The Fifth Desk · Canonical Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Miguel de Cervantes · a novel in two parts · one hundred and twenty-six chapters · 375,963 words · 1605 and 1615 · in Cervantes’s Spanish, with Ormsby’s translation (1885) for sense and quotation
Mode
Comic prose epic; a parody of romance, pastoral and novella turned into a history that doubts its own sources
Mythos
Self-creation by naming; the knight and the squire, the descent and the ascent, the double; a quest undone by a second naming
Phase
Three sallies from one village and back, the last ending in defeat on a beach, a homecoming and a death in bed
Presentation
Fiction; two parts of 52 and 74 chapters, printed ten years apart, relayed through an Arab historian and a Morisco translator, with novellas, verses and documents set in
Register
From archaic fabla and a canon’s poetics to Sancho’s proverbs, village letters and the galley slaves’ cant; about half the book is talk
Scale
Two men, one road, a kingdom from galley slaves to dukes
Governing Proposition
A village gentleman reads himself into a knight and rides out, with a labourer beside him, to make the world match his books; ten years later the world has read the book about him and stages it for him. The wager of the novel is that a self made out of reading can be better than the man who made it, and that what is real is settled between two minds on one road.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme”
“In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind”. The book opens by declining a name, and its hero’s will not hold still: Quijada or Quesada, though conjecture makes it Quejana, and Alonso Quijano only on the last pages. A gentleman of about fifty reads books of chivalry until he sells land to buy more. He makes a visor of pasteboard, and the first blow of his sword undoes a week’s work. He rebuilds it with bars of iron and then, “sin querer hacer nueva experiencia della”
“not caring to try any more experiments with it”, takes it for a perfect helmet. His first act is a test, and his second is the refusal to test again.
Then he names. Four days go on a name for his horse, eight on his own. A farm girl he once loved without her knowing it, Aldonza Lorenzo, becomes Dulcinea del Toboso, a name “musical, uncommon, and significant”. Carried home beaten from his first sally, he is told by a neighbour that he is neither Valdovinos nor Abindarráez but the worthy Señor Quijana. He answers: “Yo sé quién soy”
“I know who I am”. The whole book tests that sentence, and at its end a second naming answers it.
The book is two books, printed ten years apart, of fifty-two chapters and seventy-four, and they come out nearly equal: the second begins at 48.6 per cent of the chapter text. The middle of the whole falls early in the second part, in the hero’s answer to what his village says of him. A few lines later Sancho brings news from the bachelor Carrasco: “andaba ya en libros la historia de vuestra merced”
“your worship’s history is already abroad in books”. The middle of the novel is a man learning that he is in a book. “Books” falls by more than half from the first part to the second, and “history” nearly doubles. The first part is about reading books, the second about being in one.
Movement II
His first deed sets the terms. He frees a boy, Andrés, tied to an oak and flogged for asking his wages, and tells the master that “everyone is the son of his works”. Andrés asks the question the book keeps asking: “of what works is he the son, when he refuses me the wages of my sweat and labour?” The knight takes the farmer’s oath and rides away content, and the farmer flogs the boy until he leaves him for dead. The next sentence is “Y desta manera deshizo el agravio el valeroso don Quijote”
“Thus did the valiant Don Quixote right that wrong”. In the thirty-first chapter Andrés comes back to curse him “and all the knights-errant that have ever been born”.
Then the windmills. The knight sees giants, and Sancho’s reply is two words in the Spanish: “¿Qué gigantes?”
“What giants?” Horse and rider go rolling across the field, and the knight gets up with his explanation ready: the sage Frestón “has turned these giants into mills”. Sancho has his own kind. Tossed in a blanket at an inn, he will not hear of enchanters; the men had names, and he heard them: “el uno se llamaba Pedro Martínez, y el otro Tenorio Hernández”
“one was called Pedro Martinez, and another Tenorio Hernandez”. Between the knight’s reading and the squire’s body the world is argued out, all the way down the road.
