I just finished rereading Don Quixote again, for the first time in perhaps 15 years, and every time I read it, Im convinced again that in some respects its still the greatest novel ever written. In the summer, I like long, dilatory works, but like Tom Jones, theres also a great fusive power, in the Coleridgean lingo, and a great deal of repetition with a difference, that enhances, rather than oppresses, the sense of novelty. I come to the novel from a somewhat unusual perspective, having read my Ariosto, Boiardo, Tasso, the Arthurian romances in French and English, as well as Plato and Aristotle, and the neo-Aristotelians and their opponent critics during the Renaissance, and the Amintases and Il pastor fidos, horrible in their own way. What that means is that I get the humor of the pastoral crap, and the highfalutin rhetoric that most readers probably skim over, or dont quite know how to digest, in the course of reading the novel. But for the gist and the conceit--elaborated in a thousand ways--that requires no special training at all, just as Shakespeare could address himself simultaneously to the learned and the groundling, by virtue of his peculiar genius. It is spectacular, though, that Cervantes could create such an omnigatherum, making tributary to the course of his story so many minor masterpieces and disasterpieces, all swept up in the current of his story; and certainly there must be many Cervantists who have read many of the deserving and undeserving sources of Cervantes and Quixotes inspiration that otherwise would never be touched at all, had they not been included in the story, though I am not one of them. I cant say I laughed as much this time around, because I was focused on details that might have escaped me before, but I was well aware, at the same time, of Cervantes laughter, and alive to the fact that perhaps never in the history of literature has another author done so great a favor to another as his rival, the creator of the spurious second volume of Quixotes adventures, whom I shall not name, in accordance with the originators practice. If there were a modern version of Quixote, it would involve a man whose brain had dried up from having read too many superhero comics, and who had resolved to turn superhero, while convincing an untutored neighbor to be his sidekick. And certainly films like Mystery Men and series like The Tick have played with this concept, though never with the degree of sophistication presented by Don Quixote, wherein we have the humors displayed, of appetitive and spiritual (though unorthodox) man split off at a vast remove, but complicated by choleric and phlegmatic. Had Freud written at length on Don Quixote, he surely would have remarked that Quixote was the superego sometimes lapsing into ego, and Sancho the id sometimes rising to ego. In any event, such an effort would have to place into the mouth of the hero the assumed intelligence of the age, while at the same time producing pitch-perfect superhero chest-thumping out of his mouth, and while making both hero and sidekick risible and admirable . . . which would be no easy task. And there would need to be neighbors and family trying to capture and institutionalize them, while they receive their thumpings care of the reality principle, however constructed that might itself be. Reading through, having read it before several times, I dreaded coming to the end, as the author was well aware, foreshadowing Tristram Shandy, among many other great works (yeah, yeah, the conflicting desire for divigation and conclusion; thanatos, man). For sheer manliness, nothing beats the end of Don Quixote, who is allowed to die disenchanted, and without much ado. But Cervantes was perhaps the one author in a million who, having labored so long on his subject, with such evident love, who had it within him not to have produced for his and his readers gratification a funeral scene in which the principal characters of the story should have bewailed his death and spoken of his greatness. And that is perfect.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 00:43:41 +0000