24 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. 396 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 397 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 398 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, 255 400 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