Last time I think I promised to talk about insanity. However, after the discussion last Tuesday, I don’t think I have the right to focus this post solely on insanity.
Surely, it is quite easy to establish Don Quixote as insane. To show how his repeated mistakes, thinking a rush of sheep is two armies coming together for battle in a dust storm, mistaking inns for castles, fighting windmills as giants, as anything less than insane should be fairly easy. To get specific and heavy handed, Don Quixote warps reality time and time again with the same result of getting beaten and/or tricked. Each time Don Quixote makes up some excuse of why the events fell as they did. Sancho always a weary one, always attempts to inform his master of his mistake. However, Don Quixote, the master of all things knightly, refusing to listen to his loyal squire’s warning. Always, pain and agony follow.
There, I just proved Don Quixote’s insanity. But then again, there’s another part of me that isn’t so sure Don Quixote is insane. I’m not so sure of anything anymore. But that’s the place I was when I started this book. So nothing is really lost and so I trudge forward.
In this post, I will be covering the glorious conversation we had last Tuesday about the hundred pages we read. There’s a lot to cover and somethings will have to be postponed. For example, Marcela will have to be talked about in the next post. As we did talk about her in the meeting, and deserves to be included here, she relates to two other incidents in the following readings. Thus we’ll talk about her sooner than later.
Last Tuesday, we talked everything from POV in the novel, the main character’s, Marcela’s wonderful feminist stance to love and patriarchy to God and god. The last 100 pages have been nothing but filled with interrogations of society, the imagination in the dark, women of extraordinary beauty, and who is God and where is God. Like I said, there simply isn’t enough time to go over everything… So with that, enough rambling and let’s get to it.
It’s 430pm. I have a bag of chips and humus for the group and I am the only one eating it. Blaze starts us off by asking the question: why should I keep reading anymore? why should I care? Katie had the same problem.
What was their problem?
Their problem was they saw the insanity; they saw the same trick being played over and over again and the same result occurring. Don Quixote pretends and only bad things happen to Sancho and our knight. The readers were tired. They didn’t care anymore. They didn’t believe in the main character Don Quixote.
And why should they?
I was shocked. How could they not find this book interesting beyond interest? I found myself consumed by the undertone, the secret messages being transmitted in dialogue, narration, and anticlimactic plot development. I brought up the point that Cervantes seems to toy with the God idea.
Cervantes questions God by making Sancho make Don Quixote his God. The consequence is that whatever Don Quixote decides to do or say or believe, Sancho will have to go along whether or not he himself believes his master. There is a moment early on in this week’s reading that Sancho essentially vows to believe in Don Quixote, Sancho says, “especially when I have a master as distinguished as your grace, who will know how to give me everything that’s right for me and that I can handle,” (57). It is an old understanding: that capital-G God gives his children tests. These tests are experiences which act as an obstacle that shall be overcome. No matter how impossible the obstacles may seem to hurdle, they are not for the trial is given by the Creator. Sancho says Don Quixote will only give him what he can handle and what’s right for me. This is the same as any believer in God. We are only given obstacles that are just within victory. In essence, Sancho makes Don Quixote God.
Blaze had the excellent point, that this was in fact another critique or prod at the monarchy of the current age. The fact that the servant makes the knight a divine being, and that divine being being the idiot Don Quixote, illuminates the very ridiculous nature of the master slave relationship. How can someone ever claim divine knowledge of this world? How can anyone assume the role of God over another human being, just as a monarch?
This is an important question for us, for it lead us to believe that maybe Don Quixote is not the main character, but rather a mule whose back is broken over and over again to carry the message: Cervantes world is broken and no longer works, and perhaps always has been.
I bet you are asking how questioning the monarchical society lead us to question whether Don Quixote is the main character. Here is the logic. Sancho Panza makes Don Quixote God. Repeatedly Sancho swears by God, asking him for safe passages throughout the novel. After the aforementioned, he is asking Don Quixote for safe passage. The only problem with this is that Don Quixote is insane and constantly mistakes modern world for his imaginary chivalric code. Don Quixote is humiliated and twists reality to fit his perspective. We see this plain as day, rending it impossible to legitimately believe in Don as Don believes in himself. Thus illuminating Don Quixote’s true place in this novel. He is a vessel to fulfill the author’s pondering, questions, wanderings, etc, in the very same way Sancho, Marcela, and Dulcinea of Toboso are characters intended to do something other than be, praised, or loved as the main character of a novel is. In this light, Don Quixote falls in our eyes. We are disappointed and relieved that we are now free to read this book on the ground level. Sitting in the room with the author, Don Quixote, Sancho, and everyone else in this novel who has a characteristic presence.
