A close reading of Don Quixote requires an examination of its place in the Baroque episteme; that is, how the novel and its themes and characters exemplify the developments in thought that took place during the Baroque period. Leibniz’s theory of the monad is one of many cosmologies that defined the era. For the purposes of relating Don Quixote to Leibniz’s Monadology, a monad will be defined as perspective, embodied. According to Leibniz, infinite monads exist within the universe. Each monad contributes its own unique and unchanging perspective to a universe, the total reality of which can only be perceived by God. In The Fold, Deleuze unpacks the theory of the monad and defines its role in the formation of the ego. The Baroque, according to Deleuze, is characterized by the continued and infinite unfolding of ideas, realities, and selves. Therefore, Quixote is the essential Baroque figure: once an unremarkable member of Renaissance society, he develops into a complex ego-monad whose perception of the world is entirely unaligned with objective reality.

    In the Baroque, objective reality ceases to exist because of the introduction of a new episteme in which the perspective of each monad is equally valid and acceptable. Leibniz’s development of calculus contributes to this epistemological rupture. The advent of a math of infinity renders certainty null and void; the infallibility of algebraic equations collapses because a given equation no longer has one and only one answer. In a time when the physics of the world is increasingly pertinent above faith and human perception, calculus has the power to force a re-evaluation of the meaning of reality and objectivity. To understand the world, thinkers would have to abandon the Renaissance notion that observation (as they knew it — that is, in a visual sense) led to a realization of truth. The existence of a calculus presupposes that the more complex mysteries of the world and the universe cannot be definitely answered. While Leibniz’s Monadology does not deal specifically with the development of calculus or with advanced physics, the idea that infinite monads, or perspectives, exist is linked directly with the concept of limits. Limits are an area of calculus in which the answer to an equation may be anywhere between negative infinity and infinity; monads are part of a cosmology in which each perspective/monad — and there are infinite monads — has an equally valid interpretation of reality. If, as in Quixote’s case, a monad dictates that windmills are giants, this is so.

    Trouble occurs when Quixote’s society rejects the reality in which the Quixote-monad — Quixote as an unfolded being who embodies a specific monad — exists. In Madness and Civilization, Foucault examines the trend emerging from the late Renaissance and early Baroque in which the insane are confined like criminals or lepers. Society at large, still bound to early Renaissance perspectivalism, does not allow individuals like Quixote to act according to alternate realities (such as the one in which windmills are giants). Perhaps this resistance to Leibniz’s cosmology is linked to the trauma of the epistemological rupture: it is at the very least difficult, at the most impossible, for the entire culture of Western Europe to adjust to developments that threaten the religious and cosmological ideals it had held in the highest possible esteem for centuries. The triumph of the Renaissance lay in the development of perspective in painting, that is, the newfound ability of man to recreate reality as it is actually seen by the eye. “Madmen” such as Quixote, then, threaten the core of such hard-earned developments by questioning, through their actions, the validity of a theory of one reality. Balance no longer equals beauty; reason no longer equals truth. Foucault’s argument centers on the connection between leper colonies and madhouses: the same spaces used to quarantine lepers for the physical health of the populous are later used to secure those individuals whose minds pose a threat to the established standards of mental hygiene. He traces the separation of the insane to a Renaissance practice of expulsion: the ship of fools. Quixote is not subjected to confinement — perhaps because the setting of the novel does not allow for this particular practice —  rather, whether due to the dictates of his own monad-ego or pressure from those who believe he is insane, Quixote becomes a wandering fool. Foucault explains the phenomenon: “the madman’s voyage is at once a rigorous division and an absolute Passage,” (Foucault 11) by removing himself from the surroundings consistent with a life of conformity, Quixote allows for the unfolding of his monad.

