Don Quixote (1605)
Often we wind up English 257 with a viewing of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet (performed most likely in
1603, precisely when Cervantes was composing
Don Quixote), and while discussing
that play we often find ourselves debating the question “Is Hamlet insane?”
At first it appears a simple enough question;
he himself has told us that he will
play at being insane so that no one,
especially the king, his uncle, Claudius, will suspect that he, Hamlet, is
plotting to kill Claudius. And yet
as the play unfolds we often begin to believe that Hamlet is in fact an insane
man pretending to be a sane man who is pretending to be insane.
And we might begin with the same question concerning Don Quixote: is he insane,
or is he playing at being insane because such play brings rewards greater than
mundane sanity? Certainly this is a
question that nearly every other character in the novel will struggle with when they
meet and get to know the “Knight of Mournful Countenance”: how can such an
intelligent man be insane? Or, more
interestingly, can a man who chooses to be insane still be sane?
By the end of the novel these characters and we, the readers, are left
wondering whether we are all better off playing along with Don Quixote and
injecting large doses of insanity into our own “real” lives.
The answers to these questions, whether they concern the character of Hamlet or
of Don Quixote, are deeply connected to emerging, Renaissance or “scientific”
views not just of consciousness and “sanity” – how the mind works – but also to
radical changes in how Europeans were beginning to think of the universe and
“Truth” itself -- what is sanity, after all, other than the ability to accurately
distinguish truth from fantasy? And
in 1600, at the very peak of the Renaissance, it’s safe to say that our earlier
conceptions of “Truth” were nearly completely flipped upside down to the point
that what was once considered “true” was soon becoming thought of as “fiction”
and fantastical.
And yet, even as this revolution began, humans were realizing that these
“fictions” might be as useful as “reality”.
The
Scientific Revolution
As we’ve discussed nearly to death, around 400 BCE
Platonic Idealism
revolutionized the Classical and Christian Medieval world view.
For the next 2000 years nearly all of Western Civilization agreed with
Plato that our senses mislead us and Truth lay in an eternal, abstract “Ideal”
form associated either with mathematical philosophy or “God” and heaven.
But this slowly began to change as
Copernicus (1473 – 1543), Kepler (1571-1630) and Galileo (1564 – 1642) disproved
the traditional Aristotelian and Ptolemaic theory of geocentric (earth-centered)
universe and gradually proved the heliocentric (sun centered) universe (or, as
it turned out, small galaxy somewhere in a vast universe).
Elsewhere, for the first time in 2000 years, people began breaking the Roman and
Judeo-Christian ban on "defiling" human corpses in order to understand human
anatomy and how the human body actually functions. Andreas
Vesalius (1514-1564)
shocked Europe by publicly proving, among other radical ideas, that men and
women have the same number of ribs.
By the time of Newton's Philosophiæ
Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical
Principles Of Natural Philosophy") (1687), the revolution was nearly complete*:
mankind had proved itself capable of explaining nature's greatest mysteries
without recourse to religious belief (*arguably it is Darwin’s
On The Origin Of The Species (1859)
that completes the revolution).
This isn’t to say people gave up religion -- not at all -- but, essentially,
science inverted the Platonic theory of Truth: it
began proving that mathematics could indeed be used to formulate statements of
absolute, universal “truth” but that these “truths” were to be found
not in the abstract, elsewhere Ideal
of “God” or “Heaven” or “Divine Scripture” but in the actual “real world”, in
Plato’s “sensible” (of the senses) reality:
exactly where Plato and Christians believed they were not.
The real world was the True world and the Ideal world – be it philosophical or
religious – was increasingly problematic or even
fictional.
This isn’t to say that fictional worlds aren’t “true” but rather that they no
longer correspond to the types of factual “truth” associated with mathematics or formal
logic or what we now call “science”.
The First Novel
Don Quixote is widely believed to be the first “novel”: an
extended prose work of realism (vs. fantasy or Romance) that focuses on the
experience and/or development of the protagonist as he negotiates a “realistic”
world -- one that operates according to the laws of physics and our empirical or
scientific (vs. imaginative or spiritual) view of reality.
