Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes, 1605-15 ★½

Trudging Through a Classic

The book wore me out long before it reached its merciful conclusion, its rambling narrative and repetitive prose making each of its more than a thousand pages like another millstone against my soul. 

And the worst part? All my long nights of reading, I carried with me the guilt I should be enjoying this.

Who am I not to admire Don Quixote?

Actually two books published a decade apart in 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote presents the story of an aging Spanish hidalgo, or lower-class nobleman, one Alonso Quixano, who becomes mentally unbalanced from reading too many books about medieval adventurers. In a sudden burst of unhappy inspiration, he decides he is a kind of El Cid just waiting for a cause to take up.

Soon he is out and about, picking fights with pilgrims and sheep he imagines are actually enchanted adversaries. After his first unhappy foray, he is joined in his crusade against reality by a witticism-spouting peasant named Sancho Panza, who has a better idea what’s what but a stubborn tendency to follow Quixote’s mad lead.

Don Quixote is recognized as the first real novel in the sense we know it today and considered still the best by a diverse array of literary highbrows. A fantasy-comedy set in Golden Age Spain, it plays with notions of chivalry versus reality. I love novels, fantasy, comedy, and Spain. I desperately wanted to like this. I didn’t.

The author of this work, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, was equal parts adventurer and artist, a man who knew all-too-well how tough life could be. After venturing to Italy to make his name, he was wounded in a famous battle that cost him the use of his left arm. In the years after, he struggled as a writer and a government agent, eventually finding himself imprisoned for a time, where the idea of Don Quixote first sprang into his mind. The work is one of marked bitterness, basically presenting his protagonist’s high ideals as fodder for continued frustration and embarrassment.

“All this world is nothing but trickery and stratagem, one against the other,” Quixote says in one of his many rational moments that set up the ultimately tragic nature of his character.

Or as that R&B sage Rufus Thomas would later put it: “The world is round, round, round/But it’s crooked all the same.”

All this makes a certain sad sense that middle age has taught me well, but alas, having this familiar message drummed into my head over and over hardly improved my receptiveness. After yet another failed attempt by the Don to prove his status as a knight-errant and his worthiness of the attentions of a non-existent maiden fair he calls Dulcinea, the book became a weight on my attention span that fast exceeded its doorstop heft.

That Don Quixote stands in a place far beyond my ability to cast judgment on it, or criticize it in a manner that reflects in any way other than on me, doesn’t change the basic fact that I had a miserable time reading it. There are a few reasons for this.

The Signet Classic version I read is a translation by Walter Starkie, a notable Anglo-Irish scholar of the World War II era, that too often falls into the idiom of its time and place, that being the British Isles, not Spain, of a time far removed from Cervantes’ own. The language is fussy, ornate to a fault. Sancho Panza is a font of stock phrases, in this translation often employing a kind of archaic British slang ill-suited to the period in which it is set.

Thus Sancho’s counsel, after one early dangerous encounter: “I’m thinking, sir, that the wisest course for us would be to retreat to some church, for as you’ve left the man you fought in a parlous state, I shouldn’t wonder if they’ve tipped the wink to the Holy Brotherhood and we’ll be nabbed. Mark my words – before we get out of prison we’ll have to sweat our tails out.”

“Hold your tongue,” Quixote says. “Where have you ever seen or heard a knight-errant was brought before the judge, no matter how many homicides he may have committed?”

“I know nothing of ‘omecils,’ nor did I ever commit one against anyone,” Sancho replies.

This exchange typifies problems with both characters for me. Sancho’s humor, considered some of the finest in literature, amounts at least in this translation to a succession of malaprops that lose a lot in translation. They are not helped by Starkie’s generous inclusion of footnotes, the sort of footnotes that go on for a while and leave readers like me as befuddled as they began. For Quixote’s part, his notions of knighthood are often too bloody-minded to merit a rooting interest. At least to a modern reader, he’s more than a bit of a bully.

Cervantes’ convenient explanation for all this, that Quixote’s “brains died up to such a degree that he lost the use of his reason,” is too often leaned on for motivation. Often he picks fights with various travelers, even a flock of sheep he slaughters rather wantonly. If he has a sense of dignity to go with his self-exulted condition, it seems unaccountably to have dried up with his reason.

That Quixote is such a bully may well be Cervantes’ much-lauded satiric sensibilities on display, but made him hard to care about.

Another big issue may be that I read the unabridged version. There are versions of the book which excerpt choice passages and limn over the episodic nature of the story, avoiding the many layers of exposition and mortarwork and giving you what amounts to Don Q’s Greatest Hits. Read as a single piece at full length, one finds the plot quickly devolves into a kind of revolving wheel of mistaken-identity encounters, where Quixote throws himself over and over into ridiculous situations, most famously a battle with windmills the deluded fellow mistakes for giants.

“Fly not, cowards and vile caitiffs; one knight alone attacks you,” Quixote cries out as he begins his mad attack. “Although you flourish more arms than the giant Briareus, you shall pay for it!

