The intolerable dream
by Gary Saul Morson
I k admirers call it “the Q uixote” as if to say
“the masterpiece” or even “the universe.”
Cervantes’s novel, completed exaedy four
hundred years ago, established him as one
o f the greatest writers in world literature. In
his recent book, Quixote: The Novel and the
World, Ilan Stavans is even “convinced that
the Spanish language exists in order for dtis
magisterial novel to inhabit it.”1 Some praise
has been even more extravagant.
Ivan Turgenev, otherwise a skeptic to die core,
detected a mystical significance in the apparent
coincidence that the first part of Don Quixote ap­
peared (he supposed) in die same year as Hamlet.
What’s more, Turgenev noted, Shakespeare and
Cervantes died on die same day—actually the
same date, but England and Spain used differ­
ent calendars—as if some angel had arranged to
link diem, hi what is arguably the most famous
essay in Russian literature, “Hamlet and Don
Quixote,” Turgenev described these two mas­
terpieces as representing opposite extremes of
human nature, if not o f nature itself. Together
they define “the fundamental forces o f all tiiat
exists. They explain die growth o f flowers to
us, and they even enable us to comprehend the
development o f die most powerful nations.”
h i this reading, Ham let incarnates inertia,
D on Quixote progress. Shakespeare’s brood­
ing hero proves relentiessly ironic, rational,
and perceptive, but cannot act. Believing in
nothing b u t his ow n judgm ent, he grows
i Quixote: The Novel and the World , by Ilan Stavans;
W. W. N orton, 260 pages, $26.95.
completely self-absorbed and unable to love.
D on Quixote is just the reverse, all will and
no sense. The man o f faith, he credulously
accepts an ideal o f goodness w ithout suspect­
ing he mistakes desire for fact. To his own
detriment, he lives entirely selflessly, “inher-
endy incapable o f betraying his convictions or
transferring diem from one object to another.”
hi Russian terms, Hamlet represented die aris­
tocratic “superfluous man,” who was cultivated
but lethargic, while D on Quixote recalled the
idealist revolutionary, believing foolishly in an
impossible, if noble, ideal.
Don Quixote has prom pted imitations and
responses by coundess writers, from Melville
and Flaubert to Kafka and Borges. It inspired
bodi Che Guevara and Dostoevsky. The Rus­
sian realists were obsessed with it.
So many writers and artists have taken Cer­
vantes’s book to heart that for m ost readers
it comes pre-read. Everyone has seen some
image o f the gaunt knight and his paunchy
squire, Sancho Panza, and most people know
a version o f the story, usually sentimentalized
as in the 1964 musical M an o f La Mancha. In
its m ost famous song, the idealistic, absurd
hero dedicates him self to “the im possible
dream” and swears to follow his star “no mat­
ter how hopeless, no m atter how far.” H e is
“willing to march into Hell/ For a heavenly
cause.” N o w onder the musical appealed to
the generation o f the 1960s. I can’t help it:
the song still thrills me.
But however moving this version o f the sto­
ry, it is not true to the book Cervantes wrote.
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 The intolerable dream by Gary Saul Morson
And however great the book’s reputation, it is
far from flawless. It shows its writer, who never
w rote anything else remotely comparable,
constantly surprised by an idea he can barely
handle. The.Quixote begins with an apparently
simple goal, to parody tales o f knight-errantry
by imagining someone w ho takes them liter­
ally. Having read so many chivalric epics that
Inis brains have “dried up,” die hero decides
that he has been called to revive chivalry and
restore the Golden Age in this Age o f Iron.
But as the book proceeded, Cervantes real­
ized that he had hit on something much more
profound than a simple parody. The story kept
raising ultimate questions about faith, belief,
evidence, and utopian ideals. W hen do we
need caution and when risk? Should we seek
to transform reality or the way we perceive
it? D o good intentions or good results define
moral actions? And what is die proper role o f
literature itself?
A s D on Quixote veers from adventure to
adventure, the author struggles to catch up
and, in the process, happens upon ever subder
ideas. Part o f the book’s amazing charm comes
from our sense that die author resembles his
hero. He has written a sort o f novel-errant,
battered no less than its hero by tasks beyond
its strength, but somehow all the better for
the effort.
The book exhibits all sorts o f obvious flaws,
from plot lines diat contradict each other to
the insertion o f long, tedious tales told by
die characters. Oddly enough, these pastoral
and moralistic stories are just what we would
expect the author to make fun of. Critics, o f
course, have tried to justify them , but their
very critical ingenuity tacidy admits why it
is needed. In the second part o f the novel,
written ten years after the unexpected success
o f the first, Cervantes admits all these errors.
