A rhetorical and a materialist Cervantes, angst over the married female, and a comparative miscellany. (Review Essay).

Georgina Dopico Black. Perfect Wives, Other Women: Adultery and Inquisition in Early Modern Spain. Durham, Duke University Press, 2001. xx + 307. $19.95. ISBN 0-8223-26420-6.

Carroll B. Johnson. Cervantes and the Material World. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. 239 PP. $35. ISBN 0-252-02548-2.

Charles D. Presberg. Adventures in Paradox: "Don Quixote" and the Western Tradition. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. x + 250 Pp. $55. ISBN 0-271-02039-3.

Barbara Simerka and Christopher B. Weimer, eds. Echoes and Inscriptions: Comparative Approaches to Early Modern Spanish Literatures. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2001. 277 pp. $46.50. ISBN 0-8387-5430-9.

Literary criticism responds to fashion just as surely as do clothing and L styles of hair but its cycles are notably slower. Thus, over the past forty years, one has seen the historical-positivist mode yield to the New Criticism, which in its turn made grudging way for the structuralist-deconstrucrive phase, into which New Historicism oddly inserted itself, followed by the current major trend of cultural studies, in which I include gender studies. Because of their more intense involvement with the text, one may include psychoanalytical studies, including Lacanian analysis, in the category of New Criticism. Since the ebbing of historical positivism, Marxism has been distinctly out of phase, despite the admirable efforts of such as Fredric Jameson. Nor has the disintegration of the Soviet Union helped the Marxist cause. Hispanic literary criticism, always comfortable with positivist history but hardly at all, to my knowledge, dedicated to the New Historicism, did have something of a romance with the New Critici sm, especially in the form of drama studies of the theme-and--imagety type. However, Hispanism stoutly resisted structuralism and deconstruction hoping that they would go away, which they have now done, leaving the discipline in the far more congenial realm, to it, of cultural studies.

Nonetheless, if deconstruction had one lesson to teach the critic, it was to enable her to be aware of her critical posture. One similarly ought to formulate such a consciousness in the metacritical mode, as a reviewer of scholarly books. The four books at issue here, one a miscellany and the other three monographs by a sole author, operate from distinct critical stances. Perfect Wives. Other Women seems to me decidedly to be a product, even an archproduct, of cultural studies. Adventures in Paradox, extremely well grounded in literary history is a rhetorical study that has major philosophic and theoretical corollaries, both implicit and explicit. Echoes and Inscriptions is naturally quite various in its sixteen separate articles, but the concept of the comparative in its broader and freer sense is a genuinely unifying factor. The anomaly is Cervantes and the Material World Here a psychoanalytic critic executes a Marxist analysis of major aspects of major Cervantine texts. In the "Afterword," Carroll Johnson writes of his obligation to his students "to make them aware of [the] dialectic of text and context so they can have some idea of what the authors were doing and what the texts meant when they were produced" (198). He also owns the obligation to engage "in dialogue with my fellow senior professors of Spanish Golden Age literature in American Universities" (198). But, as Gwendolyn observes to Cecily in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Ernest, there are occasions when one's duty positively becomes a pleasure. So it is here with Johnson. Cervantes and the Material World is a polemic written as much against critics whom Johnson deems to be of the errant idealist persuasion as for the materialist interpretation that he espouses.

The matter of this polemic is Don Quijote and the Novelas ejemplares. In Don Quijote Johnson concentrates on Sancho Panza, first as to the question of whether his remuneration will take the form of a salary or merced, that is a reward in grace and favor, and then in terms of his relationship with Ricote, Sancho's exiled morisco neighbor. There is also a chapter given over the Historia del cautivo. Of the Novelas ejemplares, Rinconete y Cortadillo is analyzed in chapter two, La gitanilla in chapter five, El amante liberal in chapter six, and La espanola inglesa in chapter seven. There are as well an Introduction and an Afterword. What distinguishes this relatively brief book of 231 pages is its wealth of readings in the social and economic history of the early modern period. Its literary style is interesting, standard discursive recitation aggressively interspersed with journalese, televisionese, slang and colloquialisms, all uttered no doubt as a virile reposte to the effete idealists, Hemingway to their Henr yJames. The English of the book by and large is decent and correct. We have here a well-produced and more or less serviceably written book.

Cervantes and the Material World continues the critical tendency of the past fifteen years or so to give greater weight to the "realist" element in Cervantes' narrative art. The term "realist" of course applies best to mid-nineteenth-century fiction so that Johnson was well advised to title his study a materialist one and so retain the philosophic implications of that word, especially in the relationship of Marx to liege1, materialist philosopher in attempted refutation of the idealist adversary. And yet I can't help feeling that Johnson's true title is Cervantes and the Real World. From the first page until nearly its last he characterizes history and society and economics as "real" denying ontological status to works of art and products of the mind. This is the oldest dispute in the history of philosophy, and Johnson settles it in Aristotle's favor. That would be fine if all of Cervantes' writings did not structurally abound in oppositions by juxtaposition of matter to mind, his versions of Nicholas of Cusa 's coincidentia oppositorum, what Johnson exasperatedly labels as "Cervantes' maddening ambiguity" (104). It is maddening because highly inconvenient, if not fatal, to an understanding of Cervantes that suppresses the abstract so as to strengthen the concrete and so destroy the binariness that is fundamental to Cervantes' art. Johnson is right and does well to redress the balance of oppositions but verges on philistinism where he attempts to eliminate or reduce to inconsequentiality the moral and aesthetic dimensions of Cervantine narrations. These dimensions are not a set of silly drawing room niceties which Johnson acidly describes as "the great questions," "the finer things," and "the higher aspirations of Man" (1). They are vital issues, such as that of freedom, propounded with, precisely, such maddening ambiguity in the galeotes chapter of Quijote I, and most physically and concretely propounded, I might add.

Theory has practical consequences, and the absence in Marxist thought of any category of the aesthetic has grave consequences for the criticism of works of art, despite the valiant efforts of Jameson in Marxism and Form (1971). Without some notion of art itself, the text risks getting lost in the context, so that one may reasonably ask, why not studyhistory, sociology, and economics instead of their pale reflection in some indecipherable text? Plato had similar objections to art, calling it an imitation of an imitation; but his reservations are idealist ones, where art is painfully distant from the realm of transcendent idea.

Another remarkable lack, related to its effaced aesthetic, in Cervantes and the Material World is an awareness of the complexities of representation. Works of art process and admit actuality in ways that alter raw perception of the prime material. Gypsies, for a wonder, find their liminal place in La gitanilla against every expectation of their being represented in literature at all; but they do so under a tremendous negative charge. In a strange and wonderful passage, Jose Ortega y Gasset writes of how Quijote operates as a kind of mirage, obliquely mirroring the world outside it. Perception, as Lewis Carroll taught us, is quite different on the other side of the looking-glass of art from what is on this historical, societal, and economic side. For one thing, in the world of Quijote and the Novelas ejemplares, nearly all principal young women and men are hermosos, a situation inexplicable in economics but perfectly intelligible in romance, as any viewer of soap operas on television can attest.

