Is it Don-licious, or does it put the "dull" in "Dulcinea"?
CLOSE READER:
I embarked on the quixotic adventure of reading Don Quixote because it has so often been deemed the abuelo of contemporary literature, the first modern novel, one of the greatest literary works of all time. To be perfectly honest, as a writer I felt secretly ashamed of not having made my way through it long ago.And now I will continue to be perfectly honest by getting the negatives out of the way immediately. I found this 940-page tome to be tediously repetitive, narratively undisciplined, and certainly less than the sum of its many parts (126 chapters contained in two separate volumes). That said, the experience of Don Quixote is about much more than the actual text. What I find more interesting than the novel itself are its history and ripple effects. In my estimation, its status as a cultural phenomenon far outshines its inherent literary merit.
It would be useful, probably, to give just a brief background history. Don Quixote was published in two volumes a decade apart, in 1605 and 1615. The author, Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), was a Spanish soldier captured at sea by Barbary pirates. They sold him into slavery in Algiers, and he wasn't released until five years later. His only child, a daughter named Isabel, was the result of an affair with a married woman. After returning to Spain and marrying, he pursued a writing career, publishing a successful pastoral romance and drafting plays. He was overshadowed in playwriting, however, by the dramatist Lope de Vega, a fact that would deeply affect Don Quixote. But we'll get to that in a minute. Eventually Cervantes found work as a tax collector, but a subordinate's mistake landed him in prison for fraud. During his three-month incarceration, Cervantes thought up the plot of Don Quixote.
When Book I of Don Quixote appeared in 1605, it was an instant hit, and Cervantes threw himself fully into writing. Over the next 10 years he worked on numerous projects, including the long-awaited second half of Don Quixote. This is where Cervantes's playwriting rival, Lope de Vega, comes in. In 1614, the infamous "spurious Book II" appeared. A Lope de Vega devotee with the pen name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda had written an unauthorized sequel to Cervantes's Book I, complete with a preface containing personal insults; for instance, Avellaneda mocks Cervantes for both his age and his wounded hand, an injury sustained during his career as a soldier. It is commonly believed that Cervantes was sufficiently pissed off by the mocking co-opting of his intellectual property that he was newly inspired to finish the genuine Book II, published the following year. The latter chapters of Cervantes's second half are intriguing because of the author's decision to acknowledge and respond to Avellaneda's false sequel. It is all very meta.
A final historical note: much has been made of the fact that Shakespeare and Cervantes both died on April 23, 1616. But technically they passed away 10 days apart, since Spain was on the Gregorian calendar while England still used the Julian one. Still, this inconvenient fact didn't prevent UNESCO from declaring April 23 the International Day of the Book.
Incidentally, April 23 is also the birthday of Vladimir Nabokov, whose Lectures on Don Quixote I read after finishing the novel itself. Lolita is probably one of my top five reads of all time, so I was particularly interested to see what Nabokov thought of Cervantes. As it turned out, Nabokov and I had fairly similar reactions to many aspects of the work. I've picked out a couple of choice quotations that neatly summarize his sentiments:
"Don Quixote has been called the greatest novel ever written. This, of course, is nonsense. As a matter of fact, it is not even one of the greatest novels of the world, but its hero, whose personality is a stroke of genius on the part of Cervantes, looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through the sheer vitality that Cervantes has injected into the main character of a very patchy haphazard tale, which is saved from falling apart only by its creator's wonderful artistic intuition that has his Don Quixote go into action at the right moments of the story." (Nabokov 27-28)
"The novel is a farrago of prefabricated events, secondhand intrigues, mediocre pieces of verse, trite interpolations, impossible disguises, and incredible coincidences.... Don Quixote is one of those books that are, perhaps, more important in eccentric diffusion than in their own intrinsic value.... We are confronted by an interesting phenomenon: a literary hero losing gradually contact with the book that bore him; leaving his fatherland, leaving his creator's desk and roaming space after roaming Spain. In result, Don Quixote is greater today than he was in Cervantes's womb." (Nabokov 111-112)Nabokov makes a number of interesting points throughout his lectures, but the quotations above do the best job of bolstering my earlier comment that the text itself is less than the sum of its parts. I share Nabokov's fascination at how Cervantes's insane self-styled knight and his unremarkable squire, Sancho Panza, have so thoroughly transcended the original source material. Nabokov argues that Cervantes's dialogue, i.e., the oral manifestation of his characters, far outshines his powers of plotting and description, and perhaps that goes a long way toward explaining my perception of the "diamond in the rough" quality of the two central figures, the sense that they deserve a better book to inhabit.
I have probably hogged the microphone long enough for the moment, so I will hand the talking-stick to my esteemed fellow discussant. But before I do, I'll go ahead and list some of the themes of the book that I found most compelling and would love to discuss. Apart from the most obvious theme of Don Quixote—reality versus fantasy—I focused on the ideas of captivity (well-known to Cervantes), bigotry (only briefly touched on by Nabokov, who was lecturing at less-than-diverse Harvard in less-than-enlightened 1952), and homoeroticism (which Nabokov did not even mention).
And now, mi amigo, you're it. What did you think of the novel?