And as if anticipating the pedantic glosses on
his book, he parodies pedantry too. “A wise
friend of mine,” Don Quixote explains, “was of
the opinion that no one should weary himself
by writing glosses and the reason, he used to
say, was that the gloss could never come near
the text” and is usually “far from the intention
and them e to be glossed.” Is diat wise friend
io The New Criterion November 2015
Cervantes himself? A few pages later, when
knight and squire encounter a pedantic author,
whose poindess scholarly discoveries Sancho
can easily copy, the squire explains that “it’s
just a m atter o f asking idiotic questions and
giving silly replies.” “You have said more titan
you know,” agrees Don Quixote, “for there are
some people who tire diemselves out learn­
ing and proving things that, once learned and
proved, don’t m atter a straw.”
The book starts out describing the hero’s pe­
culiar, literary madness, his decrepit armor and
pasteboard helmet, and the beaten-down old
horse he grandiloquendy names Rosinante, in
imitation o f the steeds in chivalric epic. It is
as if naming by itself can transform reality, as,
indeed, it sometimes does. A series o f famous
adventures are narrated both as D on Quixote
sees them and as they are in reality. To no avail
his squire cautions that those are windmills,
not giants; sheep, not soldiers; and a barber’s
basin, not “the helmet o f Mambrino.”
One might think that when windmills bat­
ter him and people stone him, D on Quixote
will at last doubt his vision, but he resists all
contrary evidence. Like so many systems with
which we are distressingly familiar, his mania
precludes any possible discontinuation. If capi­
talism does not collapse as Marxists predicted,
dtey just call the present “late capitalism.” From
the beginning, psychoanalysis has discounted
objections as so much “resistance,” and there­
fore positive proof o f the theory’s correctness.
As Freud’s critic Karl Kraus once observed, “I
tell the psychoanalysts to kiss my ass and they
tell me I have an anal obsession.”
Don Quixote attributes his failures to the
schemes o f evil enchanters. If the knight’s peer­
less lady, Dulcinea o f El Toboso, appears to be
a hairy, smelly peasant girl, that is because she
has been enchanted. “All the adventures o f a
knight-errant appear to be illusions, follies, and
dreams, and m rn out to be the reverse,” he tells
Sancho, “because in our midst, there is a host
o f enchanters, forever changing, disguising our
affairs.” And that will always be so, because
“enchanters persecute me and will persecute
me until they sink me and my exalted chivalries
in the deepest abyss o f oblivion.” Empiricist
philosophers tell us that the senses are the

bedrock o f knowledge, but for D on Quixote
they are w hat is least trustworthy. “W ho do
you believe,” asked G roucho Marx, “me or
your lying eyes?” Senses prove mistaken, but
a good theory never does.
H ere we verge on the “postm odern” D on
Quixote. A truism o f o ur age teaches that
everything is equally a “fiction,” even if some
fictions should prove tem porarily m ore use­
ful than others. As Cervantes’s novel gains
steam, more and more people start construct­
ing fictional worlds as they get the idea o f
hum oring the madman. They pretend to be
knights-errant or evil enchanters and con­
struct elaborate tableaux w ithin tableaux.
In Part Two, alm ost everyone D on Quix­
ote meets has read Part One and knows all
about him. Amusingly, Sancho can’t figure
o u t how their chronicler managed to learn
about things Sancho did when no one was
there to see him. Is the book’s narrator some
sort o f evil enchanter himself?
Some o f the jokes these readers play on the
heroes are so elaborate, and require so many
participants, that one begins to ask whether it
takes a fool to expend so much effort gulling a
pair o f fools. In the postm odern critical read­
ing, all this play within play indicates that we
live in a hall o f infinite mirrors with no exit to
“reality.” But in joining the hero in a world o f
pure make-believe, aren’t these critics imitating
the folly o f the readers in the book?
S o m e authors have taken such reflections
n o t nihilistically, like the postm odernists,
but religiously, as a sign o f our inevitably
fallen state. W ithout divine revelation, we
are shut o u t from the truth. In Nikolai G o­
gol’s hilarious version o f Cervantes’s tale, The
Inspector-General, a tow n’s corrupt officials,
learning that a government inspector is com ­
ing, resolve to con him. Impressed w ith their
own cleverness, they decide that a scapegrace
staying at the local inn m ust be the inspector
in disguise. As with D on Quixote, counter­
evidence becomes evidence: the less the
scapegrace resembles a governm ent official,
the better they think the official’s disguise,
and the better the disguise, the m ore certain
he m ust be the official! In fact, he is just a
The intolerable dream by Gary SaulMorson
spendthrift idiot w ho is delighted to accept
their bribes. So the officials wind up conning
themselves, as perhaps we all do. Just as read­
ers are about to conclude that everything in
the w orld is counterfeit, the real inspector
general shows up, not at all in disguise, but
like God at the Last Judgment, arriving when
least expected.
