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Book Burning in Don Quixote

#82: April - May 2010 (Fiction)
bleachededen

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Book Burning in Don Quixote

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Don Quixote's madness is caused by reading too many books of chivalry, so when his housekeeper and neice find out, they call the Priest and a local doctor to decide what to do about their master/uncle's madness. The Priest suggests that they go through Don Quixote's library and burn the books that have possibly caused the most damage, and which are likely to cause further damage if Don Quixote were to read them again.

Even though it is the priest who suggests that the books be burned, there are several that he saves, either for himself or for the doctor to keep locked away for posterity. It didn't surprise me that the priest would suggest burning the books, as church figures have been burning "harmful" or "evil" books for centuries, both before and after Cervantes' time, and as books showed to be the cause of Don Quixote's madness, it made sense that the priest would burn the evil influence. What did surprise me, however, was that he saved some of the books, even lamenting the fact that he almost destroyed them. This amused me, to hear him praise a book of chivalry or an antique, even though it was he who suggested the books be destroyed. Even though he is a man of the church, he does not seem to be as hostile as other clergy might have been in such a situation.

Of course in the story, the differences the priest sees from book to book make sense, but to me, a reader centuries removed and without knowledge of the chivalric tales owned by Don Quixote, I saw no difference between what the priest exclaimed to be exquisite writing and what he gave to the housekeeper to burn. I would be curious to know what other people think about this part of the book, because the irony of a bookburning inside a book about a man who has gone insane from books is not understated and definitely makes its mark.

So what are everyone else's thoughts?
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Re: Book Burning in Don Quixote

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The scene reminds me of "Peony in Love," in which there's a scene where a local doctor burns the main character's books and writings because she is starving herself with lovesickness. I guess the author may have been influenced by Don Quixote. :lol:


The priest in "Don Quixote" does seem to have noble intentions, but I don't really know if burning them was absolutely necessary, or even the right thing to do.
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bleachededen

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Re: Book Burning in Don Quixote

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The church has always been a big supporter of banning/burning "immoral" books, especially in this period of history, so the fact that he condemned them to the fire makes perfect sense to me.

What I was so surprised at was the priest's judgment of the books. When the idea first comes up, the idea seems to be that they will burn all of the books that have anything to do with chivalry, but the priest then "saves" many of them, praising their poetry and the strength of the characters and authors, even though these are also some of the books that drove Don Quixote mad. It's the arbitrary nature of the book burning that surprised and amused me.

And he then let the housekeeper burn the rest of Quixote's library, on her suspicion that without the chivalric texts he will then become mad from the poetry that is left.

It is also amusing to me that, instead of trying to "treat" Quixote's illness and explain to him who he is and what is wrong, they play along with his madness (only strengthening it), by telling him that an enchanter has stolen his library and any memory of the books that were in it. Instead of fearing for his health, or even his soul, as I would have thought a priest would be wont to do (oh God, I'm writing like Cervantes!), they are mocking him, using his illness to keep him hidden from the world and thus trying not to bring shame upon the house. Obviously, this backfires and Quixote leaves unnoticed, but the very idea that they would play along with him in order to keep him from seeing what they had done amazes me, because, in the end, it only undoes what they were trying to accomplish.
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Re: Book Burning in Don Quixote

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The book burning drips with irony. The reader is invited to think, if reading books is this bad, why did Cervantes write such a fat book, so full of literary allusions, and why the hell am I reading it? I'm sure there is a strong political message in this episode, as book burning was associated with the auto-da-fe, the 'act of faith' where the Inquisition burnt heretics at the stake. How I read it was that Cervantes is condemning book burning as the act of idiots, with the vacillation of the priest showing his recognition that his complicity was an immoral piece of cultural vandalism.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book-burning
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Wed Mar 31, 2010 10:05 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Book Burning in Don Quixote

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Then why does the priest comply with this at all? With everyone else looking to him to find a solution, couldn't he have come up with something else?

That being said, I do understand that Cervantes specifically wrote the priest to behave as such to show the irony and his own recognition that this action is wrong. It is more for the audience, for the satirism, that Cervantes lets the priest act the way he does. I just found it amusing, which I guess was the desired reaction.
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DWill

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Re: Book Burning in Don Quixote

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I think you're right about Cervantes' purpose being to extend the comedy. On my previous readings of the book, I found little, if any social criticism or irony. Maybe I'll see some this time or somebody will point it out to me. It's always funny to see a character play against his type or the expectations of a situation. So here we have the priest, too, unable to part with some of these same works that have supposedly addled the Don's brain, even though he's suposed to be all about censorship of anything so frivolous. It shows the priest as quite human, too.

Then too, we know the Don is totally looney tunes, but at least there is evidence that he is not alone in his fanaticism. These chivalry books are wildly popular, after all; it's just that nobody else has gotten quite so into them as DQ has.

