Chekhov’s Mistess

The Knight of the Sorrowful (Blood Caked, Puke Covered) Face

On my own journey through La Mancha I am meeting obstacles that are not always easy to see past. This comparison is not new, but I often feel like I’m reading the genesis of one of the (amazingly) violent cartoons that I grew up with. At some point I feel like a giant anvil must drop from the sky on top of our Ingenious Gentleman and pound him into the ground – “Beep Beep.”

Sancho, our sagacious illiterate, recognizes the absurdity of these misfortunes (to a point) and dubs Quixote as The Knight of the Sorrowful Face, saying “…your grace has the sorriest-looking face I’ve seen recently…” Naturally, Quixote takes this in stride and finds as he always does, something from his books to fit the occasion and decides his new moniker should be on his shield – Sancho responds, always unwittingly realistically:

“There’s no reason to waste time and money making that face,” [referring to putting a picture on his shield] said Sancho. “What your grace should do instead is uncover yours and show it to those who are looking at you, and right away, without any images or shields, they’ll call you The Knight of the Sorrowful Face; believe me…¹³⁹

Now this might sound stupid, but if it weren’t for Sancho, there’s no way I would read this book. He’s the perfect Lou Costello or Oliver Hardy – only in those duos the straight man was the smart guy.

Maybe a little less stupid would be to say that it is the dialogue between the two that keeps me coming back because I find the absurd violence and gross-out humor a turn-off. The scene on page 131 where the two vomit in one another’s faces is witty enough “and the two of them were left splendid as pearls,” but something less than charming for what’s considered one of the world’s greatest pieces of literature.

One of my all time favorite books is Moby Dick, but there are all these long passages, chapters actually, with talk about the different types of whales and such. Those you can pass by on subsequent readings, but Cervante’s affection for gore is ingrained into the book. Thankfully the dialogue brings us (me) back just as we (me) are slipping away.

Could it be any different? I don’t know and I’ve never been one to try and put myself into that ether of a great writer and suppose I could improve on a masterpiece.

While I’m complaining, I had mixed emotions over the aside telling us the story of the shepherds Grisostomo and Marcela. I couldn’t figure out what it was doing there other than, as one of the translators in the Global Quioxte panel said that Cervantes wanted to make sure that his readers understood him by repeating repeating. The shepherds of course, are not shepherds, only play acting as shepherds in the name of love – an unrequited love by a woman who displays all the feminine logic of womanhood. What I mean, so as not to be accused of anything, is that Men are often confounded by the logic of Women, particularly those that hold us at arms-length. That logic is so undeniable, but to our way of thinking, doesn’t make any sense at all. Let’s just say I’ve followed my own Marcelas and “Until now heaven has not ordained that I love” is all too famiiar. But in my mind, Quixote is hypocritical (human) in endorsing the truth of Marcela publicly and then behaving as he does in the dark room with the peasant girl (holding her so firmly seems to mean that if not interrupted things might have turned out differently), who he believes is the daughter of the castle’s keeper. Quixote’s weaknesses are always shrouded in circumstance, such as when he is unable to help Sancho as he is being tossed in the air. But I digress.

I briefly looked up some of the scholarly opinions on Grisostomo and Marcela. The story is dismissed as Cervante’s nod to Virgils’ eclogues, which were homages to the shepherd’s way of life, echoing I suppose, Quixote’s longing for a more simple time. Vivaldo’s desire to keep Grisostomo’s poetry also echoes Augustus Ceaser’s disallowance of Virgil’s will where he ordered the Aeneid (a journey that ends with the formation of a new civilization) be burned.

Cervantes is a purposeful writer and despite his method of repetition and the length of the book, I don’t feel that he wastes words. Still, I’m left wondering why all the gross-outs?

Page references are to the hardback edition of the Grossman translation

comments

Funny, I’ve been having similar reactions to the “gross-outs” in DQ.

I think I chalk it up to “popular entertainment,” which (I presume) DQ was intended to be at the time. That the notion of “high literary merit” had still not split off from fart jokes by Cervantes’ time.

May also be meant to be ironic when juxtaposed with Quixote’s intended gallantry.

    – Mike Morrow (04/28  at  08:45 PM)

(Gahhr, stupid f*****g Treo! I’m going to try posting my comment one more time, and then am giving up.)

Bud, like you I’ve been struck unfavorably by the cartoonish violence increasingly showing in the book - in fact, in the first draft of my notes for chapters 15-27 I wrote the exact phrase “Quixote as Wile E. Coyote?” I mean, let’s face it, by all rights Quixote shouldn’t even be moving by now - he’s had teeth knocked out since the beginning of the book, part of his ear ripped off, and too many body blows to even count anymore. Like Mike, I’ve just assumed that such scenes (especially the vomit ones) were put in to deliberately appeal to lowbrow culture; it doesn’t stop me from being frustrated by them, though. It’s sad, I thintÕ

    – Jason Pettus (04/29  at  09:04 PM)

FWIW, colleague, a theater historian, tells me that it now seems that every performance of every Shakespeare play was followed by a “jig.” That means, for example, that at the end of Hamlet, all the actors playing corpses (save Hamlet, whose body, we know, is carried offstage) would stand up and do a little dance.

The mind that can wrap itself around that, the mind that can move from vomit to Marcela, is a very different mind than ours, I think. His guess was that they--people in Europe of 1605--just didn’t feel the seismic shift the same way we do.

    – Anne Fernald (05/01  at  07:38 PM)

That’s funny, Anne!

It seems to me that nearly all of Shakespeare’s plays have some sort of “fool” or cartoonish character that supplies the bawdy/gross-out humor (yes, even fart jokes).  Of course, the slapstick violence has been pretty constant in Quixote.  But the contrast it lends can be startling: I was very moved by the embrace between Cardenio and Don Quixote--that moment of understanding was all the more profound considering what “our hero” had gone through… Um...until Cardenio hit him with that rock.

    – amcorrea (05/02  at  09:59 PM)

I’ve been to the Globe (reproduced) theatre in London where they put on a show (for lack of a better description on this allergy infested morning) before the play to make it “feel” like Elizabethan times. It’s always interesting, but only in the sense of seeing what it might have been like then, but never funny in its own right.

I did some reading on Humor in DQ, which I will share in a post this week.

    – Bud Parr (05/03  at  09:16 AM)

Looking forward to it, Bud.  The understatement and irony ("My master is doing penance in the middle of those mountains, as happy as can be.” ~ Sancho) far surpasses the over-the-top elements.  Interesting that he uses so much of both (equally?)…

    – amcorrea (05/03  at  10:46 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: April 28, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Cervantes, Don Quixote

• Comments:6
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