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Image captured on this morning’s walk.

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.

“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? 

Notes on Chapters XXII through XXXIII

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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.”