A quick word about Don Quixote's library.
After the knight returns home, as he sleeps, recovering from his first sally, his friends and family gather to consider how best to help him. They pin the blame for his madness on the books he has been reading. What follows is a parody of an auto de fe, with two of Don Quixote's friends, the Priest and the Barber, functioning as Inquisitors.
From a literary point of view, the scene in Don Quixote's library is important for another reason: characters within the novel become literary critics, judging which books are worthwhile and which must be consigned to the flames based on the effect those books have on the reader and how truthful they are.
A theme that the author presented in the prologue gets picked up by the characters: the pernicious influence of books that imitate lies rather than the truth. Art, in this schema, is imitation. Art is a representation of something; good art represents real things. True things. Fiction, by definition, is a lie. But fiction can have value if it imitates reality; if it imitates the truth. The problem with books of chivalry, from this point of view, is that they represent things that clearly have no basis in reality. They are works of fantasy, and therefore have no worth. Not only do they have no worth; they are dangerous. Because if the role of art is to imitate things, the role of the reader is to imitate art. In other words, art is expected to have an effect on the world because it is assumed that the audience will imitate models found in art. Hence, it is in the interest of the reader (and of society) to seek out good models to imitate. Bad art has a pernicious effect on the world, and the clearest evidence of this is Don Quixote himself: he is presented, from the beginning, as a reader incapable of discerning truth from fiction, one who has chosen the wrong model to imitate.
Viewed in this way, Don Quixote becomes a parable of reading, with a clear tension between critical readers and uncritical readers. This is an idea I return to many times throughout the semester.
The scrutiny of the books in Don Quixote's library, then, is a detailed examination of several titles, not only of chivalric romance, but also of pastoral poetry (another popular genre of the time that we'll return to later). Some books are saved: Amadis de Gaula (seen as the original chivalric romance, therefore worth keeping); Cervantes's own Galatea (shameless self promotion from the author). Most are tossed into the patio to be burned. One book is singled out for praise: Tirante el blanco (Tirant lo blanc, a fifteenth century book, written originally in Catalan). This is the best book in the world, the Priest declares: "in it knights eat, and sleep, and die in their beds, and make a will before they die, and do everything else that all the other books of this sort leave out" (from the Edith Grossman translation). In other words, it has value because it eschews fantasy and reflects life (it is also very erotic in parts, which made for some lively class discussions when I read it as a graduate student).
So in Chapter 6 we have literary characters critiquing fiction. They are not quite critiquing the work in which they themselves appear, but they are getting perilously close to metafiction, a mode of fiction that might best be described as "self conscious." Ironically, by attempting to cure Don Quixote by burning his books, these characters inadvertently lay the groundwork for what is to follow. When Don Quixote wakes up and attempts to go into his library he finds instead a blank wall. His friends have walled it up; his niece explains that an enchanter, Frestón, has spirited his library away. From this point on, Don Quixote begins to treat Frestón as his nemesis.Ironically, in attempting to cure the knight's madness, his friends have only made it worse, for now Don Quixote has a convenient excuse every time his fantasy bumps up against inconvenient reality: Frestón did it.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
The First Sally
Since Don Quixote is first and foremost a parody of chivalric romance, it helps to know something of this much-maligned genre. To find out more, I have my students read a helpful article by Daniel Eisenberg, a primer of sorts about the "typical" chivalric romance. The chivalric romance is set in the distant past, often in an exotic locale. The hero is young and handsome, and usually of royal blood, although at the beginning he may be a foundling who does not know his true identity (as is the case with Amadis of Gaul, the most famous chivalric hero). There is more, but this is enough to show the broad outlines of Cervantes's parody: in place of a young, handsome, royal hero we have an old, weathered hidalgo, who by definition occupies the lowest rung on the noble ladder. Instead of an exotic locale, we get La Mancha, which, for Cervantes's readers would have been the least exotic place imaginable. From our point of view it might be difficult to grasp how ordinary, mundane, non-exotic Don Quixote's world is. Imagine Fresno, I tell my students. Or Bakersfield.
Unfair? Perhaps. But anyone who's traveled an interstate highway and stopped at a truck stop can imagine the normal, ordinary people that Don Quixote encounters during his first sally. And that goes a long way toward helping us appreciate the humor of the situation. There is a tension between the ordinary world through which DQ moves and the exotic setting of the romance that's playing out inside his head. He arrives at the 16th-century Spanish equivalent of a truck stop, complete with truckers (muleteers), and dubious women, and acts as if he is entering a castle. He addresses a pair of prostitutes as if they were noble ladies, and the innkeeper as if he were a castellan.
