The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes

Hello and welcome to the first episode of The Man Behind the Curtain, a new Close Reading series for 2026 from the London Review of Books. I'm Thomas Jones, a senior editor at the paper, and the main presenter of the LRB podcast, which is where you may be hearing this episode. And as you may already be aware, Close Readings is another of our podcasts, which you can find by searching for those two words, Close Readings, wherever you listen to podcasts. For 4.99 a month, you can hear longstanding contributors to the LRB, such as Emily Wilson, Judith Butler, James Wood, Marina Warner, discuss everything from ancient Greek and Roman literature to revolutionary writing of the 20th century. English literature's medieval beginnings to conversations in philosophy, satire and the fantastic. In 2026, Close Readings will be looking at writing about nature in crisis, with me and Christ and Peter Godry Smith, realism and the novel with James Wood and guests, narrative poetry with Mark Ford and Seamus Perry, and a cultural history of London with Rosemary Hill and guests. But for this series, I'm delighted to be joined by the writer, artist, twice book a shortlisted novelist and contributor to the LRB since 2007. Tom McCarthy. Hello, Tom. Hello, nice to be here. I am sorry we're both called Tom, but shouldn't be too confusing, I hope. So The Man Behind the Curtain is an extra series, which will be running in parallel as a kind of meta series, I guess you could say, to the usual weekly episodes of the Close Readings podcast, and we'll be popping up or dropping in every couple of months, sometimes as a bonus podcast, sometimes as a live event, and we hope you'll join us and join in when we do. Future episodes will be on Frankenstein, Middle March, Ulysses, The Invisible Man, Gravity's Rainbow. This first episode is about Don Quixote by Miguel Deservantes, but before we turn to the ingenious gentleman of Lamontja, the knight of the sad countenance, Tom, why The Man Behind the Curtain? Well, I was thinking of the scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy and her friends finally get to meet the wizard. And as he looms, spectral and booming in front of them, the curtain at the side starts coming open and to reveal the little man cranking the levers and speaking into the voice distorter to produce the illusion of a wizard. And even as he's rumbled, he in a panicked voice says into the microphone, "Oh, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." And it struck me that in some way that I'm not quite certain exactly how, but in some way, this seems perhaps to allegorise the way we might understand the novel as a form. But The Man Behind the Curtain isn't simply another name for the novelist. Is that you don't mean it in that way? No, of course, we always know there's an author somewhere, but I think the scene could be seen to allegorise our understanding of the novel in the following way. I mean, a naive understanding of the novel would maybe hold that all this novelist does is reveal some essence that's present in and of itself, right? Some psychological or spiritual or universal truth. And that the work sheds light on a trove of identity or experience or communicates an intensity of feeling that was there already and exists independently of the work which is merely reflecting or expressing it. And by contrast, I would suspect that what we might call the novelistic mode or zone or state or condition, that this condition only begins, really, when the mechanisms through which these fantasies of authenticity are projected themselves become to a large extent the subject under scrutiny. So when the various scaffolding and armatures of, you know, law, cultural codes often in conflict with each other, the economic frameworks and substrates, the technological frameworks and substrates, and not least the various systems of representation, the manifold artifices through which both the world and the novel are conducted, including other books, when all these start to poke through the surface to become the agon, the central conflict of the work rather than just be, you know, camouflaged in the background disguised as something natural or the very least we could say, you know, as in that scene in the Wizard of Oz is that perhaps the novel is the space in which these two perspectives, you know, the wizard focused one on the one hand and the kind of large of you man behind curtain and wizard vision on the other in which these two perspectives kind of enter into tension with each other, and this tension itself is what both generates the fantasy of authentic being and subvert, so unravels it. And that's why I invoke that scene, right? Not as some kind of formula or dogma, but as a kind of primal scene to use the language of psychoanalysis. I want it to be the background to all our discussions. So rather than the humanistic or to give it a more contemporary spin, neoliberal metric of sovereign individual experience, we're going to focus on the five M's, money, matter, machinery, mediation and metaphor as they join battle against the big other M metaphysics. And that tension that you've just described with that dynamic between the construction of the appearance of naturalness in fiction and the simultaneous questioning or undermining or unraveling as you put it of the illusion is clearly a driving force in Don Quixote. So what is the setup? It's very simple, some guy who's maybe called Quixada or K-Zada or maybe Quixana. This guy reads loads of books of chivalry, so he read, you know, a mardis of Gaul, Felix Marty of Heuricania, Tyron LeBlanc, Belianis of Greece and so on and so on. And he reads so many of them, so intensely that these books kind of take over his imagination as Savante's Rites, and this is John Rutherford's 2000 translation. Savante's Rites, everything he read in his books, took possession of his imagination, enchantments, fights, battles, challenges, wounds, sweet nothings, love affairs, storms and impossible absurdities. The idea that this whole fabric of famous fabrications was real so established itself in his mind that no history in the world was truer for him. And so having done this, he then becomes convinced that he is himself a character from one of-- Yeah, well, he goes through two phases, the first phase, the first short lived phase, he thinks, well, I'll just be a writer and kind of write more adventures, because, you know, Don, these texts are really quite open, they're kind of open source, you know, you can just carry on writing more. But he gives up that idea pretty quickly, he says, that's not enough to be a writer, you've got to be a doer. So he dons a rusty suit, you know, puts some cardboard in for the visor, renames his clapped out horse, Rod Sinante, renames a local very homely wench, Aldonzel or Enza, he renames her, little Chine, and he sets out on these sallys on these adventures with predictably farcical results. He's endlessly falling off his horse, getting beaten up, misinterpreting every possible situation through this filter of chivalric fiction, and generally causing mayhem. And so on, what is Savante's doing with this? I think he's doing two things, I think he's using this premise to firstly elaborate a theory of aesthetics. So over the course of the 900-plus pages, in which he pretty much does the same thing on repeat, Keyhote. Over these pages, you know, issues are raised and debated of Imitati-O, Verissomilitude, Literary genre, poetic or narrative forms, and so on. And the second thing I think he's doing is to elaborate, and I mean, this in a very modern sense to elaborate a theory of media. So that's one of one of your ends, the media, the mediation, and so what is what is the the theory of media? I think the best way of describing it to a contemporary audience is by reference to the wonderful 2006 