Don Quixote and Picrochole are distant cousins, and both are also, as it happens, closely related to Cervantes and Rabelais. Don Quixote's madness makes of him a kind of fundamentalist, someone who is determined to find meaning in a world where it is difficult for the rest of us to see it. As with the fundamentalist, the person who is convinced that Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays, or the anti-Semite, nothing crosses his consciousness that cannot be seen in the terms in which he has chosen to view the world. If a giant turns out to be a windmill, or his beloved Dulcinea a peasant girl, that is only because enchanters have been fiddling with the way the world appears; in reality he knows they are of course a giant and Dulcinea. But, as Cervantes is fully aware, there is a sense in which windmills, peasant girls, giants and Dulcinea are all equally unreal, all the products of one man's imagination, and to take fictional windmills and peasant girls as being real is as much of a leap of faith as to take them as being giants and Dulcinea.
Don Quixote's madness dramatises for us the hidden madness in every realist novel, the fact that the hero of every such novel is given a name merely in order to persuade us of his reality, and that he has giants created for him to do battle with and Dulcineas for him to fall in love with simply to satisfy the demands of the narrative. And it dramatises the way we as readers collude in this game because we want, for the duration of our reading, to be part of a realised world, a world full of meaning and adventure, an enchanted world. It is no coincidence that the novel emerges at the very moment when the world is growing disenchanted. We need enchantment and are prepared to pay good money to get at least a dose of it. The profound irony of Don Quixote is this: that as we read about the hero's obvious delusions we believe that we are more realistic about the world than he is, less enchanted, whereas we are of course ourselves in that very moment caught in Cervantes' web and enchanted by his tale.
Or not quite. Cervantes enchants us and then, as we have seen, periodically pulls the rug (the magic carpet?) from under our feet. And he does this partly in order to remain honest and partly in order to remind us that the world is no longer enchanted. This is no easy task, because there are powerful elements within us which want to deny this. But it is a task he relishes.
Towards the end of Chapter VIII of Part I, which in Cervantes' original division of his book concluded Part I, a Basque squire picks a quarrel with Don Quixote and this quickly escalates into a full-blown fight:
Don Quixote was charging the wary Basque with his sword on high, determined to cut him in half, and the Basque, well-protected by his pillow, was waiting for him, his sword also raised, and all the onlookers were filled with fear and suspense regarding the outcome of the great blows they threatened to give each other … But the difficulty in all this is that at this very point and juncture, the author of the history leaves the battle pending, apologising because he found nothing else written about the feats of Don Quixote.
Some readers may be old enough to remember the sense of impotent outrage we used to feel when, at the climax of a film, something happened to the projector or the reel and the screen went blank, followed by the lights going on and apologies from the management together with the promise that everything would be in order soon and the film would go on. Something of that feeling now engulfs the reader of Don Quixote. This is the first we have heard about a manuscript on which the story depends, and though it has been prepared for as early as the Prologue, the sudden discovery that not only is this the case but that the manuscript has now petered out is devastating. The next chapter takes stock of the situation:
In part one of this history, we left the brave Basque and the famous Don Quixote with their swords raised and unsheathed, about to deliver two down strokes so furious that if they had entirely hit the mark, the combatants would have been cut and split in half from top to bottom and opened like pomegranates; and at that extremely uncertain point, the delectable history stopped and was interrupted, without the author giving us any information as to where the missing parts could be found.
The new author or editor, or whatever we choose to call him, now takes centre stage, telling us that this caused him no end of grief, though he was convinced that ‘it seemed impossible and completely contrary to all good precedent that so good a knight should have lacked a wise man who would assume the responsibility of recording his never-before-seen-deeds’. He concludes sadly that only Time is to blame, ‘Time, the devourer and consumer of all things, who had either hidden it away or consumed it’. However, as is the way with these things, one day when he is in the market in Toledo, a boy comes up to sell some notebooks and old papers to a silk merchant he is talking to, and he takes a look at one of them. Unfortunately it is in Arabic, so he needs a translator, but in Toledo these are not hard to find. It turns out that the book is entitled History of Don Quixote of La Mancha Written by Cide Hamete Benengeli (or, in good Castilian English, Mr Hamid Eggplant). Promptly buying the book, the ‘editor’ engages a Moriscan translator, who in barely a month and a half translates the entire history ‘just as it is recounted here’.
However, though the editor tells us that ‘no history is bad if it is true’, he also has to admit that the author was an Arab, and ‘the people of that nation are very prone to telling falsehoods’. Moreover, because they are such enemies of Spain, ‘it can be assumed that he has given us too little rather than too much’. However, in the spirit of genial obtuseness which seems to characterise him, he concludes:
In this account I know there will be found everything that could rightly be desired in the most pleasant history, and if something of value is missing from it, in my opinion the fault lies with the dog who was its author rather than with any defect in its subject. In short, its second part, according to the translation, began in this manner…
Thus we are to rely on a historian who belongs to a race of liars who is writing about one of his enemies, and on a translator who has put hundreds of pages of Arabic into Spanish in under two months. Yet such is the power of narrative that we soon forget all this, except, of course, when it suits Cervantes to remind us.
As Marthe Robert points out, and as I have been arguing, the book is not really a satire on popular romances, such as Amadis of Gaul, which at moments it purports to be. It is about our relation to tradition and about the place of art, and especially that most mysterious of arts, the art of narrative, in a world where disenchantment has eroded our confidence in the sacramental. Behind Amadis, as Robert rightly insists, looms the figure of Homer (just as behind the popular tales of the giants Rabelais parodies looms the book of Genesis). The author of Don Quixote, she says,