A Reader on Reading

The year of inaction that Sansón Carrasco demands from Don Quixote belongs to false time, to the time of nonexistence. This is the time described by those condemned to real and literary hells, an inhuman time, a species of eternity in which nothing, except pain, has its existence and the sufferer loses everything that allows us to grant ourselves a recognizable identity. It is a time of no mirrors, or of fake mirrors that reflect only emptiness, the time of commercial and political advertising that stultifies and distracts, a time in which the consumer is trained to forget his own self and become another, become someone who identifies his desire with what is merely superficial, useless, sterile. This is the time wished upon us by the wizards of the mercantile world, like the one who, according to Don Quixote, caused his library to vanish (though the library has in fact been walled up by the censorious priest and barber): “Because his arts and his letters have taught him that in time I must come to fight a singular battle with a knight whom he favors, and that I must defeat him.”

Against this false time flows the time of Don Quixote, ever-changing in that two-volume space created for us by Cervantes. In this time—true, rich, full of marvels — there is for us, his readers, one moment that, though perhaps no more mysterious than many others, is at least more bewildering and disconcerting. This is the moment in which the reader forgets Miguel de Cervantes, the author, and believes only in the reality of Don Quixote.

Everyone (even those who have not read Cervantes’s books) knows Don Quixote. Next to him, Cervantes is almost phantomlike, a very minor character in the novel, an intruder who from time to time emits a comment or an opinion on the events, a leisurely reader who one day found a bundle of papers in a Toledo market and had them translated, thereby allowing us to read the adventures of the memorable knight. Even Cervantes’s physical characteristics become in time those of his invention, a usurpation that by the nineteenth century is so firmly established that the illustrators of the novel see both author and fictional hero as identical. The clean-shaven knight of the early engravings vanishes and in his place appears a gentleman with the features of Cervantes: “eagle-faced … hawk-nosed … silver beard … teeth neither tiny nor enormous, because he has only six, and these badly kept and worse disposed … the body between two extremes, neither too big nor too small … somewhat curved in the shoulders and not very fast on his feet.” This is the description that Cervantes makes of himself at the age of sixty-six, as if he had grown into the character of Don Quixote as he described him in the novel: “aged close to fifty … dry, nut-colored, moody … of tough complexion, wizened, thin faced.” The literary creation comes to life in the time of the book, while he author himself fades away in the time of literary history, a ghost in the groves of academe.

Possibly Cervantes guessed that this was to be his fate. When in the sixth chapter of the first part the priest and the barber purge Don Quixote’s library before walling it up, and find next to López Maldonado’s Cancionero the unfinished Galatea by Miguel de Cervantes, the first instance of this vertiginous game takes place. Cervantes now exists because Don Quixote has read him and placed his book on the shelf, and La Galatea is saved from destruction because the priest says that he is a long-time friend of the author. And so the reader finds himself on the verge of a first abyss: if the pages he is reading are meant to be fiction, then the author of those pages is now part of that fiction, and the witness of the story (the reader who is summoned to take part in the story) no longer belongs to the conventional time of everyday life but to a time of imaginary existences whose flow depends only on an act of faith, faith in the reality of that fiction.