Cervantes Syndrome

Miguel de Cervantes was an interesting, seemingly flighty character, who worked for the government in Spain (between jail visits) and wrote one of the foundational works for modern, western literature.

"The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha" often truncated to simply "Don Quixote" was one of the later renaissance works and one of few produced by Cervantes. It was published as two separate parts, the first released in 1605 and second ten years later and is the caricaturized story of a man, disenchanted with his modern life who dons a new identity and sets out on a quest to restore chivalry (much to the dismay of his friends and family who assume he has gone mad). The inspiration for this quest however is not madness as his family suggests, but the content of many books he has read that highlight chivalrous acts.

In fact, our hero was quite the bookworm. Even our narrator admits, "finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind." This is significant personally, as I can relate to family chastisement for book-worminess, but is also significant in the larger context of the renaissance. This novel comes near the end of the period, and centers a new medium at the heart of the story: physical novels. The printed word had recently begun to permeate European life, and the novels of chivalry and brainless romance that were popular in previous periods are mocked in Cervantes' brilliant satire. I recognized my own unrelated follies in the endearing naiveté of Quixote, and can only imagine the reception of those who were openly mocked.

The clever style and subject of Cervantes' novel absolutely holds in our day. The poignancy of the meta-narrative is applicable to each new creative outlet, and as I scroll through my Twitter feed appreciating users who joke about people who use Twitter, I laugh as I suffer from rasin-brain also known as dried brain also known as Cervantes Syndrome.

Father of the Spanish Language

Somewhere in the packed filing cabinets of my mother’s office are several small books that where made out of printing paper by my second grade self. These books contain colorful drawing and incoherent story-lines filled with characters from my imagination (and the movie Tarzan, because the elephant was my favorite character at the time) and peppered with the silly made-up words that my friends and I used in our everyday conversations. Likewise, in the works of Spanish writer Cervantes you could find many colorful characters and made up words.

The primary difference between the books written by Cervantes and myself (besides the literary merit, as needless to say nothing I wrote was near as good as Don Quixote) was that while my words slipped out memory after a few weeks the words that Cervantes created are not only still remembered, but are part of a regular Spanish vocabulary. In fact, Cervantes is to Spanish what Shakespeare is to English, buoying up the vocabulary of the infant Spanish language like the plays of Shakespeare contributed to the English language. He might have had even more of an impact, given that his works where published in the early 1600s, and where therefore in circulation longer. With the established dictionaries of today words created by an individual are less likely to catch on, but the brilliance of writers like Cervantes makes it easy to see why their words have endured and are still used today.