A night of dread ends at dawn in “six fulling hammers”, in laughter, and in blows when Sancho mocks his master. The knight allows only that the night was “digna de risa, pero no es digna de contarse”
“worth laughing at, but it is not worth making a story about”. The book has just told it. In the end what things are is put to a vote. At a crowded inn the company is polled in secret on whether a barber’s pack-saddle is a caparison, and “the pack-saddle remained a caparison till the day of judgment, and the basin a helmet and the inn a castle in Don Quixote’s imagination.” Of Dulcinea he has said it plainly: “píntola en mi imaginación como la deseo”
“I picture her in my imagination as I would have her to be”.
Movement III
At the end of the eighth chapter the book breaks off with two swords raised: the author, it says, found no more written. A second author tells how he found the rest. In the Alcaná de Toledo a boy is selling notebooks in Arabic; a Morisco reads a note in the margin and laughs, because it says that Dulcinea had “the best hand of any woman in all La Mancha for salting pigs.” They are the history of Don Quixote by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian, and they are bought for half a real. The narrator praises history as the path “de la verdad, cuya madre es la historia”
“of truth, whose mother is history”. From here on every word has come through a historian, a translator and a second author.
The history names itself with care. In the twenty-second chapter it is “gravísima, altisonante, mínima, dulce e imaginada historia”
“most grave, high-sounding, minute, delightful, and original history”; the Spanish ends on imaginada, imagined, and Ormsby’s “original” lets it go. A canon who despises the romances grants their loose form one virtue: “la épica también puede escrebirse en prosa”
“the epic may be written in prose just as well as in verse”. He says it inside the book he describes. The knight, carried home in a cage, answers Sancho’s proof that he cannot be enchanted with “I know and feel that I am enchanted, and that is enough to ease my conscience”, and tells the canon what the books have made of him: “valiant, polite, generous, well-bred, magnanimous, courteous, dauntless, gentle, patient”.
Nearly a third of the first part is other people’s stories, from the goatherds’ funeral for Grisóstomo to El curioso impertinente, read aloud at an inn, and the captive’s escape from Algiers. In six chapters the hero’s name does not appear. Some of these voices carry the argument. Marcela, blamed for a shepherd’s death, answers, “Yo nací libre”
“I was born free”. Zoraida’s father calls from the shore, “Come back, dear daughter, come back to shore; I forgive thee all”, and her answer comes when “neither could her father hear her nor we see him”. Ten years later Cide Hamete judged the two longest himself. They stand “como separadas de la historia”
“as it were, apart from the story”, and the second part admits only episodes “arising out of the circumstances the facts present”.
Movement IV
The second part begins in a world that has read the first. Carrasco reports “more than twelve thousand volumes of the said history in print”, and readers’ complaints: the author “forgot to say who the thief was who stole Sancho’s Dapple”. It is true of the Spanish of 1605, where the ass vanishes unnarrated; Ormsby’s English, following a corrected text, prints the theft. Sancho takes the lapse into the fiction: “the historian made a mistake, or perhaps it might be a blunder of the printer’s.” From here on the readers act. Carrasco rides out as a knight because he has read the book, and a duke and duchess stage its romances because they have read it too.
Sent to El Toboso for a princess who does not exist, Sancho reasons it out: a man who takes windmills for giants can be made to take the first peasant girl who comes by for Dulcinea, and an enchanter can take the blame. Three girls ride out of El Toboso on donkeys, and Sancho kneels to them as royalty. The knight kneels beside him and sees nothing “sino a tres labradoras sobre tres borricos”
“but three country girls on three jackasses”. In the first part the knight saw giants where the squire saw mills; now the squire sees princesses where the knight sees donkeys. Then the lie is taken from its maker. The Duchess tells Sancho that the girl was Dulcinea, enchanted, and that he, “though he fancies himself the deceiver, is the one that is deceived”.
Let down into the cave of Montesinos, the knight comes back sure that “I was the same then and there that I am this moment.” He saw Durandarte answer a prophecy of rescue with “patience and shuffle”, and one of Dulcinea’s companions asked him for six reals on a petticoat, since need “does not spare even the enchanted”. Cide Hamete will not decide: “Tú, letor, pues eres prudente, juzga lo que te pareciere”
“Decide for thyself in thy wisdom, reader”. At the ducal table the duke’s ecclesiastic walks out: “¡Mirad si no han de ser ellos locos, pues los cuerdos canonizan sus locuras!”
