Quixote and non-existence

Just over four hundred years ago, on January 16, 1605, there appeared the first part of a text entitled The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, supposedly based in part on an Arabic manuscript by a certain Cide Hamete Benengeli. This manuscript, of course, like its supposed author, never existed, as much part of the fertile imagination of Miguel de Cervantes as Don Quixote himself.

But then, non-existence is part of the essence of the text. 'Quixotic' has passed into the English language, to indicate idealism divorced from reality. Quixote takes rural inns for enchanted castles, peasant girls for princesses, and windmills for giants.

The same unreality is inherited by some of Cervantes' rather unlikely progeny. In 1939, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges published an 'article' purporting to describe the work of one Pierre Menard, author of sonnets in the French symbolist manner, of a monograph on the eighteenth-century philosopher Leibniz – and of Don Quixote. A Don Quixote which is word-for-word identical with that of Cervantes but which, as Borges engagingly shows, means quite different things when written by a twentieth-century Frenchman than when written by a seventeenth-century Spaniard.

Menard did not, of course, exist. Equally non-existent is The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, ex-Python Terry Gilliam's proposed film version of Cervantes' masterpiece. Over-ambitious and under-funded, production was beset by disasters. Flash-floods destroyed sets, the lead actor fell ill, NATO exercises interrupted shoots – until all that was left of the project was the biggest insurance claim in film history.

But in a paradox both Cervantes and Borges would have appreciated, Lost in La Mancha, the documentary which charts this epic failure, proved a triumph. "The documentarians," wrote the Hollywood Reporter, "make you see a non-existent movie".

RICHARD COX