film by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Perreino, just simply called Zidane, a 21st century portrait, which is a multi-camera study of the epically brilliant footballers in it in Zidane over the 90 minutes of a single La Liga, Spanish La Liga game, in which right at the outset we get Zidane's text over to the image of Zidane playing football, and he says a beautiful thing, Zidane says, "As a child, I had a running commentary in my head when I was playing. It wasn't really my own voice. It was the voice of Pierre Kenjioni, a television anchor from the 1970s. Every time I heard his voice, I would run towards the TV as close as I could get for as long as I could. It wasn't that his words were so important, but the tone, the accent, the atmosphere was everything." Now I think Don Quixote is as seduced by early modern media, the early modern media of Chivharic books, as Zidane was as a child by the late modern media of television. I mean, this is a Zidane's ambition. It's not to be a great football player. It's to be in that media space, and even when he becomes a great football player, he says, "Now I'm in that space, I'm like the editor, I can drop the sound up, I can focus on the grass, I can look at the screens." So the seduction is the same. The difference is that whereas Zidane can, from Charles to Donwards, train and train and train and become really good, and realise his fantasy of being the one in that media space, Quixote can't, because A, it's fictional, it's not real, and B, it's defunct already. Chivharic fiction is over 100 years old when this novelist set, the Picaresque is over 50 years old. In 1555, a petition was presented to the Spanish Parliament Valadolid, urging them to ban Chivharic books, you know, like the Christian parents of America wanting to ban heavy metal albums, because of the deleterious effect it was having on the youth. So this is 50 years before Don Quixote is written. It's already old hat, and An Quixote is old, he's 50 when he becomes seduced by all these. So this general and that chronistic setup, a whole disjuncture or decalage and out of jointness of different periods going on, which is fascinating. Yeah, he's belated, that's part of his. Well, he's belated, but it works in both directions. So, for example, when he sets out on his first Sally as a night-errant, he kind of plays himself a soundtrack in his head of how it's going to be written in the future. He says to himself, "Who can doubt, but that in future times, when the true history of my famous deeds sees the light, that the sage who chronicles them will, when he recounts this, my first Sally, so early in the morning, right in this manner." Quote, "Scares had ruddy Apollo spread over the face of the wide and spacious earth, the golden tresses of his beauty as hair, and scarce had the speckled little birds with their harmonious tongues hailed in musical and malifluous melody, the approach of rose aurora, who rising from her jealous husband's soft couch, disclosed herself to mortals in the portals and balconies of Le Mansch's horizon." Coma, "When the famous night Don Quixote de la Mancha quitting the slothful feathers of his bed, mounted his famous steed Rozzanante and began to ride over the ancient and far-famed plane of Monatel." Quote, question mark. So, in order to experience the presence of his present, he has to root it through a punitive, future mediation that itself is rooted via a hundred-year-old anachronistic dead media form. It's a quite extraordinary situation he's in here." Part of the comedy of that is the way in which he is so mistaken that he wants to believe, or he does believe, or in some sense, he is a night-errant from an old book of chivalry, but at the same time he's this sort of, you know, 50-year-old modern Spanish guy in 1600, with not a lot to do, and so much the comedy of the book and or the tragedy of the book, depending on how you look at it, is from the collision between the world he believes he inhabits, the imaginary world of fiction that he's inhabiting, and the real world that this is continually running up against, and everyone who meets thinks he's mad. I mean, that could be another real M's, his madness, but it's not there to, and he's been driven mad by the books, but in some sense, is it the books that have driven him mad, or is it the conflict between the books and the in quotes real world? Because he imagines he's a character in a book, but he is a character in a book. So, in that sense, he is right. He's the only one who sees the truth that he is a character in a book. Everyone else thinks they're real, and they couldn't, you know, they're all mistaken, because they're only characters. Yes. I mean, there's an endless series of what we might call feedback loops. I mean, everything he does is mediated, not just by the the meta frame of, you know, my territory, but every little kind of micro episode is set up in a feedback loop with the kind of mini-reference. He's very like improusse, or he can't, he can't even relate to Albertine without quoting Rassine, you know, and so, you know, to explain what's happened to him when he's been beaten up by merchants from Toledo, Don Quixote, recites the lines about the killing of Baldwin by Charlemagne's son, Carlotto, from a popular ballad, or even in real time, you know, as these prostitutes are undressing him and an inn, he overrides them as ladies of the castle by intoning and slightly adapting this ballad about, lance a lot. So, but yeah, as you say, I mean, the books are the problem. So, when he's laid up and delirious after his first Sally and the Curet and the Barber and his niece are attending to him, the way they kind of get a reading on what's wrong with him is not by taking your blood sample or whatever, but it's by going to his library. This is the source code of the problem. I mean, and they say we've got to get rid of all these books, but then of course a very interesting reversal takes place as they're taking the books off the shelf to take away and burn. They start saying, oh no, we can't burn this one. This is wonderful. They say, oh no, not there's the mirror of chivalry contains some of the creations of the famous Matteo Boyado from which the Christian poet Ludovico Ariosto also wove his tapestry and parmarine of England should be kept and preserved as something unique and a casket be made for it like the one Alex Hunter, the great found among the spoils of derrius and designated as a case for the works of the poet Homer and so on and so on. So, so they're entering again this same kind of space. Their role as destroyers turns into one as curators. But yeah, the books are the problem. There's a contagious force of this kind of madness. And it isn't only Don Quixote who's affected by it. Although, in some sense, he seems more of aware of his, the infection as it were. I mean, there's a bit, which I mean, when I first read this as a teenager, I'm being really taken by it. And there's that moment when there's the shepherd called Chrysostom and he's in love with it. It's a classic pastoral lyric situation. You have the love-lawn shepherd and the cruel so-called cruel maiden who's in love with and she cruelly rejects him. And he eventually dies allegedly from her cruelty and then his friends are all very angry with her. And then she comes to them and sort of she gives this sort of amazing speech where, you know, one thing she says, I do not understand why this is James Cohen's translation, merely because she inspires love. A woman who is loved for her beauty is obliged to love the man who loves her. And she gives this very reasonable, you know, she never gave him any reason to do what once. And essentially, he's a stalker who drove himself to death. And that's really not her problem. And all his friends are, you know, they marvel. Everyone's amazed at her good sense as well as her beauty. And