Well-Educated Minds

2005-04-29T09:21:00.000-07:00

From here, via Pages Turned (Thanks, SFP!):

In all the battles for the Enlightenment, one combatant's name is rarely mentioned. Don Quixote de la Mancha, icon of everything in humanity that is calamitously idealistic, is renowned for qualities other than rationalist courage: for kindness and foolishness; for unintended comedy and a refusal to be disenchanted; for clairvoyant lunacy and obstinate romanticism in a rotten, factual world. He rides out with Sancho Panza from his village in la Mancha to discover that the world is not as he has read about it in books of chivalry and, impervious to ridicule or failure, for 124 chapters seeks to live up to the pastoral ideal of the knight errant, that fiction of the good man. Only in the 126th and final chapter does he acknowledge the "absurdities and deceptions" of the books that inspired him and then, in an ending of unbearable sadness, finally renounces his world of fantasy, returns to his senses, and dies.

For 400 years—the first edition of the Quixote was distributed in Madrid in 1605—his story has supplied the archetype of the bookish dreamer and the outermost comic landmark of our idealism. Yet Don Quixote's achievement is surely greater than that. Without him, and without Cervantes's own constant shifting between tradition and modernity, we might have remained for longer in a world of superstition and dogma. "Enlightenment is man's leaving his self-caused immaturity," Kant wrote in 1784, 180 years after the first publication of the Quixote. "The motto of Enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own intelligence." On the knight's 400th anniversary we can see that this was the courage that Don Quixote has bequeathed us. His own misguided intelligence, bound to an immaturity that leads to folly, takes him on an epic of discovery in which he finally leads the reader out of his or her own immaturity. Frequently evoked as picaresque, the Quixote is more accurately seen as a Bildungsroman. It takes its Bildung in two directions, the one in which Don Quixote is shown his own folly, and the other in which the reader is invited to understand the difference between appearance and reality.

How much did Cervantes intend such a reading of his book? There is no reason to disbelieve his claim that his main object was to ridicule the romances of chivalry which, in their late 16th-century incarnation, had become increasingly absurd. Cervantes wrote, like most writers, for money, and his intention at the outset was to write a prose tale in which these absurdities could be satirised. As he continued, his story expanded into a brilliant panoramic fresco of Spanish society declining into economic chaos and class resentment under the decadent rule of Philip II and III. But Cervantes could not have understood that he was also composing something else, a determining text, the first story to be aware at every moment of its own fictitiousness, the book which would send a continent of writers off in search of a new identity—the original modern novel.When the first part, the 1605 publication, became successful Cervantes saw the logic of producing a sequel, but we have a rival "second volume" by Fernández de Avellaneda, published in 1614 in an attempt to cash in on Quixote's popularity, to thank for Cervantes finally finishing the second part (Cervantes was always a leisurely writer). We may also owe the deep well of pathos that is Quixote's death scene to Avellaneda's attempted hijacking. The death of his hero may have been Cervantes's way of ensuring that no one could ever again interfere with his character.

But the novel's contemporary popularity was due to its wealth of incident and its strokes of comic timing. Full appreciation of its political insight, its grasp of its own times and its humanity came much later. It is Jorge Luis Borges who, 300-odd years after publication of the Quixote, writes in his story "Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote" about how we are able, in the light of what has happened to the world since Cervantes's novel appeared, to find it much richer in allusion and significance now than it was then.

We cannot attribute to Cervantes a sense of his own future greatness or influence. He was experienced in matters of state: he had seen Spain fall from greatness through misgovernment, bankruptcy and military arrogance, a fall so sudden that Spaniards wondered if their country's original grandeur had been "no more than un engaño [illusion]?" This land of depopulation and unrest was Don Quixote's country; foolish and unsuccessful wanderer he may have been, but Cervantes intentionally set him up in stark opposition to Philip II, who rarely rose from his desk in the Escorial.

The author was, however, aware of his novel's early success. We are told that by June 1605, only a few months after publication, "the citizens of Valladolid [where he was living] already regarded Don Quixote and Sancho Panza as proverbial types." He would also have known that his novel was first translated into English in 1612 and into French in 1614. (There may be a strand of the English character that uniquely identifies with a strand of the Quixote's romanticism, not so much its idealism and emotion as its eccentricity. The English feel a special sympathy for folly committed in the name of loyalty to an utterly outmoded code of conduct.) But Cervantes could not know that in 2002, in a poll organised by the Norwegian Nobel Institute, 100 writers worldwide would vote Don Quixote the "best and most central work" in literature, eclipsing the plays of Shakespeare, Dostoevsky's novels and Homer's epics.

So the Quixote is, like all masterpieces, accidental. But how, as readers, are we to discern its greatness from the perspective of our own post-Enlightenment times? Do its concerns still speak to us? We need to start by reading it, but do we actually read it? Well, not individually, as the head of a modern publishing conglomerate recently said to an author he met by chance. We do not read the Quixote because of its length and, even in most recent English versions, difficult prose. But we also do not read it because we do not need to. In critical terms, one problem, perhaps unique to Cervantes's work, is that we have no perspective on the novel, because the Quixote itself created our perspective. Harold Bloom writes, in his introduction to Edith Grossman's excellent 2003 translation, that "it so contains us that, as with Shakespeare, we cannot get out of it."

