D.Q. (Don quijote en Barcelona)/ D.Q. (Don Quixote in Barcelona)

By José Luis Turina and Justo Navarro

(Presentations published in the book of the congress Cervantes and Don Quixote in Music, held at the Autonomous University of Madrid in October 2005. Madrid, October 2007)


Presentation by José Luis Turina
Presentation by Justo Navarro

D.Q. (Don Quixote in Barcelona)

By José Luis Turina


INTRODUCTION

From a lamentably misguided mindset, more typical of the 19th century -if not the Stone Age- than of modern times, it is often argued that composers should only express themselves by stringing one note after another, as if having a great deaf man as a reference obligates the rest of us to emulate him, albeit as mutes.
However, there is nothing in the history of music to justify such a view. On the contrary, it was precisely the breaking of that silence by the great deaf man and his contemporaries that, in their time, liberated musical composition -for themselves and their successors- from the servitude in which it had been trapped. Since then, the artisan composer, who focuses solely on sound, has coexisted with the intellectual composer, who not only thinks about other matters but also articulates them. Society, as always, leans to varying degrees toward one side or the other; while some defend the latter type, many still believe that music does not need words to be understood, a task that should be left to musicologists and specialized critics. I wholeheartedly align myself with the first group. For that reason, I feel especially honored to take part in sessions like this one, which allow me, as I mentioned at the beginning, to explain what I aimed to achieve, share my experience of creating it, and reflect on the extent to which my expectations were fulfilled.


THE COMPOSER AND OPERA

No one is unaware that opera is a continual source of dilemmas, where temptation and hesitation coexist in a schizoid manner for the composer. In the face of the allure of the ultimate synesthetic experience (the "total work of art" that Richard Wagner dreamed of), of the impossible sum -like that of apples and oranges- of the innumerable heterogeneous factors of each art form that contributes to it, opera often overwhelms composers. Not because of the difficulty of the endeavor (which, generally, is a motivator), but because of the unpredictability of its outcome.
The history of music is nothing more than the progressive conquest, by successive generations of composers, of the various parameters involved in music once writing gave it the gift of permanence. Quickly mastering basic components (pitch and rhythm), composers spent centuries "taming" the more elusive aspects (dynamics, tempo, and, to some extent, timbre), achieving optimal results in the field of electroacoustic music, the only domain where the composer can produce a definitive version, fully controlled in every respect. This is not the case, clearly, with instrumental music performed by human means, where part of the final result inevitably escapes the composer's control. Even so, composers sustain the illusion with every piece they write that they have encoded everything necessary in the score so that subsequent performances will closely resemble the sound they envisioned when composing.
Perhaps for that reason, composers approach -with great caution- musical expressions where the unpredictability of the final outcome exceeds acceptable limits. In this respect, opera represents entry into a world where, once the score is finished, everyone involved in each production seems to have a say and something to contribute -except the composer.
For my part, I must add that these reflections pale in comparison to the immense technical challenges posed by setting text to music, challenges further compounded by staging requirements. Is it music? Theater? Literature? Opera is all these things, but for this synthesis to occur, each art form must yield part of its identity for the sake of synergy. The key lies in recognizing how far each element can be pushed without breaking or losing its essence. To what extent can the rhythm of a scene be slowed down to accommodate slow music without ceasing to be theater? Or how far can one manipulate the musical aspects of text (intonation, accents, rhythm) without losing their presence in the singing, which is essential for understanding meaning? These are just two examples of the complexity -and grandeur- of the endeavor.


