Long Shadow

By Stefan Kanfer

LECTURES ON DON QUIXOTE by Vladimir Nabokov; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 219 pages; $17.95

Master of nuance, connoisseur of transparent things, Vladimir Nabokov disliked the blunt instruments of art. "I remember with delight," he liked to say, "tearing apart Don Quixote, a cruel and crude old book, before six hundred students . . ." Yet he lectured on the book at Harvard, partly because it was required reading but also because it struck some chord in the speaker. The lectures, reconstructed by Editor Fredson Bowers, disclose reasons for that resonance.

As Nabokov acknowledges, Don Quixote the novel may be flawed, but Don Quixote the man is permanent. The bony knight and his fat squire, Sancho Panza, are the most recognizable duo in all of fiction. The lecturer traces their "long shadow" through the works of such disparate men as Dickens, Flaubert and Tolstoy. Had he ventured only a little further, he might have found quixotic elements in the books of Saul Bellow, John Updike and Vladimir Nabokov.

But influence does not guarantee indulgence. As the great Russian scrutinizes the great Spaniard, revisionism becomes the order of the day. Sancho's celebrated proverbs are in fact "not very mirth provoking . . . The corniest modern gag is funnier." Don Quixote's attempts to act like an old cavalier show "a rather limited schoolboyish imagination in the way of pranks." As for the author, "Cervantes. . . seems to have had alternate phases of lucidity . . . and sloppy vagueness, much as his hero was mad in patches." Don and squire wander and blunder through Spain, tilting at customs and rituals, obscure priests and famous windmills. En route, they are beaten and humiliated in "a veritable encyclopedia of cruelty." Even the animals suffer so greatly, admits Cervantes, that if a horse "had possessed the power to complain, you may be sure that he would have been an equal for Sancho and his master."

Indignity by indignity, affront by affront, the lecturer carefully guides his students through the work. Even his slips are calculated: "Platitudes (sorry, latitudes)." There are no side trips for biography. Of the author's "maimed hand you will learn not from me," says Nabokov, turning back to the "irresponsible, infantile, barbed and barbarous world of the book."

If that world is so morally repugnant, why did the lecturer grant it so much of his time and intelligence? Because, as the reader can see, in the process of analyzing the don he was converted by him. To Nabokov, the ultimate displaced person, the contemporary world increasingly came to appear more barbarous than the thumbscrew age of Cervantes. With each lecture, the knight of doleful countenance gains in vitality and stature. But there is a deeper source of affection. Like his predecessor, Nabokov punctuated his fiction with instances of comic cruelty, and for the same black-comic purpose. In Laughter in the Dark, a blind man is teased by his wife and her lover;' in Lolita, Humbert Humbert pumps bullets into the loquacious Quilty, who keeps talking until the blood runs out; in Ada, an old man dies believing that he is being ridden by a great rat, an image that he remembers from a Bosch painting. These tormented protagonists, every one of them, tumble from the don's suit of armor, commenting on the pains of life as they leave it.

Today, as Nabokov recognized, Quixote can no longer be regarded simply as a clownish victim: "He has ridden for three hundred and fifty years through the jungles and tundras of human thought. . . We do not laugh at him any longer. His blazon is pity, his banner is beauty. He stands for everything that is gentle, forlorn, pure, unselfish and gallant. The parody has become a paragon." The word paragon adheres oddly to his followers, Humbert & Co. But it fits them as appropriately as the dented helmet sits on the sad old head of the don. --By Stefan Kanfer This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.