Don Quixote

I am now on page 772 of Don Quixote. Don Quixote and the house maid (or maiden), Senora Dona Rodriguez were just flogged in the middle of the night in the dark by unknown assailants. Sancho has been sent to govern his insula by order of the tricksers, the Duke and Duchess. Just after he arrives Sancho is confronted with several tests, or more accurately jokes. The Duke sent peasants to mock and try and confuse our poor Sancho, but Sancho surprises us all by showing us his hidden wisdoms of the hundreds of proverbs he has stuffed into his meaty brain. He uses his madness and simplemindedness to excel at ingenious unveiling of frauds.
When Sancho discovers the truth behind the mystery of the money lending between the two friends the secret of the older man's cane I was reminded of the myth of the two women both claiming to be the mother of the same child. The king solves the argument by saying that they should just cut the child in half so they both could have a part. One woman agreed and the other refused and said the other woman could have it. Thus the king knew that the woman who refused was the true mother because no mother would allow her child to get cut in half...one hopes.
To go off on a small tangent, in the third paragraph on page 738 and interesting line said by none other than Cervantes started my mind wheels a-turning.






















"...for there can be no humor where there is no intelligence..."
This is but one of Cervantes little interjections that makes this book not only a Metafiction but oh so delightful to read. Sometimes these little inserts are clever, ironic, or just add to the story. This one provoked me to think about true humor opposed to comedy. Something can be comical, like a Stooge getting slapped with a carp, but not humorous. Humor requires insight and knowledge because humor often involves irony or the mockery of something higher
than ones self. If someone doesn't have the intelligence, the worldly knowledge that revolves around irony they won't get the humor and can't produce it.



















The Greeks, crazy philosophers that they are, believed that "humor" was a sort of "human sap" that controlled human health and emotions which derived from the theory of Humorism. It's really quite interesting so here's a Wiki link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism

The other day when Sexson brought up Metafiction in class I was very excited because the interjections of Cervantes had been fascinating me ever since I begun reading the novel. The books is riddled with metafictional delights and tidbits but the most recent one I ran across was on page 738 at the beginning of Chapter XLIV. Cervantes is yet again commenting on the previous versions of Don Quixote and the debates over the possible discrepancies. Don Quixote is such an old story it is alterations along the way because it essentially started as a orally produced and passed on story.

And finally at the end of the adventure of the Wooden Horse in which Sancho shows his desire to be just as mad as Don Quixote and succeeds at being his own enchanter. There's a line uttered by Don Quixote that I've wrestling with for a few days. It brings into question Don Quixote's madness and if he truly is as mad as he leads us to believe.

"Sancho, just as you want people to believe what you have seen in the sky, I want you to believe what I saw in the Cave of Montesinos. And that is all I have to say." - Don Quixote
-pg. 727

It seems to me that Don Quixote either believes Sancho and sympathizes with him and his experience with people doubting him and what he says, or Don Quixote is hinting and both Sancho's and his own madness and fabrication of wonders for the sake of knightly adventures. It seems like Don Quixote is trying to persuade Sancho to believe him, but at the same time I sense an underlining irony of truth vs desired or poetic truth. The poetic truth is that Sancho really saw what he saw in the sky and Don Quixote really did experience his three day adventure of enchanters and enchantment down in the cave and the irony is that we know Don Quixote is mad but I feel more compelled to believe Don Quixote's madness over Sancho's.

My Apology

Claire Nagode
300 Survey of Criticism
“Apology for Poetry/Literature”