The day Quixote and Sancho rode out from their unnamed village, a fictional blueprint came to life. Don Quixote is our prototypical text, the first story to emerge out of a self-awareness of its own fictional form, to take as its theme the gap between appearance and reality; to be, in our terms, modern. It is to the modern novel what Sigmund Freud is to psychoanalysis. Freud, in fact, was an admirer of Cervantes: in the summer of 1883 he confessed to his fiancée Martha Bernays that he was more interested in Don Quixote than in brain anatomy. He found Quixote's dialogues with Sancho Panza significant for the lesson they offered of the need both to discriminate between reality and fantasy and to understand their interplay. He expressed an oddly romantic sympathy for Quixote's idealism: "Once we were all noble knights passing through the world caught in a dream, misinterpreting the simplest things, magnifying commonplaces into something noble and rare, and thereby cutting a sad figure… we men always read with respect about what we once were and in part still remain."

In the 21st century, with our potent self-consciousness, we not only know too much but know that we do, and to read Don Quixote is to be heartened that in the embrace of their illusions people are capable of decent, funny, unpredictable acts. The Enlightenment was essential for our freedoms, but more than rationalism is needed in the world. Carlos Fuentes has written that at the end of the novel, Don Quixote suffers from "the nostalgia of realism"—not the realism Cervantes has invented but the realism of old, of impossible adventures with knights errant, magicians and frightful giants. "Before, everything that was written was true," writes Fuentes, "even if it were a phantasy. There were no cracks between what was said and what was done in the epic. 'For Aristotle and the middle ages,' explains Ortega y Gasset, 'all things were possible that do not contain an inner contradiction. For Aristotle, the centaur is a possibility; not for us, since biology will not tolerate it.'" Fuentes illuminates well Don Quixote's suffering—that he must choose between the drama of make-believe and the mean necessities of reality—but the novel additionally lights the way of readers yet unborn through the knight's dual lesson of the choice he must make and the choice the reader must make about his fictional necessity (or not).

Believe in me! My feats are true, the windmills are giants, the herds of sheep are armies, the inns are castles and there is in the world no lady more beautiful than the empress of la Mancha, the unrivalled Dulcinea del Toboso! Believe in me.

Reality, as Fuentes writes, "may laugh or weep on hearing such words." But reality also feels itself outmanoeuvred, outgunned by their appeal. After hearing them, we as readers can forever understand that there is more than one objective reality.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra personally felt the disenchantment of reality. His novel is driven by the rebuffs and misfortunes he was dealt: to choose refuge in noble dreams would have been an obvious choice for a man whose aspirations repeatedly failed to bear fruit. Little is known of Cervantes's first 24 years. In 1571, enlisted with his brother Rodrigo as a soldier, he sailed on the Marquesa from Messina as a member of Don Miguel de Moncada's regiment to repel the Ottoman advance in the fleet of Don John of Austria. At the battle of Lepanto, in the gulf of Corinth, the Marquesa was in the thick of the eventually victorious fight. Cervantes received three gunshot wounds, one of which maimed his left hand, "for the greater glory of the right" as he said afterwards. After Lepanto his military service was spent in Naples and Palermo. In 1575, returning to Spain, he and Rodrigo were captured by Barbary corsairs. Cervantes was enslaved to a Greek renegade at Algiers. Repeated escape attempts failed: twice betrayed, he then saw his brother liberated when funds sent by his parents were inadequate to ransom them both. Resold to the viceroy of Algiers and betrayed again by a Dominican monk, he was finally released after five years of slavery when two Trinitarian friars successfully ransomed him.

On his return he wrote plays and the pastoral novel Galatea, a serious bid for fame that failed; it was inconclusive and derivative, and pushed him back into paid employment. At Seville in 1587 he found employment provisioning the Armada and was excommunicated for excessive zeal in collecting wheat. He then applied for a complete getaway, to a post in the Indies. "Let him look for something nearer home," his petition was drily annotated.

He found work as a tax collector and was imprisoned at least four, possibly six times for everything from irregularities in his accounts to allegedly making a pass at the sister/niece/mistress of a (probably tax-evading) landowner, Don Rodrigo de Pacheco. It may be that Don Quixote began as a desire to get his own back by satirising Don Rodrigo as a mad knight who "slept so little and read so much that his brain dried up and he lost his reason."

A continuing run of professional bad luck during the 1590s produced increasing disillusionment, chiefly with Spain's imperial outlook and incompetent absolutist monarchy. His poetry and prose began to show signs of intensifying parody and of the mock-heroic attitude that would become his strongest comic device.

Cervantes's whereabouts in the early 1600s are unclear, but if he was in the prison cell in Argamasilla de Alba where Don Rodrigo had slung him, he was using his time well, writing the novel that would reverse his fortunes and determine the form of fiction for the next four centuries. He suspected neither of these things, and curiously, though he read some of the manuscript, neither did Lope de Vega, Spain's greatest playwright, who had written to a friend that "no poet is as bad as Cervantes, nor so foolish as to praise Don Quixote."

