Posted Wednesday morning, September 25, 2019.
Illustration by Gustave Dore for Chapter LII of “Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes.
Every now and again, I forget Conrad’s warning, and get to remembering what a fine fellow I was when I was a young college professor and I think, “Weren’t my students lucky they were in my class!” For example, one semester I taught an introduction to literature the syllabus for which included “Le Morte de Arthur” and“Don Quixote.” (I didn’t have them read the whole of either; just key chapters and passages, so they got the best parts and wrestled with the main themes. “Pride and Prejudice”, “The Age of Innocence”, and two more contemporary novels that I can’t recall at the moment were on the syllabus too, and those they had to read in their entire.) I was a good lecturer and knew how to get discussions going, so, while I’m not sure my students liked the books. I know they did enjoy talking about them. The lecture and discussion I remember most clearly and am proudest of was the one dealing with the transition from narrative fiction dominated by romance and epic to realistic domestic comedy and melodrama. Suddenly stories people were reading stories populated by middle class tradespeople and merchants, ordinary soldiers and sailors, goatherds, barbers, barmaids, and small local landowners whose brains melted because they read too many of the wrong sort of books. This was due to more people reading---being able to read---and they wanted to read about characters like themselves struggling through storylines that reflected life as they knew it
To introduce the point I showed them two movie clips. The first was the final scenes from the best Arthurian story to have made its way to the big screen, John Boorman’s “Excalibur”. As soon as the Lady of the Lake reclaimed the sword and the boat bearing Arthur to Avalon sailed into the sunset I quick put on the second video---”Monty Python and the Holy Grail”, specifically the scene in which the dancing knights at Camelot sing “Knights of the Round Table.” Almost derailed the class with that one, because of course the kids started clamoring to watch the whole movie.But they got the point. From here on out, “Camelot” was a target and could be treated as a silly place.
I filled out the rest of the hour giving them background on Cervantes and his Don Quixote and the Don Quixote they probably knew of from popular culture---which is to say the tragicomic hero of “Man of la Mancha.”
The difference is that the musical’s Quixote’s madness is actually a transcendent wisdom and his determination to reintroduce chivalry into the world ennobles him and just about everyone he encounters. Cervantes’ Quixote is just plain nuts, and his interference in people’s daily lives always leads to him getting his head knocked in. Nobody is the wiser for it, least of all him, and nobody’s lot in life is improved, and in fact his attempts to do so threaten people’s livelihoods and disrupt their daily routines of work, play, making love, raising their families, and managing their households.
I went on to talk about the common superficial gloss on the book as satirizing the romances that cause Quixote to go nuts. There’s some of that at the outset. Cervantes implies to his readers that books like the one they’re about to read are much better written because they portray life as it’s really lived and, not incidentally, are therefore more intellectually enlightening and morally uplifting, not to mention better written and more fun to read. But he’s over and done with that in a few paragraphs. The rest of the first volume of “Don Quixote” is social satire. Quixote himself isn’t there to be laughed at because he’s a clown and a madman. He’s there as a representative of people in real life---social conservatives---who hated the way society was changing and wanted things to go back to the way things were and put people who were benefiting from the changes---mainly the rising middle class---back in their proper places.
Quixote is nuts, but he’s not a lone nut. He’s representative of the many people in Spain at the turn of the 17th Century who couldn’t get their heads around that times had changed and were in the process of changing even more. They wanted the world to be what it was when they were children---when their grandparents were children! and that’s nuts. Throughout the first half of the book, Quixote keeps encountering life as it is now, challenging it (in effect attempting to turn back the clock), and meeting defeat---he usually finishes off an adventure flat on his back with a cracked and bleeding skull. Nevertheless, he persists. Always he has an explanation. His mortal enemy, the evil necromancer Friston, has thwarted him again with his dark magic. Magic happens to be the explanation the traditionalists reached for to explain the social, economic, and climatic upheavals that were causing the changes around them they didn’t like, particularly the ones that called into question the authority of the Church and the Royal Court.
Yes, climatic upheavals---climate change. This was the beginning of the Little Ice Age. And Don Quixote runs into an effect of that on one of his adventures.
None of this was original with me. I probably cribbed most of it from Nabokov’s “Lectures on Don Quixote” which I’d assigned myself to read in grad school. The point I was making that day---or the point Nabokov made---was that “Don Quixote” is about the clash between the old societal order---authoritarian, tradition-bound, hierarchical, communal as opposed to individualistic in which people are defined and limited by their more or less permanent place in society, held together by religion as interpreted by priests and enforced by princes and kings---and a new order, more egalitarian, individualistic, with people freer to decide for themselves who they were and what they wanted to do with their lives, more open to questioning, skepticism, rationalism, and empiricism---this was the beginning of the scientific revolution---and held together by trade, commerce, mass education, and books like Francis Bacon’s “The Advancement of Learning”, which was published the same year as “Don Quixote”.
