The Phrenological Journal & Haunted Typebox Blog

I would warn readers of this blog not to read further, lest the ending of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha be revealed to them, but that would be presumptuous. Which is not to deny existence to any chance readers, but to temper my own expectations. Let this preamble then close so I may begin my eulogy for the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance.

It’s hard to say goodbye to a character in a book. At the best, when you close the covers that character is still alive, so you may still imagine them in some further adventures. But Don Quixote dies. And he does so twice, once by his own hand and once by his sorrow’s (though these causes are so intertwined as to make them one). Or perhaps it is, as he claims, God that retires Don Quixote. We should blame that false Knight, the bachellor Carrasco, since he conquers the Knight, and that causes the sickness. Don Quixote, sick to the heart, develops a fever which—ironically—gives him a sudden lucidity, and Alonso Quixano denounces his mad, chivalrous self. This is the death that’s hard to take. It softens the blow for Quixano’s death. Because no reader can conclude these adventures and not love Don Quixote, and feel betrayed by Quixano (and justly his God).

I finished the book in a cafe, and as I closed its covers I looked up at those around me. People sipping drinks, others walking by, people being people. And it came to me that we are all Don Quixote. I don’t mean for this to sound grandiose. It was a quieter truth—and not an original thought either. But I felt it profoundly. In a strange melding of Borges and Bloom, I truly began to see everyone as Don Quixote, in a very literal sense. Which made me laugh, and it became a kind of game. The man punching away at his iPhone was Don Quixote, as was the woman with the double-wide stroller. Just as Borges says that we can read every book as though authored by a someone else, I think it’s possible to read people as though they are, in fact, Don Quixote (even if they never read the book). And the world makes a good deal more sense by it.

Why else would we derive a word, quixotic, from this character’s name? There’s no Hamletish, no Havishamic, no Marlowic. And yet,the experience of reading Quixote’s pursuits defy the pejorative nature of the term. Because we have to love him. Which is to say nothing of Sancho. And as Sancho would say, “there’s much to say about that.”

The Knight of the Sorrowful face is again free, and so am I. Away from the confinement of privilege, and the pranks of the Duke and Duchess, he can do what he does best: devise his own jokes upon himself. But oh, how I wept with joy at chapter LIX, where Don Quixote’s greatest adversary is revealed: the author of the false Quixote (it’s true, there were at least two tears in my eyes when I read this most meta of moments—You may say two tears do not make a weeping, but how my heart sang when I read this!).

It is a welcome change after the previous section. It’s curious how both volumes reach a kind of plateau in their second acts. The narratives start to belong to others. In the first, it’s a volume of writing found by the curate, and in the second it’s to the cursed Duke and Duchess. It is when the story is in the hands of our knight that it blossoms, that the full potential of Quixote’s questionable madness can take us into new and uncharted realms of brilliance.

Yes, it’s the Knight of the Sorrowful face who guides us. But does someone guide him? Quixote is a chivalric knight who serves his lady and his god, but just as his lady is a projection of his delusions, the same could be said for his god. I believe it’s Bloom who points out that while Quixote professes faith, he is ultimately drawn by his own whims. His god is in his universe, as real to him as the pasteboard Moors in the Master Pedro’s puppet show. Is there a god over Don Quixote? There is certainly providence in this universe (we, today, could not stand the narrative conceits that bring together the far flung lovers in the first Volume, but such is the concept of providence in the 17th century). But a god? For the historian, of course, there is. And the name of that god is Muhammad. But how little his hand seems to be in play in this most important history.

The question that runs through Quixote is whether or not the “knight” is mad. And it’s not just the reader that asks it. The characters do too. From those encountered in route, to the loyal squire, Sancho, the debate rages across Spain and even all of La Mancha (Cervantes used this joke twice, I will use it once).

I can’t judge Quixote’s sanity, but what I can judge, or at least opine on, is how the argument reveals something about the 17th Century’s idea of madness (and our own). Despite Quixote’s obvious outward signs of madness (charging a flock of sheep, wearing a barber’s basin on his head, etc.), many of those who meet him hold this judgement in reserve. The reason? His intelligence. Those who meet him marvel at his contradictory nature: the aforementioned signs of delusion versus his lucid explanations of philosophical concepts. Such contradictions create cognitive dissonance in the 17th century mind. But in ours?

