Category Archives: annotated reading lists (2023)

The year in books

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And still, jólabókaflóð continues.

As it has been for the past few years, my general reading plan was to select more volumes from my shelves (i.e., books purchased in 2022 or earlier) – specifically, at least twenty-four non-fiction titles and at least one book from each of the special collections in my home library: Shakespeare (about or retold), poetry, NYRB, Kurt Vonnegut (by or about), Joyce Carol Oates (by or about), philosophy, art, and children’s / YA. Although more than half of the books I have read this year were from the shelves, only twelve of the thirty-five non-fiction works were, and I fared only a bit better with the special collections, missing on both NYRB and art:

■ Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy (Paula Marantz Cohen; 2021)
■ Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (Pádraig Ó Tuama; 2022)
■ And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life (Charles J. Shields; 2011)
■ Babysitter (Joyce Carol Oates; 2022)
■ The Republic (Plato; 375 BCE)
■ The Lemming Condition (Alan Arkin; 1976)

It was certainly a wonderful year of reading, though. With the Catherine Project, I read and studied Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes) in a tutorial and The Republic (Plato) in a small reading group led by a professor of philosophy. In a course at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, I finally read the Emily Watson translation of The Odyssey (and I still prefer the Fagles). I reread Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Herman Melville; 1851) with both Night School Bar and the University of Chicago Graham School. With the latter, I also (finally!) read The Moonstone (Wilkie Collins; 1868). (Soon after that course, a classmate and I did a “buddy read” of The Woman in White (1859) and decided that The Moonstone is the better book; in fact, it was one of my favorite books of the year.) With A Public Space’s APS Together, I read Michael F. Moore’s new translation of The Betrothed (Alessandro Manzoni; 1827), The Haunting of Hill House (Shirley Jackson; 1959), and New Grub Street (George Gissing; 1891). (The Gissing, which had been on my shelves for more than thirty years, was so compelling, I soon followed up with The Odd Women (1893).)

Here are a few of the other groups with which I read:

Premise Institute
■ Hello, Stranger: How We Find Connection in a Disconnected World (Will Buckingham; 2021)

Cardiff BookTalk
■ Watership Down (Richard Adams; 1972)

Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
■ Necessary Trouble (Drew Gilpin Faust; 2023)

The Deep Read: The Humanities Institute at University of California Santa Cruz
■ Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (Elizabeth Kolbert; 2021)

Faulkner in August
■ Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner; 1936)

Victober
■ Wuthering Heights (Emily Brontë; 1847)
■ The Way We Live Now (Anthony Trollope; 1875)

In addition to reading and studying, these courses, programs, and groups offer opportunities to meet and connect with other readers, and with several who decided to continue meeting after the conclusion of a 2022 group, I finally tackled Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoevsky; 1866). In April, I led a meeting on The Emigrants (W.G. Sebald; 1992/1996) for a few of those readers, and one invited me to an altogether different spinoff group to read Far from the Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy; 1874). That same reader and I have continued reading, corresponding, and meeting. Our first “duet” project was Nights of Plague (Orhan Pamuk; 2021). That went so well, we decided to embark on a slow read of The Magic Mountain (Thomas Mann; 1924), which we will finish in March. Our shared love of quality children’s literature and our work as writers and editors led to deep dive into the work of E.B. White, including Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, and The Trumpet of the Swan. We will discuss the first ten or so pieces in Essays of E.B. White next week, and once we’ve finished discussing White and Mann in early 2024, we plan to read Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.

Great stuff, right?

Speaking of great, of the one hundred and twenty-two of books I have read so far, eighteen were published this year, and the standouts were I Have Some Questions for You (Rebecca Makkai), The Last Devil to Die (Richard Osman), To Name the Bigger Lie (Sarah Viren), and Chain Gang All-Stars (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah). Honorable mention goes to What You Are Looking for Is in the Library (Michiko Aoyama), a book that could have been twee but was quite lovely and life-affirming. Obviously, I appreciate the occasional “feel good” book in my stack. How else would I explain my immediate and deep affection for Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, of which The Last Devil to Die is the fourth title?

