Touchstones

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  What idea of freedom is this? The same idea that, from the eighteenth century, the so-called liberals would formulate in Europe: that freedom is the sovereignty of the individual to decide his or her life without pressure or conditions, in accordance solely with their intelligence and their wishes. That is what, several centuries later, Isaiah Berlin would term ‘negative freedom’, to be free from interference and coercion when thinking, expressing oneself and acting. What is at the heart of this idea of freedom is a profound mistrust of authority, of the excesses that power, all power, can perpetrate.

  Let us not forget that Don Quixote delivers this passionate eulogy to freedom just as he has left the estate of the anonymous Duke and Duchess, where he has been regally treated by the exuberant lord of the castle, the very incarnation of power. But in the midst of all the flattery and attention that he received, the Ingenious Hidalgo felt that his freedom was imperceptibly being threatened and constrained: ‘I could not enjoy such luxuries [the gifts and attention lavished on him] with the same freedom as if they had been my own’ (II, 58). This declaration implies that the foundation of freedom is private property, and that true pleasure is only complete when the people experiencing the pleasure do not feel that they cannot take any initiative, that their freedom to think and act are being curtailed. Because, ‘the obligation to repay the benefits and favours received is a bond that prevents the spirit from campaigning freely. Happy is he to whom heaven has given a crust of bread and who is under no obligation to thank anyone for it except heaven itself.’ What could be clearer? Freedom is individual and requires a minimum level of prosperity to be real. Because people who are poor and depend on gifts or charity to survive, can never be totally free. It is true that there was a time long since past, as Don Quixote recalls to the terrified goatherds in his speech on the Golden Age (I, 11), in which virtue and goodness held sway in the world, and that in this age of paradise, before private property, ‘men living in such times did not know those words, “yours” and “mine”’, and ‘all things were held in common’. But then history changed, and ‘our detestable times’ arrived in which, for security and justice to prevail, ‘the order of knights errant was founded to defend maidens, protect widows and succour orphans and the needy’.

  Don Quixote does not believe that justice, social order and progress emanate from authority, but rather that they are the work of individuals who, like his models, the knights errant, and he himself, shoulder the task of making the world they live in less unjust, freer and more prosperous. That is the knight errant: an individual who, dedicated to a life of generosity, heads out on the highways to seek redress for all the evils on the planet. Authority, when it appears, hinders rather than aids this task.

  Where is the authority in the Spain that Don Quixote travels around on his three sallies? We have to step out of the novel to know that the King of Spain who is alluded to on several occasions is Philip III, because within the fiction, except for a very few, fleeting appearances, such as the appearance of the governor of Barcelona when Don Quixote visits that city, the authorities are conspicuous by their absence. And the institutions that embody authority, like the Holy Brotherhood, which enforces law in the countryside, and which is alluded to on Don Quixote’s and Sancho’s journeys, are mentioned as something distant, dark and threatening.

  Don Quixote has not the slightest qualm in standing up to authority and defying the laws when they go against his own conception of justice and freedom. On his first sally he confronts a rich man, Juan Haldudo, from Quintanar, who is whipping one of his servants for losing some sheep, something that, in keeping with the barbarous customs of the time, he was quite entitled to do. But the man from La Mancha considers this entitlement intolerable and he rescues the boy, thus righting what he considers to be a wrong (although, as soon as he leaves, Juan Haldudo, despite his promises to the contrary, starts beating Andrés again, leaving him half dead) (I, 4). The novel is full of episodes like this, where his individualistic and freedom-based view of justice leads the bold hidalgo to defy the established powers, laws and customs in the name of what for him is a superior moral imperative.

  The adventure where Don Quixote takes his libertarian principles to almost suicidal lengths – demonstrating that his idea of freedom anticipates by some two centuries certain aspects of anarchist thinking – is one of the most famous in the novel. It is when he frees twelve criminals, including the sinister Ginés de Pasamonte, the future Master Pedro, despite the fact that the Ingenious Hidalgo is perfectly aware, from their own words, that they are all criminals, condemned to the king’s galleys (I, 22). The reasons he gives for his open defiance of authority – that it is not right that honourable men should be the executioners of other men – scarcely masks, in its vagueness, the real motivation for his behaviour which, in this regard, is utterly coherent throughout the novel. This motivation is his overwhelming love of freedom which, if he has to choose, he even places above the law, and his profound scepticism towards authority that, for him, offers no guarantee of what he calls, rather ambiguously, ‘distributive justice’, an expression that seems to imply a desire for equality, that sometimes counterbalances his libertarian ideals.

  In this episode, as if to dispel even the slightest doubt as to how unbridled and free his thinking really is, he praises the office of the pimp: it is seen as an office for intelligent people, one that is very necessary in a well-ordered society. He is angry to hear that an old man has been sent to the galleys for this because, in his opinion, a pimp should have been sent there, not to row but to lead and to command. Anyone daring to rebel in such an open fashion against the political and moral correctness of the time was a unique kind of madman who, and not just when he spoke about romances of chivalry, said and did things that questioned the very roots of the society that he lived in.

