Critics
in Disarray: On Don Quixote
by Douglas Glover
[an exerpt from The Enamoured Knight,
Oberon Press, 2004]
Read
another excerpt on The Globe and Mail website
One
can quickly become confused, bemused and befuddled reading the file on Don
Quixote. Walter Starkie, in the introduction to his translation,
writes, "Out of a spirit of fin de siècle melancholy sprang
Don Quixote, the first modern novel in the world...." Harold
Bloom, in How to Read and Why, calls it "the first and best
of all novels, which nevertheless is more than a novel...." In the New
York Times, Carlos Fuentes writes, "If for many reasons Don
Quixote is the first modern novel, it is pre-eminently
because...." Walter Benjamin called it "the earliest perfect
specimen of the novel."
But other critics tell us that it’s
not the first novel or not even a novel at all. Ian Watt, in The Rise
of the Novel, begins the history of the novel with Defoe’s
Robinson Crusoe in England in the early eighteenth century because
it reflects the common-sense realism of the rising English middle class.
André Malraux said Madame de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves
(1678) was the first novel because it concentrates on depicting the
inner emotional life of a character. In From Dawn to Decadence,
Jacques Barzun gives credit for inventing the new genre to the anonymous
author of La Vida de Lazarillo de Tormes (1554).
What makes the work, though short, a
true novel is this double subject: character and social scene, both
treated matter-of-factly and by inference critically. Don Quixote does
indeed contain elements of what is the distinctive subject matter of
the novel, but it merges them with allegory and philosophy. It is not
bound by the plausible, whereas the novel pretends to be genuine
history, full of real people and places. (From Dawn to
Decadence, 111)
It’s actually not so difficult to
figure out what the problem is here. When you look at what critics say
about the novel, you find roughly five schools of thought; let’s call
them the strict realist, the hybrid, the weak thematic, the easy-going
(romantic and postmodern) and the experimental. The problem then is that
no-one actually ever tells you there are five schools of thought. The
poor reader or the neophyte novelist assumes everyone is on the same map
when the subject of novels comes up when, in fact, there are multiple
maps and they’re not congruent. They have fallen into what Milan
Kundera calls "the slough where everyone thinks he understands
everything without understanding anything."
The primary cleavage upon which
theories of the novel divide is the concept of reality. Most theories
are deficient because they privilege one type of novel, a particular
era, a social class, or a particular subject matter: reality, the
plausible, or as Theodor Adorno calls it "mere existence"
(where the idea of what constitutes reality tends toward a capitalist
bourgeois common sense definition of the term). With or without being
conscious of it, every novelist begins by making quite complicated
decisions about what is and is not realistic. In a sense, every novel
moves the goalposts this way or that; every novel puts into question the
nature of reality.
If you define plausibility strictly in
terms of contemporary, common sense, everyday reality, then all sorts of
texts and textual moves become non-novelistic. Old-fashioned motifs,
borrowed from romance, epic and myth, become non-novelistic. Certain
forms, such as the allegory, which direct the reader to a reality beyond
the surface reality of the text, become non-novelistic. Form itself, the
aesthetic exfoliation of repetitions, doubles and reflecting parallels,
becomes non-novelistic. And anything that draws attention in the text to
the fact that you are reading a book is non-novelistic. This last item
involves a paradox: a novel assumes a certain definition of reality, but
if that definition becomes an explicit part of the text the text becomes
unrealistic. In other words, if the novel becomes too aware of itself as
a novel, it somehow ceases to be a novel at all.
Don Quixote is exuberantly and
self-consciously problematic on every single one of these points, which,
in turn, problematizes much modern critical thought about novels. In
fact, it’s possible to read Cervantes’ attack on those false,
misleading and dishonest chivalric romances as an attack on
verisimilitude, the suspension of disbelief, and books that pretend to
seduce us into thinking they are true. Cervantes moves the goalposts to
include the book itself; a book that does not confess its own
bookishness as part of its reality is a fraud. Of course, this is partly
a very witty joke, a play on the paradox of verisimilitude, the quality
of seeming to be real. From the outset, Cervantes engages with
the fakery of his own project; he composes that odd thing, an
anti-novel, a book against books.
Or, to put this another way, Cervantes
composes out of an awareness of the various novelistic possibilities
suggested by the multiple meanings of that word "reality." At
the outset, he invents a new form, playfully aware of itself as a book.
But the history of the novel took another path, the path of
verisimilitude. Writing about Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
and Denis Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste, similarly bookish
books, Kundera makes a parallel argument.
They reach heights of playfulness, of
lightness, never scaled before or since. Afterward, the novel got
itself tied to
the imperative of verisimilitude, to realistic settings, to
chronological order. It abandoned the possibilities opened up by these
two masterpieces, which could have led to a different development of
the novel (yes, it’s possible to imagine a whole other history of
the European novel....) (The Art of the Novel, 15)
As a matter of fact, however, it
actually seems as if the novel followed several historical trajectories
at once. While one kind of novel followed the path of conventional
realism, what we might call an alternative tradition of
self-consciousness, complexity, experiment, elaboration and playfulness
has flourished simultaneously, though perhaps with leaner commercial
success.
*
Other Douglas Glover features on The
Danforth Review:
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