This interpolated novel takes up Chapters 33-35 of Part One of Don Quixote.

Summary

In Florence live two friends, Anselmo and Lotario, who are so close they are known as the friends to everyone. Anselmo falls in love with and then marries Camila. Nevertheless, he insists Lotario visit constantly so as to preserve their friendship. But Anselmo, “recklessly curious”, then asks Lotario to test Camila’s virtue. He persists in asking even after Lotario tells him (correctly) what a terrible idea this is. Lotario agrees, reluctantly. Thus begins a spiraling tragedy. All three die young and unhappy, having betrayed one another (and themselves) in various forms.

Fear of breakdown

While reading this interpolated novel, I was also reading Roland Barthes’s Mourning Diary, and at one point was struck by his quoting D.W. Winnicott’s discussion of “the breakdown that has occurred”. (This is from Winnicott’s paper “Fear of Breakdown”.) This is in the context of Barthes’s grief over his mother’s death:

For the last few nights, images–nightmares during which I see maman sick, abused. Terror.

I am suffering from fear of what has happened.

Cf. Winnicott: fear of a breakdown that has occurred. (222)

For Winnicott, the fear is of something that the patient experienced but was too immature to experience it as the traumatic experience it was. As he puts it:

The patient needs to “remember” this but it is not possible to remember something that has not yet happened, and this thing in the past has not happened yet because the patient was not there for it to happen to. (105)

In this note, I explore some of the implications reading Anselmo’s behavior as a reaction to this sort of compulsive fear.

Compulsive fear of betrayal

Anselmo wants to test Camila’s virtue. He fears that she is not virtuous–that is, that she cannot be relied upon to remain faithful to him. Anselmo then goes on to ensure that she loses her virtue, that she becomes unfaithful. Seen through the Winnicottian lens, Anselmo does not fear that Camila will betray him so much as that he fears his own agony of that betrayal. But that is an agony he has already experienced. The evidence for this is that he seems to compulsively orchestrate her betrayal–it’s as if he wants her to betray him.

Now, Anselmo’s deathbed realization of how he was the author of his own dishonor is clumsy and artificial, as we should expect in such an old story. Yet much of the artifice he enacts rings true. He is the author of his own dishonor. He has compulsively sought it out. So we must ask, what is the source of this mad compulsion?

Perhaps the novel’s title points us to the source. Reckless curiosity? But Anselmo is deeply self-deceiving. So we ought not take his self-professed curiosity at face value.

It is not merely Anselmo’s poor treatment of Camila that stands out. He is perversely compelled to effectively demand that the two people he professes to love most betray him.

Seeking the agony of betrayal “recklessly”

Obsessive morbid jealousy (OMJ) is a compulsive disorder characterized by “intrusive jealous thoughts that tend to drive compulsive behaviors such as clinginess, interrogating, and checking.” (537) We can see all three of these compulsive behaviors in Anselmo: clinginess in his insistence on Lotario often visiting after his marriage to Camila, interrogating and checking in, well, everything else he does subsequently. In the referenced paper, people exhibiting OMJ generally seek a “‘perfect-love’ merger-union state” (539), akin to the state Anselmo seeks with Camila and which he believes he has with Lotario. (“The friends.")

In the denouement of the novel, when all three die, there is an almost tangible relaxation in the narrative, initiated by Anselmo’s unfinished confession. Note that his language is far less flowery and has a sense of grim recognition. It is as if he is seeing himself and Lotario and Camila for the very first time for who they actually are–that he is no longer seeing them through the prism of his self-destructive fantasies. That he does not recognize his loved ones at all until he has destroyed their relationships is deeply tragic. Still, Anselmo seems to have achieved a release from his compulsion, of a kind aimed for between analyst and patient in the analysis of transference:

If the patient is ready for some kind of acceptance of this queer kind of truth, that what is not yet experienced did nevertheless happen in the past, then the way is open for the agony to be experienced in the transference, in reaction to the analyst’s failures and mistakes. (105)

In the therapeutic sessions, these failures and mistakes would include the patient experiencing a behavior of the analyst as betrayal, with the subsequent repair of the relationship during the analysis. In this way, the patient would experience the agony of these betrayals in a safe environment wherein they can build the tools for understanding and managing the experience. Thus, over time the compulsion to test one’s loving relationships would fade; the patient can relax and enjoy the relationship they have, instead of seeking an ideal relationship that cannot exist.

A way of interpreting the relaxation in the story’s denouement, then, is as our identification with Anselmo’s reckless way of seeking to experience the agony he needs to experience. So there is, in the end, a kind of reckless curiosity in the story, just not the kind Cervantes seems to have meant.

OK, so I’ve joined the BlueSky reading group for Don Quixote through 2025. I will be posting occasional notes on what I’ve read here.

How should we denote an arbitrary sequence of consecutive natural numbers, i.e., the set of non-negative integers? Dijkstra considers the four exhaustive possibilities, using the example 2, 3, …, 12:

a) 2 <= i < 13
b) 1 < i <= 12
c) 2 <= i <= 12
d) 1 < i < 13

He notes that only in a) and b) is the difference between the bounds equal to the length of the subsequence. This is important for being able to calculate (easily, or intuitively) the length of the sequence from the notation, so is a reason to exclude c) and d).

Then he notes that because there is a smallest natural number (0), b) cannot denote the empty sequence (a sequence with 0 elements) without using non-natural numbers, so is a reason for preferring a) to b):

a) 0 <= i < 0
b) -1 < i <= -1

(We could try something like 1 < 0 <= 0 to denote an empty sequence using notation b), but that would violate the requirement that nondecreasing sequences be denoted using left-to-right nondecreasing numbers.)

This brings us to the question of how to denote the index of the starting element of a sequence of length N: 0 or 1? If we use the convention we’ve already decided upon, we get the following when we start with 0 and 1 respectively:

0 <= i < N
1 <= i < N + 1

Echoing the prior discussion of denoting sequences, choosing 1 requires using a number larger than the number of elements in the sequence; choosing 0 does not. Hence, as Dijkstra observes, we can define an element’s index to denote the number of elements preceding it.

I learned of Mimesis when reading the Introduction to Roberto González Echevarría’s Cervantes' Don Quixote: A Casebook, which features one of its essays. I read the first essay, “Odysseus’s Scar”, and it gripped me at once.

Auerbach was a philologist, and despite the close attention to the texts he studies, Mimesis is distinctly a work of history, tracing how literature, at first mainly a way to entertain with myths and portray great deeds, gradually developed into a multifaceted portrayal of human living.

What grips me more than anything else is Auerbach’s ability to connect his larger themes with particular language and narrative choices.

I’m reading Auerbach’s book slowly. Further posts concerning the book will be about my wrestling with its individual essays.