In the novel, action is subservient to character (the characters are more
important than what “happens”), while in the Romance and similar genres (like
the Epic), character is subservient to plot and an Ideal, or an Idealized
character living in what is essentially a fantastical world. To make sense
of this difference, consider that the character Don Quixote is in a novel, and
he has been reading Romances; we are constantly reminded of the difference
between the two genres by the fact that these Romances are not realistic (they
do not correspond to scientific understandings of the natural world) and have
therefore lead him to misunderstand this reality; this no understanding no
longer leads one toward genius but instead the opposite: idiocy.
The Novel And Post-Platonic Reality
Now, when you think about what separates the novel from other prose fiction – it
is a work of realism in which the protagonist negotiates a realistic world – it
should be clear that
the novel represents this emerging,
scientific view of reality:
now we are interested in how real – not idealized – humans operate in the
“real”—not Ideal – world, one in which
the realistic people must live lives governed by the laws of physics (as opposed to
the supernatural world of, say, Beowulf and Sir Gawain, where men hold their
breath underwater for days and others have live after their heads are lopped
off).
While Renaissance characters like Don Quixote (or Hamlet) are certainly guided
by their religious beliefs and values,
both Shakespeare and Cervantes are
interested in how those Ideals collide and conflict with the “real” world.
Platonic philosophy is about transcending reality; the novel is about being
forced to live with reality.
Augustine, Dante, Perceval and Sir Gawain are all “saved” from the sins of this
“real” world and “sensible” (sensory) knowledge by their quest toward the Ideal.
…but, in stark contrast to these Idealized heroes, this same Ideal has driven
Don Quixote insane because he (like all of us) doesn’t live in Plato’s “Ideal”;
he lives in reality.
The ideal is a fiction.
Ironically, in some ways this theme harkens back to an argument Plato makes in Chapter X of The Republic: poetry (or fiction; he’s explicitly discusses Homer) is so beautiful, so seductive, that it ultimately corrupts our understanding of the Truth, and, of course, Plato is all about the Truth. Plato believes this “Truth” is located in the Ideal, not the concrete, so-called “real” world, whereas Cervantes ironically (and perhaps intentionally, and certainly importantly), suggests that Don Quixote has been driven mad because he ignores reality in search of an unattainable Ideal. In other words, the entire comedy of Don Quixote is that the main character shows us how absurd Plato’s approach to knowledge really is.
But is there
still great wisdom in this insanity? This is perhaps the main question
Cervantes poses.
“Post-Modern” Perspectives On The Novel
But it’s not enough for Cervantes to create a new – and in many ways the most
important – way of telling stories;
in that very first novel he must also point out the problems inherent to the
novel – and therefore the scientific view of reality –
itself.
Because the character Don Quixote is no more “real” than Perceval or Sir Gawain;
all these characters are in fact, fantasy; all characters in all stories are in
fact fictional, no matter how “realistic” they appear;
Jay Gatsby or Huck Finn or Walter White are no more “real” than Achilles
or Sir Gawain or Peter Parker – Gatsby and Huck and White just
appear more realistic because the
genre is “realism”.
To put it another way, if I write a "realistic" novel about a fictional student who goes to college in Moscow, Idaho, lives in the Farm House fraternity, and drives his Ford Ranger home to Buhl to visit his family farm, that story is just as fictional as a story about a kid who lives on the moon and flies his jetpack home to his family's diamond farm: both are fiction.
And so, in this very first novel, this very first work of absolute realism,
Cervantes is careful to establish that “realism” is itself a fictive conceit:
that a realistic novel is still a work of absolute fiction, no more “real” in
the ontological, absolute sense, than is a work of absolute fantasy; he is
careful to show us, the readers of novel Don Quixote, that we have mistaken
“realism” for reality exactly as Don Quixote has mistaken Medieval Romances as
“real” and true, and he seems intent on undermining his own narrative
structure. (See
Don Quixote Discusion Questions 2)