In that paper I will
summarize my three chosen websites and finally I will provide my own conclusion.
The first article chosen is
Under the
Influence of Cervantes: Trapiello’s Al morir don Quijote
by the Dr. Isidoro Arén Janeiro.
It deals about
the importance of
Trapiello’s book Al morir don Quijote. It begins saying that there is a before
and and an after the first publication of the
Primera parte
Trapiello says that the
adventure continues through the secondary characters.
Trapiello’s novel takes as a
departing point an event, the death of Don Quixote,
and the final renouncing of his fantastical voyage. It is the awakening
moment for the reader who has been a witness to the
death of a genre, since as we know
Primera parte
He had to write a second
part to complete the deconstruction of the first
part, and, at the same time, to refute the apocryphal
Quixote. On one hand
on the first part parodies the novels of chivalry, on
the other hand, the second part of Cervantes’ masterpiece,
Segunda Parte del Ingenioso Caballero
don Quijote de
The success of Cervantes’
second part had to depend on his ability to deconstruct these two worlds. It’s
important that to fully comprehend second part, either Cervante’s,
the reader must comprehend the genesis, their aim,
which lies within the pages of the first part. Also to comprehend the second
part, the reader has to take into account the events that happened on the first
part, constantly revised by Quixote and Sancho, and
We must take
into account also those defining lines that divide the world of Don Quixote and
Alonso Quijano, and the numerous characters that form the complexity of the
novel in itself.
Cervantes
plays with the reader, he makes him/her accept the fictitious reality that he constructed.
The objective is to force
the reader to reach an understanding of his self awareness, and obtain a new
knowledge of the world that conditions him.
The choice of characters and
action are not arbitrary. It is a new reading, a deconstruction of the
characters that left everyone with a sensation of being betrayed by Alonso
Quijano.
It is
Cervantes’ practical capacity to arrange images the thing that question our
senses, forcing us to negotiate the meanings within
Don Quixote’s
textual sites, which creates a dichotomy defying our ‘sense
experience’ and ‘sense perception’ of reality.
In the first
part, our senses are in constant attack, the limitation of the reality that is
perceived challenges the reality of our own experience.
We are aware
of the burlesque nature of the narrative, but the danger arises when the
imitation of
the textual world becomes the real world.
It speaks
about the themes of the first and second part and on page 65 it concludes:
“It is, in a way, Cervantes’
deconstruction of the first part, so that his second one can stand
side by side
as a unique work on its own. Both serve as examples of how corrupting a
misreading of
textual signs can be for the reader”.
It speaks
about Quixote and Sancho, who is credulous enough to believe in Don Quixote’s
stories. In the second part we find a more rational Don Quixote and Sancho: both
are engaged in a world based in the first part of the novel, it is a broken
continuity because they are aware of the contradictions of the realities that
they try to emulate. But, in a way, it is the final realization that their view
on the world is wrong: both of them know this, and are perfectly aware of their
particular predicament.
They gain
knowledge through their own evasiveness of the true reality, which at the very
end, Don Quixote admits in his dying bed. He has been deceived by his false
sense of reality:
“Yo tengo
juicio ya libre y claro, sin las sombras caliginosas de la ignorancia que sobre
él me pusieron mi amarga y continua leyenda de los detestables libros de las
caballerías. Ya conozco sus disparates y sus embelecos, y no me pesa sin que
este desengaño ha llegado tan tarde, que no me deja tiempo para hacer alguna
recompensa leyendo otros que sean
luz del alma”.
(1217)
In
Al morir Don Quijote, the
reader will be forced to choose between these constructions of reality: on one
hand, Don Quixote’s, on the other Alonso Quijano’s. The reader will be caught up
in a reality where the secondary characters are
left
off to fend for themselves, and they become aware that the fantastical voyage
was, in essence, a negation of their own reality that they so desperately wanted
to avoid.
The action in
Trapiello’s novel begins in the deathbed of Alonso Quijano, where everyone that
knew Don Quixote have to pay their last respects. It is a setting that allows
the reader to reconnect with Cervantes’ novel.
The good point
there is that once he is dead, there is an empty void that has to be filled, and
it is during this interlude that Trapiello sets the reader for what is about to
happen next.
