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  • Essay / The process of perception: Cervantes' Don Quixote and Woolf's Lily Briscoe

    The process of perception has two stages: recognition of sensory information and interpretation of sensory information. For the truth to be perceived, or, in other words, for something to be accurately perceived, sensory information must be recognized or identified correctly, and then faithfully interpreted based on that recognition. A faithful interpretation is one that does not deny the recognition of sensory information. The truth is not perceived if an inaccurate recognition is faithfully interpreted. An interpretation can, however, take several forms, and the truth can nevertheless be perceived, if the recognition is accurate and if the interpretation does not deny this recognition. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay In Part One, Chapter Eighteen of Cervantes' Don Quixote, when the main character enters into battle with a flock of sheep, his perception of the sheep is initially influenced by expectations. In this case, the mode of perception is sight; vision is the sensory information that Don Quixote must recognize and interpret. Don Quixote and his squire Sancho cannot at first see the sheep because of the "clouds of dust which they [the sheep] raised, which obscured and blinded their [Don Quixote and Sancho's] vision" (Cervantes 135). Before he can truly perceive the approaching hordes, Don Quixote expects them to be enemy armies ready to meet each other in battle, because, as the narrator explains, "every hour and every minute, his mind was always full of these battles, enchantments, adventures, miracles.” , the loves and the challenges which are recounted in the books of chivalry" (Cervantes 135). In other words, Don Quixote's madness, provoked by literature, incites him to expect that these hordes which approach are armies Yet, even after seeing the hordes of sheep, he continues to believe that they are armies. As the herds approach, Sancho shouts to Don Quixote, who vows to defeat one of the "armies". , “Go back, Don Quixote, for I swear before God, sir, that it is rams and sheep that you are going to attack. Turn around. back!" (Cervantes 137). Don Quixote, however, ignores his squire's warning and attacks the sheep as if they were an enemy army. At this point in the adventure, Don Quixote wrongly recognizes the sheep as warriors and interprets them as such The first stage of his perception is inaccurate, he does not perceive the truth, but the second stage is accurate He faithfully interprets his vision according to his recognition, but as the first stage. perception is inaccurate, he does not perceive the truth The knight's perception changes, however, after the battle, when Sancho says to him once again: “Did I not tell you, Don Quixote, sir, ... to do. turn around, because it was not armies you were going to attack, but flocks of sheep? (Cervantes 138). It is here that Don Quixote recognizes the truth, and he recognizes that the hordes were indeed sheep. He interprets his recognition unfaithfully, however, as he goes on to assert that “an enchanter… transformed the hostile squadrons into flocks of sheep” (Cervantes 139). Such an interpretation denies correct recognition and is therefore unfaithful. In this way, Don Quixote's perception moves from inaccurate recognition and faithful interpretation to accurate recognition and unfaithful interpretation. He changes his perception to accommodate Sancho's objection. Another example which illustratesDon Quixote's misperception of the truth is the famous adventure of the windmills. On this occasion, unlike the battle with the sheep, in which a cloud of dust first impairs his vision, Don Quixote sees and perceives the windmills from the beginning, but he still cannot perceive the truth. He said: “Look there, friend Sancho Panza, where more than thirty monstrous giants appear” (Cervantes 68). Don Quixote's command to "look" and his insistence that the giants "appear" must mean that he can see them. He mistakenly recognizes the sight of windmills as giants and faithfully interprets them as such. As in the adventure of the sheep, when, after the battle, Sancho tells Don Quixote that his perception was wrong, Don Quixote's perception goes from inaccurate recognition and faithful interpretation to exact recognition and unfaithful interpretation . Sancho said: “Didn't I tell your Honor to look at what you were doing, because they were just windmills? (Cervantes 69). Once again, Don Quixote asserts that an enchanter, the “wise Friston... transformed these giants into windmills” (Cervantes 69). The character Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse also perceives the elements of the world differently from other characters. Like Don Quixote, Lily's mode of perception is vision. Unlike Don Quixote, whose recognition of the truth changes in the sheep scene, Lily's recognition of the truth that, for example, Mrs. Ramsay is Mrs. Ramsay, remains constant. Unlike Don Quixote, whose interpretation takes the form of words, as in his long enumeration of the "knights" in the approaching "armies", and of action, as in his attack on the sheep, Lily's interpretation takes the form of thought and representation in painting. Lily attempts, without much success, to perceive, and therefore understand, Mrs. Ramsay in all her complexity as a woman and as a human being. She uses the language of "seeing" or "seeing" to express her frustration with such an arduous task: "Fifty pairs of eyes were not enough to get around this one woman, she thought" (Woolf 198). . The interpretation of these attempts to perceive the totality of people takes the form of thought. Lily's primary form of interpretation, however, is represented in her painting. The scene that Lily paints from Ramsay's summer home in the Hebrides includes Mrs. Ramsay reading to James. Lily recognizes that Mrs. Ramsay's form is, in fact, Mrs. Ramsay. She distorts her interpretation of the painting by depicting Mrs. Ramsay and James as a purple triangle. We cannot say, as might be the case with Don Quixote, that because her interpretation represents Mrs. Ramsay differently from how she sees them, Lily does not perceive the truth. There is a crucial difference in the interpretations of these characters. Don Quixote's belief, for example, that an enchanter transformed armies into sheep, belies his recognition. Although he recognizes the truth that the hordes appear as sheep, his interpretation that they are in fact warriors negates his recognition. Lily's artistic interpretation of Mrs. Ramsay as a triangle does not negate her recognition of Mrs. Ramsay as herself. Lily doesn't think that Mrs. Ramsay and James are actually a purple triangle. She told Mr. Bankes that “she had made no attempt at resemblance” (Woolf 52) in describing Mrs. Ramsay and James as a triangular shape. Lily's awareness of interpretation, her deliberate modification of perception, marks another crucial difference between her. and Don Quixote: that Lily actively modifies her vision..