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Madness in El Quijote
Too much sanity may be madness. And maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be!
Miguel de Cervantes
From the first edition of El Quijote by Juan de la Cuesta in 1605, this work in general, the character of Don Quijote in particular, has been the subject of many and varied interpretations and readings, becoming one of the most widely discussed issues in the field of literary criticism. As highlighted by Ortega y Gasset, Alonso Quijano/Don Quijote is probably one of the most ambiguous characters in the history of literature. In fact, one of the most controversial themes in scholarly discussions has been the paradoxical characterisation of Don Quijote as ‘a madman with moments of sanity’. What we are mainly concerned with here is the discussion of the intentions underlying the use of madness by Cervantes. Since we understand that every single masterpiece represents the perfect integration of form and purpose, Cervantes’ intention cannot be ignored as regards the portray of Don Quijote as a madman. As Krabbenhoft (2000) notices, ‘Don Quijote’s madness has a use, and it is when this use is discovered that Cervantes’ novel takes the turn that anticipates much of the fiction that has been written since El Quijote’.
What it should be established at the very outset is that, since Cervante’s intentions were not openly declared, criticism can only speculate as to Don Quijote. In fact, there is no critical consensus on Cervantes’ reason to create such an ambiguous character and the only thing that seems to be clear regarding this issue is that, from the very beginning of the novel, Cervantes is trying to portray Don Quijote as a madman, since the whole story begins with the narrator’s explicit commentary on how an impoverished gentleman called Alonso Quijano goes insane from reading too many chivalric romances and decides to become an errant knight.
Generally speaking, the interpretations of the novel have followed two main trends: that of those who believe that Cervantes intended nothing more than a parody of romances of chivalry and that of those critics who, following the Romantic approach, believe that the novel had a deep metaphysical purpose and conceive it as ‘a serious, an indeed, tragic vision of man’s struggle to find ideal values in a relativistic, God-forsaken world’ (Edwin Williamson, 1998).
According to the previous divergent points of view, the character of Don Quijote have been understood both as a laughable buffon or, from the Romantic point of view, as some sort of ‘noble and heroic figure, the supreme literary symbol of the alienated condition of the modern soul’ (Edwin Williamson, 1998). In this respect, it should be mentioned that, throughout his whole work, it is easily appreciated that comic aspects in Cervantes’ stories always have underlying serious intentions. We believe that his work can only be explained if we take into account both the symbolic and the literal approaches, this is the reason why we will combine both points of view for our purpose.
This way, we could start by saying that criticism has generally highlighted that apart from entertaining, Cervantes also comments on deeper transcendental issues and that El Quijote represents a place to discuss issues of human identity, morality and art. In fact, the novel touches upon one of the essential debates of Renaissance thinking: the fact that reality is not always what it seems to be and the ambiguity arising from it. This way, the exploration of Don Quijote’s process of insanity could be said to represents an exploration on the special relationship established between idealism and realism, between fiction and reality, as some have suggested, the novel could be read as a lesson on how we all can fall victim of appearances or of our own foulness. In relation to this, it is important to notice the traumatic nature of Don Quijote’s recovering in the second part, which finishes with the return of his senses before dying at the end of the novel. As Krabbenhoft (1998) notices, ‘Don Quijote’s death conforms to the conventions of chivalric and epic romance that Cervantes consistently parodies, but it is also the bitter consequence of his personal disillusionment with a gentler alternate reality’.
Another related common place for criticism connected to madness and the debate around the nature reality is that conceiving Don Quijote’s insanity as virtue, as a form of higher wisdom serving to the purpose of social criticism. It has been often suggested that Cervantes employ Don Quixote and other characters and situations in the story to express his criticism towards the world in which he lived. In fact, thanks to his madness, Don Quijote converts the world to his own point of view, managing to see truth, to see humble people as noble and to call the ecclesiastical elite and the rich monster and villains.
Authors such as Iffland (1999) have observed a bitter criticism of class structure in Spain and have conceived El Quijote as a work bound to upset the current status quo, portraying a carnivalesque world of inverted social hierarchies in which the hero clashes with secular and ecclesiastic authorities and those of lower rank laugh at those above them. Madness would be used here, according to this point of view, as a device to safely include socio-political, military or religious commentary throughout the novel.
In this sense, critics have also conceived El Quijote as some sort of tragic-comic work where Cervantes illustrates Spain’s divergent worlds and portrays the conflict between the old and the new. In fact, the origin of Don Quijote’s madness has been often related to the fact that he is trapped between two worlds: the past and the present. What is more, by means of portraying Don Quijote as a madmen who longs for the sense of purpose and beauty of a past chivalric times, the author defends his ideals and desires for a better world, making his contemporaries face their own failure to maintain the old system of morality.
It is worth stating at this point that, in the seventeenth-century Castile, the old medieval past survived and mixed with a new renaissance present. El Quijote as a whole has been often regarded as a mixture of this two main elements: the medieval heroes, myths or beliefs still alive in the collective memory and the new baroque realism. According to this view, the novel is conceived as a commentary on the failure of the old medieval wish for universality Spain had. Scholars have suggested that the ruin we see in El Quijote would be then ruin the author is experiencing and touching in Spain. In fact, it has been often commented that, as the ideal world of Don Quixote falls apart, Spanish ideals are also destroyed with the disaster concerning the Spanish ‘armada invencible’ or Westphalia among others. This way, critics have observed that in Don Quijote, rather than winners or looser, we find the everlasting paradox within the soul of human beings: illusion and failure, what is connected with the previously mentioned Don Quijote’s rejection, on his deathbed, of his life as a night errant.