then at the end of the day, bury him and they put up his tombstone, which says that he was, you know, where there's a, you know, there's a poem saying that he was killed by her cruelty because they can't escape the literary fantasy that he was living when he died. And she comes and she sort of tries to break it. And they also, oh yeah, no, and quite right. And then they immediately go back into this literary fantasy. So it's not only don't care how to do that. Actually, everyone in this book is, of course, up in the contagious force that this fantasy takes over almost everybody. I mean, there's even a scene later on where Al Tizadora, this woman who's been playing the role of, I mean, tricking Don Quixote by playing the role at role of, and he's like the dame de la Rosa and so on. Or someone who's meant to be in love with him when he rejects her because he's loyal to Jean-ère. She gets genuinely angry. I mean, she gets furious. It says, "How dare you reject me?" So there's a, I mean, we'll talk about this later, but by the end Don Quixote seems to be the only sane one. I mean, everyone else is, is, is completely taken by this, by this kind of fantasy. Yeah. But if we're back in his library, quite near the beginning, and he is convinced that the destruction can't be done by his friends. So he, he, he, he, well, they're debating which ones to keep and which ones to burn. The housekeeper does just go in and burn the lot. But this just fuels his fantasy because he says, "Ah-ha, Don, fresh on the enchanter from Don Bellianos of Greece. This dragon has burned it." And this is why there's all the smoke there. So it just, it just makes him more and more in trance. I mean, yeah, and our pro pro of that word in trance. I mean, you know, to come back to the question of media, I think, I think all of this anticipates 20th century media theory. At two moments in particular, one would be Marshall McCluen's famous claim in his 1964 book, "Understanding Media," where he says, "Look, the true content of each medium is the previous medium." So the content of photography is painting, the content of cinema is theatre and so on and so on. So we can see this very clearly in Tokyo. The content of the first first great example of a kind of sophisticated, emergent modern novel is the earlier naive genre of night-aruntry. I mean, that's that's kind of pretty straightforward. But there's another kind of a less well-known, but for me, equally important media theorist from the late 90s, called Aryan Mulder, who writes a wonderful piece called trance media in in 1999. And his formula for media is as follows. He writes that media, considered as an autonomous sphere, are not out to inform what they create in their users is not informantous knowledge or insight, but transport, ecstasy, hot or cool hypnosis trance. I think trance is a very good way of understanding not just Donkey Hote's condition. I mean, he is entranced, but the general contagious condition that takes over the whole novel, the whole world if the novel. And including his squire, Sancho Pansa. It's interesting to me that one of the ways that it's often gets talked about is the idea that they're physically very different. Donkey Hote is very tall and thin, and Sancho Pansa is short and fat. And Donkey Hote sort of represents a terrible word, but he sort of lives in a world of the imagination and fantasy and of the mind, and that Sancho Pansa is this sort of incredibly earthy, you know, he's about appetite and autumn calls him pure matter. And he's, you know, and he's he's very focused on shitting and like he needs to shit. And there's the bit where he says when Donkey Hote has been captured and has been taken back to his village towards the end of the first volume. And Sancho Pansa thing, well, you know, maybe you've been enchanted and the way we can tell is, you know, do you need a shit? But yeah, because if you're enchanted, then you wouldn't need to and then don't go to actually know now you mentioned it, I kind of do. And he says, well, he can't be enchanted. And so tell them you need a craft or we can run away. But but at the same time, Sancho Pansa is completely wrapped up in Donkey Hote's trance, because he he does seem to believe that he is a Nigerian and he's the squire and he will be rewarded for his service. Is he enchanted and tranced as well? He straddles the lion. He can see that at times, he can see that Kiyote is deluded. At other times, he is himself entranced and believes that the or he sees the world through the filter of Kiyote's delusion. And then he has this much more kind of base material motivation through the book. He he's been promised an island to govern and he wants money. So there's I mean, there's a wonderful passage towards the end where he just for about half a page tots up everything he's hoed from the last the last couple of years. He's he's got it all in his head. But you know, there is a very interesting interplay. So at one point, there's been a whole charade put on for for them where where Merlin has said his entourage, who are people dressed up, have said, well, Dolce Nere who has been enchanted can be unenchanted. If Sancho Pansa receives 3000 lashes on his bear buttocks and and Pansa goes, I don't see what my bum has to do with enchantment. So it's a very this is very anti-mester physics, you know, in a sense he can see the if not the mechanism at least a kind of physicality and materialism and a monetary kind of materialism behind this whole scene of operations. But both of them that Sancho Pansa and Don Kiyote, it's not as if Don Kiyote can't see what's happening in the real world around him and the real things. But his one of his explanations for that right is that they've they've been enchanted. There's a bit where he goes to attack. He thinks that he's two great armies and he goes in to take the side of one of them. And in fact, it's a flock of sheep and he starts killing all these sheep, which you know, the shepherds are unsurprisingly quite angry about and then they beat him. But he says, oh, and enchanted turn them into sheep. So he can see the real world but he seems that well, yeah, he has this theory of enchantment, which it strikes me could equally have been translated after Mulder's entrenchment. And it's quite a sophisticated theory. He says so at one point, they see another barber coming along, it's raining. So the barber's got his basin on his head. And Kiyote says, look, it's the King Mambrino's magical helmet and and he grabs it. And the barber says, what are you doing with my basin? He says, this is no basin. It's Mambrino's helmets and everyone else is saying, Don Kiyote has a bloody basin. And then and to explain this, he says, he says, depends, is it possible that in all the time you have been with me, you have felt to realize that all things appertaining to us nights aren't seem like chimera's follies and nonsense because they have been turned on their heads. Not because that is their real state, but because we are always attended by a crew of enchanters who keep transforming everything and changing it into whatever they like. And so what looks to you like a barber's basin looks to me like Mambrino's helmet. And the sage who is on my side showed rare foresight in making everyone take what is really and truly Mambrino's helmet for a barber's basin because Mambrino's helmet is so highly esteemed that everyone would otherwise have pursued me to try and take it from me. So it's quite a sophisticated theory. It makes me think of that wonderful 1973 art piece by Michael Craig Martin called An oak tree in which the viewer sees a glass of water on a shelf and this long text, which is part of the work, explains that no, this is really an oak tree. It becomes an oak tree when you look at it and think of it as an oak tree. And I think what both Michael Craig Martin and Savannah's are addressing here is