Tuesday, May 19, 2015

On Being Quixotic and Having Panache






My friend the very talented artist, calligrapher and illustrator Valle Camacho Matute recently opened an exhibition in Logroño, Spain. The show is called La Segunda Parte, and in it  her wonderful artwork celebrates the 400th anniversary of the publication of the second part of the great novel by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.It's an outstanding exposition that has inspired me to reread the wonderful story of don Quixote and his squire Sancho Panza, and it got me to thinking about my relationship with the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha.


I think for most of my generation learned about Don Quixote after the premiere of that great Broadway musical The Man from La Mancha. When Richard Kiley sang Joe Darion's lyrics to The Impossible Dream by it made him a Broadway star and it define who Don Quixote was, his quest, and what it was to be quixotic.

To dream the impossible dream
To fight the unbeatable foe
To bear with unbearable sorrow
To run where the brave dare not go
To right the unrightable wrong
To love pure and chaste from afar
To try when your arms are too weary
To reach the unreachable star
This is my quest
To follow that star
No matter how hopeless
No matter how far
To fight for the right
Without question or pause
To be willing to march into Hell
For a heavenly cause
And I know if I'll only be true
To this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm
When I'm laid to my rest
And the world will be better for this
That one man, scorned and covered with scars
Still strove with his last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable star

I, however, already sort of knew about Don Quixote and his quest. A few years before my dad had purchased a set of 45s recording of the great speeches from 1950 movie of Edmond Rostand's 1897 play "Cyrano de Bergerac." The actor who played heroic large-nosed swordsman in this 'heroic comedy' was played José Ferrer who coincidentally would take over for Richard Kiley on the Broadway production of The Man from La Mancha

Ferrar was great portraying the panache of Cyrano-especially when in Act One. There his panache is quickly demonstrated when he rebuffs an insult by saying the different and more clever ways the insult could have been delivered. Then during the sword fight with his antagonist that follows, Cyrano creates a ballad which consists of three verses of eight lines each and a two line coda. As they duel, he ends each verse with the words "at the coda's end_I hit!" At the coda's end, the swordsman and poet strikes home and kills his opponent.

Later in Act Two, Cyrano talks about Don Quixote in the following exchange with his powerful enemy the Comte de Guiche:

DE QUICHE [controlled, smiling]: Have you ever read "Don Quixote?"
CYRANO: With great delight. I take my hat off to that old fly-by-night.
DE QUICHE: I suggest you study. . .I mean the passage about the windmills.
CYRANO: Chapter Thirteen.
DE QUICHE: When you make war on windmills you may find---
CYRANO: I'm tilting at men who veer with every wind?
DE QUICHE: That those mill-sails will thrash their mighty spars and throw you in the mud.
CYRANO: Or up among the stars!

Even though the story of the windmills is in Chapter Eight and not Thirteen, Rostand's Cyrano truly understands Don Quixote and his gallant quest. When he calls the novel "that old fly-by-night," he is sharing in the audience's familiarity with the classic as well. According to Cambridge scholar Anthony Close, Cervantes' hero was well known to educated readers and theatergoers of the 19th century. In fact, the quixote hero was something of a type of character, and the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha is the "father to some unexpected offspring, among them Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), the hero of Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1868), Maxi in Galdós's Fortunata y Jacinta (1887)---and Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac."

As I think about it now, I didn't first meet Don Quixote through the portrayal of Cyrano de Bergerac, but through through another character in an 1849 poem by Edgar Allen Poe entitled Eldorado. I first read in a book of 19th Century poetry when I was eight or nine in a book that my mom had used in college. The  poem has elements of both having panache and being quixotic.

Panche because it's about a gaily bedight and gallant knight who sings a song as he searches for Eldorado. Over time, he becomes disillusioned because his quest has not been realized. Quixotic because he's reminded by a pilgrim (i.e., another person on a quest) that he must "Ride, boldly ride" if he's ever to reach his goal. Eldorado written El Dorado means the golden man. Perhaps the shade is reminding the knight what he must do to be the man the wants to be. Eldorado is one of Poe's last works; perhaps the poet wrote it as a reflection on his own life quests.

With Cyrano de Bergerac, Rostand popularized the word panache in French and English. The word is first used in Act One and is Cyrano's last word before he dies: 


CYRANO: Yes, the last of the laurel is cut alright,

And the rose is withered. Nevertheless, tonight
When I make my sweeping bow at heaven's gate,
One thing I shall still possess, at any rate,
Unscathed, something outlasting mortal flesh,
And that is . . . [He holds his sword aloft.]
[The sword falls from his hands, he staggers and falls into the arms of LE BRET and RAGUENEAU]
ROXANE[Leaning over to kiss his brow]: That . . .that is?
CYRANO [opening his eyes and smiling at her]: My panache.

