Visor de obras.

University of Hartford

Cruz, Anne J., and Carroll B. Johnson, editors. Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies. New York: Garland, 1999. 275 pp.

Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies is a compilation of essays that resulted from the Southern California Cervantes Symposium held in 1996 at UCLA. Carroll B. Johnson tells us in his fine introduction to the collection that the conference and the subsequent book assume «a rupture» in Cervantes studies, a rupture that he ascribes to a «more general crisis in philosophy and literary studies in "the age of the post"» (ix). I will return to this at the end of the review.

The book is divided into three sections: «Cervantismo and the Crisis of Hispanism,» «Revisioning Cervantes Studies,» and «The Future of Cervantes Studies.» Anthony Close's contribution, the lead article in the collection, contrasts the liberal humanist tradition, which he sees as focusing on the cultural and historical grounding of texts (thereby coopting the postmodernist emphasis on contextualization), with the de-aestheticizing and ahistorical penchant of some postmodernist theories which are «utterly conditioned by discursive power play» (12). Although Close's criticism is not wholly off the mark, as the sometimes sterile self-reflexivity and the obscurantism of some theoretical analyses demonstrate today, he overstates the case by toning down the universalizing claims of humanism and rendering excessive those ascribed to postmodernism. Close laments postmodernism's ludic emphasis and its consequent   —187→   indifference to a text's «viability of reference, the specificity of meaning and the accessibility of presence and origins» (13). Humanist and postmodernist may debate the limits of reference but neither denies its viability.

Anthony Cascardi's essay, immediately following, is a clear indication that Close's criticism describes only the extreme instances of some «practitioners,» as he himself admits (Close 18). Cascardi's analysis situates the Quijote in its historical and cultural moment in the seventeenth century and then, espousing a Marxist position, shows how a historically-situated work is able to generate meanings «in contexts quite alien to those in which they originate» (23). What Cascardi theorizes, Diana de Armas Wilson demonstrates in her essay, namely, how deeply the Quijote and the Persiles are imbricated in «a great variety of New World discourses» (51). Wilson demonstrates that the polyphony and the normalizing of multicultural coexistences in Cervantes's fictional worlds also effect different cultural meanings. Her creation of a dialogic third space from which the voice of the marginalized other of Cervantes's time -gypsies, Basques, Amerindians, Moriscoscan be heard, makes possible not only the encounter of the same and the other in his time but a similar encounter in ours. Her article demonstrates, in practice, how «morally enlightening» (pace Close 2) the inclusionary approaches of postmodern theories can be. Responsibly applied, they dissolve the binaries between humanism and a supposedly antinomial postmodernism and arrive, in practice, at the same conclusion as Close's, namely, that «[u]nderstanding old texts and understanding the living Other are kindred activities» (Close 2, 12). John J. Allen's position, coming after Cascardi's and Wilson's essays, is not only convincing but wonderfully terre-à-terre. He eschews the idea that there is a genuine rupture in Hispanic studies and points instead to the healthy loss of consensus already preceding the intellectual ferment of the 1960s. Allen reminds us that whatever perspective we apply, «the practical sine qua non of any literary analysis must still be: "how does [the approach] illuminate the work it treats?"» (73).

In Part II, «Re-visioning Cervantes Studies,» Charles D. Presberg uses Augustine's trope of two embattled cities -the city of God and the city of Man- to speak of both the Quijote itself and to trace a literary history. Like Augustine's ecclesia, literary history has struggled to «canonize» and homologize a scholar ship that he too reminds us was already disturbed -and as early as 1925- with Américo Castro's work. Pablo Jauralde Pou's essay traces the advantages and the disadvantages of the emphasis on philology in Cervantine studies in Spain and looks for fruitful critical transatlantic interaction in the process. Ellen Lokos returns to the 1569 document surrounding the Sigura affair -«Información de limpieza»- and to the cloud that hangs over Cervantes's possible converso ancestry in order to suggest that the women in Cervantes's family may have participated «in degrading arrangements because they [had] no other choice» (122).

