“…and to put the whole thing in a nutshell, I persuade myself that all I say is as I say, neither more nor less, and I picture her in my imagination as I would have her to be, as well in beauty as in condition….”
I am now about a third of the way through Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. It’s quite a trek, and it offers ample fodder for thought. This thought, of course, I propose to dump in your lap.
It would be easy to call Don Quixote an attack on “chivalry.” It is that, in the sense that it parodies a literary genre called “Chivalrous Romance.” However, it’s far from an attack on the concept itself. Considering the general (low) character displayed by so many of the world’s great writers, Cervantes stands as something like a paragon. He fought bravely for his king in the Mediterranean wars against Islam, suffering a permanently crippled left hand (or arm) at the Battle of Lepanto. He was captured by Barbary pirates and enslaved for five years, leading several escape attempts, which all failed. In each case, he endured torture and refused to name any of his partners – in one instance nearly being executed. (Eventually he was ransomed.) He did father an illegitimate daughter, but he acknowledged her and saw to her upbringing.
What Cervantes seems to recognize in the Chivalrous Romance genre is, first of all, its poor quality. He was himself a great writer, and had no patience for shoddy work. But he seems to particularly object to the unreality of the stories. As a disabled veteran, he knew the real face of war. He must have found many of the Romances contemptible, just as a genuine secret agent might sneer at a James Bond movie from the Roger Moore era.
He sees even more, though. Don Quixote, through excessive reading of such pop literature, has lost touch with reality. He has entered a virtual world, walking around like a gamer in Google glasses, stumbling over actual physical objects in his path.
Andrew Klavan says that one of the most common objections he hears from Christians in regard to his fiction is, “But fiction isn’t real!”
Good fiction is real, in a profound sense (related to subcreation as Lewis and Tolkien understood it). But trash literature, written to amuse the reader through catering to his predilections and sugar-coating life’s tragedies, does interfere with serious, moral thought. (Straight farce, as in Wodehouse, I would insist, is another matter.)
Or so it seems to me.
