![]() Don Quixote is the great chivalric egotist, never more egotistical than when he appears to be most chivalrous. Collins, who proposes to Elizabeth Bennet by listing all the ways in which he will benefit from marriage. First, there is the comedy of egotism-the “But enough about my work, what do you think of my work?” grand manner, brilliantly exploited by Tartuffe, and by Jane Austen’s Mr. If all of modern fiction comes out of the Knight’s cape, one reason might be that Cervantes’s novel contains the major comic tropes, from the farcical to the delicately ironic. ![]() So it is worth reminding ourselves of the gross, the worldly, the violent, and, above all, the comic in “Don Quixote”-worth reminding ourselves that we are permitted the odd secular guffaw while reading it. Auden thought that “Don Quixote” was a portrait of a Christian saint and Unamuno’s unlikely American supporter Harold Bloom, in his introduction to Edith Grossman’s marvellous new translation (Ecco $29.95), reminds us that “Don Quixote,” though it “may not be a scripture,” nonetheless captures all humanity, as Shakespeare does-which sounds more like religious lament than like secular caution. Miguel de Unamuno, the relentlessly idealizing Spanish philosopher, considered “Don Quixote” a “profoundly Christian epic” and the true “Spanish Bible,” and correspondingly managed to write about the novel as if not a single comic episode occurred in it. Both are comic writers, properly snagged in the mundane, whose fiction has too often been etherealized out of existence. And Cervantes may resemble Proust in another way. ![]() ![]() ![]() The windmills that Don Quixote mistakes for giants have something in common with the madeleine that makes Marcel’s memory buds salivate: both occur conveniently early in very long books that are, in English at least, more praised than read. ![]()
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