This study posits a link between the logic of quixotism and the logic of exceptionalism….
…[T]he exceptionalist mind-set that drives quixotes is neither a legal nor a forceful claim to exceptionalism…. Quixotic exceptionalism is rather the experience of one’s own exceptionality based in the belief in one’s own exceptionality, of moving through the world convinced that all obstacles can and should be subordinated to the quixote’s superior sense of purpose. Whereas the idealist expects to be challenged by the status quo and marks the distinction between the idealistic worldview and the routine from which it deviates, the exceptionalist quixote meets challenges with surprise and indignation, because for quixotes the guiding worldview and the assumed moral superiority of the quixote are inseparable. The quixote experiences exceptionality at every turn, even in and through resistance to quixotism, or challenges to whatever authority or exceptionality to which the quixote lays claim.
….I argue further that the exceptionalist logic that quixotes deploy at the interpersonal level becomes a way of mediating in literature the exceptionalist practices of states and of those empowered within social and political hierarchies. What we call quixotic fiction has been a strategy for identifying and grappling with exceptionalist worldviews and practices, whether in geopolitics, legal systems, or class hierarchies, and allegorizing these in fiction. In these ways the connection between the logic of quixotism and the logic of exceptionalism is one of shared political and rhetorical practices.Introduction: Tilting at Concepts
I often cringe when a well-intentioned (and appreciated!) reader calls my posts here “reviews.” Book reviewing is an art and a skill, one in which I have no training. That’s particularly the case for academic non-fiction, such as this book. What I record here is instead my own experience of reading (and I’ll go into some interesting details of this later), which may or may not be typical, and my understanding of the subject, which may or may not be accurate or complete. My purpose is not to explain or convince, but to help me retain what I’ve just read, and to leave a record so that one or five years from now, I can see what I was thinking when I read this. I start with this in order to emphasize: If you are drawn to the topic of quixotic exceptionalism, or, for that matter, British and American literature of the 18th century, but you find my comments here bewildering, I urge you to read the book instead to have a more direct line of sight to the author’s reasoning.
The introduction and first section of the book review the concepts involved in quixotic exceptionalism, including the theories that underlie such terms. The key starting point is Hanlon’s examination of the logic of exceptionalism, a logic that “reasons from the exception rather than the example.” Don Quixote believed in his exceptionality as a chivalric knight, aiding those in distress; the world, of course, thought he was nuts. But he reversed the polarity, so to speak: to him, the world was nuts because it didn’t conform to his view of how things should be, and thus, because he was better than the world, he was entitled to act according to his exceptionalism. Hanlon’s description:
Quixotes conceive of themselves as exceptional, so define their relationship to their surroundings paradoxically as one of the quixote’s entirely justifiable existence and a surrounding world of unfathomable exceptions to the just order of things. This condition of quixotism hinges on the quixote’s concept of fictionality, which is not that the surrounding world is like chivalric romance (or a quixote’s given hobbyhorse), but that the surrounding world is full of baffling exceptions to what ought to look more like the world of chivalric romance. This is the effect of quixotic exceptionalism: for the quixote, the exception is the example, and the example is the exception.Chapter 1: Quixotic Exceptionalism
Exceptionalism, and belief in one’s exceptionalism (or that of one’s country, or class, or other group) are not the same. The ability to ignore inconvenient evidence that one is not exceptional, or that the world does not operate on chivalric principles, is also key to this outlook.
I struggled with these ideas – as I’ll explain later, I even put the book aside for a few months – because the terms seem to shift meaning at times. Exceptional generally means outstandingly good – in third grade, I was very confused by my teacher telling me my grade on some assignment was “exceptional” because I didn’t know what it meant, I just heard the “X”; my face must have shown disappointment, because she stopped and explained, “That the best grade there is” – but it also means atypical, as in an exception to the norm. I gather the idea is that Don Quixote might consider himself exceptional in the first sense; the world would consider him exceptional in the second.
Likewise, I had trouble with this idea of the exception and the example. If Don Quixote believes he is a knight errant, and sets out to slay giants and armies and free captives (the exception), the world might point out to him he is actually an ordinary hidalgo facing windmills and sheep and dangerous criminals. But he reasons from the exception – his point of view – and not from the example – the reality of the world. I think. Again, these poles seem to shift depending on which side of the argument you stand.
