The quixotic don

CERTAIN make-believe characters loom like giants in the collective psyche: Hamlet, Madame Bovary, Captain Ahab, Tony Soprano. They serve, for better or worse, as humanity’s behavioral role models and cast long shadows over our communal dream lives.

But for lasting influence across a wide swath of the planet, it would be hard to match the deep imprint left on Latin America by one fictional figure in particular: Don Quixote.

Two years ago, the 400th anniversary of the publication of the first part of Miguel de Cervantes’ picaresque epic was marked with scholarly symposiums and reams of thumb-sucking prose from Mexico City to Buenos Aires.

Yet Cervantes’ “ingenious gentleman” is such a paragon of Latin identity, and the book in which he stars such a cracked-mirror image of enduring hemispheric obsessions, that Don Quixote remains a perpetual presence in Latin American culture. Every year, the old warrior gets put back on his trusty nag Rocinante and trotted out to do metaphorical battle -- in literature, editorial cartoons, music, art.

It’s hardly surprising that Don Quixote still captivates Spain, his birthplace. Nearly half a millennium since he sprang into being on a Madrid printing press, he is the country’s most famous trademark (now rivaled by the Real Madrid and Barcelona soccer teams). The most prestigious prize in Spanish letters is named for Cervantes, and el Quixote himself is instantly recognizable in hundreds of tourist-tchotchke incarnations, as well as in more exalted guises, such as Picasso’s famous silhouette.

Don Quixote’s relationship with Spain’s former colonies is more complex. Cervantes’ masterpiece always has belonged more to the Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking than to the Anglophone or Francophone countries of the New World. Some scholars even argue that if not for the New World’s “discovery” half a century before Cervantes was born, “Don Quixote” as we know it might not even exist.

Like many writers of Spain’s literary Golden Age, Cervantes was fascinated by the exotic accounts of Europeans arriving in the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the second part of “Don Quixote,” and in his last novel, “Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda,” he makes numerous wide-eyed mentions of the strange new hemisphere.

Several scholars, notably Diane de Armas Wilson in her influential study “Cervantes and the New World,” have noted how Cervantes imported words of Amazonian origin and wove anecdotes and facts from what he called “the remote Indies” into his later fictions. At one point, he even wrote to the Spanish authorities seeking to obtain a post in the colonies.

Michael K. Schuessler, who teaches at the Autonomous Metropolitan University here, has written that “it is not coincidental that the discovery, conquest, and subsequent colonization” of the New World -- “with its curious inhabitants, temperate clime, lush vegetation, fabulous riches and mythological proportions” -- coincided with the era of “Spain’s greatest artistic and literary production,” including “Don Quixote.” While Spain was colonizing the New World politically and economically, the New World was colonizing Spain imaginatively.

Inspiration from afar

IT was the novelty (to Spanish eyes) of the New World that partly inspired Cervantes to help invent a new literary form with “Don Quixote”: the novel, which, unlike most poetry or drama of the period, was grounded in the ordinary events of daily life. But it strove to embroider these quotidian happenings with intensely realistic descriptions and keen psychological and social insight.

With this new art form, Cervantes broke with, and simultaneously lampooned, the popular chivalric romances that spur Don Quixote to imagine himself to be a gallant medieval knight slaying giants and saving damsels in distress. “Don Quixote” also implicitly parodies the knight-conquerors of the New World, the conquistadors, whose flowery rhetoric and chivalrous posturings hardly masked their greed and brutality.

In the Latin American imagination, Don Quixote has functioned both as a symbol of the former colonies’ knotty old-world heritage and as a rebel figure whose absurd behavior pulls the rug out from under the Old World’s affectations and delusions of superiority (and, by extension, those of any great power). Over the last four centuries of Latin American cultural history, Cervantes and his mad visionary have had many disciples and imitators. What’s striking is how powerful their presence remains even today.

Jorge Luis Borges, the reality-bending Argentine writer who dominated South American short fiction during the mid-20th century, shared “Don Quixote’s” Baroque fixation on stories-within-stories and with the idea that a book’s author is himself a kind of semi-fictional creation. (The Baroque era was very big on mirrors and surfaces that simultaneously conceal and reveal.)

The best illustration of Borges’ Cervantine bent can be found in his famous short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” about an early 20th century Parisian author who resolves to “write,” word for word, 2 1/2 chapters of “Don Quixote” by, in effect, turning himself into Cervantes and adopting the habits and mind-set of a 17th century Spaniard -- a lunatic labor that nonetheless boasts a bizarre circular logic.

Casting a long shadow

AROUND the same time as Borges, the Swiss Cuban writer and musicologist Alejo Carpentier was excavating Cervantes in his magical-realist historical novel “Concierto barroco.” The story follows the transatlantic quest of an 18th century Mexican nobleman and his Cuban servant-sidekick (shades of Sancho Panza!), who has a revelation while in Venice watching a Baroque opera set in the New World about some of the ugly realities behind Spain’s seizure of the Americas.

