Man of la mancha

“I know who I am and who I may be if I choose.”

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

Storyworlds Composition Notebook

Goals and thoughts for new entries:

- Poetry

- Mixing art and text (a comic strip? a cartoon?)

- Reflections on identity and ideology

- Reflections on class material/pedagogy

- Reflections on reaching the end of senior year/future plans

- Fan doodles

- Plans for AMI Capstone film (production design, storyboarding, etc)

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

Don Quixote: In Conclusion

Don Quixote was somewhat of a behemoth to tackle. Its storyworld is so expansive, full of characters with unique stories and metatextual reflections on its lineage in chivalric romance and status as a novel. Searching for a place to start, I began with a look at the geography of Don Quixote and how Cervantes conjured up a sense of place in his novel. Perhaps I would have been better served looking at Quixote's ability to cross borders. In what ways was Quixote a product of nationalism, given that he preceded efforts at centralization in the 18th century? Quixote's journeys take place amidst hightened regionalism, and one wonders to what extent he reflects the uniqueness of his province and how those origins influence his story.

Border crossing motivated my discussion of English translations of Don Quixote, which proved fertile ground for comparison. Each translator is influenced by their own historical context and attitudes toward style and meaning, complicating questions of authorship over the text. If Grossman and Shelton's Quixotes are sufficiently different, as we can see they are, then are they fundamentally different texts? I would have liked to compare more translations (perhaps to trace an evolution in the language over time) or placed certain translations within different philosophical attitudes toward translation (c.f. Nabokov's "Notes on Prosody").

Dulcinea provided a platform for exploring ideological reproduction after Adorno and Horkheimer's discussion of the "culture industry." Since Don Quixote is in conversation with chivalric romances, which reinforces very particular notions of gender roles, the woman-object role gains a special significance. I would have liked to explore the novel's ideological function (both in 17th century Spain and in general) and the way genre plays into that role. This is where Don Quixote's status as a postmodern novel may have been useful to analyze (perhaps through Jameson's work on pastiche).

I then wanted to explore Don Quixote's travels across mediums and how that led to different assignations of meaning. Focusing on ballet and the musical, I wanted to see if placing the audience in a new environment and using new signs (bodily movement, music) gave Quixote a different purpose. An under-explored aspect in my writing was how the history of these media impacted the transmission of the Quixote storyworld. Especially with ballet, I wonder how different choreographies and stage designs of Richard Strauss' music created a Quixote who was maybe distant from Cervantes' original. Although it is out of my depth, I think score analysis may provide further material for analyzing cross-media translation.

I ended my posts with more contemporary views of the legacy of Cervantes' storyworld. Given the ubiquity of a word like "quixotic" and the ideological underpinnings of the media, there are interesting consequences of this re-appropriation. Although I did some research into the historical usage of "quixotic" using Google ngrams and Trends, I was unable to find specific reasons for shifts in usage and, more futilely, unable to trace the source of a spike in searches in July 2007. Between the news media and fan fiction, I think there are interesting ways text mining can be used to detect trends in usage and the ways meaning intersects with history.

More than anything, I have found Don Quixote to spread its tendrils throughout history and media in interesting ways that make it possible for seemingly infinite probing.

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

Don Quixote, By the Fans

cw: sexualization of minors

Perhaps the most fun I get out of fan fiction, aside from high-quality writing and queer representation, are in the zany combinations people create. One such bizarre mixture is a Reylo fanfic that places Rey and Kylo Ren (here as "Reyla" and Ben Solo, respectively) into Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, in which a director goes on a series of misadventures after the star of his Quixote film believes himself to be Quixote. It is worth going over a couple quotes from the story to see the cultural encounter staged in this author's imagination.

"'Hola hermoso!' Ben called in out to her in on fluent Spanish. Although he wasn’t native to their tongue—he was able to recite a few words."

I find it fascinating that the author unwittingly depicts a clash of cultures with this excerpt. Ben Solo, transplanted from the Star Wars universe, is presented as Spanish-fluent despite being unable to master gender agreement. Just as Solo is a stranger to Gilliam's film-world, the director character is a stranger to Spain, operating in a world in which he is unfamiliar.

"'And we will, my turtle dove, my muse, my little Reyla.' Said Ben; brushing his hands against her cheek."