But many groups – countries, economic and social classes, universities – like Don Quixote, use exceptionalist logic to enforce their own sense of fictionality, to claim they are the best country, type of person, place to go into debt for the next thirty years. Evidence to the contrary is minimized, discredited, or ignored. This makes quixotic literature “a highly desirable medium for expressions or critiques of exceptionalist politics.”
Hanlon gives several qualities necessary for quixotism, among them: the ability to create a fictionality, which generally requires the socioeconomic means to become educated and well-read, comfortable with storytelling; and mimetic appeal, the ability to inspire others to imitate him. Often this imitation is done falsely for a manipulative purpose, but sometimes it is genuine.
I want to mention the idea of quixotic conversion here, as well. Hanlon brings it in while discussing individual works in the next section, but since it’s common to them all, I’d rather get it out in front here. At the very end of Don Quixote, our hero realizes he’s not a knight, he’s just LARPing, and he’s not fixing the world. Then he takes to his bed and dies. This conversion can happen in many different ways, but it seems to be a common feature of a quixotic narrative. In fact, it is this conversion, as well as the mimetic factor, that I found the most interesting in the examples.
In Part Two, we have a series of works employing quixotic exceptionalism from the 18th century. I found these examples helpful in better understanding the concepts from Part One. A number of books are used as examples of quixotic exceptionalism in different contexts:
- Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (British exceptionalism)
Royall Tyler: The Algerine Captive (American exceptionalism)
Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews (Civic exceptionalism in Britain)
H. H. Brackenridge: Modern Chivalry (Civic exceptionalism in the very early US)
Charlotte Lennox: The Female Quixote (Domestic exceptionalism, service staff, in Britain)
Tabitha Tenney: Female Quixotism (Domestic exceptionalism, service staff, in the early US)
Tobias Smollet: Launcelot Greaves (Juridical exceptionalism, Britain)
Washington Irving: A History of New York (Reactionary exceptionalism, the power of writing, US)
Charles Lucas: The Infernal Quixote (radical exceptionalism; British anti-Jacobinism)
The 18th century is, shall we say, not my strength; the only one of these I’ve read is Swift, and that was a very long time ago in college. Fortunately, these works were originally in English and are long out of copyright, so most are available on Gutenberg and Librivox. I wasn’t going to make this a six-month project (though I did consider it; this book would be a spectacular backbone for such a class), so I had to be selective. I chose to re-read Gulliver, the Brobdingnag and Houyhnhnm segments, and Smollett. I also ordered the Tyler which is not on either online site for some reason, but it’s still mired in between OSM and USPS somewhere outside of Baltimore. I also read the first book-and-a-half of Irving (which was hilarious). Thus I can only speak to my experience of those works; the rest, I must rely on Hanlon’s chapters.
I should add that I did read a first-read of Don Quixote a few years ago (it’s a multi-read sort of book), with the help of the Yale OCW lectures (delivered by Prof. Roberto González Echevarría, whom Hanlon quotes several times in his book), and a cute little independent mooc by Prof. Eric Clifford Graf from Universidad Francisco Marroquín in Guatemala. The former included a text on imperial Spanish history, and a Quixote casebook, edited by Gonzales, of essays about the book (which shows up in Hanlon’s bibliography) and covered numerous themes and literary techniques; the latter was useful in presenting a chapter-by-chapter narrative for those of us who might have missed a step somewhere along the line.
Hanlon’s chapter on Gulliver includes the admission that he isn’t typically seen as a quixotic character. Hanlon makes the case, building on Nicholas Amhurst’s 1726 proposal, that his desire for travel is quixotic; it is his way of looking for a Utopia that is his idealism. Much of this chapter is focused on Gulliver’s exceptionalism as a way of satirizing the English belief in its superiority. Gulliver describes England – its government, courts, international relations, economy – to the Brobdingnag king with great pride. The King’s response is not what he expected:
He was perfectly astonished with the historical account I gave him of our affairs during the last century; protesting “it was only a heap of conspiracies, rebellions, murders, massacres, revolutions, banishments, the very worst effects that avarice, faction, hypocrisy, perfidiousness, cruelty, rage, madness, hatred, envy, lust, malice, and ambition, could produce.”
