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Howard Hughes and Don Quixote |
by Matthew Schneider
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes' only novel, gave the English language a useful adjective, quixotic, adapted from the adopted name of this massive book's massive title character. The noun form of that adjective, quixoticism, is a bit of a mouthful, but denotes something splendid: a vastly expanded faith in our power to tell the world who we are. In chapter 5, when a well-meaning laborer tries to talk this poor old gentleman out of his delusions, Don Quixote answers with the first of what will turn out to be many utterances of insane lucidity (or lucid insanity—take your pick): "I know who I am, and who I may be, if I choose."
This bold assertion of every individual's prerogative for self-making came back to me when I saw, a few years ago, The Aviator, Martin Scorsese's 2004 film biography of Howard Hughes. The title is a little odd, though apparently based in fact: in the summer of 1946, Hughes crashed into a Beverly Hills residential neighborhood while test-piloting an airplane he had designed—an event horrifyingly recreated in the film. After dragging himself, bleeding and badly burned, from the wreckage, Hughes said to a passer-by who came to his aid, "I'm Howard Hughes, the aviator."
Clearly what struck Scorsese about this vignette was what it revealed about Howard Hughes's sense of himself. Hughes was called many things during his life—billionaire playboy, ruthless business tycoon, maverick film director, war profiteer, insane recluse—but what he called himself in what could have been his last moment on earth was "aviator." Scorsese's film doesn't whitewash Hughes, who emerges as quixotic in the strictest sense of that adjective—impetuous, impractical, eager to sink his wealth and prodigious energies into extravagant projects, like constructing and flying the largest airplane the world has ever seen. There's another sense, though, in which Scorsese's Hughes emerges as quixotic, and admirably so. The film touchingly portrays Hughes—damaged psyche and all—repeatedly asserting, with bracing valor, his Quixotic right of self-determination.
To varying degrees, all of us share with Don Quixote and Howard Hughes the desire to decide who we are, and who we choose to be. And all of us experience at one time or another the burden of trying to get the world to concur with our self-definition, or at least grudgingly acknowledge that it will grant us a voice in that all-important task. "I am—," we say, and the world, for reasons usually stemming from reflex enviousness or resentment of our boldness, says, "No, you're not. You don't have the right to state your own identity or to claim your individuality—I will tell you who you are, and I'll start by telling you that whatever you think about yourself, you're wrong. You'll be who I tell you you'll be, damn it, and if I tell you you're not a knight or a visionary, you won't be a knight or a visionary. If I tell you you're nobody, you'll be nobody, and like it."
Most of us end up negotiating an identity that falls somewhere in between our cherished aspirations for ourselves and the world's attempts to pigeon-hole us into its clumsy categories. For Quixote and Hughes, this negotiation is particularly difficult, because, like all dreamers and people of genius, quixotic heroes of self-making are especially unable or unwilling to relinquish any ground to their adversaries. The stubbornness with which both fictional and actual Quixotes cling to their right of self-determination only incenses their adversaries, who, like attack dogs, are enraged by resistance to even greater fury. By refusing to accept the identity that's been dealt to them, Quixotes rouse the world to redouble its efforts to break them down, either—as in Hughes's case—by calling them lunatics and criminals, or—as for Don Quixote—laughing them to scorn.
I think Martin Scorsese made this movie about Hughes because the director, like his subject, is a man of ambition, and his ambitions are large and public. And, also like his subject, Miguel de Cervantes forged for himself a new identity and direction in life by turning from soldier to novelist. What the film and the novel try to capture, though, is not just the nature and scope of their creator/subject's ambitions, nor do they try to psychologize us into pitying Hughes and the Don, both broken vessels for the human spirit (as we all are, to some extent). What these sweeping tributes do show—and this is reflected in the brisk simplicity of their titles—is that the trials these Quixotes endured pale in importance next to the joy they derived from pursuing their ambitions.
By novel's end, Don Quixote's accomplishment is miraculous—his stubborn refusal to accommodate his assumed identity to the role his world wants him to play results in the world shedding its identity to join him in a time and place that never existed: the world of romantic chivalry. And despite all he went through, Hughes never ceased to marvel at the miracle of powered flight. For man to fly is a miracle. Of all the technologies produced by human ingenuity—a force of mind-boggling proportions—flight is the one that most astounds. Flight grants us freedom from what the poet Sir Philip Sidney called "our clayey lodgings." Gravity and the weight of atmosphere chain us to the ground, but a plane makes the air into a medium of speed and freedom. On the ground, the wind pushes us; but in an airplane we push back. Airplanes chortle at the grinding friction of earthbound travel. They focus human aspiration not merely ahead, but above and beyond. Scorsese's film shows that as a playboy, Hughes amassed an enviable record, hooking up with Jean Harlow, Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and countless others. But the accomplishment that carries the greatest vicarious thrill for me is that Hughes was the fastest man on the planet. As an aviator, Hughes loosed the bonds of earth, and freed himself from the dumb oppression of a nature that alternately taunts us with glimpses of infinity and shames us—as Hughes's obsessively germ-phobic mother shamed him—into casting our glances downward.
Tall, lank, and all verticality in portraits by Daumier and Picasso, Don Quixote invites us to follow the line of his lance upward, and embrace the power we have to throw off the contingent and stifling identity that society assigns us. The name of the unhinged Spanish gentleman who becomes The Knight of the Woeful Countenance is lost, because that man really is Don Quixote. Howard Hughes the aviator is the real Howard Hughes, not because he pursued crackpot aviation schemes, but because aviation represents humankind's most stunning victory over natural necessity. When their mothers and Mother Nature told them to look down, Quixote and Hughes looked up, and in so doing declared that others' dictates about where we are born, stir, and will return after death need not be blindly obeyed. What finally emerges from both the four-centuries-old story of Don Quixote, and the recently re-told story of Howard Hughes is a splendid assurance that when death appears at our door and asks "Who are you?" the answer to that question is entirely up to us.
Matthew Schneider is professor and chair of English at High Point University in High Point, North Carolina. The author of two books and numerous scholarly articles on literature, critical theory, and pop culture, his most recent publication is The Long and Winding Road from Blake to the Beatles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
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