Q is for Quixotic
The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote (or alternatively The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, but hereon in just ‘Don Quixote’), is a remarkable, sprawling and fascinating novel, written in the early years of the 17th Century by Miguel de Cervantes. There have been many translations from the Spanish, and when I was still at school the version I read was short, and, I thought, very funny. Now I possess the full novel, in a rather elegant hardback format, complete with several wavery line illustrations by the incomparable Quentin Blake. [i] Older, now I see it in a very different light.
If you haven’t read the book, the story line comprises a series of episodes in the life of an apparently mad, or at least deluded, minor nobleman living in La Mancha. Having read many volumes of literature concerning knights and chivalry, Don Quixote decides to become a knight-errant, a wanderer seeking adventures which would test his commitment to the ideals of chivalry. Cervantes’ book marked a step away from what had been a popular literary form in the middle ages, thrilling epics which included such classics as the heroic tales of King Arthur, the knights of the Round Table, and the pursuit of the Holy Grail. By the end of the 12th Century, the ‘wandering knight’ became a staple in romantic literature, although it appears the term knight-errant was first used in the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. [ii] Don Quixote was quite different. Published in two parts, the second ten years after the first, the crazy saga was completed in 1615, and it reads like a biography. In Part 1 you are led to believe you are reading some archives from La Mancha. Part 2 appears to be a translated Arabic text. Clearly, all of this was to persuade you the man must have been real!
The story begins with Don Quixote setting out from home to find adventure, clad in an ancient suit of armour and on an old horse, Rocinante. Without telling her, he decides Aldonza Lorenzo, a girl from a nearby farm, is his lady love, renaming her Dulcinea del Toboso. Before long, he arrives at a local inn, which he considers a castle, the innkeeper a lord, and some prostitutes there the ‘ladies’ of the castle. Events quickly get out of control, he is badly beaten, and taken back to his house. It’s a continuing theme; Don Quixote’s adventures always seem end with him being wounded, bashed, his bones broken. Famously, he takes on his neighbour, Sancho Panza, as his ‘squire’; the two will reappear throughout the stories, Don Quixote tall, thin, and confused; Sancho Panza short, fat and sly! Memorably, Don Quixote sees some windmills in his second outing, and convinced they are giants, attacks them. He was ‘tilting at windmills’, and that phrase is now an everyday expression to describe fighting imaginary enemies. The saga continues, the delusions become even more improbable and complex, and Don Quixote ends each of his many attempts to right wrongs thrashed and miserable: such is the life of a knight!
At one level, the book is simply funny, painfully so at times. Don Quixote’s foolish and gullible behaviour makes him vulnerable to all kinds of traps and lies, with Sancho Panza often a willing partner in the trickery. Occasionally, we leave the trials and tribulations to listen to a story told by a traveller they meet. Reading the book four hundred years later, we miss appreciating how it mocks the literature of the previous four hundred years, which offered the romantic image of the good, handsome and chivalrous knight saving damsels in distress, battling ogres and other evils. To parody that corpus was a masterstroke. It presaged a decline of this style of literature into parody and humour. Cervantes book has been claimed as the first ‘modern novel’, the story a framework to allow us to understand the character of Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and the others we meet. Indeed, it’s true: this is about people, the adventures are merely window dressing.
To claim it as the first novel is mistaken, of course. If a novel is a prose fiction, exploring characters and events, then today most would suggest the first novel was Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, written some time in the early 11th Century. If the focus is on European novels, then the claim makes better sense. Indeed, after Cervantes the novel emerged as a popular form, quickly developed in England in the 18th Century by writers including Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, and especially Laurence Sterne. I believe it was his novel, Tristram Shandy, which was the first to use the possibilities of fiction to jump around in voice, time and events.