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, Book II, Ch. VI
He offers knowledge of gunpowder, weapons, and warfare as a tribute, and is again surprised when the King refuses them. His explanation for this exemplifies exceptionalism:
But great allowances should be given to a king, who lives wholly secluded from the rest of the world, and must therefore be altogether unacquainted with the manners and customs that most prevail in other nations: the want of which knowledge will ever produce many prejudices, and a certain narrowness of thinking, from which we, and the politer countries of Europe, are wholly exempted. And it would be hard indeed, if so remote a prince’s notions of virtue and vice were to be offered as a standard for all mankind.
….The learning of this people is very defective, consisting only in morality, history, poetry, and mathematics, wherein they must be allowed to excel. But the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in life, to the improvement of agriculture, and all mechanical arts; so that among us, it would be little esteemed. And as to ideas, entities, abstractions, and transcendentals, I could never drive the least conception into their heads.
Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, Book II, Ch. VII
That’s one way to maintain one’s exceptionalism: those who disagree just aren’t sharp enough to get it; there’s no need to examine their objections and see if they might have a point.
If in Brobdingnag the most common form of exceptionalism is exemplified, it’s with the Houyhnhnms that we see a distinct variation leading to an atypical quixotic conversion. Gulliver is repelled by the Yahoos, whom he finally realizes he resembles physically, and identifies with the far more civilized Houyhnhnms, in spite of the fact that they are horses. When he is kicked out of the country and returns to England, he goes so far as to find people revolting, and prefers the company of horses.
Hanlon unpacks this conversion and links Gulliver more firmly to quixotism via his reading of travel books instead of chivalric romances:
…Gulliver sets out in Part 4 and arrives in the Country of the Houyhnhnms, a utopian land ultimately responsible for Gulliver’s final moments of quixotic conversion, not from mad quixote to rational English citizen, but from an apologist for a fictive vision of England and Europe to an apologist for a foreign utopia. Gulliver’s quixotic conversion is complex, less a rejection of quixotism than a substitution of one quixotic ideal for another. In this sense, Gulliver is the gullible character par excellence, an engine of satire because he fails to learn that his quixotism of travel and his exceptionalist predisposition are what continually land him in trouble.
…. Afterward, that very exceptionalist mind-set enables Gulliver to identify with the Houyhnhnms despite his physical resemblance to the reviled Yahoos. That exceptionalist mind-set arose from his reading of books of travel that idealized England and wider Europe’s place in the world, and this is precisely why Amhurst took Gulliver’s Travels for a Cervantic satire on travel writing.Chapter 5: Gulliver and English Exceptionalism
The other exemplar I read to completion was Tobias Smollett’s Launcelot Greaves, covered in Chapter 9. While I enjoyed reading Gulliver, this was less my cup of tea. It starts out very closely imitating Don Quixote, to which it refers several times in the early chapters: Greaves, disappointed in love, finds a hundred-year-old suit of armor and decides to roam England distributing justice for the oppressed, dragging along a reluctant Timothy Crabshaw as his squire. I found it very confusing, as most of the ten or so primary characters are referred to by several names each: first name, last name, occupation, rank, role in the story, etc.
In several ways it deviates from the original Don Quixote. Greaves often knows who he is; in fact, his detailed memory of his broken romance drives him. And, as Hanlon points out, “Launcelot’s adventures differ radically from those of other quixotes because of the unquestionably favorable results they produce, as well as the verifiable soundness of the knight’s rationale.” His idealism is the power of law to right wrongs; on a couple of occasions he refuses to engage in chivalric duels, such as when his rival for the affections of his rediscovered love sends him a note challenging him to battle for her hand (a mimetic event, by the way):
…Sir Launcelot passed the night awake, in ruminating on the strange challenge he had received. He had got notice that the sender was Mr. Sycamore, and hesitated with himself whether he should not punish him for his impertinence; but when he reflected on the nature of the dispute, and the serious consequences it might produce, he resolved to decline the combat, as a trial of right and merit founded upon absurdity. Even in his maddest hours, he never adopted those maxims of knight-errantry which related to challenges. He always perceived the folly and wickedness of defying a man to mortal fight, because he did not like the colour of his beard, or the complexion of his mistress; or of deciding by homicide whether he or his rival deserved the preference, when it was the lady’s prerogative to determine which should be the happy lover. It was his opinion that chivalry was an useful institution while confined to its original purposes of protecting the innocent, assisting the friendless, and bringing the guilty to condign punishment. But he could not conceive how these laws should be answered by violating every suggestion of reason, and every precept of humanity.
