Revista: Don Quixote

The following are excerpts from a talk given by the author at Instituto Cervantes recently as the first of three lectures by Filipino novelists in commemoration of the 400th year of the publication of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. The second lecture will be delivered by Vincent Groyon on July 7. National Artist for Literature F. Sionil Jose winds up the series on a still unconfirmed date.

I first became more than peripherally aware of Don Quixote when I read the comic-book version in the Illustrated Classics of my boyhood. This was in the Fifties, when I started collecting those irreplaceable comic books based on outstanding world literature.

I have kept much of that collection, bound together: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Les Miserables, The Call of the Wild, Don Quixote, Around the World in 80 Days, The Iliad, etc.

That early, although black-and-white television still had to make its way to Sampaloc, Manila, prescience on my part must have dictated that I spend as little time as possible in absorbing as much as I could of the classics of world literature.

Oh, I became a legitimate bookworm eventually, and read some of those titles in their original editions. But I still believe that I owe my current reading skills to the Illustrated Classics – inclusive of comprehension level as well as the ability to picture scenes and images while these were being painted with words. Novels were already being rendered graphically in my mental screen well before the genre turned graphic. And I must thank that comic-book series for this facility.

One may note that the titles I cited have all since been turned into movies. In fact, both Around the World in 80 Days and The Iliad have been adapted as recent blockbusters, not for the first time at that.

Don Quixote, too, has undergone considerable transposition from its original, voluminous text in Spanish – into plays, musicals, and film – so that to say Don Quixote now would be to recall the rueful countenance of one British actor, Peter O’Toole, as The Man of La Mancha, and the Italian actress, the bawdy-looking Sophia Loren as the illusive, elusive Dulcinea.

In its comic-book form, however, I recall that Dulcinea, aka Aldonza Lorenzo, never appeared except inside a fanciful balloon circumscribed by broken lines, meaning that the image of the lady was just a product of the central character’s mind, or, well, fantasy. But such is the power of cinema to transform a literary work to what is often an incompetent level of cinematic digression, divagation or burlesque.

World literature certainly owes much to Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and his epic, two-part novel. He has been lauded not only as the contemporary of William Shakespeare but a veritable peer – a claim that may have gained Fate’s very own approval when it decreed that both men expire on the same day: April 23, 1616.

According to Juan Antonio Pellicer, however, Cervantes liked to call himself the Spanish Ovid because of the many metamorphoses he created in Don Quixote. Diligent readers will note that the self-styled knight-errant and his "anointed" squire Sancho Panza wind up exchanging character traits well towards Part II of the monumental work.

Ironies are rife and so very rich in Cervantes’ writings. He liked to subject rivals and idols both to satire and parody. He merged realism with fantasy. He utilized puns and played jokes, on the readers as well as with himself. In brief, he believed in having fun as a writer.

Most literary scholars, however, understandably tend to extol only the gravitas in Don Quixote, the pathos attending a senior citizen who appears to have lost his marbles and gone bravely forth in an already less than chivalrous, medieval world, so he can rescue fair damsels in distress and tilt at windmills of the imagination.

Don Quixote can be read in multiple levels. As a magniloquent epic that celebrates the grandeur of the passing world of chivalry, replete with romantic ballads about legends and folkloric heroes. As a treatise on madness and fantasy. As a tribute to earlier works that inspired the author. As a psychological release on the part of the writer, who had to slay the demons of poverty and imprisonment that he suffered in his earlier years. As satire.

Indeed, it is all these, and much more. Personally, I like to think that the work is primarily one of comic, antic imagination. And that the rest of its positive features are, so to speak, gravy.

The book’s significance can easily be ascertained if one indulges in a modern technological exercise: that which we call googling. Google Cervantes and Don Quixote, and you get a plethora, a treasury, of extensive links and expansive quotes.

