3—
Cervantes and Humor
Humor and Madness
Although Cervantes is traditionally included among Europe's great humorists and Don Quixote is referred to as a "masterpiece of humor," rarely is this epithet applied to his poetry. However, his burlesque sonnets are infused with the same humorous spirit as his prose. In order to correctly appraise them, this most elusive and unstable of terms must first be defined: what did "humor" mean during Cervantes's time?
The word originated in the classical medical doctrine expounded by Hippocrates and Galen. According to their theories, all earthly matter is made up of four elements—air, water, earth, and fire—which, in turn, have a certain combination of four basic qualities—heat, dryness, humidity, and cold. The food we eat is made up of these four elements. As it is absorbed by the body it is converted into liquid substances that are the source of energy and life. These substances—melancholy, phlegm, blood, and choler—are known as the "four humors." Each humor has its counterpart among the elements and assumes the qualities associated with it. When these humors are present in the correct proportion, the person is in good health; however, an imbalance (an extreme predominance of one) causes illness.
Martine Bigeard, among others, has noted that these classical theories were reasserted in the Renaissance: "La théorie des humeurs s'est incrustée dans le fond culturel commun, et a exercé sous la Renaissance une véritable fascination sur les hommes de lettres et les hommes de science espagnols [Humoral theory is embedded in traditional culture and was a source of veritable fascination for Spanish men of letters and science during the Renaissance]."[1] To no other person are
Bigeard's words more applicable than to the Spanish physician Juan Huarte de San Juan. His treatise on pedagogical psychology, entitled Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, explains commonly held humoral theory in detail.[2] Huarte illustrates how one's physical and psychological makeup is determined by one's unique proportional combination, or temper, of humors. By natural extension, during the late sixteenth century the word "humor" was used throughout Europe to mean disposition or temperament in general.
Huarte goes on to state that an equal balance of the humors is impossible because of the rigors of climate, customs, and lifestyle. Thus all people are somewhat "distempered" (destemplado ), even though they may not seem to be, or are unaware of it:
todos hombres que vivimos en regiones destempladas estamos actualmente enfermos y con alguna lesión, aunque por habernos engendrado y nacido con ella, y no haber gozado de otra mejor templanza, no lo sentimos.[3]
[all men who live in distempered regions are ill and have some type of lesion, however, because we were born with it and have never had the benefit of a better temper, we are unaware of it.]
Because one's distemper (destemplanza ) is unique, so are one's temperament, outlook, aptitudes, and skills. Huarte then applies humoral theory to pedagogy. First he establishes the specific temperament required by various professions; then he recommends matching young people's humoral composition to a career for which they are apt.
What is of interest here is the idea of distemper or destemplanza . Huarte feels that the same humoral imbalance that leads us to make different rational judgments is also the cause of each individual being, to some extent, mentally imbalanced:
pasemos aquellos cuatro humores en mayor cantidad al celebro, de manera que la inflamen; y veremos mil diferencias de locuras y disparates, por donde se dijo: cada loco con su tema . Los que no llegan a tanta enfermedad parece que están en su juicio y que dicen y hacen cosas convenientes; pero realmente disparan, sino que no se echa de ver por la mansedumbre con que algunos proceden.[4]
[let us pass those four humors in greater quantity to the brain so that they inflame it, and we shall see a thousand different types of madness and lunacy, whence it is said: to each his own madness . Those who are not quite as ill appear to be in their right mind and to speak and act logically, but in reality they talk nonsense, although this goes unnoticed owing to the calmness with which they proceed.]
In this way Huarte establishes a causal progression between humor, individual idiosyncracy, and madness. Because of humoral differences—temperament—all human beings enjoy their own particular brand of folly. At the same time the word "humor" is irrevocably linked to the idea of folly or madness. "To have a humor" or to be "humorous" assumes the meaning of "to be mad."
