What Don Quixote Taught Me (so far)
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| Don Quixote by Salvador Dalí |
A little over a year ago I was coming back from Spain with
some images on a thumb drive and a notebook full of scribbles. My full-scale research on Don Quixote had just
started. My mission was to research and write
a doctoral dissertation in about a year, a pretty ambitious (maybe even
quixotic) undertaking. One thing you are
expected to do in a dissertation is to demonstrate knowledge of the field and
with the Quixote, that’s over 400 years of existing scholarship written mostly
in English and Spanish. Then there was
the task of coming up with something new, some addition to the knowledge about
the subject and express those findings in a well-researched and cited +/- 300
page paper.
There were times when I felt like I was not going to get it
done, which would put me in the large percentage of Ph.D. candidates who take
all the classes and pass their exams to go on to the dissertation phase . . .
and . . . never . . . finish. There were
doldrums where I struggled to write much of anything. But I was propelled forward by several things,
some negative, some positive. One big
motivator was the knowledge that a few people in my department never thought I
belonged in the Ph.D. program, some of them because they thought I was some
kind of incurious knuckle-dragger due to my previous career in the military. A very important person in our College of
Liberal Arts once told me he didn't think the G.I. bill was meant to be used to
pursue graduate studies. I suppose he
thought I should be using my military benefits to learn welding or automotive
repair (I discovered my lack of talent for welding in Mr. Vidrine’s Vocational
Agriculture class in 1979 in high school).
But to investigate a field you are really
interested in is a real privilege and I was also mindful through the process
that I was being given a great opportunity.
Many people would love to pursue a Ph.D. but would never have the chance
because it costs so much and takes so much time. My opportunity was funded by my military
service but also by the fact that a sizeable number of people valued my service
and were willing to fund my studies through the G.I. bill. So it was never just me pushing to the finish
line to get the dissertation done.
The task I took up was to figure out how the 17th
century Spanish literary character grew into a nearly universally recognizable popular
icon today. Answering that question taps
into a little bit about what fiction, images and symbols mean to us, as well as
how we use narrative as humans. A few
books out there track how Don Quixote broke out of his literary beginnings in
the original novel and showed up in translations, illustrations, tapestries,
films and theater over 400 years. But almost none of them bundle all of those
genres together and none of them attempt to explain why; what it is about the
character Don Quixote that makes us attracted to him and gives him long life.
The conclusion of my dissertation is attached below if you're a real trooper and have a few minutes.
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At the beginning of this study we saw that the Quixote initially gained bestseller
status because it rode a wave of Spanish literary production and brilliantly
satirized a well-known literary genre.
The Quixote was image based,
developing its own proto-iconography by exploiting the existing religious
iconography and combining it with the imagery of medieval carnival. As Spolsky points out, we seem to gravitate
as human beings to images due to the phenomenon of representational hunger,
filling needs with the representations provided by narrative and its
concomitant set of images (Iconotropism
16). With the advent of film just before
the turn of the twentieth century, the Quixote
was the subject of some of the very first films ever made, proving to be
exceptionally useful by providing a visually impactful protagonist whose episodic
adventures worked well in the new multi-track media. The protagonist´s paradoxical flexibility
came into play in film, providing a mouthpiece and model for Socialist and
Communist ideology as well as supporting a fascist Franco regime, while later
coming to exemplify North American post-modern individuality in the 20th
century. Translators and adapters seemed
to respond to some basic drive to universalize the Quixote, providing translations in nearly every written language
and adaptations for every age. In order
to serve national agendas, some translators have used a variety of techniques
and word choices to emphasize the insanity or oddness of the Manchegan
knight. Later translators sought to
recover the dignified and heroic side of Don Quixote, preserving his Spanish
character while making him understandable for the target audience. The writers of children´s adaptations in
Spain have appropriated the work and the protagonist as a paragon of national
character while those outside of Spain have tended to mine his playful,
adventurous side for stories which would appeal to young readers. The image of Don Quixote has been enhanced,
embellished and propagated by illustrators who have used technological advances
and their own artistic vision to highlight either the comic or serious side of
the protagonist. That iconography, as
well as the other manifestations of the protagonist, has allowed Don Quixote to
gain his own momentum separate from the text and be appropriated for political
purposes to either lampoon one´s opponents or to be the guiding model for one´s
own movement. Proof of his iconic status
is that he is used to introduce and sell products and has become the backbone
of an entire segment of the tourism industry in Spain. His name and story are invoked by both
oppressive governments and revolutionary movements and his iconic figure is so
strong that echoes of his discourses are still heard in the modern military
ethic.
As the Quixote was about the intrusion of
fiction into the life of its main character, this study seems to point to what
may be a basic human tendency to bundle fiction and reality to produce our own
narrative, our own “truth” for our own purposes and conveniences. The examples of movie directors like Rafael
Gil and Miguel Gutiérrez Aragón remind us that we sometimes like to have it
both ways: to construct our own truth and claim that it is not a construction,
but faithful to the original text, an even more powerful platform for our own
personal agendas. But we should not be
too hard on ourselves, as this mixing of the fictional and real is our
birthright as modern humans who have been taught by literature and language to
“imagine counterfactual and qualitatively new contexts (new in the sense of
different from that which is already and merely present) suggest[ing] the
possibility of attempting to realize them, and therefore also purposive action”
(Berman 45,46). Our ability to see
beyond the present, quotidian, and tangible to imagine the hypothetical, the
notional, and possible and take steps to achieve them is what makes us human,
even quixotic.