MUSIC AND TEXT

Nine years ago, I had the fortune of seeing my stage-musical production La raya en el agua brought to life at the "Fernando de Rojas" Hall of the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. This marked the conclusion of a slow but progressive approach to opera, although this production cannot, in any way, be considered as such (a perceptive critic aptly described it as "variety theater"). This phase began fifteen years earlier with the composition and subsequent premiere of Ligazón, a short chamber opera based on the first tableau from Retablo de la avaricia, la lujuria y la muerte by Valle-Inclán. That magnificent experience led me to decide not to touch the subject of opera again until I could fully explore the complex world of the music-text relationship. With diligence, curiosity, and enthusiasm, I dedicated several years of my life to studying -exhaustively but haphazardly- all the measurable musical aspects of spoken language (intonation, accents, dynamics, rhythm, meter). These elements, to which linguists have paid little more than descriptive attention due to their lack of training to analyze them from a musical perspective, became my focus.
Once I had unraveled -at least to the extent possible- these aspects, the staging of La raya en el agua positioned me to believe I was ready to undertake the composition of an opera. At that point, as if by chance, I received a phone call from Carles Padrisa and Álex Oller, two prominent members of La Fura dels Baus, who had heard of the premiere and its favorable reception. This led to an extensive conversation, during which they invited me to compose the music for a new opera, an idea they had been contemplating since their staging of La Atlántida in 1996 and their preparations for two other oratorios, Le Martyre de saint Sébastien and La Damnation de Faust.
Naturally, I didn't need to think twice. The natural fear of the unknown was no obstacle to being swept up by the immense appeal of the project, to which I devoted myself fully for three years. La Fura dels Baus offered only a minimal but compelling clue to start with: none other than Don Quixote as the central axis of the spectacle. It wasn't difficult, after that, to secure the agreement of Justo Navarro to write the libretto.


WHO BELONGS AN OPERA TO?

Before delving further into this topic, it's necessary to reflect on a mandatory and increasingly difficult question: Who belongs an opera to?
Recent times have seen a genuine revolution in opera, placing the three inherently creative components that define it on an equal footing. Music, traditionally regarded as the most important element, now shares its central role with the libretto and the staging, the latter of which often accounts for much of the appeal in any production of a repertoire work.
All of us who, in one way or another, love opera are pleased that this balance has been achieved, convinced as we are that the exact conjunction of these three elements is the key to the much-desired and indispensable renewal of a repertoire that, anchored for decades in a handful of standard titles, resists any proposal for innovation. At the same time, all of us who believe in the validity of opera as a genre with much left to say are convinced that this balance must not -and cannot- be exceeded for the sake of opera's artistic integrity. The worst enemy of a cohesive concept for a production is the ego of any one of its components. We've seen this time and again with the demands and whims of divos and divas whose antics have endangered and even ruined the integrity of performances. Similarly, in recent years, there have been stagings driven purely by provocation, often bordering on the absurd.
In that sense (forgive my immodesty), this production, as it was seen and heard at its premiere at the Liceu, was exemplary in its foundational approach. Creatively, it belonged equally to La Fura dels Baus, Justo Navarro, and myself -without any hierarchical order implied in that listing and independent of the fact that, for its premiere, all the spotlight fell on the Catalan company, for better and, especially, for worse. I emphasize this because, in my view, it represents the central innovation of the proposal. Unlike the usual practice, this was not a case where a composer spends years knocking on the doors of impresarios and managers, begging for a chance to stage a score based on a libretto someone else wrote using a preexisting narrative or dramatic work. Nor was it a case where, at best, a staging was developed entirely detached from the initial artistic intentions, long lost in the years of bureaucratic pilgrimage.
On the contrary, everything in D.Q. (Don Quixote in Barcelona) unfolded with absolute creative synchronization. La Fura dels Baus took the lead, inviting Justo Navarro and me to write the libretto and music, respectively, for an opera based on the Quixotic myth. From there, Justo Navarro began writing, and I started composing at the pace he set. The entire production process followed the chronological order of the final performance: the first act was completed, then the second, and the third brought the work to its conclusion. As expected in a project carried out in close and amicable collaboration, frequent three-way meetings influenced our respective contributions in mutually enriching and fruitful ways. Justo Navarro and I benefited from the suggestions of Carles Padrisa and Álex Oller just as much as they, in turn, benefited from ours.


