Reviews of Don Quixote (1605) and related work

• Sequel: Don Quixote: Part Two (1615)
• Document: Lost in La Mancha (2002)
• Spin-off: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018)

Don Quixote (1605)

Miguel de Cervantes (writer).

Read in 2020.

This review refers to the original novel, not the 1615 sequel. I read it in John Ormsby’s 1885 translation, after having read excerpts in Swedish years earlier.

A landmark in literary history and part of Harold Bloom’s dubious canon, this farce is many things, but not funny. For comparison, it’s less funny than The Golden Ass (ca. 160 CE), whose wineskin scene it repeats. It’s much less funny than True History (ca. 175 CE), outdoing it only by adding more metafiction, including a layer of realism greater than that of the genre it targets. Here, the object of ridicule is late-medieval knightly romances.

Ormsby’s translation is generally considered accurate but dry. Many other translations to English are available, about 25 in total as of 2020, and many of them emphasize humor. In a 2009 appearance, Edith Grossman, whose 2003 translation was the most celebrated at the time of my reading, said this:

When I first started to read the Quixote, I thought it was the most tragic book I had ever read, and I would read it and weep. I was so moved by Quixote, and the cruelty of the people around him who berated him, laughed at him, played tricks on him, and so forth. As I got older and my skin got thicker and thicker I guess, and I became less and less sensitive, I found it funnier and funnier. And so, when I was working on the translation I was actually sitting at my computer and laughing out loud.

[Cervantes combined tragedy and comedy] by never letting the reader rest. You are never certain, reading the Quixote, whether you’ve really gotten it, because as soon as you’re sure that you know what’s going on, Cervantes introduces something that contradicts your premise.

Grossman finds this technique brilliant. She assumes it is a technique. It seems to me that a simpler explanation is available. Bad fiction is often ambiguous and self-contradictory. The constant violence done to a psychotic man and a fool in this book is no doubt comic in its intent, but I do not find it funny. Without assuming the author’s Schadenfreude, the book would be incomprehensible, not tragic. Similarly, the intent of pathos is obvious, but the story does not deliver it.

To be fair, there are brief moments of wit and a handful of interesting scenarios, but they disappear in the mass of text with its many digressions. Of course, Cervantes had to comment wrily on his own digressions. Here he is doing so in chapter 27:

To this the curate replied that not only were they not weary of listening to him, but that the details he mentioned interested them greatly, being of a kind by no means to be omitted and deserving of the same attention as the main story.

In chapter 51, a goatherd comments on an evident digression inside a hypodiegesis which itself constitutes a digression inside a hypodiegesis:

To-day he would appear in one gay dress, to-morrow in another; but all flimsy and gaudy, of little substance and less worth. The peasant folk, who are naturally malicious, and when they have nothing to do can be malice itself, remarked all this, and took note of his finery and jewellery, piece by piece, and discovered that he had three suits of different colours, with garters and stockings to match; but he made so many arrangements and combinations out of them, that if they had not counted them, anyone would have sworn that he had made a display of more than ten suits of clothes and twenty plumes. Do not look upon all this that I am telling you about the clothes as uncalled for or spun out, for they have a great deal to do with the story.

They don’t, really. Cervantes could have used an editor and another few drafts.

As I expected, the author mocks the implausible literary tropes of knightly romances, but not in same way Lucian mocked the tropes of the epic in True History. It is not a pastiche, or even a proper parody. Nothing in Don Quixote provides the beauty, thrill or imagination of the romances to deconstruct their conceits. It has structural elements of the picaresque, but not the genre’s characters. It has other structural elements of the frame story and anthology, but everybody seems to read it for the frame within the frame.

More importantly, Don Quixote is not good satire. It is too servile. There are scenes where cowardice, viciousness and horniness—including Quixote’s own—are cloaked in the romantic emblems of late-medieval society to point to hypocrisy, but it’s only personal hypocrisy. Cervantes may not have understood that these emblems and the very genre he mocks were invented to flatter those upper classes who gained status through force, terror and rent. He uses phrases like “a person of quality and good birth” without any apparent irony. In the goatherd’s story, respect “is the natural consequence of being rich”. In the end, Sancho returns to his poor wife, who is named only as an aside, and he concludes “that there is nothing in the world more delightful than to be a person of consideration”. Compare True History, where Lucian gleefully attacks the Greek cultural establishment by retconning, amending and undermining its classics. Compare the many popular medieval texts that made fun of the powerful; among them, “A Gest of Robyn Hode” (ca. 1450) is one of the more respectful. Satire criticizes power, at least by proxy. Cervantes does not.

The fluid escapes from nearby genres are not necessarily intentional, but intellectually influential, perhaps on the taboo against calling the “literary novel” genre a genre. One of the big reasons for the novel’s fame is negative: The literary novel is famously required to omit all the fantastical premises and all the big tropes that ancient and medieval writers used to thrill their audiences. Cervantes was one of the first to cut all that stuff and mock it, not for being impious or boring but for being unrealistic.

