Don Quixote [Trans. by Edith Grossman] Read Online Free PDF Page A

Country Doctor.” To Kafka, Don Quixote was Sancho Panza’s daemon or genius, projected by the shrewd Sancho into a book of adventure unto death:
    Without making any boast of it, Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by devouring a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon set out in perfect freedom on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.
    In Kafka’s marvelous interpretation, the authentic object of the Knight’s quest is Sancho Panza himself, who as an auditor refuses to believe Don Quixote’s account of the cave. So I circle back to my question: Does the Knight believe his own story? It makes little sense to answer either “yes” or “no,” so the question must be wrong. We cannot know what Don Quixote and Hamlet believe, since they do not share in our limitations. Don Quixote knows who he is, even as the Hamlet of act V comes to know what can be known.
    Cervantes stations his Knight quite close to us, while Hamlet always is remote and requires mediation. Ortega y Gasset remarks of Don Quixote: “Such a life is a perpetual suffering,” which holds also for Hamlet’s existence. Though Hamlet tends to accuse himself of cowardice, he is as courageous, metaphysically and in action, as Don Quixote: they compete as literary instances of moral valor. Hamlet does not believe the will and its object can be brought together: “Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.” That is the Player-King enacting The Mousetrap, Hamlet’s revision of the (nonexistent) Murder of Gonzago . Don Quixote refuses such despair yet nevertheless suffers it.
    Thomas Mann loved Don Quixote for its ironies, but then Mann could have said, at any time: “Irony of ironies, all is irony.” We behold in Cervantes’s vast scripture what we already are. Dr. Samuel Johnson, who could not abide Jonathan Swift’s ironies, easily accepted those of Cervantes; Swift’s satire corrodes, while Cervantes’s allows us some hope. Johnson felt that we required some illusions, lest we go mad. Is that part of Cervantes’s design?
    Mark Van Doren, in a very useful study, Don Quixote’s Profession, is haunted by the analogues between the Knight and Hamlet, which to me seem inevitable. Here are the two characters, beyond all others, who seem always to know what they are doing, though they baffle us whenever we try to share their knowledge. It is a knowledge unlike that of Sir John Falstaff and Sancho Panza, who are so delighted at being themselves that they bid knowledge to go aside and pass them by. I would rather be Falstaff or Sancho than a version of Hamlet or Don Quixote, because growing old and ill teaches me that being matters more than knowing. The Knight and Hamlet are reckless beyond belief; Falstaff and Sancho have some awareness of discretion in matters of valor.
    We cannot know the object of Don Quixote’s quest unless we ourselves are Quixotic (note the capital Q). Did Cervantes, looking back upon his own arduous life, think of it as somehow Quixotic? The Sorrowful Face stares out at us in his portrait, a countenance wholly unlike Shakespeare’s subtle blandness. They match each other in genius, because more even than Chaucer before them, and the host of novelists who have blended their influences since, they gave us personalities more alive than ourselves. Cervantes, I suspect, would not have wanted us to compare him to Shakespeare or to anyone else. Don Quixote says that all comparisons are odious. Perhaps they are, but this may be the exception. We need, with Cervantes and Shakespeare, all the help