The tribute to Cervantes carry on. This post is a summary of three articles. The first was published at https://www.shmoop.com/don-quixote/. The second was published in June of 2016 at https://www.ft.com/content/570e8b70-282f-11e6-8ba3-cdd781d02d89. The third was published in September 2016 at https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/25/quixote-colbert-and-the-reality-of-fiction/
When Part 1 of Dom Quixote was first published in 1605, it was an instant hit. In fact, people might have liked the book a little too much, because some unscrupulous jerk decided to write a sequel to the original Dom Quixote... without Cervantes's permission. This irkedCervantes so much that he went and published his own sequel in 1615, which turned into Part 2 we all know and love today. In fact, some critics speculate that Cervantes might not have even written his sequel if it were not for the upstart knock-off artist. If the text of Dom Quixote ever strutted into an office and applied for a job, its résumé would include a impressive entries. For start, the book is considered to be the first example of modern novel. Let's go ahead and say that it just might be the best book ever written. Well, according to a 2002 poll of 100 famous authors, Dom Quixote is "the best book of all time". It is not surprising that Dom Quixote has received this kind of support, The novel is such a big deal that it is directly referenced on other classic novels like The Three Musketeers, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Madame Bovary, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to name just a few. Apart from the fact that the world's greatest living authors have voted Dom Quixote the "best book of all time," there are plenty of reasons to care about the book. For start, the idea of a regular person wanting to dress up and become a hero is probably even more popular today than it was in Cervantes's time. After all, just look at how many Batman movies they are making. Batman and Don Quixote are both dudes who use their fortunes to fund their crime fighting. With the popularity of superhero movies today, maybe this generation could use Don Quixote to help bring audiences back down to earth. It is great walking out of a superhero movie and feeling like you can do anything. But it does not hurt to remind people that they live in the real world, with real world limitations, but Cervantes show us that maybe it is wisest to wake up every morning and be our best selves in a realistic way, rather than always escape into the world of pure fantasy. To clarify, Dom Quixote is an important book for many reasons, but mostly because it was the first book to bring legitimate real-life consequences into the world of literature. In short, this book introduced the world of literature to a pesky little thing called reality.
In January 1605, an ageing veteran of Spain's wars against the Ottoman Empire published the strangest of books. Unlike the bestsellers of the day, it was not a chivalric romance, a pastoral drama or the fictional confession of an outlaw. instead, it told the story of a gentleman so besotted with reading those kinds of books, especially the ones about knights errants and their magical adventures, that he loses his mind and begins to believe they are real. The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was an immediate and roaring success. Demand for copies was so high that within a few months its author, Miguel de Cervantes, was having the book distributed throughout the Iberian peninsula while his publishers began work on a second edition. Two pirated versions appeared in London, along with two others in Valencia and Zaragoza. While Cervantes may have been surprised by his novel's success, he was certainly not innocent of the fact that his style was something new. We can appreciate something of the disruption that Cervantes wrought to the old Aristotelian categories of poetry and history into which literary texts were supposed to fall. Fantastical in the sense that they were born exclusively of his own imagination, and thus a vehicle for universal, philosophical truths, his stories were also intended to have real pertinence to readers' lives: they aspired to the condition of the highest literature even as they claim to the territory of the most popular. "I have given them the name 'exemplary'," Cervantes wrote of the 12 novellas, "and if you look at it well, there is not one from which you can not take some example." To understand that example, his public would have to approach these stories in a new way, not merely as external judges of an entertaining and false image of the world, but as "attentive readers" attuned to how their own prejudices helped create that image. Today, more than 400 years after his death, we rightly fête Cervantes as the creator of the modern novel. What is less appreciated is the extent to which his innovations were a response to a media revolution that in some aspects mirror our own. Don Quixote was published at a time when the print industry was booming. Literacy had exploded during the previous century. We see the influence of books in the first pages of Cervantes' novel: not only are they the ostensible cause of Quixote's madness, they also quickly become the subjecty of commentary from almost every