House as Bizarro-Quijote

Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that there's no way this post lives up to its title. I had this epiphany, you see, and I'm committed to seeing it through to the dirty end; only I'm not certain I can, or that it'd even work if I could. But it's spent the day gnawing at the peripheries of my consciousness, so I'm obliged to address it, lest I sleep less tonight than the 45 minutes I've slept since Thursday morning. (I know what you're thinking. I thought it too. But since I'm not dead or in a coma, I'm going with ischemia. Death of brain tissue. Short-term consequence of paralzying insomnia. Not permanent ... just permanent enough to score me a night's reprieve from hyper-scrutinizing minds.) What was I saying? I was driving at something, I remember. Had to do w—w—w— (calm down, calm down. Don't want to scare yourself into stroking out.) w—w—with House and Don Quijote.

I remember now. I wanted to point to the transition from the first season of House to the second and its counterpart between the first and second books of Cervantes' Don Quijote. The problem with my theory is that it depends on some creative mappings and convenient reversals to work. Still, I think the comparison interesting enough to deserve refutation. So here goes:

Readers of the Quijote are already familiar with meta-spheric movement between the first and second volumes. The first consists of a conventional romance, by which I mean, a series of adventures connected (slightly) by the central character who has them all. The second volume, however, propels the novel into the aforementioned meta-sphere.

In its prologue, Cervantes informs his readers that he will not, as expected, "spit in the face of whoever wrote that second Don Quijote":

I'm not planning on to give you any such satisfaction: it's true, insults may make even the humblest hearts thirst for vengence, but the rule will have to let me be an exception. You want me to call him an ass, tell him he's a liar, and impudent, but the idea has never so much as occurred to me: his own sin can punish him, he can eat it with his bread, that's that. (360)

Only that's not that. That is the beginning of the modern novel, according to its most illustrious historians, Ian Watt and Michael McKeon. Not only does it saturate the second volume with Cervantes' awareness of romantic convention, it also initiates Quijote's own questioning on those conventions. If you think the Quijote a tragedy, this is the moment it turns tragic. Once the good knight punctures his fantasy, his mental adventures stop resonating historically. He begins a descent that's all the more devestating for its increasingly perfunctory quality. He desperately wants the scrim to drop again, but even when it does, its opacity has given way to a translucence he finds blinding.

House inverts this movement from comfortable convention to cold, hard fact. In the first season, the eponymous Gregory House spends an inordinate amount of time watching a General Hospital-esque soap opera. Every time a character approaches him, his feet are propped in an unsanitary fashion on expensive medical equipment and he hushes his underling by demanding he wait until the next commercial. His obsession resembles the conventionally quirky tics which have peppered television for the better part of the past two decades. However, as the first season closes, what had been a straight-forward medical drama transmogrifies into a General Hospital-esque soap opera as House's ex-wife is hired by his hospital, the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hosptial, as its lead counsel.

Since 40 percent of the lawsuits filed are against House, this tightens their orbits unto collision. What makes House interesting—by which I mean, what makes this different from programs which begin with a bang but start shark-hopping before intelligent people can get attached—is that he reenacts the birth of the modern novel. He spends the first season compulsively watching soap operas in order to prepare himself for the soap opera his life will become in the second. His manipulation of interpersonal and departmental relations, so shrewd in the first season, seems forced in the second as he searches for a balance between the knowledge of melodrama he's acquired and the circumstances in which he's called upon to use it.

However, I've only finished half of the second season, so my epiphanic inkling could fizzle into so much senseless blather. But I don't think it will.

Why?

Because all my lip-flapping is less interpretation than description.