THR Web Features / November 6, 2025

What keeps a conversation going?

James Como

(** A conversation between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Plaza de España, Seville, Alamy; background: the novel appears for sale for ten reales on this bookshop inventory from the seventeenth century, artsandculture.google.com.)

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha has been examined, re-examined, and cross-examined. And yet, astonishingly, we have yet to get to the bottom of it, and perhaps never will. That may be one reason Samuel Johnson could say it is the only book he wished were longer. I hope to add to the fun by revealing a storytelling device (hiding in plain sight) that I believe is, first, of very great value; second, propulsive throughout the narrative; and, third, responsible for bringing out two thematic features that matter transcendently.

Think of the beginning of things, according to Genesis. “Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” God did not manufacture light, because He did not have to. Speaking was enough. Later we are reminded that “In the beginning was the Word”—the logos, fraught with meaning—“and the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us.” So all of creation, including us, are Him speaking. And not only that. Such is the generosity of God that he gave *us *the power of speech.

In The Kingdom of Speech (2016), Tom Wolfe reminded us that we are Homo loquax, alone in the regnum loquax, the Kingdom of Speech. After rigorous research, he concluded that “the most fundamental questions about the origins and evolution of our linguistic capacity remain as mysterious as ever.” Furthermore, “in the one hundred and fifty years since the Theory of Evolution was announced [linguistic researchers] have learned…nothing.” As Wolfe emphasized, “speech is not one of man’s several unique attributes—speech is the attribute of all attributes.” And then he concluded elegantly: “To say that animals evolved into man is like saying that Carrara marble evolved into Michelangelo’s David.”

We most often practice this uncommon ability in common conversation, which to many of us is like wetness to a fish, taken for granted. Conversation: from com and versare, “to occupy oneself along with”; and from conversus, the past participle of converter, “to turn about.” The great Michel de Montaigne, in “On the Art of Conversing,” said of it: “The most fruitful and natural exercise of our mind, in my opinion, is discussion. I find it sweeter than any other action of our life; and that is the reason why, if I were right now forced to choose, I believe I would rather consent to lose my sight than my hearing or speech.”

Montaigne knew that iden­tity is at the heart of healthy conversation. Who are you? Would you like to know who I am? I favor both. The process entails a burden of accountability: for being voluble, for discovering, choosing, designing, examining, arguing, judging, making and expecting sense, and finally for performing, as though others matter greatly and we owed them our best. After all, our attitudes toward law, duty, and morality, as well as a common language, religious beliefs and rituals, our reverence of iconic people, places, and things, our folklore and myths—these are all formed by conversations great and small. John Durham Peters (in Speaking Into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication) pierces to the center of the act:

“communication” is…from the Latin communicare, meaning to impart, share or to make common.…The key root is mun-, related to…“munificent,” “community,” “meaning”…munus has to do with gifts or duties offered publicly.

And, I add, socially. That is why we can see it clearly as a portal into, and then sustenance for, friendship, always an enormous gift.

Personal display and recreation, examining the culture around us as well as the one in our own head, whether by argument, exhortation, musings, pontification, joking, diagnosing, wise counsel, or other—these are all in Don Quixote, mattering more than almost any of the Hitchcockian McGuffins (e.g., those windmills), along with the many subjects that arise in conversation. Except one: the Don’s presumed madness.

His conversations with others are like a doctor’s differential diagnosis: If not this, then…what? In the Second Part, with layers of disputed authorship at issue and much satire and irony at work, this awareness begins to arise—until he snaps out of it and dies, at peace. By then, Cervantes has taken us through a labyrinthine consciousness as engaging as any, even Hamlet’s. He is mad, of course (or probably), certainly often, but always he seems possessed of a glancing awareness of his authentic self.

How did Cervantes “occupy us” with this “turning about”? Of the 126 chapters, forty-one feature conversation and twenty-four of those are preponderantly, if not wholly, conversational, and, of those, several are pivotal. (We should keep in mind that Cervantes was also a playwright.) He converses with his reader, but also with Quixote, who converses with everyone, including himself, or so it seems. Most notably Quixote (and so Cervantes) continually talks with the character who may be the greatest sidekick and friend in literary history, Sancho Panza. Together the two of them quibble, quarrel, explain, justify, console, advise, rhapsodize, lie, confess, forgive, and love. Who wouldn’t want a friend like Sancho, clueless though he often is?

Choose any one of those forty-one chapters and you will likely find a conversation that develops character, expands a theme, or moves the action. But, in the case of such randomness, a pattern would be lost, because conversations become slightly more laden and consequential as Cervantes takes his hero, and us, through the story. For example, in Part Two, chapter eighteen, Sancho has been beaten and is drop-dead tired, having been unaided by the Don. He allows (in Edith Grossman’s translation) that “the better and smarter thing, to the very best of my poor understanding, would be for us to go back home.” So we are at a juncture, early in the story, where the two (and the sane reader must agree) could sensibly turn back.

But the Don answers, “How little you know, Sancho…about the matter of chivalry.” Sancho replies that, yes, victory is fine, if only they’d had one. And in this way, they proceed: the Don giving his reason for going on, Sancho filing objections—except the obvious one, that his master is crazy. Not until much later does Sancho realize (we recall that he has been promised an island to rule) that the chivalric code is dead, and has been for some time.

The chapter proceeds with a battle against goats (taken for an army) and ends with the Don missing some teeth. Sancho says, “Your grace has no more than two-and-a-half molars, and in the upper part, none at all.” The Don answers, “A mouth without molars is like a mill without a millstone,” and tells Sancho to lead the way to lodgings. Conversation has run the cycle from suggestion, to debate, to diagnosis, and (except for the loss of molars) nothing has changed. Nowhere does Sancho note (though Cervantes knows) that the Don is delusional.

