Morning Read: About Quixote
¶ On a whim, I read through to the end of Part I of Don Quixote this morning. Busy evenings and late hours left me wanting to spend time with just one book, and only four chapters remained. I was curious to see what Cervanted originally intended as an ending to his mocking epic.
Although I’ve been very amused by Don Quixote, and keenly interested in its dramatic foreshadowings of the comic opera of the Eighteenth Century, I have never once felt the rustle of greatness in its pages, and I’m far more sympathetic than I was, before opening the book, to the generations of Spanish readers who failed to recognize it as their national classic. Cervantes appears to have two fundamentally incompatible objectives in mind. He wants to entertain his readers with comic situations, but he also wants his entertainment to embody a critical analysis of popular literary forms. In one of today’s chapters, the canon and the priest engage in a leisurely discussion of the current theatre scene that betrays Cervantes as a very inexpert ventriloquist. Not for the first time, the narrative forgets about its hero (caged, at the moment) and gives way to the language of the treatise.
It would not be a sufficient excuse to say that the principal intention of well-olrdered states in allowing the public performance of plays is to entertain the common folk with some honest recreation and distract them from the hurtful humors born in idleness, and since this can be achieved with any play, good or bad, there is no reason to impose laws or to oblige those who write and act in them to make plays as they ought to be because, as I have said …
Far more troublesome than the story’s shambolic structure is its failure to bring Quixote himself alive, at least for me. This, again, seems to be the result of conflicting conceptions of his character.
The canon looked at him, marveling at the strangeness of his profound madness and at how he displayed a very find intelligence when he spoke and responded to questions, his feet slipping from the stirrups, as has been said many times before, only when the subject was chivalry.
I myself don’t marvel, but I do squint and scratch my head. In the end, I’m comforted by Jane Smiley’s claim, in 13 Ways of Looking at the Novel, that the “second volume is vastly more literary than the first.”