Time and the Doleful knight - The ideal reader

A reader on reading - Alberto Manguel 2010

Time and the Doleful knight
The ideal reader

“If you knew Time as well as I do,” said the Hatter, “you wouldn’t

talk about wasting it.”

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Chapter 7






AFTER THE STORY OF DON QUIXOTE has been brought almost to its end, Sansón Carrasco, the pompous intellectual who believes he can cure all this madness, says that he is the Knight of the White Moon and, swearing that his lady is far more beautiful than Dulcinea, forces the old gentleman to challenge him to a duel. Don Quixote charges against his adversary, falls to the ground badly hurt, and, unable to raise himself, hears Carrasco say that he’ll admit to Dulcinea’s superior charms only if he, Don Quixote, agrees to withdraw to his house for a full year “or until such time by me decided.” The defeated Don Quixote gives his consent. A few further events take place on the following pages, further hallucinations and further enchantments, but as a result of the promise Don Quixote returns with Sancho to his village and asks to be taken to his bed, where a week later, having become once again Alonso Quijano (as the distraught author, Cide Hamete Benegeli, tells us), “he gave up his spirit: I mean to say, he died.”

The year of abeyance that Sansón Carrasco has Don Quixote promise him is, for our hero, a period of impossible time. To stop being Don Quixote for a year, or even for a moment, is to demand that time come to a halt. Don Quixote cannot simultaneously stop being himself and go on living. Don Quixote is a creation of his own reading, and his world, materially alive in all its brutality and violence, is something that he can only know through his activity as a reader. Nothing exists for Don Quixote that has not previously been read, or rather, nothing exists that does not begin and end in his books. Consequently, Don Quixote cannot refuse himself the acting-out of his reading, to continue the story that his life has become, to behave like a knight in arms, because as soon as Alonso Quijano stops reading his dream book, Don Quixote must die. Don Quixote’s time consists of the moments that Alonso Quijano is willing to grant him.

Don Quixote exists (as Alonso Quijano knows) between the covers of Cide Hamete’s book: this, for the reader, is the only true story, and there cannot be other concurrent ones. This is why it is not fortuitous that in the last chapters of Part 2 the characters discuss the false nature of the sequel to Don Quixote published by Avellaneda after the success of Cervantes’s first part of the knight’s adventures. The maid Altisidora, who pretends to have died because of her unrequited love for the old knight, describes her descent to Hell, saying that there she saw a group of devils playing ball with books, who tore Avellaneda’s opus to bits, “a book so bad,” says one of the devils, “that if I tried to produce a worse one on purpose, I wouldn’t succeed.” Neither is it fortuitous that when Alonso Quijano dictates his last will and testament, he instructs his executor to apologize to the apocryphal author for having provided an occasion for writing “such enormous and copious nonsense.” Implicit in this apology is that Avellaneda’s book was nonsense, not the one the reader now holds in his hands. False fiction (wasted time, untruth, fruitless lies) and true fiction (the chronicle of real time, of things as they essentially are) cannot and must not coexist. And Don Quixote, seemingly a believer in witchcraft and magic, never mistakes reality and untruth. Don Quixote’s time is that of the real world, the one we can recognize because we can tell it in a story.

The year of inaction that Sansón Carrasco demands from Don Quixote belongs to false time, to the time of nonexistence. This is the time described by those condemned to real and literary hells, an inhuman time, a species of eternity in which nothing, except pain, has its existence and the sufferer loses everything that allows us to grant ourselves a recognizable identity. It is a time of no mirrors, or of fake mirrors that reflect only emptiness, the time of commercial and political advertising that stultifies and distracts, a time in which the consumer is trained to forget his own self and become another, become someone who identifies his desire with what is merely superficial, useless, sterile. This is the time wished upon us by the wizards of the mercantile world, like the one who, according to Don Quixote, caused his library to vanish (though the library has in fact been walled up by the censorious priest and barber): “Because his arts and his letters have taught him that in time I must come to fight a singular battle with a knight whom he favors, and that I must defeat him.”

Against this false time flows the time of Don Quixote, ever-changing in that two-volume space created for us by Cervantes. In this time—true, rich, full of marvels — there is for us, his readers, one moment that, though perhaps no more mysterious than many others, is at least more bewildering and disconcerting. This is the moment in which the reader forgets Miguel de Cervantes, the author, and believes only in the reality of Don Quixote.