However, Huarte was not the first to relate "humor" to madness. In Book One of his Cortegiano (1528), Castiglione had already said that madness was common to all humans: "Therefore I hold this for certain: that in each one of us there is some seed of folly which, once it is stirred, can grow indefinitely."[5] What determines a particular type of madness is a certain humor, which can be sparked into action by others:
In the same way, whenever we have suspected some hidden strain of folly, we have stimulated it so cunningly and with so many different inducements and in so many various ways that eventually we have discovered its nature; then, having recognized the humour for what it was, we have agitated it so thoroughly that it has always been brought to the culmination of open madness.[6]
The parallel between Castiglione's words and what happens during Don Quixote's sojourn at the ducal palace in part two of the novel is startling.
Juan Luis Vives had also incorporated the basics of humoral theory into his 1538 psychological treatise entitled Tratado del alma y de la vida . In this book he writes of the effects produced on the body and mind by the respective humors. He also comments that we all have "un grano de locura que es efecto de la bilis negra [a grain of madness which is a product of the black bile]".[7]
Huarte was a source of inspiration for many Golden Age
writers in Spain. Literary theorists such as El Pinciano (in his 1596 Philosophia antigua poética ) and Luis Carvallo (in his 1602 Cisne de Apolo ) developed Huarte's theories on the origins of literary creativity. Baltasar Gracián's 1648 study of wit, Agudeza y Arte de ingenio, shares similar ideas with the Examen and Jerónimo de Mondragón's 1598 Censura de la locura humana y excelencias della borrows an anecdotal tale from Huarte.
More important, however, is the provocative question of Huarte's influence on Cervantes. The presence of a nucleus of Huartean theory is undeniable, at least in Don Quixote and El licenciado Vidriera . The nature of Huarte's influence with respect to these works has been discussed in varying depth in three works. Rafael Salillas argues for the direct influence of Huarte on Cervantes.[8] Malcolm Read rejects Salillas's notion of direct influence, citing the popularity of the madness theme among Renaissance writers and in folklore. He prefers to recommend further study of the extent to which Cervantes and Huarte shared a common intellectual outlook.[9] Mauricio de Iriarte contends that Cervantes must have been acquainted with the Examen given its great editorial success—ten editions were published in Spain prior to the first part of Don Quixote . As he says, in Huarte Cervantes found "un alma . . . afín a la suya [a kindred spirit]".[10]
The most obvious reflection of Huarte in the Cervantine works mentioned are the fact that both are clinical studies in madness. As we know, Don Quixote's lunacy stemmed from the excessive reading of romances of chivalry. He passed countless sleepless nights devouring book after book until, finally, "se le secó el cerebro" (his brain dried up and shriveled).[11] The resulting heat and dryness lead to his particular locura (madness, insanity)—an excess of ingenio . Indeed, what befell the ingenioso caballero was an uncontrollable imagination (imaginativa ), which nevertheless left his understanding (entendimiento ) and memory unimpaired. Therefore Don Quixote can hold forth intelligently on any topic that does not concern chivalry.
Thus the link between the term "humor" and the notion of extravagant behavior is made in the mind of Cervantes and his contemporaries, both in Spain and abroad. In England, self-declared home of humor, the Latin term was also borrowed to
mean something other than simple disposition. Huarte's Examen was first translated into English in 1594 by Richard Carew. It was doubtless read by the great playwright Ben Jonson, who, as Harry Levin has pointed out, was the first to transpose humor from physiognomy to the sphere of comedy.[12] In the induction to his Every Man Out of His Humor (1599), Jonson explains the term humor as he uses it to mean, basically, human eccentricity:
so in every humane body
The choller, melancholy, flegme, and bloud,
By reason that they flow continually
In some one part, and are not continent,
Receive the name of Humours. Now thus farre
It may, by Metaphore, apply it selfe
Unto the generall disposition:
As when some one peculiar quality
Doth so possesse a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to runne one way,
This may be truly said to be a Humour.
