Quixote by Ilan Stavans

Author:Ilan Stavans
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2016-09-28T16:00:00+00:00

9

AMERICA’S EXCEPTIONALISM

George Washington purchased a copy of El Quijote in Philadelphia on the very day the Constitution was adopted, September 17, 1787. It was the four-volume Tobias Smollett translation, which cost him, in Pennsylvania currency, twenty-two shillings, six pence. His presidential library at Mount Vernon still holds it, with Washington’s signature on the title page of each volume as well as an impression of his bookplate in the front pastedown endpaper. Earlier that same year, Washington had engaged in correspondence with Don Diego de Gardoqui, Spain’s ambassador. The topic was trade along the Mississippi River, which would be beneficial to Spain. On September 11, Gardoqui visited the future first president, and the conversation included the topic of Cervantes. Almost a couple of months later, the Spanish ambassador wrote to Washington, “requesting you would accept, and give a place in your library, to the best Spanish edition of Don Quixote [a copy published in Madrid in 1780].”

When Washington died in 1799, the eighteen-page inventory of his books described the English “Donquixote” as being “On the Table.” Its value then was assessed at three dollars.

El Quijote was one of Jefferson’s favorites, as many references to it in his letters attest. Benjamin Franklin owned a five-volume Spanish edition, which he prized as an outstanding example of the typographer’s art. He used the novel to teach himself Spanish and encouraged his children to do the same. In his correspondence, full of adulation for the book, he described himself also as “combat[ing] against windmills.” In addition, Franklin noted that while “Don Quixote undertook to redress the bodily wrongs of the world,” he, Franklin, recognized that the “redressment of mental vagaries” in the United States around 1822 “would be an enterprise more than Quixotic.” Still, he used Cervantes’s template to plow forward with a plan to make America “the Canaan of the New World.”

If the Spanish-speaking Americas have fostered an aesthetic philosophy called Menardismo that has been liberating in its capacity to cultivate a postcolonial mentality, in the United States, El Quijote is read altogether differently: as a guidebook to exceptionalism. A profusion of English translations, five in the eighteenth century and four in the nineteenth, all of them produced in England (none would be published in America until the mid-twentieth century), made El Quijote ever popular on these shores.

The Founding Fathers were not the only devotees in the early Republic. Motifs and characters in El Quijote show up frequently in the realm of letters. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, an early American judge and writer, published a satirical novel, Modern Chivalry: Containing the Adventures of Captain John Farrago and Teague O’Regan, His servant, set on a western Pennsylvania farm, yet borrowing much from Cervantes’s book. Its protagonist, Captain John Farrago, sets out “to write about the world a little, with his man Teague at his heels, to see how things were going on here and there, and to observe human nature.” The first two parts appeared in 1792, the third in 1793, and the fourth in 1797, with a revised version in 1805.

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