Chekhov's Mistress

We’re All a Little Mad: Final Thoughts on Don Quixote

by Bud Parr


Ernest Hemingway said “All good books have one thing in common – they are truer than if they had really happened, and after you have read one of them you will feel that all that happened, happened to you and then it belongs to you forever.”


I think Pappa stole that idea from Cervantes. Who better knew how literature seeps into our consciousness just as much as we let it? Who more than Don Quixote lived through the books he read, defended the honor of made up characters and, when becoming one of those characters himself championed the unseen author of his own history?


When I wrote a piece called “Why Read Don Quixote?” just before starting the book, I wondered if I would finish, or enjoy it or if in the end it would mean anything to me. I admitted then that I had started once and put it down. I said too in that piece that reading the Quixote was the result “of a seemingly inevitable collision with the book through others I’ve read.” I had no idea that Don Quixote is, in many ways, all about that collision. Our ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha was a great lover of books. Not only did he read a lot, his erudition amazed everyone he met, even as they puzzled over his madness. He retained so much that his books became collectively his Bible in the way that many look to theirs as a manual on how to live. But for Quixote, the Gospel according to John was instead maybe the Gospel according to Amadís of Gaul.


Like the parting of the Red Sea, Don Quixote’s “history” was born from the very idea that the romances he read were indeed “truer than if they had really happened.” That trueness, Don Quixote’s reality, is the most fascinating element of the story. His sanity always lay just below the surface in the same but opposite way that most of us have a little madness just below our social veneer.


I was struck around mid-way through when a boy whom Don Quixote had “saved” from a beating by his master, revealed that because of Don Quixote’s actions he was beaten even more. Quixote’s remorse was painful and I felt as though he would have passed through his sanity divide and stayed there, but ultimately he couldn’t help himself and continued on his travels. That sort of thing was a constant source of frustration and tension throughout the book. He never seemed to learn from all that happened until finally he was vanquished himself, which wasn’t just a matter of valor, but faith. When Don Quixote stopped believing in the literature, he stopped believing in himself and he died.


Right from the prologue we know that the book Don Quixote is about language and literature as Cervantes criticizes the methods of his peers and forebears. There are stories within the story and most every character at some point becomes someone who they are not in everyday life – everyone is a storyteller and everyone straddles the line of believing in their tales.


In terms of language, Sancho is constantly harangued by Don Quixote for his poor use of proverbs and incessant malapropisms. Interestingly, Quixote’s intolerance for poor language and circumlocution is usually met by the public’s vulgar tastes. For example, the Duke and Duchess love Sancho’s witless witticisms and always insist he keep talking despite Quixote’s protests. So while Quixote chastises Sancho, everyone else is amused and only wants to hear more, which seems to be the very same problem that Cervantes has in stamping out the romance literature of old.


Our text, putting aside for a moment that it is a translation from the Spanish, is, we are told, a translation from events that transpired in Spanish dialogue into Arabic by Cide Hamete Benengeli, which is then translated back to Spanish for the benefit of our narrator. This naturally was an area of exploration for speakers on the Global Quixote translator’s panel. There are a lot of errors in the book and no one knows if they were intentional or not, although some suspect they were, and that becomes just one aspect of the translation. Additionally, most agree that Cervantes’ wordplay is often central to enjoying the book and extracting meaning from the dialogue. I recommend Edith Grossman’s translation to anyone who thinks those elements are essential. I thought Grossman’s spare footnotes terrifically enlightened me when Cervantes used meanings that through time or translation would be lost. I imagine there are many more examples that a scholarly edition would include, but her judgement produced a balanced, readable and enjoyable novel. Given the layers of translation, a non-Spanish reader must recognize their translator as just as much a part of the book as Hamete or Cervantes himself.

