Did Cervantes invent “truthiness”? A writer, for the New York Times, examines how the 17th-century master’s multilayered world mirrors the realities and absurdities of our modern age.
From the article...
As a literary theorist, I suppose I could take umbrage at the claim that my own discipline, while fun, doesn’t rise to the level of knowledge. But what I’d actually like to argue goes a little further. Not only can literary theory (along with art criticism, sociology, and yes, non-naturalistic philosophy) produce knowledge of an important and even fundamental nature, but fiction itself, so breezily dismissed in Professor Rosenberg’s assertions, has played a profound role in creating the very idea of reality that naturalism seeks to describe.
We especially revere the genius of Shakespeare in the English-speaking world, but I’d like to focus on the genius of another writer, a Spanish one, Miguel de Cervantes, who shaped our world as well, and did so in ways that may not be apparent even to those aware of his enormous literary influence. With the two parts of “Don Quixote,” published in 1605 and 1615 respectively, Cervantes created the world’s first bestseller, a novel that, in the words of the great critic Harold Bloom, “contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake.”
As if that were not enough, in writing those volumes Cervantes did something even more profound: he crystallized in prose a confluence of changes in how people in early modern Europe understood themselves and the world around them. What he passed down to those who would write in his wake, then, was not merely a new genre but an implicit worldview that would infiltrate every aspect of social life: fiction.
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