I was talking to a friend of mine about this dichotomy, how alien it seemed to me. Those of us in the twenty-centuries are accustomed to the idea of madmen being geniuses—it’s de rigeur. So much so that anyone who wants to be perceived as a genius, takes on the colors of madness, builds a mythology of irrational acts. I think of Dali who, naturally, illustrated Quixote, but the list goes on: Crispin Glover, Marilyn Manson, Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon. I think it’s a fin de siecle trend, and we see the genesis in Van Gogh, Rimbaud, even Poe. Genius = Madness.

But not so in 17th c.  Spain. No, here madness has its equivalency with idiocy. After all, it’s still the dark ages of what we now know as psychology. At some point it all changed. The insane could be ingenious. It may be that our Knight of the Sorrowful Face, with Hamlet as accomplice, ushered in this idea even before that dutch painter removed part of his ear.

Idol is starting to get sad. I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense (not the way Simon did when he used it to describe Anoop’s performance). No, it’s sad to see these people go. This means I’m so far gone in this American Idol mess that there’s no other way out then to finish the season. But it’s going to be hard.

Yes, it’s hard to say goodbye to Jorge Nunez, who broke down into a bilingual thank-you speech when he found out he made it into the top 12  13. He’s cute, his voice has a good tone, and he brought genuine emotion to every performance (save the last, he just wasn’t cut-out for Michael Jackson and he floundered when the judges asked him about it). We also said farewell to sixteen-year-old Jasmine Murray, who seemed like one of Idol’s brightest stars. Her R&B vocals should have been able to carry Michael Jackson. Still, she was up against my girl Megan Joy. With her tatts and her love of Bjork, she’s got my heart.

This involvement is unnerving, but let us turn to Don Quixote, because his quest too lacks neither heartbreak nor travails. And suddenly a question of his madness starts to ripple through the book. Volume II is more philosophical and the Knight, in turn, is seemingly more lucid. In fact, it’s a good XXVI (26!) chapters before Quixote enters into unprovoked combat. Whereas in Volume I, he saw enemies in every cart and procession, in Volume II he’s more likely to enter into conversation than to draw his sword. But here is the line which breaks our understanding of Quixote:

“this was the first day he really knew and believed he was a true knight errant and not a fantastic one…”

Actually, this is not the first time. Earlier we learn that the Knight of the Sorrowful Face Lions is said to have retracted a portion of his adventure, claiming he “had invented it because he thought it was consonant and compatible with the adventures he had read in his histories.” So, Sir Knight, how mad are you? Are you just pretending?

It’s a good question and not a question that we’re unprepared for. Twice we are presented with the question of the difference between going mad and choosing to go mad. Quixote presents the argument in the mountains of Sierra Moreno claiming it is superior to choose—his reasoning having to do with the nobility of sacrifice, penance. The Knight of Mirrors makes a similar claim, though on slightly different grounds: “The difference between those two madmen is that the one who can’t help it will always be mad, and the one who chooses can stop whenever he wants to.”

Websites that you visit often know you. Or they know your cookie. And they recognize you. Like a good friend, they say, “hello.” But unlike a good friend, unless your friend is Rod Serling or David Byrne, they give you a curious option. My online bank, for instance, has a link that says: “I’m not Kent.”

I’m not exaggerating when I say that it sometimes sends me reeling, that it sometimes seems like either: a) a distinct possibility, or b), a viable option. It depends on my optimism, but the feeling is the same. And so are the roots. It’s a little postmodern and a little nouveau vague, a little depression and a little bit of 21st century alienation. It’s born of a lot of things, not the least of which being a life that’s increasingly mediated through technology. There are other things too: a lost job, artistic ennui, the pressure-sensitive door at the supermarket not opening for me. In short: oh, godless universe, who am I?

I’ve long known that identity is a thing that’s built of component parts, just as I’ve felt that there is no plan, no order, no meaning. It’s just that there wasn’t always a feeling of fear and even doubt that came along with it (a contradiction, sure). But hey, I’m almost 33—and I still don’t know whom I want to be.

There are stories where an ordinary man becomes a man without a past, a plebeian turned assassin*, an amnesiac, a prisoner who dreams his execution anew every time he dies**, any of a number of narratives—many of them violent—about the arbitrary nature of identity. Yes, too, there are narratives where old men think they’re Knights (but that’s another story).

If “I’m not Kent” is a condition, I’m  not sure what will become of me. And if it’s an option and I click it, I may scream as loud as I can: “My God, what have I done!”

