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. There are wonderful paragraphs in which one can feel how closely VN followed the crazy knight’s adventures and understood his suffering ( As for example, on page 69 of his Quixote lecture we find: “The wretched sense of poverty mingles with his general dejection and he finally goes to bed, moody and heavy-hearted. Is it only Sancho´s absence and the burst threads of his stockings that induce this sadness, this Spanish soledad, this Portuguese saudades, this French angoisse, this German sensucht, this Russian toska? We wonder – we wonder if it does not go deeper.”)
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.
I don’t think I can fully understand VN’s indignation nor am I able to amplify its resonance to embrace other authors, novels and their characters: it’s so very new to me to imagine kindness and pity as an author’s “obligation” towards his characters. Where does the recognition about characters being “galley slaves” fit in ? Krug and Lolita are examples of brief testimonies of authorial pity, an emotion that could also be curiously extended towards Humbert –but not Hermann.
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? (“For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.”)
While I was browsing the net to find if the quote I need appears on line, I found: The Secret Jewish History of Don Quixote, by Benjamin Ivry (February 17, 2014)
Read more: http://forward.com/culture/192662/the-secret-jewish-history-of-don-quixote/#ixzz3esDdHlzy
“Was Don Quixote’s impossible dream a Yiddisher one? The French author Dominique Aubier, whose study “Don Quixote: Prophet of Israel” has just been reprinted, apparently thinks so.
Aubier’s book, which originally appeared in 1966, is based on the thesis now generally accepted by literary historians that the author of “Don Quixote,” Miguel de Cervantes, likely hailed from a family of conversos , or converts, Spanish Jews who in 1492 were faced with the choice of leaving their homeland or staying on as Christians. Extrapolating from this likelihood, Aubier advanced controversial theories, for example that “Don Quixote” contains numerous references to the Kabbalah and other Jewish themes. The protagonist’s very name, according to Aubier, is derived from the Aramaic word qeshot , meaning truth or certainty, often used in the Zohar, a key text in Kabbalah.
Critics of Aubier’s ideas are plentiful among Spanish literature experts (the Cervantes scholar Daniel Eisenberg has termed her book “highly misleading”), who point out that it is near impossible that Cervantes could have had access to Jewish mystical literature in Spain. When “Don Quixote” was originally published, from 1605 to 1610, observant Jews had long since been expelled from the country. Among Aubier’s other suggestions is one concerning Dulcinea del Toboso, Don Quixote’s ideal woman who was in reality a peasant-like “brawny girl,” as Quixote’s servant Sancho Panza described her. Aubier states that Dulcinea symbolizes the Shekhinah, which in talmudic tradition has been described as representing feminine attributes of God’s presence. “Don Quixote: Prophet of Israel” also offers an etymology for Dulcinea’s town El Toboso as deriving from the Hebrew words tov and sod , or good and hidden meaning.
[…]
The novelist Vladimir Nabokov termed “Don Quixote” a “cruel and crude old book,” an observation justified by a readily available online summary of the novel’s action: “Don Quixote promises to make a balsam to cure Sancho… Don Quixote mixes ingredients and drinks the potion. He vomits immediately and passes out… Sancho also takes the potion, and although it makes him tremendously ill, he does not vomit… Don Quixote rushes into the battle and kills seven sheep before two shepherds throw stones at him and knock out several of his teeth… Don Quixote takes more of the balsam, and as Sancho comes close to see how badly his master’s teeth have been injured, Don Quixote vomits on him. Nauseous, Sancho then vomits on Don Quixote.”
Yet in appetizing English-language versions by the acclaimed Jewish translators J. M. Cohen, Burton Raffel and Edith Grossman, “Don Quixote” is no stomach turner. The literature-obsessed knight of doleful countenance was a man of the book, simultaneously a schlemiel and schlemazel, who seems destined to remain irresistible to Jewish readers. Even Nabokov, in his “Lectures on Don Quixote,” admitted that by the novel’s end, “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.”