Chekhov's Mistress
A Perfect Example of What Too Little Sleep and Too Much Reading Will Do
Ilan Stavans is a professor of Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College and, as someone who has translated “Don Quixote” in to “Spanglish,” intimate with the novel. In fact, he says that he has 80 different versions in his personal library. Stavans writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education about “Don Quixote the character…”
“too little sleep and too many chivalry novels have addled his brain”
…and Don Quixote the novel…
“Don Quixote might be dead, but his ever-ambiguous ghost lives on. His admirers—and, in unequal measure, detractors—are legion. Operas, musicals, theatrical and film adaptations, as well as fictional recreations keep piling up: Laurence Sterne was inspired by Don Quixote’s misadventures when writing Tristram Shandy; Gustave Flaubert paid homage to him in Madame Bovary, as did Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The Idiot. Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “Gimpel the Fool” can be read as a reimagining of the knight’s simplicity. And so on.
Anybody that is somebody has put forth an opinion, from Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, Salvador de Madariaga y Rojo, and Américo Castro, to name a handful of Iberians first, to Samuel Johnson, Denis Diderot, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Lionel Trilling, and Vladimir Nabokov. Over the years, Don Quixote has been a template of the times: The 18th century believed the knight to be a lunatic, lost to reason; the Victorians approached him as a romantic dreamer, trapped, just like artists and prophets, in his own fantasy; the modernists applauded his quest for an inner language; the postmodernists adore his dislocated identity. Psychiatrists have seen him as a case study in schizophrenia. Communists have turned him into a victim of market forces. Intellectual historians have portrayed him as a portent of Spain’s decline into intellectual obscurantism.”
…and sadly, a truth about “Don Quixote” in the modern publishing world…
“One wonders: Would Don Quixote pass the test and be published in New York today? I frankly doubt it. It would be deemed what editors call “a trouble manuscript”: too long, the story line problematic, the plot stuffed with too many adventures that do too little to advance the narrative and too many characters whose fate the reader gets attached to but who suddenly disappear. And that awkward conceit of a character finding a book about himself! The style! Those careless sentences that twist and turn!”
Because of the anniversary this year of the novel’s publication, there are many articles out there, but this one I thought was particularly interesting in its broad coverage and appreciative tone. I particularly like the way Stavans ended the article…
“To be an underdog, to be a fool content with one’s delusions, is that what modernity is about? Or is it the impulse to pursue those delusions into action? Undoubtedly we will continue asking ourselves those questions as the enthusiastic visionary starts his fifth century, still as vibrant and mischievous, as resourceful and controversial as ever.”
comments
It’s funny that the sentence that describes why Dom Quixote would be a “trouble manuscript” practically defines post-modern literature, including some heavyweights which are as popular as serious writers can be and wouldn’t have much trouble getting published in New York.
– Guilherme (03/15 at 02:53 PM)
Even though I don’t think his career really took off until the Quixote, Cervantes was, I believe, already an established writer by the time he published this book (and fairly prolific). So, maybe he would have better luck than Stavan’s thinks. Still, I would imagine that the marketing department would have him pare the book way back - I can hear them now… “Miguel, you really must cut out that windmill scene, no one will buy it.”
– Bud Parr (03/15 at 10:53 PM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: March 13, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:2
- Links to this Post: Technorati
