“Anything can happen. Here can be there, then can be now, up can be down, truth can be lies. Everything’s slip-sliding around and there’s nothing to hold on to. The whole thing has come apart at the seams.”
Published in two parts, 1605 and 1615, Don Quixote remains the most influential work of literature from the Spanish Golden Age and the entire Spanish literary canon. A founding work of Western literature, it is often labelled “the first modern novel”. In 2002, BBC asked a panel of 100 “leading authors”, Salman Rushdie among them, to list the 10 works of fiction they considered the “best and most central works in world literature”. Don Quixote easily received fifty per cent more votes than any other book, highlighting its endurance.
In an interview from 2018, Rushdie talks about re-reading the novel and how to him “the idea of a man determinedly seeing the world according to his own vision, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, feels strikingly contemporary”. Intended as a satirical parody of the popular taste in literature during his time, the plot of the original by Cervantes revolves around the (mis)adventures of one Alonso Quixano who loses his mind after reading too many chivalric romances and decides to become a knight himself. He recruits Sancho Panza, a simple farmer, as his square and declares a neighbourhood farm girl as his lady love.
Rushdie in Quichotte, his 14th novel, delivers a modern take on the old classic. The title of the novel is the French spelling of “Quixote” and is a reference to Jules Massenet’s 1910 opera, Don Quichotte. Ismail Smile, a travelling salesman working for his cousin’s pharmaceutical company, is inordinately obsessed with movie star and celebrity talk show host, Salma R. after being laid off, he dons the pseudonym Quichotte and decides to go on a cross-country quest across America with his imaginary son, Sancho, in order to prove worthy of her. The Seven Valleys that have to be crossed during the quest are based on Persian Sufi poet Farid-ud-Din Attar’s The Conference of the Birds, a 12th Century work. But being a Rushdie novel, that is not where the outlandish strangeness stops.
Just like Don Quixote takes a meta-fictional turn in its second part, Quichotte also adopts a similar shift in its second chapter. It is revealed that the first chapter was written by Sam DuChamp, mediocre author of a series of middling spy novels, for a new book-in-progress. Known as Brother/Author throughout the novel, with a sister called Sister and a son called Son, Quichotte also becomes an exploration of his own life and the way it intersects with his fiction. This story-within-a-story premise through the use of a frame narrator is then deftly employed by Rushdie to comment on the weirdness of our current world.
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Rushdie is known to reject the conventionality of genre restriction. He does not confine his works into preset boxes. Talking about Quichotte, he says, “I use many different manners of the novel – the picaresque, the absurd, the spy novel, the science-fiction novel, the realistic, emotional drama—throwing many different kinds of net, so to speak – to try and capture a panorama of surreal, metamorphic time, if I can.” The book flits from genre to genre moment to moment, refusing to be chained down. Cervantes’ vision of the wild west with knights on horses get modified into a road novel yet the epic import remains. The book is steeped in intertextuality, playfully immersed in the same cultural rubbish it seeks to criticize. It endlessly references the various elements which shape it. From Lord of the Rings to Shakespeare, to Marvel, to Hannibal.
In the fourth chapter, while we are being introduced to Sister in England, the main authorial narrator interjects in what seems almost like an apology given in advance. “It may be argued that stories should not sprawl in this way, that they should be grounded in one place or the other, put down roots in the other or the one and flower in that singular soil; yet so many of today’s stories are and must be of this plural, sprawling kind.” According to the narrator, this is necessitated due to the fragmented nature of the 21st century marked by vicious ongoing armed conflicts and refugees seeking asylum in all corners of the world.
Shocked by a revelation, Brother ruminates in the second half of the novel: “Maybe this was the human condition, to live inside fictions created by untruths or the withholding of actual truths. Maybe human life was truly fictional in this sense, that those who lived it didn’t understand it wasn’t real.” The world that Don Quixote and Quichotte occupy is massively delusional, disconnected from reality, yet neither of them is ready to accept it. Sancho, in both iterations, catches on quick but decides to go along with it and humour them both.
The two storylines also come weirdly close to each other and start overlapping. When Brother describes the plot, Sister is quick to point out that it appears he is lampooning his own life in the novel. Sancho, while examining the mind of his father-figure creator, almost feels as if there is someone else up in there pulling the strings. This all brings into question the nature of the characters’ realities across the nested narrative. It almost feels like they are affecting each other, mapping out futures. Who is the actual author and who is the creation?
Addiction plays a very important role in Rushdie’s novel. In the modern world, our increasingly short attention span is always getting tugged in one or the other direction, constantly disrupted by all kinds of stimuli surrounding the reader. Just like the original Don was intoxicated by the chivalric romances of the day, Quichotte is taken up with television. He has been glued to it day and night for years, overfed on everything from daily soap operas, to dramas, to crime-solving to reality shows. They are his Gospel and he knows every single detail by heart. The fantasy and make-believe of the small screen keep on meddling with reality.
There is, of course, a more traditional form of addiction explored through Salma R, the Beloved, who is not the spotless goddess Quichotte has deemed her to be – just like Dulcinea del Toboso from the original. She suffers from bipolar disorder, like her mother and grandmother, a family inheritance. Her choice of combat is the extensive opioid family. And when that ceases to work, she goes for a massively effective fentanyl spray patented by the company for which Quichotte works. Hence, the Suitor and the Beloved both have their own addictions.
To a lot of readers, the book may seem more bizarre than its original counterpart but it perfectly mirrors the reality of a post-truth world. Taking place in the age of Anything-Can-Happen, nothing is impossible. In the era of alternative facts and fake news, the distinction between right and wrong becomes increasingly confusing. From the parthenogenetic birth of Sancho directly as a teenager to human beings turning into mastodons in a New Jersey small town to the very end of the universe, nothing is off the table. Rushdie does indeed employ excess when it comes to depicting our world. The satirical magical realism, and their explanations, do indeed get frequently tiring. But it is a daring and bold work of boundless imagination, a literary homage to the power of popular culture.
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