Things I have in Common with a 500-year-old Fictional Mad Man.

I started reading Don Quixote—I took the fact that Steinbeck had named his truck Rocinante in Travels with Charley as an omen of which travel narrative I should tackle next—and within a few pages came to an uncomfortable realization. I am Don Quixote. (Apart from the fact that Don Quixote is a mad man this realization was also distressing because I’ve always aimed to be more of a Sancho Panza.)

I set off on this adventure because my brain was addled by stories of heroic quests. I’m interpreting my journey through the literature of heroic quests, as is readily apparent in the posts where Lord of the Rings has served as a short-hand to explain an emotion or a vista or a (mild) hardship. I’ve been doing this for a long time. (I’d argue that we all do this, although some of us rely more heavily on rom-coms or procedural dramas.) Interpreting life through the lens of story makes it easier to get a grasp on things. Plus it makes life more fun.

In the very first chapter of Don Quixote (after the prologue, which yes, I did read all of) we get this description of him.

he so immersed himself in those romances that he spent whole days and nights over his books… He would say that the Cid Ruiz Diaz was a very gallant knight, but not to be compared with the Knight of the Burning Sword, who with a single thwart blow cleft asunder a brace of hulking, blustering giants. He was better pleased with Bernardo del Carpio, because at Roncesvalles he had slain Rolland the Enchanted by availing himself of the stratagem Hercules had employed on Antaeus, the son of the Earth, whom he squeezed to death in his arms. He praised the giant Morgante, for he alone was courteous and well bred among that monstrous brood puffed up with arrogance and insolence.

Here I scribbled excitedly in the margins: “He’s a fan.” Replace Cid Ruiz Diaz with Jean-Luc Picard, substitute James T. Kirk for the Knight of the Burning Sword, and make them hulking, blustering klingons instead of giants and perhaps you’ll begin to understand what I mean. Don Quixote is a character who cares passionately about fiction and memorizes its minutiae. This is yet another similarity he and I share.

The third strike, that confirmed I was going to spend the rest of this book identifying to an uncomfortable degree with a fictional mad man from five hundred years ago came when we are told that Don Quixote is “letting his horse choose the way, believing that in this consisted the true spirit of adventure.” I may not have a horse, but cheap buses are kind of close. And, the both of us, with no fixed final destination go in circles occasionally. He travels away from the inn he mistook for a castle and then ends up back there later in the narrative. I started in Cleveland, headed for Chicago, circled back to Columbus, dropped down to Cincinnati and then traveled back through Columbus to go to Homecoming, just an hour south of Cleveland.

The novel hasn’t made it easy to identify with Don Quixote by any means. It’s interesting reading the original Don Quixote–a story that until now I’d experienced only through Wishbone and a vague awareness of Man of la Mancha–because I’m discovering how much the text looks down on its titular character. I took out the bit from the above quote where Cervantes writes “his brains dried up to such a degree that he lost the use of his reason. His imagination became filled with a host of fancies he had read in his books–enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges wounds, courtships, loves, tortures  and many other absurdities” and the text only gets meaner from there. It ridicules him for thinking he’s a knight and existing half in a world of fantasy. But at the same time it supports his delusion by calling him a knight throughout and using the language to describe the world that he uses in his speech. Chapter Six begins, “The knight was still sleeping.” It’s a strange contradiction.

I feel like a modern understanding of the character is that of a sort of romantic dreamer. Sure, he’s a bit foolish, but there’s something admirable about his tenacity in seeing the world as something more fantastic than it is. The actual text has no such sympathy for him and consistently mocks him as an absolute moron. The text doesn’t even show any sympathy for Sancho Panza. I was ready to find a Samwise Gamgee in the character, someone slow maybe, but with a heart of gold–or some equally cliched phrase to indicate kindness and likeability. But Sancho Panza is also portrayed simply as a moron, with no potentially redeeming warm feelings toward Don Quixote who he mainly follows around because it might make him rich some day.

I’m about half way through, and the narrative has gotten bogged down in telling the stories of about a hundred other characters, and the wind mill giants have been conquered long ago, and I’ve gotten distracted by more modern books that are easier to read. (It seems everyone I stay with has at least one book that I must read, and I always like to give book recommendations a shot.) I find myself compelled to finish it though. As familiar as parts of this story are, I have no memory of what happens to Don Quixote in the end, and now that I’ve found out we’re kindred spirits it seems rather important that I know.