“Reason respects the differences, and imagination the similitudes of things” (Percy Shelly). Shelly is where I find my support and inspiration for this Apology for Poetry, or more specifically, for being a student, writer and lover of literature. I write this paper not as a Literature Major, and not even as a English Major, but as a film major minoring in writing. Film and literature are very similar in that they both tell stories, one with words and others with images. But don't those words in the novels and poems we love so dearly paint images in our minds? If some one, not an english minded individual, looks at films and literature they see the reasonable differences; the medium, the device, the production, the consumer, but if one looks with the imaginative mind, with poetry seeing eyes if you will, they see only ways of telling a story, of reflecting the images of reality through characters, plot and words. Literature and film belong in the same boat, so to speak. They entertain, delight, and inform, even if not on the same level. No one can argue that the poetry of Wallace Steves is more “sublime” than Dumb and Dumber, but which holds more irony? And another thought to chew on is how much more sublime is Steves' poetry when compared to a film such as Hero? A film in which the very images hold their own beauty and poetry and consequently moves a person towards inspiration. But can a film really do that? Can a film “awaken and enlarge the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought.”? (Shelly). I think so, or well, I hope so.
I've always loved storytelling, whether I was the one doing the telling or whether I was the one experiencing the telling. Stories create opportunities to experience things you might not even get the chance to in real life. Take Don Quixote and his tragic/comedic/romantic/ironic adventures, he is the perfect example. In his day in age, the time of chivalrous knights and epic quests was long gone, and possibly mostly fictional to begin with. But he imitated the fictions that imitated the life of a knight errant. Take a moment and think about the last time you let go of all your social inhibitions and just pretended, played make-believe, with the staggering freedom in which Don Quixote does. Don Quixote is like a child, playing the make believe game of knights errant. However, even a child, who even though they believe with all their heart that they really are a world famous knight, saving with world from evil and injustice, in their heads, they still know it's just a game. Now Don Quixote believes that he is a knight, his is no longer merely imitating the heroic knights from his novels, he is one of those knights, no matter how mad they say he is or how confused he gets when the people he meets appear to believe him. Don Quixote is a child of imagination and imitation in a “man's” world of reality and reason. Just as we lovers of literature are somewhat blinded by the romance of it all. We chose the hazardous quest of art, beauty and storytelling over the stability of business, medicine, or law. We chose to continue the tradition of imitating the potential of the world and people around us instead of weaving the fabric of the real world we have to live in.
As lovers of literature , English majors, and even film majors ,we choose the path of something higher. When we read the works of artists past, we step out of the 21st century and into another. One that always seems to hold more poetry and beauty that our own could ever dream of. And thus the spark of the chase to catch that dream of beauty. No matter what story we tell, what poem of beautiful words we compose, we are creating something higher than ourselves. “Poetry is indeed something divine. It is at once the center and the circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought.” (Shelly). We strive to capture the golden inner beauty of the brazen world and chip away the outer shell that is reality. Reality is obtainable while we strive to create verbal equivalent of the unreachable divine. Poetry is the stepping ladder to the divine.
As students of language and stories we see the world differently. We see more then the face value, more even than the reality of something. We see deep inside, all the way to the potential magnificence someone or something holds. In Don Quixote, during our valiant knight's conversation with Sanson, a light reflected the heart of our literary dedication, as english majors, or minors. “ 'That is true' said Sanson, ' but it is one thing to write as a poet and another to write as a historian; the poet can recount or sing about things not as they were, but as they should have been, and the historian must write about them not as they should have been, but as they were, without adding or subtracting anything from the truth.' ” (476). When we write a story or a poem, we aren't chained down by silly things such as realism, accuracy, or absolute truth. And we have the concept of “suspension of disbelief” to support our wandering from the path of “true”. It's interesting to me because I first heard this phrase in a film class when discussing how films and stage plays defy what the audience might consider “right', “true” or “normal” and it's the audience's participation in their suspension that makes fiction possible. I don't know of anybody who could watch a film, go to a stage play, or read a novel and become upset because the hero jumped a motorcycle off a plane, lived a life time in two hours, or traveled around mid evil Spain fighting injustice. Sure the action sequence was ridiculous and repeatedly defied gravity, but that's not the point. The story is the point. The experience reading, watching or hearing whatever is was/is that our fellow story lover has to say. The point is the experience of the imitation, not the accuracy of it's truth. Why would we take the time to travel to another world that has to follow all of the same rules as our own? The goal one has in mind when sitting down to experience a fictional story isn't one of historical accuracy, but divine escape, enlightenment, entertainment, and if nothing else to experience something new.
The truth is, no matter how much someone may resist it, we all need poetry. And I mean poetry in the sense of all fictional storytelling genres or mediums. We need an escape from our boring world and what better escape than to see the potential beauty of that world. We're here, in English 300, to carry on the tradition of the divine beauty of storytelling, in whatever form. We see more merit in pursuing the mysteries of language, of literature, storytelling, fiction, poetry and art than pursuing financial gain ( because we all know how much there is to be found in writing) or some other science. Poetry and literature encompass the entire breath of human and superhuman experience, so in essence we study and pursue all things human, and even stretch upwards towards the divine. When you write, you can go anywhere; philosophically, spiritually, emotionally , scientifically even physically. Have you ever read something that described something so well it was like someone had inputted the image straight into your mind? It's like you're really there seeing, smelling and experiencing the story being told.
Don Quixote embodies our goal as english majors/minors. He's living the impossible dream of pure fiction, that we, or at least I, aim and dream for. He sees the world at and in it's full potential, all the time. He lives it while we struggle to embody it in words, mere letters of representation. Don Quixote is that representation. He's a fictional character in a fiction about him being in a fiction where the author reflects on it's fictionalness, but one can't help but feel a little whimsical about the possible meanings behind Don Quixote imitating past fictions and taking them as reality. As a lover of stories I'm obliged to imagine the possibility that Don Quixote is in fact an actual history about a crazy old man who wandered around Spain as a knight errant. I think the funnest part of experiencing a work of fiction is imagining beyond the “letteralness” of the words and what they are saying, and play the “what-if” game. What if this was true? And why not? What is fiction if not a catalyst to think outside and far beyond the box of reality? Just look at Don Quixote. He wasn't merely content with thinking outside the box of reality by only reading the fictions about knights. No, he went as far as to become part of that world, a world of romance, adventure and glory. He kept the journey one experiences while reading a fiction alive by becoming part of that fiction himself.

