June 20, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY Page 11

Music: Vivian Zoakos

Cervantes: Greatest Genius of Prose

Miguel de Cervantes

The Humanist Academy has undertaken to revive the tradition of the Mexican republican founding fathers in their attempts to use great music and other aspects of international culture to educate their population, and it has become abundantly clear that there is one figure above all who is crucial to this effort. That man is Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, best known among international audiences as the author of Don Quixote.

This column will do little more than introduce the reader to the great poet who is probably the greatest genius produced in the history of the Spanishspeaking world. A fuller discussion of Cervantes's life and work, by Adolfo Carbajal, will soon be available for publication. Heir of Dante Miguel Cervantes is the intellectual heir of the Italian Dante Alighieri, whom Cervantes learned to know intimately during the more than a dozen years he spent in Italy during his youth. His achievements are thus based on a profound assimilation of the scientific-poetic method of Dante. The clearest proof of that was Cervantes's ability to apply the method to a completely new form of art: the so-called novel or prose poetry of which he is the acknowledged "inventor" or creator. Before Cervantes there existed no realized conception of how prose might be used as a great art form, rivaling the poetic epic with its ancient tradition spanning Dante, The Cid, through Homer and even earlier to the Sumerian Gilgamesh. This is not to say that prose before Cervantes could not be written with great beauty and poetic content. The dialogues of Plato immediately come to mind in that connection. But the Dialogues, for all their beauty, are meant as systematic expositions of science and the scientific method, belonging to a different category entirely from the Divine Comedy or the Odyssey. The same is true of any other prose work that might be mentioned. Prose Before Cervantes The epic, like music, had always been a tool for the moral education of a population through poetic means. Indeed in ancient Greece and no doubt earlier, epic and music were considered to by synonymous, the one being impossible without the other. But "art" prose before Cervantes (1547-1616) was the province of banality, characterized throughout the century up through Cervantes's mature period by the books of knight errantry which Don Quixote therefore uses as its polemical point of departure. Cervantes's final version of Don Quixote was in his own estimation his greatest work and most closely parallels Dante's Commedia, written in the outward form of a vast allegory of the Catholic faith. But this brief column will focus on the earlier Don Quixote, a book whose number of translations is superseded only by the Bible.

Platonic Dialogue It is often acknowledged that the true quest of the character Don Quixote is Platonic truth or reason. But even more important is the fact that Cervantes from the outset uses the Platonic dialogue method, as does Dante, in the very structure of the book. This occurs at three primary levels. The first and most obvious is the dialogue between Quixote and Sancho Panza. At a more profound level, Cervantes introduces himself into the book, intervening to comment and actively engage the reader in conversation or reflection on what is occurring at any point. He does this through the device of pretending that the book is an actual biography of a true person, Don Quixote, and he, Cervantes, is no more than the translator from the Arabic in which the biography was originally writtenfree to disagree or agree with the actual author's choice of content and characterization. Thus Cervantes can stop the action at various points to argue that the "biographer" must have misrepresented Don Quixote's actions because what the biographer claims Don Quixote was doing at any point is completely out of character for him and could not possibly be true, and so forth. Thus Cervantes, who appeals to the reader and argues with his characters and their "biographer," is himself in part a device to induce the reader to a process of self-reflection on what occurs to his own mind in the course of reading the book. This is the deepest level of Don Quixote. The reader is helped by the Cervantes "Character'' to better understand his own creative processes, thereby allowing him to delve further into the creative mind of the true Cervantes. This in turn affords him a mirror to better understand sensuously the creative potential within himself. Exposing the Creative Process Throughout the book Cervantes is at pains to expose the method of the creative process to the reader. He sends Quixote out with another person, his squire Sancho, so that through their dialogue the process of their respective development will be made conscious. But he goes beyond this to prove to the reader that this dialogue is necessary, so that the reader can share in Cervantes's own discovery of the dialogue method.

Hence Cervantes sends Quixote out alone the first time, returning him home only to send him out a second time now accompanied by Sancho. The superiority of this second approach, in which Quixote can discourse with Sancho to expose his own mind and uplift that of his banalized squire, is immediately obvious to the reader. The reader has thus been allowed to participate in Cervantes's own discovery of the dialogue as a fundamental poetic technique. Nothing has been said in this brief space of Cervantes's use of language. Yet if Spanish is to be returned to its rightful place as a wonderful medium for communicating great ideas, and rescued from its present degenerated form, there is no possible way to do it without returning to Cervantes. Whole layers of Spanish-speaking populations todayadmittedly the less educated layersare unable to easily understand Cervantes's Spanish. Yet Cervantes's language is the clearest, most concise means of expression available in Spanish. But the fault lies not in these populations. All one need do is look at so-called "erudite" Spanish today to see the language's degeneration in the enormous difficulties it puts in the way of thinking clearly and directly. This was the same battle Cervantes fought with the erudite elites of his own day, as he discusses with enormous humor in his preface to Don Quixote. The challenge must be taken up again. As Lyndon LaRouche has noted, a republic exists for the purpose of creating and developing language: because language is the means for communicating ideas, and without ideas there can be no human beings. The sole purpose of republics is to generate full human beings freed of the banality which imprisoned the squire Sancho Panza.