Chicanonautica: The Persistence of Quijote

by Ernest Hogan

Years after it finally came into being, I got around to seeing Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. I wanted to see it, but these years have been overwhelming. Enough to make a humble vato get in his troque and go searching for windmills to tilt with.

I liked it--I’ve been a fan of Gilliam ever since the early Monty Python days, even though he often gets carried away with his imagery in the European art film tradition, losing track of the story, which I understand, also being an artist whose inspiration come visually, leaving me struggling to come up with appropriate verbalization. He also does better when adapting someone else’s story. 

Like I said, I liked it. It brings the whole myth that launched the novel as an art form into the twenty-first century. El Quijote faces off with the corporate entertainment industry in a dazzling, surreal fantasmagoria that will confuse folks who like a straight forward story line, but delivers with an ending that brings it all together in a satisfying way.

Makes me wonder if the younger generations know about Cervantes’ original novel. Oh well, they can always Google it . . .

It kept me thinking, even as I drifted off into a dream-filled sleep, and into the next day, when I found myself liking it even better.

Then, I had a revelation . . . The novel (that is--gulp!--expanding into a trilogy) Zyx; Or, Bring Me the Brain of  Victor Theremin that I’m working on is an updating of Don Quixote. Honestly, I had no idea I was doing it, but looking at it now it all becomes clear: Victor Theremin, the Chicano science fiction writer who has lost track of where his life ends and the sci-fi begins, is a modern Quijote, the AIs are his Sancho Panza. 

Oh well, maybe it will help when I go off looking for a publisher.

The really strange thing is this isn’t my first Quijote novel. Walter Quixote; Or, Love in the Time of Terroism was a deliberate adaptation of the story, making it about the life and loves of a young Chicano artist in Phoenix in the years 2001 through 2003. Don’t bother looking for it--it was never published. Fed up with my struggles to establish myself as a science fiction writer, I tried to walk away from the unholy megagenre, and go mainstream. Unfortunately, the publishing world recoiled in horror of my creation. After years of rejection, I was told that it was just too damn weird for anybody in New York to publish.

So I went crawling back to sci-fi, where they still are disturbed by my presence.

Oddly, enough, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, isn’t Gilliam’s first Quijote adaptation: I’ve long been saying that Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is a twentieth century version of the story. Think about. There are a helluvalota parallels. You lit students out there can thank me later.

I know that El Quijote, the book and the character, are controversial as part of La Cultura to anti-Hispanic/Puro Mejicano types. Like it or not, we have been influenced by Hispanic culture ever since the first hijo de la chingada. In the Mundo Nuevo, El Quijote evolved into the charro, and the vaquero, who was Anglicized into the buckaroo, and translated into the cowboy, who without the quixotic compulsion to seek Truth, Justice, and True Love under a blazing sun is just a common redneck. His grey-bearded avatars can still be seen on the dusty roadsides of Aztlán, in their Rocinante-ish vehicles surrounded by light-flashing police cars.

Tezcatlipoca help me, I’m one of them. I’m going to keep writing these books, and battling these windmills. I just can’t help it.

Ernest Hogan is currently leapfrogging between the original Quijote and John Ormsby’s English translation on his phone.