Tobias Smollett: Launcelot Greaves, Ch. 18
In spite of my irritation with the book, it was in this reading that I began to understand better the idea of reasoning from the exception rather than the example. I can’t find the quote, so I can’t attribute it, but somewhere I read something like, “His belief in the power of law is rooted in his experience: the law has always worked for him, so if it doesn’t work for others, there must be some problem in its execution.” That the law might have, baked into it, a few escape hatches and back doors (from unique interpretations to outright corruption) to aid those with the power to access them – or money to hire lawyer who can access them – doesn’t cross his mind. It’s also telling that, as Hanlon points out, his exceptionalism “allows him to function simultaneously as a skeptic toward and successful manipulator of the law in this pursuit of justice.” I can understand that, actually: it’s quite possible to believe in an institution, yet realize it sometimes fails, particularly when the failures seem outside of the institution itself.
The quixotic conversion is also very different in this text. Unlike both Don Quixote and Gulliver, who wind up miserable, everything comes together for Launcelot – and for pretty much everyone in his scope. In the process, he completely abandons his quixotic persona and again becomes the landowner Greaves. It might be another reason I disliked the book: I don’t mind a happy ending, but this was ridiculous.
Hanlon sees it differently:
However, it is also clear that a quixotic belief in the power of the law, which proves a precarious position, has been a significant part of Launcelot’s default quixotism all along, a quixotism of law that remains with him through the novel’s end. Though Launcelot Greaves comes together in the end in a tidy manner similar to the ending of Joseph Andrews, Launcelot never actually experiences an end-of-novel conversion. That is, like Fielding’s Parson Adams, never actually has his quixotic expectations shattered, let alone seriously challenged. Instead, he has his quixotism logically and empirically affirmed by his considerable success…. Smollet rewrites the quixote story, providing readers with all of the salient trappings of quixotism, but twisting the effect of quixotism such that it becomes the basis not of folly, but of the successful pursuit of justice.Chapter 9: Launcelot and Juridical Exceptionalism
Maybe part of my dislike of the book stems from my impression that a rich guy LARPed his way around England, doing considerable good, particularly for those people oppressed by Judge Gobble, then went back to his real life, safe and sound. I’m reading from a 21st century view of privilege, not from an 18th-century view of nobility. I’ll take Hanlon’s comments under serious advisement.
The other work I read in part – very small part – is examined in Chapter 10, Knickerbocker and Reactionary Exceptionalism. However, for me, it involved a surprise having nothing whatsoever to do with Don Quixote. I’d always assumed there was someone named Knickerbocker who did something considered impressive way back somewhen, hence all the use of the name in New York: the basketball team, a classic hotel, and a variety of small businesses in much the same way every other store in my own town of Portland, Maine names itself “Longfellow”. Longfellow was, after all, a real person, and he did live here for a short time (his childhood home is a couple of blocks from where I now sit). But it turns out Knickerbocker was… well, maybe imaginary is not the right word. Mythical.
Knickerbocker is the creation of Washington Irving:
Knickerbocker, the fictional historian of Irving’s A History of New York, made his first public appearance in the October 26, 1809, edition of the New-York Evening Post. In an elaborate hoax, Irving introduced Knickerbocker in a series of letters to the Post under the persona of a landlord who claims that a mysterious “elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat” and “not entirely in his right mind,” had disappeared from his lodgings without settling his bill. But the gentleman did leave behind a “curious” manuscript….Thus unfolded Irving’s ingenious plot, which created, in the vernacular of viral marketing, a buzz surrounding the publication of A History of New York, a mock-historical narrative Irving penned in the persona of the quixotic historian, Knickerbocker.
