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. Hence, his ordinary nag is christened "Rocinante"; the lady of his faney, "Dulcinea del Toboso;" and he himself, "Don Quixote de la Mancha." Don Quixote's vindication of the palpable and phenomenal existence of the characters of chivalric romance that he has meditated upon and assimilated in his own mind, is supported with the logos of visual representation or illustrations ("evidence so infallible," 1, p.478) of these figures by the artist in himself, recreating the images he sees intuitively with psychic precision:
"1 might say 1 have seen Amadis of Gaul with my own eyes. He was aman tall of stature and fair of face. with a well-trimmed black beard. His looks were half rnild and half severe ... now in the same way as 1 have drawn Amadis. 1 could, 1 think, depict and describe a11 the knights-errant in all the histories in the world. For my absolute faith in the details of their histories and my
7 Don Quixote, Ch.5, p. 54.
420 Don Díscourse
knowledge of their deeds and their characters enable me by sound philosophy to depict their features, their complexions and their stature (Don Quixote, 1, p. 479). This is Don Quixote' s romantic rejoinder as a creator of forms to the priest' s skepticism about all the knights errant the former has referred to being "really and truly people of flesh and blood."
*** In the 17th century some of the names that appear to have a bearing on the Cervantian visual discourse contextually, parallel with or successively in Renaissance8 or Baroque terms, are those of El Greco, Velázquez and Annibale Carracci; while Botticelli, Raphael, Titian and Tintoretto feature in the previous century as precursors in their capacities of possibly influencing Cervantes' artistic perception. Rome constituted, at some point or another, the familiar setting to most of them. El Greco was a guest of the Cardinal Famese and Cervantes served under Cardinal Giulio Acquaviva during this time, around 1569. Hans Rosenkranz in his book El Greco and Cervantes (London, 1932) has observed that "the works of both show a deep and preordained resemblance." This could be said of their individual portraits as well--they so resemble each other! And El Greco's flame-like, elongated, sinuous, sunken-cheeked figures, as well as El Greco's face, seem to be of the same Mannerist mould as that which sculpted the lineaments of Don Quixote! Rosenkranz observes: "If one endeavors to visualize the creations of Cervantes, if especially one tries to, imagine what Don Quixote looked like,
8 Reí". Frederick A, De Armas, "Cervantes and the Italian Renaissance "in Anthony J. Cascardi, ed. The Cambridge Companion fo Cervantes, Cambridge UP, 2002, pp.32-57.
421 RU1lprulm Guha one sees a figure such as El Greco may have painted" This may be wishful conjecture; yet the corresponding images are quite a few in number. According to Rosenkranz, elongation in El Greco's figures-Sto Martín and the Beggar (Platela), Lacoon, The Crucifixion--can be explained in the case 01' the portraits as a means 01' delineating limpieza, purity, purity 01' blood, in a perceptible way, "not only by depicting the high, narrow heads and slender fingers, but by exaggerating the slimness 01' the whole body as well"(88). In the religious pictures, elongation is more general and its objective is to express the supematural and everything that transcends the mundaneo Cervantes's works also indicate that limpieza "was evidently the greatest pride 01' the Spaniards 01' his time" (55). Yet implicit within the idea 01' purity 01' blood is the "beginning 01' decadence"(72). And we also see in the El Greco's artistic methodology 01' elongation and distortion 01' naturalistic forms the conscious exaggeration that leads to the dynamics 01' caricature paralleling that 01' the images 01' Don Quixote in Daumier and Picasso. The effective application of psychology in his portrait paintings (e.g. The Burial 01' the Count Orgaz, 1586) 9 highlights a dramatic side 01' El Greco that establishes his kinship with Alarcon, Lope de Vega and Cervantes and is, according to Rosenkranz, "his greatest contribution to the development of art" (El Greco and Cervantes, 75). Such a kinship proved how thoroughly El Greco, a Greek by birth, was assimilated into the Spanish environment from which his work, like that of Cervantes, derived its colour, form and intensity. Cervantes himself studied and used in his writings facets 01' the works of his contemporary,
9 The painting ineludes a figure resembling El Greco, looking straight at the viewer independently as the burial of the count proceeds in its own course, with "such a piercing glance that he seems to search into our character "(El Greco and Cervantes, 66). There is a similar instance of characters looking outwards at the painter or viewer-as in a photograph-in Velázquez's The Surrender of Breda (1634).
