The Ingenious Gentleman of La Mancha

[Danik 2016]

Lol! if he did he wouldn´t have been who he was. I think the Quixote is also a book about to what extent a man permits his perception to cheat him. I remember there is one (of many) episode that shows this with special beauty, when he and Sancho are forced to pass the night in open country.

[Sancho]

Very true, Danik. I liked the scene where they are outside after the skirmish with the Basque. Our brave knight, if you remember, lost half his ear to the sword of the Basque. He insisted to Sancho that knights errant care little about such trifles, but as the night wears on he comments a number times about how his wounded ear is bothering him. Personal fictions will only carry you so far, I suppose.

[Danik 2016]

I don't remember the part about the ear, Sancho. But if it is the same episode, he is very bothered about the noises he hears during the night.

[Sancho]

Yep, he lost part of his ear to The Basque and later lost a number of teeth when he was attacked by sheep herders. (He’d imagined the two herds of sheep were armies attacking each other and wasted no time joining the fray. The sheep herders seeing their flocks attacked by a crazy man, pelted him with rocks, gathered their sheep and skedaddled) Anyway the truly comic part was after the battle when The Don asked Sancho to look in his mouth and tell him how many molars he’d lost the one side. Sancho does as requested and asks — how many did you used to have? The Don says he had a full set. Sancho said something like — well, you have one left.

I like the vividness of the scenes of the two of them sleeping outdoors. Cervantes has a real knack for describing that type of event — the shadows, the night noises, their imaginations running wild. It really puts the reader right there with them. It made me remember camping with my family when I was little. We’d gotten to our campsite after the sun was down, so we were pitching the tent and setting up the camp by lantern light. Cicadas were buzzing, owls were hooting, there was a loon on the lake, critters were scampering through the forest, and everything beyond the lantern light was open to imagination. The next morning I got up and looked around and nothing seemed quite so “big” as it did the night before. Don Quixote had such an experience just after he set the galley slaves free (I think it was that night anyway). It was after dark and he and Sancho had decided they were going to have to sleep outdoors. They were hungry and thirsty and could hear running water in the distance. As they neared the stream or waterfall they could hear a heavy stomping or thumping and believed giants to be there. Sancho had to hobble Rocinante to keep Don Quixote from going on the attack. The next morning they discover that they are near a mill and the stomping was actually fulling hammers pounding the weave of a fabric. (There was also a pretty good fart joke that night as Sancho was holding Don Quixote back.)

[Danik 2016]

I particularly like this episode of the night outdoors (not really an episode because actually nothing happens outside the fertile imagination of the knight) but it is this lack of action that points out so clearly the difference between fantasy and reality. Besides I was also impressed by the many noises at night. It is more an audible than an visual chapter.

And I like very much the story of Dorothea but can´t say if it is near or far from that chapter.

[Sancho]

Dorotea certainly cuts a wide swath in part one. In fact, it seems to me, Cervantes takes pleasure in upending the gender norms of the day, not to mention the gender norms of the chivalric tradition. Well, as I understand them anyway. At any rate Dorotea has a compelling story, as does Luscinda. Those two women are much more interesting than the objects of their affection, Don Fernando and Cordenio. For that matter, the story within the story about the love triangle between Camilla, Aselmo, and Latorio is more interesting when viewed from the perspective of Camilla than from either of the two men. Aselmo was self-obsessed and Latorio was predictable (and long-winded, and boring), but Camilla had depth and intellectually ran circles around the men.

To find another compelling female character, I’d go back earlier in the book to the chapter where The Don and Sancho fall in with a bunch of goatherds who are on a funeral procession. They are taking a young goatherd, Grisóstomo, to his final resting place, which is a spot at the base of a crag where he first met, and fell in love with, Marcela. The girl had no interest In Grisóstomo and had thwarted all of his advances. In fact she never even gave him an inkling of hope. So…Grisóstomo offed himself. (A permanent solution to a temporary problem, I say.) Anyway, all of Grisóstomo’s friends and in fact the whole town blamed Marcela for Grisóstomo’s death.

