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Cervantes and the coming of modern times.

#82: April - May 2010 (Fiction)
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Robert Tulip

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Re: Cervantes and the coming of modern times.

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Valiunas: in destroying the fancies of chivalric romance stories, Cervantes simultaneously mounts a sneak attack on Christianity itself, chipping subtly away at the faith based on yet another book--The Book. Indeed, Don Quixote insists on the literal truth of the Bible with the same force that he insists on the literal truth of the knightly adventures of romance literature. People disagree on whether giants ever walked the earth, he states, but Holy Scripture, "which cannot deviate an iota from the truth," proves they did, in the story of Goliath. It is the sort of testimonial designed to make a Christian cringe.
Valiunas, in his review quoted in the opening post of this thread, concisely explains my argument against DWill. Cervantes’ ‘sneak attack on Christianity’ is conscious and deliberate, but is concealed because a direct assault would incur the wrath of the church. Don Quixote is like those young earth creationist pastors and evangelists who make all rational Christians cringe, and who make atheists think that ‘rational Christian’ is an oxymoron. Evangelising about chivalry is exactly like evangelizing about Jesus. Both hold a deep ambivalence. They share an ethic of helping the outcast, but set this moral ideal within a fantasy vision that has numerous harmful results. The harm of the fantasy is only partly offset by any good works.
Cervantes leaves no orthodox religious hope untouched, and he operates with the cunning discretion of Machiavelli or Bacon, bold in what he discloses but far bolder in what he conceals. A definite chill underlies the warm geniality of Don Quixote; it is the breath of icy reason, threatening to blow the doors off revealed religion and the entire medieval world.
Knight errantry is the proxy for all orthodox dogmatism. Cervantes stands at the hinge of the modern world, seeing that the future belongs to reason, but fearing that this icy logic will generate its own dogma of arrogant disenchantment. I will come back later to comment on disenchantment in terms of care for the soul and the loss of intimacy.
The Moor's authorship presents Don Quixote with a possibility he had not considered: The truth can come from an unauthorized source.
Writing at the same time as the “Authorized Version” of the Bible, the King James, Cervantes is entirely seditious in his humane respect for the rational faculties of the infidel Moor. Only by generous dollops of humour can he make his book popular enough that he gets away with such heretical ideas, calling into question the universality of the One True Faith of the Holy Catholic Church. The spirit of the renaissance opened the idea that reason and evidence are better sources of wisdom than tradition and authority. Today the primacy of logic seems almost a commonplace, except that our primitive instincts continue to perpetuate a stupid culture of deference to authority that is a main obstacle to innovation and progress.
Cervantes portrays a man at once too large and too small for the world he inhabits…. Don Quixote is both a hilarious clown and the Knight of the Sorrowful Face, a man of sorrows for the really new dispensation.
Such paradox – too large and too small - indicates the tension of defining human identity at a time of cultural turmoil. Surely Don Quixote has borne our sorrows and is acquainted with grief, as Handel quoted Isaiah speaking of Christ. The kenotic vision of the sacrificial servant keys in to the ultimate type of human identity, in solidarity with ordinary suffering while offering the keys to the kingdom of God.
a mind such as Cervantes's--finds itself uncomfortably poised between piety and irreverence,
This poise is precisely the source of Cervantes’ creative genius. Only because he maintains respect for both piety and irreverence can Cervantes understand both sides of the deep cultural war occurring in modern Europe as reason displaced faith as the driver of history. People who are captured by myth, either of piety or irreverence, are incapable of seeing the value in the opposing vision, and form a Manichean vision in which they are on the side of the angels (or maybe robots) while their opponents are irredeemably evil. Those captured by the myth of irreverence cannot see that their narrative vision is less than absolute. Because Cervantes puts forgiveness and sensitivity at the centre of his moral universe, he establishes this exquisite poise, equally between reverence and impiety, that respects and identifies with all of humanity.
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Re: Cervantes and the coming of modern times.