    Quixote acts based upon a certain perception of reality, and though not all people are monads, Quixote’s body is part of one. Leibniz clarifies the relationship between monads and bodies by saying, “the body belonging to a monad, which is its entelechy or soul, constitutes together with the entelechy what may be called a living being.” (Leibniz #63) That said, it is interesting to examine the development of Quixote’s character from a man who simply read adventures to a lunatic knight who had them. Leibniz’s theory also states that “the natural changes of the Monad come from an internal principle, because an external cause can have no influence upon its inner being” (Leibniz #11). In Quixote’s case, this would seem to indicate that he always had within him his knight-ego, and that literature could not possibly have caused such a severe change in his behavior. Perhaps he was always attached to his monad — or it to him —  and needed a catalyst to unfold. Foucault’s theories on madness in the Baroque period may offer an answer as to how literature could have had such a profound impact on Quixote. We know that Quixote read chivalric novels, an antiquated, nostalgic form even in his time that were symbols of days past. In the medieval world of knights and chivalric adventures, Renaissance perception has no significance. Therefore, the characters of which Quixote read were free from the pressing importance of reason; to him they symbolized the truth of the monad-ego within. Foucault says that for the madman, “the symbolic man becomes a fantastic bird whose disproportionate neck folds a thousand times upon itself — an insane being, halfway between animal and thing, closer to the charms of an image than to the rigor of meaning.” (Foucault 19) Let us apply this description to characters of chivalric novels. If we consider Cervantes’s priest’s assertion that Quixote went mad from reading, it is because he became such a “fantastic bird.” Early in Don Quixote, the priest references an earlier work by Cervantes and says that “it proposes something and concludes nothing.” (Cervantes 52) Here is a nod to the pathology of the novel itself: if we take these words as literally as possible and apply them to Don Quixote, then the novel is exactly like one of Leibniz’s limit problems. We have a question: What is Quixote? The question can only be be answered in infinities.

    Because Quixote is so concerned with the literature of chivalry, the Renaissance emphasis on perspectivalism is of little use to him. Reason has nothing to do with adventure, and adventure is the most important thing. Thus freed from the confines of reason, as his fictional knights were by definition, Quixote begins to unfold. For Deleuze, the unfolding of a folded being — or monad — is the process of the essential Baroque individual. By contrast, the Renaissance episteme leaves little room for individuality and unique interpretation. From an art historical perspective, the Baroque began with a rupture in architecture. Wölfflin describes characteristics of the painterly style, which defines Baroque architecture: “the composition is purposely arranged in such a way that the effect is an impression of transitoriness.” (Wölfflin 33) Inherent in the Baroque is an expression of the anxiety surrounding the collapse of Renaissance rationality. Wölfflin also describes the descent of the Renaissance episteme in terms of architectural evolution, but his theory can also be applied to Don Quixote. He says that “art is in a state of decline from the moment that it aspires to massiveness through colossal proportions.” (Wölfflin 40) In other words, a Baroque work is degenerating from its Renaissance predecessors if its impact is achieved through grandiosity, as opposed to the subtlety of portraying reality as closely as possible. Again, if we connect the Renaissance episteme to the emergence of perspective painting, we know that people were starved for reason, for an art that was beautiful because it was carefully calculated and formed based on ancient ideas of symmetry. Renaissance thinkers sought for philosophies that were founded on faith, yet led to a scientific understanding of the physical world. Don Quixote, through its grandiose language and fantastic adventures — all filtered through the perspective of a madman-monad — mocks the Renaissance. The Renaissance denies the existence of folds or of an ego, and when Quixote exhibits both of these qualities, the Renaissance society in which he lives labels him mad.

    Like the Baroque architecture Wölfflin describes, all things Baroque posses folds that disturb any sense of stasis. Deleuze equates development with unfolding, or allowing the changing and transitory surface of a monad to reveal itself. He explains this process:

Development does not go from smaller to greater things through growth or augmentation, but from the general to the special, through differentiations of an initially undifferentiated field either under the action of exterior surroundings or under the influence of internal forces that are directive, directional, but that remain neither constructive nor preformative. (Deleuze 10)

Quixote is the “undifferentiated field”, and here we see Leibniz’s calculus at work again. Working with limits, an equation is differentiable — that is, we can determine the rate of change between a y and an x — at a given point if and only if the limit of the equation is defined as infinity through negative infinity. Quixote begins as raw material, as it were, in a mathematical sense: he is an equation with no answer. When we differentiate Quixote, his more specific characteristics surface. Deleuze forms a link between Leibniz’s cosmology and his calculus in saying that “the notion of requisite … takes on its most rigorous, autonomous meaning by designating conditions, limits, and differential relations among these limits.” (Deleuze 47) Here the requisite condition is the nature of the Quixote-monad, which establishes the limits of Quixote’s equation and differentiates it as he unfolds and becomes an embodiment of the monad.

