The Library

A quick word about Don Quixote's library.

After the knight returns home, as he sleeps, recovering from his first sally, his friends and family gather to consider how best to help him. They pin the blame for his madness on the books he has been reading. What follows is a parody of an auto de fe, with two of Don Quixote's friends, the Priest and the Barber, functioning as Inquisitors.

From a literary point of view, the scene in Don Quixote's library is important for another reason: characters within the novel become literary critics, judging which books are worthwhile and which must be consigned to the flames based on the effect those books have on the reader and how truthful they are.

A theme that the author presented in the prologue gets picked up by the characters: the pernicious influence of books that imitate lies rather than the truth. Art, in this schema, is imitation. Art is a representation of something; good art represents real things. True things. Fiction, by definition, is a lie. But fiction can have value if it imitates reality; if it imitates the truth. The problem with books of chivalry, from this point of view, is that they represent things that clearly have no basis in reality. They are works of fantasy, and therefore have no worth. Not only do they have no worth; they are dangerous. Because if the role of art is to imitate things, the role of the reader is to imitate art. In other words, art is expected to have an effect on the world because it is assumed that the audience will imitate models found in art. Hence, it is in the interest of the reader (and of society) to seek out good models to imitate. Bad art has a pernicious effect on the world, and the clearest evidence of this is Don Quixote himself: he is presented, from the beginning, as a reader incapable of discerning truth from fiction, one who has chosen the wrong model to imitate.

Viewed in this way, Don Quixote becomes a parable of reading, with a clear tension between critical readers and uncritical readers. This is an idea I return to many times throughout the semester.

The scrutiny of the books in Don Quixote's library, then, is a detailed examination of several titles, not only of chivalric romance, but also of pastoral poetry (another popular genre of the time that we'll return to later). Some books are saved: Amadis de Gaula (seen as the original chivalric romance, therefore worth keeping); Cervantes's own Galatea (shameless self promotion from the author). Most are tossed into the patio to be burned. One book is singled out for praise: Tirante el blanco (Tirant lo blanc, a fifteenth century book, written originally in Catalan). This is the best book in the world, the Priest declares: "in it knights eat, and sleep, and die in their beds, and make a will before they die, and do everything else that all the other books of this sort leave out" (from the Edith Grossman translation). In other words, it has value because it eschews fantasy and reflects life (it is also very erotic in parts, which made for some lively class discussions when I read it as a graduate student).

So in Chapter 6 we have literary characters critiquing fiction. They are not quite critiquing the work in which they themselves appear, but they are getting perilously close to metafiction, a mode of fiction that might best be described as "self conscious." Ironically, by attempting to cure Don Quixote by burning his books, these characters inadvertently lay the groundwork for what is to follow. When Don Quixote wakes up and attempts to go into his library he finds instead a blank wall. His friends have walled it up; his niece explains that an enchanter, Frestón, has spirited his library away. From this point on, Don Quixote begins to treat Frestón as his nemesis.Ironically, in attempting to cure the knight's madness, his friends have only made it worse, for now Don Quixote has a convenient excuse every time his fantasy bumps up against inconvenient reality: Frestón did it.