What Don Quixote Taught Me

Don Quixote, as a knight-errant, needed a fair maiden to love, and have that love unrequited until he could perform some daring feat and earn her favor. He settles on a peasant wench of no particular beauty. He changes her plain, even coarse, name to Dulcinea del Toboso, granting her some aristocracy.

Of course, we laugh at his folly. But there, I think, is the trap Cervantes sets for us. We have already laughed at his squire, Sancho Panza. We think, “This is a joke!” He’s no Percival or Gawain; no Oliver if Don Quixote could fancy himself to be Roland.

We crack up when he addresses the whores outside the tavern as if they were women worthy of respect.

And yet, they are. Don Quixote, towards the end of his life says that St. Paul was the greatest knight-errant there ever was. There, I think, is a key to understanding how Cervantes tweaks us.

Sure, Don Quixote isn’t all there. But, he is the forerunner of Dostoevsky’s Idiot, the prototypical holy fool. In the end, it is clear that Jesus would have greeted the whores outside the tavern as actual women, in spite of what anyone else might think. And what if God chose us, exalted us, based on our usefulness? This is precisely why Sancho Panza is such a precious character in literature. He is one of the “nothings” that St. Paul says God uses to shame the people who think they are something.

And then, Dulcinea. Only a hardened heart indeed would say that the young peasant woman did not deserve someone to love her, to give her a sweet nickname, to be willing to fight and even die for her.

Maybe the problem is that we find fault with Don Quixote’s sense of reality. Maybe the problem is that only a madman can see what ought to be in human relationships! The rest of us keep judging by the world’s standards, confessing (if ever we are ashamed or wonder, “How did it get this way?”) that it is a dog-eat-dog world.

And yet, who said you had to live with the dogs?