The author chooses the reductive approach for portraying Dulcinea. A great irony: rather than bumbling around failing to fulfill the (masculine) chivalrous ideal, the author's Quixote stand-in is an assured seducer. Dulcinea, represented rather than abstracted, occupies the object status that is further problematized by the author's frequent use of highly ethnicized adjectives to describe her ("sun kissed skin" being one example).

"'She’s fifteen, Solo. You might want to start picking up girls your own age—not to mention her father is a crew member on my production.'"

The author makes clear his horrific intent with this line. He claims at the beginning of the film to have seen only the trailer to Gilliam's film, so it is unclear whether he is operating from that text or his own imagination. The author has taken characters with much more fractured psychologies and flattened them into patriarchal archetypes. This is fundamentally a self-serving text; this is fan-fiction as a fulfillment of the author's (tired, uninteresting) fantasy rather than the treading of new ground.

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

Don Quixote: The “Quixotic”

In May 2018, nearly 18 years after its production was infamously cancelled due to a catastrophic series of events (including a flood and a herniated disc in the starring actor), Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote premiered at Cannes. Fittingly, the documentary accompanying the original production was titled Lost in La Mancha, putting Gilliam in the position of Quixote (and perhaps not anticipating the film’s eventual release).

What does it mean to be quixotic? The word, along with the episode with the windmills, probably represents the most widespread impact of the novel. Given its broad usage (in news articles, for instance), it seems people assume and understanding that people know to associate “quixotic” with a quest for something seemingly unachievable.

A “quixotic” framing has interesting consequences when applied to real people rather than fictional characters. A recent WaPo article, “Trump’s Quixotic Quest For a Trade-Deal Victory,” casts the president as the errant knight whose bumbling gets in the way of his goals. It seems the connotation of the word is highly dependent on its context. WaPo uses it to denigrate its subject (although, if we stick to the original text, perhaps it casts him in a positive light), while a columnist in the Telegraph uses it to sympathetically depict her struggle against alcoholism.

The ubiquity of "quixotic" beyond its original text makes a compelling case for the death of the author. Intention becomes much more difficult to reckon with when hundreds of years have passed and a word is used while barely presuming knowledge of its source. Whether that makes contemporary comparisons (via the adjective "quixotic") less compelling depends on the astuteness of the employer.

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

Don Quixote, Musical

Sometimes crossing mediums means crossing into new realms of intention as well. Man of La Mancha, a musical with a book by Dale Wasserman, employs a new context to use the narrative of Don Quixote for its own reflections on art and art-making. Rather than the fictional author Cide Hamete Benengeli, the in-text author is Cervantes himself, imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition and set upon by his fellow prisoners. Don Quixote becomes a practical text, a play put on by the prisoners so Cervantes can defend himself as an artist.

The musical thus stands at an odd points where the play-within-a-play is the adaptation and the musical provides the context for the adaptation. Creating art becomes an act of survival amidst political repression. And beyond the communal act of spectating, characters within the text itself join in as viewers with radically different contexts of experience (even if we consider them as actors instead).

Such an adaptation places Quixote as a firmly sympathetic character in contrast to Cervantes' more ambiguous humor. His exaltation emerges in the motif of "The Impossible Dream," the most important number. Describing the pursuit of seemingly unachievable goals, the song's tune first occurs in the overture and is sung throughout the musical. The interaction with music as a medium provides a fundamental difference between Wasserman's text and Cervantes'. Cervantes' original Quixote dies having renounced his knighthood, but Wasserman has "Dulcinea" rush in and reminds him of "The Impossible Dream," leading him to remember and sing before dying.

Wasserman thus uses Cervantes' text as a paean to perseverance: art enables a person to remember who they truly are and to continue striving for their desires. At the end of the musical, the prisoners sing "The Impossible Dream" after Cervantes is led to the Inquisition, itself positing the affective and material impact of art on its audience.

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

Don Quixote, From Word to Dance

In the novel, we have access to the voices of every character and the narrator, but in the ballet, with music by Richard Strauss and choreography originally by Marius Petipa, the voice loses its expressive capabilities. Instead, bodily movements and music serve as primary modes of expression, opening up new ways of telling the same story. Our relation to the artwork also changes: rather than experiencing the work at our own paces and materially interacting with the physical medium, the ballet audience sits at a distance, unable to control the speed of the narrative.

How does this translation occur when we consider the episode with the windmills? In the novel, the episode includes only Don Quixote and Sancho, the latter of whom tries to warn the knight before he stabs his lance into a sail and gets thrown from his horse. We understand that he sees these windmills as knights because he says so to Sancho, and his internal prayers to Dulcinea are conveyed to us through the narrator. 

