24 Lost in La Mancha: Terry Gilliam, Holy Fools, Pirates and the Mulla*
Anand Vivek Taneja SARA!, CSDS, Delhi
After the abject faiIure of his ambitious, Ioopy film, 'The Adventures of Baron Munchimsen', Terry Gilliam called up a friend and said:
I have two names for you: Quixote and Gilliam. And 1 need 20 million dollars. He said, "Done!" I then sat down and read the book and thought, Jesus, this is 1 unfilmable •
It says something about Gilliam that he sustained the dream of filrning the un-filmable for ten years, and still does. The film that he wanted to make, 'The Man who Killed Don Quixote' never got made, defeated by institutional funding, natural disasters. and NATO jets. The unravelling of the film has been lovingly, and heartbreakingly documented by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe in their documentary, 'Lost in La Mancha,2; whÍch could easily have
• This paper is best read immediately after watching 'Lost in La Mancha', a documentary directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, Quixote Films Limited, 2002. In the text of the paper, there are specific references to chapters from the OVO, which, in keeping with the 'multiverse' nature of this essay, should be watched at the points indicated. 1 'My latest is a disaster movie', The Observer, Sunday, February 4,2001. http://observer.guardian.co.uklreview/story/O,6903,432993,OO.html 2 LoSE in La Mancha, directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, Quixote Anand Vívek been a chapter out of the book. And Iike Don Quixote after a particularly nasty chapter in the book, Terry Gilliam carries on. 'Like Don Quixote' is a significant phrase. For Terry Gilliam throughout the making of the film, identified with, and was identífied as, Don Quixote, ever tilting at the windmills of the Hollywood studío system. J, a young upstart with no grounding in Spanish, or Cervantes, or even literary theory, think of myself as having the quixotic temerity to present a paper at a Cervantes conference. Jt is widely understood that Don Quixote has many lives, and many appropriations in the world of texts - filmic and literary. Whether it be Pierre Menard' s Don Quixote, or 'The Man Who Killed Don Quíxote' in the late 20th century, in which an advertísing executive travels back in time to be mistaken for Sancho Panza. Or Mary Shelley's Frankensteín from the early níneteenth century for which, as Erín Webster Garett has argued, Don Quixote is an important subtext 3. Or Avellaneda and his sixteenth century rogue masterpiece to which Cervantes ironically refers in the introduction to the second part of his novel. But perhaps more importantly than the world of text is the appropriation of Don Quixote into the larger world of narrative and narrativisation how people tel! stories about their Uves, and how they define who they are. There are many, ofien contradictory Don Quixotes at large in the world, which is something that Cervantes would have been quite happy about, 1 think. To this babel, J want to bring the concept of a multí-verse, as opposed to a uní-verse. The multi verse is a concept from
Films Limited, 2002. DVD released by Docurama. http://www.lostinlamancha.com 3 Erin Webster Garett, Recycling Zoraida: The Muslim Heroine in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, (Cervantes: BuIletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 20.1,2000), 133
394 Los! in La Mancha: Pirates and the Mulla cosmological physics, which has since been appropriated by comic 4 books • In DC and Marvel Comics, sujJ"ering from an abundance of superheroes and mythic times, the Multiverse was a continuity construct in which multiple fictional versions of the universe existed in the same space, separa/ed from each other by their 'vibrational resonances '. Multiple fictional universes also exist in time, so it is entirely possible for the X-Men, for example, to be teenagers fighting state terror and discriminatíon in post 9/11 America in the 'X-Men Evolution' series, while they visit a lost paradise in Antarctica in completely dijferent getups in 'X-Men the Hidden Years' and both being available at the news stand at the same time as X-Men 2 is playing in the theatres. Avid readers, like my younger brother, are