they're conducting literary theory basically. They're thinking about the work of metaphor, which means nothing more than, you know, transposition, you know, seeing one thing in terms of another, a cloud as a sheep, as a bit of custom wool or whatever. Gohose uses this idea extensively. He uses it to explain everything. Okay, it looks to you like this, but to me like this is entransment or you know that lowly wench we saw, was dolcinea, the noble, but she just looks like a lowly wench because because of enchantment, it's his kind of go-to explanation for everything. And I think this stands very close to the question of errancy. I mean, he's a knight, errant, he wanders around, but Savannah's gleefully plays with the and it's in works in Spanish as well, the double sense of that word. So, you know, being in error, people say to him, errant, knight, errant, who's errors I'm paying for. And he talks about his errant thoughts. So, there's this double sense of kind of displacement, transposition, wrongness, right? And I think there's this quite intimate relation between a space of errancy and what after Maurice Blasho, we might call, you know, a space of literature. I mean, that question of metaphor and enchantment, you know, perhaps this is being a bit too naive, you might say, that the enchanter, I mean, in a sense, Savannah is the enchanter, that he has taken, you know, he takes these things and he makes them into whatever he wants, that the author does have this sort of power. And we might say the author of a shavari romance can then can make up all these impossible things for the knight errant to do battle with. But it is, you know, there is a cloud of dust. Is it two armies fighting? Is it a flock of sheep? There's a sense in which it's the author or it's the book or it's the story, which makes the decision that they're sheep. And Don Quixote, he's kind of rebelling against that in some ways. He's saying, I'm not your puppet. He's sort of trying to assert somehow his independence from his author in that you say it's a flock of sheep. But I say it's the army of whoever. And actually, who are you, you know, false enchanter, whoever to tell me otherwise? And that sort of assertion of his independence from his author? I think that's absolutely right. You know, all of the characters are negotiating and contesting this kind of space. It's not just like, you know, you have a prosperous figure who's controlling the whole island and everyone else is in their, you know, in their power that they're endlessly, um, it reminds me of, you know, to use another very contemporary kind of analogy of of the kind of game space of grand theft auto, you know, you traverse this landscape out of which situations and narratives endlessly emerge and stories cashed in other parts of the book kind of pop up or the characters from them pop out of the very woods and paths. But this is never a smooth space. This space, it can never be traversed kind of smoothly or in anything approaching a kind of authentic manner. So there's this endless kind of buffering and juttering and every story, every situation has to be critiqued, analyzed, debated, often violently contested. I mean, so many of the encounters like in grand theft auto turn into fights. And it's very glitchy, right? The narrative is unreliable. It keeps breaking off. I mean, quite early on in the middle of a big battle. The author just goes, I've got a stop here because I don't know what happens next. And then there's a break. And then he says, okay, I've got, I've got the continuation of it. The author is Siddha matey Benning-Gelly. He's a Moore. So I had to have it translated by a Moorish translator. I bumped into in a market. And then in this kind of racist way, he says, well, Moore's are all liars anyhow. So I don't know how much of this we can actually, you know, we can actually believe in. And then this is whole fake book subplot, which is actually true. Someone else or someone other than Savannah's wrote a second, a pirate second edition, second volume, which Savannah's delights in trashing having his characters trash. So again, these kind of endless feedback loops and inconsistencies is a huge, I mean, there are inconsistencies in the plot, which they comment on. And so many deliberate mistakes. I mean, Tarkin, Fatalia's, Perseus, Faticia's, Orlando for Farragut, Crete for Thessaly, almost all the classical illusions are wrong deliberately. And Donkey Hote says, well, these errors are down to enchantment again. And then there's a bit when Sancho Panzer loses his mule, and then he's riding his mule again, and then he's lost it again. And then I found it. I've lost it. It appears, and as you say, glitching, it's almost there's the mule, and then it flickers, and it's gone, and then flickers, and it's back again. Yes. But through all of this, what is one of the many extraordinary kind of twists in the novelist that towards the end of the second volume, his Zidane-like fantasy of being the one in that media moment actually comes true, and the actual prose of Savannah's novel does indeed slip into this rather cliched register of speckled birds and aurora shuffling off the feathers of her bed. He literally kind of recycles those, but not in quotation marks anymore. So, so again, the contagion spreads all the way up to the to the author level and beyond. Yeah. But in terms of that, the space of it, that one of the things that seems sort of there, all these coincidences, that they, you know, in a sense, he has the whole of the plane of La Mancha to wander around, and yet there's this one road that they keep going up and down. There's a kind of a choke point, and there's this one in that they keep stuffing there, and he thinks it's a castle that only looks like an in because it's been enchanted and so on. But so much happens then, and they meet people, and then someone's brother who they haven't seen for years happens to be at the same end, and so there's this of in these coincidences of romance, you know, but which sort of seems to be accepted as perfectly normal. No one thinks it's at all surprising that everyone from all corners of the earth sort of ends up in the same pub at the same time. Absolutely. I mean, it's quite interesting. In the end, I think he uses, well, he uses the energy say for many things, savantes, but one interesting aspect of what happens there is is collision between the world of, you know, labor and industry, productive commerce on the one hand, and this kind of indolence on the other, this shrinking away from productive labor, and which is the whole, this is what drives Don Quixote. I mean, it's he has an estate that he's meant to, you know, husband, and he neglects his husbandry. I mean, savantes rights. Now, you must understand that during his idol moments, which accounted for most of the year, this gentleman took to reading books of chivalry with such relish and enthusiasm that he almost forgot about his hunting and even running his property. So Quixote's whole space of enchantment or entrançment emerges as a kind of turning away, a shrinking away from productivity and from economic productivity as well. So when he's in the, you know, when he's in the in, the other people in the end of professionals, their cloth teasers from Segovia and needle makers from Cordova, you know, doing business and he's there kind of swooning around. In fact, he gets the inkeeper to knight him and he says, well, you have to enter this in a book. It has to be recorded. And the only book the inkeeper has is the ledger, the account book for, you know, registering, um, immunities, straw and barley and so on. And, and the, the obliging inkeeper says, okay, I'll enter it in here. So again, this is another kind of space of literature emerging in the, you know, sitting uncomfortably within the account book of, of productivity. He's obviously don't, don't cage his