Earlier this week 'world renowned' (how does one measure renown, Maestro?) 'Peruvian' (now only by origin for he is Spanish by citizenship) novelist Mario Vargas Llosa was in town to deliver the Richard A. Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature, in a dual purpose church down the street. Obviously, I went to hear what the Man had to say on the topics of 'Cervantes and Don Quixote' and Borges on two consecutive nights. I missed the third lecture on Ortega y Gasset because I was at a worksite, and also perhaps because I had never heard of him before.

I have in front of me a set of notes I took from the two lectures, and they are simply unreadable. The axiom 'thou shall not be able to pay attention to what is being said (or read in this case) and take legible notes at once' seemed to have held up. But for the sake of my kind readers (and 'peeps'), I engaged in heroic jujitsu, or more appropriately 'tilted at the windmills', to revel and reconstruct the following set of cryptic notes from Lecture Uno, 'Cervantes and Don Quixote'. Also don't ask where Senor Llosa ends, and where I begin in the following!

The torments of Cervantes, his dispossession, his prison spells, his long litany of debts, his inability to write verse, which in his era was the preferred mode of literary manifestation, and so ends us writing prose, which is close to the masses.

Don Quixote (DQ) as a fiction of fiction, and also as a literary criticism of then popular genre of novels of chivalry. DQ as a dream, as a way of escape from the heaviness of life, from the primitive cares, as a transformation of reality into fantasy, a breakdown of rational leading to foolish adventures into false reality and fantasy.

A short riff on the origins of novel as a transition from the perishable tradition of oral stories and ballads into a medium that is capable of creating alternative realities, as well the desire to escape from the real.

Balzac’s comment on how reading engenders ‘a private history of nations’

Initial definition of Pancho: someone whose matter suffocates the spirit

DQ is the original fanatic as he doesn’t have doubts about anything he believes to be true, and doesn’t believe he can ever make a mistake; this even when he ‘liberates’ those dangerous criminals from prison, or when he attacks goats and pilgrims as evils. [Does this mean Le Chosen One des Etats-Unis is just another DQ of our current crazy times?]

Other ominous signs in DQ: doesn’t have any sense of humor and is intolerant of criticism. In this DQ as a fore runner of the revolutionary Jacobeans of the French Republic with their elegant reason and rationality, the Aryan Nazis with their utopia devoid of all untermenschs, the Gulag commissars with their glorious revolution of the working class etc. [Should we add to this list the Glorious Heterosexual Christian Soldiers of these United States, who wait for the Rapture (Sweet Jesus! Come save us Lordy!) as they spread ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’, at the end of smart missiles and cluster bombs?]

Pancho as the rough, the illiterate, the materialist, the ‘respector’ of social rules and customs who draws wisdom and sustenance against calamities caused by his master from popular and religious sayings, the ideal citizen, and as the doppelganger of DQ. And thus acting as an anchor, and preventing the novel from disintegrating and floating away into irredeemable fantasy. But this also sets the stage for a role reversal of sorts in the latter part of the novel, when Pancho and other observers of DQ encourage him to behave with his earlier outrageousness, and perhaps showing their other humanity by display the hungers for the unreal. This also as a symptom of how DQ’s contagious passion for living out fiction, which is to say to live many lives simultaneously, slowly spreads throughout the novel, to infect others, so much so that it is as if DQ has expanded to permeate all life!

DQ as a fictional character or a specter, who channels the human condition for fiction, to give up life and blood for the airy perch of a tale

Questions: Was it fiction that was the cause of DQ’s troubles, and nearly constant unhappiness? Also, politically, does the creation of DQ explain the ‘magic realism’ of Latin America? Also doesn’t behind the comedy of DQ and Pancho lay the larger personal law of freedom?

.....

Moving on to Lecture Dos, on Borges, before I was about to transcribe my chicken scrawl, I decided to look at what Senor Llosa had previously said/wrote about Borges in his book A Writer's Reality (a book which I had avidly read two years ago, with a pen in hand). And to my complete surprise, I discovered that the remarks Senor L had delivered on Borges two nights ago were identical to a I with the sentences (which were initially delivered as lectures at Syracuse University in 1989) I found in front of me on the printed pages of this book, complete with my crazy night time marginalia!

Anyway kind readers, this saved me the trouble of transcribing my jerky chicken scrawl for your edification. So if you want to know what Senor Llosa had to say (and say again a few nights ago, this time after excising those stray references to Garcia Marquez and Pablo Neruda, for Senor Llosa is a recovered Leftie, who had seen the light, as formulated by that darling of gringo right wing supplysiders’, Milton Friedman!), please read Chapter 1 of ‘A Writer’s Reality’.

And finally this is what Borges cooked up on Quixote in "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote". Also the Spanish original for those kind readers who can lea y entienda a Español! Gracias.

wonderful words buoy