In a well-crafted 400 word mini-essay, and drawing on the discussion in the lesson notes, explore the metaphorical and analogical dimensions of the story told by Sancho to Quixote in Chapter 20. This assignment is deliberately open-ended. It challenges your interpretive powers and creative thinking. How does Sancho’s story relate to the episode of the misrecognition of the hammering sound? How does it relate to the general theme of tensions between fact and fiction? Or you might, for example, see an analogy between Sancho and Cervantes (telling their audience a story), and Quixote and the reader (you).
L
Introduction
The Adventures of Don Quixote, published in two parts in 1605 and 1615, is, after the Bible, the world’s most read and most translated book. The book tells the story of one Alonso Quijano who, after lapsing into a kind of madness occasioned by his obsession with reading books of chivalry, knight’s himself with the name Don Quixote, and travels the Spanish countryside on his worn out horse Rocinante, in search of chivalrous adventure, accompanied by his down to earth, reasonable and commonsensical sidekick Sancho Panza. The book is a collection of tales recounting their wanderings and adventures. We will restrict our reading to a single chapter, chapter 20.
Don Quixote is typically considered the first of a new genre, the novel; historically, its appearance coincides with the beginnings of modernity; and its central theme—the tension between appearance and reality, fiction and fact has served as a metaphor for religious life in modernity.
You should now read Chapter 20:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/996/996-h/996-h.htm#ch20
Chapter 20 – Thirst and Stories
“The night was, as has been said, dark…. to all which might be added their ignorance as to where they were.”
Summary: Teased by the thought that some water might lay ahead, the two make their way in the dark across a meadow. They hear roaring water, by also a loud banging noise which frightens Sancho and even causes Quixote some agitation. But Quixote rises to the occasion, and decides to meet this new unknown danger head-on, in the dark. Sancho, unable to dissuade him, ties together Rocinante’s legs. Worried that Quixote will set-off on foot, Sancho grasp hold of his leg, and tells Quixote a story to occupy him, a story about a goat shepherd and a shepherdess. Sancho botches the story, and Quixote gives him a bit of biting sarcasm. Sancho really has to relieve himself, and does so, on the ground right where he is standing, still holding firmly to Quixote’s thigh. Quixote complains that Sancho has become a bit too informal with his master. Morning arrives, Sancho pulls his pants up, unties the horse and they discover that the fearful sound was a type of hydraulic hammer used to beat cloth. The two have a good laugh, and Sancho mocks Quixote by imitating his grandiose speech from the night before. Quixote whacks him with his lance, and again comments on Sancho’s informal style.
On the surface, it isn’t clear that Don Quixote has much at all to do with “the sacred.” What, after all, does this little episode of Chapter 20 have to say about religion?
The reason we have read Chapter 20 of the Quixote is that it exemplifies the analogical and metaphorical qualities of the book that have enchanted readers and critics for centuries. The book is a commentary on that sea-change in attitudes, values, beliefs, technology, society called modernity.
In Chapter 20 we read: “Friend Sancho, know that I by Heaven’s will have been born in this our iron age to revive in it the age of gold, or the golden as it is called; I am he for whom perils, mighty achievements, and valiant deeds are reserved; I am, I say again, he who is to revive the Knights of the Round Table…”
An overarching theme of Don Quixote is that Quixote thinks he is living in an age of decline (a sentiment shared by Cervantes’ contemporaries, to say nothing of those generations that followed Cervantes) and that it is his task to revive this lost, golden age.
This theme (cultural decline, questing for something of value) is what made and continues to make the Quixote a powerful story.
When first published, readers typically laughed at the exploits and ideals of Quixote. But as the decades and centuries wore on, critics and artists started to perceive the figure of Don Quixote in a new way, and the story came to be seen by many as an analogy for religious life in the modern world. Quixote’s search for the lost golden age of chivalry and romance became a paradigm for religious questing and faith in an age in which religion was under attack and in decline.
