The contrast seems to be between a traditional florid, mendacious prologue, full of rhetoric and bearing no relation to the subject in hand, and one which is completely true to it. But what appears to happen is that if you banish the traditional preface you are left not with the truth but with nothing. Robbed of his traditional rhetoric, the writer too finds himself desocupado, without an occupation, uncomfortably aware of his body precisely because he is thrown back on himself and his private resources. This, at least is what the Prologue shows. But what it does is something quite different. For all this talk of being unable to say anything in effect constitutes a new kind of prologue, which is at one and the same time an examination of the absurdity of all prologues, a cry for help, a plea for understanding, and an unusual but effective way of starting an unusual book.
What happens when the story proper gets under way? At first all seems to be well, if by well we mean that at last the story proceeds as we expect stories to proceed. ‘Somewhere in La Mancha’, the book begins, like many a respectable and self-respecting novel, and though the next phrase is a little odd, we skim over it and find ourselves where we want to be, in the midst of a life and a world that are not our own:
Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. An occasional stew, beef more often than lamb, hash most nights, eggs and abstinence on Sundays, lentils on Fridays, sometimes squab as a treat on Sundays — these consumed three-fourths of his income. The rest went for a light woolen tunic and velvet breeches and hose of the same material for feast days, while weekdays were honored with dun-colored coarse cloth. He had a housekeeper past forty, a niece not yet twenty, and a man-of-all-work who did everything from saddling the horse to pruning the trees. Our gentleman was approximately fifty years old; his complexion was weathered, his flesh scrawny, his face gaunt, and he was a very early riser and a great lover of the hunt.
Suddenly, though, a new note is struck:
Some claim that his family name was Quixada, or Quexada, for there is a certain amount of disagreement among the authors who write of this matter, although reliable conjecture seems to indicate that his name was Quexana, but this does not matter very much to our story; in its telling there is absolutely no deviation from the truth.
Instead of happily entering into another world we are suddenly made to face up to the fact that this world comes to us filtered through ‘the authors who write of this matter’, and this intrusion of scholarly precision, far from reassuring us, only serves to fuel our anxieties. We did not open the book to be faced with this but to be swept away by a story where questions of accuracy would be suspended. For the duration of the story, at least, we wanted to be able to have total confidence in the narrator and not to have to think about whether he was, like Homer, privy to the Muses or not.
Yet we read on and are soon reassured: the phrase ‘our story’ suggests a tale honed by tradition, one belonging not to a single author but to a community, and even if we know that what we are reading is not an aural narrative told by the village story-teller but a tale invented for our delectation by one man, we find reassurance in that first person plural. Yet the bland conclusion, that ‘in its telling there is absolutely no deviation from the truth’, far from reassuring us, only raises questions about the confidence we can place in this narrator who at one and the same time tells us he ‘does not care to remember’ where exactly his hero came from, that he isn't sure of his name, and that his story is true in every respect. What, we wonder, can he possibly mean by truth?
However, the story picks up again, to present us with the central fact about ‘our hero’ — that he spent all his time reading books of chivalry, neglected the administration of his estate and in the end loses his mind, becomes ‘so convinced in his imagination of the truth of all the countless grandiloquent and false inventions he read that for him no history in the world was truer’, and then takes the final step and determines ‘both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armour and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in’. To that end he digs out an old suit of armour and polishes it up, finds a suitable name, Rocinante, for his old nag, and then, ‘having given a name, and one so much to his liking, to his horse, he wanted to give one to himself, and he spent another eight days pondering this, and at last he called himself Don Quixote’. To this he adds the suffix of ‘la Mancha’, ‘thereby, to his mind, clearly stating his lineage and country and honouring it by making it part of his title’.
There is something deeply unsettling about this. We do not want heroes of novels to give themselves their names; we want the author to do that. For by giving himself a name the hero of this novel opens up an uncomfortable gap between himself and his name. We grasp the name but we want to grasp the self. We know that names are arbitrary things, given by parents; but that is the point: they are given, not assumed. Only confidence men give themselves their names, but Don Quixote is anything but a con man. Who then is he? As Marthe Robert points out, by choosing a name for himself, Don Quixote brings out into the open all the contradictions that have been building up about what it is we are reading and sets the tone for the rest of the book. Don Quixote, she argues, deflects the destiny of the novel he is in, which should have been about an impoverished country gentleman in the backwoods of Castile (we can easily imagine a nineteenth-century Spanish novel of this kind) and turns it before our eyes into something much stranger and more arresting, an exploration of the nature of novels and their ontological status.
This has not been well understood. The standard view of the novel, most recently expounded by Adam Thirlwell in Miss Herbert, a book I will return to in a later chapter, is that it is a critique of idealism. The example is often taken of one of the first episodes, that of Don Quixote's freeing a boy who is being beaten by his master. He orders the man to pay the boy his wages and let him go. The man accepts but says that as he has no money on him the boy must come with him ‘and I'll pay him all the reales he deserves’. The boy protests. If I go with him, he says, he's going to beat me even harder. Don't worry, Don Quixote grandly reassures him, as long as he gives me his word you have nothing to fear. Many chapters later Don Quixote and Sancho Panza meet the boy again, and the don explains that here is a living example of ‘how important it is that there be knights errant in the world to right the wrongs and offences committed by the insolent and evil men who live in it’. The boy, however, has another view. He explains that as soon as Don Quixote had left them the man tied him up again and beat him harder than ever:
Your grace is to blame for everything, because if you had continued on your way and not come when nobody was calling you or mixed into other people's business, my master would have been satisfied with giving me one or two dozen lashes, and then he would have let me go and paid me what he owed me.
This, Thirlwell claims, is the essence of the novel, ‘the juxtaposition of chivalrously good intentions with the prose of real life’.
That is certainly one strand in it. But to see it as the main strand is to assimilate this strange and powerful novel too easily to a certain tradition, one which sees the novel as replacing the idealism of poetry with a new realism. Cervantes, like Rabelais, finds the form more troubling, as the Prologue has suggested. His stroke of genius was not the relatively obvious one of parodying, through his hero, the romances of the time, or even idealism in general, but of doing precisely what he said he had done in the Prologue, creating a hero who is in some essential way like himself. Those who see the don as an exemplar of an outdated idealism, and therefore feel comfortably superior to him, choose to disregard what Cervantes ruefully says in the Prologue: ‘I have not been able to contravene the natural order; in it, like begets like. And so what could my barren and poorly cultivated wits beget but the history of a child who is dry, withered, capricious, and filled with inconstant thoughts never imagined by anyone else?’ The critique of idealism we find in the novel is so troubling precisely because the primal idealisation is the conception and execution of the very work in which the critique is made.