As I mentioned above, The Moonstone was one of my favorite books of the year. Others include Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution (R.F. Kuang; 2022), Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World (Pádraig Ó Tuama; 2022), New Grub Street (George Gissing; 1891), Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (Patrick Radden Keefe; 2021), and, of course, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Herman Melville; 1851).

Some(what random) statistics:
— 7 dramas, 3 of which were by Shakespeare
— 5 works of poetry
— 20 graphic works, 7 of which were non-fiction
— 34 library books
— 24 rereads

“The solitude of the hero is a sad thing!”

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Along the prairie trail this past weekend.

This week’s reading delivers what must be one of the novel’s most poignant moments: “It is recounted that as soon as Sancho left, Don Quixote felt lonely for him, and if it had been possible for him to revoke the squire’s mandate and take the governorship away from him, his master would have done so” (p. 739). Theirs may be, in contemporary terms, a somewhat toxic co-dependency, but the sparring knight and squire are one another’s person – or, perhaps more accurately, the squire is the knight’s person. After all, what is Don Quixote sans Sancho Panza? What happens when a knight confronts a lion and survives, but his squire is not present to witness (and potentially retell) the adventure? 

From the edges of painful absence, the Knight of the Lions begs leave of the Duchess – “he withdrew to his chamber alone, not permitting anyone to come in to serve him…” (p. 741) – and promptly ruins his stocking. Readers have been aware of Don Quixote’s material poverty for nearly eight hundred pages, but this bitter blend of need and loneliness hurts, doesn’t it? In Our Lord Don Quixote, Miguel de Unamuno asks, “How indeed could he have avoided feeling his solitude, since Sancho was the whole of humanity for him, and it was in Sancho that he loved all men? How could he not feel lonely, when Sancho had been his confidant […]? Was not the mysterious secret of his life something between the two of them alone? Without Sancho, Don Quixote is not Don Quixote, and the master has greater need of the squire than the squire of the master. The solitude of the hero is a sad thing!” (pp. 223-224) Yes, it is, and if Cervantes has somehow failed to appeal to our better natures prior to Sancho’s departure, he handily succeeds in Chapter XLIV. 

This week, I have been reading Of Human Kindness: What Shakespeare Teaches Us About Empathy (Paula Marantz Cohen; 2021). Cohen builds on Harold Bloom’s assertion that Shakespeare “‘invented the human’ – a reference to the rich interior lives of his characters” by arguing, “[T]his human dimension also involves an intimate connection to us, who study him. Shakespeare invented complex individuals who elicit empathy,whom we, audience or readers, feel for even when they fall outside the realm of our experience” (p. 3). Perhaps because the Grossman translation of Don Quixote includes Bloom’s introduction, or perhaps because I have read the plays so often, I have been a bit obsessed with the idea that Shakespeare and Cervantes were, at the same moment in history, (re)writing the characters whose names alone now serve as shorthand for aspects of human experience (e.g., Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear, Romeo, Falstaff, Brutus, Don Quixote). The passage “Don Quixote felt lonely for him” elicited in me the same throat-lump empathy as “I know thee not, old man” (Prince Hal – now King Henry V – to former companion Falstaff in Henry IV, Act V, Scene 4); “O, reason not the need!” (Lear to Regan in King Lear, Act II, Scene 4); and “[T]he rest is silence” (Hamlet to Horatio in Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2).

Speaking of Hamlet, Don Quixote’s advice to Sancho Panza (Chapters XLII and XLIII) reads like a nuanced version of Polonius’ speech to Laertes in Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3, beginning, “And these few precepts in thy memory – Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue, any unproportion’d thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.” And still speaking of Shakespeare, the manner in which the Duke and Duchess toy with the knight and squire initially reminded me of the laughter and sport Theseus and Hippolyta and the two couples enjoy at the expense of the “rude mechanicals” in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but when I reread Act V, Scene 1, I realized that, in fact, Theseus leans more toward Don Diego than the manipulative Duke and Duchess; he demonstrates tolerance and patience in accepting their performance. So, what motivates the Duke and Duchess, anyway? Does the idea of Sancho beating himself entertain them? Do their machinations represent a bid for immortality – that is, are their antics an attempt to insert themselves into the sequel of a popular novel? 

