...and shipping included; ordering details at . To order using a credit card, call (416) 205-7367, of you can send a check or credit card information to: Ideas Transcripts, (18) Box 500, Station A, Toronto, MSW 1E6, Canada.

The program was transcribed by Christina H. Lee and the transcription edited by Daniel Eisenberg (who wrote the footnotes). (19)

Some words of James Iffland had been mistakenly attributed to Edward Friedman; this has been corrected here and on the audio version currently for sale. All participants have had the opportunity to review the transcriptions and make corrections.

The variations between Quixote and Quijote, and between Cervantes' and Cervantes's, reflect the pronunciation of the speakers.

PART I

PAUL KENNEDY: I'm Paul Kennedy and this is Ideas.

PAUL KENNEDY: In a poll released last year, the novel Don Quijote was voted the best and most central work of literature of all time. There were a hundred writers polled. The survey was conducted by the Norwegian Nobel Institute. The Institute was choosing 100 titles to make up a library of world literature. They weren't necessarily seeking a number one book, but Don Quijote came very much in the lead. It earned fifty percent more votes than any other title.

Don Quijote came out in two parts, Part I in 1605, and Part II ten years later. It's now published as one enormous book. And most of us haven't read it. Of we've read it a bit of it in school. Of we've seen Man of La Mancha. Of we've seen a picture of the hero and the windmills. So many of us will have asked, when we saw the results of that poll in newspapers last year: "Why Don Quijote?" The question is "Why this book.?" Tonight on Ideas, the beginnings of an answer: points of view from some of the world's leading experts on the book, as the three-part series gets on the way.

Don Quijote: 400 Years on the Road is produced and presented by Barbara Nichol.

Part I, Chapter 1. In a village of La Mancha (I don't want to bother you with its name) there lived, not very long ago, one of those gentlemen who keep a lance in a lance-rack, an ancient shield, a skinny old horse, and a fast greyhound. Three quarters of his income went into his pot of stew (which contained a good deal more cow than sheep), the cold salt beef he ate most nights, Friday's beans and lentils and Saturday's leftover scraps, and sometimes a slender young pigeon for Sunday. All the rest ended up in a heavy broadcloth coat, velvet breeches he wore on feast days (with velvet slippers to match), and the fine quality homespun he wore, with great dignity, during the week. He lived with a housekeeper who was over forty. and a niece who hadn't reached twenty, plus a boy for the fields and the market, who spent as much time saddling the old horse as wielding the pruning knife. Our gentleman was getting close to fifty, but strong, lean, his face sharp, always up at dawn, and a devoted hunter. It's said his family name was Quijada, or maybe Quesada: there's some disagreement among the writers who've discussed the matter. But more than likely his name was really Quejana. Not that this makes much difference in our story; it's just important to tell things as faithfully as you can. (I, 1; 13) (21)

BARBARA NICHOL: And so Miguel de Cervantes starts out, telling his tale, he says, as faithfully as he can. But the story--he tells us it's a true story--is gathered up from more than one account, most of it collected by an historian, a Moor, Cide Hamete Benengeli. The story is about a man who went mad reading what he believed to be true stories. Don Quijote took as truth medieval tales of wandering knights and ladies fair. But in this book, the book about this man, are many stories and many voices speaking. Told as faithfully as it can be, the story of Don Quijote is a kaleidoscope, a hall of mirrors, a puzzle: fractured, conflicting, reflecting points of view. It was written in Spain at the start of the seventeenth century, a society that was making every effort to keep variety in check.

CARROLL JOHNSON: Cervantes was born into a society that was officially monolithic, mono-religious, monolingual, mono-cultural, and it was characterized by, you can almost say, a mania for exclusivity.

BARBARA NICHOL: Carroll B. Johnson is a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. His specialty is early modern Spanish literature. Among his publications on Don Quijote are the books: Madness and Lust and The Quest for Modern Fiction. He's the author of Cervantes and the Material World.

