A VERRAY PARFIT GENTLE KNIGHT BY MALCOLM FORBES
Amid the celebratory hullaballoo marking the quadricentennial of Shakespeare’s death, it is worth remembering that 400 years ago another writer died, one whose greatest work also transformed literature and created a new way of seeing the world.
On publication in 1605, El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha became an international bestseller and brought Miguel de Cervantes, an aging, crippled veteran of Spain’s wars, fame and fortune after years of moderate artistic success, financial loss, imprisonment and disillusionment. Readers delighted in the picaresque scrapes and adventures of Cervantes’ comic double-act: Don Quixote, a humble nobleman whose obsession with chivalric romances has deluded him into thinking he is a knight errant; and Sancho Panza, his dumpy, trusty squire who is “a little short of salt in the brain-pan”. The book was such a hit that Cervantes sent his characters out on fresh sallies in a sequel ten years later. Both volumes became one classic, an imperishable cornerstone of Western culture, and a source of pleasure and inspiration for generations of readers and writers.
Chiming with the anniversary of Cervantes’ death comes a book on him and his famous creation. The Man Who Invented Fiction is not a traditional biography of Cervantes. In his introduction, William Egginton, a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins University, explains that his book explores Cervantes’ life in order to demonstrate how the author achieved his “innovation”. “I hope to cast a new light on what fiction is,” Egginton writes, “and to show how it was that Miguel de Cervantes came to invent it.”
Much of Cervantes’ life consisted of encountering and surmounting hard knocks, and weathering the debilitating fug of desengaño, or disappointment, which plagued late-16th-century Spain. His father was hounded by creditors and eventually jailed, which resulted in a childhood spent largely on the move and blighted by poverty and dishonour. Egginton’s early chapters depict an adolescent Cervantes seeking solace by writing poetry.
However, the book truly takes off when he trades his native Spain and relative peace for Italy and war. He participates in great battles, makes treacherous voyages and suffers many injuries, including the permanent loss of feeling in his left hand. Egginton argues that Cervantes’ later fiction is shot through with ambivalence towards war: a deft seesawing whereby a character is seen lauding or enacting individual deeds of valour while in the same breath condemning the practice of warfare and skewering the state for its merciless treatment of soldiers.
Cervantes was held captive for five years in Algiers (during which time he made four unsuccessful escape attempts) and later wound up in jail in Seville. According to Egginton, both internments provided valuable first-hand material to draw on for Don Quixote. Cervantes’ stinking cell in Seville exposed him to the wild stories and perspectives of numerous rogues and outcasts. Algiers engendered the intercalated “Captive’s Tale”. Egginton goes on to make the convincing claim that while capitalising on the traumatic memory of his captivity to create fiction, Cervantes was in turn using fiction as a means of helping himself overcome that trauma. What’s more, in writing invented stories to deal with his personal pain, “Cervantes was inaugurating a particularly modern use of literature.”