History enjoys the major ontological privilege in Cervantes and the Material World. It is real. But well before Hayden White, Cervantes himself questioned its truth status, in another of those maddening ambiguities, that of the "verdadera historia." The problem is the documentary basis of most historical accounts. Bruce Wardropper, in his justly celebrated "Don Quijote: Story or History" (Modern Philology, 63 [1965]): 1-11, revealed the terrible uncertainty with respect to the official record when it was shown that the Donation of Constantine, a key document supporting the primacy of the Bishop of Rome, was false. Livy invented the early history of Rome. Moreover, even when they do not fabricate or falsify, historians are writers who must shape their material, omitting, emphasizing, de-emphasizing. It is above all their omissions that are troubling, especially when, as is so often the case, they write from the point of view of the victors, in war, in class conflict, in economic rivalry. Thus it seems naive fo r a critic of prose fiction to credit historical narrative with almost absolute veracity; even though historians themselves understandably are most reluctant to allow that their craft necessarily resorts to invention and the wiles of artful elaboration. In his history of the Peloponnesian War Thucydides has nearly every commander of troops, Athenian and Spartan, pronounce an eloquent discourse on the eve of battle. This cannot have been the case, and even if it had been, it appears impossible for the text of these many orations to have been preserved and transmitted to the author. However, decorum demands that each leader make a speech before an armed engagement, and speeches there are.

Furthermore although in the age of Cervantes there are wonderful practitioners of the craft of history (Garcilaso el Inca comes immediately to mind), history as a well-developed intellectual and academic discipline does not come into being until the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, first and above all with Edward Gibbon and his marvelous footnotes, but then also with the likes of Theodor Mommsen, Leopold von Ranke, and Thomas Babington Mccaulay. The chronicle, a recitation of notable events year by year in a sovereign's reign, is the characteristic format before, during, and after Cervantes' lifetime. And even in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the duke of Saint-Simon uses just such a calendrical system for his magnificent chronique scandaleuse of the later years of the reign of Louis XIV "le Grand." My understanding is that by history Johnson means the highly developed late -- modern version that one finds in Fernand Brandel, John Elliott, Pierre Chaunu, and Jose Antonio Maravall. This elaborate, late-modern ciencia existed only in embryonic form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, so that it is a considerable anachronism to posit it as a flourishing enterprise of superior weight and credibility during the Spanish Golden Age.

Even more anachronistic is the effort to apply a peculiarly Marxist construct of history to Cervantes. It derives from Karl Marx's concentration on around sixty years of events, mainly in France, from the outbreak of revolution there in 1789 until Napoleon III's assumption of the title and power of emperor in 1850. The major premise here is that of well-defined classes -- aristocrats, peasants, and workers, and the middle class -- in strife over the means of production. It traces this through three phases not unlike Auguste Comte's trois etats of superstition, religion, and rational belief, or positivism. These are the familiar feudal system based on tenure of land, capitalism, and socialism. The construct incorporates the idea of progress by seeing the phases after the feudal as better, capitalism better than feudalism, socialism better than capitalism. Nonetheless, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his winning essay submitted to the Dijon Academy, long before Marx, denied the correlation then and now assumed, betwe en technological advance and human moral betterment. The horrors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries bear eloquent witness to the truth of his intuition, with the appalling spectacle of holocaust in Germany and the slaughter of millions in Soviet Russia.

But in addition to the demonstrable absence of Marxist -- style class conflict in the Spain of Cervantes, the fatal flaw is the non-existence of a middle class there. Johnson himself admits this: "The social structure peculiar to Spain...simply did not allow for the independent development of the bourgeoisie" (187). For it he substitutes the tiny group of merchants, financiers, and merchant bankers. But he cannot accept this void in the scheme and proceeds to interpret La espanola inglesa as a socialist allegory:... "consider La espanola inglesa as a reflection of the dialectic of history as conceived in classic Marxist theory. The idealized love story is or had been traditionally the province of the aristocracy, but Cervantes eliminates aristocratic protagonists in favor of the bourgeoisie. When Cervantes belabors the financial infrastructure of the bourgeois lifestyle he is insisting on the emergence of the bourgeoisie onto center stage in both history and fiction. The bourgeoisie displaces the aristocracy as the protagonist of history, and fiction mirrors this change" (186).

Apart from the fairly delirious notion of Cervantes as a proto-prophet of Marx (in a Spain that almost entirely lacks the culture, the economy, and the class structure of France in the first half of the nineteenth century), apart from this archanachronism, we have here two cardinal errors, one historical and the other literary. The historical misapprehension is that the middle classes displaced the aristocracy in Europe before 1920, let us say. The misconception has enjoyed considerable currency in large part owing to precisely such fears harbored by Alexis de Tocqueville, who was moved by them to visit the United States and to write De la democratie en Amerique, probably the canniest analysis of American culture and political mimic ever written by a non-American. De la democratie is also a sustained and magnificent dialogue between the aristocratic and the democratic point of view. In anticipating the proximate demise of his own class, however, Tocqueville was premature. The upper nobility still had nearly a century of power and wealth to enjoy before World War I removed it from the eminence that it had enjoyed for centuries. Even so, the Renaissance in Europe presented the nobility with a grave challenge. The feudal basis of power -- land, physical strength, regional identity -- was evolving into a much more complex polity of finance and credit, technology especially in warfare, and a centralized concept of government that ruled from major cities and courts, la cour et la vile. To continue to participate in the control of the state, the aristocracy needed to educate itself in the new techniques of administration and warfare and to quit the regions where its estates had provided it with wealth and influence for the seats of power, the city and the court. With far greater means at its disposal than its lesser brethren constituting the petite noblesse, the upper nobility, throughout Europe, including Spain, by and large managed to effect the transition, even to the extent of educating its women, to make them more marriageable.

But its lesser regional counterparts lost the support of the magnates on whom they had depended, could nor afford other than minimal education for the men, could not afford to transfer to the center. They disappeared, merging into the peasantry, or, in the case of a few fortunate alliances, blending into the upper nobility. This is the doomed class to which Don Quijote belongs and the phenomenon of its waning away is European, not uniquely Spanish. The process by which the European nobility, in its upper reaches, survived the threat posed to it by the changes in early-modern culture, government, technology, and warfare is most lucidly and compellingly depicted and analyzed by Jonathan Dewald in his extremely important The European Nobility 1400-1800 (1996). The French Revolution did not extinguish this class. That took the huge catastrophes of World War I.

If Tocqueville helped deeply to implant the notion that the bourgeoisie soon supplanted the aristocracy, Ian Watt in his most enduring and influential Rise a/the Novel (1967) gives great credence to the presumption that the novel itself is a middle-class development. The argument draws its greatest strength from Watt's perusal of the Daniel Defoe of Robinson Crusoe, to which Mall Flanders and Colonel Jack might well be added. But Roxana, though its protagonist has her beginnings in Huguenot merchants and a British brewery, is quite another matter as this astute female creates her fortune as the king's mistress and the consort of German prince, to become finally, through her marriage to a Dutch merchant, a countess in Holland if not in England. And Henry Fielding's Tom Jones is the story of bastardy in the squirearchy, not the bourgeoisie. Even Jane Austen's portrayals of life among the lesser gentry are strangely dominated by the benefactions and malefactions of the upper nobility, Darnley in Pride and Prejud ice, for example. Dewald calls England the most aristocratic country in Europe, and this situation is much more profoundly represented in fiction than is generally allowed.

But the most grievous weakness in Watt's reasoning is its dismissal of the continental novel. He discounts Mine. de la Fayette's Princesse de Cleves as too elegant to be the genuine article. What Watt makes of Honore de Balzac I cannot imagine, but aristocratic presences and aspirations dominate his best fiction. His massive and splendid Illusions perdues traces the conversion of the bourgeois Lucien Chardon into the aristocratic Lucien de Rubempre, whose efforts to reconstitute his patent of nobility by purchasing a mayorazgo to validate and support it, end in disaster. Balzac's most intense personal ambition was to marry a titled woman, and towards the end of his regrettably short life he succeeded in doing so. In Gustave Flaubert's hymn of hatred of the bourgeoisie, Madame Bovary, anagnorisis comes early when Emma discerns at the marquis' ball a discrete group of guests formed by her host's aristocratic male power elite. They represent everything that Emma covets and never achieves. They represent gratific ation, passions assouvies.

