Week 14, Cervantes

Notes on Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605/1615)

First Part, Chapter 1

19-20. The protagonist belongs to the gentility, he is what we might call shabby genteel, and has a great deal of free time on his hands. What he does not have is much money. We find that he has sold some of his land to buy chivalric books—apparently hundreds of them. The books are so filled with airy abstractions that our poor hero goes absolutely insane. What he seems to value most of all is “the promise of unending adventure.” What the author seems to promise is, by means of his fictional frame, absolute veracity in recounting the unending adventures of Don Quixote.

21. Once Don Quixote goes mad, his imagination fills up with everything he has read in the chivalric books. As Dr. Johnson would say, once you admit delusion, it has no certain limitation. And so he must become a knight just like the ones he has read about, pursuing both honor and service to his nation.

22. His first task, therefore, is to clean up the armor of his ancestors, which he does tolerably well except for the helmet. And he names his old horse Rocinante. We are told that he chooses this name because of its noble sonority as well as its quality of reflecting the past. Language indeed is a powerful ally of Don Quixote’s all-distorting imagination.

23. Now that he has a name, armor, and a horse, he must have a lady to serve. So he chooses a peasant girl whom he used to love even though she never knew it. Her name is Aldonza Lorenzo, but he renames her Dulcinea of Toboso.

First Part, Chapter 2

24-25. It is now high time that he set out on his moral crusade. Wherever there is injustice being done, he must combat it. But he has not yet been properly dubbed. But he manages to talk himself into a cheerful and foolish state, offering flourishes of chivalric rhetoric as he rides. At the end of page 25, we find the narrator discussing the comparative source work that he has done to describe things most accurately.

26-27. But he rides all day and becomes tired and hungry. He comes upon a certain tavern and reaches it at nightfall. Greeting him are a couple of prostitutes on their way to Seville and some mule drivers. Don Quixote believes he has arrived at a castle. His strong imagination construes a swineherd’s horn as the signal given by a dwarf that the noble Don Quixote has arrived. His high rhetoric causes laughter in the fair ladies who greet him. The innkeeper comes out and is able to size up the situation more astutely than the prostitutes, and he decides not to provoke this madman.

28-29. Don Quixote takes his first meal, which turns out to be quite a comic affair because he will not remove his helmet and so must receive his meal through it. We see that his imagination is able to knit together every material thing and person around him, every circumstance, into a single harmonious fantasy. And within this fantasy, there is a center of lucidity—he is still troubled about not yet having been declared a proper knight.

First Part, Chapter 3

30-31. When the innkeeper is asked by Don Quixote to do him the honor of dubbing him as a knight, the sly fellow of course accepts, and even presumes to claim that he himself had formerly been of that profession. And he offers Don Quixote sage advice, telling him that he must carry about money and other important provisions.

32-33. Now he must keep a vigil over his armor as part of the ceremony. Misfortune strikes when a couple of the mule drivers staying at the end decide to water their mules and in the process treat Don Quixote’s armor with disregard. He wounds them both rather badly, so the innkeeper decides to get the ceremony out of the way as quickly as possible.

34-35. By now, everyone is going along with Don Quixote’s insanity, with the ladies accepting honorary titles and the innkeeper being so much in haste to get Don Quixote off the property that he skips payment.

First Part, Chapter 4

35-38. Don Quixote’s first adventure consists of correcting what he calls the worst of all possible evils—a wealthy peasant whipping an unruly servant. Don Quixote thinks this episode turns out splendidly, but of course it really doesn’t because the wealthy peasant simply makes the necessary promises and then punishes the servant even worse. Now that Don Quixote’s insanity has been loosed upon the wider world, he begins to lose control of the consequences.

39-41. On his way back home to resupply himself and possibly gain a squire, Don Quixote comes upon some merchants and imperiously demands that they declare Dulcinea of Toboso the most beautiful woman in the world. One of these merchants is a smart aleck, and he treats Don Quixote with much disrespect. Don Quixote charges the man, but Rocinante trips and the knight goes sprawling. When he has fallen, he is badly beaten by a mule driver. Somehow, Don Quixote thinks this is a perfectly appropriate experience for a man of his position.

First Part, Chapter 5

41-43. In fact, he begins to relate the episode to episodes from his chivalric books, in one of which a wounded quester is in need of rescue. But the man who rescues him here is not his uncle the Marquis of Mantua but rather a farmer who recognizes him. All Don Quixote can do is go on reciting his ballad, provoking considerable impatience in the farmer. The man’s name is Pedro Alonso.

