SOURCE: "Punko Panza," in New Republic, May 4, 1987, pp. 38-41.
In the following review, Van Leer discusses the form, content, and literary intent of Don Quixote.
It was only a matter of time before the postmodernists got around to rewriting Don Quixote. In their attack on modernism's lingering romanticism and cultural elitism, Cervantes's novel has taken on a privileged status. Perhaps as a very early novel, the work seems uncorrupted by that cultural accumulation glorified as "the literary tradition." Or as a Spanish work, it seems an alternative to the mainstream of English, French, and German literature. Or in the very quixotism of its ironic quest, it seems the perfect vehicle for anti-essentialist criticisms of absolutes such as "self" and "presence" that modernism left unchallenged. For whatever reason, Don Quixote has become the inevitable starting point of postmodernist literature. Nabokov made it the center of a lecture series. Borges imagined as his prototypical metafictionist an author who in the 20th century rewrites Cervantes's novel verbatim. And Robert Coover actually began such a project with the Cervantesque "prologue" placed midway through his collection of "fictions" Pricksongs and Descants.
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