TED:
You had me at homoeroticism, but you lost me at novel. Over the long, long (long) course of reading Don Quixote, I kept waiting for a novel to emerge, but it never happened. And since many of my impressions of Don Quixote are tied up with its failure as a novel, I'm going to approach the book with that failure in mind.Normally, I'd start to describe the novel (as a form) in terms of development, character or otherwise, but for the moment, I'll borrow your formulation. A novel has to be more than the sum of its parts, and I couldn't agree with you more that Don Quixote is less. Many of its parts are terrific: Cervantes is very funny and a master of word play, and if the main characters don't necessarily make sense—either as characters or in terms of what they say—at least they're entertaining. And he can tell a good short story. The problem is that the characters would be much more entertaining if there were a good deal less of them. And the shorter stories don't add up to anything.
Which brings me to another area in which Don Quixote doesn't cut it as a novel: a novel has to be a unified work. Put another way, a novel is something that you enjoy most when you read it over a relatively short period of time and to the exclusion of all other literature. Don Quixote is something that you should probably read an episode at a time, perhaps over several years. Or eight months, if that's all you've got. It's hard to see how a certain disjointedness could fail to be the case, when the two parts were written and published with such a long gap between them. If you read only Book I of Don Quixote, you might very well think that it hadn't gone anywhere or come to a satisfactory conclusion. But I still felt the same way after reading Book II. In fact, the problem was worse because Book II only incidentally works at telling the story of the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. Book II begins by giving unsatisfactory explanations for the publicly perceived shortcomings of Book I, and then continues while Cervantes grinds a long series of axes. Granted, a life like his would produce a lot of scores to settle (he must have had several run-ins with especially odious duennas), but when I wasn't tickled by the cleverness, I was thinking, "Dude. Let it go already."
I have long thought that the best literature is incandescent, by which I mean that the writing is so luminous as to obscure the author to the point where he or she cannot be discerned in the work. Incandescence is why, for example, I hold Jane Austen to be a finer writer than Dickens, whose plots and characters I adore above almost all others. Incandescence is what Shakespeare embodies. I typically prefer to consider literature on its own and without secondary analysis, but since I knew you'd be reading Nabokov, I thought I could at least try to get through the introduction to the Edith Grossman translation. But when the writer tried to place Cervantes and Shakespeare on equal footing and above all other writers, I became downright angry and had to give up. I'll gladly give you Shakespeare above all other writers, but Cervantes? On what basis? If Shakespeare had axes to grind, he did so without letting anyone know. And there are also the small matters of brilliant language, fully realized characters, and (usually) coherent plots.
But more to the point, it's hard to imagine seeing, for the first time, a really good production of As You Like It or Henry V or King Lear or any of a number of the plays without the experience changing your life or at least expanding your horizons. Even very recently, now in my forties, I have sat in awe at the end of The Tempest and perceived a world of new possibility. Upon finishing Don Quixote, I felt a small amount of accomplishment and a less small amount of relief, but it's very difficult to imagine Don Quixote changing anyone's life. Unless, of course, you drop the book on your foot.
And that would be entirely appropriate: the very first lesson of Don Quixote is that literature will hurt—and even kill—you. I have to admit that I take considerable delight in Cervantes's having written a really long book about how dangerous it is to take books too seriously. It's a brilliant paradox that makes all the many other not-so-brilliant inconsistencies in Don Quixote seem like they belong, even if they don't ever make any sense.
The inconsistencies begin, of course, with Don Quixote himself. One can say that his behavior is so erratic because he's insane, but that's both unsatisfying and too easy: it isn't just his behavior that's erratic. There are passages where Cervantes seems to have great affection for his protagonist interspersed, in rapid succession, with pages where the author dismisses him entirely. Perhaps it's this lack of a consistent character that has made Quixote, as Nabokov says, such a memorable figure. When a character is so unpredictable and uneven that he can't be pinned down, he can become anything to anyone. Literary immortality through poor character development.
I don't want to catalog all or even many of the inconsistencies, but I was struck by how the generally expansive and generous spirit of Book I gave way to the bone-crushing (sometimes literally) cruelty of Book II. In Book I (and into the beginning of Book II), you have characters sometimes treating Don Quixote harshly out of affection, in order to teach him a lesson. As Book II progresses, both he and Sancho Panza become little more than flies to wanton boys. Wanton rich boys, that is. I don't know what the political effects of the book were in early seventeenth-century Spain, but reading Book II, in particular, made revolution seem like a damned good idea.
I don't for a moment think that Cervantes meant Don Quixote as a cannon in the class wars, but the fact that I reacted to it in that way does demonstrate its vastness and its versatility—and that it's very fertile ground for literary analysis. If I'm just considering the text, I really can't call it a great book, but it certainly invites a great deal of thought and comment.
CLOSE READER:
So other than that, Mrs. Lincoln...?I think probably my exasperation with this book rivaled yours, but looking back over my introductory remarks I see that I didn't express much of it there. Thanks for doing such a great job of that for me! I will specify that I agree a novel should be a unified work, and my greatest admiration is for highly disciplined writing, which is certainly not what we're dealing with in Don Quixote.
