By Pedro Blas Gonzalez.
Plainness, Sancho, for all affectation is bad (Llaneza, Sancho, que toda afectación es mala).
– Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes addresses perennial concerns about human nature and reality, the snare of confusing appearance with reality, man’s quest for love, and reflections on life and death with a timeless, melancholic embrace of beauty. Cervantes makes the passage of time and man’s often overzealous regard for the world a picaresque, devil-may-care, animated puppet theater. This is true of his shorter Novelas Ejemplares (Exemplary Novels); Don Quixote displays Cervantes’ philosophical and literary perspicuity and acumen.
Don Quixote makes life the protagonist. The affirmation of life is truly Don Quixote’s quest. The venerable knight-errant seeks more than life from his life. He is a man who does not want to squander the time that he is allotted to live, thus concocts a plan that aims to squeeze from life nectar that is sweeter than life itself.
Granted, the affirmation of life and the quest to demand more than life from the immediacy of lived experience can at times exhaust itself in disappointment and disenchantment. That is a risk that people who seek more than life from life must recognize and appropriate. Don Quixote is cognizant of this.
To embrace more than life, Alonso Quijano, a homely man who is enamored of reading and learning, especially books of chivalry, must transform himself into Don Quixote, the “ingenious hidalgo from La Mancha.”
Quijano becomes aware that his life has become the object of heightened thought and reflection, something he had never considered before. Don Quixote turns the novelty and exploration of the La Mancha region of Spain into an existential justification of life. It is a significant detail of Cervantes’ literary masterpiece that Quijano is a man close to fifty years of age and not a budding young romantic, though the author informs readers that he is “of a robust constitution.”
Don Quixote’s strong will—his robust Spanish constitution and temperament—is the fuel that animates his trek through the dusty open plains of La Mancha. His mature age has prepared Don Quixote for a life-plan that, while it may appear idealistic to readers, equips the knight-errant-to-be with the wisdom of lived experience and knowledge of the human condition that carries him and Sancho Panza through their seemingly endless array of thorny situations. Don Quixote’s wisdom, which is strengthened by Sancho’s quick wit and proverbs, which become more pronounced as the novel develops, enables both men to return home.
Alonso Quijano, who is soon to transform himself into Don Quixote, plans to do battle with the scoundrels that bring unhappiness to righteous people, right the “wrongs” of the world, and other contingencies that the region of La Mancha throws at him.
La Mancha symbolizes the world for the venerable knight-errant. Don Quixote’s exploration of the arid plateau that is Spain’s La Mancha region unites Cervantes’ love of books and reading and the life of the mind with the author’s worldly experience. We cannot forget that Miguel de Cervantes was a worldly man. As Cervantes writes, “He who reads much and travels much, sees much and knows much (“El que lee mucho y anda mucho, ve mucho y sabe mucho”).
Don Quixote exemplifies Cervantes’ awe and wonder. The Spanish author embraces the immediacy and translucence that is human existence, a sentiment that William Blake puts on display in Auguries of Innocence: “To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour.” The reflective Don Quixote devises a life plan, an existential concept that many subsequent Spanish thinkers explore, including Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset.
To want more than life from life is equivalent to desiring a justification for life; Don Quixote is marred by the tension between life, as lived experience, and our capacity for self-reflection. We must not confuse the capacity for existential self-reflection with mere reason. Reason alone does not satiate Don Quixote’s attitude toward life. Reason does not assuage the existential inquietude that Don Quixote desires to satisfy.
Fighting windmills and seeking an imaginary romance with a girl who lives nearby, Aldonza Lorenzo, whom the knight-errant names Dulcinea del Toboso, fuels Don Quixote’s passion. Fighting windmills and assuaging Dulcinea’s unrequited love only make up a few items of Don Quixote’s animated prospectus of what it means for him to live his life as a waking dream.
Life as dream, that is, reality as suspended animation that courageous and imaginative people can discern, is a major theme in Don Quixote. We encounter this theme in other Spanish writers and thinkers, including Lope de Vega, Baltasar Gracián, Calderon de La Barca, and in Spain’s most gifted romantic poets. While Don Quixote is a poetic and lyrical novel about life as illusion, it is also a playful work that is prescient about the human condition.
Cervantes was a worldly man who lost the use of his left hand in 1571 in the Battle of Lepanto, was imprisoned by pirates in Algiers from 1575 to 1580, and worked as a commissary for the Spanish Armada between 1587 and 1588.
Miguel de Cervantes had as full a life as any writer or thinker can accommodate, live through, and retain the necessary vitality and mental clarity to commit to paper. Cervantes’ quest to joust with life makes his Spanish temperament shine through the literary conventions he developed, including his penchant for telling stories within stories and for turning the author into a participant in the action of the novel.
Cervantes was a writer, poet, and thinker. This is perhaps the most astounding aspect of his writing and life that befuddles readers and biographers alike, especially in late postmodernism, when “specialization” has such chic appeal for pampered, would-be writers and thinkers. The lyrical quality of Don Quixote highlights Cervantes’ poetic temperament as a novelist.
Being a writer and a practical man of the world, Cervantes exploits the vagaries and intricacies of life and thought. Though this is not an enviable task that most writers care to cultivate. As a thinker, Cervantes is a stoic Catholic. Setting his sight on the life of the soul, the Spanish author treats the here-and-now with guarded, even comical, disinterest. This makes him patient and perspicuous about the ways of the world and man. Though idealistic in life and love, Don Quixote does not suffer fools, as far as his relationship with other people is concerned. Don Quixote is savvy about what to expect from people.
When Don Quixote sets out to right the wrongs of the world, he takes with him a loyal farmer who lives nearby. His name is Sancho Panza. Don Quixote convinces the pudgy man that “panza” means belly in Spanish, and he should go with him because together they will live a life of adventure. Sancho Panza becomes convinced that he should accompany Don Quixote after the knight-errant promises his future companion and squire-to-be that Sancho Panza will come into the possession of an island of which he will be governor: “In the meanwhile Don Quixote was bringing his powers of persuasion to bear upon a farmer who lived near by, a good man—if this title may be applied to one who is poor—but with very few wits in his head.”
Besides becoming Don Quixote’s loyal companion, Sancho Panza is a central witness to Don Quixote’s exploits. It is Sancho Panza who keeps Don Quixote from falling into greater and graver dangers. Sancho Panza, who is supposed to be Don Quixote’s apprentice in the ways of life and the world, his sounding board for the knight errant’s timeless and life-affirming proverbs, turns out to be a quick understudy. In the second half of the novel, it is Sancho Panza who advises Don Quixote with his elaborate and witty proverbs. Don Quixote is so impressed with Sancho Panza’s witticisms that he tells his squire to use his proverbs sparingly.
Don Quixote’s deathbed scene is one of the most profound and perspicuous life-as-dream dialogues that literature has ever attained. Through Don Quixote, the knight-errant, readers glimpse life with the clarity that the passage of time brings to the lives of poets, thoughtful thinkers, and other seers. Not the least of these is Sancho Panza, who delivers timeless wisdom to Don Quixote about the meaning of human existence.
Pedro Blas González is a professor of philosophy at Barry University.
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