#31 Fri (7/22/22) - Spain itself would not exist without el Quijote

    Menard could have chosen another Iberian literary landmark: El Cid,
The Lazarillo of Tormes, or La Celestina. However, these books are
contingent on the Spanish tradition, but they are not superior to it; that is,
they are part of history, not above it. El Quijote is the ur-text, the
fountainhead, the book that gives legitimacy to this tradition. One could
imagine Spanish letters without La Celestina; but Spain itself, as concept
and reality, would not exist without El Quijote. -Ilan Stavans

 "The Quixote? explains Menard, deeply interests me, but does not seem to me

— comment dirai-je? — inevitable. I cannot imagine the universe without Poe's 

ejaculation "Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!" or the Bateauivre or 

the Ancient Mariner, but I know myself able to imagine it without the Quixote. 

(I am speaking, of course, of my personal ability, not of the historical resonance
of those works.) The Quixote is a contingent work; the Quixote is not necessary."

Pierre Menard

 

 

There is another quote that I encountered when I was first starting to look into the Quixote.  It is to the effect that when confronted with a need to justify one's existence or life one could simply gesture toward or offer up the Quixote. This quote implies that it is somehow a Universal justification of a man's or Mankind's existence. Predictably, I cannot remember to whom this quote was attributed, nor where I first encountered it. However, my reading on this subject is not so voluminous that I should not be able to track it down -- the Stavans and the Egginton books, the preface to the Putnam and Grossman translations, and the essay by Harold Bloom accounting for the vast majority of it.  I do not see it in any of those.  Perhaps I dreamt it.