I think GBS was right and that we do need to be sceptical about what we read. That is brought home to us daily by the press and by the many polemical books which are written to persuade us of this and that.
I agree with you about Kent and Sancho Bernard. Perhaps it is our fondness for the underdog.
Peppermill : Thanks a lot for the trouble you have taken in copying and pasting some of Nabokov's critique of DQ.
I do not agree with his characterisation of Sancho Panza as a clown and a 'perfect bore'. Nabokov writes: 'Sancho of the matted beard and tomato nose is the generalised clown...Sancho's cracks and proverbs are not very mirth provoking either in themselves or in their repetitious accumulation. The corniest modern gag is funnier...' He apparently did not find SP funny at all and I think this reflects more on Nobokov, the dour Russian, than on SP. He also appears to be taken in by knight errantry when he writes of DQ as 'A gallant gentleman, a man of infinite courage, a hero in the truest sense of the word'. Of the humour he writes:
'Scholars who speak of sidesplitting episodes in the book do not reveal any permanent injury to their ribs. That in this book the humor contains, as one critic puts it, “a depth of philosophical insight and genuine humanity, in which qualities it has been excelled by no other writer” seems to me to be a staggering exaggeration. The Don is certainly not funny. His squire, with all his prodigious memory for old saws, is even less funny than his master.'
He must have been reading a different DQ to myself!
bdNM wrote:I came upon this quote, attributed to George Bernard Shaw -- don't know if that's accurate or not, but it seems an interesting quote:
"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad."
The idea that being well-read makes you a gentleperson, but that one has to be somewhat skeptical (even cynical perhaps) is somewhat disheartening.On the King Lear -- surely he's not comparing the two figures, just their place in literature -- both figures are "mad," but Don Quixote is mad for believing in a world that may never have existed, and certainly no longer does, but that world is a world of generosity and honor. Lear is a rather imperious fellow, who thinks he can dictate terms to all and sundry, and he is too caught up in the flattery of others. I saw a production of Lear recently, with Ian McKellen in the title role -- and I have to say, I don't like the character of Lear. I like Kent a lot, who remains loyal to Lear, and I like the Fool, who also remains loyal. It's my fondness for the sidekick, no doubt. I like Sancho a lot, probably more than Don Quixote, but I like the Don, too.
Peppermill wrote:
Another except from Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote:
“THE ‘WHEN?’ OF THE BOOK
“So much for space. Now about time.
“From 1667, the publication year of Milton’s Paradise Lost {VN added to his students, ‘which most of you regained under Prof. Finley’s guidance,” John H. Finley being a distinguished colleague at Harvard}, 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 been 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 Cervante’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.” pp. 5-6.
NV goes on to make comparisons on what is happening in literature across Europe (and America). I'll try to share a couple of paragraphs of that another time. (The text has about six paragraphs, including ones for France, Italy, Germany, and Russia.)
Choisya wrote:
I think GBS was right and that we do need to be sceptical about what we read. That is brought home to us daily by the press and by the many polemical books which are written to persuade us of this and that.I agree with you about Kent and Sancho Bernard. Perhaps it is our fondness for the underdogPeppermill : Thanks a lot for the trouble you have taken in copying and pasting some of Nabokov's critique of DQ.I do not agree with his characterisation of Sancho Panza as a clown and a 'perfect bore'. Nabokov writes: 'Sancho of the matted beard and tomato nose is the generalised clown...Sancho's cracks and proverbs are not very mirth provoking either in themselves or in their repetitious accumulation. The corniest modern gag is funnier...' He apparently did not find SP funny at all and I think this reflects more on Nobokov, the dour Russian, than on SP. He also appears to be taken in by knight errantry when he writes of DQ as 'A gallant gentleman, a man of infinite courage, a hero in the truest sense of the word'. Of the humour he writes:'Scholars who speak of sidesplitting episodes in the book do not reveal any permanent injury to their ribs. That in this book the humor contains, as one critic puts it, “a depth of philosophical insight and genuine humanity, in which qualities it has been excelled by no other writer” seems to me to be a staggering exaggeration. The Don is certainly not funny. His squire, with all his prodigious memory for old saws, is even less funny than his master.'
He must have been reading a different DQ to myself!
bdNM wrote:
I came upon this quote, attributed to George Bernard Shaw -- don't know if that's accurate or not, but it seems an interesting quote:
"Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad."
The idea that being well-read makes you a gentleperson, but that one has to be somewhat skeptical (even cynical perhaps) is somewhat disheartening.On the King Lear -- surely he's not comparing the two figures, just their place in literature -- both figures are "mad," but Don Quixote is mad for believing in a world that may never have existed, and certainly no longer does, but that world is a world of generosity and honor. Lear is a rather imperious fellow, who thinks he can dictate terms to all and sundry, and he is too caught up in the flattery of others. I saw a production of Lear recently, with Ian McKellen in the title role -- and I have to say, I don't like the character of Lear. I like Kent a lot, who remains loyal to Lear, and I like the Fool, who also remains loyal. It's my fondness for the sidekick, no doubt. I like Sancho a lot, probably more than Don Quixote, but I like the Don, too.
Peppermill wrote:
Another except from Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote:
“THE ‘WHEN?’ OF THE BOOK
“So much for space. Now about time.
“From 1667, the publication year of Milton’s Paradise Lost {VN added to his students, ‘which most of you regained under Prof. Finley’s guidance,” John H. Finley being a distinguished colleague at Harvard}, 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 been 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 Cervante’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.” pp. 5-6.
NV goes on to make comparisons on what is happening in literature across Europe (and America). I'll try to share a couple of paragraphs of that another time. (The text has about six paragraphs, including ones for France, Italy, Germany, and Russia.)
The director of the Soviet film version of Don Quixote did not portray Sancho as a fool -- much of the focus of that film was the second book, which has a strangely more eloquent Sancho than Book I.
