Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  If you are questing for the transcendental and extraordinary, you need not read Jane Austen, but who can quest day after day throughout a lifetime? Elizabeth Bennet has little in common with Clarissa Harlowe. Jane Austen does not present us with Protestant saints. Shakespeare’s Rosalind is a closer forerunner, though even Elizabeth cannot compare to that superb vision of a woman.

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  Intersubjectivity is enough of a problem for me without sliding over into the occult. Many years ago, I wrote a commentary on Henry Corbin’s Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi; the book was published in French in 1958. My preface dates from 1997, and I have not reread it since then. I recall that the preface was very substantial and devoted mostly to what the Sufis call Hurqalya, the imaginal realm:

  Between the world of pure spiritual Lights (Luces victoriales, the world of the “Mothers” in the terminology of Ishraq) and the sensory universe, at the boundary of the ninth Sphere (the Sphere of Spheres) there opens a mundus imaginalis which is a concrete spiritual world of archetype-Figures, apparitional Forms, Angeles of species and individuals; by philosophical dialects its necessity is deduced and its plane situated; vision of it in actuality is vouchsafed to the visionary apperception of the Active Imagination. The essential connection in Sohravardi which leads from philosophical speculation to a metaphysics of ecstasy also establishes the connection between the angelology of this neo-Zoroastrian Platonism and the idea of the mundus imaginalis. This, Sohravardi declares, is the world to which the ancient Sages alluded when they affirmed that beyond the sensory world there exists another universe with a contour and dimensions and extension in a space, although these are not comparable with the shape and spatiality as we perceive them in the world of physical bodies. It is the “eighth” keshvar, the mystical Earth of Hurqalya with emerald cities; it is situated on the summit of the cosmic mountain, which the traditions handed down in Islam call the mountain of Qaf.

  (The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism)

  Ibn ‘Arabi calls Hurqalya “Creative Imagination.” Corbin translates from ‘Arabi’s major work, The Book of the Spiritual Conquests of Mecca:

  Know that when God had created Adam who was the first human organism to be constituted, and when he had established him as the origin and archetype of all human bodies, there remained a surplus of the leaven of the clay. From this surplus God created the palm tree, so that this plant (nakhla, palm tree, being feminine) is Adam’s sister; for us, therefore, it is like an aunt on our father’s side. In theology it is so described and is compared to the faithful believer. No other plant bears within it such extraordinary secrets as are hidden in this one. Now, after the creation of the palm tree, there remained hidden a portion of the clay from which the plant had been made: what was left was the equivalent of a sesame seed. And it was in this remainder that God laid out an immense Earth. Since he arranged in it the Throne and what it contains, the Firmament, the Heavens and the Earths, the worlds underground, all the paradises and hells, this means that the whole of our universe is to be found there in that Earth in its entirety, and yet the whole of it together is like a ring lost in one of our deserts in comparison with the immensity of that Earth. And that same Earth has hidden in it so many marvels and strange things that their number cannot be counted and our intelligence remains dazed by them.

  (Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth [1977])

  To me it is the loveliest of creation myths. From the remnant of the clay left over after Adam’s creation, God made the palm tree, Adam’s sister. That highly original making still left another tiny remainder, and from that God created the immensity of the heavens and the earths, the paradises and hells.

  My dreams were commonplace. I sat at the dining-room table surrounded only by the ghosts of dead friends. I tried talking to them, but there were no answers. Baffled, I started to recite poems: Yeats, E. A. Robinson, Eliot, Stevens, Hart Crane, Shelley, and many others. It all went into the void, and my throat became sore. I left the table to find water and as usual got lost.

  When I reached a river, it was too far below me, and my thirst was unabated.

  CHAPTER 1

  Don Quixote (1615)

  MIGUEL DE CERVANTES

  CERVANTES, in relation to the Spanish language, stands with the titans of European and American literature. He is what Shakespeare is to English, Dante to Italian, Goethe to German, Pushkin to Russian: the glory of the vernacular. There may be no single eminence in French: Rabelais, Racine, Molière, Montaigne, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, Stendhal, Balzac, Flaubert, Proust, Paul Valéry are among writers of the first order. In Russian, Tolstoy alone challenges Pushkin.

