Prof: So this is the
course on Cervantes' Don
Quixote.
 
I am Roberto González
Echevarría,
from Comparative Literature and
the Spanish Department.
Normally, in Spanish we go by
the first of the two last names,
so even though my e-mail is
Roberto-dot-Echevarría,
I am normally known,
if at all, as González,
Professor González or
Professor González
Echevarría,
not Professor
Echevarría,
just for your general
information.
 
You will be getting tidbits
about Spanish culture such as
the one I've just given you
throughout the course,
even if this is not a culture
class or a language class,
but it is important for you to
know them.
You will also be getting a good
deal about Spanish history,
both in the lectures and in the
assigned readings,
and of course,
through the reading of the
Quixote.
 
You will also,
of course, have to learn a few
titles in Spanish,
works of Spanish literature
that I will be mentioning and
that you will learn in the
course of the semester;
but that is to be expected,
I guess.
 
So in this course we are going
to read together one of the
unquestioned masterpieces of
world literature,
let alone the Western Canon,
as defined by my friend Harold
Bloom in his popular book,
The Western Canon,
where it appears at the very
top of the list,
paired with Hamlet.
 
The Quixote is a book
that will affect your lives,
not just your understanding and
enjoyment of literature,
I can anticipate that.
 
The Quixote is the first
modern novel.
I'll be talking a lot about the
novel, modern novel,
and it will become clear as we
move along, because there is
confusion.
 
A novel in which,
according to Gabriel
García Márquez,
the Nobel Prize Columbian
novelist,
a novel where there is already
everything that novelists would
attempt to do in the future
until today.
 
Young Sigmund Freud formed the
Cervantes club with his friends,
and the Quixote was
Jorge Luis Borges' obsession.
Borges, as you may know,
was the great Argentine writer,
famous.
 
Ian Watt, the late British
scholar considered Don
Quixote "one of four
myths of modern
individualism,"
he called them,
the others being Faust,
Don Juan and Robinson
Crusoe,
in works by Goethe,
Tirso de Molina and Daniel
Defoe,
but this is not the most
important thing about the book.
The Quixote has and has
continued to be read by millions
of readers in every imaginable
language.
And we will be asking
ourselves: Why?
What is it that this book has
that is so meaningful to so
many?
 
I myself have answered the
question in this fashion in the
introduction to the Penguin
Classics edition that we will be
using in this course,
the Penguin Classics
translation by John Rutherford.
 
I say there,
in that introduction,
the following:
"Miguel De Cervantes
Saavedra's masterpiece has
endured because it focuses on
literature's foremost appeal,
to become another,
to live a typically embattled
self for another closer to one's
desires and aspirations.
 
This is why Don Quixote
has often been read as a
children's book and continues to
be read by or to children.
Experience and life's blows
teaches our limits and erode the
hope of living up to our dreams,
but our hope never vanishes.
It is the soul's pith,
the flickering light of being,
the spiritual counterpart to
our DNA's master code.
When the hero regains his
sanity at the end of Part II,
he dies as the last chances of
living an imaginary life
disappear, so must life itself.
 
Don Quixote's serene passing
reflects this understanding.
He knows that the dream of life
is over and as a Neo-Platonist
and Christian his only hope now
is to find the true life after
death."
 
So much for my own quote...
 
Sorry.
 
For you, reading the
Quixote will be an event
that you will always remember,
and Don Quixote and Sancho,
his squire,
will become life long friends
about whom you will think often.
 
I can predict that,
safely--I think.
So, what is the Quixote?
 
A novel, you will say.
 
Well, first of all,
the Quixote,
if it is a novel,
is two novels.
One published in 1605 and the
other in 1615.
Together, they are known as
the Quixote --
much more about the title in a
minute--
and knowledgeable people refer
to them as Part I and Part II,
or the 1605 Quixote and
the 1615 Quixote.
So the first thing to learn--
and I like first things because
I like to build on them from the
ground up--
is that the Quixote
consists of two parts originally
published separately ten years
apart: ten years apart.
But what Cervantes wrote,
though, considered the first
modern novel,
was not a novel as we know them
today, because novels did not
exist as such yet.
Novels developed in the wake of
the Quixote,
so Cervantes could not have set
out to write a novel.
In his time,
in Cervantes' time,
there were chivalric romances,
stories about knight-errants--a
lot more about that in the very
near future--
pastoral romances,
stories about fake shepherds,
picaresque lives--what we call
today confusedly picaresque
novels--
and brief nouvelle or
novella,
that is, long short stories of
which Cervantes wrote quite a
few,
and very good ones,
and we will read some here in
this course, too.
 
The modern novel would evolve
from translations and imitations
of the Quixote,
particularly in France and
England,
and would attain its current
form in the eighteenth century.
 
