9/17 summary part 1: The historical context of Don Quixote

It was exciting to see new and returning faces from the Hood and Frederick communities at the second meeting of the Don Quixote reading group! If you missed it, here’s a (partial) summary of what we discussed. I’m dividing this summary into two posts, so as not to overwhelm everyone. Today I will summarize our discussion around the historical context of Don Quixote, and later this week I will summarize our discussion around Marcela and Don Quixote’s defense of Marcela’s character.

The historical context of Don Quixote

We began by discussing the historical context of Don Quixote. In particular, we looked at the historical context of chapter 9. One of our participants graciously shared some key themes from María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World (See our previous post about this book here). Menocal describes medieval Spain through the intermeshing of Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultures. Menocal’s final chapter focuses on Toledo in 1605, about 100 years after Muslims and Jews have been kicked out of Spain. Toledo in 1605 is also where we find the narrator of Don Quixote, who we tend to refer to as Cervantes himself, frantically searching for more histories of the Knight of the Sorrowful Face. Don Quixote’s battle with the Basque in chapter 8 has paused, because the narrator’s source material doesn’t contain information about the battle’s conclusion. Our narrator laments:

This caused me a good deal of grief, because the pleasure of having read so small an amount was turning into displeasure at the thought of the difficult road that lay ahead in finding the large amount that, in my opinion, was missing from so charming a tale. (p. 65)

The conclusion to the Basque/Quixote match (pardon if my sports terminology is imprecise) was found in a pile of rags in Toledo. Toledo was a city of rags in 1605, but it had been a center of art, science, and architecture some centuries prior. It was a melding place for Christian, Islamic, and Jewish learning. By 1605, however, there were only “Christians” left. Many people were “New Christians,” Jewish and Muslim converts who converted rather than be exiled. Despite these conversions, no one really knew if people truly converted, or merely put on a public show to prevent persecution. Often “New Christians” would perform publicly acts that were associated with Christianity, as to prove they had abandoned their old religion. For example, Dulcinea is described as having “the best hand for salting pork of any woman in all of La Mancha” (p. 67, see also Menocal pp. 262-63). The implication is that she is a Converso, or of a lineage of converted Jews. Working with pork so publicly indicated a rejection of Jewish customs. It’s hard to say how strongly any converts held to their new or old religions. Practices that might have had much meaning generations prior could have been merely family traditions by 1605.

Back to our narrator. Arabic and Jewish texts were burned or recycled into rags in 1605. It was dangerous to admit to be able to read Jewish or Arabic script. And yet, our narrator recognizes some Arabic script and approaches someone in the street to translate it for him. Until being exposed to Menocal’s text, I had no idea of how radical this statement was: not just translating in a public space, but translating a script that no one was supposed to remember. And by 1609, six years before the publication of the second half of Don Quixote, the political climate is worse. All Muslim converts are killed or expelled from Spain.

One of our participants mentioned that Menocal’s account, which focuses on the culture of tolerance between Muslims, Jews, and Christians between 750 and 1492, may paint too rosy a picture. Some medieval historians criticize her account of tolerance and multiculturalism. In our discussion, we contrasted Menocal’s emphasis on culture--science, art, literature, architecture--with geopolitics. It may be that the strengths of Menocal’s account are not sufficient for a gaining a complete picture of the displacement and violence towards various groups in medieval Spain.

How does this history shape how we approach Don Quixote? Was Cervantes a liberal of the day? In a world where nothing was at is seemed to be, where outward appearances and actions were not a clear indication of beliefs, how do we interpret reality? We talk about the difference between history and fiction, and yet we forget that in languages such as Spanish or French “history” and “story” are the same word. Menocal poses these questions for the reader:

Don Quixote has largely been read as a book obsessed with the history and functions of literature “itself,” with literature as the giants that replace the “realities” of windmills, a book that somehow escapes history and the contingencies of its moment. But isn’t it a Cervantes-like delusion to imagine we can read the novel outside its complex and tragic historical setting, a setting that does not have to be detailed in Don Quixote itself precisely because it is the everyday fare of its author and its readers, and which perhaps cannot be detailed on pain of being burned? (p. 261)

These questions not only resonate with Don Quixote, but also with events in our contemporary society. Days before our reading group, on September 14, a fourteen-year-old boy, wearing his NASA tee-shirt, was arrested at school because the digital clock that he made was taken to be a bomb.