Don Quixote Part 2: Conclusion

"Don Quixote begins as a province, turns into Spain, and ends as a universe." -V.S. Pritchett

The sensation is a bit like being drunk, a bit like mourning, and a dash of divine revelation all at the same time.  A few times in one's life, one finishes a book with the realization that they have just finished one of the greatest books that they shall have the pleasure of reading in their lifetime.  While one might read that book again, one will never read it again for the first time. 

I had that last night as I finished Don Quixote and, in spite of the fact that the series I am working through comprises, by all accounts, some of the greatest books ever written, it has been a long time since I've felt this, for lack of a better term, close to the holy as I finished a book.  The last time I can remember is Djuna Barnes' Nightwood.  I sort of stare off blankly for the rest of the evening, as if my brain says, "Well, there you go!  You're not getting anything else out of me today."

In this book is the wealth and sorrows of the human experience.  All of the anguish and pathos of being an individual in this world is not only contained in this book, but readily experienced in the process of reading it.  The horrors are tempered, as they are in real life, by beauty, companionship, virtue, and the lighter side of the absurdity of existence.  It is beautiful in every way, one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.  It is also, another rarity, one of the few books which found me laughing out loud in public while reading.

Another major theme, I think, would be how people ruin things for one another.  There is the obvious one, masterfully woven into the plot by Cervantes, of the second rate knock-off non-canon sequel written by someone else after Cervantes original Part 1 and before (catalyzing even) Part 2.  There is a long section of a particularly sadistic wealthy couple who essentially torture Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for their own amusement.  That section contained one of my favorite passages of literature.  They send poor Sancho off to be a governor for their own mocking and scoffing.  He turns out to be as wise as Solomon.  It is the apotheosis of the triumph of the common man. 

Indeed, if you don't fall in love with the two main characters, check your pulse.  Cervantes makes an open and shut case as to the near blasphemy of the "false Quixote" book simply by introducing us to the wonderful two main characters.  I say that anyone who would dare besmirch the character of Sancho Panza deserves all of the treatment that Quixote would threaten to one who would impugn the beauty of Dulcinea.  There is a part of me that is happy to see that, with a little digging, the "false Quixote" is still available in print as it is an important historical document, an important footnote to this piece.  There is another part of me that is also happy to see that it seems like no one ever reads it.

I am going to a take a moment to say that the same diabolical duke and duchess who send Sancho to govern the insula are also the ones who introduce the talking head to the story.  About 100 pages before the end of Part 2, there is a bust in a room which, when asked a question, will speak and answer the questions.  The motif of prophecy is strong in Part 2.  We saw the prophesying monkey last time and this latter section also features a parade of enchanters, including Merlin, who prophesy as well.  It would seem that Cervantes has a skeptical view of prophecy, however possibly a poetic one as well.  The prophets are charlatans, but the prophecies come true!  Or rather, the lead characters do things because of the prophecies.  They sort of willingly become the foot-soldiers of fate.  I suspect there may be a cautionary lesson in there.

Laurie asked me how the book compares to Man of La Mancha (which we do need to address when talking about this piece now just as much as we need to make mention of the "false Quixote."  I felt that Wasserman's Quixote is more valid than Avellaneda's, possibly because the subject matter is handled with such respect, nearly with kid gloves, in the musical.)  We both loved that play and still do.  I think that an entirely valid, separate work of art can be created out of inspiration from a first work of art.  Laurie asked if Dulcinea is a character in the book.  I said, "Well, kind of, but not in the specific, tangible way that she is in the musical.  She is more of a presence or force than an actual character."  She asked about parts of the play that come from the book.  There is also the barber's pan.  And the ending.  Sort of.  The ending presents a few problems.

It is not necessarily a spoiler to reveal that Don Quixote dies, as Cervantes tells you that he is going to die in the introduction.  I think, for me, what was most remarkable was the staggering elevation Cervantes achieves.  Quixote is a bit of a saint/Christ figure throughout, but in his ending he dies to, essentially, save us from more bad knock-off versions.  Although that makes it sound so trite.  Rather I might say that he dies on the altar of greatness. 

