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Miguel de Cervantes

For the Glory of the Write

Journey to Parnassus (by Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel De)
Don Quixote (by De Cervantes, Miquel)
Life of Miguel de Cervantes (by Watts, Henry Edward)
The Exemplary Novels of Miguel de Cervan... (by Miguel De Cerevantes Saavedra)

Don't compare yourself to a man like Miguel de Cervantes. He was a unique human of quality, the type that skews the graph of mankind's ability. The type that rarely comes around, born into a time and circumstances perfectly crafted for this singular force to flourish.

The setting is Spain, September 29, 1547. The novel is barely a concept in any literature. The Ottoman War has come to Habsburg. The Spanish Empire is in the height of its powers, and is in a golden age of art, music, and literature. A boy is born.

The boy became a man. In 1569, at age 22, Cervantes enlisted as a soldier in the Spanish navy. After a year in service, his fleet engaged with an Ottoman force in a fight that would define him. He had the fever and was below deck when they encountered an enemy vessel. Officers told him to stay put, but Cervantes responded, "I'd rather die fighting than lying down!" He emerged into the open sea air to take three bullets, two in the chest and one in the left arm. The bullet in the arm rendered it useless. “[I] had lost the movement of the left hand for the glory of the right!" he wrote in Journey to Parnassus.

What shapes men like this? War then was not just an accepted part of life, it was a call to adventure, romance, a test of one’s own mettle, and a ticket to see the world. But was Cervantes a product of his time or an anomaly?

Certainly, his fighting spirit and the stories amassed while at war fed into his writing. After recovering from his wounds and continuing his service with the navy, he was captured, in 1575, by Ottoman pirates and taken to Algiers, where he was held prisoner for five years. His time as a prisoner and slave served as fodder for his play Life in Algiers and the Captive’s tale in Don Quixote.

Many claim Don Quixote as the first modern novel because of its nonlinear nature, its foray into both tragedy and comedy, and the fully fleshed-out characters, bringing both epic from the knight himself and the picaresque from his squire Sancho Panza. It all comes under the layer of Cervantes’ dissection of the popular romance novels of the time. This could perhaps be seen as the two sides of Cervantes emerging--one the adventurous, hardened man of his youth who refused to stay below deck on that ship, and the other working class citizen and writer of his later years in Spain, a life bifurcated by five years in prison and synthesized into a more modern experience of many phases.

For more of Miguel de Cervantes, check out Life of Cervantes by Henry Edwards Watts, and Cervantes’ Exemplary Novels.

By Thad Higa