So...what are you working on now?" “Right now, an essay…

““So...what are you working on now?" “Right now, an essay about Don Quixote.” “One of my favorite books.” “Mine too.” “What’s the gist?” “It has to do with the authorship of the books.” “Is there any question?” “I mean the book inside the book Cervantes wrote, the one he imagined he was writing.” “Ah.” “Cervantes claims he is not the author, that the original text was in Arabic.” “Right. It’s an attack on make-believe, so he must claim it was real.” “Precisely. Therefore, the story has to be written by an eyewitness yet Cid Hamete Benengeli, the acknowledged author, never makes an appearance. So who is he? Sancho Panza is of course the witness – illiterate, but with a gift for language. He dictated the story to the barber and the priest, Don Quixote’s friends. They had the manuscript translated into Arabic. Cervantes found the translation and had it rendered back into Spanish. The idea was to hold up a mirror to Don Quixote’s madness so that when he finally read the book himself, he would see the error of his ways. But Don Quixote, in my view, was no mad. He only pretended to be. He engineered the collaboration, and the translation from Arabic back into Spanish. I like to imagine Cervantes hiring Don Quixote in disguise to decipher the story of Don Quixote.” “But why did Quixote go to such lengths?” “He wanted to test the gullibility of man. To what extent would people tolerate blasphemies, lies, and nonsense if they gave them amusement? The answer: to any extent. For the book is still amusing us today. That’s finally all anyone wants out of a book. To be amused.””

— David Mazzucchelli