To teach us how to read Don Quixote, a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break from all traditions

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead.” These are the first words of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. However, the beginning of a book is not necessarily the one that the author chose to start off the story.

One remarkable example is found in Don Quixote, which I have been rereading lately. The beginning that those who haven’t read the book remember starts with these famous words: “In a certain place of La Mancha whose name I don’t wish to recall...,” but the novel itself opens with a number of preliminary pages and a prologue. No doubt written after the novel itself was finished, the prologue to the 1604 edition of the First Part of Don Quixote prepares us for our participation in the great literary game that follows. Cervantes may have realized by then that he had not written a mere parody of novels of chivalry, as was probably his first intention, but something utterly unique, a text that defined itself in the process of its writing. To teach us how to read a text so contrary to conventional literary tradition, the prologue itself needed to break away from all traditional expectations.

By the end of the sixteenth century, the prologue was an expected part of any work of fiction. Conscious of the need to renew this “custom,” Cervantes begins by taking up the traditional authorial first person singular to address the reader. But instead of an explanatory exordium or a more or less lengthy dedication, as tradition dictates, the prologue that Cervantes produced is presented to the reader as the chronicle or confession of an elaborate lie that begins with declarations of incapacity and lack of inspiration, and ends with a string of commonplace references and apocryphal quotations.

Beginning with an excusatio propria infirmitatis, the medieval commonplace of “an excuse for the author’s infirmity,” Cervantes forces the reader to become an accomplice of the trickery, setting up a scene with three protagonists: the author (Cervantes himself, who explains that he is not the “father” but the “stepfather” of Don Quixote, since, as we later find out, the real author is an Arab scholar); the “leisurely reader,” whom Cervantes cordially addresses; and the anonymous friend of Cervantes who will ensure that the book does not appear without “the adornment of a prologue.” In the fictional exercise that Cervantes proposes as an introduction to the artifice that follows, we see the reticent step-author telling how the prologue came into being, to a reader whose expectations seem to respond (as they will respond throughout the novel) to inventions and asides that undermine and disappoint these same expectations. In this tangled web, the notion of authorship is several times distorted. To begin with, the author (Cervantes) seems to obey the authority of the reader who demands, following tradition, a prologue. To satisfy this demand, Cervantes places the authorship of the prologue in the hands of a friend who will explain the procedure to Cervantes and thus be responsible for the ensuing text. However, as everyone knows (and as is made explicit in the ninth chapter), the novel about to receive its prologue is not by the author who signs his name to it (Cervantes) but by a certain Arab writer (Cide Hamete Benengeli) who, in turn, is not the author of the text we read: this third and literal author is the anonymous translator who renders the text into Spanish for “thirty pounds of raisins and two bushels of wheat.” The prologue suggested by Cervantes’s friend is a foretold reflection of the relinquishing of the authorship of the novel yet to be read.

The grammarian Antonio de Nebrija, in his Retórica of 1515, defines the prologue or exordium as “the beginning of a speech through which the mood of the listener or judge becomes disposed and ready to listen.” Pretending to praise such classical prologues, Cervantes ridicules their pompous style, showing how, by reducing them to a formula, anybody can write one. “In a twinkling of an eye,” says Cervantes's apocryphal friend, “I’ll overcome all your difficulties and mend all the insufficiencies you say hold you back and intimidate you.”

The whole of Don Quixote can serve as an example of the friend’s recommended method. After the story of Don Quixote has been brought almost to its end, Sansón Carrasco, the pompous intellectual who believes he can cure all this madness, says that he is the Knight of the White Moon and, swearing that his lady is far more beautiful than Dulcinea, forces Don Quixote to challenge him to a duel. Don Quixote charges against his adversary, falls to the ground badly hurt and, unable to rise, hears Carrasco say that he'll admit to Dulcinea’s superior charms only if he, Don Quixote, agrees to withdraw to his house for a full year “or until such time by me decided.” The defeated Don Quixote gives his consent. A few further events take place on the following pages, further hallucinations and further enchantments, but as a result of the promise, Don Quixote returns with Sancho to his village and asks to be taken to his bed, where, one week later, he will become once again the impoverished gentleman Alonso Quijano, and “give up his spirit: I mean to say, he died.” Borges once remarked that in these plain words so far removed from the literary language of the rest of the novel, Cervantes revealed his very real sorrow at his fictional character’s death.

