Of Books and Bicycles

As I’m reading Don Quixote, I’m reminded of a certain type of eighteenth-century novel, particularly those of Henry Fielding, which I realize is backwards, of course — Henry Fielding’s novels should remind me of Don Quixote, not the other way around — but I came to Henry Fielding first. As backwards as my response is, I’m pleased, because one of the reasons I wanted to read Don Quixote was to understand more about the history of the novel, although, no surprise, I’m ending up with more questions than answers. But I’m seeing the same light-hearted tone in Don Quixote that I learned to love in Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews; the same picaresque, episodic style; the same violence; the same stories within stories; the same type of humorous, vulnerable but also paradoxically invulnerable type of character — the type who gets bruised and battered over and over and over and always ends up being just fine.

If Henry Fielding was hugely influenced by Cervantes, I’m left with questions about Cervantes’s influences. Obviously, he was inspired by those chivalric romances the novel is always mentioning — inspired to make fun of them, that is — but I wonder what other models and sources lie behind this novel. What conventions that Cervantes draws upon come from those chivalric works, what come from other types of books, and what things weren’t conventions at all, but were things Cervantes made up? Perhaps I’ll have to do some reading about this …

I’m also interested in the way both Fielding and Cervantes have a lot to say about writing and reading, and how much they draw attention to their books as artifacts. They are not trying to get you lost in the story and to make you forget you are reading a book; rather, they draw your attention to that fact again and again. Obviously, Cervantes is writing about reading when he makes Don Quixote so very obsessed with romances and determined to become a knight just like the ones he’s read about. Cervantes has so much to say about the pleasures and the dangers of reading in this sense.

But he also draws attention to books and authors in other ways, for example, in the library scene, where the priest, barber, and housekeeper go through Don Quixote’s collection of books to throw out those dangerous tales of chivalry — comically, the priest winds up wanting to keep most of them, finding something of value in them after all. And then between Parts One and Two of the novel’s first part, the narrator interrupts the story to tell us a bit about the text itself. Cervantes has presented himself, not as somebody who has made up a story, but as the one who found Don Quixote’s true history written up by others, and as the one who is putting various texts together into a coherent story. And at the end of Part One, he tells us that he has reached the end of his sources and must look around for others:

But the difficulty in all this is that at this very point and juncture, the author of the history leaves the battle pending, apologizing because he found nothing else written about the feats of Don Quixote other than what he has already recounted. It is certainly true that the second author [that is, Cervantes] of this work did not want to believe that so curious a history would be subjected to the laws of oblivion, or that the great minds of La Mancha possessed so little interest that they did not have in their archives or writing tables a few pages that dealt with this famous knight; and so, with this thought in mind, he did not despair of finding the conclusion to this gentle history, which, with heaven’s help, he discovered in the manner that will be revealed in part two.

This passage accomplishes a lot of things: it ends Part One with a cliffhanger — Don Quixote has been battling “the gallant Basque” and we’ll want to rush on to Part Two to find out how it goes — but it also allows Cervantes to talk up his subject. Surely so great a story as that of Don Quixote wouldn’t remain untold? Surely the story that Cervantes has so enjoyed, other people will have enjoyed in the past and will again in the future? How could we, Cervantes’s readers, not love what he is offering to us?

The author becomes a reader too, something we see even more clearly near the beginning of Part Two:

… at that extremely uncertain point, the delectable history stopped and was interrupted, without the author giving us any information as to where the missing parts could be found.

This caused me a good deal of grief, because the pleasure of having read so small an amount was turning into displeasure at the thought of the difficult road that lay ahead in finding the large amount that, in my opinion, was missing from so charming a tale.

Cervantes is acting out what he wants his reader to experience — enjoyment in the story, grief when the story ends.  A bit later, once Cervantes has found another manuscrupt, the continuation of the story, we get this wonderful passage:

I say, then, that for these and many other reasons, the gallant Don Quixote is deserving of continual and memorable praise, as am I, on account of the toil and effort I have put into finding the conclusion of this amiable history, though I know very well that if heaven, circumstances, and fortune do not assist me, the world will be deprived of the almost two hours of entertainment and pleasure the attentive reader may derive from it.

I love this passage. The author steps in and tells us not only that his main character is wonderful, but that he, the author, is wonderful too, having put so, so much work into producing his book. If he hadn’t done it, and if he didn’t have heaven’s help, the reader might lose out on two hours of pleasure. He’s mocking himself and his enterprise a bit, of course, but there’s also a seriousness to it — two hours of entertainment and pleasure may not be such a little thing after all.