Why, even Wikipedia, the Web encyclopedia, accords the work the following honor:

"Don Quixote is often nominated as the best work of fiction ever. It stands in a unique position between medieval chivalric romance and the modern novel. The former were mostly disconnected stories with little exploration of the inner life of even the main character. The latter, of course, is focused almost always on the psychological evolution of a single character. In Part I, Quixote imposes himself on his environment. By Part II, he is no longer physically capable, but people know about him, ‘having read his adventures,’ and so, he needs to do less to maintain his image. By his deathbed, he has begun to assume a new identity, including a nickname, ‘the Good.’…

"Different ages have tended to read different things into the novel. When it first came out, it was usually interpreted as a comic novel. After the French Revolution it was popular in part due to its central ethic that individuals can be right while society is quite wrong and disenchanting – not comic at all. In the 19th century it was seen as a social commentary, but no one could easily tell ‘whose side Cervantes was on.’ By the 20th century it became clear that it was simply a unique and great work, the first true modern novel."

Trivia also surround the constant re-publication of Don Quixote, which the Spanish world continues to exalt, as evidenced by the following developments in Latin America.

Soon after the Cuban revolution, the new government established a publishing house called Instituto Cubano del Libro or Cuban Book Institute, whose purpose was to publish large editions of great literature for distribution to the masses at low prices. The very first book published by the Instituto was Don Quixote.

Only recently, on the 400th anniversary of the novel’s first publication, the Venezuelan government printed one million copies for free distribution. "The event took place in 24 separate locations across the country. President Hugo Chávez urged the public to draw inspiration from the story. Venezuelan Culture Minister Francisco Sesto said, speaking about the event, ‘We’re still oppressed by giants.’"

A literary giant from Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote a short story that reads like a critical essay, titled Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote. The gist of it is that "the writer Pierre Menard sets out to write a novel identical to Cervantes’ Don Quixote; not another Don Quixote, but the Don Quixote. He succeeds admirably, actually producing an all-new word-for-word copy of Don Quixote…"

Here’s a little backgrounder on this topic: Cervantes vis-à-vis Borges. Charles Paul Freund, a Reason senior editor, writes:

"Jorge Luis Borges, the great Argentine writer, first encountered Cervantes’ Don Quixote in his father’s library, in an English-language translation. Borges was just a boy at the time, and he was soon enraptured by both the work and the edition. The book on his father’s shelves was… the old Grolier edition with its impressive steel engravings, and it imprinted itself on the imaginative boy’s mind.

"For the rest of his life, this English version with its evocative visualizations was to remain for Borges the only ‘real’ Don Quixote. Of course, he was eventually to read the novel in its original Spanish, but as he was to describe it, the experience was a disappointing anticlimax. Indeed, Cervantes’ Spanish prose actually struck him as if it were a clumsy translation from what had become, in his mind, the authentic English version. At least, that’s how the imaginative old man told that tale."

This episode may have been the source of that celebrated quote from Borges, commenting on Samuel Henley’s translation of William Beckford’s Vathek, in 1943: "The original is unfaithful to the translation."

"In ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote,’ Mr. Freund writes further, "the desire of the writer Pierre Menard to identify with Miguel de Cervantes has been so great that he has sought to write Don Quixote himself: not to write a version of it, but rather to become the novel’s author and to create it with his own hand. After immense effort, he manages to produce ‘the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of Part One,’ plus a fragment of a third chapter."

Borges played with his readers, the way Cervantes in his time played with his own fancies, and hoped to have his readers go along for the ride.

In another work, "Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote," Borges wrote: "For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end."

Indeed, we may say the same of Cervantes’ monumental work, that it is a personal myth that is ludic, or playful, in its novel representation of the mores of the time, and the very literature of the time, if in satiric style. That style would then be turned on its head over three centuries later with Jorge Luis Borges’ equally playful take on Cervantes.