Well along in his evolution from squalid moneylender to titled financier in charge of retiring Spain's foreign debt, Benito Perez Galdos' Torquemada marries an impoverished aristocrat with whom he comes to live in ducal splendor in a great Madrid mansion. As for Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, I am at a complete loss to detect its bourgeois component, unless that be in the rigid, narrow, and arriviste mentality of Karenin himself.

A cogent account of the aristocratic factor in the progress of the novel is to be found in Thomas DiPiero's Dangerous Truths and Criminal Passions (1992). The fact is that in Europe the upper nobility thrived and endured through and past the First World War, and fiction more than mirrors its persistence. Yet when in Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu Mme. Verdurin, very rich and ultrabourgeoise, transmutes her highly unaristocratic self into the Princesse de Guermantes, Johnson would express horror at her betrayal of her class. Just why he nourishes this loathing of aristocracy is unclear to me. But he makes his own repugnance Cervantes': "Cervantes" quarrel is... with the aristocracy as opposed to the [non-existent] bourgeoisie" (193). I would surmise that the explanation is dogmatic. As capitalism takes hold the middle classes take power from the nobility, in Marxist gospel. But if the greater nobles, as they adapt themselves to capitalism learn to use it to their own advantage, then the preordai ned sequence from feudalism, to capitalism, to socialism, to utopia is slowed and even thwarted. The aristocrats who do this then are Whites, or counter-revolutionaries, before the revolution. Johnson calls "the association of the aristocracy with capitalism" in the person of the nefarious duke of Medina Sidonia "sinister" (193). I find literary analysis that is dogmatic and doctrinaire in the very face of evidence that controverts it to be far more sinister.

Johnson's detestation of aristocrats helps explain the demonology of Cervantes and the Material World. The duke of Medina Sidonia heads the list of the early-modern proscribed. But many of Johnson's contemporaries and colleagues also come under fire: "What is truly surprising and not a little disconcerting is that so many of my compatriots and fellow Golden Age scholars, all products of American democracy and its bourgeois institutions, also identify with the aristocratic values that were derringer [sic; de rigueur] in the rigidly estamenrarian society of early modern Spain (2)." Robert ter Horst and Alban Forcione seem to be the prime targets, ter Horst for being the "most ardent in his embrace of the aristocrat's studied avoidance of the economic dimension of life," (2) Forcione for being an authority on Cervantes as well as a sort of crypto-Fascist reactionary: "Forcione considers Cervantes' text to be a celebration of the existing social order and the official vision of society. It is relatively easy to c oax out Forcione's academic and ideological preferences, and to discover how his reading of the text is a function of those preferences" (95). But no matter what a critic's personal conditioning and politics may be, fruitful intellectual exchange requires recognition of the potential for valuable contribution from any quarter, including Marxism, through figures of the excellence of Jameson and Lukacs, to name only two. In addition to the individuals whom he castigates, Johnson rules out whole fields of critical endeavor: "... philosophy... religion, ethics, the theory of love..." (1) and, without naming them, formalism and gender studies. And when critics of La gitanilla take up the neglected economic aspect of that tale, well in advance of Johnson's book, he makes of them a gang of three (ter Horst, Joan Ramon Resina, William Clamurro) mentored by Forcione, but put on the general materialist track by Harry Sieber.

When Johnson demonizes his predecessors in this way, he engages in some misreadings of their work that strike me as willful. Nothing except Johnson's ignorance of historical semantics authorizes the reader of "Une Saison en enfer": La giranilla (Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 5.2 [19851:87-127) to conclude that I ardently embrace aristocratic values, or, for that matter, plebeian ones. In that article I describe a hierarchy in which expenditure is ranked highest and acquisition, especially by theft, lowest. Approval of expenditure and disapproval of acquisition are factors of the text, nor of my personal system of values. However, acquisitiveness has a long and rich negative history in Western culture, beginning in classical antiquity. From antiquity to Cervantes, the very emblem of profit-seeking is the merchant who trades in the Mediterranean basin. If Alciati had devised an emblem for the merchant, its verbal accompaniment very likely would have been cupiditas, i.e. codicia, i. e. greed. Until the rise of the discipline of economics in the late eighteenth century, there exists no neutral or approving lexicon for human economic motivation. Capital formation is greed, interest usury.

Critics of older literature are regularly confronted with the semantic problem of whether or not to use contemporaneous terminology or presentday inexact equivalents. And the difficulty deepens when the older term is pejorative. But I prefer to use the word or words that the earlier speaker or writer would have used. Johnson accuses me of engaging in anachronism with the term and fancifully opines that I recoil from it: ".... 'greed' was in fact the emergence of a bourgeois mentality, the wave of the future elsewhere in Europe" (98). But the anachronism is Johnson's. Greed, or codicia, is the Golden Age term, "bourgeois mentality" a nineteenth-century construct ill applicable to Cervantes' gypsies, whose profound acquisitiveness schools them in absolutely none of the virtues inculcated by the ethos of later European middle class, such as strict financial probity and monogamy.

There is similar misconstrual of my meaning in Johnson's analysis of the sense of "merit" as I use it in "Une Saison ..." The word denotes demonstrated ability independent of any other claims, as in "merit scholarship," one awarded solely for ability, without consideration of the candidate and social status or need. The context of discussion of this term is the Teniente's hope for future preferment in his administrative career. He plans to make his case for such solely on a record that he judges to be excellent, without resorting to the bribery that was customary, in Spain and the Ottoman empire, according to Cervantes at least. But Preciosa considers the plan to be highly impractical and urges the Teniente to prime the pump: "**Coheched, vuestra merced, coheche**" The Teniente has merit, which is a function nor of his birth but of his talent. It, however, is not sufficient to secure him promotion. Money is also required.

Merit also has a later social history occurring when in eighteenth-century France the nobility's hereditary right to offices and commissions came to be challenged by those proposing to choose office-holders on the basis of their qualifications and abilities. The nobility had always claimed that birth alone was a guarantee of acceptable discharge of one's duty in government or warfare. But by the eighteenth century it had become well enough educated and trained to accept competition from non-noble rivals, so that it embraced the idea of merit, just as the Teniente has La gitanilla. Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret describes in his The French Nobility in the Eighteenth Century (1985) the appropriation of merit by the aristocracy: "From 1760 onwards the notion of worthiness and honour, which until then had defined what was special about nobles, were overtaken by a new notion: Merit, a middle class value, typical of the third order, which nobility took over, made its own, accepted and officially recognized as a criterion of nobility. From that moment on there was no longer any significant difference between nobility and middle classes" (34).

Cervantes frequently advances the notion that qualities and virtues need an appropriate material setting in order to shine. Preciosa observes to the Paje, concerning one of his poems, that love which begins in poverty is illomened. Don Quijote voices the same misgiving to Basilio and Quiteria, the lovers whom in Quijote the has helped elude the tyranny of Camacho el Rico but whose prospects are bleak because Basilio has no fortune and no profession or trade. Johnson misreads me and taxes me with trickery and un-Americanism ("sleight of hand," "a concept probably repugnant to most Americans" [98-99]) and then compares my supposedly reactionary, aristocratic skullduggery to Alexander Hamilton's undemocratic class of "the rich, the well born, and the able." This is absurd, as absurd as it is to claim that I think residencia to be an Ottoman practice.

