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answer is that he has moments when he recognizes his efforts for
what they are, as in the wonderful scene which Nabokov in his
splendid book on the knight has singled out for praise. Sancho Panza
has gone off to administer the island procured for him, and over
which he expects to rule, and Don Quixote now has a countenance
especially mournful, recognizing that he is old, alone, poor and out
of his mind.... Undaunted, nevertheless....
Another Russian writer, the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin,
has stressed the importance of Cervantes's novel, which he has as–
similated - I myself would not - to the Rabelaisian novel. I am
struck by the fact that the two great Russians, the novelist and the
theorist of the novel, have given such importance to the book ofCer–
vantes, Nabokov emphasizing in the work he devoted to it the aes–
thetic strengths and weaknesses of the book, while recognizing that
its greatness is based on the quality of its main character. Bakhtin,
for his part, saw something of equal importance which Nabokov
characteristically missed, by which I mean he
set out to miss it ;
for he
was interested exclusively in aesthetic qualities, and against giving,
or recognizing any necessity to give, any credit for insight that might
be called
moral.
And Bakhtin? He took the very opposite view.
In
an
early essay on form and content, he made it clear that we can get
something important from novels which we can no longer get, or
even expect to get, from moral philosophy, namely, a moral ex–
planation and judgment of experience. For philosophers no longer
feel able to defend the moral views they happen to hold. Can the
novelist? Not cognitively, but aesthetically. Dostoevsky does not
have to supply an argument to prove Prince Myshkin's goodness to
us; we know this as simply as we know gold from lead, as we know
the goodness of Don Quixote, which in fact inspired Dostoevsky to
create Prince Myshkin, and Unamuno to write a book entitled
Our
Lord Don Quixote.
That vindication of the morally good which Bakh–
tin points out can no longer be made in the language of philosophy
indeed can be made in literature, and to the handful of writers who
are able to do this, readers and critics have spontaneously accorded
the respect formerly reserved for moral philosophers.
It
is still the case that we cannot defend cognitively what we
support morally. Surely our relationship to the good is fantastic, be–
ing inextricably connected - as Jaspers pointed out - with our in–
ability to demonstrate its rightness. Who then could better represent
