The First Sally

Since Don Quixote is first and foremost a parody of chivalric romance, it helps to know something of this much-maligned genre. To find out more, I have my students read a helpful article by Daniel Eisenberg, a primer of sorts about the "typical" chivalric romance. The chivalric romance is set in the distant past, often in an exotic locale. The hero is young and handsome, and usually of royal blood, although at the beginning he may be a foundling who does not know his true identity (as is the case with Amadis of Gaul, the most famous chivalric hero). There is more, but this is enough to show the broad outlines of Cervantes's parody: in place of a young, handsome, royal hero we have an old, weathered hidalgo, who by definition occupies the lowest rung on the noble ladder. Instead of an exotic locale, we get La Mancha, which, for Cervantes's readers would have been the least exotic place imaginable. From our point of view it might be difficult to grasp how ordinary, mundane, non-exotic Don Quixote's world is. Imagine Fresno, I tell my students. Or Bakersfield.

Unfair? Perhaps. But anyone who's traveled an interstate highway and stopped at a truck stop can imagine the normal, ordinary people that Don Quixote encounters during his first sally. And that goes a long way toward helping us appreciate the humor of the situation. There is a tension between the ordinary world through which DQ moves and the exotic setting of the romance that's playing out inside his head. He arrives at the 16th-century Spanish equivalent of a truck stop, complete with truckers (muleteers), and dubious women, and acts as if he is entering a castle. He addresses a pair of prostitutes as if they were noble ladies, and the innkeeper as if he were a castellan.

The parody here is as broad as possible, consisting of contrasts between the chivalric fantasy and the real world. Our hero is knighted, and then he leaves the inn in search of adventures.

His first two adventures are important because they set the tone for all that is to follow. First he meets Andres, a young shepherd who is being beaten by his employer. Don Quijote stops the beating and demands that the employer pay Andres what he is owed. Then DQ leaves, trusting that the man will keep his word, ignoring Andres's pleas. Once DQ has left, the employer begins to beat the boy again, giving him a worse beating that he would have otherwise received.

In my last post I talked about good intentions and bad decisions, and here is the prime example in the knight's first adventure. Attempting to do good, DQ ends up doing harm. Not only that, but the outcome is worse than if he had never intervened in the first place.

After Andres, DQ encounters a group of merchants, taking them for knights, he demands that they confess that Dulcinea is the most beautiful woman in the world. They jokingly decline, infuriating the knight, who then attacks them. He ends up being beaten to a pulp. This also establishes a pattern of comic violence that will continue throughout the novel.

Don Quijote is found by a neighbor, who helps him home, waiting until nightfall before entering the village, to keep the knight from being a public spectacle. This will be important as we reach the end of part one.

In this first sally, Don Quijote travels alone. The innkeeper who knights him gives him some salient advice: he really should bring clean shirts with him when he travels; he should also remember to bring money. This confuses the knight, who comments that none of the books he has read have ever mentioned money. That's because, the innkeeper says, something so obvious should not need to be mentioned.

Many (including my old professor, the late Carroll Johnson) have pointed out that Don Quixote reflects a transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy; the knight's nostalgia for the past and resistance to the modern world he lives in thus get a materialist explanation. I'm by no means a marxist, and am reluctant to place too much emphasis on such interpretations. But the tension between imperfect present and idealized mythic past is significant. And economics matters, and will matter even more when Sancho Panza enters the picture.