The humble story of Don Quixote: reflections on the birth of the modern novel

VI. Unamuno’s Enthusiastic Quijotismo and the Envy of Cain

c h a p t e r v i Unamuno’s Enthusiastic Quijotismo and the Envy of Cain The crowd is untruth. Therefore was Christ crucified, because he, even though he addressed himself to all, would not have to do with the crowd....... And therefore everyone who in truth will serve the truth, is eo ipso in some way or other a martyr. (Kierkegaard, The Point of View, 109)1 As soon as the category “the single individual” goes out, Christianity is abolished....... If this happens, then the God-man is a phantom instead of an actual prototype. (Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2.282) Let us now turn to Unamuno, who is a much more complex case than Castro. Our own reading of Don Quixote from now on will be guided in part by our analysis of Unamuno’s quijotismo. While Américo Castro appears to be totally impervious to the value of Don 131 1. Quoted in Bellinger, 81. Quixote’s innocence, Unamuno was clearly quite sensitive to it. He spoke repeatedly of Don Quixote’s goodness and profound lack of malice. But that only served to make Don Quixote’s madness appear in his eyes even more heroic, because Don Quixote’s innocence—Unamuno thought—made his madness heroic in the eyes of God. In other words, not only did he see in Don Quixote’s madness no danger to his innocence, he actually saw his madness as an extension, a magnification, of his inborn goodness to a heroic degree. But Unamuno was no fool. It is important to emphasize from the start that he understood perfectly well that was not the way Cervantes saw Don Quixote’s madness or the way it related to his innocence. Thus he accused Cervantes of being narrow-minded, mediocre, incapable of understanding the true meaning and greatness of Don Quixote’s heroism, or, to be more precise, the truly heroic character of Don Quixote’s madness: [Caso] típico de un escritor enormemente inferior a su obra, a su Quijote. Si Cervantes no hubiera escrito el Quijote...... apenas figuraría en nuestra historia literaria sino como ingenio de quinta, sexta o décimotercia fila....... Cada vez que el bueno de Cervantes se introduce en el relato...... es para decir alguna impertinencia o juzgar malévola o maliciosamente a su héroe. (Obras completas, 3.577–78) ([Cervantes is a] typical [case] of a writer enormously inferior to his work. If Cervantes had not written the Quijote...... he would barely figure in our literary history as a writer of fifth, sixth, or thirteenth rank....... Every time good old Cervanters intervenes in his novel...... it is to say something impertinent, or to judge his hero in a malicious way.) I have no doubt that Unamuno would accept Sancho’s words about Don Quixote ’s childlike absence of malice as being Cervantes’s own words. It was the heroic character of his Quixote that mediocre Cervantes could not understand, and he couldn’t understand it precisely because of his mediocrity. Unamuno thought that while Cervantes could conceive of an Alonso Quijano, el bueno, he could not conceive of Alonso Quijano’s goodness to a heroic degree. Such heroic goodness would only look like madness in the eyes of mediocrity. I think, however, that Unamuno’s visceral anti-Cervantism is far more revealing of what is really happening in the novel than most of what the majority of defenders of Cervantes say. I think that Unamuno felt quite accurately what Cervantes was trying to do in his novel, and fully understood that such an intention was at its very core anti-Unamunian. Clearly, he did not like that at all. It is as if Cervantes would have tried to take away from him, from Una132 Quijotismo and the Envy of Cain muno, his own Quixote. There are moments in Unamuno’s anti-Cervantine diatribe when one cannot help thinking that he feels Cervantes’s ironic antiquixotism as something like a personal attack. And, in a certain sense, he was right. In other words, I think that implicitly, indirectly, in spite of himself , Unamuno can be an excellent guide to some of the most fundamental insights in Cervantes’s novel. In order to fully understand Unamuno’s quijotismo we must keep in mind that he attached great religious significance to the heroic figure of Don Quixote . He tells us that Don Quixote, like any...