The plot moves
around the figure of Antonia Quijano who has been left with a world on shambles,
she must take over where Don Quixote failed, and restore the image of the
Quijano homestead. Nevertheless, she is confronted with people who want to take
advantage of her precarious situation. There are characters who want to marry
her with different intentions, as the servant Cebandón, the accountant De Mal
and the young student Sansón Carrasco. The other protagonist of the story is
Quiteira, the maid, who is left without a master; and after so many years of
servitude and sacrifice she is repudiated by the niece. It is, in a way, the
only time in her life that she had to face the world on her own. She went to her
town to visit her relatives, but she realized that she did not belong. Her quest
is to find out where she exactly belonged.
There is a
clear theme, when Don Quixote was alive, these characters knew exactly who they
were, but now, who are they?
Al morir Don
Quijote
is
in the latest sequel to Cervantes’ masterpiece where this idea of betrayal is
best explored. The betrayal of Alonso Quijano is a topic that has not received
much attention until the most recent novel by Trapiello.
The death of
Alonso Quijano leaves its mark on the people closest to him, and those who were
standing to see what would happen next, which for their own selfish reasons
chose to sit by, and wait until the last sight of air. But, Trapiello presents a
new story, one where the bitter reality comes crushing into the lives of those
who for whichever reason acclaimed Alonso Quijano as Don Quixote, and those like
his niece and maid who were left in despair, and without any hope for their
immediate future.
These
characters, as I have said three paragraphs above, that played a secondary part
in the adventures of Don Quixote, become the main characters in Trapiello’s
novel. It is a reading of what happened after Alonso Quijano died. Al morir
don Quijote answers some questions that many readers might have had about
what happened to Sancho, the niece, the maid, the priest, or the barber, etc,
etc.
It answers to
a very interesting question, what happened after the death of Don Quixote? And,
also, it steers the reader into another direction where Trapiello constructs the
lives of the characters, it completes their past, as to present an explanation
of their present situation, one that would allow them to escape from the hold of
Don Quixote’s influence.
Nevertheless,
at the last stage of distancing himself from the original, there is a brief
moment where Al morir Don Quijote is, again, overshadowed by Cervantes’
masterpiece.
Finally, by
giving answers to a series of questions that were ignored by Cervantes,
Trapiello sets the tone to reread Cervantes’ Don Quijote on the shadow of
his creation.
He makes the
reader reconsider the original under a new interpretation.
In conclusion,
as argued before, the idea to continue Cervantes’ creation has been one that
caused
part of Don
Quixote’s adventures. So, one must ask, how has Al morir don Quijote
become so well received by a community of readers that hold Cervantes’
masterpiece as sacred? The answer lies in how Trapiello treats the characters;
he gave them a voice that
allowed them
to present their point of view, and their inner thoughts. An aspect that in
Cervantes’ novel was denied. The reader of Trapiello connects with these new
protagonists, their trauma of loosing Alonso Quijano is juxtaposed by his
betrayal. They
were all
betrayed because Don Quixote’s journey did not help them escape their own sordid
world, it did not help them face the challenges set upon them, but it made them
realize that
in itself life is cruel, and Alonso Quijano escaped from his responsibilities.
At the end,
they must resort to their own perception of reality, and start a journey of
selfdiscovery. In Al morir Don Quijote the reader will witness a
metamorphosis of these voiceless characters. It does not only present their
present condition, that of the post-traumatic effects of loosing a loved one,
but also it will fashion their past, one that has to be understood to determine
the result of the novel. In essence, Trapiello takes into account the past
events that shaped the personalities of their characters, aspect that Cervantes
purposely avoided. It is the journey of the hero that must face its past, and
once having done so, face the future as a new man or woman. Al morir don
Quijote is the latest attempt to deconstruct the myth of Don Quixote’s
idealism.
The second article is The
Three Deaths of Don Quixote: Comments in Favor of the Romantic Critical Approach
by A.G. Loré.