Finally, I would also like to highlight that the fact of presenting Don Quijote’s ideal world as opposed to the real world has been frequently conceived as a literary device to comment on the nature of fiction and art in general. According to this approach, literature is understood as a way to escape and establish a fictional world without necessarily having to adopt a ‘real world’ setting in order to portray the ideas about society previously commented.
We could conclude by saying that Cervante’s parody of chivalric fiction thanks to the use of a madmen as main character enables him to explore the possibilities of safe or neutral commentary on the different socio-political, cultural and ethical realities.
Although we agree with many that parodic intentions are all around and are evident from first to last (within the unusual structure of the novel, within the fantastic adventures presented, within the stylistic devices, within the hyperbolic, even coarse language...), we believe that we cannot understand El Quijote as a mere comic fiction. Even if a surface reading leads to the conclusion that it is the funny story of a madman, the novel cannot be seen as pure entertainment with no moral. We think that it is parody that allows the author to move without constrictions in a non-precedent way. Since parody makes the work lighter, presenting a madmen allows Cervantes to dive to great depths in social commentary and existential exploration in a safe way.
No analysis of Don Quixote has adequately explained the reasons lying beneath Cervantes’ will to ambiguously portray Don Quijote as ‘a madman with moments of sanity’. All this goes to show that El Quijote resumes in itself one of the essential features inherent to every single masterpiece: the everlasting richness of meaning, readings and interpretations. As Nelson (1982) points out ‘Don Quixote will survive of course as a funny book of high seriousness, a profound book of myriad shimmering surfaces, a harmonious ‘chaos’, a superabundant text of perfectedness, a conservative revolutionary work, and so forth’
Works Cited List
Estruch, J. 1992. Chaos and Parody: Reflections on Anthony Close's The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote” [WWW document] URL http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/artics92/estruch.htm
Iffland, J. 1999. De fiestas y aguafiestas: risa, locura e ideología en Cervantes. URL http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/bcsaind1.htm
Nelson, L. 1982. Chaos and Parody: Reflections on Anthony Close's The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote”. [WWW document] URL: http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/artics82/nelson.htm
Williamson, E. 1988. “Intención” and “invención” in the Quixote [WWW document] URL http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/artics88/williams.htm
http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/cervantes (This address connects you to the Cervantes International Online Bibliography and Anuario Bibliográfico Cervantino, offering the visitor an excellent and extensive bibliography on Cervantes edited by Eduardo Urbina. Project 2001 features Cervantes e-texts, both the Centro de Estudios Cervantinos texts as well as the Schevill-Bonilla editions. The texts are available both for downloading and for on-line searching).
http://cervantesvirtual.com/ (This address belongs to the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, an intreseting virtual library with works on numerous topics, including Cervantes, of course).
http://www.centroestudioscervantinos.es/ (in the Centro de Estudios Cervantinos -Universidad de Alcalá- Cervantes' works together with a search engine and other resources are available)
http://cvc.cervantes.es/portada.htm (This page belongs to the Centro virtual Miguel de Cervantes -Instituto Cervantes-. In it, you can find numerous resources to foster the Spanish language and Hispanic cultures, including an edition of the Francisco Rico version of Don Quijote).
http://www.comedias.org/ (This association for Hispanic classical theatre offers you over 100 texts of Spanish Golden-Age plays, including Cervantes' Comedias and Entremeses.
http://www.el-mundo.es/quijote (Here you will find a modernized Spanish text of the novel chapter by chapter, plus a biography of Cervantes in English).
http://www.selfknowledge.com/78au.htm (Here you will find Don Quixote translated by John Ormsby, a biography of Cervantes and many other revealing resources).
http://www.fdungan.com/quixote.htm (Here you will also find the John Ormsby translation of Don Quixote published by Dungan Books).
http://www.gutemberg.org/dirs/5/9/0/5903/5903-h/5903-hhtm (In this interesting virtual library- Gutemberg project- you can find The History of Don Quixote illustrated by Gustave Doré presented as an e-book for the use ‘of anyone anywhere at no cost and almost with no restrictions whatsoever’).
http://ingber.spanish.sbc.edu/SonnetTexts (Here you will a collection of about 100 Golden Age sonnets in Spanish and in English translation, with links to related sites).
http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csapage.htm (Here, the Cervantes Society of America gives you both socio-cultural information and access to many of its publications in electronic form, primarily issues of the interesting journal Cervantes).
http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes (This is a home page for the Humanities-Net listserver dealing, among many other things, with Cervante’s life, times, and works).
http://www.cwquijote.com/ (Here you will find an interactive journey through Castilla-La Mancha following the adventures of Don Quixote).
http://www.elquijote.com/ (this web from de Castilla-La Mancha offers the visitor a variety of resources, including a free Quijotesaver).
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/donquixote ( The Sparknotes represent an interesting tool for students, since they provide, among many other things, summaries by groups of chapters of an incredible amount of literary works together with serious comments on it and study questions with answers).
http://fajardo-acosta.com/worldlit/cervantes/index.htm (Dr. Fidel Fajardo Acosta’s World Literature Website- Creighton University- is a clear and well-organized page. In it, literature students can find interesting studies on the most important work of classical authors, a glossary on literary terms or a timeline of world literature among many other things)
http://cervantesvirtual.com/bib_autor/Cervantes/enlaces/enlaces.shtml (Here you will find some interesting links related to Cervantes and his works)
to index
Academic year 2004/2005
© a.r.e.a./Dr. Vicente Forés López
© Cristina Ortega Marcos
Universitat de València Press
Page mantained by Cristina Ortega Marcos
Created: 06/02/2005
Last Updated: 18/06/2005