Day 1 (November 18) Part I, Chapter I

Monsignor Quixote is one of my most favorite Graham Greene novels. I once taught it to a class of aspiring writers in an MFA program and greatly confused the students. Is this a road trip novel? Is this a novel about male friendship? What’s the plot of the novel? What’s…the point of the novel? The discussion greatly confused me, too. What’s the point of that madman Quixote? What’s the point of that madman Hamlet?

“How can he be descended from a fictional character?”

Father Quixote’s local bishop demands to know. The guest bishop seems much more imaginative (and friendly to us fiction writers).

“Perhaps we are all fictions, father, in the mind of God…Holiness and literary appreciation don’t always go together.”

Every character so far in chapter I speaks and thinks unexpectedly sometimes, ridiculously other times, but always interestingly. Father Quixote has one quality that his predecessor Don Quixote doesn’t necessarily possess. Greene’s Quixote brings something strange out of the other people coming into his orbit; the original Quixote often has to tilt at windmills and people with limited imagination.

“No wine can be regarded as unimportant, my friend, since the marriage at Cana.”

There are quite a few adjectives about wine: important wine, common wine, agreeable wine, young wine. Greene was not often so full of humor in his work, and one wonders if Cervantes provided an essential wine/intoxicant when Greene was working on the novel.