Don Quixote

[Scott Badger]

Quail:
> In my opinion, much of DQ is the same thing over again: the Don appears at
> an inn, meets some annoying and shallow people, they tell a story, the Don
> does something foolish,  mayhem ensues, everyone makes peace, and
> the story
> is resolved in some utterly improbable way. It was just too
> little variation
> for my taste -- not to mention the fact that Cervantes repeats many of his
> points over and over again. I know this may also sound a bit PC of me, but
> the book's racism, sexism, and classism got to me, too. Though I recognize
> that Cervantes was actually subversive on a few of these points,
> and that he
> didn't have the artistic freedom of, say, Shakespeare; I found
> the constant
> medieval mind-set to be grating.

I just finished Nabokov's _Lectures on DQ_ and one of the points he pounds
on,
despite waffling, imo, on the overall worth, genius, importance etc. of
_DQ_, is the continuous, and brutal, cruelty displayed throughout. Where, if
anywhere, Nabokov was going with this cruelty (and not just the cruelty in
_DQ_, but also the cruelty of readers amused by the cruelty), I never
figured out. Of course, Nabakov never quite comes out and says that all this
cruelty isn't, in fact, amusing.

Nabokov also goes to considerable lengths to show that Quixote chalks up an
equal number of victories and defeats in his many adventures (going so far
as to score Quixote's progress like a tennis game, in games and sets).
Though, again, I'm not sure to what end.

> Now, don't get me wrong, I admire Cervantes' achievement. There are many
> great aspects to "Don Quixote," and it would be foolish not to
> respect them.

Ironically, Nabokov points out, the fictional character Don Quixote, who
moves back and forth across the line between the fiction and reality of
Cervante's book, and into and out of Cervante's authorial control, has, in a
very real way, stepped out of the book and taken on an independent and
evolving existence of its own.

Scott Badger