problems. He doesn't have a proper job. And so he, so he decides to go, I, and he seems to recognize this himself. You know, it's kind of, he doesn't have enough to do. So I'm going to go and be a nice errands. That's that. There's, there's a worthy profession for a gentleman. But for him, this is Labour. I mean, he keeps using this word. Let, I have to labor. I have to toil at this, you know, counterproductive practice of night, air entry. When he's in the cage that you mentioned a moment ago, he says, I don't like idling here. And in fact, Sans and Carasco, one of his sidekicks comes and tries to rouse him from a, from a, a stupid when he's laid low by saying, look, your inactivity is depriving wrongs of their writing, orphans of their suck or maidens of their honour, etc. So it's a kind of double indolence, you know, his Labour is the Labour of the imaginary. And he, he works very hard at this incredibly unproductive or counterproductive use less Labour. Yeah. Although is it useless? But he, I'm at the end. And then when they're leaving and the innkeeper quite reasonably says, well, you've got to pay. And he has to have rage in the book. So I'm not going to do this. I'm a nice errands. I don't have to pay anything. And then there's yet more, yet more violence. I mean, it's something that Carl Miller wrote in the LRB. He was reviewing a reissue of Tobias Smolett's translation of it. And he says that there is too much in the way of grievous bodily harm. It's incredibly violent book. Yeah. It's almost every encounter. And, you know, the beatings and the whippings and the stabbings. And quite early on, he has, don't care, he has loads of his teeth knocked out. And he sort of becomes this increasingly sort of beat him up. Absolutely. No, it's, I mean, Nabokov says it's a sadistic book. And it's like a laboratory where the people are treated like lab rats and tortured. And he's not wrong. Yeah. I mean, also that he's the world's, his sort of belatedness or a man out of time that he's, he's a land, though, and obviously, well, there's still plenty of landowners now, but that coming from a world, essentially, I guess, a feudal agricultural world of landowners and people who worked on the land. But he's moving into a world where there's more commerce, well, an early capitalist world, essentially. And that's one of his ways of being out of time is that he's another of your aims that being machinery, right? Or, or mills. And he doesn't, you know, they're the famous windmills, but, you know, they're these other mills aren't that he doesn't, he went confronted with this very modern technology. He doesn't recognize it. Yeah. Well, the, the second mill scene is, is, um, they're filling mills. They come to a clearing above the filling mills in the pitch black so they can hear the clanking and beating of chains, filling mills and these kind of machines for treating a wall. And, um, Kihote says these are monsters and San Chopin's are, perhaps himself again. And I think what they're both reacting to in the different, I mean, in a way, Kihote is right. What he's hearing is, is the future, the industrialized, technologized, emergent, capitalist world of, you know, industry and the whole of the book, you know, you could really see as a traumatized reaction to the advent of of this. I mean, with the first, the famous windmills, he met a physicalizes technology. I think in that scene already, you know, Blake's dark, satanic mills, the whole Frankenstein, which we'll discuss later, even perhaps the whole of cinema, you know, he's worrying mechanism is kind of pre-creating a chimera. I think all of that's anticipated. But the third mill episode is, in a way, the most fascinating, it, it involves water mills. Kihote gets into a boat with panzer, he thinks some prisoners are in the mill house and he's got to rescue them. And, uh, of course, they get caught up in the machinery. They almost drowned. They get pulled out of the river, coughing and spluttering. And Kihote says, as he gets his breath back, he cries, "May God send me a remedy for everything in this world is trickery, stage machinery. Every part of it working against every other part I have done all I can." So he fails to recognize the actual material machinery of the mills, but he elevates this to the kind of metaphysical machinery of the spectacle, basically. One other aspect of the mechanical is, um, the problem of guns. And he says at one point, this is Jim Kernan's translation again, that I'm tempted to say that it grieves me to the heart to have adopted this profession of night-erentry in such a detestable age as we now live in. So he knows he's a, you know, a man out of time. For although no danger frightens me, still it causes me misgivings to think that powder and lead may deprive me of the chance of winning fame and renown by the strengths of my arm and the edge of my sword. So again, that's another way. And I mean that's seen again with where he nearly drowns in the boat and the water mills. So Vante's fought at the Battle of Levanton. And it was taken prisoner in Los Nams and there is a character in the book they meet who had that, that sort of bringing of essentially geopolitics into the novel as a really sort of forceful reminder that Don Quixote thinks he's riding around in a mythical time of an sort of ageless time of night's errant and so on. But actually this is one of the most crucial events the 16th century where they're combined forces of Christian or Catholic Europe defeated the Ottoman Empire. That's this is where the real fighting is and Vante's having fought in that. So there's a kind of frustration with this man who doesn't the way in which the modern world comes crashing in. Yeah, a very globalised vision of it. I mean we get silver mines in Potosi, governors in Mexico. I mean the whole, I mean you get the same in the merchant of Venice, we're in a very, very recognisably modern world of empire and extractive brutally violent colonialism and slavery and so on. And if such a panzer really wants to be governor of an island, he shouldn't be following a night errant, he should be going with a conquistador. Where he could actually. Yeah, where he could probably get himself an island. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. But yes, and also the question of of the spectacle. But the, um, I think Vante should be credited way before Gidebor as the first situation is he has a very sophisticated understanding of what's a ball called, you know, the spectacle, which is power, which is again, you know, the man behind the curtain and the wizard and so on. And I think, you know, just as we looked at the three mills, I think we could look at three situations in the novel where the spectacle is really prominent. The first would be when Akihote and, and panzer encounter a theatre group who they first take for devils, but eventually he realizes their actors. And he says, he says something very interesting. He says, appearances must be examined closely to discover the hidden truth. So there's this sense, you know, we're in a world that needs interpreting. We've got to peel back the curtain and see what's going on behind it. We could see this as a kind of enlightenment skepticism, curiosity, but also as a kind of proto-pinchonian or QAnon style, you know, paranoia. And then Qihote, actually, when he understands that this is theatre, he gives basically the all the world's stage speech, the same as Shakespeare, he says, you know, the same happens in this play of life in which some actors, emperors, others as popes, and ensures all the characters that they can be in a play, but when it is over. In other words, when life ends, death strips them all of the costumes that are distinguished between them and they are all equals in the grave. The second theatre scene is the puppet show, which is actually being run by this con man who, called Ginez de