*Manchette’s 3 To Kill

**The Twilight Zone: Shadow Play

As the Ingenious Knight Don Quixote makes his way across Spain, the Idol hopefuls continue to sing their way into the hearts of Americans. I don’t know that this is really a parallel relationship. But it is an introduction to a discussion of last night’s Idol proceedings. For the first two-thirds of the evening, it was pretty hard to pluck out a winner. We had perfectly affable performers doing capable renditions of songs, but nothing stellar. Predictably, the stand-out performance came at the end (if this aint fixed, it’s at least programmed) with Lil Rounds ’slaying’ some modern pop song (Keyes? Blidge?). It really was good. I guess that’s how I judge Idol: If someone can impress me in a genre I despise.

Still, and I know this is completely politically incorrect, last night’s Idol was ’special.’ By which I mean, you had the gay guy, the Spanish-speaking guy, and the blind guy. The last two are shoe-ins, both for the aforementioned characteristics, and their performances (and for Jorge’s tears and Spanish-speaking appeal to the voting public). It’s gonna be Lil, Jorge, and Scott. 

And what of the Knight of Rueful Countenance the Sorrowful Face? Quixote confronts a troupe of costumed actors and—surprisingly—takes them for a troupe of costumed actors. For Quixote, everything is transmogrified into an element of his fiction, except this element of honest  illusion (actually this brings to my count two things which are seen as they are, the other being the fulling hammers).

And now Quixote has met his mirror…

Having just begun the Second Volume, I’ve a bit of a nag. In the First, Quixote returns home with Sancho, the Barber, and the Curate. At the beginning of the Second Volume, we are informed that the Barber and Curate leave Don Quixote to convalesce for a month. So far, so good. But, in that time the first volume is published and subsequently read widely by the people of Spain. And we know that there was translation of the First Volume from arabic. That’s quite an accelerated schedule!

There are a few possibilities:

One, I’m completely wrong. I missed some marker of time passing.

Two, the explanation is still to come, and it owes to some distortion on the part of Sanson.

Three, that all of Volume One is nothing but a creation of a Volume Two, that the Quixote of V. 2, has just now sprung into being. That Volume One is a pure fiction, in the “real” narrative of Volume Two.

Four, it’s an oversight of the author or printer (like the theft of Sancho’s donkey), yet it’s not noted by either Smollet or Grossman. This, I find improbable.

Five, Cervantes is having it both ways: since some fifteen years elapsed between writing Volumes One and Two for the author, but only one month for the characters (of course the history which forms Volume II would not be “written” until later by the book’s “author.”)

Six, see item “one” above.

My plan had been to read something entirely different between volumes of Don Quixote—but that’s not likely to happen. Quixote has a peculiar power, a kind of charm that is felt not just by the reader. Even those who try to save Quixote are entranced by his madness, many even envy it. Quixote leaves his quotidian existence to live romantically, to bring to life narratives that are—to him—as true as the books in the bible. The scope of his madness is captivating: its ability to transform his reality so completely, to accommodate any objection and lay waste to any reason. Its an enchantment that even takes in the book’s main narrator, the one who collects the ‘histories’ that comprise the book. For in these tales of madness, he reports greatness.

And he’s not wrong. Quixote is great. The reader is left to figure out in which way he is great. Because Quixote is a bit of a hazard: attacking innocents, freeing prisoners, robbing barbers of their basins. We would not suffer such madness today, particularly if we were the targets. But to become that mad man, to wield that invincible arm? That we might do.

So while I will not be reading any other book between volumes, I think I will be reading a different Quixote. I’d been reading the Smollet mainly, and using the Grossman as backup. But the more I reference the Grossman, the more I love her dialogue. And I appreciate a vocabulary that’s more familiar to a reader in the 21st century. Though I must say I prefer Smollet’s ‘Knight of the Rueful Countenance’ to Grossman’s ‘Knight of the Sorrowful Face.’ But such are the sacrifices we make in translations.

There are three things I’ve promised myself to do while unemployed charting my way towards self-employment. The first is concerned with said employment, and it’s probably the least interesting.

The other two things are joined endeavors: To read Don Quixote and to watch a full season of American Idol. These items are to be concurrent and not simultaneous. This sounds like a kind of contrived postmodern pairing, comparing high and low culture. The purpose is not to examine one in the light of the other, to draw comparisons between the Idol quest for fame and the man of La Mancha’s quest for chivalric legend.* No, it’s not about that.

Having invoked the analogy in my denial of it, here’s what this is about: Doing one thing I’ve attempted before (reading Quixote) and one thing I’ve never wanted to do before (watching Idol). And it’s about becoming involved in two long narratives, both occasionally daunting but full of their own brand of joy.

-Kent

* I am reminded of the Borges story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’ in which Menard decries works that are ‘good for nothing but occasioning a plebeian delight in anachronism or (worse yet) captivating us with the elementary notion that all times and places are the same, or are different.’