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By Root 631 0

undying name, literary immortality, and finds it, but only through being all but dismantled in part I and all but teased into real madness in part II: Cervantes performs the miracle, nobly Dante-like, of presiding over his creation like a Providence, but also subjecting himself to the subtle changes brought about both in the Knight and in Sancho Panza by their wonderful conversations, in which a shared love manifests itself by equality and grumpy disputes. They are brothers, rather than father and son. To describe the precise way that Cervantes regards them, whether with ironic love or loving irony, is an impossible critical task.

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Harry Levin shrewdly phrased what he called “Cervantes’ formula”:

This is nothing more nor less than a recognition of the difference between verses and reverses, between words and deeds, palabras and hechos—in short, between literary artifice and that real thing which is life itself. But literary artifice is the only means that a writer has at his disposal. How else can he convey his impression of life? Precisely by discrediting those means, by repudiating that air of bookishness in which any book is inevitably wrapped. When Pascal observed that the true eloquence makes fun of eloquence, he succinctly formulated the principle that could look to Cervantes as its recent and striking exemplar. It remained for La Rochefoucauld to restate the other side of the paradox: some people would never have loved if they had not heard of love.

It is true that I cannot think of any other work in which the relations between words and deeds are as ambiguous as in Don Quixote, except (once again) for Hamlet. Cervantes’s formula is also Shakespeare’s, though in Cervantes we feel the burden of the experiential, whereas Shakespeare is uncanny, since nearly all of his experience was theatrical. Still, the ironizing of eloquence characterizes the speeches of both Hamlet and Don Quixote. One might at first think that Hamlet is more word-conscious than is the Knight, but part II of Cervantes’s dark book manifests a growth in the Sorrowful Face’s awareness of his own rhetoricity.

I want to illustrate Don Quixote’s development by setting him against the wonderful trickster Ginés de Pasamonte, whose first appearance is as a galley-bound prisoner in part I, chapter XXII, and who pops up again in part II, chapters XXV–XXVII, as Master Pedro, the divinator and puppeteer. Ginés is a sublime scamp and picaroon confidence man, but also a picaresque romance writer in the model of Lazarillo de Tormes (1533), the anonymous masterpiece of its mode (see W. S. Merwin’s beautiful translation, in 1962). When Ginés reappears as Master Pedro in part II, he has become a satire upon Cervantes’s hugely successful rival, Lope de Vega, the “monster of literature” who turned out a hit play nearly every week (whereas Cervantes had failed hopelessly as a dramatist).

Every reader has her or his favorite episodes in Don Quixote; mine are the two misadventures the Knight inaugurates in regard to Ginés/Master Pedro. In the first, Don Quixote gallantly frees Ginés and his fellow prisoners, only to be beaten nearly to death (with poor Sancho) by the ungrateful convicts. In the second, the Knight is so taken in by Master Pedro’s illusionism that he charges at the puppet show and cuts the puppets to pieces, in what can be regarded as Cervantes’s critique of Lope de Vega. Here first is Ginés, in the admirable new translation by Edith Grossman:

“He’s telling the truth,” said the commissary. “He wrote his own history himself, as fine as you please, and he pawned the book for two hundred reales and left it in prison.”

“And I intend to redeem it,” said Ginés, “even for two hundred ducados.”

“Is it that good?” said Don Quixote.

“It is so good,” responded Ginés, “that it’s too bad for Lazarillo de Tormes and all the other books of that genre that have been written or will be written. What I can tell your grace is that it deals with truths, and they are truths so appealing and entertaining that no lies can equal them.”

“And what is the title of the