Prologue to DQ Sunday, May 6 2007

I read the prologue to Don Quixote with great delight; there’s something very appealing about its lighthearted tone that bodes well for my enjoyment of the rest of the book (and having read the first couple chapters now, I can say I’m enjoying it greatly). Sylvia has already written an interesting post on the Prologue; I thought I’d add to her post a few thoughts on some of my favorite passages.

I love the way Cervantes claims that he’s not asking for the generosity of readers as they read and judge his book, and yet he’s asking for their generosity at one and the same time. He says:

I do not wish to go along with the common custom and implore you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to forgive or ignore the faults you may find in this my child, for you are neither his kin nor his friend, and you have a soul in your body and a will as free as anyone’s, and you are in your own house, where you are lord, as the sovereign is master of his revenues, and you know the old saying: under cover of my cloak I can kill the king. Which exempts and excuses you from all respect and obligation, and you can say anything you desire about this history without fear that you will be reviled for the bad things or rewarded for the good that you might say about it.

How can you read this passage and have any desire whatsoever to criticize this poor author? How could you heartlessly attack this novel after the author so kindly refrained from asking you not to attack it? I like the way this figures the author/reader relationship — no, the author can’t do anything whatsoever to keep readers from criticizing his book, except to appeal to their sense of kindness, to call the book his child, to imply that they couldn’t possibly be so mean as to say a harsh word. All the author has, besides the strength of the book itself, is the chance to flatter the reader into liking it.

After this uncertain opening, the author’s self-doubt deepens; first we get a description of writer’s block — he absolutely could not write the Prologue, try as he might:

For I can tell you that although [the book itself] cost me some effort to compose, none seemed greater than creating the preface you are now reading. I picked up my pen many times to write it, and many times I put it down again because I did not know what to write.

Fortunately for him, a friend comes along while the author continues to bemoan his weakness and uncertainty. He’s worried about how the public will receive the book, about how long it’s been since he’s published anything, how he has no sonnets by famous people to open his book with, how he’s lacking all the serious, scholarly paraphernalia other books have, the citations from Aristotle and Plato and the marginal notes and indexes. In despair, he says:

In short, my friend … I have decided that Don Quixote should remain buried in the archives of La Mancha until heaven provides someone who can adorn him with all the things he lacks; for I find myself incapable of correcting the situation because of my incompetence and my lack of learning, and because I am by nature too lazy and slothful to go looking for authors to say what I know how to say without them.

He comes across here as someone worried only about the quality of the book, as someone self-effacing enough to put the book away until an author more qualified comes along to publish it. He is not in this for personal gain.  If he is lazy and slothful, it’s because he’s honest and doesn’t want to ask others to say what he can say himself. What is not to like about this poor, beleaguered author?

His friend answers with a hilarious speech about how the author can overcome all these problems:

By God, brother, now I am disabused of an illusion I have lived with for all the time I have known you, for I always considered you perceptive and prudent in everything you do. But now I see that you are as far from having those qualities as heaven is from earth.

What a friend. He goes on to say that the author can solve these problems quite simply: he can write his own sonnets and falsely attribute them to famous people; he can insert Latin phrases that he already knows by heart into relevant passages to make them seem more scholarly with a minimum of effort; he can create instant annotations by naming characters after famous people and then write notes to explain the allusions; he can make up a list of references to add to the back of book and he doesn’t have to worry if he doesn’t actually use those references — no one will notice or care.

But then after this joking, the friend gets more serious and says that the book doesn’t need all this scholarly apparatus because it’s doing something completely different. His goal is to mock books of chivalry, and that’s something classical authors knew nothing about. The author is heading off into a completely new direction and he needs to rules and guidelines. What he needs to do instead is:

to make use of mimesis in the writing, and the more precise that is, the better the writing will be … instead you should strive, in plain speech, with words that are straightforward, honest, and well-placed, to make your sentences and phrases sonorous and entertaining, and have them portray, as much as you can and as far as it is possible, your intention, making your ideas clear without complicating and obscuring them.