Johnson's attack on my discussion of the modes in La gitanilla of sterility and abundance is troublesome. One major goal of "One Saison..." is to trace the interplay of the binary oppositions that so significantly constitute the tale, aristocrat vs. plebeian, wealth vs poverty, greed vs. prodigality. These beautifully contaminate one another, so that gross distinctions blur when a putative gypsy will not steal, or is charitable, or where an aristocrat is rapacious, or a queen barren. Johnson bypasses all such distinctions and nuances and forces my analysis into dogmatic oversimplifications. Nor does he really acknowledge his considerable debt to "Une Saison en enfer" for its presentation of the field of force created in La gitanilla by the interaction between sterility and abundance, even though he appropriates the perception.

My crime seems to have been to direct critical discussion to a new area, the economic, and so to have more than anticipated Johnson. Moreover, "Une Saison en enfer" offers a thoroughgoing account of La gitanilla in terms of the adversarial collaboration in it of getting and spending. The theory that accumulation is the prime economic force conflicts with the conviction that spending wealth is the superior system. Johnson seems to depict ter Horst as a partisan of priming the pump, of spending, of the aristocratic, when in fact the two modes, in their congruencies and contradictions, make up one whole economic system, where there is and must be room for Adam Smith as well as John Maynard Keynes. Johnson, however, attempts to eliminate one of the two binaries that compose the Cervantine literary economics, and by wrongly representing me as an unscrupulous advocate of prodigality attempts to suppress me as well. Conspicuous consumption, however, is not solely a characteristic of a doomed class, in Marxist terms, but rather a function of degree of accumulation. Once the grande bourgeoise has amassed millions, it will resort to lavish expenditure after the manner of the upper nobility, as surely as Mine. Verdurin becomes the Princesse de Guermantes or Consuelo Vanderbilt the duchess of Marborough. Indeed, after the waning of the old aristocracy of birth early in the twentieth century --when Proust writes its definitive elegy -- the millionaires and billionaires no longer need or wish to assume its modes and in their own right constitute a new aristocracy that simply is a plutocracy but one in which liberalidad endures. Classes may perish but, under capitalism, it persists, another of the "miracles" of the market place.

There are good things in Cervantes and the Material World. Johnson's placing of the composition of La espanola inglesa in the period of detente between England and Spain that came about in the reigns of James I and Philip III seems quite consonant with the relatively benign portrayal of the English in the tale. But not altogether benign. Clotaldo and Catalina have brought Isabela up as their prisoner, a term used of her at least four times. And this prisoner is also a thing, a beautiful valuable thing, a tesoro, a prenda, possession of which is contested between monarch and subject for as long as the object retains its beauty: "Clotaldo, agravio me habeis hecho en tenerme este tesoro tantos anos ha encubierto; mas el es tal que os haya movido a codicia: obligado estais en restituirmelo, porque de derecho es mio" (Clotaldo, you have offended me by keeping this treasure hidden for so many years. But its richness is such as to have stirred up covetousness in you. You are bound to restore it to me because by right it is mine. 1:249). So both Elizabeth and Clotaldo are greedy ("codicia") to possess Isabela, whom the Queen wrests from her ward, as well as from Ricaredo her suitor. Here I hear echoes of Elizabeth's well-documented parsimony and acquisitiveness that contrast with her father's proclivity to large expenditure. An unnamed courtier observes, after Ricaredo has returned from his privateering expedition with an immensely valuable spice ship for the queen: "Ahora se verifica lo que comunmente se dice, que dadivas quebrantan penas, pues las que ha traido Ricaredo han ablandado el duro corazon de la reina" (Now one learns the truth of the common saying that gifts can move mountains since those brought by Ricaredo have softened the queen's hard heart. 1:249). A hard-hearted queen whose favor can be bought, who punishes her murderous lady-in-waiting with only a fine and who dismisses from her presence, although with rich gifts and considerable cash, a woman who has lost her beauty. Not a flattering portrait of El izabeth.

And, as Cervantes reveals in connection with Isabela and her counterpart Leonisa of El amante liberal, codicia is both material and sexual. Until I encountered the name of Jean-Joseph Goux in Johnson's book I had wondered why no economist had perceived that at root all economics is sexual, libidinal. In his commodification of both the female and the male, particularly in the Turkish context Cervantes shows that he is a proto-economist of desire. As Johnson puts it: "One might say either that Cervantes makes explicit and conscious the connection between libido and marker value, or, with a nod to the modern economists, that the connection that was conscious and visible to Cervantes and his contemporaries had gone underground and needed to be brought into consciousness by Goux's reading of marginalist theory" (145). One of Cervantes' most audacious maneuvers is to expose the libido value of the male, along with that of the female. At the beginning and the end of El amante liberal there appears the lindo Cornelia, as artfully perfumed, coiffed, bejeweled, and clothed as is Leonisa when the Jewish merchant puts her on the Nicosian market. When Ricaredo presents himself armed and victorious to Elizabeth, his beauty is such that Cervantes likens him to Venus cross-dressed as Mars. And in Quijote II Ana Felix dresses her lover Don Gaspar Gregorio as a female to keep him from the Turks who far more greatly prize a beautiful boy than any lovely woman, as she maintains.

What mainly harms Cervantes and the Material World is its rigid Marxism, especially in terms of a doctrine of history which claims ontological status for an extremely narrow segment of the total span and then undertakes to make that construct of the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century valid for the entire record. But the ciencia of history, like that of sociology or of literary criticism, is itself historical, as are sociology and literary criticism. These, like works of art themselves, seem to require some sort of dialectic in order to come fully into being. In the case of the discipline that we call history, the second term to which it needs to oppose itself as the first in a binary is fiction, but not fiction as the occasional and sporadic manifestation of inventiveness, however rich, in prose. Rather, in order for history to emerge, a ciencia of fiction should exist, a ciencia involving many writers and readers.

Such a situation does not come about until the age of Fielding and, a generation later, Walter Scott: It is no accident, then, that Gibbon writes the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire during this period, that of the French Revolution. The point is that, in order for both of them to flourish, history wants a dialogue with prose fiction and prose fiction a dialogue with history.

Of course, in Cervantes' lifetime, neither history nor the novel operated like the industries that they first came to be in the eighteenth century. For this lack Cervantes compensates with the extensiveness of Quijote. It engages a vast array of writings of all kinds but, most notably, its chivalric predecessors and addresses, internally and externally, a very broad public of readers and listeners. Thus, explicitly and implicitly, Quijote is a universal library but, beyond Jorge Luis Borges, a universal readership and listenership as well. The cosmic claims of Don Quijote have been little noted but they are dizzying. Still, the fact remains that the totality within the book is not matched by a totality outside it, despite its aspirations to be all-inclusive: "Tout le monde existe pour aboutir un livre." And so Cervantes is once again a prophet of the dialectic between "truth" embodied in the ciencia of history and "untruth" embodied in the art of prose fiction, Quijote as "historia verdadera" and "verdadera h istoria." The wonder is that Carroll Johnson, a much published and veteran scholar of Cervantes, does nor even begin to question his own notion of "real" history. Cervantes and the Material World departs from a peculiar dialectical materialism to shape an interpretative monism that would sever the two senses of historia from each other and so put an end to the "maddening ambiguity" of Cervantes, thus denying him the matrix of his greatness.

