4

Relational Quixotism

In Poetics of Character, Susan Manning makes a compelling case for understanding character as relational, like allegory and metaphor—“intrinsically relational forms of ethical representation”—particularly for comparative studies of texts in a transatlantic context.1 As Manning observes, “Enlightenment teaching described a symbiotic relationship between ethos and character which amounted to a mutually constitutive correspondence of representation and response.” Character representations were understood as analogous to human thoughts and actions, such that characters, by relation or analogy, had the capacity to make ethical impressions upon their readers. This relationship of representation and response works, too, because reasoning itself was understood as “comparative, analogical, even tropological, at its core.”2 If reasoning—following Locke’s definition in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)—is fundamentally about the similitude or incongruity of ideas in the process of comparison, the acts of writing and reading character are also exercises in reason, in comparative or analogical thinking.

This is particularly important for understanding quixotic characters, not only because there are so many quixotic characters but also because it helps us account for why there are so many quixotic characters. Jed Rasula has argued that “Don Quixote is incitement to a superfluous yet irresistible abundance which, in the historical span of the rise of the novel, has come to be known as Literature,” though I aim to be more specific in this chapter about how and why this incitement to abundance takes place, at least as it concerns quixotic characters.3 The comparative or relational study of character demands that we assess the similitude of quixotes across texts and national traditions, and understand the character of quixotism not as a collection of allusions within a chain of authorial influence, but as a character canon formed and strengthened by demonstrations of similitude. Further, the analogical thinking that enables us to argue that a character like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver belongs in a character canon alongside a character like Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Dorcasina—when we have no reason to think Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels was a direct influence on Tenney’s Female Quixotism—is what enabled eighteenth-century writers to identify a set of core attributes in Cervantes’s Don Quixote and reproduce them in quixotic characters who have nothing to do with things like chivalric romance or seventeenth-century Spain. In other words, quixotism became a widely recognizable mode of behavior from Spain to Britain to the early US because Quixote made for an easy analogy, adaptable across languages, cultures, and social and political circumstances. The quixotic character is an easy analogy because quixotes proceed always and everywhere as exceptions.

For this reason—the suitability of the exceptionalist Quixote to analogy and adaptation—quixotes are particularly “sociable” characters. In describing a framework of character “sociability” that recognizes fan-fiction-like personal investment in the sharing and proliferation of characters—like Shakespeare’s Falstaff—across texts, David Brewer notes that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza were often shared and discussed in rewritings of their stories.4 Yet the proliferation of quixotes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was usually not a proliferation of Quixote himself—a consistent recapitulation of the same Spanish knight who, as in Fielding’s Don Quixote in England (1734), just happens to travel to the English-speaking world—but of Quixote-types that bring with them a core set of characteristics anchored in quixotic exceptionalism. For this reason the proliferation of quixotes is indeed “sociable,” as Brewer observes, but cannot be explained wholly by Brewer’s model of character proliferation. The quixote is also, in Brewer’s terms, an ontologically specific character type, one who circulates broadly within and beyond cultures and must therefore be understood as a heuristic problem because of its vast, meme-like reproduction. Once again, however, the quixote is not always Don Quixote in the way, as Brewer observes, Falstaff sometimes remains the same Falstaff across different texts.5 For this reason Brewer’s model of character sociability can help us understand certain aspects of the proliferation of quixotes but does not alone explain why quixotes proliferate as they do.

Even in their mass reproduction, then, quixotes continually understand themselves as exceptional. As I will argue, Don Quixote has taken on a character afterlife as an archetype that supersedes his immediate connection to the original Spanish text that produced him. I begin here what will become, progressively, the work of separating Don Quixote from Don Quixote as the quixotic figure acquires new meanings and functions in Britain and the early US, and as quixotism emerges as a widespread cultural touchstone in the eighteenth century.