Pazamonte, who Qihote freed earlier, he broke out of a cage. And actually a really wonderful moment, right? So their prisoners, they've been taken prisoner, and Qihote sees them and says, it's my duty to free these men. They have the prisoners and they say, but, you know, their prisoners, their criminals, they've been taken prisoner for a reason. And he says, I don't care, they are prisoners and they must be freed. And it's, I think there's something magnificent about that response of his, actually. It says, it doesn't matter. Here they are in chains, that is wrong. And this question of their criminality and his refusal to sort of enter into that, I mean, it's a kind of exchange, you know, the crime and punishment, and they, they must pay for their crimes and all of that. And he, he'd completely reject that. Absolutely. And then this, this one character loops back to me, some again, with a puppet show. And Qihote says, I mean, he says, let me show you my puppet show. And Qihote says, fine, I'll watch it. And you get the scene where this boy at the side first kind of narrates and they critique his, his narration, it's very meta. But then the puppet show itself starts and all these puppets being mawls. And Don Qihote loses his shit and starts attacking them and they're heading these mawls. I've got to, I've got to decapitate them and he does. He smashes up all these puppets and ends up having to pay loads of money and, and to explain away his actions he, he, he again says, oh, in chances. Now, the ploy of these in chances who pursue me is to place before my eyes things as they are and then change them into what they want them to be. So again, he, you know, he kind of enters the spectacle. But the third one, which takes up pretty much, you know, most of, of book two, is what I like to think of as the Truman show that he enters. He, he comes across this Duke and Duchess who are never named, but they have this big castle and they take him in as a long-term guest and they lay on these endless tricks with fire and sounds and they have ethereal battles staged and chariots bearing the enemies of a mardis of ghoul and so on and mirlin and, and even they get their butler to dress up as the enchanted dolcinae or the dolerous duener. And they, they set up, they say, look, here's a giant horse, Malambruno's horse, Klavelenio has come to take you through the air and they make it bellow and smoke. It reminds me of that very cruel 2005 program called Space Cadets where they, a reality show where they put a bunch of not very bright people in a little shaking box and said you're in space and filmed them. It's kind of the same. And they say, you're flying through the air and, and, and pans are absolutely believes it, but Don Quixote is a bit skeptical about this. I mean, the whole question of, of belief, you know, he starts kind of hedging his pets in terms of, of what is actually true. I mean, there's that way that when he's, he can ride through the normal everyday world and see enchantments and dragons and giants and everything everywhere. So in a way, there's somehow, we wonder things is at this, you can touch us, they've read volume one, haven't they? They know who you are. You're the guy from the book that we've read. Oh great, we can have fun. But they're sort of by creating the appearance, he doesn't need the appearance of these things. He can look at a windmill and say there's a giant. So the idea you present him with, with an actual sort of slightly shoddly put together, flying machine, whatever, no, it's a dragon. It's kind of, he doesn't, he knows, he, it is wrong and he can see that there's something wrong because his imagination is enough. Yeah, well, there's a big, there's a, there's a kind of categorical difference between book one and book two in that sense, because in book one, he is self deluding. In book two, the delusion has been exteriorized and, and it's other people tricking him. I mean, by the end, they sent him to, towards the end, they sent him to Barcelona and the whole city has become a, like that island in the Truman show, all the citizens in on the joke. And they say, it is the great Don Quixote, the night errant. And then there's an extraordinary scene where he's taken to see this, this machine. I mean, literally a machine, an exteriorization of, of his own delusional apparatus that, I mean, it could be describing a wizard machinery from us. So Vantes writes, it was constructed like this. So it's a machine that will, you know, make prognoses and give magical kind of pronouncements and answer questions. So Vantes writes, it was constructed like this, the slab was made of wood painted and varnish to look like Jasper and the pedestal on which it rested was of the same material, as were four eagles feet projecting from it to support the weight more securely. The bust resembling the effigy of a Roman emperor, the color of bronze was hollow. And it fitted into a hole in the slab so perfectly that the join was invisible. There was also a hollow in the pedestal exactly under the hollow in the bust and all this opened into the room underneath through the systems of holes in the bust slab and pedestal, a tin tube was neatly fitted so that nobody could see it. In the room below, the man who was to reply to all the supplicants questions was stationed with his mouth to the tin tube. And the voice downstairs went up it and the voice upstairs came down it as clearly articulate as through an air trumpet. And so it was impossible to discover the trick. And when Quixote sees it, his mind flashes back to the puppet show, actually, but it had a kind of unconscious level. He doesn't really realize, he doesn't understand that this is a puppet show. I mean, it's interesting that respect, you know, Hamlet and Quixote are more or less exact contemporaries as characters, but Hamlet, you know, is wise. He puts on the shows. He understands politics as spectacle. He knows that there is a man, literally a man, Polonius behind the curtain. Quixote is inhabiting the exact same theatre of operations, but he's naive. It's interesting that question of Hamlet and acting because one of the many 18th century English novels is hugely influenced by Quixote being Tom Jones by Henry Fielding. And there's this wonderful scene where they've got to London and Tom Jones and Partridge, who's his such a panzer type character, who's the barber and he thinks he's his father, but actually he's not. And they go and they see David Garrick's Hamlet. And afterwards they haven't talking about the play and Tom says to Partridge, you know, who did he think was the best actor? I thought, you know, Garrick playing the prince was amazing. And Partridge is like, well, what would you mean? He was a terrible actor. He saw the ghost. He was afraid. I'd be afraid. But the man who played the king, you could tell he was acting. Somehow this idea that the the need of the artist to be visible and that somehow if it's too, you know, that he doesn't, it's natural. It's kind of well, whatever. He saw a ghost. He was scared. No big deal. But there's a, so this, I don't know, a different sort of a naive understanding. The naive response is to need to see the acting. Where is the more sophisticated response that you know that even the natural seeming is performance? Right. Yep. I mean, I guess in Don Quixote that Don Quixote is heading from enchantment to whizing up and all the other characters are heading in the other direction. They're like ships passing in the night. And it's that middle space that's so interesting. So when Sandra Panza is saying, no, it was all true. The stuff with the horse and flying through the air and Quixote is going, I don't know. But then, but then Sandra Panza says, well, all that stuff you told us about the, you know, Montessino's cave where you had visions of purgatory. That's bullshit. And Quixote says, well, Sancho, since