Orality and Literacy

Ryan and Don Roger

13

Orality and Literacy

            We asked our AI friends what the rate of illiteracy was in Spain in 1605, the date of publication of DQI. According to them – Based on historical trends, the illiteracy rate in Spain in 1605 was extremely high, likely exceeding 90% to 95% of the general population. While exact nationwide surveys did not exist in 1605, historical insights from the period indicate that during the 16th and 17th centuries, the ability to read and write was generally restricted to elites, clergy, and urban professionals. Furthermore, female illiteracy was significantly higher, with hardly any women possessing writing skills during this era. And, in addition, literacy was slightly higher in major cities like Madrid or in northern Spain, while the rural south suffered from much higher illiteracy rates. Based on these insights it is easy conclude that well under 10% of the population in Cervantes’s time knew how to read and write.

            In Don Quixote, Cervantes reveals to us a rural society which is basically illiterate. Most of the multitude of characters can neither read nor write. Throughout the woven interplay of the novel, Cervantes juxtaposes the illusion of the literate nymphs and shepherds who come into the woods to dance and play with the reality of the goatherds, shepherds, and horse wranglers, like the Yanguesans (DQI, XV / 15) who, totally illiterate, work the woods for a living. This contrast is a theme of the times and can be clearly seen in the paintings of Velásquez. One has only to think of The Water Seller, The Old Lady Frying Eggs, The Topers, The Court Dwarves, and Vulcan’s Forge, to name a few paintings that illustrate the clash of youth, age, class.

            The question of learning is an interesting one, explored in depth by Walter J. Ong in Orality and Literacy (1982). Learning in an oral society is done by word of mouth. One method of handing down knowledge is the proverb, its wisdom passed down from generation to generation. Sancho Panza, totally illiterate, is famous for his stringing together of proverb after proverb. He is the prime example of what one might call oral sagacity. Don Quixote, on the other hand, amazes us at first with his mastery of the ballads and the major exploits of knights errant in the novels of chivalry that he recites and imitates at will, and later with his mastery of such themes as the Golden Age and Arms and Letters. 

As Ong points out, the presence of writing changes totally the ways in which people think and learn. The word, once spoken, can never be recalled. But, when the word is written down it can be redacted, erased, changed, crossed out. More, the immediate transference of ideas from person to person in the oral exchange of conversation is totally different from the thoughtful exchange of written letters and ideas. In the latter, one trains oneself to think before you ink. That thought process can then be transferred back to the thinking process, both by literate and illiterate people. In this way, the processing of thought changes. And that is what happens to Sancho Panza in DQII.

The question of authority arises here. In an oral society, authority rests with the older members, who have lived long, and understand much, and a great deal of it preserved in proverbs. In a literate society, the authority resides in the written word, especially when it is tested and approved by the Inquisition (in the case of Spain) and royal permission. In a literate society, those who have studied a subject become the authority in that subject. I know professors who never again took a course or opened their books after they attained their doctorates. The PhD gave them the right to be an authority and to know it all. I also know professors who never stopped learning, who continued reading, and publishing, and taking courses, and building their initial knowledge base into a life long learning process.

Is knowledge static? I certainly hope not. As T. S. Eliot writes in Burnt Norton, “Words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, will not stay still.” The lapidarian truth of the folkloric proverb softens as change surges around us. The authorities of the sixties, when I was in graduate school, faded gradually, and new names, new theories, new doctrines replaced them. We started to explore these ideas in 5 – Book Burnings and 6 – Censorship. With the proliferation of knowledge via the internet and the intrusion of an abundance of AI into our lives, this question of authority – what is true and what is false – must form a part of our current thought and teaching and learning methodology. How do we distinguish truth from fiction, real news from fake news?

In an oral society, with no writing, your word is your bond. Think of the cowboy movies – “White man speak with forked tongue.” Now make the appropriate gesture from the many Cowboy and Indian movies you have seen. White man wants it in writing. For the red man, his word is his bond, sealed maybe, with a slash of the knife across the wrist – blood brothers. We have entered a world with different cultures and expectations. Now ask yourself, how many written treaties has the white man broken across the centuries. Is his word, written or spoken, truly his bond? I guess it depends upon the courts and the lawyers.

