Don Quixote: from Text to Icon, by E. C.

Riley

http://www.h-net.org/~cervant/csa/articw88/riley.htm

From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 8 special issue (1988): 103-15. Copyright 1998, The Cervantes Society of America

ARTICLE

Don Quixote: From Text to Icon1

E. C. RILEY Yo apostar dijo Sancho que antes de mucho tiempo no ha de haber bodegn, venta ni mesn, o tienda de barbero, donde no ande pintada la historia de nuestras hazaas. (Don Quixote II, 71)

n 1985 there was a pop song enjoying a fair measure of success in Britain. Some of the lines went like this: Your mind can play tricks Makes you what you want to be Just like super heroes You saw them on TV ... In my old red saloon I'm the knight in shining armour ... Don Quijote what do you say Are we proud are we brave Or just crazy Don Quijote what do you say
This paper is a revised version of that given at the Washington Symposium, and in subsequent modied forms at the Royal Irish Academy's National Committee for Modern Language Studies Thirteenth Annual Research Symposium (October 1986) and the British Comparative Literature Association (December 1986). I am still working on it.
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Are we shouting at windmills Like you.2 In February of the same year the following advertisement appeared in the periodical Your Computer: The latest generation of laser-generated cartoon games like Super Don Quixote would make Hanna-Barbera drool. You can sit and watch the entertainment rather than play yourself, as a would-be windmill-tilter guides the Don past hazards new, fending off giants or skipping from rock to rock to avoid being swept off in a ood. During the last ten years Don Quixote has also appeared as an animated cartoon in fty-two parts, in audible form for cassette recorder lasting forty-eight hours, and in new adaptations for television and radio. Before that there was a successful Broadway musical which fathered a Hollywood lm. There is more outlandish recent testimony to the durability of Cervantes' creation. For instance the goings-on at the Mr. Cervantes 1986 competition held at the Hotel Cervantes, Torremolinos, as reported in the London Times, 4 June, 1986. The details of the event animal impressions, transvestment, striptease may be passed over hurriedly. The establishment boasts a Don Quixote Restaurant, a Sancho Panza Cafeteria and a Dulcinea Ballroom. No less bizarre but more endearing was something that occurred near the foothills of the Lammermuirs, not ve miles from my house (I had nothing to do with it) in October 1985. Here it is reported in the East Loathian Courier, 1st November, 1985: Don Quixote found hanging! A funny place to hang a painting from a tree so thought keen cyclist, George Fenton, as he meandered along on his bicycle near Bolton crossroads, last week. It turned out not to be an old master, worth millions of pounds, but being an amateur artist himself, George, who hails from West Saltoun, appreciated that the oil painting was someone's original work. He handed it in to the local police station in Haddington. So, if any reader has misplaced a 2-1/2 ft x 2 ft canvas of that
Words and music by Nik Kershaw, Rondor Music, MCA records, July-August, 1985. My thanks to Dr. Jennifer Lowe for spotting this and other Quixotic items for me.
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legendary Spanish hero, Don Quixote and his donkey [sic] it is now in the hands of police in Dalkeith. Examples of a more traditional nature can be multiplied. Don Quixote has been continued, translated, imitated and adapted within its own genre, in other genres, and in other media, such as lm. It has inspired poets and dramatists, provided material for scores of composers of orchestral music and opera, for choreographers of ballet and dance, for countless illustrators, painters, sculptors and weavers of tapestries. The Knight and the Squire have become a part of civic decoration.

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Well-known are the monumental gures in the Plaza de Espaa, Madrid, which dwarf the little statue of their creator in a manner which would surely have earned a nod of approval from Unamuno. I have seen gures made of cleverly woven wire on the banks of the Guadalquivir, and there is another impressive metallic one in Guanajuato, Mexico. That is not all, Don Quixote and Sancho have become protable merchandise for the Spanish tourist industry. The ultimate phase in their diffusion is the commercial exploitation of their visual images, either on monitor or screen or as artefact. If you can literally sell the image, you have achieved the necessary condition of celebrity in the twentieth century. They are not as universally known as Mickey Mouse or Snoopy (who are only known visually), but they are in the next league. You will note that I am not speaking of gures which came into being as graphic inventions, like Tintin or Asterix. I am not speaking of ctitious characters which began in a text and then became identied with actors playing the roles in lm or other adaptations, like Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan or Dorothy in Frank L. Baum's Wizard of Oz. Nor am I speaking of characters in books whose images are stamped on our minds via the pictures of a great illustrator, like Alice, through the marvelous drawings of Tenniel. It is true that modern illustrators of the Quixote, Gustave Dor in particular, have done a lot to stabilize the images of Quixote and Sancho, but the image-making process was under way long before that. What is interesting is the instant and almost unrivaled recognizability of Cervantes' two heroes. In Edinburgh there is a large neo-Gothic monument to Sir Walter Scott, embellished with sixty-four carvings of characters from his novels. But how many of them would we recognize out of context (or in context, for that matter)? In London's Kensington Gardens there is a well-known statue of Peter Pan. That one is easier to identify. Indeed, there are a few gures

