Chekhov’s Mistess

First impressions, ch. 15 to 27

(Sorry I’ve been having so many problems recently with getting entries properly posted; sometimes my Treo likes this site and sometimes it doesn’t. Anyway, here is my fourth attempt at posting today’s entry – hopefully it will be the one that finally works.)

So before I start today, another terrible confession (as I am wont to do here): I’m beginning to understand why so many people abandon DQ halfway through the book. Oh, don’t get me wrong, the book gets no worse as you progress than it was when you started; it gets exactly no worse, in fact, as well as exactly no better either. Which I suppose is fine if you are a contemporary reader in 1605, used to literature at that point being primarily serial short stories featuring the same characters that essentially repeat their adventures from one chapter to the next. But when you’re a reader in 2005, used to thinking of a novel as a self-contained unit instead of as a series of related short stories, who’s been asked to contribute original critical thought about the book on a regular basis, it can definitely start to become a problem. So, I read five chapters and didn’t have anything new to say; then I read another five chapters and still didn’t have anything new to say; and now I’m actually at the end of one of the major sections, so I thought I’d better post something just to assure everyone else here that I haven’t died.

(Well, okay, that plus my newest travel book is finally getting released to the public this week, and I’ve been extra busy recently trying to get that ready [I’m a self-publisher], which is also why you haven’t heard from me in awhile. We’ll mostly chalk it up, though, to what I was saying above.)

So what new can I discuss, then, for chapters 15 through 27? Well, how about the changing relationship between Quixote and Sancho Panza? In these latest chapters, in fact, Panza comes perilously close to fully understanding just how crazy Quixote is, and abandoning him for good because of it. And why wouldn’t he, really? In just these 13 chapters alone he has his saddlebags stolen; is fed a fake healing potion that makes him violently ill for hours; is tossed into the air over and over again by a rowdy group of customers at an inn; and has his ass kicked more times than we can even count. And even worse, he’s actually starting to notice some of the insane things Quixote does and believes, and is becoming less convinced by the day of the elaborate justifications Quixote has for his insane behavior (like from chapter 25, paraphrased – “Well, of course my magic helmet looks like a chamberpot! Didn’t I tell you that we’re surrounded by the enemy’s sorcerers?”).

Why now? Why be oblivious to the obvious for so long, just to start noticing it at this particular moment? That’s a question for which I don’t really have an answer. Maybe because his injuries are becoming more severe each time he goes along with his insane master, thus making Panza less willing to go along with them anymore? Or maybe Cervantes himself was just getting sick of Panza always going along with his master, and wanted to shake up things in the story a bit? I get the strong impression during these chapters, in fact, that Cervantes the author had no better idea of where the story was going than we the readers have as well…which really should not come as much of a surprise, given that he was grappling with the entire concept of a “novel” at a point when the genre was still brand-new.

Let’s not forget that for a long time literature was served up to the public as a series of short stories, not as one book-length narrative that took both you and the characters from point A to point B to point C of emotional development. (In fact, despite the label attached to DQ as “the first modern novel,” it could be argued that one must go all the way to Charles Dickens before seeing the rise of the “popular novel” of which we picture today when discussing the term.) I suppose it’s okay that DQ seems to be floundering a bit at this point, given that Cervantes was probably grappling with the idea at the same time. He seems restless himself at points, frankly, almost inserting in-jokes into the text that basically say, “Yeah, I know, we’re just repeating ourselves all over again at this point, aren’t we?” It’s something to keep in mind, I suppose, when starting to lose our modern attention once fully inside a classic book like this – that literature back then was much more like sitcoms, with a shared set of characters who went through remarkably similar adventures with each episode, ones that could later then be viewed in a different order without losing the sense of what was happening or who these characters were. The idea of a character being a different type of person by the end of these episodes than they were at the beginning is an idea from our time, one that writers like Cervantes were just starting to wrestle with in the late 1500s, so I suppose we should cut him some slack for moving so slowly as far as this is concerned.

It’s interesting, I think, to notice when Panza’s full belief in Quixote comes rushing back; namely, when Quixote describes Dulcinea of Toboso and Panza realizes that he’s talking about Aldonza Lorenzo. And of course, it only works because Panza believes that Lorenzo is worth worshipping, and only believes so because he’s a comedic villager character who admires all these traits in Lorenzo that we would normally abhor – she’s stocky, she’s muscular, she’s ugly and she’s loud. It’s great, I think, how one piece of verifiable truth allows Panza to so quickly forget all the indignities he’s occurred so far – the beatings, the robberies, the whole getting-vomited-on-in-the-face thing, etc. And finally, a small quote from chapter 26 (Grossman ed.) that nicely sums up my still-positive feelings about DQ, despite some frustration this month over these particular chapters: “Although they already knew of the madness of Don Quixote and knew what kind of madness it was, whenever they heard about it they were astonished all over again.” Amen, brother!

comments

Hi Jason,

I totally understand the, sort of, indifference that results of Sancho’s repeated mishaps.  Your reading of it as more of a “sit-com”, or installment-type technique is pretty spot-on.  The increasingly ridiculous scenarios involving Sancho tend to translate in a more “Laurel and Hardy” way. 