Cross-posted at Tilting at Windmills 

I read the prologue to Don Quixote with great delight; there’s something very appealing about its lighthearted tone that bodes well for my enjoyment of the rest of the book (and having read the first couple chapters now, I can say I’m enjoying it greatly). Sylvia has already written an interesting post on the Prologue; I thought I’d add to her post a few thoughts on some of my favorite passages.

I love the way Cervantes claims that he’s not asking for the generosity of readers as they read and judge his book, and yet he’s asking for their generosity at one and the same time. He says:

I do not wish to go along with the common custom and implore you, almost with tears in my eyes, as others do, dearest reader, to forgive or ignore the faults you may find in this my child, for you are neither his kin nor his friend, and you have a soul in your body and a will as free as anyone’s, and you are in your own house, where you are lord, as the sovereign is master of his revenues, and you know the old saying: under cover of my cloak I can kill the king. Which exempts and excuses you from all respect and obligation, and you can say anything you desire about this history without fear that you will be reviled for the bad things or rewarded for the good that you might say about it.

How can you read this passage and have any desire whatsoever to criticize this poor author? How could you heartlessly attack this novel after the author so kindly refrained from asking you not to attack it? I like the way this figures the author/reader relationship — no, the author can’t do anything whatsoever to keep readers from criticizing his book, except to appeal to their sense of kindness, to call the book his child, to imply that they couldn’t possibly be so mean as to say a harsh word. All the author has, besides the strength of the book itself, is the chance to flatter the reader into liking it.

After this uncertain opening, the author’s self-doubt deepens; first we get a description of writer’s block — he absolutely could not write the Prologue, try as he might:

For I can tell you that although [the book itself] cost me some effort to compose, none seemed greater than creating the preface you are now reading. I picked up my pen many times to write it, and many times I put it down again because I did not know what to write.

Fortunately for him, a friend comes along while the author continues to bemoan his weakness and uncertainty. He’s worried about how the public will receive the book, about how long it’s been since he’s published anything, how he has no sonnets by famous people to open his book with, how he’s lacking all the serious, scholarly paraphernalia other books have, the citations from Aristotle and Plato and the marginal notes and indexes. In despair, he says:

In short, my friend … I have decided that Don Quixote should remain buried in the archives of La Mancha until heaven provides someone who can adorn him with all the things he lacks; for I find myself incapable of correcting the situation because of my incompetence and my lack of learning, and because I am by nature too lazy and slothful to go looking for authors to say what I know how to say without them.

He comes across here as someone worried only about the quality of the book, as someone self-effacing enough to put the book away until an author more qualified comes along to publish it. He is not in this for personal gain. If he is lazy and slothful, it’s because he’s honest and doesn’t want to ask others to say what he can say himself. What is not to like about this poor, beleaguered author?

His friend answers with a hilarious speech about how the author can overcome all these problems:

By God, brother, now I am disabused of an illusion I have lived with for all the time I have known you, for I always considered you perceptive and prudent in everything you do. But now I see that you are as far from having those qualities as heaven is from earth.

What a friend. He goes on to say that the author can solve these problems quite simply: he can write his own sonnets and falsely attribute them to famous people; he can insert Latin phrases that he already knows by heart into relevant passages to make them seem more scholarly with a minimum of effort; he can create instant annotations by naming characters after famous people and then write notes to explain the allusions; he can make up a list of references to add to the back of book and he doesn’t have to worry if he doesn’t actually use those references — no one will notice or care.

But then after this joking, the friend gets more serious and says that the book doesn’t need all this scholarly apparatus because it’s doing something completely different. His goal is to mock books of chivalry, and that’s something classical authors knew nothing about. The author is heading off into a completely new direction and he needs to rules and guidelines. What he needs to do instead is:

to make use of mimesis in the writing, and the more precise that is, the better the writing will be … instead you should strive, in plain speech, with words that are straightforward, honest, and well-placed, to make your sentences and phrases sonorous and entertaining, and have them portray, as much as you can and as far as it is possible, your intention, making your ideas clear without complicating and obscuring them.

What he should worry about is the writing itself, not the book’s packaging, the apparatus that surrounds the story itself. It’s the story and the writing only that matter:

Another thing to strive for: reading your history should move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it. In short, keep your eye on the goal of demolishing the ill-founded apparatus of these chivalric books, despised by many and praised by so many more, and if you accomplish this, you will have accomplished no small thing.

He will have accomplished no small thing indeed. This strikes me as a wonderful description of what the novel, or at least one form of it, can do — it’s about mimesis, or capturing life as accurately as possible, and doing so in beautiful and clear language. And it’s a form that everyone can enjoy, from the melancholy to the cheerful, from the simple to the clever.