Genre of Van Winkle

During lecture Monday Sexson brought up the literary genre of a character dreaming a whole lifetime in the matter of a few hours or less. This being found in all fictional storytelling entertainment mediums; film with the eternally classic Dorthy's quest to the Wizard of Oz, literature with Alice and her magical trip to Wonderland, and even television with Captain Jean-Luc Picard and the episode of the "Space Probe".













Walking out of the classroom the tale of Rip Van Winkle popped into my head. This literary genre of sorts seems to stem from this classic story of a lazy, slothful farmer who gets drunk with a bunch of enchanted bowlers and falls asleep for twenty years. However, the literary genre talked about in class is more of a reverse of this tale, the world imagined possessing the drastic time leaps, not the real world as in Rip Van Winkle. And another thing is that Rip Van Winkle is more of a moral cautionary tale. Don't be lazy of ghosts will bowl you into a twenty year coma. And the happy ending of Rip being accepted again and learning from his evil slothy ways. Perhaps this explains the occasional epiphany a character achieves, or obtains while away in their unconscious, dreamy timeless world. They learn from their Cave of Montesinos adventures about themselves of whatever quests they are on.

Now, I am now on page 693 of Don Quixote and all hell is breaking loose. Don Quixote has fallen into the clutches of the Dutches and her Duke their entire household is having way too much fun at Don Quixote's madness's expense. A horde of demons is now descending down upon our white knight , The Knight of the Lions with a somewhat Sorrowful Face . The Knight's face is Sorrowful, not the Lions mind you.
I see Don Quixote's innocence being mocked and threatened at the same time. All this time he has been wondering about believing in his own madness and then the Duchess and Duke come along. They're like two mean adults who take the child's game of pirates too far and drive out to the lake to strand their kid on the beach. And poor Don Quixote is the child wondering why his father has replaced his hand with a hook and keeps referring to his mother as a wench. They're playing along with his game of Romantic Golden Knights and Don Quixote, and Sancho, don't know whether to believe it themselves or take them all for mad.

Touchstone and Frye

Well, I think it's impossible to pick out merely one or two so called "touchstones". And I don't think I've read enough of the literature that is (supposedly) produces a moment of sublime...ness. I read as a writer, not a literature major. When I come across a passage that is cleverly worded and beautifully elegant, I feel this "sublime" moment of inspiration and pleasure. But here are a few of the touchstones that I remember most and never get tired of rereading.