DEVELOPMENT OF THE WORK

The initial working meetings were essential for outlining the various details of the production -not just the narrative synopsis, but also the musical structure of each act, the type and character of the music, the instrumentation, the roles for solo voices and choir, and the potential use of electroacoustic elements. For Justo Navarro and me, collaborating closely with La Fura dels Baus was not only an exciting opportunity to engage with creativity in its purest state (and thus the possibility of doing something different) but also an immense responsibility. The company's history, marked by its obsession with technical perfection and overwhelming use of new technologies in its productions, demanded a level of rigor that matched those standards.
However, the most fundamental part was collectively understanding the type of spectacle we wanted to create. Should it be a conventional opera or a Fura-style show? The answer was as simple as it was complex: neither and both at the same time. The goal was to fuse the two approaches so they could enrich each other in the explosive blend that would inevitably arise from the coexistence of such disparate creative paths.
The result was a three-act spectacle that, with a deliberate appearance of conventional opera, could integrate all the technological and audiovisual richness implied in the proposal. The operatic world is undoubtedly in a transitional phase, moving from the Age of Painted Cardboard to the Technological Era. Today, both coexist, though the former is in decline while the latter is gradually taking hold. La Fura dels Baus' proposal for D.Q. aligned more closely with the latter, a vision shaped by the late Enric Miralles. His approach was rooted in the use of light (affecting even costumes, made from materials that absorbed and reflected light), videography as a key element, and classical references reimagined through stylization to make them surprisingly innovative. Examples included suspended chairs for the auction scene in Act I, the metallic frame of the dirigible-turned-cage for Don Quixote in Act II -which became the production's icon- and the lamp-like trees in Act III. This synthesis of the traditional and the contemporary paralleled the aesthetic goals pursued by the libretto and music, constituting one of the most striking features of the production.