There are some threads you introduced that I want to continue. First, the inconsistency of Don Quixote's character. Ostensibly, at least, one of the great mysteries of the book is whether he's actually crazy or not, and there are an infinite number of variations on the phrase "They wondered if they should consider him as mad or sane." But Cervantes's execution of this idea is clumsy and uneven, at best. Quixote becomes mad when madness serves the creaky machinery of the plot, and lucid when it suits the author in the moment. Sometimes Quixote sees an inn as a castle (26, 109, 369), and sometimes as an inn (619, 843, 922). At one point he invokes the lessons of chivalric novels, which seem to indicate that knights errant never pay for anything, as an excuse to dine-and-doze-and-dash and cheat an innkeeper out of his bill (121); at another, he cheerfully overpays both an innkeeper and a puppeteer whose property he has destroyed (636).
There are various other conceits regarding Don Quixote's characterization that Cervantes pursues for a little while before dropping them entirely. For instance, in the earlier portion of Book I, Don Quixote tirelessly and tiresomely delivers soliloquies on various "laws of chivalry," only to abruptly, and thankfully, drop the habit (61, 74, 87-90, 107, 120, 121, 156). He delivers a religious sermon on the renunciation of revenge, only to attempt to avenge with physical violence an injury to Sancho, on the very same page (641). The reader can have little, if any, confidence in the narrative voice when it is claiming such things as "Don Quixote was courteous and wished to please everyone" (552) and "Whether Don Quixote was simply Alonso Quixano the Good, or whether he was Don Quixote of La Mancha, he always had a gentle disposition and was kind in his treatment of others" (936). Really? Really? Don Quixote refers to the mothers of both Sancho Panza and a random goatherd (there are more goatherds than you'd think possible in a single book) as "the whore who bore you" (325, 439). Sancho is a "coward" (173), a "worthless thief" (324), a "dolt" (325, 729), an "ignorant man" (735), a "fool" (735), and so on.
This is nothing compared to the treatment of those whom Quixote considers his enemies. His "gentle disposition" leads him to attack, unprovoked, countless innocent bystanders. These include two muledrivers trying to get to a trough to water their animals—Quixote "broke the head of the second muledriver into more than three pieces" (32-33)—two Benedictine friars (62), a company of mourners carrying a body (136-137)—a licentiate suffers such a bad broken leg that he will probably never fully recover (138)—a barber (154), and two guards of criminals being sent to the galleys (170). When Sancho makes fun of his master, Quixote "raised his lance and struck him twice, blows so hard that if he had received them on his head instead of his back, his master would have been freed of the obligation of paying his salary, unless it was to his heirs" (150). We are not yet one-fifth of the way through the book, and already it is clear that Don Quixote is crazy, dangerous, arrogant, and extremely violent. Yet we are told, "He was a poor enchanted knight who had never harmed anyone in all the days of his life" (442). And implicit in the narrative is the understanding that the main character can act this way with relative impunity because he is a man of respectable means. So it's funny that you mentioned your perception of Quixote and Sancho as the victims of "wanton rich boys," which may be true, but it is also ironic.
In that vein of victimhood, you mentioned the "bone-crushing cruelty of Book II." Nabokov devoted an entire lecture out of his six-lecture series to the theme of cruelty throughout Don Quixote. I would disagree, as does Nabokov, that Book I is largely free of cruelty. I found it rampant throughout both halves of the novel. But there is a distinction that Nabokov points out: the cruelty in Book I is more often "cheerful physical cruelty," while that in Book II is more mental (Nabokov 51). He also sees an escalation from the (at least intended) slapstick harms of the first half to the deeper hurts of the latter half: "Compared to the fun in the first part, the mirth-provoking cruelty of the second part reaches a higher and more diabolical level in regard to the mental forms it takes and sinks to a new low of incredible crudity in its physical aspect" (56-57). This reading, I think, is warranted.
One distinction that I suspect you might also be making is between nasty reactions that Quixote brings on himself through his stupid, arrogant, baseless attacks on others in Book I and the completely gratuitous mind games that the duke and duchess invent in Book II. My memories of Book I are certainly more painful physically than pretty much anything I recall from Book II. Here's a litany of instances of physical anguish in Book I: Quixote is beaten brutally by a muledriver until he cannot stand up again (40-41), loses half an ear (69), is beaten again by the Yanguesans (104), finds himself thoroughly pummeled again by another muledriver who actually jumps up and down on the knight's ribs (114), loses half of his teeth when some shepherds stone him (133).... I could go on, but I've made my point. I will mention briefly, however, that Sancho often receives concurrent beatings as bad as or worse than those suffered by Quixote, and occasionally at Quixote's own hands. Sometimes he is the sole victim, as in the obsessively recalled incident in which Sancho is tossed roughly up and down in a blanket until he screams for mercy (122).
Neither is Book I devoid of psychological cruelty. For pages and pages and pages, Dorotea, along with a large supporting cast, deludes Don Quixote for her own amusement, as Cervantes explicitly states: "Dorotea, who was quick-witted and very spirited, knew that Don Quixote's reason was impaired and that everyone mocked and deceived him except Sancho Panza; she did not wish to do any less" (250). Finally, there is a particularly vivid betrayal by Quixote's supposed friends from his village, the priest (Señor Licentiate Pero Pérez, whose actual name, as far as I can tell, is used only once in the entire book) and the barber (Master Nicolás, not to be confused with another barber from whom Don Quixote stole a barber's basin because he believed it to be a magical helmet). In the midst of a fight between Quixote and a goatherd, "the barber...helped the goatherd to hold Don Quixote down and rain down on him so many blows that the poor knight's face bled as heavily as his adversary. The...priest doubled over with laughter" (439). Nice.
"Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty," Nabokov writes. "From that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned" (52). But, as I think we all agree, Book II does take it to another level. This is because of the duchess and the duke, in that order. I was very much aware, when reading the novel, that the chapters about Don Quixote and Sancho's misfortunes at the hands of their hosts took up a huge chunk of the book (28 chapters in one go, plus another two chapters later on for good measure, for a total of nearly 200 pages); Nabokov notes this as well. For most of this section, the two protagonists suffer one miserable humiliation after another. No wonder Book I seems so much nicer at first glance. "The cruelty of the book here reaches atrocious heights," Nabokov argues (62), describing the general pattern as "chop-licking satisfaction with a joke and the immediate planning of another just as brutal.... The ducal castle is a kind of laboratory where two poor souls, Don Quixote and Sancho, are vivisected" (65, 67).
Nabokov goes so far as to compare Don Quixote's tribulations to the Christ Passion. Maritornes's prank of leaving Quixote to dangle excruciatingly by the wrist for hours (381) prompts Nabokov to observe, "Presumably millions of readers are doubled up with laughter, as probably were many in the crowd sixteen centuries earlier when the martyred God of those people was given vinegar instead of water" (Nabokov 55), and when two maidens at the ducal castle place "a great mantle of the finest scarlet" around Quixote's shoulders (658), Nabokov comments, "I am singularly reminded of Another Martyr who was also given sumptuous clothes and called a King and jeered at by Roman soldiers" (Nabokov 63). About the sign jokingly placed on Don Quixote's back during his visit to Barcelona (866-867), Nabokov says, "On the back of it they sewed a piece of parchment with an inscription in large letters 'This is the king—' sorry—'THIS IS DON QUIXOTE DE LA MANCHA'" (Nabokov 73). Finally, Nabokov argues that the scene of Don Quixote presiding over a dinner of 12 attendees at the inn (Book I, Chapters XXXVII and XXXVIII) "reminds one vaguely of some picture of the Last Supper described in the New Testament.... All we hear is the sad quiet voice speaking of peace" (Nabokov 102).
By now I have gone on at some length, but I want to touch on just two other points. You mentioned your displeasure about Harold Bloom's attempt in the introduction to equate Cervantes with Shakespeare. (Incidentally, I took only one note while reading the entirety of Bloom's blathering introduction, when I extracted a quotation, "This great book contains within itself all the novels that have followed in its sublime wake," and added "?" in the margin of my notebook.) On this subject, Nabokov says, "I object to such statements as '[the] perception [of Cervantes] was as sensitive, his mind as supple, his imagination as active, and his humor as subtle as those of Shakespeare.' Oh no—even if we limit Shakespeare to his comedies, Cervantes lags behind in all those things. Don Quixote but squires King Lear—and squires him well. The only matter in which Cervantes and Shakespeare are equals is the matter of influence, of spiritual irrigation—I have in view the long shadow cast upon receptive posterity of a created image which may continue to live independently from the book itself. Shakespeare's plays, however, will continue to live, apart from the shadow they project" (Nabokov 8). One minor Shakespearean footnote: a lost play called The History of Cardenio, based on one of the tiresome random stories that continually mar Book I, was performed in 1613 and has been attributed to Shakespeare and John Fletcher, although the play's authorship is not a settled matter.
My final subject for this round is related to those tiresome interpolated novellas. As you put it, "The shorter stories don't add up to anything." Critics have frequently preferred Book II to Book I. Nabokov thinks that Cervantes originally meant for Don Quixote to be a long short story, and that the knight's first sally "reveals a unity of purpose and accomplishment, capped with a moral." Citing another critic, he concludes that the tediously melodramatic narratives that form much of the latter part of Book I are "the padding of a tired author who disperses in minor tasks an effort no longer sufficient for his main creation.... Cervantes may simply have run out of Quixotic adventures at the end of the first part" (Nabokov 28, 35). Such elements, of course, result in a sloppy and unwieldy work, what Nabokov called "a very early, a very primitive type of novel" (Nabokov 11). Just because a novel is important and worthy of study does not, unfortunately, make it good.
Before I sign off for this round, I thought it would be fun to try to list the ridiculous number of blandly interchangeable romantic couples/triangles/etc. that Cervantes dumps into the novel whenever he can't think of anything else to write. Not a one of them adds anything substantive to the plot. Here we go: 1) Cardenio and Luscinda, 2) Fernando and Dorotea, 3) Anselmo/Lotario/Camila, 4) Ruy Pérez de Viedma and Zoraida, 5) Luis and Clara, 6) Anselmo (another one!)/Eugenio/Vicente/various unnamed shepherds/Leandra, 7) Quiteria/Basilio/Camacho, 8) Antonomasia and Clavijo, 9) Doña Rodríguez's daughter/rich farmer's son/Tosilos, 10) Claudia/Vicente/Leonora, and 11) Ana Félix and Gaspar.
Did I leave anyone out? Well, perhaps, but I did so intentionally. That's because I want to discuss the homoerotic elements of the book separately. And that stuff is actually interesting. I also still want to talk about captivity, bigotry, and the ever-shifting facts involving Aldonza Lorenzo, Dulcinea's real-world incarnation. But for now, I yield the floor once again.