CARROLL JOHNSON: During the Middle Ages, in the Iberian peninsula, there were three ethnic, linguistic, religious groups that were coexisting for a period of seven hundred years or so. In 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel of Castile threw the Muslims off the Iberian peninsula as a political entity, and immediately following that, decreed religious unity, religious conformity. It was suddenly against the law to be a Jew of a Muslim. The Muslims were just sort of forcibly converted to Christianity. It was a huge population. They spoke a different language. The Jews were offered the opportunity to continue to be Jewish but do it somewhere else, outside of Spain, or to continue to be Spanish but do it as Christians.

In the course of these events, a society is created where officially everyone is Christian, everyone subscribes to certain national values, to a certain kind of national ethos. Underneath, the society is divided into those who had always been Christian and the newly converted, who were called New Christians, and their descendants. The New Christians were sort of systematically excluded from full participation in the power structure. The key to getting ahead in that society was to have the right kind of blood. Now, Cervantes' family mayor may not have been a family of New Christians. Circumstances suggest that this is probably where they were coming from. But the point is that within Spanish society, Cervantes is one of these kind of semi-marginalized, semi-outsiders, who is able to bring to bear a critical perspective that's denied to people who are full members, grown up in it, and never have reason to question anything.

BARBARA NICHOL: Miguel de Cervantes was born in 1547. His father was a barber-surgeon, which was on the lowest rung of the medical ladder. The father was deaf. There were lots of children and there was very little money. When Miguel de Cervantes was young, the family moved around a lot, the father trying to improve their fortunes. At one time, he was jailed for debts. Chances are our author received nothing more than a standard education for the time. Details are scarce. Four centuries of scholarship have turned up very little about the author's youth. And for centuries scholars have been busy digging and disputing their findings about Cervantes, discussing and disputing the man Cervantes invented: Don Quijote. Who was he?

CARROLL JOHNSON: When the book starts, Don Quijote has no identity. The salient feature of him as a character is his anonymity and his identification as a member of a group. He's introduced as an hidalgo, that is, a member of the absolute lowest rank of the nobility, a group of aristocrats whose aristocratic status was constantly in danger of slipping away from them, who lives out in the country: the text says "one of those hidalgos who would keep a dog, and a lance, and a shield." He eats the same menu seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year. He has two suits of clothes, one for weekdays, one for holidays. His life is a paradigm of monotony. He doesn't have a name. His name might have been Quijana, might have been Quijada, or it might have been Quesada.

Well, in that society, one's identity is a function of one's lineage, in two senses. One is either an hidalgo, some kind of an aristocrat, or a commoner. And, just as important in that society, one is either an old Christian or a New Christian. This guy has no identity, because nobody knows what his family name is. So he begins an absolute tabula rasa. The only thing that distinguishes him from many of these other country hidalgos who keep a lance and a dog and so on, and whose economic status is precarious, is that this guy is a voracious reader. He reads chivalric romance. He is so taken up in the reading of these books that he reads them all day; he stays up all night reading them; he sells off part of his small landholdings, which provide his livelihood, in order to buy more books to read.

The result of the round-the-clock reading schedule, according to the text, is that his brain dries out, and the consequence of that is that his mind becomes unbalanced. He loses his judgment; he goes crazy, in a word. And in this new state of mental alienation, induced by the physiological experience of the brain drying out from lack of sleep--which, by the way, is up-to-the-minute with contemporary scientific theory of the late sixteenth century--he conceives this project. He decides what he needs to do is to actually live one of these books. So this is the project: he is going to transform himself into a knight-errant and he is going to travel around doing the things that knights-errant do, both in order to strike a blow for good in the world, and also to win fame for himself. That is, through this new identity to achieve a kind of existential validation. So he sets about willfully transforming himself from this anonymous country hidalgo into a knight-errant on the model of those in the books that he's read.

A.J. CLOSE: These are stories about the doings of knights-errant, knights who wondered the fields and forests in search of adventure.