“No wonder they are mad, when people who are in their senses sanction their madness!” Where Ormsby has “sanction”, the Spanish has canonizan: the sane make saints of the madmen’s follies.
Movement V
Sancho governs his island and gives it up. He kisses his ass on the forehead, “not without tears in his eyes”, asks the court to “let me go back to my old freedom”, and leaves as he came: “naked I was born, naked I find myself, I neither lose nor gain”. On the road he meets his neighbour Ricote, a Morisco driven out with his people and come back among pilgrims. Ricote calls the expulsion “a divine inspiration”, and in the same speech weeps for what it took: “Doquiera que estamos lloramos por España”
“Wherever we are we weep for Spain”. He has found “liberty of conscience” in Germany. Sancho will neither help him nor give him away.
Told that a sequel by another hand, Avellaneda’s, has sent him to the jousts at Saragossa, the knight answers, “I will not set foot in Saragossa”, and the road turns to Barcelona. There, in a printing house, he finds that sequel in proof. On the beach the Knight of the White Moon, who is Carrasco again, unhorses him, and with the lance at his visor he speaks “as if he were speaking out of a tomb”: “Dulcinea del Toboso es la más hermosa mujer del mundo, y yo el más desdichado caballero de la tierra”
“Dulcinea del Toboso is the fairest woman in the world, and I the most unfortunate knight on earth”. His host protests at the plan to bring “the most amusing madman in it back to his senses”.
At home he calls his friends to his bed: “I am no longer Don Quixote of La Mancha, but Alonso Quixano, whose way of life won for him the name of Good.” The priest comes out from his confession: “Verdaderamente se muere, y verdaderamente está cuerdo Alonso Quijano el Bueno”
“Alonso Quixano the Good is indeed dying, and is indeed in his right mind”. To Sancho, who begs him to go out as shepherds, he says, “I was mad, now I am in my senses”. For three days “still the niece ate and the housekeeper drank and Sancho Panza enjoyed himself”. Then the sentence of his death corrects itself: “dio su espíritu: quiero decir que se murió”
“yielded up his spirit, that is to say died.” The priest asks for a certificate so that no other author can raise him, and Cide Hamete’s pen has the last word: “For me alone was Don Quixote born, and I for him”.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged partly on the Spanish. Length is not a cost; the question is whether the parts are required. The spine is compelled. Part II needs Part I as a printed book. Sancho’s one lie in II.X carries the second half, through Merlin’s lashes to the deathbed rumour that Dulcinea is disenchanted, and the death is required, certified so that no other author can raise him (II.LXXIV). What holds the axis lowest of the twelve the book itself names: the Curioso and the captive’s tale stand “apart from the story” (II.XLIV), 8.7 per cent of the novel. With Leandra, Clara’s open thread, the Trifaldi’s long farce and the lectures given twice, about a tenth could go.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The disclosures can be stated, and they hold. A self can be made from reading, and the made self can be better than its maker: “since I have been a knight-errant I have become valiant, polite, generous, well-bred” (I.L). Good intention is not good effect, and the poor pay for it: Andrés “went off weeping, while his master stood laughing” (I.IV). Belief secures itself against test, from the pasteboard visor to the cage. Reality is settled by society, by a vote at an inn (I.XLV). Held below the summit by period matter set down without frame: the Curioso’s “la mujer es animal imperfecto” (woman is an imperfect animal), Sancho’s boast of hating the Jews, and Ricote’s praise of the expulsion, which the book leaves unresolved.