you want people to believe what you saw in the sky, I want you to believe what I saw in the cave of Montessino's. I say no more. So, you know, he has a quite, oh, at another point when, when people are saying to him, look, you're Dolce Nea, she's just the local wench, Aldonzo Lorenzo, you know, please come off it. And he says, look, it is enough for me to be convinced that the good Aldonzo Lorenzo is beautiful and virtuous. I imagine that everything I say is precisely as I say it is. And I depict her in my imagination as I wish it to be both in beauty and in rank. And Helen cannot rival her, nor can Lucretia. So, at moments like this, he's in this very sophisticated kind of state of double consciousness. He's both the man behind the curtain and Dorothy, Michael McKeon, the critic in his 1987 book, The Origins of the English Novel. Comments on this, he says, these scenes constitute, they constitute an elaborate mechanism for inducing that species of belief without really believing, hyphenated, belief without really believing, which would become, once the mechanism itself proved unnecessary, the realm of the aesthetic. But there's also, I mean, a sense, everyone saying, oh, come off it, mate, you can't really fancy her. And him saying, but I do. And it's not for you to tell me, you know, she is, she is my, my damsel. Yes, no one's going to tell me otherwise because, but I know it isn't, he isn't saying that because he, but it's that, there's a bit early where he says, a knight errant who turns mad for a reason deserves neither merit nor thanks. The thing is to do it without cause. Yes, well, there is a point where he actually very hamlet like he says, I've got to go mad at this point because I'm being rejected in love. So, how do I go mad? I better bang my head against this rock. And Pazzer says, look, can't you just pretend to bang your head? He says, no, I've got to actually do it. So again, like hamlet kind of, you know, being mad. I mean, he has a sophisticated kind of double consciousness understanding of doing and not doing, but actually doing, even though it's a performance, but it's real or like, um, like prudent writer who even as he falls in love with Albertine understands the mechanism, all the rassine and everything else that's kind of fueling and filtering and kind of generating this, this desire, you know, he, he's not naive in that sense, he understands that it's through these cultural kind of filters that he's, um, and which is, of course, true to life. Yes. I mean, that there's, of course, people, if you, you know, our idea of what it means to fall in love and all the rest of it. So, is Hollywood has a huge influence on the way people expect human relationships to form and to take place and that, you know, in a sense, we're all Don Quixote, you watch enough romantic comedies, you think that's, you know, that's how your life should go. So it's not only a literary thing. I mean, it's an acknowledging the extent to which everyone, you know, you, there are stories that are told about the way things go and also everyone expecting to be the hero of their own story, they can see and watch, you know, action films and you kind of think, well, that's how everything's done. There's the hero and he does the stuff and it's in a way we're all right. Well, yes and no, I mean, I would argue that, of course, that, that is the kind of operational logic, but that's overlaid with the rhetoric of authenticity, you know, be true to yourself, become what you truly are, no filter, man, you know, whereas, you know, even the more and more we are filtered and mediated, the more this kind of ideology of non-mediated, pure authentic being is kind of, you know, icing dusted on top of it, whereas Quixote is precisely navigating the contradictions of that situation and dredging up all the, you know, the feedback loops and mechanisms and narrative codes and making them visible. I mean, it's extremely subversive and the effect on him is is, you know, like I said a moment ago, it's this progressive disenchantment. He ends up wise and everyone else ends up infected. So by the end, he's saying that this was all nonsense. I'm not donkey-hotem, just, you know, Alonso Quixote and all his entourage are going, no, what? Stop, you know, get off your, stop being lazy, get off your bed and get back to, you know, we're going to go out and be at this point, he's decided they should all be poets. You know, I'm already starting to, to compose all these sestinas and things, we're going to go around and be shepherd poets, reenacting Arcadia and so it's completely, it's completely switched. But in a sense, so they are rights because once he recognizes he has the total disenchantment, he says, I'm not donkey-hotem, or the rest of it. And then he dies, because actually he is donkey-hotem, in terms of the character and the novel, that's who he is, that he, the novel begins not with the childhood of, and the reading of the books, it kind of begins it, he is donkey-hotem. And Alonso Quixote and all those, the names which he, at the beginning we're told, we don't even know what his name is, and then at the end it picks on one of them. And then he, and then he dies, and that's the end of it. And then you have all the stuff about, and you know, this is the end of the story, and anyone who writes any other stories, they're all fake. They're using an ostrich feather for a quill, because they're so bad. Yeah, and there's this kind of, I mean, and it's, and there is the moment that somehow actually you strip away, or the, the illusions and the, the trance and the enchantments and everything. And, and there is nothing there, and he's dead, that you actually, that, you know, the reality needs the enchantment, needs the trance, needs the belief that he otherwise, you know, he's, he's know what? Absolutely. There's, there's, there's nothing there. I mean, you know, I think another thing, this book anticipates, we talked about media theory, but I think it very much anticipates 20th century psychoanalysis. And, you know, for Freud through Lackon, the symptom pathology is, is pleasure. It's the form of pleasure. It's a form of a meaning creation. The problem with pathology is not that it makes people miserable. It's that it makes their life dysfunctional, because they run around attacking windmills and things. So, I mean, Lackon's very explicit on this, when you, when you cure someone, you're not making them happier, you're making them more functional in a day to day, in, in a real world, by removing their disruptive pleasure. And this is exactly what, I mean, so that is, uses the word pleasure. Endlessly, it keeps coming up. His pleasure, his desire, his, it gave him such pleasure to, you know, he got so much pleasure. And at the end, he's, he's miserable, because his pleasure has been removed. I mean, another way in which he's sort of out of time is that he's a 50 year old man behaving like a small child, but, you know, children play and pretend living worlds and make believe. And that's all great. And I thought it wasn't allowed to do that. Yes. And a certain one of the things it don't care what he's doing is he's, he's, you know, playing at, not cops and robbers, he's playing at night's and damsels and, and that way, there's a childishness that he hasn't left behind. And it's just, and also the people who are, you know, joining in and making sport of him and bullying him are actually also reverting to a kind of pleasure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think, again, you know, if we think of Lackon, I mean, he, when he writes about the mirror phase, he says, this is, this is a formative moment, but it continues into adulthood. So, so Lackon's idea of the mirror phase is when the child sees themself in the mirror, they, at that moment, and recognizes themself, they form an ideal eye and ideal conception of themselves, a heroic