Anthony Close obituary

Expert on Cervantes who helped change opinions on his great work Don Quixote

Rodrigo Cacho and Steven Boldy

guardian.co.uk, Sunday 3 October 2010 18.41 BST

Close's most
substantial gift was to restore Cervantes's smile
Anthony Close, who has died suddenly aged 73, was one of the world's leading experts
on the early 17th-century Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes, and particularly on his
masterpiece, Don Quixote. A member of the department of Spanish and Portuguese at
Cambridge University from 1967 to 2004, he did much to enhance understanding of the
work.
His most substantial gift was to restore Cervantes's smile, allowing us to perceive in all
their complexity the layers of wit and humour on which Don Quixote rests. In doing so,
Close freed the novel from centuries of sombre political and existential interpretations,
concluding that its author was "an accomplished ironist", able to laugh at human nature
with kindness and understanding: "Cervantes has weathered better than his
contemporaries because he was able to make the comic alien seem more like you and
me."
Don Quixote tells of the misadventures of a deranged lover of reading whose passion for
chivalric romances leads him to believe that he can imitate the knights of these stories
and wander the dusty roads of Castile, rescuing damsels in distress and fighting evil
sorcerers. Thus, he quits his quiet life in the countryside and convinces a naive peasant
neighbour, Sancho Panza, to join him in his quest.

The book represents better than any work of fine art the thin layer that separates fiction
from reality, through offering a series of comic episodes based on the contradictions that
arise when Don Quixote imagines himself to be facing giants or armies of soldiers,
instead of as Sancho tries to make him see windmills or flocks of sheep. The novel
therefore explores the power of imagination, the boundaries of everyday life and the
pleasure and the risks that arise when we try to challenge them under the stimulus of art.
But it is also the story of a friendship that endures failures, defeats and ridicule, and that
grows deeper and stronger against all the odds.

An engraving published in 1818 of Don Quixote's

Penance On the Mountain by Robert Smirke, reflecting the serious view of Quixote
characteristic of the Romantic era
In his study The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote (1978), Close discussed the
reception of Cervantes's novel from the appearance of its two parts in 1605 and 1615 to
the 20th century. Cervantes's character has been seen as the embodiment of ideals
reflecting the major cultural trends of each age, such as a satire against the corruption of
society in the 18th-century Enlightenment, or as a metaphor for the loneliness of the
individual facing the tragedy of existence during the 19th-century Romantic period.
Close focused on this historical chain of interpretations, trying to recover the original
intention of the work which, he said, was "essentially designed to provoke laughter". He
suggested that the modern approach to the novel was mostly indebted to German
Romanticism, which imposed a serious, existential reading, going against the original
comic intention that lay behind the text. In Cervantes and the Comic Mind of His Age
(2000), he pointed to the tragic interpretations of Jos Ortega y Gasset in his Meditations
on Quixote (1914); the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who wrote The Idiot (1869) with the
character of Don Quixote in mind; or Miguel de Unamuno, who wrote in his Life of Don
Quixote and Sancho (1905) that this was "one of the saddest books ever written".
Unamuno took its protagonist as representing the defeat of the idealist fighting against a
selfish world; a hero and a victim, defeated by the windmills of conformism of a society
that has lost its ability to dream.

Don Quixote and

Sancho Panza by Honor Daumier, 1855, bringing out the comic aspect of Cervantes's
work favoured by Close. Photograph: Francis G. Mayer/Corbis
However, Close pointed to Cervantes's introduction to the novel, declaring that its main
goal was to entertain and produce laughter: "Strive, too, that in reading your story the
melancholy may be moved to laughter, and the merry made merrier still." He showed all
the freedom that is generated by the irreverent and revolutionary power of the work's
irony, with its ability to mock tradition while taking the comic mind of the Baroque to
one of its highest artistic expressions. For Close, Cervantes's laughter was a complex
product that eludes many modern readers, whereas for the author "the skilful and
effective telling of a comic story is an end in itself and an art in its own right, requiring
the highest qualities of taste, intelligence, wit".
Close was born in China, where his father worked for the British Council, and grew up in
a variety of countries, including Chile, where he learned Spanish. After receiving his BA
at Cambridge in 1960, he gained his PhD at University College, Dublin, where the
supervisor for his thesis on The Ideas of Art and Nature in the Works of Cervantes (1965)
was EC Riley.
Close's personality was, in part, like his research: honest, ironic and uncompromising. He
never paid respect to academic paraphernalia, and never felt entirely comfortable with
those university rules that did not match up to his intellectual ideals. He received greater
recognition abroad, especially in Spain, than at home. After his retirement, he became the
president of Aiso, the Asociacin Internacional Siglo de Oro, devoted to the study of
16th- and 17th-century Hispanic culture, and was invited to lecture at leading
international centres.
Close is survived by his second wife, Franoise, whom he married in 1982, a daughter,
Lucy, and two stepchildren, Virginia and David. One is bound to recall Sancho,
contemplating Don Quixote on his deathbed and moved to implore: "Please, sir, do not
leave us."

 Anthony John Close, Hispanist, born 12 February 1937; died 17 September 2010