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from ction which we can probably recognize without too much trouble. Huckleberry Finn? Certainly some from fairytales and nursery rhymes. There is also a poster in the London subway station at Baker Street: a silhouetted head in prole, hooked nose, deerstalker hat, curved pipe. We would surely know him even in some other subway station. But as for the merchandise and tourist souvenirs, is there anything quite comparable? I would seriously like to know. Who has a statuette of Oedipus? Can one nd Orlando furioso on an ashtray? Has Lady Macbeth been seen on a soup plate? Tartuffe on a T-shirt? A Manon Lescaut pencilsharpener? Anna Karenina on a bathroom tile? A set of Brothers Karamazov bookends? I am ready to believe that such things may be on sale in Milan, Paris or Stratford-on-Avon. But which of these gures from the world's great literature would one honestly know by sight without being told? One the other hand, Don Quixote, whom I have seen ornamenting nearly all these objects, is usually identiable at once. Sancho Panza on his own just possibly might not be. But together with Don Quixote, there is no problem. Cervantes has achieved the dream of every advertising man: a widely recognized symbol for his product. Like advertising men, politicians and national propagandists (following their heraldic ancestors) are no less eager to coin suitable symbols. So Don Quixote and Sancho have come quite close to being adopted as an emblem for Spain. If that has not actually happened, the reason must be a natural disinclination to embody the nation's pride in a pair of comics, however lovable. In that

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context they remain marginal a holiday souvenir of Espaa from the Costa del Sol. The surprising thing is that not only do people who know the novel recognize them, but so apparently do a very much larger number of people who never have and never will read the book, and that must include most of the pop-song and computer-game acionados. A writer in the Guardian newspaper, reviewing a BBC radio version of Don Quixote in 1980, observed that, after the Bible, Don Quixote must be one of the most widely published, translated and commented upon books of all time. But it is also one of the great unread. He went on, signicantly: Not, of course, that we don't know about Quixote: windmills, old gents on rickety horseback, even a familiar adjective.3
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Val Arnold-Forster, The Guardian, October 10th, 1980, p. 11.

