DAVID THORBURN
443
All the vital, individuated characters in Cervantes's book are talkative,
their verbalizing a contingent and intermittent but also genuine source of
energy and strength. Sancho and Don Quixote talk after each disaster they
suffer , and this talk , filled with generalizing proverbs that contain and try to
make sense ofcatastrophe by assimilating it to verbal constructions-abstract–
ing , shaping accounts of experience-this talk also creates their fraternity ,
dramatizes their reliance on one another. Like the stories narrated and the
theatricals performed to audiences all through the novel , such talk testifies to
the resilience of Cervantes's characters and is a source of community .
" In me, " says Sancho early in the story, "the need to talk is a primary
impulse ." And Quixote , with his usual wisdom , observes in the same place:
" Primary impulses are not within man's power to check."
Our talk itself, this book tells
us,
our smallest conversing , is a form of
imaginative assertion, at one with the instinct that leads to the writing of
novels . For Cervantes , the virtue of all such fictions is not that they are noble ,
but that because men make them-are driven to make them- they are,
finall y, part of the real world : a primary impulse of our human natures, an
appetite or a need as insistent and as irrepressible as a proverb on the tongue of
Sancho Panza .