I am very much a historian and
I would like for you to have a
clear historical,
chronological idea of the
development of the novel and of
Cervantes' own career,
so take note of these
chronological clarifications
that I give you.
 
Now, what may you know about
the Quixote?
Many of you,
I suppose, come to this course
intrigued by the name of an
author and the title of a book
that you may have heard about,
but that, like most classics,
not many have actually read in
its entirety,
much less studied.
 
As with most classics,
you have probably heard so much
about the Quixote that it
feels as if you had read it.
Many have heard the songs from
Man of La Mancha,
"The Impossible
Dream," and so forth;
perhaps you have even seen the
show.
It's quite a good show,
by the way.
I don't look down upon it.
 
It is a version of the
Quixote in an American mode,
very much an American mode,
but a very good one.
So many of you have seen Man
of La Mancha,
have heard the songs,
and maybe you have even read a
comic book based on the novel.
 
There are comic books based on
the novel.
Others may have read it in a
high school class,
parts of it,
some of you may have read it in
a course like Directed Studies,
in conjunction with other
western classics,
such as the Odyssey,
the Aeneid and the
Divine Comedy.
Whatever the case may be,
most of you are probably
puzzled by the spelling and
pronunciation of the
protagonist's name and the title
of the book.
Let me clarify those as a
modest beginning,
the first step having been to
tell you that the Quixote
is two novels.
 
Now, the second step is to tell
you about the name of the
protagonist and how to pronounce
it and how we pronounce it in
Spanish and how it's spelled,
and why.
The way to pronounce it in
modern Spanish is Quihote,
kee-ho-te.
 
No gliding to the 'o.'
 
No 'kee-hoe-te.'
 
In Spanish we don't glide the
vowels; they are short and
crisp.
 
Why then, that vexing 'x' in
English?
The reason is that when the
book was written in the last
years of the sixteenth century
and the first of the
seventeenth,
the sound of the 'j' in Spanish
was still in the process of
moving from the /sh/ sound that
it had thanks to the influence
of Arabic--
more about that later--moving
towards the aspirated /h/ of
modern Spanish,
that /sh/ sound was then
written with an 'x' in the
still-to-be-codified spelling of
the language.
 
Spelling of modern European
languages was not codified until
the eighteenth century.
 
For instance,
the modern word for 'soap,' in
Spanish,
many of you know who know some
Spanish know it--
;'jabón,' was written
then with an 'x' and it was
pronounced 'shabón.'
'México' was pronounced
'Méshico' and was spelled
with an 'x,' and that 'x' is
still retained,
though in Spanish it is
pronounced 'Mé-hi-co,'
never "Mé-shi-co.'
 
Hence, the English,
seeing an 'x' in the middle of
the title of Cervantes' book--
the book was translated very
early into English:
published in 1605,
the first translation appeared
in 1611;
six years is very fast in the
seventeenth century--
so the English,
seeing that 'x,' mispronounced
it 'quic-shote,' with a sound
that it never had in Spanish.
That is why you have the 'x' in
English, and the
mispronunciation 'quixote.'
 
You follow the history?
 
Now, the French,
meanwhile hearing that /sh/
rendered it 'qui-sho-t' which is
still the way they mispronounce
it.
 
The French call it 'Don
Quishot.'
I will always say here
'Quijote' and hope that you will
learn to do the same from now
on,
at the risk of sounding a
little snobbish to English
speakers.
 
But Yalies can sound snobbish
if you...
So now a few more basic,
very basic facts about the
title of the book.
 
The little of a book or a
painting is like the first
interpretation by its author.
 
It is a sort of what we would
call in literary criticism a
meta-text, a text above the
text.
Sometimes, though,
titles can be misleading,
but they are always
interesting, and should be
examined carefully making sure
that you gain access to the full
title of the first edition,
not one that has been tampered
with by editors or the reading
public later.
For instance,
the Pickwick Papers,
the novel by Dickens was really
called The Posthumous Papers
of the Pickwick Club and it
is interesting why it is called
so.
 
Now, be careful also with the
translations of titles.
I will tell you later about
some of the Quixotes'
because translations of titles
sometimes are very misleading.
A novel by Alejo Carpentier
called El Siglo de las
Luces was translated as
The Explosion in the
Cathedral.
 
So you say, what?
 
Because the editors thought
that The Age of
Enlightenment would sound
like the title of a textbook or
something,
so that's the way that they
translated it.
 
So you have to be very careful
if you're going to really read
something carefully about the
title.
So you go to the real title.
 
Now, the full title of the
first part of Don
Quixote--remember,
published in 1605;
I want to engrave that date on
your mind--is as follows:
El ingenioso hidalgo don
Quixote de la Mancha.
You know that the 'u' was
rendered as a 'v' before the
Latin.
 
So El ingenioso hidalgo don
Quixote de la Mancha.
This is a reproduction of the
actual title page of the first
Quixote.
 
