SPAN-300: CERVANTES' DON QUIXOTE Lecture 14 - Don Quixote, Part II: Front Matter and Chapters I-XI (cont.) [October 22, 2009] Chapter 1. Episodes in Part II Reminiscent of Others in Part I [00:00:00] Professor Roberto González Echevarría: Something that I will be charting as we move through the episodes that make up Part II is how they are reminiscent of others in Part I; how, in many cases, these episodes in Part II are rewritings of episodes in Part I. This is an issue that doesn't have to be just stated, but also pondered. I mean, what does that mean? Does it make a statement about there not being a possibility of something new and original, of memory impinging on the present so strongly that you cannot really move away from it, and so forth? So when I discuss these episodes I will try to link them to episodes in Part I, and I hope that you do the same as you read, because the book invites you to do so from the very beginning, when Sansón Carrasco sort of takes over as the internal author of Part II, and you realize that what Sansón Carrasco wants Don Quixote to do is to reenact Part I, to be like he was in Part I and to do the things that he did in Part I. And, in fact, many of the characters in Part II that Don Quixote and Sancho meet want them to act like as they did in Part I. So this is something that can be seen as sort of an overarching topic about in my discussions of Part II, and that I hope that you will also do as you read and think about Part II. Chapter 2. The Baroque Concept of Desengaño [00:02:10] We are going to begin today where we left off in the last class, talking about that all-important term that I was discussing, called desengaño. Desengaño is perhaps the most important concept of the Spanish Baroque. Remember, Baroque is essentially seventeenth century spilling over into the eighteenth century where it becomes Rococo, if you want to be more precise. So desengaño is perhaps the most important concept of the Spanish Baroque; it means undeceiving, opening ones eyes to reality, awakening to the truth; these are all valid translations of the term. Engaño, in Spanish, means 'deceit,' to be fooled; 'te engaño' means 'I fool you'; 'engañarse' is 'to fool one self.' This concept is fundamental to Part II because the whole plot of the novel seems to be moving towards disillusionment. So let me give you some definitions of desengaño and comment on them so that we can have as clear a concept, as clear an idea of this concept as possible. The first is from Otis Green and his bookSpain and the Western Tradition. Otis Green was a great Hispanist at the University of Pennsylvania for many years, through the '40s, '50s, and even '60s, and his book is a treasure of information about Spanish literature and culture of the Golden Age. He writes: "This desengaño is related to the sort of awakening to the nature of reality that the prodigal son must have experienced, 'I will arise and go to my father,' says the prodigal son. This waking to true awareness is called 'caer en la cuenta' [in Spanish; it's another way...] 'caer en la cuenta' to have the scales fall from one's eyes, to see things as they are. Such a state of mind is desirable." I continue with Green: "Disillusionment comes to be viewed even to be venerated as a sort of wisdom, the wisdom of the stoic sapiens or wise man of antiquity who was fully aware of what constituted the summum bonum, the supreme good, and was utterly un-enticed by everything else." [Unquote]. You know who were the stoics were, so this wise stoic man knew what the real good was and what was not valuable: "Caer en la cuenta [I go on with another quote from Green], to come to one's self was the phrase most used in connection with the type of desengaño we are considering here. It signified a passing from ignorance to knowledge, and awakening from the falsity of one's dream." [Unquote]. So you can see now this dialectic, as it were, between engaño and desengaño, deceit and un-deceit, deceit and disillusionment, and coming to realize what is the truth. The following is the quote that I gave you at the end of the last class. It was on the back of that map with the Don Quixote's route on the way to Saragossa, and then the swerve to Barcelona, and it's the following, and it is from Baltasar Gracián. Baltasar Gracián was a Jesuit who wrote about politics, wit and rhetoric. He lived between 1601 and 1658 and he wrote a very famous allegorical novel. An allegorical novel is a novel in which the characters represent abstractions: reason, truth, and so forth, and the novel is called El Criticón, The Big Critic. Here is a quote from that book, it's the quote that you have, it's a quote about desengaño: "The most monstrous of all is the placing of Deceit at the world's front gate and disillusionment at the exit — a disastrous handicap sufficient to ruin our life entirely since ... to make a misstep at the beginning of life causes one to lurch headlong with greater speed each day and end up in utter perdition. Who made such an arrangement, who ordained it? Now I am more convinced than ever that all is upside down in this world. Disillusionment should stand at the world's entrance and should place himself immediately at the shoulder of the neophyte, to free him from the dangers that lie in wait for him. But since the newcomer — by an opposite and contrary arrangement makes his first encounter with deceit [who at the beginning presents everything to him in perverted and reversed order] he heads for the left hand road and strives on to destruction." As you can see, this is very allegorical the left hand road; the left is always the bad, sinister. 'Sinistra' it means left, this is why it has that connotation. The left road is the bad road, and so you have deceit and disillusionment, and he says, is placing deceit — if this is the door to life, deceit is here, and then the end of life is the other D, Disillusionment; this is what he saying. Gracián was allegorical in his mode of thinking. Deceits are all of Don Quixote's illusions, and those of the other characters in the novel. While desengaño is what they wind up or what they reach, disillusionment, realizing that it is all vanity of vanities. This is the reason why so much of what happens in Part II is staged. Deceit is the theatricality of so many events which are made up, constructed; deceit is the dream of books that Don Quixote dreams, it is the unbroken chain of texts masked in reality, and even of language also masking reality. So Don Quixote's dream of books, these illusions about the romances of chivalry and the knights of old is a deceit, and disillusionment, is coming to realize that it is that, that it is nothing but a deceit, and the unbroken chain of texts is because in Don Quixote's mind one text leads to another, leads to another, leads to another. It's a humanist dream, the humanists, who were philologists, lovers of language, students of the classics, thought in terms of texts leading to texts, leading to texts, without ever getting to reality, and of language of something that has its own reality, and what the baroque does is undermine all of that and show that it is all a dream. The best example of these patterns of deceit and disillusionment, or of going from deceit to disillusionment is the play by Calderón de la Barca, Life is a Dream. I have put his name before on the board, but I will do it again so that you remember him, he's one of the classics of Spanish literature — You can't see from there? Pedro Calderón de la Barca. I am very fond of Pedro Calderón de la Barca and of his play, Life is a Dream, because I wrote my entire doctoral dissertation about that play, and it is one of the classics of Spanish literature. In that play, Life is a Dream, in English, prince Segismundo has been kept in a tower since birth because an omen told his father, king Basilio, that Segismundo would be a ruthless tyrant if he ever became king, so he has him grow up, since he's a baby, in a tower, cared for by Clotaldo and so forth. To put him to a test, Basilio has Segismundo drugged and brought to the palace, where, when he awakens, he is treated like a king. Confused, Segismundo acts violently, he tries to rape a woman, throws a soldier off a balcony, and so forth, confirming the omen, in a way, so he is drugged and brought back to the tower where, upon awakening, he does not know if what happened in the palace was true or just a dream. Meanwhile, the people who have found out about Segismundo's existence, the people in the kingdom, revolt and come to get him to fight against his father.