Rostand would say later that "panache is nothing but grace; . . .a grace which is so difficult to retain in the face of death, a grace which demand so much grace." I think it's more than that. Heroic young men are described as having daring and panache. Some gallant old men are admired or criticized for quixotic. Both words however evoke the same feeling of searching for an ideal in the real world.



Perhaps having panache and being quixote are pretty much the same thing. In Cyrano, the old hero brandishes his sword with panache in response to his final challenge, collapses, and dies in the arms of Roxanne the woman that he has loved pure and chaste from a far with old friends nearby.  In Man from La Mancha, Quixote brandishes his sword similairly in response to the start of a new quest, collapses, and dies in the arms of Dulcinea the woman that he has loved pure and chaste from a far while old friend and squire Sancho stands nearby. Both men have panache in their last moments, and both are being quixotic. 

This blog so far has been about a 19th Century heroic type that has endured until today. It remains a heroic type. Heros with panache or are quixote can easily found nowadays and throughout the 20th Cenury in popular books and the movies from Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. in The Prisoner of Zenda to Sean Connery in the James Bond movies to Kevin Kline and company in Silverado. That is the heroic type-the Quixote- that I was raised on. What about the Don Quixote that Cervantes wrote about at the turn of the 17th Century who inspired all these great poets, writers and playwrights of the 19th Century?

It's been said the Cervantes Don Quixote should be read at least three times: once as a young man, once as a middle aged man, and once as an old man. The first time that I read it, I was 49 years old. I started reading it here in Phoenix and finished it in a tapas bar in Jaca, Spain while on my first peregrination to Santiago de Compostela. It was an inspiring read, but it was about a Don Quixote and Sancho Panza who were somewhat different than whom that I had known. Later that summer, I even went to see the windmills in La Mancha and visited the home of Dulcinea in El Toloboso.

It seemed to me that the first great novel in the Western canon is about a guy with a mid-life crisis. I probably came to that idea because I was going through my own mid-life crisis while I was reading it, but still I think it is a valid conclusion.The middle-aged Alonso Quixano-a hildago which is a lower rank of Spanish nobility-lives a lean life of forced frugality on the featureless plain of La Mancha. His only pastime is reading books about the adventures of chivalrous knights. As he becomes disillusioned with the reality of his life as it is, he imagines the ideal life that he wants-the life as a knight errant- a life as Don Quixote. He become a knight who in his own mind is greater than Lancelot or Roland As he tried to maintain this ideal identity in his real world, the people around him considered him to mad.

Perhaps he was, and perhaps pursuing an ideal in the real world is quixotic, but for me and others it is an admirable madness. That's what sets Don Quixote apart. Despite their buffoonery, the mad knight and his squire have pathos. Both are on a quest. Quixote wants to be a knight worthy of his love Dulcinea. The less than noble Sancho wants to be ruler of an island by being his master's squire.


Even so, the 17th Century Quixote is not as crazy as he might seem. When he almost receives a concussion testing out his helmet, he is unwilling to test it a second time. When Sancho is unable to see a heroic challenges Quixote says lay at hand, his master dismisses his uncertainty as being the work of evil enemy enchanters. Additionally when they talk about adventures that will lead to Sancho getting his island, they ponder if they'll have to marry noble women to close the deal; it's a thorny issue but not a deal killer.


The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605, the second part came into print a decade later. The first part has a lot of physical torment-like really rough Three Stooges humor. Our duo are beaten, whipped, and stoned throughout the story. In the second part, the trauma is more mental. Quixote and Sancho Panza suffer from the burlas or elaborate practical jokes at the hands of others for cruel entertainment. It wears down their resolve. If a person can escape the disillusionment of everyday through madness, how do the mad escape their disillusionment?

The knight and his squire go home to La Mancha. There, they shed their dreams. Sancho Panzo accepts that he will never be a governor of an island. Don Quixote accepts that he will die without his Dulcinea. Without his ideal, the now restored to sanity Alonso Quixano decides to escape the reality around him-not with a brandished sword, but by making his last will and testament where he warns his niece about marrying a man who book about chivalrous knights.

The story of the old hidalgo is one of humor and pathos. Readers have cared about Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for 400 years. In the final pages, Cervantes write "whether Don Quixote was simply Alonso Quixano the Good or whether he was Don Quixote of La Mancha, he always had a gentle disposition and was kind in his treatment of others, and for this reason he was dearly loved not only by those in his household, but by everyone who knew him." There is no finer epithet for a man or a knight errant.

Thank you, Valle, for your wonderful exhibition that celebrates La Segunda Parte of the great Spanish novel we call Don Quixote. Thank you for inspiring me to reread this wonderful classic of the Western canon. Thank you for reminding me that it's important to visit our old friends and heroes. Thank you for reminding also of the importance of continuing seek an ideal in this all too real world. As the pilgrim shadow in Eldorado reminds us, we should "boldly ride" if we are searching for the treasure of a better world.


Artwork by Valle Camacho Matute






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