Let's Read: A Problem

In this post, we read through Borges's story A Problem, which is about Don Quixote, a story written by Cervantes:

The story follows the adventures of a nobleman named Alonso Quixano who reads so many knightly stories that he goes insane and decides to become a knight-errant, reviving chivalry and serving his country, under the name Don Quixote de la Mancha. He recruits a simple farmer, Sancho Panza, as his squire. 

His name means "Don Quixote, of la Mancha". La Mancha is a region in central Spain, where Don Quixote lived in.

A Problem

Jorge Luis Borges

Let us imagine that in Toledo someone finds a paper with an Arabic text and that the paleographers declare the handwriting belongs to that same Cide Hamete Benengeli from whom Cervantes took his Don Quixote.

Toledo is a city in Spain that's near la Mancha. The author of Don Quixote apparently also lived around that city.

Cide Hamete Benengeli is a fictional Arab Muslim historian. Cervantes wrote in the preface that the novel Don Quixote was actually written by Cide, and Cervantes simply found it in "the archives of La Mancha", and translated them to Spanish. In Chapter 9, Cervantes describes finding an Arabic manuscript called "The History of Don Quixote of La Mancha, written by Cide Hamete Benengeli, an Arab historian."

In the text we read that the hero — who, as the story goes, rambled about Spain armed with a sword and lance, challenging all sorts of people for all sorts of reasons — discovers at the end of one of his many frays that he has killed a man. At this point the fragment breaks off. The problem is to guess, or to conjecture, how Don Quixote reacts.

Borges likes playing with literature, and Don Quixote, and what-if questions.

As I see it, there are three possible solutions. The first is negative. Nothing special happens, for in the hallucinatory world of Don Quixote death is no less common than magic, and to have killed a man need not perturb someone who struggles, or thinks he struggles, with monsters and enchanters.

The second is pathetic. Don Quixote never managed to forget that he was a projection of Alonso Quijano, a reader of fairy tales.

Alonso Quijano is the irl name of Don Quixote.
Don Quixote is the knightly name of Alonso Quijano.

Seeing death, realizing that a dream has led him to commit the sin of Cain, wakes him from his pampered madness, possibly forever.

Cain is the first human to kill a human in human history, in the story of the Bible. He killed his brother Abel, and became a symbol for all humans who kill humans in a bad way.

The third is perhaps the most plausible. Having killed a man, Don Quixote cannot admit that his terrible act is the fruit of a delirium. The reality of the effect forces him to presuppose a parallel reality of the cause, and Don Quixote will never emerge from his madness.

So basically, in order to keep a delusion going he is forced to be more deluded. It has parallels in beliefs in the paranormal and conspiracy theories, where when reality disproves one delusion, more delusions are added to keep the original delusions intact.

There remains another conjecture, alien to the Spanish world and even to the Occidental world. It requires a much more ancient setting, more complex, and wearier. Don Quixote, who is no longer Don Quixote but rather a king of the Hindustani cycles,

The "Hindustani cycles" refers to Hinduism. The "cycle" means "a series of songs, stories, plays, or poems composed around a particular theme, and usually intended to be performed or read in sequence" (Oxford English Dictionary). Borges probably was talking about the Bhagavad Gita cycle, which we will talk about later.

intuitively knows as he stands before his enemy’s cadaver that to kill and to beget are divine or magical acts which manifestly transcend humanity. He knows that the dead man is an illusion, as is the bloody sword that weighs down his hand, as is he himself, and all his past life, and the vast gods, and the universe.

This is hard to explain, so let me try badly.

In Hinduism, time is cyclic. Universes are created and destroyed endlessly.  This view is directly against the Western ("Occidental") view of time, which says there exists exactly one beginning and one ending.

In Hinduism, there is "atman", which is like the intuitive idea of "soul". In all living creatures, there is atman. There are many schools of Hinduism. I'll pick the one which seems the closest to what Borges was saying: the Vedanta school of Hindu philosophy.

The Vedanta philosophers say that there are three kinds of things that exist:

• Brahma – the ultimate metaphysical reality
• Ātman – the individual soul or self
• Prakriti – the empirical world, ever-changing physical universe, body and matter.

Brahma is the true reality. It does not change. Atman = Brahma. There is only one true reality, so there is only one true soul. All souls and existence across space and time are the same.

This theory of "one soul" has been used to justify the idea of "do no harm" ("ahimsa"): Hurting others is just harming one's own self that exists in another body. (The flip side is that revenge by self-harm totally works in this theory. Take that, mom!)

The physical world is always changing, but it is not the true reality. It is just an illusion. Salvation comes from breaking free from this illusion, and understand Brahma, the true reality, how everything is actually one thing.

Side note: Hinduism contrasts with Buddhism, which claims there is no atman, and salvation comes from realizing there is no self.

So... how's that related to Don Quixote?

Let's quote the Bhagavad Gita, an epic story in Hinduism.

The Gita is a dialogue between Krishna and Arjuna right before the start of the climactic Kurukshetra War. Two massive armies have gathered to destroy the other. Prince Arjuna sees that some among his enemies are his own relatives, beloved friends, and revered teachers. He does not want to fight to kill them and is thus filled with doubt and despair on the battlefield. He drops his bow, wonders if he should just leave. He turns to his charioteer and guide Krishna, for advice on the right thing to do.

Krishna is an incarnation of Vishnu, the greatest god of Hinduism. It is sometimes considered to be equal to Brahma, the true reality.

During the dialogue, Krishna decides to give the prince divine eyes, so that the prince could see his true form. The true form was hotter than an atomic bomb:

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one...

After that, Krishna told the prince that, yes, it's sad that he must kill those he loves, but that's just fate, part of the story of the world.

The Lord says: I am Time, the mighty force which destroys everything, fully manifesting myself, I am here engaged in destroying the worlds. Even without you, none of the warriors arrayed in the enemy ranks shall survive.

Therefore, arise and win glory! Conquer your foes and fulfill your kingship! They are already killed by me. Be just my instrument, the archer at my side!