More excellent comments this week — it looks like Part II is off to a rousing start. Me, I’m behind and a bit bushed, so I’m going to drop this placeholder here, with apologies, so new comments can start up. And I’ll swap in hopefully somewhat more on topic verbiage by the weekend.
Next Wednesday: It’s just a short hop over to Chapter XXI (591 Grossman) where an unspecificed hindering something or other is about to “be recounted below.”
Sorry to start this week off on a sour note, but I’m having to drop out of the death march. I can’t keep up the pace. I wish you all the best, and would offer what remains I leave to the others to keep up their strength, but I have some doubts as to whether I would fit into dietary restrictions. (Not sure if pouched animals are halal.) Onward, dear friends! CM
Vaya con Dios, good Captain. We’ll miss you! Catch you on the next ride?
Shorter Captain Marsupial: “I almost told y’all to bite me.”
I’m still behind–doing about 30 pages per, and feeling like that’s an accomplishment.
I think Cervantes is counting on some of his audience having a short attention span but also on even more of them liking repetition. Like the folks who go to the same comedian every time he comes through town: “We want the old standards!”
There’s a real shortage of villains. Yeah, we have the peasant with the whip, and Zoraida’s father, and others not even that bad. And the women are uniformly sympathetic characters, aren’t they? A couple of them have “low” aspects (Maritornes, Camila’s maid Leonels), but even they are smiled at and excused for those. But Cervantes can’t seem to work up a real dislike for anyone–can’t even make a fake plastic SnidelyWhiplash bad guy.
I can’t believe I’m asking this, but Rodney K.’s comment made me do it. Cecil: What’s next on the March docket? Ulysses? Moby Dick? Remembrance of Things Past? Something contemporarily British or Canadian?
Apparently prosecutors in & around LA aren’t up on their Don Quixote, especially around p. 525. If they were, they would know, as Sancho did, that there’s no use trying to bring the arm of the law down on miscreant actors & stars. Their special standing with the public gives them immunity & lets them “get away with murder.” But as a member of the public, I’ve found entertainment in watching today’s prosecutors try & fail at this several times in the last decade or so.
Computilo — I’ve been thinking something small next time, like Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse (I have a real hankering to read Virginia Woolf) to change the pace. And then mebbe “V” byPynchon as the next big un some time a little bit farther down the road. What do you think?
-Cecil
I’ve been enjoying the Knight of the Wood section a lot so far, especially the interplay between Sancho and the other squire. My favorite passage lately: “No one should think that the author digressed by comparing the friendship of these animals to that of men, for men have learned a good deal from animals and have been taught many important things by them, for example: from storks, the enema, from dogs, vomiting and gratitude; from cranes, vigilance; from ants, foresight; from elephants, chastity; and loyalty from the horse.”
Vomiting and gratitude: a great combination.
I love chapter 8. In all my ventures in modern and post-modern lit, it is the first time I have seen a narrator narrating what the “narrator” is doing as he narrates.
Still loving Part II tremendously.
I had my second literal LOL moment with the book during the scene in Chapter X when our boys encounter the three peasant women on the road. DQ has a particularly flowery, effusive speech: “….see in this submission of mine as I kneel before thy deformed beauty, the humility with which my soul adoreth thee.” To which the annoyed and bewildered peasant woman replies: “You can tell that to my grandpa!” ….which struck me as some kinda 16th century version of “Blow it out your piehole!”
The Knight of the Wood section was tremendous, but one of my favorite moments was this quiet revelation, in Ch XIII, from Sancho to the other squire of his real feelings about DQ: “…there’s no malice in him: a child could convince him it’s night in the middle of the day, and because he’s simple I love him with all my heart and couldn’t leave him no matter how many crazy things he does.”
So maybe it’s not just about the promise of an insula for him..
I’m up to Quiteria’s marriage to Camacho (fried dough dipped in vats of honey, mmmm). By my quick count, this is like the 138th marriage in the book where the bride’s betrothed to someone other than her love. Why is Cervantes so stuck on that theme?
Part of me thinks, with the Raptor Mage, that Cervantes is more like a TV writer or vaudevillian than a Borges or Pynchon—it played in Peoria, let’s try it again here.
Then part of me thinks a guy so ironic—so convinced that everything’s the opposite of what it seems—must have some axe to grind against the romantic conventions at the heart of most popular fiction, then as now. When this part of me’s thinking, it thinks about Cervantes the failed playwright, sitting down in late middle age to write DQ after he gave the people what they wanted and they refused to buy seats. He’s kind of poking fun at the conventions while at the same time indulging in them—the hallmark of irony—and having a little writerly fun at the audience’s expense, too.