This seemed to free up the narrative a bit. It loosened the grip of conventional reading. See, we want to believe Don Quixote but can’t. We see clearly he is wrong and pays the price for it. Remember, he’s toothless at this point. He sees inns and castles and mistakes a young beauties love for a muledriver as a profession of her love unto Don Quixote. (I say these general plot points because I’m scared to leave anything out.)
Since there isn’t a single focal point in the narrative, it allows us to read how we like. Don Quixote represents certain things that Cervantes sets out to critique; Sancho is the same, as is lesser involved characters. Don Quixote is God and not God, as far as this book and Sancho are concerned.
There’s a point later on, where Don Quixote tells Sancho that he will have to fight all those who cross their path that aren’t knights. Right before this Don Quixote is beaten badly by the inn keepers. It dawns on him that he was punished because he raised his sword against people who were not knights and therefore against of the laws of chivalry page 104. On the very next page, Sancho’s refuses and responds, “that under no circumstances will I raise my sword against either lowborn or gentry, and from now until the day I appear before God, I forgive all offenses that have been done or will be done to me whether they were down, are being don, or will be done by a person high or low, rich or poor, noble or common, without exception, and regardless of rank or position,” (105). Sorry for the long quote. Earlier, we saw Sancho grant Don the title of God. Here we see Sancho disobeying Don Quixote. We see Sancho standing up for himself. I’d like to make clear that the existence of God is irrelevant to this discussion. Rather it is important to note that Cervantes is using Don Quixote and Sancho as a tool to realize that figures with too much power will lead us astray. Don Quixote believes what he believes, and only when Sancho participates in this belief does he get hurt.
Very quickly Sancho plays along in the inn by drinking the magic potion Don Quixote made to remedy their injuries. He falls seriously ill and is tossed multiple times in the air by the inn keepers. Then later on Don Quixote sees a dust storm as two armies coming together for battle, and all Sancho sees is a goat hard running on the plain. Sancho holds back, witnessing his master being struck with two rocks knocking out three molars. It was the shepherds protecting their herds. Sancho is left unharmed.
Sancho is a very simpleminded man and squire. He is also religious and believes heavily in God. Directly after Sancho makes Don Quixote his God, Sancho says, “God’s will be done,” (59). And that is just what happens throughout this narrative: Don Quixote’s will is carried out despite his mistaken perception, no matter what the costs. And Sancho quickly realizes that he doesn’t have to be so faithful to Don Quixote to remain unharmed by the dangers Don creates for himself.
This is what leads me to believe that no matter what Don Quixote’s view of the world, it is the only one that remains straight as an arrow. Don Quixote’s valorous knightly-hood never falters in the face of danger or in the face of feigned danger. No matter the odds, Don Quixote succeeds in being Don Quixote. With a closer look, everyone around Quixote changes their view, their perception. Even Cervantes himself.
At the end of Part 1 of the Ingenious Gentlemen Don Quixote of La Mancha, “the author” concludes the tale with stating, “he found nothing else written about the feats of Don Quixote other than what he has already recounted,” (64). This seems a bit fishy to me. In the next part, the author finds the remaining accounts in a market place. Our author just happens upon them and buys them? We can only assume this author is Cervantes himself.
Furthermore, this author even aligns himself within Quixote’s view just for a moment. Upon recalling the narrative, troubled by its sudden halt, the narrator is grieved, “and completely contrary to all good precedent that so good a knight should have lacked a wise man who would assume the responsibility of recording his never-before-seen deeds,” (65-66). Notice how the author said “good a knight,” and “good precedent.” Here we have the author acknowledging the knight’s errant as a truth. Never mind such sarcasm. The author is grieved and struck that there is no more to the adventures of Don Quixote. The knight is lost. Then suddenly the author finds the loose papers and the tale continues?
This is happenstance upon the concluding narrative of Don Quixote is a bit fishy to me. We stopped and pondered this for some time and decided it was a way of distancing Cervantes from the narrative consequences of questioning such conventions. Authors were killed and in the introduction Bloom suggested this was the cause of Shakespeare’s anonymity. Nevertheless, it’s still the author playing tricks on us, his dear reader. How can a man be trusted who is merely transcribing these events, little alone a man who found the papers and is translating and transcribing them once more? It is all too removed to find any solid truth in what to believe, who to believe, and why to believe it. The only consistency is in Don Quixote. And if you’rer thinking of Sancho, are there not parts in the narrative where Sancho swears to believe everything his master believes, goes along for the promised insula?
No. As Blaze said this book is like an unsolvable rubric’s cube, so the best thing to do is to arrange it in a color scheme we like.
This is the leading precedent of this book. It constantly falls over on itself, bends back and sometimes ceases to tell the story. The precedent is the questioning of all things we believe. This is illuminated in the fantastic feminist critique of patriarchal society in Spain by the most beautiful Marcela, who states very plainly that just because man loves does not guarantee him love in return.
Next time: We talk about love and madness.
Thanks,
Adam
The Writing Lab