By: Brett Alan Sanders My first encounter with the Beowulf epic came in the eighth grade. I would have just turned or been about to turn fourteen; like most boys my age, I had a taste for the gruesome. So it should surprise no one that the blood and gore are what immediately took hold of me; nor that almost thirty years later, as I was reading a review of Seamus Heaney's recent verse translation, I felt a rush of nostalgia for the story. I confess this as a relatively peaceable man. I remain unacquainted, for instance, with the workings of a gun, and am thus unprepared to participate with my rural neighbors in this county's annual deer harvest. That fourteen-year-old boy might have reveled in the violent heroics of a Billy Jack, but the man he became prefers the patient honor of an Atticus Finch, who rather than respond in kind to an insult would simply wipe the spit from his face. I admire the quiet heroism of his lawyerly profession. But is my very insistence not belied by the fact of this ancient memory of literary bloodshed? After all, my pacifistic tendencies are not nor have they ever been absolute. I do believe in rights of self-defense. And it was not without some glee that I rushed to purchase this new version of the epic. And yet, there is something else I am becoming aware of as I visit Heaney's masterful Anglo-Saxon rhythms. This time around, honing in on the tale's chivalrous, knightly elements, I suspect that I had originally been responding to all of those things at once. It was barely a year later, after all, that I was immersed in a juvenile Don Quixote, which I loved even without the extremes of Beowulf's gore. Perhaps I really did love Beowulf for more redeemable motives: for its sense of heroism and something like romance, for instance; the gore being mere icing on the cake. I did get the point of Don Quixote's idealism; it was so much more than the slapstick that reached out to me. I remember, in fact, a specific discussion that I had on the subject with Mrs. Nordyke, my ninth-grade Spanish teacher. Still years from a comprehension of Sancho Panza's innate humanity, humor, and practical intelligence, I contended that master was the smart one and squire the buffoon. No, she answered; you have missed the point: it was Sancho whose feet were planted on the ground, all the while suffering the continual labors of keeping his foolish master's head out of the clouds. I went away from that conversation with youthful assurance that I was right and she wrong, that what she called foolishness was indeed the pinnacle of that knight's intelligence: to see the ideal and go after it, with honor and nobility, in righteous defense of the downtrodden and defenseless. For that is, beyond any doubt, what really moved me about the story. I was, after all, despite my literary taste for gore and all the fistfights I got into on and off of school buses, a sensitive boy. It had been earlier than that, on a Vacation Bible School field trip from Bloomington, Indiana, when I was about twelve, that I glimpsed the poverty of a migrant labor camp. After leaving our chaperones with the Mexican women in their ratty trailers, the other children and I ran and played with those field workers' children beside a neighboring creek. On the bus ride home to suburban comfort I entertained painful, solitary questionings about the nature of injustice: that I, who as far as I could tell was no better than they, should have so much more in terms of security and comfort. This is a distinct and vivid memory, one that since then has never left me. I was still asking myself the same questions years later when, as a convert to Mormonism on a mission in Argentina, I sat down with people in poorer circumstances than those Mexican migrants'. Resisting the pull of any misguided sense of election, I knew that my privilege did not make me any of their superior. Even now I ask the same questions, though too often I fear they lack that youthful urgency and conviction, dulled by immediate struggles for what passes as my and my closest family's survival. As for the Quixote, it never ceases to amaze and move. Even when I was eighteen years old, fresh from the full thousand pages of Starkie's English translation, I wanted to shout that enthusiasm from the rooftops. My response some few years later to the full Spanish text was no less rapturous. Today I am teaching our textbook's abbreviated Beowulf to my own eighth-grade English students. I teach it alongside its prose retelling of The Iliad, but I will not have time for the companion excerpt from the Sundiata. For the epic is not the only genre we are exploring this semester. A discussion of the epic without Homer seems unconscionable to me, but neither can I think of excluding Beowulf. So without willful prejudice, though conscious of the lily-white composition of my southern Indiana classroom, I will regretfully pass over the African text. I live now and teach about two hours south of Bloomington on State Road 37, surrounded by Hoosier National Forest and within scent, almost, of the Ohio River. My students live scattered throughout this countryside and for the most part are not widely traveled in either space or time or literature. Beowulf represents for them an absolutely foreign world