Also in this scene, we hear the housekeeper lament that the nasty books have ruined the best mind in all of La Mancha. This appears to be not just favoritism toward the master. DQ does have an encyclopedic memory for everything that he has read, and he puts together a whole coherent fantasy world. He is crazy in a way that few people in the real world actually are, with the possible exception of Bipolars in a manic state.
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Re: Book Burning in Don Quixote

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DWill wrote:
Also in this scene, we hear the housekeeper lament that the nasty books have ruined the best mind in all of La Mancha. This appears to be not just favoritism toward the master. DQ does have an encyclopedic memory for everything that he has read, and he puts together a whole coherent fantasy world. He is crazy in a way that few people in the real world actually are, with the possible exception of Bipolars in a manic state.
Not to nitpick your assessment, which is fairly accurate, as far as I'm reading it, but I don't think even the most manic of bipolar patients would display the kind of blind fantasy Don Quixote has applied to his world. I think it might be more indicative of a psychotic episode of someone with severe schizophrenia or even dissociative identity disorder (formerly knowns as multiple personality disorder). As someone with bipolar disorder, albeit a mild form, I know that even the manic states of others I have known or read about do not reach this heightened level of reality loss. Bipolar disorder is more a mood disorder than a psychosis, so it seems highly unlikely that anyone with this diagnosis would go this far off the deep end. Don Quixote also has a plan, based on his books, which a manic bipolar patient wouldn't be able to follow, as during manic episodes, patients are prone to do things entirely on impulse, with no rhyme or reason, changing what they do from one moment to the next, and this is clearly not the case with our Knight of the Sorrowful Face (or Knight of the Woeful Countenance, as I have also seen it written).

Sorry for the psychiatric lecture, but I do try to promote awareness for identifying and correctly labeling psychiatric disorders, as I have faced many ill judgments due purely to ignorance of psychiatric disorders and symptoms.
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Re: Book Burning in Don Quixote

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What I was thinking was that, if there could be any relation at all to the Don's craziness and a MI diagnosis, maybe the energy of a manic episode, which in some fuels intense creativity, could be the closest thing. True, delusions don't precisely fit in, but grandiosity does. The problem with suggesting schizophrenia is that I think it's rare for that to invlove such mental prowess as the Don shows, however misdirected it is. I think John Nash, of "A Beautiful Mind" fame, was really exceptional in that regard.
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Re: Book Burning in Don Quixote

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Robert Tulip wrote:The book burning drips with irony. The reader is invited to think, if reading books is this bad, why did Cervantes write such a fat book, so full of literary allusions, and why the hell am I reading it? . . . How I read it was that Cervantes is condemning book burning as the act of idiots, with the vacillation of the priest showing his recognition that his complicity was an immoral piece of cultural vandalism.
These were just my thoughts as I read this the book burning. I had to smile as I read. I imagined Cervantes laughing as he wrote this part of the book.
bleachededen

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Re: Book Burning in Don Quixote

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DWill wrote:What I was thinking was that, if there could be any relation at all to the Don's craziness and a MI diagnosis, maybe the energy of a manic episode, which in some fuels intense creativity, could be the closest thing. True, delusions don't precisely fit in, but grandiosity does. The problem with suggesting schizophrenia is that I think it's rare for that to invlove such mental prowess as the Don shows, however misdirected it is. I think John Nash, of "A Beautiful Mind" fame, was really exceptional in that regard.
That's not always accurate. Schizophrenia can be devastating to the mind, but not always, and since they are prone to delusions, it seems more likely that he was schizophrenic or at least schizoaffective moreso than bipolar. But since it's not something that can be deduced with any accuracy, all we can really do is speculate. He does show attributes of both, as you are right about the grandiosity that can be felt during a manic episode, but he is definitely completely delusional, which is more indicative of schizophrenia. Since he is a fictional character and Cervantes isn't around to question (and wouldn't have known the diagnoses even if he were!), all we can do is watch as his story unfolds, and try not to superimpose 20th century ideas on a fictional 16th century character.

I am, however, unable to grasp how one could be so delusional. Since the book began, he has only had one moment where he admitted that something in reality was actually what it was: the water pounders at the mill, which, the night before, he and Sancho thought was some terrible peril. This is the only time that he concedes to accepting that the mill was what it was, and he is so ashamed of it he refuses to even look at them once he's realized what they were. Other than that, he cannot see how off base he is, even when he sees madness in someone else. It almost seems like the "faithful" Christians who refuse to hear or think anything other than what the Bible or their preachers tell them, and I think this may have been what Robert was saying in the other thread (The Strange Acceptance of Don Quixote's Madness), implying that Don Quixote is ridiculing Christ.
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