You are seeing it, okay.
 
We are fortunate enough to have
a copy of that first edition at
Beinecke Library here at Yale.
 
All right, so let us go over
those words one by one.
I can assure you we are not
going to go over every word in
the book one by one as I'm going
to do with the title,
or it would take the rest of
our lives to finish reading
the Quixote together!
 
So 'ingenioso' does not
mean here exactly what it means
today in Spanish.
 
'Ingenioso' means today
something like 'acute,' 'witty,'
'cute,' or 'inventive.'
 
In 1611 Covarrubias
writes--now, Covarrubias is a
name that you're going to be
hearing throughout the semester,
and I'm going to put it on the
board,
just the last name,
because it's very important.
 
 
His name was Sebastián
de Covarrubias y Orozco.
He was a lexicographer who
published in 1611 the first
dictionary of the Spanish
language,
the first dictionary of the
Spanish language called
Tesoro de la lengua
castellana o
española,
Thesaurus of the Castilian or
Spanish Language.
 
It's very convenient that
Covarrubias published that
dictionary in 1611,
right in between the two parts
of the Quixote,
1605,1615; the dictionary comes
in 1611.
 
So Covarrubias gives us
Cervantes' Spanish.
So this is why it is such an
important book for the reading
of Cervantes' Don
Quixote.
The title itself is
interesting, because it shows
that Castilian and Spanish are
one in the same thing.
I'll talk about that a little
more later--he writes about
ingenio:
"We commonly call
ingenio a natural force
of the mind that inquires that
which through reason and
intelligence can be found
through all sorts of sciences,
disciplines,
liberal and mechanical arts,
subtle inventions and deceit.
Hence, we call engineer
(ingeniero) he who builds
machines to fight off the enemy
and to attack him.
Ingenioso is he who has
a subtle and sharp wit."
So 'ingenioso' in the
title of Don Quixote,
of the Quixote,
means 'a heightened kind of wit
or understanding,' one that
verges on madness recalling what
Plato said in The
Republic about poets,
poets being slightly bad.
 
A few years before the
publication of Don
Quixote, of the
Quixote,
in the year 1575 within
Cervantes' lifetime,
Juan Huarte de San Juan--you
don't have to remember this name
so much--
a medical doctor published a
very important book called
Examen de ingenios para las
ciencias,
and so a very long title.
It is 'Wits Examined' would be
the translation of that title in
which he studies different kinds
of madness.
So Examen de ingenios
meant--of Huarte de San Juan--an
examination of various kinds of
madness of the kind that
Covarrubias mentioned.
 
So this is to give you the
context of the word
'ingenioso' in the title
El ingenioso hidalgo don
Quixote de la Mancha.
 
Now, 'hidalgo' is a
contraction of 'hijo de
algo,' which in Spanish
means 'son of something.'
Of course, we are all sons of
daughters of something.
But what that meant was you are
the son of someone of some
distinction,
of a worthy lineage,
and Covarrubias again,
says it means:
"The same as noble,
with an ancient pure
lineage."
 
In other words,
pure of cast,
of origin, of ilk,
of tradition.
An hidalgo,
as you will discover reading
the first chapter of the book is
a petty nobleman,
someone belonging to the lower
nobility or aristocracy.
It is important here to note
that Cervantes does not call Don
Quixote here a
'caballero,' a knight.
The novel is at the most basic
level,
the story of a petty nobleman
who becomes by din of his own
self invention a knight worthy
of using the 'Don' that
is given in the title.
 
In 1615, however,
in the second part of the
Quixote--
and we will look at that title
page when we come to it--
Don Quixote is called a
'caballero' for a variety
of reasons that I will explain
at the proper time.
 
Now, 'don,' D-O-N,
is a form of address like
'sir,' 'sire,' that not everyone
had a right to expect.
Don Quixote did not,
or Alonso Quixano,
the man who became Don Quixote,
did not,
by virtue of his modest station
in life,
but he takes on the
'don' as part of his self
invention.
 
'Hidalgos,' in other
words, did not have the right to
the 'don.' 'Don,'
of course,
derives from the Latin
'dominus,' 'sir,' 'lord,'
'master.'
 
Your readings in Elliot,
Imperial Spain,
one of the books for the
course, will give you much
further background on this.
 
Now, 'Quijote' as you
will learn reading the first
chapters of the book,
too, is said to be a derivation
of 'quijada,' jaw,
or 'quesada,' something
having to do with cheese,
or 'quejana' something
having to do with complaint.
 
'Quijano' or
'quijana' could be,
it is said that it is last
name, one of them,
'Quijano' is the last
name of Alonso Quixano,
the man of who becomes Don
Quixote,
the hidalgo who turns himself
into Don Quixote.
These names echo those words
mentioned before,
'quijada,'
'quesada,' and so forth.
They are not very high sounding
or ennobling words,
quite the contrary--I hope no
one here has the last name
Quijano or Quijana.
 