BARBARA NICHOL: A. J. Close on the literature of chivalry. Anthony Close is a Reader of Spanish at the University of Cambridge. Among his books are The Romantic Approach to Don Quijote and Cervantes and the Comic Mind of his Age.

A. J. CLOSE: They are set in dreamy and distant lands, for Spaniards that is. These include Great Britain and Brittany (France, that is, northwest France). They're set in a period shortly after the death of Christ. And it's a very fabulous world, which dresses up the medieval code and practice of chivalry, projecting it back in time. It's a world of dragons, princesses, enchanters, dragons, princesses, palaces, tourneys, dwarfs, serpents, monsters, and above all, knights and knights-errant wandering fields and forests in search of fame and adventure. And it was hugely popular in Spain in the sixteenth century. There were about eighty or ninety chivalric romances produced beginning with most the famous of them all, Amadís de Gaula, which came out in 1508. (22) Many of them were wrist-breakingly heavy tomes in several parts. So this was a massive amount of literature. It was by far and away the most popular genre. And you've got all kinds of people reading it. Saint Theresa of Avila confesses that she was an enthusiast of chivalric romances in her youth. Saint Ignatius Loyola, before he converted and turned to the religious life, was a very worldly courtier. And when he was wounded at the siege of Pamplona (this was in 1521), lying on his sickbed, he asked to be brought his favorite reading, which was chivalric romances. Well, they didn't have any available and so they brought him The Lives of the Saints instead.

They weren't all enthusiastic supporters of the romances. There was a very long tradition of moralists and churchmen who thundered against them as frivolous, unedifying, implausible, and all the rest, and Cervantes follows in that tradition, though his objections are artistic rather than moral.

DANIEL EISENBERG: They're a type of early novel, which deals with the adventures of a royal protagonist that might be separated from his family; he doesn't know he is royal, until finally he is reconciled with his parents and goes on to become the king with his parents' death, and he can't go riding around the world anymore.

BARBARA NICHOL: Daniel Eisenberg is the editor of the journal of the Cervantes Society of America.

DANIEL EISENBERG: They fulfilled some of the role that we see today in serials, in soap operas. Or even a good comparison is the type of short movie that was seen back in movie theaters a generation ago. You'd have the adventures of Tom Mix, for example. Each installment would show the person getting out of one scrape and go on and end up in another scrape. And that was the point in which the adventure would end, and you'd have to come back the following week to find out how the person got out of that particular scrape.

CARROLL JOHNSON: He has a helmet inherited from his grandparents' generation, but it's incomplete. He doesn't have the part that covers the knight's face, so he builds that out of cardboard and takes several days. He tests it with his sword and it flies to pieces.

BARBARA NICHOL: Carroll Johnson on Don Quijote as he shapes himself and his surroundings into proper chivalric form.

CARROLL JOHNSON: So he re-does it, puts a couple of iron bars inside to reinforce it. This time, however, he refrains from testing it. And this I think is the beginning of Quixotic wisdom. That is, instead of subjecting the new helmet to some kind of an empirical demonstration, he just imposes his will on it. "It's a good helmet, not because I've seen it resist a blow, but it's a good helmet because I need it to be a good helmet."

He's got a horse. The horse he has is a decrepit old nag, it's the kind of animal that in Spanish is called a rocín. He can't rename the horse and effect a change that way, and out of that, the word Rocinante emerges. It's kind of a little pun, which the narrator explains. Ante means before, so this horse was a rocín before.

So he's very satisfied with that name, and he moves on into renaming himself. It takes him a week, and he comes up finally with his name "Don Quijote" in imitation of the most famous knight-errant in all the books he has read, a man named Amadís de Gaula. He decides that "Don Quijote" by itself is not enough. Amadís was not just Amadís, but Amadís de Gaula, "of Wales" He names himself Don Quijote de la Mancha, which is the part of Spain that he lives in.

