Was "not a coincidence" but now I'm not sure...

I’ll start with “a voice”

Daumier tried to capture Don Quixote as a character who had escaped Cervantes and the prison bars of lines of print on pages of a book. And it seems to be true, DQ has escaped the world of “retreat” and has entered the “real” world as an icon of some kind, known by everybody from scholar to man-in-the-street. This escape from the author and even the story the author placed him in is quite fascinating. Sherlock Holmes has done it, so has the monster of Frankenstein, and Dracula, probably Ebenezer Scrooge. They no longer have to have anything to the book that gave them birth, but they can if they want to. They are comfortable in both the “real” world and the splendid world of “retreat”.

…and continue with “Otto”

I love the notion of the "creature" being free of the creator - free to be accessed by anyone who sees themself in him or her.

…and then it’s over to me…

I’d already titled this entry “not a coincidence” and I was starting to write it in my head while on my way to work this morning.

But there is a coincidence, something I probably looked at a long time ago but didn’t remember – especially as both the back and front covers of my Penguin Classic DQ fell off several months ago so I don’t see the real cover as the cover anymore – I just see what I have left which is really just the title page and the text. The papers are all curling up at the bottom right corner and I’ve now torn a couple of pages…but I believe this is a Daumier painting on the cover that I’ve kept and sometimes use as a bookmark:















So now to the part that is not a coincidence or is no longer a coincidence:

A couple of months ago, the local Jane Austen Fellowship group asked me if I would give a talk on Austen at one of their upcoming meetings. I agreed but put them off a bit. Now the date is fast approaching. I vaguely said I’d talk about either the juvenilia or the influence of earlier authors on Austen but I’ve decided now that I’ll incorporate DQ.

I have a somewhat uncomfortable relationship to Jane Austen’s work. I used to teach a course on Austen which I enjoyed but I am definitely not a Janeite. My students were either appalled by this or didn’t care. They were amused by my attachment to Austen’s juvenilia – one of the Janeites suggested that it was a sign of my immaturity. So be it. The juvenilia makes me laugh and it’s clever. I’ll report on my journey to integrate Austen and DQ (it’s fairly obvious in Northanger Abbey that Austen is borrowing from either DQ or Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote which is an eighteenth-century rewriting of DQ – and a very funny book too!).