The surprisingly modern Don Quixote

Ivor Starkey finds that the 17^th Spanish classic still has much to teach us in the high-tech 21^st century.

“And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,

Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain.” (G.K Chesterton, Lepanto)

I was in a restaurant in the Cantabrian mountains, eating lunch with two elderly Spanish family friends. They asked me what I was reading, and I held up the weighty orange tome so they could see the words on the cover. “Ah”, they said with a moment of reverence, “Don Quixote.”

They began to explain to me how between the two covers of Cervantes’ epic was contained the essence of what it meant to be Spanish. How the ubiquitous figures of the gangly knight and the portly squire symbolise two extremes, opposing poles in the Spanish national character. This was the beginning of my relationship with the world’s first modern novel, and it has since then continued to lead me down many a merry path.

El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha is one of the world’s most widely translated books, 10^th on the list according to Wikipedia. In 2002, a group of around 100 of the most famous contemporary authors voted the Quixote ‘the most meaningful book of all time’, amongst them Salmon Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer and Seamus Heaney.

Literary critics have, since the work’s publication, struggled to reconcile themselves with its gratuitous violence and (spoiler alert) tragic ending – in which the Don is cured of his madness on his deathbed.

The American literary critic Harold Bloom understood Quixote’s insanity as a rejection of Freud’s reality principle, a neurosis which suggests the Don’s overwhelming fear of death. Quixote cannot accept reality as it is. Because of this mental disturbance, he finds himself pursuing some form of transcendent glory – perhaps even a share in the literary fame of his creator.

It’s easy for us in the Anglophone world to neglect Don Quixote. No wonder: at first glance, it’s a story about two half-wits rampaging across the Spanish meseta. It can be dismissed a low-brow comedy.

Whilst there is no denying the half-wittedness of the protagonists, the Quixote has much to offer the dissuaded or spiritually weary and is a precious jewel for those who feel lost upon the tides of the modern world.

Cervantes wrote in a period of great change. Since the end of the seven-century-long Reconquista, Spain had become an imperial power. The Jews and Muslims who had lived under Moorish rule in Al-Andalus had been expelled or forcibly converted. The Americas had been conquered and the gold of the Incas was being transported back to the Peninsula. Plus Ultra or ‘Ever Beyond’ was the expansionist motto embraced by the Spanish monarchs, and alongside it, the Christian Cross was the symbol used to justify the conquest of the Americas, and the beginnings of the slave trade.

But such expansion brought with it social upheaval, with widening inequality, religious nationalism and the rise of a new merchant class. The peoples of Europe were transitioning into modern nations and the old Catholic civilisation had come to an end with the Protestant Reformation.

This was, above all, a period of desengaño, or disenchantment.

Yet this time is not too dissimilar from our own, despite the centuries between. The humanistic and democratic ideals of the Enlightenment have been undermined and hollowed out. In the UK – and across the world – belief in the democratic process is waning. Conflicts in Europe, Africa and the Middle East suggest that states are no longer afraid of international mores and will now unabashedly pursue their own self-interests.

It may seem odd then to suggest that a 17^th century comedic novel written for the masses may hold any consolation for us in the world of plastic, climate change and AI.

But like us, Cervantes saw the end of a way of life. He survived and recorded the convulsions brought about in the transition to Modernity, just as we are faced with a daunting and perilous future.

The characters and landscapes of the Quixote reflect a Spain undergoing revolutionary change, and the protagonist himself stands in stark contrast to his environment. He displays a deep affection for Moorish culture, which had by Cervantes’ lifetime been crushed under the Catholic Kings.

The knight’s nostalgia for the Golden Age of Chivalry is met with derision by those whom he meets on his sallies. In Act I, Scene II, the would-be knight meets two prostitutes – a nod to the economic turmoil of the era – outside an inn. When he addresses these two ‘dissolute wenches’ as high-born maidens, and praises their virtue and beauty, they laugh in his face. His ideals belong to a different time, a different world. They seem absurd in the harsh, cruel and repressive society he lives in.

Everywhere the Don goes he is met with similar disdain and disbelief. He subscribes to a vision of the Christian warrior, who has his mind set on the transcendent and eternal rather than the trivial and worldly:

“We knights errant, Christian and Catholic, must be more concerned with the life to come, to be enjoyed throughout eternity in the ethereal and celestial regions, than with the vanity of the fame that can be achieved in this present transient life.” (Act II, Chapter VIII)

What the Quixote knows is the absurd aspect of faith, the recognition that belief can appear essentially ridiculous, rather than the arrogant assuredness of fanaticism.

Religion can seem une belle folie, and it is the occasional moments of doubt that can lead to light-heartedness and liberality.

 Don Quixote is a man at arms, a warrior and not a priest, and he represents the jovial and good-spirited aspect of faith. As always, the great conflict is within us. Other world religions, such as Islam, also know this truth, with their distinction between the lesser, outer jihad and the greater, inner sacred war.

His is not the saint’s path, W.H Auden suggested, but that of the Holy Soldier. His violent outbursts and dreams of conquering cities are tempered by a profoundly Christian temperament and a nostalgia for the traditions of the Middle Ages. Such beliefs are surely as at odds with our 21^st way of life as they were foreign in 17^th century La Mancha. 

However, upon his deathbed, the Don is apparently cured of his affliction. He denounces his adventures, and apologises to the faithful Sancho for dragging him along on his quest:

“And turning his face towards Sancho he said: ‘Forgive me, my friend, for making you seem mad, like me, and for making you fall into my own error of believing that knights errant ever have existed or do exist.’” (Act II, Chapter LXXIV)

But his adventures were real – he really did live as a knight errant, albeit in an age unsuited to such characters. Quixote’s moment of doubt before his death is wonderfully and distinctly Christian; it is the same as Christ’s call to his Father upon the Cross.

The figure of Don Quixote is a necessary one for our times. He represents the maddening, doubting, absurd aspect of faith as opposed to unthinking, smug certainty. As more and more people return to religion, we can only hope that it is the wandering and free-spirited Christianity of Don Quixote that is turned to, and not some false and brutal aberration.

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