The Black/White Dichotomy

The opening chapter of Don Quixote makes such a deft and confident beginning of a novel that one might expect it to derive from well-established precedents. Yet to my mind none of those that have been adduced, more or less plausibly, go very far towards explaining its genesis. I refer, first, to the social and domestic setting in which the hero is originally presented to us. It is the tranquil, sheltered life of a fifty-year-old country hidalgo, a bachelor, who lives with a housekeeper and his niece, consuming, week after week, the same frugal diet, wearing the same clothes, pursuing the same pastimes: now a spot of hunting with nag and greyhound, now a chat with the village priest and barber on politics or literature. Contemporaries of Cervantes would have recognised the type, evoked in Antonio de Guevara's Menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea (1539) (Disparagement of Court and Praise of Country) and an early ballad by Góngora. However, the specific detail of this benignly satiric portrait, and its use as a way of contextualising the destiny of a fictional protagonist, are quite new.

The salient feature of it is the character's compulsive addiction to chivalry books, consumed day and night until they drive him mad, and making him lose all sense of the distinction, first of all between history and fiction, then between literary imitation and real doing or being. This is the impulse for his resolve to become a knight-errant and embark on the adventures to be studied in this chapter. Beyond saying that he was idle for most of the year, as most hidalgos of his class were, Cervantes does not explicitly draw a cause-andeffect relationship between his life-style and his mental condition. He does not say, for example, that he was driven mad by a combination of screaming boredom and nostalgia for the bygone military vocation of his class, still less that his retreat into fantasy was a way of sublimating an incestuous passion for his niece. It is typical of his mutely suggestive characterisation that it continually supplies hints that might prompt such hypotheses, without, however, making their consequences explicit. While there are contemporary reports or anecdotes about conditions like our hero’s, the flat, take-it-or-leaveit way in which it is introduced, together with its sheer extremity, marks it as a burlesque device.