Tilting at Quixote
by Brian Gebhart, June 22, 2016
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha, 1605/1615
Editors’ Note: This essay is the second in our series on books writers have stopped reading, either because the books were difficult, or too time-consuming, or because the writers just didn’t have it in them at the end of the day. Today: Brian Gebhart on Don Quixote.
Of all the weighty tomes I’ve picked up and then abandoned—a list too long and embarrassing to mention here, lest I descend into a spiral of self-justification and self-loathing—the one that haunts me most is Don Quixote. Unlike so many classics of the literary canon, Quixote is supposed to be a lighthearted romp, a funny, farcical send-up of the Renaissance romances that served as precursor to the novel as a literary form. What's more, Quixote is often credited as the first modern novel. As an aspiring novelist, I felt I was pretty much required to read it.
For background (and not to excuse my failings, but still): I began reading Quixote about a week after the birth of my son. This seemed like a good idea at the time, although it hindsight it looks insane. I had taken two weeks off from work, and the holidays were approaching, so there would be plenty of empty hours to fill. In addition, I was between writing projects and so would not be nagged by guilt that there was more important work to be doing. Moreover, it was wintertime in Minnesota, when the cold, snow, and darkness incline one toward curling up with a hefty book. And although I knew I’d be overwhelmed by sleeplessness and exhaustion and the emotional whirlwind of having a baby in the house, this state of affairs actually seemed to tilt (pun intended) in Quixote's favor. After all, if I wasn't going to be sleeping much, I might as well get some reading done. And if I lay awake at odd hours, absorbed in Cervantes's tale, I could be more helpful to my wife, whose exhaustion I knew would surpass my own. Right?
The first chapters were a slog. Cervantes does a lot of throat-clearing, as Don Quixote slowly gathers all the elements he needs to make himself a knight: horse, armor, squire. Amid all this, the prose is peppered with references to heroes and legendary battles that might have struck a chord with seventeenth-century readers, but mean nothing to us today. In my Modern Library edition (a small block of paper nearly as thick as it is wide) it takes more than 60 pages for Quixote to acquire Sancho as his squire and join his famous battle against the windmills.
Still, I made it through these pages and sallied forth into the main action. As I read on, I was continually impressed by the deftness with which Cervantes handles the parodic and meta-fictional elements of his story. And there's much to be admired about the perspective revealed by Cervantes’s prose. He's ribald and witty, insightful and incisive, expressing a warmth of feeling toward his characters and a nuanced understanding of their psychology—displaying a previously unprecedented literary humanism all while narrating scenes of farcical action. As I read, mostly in bed, by lamplight, I found myself stifling laughter so as not to wake my wife and newborn son, and struggling with the book’s stiff binding as I underlined passages that were particularly sharp or funny. The narrative moves slowly, but I don’t mean to suggest it’s boring; even a humorous paragraph describing Quixote mounting his steed can be freighted with meaning.
No, what defeated me was the sentences. Cervantes’s sentences are dense, thorny clusters, notable for both length and circuitousness; they often meander through dependent clauses carrying verbose asides that manage to hijack the sentence itself, leading the reader through a set of labyrinthine descriptions and abstruse speculations: during which the punctuation often confuses the situation even further, suggesting a point of culmination that ultimately dissolves back toward the sentence’s original thrust, although it has now been diverted to such an extent that it’s difficult to remember where it was heading in the first place, and one must return to the beginning of the sentence and start all over again to regain any sense of momentum, after which one realizes that an entire paragraph has passed, but to which of many possible purposes it is now impossible to ascertain.
Imagine wrestling with a sentence like the following, having slept only a handful of hours in the past few days, and possessing only a faint memory of the previous night’s reading:
“He received a very hearty welcome from the goatherds, and Sancho having, as well as he could, accommodated Rozinante and his ass, was attracted by the odour, that issued from some pieces of goat’s-flesh, that were boiling in a kettle; but though he longed very much, at that instant, to see if it was time to transfer them from the kettle to the belly, he checked his curiosity, because the landlord took them from the fire, and spreading some sheep-skins upon the ground, set out their rustic table without loss of time; inviting their two guests to a share of their mess, with many expressions of good will and hospitality.”
As a writer living more than four hundred years after Quixote’s publication, having been raised in an atmosphere of literary minimalism, trained to excise every unnecessary word by those who worshipped at the altar of Hemingway and Barthelme and Carver, the above sentence is maddening. I’d like to bracket the entire paragraph and scrawl the word “condense” in the margins, or simply rewrite it: “The goatherds shared their meal with Don Quixote and Sancho.”
It is tempting to blame Tobias Smollett, whose translation Modern Library chose for the edition I have. Given the era in which he wrote, Smollett’s instincts as a translator, like his instincts as a novelist, were probably on the loquacious end of the spectrum. But I know that’s a bullshit rationalization Condensing some phrases here and there might shave off a few pages from the total, but the book will always clock in around a thousand pages, give or take a couple hundred, depending on dimensions and type size. No, Don Quixote is a product of its time, a time when a writer could describe the anticipation of a meal at leisure, mimetically, until one can almost smell the steam curling up from the kettle. It was a time of “goat’s-flesh” and “sheep-skins,” a time of “hearty welcome” and “expressions of good will.”
And, alas, it is a time for which I have no time, at least not now or into the foreseeable future. Between family, a full-time job, and the remaining shreds of ambition to publish my writing, the hours I have to devote to reading books have dwindled in the past few years. And given the fact that I could finish ten or fifteen contemporary books in the time it would take me to trudge through every sentence of Quixote, persisting in the effort seems a bit, well, quixotic. Sure, I once imagined Cervantes’s masterpiece as part of an essential foundation for literary knowledge. But I read The Divine Comedy on the same theory, and my memory of that great work consists mostly of torture imagery. I never finished The Canterbury Tales or Paradise Lost, to say nothing of War and Peace or Ulysses. Those failures remain a source of mild shame and a vague sense of lack, but I get by.
When I return to Quixote, I want to do it without any ulterior motive. I’ve reached the point in my reading life where I’m no longer concerned with completing some personal survey course to validate my own learnedness. Any book that can’t hold my attention through my lunch break, or during the minutes between my head hitting the pillow and my eyes drifting closed, is not a book I’ll finish. But I won’t be such a miserly reader forever. In the same way my wife and I dream about a distant, post-parental future of carefree travel and uninterrupted sleep, I yearn for days with long stretches of time to lose myself in a long, winding novel. So, in the spirit of the picaresque hero himself, I hereby vow that someday, I will carve out a space of quiet long enough to regain the necessary focus and absorption, to tilt at Quixote once again.
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Brian Gebhart is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and video description. He gets paid for the latter. He holds an MFA in fiction from the University of Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis with his wife and son.
Both images—illustrations of Don Quixote, 1863—by Gustave Doré, via Wikimedia Commons.