Jorge Luis Borges elegantly explains the process by which Don Quixote became an important and influential character in the English-speaking world in a 1966 lecture on the relationship between Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. We know from Thomas Percy, by way of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791), that the teenaged Johnson was “immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry,” a fondness he “retained . . . throughout his life.” Percy also noted that Johnson himself ascribed to “these extravagant fictions that unsettled turn of mind which prevented his ever fixing in any profession.”6 Using this characterization of Johnson as a quixotic figure in relation to his biographer Boswell (who strategically styled himself as Johnson’s Sancho Panza), Borges explains Boswell’s artful role in creating the character of Johnson in much the same way as Cervantes created the character of Don Quixote. In so doing, Borges emphasizes the process by which the creator of character fades into the background as the character itself becomes increasingly real, and as authors and readers “get to know” the character who develops:

This is what happens with Cervantes’ character, especially in the second part, when the author has learned to know his character and has forgotten his initial goal of parodying novels of chivalry. This is true, because the more writers develop their characters, the better they get to know them. So, that’s how we have a character who is sometimes ridiculous, but who can be serious and have profound thoughts, and above all is one of the most beloved characters in all of history. And we can say “of history” because Don Quixote is more real to us than Cervantes himself.7

Here Borges acknowledges a reality that many of the early translators of Don Quixote acknowledged as well: the character Don Quixote has the capacity to become not as real, but “more real” than the flesh-and-blood author who created him. We can take Borges’s formulation “more real” to mean that Don Quixote becomes more familiar, more sociable, and more viscerally a part of our lives than does Cervantes. Borges, like the early British translators of Don Quixote, does not labor under Don Quixote’s confusion between fiction and reality when he describes Don Quixote as “more real,” even if he runs afoul of Bertrand Russell’s claim that all statements about characters are false.8 Rather, Borges gives an account of the unmistakable reality that characters’ lives—even as archetypes—mattered to readers who were nevertheless fully capable of distinguishing between the ontological categories of reality and fiction.9 As Catherine Gallagher notes, “Discussions of the dissimilarities between possible and fictional worlds underscore certain features of characters that can help us understand their emotional appeal.”10 Though, as I have noted, literary scholars have been duly fascinated by the “Cervantic” or “Cervantine” or “Cervantean” qualities of texts, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century readers and translators tended to be more invested in who Don Quixote was, how his mind functioned (or malfunctioned), and what instructive (or destructive) possibilities emerge not only from his life story but from the stories of other quixotes refitted for British and early US readerships. Though quixotes were not usually the subjects of fan fiction in the ways Gulliver or Falstaff were, the tendency of authors to reproduce quixote stories made the quixote-type—if not a singular quixote with a consistent backstory—a recognizable phenomenon in British and early US cultures.

Particularly at stake in this discussion of the character afterlife of Don Quixote is how we understand the eighteenth-century reader’s relationship to character, as well as what characters signified to readers. Deidre Lynch’s argument that character is in eighteenth-century Britain “a rubric that licensed discussion of the order of things in a conversible, commercial society” helps explain the first element of the importance of character as a political medium that I want to address: literary characters have material, real-world functions as mediators and signifiers of real-world feelings and actions.11 The second important element of character that I want to establish here relates to Brewer’s analysis of character as the primary participant in “social canon” formation.12 Lynch is interested in the possibilities characters generate for readers to insinuate themselves in imaginative but controlled ways into their broader commercial societies, as a means of coping with the demands of an “economy of prestige.”13 Brewer is interested in the social “feedback loop or bandwagon effect” by which “characters come to seem more socially canonical and desirable as they came to seem more common and used by all, which in turn enhanced their value and publicity.”14 Both of these analyses are relevant for what happens to the quixote in the eighteenth century, even as, in the case of quixotes, it is the archetype, and not the selfsame Don Quixote, who generates social interest.

The widespread reproductions of the quixote character in eighteenth-century writing emphasized the very characteristics that readers valued. As Lynch has shown, eighteenth-century characters became “valued for their indescribability, their exceptionality, and their polyvalence,” traits that enabled a vast multiplicity of readers to cultivate their own senses of interiority through characters and to use representations of carefully and skillfully crafted characters to establish themselves as exceptions to the sort of “undiscriminating” readers who reveled in mere caricature or burlesque.15 The “indescribability” of the quixote stems not merely from Quixote’s peculiar strain of madness but also from the fact that quixotic characters could be reactionaries (Washington Irving’s Diedrich Knickerbocker) or radicals (Charles Lucas’s Marauder), gentry (Smollett’s Launcelot Greaves) or clergy (Fielding’s Parson Adams), women (Tabitha Gilman Tenney’s Dorcasina) or men (Royall Tyler’s Updike Underhill). This variety has certainly given way to the problem of the quixotic character’s polyvalence, as well as the exceptionality of the quixote as a slippery character who eschews definition and transgresses the conventional boundaries of genre, nationality, and political ideology. Accordingly, readers could scour the depths of these quixotic characters almost endlessly, without fixing immediately on a singular, quixotic “type” that might short-circuit the reader’s imaginative social self-positioning through “deep” character exploration. In other words, quixotic characters were ideally suitable for the kinds of social and interpretive reading practices that were central to how eighteenth-century readers apprehended character.