This new world order didn’t need knights riding to its rescue. More importantly, it didn’t need magic to explain and sustain it, which is to say it didn’t need religion---which is to say it didn’t need God. Which was both emancipating and terrifying. The same year Bacon and Cervantes published their revolutionary books, Shakespeare wrote “King Lear”. There was a big change.
One of the books we Mannions have been listening to on our drives hither and yon is “Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present" by Phillip Blom. Blom’s thesis is that climate change brought about social change as the old ways of doing business and the going about of getting through daily life were disrupted, and new methods and ways of thinking became necessary to cope. Blom refers to the literature and art of the period---roughly the last decades of the 16th Century into the last third of the 18th---to illustrate the changes in the ways people began to see and think about the world, which, Blom argues, were evolving towards being more like our own here in the 21st. We can see ourselves in them to a degree we can’t in the people of the Middle Ages and even the late Renaissance. And one of the books Blom looks at is “Don Quixote”. Like I said earlier, climate change makes an appearance in La Mancha. Keep in mind that climate change then, as it's doing now, disrupted familiar weather patterns, and temperatures and conditions swung wildly. While winters in Europe grew colder and longer, summers grew hotter and drier.
The natural order apparently shaken, many pious or popular commentators also predicted an imminent Last Judgment. Every remote rumbling or thunder was interpreted as the first harbinger of the apocalypse---the clattering hooves of the Four Horsemen bringing death and destruction in their wake. From this point of view, it made sense to conclude that if nature was simply following the divine command by withholding its blessings, Christians would have to restore the balance, making amends in their individual and communal lives in order to return things to their previous harmonious state. Repentance and personal forms of piety...rapidly gained in popularity from Spain to France, southern Italy, and the Alpine region. Dramatic large processions were organized in a show of appeasements, to implore the Lord’s mercy. Holy relics were carried aloft, with flagellants following, whipping themselves repentantly until the blood streamed down their backs.
In his great Don Quixote, first published in 1605, Miguel de Cervantes describes just one such procession whose participants are accosted by the Knight of the Woeful Countenance (Don Quixote himself), who has mistaken the Virgin Mary statue being carried by the faithful for a noble damsel, in need of rescue by a strong knightly arm...of course the story ends badly for him. Cervantes, however, used a very common event for this story: Processions praying for rain were frequent in Spain, as drought made normal life all but impossible for local farmers. Even in Barcelona, at the coast, two or three rain processions were held annually around 1600. In a religious and superstitious age, divine intercession seemed the best, indeed the only hope for restoring nature to the harmony it had so clearly lost.
That’s the set-up. Now onward, Don Quixote. The knight is just finishing up a brawl with a goatherd he got into an argument with, but the fight is interrupted before Quixote finishes receiving his usual sound thrashing:
At last, while they were all, with the exception of the two bruisers who were mauling each other, in high glee and enjoyment, they heard a trumpet sound a note so doleful that it made them all look in the direction whence the sound seemed to come. But the one that was most excited by hearing it was Don Quixote, who though sorely against his will he was under the goatherd, and something more than pretty well pummelled, said to him, "Brother devil (for it is impossible but that thou must be one since thou hast had might and strength enough to overcome mine), I ask thee to agree to a truce for but one hour for the solemn note of yonder trumpet that falls on our ears seems to me to summon me to some new adventure." The goatherd, who was by this time tired of pummelling and being pummelled, released him at once, and Don Quixote rising to his feet and turning his eyes to the quarter where the sound had been heard, suddenly saw coming down the slope of a hill several men clad in white like penitents.