It happened to me in one of
these classes,
as I was explaining this,
that a Hispanic young woman in
the class had the last name
Quijano,
and I had to profusely
apologize.
But I'm just trying to explain
the title of the novel,
but I am hoping that none of
your last names is Quijano.
Now, the 'â€“ote'
ending, O-T-E,
suffix is a suffix that in
Spanish always refers to
something base or grotesque and
sounds it: 'gordote,'
from 'gordo' is a fatso;
'grandote' from
'grande' is a hulking big
guy, a lummox;
'feote' from
'feo,' is an ugly cuss,
so 'Quijote,' then,
was meant to sound abasing and
ridiculous,
particularly when paired with
'don,' with which it
forms a kind of oxymoronic pair,
'Don Quijote.'
 
'Don' is high sounding,
and Quixote has all of these
negative connotations.
 
It also has echoes of
'Lanzarote,' one of the
knight-errants that Don Quixote
reads about,
and it has also been discovered
that it is the name of a part of
the armor covering the leg,
but the important background is
what I gave before.
 
Now, 'Mancha,' 'la
Mancha,' is a region in
central Spain,
in Castile, that encompasses
parts of the provinces of
Toledo, Ciudad Real,
Cuenca and Albacete.
 
There are maps of Spain on the
website and geography is very
important in the Quixote,
particularly in Part II.
This is a novel that is very
rooted in a given geography.
Now, La Mancha is flat,
arid and monotonous.
Its main products used to be
cereals and wine,
but the important thing here is
that it is not,
or it was not until Cervantes'
work,
a particularly desirable place
to be from.
'Mancha' also means
stain in Spanish.
It all sounds like a put down.
 
Being from La Mancha was like
being from Bridgeport,
or Buffalo, or Brooklyn,
or Podunk.
Now, of course,
this has all changed with the
book,
and now the name has and the
region has a poetic air,
and there are theme parks in La
Mancha with windmills and all in
Spain,
of course, but that was not
what Cervantes intended when he
had Don Quixote be from La
Mancha.
It was to be in contrast to
other knights who came from more
distinguished places,
Amadís de Gaula,
from Wales, or Palmerín
de Inglaterra,
from England,
and then, Don Quixote de la
Mancha.
 
You see, this is what is
supposed to be meant by the
title.
 
You wouldn't have suspected
this if I hadn't told you,
because you are still under the
influence of Man of La
Mancha.
 
Now, the issue of Don Quixote's
spurious 'don' is
significant in a broader
historical sense.
By the sixteenth century,
the glory days of the nobility
were long gone.
 
Noblemen were no longer much
engaged in the military,
except that the highest ranks
had never seen actual combat.
Wars were fought by
professional armies.
There was little chance for the
nobility to exercise marshal
like activities which were left
now to jousts and to hunting.
War became sports for the
aristocracy.
The nobility was on the whole
on a downturn in Spain because
of policies initiated by the
Catholic Kings,
Ferdinand and Isabella,
to curtail the power of the
aristocracy.
 
Now, certain groups at the
highest level cluster around the
courts of the descendants of the
Catholic Kings just had a lot of
power,
but on the whole,
the nobility is on the decline,
more noticeably so in La
Mancha, which had a sparse
population of hidalgos as
opposed to northern regions of
the peninsula.
So for Don Quixote to practice
caballería,
knight-errantry,
was a way of reviving the past,
of reliving a past of splendor
and glory,
now only really available
through reading the chivalric
romances which portrayed a
medieval world when the
aristocracy was truly involved
in warfare,
or in sports,
such as hunting--of which Don
Quixote was fond as you will
learn in the early chapters of
the book.
 
We will have much more on
chivalric romances as I promised
in the future.
 
Now, what about the language of
the Quixote,
what language did Cervantes
write?
You say: in Spanish;
yes, but we're in the
sixteenth, seventeenth century.
 
In the sixteenth century
Spanish was undergoing its last
significant linguistic
revolution, its last significant
change.
 
And at the time that the
Quixote was written and
published, pronoun and verb
forms were still in relative
flux.
 
But Cervantes' Spanish does not
sound to the modern Spanish ear
as archaic and arcane as
Shakespearean English does to
modern English readers.
 
I have a difficult time
understanding Shakespeare on the
stage sometimes with my American
English.
It does sound,
the Spanish of Cervantes,
does sound quaint,
and the book's fame gives
Cervantes' Spanish today a
formal sound that it did not
have to its contemporaries for
whom the book was not,
of course, still a classic.
 
If read out loud,
the Quixote is more
comprehensible to current
speakers of Spanish from Spain
and Latin American than
Hamlet is to a modern
British or American audience.
 
