Tea at Trianon: Don Quixote

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Don Quixote

From Reid's Reader:

Don Quixote is certainly a comic masterpiece. Indeed much of it is pure slapstick and farce and the “mistakes of the night at the inn” variety of comedy. But I have never read its best episodes without seeing how Cervantes is also playing with bigger and more resonant ideas. Is it the triumph of the imagination over material reality when the lion released from its cage does not attack Don Quixote? Is it the revenge of material reality over imagination when Don Quixote is knocked down by a herd of bulls? Are we deep into the realms of subjectivism and rationalism when Don Quixote is lowered into a cave, clearly falls asleep, and yet emerges telling of the wonderful things he has seen? How clearly does Cervantes comment on the suspension of disbelief in theatre when Don Quixote slashes with his sword at the puppet show? How satirical is he being about war and warriors when Don Quixote mistakes two flocks of sheep for two armies? One could almost read such examples as parables.

I do admit that I find the two parts of the novel not to be a perfect match. Part One, published in 1605, is the more purely comic part – the part which often simply invites us to laugh at the crazy things done by a deluded old man. Part Two, published ten years later in 1615, is the part which waxes more philosophical and certainly has some of the sequences I enjoy most as Cervantes reconsiders his knight and squire and has them more often melding into each other in the ways they see reality. It also has Sancho at last getting his “island” and ruling it; and it has the best conflicts in the whole opus when Samson Carrasco confronts Don Quixote with a more challenging view of what reality is. (Read more.)