Innocence Blog

I return to my initial question: the Sorrowful Knight's object. He is at war with Freud's reality principle, which accepts the necessity of dying. But he is neither a fool nor a madman, and his vision is always at least double: he sees what we see, yet he sees something else also, a possible glory that he describes to appropriate or at least to share. Unamuno names this transcendence as literary fame, the immortality of Cervantes and Shakespeare. Certainly that is part of the Knight's quest; much of Part II turns upon his and Sancho's delightful apprehension that their adventures in Part I are recognized everywhere. Perhaps Unamuno underestimated the complexities involved in so grand a disruption in the aesthetics of representation. Hamlet again is the best analogue: from the entrance of the players in Act II through the closure of the performance of The Mousetrap in Act III all the rules of normative representation are tossed away and everything is theatricality. Part II of Don Quixote is similarly and bewilderingly advanced, since the Knight, Sancho, and everyone they encounter are acutely conscious that fiction has disrupted the order of reality.

. . .

The aesthetic wonder is that this enormity (DQ as a "veritable encylopedia of cruelty"--Nabokov) fades when we stand back from the huge book and ponder its shape and endless range of meaning. No critic's account of Cervantes' masterpiece agrees with, or even resembles, any other critic's impressions. Don Quixote is a mirror held up not to nature, but to the reader. How can this bashed and mocked knight be, as he is, a universal paradigm?

From Harold Bloom's Introduction to Don Quixote
(bold mine)

I have come to be very much of a cynic in these matters; I mean that it is impossible to believe in the permanence of man's or woman's love. Or, at any rate, it is impossible to believe in the permanence of an early passion. As I see it, at least, with regard to man, a love affair, a love for any definite woman, is something in the nature of a widening of the experience. With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory. A turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer characteristic gesture--all these things, and it is these things that cause to arise the passion of love--all these things are like so many objects on the horizon of the landscape that tempt a man to walk beyond the horizon, to explore.