Whitman College
The thesis here is that to live a truly Christian life in the modern secular world is to appear quixotic, to take illusion for reality. The author attempts —141→ to depict this phenomenon in post-Cervantine literature where the religious hero is identified with Don Quixote who, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, is effectively sanctified in a process that simultaneously connects the quixotic figure to Christ. A thirty-page introduction, with references to Burckhardt, Lukács, Ortega, Bakhtin, Goldmann, Girard, and Kundera, portrays the novel as the genre of modernity that deals with the present, accepts ambiguity, and serves as a locus for the quest for authentic values in a world of degradation. In addition, it contains a brief overview of the criticism of Don Quixote from the German Romantics through the writings of twentieth-century critics such as Américo Castro, Carlos Fuentes, Marthe Robert, Miguel de Unamuno, and Harry Levin, all of which suggests the absolute lack of a consensus on the meaning of the novel. It highlights too the «sanchification» of Don Quixote -and the epistemological shift it entails: from «believing is seeing» to «seeing is believing»- and the possible religious views of the novel's author. More concerned with Don Quixote than with Don Quixote, however, and more specifically with the religious dimension of his mythical legacy, the knight appears theologically significant insofar as he strives to uphold faith in his chivalric fantasy in the face of reality and reason. This mirrors the struggle of the modern religious individual to sustain faith in God despite the challenge of secularity and skepticism. The body of the book is neatly divided into three parts, each of which contains two sections: an historical account of the reception of Don Quixote in a particular century (eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth) and a textual analysis of a novel from that period (Fielding's Joseph Andrews, Dostoevsky's The Idiot, Greene's Monsignor Quixote) which adapts the Don Quixote figure for sacred ends and crystallizes its century's religious image of the knight.
Part One begins with a carefully documented presentation of the
eighteenth-century view of Don Quixote which generally envisioned the knight as
an «enthusiast» or fanatic, a term often leveled against religious
groups during the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany. Against this
backdrop, Ziolkowski paints Fielding's radically different sympathetic view of
Don Quixote (as it slowly emerges in his works from
Love in Several Masks,
Don Quixote in England,
The Coffee House Politician, and
Joseph Andrews) as a good-natured spokesman
for virtue, a foil to hypocrisy, and a figure of positive religious
significance, indeed a «Christian paragon»
(54)
full of universal benevolence, pity, natural goodness, and charity, who defends
Fielding's latitudinarian ethic against the Methodist emphasis on faith alone.
Ziolkowski's analysis of the novel describes both the influence of Cervantes's
text on
Joseph Andrews and the religious
transformation of the Spanish hero within the narrative. He systematically
notes how
Joseph Andrews builds on episodes in
Don Quixote, contains interpolated tales, and
generally reproduces Cervantine narrative play, but he occasionally exaggerates
to make his points: Is «worldly knowledge»
(75)
really an attribute of Joseph Andrews? Is Mr. Wilson to be seen mainly as an
eighteenth century English Don Diego? If so, why the importance attributed to
his past
—142→
life? Often Ziolkowski does not push far enough. Why is
there no discussion of Parson Adams's inability to live up to his own
principles when he is told that his son has drowned? Why, finally, is it never
pointed out that the question of ironic distance is radically different in the
two novels? Ziolkowski's analysis of the religious transformation of Don
Quixote in the character of Parson Adams is particularly well crafted. No
longer mad but eccentric and absentminded, Adams is both an English Quixote and
a Christian exemplar. Innocent, charitable, well intentioned, devoid of worldly
experience, and dedicated to the relief of the poor and needy, he sallies forth
as a quixotic misfit, noble and amusing, in a text that begins as a parody of
Pamela and ends by satirizing the shallow
piety, lack of charity, and religious hypocrisy of eighteenth-century
Christianity.
Chapter Three details the history of Romantic readings of
Don Quixote which changed the knight from a
comic figure into a «noble, idealistic, tragic and ultimately
Christ-like hero»
(95). Here Don Quixote is endowed with
religious significance and represents the infinite within the finite: the ideal
in its struggle with the real (Schiller and Schelling), the soul in opposition
to the body (Heinrich Heine), poetry in dialogue with prose (Schlegel).
