VLADIMIR NABOKOV
35
prove, not very successfully, that Cervantes in
Don Quixote
fearlessly
expressed his scorn for what a harsh Protestant commentator,
Duffield, calls "Romish ritual" and "priestly tyranny"; and the same
critic concludes that not only was Don Quixote a monomaniac but
that the whole of "Spain in the sixteenth century was overrun with
madmen of the same [pathological type]-men of one idea [ruling
the country]" -since the king, the Inquisition, the nobles, the cardi–
nals, the priests etc. were all dominated, as that critic violently puts
it, by one overbearing conviction that the way to heaven was
through a grilled door, the keys of which were in their keeping.
*
We shall not follow in the dusty path of these pious or impious,
impish or solemn, generalizations . It does not really matter very
much whether Cervantes was a good Catholic or a bad one; it does
not even matter whether he was a good or a bad man; nor do I deem
very important his attitude, whatever it was, to the conditions of his
day. Personally, I am more inclined to accept the view that he did not
much bother about these conditions. What, however, does concern
us is the book itself, a certain Spanish text in a more or less adequate
English translation. Proceeding from the text, we do come, of
course, across certain moral implications that have to be considered
in a light that perhaps transcends the world of the book itself, and we
shall not wince when we come to those thorns.
"L'homme n 'est rien–
l'oeuvre est tout}}
(the master is nothing, the masterpiece is everything)
said Flaubert. In many an art-for-art man there dwells a frustrated
moralist-and there is something about the ethics of the book
Don
Quixote
that casts a livid laboratory light on the proud flesh of some of
its passages....
General Remarks on Form
Novels can be divided into
one-track
novels and
multi-track
novels.
One track-in
which there is only one major line of human exis–
tence.
"Alexander James Duffield,
Don Quixote, His Critics and Commentators
(London:
C. K . Paul, 1881).