Jonson's so-called humor plays (Every Man in His Humor, Every Man out, and Magnetic Lady ) develop a theory of comedy based on the humors which demands strict adherence to decorum in characterization. That is, all characters must act in accordance with their particular humors. Through their individual eccentricities, Jonson's "humorous" characters are, in fact, good examples of the adage Huarte also put to use: "cada loco con su tema."
In his mentioned study of humor, Levin clarifies that in Jonson's time:
humor could be conceived as a person's state of mind at the moment: a mood, caprice, a whim, an inclination to be indulged—or humored [Shakespeare was apparently the first to use the verbal form]. Persons subject to such passing states—moody, capricious, whimsical—were said to be humorous.[13]
The question of who was the first to use the verbal form is of little consequence. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that
Cervantes uses the expression "seguirle el humor" in both parts of Don Quixote . The knight is "humored" by the innkeeper (I: 3), by Sansón Carrasco (II: 3), and by the infamous duke and duchess (II: 30). The opposite expression—"revolver los humores"—meaning to upset or "turbar el sosiego," is also used (I: 33). "Buen humor" (II: 35) and "mal humor" (I: 48) are used in the same sense as they are today. But "humor" meaning a distemper or madness is used three times with reference to Don Quixote. Dorotea is aware of his "menguado humor" (I: 30), the group that comes together at Juan Palomeque's inn is aware of his "humor estraño" (I: 43), and the ducal pair "humors" Don Quixote after learning of his "disparatado humor" (II: 30).
These expressions coincide in Don Quixote with the use of the term "humor" in its original etymological sense of fluid from the Latin umor, -oris[ōris] (I: 25; I: 27; II: 39). We are at a fascinating point in the evolution of the word—the moment at which an already existing term is borrowed for a notion still in the developmental stage. Through the idea of madness, humor is taking on comical shadings.
Jonson reveals that at the beginning of the seventeenth century human eccentricity became a subject worthy of taking front-stage.[14] England's famous playwright permanently linked the idea of "humor," indicating temperament, to the idea of comicity. As Louis Cazamian has noted:
Through his strong relish for the raciness of full-blooded eccentricities and his abundant vein of comic invention . . . he destroyed whatever impression might still linger that the physical bondage implied in the medical sense of "humor" was a tragic element, fit rather for pathos than for comedy. He made the atmosphere of the word and the notion definitely comic.[15]
After Jonson, in England any eccentricity of behavior was referred to as a humor. These eccentricities could be purely individual or collective, leading to Jonsonian satire of social conduct. This "atmosphere of the word" Cazamian speaks of is the atmosphere of madness created by the eccentricities or multifarious follies of Jonson's comedy.
The same linguistic evolution occurs concurrently in Italy. Around the year 1603 certain festivities were held to honor the
recent marriage of a young Roman gentleman by the name of Paolo Mancini. Because the date coincided with Carnival (the traditional season of madness), a group of young gentlemen, relatives of the bride and groom, gave themselves to the composition of impromptu comedies, sonnets, and speeches on light, entertaining subjects—to the delight of the celebrants.[16] So successful were these young wits that they were dubbed "Belli Humori." Hence the notions of good humor and wit were interlocked in an atmosphere of gay festivity. The group then decided to form a literary academy, changing their name to "Humoristi." Thus was born the long-lived Roman Accademia degli Umoristi whose insignia was a cloud:
che formata dalle amare essalationi del mare, e sollevata in alto per virtù de raggi del Sole, si vede poco dopo in minuta, e spessa, ma gratiosa pioggia, risolta, all'in giù stillare, co 'l motto, tolto da Lucretio nel Lib. 6, REDIT AGMINE DULCI.[17]
[which, formed from the bitter exhalations of the sea and raised above by virtue of the sun's rays, turns into minute, thick, and welcome drops of falling rain, with the following motto from Book 6 of Lucretius: REDIT AGMINE DULCI.]