One of the only times I've appeared in the local paper was when I was asked one of those "People on the street" questions outside of our post office.  I was asked what, given my druthers, I would prefer to have written on my tombstone (assuming no one goes through with my wishes of donating my body to the crime school that leaves donated bodies out in a presumably secured wild area to observe the effects of long term exposure on corpses for the educational amelioration of future criminologists).  I stammered out some nonsense on the spot, but I think in actuality I should like to borrow an abridgment of Quixote's own:

"It was his great good fortune to live a madman, and die sane."

Reader, you need to read this book.  You need to get a copy of the Edith Grossman translation of Don Quixote and read it while the sun still shines on you.  For your own sake.  You will be a better person for it.

 

Don Quixote Part 2: Part 1

Christopher was right.  At the end of Part 1, I had a moment where I wondered if I should read Part 2 right away or put it on the back burner while I went back to the Harvard Classics list proper.  Christopher said, "No!  Read Part 2 immediately!  It is even better than Part 1!"

And I'll be hanged if he wasn't right.  This, and I am not just saying this out of being caught up in the emotion of the moment, is one of the best reading experiences of my life.  I know I'm starting to sound like a broken record, but my gratitude towards Dr. Eliot for leading me to finally read this book is matched only by my utter astonishment that he only included Part 1 in his curriculum.  Part 2 reveals a more evolved author who has adapted intrepidly from the lessons that the publication of Part 1 and the subsequent public reaction occasioned.  He has scuttled the stories within the story to focus, instead, purely on the adventures of the ingenious gentleman.  The meta-fiction aspect balloons in this section, starting with a scholar telling Sancho and Quixote about Part 1, its publication, contents, and reception.  Their reaction is as hilarious as one might imagine.  In his further adventures, Part 1 is something often considered and he encounters a number of people who read it.  Part 2 also, it is promised and I will soon get to it, unquestionably ends the story.  On reading the introduction, I mused why some wag hadn't thought of penning a Don Quixote's Adventures in the Afterlife.  Something that might make both Cervantes and Dante plunk out their respective mustaches in rage.

Depending on how one looks at it I suppose, it is either a series of fantastic and absurd events that the premise (madman wandering around thinking he's a knight errant) suggest punctuated by some of the best dialogue in all of literature between Sancho and Quixote or vice versa.  I am inclined towards the latter.  I could read conversations between Quixote and Sancho for the rest of my life and never fall out of sheer delight.  I suspect the same was true for Cervantes.  It is not difficult to imagine it was rip-roaring fun for him to write this.  It seems like the sort of thing that, when one gets one's teeth into writing something like this, the rest of life sort of becomes a hindrance to writing.  It's my experience, as a writer and having read many other writers on the subject, that such blessings are exceedingly rare in writing.  It is almost always a slog to get anything written at all.  In this, I envy Cervantes.

This is not to say that the action isn't equally thrilling.  The scene in the etching above is when Don Quixote is watching a puppet show.  He becomes so enthralled by the action that he enters into it.  I was reminded of a true story that the head of Shakespeare Orange County (my former boss) told me once about a production of Henry VIII in which he was playing the title role.  There was a scene between Henry and Cranmer which was so intense, acted with such tension, that one night a member of the audience climbed on stage and told them to cut it out.

It was also one of my favorite scenes in the book.  I searched for hours, but apparently Doré never drew the prophesying monkey.

At present I am with Quixote and Sancho in the court of a Duke and Duchess who have the main characters from one of their favorite books drop by quite unexpectedly one day to pay them a visit.  Childhood daydreams: resurrected!