From one of all time FAVORITE books Bored of the Rings (which is, if you don't know or couldn't guess it, a parody of The Lord of the Rings):

The company stood rooted to the ground in terror. The creature was about fifty feet tall, with wide lapels, long dangling participles, and a pronounced gazetteer.
"Aiyee!" shouted Legolam. "A Thesaurus!"
"Maim!" roared the monster. "Mutilate, mangle, crush. See HARM."

and

...At last the fighting was over and the long-parted friends ran to each other with joyful greetings.
"Joyful greetings!" cried Moxie and Pepsi.
"The same and more to you, I'm sure," said Goodgulf, stifling a yawn of recognition.
"Hail fellow well met," bowed Legolam, "May your dandruff worries be over forever."
Gimlet limped over to the two boggies and forced a smile.
"Pox vobiscum. May you eat three balanced meals a day and have healthful, regular bowel movements."
"How comes it," said Arrowroot, "that we meet in this strange land?"
"It is a tale long in the telling," said Pepsi, pulling out a sheaf of notes.
"Then save it," said Goodgulf..

If you haven't read this book, you should. Even if you don't like Lord of the Rings...actually, especially if you don't like Lord of the Rings. Me, I love it, it's one of my all time favorites and this small crazy book makes it all the better. The entire book is a touchstone...for me.
I love the madness of the language and the ridiculous use of the Thesaurus, which I adore and probably use everyday.

Next, is my favorite thus far, of Shakespeare's plays, Titus Andronicus. I've never figured out why this is my favorite. It's the first film version of a Shakespeare play I've ever seen and I think the powerful performances make it stick out in my mind. I love the gothic and morbid tone of the entire play. There are lines that strike me as ingenious or moving, but my favorite send the string of shivers down my spine, arms, and legs.


TITUS ANDRONICUS
Who doth molest my contemplation?
Is it your trick to make me ope the door,
That so my sad decrees may fly away,
And all my study be to no effect?
You are deceived: for what I mean to do
See here in bloody lines I have set down;
And what is written shall be executed.

This is from the last act in the play, when Titus has descended fully into madness. Tamora has come to his house, disguised as Revenge and her sons as Rape and Murder. And even though Titus is mad, he knows it Tamora and her rapist sons, so he tricks her into leaving her sons with Titus and consequently leaves them to their death to be baked in a pie.
I think the fact that this is one of Shakespeare's darkest and most morbid plays, makes me like it even more. It's so different from my other favorites; Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like it, Othello, and Henry V.

TITUS ANDRONICUS
I am not mad; I know thee well enough:
Witness this wretched stump, witness these crimson lines;
Witness these trenches made by grief and care,
Witness the tiring day and heavy night;
Witness all sorrow, that I know thee well
For our proud empress, mighty Tamora:
Is not thy coming for my other hand?

I couldn't think of any touchstones from poetry that didn't come from songs. But hey, I'm not a literature major so I don't think like one. I'm a film major who loves to read and write.

Now moving on to my "Woo woo" moments from Frye's Mythos of the Seasons.
From the Mythos of Summer: Romance, I found this light bulb line:

"The central form of romance is dialectical: everything is focused on a conflict between he hero and his emeny, and all the reader's values are bound up with the hero...hence the opposite poles of the cycles of nature are assimilated to the opposition of the hero and his enemy."
-187

Since the conflict of the hero takes place in our world, the world of cycles and seasons, the arch or shape of the story and the characters follows the same patterns as nature does with the seasons. The villain is the cold and darkness of winter and the hero embodies the youth, strength, and light of spring.
Then: The Mythos of Autum: Tragedy

"In it's most elementary form, the vision of law (dike) operates as lex talionis or revenge. The hero provokes enmity, or inherits a situation of enmity, and the return of the avenger constitutes the catastrophe."
-209

When read this, I sat and tried to think of all of the tragic stories I know and how many revolved around or even merely involved the theme or aspect of revenge. And let me tell you, there are more than a fair few. Now, that doesn't mean that any story in which there is revenge is automatically a tragedy, it depends on the fate of the hero and the other characters as a result of the revenge or the quest for revenge. And another woo woo from this section:

"Tragedy, in short, seems to elude the antithesis of moral responsibility and arbitrary fate, just as it eludes the antithesis of good and evil"
-211

Finally, the Mythos of Winter: Irony and Satire.

