen as a humorous parody of the parody that is Don Quixote’s language. Cervantes rather than Sansón Carrasco should have been dubbed the Knight of the Mirrors, because Don Quixote de la Mancha is a veritable labyrinth of mirrors where everything, the characters, the artistic form, the plot, the styles, split in two and multiply, in images that express all the infinite subtlety and diversity of human life.