page 150 You can feel sorry for yourself and not whine about it. Future-you will thank now-you for not giving up when you feel like it. Suffer, but don’t add to your suffering with a whole performance. Write a timetable, stick to it. “Our routes,” I’d told the children when they were small. “Bath, books, bed.” Routine first, because routine is a way to get traction, if nothing else, when all else fails or has failed: handhold, toehold, step. “It’s a question of discipline… When you’ve finished washing and dressing each morning, you must tend your planet. I’d written that out for all my children, from The Little Prince.
That’s the great thing about parenting, one of them, all the stuff I wish I’d known; I could learn it and teach it at the same time.
page 211 Even ease takes discipline is the point; you have to participate in your own life, survive enthusiastically whatever happens, or you’ll never rise again. Discipline is borrowed backbone. I’d have been sunk, drunk, gone under without it.
Discipline is the only gift you can give your future self.
page 252 You see, in this way, a child dies — your child, mine — and you think, I thought, I’ll never care about anything else again. Not really. But unbidden, other things shoulder their way into your grief, saturated world; and coincidentally, you should shoulder your way out of it. Apples roll under seats, you drink, tea, and your bladder fills. You register injustice, you feel outrage, you find yourself at a border post looking for the bathroom. You’re ridiculous and human and insufficient, but you’re back in play. Relief filled my chest, blew it open like the steel bands on an oak casket that had been snapped.
Another stack of books to be shelved (although I will consult Homer and the Heroic Tradition soon).
This morning’s seminar on the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke represented as profound a pivot from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as can be conjured, I reckon.
From this —
They rode through regions of particolored stone upthrust in ragged kerfs and shelves of traprock reared in faults and anticlines curved back upon themselves and broken off like stumps of great stone treeboles and stones the lightning had clove open, seeps exploding in steam in some old storm. They rode past trapdykes of brown rock running down the narrow chines of the ridges and onto the plain like the ruins of old walls, such auguries everywhere of the hand of man before man was or any living thing.
to this —
Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive.
I know, right?
But I have now returned to the forbidding and unyielding landscapes of Blood Meridian and am struggling with the assignment for our final class meeting: Develop an elevator pitch to convince others to read McCarthy’s magnum opus. That I loathe this sort of thing is as unsurprising as my recent discovery that Werner Herzog and McCarthy admired one another’s work. (Check out this terrific NPR feature.) Wait! I’ve got it: If, like Werner Herzog, you believe that “the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder,” read this book. Or maybe: Imagine a Moby-Dick in which the whales are people. You know what? I think I will mysteriously end video when we are required to share our pitches tomorrow.
Image captured in March at “Pompeii: The Exhibition” at MSI.
From Sarah Viren’s To Tell the Bigger Lie:
Not that truth doesn’t matter, but that what often matters more is the context in which whatever is true or false comes to our attention. That context is the story, the poem, the meaning we make from the raw material of a lived life.
Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget.
If Don Quixote truly regains his sanity (as opposed to, say, capitulating to the machinations of those around him), has it anything to do with the fact that in succumbing to his exhaustion and illness, he finally sleeps? Yes, this is fiction, but if we are still, quixotically, seeking the reason for his madness, perhaps the chief clue appears on page 21: “In short our gentleman became so caught up in reading that he spent his nights reading from dusk till dawn and his days reading from sunrise to sunset, and so with too little sleep and too much reading his brains dried up causing him to lose his mind” (emphasis added). Over the course of the novel, Don Quixote continues to spend little time sleeping. Even when he is abed nursing wounds, he frets, he dwells, he thinks and rethinks. An obsession with chivalric romances may not be healthy, but contemporary readers know that the perils of sleep-deficiency include deleterious physical, psychological, and neurological effects. Perhaps Cervantes knew, too. In this week’s reading, at the beginning of Chapter LXX, Sancho knows his sleep will be disturbed if he shares a room with his agitated master. Sure enough, once they have retired, the knight plies him with questions about “the strangest and most remarkable event to befall Don Quixote in the entire course of this great history” (p. 907). Before that, Chapter LXVIII opens with the observation that Don Quixote’s first sleep never yields to his second, “unlike Sancho, who never had a second sleep because his sleep lasted from nightfall until morning, proving he had a strong constitution and few cares” (p. 902). Later Sancho says:
“I only understand that while I’m sleeping I have no fear, or hope, or trouble, or glory; blessed be whoever invented sleep, the mantle that covers all human thought, the food that satisfies hunger, the water that quenches thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that cools down ardor, and, finally, the general coin with which all things are bought, the scale and balance that make the shepherd equal to the king, and the simple man equal to the wise. There is only one defect in sleep, or so I’ve heard, and it is that it resembles death, for there is very little difference between a man who is sleeping and a man who is dead” (p. 903; emphasis added).
