The romancing of Don Quixote: Spatial innovation and visual interpretation in the imagery of Johannot, Doré and Daumier

Abstract

One of the more curious phenomena in literary history is the process whereby the characters or narrative content of a work in one medium pass to another, as if they have outgrown the bounds of their original manifestation. This essay will address how Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, that contrasting pair shambling down some unnamed road in La Mancha, became separated in Western popular iconography from Cervantes' novel Don Quixote. The tall, skeletal knight errant and his round, earthbound squire are now such a staple of popular imagery that even cartoons and advertisements depend upon their recognition by a public largely unfamiliar with the novel itself. In effect, the deluded duo have slipped from their literary origins to become iconic, more present in their visual representation than in their textual presentation. A corresponding interpretive shift has occurred, specifically the romancing of the character's adventures and misadventures. That is to say, Don Quixote, Cervantes' instrument of parody of chivalric romance, now exists as a figure of popular romance. His ‘impossible dream’ no longer satirizes the foolish consumption of a literature designed to appease the nostalgic yearnings of the hidalguía, the class of lower nobility left disenfranchized by the economic, social and environmental crises that struck sixteenth-century Spain. Rather, it now proves his sentimental nobility, doomed to failure against an unmoveable status quo. Thus, Don Quixote, the parody of an essentially conservative genre championing the ethos of a lost golden age, emerges in modern popular culture as a conservative requiem for the efficacy of any attempt to right the wrongs of society. Although the sentimentalization of the crazy protagonist began in eighteenth-century book illustrations and commentaries on the novel and the biography of Cervantes, it reached its apogee in visual imagery in the nineteenth century. This account of the liberation — or kidnapping — of the knight and his squire from the bonds of the author's novel focuses on the work of the nineteenth-century French artists, Tony Johannot, Gustave Doré, and Honoré Daumier. All three greatly shaped and influenced the culture of printed images owing to their prolific work in book and journal illustration, and, in particular, informed the reception of the novel Don Quixote.