University of Cambridge
Paulson's book is about the influence of Don Quijote on the evolution of the aesthetics of laughter and satire in eighteenth-century England. Cervantes' novel was immensely popular in that period, being a key reference-point for its foremost writers; and, because of the rise of empiricism and the decentralizing of political power, they used it in a way that was unmatched in contemporary France and Spain. It put in question -Paulson argues- the conventional equation of comedy with satire and laughter with ridicule, as expounded by Hobbes in his Leviathan. For the royalist and Anglican Jonathan Swift, Don Quijote's madness symbolizes the Moderns' quest to change —221→ the world: using the norm of common experience, it exposes the folly of the unfettered enthusiasm of Dissenters and radical nonconformist sects. The Whig Joseph Addison, on the other hand, in the Spectator (1711-12), takes Quixotic madness as a model for revaluing the imagination that Swift treats as transgressive, and transforms Swiftian satiric ridicule into pure comedy, based on an aesthetics of pleasurable response or sympathetic laughter, an area which he designated as the Novel, New, or Uncommon. In this Addison follows the Earl of Shaftesbury, who, in his «Letter Concerning Enthusiasm and Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour», upholds civilized, good-humored raillery, which he sees as a test of gravity, and while criticizing Enthusiasm in its fanatical religious form, defends it, in poetry, as an instrument of the Sublime. The engraver and cartoonist William Hogarth, a prominent figure in Paulson's story, adopts a position akin to Addison's. His transformation of religious symbols into aesthetic equivalents involves secularizing and humanizing them, assimilating them to a Sanchopanzine ideal of blemished but living beauty, which is experienced as Novelty and grounded in a response of laughter.
Many other writers and themes figure in Paulson's account: Henry Fielding's debunking and transformation of Richardson's Pamela, the Quixotism of the hero of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Sterne's conception of the hobby-horse in Tristram Shandy, and the conversion of Marcela (Don Quijote I, 14) into the heroine of Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1742). Cervantes' masterpiece is a paradigm in all these cases, which bring four contentious problems into play: the madness of the imagination, the cruelty of laughter and ridicule, the question whether the re are objective norms of beauty, and the extension of madness to religious belief.
Paulson's book takes its cue from two seminal texts. The first is Milan Kundera's essay «The Day Panurge No Longer Makes People Laugh», in which the Czech novelist defines humor as bound up with the birth of the novel and as an imaginary terrain where moral judgement is suspended. Paulson also draws on Michael McKeon's chapter on Don Quijote in The Origins of the English Novel (1987), according to whom Cervantes' work entails that the modern disenchantment of the world involves not the eradication of enchantment but its secular reappropriation.
This is a detailed, substantial study, particularly illuminating on the
interconnections among the foremost aestheticians of the period, their
diverse responses to Don Quijote, and the interplay between aesthetics and
ideology, political or religious. I sometimes found the exposition over-detailed,
perhaps because of my unfamiliarity with some of the texts. Had
Paulson stuck to the brief that he defines on p. xi: «Bracketing the intentions
of Cervantes himself or the response of his Spanish readers in the seventeenth
century, I examine the text of Don Quixote from the perspective of an
eighteenth-century English reader»
, I would have had few quibbles. However,
in Chapters One and Two in particular he pursues a line indicated by
—222→
the sentence immediately following the one just quoted: «I do not wish to
deviate from the Cervantean text: everything to which I draw attention is
there»
. In general, I found Paulson's interpretations of passages in Don Quijote
and comments on its background shaky and outdated. Readers of this journal
will be surprised to read statements like these: «Don Quixote's one fictional
predecessor in Spain was La vida de Lazarillo de Tormes»
(p. 7); «Maritornes's
jest that leaves Quixote hanging from the gate precariously balanced on the
back of Rocinante»
(p. 19); «to judge by the comedia of Lope [de Vega] and
Cervantes, many of these plays were essentially Plautine comedies»
(p. 38);
«from the view of Sancho the peasant, 'a figure as low and repulsive as that
village girl' [i. e. the wench sighted outside El Toboso], is beautiful»
(p. 85). I
also find it odd, given that Paulson aims to look at Don Quijote from the
perspective of the eighteenth-century reader, that he chooses as his base text
Samuel Putnam's prim and modernizing translation. Doubtless none of these
defects will matter much to the staff and students of English literature and
comparative literature departments to whom this book is primarily addressed.
However, Hispanists should be warned of them. This does not
detract from the book's merits as a source of information about how Don
Quijote was interpreted by posterity.