  The Homelands of Don Quixote

  What image of Spain emerges from the pages of Cervantes’s novel? That of a vast and diverse world, without geographical borders, made up of an archipelago of communities, villages and towns, which the characters call their ‘homelands’. This is very similar to the way in which empires and kingdoms are described in romances of chivalry, even though Cervantes was supposedly ridiculing the genre in Don Quixote. (Instead, he paid them a magnificent homage, and one of his great literary achievements was to bring them up to date, preserving, through playfulness and humour, everything that could survive from the chivalric romances, and incorporating all of this into the social and artistic values of the seventeenth century, a very different period to the time when the romances had first appeared.)

  On his three sallies, Don Quixote travels round La Mancha and parts of Aragon and Catalonia, but, since there are so many diverse characters and references to places and things throughout the novel, Spain appears to be much larger, united in its geographical and cultural diversity, with vague borders that seem to be defined not in terms of territories and administrative districts, but rather in terms of religious boundaries. Spain ends in those vague, specifically marine, boundaries where the dominions of the Moors, the religious enemies, begin. But while Spain provides the context, the varied and inescapable limits that encompass the relatively small area that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza move around in, what is described, with great vividness and warmth, is the ‘homeland’, that concrete, human space, bounded by memory, a landscape, certain people, certain habits and customs that men and women retain in their memory as their patrimony, as the thing that best defines them. The characters of the novel travel the world, we might say, with their towns and villages on their backs. They turn up with these credentials, their ‘homelands’, and everyone can remember, with irrepressible nostalgia, these small communities where they have left loved ones, friends, family, houses and animals. When at the end of the third journey, after so many adventures, Sancho Panza catches sight of his village, he falls to his knees, visibly moved, and exclaims, ‘open your eyes, my longed-for village, and see your son Sancho Panza returning�
�� (II, 72).

  Because, with the passage of time, this idea of the homeland would gradually disintegrate and begin to meld instead with the concept of the nation (which does not appear until the nineteenth century), we should point out that the ‘homelands’ in Don Quixote have nothing to do with, indeed they sit uncomfortably with, this abstract, general, schematic and essentially political concept of the nation. This nation is at the root of all nationalisms, a collectivist ideology that purports to define individuals through their belonging to a human conglomerate marked out as different to others by certain characteristics such as race, language and religion. This concept is poles apart from the impassioned individualism shown by Don Quixote and those who accompany him in Cervantes’s novel, a world in which ‘patriotism’ is a generous and positive feeling, of love of the land and one’s own people, an adherence to memory and the family past, and not a way of setting oneself apart, becoming exclusive and erecting barriers against ‘others’. Don Quixote’s Spain does not have borders, and it is a diverse, multicoloured world, made up of innumerable homelands, which opens up to the outside world and merges with it, and opens its doors to people who come from other parts, so long as they come in peace and can overcome the hurdle (which was insurmountable in the Counter-Reformation mentality of the period) of religion (that is, by converting to Christianity).

  A Modern Book

  Don Quixote’s modernity can be found in the rebellious quest for justice that leads the main character to take on, as his personal responsibility, the task of changing the world for the better even when, as he attempts to put this into practice, he makes mistakes, comes up against insuperable obstacles and is beaten, ill-treated and turned into an object of derision. But it is also a contemporary novel because, in his account of Don Quixote’s exploits, Cervantes revolutionised the narrative forms of his time and laid the foundations for the modern novel. Even if they do not know it, contemporary novelists who play with form, distort time, mix up different points of view and experiment with language, are all indebted to Cervantes.

  The revolution in form that is Don Quixote has been studied and analysed from every possible standpoint, and yet, as happens with these exemplary masterpieces, it is an inexhaustible source because, like Hamlet or The Divine Comedy or the Iliad and Odyssey, it evolves with the passage of time and recreates itself in accordance with the aesthetic values of each different culture, becoming in this way a real Ali Baba’s cave, whose treasures are never-ending.

  Perhaps the most innovative aspect of the narrative form of Don Quixote is the way in which Cervantes dealt with the problem of the narrator, the basic problem that any novelist must first resolve: who is going to tell the story? The answer that Cervantes gave to this question brought a subtlety and complexity to the genre which modern novelists still benefit from, and which was the equivalent in its day to the impact in our times of Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, or, in the Latin American field, of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Cortázar’s Hopscotch.

  Who is telling the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? Two narrators: the mysterious Cide Hamete Benengeli, whom we never read directly because his original manuscript is in Arabic, and an anonymous narrator, who sometimes speaks in the first person but most frequently in the third person of omniscient narrators, who, supposedly, translates Cide Hamete Benengeli’s manuscript into Spanish and, at the same time, adapts, edits and comments on it. This is a Chinese box structure; the story that we are reading is contained in another, earlier and much larger structure that we can only guess at. The existence of these two narrators introduces into the story an ambiguity and a sense of uncertainty about this ‘other story’, Cide Hamete Benengeli’s account, which lends a subtle relativism to the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, a subjective aura that is a key component of the autonomy, sovereignty and originality of the work.