And what of everything else that Cervantes could not suspect? Bloom compares Cervantes with Shakespeare but makes a key distinction between their methods: "Cervantes remains the best of all novelists, just as Shakespeare remains the best of all dramatists. There are parts of yourself that you will never know fully until you know Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. But there's a fundamental difference between Cervantes and Shakespeare: Sancho and the Don develop newer and richer egos by talking to each other. Falstaff and Hamlet perform the same process through lonely soliloquies." On the one hand, we first realise through Don Quixote that the novel exists as a new kind of meaning, a sign, as Carlos Fuentes writes "of a modern divorce between words and things." On the other hand, in Quixote's search for a new union between reality and the words to articulate it, we also realise that it is dangerous to attempt this enterprise alone. The novel has become a social form for a very good reason: the identity that emerges from each of us is composed not only of our egos but our links with other egos. How can the novel tell us who we are, or ask us if we recognise anything human in it, without reflecting on those links? A modern or postmodern Quixote might consider it his duty to liberate, as well as the widows, maidens and orphans, the millions of urban dwellers who live alone.

For such reasons has Cervantes's novel held its ground since 1605. In the 17th century, at a time when more ruthlessly than today the market decided, the wide pirating of the Quixote was an infallible mark of its popularity. In the 18th, as the English novel established itself, British novelists paid Cervantes constant tribute: witness Defoe's inspirations in Moll Flanders and Robinson Crusoe; Fielding's 1742 preface to Joseph Andrews, "written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote" (he also wrote Don Quixote in England, for the theatre); Sterne's blithe obviousness, among countless borrowings, in using Quixote and Sancho Panza as models for uncle Toby and corporal Trim in Tristram Shandy; and Smollett's translation of 1755 that ran to 13 editions. The English love of folly and, in Smollet's words, Cervantes's "strength, humour and propriety," not to mention the obvious commercial success of his model, ensured the Quixote's endurance.

A century later, Dickens's and Thackeray's conversion of Quixote's horizontal and eschatological wanderings into fiction that journeyed vertically, socially and materially, was mirrored by Balzac and Stendhal. In Germany, Don Quixote may have been the last book Kleist ever read—found with his barest possessions after his suicide—while in France it was the first that the six-year-old Flaubert read, in an abridged version with 34 large illustrations. (The tragi-comic theme of the romantic hero at odds with reality explains almost all of Flaubert's work, from Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education to Bouvard and Pécuchet.) The Spanish novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina once said to me that although modern Spanish novelists do not make much of Cervantes—the anxiety of influence is too great—they cannot avoid his fictional blueprint. In the 20th century, neither Kafka nor Nabokov, Borges, Bellow or Kundera could have clothed their worlds in fiction without the pattern furnished by their Spanish ancestor. One might go even further: Don Quixote's influence has been super-literary—without it the French revolution, with its notion that individuals can be right, society wrong, might never have happened, and Martin Luther King Jr might never have delivered a speech that contained the words "I have a dream."

Anglophone readers have never had a better chance to confront that greatness directly. Edith Grossman's new translation (apart from brief confusions of "thee" and "thou") is so good that it ought to compel us to start reading the Quixote again. Her text restores Cervantes's readability, the vitality of his dialogue and characterisation and the darkening quality of his vision. The thought patterns of his madness, which earlier translations obscured by rendering the original too literally or too loosely, are here rendered as logical, and thus funnier and sadder. One of my favourite episodes is the "enchanted boat" adventure in the second part, in which the two travellers steal a small rowing boat, Quixote believing that it has been sent by an enchanter as a kind of celestial cab to transport them to some knight or maiden requiring assistance. Knight and squire dispute their way downstream, one hurling curses at his servant's cowardice, the other cursing his master's madness, and as they are swept into the dangerous millrace their exchange climaxes in a superbly indifferent discourse by Quixote on how enchantment works. "'Be quiet, Sancho,' said Don Quixote, 'for although they seem to be watermills, they are not; I have already told you that enchantments change and alter all things from their natural state. I do not mean to say that they are really altered from one state to another, but that they seem to be, as experience has shown in the transformation of Dulcinea, sole refuge of my hopes.'" The comic timing of which Cervantes was capable, and his understanding of Quixote's pathos, have rarely been so in evidence for English readers. In the last third of the novel, Cervantes's increasingly unkind mischiefs towards his hero bespeak not just impatience but also a yearning to eliminate him, yet the admiration and compassion he has already instilled in us is proof against everything the author can do to undermine them.

There is a view in literary-critical circles that Don Quixote's signal accomplishment was the victorious elevation of the novel over the romance. The deluded knight's attack on Master Pedro's puppet theatre for example, is, according to Bloom, "a parable of the triumph of Cervantes over the picaresque and of the triumph of the novel over the romance."

Yet this seems a limited reading of the novel. It is as unfair to say that the Quixote is merely a "critical parody" of the romance as it is to say that its eponymous hero is merely mad. The forms of Cervantes's moral thought are pointed to in his humour: the author is simultaneously satirising Quixote's belief in chivalry and commemorating it through the comic forms of his forgiveness. There is no better example of the comedy of compassion. And Cervantes did not abandon the form of the romance; it is present in his Exemplary Novels, which he was writing between the two parts of Don Quixote, and in his posthumously published epic, Persiles and Sigismunda. Romance is in all his work. In the Quixote it is the engine both of Quixote's folly and of our deepening sympathy—a reader's way of recognising a hero's predicament as latently his or her own. Through the innumerable possible readings of the Quixote, we can perhaps identify a core of distinct principles: that there is no reality without folly, and no underlying perception of reality without romance, of one kind or another, to draw out human curiosity.