not disturbed by the conflicting plots, characters or chronologies; but the dijferent fictional multiverses, existing simultaneously, do speak to each other. There may be no perceived contradiction between the two dijferent versions of the world available on the newsstand outside the movie hall, where a third version is playing - but there is certain to be dialogue; the texts do speak to each other, they do not occupy separate hermetically sealed spaces in the reader/viewer's minds. Similarly, in a multi verse, many Quixotes and many Cervantes can exist in paraUet narratives, historical and fictional, and dialogue with each other without contradicting each other. This is what 1 will attempt to do, briefly - attempt a dialogue between Terry Gilliam and his abortive film, 'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' with Cervantes and the text of the novel, some of the histories that novel was engaging with, and with people who in the twentieth and twenty first centuries, are identified as being quixotic; like Quixote. The dialogues will also address some speculation as to the possible pasts of Don Quixote, and more importantly, possibilities for the
4 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wikilMultiverse
395 Anand Vivek future. My attempt will also be to read an ethical imperative into these dialogues, as is reflected in the scholarly work of EC Graf, Mary Malcolm Gaylord and Maria Rosa Menocal. Film Clip'
The first shot filmed for 'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' is immediately recognisable as deriving from the chapter in which Don Quixote sets free twelve captives of the Inquisition, destined otherwise to a captive life of rowing in the galleys bound for the New World. For me the episode in the book is significant, as it is the first time that Don Quixote is spurred into action not by delusion, not by seeing giants where others see windmills, but by a rather clearheaded vision of what is happening. 'dearest brethren, , says the Quixote of the book, '1 find by what 1 gather from your own words, that though you de serve punishment for the various crimes for which you stand convicted, yet you suffer execution of the sentence by constraint, and merely because you cannot help it. . . these considerations induce me to take you under my protection.'5 In a novel that is renownedfor its veiled allusion, this is a fairly direct ethical statement of rebellion against the King and the Inquisition. Especially with ilS stark contrast lo the preceding chapter, in which after Don Quixote makes a barber's shaving basin his helmet, he and Sancho Panza have a long and fanciful conversation about how with the help of chivalric amour, a mysterious knight can gain a kingdom, and his squire an earldom. lf there is a delusion involved in the episode of the released
'(ClU1pter 8 ofthe 'La Mancha' DVD, 'Production Day 1 ')
5 Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, transo P.A. Motteux (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2003),133. Part 1, Chapter 22, How Don Quixote set free many miserable crealures, who were carrying. much against their wills, lo a place they did no! like.
396 Pirates and the Mulla
captives, it is only in Quixote' s belief in the gratefulness of the newly released captives. Does this ethical stand, this standing with the sons of Caín, redeem Don Quixote as a figure of hope, and not just an 'annoying ethnocentric fool, amenace to society who acts out of his infatuatíon with ... laughably antiquated aristocratic ideoiogy ... ,6, as EC Graf paints him? Jf not, then how ís the figure of Don Quixote dif.{erent from George W. Bush, who went to fight a war in Jraq because of WMDs that no one else could see? Speaking in terms of cultural archetypes, if a village somewhere in Texas is missing an idiot, then Houston, we have a problem. The figure of the Fooi, in various cultures atrope of resistance fo Power, has now become the very embodiment of Power. We need then, to retain the figure of Don Quixote as a profoundiy ethical and even noble figure, as a Holy Fooi, whether or not Cervantes in tended him to be one. Jn speculations later on in the paper, 1 hope to indica te that Cervantes did perhaps intend something like this.
But to come back to the prisoners newly freed by Don Quixote. Gines de Pasamonte, the most notorious of the prisoners he releases, aman with, in a classic Cervantes touch, a passion for recording the history of his own exploits, escapes from Don Quixote and then returns in the second part of the novel to meet Don Quixote at an inn. It is the fírst inn in all his adventures that Quixote recognises as an inn, rather than as a castle, but Gines de Passamonte is presented to us as Master Peter, or Maese Pedro, master of puppets, complete with a fortune telling ape 7. The
6 E. C. Graf, When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes 's Interpellation of Early Modem Spanish Orientalism, (Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 29.2, Summer 1999): 68-85. 7 Cervantes, Quixote, 507. Part 2, Chapter 27, Wherein is discovered who
397 Anand Vivek staging of the puppet play that follows has been read by George Hayley as a striking emblem ofCervantes's novel as a whole. Master Peter stages a story that is an established part of the canon of 'Reconquest' Narratives. It is the story of the knight Gaiferos, who rides from France into Moorish Spain to rescue his wife Melisendra, the daughter of Charlemagne. To quote Gaylord, 'Its ideal subject is the rescue by a French Christian Knight of a 8 Christian Woman from her Moslem captors in Spain ,. /t is not just any chivalríc tale, but parf of the 'enduring cultural scrípr' of the victorious Catholic crusade against the /nfidel, so important fo the building of a unitary Spanish cultural identity, defined and delimited by Othemess, by what ir was noto But in Cervantes' s staging of Master Peter's play, this traditional narrative is constantly disrupted. Gayferos is shown as lazy and indolent, playing listlessly at Tables, and has to be upbraided and insulted by Charlemagne before he gets his act together. As the play progresses, Master Peter and Don Quixote constantly heckIe and interrupt the boy narrator for adding too many flourishes or for getting historical facts wrong. Finally, as the puppets Gayferos and Melisendra are escaping on horseback, pursued by Moorish forces, Don Quixote, carried away by the tableau before him, jumps onto the stage to aid their cause, and single-handedly fights and destroys the puppet Moorish arrny; 10 comprehensively, metaphorically and lite rally disrupting the
Master Peter was, and his Ape; 8 Mary Malcolm Gaylord, Pulling Strings with Master Peter's Puppets: Fiction and History in Don Quixote, (Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, 18:2, 1998), 129. 9 Ibid. 10 Cervantes, Quixote. 501-507. part 2, Chapter 26, A pleasant account of the Puppet Play, with other good things truly
398 Lost in La Mancha: Pira/es and ¡he Mulla telling of the traditional tale. We are made aware of the staged nature of 'reconquest' history; a puppet history orchestrated by the project of, dare I say, cultural nationalism? And we are made aware of this staging, paradoxically, by Quixote's complete immersion and belief in the reality of the story. 'It is nothing less than the distortion and dissolution of one of Spanish Culture's master narratives. ,11 As Gaylord indicates, Cervantes is engaging in serious fictional dialogue, not only with the phony histories of chivalry, but with the eamest historians of his day, and with the 12 history of Spain they were constructing • Film Clip' The episode of the puppets, though much altered, is also present in 'Lost in La Mancha'. In this case it is a twenty first century character caught in a seventeenth century tableau, who ha', to fight the puppet arrny, which unlike the arrny facing Don Quixote fights back, and entangles him in its strings. According to Gilliam, this twenty first century ad executive, played by Johnny Depp, is supposed to be the modem audience's entry point into a seventeenth century rnilieu. The twenty first century character that is supposed to be us entering Quixote's world, then, is still tangled up in the narrative strings of that constructed history.
But the puppets as an image of history also lead us to another image, which can give us a completely different insight -
The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each
11 Gaylord, Pulling strings With Master Peter's Puppets, 132 121bid 127 *(Cha;ter 60fthe 'La Mancha' DVD, 'Twa weeks Befare Production')
399 Anand Vivek move of an opponent with a countennove. A puppet in Turkish attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard placed on a large tableo A system of mirrors created the illusíon that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided the puppet' s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet caBed 'historical materialism' is to win all the time. It can easily be a match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sighí. 13
Walter Benjamín 's messianic invocation of historical materialism in the first of his famous 'Theses On the Philosophy of History' moves 'materialism' away from the economics of base and superstructure into the realms of hope, imagination, redemption and deep despair; into the realm of 'culture', 'of refined and spiritual things'. Benjamin writes of refined and spiritual things that, , ... it is not in the fonn of the spoils which fall to the victor that [they] make their presence felt.. .. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning and fortitude. They have a retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers tum towards the sun, by a dint of secret heliotropism the past strives to tum towards that sun which is rising in the sky of history.,14
This then is the wizened secret theology, hidden away behind all the mirrors, that animates Cervantes' s historical critique masquerading as fiction. A critique of various fonns of power and
13 Walter Benjamín, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1, transo Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969),253 14 Ibid, IV, 255
400 Lost in La Mancha: Terry Gilliam, Holy Fools, Pirates and the Mulla their ideology can be seen as the fundamental propositions of Cervantes's Don Quixote. Cervantes, to borrow from EC Graf, was the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of l5 Southern Spain . Don Quixote came out in 1605, a hundred and thirteen years after the edict expelling the Moors and Jews from Spain, a hundred and thirteen years after Columbus had sailed to the New World. But Don Quixote is suffused with an invocation of an older world, a world in which it would not be dangerous to be seen reading a book written in Arabic in the streets of the Alcana of Toledo'; a world in which Toledo, where an Arabic history of Don Quixote is being sold to a rag seller, was once the brilliant centre for translations in Western Europe. ' ... had 1 wanted [a translator] for a better or more ancient tongue, that place would infallibly have supplied me. ,16
The episode of Don Quixote 's battle with the Biscainer left hanging halfway, the narrator goes looking for the complete history of Don Quixote, and finds it in a book written in Arabic, which is translated for him by a Morisco, a 'little Muslim' remembered as a convert to Christianity, who still knew the Arabic script. At his first glance at the book, the Morisco, out on the street in Toledo, starts laughing.
'1 asked him what he laughed at. "At a certain remark here in the margin of the book," said he. 1 prayed him to explain it, whereupon still laughing he did it in these words: 'This Dulcinea
15 Graf, When an Arab Laughs in Toledo, op.cit 16 Cervantes, Quixote, 50. Chapter 9, The event of the most stupendous Combat between the brave Biscainer and the valorous Don Quixote.
401 AnandVívek del Toboso, so often mentioned in this book is said to have the best hand at salting pork of any woman in La Mancha.'" 17 It is a complex cultural joke, for in an Inquisitiorial Spain where the puppet history had succeeded, Jews and Muslims were not supposed to exist. Not as Jews or Muslims. But how can you tell the difference between a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian when they are dressed the same? The difference was sought in 'the purity of blood', which was well, quixotic, for after eight hundred years of the cultivation of what Maria Rosa Menocal calls ' a culture of tolerance', there were no visible racial differences. So it was behavioural traits that gave you away. So if you were a crypto Muslim or a crypto-Jew, you would make an art of eating forbidden food that is pork, in public, knowing full well that not doing so would give you away and land you in the inquisitorial fires. The Morisco bursts out laughing when he arrives at the annotation about Dulcinea. The homely peasant woman, who the deluded Quixote has reimagined to be a noblewoman, is in fact "the best hand at salting pork of any woman in all La Mancha." In other words, she is a Converso or a MorisCO. 18 When Cervantes interrupts Don Quixote's Battle with the Basque in order to have a Toledan Morisco laugh at an Arabic joke scribbled in the margin of a passage about a Spanish identity crisis, he has inserted a meta-textual obstacle, a counter-interpellation, a dint of secret heliotropism by which the past tries to tum towards the sun rising in the sky of history. 19
17Ibid. 18 Maria Rosa Menocal, The Omament ofthe World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain, (Little, Brown and Company, 2003), 262 19 Graf, When an Arab Laughs in Toledo
402 Lostin Lo Pirates and the Mulla
But what made Cervantes, writing over a hundred years after the Reconquest, with his own past as a soldier who had fought the Turks, pay attention to voices scribbled in the margins of Spanish history? What made him write the 'multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of southem Spain'? Cervantes, like Captain Ruy Perez de Viedrna who tells the Captive' s tale in the novel, fought at the battle of Lepanto in 1571, where Venetian, Genoese, Austrian and Spanish soldiers fought Ottoman Janissaries and Algerian Pirates, after the Ottomans had captured the island of Cyprus
, ... there carne news of the league concluded by Pope Pious V of happy memory, in conjunction with Spain, against the common enemy the Turk, who at the time had taken the Island of Cyprus from the Venetians; which was an unfortunate and lamentable 108s to Christendom. ,20
There is a character beloved in the Ottoman world, a world whose armies Cervantes had gone to fight in 1571, a character that most Cervantistas will find strangely and compellingly familiar. This is the character of Mulla Nasruddin. Mulla Nasruddin is a strange, comic figure in the folklore of Turkey, North Africa, sorne of the Mediterranean Islands, Central Asia, and South Asia. The Cypriot Greeks also tell stories of Mulla Nasruddin. The widespread N asruddin stories were, and are about a man, who travelled far and wide with his donkey, and did very strange and eccentrlc things. Wherever he went he had the tendency to create trouble. Sometimes the donkey, faithful, but
20 Cervantes, Quixote, 274. Part 1, Chapter 39, Where the Captive relates his Lije and Adventures
403 Anand Vivek obstinate, created the trouble for him. There is no one canonical narrative, or one canonical history for the Mulla; his stories have been circulating, and mutating from at least the fifteenth century. The first written account we have of the Mulla dates back to 1480 in a book called the Saltukname. But even though the Mullah is often a figure of ridicule, he is also often very cunning, and the stories make fun of despotic rulers and of religious orthodoxy. And yes, the Mulla would have understood about the windmills and the giants. For the Mulla, like Don Quixote, often saw the world rather differentIy. Díd he not once throw yeast ínto a lake to tum it ínto yoghurt? Did he not once ride bis donkey facing backwards? A peripatetic, eccentric and mounted protagonist who creates picaresque mayhem where he goes; Nasruddin was also a character that ínvokes the Islamic tradition of peripatetic scholars and Sufí saints which followed the trade and travel routes of the Islamicate world, the Dar-al-Islam. 21 But lhe donkey is also a representative of humbler travellers, neither scholars, nor nobility, who criss-crossed this world; and took lhe stories of Nasruddin along with them. For the stories themselves have been even more widely travelled than the Nasruddin of legend, and have spread far wider than the boundaries of the O!toman Empire al its greatest extent, to places perhaps unheard ofín Akshehir, Anatolia, where there stands a memorial to a Nasruddin who lived and died in the 13th century. Where there is a locked ¡ron gate on one side of his grave; but there are no walls on the other three sides.
Could Cervantes perhaps have heard of Nasruddin? It seems highly unlikely unless we consider the flve years he spent in
21 For the context of travelíng in the Dar-al-Islam. see Richard Eaton. Islamic History as World History, in Essays on Islam and Indian History (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), 42
404 Lost in Lo Mancha: Terry Gilliam, Holy Fools, Pirates and the Mulla the OUoman world, as a captive in Algiers. This period is obviously referred to in the chapters that make up the Captive's tale in Quixote. It is a strange world, a world in which Christian renegades from Spain are business partners with Moors expelled from Andalusia, and also friends with Christian captives, like Ruy Perez, and perhaps Cervantes. A world in which once ransomed, Ruy Perez, or Cervantes, could move about freely, and even manage to communicate freely, for there was a Lingua Franca spoken, 'the language used all over the Turkish dominions, which is a mixture of all the Christian and Moorish languages, by which we understand one another from Constantinople to AIgiers.'22 It is a world, in the Captive's telling of the tale, of great cruelty to Christian captives. But in the next line Cervantes not so much alludes as declares that he himself did not suffer. ' ... his name was Saavedra; who, though he had done many things that will not easily be forgotten by the Turks, yet all to gain his liberty, his master never gave him a blow, nor used him ill, either in word or deed; ,23 It is a world in which Muslim women remain unveiled in front of Christian captives, and Christian men and Muslim women fall in love, and get married. A world in which a Muslim woman, Zoraida, falls in love with Ruy Perez and helps him escape, so that she can escape with him to a Christian land, and worship the Virgin Mary.
This is where the Captive's tale diverges from the historical and autobiographical details to which it is largely faithful. From what we know of Cervantes' s life, he never did bring a
22 Cervantes, Quixote, 287. Part 1, Chapter 41, The Adventures ofthe Captive Continued 23 Cervantes, Quixote, 280. Part 1, Chapter 40, The Story ofthe Captive continued
405 Anand Vivek
Zoraida back to Spain with him. And historically, it lS highly unlikely that he could have. For,
'From about the late 1500s to the 18th century many thousands of European men and women - converted to Islafil. Most of them lived and worked in Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and the Rabat-Sale area of Morocco ... Christian Europeans had a special term for these men: Renegados, "renegades": apostates, turncoats, traitors ... Almost to aman, the Renegadoes were employed as "Barbary Corsairs." They attacked and looted European ships and ravished Christian captives back to Barbary, to be ransomed or sold as slaves. Of course Christian Corsairs were doing exactly the same thing to the ships and crews of Moslem vessels. But very few of the Moslem captives "turned Christian." The flow of renegades went largely one way. ,24
Peter Lambom Wilson sees this one way flow of renegadoes towards Piracy as a practise of social resistance, as
'The Sailor had every reason to consider himself the lowest and most rejected figure of aIl European economy and govemment -powerless, underpaid, brutalised, tortured, lost to scurvy and storms at sea, the virtual slave of wealthy merchants and ship-owners, and of penny pinching
24 Pe ter Lamborn Wilson, Pirate Utopias: Moorish Corsairs and European Renegadoes, (New York: Autonomedia, 2003), 11
406 Lost in La Pirates and (he Mulla
kings and greedy princes. The pirate was first and foremost the enemy of his own civilisation.'25 The much improved material and social conditions of life as a Barbary Corsair would also have played a part in the decisions to become 'Christians Turned Turk.' Wilson's excellent account of Pirate Utopias gives us a picture of what AIgiers would have been like in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in the times of Cervantes's captivity. For one, it would have been, for lack of a better word, fairly cosmopolitan. Not just because of the European renegades, but also because of the multi-cultural nature of the Ottoman Empire, of which AIgiers was a parto The Janissary corps, for example, 'were originally not native Anatolians or even born Muslims ... but recruited from such outlying areas of the imperium as Christian Albania. The Barbarossa brothers, who founded the regency of AIgiers, were Albanians or perhaps Greek islanders by birth.' 26 Eventually, even European renegades were admitted into the AIgerian branch of the Janissaries. The government was a sort of military democracy, nominally under the Ottoman Sultan, but with a large degree of local autonomy, and run by the ruling body of Jannisaries. The most notable feature of the AIgerian Ocak was its system oi 'democracy by seniority.' A recruit rose up through the ranks, once every tbree years. If he survived long enough, he' d serve as cornmander in chief for two months, and then retire into the divan chamber of government with a vote on all important issues. The lowest Albanian slaveboy or peasant lad from the Anatolian outback, and the outcast con verted European captive sailor, could equally hope one day to participate in government.
25 Wilson, Pirate Utopías, 22 26 ibid, 31
407 Anand Vivek
The Dívan was unruly and anarchic, but none of its members were allowed to carry arms, or use their físts during arguments. Speech was in Turkish; dragomen translated into Berber or Arabic and the European languages when necessary. 27 The same loud, anarchic, democratic discussions, in the polyglot Franco of the pírates must have spilled over into the vibrant cafés of Algíers.
But what was life for a slave like, before he was ransomed? The accounts that Wilson gives us are consonant with the captive's tale, of not being hell on earth. As Wilson writes, the captíve's fate was no picnic, but it had its ups and downs, and even its possíble routes of salvation and escape, unlike the horrendous tales of 28 captivity and torture circulated by the Europeans •
Over the centuries, AIgiers had adopted a great deal of Turkish culture. The Jamssaries followed the Bektashi Sufí order, a 29 heterodox sect which ritually used wine , and even confession. Stories of the Mulla Nasruddin must also have be en par! of this heady cultural brew, especially because of their often subversive, anti-authoritarian nature. And perhaps most poignantly for Cervantes, everywhere in Algiers were the memories of Spain, rhe refugees who had left Spain. 'Those Moors are called in Barbary Tagarins who were driven out of Aragon; as they call those of Granada, Mudajares ,.30 In those cafes, every evening couid be heard orchestras piaying the music brought by the Moors, the music that is still known as Andalusi.31
27 ibid, 35 28 íbid, 156-158 29 ibid, 28 30 Cervantes, Quixote, 286. Part 1, Chapter 41, The Adventures of the Captive Continued 31 Wilson, Pirate Utopias, 34, fn.