    Alternately, we can approach Quixote’s unfolding from a more biological perspective. Deleuze offers another comparison, this time between the unfolding of a monad and the transformation of a butterfly: “metamorphosis or ‘metaschematism’ pertains to more than mere change of dimension: every animal is double — but as a heterogeneous or heteromorphic creature, just as the butterfly is folded into the caterpillar that will soon unfold” (Deleuze 9). In either case, the Quixote-monad always exists as part of Quixote, but a process of unfolding is necessary for him to reach his potential. Because Quixote does complete the process, he is the essential, unfolded Baroque figure. As an unfolded monad, Quixote’s perspective is obviously different from the accepted reality of other individuals. Deleuze clarifies Leibniz’s concept of the monad as perspective in an explanation that further reveals exactly how the Quixote-monad functions: “the whole world is only a virtuality that currently exists only in the folds of the soul which convey it, the soul implementing inner pleats through which it endows itself with a representation of the enclosed world.” (Deleuze 23) Here we understand why the windmills are giants, but only in the Quixote-monad. Even Cervantes, as the narrator of Quixote’s story, tells us that Quixote “was so convinced [the windmills] were giants … and could not see, though he was very close, what they really were.” (Cervantes 59) It is a highly specific monad, to be sure, with a perspective distorted to the point of apparent insanity.

    Lacan deals with the question of perception and reality from a psychoanalytic standpoint that is divorced from Leibniz’s Monadology. He argues that forms in the world are subject to more than an objective reality, dictated and defined “not only by the subject’s eye, but by his expectations, his movement, his grip, his muscular and visceral emotion” (Lacan 71). Because Quixote knows that the windmills are giants — this is what the monad expresses — his projection trumps any objectivity his eyes possess. The disconnect between the eye (objective reality) and the gaze (projected reality) forms what Lacan calls the “scopic drive”. a pathology resulting from the belief that one’s projections are manifest. Quixote is a perfect example, and Lacan would call him a narcissist for believing as he does that the windmills are giants. When Foucault explores the nature of madness, he argues that “self-attachment is the first sign of madness, but it is because man is attached to himself that he accepts error as truth, lies as reality.” (Foucault 26) Certainly Quixote is guilty of self-attachment if nothing else; and Cervantes tells us early in the novel that his “madness [is] stronger than any other faculty.” (Cervantes 24) If we approach Quixote from a psychoanalytic standpoint — one in which monads and cosmology are not factors — he is, by definition, mad. However, so is the Baroque, because anything that is Baroque must involve a rejection of the existence of objective reality. It is important to address the origins of such a definition of madness, and Foucault describes the nature of madness as it relates to the Renaissance:

The dawn of madness on the horizon of the Renaissance is the first perceptible in the decay of Gothic symbolism; as if that world, whose network of spiritual meanings was so close-knit, had begun to unravel, showing faces whose meaning was no longer clear except in forms of madness. (Foucault 18)

Here we can trace ideas of madness through the Renaissance into the Baroque. The Renaissance preoccupation with reason evolved from the blind faith of the Middle Ages. While such reason allowed for unprecedented development in science and art, it ignored the role of the individual in the new society. In doing so, the Renaissance invited Baroque thinkers to find exceptions to the order. Where to put these exceptions, these abnormalities that do not fit into the Renaissance episteme? They overflow into the Baroque. Again, Wölfflin’s analysis of Baroque architecture is pertinent to the general epistemological rupture: “what is regular is dead, without movement, unpainterly.” (Wölfflin 32) That which is Baroque is necessarily violent, confused, changing.

