Don Quixote_ Translation by Edith Grossman (HarperCollins) - Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra [9]
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Hamlet does not need or want our admiration and affection, but Don Quixote does, and he receives it, as Hamlet generally does also. Sancho, like Falstaff, is replete with self-delight, though Sancho does not rouse moralizing critics to wrath and disapproval, as the sublime Falstaff does. Much more has been written about the Hamlet/Don Quixote contrast than about Sancho/Falstaff, two vitalists in aesthetic contention as masters of reality. But no critic has called Don Quixote a murderer or Sancho an immoralist. Hamlet is responsible for eight deaths, his own included, and Falstaff is a highwayman, a warrior averse to battle, and a fleecer of everyone he encounters. Yet Hamlet and Falstaff are victimizers, not victims, even if Hamlet dies properly fearing a wounded name and Falstaff is destroyed by Hal/Henry V’s rejection. It does not matter. The fascination of Hamlet’s intellect and of Falstaff’s wit is what endures. Don Quixote and Sancho are victims, but both are extraordinarily resilient, until the Knight’s final defeat and dying into the identity of Quixano the Good, whom Sancho vainly implores to take to the road again. The fascination of Don Quixote’s endurance and of Sancho’s loyal wisdom always remains.
Cervantes plays upon the human need to withstand suffering, which is one reason the Knight awes us. However good a Catholic he may (or may not) have been, Cervantes is interested in heroism and not in sainthood. Shakespeare, I think, was not interested in either, since none of his heroes can endure close scrutiny: Hamlet, Othello, Antony, Coriolanus. Only Edgar, the recalcitrant survivor who inherits the nation, most unwillingly, in King Lear, abides our skepticism, and at least one prominent Shakespeare critic weirdly has called Edgar “weak and murderous.” The heroism of Don Quixote is by no means constant: he is perfectly capable of flight, abandoning poor Sancho to be beaten up by an entire village. Cervantes, a hero at Lepanto, wants Don Quixote to be a new kind of hero, neither ironic nor mindless, but one who wills to be himself, as José Ortega y Gasset accurately phrased it.
Hamlet subverts the will, while Falstaff satirizes it. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza both exalt the will, though the Knight transcendentalizes it, and Sancho, the first postpragmatic, wants to keep it within limits. It is the transcendent element in Don Quixote that ultimately persuades us of his greatness, partly because it is set against the deliberately coarse, frequently sordid context of the panoramic book. And again it is important to note that this transcendence is secular and literary, and not Catholic. The Quixotic quest is erotic, yet even the eros is literary. Crazed by reading (as so many of us still are), the Knight is in quest of a new self, one that can overgo the erotic madness of Orlando (Roland) in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso or of the mythic Amadís of Gaul. Unlike Orlando’s or Amadís’s, Don Quixote’s madness is deliberate, self-inflicted, a traditional poetic strategy. Still, there is a clear sublimation of the sexual drive in the Knight’s desperate courage. Lucidity keeps breaking in, reminding him that Dulcinea is his own supreme fiction, transcending an honest lust for the peasant girl Aldonza Lorenzo. A fiction, believed in even though you know it is a fiction, can be validated only by sheer will.
Erich Auerbach argued for the book’s “continuous gaiety,” which is not at all my own experience as a reader. But Don Quixote, like the best of Shakespeare, will sustain any theory you bring to it, as well or as badly as any other. The Sorrowful Knight is more than an enigma: he seeks an