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How do people know him so well if they do not read the book? It is not a sufcient answer to say that in the last century or two he has been taken over by other media, nor to attribute it to today's commercialism. For the fact is that within six months of the novel's rst appearance in print, when its two heroes existed solely as verbal constructs, these visual materializations started to occur. The rst evidence of Don Quixote's iconic power dates from June, 1605. The semi-ofcial account, by Tom Pinheiro da Veiga, of the festivities which took place that month in Valladolid to celebrate the birth of the prince who would later be King Philip IV, includes a description of a Portuguese nobleman dressed up as Don Quixote, riding a grey nag and accompanied by his Sancho Panza squire. Elsewhere in the same account he describes as a Don Quixote a certain tall skinny gentleman in green, who was courting some ladies so extravagantly in public that he caused a crowd to collect and aroused its mirth and mockery. From which we may conclude that both the masquerader and the chronicler could count on a public visually receptive to Cervantes' invention as early as the year 1605.4 Just two years later, 1607, in distant Peru, Don Quixote, together with Rocinante, Sancho, the Priest, Barber and Princess Micomicona, appeared along with others as processional gures in festivities held to honour the Viceroy.5 At least ten such appearances are recorded, from Cuzco to Heidelburg, by 1621. The horse had a principal role in the recognition process from the rst. This is acknowledged within the book itself. In the discussion of Part One which occurs early in Part Two the Bachelor Carrasco comments: que apenas han visto algn rocn aco, cuando dicen: All va Rocinante.6 This kind of visual recognizability is soon conrmed by other writers. There is an example in Caldern's Alcalde de Zalamea which will sufce: Un hombre, que de un aco rocinante
See F. Rodrguez Marn, Don Quijote en Amrica, Estudios cervantinos (Madrid, Atlas, 1947), p. 110. F. Rodrguez Marn, Don Quijote en Amrica en 1607, in op. cit., pp. 592-3. 6 See El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, Pt. 2, ch. 3, ed. L. A. Murillo (Madrid: Clsicos Castalia, 1978, 3 vols.), vol. II, p. 64. References are to this edition.
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a la vuelta de esa esquina se ape, y en rostro y talle parece aquel don Quijote, de quien Miguel de Cervantes escribi las aventuras (Act I, ll. 213-19). The two basic constituents of our icon are the gure of the tall thin gentleman complemented by his short fat peasant companion. Rocinante is usually present, and sometimes the donkey. In most modern representations Don Quixote is equipped with arms and armour and there is most probably a windmill or two. Think of Picasso's masterly scribble. Recall the pop song, the computer-game advertisement and the words of the radio-play reviewer, windmills, old gents on rickety horses. There was an inspired cartoon which appeared around 1965 or '67,7 showing Don Quixote in his underwear, riding the donkey, while Sancho, in full armour, and riding Rocinante, is saying: You realize, don't you, that this will change all Western literature! I see two points of special interest in all this: (1) A piece of verbal discourse (and initially nothing else) has evoked an image in the minds of individual readers clearly enough for them to recognize immediately visual reproductions of the original made by other minds and hands. (2) These visual reproductions are capable of triggering a response of recognition from people who only know the textual original by allusion and hearsay. These questions, as regards Cervantes, have not been fully confronted before, to the best of my knowledge.8 However, the ndings of certain modern scholars throw important light upon them. Bakhtin rst pointed out the strong similarity between Sancho and the gure of Carnival, known throughout medieval Christendom. Sancho's fat belly (panza), his appetite and thirst still convey a powerful carnivalesque spirit.9 Graphic gures, like that in Pieter Breughel's painting, come to mind, and literary ones like Juan Ruiz's Don Carnal. Later critics Agustn Redondo, Luis Murillo, Francisco
It may have been the New Yorker. I have not yet relocated it. E. L. Rivers suggests, in passing, that a comical effect is produced by the social and psychological tensions implicit in the sight of the pair of contrasting gures, Cervantine dialectic, Quixotic Scriptures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), p. 113. 9 M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, transl. by R. Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1968), pp. 20-3. See also J. Caro Baroja, El carnaval (Madrid: Taurus, 1965), p. 105.
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Mrquez Villanueva, Alban Forcione have gone on to show that there is even more of the carnivalesque in the Quixote than had been thought.10 Carnival's antagonist, Lent, was a tall emaciated gure, sometimes riding a bony horse: an old woman (Doa Cuaresma), the image of penitential austerities. Being a woman, the correspondence with Don Quixote is less marked, but there