Later, in chapter thirty-one, still nothing has changed. Don Quixote has given Sancho a letter to deliver to Dulcinea. Has she read it? She was making bread, is the answer. She is a high lady. Yes, taller than I. And what of her smell? “Did you not smell the perfume of Sheba?” Sancho answers, “I smelled a mannish kind of odor.” And on it goes: a delusional supposition countered by an empirical response, whether about the graces of Dulcinea, her activities, or the behavior of those around her. The lunacy is reinforced, with the Don explaining that the other knights serve her simply for the implicit pleasure of such service.

At that point the penny drops. “That’s the way…. I’ve heard it said in sermons, we should love our Lord for Himself alone, not because we hope for glory or are afraid of punishment.” The Don: “What intelligent things you say sometimes! One would think you’ve studied.” But Sancho points out that he cannot read. And yet he has struck upon a main theme: goodness as a sign of love for our Lord. Sanity, from Sancho, affirmed by the Don, has irrupted.

Approaching the end of the First Part (written some years before the Second), conversation becomes Cervantes’s primary method of both jogging in place and moving us along. This goes on, not only for the final five chapters of that Part, but fluently into the first seven chapters of the second, with at least two of those chapters being, as Cervantes might have said, contundente, rich and full nearly to overflowing.

We hear theories of the theater and of the dangers of the state licensing art. But then a change occurs, and we hear Sancho talking sense, insistently. “By the Blessed Virgin!… Is it possible that you are so thick-headed…that you cannot see that malice has more to do with your imprisonment [another McGuffin]…than enchantment?” The conversation becomes intimate, finally therapeutic. The canon (a friend) listening in asks, “Is it possible, Señor, that the…idle reading of books…has made you believe that you are enchanted?” Conversation has turned into what these days walks about as “the talking cure.”

This could be a turning point—until, once again, the Don answers patiently. He accuses his interlocutors of being the crazy ones. Convincing him that he is deluded is, he says, “the same as trying to persuade [a] person that the sun does not shine.” With that the talk goes downhill, devolving into an argument over courtship and justice, in which the Don gains the upper hand. How? His “reasoned nonsense” has drawn in his interlocutors!

The questions become: What is real? How can we know it? Or, put another way, whom do we trust? We are near the middle of the whole (the end of the First Part) when conversation pauses. Instead, the narrator describes a box containing some poetry, doggerel really, except for the final two poems, both epitaphs, one of Dulcinea, the other of the Don. We are given to understand that the Don himself has written these, not “reasoned nonsense.”

We are told that the author could not “find nor learn anything about Don Quixote’s final end.” Would there be a third sally? All we are told—we are now in conversation with Cervantes—is that “the author does not ask for compensation from his readers” and that they give to his narrative “the same credit that judicious readers give to the books of chivalry that are esteemed so highly in the world”—which is precisely none. Then he will be “encouraged to seek and publish other histories,” that is, to keep the conversation going.

And so he does. Early in the Second Part, there is much satirical talk as literary investigation: How reliable is the First Part? Is there any truth in it? At one point, the Don insults Sancho; he wants nothing to do with an “ignorant gossip monger,” but the anger passes quickly. Soon we learn that the Don’s niece and housekeeper truly love the Don but are intolerant of his madness, the niece shouting at him, “You have been struck by such a great blindness and such obvious foolishness.” The Don, as always, answers calmly, with a disquisition on lineage, of all things, and then utters a telling truth: “an impoverished knight has no way to show he is a knight except through virtue [my emphasis],” and here, along with friendship, is the second thematic solvent.

When Sancho converses with the Duchess and her ladies, the Duchess, from impure motive (she is not of a generous spirit), calls the Don “a madman, a fool, and a simpleton” and Sancho a “dimwit.” Here Sancho answers, with maybe the most telling passage in the entire book:

I can’t help it, I have to follow him: we are from the same village, I’ve eaten his bread, I love him dearly, he’s a grateful man, he gave me his donkeys; and more than anything else, I’m faithful; and so it’s impossible for anything to separate us except the man with the pick and shovel.

He concludes with a touch of sarcasm: “I have seen more than two jackasses go into governorships, and if I take mine with me, it won’t be anything new.”

Earlier I claimed that most of the adventures are mere MacGuffins; now the truth will out. Indeed, all of the adventures were tests, but not of the Don’s courage. Rather, they were tests of friendship, pure and simple. What Sancho has endured for what appeared to be a preposterous promise of a governorship was actually for the sake of his friendship with the Don, a display of virtue (a word deriving from the Latin vir, “man”). And there we have our two thematic features, the double helix at the center of the book.

Approaching his deathbed, the Don, with his friends the barber, the priest, and the bachelor looking on along with Sancho, says to them (the women especially) who urge him to be calm and to keep on living, “Be quiet, my dears…for I know what I must do…whether I am a knight errant or a shepherd on the verge of wandering, I shall always provide for you, as my actions will prove.”

At the very end, the Don would repent, but the reader must wonder, of what is there to repent? He renounces tales of chivalry and settles his affairs as Alonso Quixano. So much for the McGuffins, but whether mad or sane, Don Quixote de la Mancha was true. His conversations reflect his madness, certainly. But, “in the the beginning,” that is, from his enchantment by way of books, to the end, he epitomized, always, guided by friendship and virtue, the sanity beneath all madness. C.S. Lewis, I think, says it best. All along, he writes,

a secret Master of Ceremonies has been at work…friendship is the instrument by which God reveals to each the beauties of all the others…. It is He [who] always should preside. Let us not reckon without our Host.

Cervantes, a devout Catholic, would not, I believe, dispute that.