Belief systems seem to be one of the themes addressed in the story.  I have chuckled more than once at Quixote's capacity to explain away inconvenient truths by attributing them to invisible enchanters who cloud the eyes of their enemies with illusion.  Even better, at one point Sancho tries to exploit this tendency, having observed Quixote, in the garden of his mind as it were, turn inns into castles, windmills into giants, lions into things that should be attacked, Sancho tries to convince Quixote that a poor, crass peasant girl is his beloved Dulcinea.  Quixote doesn't see it, which he, again, attributes to enchanters.  Maybe he is enchanted, maybe Sancho is enchanted, finally settling on Dulcinea being enchanted and he needing to save her from said enchantment.  This plan backfires on Sancho in a nearly literal way a few hundred pages later.  While Quixote's reality is not our consensus reality, it is nonetheless as hermetically sealed as our reality, as any functioning reality must be.

I should also like to say a few words about the footnotes.  Again, this entire reading experience has been infinitely enriched by the excellent and tastefully appropriate footnotes by Ms. Grossman.  While I say, again, that everyone should read this book, I will also say that every native of the Queen's English should read this specific translation of this book.  I am already bracing myself for the inevitable whiplash of my next book, the footnoteless and likely inferior translation of The Aeneid which sits at my right elbow while an angels sits on my left shoulder whispering "Go out and buy the Fagles translation tomorrow.  You'll be much happier if you do."  A suspiciously Mephistophelean voice from my other shoulder is whispering about thrift and our recent electric and medical bills.  

There is one particular footnote that burrowed its way deep into my brain like a thorn these past two days.  In it, Grossman points out a phrase, spoken by Sancho, which was suppressed by the Inquisition.  I shivered.  There is something about the grimmest of realities popping in to remind us that they exist while we are in the middle of a didactic tale on the virtues of creating one's own reality that almost demands a renewed commitment on the part of the reader, similar to a conversion in the face of persecution.  Quixote is a saint or even messianic figure for crazy wisdom and holy madness.  I see one of the lessons of the story to be along the lines of:

"Don't like this reality?  Make up a better one and live in that one instead!"

And I think there is some hope in that some of the characters are permitting the co-existence of Quixote's reality if not actively joining in on occasion.  For those examining from the heartbreaking perspective of without, the demands of our reality does not allow us to see the invisible enchanters as the true antagonists, but rather the true antagonists in this story are disbelief and the unwillingness to permit the reality of Quixote's devising.  

For my part, it is my intention to withdraw as much of this weekend as I can to spend on the remainder of this book.  One of the strange compulsions of reading a great book is the desire to spend so much time in it which only serves to make the end come that much more quickly.  Such is life.

Don Quixote Part 1: Part 2

I finished reading Part 1 and was torn.  Should I proceed immediately to Part 2 or should I return to the curriculum of the Harvard Classics series and move back to The Aeneid.  I sought the advice of my friend Christopher who strongly urged me to read Part 2 immediately.  He said it was even better than Part 1, which sold me as Part 1 was, as I've said, one of the most enjoyable reading experiences I've had in recent memory.

I still wonder why Dr. Eliot only included Part 1 in his series.  I mentioned this to Laurie with a few of my own guesses: the meta-content of Part 2 might be more in line with contemporary thought than Dr. Eliot (making Cervantes ahead of not only his own, but also of Dr. Eliot's time), maybe something as simple as space constraints, or at the end of Part 1 just sort of shrugging his shoulders and saying "Eh, I think you get the point."  Laurie suggested, and I think she may have it, that perhaps Part 1 was more historically influential as it was written quite some time before Part 2.  So much, in fact, that someone else came along and wrote a "false" Part 2 before Cervantes finished his authentic conclusion.  By the time the authentic Part 2 came to be, Cervantes was already a world renowned figure, with a reported offer to teach Castilian in China with Quixote 1 as the textbook, and even likely having a play penned by William Shakespeare based upon Cardenio's story (one of Shakespeare's "lost" plays, which hasn't stopped a few theater companies from mounting productions of what might be Shakespeare's Cardenio.)  The world in which Cervantes lived when he wrote Part 2 was a world that knew Cervantes.

