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Don Quixote and Legacy of a Caricaturist/Artistic Discourse

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Don Quixote and Legacy of a Caricaturist/Artistic Discourse Don Quixote and the Legacy of a Caricaturist I Artistic Discourse Rupendra Guha Majumdar University of Delhi In Miguel de Cervantes' last book, The Tria/s Of Persiles and Sigismunda, a Byzantine romance published posthumously a year after his death in 1616 but declared as being dedicated to the Count of Lemos in the second part of Don Quixote, a basic aesthetie principIe conjoining literature and art was underscored: "Fiction, poetry and painting, in their fundamental conceptions, are in such accord, are so close to each other, that to write a tale is to create pietoríal work, and to paint a pieture is likewise to create poetic work." 1 In focusing on a primal harmony within man's complex potential of literary and artistic expression in tandem, Cervantes was projecting a philosophy that relied less on esoteric, classical ideas of excellence and truth, and more on down-to-earth, unpredictable, starkly naturalistic and incongruous elements of life. "But fiction does not", he said, "maintain an even pace, painting does not confine itself to sublime subjects, nor does poetry devote itself to none but epie themes; for the baseness of lífe has its part in fiction, grass and weeds come into pietures, and poetry sometimes concems itself with humble things.,,2 1 Quoted in Hans Rosenkranz, El Greco and Cervantes (London: Peter Davies, 1932), p.179 2 Ibid.pp.179-180 Run'endra Guha It is, perhaps, not difficult to read in these lines Cervantes' intuitive vindication of the essence of Don Quixote and of it's potential to generate a plural discourse of literature and art in the years to come, at multiple levels of authenticity. The evolution of Don Quixote from burlesque comedy to canonized text since the time it was published in 1605/1615, parallels the altemating graduation of its corollary and evolving body of illustrations from the level of caricature to that of an evocative, gripping and profoundly serious artistic statement by a range of the most erninent artists of the westem world. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the multiple legacies of the novel' s visual discourse that has sought to define its unique and at the same time, humble, iconography. For artists like Daurnier, Dore, Picasso and Dali­ Cervantes' great text and the legacy of a visual discourse that it had engendered, provided the basis of their individual, quixotic adventures or medítations in the open and formidable terrain of La Mancha. Daumier, for one, was described as having the soul of Don Quixote and the body of Sancho Panza! Dali's identification with the Don is far more progressively Catholic3 in form and spirit! Since the inception of Cervantes' s archetypal image of the Knight of La Mancha in the first decade of the seventeenth century, the imrninently proverbial connotation of the epithet "quixotic" has gained significance in the terms of a pristine mythology at both literary and visual levels of the imagination. Those who have wandered into the proximity of the Don, Unamuno's tragi-cornic figure, "the hero of (their) national art" in Spain, have indeed relished his electrifying portraiture through the medium of language/s that the story has been expressed through, starting with 3 After Dali díssociated himself from the movement of Surrealism in 1938, he tumed to Classicism. He justified this change in his thinking as "a religious Renaissance based on a progressive Catholicism." 416 Don e ar¡catur¡st I Artistic Discourse the Spanish. But, besídes the act of readíng about the unique man, there has also been sustained, since the beginning, the manifest desire to see him in the 'flesh' of an illustrated representatíon, however lean, bruised and battered that that emanation might have appeared to be. An age-old gallery of iconic figures in westem literature and drama has inspired similar aesthetic correlatives: Odysseus, Faust, Harnlet, Lady Macbeth, Don Juan, Frankenstein, Alice-in-Wonderland and Sherlock Holmes, to name a few, who have evolved through interpretations of artists, stage managers, actors and film directors subsequent to their initíation at narrative/dramatic levels by their respective authors. But there are few literary characters who would be able to surpass the artistic attention that Don Quixote has received in the cause of his iconic being and becoming, in popular, as well as, not so popuaslar, art. What Cervantes, imbued in the Renaissance, began as a literary envisioning of a subject of burlesque, was complimented through artistic incamations in a continuing discourse across four centuries, a legacy worth medítation. Such a discourse which incorporates, on the one hand, the consciousness of the real life experiences of a veteran soldier, adventurer, captured slave like Cervantes himself who had fought and had suffered grievous injuries in the battle of Lepant04 in 1571; and on the other the critical, self-abnegating response to a chivalric, picaresque tradition, viewing heroic valour through prisms of irony or surrealistic dread. 