Guest post

[This is part of a three-way swap where I write something for Choler, he writes something for Mr and Mrs Brown, and Mr Brown writes something for me. The only link between our three blogs is that the three of us are old friends, so it's been a fascinating challenge. Here's my post for Choler, on the subject of World Femininity Day and what femininity looks like.]

 

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 20 Things You Didn’t Know About Don Quixote

“Uh, Don Quixote! Thin man on a horse, fat man on a donkey! Um… windmills? It’s very long. Spanish. I think. Old, too. Not sure how old. But verrry old.” This was the sum total of everything I knew about Don Quixote. And I’m an English graduate, too. I should know better! Don Quixote felt like a huge blind spot in my literary knowledge. A hidden monster. A dragon to slay.

So with an air of grim determination, in my 35th year, I finally plucked up the courage to tackle Don Quixote, while on holiday in Spain. All 750 pages of it. In an 18th-century translation the experts agree is ‘worse than useless’. I think I had gritted teeth when I started to read.

I won’t lie to you. It was a slog. The events can be repetitive. The speech seems stilted and lengthy. If there’d been any English-language TV to watch, Don Quixote would probably still be sitting unread in my luggage. But it was worth it: although it absolutely felt four hundred years old, it was bizarre, heartfelt, hilarious and unexpectedly moving.

If you don’t fancy the eye-burn yourself, just read the facts below and lie about it. Nobody will ever know! Here goes:

1. Everything you think you know is right.

Yep! You haven’t got it wrong. Don Quixote is the story of an old gentleman who goes crazy after reading too many books of chivalry (the summer blockbuster/airport novel nonsense of its day) and thinks he’s a super-powered knight from the days of old. He enlists a credulous peasant called Sancho Panza (played, forever in my imagination, by Luis Guzman) to be his squire, and goes off into the flea-bitten, dusty, heartbreakingly mundane world of seventeenth-century rural Spain, convinced he’s on a series of impossible knightly adventures: slaying monsters, rescuing maidens, righting wrongs and fighting epic battles. He’s not.

2. ‘Don Quixote’ means ‘Sir Bummo The Magnificent’.

In the book, Don Quixote’s real name is Don Alonso Quesada. Don Quixote, the name he gives himself in his madness, means something a bit like ‘Sir Haunches’. The ending ‘ote’ makes it grander – hence ‘the magnificent.’ It’s a silly name that doesn’t translate, basically. He renames his horse ‘Rocinante’, which means something like ‘Wonderhorse’, too.

3. It’s two books.

The standard big-ass volume you see for £1.99 on remainder bookstore shelves contains Don Quixote and Don Quixote II. The sequel was written ten years after the first one, which was a massive success. It’s a straight continuation of our mad Don’s misadventures, but there are a few twists in there too – more of that later.

4. The bit with the windmills happens right at the start.

You’re dealt the famous bit with the windmills in the first fifty pages – it’s almost the first thing Don Quixote does once he’s enlisted Sancho Panza as his squire. You know the bit I mean: Don sees windmills, thinks they’re giants, charges at them, goes flying, hilarity ensues. That leaves over 700 pages of Quixote-y goodness still to go! Sigh. At this point, I started wondering how good the rest of it was going to be. You know? A lot of what happens afterwards follows the same lines: the Don sees something mundane, thinks it’s an epic situation, wades in (with Sancho Panza desperately trying to hold him back, and failing) and comes a cropper. Usually violently. I lost count of the number of times Don Quixote fell off his horse. He’s often pelted with stones, beaten up, trampled by various animals, and generally completely battered. None of it stops him. What makes all this funnier is that the Don has no fear. None whatsoever. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza must be the most physically abused comedy heroes in literary history.

5. There was a fake cash-in Don Quixote sequel.

Don Quixote was so successful, an unknown writer or writers bashed out a sequel a few years later. It was, by all accounts, a pile of steaming toss. (You can read it on the internet if you must – and you don’t must, you really don’t.) But it did motivate Cervantes to finally write the real sequel – and to fill it with a ton of invective about the fake one, too. Hoookaay…

6. It’s hella postmodern.

Not Don Quixote 1, in any major way. But as the Don and Sancho resume their insane adventures in Part 2, they find out that someone has written up their exploits in the form of Don Quixote 1. It’s been published and everything. (They’re even a bit suspicious about how the unknown author knew what they were thinking when they’d not told anyone.) And it’s become a big hit.

