The question that runs through Quixote is whether or not the “knight” is mad. And it’s not just the reader that asks it. The characters do too. From those encountered in route, to the loyal squire, Sancho, the debate rages across Spain and even all of La Mancha (Cervantes used this joke twice, I will use it once).

I can’t judge Quixote’s sanity, but what I can judge, or at least opine on, is how the argument reveals something about the 17th Century’s idea of madness (and our own). Despite Quixote’s obvious outward signs of madness (charging a flock of sheep, wearing a barber’s basin on his head, etc.), many of those who meet him hold this judgement in reserve. The reason? His intelligence. Those who meet him marvel at his contradictory nature: the aforementioned signs of delusion versus his lucid explanations of philosophical concepts. Such contradictions create cognitive dissonance in the 17th century mind. But in ours?

I was talking to a friend of mine about this dichotomy, how alien it seemed to me. Those of us in the twenty-centuries are accustomed to the idea of madmen being geniuses—it’s de rigeur. So much so that anyone who wants to be perceived as a genius, takes on the colors of madness, builds a mythology of irrational acts. I think of Dali who, naturally, illustrated Quixote, but the list goes on: Crispin Glover, Marilyn Manson, Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon. I think it’s a fin de siecle trend, and we see the genesis in Van Gogh, Rimbaud, even Poe. Genius = Madness.

But not so in 17th c.  Spain. No, here madness has its equivalency with idiocy. After all, it’s still the dark ages of what we now know as psychology. At some point it all changed. The insane could be ingenious. It may be that our Knight of the Sorrowful Face, with Hamlet as accomplice, ushered in this idea even before that dutch painter removed part of his ear.