Why Don Quixote Is an Eternal
Masterpiece of World Literature
Delusion Lifts Us Ever So Slightly Above Reality
I had, of course, known of the existence of Cervantes’s Don Quixote since childhood. I had also heard countless times that it was one of the supreme masterpieces of world literature. And yet many years passed without my ever finding an opportunity to read it. Now, at last, I have read the entire work in Edith Grossman’s English translation. To put it simply, I was overwhelmed. Books that have earned the name of masterpiece should be read as early in life as possible. Don Quixote is an immense work—roughly as long as four ordinary books—but when I reached the end, I could only wonder why I had waited so long. I felt that I had been missing something of enormous value.
Within the Spanish-speaking world, Don Quixote may well occupy an almost singular and absolute position. In Japan, when people hear its title, most immediately picture the famous scene in which a deluded, gaunt old gentleman mistakes windmills for giants and charges into battle against them. That scene does indeed appear in the novel. Yet, to my surprise, it occurs near the very beginning of Part One and is over almost at once—in only three or four pages of a printed edition. The reader is left thinking, “Is that all?” The true greatness of Don Quixote lies in the vast world that unfolds afterward.
Reading Until One Becomes Someone Else
The protagonist calls himself “Don Quixote of La Mancha.” How did he become such a person? By reading far too many medieval romances of chivalry. He immerses himself so completely in their world that he comes to believe he is a knight-errant and sets out in search of adventures in the real world. Accompanied by his stout squire, Sancho Panza, the gaunt knight forms with his round companion one of the most celebrated mismatched pairs in literary history.
The idea that a person might be transformed by reading too much impressed me in itself. Reading ordinarily means entering the world of someone other than oneself. In Don Quixote’s case, however, this process goes to such an extreme that fiction begins to invade reality. He is no longer content merely to read romances of chivalry; he begins to live one himself.
I was even more surprised by the treatment of Dulcinea, the ideal woman to whom Don Quixote pledges his devotion. According to the chivalric code, a knight must undertake adventures and win glory in defense of a noble lady’s honor. Don Quixote therefore appoints Dulcinea as the lady of his heart. Yet she never once appears in person in Cervantes’s novel. She is not, in fact, a princess or a noblewoman at all, but an ordinary farmer’s daughter whom Don Quixote has elevated, entirely on his own authority, into a great lady.
In both Part One and Part Two, there are moments that might be described as near encounters with her. In Part One, Sancho lies that he has delivered a letter to Dulcinea and received her reply. Consequently, in Part Two, he is forced to point to a passing peasant girl and insist, “This lady is Dulcinea.” The girl before him bears no resemblance whatsoever to the princess Don Quixote imagines. He therefore concludes that an enchantment has made her appear not in her true and beautiful form but in the guise of a country girl. Whenever reality contradicts his delusion, magic neatly closes the rift.
In the musical Man of La Mancha, a woman corresponding to Dulcinea actually appears onstage. In Cervantes’s original, however, she remains absent to the very end. Though absent, she continues to drive Don Quixote’s actions. Indeed, it is precisely because she never appears that Dulcinea can exist as a pure ideal. I was profoundly struck by the audacity of this structure.
Between Madness and Reality
The fascination of Don Quixote begins with the obvious fact that its protagonist is mad. Moreover, the people around him know perfectly well that he is mad. When he and Sancho arrive at an inn, for example, Don Quixote takes it for a castle. He treats the innkeeper as its lord and grandly declares, “Tonight we shall lodge in this castle.” Because everyone else can see his delusion for what it is, some humor him while others make sport of him.
In Part Two, a duke and duchess appear and devise an elaborate series of practical jokes at the expense of Don Quixote and Sancho. Don Quixote sees something different from reality, while the people around him, fully aware of the discrepancy, proceed to stage and embellish his fantasy. This dance between reality and delusion is extraordinarily subtle and entertaining.
As one reads, a deeper question begins to emerge: what, after all, is the reality that any of us sees? If being possessed by something is the criterion, are we not all Don Quixote? We, too, live under the spell of the stories our age presents to us—stories about economics, money, globalism, artificial intelligence, and much else besides. If so, are Don Quixote and the rest of us really so different?
When I was in junior high school, I learned from the Bluebacks science book The World of Einstein that Albert Einstein loved Don Quixote and always kept it close at hand. The novel had intrigued me ever since. Yet until I actually read it, I had understood almost nothing about what kind of work it was. Few things are more dangerous than believing that we know something. Knowing the windmill episode and knowing Don Quixote are entirely different matters.
