A Reader on Reading

Perhaps it may be easier to understand Socrates’ words if we listen for their echo in a distant and strange disciple of his, a certain gentleman of La Mancha who, obsessed by his reading of novels of chivalry, sets out one day to be a knight errant and to carry out the precepts of valor, honor, and righteousness “for the increase of his honor and as a service to his society.” Like Socrates, Don Quixote knows of the risks of attempting to prevent “a great many wrongs and illegalities from taking place in the state to which he belongs.” And for this, Don Quixote is deemed a madman.

But what precisely is his madness? Don Quixote sees windmills as giants and sheep as warriors, and has faith in enchanters and flying horses, but in the midst of all this fantasy, he believes in something as solid as the earth he treads: the obligatory need for justice. Don Quixote’s storybook visions are circumstantial imaginations, ways of coping with the drabness of reality. But his driving passion, his unshakable conviction, is that orphans must be helped and widows rescued — even if, as a consequence of his actions, both the savior’s and the victim’s fates become worse. This is the great paradox that Cervantes wants us to face: justice is necessary even if the world remains unjust. Evil deeds must not be allowed to go unchallenged even if other deeds, of greater evil perhaps, will follow. Jorge Luis Borges put it this way, in the mouth of one of his most fearful characters: “Let Heaven exist, even if our place be Hell.”

In this pursuit of justice (which is the human way of seeking out truth) Don Quixote acts individually. Never, in his many adventures, does he lust for a position of power, a seat of government, a role in the world of politics. It is Sancho, his squire, who is offered (in the tradition of the novels of chivalry) the lordship of a realm as reward for his efforts. And it is Sancho to whom Don Quixote offers advice about public affairs: dress the part, know something of both arms and letters, show humility, avoid passion in judgment. Between irony and wisdom, Don Quixote’s recommendations define the role of the head of state — a role to which, clearly, he himself does not aspire.

Towards the end of all the adventures, returning home with Sancho after having been tortured and mocked by dukes and duchesses, Don Quixote has this to say to his native village: “Open your arms and welcome your son, Don Quixote, who though vanquished by a stranger’s hand, returns the victor of himself; and that, as has often been told, is the greatest victory that can be desired.” And here is perhaps part of the answer to my question. Maybe this is what Socrates meant when he said that “the true champion of justice, if he intends to survive even for a short time, must necessarily confine himself to private life and leave politics alone.” Not to seek public victory or praise but merely a private victory over oneself, an honorable role in the intimate sphere, vanquishing the cowardly impulse to close one’s eyes to injustice and to remain silent about society’s wrongdoings.

This is Don Quixote’s underlying concern: not to ignore society’s atrocities, not to allow those in power to bear false witness, and, above all, to chronicle the things that happen. And if, to get to the truth, Don Quixote must retell reality in his own literary vocabulary, so be it. Better to see windmills as giants than to deny the existence of windmills absolutely. Fiction, in Cervantes’s case, is the way of telling the truth when Spain had decided to rebuild its own history on a lie, the lie of a pure, uncontaminated Christian kingdom, barely a century after the expulsion of the Jews and the Arabs, and at the time of the banishment of all Arab and Jewish converts. For that reason, in order to denounce the fictional reality, Cervantes invents an honest fiction and tells the reader that he is not the father but merely the stepfather of Don Quixote, that the real author is a certain Cide Hamete Benegeli, an Arab scholar, one of the supposedly disappeared people, so that credulous readers will believe that the book they hold in their hands is merely a translation from a tongue long banned in the realm. Fiction, Cervantes implies, must reveal the deceit of an identity in which Spanish history attempts to clothe itself, an identity cleansed of any Jewish or Arab influence, an identity that need not question or take itself to task because it is supposed to be cloaked in Christian purity. Innocent as the boy in Andersen’s tale, Don Quixote points his sword at that identity and shouts: “But it is naked!”