4 Cervantes (through the Captive), in Part 1, Ch. 39,recalls the preparations for the Battle oí' Lepanto which had been led by Don Juan, the brother of King Philip of Spain and son of Charles V. It is the same battle that Shakespeare refers to in Othello, in which the Venetians in Cyprus seek liberation from Turkish domination and ultimately win it."I was present at that most glorious battle." says the Captive (348). 417 Runlpndm Guha The need for illustrating Don Quixote was fulfilled; it is said, only with the second edition in 1615. The caricatures thus conceived in tune with the memorable instances and tuming points of the epical narrative, along with the respective images of the Don and his faithful squire, Sancho, in unison or quite alone, not only supplemented the comic or satirical intent of Cervantes, but also inevitably gained through time the quality of an artistic discourse which evolved as a legacy for the perception of future readers and illustrators. The extravagance, the starkness, the sovereignty of Don Quixote's character and actions set against the elemental, often lurid AndalusÍa landscape, were reflected in the complementary visual narrative of a cavalcade of artists5 through the centuries. These images of the Don and his peers have been exhibited collectively in various CÍties of Europe and Arnerica in recent years. The Museo del Prado held an exhibition a few years ago, displaying a survey of illustrated editions of Don Quixote from the 17th to the 19th centuries, documenting the visual transformations in the interpretation of the text. The Hispanic Society of America has been conducting exhibitions of illustrations and prints from the 17th to the early 20th centuries. In the 17 th century printers emphasized slapstick humour; in the 18th century Coypel, Vanderbank, Chodowieki and Hogarth stressed upon a comedy of manners; in the 19th century, Gustave Dore and Daumier provided a powerful visualization of the romantic and tragi-comic interpretation of the novel. The Society's main 5 Jacques Lagniet (París, 1640), Charles-Antoine Coypel (París, 1725), John Vanderbank and Wiliam Hogarth (London, 1738), Antonio Carnicero and Francisco de Goya (Madrid, 1780); Daniel Chodowiecki (Leipzig,1780), Luis Paret (Madríd,1798), lean-Honore Fragonard (París, 1800), Robert Smirke (London, 1818),Gustave Dore( París,1863),Adolphe Lalauze (Edinburgh, 1879), Ricardo de Ríos (Paris, 1880), Gottfried Franz (Stuttgart,1882). 418 Don Caricaturisll Artislic Discourse resource has been based on the collections of drawings of artists down the years in the holdings of Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834- 1900). The general consensus of these exhibitíons has been the following: "It was through the prints that illustrated the text that the figure of Don Quixote was fixed in our collective imagination." *** In the Prologue of the novel Cervantes affinns through a metaphor of birth, the primary, creative sovereignty of his own imagination, limited and afflicted though ir is, as the source of the unique character that he had of necessity been destined to create "What could my sterile and ill cultivated genius beget but the story of a lean, shriveled, whimsical child, full of varied fancies that no one else had ever imagined.,,6 Here we approach a basic, endemic paradox of creativity: that which is without precedent, a character and a story never imagined in the history of literary predicaments, inimitable in a world that presupposes its own sanity and power; such a story, such a character, also establishes the need, the inverse condition and cause of an ongoing iconography in varied configuratíons, to register the truth of that experience in visual tenns for the world at large. A second iconic and equally paradoxical development follows on the first: a character who has no precedent, when a neighbour of his protests that he is no paradigmatic warrior to be emulated but a "plain Señor Quixana-Master Lantem jaws," the latter, hackles raised, retorts, "1 know who I am and 1 know 1 am capable of being not only tIle characters 1 have named but all the twelve peers of Franee and all the Nine Worthies as well; for my 6 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, Trs. J. M. Cahen (Penguin, 1972, p.54) 419 Guha exploits are far greater than all the deeds they have done. all together and each by himself.,,7 Thus between the two extreme images-that of the unique, the singular, the unprecedented; and that of the individuated, the generic, the universal, the cosrruc­ evolves the icon of Don Quixote whose actions provide scope for both literary and visual compositions through a variety of imaginative angles. Cervantes's gaunt protagoníst is shown as being no less a literary creator in a Pirandellian realization of identities. While the former adrruts to starting a story about "the foremost of aH hacks in the world;" the latter augments that honour through an aet of naming that will enhance the ordinary and temporal into the exeeptional and everlasting.
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