Chekhov's Mistress
Brian Phillips Essay on Don Quixote
Brian Phillips essay “The First Person Don Quixote*” is a fabulous meditation. Phillips ventures into the book by saying…
“The question that I want to ask is this. Don Quixote is a book about the human experience of the aesthetic image. Why is it not written in the first person?…For if the ends of interpretation have habitually been philosophical— whether Don Quixote saves or destroys religious faith; whether his creator glorifies or fears imagination—then underlying them all is a question of experience, a question of character: the central question of what Don Quixote sees. Any interpretation of the novel must necessarily begin with either an answer to this question or what amounts to the same thing, a conclusion drawn from the absence of an answer.”
Set aside some time – the essay is 27 pages – and find out the answer. In some ways, his conclusion, with more eloquence and depth, is similar to some we’ve talked about here at 400 Windmills.
- Hudson Review (Vol. LVIII, No. 3: Autumn 2005). Essay is in pdf format.
comments
“He asserts his freedom at the cost of his freedom, and as the world comes more and more to resemble his madness, he is slowly alienated from himself. He becomes external to his own expereince.”
and
“Don Quixote transforms himself as a literary character by abstracting himself from his book.”
and
“What is extraordinary is that, in a novel in which ‘well-founded reality’ supposedly holds madness up to ridicule, these characters are allowed to fit perfectly within the conventions of their genres and to be accepted by others on that basis. Love gives them power to refashion themselves, and it is only Don Quixote for whom the action fails, only Don Quixote for whom the transformation is incomplete. In this sense we could argue that Don Quixote is one of the only characters in the book to live in the real world, since he is one of the only significant figures for whom the image fails to be actual. He is one of the only characters who is divided, as we are, between himself and the world he desires.”
and…
(I could go on, but I won’t.)
This has got to be the best Quixote essay I’ve ever read. Thank you so much for posting it!!
– amcorrea (03/19 at 04:12 PM)
Yeah, it is a great piece, very thoughtful. If you like that sort of thing, you may like Ortega Y Gassat’s work, “Meditations on Quixote.” It’s not all Quixote, but it’s a very ruminative book, that if you haven’t already read, I’m sure you’d enjoy.
– Bud Parr (03/20 at 03:18 PM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: March 17, 2006
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:2
- Links to this Post: Technorati
