the Don
I’ve been having a wayward, yet enjoyable argument with my brother, of late, concerning the viewpoint of Don Quixote. I have read (most) of the book, while he looked up someone’s opinion on Wikipedia and regurgitated it as some kind of informed discussion. You obviously know where I put my jelly beans. Yes. In my own opinion.
That being said, he believes the Don is all about running away from his problems, making something larger than what it is to make it seem much more important, and being incredibly depressed to his lot in life when he’s in some of his more lucid states.
I believe the Don never runs away from his problems (albeit, he runs from what society wants him to be: heavy-handed, rich, proper, with his head out of the clouds), slowly and steadily gains a following of people who begin to understand his dream, and sees an overall boring, backward society (and world) as an incredible, powerful place to live.
I’m bringing this to light because I believe both sides are justifiable, arguable ones. Has anyone else read Don Quixote? I’m inclined to believe those who see society as a helpful, nurturing thing will tend to believe Don Quixote as delusional and in denial, while those who see society as a status quo and statistics will tend to believe Quixote is recreating the world in a much more meaningful way.
Now, my brother says that everything the Don sees is fantastical and delusional, and this frustrates me because he clearly didn’t read the book; the Don rarely turned something into a fantastical thing, and tended to refer more to the person’s personality more than the person’s ability. People who are there to run him out of his unpaid-for bed tend to be brigands, and women of impeccable look tend to be princesses.
To the contrary, he fought for his lady for a long while, even though he had never met her, and had no idea what she looked like. When they finally met, he found her the most beautiful thing in the world, even though she was worn by years of working in the field, wore rags, and was overall a negative thing to look at. He saw the inner beauty–not the fantastical, let’s-be-royalty-for-the-day beauty.
He would often do things like attack the captors of abused criminals in chains, usually being beaten to within an inch of his life. His actions would usually come back to haunt him, with the criminals returning to rob him blind at a later date. Did he run from his problems? No. Did he create many problems? Yes.
Quixote was a revolutionary without a revolution. He fought for a more organized society that disregarded caste and wealth, and he saw all people through the same lens. Furthermore, he slowly gained followers not because he turned everything into a fantasy, but because he began convincing them he saw a better life–and that Dulcinea would reward them. He had become the purveyor of fine romance, of masculine strength and humilty, a bard and a storyteller, all the while walking a road only he could see.
I do not believe he ever was in denial, in spite of what many of the characters–and the writer of that Wiki–said. I believe he cut through the outer shell, the physical. He was rarely safe, spoke out of turn often, and was confused quite often as well. He was usually enraged by his society’s lack of understanding, and their disbelief, and sometimes grew depressed and saddened by how simple everyone around him lived.
But this is my argument. I can’t speak on Brian’s behalf because I’m certain he’d pick my word choice apart, and create an anthill out of a mountain (read: I might put words in his mouth), so I won’t write of it.
I’m fairly certain most of you have never even picked up the complicated, convoluted book, much less read more than two chapters. And I understand that. Regardless, I’d like your opinions. ~x
This entry was posted on Monday, July 12th, 2010 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Personal Thoughts, Thoughts on Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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on July 12th, 2010 at 5:40 pm
You argue both sides while claiming against mine. I don’t get it. Might put words in my mouth? You keep saying “ran away from his problems” when i kept saying he ran away from his personal problems and ran into his newly created ones. He made everyone larger than life, either by placing the common on a pedestal or perceiving them as symbolic archetypes. You, being a poet and writer, find nothing wrong in this. It’s no different than a Poe or a Yeats. But find someone nowadays walking around in a spacehelmet claiming he’s an explorer of stars while wondering why his spoon isn’t a fork and why aliens are spying on us from commercial planes and you’d say they’re fantastical too. You want to get into an argument over Decartian normalcy, that’s one thing. But you sidetrack the arguement by pretending like the DQ’s specifics of his reactions to people is outside of what I claimed. It really isn’t. You focus on your ant and claim it’s alive. I’ll look at the whole hill and tell you someone stepped on it.
And I know you like to claim that wikipedia is automatically less accurate than the way you see it because it’s not the book, but it has references. And it’s not written by a single person. It’s a collaboration of a lot of people arguing their viewpoints via forums and then it being mediated into a coherent wiki article. The sources of the claims are listed at the bottom of the page.
When you realize that you’re arguing from DQ’s viewpoint (a lof of which had to do with self-delusion) and I’m arguing from an objective view of his life, you’ll see that what we say individually is accurate. We just suck at explaining the other’s point.
I just don’t get why you claim that to DQ, they WERE giants, then go on to claim that he was a revolutionary for social reform. How were the windmills oppressing? Or how were the criminals that he fought for going to better society? There’s too many inconsistencies about him to deify his purpose into that of an altruistic visionary.
His fallacy was the one of false confidence. Trusting emotional perception above all else.
on July 12th, 2010 at 10:12 pm
Using largess vocabulary and complicated jargon to simply regurgitate a plethora of opinions only results in you sounding ostentatious. I was trained in the English classroom, I’ve been through the convoluted ringer when it comes to bullshit, written papers that consisted entirely of “the author’s use of this word and that word proves him inadequate in explaining this situation,” and other such drivel, and you aren’t actually arguing anything. Mostly because you haven’t actually read anything. Cliff’s notes from two thousand people who share the same opinion does nothing for me. I don’t care if you found a few passages and opinions that lend credence to your perspective of Quixote being a textbook delusional with textbook issues and textbook symptoms of denial. I’m certain more than twenty people would say they like Twilight because they found Edward complicated, lovely, dark, and deep.