The article is about the
three deaths of Don Quixote, as it is put on the page 24
“Don Quixote's death is mentioned three
times in the novel: the first at the end of Part I, Chapter 52; the second after
the episode of the Cave of Montesinos, II, 24; the last, of course, the explicit
final death scene at the end of II, 74. Each described circumstance differs from
the others, revealing important changes in the author's plans, changes which
give us clues to his developing attitudes toward his protagonist. My quotations
are from the eight volume Clásicos Castellanos ninth edition of
Don Quijote de
Cervantes tells us in lines which begin in Chapter 74 of Part II, “Como las cosas humanas no sean eternas . . . llegó su fin y acabamiento cuando él (Don Quixote) menos lo pensaba; porque, ó ya fuese de la melancolía que le causaba el verse vencido, ó ya por la disposición del cielo, que así lo ordenaba, se le arraigó una calentura, que le tuvo seis días en la cama . . .” Don Quixote's friends then visit him. “Estos, creyendo que la pesadumbre de verse vencido y de no ver cumplido su deseo en la libertad y desencanto de Dulcinea le tenía de aquella suerte.” They try to cheer him with talk of becoming shepherds. “Pero no por esto dejaba Don Quijote sus tristezas.” A doctor is called in. “Fué el parecer del médico que melancolías y desabrimientos le acababan.” Don Quixote sleeps; then awakens declaring himself cured of his madness and now an enemy of Amadís de Gaula and his brood. Dictating his will and turning to Sancho, he says: “Perdóname, amigo, de la ocasión que te he dado de parecer loco como yo, haciéndote caer en el error en que yo he caído, de que hubo y hay caballeros andantes en el mundo.”
Don Quixote’s death was
caused either by the will of heaven or because of his melancholy. Don Quixote is
taken by fever and dies. Cervantes remains, as ever, innocently, or perhaps
deliberately, ambiguous. But since the fever has been brought about and
stayed by melancholy, with some logic we can insist that he dies of sadness
and melancholy, as suggested by his doctor and friends. Cervantes's vagueness,
allow for such an assumption. This conclusion, which the author believes is
justly sustained, is one of the premises of the study presented.
Don Quixote provides the physical reason for the actual, dignified death while
Alonso Quixano allows for deserved spiritual salvation. Cervantes succeeds in
having it both ways. Alonso Quixano the Sane dies of the bitter disappointment,
sadness and despair that is suffered by his counterpart. Don Quixote the Mad
commonly interpreted as the expression of regret for his error —taken in another
way, can still reveal him to be as much a dreamer and idealist as his mad
equivalent.
As the novel ends, that
schizophrenic part of Don Quixote still overwhelms that of Alonso Quixano.
Cervantes himself writes (II, 74) even after Alonso insists he is no longer Don
Quixote de
As a second preliminary his
exposition, the autor starts from these two premises: Don Quixote, whether
considered as Don Quixote or Alonso Quixano, 1) dies of melancholy, and 2) dies
repentant, but still an idealist. If these two premises are valid, we can think
that if Don Quixote's story is simply funny or something more than that, leading
us back to Romantic views that have suffered such an intimidating relieve of
criticism in the last three decades.
In this paper the author’s attempt is to show how the conclusions posed can be
supported, by commenting on the death —the
three deaths, as he is putting it— of Don Quixote, which deaths
become a major part of the controversy and a key to the determination of
Cervantes's thoughts as he finished his work.
Don Quixote's death, as I have explained on my first paragraph, is mentioned
three times in the novel.
This first passing mention
of the death of Don Quixote cannot be more appropriate to the ending of Part I
which, has been a funny tale about a gentleman who has gone off pretending to be
a knight-errant. Don Quixote at some time in the past is reported to have died,
apparently still a madman.
Part II
opens with a visit by Don Quixote's two friends,
who find he is still mad and still believes in his mission. Sancho appears and
tells what the townspeople are saying about the other two. At one point
Sancho makes this relevant comment: ‘‘En
lo que toca á la valentía, cortesía, hazañas y asumpto de vuesa merced, hay
diferentes opiniones: Unos dicen: ‘Loco pero gracioso’; otros, ‘Valiente, pero
desgraciado’; otros, ‘Cortés, pero impertinente . . .
(II, 2).’’
Don Quixote's death, may
have been next planned to come about, would then take place. This death, one can
suppose, would have been less vague and less comic than the first, but less
dramatic than the last, probably leading to an ending still appropriate to the
parody being written. A notable feature of this supposed second plan is that Don
Quixote's admission to pretense would have rung false.
