Sic Semper Tyrannis

Don Quixote

So, I finished the monstrously long Don Quixote, translated by Edith Grossman, last night. There is a certain feeling of accomplishment whenever I tackle a huge book like that. I must say I liked Book I better than Book II because of the frequency of new “adventures” in the first half.

The whole time I was reading this book I was constantly trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes this book such an internationally revered “classic.” True, it’s monumental in scope, (almost 1000 pages in this translation), but there’s got to be more to it than that. After all, encyclopedias are monumental in scope, but they’re never considered literary masterpieces. I was also wondering what Cervantes was trying to say with this.

He was writing at the same time as Shakespeare and my first impression is that this was a humorous critique of chivalric romance and the novels that perpetuated those ideas. The character of Don Quixote, in a fit of delusions inspired by novels of knight errantry, goes off to set the world to right and bumbles his way through-sometimes as victim, sometimes as unwitting victimizer. The one constant is his skewed vision of reality, he never sees the world as it is, but rather sees it as a chivalric romance would describe it.

So, I know that criticism is there. But I wonder-why is (or was) chivalry an appropriate subject for skewering? “Ah, it’s all just a bunch of dreams, chivalry,” a dug-up Cervantes would probably say. “There ain’t no such thing as honor and duty and love, at least not as it was depicted in those old novels.”

You know, when I was in high school, I’ll sheepishly admit I had some pretty chivalrous ideas about love-mooning over chaste, pure beauty as if it was the force behind all my actions. I liked the idea of love setting me off to be a better person. The problem with this was that those “chaste, pure beauties” had no choice in the matter. They were just objects of my flights of romantic fancy- not living, breathing girls who didn’t even like me. It’s really kind of humorous, the male gaze, and I think Cervantes definitely captures that humor in his bumbling knight.

But I was reading up just a tiny bit and other people approach this early novel as a tale of morality, a study of individual ethics vs. social dictates of reality. Of course, this is very interesting to a post-modernist like myself, inundated with language of the “here-but-not-yet Kingdom of God.” But whether Cervantes really wanted to tout Don Quixote as an honest-to-God hero is very questionable in my book. To say that Quixote is a flawed protagonist is a heavy understatement. In his head, he is the greatest knight in the world, (a world which, by the way, has actually moved on from knights and knight-errantry), yet in every one of his early skirmishes he gets beaten to a pulp. This reality makes no impression on his claims. So, is he a madman worthy of laughter or is he a determined, uncompromising man worthy of admiration? I don’t know. But that’s one thing I liked about this book. (I will say that I would lean towards the verdict of “madman.”)

Another cool thing I found about this book is the displacement of narration and meta-textual elements that arise in the second part of the book as Cervantes cites another source for the second part as well as makes frequent allusions to an actual rebel text by another author that supposedly continued Don Quixote’s story, all the while continuing the story itself.

But, as usual I think the interesting things about this book are what we as readers bring to it. You know, we have four hundred years of history and new ideas that we bring to the table when we read this book, so the number of possible interpretations seems almost limitless.

I’m not sure I would recommend this book to anyone. I think it appeals to a very specific type of nerd with oodles of patience and time on their hands. But I liked it well enough.

posted by Mike @ 10:44 AM