S Y LV I A R E Y E S
Cheeky, Challenging, and Chistoso:
Why El Quijote Demands More
Than Your Average Book
E
l ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha is a daunting masterpiece that must
be savored. It is not a book that can or should be read absentmindedly. Don
Quixote the novel and Cervantes its author both demand that the reader pay
close attention, dragging them along for the tumultuous ride and leaves them feeling
dazed, confused, and a tiny bit nauseous. Cervantes created an extremely unconventional piece of literature that challenges the notion of what a book is supposed to be.
On a linguistic level, Don Quixote is a confusing book. It is written in mostly sixteenth-century Castellano (Castilian), however, there is a marked difference in the
way that Don Quixote speaks and the way that everybody else around him does. Don
Quixote’s speech mimics the fourteenth-century Castellano found in his chivalric romances, though these specific linguistic novelties are not present in English translations they are quite obvious in a Spanish version of the text. For example, Don Quixote
uses the Latin F at the start of many of his words, a practice which had fallen out of
fashion by the sixteenth century as people had shifted over to using H in a process
known as debuccalization, such as when he refers to his lady Dulcinea as “vuestra
fermosura” instead of “hermosura” as would be used today and would have been used
when Cervantes was writing. Furthermore, Don Quixote’s ramblings are marked with
periphrasis and circumlocution such as when he narrates the start of his first sally,
stringing “absurdities together with many others, all in the style of those that he’d
learned from his books” (Cervantes 31). Deciphering this nonsensical, unnecessarily
difficult and convoluted language is so impossible that our narrator tells us “Aristotle
himself wouldn’t have been capable of [unraveling it] even if he’d come back to life for
this purpose alone” (26).
Miguel de Cervantes was a very clever author and yet, the original text of Don
Quixote is inconsistent and riddled with mistakes and continuity errors. Sancho’s wife
changes names multiple times from Juana to Maria within the same conversation (63)
and to Teresa in Part 2. There are often “errors in mathematics,” and “mistakes in chap-
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ter titles” (Lathrop 12) such as for Chapter 10 entitled “About what happened next
between Don Quixote and the Basque, and the peril with which he was threatened by
a mob of men from Yanguas” despite the conflict having already been violently resolved
between Don Quixote and the Basque and the episode with the Yangüesans not occurring until Chapter 15. This style of erroneously titling chapters follows the practice of
stating “in the chapter title events that took place in the story, but not in the chapter in
question” (Lathrop 12). Mistakes like these have been corrected by editors who thought
they were simple errors. One large error that is often “corrected” in Don Quixote is the
fiasco that is the disappearance of Sancho’s donkey. While traversing the Sierra Morena, Sancho is described as lacking his donkey which mysteriously reappears later with
no mention of what might have happened. In the Penguin edition, Chapter 25 mentions that Ginés de Pasamonte has stolen Sancho’s beloved donkey and they are then
heartwarmingly reunited in Chapter 30. In the second printing of the book in 1605, the
stealing of the donkey occurs in Chapter 23 with Sancho being mentioned as both having and not having his donkey multiple times before they find Ginés and the donkey
in Chapter 30. Though these edits make it easier to understand the story it takes away
from the brilliance of Cervantes’ writing and ironic parody of chivalric romances which
characteristically would also commit similar errors and contradictions. (Lathrop 10)
The story of Amadis de Gaula, Don Quixote’s role model, has its own peculiar
editorial history. The written copy from which all other written copies today have
stemmed from was compiled by a man known as Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo. De
Montalvo edits (though he refers to it as “correcting” the stories because, as he claims,
they had been corrupted by the “deficiencies of poor copyists and composers”) the first
3 books of Amadis de Gaula and extensively edits Book 3 because he was dissatisfied
with the ending, introducing “some episodes scattered throughout the work which
have no purpose other than that of linking Amadis with the continuation that he
wrote himself ”: Book 4 and Book 5 Las sergas de Esplandián (Rafael 369). We will probably never read the original Amadis, but we do know that de Montalvo’s edits stray
dramatically from the original story through references in other texts. Despite being
condemned by a priest for being the origin and inspiration of numerous other Spanish
chivalric romances, Amadis de Gaula narrowly escapes a fiery demise in Chapter 6 of
Don Quixote.
The confusion between narrators and authorship is another aspect of Don Quixote
that makes this book so unique and difficult to traverse. Chapters 1-8 features the voice
of what the reader assumes to be Cervantes himself, after all, his name is on the cover,
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but all of a sudden the action skids to a halt at the end of Chapter 8, and readers are left
deeply confused, because according to the text, they’ve just read the work of the first
“author of this history” and very shortly the “second author of this work” (Cervantes
70) will take on the job of continuing the story which the first author failed to do.
However, if author 1 left “the battle unfinished” and author 2 has yet to start his own
tale, who on earth is talking at the very end of Chapter 8?