But there is more. The year of abeyance that Sansón Carrasco has Don Quixote promise him is, for our hero, a period of impossible time. To stop being Don Quixote for a year, or even for a moment, is to demand that time come to a halt. Don Quixote cannot simultaneously stop being himself and go on living. Don Quixote is a creation of the old gentleman’s own reading and his world, materially alive in all its brutality and violence, is something that he can only know through his activity as a reader. Nothing exists for Don Quixote that has not previously been read, or rather, nothing exists that does not begin and end in his books. Consequently, Don Quixote cannot refuse himself the acting-out of his reading, to continue the story that his life has become, to behave like a knight-in-arms. Because, as soon as Alonso Quijano stops reading his dream book, Don Quixote must die. Don Quixote’s being consists of the moments that Alonso Quijano is willing to grant him.

Don Quixote exists (as Alonso Quijano knows) between the covers of Cide Hamete’s book. For the reader, this is the only true story. This is why it isn't fortuitous that, in the last chapters of the Second Part, the characters discuss the false nature of the sequel to Don Quixote written by Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda after the success of the First Part of the adventures: there cannot be alternative versions of the true story. The maid Altisidora, who pretends to have died because of her unrequited love for the old knight, describes her descent to Hell, saying that there she saw a group of devils playing ball with books, who tear Avellaneda's apocryphal opus to bits, “a book so bad,” says one of the devils, “that if I tried to produce a worse one on purpose, I wouldn’t succeed.” Neither is it fortuitous that, when Alonso Quijano dictates his last will and testament, he instructs his executor to apologize to the apocryphal author for having provided an occasion for writing “such enormous and copious nonsense.” Implicit in this apology is that Avellaneda's book is untrue, unlike the one the reader now holds in his hands. False fiction (wasted time, untruth, fruitless lies) and true fiction (the chronicle of real things, of things as they essentially are) cannot and must not coexist. And Don Quixote, seemingly a believer in witchcraft and magic, never confuses reality and untruth. In this quest for what is true, full of rich marvels, there is for us, his readers, one moment that, though perhaps not more mysterious than many others, is certainly more bewildering and disconcerting. This is the moment in which the reader forgets Miguel de Cervantes, the author, and believes only in the reality of Don Quixote.

So thoroughly does Cervantes’s fiction absorb reality to render it “more real” that it ends up devouring its own self. In the second chapter of the Second Part, Sansón Carrasco lets Sancho know that his adventures are written in a book that Carrasco has read in Salamanca, a town famous for the seriousness of its academic publications, “under the title The Ingenious Knight Don Quixote de la Mancha.” Hearing this, Sancho crosses himself in fright; much the same reaction is that of the reader for whom, if the first part of the book he’s reading has also been read by the characters of the part he’s reading now, then he, a creature of flesh and blood, is also part of that device, that trickery, that imaginary world, a ghost among ghosts, a servant not of his own will but of another man's dreams, a man who is not dust and ashes and who once upon a time was called Miguel de Cervantes.

Cervantes was doubtless aware of the mirror he held up to his readers. Toward the end of the Second Part, a scholarly canon tells Don Quixote that he cannot understand how certain books can delight without teaching, unless they are nothing but beautiful. For the canon, “delight conceived in the soul must be that of loveliness and balance seen or observed in things that sight or imagination bring forward; since anything that carries in itself ugliness or imperfection can produce no contentment whatsoever.” The world of which the canon approves is that of perfect sterility, meaningless beauty, vacuous creations, and produces nothing but a state of suspended being in which there is no responsibility and no distress. To this existence without depth and without limits with which society shrouds the real passing of time, Don Quixote opposes a time of ethical action, a time in which every act has its consequences, good or evil, just or unjust. Instead of a vast and anonymous magma in which we exist unconsciously, Don Quixote proposes a time in which we are alive and fertile, in which our consciousness works toward rendering us more fully in our own image, becoming whoever it is the canon’s time prevents us from knowing. In this time, in this truly real time, we must live, Don Quixote says, “undoing all manner of wrongs, and placing ourselves in situations and dangers which, once overcome, will grant us eternal renown and fame.” This is the great ironic truth: that individual freedom, a freedom necessary to act according to one’s personal ethics, condemns the individual to an essential, irrepressible solitude, which is our common lot.