To read Cervantes's Quixote as the first and greatest modern novel, and then, self-satisfied, to read back into it that we have nailed the folly of romance, is to miss half of Cervantes's intention. Having delineated Enlightenment rationality by the comic delineation of its opposite, Cervantes overflows the dimensions of both. If we admire Don Quixote today, it is surely because we continue to agree with him that his madness, not his reason, enables him to transcend the world of things and believe in a world of value. Enlightenment virtues we may all share. Our madness is our faith, and belongs to us alone.

2005-04-26T05:25:00.000-07:00

An essay in The Walrus reviews Don Quixote's place in literary history.

Is there anything the novel form designed by Cervantes can't do? The diligent reader of Don Quixote may end up answering with a flat no. And yet the author is determined to emphasize one restriction, although he probably thinks of it more as an ironic truth. The novel can't do reality. It can't ever not be a book. Whether we choose to admit it or not, the moment we open a work of fiction we have exited life and entered art. We're down a road and off on a quest, and neither the destination, nor necessarily the purposes, are at first obvious.

************

The Czech novelist Milan Kundera believes the legacy of Don Quixote has been denigrated by an adherence to the "imperative of verisimilitude" in the novel. He lays partial blame on our fixation with realistic settings and chronological order. Glover qualifies Kundera by suggesting that literary realism is a technique that becomes problematic only "when someone tries to turn it into a definition." Glover admits, however, that this is precisely what "unthinking writers and journalist-critics" have done. Psychological realism, with its emphasis on credible plots and believable characters, is a major tradition in western literature. But it isn't the only one.

Other DQ discussions

2005-03-20T06:37:00.000-08:00

Hello?

I'm still reading Don Quixote, though I haven't progressed much, if at all, since last I posted.

If anyone else is still muddling along, you may be interested to know that another discussion of the book is set to get underway in April at 400 Windmills. Contributors there have already posted some interesting links and background (with some overlap of what's been presented here).

I, for one, feel a little invigorated by this, that a conversation is about to start and I'm already a few hundred pages ahead and thus in good shape to actually think about what I've read.

Innovation in older technologies?

2005-02-13T18:35:00.000-08:00

I was just directed to this post, in which is discussed "Don Quixote, and how revolutions in technologies of writing paradoxically spur innovation in older technologies."

I have no comment as I haven't read it yet, but want to note it here before I forget.

I haven't read any DQ in a week. I really wish I'd gone with a paperback. Anyone?

Some thoughts and many asides

2005-01-29T11:11:00.000-08:00

Hi!

The end is not yet in sight, but the quarter mark is. The fact that I have truckloads of paying work to do means I will likely be procrastinating a great deal in days to come, both reading and posting.

Plus, I've decided there's no point in waiting till I've finished reading to discuss what's going on.

Diana's recent lightbulb moment is helping me consolidate some impressions of my own.

The mystery to me at this stage is how could anyone possibly think Don Quixote is not mad?! It's bloody obvious he's a raving lunatic. It's openly stated on virtually every other page. How did it ever come to be a question? (Do things take a drastic turn in the pages to come?)

The only sense, that I can see, in which he isn't mad is if you read the whole quest as a metaphor — and this is where my impression bumps up against Diana's lightbulb (in a good way) and I find I'm constantly thinking about it while riding the metro, or blogging for that matter.

Random thoughts
Every individual has their personal quest.
We decide who we are.
We create personas.

How often do you find yourself in situations and have a meta-moment, where you see and hear yourself acting a part. You wonder if others hear themselves — are they for real? Or are they reciting the lines they think they're supposed to say, "playing" the role of "Expert" or "Lover" or "Mother" or "Grocery Store Clerk" or "Mysterious Passenger on Train" or "Coffee Drinker in Quaint Cafe"?

I can recall several work situations where I would remind myself to exude confidence, pretend you really know what you're talking about, feign enthusiasm. At times, I believed myself. I wonder how often other people perceived the script in my head. At home, there are days I pretend to be a grown-up, someone who's organized and has all their bills and paperwork under control. It's a little more than just "putting on a hat." Maybe it's closer to what in psychotherapeutic terms is called "visualizing."

A friend the other day posted: "I learned that Don Quixote was right: Facts are the enemy of truth."

A quotation

"It is your fear, Sancho," said Don Quixote, "that keeps you from seeing or hearing properly, because one of the effects of fear is to cloud the senses and make things appear other than they are..."

A question
Why doesn't Sancho Panza just give it up and go home?

A spot of humour
I keep hearing this dialogue in my head involving the Black Knight. Is it just me?

Apropos of nothing
I was discussing Jorge Luis Borges the other day, and when checking a biographical detail came across this:

At times, confronted with an idea for a work that bordered on the conceptual, Borges chose, instead of following through with the idea in the obvious way by writing a piece that fulfilled the concept, to write a review of a nonexistent work, writing as though this work had already been created by some other person. The most famous example of this is "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote", which imagines a twentieth-century Frenchman who so immerses himself in the world of sixteenth-century Spain that he can sit down and create a large portion of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote — verbatim — not by having memorized Cervantes's work, but as an "original" work of his own mind. Borges's "review" of the work of the fictional Menard effectively discusses the resonances that Don Quixote has picked up over the centuries since it was written, by way of overtly discussing how much richer Menard's work is than Cervantes' (verbatim identical) work.