This is the body of Grisóstomo, who was unique in intelligence, unequaled in courtesy, inimitable in gallantry, peerless in friendship, faultless in generosity, serious without presumption, merry without vulgarity, and, finally first in everything it means to be good and second to none in everything it means to be unfortunate. He loved deeply and was rejected; he adored and was scorned; he pleaded with a wild beast, importuned a piece of marble, pursued the wind, shouted in the desert, served ingratitude, and his reward was to fall victim to death in the middle of his life, which was ended by a shepherdess …

Marcela, it seems, has no interest in any man and prefers the isolated life of a shepardess tending her flock. So as they are putting Grisóstomo into the ground Marcela shows up at the top of the crag and delivers a speech essentially making a case for free will:

…I return here on my own behalf to explain how unreasonable are those who in their grief blame me for the death of Grisóstomo, and so I beg all those present to hear me, for there will be no need to spend much time or waste many words to persuade discerning men of the truth…

…According to what I have heard, true love is not divided and must be voluntary, not forced. If this is true, as I believe it is, why do you want to force me to surrender my will, obliged to do so simply because you say you love me?

…Honor and virtue are adornments of the soul, without which the body is not truly beautiful, even if it seems to be so. And if chastity is one of the virtues that most adorn and beautify both body and soul, why should a woman, loved for being beautiful, lose that virtue in order to satisfy the desire of a man who, for the sake of his pleasure, attempts with all his might and main to have her lose it?

I was born free, and in order to live free I chose the solitude of the countryside…

And at that point, the clue bird landed on just about everybody at the funeral and, to their credit, they could now see things from Marcela’s perspective. And then it was pretty much — let’s get this dude in the ground and get back to our goats. (I’m paraphrasing here)

I’m thinking a good way to read Don Quixote is to try to read it from the perspective of a 16th Century Spanish woman.

[Danik 2016]

And a quite forgot that splendid Marcela not to speak of Luscinda.She must have been one of the first female activists to speak their minds that "no is no".When one sees this valiant characters of Cervantes coming valiantly out of the chaos and the mist that surrounds them one can´t help thinking how much tamer the novel became at later times.

[Sancho]

After the stories of Marcela (no means no), Dorotea (you make a promise, mister, you better keep it!) Luscinda (I don’t care who I’m supposed to marry, I’m holding out for my true lover-boy), and Camilla (you two morons aren’t clever enough to share my space), I was getting all geared up for a tale about the Moorish lady — Maria Zoraida — but this one turned out to be more about The Captive than about Zoraida. According to the footnotes much of the Captive’s tale is autobiographical and about the writer’s time as a prisoner in Algiers. It is fascinating. Cervantes names names and uses true historical events to flesh out the story. There’s even a swashbuckling part where The Captive, Zoraida, and crew make their escape and sail for Spain. Don Quixote stays out of the way while these stories are being told. He just doesn’t play a big part in these chapters. He’s off doing his own thing, or standing guard out front of the Castle/Inn, or generally indisposed. It’s a nice story-telling technique by Cervantes to expand the narrative and set aside for a while the parallel universe Don Quixote has created in his mind.

Anyway I’m just starting Book Two of Don Quixote, which was published 10 years or so after Book One and is generally published as one big book now. In the conclusion of Book One our Ingenious Gentleman is ignominiously returned to La Mancha, and El Sancho never does get his Isla — Oy vey.

[Danik 2016]

You are a very fast reader, Sancho. I remember taking ages in finishing that first volume of the Quixote.

Maybe now there is the moment to mention that besides the "internal meddlers" that so to speak stole some of the limelight of the knight, there were external meddlers too. The Preface of my English translation mentions a certain Avellaneda, who took it upon himself to write a sequel to volume 1 of the Quijote, with an insulting Preface to it´s author. Cervantes was more occupied a that time with more recent works, but Avellaneda's abusive enterprise, moved him to produce a own and definitive sequel to the Quijote. So the novel got a legitimate sequel and Avellaneda became part of the history of it´s production.

[Danik 2016]

Here in the own words of translator John Ormsby:
"He had got as far as Chapter LIX, which at his leisurely pace he could hardly have reached before October or November 1614, when there was put into his hand a small octave lately printed at Tarragona, and calling itself “Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licentiate Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda of Tordesillas.” The last half of Chapter LIX and most of the following chapters of the Second Part give us some idea of the effect produced upon him, and his irritation was not likely to be lessened by the reflection that he had no one to blame but himself. Had Avellaneda, in fact, been content with merely bringing out a continuation to “Don Quixote,” Cervantes would have had no reasonable grievance. His own intentions were expressed in the very vaguest language at the end of the book; nay, in his last words, “forse altro cantera con miglior plettro,” he seems actually to invite someone else to continue the work, and he made no sign until eight years and a half had gone by; by which time Avellaneda’s volume was no doubt written.

