Quixote, tedious Quixote

I went to return to my reading the other day, and found myself recoiling at the thought of going further into Quixote.  This was surprising for me as an avid reader, and I explored that feeling a bit further.  I realized that within Quixote I had run into the same thing that disenchants me with modern literature: mainly it's own aspect of disenchantment.

As mentioned earlier, Cervantes wrote Quixote as a statement against the pablum of popular literature at the time, these fantastic tales of knights and damsels, wicked giants, powerful enchantments.  Cervantes framed Quixote as a penultimate example of the dangers of these tales, someone gone out of their mind with a fixation on magic, honor and adventure.  Clearly, Cervantes was not a moralist, censor, or alarmist.  He seemed to think of chivalric novels, as they were called, as exceedingly banal, stupid, unrealistic, and non-reflective of modern life.  So it is said that Cervantes writes the first modern novel by removing this shroud of myth, and by presenting a basically naturalistic story.  There is no magic, there are no dragons, there is no enchantment.  It's just normal people living life.  

This is of course admirable on one level.  It allowed literature and storytelling to become more serious, broadening the aspects of human life it could address.  It, on one level is the reason that contemporary film and television is able to tackle life issues in a realistic format, like "The Wire", or "Kids".  

But here is where my preferences enter the picture.  I have read articles on both "The Wire" and "Kids", which praise them as incredible works of art, profoundly realistic and meaningful as ways of grappling with the challenges of inner city crime and poverty, as well as the challenge of kids being raised without support, adult relationship.  I can appreciate both those areas of inquiry, but I have seen neither works.  Why?  Because I like enchantment, I like a filtered lense, some aspect of the story that is out of the ordinary.  This doesn't mean that I don't like serious literature, but there is something about a purely naturalistic setting that seems boring to me.  

I read books to learn about other places, ideas, things, and reading 20th century fiction has largely just taken me back to people.  The Great Gatsby and The Sun Also Rises both come to mind as books that I could recognize as significant, but which presented little emotional pleasure for me.  In contrast, I found Lord of the Rings to be both wildly enjoyable and deeply moving.  What's more, I think LOTR also had something to say about the human condition, it had some substance to it, but the Academy has yet to consider it "serious art".  Which leads to my second thought...

Quixote seems to break ground in the area of "serious art" by doing what comic authors refer to as "breaking the fourth wall" (pvp link?), which basically amounts to undermining the mythical link in the story.  In comics, this means the characters acknowledge the audience, and the fact that they are not real people, that they are actually characters in a comic, and on a deeper level, just arbitrary creations of someone's imagination, having in a sense no real "reality" within themselves.

This of course is Quixote's fundamental flaw.  He believes that the knights he read about, and their exploits are in fact real, and sets out on his (mis)adventures in an attempt to emulate them.  He does so within a world that is neither magical nor chivalrous, and his efforts are alternately mocked, misunderstood or exploited.

I digress, "breaking the mythic bond"...  Cervantes undermines his story as a story through structural devices, downplaying the mythic significance of even his own work.  I am about 150 pages from the end of book 1, and the characters in the story have come to a hotel.  At this point, I as reader am eager to see existing storylines continue to build, and come to some sort of conclusion.  Rather than delivering that, Cervantes introduces a manuscript, found in the hotel.  The travelling party asks each other, "Do you want to hear this story?"  Rather than going to bed, everyone says "sure, let's hear the story."  The priest begins to read a completely separate story that I quickly grow impatient with.  I flip ahead and realize it is 75 pages long!  That half of the remaining story will be consumed with this novella that has no immediate relation to the events at hand, namely Quixote's "quest" and his neighbor's efforts to retrieve him.

This is Cervantes saying as author, "See, I don't have to follow any rules," and at a deeper level working against the expectations of his audience, denying them the sentimental satisfaction they desire.  Modern art has been described as "any art that is aware of itself as art."  The fourth wall in comics, Cervantes' denial of expectation both illustrate this point perfectly, in that they are playing against the expectations of their audience and "breaking the rules" of the story/comic.

This aesthetic development, of breaking the rules of one's own genre, makes art self aware, and represents a major development in asking the question of what art means, and what it can become.  That said, it can be frigging annoying to read and experience, because it asks the audience to both appreciate the art as art, and also minimize, maintain skepticism about it's overall value and message.

Gerhard Richter, a wildly talented contemporary painter, talked about this process in describing one of his paintings.  It was a photorealistic rendering of waves at sea, large canvas.  Instead of having sky above the waves, Richter inserted an inverted image of the waves, so that "sky" and "land" were both images of waves moving toward the horizon.  He talked, in the attached essay, about the viewers "hunger for beauty" and the way they would crave the satisfaction of the horizon and sky above it.  By denying this satisfaction, Richter hoped to draw attention to the way our own hunger for meaning interacts with our experience of art.  This is of course meaningful and thought provoking, but it is not satisfying.  

And that is my beef, then with Quixote and modern aesthetic in general, is the absence of satisfaction.  I understand it is valuable to ask hard questions, explore tough issues within art, but where do we find satisfaction?  "Serious art” has consigned satisfaction to the realm of “pop art”, non ambitious film and literature.  And to a large extent the popular genres have been happy to take that up.  Witness the staggering popularity of romance and fantasy novels, Danielle Steele and Robert Jordan come to mind.  They are popular because they keep their promise to their audience, of a story or artwork that delivers some kind of satisfaction, that doesn’t toy around with expectations, stringing the audience along.

I feel like pre-modern “serious art” does this same thing, and it is frustrating to me that modernity brought this divide between serious art and a sense of loyalty to one’s audience.  One could of course say the author/artist is making a deeper promise to her audience by not “telling lies” in their art, but sometimes you just want a little satisfaction with your substance.

Cue Rolling Stones guitar riff...