Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
translated by Edith Grossman
introduction by Harold Bloom
HarperCollins (2003)
The Enamoured Knight
by Douglas Glover
Oberon Press (2004)
194 pp., $22
Tales Of Don Quixote
by Barbara Nichol
Tundra Books (2004)
216 pp., $23
Life of Pi
by Yann Martel
Vintage Canada (2002)
356 pp., $21
How about this for inspired literary mischief. A writer is late delivering a promised sequel to his best-selling novel. Ten years late, to be exact, a lifetime in the publishing business. In the interim, a rival hiding behind a pseudonym has issued a spurious version that discredits the original. The existence of the counterfeit encourages the writer to hurry quill back to paper. He brings out his Part II, resuming the action a month after Part I ended. His heroes, a knight errant and his faithful squire, are now recognized wherever they go, thanks to that decade-old book, which everyone seems to have read. Knowing they are already the stars of one fiction encourages the pair to embark on further adventures, to provide fresh material for their chronicler. “Does the author promise a second part?” the knight asks a character who has read Part I. He does, the fellow answers.
The same character summarizes the conventional wisdom about sequels. “Second parts were never very good,” he remarks, sounding like a critic of Hollywood blockbusters. So far, this seems a decent play on the fiction of any fiction. But the writer is just warming up. Far from ignoring his rival’s “fake” sequel, he refers to it in his own “real” one as “the false, the fictitious, the apocryphal” version of events. Then he reports rumours that the knight and squire from the imitator’s book are now loose inside his story as well, pretending to be them. This last twist proves too much for his identity-challenged hero. The poor knight demands that a character who has met the impostors swear before a judge that he—and not the other guy—is authentic. “Because there is no other I in the world,” he says.
Sadly for Don Quixote de la Mancha, as the knight is known, this is also a fabrication. His real name is Alonso Quixano, a middle-aged country squire who has suffered a nervous breakdown. In his delirium—the result, unsurprisingly, of an addiction to chivalric romance novels—Alonso has given himself a grand title and quest, involving slaying giants and sacking castles in the service of Dulcinea del Toboso, his lady most fair. She, it so happens, is still another invention, the reality being a buxomy wench called Aldonza Lorenzo whom Alonso is too shy to approach.
“The author of our history must be some wise enchanter,” Don Quixote says of his creator. As usual, he doesn’t know the half of it. Don Quixote doesn’t know that The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha is so in the thrall of its own enchantments that it has been wagging its narrative tail for better than 900 pages. He doesn’t know that the author, Miguel de Cervantes, while certainly wise, may be adding to the page count in part because he still isn’t sure how to close the book he has so brilliantly opened.
When the end finally comes for the knight, it is abrupt. He is made to renounce his delusion and then swiftly expire. He is accorded a nice epitaph—“For it was his great good fortune /to live a madman, and die sane”— but is also treated to a proverbial stake-through-the-vampire’s-heart, in the form of a document attesting that the corpse is indeed the real Don Quixote. There will be no sequel to the sequel, by the sage enchanter Cervantes or anyone else.
Miguel de Cervantes published the second part of Don Quixote in 1615, a decade after the first volume had granted the sixty-eight-year-old Spaniard unexpected late-career success, and a year after the appearance of the counterfeit Part II. A failed playwright, he appears to have dashed off both parts of his masterpiece in a hurry, anxious to counter his imitators and return to what he believed was his serious work. In his haste, Cervantes allowed his imagination to wander so far and wide from existing prose genres—the pastoral tale and chivalric romance being the most popular at the time—that he ended up in an entirely new form. Today we call that form the modern novel, and credit him with its invention. The author himself died in 1616, his hopes for immortality pinned to a pastoral adventure titled Persiles y Sigismunda. It is said to deserve its obscurity.
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the first instalment of Don Quixote. The occasion is being celebrated, predictably enough, with a slew of new books, including a fresh translation by the esteemed Edith Grossman and a retelling of the tale for children by Barbara Nichol; The Enamoured Knight, by novelist Douglas Glover, is an appreciation of the novel. Grossman’s translation comes jacketed in an A-list of blurbs, with Carlos Fuentes calling Don Quixote “the most eternal novel ever written” and Thomas Mann’s pronouncement that “its creative genius, critical, free, and human, soars above its age!” Critic Harold Bloom provides an introduction in which he remarks that “this great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake.”
That might be so. But it might also be the case that four centuries after the birth of the novel—a spectacular birth it was, too, like delivering an eighty-kilogram baby with a wicked sense of humour and a Mensa IQ—the majority of us hardly recognize the form innovated by Cervantes in the fictions we currently admire. The anniversary offers a chance to revisit the enchantments of Don Quixote and also to wonder about the state of enchantment in the literature of our own age.
The book tells the most enduring of stories. The journey of the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and his squire Sancho Panza in quest of a new self is the search of all humans for fulfillment and meaning. Quixote’s insanity is triggered by desire, and Dulcinea is a figment of his emotional yearning. The knight, during a moment of lucidity, states that “it is enough for me to think and believe that my good Aldonza Lorenzo is beautiful and virtuous . . . . I depict her in my imagination as I wish her to be.” His search is notable for the questions it asks, not for any answers it provides. How do our minds function? How “real” is reality and “unreal” is illusion? And what of our identities: are they fixed and defined, or fluid and evolving?
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