WHAT HAPPENED TO DON QUIXOTE IN THE CAVE OF MONTESINOS, AND THE TRUE REASON FOR HIS JOURNEY TO BARCELONA

From the outset, Justo Navarro and I were clear that our opera could not and should not be merely a mise en musique of one or several scenes from the novel. Such an approach, however novel the musical proposal might be, would have inevitably resulted in a conventional treatment of the theme. Instead, we chose from the beginning to reverse this logic. While embracing traditional musical elements and techniques -often intensifying their presence to benefit the dramatic intent- we aimed to reinvigorate them through their integration into a modern staging.
While Don Quixote is astonishing in many ways, its most dazzling quality for contemporary readers is the absolute modernity of its structural and formal conception. For minds steeped in classical or romantic traditions, the novel's purely narrative aspects or the human traits of its characters may be its most appealing features. But from a modern perspective, these aspects are almost secondary to the overwhelming ingenuity of Cervantes' storytelling methods. The focus is not so much on what is told but on how it is told. Don Quixote himself matters less than Cervantes' genius as a creator, revealed through a complex system of literary artifices that are as fascinating as the novel itself.
Nearly 400 years after its creation, Don Quixote has become inseparable from the vast corpus of literature, theory, philosophy, music, drama, and art inspired by it. Thanks to a wealth of literary criticism, we now read Don Quixote with footnotes that, far from hindering our experience, enrich it by uncovering layers of erudition invisible to the unannotated reader. How can one resist the literary revolution Cervantes pioneered by inserting himself into the pages of his own novel, appearing and disappearing as its author, saving himself from the book-burning he orchestrates, and even competing with his rival Avellaneda in the second part? How not to marvel at a work that is simultaneously a novel, parody, critique, and essay, where stories nest within stories, each embedded in another narrative, until the reader's confidence in managing structural planes is delightfully shaken?
All this makes Don Quixote profoundly relevant today, not just for its timeless procedures but for the way it forces us to reflect on storytelling itself. For contemporary readers, Cervantes' satirical intent -so crucial to his critique of chivalric romances- has become almost secondary. Understanding this satire requires familiarity with the now-obscure works Cervantes aimed to ridicule. Yet, even as those references fade into obscurity, Don Quixote endures, proving the novel's autonomy from the parodic intentions that inspired it. Its captivating narrative and unparalleled literary quality ensure its continued resonance.
Our scenic proposal sought to reconnect with the novel's fundamental pretext through a triple parody. Broadly speaking, the references are as follows:
a) Parody of Opera as a Genre. We employed easily recognizable operatic formal devices, lending a distinctive character to major figures. Examples include the Auctioneer's arias in Act I or those of Don Quijote and the Trifaldi Sisters in Act II. Additionally, we incorporated playful references -brief flashes of melodies from the traditional operatic repertoire. These nods are designed to resonate with knowledgeable audiences while passing unnoticed by others, akin to Cervantes' use of parody. In his time, readers familiar with chivalric romances grasped the humor, while modern readers, unfamiliar with those texts, still enjoy Don Quijote for its inherent qualities.
b) Parody of Cervantes' novel. The opera abounds in references to scenes from Don Quijote: the adventure with the galley slaves, Maese Pedro's puppet show, the enchanted head, Don Quijote's penance in Sierra Morena, and the Court of Death. Yet one detail especially caught our attention. In the brilliant metafictional twist of Chapter 23 in the second book, Cervantes labels Don Quijote's adventure in Montesinos' Cave as apocryphal. This self-referential flair inspired our narrative framework. Thus, D.Q. (Don Quijote en Barcelona) dramatizes what actually happened in Montesinos' Cave, revealing Cervantes' supposed cover-up. Instead of entering the cave, Don Quijote finds himself transported to a futuristic Geneva auction hall, trapped by a time-traveling machine designed to retrieve ancient marvels. He is sold to a Hong Kong billionaire as a gift for his daughters, the Trifaldi Sisters. They display him in a "cage of air and time" within their Garden of Monsters. Stricken with nostalgia, Don Quijote's longing moves the Trifaldi Sisters to return him to a place where he is remembered. However, due to an error, he emerges not in his own time but in Barcelona in 2005, during a congress commemorating the novel's 400th anniversary. This gathering seeks to resolve the ambiguities surrounding Don Quijote's authorship, a recurring meta-narrative within Cervantes' text. Don Quijote's presence disrupts the event and unleashes natural chaos: a hurricane sweeps up from the sea and ravages the city, ascending the Ramblas. This catastrophic event, rather than his dispute with Avellaneda, becomes the true reason Don Quijote wishes to return to Barcelona in the novel's second part -to undo the chaos he previously caused.
c) Parody of "Metaquixotism", or everything that has been written about Don Quixote to explain Don Quixote, which I referred to earlier as an integral part of the book itself, and which in our opera focuses on the last act, on the Intercontinental Congress "Don Quixote de la Mancha".
And this is, broadly speaking, our pretext. With regard to the text, it must be said that the general parodic intention of D. Q. (Don Quixote in Barcelona) requires for its realization a not inconsiderable amount of sense of humor and scenic agility. Yet, as with Cervantes' novel, these elements do not detract from the profound humanity of Don Quijote. At its core, the character is an endearing figure -a man striving to escape the monotony of a life defined by lentils on Fridays, minced meat on most evenings, and pigeon on Sundays. In the Garden of Monsters, visitors recoil upon realizing Don Quijote is "infected with Time", a radioactive, deadly substance from which their society has long since freed itself. Time, in their world, is now a relic excavated to recover ancient treasures, with Don Quijote embodying one such artifact.
This revelation is expressed not only in what Don Quijote says -lines like "And not to feel time, a Merlin who injects me with time…" and "… I wish to be cured of time, to no longer be myself, to be Don Quijote"-, but also in how he says it. His tonal language and operatic forms (notably, the aria) betray his origins in a bygone era where time tormented humanity. This contrast between modern and traditional language is not merely a formal device but an expressive one, evoking the protagonist's nostalgia. This ailment of the soul, as everyone knows, has time as both its cause and its only cure.