422 Don ºuixote (lIld ¡he Le¡?acy ,{ a Carica¡urist / Artistic Discourse
1 a: El Greco. SI. Martin and Ihe Beggar 38: Daumier: 000 Quixole and Sancho Paza
2a: Carraoo: The Wralh ot Polyphemus 2b: Carracci: PoIyphemus and GaJalaa
423 Guha
Juan Huarte (1530-1592), the founder of several psychoanalytical theories like differential psychology, phrenology and physiognomy 10. In extremity, the theme of madness would also feature in that eoncern through literary and artistic tropes. Like Cervantes and his hero Don Quixote, El Greco also pos ses sed the resourcefulness of transmuting the pathologieal or debilitating eondition (e.g. his astigmatism) of his physieal and psyehic being into the medium of his revolutionary art, thus eonverting the sufferer into an indefatigable though eommon hero of inequitable eireumstanees. The 10ss of the use of his left arm after the battle of Lepanto did not eurb Cervantes'· spirit. Don Quixote is often at the reeeiving end of the wrath of feIlow ereatures like the Basque or of inanimate giants like the windmills. But eaeh time he eneounters what he reekons as the maehinations of the blaek arts with the "goodness of his sword," like a erusading knight, his resolve to prevail inereases all the more, as Gustave Dore's earieaturesll portray dramatieally. Renaissanee and Baroque artists like Raphael, Titian, Annibale Carraeci, Caravaggio and Diego Velázquez feature signifieantly in our diseourse as well. Caravaggio's ehiaroseuro paintings, like the eontemporary David With the Head of Goliath (1605)--in whieh the deeapitated head of the giant, grirnly held by David, is supposed to be a self-portrait of Caravaggio; and David is
¡OJohn Huarte in his book Examination of Men's Wits for the Purpose of Science, (1575), endorsed the contemporary conception of 'humour' as a reflection of what originated in the state of imbalance of the four acknowledged bodily humours. He "established a progression between humour, individual idiosyncrasy and madness." Ref. Adrienne L. Martin, "Humour and Violence in Cervantes," in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, pp.160-185. 11 Dore: Don Quixote in His Library (Plate 3g).
424 Don Carícalurist I Artís/ie Díscourse supposed to be based on the artist' s own son--recall the disturbed, itinerant and isolated life of Cervantes in search of love and solace 12 . Velázquez (1599-1660), like Cervantes, develops upon the artistic tension of projecting socially or physically unattractive and marginalized figures-dwarfs, mulattoes, old, decrepit folk, tired divínitíes-into the forefront of modem arto Michael AtIee observes that "in Velázquez' s study of physicaI perspective líes his philosophical or if you will, social perspective which is consonant with that found in Cervantes' Don Quixote" (A rtchive, nip.). Focusing on what is conventionally distorted, grotesque or marginalized, in order to underscore the universally human within them is the inversion 01' the principIe 01' caricature. Because in caricature the conventionally formal is distorted on purpose to highlight the actual incongruity of a person or a historical momento Velázquez abandons the medieval vertical index 1'or the modern, democratic, horizontal one. This was much to the consternation of the court of Philip IV who patronized him. Velázquez demonstrates this attitude in his choice of subjects: Mennipus and the fabulíst Aesop 13 --classical forerunners of
12 The theme of David and Goliath features comically in Don Quixote: Part 1, Ch. 37,the incident of Don Quixote slashing the wine-skins in his sleep and imagining that he had "fought the most monstrous and outrageous battle with that giant " and had "slashed his head to the ground" (p.333)--a possible parody of Titian's David and Goliath in which the head of the giant is not only completely severed fram the body (as in Caravaggio's painting) but rests on the earth; and David prays to God in the posture of a medieval saint; and in Part JI , Ch.l. : Don Quixote cites Holy Scripture to mark the empirieal validity of such legendary icons-"the story of that great Philistine Goliath who was seven cubits tall"(479) 13 In Ch.25 of Don Quixote Sancho speculates in his loneliness: " .. jf nature allowed animal s to talk as they did in Aesop's days, it wouldn't
425 Guha
Cervantes in their low key, satirical, earthy preoccupations, besides being former slaves; Juan de Pareja,14 (PI ate lb) his own mulatto slave whom he later freed from bondage, portrayed as a noble, dignified, lavishly adomed member of royalty. In Las Meninas, Velázquez includes hirnself, autobiographicalIy, in the picture, like Cervantes did in both parts of Don Quíxote. He also places Mari Barbola, 'a dwarf of dread appearance' in the forefront, while the reigning monarch of Spain is delegated to the background arnong fleeting shadows. In Bacchus and his Companions (1628), the
wine-god sits in an outdoor bodegon 15 or tavem scene with contemporary Spanish peasants. Through such a discourse, both Cervantes and Velázquez refrain from distinguishing too sharply the human and the divine, the central and the peripheral, the congruous and the incongruous. They reveal the divine, the fantastÍCal and the exceptional within the human. Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) is another contemporary artist who epitomizes the plurality of the real and the ideal that Cervantes dramatized in Don Quixote. Carracci, who in subscribing to the genre of low-life, burlesque paintings (market scenes, butchers' stalls) had anticipated Hogarth; and he was credited with the invention of caricature during the Renaissance, having had developed the two attributes essential to that form: strong individual characterization and economy of means. On the other hand, Carracci is also credited with the invention of ideal landscape that his French successors, Poussin and Claude Lorrain,
be so bad. Then 1 could talk to rny ass about anything 1 like and forget rny bad luck that way" (199). 14 Velázquez's honourable portrait of his slave Juan de Pareja, done in 1650, was auctioned in 1970 at Christie's in London for a record 2.3 million Pounds. h 15 Ref. Barry Wind, Velázquez's Bodegones: A Study in the l1 Century Spanish Genre Paínting (Univ. Press of America, 1987).