In the ballet, the windmill episode occurs after Don Quixote interrupts a marionette play by attacking the actors. He conveys his madness through staggering movements, having to be controlled by the audience as he tries to stab the acting tent and reach the windmill. The music swells as he receives his lance and kneels to pray. Without other sources of information, the spectator must rely on their knowledge of the source material to know he prays to Dulcinea for strength before attacking the windmill. The audience becomes enraptured because of the dramatic music and the longing expressions on Don Quixote's face as he lies, stricken, beaten back by one of his many defeats.

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

Lost in Translation: Don Quixote from Shelton to Grossman

I will address, in turn, the English translation of the opening line of Don Quixote by a couple different scholars. Rather than a quality-based evaluation, I seek only to parse the ways different translators make sense of Cervantes’ sentence and use it to set the scene for the rest of the novel.

I’ll begin with the original line:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor.

And this is my own translation with mediocre, high-school level Spanish:

“In a place in La Mancha, whose name I do not want to remember, there has not been much time since there lived a gentleman* of those with the shipyard* lance, old shield*, weak nag* and running greyhound*.

I’ve marked with an asterisk the words that I could not reasonably guess at and that were filled in with the first result from Google Translate. Context and style seem to be the most difficult properties to preserve. Phrases like “shipyard lance” and “running greyhound” are missing some kind of historical context that causes the literal translation to lack depth. Literal phrases like “whose name I choose” and “there has not been much time since” could probably be tweaked so that they flow in English with the same ease that they do in Spanish.

Here’s Thomas Shelton’s, from 1680:

“There lived not long since, in a certain village of the Mancha, the name whereof I purposely omit, a gentleman of their calling that use to pile up in their halls old lances, halberds, morions, and such other armours and weapons.”

Shelton deploys an immediate stylistic change, moving the first part of the third clause to the beginning of the sentence to precede the first two clauses. Humorously Shelton translates “la Mancha” as “the Mancha,” which is akin to translating “Los Angeles” as “The Angels” rather than leaving the city name as it is. He hews very closely to the literal translation of the second clause, preserving the exact order of phrases (”name whereof” and “purposely omit”) used by Cervantes. To preserve the sense of the sentence Shelton adds both “of their calling” and the act of collecting weaponry rather than merely saying that Don Quixote is a knight “of the weaponry.” Discarding the animals entirely, Shelton replaces them with “such other armours and weapons,” preferring to evoke a limitless array of knightly objects rather than a fixed set. An impression emerges of a knight grown into old age rather than an old farmhand impersonating a knight.

Here’s Edith Grossman’s, from a 2005 translation:

“Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing.”

Grossman keeps the spirit of the first clause but substitutes “somewhere” instead of the translating it literally as I did. Rather than evoking a specific place, “somewhere” alludes to a location that cannot be pinned down, which fits the lack of verisimilitude in Cervantes’ narration. However she then does use the phrase “in a place” (thus switching its original juxtaposition), but emphasizes that the narrator does “not care to remember” its name. Grossman agrees with Shelton’s indication that the lack of memory is purposeful by rather than phrasing it so directly depicts it as a willful laziness on the narrator’s part, imbuing him with personality. 

The phrase “lived not long ago” is a clever way of translating Cervantes’ “no ha mucho tiempo que” into a well-recognized English form of tale-telling. Maintaining the literal translation “one of those who” seems to sacrifice style for verisimilitude (although far be it from me to make that sort of judgment! I could not think of a way to reorganize the sentence to make it flow and maintain its original meaning). Notably, Grossman divides the sentence-ending list in two categories: antique artifacts of knighthood and animals of Quixote’s life as a farmhand. The resulting depiction is of a man tied between his romantic idealization of knighthood and his everyday existence.

