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

Don Quixote (2000)

Starring John Lithgow and Bob Hoskins. Aired on TNT in 2000.

When I was a grad student at UCLA I used to see John Lithgow walking his dogs on campus. He seemed somewhat approachable, and knowing he was starring in a new version of Don Quixote that was going to air on TNT, I decided to pitch an interview with him to the Los Angeles Times, for whom I had done some freelancing in the past. To my surprise, they bought the idea. Armed with an actual assignment I talked to Lithgow’s publicist, who set up a lunchtime interview for me during the upcoming press junket.

I went to Lithgow’s suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and we walked down together to the restaurant. Quick side note: On the way down the hall we passed another suite where someone was doing press interviews. Lithgow asked who it was, found out it was Tobey Maguire, and decided to pop in and say hello. I waited in the hall.

Anyway, we ended up at the restaurant, where I enjoyed some very good crab cakes and conducted a woefully inept interview. Well, maybe it wasn’t that bad, but even though I had been a newspaper reporter I did not have much experience in the celebrity interview department. But Lithgow was congenial and patient with me, the piece ran in the Calendar section of the Times, and I got a check along with lunch at the Four Seasons.

So what do I think of the film?

If you click on the link above you’ll notice that the story I published was not a review. I wasn’t there to critique the film. Lithgow asked what I thought of it and I told him I liked it. And I did, but I wasn’t blown away. I found the acting a little too mannered for my taste, the Duke and Duchess too benign, the pacing a bit languid and the tone occasionally too reverential. But no film of Don Quixote gets it exactly right; every reader has his own idea of how the book should play on the screen and no film is going to please everyone 100 percent.

But I do use clips from this film when I teach Don Quixote because there’s a lot that I like about it. For starters, the language. My students sometimes complain about how Bob Hoskins portrays Sancho; they find his cockney accent distracting or inappropriate. But I love it. I like how the simple difference in linguistic register signals an important fact about Don Quixote and his squire: they come from the same town, but one is a gentleman, and the other is an illiterate peasant laborer.

The Setting. Although never explicitly mentioned, from the costumes you can tell the film is set in the 19^th century. Some might have a problem with this; if you’re married to the idea that Don Quixote is the product of a particular time and place, then taking him out of the 17^th century might seem to be one liberty too many.

But really, why not set it in a different time? We've all seen Shakespeare adaptations in modern dress and there is precedent for doing the same with Quixote: Orson Welles gave Don Quixote a modern setting in his doomed production. But another reason for moving the setting to the 19^th century could be to simply make it that much more obvious to modern viewers that the armor-clad Don Quixote is very much a fish out of water.

Point of View. I like the way the film visualizes Quixote's madness. This is a clear contrast to what many other films do. Usually, when Don Quixote attacks the windmills, the audience sees windmills. See for example, this clip from the 1991 Televisión Española production staring Fernando Rey and Alfredo Landa:

http://youtu.be/IVJEo92sy48?t=2m48s

We only know what Don Quixote is seeing based on his own description. But the Lithgow film shows us what Don Quixote sees.

http://youtu.be/VuIUnw1_8X0?t=15m31s

This approach puts us in Don Quixote’s head. We understand his madness from experiencing it instead of just witnessing it.

DQ in the News: Pope Francis as Don Quixote

The Irish Independent today used two literary images to describe Pope Francis's attempts to reform the Vatican bureaucracy. On the one hand, he is compared to the heroic horsemen of Alfred Lord Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade."

An heroic poem proclaims that “Into the valley of Death rode the six hundred”.
And into the Vatican at Christmas boldly rode Pope Francis.

On the other hand, perhaps the Pope is more like everyone’s favorite misguided knight:

But some fear that Pope Francis is less like an heroic horseman in braided uniform than a well-intended Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. 

Inspired by noble ideas, but aided only by the simple Sancho Panza, Spain's Don Quixote set out to undo wrongs and to defend the helpless before things went wrong and he ended up attacking mills that he mistook for giants.

But people always forget that it wasn’t just noble ideas that inspired Don Quixote. In addition to the lofty ideas we must remember that he found those ideas in bad literature that drove him crazy.

A Moment in El Toboso (Dulcinea's village)

From my journal, Wednesday, August 23, 2000

At 11 a.m. the Centro Cervantino opened up. 

The museum displays some 273 editions of Don Quixote from all over the world and translated into some 43 languages. The oldest editions are from the 18th century. 

Many of the books are donated and signed by leaders from all over the world and from decades past. Among the world leaders donating signed copies of Don Quixote: Ronald Reagan, Moamar Qaddafi, Benito Mussolini and King Juan Carlos I. 

I asked the woman in charge about Alcázar de San Juan's claim to be Cervantes's birthplace. She said a local academic claimed that the church in Alcázar had Cervantes's baptismal record, but as far as she knew it has since disappeared. The plot thickens... 

After El Toboso we checked out the windmills at Campo de Criptana. What can I say? They are windmills. Actually, the hillsides all around this neck of the woods bristle with windmills, some still with their original mechanisms, some, apparently, just for the benefit of the tourists. We toured one windmill. At the top we could see how the sails turn these massive gears, which in turn move the millstones to grind the flour. The next floor below had a chute which would channel the flour into bags. The guy selling post cards said this mill was 400 years old. I don't think it's still in working condition. But it's still mightily impressive. 