426 Don Quixole mld Ih e Legacy of a Cor;calurisll Arlislic Discourse
3b: OaumM!r: Don Qulxote Anacklng lhe Windmills 3c: Tin!oretto: SI George and Ihe Dragon
3d: Da,umier: Don Oublote and lhe Oead Mule 3': Daumier: Don Ql&i xote Aeading
3e: Daum~r; Don Oulx01e 3g: Guslave Dore: Don Quixote in the Ub(ary
427 Hunpnt1,m Guha would further nurture on their own terms; he is said to have attained Ha lucid intensity of effect that evokes the spirit of Greek tragedy." Thus Carracci combines in his work the mutual tensions of both comedy and tragedy, as Cervantes' Don Quixote also does in the view of Miguel de Unamuno. 16
However, what really drew me to CarraccÍ in the context of the present paper was his interest in the iconography of the pastoral tragedy of the sea-nymph Galatea and her two foredoomed suitors, Acis and the Cyclop Polyphemus, son of Poseidon-a popular, Ovidian 17 theme that found expression in vacious instances of Renaissance, Baroque and Neo Classical art (Raphael; Poussin, Claude Lorrain), literature and opera music (Gay, Handel). Cervantes' story, of course is not a líteral projection of the classical source that Ovid presents in Metamorphosis. Infatuated with Galatea and overcome with anger and envy, Polyphemus kills with
16 Miguel de Unamuno, "Don Quixote in the Contemporary European Tragi-Comedy," in Tragic Sense of Lije (New York: Dover Pub., 1954), p.321: "The philosophy in the soul of my people appears to me as the expression of an inward tragedy analogous to the tragedy of the soul of Don Quixote, as the expression of a conflict between what the world is as scientific reason shows it to be, and what we wish that it might be as our réligious faith affirms it to be." 17 Homer deals with a later facet of Polyphemus' life, subsequent to the Galtea episode. In The Odyssey Polyphemus gains a central role in the cause of Odysseus' extended joumey back home to ¡thaca after the end of the Trojan War. For, it was Odysseus' deliberate and boastful act of blindíng the Cyclop that provoked the latter' s inducement of the curse of traumatic wandering through the power of Poseidon, his father. Polyphemus vainly attempts to destroy Odysseus and his ship with huge boulders-the means he had employed earlier to kill Acis, his rival to the love of Galatea. We see the OvidíanJ Arcadian side of Polyphemus in The Odyssey when we hear him play the flute as a shepherd and when he talks to the sheep after his blinding. The Homeric idiom appealed immensely to Cervantes.
428 Don Caricaturist lA rtistic Discourse a boulder her tme lover Acis who is tumed into a river. Cervantes' first published book, La Galatea (1585), a pastoral romance dealing obliquely with the mythic theme of unrequited love is written almost about the same period that Carracci composed his two fresco paintings on the subject in the Farnese Palace in Rome, Polyphemus and Galatea and The Wrath of Polyphemus, 1600 (Plates 2a & 2b) in the tradition of Raphael' s Triumph of Galtea, 1511, also placed in the same gallery and which, as Frederick A. De Armas observes, "Cervantes uses to fashion the eponymous heroine of his pastoral romance,,,18 La Galatea. The image of an ideal, inaccessible semi-divine woman invested with the status of a beloved by someone outside the normal fold of society, in a one sided, destructive and hopeless configuration of emotions, finds a literary embodiment in Don Quixote's preconception of Dulcinea de Toboso, an image that Cervantes may have formed through his interest in the Renaissance art of Raphael and Carracci while he lived in Rome. Edward Dudley has also shown interesting parallels between Raphael's and Cervantes's Galatea. 19 Both the painting at the Farnesina and the heroine of Cervantes' pastoral romance partake of deep humanistic learning. It is, perhaps, not surprising that in Ch.6 of Don Quixote, besides Amadis of Gaul, La Galatea is among the few books of romance that the priest does not delegate to the flames! Don Quixote reminds me, symbolically, of Polyphemus, the Cyc1op, with his singular (or mad) vision and his profound obsession to pursue the love of rus ideal, Galatea. The significance of her ethereal beauty is objectified through his own mind and imagination to an extreme and violent point of desire. The Don too
18 Frederick A De Armas, "Cervantes and the !tallan Renaissance", 40. 19 Edward Dudley, "Goddess on the Edge: The Galatea Agenda in Raphael, Carcilaso and Cervantes," (Caliope, 1995), 1:27-46),
429 Guha is obsessed with the Dulcinea whom he invests with unearthly, mystical value. He will not bear the ignominy of anyone insulting the idea or image that she epitomises as a paradigm of beauty and grace. In the myth, Galatea chooses Acis as her lover while fleeing from Polyphemus, her yearning but unwanted devotee. At one point, discovering the lovers during a tryst, the Cyclop angrily hurls a boulder upon Acis and kills him (as depicted in Carracci's painting), while Galatea returns to her father' s abode after transforrning her dead lover into a brook Acis and Polyphemus, the tragic and the unrequited lovers, can be seen symbolically as two aspects of the same protagonist with Galatea at the apex of the triangle Acis symbolizing consummation; Polyphemus symbolizing the perpetual possibility or hope of it, as John Keats portrays in his Ode to a Grecian Um with the lover's attempt at a kiss frozen in time ("Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss"l Though winning near the goal"). The impulsive killing of Acis with a boulder by Polyphemus can be symbolic of such a choice: that is, the dispensing of the final consurnmation with the ideal and the adoption of a more indefinite, quixotic possibility of the beloved (Galatea! Dulcinea! Fanny Brawne) remaining the Keatsian "bright star", the eternal object of desire of a maddened, world-weary lover like Polyphemusl Don Quixotel Keats, "yet still steadfast, still unchangeable20." The contemporary Renaissance paintings on the Galatea theme, as cited abo ve, may have possibly implanted the seeds of a personal romantic story in the fertile soil of Cervantes' imagination.