There are many theories as to how many voices exist within Don Quixote and how
they all fit together. Ignoring the role of Cervantes as overall writer of Don Quixote
there exists the first author who writes Chapters 1-8, the second author who writes
Chapter 9 and onwards, and a disputed third voice often referred to as the ‘supernarrator’ or the ‘narrator-editor’ (Polchow 12). Others believe this voice to be the same as
the second author and that the interruption at the end of Chapter 8 is his own announcement of his introduction. The 3 main narrator theory makes the most sense as
we can often see a different voice occasionally interjecting into the narrative, creating
transitions between scenes in a “meanwhile…” fashion or making his own commentary
often marked by his exclaiming “¡válame Dios!”, “good lord!”
“Pull my finger.”
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Though not a narrator, but definitely a “presence” in the story, Cide Hamete
Benengeli as the pseudo-primary source of the two authors adds to the verisimilitude
of Don Quixote (Polchow 73). Having a source adds authority to the story and has made
people wonder if this was a true account. When the people of Spain first read Don
Quixote in 1605 they were left convinced that this was a real historical documentation
of the life of a real man, and demanded to know more about this man. In their quest
for knowledge they scoured libraries and bookstores and other sources of text, trying
in vain to look for other sources or authors to tell them more about the curious history
of Don Quixote de La Mancha which had somehow managed to escape their notice
all these years. Students reading Don Quixote today can be heard asking the same question: “Wait, was Don Quixote a real person”?
Cervantes is such a brilliant storyteller and world builder that readers have gotten
lost in the fiction he creates and have confused their reality with the reality spun in Don
Quixote. Readers must proceed with caution, lest they find themselves driven to insanity as Don Quixote was through reading because reading is a transformative process.
Through the act of reading, Alonso Quixano becomes Don Quixote, a most valiant
knight from la Mancha, and he transforms the entire world in order for it to correspond to the fantasy he wants, filled with maidens and knights and giants and wizards
and magic, but the real magic at work is reading. Readers of that era remark on “how
it felt to become intoxicated by reading and how bookish knowledge was regarded as if
it were a magic elixir conferring new powers with every draught” (Eisenstein 72). The
magic of reading is allowing yourself to be placed in a fictional world. There is a suspension of disbelief where you accept everything being told to you as truth. A “normal”
reader enjoying a “normal” story can exit the world of the book easily and resume their
existence in Reality. Don Quixote the character loses this ability, (or perhaps ignores it
depending on your own views of his sanity,) and Don Quixote the novel blurs the line
between fiction and reality forcing the reader to stumble along unsure of what’s real.
What we can be sure of is that Don Quixote is meant to entertain. A beast of a book
with two parts comprising 124 chapters in all, it is quite a lot to go through. However,
reading it is not such a laborious task considering the wonderful instances of humor
such as the famous tilting at windmills, poor Sancho being tossed around in a blanket,
and the many horrific instances of the expulsion of bodily fluids. Every episode demands to be visualized to fully achieve the effect that Cervantes was trying to create.
Even the basic descriptions of our dynamic duo are hilarious and iconic caricatures.
The tall and frail old man on a skinny horse wearing ancient armor that is probably too
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big for him and the short and fat laborer following him around on a donkey.
The humor might be crude and the story not very “sophisticated” in comparison to
many other books that are held in high esteem, but that doesn’t mean that the validity
of Don Quixote as a revolutionary piece of literature should be dismissed when it is
considered for what it fundamentally is. Tragedy is not the only media for a masterpiece. Cervantes was a funny man and a large chunk of his audience appreciated the
vulgarity and burlesque nature of his work. It was funny then and it’s funny now. Modern readers have no reason to care about how it acts as a parody of chivalric romances,
nor would they be aware of it being a parody of said romances without anybody telling
them. They read Don Quixote because it is an absurd book about an absurd man doing absurd things. It has survived these past four centuries and has had a tremendous
impact because of its absurdity. At the end of his life, Don Quixote’s friends and family
realize that they didn’t just love him in spite of his madness, they loved him because
of it. They all bought into his fantasy, even if it was just a little. They might not have
wanted to admit it then, but his antics brought joy to the mundanity of their lives much
like Don Quixote has touched the lives of countless people across time. „
Works Referenced
Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de. Don Quixote. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. “The Unacknowledged Revolution.” The Printing Press as an
Agent of Change (1979): 70-81.
Lathrop, Tom. “Don Quixote and Its Errant Author.” New England Review, vol. 31, no.
4, 2010, pp. 8-19.
Polchow, Shannon. “Manipulation of Narrative Discourse: From Amadis de Gaula to
Don Quixote.” Hispania, vol. 88, no. 1, 2005, pp. 72-81.
Ramos, Rafael. “Amadís de Gaula.” The Arthur of the Iberians. Ed. David Hook.
University of Wales Press, 2015, pp. 364-81.