As the novel hurtles toward its inevitable conclusion, the melancholic, low-spirited knight returns to his village and home and finally sleeps “more than six hours at a stretch, as they say, so long that his housekeeper and his niece thought he would never open his eyes again” (p. 935). When he awakens, his “judgment is restored, free and clear of the dark shadows of ignorance imposed on it by [his] grievous and constant reading of detestable books of chivalry” (p. 935).
At the beginning of Part II, we are presented with “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), so passages such as, “‘There is a remedy for everything but death,’ responded Don Quixote” (p. 884), and the verses the knight sings “to the sound of his own sighs” (p. 905) do not foreshadow so much as remind us – emphatically –that we already know how this will end.* Restored to himself by sleep, Alonso Quixano the Good renounces his obsession and calls his friends and family to his side. And in the end, the hasty and heavily foreshadowed death leaves this reader dissatisfied. I’m with Sancho: “[T]he greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that, without anybody killing him or any other hands ending his life except those of melancholy” (p. 937).
Marginalia
On page 876: “Sancho’s wingless flight” mirrors the ignominy of the blanket-bouncing incident. Had time permitted, I would have recorded more of the symmetries and similarities that the structures of the novel’s two parts share.
On page 889: “‘Oh, Señor,’ said Don Antonio, ‘may God forgive you for the harm you have done to the entire world in wishing to restore the sanity of the most amusing madman in it! Don’t you see, Señor, that the benefit caused by the insanity of Don Quixote cannot be as great as the pleasure produced by his madness?’” I would add, restoration of his sanity apparently means death.
On the same page I couldn’t help but mark “this true history.” Over the course of these fourteen weeks, I have not resolved what, precisely, we are to make of the repetition of “true” and “truth.”
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* Because I read the work in translation, I am uncertain if the brilliant pun that concludes the song is intentional: “Mine is a novel state: I go on living, and constantly die.” Just. Brilliant.
An introduction of sorts If you’ve been visiting this site for a while, you know I am drawn to Anselm Kiefer’s extraordinary painting Midgard. Last year, when I read The Emigrants for the first time, I connected the ways in which W.G. Sebald’s prose moved me to the ways in which Midgard acts on my imagination; both works are now housed in the same room in my imagination.
Not one to be content with simply sensing the artistic pairing, though, I poked around a bit. Plenty on this topic can be found in academic article databases, but here’s something succinct from The Nation (August 2016):
“The link between artistic creation and failure is intimate in the best of cases, but nowhere is this sense of inadequacy more acute than in literature or art about the Holocaust, which erects, by its own lights, a series of failed monuments to an event that is fundamentally illegible. To memorialize a tragedy, one must inscribe unmistakable significance into reticent materials, attempting to curb the natural processes of forgetting and obsolescence. In this way, acts of aestheticization are exercises in misrepresentation, requiring us to arrange neutral resources into artificially beautiful or meaningful configurations. But can we misrepresent without also misleading, mangling? These questions rightfully obsess a generation of postwar German-language writers and artists, most notably the author W.G. Sebald, who was born in 1944 in Bavaria and died in the UK in 2001, and the visual artist Anselm Kiefer, born one year later in the neighboring state of Baden-Württemberg, and since 1992 a resident of France.” [Emphasis added]
Naturally, I then spent more time with Kiefer’s work. If you’re interested in how artistic expressions can intersect, give Anselm Kiefer a google. Does his work evoke in you the same unease Sebald’s prose does?