Charles D. Presberg calls this matrix paradoxy in his Adventures in Paradox, a book that might distress Carroll Johnson. Presberg conceives of "...Don Quijote [as] a species of literary discourse, that is about, for, and against literary discourse, including its own. Cervantes' fiction represents a self-conscious text that is made from other texts, and a text that is about the reading and writing of texts. Indeed, one of the fiction's chief traits is that it dramatizes a systematic yet open method of paradoxy that simultaneously affirms, denies, and enlarges the categories by which we judge and speak about the mysteries of both art and nature. Further, in its development of both character and action, the fiction enlists a specifically narrative method that relates nothing less than the paradoxicality of both literature and life, and that prevents its readers from equating either 'knowledge' or 'truth' about those matters with a rationalist quest for closure or formulaic certainty" (3).

Here, we are very far indeed from Johnson's materialism and his quest, especially when one reads that "One unsettling consequence of identifying the coincidence between life and art (and identifying all human discourse as insubstantial artifice, is that we come to perceive much of 'life' [specifically, knowledge, history, and therefore historiography] as an infinite series of imitations imitating imitations... in historical discourse and, indeed, in 'histories,' reportedly factual accounts may derive from what someone said about what someone said about what someone said, and infinitum" (163). Thus Presberg and Johnson could not be farther apart, Presberg belonging to the rhetorical tradition of Cervantine interpretation that Johnson totally rejects.

Adventures in Paradox first places Don Quijote in the perspective of Plato, Nicholas of Cusa, and Erasmus with succinct investigations of the Parmenides, of De docta ignorantia, and of The Praise of Folly and then proceeds to make a major contribution to Renaissance studies by pursuing manifestations of its master trope in La Celestina, Antonio de Guevara's Menosprecio de corte, and Pedro de Mejia's Silva de varia leccion along with his Coloquios. Important studies of Renaissance literature have a marked and distressing tendency to omit Spain, as does Thomas Greene, with unsatisfactory apology, in The Light in Troy (1982), or Rosalie Colie, author of Presberg's critical Urtext, the Paradoxia Epidemica of 1966.

In the 71 pages of his first two chapters Presberg skillfully and learnedly puts Spain into the paradox picture, learnedly but lightly, as when he comments that "For Mexia, it seems that the unexamined Christian life is the only one worth living" (67). Moreover, he offers in these pages the only cogent critical account of Menosprecio that I have seen, so that "Paradoxy in the Spanish Renaissance" is far from being that arid academic enterprise one sometimes finds in dissertations, of which Adventures was one at Harvard in an earlier avatar, but one which even in its first redaction must have been the learned, sophisticated, confident, and well-conceived undertaking that Adventures unquestionably is. It is even unusually well and fluently written, free of needless jargon except for some fancy terms such as "paralipsis," and untainted by academese except for the recourse to the "... it is worth noting..." (224) and the "It is pertinent to recall..." (196) kind of structural pleonasm that some very seasoned scho lars still indulge in.

I've noticed only one error of fact, quite minor, in the book. This is Presberg's etymology for hidalgo, as from "hijo d' algo, 'son of someone [i.e., someone important] ..." (113). But in medieval Spanish, according to Menendez Pidal, algo means "cosa de valor" ... "de gran valor" and fijo dalgo "hombre de bien," or a worthy, a man of standing and substance. In the brief discussion of Sancho's description of Quijote as a "vencedor de si mismo," Presberg attributes the phrase to Sancho's ingestion of the language of sermons and points to a tract by Melchor Cano as a possible source. However, "vencerse a si mismo" is an aspect of heroic virtue that was well implanted into the popular mind, as its occurrence in Act III of La vida es sueno and Lope's play La mas alta victoria suggests. Thus when Quijote returns with Sancho to their village after being defeated by the "brazos ajenos" of Sanson Carrasco, he returns, as Sancho consolingly would have it, still in full possession of that control over his passions, ab ove all sexual, that characterizes Scipio or the refashioned Segismundo, or, ironically, the man who refused the embraces of Maritornes and Altisidora. So it's hard for me to perceive self-defeat in this context, although in a larger sense Quijote's enterprise is obviously doomed. Again, a minor difficulty.

The 86 pages of "This is not a prologue" constitute the core of Adventures. It begins with a typology of paradoxy of five classifications, the ontological, the cosmological, the psychological, the axiological, and the logical. Then Presberg moves in on the Prologue to Part I with the notion that "Cervantes' Don Quijote represents a synthesis and culmination of paradoxical rhetoric in Spain's Renaissance ..." that is "... nowhere more evident ... than in the Prologue to Part I (1605), where Cervantes examines the interplay and overlap between historical and poetic discourse" (81). The 80 pages that succeed this declaration offer bravura scrutiny of almost every conceivable aspect of the just under seven pages of the 1605 Prologue in my (Allen) edition of Don Quijote. It is exhaustive and exhausting, while impeccably written and unfailingly intelligent and perceptive. I feel unequal to giving a coherent account of the whole but will comment on a topic or two. The question of the nature of Cervantes' relation to Don Quijote as protagonist and Don Quijote as a book is one that Presberg takes up first under the rubric "The Naturalness of Art and the Artifice of 'Nature"' (103) and then under "Fathers, Stepfathers, and Sons" (112). The sense of the discussion seems to be that, metaphorically, Cervantes functions as the father of the fiction which features Don Quijote, father, then, of the narrative, but acts as stepfather to its insane protagonist. This formulation blends the "natural," the procreative, conflictively with the artistic, the artificial, the creative, for one does not deal with a stepson of as one deals with a son.

However, before Cervantes, it is the poets who have most compellingly dealt with the connection between artist and work, rather than Erasmus. Shakespeare, in the first seventeen sonnets, urges his beautiful young male friend to marry and have lawful issue. This is the goal of the poet's "barren rhyme." So we have here a paradoxical contract between fertile nature and sterile art. Nonetheless, it is this same rhyme that confers immortality upon its subject: "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this and gives life to thee." At the same time, the dedication of the sonnets to Mr. W.H. by T.T. (possibly Thomas Thorpe) as their "onlie. begetter" wonderfully complicates the authorial situation. One would think that Shakespeare would claim sole progenitorship, as Lope parthenogenetically does in the first sonnet of his Rimas humanas:

Versos de amor, conceptos esparcidos,
engendrados del alma en mis cuidados;
partos de mis sentidos abrasados,
con mas dolor que libertad nacidos (Blecua ed.)

(Love poems, scattered conceptions / begotten by my soul upon my
sorrows, / offspring of ardent sensation / born less to liberty than to
grief.)

Here, as with Cervantes, one notices the absence of the female. The poet's own suffering performs that function. His persona, moreover, gives powerful birth to conceptos that scatter, presumably upon utterance and publication. The conceptos, the seed, behave like illegitimate children, abandoned, "exp6sitos al mundo," and wander like waifs over the earth, unrecognizable save to their parent. An idea of bastardy pervades this seminal poem, where the poet dedares "Je seme tout vent" and where ejaculation and creativity combine in a parthenogenesis that mimics biology but which issues out into monsters, the minotaur ("laberinto"), the hydra ("aquel aspid hermoso"). Even so, these offspring, Shakespeare's sonnets, Lope's secular Rimas, do have the simulacrum of a sole parent by whom, bastards though they may seem to be, they are authorially recognized as the first step in the legal process of legitimization.

