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Carlos G. Fernández
Viernes, 6 de junio 2025, 00:36
Antonio Muñoz Molina's first remark about tackling a classic is that it shouldn't be seen as such: "A classic sounds intimidating, something indisputable, solid, unfriendly. Don Quixote is the opposite; it's experimental, sometimes created on the fly, a parody of chivalric books that is irreverent, comedic, with a very insolent part." A good starting point for 'The Summer of Cervantes', his new essay published by Seix Barral, which already has a long history.
In 2016, the fourth centenary of the death of the Alcalá native, Muñoz Molina had been taking handwritten notes on Don Quixote for a year. He mixed memories, reflections, and research, but decided not to rush with "the pomp of anniversaries," and the text's creation has ultimately taken a decade. It could have remained a draft, but he decided to give it the final push: "When you finally type it into the computer, as the word suggests, you start to give it some order. Due to a lack of final effort, several books I worked hard on remained unfinished." The writer has thoroughly traced Cervantes' impact on the literatures of other countries. He speaks of Flaubert and that children's edition of Don Quixote from 1828 that he saw displayed in his house museum—"his library is preserved, there are countries that preserve such things"—or of Stendhal, who could laugh for the first time after his mother's death thanks to the book, much to the monumental annoyance of his strict father.
Also Melville, Mark Twain, George Eliot—the protagonist of 'Middlemarch' is named Dorothea after Cervantes' character—, Faulkner, or "Charlotte Lennox, who published a novel with extraordinary success, 'The Female Quixote'." In it, the protagonist becomes obsessed with French romantic novels and thinks everyone around her are characters. "One of her many readers was Jane Austen, who would later write the very Quixotic 'Northanger Abbey'. The idea of emancipation through reading and imagination was very attractive to women who felt very trapped in a patriarchal world where their place was very limited." True to his style, he provides a thousand more examples.
In Spain, however, the story is different. "It's one of the great paradoxes of our culture. While Don Quixote fertilized literatures that seemed very foreign, here it remained practically ignored and bore no fruit until almost Pérez Galdós." When discussing the relevance of the text, for example in representing women, he notes: "We must keep in mind that Cervantes is a 17th-century writer, not a 21st-century one. We admire him so much that we want him to resemble us, instead of resembling his contemporaries. Many of his characters have vulgar opinions about women, but the entire novel is crossed by extraordinary female characters, and these are not speculations I make to flatter contemporary taste." He especially mentions Marcela, with her great monologue after the death of Grisóstomo, for which she is accused of not reciprocating his love: "Why must I love someone who wants me to love them? I was born free, and to live free I chose the solitude of these fields." What interests Antonio Muñoz Molina about a writer, he says, is not their opinions, but their characters.
"The greatest influence an artist can have on you is on your perspective, your way of understanding the world. What I've learned from Cervantes is universal curiosity and the feeling that one must distrust grand declarations. He is always ironic; if he starts a laudatory sentence, in the second half he makes a joke or says the opposite." For example, when everyone cries at Alonso Quijano's deathbed, "but they also laughed, because inheriting always brings joy," or when the end comes: "And then he gave up his spirit. I mean, he died."
The life of Cervantes is key to understanding, according to Muñoz Molina, his ironic, parodic, and skeptical attitude towards power. "His childhood, with that strange, deaf, and very poor father, his journey to Italy, with that more joyful and vital part where he discovers the opening of the world, participating in Lepanto, which is like being at the Normandy Landing, then spending eight months on the brink of death," and much more: "Five years imprisoned in Algiers, in another world, experiencing something inaccessible to anyone in Spain. And then here trying to make his way as a writer." All that experience, "that life of great complexity," leads him to that instinct to mock everything, "even what he loved most: literature." And this perspective is applicable to today's world. "It's a tool of humanist resistance, more relevant than ever. We must strive to maintain our humanity and our freedom of spirit. And if possible, our freedom of expression too."
Muñoz Molina mixes all this with scattered memories throughout his life. Besides following the route of Don Quixote through places like El Toboso or the windmills of Puerto Lápice, the reflection on reality and fiction—and the confusion between the two—brings back memories of youth. "We also fed on chivalric books: we watched western movies where the protagonists were knights-errant who went about doing justice."
Some took it too far, like a neighbor who once participated in the filming of 'Curro Jiménez', and later "gradually started walking the streets dressed like in the series. Then he opened a tavern and called it Curro Jiménez. The series ended and went out of fashion, and he still walked the streets dressed like that." Including those memories in the rest of the book was a challenge, a sought challenge, because "what was acting within me was like that search for what books and fiction in general do, what place they occupy in life. And that also led me to the role a book can play as a refuge in times of illness or distress, moments when you feel the strangeness of the outside world."
Again, this is not something from the past or that only happens to Don Quixote's character: "The human mind is very capable of being abducted by fiction. Deceiving the brain is very easy. And one of the things literature educates us for is to distinguish the real from the unreal. When we now see how easily people get frozen in front of screens all night, one could say what Cervantes says about Quixote reading non-stop: that he spent the nights from clear to clear and the days from cloudy to cloudy... and he forgot to live."
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