***
20 Keats. Poetical Works, ed. H.W. Garrod. Oxford UP, 1970: Ode on a Grecian Urn, p.209; the sonnet Bright Star, p.372.
430 Don Caricaturistl Artistic Discourse
Rachel Schmidt's study, Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote Through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century (McGill, 2001), explores the manner in which these early visual images of Don Quixote presented critical interpretations that formed and represented the novel's historical reception.21 She delves into severa! of the iconographic traditions present in these illustrations : (a) the burlesque, which focuses on slapstick humour; (b) the satirical , which stresses the supposed Enlightenment message of the author; and (c) the sentimental, which upholds the Don's purity of heart and purpose. She refers mainly to the Lord Carteret, London edition of 1738 and the Real Academia, Madrid edition of 1780 for her analysís of the canonizatíon of Don Quixote. She highlights the struggle between publishers and artists regarding choice of episodes and the use of fantasy (imagination) by the artists22 concemed, beyond the written text. Such conflicts often led to the questioning or rejection of commissioned illustrations, as in the case of William Hogarth's etehings for the 1738 edition and Goya's sketches23 (PI ate 2e) for
21 She writes: 'The riehly detailed and pointedly satirie tapestry of sixteenth eentury Spain ... does not serve as the backdrop of modern adaptations but rather is replaced by a nostalgically bucolic countryside or an empty horizon. This idealized setting shapes the romancing of Don Quixote. In short, Don Quixote's mad vision, the result of too much ingenuous consumption of chivalric romances overshadows Cervantes' satiric puncturing of the genre. Don Quixote, the parody of a romance genre, becomes a romance in the modern popular imagination." 22 Caravaggio, in his time, was checked símilarly by his ecclesíastícal patrons for his brand of naturalism that, according to them, treated Biblical subjects-as in The Crucifixion 01 Sto Peter, 160G--with an apparent and objectionable vulgarity. 23 Cervantes shares with Goya an Ínterest in the subject of lunacy through a humanist perception established by such Renaissance antecedents as Erasmus's Praise 01 Folly (1511). In Don Quixote, Part 11, Ch. 1, the barber recounts a story concerning the madhouse at Seville. A madman
431 the 1780 publícation. Such a polítical or religious censoring of illustrations which are meant to represent the ideas, moods and social equations in a popular text, is unnatural and against the norms of fundamental freedom. It is like the capture and enslavement of Cervantes by the pirates of Algiers for severa! years, till he is ransomed at a high price by his polítical masters to retum to his legitimate position in society as an author. *** In the nineteenth century, Honore Daumier (1808-1879) and Gustave Dore contributed immensely to the enhancement of the visual discourse of Don Quixote. But it is Daumier's brilliant work in this sphere that transcends the limitations of the genre of caricature with which he himself began his examination of Cervantes' magnum opus in 1850. As a social satirist Daumier expressed an eclectic and revolutionary zeal through lithographs of caricatures that he published in the satirical weekly, La Caricature in Paris in the 1830's. Thereby he drew not only the praise of writers like Balzac24 and Baudelaire, but also the wrath of a king like Louis Philippe whom he had unsparingly lampooned.25 His influence on Delacroix, Van Gogh, Cézanne and Corot marked his relevance as an artist far beyond his time. In his own work, as well as in his influence on other modem artists like Picasso, Daumier resol ves the distinction between caricature and a larger, more
claims to be the king of the Gods, Jupiter, holding in his hands "the flaming thunderbolts" with which he could and did "menace and destroy the world." Goya's painting, T11e Madhouse (1800), depícts such a madman who has crowned himself a monarch with a crown of feathers and has wom the regal necklace of his office before his court of lunatic inmates. Goya' s iIlustration of Don Quixote reading (1780) anticipates the dreamlike surrealismlsymbolism of Salvador Dali and Marc Chagall. 24 Daumier contributed illustrations to Balzac's The Human Comedv. 25 Daumier was imprisoned in 1832 for his anti-monarchical 'satire of Louise-Phillipe as Gargantua.