Anne Cruz does a fine job of re-visioning the gaps and absences of the female voice in Cervantine criticism before tracing the different changes that have resulted from new feminist perspectives. Cruz privileges reception theory in order to remind her readers that in any textual criticism, regardless of the approach the critic claims to espouse, it is always «through the readers'   —188→   prescribed notions of gender that the protagonists' sexual characteristics are ultimately assumed or presumed» ; she argues that critics who «hold to an ordered humanist, Renaissance world view» (135) reify and essentialize the trope of gender, while postmodernist theorists, on the other hand, produce gender as performative, as an enactment of ritualized behaviors. What cannot be emphasized enough in this regard, I believe, is that it is the kind of ordering principles, and the way these principles are used to produce meaning, that constitutes the essential differences between the two approaches. Adrienne L. Martín, like Diana de Armas Wilson, seeks to create a space in which a contrapuntal reading of Cervantes's «El amante liberal» can take place. She frames Cervantes's novella in a sociohistorical background equating male effeminacy with sodomy, and points to the link between male homosexuality and effeminacy in the literature of Spain's Golden Age, in treatises of manners such as Il Cortegiano, and in the English satires against sodomites where homosexuality is also linked with indolence. Martín privileges romance as «the realm of homosexual allusion and suggestion» (157) in order to focus on the character of Cornelio in «El amante» as a «type of effeminacy closely associated with homosexuality in the early modern mind» (161). Whereas Adrienne Martín focuses on homosexual suggestiveness in Cervantes's work from a historicocultural perspective, Nicolás Wey-Gómez, resorting to Freudian theory, sees jealousy instead as a «symptom» of latent homosexuality in both «El curioso impertinente» and «El celoso extremeño.» Jealousy becomes, for Wey-Gómez, the «substitute effect for a libidinal impulse that has been repressed,» that of homosexuality (172).

Part III, «The Future of Cervantes Studies,» purports to be radical. George Mariscal bids farewell to the «master narratives» of both humanism and postmodernism (213) and promotes political activism over the supposedly «[s]elf enclosed systems of reading» (205) that for him constitute literary studies in the academy. He chooses to use Cervantes in a way that make the latter's seventeenth-century works «speak from their particular historical situatedness to the present and to a vastly different social and cultural space» (205). Mariscal's focus on the relevance of the mestiza Ricla in the Persiles to the mestizaje of Chicano-Mexicanos today constitutes the same emphasis Diana de Armas Wilson suggested, citing Homi Bhabha. That is to say, that the alien territories represented by writers like Cervantes can provide spaces in which «contraries are assimilated and an instability created which "presages powerful and cultural changes"» (Wilson 60). Mariscal's plea for finding «organizing principles of personal ethics and social justice» (207) in Cervantes's texts, Persiles specifically, is not incompatible with the «morally enlightening» ends to which Close refers in the humanistic studies he sees proffered by Spitzer and Curtius (2). Alison Weber goes back to the varying history of Cervantine reception and interpretation. She acknowledges that Cervantes resists ideological discourses of his time, as many postmodernist critics have claimed, but agrees with current cultural critics who place limits on the extent of Cervantes's supposed oppositional discourse. She asks that «his work be reread in terms of its possible solidarity-enhancing qualities» and contingent upon the reader's «position in a transformed political landscape» (229). James Iffland, with whom the collection of essays ends, emphasizes   —189→   the fact that as we invent new forms of political discourse in the profession and pepper them with «the language of social transformation and justice» (236), we seem to become increasingly apolitical, caring less and less about transforming the polis. But need it be so? In the light of feminist, ethnic, and gay and lesbian emphases on the very real political effects of interpretation, does not the critique of postmodernism as apolitical lose its force? If in generating a new language and theory we become apolitical, the problem lies with us and not in the nature of theory or in the search for a more adequate language in which the desires of a new interpretive community can be expressed; and the same reservation applies to Iffland's query, that the «sophisticated» rejection of master narratives or macrotheories, may serve to legitimize «the very structure of power we hope to modify» (242). It may, but this is not necessarily the case.

If there is a «crisis» in Hispanism, as some of the contributors suggest, it appears on the evidence of these essays to take the familiar form of proposing novel interpretations of texts and questioning the validity of others. If a «rupture» exists between humanism and today's postmodernism, the postulates of neither approach are clarified in the essays. And this poses a problem. In the words of Alasdair MacIntyre, if we do not define our position then we cannot identify and transcend the limitations of rival postulates. We end up defining and identifying these limitations by the standards to which we as proponents of the rival theory are committed by our allegiance to it (After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory [Notre Dame: U. of Notre Dame Press, 1981], 26869). Such is the case in those essays which presuppose an ideological chasm between the humanistic tradition and postmodernism. The implied argument assumes for the humanistic tradition a foundationalist notion of knowledge as material content that can be contained and of truths that can be grasped. It is based on the notion of a unified, autonomous self, of a hierarchy in values, and of the accessibility of meaning. Such knowledge, traditionally directed toward the formation of good and informed citizens of the polis, has been supposedly replaced with the linguistic games, relative truths, and the fragmentation of the arbitrary narratives/theories of postmodernism.

