the ramble dump

'Now I must tear my garments, scatter my armour and dash my head against these rocks, and perform other similar actions that will amaze you.'

Don Quixote, or, in full, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, is a novel of approximately 1,000 pages published by Miguel de Cervantes in two parts, the first in 1605 and the second in 1615. It charts the escapades and misadventures of, as the title says, the Spanish Hidalgo Don Quixote, who suffers from a strange sort of madness brought about by reading too many chivalry books. The deluded Don Quixote firmly believes that he is a knight errant and that the universe must work according to the laws of chivalry as he has read them, to the point that he imagines such things as a local farmgirl as a lady, princess and the subject of his affections despite never having seen her; an inn as a castle; and, most famously, the windmills of La Mancha as ferocious giants.

It's taken me about a month to read the first part. The book has followed me across Europe on my own adventures to London, Venice and Lake Garda. I finished it yesterday, and decided, because I had so much to say about it already, that today I'd write about what I've read so far.

Don Quixote begins as a simple, farcical parody of the chivalric romance genre that had been popular not long before the book was first published. It is episodic in format (like the books it parodies), chronicling various humorous encounters that Don Quixote and his squire, Sancho Panza, have as they venture out and in his deluded way Quixote mistakes things for things that they are not. Characters and events more true to reality are forever conflicting with the archetypes of his books, triggering predictable but entertaining conflicts which usually end in the knight and his squire getting beaten to within an inch of their lives.

Cervantes writes a bit like Shakespeare in the way that the language flourishes, befitting of Don Quixote's lengthy declarations of the convoluted specifics of knight-errantry, but also just as impressive when Cervantes is being less tongue-in-cheek. No doubt credit is due also to John Rutherford, whose translation I read. The sentences are always lengthy, especially in dialogue, but even when Don Quixote is talking complete rubbish it can be absurdly captivating, flowing like a strange but fascinating dream, and sometimes I found myself just as caught up in it as the often staggeringly simple and naïve Sancho, who goes along, though often reluctantly, with everything that his master does and says.

As much as I was enjoying it, I did begin to wonder if its episodic format could really last for 1,000 or even 500 pages. But Cervantes, probably realising the same thing, soon introduces fresh ways to poke fun. The first is through having multiple narrators, supposedly historians who are recounting Don Quixote's life. One sequence stops suddenly half-way through as the narrator claims to have reached the end of the written records available, only for it to be continued by another in the next part, who introduces it with his account of how he is someone who enjoyed reading about the adventures so far and was disappointed that they didn't continue, only to then come across further writings by chance while out shopping, which themselves are supposedly written by some Moorish historian, which he then got translated. The story then continues just as it had done, but with Cervantes now able to play with the potential unreliability and conflict that different narrators might result in.

In this way and others, Cervantes plays with the literary conventions themselves as much as playing with the characters. This occurs on many levels, from satirical sonnets in his direct parody of chivalric romance, to detailed reviews by characters of invidivual chivalric books (and later other things); to constant switching between different sidestories, arrived at through the accounts of the people they meet (sometimes hopping between different people for different perspectives) or manuscripts they find - all continually distracting from Don Quixote's adventures and giving the novel a meta sort of dimension. These sidestories are often surprisingly sober compared to Don Quixote's misadventures, and most of the time seem to follow very conventional chivalric or romantic themes, with probably all of them involving some incredibly beautiful and virtuous woman and the conflicts of the men who have fallen in love with her, to the point that the beautiful women start to feel very generic and the stories a bit ridiculous, which is possibly what Cervantes intended. While all these sidestories appear to be delivered in a straight-faced way, it all gets very farcical when, through amazing coincidence, about half a dozen of the stories and their characters converge at an inn and are brought to their happy conclusions, following which the attention of all the characters is then brought back to the madness of Don Quixote.

This occasional sobriety also emerges in speeches made by the characters themselves. Towards the end of Part I, the priest and the canon discuss Don Quixote's madness, which leads them on to their shared loathing of chivalry books, which itself then leads on to deep discussion of theatrical plays (the new popular thing during Cervantes' time), in which the priest describes why he dislikes such popular things because they are made for the ignorant masses at the expense of real, intelligent, thought-provoking art. The fact that the novel so suddenly veers off into this expansive, philosophical conjecturing is something tongue-in-cheek in itself because Cervantes must know he's being so blatant in using his characters to put forward these opinions (in the same way that he cheekily reviewed other chivalric books at the start). They're still thought-provoking moments, though, and in the discussion of theatre it seems as though Cervantes is trying to make a serious point, although it's not always as clear if it's Cervantes' own opinion or if he's just playing devil's advocate.

Probably the most surprisingly lucid comments of all came from Don Quixote himself. In Chapter XXXVIII, as part of another lengthy speech on chivalry, he had this to say:

'A blessing on those happy ages that did not know the dreadful fury of these devilish instruments of artillery, whose inventor is, I feel sure, being rewarded in hell for his diabolical creation, by which he made it possible for an infamous and cowardly hand to take away the life of a brave knight as, in the heat of the courage and resolution that fires and animates the gallant breast, a stray bullet appears, nobody knows how or from where - fired perhaps by some fellow who took fright at the flash of the fiendish contraption, and fled - and in an instant puts an end to the life and loves of one who deserved to live for many a long age. And when I think about this I am tempted to say that it grieves me to the depths of my soul that I ever took up this profession of knight-errantry in such a detestable age as this one in which we are living, because even though there is no danger that can strike fear into me I am concerned when I think that gunpowder and lead might deprive me of the opportunity to make myself famous all over the face of the earth and by the might of my arm and the blade of my sword. But let heaven do what it pleases, for I shall be more highly esteemed, if I accomplish my aim, for having exposed myself to dangers greater than were ever faced by knights errant of centuries past.'

Don Quixote is clearly still under some illusion about the worth of his chivalric acts, and likely misguided with his quest to make himself 'famous all over the face of the earth', but the slightly frightening thing is that after reading that, I suddenly sort of understood his madness. Most of us like to feel that things have some sort of meaning; that we as people have meaning and that we can stand for something, which is increasingly difficult the more impersonal the world feels. The chivalric, noble values and the kind of honour that Don Quixote believes in may well be ridiculous and empty, but so is a world where you and your actions mean nothing and where personal responsibility, dignity or character seem to count for far less, and as Don Quixote (or Cervantes) himself points out, there's a feeling of some injustice in the kind of world that Don Quixote regretted to live in. There's always the danger that we can place too much importance on, and become deluded by, the overly romantic notions or ideals of traditions or past ways of life; but at the same time that Don Quixote's ambitions sound ridiculous, I felt, in this instance, that there was something, if not noble¹, honourable², admirable or praiseworthy, then at least in some way understandable - or even, dare I say it, reasonable - about the fact that he is trying anyway.

Finally, despite starting out as a simple episodic parody written for popular consumption³, through the development of its characters and exploration of its themes, Don Quixote exists as a good example that what can start out as the subject of a few laughs can soon go much deeper than first imagined, and although it is not the most tightly written of novels and of considerable length, it has remained interesting and enjoyable throughout. I'll be reading Part II before long.

^{1 2}Both nobility and honour are themselves vague ideas and prone to romantic illusions of grandeur.

³ Interestingly enough, according to Oscar Wilde, this would prevent Don Quixote from counting as 'art', yet later on, the priest's discussion of popular theatre highlights some views of art that match very closely and specifically with Wilde's own.

Labels: don quixote, i am the ramblemaster, language, literature, oscar wilde, rabbit-hole theory, shakespeare

# posted by Chris @ 5:30 PM 0 comments