We can see further how the reproduction of the quixotic character throughout the eighteenth century—whether read roughly as a “type” or perused case by case for the “depth” of the individual quixote—also reflects what Lynch identifies as an important “shift in the economy of characteristic writing.” This shift—from reading character for clearly legible “types” to reading character as part of a signifying system increasingly reliant on particulars and fine detail—arose from print-culture-related anxieties about the “copy theory of knowledge” that “postulated a mimetic relation between ideas and the external objects of sensation that ideas imagined.”16

If, as Lynch posits, the “enhancement of communications technologies in the early modern period” and the heightening of commercial print culture meant that “an unprecedented attention to fine detail” was required of readers to differentiate between originals and copies, then the “newly intense emphasis on uniform reproduction” that results is especially relevant to the reproduction of quixotes in eighteenth-century fiction.17 Translating the Quixote meant at once grappling with questions of accuracy and precision in translation and the question of cultural fit, or how to introduce Quixote such that the Quixote’s particular characteristics would be legible to a British readership. As the early translators indicate, portraying the character of Don Quixote accurately, with precise attention to his humor-generating and sympathy-generating foibles and mannerisms, was sometimes in tension with framing the Quixote such that British audiences could relate to him.

Further, as British authors began to adopt the quixote for their own narratives, this tension between faithful and legible imitation gained increasing importance. Authors like Henry Fielding and Charlotte Lennox gave ample indications that characters like Parson Adams and Arabella were to be read and understood as spin-offs of Don Quixote, yet these characters also took on, quite ostentatiously, the language and mannerisms of British types in British settings. In Henry Fielding’s dramatic rendering of the Quixote story, Don Quixote in England (1734), for example, Sancho Panza tells us he is “so fond of the English rost beef and strong beer, that I don’t intend ever to set my Foot in Spain again.”18 Not coincidentally, the question of whether English roast beef or Spanish mutton is the more desirable food comes up as well in eighteenth-century English translations of Don Quixote, particularly in Smollett’s satirical translator’s notes on the proportion of beef to mutton in a Spanish dish whose translation was under dispute.19 In these ways, translating the character of Quixote and his supporting cast meant simultaneously coding the Quixote for more local sensibilities while decoding Cervantes’s Quixote from a British perspective. This coding-decoding dynamic also enabled quixotic figures to embody and critique national stereotypes (England as a stout, “rost beef” society, for example), feeding into larger commentaries on nationalism and international relations.

Here again we get the impression that the project of rewriting the quixote is an inherently paradoxical endeavor, fraught with inconsistencies and plagued by tensions and hybrid identities. Nevertheless, if we consider the great reproduction of quixotes that ensued in literatures in English from 1612 to 1815 as at least partly a manifestation of the successful translation of the quixotic character type, we see that quixotic characters have been able to transcend authors’ and readers’ scruples about inconsistency, tension, and cultural hybridity. The quixotic character possessed traits that made it particularly attractive to eighteenth-century British readers who looked to literary characters as vessels for positioning themselves within a society under the considerable influence of commercial imperatives, and the more specific socioeconomic demands of prestige and individuation.20

Here we can observe that Lynch’s argument about the role eighteenth-century characters played in social self-positioning in the world is consistent with Manning’s understanding of eighteenth-century character as relational and analogical, an occasion for readers to engage in ethical reasoning with and through fictional characters. Further, “characters are not ontologically different because they inhabit possible, rather than actual worlds to which novels merely refer,” writes Gallagher. “They are different because they are ‘constructs of textual activity.’ ” It is precisely the fictionality of characters that enables an “inviting openness” that draws us to them.21

To caution against the misunderstanding that all eighteenth-century readers clamored voraciously for more iterations of their favorite characters’ stories, Brewer cites Samuel Johnson’s famous rhetorical question, “Was ever yet any thing written by mere man that was wished longer by its readers, excepting Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, and the Pilgrim’s Progress?”22 Notwithstanding Johnson’s justifiably sound and thus heavily weighted reputation as an eighteenth-century reader, we might nonetheless attribute this list of exceptional texts to Johnson’s idiosyncrasy. Yet it would be an understatement of comical proportion to suggest at this point that Don Quixote, named here as one of the texts that even Johnson wanted more of, did indeed deliver more. Don Quixote became something of an eighteenth-century literary meme who generated increasing cultural capital with each new reproduction of a quixote-type character.

