Don Quixote

Abstract

The case for Don Quixote as the first great realist novel is well established of course. It tends to rely on a view of the novel’s realism as emerging out of certain oppositions: between Quixote and his world, romance and reality, lunacy and common sense. This, in essence, is Auerbach’s argument in Mimesis. ‘The whole book’, Auerbach writes of Don Quixote, ‘is a comedy in which well-founded reality holds madness up to ridicule.’1 Levin has taken a similar line, seeing a ‘colloquy’ in Don Quixote between romance and picaresque, ‘matter of fact’ and ‘matter of fiction’.2 Cervantes’ novel is thus read as juxtaposing ‘high-flown literary fantasies with grubby actuality’, thereby pointing the way ‘to the realists’.3Don Quixote defines the realities of its world against romance. More specifically, it guarantees the authenticity of those realities by playing them off against Quixote’s commitment to romance, against quixotic delusion. As Auerbach sees it, ‘the persons and events of everyday life are constantly colliding’ with Quixote’s madness, ‘and come out in stronger relief through the contrast’.4