that, without coaxing, they are reluctant to enter. So I do play up, at least initially, the blood and gore that so richly appealed to me at their age and that still move me within this wondrous context of mythic lore. And as I read the most gruesome passages to them - slowing down to savor the poet's evocation of crunching bones, for the hideous shrieking of the monster Grendel as the hero rips arm and shoulder from bloody socket - I am privately amused at the exchanged glances and grimaces: knowing, from eavesdropped conversations, how little they will blink at the context-less mayhem of the next Wes Craven comedy / slasher. And nevermind the violence: the poet's language itself is amply stirring. I love this passage, as it appears in Heaney's version (emphasis mine): ... yet he bought his freedom at a high price, for he left his hand and arm and shoulder to show he had been here, a cold comfort for having come among us. And now he won't be long for this world. He has done his worst but the wound will end him. He is hasped and hooped and hirpling with pain, limping and looped in it. Like a man outlawed for wickedness, he must await the mighty judgment of God in majesty. Such perfectly mighty alliteration, conveyed to us by the Irish Nobel laureate, takes my breath away. But beneath all this is the revelation of a truly strange and ancient world, mythic and mysterious. As I hint above, it is closer to the peculiar territory of chivalric deeds and knightly adventures that Don Quixote imaginatively inhabited. And I stress imaginatively since, beyond the still persistent novels of chivalric romance, this world bore little resemblance to the actual Spanish territory and history that Don Quixote, enlivened by Cervantes's vivifying pen, inhabited in flesh - despite the not-so-remote survival, within conquering Spain in its heyday, of a knightly behavior and ideal. First, let's simply imagine the world of glory and honor that inspired both heroes, the mythic and almost superhuman against the poignantly human and fallible. Don Quixote would surely have had no chance against a flesh-and-blood Grendel, but he assaults his windmill-giants with an identical sense of glory (represented by his phantom lady Dulcinea) as has motivated every knight-errant of chivalric romance. Beowulf, for his part, is not about to give up the treasure that the Danish king Hrothgar is determined to give him for his trouble. Later, in fact, when he prepares to go against Grendel's mother, Beowulf makes sure that, if in this encounter he should die, the treasure will be sent to his own king Hygelac. Still later, in the midst of that final battle in which both he and dragon will expire - "Inspired again / by the thought of glory," the poet writes - he continues battle for the sake of that ideal, even conscious that doing so will prove his end. But death itself is not to be feared so much as any dishonoring of the warrior code and a subsequent loss of glory. "For every one of us, living in this world / means waiting for our end," Beowulf has already said ("I was born to live dying," Don Quixote echoes). "Let whoever can / win glory before death." When in relation to this reading I teach my eighth graders the living reality of that ancient warrior code, I try to get them thinking of commonalities and divergences from our own sense of glory and honor. Perhaps someday, for example, as in a colleague's U.S. history course for high school juniors, they will watch Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan and reflect on our World War II generation's take on such perennial values. Glory, honor, truth, loyalty. But most importantly to their immediate experience at this moment (the stark horrors and heroisms of 9/11/01 still months in their future and mine), I will ask them to discuss what such values might signify in relation to their painfully more ordinary and mundane lives. What is honor when simply informed by our everyday interactions with each other? In my journal of just over a year previous to this writing, as I was also discovering Heaney's Beowulf, I find notes on my reading of Julio Cortázar's Nicaraguan Sketches, or as the original Spanish title says so much more evocatively, Nicaragua tan violentamente dulce (Nicaragua so violently sweet). I knew Cortázar already as the author of some stylistically sophisticated fiction, an Argentine who resided more commonly in Paris, heir to the intellectual artistry of fellow Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. So I was puzzled by the existence, so contrary to what I had known of his work, of this apparently revolutionary book - published in Managua not too long before his death (at the age of about seventy) in 1984. I live in a particularly conservative community, and while my lunchroom colleagues rib me as the resident "liberal" and "intellectual", I tend to share at least some of their biases. For example, I have generally bought into the old saw about Fidel Castro's Cuban revolution having gone to the dogs: its perpetrators, so far removed from the inspired fervor of our generation of 1776, doomed to become the evil they condemned. My colleagues, while politely genuflecting to the effect that Batista might have been nearly as bad as Castro, would scoff were I to suggest