Cervantes, has just had his
first real look at
The story now leads to
Since the mention of
We should be reminded of Don
Quixote's speech on liberty mentioned above, which certainly must have been
prompted by Cervantes's Algerian experience. The “ánimo” shown by the author as
a young man is surely comparable to that of his madman.
“¡Aquí fué Troya! ¡Aquí mi desdicha, y no
mi cobardía, se llevó mis alcanzadas glorias; aquí usó la fortuna conmigo de sus
vueltas y revueltas; aquí se escurecieron mis hazañas; aquí, finalmente, cayó mi
ventura para jamás levantarse!”
These portentous lines are
no doubt still meant to be funny. What glory has Don Quixote won? What exploits
have been eclipsed? However, if we allow ourselves to take his part in
the drama developing quite apart from the parody, we see that sadness and
despair are now growing logically and inevitably within him, an awareness of his
coming demise, already being planned by the creator of his “history” and sensed
by him, the character created. Don Quixote is now truly sad. Sancho attempts to
cheer him. Don Quixote then speaks of Fortune and the saying that every man is
the architect of his own destiny.
“Yo lo he sido de la mía; pero no con la prudencia necesaria, y así me han
salido al gallarín mis presunciones . . .’’
“Camina, pues, amigo Sancho, y vamos a
tener en nuestra tierra el año del noviciado, con cuyo encerramiento cobraremos
virtud nueva para volver al nunca de
mí olvidado ejercicio de las armas.”
Don Quixote is clearly not
confessing any errors here, no self-discovery has taken place. He is telling us,
indirectly, that the next time he charges a “Knight of the White Moon” he may
not be mounted on a Rocinante, but hopefully on a Bucephalus or a Babieca. He
has apparently at this point not given up any of his ideals. The knight is still
madly determined and constant to his lady, and Cervantes is still attempting to
write within the bounds of his parody.
“Déjalos estar, amigo; que esta
afrenta es pena de mi pecado, y justo castigo del cielo es que á un caballero
andante vencido le coman adivas, y le piquen avispas, y le hollen puercos.”
Note that Don Quixote's
“sin” is that he has been conquered, not that he has been presumptuous.
Again he is not confessing to errors. He then sings a madrigal, and the author,
still writing his funny book, tells us
“Cada verso déstos acompañaba con muchos suspiros y no pocas lágrimas, bien como
aquel cuyo corazón gemía traspasado con el dolor del vencimiento y con la
ausencia de Dulcinea.’’
There is, in reality, no
epiphany at this point. Don Quixote recognizes no error he has committed as his
ideals are concerned, and his love for Dulcinea remains as constant as it was
when he responded to the threat of the Knight of the White Moon:
“Aprieta, caballero, la lanza y quítame
la vida . . .”
The strength of Don
Quixote's beliefs and his desire to return to the profession he can never forget
is evidently so powerful that it carries him through what I consider to be weak
and unconvincing attempts to show he is regaining his senses, that is, in
preparation for his rejection of the chivalric romances and his death. The
strength of his beliefs is to make one think that Cervantes himself, who has
come to admire and defend his character —perhaps now even identify with him— is
formulating an ending that now may be against his own inclinations.
Don Quixote, who has,
particularly since Chapter 58, gradually become a different person, steps
outside of the parody transformed from buffoon to credible, disillusioned
idealist, by virtue of his genuine grief over his failures. Cervantes has noted
and accepted the humanity and worth of his mad knight, and in the end he is no
longer asking us to laugh at him, for he himself has stopped doing so. As
already suggested, it is probable that, on the occasion just noted, as he
prompted us to laughter (Don Quixote's singing of the madrigal), he himself had
already stopped laughing.
A Don Quixote finally, as in
the beginning, acknowledged as mad prompted the turning seen in Death III, the
return to sanity by the rejection of those books which had brought on madness.
Don Quixote, now looking to the salvation of his soul, refuses to listen to his
friends who urge him “Calle, por su vida,
vuelva en sí, y déjese de cuentos.”
