Half a billion copies
On the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, William Egginton, professor of humanities and of Germanic and Romance languages and literatures at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, has published a very important essay: The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushred in the Modern World (The man who invented the novel: how Cervantes ushered in the modern world), Bloomsbury, 2016.
This book is important not so much because it deals with one of the greatest writers of all time, but also because it explores how in Cervantes' poetics and action there are all the prodromes of the modern writer and his relationship with the target audience. the readers. Cervantes is right at the watershed between one era and another as we are today with the entry of technology into the world of production and dissemination of culture and ideas. Nor is it secondary that, according to some sources, Cervantes' masterpiece is the greatest bestseller of all time, excluding sacred texts. It is calculated, many say downwards, that it has sold over 500 million copies. A record that no modern writer in a totally literate society has managed to match. This is why Don Quixote can truly be a case study for a business school.
Egginton outlined the highlights of his work on Cervantes in an article published in the Financial Times weekend supplement. Below we publish the article in the Italian translation by Ilaria Amurri.
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Don Quixote instant bestseller
Four centuries after Cervantes' death we can consider his novel as a response to a media revolution that partially mirrors the current one.
In January 1605, a veteran of the Spanish war against the Ottoman Empire published a completely unusual book. Unlike the "bestsellers" of the time, it was not a chivalric or picaresque novel, nor a pastoral drama, but told the story of a gentleman so obsessed with this genre of books, especially those about knights errant and the their fantastic adventures, who loses his mind and begins to think that those stories are real.
From the start, The Ingenious Citizen Don Quixote de la Mancha was a roaring success. Miguel de Cervantes' book was in such demand that within months it was sold out throughout the Iberian Peninsula, and publishers immediately began preparing the second edition. Even a few pirated versions came out, two in London and two in Valencia and Zaragoza, meanwhile entire parcels of volumes were loaded onto the galleons setting sail for the new world. By June the two protagonists had become real icons, their effigies were exhibited in royal and popular parades and celebrations.
Don Quixote would go on to become perhaps the most published work of literature in history, and its influence on literature has been unparalleled. When in 2002 the Norwegian Nobel Institute selected 100 authors to elect the most significant work, the victory was overwhelming, no other book was comparable to Don Quixote.
An author aware of the target audience
While Cervantes might have been surprised by the novel's success, he was certainly aware of the innovativeness of his style. In the preface he composed for the collection Exemplary novels, which he published eight years after Don Quixote, he proudly defended his originality, stating that "the many novels that have been published in this [Castillian] language are all translated from foreign languages, while these are mine, not imitated or stolen; my ingenuity generated them, my pen gave birth to them and now they are growing in the arms of the press”.
Here we can observe Cervantes' break with the old Aristotelian categories of poetry and history, in which all literary texts were placed. Fantastic, in the sense that they were solely the fruit of his imagination and therefore a vehicle of universal and philosophical truths, his stories also wanted to be pertinent to the readers' lives: they aspired to the firmament of high literature, but claimed a widely popular territory.
“I have given them the name of 'exemplaries'”, writes Cervantes regarding the 12 short stories, “and in fact, if you look carefully, you will see that there is not even one from which a useful example cannot be drawn”. To understand this example, to bring to light "the mystery they enclose and from which they arise" the public would have been forced to approach these stories in a new way, not only as an external judge of an image of the world as pleasant as it is illusory, but as an "attentive reader", aware of how his prejudices contribute to creating that same vision of reality.
The answer to media innovation
Today, 400 years after his death, Cervantes is deservedly celebrated as the inventor of the modern novel. However, it is rarely appreciated that his innovations have represented a response to a media revolution that in some ways mirrors the one we are experiencing today. Don Quixote was published at a time when printing was booming, literacy had exploded over the past hundred years and now extended beyond the clergy and nobility, reaching many commoners, the city bourgeoisie, but also merchants and farmers.
In Cervantes' novel, the presence and influence of literature emerge from the very first pages: not only is it the apparent cause of Don Quixote's madness, but it soon becomes the subject of the comments of most of the characters, regardless of their situation. For example, as Don Quixote is being taken home after his first unfortunate outing, the governess says: “Me sventurata! I understand, and this is as true as that I was born to die, that these accursed books of chivalrous things which he has and which he so usually reads have turned his brain inside out.'
Then there was the theatre, which held a hold in Renaissance Europe comparable to that of television and cinema today. By the early 90th century, in rapidly expanding urban centers across the continent, up to XNUMX% of the population had experienced going to the theater, and tickets were sold for all walks of life.
Books and theatrical productions, heavily controlled and often financed by the monarchy and its hardline police, the Inquisition, tended to define extremely precisely what was right and desirable for a Spanish citizen.
