Gloss on “Quixote”

As with Shakespeare’s character King Lear, Cervantes’ character Don Quixote is ambiguously depicted — by the ambiguity of what we have been calling in class a coincidentia oppositorum (a coincidence of opposites) — as absolutely insane and absolutely sane.  In DQ the character, opposites finally abide each in each to become a new singlular reality — sane-madness, sober-insobriety, insane-sanity.  And correlatively “life  as it is” and “life as it should be” are both varioulsy depicted in the novel as both sane and insane. Cervantes writes:

When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”  

Additionally, Cervantes (following Shakespeare’s characterization of Lear) depicts the healthiest, most reliable seeing-acts in the novel as the seeing-acts of madmen and, by contrast he depicts the seeing-acts of sane men as insane and radically untrustworthy. Cervantes writes:

Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth.”
“What giants?” Asked Sancho Panza.
“The ones you can see over there,” answered his master, “with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long.”
“Now look, your grace,” said Sancho, “what you see over there aren’t giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.”
“Obviously,” replied Don Quijote, “you don’t know much about adventures.”

This well-known Windmill scene  –which compares “life as it is” with  “life as it should be” / seeing what is there versus seeing what is more than there  — is beautifully depicted in the above video clip between 48:45 mins and 52 mins.

 

 

 

 

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