Lectures on Don Quixote

by Vladimir Nabokov, Fredson Bowers (Editor), Guy Davenport (Foreword by)

Overview

One of the twentieth century’s greatest novelists offers his take on the Spanish classic.
 
The author of Lolita and Pale Fire was not only a master of fiction but a distinguished literary critic as well. In this collection of lectures, which he delivered at Harvard in the early 1950s, Vladimir Nabokov shares insights based on a chapter-by-chapter synopsis of the seventeenth-century novel by Miguel de Cervantes, a timeless classic and one of the most deeply influential works in all of Western literature.
 
Rejecting the common interpretation of Don Quixote as a warm satire, Nabokov perceives the work as a catalog of cruelty through which the gaunt knight passes. Edited and with a preface by Fredson Bowers, this volume offers “a powerful, critical, and dramatic elaboration of the theme of illusion” (V. S. Pritchett, The New York Review of Books).
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780544998087
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	06/01/2018
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Sales rank:	1,021,540
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977), Russian-born poet, novelist, literary critic, translator, and essayist was awarded the National Medal for Literature for his life's work in 1973. He taught literature at Wellesley, Stanford, Cornell, and Harvard. He is the author of many works including Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada, and Speak, Memory.
Guy Davenport (1927–2005) was an American writer, artist, translator, and teacher who was best known for his short stories that combined a modernist style with classical subjects. Originally from South Carolina, Davenport graduated from Duke University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, where he wrote his thesis on James Joyce. After earning a PhD from Harvard, he taught English at Haverford College from 1961 to 1963 before accepting a position at the University of Kentucky, where he remained until his retirement in 1990. In 2012, the university appointed its inaugural Guy Davenport Endowed English Professor. Davenport won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for his literary achievements and an O. Henry Award for his short stories. He was also a visual artist whose illustrations were included in several of his books. His works include Da Vinci’s Bicycle, Eclogues, Apples and Pears, and The Jules Verne Steam Balloon.

Date of Birth:

April 23, 1899

Date of Death:

July 2, 1977

Place of Birth:

St. Petersburg, Russia

Place of Death:

Montreux, Switzerland

Education:

Trinity College, Cambridge, 1922

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

"REAL LIFE" AND FICTION

We shall do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for so-called "real life" in novels. Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts of fiction. Don Quixote is a fairy tale, so is Bleak House, so is Dead Souls. Madame Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But without these fairy tales the world would not be real. A masterpiece of fiction is an original world and as such is not likely to fit the world of the reader. On the other hand, what is this vaunted "real life," what are these solid "facts"? One is suspicious of them when one sees biologists stalking each other with loaded genes, or battling historians locked in each other's arms as they roll in the dust of centuries. Whether or not his newspaper and a set of senses reduced to five are the main sources of the so-called "real life" of the so-called average man, one thing is fortunately certain: namely, that the average man himself is but a piece of fiction, a tissue of statistics.

The notion of "real life," then, is based on a system of generalities, and it is only as generalities that the so-called "facts" of so-called "real life" are in contact with a work of fiction. The less general a work of fiction is, then, the less recognizable it is in terms of "real life." Or to put it the other way around, the more vivid and new details in a work of fiction, then the more it departs from so-called "real life," since "real life" is the generalized epithet, the average emotion, the advertised multitude, the commonsensical world. I am deliberately plunging at once into rather icy waters, which is inevitable if one wishes to break the ice. There is no use, therefore, looking in these books for detailed factual representation of so-called "real life." On the other hand, between certain generalities of fiction and certain generalities of life there is some correspondence. Take physical or mental pain, for instance, or dreams, or madness, or such things as kindness, mercy, justice — take these general elements of human life, and you must agree that it should be a profitable task to study the way they are transmuted into art by masters of fiction.

THE "WHERE?" OF DON QUIXOTE

Let us not kid ourselves. Cervantes is no land surveyor. The wobbly backdrop of Don Quixote is fiction — and rather unsatisfactory fiction at that. With its preposterous inns full of belated characters from Italian storybooks and its preposterous mountains teeming with lovelorn poetasters disguised as Arcadian shepherds, the picture Cervantes paints of the country is about as true and typical of seventeenth-century Spain as Santa Claus is true and typical of the twentieth-century North Pole. Indeed, Cervantes seems to know Spain as little as Gogol did central Russia.

