This year marks the 400th anniversary of the first publication of Don Quixote. Looking back at Cervantes’s major work allows us to explore the universal reach of great world literature.Not long ago the Norwegian Academy asked a hundred writers from all over the world a question: name the novel that you consider the best ever written. Fifty of them answered Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. This answer poses the interesting question of the long-seller versus the bestseller.
There is, of course, no single answer to why a bestseller sells, or why a long-seller lasts. Don Quixote was a bestseller when it first appeared in 1605 and has continued to sell ever since, whereas William Faulkner was a bad-seller if you compare the meagre sales of Absalom, Absalom (1936) with those of the really big seller of the year, Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse, a Napoleonic saga of love, war and trade. So there is no thermometer: time will tell, and maybe time will sell.
One might think that Cervantes was in tune with his times. Whereas Stendhal consciously wrote for "the happy few", sold poorly in his own life, was given the reward of Balzac’s praise before he died and only came into his own thanks to the efforts of the critic Henri Martineau in the 20th century.
Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear for ever. The bestseller lists of the past 50 years are, with a few lively exceptions, a sombre graveyard of dead books. Yet permanence is not a wilful proposition. No one can write a book aspiring to immortality.
We could take each one of the writers I have quoted so far and make an excursion into their relationship with the times they lived in. However fascinating, I wonder how much it tells us about the books that they wrote, the imagination that moved them to write, their use of language, their critical approach to the art of literature, their awareness of belonging to the larger tradition that Milan Kundera invokes in his recent book The Curtain: the fact that a novelist belongs - more than to his country or even to his native tongue - to a tradition in which Rabelais, Cervantes, Sterne and Diderot are a part of the same family and that family, as desired by Goethe, lives in the house of world literature, the Weltliteratur which each writer, Goethe suggests, fosters independently of national literatures that "have ceased to represent anything of importance".
If this is true, then all great works of literature contain both the tradition they spring from and add to and the new creation that depends as much on preceding tradition as tradition itself depends upon the new creations that nourish it.
Carlos Fuentes in Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2005.