TED:
Damn you for taking such good notes. When I look over your list of romantic groupings, I keep saying, "Who?" And even after I recall who they are, they still seem, as you say, bland and interchangeable. And pointless. But then, when you consider that calling the main plot of Don Quixote skeletal is probably being very generous, maybe Cervantes introduced the novellas and other romantic entanglements to demonstrate that he could write a plot, if only a short, contrived one. But the plots are as interchangeable as the characters, aren't they? You never get very far into one of the stories before you know how it's going to turn out. I did have a sense that the stories and characters got slightly more interesting, and less predictable, in Book II. Among the minor characters, Roque Guinart (the bandit) and Doña Rodríguez are the most complex and memorable. And the story of Doña Rodríguez's daughter and Tosilos is the most interesting romantic subplot, probably because it doesn't resolve itself neatly.And to return to the subject of Book I v. Book II, I didn't mean to say, and I don't think I did say, that Book I is free of cruelty. There's plenty of violence in Book I, but it mostly comes off as Road Runner violence, with the Don as a distant ancestor of Wile E. Coyote. Despite the sometimes gruesome detail, and the much longer recovery periods,* Don Quixote picks himself up, dusts himself off, and starts all over again. Sancho not so much, or at least not so willingly, but they both survive, relatively (heavy emphasis there) unscathed, a series of attacks whose described harshness, coupled with the state of medical care in seventeenth-century Spain, should have left them dead several times over.
By the way, I wish to go on record as saying that I could easily make the argument that Wile E. Coyote is truly heroic where Don Quixote is merely annoying, and even though I would probably only make that argument while inebriated, I would surely be correct.
Anyway, maybe it's the accretion of violence as time goes by, or the fact that Don Quixote (spoiler alert!) dies at the end of Book II, or simple reader fatigue that made Book I seem almost kind by comparison, but it's more likely the psychological cruelty you refer to, coupled with my inability to excuse mistreatment of the mentally ill or the lower classes by their supposed superiors as merely an artifact of the times. I'm sure the boredom suffered by the nobility in those days was nearly unbearable, but finding insane people to take it out on seems beyond the pale. Couldn't they just (anachronism alert!) play golf?
I feel like I should pause to point out that I get a lot more annoyed when writing about Don Quixote than I ever got while reading it. I reckon we should consider that pique as yet more evidence of the long literary shadow that it manages to cast without sufficient apparent substance. I don't want to go much farther down that path, especially since you do it so well, but I do wonder whether that shadow is as great as some perceive it to be. The fact that I, having finally read Don Quixote, can think of the character as a literary antecedent to Wile E. Coyote doesn't mean that we wouldn't have Wile E. from other antecedents. Surely Shakespeare's influence on English is much greater than Cervantes's on Spanish. Since my knowledge of Spanish is, well, rudimentary, I can't say for sure that Cervantes hasn't had the same impact, but not only are Shakespeare's plots and characters all over English literature, his very words and phrases are all over our language. But enough with my being annoyed at Harold Bloom. Let me return to being annoyed at Cervantes.
And certainly, the pervasive bigotry in Don Quixote is annoying. A partial list of the groups of people he doesn't like would include Muslims, Jews, Protestants, clerics, the French, most other Europeans (excepting, perhaps, Germans), people from the wrong parts of Spain, and women. Especially women—unless the woman in question is pretending to be a man or is assuming a traditionally masculine role. (Cervantes seems to love all kinds of gender confusion: he's equally taken with men pretending to be women.)
His biases against non-Christians show themselves frequently, most often with Muslims. But that particular prejudice is unsurprising in both the historical and personal contexts. He was, after all, captured by Muslim pirates and held captive for five years in Algiers. But, to be fair, he doesn't appear to have put a lot of thought or energy into the bigotry. I never felt like he was waging an organized literary campaign against any group. It's more that he relies, lazily, on existing prejudices and stereotypes to make cheap jokes that have to be explained to contemporary readers. There were any number of occasions when he made fun of some group or other (Hey, what about those dim-witted Siguenzans? Ha ha ha!) where the only possible response was to roll my eyes and check the footnotes. I'm not usually so quick to excuse bigotry as just something that everyone was doing at that point in history, and certainly there are enough contemporary examples of, especially, anti-Muslim prejudice that the bigotry in Don Quixote should carry more of a sting. Once again, I'm going to attribute the fact that it doesn't to the book's redundancy and relative lack of merit. I just got bored of hearing the Moors (and everyone else) denigrated. It didn't anger me the way, say, the anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice does. In Shakespeare's case, you have an otherwise brilliant work utterly ruined by bigotry. In Cervantes's case, it's just one more mark against him. If it's annoying (and it is), it's because Cervantes was so clever that there was no need for him to rely on cheap ethnic humor.
On the other hand, I will say that it's a shame that Cervantes isn't writing now: I would have loved to see his wit used to skewer Americans.
Before handing the discussion back to you, I'd like to touch on the parallels between insanity and captivity in the book. There are many instances of prisoners in Don Quixote, but there is no greater captive than the Don himself. In many cases the captivity is metaphorical and mental, but there are plenty of instances of actual captivity, beginning with the way he traps himself inside his armor, which in most cases does him more harm than good. I thought first of the episode with Maritornes, the window, and Rocinante's poor back (381) that you mentioned in your last post. Delusion leads Don Quixote into this situation, and trying to rescue himself via further delusions (calling on, for example, Urganda the Wise) makes his situation all the more dire. The same dynamic puts him in danger over and over and over again.