Getting past its place in history and the basic story, Don Quixote’s adventures explore deeper issues. This book challenges what we mean by reality, belief and good behaviour. It forces us to confront questions about self-interest, the way we treat others, and the ways in which we justify what we do. Much of that comes down to what it means to be quixotic. Dictionaries tend to offer at least two meanings for quixotic. One definition is that it refers to unrealistic idealism: “extravagantly chivalrous or romantic; visionary, impractical, or impracticable”. Star struck you might say. The other encompasses uncertain and illogical behaviour: “impulsive and often rashly unpredictable”. [iii] I like to think of a third definition, “against the odds and against the current”. This acknowledges the quixotic is unlikely to be successful, but also makes it clear to be quixotic is to attempt something quite different, well out of the mainstream.
Perhaps a simple example will help. ‘Up’ was a 2009 animated Pixar film concerning the adventures of Carl Fredricksen, and Russell an explorer scout. Carl was an old man, his wife Ellie had just died, and now he wanted to fulfill their life-long dream to fly to Paradise Falls in South America. The plan is crazy, certainly against the odds, and quite clearly not the kind of adventure that Carl should undertake. He’s cantankerous, something of a ‘dog in the manger’; he doesn’t think he can succeed, but he is going to try, anyway. The film is described as a comedy, much of the action is madcap, but the emotions of loss, hope and love swirl throughout the story. It is a film about a quixotic quest, and the more complicated the story becomes, the more its ‘extravagantly romantic and impractical’ character drags you in. Just as you might laugh at Don Quixote’s various sallies into the world yet want him to win against such crazy odds, so, too, you keep wishing Carl will achieve his last and long-awaited dream.
Like most Pixar films, Up is technically superb. However, it much more than that. It is an extraordinary example of what animation can achieve, second only to the profoundly moving Grave of the Fireflies, Isao Takahata’s incomparable animéversion of Akiyuki Nosaka’s book of the same name. Both films succeed in touching deep emotions, in the distinctive way that animation makes possible. It’s not my job to tell you what to do, but if you haven’t seen either of these, make sure you do! And please, remember to have some tissues with you.
If we have inherited the word quixotic from Don Quixote, we have enhanced its complex and subtle meanings. In a world where choices and aspirations are shaped by businesses guiding us to the next products for sale, any way to toss the marketing aside is all the more important. Those playing games on smartphones, or following the rich and famous while simultaneously attacking those whose views differ from your own, dazzled by colourful fashions and products, dream of escaping life in what is a narrow, circumscribed and boring world. Some break out, attempting to climb El Capitan without any mountaineering aids or safety measures, sailing solo around the world, or swimming flipperless across the Adriatic. Some, persistently, stand up in major forum after major forum and challenge us: “I want you to act as if the house is on fire, because it is”.
Does Don Quixote offer something more than star-struck idealism? It turns out that, like any rich and complex text, Don Quixote can be mined in many different ways. If it’s a comedy, it’s a tragedy; if it’s a story about madness, it’s a story about the sanity of mad men; if it’s a reflection on how reality triumphs over illusions, it’s a reflection of how illusions constitute reality; if it’s about the centrality of chivalry, it’s about the death of chivalry; and if it’s about the power of books, it’s about the importance of ensuring power over books. Above all, it reminds us how a complex novel can be read as a source to reflect on many things we want to understand.