Two other notes:

(1) Is it sloppy reading on my part, or did Sancho Panza dispense with the assorted petitioners pretty handily?

(2) Near the conclusion of Chapter XLII, Don Quixote says of the squire’s tall tale about the ride on Clavileño,“…[E]ither Sancho is lying, or Sancho is dreaming.” Coupled with the chapter’s conclusion about what the knight wants Sancho to believe about his adventures in the cave, this statement admits doubt about the nature of truth in this narrative. If they build consensus around a single narrative, is it true? Even if it only occurred in their dreams or their imaginations? 

Pages remaining in journey: 364

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“As for your grace’s valor, courtesy, deeds, and undertakings,” Sancho continued, “there are different opinions. Some say, ‘Crazy, but amusing’; others, ‘Brave, but unfortunate’; and others, ‘Courteous, but insolent’; and they go on and on so much in this vein that they don’t leave an untouched bone in your grace’s body or mine” (p. 472).

It sounds as if Sancho has overheard a few book discussions, doesn’t it?

Earlier this week, one of my reading groups finished Crime and Punishment. Despite ten weeks of engaged reading and discussion, we failed to build consensus around any single idea about the philosophy and/or psychology of Raskolnikov. Might he be a psychopath or, at the very least, disturbed? Did the extremities of hunger and poverty inform his disordered thinking? Do his thought patterns simply underscore the limits of nihilism? Some combination of all of this? None of this? In our eighth meeting, I posited that the compulsion to pin a character to a specimen tray and label each of his acts (or, as Sancho might say, bones) might represent a contemporary tendency, one fueled by popular psychology, legal dramas, and the assumption that everything we do can be ascribed a concrete motive and, by extension, a value judgment: He did [insert act] because [insert motive], and that is [insert moral value]. After all, I suggested, sometimes thoughts and acts follow no discernible logic. Shakespeare gives us a fabulous example of this in The Winter’s Tale. Leontes’ jealous rage occurs in one short speech after his departing friend acquiesces to the queen’s entreaties that he, the friend, remain — for her husband’s sake! Leontes’ inexplicable madness results in the deaths of his son and a courtier, as well as the apparent deaths of his newborn and his wife. In a move that can confound readers, audiences, actors, and directors, Shakespeare provides no explanation for Leontes’ unbridled jealousy. Nothing in the text points to a motive. Rather, the writer seems to say, Some people are like this; here is a story about one. And it works! Why? Because more often than anyone would like to admit, what we say, do, and believe defies both logic and diagnosis.

I reread The Winter’s Tale following that meeting and was struck again by how inessential Leontes’ motive is to the plot. In Shakespeare’s blend of tragedy (the first three acts, the fall of the king), comedy (the fourth act, the pastoral involving the shepherdess and the prince), and history (the fifth act, the kingdom in need of an heir), the why of Leontes’ behavior proves far less critical to the play than the fallout of that behavior. Similarly, the why of Raskolnikov’s behavior – in this reader’s opinion, anyway – proves far less critical to Crime and Punishment than the fallout of that behavior. Like Shakespeare, Dostoevsky refrains from defining a motive for the main character’s action. Yes, he draws readers into Raskolnikov’s head; in fact, many early paragraphs read like soliloquies; but the novel seems rooted in the effects of Raskolnikov’s act, on him and on the characters with whom he interacts. It is not, then, a story about why Raskolnikov kills, any more than The Winter’s Tale is a story about why Leontes spirals out of control. Crime and Punishment concerns what occurs in the aftermath of a brutal act.

