“for love, as I have heard say, sometimes flies and sometimes walks; with this one it runs, with that it moves slowly; some it cools, others it burns; some it wounds, others it slays; it begins the course of its desires, and at the same moment completes and ends it; in the morning it will lay siege to a fortress and by night will have taken it, for there is no power that can resist it”
I’m reading Don Quixote for my world literature class and apparently when it was first published in 1605 it was world-changingly popular, one of the first “popular novels” as we know it today, and there were all sorts of people who were writing and publishing their own unofficial fan-sequels to Don Quixote which was basically the first fan-fiction, and then in 1615 the original author wrote an official sequel in which Don Quixote reads a piece of fanfic about him and sets out on a quest to beat up the author who mischaracterized him
This is all true. What happened more specifically is that one fan fiction got really really popular and since people weren’t all that familiar with how novels worked (because there weren’t really any other novels in Europe yet), a lot of people just took this as a valid sequel. Cervantes (the original author) had pretty much stopped working on any kind of sequel to the original at point, but he got really pissed that people were reading this fan fic and assuming it was as legit as his canon. So he got off his butt and wrote this sequel, which academics call big words like “meta-textual” when really it was Cervantes trying to make sure people understood his canon correctly and didn’t get carried away with their silly fan theories based on this one fic writer’s interpretation.
Now-a-days, the “true sequel” is normally just lumped in and stuck onto the end as a “part II,” in case you are wondering why you’ve never heard of a Don Quixote the Sequel. By all accounts, the fan fic was pretty bad, which makes it’s a perfect beginning to the grand tradition of fanfiction.
Calling this the first instance of fanfiction, though, comes from the fact that this was the first time, as far as we know, that the author of the original stepped in to officially denounce fan work as not canon. For most of history (at least western history) there wasn’t really an idea that stories had ownership. Most famous greek plays and poems are based on other works. Virgil’s Aeneid can easily be called Homer fan fiction (we have no real way of knowing how much of the story existed in folk tradition and how much he made up). Most of the versions of greek myths you know come from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which is largely his short fics about other myths. Moving out of the classical world, bible fic constitutes a lot of what literature is for a while. Dante’s Inferno, specifically, (which is, lets be clear, a self insert fic where the author meets his fave author - so it’s also RPF - and they take a tour through a crossover fic between the Bible, historical fic, and greek myth) was so popular that it’s kind of crossed over into fanon (quick - biblically how many cicles does Hell have? Answer: none, they all come from Dante and in turn Virgil, and eventually Homer…) On the run up to Don Quixote, we have Shakespeare, who adapted most of his plays directly from other works by other people, from which he asked no permission (nor was he expected to.)
The real move that makes this false sequel the first official fan fiction is that the author of the canon material asserted his ownership of the intellectual property that was the characters and the story. Not in the legal sense - there was nothing illegal about this sequel - but in the sense that you could call this sequel “unauthorized.” It’s the beginning of thinking of characters and stories as belonging to a specific person, rather than simply being created by said person.
An old man in a small Spanish village reads too many tales of chivalry and imagines himself to be a knight. With his scraggy horse, Rozinante, his dumpy friend, Sancho Panza, and some ridiculous armour made from kitchen utensils, he casts himself as the hero of a story that exists only inside his head. He keeps interrupting the affairs of oblivious passers-by with his delusional gibberish, dedicating his non-existent mission to the permanently off-screen Dulcinea, often with violent threats. Therefore, many of the episodes end with various parts of his body being repeatedly kicked.
That sounds like a Three Stooges episode. Are you sure it’s a “classic”?
Yes. The book is written in two parts. The first part is 50% Three Stooges and 50% harsh literary criticism. It’s fun and sometimes very funny, but that’s not why it’s a classic. In the second half, he meets people who have already read the first half and deal with him based on that information.
They what? What?
The two parts of the book were published ten years apart, so Cervantes decided to set the second half in, for want of a better term, the real world. For the first time in history, a fictional character is aware of himself. This is the essence of postmodern, self-referential art and literature, which really took off in the 20th century. This book was written in 1615.
What should I say to make people think I’ve read it?
“Along with Tristram Shandy, this invented the concept of what we mean by the word ‘novel’.”
What should I avoid saying when trying to convince people I’ve read it?
“Is Don short for Donald or something else?”
Should I actually read it?
Yes, if you’re interested in reading something that was demonstrably 400 years ahead of its time. You can skip parts of the first section because it’s repetitive (and many modern translations do that for you), but if you’ve read Game of Thrones and you think the parts of Don Quixote were published too far apart, you should probably present yourself to the relevant authorities at first light.