            “My word is as good as my bond,” 007 aka James Bond aka Sean Connery aka Daniel Craig aka Pierce Brosnan aka Roger Moore aka 3M-007. How many levels of different linguistic reality, at the intertextual level, can you count in that delightful sentence? Just think about it. And tell me, if you are an authority on the subject, who is the real James Bond! Meanwhile, remember that The Olde Order Changeth Lest One Good Custom Should Corrupt The World. Now, could that be Tennyson, Idylls of the King, or is it a quote from The Wycliffe Star? You are the authority. You choose!

Mindfulness

Mindfulness

Poems arrive, as silent as the deer
that troop through my garden.

Some times they hurry past,
and catch them if you can.

Sometimes, they stay, wait, nibble
 at an overhanging branch.

Just when you think you can
reach out and grasp them,
they sense the bark of a dog,
the sigh of the wind
through leafless trees.

You blink, and they have gone.

Was your camera ready?
Was your note book open,
your pen in your hand?

Or did they flit away like dreams
 in the morning when the sun
comes into the bedroom
and sparks diamond fires
from the lashes that stand guard?

Nights

Nights

There are nights
when the trees
seem to whisper
your name,

cautioning you
against the wind’s
knife edge.

“What have I done,”
you ask,
“to merit this?”

The soft fall
of burnt brown leaves
weeps over
your woodland grave.

You will walk
these woods
no more, save
on a frosty night

when deer shiver
beneath naked trees
and the moonbeam’s
icy blade.

Comment:

Poems arrive, as silent as the deer that troop through my garden. Some times they hurry past, and catch them if you can. Sometimes, they stay, wait, nibble at an overhanging branch. Just when you think you can reach out and grasp them, they sense the bark of a dog, the sigh of the wind through leafless trees. You blink, and they have gone.

Was your camera ready? Was your note book open, your pen in your hand? Or did they flit away like dreams in the morning when the sun comes into the bedroom and sparks diamond fires from the lashes that guard your eyes?

Spring Cleaning

Spring Cleaning

Sun’s yellow duster
arrived late this year
gray cobwebs still
clutter my mind

I try to brush them away
with clumsy fingers
but stubbornly they stick
and cling and will not go

Spring came in with snow
gales and icy rain

Warm winds will soon
spring showers bring
to revive cold clay
and help things grow

Comment:

We have lived in this house for 37 years, but only once have I seen ducks land on the snow-covered lawn. Whatever were they thinking? Good question – do ducks think? They are living beings, so of course they do. But I am totally unaware of what they think nor am I able to understand the nature of their mental computations.

We share this world with so many creatures that we do not understand. I wonder sometimes if they understand us. Who knows? If we cannot speak their multiple languages, if we cannot enter their culture and their minds, if we see them as nothing but food and devour them as fast as we can, never thinking of them at all, save as more or less savoury items on our dinner plate — les meurtiers et les victimes, as Albert Camus wrote. Murderers and victims – and we are both. Murderers of our victims and victims ourselves to our unbounded greed.

Lure of the Picaresque Novel

Ryan and Don Roger

12

Lure of the Picaresque Novel

            Let us begin by asking – what is the picaresque novel? According to Wikipedia, “the picaresque novel, is a genre of prose fiction that depicts the adventures of a roguish but appealing hero, usually of a low social class who lives by his wits in a corrupt society. Picaresque novels typically adopt the form of an episodic prose narrative with a realistic style.”

            Is Don Quixote a picaresque novel? It has been called a picaresque novel by English standards, but rarely, if ever, by Spanish ones. Yes, Don Quixote is prose fiction that relates the adventures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. However, while Sancho is of low social class, Quixote himself most certainly isn’t. He is a landowner, with an expensive library, and a solid education. He is literate, though Sancho is not. Does Don Quixote live by his wits? Good question. Some would say yes, he does. Others, including the first-person narrator in DQI, I/1, would say his brain was so decayed with his all-night readings that it had dried up and he had no wits left to lose. Is the society around him corrupt? This is a much more difficult question to answer.