432 DOIl QIIUOle alld Ih e Lel{acy ola Caricalurisl / Arli.wic Disc"urse
4b: DaJi: Portrall 01 Cervantes
3h: Daumle r: Sancho Panza and Don Ouixote
4c: Dati: Don Quixote t!le Drsamer
4g: Dar¡ : SeIf-Por1rait on lilm 48: SBlvaoor Dall : The Temptation of St. Anthony
433 Guha humanist and intense form of arto In exammmg a handful of Daumier's íllustrations of Don Quixote, executed between 1850 and 1879, we observe his gradual qualification of the dynamics of caricature. These paintings conceptualize the visual serenity of a state of mind that anticipates a final passage into a realm of the spirit radiantIy symbolized in the sky. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (1854), (Plate 3a), is a preliminary, working-sketch in colour for a larger painting, perhaps, never completed in oH. Though incomplete in its formation, like a foetus, the sketch anticipates a future iconography aligned to an emerging visiono The Don is riding Rocinante, followed by Sancho. on bis donkey in a slow trot towards the end of the embankment in the extreme right of the can vas The former is indistinguishable as aman, far less as the redoubtable knight of La Mancha. Neither his shield nor his lance, nor his right leg can be seen, being hidden in shadows; the left hand-side limbs of Rocinante are also non-existent. The combined images of only the torso and a twisted knob of a head of the Don, and the angular body of Rocinante affixed below him--the entire configuration of half man, half horse, appears like an itinerant centaur. Sancho follows, leaning backwards fmm his saddle, faceless in profile; the mass of his body merges, through moonlight and shadow, with that of his donkey. The two ghostIy figures advance in slow motion in a dream-like terrain. He seems weightIess, "the outline is not really of a human body," but a metamorphosing impulse personified, recalling those Hnes from W. B. Yeats' Second Coming: "What rough beast its hour come mund at lastl Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?" Don Quixote Attacking the Windmills (1866), (Plate 3b), is one of Daumier' s remarkable illustrations of Cervantes' hero, "drunk with sublime madness," in an action that reaches beyond the irnmediate to the universal. For, when we place this painting in
434 Don Caricaturist f Artistic Discourse the context of Tintoretto's Sto George and Ihe Dragon (1560), (Plate 3c) we not onIy register the resemblance of the two charging figures on horseback but also perceive~ them as complementing each other in a larger, mythopoeic canvas of Christian and absurdistlexistential meaning. Both the windmill-as-giant and the dragon symbolize an evil that the respective hero resolves to eradicate with bis immediate energies. Conversely, motion is frozen in Daumier's Don Quixole and Ihe Dead Mule (1868), (Plate 3d). Though a small painting,26 it gives the impression of being a monumental canvas because of its spatial landscape and the scope of movement, albeit thwarted, from one end to the other. This is anytbing but a caricature in wbich the distinctive features of the subject are exaggerated for comic effect, The humour here, if any, is a dark one-a dead muIe blocking the hero's progress in a ravine at dawn! Daumier drew this scene more than once--as if undergoing a mode of Kierkegaardian meditation regarding the purposiveness of the Self. In bis singular portrait of Don Quixote (1868), (PIate 3e), astride a white, phantom-like Rocinante against a deep blue sky, Cervantes' hero seems to express the intensity of bis desire for silence and solitude; he seems to have come full circle away from the Mannerist anxieties of triumph and dispossession. Such anxieties also define the inner workings of the genre of caricature that an artist like Daumier, through his psychic association with Don Quixote, is withdrawing from as he moves towards a more serene horizon reminiscent of the golden vistas of the Renaissance that Bellini, Raphael and Titian reveal in their work. The figures of both the Don and Rocinante in Daumier's painting are eIongated upwards Iike a retrospective El Greco painting that uses Mannerist and Impressionist elements together: "A weird ghost of aman on a
26 Approximately 10 by 20 inches
435 Guha nightmarish horse without bridle or stirrups," glistening weirdly in the moonlit night. Don Quixote' s facelessness-no eyes, nose or mouth-may represent Daumier's intuitive foreknowledge of his own ultimate blindness in old age expressed through the physiognomy of a champion of the human spirit. It could also suggest a penultimate inner visiono Indeed, his last paintings conceming Don Quixote, suggest such an expedient divestment of the accoutrements of a picaresque heroism that had been the erstwhile subject of caricature; and stresses on a metamorphosis of the total self. His Don Quixote Reading (1867), (Plate 3f), is an amazing statement of introspection in this regard. We only need to view 7 Gustave Dore's caricature (Plate 3g) of the same subjece ; of the hero's fabulous imagination filled with dragons, distressed maidens, pirates and decapitated heads of Goliath-like giants--to realize the difference with Daumier's view of the knight-without armour, shield, helmet, lance, horse, faithful squire; palpable memories, rocky landscape or stormy sky. The man is massive with long powerful limbs and a beaked Roman nose; not the scrawny, bedraggled knight with a dislocated cranium and broken ribs that was so often cast on the burlesque/caricaturist stage. The background is black and uncluttered with images or books, symbolic of the burning down of most of Don Quixote's library of chivalric romances28 through the peremptory "inquisition"(425) of the priest (echoes of the eounter Reformation?) who spares onIy such quintessential works of the' imagination as Amadis 01 Gaul. That is, perhaps, the book the hero holds in his hands. Daumier has achieved in this portrait of the hero an essential seriousness that is the outcome, rather than the contradiction, of the caricature of the
27 Gustave Dore, Don Quixote in his Library, Fig.3g, 28 Don Quixote, Part 1, Ch. VI. The action is retrospectively reported by the priest in, Ch. XL VII.
