JAD ABUMRAD: We're back.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Well, tell us who you are.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: I am Bruce Burningham.

ROBERT: And where do you teach?

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: I teach at Illinois State University.

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert. So Bruce? He's a scholar, a language professor. And I called him up because Jad and I were having a little disagreement.

JAD: A friendly one.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Okay.

ROBERT: Hmm. We're having an argument here. I said that when you get the hip hop and the wrestling and the novels and all that, you're getting a sort of a moment.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: A contemporary moment where people are fascinated by authenticity. And then Jad, my partner, said, "I don't know. Maybe people have always been interested in authenticity. And this just comes with being a human. It's nothing about now, it's just about us."

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: I mean, it's new in the sense that this generation of which we belong has become very interested in these kind of questions.

ROBERT: But Bruce told me this preoccupation, it's not really new. In fact, at least in book form, it goes back way longer than you'd think.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: 1605.

JAD: Whoa!

ROBERT: Before wrestling and before Fleetwood Mac and before Jimmy Fallon began laughing at his own jokes, there was Miguel Cervantes's book, Don Quixote.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Yeah, so the first book really is about authenticity from the get-go.

ROBERT: You open this book ...

[AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes.]

ROBERT: And right away, the narrator says, "I'm going to tell you a story which I actually gathered from other authors, from a bunch of different historical documents. So I'm not really the author.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: He says things like, "While some books say the first adventure was this, and some say it was that." So even from the start, you have a very unreliable narrator.

ROBERT: Who then proceeds to tell the story of a very unreliable, if not completely crazy character.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Don Quixote.

[AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR: Who is dry, withered, capricious, and filled with inconstant thoughts never imagined by anyone else.]

ROBERT: So Don Quixote believes that he has been set on Earth to rescue widows, princesses and be kind to orphans.

JAD: He's like a delusional ...

ROBERT: Totally delusional.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Right? He is—he's essentially a guy who's read too many Zane Grey novels and decides he needs to be a cowboy.

ROBERT: He thinks herds of sheep are attacking armies. He thinks windmills are giants. At the same time, he has this savvy assistant, Sancho Panza, who seems to know what's really going on, and they're constantly arguing about what's real and what's not. And then in chapter eight, something really strange happens. One day, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are traveling down the road, and they see a carriage with a woman inside. Just an ordinary woman going, you know, to meet her husband. Don Quixote however, for no reason at all, decides that she is a woman in distress, needs to be rescued. And he spies this man standing right next to the carriage. He's a Basque guy.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: He sees this guy, and he decides that he's an enemy who needs to be confronted. And so they start fighting.

[AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR: Don Quixote was charging the wary Basque with his sword on high, determined to cut him in half. And The Basque was waiting for him, his sword also raised.]

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: And in mid-swing when both swords are in the air, the narrator stops and says, "And I don't know where this goes from there. I've run out of material."

ROBERT: [laughs]

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: And he just sort of stops narrating.

ROBERT: And this is, what, 160-something?

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: 1605.

JAD: And the book stops?

ROBERT: It just stops.

JAD: I mean, that's the end of the book?

ROBERT: Well, no.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: So you turn the page and you're in a new chapter. And now the narrator is telling you how, as luck would have it, he found this manuscript.

[AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR: One day when I was in the Alcaná Market in Toledo.]

ROBERT: Crazily enough, he's at a bazaar, like a sort of a, you know, shopping kind of place. And he sees this pile of old papers and books together in a basket. And he's rifling through it, and he sees a picture of Don Quixote de la Mancha.

[AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR: I was astounded and filled with anticipation.]

ROBERT: There it was. Apparently, a real historical account.

[AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR: In which the stupendous battle between the gallant Basque and the valiant Manchigan is concluded.]

ROBERT: The problem was it was in Arabic.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: And so then he hires a local Morisco, who is a Christianized Moor, to translate it for him.

ROBERT: All right, so you now got a guy who's writing a book from historical sources. He's run out of one. He's found another, but now that one has to be translated. And on top of that ...

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: He frequently inserts commentary about the translation, and will say stuff, like, "Well, Cide Hamete says this, but we all know that Arabs can't be trusted. So, you know, take that for what that's worth."

ROBERT: And as I'm reading it, I'm thinking wait a second. This was written in 1605? What did people make of a book that didn't seem to have any author? Or had author upon author upon author? Like, were they horrify ...

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: I mean, the book was a best-seller. It was hugely popular.

ROBERT: Apparently, people found all these layers and these ambiguities a laugh riot.

