Enlightenment and Political Fiction

The Everyday Intellectual

Cecilia Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317357018
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

The easy accessibility of political fiction in the long eighteenth century made it possible for any reader or listener to enter into the intellectual debates of the time, as much of the core of modern political and economic theory was to be found first in the fiction, not the theory, of this age. Amusingly, many of these abstract ideas were presented for the first time in stories featuring less-than-gifted central characters. The five particular works of fiction examined here, which this book takes as embodying the core of the Enlightenment, focus more on the individual than on social group. Nevertheless, in these same works of fiction, this individual has responsibilities as well as rights—and these responsibilities and rights apply to every individual, across the board, regardless of social class, financial status, race, age, or gender. Unlike studies of the Enlightenment which focus only on theory and nonfiction, this study of fiction makes evident that there was a vibrant concern for the constructive as well as destructive aspects of emotion during the Enlightenment, rather than an exclusive concern for rationality.

1 Don Quixote (1605, 1615), Rationality, and Forms of Government

DOI: 10.4324/9781315667072-2

I BACKGROUND

1 Preamble: A New Interpretation of Sancho Panza

A tall, skinny, early-modern Spanish country gentleman, from the lower gentry, steeped in books of medieval chivalry, has, according to those around him, gone mad from too much reading.¹ Repulsed by modern trends, he reinvents himself as a latter-day, medieval knight. This includes, in this order: locating armor “which had belonged to his ancestors, and had lain for ages forgotten in a corner, eaten with rust and covered with mould”; giving his horse a name, Rocinante; taking the name of Don Quixote for himself; choosing a lady love; beginning to travel in order to find adventure—in time wearing a barber’s basin as a helmet; being knighted; and finally taking a local working man, Sancho Panza, as his squire (Sancho gets a mule as his steed, and the mule’s name does not even remain fixed, unlike that of Quixote’s horse).² Additionally, Quixote imagines the basin to be a magical helmet.³ Mystical qualities and the grubbiness of real life are mixed at all stages.

Don Quixote focuses at all stages on madness and liberty. For example, it is relatively easy to discern a relationship between themes Robert Burton raises in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) and the evolving concept of personal liberty in European thought and the presentation of the magic helmet (drawn from Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, Mad Orlando, 1516) in Don Quixote. In Part I, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza travel relatively little in terms of distance, but a lot in miles, each time circling around a local inn, where Quixote is treated with little respect. Quixote, however, does not do much to garner respect. His adventures regularly get him roughed up, often left with broken bones and missing teeth, and the people he intends to help almost always suffer much more after his interference. He is, however, not only a buffoon, but he also kills people. Both in genre, and tone, the book changes frequently, alternating between romance, chivalry, poetry, songs, novellas, burlesque, tragedy, epic, pastoral, picaresque, letters, narrative, and political writing, just to name a few.⁴ The story of Quixote and Sancho is interspersed with other long tales—one of a tedious love triangle (which is a novella in its own right, in the style of medieval allegory, as perfected earlier by Giovanni Boccaccio in The Decameron, 1350–1353), and another of a captive Christian and his Moorish lady friend. These stories are often told by travelers at the inn, and by aristocrats who pass in and out of the story. Impossibly long digressions both show off the virtuosity of the book, demonstrating an astonishing range of literary styles, and offer examples of, exceptions to, and counter-arguments regarding the major themes of the work. The magic helmet—that is, a barber’s basin—for example, is used as a device to demonstrate how people can actually claim what they need if only they believe they have the power to do so.

By Part II, Quixote has become relatively famous locally, and many rash men on the local scene—most presumably impoverished, mad, or both—pretend to be Don Quixote in order to share in the success of the main character. They symbolize the many false sequels to Part I of Don Quixote, which were published quickly after 1605. In Cervantes’s Part II, the real Quixote continues to pursue his quest, still with Sancho, but on a much less frenetic level. There are flamboyant discussions, and prolonged scenes. Many of the adventures take place as highly organized farces, arranged by specific aristocrats, who amuse themselves greatly at the leading pair’s expense. For example, this group of aristocrats plays an extended, complicated trick on Sancho in order to lead him to believe that he has finally realized his overarching dream of becoming the governor of an island. Yet in the midst of this particular farce, the book forces us to ponder the surprising possibility that Sancho Panza might be a source on good government. Part II, especially Chapter 51, on Sancho’s island, presents proto-Lockean economic and political ideas. The joke is that Sancho, known for his repeated trite sayings, sometimes called sanchismos, could devise a new political order. Nevertheless, it is this chapter of Don Quixote that indicates a break with the Spanish emphasis on economic and political theory—especially the School of Salamanca on monetary theory, just war, and international relations—toward an emphasis on practical politics and political institutions. Indeed, Part II of Don Quixote, from 1615, crisply outlines many ideas credited to Locke in 1690. This debt was acknowledged by Locke, but has not been probed by later scholars.

Throughout the book, Basques, gypsies, Turks, and even people from the less fashionable parts of Spain, as represented by the Asturian maid at the inn, are all briefly put in the spotlight not just as entertainment—thus as a means of mocking the religious and ethnic complexities of the fractured Iberian peninsula—but also as distinct means of telling the multiple stories of the nation of Spain, thus emphasizing that the story would not be complete without each voice.⁵ At the end of the book, Quixote is dying, and he repudiates his commitment not only to chivalry, but also to all kinds of stylized, altruistic, and even noble deeds. In this particularly extended, final scene, Quixote goes so far as to change his will to read that his niece would be disinherited if she were to marry a man who believes in chivalry, that is, a man like Quixote himself had been before his deathbed conversion. The implication is clear that Quixote’s manner of dying—his preferences regarding the routine of his daily life as much as his ideological preferences—has significance for all Spaniards, regardless of their gender, ethnic background, religious preferences, or even wealth. In economic terms, the deathbed scene and the injunction to his niece do not have to be seen as pitiful acts of desperation, of Quixote giving up his quest. Rather, they could be interpreted as Quixote, in a constructive mode, identifying a new economic system—emerging capitalism, in stark opposition to his previous choices of feudalism and chivalry—as the best way to care for his family in the future.

