SLSL: "Low-lands" - Holdsworth's "Cervantine Echoes in Early Pynchon"

Tue Jan 7 09:04:39 CST 2003

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From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 8.1 (1988):
47-53.
Copyright © 1988, The Cervantes Society of America
ARTICLE    
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Cervantine Echoes in Early Pynchon

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    CAROLE HOLDSWORTH

HE RECENTLY PUBLISHED collection Slow Learner: Early Stories1 has renewed
interest in Thomas Pynchon's earliest fiction. ³Low-lands,² written while
the novelist was an undergraduate at Cornell University2 and first published
in New World Writing 16 (1960), is ³an explicit parody²3 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
³No evidence is preserved to show that the Cervantes lectures were given
later at Cornell on Nabokov's return,²4 the Russian novelist and critic
might

     1 Thomas Pynchon (Boston-Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1984). It
is an amusing detail that a very minor character among the hundreds of
characters in Pynchon's huge novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is named Howard
(³Slow²) Lerner (New York: Bantam, 1976: 747).
     2 Mathew Winston, ³The Quest for Pynchon,² Mindful Pleasures: Essays on
Thomas Pynchon, ed. George Levine and David Levernez (Boston-Toronto:
Little, Brown and Company, 1976) 258.
     3 Joseph W. Slade, ³Entropy¹ and Other Calamities,² Pynchon: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Edward Mendelson (Englewood Cliffs, N.
J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1978) 73.
     4 Fredson Bowers, Editor's Preface, Lectures on Don Quixote by Vladimir
Nabokov, viii.

47 

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48    CAROLE HOLDSWORTH    Cervantes
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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.5
     In this study, I shall discuss the possibility of the influence, in
Nabokov's words the ³spiritual irrigation,²6 of Cervantes upon the haunting
story written by the twenty-two-year-old Pynchon. The Waste Land, of course,
remains a primary influence.
     In his extremely interesting Introduction to Slow Learner, the mature
Pynchon (born in 1937) writes as follows: ³In a way this is more of a
character sketch than a story . . .  Oddly enough, I had not intended this
to be Dennis's story at all he was supposed to have been a straight man for
Pig Bodine² (9-10). Dennis Flange, Pynchon's protagonist, is an unhappily
married former ³competent [naval] communications officer² (³Low-lands² 62),
who is quite unceremoniously thrown out of his house by his practical wife
Cindy because of his poor choice of friends and lack of interest in his job.
Dennis then stays overnight at the town dump with some of his unsavory
friends; there he meets the beautiful gypsy midget Nerissa, with whom he
decides to stay ³for a while, at least² (77). As is the case with Don
Quixote, the character of Flange dominates the loose plot; as Pynchon
comments, ³his fantasies become increasingly vivid, that's about all that
happens² (Introduction 10). Slade considers Flange ³The traveler of the
waste land, a mockery of the protagonist of Eliot's poem . . .² (74). He is
also a most quixotic character.
     Don Quixote, of course, was a bearded man around fifty years old
(³Frisaba la edad de nuestro hidalgo con los cincuenta años . . .²7), tall
in contrast to his plump squire, Sancho Panza. Flange is a tall (72) man
showing ³the current signs of incipient middle age² (60); as he

     5 Pynchon's interest in Hispanic literature has been studied previously
e.g. Peter L. Hays and Robert Redfield, ³Pynchon's Spanish Source for
Entropy,¹² Studies in Short Fiction 16 (1979) 327-334. I am currently
working on a book-length study of Pynchon's ³Hispanic Connection,² an
interest of mine reflected in my article ³Fateful Labyrinths: La vida es
sueño and The Crying of Lot 49² (The Comparatist 7 [1983]: 57-74).
     6 Vladimir Nabokov uses the expression ³spiritual irrigation² to refer
to the tremendous influence of Don Quixote upon later writers (Lectures on
Don Quixote [San Diego-New York-London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Publishers, 1983] 8).
     7 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Martín de
Riquer (Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1966) I, 1, 36.

