Week Thirty: Don Quixote and Tartuffe
Last week, Italy. This week, Spain and France. It’s like I’m on the college-graduate “Grand Tour” but with books. And I’m having almost as much fun.
Ted Gioia’s Immersive Humanities Course serves up Chapters 1-5 of Miguel Cervantes’ Don Quixote along with Molière’s play Tartuffe—a picaresque week! This was a great pairing, both works light and frothy, perfect for summer. And I couldn’t get enough. In fact, that posed a bit of a problem for me…more in a second.
Don Quixote was written in 1605, so it’s roughly contemporary with the other works we’ve been reading for the last few weeks. Cervantes was a tax collector and part-time writer who spent some time in prison, likely for being very bad at tax collection. Cervantes later said his idea for Don Quixote came to him while he was behind bars! Briefly, a man named Quexana (or Quesada…”but this doesn’t matter much”) decides his life is boring and he would like to try being like all of his heroes that he reads about. He becomes a Don Quixote, a knight errant, using all his books as his guide; never mind that he’s fifty, not actually a knight, has hand-me-down armor minus a helmet, and has no lady to fight for. Details. He sets out to acquire these things are more, and to perform feats of derring-do as he sallies forth.
I realized as I was reading that my knowledge of Don Quixote started with the pen drawing of Quixote and his squire and ended with windmills. How little I knew! Quixote is funny, sometimes a little tragic, and worth reading in every way. To be honest, I read it without taking any notes, simply enjoying it. And every time I went back to make notes, I got sucked back into the story. What a fun problem to have, although it has made writing this post more difficult.
So let me just bullet a few things:
Quixote is an interesting figure. Everyone around him thinks he’s crazy, and he’s certainly carried away. I mean, he ISN’T an actual knight, but there is something kind of sweet about him.
The windmill scene is famous for a reason. Watching Sancho Panza, his newly-hired “squire,” observe Quixote and realize what a kook he is working for is very funny. But there’s something endearing in Quixote, too. He wants these ridiculous stories to be true so deeply that he is willing to give up everything for them. He is a true believer.
The funnier scene to me is the one right after the windmills, where Quixote’s neighbors come over and diagnose his problem: too many books. They care about him, and so even though they do laugh at him a little they also want him to come back to being himself. Watching the priest and a neighboring farmer go through his library choosing which books stay and which books burn is very funny—especially when one of Cervantes’ own books comes up!
There is an interesting play between Sancho Panza and Quixote. Sancho is clearly not up to being a squire, doesn’t really even know what the job entails, and Quixote doesn’t either—or else why would he have chosen Sancho? They are just so funny together, and Sancho gives a wry “every man” observer’s point of view to Quixote’s false nobility.
Marcela the beautiful shepherdess makes a rousing speech about the responsibilities of lovers and their beloved, and about the role of beauty in stirring up that love. I adore her for that.
About that painting. Picasso made Quixote seem dark and obscure, and frankly kind of ugly. But the book is literally none of those things, and I’m a little aggravated by Picasso doing that to me, to Sancho and to Quixote himself.
Finally, I think Don Quixote has a lot to say in this world of Comic-Con and grown-up cosplay. Are they really so different? We happened to be in San Diego last summer during Comic-Con, which of course explained why the hotel rooms were so expensive. It was kind of fun, and kind of weird, but also bizarre as we realized that some of these people were genuinely serious about these characters they were personifying. At what point do fun and games turn to something stranger, sadder? When part of your ear gets chopped off?
I can’t begin to tell you how much I want to finish this book. Ted assigned Chapters 1-5, and that wasn’t nearly enough. I read through Chapter 15 before putting it down and moving on to Molière.
Tartuffe was written around 1664 and performed for Louis XIV one time before being banned. Nine years later they were allowed to perform it again, when it came back as a five-act play rather than the three-act performed for the king. No one knows if things were added or merely re-organized, but at any rate the play is very, very funny. After reading Shakespeare for a month, Molière is so much lighter! The commentary is funny and sharp and not at all subtle. And character development is basically zero. This is all about making people laugh and skewering the people who need skewering.