Apparently, Borges references Don Quixote quite a lot, but I'd never noticed. I don't pretend to have any idea what the above quote means — I just think it's rather interesting.

Meanwhile, a book on my own shelf jumped out at me: Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream, by Kathy Acker, postmodern feminist (and it shows). (You can read an excerpt at Amazon, and I recommend that you do.) I read this book about 15 years ago and thought it convoluted and weird, yet oddly I did not dispose of it those few times that I've culled my shelves.

It begins thus:

When she was finally crazy because she was about to have an abortion, she conceived of the most insane idea any woman can think of. Which is to love....
She decided that since she was setting out on the greatest adventure any person can take, that of the Holy Grail, she ought to have a name (identity)...

And wouldn't you know, here's an article that the most evident precursor to Acker's Don Quixote was Borges' creation.

Thoughts?

2005-01-26T15:16:00.000-08:00

My head is swimming with thoughts of Don Quixote. Here is something I posted on my blog today on the subject:

Reflections on Don Quixote

To Priscilla, and anyone else who's flagging!

2005-01-23T15:16:00.000-08:00

Priscilla, I hope you'll reconsider and hang in there with us and Don Quixote. I was really encouraged by your enthusiasm back when we started talking about this, and I hope that I can in some small way encourage you to not give up.

Ok, I'll just be up front and admit that I'm within 100 pages of finishing this thing. I really hope to be done Monday! But I don't want anyone to feel like they're "not keeping up" with me, or that they should quit because they've barely started and I'm almost done.

I set myself the goal of getting through this book in January because I had already attempted it once, over the summer, and my enthusiasm waned after a few chapters. I knew that if I was going to make it through this time, it'd have to be with a concerted, focused energy. (And a more readable translation.) That doesn't mean that everyone needs to read it at this pace! I would suggest, though, setting a per-day goal, be it 10 pages or one chapter or 20 minutes. Consistency really does pay off.

I plan to start with the second book on the TWEM list, The Pilgrim's Progress, in February but I expect the Don Quixote discussion to be going on here for many more months. We'll never all be at the same place in our reading because we all have different goals and life situations.

But we all seem to want to broaden our horizons by reading the classics, right? I think this is a worthwhile goal, and not incompatible with our busy lives. At least that's what I'm hoping.

I'm going to sign off now and read some more DQ. How's everyone else doing out there?

P.S. The children's version that I referred to in the post below this one arrived and it looks wonderful. My only regret is that it only covers the first half of the book, the original first book. Otherwise, I'd be tempted to say that it would be an acceptable stand-in for the real thing, if a person just wanted to familiarize themself with the story and the themes...

A Flash of Inspiration

2005-01-16T19:01:00.000-08:00

I just ordered this book for my kids, ages 10 and 8. I figured they could read the children's versions of each of the books I'll be reading from The Well-Educated Mind.

Artifice and urbane humour flavour Torontonian Barbara Nichol's retelling of Miguel de Cervantes' Tales of Don Quixote (Tundra, 203 pages, $22.99, ages 11+). Nichol abbreviates the story to include her favourite parts — "the parts I think you'll like the best," she says candidly.

In chatty, personable voice she tells of mad Quixote's obsessive reading of chivalric tales and his miguided departure into the world to live the life of a knight errant. "How can we know how Don Quixote saw things?" the narrator asks. "Did he really think he was a knight? We readers must feel free to disagree."

Quixote heads off to tilt at windmills, assault innocent muleteers and barbers, defend women and men of uncertain virtue and generally meet with slapstick violence and scatalogical disasters. Most readers will recognize the parody in Quixote's version of adventurous romance; for those who don't there's the less complex humour of ravaged bowels and outright delusion (the barber's basin that serves as enchanted helmet; the "magical" potion that brings explosive results).

Nichol's narrator is more than willing to bring her own mediating interpretation to events, offering readers a way to understand Quixote's psyche that goes beyond the sensational weirdness of his choices. Always, too, there is Nichol's wry humour ("the awesome mysteries of life and death a rotting ass calls up," she says) and her rhythmic, arresting way even with the simplest of words. "What seems to be quite simply is not so," she has Quixote declare, causing us to pause and consider this musical, at first puzzling, sentence.Even the bawdy is slyly concealed in a clever lineup of words: "a nightshirt far too short to cover everything that everyone might dearly wish were hidden ..."

A link from Jim and a Happy Birthday

2005-01-15T21:13:00.000-08:00

Jim emailed me this link today from the newspaper where he works:

Don Quixote article

And Isabella reminded me a few days ago that tomorrow is the official 400th anniversary of Don Quixote...

Are we trendy, or what?

Finished the first half!

2005-01-15T13:32:00.000-08:00

I should really be reading my segment for today, but I'll procrastinate a bit by saying that I was moved to post Misha's comments below because he didn't like the book. I hope that this will serve to break the ice here, so that as we go along anyone else will feel free to admit to any ambivalent feelings they may have.

