Cervantes' "Don Quixote"

The Open Yale Courses Series

by Roberto González Echevarría

The novel Don Quixote, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, is widely considered to be one of the greatest fictional works in the entire canon of Western literature. At once farcical and deeply philosophical, Cervantes’ novel and its characters have become integrated into the cultures of the Western Hemisphere, influencing language and modern thought while inspiring art and artists such as Richard Strauss and Pablo Picasso. Based on Professor Roberto González Echevarría’s popular open course at Yale University, this essential guide to the enduring Spanish classic facilitates a close reading of Don Quixote in the artistic and historical context of renaissance and baroque Spain while exploring why Cervantes’ masterwork is still widely read and relevant today. González Echevarría addresses the novel’s major themes and demonstrates how the story of an aging, deluded would-be knight-errant embodies that most modern of the individual’s dissatisfaction with the world in which he lives, and his struggle to make that world mesh with his desires.

Genres: Spanish Literature

384 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 28, 2015

About the author

Roberto González Echevarría is Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature at Yale.

Reviews

[Jason Furman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This books is the lectures from Roberto González Echevarría's course on Don Quixote at Yale. Each chapter begins with assigned readings that take you through Don Quixote (the John Rutherford translation) in groups of about 10 to 20 chapters along with readings from the excellent Imperial Spain, 1469 - 1716 (which I read and reviewed), Cervantes' Don Quixote: A Casebook (which I read a bunch of, skimmed a bunch, and skipped some so won't be reviewing), and Exemplary Novels (which I've read before and plan to re-read in the Edith Grossman translation). The lectures are not overly edited so they have a real conversational feel, an energy, joy and set of insights.

First and foremost Echevarría helps you understand Don Quixote, its internal dynamics, how the second part relates to the first, etc. While the book is not complicated and thoroughly enjoyable without a companion, Echevarría does a good job deepening the appreciation. He also has some links to Spanish history (I confess I never previously linked things like the role of the rise of the state, the role of the Holy Brotherhood, and they way they are pursuing Don Quixote for his various subversive actions, like the freeing of the convicts). And he has some literary context, both in terms of Spanish writing at the time, the relationship to Shakespeare, and a tiny bit about how the book was interpreted in subsequent literature, mostly Franz Kafka's wonderful parable about Sancho and Jorge Luis Borges's amazing story "Pierre Menard". Echevarría is relatively light on literary theory but he has some, like Eric Auerbach and the focus on the Enchanted Dulcinea.

Echevarría explains why Don Quixote is so often regarded as the first modern novel: it transports us into the psychology of two very different people, those people themselves are evolving and changing through their interactions with each other, it is a mixture of the high style and the low, where comedy and tragedy are intermingled without a clear division. Ultimately, it is about books, the way we see ourselves through books, and the way books can become a reality for us.

Overall, this was like taking an excellent course on a single book--but seeing much more through that book. For comparison to some other books on Don Quixote: Vladimir Nabokov also published his Lectures on Don Quixote which, in some ways, set me back in my appreciation of the book by dwelling on the alleged cruelty of some of characters in the Second Part (e.g., the Duke and Duchess who set up an elaborate set of pranks for Don Quixote and Sancho Panza) while missing the more important things happening at the same time (the amazing deepening of Sancho as a character). Ilan Stavans wrote a great book Quixote: The Novel and the World which is particularly strong on the afterlife of Don Quixote in subsequent adaptations, influences, etc., and William Egginton's The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World was also quite good if a bit hyperbolic. I have never read a biography of Cervantes and it appears that none of the ones in English are outstanding so maybe I'll just wait, unless someone has a suggestion for one.

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thought-provoking observations, citing of of some key critics, sincere appreciation from a lifelong lover of Don Quixote. Perfect for setting me off on further adventures with Cervantes.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent guide or exegesis to the Quixote. If only every great book were accompanied by a series of scholarly lectures written down and compiled for easy reading! The urge to read Don Quixote arose for mysterious reasons in late spring, as I was preparing to leave my job and move across the country. Up to then I had never given the book much thought, aside from the naive impression of its standing as the first bona fide "novel" in the western tradition, but seemingly out of nowhere it became my companion for two months of a summer in which I did some traveling and worked as little as possible. At night or in the afternoon I read the Quixote for sometimes 5 or 10 pages at a time, until toward the midpoint of Part II the story gathered a kind of irresistible momentum through to the ending. The Quixote contains an astounding richness of philosophy and irony and metaphor that is probably only approached in a handful of other works: Shakespeare, the Hebrew Bible, the great classical novels of China, "Ulysses," maybe. Though I relished the experience of reading it, the full extent of the Quixote's brilliance would have been lost on me without a guide like this one, simply because I came to it without the requisite command of either the classics (Homer, Virgil, Ovid) or the literary-historical milieu of Golden Age Spain (the chivalric romances, the picaresque, the Reconquista, the Battle of Lepanto, the Counter-Reformation, the Byzantine romance, etc. etc.). Cervantes marries these two strains and from them creates a kind of secular scripture in the Castilian vernacular, by turns sacred and profane, both firmly rooted in time and geography but also universal in its sheer stylistic breadth and its knowledge of humanity. For all that, I needed this exegesis, which at times inevitably engages in some interpretive guesswork, but, to quote Emerson, "It is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul." Echevarría gives you both.

[Billie Pritchett · Rating 1 out of 5]

Guy's a doofus. Apart from the background on Book 1 being Renaissance and Book 2 being Baroque, this book is basically useless.

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really enjoyable way to revisit and to find new things to love about the Quixote. Gonzalez digs deep.