Don Quixote: pointing the way toward literature about contemporary life

Volume 1 of Miguel de Cervantes's "Don Quixote" ends with some discourse among the characters, including DQ, on the function and utility of literature - a familiar topic of that era (not of this era), and Cervantes allow the priest to express some pretty sensible views - though maybe literature can drive some people, e.g., DQ, insane, there's nothing wrong with a little entertainment. He wouldn't burn all the tales of chivalry, though he would scour them for immoral and blasphemous elements. Okay, I wouldn't agree with this entirely, obviously, but it's a pretty enlightened viewpoint to allow a cleric to voice - what we're seeing here, and throughout the novel, is the origins of a popular literature that's not entirely about myth, about heroes, about the ancients - though DQ is obsessed with the courtly literature about a time and place that never was, one of the many puzzles of this novel is that "Don Quixote" is showing the way toward a new kind of literature that Don Quixote (the character) could not fathom and would not appreciate: it's the beginning of a literature about contemporary life. (Chaucer touched in this, too, in his poetry - but without the complex development of relationships among the characters over time.) Obviously there's a long stretch between Cervantes and the realism of Balzac or the naturalism of Flaubert - and obviously there are many elements in DQ that are not meant to be realistic at all, they are intentionally fantastical and preposterous - but part of its greatness is the realism of the characters, their humble settings, life on the road, the peasantry and the innkeepers, the village life to which DQ returns, and the tender relationships among and between the characters, Sancho Panza and DQ in particular, but also the priest and the barber who at personal expense and discomfort try to lead DQ back to safety and sanity. It's a novel that pretends to look backward but its greatness is the world of fiction that lies ahead and toward which Cervantes points the way.