So much of the action of Don Quixote does not involve Don Quixote.  So much of the delight in the parts of the action which do involve Don Quixote are not so much delightful for the action, but for the conversation and ideas.  In spite of the fact that this book is a rip-roaring good narrative after chivalry, I felt that one of the key delights of this book is that it is a book of ideas.  One of the other other key delights of this book is the scope of its humanity.  Of course, the major delight of the book is simply the sheer quality of the writing and story-telling.  It is amazing to have a book where you are involved in the story of two character that you love interrupted by another new character or circumstance bringing several chapters of a completely unrelated story, and you are in no way annoyed by this.  Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I am.  I was simply enchanted the whole way through.

Again, it is too huge to survey all that I loved: the story of the Moorish prisoner, Don Quixote's penitent madness in the wilderness, the canon's speech about a minister of culture, Don Quixote's response to the priest's disparaging remarks about books of chivalry (in which he expresses the Fruit of the Spirit he has exhibited since becoming a knight errant, which would be true if it weren't for the fact that he is barking mad and all of his assumptions are based upon premises which lay outside of consensus reality, leading him to, say, attack a group of penitents in order to free the effigy of the Virgin Mary that they are carrying), Anselmo and Lotario, Don Francisco, the battle against the wineskins, the return of the whipped child, and so on and so forth.  What I have read thus far dances in my head and I was sorry to see it end (and end so abruptly.)  I am grateful for the permission slip to make haste into Part 2.

In my previous post, I imagined I would break this reading into 3 responses, but I think 4 will be more likely at this point.  More soon.
 

Don Quixote Part 1: Part 1

Having already thrown the strictest version of Dr. Eliot's prescription to the wind, I am reading all of Don Quixote.  Dr. Eliot actually only demands Don Quixote Part 1.  Of course, this being my first time through the work, I have no idea why.  I do know that Part 2 was written and published many years later after someone else wrote a Further Adventures of Don Quixote.  This bastard version was to Cervantes what 50 Shades of Grey is to Twilight, what Mormonism is to Christianity, and what American Democracy is to the ancient Greek ideal of Democracy.  You can imagine Cervantes chagrin, to the extreme of writing a whole additional book.

I have decided to read the entire thing because, simply put, this is without a doubt one of the top five most enjoyable reading experiences of my life so far.  Other titles in the Harvard Classics series I have found enjoyable and profitable; I might have recommended them to certain parties.  The Grossman translation of Don Quixote, on the other hand, is something I would recommend to everyone.  It reads as easily as anything contemporary, and the footnotes are excellent.  In fact, there are several moments which would suffer enormously to the contemporary English speaking reader without the footnotes (specifically, the chapter where the priest culls Don Quixote's library would have been terribly dull without the footnotes.  With the footnotes, the reader grasps the brilliant satire).  There are also a few narrative gaps explained by the footnotes, gaps which likely inspired the Los Angeles Times critic to write the quote on the back cover which calls it "Cervantes's imperfect masterpiece."  Which seems to me like a nervy thing to say.  Your novel had better be pretty stunning if you're going to go around calling Don Quixote imperfect, book review-boy.

He was probably referring to Sancho Panza's magically disappearing and reappearing mule.

I have decided to post about each third of this book.

I found Cervantes to be charming and sublimely clever.  It is rare that I laugh out loud while reading, even rarer in 400 year old texts, but in this instance I have already several times and in public.  I have even chuckled a few times away from the book when thinking about the scene when Sancho leans over Quixote to see which teeth he lost in battle.

We start with a long series of sonnets at a friend of the author's suggestion and Latin phrases become a running gag.  Quixote is driven mad by reading novels, yes, very much like the one we are reading.  Early on we are treated to a chapter where, as I mentioned, a priest culls a library for books that should be burned.  The meta-commentary of that scene early on informs us that this is far more cunning and modern than one might expect from a work from the 1600s.  I cannot adequately express what a delight it is to read this book.

