Saturday (7/9/22) - thinking now about the Quixote
I am thinking now about the Quixote, prototype of the first novel, Bloom called it. But surely there were others before it, I wonder. The Golden Ass of Apuleius, A True Story of Lucian of Samosata, Amadis de Gaula, Tirant lo Blanch, Ariosto's Orlando... Why is this considered the first novel? Why the prototype?
Borges is fascinated with the Quixote, he revisits it again and again, in fiction, essay and poetry. His Pierre Menard he sets out to recreate it, not copy it, but rediscover it independently and on his own, authentically, Quixotically - an impractical and idealistic endeavor. The line cited in the story:
. . . truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past,
exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future's counselor.
Truly a remarkable line, is from Chapter IX, Part 1, wherein Cervantes(?) the Narrator finds a manuscript by Cid Hamete Benengeli, an Arabic historian, entitled History of Don Quixote de la Mancha. A pseudoepigraphical diversion. (As Borges says - a game of false attributions).
The full(er) quotation is:
... no history can be bad so long as it is true. If against the present one any objection be raised on the score of its truth, it can only be that its author was an Arab, as lying is a very common propensity with those of that nation; though, as they are such enemies of ours, it is conceivable that there were omissions rather than additions made in the course of it. And this is my own opinion; for, where he could and should give freedom to his pen in praise of so worthy a knight, he seems to me deliberately to pass it over in silence; which is ill done and worse contrived, for it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion, and neither interest nor fear, hatred nor love, should make them swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future.
Immediately thereafter, Borges says:
"There is no exercise of the intellect which is not, in the final analysis, useless. A philosophical doctrine begins as a plausible description of the universe; with the passage of the years it becomes a mere chapter ― if not a paragraph or a name ― in the history of philosophy."
In A Problem, Borges wonders how the character of Don Quixote would react if he realizes he has killed a man. Or rather how we would react if we indeed found a fragment from that Arabic Historian, Cid Hamete Benegeli in which the hero Don Quixote is found to have killed a man. There are so many inversions and speculations in this simple premise alone. The fictional Cid Hamete elevated to actual historian, whose work in other surviving frgaments now authenticates the statement in Don Quixote that Don Quixote is itself the work of Benegeli; and if this is so, then the surviving fragment of Don Quixote killing a man is also now part of the story.) Borges imagines a branching path, in which there are only three possibilities (or perhaps four).
But after all, who is the Real Don Quixote? Borges relates in his Autobiographical Essay that
"All the foregoing books [Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, etc.] I read in English. When later I read Don Quixote in the original, it sounded like a bad translation to me. I still remember those red volumes with the gold lettering of the Garnier edition.
At some point, my father’s library was broken up, and when I read the Quixote in another edition I had the feeling that it wasn’t the real Quixote. Later, I had a friend get me the Garnier, with the same steel engravings, the same footnotes, and also the same errata. All those things form part of the book for me; this I consider the real Quixote."
In other context, Borges has remarked that "The original is unfaithful to the translation." He notes that "The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they
tend to be frightful" and raises the specter of "monsters that
combine the illustrious features of Greta Garbo with the voice of
Aldonza Lorenzo."[On Dubbing, Discusion] Don Quixote has been translated into over 50 languages making it one of, if not, the most translated novels in existence. Yet, even in English there are many competing translations, some more literal, some more or less abridged. Each translator is choosing what to include, what to omit, what to alter and what words to use to convey the message. Is every translation a new work? Isn't it at least a variation of the original, one of the adjacent copies in the Library of Babel?
Menard might know who is the real Don Quixote, but would Cervantes? Would Cid Hamete Benegeli? Would Kafka?
In The Truth about Sancho Panza, Kafka writes:
"Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by devouring a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from him his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that his demon thereupon set out in perfect freedom on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days."
Don Quixote is perhaps the demon that plagues or frees Sancho Panza. This involves a tremendous inversion, making the protagonist and the supporting character change places. It moves Sancho to the center of the drama, reconfiguring all of the previously accepted relationships.
Harold Bloom says:
"But [Quixote] is neither a fool nor a madman, and his vision always is at least double: he sees what we see, yet he sees something else also, a possible glory that he desires to appropriate or at least share. De Unamuno names this transcendence as literary fame, the immortality of Cervantes and Shakespeare. We need to hold in mind as we read Don Quixote that we cannot condescend to the knight and Sancho, since together they know more than we do, just as we never can catch up to the amazing speed of Hamlet's cognitions. Do we know exactly who we are? The more urgently we quest for our authentic selves, the more they tend to recede. The knight and Sancho, as the great work closes, know exactly who they are, not so much by their adventures as through their marvellous conversations, be they quarrels or exchanges of insights."
In Partial Magic in the Quixote, Borges elucidates a frightening inversion of reality:
Why does it disturb us that the map be included in the map and the
thousand and one nights in the book of the Thousand and One Nights? Why
does it disturb us that Don Quixote be a reader of the Quixote and Hamlet a
spectator of Hamlet? I believe I have found the reason: these inversions
suggest that if the characters of a fictional work can be readers or
spectators, we, its readers or spectators, can be fictitious.
Borges presents A Parable of Cervantes and Don Quixote:
Weary of his land of Spain, an old soldier of the king sought solace in Ariosto’s vast geographies, in that valley of the moon where misspent dream-time goes, and in the golden idol of Mohammed stolen by Montalban.
In gentle mockery of himself he conceived a credulous man who, unsettled by the marvels he read about, hit upon the idea of seeking noble deeds and enchantments in prosaic places called El Toboso or Montiel.
Defeated by reality, by Spain, Don Quixote died in his native village around 1614. He was survived only briefly by Miguel de Cervantes.
For both of them, for the dreamer and the dreamed, the tissue of that whole plot consisted in the contraposition of two worlds: the unreal world of the books of chivalry and the common everyday world of the seventeenth century.
Little did they suspect that the years would end by wearing away the disharmony. Little did they suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s frail figure would be, for the future, no less poetic than Sinbad’s haunts or Ariosto’s vast geographies.
For myth is at the beginning of literature, and also at its end.
Or perhaps for those preferring an answer in a dream:
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