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La Mancha in central Spain is a dry
but agriculturally important area,
lacking in literary resonance and
therefore an unlikely (and amusing)
home for a would-be chivalric hero.romances of chivalry dwelled in
a world of myth, Cervantes’ novel
was ready to engage with gritty,
present-day issues.Illusion and disillusion
Stories proliferate at every turn,
offering further opportunities for
illusion and disillusion. Quixote
and Sancho hear of a young man
who became a shepherd after
having studied pastoral literature,
but died for the love of a beautiful
shepherdess, Marcella. Accused
of being the cause of his death,
Marcella delivers a fiery speech at
the funeral defending her right to
live as she wants and refusing to be
the object of male fantasy. Literature
is seemingly condemned for its
capacity to encourage its readers
to live in a dream world, while the
book achieves precisely this goal.
Cervantes makes clear that as
an author he will do exactly what
he wants. Slowly, Don Quixote is
brought back home, exhausted and
disenchanted. “I was mad, now I
am in my senses,” he says, shortlybefore his death. By killing him off,
Cervantes clearly wanted to prevent
any more unauthorized sequels.
Despite Cervantes’ claims of
ownership, Don Quixote illustrates
the way great fictional characters
ultimately escape their authors,
seeming to move away from the
pages in which they first appear.
He inspired English comic novelists
such as Henry Fielding and French
realists such as Gustave Flaubert,
whose character Emma Bovary canRENAISSANCE TO ENLIGHTENMENT
be seen as a 19th-century Quixote
in her bid to escape the tedium
of life by imitating fiction. In the
20th century, Cervantes’ playful
and metafictional side inspired
Jorge Luis Borges to write “Pierre
Menard, Author of the Quixote”
(about a writer who recreates
Cervantes’ novel), which Borges
described, mischieviously, as “more
subtle than Cervantes’ [story].” Don
Quixote is also immortalized as
an English adjective for erratic if
idealistic behavior—quixotic.Interpretations
Standing at the junction between
medieval chivalric tales and
the modern novel, Don Quixote
bequeathed a rich cultural legacy
to generations of readers, and the
work has been subject to shifting
interpretations over the centuries.
Upon publication in Spain’s Golden
Century, it was widely perceived as
a satire—with Don Quixote as the
butt of the jokes; but with much of
Spain’s history woven into the tale,
it was also seen as a critique of the
country’s imperial ambitions. Don
Quixote’s delusions of heroism can
be read as a symbol of his nation’s
wasteful expansionism in the face
of decline. For revolutionaries, Don
Quixote was an inspiration—a man
who was right when the system
was wrong; and the Romantics
transformed him into a tragic
character—a man with noble
intentions, defeated by the second
rate. This reevaluation of the work
over time points to the enduring
power of its story and its writing,
and guarantees the text a central
place in literary history. ■‘Tell me, Senor Don Alvaro,’
said Don Quixote, ‘am I
at all like that Don Quixote
you talk of?’
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