I finished Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters a couple days ago and found it was a satisfying read; it wasn’t quite as absorbing as I wanted it to be, but as I’ve written here before, that could well be my fault. I did find myself consistently interested in the characters and stories and I found lots to think about. I’d say this is a book that was more likely to make me pause and think than to keep turning the pages at a fast pace.

The novel’s title is a big clue as to its themes, of course; it’s all about family relationships, particularly as they affect women. This is a typical 19C novel in the sense that it’s about young women as they reach marriageable age, telling the story of how they and their families negotiate all the difficulties this brings. Two of the main characters, Molly and Cynthia, contrast in interesting ways; Molly is a quiet, meek, obedient, nearly-perfect heroine, but Cynthia is much more complex and troubling. She is flirtatious and popular; she is secretive and slightly suspicious; she is not quite regular and proper and therefore destined to a nice-quite-perfect fate. Molly is likeable, but Cynthia is much more compelling; Gaskell makes it clear that it is her upbringing — her mother’s neglect, in particular — that has made her the way she is, and while this is not her fault, there is no getting around the fact that she must suffer for it. Cynthia knows this and she seems to mourn it a little, but she also accepts it bravely.

There is something troubling about this; Gaskell leads the reader to sympathize with Cynthia — Molly sympathizes with her too — but it’s clear that there is no way Cynthia can overcome this handicap. She is doomed by her upbringing. Well, not really doomed — she ends up in a reasonably nice marriage — but there is no way she will reach the level of Molly’s goodness and happiness. This is typical of 18C and 19C novels where characters can seem stuck; a certain amount of change may occur but ultimately they’ll get sorted out according to their family background, their upbringing, their innate level of goodness, and rewarded or punished at the novel’s end accordingly. You know from fairly early on that Molly will find a good husband and be happy, and that Cynthia will struggle and suffer and make mistakes and wind up with a clearly less-than-perfect end. Her story is more about how she will accept her circumstances rather than how she might change them.

I was also interested in the fates of the two main male characters, Roger and Osborne (whom I wrote about here). Not surprisingly, these two have more room to change and grow and make mistakes than the female characters do; Roger’s main story is that he falls in love with the wrong woman, but he is allowed to recover from this and eventually find the right one, and Osborne marries the “wrong” woman who eventually turns out to be the right one, or at least an acceptable one, and he is forgiven. These are things that Molly would never, ever do, and that Cynthia gets punished for.

Roger is an outdoorsy type, a scientist, a traveler, and a writer; the introduction to my edition notes that Gaskell modeled him after Charles Darwin. He’s a much more stereotypically masculine figure than his brother Osborne, the poetry-writer, the romantic, the handsome one, the one with a secret life. It’s like Gaskell is writing the end of the Romantic era and the beginning of the Victorian one; the book was published in 1866, and my introduction tells me it was set about 40 years earlier than its writing. The book is clearly written from an 1860s perspective, looking back at the 1820s; it’s full of references to the way things used to be, to the peaceful, quiet past, and also to changes to come, the railroads, for example.

This is only a brief sketch of a few things going on the in novel; there is so much more to notice. Molly’s father I find troubling — at the beginning of the book he mentions in conversation that he doesn’t think women need much training in reading and writing, which surely is Gaskell’s signal that we are to be a bit suspicious of him — and her stepmother is as well. She’s a comic figure much of the time, so self-absorbed and manipulative she’s almost unbearable. There is also a host of minor characters who are amusing and annoying and thought-provoking in turn. This makes the second Gaskell novel I’ve read; I think I may well end up reading more.

I was hoping to post on Harold Bloom’s introduction to Don Quixote after I’d had a chance to read it this evening, but I’ve just finished it and I thought it was terrible, so I won’t be posting on it after all.  Has anybody else read it, from the Edith Grossman translation?  Yes, I’ll admit I’m tired this evening and not at my reading best, but still I couldn’t make much sense out of it and I’m sure I wouldn’t have liked it even if I’d felt more alert.  It’s rambling and vague and has rather too much Hamlet in it.

So, instead, I’ll give you a paragraph from Edith Grossman’s “Translator’s Note to the Reader,” which is short but much better than Bloom’s irritation introuction.  Describing Cervantes’s writing, she says:

[It] is a marvel: it gives off sparks and flows like honey.  Cervantes’s style is so artful it seems absolutely natural and inevitable; his irony is sweet-natured, his sensibility sophisticated, compassionate, and humorous.  If my translation works at all, the reader should keep turning the pages, smiling a good deal, periodically bursting into laughter, and impatiently waiting for the next synonym (Cervantes delighted in accumulating synonyms, especially descriptive ones, within the same phrase), the next mind-bending coincidence, the next variation on the structure of Don Quixote’s adventures, the next incomparable conversation between the knight and his squire.  To quote again from Cervantes’s prologue: “I do not want to charge you too much for the service I have performed in introducing you to so noble and honorable a knight; but I do want you to thank me for allowing you to make the acquaintance of the famous Sancho Panza, his squire….”