This coat of arms apparently had its detractors. The academician Girolamo Aleandro subsequently came to its defense, explaining the relationship between the Umoristi and the rain-cloud logo. In his Discorso sopra l'Impresa degli Accademici Humoristi, Aleando clarifies that: "sicome la Nuvola è condensata d'humorosi vapori levatisi dall'amarezza del mare, così l'Accademia de gli Humoristi è una raunanza di spiritosi ingegni, che dall'amarezza de' costumi mondani sí sono separati [just as the cloud is condensed from humorous vapors risen from the bitterness of the sea, so the Accademia de gli Humoristi is a gathering of spirited wits who have distanced themselves from the bitterness of social custom]."[18] In Italy, as in Spain and England, the terminology still current to indicate humidity was evolving in a new direction. The fact that these buffoonish wits felt the name that best expressed their nature was "humorists," as well as Aleandro's insistence upon their carnivalesque separateness from sour mundaneness, reveal, once again, the link between humor, madness, and comicity.
The Literary Tradition of Madness
Madness or folly was traditionally associated with comicity throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The presence of "natural" fools (the mentally defective), who were not institutionalized but integrated into medieval communities and supported by them as dependents, were a ready source of amusement for societies less sensitive to the handicapped. The fifteenth century witnessed the rise and rapid development of the "artificial" fool. Whether simple public entertainers or highly esteemed court jesters, these "buffoons" or "fools" assumed the guise of the mentally imbalanced in order to make a living of ridiculing and criticizing with the impunity traditionally granted to the mentally deficient. Thus folly, whether real or feigned, was a highly visible presence in Renaissance society. The story of the natural fool belongs to the history of psychiatry; that of the artificial fool belongs to literary history.[19]
The literary tradition of folly gained tremendous popularity in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, especially after the publication in 1511 of Erasmus's best selling opuscule Moriae Encomium (Praise of Folly ). This little book marked a turning point in the literature of madness. In the main work prior to Praise of Folly, the figure of the fool had been treated as an inferior species, indeed a sinner because he failed to seek the true end of man—knowledge of God. Brant's 1497 Narrenschiff was, in essence, a vigorous denunciation of disorder in favor of reason. By following the established order man lived well on earth and gained access to heaven; to fail to do so was to be ignorant and a fool. For Brant, the severe moralist, the fool was unacceptable to God.
Praise of Folly, as its title implies, holds quite the opposite to be true. For Erasmus human nature, although foolish, is basically good. Precisely within our foolishness lies our humanity and our happiness:
Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance. But it isn't—it's human . . . a foolish man is not unfortunate, because this is in keeping with his nature.[20]
Through what Walter Kaiser (following Edgar Wind) has called the "transvaluation of values," Stultitia ironically inverts all commonly accepted values by showing their opposite to be true.[21] In the resulting topsy-turviness, ideals such as reason, wisdom, and prudence are shown, paradoxically, to be no less "good" (and most certainly less advantageous) than foolishness. Through Stultitia's charmingly specious arguments, Erasmus nevertheless provides a moral lesson: tolerance. Human beings should not be condemned but understood and accepted in all their folly. To be foolish is to be human. To be foolish is, also, to be Godlike. This, Erasmus's ultimate vindication of madness, is through the Fool in Christ.
Erasmus's theological apology for the fool is the culmination of a theme dating back to the teachings of St. Paul. Basic to Christian belief is the notion that the Christian is a fool in the eyes of the world: "Nonne stultam fecit Deus sapientiam huius mundi? . . . Quia quod stultum est Dei, sapientius est hominibus, et quod infirmum est Dei, fortius est hominibus [Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? . . . Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men]."[22] The Pauline interpretation of the fool refers to the innocent Christians who, in their disregard for human reason, are close to Christ. Christ, in turn, had allowed himself to be taken for a fool when he assumed the form of a man. The Northern Renaissance thinkers Thomas à Kempis and Nicholaus of Cusa, as well as Erasmus, had reasserted Christian folly as a means to salvation. The former's Imitatio Christi (1421?), an apology for the humble Christian life, and the latter's De docta ignorantia (1440), an explanation of the notion of learned ignorance through the paradoxical coincidentia oppositorum, helped in laying the foundations for Erasmus's further development of the wise-fool paradox.
