See through my eyes.

"He also told Don Quixote that in his castle there wasn't any chapel where he could keep the vigil of arms, because it had been demolished to build a new one, but he knew that in case of need, vigil might be kept anywhere and Don Quixote could do so that night in a courtyard in the castle..."
"... Don Quixote promised to do exactly as he'd been told and then was given orders to keep the vigil of arms in a large yard on one side of the inn; and he gathered his armour together and placed it on a water-trough next to a well, and taking up his leather shield and seizing his lance, he began with a stately bearing, to pace back and forth in front of the trough; and as his pacing began night was beginning to fall." --- Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Book 1, Chapter 3, translated by John Rutherford)


(Gustave Doré, Don Quixote Guards his Armour)

I've chosen this passage from Don Quixote, not because it ever stood out for me in my readings, but because I fell deeply in love with Doré's rendition of the scene. We have a lonely old man, and his makeshift sword pointing upwards towards the moon, upwards as it always does, a full moon up above, and an armour sitting atop a stage that serves beasts by day. What struck me in the image was the exquisite loneliness that is embodied in Don Quixote's person-- a loneliness that is so beautifully portrayed by the artist who understands how thin the old man must be, yet how regally he holds his probably aching back, and how graceful his poise remains as he extends his lance to threaten any and all who come for his armour and his honor.
In the text, of course, Don Quixote is performing the vigil that is the final task he must fulfill before being knighted by the innkeeper, yet, when I see this image, I wonder to myself whether that is exactly what he's doing. So what I'd like to do in this post is to somehow try to envision vision-- what Don Quixote's sees within and outside himself, and how the reader-artist sees his figure. Don Quixote, I would think, is an artist in himself, only the images and sounds he is able to produce remain within his mind and are enunciated in his speech and actions. In other words, what Don Quixote sees and does is directly a response to a reimagining that takes place in his mind. As a character in the text, he behaves in accordance with his own narration rather than that of a narrator's. Windmills, then, become giants taken almost directly out of the Inferno. A humble inn becomes a castle. Friars become enchanters abducting a princess. In an earlier post, I called Don Quixote, "the reader;" in this one, I'd like to call him "the writer." His figure is of the artist who having read everything turns to produce his own art-- an art that comes to us in what his friends and neighbours see as madness.

But if Don Quixote's art is visible in only in his performance, or possibly in his knowledge that he is being written, what does Doré's image tell us about our own limits. I think it tests our limits in all kinds of ways, actually. For one, I was reminded more than anything else of Pygmalion praying that his statue come to life. I had all kinds of ideas floating in my head about the armour as a kind of ghostly lover that accompanies Don Quixote throughout his travels. More importantly, though, I think Doré's image puts forward a fascinating match between madness and the right not be mad. The full moon represents so much more so Don Quixote's mental infirmity in the real world, but the lance that extends outward almost threatening the moon is the madness that knows itself.
As I see this post, it says two almost oppositional things in the same vein-- there is the idea that Don Quixote is essentially a lonely figure whose incredible belief in his self renders him the subject of an image so potent. And then we can read him as a figure on par with Cervantes, guiding the text through an eye that reenvisions what it sees; and as a figure who, particularly, in the image dares for there to be a greater insanity than his own.
Cervantes has never been one of my strengths when it comes to reading, so if this post comes of as somewhat incoherent, it's because I had a conversation with my friend AR earlier today where she told me that this text makes her want to be better at Spanish-- and that inspired me to give Cervantes another shot. I don't think there's any higher compliment one can pay a writer, so here's to hoping I've done some justice to C, to DQ... and to A.

The reader.

"In short, our hidalgo was soon so absorbed in these books that his nights were spent reading from dusk till dawn, and his days from dawn till dusk, until the lack of sleep and the excess of reading withered his brain, and he went mad. Everything he read in his books took possession of his imagination: enchantments, fights, battles, challenges, wounds, sweet nothings, love affairs, storms, and impossible absurdities. The idea that this whole fabric of famous fabrications was real so established itself in his mind that no history in the world was truer for him." Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, translated by John Rutherford.

I could have delved deeper into the History of Don Quixote de la Mancha when searching for a piece of text to read, but of late I've become interested in looking at artists' renditions of literary scenes and characters. So here we have Cervantes' description of Don Quixote's descent into madness, but we also have Gustav Dore´'s (1832-83) rendition of Quixote going mad from his books. What struck me about both the image and the corresponding textual description is their sheer richness. Cervantes wants us to be in touch with the body as much as the mind. We must feel the relationship of what is physically within us to what is somehow contained despite of our physicality. What is written is somehow able to transform and possess the body of one who succumbs to it. This is a cause that writers early in the modern period took up and that in some ways defined many of the great books that were to emerge between 1500 and 1900. My other favorite for this, of course, is Emma Bovary.
It seems what I'm saying then is that this richness of image and text comes from the relationship that writer and artist establish between what is body and what is not. In Dore´'s strikingly detailed image we have the object i.e. books lying untended on the ground, and Quixote, this regal looking old man, sits in his chair attempting to stave of the "disorderly notions" that crowd around him. The key word here is "attempt"-- if we look at the image again, we'll see that the sword points in a direction almost opposite to where the monsters, princesses, and angels surround the hero. Clearly, Don Quixote likes to play.
We never really know how tongue-in-cheek Cervantes was being when he addressed Don Quixote's problem for surely he was aware that the adventures of this crazy would be analyzed forever. Similarly, when Flaubert said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi," there was a tacit admittance that the problems of the character were his as well. What I want to say here is how do we judge ourselves or characters such as Emma or DQ for living a life that is imagined through the help of objects, words, and images. Or should we perhaps do the opposite-- judge ourselves against them? I mean, Emma was a bitch to her husband and Don Quixote couldn't have cared less whether Sancho Panza lived or died-- yet, these people obsess us because of their naked presence and because we see them digesting what they read and see.
Yesterday my cousin A. and I had a conversation about writers who make their readers physically react through their words. My favorite example for this feeling is TSE and his Love Song. Emma and DQ experience something similar-- except that unlike us, they let themselves try to make it real.