Coda
Quixotism, Phenomenology, Epistemology
The impetus for this study was the recognition that prior studies of quixotism have been unable to find intellectual consistency among so many quixotic figures in fiction of the long eighteenth century and beyond. Consequently, the concept of the quixotic has reached—in literary studies, as in the broader world of politics—a critical mass of meaning, resulting too often in confusion rather than clarification. This is an exigent problem, because Don Quixote is among the most widely influential characters in literary history. Because quixotes can be different genders, different ranks, and of different political persuasions, nationalities, and professions, quixotism would seem incapable of describing much more than a loose association with Don Quixote. The temptation has been to conclude therefore that quixotism is simply an allusive phenomenon, not capable of offering any conceptual coherence where applied (even though the term “quixotic” is indeed frequently applied). As I have argued, however, quixotism is a coherent disposition common to quixotes of vastly differing politics and demographics in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, and that disposition is fundamentally a form of exceptionalism. Quixotic exceptionalism explains the prevalence and influence of quixotic characters in eighteenth-century literatures in English in particular, and it helps explain a range of eighteenth-century social, legal, and political conflicts.
Quixotic exceptionalism is the logic that enables one to continually subordinate competing evidence and concerns to the quixotic worldview, on the grounds that whatever it is that animates quixotism—belief in a higher form of justice, of morality, or of self-actualization—shapes and takes precedent over everything else. Quixotes rely on exceptionalism to maintain their quixotism, even after supposed conversions from quixotism (at least, the kind that do not result in the quixote’s death, as in Marauder’s case). Further, as we can observe in the quixotes presented in this study, the bookishness of quixotes that enables quixotism’s high-minded attitude equips quixotes to carry out exceptionalist practices, whether in denying the flaws in one’s own nationalism, as Gulliver does, or in denying a lesser, more stifling reality, as Arabella does. Understanding that quixotes are exceptionalists allows us to understand both how they function and why they were such popular choices for novelistic political interventions.
Crucial to understanding quixotic exceptionalism is understanding that exceptionalism is not simply a function of difference or aberration. Cervantes’s Quixote is not merely an exception because of his madness, a character unlike others around him. Quixote believes he is a modern incarnation of a set of past values that he holds sacred, and he proceeds as though others should make accommodations for this belief, or else face the lance. Gulliver, too, considers himself not merely different from those he meets along his travels, but representative, in some sense, of ways of life he believes superior. Whether as an Englishman in Brobdingnag or a Houyhnhnm-convert among fellow English Yahoos upon his final return, Gulliver thinks himself responsible for upholding what he takes to be the superior values that he has left behind (or that have left him behind). For Gulliver, the naïve and isolated King of Brobdingnag cannot possibly have the breadth of insight and understanding of interconnected Britain and Europe, though later in the narrative Gulliver laments that his English family and friends cannot possibly know the exemplary qualities of the Utopian Houyhnhnms from the isolated, faraway land of England. Gulliver’s exceptionalism takes its ultimate form when, as a consequence of his quixotism, he manages to identify with a different species from his own, and from that of his family.
In the early US, too, quixotic exceptionalism played a significant role in policing and reforming notions of American exceptionalism. In The Algerine Captive, for example, Updike Underhill’s quixotism helped illustrate the contradictions of American exceptionalism while simultaneously differentiating between English and US notions of freedom and opportunity. Updike admires Benjamin Franklin’s ability to adjust to uncertain circumstances and to learn from misjudgments (in a way Updike so often fails to do); but he ridicules a group of Londoners for boasting of their “glorious freedom” despite “hereditary senators” and other clear forms of injustice (86). Given Don Quixote’s role in satirizing the bellicose attitudes and nationalisms of the Spanish Empire in its bygone zenith, eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers found an enticing and effective character model in Quixote, taking him up to interrogate national exceptionalisms.
