Lost in La Mancha

22 Pages·2012·0.8 MB·English

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Lost in La Mancha: Terry Gilliam, Holy Fools,
Pirates and the Mulla*
Anand Vivek Taneja
SARA!, CSDS, Delhi
After the abject faiIure of his ambitious, Ioopy film, 'The
Adventures of Baron Munchimsen', Terry Gilliam called up a
friend and said:
I have two names for you: Quixote and Gilliam.
And 1 need 20 million dollars. He said, "Done!" I then
sat down and read the book and thought, Jesus, this is
unfilmable1
•
It says something about Gilliam that he sustained the
dream of filrning the un-filmable for ten years, and still does. The
film that he wanted to make, 'The Man who Killed Don Quixote'
never got made, defeated by institutional funding, natural disasters.
and NATO jets. The unravelling of the film has been lovingly, and
heartbreakingly documented by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe in
their documentary, 'Lost in La Mancha,2; whÍch could easily have
• This paper is best read immediately after watching 'Lost in La Mancha',
a documentary directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, Quixote Films
Limited, 2002. In the text of the paper, there are specific references to
chapters from the OVO, which, in keeping with the 'multiverse' nature
of this essay, should be watched at the points indicated.
1 'My latest is a disaster movie', The Observer, Sunday, February 4,2001.
http://observer.guardian.co.uklreview/story/O,6903,432993,OO.html
2 LoSE in La Mancha, directed by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe, Quixote
Anand Vívek
been a chapter out of the book. And Iike Don Quixote after a
particularly nasty chapter in the book, Terry Gilliam carries on.
'Like Don Quixote' is a significant phrase. For Terry
Gilliam throughout the making of the film, identified with, and was
identífied as, Don Quixote, ever tilting at the windmills of the
Hollywood studío system. J, a young upstart with no grounding in
Spanish, or Cervantes, or even literary theory, think of myself as
having the quixotic temerity to present a paper at a Cervantes
conference. Jt is widely understood that Don Quixote has many
lives, and many appropriations in the world of texts - filmic and
literary. Whether it be Pierre Menard' s Don Quixote, or 'The Man
Who Killed Don Quíxote' in the late 20th century, in which an
advertísing executive travels back in time to be mistaken for
Sancho Panza. Or Mary Shelley's Frankensteín from the early
níneteenth century for which, as Erín Webster Garett has argued,
Don Quixote is an important subtext 3. Or Avellaneda and his
sixteenth century rogue masterpiece to which Cervantes ironically
refers in the introduction to the second part of his novel. But
perhaps more importantly than the world of text is the
appropriation of Don Quixote into the larger world of narrative
and narrativisation how people tel! stories about their Uves, and
how they define who they are. There are many, ofien contradictory
Don Quixotes at large in the world, which is something that
Cervantes would have been quite happy about, 1 think.
To this babel, J want to bring the concept of a multí-verse,
as opposed to a uní-verse. The multi verse is a concept from
Films Limited, 2002. DVD released by Docurama.
http://www.lostinlamancha.com
3 Erin Webster Garett, Recycling Zoraida: The Muslim Heroine in Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein, (Cervantes: BuIletin of the Cervantes Society of
America, 20.1,2000), 133
394
Los! in La Mancha: Pirates and the Mulla
cosmological physics, which has since been appropriated by comic
books4 In DC and Marvel Comics, sujJ"ering from an abundance of
•
superheroes and mythic times, the Multiverse was a continuity
construct in which multiple fictional versions of the universe
existed in the same space, separa/ed from each other by their
'vibrational resonances '. Multiple fictional universes also exist in
time, so it is entirely possible for the X-Men, for example, to be
teenagers fighting state terror and discriminatíon in post 9/11
America in the 'X-Men Evolution' series, while they visit a lost
paradise in Antarctica in completely dijferent getups in 'X-Men the
Hidden Years' and both being available at the news stand at the
same time as X-Men 2 is playing in the theatres. Avid readers, like
my younger brother, are not disturbed by the conflicting plots,
characters or chronologies; but the dijferent fictional multiverses,
existing simultaneously, do speak to each other. There may be no
perceived contradiction between the two dijferent versions of the
world available on the newsstand outside the movie hall, where a
third version is playing - but there is certain to be dialogue; the
texts do speak to each other, they do not occupy separate
hermetically sealed spaces in the reader/viewer's minds. Similarly,
in a multi verse, many Quixotes and many Cervantes can exist in
paraUet narratives, historical and fictional, and dialogue with
each other without contradicting each other. This is what 1 will
attempt to do, briefly - attempt a dialogue between Terry Gilliam
and his abortive film, 'The Man Who Killed Don Quixote' with
Cervantes and the text of the novel, some of the histories that novel
was engaging with, and with people who in the twentieth and
twenty first centuries, are identified as being quixotic; like Quixote.
