Speculative Elements and the Plasticity of Reality in Don Quixote
On the surface of things, Don Quixote appears
to be planted firmly in the realm of literary realism rather than that of speculative
fiction. It is a work grounded in dusty roads, inns mistaken for castles,
windmills perceived as giants and the ephemera and gritty social reality of
everyday life in early 17th-century Spain. Dig a little deeper,
however, and one discovers something far stranger and even more remarkable: a
prolonged meditation on the instability of reality itself. Through the
protagonist’s unswerving belief in a world that does not quite exist, the novel
explores a question that would become central to the genre of speculative
fiction centuries later: What happens when reality becomes negotiable, a matter
of opinion?
In attempting to understand how Don Quixote anticipates speculative fiction, it’s probably best to hazard a definition of that genre. Speculative fiction – in all of its myriad forms – encompasses narratives that depart from what has come to be called “consensus reality.” As such, under its rather broad umbrella can be found works that may be subclassified as science fiction, fantasy, alternate history and magic realism … among others. Typically, such texts imagine “what if” scenarios that challenge or diverge from the known laws of nature and/or the accepted findings of historical and scientific investigation.
Crucial to our thesis here is the fact that speculative fiction not only introduces elements of the impossible but, in so doing, subjects the boundaries of reality to a rather rigorous third-degree interrogation. It asks, often quite forcefully, what if the world operated differently? What if (individual or communal) perception could reshape what is real?
The Knight Who Reshapes the World or Narrative as Technology
Alonso Quixano’s transformation into Don Quixote is, at its core, an act of speculative imagination. As he becomes immersed in chivalric romances, he decides not simply to imitate them but to inhabit and assume their inner logic completely. “His fantasy grew so full of what he read in those books,” Cervantes explains, “that for him no history in the world was truer.” It would be difficult to overestimate the profound, reality-shattering implications of this ostensibly simple and straightforward statement. Senor Quixote does not simply confuse fiction with reality, he elevates the former into a superior brand of truth.
Once he adopts this framework, the world begins to comply … not physically, but narratively. Inns and taverna become castles, prostitutes become noble ladies, prisoners are seen as innocent victims of oppression and, of course, windmills become giants. The latter is perhaps the most famous scene in the novel and it demonstrates the power of this transformative process most vividly.
When Quixote’s squire, Sancho Panza,
points out the obvious – what you see are not giants but windmills – Quixote
counters with absolute hermeneutical certainty. “It seems clear to me,” Quixote
replies, “that you are not well-versed in the matter of adventures.” The
disagreement is not about empirical evidence. Rather, it concerns
interpretative and narrative competence. Quixote asserts that he is seeing
through to the deeper structure of reality while Sancho remains trapped in what
is nothing more than surface appearance.
It is at this point that Cervantes introduces an important speculative question. What if, he asks, reality is determined not by what is objectively present, but by the interpretive system or structure imposed upon it? That question, of course, becomes the basis of numerous later speculative works that explore simulated realities, subjective universes and perception-driven worlds. The novels of Willian Gibson, Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem come immediately to mind. Here, Quixote’s Spain becomes a proto-simulation; not technology generated, to be sure, but cognitively and narratively constructed.
Enchantment as ‘Bug Fix’
The key concept that sustains Don Quixote’s version of reality is that of enchantment. On the numerous occasions (almost daily!) when his understanding of reality is contradicted by events – when windmills don’t behave like giants as they should, when his golden helmet turns out to be nothing more than a barber’s basin and when inns revert to their mundane reality – he blames the power of enchanters. As the usually pragmatic Sancho explains, “My master must be right … all that has happened to him is because of enchantment.”
This is an essential speculative trope. Enchantment functions as a narrative ‘patch’ or ‘bug fix’. It becomes a crucial way of preserving internal coherence in a chaotic world that, over and over again, resists it. In modern works of speculative fiction – consider the books of Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delaney and Greg Egan, for example – similar devices appear in the form of simulation glitches, alternate timelines and unreliable sensory input/output. Quixote’s enchanters serve the same purpose; they reconcile conflicting data by positing the existence of an alternate or unseen layer of reality that is, in effect, manipulating events in the mundane world.
In this same way, Cervantes anticipates what has become a hallmark of speculative fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries, the existence and, indeed, coexistence of multiple realities. In the most provocative works of this kind, no one of those realities can be considered definitively “privileged.” As a result, the reader is left in a delicious state of interpretive tension and, at times, suspension. Is he or she witnessing madness or are they somehow glimpsing a different order of truth? Consider Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore, for example, in this context.
To my mind, one of the most remarkable and interesting facets of Cervantes’ novel is the manner in which Quixote’s reality begins to infect others. Sancho Panza, initially the voice of almost militant skepticism, gradually becomes complicit in his master’s worldview. At times, he adopts the very language of enchantment. At others, and as mentioned earlier, he openly voices the possibility that Quixote may be right after all.
This particular shift in understanding suggests that, in world of Don Quixote, reality is socially negotiated. It is not merely an individual hallucination or delusion, but a shared construct or vector that is ultimately contagious. When characters humor Quixote, such as when he is dubbed a knight by a frustrated innkeeper or when assorted travelers play along with his “madness”, they participate in the creation of his world. In Don Quixote, fiction thus becomes collaborative.
The parade example of this takes place in Part II of the novel when the less-than-altruistic duke and duchess who, having read Part I of the story, encounter the intrepid knight and stage all manner of madcap adventures for him. In this way, the author introduces a metafictional layer in which the fictional world becomes aware of itself as fiction. At that point, Quixote is no longer just imagining his reality, others are actively creating it for him … all based on prior narratives about his exploits.
