It is today the most widely read literary masterpiece in world literature, and yet the 400th anniversary of its first publication in 2005 passed with little fanfare, except in its native land, Spain. For many in the non-Spanish- speaking world, mention its title and one immediately begins humming the tune of that Rocinante of show-stopping warhorse anthems, “The Impossible Dream.”
Filled with celebratory energy apt to a quadricentennial, co-authors Fay Rogg, professor of Spanish at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and Manuel Durán, Yale professor emeritus of Spanish literature, have produced a book-length homage intended to remind one and all of the enormous after-presence, in later centuries and in the literatures of other nations, of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quixote de la Mancha. Fighting Windmills: Encounters with Don Quixote (Yale University Press), the authors say, attempts to answer the questions, “Why do Don Quixote and Sancho Panza captivate us? How does the work penetrate and play on the modern mind?”
Rogg notes that Harold Bloom, the author (among countless other books) of The Anxiety of Influence, played a role in sparking the project to life, and one could well call Fighting Windmills a virtuoso demonstration of the pleasures of finding literary influence.
Before embarking on their search for Don Quixote’s literary DNA in masterpieces of the last four centuries, Rogg and Durán (Rogg’s mentor during her graduate studies at Yale) devote four chapters in Part One to an overview of Cervantes’ life and personality, his intellectual milieu, the creation of what many consider the fons et origo of all later novels, and some of the author’s defining stylistic hallmarks.
Like his contemporary Shakespeare (they both died in 1616), Cervantes left hardly a clue about his “inner life.” There is “no correspon-dence, no personal diary, and only a few references to himself in the prologues to his works.” Also like Shakespeare, this very well-read author never darkened a university’s door. Cervantes’ “outer” life is summarized by the authors as “intense, adventurous, and varied.” Notably, it involved much traveling around Europe, though his request to head for the New World was turned down. Among his high points were participation in the Holy League’s defeat of the Turks at Lepanto in 1571 and the instant popularity of Part One of Don Quixote. It was a long time coming, though: he was 58 at the time. As with his hero, disappointments were mostly his lot, not least the mutilation of his left hand in battle, his five years’ slavery as a Muslim prisoner in Algiers, and his disgrace and punishment, as a minor official, for losing government money in a bank failure.
Part Two of Fighting Windmills offers a remarkable tour — and critical tour de force — revealing the knight of La Mancha’s pop-up appearances in masterpieces of world literature. Voltaire’s Candide, for example. The authors concede the obvious difference: Candide is “simply a short, brilliant masterpiece, a sort of Fabergé egg, whereas Don Quixote is more like a huge country house, full of corridors, secret passages, spacious halls, and turrets.” But these works, the authors counter, are “travel books” not only in the geographical but also the philosophical sense: “both works announce the triumph of a pragmatic attitude, finally free from idealization.” After all, they produced the near-synonyms quixotic and panglossian.
Its rich vein of parody and Cervantes’ willingness to enter his own narrative, the authors suggest, tie Don Quixote to the novels of Henry Fielding (both Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones) and Laurence Sterne’s garrulous narrative slapstick in Tristram Shandy. Sterne’s inimitably eccentric Uncle Toby (oddly referred to here as Tobias) and his servant Trim are plausibly likened to the Don and Sancho. Likewise, in the next century, in Dickens’ Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, “Mr. Pickwick, a new Don Quixote, found his Sancho, his servant Sam Weller.”
Cervantes’ strong vein of realism and disenchantment with the politics and society of his day are the ties that bind Quixote to Stendhal’s The Red and the Black. Then Flaubert’s Madame Bovary is convincingly cast as a female Quixote.
Turning to Russia, the authors note that a friend of Nicolai Gogol wrote in her diary that “Pushkin spent four hours at Gogol’s place and gave him the subject for a novel which, like Don Quixote, will be divided into cantos. The hero will travel all over the provinces.” The result was Gogol’s comic epic, Dead Souls. Ties are also made to the novels of Turgenev and a lecture of his, “Hamlet and Don Quixote,” which argues that mankind can be divided among these two types. In War and Peace Tolstoy is credited with two Quixotes (the erstwhile world-changers Prince Andrey and Bezuhkov) and one Dulcinea (Natasha Rostova).
Turning to the New World, Rogg and Durán mount a comparison of the Don with Melville’s whaling captain-errant Ahab. They note that Melville’s copy of Quixote is filled with pertinent marginalia and cite critic Harry Levin’s view that “No American author…can be more fitly compared with Cervantes than Herman Melville.”
Among “sightings of Cervantes” in the 20th century are Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby: “Just as Alonso Quijano requires a new name for his new personality, James Gatz will morph into Jay Gatsby.” Kafka’s short story “The Truth About Sancho Panza” is cited, as well as Graham Greene’s 1982 novel Monsignor Quixote. The many meta-literary mindgames of Borges, the Argentine librarian and fabulist, are thoroughly Cervantesian. Check out his story, “Pierre
Menard, Author of Don Quixote.”
Even Woody Allen makes a cameo appearance in Fighting Windmills, thanks to his 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo. Allen’s Mia Farrow character escapes the dreariness of the Depression in a movie house, just as the Don avoids the dreariness of La Mancha in
his library, and both characters are eventually thrust by their creators into an exciting imagined parallel universe.
By the way, Man of La Mancha, which was based not on the novel but on a prior television play, gets short shrift: “too many liberties.”
My favorite far-flung pop culture tie-in to Don Quixote is when Rogg and Durán observe of the Don: “No matter how much he suffers and falls down, he always picks himself up and continues his quest.” They then point to that cartoon character famed for his impossible avicidal dream: “today’s young readers may be reminded of another courageous character, also familiar with adversity and misadventure, Wile E. Coyote.”
For a look at the original article, visit CUNY Matters.
According to Library Journal, Fighting Windmills is “an engaging and convincing study…recommended for all literary collections.”