But, what language was it that
Cervantes used?
Well, he wrote in Castilian or
Spanish, which are the same,
as we learn in Covarrubias'
title.
Americans have the mistaken
notion that they speak Castilian
in Spain, and we don't know in
the rest of Latin America.
It is the same language.
 
Castilian was the language of
Castile,
land of castles,
because as the re-conquest--
you will learn what the
re-conquest is,
that is, the re-conquest of
Spain from the Moors--
advanced in central Spain,
as this re-conquest advanced,
castles were built to secure
the territories,
hence, Castile.
 
And then Castile became,
as you will read in Elliot,
the most influential region,
political and military above
all of the peninsula,
and with the unification of the
peninsula under the Catholic
kings it tried to impose its
language on the rest of Spain.
 
So you know what the difference
between a language and a dialect
is?
 
A language is a dialect with an
army, so a language is the
language of a region with enough
power to impose it on other
people and become so.
 
So there were--and are--other
languages in Spain:
Catalan,
Galician, Basque,
Valencian, but the Catholic
Kings and their descendents
imposed Castilian on the
peninsula as much as they could
and on the vast territories of
the New World,
what is today Latin America,
because the discovery and
conquest were mainly Castilian
projects.
Spanish is more uniform as a
result of these policies today
than English is.
 
So what is spoken in the Bronx,
Mexico City and Madrid?
Castilian, which is Spanish,
is what's spoken,
it's spoken in those places.
 
So you can erase that American
prejudice from your mind if you
ever had it.
 
It is true--I mean,
I had a colleague at Cornell,
a very distinguished American
medievalist who would ask me,
"In what language do you
write your scholarship,
Roberto?"
 
I said, "What do you mean?
 
In English and Spanish."
 
He was worried that if I didn't
write in English being in Latin
America,
I didn't have a language of
culture in which I could write,
because he didn't think that in
Latin America we had a language
of culture.
It is an American prejudice.
 
Well, if Spanish is undergoing
its last transformation in the
sixteenth century,
this was also a turbulent
century for Spain in political,
religious, social and artistic
terms.
 
Consider that in the sixteenth
century Spain settled the new
world and beyond,
the Philippines,
and organized a vast imperial
bureaucracy to rule it.
Spain also controlled parts of
Italy and the low countries,
and Spain itself was adjusting
to the unification brought about
by the marriage of Ferdinand and
Isabella,
she from Castile,
he from Aragon.
They created the first modern
state--
by the way, you will find in
the Quixote characters
that come from various regions
of Spain,
most memorably,
at the very beginning,
a Basque who speaks broken
Spanish because,
even today, there are regions
in Spain,
as you now if you've been to
Spain,
where Spanish is really not the
language spoken;
in Galicia, the Basque
countries, and Cataluña,
and so forth.
 
Now, in the religious sphere,
Spain became the defender of
the Catholic Church,
which was breaking up in the
rest of Europe as a result of
The Reformation.
Remember, the Reformation is a
sixteenth century event,
Spain was the bastion of
orthodox Catholicism,
and this effected tremendously
its political,
social and literally life.
 
In 1492 the Catholic Kings
expelled the Jews from Spain,
and then, in 1613,
the Moriscos,
the descendents of the Arabs
who were still,
left, and we will be speaking
about that,
and there will be distinct
echoes of all of these movements
and political events in the
novel.
One could say that the
Quixote is not only the
first modern novel,
but the first political novel
in that it reflects very clearly
political controversies of its
time.
 
In the social domain,
there was a significant
population drain to the New
World,
social mobility,
caused by the deliberate
erosion of the aristocracy by a
crown bent on centralization and
control.
 
You will find as you read the
book that the characters move
through areas that are really
depopulated, and this reflects
this demographic reality.
 
The new bureaucracy provided
ways to attain wealth and power
that threatened the status of
the old and powerful
aristocratic families,
as well as the traditional
independence of provinces and
fiefdoms that dated back to the
Middle Ages.
 
In the literary world,
Spain's greatest splendor came
at this moment,
in the waning of the
Renaissance and the emergence of
new modern forms and genres.
The sixteenth century opened
actually just before the
sixteenth century,
in 1499, with the publication
of Celestina or La
Celestina--
that is a word that you should
learn here...
1499--and was followed by the
emergence of the picaresque in
El Lazarillo de Tormes.
 
Lazarillo de Tormes was
the first--what we call--a
picaresque novel,
1554.
 
 
And there emerged what came to
be known as the Spanish
comedia for the Spanish
theater.
They were not all comedies,
but they were called the
comedia,
and these were written by Lope
de Vega--
a name that you might want to
keep in mind because he was a
very prolific writer who was
also Cervantes's rival.
 
 
 
He may have written seven
hundred plays.
How many did Shakespeare write?
 
Thirty-some?
 
Lope would write those in a
month.
It's amazing.
 
