Inspiring Older Readers
The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World by William Egginton
William Egginton sets out his stall in the very first sentences of his introduction:
“Something strange happened in the winter of 1605. At the heart of the world’s most powerful empire, in a time of economic decline and political stagnation, word started spreading about, of all things, a book. The dealers quickly sold out; those who could read passed increasingly threadbare copies from hand to hand; and those who could not read began to congregate in inns, village squares, and taverns to hear the pages read aloud.”
And from this point on we know what we’re dealing with here – it’s the anatomy or biography of a book, Don Quixote, and only by association something of a biography of its author, Cervantes. And, for me, this is what makes the book a little gem.
Egginton’s central thesis isn’t, I don’t think, one that rewrites our understanding of the book – plenty of other critics have cited Don Quixote as a defining work ( indeed, as the very first work) of fiction. How the novel form evolved is a complex story and is a study in its own right but I like the way in which Egginton has gone about building his case for Don Quixote’s pivotal role in this process by locating the book in its social and political circumstances and by seeking to show that the book’s author was uniquely placed to produce this work of art at that precise moment in time.
But, of course, Cervantes himself comes out of this as a really fascinating individual in his own right. His background was as a soldier fighting for Spain against the insurgent Ottoman Empire and Don Quixote is the product of a man who has, literally, been through the wars. By the time his book is published he’s a “crippled, graying, almost toothless veteran” but he’s also learned to be a humanist and a subversive – and these are very much the qualities he brings to his writing and imbues in his unlikely heroes, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.
The story of an old man so deluded by his love for chivalric romance literature that he imagines himself a knight errant and the loyal companionship of his stolid, realist, squat working class side-kick sounds like a recipe for rather brutal satire or even broad farce but that’s not at all what Cervantes is interested in. Instead, as Daniel Hahn notes in his review of this book in The Guardian:
“As a writer, Cervantes treats his struggling characters with kindness and understanding rather than mockery, because they have been animated by his own sometimes traumatic life experiences. He often draws most fully those suffering misfortune, and he does so with sympathy and concern for their inner lives, the conflicts in their intents and desires.”
It is these qualities in Cervantes that Egginton argues lifts Don Quixote out of the ordinary and gives it an animating spirit that we can recognise as essentially ‘modern’ and which qualifies the book for the accolade of being the first real novel in the way we have come to understand that label.
This is a scholarly book but it’s also an approachable and readable one for the lay audience who might not consider themselves to be literary academics. I found it fascinating and it gave me new impetus to have another go at Don Quixote – a book I must have started two or three times and found myself putting down and drifting away from after the first 100 pages or so.
I want to leave the final observation with Egginton himself because it seems to me he captures the essence of Cervantes and his creation:
“His writing conveyed neither flights of fancy nor the impressive portrayal of reality: instead, in a crescendo of vivid characters able to connect with readers across chasms of culture and time, it revealed the achingly tragic and yet mordantly funny battle to the death between reality and our immortal desire to transcend it.”
Terry Potter
May 2019