Even though we might not know “what” these literary adventures are, we still must go on them for in doing so we can find the only counsel worthy of our attention. The real protagonists…are the wrier and the reader, who both undergo adventures enough to last them a lifetime, even if neither ever quite understands what these are. But, more importantly, is the fact that we – the author and the reader – are moving together on a comical kind of journey:

Josipovici explains – like Michel Serres – that the point of the book is to keep things moving and that, itself, is a kind of counsel. The adventure of experience – in the wake of tradition – does in fact provide some kind of measure and it does offer us some kind of counsel. If they did, their lives would be mired in dreams, delusions, and distractions.Įven though the reader may distinguish him or herself from Quixote and even thought Quixote recognizes his folly at the end of the novel, the fact of the matter is that we readers went along with him on his journey. To be sure, Don Quixote and his readers do not have a stable community and the reader cannot live their lives by the kind of “counsel” he offers. The community of the story teller is entirely different from the community of the novelist and his readers. The relationship of the novelist to the reader is more precarious than the relationship of the storyteller to his or her listeners. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer capable to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others.” While the storyteller “makes” his experience “the experience of those who are listening to his tale,” the novelist “has isolated himself. However, Walter Benjamin, in his “Storyteller” essay, points out that the experiences and the goals of the storyteller are different from the novelist. In other words, the novelist draws on his or her own experience not on tradition. And this will require us to map out and discuss the death of the storyteller and the birth of the novelist.Ĭiting Marthe Robert, Josipovici argues that the “author” of Don Quixote is “not, like the Homeric bard, a central component of an organization where each one is, by virtue of tradition, both the protégé and the protector of order, but a solitary individual, answerable to no-one but himself, without any faith other than his experience, without any guide other than his intuition”(37). Without the “traditional sacraments”(36), we must ask ourselves, as Cervantes did with Don Quixote, what the “art of narrative,” the “most mysterious of arts,” means. It all depends on how one understands the new relationship between the author and the reader which is based on sharing an experience. In his book What Ever Happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici argues that, in the face of disenchantment (by virtue of the loss of “tradition” in the European and Christian West), the modernist writer or thinker will have to address the possibility that man may, as Protagoras once said, be the “measure of all things.” There are two options: humor or despair. But what I experience, as a person, defines “me” not “us” if and only if I no longer have a tradition to measure myself against. Do we still look at and judge ourselves by virtue of a tradition or by virtue of our own private experiences? Perhaps we are too far away from the point in time where we can distinguish between having or not having a tradition? But this all depends on how we conceive of the word “we.” To be sure, millions of people around the globe are struggling with modernity and in doing so their traditions are put to the test by the ultimate modern measuring stick: experience.

Disenchantment the most unknown