that Castro might have meant well. I suspect they might also shake their heads at any hinting in favor of the Chiapan revolt in NAFTA-era Mexico; certainly, were I to speak in favor of the Sandinistas. The fact is that we do not too often get that far removed from our immediate teacherly concerns, which typically range from occasional delight at a triumph with one class or student to the more common grumblings about so many others' disinterest - or mixed administrative signals about classroom discipline and standards. But reading a book like Cortázar's (aside from causing me to reconsider my prejudice against Castro's Cuba: could his ills primarily stem from a legitimate defensive reaction against Yankee aggression?) always makes me wish that we more often did: that I would more frequently and clearly advocate, at least, on behalf of our more recalcitrant students; that we focus on the quixotic aim of stirring them, yet, from moral stupor. To take the full measure of Cortázar's Nicaraguan essays, I compare them to Salman Rushdie's The Jaguar Smile (1987). Rushdie's book, coming chronologically after Cortázar's, does benefit from a longer perspective, and Rushdie's particular journalistic skepticism provides balance to some of Cortázar's more questionable reveries. A good for instance would be in respect to press freedom: when Rushdie wrote, the Sandinistas had closed the opposition La Prensa; Rushdie had long discussions with the Sandinista leaders on that topic, fruitlessly trying to persuade them that what may seem necessary in wartime may become just a nasty habit after wartime. Another example: Rushdie gives more detail about early mistakes made in the resettlement of the Miskito Indians. On the other hand, Cortázar may be more specific about La Prensa's abuses of truth, tolerated by the Sandinistas in the period of his writing. In its essence, that account does not vary from Rushdie's report of La Prensa editor and future president Violeta Chamorra's evasive and disingenuous interview. In some instances, Cortázar's pronouncements may border on the apologetic, but otherwise there is little substantive difference between Cortázar's and Rushdie's views of the Sandinista revolution. Aside from his worry that it not become what it fought to overthrow (in that sense he too faults the Cuban revolution, in which Cortázar finds no obvious fault), Rushdie does become persuaded of this revolution's integrity, that it deserves support. Cortázar, for his part, does also speak frankly of challenges that the revolution faces and would yet face. His essays, aside from an obvious enthusiasm and even love, always reflect a deep and penetrating intellect. The essays are concise and beautiful, poetic and for the most part concrete in detail and argument. One thing about reading books like this, as I suggest above, is that the experience makes me lament the heroic activism that I have not engaged in. It fills me with regrets, heightened by middle age and the recurrent feeling that my life has been little more than a series of wrong turns. It does not help that on the same day one of my Spanish classes harangues me with their ethnocentric conceit that those "Mexicans" streaming into the area have no right to even be in our country if they do not first speak perfectly unaccented English: that it is stupid to come here if they do not; what are they thinking? None of this, they insist, has anything to do with prejudice, racial or linguistic. All of my attempted instruction about immigration patterns past and present; about English predominating by the third generation, if the language does not essentially disappear (even when the first language is Spanish) - none of this makes any sense to these students. Why are you talking about our German or French ancestors? they ask. What has the past got to do with the present? Fruitlessly I attempt a gently paced and reasoned response, but for now the argument is lost. At their obstinate refusal to consider a different perspective, I become heated up and edgy. I feel irrelevant since no one seems to be listening. This collective prejudice, unacknowledgedly inherited from parental voices and hardened by adolescent certainty, overwhelms me for the moment. I find myself wishing I had done something more noble with my life. Instead of the yearned-for heroism of at least two of my boyhood heroes - Beowulf and Don Quixote - what have I accomplished in my life? The answers to that question, despite momentary successes, are tinged with failure. Take the recent case of a troubled eighth grader who loves to write poetry. At first, to my encouragement of his ardent though undisciplined gift, there is a correspondingly positive response. I turn my head to some of his misconduct and try patiently to rein it in; I have heard the horrid stories of his home life, some of which he has written about in required essays. In a case conference I speak mostly of his promise, of his passionate character that if channeled might bear positive fruit for him. When my turn to speak has passed, he mouths a silent "thank you." But later, as he anticipates a move out of our district, his misbehavior escalates. I am forced to confront him on it or lose control of my other students. On one occasion after he enters my