Don Quixote is also a step toward humanism, compared to the ancient authors or The Song of Roland (ca. 1115), but it is still remarkably inconsiderate. Sancho, for example, is celebrated in fandom for his purported common sense, but that only shows up in the sequel. In this first entry he is a type, not much more human than the squires of the romances. I find it hard to avoid the impression that Don Quixote is famous in part because it was received in the rest of Europe as an opportunity to caricature the Spanish as whimsical, shall we say quixotic wastrels and clowns. Even the Spanish themselves soon elevated the franchise to a national myth.

If you read this early-modern novel, do it for the history of literary epistemology and metafiction, and do continue to the sequel. Chapter 25 has an exchange on Quixote’s wash-basin helmet where shades of unfalsiable, narcissistic, ego-preserving conspiracy theory are brought to the fore. In chapter 49, Don Quixote debates a canon who suggests he read Judges (ca. 650–500 BCE) as if it were true, and for precisely that reason. In moments like that, Cervantes manages to meditate on illusionism in art and the functions of literature in a way that clearly looks ahead to good fiction, but the layered frames and rambling language obscure his arguments, if he had any. It is not at all clear that Cervantes knew what he was doing. In the outermost frame, the author’s fictionalized version of himself pretends to decry the romances he loves, but for all I know, he thought Judges was wonderful.

References here: Don Quixote: Part Two (1615), The Castle of Otranto (1764), Life in the Middle Ages (1910), “Words of Farewell” (2007), The Platform (2019).

text fiction

‣ Don Quixote: Part Two (1615)

Miguel de Cervantes (writer).

Read in 2021.

Read in John Ormsby’s 1885 translation.

In his dedication, to the Count of Lemos, Cervantes claims that the Emperor of China asked Cervantes to “found a college where the Spanish tongue would be taught”. This sequel, more than the original, is about Cervantes’s fame.

The main avenue of escalation in the series’ metafiction is that the 1605 original is inserted into the fiction as a famous book, so that those who meet the main characters recognize them from the book. Modern critics sometimes describe this conceit in postmodern terms, as if Don Quixote was the first fictional character to encounter descriptions of himself as a fictional character, but that is not exactly what Cervantes was aiming to do.

In 1614, Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda (pseudonym) had published a fan-fiction sequel to Cervantes’s original. Cervantes hated it and wrote his own canonical sequel in part to scorn Avellaneda, whose work also appears in Don Quixote: Part Two. That is the proximate reason why Cervantes included his own book, and by extension, himself.

In writing the sequel, Cervantes kept up the pretense that he was merely translating the work of Arab “historian” Cide Hamete Benengeli. A character in the sequel therefore says “a double blessing on that connoisseur who took the trouble of having it translated out of the Arabic into our Castilian vulgar tongue”. This is Cervantes singing his own praises, as in the dedication. He also speaks of the translator in the third person, as someone other than himself.

Of course, Cervantes continued to comment on his own writing, saying “no second part has ever been good”; sequels were unpopular even in the 1600s! His contemporary readers told him truthfullly that the digressions in the original were a bad idea, so Cervantes did a better job in the sequel, reducing their length and integrating most of them into the narrative, but he had to comment on that too: Benengeli, he says “found himself forced to speak perpetually of him and Sancho, without venturing to indulge in digressions and episodes more serious and more interesting”. Unfortunately, he kept up the episodes of dull roman à clef. To lighten up those dreary days at his desk, Cervantes also inserted non-canon fan fiction of his work in his work, and commented on this, again as Benengeli:

I cannot convince or persuade myself that everything that is written in the preceding chapter could have precisely happened to the valiant Don Quixote; and for this reason, that all the adventures that have occurred up to the present have been possible and probable; but as for this one of the cave, I see no way of accepting it as true, as it passes all reasonable bounds.

Don Quixote does not actually realize that he is fictional, but Cervantes’s trick to heap scorn on Avellaneda by including him is extended to further undermine the plausibility of the narrative in another way. Don Quixote himself estimates that all of his adventures to date have lasted “barely two months”, with only one month passing between his second and third sallies. That is obviously not enough time for Benengeli to have authored his history, for the fictional version of Cervantes to have translated it (and “lost” the second volume until now), for it to have sold out and been reprinted, for Avellaneda to have written his sequel, and for that sequel to have made its own tour of Spain. This means that Cervantes did not bother to make the inclusion of the original within the sequel plausible. Instead, he clarifies that the main characters have never even heard of Benengeli, although Don Quixote does give Benengeli the exclusive right to chronicle his adventures; a poor substitute for copyright law. As usual, Don Quixote assumes it’s all sorcery.