He was an amazing writer,
very powerful,
and Cervantes had a very tense
relationship with him.
In poetry, the sixteenth
century saw Garcilaso de la
Vega,
a name you will see in the book
many times,
and his many followers,
the late great blossoming of
the Petrarchan tradition,
you know Petrarch,
and the development from that
Petrarchan tradition of a
powerful strain of mystical
poetry,
particularly in the verse of
St.
 
John of the Cross.
 
So the sixteenth century and
seventeenth centuries are what
are called in Spanish literary
history as the Golden Age.
It was also the golden age in
painting.
If you have been to the Prado
Museum in Madrid,
you will see what I mean,
and we will be talking a great
deal about a Spanish painting
here, particularly about
Velázquez.
 
Now, our little philological
excursion about the title of the
book already reveals a number of
things about the Quixote
and about Spain.
 
You may wonder, Arabic?
 
What do the Arabs have to do
with Spain?
Well, the Arabs occupied Spain
for eight centuries,
from 711--these are good dates
to remember--
to 1492, when Granada fell,
and that was last bastion of
Arab power in Spain,
and it was taken by the
Catholic Kings Ferdinand and
Isabella.
But the Arabs left an indelible
mark upon Spanish history and
Spanish language.
 
It was not an occupation in the
sense that we envision
occupations in the modern
period.
Historians speak of a
convivencia,
that is, a living together of
these Christian and Muslim
cultures which involved fighting
with each other,
but fighting amongst the
Christians,
and the Muslims allied with
Christians together with
Muslims, and so forth.
 
But they were there for eight
centuries,
and one could say that the
Arabic component in the broader
sense is the main difference
between Spain and the rest of
Europe.
 
The title of the book already
alludes to that difference
because of that 'x,' but you
will see it in many other ways
as you read it.
 
Now, you can also glean from
what I have said that the
Quixote was translated very
early into other European
languages which,
as already mentioned,
1611 for the English and it
went on to be translated in
France and so forth.
 
The Quixote became very
rapidly,
that first edition in 1605,
a European best seller,
turning Cervantes,
who was, as you will read when
you read from the assigned
readings in the case book,
a minor figure,
suddenly into a great success.
It never brought him the
financial rewards that he
desperately needed,
but it turned him into a
success.
 
They say that at the beginning
in the early years the
Quixote was read almost
universally as a funny book.
It's obviously a misreading,
it is much more than just a
funny book.
 
Now, let us turn now in this
sort of introduction to basics
to the title,
to the protagonists name in
English.
 
All of you, no doubt,
have read or heard the word
'quixotic' and surely have a
general notion of its meaning.
Someone who is a Quixote,
says the Oxford English
Direction is--quote:
"an enthusiastic visionary
person like Don Quijote or Don
Quixote,
[the way that they write it]
inspired by lofty and
chivalrous but also unrealizable
ideas" --Unquote.
Hence, 'quixotic' is,
quote:
"to strive with lofty
enthusiasm for visionary
ideas."
 
How many authors or books or
characters have entered common
usage in this way?
 
Actions or people can be
Dantesque, Kafkaesque,
Rabelaisian,
but are any of these as common
as 'quixotic'?
 
'Dantesque' always refers to
the Inferno and conveys a
sense of gloom,
of fire burning,
sinners and all of that is
Dantesque.
'Kafkaesque' describes the
situation in which a labyrinth
of forces appears to control
your life and it is applied
mostly to bureaucracies.
 
Yale's bureaucracy is becoming
Kafkaesque,
I can assure you of
that--'Rabelaisian,' less
common,
means uncontrollable appetites,
most of the time referring to
gluttony: 'He had a Rabelaisian
dinner.'
 
But you risk really sounding
snobbish if you say that you had
a 'Rabelaisian dinner,' even if
you are a Yalie,
but not saying 'quixotic';
'quixotic' is really part of
the common usage.
 
If pressed, I bet any one of
you could give a TV Guide
abstract of the book,
even though who haven't read a
word of it.
 
It would go something like
this--I made this up:
"Middle-aged many believes
that he can become a
knight-errant like those he has
read about in chivalric romances
and takes to the road with
Sancho,
a peasant, as his squire to set
the world aright,
suffers many defeats but
remains unbowed."
That's the whole novel,
right there,
encapsulated,
and you can put that in a TV
guide or something--
I have the fantasy that you can
do that with any book no matter
how complicated.
Try it with the Bible or
The Odyssey or something
like that.
 
But I think with the
Quixote it works,
and that is what people have in
their imaginations about the
Quixote.
 
Now, general knowledge of this
kind is the aura that surrounds
most classics.
 