Honor could kiss all men, as long as there was not the slightest trace of suspicion about the religious purity of their lineage or the chastity of their women, an insidious ideology that devoured the whole of society in almost inverse proportion to the control it held. crown was able to exercise on his subjects, on the economy of the state and on foreign policy conflicts.
The disillusionment with the society of his time
Cervantes was obsessed with this dominant ideology, as his stories show. His entire literary production is aimed at reflecting on a historical period in which new forms of communication allowed anyone to have access to multiple and often conflicting representations of reality. At the same time, however, he was deeply skeptical of the reality that readers and viewers were led to believe, a skepticism prompted in large part by his own personal vicissitudes.
Born in the mid-XNUMXth century in a university town at the heart of what was then the most powerful empire in the world, Cervantes was always on the move: first due to an itinerant father, whose attempts to support an increasingly large family they drove him into increasingly heavy debts, then as a fugitive, a soldier, a prisoner, and finally a tax collector. Fleeing Spain, after wounding another man in a duel, the young Cervantes left for Italy, where he joined the papal fleet to fight the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto, off the coast of Greece. Badly wounded, he retired to Sicily and then Naples, before trying to sail home many years later, when misfortune struck again and he was captured by Barbary corsairs.
For five years Cervantes suffered in the squalor of the prisons of Algiers, attempting escape no less than four times, each of which was a failure that could have led to his death. Finally ransomed and back in Spain, the former prisoner of war would have expected to be greeted as a hero, but a ruined monarchy repeatedly rebuffed his attempts to secure a pension or job that would reward his sacrifices, so he ended up to stoop to being a debt collector for a highly unpopular government.
The novelty of the narrative approach of Don Quixote
After fifty years, when he published Don Quixote, Cervantes had lost all illusions about the ideals that his society propagated without then living up to them, a factor that determined more than anything else the success and innovative impact of Don Quixote , because with it Cervantes created not just a representation of the world, but an image of how the world is represented wrongly. This narrative approach still persists today and extends well beyond the novel: characters in theatre, television and cinema all need to be constructed in a way that allows us to perceive the limits of their point of view and this makes them more "real". in our eyes. Certainly we ourselves suffer from this duplication, since we claim an illusory realism while remaining perfectly aware that what we are reading or watching is the fruit of the imagination.
The point is that Cervantes' innovation was an ingenious and unique reaction in its millennium to a world in which the media had blurred the line between reality and fantasy. A state-controlled theater industry, but also an official censorship and historiography at the service of the monarchy kept the content of plays and books under strict control, actively spreading an image of the nation aimed at supporting the fragile alliance between monarchy and aristocracy landed, without renouncing to ingratiate himself with the bourgeoisie and the peasantry with fantasies of honor and purity of blood. In turn, these fantasies were fueled by an extensive and rambling media campaign demonizing both Jews, most of whom had been exiled or forced to convert in the late XNUMXth century, and Moriscos, i.e. ex-Muslims now living in Christian while retaining some Moorish cultural practices.
Dissonance as an object of writing
Cervantes, clearly unable to reconcile his experience with this picture of the world, did something different: he made dissonance the subject of his writing. This is why today so many people who decide to return to the great classics are amazed to find Don Quixote so "modern": a preface in which the author is presented as a character, a clearly fictitious narrative framework which insists on the veracity of the facts narrated, the characters who talk about the author as if he were a character in the book, to finish, in the second half of the novel, published 10 years later, with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza who talk about their fame as literary characters and the poor attempt to an impersonator to replace them between the first and second publication of their adventures.
In a short theatrical composition published near the end of his life [El retablo de las maravillas], Cervantes tells of a small town whose bosses agreed to hire a company of puppeteers to stage a magical show. The imposter who convinces them to invest in his scam promises audiences will witness marvels that surpass wildest dreams on his makeshift stage, but warns them that magic is denied to anyone who “has any trace of the other faith or is not brought into the world by legally wedded parents.
The fraudulent potential of narratives
Of course, the townspeople are furious and protest vigorously. As the elder says: "I can assure you that, for my part, I submit to the test in complete safety, since my father was the mayor of the city and I have old, rancid Christian flesh four centimeters thick on all four sides of my lineage. Tell me if I can ever have a problem seeing the show!”. Indeed they see it, but only get a scam and threats from a soldier, when they try to use their old Christian privileges to avoid hosting the king's troops.
What Cervantes understood and which perhaps we should still remember today is that, precisely because some means of communication are so engaging, they are capable not only of persuading us, but of leading us to confuse them with reality. When the media threaten to cross this limit, the novel can acquire a very important value: give our awareness a little nudge, shake us from our complacency and show us that we have taken the bait.
