The Worst and the Reckless

An emotional sitrep. I pass the halfway point in a lengthy novel I'm reading. I finish one book of comics and start in on another. I watch an animated television special and a very good feature film.

With global antisemitic sentiment skyrocketing, pogroms breaking out all over the shop including in Germany, Jews of all ages being tortured to death and burned alive and the world preparing for war, one could be forgiven for thinking we were describing 1939. So, more of the new usual here at the One Could Argue offices: sobered, wired, motivated, morally exhausted. Sophistry, hypocrisy, cowardice and, in one or two instances, endorsement of antisemitic violence continue to proliferate among people I have admired and loved. Other friendships, including two of my very closest and several with people I am still getting to know, have deepened and strengthened considerably in the past month. I suppose sometimes you choose to mature and grow less naive and on other occasions events intervene and you have no choice. If my paternal great-grandfather could ditch Ukraine at twenty-five years of age and emigrate to America with nothing but his knowledge of how to cobble shoes and my maternal great-great-grandfather could cut off his own thumb to avoid serving in the Czar’s army, I can risk compromising my friendships with certain people I evidently never knew as well as I thought I did.

These past weeks I’ve been drawing much more than writing and have been leaning on fiction and comics for emotional nourishment. I’ve also done a modest amount of film-watching, though these days I find myself uncharacteristically unenthusiastic about sitting through pictures of any length.

I finished the “First Part of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha,” Cervantes having published the text we now know as Don Quixote in two parts in 1605 and 1615 respectively. Compelling to contemplate that with the flip of a few pages the reader jumps ten years in the distinguished and unlucky life of one of the most influential writers in history.

• I love when I start reading something I’ve been hearing about all my life and find myself thinking, “Ohhhhhh, so this is why people have been into this for over four hundred years.” I’ve had similar experiences, give or take some years or a century, with A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare and Gulliver’s Travels by Swift.

• There are the exact right amount of shit, piss and puke jokes in Don Quixote, regular enough to make the text sillier and infrequent enough to avoid any appearance of an undue fascination on Cervantes’s part. And they are worded as tastefully as the rest of the book, which makes them more genuinely funny; Cervantes never has to break tonal stride when he wants to resort to scatological set pieces, for example in Chapter XVII of the First Part when Sancho starts to “erupt from both channels.”

• It occurred to me some time back that the freewheeling and picaresque narrative saunter of Don Quixote, in which stuff happens and then more stuff just continues to happen, reminds me of the great novel 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, a copy of which a friend gave me to read about ten years ago. Both novels have a meandering breadth and sublimity of depth which gives their ingenious authors all the opportunity they need to shoot off along any axis into different episodes, side stories, philosophical musings, framed narratives-within-the-main-narrative and even poetry. (There’s a lot of poetry in Don Quixote and I can’t quite remember how much there is in 2666 but I remember Bolaño in that novel making favorable reference to one of the benefits of prose fiction being that it can contain poetry within it, while the reverse is not true. If I have that right, that reads in my retrospect as a near-direct nod to Cervantes on Bolaño’s part.) When I mentioned to Frienefactor that I saw Bolaño as being downstream of Cervantes, she told me that more Spanish-language literature than I realize is characterized by this looser sense of structure and wider spectrum of narrative possibility, contrasted with what we might be accustomed to with works of fiction that originate in English.

• Speaking of those framed narratives, their predominance in Don Quixote is one of the funnest things about this book. The reader can be in one time and place with Cervantes’s central characters of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and their various hangers-on, and then can suddenly be whisked off into some far-flung and radically different fictional environs with a novel subset of dramatis personae: the separate but intertwined stories of Cardenio and Dorotea, the novel-within-a-novel “The Man Who Was Recklessly Curious,” the swashbuckling and romantic “history of the captive” and the goatherd’s explanation of the loose-knit, rustically-wandering cult of men who have been spurned by and dedicated themselves to the penitent artistic worship of the beauteous Leandra. There are also the strange dissertation-like musings by Don Quixote himself on comparing the merits of the warrior with those of the learned man and of his detachment from reality that makes him think all novels of chivalry are real histories of things that have actually happened, not to mention the self-referential opinion-unspooling of a scholarly canon who holds forth on the problem of what we today call audience-capture and its deleterious effect on the art of writing.

• The novel has what appears to me to be a running joke about feminine beauty, starting with Marcela and then with other characters including Luscinda, Dorotea, Zoraida and the mentioned-but-not-encountered Leandra: each one is alleged to top the one before and Cervantes wears himself out finding new ways to describe each successive girl as even more beautiful than the last. This all traces back to the novel’s early mention of Aldonza, the “very attractive peasant girl with whom” Don Quixote “had once been in love” and whom he rechristens “Dulcinea of Toboso,” the service of whom is the nominal reason for his delusions of knight errantry. As important as Dulcinea is to Don Quixote and to his madness and to Cervantes’s story, I haven’t yet encountered her face-to-face.

• I’m now into the Second Part and we know from the introduction that Don Quixote eventually DIES! But not yet. Also the Second Part begins with the entire book folding back on itself in even grander metatextual fashion, with Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and an associate of theirs discussing the First Part in the way in which it was winkingly presented to the reader, as a historical text describing supposedly real events. D.Q. and S.P. debate over and marvel at how the historian who wrote the First Part about them could have known things that happened when no one else was around. Cervantes also calls himself out through their dialogue for narrative inconsistencies he made by accident and turns his own errors into comic fodder. I wonder what Swift thought about Don Quixote when he read it; I bet he and Cervantes would have gotten along famously if they had been alive at the same time and spoken a common tongue.

I finished a book of circumspect Sunday-only comics by FoxTrot cartoonist Bill Amend called Deliciously FoxTrot and started right in on a well-drawn collection of dailies and Sunday strips from 2006 entitled Jam-Packed FoxTrot. On a morning off a few days before Halloween I also squeezed in a quick watch of the 1966 Peanuts animated television special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, directed by series stalwart Bill Melendez. The DVD of the Peanuts special came as a loan from Frienefactor and she also recommended to me the feature film that I watched for this entry, the 2021 picture The Worst Person in the World, directed by Joachim Trier.

This entertaining and moving film is a Bildungsroman about a beautiful and intelligent but scattered and overly-ambitious thirty-year-old woman in Oslo who fumbles and grows through some of the types of dumb missteps we all make around formative ages and times of change. The point of the title and arguably of the film is that these travails and mistakes are a near-mandatory right of passage for anyone gifted and cursed with thirty years of life in which to love, err and grow, but that their universality does vanishingly little while we are going through them to make any of us feel like anything other than what is described in the title.

In its playful experimentalism, formally episodic structure and flawed-but-relatable protagonist Trier seems to owe a surprising amount to Woody Allen here, cemented with a wry and confrontational perspective on some of 2021’s frustratingly silly contemporary trends and issues du jour. The protagonist and her friends, rivals and two serious love partners are mostly so beautiful and charismatic and so ensconced in their urbane Northern European milieu that their dramatic difficulties might be too easily dismissed as petty and unserious, but that would be overlooking the sophisticated aesthetic, expansive storytelling and clear commitment to the material on the part of everyone involved both in front of and behind the camera which lends significance and plausibility to well-depicted rites of passage like relationships, cheating, changing careers, tripping on psilocybin and confronting mortality and pregnancy. If you’re feeling as stressed and tired as I have been and need to look at some beautiful people playing interesting characters in a well-composed and interesting movie, get lost in The Worst Person in the World for two hours. It’s refreshingly easy to sit through in the way that unapologetically entertaining movies are meant to be. Goodness knows we can use them now.