de Cervantes Miguel Saavedra - Quixote: the novel and the world

To my parents,

Ofelia and Abraham

soadores.

And to my siblings,

Darin and Liora.

CLASSIC: A book people praise but dont read.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897)

A steroid 3552 displays some bizarre, disassociated behavior. Astronomers describe it as a small body orbiting around the sun. Yet it acts like a comet and, for that matter, like an extinct one, meaning that the asteroid has expelled from its nucleus most of its volatile ice. Thus, it is lifeless, incapable of generating energy in its taila comet without force, a kind of impostor, pretending to be something it isnt.

Aside from its number, astronomers have given it a name: Don Quixote. Greek myths are often used to name planets (Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, etc.) as well as asteroids (Apollo, Trojan, Centaur, etc.). The names of other such chunks of space matter have also been drawn from writers names (Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut, for example) and literary characters (the moons orbiting Uranus are named after characters in Shakespeares plays). The asteroid known as Don Quixote was detected by Swiss astronomer Paul Wild in 1983. Measuring almost twelve miles in diameter (the width of San Francisco Bay), it has an inclined comet-like path, crosses the Mars orbit, and is frequently perturbed by Jupiters gravitational force. Its existence is tenuous: at some point, like other debris in the solar system, it might crash into the sun. But it could escape such a tragic end.

In other words, Don Quixote is likely to wander foreverwhatever that word means in our vast, expanding universe. Isnt that what the real Don Quixote, the character created by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, does toowander around aimlessly in our imagination? Personally, I find it fitting to call Asteroid 3552 after what is arguably the most famousand, in my view, the bestnovelistic character of all time. He too is a kind of impostor, a migrating object faking his path through existence, an artifact passing for something he is not, dreaming of an alternative life.

We all dream of a different life. We all want to be someone else. Don Quixote is such an appealing character because he acts on that dream. As a result, he is seen as a fool, imprisoned in his own self-made universe. But contrary to common wisdom, foolishness isnt the antonym of reason. One can be a wise fool as well as an insane genius. Reason and foolishnesscall it madness!are actually one and the same: to be who we want to be, we need to invent a self, complete with its own logic. To be free, we need to create our own definition of liberty.

Looking back, I realize that I have spent my entire adult life wanting to be Don Quixote. Or, rather, imitating him. I have created a self that feels appropriate, a sense of freedom I am comfortable inhabiting. I have sought to be a quixotic fool.

My admiration for Don Quixote of La Mancha has taken myriad forms. In my library, I have a large collection of Quixotaliafor example, versions of the novel in multiple languages (from Yiddish to Korean, from Quechua to Klingon). I also have an endless assortment of artifacts inspired by it: films and recordings of theater productions, action figures, picture books, lunch boxes, lithographs, advertisements, and postal stamps. Ironically, they all mimic a hero whose existence is spent as an impostor, pretending to be someone else.

Aside from collecting all sorts of tchotchkes, Ive been rereading the novel, as William Faulkner often said he did: about once a year, forever learning from its protagonist. I have also taught it countless times to passionate, devoted students eager to find out why the darned book is so long and why it has remained a classic over so many centuries. Their research has pushed me in endless directions: What makes Picassos minimalist depiction of the knight-errant and his squireno more than a handful of pencil linesenduring? How do we explain Orson Welless fascination with it? Why did George Washington like the character so much? Did Cantinflas, the so-called Hispanic Charlie Chaplin, help to popularize the novel more than anyone else in the twentieth century? And is there a reason why translators like Franois Filleau de Saint-Martin dreamed of adding extra chapters to it?

I first discovered Don Quixote when I was in my teens, still living in Mexico, where I grew up. My very first copy, a cheap Spanish-language paperback, ended up in the garbage. I must have tried reading it but found it untidy, unfocused, and monotonousin short, impenetrable. Why keep an item you do not like? So I threw it away in the bathrooms wastebasket. I can still see it at the bottom, amid used Q-tips, an empty toothpaste box, and Kleenex.

In 1980, I bought myself another single-volume copy (the First and Second Parts together in a hardcover edition). I know the exact year because I used to engrave my full nameIlan Stavchanskyin my books using a special metal-press seal I had bought through the mail. The seal had a coat of arms I had designed, and under it, I signed in Hebrew and added the year.

Why such an obsession to claim this copy as my own? Perhaps because of the quick, miserable death the earlier Don Quixote had received. Released by the publisher Bruguera in Barcelona in 1974, my embossed copy was part of the sixth printing (in Spanish, printings are called editions) and was bound in a handsome black cover that looked like expensive leather. It was by no means a collectors copy, although it proved durable. It came with me to New York when I emigrated, moving from one apartment to the next as I made my way through life.

Youth is both an illness and its cure. I was infatuated with the decaying state of the world and wanted to change it, while being perfectly aware of the impracticalities of my dream. For one thing, I wanted to one day become a writer. Writers spend their time in isolation, putting words on a page. How much more impractical might one be? Cervantess novel turns those impracticalities into a quest. Its protagonist is a hidalgo, a nobleman, who is around fifty years old and doesnt do much except read escapist literature. Soon his brains dry up. He starts fashioning himself as a knight-errant eager to fight oppression, even though the injustices he encounters are imagined and his attempts to right them ineffective. Everything he does is pathetic.

That, precisely, is what I adored about the book: its vitality as well as its pathetic nature. Alonso Quijano, the hidalgo, concocts for himself a ridiculous name. He finds shining armor in the closet. He turns his skinny horse into Rocinante, a name befitting the illustrious horses of mythical stature that accompany adventurers like Amadis of Gaul and Tirant lo Blanc. And he identifies a humble village woman, Aldonza Lorenzo, as his beautiful and virtuous dame. His imagination alone launches him on an adventure that requires him to be courageous.

Isnt that what we all do in life: find a purpose, a mission, to justify our days? As a young man, I admired Don Quixote because of his idealism. But as Ive returned to the book time and again, I have found other sources of inspiration. Maybe the plot isnt really about an idealist but instead a fool. After all, one doesnt reach fifty and find nothing else to do but rectify all wrongs if insanity isnt a part of it. As I myself have reached the age of Cervantess protagonist, I realize that this is the story of a middle-aged quest, as the body deteriorates, to retrieve the dreams we nurtured earlier in life.