The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays (New York Review Books Classics) (3 page)

But if the author were to intervene in his narratives—if, instead of letting facts and actions speak for themselves, he were to speak in his own voice—the spell would be broken at once, we would be suddenly reminded that this is not life, this is not reality—it is merely a tale. When we reproach Cervantes for his lack of compassion, his indifference, his cruelty, for the brutality of his jokes, we forget that the more we hate the author, the more we believe in the reality of his world and his creatures.

This absolute reality of Don Quixote became an article of faith for the most powerful and most original of all his modern commentators
—my third critic, Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno (1864–1936) was a multiform genius: scholar, philosopher, novelist, essayist, poet—Basque, Spaniard, European, universal humanist. He wrote a book,
The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
,[
3
] in which he commented on the entire novel of Cervantes, chapter by chapter. His paraphrase of Cervantes is imaginative, paradoxical, profound—and also extremely funny.

His main argument, which he sustained, tongue in cheek, over more than four hundred pages, is that Don Quixote should be urgently rescued from the clumsy hands of Cervantes. Don Quixote is our guide, he is inspired, he is sublime, he is true. As for Cervantes, he is a mere shadow: deprived of Don Quixote’s support, he hardly exists; when reduced to his own meagre moral and intellectual resources, he proved unable to produce any significant work. How could he ever have appreciated the genius of his own hero? He looked at Don Quixote from the point of view of the world—he took the side of the enemy. Thus, the task which Unamuno assigned to himself was to set the record straight—to vindicate at last the validity of Don Quixote’s vision against the false wisdom of the clever wits, the vulgarity of the bullies, the narrow minds of the jesters—and against the dim understanding of Cervantes.

In order to appreciate fully Unamuno’s essay, one must place it within the context of his own spiritual life, which was passionate and tragic. Unamuno was a Catholic for whom the problem of faith remained all his life
the
central issue: not to believe was inconceivable—and to believe was impossible. This dramatic contradiction was well expressed in one of his poems:

In other words: God does not exist, and the clearest evidence of this is that—as all of you can see—
I
do not exist, either. Thus, with Unamuno, every statement of disbelief turns into a paradoxical profession of faith. In Unamuno’s philosophy, faith ultimately creates the thing
it contemplates—not as subjective and fleeting auto-suggestion, but as an objective and everlasting reality that can be transmitted to others.

And finally it is Sancho Panza—all the Sancho Panzas of this world—who will vouch for this reality. The earthy Sancho, who followed Don Quixote for so long, with scepticism, with perplexity, with fear, also followed him with fidelity. Sancho did not believe in what his master believed, but he believed in his master. At first he was moved by greed, finally he was moved by love. And even through the worst tribulations, he kept following him because he came to
like the idea
. When Don Quixote lay dying, sadly cured of his splendid illusion, ultimately divested of his dream, Sancho found that he had inherited his master’s faith; he had acquired it simply as one would catch a disease—through the contagion of fidelity and love.

Because he converted Sancho, Don Quixote will never die.

Thus, in the madness of Don Quixote, Unamuno reads a perfect illustration of the power and wisdom of faith. Don Quixote pursued immortal fame and a glory that would never fade. To this purpose, he chose to follow what would appear to be the most absurd and impractical path: he followed the way of a knight errant in a world where chivalry had disappeared ages ago. Therefore clever wits all laughed at his folly. But in this long fight, which pitted the lonely knight and his faithful squire against the world, which side was finally befogged in illusion? The world that mocked them has turned to dust, whereas Don Quixote and Sancho live forever.

That Don Quixote proved ultimately to have been wise is a point which was persuasively developed by the last of my critics, Mark Van Doren, in his essay
Don Quixote’s Profession
. This piece, now sadly out of print, urgently deserves to be rediscovered by all lovers of literature.[
5
]

Van Doren aptly characterises
Don Quixote
as a book of “mysterious simplicity”: “The sign of its simplicity is that it can be summarised in a few sentences. The sign of its mysteriousness is that it can be talked about forever. It has indeed been talked about as no other story ever was. For a strange thing happens to its readers. They do not read the same book . . . There were never so many theories about anything, one is tempted to say, as there are about
Don Quixote
. Yet it survives them all, as a masterpiece must do, if it would live.”

The entire essay begins with a paragraph which deserves to be quoted in full, for, in its luminous elegance, it affords a characteristic example of Van Doren’s style:

The central argument in Van Doren’s essay is that (whatever Cervantes himself may have thought on the subject), Don Quixote was not mad. He became deluded only when he tried to assess the progress of his enterprise. And here, the hoaxes to which he fell victim played a fatal role: they gave him a false assurance that his undertaking was really feasible, they confirmed his mistaken hope that he might eventually succeed. Thus, these hoaxes artificially prolonged his career. Yet, at any time he could have abandoned his quest and returned home, had success not appeared to be within reach. Only the illusion which fed on the hoaxes gave him the courage to forge ahead. But he always remained free to decide whether to pursue or to desist. A real madman does not have such a choice: he is the prisoner of his madness; when it becomes unbearable he cannot drop out of it and simply go home to resume his previous way of life.

The occupation Don Quixote chooses for himself is that of knight
errant. He is not under the delusion that he is a knight errant—no, he sets his mind on
becoming
one. He does not play at being someone else, as children do in their games; he is not pretending to be someone else, like an impostor, or impersonating a character, like an actor on stage. And he adopts the profession of knight after due reflection: it is the result of a deliberate choice. After having considered other options, he finally decides that the career of a knight errant would be the most rewarding, intellectually and morally.

