The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote

3. Parallel Worlds: Myth into History and Performance

  39 3 Parallel Worlds Myth into History and Performance How did the concept of “utopianism,” as we have used it, develop? The notion of a primitive age of equality among ancient Greek and Latin writers has been extensively documented by Arthur O. Lovejoy and George Boas and, more recently, by Jean Delumeau. They have noted the different ideas of history that frame such imaginative speculation (e.g., meliorative, pejorative, cyclical). The Christian doctrine of “the Fall” eliminated all but the pejorative, investing with post-lapsarian nostalgia a vision of a world forever lost, of what Eden might have become had “[m]an’s first disobedience,” in the language of Milton, not provoked the wrath of God. And so in this tradition the originary state of humankind becomes imaged as a life of leisure, of abundant fruit and grain, and of universal harmony. It is this topos, marked by different socio-cultural emphases, that we will see informing the vision of primordial bliss when it is represented. Christianity had fixed the originary place of unspoiled happiness and blissful innocence in Eden’s garden. Whereas the pagan myth of the different ages—gold, silver, brass, iron—presented an orderly sequence of decline, the Christian story presented an abrupt and traumatic ejection from paradisal leisure and abundance into a hostile world marked . Lovejoy’s and Boas’s distinction between the “soft” primitivism which we have seen privileged in Ovid, characterized by a bountiful Nature and life without labor, and its difference from the “hard” kind with its heat and cold and meager diet of acorns (which is partly the one Don Quijote conjures up in Part I, chapter 11, and which scholars from Lucretius to Hobbes make even more barbaric), can be made for the pagan view of the originary state of humankind but not, of course, for the Judeo-Christian Eden. 40   The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote by the compulsory labor that had become the human lot: “by the sweat of your face / you shall eat bread” (Gen. 3 RSV). Humankind’s fate was irrevocable. Not only was it determined by divine decree, but it was moreover a matter of faith. Saint Augustine had urged Christians to “believe in the actual truth of the story of Eden” in De civitate dei (bk. XIII: ch. 21, 288). The expulsion, then, unlike the Stoics’ concept of a recurrent history, postulated an irreversible loss. But faith and doctrine, as has so often happened, left a residue of obstinate practical questions. Where, for example, was Eden located? Was it washed away in the Flood, as some maintained, or did it still exist in some remote and inaccessible part of the world? (Delumeau, History ch. 2). Origen had assumed that paradise did exist somewhere, and he placed it as a way station for the souls of saints on their journey to heaven (Boas 156–57; Delumeau, History 31). Delumeau cites numerous medieval writers on geography who claimed to situate the earthly Paradise and he reproduces twelve maps showing its supposed location (ch. 3). The anonymous Hortus sanitatis of 1491, which describes more than five hundred plants, actually includes the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life, and declares their provenance and existence in the Garden of Eden (Grafton 162). Imaginative descriptions of the earthly Paradise also include features derived from pagan writers. The treatise on the phoenix (De Phoenice), long attributed to Lactantius, describes a place without frost or burning sun, without hunger or disease, where trees are forever green (Boas 157–58). Antonio de Torquemada’s Jardín de flores curiosas (1560; frequently reprinted), Book II, records a lengthy discussion among three speakers on the location of the earthly Paradise (208–22) in which one of the speakers repeats the pseudo-Lactantius’s description, but leaves unresolved the question of whether the original Paradise of Genesis still exists somewhere. Covarrubias in his dictionary also leaves the . One of the speakers, Antonio, explains: There is a wood there, dense with trees that are perpetually green and in leaf . . . when the flood engulfed the world, it rose above the waters of Deucalion, which did not reach it. There is no sickness there, nor difficult old age, nor death, nor harsh, cruel fear of any thing. There is no wickedness, no greed for riches. There are no pangs of hunger; no storms, no force in the winds that Parallel Worlds...