The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha

[bounty]

heck danik, there might already be a gone with the wind thread. give me a bit and i'll peek...

[Sancho]

Bah, to be human is to stray off topic. Besides, I’m willing to bet Margaret Mitchell read Don Quixote, and I know Flannery O’Connor did. And anyone who’s read Don Quixote is touched by it and to a greater or lesser extent it influences the way they see the world for the rest of their life.

You know the Southern Gentry of the 19th century was certainly living in their own reality. What were they thinking? For that matter, isn’t any young man who joins up and goes off to war, on somewhat of a Quixotic adventure?

[Danik 2016]

Quite early in the novel Cervantes lays out the reason for Alonso Quijano going over the edge and becoming Don Quixote. I think he’s also taking a pot shot at some of the maddening, over-the-top prose of the most popular genre fiction of the day — chivalric literature

Trying to make sense of this sort of writing is what scrambled poor Alonso’s brains:



Para los gringos:



He goes on to say that even Aristotle couldn’t figure out that mess. I pictured the poor man in his house late at night, reading under candle light with wrinkled brow. I sympathized with him because at one time in my life I tried to get through the Sandymount Strand chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses.

Hi, Sancho,
It's already late and my reason is somewhat weakened and may easily turn into unreason, so tomorrow I'll come back with a better answer. But you seem to have a charming translation there.

[Danik 2016]

So, still on the madness of D. Quixote:
A layman pouring over books and specially on chivalry books might still be a very unusual sight at that time. Books were probably held in awe by all the people that didn´t read them. At the beginning of 20 C, a Brazilian author created a Brazilian Quixote called Policarpo Quaresma. Instead of chivalry book, Policarpo had in his library every possible book that exalted the Brazilian Nation.

It seems that what both these Quixotes wanted was a more ethical world than the one they knew. Needless to say they both went mad, while trying to correct matters.

[Sancho]

Good point, Danik. There were no lending libraries back then, so books would have been out of reach for the vast majority of the people. In the very first paragraph Cervantes describes the gentleman of La Mancha as a member of the rural gentry. He has a horse, a racing greyhound, a housekeeper, and a handyman, but he seems to be in decline: his horse is a “skinny nag,” his housekeeper is “past forty,” and his sustenance consumes “three-fourths of his income.” His diet includes an occasional stew of “beef more often than lamb,” beef being cheaper than lamb at the time. In fact he’s become so obsessed with books that he “went so far as to sell acres of arable land in order to buy books of chivalry to read.”

Two of our early Presidents kept large personal libraries, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Jefferson was so far in debt by the time he died that his library was sold to the government in part to pay off his debts. Jefferson’s library became the start of The Library of Congress. I read a comparison of Adams’ and Jefferson’s books. Evidently Jefferson’s books were in terrific shape. Adams’s, by contrast, were a mess. His were all beat up, dog-eared, underlined. Adams had running conversations with the authors that he’d written in the margins. But that’s another story.

It seems that what both these Quixotes wanted was a more ethical world than the one they knew. Needless to say they both went mad, while trying to correct matters.

Spot on, Danik. From Don Quixote:

The truth is that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read knights errant engaged in, righting all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame.

Yeah! Go-man-go! And, you know, he did achieve “everlasting fame,” eh?

[Danik 2016]

Just lit on this, while looking for a poem for another thread:

"Don Quixote
A poem by Nazim Hikmet

The knight of immortal youth
at the age of fifty found his mind in his heart
and on July morning went out to capture
the right, the beautiful, the just.

Facing him a world of silly and arrogant giants,
he on his sad but brave Rocinante.
I know what it means to be longing for something,
but if your heart weighs only a pound and sixteen ounces,
there's no sense, my Don, in fighting these senseless windmills.

But you are right, of course, Dulcinea is your woman,
the most beautiful in the world;
I'm sure you'll shout this fact
at the face of street-traders;
but they'll pull you down from your horse
and beat you up.
But you, the unbeatable knight of our curse,
will continue to glow behind the heavy iron visor
and Dulcinea will become even more beautiful."
https://www.poetrycat.com/nazim-hikmet/don-quixote

No honorable mention of Sancho and Dapple though.

[Sancho]

Just lit on this, while looking for a poem for another thread:


No honorable mention of Sancho and Dapple though.

Flunkies get no respect. At the beginning of the book he did get one of those humorous poems where the poet lops off the last syllable of the last word on each line.

[Danik 2016]

This poem is quoted above.

[Sancho]

And he’s off, full of good intentions, on his first adventure.

I read a book a while back all about the American Army in the Northern African Campaign at the beginning of WWII. An Army at Dawn, by Rick Atkinson. What a mess — the army not the book. It was basically a book about a green army making all the mistakes a green army makes on first contact with the enemy.