D.Q. (Don Quixote in Barcelona)

By Justo Navarro


I accepted the task of writing a libretto for an opera by José Luis Turina and La Fura dels Baus, a D.Q., and committed an unforgivable boldness, given my complete lack of theatrical experience, let alone operatic expertise. In my defense, I will say I trusted my collaborators, Turina and La Fura, artists of unusual talent. Yet, with the confidence of the reckless, I held one clear idea from the beginning: I would not turn into a theatrical illustrator, so to speak, of a series of selected Quixotic, Cervantine vignettes.
Don Quixote is one of those poetic -or mythopoetic- characters, meaning those that inherently generate new images and fables, much like the characters of the Bible, Homeric poems, the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, or, at a certain moment, our own Romancero. He belongs to that category of fabled characters who become historical beings around whom countless additional stories are created. His vitality is no different from that of certain historical figures who achieve the status of legendary characters -Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, or Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of Kennedy, who became the protagonist of novels by Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo. In the opening chapter of Underworld, DeLillo also features Frank Sinatra and a famous FBI director in cameo roles, much like James Ellroy does in his noir novels. Similarly, Joe Gores introduces Dashiell Hammett as a hard-hitting detective in his novel Hammett, which later became a film by Wim Wenders, known in Spain as The Man from Chinatown.
(The reuse of already established symbols may signal dissatisfaction or insecurity: Spanish distributors used the word Chinatown in the title of Wenders' film, evoking Polanski's successful movie, as if unsure of Wenders' work itself.)
In popular literature, especially in detective fiction, repetition and the appropriation of other creators' characters are common, resembling how comic book or film heroes like James Bond or Batman pass through the hands of various writers and artists. I recall now the use of the character Sherlock Holmes, whom I even found in a story by Isaac Asimov. At its most brilliant moments, this tradition leads to characters being perceived as real by many people. I have sometimes heard people ask if Don Quixote actually existed, and I've heard the same question about Robin Hood or Robinson Crusoe -similar to how people might regard characters from the Scriptures.
A famous American critic recently listed, in a newspaper, the three books he believed the wisest readers would choose for a desert island: the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and Don Quixote. In all three cases, these are works filled with stories that spawn further stories, centered on the type of characters I've called mythopoetic: Shakespeare's kings and princes, the holy figures of the Bible, and Don Quixote. The critic Sainte-Beuve once referred to Don Quixote as the modern Bible. The power of these books is such that they not only produce legends -repeated, renewed, or wholly new-, but also serve as the prosperous foundation of a tourist souvenir industry, as any traveler visiting England, Jerusalem, Santiago de Compostela, Rome, or La Mancha can verify.
The proliferation of Quixotes over time has produced a wide variety of representations of the hero, his squire, his horse, and his donkey, appealing to all the senses: to sight, not only through printed words but also in films, illustrations, paintings, and sculptures that can also be touched, engaging the sense of touch; to hearing, through music and spoken or sung recitations; and even to smell and taste, thanks to an admirable assortment of soaps, oils, sausages, cheeses, quince paste, and sweets. Max Aub reasonably claimed that there is a Quixote for every era, but today it seems we have a Quixote for every situation. His realism is so real that no one can doubt his authenticity, Max Aub also said. He was never more right than now, when Don Quixote has become a repetition that has achieved the status of a state apparatus, the Soul of Spain, as Unamuno and the entire Generation of '98 aspired. However, Don Quixote, as a classic of world literature, might just be a foreign invention -crafted by the French, Germans, and especially the English, who regarded it as a classic not for the idealism of the work but for its realism, for Cervantes' genius in embedding his fabulous knight in vivid scenes that sensorially captured the materiality of his time.