…. The history chronicles the earliest seventeenth-century Dutch settlements in the Manhattan area, what Knickerbocker terms the “Dutch Dynasty,” from the generally placid reign of its first governor, Wouter Van Twiller (Wouter the Doubter), through the embattled tenure of its second governor, Wilhelmus (William) Kieft (William the Testy), to the final era of Dutch reign, that of the heroic Peter Stuyvesant (Peter the Headstrong, Peter the Great), leading up to the British takeover that made Dutch New Amsterdam into British New York.
Though A History of New York includes plenty of Quixote allusions and a second quixotic hero, Peter Stuyvesant, with a Sancho-like sidekick in the trumpeter Antony Van Corlear, it is Knickerbocker’s quixotism that drives History‘s critique of American exceptionalism and Jeffersonian legalism. Foremost, Knickerbocker proceeds with a basic form of quixotic exceptionalism in his approach to the act of writing history….In this way Knickerbocker succinctly describes his reactionary quixotism, a propensity to find greatness in the past even as history itself casts doubt on the notion that it was better then than now.Chapter 10: Knickerbocker and Reactionary Exceptionalism
The opening chapters give some flavor to the work. He starts, not with any European voyage to the New World, but with the creation of the world itself, running through various theories of ancient origin (Egyptian, Chaldean, Persian, Greek, Latin, Congo, Mohawk) to more contemporary European theories, some of which I’ve run across in various moocs.
Since I only read through the first book and a half, I’m relying on Hanlon’s description of the elements of quixotic exceptionalism here, beyond the satire of the encounters above. He points out this paragraph f rom Book I, Chapter V, which precedes the above:
The writer of a history may, in some respects, be likened unto an adventurous knight, who having undertaken a perilous enterprise by way of establishing his fame, feels bound, in honor and chivalry to turn back for no difficulty nor hardship, and never to shrink or quail, whatever enemy he may encounter. Under this impression, I resolutely draw my pen, and fall to with might and main at those doughty questions and subtle paradoxes which, like fiery dragons and bloody giants, beset the entrance to my history, and would fain repulse me from the very threshold. And at this moment a gigantic question has started up, which I must needs take by the beard and utterly subdue before I can advance another step in my historic undertaking; but I trust this will be the last adversary I shall have to contend with, and that in the next book I shall be enabled to conduct my readers in triumph into the body of my work.
The question which has thus suddenly arisen is, What right had the first discoverers of America to land and take possession of a country without first gaining the consent of its inhabitants, or yielding them an adequate compensation for their territory?—a question which has withstood many fierce assaults, and has given much distress of mind to multitudes of kind-hearted folk. And, indeed, until it be totally vanquished, and put to rest, the worthy people of America can by no means enjoy the soil they inhabit with clear right and title, and quiet, unsullied conscience.
Washington Irving: A History of New York, Book I, Ch. V
He then deals quite savagely, shall we say, with the arrival of Europeans – Spaniards, initially – in the New World, and the attitudes towards the people found there; how they were declared to be more beast than human: they had no agriculture (you can’t own soil you don’t work) and few wants: “…it is this superiority in the number and magnitude of his desires that distinguishes the man from the beast.” The refrain “therefore, they ought to be exterminated” follows a half-dozen such charges.
I can see wisps of exceptionalism where Hanlon points them out – Knickerbocker’s assertion that Henry Hudson was the first to alight on the shores of America, and “[t]hough all the proofs in the world were introduced on the other side, I would set them at naught as undeserving of my attention.” Hanlon describes this as “the recognition of counterevidence and the simultaneous and open refusal to bend to it,” which ranks aside Gulliver’s attributing the Brobdingnagian King’s criticism of England as evidence of his narrow-mindedness and inability to understand complexity. Pay attention to these techniques; you’ll hear them often in contemporary discussions.
The difficulty in this chapter lies in the levels. We have the actual author, Irving, and the author he creates, Knickerbocker: that is, a character written in quixotic fashion. I love this sort of thing; and by the way, it shows up in the original DQ, as well as in a few other works I’ve read along the way. There is the possibility that Knickerbocker is, as Hanlon says, “in on the joke.” This to me, despite being rather ignorant of early New York history, is the most interesting aspect of the book.
Now to chapters that discuss works I didn’t read at all. I wish Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive had arrived in time; Chapter 6, Underhill and American Exceptionalism, gives me a look at what I missed. It draws on Cervantes’ work, the captive tale in Don Quixote, but also involves travel as an element, since that is how Updike Underhill came to find himself enslaved in Algeria.