Don Quixote’s first sortie reminded me of An Army At Dawn. He makes the basic tactical error of riding all day, when it’s really hot, in full armor, and wears himself out. He sees what he wants to see not what’s really there. He sees a castle instead of a humble inn. He sees a couple of fair maidens instead of a couple of hookers. He misidentifies the enemy, and assaults two innocent mule drivers instead. He has multiple equipment failures. And in the end he winds up getting beaten with his own (broken) lance.

But he does manage to get himself knighted.

So, woo-hoo success!

[Danik 2016]

"He sees what he wants to see not what’s really there. He sees a castle instead of a humble inn. He sees a couple of fair maidens instead of a couple of hookers. He misidentifies the enemy, and assaults two innocent mule drivers instead."
A very important point, Sancho and maybe one of the themes of the novel. The Quixote tries to force his own parallel world on reality, and reality responds, or rather, hits back. I think many people live in parallel worlds, but the Quixote is particularly innocent.

[Sancho]

The Quixote tries to force his own parallel world on reality, and reality responds, or rather, hits back. I think many people live in parallel worlds, but the Quixote is particularly innocent.

I agree totally, Danik. And it is one of the facets of the novel that make it timeless.

I suppose one of the clearest examples of Don Quixote in his own parallel world and trying to draw others into it is the incident that occurred almost immediately after he is knighted. He comes across a boy who is tied to a tree and being lashed by an man. Turns out the boy is a shepherd for the man’s sheep. Evidently the boy has been a lousy, inattentive shepherd and due to his carelessness the farmer had lost several sheep, hence the corporal punishment.

At any rate the knight sees an injustice that must be righted. He demands the farmer release the boy or prepare the be run through by his lance. The farmer, fearing for his life, does so. Initially the boy sees the knight as his salvation and lays out his grievances against the farmer. One of the boy’s grievances is that the sheep farmer hasn’t paid him. The knight demands the boy be paid. The farmer agrees to pay the boy, but has no reales on his person so he must go back to the house at which point he will “pay the boy what he deserves.” The boy is no fool and and tells the knight the minute he’s alone with farmer, the lashing will continue. But Don Quixote insists that the farmer is bound by the order of chivalry to honor the agreement. In other words, he is trying draw the others into his parallel world. And then he rides away, problem solved, the wrong has been righted — mission accomplished. And of course as soon as he’s out of sight, the farmer “tied the boy to the oak tree again and gave him so many lashes that he left him half dead.”

It reminded me of the “Mission Accomplished” banner on USS Abraham Lincoln in May 2003 and a certain US President (Dubya) declaring the end of combat operations in Iraq — whoopsie

[Danik 2016]

This is a very good example how D. Quixotes parallel world works, Sancho. The knight goes away satisfied that he has accomplished his mission and the boy gets a worse beating.

Today the great producer of paralell worlds is the internet.Additional to the good things it brought, like chatting with people from other countries, there are these hate groups. Recently I learned that there are groups in Brazil that want to abolish schools as something unecessary. And so they have started menacing and attacking schools, killing students and teachers. About two weeks ago a 13 year old killed an 71 old teacher and wounded several students and other teachers with a knife. This week a man attacked a Kindergarden and killed four children. The man hadn´t any personal connection to the Kindergarden. Instead of the misdirected idealism of the Quixote, there are very bad and also misdirected people at work.

[Sancho]

I heard about that, Danik. And that sort of stuff, I’m sure, has many Brazilians asking themselves — has the whole world gone crazy? We’ve certainly had our share craziness — school shootings, foreign adventures, insurrections, and the general hatefulness that goes along with political polarization. I think modern readers find a lot of things familiar about the backdrop of Don Quixote. I mean there’s just a feeling in the countryside that things are are coming apart. At the time, Spain as an empire, was overextended and in decline. The people were caught between two juggernauts, the crown and the church. Neither of which were taxed, which left the burden squarely on the backs of the peasants. An amazing thing about Don Quixote is that Cervantes gets at all of this and does it with such humor.

I liked the scene where he’s standing at the watering trough guarding his armor, waiting to be knighted by the inn keeper, and one of the mule drivers comes along to water his mules and tries to move The Don’s armor. I couldn’t help but to picture the Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail — “NONE SHALL PASS.”

[Danik 2016]

Yes, I agree with you. Maybe it was a way of forgetting that he was in prison, but a sort of "resting carrying stones" as we say here. Possibly Cervantes remained sane in a Spain that exacted so much of him but gave little back by transferring the madness to his character.

I don´t think I saw this Mounty Python, but if one does n´t have a water fountain one has to be satified with a trough!

[Sancho]

This is what I like so much about this website:

Maybe it was a way of forgetting that he was in prison, but a sort of "resting carrying stones" as we say here.

That is something I’d’ve never known, unless you posted it, Danik.

Cervantes certainly did have an eventful life. Not just imprisoned, but abducted by Barbary Pirates, enslaved and then ransomed. Like his protagonist, he was a survivor.

Monty Python’s Holy Grail
The Black Knight:

https://youtu.be/ZmInkxbvlCs

“Okay, we’ll call it a draw.”