In the final section of Praise of Folly Erasmus distances himself from the harsh satire that characterizes the second part of the book, to set forth his final apology for folly. Culling from the Scriptures, he cites Jeremiah, Ecclesiastes, and St. Paul to denounce, as did Christ, those who put their trust in reason and their own intelligence. He concludes that "it is quite clear that the Christian religion has a kind of kinship with folly in some
form, though it has none at all with wisdom."[23] He also links the idea of pleasure to folly when in his Christian Epicureanism he states that "the supreme reward for man is no other than a kind of madness."[24]
Kaiser has pointed out that this concept of happiness is the essence of Stultitia's teleology and the ultimate justification of all her arguments. Because the world is God's creation and was made for our pleasure, we should rejoice in it. Of course the greatest pleasures are afforded by Christian piety; thus pleasure is reconciled to virtue.[25]
Erasmus's greatest contribution to both the notion of madness and the literary expression of that notion was to legitimize it. The ultimate folly is to lose oneself in God and to follow His teachings. And as Stultitia says, to his ignorant apostles Christ "unfailingly preached folly."[26] Therefore, to be foolish is to be Godlike, and to be Godlike means to be tolerant of human frailty—in the words of Saint Paul and of Shakespeare, to "suffer fools gladly."
The content of Praise of Folly has been explored, but of equal importance here is the manner in which Erasmus chose to write his treatise. Through his manipulation of irony and paradox Erasmus puts his ideas into practice. What is expressed is contained within the manner of expression itself. Each idea Stultitia discusses is clothed in paradox. We can see this when, for example, she states that "it's sad, people say, to be deceived. Not at all, it's far sadder not to be deceived."[27] She goes on to explain that our happiness depends not on actual fact but on our opinions: if a man has a dreadfully ugly wife, yet in his eyes she is a Venus, isn't it just the same as if she were genuinely beautiful?
Stultitia's ironic presentation of both sides of all questions reveals that for any given truth, the opposite may be equally true. Erasmus is pointing out the necessity of considering all sides to any question. In a word, he is addressing the problem of perspectivismo .[28] It is not so much a question of the "truth" equaling "A" or "B"; the only possible truth is "A plus B," plus "C," plus "D," ad infinitum. The most felicitous literary symbol for this idea is, of course, Sancho Panza's ingenious baciyelmo .
We also must not forget the fundamental irony of Praise of Folly : the fact that Stultitia is both its subject and object. Folly
praises folly, therefore, can anything she says be considered remotely the "truth"? Or is the whole book a mere equivocal joke? Erasmus himself warns against that interpretation when in the preface to More he comments: "unless my 'self-love' entirely deceives me, my praise of folly has not been altogether foolish."[29]
Erasmus speaks the truth; while appearing comically foolish, Stultitia points out life's paradoxical dimension. She exposes both its underlying foolishness and its completeness. This totalizing perspective in which "reality" becomes a complex and ultimately equivocal paradox heralds literature's entrance into modernity. This growing awareness of the ambiguous nature of the world and of humankind is best expressed from the ironical distance that Erasmus has established. His irony and paradox enable our wit to perceive the absurdities of life at the appropriate emotional distance. The resulting self-conscious expression of human folly, underlaid with an acknowledgment and acceptance of the same quality in oneself, is humor.
