Cervantine Echoes in Early Pynchon

[Dave Monroe]

>From Carole Holdsworth, "Cervantine Echoes in Early
Pynchon," Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society
of America 8.1 (1988), pp. 47-53 ...

... “Low-lands,” written while the novelist was an
undergraduate at Cornell University and first
published in New World Writing 16 (1960), is “an
explicit parody” of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land,
according to Joseph W. Slade. There is, however,
another possible important influence: the writings of
Cervantes, in particular Don Quixote de la Mancha.
Pynchon studied with Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell; in
the second semester of the academic year 1951-1952,
Nabokov delivered his famous Don Quixote lectures at
Harvard. Although Fredson Bowers states that “No
evidence is preserved to show that the Cervantes
lectures were given later at Cornell on Nabokov's
return,” the Russian novelist and critic might well
have included references to the Spanish masterpiece in
his Cornell courses. In any case, Pynchon, whose
writings reveal his voracious reading, has shown an
interest in Hispanic literature throughout his stories
and his novels.
   In this study, I shall discuss the possibility of
the influence, in Nabokov's words the “spiritual
irrigation,” of Cervantes upon the haunting story
written by the twenty-two-year-old Pynchon. The Waste
Land, of course, remains a primary influence.

[...]

As is the case with Don Quixote, the character of
Flange dominates the loose plot; as Pynchon comments,
“his fantasies become increasingly vivid, that's about
all that happens” (Introduction 10). Slade considers
Flange “The traveler of the waste land, a mockery of
the protagonist of Eliot's poem ...” (74). He is also
a most quixotic character.
     Don Quixote, of course, was a bearded man around
fifty years old ... tall in contrast to his plump
squire, Sancho Panza. Flange is a tall (72) man
showing “the current signs of incipient middle age”
(60); as he leaves his house for the dump, his last
words to his wife are that he will now “grow a beard”
(60). Like Don Quixote, Flange is dominated by a
romantic obsession, not indeed books of chivalry but
the sea, which he transforms into his Dulcinea: “He
had read or heard somewhere in his pre-adolescence
that the sea was a woman, and the metaphor had
enslaved him and largely determined what he became
from that moment” (58-59). Like Don Quixote, Flange
takes refuge in a world of fantasy .... Don Quixote
loved the old Spanish ballads and the books of
chivalry; Flange loves Noel Coward songs and
sea-ballads .... Both men learn through bitter
experience that there is a difference between art and
reality....
     One of the most interesting similarities between
the renowned knight of La Mancha and Flange is their
experiencing a mid-life crisis reminiscent of
adolescence....  In his Introduction, Pynchon writes:
“It is no secret nowadays ... that many American
males, even those of middle-aged appearance ... are in
fact, incredible as it sounds, still small boys
inside. Flange is this type of character ...” (10 ).
Like Don Quixote, Flange is incapable of “developing
any real life shared with an adult woman. His solution
is Nerissa .... It looks like I wanted some ambiguity
here about whether or not she was only a creature of
his fantasies” (ibid.)

[...]

   Like Don Quixote in the Cave of Montesinos episode
(II, 22-23), Flange descends the dump's ravine to act
out his fantasies. The scene in which Nerissa calls
the sleeping Dennis from the dump's shack into her
private underworld has curious resonances of an
episode of Don Quixote (II, 44) which was a favorite
of Nabokov.... This episode is followed  shortly by
the unpleasant episode of the cats which the mocking
Duke and Duchess cause to be released in their deluded
guest's bedchamber (II, 46); it is particularly
interesting, therefore, that Pynchon describes as
follows the moment in which Nerissa calls to Flange:
“... a desolate hour somehow not intended
for human perception, but rather belonging to cats [my
italics], owls and peepers and whatever else make
noises in the night ...  For a full minute there was
nothing, then at last it came. A girl's voice, riding
on the wind” (72)....

[...]

Don Quixote chooses to wander the roads of Spain in
the company of his peasant squire to free
galley-slaves (I, 12) who have broken their contract
with society. Flange ... too chooses to consort with
garbagemen, dump-keepers and gypsies .... Like Don
Quixote, Flange seeks to be a “redeemer” (Slade 73), a
frequent figure in Pynchon's fiction; unlike Don
Quixote, he ends as “a miserable messiah” (Slade 75),
because Pynchon leaves him lost in his fantasies....

[...]

... there are other echoes of the great novel and of
other writings of Cervantes as well. Pig Bodine, a
favorite Pynchon character, is a sort of grotesque
version of Sancho Panza, “squat and leering” (60) ....
Cindy reacts to Pig's inopportune appearance at her
door exactly as did the niece and housekeeper when
Sancho calls on Don Quixote near the beginning of Part
II .... Don Quixote is not the only madman in
Cervantes's works; the Licenciado Vidriera, from the
Exemplary Novel of the same name, may be an antecedent
of Geronimo Diaz ... the first of several delightfully
loony medical men in Pynchon's writings ....

[...]

   The emerald-green eyes of Dulcinea call to mind
still another green-eyed Cervantes heroine, Preciosa
of the Exemplary Novel “La gitanilla.” It is tempting
to speculate upon the possible influence of Preciosa
upon Nerissa, who —at “roughly three and a half feet”
(74)— can surely be considered a gitanilla.... 

[...]

The eternal waters of Cervantes's writings may well
have irrigated Thomas Pynchon's early story
“Low-lands.”

http://www2.h-net.msu.edu/~cervantes/csa/artics88/holdswor.htm

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