From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
19.1 (1999): 145-49.
Copyright © 1999, The Cervantes Society of America
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Paulson, Ronald. Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of
Laughter. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
242 pp.
Don Quixote in England represents the culmination of more than three decades of Ronald Paulson's research on eighteenth-century English culture and literature. Paulson's familiarity with mythology, iconography, English painting, illustration, politics, aesthetics, satire, and the comic, as demonstrated
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in his publications on a wide variety of poets, novelists, essayists, and
painters of the period, endows him with the critical tools necessary for
this comparative study. A basic thesis of Paulson's work is that Cervantes's
masterpiece, Don Quixote, a highly popular work in eighteenth-century
England, exerts a pervasive cultural influence that cuts across and intersects
the various media and disciplines. There is both density and breadth underlying
this work, the first resulting from a reflective revision of works and concepts
that the author has analyzed over time, and the second from the encyclopedic
nature of the enterprise itself. Paulson admits that he is working outside
the tradition of Hispanic studies. In doing so, he creates certain critical
constraints that justify his approach to Cervantes's text, which serves as
an intertextual framework for the debates waged on the aesthetics of laughter
in eighteenth-century English texts. Hispanists should not expect to encounter
in this work an intention to enhance the reader's understanding of Cervantes's
text.
Paulson makes the claim that Cervantes's work
enjoyed a popularity in England that it did not enjoy elsewhere because of
the rise of empiricism in England in the eighteenth century. Skepticism and
secularization take the place of the belief in enchantment. Laughter changes
in tonality due to a new understanding of aesthetics or the philosophy of
the perception of beauty. Addison's satire is most exemplary in revealing
and defining the changing definitions of aesthetics, now applied to and
integrated with satire and comedy. Indeed, this book is a companion piece
and complement to Paulson's work on Addison, The Beautiful, Novel, and
Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy (1996). It is as much about how
eighteenth-century readers interpreted Addison's aesthetics of satire as
it is about how Don Quixote was read by writers and artists in
England.
According to Paulson, aesthetics is linked
to the humorous in the eighteenth century. As opposed to the practice of
the type of morality that demands judging without understanding, humor, in
its various forms, including wit, satire, burlesque, travesty, and irony,
discovers the new, the novel, and the uncommon, attributes also related to
aesthetics. Humor is pleasurable, but it is also insightful. It is an
epistemology. In addition, the aesthetics of laughter is connected to the
politics of the time. The major satirical writers and illustrators of the
time belonged to the Whig or Tory factions, and their satire reflected anti-
and pro-clerical, papist and absolutist perspectives. Paulson draws on Kundera
and Bergson's studies of the comic to define humor as it was practiced by
the English satirists. This reader could not help but wonder why a broader
number of contemporary theorists of the comic and satire was not also examined.
In the following chapters, however, one becomes aware that the defining framework
for understanding laughter emerges from the texts analyzed. Definition becomes
self-definition.
Paulson breaks down the concept of aestheticizing
laughter into four major thematic blocks: the madness of the imagination,
the cruelty of the laughter of ridicule, the problematizing of the beautiful,
and the extension of the idea of madness into religious doctrine. In chapter
1, he traces the metaphor of madness and its evocation of laughter to Ariosto.
Don Quixote's chivalric imagination and madness lead him to ape the heroic
quest. The English imitators found
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various targets for their satires on madness: the religious enthusiasts (the
Aeolists), the fops of Restoration Comedy, and the imitation of fashionable
role models. Paulson's technique here, as in successive chapters, is to begin
with the analysis of a scene from Don Quixote and then to compare
it to analogous scenes in English works. In this chapter, he analyzes Don
Quixote's invocation of the aesthetic response of the reader, when reading
about the heroic exploits of the Knight of the Lake. In tracing the ideas
of the imagination from Cervantes, to Hobbes, Locke, Swift, and Addison,
Paulson convincingly concludes that Cervantes's imprint can be felt in England
in the general acceptance of the deceptions of the imagination. At the same
time however, English writers emphasize the necessity of recovering the pleasures
of the imagination. This is what Paulson refers to as an aestheticizing of
the imagination. His discussion of a variety of writers reveals that imitative
satire played itself out politically in a variety of ways. While Swift
interpreted Don Quixote as a mere parrot of the Moderns, Addison presented
him in the guise of a favorite satirical figure, Sir Roger, a Tory living
an antiquated existence in the Cavalier past, but in a modern Whig world.
Addison redefined satire by making Sir Roger not just a flawed clown but
also a lovable one. This complex image had powerful implications for a revised
understanding of the comic: laughter should not be confined to the merely
ridiculous, but merged with beautiful, natural objects, as well as with the
emotions pertaining to human love.