Quixote news of note

Can't believe I didn't know about this. Apparently the ubiquitous and often-annoying James Franco has directed his own version of Don Quixote. I'm intrigued, yet mildly put-off.

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.

The Windmills

These thoughts are somewhat choppy and random, especially toward the end, but I'll post them anyway.

Years ago at a family reunion I mentioned to my older sister that I was teaching Don Quixote for the first time. My sister asked, "what's that book about, anyway?" Her daughter, who was listening in on the conversation, piped up and said "Oh, you know Mom. It's about that guy who fights with windmills."

My niece, who must have been about 12, had absorbed the key image of Don Quixote. If you know nothing at all about Don Quixote, you at least know about the windmills. Google Don Quixote and the first thing that pops up is windmills. I have a theory about well-intentioned readers who dutifully begin reading Don Quixote. Like my niece, they know it has something to do with windmills. And like Mark Twain, they know it is a classic that has been much-praised and therefore ought to be read.

So like Don Quixote they sally forth on the adventure of reading and manage to get all the way to Chapter 8, where they encounter this: http://www.online-literature.com/cervantes/don_quixote/12/

At this point they came in sight of thirty forty windmills that there are on plain, and as soon as Don Quixote saw them he said to his squire, "Fortune is arranging matters for us better than we could have shaped our desires ourselves, for look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants present themselves, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes; for this is righteous warfare, and it is God's good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth."

"What giants?" said Sancho Panza.

"Those thou seest there," answered his master, "with the long arms, and some have them nearly two leagues long."
"Look, your worship," said Sancho; "what we see there are not giants but windmills, and what seem to be their arms are the sails that turned by the wind make the millstone go."

"It is easy to see," replied Don Quixote, "that thou art not used to this business of adventures; those are giants; and if thou art afraid, away with thee out of this and betake thyself to prayer while I engage them in fierce and unequal combat."

So saying, he gave the spur to his steed Rocinante, heedless of the cries his squire Sancho sent after him, warning him that most certainly they were windmills and not giants he was going to attack. He, however, was so positive they were giants that he neither heard the cries of Sancho, nor perceived, near as he was, what they were, but made at them shouting, "Fly not, cowards and vile beings, for a single knight attacks you."

A slight breeze at this moment sprang up, and the great sails began to move, seeing which Don Quixote exclaimed, "Though ye flourish more arms than the giant Briareus, ye have to reckon with me."

So saying, and commending himself with all his heart to his lady Dulcinea, imploring her to support him in such a peril, with lance in rest and covered by his buckler, he charged at Rocinante's fullest gallop and fell upon the first mill that stood in front of him; but as he drove his lance-point into the sail the wind whirled it round with such force that it shivered the lance to pieces, sweeping with it horse and rider, who went rolling over on the plain, in a sorry condition. Sancho hastened to his assistance as fast as his ass could go, and when he came up found him unable to move, with such a shock had Rocinante fallen with him.

"God bless me!" said Sancho, "did I not tell your worship to mind what you were about, for they were only windmills? and no one could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his head."

"Hush, friend Sancho," replied Don Quixote, "the fortunes of war more than any other are liable to frequent fluctuations; and moreover I think, and it is the truth, that that same sage Friston who carried off my study and books, has turned these giants into mills in order to rob me of the glory of vanquishing them, such is the enmity he bears me; but in the end his wicked arts will avail but little against my good sword."

And that is it. No more fighting against windmills will occur for the rest of the novel, nor are they even mentioned again, except in a sort "I told you so" way. My personal theory is that by the time most well-intentioned readers get to this point the've found the novel to be not an easy read. They get to the windmills and find it somewhat anticlimactic. Their enthusiasm begins to flag and not only do they not finish the novel, they most likely do not make it through Chapter 9, which is a shame, because that's where things start to get funky.

So if the book is not really about a guy who fights windmills, why is that particular image the one most associated with Don Quixote? I don't know. But it is emblematic of many of the tensions inherent in the book. For those inclined to see the novel as a witness to social change, then Don Quixote is the perfect emblem of a man who finds himself becoming progressively alienated. He yearns to recreate an idealized past in the face of an impersonal present.

Sancho and Don Quixote
The windmill episode may be anticlimaticic, but should not be taken as unimportant. There is evidence within the book itself that many readers at the time of Cervantes considered it their favorite episode. Indeed, it is with the windmill episode that certain tensions get crystalized that will mark the rest of volume one. Among these are the tension between past and present, beween fantasy and reality, between fact and fiction. These tensions get personified in the persons of Don Quixote and Sancho, and in fact we could add a few more: book wisdom/popular wisdom; carnavalesque inversion of and subversion of social mores; sanity/madness.

In the windmill episode Don Quixote has his first adventure accompanied by Sancho Panza. Sancho is more connected to the realities of life (especially economic). He lives in the world, not in the clouds. He is also street smart. But he is not astute enough to see through DQ's promises to him.

The very fact that these two have been thrown together provides ample ground for them to bicker. Sancho's job at the beginning seems to be one of undermining DQ at every turn. When DQ gives a high sounding speech about how knights errant are accustomed to sleep in the open and go a month without food, Sancho all but rub his face in the fact that DQ can pass vigil all he wants, but SP is going to eat.