Speaking of unease, in many of the reading groups in which I have participated in the last few years, we have been exhorted to focus exclusively on the text we share. I hear that, but as a former teacher and as an engaged reader, I can also see numerous shortcomings in such a reading, not the least of which would be the disadvantages of a lack of context. If I were in the middle of a deserted island and The Emigrants fell from the sky and thwocked me in the head, presuming I knew enough of the world, I could glean a great deal from the text alone. But wouldn’t a bit of a frame enrich the reading? For example, doesn’t the information from The Nation article quoted above provide helpful context?
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It has been suggested that what writers and artists say about their own work — in interviews, for example, or autobiographies – is largely unreliable, primarily because much of their “interpretation” is simply storytelling (or, in the case of, say, Ernest Hemingway, mythologizing) or reinterpreting past work to dovetail current efforts. In her biography of Sebald (Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald, 2022), Carol Angier dismantles many of the lies Sebald perpetrated stories Sebald told not only about his own life but about the sources of his work — and the latter in particular is kind of a big deal. Authors are invariably asked some version of, “Where do you get your ideas?” Sebald was (beyond) slippery in his answers, and simply skimming a few articles (here, here, and here) provides some clues as to why. Were these stories his to tell?
Context has its merits.
What follows next are a few questions that may prove helpful in a discussion of The Emigrants. Feel free to add your own in the comments.
What do we make of the epigraphs? They’re unattributed and enigmatic.
DR HENRY SELWYN: “And the last remnants memory destroys” (Doesn’t memory preserve?)
PAUL BEREYTER: “There is a mist that no eye can dispel” (Blindness, memory, trauma?)
AMBROS ADELWARTH: “My field of corn is but a crop of tears” (Trauma?)
MAX FERBER: “They come when night falls to search for life” (Ghosts? Memories? Dreams?)
What is the purpose of the photographs? Typically, we consider photographs “evidence” or “fact.” (Apparently, a line of philosophical inquiry disputes this, which is cool, but I am talking about our general experience of physical photographs. After all, when someone shares a school photo of her granddaughter, we don’t ordinarily enter into a discussion about the truth-value of representational photography.) The inclusion of photos in works of non-fiction tends to lend credibility and truth to the work because photos are customarily the fruits of research: They are “proof.”
But The Emigrants is a work of fiction. So what’s with the photographs?More, what is with their quality? Yes, quality. Many are fuzzy, hard to see. A publisher would make every effort to improve or enhance the reproducibility of images in a text, so the lack of clarity is certainly by design. Look at the images on pp. 7, 27, and 49, or on pp. 158, 159, and 168, for example. You need to work hard to discern the subject. More, the images are uncaptioned. Grab a few books from your shelves and look at the photos and images. If you find one that fails to caption (and credit) those photos and images, either directly on that page or in a section collecting that information, let me know.
Many readers simply ignore photos, but the photos’ inclusion alone would still inform such readers’ experience of the text. Why? As I said above, we consider photographs to be evidence, fact, truth.
So, what is the point of the photos in The Emigrants?And if the point is to lend a fictional narrative a sense of truth, how do we reconcile the fact that this is clearly a work about the Holocaust? And consider all of this while rereading the section in Max Ferber in which Uncle Leo asserts that the photo of the book burning on the Residenzplatz in Würzburg is a forgery (p. 1830: “In other words, the photographic document in the paper was a fake. And just as that document was a fake, said Uncle, as if his discovery were the one vital proof, so too everything else has been a fake, from the very start.”If we use photos to signal truth, don’t faked or forged photos deny truth?
Finally, note that The Emigrants concludes with an extended meditation on pictures from an exhibition the narrator of the Ferber section saw in Frankfurt (pp. 235-237): “color photographs, tinted with a greenish-blue or reddish-brown.”
Who is the narrator of The Emigrants? Is it the same person in all four sections? Is the narrator a stand-in for Sebald, or is something more complicated occurring? In the margin of p. 75, I wrote, “Oral histories,” which made me think of singers in the Iliad and the Odyssey and the way in which stories are passed in an oral tradition. Passages to consider:
From Bereyter, p. 29: “And so, belatedly, I tried to get closer to him, to imagine what his life was life….” Why? The writer’s instinct? This whole page is sort of depressing, right? It’s as if the narrator is colluding in Paul’s destruction. He (the narrator) is moved to empathy and connection “belatedly” and with the object of parlaying it into a story, his story. His medium is others’ pain, trauma.