***


Now that Don Quixote has sat snugly on the shelf for a couple of weeks, I’ve practically forgotten some of my earlier misgivings (that I wrote about). I see now why this novel is loved by so many great writers and I think the Hemingway quote says it all. I like to think, like Don Quixote or like Fabrizio in The Charterhouse of Parma – who was impelled to set out into the world by reading about Napoleon – that I too live richer having seen the world through the lives of my imaginary heros. Don Quixote is a testament to reading and a testament to believing in the imagination, even if the outside world doesn’t always get it.


I remember the novel A Mapmaker’s Dream, where a hermetic cartographer draws maps of the world based solely upon the exotic tales of travelers. Fra Mauro, the mapmaker, says:


…I believed that the thoughts and impressions of all my visitors were derived from a certain actuality, at all times palpable, when in truth their remarks had quite obviously passed through the filter of their own sensibility.




What that belief really means is that my map is a distortion. All its representation of terrain and oceans is but the revelation of how I regarded my visitors’ perceptions in the first place. I now realize that the world is not real save in the way each of us impresses upon it his own sensibility. More importantly, this sensibility results from a belief in the world being a measurable whole, rather than something that extends beyond time or place.




Yet I am grateful to those who have provided me with the benefit of their illusions. They have journeyed to Venice, to this monastery, from so many distant places in order to share with me the purest of all deceptions – that of their own willingness to be entranced.


In a way, we all have that, we are all a little crazy because we are willing to be entranced, and so was most every character in Don Quixote. I think that one thing that people miss when talking about this book is just how great every single character is. Besides maybe Alice in Wonderland or Hamlet, I can’t think of another book that makes every single character integral to the story. It’s that wholeness that gives it life and makes it so true.


For anyone who has only read the first part of Don Quixote, I say read the second. In some way that I can’t identify, particularly since they were published ten years apart, the second half completes and defines the novel as a whole and makes it so much more meaningful. Vale.



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posted July 11, 2005

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On not keeping up with Don Quixote:

“What I can tell you,” said the goatherd, “is that there’s a sheepfold about three leagues from here . . . .”

Remember that? That’s where my bookmark rests, p. 179, DQ in pace on the coffee table patiently awaiting the return of my attention to it. I noted in the archived comments that I haven’t posted anything since April 27. That was the evening of the Trillium Awards in Toronto, celebrations afterward, perhaps a shade hung over the next day, and the day after that off to a festival of “New Music” in Kitchener, which marked the beginning of a couple of months of intense activity. I was either going places, or people were coming to visit me, and Our Ingenious Knight was left behind.

Now I note some kinship with Quixote: he had to leave his books behind to go questing, as I had to leave him behind to go on my own adventuring, as I had to content myself with slender poetry books as reading material instead of the well-armoured hard cover book.

I have indeed missed the knight, and the fellowship of his more faithful readers, and will now have to pick up where I left off hoping only that all the comments and postings by the 400windmills contributors will remain available for me to read as I “catch up” with reading DQ, will follow on my “customary donkey” like Sancho.

My own litblog has likewise also been temporarily shelved: when I’ve had time to write while on the go, it has been to make notes towards the novel currently in the works, albeit haltingly. But I will pick up both my reading and the threads of waylaid litblogging now that some activities and travels are slowing down—at least for the next six weeks.

I’ve missed him, and have missed being part of the discussions, and remain in a state of admiration for the project and the concerted reading.

    – Norma (07/13  at  09:19 PM)


Keep reading! The second half of the journey is rewarding.

    – Bud Parr (07/15  at  03:27 PM)


I just finished it about an hour ago.  At 940 pages, I thought it would be a relief once I reached the end.  Not so.  I only wanted the adventures to continue (much like his friends with their deathbed pleas).  I’m filled with a deep affection for that (un)fortunate pair...who bickered like an old married couple and endured pranks more bizarre than any enchantment.  I’m not quite sure what to do with myself now that it’s over. 

(More thoughts forthcoming.)

    – amcorrea (07/30  at  09:12 PM)


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