What he should worry about is the writing itself, not the book’s packaging, the apparatus that surrounds the story itself.  It’s the story and the writing only that matter:

Another thing to strive for: reading your history should move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it. In short, keep your eye on the goal of demolishing the ill-founded apparatus of these chivalric books, despised by many and praised by so many more, and if you accomplish this, you will have accomplished no small thing.

He will have accomplished no small thing indeed. This strikes me as a wonderful description of what the novel, or at least one form of it, can do — it’s about mimesis, or capturing life as accurately as possible, and doing so in beautiful and clear language. And it’s a form that everyone can enjoy, from the melancholy to the cheerful, from the simple to the clever.

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Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote: Introduction Saturday, May 5 2007

I absolutely loved Vladimir Nabokov’s “Introduction,” the first in his six part series on Don Quixote. It begins thusly:

We shall do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for so-called “real life” in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. Don Quixote is a fairy tale, so is Bleak House, so is Dead Souls. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales the world would not be real. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader.

Well, that sure is lovely! Nabokov then advances his point, explaining that “real life,” if it is anything at all, “is but a piece of fiction, a tissue of statistics.” Therefore, since the notion of “real life” is in itself built on boring generalities, we should be glad that fiction does not often depict life as we understand it.

… the more vivid a new details in a work of fiction, then the more it departs from so-called “real life,” since “real life” is the generalized epithet, the average emotion, the advertised multitude, the commonsensical world.

Having this dispatched with a serious bugaboo, Nabokov proceeds to consider, in brief, some introductory concerns. Here are a few of them:

The “Where?” of Don Quixote

Nabokov here explains that the Spain depicted in Cervantes’ book has little resemblance to the country’s actual geography:

If [...] we examine Don Quixote’s excursions topographically, we are confronted with a ghastly muddle. I shall spare you its details and only mention the fact that throughout those adventures there is a mass of monstrous inaccuracies at every step.

Then that’s one thing you don’t have to worry about!

The “When?” of the Book

Sylvia has already posted a wonderful timeline, so I won’t bother reminding you that Cervantes was a contemporary of Shakespeare, or that the Spanish Empire was at its height during his lifetime. I will, however, quote Nabokov at length on the book’s place in the history of narrative:

What we shall witness now is the evolution of the epic form, the shedding of its metrical skin, the hoofing of its feet, a sudden fertile cross between the winged monster of the epic and the specialized prose form of entertaining narration, more or less a domesticated mammal, if I may pursue the metaphor to its lame end. The result is a fertile hybrid, a new species, the European novel.

As you can see, reading the lectures of a great novelist has its perks.

The General Comments of Critics

In the Foreward, Guy Davenport explained that one of Nabokov’s chief goals was to dispel the hyperventilating style of criticism that surrounds this novel. So he begins this section with:

Some critics, a very vague minority long dead, have tried to prove that Don Quixote is but a stale farce. Others have maintained that Don Quixote is the greatest novel ever written. A hundred years ago one enthusiastic French critic, Sainte-Beuve, called it “the Bible of Humanity.” Let us not fall under the spell of these enchanters.

Nabokov has little patience for this sort of talk, nor does he care to argue about whether Cervantes was as good as Shakespeare (he’s not, according the Nabokov), or whether he was a Protestant Reformer or a militant Catholic.

In conclusion, here is a lovely snippet from the lecture’s final paragraph:

We should, therefore, imagine Don Quixote and his squire as two little silhouettes ambling in the distance against an ample flaming sunset, and their two huge black shadows, one of them especially elongated, stretching across the open country of centuries and reaching us here.

One thinks of Picasso.

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Getting Started: Prologue Friday, May 4 2007

I thought I’d get the ball rolling by posting my thoughts on the Prologue to the first book of Don Quixote. I must say I was very impressed by how much business Cervantes took care of in these casual few pages. Using the conceit of advice from a “friend,” he is able to state his purpose (“an invective against books of chivalry”), expose the fraudulent means by which authors give the appearance of weight to their works (sonnets, allusions, quotations, annotations), and he introduces us to the main characters, Don Quixote (who is described as if entirely real) and Sancho Panza (who is described as if entirely fictional). The latter point interests me because I gathered from Bloom’s introduction that it is Quixote who is out of touch with reality and Panza who is the more grounded one. I also wonder if the Latin quotations which are supposedly given off-hand will be relevant later on? Considering how much work the rest of the Prologue does, we might do well to keep an eye on them.