Also on that page: “It is in order to avoid this sort of wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter.” And with that we are introduced to a narrator who thinks there is a “rightful” trespass of someone else’s story.
And on p. 224, this: “[A]nd now as I write these lines, it feels as if I had lost her, and as if I could not get over the loss.” So. Let’s revisit the question from the piece I linked above: Can one misrepresent without also misleading, mangling?
What is this work saying about nature? From Selwyn, p. 7: “Nature itself was groaning and collapsing beneath the burden we placed upon it.” It seems as if this is one of Sebald’s chief themes – nature brutalized by man (e.g., Manchester and industrialization in Max Ferber); nature reasserting itself amid the ruins of man’s architecture (the hospital in Ambros Adelwarth); nature as largely inscrutable. Passages to consider:
From Bereyter, p. 45: “… [O]n this occasion, Paul, in a conjecture she felt to be most daring, had linked the bourgeois concept of Utopia and order, as expressed in the designs and buildings of Nicolas Ledoux, with the progressive destruction of natural life.”
From Adelwarth, p. 110: “… I have spent my life out of doors here, in the boathouse or the apiary, depending on the weather, and I no longer concern myself with what goes on in the so-called real world. No doubt I am now, in some sense, mad; but, as you may know, these things are merely a question of perspective.” Dr Abramsky lives on the decaying site of the hospital; nature is reclaiming the horror man built. (Side note: Why might the narrator know that these things are merely a question of perspective?)
p. 137: “Decay, nothing but decay, marasmus, and emptiness. Not a sign of any business of industry.”
p. 140: “Cosmo says repeatedly that he is horrified by the city.”
From Max Ferber, p. 150: “… a city spread across a thousand square kilometres, built of countless bricks and inhabited by millions of souls, dead and alive.”
p. 151: “One might have supposed that the city had long since been deserted, and was left now as a necropolis or mausoleum.”
p. 156: “On those wanderings, when winter light flooded the deserted streets and squares for the few hours of real daylight, I never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialization had spread across the entire world, displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cared to see.” Perhaps this will interest no one but me, but does the “its” in that perfect if bleak sentence refer to the city or industrialization? How well it works as either!
Similarly, what is this work saying about trauma and despair? Passages to consider:
From Selwyn, p. 21 (Selwyn is speaking): “But I have never been able to bring myself to sell anything, except perhaps, at one point, my soul.” __ and __ “The years of the second war, and the decades after, were a blinding bad time for me, about which I could not say a thing even if I wanted to.”
From Selwyn, p. 23 (the narrator is speaking): “But certain things, as I am increasingly becoming aware, have a way of returning unexpectedly, often after a lengthy absence.” __ and __ “And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found on the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.”
From Bereyter, p. 42: Describing Paul as “… desolation itself.”
p. 44: “… Paul, who was almost consumed by the loneliness within him….”
p. 55: “… and doubtless saw more than any heart or eye can bear.”
p. 58: “Paul copied out hundreds of pages, mostly in Gabelsberg shorthand because otherwise he would not have been able to write fast enough, and time and again one comes across stories of suicide. It seemed to me, said Mme Landau, handing me the black oilcloth books, as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belonged to the exiles and not to the people of S.”
p. 61: “It is hard, said Mme Landau, when I told her about those railway lessons, in the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of.”
From Adelwarth, p. 99: “At that time he had no interest in talking about the past at all.” (This section opens with depiction upon depiction of sorrow and loss in his extended family.)
p. 102: “At any rate, the more Uncle Adelwarth told his stories, the more desolate he became.”
p. 111: Dr Abramsky describes Adelwarth: “Nonetheless, even when he was simply standing at the window looking out he always gave the impression of being filled with some appalling grief. I do not think, said Dr Abramsky, that I have ever met a more melancholy person than your great-uncle; every casual utterance, every gesture, his entire deportment (he held himself erect until the end), was tantamount to a constant pleading for leave of absence.”
p. 113: Dr. Abramsky on Adelwarth: “… [T]hat docility, as I was already beginning to suspect, was in fact due simply to your great-uncle’s longing for an extinction as total and irreversible as possible of his capacity to think and remember.”