It can become a temptation not
to read them.
As a result,
this sort of vague knowledge
also has an undeniable influence
on those who read them.
It is nearly impossible to read
a classic innocently,
unless you are a complete
illiterate.
Besides, if you have read--in
some ways,
you have read Don
Quixote if you have read
The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn,
or if you have read Madame
Bovary,
or if you have read Kafka's
Metamorphosis,
because of the influence in
the Quixote in all of
those works is so great that in
a sense you have read it through
them.
 
Very few literary characters
have this aura.
I wonder, Hamlet,
of course, Faust,
remembering what Ian Watt said,
King Lear, Don Juan,
Oedipus come to mind.
 
Can you think of any others?
 
There are few within each
literary tradition.
For instance,
Huckleberry Finn in the
American context.
 
Jean Valjean,
perhaps, in France.
Why is it that Don
Quixote has such currency as
a kind of literary myth?
 
I think that there is hardly
another secular book to which we
come with more preconceived
notions and expectations.
It is also one of the very few
great works of world literature
that is also a children's book,
as I said in the paragraph of
my introduction.
 
I read it first,
it was read to me,
as a children's book the first
time.
Now, is it akin to a modern
secular Bible?
Miguel de Unamuno,
the Spanish philosopher,
read Don Quixote as if
it were a kind of secular
Bible,
and I have the feeling that my
friend Harold Bloom does the
same;
a kind of new gospel,
a gospel for the modern age.
Why not?
 
You have to get something out
of the Quixote relevant
to your own lives,
I think, or you're going to be
wasting your time here,
believe me.
I can't tell you what that is,
you'll have to find out for
yourself, but why can't it
suggest something relevant to
you?
 
Or, why has it for so many over
so many years?
Now, I gave my explanation in
that first paragraph to my
introduction to the Penguin
Classics, but let me give you a
more detailed one now.
 
Whatever other more subtle and
specialized answers we give to
this question throughout the
semester,
the only way to respond to it
is to say that Don
Quixote embodies the most
modern of predicaments:
the individual's
dissatisfaction with the world
in which he lives,
and his struggle to make the
world in his desire mesh.
 
I mean this world,
not a world yet to come,
a promised heaven.
 
Why is this a modern
predicament or crisis?
Because the world is no longer
a given by the time Cervantes
writes.
 
The western conception of the
universe,
which was up to about sixteenth
century largely based on a
combination of Aristotle and the
Bible,
that is to say,
scholasticism and the work of
Aquinas has been proven faulty.
 
Think of one major change,
the first part of the
Quixote is published in 1605
barely over a hundred years
after the discovery of America,
a hundred a thirteen,
to be exact,
and the confirmation that the
world is round,
which proved beyond argument or
doubt that much of the legacy of
the ancient world in the Middle
Ages was open to question.
 
Think of a second major change,
the Reformation had challenged
the authority of the Catholic
Church and made political gains
in many important European
nations.
Don Quixote is not as a
struggle between the individual
and the gods,
a fight against cosmic abstract
forces as in Greek tragedy,
it is not as in Dante's human
desire transformed into the
yearning for a sublime
transcendental vision cast in a
universe of perfect coherence,
the machine of the world.
 
It is, instead,
the struggle of an individual
against the intractability of a
world in which he lives,
a world redolent with the
imperfections of the material,
caught in a temporal flow that
carries it further and further
away from ideals that seem to
exist only in the individual's
mind.
 
As Hamlet says:
"The world is out of sorts
and I am here to make it
right."
This is what Don Quixote says.
 
"The novel [says
György Lukács,
the great Hungarian critic]
is the epic of a world that has
been abandoned by God."
 
The novels hero's psychology is
demonic.
The objectivity of the novel is
the mature man's knowledge,
that meaning can never quite
penetrate reality,
but that without meaning
reality would disintegrate into
the inessential,
into the nothingness of
inessentiality."
 
This is very abstract language
of Lukács,
who was a neo-Kantian,
but I think the important thing
to remember from that is that
it's a world abandoned by God.
That it is not a God-centered
world any more,
as in Dante,
that the Quixote moves
through.
 
There are other less abstract
definitions of the
Quixote, global definitions
that I am fond of.
The one by Larry Nelson that I
quote in my introduction,
too, which goes:
"In crudest terms,
the formula of Don Quixote may
be expressed as the pairing of a
tall thin idealist with a short
fat realist and setting them off
on a series of hazards.
 
In previous fiction,
pairs of characters had almost
always been young friends or
lovers.
This new, however,
simpler arrangement together
with the motif of bad literature
influencing life constitutes a
primal and influential glory for
Cervantes."
A corollary issue to the
question of the individual's
maladjustment to the world is
another crucial modern concern;
the perception of reality and
the organization of that
perception into something that
can be considered the truth,
the way that modern criticism
has labeled this in the
Quixote is perspectivism.
 
