READIN

Monday, February 23rd, 2004

Don Quixote, Chapter XLIV: The web of coincidences in the last section of Part I was really threatening to lose my interest... But somehow it has pulled me back in over the last two chapters.

posted evening of February 23rd, 2004: Respond
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Wednesday, February 25th, 2004

Don Quixote, Chapter XLV: Ah, we're back to the main subject matter of the book, the madness of Señor Quexana. The other stories are good too but this is the real meat of it.

posted evening of February 25th, 2004: Respond
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Friday, February 27th, 2004

I am just ploughing through House of Sand and Fog now, loving the world of the book -- Dubus has got me totally roped in to his reality. He is leaping around amongst various time frames and points of view and it seems totally fluid to me. This is IMO the key to a really good modern novel. I would like to develop this at more length sometime. Also it was occurring to me this morning, how does that tie in with my experience of Don Quixote? The movement between various narrative lines which I was admiring a few posts back is in the same direction as this quality I am talking about; but it is not precisely the same.

posted morning of February 27th, 2004: Respond
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Sunday, February 29th, 2004

Don Quixote, chapter L: the story of Part I is drawing to a close and I am a bit troubled. I have been appreciating the narrative gymnastics and the wry wit; but I don't think any of the characters have emerged over these 450 pages as much more than one-dimensional. I am confused a bit about the pedantic tone of the sections that inveigh against chivalric novels -- sometimes it seems like irony, other times quite earnest.

As a reader in 2004, the question of chivalric novels doesn't matter much to me except insofar as it expands to cover popular action novels in general -- do I read Cervantes as talking specifically about the genre popular at his time, or as addressing a more universal human trait?

posted evening of February 29th, 2004: Respond

Tuesday, March second, 2004

I finished the first part of Don Quixote last night. What I want to say about the book is that it is funny and clever but not satisfying. And that the reason for this is, the reader is given no chance to get to know the characters as humans. (Funny, this is the same thing I just said about "The Dreamer" -- I don't know if that makes my saying it more or less trustworthy...) I do not want to paint myself into a corner where the only thing I can appreciate is modern novels. And I don't really thing that's what is going on: I can think of two works I love (and find satisfying) straight off the bat, Iliad and Beowulf, which do not have human characters in the sense I have been talking about; I'm sure there would be many more if I took some time to dig through my memory. Why is it that these work? Can I shift my expectations of Don Quixote to make myself enjoy it more?

posted morning of March second, 2004: Respond

Friday, March 19th, 2004

Truth may be stretched thin and not break, but float upon the surface of the lie, like oil on water

Cervantes
Don Quixote, Part II, Chapter X

For some reason, this quote out of context reminds me strongly of neocon arguments in support of the Iraq war.

posted evening of March 19th, 2004: Respond

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

🦋 -- Ohhhhh......

So I'm reading the third chapter of Autobiographies of Orhan Pamuk (which concerns The Silent House) and thinking, the family name Darvinoğlu sounds awfully familiar -- was it the name of one of the characters in The Black Book? And then I start reading the fourth chapter, which concerns The White Castle, and get to the following passage, which makes the scales fall from my eyes:

It was Don Quixote that inspired [Pamuk] to present his own novel as an old manuscript found and translated into modern Turkish; once that was decided, it occurred to him that it would be amusing to have the manuscript found in the archives at Gebze and translated by none other than Faruk Darvinoğlu, the historian of The Silent House.

Oh! So the characters I was wondering about in the winter have earlier roots. Wild -- I wish The Silent House were available in an English translation.

McGaha also says that some critics faulted Holbrook, in her translation of The White Castle, for including the references to The Silent House without any explanation -- this seems a little weird to me. I can't see how she could have provided any explanation within the text; maybe an afterword should have been included. Doesn't seem like it would have made a huge difference in the reading experience.

posted afternoon of July 26th, 2008: Respond
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Thursday, February 26th, 2009

🦋 In which I take issue with Borges

Borges starts out by talking about how one reads detective stories.

To think is to generalize; we need the useful archetypes of Plato to be able to make any claim. So: why shouldn't we affirm that there are literary genres? I will add a personal observation: literary genres depend, perhaps, less on the texts themselves than on the manner in which they are read. The æsthetic fact requires a conjunction of reader and text; only then does it exist. It is absurd to suppose that a volume is anything more than a volume. It starts to exist when the reader opens the volume. Then the æsthetic phenomenon comes into existence, which could be imagined from the moment when the book was engendered.

And there is an actual type of reader, the reader of detective fiction. This reader -- this reader whom we encounter in every country of the world and who numbers in the millions -- was brought into being by Edgar Allen Poe. Let us suppose that this reader did not exist -- or let's suppose something perhaps more interesting, that we are dealing with a person far removed from ourselves. He could be a Persian, a Malay, a hayseed, a kid -- some person whom we tell that the Quixote is a detective novel; let us suppose that this hypothetical person has read detective novels, and he begins reading the Quixote. So how is he going to read it?

