Missed goal

My original ambitious plan was to post something about Don Quixote every day. Obviously, that did not happen during the month of January.nor has it happened so far during the month of February. I am going to try and be a little more consistent though with my posts, as the semester progresses.

Don Quixote class, Day 1

Today, for the first day of our Don Quixote class, we did a close reading of the first paragraph of Chapter 1, possibly the most famous opening paragraph in all of Spanish literature:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda. El resto della concluían sayo de velarte, calzas de velludo para las fiestas, con sus pantuflos de lo mesmo, y los días de entresemana se honraba con su vellorí de lo más fino. Tenía en su casa una ama que pasaba de los cuarenta, y una sobrina que no llegaba a los veinte, y un mozo de campo y plaza, que así ensillaba el rocín como tomaba la podadera. Frisaba la edad de nuestro hidalgo con los cincuenta años; era de complexión recia, seco de carnes, enjuto de rostro, gran madrugador y amigo de la caza. Quieren decir que tenía el sobrenombre de Quijada, o Quesada, que en esto hay alguna diferencia en los autores que deste caso escriben; aunque por conjeturas verosímiles se deja entender que se llamaba Quijana. Pero esto importa poco a nuestro cuento: basta que en la narración dél no se salga un punto de la verdad.

I don't want to translate the whole thing right now, but basically my goals for this exercise had to do with strangeness and familiarity.

First of all, there's the strangeness of the language. This is modern Spanish, but it doesn't feel modern to today's students. It feels as unfamiliar as the English of the King James Bible. But by working through it together I hope to show them that its unfamiliarity is not an insurmountable barrier. it's important not to be put-off by the language, because much of Cervantes's humor is built on irony and witty turns of phrase and it's easy to get so bogged down in trying to make sense of the unfamiliar that we miss the comic elements.

I want them to appreciate the strangeness of the Spanish and of the world this book inhabits. Ironically, part of this strangeness is its utter ordinariness -- something we don't always recognize because 400 years separate our world from Don Quixote's. The world of the novel is not our world and the language is not our language. When I teach Don Quixote I try to acknowledge distance and I see it as my function -- especially with undergraduates -- to bridge the gap between those two worlds. As I said above, that gap can prevent us from recognizing just how ordinary the world of Don Quixote is. Cervantes was writing a parody of chivalric romances, which adventure books that were often set in exotic lands. For his parody, Cervantes chose La Mancha, possibly the least exotic place in all of Spain. This is perhaps unfair to California's great Central Valley, but I tell the students to imagine a superhero, whose mission in life is to protect not Metropolis or Gotham, but Bakersfield and Fresno.

More to come. 

A Glorious Mess

As I search for titles to include in my Don Quixote film series, I finally got around to watching the Orson Welles version. I suspect it's one of the great might-have-beens in film history. It was famously never finished, in fact, there seem to be questions about whether it was ever meant to be finished. Welles worked on it intermittently for decades; Spanish filmmakers Jesús Franco and Patxi Irigoyen cobbled together this version in 1992, seven years after Welles's death.

The result is sometimes jarring. In the English-language version that I watched sometimes the characters' voices are dubbed by different actors within the same scene. The film gets repetitive at times, some scenes go on far longer than they need to, and great stretches of the film feel more like scattered clips from Welles's home movies than a coherent whole.

However, despite its messiness there are glimpses of something wonderful. Welles sets the film in modern Spain, so not only do we get windmills, we also get to see Don Quixote, played by a gaunt Francisco Reiguera, attempt to liberate a protesting woman from the Vespa that has captured her. The first hour, in fact, is very funny. Quixote gets carried away by his flights of fancy, while Sancho, played by Akim Tamiroff, trails behind not quite knowing what to make of this madman. In the second hour it becomes clear that Sancho is the real star of this show; Don Quixote is a somewhat static myth while Sancho, in Welles's telling, is a "character."

What I really enjoyed about this film is that even in its fractured state it's the only Don Quixote adaptation I've seen that does real justice to the metafictional frame. Orson Welles pops up occasionally as a filmmaker named Orson Welles who is making an adaptation of Don Quixote. At one point Sancho gets a part as an extra in Welles's film. So Welles essentially becomes the voice of Cide Hamete Benengeli. The possibilities of this arrangement are delightful and were brought home to me in one of the never-ending scenes I complained of above. At one point Sancho is looking for Don Quixote on the midst of a town festival. As he stumbles among the spectators of a bullfight, more than one person dismisses him as crazy. We are watching a spectacle in which Sancho interacts with other people who dismiss him as mad, people who themselves are watching a spectacle that many other people would dismiss as mad. The question of madness and how to define it becomes impossible to ignore. And through it all the quixotic figure of Orson Welles smiles enigmatically as if to say "look what I've done."