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

Dulcinea and Ideological Reproduction

Don Quixote parodies the chivalric romance, a genre popular in medieval Europe that emphasized courtly romance and heterosexual love. Quixote's relationship with the romance highlights the porous boundaries between the art we consume and the lives we lead. The chivalric romance reproduces a gender dynamic in which men are agents and women are objects to be won due to male agency. Quixote takes this to its parodic extreme by fixating on Dulcinea de Toboso, a neighboring farm girl who he may have pined after once but who never took notice of him. Importantly, the actual woman Dulcinea is based upon does not matter: she serves only a symbolic role as the motivation for Quixote's quests. Cervantes's implicit claim is that women such as Lancelot's Guinevere and Erec's Enide are easily interchangeable because they are modeled after a Western ideal of beauty and stereotypically effeminate qualities such as demure politeness. The ridiculous consequences of this abstraction become apparent when Quixote insists that Sancho Panza endure thousands of lashes to free her from an enchantment. Sancho, like the knights of the medieval romances, endures extreme pain for an idea that has no basis in reality (made more ridiculous by the fact that Quixote should be the one enduring the trial). We see from this that making a work of art is fundamentally an ideological act, one that reproduces a certain worldview through its narrative. Quixote is the extreme of this, but he is no different from the men who idealize the knights of the romance for their brutish perseverance in pursuit of the woman-object. Even when Quixote's neighbors burn his books, they have already performed their reproductive purpose, birthing a knight who is only vanquished when he can no longer reproduce the narrative he is so attached to.

[thecoldpenguin]

The Nutcracker: Introduction

The Nutcracker, an incredible tale of wonderment, bravery, magic, and growth. The Christmas fairytale brings joy to millions young and old, with a whimsical display of dancers accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s well-known music. The story is simple, yet captivating, continuing to usher in an audience year after year. It tells of a young girl Clara (or Marie) and her family in Germany at Christmas-time, when reality meshes with the fantastical, toys come to life to battle nightmarish giant mice, a nutcracker prince saves the night and whisks young Clara away, and we find ourselves experiencing the wonders of a Land of Sweets.

As a ballet, this is a story told through movement and music. I have always loved ballet, having danced since I was a tot. While I grew up surrounded by Nutcracker fever every fall, I never participated in the performance myself, but I nevertheless love this lighthearted and wholesome ballet. 

In addition to the ballet, the Nutcracker story has also taken the form of books and movies throughout time. This semester, I would like to explore ballet as a unique medium of storytelling, in comparison with other mediums. I would also explore the story’s transformation and development into the classic holiday tradition it is today, and how this tradition has persisted despite the decline of ballet as a form of mainstream entertainment. From E. T. A. Hoffmann’s original novel, Alexandre Dumas’ adaptation, various ballet productions– including a local Durham modern-day take, and movies, it will be intriguing to trace how the story has evolved over time. It will also be interesting to note the story’s opportunity for social commentary, how it started as a critique of convention and then with certain subsequent adaptations and productions, a statement of culture and change.

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

Your introductory post establishes the ways in which the original text proliferated and gives context for the poster's investment. The formal qualities of the opening paragraph emotionally appeal to the audience's desire for fantastic narratives as exemplified by the nutcracker. In particular, the post singles out the qualities of movement and music as central to the medium in which the narrative is best known: ballet. From there, the post provides the setup for future posts to branch into both the ways in which The Nutcracker changes within the medium of ballet and the ways it is represented in other media such as literature and film. Future posts could analyze how socio-historical changes in certain locations made the presentation of a particular kind of Nutcracker especially relevant. This tumblr could also look into how The Nutcracker became such a yearly phenomenon and how it has crossed borders to be represented in other (especially non-Western) cultures.

[clstories61-blog]

Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire “Nero”

As this is a documentary with dramatic representation based on real history, I will have to approach my storyworld differently from those of my classmates who provide accounts for fictional storylines. Since elementary school, I have always been fascinated by all things ancient Rome, from the mythical tales of Romulus and Remus to the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. Not surprisingly, this passion has been a major influence in my scholarly interests in college with my current area of study at Duke (European History with specializations in ancient Rome and medieval Italy).

In my sophomore year of high school Latin, Mr. James Carroll, a fellow Roman history aficionado, showed me the BBC documentary Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire “Nero,” which chronicled the life of perhaps Rome’s most infamous historical figure Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. Ever since that viewing, I have continued to explore Nero’s backstory as well as the various forms of media that portray the fifth Roman emperor. Aside from Gaius Julius Caesar, Nero is arguably the most well known and depicted character from Roman times.              

Contrary to popular thought about nonfiction documentaries (i.e. that they are extremely dull with a droning and pretentious British voiceover), Ancient Rome is a “docudrama” that masterfully combines historical accuracy and entertainment. The series’ producer Mark Hedgecoe explained in the behind-the-scenes that he created the documentary in response to the multiplicity of media that “have tended to ignore real history and chosen to fictionalize the story.” For example, the 2000 film Gladiator with Russell Crowe or the Spartacus television series with Andy Whitfield that grossly misrepresent historical fact for the sake of dramatic and commercial flair. In Ancient Rome, Nero played by Welsh actor Michael Sheen is portrayed in a way that matches his historical narrative and “descent into madness” that solidified his legacy as one of Rome’s most insane and vilified characters.             

