Today the world’s first novel was published.
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s life reads like a work of fantastic fiction. He was first a soldier, losing the use of his left hand to a war injury when he was 24. Then he was captured by pirates and spent five years as a slave in Algiers, getting ransomed so he could serve as a spy for Spain in Portugal. Then he’d write a novel and a play each year for twenty years, all of which found little to no audiences. So he became a tax collector, got indicted for malfeasance, and was sent to jail. Legend has it that’s where he started writing his second novel, Don Quixote, Part I of which was published on this day in 1605 (by way of context, William Shakespeare’s King Lear was all the rage at London’s Globe Theatre). Cervantes’ publisher ripped him off of all royalties on it, and he’d go one to publish Part II a decade later and die nearly destitute but for the largesse of a sympathetic nobleman.
Don Quixote is regularly cited as the first “modern novel,” in that it’s characters grow and change during the course of the plot (unlike the static presentations of character common in works dating back to The Canterbury Tales). The reader is acknowledged in a different way, too, in a way that transcends the formalities of address (“dear reader…”) and instead shares a plot that can be as befuddling to him or her as the events are to Cervantes’ protagonist. It reads like a self-contained, narrated “theatrical” experience, almost as if Cervantes took the model of live theater and captured it in a new medium. Don Quixote emerged somewhat preformed or organically from Cervantes’ creative genius which, until that time (and mostly long after he was dead), nobody really recognized.
So would he have been able to create it without his own unique life experience, and would the result have been so uniquely, er, novel had he enjoyed the understanding and support of his contemporaries?