Everyone (even those who have not read Cervantes’s books) knows Don Quixote. Next to him, Cervantes is almost phantomlike, a very minor character in the novel, an intruder who from time to time emits a comment or an opinion on the events, a leisurely reader who one day found a bundle of papers in a Toledo market and had them translated, thereby allowing us to read the adventures of the memorable knight. Even Cervantes’s physical characteristics become in time those of his invention, a usurpation that by the nineteenth century is so firmly established that the illustrators of the novel see both author and fictional hero as identical. The clean-shaven knight of the early engravings vanishes and in his place appears a gentleman with the features of Cervantes: “eagle-faced … hawk-nosed … silver beard … teeth neither tiny nor enormous, because he has only six, and these badly kept and worse disposed … the body between two extremes, neither too big nor too small … somewhat curved in the shoulders and not very fast on his feet.” This is the description that Cervantes makes of himself at the age of sixty-six, as if he had grown into the character of Don Quixote as he described him in the novel: “aged close to fifty … dry, nut-colored, moody … of tough complexion, wizened, thin faced.” The literary creation comes to life in the time of the book, while he author himself fades away in the time of literary history, a ghost in the groves of academe.

Possibly Cervantes guessed that this was to be his fate. When in the sixth chapter of the first part the priest and the barber purge Don Quixote’s library before walling it up, and find next to López Maldonado’s Cancionero the unfinished Galatea by Miguel de Cervantes, the first instance of this vertiginous game takes place. Cervantes now exists because Don Quixote has read him and placed his book on the shelf, and La Galatea is saved from destruction because the priest says that he is a long-time friend of the author. And so the reader finds himself on the verge of a first abyss: if the pages he is reading are meant to be fiction, then the author of those pages is now part of that fiction, and the witness of the story (the reader who is summoned to take part in the story) no longer belongs to the conventional time of everyday life but to a time of imaginary existences whose flow depends only on an act of faith, faith in the reality of that fiction.

Cervantes (the imaginary figure we call Cervantes) guides and diverts, again and again, this fictitious time. When after barely eight chapters, halfway through an adventure, Cervantes confesses not to know how to continue Don Quixote’s story, a miracle occurs. Finding himself one day in Toledo, Cervantes tells us, he finds a folder full of papers written in Arabic characters and since he can’t read them, he looks for a morisco aljaimado (a Spanish-speaking Arab) to translate them for him. He discovers that the manuscript is by a certain Cide Hamete Benegeli, who has put on paper the entire story of Don Quixote. That is to say: depending on our point of departure, either Cide Hamete Benegeli narrates the story of Don Quixote that a morisco translates for Cervantes — the Cervantes who is a character in the preceding chapters — or the character called Cervantes, author of a book found in Don Quixote’s library, has the translator read him the story of what follows the knight’s first adventures in the manuscript of an Arabic author who writes in aljaimia, a Romance tongue transcribed in Arabic characters. The book we hold in our hands is such that, at whichever page we open it, conventional time disappears and becomes the time of fiction in order to render it “more real,” as Don Quixote himself explains.

So thoroughly does Cervantes’s fiction absorb reality to render it “more real” that it ends up devouring its own self. In the second chapter of Part 2, Sansón Carrasco lets Sancho know that his adventures are told in a book (which Carrasco has read in Salamanca, a town famous for the seriousness of its academic publications) “under the title The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha.” Hearing this, Sancho crosses himself in fright; much the same reaction is that of the reader for whom, if the first part of the book he’s reading has also been read by the characters of the part he’s reading now, then he, a creature of flesh and blood, is also part of that device, that trickery, that imaginary world, a ghost among ghosts, a servant not of his own will but of another man’s dreams, a man who is not dust and ashes and who once upon a time was called Miguel de Cervantes.

Cervantes was no doubt aware of the mirror he held up to his readers. Towards the end of Part 2, a certain scholarly canon tells Don Quixote that he cannot understand how certain books can delight without teaching unless they are nothing but beautiful. For the canon, “Delight conceived in the soul must be that of loveliness and balance seen or observed in things that sight or imagination bring forward; since anything that carries in itself ugliness or imperfection can produce no contentment whatsoever.” The world of which the canon approves is that of perfect sterility, meaningless beauty, vacuous creations, like that of today’s fashion models or sitcom characters for whom everything is immaculately aseptic, and time nothing but an interminable state of existence in which there is no responsibility and no distress. To this time without depth and without limits with which society shrouds the real passing of time, Don Quixote opposes a time of ethical action, a time in which every act has its consequences, good or evil, just or unjust. Instead of a vast and anonymous magma in which we exist unconsciously, Don Quixote proposes a time in which we are alive and fertile, in which our consciousness works towards rendering us more fully in our own image, becoming whoever it is the canon’s time prevents us from knowing. In this time, in this truly real time, we must live, Don Quixote says, “undoing all manner of wrongs, and placing ourselves in situations and dangers which, once overcome, will grant us eternal renown and fame.” This, Cervantes tells us, is the time of the stories we tell in order to be able to affirm that we exist.