Cervantes and the coming of modern times.
Posted: Sat Apr 10, 2010 4:38 pm
As noted in the thread Chinese Whispers in Don Quixote, a superb review of Grossman's translation was published by the Weekly Standard
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/P ... v.asp?pg=2
Quixotic Adventures
Cervantes and the coming of modern times.
BY ALGIS VALIUNAS
May 10, 2004, Vol. 9, No. 33
Here are some choice quotes
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/P ... v.asp?pg=2
Quixotic Adventures
Cervantes and the coming of modern times.
BY ALGIS VALIUNAS
May 10, 2004, Vol. 9, No. 33
Here are some choice quotes
THE MODERN WORLD, Max Weber claimed, is a disenchanted one, shorn of the magic that once animated it, that filled it with spirits and gave it meaning; the seventeenth century stands on the cusp between medieval and modern, and Don Quixote is a man of the ancient sort forced to live in times that are becoming lethally uncongenial to souls like his. For him, enchantment is the ordinary state of being. Giants are as common as mushrooms. Demons troll for souls, and infect all they see. Sages and sorcerers patrol the night, seeking out worthy adventurers to aid on their quests. Necromancy is as natural as the sun is revolving around the earth, or the earth is revolving around the sun, and more readily explicable.
"All things are possible," Don Quixote observes with portentous sonority, unwittingly encapsulating his essential misconception; then he cleans himself off, and declares himself ready to take on Satan himself. Satan never actually does make an appearance, but his minions are everywhere: Believing that he is doing battle with giants, Don Quixote jousts with the renowned windmills, cuts an innkeeper's wineskins to pieces, assaults a pair of monks. When the error of his ways is pointed out to him, as it is after every fiasco, Don Quixote always has the same response: Enchanters have beguiled him once again. His mind is a perfect closed system, a psychotic fortress that reality cannot penetrate.
Like Machiavelli in The Prince, Shakespeare in Richard III, and Francis Bacon in The New Organon, Cervantes plays seriously with the Christian virtues of faith, hope, and charity. Don Quixote expects every tradesman to practice charity toward him, out of courteous regard for his profession; he places his hope in the love of Dulcinea, even before he has ever seen her; his faith lies in force of arms and a heroic destiny inscribed among the stars. This mad faith in his nonexistent prowess and misdirected virtue assails his own considerable Christian faith, quite literally: Mistaking a procession of penitents bearing a draped image of the blessed Virgin for a gang of evildoers abducting a gracious lady, he draws his sword on the priests and peasants, and of course gets a drubbing for his trouble.
This episode might seem to indicate that Cervantes is as ardent a defender of the One True Faith as he is a detractor of the don's aberrant faith in martial nerve and chaste eroticism. Yet 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.
SIMILARLY, there is Cervantes's sympathetic treatment of Islam. There are Muslims good as any Christians in this book--though the best of these Muslims are converts to or friends of Christianity--and their official persecution in Spain is presented as a dire human tragedy. That is not to say that Islam holds the truth that Christianity does not. Early in the novel, after Don Quixote has been pulped by a muledriver he crossed, he consoles himself by recalling a ballad about Valdovinos, "a history known to children, acknowledged by youths, celebrated, and even believed by the old, and, despite all this, no truer than the miracles of Mohammed."
This dismissal of the Koran acquires its full destructive significance only much later, when Don Quixote asserts the inviolable truth of the famous stories that he says everyone believes, but which the reader knows to be fictional. 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.
Cervantes concludes, "only human life races to its end more quickly than time, with no hope for renewal except in the next life, which has no boundaries that limit. So says Cide Hamete, a Muslim philosopher, because an understanding of the fleeting impermanence of our present life, and the everlasting nature of the life that awaits us, has been grasped by many without the enlightenment of faith but only with the light of their natural intelligence." The authority of Cide Hamete resides in the power of his mind--and it is not diminished by his being a Muslim, for native human reason is what Cervantes praises here.
The Moor's authorship presents Don Quixote with a possibility he had not considered: The truth can come from an unauthorized source. The wise Moor may not subscribe to The Book, but he has written the book that Don Quixote regards as the greatest story ever told. OF COURSE, the reader knows that Hamete never wrote the book, never existed at all: He is as much Cervantes's invention as all the characters he purportedly wrote about. The historical truth about Don Quixote is that there can be no history of him, no truth; the book that appears to be the authoritative version of his life is a fiction within a fiction.
Rabelais's sixteenth century gives way to Cervantes's seventeenth. Don Quixote and his comedy are of a radically different sort. Gargantua and son are larger than any men imagined before; Don Quixote is less than he imagines himself to be. Rabelais conceived of giants and made them live; Don Quixote sees giants, but they turn out to be windmills. Rabelais presents men equal to their marvelous world; Cervantes portrays a man at once too large and too small for the world he inhabits. The disparity between what the hero wants the world to be and what in fact it is provides the source at once of Cervantes's antic humor and his profound sadness; Don Quixote is both a hilarious clown and the Knight of the Sorrowful Face, a man of sorrows for the really new dispensation.
Don Quixote represents a new condition for mankind which takes some getting used to, so that the mind of greatest sensitivity--a mind such as Cervantes's--finds itself uncomfortably poised between piety and irreverence, lurching now and then into one or the other, yet generally keeping a wary eye on both, unwilling or unable to come down decisively for either side. Cervantes is of the first generation of great modern agnostics. His pained ambivalence illuminates Don Quixote's glory and misery. He is superior to the unexceptional multitudes, who nevertheless point up his utter failure as a viable human specimen. His mad longing for the marvelous is shatteringly poignant, for the human arrangements of his time have no place for it. Neither do the human arrangements of ours.