30
PARTISAN REVIEW
ties of fiction and certain generalities oflife there is some correspon–
dence. Take physical or mental pain, for instance, or dreams, or
madness, or such things as kindness, mercy, justice-take these gen–
eral elements of human life, and you must agree that it should be a
profitable task to study the way they are transmuted into art by mas–
ters of fiction.
The "Where" of Don Quixote
Let us not kid ourselves . Cervantes is no land surveyor. The
wobbly backdrop of
Don Quixote
is fiction-and rather unsatisfactory
fiction at that. With its preposterous inns full of belated characters
from Italian storybooks and its preposterous mountains teeming
with lovelorn poetasters disguised as Arcadian shepherds, the pic–
ture Cervantes paints of the country is about as true and typical of
seventeenth-century Spain as Santa Claus is true and typical of the
twentieth-century North Pole. Indeed, Cervantes seems to know
Spain as little as Gogol did central Russia.
However, it is still Spain; and here is where the generalities of
"real life" (in this case geography) may be applied to the generalities
of a work of fiction. In a general way Don Quixote's adventures, in
the First Part, take place around the villages of Argamasila and
EI
Toboso in La Mancha, in the Castilian parched plain, and to the
south in the mountains of the Morena range, Sierra Morena. I sug–
gest that you look at these places on the map that I have drawn.
Spain as you will see spreads in terms of platitudes (sorry, latitudes),
degrees 43 to 36, from Massachusetts to North Carolina, with the
book's main action taking place in a region corresponding to
Virginia. You will find the university town of Salamanca in the west,
near the border of Portugal; and you will admire Madrid and Toledo
in the middle of Spain. In the Second Part of the book the general
drift of the ramble takes us north toward Saragossa in Aragon but
then for reasons I shall discuss later the author changes his mind and
sends his hero to Barcelona instead, on the eastern coast.
If,
however, we examine Don Quixote's excursions topographi–
cally, we are confronted by a ghastly muddle. I shall spare you its
details and only mention the fact that throughout those adventures
there is a mass of monstrous inaccuracies at every step. The author
avoids descriptions that would be particular and might be verified.
