Harold Bloom: Don Quixote at 400

[Joe Allonby]

OK,here's where we link threads. 

If I'm on a desert island, I hope that I have a dangerous book with me.



On 6/3/05, jbor at bigpond.com <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> ... 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
> 
>