Don Quixote brought its author considerable success in his lifetime. With huge sales and multiple reprintings (and piratings), the first part of the novel was widely translated and celebrated across Europe even before the arguably superior second part had been published. Yet Miguel de Cervantes’ life was a far from easy one. Self-exiled from his homeland, on the run from the authorities, he was repeatedly jailed, often through no fault of his own, and enslaved; as a soldier he lost the use of his left hand and most of his ideals; he had relentless family struggles, and more often than not was utterly broke. (All those sales never made him wealthy.)

The Man Who Invented Fiction is not a narrative biography; rather William Egginton is interested in what Cervantes’ life reveals about how Don Quixote came to be, and how it might prove the bold claim in his title: that Quixote is not merely, as often claimed, the first recognisable modern novel, but offers a first definition of what fiction is and what it does.

Cervantes was a highly committed professional soldier. His early beliefs in the ideals of honour, courage and patriotic service were harshly challenged by experience. Yet when his career ended not in glory but injury and the ingratitude of the state, he didn’t let unremitting cynicism turn him into a writer of crude satire; his participation in the world left him instead with a profound understanding of ambivalence, which fed something different: his development of character.

For a writer like Cervantes, ambivalence was not to be resolved simply, but embraced and expressed

For a writer like Cervantes, ambivalence was not to be resolved simply, but embraced and expressed, through characters who are not real but seem so. Quixote and Sancho Panza attempt between them to negotiate their conflicting perceptions (on soldiery, honour, patriotic duty) on Cervantes’ behalf, and therefore as our proxy, too. Characters can enable a writer – and then, empathetically, a reader – to experiment with different perceptions and misperceptions of reality, between lofty ideals and a reality that falls lamentably short.

Empathy is central to Egginton’s argument. Fiction by his definition is about creating characters whose perspectives we can inhabit as we read, while at the same time being aware that we are colluding in a deception. (Two centuries later, this would be Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief”.) Cervantes learned some of his craft while writing for the stage, where this split awareness is especially evident: actors know they are not the characters they are playing, yet our experience depends on our all agreeing to fool ourselves that they are. Theatrical audiences, like readers of fiction, do not merely watch sequences of untrue events from the outside, we knowingly inhabit them, and thereby find greater truths within them. And within this particular story, the character Sancho himself learns empathy, too.

Characters drawn with kindness … a Gustave Dore illustration of Don Quixote. Photograph: Gustave Dore/Alamy

As a writer, Cervantes treats his struggling characters with kindness and understanding rather than mockery, because they have been animated by his own sometimes traumatic life experiences. He often draws most fully those suffering misfortune, and he does so with sympathy and concern for their inner lives, the conflicts in their intents and desires.

This was a new way of telling a story. Cervantes, always eager to undermine the conventions of a genre, is well aware of the novelty, drawing attention to it time and again. And the new thing he’s doing, Egginton says, well, that’s fiction. There are signs of it in The Exemplary Novels, and in the pre-Quixote pastoral romance, La Galatea, which partly foreshadows the remarkable literary revolution ahead, but Quixote is the true origin text. (This exploration of the origins of fiction also serves, incidentally, as a reminder of its possible value. Recent high-profile studies have claimed that reading fiction can help strengthen empathy, and improve theory of mind.)

The splitting of perspectives – experiencing this “fiction” from within and without, with a multiplicity of differing understandings of the world – allowed Cervantes to explore moral questions without ever being moralistic; and it allowed him, too, to get past any censor on the lookout for seditious anti-national or anti-religious messages in an increasingly controlling state. Egginton fits his argument not only into the schema of Cervantes’ life, but also into the social, economic and political context in which Quixote was written (Spain’s continuing economic decline, a newly grown print industry, foreign and domestic political turmoil). He mentions, too, developments in the arts and in science, and great intellectual shifts, including a widening appreciation of subjective views – a rise in the recognition of an individual’s interpretation as opposed to unified institutional thinking. This is the intellectual background, while in the foreground we’re watching Quixote navigating the borders of the real and the perceived – helmet or basin, windmills or giants?

Cervantes’ life, for all his literary success, was one of failure, false promise and disillusionment. Its main events are vividly described here (thanks to a certain amount of unavoidable speculation), but entirely in order to serve Egginton’s detailed reading of his famous novel. Given the ambition of the task, this reading is surprisingly effective, and surprisingly convincing.

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