Of course, because I am also reading Don Quixote, I have found myself wondering about the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. “[T]he common people think your grace is a madman, and that I’m just as great a simpleton” (p. 471), Sancho informs Don Quixote. The gentry suggest he has overstepped his bounds, and other knights want nothing to do with him. Crazy, amusing; brave, unfortunate; courteous, insolent. Maybe the compulsion to pin a character to a specimen tray and label each of his bones is not as contemporary as I thought, eh? Increasingly, however, I find myself drawn to the idea that we need to keep this character far, far away from tray and pins.

A participant in the tutorial has noted that some of us have been “cheating” on Don Quixote and wondered how that has affected our experience of other novels. I loved the use of “cheating” because I often refer to myself as a recklessly and unapologetically promiscuous reader, one who will leave books partially read to pursue others, only to return to books begun well before any of those, all with the cologne of new books clinging to my sweater. Seriously, though, it is not so much that I have been cheating on Don Quixote but rather that I have added Cervantes to a conversation occurring in one of the rooms of my imagination. While participating in the tutorial, I have also completed two courses on one of my favorite works of fiction, Moby-Dick, a short course on The Odyssey, and the reading group for Crime and Punishment. That puts Melville, Homer, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and Shakespeare in the same mental living room; imagine my delight! Although I am still working out Dostoevsky’s relationship to the other writers, it is clear that Melville is indebted to both Cervantes and Shakespeare, and that these three have a running tab with the oral tradition that yielded the Homeric epics. In anticipation of another course, I began rereading Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, which begins, “Call me Jonah.” With that nod to Melville, Vonnegut entered the living room. (Speaking of Melville and specimen trays, has anyone yet satisfactorily explained Ahab? Of course not, although CLR James makes some insightful, if dated, points about who Ahab may have become to the collective American imagination.) These authors have a lot to talk about, and I am listening.

The other books I am reading have not been enveloped by Don Quixote; nor the reverse. Rather, each of the books amplifies the others.

Marginalia
“…I give you a Don Quixote who is, at the end, dead and buried, so that no one will dare tell more tales about him, for the ones told in the past are enough…” (p. 458).
Spoiler alert, right? Since January 2022, I have participated in one discussion group and two courses on Moby- Dick, and in each, participants were upset when the conclusion was referenced. And our Crime and Punishment group agreed to avoid spoilers, although privately I argued that the title is as much a spoiler as this quote from Don Quixote.

“…I only devote myself to making the world understand its error in not restoring that happiest of times when the order of knight errantry was in flower” (p. 464).
Don Quixote has a vision board.

“It seems to me,” said Don Quixote, “there is no human history in the world that does not have its ups and downs, especially those that deal with chivalry; they cannot be filled with nothing but successful exploits” (p. 476).
Given my reflection above, you will understand how the idea of Don Quixote saying this to Leontes or Ahab simply cracked me up.

“To say witty things and to write cleverly requires great intelligence: the most perceptive character in a play is the fool, because the man who wishes to seem simple cannot possibly be a simpleton. History is like a sacred thing; it must be truthful, and wherever truth is, there God is; but despite this, there are some who write and toss off books as if they were fritters” (p. 478).
Elsewhere, while discussing Moby-Dick, I observed the parallels between Pip and Lear’s fool, which, naturally, ensured I added King Lear to my to-be-(re)read stack, but arriving at this passage, I wondered, Does Don Quixote have a fool? If so, is it Sancho? Or is the Knight of the Sorrowful Face the author’s fool? (And, yes, there is truth, my readerly kryptonite.)

Six weeks and 398 pages in

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My image of detail from Salvador Dalí’s Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938).

Unsurprisingly, the story of Cardenio’s madness concludes when he is reunited with Luscinda, and Fernando is persuaded by Dorotea: “You have conquered, O beautiful Dorotea, you have conquered because I do not have the heart to deny so many truths spoken together” (p. 318; and there it is again, truth – my literary kryptonite). Tender feeling, undeniable signs of love and repentance, and several pages later, Don Fernando displays “great love and courtesy” (p. 320) to Cardenio and Luscinda, who have knelt before him. Yes, apparently all’s well that ends well in this story that bears a remarkable resemblance to Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, which, according to Professor Michael Delahoyde, makes sense:

The closest source of [The Two Gentlemen of Verona] seems to be Diana Enamorada, written in Spanish by the Portuguese Jorge de Montemayor in 1542 but not translated into English until 1598 (Asimov 465). The Felix and Felismena story had other incarnations, such as Felix and Philiomena (1585) and in Part I of Don Quixote in which the Valentine character is named Cardenio (Barton 178). The friendship theme, or friendship vs. love, could be found in the Palamon and Arcite stories, and perhaps Damon and Pithias (credited to Richard Edwards in 1565) was an influence (Barton 178). 