However, it is still Spain; and here is where the generalities of "real life" (in this case geography) may be applied to the generalities of a work of fiction. In a general way Don Quixote's adventures, in the first part, take place around the villages of Argamasilla and El Toboso in La Mancha, in the Castilian parched plain, and to the south in the mountains of the Morena range, Sierra Morena. I suggest that you look at these places on the map that I have drawn. Spain as you will see spreads in terms of platitudes (sorry, latitudes), degrees 43 to 36, from Massachusetts to North Carolina, with the book's main action taking place in a region corresponding to Virginia. You will find the university town of Salamanca in the west, near the border of Portugal; and you will admire Madrid and Toledo in the middle of Spain. In the second part of the book the general drift of the ramble takes us north toward Saragossa in Aragon but then for reasons I shall discuss later the author changes his mind and sends his hero to Barcelona instead, on the eastern coast.

If, however, we examine Don Quixote's excursions topographically, we are confronted by a ghastly muddle. I shall spare you its details and only mention the fact that throughout those adventures there is a mass of monstrous inaccuracies at every step. The author avoids descriptions that would be particular and might be verified. It is quite impossible to follow these rambles in central Spain across four or six provinces, in the course of which until we reach Barcelona in the northeast one does not meet with a single known town or cross a single river. Cervantes's ignorance of places is wholesale and absolute, even in respect of Argamasilla in the La Mancha district, which some consider the more or less definite starting point.

THE "WHEN?" OF THE BOOK

So much for space. Now about time.

From 1667, the publication year of Milton's Paradise Lost, we now slide back into a sunshot hell, back to the first two decades of the seventeenth century.

Odysseus in a blaze of bronze leaping from the threshold upon the wooers; Dante shuddering at Virgil's side as sinner and snake grade into one; Satan bombing the angels — these and others exist within a form or phase of art that we call epic. Great literatures of the past seem to have to be born on the periphery of Europe, along the rim of the known world. We are aware of such southeastern, southern, and northwestern points as, respectively, Greece, Italy, and England. A fourth point is now Spain in the southwest.

What we shall witness now is the evolution of the epic form, the shedding of its metrical skin, the hoofing of its feet, a sudden fertile cross between the winged monster of the epic and the specialized prose form of entertaining narration, more or less a domesticated mammal, if I may pursue the metaphor to its lame end. The result is a fertile hybrid, a new species, the European novel.

So the place is Spain and the time is 1605 to 1615, a very handy decade easy to pocket and keep. Spanish literature flourishes, Lope de Vega writes 500 plays which today are as dead as the armful of plays by his contemporary, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Our man comes very softly out of his corner. I can devote only a slanting minute to his life, which, however, you will easily find in various introductions to his work. We are interested in books, not people. Of Saavedra's maimed hand you will learn not from me.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616); William Shakespeare (1564–1616). The Spanish Empire was at the height of its power and fame when Cervantes was born. Its worst troubles and its best literature began at the end of the century. Madrid in the days of Cervantes's literary apprenticeship, from 1583 onward, was alive with needy rhymesters and producers of more or less polished Castilian prose. There was, as I have already said, Lope de Vega, who completely overshadowed the playwright Cervantes and could write an entire play within twenty-four hours with all the jokes and deaths necessary. There was Cervantes himself — a failure as a soldier, as a poet, as a playwright, as an official (he was paid sixty cents a day for requisitioning wheat for the luckless Spanish Armada) — and then, in 1605, he produced the first part of Don Quixote.

It may be worthwhile to cast a rapid glance over the world of letters between 1605 and 1615, in which years both parts of Don Quixote were published. One thing catches the fancy of this observer: it is the almost pathological orgy of sonnet-making throughout Europe, in Italy, Spain, England, Poland, France; the queer but not wholly contemptible urge to cage an emotion, an image, or an idea within a cell of fourteen lines, behind the gilt bars of five or seven rhymes, five in the Latin countries, seven in England.

