From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
11.1 (1991): 135-36.
Copyright © 1991, The Cervantes Society of America
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This study, traditional in approach in that
Cervantes's masterpiece is viewed against the socio-historical background
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, combines a rigorous, factual
review of the historical times with the symbolic reading of episodes and
details thereby reaching beyond the readily accessible narrative level.
Succinctly and convincingly, Creel shows how Cervantes has embodied in Don
Quijote, on the one hand, an “image” of the new Spanish elitism,
and, on the other, its antithesis. Bryant Creel perceives and insightfully
exposes Cervantes's irony as the novelist projects Don Quijote's “heroic
idealism” —a mirror of the ideals of the nobility— as an
“empty fiction” being enacted by the society of Cervantes's day
(p. 32). In the figure of Don Quijote, rather than exalting the epic greatness
of the heroes of the past, Cervantes exalts the nobility of human values.
The work under review is divided into five
chapters and has a preface and a bibliography of cited works. Chapter I,
“Vestige of the Chivalric Past,” focuses on the adulteration and
final breakdown of the traditional values of Spanish society in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries. This chapter is based on the socio-historical studies
of critics primarily but not exclusively from the first decades of the twentieth
century who have dealt with Spanish life and thought in Cervantes's times.
If the helmet of Mambrino represents “Don Quijote's reassertion of the
authentic tradition of knightly heroism” (p. 31), the missing piece
of the helmet (actually a barber's basin) symbolically suggests the breakdown
of Spanish idealism. Sancho's compromise, baciyelmo (basin-helmet)
phonetically suggests the hollowness of such idealism (p. 31).
In chapter II, “Don Azote, Scourge of
the Infamous,” Bryant Creel successfully shows how Don Quijote's character
is “ethically ambiguous and contradictory” (p. 40). Don Quijote
justifies his actions by juggling the same nouns and adjectives in totally
different directions from those in earlier situations (e.g., rashness may
be courage, temerity or madness, pp. 41-44) depending upon his impulses of
the moment. Creel concludes this
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chapter with Cervantes's implied analogy: recklessness and righteous idealism
is an escape from “internal failings” (p. 44) for individuals as
well as for nations.
In chapter III, “Exile in a World of
Prose,” the discussion centers on Cervantes's art as a fusion of
“chivalric romance” and “realistic prose fiction” (p.
46). The novelist satirizes the “obsolete and reckless crusading
heroism” embodied in Don Quijote leaving intact the ideals themselves.
The butt of the “pungent ridicule” incurred by Don Quijote is
“aimed at the society with which [he] clashes” (p. 47). A review
of the characters in the interpolated stories of Part I shows their kinship
to Don Quijote in their restlessness (p. 64). Like Don Quijote they present
a contrast to the “unimaginative” Diego de Miranda as well as to
other characters “from goatherds to players to innkeepers” (p.
63) belonging to the real world. In this chapter, more interpretive than
analytically relevant to the historical times, Creel relies on symbolic
perspectives found in the feigned Arcadia (p. 68) or in the trampling of
the ideals embodied in Don Quijote in the form of herds of bullocks and bulls
(68-69) that overrun the knight, his squire and their mounts. The
“potential reality” of an idealized conception of life such as
Don Quijote endeavors to live out in a world that has long lost sight of
ideals may not be easy to attain but worthy of the try.
In chapter IV, “The Hobnobbing Knight,”
Creel discusses the secular Renaissance spirit embodied in Don Quijote contrasted
not only to the “morally declining aristocracy but more sharply still
to the repressive nobility and the ecclesiastical hierarchy” (p. 73).
From Creel's discussion it becomes clear that Cervantes's subtle characterization
of his “equivocal hero” (p. 80) was conceived with a critical purpose
in mind. The degree to which Don Quijote represents the misguided national
character constitutes Cervantes's criticism of the standards of his countrymen
(p. 85).
In Chapter V, “Champion of a Spiritual
Order,” Creel focuses on the “primacy of the higher moral and
intellectual qualities” of Don Quijote which he interprets as Cervantes's
intention to vindicate “the essential, spiritual dignity of human
nature” (p. 86) regardless of its shortcomings.
An unfortunate slip of the mind turns Dorotea,
Don Fernando's conquest, into Galatea (p. 66), a character from Cervantes's
pastoral novel. Some readers may quarrel with a statement or a detail of
Creel's discussion, but it would be hard to quarrel with the thrust of his
study written in a clear and direct critical language. Creel's work constitutes
an excellent guide to Don Quijote that will be read with much profit
by students of Cervantes's work.
HELENA PERCAS DE PONSETI |
Grinnell College |
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Digitized with the help of Contessa Marion |
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| Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu | Publications of the CSA | H–Cervantes |
| URL: http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/artics91/percas.htm | ||