43-45. Don Quixote’s house is in an uproar, with everyone standing around trying to make sense of it all. The housekeeper immediately blames the chivalric books. And Don Quixote’s niece agrees. She tells the barber that she blames herself because she had seen Don Quixote carrying on like a madman after reading these books two days straight, but she did nothing. The priest agrees with all of this, especially with the notion that the books themselves should be cast into the flames. This is after all the age of the Spanish Inquisition, which began under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1478 and continued for several centuries. Of course, in the next chapter, the priest turns out to be something of a literary critic, so the only books he condemns seem to be the rather badly written ones.

First Part, Chapter 7

53-55. Back home, Don Quixote has really spun out a fantastic account for himself of the beating that he took. In a very moving moment, he looks for the books that have long been his companions, only to find that they have been taken away. The housekeeper and Don Quixote’s niece tell him that either the devil took the books away or some enchanter came and did it. His acquaintances do not know quite how to treat him, and the priest and the barber go back and forth on whether to agree with him or contradict him in his madness.

55-57. At this point, Don Quixote approaches a neighboring farmer named Sancho Panza, and talks the man into becoming his squire. He makes grandiose promises of land and power, which Sancho seems at least partly to buy. In fact, he seems quite impressed with his prospects. Don Quixote scrapes together the necessary funds, and finds himself a nice round shield. The two men ride out together in the evening, and it seems that no one notices they’ve left.

Already we begin to see the dynamic that will develop in subsequent chapters—Sancho is perhaps the best possible companion for Don Quixote because he is open to experience and, not being a learned man, he is in no position to challenge his master on points of chivalry. But there is also a keen element of realism in Sancho that is entirely missing in Don Quixote. Evidence of this is abundant on 57, where Don Quixote promises to make Sancho’s wife a queen, and Sancho gives him the thumbs down on that proposal because his wife, as he explains, is by no means fit for such high office. In the end, Sancho says that he trusts Don Quixote “to give me everything that’s right for me and that I can handle.”

First Part, Chapter 8

58-59. Their first adventure together shows them to be of completely different minds about the shape of reality. They come across 30 or 40 windmills, and Don Quixote immediately takes them for giants and simply cannot hear Sancho’s insistent utterances to the effect that they are in fact windmills. Quixote will do what he calls “unequal combat” with these so-called giants. It is revealing that he says, “I think, and therefore it is true....” We may take this remark somewhat out of context and generalize it to show the quality of Don Quixote’s madness. Whatever he thinks must be the truth. He is assuming or rather asserting the infallibility of the imagination. Well, the windmills break his lance and nearly the back of Rocinante. Don Quixote now understands that the windmills were really windmills, but it makes no difference to him—he simply asserts that a certain wizard has changed the Giants into windmills to deprive him of “the glory of defeating them.”

60-61. Now they go off to Puerto Lapice in search of adventure. Don Quixote recounts how a knight from his chivalric books found a heavy branch to replace the weapon he lost, and says he intends to do something like that as well. Sancho sees that Don Quixote is in some pain and tells him he really ought to complain when something hurts, and Quixote agrees that the chivalric code is indeed silent on the matter. At the moment, Sancho seems to be in good spirits since we are told that as they ride along and he eats and drinks, “he did not consider it work but sheer pleasure to go around seeking adventures, no matter how dangerous they might be.” Sancho does not have much to worry about in the way of rank or fortune, so he is up for just about anything so long as it does not imperil his life, comment about danger notwithstanding. Quixote does not care so much about food, intending instead “to live on sweet memories” (61). Don Quixote informs Sancho that he must not try to help defend his master unless the people they are fighting are not gentlemen. Sancho agrees easily.

61-65. Now they come across a couple of Benedictine friars and a Basque woman on her way to Seville to meet her husband, who is about to sail for the Indies and take up a post of honor. Don Quixote believes that the friars are enchanters who have captured a princess. Again, Sancho tries to talk him out of this nonsense, to no avail. Don Quixote attacks one of the friars, who falls off his mule while the other one gallops away. Sancho begins pulling off the habit of the friar, but the servants are in no mood to allow this, and they began attacking Sancho. Meanwhile, Don Quixote is talking to the lady in her carriage, believing that he has liberated her from evil forces. He promptly gets in what looks to be a deadly fight with one of the lady’s Basque squires. The both of them use pillows for shields, and the fight turns comic.