The film, though, is nothing but a tease. A might have been. A mess. But a glorious one.

Quixotic Reference of the Day

I came across this one as I was browsing El Pais for material to use in my Spanish culture class. It’s a review by a writer named Maruja Tarre of Hillary Clinton’s book Hard Choices. Tarre describes herself as a fan of Clinton – one who feels profoundly let down by a book that reveals “una gran ignorancia del mundo en general y una extraordinaria arrogancia” [great ignorance of the world in general and extraordinary arrogance.] I have not read Clinton’s book, which many reviews said was unreadable, so I have to take Tarre’s word for it. What I found interesting was what for Tarre was the last straw:

... en dos oportunidades Hillary califica al gobierno de Muamar el Gadafi como “quijotesco”. Me parece que esa dictadura podía considerarse como grotesca, monstruosa, cruel, anacrónica, ¿pero quijotesca? ¿Qué visión tiene la flamante candidata y exsecretaria de Estado, de un personaje que es un arquetipo universal como Don Quijote? ¿Ha leído aunque sea un resumen para bachillerato, de la obra de Cervantes? Todos esos editores que corrigieron su libro, ¿no pensaron que comparar a un dictador como Gadafi con una figura emblemática de la hispanidad, podría resultar chocante para algunos de esos electores latinos que pretenden conquistar?

[... twice Hillary refers to the government of Muammar Gaddafi as “quixotic.” It seems to me that dictatorship could be thought of as grotesque, monstruous, cruel, anachronistic, but quixotic? What vision does the presumed presidential candidate and former Secretary of State have of such a universal archetype as Don Quixote? Did she bother to read even a summary of Cervantes’s work for her baccalaureate? Didn’t any of those editors who proofread her book think that comparing a dictator like Gaddafi with an emblematic figure of the Hispanic world might shock some of those Latino voters they want to win over?]

I am now curious to track down Hillary’s book and see how she uses “quixotic.” Meanwhile, in her possible defense, it’s worth pointing out that she’s not the only one to go that route with Gaddafi.

"Quixotic" in History

I found this interesting blurb from Talks on Temperance, by Frederic William Farrar (1881):

I know our attempt to resist the evil has been called Quixotic, and that we have been charged with a want of judgment. Be it so… I am not in the least degree afraid to be called Quixotic. I have enough experience of life, and have read enough of history to know that there has hardly ever been any single man who is been in the least degree more in earnest than his fellows, who has not been called Quixotic. In these days of a somewhat armchair kind of Christianity… to be called Quixotic, may be a testimony to which some honor may attach when it takes the form of an endeavor to do good to our fellow man. I am quite sure Luther would have been called Quixotic; Whitfield would have been called Quixotic, and also Howard and Wilberforce. To be called Quixotic very often means no more than this, that a man has been called into wakefulness of his peril, while others are slumbering around him through the mist. It means often that he is fired with a noble and necessary enthusiasm, having realized the dimensions of an evil to which others are blinded by familiarity. (pages 29-30)

I'm taken by the phrase "to be called Quixotic, may be a testimony to which some honor may attach when it takes the form of an endeavor to do good to our fellow man" because it seems that by this time the popular image of Don Quixote has become divorced from the actual novel. Because nearly every time Don Quixote endeavors to do good to his fellow man, he fails miserably.

Quixotic wordsmithery

I'm in Canada for the MLA with spotty wifi and no data roaming, so I missed posting yesterday. Here's a brief one for today. 

http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/01/06/word-inventor/21364263/

Zimmer said word developers have to be realistic, calling an attempt to fill in a gap in the language "quixotic" and warning that it likely will not catch on. And using word parts which likely don't resonate with current speakers also undermines its likelihood of success: "People wouldn't hear 'sofralia' and say, 'Oh.' "

Quixotic in the News

Today's use of 'quixotic' in the news comes courtesy Bloomberg's Dave Weigel on Twitter:

GOP rebels celebrate their quixotic campaign, with the nagging feeling they could have done better. http://t.co/R2y6fl5dvB
— daveweigel (@daveweigel) January 6, 2015