In this case, the title character Tartuffe is a self-righteous prig, a religious leach who survives by ingratiating himself in rich households. In the play, the master of the house Orgon is completely besotted with Tartuffe and his piety, so that he wants to marry his daughter to Tartuffe. Meanwhile Tartuffe thinks that is a GREAT idea because it will get him closer to Orgon’s wife, whom he lusts after, and Orgon’s money, which he also lusts after. Tartuffe is foiled but tries to exact revenge on the family. And there is where my love for the play ends. SPOILER in the bullets BELOW.
Here are a few other thoughts:
Molière does a great job of drawing archetypes and letting them work together. The hot-headed son, the ardent suiter, the mouthy-but-always-right maid, the whiny mother-in-law. It’s fun to watch the characters move through the plot.
The dialog is snappy. I could have quoted so many lines! Here’s one from Cléante, the brother-in-law and one of the voices of reason: “When battle’s joined, and men of honour come to fight, The quiet men are brave, the boasters may take fright…Can’t you see there’s a distinction between hypocrisy and true devotion?” And here’s one from the other level head, Dorine the maid: “What she’ll do for him is cuckold him a bit…He’s got the looks for it!” On top of funny lines, there is a ton of interplay and asides to the audience in the dialog. It’s very engaging.
I think, again, that there is room to consider the roles that the sexes play. It seems to be a trope that women had no power. Do I then read this play as a narrative that completely plays against type? The wife, daughter, and maid are not the bosses of the household—that is left to the almost-buffoonish Orgon—but they act wisely and end up getting their way. They aren’t powerless at all! They simply wield a different kind of power. This goes along with what I observed above about Marcela the shepherdess. These women aren’t cardboard cutouts any more than the men—or any less. And does that make Orgon the “sit-com dad” of French theatre, blustering and bumbling but ultimately manipulated into the best decisions by his loving family?
SPOILER: This play is so entertaining, with a couple of little plot twists along the way. Molière gets them wound into a pretty bad situation—how in the world will everyone come out okay? It seems bleak…and then the KING swoops in and sets everything aright. He had been watching the whole time, saw what a villan Tartuffe was, saw how Orgon’s heart was always in the right place. The benevolent King restores everything to The Way Things Ought To Be. That is not how you end a play like this! I absolutely hated the ending and felt a little cheated. Molière took the easy way out.
This play was enjoyable from start to the almost-finish, and the translation (Maya Slater) was wonderful! She was able to duplicate meter and rhyme, a pretty stellar achievement. I would gladly go see a Molière play live, and look forward to reading a few more.
On the idea of reading a few more, that’s been a real surprise lately with this project. I love reading drama! Plays aren’t that long; an audience is only going to sit for a couple of hours, max. So reading a play much more like reading a novella than a novel. From the Greeks to Molière, I can heartily endorse reading plays, even if you are on your own. The emotions are bigger, the gestures wilder, the action more intense than the subtlety of a poem or the spaciousness of a novel. A play has tight boundaries, so to accomplish it’s mission it has to move. That’s been something fun to realize.
This week’s music was so lovely, and I was totally unfamiliar with it. I grew up taking piano lessons and naturally gravitated to classical piano. I thought I had heard it all! But this week’s piano from Isaac Albeniz and Enrique Granados is wonderful, and just different enough that it is interesting. This is a wonderful video of Albeniz’ music; YouTube just doesn’t let me embed it here. Here’s a look at Granados’ piano music:
I honestly didn’t know Spanish music could sound like this. I love classical guitar but that was the sum total of my familiarity with music from Spain. I’m so grateful to Ted for introducing me to these composers!
As for art, well, every time I had a spare couple of minutes, I was reading Don Quixote, so I didn’t get to it. Maybe next week?
And so, next week, we turn serious. We are reading Machieavelli’s The Prince along with Rousseau’s The Social Contract. After so much drama and especially this week’s fun, I’m feeling a little hesitant to buckle down again. But these books are thin and we are all smart. Right?! See you next week.
As always, Ted’s list (Paywalled) and my Amazon list are available to help you.