The sequel is definitely a stronger piece of writing, and not only in its metafictive inventiveness and relative cohesion. The lions, Camacho’s wedding and Don Diego’s hospitality are great episodes; they have some of the juiciness missing from the original and present in knightly romances. Interestingly, there is even a brief scene where a “grave ecclesiastic” criticizes the original novel as harmful literature, like the conspicuously knowledgeable parish curate who criticized knightly romances in the original. Cervantes, who loved both the romances and his own work, added proper satire to it at last.

In one episode, Don Quixote lectures Sancho on courtly manners: “Eruct, Sancho, not belch”. This is funny because there’s an important satirical angle to it. Don Quixote, in his madness, primarily emulates the hot-headed, stubborn, personally violent ideal of medieval knights: The idealized chivalry of the Crusades, which was as fully anachronistic in 1615 as the Arcadian shepherd motif the man later decides to take up instead. In the episode on manners, he emulates the ideals of chivalry that actually existed in the 1600s, after they were transformed into matters of morals and etiquette, turned away from violence.

The characters changed between books, which seems to show that Cervantes recognized the first novel as a mistake. Ormsby denied this; in his preface to his own translation he wrote, of the new characterization of Sancho Panza:

An inferior genius, taking him in hand a second time, would very likely have tried to improve him by making him more comical, clever, amiable, or virtuous. But Cervantes was too true an artist to spoil his work in this way.

Nope. Panza is more comical, clever, amiable, and indeed virtuous, though not consistent. In the sequel he acquires both common sense and intelligence, which he exercises in his amusing stint as the incorruptible “governor” of a village. Alas, this episode—which is possibly the best in the two novels—forms part of a large body of the narrative where a duke and duchess arrange an implausibly expensive and labour-intensive LARP to make the main characters display their mental illness and stupidity, all for the nobles’ amusement. Given his new common sense and cunning, it does not make sense that even Sancho is continually victimized in this enterprise, or that he returns to Don Quixote’s service after it. In another sign of Cervantes’ development, Teresa Panza is a rounded character, suitably expanded from the original. Her “news of the village”, included in a letter to Sancho, is just beautiful in its superior realism and humour.

The object of satire is not so much the dour clergyman or the villainous nobility as the readers of the original, who failed to spot its humanism. Cervantes seems to have gotten tired of physically abusing and idiot-balling the iconic pair for his readers’ amusement, although he kept doing both. Their new adventures are generally more entertaining than the old in part because the pair are now more sympathetic. The ending, where Don Quixote is defeated, regains his sanity and dies, underlines the change in attitude, toward a deepening humanism and a later era when novels would not regularly mock the disabled.

text sequel fiction

‣ Lost in La Mancha (2002)

Terry Gilliam (cast).

References here: The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018).

moving picture document non-fiction

‣ The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018)

Terry Gilliam (director).

Seen in 2019.

Seen in a jam-packed Draken as the last film of GIFF 2019.

Contemporary Todorovian-uncanny metatheatre. This film completes the project documented in Lost in La Mancha (2002).

The good: Gilliam is admirably restrained with the CGI effects. There are clever little touches throughout the narrative, including the blending of Muslim migrant workers and Quixote’s Saracens, a motif twisted later on when Quixote himself preaches religious tolerance along the lines of the many Spanish states that slowed or resisted the long Reconquista. The whole thing flows well enough except for the awakenings. Gilliam demonstrates real love of the literary figure whose themes underpin his entire career. Unsurprisingly, Gilliam aligns himself personally with Don Quixote: Like Toby, Gilliam has spent much of his preceding ten years in advertising, with Hollywood spectacles and prominently branded short film productions, and it is Toby who gets to carry the torch in the end. Toby’s passively grey-black morality is a pretty good recurring joke and his profession enables the unsubtle metatheatre. On the whole, it is a successful attempt to cover both the farce of the original and Quixote as a portal to modern literature, for a modern audience, without just bringing the whole thing into the present day.

The bad: Whereas Cervantes allows Dulcinea to be an unseen normal person, realistically unresponsive to Quixote’s creepy idolization of her, Gilliam inserts three female characters who are all on screen, identified primarily as sexual objects. There is some nuance but it’s uncomfortably close to the madonna-whore gender roles that infest Gilliam’s immediately preceding features, most prominently The Zero Theorem (2013). Sex intersects a melodrama with the boss and the oligarch as mutually redundant villains. This melodrama should exist in Quixote’s wishful thinking but for some reason, it is equally flat and intractable in external reality, which leaves no point to the escapism. A tertiary villain, the unnamed “Gypsy”, is less consistently evil, but his violence against the Civil Guard aligns too neatly with antizigan stereotype. Like Cervantes, Gilliam fails to make a point out of dissolving the barriers between reality and the various levels of fantasy: Supernatural medieval knight-errantry vs. Quixote’s racist 17th century vs. a romantic version of modern Europe etc. The transitions can be awkward, like the awakenings; the village where Toby shot his student film is just called “The Dreams”, which is sophomoric. In the end, there aren’t any major surprises or great depths in this creative vision, despite it taking 29 years to make the movie.

moving picture spin-off fiction