I think, however, it helps to read the first book of Don Quijote as just that, a book in itself, seperate from the second book.  If you read the first part of Don Quijote as a whole book, with a begining, middle and end, Sancho’s mishaps come across more as the peak of the plot, repetitive nonetheless, but perhaps purposeful in driving home the point of their relationship (Sancho and Quijote) before the novel comes to a close. 

Reading the first part as just the first part of a long (continious) novel it would seem that Cervantes is cramming way too many experiences into way too few chapters, which makes more sense for a short novel (and that is exactly what Don Quijote was when it was first published) but doesn’t really makes sense (in terms of timing) for a long novel.

Oh, and congratulations on your travel book!

    – heather (05/09  at  11:31 PM)

Great point, Heather, and I admit that there are definitely some limitations to the “blind” reading I’m doing of DQ 

    – Jason Pettus (05/10  at  01:09 PM)

Great point, Heather, and I admit that there are definitely some limitations to the “blind” reading I’m doing of DQ right now (basically, where I’m commenting on chapters without knowing what’s coming next in the plot). When I get to the end of Book 1, I’ll be revisiting this comment you’ve made and seeing how Sancho’s mishaps fall into the overall arc of the book’s development.

    – Jason Pettus (05/10  at  01:11 PM)

I’ve started reading Nabokov’s lectures (I really enjoy his wry commentary), and both of your thoughts coincide with a lot of what he says.  Here are some pertinent quotes on structure:

“I think there can hardly be any doubt as to the fact the Don Quixote was originally intended by Cervantes to be a long short story, providing amusement for an hour or two.  The first sally, the one from which Sancho is still absent, is obviously conceived as a separate novella: it reveals a unity of purpose and accomplishment, capped with a moral.  But then the book grew and expanded and came to include matters of all kinds. [...] In part two (without sections) Cervantes regains full control over his central theme.

“In order to give the work some crude unity, Sancho is made, here and there, to recall former incidents.  But in the evolution of literature the seventeenth-century novel--especially the picaresque novel--had not yet evolved consciousness, conscious memory permeating the whole work, when we feel that the characters remember and know events that we remember and know about them.  This is a developement of the nineteenth century.  But in our book even the artificial recalls are haphazard and are half-hearted.

“Cervantes, in writing his work, seems to have had alternate phases of lucidity and vagueness, deliberate planning and sloppy vagueness, much as his hero was mad in patches.  Intuition saved Cervantes.  As Groussac remarks, he never saw his book in front of him as a perfect composition, standing aloof, completely separate from the chaos of matter from which it had grown.  Not only that, not only did he never forsee things, but also he never looked back.  One has the impression that when he was in the act of writing the second part, he did not have a copy of the first part on his writing desk; never thumbed through it: he seems to remember that first part as an average reader would, not as a writer, not as a student.  Otherwise it is impossible to explain how he managed, for instance, while in the very act of criticizing the errors committed by the author of the spurious continuation of Don Quixote to make even worse blunders in the same connection, in regard to the same characters.  But, I repeat, the intuition of genius saved him” (28-29).

Later, Nabokov quotes a translator (Samuel Putnam) quoting another translator (John Ormsby), regarding the rationale of the “inset tales”:

“‘He [Cervantes] had these stories ready written, and it seemed a good way of disposing of them; it is by no means unlikely that he mistrusted his own powers of extracting from Don Quixote and Sancho material enough to fill a book; but, above all, it is likely that he felt doubtful about his venture.  It was an experiment in literature . . . he could not tell how it would be received; and it was well, therefore, to provide his readers with something of the sort they were used to, as a kind of insurance against total failure.  The event did not justify his diffidence.  The public . . . skimmed the tales hastily and impatiently, eager to return to the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho; and the public has ever since done much the same’” (35).

[In the lecture notes, Nabokov “adds an interlined comment: ‘Harvard students, of course, do *not* skim.’"]

Heh.  And then there are those of us who enjoyed the respite and inclusion of additional characters (at least for the time being).

    – amcorrea (05/12  at  08:11 PM)

Also--according to Nabokov--the climax of Part I happens in Ch. 45, so we do have more to look forward to.  Things won’t stay static forever!

    – amcorrea (05/12  at  08:18 PM)

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• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: May 09, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

• Comments:5
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