Jansy Mello: I’ve
always been surprised at the famous bouts of criticism V.Nabokov directed
against “Dom Quixote,” because his
“Lecture on Quixote” was lovingly researched and presented [ ]A few months ago I found a statement
relating VN’s criticism about this “cruel and crude
…book” to the way
in which Cervantes treated his character and not
to any other kind of cruelty pertaining to its
action nor in relation to the readers. [ ]Is VN demonstrating, through his
rejection of Cervantes’s writing that, in any novel, life’s destructiveness and
evil are to
be portrayed
only as aspects of the real cruelty of
the external world and its
inhabitants? That an
author should never be an
accomplice of the world’s evil to remain, at
most, an
impartial observer? [ ]quote: “we do not laugh at [Don Quixote] any longer. His blazon
is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle,
forlorn, pure, unselfish and gallant.”
Present
posting: My initial
query related to VN’s indignation at the ways in which Cervantes tortured his
unhappy knight has been amply explored by scholars, * although my sweeping
supposition about how VN seemed to recommend that authors avoid becoming
accomplices of the evil & cruelty presented in a novel hasn’t been
considered under the same light. Before examining more deeply the articles
available to me, or returning to VN’s original lecture, I allowed myself to
imagine that an artist’s pursuit of beauty and pity must belong to a different
dimension as that of an artwork’s materiality (should VN have extended the
same discipline of attention to detail and neutrality of science to the art of
creating a work of fiction that his words about science and art attest).
V.Nabokov’s words on Dom Quixote: “His
blazon is pity, his banner is beauty” are the same ones that he
chose for his definition of Art: “Beauty plus pity-that is the closest we can get to a
definition of art. Where there is beauty there is pity for the simple reason
that beauty must die: beauty always dies, the manner dies with the matter, the
world dies with the individual.” (Lecture on Kafka,LL,251). I wonder
what’s the fictional status of Dom Quixote after being alienated from
his creator’s work, or granted “immortality”.
The need to reexamine VN’s various choices for first-person
narrators, confessions and diaries in relation to his keeping an authorial
distance from the narrated events was clear to me, as well as the importance
of distinguishing them from his interventions and from his play with
extradiegetic levels. Nevertheless, I fear I’ll have to abandon my projects
because… “Vladimir Nabokov, with typical fastidiousness, squabbled that
seldom has an author been as cruel to his character, although he also
recommended that we ‘do our best to avoid the fatal error of looking for so-called ‘real
life’ in novels.’ Nabokov added: ‘Let us not try and reconcile the fiction of facts with the facts
of fiction. Don Quixote is a fairy tale, so is Bleak
House, so is Dead Souls. Madame
Bovary and Anna Karenin are supreme fairy tales. But
without these fairy tales the world would not be real’.” (Ilan Stavans http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2008/septemberoctober/feature/one-master-many-cervantes
). Even after we leave out what’s habitually described as “ the facts
of the world” from fiction and fairy tale, the world of fantasy still retains
important links with the human mind. And did VN equally isolate “pity” from
“compassion”? It’s so very confusing.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
*-quoting and indicating a few texts:
Don
Quixote Restored by Guy Davenport (1983)
http://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/13/books/don-quixote-restored.html
''I REMEMBER
with delight,'' Vladimir Nabokov said in 1966 to Herbert Gold, who had
traveled to Montreux to interview him, ''tearing apart 'Don Quixote,' a cruel
and crude old book, before 600 students in Memorial Hall, much to the horror
and embarrassment of some of my more conservative colleagues.'' [ ] What
Nabokov's eyes kept seeing as he prepared his lectures was the accurately
perceived fact that the book elicits cruel laughter. Cervantes' old man who
had read himself into insanity and his smelly squire were created to be the
butt of mockery.”
“Cruel and Crude”: Nabokov Reading Cervantes by Catherine Kunce
Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
13.2 (1993): 93-104.
“The late
Stephen Gilman, however, caustically protests that Nabokov, ‘the author of
that most painfully méchant of novels, Bend
Sinister, . . . professed to be shocked both by the cruelty of
Cervantes' treatment of his hero and by the gales of laughter that that
cruelty supposedly provoked’… But Gilman reminds us that Cervantes' “two
supremely naive protagonists are used in order to illuminate ironically a
society, swollen with self-importance, that refused to make a place for him
despite his past heroism”(44). Gilman places Cervantes in the larger tradition
of the novel, concluding that “it was Fielding's conscious adaptation of
Cervantine irony that opened the way to the future of the novel”... To the
degree, then, that Nabokov refuses Cervantes his irony, he impugns the tenor
of his own novels.[ ] There is a further irony to consider, this time,
in Nabokov's disdain for the “violence” in Don Quixote. The word
requires some scrutiny. Nabokov's complaints of the innumerable beatings and
the duchess and duke's “playful” inhumanity towards Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza are well taken, but this “violence” is not for the mindless amusement of
cloddish readers, as Nabokov suggests: rather, it carries a psychological
message.”
( “Cruel and Crude”: Nabokov Reading
Cervantes by Catherine Kunce)
The Imitation of Our Lord Don Quixote, by Simon Leys(1998) . http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1998/jun/11/the-imitation-of-our-lord-don-quixote/
The New York Review of Books
“he was appalled by the crudeness and the savagery of Cervantes’
narrative. In the words of Brian Boyd, his biographer, “He detested the
belly-laughs Cervantes wanted his readers to derive from his hero’s
discomfiture, and he repeatedly compared the vicious ‘fun’ of the book with
Christ’s humiliation and crucifixion, with the Spanish Inquisition, with
modern bullfighting.” [ ] His distaste for Cervantes’ sadistic treatment
of Don Quixote reached such a point that he eventually excluded the book from
his regular lectures on foreign literature at Cornell: he could not bear to
dwell on the subject any further. But the corollary of his virulent hostility
toward the writer was a loving admiration for his creature” Simon Leys
One Master Many Cervantes Don Quixote in Translation
By Ilan
Stavans | HUMANITIES,
September/October 2008 | Volume 29, Number 5 http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2008/septemberoctober/feature/one-master-many-cervantes
The Cambridge
Companion to Nabokov: edited by Julian W. Connolly
Nabokov’s Worldview,
by Leona Toker.
Style Is Matter - The Moral Art of Vladimir
Nabokov
Leland de la Durantaye Cornell University
Press,2007