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8 (1988)    Cervantine Echoes in Early Pynchon    49
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leaves his house for the dump, his last words to his wife are that he will
now ³grow a beard² (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: ³He 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 moment² (58-59). Like Don Quixote,
Flange takes refuge in a world of fantasy, fleeing from the ³relentless
rationality² (58) of his wife as Alonso Quijano had fled from the ³curate's
and the housekeeper's so-called common sense² (Nabokov 43). Don Quixote
loved the old Spanish ballads and the books of chivalry; Flange loves Noel
Coward songs and sea-ballads, such as the ballad sung during his navy days
by the Filipino steward Delgado which contains the lines: ³Oh, I fear she
will be taken by a Spanish Gal-la-lee / As she sails by the Low-lands low²
(65). Both men learn through bitter experience that there is a difference
between art and reality. On his deathbed Don Quixote recants and repudiates
his beloved books: ³Ya soy enemigo de Amadís de Gaula . . . ya me son
odiosas todas las historias profanas del andante caballería . . .² (II, 74,
1064); Dennis once sang Noel Coward songs to his new wife, but ³Noel Coward
songs often bear little relevance to reality if Flange hadn't known this
before, he soon found it out . . .² (57 ).
     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. The Knight, for Carroll B. Johnson, suffers from a ³drastically
stunted psychosexual development.²8 Unable to form a normal relationship
with a woman, he creates his Dulcinea: ³píntola en mi imaginación como la
deseo . . .² (I, 25, 246). In his Introduction, Pynchon writes: ³It 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 . . .² (10 ). Like Don Quixote,
Flange is incapable of ³developing 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 fantasies² (ibid.).
Nerissa, like Dulcinea, is most beautiful, but she is a midget, a perfect
incarnation of Flange's ³drastically stunted psychosexual development²: ³She
was a dream, this girl, an angel. She was also roughly three and a half feet
tall² (74). 

     8 Carroll B. Johnson, Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytical Approach to
Don Quijote (Berkeley-Los Angeles-Toronto: U of California P, 1983) 196.

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50    CAROLE HOLDSWORTH    Cervantes
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     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. The Knight, during his stay at the ducal
hunting palace, leaves his bed one warm evening to listen to young
Altisidora's feigned love-songs: ³. . . the grated window, now shut, and the
warm Spanish night that henceforth for three centuries is to become the
breeding place of romantic prose-and-verse in all languages, and
fifty-year-old Quixote fighting one delusion by means of another delusion
melancholy, miserable, tempted, excited by little Altisidora's musical
moans² (Nabokov 70). 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: ³. . . 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 wind²
(72). Nerissa calls to the ³tall Anglo with the gold hair and shining
teeth²; this description first causes Flange to exclaim, ³That's me, ain't
it²; he then ruefully reflects that such a description fits his younger self
much better than it fits his current self (72-73); in like manner, Don
Quixote's niece Antonia at one point reminds her uncle that he cannot be
³valiente, siendo viejo . . . estando por la edad agobiado² (II, 6,
579-580).
     As ³Low-lands² ends, Flange watching Nerissa crooning to her pet rat
Hyacinth (76) decides to remain with her, to ignore for a time the real
world and its responsibilities: ³let the world shrink to a boccie ball²
(ibid.). He prefers the tiny gypsy who looks like a child playing with a
doll to his fierce ³small blond terrier² (60) of a wife, prefers to play at
having a child. According to Guy Davenport, ³Both Cervantes and Nabokov
recognize that playing can extend beyond childhood not as its natural
transformation into daydreaming . . . or creativity of all sorts, but as
play itself. That's what Don Quixote is doing: playing knight-errant.²9 When
Don Quixote makes a new helmet out of cardboard, he carefully refrains from
testing it: ³sin 

     9 Guy Davenport, Foreward, Lectures on Don Quixote by Vladimir Nabokov,
xviii.

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8 (1988)    Cervantine Echoes in Early Pynchon    51
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querer hacer nueva experiencia della, la diputó y tuvo por celada finísima
de encaje² (I, 1, 39). 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 is also a basically ³sympathetic
character² (Introduction 9), but he too chooses to consort with garbagemen,
dump-keepers and gypsies; to spend all day drinking cheap wine and listening
to Vivaldi on the stereo instead of going off tohis law office. Like Don
Quixote, Flange seeks to be a ³redeemer² (Slade 73), a frequent figure in
Pynchon's fiction; unlike Don Quixote, he ends as ³a miserable messiah²
(Slade 75), because Pynchon leaves him lost in his fantasies. Don Quixote,
on the other hand, regains his lucidity as the moment of his death
approaches: ³Yo tengo juicio ya, libre y claro, sin las sombras caliginosas
de la ignorancia . . .¹² (II, 74, 1063). ³We who were living are now dying,²
writes Eliot in The Waste Land10; Don Quixote recognizes this truth, while
Flange seeks to forget it through his decision to stay and ³play² with
Nerissa.11
     Although the character of Flange is the element of ³Low-lands² most
reminiscent of Don Quixote, 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, ³squat and
leering² (60) in contrast to his tall, well-educated officer friend Flange.
Dennis's depressingly rational wife 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: ³No,¹ she wailed, You
ugly bastard . . . Oh, no,¹ Cindy said, barring the door² (69) ³. . . ellas
le defendían la puerta: ¿Qué quiere este mostrenco en esta casa?² (II, 2,
552-553). 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, Flange's ³crazed and boozy wetback analyst²
(57); the first of several delightfully loony medical men in Pynchon's
writings, Diaz suffers from a ³wonderful, random sort of