I especially love how Cervantes addresses his audience: “Idle reader.” Perhaps he was poking fun at the hidalgos, the lower nobility who abhorred gainful employment as beneath them, no matter how poor they were. Because of that non-work ethic, Spain lacked a productive industrial economy, its agriculture was backward, and monarchs had to declare bankruptcy repeatedly. If it weren’t for the influx of New World gold and silver, Spain might have been a primitive backwater instead of the dominant force in Europe. Some in Spain, called the arbitristas (“projectors”) were aware of this and tried to advise reforms, but the monarchs were more interested in fighting wars.

As I said, I was very impressed by the Prologue. At the risk of sounding Bloom-ish, I think we are in for a work of genius here.

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Dreamer Thursday, May 3 2007

I haven’t had time to think of Don Quixote this week, let alone pick up the sadly neglected hardcover edition from my shelf to start reading, but my brain must be preparing me for the endeavor, eager to start, because I had a dream this morning about sighting what looked like windmills on the horizon of a vast desert, but which were I think just several people waving their arms for me to stop and chat with them, and riding a horse that I wasn’t allergic to, and noting with surprise now and then the presence of a companion, whom I alternately ignored and berated—and with the general impression that life should be lived as a dream, or as several dreams at once. At one point I asked my companion what he thought of this mission, living life as a dream, or as several dreams at once, but didn’t hear his response because I had hurried my horse forward, aware that my question had not been asked properly and that the proper question, or the proper proposition perhaps, lay just ahead on that horizon with the waving arms. But when I reached them, these relentlessly flapping arms which were indeed attached to human bodies but were in the shape of long, narrow paddles, my horse stopped and I heard a very distinct godlike voice all around me: “Stay tuned for next week, when our narrator meets the Lady of La Mancha.” Then a fade to black. And then I woke up.

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An Anatomy of an Edition Wednesday, May 2 2007

Some four hundred years after the first edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote hit bookstore shelves, I hold in my hand a Penguin Classics edition of Cervantes’ most celebrated tome. It’s in paperback. It’s translated by J. M. Cohen who, I have learned, has done a lot for Penguin. Cohen also wrote the introduction to the text but, as a general rule, I don’t read introductions until I have finished the book.

My copy of Don Quixote, as it stands with the intro and everything, was first published by Penguin in 1950. My copy is the 40th printing, I think, and I’m not sure of the year the book left the printers (it was, incidentally, printed by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc. It is set in Monotype Fournier).

I bought the book used at an independent used book store in Nebraska called A Novel Idea. A Novel Idea has a cat named Silas. Silas has a brass bed, a leopard printed couch, and other furniture. He stares at you from the storefront window as you pass by. If you mouth to him through the glass, he’ll mouth back.

I paid three dollars for the book, which is marked on the first page in pencil, lightly, as used bookstore owners are wont to do. I thought three dollars was a fair price for the 940 page book.

Over a month ago, I started reading the book–first with Cervantes’ prologue, then the first chapter, then I got sick, then school got more difficult, etc (needless to say, I haven’t read it for a while), I absently wondered about the markings–in blue ink–left by the book’s previous owner. Chapters had asterisks beside their numbers in the T.O.C. (32-35, 39-41, 45-47, 51-52, etc) and some even had two asterisks, like chapter 33, or “The Tale of Foolish Curiosity” and 45, or “The Truth about Mambrino’s Helmet.”

In the actual text, for instance, in the prologue to the first part, I noticed whole sections underlined. On the first page, there was a section underlined: “But I, though in appearance Don Quixote’s father, am really his step-father, and so will not drift with the current of custom, nor implore you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to pardon or ignore the faults you see in this child of mine. For you are no relation or friend of his. Your soul is in your own body, and you have free will with the best of them,” and the underlining stops, mid-sentence, ignoring the bit about being a “lord in your own house as the King is over his taxes” (which, in my mind blatantly challenges the charge of the aforementioned free will! Or maybe it’s not a challenge and I’m reading too far into it? I think I’m not far enough into the book to get a clear judgement on Cervantes’ words, so my complaint is neither here or there). Deep, dark neat, straight-edged lines in blue.

