Literature and Life in Don Quixote

Abstract

Abstract The interaction of literature and life is a fundamental theme of Don Quixote. The subject is not literary theory itself (no one would be so foolish as to suggest that Don Quixote was a sort of dramatized treatise), but it is useful to approach it from the standpoint of Cervantes’ novelistic theory, with which it is firmly connected. This may throw more light not only on the theory but on the motivation and methods of the author in what looks at times like a waggish, bewildering, and complicated game or a protracted private joke. We must confine ourselves to the literary and artistic aspects of matters susceptible of unlimited philosophical extension. The epistemological questions which the Quixote poses are also literary problems of professional interest to Cervantes as a novelist. There is a basic preoccupation with literary fiction in the expressed purpose of the book and in the most elemental conception of the hero. However far the author transcended his purpose, his declared aim was to debunk the novels of chivalry. Whatever else the hero may be, he is, quite simply, a man who cannot distinguish between life and literary fiction: ‘everything that our adventurer thought, saw or imagined seemed to him to be done and to happen in the manner of the things he had read’ (I, 2).