436 Don Discourse chivalric tradition exorcised in Don Quixote. This is no fleeting caricature, but a statement of faith and recapitulation in the centrality of a unique book and character that prevails over the incontinent imagination. Rosenkranz observes that the men of El Greco' s pictures are also "greatly concemed with books, which they read;" and what they are reading "is the text of El Greco's own work" (El Greco and Cervantes, 98). The same may be said of Daumier's Don Quixote reading a book. He is reading the text of the Cervantian, quixotic universe in aH its tragi-comic intensity and 10neJiness. He is communicating with himself in the only way he knows. In Sancho and Don Quixote (1886), (Plate 3h), Daumier combines the ideas of the inner strength and beauty that are reflected in the dissolving or 'dying,' metamorphosing physiognomy of the hero and the distant, glowing, Bellini-like Sky 29 that he looks calmly at, measuring his own agony in the garden. The colours are vivid and contrasting in an elemental manner--like Gauguin's The White Horse (1898). With reference to the working-sketch of Daumier discussed earlier, Don Quixote appears on the verge of being freed of the rocky, spirituaHy trying landscape-an equation that we find in the paintings of Bellini, Mantegna and Leonardo. The pair seems to advance toward a state of liberation from the memory of the Mannerist legacy and other anxieties. He is poised with a wand-like, ineffectuallance at an exit point of sublimation where both he and his steed appear like a vision, a simmering mirage that may disappear any moment into the blazing red sky. The potential of his immanence is viewed from the angle of the earthbound Sancho who duplicates in microcosmic form the triangular shape of the hillock he is seen against. He is the
29 The rose-tinted sky and a state of transition recall Bellini's The Agony in the Garden, 1460.
437 Run,pndm Guha slow but steady Horatio who must be left behind to carry and deliver the vision that he has glimpsed of his master' s Passion, the truth that there is nothing left to conquer but the Self with all its quintessential conflicts. Daumier also progresses like the Don ínto the silence. In this illustration of Don Quixote the spiritualism and naturalism of the 17th century Mannerist repertoire becomes composed through the idiom of Impressionism meditated upon by Daumier whom Charles Baudelaire had once described as "one of the most important men ... not only in caricature but in the whole of modem art." *** In the twentieth century three of the most accomplished of modem artists who are the inheritors of the legacy of the Cervantian visual discourse happen to belong to the same mythic context of Spain that Don Quixote represented through lts pages Salvador Dali, Miro and Picasso. AH of them, imbued with the consciousness of the quixotic iconography in its evolution, reiterate its líneaments through their individual surrealist or cubist visions. In the case of Dali the process reaches an extreme form of narcissistic introspection when at the end of the day, after extensively illustrating the discourse of Don Quixote and also projecting the icon of Don Quixote into the trajectory of other discourses like that of the 'Temptation of St. Anthony' and the 'Apotheosis of Homer' in the midst of the atomic age, Dali adopts the mantle of the protagonist he has so self-consciously illustrated (Plate 3e). The theme of the temptation of St. Anthony, the herrnit saÍnt who is generally considered the founder of monasticism, has been a popular subject in westem arto Bosch's painting of 1500-10 and Gnmewald's of 1512-16, contribute to the surrealistic epistemology that anticipates Dali's explorations into the subconscious.
438 DOII QuLwle {/lId Ihe Legacy 01 a Caricaturisl / Arlislic Discourse
41: Durer: The Knighl, Death and the 09\líl 4&: T¡tian: Charles V On Horseback
5b: Daumier: Don Quixole and Sancho Panza
4d: Dall: Don Qulxote CoIossus 5s: Picasso: Oon Quixote 800 Sancho Panza
439 Guha
In his The Temptatíon of St. Anthony (1946), (Plate 4a), Dali telescopes the dramatic image of a heroic, naked Don Quixote-like figure into the ascetic predicament of the saint' s temptation of overwhelming sensuality and materialism. Dali may have got the idea of this very vigorous, quixotic image of the saint from Ch25 of Don Quixote where the hero takes off all his elothes in the Sierra Morena, after announcing to Sancho his intention of undergoing severe penance in imitation of that of saints of the past: "1 must strip off all my annour," Don Quixote declares, "and be naked as 1 was bom"(I, 205)-- much to the constemation of Sancho who proceeds, as instructed by his master, to solicit the concem and love of Dulcinea el Toboso on the hero' s behalf. In The Apotheosis of Homer (1945), Dali's shocked, surrealistic response to the dropping of the first atom bomb on Hiroshima, the artist conveys his impression of tbe world of the blind through the blind eyes of Homer, registering a deconstructíon of Classical, Renaissance and modem iconography in a state of dream-like turmoil. As in Cervantes's own tragedy The Síege of Numancia (1581) that deals with the myth of origins of the Spanish national identity and ineludes Homer as a model of civilization- besides Virgil, Lucan and Cicero--Dali' s painting brings together in a surrealistic, Mediterranean setting, diverse cultural images, ineluding grirnacing busts of Don Quixote (?) falling to the earth froro the sky and shattering into líttle pieces! The 'Horneric' perception finds further shape in Dali's illustrations of Cervantes' work: Don Quixote: The Warnors' Head depicting the Don attacking the flock of sheep which he imagines to be arroies Here Don Quixote, albeit imbued with the passion of roadness, is like Odysseus contending with the powerful magic of Circe the enchantress who has transformed his sailors into swine
440 Caricaturist I Artistic Discourse