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DWill wrote:At the end of the book, Don admits the stories he told were all lies.
This reminds me of "Life of Pi", where the reader is asked to believe what is fantastic, to have faith in the improbable, to have faith in what makes no sense. If Don Quixote is based in part on religious dogma, and the dangers of blind faith, Cervantes has succeeded in this message. For Don to recant the entire adventure shows how guilable us humans can be, and how badly we want certain things to be true, and our willingness to have faith and to believe what is nonsensical.
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Re: Cervantes and the coming of modern times.

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Robert Tulip wrote:Valiunas: "in destroying the fancies of chivalric romance stories, Cervantes simultaneously mounts a sneak attack on Christianity itself, chipping subtly away at the faith based on yet another book--The Book. Indeed, Don Quixote insists on the literal truth of the Bible with the same force that he insists on the literal truth of the knightly adventures of romance literature. People disagree on whether giants ever walked the earth, he states, but Holy Scripture, "which cannot deviate an iota from the truth," proves they did, in the story of Goliath. It is the sort of testimonial designed to make a Christian cringe."
Valiunas, in his review quoted in the opening post of this thread, concisely explains my argument against DWill. Cervantes’ ‘sneak attack on Christianity’ is conscious and deliberate, but is concealed because a direct assault would incur the wrath of the church. Don Quixote is like those young earth creationist pastors and evangelists who make all rational Christians cringe, and who make atheists think that ‘rational Christian’ is an oxymoron. Evangelising about chivalry is exactly like evangelizing about Jesus. Both hold a deep ambivalence. They share an ethic of helping the outcast, but set this moral ideal within a fantasy vision that has numerous harmful results. The harm of the fantasy is only partly offset by any good works.
Hello again, Robert. The lynchpin of your and Valiunas' argument is that Cervantes is mounting an attack on superheroic tales in the chivalric romance tradition. He has to do this because he can't attack Christianity, yet the two traditions are basically the same so one can stand in for the other, and Cervantes can make his point about Christianity being based on outrageous fantasies.

Cervantes is not, however, attacking or even satirizing knight errantry tales in the book. I don't suppose, though, that there is any way to prove this. The matter seems to be so wrapped up in how one reads. I give Cervantes credit for knowing an appropriate subject for attack or ridicule, and knight errantry isn't such a subject. It's already, on its face, the stuff of incredible and entertaining stories for the masses, needing no one to persuade people that it's objectively false. There is no evidence that I know of that people of the time were in some way showing that they took giants, wizards, magic, and impossible feats as reality. No attack on these works of fiction was needed, whch is fortuante, because if this is all that DQ was, the book would be quickly dated and forgotten. Dialogue you quoted a while back showed two ecclesiastical types going pro and con on the subject of these romances. This exemplifies Cervantes' dramatic--not polemical--strategy in the book.

Cervantes came up with a brilliant what if for Don Quixote. What if there was a man who so taken with these extraordinary tales that he actually believed in their truth and tried to replicate the deeds of knights errant? The device works because Don sallies forth and astounds everyone with the novelty of his strange passion.

According to the Valiunas/Tulip thesis, the supernatural aspects of knight erantry tales are credibly attacked, which may as well mean that Catholic doctrines such as the virgin birth and the ressurection itself are attacked as well. I've said several times already that the evidence for this appears weak and is largely extra-textual.
Knight errantry is the proxy for all orthodox dogmatism.

Yet at other times you have presented knight errantry as the saving idealism of Don Quixote. Which is it to be? It can't be both demon and angel unless you are charging the author with incoherence.
The Moor's authorship presents Don Quixote with a possibility he had not considered: The truth can come from an unauthorized source.
What about the narrator's continual knowing comments about "this true history," indicating that he actually doubts the veracity of Cide Hamete? You've made a point of this to show that the narrator means the opposite of what he says. Now he means exactly what he says?
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Re: Cervantes and the coming of modern times.

