Chekhov’s Mistess

Why Read Don Quixote?

Once while having lunch with a friend, we hit upon the inevitable subject of what each of us was reading. He said he was slogging through some long classic, but was determined to finish. When I asked why he would spend his time on something so taxing, he commented that it’s an important book and he felt like he needed to have read it. I imagine that his is a common affliction, wanting to have read something for no other reason than it’s supposed to be important. Do that a few too many times and you’re sure to take the enjoyment out of reading.

Now, I have to confess that I’ve read Don Quixote before, but I put it down nearly half-way through. I was having a difficult time understanding why it was the great novel that it is so often hailed. Now I’m back to it, and not only that, but here I am pulling together a diverse bunch of writers to write about the book as we go along – I’m jumping off the deep end, as they say, on a book that I couldn’t get through the first time around. Why?

Dunno, really, but everyone has some gravitational force pulling them from one book to the next and mine happens to be fairly consistent. I have a distinct curiosity about what inspires and influences a writer. There is this thread of a conversation throughout great literature that fascinates me. Sometimes that conversation takes the form of a direct reference: Father Mapple in Moby Dick retelling the biblical tale of Jonah, or Dante guided by Virgil, the author of The Aeneid, through Hell and Purgatory. Sometimes it’s an acknowledgment, like Faulkner naming his masterpiece from a line in a Shakespeare play (“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Macbeth Act V, Scene V). And other times it’s more subtle, a recognition that Nabokov and T.S. Eliot owe some of their linguistic playfulness to Lewis Carroll, for instance.

These things tend to lead me down a road that I find just as compelling as Dante’s path to Paradise. Here’s an example: Reading William Gaddis’s The Recognitions, I learned that he was influenced by T.S. Eliot’s poetry, particularly The Waste Land, which I promptly went back and re-read (Calvino says to read a classic is always to re-read it). What did I find there (reading the annotations), but Eliot’s debt to The Quest for the Holy Grail. Reading one of the original conceptions of the Quest I found that, sure enough, the relationship between all these books was right there in a text written somewhere around 1215, itself derived from Celtic folk tales and the Bible. Even the phrase “the waste land” is used many times throughout and I could feel, and feel is about the best I could do, how Eliot might have interpreted this Christian tale and some of its pagan interpretations. Of course the Quest takes place in King Arthur’s court and those knights errant are the very chivalric searchers that our gallant hero, Don Quixote read about.

If you’re going to rely on anyone to tell you who to read, let it be Melville, Faulkner, Eliot or Nabokov. Now I’m not suggesting that I would waste hours of my time to read Don Quixote or any other book because Nabokov said so (incidentally, I’ve read that he was not a fan of the Quixote at first). No, I’m saying that I came to read Don Quixote out of a seemingly inevitable collision with the book through others I’ve read. It is a part of the conversation.

Another example is James Joyce’s confounding, incredible, but fun once-you-get-to-know-it, novel, Ulysses. To read Ulysses is to read an interpretation of Homer’s Odyssey and Shakespeare’s Hamlet (among others less significant). Reading those enhance the experience of Joyce’s book, and reading Ulysses one gets an appreciation for the way Joyce opened the door (if not necessarily a direct influence) for Faulkner’s work, Beckett’s, Gaddis’s and many others. In the same way, Cervantes, so we’ve read, opened the door for writers after him to move past the romantic, flat characters and events that characterized the literature before him.

King Lear and Macbeth were published the same year as Don Quixote. It’s interesting to think, like two scientists discovering the genetic map at the same time, that Shakespeare was writing contemporaneously with Cervantes, on different continents, both creating these oh so human and subtly complex and iconic characters of literature. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza give the novel its life (that much I do know from my previous encounter) and now that I feel as though it has been handed down to me through the hands of masters, I have to ask, how could I not read Don Quixote?

