The Enamoured Knight
Douglas Glover
Oberon Press, 188 pages, $21.95
Good on Douglas Glover. Deserving winner of the Governor-General's Award for fiction in 2003 (for Elle), Glover could have published anything for his next book. Thankfully, instead of In the Kitchen with Douglas Glover, or Me, Porn and a Cabin, we get The Enamoured Knight, a book-length essay on fiction in general and Cervantes's Don Quixote in particular.
Quixote offers the literary reader and the student of writing several ripe paradoxes. Lionel Trilling claims "all prose fiction is a variation on the theme of Don Quixote," and Milan Kundera goes so far as to cite Cervantes and Descartes as the parents of the modern era. Yet Glover is quick to point out that Quixote is both the first novel and an anti-novel, a "book against books" (the old don is driven mad by reading too many books on knight errantry). This latter tension — between the aesthetic success of a book which, because it is so well conceived, arguably warns against living with too much text and not enough world — is the starting ground for Glover's loving examination of the work Harold Bloom calls "the first and best of all novels."
The Enamoured Knight wisely fuses two frequently doomed genres into a readable one, combining a thoroughly informed yet still readable run of literary criticism with a passionate and playful artist-on-art commentary. Criticism has essentially specialized itself into extinction (a Canadian academic journal is set to release an issue devoted to The Politics and Poetics of Haunting), and the inspired magazine essay often experiences growing pains in its move to the sustained book. Salman Rushdie's essay on Günter Grass's The Tin Drum is an invaluable discussion of the form while Nicholson Baker's book about John Updike (U and I), with its insistence on misquoting from memory rather than citing accurately, is an embarrassment to arboricide, and Alain De Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life won't even change your afternoon. Admirably, The Enamoured Knight avoids both self-indulgence and pedantry.
Glover knows his critics: Nabokov and Frye as well as Victor Shkolvsky and Mikhail Bakhtin, and puts them all to informative use when analyzing Don Quixote's multifaceted structure and varied operations, yet he's most enjoyable when he throws on his own dirty smock to speak as a fellow craftsman. Students of the novel or of writing can learn much from Glover, a museum guide on ecstasy who can't stop discussing (or maybe even fondling) Quixote's "cascading points of view," its "superstructure," "inset stories," "parallel action," "shadow books" and "character gradation." Glover shrewdly recognizes one Quixote chapter as "a set-piece version of the whole novel in a different key," and speaks knowingly of "the internal relativity machine of the nested narrators," or "novel thought" or a novel's "memory devices."
Unlike a more linear critical argument, the investigative and amatory The Enamoured Knight is at its best in this near-constant discussion of how novels work: "We read novels, we identify with their protagonists, not because they remind us of something that once happened to us or because they deliver a vividly realistic picture of another historical epoch, or how airports are run in a crisis, but because desire is the one universal attribute." (Glover's last book of stories was 16 Categories of Desire and a new book of essays about his work, also published by Oberon, is entitled The Art of Desire.)
Author of four books of stories and four novels, Glover has been an itinerant college instructor of creative writing and literature for years, and there are at least two critical arguments here alongside the fascinating inquiries into subjects as varied as reality, art and consciousness. Because of the book's fragmented structure, "flickering" narration and bookish self-consciousness, Glover sees Quixote as not simply the first novel, but also the first successfully experimental novel, the first, for lack of a better word, postmodern novel. He finds this paradoxical parentage radically underappreciated.
Appropriately, Glover arrives at this argument after a concise and informative history of the novel, a route that affords his second large (but only half-hearted) argument. If, as Glover and company suggest, Quixote is indeed the progenitor of the novel, and if, as Glover assiduously points out, it is a novel more concerned with writing self-consciously about a fictional world than directly portraying that world, why has the vast majority of subsequent thinking about the novel moved to prefer the latter to the former? If the novel didn't begin with a strictly "realistic" rendering of the world, why is it routinely expected to do so now?
Glover wants to know why, in U.S. writer John Hawkes's phrase, "verbal and psychological coherence" don't define the novel more fully than what Kundera derisively calls "the imperative of verisimilitude." While he establishes the material for this argument at great length, Glover never fully advances the case for linguistic play over quotidian detail, and that ultimately is no doubt part of this book's chivalrously subtle rhetoric.
Darryl Whetter wrote the 2003 book of stories A Sharp Tooth in the Fur, and is currently finishing a Quixotic bicycling novel.
