Don Quixote: A Manual for Madness

Cervantes’s Don Quixote is about a man who engineers his own reality. Inspired by his excessive reading, Alonso Quixano wakes up one day and decides to become a character in his very own tale of chivalry. He creates a makeshift suit of armor, mounts his pony, and declares himself Don Quixote de La Mancha. He became, in the words of his critics, a ‘living anachronism’, a ‘madman’, and the laughing stock of Cervantes’s satire.

Others, however, have idealized Don Quixote. The Romantics, for instance, ‘see Quixote as hero, not fool; decline to read the book primarily as satire; and find in the work a metaphysical or visionary attitude regarding the Don’s quest’ (Bloom). He is, according to this interpretation, one of the most ‘gloriously irrational characters’ in all of world literature (Schmidt). It’s not that he’s not mad (few people could convincingly make that argument); it’s that he is undeterred by social pressure. His madness is ‘a refusal to accept what Freud called “reality testing,” or the reality principle’ (Bloom). The German philosopher, Schelling, once said that the theme of the novel, ‘is the Real in conflict with the ideal’. As with William Blake’s ‘two-fold vision’, Don Quixote ‘sees what we see, yet he sees something else also’. At the start of his adventure, reality begins to contradict his fantasy, but he ignores this grayscale reality and, through ‘sheer will’, sticks…