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Douglas Glover is an itinerant Canadian. Born in 1948, he grew up on the family tobacco farm in southwestern Ontario, studied philosophy at York University and the University of Edinburgh, then worked on a series of daily newspapers in New Brunswick, Ontario, Quebec and Saskatchewan before earning his MFA at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1982. He is the author of five story collections, four novels, a book of essays, Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, and The Enamoured Knight, a book about Don Quixote and novel form. His bestselling novel Elle won the 2003 Governor-General's Award for Fiction, was long-listed for the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and has been optioned by Isuma Igloolik Productions, makers of Atarnajuat, The Fast Runner. His story book A Guide to Animal Behaviour was a finalist for the 1991 Governor-General's Award. He has two sons, Jacob and Jonah.

"…wheresoever thou mayest be, mine thou art, and,
wheresoever I am,
I must be thine"
—Don Quixote (Volume 2, Chapter 48)

Love and Books, an Introduction

Don Quixote is an extraordinarily contemporary story because it's about the two pillars of modern life, love and books. To be precise, it's about an impossibly romantic love and bad books. It's that paradoxical thing, a book against books. The narrator's avowed purpose is "no other than to inspire mankind with an abhorrence of

the false and improbable stories recounted in books of chivalry." (Volume 2, Chapter 74) Reading popular novels about knights-errant drives Don Quixote mad. He falls in love with an imaginary woman, an ideal woman called Dulcinea, and rides about the country on his nag Rozinante perpetrating acts of absurd violence on innocent bystanders (not to mention windmills) in her name. Other characters take advantage of his folly to create elaborate hoaxes and provoke more mad antics for their own amusement. In Volume 2, Quixote even meets people who have read Volume 1; they know him better than he knows himself.

At a certain point, reading Don Quixote becomes a recipe for vertigo. Every sentence spins on a comic axis creating multiple ironies and subversions, blurring meaning. The novel's own bookishness, its awareness of itself as a book, punctures any illusion of verisimilitude and tells the "truth" about itself. The text becomes polysemous, becomes the proverbial elephant with critics grasping at this or that element on which to pin an interpretation. The

old don is a Christian saint, a psychotic, the last true knight, or a romantic dream-the-impossible-dream hero. Don Quixote is either not a novel in the true sense, it's the _rst and greatest modern novel, or it's an amazingly prescient postmodern confection simultaneously pre_guring Jacques Lacan and language theory (Quixote will describe himself as "wounded by the edge of absence"). Vladimir Nabokov called it cruel. Dostoevsky said it was the saddest book of all.

It stands in a meandering line of long prose stories that go back to the Classical Greeks, that is, to the beginning of written literature. Cervantes was clearly aware of his literary antecedents and models: the chivalric romance and what we call today the Greek novel, what the Greeks themselves called erotika pathemata or tales of suffering for love. The English word "novel" is misleading in this regard, connecting the genre with newness and modernity in a way that, say, the French word roman does not. The French word for novel etymologically ties the genre to the romance, medieval tales of chivalrous love and adventure which did derive historically from the Greek novel.

Cervantes' parody of the genre is next thing to a homage, or it is a homage. Don Quixote borrows plot, incident, character and theme from the chivalric romances it explicitly sets out to ridicule: chaste love, knightly adventures, single combats to the death, redemptive suffering, enchanters, giants, curing balsams, the raising of the dead, enchanted boats, Death itself, shape-changing, etc. In this, Cervantes initiated the hybrid pattern which more or less all novels have followed, romantic motif in a see-sawing tension with realistic effect (call it plausibility or verisimilitude). In any given work, the balance shifts between more or less realism and more or less myth-driven poetry or formalism. As Northrop Frye wrote in his essay "The Renaissance of Books,"

There seems something inherently paradoxical about the structure of a genre of literature that avowedly imitates life. The reason is not really so hard to grasp. Life has no shape; literature has. A realistic story must get its shape from somewhere, and ultimately the only place it can get it from is romance, a form of _ction in which the story is told for its own sake. (Spiritus Mundi: Essays on Literature, Myth, and Society)

