A don's Don
JEAN FRANCO
Our Lord Don Quixote Miguel de Unamuno translated by Anthony Kerrigan (Routledge and Kegan Paul 56s)
In his short story, 'Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote,' Borges has Menard mischievously declare that, whereas the 'Ancient Mariner' is a necessary work, Don Quixote is a con- tingent one. He could scarcely have made a remark more calculated to provoke the Hispanic world, where commentaries and glosses on this 'contingent' novel run into millions of words. Don Quixote has been recreated by dozens of writers from the Ecuadorian Montalvo who, in the last century, 'continued' the novel in his Chapters that Cervantes Forgot, to the many essays of the 'generation of 1898.' But the most monumental work of reconstruction is un- doubtedly Miguel de Unamuno's The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho (here translated as Our Lord Don Quixote), a giant labour which removes the irony, measure and charm of the original to convert Don Quixote into the sym- bol of the lonely madness of Spain.
Written in 1905, soon after that country's traumatic defeat in the Spanish-American war of 1898, this commentary presents us with a knight-errant who scorns facts and the material things of life and pursues a dream of glory, despite the fact that he is ridiculed by the foolish barbers and curates of the world. Be- cause of his faith, Don Quixote is able to make the world his creation. Glossing the original text, Unamuno produces a number of aphor- isms—`Anguish of spirit is the door to substan- tial truth'; 'Suffer, so that you may believe and believe that you may live'; 'If there is a God who has made and conserves the world, He made it and conserves it for me. There is no other I'—most of which can also be found in his best-known work, The Tragic Sense of Life.
In this essay, published in 1912, he sees a thirst for immortality, which reason tragically denies, as the essence of individual existence. Thus his view of the human individual and of Spain are identical. Spain, like the indi- vidual, follows her Quixotic thirst for glory in the face of the world's mockery. Founded on the 'consoling faith in personal immortality,' the nation has always stood for madness and impracticality.
But Spain and Don Quixote are also similar to Unamuno, or at least to his picture of himself as a freelance, fearless critic. His own rootless, solitary position was typical of that of most Spanish intellectuals of his time. Born in 1864, in Bilbao, he came to Madrid when he was sixteen and never felt at ease in that city, which he found sordid, dirty, full of haggard faces and tired eyes. His defence against the modern city was flight to the calm and beauty of the university town of Sala- manca,' where he became Professor of Greek and spent much of his first years translating Carlyle and Spencer.
This bookish dialogue with the apostles of progress led him briefly to see himself as the intellectual leader of the masses, but he soon drew away from them. Unlike the intellectuals of most underdeveloped countries, neither he nor his Spanish contemporaries played any significant role in political movements. He was to prefer (or perhaps was forced to accept) the attitude of the uncommitted critic preaching his holy crusade to redeem the 'Sepulchre of the Knight of Madness from the power of the champions of Reason.' The role of preacher meditating his sermons in solitude was cer- tainly more congenial to him than direct in- volvement in politics. He thundered against the king, against Primo de Rivera (and was exiled); he railed against the Spanish Republic and the 'tyranny of ideas' which had taken hold of left-wing Spaniards and he protested against the Falange. But ultimately, it is his scorn of reason (or rather of generalisation on the basis of investigation) that led to his undoing.
Apart from his novels, much of his work is today unreadable because the development of the human sciences of psychology, sociology, philology and anthropology makes much of their content seem childish and unfounded. We can no longer accept the simple motiva- tions he suggests and no longer believe that nations have souls (oply Spain and Russia, in any case, ever seem to have had a soul). This is why it is regrettable that Our Lord Don Quixote, which is the first of a projected series, should have appeared before the novels and stories which can still be read with pleasure. And it is a pity, too, that the introduction by Walter Starkie perpetuates these rather sad, outdated myths.
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