David Thorburn
FICTION AND IMAGINATION IN DON QUIXOTE
Don Quixote will make it imperative for him [the poet] to make a
choice, to come to a decision regarding the imagination and reality ; and
he will find that it is not a choice of one over the other and not a decision
that divides them , but something subtler, a recognition that here ,
too, . . the universal interdependence exists, and hence his choice and
his decision must be that they are equal and inseparable.
Wallace Stevens , "The Noble
Rider and the Sound of Words. "
All the classic commentaries on the
Quixote
acknowledge the
centrality of the theme of imagination, and several of them penetrate quite
deeply into the subject, calling our attention (for example)
to
the way in
which Cervantes anticipates modern writers like Gide and Pirandello, both of
whom are profoundly interested in the problem of art's connection
to
and
distance from life and both of whom write books and plays about the making
of books and plays. The best essays on Cervantes's novel are conscious of the
way in which Quixote's encounters with the world enact a drama in which the
real and the ideal (or the fictive) collide, and they are fully aware of the extent
to which the book comes finally
to
celebrate the Quixotic enterprise even as it
mocks it. But despite this widespread recognition of the importance of the
theme of imagination in the
Quixote,
there remains, I think, a good deal to be
said about the subject, both as it concerns Cervantes's characters and the
structure of his novel, and also as it affects our understanding of what the
novel as a literary kind is: what the novel by its very nature must always
potentially be.
I begin with this second point, with the way in which Cervantes's book
prepares for the birth of the novel and clarifies the very premises on which the
novel as a genre will depend, the
Quixote's
intense, encompassing self–
reflexiveness qualifying conventional definitions of the genre's realistic bias
