From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
8.1 (1988): 47-53.
Copyright © 1988, The Cervantes Society of America
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CAROLE HOLDSWORTH |
HE
RECENTLY PUBLISHED collection Slow Learner: Early
Stories1 has renewed interest in Thomas
Pynchon's earliest fiction. Low-lands, written while the novelist
was an undergraduate at Cornell
University2 and first published in New
World Writing 16 (1960), is an explicit
parody3 of T. S. Eliot's The Waste
Land, according to Joseph W. Slade. There is, however, another possible
important influence: the writings of Cervantes, in particular Don Quixote
de la Mancha. Pynchon studied with Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell; in the
second semester of the academic year 1951-1952, Nabokov delivered his famous
Don Quixote lectures at Harvard. Although Fredson Bowers states that
No evidence is preserved to show that the Cervantes lectures were given
later at Cornell on Nabokov's
return,4 the Russian novelist and critic
might
1 Thomas
Pynchon (Boston-Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1984). It is an amusing
detail that a very minor character among the hundreds of characters in Pynchon's
huge novel Gravity's Rainbow (1973) is named Howard (Slow)
Lerner (New York: Bantam, 1976: 747).
2 Mathew Winston,
The Quest for Pynchon, Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas
Pynchon, ed. George Levine and David Levernez (Boston-Toronto: Little,
Brown and Company, 1976) 258.
3 Joseph W. Slade,
Entropy and Other Calamities, Pynchon: A Collection
of Critical Essays, ed. Edward Mendelson (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.:
Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1978) 73.
4 Fredson Bowers,
Editor's Preface, Lectures on Don Quixote by Vladimir Nabokov, viii.
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48 | CAROLE HOLDSWORTH | Cervantes |
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well have included references to the Spanish masterpiece in his Cornell courses.
In any case, Pynchon, whose writings reveal his voracious reading, has shown
an interest in Hispanic literature throughout his stories and his
novels.5
In this study, I shall discuss the possibility
of the influence, in Nabokov's words the spiritual
irrigation,6 of Cervantes upon the haunting
story written by the twenty-two-year-old Pynchon. The Waste Land,
of course, remains a primary influence.
In his extremely interesting Introduction to
Slow Learner, the mature Pynchon (born in 1937) writes as follows:
In a way this is more of a character sketch than a story
. . . Oddly enough, I had not intended this to be Dennis's
story at all he was supposed to have been a straight man for Pig
Bodine (9-10). Dennis Flange, Pynchon's protagonist, is an unhappily
married former competent [naval] communications officer
(Low-lands 62), who is quite unceremoniously thrown out of his
house by his practical wife Cindy because of his poor choice of friends and
lack of interest in his job. Dennis then stays overnight at the town dump
with some of his unsavory friends; there he meets the beautiful gypsy midget
Nerissa, with whom he decides to stay for a while, at least (77).
As is the case with Don Quixote, the character of Flange dominates the loose
plot; as Pynchon comments, his fantasies become increasingly vivid,
that's about all that happens (Introduction 10). Slade considers Flange
The traveler of the waste land, a mockery of the protagonist of Eliot's
poem . . . (74). He is also a most quixotic character.
Don Quixote, of course, was a bearded man around
fifty years old (Frisaba la edad de nuestro hidalgo con los cincuenta
años . . .7), tall
in contrast to his plump squire, Sancho Panza. Flange is a tall (72) man
showing the current signs of incipient middle age (60); as he
5
Pynchon's interest in Hispanic literature has been studied previously
e.g. Peter L. Hays and Robert Redfield, Pynchon's Spanish Source
for Entropy, Studies in Short Fiction 16 (1979)
327-334. I am currently working on a book-length study of Pynchon's
Hispanic Connection, an interest of mine reflected in my article
Fateful Labyrinths: La vida es sueño and The Crying
of Lot 49 (The Comparatist 7 [1983]: 57-74).