Metafiction Born in an Age of Empire
Don Quixote was written in the early seventeenth century, when Spain had built an immense global empire. Although more than a century had passed since the completion of the Reconquista, the term “Moor” appears repeatedly in the novel, and the tensions between the Christian and Islamic worlds, together with the dislocations between cultures, remain strongly present. When we recall that Cervantes’s contemporary Shakespeare made a Moor the protagonist of Othello, we can begin to sense the historical resonance the word carried at the time.
One reason Don Quixote is held in such high regard is the astonishing modernity of its structure. Cervantes adopts the fiction that he did not write the story directly. Instead, he claims merely to have discovered an Arabic manuscript composed by a Muslim historian named Cide Hamete Benengeli and to be presenting it in translation. In this way, Cervantes deliberately destabilizes the authority of the narrator and turns the truthfulness of the story itself into an object of play.
This device becomes even bolder in Part Two. The adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza recounted in Part One have already been published as a book within the world of the sequel. The pair have become celebrities without quite realizing it, and wherever they go, people greet them with words to the effect of, “Why, you are the famous Don Quixote!” In other words, the Don Quixote and Sancho of Part Two travel through a world inhabited by people who have read Part One. Characters in a novel meet readers of a novel written about themselves. One cannot help marveling that metafiction of such dazzling ingenuity was written more than four hundred years ago.
In Part One, Don Quixote promises Sancho that, as a reward for serving as his squire, he will one day make him governor of an “island.” Why it should be an island is never entirely clear, but in Part Two the duke and duchess make the dream come true as part of one of their elaborate jokes. Sancho becomes governor of a fictitious territory and delivers judgments of unexpected brilliance. In the end, however, he relinquishes the position of his own accord. The scene in which he resigns as governor is comic and at the same time deeply moving. Cervantes was an extraordinary writer, capable of allowing folly and wisdom, vanity and sincerity, to coexist within a single human being.
A Moving Madness Without an “I”
There are many eccentric people in the world. I myself may be eccentric in certain ways. Yet there is something in Don Quixote’s strangeness that moves us. When I ask why, I find myself thinking that there is no “I” at the center of his madness. He does not play the knight-errant for personal gain or pleasure. Far from living comfortably, he is beaten repeatedly, wounded, and subjected to one calamity after another. Even so, he tries to aid the weak, right injustices, and defend the honor of his ideal lady. His estrangement from reality springs not from selfish desire, but from devotion to something beyond himself.
Part Two contains an exceedingly strange episode involving the Cave of Montesinos. Don Quixote is so vast a work that I cannot recount everything here, nor can I claim to have grasped the whole of it myself. Yet the cave episode is unforgettable. In its depths, Don Quixote experiences a magnificent vision in which Dulcinea also appears. Whether this was an actual event, a dream, or a delusion remains unclear to the end. The story itself trembles on the boundary between reality and vision.
Toward the conclusion, Don Quixote gradually begins to realize that he may have been possessed by delusions. At last he returns to his village and resumes the name he bore before becoming “Don Quixote”: Alonso Quixano. Having recovered his sanity, he dies as a good and ordinary man. The manner of his awakening and the scene of his death are quiet and beautiful. Yet at the same time, we know something else: he was at his most compelling not when he returned to sanity, but when he lived amid madness and delusion as Don Quixote.
Delusion Lifts Us Above Reality
During the period in which I read Don Quixote, I myself traveled to Chile for an academic conference, while Spain and Argentina—two countries of the Spanish-speaking world—met in the World Cup final. With these experiences converging, I found myself thinking about the depth of Spanish culture and its distinctive fascination. Don Quixote may be the work in which that fascination is most completely distilled.
Cervantes lived at almost exactly the same time as Shakespeare. Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s lost play Cardenio is believed to have been inspired by an episode in Don Quixote. The novel emerged from the center of an age in which Spain ruled vast regions of Central and South America and built a global empire so extensive that traces of its former colonial administrative divisions remain visible in national borders today.
Yet the reason Don Quixote is an eternal masterpiece does not lie merely in the size of that empire or the scale of its historical influence. What Cervantes depicted was the profoundly strange and profoundly moving structure of a human being possessed by delusion. Don Quixote’s fantasies are not simply a means of escaping reality. They wound him and make him suffer, yet at the same time they lift him ever so slightly above the reality before his eyes. They illuminate, from another angle, what we lose sight of when we become buried in the conventions of everyday life.
Is seeing reality accurately always what is best for a human being? Is it merely foolish to be moved by delusions, ideals, and stories? Don Quixote is ridiculous, and he is plainly mistaken. Yet there are moments when he appears nobler than the people who call themselves sane. That paradox is what has kept the novel alive for four hundred years. Don Quixote is a masterpiece among the masterpieces of world literature. Having now finished it, I finally understand this not as a matter of reputation, but as something I have felt for myself.
Transcribed and translated into English from Ken Mogi's talk in Japanese after reading Don Quixote.
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