Don Quixote Post

The Early Novel in the Western World

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Early Western literature, especially the picaresque tale, flourished in Spain. These often quite long stories narrated the adventures of a soldier of fortune living the carefree life on the open road and getting involved in all sorts of intrigues and love affairs. The Spanish also had tales similar to the King Arthur legends, dealing with the adventures on the road of brave and dashing knights who were superheroes; tremendous in battle and noble and chivalrous toward their true loves.

The first known major novelist of the Western world was Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616), whose life span closely parallels Shakespeare’s. His Don Quixote (written between 1612 and 1615) remains one of the most popular and beloved of all novels. The central character is an old man who has read so many stories of brave knights that he has gone mad and believes himself to be one of them. Riding a broken-down old horse named Rocinante and attended by his faithful squire Sancho Panza, he goes off in search of glorious adventure (Figure 4.1). Intended originally as a satire on the ridiculous excesses of the wandering knight story, Don Quixote became, in the opinion of many, a tragic tale of an idealist who sees the world not as it is but as it ought to be: a world in which people are driven by the noblest of motives, chivalry prevails, and love means forever. As an adventure story, Don Quixote influenced the work of many novelists who followed, setting the pattern for long, loosely structured yarns that would find a home in the magazine serials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The serial was a publishing gimmick, each episode ending with the hero or heroine in a perilous strait, and thus keeping the reader coming back to purchase more issues.

The English novel had its true beginnings in the eighteenth century. The coming of the magazine fostered a passion for fiction that had potential novelists busily scribbling. But the period was also one of a passion for science and its search for truth. Those who dictated the taste of the reading public insisted that a lengthy published work, to be worth the time spent in reading it, must at least pretend to be a true story. Consequently, much fiction was passed off as biography or autobiography, and this meant that the author’s real name was often omitted. For example, Gulliver’s Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift and Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe, two enduringly popular works of fiction, pretended to be nonfictional accounts of actual adventures, and Pamela: Virtue Rewarded (1740), by Samuel Richardson was an epistolary novel, consisting solely of letters “written” by its 15-year-old heroine.

American writers were slow to gain recognition and respect abroad. In the early nineteenth century, British critics were asking, “Who reads an American book or goes to see an American play?” These questions incurred the wrath of American authors, who promptly responded in a variety of ways. There was Washington Irving (1783–1859) and his satiric novel masquerading as nonfiction, A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), which took an irreverent swing at Thomas Jefferson’s democratic ideology. Irving became the first American writer to win the long-awaited praise from abroad.