is not, like the Homeric bard, a central component of an organisation where each one is, by virtue of tradition, both the protégé and the protector of order, but a solitary individual, answerable to no-one but himself, without any faith other than his experience, without any guide other than his intuition.
This reminds one of Walter Benjamin's remarks on the difference between the novel and its predecessor, the oral tale:
What differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature — the fairy tale, the legend, even the novella — is that it neither comes from oral tradition nor goes into it. This distinguishes it from storytelling in particular. The storyteller takes what he tells from experience — his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. To write a novel means to carry the incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life.
And he at least understands Don Quixote's role in the transition from the world of the story-teller to the world of the novelist: ‘Even the first great book of the genre, Don Quixote, teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness of one of the noblest of men, Don Quixote, are completely devoid of counsel and do not contain the slightest scintilla of wisdom.’
And just as the book tells us of the onset of the hero's madness and attributes it to his reading too many books on chivalry, so it describes its passing. At the end, as he lies dying, Don Quixote finally admits to himself, and to those around him, that he has been mistaken all along, and he dies recognising the folly of his quest, the madness of his desire to find meaning in everything in the world. But by this time, of course, as with the Prologue, his life has been lived and the book of his adventures completed.
Just as the discovery of the figure of Panurge, a little way into Pantagruel, the first of the five books to be written by Rabelais, seems to have freed Rabelais to pursue his epic and encyclopaedic ambitions with a free heart, so the invention of the Knight of the Mournful Countenance seems to have allowed Cervantes to move from the lazy and sluggish author unable and unwilling even to write a Prologue, to the writer we know and love. His insight lay in his grasp of how Don Quixote's invention of himself, his forcing himself into a role to be played for the duration of his life, both is and need not be (quite) a mirror of the writer's. At the end the poor knight cannot keep it up, and at his death has to admit that he behaved like a fool, that there were no real grounds for any of his actions. The writer admits as much from the start as we have seen. The extraordinary quality of the book, what gives it its status as both the first novel and the first anti-novel, depends on the fact that by doing so he allows the book to keep moving and the nature of the hero's character and adventures to see the light of day. The real protagonists, though, are the writer and the reader, who both undergo adventures enough to last them a lifetime, even if neither ever quite understands what these are.
3. Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom
One cannot look at Dürer's
Melencolia I
or read a chapter of Rabelais or Cervantes without sensing that they knew in their bones that they were living through a period of decisive change. Every major artist of the time sensed this, but most, from Leonardo to Michelangelo, from Petrarch to Spenser, saw only the opening up of new possibilities as older traditions crumbled and were swept away. The repressive tyranny of the Church was being destroyed and Protestantism had got rid of old superstitions while Humanism gave the individual a new freedom to express himself — that at least is the myth that was perpetuated by both Protestantism and Humanism, and one that in its simplicity and apparent self-evidence still shapes the popular imagination. Throughout the last century, though, and often under the impetus of Modernism itself, this picture has slowly been eroded. It now seems clear that what happened was that Protestantism and Humanism between them brought into being the world picture that was to dominate the following three centuries, a picture that seemed to explain everything and that propelled Europe into leading the world in science and technology, but that really was only
a
picture of the world. Artists who felt ill at ease in the dominant traditions started to look behind that picture to the Middle Ages or beyond it to Africa, Japan or Bali, while historians, anthropologists and cultural analysts began to discover that cultures other than the dominant one were anything but benighted and barbaric, were in fact highly sophisticated and rich in tradition, though the premises on which their world pictures were based were radically different from those of the West.
As historians have increasingly been showing, and as I suggested in my discussion of the two Dürer engravings, the disenchantment of the world was not something that happened overnight, or even in the decade between 1517 and 1527. Things were quite different with the French Revolution. No-one in Europe had any doubt that something decisive, whether wonderful or terrible, had happened in 1789. What the Revolution did was give everyone the sense that even the most ordinary life could be changed. You were not stuck for ever in the place or the role into which you had been born. Everyone was now equal and everyone, in principle, had equal opportunities. By the time Napoleon was crowned Emperor not only did every soldier feel that he had a field-marshal's baton in his knapsack, every citizen felt that he too could be Emperor. ‘Among the eminent persons of the nineteenth century,’ wrote Emerson many years later, ‘Bonaparte.. owes his predominance to the fidelity with which he expresses the tone of thought and belief, the aims of the masses of active and cultivated men.’ He owed his success, Emerson continues, entirely to the fact that he asked help of no-one, that he did things his own way. ‘I should have done no good if I had been under the necessity of conforming to the notions of another person,’ he quotes Napoleon as saying in 1796. In a world run by kings and rulers who had inherited their power and wealth, and who had no idea how to use it or what to do, ‘here was a man who in each moment and emergency knew what to do next’.
In the plenitude of his resources, every obstacle seemed to vanish. ‘There shall be no Alps,’ he said; and he built his perfect roads, climbing by graded galleries their steepest precipices, until Italy was as open to Paris as any town in France … Having decided what was to be done, he did that with might and main. He put out all his strength. He risked everything and spared nothing, neither ammunition, nor money, nor troops, nor generals, nor himself.
Unfortunately such a combination of qualities is rare; besides, there is only room for one emperor at any one time. What happened in post-Napoleonic Europe was that educated and ambitious young men found themselves in menial employment as badly paid tutors to the children of aristocrats, or as minor civil servants, when in their heart of hearts they felt it was their destiny to be Napoleons. That is the fate of Stendhal's Julien Sorel. Above all it is the fate of Dostoevsky's characters. In Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment, it is quite explicit: he is nobody, he cannot even earn enough to help his family, yet he senses that he is destined for great things, that he is a second, Russian, Napoleon. (The hero of The Adolescent wants to ‘become Rothschild’ — the principle is the same, for in the imagination of nineteenth-century Europe Rothschild was to finance as Napoleon was to war.) In the end, as the examining magistrate, Porphyry, explains to him, he murdered the old money-lender and almost asked to be caught for the simple reason that, like the rest of us, he prefers to be someone, even a murderer, than no-one at all. For the reverse side of the French Revolution was that, coinciding as it did with the growth of urbanisation and the drift to the cities, people who had once had a clear if lowly place in life, as farmers, masons, farriers or parish priests, now had none. That is the trouble with Dostoevsky's Underground Man. He wants to be pushed into the gutter because that will at least give him a sense that he exists, whereas living anonymously in the indifferent spaces of the modern city, he is not even sure that he does. That is the trouble with Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, those tragic heroines of the post-Napoleonic age who are prepared to destroy their lives and those of the human beings close to them in order to feel they are alive. That is the trouble with Melville's Bartleby. He becomes a copyist in Wall Street but something in him rejects everything that that district, in the 1850s, is starting to stand for. Soon he stops even pretending to copy for his employer, and, when asked why, merely says: ‘I would prefer not to.’ In the end, of course, he is driven out of Wall Street and eventually dies, alone and unmourned, in the great cold metropolis of New York, that monument to the twin gods of the nineteenth century, Capital and Progress.