He was not a young man, being nearly fifty, but a great sportsman nevertheless, a man of regular habits whose income teetered between straitened and genteel. |
His small pleasures were gradually consumed by a creeping absorption in reading"" "to such a pitch did his eagerness and infatuation go that he sold many an acre of tillageland to buy books of chivalry to read". |
The obsession with knights and knightly lore began to steal the gentleman's life from him: |
"... He became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them ... His fancy grew full of what he used to read about in his books, enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, agonies, and all sorts of impossible nonsense; and it so possessed his mind that the whole fabric of invention and fancy he read of was true, that to him no history in the world had more reality in it." |
This is how the history of Don Quixote de la Mancha begins. Its author, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, had maimed his left hand in the battle of Lepanto. |
His nickname from that time was El manco de (the cripple of) Lepanto, in which he took inordinate pride. He was not a young man when he embarked on Don Quixote's adventures; in his Preface, he wonders what the Public will think of him, "after slumbering so many years in the silence of oblivion, coming out now with all my years upon my back" with a story he called "dry as a rush". |
He had been a tax collector and subsequently landed in a debtor's prison: he apologised that his offspring, which he called "dry, shrivelled, whimsical" was "just what might be begotten in a prison, where every misery is lodged and every doleful sound makes its dwelling". |
The public would judge, he hinted, and the public did. Before the publication of The History of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote Of La Mancha, Cervantes' greatest literary success had involved a composition that won three silver spoons as a prize. |
The first edition of Don Quixote, published on January 16, 1605, ran to a humble 1,200 copies""not unlike the first print run of an Indian novel in English these days. |
But between 1605 and 1616, when Cervantes died (Part Two of Don Quixote's history came out in 1615), Part One had already run into nine editions""thirty thousand copies in all. |
The demand for the book has stayed constant; Don Quixote is rivalled only by the Bible, and the four hundredth anniversary of its publication has seen a surge in new editions, annotated, illustrated, cartooned and in e-book form. |
Critics down the centuries have been effusive in their views of Don Quixote, but it was probably E C Bentley, inventor of the four-line verse called the clerihew after him, who summed up Cervantes' charms the best. |
"The people of Spain think Cervantes Equal to half-a-dozen Dantes; An opinion resented most bitterly By the people of Italy." Cervantes has been seen as one of the greatest comic writers of all time, as the creator of the "universal" novel, as the towering predecessor to works as disparate as Fielding's Tom Jones and John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. |
To this day, no one knows what Cervantes' intentions were. Did he mean Don Quixote to be taken at face value, to be enjoyed merely as a riproaring comic romp, a hilarious parody of the classic tales of quests and chivalry? But four-hundred-year-old comedy rarely lasts; Shakespeare's puns barely survived his time. |
Some have peered into Don Quixote and seen a searing vision of humanity, lonely and sustained by the power of imagination; others have seen a lasting commentary on the human condition; the magic realists have claimed Quixote (Borges wrote a short story on the book); each generation finds something to claim, to hold on to. |
Even the convention of sending up the conventions of the day has lasted: Cervantes' mockery of provenance when he asserted that Quixote's tale was originally written in Arabic by Cide Hamete Benengeli (Syed Hamid Aubergine) has been imitated through the ages. |
And we still use stray phrases that he introduced into Spanish: not just "quixotic" and "tilting at windmills" but "the Haves-and-the-Have-Nots", "out of the frying pan into the fire", "make hay while the sun shines". |
It is tempting to trace the descent of the phrase "You ain't seen nothin' yet" back to Cervantes' original "Thou hast seen nothing at all". |
To mark the fourth centenary of the man from La Mancha, Spain is hosting a series of "windmill congresses". You can retrace Don Quixote's absurd journey across the landscape of La Mancha, meet broken-down old nags that bear a striking resemblance to Rocinante, watch musicals, listen to readings, see the film. |
A solemn team of researchers mapped novel to region and tracing distances mentioned in the story in an attempt to discover the identity of the "village of La Mancha, the name of which [the author had] no desire to call to mind". |
It has since been identified as the Villanueva de los Infantes, a small town some 144 miles south of Madrid, famous for absolutely nothing before this small band of the faithful academics who conceived a quest so perfectly quixotic. |
Why would we, in the twenty-first century, want to read the dusty adventures of a knight who wasn't really a knight, in 126 chapters, some four hundred years later? Everyone has a different answer, and mine is simple: because Don Quixote, or Quixada, Quesada, perhaps even Quesana, was the first character in literature to understand the lure of the written word so completely that he disappeared into it. |
Imagine a man at fifty, the best years of his life behind him""a man not so very dissimilar to his creator, then"" who had dried up his brain "from reading too much, and sleeping too little". |
Imagine a man who sallied forth to seek adventure, his only protection a pasteboard helmet, who made a faithful friend out of a servant called Sancho Panza, giants out of windmills, saw beauty in an ordinary village damsel, who understood that "in order to achieve the impossible, one must attempt the absurd". |
Imagine, then, a man whose response to the world was simple: he tried to rewrite it. Four hundred years later, the verdict is that he, and Cervantes, succeeded. nilanjanasroy@gmail.com |