Tomorrow — to the novel itself!

I’m a little more than halfway through Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, and although I’ve found it slow in places, I think that’s my fault and not the book’s, and there are just as many times I’ve found myself wanting to read on as I’ve been tempted to put the book down. All that’s to say, I’m still reading this book and am glad I’m doing so.

When I was reading Jane Austen’s Sanditon, I noticed that Austen had some things to say about novels and reading, and it turns out Gaskell does too; it seems to be the case that we can judge a character based on what Gaskell tells us about his or her reading habits. (And, really, isn’t that the way the world should be? That all our time spent reading would communicate volumes, so to speak, about what wonderful people we are?)

Mrs. Hamley, for example, is meant to be a sympathetic character; the novel’s heroine, Molly, loves her very much, and she turns out to be a peaceful center in the novel, the other characters missing her very much when she’s gone. And this is how Gaskell describes her reading:

Mrs. Hamley was a great reader, and had considerable literary taste. She was gentle and sentimental; tender and good.

I love the easy slide here from being a great reader with taste to being a good person.

Molly herself is not a deep reader; when asked if she likes reading, she says, “It depends upon the kind of book … I’m afraid I don’t like ‘steady reading’ as papa calls it.” But she does love poetry and she is capable of losing herself in a Sir Walter Scott novel (The Bride of Lammermoor). She turns out to be suggestible when it comes to reading; when she befriends Roger, another central character, he becomes her personal tutor, suggesting books for her to read and discussing them with her. When Molly and Roger are separated for a while:

He felt something like an affectionate tutor suddenly deprived of his most promising pupil; he wondered how she would go on without him; whether she would be puzzled and dishearted by the books he had lent her to read …

A little later in the novel another character accuses her of becoming a bluestocking and reading “deep books — all about facts and figures.” She responds that she has come to find those “deep books” interesting. As befits a novel’s heroine, she has proven her ability to learn and change.

Roger has a brother Osborne, and early on we learn that Osborne reads and writes poetry, while Roger:

is not much of a reader; at least, he doesn’t care for poetry and books of romance, or sentiment. He is so fond of natural history; and that takes him, like the Squire, a great deal out of doors; and when he is in, he is always reading scientific books that bear upon his pursuits. He is a good, steady fellow, though …

The family owns a portrait of these brothers showing Osborne deep in a book of poetry, and Roger trying to draw his attention to something outdoors. I get the feeling that Gaskell thought of reading and writing poetry as a feminized pursuit and therefore a little unsuitable for Osborne; it’s fine for Molly and Mrs. Hamley to love poetry, but not for Osborne — he turns out to be a disappointment, a weak and susceptible failure, not “manly” enough. Roger, however, turns out splendidly, becoming his family’s savior; his scientific reading and his love of nature bring him worldly success — he earns some fame for publishing an important scientific paper — but it also seems to prove he is, according to Gaskell, the proper sort of man, energetic, capable, outdoorsy, and scientific, but not poetic. In her “deep” reading of facts and figures, Molly may be venturing a bit into “male” territory, but she is doing so with a man’s guidance, and so this doesn’t really disrupt the proper gender roles.

Molly has a stepmother, Mrs. Gibson, who is — no surprise! — a major pain. And this is what Gaskell says about her reading:

About novels and poetry, travels and gossip, personal details, or anecdotes of any kind, she always made exactly the remarks which are expected from an agreeable listener; and she had sense enough to confine herself to those short expressions of wonder, admiration, and astonishment, which may mean anything, when more recondite things were talked about.

No, she is not known for her intelligence or her insight. She also reads light novels, ones, not at all like Wives and Daughters, that are meant merely to pass the time, “the dirty dog’s-eared delightful novel[s] from the Ashcombe circulating library, the leaves of which she turned over with a pair of scissors.” She considers these novels “little indulgences that were innocent enough in themselves, but which [her] former life had caused her to look upon as sins to be concealed.”

Mrs. Gibson’s daughter, Cynthia, who is a sympathetic character but not entirely trustworthy and with a dark secret in her past (at least I think so — it hasn’t been revealed yet, but there are hints …), turns out not to be much of a reader; she prefers millinery to reading, we learn. Mrs. Gibson tries to get Cynthia to undertake some “improving reading,” but her motives for this are bad ones, and neither Mrs. Gibson or Cynthia persist in this quest to improve Cynthia’s mind.

So, I’m fascinated by the way one’s reading is a clear guide to one’s character in this novel, and the way reading gets gendered. I shall have to see how all this plays out as the novel continues …