  The Desert Island Question (“If just one book, which?”) has no universal answer, but many readers would choose among three: the King James Bible, the complete Shakespeare, and Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Is it an oddity that the three competitors were almost simultaneous? The King James Bible appeared in 1611, six years after the publication of the first part of Don Quixote, in 1605 (the second part came a decade later, in 1615). In 1605, Shakespeare matched the greatness of Cervantes’s masterwork with King Lear, and then went on rapidly to Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

  It could be argued that Don Quixote is the central work of the last half-millennium, since the greater novelists tend to be as much Cervantes’s children as they are Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare teaches us how to talk to ourselves, whereas Cervantes instructs us how to talk to one another. Hamlet scarcely listens to what anyone else says (except it be the Ghost); Falstaff so delights himself that Prince Hal can seem merely the best of resentful students and half-voluntary audiences. But Don Quixote and Sancho Panza change and mature by listening to each other, and their friendship is the most persuasive in all of literature.

  Sancho Panza or Falstaff? Don Quixote or Hamlet? Hamlet has only Horatio. Falstaff dies almost solitary. But Don Quixote dies in the loving presence of Sancho, who proposes new quests to his heroic Knight. I have frequently argued that Shakespeare invented the ever-growing inward self, condemned to be its own adventure, as Emily Dickinson affirmed.

  Cervantes, whose life was arduous and darkly solitary, either had endless bad luck or had to battle against the stigma of being a “New Christian,” a converso of Jewish descent. He insisted he was of “untainted blood” and allows Sancho Panza to denounce “the Jews.” Yet he had to go into exile to Italy, for legal reasons, and then enlisted in the Spanish military. He fought with exemplary courage at the naval Battle of Lepanto in 1571, under the command of Don John of Austria, and sustained three serious bullet wounds. He underwent half a year of rehabilitation, and permanently lost the use of his left arm. When he enlisted again, he was captured by Barbary pirates, and endured five years of captivity in Algiers. Finally, he was ransomed by a monk of the Trinitarian Order and by his parents.

  His vicissitudes were far from finished. He was imprisoned for several months when he served as a purchasing agent for the Spanish navy, and had later difficulties as a tax collector. Despite the instant success of Don Quixote, Part I (1605), he received no royalties and had to bring out the second part in 1615, when a plagiarist published a dubious sequel to Part I. He could not find sufficient patronage from noblemen, but finally received enough of a stipend so he could devote himself to writing in his final years.

  Cervantes (1547–1616) died the day before Shakespeare (1564–1616) and doubtless never heard of the English dramatist. Shakespeare had so uneventful and colorless a life that no biography of him can be at all persuasive. The significant facts can be stated in a few paragraphs. Cervantes, however, experienced a difficult and violent existence, though no account of his life worthy of the subject exists as yet in English.

  Reading Don Quixote, I am not at all convinced that scholars who believe book and writer devout are at all accurate, if only because they miss his irony. But, t
hen, many scholars tell us that Shakespeare was Catholic, and again I am not persuaded, since his major allusions are to the Geneva Bible, a very Protestant version. Don Quixote, like the later Shakespeare, seems to me more nihilistic than Christian, and both of these greatest Western imaginers hint that annihilation is the final fate of the soul.

  What is it that makes Don Quixote Shakespeare’s only rival for the highest aesthetic glory? Cervantes is superbly comic, as is Shakespeare, but Don Quixote is no more to be characterized as comedy than is Hamlet. Philip II, who exhausted the resources of the Spanish Empire on behalf of the Counter-Reformation, died in 1598, a decade after the fiasco of the Spanish Armada, destroyed by the gales and English seamen. The Spain depicted in Don Quixote is post-1598: impoverished, demoralized, clergy-ridden, with the underlying sadness of having wrecked itself a century before by exiling or driving underground its large and productive Jewish and Muslim communities. Much of Don Quixote, as of Shakespeare, needs to be read between the lines. When the amiable Sancho Panza shouts that he himself is an Old Christian and hates the Jews, does the subtle Cervantes intend us to receive this without irony? The context of Don Quixote is squalor, except for the noble houses, which are bastions of mockery and racism, subjecting the wonderful Don Quixote to horrible practical jokes.