            In an earlier discussion, The Golden Age, we saw that Don Quixote, in his speech to the goat herds, contrasted the idyllic golden age of the Edenic pastoral with the corruption of contemporary society. As we mentioned earlier, neither description is truly accurate. As for the society in which Don Quixote moves, he meets, in the course of the novel, more than 600 characters, many of them unforgettable, some of whom are good, and some bad. More, Cervantes’s description of Spanish society is so wide and it is painted in such depth that it is hard to generalize and call that society corrupt. In addition, while Don Quixote meets low class characters in his travellers, he also mingles with judges, high ranking churchmen, country gentlemen, and even dukes and duchesses. Case made, I would hope.

            One further point on the picaresque, while the peripatetic novel may be considered picaresque in English, it is not picaresque in Spanish unless it is narrated in the first-person singular. The first word in Quevedo’s Buscón is ‘Yo’ / ‘I’ – “Yo, señor soy de Segovia.” / “I, sir, am from Segovia.” Then Pablos goes on to tell his own life story. On the other hand, the first-person narrator at the beginning of Don Quixote tells the story of the knight. He does not tell his own story, even though elements of his personal life are included within the knight’s tale.

            That said, elements of the picaresque do occur in the Quixote. The most important sequence can be found in DQI, XXII / 22, The freeing of the galley slaves. In this chapter, Don Quixote and Sancho meet a chain gang of low-class criminals who are en route to the coast to serve penal sentences chained to the oars of the King’s galleys. When Sancho tells his master that these men are forced, against their will, to serve in the galleys, Don Quixote sees an opportunity to employ his knightly skills – “this is a case for the exercising of my profession, for the redressing of outrages and the succouring and relieving of the wretched.”

            Don Quixote then asks each criminal in turn about the crimes they have committed. Big problem – in the same way that the goat herds have not understood a word of Don Quixote’s learned language, the knight is unable to understand the thieves’ slang of the galley slaves. There follows a series of misinterpretations. The first slave fell in love, the second had been singing, the third was short of a small sum of money, the fourth paraded the streets in state and on horse back, and the fifth had been caught up in an intricate tangle of relationships. Don Quixote cannot comprehend any of this and interprets each word in its literal, dictionary meaning.

            He doesn’t understand that the man in love was in love with someone else’s belongings, the singer had ‘sung’, ie confessed under torture, the third didn’t have enough money to bribe the judge, the fourth had been whipped through the streets, guilty of procuring, and possibly witchcraft, and the fifth had been involved in irregular sexual adventures with a wide range of people, some related and others not. Poor Don Quixote is baffled by this language.

            The sixth prisoner, the famous Gines de Pasamonte, is a different kettle of fish, for he has, in true picaresque fashion, written his own life story with his own fingers. Translated – he has written his own picaresque novel with himself in the starring role. When Don Quixote asks if the book is good, Gines replies that “it is so good … that Lazarillo de Tormes will have to look out, and so will everything else in that style …” “Is it finished?” Don Quixote asks him. “How can it be … if my life isn’t?” is the reply.  

            So, that is the story of Don Quixote’s encounter with the picaresque. It is a style that Cervantes tended to avoid, preferring at this stage the Italianate, the pastoral, the romance, and his own invention of the novel as a reinvention of the epic poem that can be written in prose. The picaresque was certainly a temptation for Cervantes, for he leaned towards that style from time to time in Don Quixote, and also in a couple of his exemplary novels (1612), namely Rinconete y Cortadillo and El Coloquio delosPerros, among others. That said, Don Quixote is certainly not a picaresque novel, in the Spanish sense of the word.

The Golden Age

Ryan and Don Roger

11

The Golden Age

            Don Quixote begins his discourse on the Golden Age (DQI, XI/11) with these words: “Happy the age and happy the times on which the ancients bestowed the name of golden, not because gold, which in this iron age of ours is rated so highly, was attainable without labour in those fortunate times, but rather because the people of those days did not know those two words thine and mine. In that blessed age all things were held in common.”