classroom late, cussing another teacher for who knows what offense, I ask him to go back out the door and enter more civilly. Instead he grabs books from desk and stalks out cussing me ("I might as well just go to the office, you fat fucking son of a bitch") and never returns. Later, when I realize that my write-up will be the one that gets him expelled, I feel sick. I have just been letting off a little steam by the teacher mailboxes, laughingly exchanging horror stories with a couple of colleagues, when it hits me that everything gained has been lost; that my fair-weather championing of him was inadequate: I do not feel the least bit comforted by anything I had attempted in the past to save him. And then there is the political arena. Years earlier at the university in Bloomington, chatting with a professor about his involvement in the Sanctuary Movement that sought to aid refugees from the wars, death squads, and deprivations of Central America, I expressed a merely tepid support for what he was doing. In fact, were my situation more amenable to such an intention, I believe I might have tried convincing my wife to assist me in illegally hiding one of those refugees. As it was, though, conscious of my own Mormon church's political conservatism (so contrary to the lessons its own heritage of persecution should have taught it), I hesitated when asked to arrange an informative meeting at our local building. It does not comfort me to know that, had I been at all frank about the purpose of the meeting, it would have been forbidden me. For in that case would a heroic lie have not been preferable to cowardly, silent inaction? That cowardice (perhaps the original sin of wretched humanity whose first instinct is for his own survival) cries out for redemption. One hope for that redemption since we have taught ourselves to reflect and to contemplate beauty, to write and to create art, must lie in literature's and in music's and in art's own intervention. In a recent and lavishly filmed Arabian Nights, it is posited that storytelling and imagination have the power to heal us of our sorrows and madnesses. I think this must be the basic reason that I can never bring myself to give up writing. Then also there is the simple matter of beauty, as encountered in the majesty of Beowulf's heroic saga as well as in Don Quixote's - as also in the best of the chivalric literatures that Cervantes claimed an intention to destroy (the best spirit of which lives even today in, for instance, the supremely believable fantasies of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and J. K. Rowling). |
Consider, for example, the conversation that occurs at one inn - out of earshot of Don Quixote - about the merits or demerits of the chivalric romances that have purportedly driven Don Quixote mad. Most moving in their defense, and evidently signaling some deeper intention on Cervantes's part, is the servant girl Maritornes's comment that I will quote in the version I first read it in:
"That's the honest truth," said Maritornes, "and I, too, love to hear those lovely goings-on, especially when they tell how a lady is lying under an orange tree wrapped in the arms of her knight, and the duenna keeping guard for them, dying of envy herself and all in a dither; I tell you, it is as sweet as honey." Furthering my by-no-means-original reading of Cervantes's chivalric sensibility is also the fact that even the innkeeper, while decrying the madness of actually trying to be a knight-errant in that day, does believe that all those stories really occurred. In contrast to that faith-on-the-cheap, as it were, consider the new respect that Don Quixote by now commands in the reader's eyes. His genuine faith-in-action rises far above the mockery of pretended friends who, by mimicking his heroic madness, would trick him out of it. The words that he speaks in that madness's favor are as moving as any genuine chivalric romance ever written. To the point that in the end I still believe I was essentially right, in my adolescent conversation with Mrs. Nordyke, to insist on the innate intelligence of that peculiar madness - over and against the cynicism of would-be confounders who themselves end up playing fools. I am now gazing, at center of an old copy of Ozell's revision of the Peter Motteaux translation of the Quixote, at a black-and-white print (signed H. PISAN) of an intrepid knight overlooking, yards below, "A vast Lake of boiling Pitch, in which an infinite Multitude of Serpents, Snakes, Crocodiles, and other Sorts of fierce and terrible Creatures, are swimming and traversing backwards and forwards." (I am reminded of the parallel scene in Beowulf, just as he is about to take on Grendel's mother in her watery home: "After these words, [Beowulf] / was impatient to be away and plunged suddenly: / without more ado, he dived into the heaving depths of the lake.") In Don Quixote's case, the picture does not represent an actual scene from his or any previous knight's adventures, but is a deliberate fiction of his own composition, a rhetorical device to impress, on his ecclesiastical interlocutor, the truth and beauty inherent in the chivalric romance's very nature. "For tell me," Don Quixote says, "is there anything more delightful than to see this very moment