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?
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