Cervantes and His Postmodern Constituencies

Anne J. Cruz, Carroll B. Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317944515
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

The essays in this collection represent the first effort in Hispanism to address the conflicted status of Cervantes studies by interrogating the possibility of continued critical dialogue in the context of postmodern theories that threaten to divide into oppositional discourses. Comprising broad historical overviews as well as close readings of texts, and wielding the rhetoric of scientific detachment and of impassioned political commitments, the essays at once exemplify and critique multiple critical positions. The collection takes a meaningful and timely look at the formation of cervantismo from the early twentieth century to the prevailing debates on postmodernism and the current crisis of literary studies.

Part 1 Cervantismo and the Crisis of Hispanism

Chapter 1
Theory vs. the Humanist Tradition Stemming from Américo Castro

Anthony J. Close

Most of the influential Cervantes criticism written this century forms a fairly coherent tradition stemming from Américo Castro's El pensamiento de Cervantes (1925). The tradition is idealist and humanist. By this I mean that it starts from something like Ortega y Gasset's position in his Meditaciones del "Quijote" (1914), which anticipates common themes of the liberal humanist stream of criticism dominant in the first half of the twentieth century, and led by such figures as T.S. Eliot, Ernst Curtius, Leo Spitzer, and Erich Auerbach. I refer to anxiety about the disruption of the tradition of Western European culture, the sense of the need to define man's spiritual goals in a disoriented modern age, the faith in literary classics as offering just this kind of illumination and as providing a golden link to the past, the impatience with the pedestrian qualities of nineteeth-century positivism, the concept of mind as "lamp" rather than "mirror" and of language as an internally ordered system rather than a transparent window on the world. Much of this ideology is basic to Curtius's monumental European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (German original, 1948; English translation, 1953), which defined the succeeding generation's guiding concepts of literary scholarship: the canon, the classic, the topic, the tradition and so forth. These premises are also reflected in the major movements of literary criticism of the period from 1920 to 1960—the New Criticism, Stylistics, the study of period-styles, Formalism. Two of the scholars mentioned above, Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, contributed seminally influential essays on Don Quixote: I refer to Spitzer's "Perspectivismo lingüístico en el Quijote" (1955), and to Auerbach's "The Enchanted Dulcinea" (1953). The terms "humanism," "humanistic," "humanities," redolent of the morally enlightening study of the classics, are used recurrently by Spitzer, as they are by Curtius.

Because it starts from this kind of base, the humanist tradition stands exposed to the often virulent attack mounted against it by the main branches or exponents of theory: Derridean poststructuralism; Foucauldianism; Althusserian Marxism; Lacan; French feminism.¹ Foucault's Archaeology of Knowledge (French original, 1969, English translation, 1972), for example, is a direct assault on the kind of historical enquiry formulated by Curtius. For its leading concepts, which imply the nobility, continuity and mutual accessibility of the works of the human spirit, Foucault would substitute "rupture," "discontinuity," "threshold," "discursive space" and other notions, which presuppose the opposite. Likewise, Derrida's thesis about the indefinitely deferred nature of textual meaning, with its barring of presence, reference and the recovery of origins, its effect of constantly inverting the underpinning dualisms of Western thought, is explicitly intended to demolish humanist criticism and replace it with a new program. Most European Hispanists working in Cervantes, or more broadly, the Golden Age, are still rooted in the humanist tradition and regard some of the criticism of Cervantes emanating in recent years from outside Spain, especially the United States, as alien, maverick or worse. To what extent is rapprochement between theory humanist scholarship possible? This is the question to which I address myself in this essay.