  As masters of representation, Shakespeare and Cervantes alike are vitalists, which is why Falstaff and Sancho Panza bear the Blessing. But these two foremost of modern writers are also skeptics, so that Hamlet and Don Quixote are ironists, even when they behave like madmen. Gusto, a primal exuberance, is the shared genius of the Castilian father of the novel and the English poet-dramatist beyond all others, before or since, in any language.

  Freedom, for Quixote and for Sancho, is a function of the order of play, which is disinterested and precarious. The play of the world, for Quixote, is a purified view of chivalry, the game of knights-errant, virtuously beautiful and distressed damozels, nasty and powerful enchanters, as well as giants, ogres, and idealized quests. Don Quixote is courageously mad and obsessively courageous, but he is not self-deceived. He knows who he is, but also who he may be, if he chooses. When a moralizing priest accuses the Knight of an absence in reality, and orders him to go home and cease wandering, Quixote replies realistically that as knight-errant he has righted wrongs, chastised arrogance, and crushed assorted monsters.

  Why did the invention of the novel have to wait for Cervantes? Now, in the twenty-first century, the novel seems to be experiencing a long day’s dying. Our contemporary masters—Pynchon, the late Philip Roth, and others—seem forced to retreat back to picaresque and the romance form, pre-Cervantine. Shakespeare and Cervantes created much of human personality as we know it, or at least the ways in which personality could be represented: Joyce’s Poldy, his Irish Jewish Ulysses, is both Quixotic and Shakespearean, but Joyce died in 1941, before Hitler’s Shoah could be fully known. In our Age of Information and of ongoing Terror, the Cervantine novel may be as obsolete as the Shakespearean drama. I speak of the genres, and not of their supreme masters, who never will become outmoded. The Knight and Sancho, between them, know all that there is to know. They know at least exactly who they are, which is what, finally, they will teach the rest of us.

  WHICH DESCRIBES THE CONDITION AND PROFESSION OF THE FAMOUS GENTLEMAN DON QUIXOTE OF LA MANCHA

  Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember, a gentleman lived not long ago, one of those who has a lance and ancient shield on a shelf and keeps a skinny nag and a greyhound for racing. An occasional stew, beef more often than lamb, hash most nights, eggs and abstinence on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, sometimes squab as a treat on Sundays—these consumed three-fourths of his income. The rest went for a light woolen tunic and velvet breeches and hose of the same material for feast days, while weekdays were honored with dun-colored coarse cloth. He had a housekeeper past forty, a niece not yet twenty, and a man-of-all-work who did everything from saddling the horse to pruning the trees. Our gentleman was approximately fifty years old; his complexion was weathered, his flesh scrawny, his face gaunt, and he was a very early riser and a great lover of the hunt. Some claim that his family name was Quixada, or Quexada, for there is a certain amount of disagreement among the authors who write of this matter, although reliable conjecture seems to indicate that his name was Quexana. But this does not matter very much to our story; in its telling there is absolutely no deviation from the truth.

  (trans. Edith Grossman)

  The opening of Part I of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes more than sets the tone of this first and greatest of all Western novels. I quote it here and throughout from the skilled translation by Edith Grossman (2003).

  Cervantes stations Don Quixote in a Spain just before his own, a country declining from the glory of the naval victory of Lepanto over the Ottoman Empire on October 7, 1571. In 1588, the Spanish Armada failed against the English fire ships and then was scattered by fierce storms. The Dutch, allies of the English, blockaded the Spanish army in the Netherlands, employing flyboats to splendid effect.