            Several things of note. First, the length of the sentences. Remember we are reading about a society in which the majority of people were still illiterate, knowing neither how to read nor to write. Earlier, in the same chapter, when Don Quixote describes his role as a knight errant, we read that “The goatherds did not understand this gibberish about squires and knights errant, but just watched in silence …”

            Don Quixote goes on to describe the perfect pastoral life in the course of which nymphs and shepherds could go about their daily lives living in peace, love, and justice, and aways at one with the land. It is interesting to read about this idealistic and escapist pastoral myth that takes place in a land overflowing with milk and honey. Now compare it with the reality of the illiterate goatherds who slaughter and consume their own goats, devour dried, wrinkled acorns, and eat rock hard, age-old cheese.

Compare it too with the reality of the current age of iron, as described by Don Quixote who says “But now, in tis detestable age of ours, no maiden is safe even though she be hidden in the centre of another Cretan labyrinth; for even there, through some chink or through the air, by dint of its accursed persistence, the plague of love gets in and brings them to the ruin despite their seclusion.” Is Don Quixote’s description of this detestable age any more real than his description of the Golden Age? Whether it is or isn’t, Eon Quixote uses the contrast between the two worlds, past and present, for his own ends. I quote “Therefore, as times rolled on and wickedness increased, the order of knights errant was founded for their protection, to defend maidens, relieve widows, and succour the orphans and the needy.”

            We should also mention the illusion of the Don Quixote’s literary pastoral in which “all was peace then, all amity, and all concord” and the reality of the harsh life led by these real goatherds.

Reality and illusion is a common theme as we move from the Renaissance towards the Baroque. For those of us who follow Spanish Art, we have only to look at Velásquez’s paintings to understand the difference between the ugliness of the court dwarves and the beauty of the royalty they entertain. In his painting The Topers, for example, Velásquez shows the reality of the country folk. In Vulcan’s Forge he presents us with the workmen who labour around the furnace contrasting them with the god Apollo who addresses them from within a golden light.

            We will meet the pastoral myth on many occasions in Don Quixote I & II, for our adventurer meets with many suffering lovers who escape, or try to escape, their sufferings by fleeing to the countryside to live an idyllic life free from the stress of their supposed multiple love and relationship problems. The pastoral – escapist literary, it is, describing a perfect world that never existed. A suitable follow-up to Past Glories Restored #10 in this sequence of ours. Can such Edenic innocence ever be re-created in contemporary society, Don Quixote’s or our own? A leading question and one that readers must answer for themselves.

In Wales and in the Welsh language, we have a wonderful word to describe that longing for the Golden Age that is long past and unrecoverable. Hiraeth – a spiritual longing for a home that maybe never existed. Nostalgia for ancient places and times to which we can never return. It is the echo of the lost places of our soul’s past and our grief for them and their loss. It is in the wind, the rocks, the bays of the Gower coast, and the waves of the sea. It is nowhere and yet it is ubiquitous.

Past Glories Restored

Ryan and Don Roger

10

Past Glories Restored

            What is it about madmen like Don Quixote that they find it hard to live in the present and always want to see themselves restore past glories however impossible it is to do so? The search for the beauty and peacefulness of the past is always with us. Many seek the perfection of the Garden of Eden, but wise men know that Adam and Eve were expelled from the garden by an angel with a fiery sword, never to return.

            Jorge Manrique (1440-1479) begins his Coplas por la Muerte de su padre with the statement that “a nuestro parescer, cualquier tiempo passado fué mejor.” / It seems to us that any past time was better. Why do poets and madmen always look back to the past, all too often with a view to recreating that which can never be recreated?

            François Villon (1431 – 1463?) asks, in his famous refrain to La Ballade des Dames de Jadis – “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan!” / Where are last year’s snows! Indeed, the theme of ubi sunt / where is – where are is a constant throughout literature. And where is last year’s snow? Can you tell me? It certainly isn’t in our aquifer. I didn’t even use the snowblower last year. Tell me, where did the snow go? I live in Canada, and we didn’t see it. So where did it go?

            Marcel Proust (1871-1922) searched for those lost times in his novel À la recherche du temps perdu. This can be translated directly as In Search of Lost Time. It also occurs, more poetically as Remembrance of Things Past. Unfortunately, the word Remembrance rather cancels out the idea of Search, not to mention the twin ideas of recalling and re-establishing. However, in the case of the madman, Don Quixote, it can be argued that all those meanings are correct. But what exactly does Don Quixote want to restore?