In early prose fiction, on the other hand, the act of the 'male parent's engenderment of the "child" becomes occluded. At the French court in the time of the duke de Saint-Simon, royal marriages were publicly consummated, the pair put to bed together, the bed curtains drawn and, after a decent (or indecent) interval, the "lust-stained sheets" held up for those in attendance to register. There is something of this procedure in Lope's poem, a certain jactancia. But Lazaro's conception occurs in the base circumstance of his parents' near invisible class, of their thefts of grain out in the deep river race by night, Lazaro himself probably born on one such occasion of darkness and stealth. And only DNA testing could I think, determine Guzman's true paternity.

No doubt, however, attaches to Don Quijote's descent among the Quijanos "en linea recta de var6n en var6n" (again the customary total absence of the female vessel). So Alonso Quijano is unquestionably legitimate. But Don Quijote, as both personaje and historia, to use Presberg's terminology, is simultaneously avowed and disavowed by the fabricator of them both, Cervantes. A legitimacy that is authoritatively questionable is hardly any legitimacy at all. Furthermore, that great father of the genres upon whom the Renaissance conferred supreme authority is silent, whether by truncation or intent, on the subject of the novel. Yet because of Cervantes' obsession with him, Aristotle is the missing, the absent, father of Don Quijote de la Mancha, not the least of the madnesses of which is the Phaeton-like desire to ascend as script to the level of the patrician and patristic. Nonetheless, the then bastard, in flesh or concept, by legal definition was a filius nullius, the son of nobody, the very opposite of the patr ician and the patristic. Well before Don Quijote, but supremely so in it, bastardy, with a potent concomitant desire to achieve legitimacy and legitimization, haunts the genre of the novel; and in a Wardropperian dramatization of this metaphoric later expressions literally embody such terribly powerful yearnings in their plots. Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Sir Walter Scott's St. Ronan's Well, come at once to mind. With Charles Dickens, the journey of the exposito to an anagnorisis that resembles royal mystical consummation in seventeenth-century France, prose fiction reformulated in the pattern of Menander's Eunuch, is practically the primeval model for a progress from waif to patrician. I missed Presberg's awareness of such a factor in his remarkable examination of fathers, sons, and stepfathers in Prologue to Part I of Don Quijote.

The quality of Presberg's analysis does not falter in the chapters that follow "This is Not a Prologue." His address to the figure of Don Diego de Miranda, a personage whom, over the years, I have found really quite unfathomable, seems to me to be the most useful approach that I know. Presberg's idea here is that the two men are reflections of and on each other, a situation suggested by, among many other things, the elements of seeing and visibility in Don Diego's surname. Their exposure to each other is anticipated in Part I with the appearance of Vivaldo on the way to Grisostomo's burial. Don Diego and Don Quijote both aspire to exemplarity and are in a measure Doppelganger of each other, especially in their failure to achieve plenary status as models, obvious with Quijote whom madness both motivates and flaws, subtler with Diego. The coincidentia, the juxtaposition, of these two men, curiously consonant with Stendhal's apocryphal definition of the novel, in Le Rouge et le noir, as a "miroir qu'on promene l e long des sentiers de la vie," demonstrates Cervantes' novelistic metonymies whereby "toda comparacion es invidiosa," because, unlike the intended effect of metaphor in poetry, through which each of the things compared gains in force, in Cervantine comparison each element loses force.

Of course, as between Miranda and Quijote, at the outset there appears to be an inequality since Quijote's madness is manifest while Miranda's wonderful aspect only slowly deteriorates. At the same time, Don Quijote rather restores the balance by displaying admirable lucidity from time to time. Despite the exemplarity evinced by all three men, for we must add Don Lorenzo, Diego's poet (or, for me, poetaster) son, all three are ruled by madness, the madness of a quest called imitatio, in which the imitator strives to equal a perfect model, poetic in its perfection, but, in a metonymic declension, necessarily fails to do so. This failure of absolute imitation is parody, is prose fiction, is the novel Don Quijote.

Presberg's sense of Quijote in not, I think, novel. But it is extraordinarily cogent and beautifully worked out:

...every definitive "version" of historical and poetic truth in Don Quijote seems to contain a limiting bias that prevents its revealing more than a fragment of the "whole story." Indeed, pretensions to convey in anything akin to a "whole story" become the chief objects of the author's parody. Through its dialogic interplay of limited, varied perspectives, Don Quijote gives an unfolding, narrative intelligibility to the complexities, paradoxes, and antinomies involved in the fully discursive process of both discovering and adding to the meaning, purpose, or "truth" of knowledge and history. For in light of a core paradox concerning the overlap between art and nature... one perceives related paradoxes concerning the mutual dependence of what received opinion holds to be contrary categories of literature and life, history and poetry, or historical and poetic truth. Cervantes bodies forth the latent paradox in Aristotle's definition of art as an imitation of nature in order to create an intricate parody of how h uman beings, in a manner analogous to that of narrators and other characters within the heterocosm, transform and make sense of their world. The narrative dramatizes how, through the "art" of their discourse, of their fictive categories of thought and expression, human beings order and frame their experience, investing it and themselves with intelligibility, meaning, purpose, or "truth." (191)

Thus does Adventures in Paradox take the rhetorical road to Jacques Derrida. And it is indispensable to rake this road with Presberg in "Paradoxy and the Spanish Renaissance" in order to appreciate his subsequent achievement because the rhetorical situates his study rather in literature than in philosophy and so avoids Derrida's quarrel with Plato. Not that Cervantes doesn't take Plato on. Still, I cannot extinguish the irredentist conviction that Cervantes is better and richer than the text of Derrida, that in so exploiting paradox he overcomes paradox. But I also fear that this may be ontological nostalgia, "desir et mal de mes vertebres," the ghost that neither Cervantes nor Derrida can altogether exorcise.

Georgiana Dopico Black's Perfect Wives, Other Women takes us as far critically from the aesthetic coherence assumed by many New Critics to characterize the poem, the play, and even the novel, to a sense of texts as radically conflictive in the same way that the culture that brought these texts forth was beset by doubt and anxiety especially where women are concerned. Of course her first text, Luis de Leon's Perfecta casada, is not a work of literature after the fashion of Calderon's El medico de su honra or Sor Juana's Los empenos de una casa. It is a treatise, like Vives' De institutione foeminae christianae, but a treatise by a splendid poet, like Milton's tracts on divorce, although it strikes me as gratuitous for Black to observe that Fray Luis is "perhaps the greatest lyric poet of Spanish literature" (51). Black's line of thought with respect to La perfecta casada seems to me to be fairly simple. Reflecting Spanish society of the Golden Age, with its Inquisition and the concomitant oppression of woman, Jews, and Moriscos, it contradictorily and incoherently voices great anxiety over how to control women. In this fear and confusion, it reveals the flaws and inconsistencies in Spanish patriarchy and so weakens the code: ". . . the secondary status of women.., is called into question. I do not wish to suggest by this that La perfecta casada is a nascent or even crypto -- feminist text that radically departs from the proscriptive [sic] misogyny of conduct literature for wives. Rather, in its seductive excesses and contradictions, the text offers a (most likely unconscious) resistance to the more repressive norms that it prescribes for perfect wives" (108).

Black transposes this notion over onto Calderon by means of analogy, Luis' code for the wife inscribed as honor on the body of Mencia, ciphered and deciphered (wrongly) by her grand inquisitor of a husband, Don Gutierre Solis. While this body is yet alive, the code ordains but does not effect its containment within patriarchal enclosure (Mencia ventures out into the garden), nor is it successfully surrounded by the system in death. Black's originality here is to see honor as a semiotic system that can be fatally misread.