So after he's done that, there's only one attribute of a knight-errant that remains, and that is the lady fair. He thinks for a while about that. And apparently there was a farm girl in a neighboring village that he had kind of worshiped from afar. She had never understood that he was interested in her. He decides that this girl will be the lady of his thoughts. Her name is Aldonza Lorenzo, a name that just won't do for the lady fair of a knight-errant. So he thinks for a while and he renames her, and she becomes "Dulcinea," which is a name that has resonances not only to chivalric literature but also to another kind of highbrow literary form called pastoral literature. She is from the neighboring village of El Toboso, so she becomes Dulcinea del Toboso.

Both of these names are composed of two parts: the Don Quijote part and the Dulcinea part are reaching up to assimilate these people into the world of chivalric literature. The de La Mancha and del Toboso del part are pulling them down to earth. La Mancha is a region in Spain that really doesn't have much to bring it anyone's notice. It's generally flat, they grow some wheat, they raise sheep. There are no big cities, not the site of any famous battles, or anything like that. So to style yourself as from La Mancha is to actually detract from any kind of prestige that might be associated with the place where you are from. El Toboso is a little town in La Mancha and in Cervantes' time, El Toboso did have a little claim to fame, which was that it was populated almost entirely by moriscos, that is, Spaniards who were the descendants of Muslims who had been converted to Christianity around 1492 to 1500, people who were defined in that society as outsiders. It's from El Toboso that Don Quijote picks his girlfriend.

BARBARA NICHOL: Dulcinea del Toboso, the light of his life, beauty most rare. Sancho Panza, the local peasant, who will become Quijote's squire, is most enthusiastic at the choice. He knows the girl whom Don Quijote has now renamed Dulcinea.

"Oh ho!" said Sancho. "Then the lady Dulcinea del Toboso is ... otherwise known as Aldonza Lorenzo?"

"That she is, said Don Quixote, "and she's worthy to be mistress of the entire universe."

"I know her well," said Sancho, "and let me tell you, she can throw an iron ball as far as the strongest boy in the whole village. Praise the Lord! but she's a damned good girl, well built and straight as an arrow, and as strong and brave as they come ... and what a voice! Let me tell you, one day she got up in the village bell tower, to call some of their boys, working in one of her father's ploughed fields, and even though those fellows were more than a mile off they heard her as if they'd been standing at the foot of the tower. And maybe the best thing about her is that she hasn't got a finicky bone in her body, ... she can crackjokes with everyone, and make faces ... It's been a long time since I laid eyes on her, and she must have changed: women who are always out in the fields ... their faces really take a beating." (I, 25; 155-56)

BARBARA NICHOL: We never meet Dulcinea del Toboso. Well, perhaps we see her once in an episode the author says he cannot guarantee it's true. In the Cave of Montesinos, Dulcinea quietly flees when she sees our hero, but sends to him an emissary. Dulcinea wants to know, says the emissary, if she can borrow six bucks.

PAUL KENNEDY: Tonight on Ideas you are listening to Don Quijote: 400 Years on the Road, produced and presented by Barbara Nichol.

BARBARA NICHOL: As the book starts in the prologue, we find the author stymied by his task. But a friend comes to his rescue. He offers his advice: "stay focused on the task at hand." He says this: "keep yourself focused on demolishing the whole false, irrational network of chivalric romances despised by so many, yet adored by so many more. Do this and what you have accomplished will be no small affair." Was this what Cervantes was after in writing the book? Some say yes, some say no. As in each and every detail of the author's life and work, it sometimes seems that there are not two sides, but many.

DIANA DE ARMAS WILSON: Montaigne called them "wit-besotting trash"

BARBARA NICHOL: Diana de Armas Wilson is Professor Emerita of English and Renaissance Studies at the University of...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
Was Thomas Shelton the translator of the 'Second Part' (1620) of Don Q..., March 22, 2006
On the rhetoric within and without Don Quixote (1)., March 22, 2006
Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote., March 22, 2006
Hearing voices of satire in Don Quixote., March 22, 2006
Eric J. Kartchner. Unhappily Ever After: Deceptive Idealism in Cervant..., March 22, 2006

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