Let us glance at England. In the tremendous afterglow of the Elizabethan period the great series of Shakespeare's incomparable tragedies — Hamlet (1601), Othello (1604), Macb eth (1605), King Lear (1606) — were or had just been produced. (Indeed, while Cervantes was making his mad knight, Shakespeare might have been making his mad King.) And in Shakespeare's oakshade Ben Jonson and Fletcher and a number of other dramatists grew — a dense undergrowth of talent. Shakespeare's sonnets, the ultimate reach of this type of thing, were published in 1609 and that influential monument in prose, King James's version of the Bible, came out in 1611. Milton was born in 1608, between the publication dates of the first and the second part of Don Quixote. In England's Virginia colony Captain John Smith produced his A True Revelation in 1608 and A Map of Virginia in 1612. He was the teller of the tale of Pocahontas, a rude but robust narrator, this country's first frontier writer.

For France this decade was a short period of slump between two great eras, immediately after the admirable colorful era of Ronsard the poet and of Montaigne the essayist. Poetry was dying a decorous death at the hands of pale perfectionists, perfect rhymesters but impotent visionaries, such as the famous and influential Malherbe. Such inept sentimental novels as L'Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé were the fashion. The next really great poet, La Fontaine, was not yet born, and neither Racine nor Molière the playwrights were yet on the scene.

In Italy, in an age of oppression and tyranny beginning in the middle of the sixteenth century, with all thought under suspicion and all expression of thought fettered, the decade we are discussing is one of inflated poetry with nothing worth mentioning beyond the extravagant metaphors and far-fetched conceits of Giovanni Marini and his followers. Torquato Tasso the poet had completed his tragically botched life ten years before, and Giordano Bruno, the great independent thinker, had just been burned at the stake (1600).

As for Germany, no great writers are present during the decade under discussion, which corresponds to the threshold of the so-called German Renaissance (1600–1740). French literature was strongly influencing various minor poets, and there were numerous literary societies modeled on Italian ones.

In Russia between the fiery pamphlets of Ivan the Terrible (end of the sixteenth century) and the birth of the greatest of all Muscovite writers (before the nineteenth-century Renaissance) the Archpriest Avvakum (1620–1681), all we can distinguish in a protracted era of oppression and isolation are anonymous fairy tales, narrated unrhymed poems intoned by reciters singing the exploits of legendary heroes (the oldest text of these Bwilinas was written down in 1620 for an Englishman, Richard James). In Russia, as in Germany, literature was still fetal.

THE GENERAL COMMENTS OF CRITICS

Some critics, a very vague minority long dead, have tried to prove that Don Quixote is but a stale farce. Others have maintained that Don Quixote is the greatest novel ever written. A hundred years ago one enthusiastic French critic, Sainte-Beuve, called it "the Bible of Humanity." Let us not fall under the spell of these enchanters.

The translator Samuel Putnam in the Viking edition recommends books by Bell and by Krutch on Don Quixote. I strongly object to many things in those books. I object to such statements as "[the] perception [of Cervantes] was as sensitive, his mind as supple, his imagination as active, and his humor as subtle as those of Shakespeare." Oh no — even if we limit Shakespeare to his comedies, Cervantes lags behind in all those things. Don Quixote but squires King Lear — and squires him well. The only matter in which Cervantes and Shakespeare are equals is the matter of influence, of spiritual irrigation — I have in view the long shadow cast upon receptive posterity of a created image which may continue to live independently from the book itself. Shakespeare's plays, however, will continue to live, apart from the shadow they project.

It has been noted that both writers died on St. George's Day, 1616, "after having joined to slay the dragon of false appearances," as Bell (p. 34) puts it whimsically but incorrectly: far from slaying the dragon, Cervantes and Shakespeare each in his own way paraded the lovely beast, leading it on a leash to have its iridescent scales and melancholy eye enjoyed through the eternity of letters. (Incidentally, although the twenty-third of April is taken to be the date of both men's deaths — and is my birthday — Cervantes and Shakespeare died by different calendars; there is a ten-day gap between the two dates.)

