Desert Drifter Forbidden Cliff - The Monday Morning Memo

“There is, of course, in Don Quixote’s stable a half-starved nag. After four days of meditation on such names as Bucephalus and Babieca, (the stallion of the Cid), Quixote christens his jade Rocinante. Rocin means hack horse: wherefore Don Quixote meant that his mount was before all the other hacks of the world.

This detail, appearing in the first chapter of the Book, might give the canny reader pause. ‘Why,’ he might ask, ‘if the deluded eyes—as we are told—of Don Quixote saw his hack equal to the steeds of Amadis or King Alexander, did he christen him with a name so comical and so revealing?’ The reader will be aware of a curious shift in this Don Quixote’s madness: a note of self-conscious irony, not usually found in the insane upon the point of their mania…

In the matter of the selecting of a Lady (that needed spur of every true knight-errant) it is clear that Don Quixote knows the facts about Aldonza Lorenzo, wench daughter of Lorenzo Cochuelo of El Toboso. Quite consciously, he turns her into the divine Dulcinea whom henceforth he will worship. This he makes his ‘truth’: there is no evidence that the fact of the girl is ever hidden from him. He needs a helmet—indeed he needs Mambrino’s magic helmet. A barber comes, riding an ass and on his head (for it is raining) a copper bleeding-dish. This is the golden helmet of Mambrino; and as such Don Quixote takes it. But in the parley before and after, with Sancho Panza, it is plain that the knight accepts Sancho’s fact about the dish: he merely turns it, for his own purpose, into his knightly ‘truth.'”

- - from Don Quixote: A Modern Scripture, by Waldo Frank. A feature in VQR, Volume 2, Number 1, Winter 1926

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