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of Cide Hamete's lack of sympathy but ends, late in Part II, by extolling his
meticulous insight and fairness. For the Spanish narrator, Cide Hamete has
become a "renowned author" and Quixote is "fortunate" in his chronicler.
To emphasize Cide Hamete's growing affection for Quixote is not to
suggest that the book means us to give simple assent to Quixote's madness, or
to admire his fantasies unreservedly. The Broadway version of Quixote's story
may romanticize his quest for the impossible dream, but Cervantes is free of
such sentimentality. He is less interested in judging, or in asking us to judge
Quixote, than he is in causing us to acknowledge, as Cide Hamete acknowl–
edges, our kinship with him. The book seems to me finally reluctant to say
that the exercise of imagination, the act of projecting fictions upon others and
the world, is good or bad, though it does insist that our fictions define us in a
partly moral sense. But mainly it wants to get at something more complicated
and fundamental: that we make fictions about the world and ourselves auto–
matically, inevitably, because we are alive and need to survive.
The novel associates fantasy, fiction-making, the human powers of
imagination, with our impulse to free ourselves from various kinds of con–
finement, with our impulse to control our own lives, to assert our individual
natures, as Sancho asserts his in the chapter I spoke of earlier. From this per–
spective Quixote is just an extreme version of what all men are, and if his
lunacies are more extravagant and foolish than most, they have compensating
purity and unselfishness. Sancho is right when, confronted by the tale of the
bearded waiting women, he exclaims: "I swear I've never heard or seen, nor
has my master ever related to me, nor so much as imagined, an adventure like
this." The cruelty and grotesquerie of this adventure, the brainchild of the
Duke and the Duchess,
is
beyond, or beneath, Quixote's less selfish and less
manipulative imagination. The Duke and the Duchess, like all their entour–
age, indulge their imaginations for baser reasons than Quixote does, though
the difference is perhaps one of degree and not of kind.
In any case, the crucial point is not that Quixote is a noble lunatic, a
sainted fool-Cervantes is far more levelheaded, aware ofQuixote's clownish–
ness and even his dangerousness than many of his modern readers- but more
simply and also more terribly, that he is a man:
"Good Heavens!" exclaimed his niece. "What a lot you know, uncle
l
Why , at a pinch, you could get up in the pulpit or go and preach in the
streets, and yet you're so blind and so palpably foolish that you'd have us
think you're valiant when you are old; and strong when you're infirm;
that you right wrongs when you're bent by age; and, worst of all , that
you're a knight when you aren't , for though a gentleman can be one, a
poor man can't
l "