Somewhere in la Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, not long ago there lived a gentleman... and already this reader is filled with suspicions, for the reader of detective novels is a skeptical reader, suspicious, particularly suspicious.

For example, when he reads: Somewhere in la Mancha..., of course he supposes that this did not take place in la Mancha. Then: ...whose name I do not care to remember..., -- why does Cervantes not care to remember? Without a doubt because Cervantes is the murder[er], is at fault. Then, ...not long ago...; it may be that what has already happened is not as terrifying as the future.

The first two paragraphs of this passage seem just fantastic to me (given that I didn't think there was any real need in the first place, to defend the legitimacy of talking about genre) -- the idea that literary genre is determined by an interaction between the reader and the text has a whole lot of room for interesting stuff to com out of it. The idea that Edgar Allen Poe created the reader of detective stories is a nice little nugget of thought. And the thought experiment of reading Don Quixote as a detective story is a great idea, of course bringing to mind Borges' story about Pierre Menard. But when he embarks on the experiment, he goes off on the wrong track.

The suspicions that Borges attributes to the reader of detective fiction are suspicions about the intent of the narrator, of the author of the Quixote. But the unreliable narrator does not belong to the detective story, and suspicion of him does not belong to the detective story reader; Laurence Sterne predates Poe by a hundred years, and he did not invent the unreliable narrator. (If memory serves, for that matter, the narrator of the actual Quixote is himself not particularly reliable.*) It's been a while since I read any genre detective stories, but the way I recall reading them is being suspicious of the characters and the ways they presented themselves; the narrator (speaking here of stories in the third person or narrated by the detective, and not considering the Raymond Chandler branch of the genre) did not lie, though he might fail to disclose valuable information or might himself be deceived.

So, there's my quibble with this lecture -- which I have not read in full yet. This reading a language I do not understand seems to really point me in the direction of reading closely, at least...

...Looking ahead, some really great stuff in the body of this lecture. Stay tuned, I'll try and write more this evening. Borges thinks the two authors "without whom literature would not be what it is today" are Poe and Whitman.

* I mean to say, it seems completely natural to wonder why Cervantes does not care to remember the place where his novel begins -- but it's not because I suspect Cervantes of being the guilty party, and I don't believe it's because I have read detective stories. I wonder if a 17th-Century reader would have this reaction -- it's hard for me to imagine any other way of reacting to that sentence.

posted evening of February 26th, 2009: 11 responses
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Sunday, September 20th, 2009

🦋 Picaresque

I've been reading some stories from Angel Flores' Spanish Stories/Cuentos Españoles, a facing-pages bilingual edition of Spanish short stories from Don Juan Manuel to Goytisolo. It's kind of a tricky book to recommend other than to someone learning Spanish -- for which purpose it is extremely useful -- because the translations are close to literal, rather than literary. They serve their purpose very well, of allowing me to cross-reference when I do not understand a bit of the Spanish; but if I were just reading the English I think I would look for a more polished translation. Anyways, I am loving the book and I recommend it if you find yourself in a similar position to me, interested in acquainting yourself with the literature and language of Spain.

I'm a bit surprised by how well I can understand the old Spanish of Lazarillo de Tormes -- I am not worrying too much about recognizing verb tenses, generally it is just enough to recognize that a word is some form of a particular verb, and I can get the rest from context. The text uses a whole lot of subjunctive preterites and second-person plurals which I'm pretty unfamiliar with... Lazarillo de Tormes (you can read a bilingual edition of it here, by a translator who apparently wishes to remain nameless) is according to Flores (and confirmed by Wikipædia), the first instance of Picaresque literature. Neat! I'm not real well acquainted with this genre beyond Don Quixote and The Adventures of a Simpleton... Lazarillo is fun and entertaining but did not really draw me in, I think the narrative voice just sounds too stilted for me to really get into it -- by way of comparison the first few pages of Cervantes' La fuerza de la sangre (one of his Novelas exemplares, which you can read here) have me falling in love with his clear voice -- I have only read him in translation before, I think when I am a little better at reading Spanish I need to try Don Quixote in the original, or in a bilingual edition if such a thing exists.* Cervantes was writing only a few decades later than the author of Lazarillo so I definitely think the stilted quality of the latter is a product of the author rather than of his age

*A bilingual e-book of Part I of Don Quixote is available for free download from Fusion Bilingual eBooks. Also there is an abridged bilingual edition from Anglo-Didacto which comes with a CD of readings; my first impulse is to be skeptical of the claim that the updating of archaic forms has been "done with profound respect to the Spanish text as well as its translation in English, [and] only emphasises, more if possible, the magic of Cervantes' pen."

posted afternoon of September 20th, 2009: Respond
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Friday, September 25th, 2009

Y así, sin dar parte a persona alguna de su intención, y sin que nadie le viese, una mañana, antes del día, que era uno de los calurosos del mes de julio,... salío al campo con grandísima contento y alborozo de ver con cuanta facilidad había dado principio a su gran buen deseo.

Update: Oh and cool, look at this article I just found with some history as regards Picasso's image of the man of La Mancha.

posted evening of September 25th, 2009: 3 responses

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