character encountered, no matter what his or her station in life. These book and theatrical productions, heavily controlled and often sponsored by the monarchy and its thought police, tended to paint a specific picture of what was right and desirable for a citizen of the Spanish state. Honour was available to all men as long as they were free of even the slightest stain of suspicion concerning the religion or the sexual purity of their women. This insidious ideology metastasised throughout Spanich society almost inverse proportion to the control the Spanish crown was able to exert over its diverse subjects. His entire literary creation is bent on exploring the ramifications of a media age in which everyone has access to multiple, often conflicting portrayals of reality. More than that, though, he was sceptical about the reality readers and theatregoers were being led to believe in. Born in the middle of the 16th ventury in a university town at the heart of what was then the world's most powerful empire, Cervantes was always on the move: In his fifties by the time he published Don Quixote, Cervantes had become deeply disillusioned with the ideals his society trumpeted but failed to live up to. This more than any other single factor accounts for the extraordinary success and innovation of Don Quixote. For in it, Cervantes created not just a picture of the world but a picture of how people pictured the world and got it wrong. This approach to fiction continues today and extends far beyond the novel. The point to grasp is that Cervantes' innovation was areaction, a brilliant, to a world in which media had blurred the boundaries between fiction and reality. The state-controlled theatre industry and the monarchy's censors and official historians kept a sharp eye on the content of plays and books, and actively propagated a vision of the nation that helped sustain the monarchy's fragile alliance with the landed aristocracy while co-opting a complacent bourgeoisie and peasantry with fantasies of honour and blood purity. Cervantes, clearly unable to reconcile his own experiences with this picture of the world, did something different: he made dissonance the subject of his writing. This is why so many people today who decide to return to that great classic are stunned to find in Don Quixote so much that they consider "modern": a preface in which the author appears as a character, an fictional frame story that insist that what is being recounted is utterly real: characters making mention of the author as if he were another character in the book. What Cervantes realised, and what we should remind ourselves today, is that precisely because media are immersive, they are capable not only of persuading us, but of making us take for reality itself. When media threaten to blur that border, fiction is on all. Its job is to jog our awareness, shake our complacency, and show us how we have taken the bait.
In his contribution last week, Alex Rosenberg, posed a defense of naturalism, "the philosophical theory that treats science as our most reliable source of knowledge and scientific method as the most effective route to knowledge." At the expense of other theoretical endeavors such as, literary theory. To the question of "whether disciplines like literary theory provide real understanding, Professor Rosenberg's answer it is withering: just like fiction, literary theory can be fun, but neither one qualifies as knowledge. As a literary theorist, I could take umbrage at the calim that my own discipline, while fun, does not rise to the level of knowledge. But what I'd like actually like to argue goes a little further. Not only can literary theory, along with art criticism, sociology, and philosophy produce knowledge of an important and even fundamental nature, but fiction itself, so breezily dismissed in Rosenberg's assertion, has played a profound role in creating the very idea of reality that naturalism seeks to describe. We especially revere Shakespeare in the English-speaking world, but I'd like to focus in the genius of Miguel de Cervantes. He did someting more profound: he crystallized in prose a confluence of changes in how people in early modern Europe understood themselves and the world around them. While writers prior to Cervantes deployed elements of this fictional template, he was the first to use the technique as a basis of a full-blown, extended narrative. In order to do this, Cervantes imported into the art of prose narration a ploy he learned from the theater. In one of the many debates about literature that takes place in Don Quixote, the canon, a staunch critic of the kind of reading that occupies his good friend, says, "For my part I can say that when I read the tales of chivalry, as long as I avoid thinking about the fact that they are all lies and frivolity. And when I realized what they are, I throw the best of them against the wall. As Cervantes realized in the context of the newly born mass culture of the catholic, imperial, Spanish state, irony expertly wielded is the best defense against the manipulation of truth by the media. Its effect was and still is to remind its audience that we are all active participants in the creation and support of a fictional world that is always in danger of being sold to us as reality.
No comments:
Post a Comment