In an age of troublesome wannabe heroes, let’s remember Don Quixote
If the success of fantasy fiction such as Game of Thrones has shown anything, it’s that society is riddled with nostalgia. Medieval populations might have been starved and mutilated with shocking regularity, but there’s something about that image of a lone rider setting off on horseback over a green hillside that stirs the soul.
This is exactly why correctives like Don Quixote are so necessary. Cervantes’s classic is on as a play at the Garrick Theatre (scripted by James Fenton, who, I should disclose, is an in-law of mine) and implicitly it raises the doubts we ought to have about that longing for the days of yore.
On one reading, Don Quixote is an admirable throwback to a better age, a man on a bold mission to revive the age of chivalry, a bolshy pensioner whose gumption trumps his frailty.
Ultimately, though, he isn’t really any of these things. He’s a ridiculous and troublesome old man who refuses to age gracefully.
His old age means we can laugh, rather than boo, when he harasses passers-by for no reason, slaughters sheep that he thinks are soldiers, and mugs an innocent barber for his brass basin, which he mistakes for an ancient helmet. His chivalry has its upside for the beautiful waif whom he saves from attack, but its flipside is the relentless vanity of his desire for acclaim. He can find peace only when he renounces all of it.
It’s an ailment that’s still with us, of course: the fat old man with a sports car, the placard-bearing hippie
The flipside of his chivalry is the vanity of his desire for acclaim
who thinks she’s saving the world, the feckless youth who joins Isil to be a warrior.
We’d all like to be heroes in an epic. But one of the hallmarks of oldage wisdom, it seems to me, is the realisation that we aren’t and that that’s actually quite all right.
If there’s one thing our age needs, it’s more tales like Don Quixote and fewer about superheroes.