More Cardenio, etc.

I will reach the end of Part 1 of Don Quixote shortly. That might be enough. It's all that Cervantes originally did but then he added Part 2 when somebody else took it upon themselves to continue it.

Perhaps the big news is that Cardenio's story could be Love's Labour's Won in Shakespeare's lost play because he does have a happy outcome.

More than that, though, Cervantes is 'modern' and deals in 'meta-fiction' in his pastiche of chivalric novels by referring back to his hack models, not least when the canon pronounces,

I have never been able to read any from beginning to end, because it seems to me they are all essentially the same, and one is no different from another.

Not all readers of westerns, thrillers, Mills & Boon or devotees of science fiction films will think that all the books they read or things they like are the same and they might even think that the sort of 'literary fiction' that I sometimes read could be accused of similar failings in as far as it's for it's own sake, nobody gets shot, there are no green monsters from other universes or the lonely spinster that lives in the Old Rectory doesn't end up marrying the dashingly glamorous man who arrives in the picturesque village. 

But Don Quixote does resort to routine cartoon violence on a regular basis. It is jokey, like that in Tom and Jerry, and one very soon doesn't take it seriously and so maybe it wouldn't satisfy those who want gun crime and murder as the staple diet of their entertainment. And yet they might. 'Realism' is not an easy idea in things that are accepted as fictional and so perhaps token violence is violence enough.

I don't think I need Part 2, though. I've got the main idea of it. It's probably better than I give it credit for. I've been reading it dutifully, not entirely against my will but I'd prefer to be looking forward to getting back to my book a bit more than I have been in recent weeks.