before our eyes, as it were, a great lake of pitch, boiling hot, and swimming and writhing about in it, a swirling mass of serpents, snakes, lizards, and many other kind of grisly and savage creatures, and then to hear a dismal voice from the lake crying: "You, knight, whoever you are, you who stare at this awful lake, if you wish to reach the guerdon hidden beneath these black waters, show the valor of your dauntless heart and plunge into the midst of this dark seething flood, for if you do not do so, you will not be worthy to see the mighty marvels hidden within the seven castles of the seven fairies who dwell beneath these murky waters"? At this point, as our knight continues his tale, the Knight of the Lake dives in with nary a thought to what might become of him. He does not even remove his armor. He just "commends himself to God and his lady and casts himself into the middle of the seething pool." Suddenly he finds himself amidst unimaginable splendor: flowered fields more glorious than the Elysian fields; a pleasant forest with gentle birdsong; a crystalline stream with gilded, pearl-like pebbles; and so much more, all of it combining "to create so varied a composition that Art, imitating Nature, seems here to surpass her." Then there is "a strong castle or sightly palace" whose remarkable workmanship our knightly storyteller spares no detail. And then, what beats all, a procession of beautiful ladies, the leader of which takes the intrepid knight's hand and escorts him to the castle, where they strip him of his burdensome attire, bathe him in water and fragrant oils, and clothe him in a priceless mantle. And that is not even the end of this particular profusion of passionate, sensual, literary splendor that we see pour forth from our bold knight's mouth. Never before or since has knight-errant spoken so many or such affecting words. And they are his words, after all, probably more than the misguided adventures, that most deeply move us. They are his words, in fact, that clothe his gentle idealisms and proffer the faintest hope of feeble humanity's eventual redemption from its persistent and inescapable folly. In this context - in the shadow of Don Quixote's rhetorical invention of this Knight of the Lake - we can at last speak of Don Quixote as not only knight-errant but also rhetor. And Beowulf, too: for if not in his fierce combat with Cain's misshapen and distinctly un-discoursive offspring, nor in his boyish encounter with nine sea monsters nor that final, fateful battle with the dragon, at least in his ordinary human intercourse he does show himself capable of the political and rhetorical arts. But first back to a more personal if not unrelated consideration: the one I raise to my students as to what such apparently archaic values as glory, honor, truth, and loyalty have to do with our everyday and thus mundane existences, our ordinary interactions with our fellow humanity. I have already tried to be frank about my particular failures in that regard. Even so, I have scarcely scratched the surface. I should speak, for instance, of my not-infrequent little unkindnesses toward members of my family, which even now mock the quasi-heroic process of this writing. Somewhere I have read that it was even so with Gandhi, who could heroically lead a whole nation but not patiently endure his own recalcitrant son. Failure also visits Don Quixote, who at last must confront the limitations of his mortality; likewise Beowulf, who in the end can neither avert his own nor his people's doom. None of which is any comfort to one who remains unable to convincingly lead an entire classroom. Don Quixote, to preserve fragile illusions, asserts his pre-eminence by lashing out at Sancho, his increasingly self-confident and assertive squire. I am like that, too. I like to think of myself as a reasonable man, a comprehending teacher, but in the face of a concerted challenge I have sometimes been too defensive. This defensiveness is, of course, a product of fear. The hero, though afraid, knows how to conceal his fear, while the merely quasi-heroic teacher may not. In an increasingly uncivil and unsupportive environment he walks a tightrope between fearlessness and arrogance, weakness and humility. If like me he lacks the charismatic presence of a TV or cinematic teacher-hero, I suspect he can do no better than engage in constant inner dialogue about achievements and failures past and present, ever rediscovering a proper balance between sternness and humility. Beyond that, I consider it his duty to deliver what he can of a basic education in the supremely civil values of the liberal arts. In the honest endeavor to accomplish this, wading through the ubiquitous failure that is a given of our human nature, lies what I can only suppose is the least improbable substance of his honor or glory. Francis Conroy, a professor at Pemberton, New Jersey's Burlington County College, has the right idea in his July 17, 2001 opinion in The Christian Science Monitor: "Alongside the breakdown of the family, the decline of the church, and the fragmenting of local community over the last third of the 20th century, I want to propose that the loss of the liberal arts may be having comparably deep consequences for American society." Later, he