Don Quixote and the Subversive Tradition of Golden Age Spain by R.K. Britton

Author:R.K. Britton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: International Specialized Book Services
Published: 2018-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

6

Humour, Irony and Satire in

Don Quixote

Public Merriment and Private Laughter

There is a well-known anecdote that, on hearing one of his courtiers suddenly burst into a peal of spontaneous laughter, King Philip III of Spain commented: “He must be reading Don Quixote.” The question of humour in Cervantes’ novel – what kind it is, its centrality to the book’s conception and how the author chooses to employ it – has had its fair share of critical attention since its infectious influence began to spread across Western Europe and the New World. But since the early 1960s, when P. E. Russell’s important and controversial article “Don Quixote as a Funny Book” appeared,1 a keen, historicist light has been shed on the subject. Professor Russell’s argument was that Cervantes himself regarded his experimental narrative to be an inducement to laughter, and that there was no evidence that either its author or its international readership, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, saw it other-wise – in short, it was universally regarded as primarily a source of amusement.

To a significant extent, this view, which was shared and developed by a number of Cervantes specialists, notably A. J. Close, questioned the assumptions behind the Romantic school of Cervantes criticism which had dominated the period from 1830 to 1920. Indeed, Close’s influential work The Romantic Approach to “Don Quixote” (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979) effectively challenged the basis for symbolic readings of the book which turned its mad protagonist into a tragic figure – the idealist ultimately defeated by a cynical and materialistic world. But in the process, both Russell and Close raised some necessary questions about humour in Don Quixote, namely, what did Cervantes and his contemporaries regard as funny, and how far could humour and hilarity be exploited in a fictional narrative without causing offence? Close’s investigation of these questions in his study entitled Cervantes and the Comic Mind of his Age (2000)2 provided a number of detailed and well-researched answers.

But laughter, particularly in the literary sphere, is a notoriously two-edged weapon. It is almost always subversive, even when sympathetic, because it banishes seriousness and strips away dignity and authority from whatever it is directed at. A “funny book” is always likely to exploit the laughter of its readers for some particular end, often doing so in the form of satire. The things that made Cervantes’ contemporaries laugh are mostly familiar enough to the post-modern reader. The incongruous, the ugly or misshapen – including human beings – often excited mocking, ribald merriment. Accidents and physical mishaps might also be greeted with laughter, much to the probable chagrin of the victims. Obscenity and scatological humour were – and still are – commonplace among ordinary people, as was parody, iconoclasm and almost any kind of irreverence directed by the masses at their social superiors. These were all mainly “vulgar,” spontaneous forms of humour, which, along with word-play, slang and thieves’ cant, made up the popular “carnavalesque” tradition so brilliantly defined by Bakhtin. These were the cultural patrimony of all classes, notwithstanding their social position.

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