    The psychological turbulence of the Baroque must also have physical implications. It does for Quixote, whose scopic drive leads him away from the safety of his home and into harm’s way. Even his own language foreshadows the physical consequences of his pathology. When Quixote convinces Sancho Panza to accompany him, he says, “we can, brother Sancho Panza, plunge our hands all the way up to the elbows in this thing they call adventures.” (Cervantes 61) Where Quixote had been content to immerse himself only mentally into chivalric adventures, his unfolding and the revelation of the Quixote-monad dictates that he must physically become a knight. For Foucault, this sort of madness is a consumptive force, but does not necessarily signify disorder; “in madness equilibrium is established, but it masks that equilibrium beneath a cloud of illusion, beneath feigned disorder; the rigor of the architecture is concealed beneath the cunning arrangement of these disordered violences.” (Foucault 34) Here the metaphor of Baroque architecture is once again relevant; the madman of the Baroque is characterized by the disparity between his interior and exterior. Deleuze crystallizes this connection, saying, “[the monad] resembles a sacristy more than an atom: a room with neither doors nor windows, where all activity takes place on the inside.” (Deleuze 28) In Quixote’s case, his exterior is that of the man he always was: erudite, sensible, ordinary. Even as a knight, he appears normal to other characters until he speaks. The interior, of course, is his unfolded state as the Quixote-monad. This is the part that dictates what Lacan calls Quixote’s gaze, or the projection of giants onto windmills. We can apply Wölfflin’s characteristics of Baroque architecture to further understand how this psychological divide relates to the Baroque episteme. According to Wölfflin:

In the upper parts of the building, surface and decoration coexist more peacefully; but any impression of complete calm was kept for the interior, and the contrast between the agitated idiom of the façade and the relaxed peace of the interior is one of the most compelling effects in the baroque repertory. (Wölfflin 60)

By this standard, there is a reversal of the roles of the interior and exterior. Nevertheless, the division and disparity between the two is a distinctly Baroque characteristic. Therefore, we see that the Baroque episteme is so extensive as to encompass literary figures and architecture alike. In a time of such intellectual trauma, it is no wonder that a single idea — that of disunity and disorder for the sake of expressing dissatisfaction with Renaissance ideological confines — could have such interdisciplinary consequences.

    When Foucault addresses the problems posed by Don Quixote, he approaches the novel as it contrasts with Renaissance ideas of representation. Here we see that Quixote is the essential Baroque figure because he is not at all connected to the Renaissance. While it is important to examine why Quixote is Baroque, we must also consider why he is not Renaissance. Foucault explains this separation:

… writing has ceased to be the prose of the world; resemblances and signs have dissolved their former alliance; similitudes have become deceptive and verge upon the visionary or madness; things still remain stubbornly within their ironic identity: they are no longer anything but what they are; words wander off on their own, without content, without resemblance to fill their emptiness; they are no longer the marks of things; they lie sleeping between the pages of books and covered in dust. (Foucault 47-8)

For Foucault, Don Quixote is perhaps an exercise in emptiness. Just as the Baroque building has a massive façade with a calm interior, so Cervantes’s novel is a dense work with no clear meaning or significance. Is Don Quixote mad? We have just read Don Quixote as the story of a fully developed, unfolded monad. To Leibniz, the Quixote-monad is one of infinite perspectives for whom truth is what it is, despite the objections of the rest of the world. Deleuze explains how the unfolding of the monad signifies development and actualization; Quixote, then, is not mad but highly developed if he acts as he does. For these thinkers, Quixote cannot be mad because his reality — in which windmills are giants — is a reality as valid as any other. For Foucault and Lacan, however, Quixote’s actions are indicative of pathology. Quixote’s scopic drive overwhelms his senses and he lives in a fantasy, detached from a single reality that definitely exists. He exhibits the characteristics of the madman: he is narcissistic and certain that his perceptions are truth. So, whether or not Quixote is mad, what does it matter? The proposed existence of infinite valid perspectives is undeniably responsible for the epistemological rupture between the Renaissance and the Baroque. The answer to either question, then, absolutely cannot matter: we know that Don Quixote is Baroque in every sense and, given this, any questions we can ask about him will surely have infinite answers.

Works Cited

Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote. Trans. Edith Grossman. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization. New York: Vintage, 1988. p. 3-37.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. New York: Vintage, 1973. p. 46-71.

Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton, 1981. p. 67-119.

Leibniz, Gottfried. “The Monadology.” The Rationalists. Trans. George Montgomery. New York: Anchor Books, 1974.

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Renaissance and Baroque. Trans. Kathrin Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. p. 15-70.

Brooklyn, Winter 2006.

The Baroque, Professor Suzanne Verderber.

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