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DWill and Suzanne, thanks for these last comments. Here are some responses to earlier comments from DWill and Giselle. DWill - could you please edit your last post - in the first quote you have claimed authorship of my statement.
DWill: ...to project make-believe on the world, as Don does… is marvellous, I suppose, in the limited sense of magical and fantastic, but I have difficulty being as nostalgic for that as some might be. Disenchantment also means that people are less likely to tie others to the stake and burn them as witches. To that extent, I'm all for disenchantment.
Beauty and love are enchanting. They draw us into a universe full of meaning and purpose and belonging. The disenchantment of modern reason established a clockwork universe in which humans are a material accident. While this may have a sort of ultimate logic, scientific rationality destroys the anthropic hope that humanity is the apex of evolution, that in our ability to describe reality in language the universe is reflecting upon itself. Enchantment is really about a sense of natural relationship, as much within a complex ecology as within a supernatural mythology. Cervantes points to the risk inherent in enchantment, that we can be carried away by false imagination. But the tantalizing corollary is that imagination can be a source of truth as much as of falsity. If we insist on disenchantment, we close down the realm of the imagination, and fossilize our current beliefs as an absolute mythology.
Don Q. views that golden age nostalgically, which is always to say, inaccurately. There never was this golden age, any more than there was an Eden.
Humans left Africa one hundred thousand years ago and lived peacefully in India for 90,000 years. India was Eden.
non-conformity will always be punished, if necessary by branding it as a mental illness. I think DQ has quite understandably been looked at in this light by modern readers. My argument all along has been that Cervantes' conscious intent, to the extent that we can make it out and that Cervantes had any unified intent in the book, isn't to introduce us to this now-modern notion. But he perhaps unconsciously gave it to us nevertheless; by the very confusion of his intent he made it possible for readers to draw out the theme from the work.
Cervantes himself was a non-conformist, and managed to evade punishment by his deft genius. He understood perfectly what he was doing in Don Quixote. It sells him short to claim that things readers have found in the book were not put there deliberately by the author.
Giselle: All authors are chroniclers, some are historians, some serve as bellwethers, some as alarmists or whistle blowers and still others are purely entertainers. I see Cervantes as operating on many of these levels at once and creating a work with many layers.
Yes, it is the many-layered texture of Don Quixote that makes it such an endless source of amusement and instruction and debate. Conventionally, a chronicler is meant to be a reliable conveyor of the truth, but in fantasy epic this word has morphed into a description of fictional imagination. Generally, chronicles that are true have greater interest than those that are invented. As Groucho Panza said, if you can fake sincerity you’ve got it made. Cervantes is the father of postmodern irony with his insistence that Cide Hamete’s chronicle is indubidubitable.

As historian, Cervantes connects us to the mythic universe of chivalry, and also rubs the wound of the tense relation between Spain and Islam. I find these cultural currents fascinating, with modern resonance in the War on Terror and in the strange status of celebrity trash.

As bellwether, Cervantes sniffs the breeze of the rise of reason and the fall of faith
Last edited by Robert Tulip on Mon Jun 07, 2010 5:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Cervantes and the coming of modern times.

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Robert, I mean the following remark in a nice and complimentary way, because I've enjoyed from time to time listening to preachers give their sermons. Have you ever done any sermonizing yourself? I ask because it appears to me that you use as your text the book Don Quixote in exactly the same way that a preacher uses another well-known book. The book serves as your point of departure for elaboration of your philosophic/moral vision, which is a fine one, certainly. But that's just the problem for me, that you depart from the book so often in assigning significance to aspects of it. Radical difference in approach: I think that the primary job of discussion of a novel, of fiction, is to remain within its world, whereas you appear to think the job is to place the novel within the drift of intellectual history. And you appear to assume that any fiction writer has a purpose beyond an artistic or literary one, that of statement or instruction. Or, if it is really only about DQ that you have this idea, what makes you so sure of it?
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Re: Cervantes and the coming of modern times.

