It is, evidently, an absurd task to try and write about Quixote in a few lines here, as though this were just another book. Which it is, but it isn’t.
Some of the reasons why it isn’t.
On a most obvious level, no book I have ever read has taken me as long to read as the twin volumes of Don Quixote. It has taken me this long to read in part because of its length. But also because I was in no kind of a hurry. There is no urgency to the reading. A factor which modern publishing criteria might decry. There was no urgency, as I knew that I was setting out on a journey with Sancho and his master, and they were in no hurry. There was no dramatic imperative. No pot of narrative gold at the end of the rainbow. They were drifting through Spain and the reader is invited to drift along with them. Is the reader accompanying Sancho Panza and Don Quixote on their journey, or are Don Quixote and Sancho Panza accompanying the reader on their journey? Sin dudas, it is a little bit of both. The two wanderers have kept me company through the peaks and troughs of this year’s Covid, through my absence from the story of Censor, through times of exile and languor, through work, hangovers and arguments. In which, sense, they, and their author, have been part of my life this year, just as much as I have been part of theirs.
On another level, with reference to the author, because this is a novel which is, as is well known, the godparent of all Western novels. When one says ‘all’ one means the novels of all the European and by default American canon. One of the most remarkable things Cervantes achieves, centuries before the words post-modernism or nouveau roman or Joyce or Derrida or anything else you care to throw at the fan might have been coined, is the construction of a text which is also an auto-commentary. Again, noting that these notes are barely enough to flesh out an idea about an idea, one has to register the difference between the first book, which adopts what might once have been termed a more naturalistic feel, and the second which blows naturalism and all its shiny towers to smithereens. The number of times I found myself highlighting a passage, astonished by the author’s audaciousness, was many. I realise that this too, was a writer working within a context and a tradition, but the originality of thought and execution and the playfulness that goes with it, is a constant delight. The book sings and the author sings with it, rarely letting the reader forget it. As an English soul, steeped to some extent in contemporary British approaches to the novel, Cervantes’ approach felt like a dousing of iced champagne over the crowd of po-faced guardians of the keys to the literary kingdom.
The novel is also godparent, to every other style in the canon. Two examples. Firstly, the comic book. The violence in part one is gratuitous, but entirely in keeping with the Kapows!!! of any comic. No man or woman could withstand the punishment meted out to Quixote, Sancho, Rocinante and the ass. Violence is a trope, a device, a way of grabbing the reader’s attention and subverting reality.
Secondly, there are the novels within the novels of the opening section. These stories, of maidens and their lovers, of overheard conversations, misunderstandings and perilous outcomes, are nevertheless rooted in a far more naturalistic register. These are the stepsisters to Shakespeare’s lovers, characters who feel as though they might have fallen out of Measure for Measure or Much Ado, but they are also the godparents of the naturalistic novels of Marias, Austen or Eliot, to name three at random. The writer, whilst at other points in the book subverting notions of emotional truth, burlesquing notions of courtly love, finds space and time within the novel to present the other side of the coin.
All of which is like being presented with a film script which contains every genre, from fantasy to romcom to drama to Western to horror, a script which in usual terms has no chance of ‘working’ only for it to prove to be the king and queen of cinema, against all logic.
I was talking to a friend, Nicole, about the novel, who described how she had to read it for school, chapter by chapter, demonstrating a comprehensive knowledge of every episode. She related how she would wake in the mornings and read a chapter in bed. Her mother would hear her laughing, and ask what she was laughing about. Oh nothing, she would say, just Quixote. Cervantes invites one to laugh at every opportunity, he understands that laughter binds the reader to the book, across the divide of time. The essentials of narration sit side by side with the most abstruse elements of meta-fiction. When you’re in need of company, feeling lonesome, when the world isn’t cutting it, there will always by the travails of a man out of his time, sagacious fools, brilliant crazies, to keep you going, to remind you of the charms of having been born a human.
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