Yet much of the story is embedded in the past, not the future, for not far below the surface of this tale of two travelers is a parallel story by the Spanish narrator of how he found the account of Don Quixote in the writing of a Muslim historian, and thus, of history being recovered both by accident and then by deliberate effort. The narrator mouths anti-Moorish sentiments throughout the book, and uses the materials written in Arabic by the historian, with relatively little thanks to the earlier scholar. However, these repeated racial slurs by the narrator might well have been intentional, not unthinking, in the text, a secure means to get across a subtle but powerful message about both Quixote’s sanity and the richness of Arab learning.

Consider, if the Moorish historian deems Quixote to be mad, and the message is clearly that the Moor is not to be trusted, then perhaps this work should be read as a palimpsest, a manuscript that had been written on, cleaned off, and written on again many times. The message thus becomes the exact opposite: with Arab medieval learning as a background and a clever Moorish historian, Quixote could then be argued to be the only sane person in his time and place, the only one who recognizes the social, political, and economic abuses of his time and who even has some ideas about how to change his society, and it is only through the lens of a different culture and religion that this becomes apparent.

The dominant Spanish narrator’s growing obsession with the Quixote story is linked to his concern to analyze history. The narrator has questions about whether there is a pattern to history, and also whether there are specific means by which history might be comprehended. The novel thus delivers, in the midst of grandiose pranks, prolonged references to what would now be referred to as academic subfields, including speculative philosophy of history and analytic philosophy of history, in addition to grandstanding designed to promote political revolt.

In general, most scholars prefer Part II of this book; most children, Part I. Part I is best known for Quixote’s jousts with windmills—often taken to symbolize modern industry—which he is convinced are evil enchanters, and also for Quixote’s first meeting with his lady love, renamed Dulcinea by Quixote, actually a working girl, Aldonza Lorenzo, who has no interest in him whatsoever. Dulcinea never appears directly in the book, however frequently she is mentioned, and astonishingly, Aldonza only appears once. The difference between the two parts has to do with content as well as style. Part I demands attention to the fundamental question: What choices should a moral person make while living in an immoral society, even under a corrupt government? Part I tells the Quixote/Sancho story as a universal trope, that could be played out in any place and time. Part II delineates the range of choices for scholars, and the problems that writers face in all times and places. This chapter, however, gives substantial attention to the child-friendly Part I; even if the symbolism is starker and less academic, the early part of the book—almost half of the total text—contains more universally accessible themes.

It is through the sympathetic but plodding Sancho Panza that the reader of Don Quixote encounters the frantic need to find additional income, which most families experience, and the disrespect that such deliberate financial choices often invoke. One commonplace view of Don Quixote is that the supposed servant, Sancho Panza, a peasant motivated by money, food, and alcohol (and not always in that order), increasingly willingly accompanies Quixote on his travel. Certainly at the outset, Sancho is the more passive and witless of the two. Yet Sancho manifests both loyalty to, and trust in, the man who at first he had only hoped would assist him in earning status and wealth. Taking work with Don Quixote indicates Sancho’s desperation, not shared by his wife, to raise the growing Panza family’s social standing as much as its financial status; his wife Teresa focuses on their urgent need for more money.⁶ She symbolizes the power of feudalism, for her choices make sense in the midst of a system lacking any commitment to the people on the bottom of the social scale. Sancho, however, can be read as symbolizing the insecurity of a world shifting from feudalism to capitalism, yet in a time of want, not a time of plenty. Sancho cannot be properly understood without recognizing the power structure in which he is enmeshed.⁷

This novel made new economic contributions on two fronts: by distilling the economic criticisms of the time and by putting forward its own original economic contributions, including proposing alternatives that broke with the Mediterranean economic approaches. Don Quixote is the most extreme example, of the five novels examined in this book, of the limitation of using the term “Enlightenment” only for mid-eighteenth-century French thought, a restriction that seems no longer tenable, especially for the history of economic thought. This book suggests that the Enlightenment was to be not so much a time and place, but rather a profitable category of thought, and a pointer toward a method of study. Given this new definition, a book published in 1605 (Part I) and 1615 (Part II) can be considered part of the Enlightenment tradition, and would count as an early example of pensamiento ilustrado, Spanish Enlightenment thought.⁸

Although modernity arguably includes cultural elements, economic connections, and political connections, Don Quixote is not necessarily modern in all three ways. This has to do primarily with the economic context of the book: during Cervantes’s lifetime, Spain was in what would be later called its “Golden Age,” a world leader with a far-flung empire, and yet, following the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and plague in Castile in the late 1500s, by the early 1600s, when this book was first published, Spain was becoming increasingly economically backward. Early-modern Spain suffered from inflation, largely due to the influx of precious metals from the Americas; workers were being thr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Don Quixote (1605, 1615), Rationality, and Forms of Government
• 2 Simplicissimus (1668, 1669), Religious Toleration, and Friendship
• 3 Gulliver’s Travels (1726, amended 1735), Science, and Social Class
• 4 Candide (1759), Sexuality, and the Modern Individual
• 5 The Betrothed (1825–1827, 1840–1842), Revolution, and the Perfectibility of the Human Mind
• Conclusion
• Name Index