It strikes me that characters in Don Quixote move in and out of captivity with the same speed with which the Don moves in and out of insanity—sometimes because they're freed by a madman. Or perhaps their situations change with the same capriciousness with which Cervantes may have felt he moved in and out of captivity. There don't appear to have been good reasons for most, perhaps all, of Cervantes's various imprisonments, and there doesn't seem to be much sense behind who gets imprisoned, released, and re-imprisoned over the course of the book.
I think that Cervantes means to link the final abandonment of insanity at the end of the book with a final release from imprisonment. But this device makes for a very unsatisfying ending. The correlation makes sense in a religious context, perhaps, but there's no character or plot development to provide a literary context in which it's anything other than, well, crazy.
Back to you.
*Of course, the Road Runner and Wile E. live in a timeless desert, so we don't really know how much time passes between when Wile E. gets crushed by a boulder and when he straps himself onto a giant rocket. It could be that he spends months in a rehab facility.
CLOSE READER:
Beep beep!Your conjecture that "maybe Cervantes introduced the novellas and other romantic entanglements to demonstrate that he could write a plot, if only a short, contrived one" seems borne out by Cervantes's text itself, when he offers (in the narrator's voice, referring to the "author," Cide Hamete Benengeli) a defense of Book I's numerous interpolated novellas: "It seemed to [Benengeli] he always had to talk of Don Quixote and Sancho, not daring to wander into other digressions and episodes that were more serious and more entertaining.... In order to circumvent this difficulty, in the first part he had used the device of some novels...which are, in a sense, separate from the history.... [M]any readers, carried away by the attention demanded by the deeds of Don Quixote, would pay none at all to the novels, and pass them over entirely or read them with haste or with annoyance, not realizing the elegance and invention they contain, which would be readily apparent if they came to light on their own, not depending on the madness of Don Quixote or the foolishness of Sancho" (737-738). I believe we can safely count ourselves among that class of readers.
Nabokov points out this passage, quoting the translator Samuel Putnam, who himself is commenting on the remarks of an earlier translator, John Ormsby: "That [Cervantes] took these tales seriously is indicated by the remark concerning their craftsmanship.... In the introduction to his translation of Don Quixote, Ormsby observes: 'He [Cervantes] had these stories ready written, and it seemed a good way of disposing of them.... [I]t is likely that he felt doubtful of his venture. It was an experiment in literature... he could not tell how it would be received; and it was well, therefore, to provide his readers with something of the sort they were used to, as a kind of insurance against total failure'" (Nabokov 35). Nabokov does not entirely buy this theory, and I don't, either, but it is an interesting perspective.
Among my copious, damned notes is one related to Roque Guinart, a character you found interesting. My note is not about Roque himself, however, but rather what happens immediately before he and his bandits appear, when Sancho accidentally discovers that the grove they are in has been used as a gallows: "As he was about to lean against another tree, he felt something graze his head, and he raised his hands and touched two feet in shoes and stockings. He trembled with fear and hurried to another tree, where the same thing happened. He shouted, calling for Don Quixote to help him. Don Quixote approached, asking what had happened and why he was afraid, and Sancho responded that all the trees were filled with human feet and legs" (851). I found the scene simple in concept and chillingly effective in its execution. A nice bit of writing.
We have been hard on Cervantes, and although I don't think our criticisms are unwarranted, I'd also like to point to a few more examples of well-crafted prose and give the author his due. As it turns out, Nabokov comments on some passages that I'd noted independently. There is Don Quixote's speech to Sancho asking him to observe Dulcinea closely when Sancho delivers Quixote's message to her: "[I]f she is standing, look at her to see if she shifts from one foot to another... if she raises her hand to her hair to smooth it, although it is not disarranged" (514) (Nabokov 57). Nabokov also admires, as do I, the vivid description of the lion Quixote challenges (563-564) (Nabokov 105). Further, Nabokov notes something I hadn't about Chapter XI of Book I: "Don Quixote is quietly drunk: we feel it all through the end of the chapter, without the author's stressing the point" (Nabokov 122). Finally, he singles out for praise Chapter XVII of Book I: "The whole chapter, with the blanket-tossing of Sancho and the ugly and lewd servant girl's beautiful gesture at the end, is superb" (Nabokov 126).
Quite rightly, you have an "inability to excuse mistreatment of the mentally ill or the lower classes by their supposed superiors as merely an artifact of the times." I should mention, however, that when you refer to your tongue-in-cheek suggestion that the duke and duchess play golf instead as an anachronism, it isn't, at least not if about.com is to be believed; apparently a set of clubs was made for Scotland's King James VI in 1602. That makes those two look even worse, doesn't it?
But in seriousness, Altisidora, who comes straight from the court of the duke and duchess, refers to a much more culturally likely sporting diversion when she is making up stories about visiting the gates of hell. There, she claims, devils were playing pelota, an ancestor of the modern game of tennis (915). In what I consider Nabokov's most interesting lecture, he creates a catalogue of Don Quixote's victories and defeats (40 episodes in all) and treats the endeavor like a tennis match for which Nabokov is the referee, declaring each win or loss in chronological order, one encounter at a time. Reading the rundown is honestly suspenseful, since Don Quixote is often neck-and-neck with his adversaries. Acknowledging at the conclusion that "Death cancels the match" and, thus, the fifth set will never occur, Nabokov sums it up: "In terms of encounters the score is even: twenty victories against twenty defeats. Moreover, in each of the two parts of the book the score is also even: 13 to 13 and 7 to 7, respectively. This perfect balance of victory and defeat is very amazing in what seems such a disjointed haphazard book. It is due to a secret sense of writing, the harmonizing intuition of the artist" (Nabokov 110). Nabokov also goes to the trouble of figuring out the length of time in which the narrative occurs: 175 days, from the beginning of July to mid-December (Nabokov 93). I swear it felt twice as long to me.