Suddenly, they’re celebrities! Almost everyone they meet has read and loved Don Quixote. Sancho is continually being asked to say something funny and gnomic and peasant-like. (Sometimes they even complain about all the extraneous stories in Part I, and quiz Don Quixote on continuity errors in the book too.) The Don isn’t just a figure of ridicule any more; he’s also a well-loved (if embarrassing) national character, famous for his madness. He’s Jedward, basically.

A good portion of the sequel is taken up with the Don and Sancho becoming friends with a good-natured Duke and Duchess, big Don Quixote fans, who engineer all kinds of schemes to bring Don Quixote’s mad world of chivalry to life. They even get Sancho the ‘island’ that Don Quixote has been promising him as a reward, and he finds out that administering a community is harder than it looks.

Then later, Don Quixote and Sancho find out about the fake sequel, too. This lying account of their deeds enrages the Don so much, he refuses to go to some towns he visits in the fake sequel, just to prove it can’t be true. That’s deep.

They even meet a character from the fake sequel, who proclaims that those two clowns he hung out with before must have been impostors – the real Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are nothing like so rubbish. Brain-twisting.

7. Also, gross.

Things that happen in Don Quixote: Sancho Panza is too scared to leave his master, so he takes his trousers off and shits where he stands; Don Quixote shits himself in a cage; Don Quixote accidentally exposes himself to young ladies who stumble into his bedroom; Sancho Panza pukes everywhere; Don Quixote pukes in Sancho Panza’s face; this makes Sancho Panza puke in Don Quixote’s face too. The Farrelly Brothers would definitely approve.

8. It was written by a battle-hardened soldier who spent five years in a North African prison.

So who wrote this, anyway? Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra wasn’t just a rather unsuccessful playwright and poet. He was also a soldier who lost his left hand in the famous naval battle of Lepanto in 1571. Four years later, he was captured by pirates who sold him to the brutal King of Algiers.

Unlike many who were horribly tortured, your man Cervantes survived and made it back home in one piece. And a lot of this makes it into Don Quixote. You see, especially in the first part, there are a lot of other stories inserted into the narrative – often as tales told to the Don by people he meets. One is a detailed adventure story about a man who is imprisoned by the Turks and makes a daring escape, which draws on Cervantes’ own experiences.

9. Cervantes helped invade England.

Back from soldiering and prison, Cervantes got a job requisitioning funds for a little military idea of King Philip II’s: the Spanish Armada. Being effectively a taxman can’t have been much fun – but at least he got to travel around a bit, experiencing the people and places he later referenced in Don Quixote.

10. And he was excommunicated. (Twice.)

Cervantes made the mistake of taking too much of the local monastery’s supplies for the Armada. So the angry abbot excommunicated him from the Catholic Church. He made amends and was accepted back into the arms of Mother Church – then he did it again. It was fine, though. This was sixteenth-century Spain – if you made it past breakfast without excommunication, you were doing okay.

11. It’s where part of The Princess Bride comes from.

One of the extraneous stories in Don Quixote concerns a girl who is wedded to a no-good duke for her money. Her real lover tries to reach her in time, but he’s too late! She’s forced through the wedding ceremony, and then faints. Later, she is about to commit suicide by stabbing herself through the heart, when her lover shows up. All is not lost! She never said ‘I do’ (or words to that effect), so they’re not really married. After many shenanigans, happily ever after ensues. It doesn’t say if the presiding preist could pronounce his ‘r’s, though.

12. It has one of the best Monty Python sketches in it.

This one! The Cheese Shop Sketch. Sancho Panza goes into an inn and has pretty much the same conversation. Coincidence, or something stranger? Knowing the arts heritage of the Pythons, I reckon they got their sketch from Don Quixote.

NB: Although the Spanish Inquisition is mentioned in Don Quixote, they don’t pop up much. And they have no comfy chairs.