"The chief distinction between irony and satire is that satire is militant irony: it's moral norms are relatively clear and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and the absurd are measured."
"...whenever a reader is not sure what the author's attitude is or what his own is supposed to be, we have irony with relatively little satire."
-223

"Hence satire is irony which is structurally close to the comic: the comic struggle of two societies, one normal and the other absurd, is reflected in it's double focus of morality and fantasy. Irony with little satire is the non-heroic residue of tragedy, centering on a theme of puzzled defeat."
-224

Before this, I was actually a little unsure what the real difference between irony and satire were. But now, thanks yet again to Frye, I understand that they can work together but are different types of stories and hold different themes.

Don Quixote

I am now on page 657 in my readings of Don Quixote. I found many an interesting and "woo woo" filled moments whilst reading but I'll concentrate of the few I thought were the most relevant to our class discussions and other readings.
But first, I'd like to start off by saying that we ALL need to work together at bringing this phrase back into popular use:

"The tambourine's in just the right hands." - Sancho pg. 602
This of course means that "matters are being handled by someone competent." Just imagine the literary and vocabulary fun and adventures you could have!

Anyway...I found several delicious bites of irony in reading this section, one being in the conversation between Don Quixote, Sancho, the cousin. On page 600, the cousin is explaining what we writes about and is convinced that his books containing irrelevant facts, such as who got the first cold ever, are masterful works full of "allegories, metaphors, and transformations that delight, astonish, and instruct, all at the same time."

After hearing this, good ol' D.Q. responded:
"You have said more, Sancho, than you realize. For there are some who exhaust themselves learning and investigating things that, once learned and investigated, do no matter in the slightest to the understanding or the memory." The day was spent in this agreeable conversation, and others like it."
-601

The cousin is one of those investigating and leaning all those things that do not matter and yet he agrees with Don Quixote when he says this. I want to believe that Don Quixote knew what he was saying and was giggling to himself as the cousin went on heartily agreeing with him. I can't really tell if that was intended irony, or if I'm just trying to read too much into it, but I'm leaning more towards intended than not.

The next piece of irony I found on pages 630 and/through 632. This is the section containing the puppet show performed by a disguised escaped gallery slave that D.Q. had freed earlier. ( I love how past characters keep showing up to help confuse and baffle poor Don Quixote). Before Don Quixote takes it upon himself to avenge the menaced puppets, he's commenting, loudly, on the realism, or truthfulness of the show. First:

"Boy, boy,' said Don Quixote in a loud voice, 'tell your story in a straight line and do not become involved in curves or transverse lines, for to get a clear idea of the truth, one must have proofs and more proofs."

Then on page 632, when Don Quixote objects again to the straying from the concrete truth by objecting to the Moor's use of bells instead of drums:

This was heard by the Master Pedro, who stopped the ringing and said, "Your grace should not concern yourself with trifles, Senor Don Quixote, or try to carry things to far that you never reach the end of them. Aren't a thousand plays performed almost every day that are full of a thousand errors and pieces of nonsense, and yet are successful productions that are greeted not only with applause but with admiration?"

And Don Quixote agrees. The irony lies in that before, Don Quixote was screaming the Platoian cry of Truth! Truth! But then he accepts it for what it is, a play. A imitation of events and people for the sake of enjoyment. But then Don Quixote turns around yet again, just a few lines later, and sees the play's attack on the innocent puppet characters and ,even though he just a puppet version of Don Gaiferos, D.Q. can't take such injustices acted upon such a knight so he wipes out not only the puppets but the whole play and stage. The ring of irony runs full circle; from desire of actual truth, to suspension of disbelief, back to the "actual" truth of the offenses acted upon a great knight, a puppet version of that knight, but still an embodiment of that knight. And that was enough for our valiant Don Quixote of La Mancha.
The irony lies in the wishy-washy foundation of when truth is necessary. And to begin with, the whole concept of truth is grotesquely skewed by Don Quixote's pick and choose, then fabricate and then maul kind of mentality . And then he wants accurate truth (like the truth found in his books of chivalry) but is then able to accept the events as a play, a showing of imitations with the intent to entertain and delight, and then goes back to his mad truth and stops the vicious attacks on the puppets, that he had just accepts as being imitations that entertain. But thus is the madness of madmen.

