Don Quixote

[jbor]

>> I think Don Quixote, the character, is tedious when he speaks and tells his
>> versions of stories, and that Cervantes has deliberately made him so.

GQ: 
> Perhaps -- but after many of his speeches, other characters fall over
> themselves to indicate how wise he is, despite his insanity. So I disagree
> with you -- he may be deliberately pompous, but not even Sancho finds him
> tedious. 

More often than not they're merely humouring him, however, goading him on to
ever greater demonstrations of folly for their own amusement (and this is
perhaps part of the "cruelty" that Nabokov was referring to I think), or
convinced that he's a lunatic and cautious of how he might react if they
don't play along. I think it's fair to say that DQ's tedious (in the sense
that his stories and self-justifications go on and on interminably and he
will as a rule use 50 words where one would have sufficed) and pompous
orations are part of the point. For example, there's often dramatic irony in
those scenes when DQ abuses Sancho for his simplemindedness and his mangled
metaphors and homilies, and then Sancho is vindicated -- I think Cervantes
is orchestrating these counterpoints quite deliberately.

I'm not going to quibble over definitions, however. As a reader I don't find
the novel tedious at all, and I find much to admire in Cervantes'
subversions of the prevailing cultural, social and sexual prejudices of his
time. 

> For instance, in Book II, DQ and Sancho run into a Morisco -- a Christian of
> Moorish descent. Like all Moriscos, he has recently been forced to leave the
> country. Now, while Cervantes is *clearly* showing him to be a good guy, and
> his presence in the book is *clearly* intended to show that this may be an
> unwise policy, at several points, the Morisco explains that the policy is
> overall actually very fair, etc. etc.
>
> Now, of course I realize that Cervantes had to put this speech in his mouth,
> or he might not have been allowed to publish his book.

I assume you're referring to Sancho's chance meeting with his former
neighbour, Ricote (Part Two, Book Four, Chapter Two), where Ricote admits to
"knowing the base and mad designs which our people harboured" and observes
that the king must have been "divinely inspired" and that the Spanish Moors
were "justly chastised by the sentence of banishment". I don't agree that
Cervantes had to put these words into Ricote's mouth in order to publish his
book. In this scene he's foregrounding the fact that some of the Moors were
Christian, which serves to break down an ethnic stereotype. Ricote's
reasoning for supporting the king's edict, while lamenting his forced
removal from his native land, is that a large number of his countrymen (who
aren't "Christian") *were* in fact plotting "schemes". Historically accurate
or not, it's not so simply a matter of pandering to the monarchy, either on
Ricote's part or on that of Cervantes either. But I do agree that there's an
overtone of religious prejudice here, and that Cervantes is writing from
within an uncompromisingly Christian perspective, though there is enough
evidence of tolerance and respect for other faiths elsewhere in the text to
forgive this small blemish.

> But that doesn't mean
> I have to enjoy it: its is obsequious, hard-to-swallow, and it grates on me.
> Imagine reading a book written in the American 1800s that has a sympathetic
> Black character whose story is intended to show that maybe slavery may be a
> bad thing, but 

One wonders what you make of Pynchon's Gershom and his loyalty and affection
towards George Washington in _M&D_!

best