13. It was ‘written’ by a Muslim.

Like the medieval romances that Cervantes is spoofing, Cervantes claims that he’s actually translating all the Don’s adventues from an old book written by a Moor. He calls this fake writer Cide Hamete Benengeli (Benengeli is from the Arabic word for ‘aubergine’, lol) and occasionally ‘transcribes’ comments that the fictional Cide Hamete has made for good measure.

14. There’s a ‘lost’ animals-only version.

One of Cide Hamete Benengeli’s comments is to the effect that there’s a completely separate lost manuscript that just deals with the events of the novels from the viewpoint of Don Quixote’s horse Rosinante and Sancho Panza’s mule Dapple. Which would make a great Disney version.

15. It’s exactly contemporary to Shakespeare.

The first Don Quixote came out in 1605, when Shakespeare was at his height of his powers. (King Lear was first performed the year after.) It was translated into English very quickly – Shakespeare might even have owned a copy. Cervantes died in 1616, within ten days of Shakespeare. Shame they never got to meet. I envision a hell of a pub crawl.

16. It invented the term ‘Lothario’.

Another extraneous story in Don Quixote concerns a man who wants to test his wife’s fidelity, by getting his best friend to try to seduce her. His best friend is called ‘Lothario’. Yeah, you guessed it. It doesn’t end well.

17. Gustav Doré did no less than 350 illustrations for it.

Seriously. They’re all here, and they’re all amazing – cartoonish and epic in equal measure, fitting snugly with the timbre of the book. You may have heard of others who made images of Don Quixote … Dali? Picasso? [smiles smugly] Amateurs.

18. Orson Welles spent 14 years trying to film it. And failed.

This is a whole saga in itself. Welles started on a 30 minute TV movie which bloated into an improvisatory feature film. After years of shoots, reshoots, changes of plot, character and filming location, Welles died before anything like a finished film could be put together, although you can find parts of it if you poke around on the internet.

19. Terry Gilliam tried too. And he might still make it!

In 2000, Gilliam starting filming a movie called The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, about a time-travelling ad exec who keeps finding himself playing Sancho Panza to the Don. Everything went wrong – from cast injuries to torrential rain to impossible shooting conditions. It completely collapsed, and the film was never made. You can see what happened in the documentary Lost in La Mancha. The latest word is that Gilliam’s returned to the project, so we might finally see this notorious movie one day.

20. Don Quixote dies at the end.

Spoilers! In the last few chapters, Don Quixote is bested in combat as part of a crafty scheme to get him back to his home village. He’s made to swear to give up knight-errantry for ten years. A broken man, he returns home, becomes ill, and regains his sanity. He dies surrounded by his grieving friends and family, renouncing all forms of chivalry. (Cervantes states that one reason he’s killing him off is so that nobody can write any more fake sequels.)

Anyway, I had a lump in my throat. You can’t spend 750 pages with characters this good and not come to care for them. Because this is the most important thing about Don Quixote, and the reason it’s sometimes called the first novel: these characters are special. Don Quixote’s naive, romantic madness is incredibly appealing. Later, he becomes something of a holy fool, accessing an imaginary world that’s as epic as it is funny. Cowardly, food-loving Sancho Panza isn’t just a cheap stereotype; he gains his own wisdom along the way. And the world they’re in is so full of incident and imagination, it’s a wrench to leave it behind.

Something odd happens throughout Don Quixote, which is that the old man’s madness infects everyone around him to some degree. Whores are princesses; windmills are giants; peasants inns are palaces, and the world can never truly be the same again.

Frankly, I can’t be the only one who secretly hoped Don Quixote would have a last-minute bout of insanity, pick up his battered lance and charge away across the plains, forever the gallant knight of his imagination. Who knows? He might have even heard the applause of readers through the centuries.

Phew. There. I’m done. Thanks for reading, and thanks for Katy for letting me spout so much nonsense on her shiny blog. If you want to read more rubbish, go to www.mrandmrsbrown.co.uk to read about our quest to visit 211 London events in 2011. It’s epic!

MrBrown