Don Quixote remarks that the "enchanter" has "turned the hostile squadrons into flocks of sheep," and that they would "turn back to their original shapes" when the enchantment had worn off, as happens with Odysseus's meno Thus the two paintings become thematicalIy related in that the artist, be it Homer or Cervantes or Dali, recreates the emerging human condition with the sovereignty of his own visiono In line with Daumier, Dali invests the images of both Cervantes and Don Quixote with a nobility and idealism, expediency and grandeur that leaves little doubt about his estimation of the quixotic mode of literary and artistic expression. However, his portrait of Cervantes (Plate 4b), like his own photographic portrait (Plate 4g), constitutes the duality of an aristocratic élan and a streak of insanity in the askewed alignment of the intense eyes. 30 The miniscule, standing figure of Don Quixote waves to his creator from the background of the rolling plains. Dali's illustration of Don Quixote the Dreamer (PIate 4c), another small etching, combines European and Byzantine meditations of knighthood and highlights the duality of bis persona. His arms and heavily armoured chest, adorned with the motif of a small tragic mask are aligned to the earth below the line of the horizon at the middle of the page; whereas bis head, crowned with a peaked helmet resembling a B yzantíne turban, bis flowing locks, stern demeanor, left wrist and fingers holding a small stick or wand rather than a lance-are all aligned along the space of the sky with
30 This small black-and-white etching of Dali's was sold for $330 in 2001. Dali's imaginative decision of placing a prominent lace collar around Cervantes' neck recalls that of Velázquez in painting the portrait of his slave Juan de Pareja adomed with the sartoría!, cultural signifier, a lace collar, that only the nobility was permitted to wear in those days.
441 Guha a single swallow fleeting past his head. Daumier conveys the same ambivalence by showing an earth-bound Sancho and an ethereal Don Quixote within the same frame of reference. Dali comprehensibly illustrated the Buddenbrook edition31 of Don Quixote, Part-I in 1979, along with various other instances of individual illustrating quests. But 1 would like to conclude with a reference to his 1971 etching of Don Quixote Colossus, (PI ate 4d) astride Rocinante, portrayed on a scale that recalls Goya's colossal figures (The Collosus, Saturn),and Dali's own fantastic monster in Premonition of Civil War (1904). The provisional, magical formidability of Shakespeare's Prospero also flits through our minds. In this drawing, master and horse tower far above the Andalusian plains and the distant mountaíns. The body of the hero, within the outline, is depicted like a tomado, with the head, the torso, shoulders and arms, swirling in rapid circles of black lines, progressing upwards and sideways; the supposed shield is also artistically represented as a swirling vortex of wind created by the hero's outstretched armo Paradoxical1y, the external bearing of the body, suggested by the outline, is relaxed and in control. Don Quixote here is like a personified West Wind, a titanic, apocaIyptic force revealing his potential to those who recognize his inner being. Rocinante matches his rider point to point. He is not the usual scrawny, enervated nag bearing the whimsical dictates of an eccentric. He is equally titanic and beautiful, with an erotically muscled body32, a curved neck with flowing tresses and taíl, a
31 Don Quixote, Part 1, trs. Peter Motteux, New York: Abbeville Press, 1979. It contains 10 double-page colour illustrations by Dali and many black and white drawings, also by him. 32 A full-bodied, attractive horse has been a symbol of aggressive sensuality in Dali's iconography, as is seen in his painting, The Temptation of Sto Anthony (1946). But the fact that here in the drawing, Don Quixote is shown riding the horse in full control suggests his
442 Don Caricaturist I Artistic Discourse
Pegasus or prineely horse proudly striding the finnament. Don Quixote, in a Jovian posture (using no saddle or stirrup as in Daumier's painting diseussed earlier) holds a massive staff of authority eonneeting earth and the dark clouds in the sky, while the streaks of sunlight shower down on him in blessing. He eould be refleeting the glory of Titian's Charles V On Horseback (1548), (Plate 4e), triumphantly clutehing his long lance, astride his magnifieent black war-horse after his vietory at the Batde of Muhlberg; or Albert Durer's superb knight in The Knight, Death and the Devil (1513)33, (Plate 4f) calmly personifying Christian faith. Frederiek A. De AnTIas suggests that Don Quixote is a parody of Charles V, "the perfect knight and emperor dashing to battle and defeating the enemy in the fashion of the romances of chivalry" ("Cervantes and the Italian Renaissanee," p.46). This may be tme to an extent of the novel as a whole; But Dali's rendering of an arehetypal Don Quixote seems more of an abstraet, surrealistie take-off on Titian' s Charles V than a mere parody of the utopianism of a great 16th century monarch of Spain, if at all Dali took recourse to that icon of valour. However, the Don is still himself in Dali's etehing. He is still in the proximity of his
spiritual superiority, his continenee, and henee constitutes a post-Sto Anthony statement. 33 In Don Quixote, Pan lI, Ch. xi, p. 534, the hero is suddenly eonfronted with seemingly supematural forces-a wagon loaded with unearthly looking beings ("more like Charon's bark than an ordinary can"). And we are told that "the first figure which presented itself before Don Quixote's eyes was Death himself with a human face." In making bis hero take up a position in front of these ereatures from the unknown, who are aetually actors in make-up, Cervantes reiterates tbe tensions between the allegorical and burlesque modes implicit in the contemporary Renaissance setting. And as far as the figure of tbe knight as a universal symbolic paradigm is concemed, Durer's etehing may well bave a direct or indirect bearing on tbe coneeptualizations of Cervantes or of Dali.
