The Tragedy and Comedy of Don Quixote

Dali Mami, a renegado corsair who ruled as a pirate king in Algiers, where he was infamous for his household full of mutilated prisoners, was referred to as “The Lame” because of a leg injury sustained during a raid. His most famous captive, a Spanish sailor for the Holy League named Miguel de Cervantes, was called “El Manco de Lepanto,” that is the “One-Handed Man of Lepanto,” christened thus after a gunshot wound incurred during that famed naval battle of 1571 had rendered his left appendage withered. Pirate and sailor, Muslim and Christian, Turk and Spaniard, master and slave—both mocked as cripples. Cervantes was a novelist—the first great one—and great novelists don’t deal in allegory so much as they do in the messy particularities of life as strung between fantasy and reality.

Today is the 450th anniversary of Cervantes’ kidnapping and the beginning of his five-year bondage in Algiers. Human trafficking in the Mediterranean was common during Cervantes’ day (it still is), with hundreds of thousands from Greece to Galicia, Ireland to Iceland captured by the Barbary Coast pirates from the sixteenth to the nineteenth-centuries (it must be emphasized that that number was dwarfed by the thirteen million Africans who were victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade). David Cordingly in Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates explains that “Barbary corsairs intercepted ships traveling… from the trading ports of Alexandria and Venice… [They] captured their passengers and crews, and… sold them into slavery.”

Huddled on their boat alongside his brother Roderigo as Mami’s galley approached, the inky blackness of the sea illuminated by the ghostly light of the waning moon through the salty air, Cervantes must have felt that uncertainty that marks the death of agency. Cervantes’ esteem from Lepanto, the largest naval battle since classical antiquity in which the westward Ottoman encroachment was halted, as well as his letters of introduction from John of Austria, afforded him some privileges (he kept his nose and ears), though it also ironically ensured a longer imprisonment, since his captors believed that the (poor) man could garner a larger ransom. Imprisoned in an Algerian bagnio, Cervantes spent five years trying to escape before the Trinitarian monks of Madrid paid the hefty fee for his release.

That Don Quixote was first envisioned in a Seville jail where Cervantes was imprisoned for tax evasion is a central part of the novel’s legend; it’s even a narrative conceit of the 1965 musical The Man of La Mancha (though there the author is being punished by the Inquisition). “To dream the impossible dream,” sings Cervantes in the lyrics of Richard Kiley, “To follow that star/No matter how hopeless/No matter how far.”

All right—it’s maudlin, it’s saccharine, it’s pablum, but there is a reason that it resonates, even if the book which Mark Twain, Gustave Flaubert, and William Faulkner thought was the greatest novel ever written is more complicated than a Broadway musical. In The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800, Steven Moore writes that Don Quixote contains “scenes of such stupendous, iconic power… that they seem to belong to the timeless realm of myth,” with tilting at windmills on the scorched and windswept planes of La Mancha part of our collective literary consciousness.

Central to that myth is the power (and danger) of imagination; where a foolish old man enraptured to Medieval chivalric romances can deny that he is Alonso Quixano but rather that he is the faithful knight errant Don Quixote, where rusted armor gleams and a barber’s basin is a helmet; where the portly peasant Sancho Panza is made a faithful squire, the tavern-wench and sometimes-prostitute Aldonza Lorenza, becomes the idealized lady Dulcinea del Toboso, and an old horse as broken as his owner becomes the mighty steed Rocinante. Don Quixote is about refusing to see the world in its actual grubby reality; to rather gild it in the beauties of our own invention. That this is the task of writers is something Cervantes is keenly aware of. That it’s bound to failure is what makes Don Quixote so terribly sad.

Whether a cell in 1598 played a part in conceiving of the scrawny, hobbled hidalgo with a cardboard visor and a bent lance is arguable, but Cervantes’ far more traumatic enslavement from 1571 until 1576 must have formed his intimate comprehension of the difference between freedom and servitude. Cervantes’ North African interregnum supplied the plot of two plays, 1615’s The Bagnios of Algiers and The Great Sultana published that same year, as well as portions of his final novel from 1617, The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda. Yet among the most personal recounting is from Part One of Don Quixote that runs from chapter 39 to 41 and is known as “The Captive’s Tale.”

Narrated by a Spanish sailor—also a hero of Lepanto—whom Don Quixote and Sancho Panza encounter in an inn, the short interlude is mostly composed of the daring story of the captive’s escape through the intercession of a lovely and beautiful Moorish woman named Zoraida. “The Captive’s Tale,” despite seeming a narrative one-off in Don Quixote, simply a story about a daring escape with Zoraida paying her beloved’s ransom which is used to buy a boat for him and the other prisoners, is actually highly instructive not just in what it does say, but what it doesn’t. 