Here’s a test. Does Don Quixote, a story about a fictional 16th century nobleman with a penchant for unrealistic quests, an inability to tell windmills apart from giants, and a continuing habit of ending up bashed and beaten, does this person have anything to teach us about management? Once expert suggested, yes, he can. “We live in a world that emphasizes realistic expectations and clear successes. Quixote had neither. But through failure after failure, he persists in his vision and his commitment. He persists because he knows who he is.” He goes on to comment “Leaders can learn from Quixote, whose life was dedicated to imagination, commitment, and joy. The critical concerns of leadership are not technical questions of management or power, they are fundamental issues of life” [iv]
Good point, but as Aristotle said one swallow does not a summer make, nor one fine day. Yet, if many swallows appear, that’s different. In recent years it seems Don Quixote as a leader, and more specifically leadership as a “quixotic endeavour” are both important topics on the current management learning agenda. [v] This rests on the view Don Quixote exemplifies the visionary and romantic leader, rather than a rational and analytical one, pursuing an impossible dream. This realisation of their quixotic approach is claimed to underly the success of people like Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Hard to swallow? It turns out that there is a long history of people searching through Cervantes’ work to discover meaning and relevance. [vi]
To illustrate how far this is going, we can turn to Harold Bloom, who was asked by the Harvard Business Review to provide a reading list for ‘Bill Gates and You’. He observed: “For people who find it difficult to talk to themselves—and I suspect that this is true for many people in business—reading Shakespeare is an incredible way to learn about themselves. Shakespeare’s only possible rival in imaginative literature of the past four centuries is Miguel de Cervantes, who wrote the classic, Don Quixote. Cervantes remains the best of all novelists, just as Shakespeare remains the best of all dramatists. There are parts of yourself that you will never know fully until you know Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. But there’s a fundamental difference between Cervantes and Shakespeare: Sancho and the Don develop newer and richer egos by talking to each other. Falstaff and Hamlet perform the same process through lonely soliloquies.” [vii]
Many people do find it hard to learn about themselves, including many business and political leaders who appear to act with little personal insight. Success breeds confidence, pushing aside self-examination in favour of attacking the weaknesses and failures of others. Personal insight is best left to those ‘ineffective’ executives who wander off to ashrams and meditation centres, whose quixotic ventures are merely romantic dreaming, pursuing impossible, illusory dreams. A few chief executives might talk about spiritual rather than material outcomes, spending a couple of days at The Aspen Institute with a few friends, but then it is time to get back to business. In our excessively materialistic world, there are so many practical things to be done.
Don Quixote as a romantic, visionary leader, or a foolish, confused and sad parody of ancient values? One of the book’s most quoted extracts concerns that confrontation with windmills:
“At this point they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that there are on that plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, ‘Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.’ ‘What giants?’ said Sancho Panza. ‘Those thou seest there,’ answered his master, ‘with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long.’ ‘Look, your worship,’ said Sancho; ‘what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go.’”
Undeterred, Don Quixote launches into battle. As usual, his confrontation ends with him thrown to the ground, his lance broken, and himself in a ‘sorry condition’. Cervantes continues:
“’God bless me!’ said Sancho, ‘did I not tell your worship to mind what you were about, for they were only windmills? and no one could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his head.’ ‘Hush, friend Sancho,’ replied Don Quixote, ‘the fortunes of war more than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations; and moreover I think, and it is the truth, that that same sage Friston who carried off my study and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me; but in the end his wicked arts will avail but little against my good sword.’” [viii]
As I read this crazy, funny, sad story, I know Don Quixote is driven by the world as he sees it. To be quixotic is to push against the odds, pursue a vision others reject or ignore, seeking change whether it is for good or bad, willing to challenge accepted views. But in saying that, I’m reminded of the proud mother observing her son in a school parade: “look, everyone’s out of step except for our Johnny”. We do need quixotic leaders, willing to challenge the status quo and be different, but they can be wrong; perhaps, like windmill sails, we should fear them, too.
[i] London: Folio Society, 1995.
[ii] Once more, thank you Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight-errant
[iii] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/quixotic
[iv] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/don-quixotes-lessons-leadership
[v] Aurora Hermida-Ruiz, The Relevance of Don Quixote to Leadership Studies: Nostalgia, Cynicism and Ambivalence, Chapter 2, Book 3, Leadership at the Crossroads, Ed. Joanne Ciulla at al, Praeger, 2008
[vi] Ibid, pp. 28-30
[vii] Diane Coutu, A Reading List for Bill Gates and You: A Conversation with Literary Critic Harold Bloom, Harvard Business Review, May 2001
[viii] Op Cit, pp. 41-2