6 Vladimir Nabokov
uses the expression spiritual irrigation to refer to the tremendous
influence of Don Quixote upon later writers (Lectures on Don
Quixote [San Diego-New York-London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers,
1983] 8).
7 Miguel de Cervantes
Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Martín de Riquer
(Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1966) I, 1, 36.
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8 (1988) | Cervantine Echoes in Early Pynchon | 49 |
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leaves his house for the dump, his last words to his wife are that he will
now grow a beard (60). Like Don Quixote, Flange is dominated
by a romantic obsession, not indeed books of chivalry but the sea, which
he transforms into his Dulcinea: He had read or heard somewhere
in his pre-adolescence that the sea was a woman, and the metaphor had enslaved
him and largely determined what he became from that moment (58-59).
Like Don Quixote, Flange takes refuge in a world of fantasy, fleeing from
the relentless rationality (58) of his wife as Alonso Quijano
had fled from the curate's and the housekeeper's so-called common
sense (Nabokov 43). Don Quixote loved the old Spanish ballads and the
books of chivalry; Flange loves Noel Coward songs and sea-ballads, such as
the ballad sung during his navy days by the Filipino steward Delgado which
contains the lines: Oh, I fear she will be taken by a Spanish Gal-la-lee
/ As she sails by the Low-lands low (65). Both men learn through bitter
experience that there is a difference between art and reality. On his deathbed
Don Quixote recants and repudiates his beloved books: Ya soy enemigo
de Amadís de Gaula . . . ya me son odiosas todas las historias
profanas del andante caballería . . . (II, 74, 1064);
Dennis once sang Noel Coward songs to his new wife, but Noel Coward
songs often bear little relevance to reality if Flange hadn't known
this before, he soon found it out . . . (57 ).
One of the most interesting similarities between
the renowned knight of La Mancha and Flange is their experiencing a mid-life
crisis reminiscent of adolescence. The Knight, for Carroll B. Johnson, suffers
from a drastically stunted psychosexual
development.8 Unable to form a normal
relationship with a woman, he creates his Dulcinea: píntola
en mi imaginación como la deseo . . . (I, 25, 246).
In his Introduction, Pynchon writes: It is no secret nowadays
. . . that many American males, even those of middle-aged appearance,
. . . are in fact, incredible as it sounds, still small boys inside.
Flange is this type of character . . . (10 ). Like Don Quixote,
Flange is incapable of developing any real life shared with an adult
woman. His solution is Nerissa . . . . It looks like
I wanted some ambiguity here about whether or not she was only a creature
of his fantasies (ibid.). Nerissa, like Dulcinea, is most beautiful,
but she is a midget, a perfect incarnation of Flange's drastically
stunted psychosexual development: She was a dream, this girl,
an angel. She was also roughly three and a half feet tall (74).
8 Carroll
B. Johnson, Madness and Lust: A Psychoanalytical Approach to Don Quijote
(Berkeley-Los Angeles-Toronto: U of California P, 1983) 196.
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50 | CAROLE HOLDSWORTH | Cervantes |
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Like Don Quixote in the Cave of Montesinos
episode (II, 22-23), Flange descends the dump's ravine to act out his fantasies.