The windmills happen right out of the gate.  So much of the joy of the book is in the relationship between Quixote and Sancho Panza.  There is a sort of unspoken idea behind the text, bringing to mind Tristram Shandy, that we are in no hurry and shall take our time enjoying what is before us.  If Cervantes feels like taking three chapters to describe a novel that some of the characters found at an inn, well, he will do so without apology and we shall enjoy it (I am currently in one such section). 

But it goes beyond all of that.  It is also tender, brutal, and excruciatingly human.  It is also an excellent piece of literature.  Definitely on my short list for when I am inevitably exiled to a desert island.  To be completely honest, I am far more intimidated to write about this book than I am to read it.

More soon.

Introducing Quixote

"You're reading them out of order now?!!? Outrageous! 10 points from Ravenclaw!"

I decided to leapfrog over Virgil's Aeneid to read Don Quixote.  I fully understand that this overlap in material covered in Plutarch's Lives and I am sure that the Harvard Classics were put in that order for good reasons.  My reasoning is simple.  I really want to read Don Quixote.  I will simply read the Aeneid next. 

As a little glimpse inside my brain, I can tell you that I struggled for some time over feeling guilty about this.

I decided to go with the recent Edith Grossman translation.  Quixote is one of those books that, as I have often heard from trusted sources, has suffered much in translation.  One of the key concerns seems to be preservation of tone and, specifically, humor.  I had heard good things about the Raffel translation as well, but my tipping point was in the footnotes and in the recommendation of the Grossman by my friend Christopher.  I am well into the text and feel that this was the best possible choice.  It really is, as the endorsement by Library Journal claims on the cover, "the translation to beat."

The translators preface further serves to back up what I assume was Ms. Grossman's intentions/philosophy in her translation.  Simply put, she intends to preserve the experience that readers of the work in Spanish would have for readers of the work in English.  She writes, "...all human efforts to communicate- even in the same language- are equally utopian, equally luminous with value, and equally worth the doing."

I skipped most of Harold Bloom's introduction.  Look, I have enjoyed Professor Bloom's work in the past and I am sure I will again in the future.  I did not enjoy his introduction at this particular time.  He spends a great deal of the introduction comparing Cervantes to Shakespeare (who, granted, were contemporaries to the point where they actually died on the same day.)  I commented to Laurie that it struck me as being a bit like what Quentin Crisp said about television interviews:

A television interview, you see, is like a geography examination. You can’t study the whole world. Therefore, on the night before your exam, you take your atlas down from its shelf and open it at random. The map that you happen to expose is of China. You regard this as a sign from You-Know-Who and study China. The next day the main question in your paper is about France. You-Know-Who has sold you a pup. Don’t panic. Your answer begins, "France is not like China, which is . . . "

I haven't graphed it, but I suspect he spent more of his introduction talking about Shakespeare than Cervantes.

But that is not why I skipped it.  I skipped it because twice in the few pages I read, Professor Bloom committed the unforgivable sin of revealing major plot points of the work that I was about to read.  I am cursed with the sort of brain that remembers everything.  I don't care how famous you believe the work to be, if you are called upon to speak before a piece, it is part of your duty to preserve the wonderful experience before all of the audience, especially those who have never had the pleasure before.  If you are unable to do this, you should not be speaking in that context.  In fact, I would suggest to the publisher that what they have from Professor Bloom is not an Introduction that should ever be used for this piece.  What they have from Professor Bloom is probably an excellent Afterword.  I shall treat it as such and I shall return to comment on it once I've finished the book.

And then there is Cervantes' own Prologue.  I was instantly enchanted.  I literally smiled while I was reading it.  I am finding Cervantes to be delightful clever, but that is an terrible understatement.  I am finding Cervantes to be one of the cleverest authors I have ever had the pleasure to read.  In his prologue he establishes that we are to read a work of satire and that the target of the satire will largely be chivalry (although there seems to be a winking understanding that the scope of the work shall be far far larger.)  He also establishes the startling modernity of the work.  Having read Milton and Shakespeare in recent memory, I found it astoundingly modern to be reading not only a novel, but one in which the author periodically appears in the narrative. 

In short, I have no regrets over my decision.