These formal structures and romantic motifs are in turn themselves borrowed or copied from archaic myths and rituals—rites of initiation and passage, fertility rites, sacri_ce rites—bereft of the inherent belief systems which constituted their motivation and meaning, fragmented by faulty transmission and memory, jumbled and out of sequence. The fact that so much of what goes for narrative form has this mysteriously archaic quality is one of the things that makes interpreting literature such an open-ended activity. We don't know the form of form or what myths mean or why stories cohere around desire. Indeed, so much of what happens in Don Quixote, examined in a certain light, seems dream-like and contingent, a quality which one begins to notice in all great stories (what about that white whale and Gustave Aschenbach's bacchanalian nightmare and Anna Karenina's peasant working mysteriously over a piece of iron as she jumps beneath the train?).

At the same time, as I have said, Don Quixote is passionately and wittily aware of itself as a book. It's full of authors, translators, typographers, critics, readers, projected books, lists of books, literary criticism, book burnings, found manuscripts, references to the published _rst volume in Volume 2, and spurious books. One of the books discussed (Volume 1, Chapter 6) is "the Galatea of Miguel de Cervantes." Quixote's friend the village curate remarks, "…that same Cervantes has been an intimate friend of mine, these many years...." Quixote even visits a publishing house and discusses the theory of literary translation with an author. Except for Sancho, the important characters in the novel are readers, and not just readers, avid readers, almost as obsessed with reading and literary debate as Quixote himself. Though every character has a particular social role or profession, we rarely see them doing their jobs; the curate never preaches, the barber never cuts anyone's hair, the student never studies; they mostly _t into the novel as readers. Several are writers as well as readers. Even the arch-criminal and donkey thief Gines de Passamonte is writing his memoirs, and the canon of Toledo in Volume 1 has a hundred pages of a chivalric romance in manuscript. Alonso Quixano himself, Alonso the Good, has _irted with the idea of writing a book.

He, notwithstanding, bestowed great commendations on the author, who concludes his book with the promise of _nishing that interminable adventure; and was more than once inclined to seize the quill, with a view to performing what was left undone; nay, he would have actually accomplished the affair, and published it accordingly, had not re_exions of greater moment employed his imagination, and diverted him from the execution of his design. (Volume 1, Chapter 1)

Books trigger Quixote's insanity; they set the novel's plot in motion; books provide the mental and moral template for Quixote's behaviour. It's no stretch to say the narrative becomes a dramatic meditation on reading, on the logical interplay of text, truth, _ction and meaning, and on the book as a constructed arti_ce and as a technology. This is signalled by the internal relativity machine of the nested narrators, the cascading points of view, the playful shifting of discourses, the formal repetition (doubling) of event and character, the self-re_exive critical passages, the inter-textual reference, the motifs of writing, publishing and reading, and, above all, the paradoxical argument against chivalric romances. Both Quix-

ote and Sancho are haunted by their own unreality, by being characters trapped in a book, by the sense of being written by unseen hands.

The climax of this purely bookish invention is the moment when an impostor calling himself Don Quixote walks out of the pages of one book (the spurious Second Volume of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha: by the Licentiate Alonso Fernandez de Avellaneda of Tordesillas published in 1614) into the pages of another book (Cervantes' own Volume 2) and goes to joust at Saragossa. In the world of Don Quixote, this impostor is only a character in a bad novel, yet there he is, walking about the countryside like every other real character, a miracle that can only take place in a book where the grammatical throw of language makes such sleight of hand possible. At this point, Don Quixote severs its last tie with verisimilitude, wrenching itself out of the discourse of reality into the relativity of discourses, of language, as it were, in that _oaty, postmodern, post-structuralist sense of language as a self-referential system of signs. As Michel Foucault writes:

Don Quixote is the _rst modern work of literature, because in it we see the cruel reason of identities and differences make endless sport of signs and similitudes; because in it language breaks off its old kinship with things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in its separated state, only as literature; because it marks the point where resemblance enters an age which is, from the point of view of resemblance, one of madness and imagination. Once similitude and signs are sundered from each other, two experiences can be established and two characters appear face to face. (The Order of Things, 48-49)

