Sunday, March 22, 2009
3/24 Don Quixote
It has been argued that Cervantes' parody of romance killed the genre. He is often read as the watershed figure between these older forms of peripatetic narratives and the emerging form of the novel. Considering all we know now about the romance, does this book seem to you to be doing something different? If so, what is it?
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I don't think Cervantes killed the romance genre. If that was his intention then he must have believed along with Oscar Wilde that "we always kill the things we love" -- for he certainly loves the genre.
ReplyDeleteBy (lovingly) parodying Romance, Cervantes in a self-reflexive way is highlighting and exposing all the tropes and conventions of the genre -- thus, opening it up to renewal. A healthy thing, I think.
It's probably safe to say that Romance was never the same after Don Quixote (that may have had more to do with the times than with his story) but it didn't die. I see some of Cervantes influence in Walpole's Castle of Otranto (though I doubt C. would be pleased by that) and, if I squint, in Richardson's melodramas, too. What are Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy if not 'peripatetic' bastard offspring of the old Don?
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ReplyDeleteBy way of responding to both the prompt and Kieran’s post, maybe it doesn’t make sense to consider Don Quixote as the death of the romance per se, but rather to think of it as the moment at which its largely non-self reflexive manifestation was purged from the realm of serious literature (whatever that is). While Cervantes turns most of the genre’s tropes that we’ve seen in our readings to date on their heads, often to the detriment of the hapless Don Quixote, it doesn’t always quite pan out that way. For example, I think we can read good intentions into his request that Sancho Panza “sit here at my side and in the company of these good people, and be the same as I, who am your natural lord and master; eat from my plate and drink where I drink, for one may say of knight errantry what is said of love: it makes all things equal” (75). However much Sancho Panza feels condescended to by this invitation, there is something laudably egalitarian underlying this invitation; I certainly can’t imagine the Redcrosse Knight asking the dwarf to dine with him in a similar fashion. Against this charitable depiction, I suppose, one might pose the cliche that even a blind squirrel can find a nut once in a while, but I think there’s something interesting here – the way D.Q. (what unfortunate initials!) responds to Marcela is another incident that’s interesting to consider in terms of this tentative egalitarianism.
ReplyDeleteOne more general thought I’ve had is that if Cervantes had a problem with any of the various defining traits of romance that we identified back in week 1, it was probably with excess. Battles work the way they’re supposed to work here, so that when one middle-aged man with a sword and his unarmed squire rush twenty staff-wielding drovers, the result is the absolute defeat that it should be (103-4). But at the same time, in unpacking romance, Cervantes himself is careful not to be too excessive. Thus, in the book-burning scene, the priest is a moderating influence, curbing the instincts of the members of Don Quixote’s household to dispense with all the books, and preserving a good number of the works that have inspired the “madness” with which the knight errant is afflicted (45-52). There’s an underlying sense that while a lot of romances lack self-reflexivity, human agency also has a role to play in the choice of reading material we make, and so the romances that can be argued to have some sort of merit deserve to survive.
Like Kasim, I also found the book-burning scene to be of particular interest in terms of its relation to excess. This part of the book tries to manage the excesses of Romance by assessing their merits as individual texts as well as in terms of their contribution to the genre as a whole. The priest and barber, clearly very well versed in romance, catalogue Don Quixote’s library in terms of each book’s merits. The barber “pardons” the first of the four books of Amadis de Gaul because it “is the best of all the books of this kind ever written” (46). Other romances are saved because of their literary merits, the status of the author, and their “courtly and clear” language (49). The books that are condemned are destroyed as a result of their “complicated language”, their silliness, arrogance, and stupidity (47).
ReplyDeleteWhile it could be argued that Don Quixote suffers as a result of his inability to distinguish between the good and bad romances, and thus is unable to manage the excesses, what the book burning scene does foreground is the importance of style. Throughout the first book Don Quixote is most offended by people who address him using what he considers to be inappropriately low style. By contrast, DQ feels the most admiration for immediate admiration for characters like Cardenio who are capable of courteous speech and writing poetry (Chapter XXIII-XXIV). This reception of style, however, is subverted throughout the text. For example, when Don Quixote addresses the prostitutes at the inn using elevated language which makes them laugh (26-27) and again when Dorotea is able to perform the role of a great lady though costume and rhetoric (Chapter XXIX).
Kasim and Heather, I agree that the excess of romance seems to be absent – unless we consider the number of Don Quixote’s misadventures excessive! Could we reverse this idea of killing romance and think about what Don Quixote introduces? It perhaps begins a subgenre of literary parody through the figure of the inept reader. I am thinking particularly of two works – The Female Quixote by Charlotte Lennox and Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen - although there must be others.
ReplyDeleteI have been wondering about the book's tone. Rather than imitating romance language (to excess), or using matter-of-fact description to expose Don Quixote’s illusion, Miguel de Cervantes uses both. For instance, the battle with the Basque is filled with language of high chivalry (69), and Marcela's speech is not unlike one Pamela might make in Arcadia in terms of reasoning and diction. However, Don Quixote is continually described as lunatic in a quite straightforward manner, with phrases such as “rash curiosity and folly” (20). This tonal shift is, I think, different from simply including the reality of Don Quixote’s adventure, and an attention to the physical aspects of daily life, such as needing to eat. These elements could be easily included without shifting between a romantic and a matter-of-fact style.
It seems to me that the tone or narrative style is related to one of our characteristics of romance: an interpolated or digressive / woven narrative structure. The interpolated tale is still here, although it does not occur to the same extent as in the works by Sidney or Spenser for instance. In fact, the prevalent form of interpolated tale are Don Quixote’s ramblings about romances he has read or that he imagines he is in. Unlike the romances we read, where the tales are all equally true in the romance world (unless told by a character that is evil and deceitful), Don Quixote creates a sharp contrast between the real world of the novel and romances, which are not true – a contrast that is represented in the differences in tone, although the changing tone may also confuse the distinction.
With respect to language and narrative, I would add that Cervantes descriptions are very wonderfully 'earthy' (I don't think we've seen references to defecation before or trouserless men doing somersaults and exposing their 'naughty bits' to public scrutiny). The focus on food, rest (and other bodily needs), injury (poor guy had half his teeth knocked out), etc. speak to a level of realism we have yet to see. For the first time (in our readings) we are seeing a human being realistically portrayed. Again I'm reminded of the focus on the 'bodily needs' throughout Tom Jones. Por supuesto, eso es posiblemente la natividad de realismo en la literatura europeo.
ReplyDelete