Cervantes's Novel of Modern Times: A New Reading of Don Quijote (review)

Like the work that is the object of its interest, David Quint's book on Cervantes's masterpiece Don Quijote (1605) constitutes something of a translation. It purports to offer English readers a radically new reading of the work, yet it is as much a synthesis and relocation of a great deal of what hispanists have known for a very long time, namely, that Don Quijote is, in both form and substance, the first modern novel. That said, Quint's book provides a sensitive, theoretically well-informed, well-written interpretation of the text as modern novel.

Quint is at his best when he describes the recursive nature of the interpolated narratives that comprise Don Quijote. He shows clearly how Cervantes availed himself of, and refined, the interlacing narrative technique of medieval romance, and how the numerous tales that make up the narrative are tied together, often imaginatively echoing and reprising one another, lending a coherent, intricately contrived structure to the work. Far from the episodic, anecdotal narrative hostile critics like Vladimir Nabokov found, Quint persuasively establishes the tight thematic and conceptual unity of Cervantes's masterpiece. At the same time, Quint calls attention to the larger social and existential significance of Don Quijote's encounters throughout the novel, tracing an evolving confrontation between an ancient, longed-for heroic world of chivalric values, the nostalgic source of the main character's madness, and the newly emerging, fallen materialist universe that configures modernity. Quint rightly argues that, as the novel progresses, Don Quijote is methodically reconciled to a world of contradictions, a place populated by ignoble nobles (the duke and the duchess) and uninteresting, if pious, citizens like Don Diego de Miranda (the Man in the Green Cloak). Wisdom and tranquility come with rapprochement, and with boredom and inertia. Don Quijote dies at home, in his bed, finally identified as Alonso Quijano. In the end, the transformation of Don Quijote into a petit bourgeois defines Cervantes's work as both modern and as novel. Feudalism and capitalism struggle at the expense of poetry, and the prose of progress triumphs. Don Quijote conforms to the ordinary — to what we are all destined to become in the modern world — and in the end Alonso Quijano, called "the good" by friends and neighbors, recognizes the need to compromise with money and mediocrity. Yet, having put up the good fight, we must continue to admire his tenacious resistance to the tyranny of the run-of-the-mill.

As Américo Castro recognized some eighty years ago, Cervantes's genius and his prodigious contribution to the origins of the modern novel lie in his discovery of the extraordinary qualities of ordinary lives. Laying the groundwork for Joyce three centuries later, who would trace with equal wit and blistering irony the epic resonances of the commonplace in his Ulysses, Cervantes understood that pathos and bathos could, in fact, coexist and that tedium could be the springboard to life, being every bit as interesting and as the epic deeds of Amadis or the dauntless wanderings of Homer's heroes. Cervantes's merit, and the magnificent leap of the imagination upon which his founding of the modern novels rests, can be located in his ability to find transcendence in the ordinary — in the here and now. Challenging the ancient norms and conventions of narrative, Cervantes learned to recite a new song, the epic of the commonplace, which we have come to call the novel.

It is very satisfying to see the case made well in English for Don Quijote as a modern novel since, much to the chagrin of hispanists, the critical and theoretical perception and reception of the work as a novel has not fared well in the English-speaking world despite Stern's and Fielding's open admiration and early imitation of the book. Individuals of the stature of Nabokov, who failed to read Spanish and...