Don Quixote, Irony and the Head of Orpheus

One of my favorite passages from Don Quixote takes place in the Sierra Morena: Quixote leaps across the rocks, imitating those knights, like Amadis and Orlando, who, driven mad by jealousy, indulged in the most insane acts. Sancho asks him why he behaved so unnecessarily, given that he has no reason to feel despised by his Dulcinea. To which Quixote replies: "That is the point, and the subtlety of my business: for a knight errant to go mad for a cause has neither honor nor grace: the trick is to be mad without cause."

This "unreasonable madness" is the key to Cervantes's book. The dictionary defines "madness" as "madness, absurdity, or error." But in Cervantes, it has a very different meaning. Like the absurd gestures of a Zen master, Don Quixote's madness has the power to momentarily suspend the reality principle. Its function is to open a breach in logic and lead us to the profound and immediate understanding of a new truth. Therefore, between the two models that confront him in the Sierra Morena, that of Amadis and that of Orlando, Don Quixote unhesitatingly chooses the former: Orlando, distraught by Angelica's betrayal, alters the course of rivers, devastates forests, and annihilates livestock; while Amadis commits "madness not of harm, but of tears and feelings." This is the path of Don Quixote, for whom adventure never implies a rupture with reality, but rather its exaltation. Therefore, it is inseparable from the joy that comes from conceiving things not in terms of true or false, but of epiphany. Folly is a condition of paradise, for it makes the world a place of possibility.

It has nothing to do with madness. Madness is not taking others into account, and few heroes took them as seriously as Don Quixote. The great lesson of his adventures is that a world without justice is worthless; but neither is a world without mercy, which is nothing more than that second chance we give things so they can finally be what they can be. Don Quixote is the knight of this second chance, and that is why there are few heroes more talkative than he, for this second chance is always played out in language. To the point that one could say he does everything motivated by his desire to never stop talking, and that speech itself—always finding things to say and someone to say them to—is his reason for being a knight. So, alongside these names he so deservedly assumes—Knight of the Sad Countenance, Knight of the Lions—he might more appropriately have called himself the Knight of the Word.

But he also offers his body, the body rejected by the woman he loved most: he loses spears, shields, helmets, pieces of armor, and is struck and wounded countless times. Few characters in the history of literature have left such a trail, to the point that we could almost say there is no adventure he embarks on without leaving something of himself. In other words, he doesn't just talk. When his turn comes, he pays the price. And this is the irony: the knight who makes mistake after mistake is also the one who ultimately reveals, with his words and actions, all that is unspeakable, noble, and beautiful within us.

Irony, for Cervantes, is the ability to accept life's contradictions; to accept, in short, that nothing exists in just one way. That's why Don Quixote never tires of asking. He asks filthy innkeepers to be courteous hosts; poor maids to be mysterious and sweet; the arid and barren fields of La Mancha to return to the Golden Age, and for a barber's chamber pot to be transformed into a golden helmet. His strength always stems from the belief that the world is much better than it is, as if only by ignoring the true nature of things can we transform them into what they should have been.

In a way, Don Quixote is like Orpheus, who, thanks to his song, makes rivers stop, branches bend before him, and animals forget to graze. Orpheus will be torn apart by the Bacchantes, and the myth tells us how his head continues to sing as it is swept away by the waters. Neither Don Quixote nor Orpheus ceases to pray, for they love life so absorbingly that they cannot help but rebel against the incompleteness of their own experience. Quixote wants to transform the world into a beautiful book full of adventures, and Orpheus, with his song, wishes to invent a new language that will make it livable. In hindsight, this is exactly what a reader does: he performs that supreme act of praying that is reading, driven by nostalgia for an impossible totality. He reads to deny the truth that life is meaningless and because he does not want things like kindness, love, and forgiveness to cease to exist in the world.

And in this, readers are no different from children. They also never tire of asking : they see a mirror and ask for a door to another world; they see a tramp and want to receive from him a map of a lost island; a bird flies through the window and they ask for news of the garden where the birds talk and the trees sing; they go to the butcher's and stop before the heads of the sacrificed lambs as if they were whispering their sad story to them. It's not that they're searching for things; they find them without realizing it. Because it's not about expecting books to give us decisive truths about life, but about reading them without knowing what we're hoping for, if anything at all. That's why good books are useless. They don't help us understand the world, they don't make us wiser; but they plunge us into that Cervant-like state of perplexity.

We arrive at books like magical islands, not because someone takes us by the hand, but simply because they come our way. Reading is, like loving, arriving unexpectedly at a new place. A place that, like a lost island, we didn't know existed and where we can't predict what awaits us. A place we must enter silently, with our eyes wide open, like children do when they enter an abandoned house.

And, at this point, Don Quixote always lends a helping hand. He teaches us that there are two kinds of liars: those who disguise themselves to muzzle the truth and those who do so to follow it wherever it leads. The masked figures in films and comics we adored as children belonged to the second type. They pretended to be others and, thanks to this new identity, rebelled against injustice, brought joy to the sad, and offered their new bodies to their beloved. Don Quixote, the Knight of the Word, is one of these masked figures whose madness has the power to give wings to the truth.