comments

I also had a go at reading Don Quixote years ago after buying Raffel’s translation, and got caught up in it for a while before getting waylaid by another book, intending to get back to it but only doing so when it appeared on the list for my offspring’s university English literature course, “The Western Tradition”. When the prof mentioned Nabokov’s negative reaction to Cervantes’ novel, I was surprised, and merely thought, well: if Nabokov dislikes it, he no doubt provides an eloquently detailed explanation. Rather than deterring my intention to read Don Quixote because of Nabokov referring to it as “a cruel and crude old book”, I wanted to discover the origin of his alleged dislike. I returned to my well-thumbed copy of Guy Davenport’s essays, Every Force Evolves a Form, and began reading “Nabokov’s Don Quixote”, which clarifies for me what Nabokov really meant, and resoundingly affirms your reason for reading Don Quixote. “Don Quixote” has become a “name”— a kind of cultural icon, if you will—much in the same way that (Davenport points out) Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes, and Robinson Crusoe have, and “began to stray from his book almost as soon as he was invented”, adapted and re-envisioned and re-interpreted in common parlance, becoming ever more removed from the novel itself. Nabokov’s intention in his lectures was to restore Don Quixote to the book as it was written by Cervantes, rather than embodying some watered-down notion of a merely dotty old madman who made a fool out of himself pretending to be a knight. There’s more to the story than that, and that’s why I want to read it: to know the story as it was written, to bring Quixote back to life as Cervantes intended, in all its richness, complexity, pathos, pain, and humour—and violence. The purveyors of second-hand notions have misrepresented Nabokov’s reaction to the novel, just as the novel itself has suffered from being more read about than read. What better reason for reading it, than to know for oneself?

And what better guide than the likes of Davenport—and all those other writers who continue to guide us back to the original works?

    – Norma (04/02  at  12:52 AM)

Like most high school students in my neck of the woods, I was subjected to Don Quijote (in the original Spanish, no less) when I was about 15 years old. Now, I have always loved reading, and thick books have never daunted me, but I confess my first acquaintance with DQ was not a happy one. I hated Don Quijote. I hated Cervantes (we also had to read his Novelas Ejemplares). I thought the novel and the protagonist were both sad and pathetic and greatly overrated. And I could never understand why my grandfather would reread DQ every few years, just for the sheer pleasure of revisiting an old favorite. When required to read DQ in college, I resorted to several English translations, and yes, Cliffs notes. I still disliked DQ. Intensely.

It took about 17 years for me to pay a second visit to DQ. This time we clicked. I finally saw more than pathos in DQ—I saw a richly textured, wonderfully intertextual world where every character is both storyteller and critic, from DQ and Sancho Panza to the many peasants, sailors, and tavern wenches they meet on their quests. I loved the mix of narrative styles and the parodic nature of Cervantes’s style.

So, in a homage to my favorite grandparent, and to indulge my own love of the book, I think I’ll be a frequent visitor here. Happy trails everyone!

Margaret at Bookish Marginalia

    – Margaret Able (04/02  at  10:22 PM)

I never once humored the idea of reading Don Quijote in Spanish, English or any other language.  Never once crossed my mind.  Wasn’t even the tiniest bit curious.

Then I married a Spaniard and moved to Spain.  I wondered about the book, thought that it might be a good idea to read it some day.  Still, Don Quijote was not at the top of my “must read” list.  We moved back to New York and my husband got me the Edith Grossman translation for my birthday.  I was thrilled with the book because it was thick, heavy and such and intense red color.  It seemed just the sort of book that a smart person would own.

An even smarter one, of course, would read it. 

And, I did.  Finally.  I figured I would do the two book at a time thing, read one that was light, fun, entertaining and could be toted around on the subway easily and then, right before going to sleep (begrudgingly) read a few pages of Don Quijote.

Well, I got about four pages into my “light, fun and entertaining” book and have not been back to it.  I am half way through the second book of Don Quijote and forcing myself to go slowly in an attempt to stave off the end.  I have not been able to put it down.  I now look at the “entertaining” book I was going to read at the same time, as the loser in a Quixotic duel.  Poor thing didn’t stand a chance against Quijote.

I love this book.  I am thrilled that I found this website.

    – heather hoskeer (04/06  at  03:59 PM)

Thanks Heather, we look forward to seeing more of your comments as we go along.

    – Bud Parr (04/06  at  11:53 PM)

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About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: April 01, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Wise Men Fish Here: Literature

Tags: Cervantes, Don Quixote

• Comments:4
• Links to this Post: Technorati

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