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Robert, I mean the following remark in a nice and complimentary way, because I've enjoyed from time to time listening to preachers give their sermons. Have you ever done any sermonizing yourself? I ask because it appears to me that you use as your text the book Don Quixote in exactly the same way that a preacher uses another well-known book. The book serves as your point of departure for elaboration of your philosophic/moral vision, which is a fine one, certainly. But that's just the problem for me, that you depart from the book so often in assigning significance to aspects of it. Radical difference in approach: I think that the primary job of discussion of a novel, of fiction, is to remain within its world, whereas you appear to think the job is to place the novel within the drift of intellectual history. And you appear to assume that any fiction writer has a purpose beyond an artistic or literary one, that of statement or instruction. Or, if it is really only about DQ that you have this idea, what makes you so sure of it?

Sorry for messing up my previous post.
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Re: Cervantes and the coming of modern times.

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DWill wrote:Robert, I mean the following remark in a nice and complimentary way, because I've enjoyed from time to time listening to preachers give their sermons. Have you ever done any sermonizing yourself? I ask because it appears to me that you use as your text the book Don Quixote in exactly the same way that a preacher uses another well-known book. The book serves as your point of departure for elaboration of your philosophic/moral vision, which is a fine one, certainly. But that's just the problem for me, that you depart from the book so often in assigning significance to aspects of it. Radical difference in approach: I think that the primary job of discussion of a novel, of fiction, is to remain within its world, whereas you appear to think the job is to place the novel within the drift of intellectual history. And you appear to assume that any fiction writer has a purpose beyond an artistic or literary one, that of statement or instruction. Or, if it is really only about DQ that you have this idea, what makes you so sure of it?
I do have a deconstructive approach to literature, looking primarily to what a book has to say about the big themes of human history and identity. This approach seems to me to work very well with Don Quixote because Cervantes himself licences it, especially with his comment that writers should balance entertainment and instruction. There is no need to depart too far from the book to find the meaning in it, as its comment on the drift of ideas sits just below the surface. “Sitting within Cervantes’world” presents a completely ambiguous project, because he lived at a time when the old world was collapsing and the new world had barely begun. Hence his ambivalence regarding whether Don Quixote is a hero or a fool or both.
DWill wrote: The lynchpin of your and Valiunas' argument is that Cervantes ... can make his point about Christianity being based on outrageous fantasies.Cervantes is not, however, attacking or even satirizing knight errantry tales in the book.
As I mentioned before, Cervantes says on the last page that the whole point of the book is to stop people from taking chivalrous books seriously. I can’t believe you don’t see the satire regarding errantry, as it is laid on with dollops.
I give Cervantes credit for knowing an appropriate subject for attack or ridicule, and knight errantry isn't such a subject. It's already, on its face, the stuff of incredible and entertaining stories for the masses, needing no one to persuade people that it's objectively false. There is no evidence that I know of that people of the time were in some way showing that they took giants, wizards, magic, and impossible feats as reality. No attack on these works of fiction was needed, which is fortunate, because if this is all that DQ was, the book would be quickly dated and forgotten.
I think you exaggerate popular intelligence. Here at booktalk we have one troll who believes the universe is 6000 years old. People live in a trashy universe of the mind populated by movie stars. The nature of epic tales, whether the Iliad or the Ballads of Lancelot and Galahad, is that the narrator seeks to make them plausible for his audience. Homer’s illiterate listeners, many of whom had never ventured beyond their home valley, could well have thought the lotus eaters, the floating island, the descent to hell, Polyphemus the Cyclops and all the other fantastic tales were honestly recorded and told.
Dialogue you quoted a while back showed two ecclesiastical types going pro and con on the subject of these romances. This exemplifies Cervantes' dramatic--not polemical--strategy in the book. Cervantes came up with a brilliant what if for Don Quixote. What if there was a man who so taken with these extraordinary tales that he actually believed in their truth and tried to replicate the deeds of knights errant? The device works because Don sallies forth and astounds everyone with the novelty of his strange passion.
What if there was a man who believed the universe was 6000 years old, that Goliath was a real giant, that Satan showed Christ all the kingdoms of the earth from atop a high mountain, that believers will go to heaven when they die? All these are just as incredible as the idea that a windmill is a giant. The temper of the times was the shift from authority to evidence as the basis of belief. Cervantes struck a chord in his subtle lampooning of trust in authority. The device works because people can relate to hearing crazy ideas and knowing they are rubbish.