Both Tyler’s Updike and Cervantes’s captive struggle to purchase their freedom with the aid of sympathetic Algerians and fellow slaves; both reference the gruesome punishment of impalement for those caught in escape attempts; and both treat religious difference between the Algerian Muslims and the Christian captives as a means of interrogating national (and religious) loyalties and identities.Chapter 6: Underhill and American Exceptionalism
Again, I have not read the work in question, but Hanlon’s description of Updike’s quixotic conversion from American discontent to “a worthy federal citizen” via his Algerian enslavement gives me 1984 vibes, but the word “federal” had a particular resonance in 1797, the date of publication, as a political party opposed to Jeffersonian republicans, one I’m not equipped to parse.
Chapter 7 compares and contrasts two works, one dealing with English and one with American Christian values.
Two eighteenth-century novels in particular adopt the quixotic exceptionalist motif to address civic exceptionalism through illustrations of political and economic tumult at home. Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792-1815) engage explicitly with civic issues and problems-charity, poverty, social and legal order-on two sides of the Atlantic.
….Adams and Farrago find their societies bewildering, largely because both men generate their expectations of political reality from exceptionalist myths. Adams expects a deeply moral, Christian society that cares for its poor and its young, whereas Farrago expects the high-minded, legalistic discourse that underwrites US founding documents to sufficiently curb excesses of self-interest and political fervor among the populace. Both quixotes respond to the bewilderment of mismatched expectations and experiences by adopting an exceptionalist outlook. As moral and political visionaries, they alone can forge a path to enlightenment, if only they can convince everyone else to follow along. The tragicomic fact that Adams and Farrago, convinced of their visionary qualities, nevertheless struggle to gain a following creates a scenario that forces readers to evaluate whether quixotism is a form of madness or of exceeding rationality in these novels.Chapter 7: Adams, Farrago, and Civic Exceptionalism
I’ve omitted a sentence that deserves attention regarding Modern Chivalry, set in the US: it features “a similarly bookish quixote, Captain John Farrago, who struggles to understand why his crass, illiterate sidekick, a crudely stereotyped Irishman, Teague O’Regan, commands so much more respect among angry and unlettered US citizens than the effete and learned captain.” I don’t think anyone in the present-day US has any trouble understanding this, whether as a plus or a minus.
I was very tempted to read these two works, as they highlight issues that interest me, but Modern Chivalry is extremely long. Considering I spent four weeks on this book and the associated readings, I did not give it short shrift, but I did have to decide how best to spend time, the most strictly limited resource available to any of us.
I was similarly tempted to read the two works discussed in Chapter 8 – Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote and Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism – but, frankly, the second one annoyed me at first glance. They deal with what Hanlon calls “domestic exceptionalism” as seen via the relationships between two ladies – and I use the term with all it applies in the 18th century – and their domestic servants, recreating the class relationship between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, as well as the distinctions between British and American class systems. I enjoyed Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey as much as anyone, but I preferred to look at quixotism through other lenses.
Here it is important to understand that Dorcasina’s exceptionalism is what brings about Betty’s plight. Betty finds Dorcasina compelling-even when Betty’s better judgment indicates otherwise-because Dorcasina can simultaneously bring Betty in as a confidante, enchanting her with high romance while admonishing her lack of understanding. This form of domestic exceptionalism – having it both ways when it comes to the quixote’s expectations of her maid – regulates Arabella’s Lucy and Dorcasina’s Betty from two ends simultaneously: they are intrigued, compelled, and flattered on one end, and ordered, shamed, and ridiculed on the other.Chapter 8: Arabella, Dorcasina, and Domestic Exceptionalism
This, combined with the tip that Betty ends up physically abused while serving as a stand-in for Dorcasina, convinced me I didn’t want to examine the feminine side of quixotism after all. To be fair, most sidekicks undergo some degree of physical pain – poor Sancho! – but I’d just as soon not dwell on it.
The Infernal Quixote by Charles Lucas sounds incredibly interesting, but would require a lot of preparation and grounding: that is, the reading of William Godwin’s Political Justice, to have any hope of understanding it, as it reacts to Jacobin and anti-Jacobin political theory courtesy of the French revolution, and manages to work a debate on cohabitation in there.