            Above all, Don Quixote wishes to restore the lost age of knight errantry. He is besotted by the fantasy tales of these knights errant and believes that he can be one himself and restore their glory with the force of his arm alone.  In DQI, II/2, The knight addresses the ‘ladies of easy virtue’ at the inn in these terms: “I beg you, ladies, not to fly, nor to fear any outrage; for it ill fits or suits the order of chivalry which I profess to injure anyone, least of all maidens of such rank as your appearance proclaims you to be.’ His language, which was unintelligible to them, made them laugh more. So, knights errant protect women, especially damsels in trouble, and women of easy virtue. That is one of their most important tasks.

            In DQI, IV/4, our knight meets the boy, Andrés, who is being whipped by his master, the farmer. Don Quixote stops the thrashing and makes the man promise to pay the boy the wages that are owed him. The farmer promises to do so, but when Don Quixote leaves, he ties Andrés to a tree and whips him so soundly ‘that he laves him for dead.’ Protect the innocent, then, is another task, one at which Don Quixote fails miserably, as we will see later.

            In addition to restoring the high ideals of the ancient order of knights errant, Don Quixote also wishes to keep the words and deeds of the ancient romances / ballads alive, and this he does throughout the book. His constant quoting of passages and deeds from the books of chivalry, those that have driven him mad, serves to keep them alive. As we said earlier, you can burn the individual books, and destroy them, but you cannot destroy the ideas they contain. Don Quixote, in his constant and lively embodiment of those books serves to keep them, and their ideals and ideas, vibrant in the eyes and the minds of the readers.

            Cervantes, perhaps a wiser man than many, restructures the theme by rejecting it – no hay pájaros en los nidos de antaño / there are no birds in last year’s nests. However, as we shall see, it doesn’t stop Don Quixote the madman, from searching for the glories of past times and from fighting for them in an effort to restore them.

And don’t forget Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), who perished in WWI – “Ni temps passés ni les amours reviennent / sous le Pont Mirabeau coule la Seine.” “Nor past times nor past loves return / beneath Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine.”

Comment:

We don’t need a comment really except that The Olde Order Changeth Lest One Good Custom Should Corrupt the World. Interpret that as you will. And as Moo says to Ryan in the presence of Don Roger – “Hey, Ryan, look at all those changes in my painting.”

The Sowing of Acorns

Painting by Moo
PTSD Spatter
aka

The tangled web we weave
when first we practice to deceive

Ryan and Don Roger

9

The Sowing of Acorns

            Metatheatre can be defined as a play within a play. In DQI,7, the priest and the barber decide that one of the easiest ways to cure Don Quixote of his madness will be to wall up his library, so that he can find no trace of the room in which it was contained. They thought it might stop him from thinking about his books. Then they agreed to tell him that an enchanter had taken the books away, room and all.

            When Don Quixote asks the housekeeper about his books, she tells him that there is neither room nor books because the devil has taken them away. The niece joins in and corrects her saying that no, it wasn’t the devil. A sage enchanter descended one night in a cloud, dismounted from his dragon, went into the room, came out through the roof in a puff of smoke, and left no trace of room or books. He called himself Muñaton and said he had a grudge against the books’ owner. Don Quixote corrects her and tells her is must have been Freston. The housekeeper joined in with “Freston or Friton, but it ended in ton.”

            Cervantes has now planted several little acorns in the mind of the reader. Sooner or later, they will grow into large oak trees.

1. Metatheatre is based on a falsehood. The main character does not see the dramatic irony in the situation, but believes the lie that the other characters have spun for him. They write the play within a play, and Don Quixote becomes the actor in that play written specifically for him. This metatheatrical theme will recur throughout the novel and will become dominant in DQII.

2. The correction of speech – Muñaton (housekeeper and niece) becomes Freston (DQ), becomes Freston (the housekeeper), and then Friton, or something ending in -ton. The correction of spoken language will play a much larger role later in the novel.