According to the Valiunas/Tulip thesis, the supernatural aspects of knight errantry tales are credibly attacked, which may as well mean that Catholic doctrines such as the virgin birth and the resurrection itself are attacked as well. I've said several times already that the evidence for this appears weak and is largely extra-textual. “Knight errantry is the proxy for all orthodox dogmatism.”
Yet at other times you have presented knight errantry as the saving idealism of Don Quixote. Which is it to be? It can't be both demon and angel unless you are charging the author with incoherence.
It is a deliberate incoherence. Cervantes steps boldly into the realm of paradoxical uncertainty, unsure, with Kepler, about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He respects noble ideals, but sees they are enframed in superstition. By lampooning the frame perhaps he hopes to preserve the masterpiece. Even orthodox dogma has some redeeming content. Remember, demon (daimon) is the old word for angel, illustrating the slippery ambiguity of words.
The Moor's authorship presents Don Quixote with a possibility he had not considered: The truth can come from an unauthorized source.
What about the narrator's continual knowing comments about "this true history," indicating that he actually doubts the veracity of Cide Hamete? You've made a point of this to show that the narrator means the opposite of what he says. Now he means exactly what he says?
It is Don Quixote, not Cervantes, who believes Cide Hamete is absolutely correct in every respect. Cervantes is far more circumspect, to the point of mockery and satire of all claims about ‘true history’.
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Re: Cervantes and the coming of modern times.