Eric Ziolkowski, in his The Sanctification of Don Quixote: From Hidalgo to Priest, explores how the story was read and adapted across several centuries in the modern west. Ziolkowski shows that there exists in western literature since Cervantes an ongoing encounter with the figure of Quixote, an encounter that has served to “sanctify” the quixotic as an indispensable element of modern religious thought.
The Quixote, in other words, has been read analogically and metaphorically as a reflecting the trajectory of modernity with respect to religious and spiritual questions.
A metaphor uses one thing to depict or represent another. Metaphor is a way of thinking through the making of comparisons. Some scholars argue that human thought is, at its most basic level, founded on metaphor.
When Shakespeare writes that “All the world’s a stage,” he is using metaphor, compelling us to perceive our life as if it were a kind of drama; life as drama is Shakespeare’s overarching metaphor.
Cervantes compels us to think of life as an adventurous journey.
An analogy is an extended metaphor. Analogy uses one situation or scene, generally fairly well-known or familiar, as the vehicle to understand something less well-known, or to reveal something beneath the surface of what we think we know. Analogy shows similarities between things or situations that might at first glance seem quite different.
Don Quixote is a large, intricate, detailed work of metaphor and analogy.
That Sancho and Quixote are so often hungry and thirsty, as in this chapter, for example, takes on a metaphorical quality: Quixote is not simply literally thirsty, but seeking spiritual values that can quench his thirst. Hunger and thirst are metaphors for life in an age emptied of foundational values and beliefs.
Quixote says to Sancho: “Thou dost mark well, faithful and trusty squire, the gloom of this night, its strange silence, the dull confused murmur of those trees, the awful sound of that water in quest of which we came, that seems as though it were precipitating and dashing itself down from the lofty mountains of the Moon, and that incessant hammering that wounds and pains our ears; which things all together and each of itself are enough to instil fear, dread, and dismay into the breast of Mars himself, much more into one not used to hazards and adventures of the kind.”
Such passage in the Quixote (and there are countless numbers of them) have been received by readers as a commentary on an age in which faith and values are being eroded, a cultural sea-change that brings with it a sense of the “the gloom of this night.” “Night” here means “this age” or “this era.”
It is an era of strange silence – No one speaks to us from outside of us; we listen for the voice of God, but hear nothing.
The wind (a symbol of the spirit) can only produce a dull, confused murmur.
Water, a powerful and central Christian symbol of life, must be sought out (and can’t simply be accessed through, say, communion) and, when it is encountered, produces an “awful sound.”
There is an “incessant hammering” – the pace and direction of mechanized life; the hydraulic hammers are symbolic of the technological control and mastery of nature.
All of this is enough to “instill fear, dread and dismay into the breast of Mars” – so imagine what this gloomy, confused world does to us mere mortals.
So, while many readers were laughing at the exploits of Don Quixote, others, with ears to hear what he was saying, read in the book a compelling, insightful awareness of the spirit of the modern age. Once you begin to read the Quixote with a metaphorical, symbolic, analogical frame of mind, the work leads you into worlds of potential meaning and even mystery.
Another example: Sancho, representing reasonableness, down-to-earth, middle class sensibilities, binds Quixote so he can’t pursue his adventure. Reason binds spirit.
Another example: After they discover that the fulling-hammers are the source of the mysterious noise that spurred Quixote to adventure, Sancho thinks it a funny story. Funny, yes, replies Quixote, but not one that should be told to others. “I do not deny,” said Don Quixote, “that what happened to us may be worth laughing at, but it is not worth making a story about, for it is not everyone that is shrewd enough to hit the right point of a thing.” A different translation of this passage reads: “But it is not worth telling, for not everyone is sufficiently intelligent to be able to see things from the right point of view.”
Not everyone, in other words, is capable of understanding Quixote’s seeking of adventure. The desire that drives Quixote might be taken simply and merely as madness.
In the discussion post for this lesson, you are asked to think about the symbolic, metaphorical and analogical meanings of Sancho’s story.