Conquering illusions: Don Quixote and the educational significance of the novel

Abstract

Abstract In this article we want to rethink the educational significance of the novel from the perspective of a ‘metanovelistic’ reading of Don Quixote, often acclaimed as the ‘first modern novel’. Our point of departure is two-fold: on the one hand, there is the controversial contemporary phenomenon of de-reading, and all the educational discussions it entails; on the other hand, there is the existing tradition of literary education, which has already extensively reflected upon the (moral, epistemological, ontological) relations between novel reading, education, and subjectification, but which perhaps also has exhausted its means for doing so. To problematize this double starting point in a new way, we propose to revisit the ‘origins’ of the (Western) novel and novel reading, at the dawn of modernity. Exploring the differences between the narratives of subjectification represented by the Cartesian cogito and Cervantes’ Don Quixote—which were near-contemporaries—we strongly argue for an educational–philosophical rehabilitation of the latter. In a first movement, and in dialogue with novelists Milan Kundera and Carlos Fuentes, we do so by focusing on the novel as a particular form or configuration of knowledge—one that is by nature experimental and pluralist. In a second movement, we link this to Jean Baudrillard’s famous distinction between ‘simulation’ and ‘illusion’, claiming that novel reading qua educational subjectification always involves a quixotic practice of adventurous, ‘playful’, and public negotiation between reality and its more or less illusory alternatives.