From Max Ferber, p. 161: “There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the grey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.”
p. 170: Max Ferber is speaking: “… I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being experienced – consciousness – and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit, but there are always more torments to come. One plunges from one abyss into the next.”
p. 191: “Naturally, I took steps, consciously or unconsciously, to keep at bay thoughts of my parents’ sufferings and of my own misfortune, and no doubt I succeeded sometimes in maintaining a certain equability by my self-imposed seclusion; but the fact is that that tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark in recent years.”
What is Sebald saying about memory (which is, of course, inextricably linked to any discussion of trauma and despair)? Passages to consider:
From Selwyn, p. 17: “Kaspar, to the delight of his mentor, was distinguishing for the first time between dream and reality, beginning his account with the words: I was in a dream, and in my dream I saw the Caucasus.”
From Bereyter, p. 50: “Do you know, she said on one of my visits to Yverdon, the systematic thoroughness with which these people kept silent in the years after the war, kept their secrets, and even, I sometimes think, really did forget, is nothing more than the other side of the perfidious way in which Schöferle, who ran a coffee house in S, informed Paul’s mother Thekla, who had been on stage for some time in Nuremberg, that the presence of a lady who was married to a half Jew might be embarrassing to his respectable clientele….”
p. 51: “He said that he could see things with the greatest clarity, as one sees them in dreams, things he had not thought he still had within in him.”
p. 63: “The disquiet I experienced because of that momentary failure to see what was meant – I now sometimes feel that at that moment I beheld an image of death – lasted only a very short time, and passed over me like the shadow of a bird in flight.”
From Adelwarth, p. 100: “… Uncle Adelwarth had an infallible memory, but that, at the same time, he scarcely allowed himself access to it. For that reason, telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.”
p. 145: “Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the crowds.” (Consider this powerful observation in light of the work Uncle Kasimir did (p. 85). “Have you got a head for heights?”)
From Max Ferber, p. 181: “Ferber commented that, purely in terms of time, I was now as far removed from Germany as he had been in 1966; but time, he went on, is an unreliable way of gauging these things, indeed it is nothing but a disquiet of the soul. There is neither a past nor a future. At least, not for me. The fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character. When I think of Germany, it feels as if there were some kind of insanity lodged in my head. Probably the reason why I have never been to Germany again is that I am afraid to find that this insanity really exists.”
p. 207: In Luisa’s memoir: “Only when you hold your own breath do they return from death to life, only then does time begin to pass again. Time. What time was all that? How slowly the days passed then! And who was that strange child, walking home, tired, with a tiny blue and white jay’s feather in her hand?”
p. 225: “…I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves.”
What did you make of the work’s editorial style and the appearance of the pages? Did you notice the length of the paragraphs? Their arbitrary divisions or lack thereof (e.g., the bottom of p. 176)? The unusual punctuation breaks (e.g., the em dashes on pp. 38 and 220, which could have simply been paragraph breaks)? I wonder if the appearance or form of the pages – the lengthy paragraphs, the enigmatic punctuation “pauses,” the uncaptioned, blurry images – is meant to convey the shape of memory and/or dream, which would not be as, for lack of better words, rigid or strictly shaped as a lived event. Did you also notice that nothing is quoted? Long passages of people telling the narrator stories occur sans quotation marks. Why? What effect does that produce?
Did you notice the nods to Nabakov? See. pp. 16, 43, 104. It is possible that most of the references to men and butterflies regard Nabakov (e.g., pp. 115, 174, 214).
Other notes and questions
Apart from all of the other trauma they have experienced, the notable loves of both Selwyn and Adelwarth were men – men they then lost.
What do you make of the narrator’s elaborate dream in the Ambros Adelwarth section, beginning on p. 121?
Sebald relied on lists (e.g., p. 130 (“Acacias, cork oaks, sycamores, eucalypts, junipers, laurels…”). Take a look at the list of religious institutions beginning on p. 137 and continuing through p. 140 or of occupations and surnames on p. 191 and 192. Is it an affectation, or is he making a point? If the latter, what is it?
Max Feber’s work in charcoal (pp. 161 to 162) resembles the narrator’s writing process (p. 230).
References to a mental asylum, pigeons, and an anarchic school teacher in the Ferber section (p. 189) neatly anchor the narrative to the Abelwarth, Selwyn, and Bereyter stories, respectively.
