A Soldier Who Writes After Fifty
Cervantes was born in 1547, served as a soldier under Philip II, fought at the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571, from which he emerged wounded, and was a slave in Algiers from 1575 to 1580. He returned to Spain to a life of hardship, tax collecting and prison, and knew success only with the First Part of the Quixote, in 1605. His life, with the dates that each source supports and those on which they diverge, is set out in Miguel de Cervantes. Carpeaux reads him as the last of the Spanish Erasmians, an anachronistic "miles christianus" in a Spain that had already traded Erasmus's universalism for the Machiavellianism of the state.
Cervantes (1547-1616) served Philip II as a soldier, was a captive of the Moors, and published Don Quixote in two parts, in 1605 and 1615; Carpeaux's reading places him as the last of the Spanish Erasmians, an anachronistic "miles christianus" in a Spain that had already traded Erasmian universalism for the Machiavellianism of the state.
How the Book Was Born
In the prologue, Cervantes says the book was "engendered in a prison," and he probably means the prison in Seville, in 1597 and 1598. The work he had in mind was, it seems, a brief fiction, similar to the Exemplary Novels that would come out in 1613: the narrator calls the text a cuento, a tale, in chapter I and only once more, in chapter IX, and from then on speaks of libro and historia. In between, the story expands: it gains a squire in chapter VII, an Arab historian and a translator in chapter IX, and the interpolated novellas. The First Part was published in Madrid between the end of December 1604 and the beginning of 1605, in a hurried printing, and was an immediate popular success.
Desocupado lector: sin juramento me podrás creer que quisiera que este libro, como hijo del entendimiento, fuera el más hermoso, el más gallardo y más discreto que pudiera imaginarse, idle reader: without an oath you may believe me when I say that I would wish this book, as the child of my understanding, were the most beautiful, the most gallant and the most witty that could be imagined.
Books of Chivalry in Print and Their End
Books of chivalry were a popular success for the first seventy years of the sixteenth century, and moralists criticized them for drawing readers away from religion; by Cervantes's time they had already been surpassed by the literature of the Golden Age, and no one saw them as a threat. The genre came out of the courtly romance: Auerbach reads the departure of Calogrenant, at the court of King Arthur, as the model of an adventure with no political task, undertaken only for the knight's personal trial, and Don Quixote's first sally as a perfect parody of it. The Amadis of Gaul, the last phase of the prose courtly romance, is the hero's favorite book and the first that the priest spares at the bonfire of the library (chapter VI of Part One).
Don Quixote's first sally [...] is a perfect parody of Calogrenant's sally, precisely because Don Quixote does not find the world prepared on purpose for his trial, but an ordinary world.
a book that was the favorite reading of Don Quixote cannot die out entirely.
Avellaneda's Apocryphal Sequel
In the autumn of 1614, while Cervantes was still writing the Second Part, a Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha appeared in Tarragona, by one Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, a pseudonym of a writer never identified, which told of the journey to Zaragoza that the end of the First Part had promised. Cervantes responds in four ways, and the first is the prologue to the Second Part, in which he speaks to the reader without giving the rival's name:
Quisieras tú que lo diera del asno, del mentecato y del atrevido, pero no me pasa por el pensamiento: castíguele su pecado, con su pan se lo coma y allá se lo haya, you would have me call him an ass, a fool and an upstart, but it does not even cross my mind: let his sin punish him, let him eat his own bread and manage as he can.
The other three ways are in the body of the book: in chapter LIX, the gentleman hears two guests read the false book and changes course so as not to go to Zaragoza; in chapter LXXII, Don Álvaro Tarfe, a character from the rival book, declares before an alcalde that this is the true Don Quixote; and in the will in chapter LXXIV.
Ten Years Between the Two Parts
The First Part ends with the gentleman back in the village, the promise of a third sally to the jousts of Zaragoza, and a quotation from Ariosto that suggests to another the continuation of the story (chapter LII of Part One). In the Second, the book's success becomes subject matter: the gentleman discovers that he is a printed hero, and the bachelor points out as errors the donkey that reappears without explanation and the Curious Impertinent out of place (chapter III of Part Two). The narrator explains in chapter XLIV that, to avoid always writing about a single subject, he had used separate novellas in the First Part, such as that of the Curious Impertinent and that of the captive, and that in the Second he did not want loose novellas, but episodes born of the same successes (chapter XLIV of Part Two). The Second Part was dedicated to the Count of Lemos, with the promise of a new novel, the Persiles.
The Novel and Its Readings
Carpeaux calls Don Quixote the "novel of novels," because the contrast between appearance and reality is the substance of the genre, and he divides interpretations into two lineages: the one that reads the gentleman's defeat as the defeat of faith in a world without faith (Turgenev, then Unamuno), and the one that restores the rights of reality, bringing the book closer to the picaresque novel (Menéndez y Pelayo, then Américo Castro). Auerbach rejects the tragic and symbolic readings; another reading sees the duel between the gentleman and the bachelor as one between two worldviews, the medieval, mystical and ambiguous, and the Renaissance, rationalist.
the contrast between appearances and reality is the very substance of the genre "novel". In this sense Don Quixote is "the novel of novels".