Novels and the Sociology of the Contemporary

Arpad Szakolczai

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317222996
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

This book substantiates two claims. First, the modern world was not simply produced by "objective" factors, rooted in geographical discoveries and scientific inventions, to be traced to economic, technological or political factors, but is the outcome of social, cultural and spiritual processes. Among such factors, beyond the Protestant ethic (Max Weber), the rise of the absolutist state and its disciplinary network (Michel Foucault), or court society (Norbert Elias), a prime role is played by theatre. The modern reality is deeply theatricalized. Second, a special access for studying this theatricalized world is offered by novels. The best classical novels not simply can be interpreted as describing a world "like" the theatre, but they capture and present a world that has become thoroughly transformed into a global theatre. The theatre effectively transformed the world, and classical novels effectively analyze this "theatricalized" reality – much better than the main instruments supposedly destined to study reality, philosophy and sociology. Thus, instead of using the technique of sociology to analyze novels, the book will treat novels as a "royal road" to analyze a theatricalized reality, in order to find our way back to a genuine and meaningful life.

1 The Don Quixote Chronotope Paradoxical Paradoxes, or the Games of Cervantes

DOI: 10.4324/9781315622439-1

[In Don Quixote] everything is, at the same time, absolutely false and absolutely true; there the true, without ceasing to be true, is absolutely false, and the false, without ceasing to be false, is absolutely true.

—Pietro Citati, Il Don Chisciotte (p. 6)

Don Quixote by Cervantes is an at once evident and highly paradoxical starting point for a sociology of the contemporary through novels. It is evident, as widely considered the first modern novel, a work that can hardly be side-stepped in any study of the novel, and which is one of the most important fruits of European culture—probably the most important Spanish work of art. Yet, not simply by its content but by its very existence the novel is enshrined in a whole series of paradoxes.

To begin with, it has a major precedent in the novels of Rabelais, though these novels are usually considered mere predecessors. Thus, a central issue is to clarify, from the perspective of the central aims of this book, the relationship between Cervantes and Rabelais. Second, and in an even more striking manner, they hardly had followers for a long time. The next, ‘really’ modern novels were written only in 18th-century England, for which Don Quixote is often reduced as a precursor. This raises the problem of the connections between novels, the rise of capitalism and of the ‘public sphere’. Third, Don Quixote stands alone even within the oeuvre of Cervantes. All the other comparable giants of European culture, Dante, Shakespeare or Goethe produced a series of masterpieces and in several genres. For Cervantes, Don Quixote is something unique, way above anything else he ever created. But the greatest paradox of all is that the first novel was explicitly written against novels. What this means is not simply that Don Quixote is therefore, literally, an anti-novel, thus recalling the anti-theatrical stance of Shakespeare or the anti-philosophical philosophers of modern times (like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche or Foucault), but an even more evident paradox: how could a ‘first’ novel be immediately ‘against’ novels?

The parallels with Shakespeare are central for understanding Don Quixote at every level. Just as Shakespeare’s plays, the novel of Cervantes was very popular in its time, but this by no means implies that judgement and understanding of contemporaries can be taken as a measure. Further on, for both the romantic reception, with all its shortcomings, is indeed vital. The shortcomings are evident, as romantics glorified these works at face value, thus failed to give full attention to their ironic character—just as ‘idealist’ German philosophers failed to read the irony in Plato. Yet, Romanticism being a symptom of modernity, the parallels they perceived between their age and that of Shakespeare and Cervantes are important.

The works of Shakespeare and Cervantes are motivated by a dual recognition. First, they perceived that in their world something happened at a very fundamental level with the nature of reality. Such changes were already intuited by other giants of European culture, such as Leonardo da Vinci or Rabelais; the difference was that by 1600, they were perceptible for description and analysis. At a trivial level, this problem is contained in the a sentence of Hamlet, ‘to be or not to be’, echoed in the central underlying question of Don Quixote, ‘to be or not to be mad’, or is Don Quixote mad, or not? A few decades later this same question, in a more problematic and less enjoyable manner would become the foundational question of modern philosophy, with Descartes and the foundational confusion between thinking and doubting, the doubting of one’s own existence being so dangerously close to madness.

The second main recognition was even more significant: it was that their own activity as artists had a profound relationship, even complicity with the transformation of the real. In contrast to the illusion of modern rationalist philosophers, who desperately try to pretend that they are external to reality, autonomous and not ‘contaminated’ by it, belonging to ‘pure thought’, they recognised that they are not simply part of reality but also part and parcel of the transformation and contamination of the real. This illuminates a great paradox of modern culture: in spite of philosophy’s pretence to be the queen of knowledge, the most important modern thinkers were not philosophers but, rather, were artists, men of literature, though by no means were they literati.

Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality

Don Quixote, hero of the eponymous book, evidently has some problems with reality. At a first level, the problem is that he had read too many books of chivalry, which interfered with his sense of judgement, and thus, he lost his senses, becoming unable to differentiate between things written in such books and happening in the world outside. The novel is a critical attack against such books, making a laughing stock of poor Don Quixote.

Trivial as it is, this first level is not irrelevant for Cervantes. This is the level where most contemporaries, no doubt, were reading the novel and where children can enjoy it even in our days. It is important, as it covers the world of normal everyday life and common sense; the world most directly represented in the book by Sancho Panza. It is the level of the solid concreteness of reality—and thus this is the level where evidences (or ‘facts’) and values (or ‘norms’) coincide, as everything that exists carries the value of its own physical presence, showing itself up as a datum, a given, or literally a gift.

However, this simple model of Don Quixote being a singular fool and chivalry romances culpable for this fact suffers a dual setback at the next level. To start with, as Don Quixote itself is nothing else but a novel of adventure, it proposes an unresolvable paradox, comparable to the famous paradox of the Cretan philosopher, pronouncing at the agora that ‘all Cretans lie’. Cervantes could well have written a philosophical essay against such romances—but he decided to attack romances by another romance. He must have had his reasons—and certainly right ones, given the enormous success of his work. But we have to investigate what exactly are the reasons for such success.

This can be helped by the second aspect of this second level. If denouncing chivalry romances by a novel could help to stimulate the (self-)reflexivity of the readers, it also promotes a deeper apprehension of Don Quixote. If at the first level Don Quixote is just a distant figure, object of ridicule for readers, at the second level the distance breaks down, as one is forced to reflect on the effects of novels not simply on ‘him’ but also on ‘us’. Ridiculing the other, finding one individual who could be the object of laughter by ‘everybody’ is just a version of the sacrificial mechanism, (Szakolczai 2013a: 63–4). Don Quixote is not the only person ‘infected’ by books. His singularity is rather that through his imagination and honesty, he was capable of revealing the nature of the game.

Here we move to the third level: Don Quixote, from a mere victim, a laughing stock, becomes a hero who could reveal the effect mechanism of such books, the sacrificial mechanism itself. According to Girard, it was Christ who revealed the sacrificial mechanism, and Don Quixote was indeed identified with the figure of Christ by Unamuno.

Such parallels with Christ, though as if from the reverse, are revealed with particular clarity at the end of the book. Don Quixote enters Barcelona recalling the entry of Christ in Jerusalem on a donkey. Even further, it is the eve of the main feast of the city, the day of St John the Baptist and Midsummer Day, 24 June, thus the opposite calendar day to Christmas. A few days later, still in Barcelona, he would suffer the decisive defeat of his career, from the Knight of the White Moon, after which he would decline, return home, and soon die.

Here we reach the fourth level, as Cervantes was certainly conscious of his own powers as a writer. This means to be aware about producing effects on readers, and so to problematise such powers. Thus, instead of creating a fictional hero to be imitated, or an anti-hero to be ridiculed, he crafted a paradoxical anti-heroic hero who was both and neither—the perfect ‘hero’ for the age of printed, mass-produced and mass-read books. This hero had to die, renouncing his ‘folly’, thus ending on a note about the problematisation of novels—or on the problematic power of the novelist who wrote the story.

Finally, at the fifth level, after reviewing the ambivalences attached to the hero, the readers, and the author of the novel, we can revisit the question of ‘reality’. According to the simple common sense, the first-level books are also real, as they physically exist. But their existence is not such a simple fact because it implies that they can be read; if read, they produce an effect on the thinking and imagination of those who read them; and in this sense, they are not simply parts of reality, but they alter reality. After reading a book, we see the world differently. Indeed, what is the reason for writing a book if it is not to make people see the world differently—if only to cheer them up by a good story. But if this is so, then the question becomes the responsibility of the writer for altering the way his readers see the world—and this is one of the most frightful responsibilities.

After this first round, circling around the ‘games’ of Cervantes (Citati), we can enter more details concerning Don Quixote’s ‘paradoxical’ attitude to reality.

Reality for Don Quixote

Reality—being-in-the-world, the lived experience of real life—was more complex for Don Quixote than something to be mistaken for a scenery for romance action. It had two basic aspects, just as it has these two aspects for every human being—but these aspects, and especially their relationship, were profoundly disturbed. On one hand, day-to-day living for him was evidently utterly boring, a repetitive routine (Citati 2013: 10). On the other, his world was also deprived of proper ideas, in the Platonic sense of eidos, which could offer models for meaning—and Don Quixote longed for them (Citati 2013: 13–4). It was a strangely disconnected, already atomised world, deprived of community substance, where somebody who perceived such a lack and had a desire for something more was forced to look for ways of escape, of ‘entertainment’, in order to prevent the drying out of his spirit. Thus, Don Quixote turned to the reading of books (Citati 2013: 43).