Chapter 2 deals with the various interlocking
notions of the burlesque, comedy, and travesty, and their applications both
to Don Quixote and English comic heroes. Focusing on the burlesque, Paulson
distinguishes between the “false burlesque,” where the butt of
the burlesque satire is pulled down and degraded, and the “true
burlesque,” or what he calls “grave irony,” by which the victim
of satire is pulled down but is also revealed capable of maintaining the
face of gravity. This compound representation of the “true” burlesque
figure prevailed among English writers, as well as among English illustrators
of Don Quixote. Hogarth's illustrations of Don Quixote freeing the
galley slaves dignify the hero's action. By representing him in a breastplate
as opposed to a full suit of armor, Hogarth is able to project Don Quixote
in terms of a lower social order, with egalitarian political and spiritual
values that were anti-papist and anti-clerical. In this manner, burlesque
satire is transformed into an aesthetically pleasing concept. Hogarth's two
plates for Butler's Hudibras also reflect a graphic depiction of Don
Quixote's madness. Paulson studies the presence of grave irony as well in
Fielding's Joseph Andrews and Shamela. This chapter represents
Paulson's tendency to be as inclusive as possible in his treatment of a theme.
Such an endeavor seems critically justifiable, as a manner of proving widespread
influence, but often results in rushed analyses of the works selected.
Chapter 3 deals with definitions and applications
of wit and humor. Addison's reading of Cervantes's wit evokes a good-natured
humor that delights and surprises. Wit is related to comedy since it is a
medium for discovering and knowing, rather than of condemning. Humor and
the ridiculous are thus interwoven. Corbyn Morris's “Essay towards Fixing
the True Standards of Wit,
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Humor, Reality, Satire and the Ridiculous,” Fielding's Joseph
Andrews, and Collins's Odes invite this type of discovery and
its attendant pleasures.
Chapter 4 deals with the aesthetics of laughter
from the perspective of the comic motif of the “blemish.” Both
the aesthetics of wine-tasting, as illustrated by the actions of Sancho and
the Knight of the Mirrors, and the aesthetics of “Dulcinea,” as
she appears to Sancho and Don Quixote in Toboso in the guise of a peasant
wench, generate ideas about beauty and its relative responses or effects.
Dulcinea's mole displays the plebeian aesthetic later reproduced in the works
of Hume, Hogarth, Addison, and Swift. Maritornes serves as an analogous example
of beauty redefined in her interaction with Don Quixote in their first encounter
at the inn. As Maritornes provides water to the fatigued and wounded knight,
she provokes an aestheticizing laughter that results from the reader's
contemplation of a compound figure who depicts both charitable sweetness
and physical ugliness. According to Paulson, the figure of the sweet prostitute
served as a model for Hogarth in his depiction of the Harlot's servant in
A Harlot's Progress, in his portrayal of the faithful Sarah Young
in A Rake's Progress, and in his representation of Eve's lock in The
Analysis of Beauty. The motif of the blemish henceforth became a convention
for the description of beauty in the emergent novel.
The composite, double-faced nature that Paulson
perceives in Maritornes which serves as a model for a revitalized conception
of beauty, does not, to my mind, adequately describe Cervantes's female
character. Such an attribution foregrounds the unavoidable risks of
misinterpretation when arguing the influence of one text on another. This
occurs in particular when the texts that are influenced can fluctuate from
exact replications of source material to extreme deviations from the source;
when characters, descriptive scenes, or episodes from the source of influence
are removed from their original contexts, in this case, contexts created
by novelistic progression and authorial voice; and when critical engagement
with the source of influence is not on a par with the texts influenced.
In chapter 5, Paulson analyzes the comic
exposé of religious issues. The episodes in Don Quixote which
most influence English writers on these themes are the Parliament of Death
and Maese Pedro's Puppet Show. Accordingly, Addison, Swift, Hogarth, and
Fielding separate the motifs of ‘life as a stage’ or ‘life
as a pilgrimage’ from their religious associations. Like Cervantes,
they focus instead on the analysis and reception of aesthetic pleasures that
are evoked by these motifs.
The last chapter deals with the female subject.
Paulson relates laughter to romance, with particular emphasis on the
Marcela-Grisóstomo story. Vanderbank and Hayman's illustrations of
the episode follow more closely the narrative description. The young woman
rises above the shepherds on a high rock, drawing attention to her moral
and spiritual superiority. Hogarth's version, on the other hand, puts Marcela
on the same level as the men. He is attempting to represent not the classical
but the humane version of beauty. Paulson additionally reviews in this chapter
the themes of female madness and beauty in a variety of eighteenth-century
English texts, with a special focus on Charlotte Lennox's The
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Female Quixote, Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Mary
Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men. The comparison
of the articulation of the female subject in the Marcela-Grisóstomo
story with that found in the other works analyzed is not entirely clear.
This is perhaps due to the lack of a theoretical framework for analyzing
gender differences in the portrayal of madness, or the notion of female
subjectivity.
Paulson's study represents a herculean effort
to reveal the broad spectrum of influence of Don Quixote on English
culture and to tackle the complexities involved in comparing works that have
a clear indebtedness to Cervantes's masterpiece, but that manifest the debt
from a widely divergent set of cultural perspectives. Even if not convinced
by all of his arguments, one must certainly admire the manner in which Paulson
endeavors to chart the various transformations of Cervantes's humor as they
filter into the major philosophical schools of thought emerging in the modern
era in England. Also undisputable are the erudition and reflection of this
study, which makes it one that will be read for decades to come.
| Laura J. Gorfkle |
| Virginia Polytechnical Institute and State University |
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| Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu | Publications of the CSA | H–Cervantes |
| URL: http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/artics99/gorfkle.htm | ||