It is true that at times the assumption of fragmentation has been a source of concern to feminists struggling to act in concert, to ethnic groups seeking political identity, and to gay and lesbian groups who fear that the lack of consensus in queer theories could result in what Iffland calls a powerless «array of social movements thrashing away in the interstices and at the margins» (242). Responsible postmodernists, of which there are many, however, do not advocate moral relativism. They instead foreground moral fallibility. The distinction between the two is important.

Postmodernism does lack the mythical cohesiveness of a humanism that presupposes a common world and a shared body of knowledge, that is, a script in which we can all participate as actors and in which we occupy a place in civilization's time scale. But how inclusive has that cohesiveness been? Who are the «we» and the «us» represented in this communitas? In practice such an approach has been primarily Eurocentric, male, white, heterosexual, Christian, largely indifferent to its exclusionary nature, naturalized as universal, and unable or unwilling to be critical of its norms.

Its critical «rival,» today's postmodernisms, on the other hand, treats knowledge as a historically-contingent notion, not as something that the mind discovers but as something generated by what Richard Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, calls the «normal discourse» of a community. From this perspective, interpretations prevail so long as a given community coheres. When that community dissolves, these interpretations lose their legitimacy. Replaced, then, is the foundationalist notion of knowledge as a mental construct with the non-foundationalist notion of knowledge as a social artifact sustained by the existing consensus of a given community. The interpretation of texts consists, then, to quote Rorty in «Hermeneutics, General Studies, and Teaching» in Synergos, not in the «encounter with [a] Reality or with [a] Truth,» but in the attempt of a historically -situated author and an equally historically- situated reader «to work out the potentialities of the languages and activities available to them... by transcending the vocabulary in which these problems [are] posed» (9; emphasis mine).

Responsible theory, then, asks that proponents of both «sides» raise the question: Can we make of Cervantes's opus genuine texts-in-use in order to discover both his and our blind spots? If we put ourselves in Cervantes's place, we realize that, like him, we humanists and postmodernists alike are the products of different social and discursive formations that have produced our habits, our tastes, our desires, and even the forms our resistances take to one another's theoretical positions.

Winthrop University

Yamada, Yumiko. Ben Jonson and Cervantes: Tilting against Chivalric Romances. Tokyo: Maruzen, 2000. 200 pg.

Citing Aristotelian dramatic principles and the related impulse to satirize chivalric romance, Yumiko Yamada makes a strong case that Cervantes influenced Ben Jonson through Thomas Shelton's English translation of Don Quixote. Her argument centers on a homology that unifies the entire study and corrects the modern linkage of Cervantes to Shakespeare. By showing that Cervantes is to Lope de Vega as Jonson is to Shakespeare, Yamada resurrects the link between Cervantes and Jonson (both were strongly classical and humanist) and argues that Lope and Shakespeare preferred commercialism over classical principles. Yamada also casts the difference in style between Jonson and Shakespeare as the difference between neoclassicism and romanticism, the rational and the sentimental. These broad strokes are examined closely in six chapters and a conclusion.

In the first two chapters, Yamada establishes the influence of Cervantes on Jonson, who originally considered Don Quixote as similar to the chivalric romance   —191→   Amadís de Gaula but later recognized in comments on drama by the Canon of Toledo and the Curate that Cervantes shared Jonson's own preference for classical dramaturgy. Jonson saw the dialogue between the Canon and the Curate not as a caricature of neo-Aristotelianism but as a genuine reflection of shared artistic ideals: simplicity, lucidity, poetic truth, verisimilitude, proportion, the unities, and the separation of comedy and tragedy, all of which contrast with the techniques of chivalric romance. Cervantes and Jonson promoted such principles of classical dramaturgy and criticized, respectively, Lope and Shakespeare, who abandoned them for profit. Indeed, Yamada remarks, Don Quixote is actually more against Lope than chivalric books.