3. The role of the evil enchanter who dogs Don Quixote’s footsteps and robs him of his greatest triumphs. This will start in the very near future with the adventure of the windmills.

4. The intersection of illusion and reality. This is really important for several reasons. Cervantes, as author, causes his characters to reveal the truth behind any metatheatrical (or other) illusion that concerns Don Quixote. He does not wish to trade, like Lazarillo de Tormes in false miracle. Clearly, he has no wish to be, like Lazarillo, castigado.

The simplest conflict between illusion and reality occurs in the first sortie. Don Quixote sees an inn, a humble country inn. Totally deluded, he believes it is a castle. Nobody contradicts him. Inn – reality / castle / illusion – but nobody really points out the difference. The adventure of the windmills is similar. Don Quixote sees giants. Sancho Panza sees windmills. Now the conflict is supported by a sane and reliable witness aka his squire. When one of the characters reveals the illusion, the author does not need to step in and do so. Throughout part one of the novel (DQI), we will see Don Quixote reacting in different ways to the unmasking of the illusion in which he so strongly believed.  This situation, as we will see, will be presented in very different fashion in DQII. One fictional month between the two parts – but, in reality, ten years in which Cervantes thinks, plans, rewrites, and deepens his plots while polishing his skills.

So many little acorns. So many sown seeds. Hopefully, we will soon be able to watch them grow.

House of Dreams 5 & 6

House of Dreams

5

A leaf lies down
in a broken
corner
and fills me
with a sudden
silence.

I revise
our scrimshaw history
carving fresh tales
on the ivory
of new found bones.

6

A vixen
hunts for my remains.

She digs deep
at midnight
unearthing
the decaying teeth
you buried with
my borrowed
head.

Comment:

None of this makes sense. Why should it? Don’t ask me to explain it to you. Who am I to tell you what to think and what to do? You are not in elementary school now. Teacher is not leaning over you, teaching you how to shape letters with a pen, telling you to color in red, or yellow, or orange.

Learning – tell me what have you learned? Have you learned to think for yourself? Have you learned that life is mysterious, joyful, sad? Do you not know it can also be incredibly dangerous? Fear not the thunder. Rejoice in the rain and snow. Open your eyes to the world around you and be joyous wherever you go.

Meditation

I am the gatherer of words,
the weaver of wooly clouds.

I am the sheep dog
who shepherds the flock
in and out of the field.

I am the corgi
who snaps at the heels
of cows and pigs,
too small to be noticed.

I am the butterfly
turned into an eagle
who soars into the sky
and gazes on the sun
with an open eye.

Tell me,
my friend,
what and who
are you?

House of Dreams 3 & 4

House of Dreams
3 & 4

3

The light fails
fast, I hold up
shorn stumps
of flowers
for the night
wind to heal.

The pale magnolia
bleeds into summer:
white petals
melting on the lawn
like snow.

Sparrow sings
an afterlife
built of spring
branches.

4

Pressed between
the pages of my dream:
a lingering scent –
the death of last
year’s delphiniums –
the tall tree
toppled in the yard –
a crab apple flower-

a shard of grass
as brittle
as a bitter tongue
at winter’s
beginning.

Comment:

“La poesía se explica sola, si no, no se explica.” Pedro Salinas. Poetry explains itself. If it doesn’t, it can’t be explained.

This quote suggests that the poem is a self-contained entity that must be accepted and understood on its own terms. This is particularly true when metaphor rules and feelings and meaning are contained within the poem’s enunciation. In addition, the musicality of words can never be ignored. The rhythm they bear within them speaks for itself.

Show don’t tell – easy advice, but what exactly does it mean? So many people say so many different things. A cliché is always the simplest form of criticism.

“I don’t understand your poem,” Moo tells me.
“Neither do I,” I reply, “and I wrote it.”

“I don’t understand your painting,” I tell Moo.
“Neither do I,” Moo replies. “And I painted it.”

Words of wisdom.

Breathe deep.
Look and listen.
Don’t think.
Feel.

Hear the smell of color.
Touch the emanating light.
Taste the dry leaves crackling.

See the words shaping,
carving themselves
deep into your dream.