The windmill episode is remarkably brief given the weight it carries in the legend of Quixote. Even the cover art of my Signet edition, a 1955 sketch by Pablo Picasso, features the windmills alongside Quixote, Panza, and their mounts, suggesting the sequence carries an importance to the story that isn’t borne out by the actual narrative, except perhaps that it happens early in the first book. Quixote just has his tilt, falls off his horse, and learns nothing from the experience. It is thus ever so for him.

Don Quixote, as depicted by the famous French illustrator Gustave Doré, astride his mount Rozinante and ready to do battle against the monsters of his imagination. Image from Pinterest.com.

The one-note nature of the joke of Quixote, that he continually imagines himself the victim of “enchantment” and thus explains away anything threatening his fantasy world as the work of evil wizards, got old quickly for me. If I had read an abridged version, perhaps the story as it was might not have worn out its welcome so.

There were other things that annoyed me about the book. Cervantes has a rambling style, continuously getting sidetracked from one thing to latch on to another. Sometimes, especially in the first book, he peels off from the Quixote story entirely, and jumps into another narrative. Sometimes the result is some good plot material.

Take for example the story of Cardenio. He’s a lovelorn figure, driven like Quixote by his passion for a seemingly unattainable woman; in Cardenio’s case one Luscinda, stolen from him by a duke’s son he mistook for a friend. Cardenio starts out a kind of frail echo of Quixote, with the same tendency for going off the rails and then back to reason.

“You see me now reduced to nakedness and misery, deprived even of human pity, and what is worst of all, minus my reason except when Heaven pleases,” Cardenio says.

Yet when he finally pauses to explain himself, the story he tells is rather good, with a solid dramatic flow and a few clever twists of a kind I sought in vain in Quixote’s own story. Even Shakespeare was apparently impressed enough to use Cardenio as the subject of a famous lost play that bears the character’s name.

That Cardenio also pushes Quixote and Panza so far from the center of things that they are reduced to making sideline observations is a problem given the book is supposed to be about them, but not as much of one if their story was actually involving on its own.

More problematic for me is the pat resolution of the Cardenio story, which feels hollow. Also annoying is how Cardenio’s story is sidetracked in turn by that of a woman who loves the same Duke who stole Luscinda from him. No sooner is that sorted out, in a tavern, than Cervantes throws in another subplot, about a soldier, Ruy Perez, fresh from escaping Muslim captivity who tells of his experience at great length.

Perez’s narrative is one of the most famous in the whole book, as it provides a window into Cervantes’ own real-life imprisonment in Algiers. “If time allowed I could describe some of the deeds done by that soldier that would fascinate and amaze you more than my own tale,” Perez says of this unnamed fellow known to be the author himself.

There are a lot of meta-fictional moments like that, which show Cervantes as a man well ahead of his time. The narrative is continually interrupted as Cervantes expresses frustration with a text he claims came to him second-hand from a Moorish scribe. In a series of prefatory verses that begin the first book, Cervantes even allows Quixote’s horse, Rozinante, an opportunity to unload on himself:

Why shouldn’t I blame the author of my woes?

Why both the squire and knight or seneschal

Are just as arrant hacks as Rozinante.

Moments like this are often fun, but the peeking-through-fiction’s-veil becomes more labored in the second book. Here we have Quixote and Panza as quasi-celebrities, being as the first book was by then published and a success throughout the Continent as well as in England. As the pair wanders across Spain, the people they meet are already acquainted with them, and use Quixote’s delusions for easy laughs.

The longest section in the second book centers on a duke and duchess who play tricks on Quixote and Panza for chapter after chapter. Apparently this noble couple were based on real-life examples from whom Cervantes either received or hoped to receive support.

For me, they were easily the most obnoxious characters in the book. Cervantes plays them rather straight, if impish in their delight in discomfiting our title character and his constant companion. In one of their tricks, they persuade the easily-tractable Quixote that his beloved Dulcinea will be released from her own magical entrapment if only Panza will consent to be whipped 3,000 times. Poor Panza is put through at least some of this, while Quixote alternately demands, begs, and bribes his squire to endure the rest.

Cervantes also spends a lot of his book settling scores regarding a “false Quixote,” a book about the character written by another which appeared between Cervantes’ two volumes. Cervantes’ understandable anger boils over into long segments where characters in the story, upon meeting Quixote, agree he is nothing like that fellow they read about in that other book. Ironically, Cervantes’ effort to denounce his competitor, whom history has forgotten, imparts on the counterfeiter a degree of fame he never managed to achieve on his own.

I’m not going to say this book is bad. It’s Don Quixote, after all. He’s a cultural icon, and widely loved. I’m not going to try and challenge that. Cervantes brings you a sense of a time and a place that envelops you. But the book left me cold, and I feel obligated to share my experience, if only so some other person out there somewhere will know they aren’t alone.