elaborates. "Central to the failure to address this problem," he writes, "has been society's lack of clarity as to their significance in the first place. Whereas family and church have perennially had their constituencies among the broad American public, the liberal arts and their function have not been well understood. Even during such high points as the early to middle 1960s, the public only vaguely understood what it meant for societal leadership to be schooled in the rich and subtle arts of reasoning, questioning, dialogue, appreciating complexity, balancing tradition and innovation, and exercising judgment." Quixote, says Sancho the good, should rather have been a preacher than a knight-errant. But faith without works is dead, Quixote answers; we are all children of what we do. Saints, like Jacob with his angel, have taken heaven by force, as I would now take it in my peerless Dulcinea's name. I do not take it as a violent man, rashly sacking the earthly kingdom, but as a peaceful crusader and righteous warrior. Knight-errantry is both my ensign and my religion. Herein lies the paradox of Don Quixote, both preacher (or rhetor) and knight-errant (soldier). He is a madman with lucid intervals, as apt to regale with sublime, archaic speeches on the merits of a vanished golden age as to lash out in the night at the unoffending wineskins that he mistakes for evil giants in need of swift beheading. And this is also, if less dramatically evident, the enigma of the Old English poet's Beowulf, as apt to lop off the head of dead Grendel resting in his underwater lair as to appease with political and rhetorical arts the braggart Unferth who had formerly provoked him. At first, Unferth publicly accuses him of famously failing in a previous contest; Beowulf responds with biting rhetoric that sets the record straight. "Well, friend Unferth, you have had your say / ... But it was mostly beer / that was doing the talking." Then he relates the true story, which involved his courageous struggle with nine sea monsters, before further putting the boaster in his place: Now I cannot recall any fight you entered, Unferth, that bears comparison ... The fact is ... if you were truly as keen or courageous as you claim to be Grendel would never have got away with such unchecked atrocity, attacks on your king, havoc in Heorot and horrors everywhere. But he knows he need never be in dread of your sword making a mizzle of his blood or of vengeance arriving ever from this quarter - ... But he will find me different. Yet this more demeaning example of Beowulf's rhetoric is only the beginning of the story. More telling is later, after returning from the second battle with Grendel's mother. A humbled Unferth, afraid to fight the monster himself, had lent Beowulf his sword. Aware that by doing so Unferth suffered a further loss of prestige among his people, Beowulf presented it back to him graciously, without any hint of the former quarrel. He did this despite its having proved powerless against the monster, to kill which he had relied instead on a magical sword that he encountered in that underwater struggle. "He said he had found [Unferth's sword] a friend in battle / and a powerful help; he put no blame / on the blade's cutting edge. He was a considerate man." Sublimely modest instance of the principle of conciliatory rhetorics! Yet it pales in comparison to the vast complexity of Don Quixote's interactions with his Spanish populace, his awareness of the worth of a caressing civility that others might dismiss as mere flattery. Beowulf, first and foremost a warrior, is not given to eloquence of other than the most ordinary sort; Don Quixote, on the other hand, is warrior only by virtue of his words and the power of his imagination, both of which will him to go soldiering off into the world. And this flattery that he is known to wield alongside his lance (despite the occasional burst of incivility) is not the sycophancy that kings and princes are warned against, but a vital and viable courtesy underlying the chivalric principle as it merges in our era with the democratic. Consider, among countless examples, with what extreme courtesy he discourses with the so-called Knight of the Green Cloak and his poet son. This is an essential civility that, if exercised with genuine sentiment, could do much to soften the harsh discourse that too often passes as the whole of politics. It is in this context that, of late, I have been imagining a previously unrelated encounter between our knight and some wandering sophist: the two of them in equally discordant attire (singularly out of place among their peers) and at ease with each other in a mutual flattery of conversation, a civil exchange of ideas. The knight is intent on renewing ancient arts of chivalry; the sophist, on restoring ancient arts of rhetoric. Don Quixote, ignoring the divergences of thought between Ciceronian oratory and Quintilian pedagogy, between Socratic / Platonic dialectic and Aristotelian science, heaps praise upon all. This is not inconsistent with the reverence he pays within Cervantes's Quixote to all the ancient arts and their practitioners: "Demosthenian rhetoric," Don Quixote explains to Sancho, "is as much as to say the rhetoric of Demosthenes, as Ciceronian is Cicero's, who