Chekhov’s Mistess

D.Q. Article

Hey boys and girls:

I just came across this article in Prospect magazine. It’s of the kind Arguing for the Importance of Quixote. Here’s the take:

Cervantes is celebrated as the first and greatest of novelists. Less appreciated is Don Quixote’s own role as the founding father of the Enlightenment. His delusion is the key to reason.

Here’s a few key points to ponder:

• "But Cervantes could not have understood that he was also composing something else, a determining text, the first story to be aware at every moment of its own fictitiousness, the book which would send a continent of writers off in search of a new identity—the original modern novel."
• "The day Quixote and Sancho rode out from their unnamed village, a fictional blueprint came to life. Don Quixote is our prototypical text, the first story to emerge out of a self-awareness of its own fictional form, to take as its theme the gap between appearance and reality; to be, in our terms, modern."
• "We first realise through Don Quixote that the novel exists as a new kind of meaning, a sign, as Carlos Fuentes writes "of a modern divorce between words and things." On the other hand, in Quixote’s search for a new union between reality and the words to articulate it, we also realise that it is dangerous to attempt this enterprise alone. The novel has become a social form for a very good reason: the identity that emerges from each of us is composed not only of our egos but our links with other egos. How can the novel tell us who we are, or ask us if we recognise anything human in it, without reflecting on those links?"
• "A century later, Dickens’s and Thackeray’s conversion of Quixote’s horizontal and eschatological wanderings into fiction that journeyed vertically, socially and materially, was mirrored by Balzac and Stendhal. In Germany, Don Quixote may have been the last book Kleist ever read—found with his barest possessions after his suicide—while in France it was the first that the six-year-old Flaubert read, in an abridged version with 34 large illustrations."

There’s also an interesting biographical sketch of Cervantes. Among other things, we learn:

• "In 1575, returning to Spain, he and Rodrigo were captured by Barbary corsairs. Cervantes was enslaved to a Greek renegade at Algiers. Repeated escape attempts failed: twice betrayed, he then saw his brother liberated when funds sent by his parents were inadequate to ransom them both. Resold to the viceroy of Algiers and betrayed again by a Dominican monk, he was finally released after five years of slavery when two Trinitarian friars successfully ransomed him."
• "At Seville in 1587 he found employment provisioning the Armada and was excommunicated for excessive zeal in collecting wheat."
• "He found work as a tax collector and was imprisoned at least four, possibly six times for everything from irregularities in his accounts to allegedly making a pass at the sister/niece/mistress of a (probably tax-evading) landowner."

And, lastly, some words about the Grossman translation:

• "Anglophone readers have never had a better chance to confront that greatness directly. Edith Grossman’s new translation (apart from brief confusions of "thee" and "thou") is so good that it ought to compel us to start reading the Quixote again. Her text restores Cervantes’s readability, the vitality of his dialogue and characterisation and the darkening quality of his vision."

comments

Thanks, Scott. The comment about Quixote’s insanity playing a part in the founding of the Enlightenment is puzzling with regard to time (Isn’t 1605 a little early for the Enlightenment? Wikipedia tells me it’s an 18th c. phenom, stretching back to the 17th, but the beginning of the 17th seems a bit of a stretch to me--that’s a quibble with the author.) Nonetheless, it chimes with a common observation about Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, complete with its own mad, foolish protagonist and full of (what appear to us as) postmodern devices (i.e. my mistress is beautiful, turn the page to see--followed by a blank page upon which we are to draw our own mistress...). People say that understanding Shandy is one of the best ways to understand John Locke.

So, why do these inspired giant egos have attributed to them what Hazlitt called “The Spirit of the Age”? And what mad protagonist best helps us understand our age?

    – Anne Fernald (05/01  at  07:33 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: April 29, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:1
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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