  Throughout the seventeenth century, Spain declined from its earlier Golden Age, of which Cervantes was the great ornament, and instead lost its financial, military, and political dominance. Don Quixote is poised at the turning point between the culture’s glory and its fading away into a harsh land of the Inquisition, the torture and burning of Jewish and Muslim converts suspected of backsliding.

  I enjoy the exuberant comic elements, but the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and poor Sancho suffer every kind of violence and ridicule as they continue questing. At the close, the Knight suffers shattering defeat, and goes home to die.

  Let us begin with Don Quixote in his early glory. His mind crazed by chivalric romances, he determines to become a knight-errant and rather outrageously sets about the labor of finding the proper equipment:

  The truth is that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in, righting all manner of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame. The poor man imagined himself already wearing the crown, won by the valor of his arm, of the empire of Trebizond at the very least; and so it was that with these exceedingly agreeable thoughts, and carried away by the extraordinary pleasure he took in them, he hastened to put into effect what he so fervently desired. And the first thing he did was to attempt to clean some armor that had belonged to his great-grandfathers and, stained with rust and covered with mildew, had spent many long years stored and forgotten in a corner. He did the best he could to clean and repair it, but he saw that it had a great defect, which was that instead of a full sallet helmet with an attached neckguard, there was only a simple headpiece; but he compensated for this with his industry, and out of pasteboard he fashioned a kind of half-helmet that, when attached to the headpiece, took on the appearance of a full sallet. It is true that in order to test if it was strong and could withstand a blow, he took out his sword and struck it twice, and with the first blow he undid in a moment what it had taken him a week to create; he could not help being disappointed at the ease with which he had hacked it to pieces, and to protect against that danger, he made another one, placing strips of iron on the inside so that he was satisfied with its strength; and not wanting to put it to the test again, he designated and accepted it as an extremely fine sallet.

  If there is irony here it is washed away by surpassing tenderness. Cervantes loves his Knight and so do we. It would have been more than enough had Cervantes given us only Don Quixote and Cervantes himself. Genius triumphant presents
us with the Squire of Squires, Sancho Panza:

  During this time, Don Quixote approached a farmer who was a neighbor of his, a good man—if that title can be given to someone who is poor—but without much in the way of brains. In short, he told him so much, and persuaded and promised him so much, that the poor peasant resolved to go off with him and serve as his squire. Among other things, Don Quixote said that he should prepare to go with him gladly, because it might happen that one day he would have an adventure that would gain him, in the blink of an eye, an ínsula, and he would make him its governor. With these promises and others like them, Sancho Panza, for that was the farmer’s name, left his wife and children and agreed to be his neighbor’s squire.

  It is an irony to call Sancho brainless. He is shrewd, sly, awake to reality, and his greatness justifies Franz Kafka’s parable in which Don Quixote is only Sancho’s daemon:

  Without making any boast of it Sancho Panza succeeded in the course of years, by feeding him a great number of romances of chivalry and adventure in the evening and night hours, in so diverting from himself his demon, whom he later called Don Quixote, that this demon thereupon set out, uninhibited, on the maddest exploits, which, however, for the lack of a preordained object, which should have been Sancho Panza himself, harmed nobody. A free man, Sancho Panza philosophically followed Don Quixote on his crusades, perhaps out of a sense of responsibility, and had of them a great and edifying entertainment to the end of his days.

  (“The Truth about Sancho Panza,” trans. Edwin and Willa Muir)

  Kafka manifests critical acuity by placing Sancho at the center. Sancho dreams, and his daemon or genius rides out into the ultimate elegance, the imagined land. That realm is and is not Castile. If we set aside Kafka’s lovely joke about the Squire’s sense of responsibility, what we witness is the birth of the loving friendship between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, which will become the unextinguished hearth of the book. The impetuous Knight is both rash and violently forceful. Sancho, prudent and passively peaceful, will be carried along from catastrophe to virtual immolation, and yet, like his Knight, somehow he attains survival.