443 Guha favourite squire. The Lilliputian Sancho cheerfully waves out to him from across the rolling pIains. Sancho's and DappIe's combined shadow reaches out signíficantIy to his mentor in a symbolic gestus of bonding. Dali' s illustration ís a more mythopoeic interpretation of what Daumier embodied in his final estimation of Don Quixote being on the verge of transcendence.
We witness the terrain that Dali has traversed as Representative Artist in the wake of all his precursors-from an illustrator to the illustration itself (PIate 3e)--when he inducts the lineaments of his own face to artistically decípher the text of Don Quixote's epicaI and temporal anxieties, mus taches bristling, eyes flushed with wonder, a character peering out from the text/picture to meet the gaze of the viewer. Iike those figures in the paintings of El Greco and VeIázquez mentioned earlier! And in the end we turn to Pablo Picasso's illustration: two wire-like, almost hieroglyphic figures, (PI ate 5a), poised on a sun drenched hillock overlooking the windmills which Don Quixote is not interested in attacking at the moment! While being related to Daumier' s pen and ink caricature-an obvious precursor--of the pair, (Plate 5b) they are the recognizable, acutely codified images, and not mere caricatures, of a four hundred year old visual discourse that began its critical yet sublime itinerary in the twilight of the Renaissance.
Gertrude Stein in her book Picasso (1970), points to the sovereignty of the creative perceiver of an image, an kon, an idea of life in Íts totality, that is gradually realized through degrees of trial and error, alienation and sacrifice: "Well, Don Quixote was a Spaniard, he did not imagine things, he saw things, and it was not a
444 DOII Quixote alld tite LeXacy of a Caricaturist I Artistic Discourse dream, it was not lunacy, he really saw them"(44). This is the Don Quixote and Sancho we see in Picasso' s 1937, less known, close up (PI ate Sc) of the pair, no longer codified )mages, but memorable tndividuals as real as the scorching Spanish sun. Perhaps we could observe similarIy with Stein about the illustrator who chooses to see the same iconic image in different ways, who chooses to see a strange, lean and gaunt old man in the myriad incamations that his marvelous spirit endorses.
5e: Pablo PiC8SS0: Oon Quixole and Sancho Panza 1937
445 Rupelldra Guha Majunuiar
L Salvador Dali: Don Quixote, 1971
446 Don Caricaturist I Artistic Discourse
List of 11lustrations la: El Greco. Sto Martín and the Beggar lb: Velázquez: Juan de Pareja 2a: Annibale Carraeci: The Wrath oi Polyphemus 2b: Annibale Carracci: Polyphemus and Galatea 2c: Goya: Don Quixote Reading 3a: Daumier: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. 3b: Daumier: Don Quixote Attacking the Windmills. 3c: Tintoretto: St George and the Dragon. 3d: Daumier: Don Quixote and the Dead Mule 3e: Daumier: Don Quíxote 3f: Daumier: Don Quixote Reading. 3g: Gustave Dore: Don Quíxote in the Library 3h: Daumier: Sancho and Don Quixote. 4a: Salvador Dali: The Temptation oi Sto Anthony. 4b: Dali: Portrait oi Cen;antes 4e: Dali: Don Quíxote the Dreamer 4d: Da1i: Don Quíxote Colossus 4e: Titian: Charles V on Horseback 4f: Albert Durer: The Knight, Death and the Devil 4g: Dali (Photo Portrait) 5a: Picasso: Don Quíxote and Sancho Panza 5b: Daumier: Don Quíxote and Sancho Panza 5e: Pieasso: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza
447 Guha
Notes Adhemar, Jean. Honore Daumier,. París, 1954 Armas, Frederick A. De. "Cervantes and the Italian Renaissance." In Anthony J. Cascardi, Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes. Cambridge UP,2002, 32-57 Cervantes, Miguel De. The Adventures of Don Quixote. Trs. J.M. Cohen, London: Peter Davies, 1932. Dore 's Illustrationsfor Don Quixote, New York: Dover, 2003. Dudley, Edward. "Goddess on the Edge: The Galatea Agenda in Raphael, Carcilasco and Cervantes." Caliope (1995), 1:227-46. Martin, Adrienne L. "Humour and Violence in Cervantes," in Cascardi, ed. Cervantes, pp.160-185. Schmidt, Caro}, Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century. McGill Queen' s UP, 200 l.
Spanish Drawings: From the J(jh to the l 448