Don Quixote: Just mad about the man of La Mancha

Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote is one of the weirdest works of fiction – but also the greatest

The work of fiction that represents the long goodbye of Renaissance Europe to the world of medievalism that still haunted it. Picture: AFP

Earlier this year Cardinal Carlos Osoro, the Archbishop of Madrid, said a solemn mass in honour of Miguel de Cervantes, the creator of Don Quixote, whose bones are to be found the Lord knows where. Cervantes is universally acknowledged as the greatest Spanish writer who lived and he belongs to the tiny handful of the greatest writers ever.

Don Quixote is one of the weirdest works of fiction and we cherish it as the greatest, not simply because it is the first. It represents the long goodbye of Renaissance Europe to the world of medievalism it was still haunted by.

In Shakespeare’s history plays Richard II is an actor king stuck in a stained glass window. Hotspur and Prince Hal who slays him and becomes Henry V are both intensely dashing figures who speak the language of chivalry. Well, the poor old country gentleman we know as Don Quixote de la Mancha not only speaks this language, it has overpowered his imagination and enveloped his mind to the point of madness. He is the supremely gallant dreamer who has internalised the dream of chivalry, the knight who rides out to battle iniquity, to defend the poor and oppressed and to take down the mighty from their seats when they are creatures of evil.

Don Quixote statue in Madrid. Spain.

Don Quixote is a madman with a vertiginous nobility of mind who rides through an earthy, not to say dirty, world with his squire Sancho Panza tracking the landscape he encounters, of folks pursuing their worldly duties and rackets, thinking he is encountering a world of great immensities of beauty and wickedness because he sees everything through the coloured glass of his own enchantment. He has become through his imaginative enthralment to the ideal of nobility as mad as a meataxe even though the weapons he thinks he carries are for the defence of the good, on behalf of the oppressed, to the honour and glory of God.

It was his extraordinary achievement to create a supreme comedy about madness that could be a cruel farce if the Don’s delusions were not themselves presented, however comically, as sublime things, as mighty emblems of the way the mind can fathom mysteries the rational intellect has an obligation to reject. As a novel – if that is what this weird labyrinth of an epic is – Don Quixote is a satire about an old guy who goes bananas, and the ridiculous irrelevancy of the ideals that had provided the mythical and moral framework of yesteryear, which is represented in our English language tradition most powerfully by Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.

The Don thinks he can bring this world to life, that he is a player in the world of chivalry, and the upshot is that he tilts at windmills imagining they’re giants, he disrupts religious processions and merchant treks, he gets people to pay courtly homage to his beloved Dulcinea who is just an attractive barmaid. He sees Sancho Panza as a man who could command islands, whereas he’s just a kindly, earthy dill of a man who can minister to the Don’s delusions.

But we need to be careful of the word just with Don Quixote. Yes, it’s savage comedy, a madcap farce, but it is also one of the greatest examples we have in literature of the poignancy and grandeur of the imagination not only gone haywire but retaining its towering moral goodness and coexisting with that beauty of soul that is there every inch of the way through the great cavalcade of the Don’s follies.

A Portrait of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, by Juan de Jauregui painted in 1600.

So this book, the greatest prose work the Renaissance produced is a terrific and terrifically sustained work of deliciously funny comic diversion and it could be dramatised by breakneck speed and wild physical lunacy and rapid verbal fire. This is one part of the Russian conception of the role of the Don (and they have a particular vision of the Don not unrelated to Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman: they told Geoffrey Rush they would love to see him in the role).

If you want a version of Don Quixote that corresponds to this conception try Tobias Smollett’s 18th-century version, which is terrific at catching all the jokes in the original and moves with speed. This is Salman Rushdie’s favourite version and you can get it as a squat modern library paperback with an Honore Daumier sketch of the Don and Sancho on the cover.

But there is also that sense of the Don as pure of heart, however poor in spirit his madness makes him. The Don is the greatest and most sustained representation of a mind untuned and deranged that has not lost its apprehension of the Good: he sails into battle no matter the odds, no matter the darkness of the delusions that give him his recurrent confusion and his moments of tragic intensity.

Well, William Blake said the fool who persists in his folly shall become wise, but the Don’s recantation at the end doesn’t change the tremendous poignancy of the enchantment he subjects himself to.

Some fraction of baby boomers were taken to see Grigori Kozintsev’s 1957 film with the great Nikolay Cherkasov (Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible) as the Don. Orson Welles wanted to film it and Terry Gilliam did a meta-version but not alas with John Cleese. There is a 1973 BBC television version with Rex Harrison, of all people.

You can still find 19th-century editions – and it’s also on YouTube – of the first translation by Irishman Thomas Shelton which with its rugged and racy rhythms is a reminder that we’re reading a contemporary of Shakespeare who won’t settle for the fluent rhythms of modern prose.

Shakespeare was aware of Don Quixote. There’s his hopeless caricature of a knightly Spaniard Don Armado in Love’s Labour Lost and there is also his lost play Cardenio, which uses one of the stories in Cervantes. That great actor Paul Scofield – a marvellous Armado – did Don Quixote on stage and everyone was taken aback by the way Shelton’s Cervantes sounded like blank verse.

The Quixote Protocol shows spanish author Miguel de Cervantes on horseback as he looks at a windfarm. Illustration: Paul Newman

Apart from Homer, who had him present Achilles as a thug in Troilus and Cressida, Shakespeare is aware of Cervantes like no other contemporary writer (except for his beloved Ovid).

And that tallies with his position in modern literary history. He is himself an example of the “impossible dream” that we get in the musical Man of La Mancha, filmed with Peter O’Toole as the Don.

Everything the Don dreams of is impossible except the power and the beauty of his dreaming and the loftiness of his capacity to dream and the greatness of heart he brings to the endeavour. It’s probably no coincidence that one of the greatest Spanish plays, in the next generation, is Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s Life is a Dream (La Vida es Sueno).

No other work of literature gives us the cruel comedy of madness derided in combination with the transfigured face of the perfect gentle knight who wants to become like Christ. Graham Greene had a go at modernising all this in Monsignor Quixote, put on television with Alec Guinness as the knight of the lord and Leo McKern as his pugnacious Sancho.

But the madness of the Don and his moral grandeur will abide forever. It’s a theme the Renaissance constantly toyed with – think of King Lear – but it is Cervantes who invented the novel to give it the fullest possible life.

In the end it doesn’t matter whether you give the Don a “ghastly face” like Shelton or opt for “the Knight of the sorrowful countenance” like Peter Anthony Motteux, the most quoted version. The deep poignancy of tragicomedy is a well of magic.