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

Both of your tumblr posts highlight interesting aspects of the “Nero Storyworld” material and the poster’s relationship to it. The presentation of a personal history with the material creates a groundwork for others to become invested along with the poster. Further, the appeal to historical accuracy provides a logical justification for an interest in the material, especially by pointing the audience toward a genre that they may have experienced but not given much aesthetic credence ("nonfiction documentaries"). The short posts consisting of a picture with a caption are a good way to continually provide short bursts of informative content that explore the different media in which Nero is presented. For instance, the post of the bust of Nero touches on the impact of history on art (via the "damnatio memoriae"), the medium of sculpture, and the space of the museum. The second post addresses an intersection of history and episodic filmic depiction through the sequence in which Nero gives a speech before the Roman Senate. It may be worthwhile to explore what sources Ancient Rome (the show) uses to inform its own depiction and in what ways that depiction conflicts with primary accounts. However, the inclusion of historical context allows viewers a greater depth such that the actor's performances, which may have previously only been interpreted as direct reactions to the theatricality of Nero's speech, are now understood in terms of historical stakes. Although the inclusion of a meme post provides more widespread appeal, hashtags will help the tumblr reach a wider audience of Ancient Rome enthusiasts.

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

The Geography of Don Quixote

Cervantes' narrator opens Don Quixote "in a village of La Mancha," but refuses to identify the particular village. La Mancha itself is an arid plateau in the center of Spain bounded by the regions of La Alcarria and Sierra Morena. The travels of Don Quixote can be divided into three journeys, or “sallies,” in which he leaves home and travels across Spain (never going further than Barcelona). However, Cervantes often makes oblique references to location, such as when he refers to Quixote coming across traders "on the way to...Murcia" near the end of the first journey. After being beaten up he is transported home in a ride that quickly crosses geographical space. 

The second journey spends much of its time in Sierra Morena, a mountain range that traverses the Iberian peninsula. Even within this journey there are multiple chapters relating a novel about two friends set in Tuscany. Don Quixote contains many of these miniature stories that traverse Europe; a couple chapters later a captive from Leon tells of his journeys to Milan, Genoa, and Constantinople, among others. The stories that constitute this portion of the novel occur within an inn in Sierra Morena, which serves as a storytelling space. 

Quixote's journey home from Sierra Morena ends the first part of the novel, while the third journey occupies the entire second part. In the midst of this journey the novel makes its only foray into a fictional locale: Borataria, an island that Sancho Panza (Quixote's squire) briefly governs. This third journey terminates in Barcelona, where Quixote is defeated by the so-called Knight of the White Moon and retreats (once more, very quickly) to his village. Here, in Quixote's home, the novel ends its geographical crossings with his death.

[tiltering-at-windmills-blog]

Don Quixote

Don Quixote, written by Miguel de Cervantes and published in Spain in 1605, tells the story of an older man named Alonso Quixano who adopts the title of Don Quixote to roam around as a knight in imitation of the romances that he obsessively reads. Along with his squire, the farmer Sancho Panza, they go on a series of adventures until finally he is defeated by the Knight of the White Moon and returns home to die in his bed. It is a story, among many things, of the capacity of humans to craft their own reality and the influence of stories (both in content and transmission) on our everyday lives. 

Although I have been aware of the delusional knight who fought windmills since they were giants since my childhood, I first read portions of the novel for Spanish class in my senior year of high school. I found the story particularly affecting; the idea that Don Quixote may be purposely adopting his persona rather than suffering from delusion was especially interesting to me. Additionally, it is a story that has wormed its way into our contemporary consciousness in a variety of ways: the concept of "tilting at windmills," the musical Man of La Mancha, and illustrations from people such as Picasso and Dali, to name a few. 

I would like to explore how these new modes of transmission create a new way of looking at a character and understanding his motivations. Further, I would like to see how "Quixotic" characters beyond the Spanish countryside (such as Pirandello's imitator of Henry IV and Kathy Acker's woman Quixote) adopt new characteristics to reflect their inhabitation of new temporal and spatial fields.