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of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old

buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursinghides as
much as it reveals about the identity of the protagonist, Alonso
Quijano, which might be a comment on the veil certain noblemen in the early seventeenth century used in order not to
attract undue attention from the authorities: silence as a shield
to protect privacy. I also discuss the role of Muslim culture in
Cervantess time and his provocative use of a fictional Arab historian to joke about the twisted origins of Iberian ancestry.
At one point, seeking to map Cervantess affinities, I reduce
the novel to a set of basic numbers: how many letters it contains, how many and what types of words. This allows me to
consider the overall reach of Cervantess lexicon. In line with
Sigmund Freud, I ask if it might be possible to diagnose Alonso
Quijanos illness from a psychiatric perspective. Is he schizophrenic or manic-depressive? I discuss the way Don Quixote
and Sancho Panza are shaped as an odd couple; the ghost-like
role played by Dulcinea del Toboso; the novels parody on chivalry; the mechanics of its famous first line; and the metafictional aspects overall that are built like Russian nesting dolls,
one story within another story, and so on. In this regard I analyze how, along with a handful of other representative European works from the end of the fifteenth century, El Quijote
is seen as an engine of the Enlightenment. I also talk about
the route Don Quixote and Sancho take, physical and spiritual,
and the creation of Barataria, the island Sancho is made governor of, as a conduit for Cervantess observations about the
Spanish incursion into the New World. And I talk about the
adjective quijotesco, which has become an essential component
of the Hispanic worldview.

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Section Two, The World, follows the vertiginous speed at

which El Quijote became larger than life, a platform of arrival
and departure, a center of gravity for all Western literature
the universe bounded in a nutshell, its readers counting
themselves kings of infinite space. I use the military defeat
Spain suffered against the British in 1588, almost two decades
before Cervantes wrote the First Part, to explore the theme of
loss for Spain of its colonies across the Atlantic Ocean, which
El Quijote, for better or worse, has come to represent. I begin
this section with a disquisition on how Cervantess book gave
rise to an ideology known as Quijotismo and how that ideology
played out during various historical periods in Spanish history,
especiallythrough the works of Unamuno and Jos Ortega
y Gassetat the end of the nineteenth century during the
Spanish-American War of 1898, when the country ceded control of its satellites in the Caribbean Basin and the Philippines.
The novel then inspired a series of homages in the Hispanic
world, direct or otherwise, that culminated in what came to be
known as Menardismo, the capacity to be creative in a landscape
defined by unoriginality. In Latin America, it is a book for all
seasons, which means everyone finds in it what theyre looking
for, even if that find is apocryphal. For instance, a defiant line
from itLadran, Sancho, seal que cabalgamos, They are barking, Sancho, proof that were still riding forwardhas often
been quoted by politicians like Eva Pern and Hugo Chvez,
as well as writers and artists, even though it is nowhere to be
found in the novel.
The second section of this book then moves to an even larger
stage. Quantitatively, the number of adaptations of El Quijote
in literature, chess sets, and so on is endless. I first focus on

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the elements that unite Cervantes and Shakespeare, the two

giants of the European Renaissance. I explore the way German
Romantics, such as Goethe and Richard Strauss, idealized the
story, and I address the countless ways the novel, as a popular icon in mass culture, inspired lithographers like Gustave
Dor and Expressionist painters like Picasso. I then reflect on
its adaptations into music, opera, theater, film, and even video
games. I compare El Quijote to Gustave Flauberts Madame
Bovary, talk about Fyodor Dostoyevskys infatuation with the
novel, and discuss Franz Kafkas famous parable in which
Sancho is the actual creator of Don Quixote, as well as Jorge
Luis Borgess influential short story, Pierre Menard, Author of
the Quixote, in which a nineteenth-century French Symbolist
attempts to rewritenot copy but rewriteCervantess novel.
I meditate on the vicissitudes of El Quijote in translation,
concentrating on the knight-errants adventures in English,
a language in which there are more than twenty full-fledged
renditions, some of which I compare and contrast. And I pay
special attention to the novels reception in the United States,
from the Founding Fathers to William Cullen Bryant and
James Russell Lowell, from Herman Melville to Mark Twain,
from John Steinbeck to Susan Sontag. I talk about the Broadway musical Man of La Mancha, especially about its theme song,
The Impossible Dream, and even discuss an episode of The
Muppet Show.
There are travel agencies making their livelihood on El Quijote, as is a supermarket chain in Japan. Academic conferences
have been devoted to a single word from the novel, cookbooks
and clothing lines have been inspired by it, and political parties
have built their gravitas on the knight-errants resilience. Along

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the way, I discuss Manuel de Falla, Mara Amparo Ruiz de Burton and Gyrgy Lukcs, Georg Philipp Telemann and Michel
Foucault, Erasmus of Rotterdam and George Balanchine, and
Jos Guadalupe Posada.
In spite of the collection of Quixotalia I have amassed
through the years, this overabundance of novel-related stuff
still seems rather implausible to me. Even more implausible is
that Cervantes wasnt far from his death when he completed
the books final scene. That is, he could have died without finishing it, which means we would have been left without the
source from which we drink every day. And yet, he managed to
make Alonso Quijano repent his sins, refute his lifelong delusions of chivalric grandeur, and die peacefully in his own bed.
The history of how El Quijote became an international sensation is also the history of how Western civilization came to
terms with its artistic vision. This book, then, is an invitation
to engage in cultural history that traces El Quijotes path from
the surprising success it became in early-seventeenth-century
Spain to the global moneymaking machine it is now. My purpose is to explain how Cervantes, a second-rate poet and dramaturge of modest esteem, became, along with his contemporaries
Shakespeare and Montaigne, the unlikely father of modernity.
El Quijote makes me proud of having been born into the
Spanish language. In fact, I am convinced that the Spanish
language exists in order for this magisterial novel to inhabit
it. Hispanic civilizationits people, its culture, its politics
would not be what it is without El Quijote. Simultaneously, I
counterargue that, against common perceptions, classics have
no nationality. As the reader will find out, these two statements are not incompatible.

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