The Joke and Its Cost
Don Quixote believes that the world is organized according to the categories of chivalric romance: that knights exist to defend the helpless, that vows of honor bind absolutely, that giants and enchanters are loose in the countryside and require opposing. Everyone around him – innkeepers, barbers, dukes, his own squire at the novel's outset – knows this is not how the world works, and the novel's comedy is generated, again and again, by the collision between Quixote's categories and theirs.
The joke, on a first reading, is entirely at Quixote's expense: a man who mistakes windmills for giants, sheep for armies, and an innkeeper's daughter for a captive princess is a man whose grip on reality has failed. Cervantes wrote the novel as a parody of chivalric romances that had, in his view, filled too many heads with exactly this kind of nonsense. The joke is supposed to land on Quixote, and for long stretches of the novel, it does.
What Don Quixote Reveals
And yet the novel does not stay there. As Don Quixote proceeds, particularly in Part II, the joke begins to acquire a second layer that the first layer cannot account for. Quixote's specific delusions – the windmills, the sheep – remain delusions, and the novel never asks the reader to believe otherwise. But the categories underneath those delusions – that the weak deserve defense, that promises bind, that there is such a thing as a wrong that ought to be righted – are categories the novel does not parody. Quixote is wrong about the facts on the ground with startling, comic regularity. He is not obviously wrong about what would matter if the facts were different.
The other characters, who see the world accurately and act accordingly, are not thereby shown to be admirable. Many of them are petty, cruel, or indifferent in ways the novel registers without sympathy. Sancho Panza, Quixote's practical squire, comes by the novel's end to love and defend the madman he initially followed for profit – not because Sancho has come to believe in giants, but because something in Quixote's commitment to a world organized by honor and justice, however misapplied, has proven more durable and more humanly valuable than the cynical accuracy of everyone who saw the windmills correctly from the start.
Genesis 3 and the World That Stopped Believing
Genesis 3 narrates the moment at which the categories of obligation, judgment, and consequence – categories the man and the woman had previously inhabited without needing to argue for them – become, for the first time, things to be evaded, denied, and blamed onto others. The fig leaves and the hiding are not merely physical actions; they are the first instance of a world in which the old categories are still real, still operative, still the terms on which the story proceeds, even as the characters within the story begin acting as though they might not be.
Cervantes's Spain, and Cervantes's novel, stage a later version of the same gap. The world of innkeepers and dukes operates as though honor, vows, and the defense of the wronged were quaint fictions left over from an earlier age – a revolutionary verdict on the old categories, treating them as obsolete conventions to be discarded rather than as a description of how things actually stand. Don Quixote is funny because Quixote acts as though the old categories were still binding in a world that has quietly decided they are not. The novel is something more than funny because it cannot, finally, agree with that world's verdict: it keeps presenting Quixote's commitments, however absurdly applied, as more valuable than the accurate cynicism that surrounds him. That valuation is not something the novel's "accurate" world can generate from its own resources. It is borrowed from the categories Quixote, alone among the novel's characters, still takes at face value – categories whose ultimate ground, Genesis 3:15 insists, was never human chivalry to begin with, but a promise made in the same scene where the old categories were first put in doubt.