The recognition of folly as underlying the human spirit facilitates a benevolent attitude toward it. While satirists refuse to forgive or to see in themselves the "vices" they castigate and instead remain at a critical distance, humorists use ironical distance to allow them to include themselves in the collective object of their humor.[30] Humorists must look gently upon the phenomenon in others for the simple reason that they recognize that lunacy within themselves. Humor represents a kindly and participatory attitude toward life's inconsistencies. While not excluding a critical stance, it nevertheless accepts the faults it criticizes as part of humankind's inevitably foolish nature. Thus literary humorism is not simply madness, but a reaction to madness—a toma de postura before it. We smile at it, but our smile is indulgent; we are at one with the madman.
With Praise of Folly the comic has undergone a process of intellectualization and self-awareness, just as the medieval buffoon has evolved into a thinking fool (Stultitia). This new and self-conscious way of perceiving the comicity of madness is the humorous perspective. Humor becomes the expression of folly in sixteenth century literature when folly is perceived to be the quintessence of our humanity:
folly is the entrance to the human. We are unable to take ourselves seriously and thus we know we are human. We know we are human because we can fall into error, not simply in the rational sense of making a mistake, but in the sense of mistaking completely the very nature of things. We can do nothing in this situation of folly but be open to the world and attempt to chart our course on its stage.[31]
As stated earlier, the appropriate modes for expressing humor are irony and paradox because they provide emotional distance and a totalizing perspective.[32] Erasmus's new and totalizing expression of folly marked the entrance of humor into Renaissance literature. Through his analysis and rationalization of human folly, Erasmus intellectualized the comic mode, giving it a new philosophical dimension, a "dimension of calculation and thus reflective wit" with a target beyond mere comicity.[33] This self-consciousness, and the combination of serious and comic elements viewed from an ironic distance, constitute modern humor. By intellectualizing the comic (thereby transforming it into humor) Erasmus legitimized it. Thus through the legitimization of human folly, humor and its accompanying laughter are in turn legitimized and brought into the literary mainstream. It is now possible and licit for a libro de entretenimiento to be so written that "el melancólico se mueva a risa, [y] el risueño la acreciente [the melancholy may be moved to laughter, and the merry made merrier still]."[34]
Cervantes and Humor
The literary tradition of madness reaches its culmination when Cervantes transforms it into the very material of his great novel. The basic allegory of folly that Don Quixote embodies is at the core of Cervantes's humor and his vital philosophy. The author teaches us the truth through laughter—a new laughter different from the comicity of previous literature. It is a laughter that ridicules but also understands our folly and our humanity. Cervantes presents it dressed in the same paradox and irony that clothe Praise of Folly ; it is within this stylistic area that his debt to the little book lies.
Although our author's spiritual debt to Erasmus has been confidently established since Américo Castro's El pensamiento de Cervantes, Hispanists have been somewhat reluctant to recognize the shadow of the Moria in his works. At the time he wrote his Erasmo y España, Marcel Bataillon felt that because there were no Castilian translations of the Moria, it would have been known by only an extremely small minority.[35] He later modified his opinion, realizing that "la locura itinerante y comunicativa de Don Quijote pudiera ponerse bajo el estandarte de la Moria erasmiana [Don Quixote's itinerant and communicative madness could be placed beneath the banner of Erasmus's Moria ]."[36] While declaring the problem of whether Cervantes had read Praise of Folly to be unsolvable, Bataillon nevertheless ends by acknowledging its influence on Don Quixote, situating Cervantes "en la estela de Erasmo, con Rabelais y Shakespeare, entre los 'loadores de la Locura' que inauguran en la literatura moderna un tono nuevo [in the wake of Erasmus and, along with Rabelais and Shakespeare, among the 'praisers of folly' who inaugurate a new tone in modern literature]."[37] The critic who has most insisted upon Cervantes's debt to the Moria is Antonio Vilanova. His studies trace in detail Cervantes's application of the lessons taught by Praise of Folly .[38] Francisco Márquez Villanueva, in turn, includes the Moria as an important element within the fool literature of which Don Quixote is the endpoint.[39]