First Part, Chapter 18 (125 bottom-133)

124-25. Sancho tries to explain to Don Quixote that they had best follow the natural rhythms of life—it is time for the harvest, and he wants to go home. But chivalry, counters Don Quixote, is essentially an artificial alternative. There can be no greater joy, he explains, than to defeat your enemy in battle. Sancho also gets in a dig about class differences—when Don Quixote says he will get hold of a special sword, Sancho says it will only work for him and not for his squire.

126-27. And now comes a thick cloud of dust signaling their next adventure. Don Quixote of course takes the cloud for the dust kicked up by two great armies ready to do battle. It is in fact sheep. Don Quixote spins a romantic tale about a great emperor and a king who hate each other.

128-29. Sancho again tries to talk sense into Don Quixote, but to no avail. Don Quixote’s wild imaginings just become more grandiose by the minute, and he attributes Sancho’s protestations to fear, which can distort our perceptions of reality.

130-33. Don Quixote is wounded by some pebbles thrown by the shepherds when he tries to attack them. Some of his teeth are apparently knocked out, causing him great pain. Both men vomit all over each other, Don Quixote because of the balm that he drank and Sancho because of his disgust. On 131, Sancho “cursed his fate again and resolved in his heart to leave his master and return home...” He is becoming more and more disillusioned. On 132-33, at least for the moment even Don Quixote is more or less reduced to the pain in his jaw—to the physicality he has fought so valiantly to dismiss from his mind.

First Part, Chapter 22 (163-72)

163-67. Don Quixote speaks to a series of five prisoners, Galley slaves being escorted by their keepers. Each has an interesting story to tell, which Quixote comically misunderstands until he is corrected by further information. The prisoners have an imaginative language all their own—they are not literalists, but their language is foreign to the chivalric sensibilities of Don Quixote. But those same sensibilities result in his treating them with greater generosity than they could have imagined possible. He comes close to the magnificent ravings of King Lear in Shakespeare’s play, though not quite that far since the king condemned human society as a system that does little but propagate injustice: the usurer hangs the cozener, etc.

168-69. But the sixth prisoner that he meets is Ginés de Pasamonte, apparently a famous brigand who has even written his own biography. This man is eloquent and fearless, so he and Don Quixote strike up a conversation in the midst of the guards. He professes to be a teller of hard truths to the world, and therefore a rival of the romance texts that Don Quixote himself has been reading.

169-72. Don Quixote issues a rather long demand that the guards must let the prisoners go. His reason is that they have done nothing to the guards themselves; the wrongs they have committed were committed against others. So Don Quixote interprets the scene from the vantage point of a highly personalistic code of honor. A fight ensues, and the prisoners get their liberty, only to turn against their liberators. We might well have expected as much, but of course Don Quixote is stunned, “grief-stricken at seeing himself so injured by the very people for whom he had done so much good.” He simply cannot understand those who return evil for good, who take kindness and turn it into weakness. The chivalric law of reciprocity does not hold water with them. It’s

First Part, Chapter 52 (440 middle—446 top)

440-41. Don Quixote and Sancho happen upon some villagers taking part in a Christianized fertility rite, a procession capped with an image of the Virgin Mary and led by Catholic priests. It seems that the area has been suffering from drought, so the villagers are praying for rain. Anyhow, Don Quixote of course takes the statue of the Virgin for a lady in need of rescue, what with her “tears and melancholy countenance” (441 2/3 down). The procession-goers begin to laugh at the knight, and a fight predictably follows. Just as predictably, Don Quixote is badly injured, this time in the shoulder.

442-43. Sancho is genuinely horrified by this turn of events, in which his master’s deluded imagination has caused him to assault a holy procession and then get himself hurt. At 442 bottom, he covers his master with lamentations and chivalric praise, both because he is distraught and because he probably hopes that will revive the man, which they do. Sancho declares to all that he and Don Quixote will return to their own village, which is nearby, and the priest and their old friend the barber agree that that is the most sensible thing to do.

444-45. The homecoming of the two men is bittersweet, with Sancho’s wife demanding what he has to show for his travels, which isn’t much but empty promises that she doesn’t presume to understand. But Sancho doesn’t seem as disheartened as we might expect. In fact, he seems buoyant, even jaunty, about the whole affair. Don Quixote is received tenderly by his niece, and the priest tells her to take good care of him, making sure he doesn’t escape again, for he is still as deranged as ever: the text says that he “stared at them, his eyes transfixed, and did not understand where he was.” And what of the third set of adventures, now that this second homecoming has been accomplished? The narrator says that at present (1605), he has been entrusted only with a box of Castilian poems celebrating the further exploits of Don Quixote, thanks to the “leaden box” found by a doctor, who himself came upon them “in the ruined foundations of an old hermitage that was being renovated.” A hermitage is a monastery or abbey, so the poetry that the narrator includes at the end of this first book is a survivor in the midst of Spanish modernization. Of course, some ten years later, Cervantes would publish his Second Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, partly as a response to what he considered the spurious sequels of another writer. But more on that next time.


