Kicking Against the Tricks: Reading Cervantes' Duchess and the Duke

I guess it's one of those little commonplace "fun facts" about literature that Nabokov wasn't a big fan of Don Quixote. His lectures on the book are uncharacteristically nit-picky and pedantic, with a kind of catty undertone that usually only comes out in personal interviews. However, there's one point that he strikes on that other critics tend to skirt around, or dress up in equivocations:

"Both parts of Don Quixote form a veritable encyclopedia or cruelty. From that viewpoint it is one of the most bitter and barbarous books ever penned. And its cruelty is artistic."

Maybe this goes a little ways in illuminating Nabokov's distaste, for who, in the 20th century, comes so close to matching Cervantes' theatrical cruelty? I think its fair to say that Nabokov approached fiction like a grandmaster; all of his novels set up the pieces and maneuver them into position for a killing stroke. His cruelty is controlled and, sometimes, cold. 

Don Quixote on the other hand maintains a definite warmth for the big D and Sancho despite putting them through the wringer. The narrative voice throughout is curious; its easy at the start to read its praise of the characters as ironic, but as the novel progresses, particularly in the second part, its hard not to feel that the sardonic irony of the narrator is splitting, with the world becoming crueller and the characters becoming less ridiculous and more sublime. And, remarkably, the reader shifts from being complicit in the universe's tricks against Quixote to being almost another dupe at points. 

The key incident here is the episode of Sancho Panza's governorship. How can you not feel a little elated, about halfway through Part Two, when the duke finally bestows an insula on the long-suffering squire? All these fantasies and deceptions and everybody getting the shit knocked out of them and now, man, at last he gets what he wants. 

Except, of course he doesn't. Everything that's been promised in the novel so far has been false; everything the duke and the duchess, in particular, have shown has been an elaborate prank on the novel's two heros. Why should this be any different? Soon we're even told that the population of the village is in on the scheme, that everything has been set up in advance. Still, incredibly, the reader insists on a bit of optimism that Cervantes obligingly stokes. This entire sequence of events, when the certainty that Sancho's reward isn't genuine struggles against the hope that it is, constitutes for me some of the most heartbreaking tension in the history of the novel. 

"We need to hold in mind as we read Don Quixote that we cannot condescend to the Knight and Sancho, since together they know more than we do," writes Harold Bloom. The funny thing is, for 900-odd pages the narrator does just that-- the entire novel is the process of coming to rebel against the narrator, and by extension the audience of the first part of the novel who make up most of the second part's cast. Because at the root of it, the duke and the duchess are the reader, or at least the image of what the reader once was, a few hundred pages ago-- they read Don Quixote as a funny adventure story, and they view Quixote himself as inherently ridiculous. And let's be fair, for almost 500 pages he is, before Cervantes pulls the rug out from under himself.

When the reader crosses that strange border of empathy and comes to hold the duchess and the duke in contempt, what he's really doing is looking a few hundred pages back at himself. This is Cervantes' miracle, his benediction where Nabokov would be springing his trap. Don Quixote is a novel that teaches us how to read it in showing us ourselves as readers. Laughing, we're all the fucking awful duchess and duke; fooled by affection into hoping for a happy resolution, we're all Quixote.