Quixotic Endeavors

I’m intrigued by the word quixotic. I did a LexisNexis search this morning and looked for uses of quixotic during the previous 24 hours. Here is some of what I came up with:

From Associated Press:

Ron Paul, a physician and former congressman from Texas, opposed almost every facet of government as overreach during his time in office and two Quixotic campaigns for president, winning the nickname "Dr. No."

From a Washington Post travel article about Tijuana and its environs, wherein the writer is searching for Al Capone:

The room is decorated with blue-and-white ceramic tiles painted with scenes from Don Quixote, and there’s a lofted area above the bar where mariachis would play. There are sumptuous satin window treatments, crystal chandeliers, stately furnishings and a knock-off Renoir hanging on one wall, but the centerpiece is a stained-glass dome on the ceiling, under which Capone allegedly ran a card game. Today the space is used mostly for weddings. I’m beginning to feel like my hunt for Capone is itself a little quixotic. His name is on everyone’s lips, with whispers and rumors aplenty — but hard evidence is scarce.

In both cases, quixotic describes quirky, possibly lost causes – doomed endeavors undertaken by someone out of misplaced idealism, though possibly with honorable intentions. This is a far cry from how the word was used when it was first coined.

When I teach Don Quixote we return time and again to two fundamentally different modes of reading the book. The Romantic approach tends to idealize Don Quixote and his madness. The “funny book” school of Quixote criticism (primarily British) arose to counter the Romantics and focuses on how the novel was read and embraced in its early centuries. It was a work of entertainment, and Don Quixote himself was a figure of fun to be derided. 

This trajectory from funny to philosophical finds its parallel in the word quixote and its cognates and derivatives. Quixote, in Spanish, originally referred to a piece of armor meant to protect the thigh. With the popularity of Cervantes’s book, however, quixote acquired a secondary meaning, which the Diccionario de Autoridades from 1737 defines thusly:

QUIXOTE. Se llama al hombre ridiculamente sério, o empeñado en lo que no le toca. Latín. Ridiculus homo.

In other words, quixote is how one refers to a ridiculously serious man, or one who meddles in things that don’t concern him.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines quixotic as referring to persons, things or ideas “demonstrating or motivated by exaggerated notions of chivalry and romanticism; naively idealistic; unrealistic, impracticable; (also) unpredictable, capricious, whimsical.” 

The earliest use of quixotic cited in the OED comes from “Protestant Popery,” a satirical broadside in verse from 1718:

Pulpit and Press fictitious Ills engage,

And combat Windmills with Quixotic Rage:

Tumultuous Din and Clangor shakes the Sky, 

And each vile Scribbler waves his Banners high. 

Combating windmills does not come across here as delightfully endearing. The OED also cites an 1815 letter from JohnAdams in which he talks about Don Francisco de Miranda as “a vagrant, a vagabond, a Quixotic adventurer,” someone, in short, not worth thinking about (see page 157).

So in its early usage, quixotic did not carry positive connotations. But over the years, “unpredictable and capricious” have given way to “whimsical” as Don Quixote transitioned from being a distinctly Spanish madman into a universal symbol of doomed and misunderstood idealism. This is the reading preferred by the Romantic school.

Thus, the OED provides a quote from Harold Bloom’s 1994 book The Western Canon: “Against that claim I set the most poignant and Quixotic of all critical agonists, the Basque man of letters Miguel de Unamuno.” To Bloom, to be quixotic is to be poignant. Quixotic has moved from capricious and possibly dangerous to something admirable and almost endearing.

That change can also be seen in Spanish. The Diccionario de la Real Academia Española (sucessor to the Diccionario de Autoridades) defines quixote as:

m. Hombre que antepone sus ideales a su conveniencia y obra desinteresada y comprometidamente en defensa de causas que considera justas ...

[a man who places his ideals above his convenience and works in a committed and disinterested way in defense of causes he considers just ...]

So the lesson here is that language changes. And in this case, the trajectory of one particular word and its derivatives in two languages parallels the trajectory of the novel itself and how it is read.

How I prefer to read the novel remains to be seen.