“They put a chain on me… and I spent my days in that bagnio, with many other gentlemen and people of note,” says the captive in Edith Grossman’s brilliant 2005 translation. “Although hunger and scant clothing troubled us at times, even most of the time, nothing troubled us as much as constantly hearing and seeing my master’s remarkably and exceptionally cruel treatment.” In a captivity tale that dwells little on the specificity of captivity, the clause wherein he clarifies that his being troubled at their mistreatment was actually “most of the time” conveys more than any lurid details would when it comes to the psychology of the character’s trauma.

Speaking of his master, the captive says that “Each day he hanged someone, impaled someone, cut off someone’s ears, and with so little provocation, or without any provocations at all… he did it merely for the sake of doing it and because it was in his nature.” The arbitrary nature of torture places the text in the long genealogy of the captivity narrative; if there is a degree of the adventure yarn in the tale, than there is also something of an Arthur Koestler or an Alexander Solzhenitsyn as well. “It if it necessary to shoot you, you’ll be shot,” writes Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago, “even if you’re completely innocent,” and one presumes that’s a lesson about living under the control of another person which Cervantes already understood.

But what makes “The Captive’s Tale,” indeed Don Quioxite, so powerful is that there is the desire to search “out some other hope to sustain me, no matter how weak and fragile.” Like Solzhenitsyn, who at his 1970 Nobel ceremony said that “I believe that world literature has in its power to help mankind,” the captive (and Cervantes) sees a salvific power in words. The captive tells the knight and his page that while he was in captivity, there had been another prisoner who penned sonnets in memory of those lost in the recent wars, and that “I believe they will give you more pleasure than grief.”

Both sonnets offer the captive—and Cervantes—an opportunity to commemorate and mourn, to bear witness and to commune with the dead, at least for a bit. From memory the captive recites how his compatriots at a siege were “the exhausted few, too few to resist… [who] gave up their lives to the enemy’s sharp blade,” but he imagines how perhaps in death they might be “from the mortal veil/freed and unconfined.”

But beyond the vagaries of this clearly religious belief in eternal reward, literature itself offers succor not just for the captive, but its creator. There is a modern tendency to refuse to read the author in a narrator, a tendency that exists for good reason. And yet at the risk of imposing a contemporary language of trauma onto this distant past, perhaps the author was writing and rewriting his own experience, transforming it into something not entirely devoid of meaning, for when the captive reports that among the imprisoned, the “only one who held his own with [the master] was a Spanish soldier named something de Saavedra,” that title is of course from Cervantes’ full-name.

Were Don Quixote only about the power of imagination, about the redemptive possibilities of literature, it wouldn’t be any more profound than Man of La Mancha. Most critics have read the novel in the opposite manner, with Moore observing that the “key indicator of [Don Quioxite’s] madness… is his assumption that books of fiction are literally true,” while in a 1936 essay Walter Benjamina argued that Cervantes “teaches how the spiritual greatness, the boldness, the helpfulness, of one of the noblest of men… are completely devoid of counsel and do not contain the slightest scintilla of wisdom.”

For all of his reading has driven Alonso Quixano insane, the implications of which are often skillfully occluded in some of the more romantic misrememberings of the novel. The pretend knight isn’t eccentric or idiosyncratic, a delightful oddball or harmless weirdo—he’s quite literally psychotic. Which is to say that to dream the impossible dream is one thing, but to pretend that its reality is quite another. Quixotic and Quixotism, the adjectives derived from the character’s name, refer not to the liberatory nature of literature but to the delusions of all-encompassing worldviews, the inability of the mad to grapple with our soiled and fallen existence. That we like spending time with Don Quixote is what makes the novel a tragedy as much as a comedy.

Among the saddest scenes in literature is when the knight, on his deathbed, passes into sanity, with his faithful squire trying to still convince him of the fantastical nature of a reality that is anything but. But though it’s an error to embrace only the sentimental readings of the novel, so would in only taking the opposite tact. After all, as Moore reminds us, “Whatever else it may be… [it] is unquestionably about the art of fiction.” Don Quixote’s greatness is that it exists in this tension while offering no reconciliation.

The captive—and Cervantes—found something moving in those sonnets, something that gave them the will to hope. Is that enough? Is that enough today? When women and men speaking Cervantes’ tongue are sent to concentration camps like the South Florida Detention Facility or CECOT, then what use is a sonnet? Can a poem offer any kind of freedom to the prisoner forced to kneel in 24-hours of light under the continual threat of capricious violence? Is it an obscenity to even consider the question? I genuinely don’t know—I don’t think that I can. As to Cervantes, he notes that “Then the captive fell silent.”