“Los de hasta aquí,”
replicó don Quijote, “que han sido
verdaderos en mi daño, los ha de volver mi muerte, con ayuda del cielo, en mi
provecho (II, 74).”
Repenting of his errors, his “sins” —here we must suppose he refers to his
madcap adventures as well as the ordinary sins of man— he
avows his death now will bring salvation.
The mockery and parody would
seem to end here with the ideals —the aims— of chivalry now become, I submit, a
real and accepted part of the dying Alonso's being, since they are still a part
of the dying Don Quixote's being. One need not be convinced, in any case, that
this interpretation is acceptable. In the end, whether we are dealing with a mad
Don Quixote or a sane Alonso Quixano, the sadness is equally great and
significant, and in either case, as suggested in this study, this sadness leads
to death by melancholy. Cervantes has acquiesced in and ratified the grief
shared by these two half characters and so thus ceased at this point to ridicule
their aims, their ideals.
This is the underlying cause of the final, inevitable transformation which is merely triggered by the plagiarist.
The best conclusion is the
one put by the author at the end of the article:
“The third and final death he devises for
Don Quixote is, aside from all the other things suggested, at once an apology
and a tribute. He is atoning for having mistreated him, used him for “coin”.
Just as Don Quixote turns to Sancho to say “Pardon me, friend, that I have
caused you to appear mad like me, making you fall into the same sort of error as
myself, the belief that there were and still are knights-errant in the world,”
one can easily imagine Miguel de Cervantes turning to his creation to say:
“Pardon me, dear friend, that I
made you appear mad, for if
there ever were knights-errant in this world, you had the soul to have been one
of them.” The author's deliberate, final accolade bestowed after the novel has
ended and his dedication and prologue written, is his new title to Part II in
which the word “
The third article is
The
democracy of Don Quixote by Jonathan Rée.
In that article it is said
that a new kind of writing was born when Don Quixote set off to save the world.
The novelty of the novel is
of course connected with the rise of printing, and the growth of a literate
public with time and money to spare. As the article says in its third paragraph,
“These neglected spaces were redeemed for
literature, according to Kundera, at the moment when Cervantes got his readers
to imagine Don Quixote as he lay dying while his niece went on eating, the
housekeeper went on drinking and Sancho Panza went on being "of good cheer." By
inventing a narrator through whose consciousness such dumb events could be
worked up into an affecting "scene," Cervantes created a form of literature that
could do justice to "modest sentiments"; and so a new kind of beauty—Kundera
calls it "prosaic beauty"—was born”.
Then it quotes
Kafka,
Kundera
and
Jim Coetzee. With the two first speaks about the Manicheism that
deformed Czechoslovakia, nowadays known as Czech Republic and Slovakia. Speaking about Coetzee, he says
that his political attitudes may be connected with the difficulties of being a
liberal white South African, but they have their intellectual origins in his
prodigious work as a novelist. His latest collection of essays, Inner Workings (Harvill
Secker), keeps returning to the question of "the novel form," and how Cervantes
created it in order to demonstrate the power of the imagination.
Then the article deals about
the politics and the literature, and quotes
Benjamin and
his Marxism,
Susan Sontag and
Hamish Hamilton.
Finally it speaks about
Mario Vargas
Llosa, who has on at least one occasion, gone out of his way to
achieve political power.
He won literary fame in the
early 1960s and pursued a charmed career as a writer not only in his native
As it is said in the
penultimate paragraph speaking about Vargas Llosa:
“He
traces the same kind of practical fertility in a vast range of 20th-century
novelists, from Conrad, Mann, Woolf, Orwell and Hemingway to Henry Miller,
Camus, Grass, Nabokov and Borges. A society that ignores imaginative literature,
he argues, is liable to succumb to the bovine complacencies and populist
idiocies of nationalism, and so to degenerate into "something like a sectarian
cult". “
Finally, the conclusion of
the article is that the history of democracy began not in politics but in
literature, when Cervantes first tackled "the problem of the narrator," or the
question of who gets to tell the story. As it puts in the end of the article:
No doubt about it: Don Quixote is "a
21st-century novel."
That website has also other
interesting articles, they don’t have connexion with our paper,
but I recommend it to you.
Now I
will provide my own conclusion of the three articles.