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is a physical resemblance and other associations are suggested by the frugality of the Knight's eating habits and his essential chastity. So in Carnival and Lent there already existed a pair of gures, one fat and one thin, well known in festivals. By luck or design Cervantes had hit on a couple of human shapes, which were popular emblems of religious observance, with something like an archetypal element, to which his rst readers must have responded. The frequent appearances of Cervantes' two characters in festive masquerades so soon after the book came out must be connected with this. Another secular parallel of the time tends to conrm it. There were two Italian comics well known in Spain in the later sixteenth century. They were Ganassa, who was a thin man, and Bottarga, a fat man. There is some reason (as Monique Joly and Augustn Redondo have noted)11 for associating the rst with Lent and the second with Carnival, and each with Don Quixote and Sancho respectively. A late sixteenth-century engraving of a Harlequin gure, probably Ganassa, dressed farcically as a knight errant with a cooking pot on his head and riding a scraggy mule, looks strikingly like Don Quixote. Ganassa and Bottarga are a convenient reminder that much of the popular novelistic success of Quixote and Sancho stems from their being a comic double act, where dialogue plays an important part. Not only did Cervantes' pair provide paradigms for literary duos like Parson Adams and Joseph Andrews, Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller,
Agustn Redondo, Tradicin carnavalesca y creacin literaria del personaje de Sancho Panza al episodio de la nsula Barataria en el Quixote, Bulletin Hispanique 80 (1978), 39-70, and El personaje de don Quijote: tradiciones folklricoliterarias, contexto histrico y elaboracin cervantina, NRFH 29 (1980), 36-59; L. A. Murillo, Don Quixote as Renaissance Epic, in Cervantes and the Renaissance, ed. M. D. McGaha (Easton, PA: Juan de la Cuesta, 1980), pp. 55-70; F. Mrquez Villanueva, La locura emblemtica en la segunda parte del Quijote, in ibid. pp. 87-112; A. K. Forcione, Cevantes and the Mystery of Lawlessness (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 205-07. 11 Monique Joly, D'Alberto Naseli, di Ganasse, au comte de Benavente: deux notes cervantines, Bulletin Hispanique 78 (1976), 240-53; Redondo, El personaje, pp. 40-44.
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Frodo and Sam Gamgee, and even Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, but they are also in the tradition of comedian double acts, like Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello (to restrict myself only to thin and fat ones). The latest encapsulations herald an interesting development. They are the robots C3PO and R2D2 of Star Wars.12 After robots, what? Carnival associations and archetypal elements help to explain the success of the two gures in the icon. There may well be other gestalt possibilities and psychological implications present. Those elementally Freudian shapes remind us that Gerald Brenan once compared the Quixote-Sancho relationship to a marriage. However, before any of these factors could work, Cervantes had to nd the right words to evoke the images. Three particular aspects of his narrative technique seem relevant here. Previously I had thought that the acutely memorable nature of the visual evocations had something to do with realism, or at least with Barthes' effet due rel. But if it does, it is obvious that it is of a different kind from that produced by the profusion of minute description favoured by the great modern realistic novelists such as Balzac, Dickens, Galds, Arnold Bennett. Cervantes' physical descriptions of his two heroes

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and other components of the icon are always concise and relatively infrequent. The rst one of Quixote is in the prologue: seco, avellanado. Then, frisaba la edad de nuestro hidalgo con los cincuenta aos; era de complexin recia, seco de carnes, enjuto de rostro (ch. 1). And: subi sobre Rocinante, puesta su mal compuesta celada, embraz su adarga, tom su lanza (ch. 2). Sancho on rst appearance is not described physically at all, not until they both set out, when he is shown sobre su jumento como un patriarca, con sus alforjas y su bota (ch. 7).13 Initial sketches are later lled out with sporadic or repeated graphic details. Rocinante comes poignantly to life when we read of him standing melanclico y triste, con las orejas cadas (ch. 43, p. 531). Vividness is achieved by the sparing use of well-chosen detail rather than by much cataloguing of particulars. So (secondly) is this the verbal equivalent of graphic caricature? The answer is yes, perhaps it is, if the term implies, as Gombrich
Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody (London & New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 27, thinks they are descended from Wizard of Oz characters, but the likeness to Quixote and Sancho is much more striking. 13 The above four quotations belong respectively to Don Quijote I, prol., vol. I, p. 50; I, 1, vol. I, p. 71; I, 2, vol. I, p. 79; I, 7, vol. I, p. 127.
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says, taking up and emphasizing a distinctive and consistently identiable trait, however trivial.14 The gaunt lankiness of the Knight and the corpulence of the Squire would constitute such traits. But obviously there can not have been any distortion of an extratextual physical shape, such as happens with portrait caricature. There is no original of which the caricatured representation is a distortion. It is just worth noting that portrait caricature emerged precisely around this date in the work of the Caracci brothers, according to Kris and Gombrich.15 Soon after, dramatic caricature entered the seventeenth-century French theatre. Thirdly, Don Quixote is a novel conceived in strongly visual terms, and fundamental questions of visual perception are built into the structure and fabric of the book.16 So is duality of perspective. It is a consequence of Don Quixote's peculiar madness that the reader is repeatedly reminded indirectly of the way things in the book and people, including the Knight himself, look. His optical aberration whereby everyday things are transformed in his mind's eye windmills become giants, sheep warriors, inns castles, etc. has a reciprocal suggestive effect on the reader. It puts a comparison of the two images into his head, however momentarily. This applies also to the image of the man himself. He is presented picturing himself as a handsome knight in shining armour, or a youthful gallant, thereby making us repeatedly recall the absurd spectacle he presents to others. This countersuggestion often works without any additional description at all, consolidating the original impression we have formed of his appearance. The poetics and rhetorical treatises of the day say little about realism and still less that is relevant to the more unusual techniques in the Quixote. They followed Aristotle and Quintilian in requiring writers to put their subjects right before their readers' eyes and achieve enargia in scenic description, but the representation of reality was expected to offer a point of departure for deeper meanings and was not normally regarded as self-justifying.17