For two weeks, though, I have been trying to recall where else I have encountered the material in the first interpolated novel. It was only by chance that I finally stumbled on a reading note from 2016. In April of that year, we attended the Shakespeare Project of Chicago’s staged reading of Stephen Greenblatt and Charles Mee’s Cardenio, after which I noted that only the Project’s excellence made the tedious work watchable. Although I may be drifting dangerously far from Don Quixote, I must share my favorite bit from the reading of Cardenio, spoken by the much maligned Doris:

To be honest, I’ve never understood
Why I shouldn’t tell the truth.
I mean the assumption that this is beneficial to the world,
to be nice, to be pleasant,
is just unproven.

[Is she suddenly close to tears?]

Difficult people are always the ones who advance civilization.

To be honest, I’ve never understood / Why I shouldn’t tell the truth. Yes, I am circling back to truth and storytelling, and I know I am not the only one who is struck by the following moment in this week’s reading: “[T]hey wanted the story to last longer; such was the charm with which Dorotea recounted her misfortunes” (p. 320). That such “complex and desperate affairs” (p. 321) resolve so readily into a charming story (narrated by one of that story’s victims!) boggles the mind – even one that has already suspended disbelief. Later, the priest recounts for Don Fernando and company the madness of Don Quixote, which provokes laughter and the observation that “it was the strangest kind of madness that ever affected an irrational mind” (p. 323). In the margins, I shouted, What?!?! Stranger, madder, more irrational than the story they just lived?!?!? (In the margins, one may indulge in frantic punctuation.) This is followed by a second interpolated novel (concerning the captive and Zoraida), which, however quickly, happily, and improbably resolved, shifts our focus, once again, away from the titular character. Whatever Cervantes is telling us about storytelling, he intends for us to notice how he positions narrators and listeners in the book’s nested narratives.

Speaking of nested narratives, in anticipation of attending the preview of “Salvador Dalí: The Image Disappears,” I recently read three short biographies of the artist and reviewed several books of his art. Of course, nothing compares to seeing paintings like Apparition of Face and Fruit Dish on a Beach (1938) or, one of my favorites, Inventions of the Monsters (1937) in person. On Friday, as I jockeyed for ever closer positions to the works, I paused periodically to focus on what I could see from the intermediate distances. After all, the dog in Apparition is most apparent when you stand back; the burning giraffe in Monsters, when you lean in. Oh, I thought, what a collection of stories, dreams, nightmares, and visions Dalí’s work comprises! In one of those moments of synthesis that shape the reading and thinking life, I was reminded that discerning the many narratives at play in his paintings (in many works of art, period) is dependent on the viewer’s perspective. Our attempts to resolve or make sense of the narratives in a Dalí painting require that we see the work from multiple angles. Where I stand shapes which story I see, as well as my impressions of that story. By extension, then, I might posit that with Don Quixote, Cervantes not only reimagines how a novel can be structured (I am currently envisioning a nesting doll or onion) but also slyly critiques our relationship to stories. So much depends on, among other things, who is narrating and where the listeners are positioned in a narrative (to say nothing of the listeners’ prejudices and limitations; yes, I am looking at you, good priest and barber).

Two more notes:

(1) The Homer reference at the conclusion of Chapter XXXVII, in which Don Quixote describes academics as passing “through these shoals, these Scyllas and Charybdises” (p. 330), delighted me.

(2) You will find more about Greenblatt and his work on Cardenio here. 