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Robert Tulip wrote:I do have a deconstructive approach to literature, looking primarily to what a book has to say about the big themes of human history and identity.
Okay, if that's what your interest is. This approach, when applied to most novels I can think of, is highly speculative. Fiction is an art, and it always seems best to me to treat it as such, rather than disguised or coded philosophy or moralizing.
This approach seems to me to work very well with Don Quixote because Cervantes himself licences it, especially with his comment that writers should balance entertainment and instruction.
Yes, and that's why we have Don giving these long lessons on various topics. That's the entertainment/instruction principle in action, within the boundary of the fiction. That's a lot different from Cervantes having the overarching instructional design you're claiming he has.
There is no need to depart too far from the book to find the meaning in it, as its comment on the drift of ideas sits just below the surface. “Sitting within Cervantes’world” presents a completely ambiguous project, because he lived at a time when the old world was collapsing and the new world had barely begun. Hence his ambivalence regarding whether Don Quixote is a hero or a fool or both.
But this part about the old world collapsing is your idea imported to this book. You have no real basis for saying that Cervantes was writing from his sense of being caught between two worlds. Surely as a literary artist he has some conscious control over the characters he creates and does not make Don Quixote ridiculous yet admirable because pulled by the historical strings you say are tugging at him.
Robert Tulip wrote:As I mentioned before, Cervantes says on the last page that the whole point of the book is to stop people from taking chivalrous books seriously.
Cide Hamete Bengeli makes this declaration. Cervantes gives him some play as a character in the novel, and occasionally Cide serves as a moral voice, something that the narrator-editor studiously avoids. Think about the dramatic appropriateness of Cide making this statement. As you quoted earlier, the view given of Moors is that they demand things that are "simple and palpable." It thus fits nicely that Cide would have this outlook on the extravagant books of knight errantry. His is only one voice in the novel, and this declaration cannot be taken as a resolution proposed by Cervantes. Whether escapist, stereotypical books are good or bad is a matter of sufficient human complexity that Cervantes doesn't try to tell us the correct view, because he knows there isn't one. He has characters give differing views, such as the canon and the priest, and of course Don and Sancho.
I can’t believe you don’t see the satire regarding errantry, as it is laid on with dollops.
Yes, this heavy laying on would be in the manner of broad comedy or farce. If this were social satire, Cervantes would expose the foolishness or vice of society, and he doesn't, in regard to some supposed delusion about the reality of knight errantry or to any other social custom of the time. Don and Sancho need to be the only people so deluded in order for Cervantes' idea to work at all.
Robert Tulip wrote:
DWill wrote:According to the Valiunas/Tulip thesis, the supernatural aspects of knight errantry tales are credibly attacked, which may as well mean that Catholic doctrines such as the virgin birth and the resurrection itself are attacked as well. I've said several times already that the evidence for this appears weak and is largely extra-textual. “Knight errantry is the proxy for all orthodox dogmatism.”
Yet at other times you have presented knight errantry as the saving idealism of Don Quixote. Which is it to be? It can't be both demon and angel unless you are charging the author with incoherence.
It is a deliberate incoherence. Cervantes steps boldly into the realm of paradoxical uncertainty, unsure, with Kepler, about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. He respects noble ideals, but sees they are enframed in superstition. By lampooning the frame perhaps he hopes to preserve the masterpiece. Even orthodox dogma has some redeeming content. Remember, demon (daimon) is the old word for angel, illustrating the slippery ambiguity of words.
I'm not sure this is deconstruction so much as constructing an intent that the text can't support.
It is Don Quixote, not Cervantes, who believes Cide Hamete is absolutely correct in every respect. Cervantes is far more circumspect, to the point of mockery and satire of all claims about ‘true history’.
That's a good correction. It's important to keep the voices separate. The narrator-editor is not Cervantes, either, of course. The narrator's contribution consists of the chapter titles mostly, and they do have that joking, mock-heroic, mock-serious tone. Unless, that is, you want to get into the possibility that the narrator is fabricating Cide Hamete and making up the entire story. Then the narrator's role expands.
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Re: Cervantes and the coming of modern times.

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giselle wrote:what is Cervantes saying about knight errantry? Is he saying it’s an archaic practice that should be left as a relic of the past or celebrating it and suggesting that we learn from it? Or does he value knight errantry as a great source of entertainment (like many of his time) and a great way to sell books? Or is he using the latter as a vehicle to accomplish the former? There are many layers here and, I think, questions attached to each layer.
I’ve been meaning to respond to these great questions and comments from Giselle. The wonderful thing about knight errantry is the idea of selfless compassion, of armed service for justice and truth in the face of anarchic misery. The dark ages were a time of rule by the sword. Errantry puts the sword in service of law, representing the divine nobility of Christ, so the warrior defends the helpless instead of embarking on an evil quest for domination and control. Errantry was part of the ideal of Christendom as a society of rule of law, and the myth continued into the modern world with Superman and Batman as knights errant.

However, part of the irony for Cervantes is that by his time the knight in armour had long been obsolete. A recent article by Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books cites the knight on horseback as a failed piece of military insanity, along with the dreadnought battleship and the Star Wars shield against nuclear weapons, as a strategic technology that was grossly wasteful and was never able to work as intended.

