This post serves as summary of some of the themes we discussed during the September 3 session of the Don Quixote reading group. These comments will be brief and will not do justice to the rich discussion we had, but they will serve the purpose of updating people who were unable to attend.
Don Quixote's project is to revive knight errantry, striving for the "righting [of] all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs winning eternal renown and everlasting fame" (21). This mission is inspired by consuming a vast amount of chivalric literature. Don Quixote "spent his times of leisure--which meant most of the year--reading books of chivalry with so much devotion and enthusiasm that he forgot almost completely about the hunt and even about the administration of his estate" (20).
As a group of people who love to read and who read often, the madness induced by reading was counter-intuitive to us. We marveled at the book burning in chapter 6. And yet, this scene may not be just about books. "'No,' said the [Don Quixote's] niece, 'there's no reason to pardon any of them [chivalric texts], because they all have been harmful; we ought to toss them out the windows into the courtyard, and make a pile of them and set them on fire'" (45). The priest, not satisfied with burning "innocents," decides to sift through the collection first (46). Some texts are saved through this process, indeed some of the texts are beloved by the burners. Despite the saving of some innocents, a larger question about the legitimacy of the burning lingers. Don Quixote takes place a little over one hundred years into the Spanish Inquisition, in which many innocent people, especially women, were killed (despite the veneer of legitimacy by any church "investigations”).
Don Quixote is certainly a man of vision--but what kind of vision? Becoming a knight errant "seemed reasonable and necessary to him" (21). Perhaps being a knight errant is his fate. He believes the chivalric literature to be fact rather than fiction. However, it seems (to at least some of our participants) as if Don Quixote is attempting to solve a non-problem. Although there are certainly wrongs in the world, it is not clear that Don Quixote is the right person to address them. His intervention into the beating of the shepherd boy results in the shepherd boy being paid in more lashes, not reales (chapter 4). Further, many of his adventures create problems from innocuous circumstances; the windmills are just windmills, not enchanted giants (chapter 8). It may also be that knight errantry is the wrong sort of institution to right wrongs. Armed warriors with no money and no attachment to a lord or lady roaming the country seeking adventure seems like a social problem itself.
And what of Don Quixote's moral responsibility? Despite his good intentions, his actions yield a substantial amount of harm. On the other hand, Don Quixote is a fastidious rule-follower; the chivalric code is his guide. He defends Dulcinea's honor, and when he is confronted with new information about what knights errant ought to do, he complies. That's why Don Quixote returns home for money, clean shirts, and a squire. To complicate matters, his madness seems at times to be deliberately maintained.
Although some people found Don Quixote to be unlikeable, others suggested that Don Quixote provides a mirror for ourselves. Heroes in medieval times were often flawed--in other words, real human beings. If Don Quixote is his own worst enemy, is the same true for ourselves, when we strive to do right or good and inevitably fail?
Whatever our initial impressions of our knight, we look forward to following his development. Don Quixote is a self-crafted figure. He knows who he wants to be, and seeks out opportunities to shape that self. When he is beaten, those failures are interpreted to serve a purpose in his narrative self-identity. And we have this history from a narrator who raises meta-textual questions: How does Cervantes mock his fellow contemporary writers or popular authors when their books are burned by Don Quixote's friends? And what of the narrator who is limited by his own textual references, so that many questions, such as Don Quixote's given name, are left unanswered and unanswerable?
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