The pathos of logos (reason or language) is that, as Plato pointed out, logos is always seeking completion in some lost unity, a unity made impossible by the symbolic nature of language itself. On one level, it's possible to construct a reading of Don Quixote as a narrative of the adventure of the mind seeking mythic closure with the world, as an image of the inevitably failed quest for knowledge, meaning, or the lost unity with things within the labyrinth of words. And, as it happens, the idea of sex, of love between a man and a woman, seems to offer the closest metaphorical parallel. So that on another level, the novel is a cracked love story. As the poet Anne Carson writes in Eros the Bittersweet,

In the act of thinking, the mind must reach across the space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space. (Eros the Bittersweet, 171)

The Greeks called their novels tales of suffering for love. If they weren't about suffering for love, they wouldn't be tales. A story consists of someone wanting something and having trouble getting it. There are no stories about people who start out happy and contented, remain happy and contented throughout, and end up happy and contented. Imagine the phrase "tales of not-suffering for love" or "tales of having fun for love" or "tales of _nding pleasure for love." The difference between pornography and literature is that in pornography everyone has orgasms all the time. There is no gap between desire and consummation. In literature there is always an element of frustration, displacement, delay and incompleteness (even if someone does eventually manage to have an orgasm). Don Quixote is the quintessential novel because it's about a man in love with a woman who doesn't exist. At the outset, Cervantes invents the limiting case.

Or put this another way: all novels are about acts of perversion. In novels, desire is resisted; characters invent roundabout or symbolic (fetishized or metonymic) means to try to satisfy desires which, in the very greatest works, invariably remain unsatis_ed. Don Quixote is the story of a man so inhibited in his erotic life that instead of simply talking to the real woman he loves (the peasant girl Aldonza Lorenzo) he reinvents her as an ideal, imaginary, impossible sexual partner and revels in suffering for her absence. In fact, his desire is double-blocked; not only is Dulcinea imaginary, but the love Quixote pledges her is chaste (think of Tristan placing the sword between himself and Iseult as they bed down together in the forest).

The impossibility of closing the love circuit is a commonplace of lyric poetry and modern psychology (you have to work at love, they tell us, totally missing the point). Books, those false, misleading, ridiculous chivalric romances, suggest to Quixote a metonymic (or fetishized) solution to his state of erotic stasis, the way to bridge the unbridgeable gap between himself and his lover. He will communicate his love to Dulcinea through adventures and by sending back to her a stream of messages in the form of conquered enemies sworn to pay her homage and the rumour of public renown. Yet when he actually tries to write a letter to Dulcinea, he _rst can't _nd paper, then Sancho forgets to take the letter with him when he leaves. Finally Sancho recites a garbled oral version of the letter to the wrong recipient. (Think of other postal metaphors: Derrida's The Postcard, Poe's "The Purloined Letter," and the Dead Letter Of_ce in Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener.") Resistance, suffering, the gap, the imaginary bridge, and the fetish are central to the meaning of love because they delay or prevent the recognition of the impossibility of satisfaction. Arousal lies in the tension of ambiguity, incompletion and, ultimately, disappointment, which can only be relieved in death (hence, the poetic conceit that what desire desires is death).

Dulcinea is, in fact, imaginary. Love thrives, suffers in utter absence; the old knight's fancy projects a strange, solipsistic re_ection of his own emptiness onto the empty screen: it has the look of a beautiful, smiling woman. And so, oddly enough, reason and reality can never penetrate the addled, love-sick mind of Quixote. Only another sign can discon_rm his fantasy. Entering his home village at the end of his long adventure, he hears the words, "Thou shalt never see it in all the days of thy life" and immediately applies them to his own situation. As in a dream, hounds appear chasing a hare. The hare hides, trembling, beneath Sancho's donkey. Sancho scoops it up and hands it to Quixote, who says, "Malum Signum, Malum Signum! the hare _ies, the hounds pursue, and Dulcinea does not appear." A few lines later Sancho hands Quixote the little cricket cage, image of his enchantment.

