—127→
Barnard College
Like merchants, thieves, and others who use the roads, Steven Hutchinson claims the cunning messenger Hermes as his guide during his scholarly endeavor. Like them, Professor Hutchinson embarks upon paths not yet trodden in Cervantine studies, focusing on the metaphorical and literal centrality of movement in the novels. As messenger of the greater gods, it was incumbent upon Hermes to speak clearly and to plead causes well. Oratory was his domain, and in addition he is credited with the invention of the lyre. God of travelers and patron of literature, Hermes conflates actual movement with its textual recreation.
Movement as traveling is the subject of the third and central
chapter of the book. The
Quixote and the
Persiles are located within the literary
genre fundamental to the epic beginnings of both East and West: the journey.
The
Novelas ejemplares, too, include tales of
wandering lovers, gypsies, waifs, and their canine counterparts, Cipión
and Berganza. As Hutchinson points out, the journey narrative abounds in Golden
Age literature, sometimes as mere wandering (Don Quixote follows the lead of
his horse; the pícaro that of his stomach), sometimes as a purposeful
tale of spiritual progress (El Criticón, and, of
course the
Persiles). Saints (Santa Teresa) and sinners
(Guzmán de Alfarache) alike travel, whether within the inner recesses of
the soul or across land and sea. Traveling is liberating for men; but
«wandering women» are problematic (103), and even the most
adventurous females «travel only in relation to men: away from them,
toward them, or with them, or any combination of these»
(107-08). The sedentary life associated with marriage acquires
negative connotations (when espoused, for example, by the ecclesiastic in the
ducal palace in the
Quixote [99]), and disintegrates into
pathological enclosure in such tales as the
Curioso impertinente or
El celoso extremeño (106).
The two initial chapters explore the topic of movement at the linguistic level, more generally as the basis of language itself, more specifically as the dominant metaphor of Cervantine prose to express both thought and desire. In the final chapter, the analysis of verbal figures extends to a consideration of narrative movement, where Hutchinson sees analogies to techniques of improvisation in music. One section (Chapter 4) is devoted to —128→ akhtine's «chronotope», wherein the varied worlds of Cervantes's literary imagination are classified and discussed.
Hutchinson identifies his methodological enemy: structuralism.
According to the author, its thinking has invaded the field of literary study,
and «has brought about a spatialization and detemporalization of
process»
(5). An analogy is drawn between structuralist
thinking and the Parmenidean concept of reality as absolute and eternal, in
contrast to the Heraclitean concept of eternal change. Like the prologuist of
Part I of the
Quixote, whose intent is «to destroy
the authority and influence which books of chivalry have in the world and with
the public»
, so does Hutchinson periodically reiterate his vow to
undo the authority of structuralism: «My intention here has been to
develop an awareness of discursive movement in view of the fact that, with few
exceptions, mainstream literary criticism from Aristotle to the present has
dulled our senses with regard to motion and its correlates including process,
change, intensity, and dynamism»
(51); «As we
know all too well, dynamism, movement, and becoming are rarely put on the
agenda of literary criticism»
(83). The difficulty
Hutchinson faces is the lack of a critical discourse not rooted in
structuralism and its aftermath. His basic strategy is to borrow discourse from
adjacent fields, music in particular, but also dance. For example, he employs
the term «cross-rhythms» to describe the multiplicity of
simultaneous experiences evoked in Cervantine prose, and explains in a note:
«The adaptation loses the term's musical specificity, but is meant to
fill a terminological void concerning what I see as an integral and usually
ignored aspect of experience»
(240, n.17); when he
addresses the topic of improvised action, he states that «As far as
I'm aware, literary criticism has scarcely dealt with this issue as such though
it is touched upon indirectly in much textual analysis. For reasons readily
apparent, certain branches of musicology have expressed strongest interest in
improvisation»
(140). Certain principles and practices
of improvised music are then transferred to the sphere of psychological
motivation -how Cervantes's characters behave, and later to his style of
writing, his
escritura desatada (215). Cervantes's
assiduous attention to movement and gesture is likened to a choreography (130).
