Good reading

[jbor]

> 
>> Actually, I think it gets better after the first 100 pages or so.
> 
> My favorite parts of the book are toward the second half, in "Book II."
> Written a few years after Book I, Cervantes addresses some of the criticisms
> of the first book, and a lot of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza's adventures
> occur because people *recognize* who they are -- having read Book I -- and
> send them up in various ways.
> 
> Still, it does get pretty repetitive, but it's less digressive and tedious
> than Book I. Though Cervantes has an axe to grind against some poor sod who
> wrote his own "unauthorized" sequel. Man, I thought Joyce went overboard in
> using his fiction to bash his enemies! He has nothing on Mikey C.

The digressions and tediousness are a deliberate part of the point of
course, the stories within stories within stories and Don Quixote's
pomposity and inflated sense of self-worth. And Cervantes, having already
complicated the notions of authorship and authority in a thoroughly
self-conscious manner at the end of Book One in Part One (where "in this
very critical instant, the author of this history has left this battle in
suspense, excusing himself, that he could find no other account of Don
Quixote's exploits, but what has already been related") and then following
this up at the beginning of Book Two with the introduction of a separate
published "history" written by "Cid Hamet Benengeli, an Arabian author",
actually incorporates the real fake sequel into the fabric of his plot when
he does come to write Part Two some eight or nine years after the
publication of Part One. In Book Four of Part Two (Ch. VII) Don Quixote
spontaneously decides to go to Barcelona instead of Saragossa because he
finds out that the "spurious Don Quixote" goes to Saragossa in the "fake"
history, and he doesn't want to be like that version of himself at all.

It's the template for Pynchon's Schwarzkommando, and much else besides.

At the same point in _DQ_ Sancho tells his listeners that "the persons ...
recorded by Cid Hamet Benegeli ... are no other than we ourselves, here
standing and sitting in your presence .... " Thus do the characters announce
their own fictionality; even more ironic is the fact that they don't even
realise that that's what they're doing.

best