Ziolkowski also shows how, during the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century,
the image of Christ was demythologized and humanized while that of Don Quixote
became mythologized and idealized, thus allowing Dostoevsky, influenced by,
among others, Strauss, Renan, and Turgenev, to join them in his concept of the
«beautiful person», which incarnates innocence, faith, enthusiasm,
passion (suffering), magnanimity, idealism, and poetic imagination. The fourth
chapter studies Don Quixote's religious transformation in
The Idiot where a Christian, living the ethic
of selfless
agape, appears as foolish as
Cervantes's hero. Ziolkowski analyzes Dostoevsky's use of paired egos,
allegory, and polyphony to establish the quixotic and Christic nature of his
hero, Myshkin, who is a heavenly stranger, naïve, honest, virginal,
humble, innocent, and compassionate. He sees only suffering (not evil), blames
no one (but himself), befriends children, and attempts to redeem a fallen
female figure whom he views as perfection. A holy fool who embodies charity and
extraordinary forgiveness, his quixotism is tragic, for he fails, in a
nihilistic, atheistic, and materialistic world, to bind humans together into a
community of love. This chapter lacks a detailed discussion of the conflict
between passion and compassion in the novel and, in my view, exaggerates both
Myshkin's supposed transformation -he is always a stranger aware of his
difference- and his religious doubt, seen, for example, by Ziolkowski, in
Myshkin's assertion that «some people» might lose their faith in
contemplating Hans Holbein's
Christ in the Tomb. One might more readily
perceive here Myshkin's great compassion for those, such as Ippolit and
Rogozhin, who might have lost their faith in this manner. These are points,
however, where there is plenty of room for disagreement. Ziolkowski's analysis
of the novel is, finally, penetrating and convincing.
The only disappointing section of this book is Chapter Five,
which deals with the religious trend in twentieth-century
Quixote criticism. Instead of studying
Unamuno's writings in depth, Ziolkowski spends over thirty pages citing a good
number of mediocre poets, essayists, and dreadful novelists who have linked
Quixote and Christ. The chapter, unfortunately, is much more of an enumeration
than an elucidation. He does, however, in Chapter Six, a very fine job of
reading
Monsignor Quixote in the light of
Don Quixote and Unamuno. Here we meet
Monsignor Quixote, a descendant of Don Quixote, who drives a car he calls
Rocinante, reads books of «chivalry» (the gospel of John, Saints
Teresa, John of the Cross, and Francis de Sales), and travels with the
Communist ex-mayor of El Toboso whom he calls Sancho and to whom the
monsignor's belief in God seems as illusory as Mambrino's helmet. Like his
ancestor who transforms two women «of the district» into
«Ladyships», the monsignor marvels at «the foot bath»
and blows up «balloons» in a brothel where he spends the night, a
place he thinks is just an extra friendly hotel with «real family
atmosphere». Many of his adventures and the people he meets recall those
of
Don Quixote, including the scene where he
hides a criminal in the trunk of his car and quotes Don Quixote when he freed
the galley slaves. In the course of the narrative, the monsignor and the mayor
transcend their ideological differences and establish «a community of
doubters» that makes tolerance and love a reality. The monsignor is
wounded in his final adventure where he attempts to defend the statue of the
Blessed Mother against the blasphemy, hypocrisy, superstition, and greed of a
crowd of priests and peasants. He dies in the Trappist monastery in Osera with
the mayor at his side. Ziolkowski demonstrates the omnipresence of Unamuno in
Greene's narrative. Not only was Unamuno the ex-mayor's professor at Salamanca,
but the monsignor's concept of faith is purely Unamunian. Here doubt is the
natural state of the believer whose faith is an act of the will born of
anguish, not of any rational compulsion. One can only conclude that, under the
influence of Unamuno, Greene wrote a religious version of
Don Quixote where the monsignor represents
the vitalist «whose faith is founded on uncertainty»
and the
Communist ex-mayor «the relativist who doubts his own
reason»
(240).
The book's conclusion makes explicit the parallels between Christ and Don Quixote, Parson Adams, Myshkin, and Monsignor Quixote. Once more, it reiterates, via Kierkegaard, that the sanctification of Don Quixote reflects the struggle of religious faith and ideals in a modern, secular world that postulates the anachronistic (i.e., quixotic) status of religion which, in turn, causes a specific «quixotic» suffering of the displaced individual who yearns to return to a paradisiacal past age. Like Unamuno who, in an early gigantic example of reader-response criticism, discarded Cervantes and granted autonomy to the immortal Don Quixote (not to the character who died in the novel), Ziolkowski's study follows the religious course taken by the same semi-extratextual legendary Don Quixote figure. His book —144→ contains a rich, learned, passionate, and original analysis of the myth of Don Quixote in our culture that will be of significant value to all those interested in the multiple possibilities of Cervantes's masterpiece.