Gender plays a considerable part in Black's reading of Los empenos de una casa, for it features a cross-dressed gracioso, Castano, who is sufficiently passable to cause confusion and chagrin in the susceptible male. Males attired as females are exceedingly rare in the comedia. I know of only two examples in Calderon, one in the Comedia palaciega Las manos blancas no ofenden and the other in the mythological El monstruo de los jardines, in which Achilles, in accordance with tradition, disguised as a female, hides among the women of the court of king Lycomedes so as not to have to join his fellow Greeks in their assault on Troy. In the customary account there is no gender trouble, for Achilles, despite his clothing, responds with alacrity to the sight of a sword, is recognized, and goes off to his hero's death in combat. Calderon elaborates on the basic transvestism by having Achilles resume his male persona at night, when alone with Deidamia, so that he can describe himself as a "Monstruo, pues, de dos especie s / Tu dama de dia y de noche / tu galan..." (A hybrid monster of two sorts: / by day your lady-in-waiting and by night / the gallant, courting you. Valbuena, 1:2010), a considerable amplification.

However, in the class-conscious theater of the Golden Age, it is one thing for a male servant to assume female attire and quite another for his master to do so. Castano's cross-dressing is notably less transcendent than is Achilles'. But it fits nicely into the trouble-making function that many graciosos carry out. These troubles and confusions, so characteristic of the lighter sort of the full-length Golden-Age player totally mastered by Calderon in the twenties and thirties of the seventeenth century, are what Black semiotically baptizes as illegibility. But they exist, for her, not to be deciphered but to provide a hiding place for those who like Sor Juana transgress the norms of gender:

Illegibility . . . is not so much a source of epistemological anxiety, then, as it is a kind of refuge, analogous in many respects with the refuge [Sor Juana] sought ... in the convent. She makes her imperfect wife's body subject, no longer object of misreading, strategically appropriating somatic illegibility in order to empty it of its content and charge it otherwise. Gender illegibility in particular is mobilized throughout Sor Juana's text as a mode of resistance, a subtle but striking treta de debil . . . that empowers a body-text that resists, at all costs, being read as a perfecta casada. (201)

One feels that this notion, not frightfully recondite, could be stated a great deal more simply and clearly. Still despite its terminological hybris ("epistemological anxiety") Perfect Wives is a venturesome study that forms a triad of a 1583 tract, a tragedy of the late 1620s and a comedy first performed in 1683 in Mexico. We have here a span of a hundred years and two continents, with only three works as evidence of the author's thesis that their authors' desire to make sense of the situation of the marriageable female in patriarchal Spain and Spanish America produces notably anxious and conflicted texts that defeat their own enterprise of woman's containment. The reading is attractive. One would like to think that Golden-Age norms were less oppressive than they appear to have been. But the evidentiary base is questionable because it rests on three quite distinct texts, widely separated in time and, in the case of Sor Juana's comedy, space. Black would strengthen the significance of the Luisian treatise and Calderon honor play by claiming that manuals of conduct and wife-murder plays were written in great numbers: "the sheer number of conduct manuals and adultery-honor plays written in the period is staggering . . ." (17). And indeed she recites a very long list of such works. However, many of these appear to be anti-Protestant tracts, or appraisals of celibacy that prize it more highly than marriage. And how many Spaniards can have read Luther's sermon on marriage in German?

When it comes to plays in which the husband murders the wife he suspects of adultery, Black's numbers are even less convincing. Of Lope's nearly 600 surviving comedias she lists thirteen, plus one attributable, works. Two plays by Tirso are included, as are twelve other dramas by various authors. With respect to Calderon, Black of course begins with the great trilogy, to which she adds four others, omitting, however, Las tres justicias en una, for a total of seven out of 120 comedias. In the Golden Age, perhaps as many as ten thousand full-length plays were composed. Cruickshank estimated that around ten thousand plays were composed. How many of these survive I do not know with any exactitude but thousands still exist. I am not staggered by some (at the most) 36 plays from among this multitude, nor can so relatively small a number be considered "vast."

Moreover, when it comes to Calderon, to see the dramas de honor in perspective, one needs to keep in mind the more than one hundred works that do not feature the murder of a wife. In many of these, especially in the wonderful comedic productions of the twenties and thirties, nonetheless, the death of a willingly or unwillingly transgressive daughter or sister at the hand of her father or brother is a very real possibility. Yet even as Calder6n's seriousness as a comedic dramatist derives from his confrontation with the sentence of death that has been irrevocably pronounced, his vocation as a Christian artist impels him to devise stratagems to impede and delay and prevent, for the ludic interval, the inevitable execution of the law. Calder6n wonderfully abounds in the tragic vision, but nearly all of his plays resist with every device of comedic art its immediate fulfillment.

In a few rare instances, however, his dramatic genius fails to provide the checks that thwart tragedy. There he becomes complicit with a terribly cruel inevitability. These instances constitute the dramas de honor, really only four plays. But they, whether four or seven, represent the failure of the comedic system, not the system itself. Calderon understood the system perfectly. He knew that the subjection of women was a major factor in his art because the female under patriarchy exemplifies more dearly than in the case of the male the human being struggling with unappealable edicts. In Afectos de odio y amor, Queen Christina dictates to her female secretary the revocation of every statute that denies equality to women, throwing open to them the schools, the professions, and the military. But as Christina's hatred of the lover and the killer of her father grows into love, even this queen falls back into subjection, but not without allowing the spectator a breathtaking glimpse into the annulment of Calder6nian dramatic art, into the disappearances of his "material," of which the major premise is the subjection of the female, and the male. His wife-murder plays are the exception, not the rule. To take them, or one of them, as representative of the whole body of his work is like taking Othello to be the most characteristic play of Shakespeare.

A besetting anxiety in La perfecta casada is Fray's Luis' yearning or full congruity in Christian virtue and wifely conduct between seeming and being, parecer y ser. Black significantly connects Luis' discursive concern with the honor code as it operates in drama, citing a key sentence fragment, "Porque no es honesta la que no lo es y parece" (78), her emphasis, I assume. This she translates as "Because a woman is not truly good unless she is good and appears to be so." But, while true to Fray Luis' intent, the translation doesn't reflect the ellipsis in his logic. The passage begins with a warning to chaste wives not to let themselves fall into slatternly ways because of the security they feel owing to their purely sexual virtue. Then the poet observes that "an unchaste woman who appears to be chaste is [still] unchaste." From there he proceeds to an all-important corollary that the chaste woman who gives the impression of being unchaste is well on her way to being an unfaithful wife. This is where Luis intr oduces the comparison of a wife careless of appearances to a pilgrim en route to Santiago who, even though he may not arrive at that shrine, is a pilgrim with his distinct garb nonetheless. Similarly, according to Fray Luis, a wife unmindful of the proprieties assumes the goals and the distinctive attire of a wanton, of a prostitute. He clinches the connection by means of a pun, in which the "romero," pilgrim, becomes a "ramera," whore.

In the pages that follow her translation and analysis of this arresting trope, Black engages in an often mind-numbing abstract dissertation on it and associated ideas. But the immediate social and literary context is lacking. The topic is the medieval and Renaissance "querelle des femmes," one often conducted in sic et non fashion, with a list of laudable women in competition with a list of despicable females. So Boccaccio in De mulieribus claris, a document in praise of classical and postclassical models (but only one Christian example) that is misogynist in tone. Likewise, Fray Luis praises the ideal wife and shows how far the usual spouse falls short of her perfection. For the romero/ramera trope, and in general, one intertext is the Arcipreste de Talavera's Corbacho, the title itself reflective of Boccaccio, with its wonderful fulminations against women who disturb the peace when they pursue their runaway chickens through the neighborhood, and against women who go on pilgrimages. For the romeria was one l icit way for a married woman to get away from children, husband, and house and have a little fun, as Chaucer makes clear. The pilgrimages as sexual freedom and adventure for the married female persist on into Garcia Lorca's Yerma. So Fray Luis as guardian of feminine virtue is right to be worried.

