On Myth and History
Don Quixote's madness invites us to look deeper at the relationship between fact and fiction.
While few today read the delightful and hilarious story of Don Quixote, he still exists in our cultural imagination as the madman who believed he was a knight errant and had misadventures, most famously with windmills he believed to be giants. As I’ve been reading through this great book, I’ve been continually struck by the recurring theme of history versus myth. In the novel, only Don Quixote really believes that knights used to exist, and that the stories he has read of them and that have turned his head are histories rather than fiction. He tries to convince others of this, and they try to convince him of the absurdity of his belief, but none can successfully move the other. Cervantes is, of course, poking fun at the typical chivalrous Romance and laughing at the contrivances within their pages. He is constantly winking at the reader, using tropes from the knight stories of his day and reworking them in a way that shows that he both loves them and also finds them laughable.
In the second part of the book, Cervantes adds another layer of comedy and depth to the story. Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza, become aware that a book has been written of their adventures, and aware of the many reactions and responses from readers. Now a true history of his own works has been added to the other histories of knights which Don Quixote believes to be true. And all of this is happening within the story, which we, the readers, know to be fictional just like the knight stories he loves and believes in, despite the amusing pretense of the book that we are reading a true history that Cervantes has simply discovered and translated.
What are we to make of all this? Are not myth and history opposites of one another, one explaining things as they actually happened and one imagining how things might have happened so that they make sense? This is the opinion of the character Sanson, who states “it’s one thing to write as a poet and quite another to write as a historian: the poet can narrate or sing events not as they were but as they should have been, and the historian must record them not as they should have been but as they were, without adding anything to the truth or taking anything away from it.” This is the modern opinion, and it’s an opinion at least as old as Cervantes. But Don Quixote himself provides the beginning of an alternate perspective on the relationship between the two, when he gives the reason for believing that mythic characters really did exist:
“There are people alive who almost remember seeing the duenna Quintañona, the best server of wine there ever was in the whole of Great Britain. And the truth of this is shown by the fact that I remember my grandmother on my father’s side saying, whenever she saw some aged duenna go by in her weeds: “That one over there, my boy, she could be old duenna Quintañona herself.” From which I conclude that my grandmother must have known her, or at least have contrived to see some portrait of her.” - Cervantes, Don Quixote.
In this we can begin to see another view of myth, one that is eluding Don Quixote in his madness, but also Sanson in his educated mind. Don Quixote’s grandmother did not mean that she actually knew the famed Quintañona, nor that she existed, but that she was a type of woman that appeared in real life just as surely as she appears in legend. She was true, not in a factual way, but in a richer way, going beyond even just symbolic.
“A great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last.” writes John Steinbeck, in East of Eden. This is another story heavily drenched in myth, and it’s mythic qualities are what allows it to transcend the personal history of Steinbeck’s family and become a story about all of us. “All novels, all poetry, are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil. And it occurs to me that evil must constantly respawn, while good, while virtue, is immortal.” Good and evil are easier to identify and see in myths than in history, and this doesn’t make them less true. It is good to have both a black and white view of good and evil given to us through the grey, hazy story of myth, and also have a nuanced and grey view of individual human beings and civilizations given to us through the black and white factual lens of history.
This was a topic on which C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien thought and wrote often. In The Two Towers, the man Eomer is astounded that the small people (hobbits) told of in the myths of Rohan actually exist.
“‘Do we walk in legends or on the green earth in the daylight?’
‘A man may do both,' said Aragorn. 'For not we but those who come after will make the legends of our time. The green earth, say you? That is a mighty matter of legend, though you tread it under the light of day!’”
And in Tales from the Perilous Realm, Tolkien puts it even more explicitly, “History often resembles myth, because they are both ultimately of the same stuff.” There was a time, after all, when scholars were convinced that the city of Troy and its war with Greece were nothing more than a work of fiction dreamed up for a good story. Now, however, the archeological record suggests that Troy really did exist, and there was in fact a war between it and Greece. The discounting of myth in the study of history has happened time and time again, and time and time again what has been ignored as myth has been later shown to carry much historical truth in it. When we rush to push myth completely into the realm of fiction, we sweep away much of the wisdom of our ancestors that has been collected into the legends that they pass down.
“It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by a majority of the people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.” - G. K. Chesteron, Orthodoxy
C. S. Lewis had much to add on the topic. In his sci-fi novel, Out of the Silent Planet, the protagonist Ransom considers the history of the planet Mars that he has been told; that the great valley in which he spent his time was not a natural phenomena but the work of ancient beings:
“Seen from the height which the space-ship had now attained, in all their unmistakable geometry, they put to shame his original impression that they were natural valleys. They were gigantic feats of engineering, about which he had learned nothing; feats accomplished, if all were true, before human history began… before animal history began. Or was that only mythology? He knew it would seem like mythology when he got back to Earth (if he ever got back), but the presence of Oyarsa was still too fresh a memory to allow him any real doubts. It even occurred to him that the distinction between history and mythology might be itself meaningless outside the Earth.”
Meaningless? How can this be? Perhaps because they are two sides of the coin, with history concerning itself with what we can see and prove has occurred, and myth concerning itself with the meaning behind it. In his novel. Till We Have Faces, (subtitled A Myth Retold), Lewis rewrites the story of Cupid and Psyche from the perspective of one of Psyche’s sisters. When late in her life she hears the Cupid and Psyche myth, she is aghast. The facts about her are wrong! They don’t tell the truth about what really happened. She tells us, “And to me it was as if the old man’s voice, and the temple, and I myself and my journey, were all things in such a story; for he was telling the very history of our Istra, of Psyche herself.” The story, the myth, is also the very history of her life. But when she asks for clarification, the response she gets from the priest is not satisfying to her. She asks,
“Do you think I care what you do? Has the thing itself happened yet or not? (…)” “But, Stranger, the sacred story is about the sacred things- the things we do in the temple. In spring, and all summer, she is a goddess. Then when harvest comes we bring a lamp into the temple in the night and the god flies away. Then we veil her. And all winter she is wandering and suffering; weeping, always weeping …” He knew nothing. The story and the worship were all one in his mind.”
Orual cannot see that her history, and the history of her sister Psyche, have become even more than she ever thought, and have taken on a meaning beyond her imagination. She believes the myth has gotten the facts wrong. By the end of the novel, she sees that the myth is telling a true version of the story that she was blinded by her own jealousy from seeing. Lewis is deftly working with this idea using a pagan myth here, but he believed that all pagan myths pointed towards the “true myth” of Christianity. In a letter he wrote about his conversion, he spoke of this in more detail:
“Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant’.
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call ‘real things’.”
To Lewis and Tolkien, myth and history are wedded together in the incarnation, where God became man and entered into our own history, a myth come to life. The creation myth of Genesis, the Flood narrative, the Tower of Babel, all of these are myths and history together, both the facts of what happened and an explanation and exploration of the meaning behind them.
“but Christians also need to be reminded . . . that what became Fact was a Myth, that it carries with it into the world of Fact all the properties of a myth. God is more than a god, not less; (…) For this is the marriage of heaven and earth: Perfect Myth and Perfect Fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight.” -Lewis, Myth Became Fact
In the end, Don Quixote may be wrong about all of his favorite knight’s tales being literal history, but he is right in that they convey to us truth nonetheless. The simple question of whether a story is factual or fictional is not enough to determine whether a story is true. “History is, as it were, sacred, because it must be truthful, and where there is truth there is God.” Don Quixote says, and he believes it. But we as readers, enjoying the fictional escapades of this mad knight errant and his naive squire, are invited to say the same thing about legends.