The scene in which Nerissa calls the sleeping Dennis from the dump's shack
into her private underworld has curious resonances of an episode of Don
Quixote (II, 44) which was a favorite of Nabokov. The Knight, during
his stay at the ducal hunting palace, leaves his bed one warm evening to
listen to young Altisidora's feigned love-songs: . . . the
grated window, now shut, and the warm Spanish night that henceforth for three
centuries is to become the breeding place of romantic prose-and-verse in
all languages, and fifty-year-old Quixote fighting one delusion by means
of another delusion melancholy, miserable, tempted, excited by little
Altisidora's musical moans (Nabokov 70). This episode is followed shortly
by the unpleasant episode of the cats which the mocking Duke and Duchess
cause to be released in their deluded guest's bedchamber (II, 46); it is
particularly interesting, therefore, that Pynchon describes as follows the
moment in which Nerissa calls to Flange: . . . a desolate
hour somehow not intended for human perception, but rather belonging to
cats [my italics], owls and peepers and whatever else make noises
in the night . . . For a full minute there was nothing, then
at last it came. A girl's voice, riding on the wind (72). Nerissa calls
to the tall Anglo with the gold hair and shining teeth; this
description first causes Flange to exclaim, That's me, ain't it;
he then ruefully reflects that such a description fits his younger self much
better than it fits his current self (72-73); in like manner, Don Quixote's
niece Antonia at one point reminds her uncle that he cannot be valiente,
siendo viejo . . . estando por la edad agobiado (II, 6,
579-580).
As Low-lands ends, Flange
watching Nerissa crooning to her pet rat Hyacinth (76) decides
to remain with her, to ignore for a time the real world and its responsibilities:
let the world shrink to a boccie ball (ibid.). He prefers
the tiny gypsy who looks like a child playing with a doll to his fierce
small blond terrier (60) of a wife, prefers to play at
having a child. According to Guy Davenport, Both Cervantes and Nabokov
recognize that playing can extend beyond childhood not as its natural
transformation into daydreaming . . . or creativity of all sorts,
but as play itself. That's what Don Quixote is doing: playing
knight-errant.9 When Don Quixote makes
a new helmet out of cardboard, he carefully refrains from testing it: sin
9 Guy
Davenport, Foreward, Lectures on Don Quixote by Vladimir Nabokov,
xviii.
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8 (1988) | Cervantine Echoes in Early Pynchon | 51 |
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querer hacer nueva experiencia della, la diputó y tuvo por celada
finísima de encaje (I, 1, 39). Don Quixote chooses to wander
the roads of Spain in the company of his peasant squire to free galley-slaves
(I, 12) who have broken their contract with society. Flange is also a basically
sympathetic character (Introduction 9), but he too chooses to
consort with garbagemen, dump-keepers and gypsies; to spend all day drinking
cheap wine and listening to Vivaldi on the stereo instead of going off to
his law office. Like Don Quixote, Flange seeks to be a redeemer
(Slade 73), a frequent figure in Pynchon's fiction; unlike Don Quixote, he
ends as a miserable messiah (Slade 75), because Pynchon leaves
him lost in his fantasies. Don Quixote, on the other hand, regains his lucidity
as the moment of his death approaches: Yo tengo juicio ya, libre
y claro, sin las sombras caliginosas de la ignorancia
. . . (II, 74, 1063). We who were living are
now dying, writes Eliot in The Waste
Land10; Don Quixote recognizes this truth,
while Flange seeks to forget it through his decision to stay and
play with Nerissa.11
Although the character of Flange is the element
of Low-lands most reminiscent of Don Quixote, there are
other echoes of the great novel and of other writings of Cervantes as well.
Pig Bodine, a favorite Pynchon character, is a sort of grotesque version
of Sancho Panza, squat and leering (60) in contrast to his tall,
well-educated officer friend Flange. Dennis's depressingly rational wife
Cindy reacts to Pig's inopportune appearance at her door exactly as did the
niece and housekeeper when Sancho calls on Don Quixote near the beginning
of Part II: No, she wailed, You ugly bastard
. . . Oh, no, Cindy said, barring the door (69)
. . . ellas le defendían la puerta: ¿Qué
quiere este mostrenco en esta casa? (II, 2, 552-553). Don Quixote is
not the only madman in Cervantes's works; the Licenciado Vidriera, from the
Exemplary Novel of the same name, may be an antecedent of Geronimo
Diaz, Flange's crazed and boozy wetback analyst (57); the first
of several delightfully loony medical men in Pynchon's writings, Diaz suffers
from a wonderful, random sort of
10 T.
S. Eliot, Poems: 1909-1925 (London: Faber & Faber Limited, 1937)
103.