Later, in the prologue yet, single short sentences are underlined. Sometimes just a word or a name: Caus. Ovid. Bishop of Mondonedo. Medea. Virgil. I wondered, while reading, did s/he underline the words on first reading? Was it used for a class? Why did they find it important to underline at all? Hm.

Okay, this is getting long. I’m a long-winded person, so I have a tendency to go on. But before I go, I have to mention the cover. It is an illustration to Don Quixote by Gustave Dore.

I have to study for a test. I’ll take the test Thursday. I’ll continue reading after.

DeEee.

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Introduction to DQ Tuesday, May 1 2007

I was hoping to post on Harold Bloom’s introduction to Don Quixote after I’d had a chance to read it this evening, but I’ve just finished it and I thought it was terrible, so I won’t be posting on it after all.  Has anybody else read it, from the Edith Grossman translation?  Yes, I’ll admit I’m tired this evening and not at my reading best, but still I couldn’t make much sense out of it and I’m sure I wouldn’t have liked it even if I’d felt more alert.  It’s rambling and vague and has rather too much Hamlet in it.

So, instead, I’ll give you a paragraph from Edith Grossman’s “Translator’s Note to the Reader,” which is short but much better than Bloom’s irritation introuction.  Describing Cervantes’s writing, she says:

[It] is a marvel: it gives off sparks and flows like honey.  Cervantes’s style is so artful it seems absolutely natural and inevitable; his irony is sweet-natured, his sensibility sophisticated, compassionate, and humorous.  If my translation works at all, the reader should keep turning the pages, smiling a good deal, periodically bursting into laughter, and impatiently waiting for the next synonym (Cervantes delighted in accumulating synonyms, especially descriptive ones, within the same phrase), the next mind-bending coincidence, the next variation on the structure of Don Quixote’s adventures, the next incomparable conversation between the knight and his squire.  To quote again from Cervantes’s prologue: “I do not want to charge you too much for the service I have performed in introducing you to so noble and honorable a knight; but I do want you to thank me for allowing you to make the acquaintance of the famous Sancho Panza, his squire….”

Tomorrow — to the novel itself!

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Historical Timeline: Spain, 1510-1616 Monday, Apr 30 2007

I’ve put together a quick and dirty timeline of major political, religious, and literary events leading up to and including the life of Miguel de Cervantes. I included some events involving Spain’s arch-enemy, England, and left out most of Spain’s despicable activities in the New World (I would be surprised if most Spaniards were very much aware of them).

I find it quite interesting that despite vigorous censorship in Spain and England, these times produced the greatest literature of both countries. No doubt the influx of wealth from newly discovered lands and trade routes increased artistic patronage, though Cervantes himself saw little of it. I also read that censorship in Spain led to the great flowering of Christian mysticism and mystical literature in that country, an interesting counterpoint to the craze for chivalric romances.

Most of the information comes from the EBSCO Literary Reference Center (check with your library to see if you can access this online resource). Please feel free to add other interesting dates in the comments.

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Nabokov’s Lectures on Don Quixote: Foreward Sunday, Apr 29 2007

Since I will not be fully participating in the reading of Don Quixote, having just finished it a few months back, I thought it would be fun to read and report on Vladimir Nabokov’s lectures on the novel — a book I’d been wanting to read anyway, and will serve to keep me in the text and on this blog. Today, before officially launching into the lectures or the commentary, I thought I’d give a background on them and paste in a few excellent observations made by Guy Davenport in the Foreward.

Nabokov’s six lectures were given to “600 young strangers” taking Humanities 2 at Harvard University in the spring semester of 1952. Nabokov was a member of the Cornell faculty, and had been given a leave of absence so that he could take the temporary position at Harvard. To prepare for his lectures, Nabokov typed up a full summary of the book, at least one paragraph for every chapter; this commentary is included in the back of my volume.