The basic indebtedness of Castro's El pensamiento de Cervantes to the perspectivism of Ortega y Gasset, and the profound influence that it exercised upon Cervantine criticism for at least half a century after its publication in 1925, are subjects that I have examined in The Romantic Approach to "Don Quixote" (1978), and have recently reexamined in my essay "La crítica del Quijote desde 1925 hasta ahora" (1995) in the light of developments since 1978, Suffice to say that none of the major critics of Cervantes from 1925 to the mid-1970s—including Hatzfeld, Bataillon, Casalduero, Spitzer, Riley, Avalle-Arce, Márquez Villanueva and Castro in his writings subsequent to El pensamiento de Cervantes—questions the "humanist" premises on which Castro's book is based. These premises were common in Golden Age scholarship, as may simply be inferred from the fact that the liberal, perspectivist and self-reflexive tendencies that the abovementioned critics attribute to Cervantes complement the picture that was being drawn around 1970 of the major comic narrative genre of the Spanish Golden Age, the picaresque novel, by the leading Spanish authorities: Lázaro Carreter, Francisco Rico, Claudio Guillén.

The various branches of avant-garde theory mentioned earlier, which emanated from France in the late 1960s, then spread to Anglo-American universities in the 1970s, have impacted upon cervantismo with relative slowness and in uneven ways, the impact being concentrated primarily in the United States.² It has intensified notably in the period from 1985 until the present, as will be seen by the following examples.

A feminist approach to Cervantes, though not from an avant-garde position, was adopted by Ruth El Saffar in Beyond Fiction: The Recovery of the Feminine in the Novels of Cervantes (1984), which presents itself as a somewhat shaken yet defiant reaction to deconstruction's and Stanley Fish's radical subversion of assumptions about the stability and objectivity of textual meaning. Combining René Girard's theory of triangular desire with Jung, El Saffar traces the process by which Cervantes's characters, and Cervantes himself, extricate themselves from the labyrinth of their obsession with the illusory object of desire, thanks to the emergence of the "fourth term," the undesired, undesirable female. Thus they achieve ultimate illumination and harmony between self and other. The same path to self-knowledge and faith in the existence of meaningful patterns in literary texts and life itself are, by implication, recommended to Stanley Fish, J. Hillis Miller and others like them.

A markedly more avant-garde kind of feminism is exemplified by Diana de Armas Wilson's Allegories of Love: Cervantes's "Persiles y Sigismunda" (1991), which, though basically indebted to Freud, challenges—and claims that Cervantes challenges—Freud's essentialist conception of gender, and the male dominant hierarchical dualisms on which it is based. Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Derrida and Lacan provide much of the theoretical underpinning of this interpretation, which maintains that the Persiles is organized at every level by the figure of the androgyne, and the tropes of syneciosis and anagogy; these are instrumental in subverting the male/female hierarchy and pointing to relationships of mutually tolerant, nondominant difference. Thus we are encouraged to see Cervantes's Byzantine romance as a revolutionary critique of paternalist tyranny of a barbaric kind and the pilgrimage of the lovers as more an allegorical quest for liberation from it than for Catholic enlightenment in Rome. The villains of the piece, the barbarians, are introduced in the first six chapters, where Cervantes fictionalizes the psychogenesis of exclusionary sexual difference, staging an all-male fantasy world in which imperialistic and libidinous discourses intertwine under the imperatives of a Barbaric Law, equivalent to Lacan's Law of the Father. The thirteen romantic episodes subsidiary to the central quest, and the mise-en-abîme presentation of the author and his book in the episode of the Flor de aforismos peregrines (Persiles IV, i), reinforce the dismantling of the apparatus of gender discrimination. While Derridean or Lacanian language is often used in the book,³ and deconstructive strategies are systematically attributed to Cervantes,⁴ he himself is exempted from that kind of destabilizing analysis. Wilson sees him, in traditional fashion, as the all-unifying, conscious giver of meaning to his text. Situated within a pre-Cartesian intellectual/literary framework—Leòn Hebreo, neo-Aristotelian theory, Aristotle's categories, Heliodorus's Aethiopic History—and equipped with its materials, Cervantes exploits them with extraordinary prescience in such a way as to anticipate the problems and solutions of postmodernist feminism. Cervantes's lucidity about his message and purposes is made apparent by passages such as this:

Here at the spatial centre of the Persiles Cervantes's uterine trope emblematizes his long brooding on issues of female sexuality: pregnancy, childbirth, and the loss of "credit" suffered by women like so many of his female relatives. . . . The configurations used by Cervantes to organize his nativity narratives show that he was experimenting with new structures of desire, that he was laboring to generate a nonlinear, nontriangular, nonsacrificial paradigm of a plot. (222)

The avowed eclecticism of Wilson's method (xiv), the refusal to decenter the subject of the text's discourse and the assumption that no problems attach to describing Cervantes as simultaneously attuned to a Spanish Baroque and a postmodernist wavelength are likewise typical of several essays in the volume Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes (1993), edited by El Saffar and Wilson, which tread the same kind of psychoanalytical, gender-oriented path as Allegories of Love. They exemplify a weakness common to avant-garde readings of Cervantes, whatever their theoretical origin.