The fact was that the clouds had that year withheld their moisture from the earth, and in all the villages of the district they were organising processions, rogations, and penances, imploring God to open the hands of his mercy and send the rain; and to this end the people of a village that was hard by were going in procession to a holy hermitage there was on one side of that valley. Don Quixote when he saw the strange garb of the penitents, without reflecting how often he had seen it before, took it into his head that this was a case of adventure, and that it fell to him alone as a knight-errant to engage in it; and he was all the more confirmed in this notion, by the idea that an image draped in black they had with them was some illustrious lady that these villains and discourteous thieves were carrying off by force. As soon as this occurred to him he ran with all speed to Rocinante who was grazing at large, and taking the bridle and the buckler from the saddle-bow, he had him bridled in an instant, and calling to Sancho for his sword he mounted Rocinante, braced his buckler on his arm, and in a loud voice exclaimed to those who stood by, "Now, noble company, ye shall see how important it is that there should be knights in the world professing the of knight-errantry; now, I say, ye shall see, by the deliverance of that worthy lady who is borne captive there, whether knights-errant deserve to be held in estimation," and so saying he brought his legs to bear on Rocinante--for he had no spurs--and at a full canter (for in all this veracious history we never read of Rocinante fairly galloping) set off to encounter the penitents, though the curate, the canon, and the barber ran to prevent him. But it was out of their power, nor did he even stop for the shouts of Sancho calling after him, "Where are you going, Senor Don Quixote? What devils have possessed you to set you on against our Catholic faith? Plague take me! mind, that is a procession of penitents, and the lady they are carrying on that stand there is the blessed image of the immaculate Virgin. Take care what you are doing, senor, for this time it may be safely said you don't know what you are about." Sancho laboured in vain, for his master was so bent on coming to quarters with these sheeted figures and releasing the lady in black that he did not hear a word; and even had he heard, he would not have turned back if the king had ordered him. He came up with the procession and reined in Rocinante, who was already anxious enough to slacken speed a little, and in a hoarse, excited voice he exclaimed, "You who hide your faces, perhaps because you are not good subjects, pay attention and listen to what I am about to say to you." The first to halt were those who were carrying the image, and one of the four ecclesiastics who were chanting the Litany, struck by the strange figure of Don Quixote, the leanness of Rocinante, and the other ludicrous peculiarities he observed, said in reply to him, "Brother, if you have anything to say to us say it quickly, for these brethren are whipping themselves, and we cannot stop, nor is it reasonable we should stop to hear anything, unless indeed it is short enough to be said in two words."
"I will say it in one," replied Don Quixote, "and it is this; that at once, this very instant, ye release that fair lady whose tears and sad aspect show plainly that ye are carrying her off against her will, and that ye have committed some scandalous outrage against her; and I, who was born into the world to redress all such like wrongs, will not permit you to advance another step until you have restored to her the liberty she pines for and deserves."
From these words all the hearers concluded that he must be a madman, and began to laugh heartily, and their laughter acted like gunpowder on Don Quixote's fury, for drawing his sword without another word he made a rush at the stand. One of those who supported it, leaving the burden to his comrades, advanced to meet him, flourishing a forked stick that he had for propping up the stand when resting, and with this he caught a mighty cut Don Quixote made at him that severed it in two; but with the portion that remained in his hand he dealt such a thwack on the shoulder of Don Quixote's sword arm (which the buckler could not protect against the clownish assault) that poor Don Quixote came to the ground in a sad plight.
Sancho Panza, who was coming on close behind puffing and blowing, seeing him fall, cried out to his assailant not to strike him again, for he was poor enchanted knight, who had never harmed anyone all the days of his life; but what checked the clown was, not Sancho's shouting, but seeing that Don Quixote did not stir hand or foot; and so, fancying he had killed him, he hastily hitched up his tunic under his girdle and took to his heels across the country like a deer.
And there he is, on the ground, again, beaten, bruised, and unconscious.
His friends gather him up and take him home where he’s cared for by his loving niece---there’s another difference between the book and the musical. In the musical, everywhere he goes, the don is met with hostility, scorn, derision, and threats. His niece is a selfish social climber who only puts up with him for the sake of an expected inheritance. In the novel, many of the characters treat him kindly. A number are hostile, but some of them are naturally upset with him for meddling in their affairs, not scornful of his idealism, and they even forgive him for the trouble he causes when they find out he’s just a lunatic. His niece genuinely cares for him and, if we read closely, we can see that her life is devoted to looking after him. I point that out for two reasons. One it shows both a change in the way madness and dementia were understood and treated, and an unfortunate change in the way the sick and the old were expected to be cared for---by the family and not by the community. Individualism often meant you were on your own when life turned against you. The other reason I want to call attention to the niece is on behalf of my college friend Ann, who played the niece in our college’s production of “Man of La Mancha” and who in real life had to be caregiver for her parents in their last, declining years and has lately been reaching out across a great distance to help me take care of things here.
The world we live in now may not need knights or a god, but it does need saints.
What came before---->"This glinting hint from a dead man’s grin is almost unnecessary---for this is a painting about transience"
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"Nature's Mutiny" by Philip Blom is available in hardcover and for kindle at Amazon and as an audiobook from Audible.
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