11 The remote
possibility exists that the encounter with Nerissa is the result of Flange's
having been knocked unconscious by one of the boobytraps which Bolingbroke
had set up for the gypsies. Borges, in such Ficciones stories as El
Sur and El fin, suggests that part of the action comes
from the fevered imagination of his characters. I have recently completed
a study of the possible influence of El fin in particular upon
the Martín Fierro episodes of Gravity's Rainbow.
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52 | CAROLE HOLDSWORTH | Cervantes |
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madness which . . . was about all [Flange] had to keep him going
(58); when Vidriera regains his sanity, he is ignored by the courtiers who
had gleefully patronized him in his modish lunacy.
Early in Part I, having just set out on his
journey, Don Quixote sees some windmills which to him resemble giants (I,
8); as they turn into the dump, Flange and his friends pass an incinerator
which looked like a Mexican hacienda (63). When Sancho finally
receives his land-locked island from the jesting ducal pair,
he governs it with surprising discretion (II, 44-54); to Flange, the dump
seems like an island or enclave in the dreary country around it, a
discrete kingdom with Bolingroke [the black dump-keeper] as its uncontested
ruler (67). Towards the end of Part II, Don Quixote and Sancho visit
Barcelona, where they view the sea for the first time: vieron el mar,
hasta entonces dellos no visto (II, 61, 986); Pig tells a sea-story
about how he and a sonarman named Feeny had stolen a horsedrawn taxi
in Barcelona (68). Don Quixote attributes emerald-green eyes to his
peerless lady Dulcinea: y a lo que yo creo, los [ojos] de Dulcinea
deben ser de verdes esmeraldas (II, 11, 611). Pynchon gives us a last
glimpse of Nerissa: She looked up gravely. Whitecaps danced across
her eyes; sea creatures, he knew, would be cruising about in the submarine
green of her heart (77).
The emerald-green eyes of Dulcinea call to
mind still another green-eyed Cervantes heroine, Preciosa of the Exemplary
Novel La gitanilla.12 It
is tempting to speculate upon the possible influence of Preciosa upon Nerissa,
who at roughly three and a half feet (74) can surely
be considered a gitanilla. The dark-haired Nerissa is no highborn
maiden abducted as a child by an old gypsy woman, but she does mention an
old woman who read her fortune many years ago (59-60).
Like Preciosa and her enamoured don Juan / Andrés, Nerissa is so
angelically beautiful that Flange is willing to join the strange nocturnal
band of gypsies for awhile. There is, however, a notable difference regarding
his planned stay at the dump: while the virginal Preciosa had insisted upon
a brother-sister arrangement with her ardent suitor during their
travels, Nerissa begs Flange to stay with her, even though he tells her that
he is married. (76). All in all, the dump as setting, the pet rat, and especially
Nerissa's dwarfish stature combined with her amoral nature cause the Pynchon
character to emerge as an antitype of
12 A
character of La gitanilla exclaims at her first sight of Preciosa,
estos sí que son ojos de esmeralda! (La
gitanilla, Novelas ejemplares 1 [Buenos Aires: Biblioteca
Clásica y Contemporánea, 1966]: 28).
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8 (1988) | Cervantine Echoes in Early Pynchon | 53 |
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Cervantes's chaste, golden-haired heroine. Yet Low-lands does
share with La gitanilla a pronounced fairy tale atmosphere. It
is interesting to recall that Nabokov considers Don Quixote also one of the
fairy tales without which the world would not be real
(1).
For Nabokov, Shakespeare and Cervantes are
equals in the matter of influence, of spiritual irrigation (8).
The eternal waters of Cervantes's writings may well have irrigated Thomas
Pynchon's early story Low-lands.
LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO |
Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu | Publications of the CSA | HCervantes |
URL: http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/artics88/holdswor.htm |