(On Quixotism and Spanishness, I always recall the lines from Don Juan by Lord Byron: "Cervantes laughed at the old Spanish chivalry, / and with that single laugh he broke the armed arm / of his country. Since then, Spain has rarely had heroes". ("Of all stories, this is the saddest / because it makes us smile", Byron also wrote, in a line that surely echoes another by Jaime Gil de Biedma: "Of all the stories I know / without a doubt the saddest is that of Spain".)
But to momentarily conclude this patriotic matter, never before has the statement by the Don Quixote character Sansón Carrasco about the first book been truer than it is today: "Children handle it, youths read it, men understand it, and elders celebrate it".
We use it as one uses old materials, following its author, who wrote his book with second-hand material drawn from chivalric novels -fictions of much entertainment and little profit, as described in Sebastián de Covarrubias's Tesoro de la Lengua Castellana. If we take its prologue at face value, Don Quixote would be an invective against chivalric novels, a huge success in the 16th century and one of the first triumphs of the printing press's power of repetition. However, in Don Quixote, there is a canon from Toledo who dismisses them as harsh, unbelievable, lengthy, foolish, absurd, and useless -rejected in a word. Cervantes revived them in his novel when they were already dead letters, soon to be mummified in libraries- "old junk", as Gracián called them. Curiously, chivalric novels themselves had grown over other literatures and myths -French narratives of the 12th and 13th centuries, both in verse and prose, and epics centered on Troy, King Arthur, Charlemagne, and the Twelve Peers of France. Don Quixote thus participates in a round of infinite, immortal characters, where Homer's heroes dance alongside Arthur, Lancelot, Geneve, Tristan, Isolde, and Merlin. And in this eternal procession appear Rolando, Orlando, or Roldán, adapting themselves to countless adaptations and reincarnations.
(The knight Amadís de Gaula, for instance, inspired a popular dog name, as noted in Martín de Riquer's book on Spanish knights-errant. Riquer recounts that the Duke of Gerona, future King John I of Aragon, owned a dog named Amadís in 1372. Similarly, in Juan Manuel Cacho Blecua's study on Amadís, he cites Samuel Gili Gaya, who found in Lleida's Municipal Archive a testimony about a Lleidan witch who also named her dog Amadís.)
Great fantasies generate other fantasies, and these characters I've mentioned are particularly prolific in this regard -none more so than Don Quixote. It's often said that Don Quixote is not only the best but the first novel; all others are born from or connected to it. As Ortega stated, every novel contains a Quixote within it. Every hero is a D.Q.; one need not invent new adventures for the original Quixote, for anyone creating new fictional heroes is inventing new Quixotes.
Don Quixote is an origin book -a creative, sacred text. Faulkner confessed to reading Don Quixote every year, as one reads the Bible. Don Quixote is a myth in the religious sense, as it recounts a foundational enterprise -the deeds and origins of a god or hero. It is a myth, meaning a belief that, by its intrinsic power and the devotion it inspires, produces behaviors.
All literature, all art, is a form of religion -a cult of ancestors who, when mythical, reproduce themselves mythically. This is evident in certain fantastical figures and popular culture icons, such as the many Draculas and vampiresses, Frankenstein's monster and his bride, the mummy and the bride of the mummy, even Mata Hari and her fictional daughter, the protagonist of a 1950s B-movie. These things happen even with Don Quixote's creator, Cervantes. For instance, there was a Hotel Cervantes in Torremolinos where a Mister Cervantes competition was held, as reported by the London Times on June 4, 1986 -nearly 20 years before the events of the IV Centenary. This hotel had a Don Quixote Restaurant, a Sancho Panza Café, and a Dulcinea Discotheque. I found this Quixotic tourism anecdote in Edward C. Riley's book, La rara invención. Riley cannot help but succumb to the mythopoetic contagion: in one of the book's essays, he speculates about Cervantes as the father or precursor of psychoanalytic narrative theory, based on Freud's youthful letters. Cervantes' Dialogue of the Dogs prefigures, in