At times, D on Quixote differs from earlier
knights-errant because, unlike them, he knows
that he is copying models. In one amusing
sequence, he decides to imitate heroes who,
like Amadis o f Gaul or Orlando Furioso, go
mad when they discover their lady’s falsity.
D on Quixote pretends to be mad like them,
because, as he explains to his squire, that is
what knights-errant do. So he goes into the wil­
derness, strips naked, and utters insane ravings
he wants reported to Dulcinea. When Sancho
Panza reminds him that Dulcinea has not been
false, Don Quixote answers: ‘T hat is just where
die subdeness o f my plan comes in. A knight-
errant who goes mad for a good reason deserves
no dianks or gratimde; the whole point consists
in going crazy w idiout cause.”
By the same logic, he demands at lance-
point, like any good knight, that passers-by
acknowledge Dulcinea’s unsurpassed beauty.
W hen one o f them protests he has never seen
her, D on Quixote replies: “If I were to show
her to you, what merit would there be in ac­
knowledging a truth so manifest to all? The
im portant point is that you should believe,
confess, swear, and defend it w ithout setting
eyes on her.”
People do not believe because they see, they
see because they already believe. Dostoevsky,
ever questing after faith, viewed the novel as
an allegory about the sources o f belief. Are
people ever convinced to accept an antago­
nistic world view? Imagine that the chemist
D m itri Mendeleev, a sort o f sm ug atheist
like Richard Dawkins today, should be con­
fronted w ith an indubitable miracle. Devils
lift him three feet in the air and leave him
there against all the laws o f physics. Would
Mendeleev admit he might have been wrong?
Never: he would insist it was all a trick and, if
it came dow n to it, “would rather disbelieve
his ow n senses than adm it the fact.” W ith
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 The intolerable dream by Gary Saul Morson
such reasoning, atheists m ight as well resort
to evil enchanters.
In one article, “A Lie Is Saved by a Lie,”
Dostoevsky speculates on a scene from Don
Quixote he (mis)remembers. Once upon a
time, the knight o f the doleful countenance
was suddenly struck by a puzzle. The books
o f chivalry describe knights who encounter
armies o f a hundred thousand conjured up by
evil sorcerers, and annihilate them to the last
man. But how could dais be?, he asks. If you
do the math, there isn’t enough time to kill a
hundred thousand people in a single battle.
Could the books be mere fantasies? In short,
Dostoevsky explains, D on Quixote “began
yearning for realism!”
If the chivalric epics contain one lie, then
they are all lies, so how can they be saved? At
last D on Quixote hits on the solution: these
men had bodies like slugs or mollusks and so a
single sword stroke could lull several at once!
To save one fantasy, he comes up widi another,
“twice, thrice as fantastic as the first one.” And
thus, “realism is satisfied, truth is saved, and
it is possible to believe in the first and most
im portant dream with no more doubts.”
N ow ask yourselves, hasn’t the same thing
happened to you, perhaps a hundred times?
“Say you’ve come to cherish a certain dream,
an idea, a theory, a conviction,” or a person
you love. If there is something you have exag­
gerated and distorted because o f your passion,
you will be aware o f it in the depths o f your
being, doubt will tease you, and you will be
unable to live at peace with your dream. Admit
it, Dostoevsky writes: “don’t you then invent
a new dream, a new lie, even a terribly crude
one, perhaps, but one that you were quick
to embrace lovingly only because it resolved
your initial doubt?”
Since the romantic period, and especially
today, the Quixote has been read as a celebra­
tion o f idealism. N o m atter how unrealistic
the dream o f peace and justice may be, isn’t
it better to believe in it and strive for it? “You
see things that are and ask ‘Why?’ But I dream
things that never were, and I ask ‘Why not?’” :
we have all heard this line, once attributed to
Bernard Shaw and now to Robert F. Kennedy.
rf k also supposedly said: “Only those who
12 The New Criterion November 2015
dare to fail greatly can ever achieve gready.”
Failure itself does not discredit but ennobles
the idealistic striven But to attribute such
sentimentality to Cervantes is to be almost as
foolish as his hero.
T im e and again, Cervantes shows the terrible
cost o f pursuing ideals w ithout attention to
real people in actual situations. If the cost is
counted, Nabokov noted, then “the im pli­
cation o f its [this book’s] hum or is brutal
and grim.” W hen D on Quixote frees some
galley slaves, they immediately pelt him with
stones and soon after become highwaymen
plundering the countryside. Reproached with
the consequences o f his chivalrous deed, Don
Quixote declares irately: “It is not the duty
o f knights-errant to find o ut w hether the af­
flicted, enslaved, and the oppressed whom
they encounter on the roads are in evil plight
and anguish because o f their crimes or be­
cause o f their good actions. Their concern
is simply to relieve them , having regard to
their sufferings and not to their knaveries. .