Then I wonder about Cervantes the philosopher. The trick to most of these marriages is that the bride’s often given not just her heart, but her, um, “virtue,� to someone else. That’s like reality’s Ground Zero for Cervantes—once that’s happened, no more fiction, fantasy, enchanters, speechifying: the physics of the episode can’t end until the right atoms are pushed back together. Cervantes’s question about what stories are good for must be all twisted up with this theme somehow: the Don righting wrongs, the author telling stories where lovers get paired & order’s restored, the social fabric protected against the artifice of money and class divisions.
Not sure about this, but SOMETHING’S going on with all this wedding stuff and I can’t quite get my finger on it. Fellow marchers, help!
Well, this may be purely psychological, but I’m finding being in the second part darn refreshing. Could be that we’re just closer to the finish line – could be, could be. But, I like getting to finally meet Theresa “Whatshername” Panza (what a sparkplug!), getting in on what it’s like at the homestead and why the idea of leaving in the first place was so appealling to D&S.
Perhaps Cervantes was drawn to the construct of the wedding purely because it was a common comedic story device of the time. Shakespeare, following tradition (Aristotle?), always had a wedding at the end of his comedies, with a splash of mistaken identity for good measure and knee-slapping, groundling fun. Maybe Cervantes was just playing with the standards of the time and then adding his own riffs of frustration and longing? I do feel like Cervantes the prisoner, Cervantes the struggling writer, might have identified somehow with the bride who doesn’t get to marry the right guy. But that’s just a personal, non-verifiable hunch of mine.
And I vote yes for a Virginia Woolf Deathmarch. This is the perfect forum in which to savor her genius and snobbery. As I recall, Ginny didn’t have much of a sense of humor though. . .
I’m a huge fan of Woolf, but also pretty well read in her work (though I’ve somehow missed Jacob’s Room). Might end up sitting on the sidelines and lobbing ideas without reading along.
And she does have a sense of humor if you read her right.
I liked:
Cervantes criticizing his own novel in the novel. We are told one objection to the story of DQ is that the author put the novel of The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious in and “it is out of place and has nothing to do with the history of his grace Senor Don Quixote.”
And later, DQ says “and that must be how my history is: a commentary (or Deathmarch?) will be necessary in order to understand it.”
I liked:
DQ on fame and infamy. “The poet did as she asked and said the most vicious things about her, and she was satisfied, for she had become famous, though her fame was infamous.”
I liked:
DQ on DQ: “We must slay pride by slaying giants; slay envy with generosity and a good heart; anger with serene bearing and tranquility of spirit; gluttony and sleep by eating little and watching always; lust and lasciviousness by maintaining fealty toward those whom we have made mistresses of our thoughts; sloth by wandering everywhere in the world…”
I liked:
DQ on plays and life and equality. Life is like a play. “but when the play is over and they have taken off their costumes, all the actors are equal.”
I really like that these little gems are sprinkled throughout the book, along with the funny stuff.
I do not like:
Sancho: “And there is my being, as I am, a mortal enemy of the Jews..”
Es tu Sancho?
at last i’m all caught up! with the comments that is.
yes, even the allure of the mugnet isn’t enough to get me back in the game. so count me out until virginia….
Yes, Woolf is witty. Didn’t meant to short change her in that respect. I recall the dark places she went to in her work more than the humor though.
I don’t have my book copy with me, so I can’t cite page numbers, but I’m finding that in Part II, DQ seems to be getting just a bit more rational and a tad bit less crazy. I may be way off base here, but he gives more lucid speeches (the one about “foreign” literature having some value, and reminding people that Homer wrote in Greek and Vergil in Latin, their own native tongues, not each others.) Although he seems to have tremendous good luck when he forces the Royal Lion Transport Wagon to release the male lion (who is either a big sissy or just acting like a well-fed and rested kitty), he also seems to almost understand the potential for real danger in this scene. Can true reason and sanity be on the horizon?
Yes, and Sancho’s getting smarter too, using the Don’s own delusion towards his own ends with the peasant girls. He says so himself: “Your grace’s conversation has been the manure that has fallen on the barren soil of my dry wits.”
o yeah … less violence, too. Maybe he took those criticisms to heart. Plus DQ and Sancho are starting to rib each other a little bit about the other’s growing eloquence: “You could be a preacher, Sancho.” “If I am a preacher, you could hang two pulpits on each finger, dear Don.” Touche.