In fact Cervantes had no case, or a very bad one, as far as the mere continuation was concerned. But Avellaneda chose to write a preface to it, full of such coarse personal abuse as only an ill-conditioned man could pour out. He taunts Cervantes with being old, with having lost his hand, with having been in prison, with being poor, with being friendless, accuses him of envy of Lope’s success, of petulance and querulousness, and so on; and it was in this that the sting lay. Avellaneda’s reason for this personal attack is obvious enough. Whoever he may have been, it is clear that he was one of the dramatists of Lope’s school, for he has the impudence to charge Cervantes with attacking him as well as Lope in his criticism on the drama. His identification has exercised the best critics and baffled all the ingenuity and research that has been brought to bear on it. Navarrete and Ticknor both incline to the belief that Cervantes knew who he was; but I must say I think the anger he shows suggests an invisible assailant; it is like the irritation of a man stung by a mosquito in the dark. Cervantes from certain solecisms of language pronounces him to be an Aragonese, and Pellicer, an Aragonese himself, supports this view and believes him, moreover, to have been an ecclesiastic, a Dominican probably.

Any merit Avellaneda has is reflected from Cervantes, and he is too dull to reflect much. “Dull and dirty” will always be, I imagine, the verdict of the vast majority of unprejudiced readers. He is, at best, a poor plagiarist; all he can do is to follow slavishly the lead given him by Cervantes; his only humour lies in making Don Quixote take inns for castles and fancy himself some legendary or historical personage, and Sancho mistake words, invert proverbs, and display his gluttony; all through he shows a proclivity to coarseness and dirt, and he has contrived to introduce two tales filthier than anything by the sixteenth century novellieri and without their sprightliness.

But whatever Avellaneda and his book may be, we must not forget the debt we owe them. But for them, there can be no doubt, “Don Quixote” would have come to us a mere torso instead of a complete work. Even if Cervantes had finished the volume he had in hand, most assuredly he would have left off with a promise of a Third Part, giving the further adventures of Don Quixote and humours of Sancho Panza as shepherds. It is plain that he had at one time an intention of dealing with the pastoral romances as he had dealt with the books of chivalry, and but for Avellaneda he would have tried to carry it out. But it is more likely that, with his plans, and projects, and hopefulness, the volume would have remained unfinished till his death, and that we should have never made the acquaintance of the Duke and Duchess, or gone with Sancho to Barataria."
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/996/996-h/996-h.htm

[Sancho]

I’m not a particularly fast reader. I just found myself on a couple of long airplane trips with nothing much else to do except read, and since I didn’t have my Spanish version of the book, I burned through the rest of Part I fairly quickly.

I think you’re exactly right, Danik, Cervantes may have never been motivated to write Part II if the false Quixote hadn’t been published. In the prologue to the real Part II he certainly does seem interested in settling a few scores. I like how he calls out the writer of the false Quixote for not even having the guts to use his own name.

Speaking directly to his readers:

I think you will say that I am showing great restraint and am keeping well within the bounds of modesty, knowing that one must not add afflictions to the afflicted, and the affliction of this gentleman is undoubtedly very great, for he does not dare to appear openly in the light of day but hides his name and conceals his birthplace, as if he had committed some terrible act of treason against the crown.

He then tells his readers to pass along a couple of stories to the writer of the false Quixote if they ever happen to come across him. The first involves a madman who inserts a reed straw into the posterior of a dog and blows the animal up like a ball. (Yeech!) The second story also involves a madman and some dogs. In this one the madman goes around dropping stones on the dogs. He does this until he drops a stone on the head of a much-beloved hound of a haberdasher who then beats the madman “to within an inch of his life.” It’s not too hard to figure out who the haberdasher, the madman, and the unfortunate hound represent.

Cervantes then goes on to tell us that at the end of Part II Don Quixote will be dead and buried, thereby making it impossible for anyone else to appropriate his creation for a future tale. That got me to thinking about how many later works were influenced by Don Quixote. Thankfully nobody has tried to outright steal the character the way the writer known by the pseudonym Avellaneda did, but there are an incredible number of Quixotic characters in literature and film. Prince Myshkin of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot comes immediately to mind. And there are many many more who were influenced less directly.

