(A)Wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque. .

David R. Castillo. (A)Wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque.

(Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures, 23.) West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001. xiii + 182 pp. index. illus. $43.95. ISBN: 1-55753-227-3.

Anamorphosis is the shaping metaphor and critical strategy for David Castillo's new book on "mutiperspectival forms of discourse" (2) in some representative literary texts of early modern Spain. As found in painting, anamorphosis is the perspectival device whereby an image that appears inexplicable when viewed from the normal or conventional spectator's viewpoint becomes comprehensible when viewed obliquely. Perhaps the most famous example is Holbein's The Ambassadors (reproduced, along with other anamorphic images, in Castillo's text), which displays, near the bottom of the painting, a peculiar oblong shape that, viewed from the side, reveals itself to be the image of a human skull.

Such "(a)wry views" in early modern painting have been used by a number of scholars as analogues for aspects of literature and culture. In his introduction, Castillo duly notes these precursors of his own approach; Ernest Gilman in The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (1978); Cesar Nicolas in Estrategias y lecturas: las anamorfosis de Quevedo (1986); Jose Antonio Maravall in one crucial chapter of La cultura del barroco (1980); and (most significantly and oddly, but more on this below) Slavoj Zizek, in a number of works. Castillo shares with these critics a concern with "oblique perspectives" (132) on culture, that is, with texts that reveal or incorporate counter-hegemonic perspectives in addition to officially-sanctioned values and beliefs. Castillo pursues his mode of reading through a number of major literary texts of the period: the picaresque novels Lazarillo de Tormes, Guzmdn de Alfarache, and La picara Justina, in part 1, and, in part 2, Cervantes' novels Don Quixote and Persiles as well as selected examples of Cervantes' theater.

As in the case of any methodology or theory, the most important questions to be asked of Castillo's study are, How successful is he in carrying out his approach? What--what that is new, innovative, original--does his mode of interpretation bring to the texts he examines?

To take the second question first, the answer must unfortunately be--nor too much. Each of the books six chapters draws heavily on prior critics who share Castillo's interest in "oblique readings" of and perspectivist tendencies in the texts studied; and it is arguable that the "anamorphic" view that Castillo adopts adds little to and differs little from earlier interpretations. To take just one example, Castillo argues that "Lazarillo de Tormes challenges the reader to gaze at the Spanish society of the mid-1600s from the marginal position of the dispossessed" (9). True enough. But this conclusion does not differ substantively from Francisco Rico's classic study of multiple perspectives in the picaresque.

To turn to the earlier question, How successful is Castillo in carrying out his "anamorphic" approach? The answer here, I should say, is that his readings show potential, but that Castillo does not sufficiently develop that potential in his brief study. Not to be frivolous, but Castillo's book is just too short; its 138 pages of text are not enough for the author to deal at all adequately with the large number of literary texts he rakes up, particularly given the length and incomparable complexity of those texts. Twenty pages on Don Quixote ? Nineteen on the Guzman (which itself runs close to 1100 pages in one recent edition)? These books, and the methodology Castillo is proposing, need more than this.

Another problem--and this one far weightier--is that Castillo seems not fully to have assimilated the theory that he is here attempting to apply. Among the numerous critics on whose work he draws, the most significant in influence is, by far, Slavoj Zizek. Castillo summarizes as follows Zizek's complex amalgam of ideological, psychoanalytical, and philosophical criticism in The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989): "[I]deology is an error of perspective that distorts our view of the world in such a way that we see meaning and supreme plenitude in those cultural symbols that hide the contradictions and radical contingency of our individual and collective Identity .... Zizek suggests that scholars involved in ideological criticism have something to learn from the cultivators of perspective anamorphosis. He argues that we must aim to reveal the ideological error of perspective by creating awry views of the field of identities, much in the same way that anamorphic devices--he cites Holbein's Ambassadors--construct oblique perspectives that dissolve the consistency of the frontal view" (106-07). This crucial contention appears to have informed Castillo's entire methodology, including the adoption of the term "anamorphosis." However, Castillo in his textual analyses does not consistently follow through on the frill implications of Zizek's position; not all his readings (for example, his interpretation of the Persiles) fully engage with Zizek's ideological and Lacanian concerns. Furthermore, it is curious indeed that he doesn't even cite what appears to be the seminal influence on his thought until two-thirds of the way through his study. Odder still is the fact that Castillo nowhere mentions another of Zizek's texts, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1997), even though the latter nor only contains a key discussion of the author's theory of anamorphosis but also seems to have inspired the title of Castillo's own book.

All in all, Castillo is certainly on to something in (A)Wry Views. As he notes in his conclusion, a good deal of present-day criticism on early modern Spanish literature "has as its ultimate goal the location of oppositional voices in the midst of the nation-building impulse of imperial and Counter-Reformation Spain" (133). Critical approaches that seek our and explicate those voices are a much-needed corrective to well-nigh centuries of criticism that saw little in that literature but conformity or complicity with official culture. Zizek's texts, little utilized in Hispanic scholarship, hold enormous potential for analyzing oppositionality. Here's hoping that Castillo leads the way in gaining a wider audience for that potential in future, more developed, studies.