The Dangers of Don Quixote: the development of the Novel, the role of the Imagination, and the good of coloring outside the lines of Reality
The Banquet, Revolutions Ed. 2
Dear All and Sundry,
In answer to the survey, I wanted to make sure I began venturing into novels, and what better novel to venture into than Don Quixote? This was a challenging Banquet to offer, as it deals with a topic near and dear to my heart, that of Imagination, but the Imagination is a dangerous topic, for many reasons, not least of which is the misappropriation of the uses of the Imagination by the Romantics, and many others since Don Quixote. Though some may say that Don Quixote is to blame, I differ—I think that like many works, certain times have misread this polyvalent work. It so happened that the time that misread it was the most consequential, and we live in a world shaped by that misreading.
But to dive in: on today’s menu, we will discuss the following:
The novelty of the Novel
Don Quixote’s daydream knighthood
Fiction and Temptation
The Good of Imagination
A poem to color the world by
Let’s sally forth!
All things Novel
The Novel is not old, as a literary genre. It can perhaps trace some meager lineage before the Renaissance, but it really only took off after Western culture stopped looking back at the past for wisdom (as it had for the previous thousand years, if not longer) and started looking for wisdom in its own generation, in its own time; it started looking to the new.
It is no accident that the Novel mirrored the rise of the Individual seeking meaning in himself or herself rather than in relationship to others, i.e. communities, the past, etc. At the time, people were reading narratives in prose— accounts (true or not) of discoveries like the travel narratives of Marco Polo, Sir John Mandeville, or Friar Odoric of Pordenone, or treatises on astronomy or medicine, and these prose works, in their basic utilitarian simplicity, prioritization of experience over authority, and exciting freedom, foreshadowed the novel, and in the process served to undermine the hegemony that poetry had always held.
To establish their own authority, writers and scholars characterized the past not as a storehouse of received wisdom but as an accumulation of outdated rules and customs. Who would look to the discoveries of the explorers and astronomers if they held to Aristotle as an authority little below that of Scripture? For the heliocentric fashion to take hold, the geocentric view must be shown to be very much out of style. I have not named this era after Revolutions for nothing.
The word “Novel” means new. And Don Quixote, as the first novel, does a thorough job in questioning the assumptions that had held sway before: what good is Chivalry in a world with guns? What good is authority in a world of experiment? What good is “Has always been” in a world of “What might be?” Like Shakespeare, his contemporary, Cervantes will look at the world that has looked to the heavens for its muse, and exclaim “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun…”
Don Quixote: Hero of the Unreal
Imagine, dear Sundry: a rawboned man, more physically fit for the quiet retreat of a library than the dusty and perilous roads of Spain, ambles towards your inn on an equally rawboned nag. Clothed in aged and rusted armor, he heralds you, in language just as antiquated, as seneschal, and says he seeks entry, not to your stable-yard, but to your castle.
Confused but quick on the uptake, you, dear Sundry, decide, this might be worth some fun, and play along. Already engaged in conversation with the slatternly tramps, this spindle-shanked gentleman, you are surprised to see, addresses them not as low-born wenches but as ladies of the court, of your court. Intrigued by the lunatic, you hear him gently scold the “high-born damsels” for their immodest laughter:
“Nothing is more commendable in beautiful women than modesty; and nothing more ridiculous than laughter proceeding from a slight cause; but this I mention not as a reproach, by which I may incur your indignation; on the contrary, my intention is only to do you service.” (DQ pg. 35)
After seeing to his horse, you return to the “knight”. Mystified, but seeing he means no harm, the women are helping him remove his armor, but are stymied by his bizarre headgear. Since he will not suffer the green laces to be cut, with pity, and something approaching graciousness, they feed him, as he is unable to feed himself, trapped inside his cumbrous helmet.
What are we to make of the lunatic? As Cervantes will state, he went mad in two ways: first, in numbering so many books of chivalry in his library, and reading them with such investment, that he became unable to tell fact from fiction, and second, that he became inflamed with the idea of being a knight upon errantry himself, though the age of chivalry had passed some centuries before.
If we can agree that he is insane, that is, unable to distinguish between the figments in his own head from the realities outside it, what are we to make of the reactions of the others? Are they sane? Are we sane, or do we too live in half-real figments of our imagination? How can we be sure of the reality we are in? More frighteningly, what makes reality ontologically superior to fantasy?
The Problem of Imagination’s Relationship to Reality
What is the imagination for? It would be easy to assume imagination is a faculty whose use is primarily to help children imitate adults. Once they become adults, imagination is unnecessary—and should be shed with the onset of maturity, like nursery rhymes, dolls, and action figures.
C. S. Lewis, in the astonishing second book of his space trilogy, Perelandra, seems to depict imagination in a decidedly negative light, as a weakness in the unfallen human intellect. Weston, the demoniac antagonist tempts the innocent Eve-like Green Lady with an original approach— with “Might be” or as we say, with a ‘What if?’
Though she is contented with the present and the satisfaction derived from total trust in the gifts of Maleldil (God), She is pressed to think about joys she does not have. Weston asks her what she thinks about the taboo on her world—not being able to sleep on the stationary land, and in doing so, presents a vision of the imagination:
“And He has not forbidden you to think about dwelling on the fixed land.”
“That would be a strange thing, to think about what will never happen.”