The dialogues will also address some speculation as to the possible
pasts of Don Quixote, and more importantly, possibilities for the
4 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wikilMultiverse
395
Anand Vivek
future. My attempt will also be to read an ethical imperative into
these dialogues, as is reflected in the scholarly work of EC Graf,
Mary Malcolm Gaylord and Maria Rosa Menocal.
Film Clip'
The first shot filmed for 'The Man Who Killed Don
Quixote' is immediately recognisable as deriving from the chapter
in which Don Quixote sets free twelve captives of the Inquisition,
destined otherwise to a captive life of rowing in the galleys bound
for the New World. For me the episode in the book is significant,
as it is the first time that Don Quixote is spurred into action not by
delusion, not by seeing giants where others see windmills, but by a
rather clearheaded vision of what is happening. 'dearest brethren, ,
says the Quixote of the book, '1 find by what 1 gather from your
own words, that though you de serve punishment for the various
crimes for which you stand convicted, yet you suffer execution of
the sentence by constraint, and merely because you cannot help
it. . . these considerations induce me to take you under my
protection.'5 In a novel that is renownedfor its veiled allusion, this
is a fairly direct ethical statement of rebellion against the King and
the Inquisition. Especially with ilS stark contrast lo the preceding
chapter, in which after Don Quixote makes a barber's shaving
basin his helmet, he and Sancho Panza have a long and fanciful
conversation about how with the help of chivalric amour, a
mysterious knight can gain a kingdom, and his squire an earldom.
lf there is a delusion involved in the episode of the released
'(ClU1pter 8 ofthe 'La Mancha' DVD, 'Production Day 1 ')
5 Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote, transo P.A. Motteux (Hertfordshire:
Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2003),133. Part 1, Chapter 22, How Don
Quixote set free many miserable crealures, who were carrying. much
against their wills, lo a place they did no! like.
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Pirates and the Mulla
captives, it is only in Quixote' s belief in the gratefulness of the
newly released captives. Does this ethical stand, this standing with
the sons of Caín, redeem Don Quixote as a figure of hope, and not
just an 'annoying ethnocentric fool, amenace to society who acts
out of his infatuatíon with ... laughably antiquated aristocratic
ideoiogy ... ,6, as EC Graf paints him? Jf not, then how ís the figure
of Don Quixote dif.{erent from George W. Bush, who went to fight a
war in Jraq because of WMDs that no one else could see?
Speaking in terms of cultural archetypes, if a village somewhere in
Texas is missing an idiot, then Houston, we have a problem. The
figure of the Fooi, in various cultures atrope of resistance fo
Power, has now become the very embodiment of Power. We need
then, to retain the figure of Don Quixote as a profoundiy ethical
and even noble figure, as a Holy Fooi, whether or not Cervantes
in tended him to be one. Jn speculations later on in the paper, 1
hope to indica te that Cervantes did perhaps intend something like
this.
But to come back to the prisoners newly freed by Don
Quixote. Gines de Pasamonte, the most notorious of the prisoners
he releases, aman with, in a classic Cervantes touch, a passion for
recording the history of his own exploits, escapes from Don
Quixote and then returns in the second part of the novel to meet
Don Quixote at an inn. It is the fírst inn in all his adventures that
Quixote recognises as an inn, rather than as a castle, but Gines de
Passamonte is presented to us as Master Peter, or Maese Pedro,
master of puppets, complete with a fortune telling ape 7. The
6 E. C. Graf, When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes 's Interpellation
of Early Modem Spanish Orientalism, (Diacritics: A Review of
Contemporary Criticism 29.2, Summer 1999): 68-85.
7 Cervantes, Quixote, 507. Part 2, Chapter 27, Wherein is discovered who
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Anand Vivek
staging of the puppet play that follows has been read by George
Hayley as a striking emblem ofCervantes's novel as a whole.
Master Peter stages a story that is an established part of the
canon of 'Reconquest' Narratives. It is the story of the knight
Gaiferos, who rides from France into Moorish Spain to rescue his
wife Melisendra, the daughter of Charlemagne. To quote Gaylord,
'Its ideal subject is the rescue by a French Christian Knight of a
Christian Woman from her Moslem captors in Spain8,. /t is not just
any chivalríc tale, but parf of the 'enduring cultural scrípr' of the
victorious Catholic crusade against the /nfidel, so important fo the
building of a unitary Spanish cultural identity, defined and
delimited by Othemess, by what ir was noto
But in Cervantes' s staging of Master Peter's play, this
traditional narrative is constantly disrupted. Gayferos is shown as
lazy and indolent, playing listlessly at Tables, and has to be
upbraided and insulted by Charlemagne before he gets his act
together. As the play progresses, Master Peter and Don Quixote
constantly heckIe and interrupt the boy narrator for adding too
many flourishes or for getting historical facts wrong. Finally, as the
puppets Gayferos and Melisendra are escaping on horseback,
pursued by Moorish forces, Don Quixote, carried away by the
tableau before him, jumps onto the stage to aid their cause, and
single-handedly fights and destroys the puppet Moorish arrny; 10
comprehensively, metaphorically and lite rally disrupting the
Master Peter was, and his Ape;
8 Mary Malcolm Gaylord, Pulling Strings with Master Peter's Puppets:
Fiction and History in Don Quixote, (Cervantes: Bulletin of the
Cervantes Society of America, 18:2, 1998), 129.
9 Ibid.
10 Cervantes, Quixote. 501-507. part 2, Chapter 26, A pleasant account of
the Puppet Play, with other good things truly
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Lost in La Mancha: Pira/es and ¡he Mulla
telling of the traditional tale. We are made aware of the staged
nature of 'reconquest' history; a puppet history orchestrated by the
project of, dare I say, cultural nationalism? And we are made
aware of this staging, paradoxically, by Quixote's complete
immersion and belief in the reality of the story. 'It is nothing less
than the distortion and dissolution of one of Spanish Culture's
master narratives. ,11 As Gaylord indicates, Cervantes is engaging
in serious fictional dialogue, not only with the phony histories of
chivalry, but with the eamest historians of his day, and with the
history of Spain they were constructing12•
Film Clip'
The episode of the puppets, though much altered, is also
present in 'Lost in La Mancha'. In this case it is a twenty first
century character caught in a seventeenth century tableau, who ha',
to fight the puppet arrny, which unlike the arrny facing Don
Quixote fights back, and entangles him in its strings. According to
Gilliam, this twenty first century ad executive, played by Johnny
Depp, is supposed to be the modem audience's entry point into a
seventeenth century rnilieu. The twenty first century character that
is supposed to be us entering Quixote's world, then, is still tangled
up in the narrative strings of that constructed history.
But the puppets as an image of history also lead us to
another image, which can give us a completely different insight -
The story is told of an automaton constructed in such a
way that it could play a winning game of chess, answering each
11 Gaylord, Pulling strings With Master Peter's Puppets, 132
121bid 127
*(Cha;ter 60fthe 'La Mancha' DVD, 'Twa weeks Befare Production')
399
Anand Vivek
move of an opponent with a countennove. A puppet in Turkish
attire and with a hookah in its mouth sat before a chessboard
placed on a large tableo A system of mirrors created the illusíon
that this table was transparent from all sides. Actually, a little
hunchback who was an expert chess player sat inside and guided
the puppet' s hand by means of strings. One can imagine a
philosophical counterpart to this device. The puppet caBed
'historical materialism' is to win all the time. It can easily be a
match for anyone if it enlists the services of theology, which today,
as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sighí. 13
Walter Benjamín 's messianic invocation of historical
materialism in the first of his famous 'Theses On the Philosophy of
History' moves 'materialism' away from the economics of base
and superstructure into the realms of hope, imagination,
redemption and deep despair; into the realm of 'culture', 'of
refined and spiritual things'. Benjamin writes of refined and
spiritual things that, , ... it is not in the fonn of the spoils which
fall to the victor that [they] make their presence felt.. .. They
manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning
and fortitude. They have a retroactive force and will constantly call
in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As
flowers tum towards the sun, by a dint of secret heliotropism the
past strives to tum towards that sun which is rising in the sky of
history.,14
This then is the wizened secret theology, hidden away
behind all the mirrors, that animates Cervantes' s historical critique
masquerading as fiction. A critique of various fonns of power and
13 Walter Benjamín, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1, transo Harry
Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1969),253
14 Ibid, IV, 255
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Lost in La Mancha: Terry Gilliam, Holy Fools, Pirates and the Mulla
their ideology can be seen as the fundamental propositions of
Cervantes's Don Quixote. Cervantes, to borrow from EC Graf, was
the author of a multicultural manifesto on behalf of the Moriscos of
Southern Spainl5.
Don Quixote came out in 1605, a hundred and thirteen
years after the edict expelling the Moors and Jews from Spain, a
hundred and thirteen years after Columbus had sailed to the New
World. But Don Quixote is suffused with an invocation of an older
world, a world in which it would not be dangerous to be seen
reading a book written in Arabic in the streets of the Alcana of
Toledo'; a world in which Toledo, where an Arabic history of Don
Quixote is being sold to a rag seller, was once the brilliant centre
for translations in Western Europe. ' ... had 1 wanted [a translator]
for a better or more ancient tongue, that place would infallibly
have supplied me. ,16
The episode of Don Quixote 's battle with the Biscainer
left hanging halfway, the narrator goes looking for the complete
history of Don Quixote, and finds it in a book written in Arabic,
which is translated for him by a Morisco, a 'little Muslim'
remembered as a convert to Christianity, who still knew the Arabic
script. At his first glance at the book, the Morisco, out on the street
in Toledo, starts laughing.
'1 asked him what he laughed at. "At a certain remark here
in the margin of the book," said he. 1 prayed him to explain it,
whereupon still laughing he did it in these words: 'This Dulcinea
15 Graf, When an Arab Laughs in Toledo, op.cit
16 Cervantes, Quixote, 50. Chapter 9, The event of the most stupendous
Combat between the brave Biscainer and the valorous Don Quixote.
401
AnandVívek
del Toboso, so often mentioned in this book is said to have the best
hand at salting pork of any woman in La Mancha.'" 17
It is a complex cultural joke, for in an Inquisitiorial Spain
where the puppet history had succeeded, Jews and Muslims were
not supposed to exist. Not as Jews or Muslims. But how can you
tell the difference between a Jew, a Muslim and a Christian when
they are dressed the same? The difference was sought in 'the
purity of blood', which was well, quixotic, for after eight hundred
years of the cultivation of what Maria Rosa Menocal calls ' a
culture of tolerance', there were no visible racial differences. So it
was behavioural traits that gave you away. So if you were a crypto
Muslim or a crypto-Jew, you would make an art of eating
forbidden food that is pork, in public, knowing full well that not
doing so would give you away and land you in the inquisitorial
fires. The Morisco bursts out laughing when he arrives at the
annotation about Dulcinea. The homely peasant woman, who the
deluded Quixote has reimagined to be a noblewoman, is in fact
"the best hand at salting pork of any woman in all La Mancha." In
other words, she is a Converso or a MorisCO.18 When Cervantes
interrupts Don Quixote's Battle with the Basque in order to have a
Toledan Morisco laugh at an Arabic joke scribbled in the margin
of a passage about a Spanish identity crisis, he has inserted a
meta-textual obstacle, a counter-interpellation, a dint of secret
heliotropism by which the past tries to tum towards the sun rising
in the sky of history.
19
17Ibid.
18 Maria Rosa Menocal, The Omament ofthe World: How Muslims, Jews,
and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain,
(Little, Brown and Company, 2003), 262
19 Graf, When an Arab Laughs in Toledo
402