In Brewer’s assessment of the comments of a sample, flesh-and-blood eighteenth-century reader on Smollett’s rewriting of the quixote story in Launcelot Greaves, we see that (in the reader’s words) “the novels in which these characters are to be found . . . will furnish perpetual amusement.” Further, this amusement is particularly special because Launcelot Greaves and his squire, Timothy Crabshaw, “resemble” Don Quixote and Sancho Panza “without imitating, and remind us of what imparted exquisite enjoyment, without diminishing their own novelty.”23 If we consider the anxieties translators of the original Quixote faced—anxieties produced by the mutual but at times conflicting desires to represent accurately and to represent in ways new audiences could relate to—we see that this concern becomes further complicated by the benefits that accrue to those who can imitate, but not slavishly. Translating the quixotic character for the British reader also meant making the character paradoxically novel and familiar. The Quixote, then, was a character to whom British readers related in large part because of the many translations and reconfigurations of his story available to them. But Quixote was also highly legible and reproducible because these translations and reconfigurations perpetuated both the sociability of the quixotic character and the many stories of these characters as representatives of a highly visible character canon. Brewer takes Shakespeare’s Falstaff as the “inexhaustible” character of his study, but we can see just as well how the quixote archetype proved just as inexhaustible.24

Brewer offers a parallel discussion of first principles of character as a way of confronting what I would refer to as Brewer’s “Multiple Falstaffs Problem,” whose analogue here is obvious. In the face of the confusion wrought not just by multiple and vastly differing representations of a character type but also by inconsistencies, gaps, and mysteries within singular portrayals of character, looking to what we might call first principles of character is a method that, in Brewer’s words, “offers a superior means of dealing with the conflicting emotions which a character like Falstaff inspires.”25 I argue likewise that operating from first principles of character is useful for unpacking this range of inconsistencies we tend to find in quixotes, who represent character inconsistencies to readers not in spite of the fact that they are types and not a singular character with a consistent backstory but because they are types. The crisis of meaning surrounding the term “quixotic”—the problem with which I began this study—is evidence that the very character inconsistencies that Brewer identifies in singular characters who appear across texts are only magnified in dealing with character archetypes who appear across texts.

Rather than spinning wheels in the muddied waters of the conflicting character positions offered by the seemingly endless reproduction of versions featuring these inexhaustible characters and character archetypes, finding in the end that, unsurprisingly, these versions provide little intellectual consistency, we should acknowledge and confront the deracination of the inexhaustible character.

This deracination, what Brewer terms the “character migration” that occurs when readers imagine characters’ lives “extending off-page in ways which suggest their fundamental independence and detachability,” might also apply to the act of writing inexhaustible characters.26 When so many prominent authors reconfigure the Quixote in new narratives, they necessarily lend both “independence and detachability” to the new quixote, who then becomes a participant in something larger than Cervantes’s original. Though scholars have been quick to label this larger thing a genre, it is more accurately a character canon, made coherent not by the formal or stylistic elements of genre, but by the reproducible elements of character.

In other words, authors, too, were crucial participants in character reproducibility. Brewer is attentive to the role of readers in perpetuating characters’ “off-page” lives; however, some very prominent authors—Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Lennox—would copy just as blithely in writing a kind of quixote fan-fiction.27 Questions over who wrote the character with more faithfulness, nuance, or originality played out not just between authors and readers but among very prominent authors themselves. Rewriting a common character type with authority meant that the quixote was not only part of the social formation of the character canon “from below” but also a legible signifier that appealed in both Britain and the early US to a privileged and often politically connected group of authors who used the quixotic figure as a vehicle for political and ideological positioning. The quixotic character certainly took on meaning to readers of fiction looking to reap from character the individual benefits made available by character reading in general, but the quixotic character also took on an important role “from above” as an icon of social commentary and political maneuvering.