Lois Parkinson Zamora, a professor in English, history and art at the University of Houston, writes about echoes of el Quixote in the work of Borges, Carpentier and others in her book “The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction.” She also discusses the way Cervantes and his Spanish contemporaries, the playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca and the painter Francisco Zurbaran, imbued human suffering with the quality of saintliness and compares these with similar depictions in the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and in Frida Kahlo’s bloodily hagiographic self-portraits. To varying degrees, these representations harken back to the martyred Don Quixote, who’s frequently viewed in Latin culture as an innocent, agonized, Christ-like figure, the victim of a world that’s even crazier than he.

Though it’s most visible on the printed page, “Don Quixote’s” shadow also falls across Latin American performing arts and pop culture. Cantinflas, the great Mexican comic actor, was a kind of Quixote-Sancho composite (he once played the latter on film). A classic “holy fool” in the Mexican pelado (urban hobo) tradition, he wielded his tongue like a lance to puncture social pretension, using loopy wordplay and self-contradicting arguments to extricate himself from the most dire straits.

At the hemisphere’s opposite end, the eccentric Brazilian singer-songwriter Tom Ze has spent decades tilting at musical windmills, fashioning a grab bag of mismatched sonic textures into the Dadaist-pop collages of Tropicalismo. His 2005 disc “Estudando o Pagode” includes the song “Teatro (Dom Quixote),” a typically (for Ze) absurdist ramble in praise of “this sweet madness, / Which trance, abandon and delirium seek,” which draws a link between the creative landscapes of Spain’s La Mancha and Brazil’s Bahia.

It’s also not hard to spot quixotic motifs in the works of the slyly self-mocking Mexican American performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena. A connoisseur of ironic confabulations, the San Francisco-based MacArthur “genius grant” recipient constantly smudges the borders between reality and fantasy, while stepping through (or shattering) the warped looking-glass of identity, especially ethnic identity.

John Ochoa, an associate professor of literature at Pennsylvania State University, discusses Gomez-Pena’s oeuvre in his book “The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity,” in a chapter titled “Bordering on Madness.” Ochoa says Mexican and other Latin American cultures are filled with examples of illustrious, quixotic failures, whose downfalls often are regarded by their countrymen as noble and valiant, rather than pitiful or ignominious.

The so-called Ninos Heroes, six young male cadets who supposedly leaped to their deaths rather than surrender to the invading U.S. forces during the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, are national folk heroes, though some doubt their actual existence. Ochoa also points to Jose Vasconcelos, the powerful Mexican education minister, who rose to power after the revolution of 1910 to 1920 but later self-sabotaged his own presidential bid.

“For us a realist is always a pessimist,” the Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz wrote in “The Labyrinth of Solitude,” his biopsy of the Mexican soul. In Mexican and Latin American culture generally, Ochoa says, “There’s almost this need for failure. There’s almost a pride in it. It makes you a survivor. This appropriation of failure becomes a character-defining thing: Because of failure, we are what we are, and we’re better for it.”

The glorious debacle. The defiant last stand. The mythic sacrifice. The impossible dream. For many Latin Americans, these symbolic tropes reach back to historical traumas that are burned in memory: the destruction of the great preColumbian civilizations, the folly and ultimate collapse of Spain’s global empire. They conjure up the repeated missteps of Latin American democracies, the ephemerality and abuse of laws, constitutions and ideals that have been trampled underfoot by countless dictators and despot revolutionaries.

Call it the Quixote complex.

But if the sad-sack knight with his barber’s-basin helmet finally fails in his quest, he also triumphs heroically in converting “the absurd into a sublime act,” as the Mexican intellectual Carlos Monsivais wrote last month in a two-part essay in the Mexico City daily newspaper El Universal.

After the Mexican author Sergio Pitol was awarded the Cervantes award in 2005, in an interview he declared Don Quixote to be “a universal champion of justice, honor, freedom, almost holiness.” While Shakespeare “teaches us to know ourselves,” Pitol observed, Cervantes and his towering creation teach us “to understand and speak with many different kinds of people.”

Put another way, “Don Quixote” teaches us that failure is not necessarily defeat, while reminding us that hardship and mortality are, after all, our human lot. Such a lesson goes against the triumphalist tone of the U.S. master narrative, but it still reverberates in places such as Oaxaca and Havana and the Amazon delta.

For all its painful episodes, “Don Quixote” in the end is a comedy. To a region that has endured so many humiliations and setbacks, Cervantes’ great novel offers the consoling thought that misfortune is sometimes only a stumbling block on the long road to dignity and self-knowledge.

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reed.johnson@latimes.com