Why are Elaine (Selwyn) and Kathinka (Ferber) such diminished, broken characters?
Dr Abramsky gestures with a goose wing (Abelwarth, p. 115), Kathinka wears a bonnet featuring a seagull wing (Ferber, p. 196), and Luisa carries a jay feather (Ferber, p. 207). I don’t like to Mrs.-Grimm-the-English-teacher every symbol, but this seems significant, particularly when one considers the passage from the Bereyter section (p. 63), quoted above and repeated here: “The disquiet I experienced because of that momentary failure to see what was meant – I now sometimes feel that at that moment I beheld an image of death – lasted only a very short time, and passed over me like the shadow of a bird in flight.”
Offered by Open Yale Courses, Cervantes’ Don Quixote includes twenty-four lectures delivered by Professor Roberto González Echevarría, who was, at the time the course was recorded (2009), the Sterling Professor Emeritus of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale. I have only had time to listen to the introductory lecture and the beginning of the second, but wow! What erudition, insight, and humor! The professor’s Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook was already on my shelves, but I have also picked up the book that collects the text of the lectures.
One takeaway from early in Lecture 2: The professor defines a romance as “a story with a linear plot and unchanging characters,” whereas novels “are works in which there is a clash between the protagonists and the settings in which they move […] and in which the characters evolve as a result of the actions in which they are involved.” Have Don Quixote and Sancho Panza evolved? If so, how?
Marginalia
On page 772: “… [H]e was foolish, unpolished, and plump….” My older daughter has recently discovered the charms of Parks and Recreation. As were her sister and I, she is rather outraged by the way otherwise dear characters treat Jerry. Advising that spoilers may prohibit her from reading the entire piece right now, I sent her a 2015 article from The Atlantic, “And the Meek Shall Inherit Pawnee.” From the conclusion: “We are all, basically, Jerry. We are all flawed and farty and meek. Our faces will all, at some point, be symbols of failure. They will all, at some point, be covered in pie.” As we near the conclusion of Don Quixote, I wonder if we are not all, basically, Sancho – flawed, farty, meek, and now keenly aware that a good meal (or pie) and a loyal pet beat a governorship any day.
On page 774: “[D]eceptions become the truth, and deceivers find themselves deceived.” Those of you who speak Spanish already knew this, but according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the name Barataria is derived from the Spanish word meaning “to deceive.” Since this is not an academic paper, I will share that a quick peek at Wikipedia indicated that it is derived from barato, which actually means “cheap.” Deception, cheating – either is apt, right? (And, yes, perhaps a footnote already addressed this, but I finally identified the pun this week.)
On page 785: The Duchess signs her letter to Teresa, “Your friend who loves you.” I wrote in the margin, “Is this true, kind?” It does seem as if she treats Teresa with less cavalier cruelty than she has treated Sancho.
On page 814: May time be on my side this week because I would really like to give the structure of Part II the same analysis I applied to Part I. When Sancho is reacquainted with the Moor Ricote, I wondered if Cervantes was mirroring characters we met in Part I.
On page 818: Trapped beneath the ground, Sancho laments that his master, while in the enchanted Montesinos, “saw beautiful and peaceable visions….” What does Sancho now believe about Don Quixote’s experience?
On page 836: Don Quixote describes two kinds of beauty and acknowledges that he may not be handsome but that “it is enough for a virtuous man not to be a monster….” Don Quixote is growing old before our readerly eyes, isn’t he?
General observation: Roque Guinart merits his own spin-off.
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?
I was reminded of the image above (taken at the Bristol Renaissance Faire in September 2013) at the beginning of Chapter XXX: “[A]s he drew near he realized they were falconers. He came closer, and among them he saw a graceful lady […] dressed in green….”
Rereading Chapters XXII and XXIII
In Our Lord Don Quixote, Miguel de Unamuno invites us to reread “the narrative of the astonishing visions of Don Quixote; let him judge as he should judge, by the joy and the delight derived from the reading, and let him tell me later if these experiences are not more believable than others no less astonishing which God is said to have granted to certain of his servants, dreamers in the profound enchanted cave of ecstasy. And there is no choice but to believe Don Quixote, a man incapable of lying….”
Is Don Quixote “incapable” of lying? Again and again, I wonder about the role of “truth” and “true” in this narrative. Are dreams and visions “true”?
