Title: The Dialogue of the Dogs

Author: Miguel de Cervantes

First published: 1613

Page count: 109

First line: On the soldier’s face as he limped out of Resurrection Hospital, beyond Fieldsgate in Valladolid, a yellowish pallor had set in.

So, I haven’t read Don Quixote, okay! You got a problem with that? Can you bear to read any further? In fact: have you read it, smartarse – “the Quixote”, as you’ll probably call it if you have – ? Ha!

Oh, you have, right…

I mean, I have it. I own it. It’s not like I’ve never opened it. Light from its pages has reached, in some form, my visual cortex. Look, it’s there on my shelf! No, it’s not, it’s here on my desk! It’s open! See, I’m reading it, I’m reading it now!

The Quixote case, as you might call it, illustrates the familiar problem of the classics, those books which can be variously defined as Books You Think You Ought To Read; Books You Wish You Had Already Read (Mark Twain); and Books You Think You Already Have Read (Alan Bennett). Don Quixote is a perfect example because it is a) long, b) old, and c) difficult, though difficult is perhaps overstating or misstating the case. Martin Amis fashioned a particularly handy Get Out of Jail card in his review for The Atlantic, which opens thus:

While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, Don Quixote suffers from one fairly serious flaw – that of outright unreadability.

More pertinent, to my mind, is the comment that this book – so often described as ‘the first modern European novel’ (“the first and best” – Harold Bloom) – was

probably never intended to be read in the modern manner: that is, straight through. Group or family recitations of a chapter a night were, in all likelihood, the most that Cervantes expected anyone to manage.

To this extent, it isn’t even ‘a novel’, in the way that Madame Bovary or Tristram Shandy is: i.e. a construction of bourgeois individualism, intended for solitary reading, to be slotted into the interstices of a more or less busy working or not working life. Don Quixote is primarily a collection of tall tales and anecdotes stitched into one single narrative, which puts it halfway between the modern novel and the portmanteau collection such as the Decameron or Arabian Nights, neither of which you would be expected to read straight through, tracing with your soul’s finger one single character or plot or emotional arc.

There is a second aspect to this classic-ness, this classic-osity of Cervantes, which builds from what Alan Bennett says: that a classic is a book we all think we’ve already read. Now, for a true classic I’d say that this is in some manner true – for a classic can’t be a classic without having significantly influenced the literature that comes after it. I may not actually have read Don Quixote, but the moment I open it I find I am intensely and intimately familiar with it; not just the what of it, but the how, too.

The comic hero; the Odd Couple double act; the parodic action sequences; the wry satire of its own form and medium, of its own bookishness, its own readers… all of these are permanent fixtures of Western cultural practice, and though it would take a more forceful personality that I to claim definitively that it was Don Quixote that fixed them there, I’d be the first to believe that personality when and if they said it.

In fact, let Amis be that personality: “Through Don Quixote we stare into the primordial soup of fiction, steaming, burping, fizzing with potential life, thick with crude and pungent prototypes.” We don’t need to read Cervantes, because we’ve already read Cervantes, because Cervantes wrote everything that came after him; he is in its DNA.

Which makes it sound like I’m saying that we read the classics merely to reap some sort of ‘cultural utility value’ from them, to  help us navigate the others books, films and plays that make up our personal cultural map.

To which others will say, Pah! Classics deserve to be read on their own merit. As Italo Calvino has it, “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say,” but perhaps what Cervantes said in his book was so worth saying that other people, down the centuries, have kept saying it, again and again, over and over, and so much so that we can take his actual, original words ‘as read’. (Harold Bloom would disagree, violently. He says:

There are part of yourself you will not know fully until you know, as well as you can, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.)

Amis ends his review calling for someone to rewrite the book for contemporary audiences. (Edit it, I think he means.) That way, he seems to be saying, people will read it out of joy, rather than duty, or for cultural utility.

(I’ve never finished Tristram Shandy either. I mean: I get it, I appreciate it, I like it, I can see what it’s doing, but what it does, formally, is exemplary, rather than experiential. It doesn’t need to be read right through to be understood, whereas, for example, Proust does. (I’ve not read Proust right through, either.))

Which is where The Dialogue of the Dogs comes in – a novella published by Cervantes in a collection in 1613, in the glow of the success of the first volume of Don Quixote. It may not give us what Bloom sees in the Quixote-Panza relationship – a duo to rival Hal and Falstaff in Shakespeare – but it certainly gives us something of the style, and approach, and brio of Don Quixote. To that extent, it could be suggested as an alternative to the owning-but-not-reading model I have followed thus far with regards to his magnus opus.

The Dialogue of the Dogs actually opens with another story, ‘The Deceitful Marriage’, which follows the classic ‘novella’ format of staging an encounter between two friends, one of whom then tells his story to the other. Ensign Campuzano is just emerging from hospital in a sorry state (having caught a bout of syphilis, it is never quite explicitly stated). His friend him invites him back to his for dinner, where he gives his account of how he ended up where he did. Which can be summarised thus: meets sexy lady, gets tricked into marriage, sexy lady absconds with worldly possessions. So far, so novella, in both form and content. What then happens is weirder. Campuzano confesses to his friend that, lying awake one night in the hospital, he overheard two of the monks’ guard dogs talking, and he wrote down everything they said.

And this is what we get for the rest of the novella: a colloquy – in dialogue form – between Berganza and Scipio, a pair of mastiffs, who describe how miraculous it is that they can suddenly find themselves able to talk, and decide that, seeing as they can’t know how long it will last, they should straightaway start telling one another their life stories, Berganza tonight, Scipio, god willing, tomorrow – though, as with Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels, we don’t get everything we’re promised, and have to make do with just Berganza’s tale.

Again, this is a picaresque, with the dog narrating his experiences moving from master to master, from butcher to shepherd to merchant to constable, and every stop on his journey involving the tale of some human folly, or mendacity, or bad luck. There would be no point in recounting or paraphrasing them all, for they live only in the telling.

Cervantes’ satire is not just on the foibles of the humans the dogs have come across in their time, but in the fact that the dogs themselves little realise that the ‘miracle’ that’s been granted them comes freighted with a curse of its own – for though they have been given the gift of speech, yet they are doomed to speak as humans. They bicker, mouth off, get caught up in their own powers of description, moralise and aphorise, tell each other to hurry up and get to the good part, show off what Latin and Greek they know then accuse the other of doing the same…

I’d like to be able to say that the two dogs act out something of the Quixote-Panza relationship, but that wouldn’t really be true. They are closer to a couple of walk-on parts in a Platonic dialogue, full to bursting of their own certainties, and just crying out for a Socrates to come along and prick their balloons.

Here then is one of the roles of ‘the novella’, as it sits in the contemporary publishing marketplace: as a way in to an author’s work, or an introduction, or even a synecdoche or encapsulation, avoiding the different dauntingnesses of the major novel and the collected stories.

Is that applicable across the other novellas in the series that I’ve read? Sometimes no. The Eternal Husband, Jacob’s Room: great though they are, they’re not the place to begin, the former unrepresentative, the latter hugely interesting but less approachable for the newcomer than To The Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway. The Distracted Preacher? Absolutely not! Alexander’s Bridge? Maybe, though I haven’t read enough of Cather’s other works to judge. The Dead? Bartleby? The Beach at Falesa? Why not?

But The Dialogue of the Dogs? Yes, I’d say, yes. Start there. Then, one day, god willing, the big one: the Don.