This recursive structure anticipates speculative novels like LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven, Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night aTraveler to cite just a few. Such works explore simulated environments, self-aware narratives and realities influenced by observation and manipulation. The world of Don Quixote becomes an intricate feedback loop where stories generate actions and behaviors which, in turn, give rise to new stories.
A Library of Babel or Texts within Texts within Texts
Cervantes further destabilizes the nature of reality through his frequent use of unreliable narration and, most importantly, embedded texts. In a literary conceit worthy of the most postmodern of postmodern authors, Don Quixote claims to be a translation of a manuscript written by the fictional historian, Cide Hamete Benengeli. This famous device introduces yet another layer of mediation between the reader and the story, between the reader and reality. By so doing, the novel prefigures in significant ways the modern novelist’s preoccupation with questions about authorial intention, reliability and truth.
If the narrative itself is a translation of rather dubious provenance, then the reality constructed in the book is already highly suspect. We are not reading a direct recounting of events, but a tale told through the filter of an invented chronicler … and a translation of that chronicle to boot. This technique places Don Quixote squarely in the camp of works by authors such as the great Argentinean fantasist, Jorge Luis Borges and, more recently, writers such as Mark Z. Danielewski.
What’s more, Quixote’s behavior is shaped almost wholly by the chivalric romances he has devoured in abundance. That is, his actions and worldview are products of the texts he has read. Reality, and even identity, in the novel are therefore not primary. Rather, they are derivative of literature.
The idea that individuals can assume multiple identities drawn from fiction anticipates future speculative explorations of identity in virtual worlds, role-playing environments and alternate timelines. Quixote is, in many ways, an early avatar of characters (again in the works of authors like William Gibson and Neal Stephenson) who create and re-create themselves by means of narrative and fictive templates.
Reality as a House of Cards
Its playful and humorous tone notwithstanding, Don Quixote seems to me to be primarily concerned with the limits of imagination. The fact that Quixote’s (mis-)adventures often result in physical harm reminds the reader that, like it or not, the material world imposes constraints and limitations. Yet even those limitations are reinterpreted narratively. When Quixote is beaten or injured, he attributes his bumps and bruises to enchantment or to the treachery of his enemies. In this way, and as outlined above, he is able to maintain his worldview.
A tension between imagination and materiality is often a key element in speculative fiction. Numerous works in the genre are predicated on a collision between imagined realities or new technologies and empirical constraints. I’m thinking here of books such as Blindsight by Peter Watts and The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. Don Quixote stages this type of conflict repeatedly. Remarkably, it does so without ever resolving it.
At the end of the novel, Quixote renounces his knightly identity and returns to being simply Alonso Quixano. In what amounts to a deathbed confession, he declares his former belief to be madness. In one of the most poignant lines in all of literature, Quixote admits: “I was mad, and now I am sane; I was Don Quixote of La Mancha, and now I am … Alonso Quixano …”
On one level, this statement appears to be a restoration of consensus reality. Yet, as presented, it actually leaves the reader with an all-important question: is such a restoration a victory or a tragic defeat? If, as almost everyone in the novel believes, Quixote’s imagined world was a delusion, it was at the same time experience-rich, narratively complex and meaningful as well as transformative. Quixote’s world, even if ‘false’, nevertheless gave birth to real experiences, important relationships and (most importantly) magnificent stories.
That ambiguity is a hallmark in the genre of speculative fiction. At its core, it suggests that reality is more than merely a matter of empirical accuracy/observation. The world must also be significant. A constructed or imagined world, even if it defies the laws of nature and is in that way factually “in error,” can at the same time possess an important form of truth which is sublimely relevant in its own right.
Speculative Pre-Cursors
To summarize, my thesis is simply that Cervantes’ masterpiece anticipates speculative elements and themes of later works in several significant ways:
… Reality as Construct – the novel presents reality as something that is shaped and reshaped by perception, language and narrative.
… A Multiplicity of Ontologies – Don Quixote presents the reader with interconnected and overlapping layers of reality; empirical, imagined and explanatory. No single layer predominates.
… Metafictional Understanding – Cervantes explores the recursive relationship between text, context and the worlds they create.
…The Plasticity of Identity – the characters in the novel inhabit multiple identities, the majority of which are derived from narrative.
The Speculative Potential of the World
Don Quixote is most often touted as the first “modern” novel, a cornerstone of Western literature. It’s not much of a stretch to suggest that it is also the first important work of what would later be known as speculative fiction. Although the novel does not depict other worlds, it does question the very nature of this world. In so doing, Cervantes lays the groundwork for a genre that, arguably, would come to dominate modern literature. His protagonist imposes a fictional framework upon reality then proceeds to demonstrate how that framework both shapes and is shaped by perception, experience and narrative. The novel asserts quite persuasively that reality is not a fixed stage where we “strut and fret” our stories in meaningless profusion. It is in fact a mutable construct which molds and is in turn molded by those stories themselves.
In tilting at those pesky windmills, Don Quixote is neither deluded nor mistaken. Rather, he is conducting a radical experiment. He is testing the outer limits of reality’s plasticity; he is probing fearlessly at that liminal barrier between what is and what might be. He is not to be pitied or belittled for his supposed madness. And he is most certainly more than just a comic or satiric figure. Quixote is in fact a visionary, a pioneer, who glimpses (however dimly) the speculative potential of the world.
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