The interpretation of reality
depends on the perspective of
the individual,
meaning in gross terms that
one's interpretation of the
world is colored by one's
background station in life
reading,
desires, and experience in
general.
There is a hilarious series of
episodes when Don Quixote takes
a basin from a barber,
puts it on his head and says
that it is Mambrino's helmet,
a famous helmet from the epic
tradition.
 
And in one of the episodes at
the inn,
there ensues a scholastic like
discussion about whether this
thing is a basin or a helmet,
which is, of course,
a funny reenactment of the
issue of perspectivism,
what for Don Quixote is a
helmet, to others it's a
barber's basin.
 
This is at the core of the
book, at the core of much of the
humor in the book;
this idea of the various
perspectives.
 
Don Quixote sees giants and
Sancho sees windmills,
and the clash repeats itself
throughout the book.
But this points to a very
important issue at the
beginnings of modern philosophy,
having to do precisely with the
perspective of the individual on
reality,
and not a perspective that has
to be determined by received
ideas.
 
So these are some of the issues
that will come up during the
semester as we read the
Quixote.
Please do the reading as I have
set it out in the syllabus.
The syllabus,
as you know,
is on the website.
 
You can download it from the
website, and there you will find
all of the readings in detail.
 
I want to go over very briefly
over that syllabus,
although you don't have it,
and also want to have you meet
with the two TAs so you can
begin to try to set up meetings
for the sections.
 
Now, let me go over the
requirements for the course,
too, because I am sure that you
are eager to learn what your
requirements will be.
 
 
 
Now, a mid term and a take home
final exam;
four two-page papers.
 
For years I have been using
this technique.
Four papers,
but each paper is only two
pages, 500 words,
no more and no less.
Two pages, because I want
something crisp and to the
point: an idea.
 
I will give you the topics of
the paper for which you can
devise your own particular topic
but so you don't have to begin:
'the Quixote,
the novel written by Miguel de
Cervantes...' No,
you're writing for me.
I'm giving you what I hope to
be a sharp, original take on the
topic that I give you,
so four of those.
And then, you are required to
come to class.
We will have discussion after
my lectures in the last fifteen
minutes of the class,
and you are required to come to
the sections as well,
where you will be graded on
your performance in the section.
 
The grade distribution,
you will find it in the
syllabus, it's forty percent the
short papers,
twenty percent the midterm and
twenty-five final exam,
fifteen attendance,
and so forth.
You can get it and it is rather
conventional.
Do you have any questions?
 
Yes.
 
Student:  Where are the
books available?
Prof: The books are
available at Barnes and Noble
and under the number of the
course.
And the books are three:
the Quixote in
translation, the Imperial
Spain, and the
Casebook that I edited
with the criticism.
Now, there is also available a
Spanish edition of the
Quixote if you are going to
read it in Spanish.
It's the same one that is
available for Spanish 660,
that is, the graduate seminar.
 
You can buy both if you want to
play around with them.
I have to say that I am not
entirely happy with
Mr. Rutherford's translation
even though I wrote the
introduction.
 
I'm not happy with any of the
translations.
There really isn't a
translation as good as
Smollett's, from the eighteenth
century, and Rutherford,
what I wrote in the
introduction--and I had a bitter
exchange through the publisher,
because I wanted him to change
a few things,
but he's an Oxford professor
who's very antiquated and he
didn't change it--
But I will be pointing out the
shortcomings of his translation
as we move along.
 
But I mean, that's what we have
to deal with,
because if you're going to read
it in translation,
the translation by Edith
Grossman that has also
circulating a lot,
Edie is my friend.
It's a little better perhaps,
but I like this one because it
has my introduction,
which I think is better than
Harold Bloom's for Edie's
translation-- Harold is a very
dear friend of mine--
so this is why I chose,
again, to go with the
Rutherford translation.
So, any other questions?
 
The books are there.
 
The website has all of the
information you could possibly
want.
 
My office hours are on Fridays,
from ten to twelve.
I am not particularly fond of
e-mails because I don't want you
to,
up at two in the morning,
say: I have to e-mail Professor
Gonzalez about this idea that I
have for a paper.
 
Don't expect that I'm going to
answer the next day,
because I get a lot of e-mails.
 
And so I am much more fond of a
personal meeting.
You come to my office,
and we talk about this,
okay.
 
Any other questions?
 
Well, if not,
we are going to now pause so
that you meet with Elena and
Dina who are distinguished
students,
Elena in Spanish and
Portuguese, and Dina in
Comparative Literature.
Elena, as I said,
is from Alicante,
in Spain.
 
Dina is from Russia.
 
Are you from Moscow itself?
 
No, no, you are from somewhere
in the backlands of Russia.
Siberia, perhaps?
 
Student:  Almost, almost.
 
Prof: So could you meet
with them now,
and try to begin to set up a
meeting?
Because I know it's very
complicated so I'm giving you
some time.
 
Okay.
 
 
 
