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Photo courtesy of UCLA Library
This ceramic tile, from the collection of
Enrique Rodriguez-Cepeda, will be exhibited at Powell Library. |
400 years and counting
Quixote's appeal: as epic as the novel
by Meg Sullivan
ucla today
In early April 1605, an impoverished and addled Spanish nobleman
set out on horseback in pursuit of the kind of adventures he had
read about in chivalric romances.
In the 400 years since, generations of others have encountered
the poor fellow and his faithful companion, Sancho Panza. But the
enduring appeal of “Don Quixote,” said to be the second-most
popular book ever published (after the Bible), remains something
of a mystery since Miguel de Cervantes wrote the two-part, 126-chapter
behemoth in the Spanish equivalent of Elizabethan English.
Of course, being first has some advantages, pointed out John Dagenais,
chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the organizer
of April’s Month of La Mancha celebration commemorating the
400th anniversary of the novel’s publication.
“‘Don Quixote’ is the beginning of the modern
novel,’” Dagenais said. “The great European writers
of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, major U.S. authors like Hawthorne,
Melville as well as Latin American novelists like García
Márquez, all learned to write by reading ‘Don Quixote.’”
To this day, such contemporary writers as Philip Roth, John Irving,
Kurt Vonnegut, and Larry McMurtry profess a debt to “Quixote,”
said Carroll Johnson, a Spanish professor and leading Cervantes
expert at UCLA.
“Quixote,” which will be featured in a Marathon Reading
at Powell Library April 13-14, also marks the beginning of a beloved
genre: the buddy-road trip story, Johnson said. Literary theorists
see variants on the relationship between the touched but inspired
Quixote and simple but grounded Panza in fictional friendships portrayed
in “Huckleberry Finn,” “Last of the Mohicans”
and even “Midnight Cowboy.”
Because Cervantes was writing at the time of Spain’s draconian
Inquisition, his masterpiece also blazed a path for satirical novels
and other fictional works read more for their subtext than their
face value, said Johnson, who is organizing an April 7-9 scholarly
conference and delivering an April 26 Faculty Research Lecture on
the novel.
The story’s resulting ambiguity has promoted a tendency for
every generation to find new meaning in the book. In the last 50
years alone, existentialists, Marxists, psychoanalysts, Kabbalists,
Sufis and scholars in multicultural studies are among the many who
have seen their reflection in “Don Quixote.”
“There are only a few books that lend themselves to so many
interpretations,” Johnson said. “People talk about Cervantes
in the same breath as Shakespeare because both had incredibly powerful
intuitions about humanity.”
The novel has even cast a long shadow over the arts. Enrique Rodríguez
Cepeda, another UCLA Spanish professor and a Cervantes scholar,
contends that Quixote is the most frequently depicted literary character.
“He’s a major international icon,” he said.
Cepeda should know, having spent the past 35 years collecting Quixote
memorabilia, which will grace exhibits at Powell Library and Young
Research Library during April.
But if “Quixote” has served as a muse, the novel has
also turned into a blind alley for more than one obsessed fan. Filmmakers
Orson Welles and Terry Gilliam, for example, have each spent years
attempting to bring the novel in all its glory to the screen.
Were they successful? That will be discussed at a mini-film festival
on “Quixote” April 29 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in Haines
Hall, Room 39.
To find more information on the Month of La Mancha, a Year of the
Arts event, go to www.college.ucla.edu/lamancha.
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