Right now, I'm enjoying the way the novel keeps toying with its fictionality, reminding me over and over again that it's fake. So when Quixote comes home in tatters from his first brief adventure (the first time he mistakes an inn for a castle -- this is before he has Sancho Panza with him), his niece and housekeeper are worried that reading too many novels has driven him to madness. The priest is there, too, and
desired [them] to hand him the books, one by one, that he might see of what subjects they treated, because he might possibly find some of them that did not deserve to be purged by fire.So I'm thinking: yes, Cervantes, I get it -- novels are fictional, and potentially dangerous. They might offend uneducated women, or make old men crazy. Butof course he's also doing something smart by having the enemies of fiction respond in such an excessive way: novels suddenly look a lot better, if they're only attacked by the batshitcrazy. Now it becomes impossible for readers to sincerely share in that fear -- and in fact, we're probably supposed to feel sorry for the books being burned like this. (Do novels really need pity, though? Like Don Quixote, they keep getting attacked -- set on fire, in one case, and beat up all the time in the other. Does Quixote need pity? Or does the violence that is done to him just make him funnier -- and the novel a little bit more cruel?)
"There is not one of them, replied the niecce, which deserves the least mercy, for they are all full of mischief and deceit. You had better, therefore, throw them out of the window into the courtyard, and there set fire to them, in a heap: or, let them be carried into the back-yard, where the bonfire may be made, and the smoke will offend nobody." (Part I, Chapter VI, second paragraph: 42)
This thing about cruelty and violence is what's bothering me most, so far. Quixote constantly has vomit, shit, blood, or teeth coming out of his body. At one point, he's being pelted with stones by some shepherds whose sheep he's been killing because he's convinced himself they're enemy knights:
He received a pebble on his side, that seemed to have buried a couple of his ribs in his belly;...there came another almond, so plum upon his hand and cruet, that after having splintered the pot to pieces, it carried off in its way, three or four of his molars, and shattered two of his fingers in a grievous manner: in short, so irresistible were both the applications, that the poor knight could not help tumbling from his horse. The shepherds immediately came up, and believing him actually dead, gathered together their flock with all imaginable dispatch, and taking their dead animals, which might be about seven in number, upon their shoulders, made off without any further inquiry. (Part I, Chapter XVIII, paragraph 10, 129)I keep wanting to pity Quixote, but there's not really anywhere to put that pity. It's like reading The Ordeal of Richard Feverel and trying to feel sorry for the boys when the squire beats them -- what happens is pitiful, but the description of it only wants you to laugh.