I still have not read Harold Bloom's introduction, but as mentioned earlier, I read his writings about Cervantes in another book (Genius) and his opinion was that Don Quixote was not crazy as much as the rest of the world was. I plan to reread this and read the introduction after I've finished the book, but at this point, I don't get that. I'm sorry, but he still just seems crazy to me. I don't admire him or even particularly like him as much as I pity him.

I did, however, have a glimpse - a mere flash! - of another understanding when I read the following from the Cliff's Notes:

With Dorothea's fictional story, Cervantes again indicates that the world of truth is the province of a knight-errant; illusion belongs to those unenlightened by the spirit of chivalry. Especially unenlightened are the curate and barber, as well as Cardenio, who is as chivalric and noble as Don Quixote himself. They are delighted by the convincing manner in which the clever Dorothea plays her role of distressed princess Micomicona. What they do not recognize, and what Don Quixote believes immediately, is that the beautiful farmer's daughter is really a dispossessed aristocrat, victim of a usurper. Dorothea is a princess by virtue of her beauty and personality; she is dispossessed, not of her lands, but of her virtue, with Don Ferdinand, a giant in rank if not in character, as the faithless usurper. And the fictionalized Micomicona, who has traveled across half the world to seek redress from a knight, is truly the ravished Dorothea, who, after much journeying, discovers Cardenio, a knight who swears to aid her in relieving her distress.

I'm sticking this up here so that when we really get to discussing this book, I can easily find it. The key to my understanding Don Quixote as anything but a pitifully deluded man lies here, I think.

Misha chimes in

2005-01-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

I took the liberty of moving Misha's comment from my other blog over here. His passion and energy don't deserve to get buried in comments.

I am more in the mood to blast Don Qixote than to praise it... :-) There is a trend in literature that can be clearly made out towards refocusing from trying to embrace the world in a book (Simplicium Simplicissimus, Thomas Jones and all sorts of picaresque novels) to attempts at understanding human nature a little bit better (and that's so much harder!). The latter seems like a more worthwhile goal, at least to me.
The second thing about the novel that makes it impossibly boring for me is that there is no - how shall I put it? - vector of the story. All Don Qixote's misadventures have no connection whatsoever and can be easily repositioned with no loss. The author has made his point in the first quarter of the book, and he could have written twice as much without adding anything new.

On the other hand, as we move forward in time, the writers begin to take pride in writing just enough, in making sure that every episode, every scene is important and contributes to the concept of the work. There is nothing that you can do without.

I have to admit, though, that I only made myself get through the first half. Any poor sinner will repent after being tortured with such volumes and volumes of pointless gibberish!

Yes, I am kind of hard on Servantes, but he deserves it. However, you can't deny that his characters are hilarious and very alive. Well, I am sure I'll have a chance to comment on that as I follow the discussion at Well-Educated Minds...:-)

Cheats

2005-01-14T13:03:00.000-08:00

CliffsNotes.

The ultra-condensed version.

Signing on

2005-01-14T12:45:00.000-08:00

I'd almost given up on finding the Grossman translation. I wasn't going to order one, either, cuz I wanted Don Quixote TODAY.

So this morning I pored over a few of the translations available at a local bookstore, comparing first paragraphs of a sampling of chapters. Finally, I was pretty comfortable going with the Rutherford (2000). The rhythm was easier than the Jarvis (1742). The Smollett (1755) by comparison was just weird (definitely the odd man out — makes me wonder if in some ways it's truest, maybe to the linguistic idiosyncracies of the time period).

I even convinced myself that it might complement this discussion to be able to reference more than one translation. Rutherford in hand, I still stopped by the information desk, just in case, where they were indeed able to set me up with the Grossman. And it truly does read easier.

The differences were not big ones, between any of the translations, in any objective pin-pointable sense, but the flavours are distinct.

I was curious how the academics view them:

As one of the foundation stones of modern literature — "It has been said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato. It can be said that all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote," wrote Lionel Trilling — it is natural that we should continue to treasure and reprint this classic. But we've done more than reprint it: we've re-translated it, again and again. Smollett's was not the first English translation of Don Quixote, but the sixth. Thomas Shelton wrote the first between 1612 and 1620; he was followed by John Phillips (a nephew of John Milton) in 1687, John Stevens in 1700, Peter Motteaux in 1700-3, and Charles Jarvis in 1742. After Smollett came 19th-century translators like John Ormsby (1885) — who called John Phillips' version "a travesty that for coarseness, vulgarity, and buffoonery is almost unexampled even in the literature of that day" — and 20th-century translators like Samuel Putnam (1949), Walter Starkie (1964), and John Rutherford, author of the latest Penguin Classics edition in 2000.

Amazing that translation of DQ has been tackled so many times! It seems no one thinks anyone else has gotten it right. That in itself serves as evidence to DQ's richness for interpretation.

OK. I start reading the Grossman NOW.

Giggles

2005-01-12T13:38:00.000-08:00

I just settled in to read some more today, and I popped right back up because I giggled once again when I came across one of the many references to Sancho's horror at the blanket-throwing incident. I love these!

Just had to share. Happy reading!

Thoroghly enjoying a second beginning; )

2005-01-11T22:29:00.000-08:00

Hurrayyy! I've made it to the party! Sorry it took so long for me to arrive--sick kids over the weekend, but things are back on track. I'm thrilled to be a part of this group. This is my second time beginning DQ--I was 18 chapters into Rutherford's translation, put it down indefinitely (months ago), and decided to start over after hearing much about Grossman's translation and reading her "notes to the reader" in the bookstore. I've given a sneek peek at the first chapter and can tell within the first few sentences that her version is truly more engaging than Rutherford's.