The parody here is as broad as possible, consisting of contrasts between the chivalric fantasy and the real world. Our hero is knighted, and then he leaves the inn in search of adventures.
His first two adventures are important because they set the tone for all that is to follow. First he meets Andres, a young shepherd who is being beaten by his employer. Don Quijote stops the beating and demands that the employer pay Andres what he is owed. Then DQ leaves, trusting that the man will keep his word, ignoring Andres's pleas. Once DQ has left, the employer begins to beat the boy again, giving him a worse beating that he would have otherwise received.
In my last post I talked about good intentions and bad decisions, and here is the prime example in the knight's first adventure. Attempting to do good, DQ ends up doing harm. Not only that, but the outcome is worse than if he had never intervened in the first place.
After Andres, DQ encounters a group of merchants, taking them for knights, he demands that they confess that Dulcinea is the most beautiful woman in the world. They jokingly decline, infuriating the knight, who then attacks them. He ends up being beaten to a pulp. This also establishes a pattern of comic violence that will continue throughout the novel.
Don Quijote is found by a neighbor, who helps him home, waiting until nightfall before entering the village, to keep the knight from being a public spectacle. This will be important as we reach the end of part one.
In this first sally, Don Quijote travels alone. The innkeeper who knights him gives him some salient advice: he really should bring clean shirts with him when he travels; he should also remember to bring money. This confuses the knight, who comments that none of the books he has read have ever mentioned money. That's because, the innkeeper says, something so obvious should not need to be mentioned.
Many (including my old professor, the late Carroll Johnson) have pointed out that Don Quixote reflects a transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy; the knight's nostalgia for the past and resistance to the modern world he lives in thus get a materialist explanation. I'm by no means a marxist, and am reluctant to place too much emphasis on such interpretations. But the tension between imperfect present and idealized mythic past is significant. And economics matters, and will matter even more when Sancho Panza enters the picture.
Unfair? Perhaps. But anyone who's traveled an interstate highway and stopped at a truck stop can imagine the normal, ordinary people that Don Quixote encounters during his first sally. And that goes a long way toward helping us appreciate the humor of the situation. There is a tension between the ordinary world through which DQ moves and the exotic setting of the romance that's playing out inside his head. He arrives at the 16th-century Spanish equivalent of a truck stop, complete with truckers (muleteers), and dubious women, and acts as if he is entering a castle. He addresses a pair of prostitutes as if they were noble ladies, and the innkeeper as if he were a castellan.
The parody here is as broad as possible, consisting of contrasts between the chivalric fantasy and the real world. Our hero is knighted, and then he leaves the inn in search of adventures.
His first two adventures are important because they set the tone for all that is to follow. First he meets Andres, a young shepherd who is being beaten by his employer. Don Quijote stops the beating and demands that the employer pay Andres what he is owed. Then DQ leaves, trusting that the man will keep his word, ignoring Andres's pleas. Once DQ has left, the employer begins to beat the boy again, giving him a worse beating that he would have otherwise received.
In my last post I talked about good intentions and bad decisions, and here is the prime example in the knight's first adventure. Attempting to do good, DQ ends up doing harm. Not only that, but the outcome is worse than if he had never intervened in the first place.
After Andres, DQ encounters a group of merchants, taking them for knights, he demands that they confess that Dulcinea is the most beautiful woman in the world. They jokingly decline, infuriating the knight, who then attacks them. He ends up being beaten to a pulp. This also establishes a pattern of comic violence that will continue throughout the novel.
Don Quijote is found by a neighbor, who helps him home, waiting until nightfall before entering the village, to keep the knight from being a public spectacle. This will be important as we reach the end of part one.
In this first sally, Don Quijote travels alone. The innkeeper who knights him gives him some salient advice: he really should bring clean shirts with him when he travels; he should also remember to bring money. This confuses the knight, who comments that none of the books he has read have ever mentioned money. That's because, the innkeeper says, something so obvious should not need to be mentioned.
Many (including my old professor, the late Carroll Johnson) have pointed out that Don Quixote reflects a transition from a feudal to a capitalist economy; the knight's nostalgia for the past and resistance to the modern world he lives in thus get a materialist explanation. I'm by no means a marxist, and am reluctant to place too much emphasis on such interpretations. But the tension between imperfect present and idealized mythic past is significant. And economics matters, and will matter even more when Sancho Panza enters the picture.