We are excited to continue our online After Hours open houses this semester! Join the Special Collections Research Center on the second Tuesday of each month 4-5 pm for a virtual encounter with our collections. While all the events are online, we have offered an in-person option for the first session in the series. All are welcome to beam in and join us.
Our first event will take place next Tuesday 11 January from 4-5.30 pm EST and will feature a selection of Spanish Treasures at the University of Michigan Library. The Special Collections Research Center holds an extraordinary collection of early printed books published in Spain from the fifteenth century onward. Particularly significant are the holdings illustrating the Golden Age of Spanish literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that is, the so-called “Siglo de Oro,“ which includes world-renowned writers like Garcilaso de la Vega, Miguel de Cervantes, and Francisco de Quevedo. Curator Pablo Alvarez will provide a tour of artifacts as witnesses of how literary masterpieces such as El Lazarillo de Tormes or Don Quixote were published and read centuries ago, as well as additional documents illustrating some of the political and religious anxieties of Spanish society at that time, including books produced by the formidable Holy Inquisition.
This drawing was made on August 10, 1955, for the August 18-24 issue (No. 581) of Les Lettres françaises, a weekly French journal, in celebration of the 350th anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote, Part I.
gonna be real a solid 1/3-½ of the things you guys propose as Gay Operas i just do not see. but the fact i’m the only one here going on about how blatantly homosexual the massenet don quixote opera is Might As Well Be A Crime
Here’s a video of Don Quixote’s death scene from that opera. I happened to have just been watching it as a model for a scene I’m writing.
Giacomo Prestia as Don Quixote and Alessandro Corbelli as Sancho (why, oh why, is there no good quality video of his Leporello when he was positively made for that role?), conducted by Dwight Bennett.
Unfortunately there are no subtitles, but if you understand any French, you’ll hear the sheer number of affectionate terms of endearment with which these two men address each other. And Sancho’s sobbing over his master’s body at the end is basically “Rodolfo at the end of Bohéme, except a bass.”
»Man könnte sagen, daß Don Quichotte die erste Gestalt in der Renaissanceliteratur ist, die durch ihr Handeln versucht, die Welt mit ihren eigenen Plänen und Ideen in Einklang zu bringen. Cervantes’ Ironie liegt in der Tatsache, daß sein Held zwar nach außen hin im Namen des Alten (des Feudalsystems) gegen das Neue (die ersten Erscheinungsformen bürgerlichen Lebens) kämpft, in Wirklichkeit aber versucht, einem neuen Prinzip Anerkennung zu verschaffen. Dieses Prinzip besteht seinem Wesen nach in der Autonomie individuellen Denkens und Fühlens. Die Dynamik der Gesellschaft führt zu der Forderung nach einer immerwährenden und aktiven Umgestaltung der Wirklichkeit; die Welt muß ständig neu gebaut werden. Don Quichotte schafft seine Welt neu, wenn auch in einer phantastischen und solipsistischen Weise. Die Ehre, für die er zu Felde zieht, ist das Produkt seines Denkens und nicht das Erzeugnis gesellschaftlich begründeter und anerkannter Werte. Er verteidigt die, die er seines Schutzes für würdig hält, und wendet sich gegen die, die ihm böse erscheinen. In diesem Sinne ist er sowohl Rationalist als auch Idealist. Trotz seiner feudalen Mitgift hat der Ritter einen weiteren Wesenszug mit dem modernen nachmittelalterlichen Menschen gemeinsam – die Einsamkeit. Seine Widersacher sind zwar auch isoliert, aber aus einem ganz anderen Grunde: ihre Atomisierung entspringt aus der Tatsache, daß jeder seine eigenen selbstischen Ziele verfolgt. Don Quichotte jedoch ist isoliert, weil er das Unmögliche möglich machen will: er will die Bösen niederhalten, die Gewalt abschaffen, die Menschen befreien und seine tiefe Liebe für das Menschliche in seiner Hingabe an Dulcinea verwirklichen.«
|||Leo Löwenthal,Das Bild des Menschen in der Literatur
(Addendum: All the kudos and death threats are really touching :D , BUT I feel the need to inform you that my only contribution to this masterpiece was to post it on tumblr. A friend sent it directly to me after finding it on another platform, I have no idea who the real author is. If this mad genius comes to tumblr one day, they can make themselve known :-)