But “How does one become a knight?” Van Doren asks. By acting like a knight—which is the very opposite of pretence, of make-believe. And to act the way Don Quixote does is more than to ape. To imitate as he does is a profound apprenticeship—the true way of learning and the key to understanding. “What is the difference between acting like a great man and being one? To act like a poet is to write poems; to act like a statesman is to ponder the nature of goodness and justice; to act like a student is to study; to act like a knight is to think and feel like one.”

Had Don Quixote been simply and plainly mad, or had he indulged in a protracted game of self-deception and play-acting, we should not be talking of him now, Van Doren observes—“We are talking of him because we suspect that, in the end, he did become a knight.”

“Man is a creature who makes pictures of himself, and then comes to resemble the picture.” Iris Murdoch made this observation in a different context, but it accurately identifies a defining feature of human nature. It was most memorably exemplified by Don Quixote—which gave Cervantes’s novel its universal relevance.

Unlike Don Quixote, however, most of us do not have the chance to select and decide for ourselves which characters we should apply ourselves to becoming. Circumstances of life do the casting; our roles are being imposed on us, other people dictate to us our lines and prompt our acting. A haunting illustration of this was provided in one of Rossellini’s last films,
General della Rovere
(1959). A petty crook in Italy at the end of World War II is arrested by the Gestapo and forced by them to impersonate a prestigious figure of the Resistance, General della Rovere, so that they can extract information
from political prisoners. But the con man performs his role so convincingly that the other prisoners come to worship him as their moral leader; thus he is progressively compelled to live above himself and to match the image created by their expectations. In the end, he refuses to betray their trust, he is put in front of a firing squad and dies the death of a hero. He has truly become General della Rovere.

As for us, life seldom offers such dramatic scripts. Usually the roles we have to play are more humble and banal—which does not mean that they are less heroic. We too have companions in captivity with extravagant expectations that can force us to act parts well beyond our natural abilities. Our parents expect us to be sons or daughters, our children expect us to be fathers and mothers, our spouses expect us to be husbands and wives; and none of these roles is light or easy. They are all fraught with risks and challenges, with trials, anguishes, humiliations, with victories and defeats.

To man’s basic interrogation—Why is it that God never speaks to us openly or answers us directly with a clear voice? Why are we never allowed to see his face?—C.S. Lewis gave a striking answer: How can God meet us face to face,
till we have faces
?

When we first enter upon the stage of life, it is as if we were only given masks that correspond to our respective roles. If we act our part well enough, the mask eventually turns into our true face. Thus Don Quixote becomes a knight, Rossellini’s petty crook becomes General della Rovere—and each of us, we can become at last who we were originally meant to be.

The famous multi-billionaire Ted Turner made a remarkable statement some years ago. He said he disliked Christianity, as he felt that it was “a religion of losers.” How very true! What an accurate definition indeed!

The word “quixotic”—as I indicated at the very beginning—has entered the common language, with the meaning “hopelessly naïve and idealistic,” “ridiculously impractical,” “doomed to fail.” That this epithet can be used now in an exclusively pejorative sense not only shows that we have ceased to read Cervantes and to understand his character, but more fundamentally it reveals that our culture has drifted away from its spiritual roots.

Make no mistake: for all its earthiness, its cynical jests, its bawdy and scatological realism, Cervantes’s masterpiece is anchored in Christianity—more specifically, in Spanish Catholicism, with its strong mystical drive. In this very connection, Unamuno remarked that John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola did not reject rationality, nor did they distrust scientific knowledge; what led them to their mysticism was simply the perception of “
an intolerable disparity between the hugeness of their desire and the smallness of reality
.”

In his quest for immortal fame, Don Quixote suffered repeated defeats. Because he obstinately refused to adjust “the hugeness of his desire” to “the smallness of reality,” he was doomed to perpetual failure. Only a culture based upon “a religion of losers” could produce such a hero.

What we should remember, however, is this (if I may thus paraphrase Bernard Shaw): The successful man adapts himself to the world. The loser persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the loser.

E
IGHTEENTH-CENTURY
literature developed the new literary genre of the epistolary novel; I wonder if it would not be legitimate for me to propose now a new form of book review, the epistolary criticism, in which arguments are developed through an exchange of letters between the reviewer and the author of the book under examination. Or perhaps I should not try to disguise the fact: what follows is not much of a book review. But then, what is being reviewed is not much of a book either.

We live in an age of hyperbole. Plumbers are now called “sanitation engineers,” waiters have become “food and beverage attendants,” barbers devote themselves to the cultivation of “creative coiffure stylism,” garbage collectors are turned into “solid-waste disposal officers”—and Christopher Hitchens’s own little piece of solid waste is called “a book” (
The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice
, London and New York: Verso, 1995).

In the latter’s case, the use of this euphemism achieved one substantial result: the thing in question could be dignified with fully fledged book reviews in otherwise reputable magazines and journals; in fact, this is how I was first exposed to it. The
New York Review of Books
published a fairly considerate, earnest and detailed account of its contents, granting it pride of place in its issue of 11 July 1996. The article in question prompted me to send the following letter to this respected literary journal, which duly published it on 19 September: