Ken's "Ulysses" - St. John's Essay

K.M.R.I.A.*

The following is written for freshmen only. This is neither ironic nor particularly paternal. That few if any such lower-classmen have read Don Quixote manifests no difficulty, for reasons made explicit by Mr. D---’s lecture [a tutor at St. John’s College, Ken’s alma mater]. The thesis of this paper is that one should not so much avoid the obvious as see how it is not obvious at all; and insofar as this is its thesis the paper aims paradoxically at instilling the

antagonistic traits of self-esteem and humility.

Don Quixote is a tragedy and there is nothing funny about death. The novel operates out in the

open on two levels — the world as it is and the world as Don Quixote sees it. The essential humor of the book lies in this double vision, in the simultaneous perception of the world’s beauty and ugliness. Cervantes opens this world to all who would see it as it appears. But deception, falsity, and lies (and I do not here mean ugliness) are not part of the world; they are instead the work of enchanters or, as Sancho says, the Devil. It is not unreasonable that when Don Quixote meets Death face to face he recognizes him, and is afraid.

The great celebrations in Don Quixote take place in damp fields among shepherds and simple people. To these people, huddled together smelling of sweat, a gaunt madman delivers profound orations on the nature of trust, human speculation, and divine guidance. How could they understand him? What meaning could they assign to the Age of Gold, a time not even he had seen? These are perhaps theological considerations, but how are we to understand those shepherds, resting against each other in the evening, who marvelled at so mad a knight?

When in the Cave of Montesinos Don Quixote weds the classical Odyssean descent into Hades to the Christian descent to Hell his confrontation with the creatures of the underworld is as real and important as the mythological confrontations of his predecessors. Apart from chronological considerations we are at a loss to distinguish the knight’s myth from those of seafarer or savior, for they appear all equally true. Myth — foremost a psychic phenomenon, like the first snow, or the plague?

Dulcinea lack the presumption of a Beatrice: certainly she is an ideal, beauty itself, but her purity is of the body and not of the soul. Her Grecian form generates an erotic drive that

*Mr. James Joyce

renders Quixote fearless. His quest cannot complete itself until the imperfectly human longings of his neighbors seem to him more beautiful than the exquisite proportion of the divine. Even a heart cut away from the stiff muscles of a dead lover slowly rots. Ripeness, the need for charity, a human need.

Like Christ, Quixote’s pride marks him as a bearer of the new and not the old law. For this reason the conventions of society cannot touch him and he moves undaunted through the social scheme. This is the freedom of madness. Sancho Panza, however, accompanies him because these conventions can and do in fact touch him and he must be shielded from and opened to the world as it really is. Thus Sancho Panza is an extension of Quixote’s armor.

As social outcast and bearer of the new law Don Quixote must paradoxically establish an hierarchical society. This makes sense only if the social order helps men to fulfill the divine law in loving God and the knowledge of God. When the knight sets out, however, he confuses the freedom of madness with the freedom of men. Don Quixote commits the sin of pride when he elevates himself to the level of Christ and the Heaven above human law. Quixote’s awareness of his position as a man in society grows as he matures from lawbreaker to lawgiver: Divine madness cannot be the principle of human actions and consequently must not be the touchstone of human freedom. He must learn that freedom follows self-knowledge and that as a man sheds his armor he can love himself and be loved by others.

Don Quixote’s journey never takes him far from his birthplace; perhaps the farthest he travels is the Sierra Morena, to Cardenio, true madness and the paralysis of love. He does however journey to the sea, closer than the mountains though more alien to him. As he rides Rocinante aboard ship amid crowds of cheering sailors his person is for the one time in the history truly ludicrous. By vocation he is a knight, a land creature and not a thing of the sea. The rocking decks nauseate him. Quixote finds himself an interloper in a world cut off from the dealings of men, a world more distant that the continual possibility of madness. And yet, across that world whole civilizations migrated to conquer and civilize other human societies. And across the world, borne up by the rolling waters, Don Quixote sailed the trade routes to the most distant of humanity.

---Ken Kronberg