the talking dogs Berganza and Cipión, the roles of the patient and the psychoanalyst -Berganza narrates his life on Cipión's psychoanalytic couch. "I will briefly seek in Berganza's life story possible analogies with psychoanalytic rhetoric", Riley states -and he delivers. The monsters of literature and horror films, like Dracula or Frankenstein's creature, are, like myths in general, beings where death does not function properly. Bruce F. Kawin, in Telling Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film, sees them as undead figures condemned to rise from their graves and live a parody of life. Cervantes did something similar with his chivalric books -inexhaustible, digressive, and brimming with adventures and characters that were themselves sequels to earlier figures. What's remarkable is that Don Quixote is not an appendix to chivalric literature; rather, chivalric literature today is an appendix to Don Quixote, which continues to spawn appendices in the form of films, comics, poetic appropriations, video games, and even psychotropic substances like sherries and brandies.
This interplay shaped my use of the Quixotic legend when envisioning La Fura's stage designs and productions, with their ability to mobilize machinery and actors conceived as masses and bodies. The names of the characters, the marvelous devices, the impersonations and duplications of personalities, the enchantments, and the fantastical geography -all came from Don Quixote and the world of chivalry. Instead of La Mancha and imaginary kingdoms, we had Geneve, Hong Kong, and Barcelona -both simultaneously, in a fantastical time. Rather than engaging with the characters themselves, I aimed to explore the current appropriation of the myth and its central figure -the noble, brave, and mad knight.
With Don Quixote, reality mirrors fiction to some extent. Erich Auerbach highlighted the effect of Don Quixote's appearance in Cervantes' novel: those around him indulge his madness for their own amusement. This happens at roadside inns, in the palace of the dukes, and in Barcelona. Reality transforms, infected by Quixotic madness: “Don Quixote's madness gives rise to endless transformations and tricks”, Auerbach observes, noting how the most ordinary people, upon interacting with the madman, turn into unexpected characters: princesses, errant knights… Reality becomes an unending theater. Great fictional characters eventually are treated as real beings, just as, as we noted earlier, real people sometimes end up functioning as fictional characters. Recently, a particular type of documentary film has gained traction -one that reconstructs, for example, Hitler's death in Berlin in May 1945. The creators mix, or blur, real footage with scenes acted out by performers, real settings with artificial backdrops, in a deliberate strategy to shatter the audience's disbelief -unless, of course, the viewer falls into complete skepticism, perceiving the real images as tainted by the actors' fiction and staging, ultimately concluding that the entire production is likely more false than true. However, I believe such disbelief is not the norm.
We are experiencing an age of credulity, deeply religious in nature, despite the apparent decline in the prestige of fictional novels. Many readers are eager for solid, historical truths and therefore turn to historical novels about the Templars, the painter Vermeer, or Leonardo, or a manuscript that passed through Petrarch's hands before reaching Mussolini's, only to be found in the portfolio of a cardinal murdered during the conclave that elected Benito XVI. There is a great yearning for reality, even if it is for a wondrous kind of reality. I am reminded of what Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet on December 25, 1852: "Do we not believe in the existence of Don Quixote as much as we do in Caesar?"
Thus, Don Quixote today commands the reverence once reserved for emperors. He is a figure of history rather than of imagination. He is found in the living room, in the kitchen, in children's rooms, as a statue in the public square, and among tourist souvenirs. We do not welcome Don Quixote with a longing for fantasy but with a true craving for reality -a reality more real than our daily one. Don Quixote has undergone a kind of enchantment. Auerbach also noted that Don Quixote experienced "a sort of triumphant satisfaction in being targeted by malicious enchanters", because such a curse certified his status as an extraordinary knight-errant.