(I dedicate this article to the memory of my dear friend Robert Dubuc, who died in Caracas on April 11, 2016).
We commemorate this centenary year another cervantino. It is a propitious moment to resume Quixote and enjoy its deep and poignant wisdom. They have written countless studies on the Quijote and it seems that everything has been said about this extraordinary work of the Spanish and world literature; however, each reader has the right to make their own interpretation of the impact of the book in his spirit.
Don Quixote is a kind of synthesis or compendium, beautifully made, comedy and tragedy that hide and yet they are expressed in human existence. This is seen in countless examples throughout the book. To mention one particularly eloquent, the famous Chapter XXV of Part Two, in which the episode of “braying” recounts, shows, while a hoot humor and tragic consciousness of our failures and moral limitations. In those few Cervantes pages makes us laugh and also tells us that human beings are capable of antagonizing and quarreling, reaching violence, virtually for any reason.
Don Quixote is full of similar moments, and the danger of privileging only one aspect over the other, highlighting excessive tragedy and comedy or vice versa undermine run. This type of unilateral evaluation is presented, I think, in the case of Vladimir Nabokov, lucid author of Lolita , who in the interesting lessons taught and then published on Don Quixote argues that the book is a kind of “encyclopedia of cruelty”. This is correct, to some extent. Throughout the work we are witnessing a relentless accumulation of blows, beatings, insults, kicking, beatings and blows that are asestados and inflicted bulk, either on the hapless Don Quixote or his inseparable squire, the faithful insuperably Sancho Panza. A blows and whippings ridicule and humiliation of victims with unusual frequency the two immortal characters, whose distancing from the “normal” reality, and its friendly and at the same irritating time add loosening of all ties with the world the rest of us looks obvious, it makes them outstanding for the exercise of mock objects, joke, jokes and derision and contempt. In multiple passages Cervantes draws the hidden evil that sometimes arises from dark areas of the soul, an evil that repudiates everything that offends our sense of stability, and rejects everything that calls into question our universe comfortable certitudes.
I think the interpretation of Nabokov falls short, because his vision of Don Quixote stands only part of the book over another equally important. In this infinite novel also they spring to gush kindness and humor, as well as solidarity and loyalty. Hence read Don Quixote with calm, devotion and dedication to the work demands and deserves, it is an exceptional experience. On the one hand, you do not want the book to end; on the other, when it reaches its end it is impossible not experience deep emotion, and almost to tears at the “defeat” of the Knight Errant, who prostrate on his deathbed renounces his adventures, but he does it faced the requests Sancho not to abandon their idealism, as well as the pleas of other characters, of the allegedly “sane” to remain the “crazy” usual.
I’ve been fortunate to run into two studies about the work that I think are notable for their analytical depth and emotional empathy. I mean, on the one hand, the brilliant book of Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukacs, entitled Theory of the Novel , and, moreover, not less relevant article of the Austrian sociologist Alfred Schultz, on Don Quixote and the problem of reality .
the study of Lukacs (which are discussed further elsewhere), lucidly explains -and the novel Don Quixote is a classic the genre is a literary genre that corresponds to a time without harmony, a fragmented time, in which the individual confronts an increasingly empty of content and lacking firm coordinates world, and then tends to invent a parallel universe, to escape the privileging reality and fantasy. In that vein, the soul of Don Quixote goes beyond the strictures of an environment that limits and for which keeps increasing distance. Don Quixote, in other words, is a great soul facing a small and unsatisfying world. And certainly, the Spain in which Cervantes wrote and which places its heroes (as Sancho so is, in its way), was a nation in decline, in which righting wrongs was a very worthy occupation and was fighting mills wind.
the study of Schultz, meanwhile, is a captivating psychological and sociological exploration of “parallel universes” (concept first articulated by William James), which are present in Don Quixote. Schultz analyzes the work from the perspective of different levels of reality in which the action takes place, and Artistry of Cervantes to handle the contrasting levels that exist in the book, but without forcing things. Cervantes preserves a fine balance in which the two central characters, and dozens of supporting characters, perform their mental acrobatics and practices plunged into a whirlwind of misunderstandings and confusion, which nevertheless allow assimilate them reader without credibility of the book is lost and its various fields and sections.
I mention these studies Quixote because I believe that help the interested reader to delve further into a work which, as I noted above, contains an inimitable compendium of wisdom about what human, about comedy, absurdity and tragedy that are part of our condition.
Now, it is essential to add to the work of Lukacs and Schultz extraordinary Guide to the reader of Don Quixote , the great Spanish historian Salvador de Madariaga, a book simply great, with genuine affection and subtle psychological insight we patentiza how Don Quixote and Sancho begin to look over the work, to empathize and to exchange roles, but without that happening with unnecessary roughness, but through a dynamic characterized by grace and cervantinas acuity perhaps his greatest virtues as a writer.
Don Quixote, a masterpiece of our Spanish language, it is the finest expression of that priceless treasure that we have inherited that language so full of richness, flexibility and expressive power. It is a legacy and a tool whose true value possibly still not reach quite understand.
(www.anibalromero.net)
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