  But these two narrators, and the delicate dialectic between them, are not the only ones in this novel of compulsive storytellers and narrators: many characters take over from them, as we have seen, recounting their own misfortunes, or the misfortunes of others, in episodes that comprise a number of smaller Chinese boxes nestling within this vast world of fiction full of individual fictions that we call Don Quixote de La Mancha.

  Using what was a commonplace in romances of chivalry (many of them were supposedly manuscripts discovered in exotic and strange places), Cervantes used Cide Hamete Benengeli as a device to introduce ambiguity and playfulness as central elements of the narrative structure. And he also introduced important innovations into another fundamental aspect of narrative form: narrative time.

  Time in Don Quixote

  Like the narrator, time is also in every novel an artifice, an invention, something constructed to meet the needs of the plot, and never a mere reproduction or reflection of ‘real’ time.

  In Don Quixote, various times are masterfully woven together, giving the novel its sense of being an independent, self-sufficient world, which makes it so persuasive a narrative. On the one hand there is the time in which the characters of the story move around, which comprises roughly six months since the three sallies that Don Quixote makes last firstly for three days, then a couple of months and lastly four months. We must then add the intervals between the journeys (the second is one month) which Don Quixote spends in his village, and the final days leading up to his death, a total of seven or eight months.

  But there are also episodes that greatly extend the time-frame of the novel, back into the past and forward into the future. Many of the events that we hear about throughout the story have already happened before the story began, and we learn about them through the accounts of people who took part in or witnessed these events, and see the final outcome of many of them in the ‘present time’ of the novel.

  The most notable and surprising aspect of narrative time, however, is that many characters in the second part of Don Quixote, like the Duke and Duchess, have read the first part. Thus we are made aware that another reality exists, other times, outside the novel, the fiction, in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza exist as characters in a book, and where some readers are inside and others ‘outside’ the story, as is our case as present-day readers. This little ploy, which must be seen as something much more daring than a simple literary conjuring trick, has far-reaching effects with regard to the structure of the novel. It expands and multiplies the time of the fiction, which is now enclosed – another Chinese box – in a wider world in which Don Quixote, Sancho and other characters have already lived, been turned into heroes of a book and affected the readers of this ‘other’ reality, which is not exactly the reality that we are reading, and which contains this reality; just as with Chinese boxes, the larger contains the smaller, and the smaller contains another box, in a process that could, in theory, be infinite.

  It is an amusing and also an unsettling game, which allows the story to be enriched by events such as those planned by the Duke and Duchess (who know, through the book they have read, of Don Quixote’s obsessions and odd behaviour). And it also illustrates the complex relationship between fiction and life, the way in which life produces fictions and how they, in turn, affect life, enlivening it, changing it, adding to it colour, adventure, emotions, passions and surprises.

  The relationship between fiction and life, a recurrent theme in classical and modern literature, is explored in Cervantes’s novel in a way that anticipated the great literary adventures of the twentieth century, in which the best novelists would be tempted to investigate the enchantments of narrative form: language, time, characters, point of view and the function of the narrator.

  In addition to these and many other reasons, the lasting appeal of Don Quixote is also due to the elegance and power of its style, one of the pinnacles of writing in the Spanish language. We need to speak perhaps not of one but of many styles in which the novel is written. There are two that are clearly distinguishable, corresponding to the two sides of
reality that the story develops: the ‘real’ and the ‘fictitious’. In the intercalated stories, the language is much more pompous and rhetorical than in the main story, in which Don Quixote, Sancho, the priest, the barber and the other people in the village talk in a much more natural and simple way. In the added stories the narrator uses a more affected – a more literary – language, through which he achieves a distancing effect, one of unreality. Similar differences can be detected in the language used by the characters, according to the social status, level of education and occupation of the speakers. Even the popular sectors speak very differently: simple villagers are very clear, while galley slaves or city thugs use slang, like the galley slaves whose criminal slang is completely incomprehensible to Don Quixote. He himself does not use just one form of expression. Since Don Quixote, according to the narrator, only exaggerated or began raving when he talked about issues of chivalric romance, he can talk about other issues quite precisely, objectively, sensibly and intelligently. But when the topic of chivalric romance arises, he becomes an unstoppable fount of literary matters, erudite allusions, literary references and delirious fantasies. Sancho Panza’s language is equally variable. As we have seen, he changes his way of speaking during the course of the novel, starting out with a spicy, lively turn of phrase, punctuated by refrains and sayings that express a whole heritage of popular wisdom, and ending with a convoluted, elaborate style that he has picked up from his master, which can be seen as a humorous parody of the parody that is Don Quixote’s language. Cervantes rather than Sansón Carrasco should have been dubbed the Knight of the Mirrors, because Don Quixote de la Mancha is a veritable labyrinth of mirrors where everything, the characters, the artistic form, the plot, the styles, split in two and multiply, in images that express all the infinite subtlety and diversity of human life.