Don Quijote/Don Quixote

Don Quijote is so well known that it is easy to forget; it stands there as a sort of giant monument that means Spain in all her historical perspective. But from a literary point of view it is a very remarkable book. It is worth focussing sharply on its date: the first half of the book came out in 1605, the second in 1615. That early.

English speakers are sometimes inclined to refer to Robinson Crusoe of 1719 as ‘the first novel’, but that may be a British idea. Long before Defoe wrote the text which he still had to pretend was a true account of a shipwrecked mariner’s experiences Cervantes had invented something a lot more like the modern idea of a novel. There had been ‘novels’ of a sort in Classical literature, and in the Middle Ages the fashion was for Chivalric romances (King Arthur et hoc genus omne), but the novel proper, the novel as we know it, the thing to be found on the Fiction bookshelves in a bookshop, did not really exist at all before 1605.

Don Quijote is not a romance-quite the opposite, it is among other things a satire on chivalry. It does not pretend to be true, it plays with tricks such as the episode where the Don meets a pseudo-Don in Volume Two; the latter is the hero of one of the plagiarised sequels to the First Volume provoked by its great success. A character from one book meets a character from another by a different author!

Cervantes, then, writes in full self-consciousness, making himself and his processes present in a way that we won’t see again until Tristram Shandy of 1760, and he plays with his literary ancestors and opponents. His narrator is clearly in charge of the action and only weakly pretends that he has received his story from another author. In other words Don Quijote really is ‘the first novel’.

One demonstration of this can be found in the huge crowd of imitators that followed the Don in European literature. From Lesage’s Gil Blas (1715-1735) to Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones to Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and on up to J.P. Donleavy and many others the influence can be felt.

In 1605 literature was only just finding its Renaissance feet, and even the later renaissance has very little that we would recognise as a real novel. More typical of the time, apart from the ephemera of the London streets, was of course the drama, verse both sacred and profane, romance (Sidney’s Arcadia, Spencer’s Fairie Queen) and travel writing. No sign of anything like the novel. But Cervantes, with no apparent effort, invents a whole genre, the genre that will come to dominate literature by the nineteenth century and which remains with us alive and well. Proper fiction.

His great work is both realistic (a forte of the modern novel) and full of satirical exaggeration (think Dickens.) His characters are not the stock heroes and villains of the older literature but very ordinary people, some of them rather odorous and stupid, who can be found in the pages of fiction and, no doubt, in the villages and cities of four hundred years ago.

A comparison with Shakespeare is telling. The bard is many-sided for sure, but rarely in his plays do we find that unconstrained direct dealing with normality that shines out from the first sentences of Quijote. Shakespeare borrowed nearly all his plots and made poetry out of them, sometimes out of very little material indeed (Think Mercutio), his genius is above and beyond us, and when it is deliberately below as in the comic scenes it is hard to laugh at much of what he found funny.

Not so with Cervantes who seems to be there, standing beside us with a sardonic smile and making up his own world. Around 1605 Shakespeare was busy with King Lear, Othello and Macbeth-a stunning catalogue-but Cervantes had his more ordinary feet on the ground and was looking around him at his contemporaries and at their reading with a humorous insight that is expressed in a language we can follow fairly easily. In contrast we English-speakers tend to forget just how difficult our ‘greatest writer’ often is.

Cervantes in Spanish is much easier to read than his great contemporary in English. There are now several good translations of Don Quijote (Think Edith Grossman) but anyone with a certain amount of Spanish and a dictionary can enjoy the original version. His simplicity against the complexity of Shakespeare?

Both equally great?

Give the Don another go, I’d say.