Everybody knows what "Don Quixote" is about, don't they? Not exactly.
The story's basics are among the most famous in all of literature, of course. A fairly rich old man with some noble ancestry named Alonso Quixano, who loves to read stories of chivalry – that is, books like "Amadis Of Gaul," mentioned here by name, about traveling knights of previous ages and their great deeds – decides that he is in fact one such knight, several hundred years after their time. He puts on an antique suit of armor that's in his possession, takes an ancient lance off his wall, saddles up a horse who is little more than a skeleton, gives him the name Rocinante, and off he goes.
Before he does this, though, he does a couple of other things: he invents a name for his lady love, because every knight errant has one of those, and invites a local peasant to be his squire, promising him that knights like himself inevitably get to a point where some great nobleman gives him the rule of some enormous province. Such knights always give their squires the governorship of some part of such a province. The peasant, Sancho Panza, gets so excited at this prospect that he hares off behind Don Quixote on the spot, leaving his wife and children behind. At least he has the advantage of existence, which Don Quixote's lady love does not have – contrary to what you might remember from the musical "Man Of La Mancha," derived from this book, the lady in "Don Quixote" has nothing but a name, Dulcinea del Toboso, that the knight made up out of whole cloth because every knight needs a lady to worship from afar.
So a little while later Don Quixote sees a group of windmills, mistakes them for huge monsters, attacks them with his lance, and gets dumped on the ground for his pains. After a time he spots a traveling barber approaching him, who's wearing his shaving basin on his head to protect him from the afternoon sun. Don Quixote mistakes the basin for the Golden Helmet of Mambrino, attacks the barber to claim it as a prize, rides off with it, and wears it for the rest of the book. And those two adventures, as far as I know, are the primary incidents in the whole 900-something pages that most people know about. So what happens in the rest of the story, and what on Earth makes the story so well known if so little of it has entered the popular culture?
Well, I'm not enough of an expert to say for sure, but a few things occur to me. For one thing, when Don Quixote (or its first volume at any rate) came out in 1605, it was a pretty new kind of story because it set out to make fun of a classic plotline. Other books had contained humor long before this, of course, but this sort of humor parodying a specific sort of story had not been seen much before, especially by such an expert writer as Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
More importantly, in Volume 2 of this work, Cervantes popularized a kind of metafiction. At the start of this volume, Quixote and Sancho, having returned to their home village, suddenly up and hit the road again. Shortly thereafter they run across a group of highwaymen who are thrilled to met them, having heard about them long since. It turns out, however, that this bunch is wildly mistaken about the character and adventures of these two heroes. Why? Because they have read not only Volume 1 of Cervantes' work, but an additional volume about them, loaded with errors. This erroneous volume was in fact published sometime after 1605, and it seems that Cervantes took the opportunity to comment on it in his own work. It was his only recourse, apparently – early 17th Century copyright law was pretty nearly nonexistent, so Cervantes couldn't sue.
In other words, two fictional characters run across the effects of the fiction in which they appear, not only from these highwaymen but from any number of others that they meet, some of whom play tremendous practical jokes on them for their own amusement. Reality, as it turns out, is not quite as solid as it appears to you and me, which is an important point when it's time to deal with an apparent madman like Don Quixote.
Which brings us to the subject of Quixote's lunacy. More than one of those who meet him comment on the remarkable fact that, when the knight talks about anything other than chivalry, he is not only coherent but in a lot of cases far wiser than the supposedly sane. Not only that, but because he is supposedly crazy, others seem to feel completely justified in mistreating him, sometimes in a terribly dangerous fashion. Literature that questions whether the mad are in fact mad is nothing new, of course – one of my personal favorite authors, Philip K. Dick, took that as his theme for most of his career – but as far as I know, Cervantes was one of the first to take it up.
In short, with this piece, Cervantes contributed a great deal to the literature of the next several hundred years, if he didn't just invent the whole thing. Which means that he resembled his main character by a lot. And he also seems to have resembled his practical, earthy, proverb-quoting protagonist's sidekick by a lot, too. That is to say, whether he invented the technique of drawing on his own person for his characters or simply participated in using that technique, he was a thoroughly modern author of fiction in oh so many ways. Maybe "Don Quixote" really is the first modern novel after all.
Benshlomo says, Read older books – they tend to surprise us.
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