Bad sign. Evil sign. It's an amazing, beautifully poignant passage, packed with exuberant life, signi_cance, and converging patterns: the two men limping home, the end of their journey, the boys squabbling over their cricket cage, the racing hounds, the quivering hare (Quixote, who began the novel as a hunter, knows exactly what they represent), the boys pushing in to see the hare, hunters hastening over the _elds, and the distraught knight reading each disparate bit of reality as if it were a message for him alone.

Quixote's passionately bitten-off phrases contain the whole tragic poetry of semiotics. Bad sign, evil omen: the sign is a lack, desire chases its meaning; but the meaning, like the object Quixote has been pursuing through the novel, never appears. In the context of courtly poems and chivalric novels, as well as Quixote's madness, the chaste, semi-divine mistress is a fundamental symbol, a structuring principle of the discourse of reality, which is why the poems of the troubadours could be read ambiguously as referring to a real mistress, an ideal woman, or, in the Christian topos, the Virgin Mary. So that when Quixote cries out, "Evil sign!" he is announcing not just the end of his own obsessional fantasy but something far worse. "Lord mend us!" he exclaims, after being rescued from the mill race by those phantom millers, "the world is nothing but a continual warfare of opposite machinations and deceit...." (2,29) His words echo another famous literary doublet, Kurtz's "The horror! The horror!"—Kurtz also being a literary knight of dubious accomplishments. At the end of "Heart of Darkness," when Marlow returns to civilization (after imitating Kurtz's journey up country and following him to death's door), he tells a lie about what he has heard.

We love stories because they dramatize what we feel obscurely to be our own adventure, though we are almost always less focused and less heroic than the people who bear our standard in literature. It's a peculiar adventure. We deploy an inadequate tool, language, to mime the shape of the emptiness. Desire and resistance are like the _ngers of a blind man touching the surface of an unseen wall. Naturally, so much pathos, impossibility and emptiness, as well as our propensity for risky, ill-advised existential experiments, is ripe for comedy. The mind likes to think in antitheses (the form of the aphorism), and comedy and tragedy are just another example of that curious oscillation or _ickering quality we _nd so often in Don Quixote. Aristotle says comedy grew out of phallic songs, an observation that makes me think of those Aubrey Beardsley prints of little men and satyrs strutting about with giant erect penises, hubris incarnated in the genital _esh, ripe for disappointment and detumescence (picture Quixote, on his scrawny old horse, with his broken lance, rusty armour and barber's basin helmet). Shakespeare's comedies, like so many modern Hollywood romantic comedies, end in marriage, a celebration of true love and fertility, which is the antithesis of Quixote's chaste, barren ideal.

The lesson here might be that art doesn't mime reality; it imitates possible realities. In story after story, novel after novel, authors repeat the hypothesis of desire. What happens if true love exists? What happens if it's just a bookish fantasy? What if we are alone and always will be? Literature becomes, through repetition and variation, a rich tangle of possible outcomes and suggested meanings which function as a commentary and gloss on our particular epics of desire. Without having recourse to Thanatos, hubris or Original Sin, there is still a meta-story with which we can identify, which is, perhaps, an old story about birth, procreation and death, especially death, which in image after image haunts the pages of Don Quixote, "gnawed by a dog's hunger," Sancho says, "that is never satis_ed." Wittgenstein said that the religious feeling, belief in God, was perhaps nothing more than an expression of awe at the fact of our existence. We exist: the strange, complex story of desire begins, and simultaneously the counter-story, the vectors of con_ict and resistance, start to whittle away our vital forces.

When we read we mime loss repetitively and in the process it seems to accrete meaning, the sense of being planned, fated or the will of the gods; we enjoy the sense of participating in a larger story, we experience the passion of the hero and, after, the generous perspective of pity and distance. What does come with repetition is a sense of mastery and control. This is the essence of repetition as a cognitive tool; it's the reason children play house or tennis players stand in front of ball machines endlessly hitting backhand shots. In the experience of reading, which is emotional rather than cognitive, we somehow _nd loss easier to bear.