Around Don Quixote we hear a plangent clash of opinions — sometimes with the ring of Sancho's sturdy but pedestrian mind and sometimes reminding us of Don Quixote's fury in attacking windmills. Catholics and Protestants, lean mystics and fat statesmen, well-meaning but verbose and stonedead critics of the Sainte-Beuve, Turgenev, or Brandes type, and quadrillions of quarrelsome scholars have expressed their conflicting views about the book and the man who made it. There are those like Aubrey Bell, who thinks that no great masterpiece can be composed without the help of a universal church; he praises "the broad-minded tolerant spirit of the ecclesiastical censors in Spain" (p. 166) and maintains that Cervantes and his hero were good Catholics in the bosom of the good Counter Reformation. There are others — crusty Protestants — who on the contrary insinuate that Cervantes may have been in touch with the Reformers. Bell also holds that the lesson of the book is Don Quixote's presumption — the folly of aiming at the general good, a field of endeavor that belongs to the Church alone. The same school maintains that Cervantes bothered as little about the Inquisition as did the playwright Lope de Vega or the painter Velazquez so that whatever fun is poked at the priests in the book is good-natured, family fun, strictly an internal affair, cloister quips, jollities in the rose garden. But other critics harshly adopt a directly opposite point of view and try to prove, not very successfully, that Cervantes in Don Quixote fearlessly expressed his scorn for what a harsh Protestant commentator, Duffield, calls "Romish ritual" and "priestly tyranny"; and the same critic concludes that not only was Don Quixote a monomaniac but that the whole of "Spain in the sixteenth century was overrun with madmen of the same [pathological] type, men of one idea" — since "the king, the Inquisition, the nobles, the cardinals, priests, and nuns ... were all dominated," as that critic violently puts it, "by one mastering and overbearing conviction that the way to heaven was through a door, the keys of which were in their keeping."

We shall not follow in the dusty path of these pious or impious, impish or solemn, generalizations. It does not really matter very much whether Cervantes was a good Catholic or a bad one; it does not even matter whether he was a good or a bad man; nor do I deem very important his attitude, whatever it was, to the conditions of his day. Personally, I am more inclined to accept the view that he did not much bother about these conditions. What, however, does concern us is the book itself, a certainSpanish text in a more or less adequate English translation. Proceeding from the text, we do come, of course, across certain moral implications that have to be considered in a light that perhaps transcends the world of the book itself, and we shall not wince when we come to those thorns. "L'homme n'est rien — l'oeuvre est tout" (the master is nothing, the masterpiece is everything) said Flaubert. In many an art-for-art man there dwells a frustrated moralist — and there is something about the ethics of the book Don Quixote that casts a livid laboratory light on the proud flesh of some of its passages. We are going to speak of its cruelty.

GENERAL REMARKS ON FORM

Novels can be divided into one-track novels and multi-track novels.

One-track — in which there is only one major line of human existence.

Multi-track — in which there are two such lines, or many.

The one or many lives may be present all the time in every chapter, or else the author may use what I call the switch, minor or major.

Minor — when the chapters in which the major life or lives are actively present but alternate with chapters in which minor characters discuss those main lives.

Major — when in multi-track novels the author switches completely from the account of one life to the account of another, then back again. The many lives may be kept apart for long stretches, but one of the features of the multi-track novel as a literary form is that the many lives are bound to come into contact at this or that point.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Lectures on Don Quixote"
by .
Copyright © 1983 Estate of Vladimir Nabokov.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents,
Frontispiece,
Copyright,
Editor's Preface by Fredson Bowers,
Foreword by Guy Davenport,
The Lectures,
Introduction,
Two Portraits: Don Quixote And Sancho Panza,
Structural Matters,
Cruelty And Mystification,
The Chroniclers Theme, Dulcinea, and Death,
Victories And Defeats,
Narrative and Commentary Part One (1605),
Narrative and Commentary Part Two (1615),
Appendix,
About the Author,
Footnotes,