My marginalia for Chapter XXII includes a note about the continued abundance and kindness accorded to Don Quixote (i.e., the gifts and respect of the newlyweds); a mark around Sancho Panza’s observation, “What a devil of a knight errant you are, and what a lot of things you know!” (p. 598); and another mark around Don Quixote’s exclamation to Sancho Panza, “[T]here are some who exhaust themselves learning and investigating things that, once learned and investigated, do not matter in the slightest to the understanding or the memory” (p. 601). Oh, and regarding the length of rope: A hundred fathoms is six hundred feet or forty stories.
Last week, I described the events of Chapter XXIII as a “remarkably benign (Arthurian-inspired?) dive into the cave.” Following the required reread of these chapters, I researched my hunch about the nature of the Cave of Montesinos episode. Here are two articles that may interest others:
(1) “The Grail Quest: Imagery and Motif in the Episode at the Cave of Montesinos in ‘Don Quixote’” by Bruce Tracy. The Bulletin of the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, Mar., 1974, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Mar., 1974), pp. 3-9.
Tracy writes, “Cervantes has combined the Grail Quest motif with the dream vision, and ingeniously, but not adequately, integrated Dulcinea within it.”
(2) “The Subterranean Grail Paradise of Cervantes” by Philip Stephan Barto. PMLA , Jun., 1923, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Jun., 1923), pp. 401-411.
Barto notes, “That we are here dealing with the Arthurian grail-paradise is further attested by the mention of the necromancer Merlin, Queen Guinevere and Quintoniana, cupbearer to Launcelot. Even Launcelot would seem, by implication, to be here, since it is said of his cupbearer that she served him ‘when he came from Britain.’”
A few notes on Chapters XXIV through XXXIII
● I laughed aloud at Sancho’s lament, “O wedding of Camacho, O plenty in the house of Don Diego, I miss you so often!” (p. 617) One could reread this novel simply to observe the (wildly unreliable) ways in which characters mark time.
● Also from Sancho: “Is it possible that a man who knows how to say all the many good things that he’s said here can say he’s seen the impossible foolishness that he says he saw in the Cave of the Montesinos? Well, now, time will tell.” (p. 619) Time is not the only topic about which our characters display an extraordinary lack of consistency or reliability; they also vacillate on such subjects as truth, intelligence, and sanity, among others.
● How did I know Señor Master Pedro was Ginés de Pasamonte? Was there a textual clue I am now failing to recall – perhaps in the introduction? (That is certainly a pitfall of reading a long work over many weeks while reading other books: Despite note-taking, discussion, and marginalia, some details are inevitably lost; this novel requires rereading.) Well, although the mild-mannered puppeteer betrayed nothing of the fierce persona displayed in Part I, I saw through his disguise. Also, in this episode – an echo or mirror of the attack on the wine bags (giants) – I appreciated that Don Quixote had enough money to make amends.
● While the duke and duchess certainly ply the knight and his squire with food and compliments, this is not the same abundance about which I wrote last week; this is sport at the expense of someone else’s dignity, made worse when one learns that for Don Quixote “this was the first day he really knew and believed he was a true knight errant and not a fantastic one” (p. 658). Later I cringed when Don Quixote expounds, “If knights, and the great, the generous, and the highborn considered me a fool, I would take it as an irreparable affront” (p. 666); is that not how the duke and duchess feel about him?
● Earlier this week, I finished reading Michael F. Moore’s new translation of The Betrothed, the 1827 novel by Alessandro Manzoni. In addition to an unfortunate character who collected many works of “chivalric science,” the book includes this remarkable passage: “In this manner, they wandered wherever fate might lead (hence the glorious name of knights-errant) among the poor pedestrian riffraff of city and country folk whose only weapon to ward off death and soften the blow were the rags on their backs. Ah, the knighthood! Such a beautiful, wise, and useful profession.”
