the nature of the fool
Please understand that when I write about romanticism or the role of the critic, my questions are urgent, not merely intellectual. I was once told that I might never be happy—I was too romantic, expecting life to be the way it is in books. This idea has troubled me since, especially because even in books, the expectation that life should be the way it is in books famously tends to work out rather badly for the protagonist, such as for Don Quixote and Emma Bovary.
I have wrestled more with Don Quixote than with Madame Bovary. I have read Madame Bovary twice but not in many, many years; the last time I tried to read it, I got to the part where Charles Bovary is considering how he might operate on Hippolyte’s club foot, read the clause it was necessary to cut the tendon of Achilles, closed the book, and never opened it again. I suppose I’ve gotten through reading about the botched surgery twice in my life already, but I haven’t yet felt up to reading about it a third time.
Don Quixote, on the other hand, I return to again and again. The novel tells the story of an aged hidalgo who read books of chivalry “until the lack of sleep and the excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad.” In his madness, he arms himself and sets off to right wrongs and win fame as a knight errant. I don’t like Don Quixote himself, but I very much enjoy the ironic, multilayered, polyvocal novel that tells his tale—and so many other tales as well.
My favorite part of the novel is the second sally, or expedition, which comprises most of Part I, first published in 1605. (Part II was published ten years later and is set a world in which everyone whom Don Quixote meets has read Part I of Don Quixote.) This part of the story includes episodes like the famous one with the windmills, where Don Quixote sees something and projects some idea about chivalry onto it (for example that the windmills are actually giants), Sancho Panza protests (“What giants?” he asks), a catastrophic battle follows, in which Don Quixote and sometimes other people (or creatures) get hurt, and then Don Quixote and Sancho discuss what happened. On the road, in the Sierra Morena, and at Juan Palomeque’s inn, Don Quixote and Sancho also encounter many people who tell their own stories, and these stories conform to other literary types (besides Don Quixote’s favored chivalric romances), such as the pastoral, picaresque, and so on. These stories are braided together, nested within each other, and frequently interrupted.
Don Quixote is, of course, a fool, but it is impossible to declare with any certainty how Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, viewed this foolishness. In Cervantes’s time, to publish books in or import books to Spain required a license, and anonymity was not permitted to authors. Meanwhile, an index of prohibited books had been established, and the Inquisition enforced conformity through violence. This context, critic Carroll B. Johnson argues in Don Quixote: The Quest for Modern Fiction, accounts for the challenges of interpreting Cervantes’s texts, in which he deploys irony in order to get his stories past the censors. This irony makes it difficult for readers today to understand Don Quixote’s madness as Cervantes might have intended—is it a sign of his delusion or of his refusal to conform to the senselessness of his world?
My view is that Don Quixote is deluded, and dangerously so. The nature of his foolishness is very different from that of The Fool, whose image (as rendered by Pamela Colman Smith) I have used as my avatar for years. The Fool in the tarot is open to experience, willing to make mistakes or fall down, and he walks toward an unknown future, as represented by the edge of the cliff. Don Quixote, on the other hand, isn’t really open to experience. Instead, he projects his own ideas—his delusion—onto experience, as in his encounter with the windmills. He is a bad reader, lacking the thoughtfulness of the critic, expecting the world to conform to his vision instead of looking to see what is actually there.
This post, the first of a few on Don Quixote, is excerpted and adapted from a presentation titled “Reading Novels Will Mess You Up: Don Quixote and the Modern Novel,” which I gave in December 2022 in the class From Manuscripts to eBooks: Studies in Print Culture taught by Dr. S. E. “Shack” Hackney at the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies at Queens College of the City University of New York.