Quixote doesn’t say he’s on the moon. He doesn’t walk around pointing at trees and laughing at the toothpick men. In some cases, when he believes something to be something it isn’t, it becomes something else. Literally. It gains properties and abilities greater than what it was in the first place. It saves him, in some cases, from instant death.
And there’s no deification, or apotheosis, in my argument. I’m giving credence to the philosophy and (possibly unexpected) intelligence of the character. I began by stating Quixote is a powerful literary character, dynamic and quite round, and that someone reminds me of him in the ways he acts, and you came in with the opposite: because you don’t agree with how this person acts, therefore Quixote must be in denial. You furthermore pursued opinions that verified your own while not caring to develop it, and instead of using any kind of actual study on the subject, the character, or the topic matter, you reinforced your need to villify the character by hiding behind others’ words.
I’m saying Wiki’s opinion isn’t your own informed opinion. Someone telling me the Sears Tower is made of cheese and me seeing it so is the difference between firsthand account and, of course, the filtered and less accurate secondhand account. I can go about reading how Freud was the most developed psychoanalyst in the world, and then turn and spew whatever I read at someone else for an “informed” effect, but it doesn’t make it correct, true, or properly argued/theorized. Your opinion is your opinion, and your researched opinion is certainly warranted. But I’m not going to argue against a “Stephanie” style where you’re only throwing out the parts of an unsubstantiated, unprofessional article you please. I’m saying get your own opinion after reading it instead of half-cocking a russian-roulette loaded gun and pointing it at me.
You aren’t too good to read the book, no matter how many opinions you find to develop your own. I’m not looking to hear what the Wiki writers have to say about the book, or about the character.
I’m not arguing both sides because I give credence to what you say is happening. I’m only arguing my side because how I see the motivations behind what the character does as opposite to what you see.
Now, using Rand’s “objective viewpoint,” or Quixote’s happiness as the main focus of his existence, your argument is still underdeveloped and poorly discussed. You aren’t pursuing the argument of how Quixote’s happiness is the focus, or anything around that perspective. In fact, as far as I can see, you’re trying to extend your personal experience into the sphere of what the character was: an unredeemable, delusional man in denial of reality. It furthers your own personal argument (and perhaps vendetta) while negating any intelligent development of the topic by either of us.
The questions you ask concerning the windmills is the focus of the entire book, and the climax of an otherwise meandering, parable-filled storyline. It is the culmination of an entire two thousand pages of storytelling, and to take a morally sterile, unbiased and context-free view to the final major act of Quixote is to blatantly ignore the rest of the book, and ignore the complexities of this character.
It’s like looking at the Lord of the Rings trilogy and say, “Gandalf killed the Balrog? How does this create a language for Tolkien to write about? Or, why didn’t Aragorn kill the Balrog if he was the representation of humanity as a whole that was so specific and important to the remainder of the series?” To remove the rest of the story from around a single event is downright ridiculous, pointless, and once more underdeveloped.
If you want the answer to your question about him fighting a windmill, perhaps you should read the book. Since it is (obviously) the most memorable scene of the book, I can assure you the rest of the book sheds some light on why he did what he did.
I don’t see how his confidence could be false to him, when he saw it as true. He didn’t fake it ’till he made it. He persevered over his lesser peers because of his so-called “emotional perception.” Finally, the projection you’re making about him is about as emotional as you can get. The evidence is as followed: judging based on gut reaction on what the character is about, extending personal experience to argue against the redeemability of a literary character, and finally seeking information that only upholds your particular perspective while eschewing the opposition because it’s not objective enough (which I assume you mean as ‘emotion-free’).
Finally, did you look at any of those citations? Other than http://www.bookrags.com/notes/dq/ and its skeleton of information concerning the use of certain imagery in the writing, most of those links are editions of the book, pictures about Quixote, and Spanish, untranslated texts. In fact, after looking through, there is absolutely no literary criticism that lends credence to your argument (except, possibly, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~yousufh/donquixote.html, which after reading would more give credence to what I’m saying than what you are). English 101 – if you want to sound smart, and want to convince anyone your article is of any kind of value, read where they get the information. Again, I’ve been through all this. I’ve done actual research. In fact, that’s one of the things I excelled at while in college.
And I know I’m not giving sources, except for my own opinion from my own reading of the book. Which is what I’m looking for. From others.
on July 13th, 2010 at 1:20 am
You start your comment by ridiculing my word choice, claim I hide behind other’s words (when my argument is completely my own) then claim ” It furthers your own personal argument (and perhaps vendetta) while negating any intelligent development of the topic by either of us.” Did you take this argument personal at some point and I missed it? Vendetta? Attacking me instead of what I claim is an interesting choice to start your side of this.
And then after that you make up a bunch of assumptions about how I came about my opinion, claiming i said things that we both have electronic proof that I never claimed. You mix what I say and what you hear together to make a more convincing argument for yourself. And the little bit you will claim to have answered of my questions is really just a sidestep. I’m not going to talk to you anymore over this. I get really pissed when people make fun of me just to win an argument. Congrats. You win.
on July 13th, 2010 at 5:39 am
Aw. That’s no fun. I didn’t mean to be such a bully. Sorry.