Don Quixote and Idealism

Here are some thoughts on Don Quixote as I finish up reading  E. C. Riley's Unwin Critical Library analysis. I shall outline my thoughts below to better organize them.

Perhaps the main point in which scholars of Cervantes differ in their view of Don Quixote is how they imagine the author's view of the hero's quixotic idealism.

1. Don Quixote's idealism is based on illusion. He (an his preoccupation with the Medieval romance genre and with Chivalry) embodies an arcane world where epistemology works differently, where the appeal to authority is the primary source of knowledge and mode of transmission for worldviews. Don Quixote is out of place in 16th century Spain where, at least theoretically, epistemology has changed and empirical evidence is the primary source of knowledge. If Don Quixote's world of chivalry ever truly existed, by Don Quixote's time, it is gone in more ways than one.

His "madness" is one of having worldviews and illusions discordant with those of 16th century Spanish readers and is literary in the sense that it is strongly informed by the romance literature of an earlier era. Through his travels and failures, Don Quixote gradually comes to move into a more contemporary system of epistemology and the illusions of his Quixotic adventures dim. He repents for the "sin" of his earlier Quixotic worldview and dies sane. Informed experience triumphs over naive, bookish idealism.

Or...

2. Don Quixote is a tragic hero in a corrupt world. There is something truly noble about his idealism. Never mind that Cervantes criticizes the romance genre, Don Quixote embodies a lot of influence from the genre in ways that are often positive. In other words, Cervantes did not want to throw out the romance genre, incorporating it into Don Quixote to produce something new instead.

Though imperfect, Don Quixote has noble intentions and rather than always ending in failure, sometimes his adventures are even victories (See Nabokov). Cervantes takes some strategies of contemporary picaresque novels to show Don Quixote adventuring through a corrupt and often cruel society. The hero's gradual loss of idealism is a tragedy that ends in his death. Cruelty, corruption and deceit win over idealism.

3. My opinion is that Don Quixote is a sophisticated enough work to espouse both views at the same time. It opens the question, but leaves itself open to ambiguous interpretation because the question of the value of idealism is not a question that can be definitively answered.

4. In any case, Don Quixote's idealism is closely associated with how he thinks of the illusory Dulcinea del Toboso. She never actually appears in the book and is purely an idea in the mind of Don Quixote, who bases many of his actions and words on based on her idealized existence in his mind. While it may be difficult to argue she is directly a symbol for the chivalric ideal, she certainly has a close relationship to chivalry, and idealism more generally in the mind of Don Quixote. When Dulcinea's idealized form is put into question, as when Sancho tries to convince him that an ugly peasant girl is Dulcinea under enchantment, Don Quixote's idealism is equally called into question.

I reserve the right to add more to this general list of ideas as I read more about Don Quixote.

Karate Bear out!