Such a mode of experiencing the world, well before any adventure starts, clearly has a paradigmatic value. But for what kind of world?

The Reality of Don Quixote

If Don Quixote as a literary character is famous for his lack of realism, mistaking beings of the world for figures in romances, then this is further and emphatically underlined by Cervantes through presenting his protagonist as a figure of unreality—or, using a technical term, as a character of liminality, a threshold being. While through his adventures he reveals a specific character, the basic coordinates of the figure are extremely weak. He does not belong to a concrete place—in his first sentence Cervantes tells us that he has no desire of revealing it and does not even have a proper name—at the start of the book he is called by several different names, then assumes the name Quixote, even adding the title ‘Don’, for which—being a simple hidalgo—he is not qualified. Finally, at the end, when purportedly returning to his senses, he again offers a different name. All this pushed Citati to identify Don Quixote as a character who did not belong anywhere, living at the margins of reality (Citati 2013: 11).

Living on the margins also implies a failure to respect limits, of being outside any normal limits, and in particular being outside the limits of reason (Citati 2013: 42–3, 6).

The problematisation of Don Quixote’s identity is accompanied by an explicitly playful and reflexive problematisation of the identity of the author. The book is published by Cervantes, but he pretends to be editor of a manuscript, written by an obscure figure with an Arabic name, Cide Hamete Benengeli, identified as a historian, purportedly underlining the authenticity of the story. However, even here paradoxicality comes to rule, as many events were not witnessed by anyone—at one stage Sancho even remarks that all the glory of the adventures will be lost, as nobody was witnessing them (Cervantes 2000: 170), yet somehow, they got to a historian. The apparent proof of authenticity only further underlines the unreality of the story—as it is only rightful for a ‘mere’ novel.

Temporal Liminality

The all-encompassing liminality around the figure of Don Quixote is further underlined by the transitory, liminal times in which he is living, and which he again embodies, in more than one senses. That Don Quixote signals the threshold of modernity was authoritatively asserted by Michel Foucault and was seconded by Citati: ‘the modern times are born just after those of Don Quixote’ (Citati 2013: 12). Given the liminal nature of the times, it is not surprising that they are also unreal and that everything around Don Quixote is surrounded by uncertainty (Citati 2013: 45). Citati offers a striking characterisation of this epoch, inaugurated by Don Quixote at its threshold, as not simply the age in which errant knights can no longer exist but, rather, as a new age of errant knighthood, of which Don Quixote is the first representative (Citati 2013: 45–6).¹ Given his previous characterisation of the anti-heroic hero as somebody profoundly alone and estranged from the world, he could be considered as heralding the new age of atomised individualism, to be marked by Descartes and Robinson Crusoe. Just as revealing is the suggestion by Foucault, according to which Don Quixote became famous not as a knight but as hero of a book, thus advancing—beyond individualism and Robinsonade—the logic of Hollywood and telecommunication, or the ultimate theatricalisation or novelisation of the world.

This, however, is only one side of the rise of modernity, the subjective, soft, carnivalesque aspect. But the novel also brings in the other side as well, though only as an almost fleeting allusion—at a highly liminal spot. This other side concerns the doctrine of the reason of state, singled out for attention by Michel Foucault (1981) as one of the two central new discourses of the modern world—the other being the police. The doctrine was first formulated by the Italian Giovanni Botero, an exact contemporary of Cervantes and Jesuit. The single mention of the doctrine is in the first chapter of the second part, in a conversation between the priest and the barber of Don Quixote’s village. Several aspects of the context are relevant and liminal. To begin with, we are literally in between the two main parts of the book. The priest and the barber played a major role in the ending of the first part, as they transported Don Quixote home, in a cage on a cart like an animal, in order to cure him from his madness. Don Quixote, however, both at the end of part I as at the start of part II explicitly defends such books, defining the days of errant knighthood as happy days, using words describing the Golden Age in the book, in contrast to the depravity of his times—the times of reason of state. In a time when ‘men of reason’ connect reasoning to ‘reason of state’ (understood in the sense of Botero and not modern political science), then a person with integrity must chose the road of apparent madness.

Cervantes offers a series of further allusions to the rising modern world. The single most important and comprehensive diagnosis is offered at a particularly significant place of the book: at the end of chapter 29 in the second part, which contains the episode of the enchanted boat, coming just after the encounter with Mastro Pedro the puppeteer, and for Citati one of the most captivating episodes of the entire book, where ‘[t]here is no trace of unreal, invisible, chimeric and occult, as i...