I’ve been enchanted by the story of Lancelot of the Lake since before I could read. The mythology of the entertainment involves the context of the quest for the holy grail, the ideals of purity and valour, the presence of danger and magic, and the moral lessons. By Cervantes’ time, modern technology was already making the feudal social relations obsolete. This is why the windmill is such an evocative symbol; it represents the impersonal power of industrial production of food, replacing the charm of the medieval ox turning the millstone with a new vast power. Of course today we see windmills as quaint and old-fashioned because technology has advanced so much further, but then they were relatively new. Confusing one with a giant deliberately mixed the Arthurian charm of the grail quest with the impersonal factory of mercantile capitalism.
I continue to find Cervantes theme of enchantment interesting and relevant to our times. As I read, I see more of enchantment and the way it influences Quixote’s mind and less of outright madness, but perhaps I am being generous toward him. In any case, I think he genuinely believes in enchantment and sees it all around and so it is real to him. President Camacho « 08 Jun 2010 12:13 » im safe, Tulip doesn't read the shoutbox
I agree, except that self-delusion is madness, so anyone who claims that their belief proves the world is wrong on such flimsy grounds is indeed mad. Yet, the problem remains that we have a nagging wonder regarding enchantment, a sense that perhaps the world is indeed more complex than our surface impressions suggest, that we are actually connected to the universe by intricate webs of mystery, creating subtle layers of reality that our science cannot detect. The miracles of Christ are entirely a gesture towards this sense of mystery, that there is more in heaven and earth than can be explained by philosophy. Descartes used Cervantes’ device of the ‘evil enchanter’ to argue that logically, solipsism is possible, and is only refuted by faith in God.
Children today typically view the world to be full of enchantment as I’m sure children did in Cervantes time. Our institutions are designed to drum enchantment and magic out of children because as mainstream society we desire stability and predictability, we do not think enchantment has a place in the adult world. We label it all sorts of negative things and we slot those who believe in enchantment into some pretty undesirable places.
A while back we read the book The Secret Garden, in which this theme of childhood sense of innocent enchantment is presented as a way to find meaning in a bleak world. The disenchantment of the world is a central theme of modern enlightenment, with the mechanistic exploitation of matter seen as the basis of production of wealth. If we regard trees and rocks and animals as ensouled, we risk a collapse in confidence of the human right to dominion over nature, the faith that has motivated the imperial conquest of the world.

Today the school system is likely the number one suppression culprit whereas in Cervantes time it was more likely the church. Although we have worked hard to suppress wacky ideas like enchantment, our suppression system is not water tight and some people slip through the cracks bringing the notion of enchantment into the adult world and into the mainstream. When this happens, do we foster this enchantment or do we suppress it because it challenges our ways and creates disorder and fear? I’m not sure, and perhaps we are not consistent one way or the other, but I feel an adult world with enchantment is a whole lot richer than a world without. Perhaps enchantment itself is an airy fairy concept but really it’s not just enchantment at stake because with enchantment may come many beneficial, productive things, like innovativeness, and these benefits will be gained only if valued and supported and nurtured through thoughtful social policy.
I’m not sure that enchantment is allowed into the mainstream, except perhaps in the controlled ‘suspension of disbelief’ in books and movies such as Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings. Anyone who believes that magic is possible gets very short shrift. What we do see is enchantment controlled on the fringes of the mainstream, with Christian belief in miracles and the eternal soul, and also with New Age beliefs like astrology. Part of the culture war is over this problem of enchantment, that the mainstream insists it is meaningless and wacky, but many people find that it resonates with their experience, so there is a loss of faith in mainstream values around science and progress.
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DWill

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Re: Cervantes and the coming of modern times.

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Robert Tulip wrote: I’ve been meaning to respond to these great questions and comments from Giselle. The wonderful thing about knight errantry is the idea of selfless compassion, of armed service for justice and truth in the face of anarchic misery. The dark ages were a time of rule by the sword. Errantry puts the sword in service of law, representing the divine nobility of Christ, so the warrior defends the helpless instead of embarking on an evil quest for domination and control. Errantry was part of the ideal of Christendom as a society of rule of law, and the myth continued into the modern world with Superman and Batman as knights errant.
Maybe in errantry's modern incarnation, crusaders became interested in social justice. In the original knight errantry--which, let's be clear, is entirely a literary invention--I'm not aware that these heroes were in any true sense democratic warriors, but rather vassals of the power structure.
Last edited by DWill on Mon Jun 14, 2010 9:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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