“Nay, in our world, we do it all the time. We put words together to mean things that have never happened and places that never were: beautiful words, well put together. And then tell them to one another. We call it stories or poetry. In that old world you spoke of, Malacandra, they did the same. It is for mirth and wonder and wisdom.”
“What is the wisdom of it?”
This makes the stakes even greater: imagination may not merely be a childish bauble to be put away with other childish things, but a habit of mind that tears us away from the real world, and ultimately from what Is (Truth) and from loving the gift of what Is (Goodness) and replacing it with what Is Not (A lie) and with denial of the gift of what Is to love what Is Not (Evil).
Indeed, if stories and poetry, if the inventive faculty of imagination, merely serves to discontent us with the real, and draw us away from it, we may well ask along with the Green Lady what wisdom there is in it.
Madness and Imagination
Don Quixote is not a knight, and yet thinks he is one. The people he encounters know he is not a knight and yet treat him as one. Consequently, even though he is not dwelling in a Chivalric Romance, his imagination is so powerful, and the world so apt to be amused, that for a certain time, everyone behaves as if they were in a Chivalric Romance.
It changes their behavior. The Innkeeper for a moment is happy to play the role of castellan, and perhaps to consider his inn in a new light, though he knows very well that the accommodations are less than princely. The ladies, for their part, laugh immodestly, as is their wanton wont, but do not otherwise flaunt themselves.
Don Quixote’s imagination is powerful—powerful enough to pull others out of the orbit of their own perceptions of reality at least for a time and bend them to the weight of his own. The sane and usually grounded world gravitates toward him. What does this say about their worldview, if they are so willing to leave it? Why are the sane ready to join in the madness?
What caused this madness in the first place?
Cervantes sets the scene described above with Don Quixote’s view of it:
As our hero’s imagination converted whatsoever he saw, heard or considered, into something of which he had read in books of chivalry; he no sooner perceived the inn, than his fancy represented it, as a stately castle with its four towers and pinnacles of shining silver, accommodated with a drawbridge, deep moat, and all other conveniences, that are described as belonging to buildings of that kind.
As Don Quixote converts his view, we the reader become divided as well: we see the inn, but cannot help also seeing the towers and drawbridge, just as they are described. We enter the fantasy of Don Quixote’s Chivalric Romance as easily as we enter the reality of his dusty and degenerate La Mancha. Of course, neither are real. Both are levels of fiction, and in blurring the line between the two, Cervantes is leading us to blur the line of his fantasy world with our own world. We are as amused as the sane peasants of the book, and as willing to be entertained. We are not looking for fact or for wisdom as much as we are looking for pleasure. In sum, we too are not as sane as we first believe.
But in gently holding this mirror to us, we become aware of the discrepancy between reality and fantasy. Cervantes is not mocking the knight as much as he is mocking the world through him—it’s impossible to read Don Quixote and not feel some affection for him. It is the world as it is perceived that comes in for more criticsim than Don Quixote’s outmoded ways.
“…My Intention is Only to do you service.”
Cervantes was in some ways an odd one to write about the death of Chivalry, having lived a life in many ways more dangerous, more fantastical and indeed more chivalrous than most.
He fought and lost the use of his arm in the Battle of Lepanto, that anachronistic sea-battle that pitted the might of the Moorish armada against the combined but lesser strength of the galleys of the Holy League, a battle whose necessity was questioned by some of the great European countries, and whose outcome guaranteed that Christendom would have the pleasure of dismembering itself from within rather than being dismembered from without.
But herein lies perhaps a clue to how we are to take Don Quixote’s prioritization of the imagination, and of works of fiction generally: Imagination of a kind allowed some, including the Pope, to see a real threat that others lost in their worldly pleasures did not. An insane venture guaranteed the freedom of the worldly sane.
For a moment, the rough harlots of the innkeepers yard became ladies in a Chivalric Romance, and fed Don Quixote as courteously as any damsel in a story, and that is exactly what they were—damsels in a story. The lie became true, in one sense because of the levels of fiction in the story itself, but in a different sense, and deeper sense, because the truth of their nature was not that they were whores, but that they were images of God. Don Quixote saw them closer to their eternal truth, though farther from their earthly one.
And this at the last is the real role of imagination. It serves the humble who know, like Socrates, that they cannot perceive the whole truth of reality, and that vices can further cloud our ability to perceive it. Imagination gives a different sight. It allows us to be makers not of fictions, but of alternate ways of portraying the truth, images of the images of God, so that even with our vision skewed by a worldly lens, though we look through a glass darkly, we perceive a reflection of the truth. In this sense, the wisest fiction is True, even though it “never was”, and it points us, not away from reality like the lies of Weston, but deeper into the mystery of it.
…An Unused Coloring Book
The 20th Century poet Richard Wilbur has a short lyric that expressed the power of the imagination in these terms. I will end with it here, and I hope you find in it, as I have, an apt metaphor for the use of imagination:
At Moorditch
“Now,” said the voice of lock and window-bar,
“You must confront things as they truly are.
Open your eyes at last, and see
The desolateness of reality.”
“Things have,” I said, “a pallid, empty look,
Like pictures in an unused coloring book.”
“Now that the scales have fallen from your eyes,”
Said the sad hallways, “you must recognize
How childishly your former sight
Salted the world with glory and delight.”
“This cannot be the world,” I said. “Nor will it,
Till the heart’s crayon spangle and fulfill it.”