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E. H. Gombrich, The Cartoonist's Armour, Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London: Phaidon, 1963), p. 134. In Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York: International Presses, 1952), ch. 7. 16 See also E. C. Riley, Don Quixote (London: Allen & Unwin, 1968), pp. 128-9, 149 ff. 17 See, especially, Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery [p. 112] (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1965), p. 80 ff. And Luisa Lpez Grigera, En torno a la descripcin en prosa de los Siglos de Oro, Homenaje a Jos Manuel Blecua (Madrid: Gredos, 1983), pp. 347-57.
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Where caricature is concerned, despite the accepted connection between portrait caricature and the contemporary science of physiognomics, neither one of the well-known works by G. B. della Porta and Jernimo Corts have proved helpful in locating a standard model for Quixote or Sancho which relates physical with character traits.18 The system only works very partially, in a few particulars and not in others. Although they are a recognizable duo as fat-man and thin-man comics, they are too individualized to be stereotypes. None of this takes us to the heart of the process whereby language changes place with a picture. Ernst Kris illustrated the circularity of this process when he wrote: The purposeful translation of the daydream into narrative form is dependent on a total translation of visual into verbal expression, the shortcut of visual imagination must be replaced by words which can evoke the vision in others.19 But precisely what happens at the interchange of verbal and visual codes I cannot imagine. This is a problem for the psychologist of cognition or the computer scientist. So much as far as it goes for the transition from verbal discourse to visual icon. It remains to say something of the quasiautonomous status and evocative power of the latter. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (more particularly the former, since Sancho is really a complementary gure) have detached themselves from the book which gave them birth and acquired autonomous existence. Some evidence for this was presented in the early part of this paper. This existence is a vast reduction of their intratextual one, but it is powerfully evocative. At this point let me bring in another component of the icon, nowadays regularly included as part of it. The best known of all Don Quixote's adventures, the one most
Io. Bapt. Portae Napolitani De hvmana Physiognomonia (Vidi Aequensis apud Josephum Cacchium, 1586); Jernimo Conteras, Libro de phisonomia natural, y varios secretos de naturaleza (Alcal de Henares: Juan Gracin, 1612). I am grateful to Karl-Ludwig Selig for his suggestions. 19 Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations, p. 38.
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often alluded to in popular versions and illustrations, is the adventure of the windmills. It has bequeathed a proverbial expression even to the English language. Windmills was the rst word the

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Guardian reviewer associated with Don Quixote. Why? (I shall ignore the cynical answer that it is one of the rst adventures in a long novel and many people do not read any farther.) The incident is related with notable economy; it could not easily be more concise. Its celebrity cannot owe anything to narrative or descriptive elaboration. This celebrity must stem from the image of the windmills and the fact of a man attacking one.20 Charles Aubrun has interpreted the encounter in socio-economic terms. He explains that this kind of windmill was a technological innovation in sixteenth-century Spain. It helped to change the pattern of the agricultural economy in ways which undermined the prosperity of the small-time country hidalgos. Dressed up in terms of storybook chivalry, Don Quixote's hostility was rooted in very materialistic grounds.21 This interpretation, which was not addressed to our particular question, does not explain why a twentieth-century public should nd the incident memorable. The same is true of Mrquez Villanueva's reminder that the episode may have an old emblematic signicance.22 There existed an association between madness and windmills. To have windmills in the head was and is an Andalusian expression for thinking and behaving madly. Sancho uses the very expression to his master. Seventeenth-century English literature knew the same metaphor, though perhaps through the Quixote.23 Pazzia in Cesare Ripa's Ioconologia is holding a toy windmill or whirligig. But could this association have more than a residually subliminal force on anyone nowadays? I doubt it.
In the year 1428, at certain courtly festivities organized in Valladolid by the king of Navarre, the Infante Enrique and King Juan II of Castile, an elaborate passage of arms called the Fuerte Ventura was devised. In the jousting which this involved it seems that the king of Navarre and his knights appeared disguised as windmills. Was Don Quijote so demented after all? asks Angus MacKay, Ritual and Propaganda in fteenth-century Castile, Past and Present 107 (1985), 37. 21 C. V. Aubrun, Pour quelle raison draisonna Don Quichotte, Homenaje a Joaqun Casalduero (Madrid: Gredos, 1972), pp. 37-44. 22 Mrquez Villanueva, La locura emblemtica, p. 105. 23 The rst references given in the Oxford English Dictionary are 1612 and 1622.
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Of all the combats engaged in by Don Quixote, this one is arguably the most futile, absurd and unlikely to succeed. To try to beat up a large and powerful machine peacefully doing its job in the service of men and women is quite one of his most pointless acts of lunacy. It stands out by its very extremism. But there is more. However harmless it is, a windmill is still a machine big, powerful, mobile, mindless, and as such potentially or symbolically threatening. Here, in fact, is a very early version of an unsurpassably modern mythic motif: that of Man versus Machine.24 We have here a premonition of one of the few genuine new myths of the technological age: Frankenstein and his man-made monster. Feeble and absurd though he is, Don Quixote charging dauntlessly in to attack this enemy strikes a chord in us today. With a ash of inspired and childlike animism our hero turns the windmills into wicked giants. He has perceived the mythopoeic possibilities of those churious structures on the plain of La Mancha (they are still to be seen there), hybrids of artefact and creature. He proceeds to consolidate his

