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Ryan and Don Roger

5

Book Burnings

            In 1492, the Spanish Jews were given the choice of conversion to Catholicism or of being expelled from Spain. Many chose to leave. Those who converted, and remained, were kept under constant supervision. In an effort to stamp out their faith, their books were condemned to the flames by the Spanish Inquisition. A similar burning of the books in Don Quixote’s library occurs in DQI, 6. Is book burning effective? Some people think so. Other people aren’t so sure.

            The Spanish conquest of Mexico, led by Hernán Cortés, concluded on August 13, 1521, when Spanish forces and their native Tlaxcalan allies captured the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan and emperor Cuauhtémoc, marking the end of the Aztec Empire and the beginning of Spanish colonial rule. The country was then called New Spain. 

Mexico is famous for its codices. These are fan-fold picture histories, drawn on vellum covered with gesso, of tribal conquests, social norms, tables of the gods, in fact a whole cultural and historical record of pre-Hispanic Mexico. The Zouche-Nuttal codex, for example, sets out the conquests of Ocho Venado / Eight Deer, nicknamed Garra de Tigre / Tiger Claw, a Mixtec warrior, who lived between 1063 and 1115. Five of the Mixtec codices survive. Many, many more were burned. The cover of the Vindobonensis shows the burn marks where some daring person pulled the codex from the flames and saved it. Without such saved codices, we would have much less knowledge of pre-Hispanic Mexico.

            Why is this anecdote important? Because prior to the invention of printing, in 1474, manuscripts were written by hand. Yes, some were copied, but many copies were single and unique. Burn the manuscript, destroy the knowledge it contains. Post 1474, with the printing of multiple copies of books, the individual book might be destroyed, but some books would survive from the printing sequence. Apply this to Don Quixote’s library and we note several things. First, Don Quixote’s copies are destroyed. Second, other copies of his books survive elsewhere. In addition, although Don Quixote’s books are burned the ideas in those books survive in the knight’s head and he lives by their rules. Those ideas are spread throughout the history of his adventures to everybody with whom he comes in contact. Conclusion – you can destroy the books. You cannot destroy the ideas that those books contained.

            Ray Bradbury, in Farhenheit 451, describes the burning of books in his dystopian novel. 451F incidentally is the temperature at which paper burns. The books are burnt in Bradbury’s world, but the book people survive. The book people are those who memorize their books and are able to quote them from memory and pass them on orally to other people.

            And people protect their books. How? By placing them in small rooms within their houses and walling up those rooms so that the books could not be found. This happens in DQI, VI – 6. Don Quixote awakes, goes to find his library, but it has disappeared. The housekeeper swears that a sage enchanter descended on a dragon and the library vanished in a puff of smoke. Don Quixote believes the metatheatrical lie and acts as if it were the truth. He then bemoans the fact that he is pursued by malignant sorcerers. These evil enchanters will pursue him throughout the novel whenever he wakes up from his illusions and is faced by reality. Clearly, the sage enchanters have robbed him of his moment of glory (illusion) and reduced him to sorry (the truth).

            Curiously enough, a 16^th Century walled-up library was found in a house in Barcarrota, Spain not so long ago. The books were hidden, probably from the Inquisition, so that their owner could escape prosecution. The discovery sheds light on how individuals hid literature from the Inquisition during the 16th century in Spain. It also illustrates how closely Cervantes followed the reality of his times when writing the Quixote.

            You can destroy books. But it is very difficult to destroy the ideas they contain. In this fashion, although the burning of that one book ends the life of that particular volume, it rarely ends the life of the ideas contained within its covers. We might not recognize the names of the characters that Don Quixote quotes from his memory of those histories, but many of the people who encounter the knight during his adventures know them and remember them. Amadis of Gaul is never dead, not when his name lives on. The same is true of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. King Arthur is said to fstill be alive and can be seen in the shape of a White Crow, bran gwen, in Welsh. And even Walt Disney knew, and profited from, the legend of the sword in the stone.

We will also see, as we continue our journey, that in the same way that tall oaks grow out of small acorns, large parts of later events found in the Quixote already have their seeds sown in these early chapters. Metatheatre, illusion and reality, authorship and censorship, truth and falsehood, waking events and dream sequences – and that is just the start.