Strangely enough, that Pierre Menard trick had a precursor of sorts, over three centuries earlier. The first part of Don Quixote, titled El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, was published in "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1605"1605, and the second, Segunda parte del ingenioso caballero Don Quijote de la Mancha, in 1615 (a year before the author’s death).

The free web encyclopedia reports: "In 1614, between the first and second parts, a fake Don Quixote sequel was published by somebody using the pen-name Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. For this reason, Part II contains several references to an imposter, whom Quixote rails against, and Part II ends with the death of Don Quixote (so no imposter could experiment again with Cervantes’ character)."

There is a monument to Don Quixote and Dulcinea in El Toboso, Castile-La Mancha, in Spain, an area that exploits the fame of the book "to promote tourism in the region. A number of sites in La Mancha are linked to the novel, including windmills and an inn upon which events of the story are thought to have been based. Several trade marks also refer to Don Quixote’s characters and events."

Only last year, Wikipedia reports, "a scholarly team led by Francisco Parra Luna announced that it had identified the ‘real’ hometown of Don Quixote, which is never actually named in the novel… Based on clues in the novel, along with computations of the time it would have taken a man on horseback to reach the various locations referenced by the author, the team identified the place as Villanueva de los Infantes, a small town some 144 miles south of Madrid.

"As reported in press accounts, Mariano Sabina, the mayor of Villanueva de los Infantes, said upon hearing the news: ‘I’m delighted that my town is the famous place in La Mancha. Now I hope the whole world will know us.’

As for literary influences, the practice of honoring a previous work has passed on through generations of writers. Literary scholars have pointed to several previous works as having had an impact on Cervantes. These would include "the Catalan novel Tirant lo Blanc, one of the first chivalric epics, which Cervantes describes in Chapter VI of Quixote as ‘the best book in the world.’"

In turn, such has been Don Quixote’s literary impact that it has spawned diverse works that owe a considerable debt of influence. These include Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding, who notes in his Preface that it is "written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote;" Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, which is often said to be a retelling of Don Quixote; The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel by Nikos Kazantzakis, which features a character called Kapetan Enas whose alias is Don Quixote; Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, which includes many references, including a horse named Rocinante; Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, and Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene, where the main character is said to be a descendant of Don Quixote.

And of course there have been myriad attempts in cinema, starting with Les aventures de Don Quichotte de la Manche, a French production directed by Lucien Ferdinand Zecca in 1902.  

A total of 79 films thus far have been listed – including short films, documentaries, cartoons, even porn (Don Pichote, a German production of 1971). Among these were Don Quixote directed by George Wilhelm Pabst in 1933; the more famous Man of La Mancha in 1972, directed by Arthur Hiller (as an adaptation of the stage musical by Dale Wasserman); a television mini-series directed by Manuel Gutierrez Aragon in 1991; another Don Quixote begun by Orson Welles but never finished, with a reshaped version by Jesus Franco released in 1992; yet another Don Quixote directed by Peter Yates in 2000; and a 2002 documentary on Terry Gilliam’s failed try at another movie adaptation. Hanna-Barbera came up with a cartoon series called Don Coyote and Sancho Panda.

The novel inspired a number of noted visual artists, including Gustave Doré, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. An opera by Jules Massinet, titled Don Quichotte, premiered at Monte Carlo Opera on February 24, 1910, with the legendary Russian Feodor Chaliapin, basso profundo, playing the title role that was actually written for him. The tone poem Don Quixote was composed by Richard Strauss, with the subtitle "Fantastic Variations for Large Orchestra on a Theme of Knightly Character."

If one tools around in the Internet, there is a free eBook of Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra at Project Gutenberg. There is also a "Virtual Museum" of Don Quixote, and a 400 Windmills Weblog devoted to discussing the book.

If one goes beyond the World Wide Web, then there is Asteroid 3552 Don Quixote, named after the celebrated literary character.

Closer to home, there’s a street in Sampaloc, Manila, where I grew up, that still retains, thankfully, the name Don Quixote.