Lucas opens The Infernal Quixote by contrasting the births of his hero and villain, Wilson Wilson and Marauder, with the precise effect of demonstrating how Marauder is raised with an air of superiority – to believe boundlessly in his superiority at every turn – whereas Wilson is raised with humility…. Whereas Wilson’s life demonstrates how “the seeds of virtue and religion … so sedulously planted in his mind, were now producing their true fruits,” Marauder’s tutelage leads him down a path of infamy that he, whom Lucas describes as naturally “of a dark complexion,” appears destined to tread. Nevertheless, Marauder develops a quixotic exceptionalist outlook in perhaps the purest form we have yet seen.
When I suggest that Marauder’s quixotism is pure quixotic exceptionalism, I mean that his quixotism is not merely defined by his exceptionalist outlook but also perpetually focused on the idea of his own exceptionality.Chapter 11: Marauder and Radical Exceptionalism
This involves a dramatic quixotic conversion at the end as well: “Marauder’s suicide becomes the dark scene and so Marauder becomes quixotism’s ultimate cautionary figure.”
I find all these different quixotic conversions to be one of the most interesting aspects of this study. From the exultant happy ending of Launcelot Greaves, to the political rehabilitation of Updike Underhill, to the despair of Gulliver, to Don Quixote’s death from disenchantment and Marauder’s suicide, we see a wide range of possibilities.
Let’s return to Chapter 3, which looks at a number of early translations of Don Quixote, and the art that often accompanied them. This will serve as a segue to the wonderful cover of Hanlon’s book, a cover that, perhaps as much as the topic itself, encouraged me to get the book. It features an engraving by Francis Engleheart, from the illustration by Robert Smirke, of Don Quixote upside down, as is found in Part I, Chapters 25-26 of the 1818 translation: Don Quixote is doing handsprings for Sancho to describe to Dulcinea when he delivers his love letter. Designer Cecilia Sorochin has set this in a cover that uses typography to emphasize the “disorderly” notions: the very word “Disorderly” is upside-down, and the author’s name and subtitle run vertically. Unfortunately, the cover reproduces horribly online, particularly since I have no skill at all with graphics, but it’s wonderful in real life. And I can’t tell you how many times I had to smile because I initially picked up the book upside-down!
I promised – or threatened, as the cases may be – to outline how I came to this book. It’s of particular interest to me because I found a couple of contemporary works, from far less highbrow sources, that I think I’d add to the list of works that use quixotic exceptionalism.
I’d initially added the title to my “Want to Read” shelf on Goodreads last November, with the cryptic note that I’d heard of it via a “twitter discussion on liberal arts education” along with a link to the author’s website. I don’t remember this at all, but I gather that’s when I would have discovered Hanlon is a professor at Colby College, just up the road from me a bit, and followed him on Twitter. I didn’t order the book until shortly after Christmas; I have no idea what triggered me at that time, however. And I started reading it on April 16 of this year, when I moved it to my Currently Reading shelf on Goodreads.
No, it didn’t take me two months to read it. In fact, I got stuck in the Introduction and first chapter, and put it aside, but, tellingly, I didn’t remove it from my Currently Reading shelf. I wanted to continue, but I was too distracted, for various reasons, to give it the attention it needed.
Three little nudges from the Universe brought me back to it. I’m not sure in what order I encountered them, but for storytelling purposes, I’ll start with Great Expectations. Pip is in no way a quixotic character, but one short paragraph struck me as very relevant: “We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable to doubt our having and our being the best of everything; and while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and dirty.” In my post about the book, I wrote: “What, you think we invented American Exceptionalism all by ourselves? We imported more than tea from the mother ship.” So I was thrilled to find my hunch confirmed in Hanlon’s chapter on Gulliver:
Further, because the quixote is a distinctly transatlantic character archetype, a literary history of quixotes is crucial for understanding the transatlantic history of American exceptionalism. Understanding American exceptionalism, in other words, necessitates understanding its roots in English exceptionalism in the eighteenth century. The quixote, shipped across the Atlantic from its inception in seventeenth-century Spain and published more widely in English in the eighteenth century than in its original Spanish, carried notions of state exceptionalism from England to the early US. Gulliver’s quixotic exceptionalism is an indispensable part of the transatlantic histories of both quixotism and state exceptionalism.Chapter 5: Gulliver and English Exceptionalism
Another nudge came from a thirty-year-old TV show. I was streaming episodes of LA Law as my Insomniac Theatre. The episode titled “The Age of Insolence” features as the comic-relief case (there’s one in every episode) a librarian who swoons at expressions of vulgarity. One of her employees delights in pushing that particular button, and she’s suing him for, I don’t know, intentional infliction of emotional distress? They both appear for a deposition, and opposing counsel laughs and calls her a lunatic. She, her armor a high-necked blouse with delicate ribbon at the throat, mounts her steed – her sense of propriety – and does battle:
Opposing counsel Peters: …This is not 19th century England, it’s 20th century Los Angeles, and you may not like it, but this is where you live.
Ms. Churchill: I beg to differ with you, Mr. Peters. Time and culture are not a place, but a state of mind. In fact, I do not live in the 20th century, nor do I have any intention of ever doing so…. Why am I a lunatic, Mr. Peters?…. I go to work every day; I perform my duties valiantly and well; I treat my fellow man with kindness. My standards of behavior are rigorous, I admit, but I’m never mean-spirited about the failure of my employees to meet those standards. What is it about my behavior which suggests mental instability?
Plaintiff Bowles: Well, look at you, look at the way you’re dressed.
Ms. Churchill: Mr. Bowles, I hardly think we are sufficiently familiar with one another so as to engage in a conversation about the way in which I dress.
Opposing counsel Peters: Ms. Churchill, you can’t force other people to live like you. You don’t have that right.
Ms. Churchill: Do you have the right to force me to live like you, in a world where violence is as common as the common cold and common decency is all but obsolete? In this world, your world, Mr. Peters, the sins of the flesh have nearly annihilated the life of the mind. Even the discussion of spirituality has become an embarrassment. People’s very souls have shrunk. Am I the lunatic because I will not embrace this world? Perhaps the Victorians were fragile creatures, whose mistakes were as grand as their achievements. But they bowed before beauty, they yearned for grace, they struggled for intellectual integrity. And they had manners. I beg your pardon if I am reluctant to exchange their values for yours.
LA Law: “The Age of Insolence”
This isn’t precisely exceptionalism, but it’s close. What really struck me after reading more of Hanlon’s book, was what came next: her tormentor shows up in his own version of a Victorian suit, apologizes, tells her he read Bleak House the night before and “was devastated by Joe’s death” and invites her to tea. It isn’t played as mockery. It’s even more than mimesis. It’s almost a quixotic conversion, but not of the quixote reverting to the world: rather, of an opponent converting to exceptionalism.
The episode credits three writers, two of whom are big TV names, but my money is on the third: Theresa Rebeck, who has, among other things, a PhD in Victorian-era melodrama.
The third nudge came when a Bluesky friend mentioned the rock group They Might Be Giants, prompting me to go into my spiel about how they took their name from the 1971 film featuring George C. Scott as an esteemed New York jurist who, after his wife dies, goes crazy and becomes Sherlock Holmes. It’s one of my all-time favorite films (and there’s a copy illicitly posted on Youtube if you can’t find it anywhere else), and now I see embodiment of all of the characteristics of a quixotic exceptionalism: bookishness and learning; idealism; a belief in his own exceptionalism that makes him immune to the requirements of the ordinary world; mimesis; and, at the very end, another mimetic quixotic conversion of his recruited partner, Dr. Watson, who initially was trying to have him committed. It’s a film that goes from clever banter to slapstick humor to poignancy in a heartbeat, and features an incredible mimetic scene where all the people Holmes has interacted with over the past couple of days begin, one by one, to follow him as he marches through New York City for his final showdown with Moriarty.
I’m glad the Universe wouldn’t let me skip out on this book. True, I’ve only skimmed the surface, but that’s fine, because I’m all about taking multiple passes at monoliths. I’m not a scholar or an academic, I’m just an old lady who likes to read. Who knows, I may become an 18th century convert after all. The next time I read Don Quixote, I’ll pick up something new; and if The Algerine Captive ever arrives (it’s now in Pennsylvania; progress!), maybe I’ll start there.
A Just Recompense 