Chekhov’s Mistess

Humor is Just Another Word for Blood and Bile

This, as I hope you can tell, is a follow up to my post “The Knight of the Sorrowful (Blood Caked, Puke Covered) Face” where I complained about all the gross-out humor in Don Quixote. Imagining that many readers have encountered this difficulty in the book’s 400 year history, I sought out some scholarship for comfort. Fortunately, I didn’t have to look far.

Nabokov is at his most sarcastic when, in the “Cruelty and Mystification” chapter of his lectures, he attacks those in the academic community for ignoring the cruelty aspects of the book:

“I have listed out a whole set of jollities for the merry young student to choose from…So we start in chapter 3 with the innkeeper who allows a haggard madman to stay at his inn just in order to laugh at him and have his guests laugh at him. We go on with a shriek of hilarity to the half-naked lad flogged with a belt be a hefty farmer. We are convulsed with laughter again in chapter 4 when a mule driver pounds the helpless Don Quixote like wheat in a mill. In chapter 8 another belly laugh is given unto us by the servants of some traveling monks, who pull every hari from Sancho’s beard and kick him mercilessly. What a riot, what a panic!”

That reaction is of course not surprising. What is surprising is the way readers and scholars have reacted to this so-called humor. Adrienne Martín’s “Humor and violence in Cervantes,” in the Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (excerpt and contents), summarizes some of the critical thought on the topic, and I will in turn summarize some of that here to try and come to terms with my feelings about the book’s humor.

I think most of our contributors here (at 400 Windmills) would fall into the camp of seeing Don Quixote as a romantic (quixotic!) hero rather than a fool and the book itself as something serious instead of satire. Martín points out that there has been ongoing debate over whether or not Quixote is a serious, philosophical work, or a comedy. I find it odd that there would be two camps on the matter, because I see the book as containing elements of both and that is probably why (gross-out humor aside) it is so successful. I can easily think of Joyce, Wilde, Bulgakov, Shakespeare and Twain as just a few writers who have successfully shrouded serious subjects in humor.

Martín quotes Milan Kundera as saying essentially that Quixote is the first Western novel to elevate comedy to the level of humor. Kundera says the difference is that humor, “the other kind of comedy” is “subtler and infinitely precious… We laugh not because someone is ridiculed, mocked or even humiliated, but because suddenly the world shows itself in its ambiguity, things lose their apparent meaning, people are revealed to be different from what they themselves thought they were.”

He’s right too. My original post only dealt with the gross-out humor that I found distracting. I said then that without the dialogue, I probably would not be reading the book. And it is the dialogue where the humor lies. Cervantes was a playwright before a novelist and I think (as others have said) it shows. The dialogue seems to create a visual element, so that when our Ingenius Gentleman gets carried away hearing Cardenio’s story and raves about characters in a book, I can see the excitement on his face. Sancho’s retorts, even when in compromising positions, are usually understated, and his malaprops (usually pointed out by Grossman) are always funny.

At the risk of sounding like I’m recanting my earlier post (which I’m not), even some of the more basic gags, like Quixote wearing a basin for a helmet, put him out on a limb of ridicule. It’s not only funny, but telling too in the sense that it adds to his ensemble of anything-but knightly accouterments.

But we’re still left with the violent, gross humor to reconcile in some way as readers. We can ignore it, skimming through, see it as part of the whole and embrace it (for lack of a better way to put it) or at least try to find some meaning or purpose in it.

The word humor is “one of the most elusive and unstable used in literary analysis,” Martín says before going into the word’s historical significance.

“Its linguistic roots lie in the classical medical doctrine known as humoral theory which was first expounded in the fifth century BC by Hippocrates, the Greek physician and ethicist known as the Father of Medicine., and in the second century AD by the Greek physician and philosopher, Galen. Reasserted in Cervantes’ time, this doctrine stressed the importance of the four bodily humors – phlegm, blood, bile and black bile – as the sources of life. It was beleived that a correct proportion between the four humors produced robust physical and mental health, while an imbalance was believed to cause illness. In his best selling treatise… the Spanish physician Juan Huarte de San Juan insisted that each individual’s physical and psychological profile is determined by his or her relative proportion, or temper, of humors. By natural extension, during the late sixteenth century the term humor was used throughout Europe to mean mental disposition or temperament. Huarte asserted that because an equal balance of the humors is impossible owing to the rigors of climate, customs and life-style, all people are to some extent ”distempered,“ or mentally imbalanced. Thus he established a causal progression between humor, individual idiosyncrasy, and madness. Because of humoral differences – temperament – all human beings display their own particular brand of folly. At the same time the word humor is irrevocably linked to the idea of folly, madness, and extravagant behavior. ”To have a humor“ or to be ”humorous“ assumed the meaning of ”to be mad.“

Pardon me for quoting the entire paragraph, but it’s interesting in it’s own right. Huarte, Martín says, was a source of inspiration for Cervantes as well as other writers of the time. Martín goes further with the role of humor and madness in Cervantes’ time, and I think it’s worth repeating here:

”For readers other than Cervantes’ contemporaries, Don Quixote’s madness is highly problematic and many (including Vladimir Nabokov) either find it difficult to laugh at this highly idiosyncratic madman, or do not find his antics funny at all. However, it should be remembered that madness or folly was traditionally associated with the risible throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. “Natural” fools (the mentally defective) were not institutionalized but integrated into medieval communities and supported by them as dependents, and were a ready source of amusement for societies less sensitive to the handicapped. The fifteenth century also witnessed the rise and rapid development of the “artificial” fool. Whether simple public entertainers or highly esteemed court jesters, these “buffoons” or “fools” assumed the guise of the mentally imbalanced to make a living of ridiculing and criticizing with the impunity traditionally granted to the mentally deficient. This folly, real or feigned, was a highly visible presence in Renaissance society.“

This fits, I think, what we expected and what Cervantes has shown us, but it’s hard to come to terms with the ethos of his time, even when you consider our own society’s treatment of ”mentally challenged,“ which is usually something like brushing them aside. Still, we aren’t left with anything to make us not want to ignore the bothersome comedic aspects of the book.

In much of the essay Martín establishes Don Quixote as ”foundational fiction of the literature of madness.“ He says that folly is at the core of Cervantes’ philosophy, that his laughter is a…

”laughter that ridicules but also understands our folly and our humanity. Cervantes’ targets were both social and literary; Don Quixote is to a great extent a comment on the problematic nature of “reason” in an age of of social unreason, one in which Spain’s semitic and other minorities continued to be subjected to repressive ideological and physical control by the state… Through the metaphor of madness Cervantes incorporates marginality, authenticity, and the transgressions of conventions into life and literature. He is violating social norms by suggesting that self-imposed madness is the only valid response to the institutionalized madness of society; at the same time his new “novel” transgresses current literary norms and maintains the immediacy of resonse we now associate with the humorous.“

Beyond the issue of madness, Martín puts the ”comic strain of mockery, laughter, and slapstick“ into context of the concept of ”carnival.“ Citing the work of twentieth century Russian scholar, Mikhail Bakhtin, Martín says that ”Carnival was a time of freedom and laughter, a festive season of misrule and license when established order was reversed.“ This is interesting because in many ways, like his wearing the barber’s basin for a helmet, Don Quixote’s behavior is a reversal of what his probably dignified life would have been like. But what about Sancho?

Bakhtin wrote that ”a fundamental strand of Cervantes’ parodies is a ‘coming down to earth,’ a contact with the reproductive and generating power of the earth and body.“ He associates ”Sancho with the body, the materiality of human existence: ‘Sancho’s materialism, his potbelly, appetite, his abundant defication, are of the absolute lower level of grotesque realism on the gay bodily grave (belly, bowels, earth) which has been dug for Don Quixote’s abstract and deadened idealism.’“ And to bring this point home, Martín uses an example from the fulling mills (book 1, ch. 20), which directly pits Sancho’s bowels against Quixote’s stubborn idealism. ”The indiscreet noises, the smell, the reader’s glimpse of Sancho’s outsized buttocks are, as Bakhitin says, a bodily and popular (and hilarious) corrective to Don Quixote’s misplaced idealism.“

This does give me a little comfort in the sense that what I hoped for would be to feel like the grotesque antics in the book served some purpose other than entertainment. Thinking of Bakhtin’s comments, maybe they do. None of that will make me laugh at what I don’t feel is funny, but maybe allow me to read without the mental jeers that I once had.

Martín adresses other issues on humor, such as its relation to the books Cervantes was parodying, the concept of masquerade (related to carnival) ever present in the story, and some more in-depth but less satisfying issues like the ”Christian desire for penitence“ and the infantilization of Sancho.

Ultimately, we are still left with humor that was more effective when it was written than today. Violence and Humor, whether subtle and complex, as in Quixote and Sancho’s relationship, or grotesque and bodily, is I think inextricably linked to the story Cervante’s was trying to tell. So while I may not be comfortable with everything that I read, I will at least try to see beyond my earlier characterization of Don Quixote as cartoon.

comments

Great and patient post. I’m inclined to be less charitable. I’m not convinced by those who call out the humor as subversive; they remind me of people who try to make a case for the potty humor of South Park as being in some sort of American libertarian tradition. The needlessly specific details of Sancho’s excretory functions were the last straw in my deciding that it was mostly just to give audiences a laugh.

There’s plenty of the same in Rabelais and Chaucer, and whta I keep in mind when reading Cervantes is that it comes from a time where the delineation between popular and sophisticated was nowhere near as discrete and distant as it is today. Authors felt compelled to add layers of meaning, and the toilet humor seems to be a pretty evident sop to those too dim to figure out the (rather broad!) satire. I.e., I would argue that even the satire isn’t the lowest level on which Cervantes intended the book to be appreciated. And I myself am wary of seeing the book too seriously given the multitude of intentions behind Quixote.

    – David Auerbach (05/14  at  03:16 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: May 12, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Cervantes, Don Quixote

• Comments:1
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