Four weeks and thirty-five chapters in

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In last week’s reading (Chapter XXVI), the barber and the priest “were astonished again as they considered how powerful the madness of Don Quixote was, for it had pulled along after it the good sense of this poor man” – that is, Sancho Panza. In this week’s reading (Chapter XXX), however, it is from Sancho Panza and not from those who “mocked and deceived” Don Quixote that the “quick-witted and very spirited” Dorotea takes her cues. Faced with an incensed knight, she flatters and placates him and reminds him of the boon he has promised her. She then narrates a clever tale featuring an imperiled kingdom, ghastly giants, and an orphaned princess. In short, she enters Don Quixote’s world and does so seemingly without patronizing him. Later, she privately acknowledges to the priest that she, too, “had often spent time reading” the books of chivalry that have reframed Don Quixote’s reality (p. 257), yet she clearly has not succumbed to their spell since she can so readily recognize that the innkeeper (Chapter XXXII) “doesn’t have far to go to be a second Don Quixote.” (p. 270) My initial – and overly simple – observation concerned the ways in which one may engage with, perhaps even indulge others: Sancho Panza and Dorotea do so in a positive manner; the priest and the barber, less so. A more significant idea that occurred to me this week is that even if they dismiss Don Quixote as mad, members of the ever-expanding cast of characters inevitably engage with him where and how he is. 

As I have shared, I am fascinated by the uses and definitions of “true” and “truth” in this work. While I am not setting that line of inquiry aside, I must, in the wake of Chapters XXXIII, XXXIV, and XXXV, wonder if Cervantes is pointing readers to compelling questions about life and literature. After all, there must be a reason our titular character’s adventures occur between and among so many other stories – including a short book read aloud by, of all characters, the priest. (Yes, while Don Quixote sleeps, the priest reads aloud The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious, and when he finishes, he asserts that while the novel “seems fine,” he “cannot persuade himself that it is true….” (p. 312) He cannot “persuade himself that it is true”? It is a novel! What does he mean? Ah, me and notions of truth; moth and flame.)

Last week, I posited that the manner in which Cardenio’s story sidelines Don Quixote’s may be a juxtaposition of two types of “madness” – the (apparently) unceasing and the (likely) temporary. (I suspect that once his narrative is resolved, Cardenio will have renounced his wandering and fits and be restored to his “true” life.) When the adventures of the Knight of the Sorrowful Face are again upstaged, this time by the novella, I was compelled to review the previous iterations of story that have occurred. The Grossman translation includes a footnote indicating that Cervantes himself was likely criticized for the “interpolated novels,” of which The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious was the first, but Don Quixote’s story has already intersected with several other narratives: histories, ballads, verses, confessions, autobiography, diary, letters; now a novella. In The World of Don Quixote (1967), Richard L. Predmore notes that critics once reviewed this material as “merely literary baggage.” Even after critics agreed that the additional literature “does fulfill an essential function” in the novel, they could not agree what, but later in the same section, Predmore writes, “Cervantes’ masterpiece suggests that any kind of reading is revolutionary.” Isn’t that a remarkable reminder? Any kind of reading is revolutionary. From that, it might follow that any kind of storytelling can also be revolutionary; therefore, the stories in which the central tale of the mad knight is nested will likely prove as integral to Cervantes’ larger narrative as Don Quixote’s battles with windmills and wine sacks.

Two additional notes:

(1) In Chapter XXXI, Don Quixote encounters Andrés, the servant he believes he rescued in Chapter IV. The unfortunate boy joins the growing chorus of characters who maintain that the knight’s intervention caused more harm than good. Ordinarily, I would be inclined to read this as an indictment, but this week, the reappearance of Andrés provoked laughter.

(2) From page 257:

“Well, there’s something else in this,” said the priest. “Aside from the foolish things this good gentleman says with reference to his madness, if you speak to him of other matters, he talks rationally and shows a clear, calm understanding in everything; in other words, except if the subject is chivalry, no one would think he does not have a very good mind.”

Do we agree with the priest’s assessment? If so, are there places in the text in which Don Quixote has discussed “other matters,” or are we meant to take the priest’s word for it? Is it madness if he is rational? 