Before the appearance of George Mariscal's Contradictory Subjects: Quevedo, Cervantes, and Seventeenth Century Spanish Culture (1991), neo-Marxist theory, with its full-blooded attack on humanist criticism as a fabrication of bourgeois ideology, was not represented in mainstream Cervantine criticism—indeed, was quite alien to it.⁵ Mariscal's refreshingly adventurous book compensates for the deficiency; to its credit, it squarely faces up to, though it does not solve, the problem alluded to at the end of the last paragraph. Avowedly written from the perspective of a member of an ethnic minority in American society, denied access to "the privileges of self-determining individualism," the book assaults the assumption that this kind of wilful, unified, self-conscious subject represents unchanging human nature. The fallacious assumption that it does, linked to the view of a homogeneous, nostalgically aestheticized Golden Age Spain, is allegedly common to such luminaries of Golden Age studies as Otis Green, Dámaso Alonso, A.A. Parker and, by implication if not name, Carroll Johnson; in Mariscal's view, it "has driven some of our most perceptive critics to mistake seventeenth century poets for existentialists and fictional hidalgos for Freudian case-studies" (4). Mariscal argues that the subject is, in any age, a product of history and culture, and is constituted by multiple, often contradictory discourses, relations of power and systems of signification. His approach, influenced by Marx, neo-Marxism (e.g., Raymond Williams), Foucault and the writings of José Antonio Maravall, treats literature and, in particular, Quevedo's love-lyrics and jácaras and the Quixotes of Cervantes and Avellaneda, as continuous with nonliterary discourses and practices, working together with them to shape the forms of subjectivity that struggled for dominance in the Spanish Golden Age. Huarte de San Juan, the structure of family life, incipient forms of capitalism, the polemics about purity of blood—all these are bracketed with the texts of Cervantes, Quevedo and Avellaneda as evidence of these competing pressures. This kind of "new historicism" is now in the air, and, in principle, I welcome it; a similar resolve to consider literature systematically in relation to its sociohistorical context is displayed by Antonio Gómez Moriana's Discourse Analysis as Socio-Criticism in the Spanish Golden Age (1993), which deals in part with Don Quixote.⁶

While Mariscal's tendency to iron out the specifically literary character of Quevedo's and Cervantes's works has the disadvantage of simplification, his resolve to place them centrally in a sociopolitical network of relations is challenging. The de-aestheticizing of literature includes renunciation of the reverential view of the great writer's lucid command of his medium and message, and conversion of him into a fragmented site of conflicting ideologies. I was sometimes baffled by this book, but never bored. So, Mariscal's students would have no cause to complain about Golden Age literature being presented in a light irrelevant to contemporary social controversies. Nor, despite his conception of theory as an instrument designed to undermine such ivory-tower exegesis, could the caviling academic critic accuse him of unthinkingly turning old texts into a theater for their representation. The awareness of the need to avoid that pitfall is not just proclaimed in principle in Chapter 1,⁷ but, to some extent, guides his interpretation of Quevedo and Cervantes. In the works of both writers the anticipation of modern forms of subjectivity is, for Mariscal, finally reined in by their submission to their historical circumstances.

And yet, despite his awareness of the need to avoid imposing a modern perspective on the Spanish Golden Age, this is what happens in practice. The book reveals, I think, a basic unclarity about the notion of "the subject"; never formally defined, it shifts between two different implied models: "what it is to be an auth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part 1 Cervantismo and the Crisis of Hispanism
• Part 2 Re-visioning Cervantes Studies
• Part 3 The Future of Cervantes Studies
• Contributors
• Index