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myth-making by comparing one of them with Briareus, the hundred-armed, one of the monstrous race of titans who rebelled against Zeus and the gods.25 But, like all the best fairytale giants, windmills are also rather comic (waving their arms and getting nowhere). Their menacing aspect is modied by this ridiculous note. This combination of qualities is precisely that which characterizes the ogres of fairytale and romance (conrmed by their ludicrous names). Freud held that the roots of comedy are buried in infantile fears. It was only to be expected that Cervantes would make the most of the comic potential of the event. So far I have suggested that this icon derives its effectiveness from an extratextual association. But what it also clearly does with more immediacy is evoke the whole Quixotic context.26 To contemplate
24 Cf. H. Mancing, The Chivalric World of Don Quixote (Columbia and London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1982), p. 113. A cartoon in Punch, 26 April, 1972, shows Don Quixote charging at a erce and steely-looking windmill. Sancho is saying: Of course, this is just a warm-up for his title ght with the Empire State Building. 25 Don Quijote I, 8, vol. I, p. 130. 26 It seems to work on the principle of the memory cell a network of associated items which have a high probability of producing each other. Thus when one thinks about any single item within the memory cell, other items and experiences tend also to be activated (Michael I. Posner, Cognition: An Introduction, Glenview, Ill. & Brighton, England: Scott Foresman, [p. 115] 1973, p. 29). Cf. Gombrich: The power of recall of symbols varies of course enormously, but thanks to their economy of elements, symbols are much more amenable to availability in storage (The Image and the Eye, Oxford: Phaidon, 1982, p. 16).

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the picture of Don Quixote tilting at a windmill is to grasp the sense of that familiar adjective quixotic. The icon is a visual expression of the main qualities we associate with Don Quixote in his early, maddest days capricious, misdirected, impractical, idealistic, militant, ineffective. The chief function of windmills in the icon is to proclaim: Attacking windmills is quixotic. In the right circumstances, they now even function synecdochically. At the end of the movie PattonLust for Glory, the defeated hero (George C. Scott) walks off into the distance a landscape with windmills. The allusion is not lost on us. The visual image, a part of the icon, in another story and another medium, three and a half centuries later, still does its work. It seems that I am going to end on a tautology. The Quixote icon gives expression to the idea of the quixotic. This needs no apology. It is the fate of every icon which contains a mythic gure. Such icons evoke rst and foremost what they are. There is no longer any need even to remember the original stories they came from. St. George and the dragon, Romeo and Juliet, Dr. Frankenstein's creature: they have detached themselves from the stories they rst appeared in. So too have Don Quixote and Sancho. We know them, perhaps, because we can nd them in ourselves. What is different, however, about Don Quixote is that somehow the comic parody of an older myth has generated an authentic new myth. To see how that happens we have to read the book after all.

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH
Prepared with the help of Myrna Douglas

Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu

Publications of the CSA

HCervantes

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Don Quixote: from Text to Icon, by E. C. Riley

http://www.h-net.org/~cervant/csa/articw88/riley.htm

URL: http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/articw88/riley.htm

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