Second Part, Chapter 71 (919 —24)

919-24. Sancho is clever enough to avoid actually injuring himself in carrying out the sentence upon himself that will supposedly free Dulcinea from her alleged enchantment of many chapters back (Sancho had pulled a scam on Don Quixote in Chapter 13 of Part 2, claiming that a peasant girl is Dulcinea, who ends up fleeing through a field from Sancho and his master.) Don Quixote’s delusions are as grand as ever, as we see on 923-924 top, where he claims that had he only been around when Paris abducted Helen of Sparta, the whole affair of the Trojan War could have been averted. But he’s easily enough fooled by Sancho in this chapter.

Second Part, Chapter 72 (925 —28)

925-28. While they are on their way back home, Don Quixote and Sancho meet one Don Álvaro Tarfe at an inn, and are able to clear up the matter of the Knight of la Mancha’s true identity. The chapter is a joke on Avellaneda’s spurious sequel to the first part of Cervantes’ novel, and he takes care to drive home the fact of the inferiority of everything about the impostor’s sequel. Don Quixote stands here before Don Álvaro, and is not in a madhouse in Toledo; neither has he been a jousting contender in Zaragoza. Sancho’s false penance to release Dulcinea from her enchantment continues and is at last completed, to Don Quixote’s great satisfaction. They part with Don Álvaro, and go their ways to their home village, where Quixote intends to take up a pastoral life since he has suffered his final defeat as a knight at the hands of Samson Carrasco, in the guise of the Knight of the White Moon, back in Chapter 64 of Part 2. It seems that this Salamanca university graduate has long been determined to keep Don Quixote safe, and when he wins his battle against him, he demands that the Don go home and live a peaceful life.

Second Part, Chapter 73 (929 —33)

929-30. Sancho and Don Quixote discuss the appropriateness of taking natural events as signs pertaining to their romantic quest, and Sancho’s commonsensical view wins out: Don Quixote gives the hunters the hare they’ve been chasing. The priest and the bachelor (Samson Carrasco) recognize Don Quixote and Sancho, and welcome them back to their village.

931-32. Don Quixote is more determined than ever to step into his new role (which he thinks temporary) as a pastoral shepherd and singer of amorous verses, in which venture he supposes he will be aided by his companions, whom of course he must rename in the most appropriate way. But his niece and housekeeper are taken aback at this plan, and it turns out that Don Quixote is in no position to argue with them—he has fallen ill, and must be taken to his bed.

Second Part, Chapter 74 (934 —40)

934-40. Don Quixote’s sudden awakening from madness into a penitent lucidity stuns everyone around him. He now realizes the error of his knight-errant ways, and wants to make amends to Sancho, his niece and housekeeper, to the man who wrote that spurious sequel about his exploits (Don Quixote is a peculiarly modern hero in that he’s aware of his own literary reputation—as much a creature of books as of actual adventure), and above all to God. Declaring himself the sworn enemy of Amadis of Gaul—i.e. of chivalric romance tales generally—Don Quixote makes his will and dies of what seems like a combination of melancholia and a fever-inducing illness. This is a conventional way to end a medieval or Renaissance book about an errant soul in search of adventure. The Arthurian romances often have about them an air of fatality—the texts’ Christian authors knew well that they were dealing with a prominent pattern of fallen humanity: self-assertion, vain pursuit of earthly meaning and pleasure, and then, when those hopes are ultimately frustrated or (if achieved) shown to lead only to transitory happiness, the bitter necessity of giving up the quest and retiring from the world. Even Chaucer’s rollicking Canterbury Tales ends with a pious retraction that modern readers often find hard to accept as entirely serious or final. But there’s no reason to think that either Chaucer or Cervantes (or the Arthurian writers) were not serious.

So in this prominent sense, Cervantes and his Don Quixote have come home to the piety demanded of them by their Church: one must, in the end, renounce earthly desire and the vain delusion it liberates into no end of troubles, exchanging the patternings of the world for those of the spirit. But the great power and universal appeal of Don Quixote’s fantasy world is evident from the way those around him treat his return to sanity: Sancho Panza in particular can hardly believe his ears, and in general the family yearns for the old “Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance” that they know has already, even as he awaits death, left them behind.