The complexities of Don Quixote 's paradoxical structure, plus the author's total grasp of Erasmian irony (to say nothing of his attitude toward madness), point not only to a knowledge but also a deep understanding of the Moria . However, whether Cervantes read Praise of Folly in the original, in its Italian translation, or through Jerónimo de Mondragón's 1598 adaptation entitled Censura de la locura humana y excelencias della, he far surpassed his source. Erasmus's creation was ultimately a moral tract, albeit presented comically; Cervantes developed the irony and paradox—the humor—to create something new in literature: a novel. His targets were both social and literary. Don Quixote is a comment on the problematic nature of "reason" in an age of social unreason—one in which Spain's semitic minorities continue to be repressed. Cervantes realized that simple comicity was no longer enough in an age of institutionalized
madness where knights errant were ineffectual and fools had taken their place. In Don Quixote madness (humor) leads to literary autonomy (the modern novel). Don Quixote looks within to literature and without to society—one in which only the "mad" can be happy. Through the metaphor of madness Cervantes incorporates marginality, authenticity, and the transgression of conventions into life and literature. He is transgressing societal norms by suggesting that self-imposed madness is the only valid response to the institutionalized madness of society; at the same time his new "novel" transgresses current literary norms. Cervantes is proposing a kind of literature that, throwing off the mantle of a depleted generic past, becomes autonomous and authentic, transgressing the inherited norms of his age.
The way our author goes about his task is by making unprecedented use of paradox. As said before, Erasmus is Cervantes's most likely influence in his choice of this mode of expression. Nevertheless, Cervantes develops and takes it to the literary limit. Like the Moria, Don Quixote is a rhetorical paradox; but unlike Erasmus's opuscule, the Quixote is also a novelistic paradox. Rosalie L. Colie has pointed out that all paradoxes are self-critical. Rhetorical and logical paradoxes criticize the limitations and rigidity of argumentation and logic; epistemological paradoxes call into question the processes of human thought.[40]Don Quixote is a rhetorical paradox in that it defends the indefensible—madness. Don Quixote's madness, his obsession, is what makes him ultimately human, and appealing. It provides him freedom and a life worth living. Because it praises the unpraisable, the novel can be placed alongside the Moria on the shelf of adoxographic literature. However, Don Quixote is also a novelistic paradox in that it criticizes the limitations and rigidity of the romances of chivalry. It questions the validity of the genre by placing it into a new "reality." Within this new context the old romance flounders and, paradoxically, the best chivalric romance ever written emerges. Cervantes's book overflows the bounds of generic limitations and in so doing creates something totally new—the modern novel.
Colie adds: "The paradox is always somehow involved in dialectic: challenging some orthodoxy, the paradox is an oblique criticism of absolute judgment or absolute convention."[41] This
is precisely the ultimate goal of Cervantine paradox, both in his novel and in all his burlesque sonnets. He is questioning received opinion, calling all dogmatic "truth" into question, and putting literary conventions to the test. For him paradox is much more than mere "linguistic acrobatics" or "intellectual play."[42] Cervantine paradox is more than a simple rhetorical exercise in epideixis; instead it questions the very nature of life, literature, and reality. It is the foundation upon which he builds most of his literature. By pointing out the equivocal nature of life and of human judgment, his lesson warns against dogmatism in all forms—whether religious, social, or literary. In a world of shifting realities it is best to practice tolerance and not impose one's criterion upon others.
Through ironical paradox, Cervantes protects the dissident who lives and breathes within him. As Jean-Claude Margolin has said of paradox: "Il porte en lui le ferment révolutionnaire qui favorise l'éveil du doute, les mises en question, l'esprit de reforme [It carries with it the revolutionary ferment that favors the awakening of doubt, of questioning, of the spirit of reform]."[43] In an age where open revolution on any level was out of the question, Cervantes finds irony and paradox the perfect vehicles to express his nonconformity with contemporary literary and social reality. They are the basic building blocks of his humor, which itself represents another way of perceiving the world. By embracing folly, Cervantine humor recognizes and welcomes the authentic human experience into literature.