Chekhov’s Mistess

It’s a Slow Road To Knighthood: A few thoughts on the end of Book I

If you happen to be reading Don Quixote at the same time as we here at 400 Windmills, you may have already breezed past us and wondered why such avid readers as those that would write about their reading would be so slow. There are but two readers in the world – to veer off from a Quixote quote – those that read a book at a time, and those that read many books at a time. Although I can only speak for myself, I will tell you friend that I can often be found moving a stack of my current reading around the house and in and out of my backpack at any given time. I think many of the others on this site do something similar.

I also read with pencil in hand and stop often to take notes and am occasionally sidetracked to a visit to the dictionary or one of the other books on the Quixote to puzzle over some thought or another, or even some other piece that suddenly seems relevant, like Walker Percy’s essay I mentioned last week.

I found a word on page 439 that I don’t think I’ve seen before: “sicced.” “The canon and the priest doubled over with laughter, the officers of the Brotherhood jumped up and down with glee, and everyone sicced them on as if they were dogs involved in a fight…”

It’s a puzzling word. It’s easy to guess its meaning as a verb to egg, as in everyone egged them on, meaning to urge on or incite, but that’s not good enough. It would seem that it would be the past tense form of sic, as in urging a dog to attack someone, but sic in its past tense is sicked. The Oxford English Dictionary does have a sicced, but it means “dry.”

So I imagine it’s a mistake, but whose? Ms. Grossman has said that there were many errors in the original edition she translated from and that she left many of those errors in as part of the book. Indeed, the topic of errors in this book has been the subject of much writing, mostly surrounding whether or not they were the printer’s doing or Cervantes and if to what degree they might have been intentional. This seems to me like it might be the author’s or editor’s error. I think Ana Maria said she had found other typos too, but at the time I dismissed them to the errors of the book.

Jarvis’s translation uses the word “hallooing,” which the O.E.D. defines as “1. a. intr. To shout ‘halloo’ to dogs in order to urge them on.  b. trans. To urge on or incite with shouts.” Even though that word is still odd (although I know it from Mary Poppins “View Halloo!”), it seems wholly appropriate given the situation and I think it’s verbally better sounding.

Ah, but trifles like this are how I get distracted. And there are other thoughts swimming around my head I hope to explore here. What exactly makes this book the first novel? I’ve read earlier books that seem just as much a novel and there are some aspects of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha that seem to me very much like those that came before it. I know there’s an essay on this in my Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, but I welcome anyone’s thoughts on the matter.

Despite the decade between publication of the two parts, it seems as though Book I ends so abruptly that Cervantes anticipated Book II, and if so, much earlier than actually happened. He published quite a bit in the meantime, and we know of the opportunistic fake part two, but the relationship of the two books leaves questions in my mind. It’s easy to see by the end of book I how Quixote’s reputation is spread, as everyone around him is amazed and intrigued by his antics (probably the only thing to keep in him alive and not in jail), which seems to be a setup for an additional tale or two.

The end of Book I indicates two things: a) Quixote died, which is not in the text, but in the poems “found” as part of the unaccounted-for third sally, and b) that the authorship of the tales of the third sally is different than the first. For the latter, perhaps Book II will reveal more information, and of course we know that DQ is alive, if not well.

And then there’s Sancho who becomes more entertaining as a foil to those that try to get Quixote home and an oddly loyal servant, sharing in some ways, Quixote’s madness and in other ways, ignorant but lucid and even wise (as has been noted here). All these different aspects of his character make him fascinating in my eyes and one of the main elements compelling me into the second half of Don Quixote. After all these tales of women, each more beautiful than the last and all more noble, although at times gullible, than the men around them, we are stunned with the reality of Sancho’s wife who pragmatically wants to know if the donkey (who has been lost and found) is okay.

My overall impression has improved since some of my earlier complaints. Although I think they are still valid, I am at this point, vested in the story. My problem with the humor in Don Quixote was alleviated a bit with the out-and-out brawl at the Inn that included practically the entire cast of characters. The resolution of that brawl seemed to me to be the climax of the book with the remainder just a winding down of the story to get our Gentleman back home.

Page references are to the hardback edition of the Grossman translation

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About this Post

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

Tags: Cervantes, Don Quixote

• Comments:0
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