As of about eleven o'clock last night
I was on page 395 of Don Quixote. I think maybe that’s about halfway but it looks like (without checking) that it’s not quite. I’ve been very hard on this book. I bang it around a lot. The cover is now the bookmark. I used to recommend to my students that they throw their novels across the room and half jokingly speculated that where a book lay after it was thrown might have some significance…Where things lie with DQ now does have some significance…as he has just become active again after sitting quietly in the wings for some pages now. I liked how we were given a glimpse of him on page 386:
And there stood Don Quixote, listening and speechless, pondering on these extraordinary events and attributing them all to the chimeras of knight errantry.
No wonder I feel so much like him as I too have been sitting quietly and listening and watching in wonder since we got back to the inn for the second time.
One thing I wonder about is the role of coincidence in a story.
In a short section of the book between the battle with the wineskins and the trick the innkeeper’s daughter & Maritornes play on Don Quixote, there are many coincidences linking apparently random visitors to the inn together. These are labelled “more strange events,” “yet more adventures,” “other strange events”. Why is DQ set apart and explained away so often -- “telling them who he was, and that they need pay no attention to him, for he was out of his mind” when all or almost all of the characters seem subject to the same wonder that he is…
How do you respond to coincidences in stories?
posted by Anne @ 9:23 AM
5 Comments:
i guess i wonder how can the resonance of coincidence carry any uncanniness if the story is fiction? If Don Quixote is a parody of romance novels maybe contrived coincidences reinforce the mundane, the same way employing ufo's in a story puts the focus on the people of Earth.
I think I'm reading the book differently from the middle of it than I would from the beginning or from the end. Though I can recognize elements of parody or sense an overview, an angle from which I can view the book as a whole, I'm not, as a reader, really in that position right now. There are these moments of tenderness in the story that really give me a sense of a sincere belief in the wonder of stories. The coincidences are part of that. Right now they read optimistically -- I believe in them at a certain level (which I don't always do -- coincidences are often only groaning fodder). I think it's because the central figures around DQ respect him and want to help him. Do the coincidences play into that project (of preserving DQ) in a more positive way -- or am I only seeing this now, from the perspective of the middle of the book??
"tenderness" is a sweet word. an impression of non-harming in the center of this story; non-harming in the sense that the reader is not aware of the writer's guile and that the story is unfolding for you and DQ at the same moment...
that word tenderness came up for me reading "The bird of Paradise" today, by RD Laing, so here's an exerpt!
...Tenderness too is possible
Ah Tenderness
Wandering
Suddenly I come upon one of my many childhoods
Preserved in forgetfulness
For this moment when it was most required.
Yes, tenderness...I think you've pinpointed something here about where I am with DQ - without the whole picture yet, I can stay in the moment. I have choices as a reader. I can accept or hold-off the (inevitable?)theme or the moral of the story. If I choose to or can't finish the book, am I choosing to hold-off in a more fundamental way? Is this a sign that I am losing my wits to reading or is it the strategy employed by a wit...?
are wit and witness related words, i wonder.
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