Making Fun of Mental Illness since 1605

[mtvessel]

Jan-Apr 2021
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes, tr. John Rutherford – Penguin Classics, 2003
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Maybe I am becoming old and cynical, or maybe it's the depressing effects of lockdown, but this is the second "great" novel I have read in the past year that didn't really work for me. I can see why authors and literary academics are enthusiastic - it's a playful and inventive work with some astonishingly modern conceits, including several (possibly unreliable) narrators, a hero who isn't very heroic and is in fact rather dislikeable, and a second half in which many of the characters are aware of and have read the first half - but what I was most reminded of was the shallow characterisation and casual cruelty evident in Shakespeare's less good comedies, such as The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant of Venice, or in pretty much everything that Christopher Marlowe ever wrote. Now of course it's not fair to criticise a work written over four centuries ago for failing to live up to modern expectations of character development or emotional subtlety, but Don Quixote has been voted by authors as the most meaningful book of all time, and I simply don't see it.

The story concerns an "ingenious hidalgo" (gentleman) in the La Mancha region of Spain who reads so many mediaeval romances that he starts seeing everything as a chivalric story. His workhorse Rocinante becomes a noble steed, a barber's bowl becomes a helmet, a humble inn becomes a castle. Because all chivalric heroes need a quest-giver, he invents a completely fictitious woman, Dulcinea del Toboso, to be his lady love. He recruits Sancho Panza, a dumb but loquacious local farmer, to be his squire by promising him an earldom. The two misfits roam around the countryside where various misadventures befall them.

It seems a little strange that the tilting at windmills incident has become the most famous one in the book, occupying as it does barely a paragraph some eighty pages in. I suspect that the reason is that it is the most perfect expression of a pattern which many of the other incidents simply repeat with variations, at least in the early part of the book - Quixote mistakes a perfectly ordinary object or person for something out of a chivalric tale and behaves wildly as a result. To a modern reader, the clear signs of mental illness make the sniggering behind his back that many of the people he meets engage in, and their deliberate attempts to provoke him, seem cruel in the extreme. Not that Quixote himself is particularly sympathetic. The armour and weapons that he uses are genuine heirlooms and he is described as inflicting serious damage on those he attacks. He is also less than understanding of the afflictions of his long-suffering squire who often gets beaten up when chivalric ideals conflict with more workaday concerns like paying the bill at the inn.

Nonetheless, there is some fun to be had in watching the way that the story twists like a particularly feisty snake from out of the control of its author. Cervantes clearly originally intended it to be a short satire of the already passé fad for chivalric romances, but when Sancho Panza came into the narrative, the ideas kept flowing. This led Cervantes to inventing a new author of the tales, who interestingly is a Moor, and an undermining of the chivalry pastiche by some clearly sincere side-stories involving tragic love triangles, women disguised as men and other tropes presumably drawn from the very books being criticised. Things go even further in the self-referential second half (published some ten years after the first), in which Quixote and Sancho meet a bored Duke and Duchess who have read all about them and who delight in arranging elaborate charades intended to feed their delusions. This is entertaining enough, I suppose, though Quixote's repeated and unfunny chiding of Sancho for his character trait of proverb-quoting takes the self-awareness too far.

Alas, what there isn't is very much development of the characters of Quixote or Sancho. While their portrayals are slightly more interesting in the second half (Quixote has moments of lucidity where he speaks knowledgeably and wisely, and Sancho proves to have good peasant common sense when given the opportunity to be the governor of a small town), Cervantes never succeeds in giving them the depth or ambiguity that, say, his contemporary Shakespeare manages with characters like Lady Macbeth or Ophelia (no female characters of any significance, by the way, though in one of the interpolated stories a girl whose refusal to entertain the advances of a lovelorn swain leads to his suicide gets a good speech pointing out the double standard of men expecting women to be both accommodating and chaste). Reading between the lines, Quixote's madness can be seen as a retreat into fantasy to escape the misery of a lonely, isolated existence; from the brief history at the start, he is evidently a life-long bachelor with no close friends, making his desire to become a knight errant an expression of his desperation to make connections and have meaningful relationships with others. But you do not get a hint of this in the text itself, which prefers to present him simply as a madman who does funny things.

So I am somewhat puzzled by all the adulation this book has received in critical circles. Although it certainly introduced some interesting new concepts to literary story-telling, the main feature of novels - the deep analysis and development of character - is simply not there. In my opinion, the critics - dare I say it - are mistaking windmills for giants.

Comments

[ingaborg]

Thank you for the review! I think it is fair to hold a classic work up to modern standards - that is exactly what Shakespeare is generally praised for, drama and character depictions that stand the test of time, with exceptions as you say such as Shrew.

Perhaps some of the book's appeal is that there's a sense in which we all want to be Quixote, or we want him to be right, despite him being lambasted in the book? If the readers didn't fundamentally get his desire for a more epic life, the book would have nothing.

[mtvessel]

Thanks for your comment! Yes, I think you're right about the attractions of an epic life driving people's affection for Quixote. In fact I'd go further and say it taps into a general desire for moral dilemmas to be solvable with a simple set of rules. Still, it's an odd interpretation when the vast majority of the text (at least in this translation) is mocking the person who is trying to live out that code.