I am close to finishing Bloom's introduction. Diane, I too wonder if he is insane. Afterall, Bloom does say that DQ's "madness is deliberate, self-inflicted" and, basically, that he wills his fiction into reality. It'll be interesting to see how others are brought into his reality.

Regarding how strictly I'm following Baur's book, for now, I'm a purist. I am not usually, but for things that are new to me and I care enough to want to succeed. While I've read classical literature in my life, most of it was required! I think it is fair to say that serious reading is new to me. TWEM has a good formula for someone in my shoes (that's me; ), so I'm sticking to it. I have even purchased vocab books and am enjoying those from the Classical Roots series. Crazy, no? A bit quixotic--je je.

Priscilla

Reading Journals

2005-01-09T14:47:00.000-08:00

I stayed up late last night rereading the beginning of The Well-Educated Mind and got to wondering about the reading journal. Last time I attempted TWEM, starting with DQ (The Penguin edition), I dutifully summarized each chapter as I read, as she suggests. I didn't get very far, though, so I don't really know if it was of benefit or not. To be honest, right now it sounds like a pain. I just want to sit and read.

However, I do like the idea of the Commonplace Book, and of the writing one's thoughts and questions about what one is reading. I suppose I am starting to use this blog in that manner.

I have questions about this whole idea of whether or not Don Quixote is insane. At this point in time, it seems obvious to me that he is. In reading some of what Harold Bloom had to say in his book, Genius (and I have to say now that I have not yet read his preface to the Grossman DQ), it would seem that there is another way of looking at this issue, one which leans heavily on Hamlet (which I also have not read).

I suppose this is all grist for the reading journal...

Are you all doing the chapter summaries? Reading journals?

Heavy Reading?

2005-01-08T14:22:00.000-08:00

I went to lift my DQ off my lap today while getting up and I wrenched my back. I either need to get in better shape or start reading drugstore paperbacks...

Hope you're all having a good reading weekend!

A little Don Quixote goes a long way

2005-01-07T23:58:00.000-08:00

[So funny, I mistakenly posted this on my own Blogger blog!]

ehem...
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Born around September 29 to October 9, 1547, the latter being the date he was baptized. (I like to say he was born September 30, so that I share his birthdate.) ;o)

He was number 4 or 6 out of 7 siblings; his mother Leonor de Cortinas, and father Rodrigo de Cervantes Saavedra. On his father’s side, Cervantes’ grandfather, who had studied law and served as Judge in the Holy Inquisition, abandoned a life of prestige, leaving his wife and children to poverty. Cervantes’ father then became a barber in order to take care of his family, and so Cervantes spent his childhood in an eternal pilgrimage throughout the cities. The events of his early life seemed to have served as a mold for what the rest of Cervantes' life would be like, one destined to be poor, showered with ill fortune.

He learned to read at a very early age, which was not common in their time, and that is credited to his father; as a teenager he was very shy and stuttered; I know Cervantes was in jail for a little less than a year for not paying debts. Poverty was the norm throughout his entire life. Cervantes was actually in and out of prison and war for most of his adult life, from which he attempted numerous escapes.

Some argue that he was a professor at Hoyos; he lost use of his left hand which earned him the nickname “el manco de Lepanto”.

By age 33 he had already several children from several different women; he married Catalina de Salazar y Palacio, from a little town in La Mancha, at 37. She was almost 20 years younger I believe, and it is said that this was an arranged marriage.

In 1587, he joined the Madrid’s First Literary Circle, at Academia Imitatoria. Sometime during 1594, Cervantes’ mother died. Shortly after, he landed in jail again, and it’s said that it was there that he began writing Don Quixote. It appeared later, in 1605, giving him instant fame. Part one was published in six editions during its first year, and was promptly translated to English and French. Yet, there was no monetary bounty for poor Miguel de Cervantes.

In 1614, José de Avellaneda (I hope I remember his name right) came up with an unofficial second part to Don Quixote. This prompted Cervantes to write the second part to Don Quixote, in 1615, while he was still working on Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses nuevos nunca representados.

His first work was La Galatea (prose-romance). Other writings during years 1613 and 1614 include Novelas Ejemplares (collection of short stories), and Viaje al Parnaso, the verses (poetic satire-?). Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda 1616, (considered Byzantine novel-?; fictional prose)

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra died on April 23, 1616, in his home in Madrid.
___

My mom has promised to send me the rest of my notes from high school. My high school? Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, located in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. Can you tell how much I love “mi querido Don Quijote de la Mancha”? :o)

I can't wait for my new book to arrive! I'm headed to B&N again tomorrow morning.

I'm so excited!

2005-01-07T19:51:00.000-08:00

Oh Diana, thank you so much for creating this blog spot! My husband (Tony) has written blogs and I've read several but I haven't participated yet. This should be great.

Ok, I'm ready. I have WEM, Grossman, and my notebook in hand, ready to go. And I'm as intimidated as I've nearly ever been! Haha! I have to admit something; I haven't taken on a classic since school days. I adore reading and couldn't possibly read enough but I've become someone who views many of the classics with a mix of "I'll read that one day" and "I don't think I'm capable of reading that". Amazing how we shortchange ourselves, isn't it?

I'm beginning chapter IV and thrilled to say that even though it does take more concentration than Crichton, it's not an impossible read like I thought. Yeah! Where is everyone else? Am I too far behind? I'm a very fast reader but I can really see how this will slow me down. You really have to catch much more of the words to get the whole picture. It's easy to see what Susan was talking about at the beginning of WEM with the speed and comprehension "tests" she had. Bubble gum books like Grishom and Crichton make it easy to speed/scan read but this one is really demanding more attention. It's like two different animals.

Anyway, I'm rambling. What are we going to post here for the most part? Where we are in reading? Thoughts on parts/chapters? Are most of us reading Grossman's translation? I think it's a beautiful book as well as easier to read. I LOVE the review for it on Amazon. That's what really sold me.

I'm just so excited....LOL ;)

Jessica (in AL)

P.S. I hope I did this right. Forgive my learning phase to blogging. I'll catch on.

And Roland begat insecurity

2005-01-06T16:22:00.000-08:00

As my book is still on the other side of the Cascades (I've been tracking its progress online), I went once again to Borders to knock out a few chapters. I may be a little ahead of most of you, so I don't mean to give spoilers here, but during the part where Don Quixote's friends and housekeeper are going through his inventory of book titles I had varying reactions.

The first, as each title is given and footnoted, was to skim over them as one does all the "begats" in Genesis. As in, "Yeah, yeah - a bunch of books. Whatever." I had a change of heart when I came across the title Chanson de Roland. As a French major, I have vivid memories of long, long days spent sitting on my bed trying to will myself to care one iota about this epic poem written in antiquated French. These are not good memories. I never did understand it much beyond your basic "knight stuff."

So now I felt myself thinking with a sinking heart that if I'd only tried harder with good old Roland all those years ago that I'd be in on some secret with this part of Don Quixote. I wondered if each one of these titles somehow held some in-joke, and briefly - very briefly! - considered looking up each one of these old chivalrous tales and reading them, thereby unlocking the secret nuances. (Luckily there's an ADD book in the same order which is winging its way over the Cascades to me as I write this.)

And the footnotes! How they gently tell me that this and that is meant to be humorous, or ironic, or some other adjective which I would never have picked up on. That's the thing about classics. They expose to me how badly-read I am. Don't even get me started on Lolita and how I loved the story but always felt that the literary references and allusions were flying over my head with every sentence.

Anyway. How's everyone doing out there? I am expecting my book to arrive tomorrow, and look forward to reading it in the quiet of my house without cheesy music and pages over the intercom to the cafe...

Don Quixote at 400

2005-01-05T20:49:00.000-08:00

Isabella posted this link in the comments and I didn't want it to get buried there. Looks like an interesting read, even more so as we get further into the book. Thanks, Isabella!

2005-01-05T15:42:00.000-08:00

I went to Borders and headed for the literature section and found four translations of Don Quixote which weren't the Grossman one. I pouted for a minute and then settled down with a book that I had listened to in audio format until my player broke several chapters from the end. I finished the book and then put it back in the "featured titles" section. I had about 20 minutes still to kill, so I perused that section some more and there on the bottom was the Grossman Don Quixote. It was meant to be. I took it back to the chairs and read the first several chapters. I figure if I read about 40 pages a day, I'll be able to get through it on deadline and when my copy does arrive I can read even more each day.

One thing I hope to accomplish with this classic-book program is more comfort with reading The Classics. I get intimidated. I blazed through the ending of The Memory of Running with virtually no effort and with only 3/4 of my mind focused on it. I didn't feel stressed about catching all of the "important" parts. I assumed that if it was important, I'd notice it. I was relaxed and having fun.

Then with Don Quixote, I stiffened up. This was Real Reading. I couldn't let any detail get by me, because if I did, I might not Get It. This is why I am insisting on this translation. I keep hearing that it is more enjoyable than any other to read, and I want to enjoy this.

Of course, in The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer does say that reading popular fiction is different than reading classical literature, and that it requires different brain functions. It's been awhile since I read her book, so I don't remember exactly how she worded it except that I remember feeling relieved that no, I wasn't stupid. Not in this, anyway.

Does anyone else struggle with these feelings of inadequacy in reading this and other classic works?

Don Quixote Kickoff

2005-01-05T13:00:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm just going to start this... This will be more of a housekeeping entry. ;)

I thought it might be nicer to have a record of our discussions all in one place than scattered emails. Does this format work for everyone? In lieu of me posting and others merely commenting, I was thinking that everyone who wants to can sign up as a poster here. I know that it's an easy thing to set up; I just haven't actually done it before. If you comment here on this post, I'll go ahead and play with that, with getting you your own poster status. Maybe you need to set up your own blogger account/profile first? We'll work that out.

I am still anxiously awaiting the arrival of my coveted Grossman translation. I'm embarrassed by this because I have a perfectly good version of the book literally within eyesight, but I so want to enjoy this (versus trudge through it) that I am going to treat myself to the much-lauded version instead. On the other hand, it's a long book and I don't want to be stuck with having to cram it all into the last two weeks of the month, so... I'm off to Borders now to sneak in a few chapters.

Has everyone else started reading yet? I am so looking forward to this!