were the two greatest rhetoricians in the world." Thus it makes sense that he praise, for its rhetorical skill, the discourse that even so does not entirely agree with his own ideological program and course of action; as also to acknowledge the complex interrelationship among various points of view, the very contingency of all knowledge. The modern function of rhetor, as even those ancients more or less understood, is by skillful use of either spoken or written argument to help bridge an otherwise unbridgeable gap between rhetor's and audience's knowing. Without malicious sophistry, those original sophists argued that human perception is always uncertain, subject to contingency rather than universal principle or absolute truth. Truth is relative but not as a consequence unarguable or unable to be acted upon. The good rhetor is not a nihilist but a facilitator in potential transformations of word into deed. This relativity of truth and rich multiplicity of perspective is already central to the Quixote's rational argument. Those sophists' art of rhetoric, then, as it has come down to us now and been transformed by the contingencies of our moment, is a populist art (potentially, at least) with its roots in Athenian democracy. The Quixote, supremely democratic novel itself, is through its largely egalitarian dialogue between master and squire of generally the same spirit. Socrates, whose aristocratic dialectic opposed itself to that rhetoric, is nevertheless preserved to us solely by the intervention of Plato's words, employed artfully as they are in the name of his own Republic of philosopher-kings. By the same token, Don Quixote comes down to us by virtue of his and his author's remarkable and brilliant exercise of language, regardless of his occasionally violent and distinctly un-sophistic pursuit of Platonic absolutes. These arts of rhetoric and public discourse are, in fact, the central element of those sadly neglected liberal arts made mention of above, those "rich and subtle arts of reasoning, questioning, dialogue, appreciating complexity, balancing tradition and innovation, and exercising judgment" to which Professor Conroy refers. Within this context too (as illustrated here by allusion both to Beowulf and the Quixote) it is evident that literature is itself in essence rhetorical, language itself sermonic, potentially heroic. The subject of these literary rhetorics has everything to do with those essential matters of glory and honor, truth and loyalty, not to mention the proper relationships between the powerful and the powerless and downtrodden: matters as inescapable today as in any era. But words without action remain suspect, as Don Quixote reminds us: faith without works remains dead and we but the children of our deeds. Yet deeds unchecked by reasoned discourse and even tolerance of dissent are as inevitably and fatally misguided. While it may sometimes be necessary to resort to soldierly action (as in the Sandinistas' case in overthrowing - and subsequently struggling to survive - the tyrant Somoza), surely most of the time the weapons most viable to all of us in our ordinary and even extraordinary lives are the rhetor's. Just consider, for instance, the case of the Zapatista rebels in Chiapas: a nearly decade-long conflict conducted, after its initial violent skirmish, almost exclusively with a flurry of internet-speeded communiqués and brilliant revolutionary poetics that by themselves garnered immediate international support and prevented an otherwise inevitable annihilation by the Mexican government's military force; a nearly decade-long struggle that more recently brought indigenous leaders themselves (emerging from behind the more flashy rhetoric of university-educated Subcomandante Marcos) to present their grievances - unschooled but eloquent - before the Congress in Mexico City. Does it matter, in this sense, that the grievances remain unmet? That the rebels have subsequently retreated, disillusioned, to the isolation of their mountains? The beauty of their words are still out there. There remains one final reflection to which all of these other thoughts lead me. I am thinking of the book Don Quixote's Profession, in which American literary critic Mark VanDoren posits his peculiar but compelling theory that Cervantes's knight wasn't a madman at all but merely an actor; an actor who, fully conscious of the role he would assume, was creating it as he went along; a role that he must assume in order for word (for ideal!) to become action. He merged with that role as he did so, thus confusing reality and illusion, but for reasons that were peculiarly his own and of which he remained always mindful. This idea of Quixote's knight-errantry as but the conscious actor's freely chosen profession raises a number of tantalizing what ifs. What if, for example, the Knight of La Mancha had instead simply become the Quixotic shepherd as he a couple of times proposed? Or what if he had taken Sancho's advice and become a preacher? Or most temptingly, as suggested by this newly contemplated dialogue between knight and sophist, what if his chosen profession had simply been that of rhetor, wandering sophist like Protagoras or Gorgias or Isocrates, but with what Plato called "a tincture of philosophy"? |