Chekhov's Mistress
The Enamoured Knight, by Douglas Glover
From The Enamoured Knight chapter “Critics in Disarray:”
One can quickly become confused, bemused and befuddled reading the file on Don Quixote. Walter Starkie, in the introduction to his translation, writes, “Out of a spirit of fin de siécle melancholy sprang Don Quixote, the first modern novel of the world…” Harold Bloom, In How to Read and Why, calls it “The first and best of all novels, which nevertheless is more than a novel…” In the New York Times, Carlos Fuentes writes, “If for many reasons Don Quixote is the first modern novel, it is pre-eminently because…” Walter Benjamin called it “the earliest perfect specimen of the novel.”
But other critics tell us that it’s not the first novel or not even a novel at all. Ian Watt, in The Rise of the Novel, begins the history of the novel with Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in England in the early eighteenth century because it reflects the common-sense realism of the rising English middle class. André Malraux said Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Cléves (1678) was the first novel because it concentrates on depicting the inner emotional life of a character. In From Dawn to Decadence, Jacques Barzun gives credit for inventing the new genre to the anonymous author of La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1554).
What makes the work, though short, a true novel is this double subject: character and social scene, both treated matter-of-factly and by inference critically. Don Quixote does indeed contain elements of the novel, but it merges them will allegory and philosophy. It is not bound by the plausible, whereas the novel pretends to be genuine history, full of real people and places. (From Dawn to Decadence, III)
It’s actually not so difficult to figure out what the problem is here. When you look at what critics say about the novel, you find roughly five schools of thought; let’s call them the strict realist, the hybrid, the weak thematic, the easy-going (romantic and post modern) and the experimental. The problem then is that no-one actually ever tells you there are five schools of thought. The poor reader or neophyte novelist assumes everyone is on the same map when the subject of novels comes up when, in fact, there are multiple maps and they’re not congruent. They have fallen into what Milan Kundera calls “the slough where everyone thinks he understands everything without understanding anything.”
I chose this sample for a few reasons. One, I think it illustrates Glover’s ease of discussion, the way he approaches the reader as if talking to a small group of friends, with intelligence but nothing to prove other than his point. Glover, a novelist, puts himself in the position of a reader; like in this passage in his section on strict realists: “Novels are about people like us, by which I mean a broad coalition of decently educated readers of no fixed ethnic or national address – as opposed to gods…” Even though he means this in a different context, I do think it’s applicable to his perspective.
Another reason I chose the above quoted passage is that it forms the basis for much of Glover’s discussion. Don Quixote’s place as a novel is something that has long confused me and Glover addresses the very reason for my lacuna: conceptions of the novel are fluid. While I never thought understanding its status as a novel critical to understanding the book itself, Glover makes for an interesting approach to discussion and meanwhile provides a useful taxonomy of schools of thought on the novel, particularly for the reader who has not spent classroom time on the subject.
I think it worthwhile to look at the table of contents, because that in itself gives an indication that this is at the very least an entertaining book:
Contents
Love and Books, an Introduction…
Recovering the Text: Technical and Analytical
A basic reading…
Plot and Subplot, Large Structural Considerations…
The Labyrinth of Mirrors…
Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls, or How the magician Seems to Disappear into the Hat with the Rabbit…
Rozinante’s Sex Life and Other Jokes…
Some Ancillary Devices…
Don Quixote and The Novel Form
Critics in Disarray…
The Strict Realists…
The Hybrid School…
The Weak Thematic…
The Easy-Going (Romantic)…
The Easy-Going (Postmodern)…
The Experimental Novel…
The Form of Form…
What Length Means for the Novel…
The Invention of Plot…
The Invention of Subplot…
Character Grouping and Gradation…
The Nudge…
Novel Form and Memory…
The Reader Theme…
Night Thoughts on an Insomniac Reader, or Thematic Meditations
Why Books are to Blame…
Character and Symptom…
The Thematic Matrix of the Novel…
The End…
Even though my initial reading of Don Quixote is past, I find myself with the Ingenious Gentleman as part of my consciousness and besides returning for re-reading pilgrimages into the text, ala Faulkner, there are a few books, this one as well as Meditations on Quixote, by José Ortega Y Gassett, that I think are wholly worthwhile and enjoyable reads, both for their subject and the fact that their application transcends the topic at hand. The Enamoured Knight is brief, accessible, and an excellent introduction to and consideration of Don Quixote.
The Enamoured Knight (Dalkey Archive Press, 2005)
Technorati Tags: Don Quixote
comments
No CommentsCreative Commons License Deed Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported
You are free:
- to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
-
Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
-
No Derivative Works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
- For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do this is with a link to this web page.
- Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author's moral rights.
This is a human-readable summary of the Legal Code (the full license):
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/3.0/legalcode
This site employs rank-denial and other anti-spam measures.
Your link here will do nothing for your rankings or traffic. Off-topic comments will be deleted.
Previous entry: Illy in the USA
About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: October 21, 2005
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:0
- Links to this Post: Technorati
