LISTSERV FILENAME: ZIOLKOWS RUSSELL LISTSERV LOCATION: Listserv@acadvm1.uottawa.ca FTP FILENAME: sanctification-of-don-quixote-review.txt FTP LOCATION: panda1.uottawa.ca directory /pub/religion/ _______________________________________________________________ The Religious Studies Publications Journal - CONTENTS REVIEW: _The Sanctification of Don Quixote_ _______________________________________________________________ Volume 2.006 ISSN 1188-5734 _______________________________________________________________ February 20, 1993 Eric J. Ziolkowski, _The Sanctification of Don Quixote_. From Hildago to Priest, University Park, Penn.: The Pennsylvania State University Press, [c. 1991]. Pp. xi + 275. Hardcover, NP. Ziolkowski illustrates his thesis that a person truly marching to the tune of faith must appear quixotically out of step in the modern world by studying characters modelled on Cervantes's mad hero in three novels: Fie1ding's _Joseph Andrews_, Dostoevsky's _The Idiot_, and Greene's _Monsignor Quixote_. Each novel is first set in the context of the religiously oriented Quixote criticism of the period and then closely analyzed to expose the parallels between its quixotic character and Cervantes's knight. In the very first lines of his preface Ziolkowski sets out the premise which gives this well-written and carefully constructed book its contemporary relevance: "the argument of this book is that to live a truly religious life in modernity is to appear (or to be?) quixotic...." (ix) He accepts, in effect, the rather common position that the decline of religious sensibility in the West in the last few centuries has put believers out of step with their contemporaries. Like the hero of Cervantes's novel, they do not share the secular, "up-to-date" view of life that is certified true by the majority opinion of their fellow citizens and, consequently, they suffer the discomfort of feeling temporally displaced. Ziolkowski's concern is to illustrate the development of an awareness of this quixotic condition in three novels from different centuries. His focus, clearly, is more on the figure of Don Quixote than on Cervantes's novel. The novels he chooses to illustrate his thesis: Henry Fielding's _Joseph Andrews_ (1742), Fyodor Dostoevsky's _The Idiot_ (1869), and Graham Greene's _Monsignor Quixote_ (1982) each feature a character who represents a shift in society's perception of the Gentleman of La Mancha. Parson Adams, Prince Myshkin and Father Quixote illustrate, respectively, the eighteenth-century development of a sympathetic interpretation of the knight who, until then, had been regarded as merely a ridiculous madman, the nineteenth-century romantic view of the great adventurer, and, finally, a twentieth-century religious interpretation of Don Quixote as a man of faith in a faithless world. An exploration of each author and the successor of Don Quixote he has created constitute the three main divisions of the book. The first section of these larger units examines the given century's "religiously informed tradition" of Quixote criticism. The second section analyses the religious transformation of the figure of the knight in the particular novel. In each case, of course, Ziolkowski is careful to establish the connection between the novel and _Don Quixote_ and its quixotic character and Cervantes's mad champion. _Joseph Andrews_, for example, bears the subtitle: "Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of _Don Quixote_," and _Monsignor Quixote_'s relation to its ancestor is obvious. The influence of Cervantes on Dostoevsky's _The Idiot_ can be traced to the author's remark that he wanted to portray a positively beautiful person based on Christ, Don Quixote, Mr. Pickwick, and Jean Valjean. Ziolkowski's detailed study of the plot of each novel brings forward incidents which imitate or rework elements in _Don Quixote_. In Fielding's Abraham Adams, the Don Quixote figure emerges as an example of the eighteenth-century "good man." The exact nature of Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin as a quixotic hero is puzzling, but he is surely a Christ-like character, ill-at-ease in the world, while Greene's naive Monsignor on a journey with the sceptical mayor of his town, would seem to represent every true believer in a world where it is taken for granted the God is dead. The description of the bare bones of this book's structure gives no real idea of the complexity of its argument. The discussion of each novel is put in the context of an impressive survey of the period's critical reflection on _Don Quixote_ as a work with religious significance. What we see, in effect, is how each century read Cervantes' important work. The particular author's own perception of _Don Quixote_ is thus put in context: these were the interpretations a writer could opt to choose. An author such as Fielding may have played a major role in affecting how people who read his work would afterward look at the figure of Don Quixote, whom he had modernised, but the critical background makes us realize that he did not stand alone. The influence of a whole current of thought on _Don Quixote_ is especially striking in the case of Graham Greene who was greatly affected by Unamuno's religious interpretation of Cervantes. Whether the reader is convinced by Ziolkowski's underlying thesis that people of faith suffer in the modern world and can only appear as quixotic oddballs to their contemporaries depends on his or her willingness to accept his presupposition that the modern world is growing increasingly secular. I realize full well that the triumph of secularism has long been considered beyond question, but I wonder if a certain ideological enthusiasm has not coloured the facts. Is the growth of the New Age Movement proof of the absence of God or a sign that a fundamental religious instinct refuses to disappear? What Ziolkowski actually sets out to prove is that to live a truly religious life in the modern world is to seem quixotic "at least as such lives and the modern world are portrayed in the texts under consideration." (ix) This argument does seem to be supported by the evidence brought forward in abundance. At a certain point in each section, however, the comparison of Don Quixote and his modern imitation begins to take on the nature of a blackboard diagram with an abstract logic of its own. When the parallels between the two characters and their novels become too tight and too detailed, the rationality of it all seems to contradict the intuitive way in which authors work. This tendency to push just a little too hard is perhaps inescapable in a study of this kind. Christians who are willing to accept that the modern world has pushed religion to the sidelines might not be quite as ready to accept Ziolkowski's description of the believer's sense of temporal displacement as a modern phenomenon. Many might be inclined to give the "eternal" nature of this feature more emphasis than he does. It is not hard to trace the image of the true believer as a fool in an unbelieving world back to the New Testament (1Cor 1, 18)25) and beyond that to the prophets of the Old. Flight from "the world" was the great concern of medieval monastic writers in the very period which we blithely label Christian! This does not disprove that Parson Adams, Prince Myshkin, and Monsignor Quixote are out of step with their time, but it does suggest that this is the inescapable condition of every true believer in any time whatsoever. Kenneth C. Russell Dominique Russell Faculty of Theology Ph.D. Candidate St. Paul University Department of Spanish University of Toronto ______________________________________________________________________ The Religious Studies Publications Journal - CONTENTS is an electronic journal that archives and disseminates research and pedagogical material of relevance to Religious Studies. Its goal is to provide free FTP and LISTSERV archiving of quality scholarly material and to also provide a comprehensive directory of network accessible resources for Religious Studies in a wide variety of mediums. Electronic subscriptions are free: to subscribe, send a mail message to Listserv@uottawa or listserv@acadvm1.uottawa.ca with the text: SUBSCRIBE CONTENTS your name. 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