I don't have any more insight than you into Cervantes's influence on his native language, although, according to Wikipedia, the book's opening line "created a Spanish cliché with the phrase de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, 'whose name I do not want to remember.'" Faint praise, that. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Cervantes strongly influenced Daniel Defoe, Laurence Sterne, and Tobias Smollett—none of whom are Spanish, of course. I have the sense that Cervantes's greatest contribution to language might be the word "quixotic," which, of course, is a reference to the overall idea of his work rather than a specific element of it—although Cervantes does use the term "quixoticies" in the more self-referential Book II (482).
Turning to the question of bigotry, you mention Cervantes's treatment of women. I feel I should point out that Marcela is a strong, sympathetic female character who directly and successfully challenges the misogyny-tinged accusations heaped on her. Likewise, Teresa Panza (aka Juana Gutiérrez, Mari Gutiérrez, Juana Panza, Teresa Cascajo, etc.) and her daughter, Sanchica, are strong female characters. They do not escape ridicule, perhaps, but they bear it nobly.
People of color fare less well. There is the odd passage when Sancho is disappointed at the possibility of having vassals who are black, but quickly cheers up at this thought: "What difference does it make to me if my vassals are blacks? All I have to do is put them on a ship and bring them to Spain, where I can sell them.... By God, I'll sell them all, large or small, it's all the same to me, and no matter how black they are, I'll turn them white and yellow" (245). Nabokov comments dryly: "Many fortunes have been made exactly according to Sancho's receipt, both in Holland and in the Southern States, and elsewhere, in the old days, by very commonsensical men. Sancho Panza is the grandpa of all tycoons" (Nabokov 140). But lest we think Nabokov too enlightened, Fredson Bowers, the editor of Nabokov's lectures, inserts a discreet footnote in a tiny font in a section dealing with Book I's Chapter XXII, when Quixote frees the galley slaves: "VN somewhat paraphrased his account of this scene and, possibly for his private amusement, recast the galley slave's speech in Negro dialect" (Nabokov 55). Even Don Quixote experiences prejudice: the people in the ducal castle laugh at his appearance, including "a complexion more than moderately dark" (669)—presumably from his travels under the Spanish sun, but the bigotry still applies.
I won't add too much to your cogent thoughts on captivity, except to mention a few things I found interesting. In the midst of one of those tiresome novellas, the one about the prisoner of the Turks, Cervantes alludes to a minor character that is a thinly veiled version of himself (344). More significantly, Quixote launches into a soliloquy on the glories of freedom immediately after he and Sancho finally escape from the duke and duchess (832). He is presumably speaking for Cervantes.
Just a couple more topics before I finish up my thoughts. Of all the inconsistencies in the novel, I think I was most vexed by those involving Dulcinea. To wit: does Aldonza Lorenzo, Dulcinea's real-life counterpart, actually exist? This is not a small question, nor are the attendant discrepancies minor. Initially, Quixote says he has seen Aldonza perhaps four times, and Sancho says he knows her very well and provides a vivid physical description (199-200). Yet later, Quixote mentions he has never seen her, and Sancho says the same (510-511). In the end, even Quixote professes not to know whether she's imaginary (672). Given that Don Quixote's entire reason for knightly being centers on his intention to win Dulcinea, this is not a matter to be glossed over, yet that's basically what happens. It goes beyond questions of reality vs. fantasy and achieves true narrative sloppiness.
And finally, the topic we've all been awaiting eagerly: homoeroticism. They spend the whole long novel together, bolstering each other's spirits, enduring the hardships of arduous journeys in search of fame. That's right, I'm talking about Sancho's donkey and Rocinante, Don Quixote's horse, both of whom are male: "Their friendship was so unusual and so firm that it has been claimed...that the author of this true history devoted particular chapters to it, but for the sake of maintaining the decency and decorum so heroic a history deserves, he did not include them, although at times he is remiss in his purpose and writes that as soon as the two animals were together they would begin to scratch each other, and then, when they were tired and satisfied, Rocinante would lay his neck across the donkey's...and, staring intently at the ground, the two of them could stand this way for three days" (528).
But I should talk also about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Let's see: there's the scene in which Sancho, while embracing his master's thigh, drops his pants to defecate right next to him (147-148). Or when he tells Don Quixote, "The one who hurts you is the one who loves you" (151). Or when Don Quixote tells Sancho, "I want you to see me naked and performing one or two dozen mad acts," and then does so (203, 204). Or when Sancho tells the Squire of the Wood, "I love him with all my heart and couldn't leave him no matter how many crazy things he does" (536). Or when Quixote refuses to strip in front of anybody but Sancho (660). Or when "Don Quixote threw his arms around Sancho's neck and gave him a thousand kisses on his forehead and cheeks" (696). Or when Don Quixote comes up behind Sancho and tries to pull Sancho's pants down so he can spank his bare buttocks (850). There's also the scene where one of Cervantes's many cross-dressing women decides to disguise her male beloved as a female "because among those barbarous Turks a handsome boy or youth is more highly esteemed than a woman, no matter how beautiful she may be" (881).