HOWARD MANSING: Oh, yeah. They gobbled up and they laughed as hard as they could.

ROBERT: This is Howard Mansing, a Cervantes scholar at Purdue.

HOWARD MANSING: And Don Quixote was translated into English in 1612, into French in 1614, into Italian in 1622. Everybody read it, including in the New World, by the way. Many copies of the first edition of Don Quixote were shipped to the colonies.

ROBERT: Wow.

ROBERT: So the book is a worldwide bestseller, maybe the first of its kind. And then 10 years later—10 years later—Cervantes writes a sequel, which kicks up this narrative weirdness to a completely new level.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: In part two ...

[AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR: Part Two, Don Quixote of La Mancha.]

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: ... he introduces a new character named Sansón Carrasco. He actually visits Don Quixote and Sancho to tell them that part one exists. It's a best-seller. And so in the very early chapters of part two, Don Quixote ...

ROBERT: This would be like walking up to Huckleberry Finn and saying, "Oh, by the way, you're living here in Hannibal, Missouri, but you're now a famous boy."

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: That's exactly what happened. Everybody he meets knows who he is because they've read part one.

ROBERT: And now it gets even stranger because in real life, during that 10 years that it took Cervantes to write his second book ...

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: A person who goes by the pseudonym of Alonzo Fernandez de Avellaneda published his own second part of Don Quixote before Cervantes could get his own second part out.

JAD: Wait. So this is—this is an unofficial part two?

ROBERT: Yeah.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Today, we'd recognize it as sort of fan fiction, or somebody attempting to steal George Lucas's idea and come up with their own Star Wars installment.

ROBERT: So there's this unauthorized part two floating around. Miguel Cervantes is very annoyed by it, I'm assuming, so in his official sequel to Don Quixote ...

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: There is this scene where Don Quixote is at an inn and he overhears a character talking about his relationship with this supposed Don Quixote.

SIMON: Wait. So this guy—this guy ...

ROBERT: That's Simon Adler, who sat in on the interview with me.

SIMON: This guy existed in the fake Quixote number two? He's a character in that, and is now appearing in the real Quixote number two?

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Right. Cervantes steals him. If you're gonna steal my character, I'll steal yours back, right?

ROBERT: So now you've got the real Don Quixote. He's bumping into a character stolen from a fake book of Don Quixote.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: So Don Quixote then decides to confront this person.

ROBERT: He marches right up to the guy and he says ...

[AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR: "I am Don Quixote of La Mancha, the same one who is on the lips of fame, and not that unfortunate man who has wanted to usurp my name and bring honor to himself with my thoughts.]

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: And so—and it's the climax of that scene, which is just wonderful, is he forces this other character who he's stolen from the unauthorized sequel, who Cervantes has stolen, to admit that the Don Quixote he knows from the unauthorized sequel is not the real one, and that the one he's currently talking to is the real one.

[AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR: I implore your grace for the sake of what you owe to your being a gentleman, to please make a statement to the magistrate of this village.]

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: And as a matter of fact, he forces him to sign an affidavit to that effect.

ROBERT: [laughs] So he busts him.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: He busts him. Right.

ROBERT: In the—in the novel.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: In the novel.

JAD: Wait. You got a story about a guy that then becomes in part two, a story about the story about the guy including false guys inside the story about the story.

ROBERT: Well, the false guy's from another book that ...

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: So why even bother trying to figure out what's real?

ROBERT: Well, exactly.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Right.

ROBERT: Has anything like this come before this?

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: No. He's really sort of inventing this whole meta-narrative game that is so popular today.

SIMON: The meta-narrative. What—what does ...?

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Well, up until that point, most stories are simply—they purport to be what they are. I'm telling you a story. But Don Quixote pretends to be something other than what it is. It really is the start of modernity, our modern sense of the world.

ROBERT: So you agree with Jad then, that this is—this has not waxed and waned, this particular era, or—because I think it has.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Well, it has waxed and waned. I mean, Don Quixote has been read by different generations for different reasons.

ROBERT: Bruce says he thinks the people who were reading the book originally at the time of Cervantes, they actually ...

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: ... reveled in the multi levels of fiction.

ROBERT: They love the meta stuff.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: But during the Romantic Period and well into the early 20th century ...

ROBERT: People were less interested in all these narrative layers, and they were more just thrilled by the romantic Don Quixote or the dreamer Don Quixote.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: But this generation of which we belong has become very interested in this terrain that Cervantes charted a long time ago. You see it in the cinema of the late '90s.