We can see in each of the quixotes in this study varying strands of exceptionalism, many of which overlap and form something of a mosaic impression of quixotic exceptionalism, the result of idealism, mimetic appeal, and a high-minded literary sensibility that fosters imagination. Each of the instances of quixotic exceptionalism covered in this book has roots in Cervantes’s Don Quixote, though each has moved in some way beyond Don Quixote as well. Whether by reconfiguring Quixote as an international traveler or a stationary dreamer, an aspiring politician, a preacher, a writer, a savior, or a radical libertine, quixotic roots anchor a form of exceptionalism but also nourish the branching off of this mind-set into different directions and toward different ends. When we look at the branches of this quixotic tree we see a sprawling and multitudinous network that appears too vast and multiform to understand as coherent. But when we consider the roots beneath the surface, the unifying framework of the exceptionalism of quixotes becomes apparent. Even in our contemporary, journalistic renderings of people and actions as “quixotic,” we can glimpse the exceptionalist roots of quixotism. A “quixotic” governmental decision frequently involves a paternalistic turn away from the will of the populace, a claim to visionary exceptionalism like that of Captain Farrago. A “quixotic” political campaign is an effort against the odds, an exceptionalist belief in one’s destiny over reason, like Gulliver’s continual testing of his fortune overseas in strange and dangerous lands. Whether understood as acts or instances of resilient heroism or woeful imprudence, quixotic efforts entail a belief in some form of exceptionalism, or a willingness to proceed according to a separate set of rules that follow from a sense of moral superiority.
Exceptionalism is both a root of quixotism and, when quixotes inspire mimesis, a product of it, stemming from the behavior of Cervantes’s Don Quixote and present in the subsequent proliferation of quixotic narratives. Returning to our point of departure—the heuristic list of quixotic characteristics with which I began—we can see after reading a series of quixotic narratives how quixotic characteristics fuel exceptionalism. The first characteristic, that the quixote is an imaginative idealist, rather than a trickster or delinquent, enables quixotes to adopt grand purposes that become powerful drivers of the quixotic imagination. In this sense, quixotes can envision an ideal for which no set of rules or laws, save those according to which the quixote lives and operates, can deter the pursuit of the ideal. Even with her inheritance at stake, Arabella will not suffer Glanville refusing to read her romances for himself, nor will Updike hear the Mollah’s talk of religious conversion, even if it means his deliverance from slavery.
The second characteristic, that the quixote is of the noble or educated ranks, means that quixotes are heavily invested in a bookish, literary high-mindedness that makes them ideal candidates for testing the limits of fictionality. Quixotes are privileged and educated enough not merely to read avidly and adeptly, but to place extraordinarily high value both on what they read (whether books of chivalry, travel, history, philosophy, or religion) and on a literary understanding of the world itself. Parson Adams and Updike Underhill, the only quixotes in this study not of some kind of noble socioeconomic background, become fixated nonetheless on a kind of belletristic and moral high-mindedness and enter into the discourse of the ruling elites by way of their superior educations. Like Gulliver, their privileging of industriousness and self-regulation within their worldviews creates grounds for their exceptionalism, enabling them to construct standards for themselves that supplant those of the surrounding people and societies they deem inadequate. Socioeconomic advantage and its attendant literary high-mindedness provide grounds for quixotes to imagine themselves as exceptions.
Thirdly, in their capacity to produce exceptions, quixotes empower their exceptionalism. When Launcelot Greaves demonstrates his sanity to Ferret, denying that he is merely an imitator of Don Quixote, while continuing to don armor and ride on horseback throughout the countryside addressing legal grievances, he sets himself up as an exception to the assumed rule that all quixotes are mad. Winning thereafter the esteem of those he aids, including his beloved Aurelia, Launcelot proceeds with his own mode of quixotic madness, reinforcing his understanding that he is an exceptional quixote rather than a Don Quixote imposter. Dorcasina empowers her exceptionalism similarly by ordering Betty to dress as and impersonate O’Connor, producing an alternate reality that, however burlesque, sustains Dorcasina’s fantasy and perpetuates her quixotic worldview.
Finally, that quixotes are themselves mimetic and also inspire mimesis drives their exceptionalism. Quixotes continue to believe as they do because they act according to their ideals, thinking themselves modern incarnations of the heroes and heroines of an idealized world. This tendency not only positions quixotes as anachronisms and aberrations but also generates the exceptionalist understanding that, as with Parson Adams, Captain Farrago, and Diedrich Knickerbocker, the quixote’s mimicking or representation of an idealized past both justifies and is justified by the quixotic claim to superior values. By imitating idealized models, quixotes make exceptions of themselves as citizens of or participants in a wider social order. By inspiring others, as Arabella and Dorcasina do, to participate in quixotic fantasy and adhere to quixotic modes of conduct, quixotes reinforce their exceptionalist positioning of themselves above the social order, soliciting feedback in the process that often empirically confirms their quixotic expectations.