Part of
the flexibility of Don Quixote´s character derives from the fact that
“Cervantes refuses to explicitly prescribe how his work is to be read”
providing what he calls an “‘open ideological canvas’ for its readers” (Bayliss
389). Indeed, Cervantes writes in the
Part I Prologue, “you have your own soul in your own body, and your own free
will like anybody else, and you are sitting in your own home, where you are the
lord and master just as much as the king is of his taxes. . .” But beyond the freedom the author give to us
the reader to interpret and engage Don Quixote, the greater availability of the
protagonist to us rests on his built-in paradox and ambivalence as a comic
hero, enabling one reader to focus on his insanity and another to hone in on
his wisdom, according to the reader´s individual needs. Ellen Spolsky has drawn a parallel between
the intake of food and narrative (Narrative
as Nourishment 42). Like many other
narratives, we consume Don Quixote individually, perhaps uniquely, casting
aside the characteristics, episodes and discourses we don´t like and digesting
what we find convenient.
Don
Quixote´s paradox has resulted in two primary readings: the hard interpretation
espoused by Anthony Close and Peter E. Russell which maintains that Cervantes´
novel should be read as a satire that aims to discredit a literary genre, and
the soft reading consistent with that of the 19th century romantics who saw the
knight as a heroic idealist and noble visionary. Similarly, the title of John Jay Allen´s Don Quixote: Hero or Fool suggests that
he must be one or the other (Bayliss 391).
But to say that the reader must choose between the burlesque and the
heroic in Don Quixote discounts the knight´s paradoxical nature. He is simultaneously cuerdo and loco, hidalgo and caballero, and that paradox is what makes him so accessible and
useful as an icon. Like Subcomandante
Marcos, who first read the Quixote at
twelve years of age and later, as a revolutionary, carried it as a primer on
political theory, the reader can enter the Quixote
through the door of burlesque entertainment and make himself at home in the
poignant and profound.
Don Quixote´s progress toward gaining iconic stature has not
just been a linear, cumulative or additive process, but a geometric,
multiplicative and viral one, since the next appropriator will have not only
the original textual Don Quixote to choose from, but all of the subsequent
appropriations from 1605 until now. The
icon has picked up speed and momentum, riding every single wave of new media,
being propelled forward by translation, illustration, theater, film and
product, but also enriching and contributing to each genre.
A great deal of our attraction to Don Quixote has to do with
his representation of the struggle to establish an individual identity,[1] but
other less viral literary figures: Faust, Don Juan, and Robinson Crusoe have
also carried an individualist message.[2] Certainly, the fact that Don Quixote is
recognizable, especially if paired with Sancho, has helped him gain iconic
status, but if being recognizable were the overriding criteria for being an
icon, this study might be about Bottarga and Ganassa or Don Carnal and Doña
Cuaresma.
Paradoxically, he is us and he is not us. In his
manifestation as Alonso Quijano he is a common man, an unremarkable,
unaccomplished man from nowhere special.
As Don Quixote, though, he highlights our own belief and idealism, our
own limitations and possibilities. Don
Quixote, the medieval knight armed to the teeth, was bizarre in the late 16th
century Spain in which he was cast and he remains bizarre today. As Russell Berman points out, the epic genre
emphasizes not what the heroes did, but the fact that they are long dead and
not replaced (Fiction Sets You Free
115), and in a similar way, we become aware of our unbelief by viewing Don
Quixote´s unshakeable belief in everything he has read. Don
Quixote is cited by Robert Alter as beginning the “erosion of belief in the
authority of the written word” (qtd. in Parr 21), not the least of which was
the loss of faith in the authority of scripture. Georg Lukács reinforces that idea about the Quixote, writing, “The first great novel
of world literature stands at the beginning of the time when the Christian God
began to forsake the world” (103). Nonetheless,
the knight´s innocent belief in his ability to achieve great things and embark
on adventures chosen for him alone invokes and partially mirrors the repeated
biblical narrative of the meagerly talented or even handicapped individuals who
achieved great things through divine inspiration (Moses, Joseph, Samuel, David,
Gideon, Mary, Jesus´ disciples, etc.).
Don Quixote´s self-efficacy and ability to create identity through
belief may be enormously attractive to the modern person conditioned by
rationalism to mistrust the metaphysical and whose aspirations are hemmed in by
the limitations of gender, race, social class, sexual orientation, education
and an economic system that commodifies basic human existence. So, between the hard and soft readings of the
Quixote, it is the soft reading that
causes us to sense, like José Cadalso in 1789, that this is much more than just
a funny book. It is that heroic reading
that connects us personally to the knight and elevates him to the status of an icon. The knight´s unwavering commitment to
impossibly high ideals, celebrated by the song “Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha, is what we admire and
would like to replicate in our own lives.
That affirmation of transcendent idealism, the desire to be greater than
what one would normally be allowed, to follow ideals and strive for the impossible
dream, is what makes him special to all of us.
Alonso Quijano had to become someone else to find out who he
was. At fifty years of age he had to be
born again as Don Quixote to truly live and die. He journeyed to the limits of his country to
get back home. His impossible ideals
resulted in many beatings and many defeats, but they were necessary for him to
become the “vencedor de sí mismo,” the conqueror of himself. He challenges us to do the same: to aspire,
to journey, and to conquer ourselves.
[1]
Alexander Welsh writes extensively on Don
Quixote as a treatise on individualism in Reflections on the Hero as Quixote. Princeton, N.J: Princeton
University Press, 1981. pp. 167-222.
[2] Ian
Watt´s book takes on the subject of Don Quixote´s individualist myth in Myths of Modern Individualism. Faust, Don
Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996. pp. 48-89.
