Harold Bloom: Don Quixote at 400

[jbor at bigpond.com]

... a couple of months older than that now, but Bloom (on Cervantes, 
Shakespeare, Joyce ... and Pynchon) is interesting and provocative as 
always:

'Don Quixote at 400', by Harold Bloom. _Wall Street Journal_, New York, 
23 Feb 2005, p. A16.

Excerpts:

"The Desert Island Question ("If just one book, which?") has no 
universal answer, but most readers with authentic judgment would choose 
among the Authorized English Bible, Shakespeare complete, and _Don 
Quixote_ by Miguel de Cervantes. Is it an oddity that the three 
competitors were almost simultaneous?

The King James Bible appeared in 1611, six years after the publication 
of the first part of _Don Quixote_ (whose 400th anniversary was just 
upon us). In 1605, Shakespeare matched the greatness of Cervantes's 
masterwork with _King Lear_, and then went on rapidly to _Macbeth_ and 
_Antony and Cleopatra_. James Joyce, when asked the Desert Island 
Question, gloriously answered: "I should like to say Dante but I would 
have to take the Englishman because he is richer." A certain Irish 
resentment of Shakespeare can be felt there, and also a personal envy 
of Shakespeare's audience at the Globe, which is expressed in the still 
unread (except by scholars and a few other enthusiasts) _Finnegans 
Wake_. The Bible is read, Shakespeare is performed and read, but 
Cervantes seems less prevalent in English-language countries than once 
he was. There have been many good translations into English since 
Thomas Shelton's in 1612, which Shakespeare evidently knew, but the 
extraordinary version by Edith Grossman, published in 2003, deserves to 
be read by those among us who cannot easily absorb Cervantes's Spanish. 
[...]

Reading Quixote, I am not at all convinced that scholars who believe 
book and writer devout are at all accurate, if only because they miss 
his irony, which frequently is too large to be seen. But then, many 
tell us that Shakespeare was Catholic, and again I am not persuaded, 
since his major allusions are to the Geneva Bible, a very Protestant 
version. _Don Quixote_, like the later Shakespeare, seems to me more 
nihilistic than Christian, and both of these greatest Western imaginers 
hint that annihilation is the final fate of the soul. [...]

Why did the invention of the novel have to wait for Cervantes? Now in 
the 21st century, the novel seems to be experiencing a long day's 
dying. Our contemporary masters -- Pynchon, Roth, Saramago and others 
-- seem forced to retreat back to picaresque and the romance form, 
pre-Cervantine. Shakespeare and Cervantes created much of human 
personality as we know it, or at least the ways in which personality 
could be represented: Joyce's Poldy, his Irish-Jewish Ulysses, is both 
Quixotic and Shakespearean, but Joyce died in 1941, before Hitler's 
Holocaust could be fully known. In our Age of Information and of 
ongoing Terror, the Cervantine novel may be as obsolete as the 
Shakespearean drama. I speak of the genres, and not of their supreme 
masters, who never will become outmoded."

Well worth digging out.

best