By Chapter XXIV in Part I, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza have endured – among other ignominies – ridicule, blanket-bouncing, grievous injuries, and “the tempest of stones” (p. 172) with which the galley slaves repay their freedom. Despite the measured (or, as some have suggested, darker) opening of Part II, however, this week’s reading shows the hapless heroes of our tale the faces of success, abundance, and even a degree of respect. Once he has handily dispatched Bachelor Sansón Carrasco*, Don Quixote encounters the Knight of the Green Coat (also known as Don Diego de Miranda), who, following the adventure of the lions, invites the newly renamed Knight of the Lions to his home. In this “castle,” Don Quixote and Sancho Panza enjoy such food, conversation, company, and bounty as to render this encounter a perfect inverse of their experiences at the inn in Part I.
To his son, Don Diego confides, “I can only say that I have seen him do things worthy of the greatest madman in the world, and heard him say things so intelligent that they wipe out and undo his mad acts” (p. 569), an observation that rightly describes the waffling this reader experiences when contemplating Cervantes’ intent. Following his lengthy discussion with the Knight of the Lions, Don Lorenzo is as puzzled as his father. “Once again the father and son were astonished by the mixed speech of Don Quixote, sometimes intelligent and sometimes utterly foolish, and by the persistence and perseverance of his complete devotion to the search for his misadventurous adventures, which were the object and goal of all his desires” (p. 575).
Not long after their departure from Don Diego’s home, Don Quixote and Sancho Panzo meet the licentiate and Cochuelo and learn about yet another besotted shepherd. (Pastoral alert!) The fair (of course!) Quiteria, object of Basilio’s affections, is about to marry the much wealthier Camacho, and thus our knight and squire find themselves guests in the second generous and abundant setting of Part II. With nary an interpolated novel, miscreant (here’s looking at you, Don Fernando), or mistreated woman in sight, a ruse works, Don Quixote brandishes his lance, love prevails, and, contrary to Sancho’s gloomy grousing, the abundance continues in a third location.
What book is this? Following the remarkably benign (Arthurian-inspired?) dive into the cave, that was my chief question. What am I reading? And why does the relative success of these several “misadventurous adventures” worry me – in fact, fill me with foreboding? “All things are possible,” Don Quixote tells us on page 559, but we already know – spoiler alert – the hero dies. Will his successes, such as they are, continue, or will Carrasco end them?
Other notes and marginalia
“Señor, sorrows were not made for animals but for men; but if men feel them too much, they turn into animals; your grace should restrain yourself….” (p. 521)
“[T]here is more rashness than courage in a single man attacking an army that has Death in it, and emperors fighting in person, and the help of good and bad angels….” (p. 525)
“Every day, Sancho,” said Don Quixote, “you are becoming less simple and more intelligent.” (p. 527)
“I tell you, Sancho, with your natural wit and intelligence, you could mount a pulpit and go around preaching some very nice things.” (p. 590)
The sagacity of “good Sancho, wise Sancho, Christian Sancho, sincere Sancho” (p. 526) continues to grow – perhaps because the knight’s “conversation has been the manure that has fallen on the barren soil of [Sancho’s] dry wits” (p. 528). Or perhaps because the inversions at work here are not only in the knight’s fortune?
“[S]ince I am a devil, all things are within my grasp.” (p. 523)
The scenes featuring the cart of actors put me in mind of the Player and the Tragedians in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
“I love him with all my heart and couldn’t leave him no matter how many crazy things he does.” (p. 536)
Watson and Wilson could intone the same of Holmes and House, no? I was reminded of these dynamic pairings again on page 570, when Don Quixote described the “science” of knight errantry, a science that shares some characteristics with the art of detection.
“Certainly, Señor Sansón Carrasco, we’ve gotten what we deserved: it’s easy enough to think up and begin an enterprise, but most of the time it’s hard to end it. Don Quixote’s crazy, we’re sane, and he walks away healthy and laughing, while your grace is bruised and sad.” (p. 549)
Indeed!
“…I shall recount to you some of what I have seen down there, which will make you believe what have recounted here, whose truth admits neither argument nor dispute.” (p. 614)
And, yes, I remain fascinated by the uses and definitions of “true” and “truth” in this work.
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* Are you a Parks and Recreation fan? For some reason, from the moment of Carrasco’s introduction in Part II, I was reminded of Justin Anderson, about whom Ron wisely observes, “He’s a tourist. He vacations in people’s lives, takes pictures, puts them in his scrapbook, and moves on. All he’s interested in are stories. Basically, Leslie, he’s selfish, and you’re not, and that’s why you don’t like him.”
Nerdishly 