408 Pirates and ¡he Mulla
After five years of living in this anarchic polyglot place, with the memory of an older Spain haunting its streets and it8 cafes, and interacting with Renegades who had tumed their back on the New Spain, what might Inquisitorial Spain have felt like to newly retumed Cervantes? What might he have thought of its grand chivalric history, as that history played out in the New World as a history of cruelty and terror? And in Spain, as a history of bumings - of books, of heretics, of renegadoes. We do not know what Cervantes thought. Just that he tried to make a living as a novelist and a playwright, and when that didn't quite work out, he took up a job as a tax collector, and landed up in jail for a time because of an inconsistency in his accounting. The jail in which Don Quixote is supposed to have been conceived.
Sitting in his prison cell, perhaps bitter about the Spain he had chosen to come back to, might he not have remembered his time in AIgiers, and a the famous story of Mulla Nasruddin riding his donkey backwards?
One day Nasruddin was riding his donkey facing towards the back. Nasruddin, the people said, you are sitting on your donkey backwards! No, he replied. It's not that 1 am sitting on the donkey backwards, I'm just interested in where 1 have been coming from more than where 1 am going.32
An image that rernÍnds us of Benjamín 's 'Angel of History.' 'This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is tumed towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling up wreckage upon
32 Backside to the Future: Coherence and Conflation of Dominant Strategic Metaphors, Worshipping the Goldm Ass, http://www.laetusinpraesens.org/, Anthony Judge, 2003.
409 Anand Vivek wreckage and hurls it in fiont of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing fiom Paradise; this storm irresistibly propels him into future to which his back is turned, while the piJe of debris before him grows skywards. This storm is what we call progress. ,33
Did Cervantes sitting in his prison cell, thinking of the 'progress' Spain had made in the last one century think that perhaps the only way one could truly represent the history of this progress was to ride the donkey baekwards, to have a character who like Nasruddin, would see the world turned upside down. A charaeter, who by provoking laughter at himself, as he and his trust y eompanion blundered through Spain, drew attention to the ridieulousness of this world tumed upside down. Perhaps Cervantes's complex fiction, that the novel ís aetualIy the work of an Arabie historian, Cide Harnet Benengeli, and that he is rnerely' the 'stepfather' retelling a tale already told, alludes to this.
Perhaps noto
Maria Rosa Menocal writes that, 'Cervantes's novel is a masterpiece in part because it can be read outside the historieal circumstances that shaped it, and we can understand its author's struggle to deal with the existential problem of the individual against the real world.'34 In the world that we live in, can we realIy afford to read Don Quixote outside of its historical context? Menocal herself reads Don Quixote as the post-script to the history of the AI-Andalus, when Christians, Jews and Muslims had created
33 Benjamín, Theses, IX, 257 34 Menocal, The Omament ofthe World, 265
410 Lost in Lo Mancha: Pira tes and the Mulla a culture of tolerance in Medieval Spain. 'Don Quixote is the most poignant lament over the 10ss of that universe, its last chapter, allusive, ironic, bittersweet, quixotic.' 35 But as 1 have hoped to show, Don Quixote did not just mourn a lost past, but actively engaged with traditions of picaresque subversion current in a world which was now irredeemably Spain's other.
March 11, 2004 is not a date that will be easily forgotten in Spain. The comparisons of 3111 with 9/11 were easily made, the parallels easily drawn. The enormity of the tragedy, the hundreds of innocent deaths, and the politically motivated attack by lslamic terrorists all made it seem like the logical sequel to the story of retaliation and revenge that the world has been accustomed to watch as spectacle since that infamous date, the 11 th of September. When after the attacks a group allied to al-Qa'eda, the Brigade of Abu Hafs al-Masri, stated that the attacks on Spain were revenge for the 108s of the Spanish Muslim kingdom of al-Andalus in 149236, it seemed like a textbook case for Samuel Huntington's 'Clash of Civilizations.'