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Good Intentions and Bad Decisions
My life is punctuated by a series of good intentions and bad decisions. I am teaching Don Quixote this semester, and I intended to spend the semester posting regularly about the class, the book, the experience of reading, and other musings. Instead, I've let a third of the semester go by without positing anything. Neglecting to post is the result of pure laziness and inertia, the twin demons that have plagued me my entire life; they can't be blamed on a bad decision. The bad decision came before the semester began, when I announced my project to a few fellow Quixote aficionados and invited them to post as well. And, of course, since then I've done nothing.
So, five weeks into the semester, maybe the time has come to post something.
Actually, I think "Good Intentions and Bad Decisions" would make a good title for this post, since Don Quixote is, in large part, an exploration of a series of bad decisions that result from good intentions gone amok. This might appear to be a counter-intuitive take on Don Quixote; we are accustomed to think of the novel as a Great Book, protagonized ('protagonist' is a noun that gets verbified quite frequently in Spanish literature classrooms) by a Great Hero. And maybe he is; the question of whether or not DQ might rightly be called a hero is one that still engages scholars. I wrote a paper once and submitted it to the Cervantes Bulletin, only to be righteously scolded by an anonymous reader for being insufficiently reverential toward the great one. Never mind that the great man is, in fact, a fictional character and the question of how he should be read has been ...
Never mind. Where was I? Oh yes: Good Intentions and Bad Decisions.
When the novel opens we are introduced to a not-well-off (if not outright poor) country gentleman (hidalgo, in Spanish) who is so addicted to books of chivalry that he begins to sell off his land in order to buy more of them. So much reading of so many books of so doubtful worth drives him crazy and he decides to reinvent himself as a knight errant. He cleans up an old suit of armor that had belonged to his great grandfather, thinks up a new name for himself, and sets forth to have adventures.
Part of my task as a teacher is to help students bridge the gap between our world and the world of Don Quixote. The book was published more than 400 years ago. Tastes have changed. Humor that was topical at the time is lost on us now. Odd juxtapositions, irony and anachronisms that would have been obvious to a 17th century reader need to be explained today. Simply put, I think it's lost on 21st century readers how out of place a knight in armor would be in the 17th century. Many students today assume that DQ is a medieval book and that his time was the Middle Ages.
So I started the class with two examples. One is very contemporary. I showed the students an article about a would be superhero in Seattle, who dresses in a costume and attempts to fight crime. The question is this: is this man crazy? Or, put another way, is this sort of behavior rational? Much like Don Quixote, this is a man who has evidently read a lot of a particular sort of book, or perhaps watched many of a particular sort of movie, has found in them something that he feels is worth imitating, something that is lacking in the world in which we live, and has decided that enacting what he finds in those books might have a positive affect on the world. Is this a good decision, or a bad decision? Is it rational or irrational? Will these undeniably good intentions end up helping the world or harming it?
In another story I tell my students, I recall my first real job out of college, when I worked for a small, thrice-weekly newspaper in California's Eastern Sierra. I lived in a little cabin outside of town on the edge of the desert, and one of my neighbors was a chiropractor who seemed to believe he was living in the Old West. He had two beautiful Arabian horses, and had the habit of feeding them inside his cabin (no lie: more than once I saw the hind end of a horse out on his porch, with the mouth end somewhere inside getting sustenance). He would dress in cowboy gear, complete with Stetson, bandana, chaps and six shooters. I remember driving down the highway and passing him as he galloped on the shoulder, revolver in hand, living the life. I never talked to him about his habit, which appeared strange to me. But in retrospect I have to ask: was he imitating the Old West the way it really was, or the Old West from classic Hollywood, the Old West that only exists as a collective myth?
I try to help the students make the connection that a Don Quixote dressed in armor, setting forth to right the world of wrongs, was as out of place in his time as a six-shooter-wielding cowboy galloping down the shoulder of four-lane blacktop highway is in our time. And that a man who imitates the heroes he reads about in books about knights errant is much like a man who imitates the heroes he reads about in comic books. And that in either case, the time and place and person that our reader seeks to emulate is one that only ever existed on a mythic plane, in fiction. The Old West my chiropractor neighbor believed in only ever existed in books and movies. Superheroes only exist in comic books and movies. And knights errant only ever existed in poetry and romance.