Chapters Three and Four develop the Cervantes-Lope- Jonson-Shakespeare homology. By abandoning classical principles, Lope catered to his audience and monopolized the stage, driving Cervantes out of the theater business. Similarly, Jonson's adherence to classical principles kept audiences away and cost him popularity as a writer of civic tragedies, whereas Shakespeare met the public's demands by violating these same principles. In short, Lope and Shakespeare are alike in «the improbability of plot and intricate, hyper-elevated style» (144). When Jonson read Shelton's translation of Don Quixote, he must have seen Cervantes's career problems underlying the remarks of the Canon and the Curate as a reflection of his own situation (being eclipsed by Shakespeare) and fought back by having his selected plays published in 1616 in the first deluxe folio edition in the history of English literature. Jonson's quotation of Don Quixote, Part I, in the opening work of the Folio highlights similarities between the two playwrights. In 1623 Shakespeare's own works were published in the same deluxe format, and Jonson's contribution «To the Reader» seems to praise him warmly. Not so, says Yamada. Jonson simultaneously shows courtesy to the late Shakespeare and builds in a critique by adopting the Cervantine technique of mock encomium, violating in the process his own Aristotelian principles: his praise of Shakespeare is neither simple nor straightforward. The hidden message is that Shakespeare's success lies not in poetic training but in a vulgar appeal to the masses in the grandiloquent language derived from chivalric romance. If «To the Reader» is a «wholly reversible» poem, then Jonson remained true to the critical position he had taken in creating his own Folio (81).

Chapters Five and Six enhance the controlling homology by locating in Sidney the influence of chivalric romance on Shakespeare. Jonson understood that Shakespeare's inflated diction and emphasis on honor and valor come from Sidney, whose Arcadia had been influenced by Amadís de Gaula, with which Cervantes begins and ends Don Quixote. In England as in Spain, for Jonson and Cervantes, the popularity of chivalric romance was an impediment to the development of humanist drama based on classical principles. The authors also disapproved of chivalric romances as literal history. In Jonson's case, the enemy was Arthurian myth and its emphasis on chivalric ideals, perpetuated by Sidney's Arcadia and the latter's own military exploits. It was Britannia, written by Jonson's teacher William Camden, that corrected British imperial history. «In sum,» writes Yamada, «it [chivalric romance] was a metaphor for any medium which could plunge an individual or body politic into insanity, by asserting what is false to be true» (145).

The conclusion finds numerous pre-chivalric elements in Plato's emphasis in the Republic on the «good» : self-sacrifice, love, honor, valor, and rewards in the afterlife. Aristotle responded in the Nicomachean Ethics and the Rhetoric with stress on human action itself, and the importance of truth, plain speech, and correct language. A further homology now becomes possible: Plato's philosophy (the roots of chivalry) is to Don Quixote as Aristotle's philosophy (the corrective to chivalry) is to Sancho Panza. More specifically, the Platonic vision of ideal good and beauty parallels Quixote's love for Dulcinea, whereas Sancho's uneducated, common-sense approach to problems not only makes him a better governor than the satirical Duke realizes but also (as Yamada would do well to point out) critiques Plato's philosopher king. She further notes Horace's preference for the hero's sapientia in the Odyssey versus war and passions in the Iliad (again the roots of chivalric romance) and concludes the book by noting that «Jonson must have felt sure that» Cervantes, like Horace, had transformed Aristotle's philosophy into a pattern of right living (165).

Ben Jonson and Cervantes is Yamada's own translation from the original Japanese. There is only one mistranslation in the main text (the botched idiom «longseated rivalry» on 11), but the errata sheet does not account for all of the printing errors. The author styles her work as a «detective story» (ix), drawing conclusions from evidence and correcting critical misperceptions. Her claims seem overwhelmingly valid, and she relies only rarely on an educated guess. Throughout the study, the reader may find Yamada's use of «romance,» «romanticism,» and «Romanticism» a bit fuzzy, but her general purpose is to associate Shakespeare with feeling rather than neoclassical restraint. The association of Shakespeare with Romanticism would be more persuasive if the author acknowledged, for example, the presence of classical dramaturgy (the unities) in The Comedy of Errors and The Tempest -plays on either end of Shakespeare's career. But Yamada has a virtuosic command of Cervantes, Jonson, Shakespeare, Plato, Aristotle, and Renaissance literary history. To a large degree, her intention to «challenge you to rethink the history of literature and ideas» (ix) accurately reflects the book's revisionist achievements.

Ayuntamiento (Antiguo Hospital de la Encarnación), Montilla