Introduction
This exhibit originated in conversations between Professor Israel Burshatin and librarians about how we might celebrate Don Quixote’s 400th anniversary and showcase the Libraries’ Cervantes holdings. The online exhibit began as a month-long student internship project in the summer of 2015. During the school year, student workers in Quaker & Special Collections who had taken classes with Professor Burshatin continued work on the exhibit content. Prof. Burshatin’s course on Quixotic Narratives includes an exploration of the Libraries' rare editions of Don Quixote; conversations around the path for the exhibit and the class visit led each students to curate a page of the online exhibit. Students in the class chose adaptations, illustrations, music, and film versions of Don Quixote to explore in their essays and selected the visual components of their pages. In 2018, students in another section of Quixotic Narratives contributed further essays to the exhibit, broadening the selection of topics covered.
The question that first motivated the project centered on the nature of truth or reality in the novel, and it is a question that the other curators have taken up in various ways. The novel's construction of truth is also a widely explored theme in Quixote scholarship in general. For example, Ilan Stavans argues in Quixote: The Novel and the World (2015) that “the tension between what is real and what is imagined [. . .] is the engine moving the action of [Don Quixote] forward” (6). Any scholarly quest to dispel this tension—by resolving the conflict between the real and ideal in favor of either one—risks undermining the very catalyst that drives the novel. Such an attempt is also necessarily quixotic. In other words, the effort is a hopeless and foolhardy enterprise that nonetheless captures the essence of the novel without preempting other, perhaps contradictory readings.
Like Quixote himself, the curators of this exhibit have sought the truth about Cervantes’s world as refracted through the verbal narrative and its corruptions at the hands of censors, printers, and translators; they have examined the changing perceptions of Don Quixote from the time of its publication to today, and they have done so through an analysis of various media—illustrations, graphic adaptations, music, films, and even furniture. In addition to describing the historical and literary background of the novel, David Zabliski explores the alternately comic and serious representations of Quixote in nineteenth-century illustrations by George Cruikshank (1792–1878), Tony Johannot (1803–1852), and Gustave Doré (1832–1883). Other curators examine more recent visual representations of Quixote, including G. W. Pabst’s 1933 film adaption—which Harrison Elbert claims is “impossible to separate from the political realities of the 1930s”—and Patricio Clarey and Lara Fuentes’s graphic novel La Sombra de Don Quijote (2014), which Willa Gutfreund argues is a “surreal” allegory of literature’s failure in the face of “modern technology.” Gabriela Lomba Guzman presents a more low-brow version of Quixote in the form of tourist kitsch: a painted-tile table that illustrates scenes from the novel. As she argues, the painter’s final tile leaves in question Alonso Quijano’s death—keeping the story of Quixote alive for its audience. Other sections of the exhibit investigate the reception of not just the narrative, but also the physical book itself. Most notably, Natalia Gutierrez-Jones imagines how the conservative Spanish politician Antonio Cánovas del Castillo (1828–1897) might have employed his first- and second-edition copies of Don Quixote, which are now owned by Haverford College.
The many iterations of Quixote examined in this exhibit underscore the vitality of Cervantes’s text, revealing the diverse interpretations of the novel and the multifarious uses to which it continues to be put. These readings also demonstrate unequivocally that the novel’s truth remains its inherent paradox: that reality is fiction and vice versa.
Work Cited
Stavans, Ilan. Quixote: The Novel and the World. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015. Print.