The City of Words (CBC Massey Lectures) by Alberto Manguel

Author:Alberto Manguel [Manguel, Alberto]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: LIT000000
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2007-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

IV.

THE BOOKS OF DON QUIXOTE

“Your hypothesis is possible, but not interesting,” Lönnrot answered. “You will reply that reality has not the least obligation to be interesting. To which I will reply that reality can forgo that obligation, but hypotheses can’t.”

— Jorge Luis Borges,

“La muerte y la brújula,” 1942

ASPIRING WITHOUT concluding, building without climbing, knowing without demanding exclusive possession of knowledge are different expressions of an ancient dichotomy: that of reason against force or, as a medieval commonplace has it, the battle between the practioners of letters and the practitioners of arms. Perhaps the most troubling version of this argument was penned in the early seventeenth century by a tired man who had, in his youth, known the sufferings of war in Italy, had been wounded in the chest and left arm during the Battle of Lepanto, had spent five long years a prisoner of Algerian pirates, had returned to his native Spain where he had tried his hand with indifferent success at plays, romances, and poems, and then, in his fifty-eighth year, in the cell to which he had been condemned for reasons that remain uncertain, had dreamt up a bookish and impoverished old gentleman who decides one day to become a knight errant. Once a soldier, now a writer, well aware of the tribulations of both callings, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra lent his Don Quixote, in the first part of the novel, a couple of speeches in which the knight compares the merits of letters to the merits of arms. Addressing a group of goatherds, Don Quixote reflects that in the idyllic days of yore, the use of force had not been necessary. “Happy age and happy centuries, to which the ancients gave the name of golden,” he says to his bewildered audience, “and not because gold, which in our iron age is held in such high esteem, was in those lucky days obtained without any effort, but because the men who then lived were ignorant of two words, mine and yours.” In that Golden Age, “everything was peace, everything friendship, everything harmony,” and knights errant were not needed since strife and injustice were inexistent. But now, in “our detestable centuries,” nothing and no one is safe, and therefore, to combat the “growing malice,” the order of knights errant was fortunately instituted. Fine words and beautiful thoughts are no longer enough; weapons and physical strength are now required “to defend maidens, protect widows and help the orphans and the needy.” Seamlessly, Don Quixote’s praise of chivalry drifts into a praise of war, and the true purpose of war, Don Quixote explains, is to bring Christ’s peace on earth, since letters require arms to protect the laws they pen. This unsettling justification has older echoes with which Cervantes was no doubt familiar.

After escaping from the ruins of Troy, holding his son’s hand and carrying his old father on his back, Aeneas begins a voyage that, in Virgil’s telling, will eventually take him to the starting place of Rome. Like every

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