According to the footnotes in the translation I’m reading, Shakespeare may have written a play about Cordenio which has been lost. The story in Part I about Cordenio, Luscinda, Don Fernando, and Dorotea certainly reads like a Shakespeare drama. But Cordenio reminded me of another character in literature — Ad Francis — from Ernest Hemingway’s story The Battler. I found myself wondering if Papa Hemingway was somehow influenced by Cervantes when he wrote The Battler. It’s one of his Nick Adams stories. Nick has hopped a train but then gets sucker punched by the brakeman and tossed off the train. Nick then meets a couple of Hobos who invite him to share their dinner. One of the hobos, Ad Francis, it turns out, used to be a prize fighter. His face is all beaten up, he’s got a cauliflower ear, and generally looks like hell. Well things are going just fine, everybody’s getting along well, but then Ad snaps and wants to fight Nick. The other hobo, Bugs, has to knock out Ad with a blackjack to keep him from attacking Nick. It reminded me of Cordenio telling his story to Don Quixote very cordially at first but then snapping and going totally ape on our poor knight errant.

[Danik 2016]

If I wasn´t sure Cervantes at botton liked dog and only wrote those dog stories because he was enraged at Avellaneda's interference with his novel, I would as people say today, instantly unfollow and cancel Cervantes. But his respect for dogs was imortalized in "The Dialogue of the Dogs" which no doubt you know.

But Cervantes was really very angry and he wanted to show whoever attended to the name or pen name of Avellaneda, that he was meddling with the wrong person. So he decided to take care personally of the destiny of his characters and protect them from any Avellaneda that was hidden in the bush and the inevitable TV series.

I remember that the second volume is very different from the first.

As Influences there were many. In Brazil we have the quixotic Policarpo Quaresma, a discreet public sevant who invents various projects to improve Brazil and fails with all of them

[Sancho]

Until you just told me about it, Danik, I was unaware of Cervantes’ El coloquio de los perros. I’m only guessing, but I’d say Cervantes was an animal lover. I say this primarily because of his treatment of Rocinante in Part One. Also I’d say he knows well the animals he writes about. At one point in Part One Don Quixote comes to a crossroads and lets fate decide which road to take, which is to say he let Rocinante decide which road to take. Well the horse immediately chooses the road that will lead him back to his stable. (My wife keeps a couple of old horses, and those two animals always know exactly which way to go to get back to the barn — and the horse feed). I’d also note that in the initial description of the gentleman of La Mancha, he says he keeps a Greyhound.

In my translated copy the Haberdasher’s dog is referred to as a hound. In the Spanish the word is podenco:

Perro ladrón, ¿a mi podenco? ¿No viste, cruel, que era podenco mi perro?

Edith Grossman’s translation:

You miserable thief, you dog, why did you hurt my hound? Didn’t you see, cruel man, that my dog was a hound?

In earlier translations the word is

lurcher

, which is a crossbreed of a greyhound (racing dog) and some type hunting dog. Whatever the case, the hound was more valued than the regular dogs, perhaps even stray dogs. And of course Cervantes must have loved dogs because in the analogy the hound was a stand-in for his novel, the hat-maker was himself, and the dirty-rotten-stone-dropper was Avellaneda.

Haha, we’ve got our share of Policarpo Quaresma here too.

[Danik 2016]

Sadly, my on line version is without any prologue at all so I thank you for your information and the quotes, Sancho. I would have liked to know how Ormsby translated "podenco".

As you enjoyed the Quijote so much, maybe you would like to check out his "Exemplary Stories"(which include The Dialogue of the Dogs). The stories are as colorful and entertaining as those included in the Quixote.

As for Policarpo Quaresma, one of his great feats was that he sent, in sheer absent mindedness an official document written in Tupi, to Parlament, I believe. After that, the poor man was put into a mental hospital.

[Sancho]

Cide Hamete Benengeli tells us in the second part of this history, which recounts the third sally of Don Quixote, that the priest and the barber…

Most of the tales of chivalry that Don Quixote has read and which have driven him to seek adventure as a knight errant are couched as true history. Whether as an ancient history that was found by a mysterious old lady in a crypt, or a text written in an obscure language and translated by an unnamed university Don, the tales of chivalry are meant to make the reader believe that they are an actual history. I think Cervantes is having a little fun here by telling us Part Two of the story of Don Quixote through the wise Moor (Praise be to Allah) Cide Hamete Benengeli, who is evidently a lover of eggplant. (Benengeli is a play on the Spanish word for eggplant — berenjena.)

We find out early on in Part Two, through Bachelor Sansón Carrasco, that this history of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza by Cide Hamete Benengeli is about attacking windmills not giants and flocks of sheep not armies. At any rate, it impels Don Quixote to once again take up arms and sally forth a third time.