595. “Partial Enchantments of the Quixote” (2)
Expert words on the compound charms of the world’s most active and ingenious spirit of chivalry. Alfred Schutz on “The Quixote”:
Knight errantry is first of all a way of life. It fulfils a heavenly mission. Knights errant are “God’s ministers on earth, and the arms by which His justice is executed here.” In this iron age it is their profession to roam the world, righting wrongs and relieving injuries. But chivalry is not only a way of life, it is a science, more, the queen of all sciences.
Schutz means in the first place of course that the knight worth his sublime salt must know a lot about a lot—law, theology, medicine, organic chemistry, poetry, civil (and then some) engineering, philosophy. But chivalry is not only the incarnated aggregation of forms of knowledge modernity is accustomed to regard as quite separate spheres. More: it is the queen of all science. And here we must cowboy up—no matter the breed or species of our stallion—to meet the “meta”: chivalry is the overarching science of the sciences, the principle by which disparate sciences are drawn into coexistence. No Hegelian (“we might be tempted to speak of a non-Hegelian dialectic”), Schutz, Quixote’s sociological Sancho Panza, admires the overarching scientific accomplishment of the Grand Master of Chivalry (enough to withstand the slings and arrows of any Arch), not as a synthesis by which different ways of knowing the world are drawn together, but rather as a sturdy (though not invulnerable) Treaty which, tacitly acknowledging that these ways of knowing will always go their separate ways, devises a peaceful means of negotiation between them.
How to explain the difference between the landscape of chivalry from the ordinary world the knight encounters? Claro! Enchanters!:
Thus, it is the function of the enchanters’ activities to guarantee the coexistence and compatibility of several sub-universes of meaning referring to the same matters of fact and to assure the maintenance of the accents of reality bestowed upon any of such sub-universes.
Friendly or hostile, these enchanters rationalize without denying any apparent discrepancy: with the aid of these hermeneutic ambassadors, Don Quixote can walk amongst ordinary mortals, an avatar of “multiculturalism” or “cultural relativism,” only franker than its contemporary iterations. (Quixote is not shy to assert his claim to possess the key to any final finding of what’s really going on—his grasp of “determination in the last instance” of the Truth is as sure as it is singular.)
And the most malevolent of the enchanters who inhabit Quixote’s Ptolemaic Universe is kindness itself, when we compare them to the condescending consumers who finally bring down the knight. As you will remember, or know soon enough, whether through the cruelty you encounter in Cervantes or somewhere else—somewhere I hope not too dark—what brings Quixote to grief is the crowd of amused readers he meets on his third expedition, the heartless and manipulative crowd who already know his story as a story, and would never consider giving his noble intentions the time of day that would make it possible to communicate with him, person to person, social being to social being:
In order to humor him and to establish with him a universe of discourse, they build up within the reality of their daily-life-world a world of play, of joke, of make-believe and “let’s pretend,” which, so they hope, will be taken by Don Quixote as reality in terms of his private sub-universe. But since they never bestow upon their make-believe world the accent of reality, they cannot succeed in establishing a discourse with Don Quixote and, consequentially, they cannot enter a true social relationship with him.
But enough for now with all this distance and disrespect. I will leave barely mentioned Schutz’s own chivalrous attitude toward Quixote’s worldview, an attitude best sounded by his near silence about it at the end of his brief and devastating essay on the World-Historical disassociation of the social senses as it is dramatized in the downfall of the knight. Remarking the regent “reality” of the world, the reigning seeing of the world, Schutz falls into respectful reticence about the view of the loser—the defeated view of the knight become a baffled clown.
I will mention—by way of the most hopeful closing I know how to make here, as we leave the knight beset by such cruelty—a story, hardly mine alone, of the Love that arises with the sight of Quixote’s heirs and defenders. The first month of my freshman year, I fell fast and hard for a guy in my entryway, and what I fell for was his outrage at the ill treatment Quixote received at the hands of those in the novel who found this best of men merely colorful and quaint: “They’re just torturing him! They don’t care about him! They just want to make fun of him!” Such noble engrossment in the noble engrossments of those once made strong, now weak, by the fictions of nobility! How could anyone help but love such devotion to an impulse as vulnerable as it venerable?
Quixotes all around us: stop this day and night to listen to them—they’re here to rock our world.
Notes:
1. Alfred Schutz, “On Multiple Realities.”
2. Alfred Schutz, “Don Quixote and the Problem of Reality.”