A few years ago, in 2002, 100 major writers from 54 countries agreed to answer a remarkable question: What is the best work of fiction ever written? By an overwhelming margin, the authors chose Don Quixote. Why is this 400-year-old Spanish novel held in such high esteem by readers, writers and critics? Entire libraries are filled with answers to that question, but I'll confine myself to just a few.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra's book contains, in germ or full-blown or by implication, practically every imaginative technique and device used by subsequent fiction writers to engage their readers and construct their works. It crystallized forever the making of literature out of life and other literature, and explored in typically ironic fashion, and for the first time, the murky, illusory frontiers between fact and fiction, imagination and history, perception and physical reality.
Cervantes had a stunningly contemporary conception of what was possible and plausible in fiction, which is surely why Don Quixote is generally considered to be not only the first modern novel within the Western literary tradition but probably the best one, as well. For example, its two archetypal figures, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, are far from static. Unlike earlier fictional models, they grow and develop and change, affecting profoundly the realistically depicted environment of the novel. They are, in turn, transformed by the crowded, shifting, recognizable landscape through which they move.
By the time we reach the end of the book, it is eminently clear that these protagonists are not precisely the men they were when they started out on their quest for chivalric adventures. For one thing, Sancho has embraced fully the notion of literary imitation that initially impelled Don Quixote to leave home and attempt to live a novel of chivalry in the real world; for the sake of his master, the squire is prepared to dress up in shepherd's clothes and enact a pastoral novel in that same world, while the erstwhile knight, having regained his sanity, as he puts it, turns his back on novels of all kinds and wishes only to die as a good Christian. Nothing in the rowdy burlesque of the early chapters of Part One prepares us for the final, heartbreaking chapters of Part Two.
This tight interplay between a kind of vaudevillian comedy and high seriousness creates what we call "realism" and what Cervantes called "verisimilitude," or the appearance of truth. It also allows for a constant and discomfiting blurring of the lines between actuality and fiction. It's a contemporary reality depicted with careful attention to physical and psychological detail, and characters whose interaction with this reality is utterly believable. It seems "realistic" enough, but in Quixote's and Sancho's world, literature itself exists as a moving force, as real and palpable as the characters with whom we identify (though they, despite our invariable suspension of disbelief, are, of course, fictional).
For example, what is called the "false Quixote," composed by someone using the pseudonym Avellaneda and published between Part One (1605) and Part Two (1615), drove Cervantes, in the 1615 novel, to present his own Part One as a real artifact that motivates a good part of the action. The fictional characters themselves deny the validity and veracity of the imitation. Avellaneda's book, Cervantes tells us, is the reason the knight has to die: To protect Don Quixote — and the reader — from other inferior counterfeits. And we should keep in mind that the wildly popular novels of chivalry, or at least an excessive reading of such fiction, are what madden the Manchegan in the first place, and allow his creator to write the book that is indisputably the best example of the genre and the work that kills off the chivalric novel forever.
Cervantes's writing is breathtaking, his characters inimitable, his originality in the creation of a genre extraordinary and his forging of a literary language memorable. He cleared a creative path for every novelist who followed him, eventually allowing prose fiction to acquire the heft and weight and solid importance that had once been the exclusive province of poetry and tragedy.
Edith Grossman's 2003 translation of "Don Quixote" has been widely acclaimed. She is also the award-winning translator of many major Latin American writers, including Gabriel Garcia Márquez.
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