Nabokov’s guiding purpose, as explained in the Foreward, was to “tear apart” Don Quixote, exposing it as a “cruel and crude old book” which had been softened by hundreds of years of appreciative scholarship.  Davenport explains:

For Don Quixote, as Nabokov knew with some pain and annoyance, is not the book people think it is. Far too many interpolated novelle [...] impede the plotless plot. We all rewrite the book in our heads so that it is a picturesque succession of events: the appropriation of the barber’s basin as Mambrino’s helmet, the tilt at the windmills (which became the archetypal quintessence of the book), charging the sheep, and so on. Many people wholly innocent of the text can supply you with a plausible plot summary.

Nabokov’s contrarian perception of the book is that it is in fact cruel, as the follies of Don Quixote and his squire “elicits cruel laughter,” as they are submitted to countless humiliations. This was to become the foundation of his lectures.

The Foreward to the Lectures also provides this helpful historical commentary: “The historical moment in which Don Quixote was written, the reign of Felipe II, that paranoid fanatic who style himself the Most Catholic King, is one we have silvered over with a moonlight of Romance.” It was a period in which the King’s spies were constantly on the lookout for anyone who did not appear to be a “Good Catholic.”

Also, in the history of Europe, Don Quixote was written at a crucial moment:

Europe was going through a time in which reality began to flip-flop. Hamlet teased Polonius with the ambiguous shapes of the clouds. Don Quixote’s abilities to fool himself are a focus of the age’s anxieties. Identity, for the first time in European history, became a matter of opinion or conviction.

In his lectures, Nabokov’s hoped to rescue Don Quixote from centuries of Enlightened residue, and expose the true nature of the text: “He wanted the book to be itself alone, to be a fairy tale, to be an imaginative construct independent of the myth ‘real life.’” In fact, it is Davenport’s opinion that Nabokov set out to expose Don Quixote as a fraud, but in his final opinion realized that it was not the text itself that was a fraud, but the “the book’s reputation and epidemic among its critics.”

I’ll close with this final quotation from the Foreward:

Don Quixote remains a crude old book full of peculiarly Spanish cruelty, pitiless cruelty that baits an old man who plays like a child into his dotage. It was written in an age when dwarfs and the afflicted were laughed at, when pride and haughtiness were more arrogant than ever before or since, when dissenters from official thought were burnt alive in city squares to general applause, when mercy and kindness seem to have been banished. Indeed, the first readers of the book laughed heartily at its cruelty. Yet the world soon found other ways of reading it. It gave birth to the modern novel all over Europe. Fielding, Smollett, Gogol, Dostoevski, Daudet, Flaubert shaped this fable out of Spain to their own ends. A character who started out in his creator’s hands as a buffoon has turned out in the course of history to be a saint.

Enjoy the first few chapters!

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Mood Music for Don Quixote Friday, Apr 27 2007

Don Quixote enthusiast Nick Senger over at Literary Compass has made some suggestions of musical accompaniment for reading DQ. One of the pieces he mentions is the Concierto de Aranjuez by Joaquín Rodrigo (1902-1999). It just so happens that I have a copy of it, so, with apologies to Julian Bream and RCA, I’d like to post the famous adagio movement (click to listen). If this piece of music doesn’t transport you to another place I don’t know what will!

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A Trip to the Library Tuesday, Apr 24 2007

I decided to start my DQ prep today with a quick trip to the University of York library on the hunt for introductory criticism. (I’m lucky that, as a staff member, I can have up to 60 books at a time!)  And I came away with four delicious looking tomes:

The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (ed. Anthony J. Cascardi) - I very much enjoy the Cambridge Companions and I think they’re a good place to start with criticism. This one has a handy timeline of Cervantes life and an Appendix with a list of electronic resources for Quixote.

A Critical Introduction to Don Quixote by L.A. Murillo - This provides a short thematic essay for every chapter or couple of chapters, and so I thought it would be interesting as a companion. It should fit well with the 50 pages a week plan too.

Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote - This one looks at DQ as a text through time with chapters like ‘Cervantes Sallies into Eighteenth Century France and England’ and ‘DQ and the New World: Two American Perspectives’.  I thought this might be an interesting counterpoint to textual criticism: thinking about how other cultures and eras have read the book and responded to it.

Finally, Cervantes by Jean Canavaggio (trans. J.R. Jones) - a biography of the man himself.

I can’t wait to dig into these!

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