This is precisely how exceptionalism functions as an engine of quixote reproduction, and how exceptionalism explains the vast proliferation of quixotic narratives during the long eighteenth century. By its nature, exceptionalism demands continual reinforcement of the terms of exception, at least until an audience or a surrounding society has acquiesced to the exceptionalist’s worldview (and even then, as with national exceptionalism, it demands routine maintenance). This means, in a fairly straightforward way, the market for exceptionalist politics and political figures is almost always thriving. Even as seventeenth-century British readers became acquainted with Don Quixote at the translation stage, it had already become clear that Quixote was originally placed within a lineage of reproduction, as if designed to be rewritten and reconfigured on an ongoing basis. Because Cervantes’s Quixote was an exceptionalist in an early modern Spanish society that tried desperately to rein him back to reality, he could become an exceptionalist anywhere and for any cause while maintaining the character blueprint Cervantes sketched out: idealistic, educated, capable of inspiring imitation in others, an adept exceptionalist. Further, because Quixote was an exceptionalist, his story invited authors to do what the Priest and the Barber do to Quixote: to intervene, perhaps to imitate in jest or in an effort to make sense of Quixote.
As I have argued, the period during which quixotes ran amok in literatures in English, from the early seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, also produced heavy demand for exceptionalist politics, particularly national exceptionalism. The quips about the French we see in Joseph Andrews, The Female Quixote, and Launcelot Greaves are still around by the turn of the nineteenth century and the publication of The Infernal Quixote. Anti-French sentiment in British literature of the period is certainly widespread and widely observed, but the point here is that quixotism became a way not only of aligning Francophile tendencies with poor character, libertinism, effeteness, moral laxity, epicureanism, traitorousness, or other well-trodden stereotypes but also of staking out the boundaries of English exceptionalism and lambasting those who stepped outside those boundaries. For Fielding and Lucas, for example, quixotes step outside of Englishness in very different ways, but in so doing they highlight the boundaries each author was setting for what Englishness was and should be. Quixotic exceptionalism in this sense helped police national exceptionalism in some cases (The Infernal Quixote) and reform it in others (Joseph Andrews, Gulliver’s Travels).
There remains one final strand of quixotic exceptionalism’s implications worth considering in this study—and worth attention in future study—and that has to do with the relationship between exceptionalism, epistemology, and phenomenology. I opened this book with the claim that Quixote is not simply mad, but actually quite logical. As we have seen, the basis of this claim is that exceptionalism produces for quixotes a self-sealing logic. When quixotes act on their idealism, their exceptionalism shields them to some extent from counterevidence for their belief system, enabling them to proceed where others turn back and correct course. Two giants of Spanish philosophy, Miguel de Unamuno and José Ortega y Gasset, both recognized this phenomenological account of quixotism, which is fundamentally driven by Quixote’s experience, his motivation to pursue his objects undeterred.1 A significant consequence of this emboldening function of quixotic exceptionalism is that others begin to respond to quixotes by imitating quixotism, hoping to communicate on the quixote’s register. Both Glanville and Sir George, for example, begin to adhere to Arabella’s expectations even as they understand Arabella’s behavior is aberrant and potentially dangerous. As they make a show of themselves acting favorably in terms of Arabella’s expectations, Arabella perceives a scenario in which reality further confirms her expectations. In this way quixotism is logical, because what quixotes empirically witness is often commensurate with the expectations created by the quixotic worldview.
Given that quixotism can be both logical and wrong, and given that exceptionalism is what enables this dynamic in quixotes and their interlocutors, a phenomenological account of quixotism poses important epistemological challenges.2 This is particularly the case because so much of quixotism in eighteenth-century fiction is signaled by direct failures of empiricism, as with Arabella, Dorcasina, and Gulliver, in particular. These quixotes, like Cervantes’s original, see what everyone else sees but derive radically different impressions about what is happening. If quixotic exceptionalism can change the interpretation without challenging the terms of empirical observation, what, then, are the effects of exceptionalism on epistemology?
This is of course a larger question for another book, but it reflects the stakes of this study of quixotic exceptionalism. The role of exceptionalist politics in nineteenth-century Britain and the US was, in a word, transformative, reshaping not just how people lived but how they perceived the world around them. While this study goes only so far in its conclusion as to gesture toward the possibilities of studying the politics of quixotism further as a study of quixotic epistemology, we already know that exceptionalist politics and quixotic behavior have been integral to expansions of British and US imperialism, just as they were to Spanish imperialism in the centuries before Don Quixote was published. As Britain extended its empire in South Asia and Africa, and the US sought its Manifest Destiny across the North American continent, the specter of Don Quixote, once again, rattled his lance.