Other than that, though, I didn't pick up on anything.
To sum up, this was not a book I particularly enjoyed reading. I appreciated it much more for its historical value than its literary merits. But as with any work, I can give the author credit for sheer effort (and give myself credit for actually finishing the book), and enjoy the sport of reading closely for interesting patterns. In a final irony, Cervantes voices a seeming disdain for close reading through one of his characters: "He spends the whole day determining if Homer wrote well or badly in a particular line of the Iliad; if Martial was indecent in a certain epigram; if specific lines of Virgil are to be understood in this manner or another" (555). I guess Miguel and I will just have to agree to disagree.
And now, at long last, you get the final word.
TED:
Vale.Oh, you probably meant more than one word. I suppose that I come down somewhere between you and Cervantes when it comes to the "sport of reading closely." For me, it's almost a guilty pleasure: pointless and perhaps distracting, but fun. It's less fun—and a lot harder—though, when the book doesn't engage you. On the other hand, it's easier when there's so much to work with, and I'm sure that Don Quixote has provided fodder for countless dissertations. I'm also very amused by the notion of Nabokov keeping score (of course it would end in a draw), though I can't help wondering whether the time he spent preparing those lectures wouldn't have been better spent working on another novel. Perhaps Nolita, a gritty tale of underage hermeneutics in one of Manhattan's least-understood neighborhoods.
I am convinced that generations of Spanish students have fallen back on "de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme" when trying to discuss Don Quixote and having difficulty keeping the characters' names straight. It's a very good phrase, and I wish there were an English equivalent: "he who must not be named" doesn't have the same meaning, and you can't say it without sounding hopelessly geeky.
And perhaps I'm hopelessly naïve, but I'm going to go on record as saying that Rocinante and the gray were just good friends. If you want real interspecies sexual tension, you have to wait for the twentieth century and Road Runner and Wile E.
I certainly feel that I deserve an "I survived Don Quixote" t-shirt, but, yeah, let's give Cervantes credit for his prose, his wit, his ambition, and his influence. I would argue that some scholars overstate that influence—there have always been heroes, and there have always been flawed heroes—but some of the influences are undeniable. Without Don Quixote, we almost certainly don't get The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (for which I also deserve a t-shirt), and without Sterne, we probably don't get Ulysses (two t-shirts and a bumper sticker), and without Ulysses, we don't get To the Lighthouse or Absalom, Absalom!, each of which more than repaid all of the effort that I put into getting through Sterne and Joyce.
Sadly, Cervantes's laudable ambition with the scope and form of Don Quixote far exceeds his ability to control the disparate (and probably uncontrollable) elements, and it's the rambling messiness of the book that threatens to obscure the brilliance of his wit and lessen the impact of his prose. Would that he had turned his formidable skills to something neither unwieldy (the big story) nor trite (the smaller stories).
It seems fair to give Cervantes credit for his ideas while still recognizing that Don Quixote fails as a novel. I would argue that its biggest failure is also its biggest success. Yes, it's overloaded with tedious and repetitive plots. And yes, it's riddled with the sorts of continuity errors that one hopes would not have gotten past a contemporary editor. But where it really fails is with Don Quixote himself, who is also the book's lasting contribution. You're certainly right that "quixotic" is the novel's greatest contribution to language. And to repeat your quote of Nabokov from the first installment:
but its hero, whose personality is a stroke of genius on the part of Cervantes, looms so wonderfully above the skyline of literature, a gaunt giant on a lean nag, that the book lives and will live through the sheer vitality that Cervantes has injected into the main character....
From my perspective, though, what Nabokov calls vitality is really just lunacy. It's the Don's utter unpredictability and inconsistency that makes it impossible to get a handle on the character, and nothing sticks in the psyche longer than that which cannot be resolved or comprehended. (It's probably easier, too, to make a character continually fascinating when you're not bound by petty restrictions like consistency or sanity. Cervantes never, or at least rarely, had to say, "Oh, but Don Quixote would never do that.") Ultimately, though, a central character who makes no sense and doesn't evolve in any meaningful way is a poor foundation for a novel.
Images, in order of appearance:
Visions of Quixote by Octavio Ocampo (1989)
Don Quixote by Pablo Picasso (1955)
Monument to Cervantes, with statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, in Madrid's Plaza de España (1927)
Don Quijote—El Combate by Salvador Dalí (1956)
Don Quixote sock monkey by Tamara (2007)
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As indicated by the title of this blog, I aim to post a new book discussion every month, except that, in this instance, it will be two months before the next post. That's because I want to give That Tome of the Month a little time to find a small audience, and also because I have an especially busy period ahead of me. And maybe some of you will even decide to attempt reading Don Quixote, despite what we've said about it!
One other note: so as not to wear out poor TED, who has a blog of his own to tend to, I am always looking for people of a literary bent who'd be interested in doing a discussion with me. If that sounds like you, send me an email.
We will return in late October or early November with a discussion of The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde. So get to reading! And I don't mean Reading Gaol.