Nevertheless, and this is important, the world of knight errantry is real to Don Quixote. It represents an older, better time, one that he hopes to recapture. The question though, is this: by attempting to remake the world along the lines of fantasy fiction, is Don Quixote, in the words of John Jay Allen, a hero or a fool?
So, five weeks into the semester, maybe the time has come to post something.
Actually, I think "Good Intentions and Bad Decisions" would make a good title for this post, since Don Quixote is, in large part, an exploration of a series of bad decisions that result from good intentions gone amok. This might appear to be a counter-intuitive take on Don Quixote; we are accustomed to think of the novel as a Great Book, protagonized ('protagonist' is a noun that gets verbified quite frequently in Spanish literature classrooms) by a Great Hero. And maybe he is; the question of whether or not DQ might rightly be called a hero is one that still engages scholars. I wrote a paper once and submitted it to the Cervantes Bulletin, only to be righteously scolded by an anonymous reader for being insufficiently reverential toward the great one. Never mind that the great man is, in fact, a fictional character and the question of how he should be read has been ...
Never mind. Where was I? Oh yes: Good Intentions and Bad Decisions.
When the novel opens we are introduced to a not-well-off (if not outright poor) country gentleman (hidalgo, in Spanish) who is so addicted to books of chivalry that he begins to sell off his land in order to buy more of them. So much reading of so many books of so doubtful worth drives him crazy and he decides to reinvent himself as a knight errant. He cleans up an old suit of armor that had belonged to his great grandfather, thinks up a new name for himself, and sets forth to have adventures.
Part of my task as a teacher is to help students bridge the gap between our world and the world of Don Quixote. The book was published more than 400 years ago. Tastes have changed. Humor that was topical at the time is lost on us now. Odd juxtapositions, irony and anachronisms that would have been obvious to a 17th century reader need to be explained today. Simply put, I think it's lost on 21st century readers how out of place a knight in armor would be in the 17th century. Many students today assume that DQ is a medieval book and that his time was the Middle Ages.
So I started the class with two examples. One is very contemporary. I showed the students an article about a would be superhero in Seattle, who dresses in a costume and attempts to fight crime. The question is this: is this man crazy? Or, put another way, is this sort of behavior rational? Much like Don Quixote, this is a man who has evidently read a lot of a particular sort of book, or perhaps watched many of a particular sort of movie, has found in them something that he feels is worth imitating, something that is lacking in the world in which we live, and has decided that enacting what he finds in those books might have a positive affect on the world. Is this a good decision, or a bad decision? Is it rational or irrational? Will these undeniably good intentions end up helping the world or harming it?
In another story I tell my students, I recall my first real job out of college, when I worked for a small, thrice-weekly newspaper in California's Eastern Sierra. I lived in a little cabin outside of town on the edge of the desert, and one of my neighbors was a chiropractor who seemed to believe he was living in the Old West. He had two beautiful Arabian horses, and had the habit of feeding them inside his cabin (no lie: more than once I saw the hind end of a horse out on his porch, with the mouth end somewhere inside getting sustenance). He would dress in cowboy gear, complete with Stetson, bandana, chaps and six shooters. I remember driving down the highway and passing him as he galloped on the shoulder, revolver in hand, living the life. I never talked to him about his habit, which appeared strange to me. But in retrospect I have to ask: was he imitating the Old West the way it really was, or the Old West from classic Hollywood, the Old West that only exists as a collective myth?
I try to help the students make the connection that a Don Quixote dressed in armor, setting forth to right the world of wrongs, was as out of place in his time as a six-shooter-wielding cowboy galloping down the shoulder of four-lane blacktop highway is in our time. And that a man who imitates the heroes he reads about in books about knights errant is much like a man who imitates the heroes he reads about in comic books. And that in either case, the time and place and person that our reader seeks to emulate is one that only ever existed on a mythic plane, in fiction. The Old West my chiropractor neighbor believed in only ever existed in books and movies. Superheroes only exist in comic books and movies. And knights errant only ever existed in poetry and romance.
Nevertheless, and this is important, the world of knight errantry is real to Don Quixote. It represents an older, better time, one that he hopes to recapture. The question though, is this: by attempting to remake the world along the lines of fantasy fiction, is Don Quixote, in the words of John Jay Allen, a hero or a fool?
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