One wonders if this cannibalization of adjacent arts is, in fact, necessary,
when postmodernist literary criticism has emphasized precisely such qualities
as fluidity, heterogeneity, multiplicity, play as salient narrative
features.
The rejection of the structuralist imperative animates -indeed
obsesses- Steven Hutchinson's own discourse. The fluidity of his style is
refreshing, yet can become diffuse. His tracing of a «semantics of
movement in etymology»
(15) infuses his own thinking,
and he obviously derives pleasure from indicating the roots of words to prove a
particular point: at the heart of «episode» is
hodos, «road, pathway»,
demonstrating that «journey narrative already has the road inscribed
in its episodic itinerary»
(201), to cite but one
example of an etymological excursus. The radicals of certain Arabic verbs
«superbly illustrate the integral relationship between experience and
telling»
(207). This linguistic fascination also invades
his
—129→
own writing pattern, with less felicitous results. Throughout
the book words are deconstructed into their component parts
(«con-ditions» [37]; «pro-cess» [37];
«di-gressions» [83]; «dis-placing» [83];
«e-motions» [128]; «extra-vagance» [135]; «The
un-fore-seen allows them to im-pro-vise, and they are willing to accept the
outcome, the e-vent, whether favorable or not» [138];
«e-ducation» [154]. Dissatisfied with the segmentation of language
into verbs and nouns and the valorization of things and states over movement,
Hutchinson seems determined to dissect nouns, and in so doing, to verbalize
them, to show the verb concealed within. Linguistic structures are thus shown
to correspond closely to a perception of the world as temporal, as a system in
movement rather than as a system of structures in place. The metaphysical
notion is interesting and basic to the theoretical premise of his study, yet
its insistent visual representation in word hyphenation disrupts the narrative
flow, distracting instead of convincing the reader.
«Cervantine Worlds», the chapter devoted primarily to
space -rather than time- within the concept of the chronotope, is a thoroughly
developed discussion and classification of the myriad places experienced by
Cervantes's characters in his novels and short stories. I use the verb
«experienced» instead of «inhabited» deliberately, in
order to convey Hutchinson's focus on the experiential -as opposed to
ideological significance- of a particular realm. Some statements are not quite
accurate. For example, his assertion is incorrect that «[s]eldom in
Cervantine criticism has there been any reflective acknowledgement or
discussion of a quite extraordinary aspect of Cervantes' novelistic writings:
the tendency of the narrative and its traveling protagonists to be drawn into
world-like vortices»
(160). The work of Félix
Martínez-Bonati on the
Quixote, which first began appearing in the
late 1970s and recently culminated in his book
«Don Quixote» and the Poetics of the
Novel (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1992), deals with the spaces in the
Quixote within a theoretical exploration of
the concept of realism and representation in literature. Discussed as
«regions of the imagination», he stresses that these imaginary
worlds «are not merely artifices of a world but programs for life»
(168). Martínez-Bonati analyzes the ironization of the different fictive
realms (and eventually of literature itself) that results from their
juxtaposition and hybridization, with a resulting ambiguity that belies any
systematic ideological certainty; Hutchinson discusses the numerous scenarios
in the
Quixote, the
Persiles, and the
Novelas ejemplares (from the exotic and
fantastic to the communal and domestic) in terms of their individual
incompleteness that permits -indeed fosters- interaction among the various
worlds. Furthermore, Hutchinson's discussion of communities (175-84) goes
beyond the notion of shared space to include a consideration of social
relationships. Peopled largely by those marginalized by society, such as
thieves, gypsies, witches, these spaces pertain less to the institutionalized
realm of literature than to the discourse of social anthropologists. Victor
Turner's concepts of liminality and communitas could be applied with ease to
these Cervantine worlds (The Ritual Process [Ithaca:
Cornell UP, 1977]).
Cervantes's journeys take us from dreamy places of felicity (pastoral abodes, dream islands, or other utopias) to the demonic underworld of the witch Cañizares in El coloquio de los perros, through the more quotidian places of hearth and home, market and country inn. Hermes, messenger of Zeus, conductor of dead souls to the underworld, friend of merchants and protector of flocks, is accustomed to traversing such divergent terrain. For readers of Cervantes, the winged god is an ideal traveling companion.