ROBERT: In movies like The Matrix, and then later Adaptation and then Inception.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Inception: You're exploring the concept of a dream within a dream.]

ROBERT: You see it in Seinfeld.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Seinfeld: What's going on? We're gonna shoot the pilot and then it's gonna be on TV the following week?]

ROBERT: You know, there's this comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who's playing a character that happens to be called Jerry Seinfeld, who's making a show within the show about a character who's Jerry Seinfeld.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: And so you have reality nested three times.

SIMON: But I guess I'm interested in this idea of why is—how is this happening again, and why is it happening again?

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Well, my sense of things is that both of these moments are moments of intellectual crisis.

ROBERT: Back in Cervantes time ...

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Coming out of the Renaissance, you have all of this new scientific knowledge that is calling into question the foundation that everybody was building their lives on. So suddenly, the Earth is no longer the center of the universe. It's now just one planet among several orbiting the sun. So you have people coming to terms with a worldview that they can no longer sustain.

ROBERT: And as for us now?

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: In the last hundred years you have Darwinism, you have relativity, you have quantum physics. I mean, cognitive scientists are telling us that we have no free will because they can sort of chart the chemical reaction that happens milliseconds before we think we decide to do something. All of these things tell us that the world that we think we see is not what it is. And I think that inspires people to then start asking these questions: "If what I'm seeing is not real, what is? Who am I?" And so I think to a great extent, it's a reaction to a moment of intellectual crisis.

SIMON: Wait. But okay, let's say that I like professional wrestling a lot. I don't know anything about any of the research you're telling me about. Why the hell do I like professional wrestling? And why did I like it more when they started blurring these lines?

ROBERT: Ooh, hard question.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Well, I would say humans are humans. And one of the things that we do, as opposed to as far as we know what other animals on this planet do, is we are aware of our own contingency.

ROBERT: Meaning we can imagine radically different possibilities. We can imagine worlds where we don't exist, or maybe we only think we exist.

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: I can remember being a child four and five years old, and going to a fabric store with my mother. And there were two mirrors set against opposite walls, and I was just fascinated at standing in between them and watching the infinite regress go in each direction, you know? And I had not even started kindergarten yet. So I think humans have this fascination with infinite regress and with embeddedness.

ROBERT: And with the questions that it forces you to consider, like where does everything begin? And where does it all come from?

BRUCE BURNINGHAM: I mean, the question at the heart of Don Quixote realizing that he's a character in a novel is: who stands above you? The author stands above you. And so that author has a kind of God-like relationship to you, but that very question starts to make you ask who stands above that author? And if you start asking that question, it goes on forever in every direction.

JAD: Thank you to Rupert Boyd for coming and playing the Spanish guitar for us in this piece on very short notice.

ROBERT: And to Recorded Books for giving us permission to use George Guidall's wonderful read of the book, Don Quixote de la Mancha. He's really good.

JAD: Okay. Well, I guess we should go, then. We should say goodbye.

ROBERT: Yes, we should go. We should say goodbye.

[DAVID SHOEMAKER: Hi, this is David Shoemaker, writer for Grantland.]

[BRUCE BURNINGHAM: This is Bruce Burningham, editor of the Journal of the Cervantes Society of America.]

[ANDREW MARANTZ: Hi, it's Andrew Marantz, and these are the credits. Here goes.]

[DAVID SHOEMAKER: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad.]

[ANDREW MARANTZ: Our staff includes Ellen Horne ...]

[BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Soren Wheeler ...]

[ANDREW MARANTZ: Tim Howard ...]

[BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Brenna Farrell ...]

[DAVID SHOEMAKER: Molly Webster ...]

[ANDREW MARANTZ: Malissa O'Donnell ...]

[BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Dylan Keefe, Jamie York, Lynn Levy ...]

[DAVID SHOEMAKER: Andy Mills ...]

[BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Kelsey Padgett, Matt Kielty ...]

[ANDREW MARANTZ: Arianne Wack and Latif Nasser.]

[BRUCE BURNINGHAM: With help from Simon Adler, Eva Dasher, Damiano Marchetti, Kelly Prime and Danny Lewis.]

[ANDREW MARANTZ: Special thanks to the legendary Jim Ross ...]

[DAVID SHOEMAKER: David Shoemaker—that's me. And Paul Jay, the director of Wrestling With Shadows, which you should see. That's it.]

[BRUCE BURNINGHAM: Thanks. Bye.]

[ANSWERING MACHINE: End of message.]

 

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