Now, this brings me to my big Woo Woo. In the beginning of Chapter XXIX, specifically on 647 and 648, Don Quixote and Sancho come upon a small fishing boat pulled up on shore. And the first thing Don Quixote says and thinks is hey, this was put here for me to partake in a fabulous and chivalrous adventure. It (finally) hit me, in a very woo woo like fashion, that Don Quixote is like a child. He embodies the innocence a child holds before they experience life and learn from it. Now Don Quixote has experienced life, drank deep from it's cup, if I may. But he has completed the circle of experience, only in a new, mad way. Instead of starting at innocence, rounding to experience and knowledge, and finishing on the "innocence" (or lack of thought that couldn't be innocent) of death, Don Quixote begins at innocence as an innocent child, rounds into an experienced adult, but then circles back to childlike innocence through the his migration to the fantasy world of Romance.

When a child sees a lone boat, parked in the middle of no where with no one to be found, you can bet they're gonna play in it. They're going to pretend the boat was sent to him by Zeus in order for him to sail to the Underworld to retrieve a bolt of fired earth so Zeus can rekindle his fire of sky and lightening ...or something like that. A child will pretend, just as Don Quixote does, that they are in some magical world of fantasy and dragons. And like Don Quixote with his oh-so-special madness, a child can rope others, adults (the supposedly sane) into playing along in their worlds of make believe and can even get other children (crazies) to believe in the very world itself.

Finally, this brings me to a few passages I found in Frye that relate directly to my ideas of Don Quixote as an innocent child.
"The perennially childlike quality of romance is marked by its extraordinary persistent nostalgia, it's search for some kind of imaginative golden age in time or space."
-Frye 186

Does that not embody Don Quixote to his very core? Is he not trapped in a "persistent nostalgia" searching ,or maybe it's better to say, living "some kind of imaginative golden age"? You can imagine my excitement when I found this passage? Everything that Don Quixote is and all that he represents, neatly packaged and tied up with a bow in a single sentence. Don Quixote stays true to his innocence. Everything we, or Sancho, sees as normal or ordinary, Don Quixote sees as fantastical and full of impossible possibilities. He is forever living in the romantic traditions of yesteryear. This entire (almost) 1000 page novel is about the saga of Don Quixote as he struggles to stay innocent in his madness, despite all of the best efforts of his friends, family, and even strangers, surrounded by a world of experience and experiences.
And just when I didn't think it could get any better...

"In romance the central theme of this phase is that of the maintaining of the integrity of the innocent world against the assault of experience."
-Frye pg. 200

Don Quixote maintains the integrity of his innocent under the endless assaults of reality and its experiences rained down upon him by Sancho, the barber, the priest, and basically everyone else Don Quixote has ever met. He even experiences his folly when he mistakes a windmill for a giant, a statue for a captured damsel, and suffers the very physical consequences. But our valiant knight perseveres, and stays the innocent, mad knight we all know and love. His will shall never wavier in his conviction, his innocent marriage to the Romance of the Golden Age of knights.

I think we all need to take a few moments and really remember the innocence of our childhood. In doing so, we all realize that each and everyone of us was once a tiny Don Quixote. Rowing our enchanted boats, storming our blanket fort castles, saving our favorite stuffed dog Scruffy from blood thirsty kitty pirates. However we played as a child, we were, without a doubt, in the realm of romance, where innocence ran supreme and experience was just a proverbial notch on our belt, or plane, or sword, or maybe even a wand. Depends on one's preferences.

Jung

I am Carl Jung and my theory of the Collective Unconscious consists of archetypes of the human psyche, and they are the Shadow, the Anima and the Animas, the Divine Couple, The Child, and the Self.

http://dresdencodak.com/cartoons/guest_stig.html
-for a better view