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Indiana University

Articulating the contradictions inherent in both Cervantes's works and psychoanalytic approaches to literature, Quixotic Desire explores the topic in fifteen eloquent essays. This is a book about Freud and Cervantes, reality and illusion, madness and sanity, desire and the law, readers and writers, the body and the mind, Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Cipión and Berganza, male and female, the unconscious and the conscious, the intensely personal and the theoretically dispassionate. It illustrates the ways that psychoanalysis can help us read Cervantes by taking us back to Freud's own early encounters with the Quixote and forward to the latest research in the field, combining clear and thoughtful analyses of Cervantine texts with the approaches of such post-Freudians as Lacan and Kristeva. This movement is at once analeptic and retrospective, as Cervantes and psychoanalysis mutually inform one another.

The volume consists of an introduction by the editors and five sections, each of which corresponds to the varying trends in psychoanalytic criticism and the distinct methodologies of the contributors; I include the authors, titles, and a thumbnail sketch of all fifteen essays here so that the interested reader can sample the richness of the topics and approaches found in the volume. The guiding tenets of the anthology, however, are outlined in the introduction: «Psychoanalysis works as a valuable and viable critical mode because -in its best moments- it posits, in both literary and interpretive texts, that the psyche functions as an organizing principle, constantly creating itself through the images and lexicons out of which it gains material expression» (3). Quixotic Desire is an example of fifteen of those best moments.

The first part, The Discourse of Affiliation, examines the «still mysterious and secret affinities between the founder of psychoanalysis and the founder of the modern novel» (4). In their essay, two Madrid psychoanalysts, León Grinberg and Juan Francisco Rodríguez, argue for «Cervantes as Cultural Ancestor of Freud», illustrating the impact of the Quixote and the «Colloquy of the Dogs» on Freud's early thinking.

Part 2, The Discourse of Desire, contains three essays. Anthony J. Cascardi's «The Archeology of Desire in Don Quixote» examines the relationship between   —168→   desire and its literary representation, with specific attention paid to «The Curious Impertinent». «Cervantes and the Night Visitors: Dream Work in the Cave of Montesinos», by Diana de Armas Wilson, «shows how Cervantes absorbs and replies to [the second-century, Hellenistic dream interpreter] Artemidorus even as he anticipates Freud» (6) and unites Don Quixote's experience in the Cave of Montesinos with both sexuality and the economic realities of the early modern world. Carroll B. Johnson's «Cervantes and the Unconscious» investigates the role of the unconscious in reader response, looking at diametrically opposed interpretations of Cervantes from an autobiographical perspective.

Three essays constitute Fragmented Heroes, Fragmented Texts, the section devoted to images of fragmentation in specific examples from the Quixote. «Mirroring Others: A Lacanian Reading of the Letrados in Don Quixote», by Anne J. Cruz, shows the impact of the «educated men» whom Don Quixote meets in the course of the Quixote; these authority figures function as Lacanian «A-fathers» who represent the Symbolic order that they lead the protagonist to reenter at the novel's close. «The Whole Body of Fable with All of Its Members: Cervantes, Pinciano, Freud», by Mary Malcolm Gaylord, utilizes Freudian views of the unconscious and the rhetoric of displacement to analyze the sexual tropes of the wrist-hanging episode in Chapter 43 of DQ, I. George A. Shipley's «Sancho's Jokework» discusses Sancho's story of Lope Ruiz and Torralba from the perspective of Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious to illustrate Sancho's unconscious feelings of hostility toward Don Quixote.

Part 4, The Other's Story: Interpolation and Disruption, focuses on secondary characters in the Quixote -specifically, from the interpolated stories- with Ruth Anthony El Saffar's «In Marcela's Case» the first example. El Saffar, who reads Marcela as incarnating the warrior and Great Mother qualities of Artemis, examines the ways that gender has played a role in critical discussions of the episode and emphasizes the links between desire, identity, and culture. Carlos Feal's «Against the Law: Mad Lovers in Don Quixote» establishes the relationship between Cardenio's madness and the issues of desire and submission to authority. In «Curious Reflex, Cruel Reflections: The Case for Impertinence», Eduardo González explores the dualities of male/female, marriage/separation in «The Curious Impertinent» via an examination of Freud and the presentation of extratextual elements such as Marcel Duchamp's paintings. Paul Julian Smith's «"The Captive's Tale": Race, Text, Gender» argues that this interpolated story can be deciphered by means of the work of theorist Guy Hocquenghem to uncover a desublimated homosexuality.

The final part of the volume, The Mother's Story: Incorporation and Abjection, moves from the Quixote to other Cervantine texts and to the role of the mother -most frequently, the witch- in them, anticipating the «shift in psychoanalysis itself from father-focus to mother-focus» (13). This section begins with «Cervantes and the "Terrible Mothers"» by Maurice Molho, which suggests that a Terrible Mother lurking in Cervantes's own unconscious might have influenced Montiela in «The Colloquy of the Dogs», the phallic women in «The Wonder Show», and Teresa Panza. «"The Pretended Aunt": Misreading and the Scandal of the Missing Mothers», by Mary S. Gossy, explores the absence of the mother   —169→   in this Cervantine text and in critical discussions of it, relating the question of patriarchal dominance to issues such as scandal, image, reading, and literary criticism. In «The Phantom of Montilla», Andrew Bush uses the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (not to mention Poe and Shakespeare) to discuss the Phantom and the Crypt, Freud and Lacan, witches and incest in «The Colloquy of the Dogs». «Berganza and the Abject: The Desecration of the Mother», by María Antonia Garcés, argues that Kristeva's explications of and challenges to Freud and Lacan can serve to elucidate the witch Cañizares. Garcés explores language and the unconscious, sexual allusions, and the question of desire in «The Colloquy of the Dogs».

Quixotic Desire is a book that will change the ways we read Cervantes, and it will also affect the ways we view the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and the applications of that methodological apparatus for understanding literature. Consistently stimulating and cogently argued, the fifteen studies comprising this critical anthology make a manifest contribution to Cervantine studies. The essays in this volume are enlightening and polemical, intelligent and intelligible, reminding us once again how much we will miss the elegant style and eloquent voice of Ruth Anthony El Saffar. Quixotic Desire challenges the ways readers have thought and talked about Cervantes for hundreds of years, and it promises to keep them thinking and talking for many years to come.