Score: 9.5 / 10
It rises in many registers. Marcela’s desires leave the mountains only “to contemplate the beauty of the heavens” (I.XIV); Zoraida’s father calls from the shore, “Come back, dear daughter, come back to shore; I forgive thee all” (I.XLI); Sancho speaks of Death, “no reaper that sleeps out the noontide” (II.XX), and kisses his ass as he leaves his government (II.LIII); the beaten knight speaks “as if he were speaking out of a tomb” (II.LXIV). The death reaches the ceiling. But most of the height is built to be punctured: the lion turns its hind-quarters (II.XVII), and the farce at the inns and in the ducal house is not meant to rise. Frequency holds the axis second lowest of the twelve.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth built, not evoked, on a particular that never dissolves. The book opens on a rite of self-creation by naming and closes on a second naming that undoes it: “I am no longer Don Quixote of La Mancha, but Alonso Quixano” (II.LXXIV). The knight and the squire become a pair the world thinks with, and the book inverts them on schedule: the knight sees giants where Sancho sees mills (I.VIII), and “three country girls on three jackasses” where Sancho sees princesses (II.X). The descent to Montesinos ends in need, not revelation. The double is built twice, in Carrasco’s Knight of the Mirrors and Avellaneda’s hero. Held a step down because much of Part I’s myth is allusion: the sonnets, the Arcadia, the Micomicona pastiche.
Score: 9.6 / 10
The inheritance is chivalric romance, pastoral, picaresque, Byzantine romance and the Italian novella, and the book argues with each inside its own pages: the scrutiny (I.VI), Ginés against Lazarillo, the canon’s poetics. The turn: a narrator who loses his source in mid-blow and buys the rest in Arabic for half a real (I.IX); a history that calls itself imaginada; a sequel whose characters have read the first part and repair it. The stake is in Part II, which lets a rival’s sequel turn its road from Saragossa to Barcelona and kills the chivalric hero sane in his bed. Held from the top: the satire of romance was a proven path, and the book succeeded at once. Its cost was risked, not paid.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Change the form and the book stops knowing three things. What can be known from texts: the relay of authors, Arab historian and Morisco translator makes truth a formal problem, and Cide Hamete’s margin can leave the cave undecided, “Decide for thyself in thy wisdom, reader” (II.XXIV). A life lived inside its own reception: only a second part could hold characters who have read their own printed lives, and it ends in documents, a sworn statement, a will, a death certificate. Two minds negotiating one world: half the text is talk, and from II.XLIV knight and squire take alternate chapters. Held off the top by Part I’s insets, whose form owes nothing to the frame, and by the summaries that close Part II’s romance threads.
Score: 9.5 / 10
Evidence rather than promise. Four centuries of reading have turned over more than once: farce in the seventeenth century, tragedy for the German Romantics; Turgenev’s “Hamlet and Don Quixote” (1860); Unamuno and Ortega; Lukács’s Theory of the Novel; Auerbach’s “The Enchanted Dulcinea” in Mimesis; Spitzer on perspectivism; Borges’s “Pierre Menard”; Nabokov’s lectures, which indict the book’s cruelty; Foucault. The text earns the record by leaving its questions open: whether the cave happened, “God knows whether there be any Dulcinea or not in the world” (II.XXXII), whether the lashes on the beech trees count, whether the deathbed sanity is cure, defeat or grace. The topical jokes give little back on return.
Score: 9.8 / 10
The book reorganised what prose fiction could do: character made in dialogue, a narrator who doubts his sources, perception as negotiation, and a fiction that reviews and repairs itself in print. It states its own theory: “fictions have the more merit and charm about them the more nearly they approach the truth or what looks like it” (II.LXII). Intrinsic force alone stands at the same figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection was immediate, with more than twelve thousand copies reported inside Part II (II.III), Shelton’s English of 1612 and Oudin’s French of 1614, and continuous through Fielding, Sterne, Smollett, Lennox, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Twain, Galdós, Kafka, Borges and Nabokov; outside literature, through Daumier, Doré, Picasso, Strauss and Falla, and the word “quixotic”.
Score: 9.8 / 10
Survival is demonstrated: in print since 1605, translated across the world, and its images, the windmills and the knight and squire in silhouette, known to people who have never read it. The surface is fixed to 1580–1615 as hard as any: romances almost no reader now knows; the Santa Hermandad, the galleys and their cant, Lepanto and the Goleta; the Avellaneda quarrel, the comedia polemic and the arbitristas; the Morisco expulsion with its official named; Old Christian boasts; a bodily farce whose cruelty Nabokov charged. Much needs annotation, and some of it now repels. But the book has outlived its own target. It was written against a genre that is dead, and it is read.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Judged on Cervantes’s Spanish. The making is load-bearing. Registers stand under one hand: the archaic fabla, the Basque’s broken Castilian, the galley cant, Sancho’s proverbs and his “baciyelmo” (I.XLIV). Dialogue is cut to the bone: “¿Qué gigantes?”
