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

I. A Story “Naked and Unadorned”

c h a p t e r i A Story “Naked and Unadorned” The Prologue to Part 1 The creative process we have just sketched cannot be easily reduced to a subjective experience of self-satisfaction and reassuring feelings of accomplishment . For Cervantes it must have been something rather ambivalent, a mixture of satisfaction at his artistic feat, and a sense of uneasiness, not so much about the fate of his novel after publication, but more deeply about the very meaning and significance of what his own story had taught him about himself and about the making of it. As we pointed out, in a novel so prophetic and defining of the new spirit of the novel, the fact that its protagonist becomes mad reading novels cannot possibly be considered an accident. In the Prologue to Part 1 Cervantes tells us that the creation of Don Quixote took place away from “the pleasantness of the fields, the serenity of the skies, the murmuring of streams and the tranquility of the spirit.” It felt “much like one engendered in prison, where every discomfort has its seat and every dismal sound its habitation.” Apart from any possible extraliterary autobiographical reference, the statement is both revealing and intrigu31 ing. It may help in the understanding of such a statement to keep in mind the rather unique status of the Quixote in the context of Cervantes’s narrative production in general. The story of Don Quixote, as we have said, was not of a kind to sooth the spirit of the author who, at the time he wrote the words just quoted, may have already had in mind the project for which he would have liked to be remembered, his magnum opus, his great Christian romance, The Travails of Persiles and Segismunda. For it is hard to imagine a greater formal contrast between these two stories and their respective protagonists. I think it is safe to say that the artistic genesis of the Persiles, for example, must have been a very different experience from that of the Quixote. If Persiles describes the Christian journey to final redemption and therefore, in a sense, to paradise, the artistic genesis and development of the Quixote must have felt somewhat like purgatory, some sort of ascetic experience, a purging or cleansing of the artistic spirit of its author.1 For there was a lot that Cervantes, who wanted to believe in the possibility of a Christian epic, had to overcome and accept in order to bring himself to the compassionate and sustained understanding of such a fool, to the only kind of profound understanding that could turn an old madman into the Knight of La Mancha that he created. Saving the old madman from his madness could only be the other side of an effort on the part of Cervantes to rid himself of his own demons. It is remarkable to see how different Cervantes’s attitude is in the presentation of Part 1 of the Quixote from the way he presents or announces his other narrative works, in particular those closest in time to the composition of his famous novel: The Exemplary Stories and the Persiles, the latter published posthumously. In the Prologue to the Exemplary Stories (1913) he clearly feels proud because he considers himself to be the first to have written that kind of short story or novela in the Castilian language, “because the many novelas printed in that language are all translated from foreign languages, while these are my own, not imitated or stolen.” He also feels confident about their “exemplary ” character, and invites the reader to look closely at and to find moral profit in them. Furthermore, since he has been “bold enough to dedicate them to the great Count of Lemos, they [must] have some mystery hidden in 1. From a rather different perspective, Henry W. Sullivan describes Part 2 of the Quixote as a “grotesque purgatory.” See Bibliography. 32 A Story “Naked and Unadorned” them to raise them to that higher level.” In fact, in the Dedication he tells the count that the twelve short stories he is sending him “could aspire to a position next to the best.” In this same Prologue he also announces the forthcoming “Travails of Persiles , a book which dares to compete with Heliodoro,” the prestigious Hellenistic author of the Ethiopian Story, considered at the time throughout Europe as one of the classics. (This...