But that' s not the way it has played out in Spain over the past year. Spain, in the year since the bombings, has proven to be quite a remarkable place. There has been virtually no violence directed against Spain's largely immigrant Muslim community. Instead there has been a renewal of interest in the country's own Islamic past and the Spanish government has promoted the
35 ibid, 263. 36 Spanish Muslims issue fatwa on bin Laden', The Telegraph, March 11, 2005 http://www .telegraph.co.uklnews/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/03/1l/w spanl1.xml&sSheet=/news/2oo5/031111ixworld.htmI
411 Anand Vivek teaching of Arabic and Islam. The Spanish King, Juan Carlos, has addressed the Moroccan Parliament most of Spain's Muslims are immigrants from Morocco, across the straits of Gibraltar.37 This is particularly poignant, for the expulsion of the Muslims from Spain in 1492, and the horrors of the Inquisition that followed, are among the darkest chapters of Eurpoean history. Many of those expelled from Spain after 1492, as Cervantes tells us, found refuge in Morroco.
'The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule.'38 To know the history of the world since 1492, from the time of Cervantes, to the time of Walter Benjamin to the time of the Madrid train bombings is to know incredible sadness. Where the genius of Cervantes líes is to turn that sadness into laughter. The power of Don Quixote lies in its ability to outmaneuver and defeat the torturous history of Spanish nationalism, to not become its 39 pathetic protagonist, but to be able to laugh at and ridicule it • A book of laughter is not necessarily a book of forgetting - but perhaps the only way the past can be redeemed from sadness.
In a Spain that has chosen reconciliation over revenge, there needs to be a concerted effort to look at Spanish history from the other side of the Mediterranean. More specificalIy, the possible multiverse connections between Don Quixote and Mulla Nasruddin need to be examined more closely. For a history of shared laughter
37 A real sign of healing', Newsweek, Intemational Edition, http://msnbc.msn.comlid/7101281/site/newsweekl 38 Benjamín, Theses, VIII, 257 39 Graf, When an Arab Laughs in Toledo
412 Lost in La Mancha: Pira/es and the Malla at the machinations oí Power is perhaps the best antidote to Otherness.
Terry Gilliam, as part oí the Monty Python collective has a past of taking chivalric tales, and turning them on their head; with large doses oí ridicule, and dollops oí 'historical materialism' thrown in. Cervantistas should certainly watch 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail'.4O In the world that we Uve in, akin now in sorne respects to those autocratic worlds in which only the rool could get away with telling Truth to Power; Cervantes, and perhaps Gilliarn have the answer - humaur, and a understanding oi history which is not idealized, but aware oi cornplexities, and aware oi Power.
In his persona, Terry Gilliam combines two Quixotes - one is the quixotic idealist, imagining the world difíerently, tilting at the windmills oí the world as it is and trying to change it, constantly battling impossible odds. The Other Quixote is the filmmaker as part oí the Monty Python collective, and a<¡ an independent director, has brought history and humor together, and held up wildly distorted funhouse rnirrors to the world - to see what it really is. Both Quixotes are important, and in my víew, inextricably linked. Not only for Gilliam, but for anyone who thinks of themselves as either humorists, or historians, today.
What oí Mulla Nasruddin? In the fractious Middle East today, in Iraq, Aíghanistan and Palestine; where terror is answered with terror; what would it be like for a Mulla Nasruddin character
40 Monty Python and The Holy Grail, directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Iones, 1975. For more details, see http://www.imdbsomltitle/ttOO71853/. For more details on Gílliam, see http://www.imdb.comlname/nmOOOO416/bio
413 Anand Vivek to (re)appear? We don't know. He'd probably be detained under American Anti-terror Legislations, and he and his donkey would be sent to Abu Ghraib or to Guantanamo Bay. He would, quite possibly, be more welcome in La Mancha. So 1 write this paper in the quixotic (but not vain) hope that at least one small rniracle will happen, that Terry Gíltiam's film on Don Quixote will finally be made, and that these possible multi-verse worlds of Terry Gilliam, Holy Fools, Pirates and The Mulla will not continue to be 'Lost in La Mancha.'
• 1 am grateful to Brian Larkin, Maneesha Taneja, Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Vivek Narayanan and Rana Dasgupta for their inputs, without which this paper would not have been possible.
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