Don and Dumber

All right, I'll be off the Don Quixote blogs here in a second. But I noticed today a very interesting parallel; Donny Q. and Sancho P. are in many ways reminiscent (though Cervantes, assuredly, came first) of Harry and Lloyd in "Dumb and Dumber." They are two innocent, likable guys who only real crime is the overall lack of knowledge of the real, working world. They are unemployed, see the world as something far different from what it truly is, and are living their lives in accordance to what the world seems to be like to them.

While Sancho Panza may be the smartest of the bunch, he still is faulted for following so insane a man, and eventually believing with similar fervor the chivalrous didactic reasoning that pervades poor Don's reality. While the modern movie characters prove to be dissimilar (they don't have the wherewithall to understand the reality of the world, living in obliviousness, in a truer sense that Mr. Q), they still tend to conform their actions to the events they assume are unfolding.

When assaulted and thrown asunder by a complacent windmill, Don Quixote insists his cruel tormentors, be they necromancer or a gang of rogue enchanters, had transmogrified the giants to windmills. When Harry and Lloyd are told by a bus of scantily-clad women they're seeking two oil boys to join them on tour, the two point them in direction of the nearest town, their absolute logic of the reality being that the women could not have meant them. While Don (and the increasingly convinced Sancho) is guilty of the sin of illusion and misinterpretation of reality, Harry and Lloyd are guilty of sheer lack of sense of the world.

Don Qui-ha-ha-xote

I'm a little disjointed. I understand the overall importance of Don Quixote as a didactic narrative of the world and of literature and/or literary criticism, but I'm somewhat unsettled that we haven't talked about the marvelous, affluent and ironic sense of humor that so pervades the novel. It helps make the unordinant amount of reading more tolerable, but also serves to advance a reader's love for the book. I smile. I laugh. Out loud. In the quiet study section of the library. People turn to look at me and I apologize without further noise.

Never since a few humorous parts of various other stories or writing specifically made for laugh-based pleasureable reading (Dave Barry, etc.) have I had so literal a "good time" reading a book. Don Quixote is no pharmakos. He is no tragic figure. He is a comic hero. He forces smile and joy at the ironic mistakes of peasants for beautiful maidens, a neglected old horse for the elegant and deserved steed of the righteous knight. True, we may find musings of humor in his less fortunate mistakes that end in bodily harm for our poor may Spaniard, invoking the universal spirit of humor from others' misfortune. He may exibit the commonalities of a scapegoat, but his character, self-deluded truimphs and innocent nature make him so much more lovable as a person, outside the ridicule and rediculous harm upon his person, that I dare say he is far too beloved by his audience of readers that he transcends the idiom of pharmakos.

The Fantastic Mind of Don

Don Quixote is a beautiful mind. I envy, desire and wish to aspire to such perfect delusion. His world is the absolute sublime. When he recieves the ever-approaching effect of his constantly deficient attempts at true chivalrous acts, he misconcieves the causes of his failure as the works of some vendettously malicous necromancer that turns giants to windmills and armies into dust. He does not, however see inn turn to castle through any sort of phasmagorical, selectively attributing any illusion that benefits his version of reality as fact, not a mystical enchantment.

A real-world comparison would be the arrival of Spanish ships on foreign ports. Circumstantially, we are told that when the first huge boats and galleons arrived, the natives where supposedly unable to see them for their minds could not comprehend something so unknown, so dislike anything they knew of in their world. Don's sheer will to live in so elevated an era, simply refuses, or perhaps cannot process the possibility for reality to be anything less.

The Experience of Tangents

Tangents (no, not dark-skinned gentlemen) are essential to didacticism. Without meandering thought, delving intellectual stimulation, general brainstorming and imaginative exploration, how can we learn? Without experience, we retain our innocence and in that sense we also deprive ourselves of the wealth of worldly knowledge. If not for (often topic- or subject-focused) expression through apparently nonlinear thinking, we would never learn a thing.

We must be inspired by experience, and even going off on a tangent is a moment of blisfull experience. Every way in which a person may express thoughts is an invaluable tool of both literature and the general human experience. Poetry is a way of exploring the inner schemes of mind, man, nature and the existential state. I would argue that tangents are a form of stream-of-consciousness profoundly manifested in oral tradition. All forms of words are important, indispensable and infinitely intragle to didactic experience.

The Victory of Don

When Don, the wonderful cad, he, decided to save the captured "maiden" as he thought was being kidnapped by the monks on horseback, drawing her carriage he was accosted and challenged by a very unusual foe. This is a very important encounter as it is the first that Don Quixote doesn't completely fail at. Not only does he seem to be an apparent equal in combat, Quixote, though by chance and folly, ends up defeating this man, and leaves his fate to the "rescued" woman.

Not only was this man a proper challenge to Don, he is also somewhat distant from reality. He attacks Don at the insistence that he is, indeed, a gentleman. He defends his honor in a way that reflect the same chivalrous values of Quixote's delusional world. Significant and strange it is that the first person who seems to share similar values to the wonderfully confused Don his first true success, especially in Quixote's mind.

Nature, Ahoy!

I think it could be sufficiently argued that a major theme of this course would be nature, or how man deals with nature and mankind's own relationship with it. The natural world is constantly emphasized, either as a pastoral scene of the romance mode or as something no longer being the container but the thing contained or the tight relationship between innocence and the themes prevalent in nature (especially in children's literature) or as something poets aspire to imitate through mimesis or the personified envious tropes exemplified in Wallace Steven's poem. The Mythos of Seasons is a perfect example; the conciseness with which the analogies are aligned show perfects a direct and significant relationship between literature and nature, which I think can be found in just about everything we've discussed thus far and remains to be the underlying idea behind this class—that nature an literature may indeed be inexorably bound to one another.

Touchstone.

For my "keystone" passage, that I often find myself coming back to is a little poem by Robert Frost called Desert Places from a collection of works known as "A Further Range."

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Mostly it is the last stanza that interests me. It means a lot to me because it holds tight to many of my personal thoughts, of the divine and the common, the intrinsic and extrinsic, internal and external, inner-human thought and capacity versus the outer possibilities of the stars. It both marvels and recoils at the ambivalent duality of nature, the apparent horror and ecstasy of nature as it occurs in the world (Earth) and eventually muses the stars themselves for inspiration. The poem has a tone of both admiration and discomfort towards the solitude and isolated state of nature, and finally sets the gaze of the poet inwards, reflecting that for all the wonder and unpleasantness of nature external, the inner workings of the human mind will always be the more complex and worrisome.