kind of perfect version of themselves, which they can never coincide with. But for the rest of their life, that will kind of accompany them. He, he uses the image of, um, a tangent that can only join its line, asymptotically, i.e. at infinity, i.e. never. So, and I think you don't care. It's a perfect example of this, you know, kind of ideal eye, um, you know, the approach to the, to the ideal version of oneself, which can never actually be, be reached. And the real, the real, you know, the, the disaster that before him is, it's not that. It's, it's realizing that he can never reach it. And he says, uh, that's very sad. He says at the end, um, "My mind has been restored to me, and it is now clear and free without those gloomy shadows of ignorance cast over me by my wretched obsessive reading of those detestable books of shivalry. Now I can recognize their absurdity and their deceitfulness. And my only regret is that this discovery has come so late that it leaves me no time to make amends by reading other books. That might be a light for myself." He gets the last little joking, "I'll cure my book, book, uh, Delirium by reading book." Yeah. I mean, it's, but it's very different. I mean, or maybe it's not that different. I mean, just thinking of that, you know, Dr. Faustus, I'll burn my books. I've done my books, I've done my books, and I'm just drowning in his books and that. Yes, it's the, well, so much donkiyote is about, it's about the problem of the book, you know, we mentioned earlier, the, the innkeeper, not knowing where in the book to put, to recounts, you know, to enter the event of his nighting, and he puts it in the ledger, the business ledger, this kind of weird book, and kihote is thinking, you know, the end point, and there's a very malame and way he says, you know, the end point of all this is a book, which will be about me. But, but, and there's a wonderful actually out his adora, who we mentioned earlier, who kind of deludes him, but then herself kind of slips into this kind of role play. She describes this vision she had of purgatory, where all these devils are playing pilota with books. It's like kind of William Barras's films of books exploding, and papers flying everywhere, and one of the books, of course, is donkiyote. So the whole, the whole thing, the whole, the whole issue is kind of the problem of, of the book, and another, another brilliant 20th century writer on donkiyote, from a quite psychoanelistical perspective as well, is Rene Shira in his book, um, from 1961, deceit, desire, and the novel, and he says, kihote is a perfect example of, of what he calls memetic desire, right? So the Shavaric model is the mediator of, of desire. So a Mardis of Gaul kind of mediates donkiyote's desire for Shavaric authenticity, at, at the same time as donkiyote mediates San Chopin's desire, for an island. It's always in triangles, right? And then, and he uses this to kind of, um, Shira to, to make, to draw a distinction between what he calls romance and what he calls the novel, or the novelistic. Um, he says, uh, the difference between romance and the novel is that the novel reveals the mechanism of memetic desire. It's born of a, of a move beyond romance. He says, it's run through. The novelistic is, is one through a great struggle against these attitudes. We have lumped together under the name romantic because they all appear to us intended to maintain the illusion of spontaneous desire and of a subjectivity, almost divine in its autonomy, right? So the novel is, is that which is born through this arduous passage beyond and against romance, but this is also a move beyond desire, right? So Shira said, "Savante's could not have written donkiyote. If the same object had not been for him, first an enchanted helmet, and then an ordinary barber's basin, the novelist is a man who has overcome desire and who, remembering it, can make a comparison. The novelist is a hero cured of metaphysical desire. The novelist is a metamorphosed hero." So I suppose in, in, in that sense, one of the, you know, other ways in which donkiyote is metafictional is that donkiyote, in a donkiyote in italics is not only the first modern novel and he's not only the first hero in inverted commas of a novel, but in there's a sense in which he is the first novelist that, the process that donkiyote goes through in this double seeing of the world and the way in which it, well, the kind of synthesis he reaches at the end of that, he is, he is a novelist. So there's a sense in which it's a model for novelists, it's not only in the way that books written, but here is what donkiyote does in his double way of seeing the world is, it's how novelists have to see the world. Yes, and it sets the template for everything through, you know, Joyce's Ulysses, Ingeball Bachens, Malena, all the novels of Tomas Bernhardt, where they're, the central kind of stake and are undertaking within the novel is, is the production of the, of the novel itself, proust, obviously, as well. And so, you know, what emerges through the, through the, the, the course of the novel is the very, you know, it takes us to the threshold of the possibility of the novel happening, a kind of discovery of the mechanisms and systems that will produce, you know, this, this field of, of the novel. So, I mean, in that sense, I've, I've kind of tempted to end our discussion by, right, by going right back to the beginning and looking at the prologue. Yeah, where it's again, there's a scene that is the, you know, here's the production, it's showing you the production of writing. He's, he's to, like, this is, you know, this is how you write one of these things. Yeah, it's showing you the man behind the curtains, did or were, right at the beginning. Right at the very beginning. So Savannah shows himself, sitting at his writing station, picking up and setting down his pen with the paper in front of me, the pen behind my ear, my elbow on the desk and my cheek in my hand. It's wonderful. And then he, he goes into this long disavowal of anything natural. He says, although I'm, although I may seem like Don Quixote's father, I am his stepfather. He uses all these, um, tropes of unnatural genesis of kind of bastarding or bend sinistering of the whole sign under which it, you know, the writing takes place. And then, and then he drops in loads of tips about, you know, how you can appear learned by dropping learned illusions, even if they're wrong, because he says they're not going to bloody check them anyhow. So he cares. But everything you said today has been fully referenced to that. Oh, he knows everything. He's, he's scripted this conversation, you know, five hundred years ago. Don't worry about that. But there's a very interesting illusion. It's what he makes to Zoixis, who, you know, in Plenty's account, is famously tricked by Peresius in their painting competition. You know, Zoixis paints fruit so realistic that the birds come down from the sky and try and, try and eat his painting. And then he, he looks at Peresius's painting of a curtain and says, well, what about the curtains? So I can see what the painting is. And Peresius basically goes, psych, dude, it's a painting of a curtain. So I think that's, that's a right at the beginning. He's giving us that. But, but even before the very first two words of Don Quixote are idle reader, des Occupador lector, which I think is wonderful right at the beginning. He's showing us that the ultimate final and the first and final kind of space of unproductive productiveness is you, the reader. Tom MacArthur, thank you very much. A pleasure. Yeah, so this has been the first episode of a bonus series of close readings for 2026 from the London Review of Books, The Man Behind the Curtain with me, Thomas Jones and me Tom MacArthur. And next time we'll be talking about Mary Sherley's Frankenstein. See you in a couple of months. See you soon!