. . As for the rest, I am not concerned.” On
another occasion, D on Quixote has rescued a
young man being w hipped by his employer,
but, the m om ent the doleful knight left, the
employer whipped the boy all the harder. “He
again tied me to the same tree,” the young
m an reports, and, while making fun o f the
rescue, “gave me so many lashes that left me
flayed like Saint Bartholomew.” And so, the
young man implores, even if you see me being
cut to pieces, do not come to my aid, because
no matter how great my misfortunes may be,
“they will not be as great as those that spring
from your help, and may G od lay a curse on
you and all the knights-errant that were ever
born in the world.”
I thought o f these passages recently when
Joseph Epstein rem inded me o f how some
leftists justify their past defense o f Stalin. They
concede that they turned out to be wrong but
maintain that in their hearts they were right,
while their critics, who turned out to be right,
have no hearts at all. O r as the late Michael
Bernstein used to say, being an idealist means
never having to say you are sorry. Good inten­
tions excuse any outcom e. But don’t good

intentions include learning that good inten­
tions are not enough?
W hen I arrived at Oxford as a graduate
student, I told my tutor that I had just trav­
eled around Europe carrying only a change of
clothes, a bottle ofW oolite, and a copy o f Don
Quixote, which I imagined especially applicable
to my own role as a scholar-errant. “Everybody
imagines that this book was written precisely
for himself?’ he replied. “It justifies everything
and everyone.”
I la n Stavans’s study catalogues the m any
writers, critics, and artists who have adored
this novel. Americans and Russians, as well as
Spaniards and Latin Americans, have deemed
it particularly applicable to their national ex­
perience. It has been endlessly translated and
retranslated, appropriately enough since even
the original purports to be a translation from
the Arabic! A t one point, when the supposed
Muslim author “swears like a Catholic Chris­
tian,” the supposed translator into Spanish
assures us th at that means he swears w ith
perfect truthfulness. No matter who the read­
ers may be, they discover a com plim ent to
themselves.
For Stavans, this book is no mere novel. If
it were, he wouldn’t like it, since, as he boasts,
“I really don’t like reading long novels. I lose
patience, m y m ind wanders. I particularly
dislike psychological novels because o f the
way they defy logic (Crime and Punishment,
ouch!).” “O uch” is about the level o f argu­
m ent in some parts o f this study. Confusing
the “eschatological” (what pertains to the end
o f die world) with the “scatological” (what
pertains to excrement), Stavans tells us: “This
surely isn’t a dirty novel. Eschatology is kept
in check. Sex is nonexistent.” H e repeatedly
calls D on Quixote an “imposter,” apparendy
unaware diat for diere to be an imposter, diere
m ust be someone real that one pretends to
be. If I imagine that I am the present king of
France, or an enchanted unicorn, I may be
many diings, but I am not an imposter. When
The intolerable dream by Gary Saul Morson
Stavans informs us that one w ordsm ith was
no t a consistent lexicographer “like Samuel
Johnson was,” one also winces at his grammar.
Surely Stavans intends this study as a quix­
otic prank? As Cervantes inserts tedious tales,
Stavans seems to be filling as many pages as
possible. For no discernible reason, he spends
pages praising the beauties o f Spanglish. Cita­
tions from various writers extend far beyond
what is needed. At one point he reproduces
a dozen translations o f the same paragraph,
thereby filling six pages, in order to show us
that the English language has changed over
the centuries and that interpretations o f a
text may differ.
So much does he love die Quixote that we
learn it contains 2,059,005 letters, 381,104
words, 40,165 commas, and 20,050 semi­
colons. The word “que” (“what” or “w ho”)
“shows up 20,617 times; that is, it constitutes
5.41 percent o f the complete text.” Could this
be a sly allusion to the novel’s parody o f need­
less pedantry? I hope so. Evidendy, the book is
Stavans’s childhood friend and current nostal­
gia, an object o f reverence he cannot talk about
enough. It is his cherished ideal, his Platonic
love, his Dulcinea o f El Toboso.
As Stavans reminds us, perhaps no one loved
this novel more than Dostoevsky, who pro­
nounced it “the final and the greatest expression
o f human thought, die bitterest irony that a
human is capable of expressing, and if the world
were to come to an end and people were asked
somewhere there: Well, did you understand
anything from your life on earth and draw any
conclusion from it?’ a person could silendy hand
over Don Quixote-. ‘Here is my conclusion about
life; can you condemn me for it?”’
To be sure, Dostoevsky immediately qualified
this statement: “I don’t claim that diis judgment
about life on earth would be right, but still. . . ”
Like Ivan Karamazov, he knew that even “the
bitterest irony” could turn into a sort o f reverse
sentimentality. For intellectuals especially, the
celebration o f well-intentioned disaster tempts
us with its own self-indulgent consolation.
The New Criterion November 2015 13
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