“Not as they were, but as they should have been”

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In what is perhaps best described as an embarrassment of riches, I am, in addition to a Catherine Project tutorial on Don Quixote and both University of Chicago Graham School and Night School Bar courses on Moby-Dick, enrolled in a short course on The Odyssey with the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. It may not surprise you, then, to learn that I have begun to discern not only the debt Melville owes Cervantes but the debt both authors owe the oral tradition that yielded the Homeric epics. In the Don Quixote reading over the last three weeks, I encountered many narrative forms (e.g., “found” history, ballad, verses, confessions, autobiography, diary, letter), as well as a diverse cast of narrators. Although their mastery of the craft varies widely, these storytellers generally receive from their audiences the time and space needed to share their tales in full (or, in the case of the Knight of the Sorrowful Face, to expound on the virtues and vicissitudes of knight errantry). Might these plot-advancing soliloquys be the kin of the poets’ songs to the guests of kings, of Nestor’s rueful recollections of Odysseus and Agamemnon, and of Odysseus’ calculated retelling of the (mis)adventures that befell him following the sack of Troy? Not long after making this tentative connection, I encountered the following passage, in which Don Quixote is, once again, schooling Sancho Panza on the chivalric code:

I say, too, that when a painter wishes to win fame in his art, he attempts to copy the original works of the most talented painters he knows; this same rule applies to all the important occupations and professions that serve to embellish nations, and it must be, and is, followed when the man who wishes to be known as prudent and long-suffering imitates Ulysses [Odysseus], in whose person and hardships Homer painted a living portrait of prudence and forbearance; Virgil, too, in the person of Aeneas, portrayed for us the valor of a devoted son and the sagacity of a valiant and experienced captain; they were depicted and described not as they were, but as they should have been, to serve as examples of virtue to men who came after them. (Chapter XXV, p. 193)

Prudence and forbearance? Perhaps Don Quixote and I have not read the same translations of The Odyssey.Where the crafty, cunning Odysseus repeatedly shape-shifts through his layered lies stories, Don Quixote commits unswervingly to the code of conduct espoused by chivalric romances: “‘I thank you for your good intentions, friend Sancho,’” responded Don Quixote, ‘but I want you to realize that all the things I am doing are not jokes but very real; otherwise, I would be contravening the rules of chivalry that command us never to lie….’” Although the knight better exemplifies virtue, suffering, and forbearance than does adroitly deceptive Odysseus, the mad knight and the many-minded Greek do seem to share a need (compulsion?) to “rewrite” the world to conform to their own stories. That said, while Odysseus ostensibly achieves his goal (with Athena’s considerable intervention), Don Quixote seems destined to endure beating after beating. 

I made three other notes about this week’s reading: 

(1) The (apparently) temporary madness of the tattered Knight of the Sierra and the unrelenting madness of Don Quixote. I moved no further along that line of inquiry than a sentence fragment and the idea that if I fronted it with the word “discuss” (i.e., “Discuss the (apparently) temporary madness….”), it would make an infuriating essay question.

(2) Don Quixote’s antics in Chapter XXVI reminded me both of Edgar disguised as “poor Tom” and Lear on the heath. These two old men – Lear and Quixote – seem like psychological brothers. I revisited Bloom’s introduction to the Grossman translation, and he seems to list toward Hamlet.

(3) “And to conclude, I imagine that everything I say is true, no more and no less….” (p. 201) While it may be a fool’s quest, I remain fascinated by the uses and definitions of “true” and “truth” in this work. In the comments last week, Jeanne suggested that Cervantes is “foregrounding something about the perspective of the storytellers in relation to what we commonly think of as truth.” Similarly, Mcanultymaccom observed, “Since its naming/defining is so allusive, perhaps we need better terms: framing devices, constructions, peculiar assertions, etc. All of which foreground the actor/framer vs any claim to ‘truth’ with all its classical undertones.”

