a good fellow to have on your side 2

introduction by roberto gonzalez echevarria
(intro to don quixote, penguin classics, john rutherford translation)
(of the hundreds of translations out there, this is the one I would start with.)

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s masterpiece has endured because it focuses on literature’s foremost appeal: to become another, to leave a typically embattled self for another closer to one’s desires and aspirations. This is why Don Quixote has often been read as a children’s book and continues to be read by or to children. Experience and life’s blows teach us our limits and erode the hope of living up to our dreams, but our hope never vanishes. It is the soul’s pith, the flickering light of being, the spiritual counterpart to our DNA’s master code. When the hero regains his sanity at the end of Part II, he dies. As the last chances of living an imaginary life disappear, so must life itself. Don Quixote’s serene passing reflects this understanding; he knows that the dream of life is over, and as a Neoplatonist and Christian, his only hope now is to find the true life after death... 

...Stories endure because they either express an archetype or create a new one. The epic and other oral narratives, including tragedy, retell known stories: think of Ulysses, Oedipus, Roland, the Cid. Don Quixote creates an archetype that is, appropriately, the archetype of type — the founding story of printed literature.  It is the tale of the reader, who indulges his imaginative needs not in a collective setting such as the theatre or the public square, but alone with his private yearnings, listening to his inner voices and those to which he gives life in his soul’s stage as he scans the pages. Because of print the reader is more educated; his memory is not only his or his people’s, but that of many other individuals and cultures. Unlike those listening to singers or actors performing, the reader can go back and replay a scene, relish again what he liked, giving his own tempo to the unfolding of the story, taking time to let the pleasure of his imaginings sink in slowly or flipping the pages quickly to come to the end of an adventure and learn his hero’s fate. This is what we, the readers of Don Quixote, imagine that the hero himself did as he read his cherished romances of chivalry. It is what we ourselves do as we savour our favorite passages, rereading isolated episodes, suspending the malleable time of fiction to postpone or really just forget our own inevitable demise...


...Alone with ourselves and a book we can be children again. You cannot get up in the theatre and challenge an actor, and you would be smothered by the crowd if you interrupted the minstrel’s performance. But in our own private space, huddled under the cloak of our fantasies with the book, we can counsel our hero, sigh for a damsel, shout insults at the wrongdoers, and enter the fiction in soul, if not in body. This last thing is, of course, what Don Quixote attempted to do: to bring his reader’s imaginings to the bruising world of tangible reality and to the withering present. The book’s archetype would not be complete if the hero remained in the ideal world of literature. Human desire is all too human; it longs for actualization in bodies and things, in the here and now of the sensory and the sensual. These are, of course, not as pliable as our fantasies and the world of books, and therein lies Don Quixote’s power — and the frontier between children’s stories and those for adults.....


.....Cervantes’s irony, elegant self-mockery, and disclaimers of authorship are certainly at the core of his mind and work. In Don Quixote the author pretends to be merely the translator of a manuscript written by Arabic historian Cide Hamete Benenjeli. He dramatizes this by stopping the action in Chapter 8 of Part I, protesting that he has run out of text and then telling an elaborate story about how he found the remaining chapters and secured the services of a translator. Thus the rest of the novel would be the work of this translator, who is intrusive enough to append impudent comments about the characters or the plausibility of their speech. There are also remarks by the author about the translator’s comments, as well as on the incongruity of the high-flown rhetoric of certain passages. Many segments are parodies of recognizable literary genres, such as the chivalric romances and the pastoral, as well as the rhetoric of the courtly love tradition, full of paradoxes and trite figures. And so there are layers upon layers of discourse, commenting on one another, blurring the source, intention, and ultimately the legitimacy and truth of the final product. Further ironic distancing is provided by the blatantly literary nature of the “found manuscript” device, which makes the whole thing appear to be a sham from the start, and by allusions to Cervantes’s other works, such as La Galatea in the episode of the scrutiny of the knight’s library. If the Cervantes mentioned by the priest is the same as the one on the cover of the book we read, is he a fictional character in Don Quixote or its author? Is the whole of reality a book whose characters we are and the author of which is too grandiose for us to fathom? If we are on the same level of reality as this author-character, the inescapable conclusion is that we, too, inhabit a fictional realm. But if Don Quixote’s inability to distinguish literary fiction from reality is what makes him a madman, where does that leave us?