     10 T. S. Eliot, Poems: 1909-1925 (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1937)
103.
     11 The remote possibility exists that the encounter with Nerissa is the
result of Flange's having been knocked unconscious by one of the boobytraps
which Bolingbroke had set up for the gypsies. Borges, in such Ficciones
stories as ³El Sur² and ³El fin,² suggests that part of the action comes
from the fevered imagination of his characters. I have recently completed a
study of the possible influence of ³El fin² in particular upon the Martín
Fierro episodes of Gravity's Rainbow.

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52    CAROLE HOLDSWORTH    Cervantes
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madness which . . . was about all [Flange] had to keep him going² (58); when
Vidriera regains his sanity, he is ignored by the courtiers who had
gleefully patronized him in his modish lunacy.
     Early in Part I, having just set out on his journey, Don Quixote sees
some windmills which to him resemble giants (I, 8); as they turn into the
dump, Flange and his friends pass an incinerator ³which looked like a
Mexican hacienda² (63). When Sancho finally receives his land-locked
³island² from the jesting ducal pair, he governs it with surprising
discretion (II, 44-54); to Flange, the dump seems like ³an island or enclave
in the dreary country around it, a discrete kingdom with Bolingroke [the
black dump-keeper] as its uncontested ruler² (67). Towards the end of Part
II, Don Quixote and Sancho visit Barcelona, where they view the sea for the
first time: ³vieron el mar, hasta entonces dellos no visto² (II, 61, 986);
Pig tells a sea-story ³about how he and a sonarman named Feeny had stolen a
horsedrawn taxi in Barcelona² (68). Don Quixote attributes emerald-green
eyes to his peerless lady Dulcinea: ³y a lo que yo creo, los [ojos] de
Dulcinea deben ser de verdes esmeraldas² (II, 11, 611). Pynchon gives us a
last glimpse of Nerissa: ³She looked up gravely. Whitecaps danced across her
eyes; sea creatures, he knew, would be cruising about in the submarine green
of her heart² (77).
     The emerald-green eyes of Dulcinea call to mind still another
green-eyed Cervantes heroine, Preciosa of the Exemplary Novel ³La
gitanilla.²12 It is tempting to speculate upon the possible influence of
Preciosa upon Nerissa, who at ³roughly three and a half feet² (74) can
surely be considered a gitanilla. The dark-haired Nerissa is no highborn
maiden abducted as a child by an old gypsy woman, but she does mention an
³old woman² who read her fortune ³many years ago² (59-60). Like Preciosa and
her enamoured don Juan / Andrés, Nerissa is so angelically beautiful that
Flange is willing to join the strange nocturnal band of gypsies for awhile.
There is, however, a notable difference regarding his planned stay at the
dump: while the virginal Preciosa had insisted upon a ³brother-sister²
arrangement with her ardent suitor during their travels, Nerissa begs Flange
to stay with her, even though he tells her that he is married. (76). All in
all, the dump as setting, the pet rat, and especially Nerissa's dwarfish
stature combined with her amoral nature cause the Pynchon character to
emerge as an antitype of

     12 A character of ³La gitanilla² exclaims at her first sight of
Preciosa, ³estos sí que son ojos de esmeralda!² (³La gitanilla,² Novelas
ejemplares 1 [Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Clásica y Contemporánea, 1966]: 28).

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Cervantes's chaste, golden-haired heroine. Yet ³Low-lands² does share with
³La gitanilla² a pronounced fairy tale atmosphere. It is interesting to
recall that Nabokov considers Don Quixote also one of the ³fairy tales²
without which ³the world would not be real² (1).
     For Nabokov, Shakespeare and Cervantes are equals in ³the matter of
influence, of spiritual irrigation² (8). The eternal waters of Cervantes's
writings may well have irrigated Thomas Pynchon's early story ³Low-lands.²

LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

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Fred Jehle jehle at ipfw.edu    Publications of the CSA    HCervantes
URL: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~cervantes/csa/artics88/holdswor.htm