“Truths so appealing and entertaining…”

By Posted in (re)reading Moby-Dick, annotated reading lists (2023), books, commonplace book, reading Don Quixote 6 Comments

Because I am also studying Moby-Dick this semester, I appreciated Harold Bloom’s assertion (see introduction to the Edith Grossman translation) that “Melville blended Don Quixote and Hamlet in Captain Ahab (with a touch of Milton’s Satan added for seasoning).” Returning to a book again and again (and again), as I have Moby-Dick, creates a familiar, well-creased mental map. With this, a reader can travel along the accustomed channels or more easily attempt new routes (meanings, metaphors, implications, associations, links to other works, etc.). On my current voyage through Moby-Dick, for example, I have been navigating ideas about how Melville (perhaps as Ishmael, perhaps as the story’s creator) shapes the narrative and what, precisely, we readers are meant to understand as truth in that narrative. Oh, how I wish I had something even approaching that level of familiarity with Don Quixote because Cervantes is also clearly experimenting (perhaps we can even say, playing?) with narrative structure and truth, but I have only the barest outline of a mental map by which to chart my course through this vast novel.

In last week’s tutorial meeting, we discussed Cervantes’ (playful? deceptive? ironic?) intent in the prologue and dedication and touched on the idea of the novel as a “found” history. In Chapters XI through XXI of Part I, readers encounter a number of other approaches to storytelling, including Quixote’s “long harangue” to the goatherds; Antonio’s ballad; Pedro’s account of Grisóstomo and Marcela; the verses of the deceased shepherd; Sancho Panza’s deceptive explanation of his and Don Quixote’s injuries; a reference to the history of the deeds of Don Quixote penned by “the wise man whose task it will be to write” it; Sancho’s “best of all stories” (which, “[a]s finished as his mother,” ends abruptly); the confessions of the prisoners; and the pawned autobiography of Ginés (a narrative of “truths so appealing and entertaining that no lies can equal them”). This variety surely represents more than simple diversion; what is its meaning and purpose?

I wonder, too, if, as with Melville’s sprawling novel (which also employs a variety of narrative forms, from sermon to soliloquy to taxonomy to stage play to sailor’s yarn and more), the varied structure is related to an underlying assertion about the role of truth in storytelling; or do I have that inverted? Is it, rather, an indication that storytelling undergirds truth? In the Grossman translation, I am struck by the repetition of the words “truth” (at least twenty-one in this week’s reading) and “true” (at least nineteen). In fact, Bloom’s introduction opens with the query, “What is the true object of Don Quixote’s quest?” I might parry, What is Don Quixote’s truth? Alternately, What do “true” and “truth” mean to the Knight of the Sorrowful Face? (I have, as I reread Moby-Dick, similarly asked, What is Ahab’s truth? How does it differ from Ishmael’s, the crew’s, and the author’s?) When I concluded this week’s Don Quixote chapters, I affixed two questions like pins to my as-yet faint mental map: Why do the novel’s assorted storytellers insist on the veracity of each narrative? More philosophically, why, when we storytelling animals narrate, do we claim to have proffered the truth?

Four passages particularly speak to the ideas above:

“Since everything I’ve told you is the absolute truth, I take it for granted that what our lad said about what people were saying about the reason for Grisóstomo’s death is also true.” (p. 85)

“I didn’t know her,” responded Sancho. “But the man who told me this story said it was so true and correct that I certainly could, when I told it to somebody else, affirm and swear I had seen it all….” (p. 145)

“… [W]asn’t it laughable how frightened we were, and wouldn’t it make a good story? At least, how frightened I was, for I already know that your grace doesn’t know what fright is or understand the meaning of fear or terror.”

“I do not deny,” responded Don Quixote, “that what happened to us is deserving of laughter, but it does not deserve to be told, for not all persons are wise enough to put things in their proper place.” (p. 151)

“It’s so good,” responded Ginés, “that it’s too bad for Lazarillo de Tormes and all the other books of that genre that have been or will be written. What I can tell your grace is that it deals with truths, and they are truths so appealing and entertaining that no lies can equal them.” (p. 169)