Don Quixote: Part One

Stefan told me that when he studied Cervantes' novel at school in Sofia his teacher described it as a book "with drawers". Until the first of these interpolated stories comes along you'd be forgiven for worrying that Don Quixote de La Mancha is a one gag comedy.

And let's face it, we all think we know what the joke is without having to take on the 800 or so pages of the novel itself - the classic case of misplaced marbles, dramatised best by the windmill joust, which actually occurs quite early on. (Though the barmy counter-productiveness of defending the helpless this way is best evidenced by the attack on the penitents carrying a statue of the Virgin, taken for a damsel in distress by the "knight with the sorrowful face". )

The first sally is something of a pilot episode in which Cervantes leaves you with the clear impression that he's exploring the comic potential of his creation. The entrance of Sancho Panza, apparently an afterthought, drives the expansive impetus of the second outing.

Having heard the term "Holy Fool" used to describe the Don in the critical literature, I was actually surprised by how big a twat he can be. Things may change in part two, but Cervantes hardly spares his protagonists from any of the available humiliation. And for the demented Don, perhaps the most demeaning aspect of his errant condition is the way he seems to be trapped in the cracks between other people's grand narratives.

"Except if the subject is chivalry, no-one would think he does not have a very good mind", it is politely observed of Quixote during one overnight stop. Yet an important aspect of the mental sophistication that grows alongside the perceptual delusions is his ability to make his "reasoned nonsense" ever more resistant to de-bunking.

How much of this is deliberate satire on the author's part? It also occurred to me that Cervantes was sending up the whole notion of "righteous combat" as Terry Jones insists was Chaucer's intention with The Knight's Tale. Some of the funniest parts of the story are where we see plain old Quixada or Quesada's pretensions exposed as little more than a ruse for blagging and petty theft. The Don is thesis and antithesis wrapped up in one madman.

Perhaps a chest of drawers is not quite the right metaphor for the way Cervantes scales up his tale using intervening narratives. I hate to have to resort to the over-used web, so I'll stick with landscape, which conveys something of the topographical continuity between all the characters, themes and genre styles that make up the scenery on this journey.

Windmills were amongst the new kids on Manchegan block in the sixteenth century, and it's clear already in part one that Quixote's greatest antagonist is the early modern world itself. If his ideals now look the icing on the freeloading cake, the mini-novels that he comes into contact with reveal how the credibility-challenged medieval romances have, through the medium of print, lastingly penetrated the social mores and 'romantic' imaginations of all westerners.

Cervantes anticipates many of the techniques developed and favoured by later writers. Postmodernity there's a plenty, but there's also something of Gabo's magical realism in the way he takes a pace back from reportage by indicating layers of hearsay and tale-telling. "There are persons who remember seeing..."

And as with Shakespeare, who died in the same year, it's a fascinating mystery how he managed to make such monumental literary ambition approachable by the "presumptuous mob" a.k.a the common man.

Onward with part two...eventually.