At first literature dealt with gods, and they had no money problems. Then there were godlike heroes who simply took what they wanted and filled their ships with slaves and booty. There follow several centuries filled mostly with the lives of saints and hermits, to whom worldly goods were of no interest.
With the medieval literature of chivalry a new kind of hero arrived, the high-minded knight whose attention was fastened on the glory of dying in battle for an ideal. No room for humdrum daily concerns here.
Then about halfway through the sixteenth century, at the height of the humanist Renaissance, appeared a ragged hungry boy called Lazarillo de Tormes guiding his blind master along the roads and through the towns of Castille. Two features of this anonymous tale were new and remarkable. First, the narrative was told in the first person. Second, not only did the hero, or rather anti-hero, have no money, but not having it was a real problem for him.
…Into this world, in 1547, was born Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra…
Happy 400th birthday-year, Don Quixote!
One of my favorite bits: The Curate and the Licentiate go through the Don’s books to get rid of the “novels of chivalry” (in this case, read “fantasy novels”, since a whole lot of them contained fantastic tropes and themes…) that are thought to have made the Knight of the Doleful Countenance mad. There is trenchant analysis, volume by volume, with no mercy shown to poor spinoffs, long-winded prose, or slipshod translations. There is also a brief ironic self-reference, one that makes me wonder if the author has had a brush or two with complaints about “sequelitis” —
“That Cervantes has been for many years a great friend of mine, and to my knowledge he has had more experience in reverses than in verses. His book has some good invention in it, it presents us with something but brings nothing to a conclusion: we must wait for the Second Part it promises: perhaps with amendment it may succeed in winning the full measure of grace that is now denied it…”
What a work. And (as happens occasionally) the thought comes up. How many of our novels will still be readable four hundred years from now? Or even be remembered…?
