Above William Lake Price, Don Quixote in his Study (Photograph, 1857), National Gallery of Art.
Don Quixote
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Roy R. Behrens, “Lunatics, Lovers, and Poets: On madness and creativity" in Journal of Creative Behavior Vol 8 No 4 (1975), pp 228ff—
Don Quixote has tunnel vision, by which he sees through the tunnel of love. Everything he sees relates to chivalry. It is as if he wore blinders, like Rocinante his “steed.”
He calls his neighbor a “squire.” He dons armored armour, with a cardboard visor top. He sees prostitutes as ladies. His unbridled imagination has left us with phantoms of windmills, whch are in turn synonymous with Quixote and quixotic. When he hears the “neighing of steeds, the sound of trumpets, and the rattling of drums,” his sidekick Sancho Panza sees “nothing but the bleating of sheep and lambs.”
Sancho Panza is conventional, while the knight-errant is errant. The “visionary gentleman” is either poetic or crazy. He confuses similarity with identity, whether by purpose or fault. A is not not-A, but inside Quixote’s mind, A and not-A merge as one. His five-and-dime descendant is the nearsighted cartoon character Mister Magoo, who (in Magoo Goes Shopping) sees and treats a rib cage (A) as if it were a xylophone (not-A), implying that musical pitch is related to the length of the ribs.…
In Magoo cartoons, Sancho Panza is Waldo. He is Watson in Sherlock Holmes. Sancho, Waldo and Watson represent unexceptional views. They know that A is A, that A is not not-A. “Look, sir,” Sancho calls out to the knight-errant, “those which appear yonder are not giants, but windmills; and what seem to be arms are sails…” more>>
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Below An interpretation of Don Quixote by José Guadalupe Posada, c1908.