“What giants?” (I.VIII). Syntax deflates: “dio su espíritu: quiero decir que se murió”
“yielded up his spirit, that is to say died” (II.LXXIV). Charged for construction and care: the ass that vanishes unnarrated in Part I, Sancho’s wife named Juana and Mari Gutiérrez within ten lines, Part II’s broken dates and day-counts, a Gregorio renamed, strands left open, stock joints, and verse the book itself calls its author’s lesser gift: “más versado en desdichas que en versos” (I.VI).
Score: 9.2 / 10
The range is very wide: Feliciano de Silva’s “reason of the unreason” (I.I) against Sancho’s bowels. One law holds most of it: the gap between a text and the world, and how each side explains it. Don Quixote explains it by enchanters, who have “turned these giants into mills” (I.VIII). Sancho explains it by the body and by names: the men who tossed him in a blanket were “Pedro Martinez” and “Tenorio Hernandez” (I.XVIII). The dukes close the gap from the other side, staging the text for its reader until “jokes become realities” (II.XLIX). The strains are real. The book that holds the canon’s demand for probability gathers four lovers at one inn “by a special disposition of Providence” (I.XXXVI), and the day-counts break.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Many orders, held by one road and one pair. Consciousness, at the edge of sanity and back. The household: the niece, the housekeeper’s wages paid first in the will, Teresa and Sanchica. Labour and money: Andrés’s nine months’ wages, Sancho’s salary, the lashes priced by the stroke. The state: the Santa Hermandad, the galleys, Barataria’s courts, the expulsion. War and empire: Lepanto, the Goleta, Algiers and its renegades. Class, in Sancho’s grandmother’s “only two families in the world, the Haves and the Haven’ts” (II.XX). The Church, the print trade, animals and death. They are integrated: Montesinos’s underworld runs on money. Held a step down because the natural order is thin and the cities come late.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.4 / 10 — Final Average
Canonical Placement: Tier V — Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 9.8, with The Archetypal Deep, The Swerve, The Imperishable and The Encompassed at 9.6. Four centuries of reading that has turned over more than once, a reorganisation of prose fiction felt within ten years, a myth built from one naming and undone by another, a sequel that stakes its hero inside his own book, survival past the genre it was written against, and one road that holds a kingdom.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2, held by what the book itself sets apart: the two novellas Cide Hamete calls “apart from the story”, 8.7 per cent of the whole, and with them Part II’s slack, about a tenth of the book in all. Below the rest also, The Sublime at 8.8. The heights are real and the death reaches the ceiling, but most of the elevation is built to be punctured.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.5, The Inner Law at 9.3, The Made at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: Pressure on Tradition at 9.8, The Archetypal Deep at 9.6, The Swerve at 9.6, The Imperishable at 9.6 and The Unconcealment at 9.5 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met — no axis falls below 8.2, against 7.5 — and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.6. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a full reading of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha (1605) and its Segunda parte (1615) in Cervantes’s Spanish, Project Gutenberg e-text #2000 — two parts, 126 chapters and 375,963 words of fiction, headings and legal documents excluded. The e-text does not name its edition; its readings show the first-edition state of Part I, and every slip named on this page was judged on it. Read alongside John Ormsby’s translation (1885), Project Gutenberg e-text #996, the only English text in hand, chosen because it is close, plain and reliable. It is used for sense and for every English quotation on this page, and its English is not charged to the novel; where a point turns on the Spanish, the Spanish is given first. Ormsby follows the corrected text. He silently mends some slips of the Spanish (“Teodora” for Dorotea among them), prints the theft of the ass that the Spanish in hand does not narrate, retitles the misplaced chapter headings, drops the legal front matter, restores the syllables of the cabo roto verses, and loses words the argument turns on, imaginada becoming “original”. Citations are by Part and chapter. The sound of the verse, and the proverbs and dialects as a reader of 1605 heard them, are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged.