La Mancha
From early February to mid-May, 2007, I suffered from a delusion that I would be unable to complete my dissertation until I read the 6-volume commentary to Don Quijote by Diego Clemencín, a 19th-century scholar whose annotations are based on his experiences attempting to read every single chivalric romance known to Cervantes. This took him so long that he actually died. The commentary was published posthumously by his sons.
I don’t know why I thought it was necessary for me to study the failed chivalric romances that Cervantes was parodying. Definitely, nobody told me to do it. It took a really long time, and so far has yielded two concrete gains:
- I got better at reading Spanish.
- While flipping through a library copy of Tirant lo blanc, a little-known Catalan romance mentioned in Don Quijote, I found a $100 bill.
Afterwards, I really needed a vacation. So, I decided to go to Spain and fulfill my dream of visiting La Mancha.
I started in Alcázar de San Juan, the transportation hub of La Mancha, where I saw the church where Cervantes was probably christened. There is a Cervantist faction (the alcazareños) which maintains that Cervantes was actually born in Alcázar. Everyone else thinks that Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares.
Later, I walked for 3 hours through some kind of very persistent thistles to a town called Campo de Criptana, the site of Don Quijote’s “original” windmills.
Campo de Criptana is actually only 7 km away from Alcázar, but for various reasons I took a very roundabout route. For the last mile or so, I even got to walk alongside the highway (420 E), where I observed the bleached skeletons of two medium-sized animals.
At Criptana I walked uphill through a maze of narrow streets (teenagers were cruising around in really old cars, blasting house music on their stereos), and suddenly emerged in the middle of the field of windmills. The windmills really did look like giants, and they all had names. Their names included: El Infante, El Burleta, Inca Garcilaso, Poyatos, and Vicente Huidobro.
I would have liked to spend some more time in La Mancha, particularly in order to see El Toboso. According to Diego Clemencín, Toboso was known for its clay deposits, used in the production of earthenware casks (vol. 1, p23). Today, El Toboso houses what the Lonely Planet guide calls a “mildly entertaining” museum devoted to Doña Dulcinea. I was pretty excited about visiting this mildly entertaining museum, in a village famous for its dirt. However, my traveling companion—who had been a really good sport about walking around looking for windmills—felt that we had seen enough dirt, and wanted to see the Alhambra, so we went to Granada instead.
I must have taken 100+ pictures in La Mancha, but I managed to lose my camera on the way home. Here are some pages I scanned instead, from a book I bought in Granada about how to retrace the route of Don Quijote.
These are the windmills at Campo de Criptana:
And these are the pages about El Toboso. You can see photographs of a kind of round hut they make in the area (no doubt, incorporating their famous clay); and also some kind of wooden barrel (I guess, Dulcinea’s favorite barrel), outside Dulcinea’s house.
Tags: academic life, dissertation, Don Quijote, graphomania, Spain, Stanford