But the question not put by Black is as to whether issues such as hypocrisy and the incongruence between seeming and being are unstable as intellectual and moral concerns or as substantial elements of the text. With El medico de su honra we have, I think, no problem. The text is the discussion. Calderon may be a philosophic dramatist, which I deeply doubt, but he pursues his investigations in fictions and verse. With Fray Luis of La perfecta casada the discussion is the text, where he examines very palpably, in the context of the wife's conjugal behavior, the ideal and the real congruence between being and seeming. The issue is paramount, and it causes great uncertainty. So for me the question is as to whether the anxiety over the bearing of essence on contingency is more intellectual, less of the text, in Fray Luis. I am indined to say that it is, that the indeterminacy of La perfecta casada is more inherent in idea. Indeterminacy is more of the text.

Of considerable difficulty in reading and understanding Perfect Wives is its terminology, basically from semiotics, I would surmise, but with borrowings from philosophy, gender studies, cultural studies, etc. At times, Black's terminological exuberance assumes almost ludicrous proportions as when she observes that "... what is extraordinary in the case of El medico de su honra is the extent to which the dagger-tongue-phallus is detachable from the body to which it is 'naturally' assigned. It is almost as if the dagger's migration from hand to hand (and from reader to reader) dramatized the reassignability of the phallus as a kind of free-floating signifier that resists refraction" (151) or that "... La Celestina, in which Celestina's work as reparadora de virgos ... casts significant doubts on hymeneal legibility, calling into question any prospect of interpretive stability..." (22).

I also find myself wondering if the "inquisitorial hermeneutics" of Perfect Wives is a viable method. It is almost as if the leyenda negra were critically reborn here to represent a Spain more benighted, tyrannous, and repressive than its European neighbors. It is impossible to defend the Inquisition. But, as Henry Kamen demonstrates in La inquisicion espanola, its ways were, alas, those of European "jurisprudence" in general. And with the Reformation and the de facto institution of cuius regio eius religio, proscribed non-establishment minorities, and in several cases majorities, in England and the Netherlands, came to be persecuted, repressed, and severely scrutinized. Is the situation of English Catholics under Elizabeth, or Protestants under Mary, radically different from that of the conversos of Habsburg Spain? Should there not be a European inquisitorial hermeneutics?

And, finally, I wonder about the implied position of critic with respect to work in Perfect Wives. Traditionally, in literary criticism, the critic has assumed a posture of inferiority to the text. Black's address is ironic, one of superiority to the work as she detects its flaws, lapses, and inconsistencies. This attitude is, I conjecture, derived from studies of popular culture, such as film, especially a feminist view of the phenomenon, in which the author finds fault with it, no doubt rightly. But the change in perspective here is revolutionary. It is more than justified to find fault with, let us say, the sexism of American cinema a generation or two ago, because investigation of the lesser part assigned to women can reveal a situation not manifest to the public and could lead to improvement. But it is impossible now to improve the culture that allowed Fray Luis and Calder6n and Sor Juana to produce their texts, in which it survives obliquely, flawed no doubt but also immutable. And whose are these flaws ? Are they those of culture or of the author or of the text? Practitioners of cultural studies delight in the idea of the intersection, that fabled place where art and the human sciences cosmically interconnect. Yet this sort of critical no-place can be an act of critical bad faith because it is undiscriminating. Where are we, in history, sociology, semiology, biography, or literary criticism? To say "all of these" is to offer no answer. Perception requires position from which to devise a construct. The indeterminacy of that position in cultural studies, and in this cultural study, poses major, one might say geographical, problems.

The sense that Spain was and is anomalous, unique, much nourished by the genius of Americo Castro, has discouraged studies comparing its literature with those of other principal European nations, despite, for example, the dazzling display of insight and erudition in Ernst Robert Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953), which amply includes Spain, as so many important critical investigations such as Thomas Greene's The Light in Troy, apologetically and unapologetically, do not. Thus Walter Cohen's introductory essay to Echoes and Inscriptions, one of the sixteen that go to make up this volume, and ironically titled "The Uniqueness of Spain," is a welcome release from the intellectual constraints of the assumption that Spain was and is extraordinary with respect to European culture in general. One need not accept altogether Cohen's account of the course of European novelistic fiction or that of the diverse nature of European culture to realize that it is much more rewarding to understand S pain in the European context than it is to see it as an entity apart. Equally productive is the notion of comparative literature that prevails in Echoes and Inscriptions. Its contributors have not had to adhere to the narrow rule of "influence." Rather, they have tried to discover what increase of comprehension can result from the comparison of a text from an environment other than the Spanish with and to a Spanish text. I believe that one can say that in every instance represented here the effort has been worthwhile.

Thus Margaret Greer offers a very useful essay on the device of the frame tale in the novellas of Maria de Zayas with her "Who's Telling This Story, Anyhow?" It studies this phenomenon in art, in film, in Hispanic theater, in Boccaccio, Lope de Vega, and many others. Her main emphasis appears to be on the educative and transforming function of the frame. Her example from the film The Princess Bride provides a wise grandfather] who is able to convince his ill grandson not only that it is a pleasure to be read to but also that lifelong monogamous heterosexual union is more than acceptable. That dictum is the foil for what Greer understands as Zayas' contrarian message, that marriage is a delusion from which certain [surely not all] women of standing ought to take refuge in the convent where, Greer maintains there is "No kissing..." This is a quite rich article which ably supports Greer's compelling thesis that Zayas used the frame polemically, against matrimony.

In "Lasting Laugher...," Amy Williamsen looks at the function of humor in the novelas of Zayas by adding to Zayas' perspective that of twentiethcentury Mexican feminist Rosario Castellansos. I would call the instances of the risible in the writings of both women satire, at which, equally with men, women excel, and as a reading of any one of the novels of Jane Austen beautifully demonstrates. But whether satire is a weapon that the female deploys more dexterously than the male, I doubt. Williamsen cites a very tricky situation in "El prevenido enganfiado," in which a male friend takes the wife's place in the conjugal bed so that she may dally with her lover. The situation here is highly reminiscent of the anecdote interpolated into the Guzman de Alfarache in which Don Rodrigo de Montalvo takes a countess' place in bed so that she may make love with his friend Don Luis (Rico edition, 526-30). These scrapes that the lovers of married women find themselves in go back to Bandello and Boccaccio. But Zayas and Caste llanos exploit them with a peculiar gusto, so that we do see the male weapon sharpened and made incisive against the male in the hands of these strong and skilled female writers.

In artistic and literary studies the term baroque is as problematical as it is indispensable. Bravely, Salvador Oropesa constructs his poet in this sense in "Xavier Villaurrutia as a Neo-Baroque writer." The effort to see this twentieth-century Mexican poet as a successor to Gongora is laudable. But I was not able to recognize in the sonnet titled "Mar" anything like the accommodation to strangeness and queerness allegedly offered by Don Luis, not even the syntactical and imagistic reminiscences that the form invites and which one does find, for example, in Machado sonnets. Urrutia may occupy a baroque or neo-baroque space but the characteristic style is lacking.

Since literary criticism is a form of journalism and so perishable and ephemeral, it is no surprise that its practitioners are forgetful of the work of their predecessors. About forty years ago a swarm of humanist scholars from many disciplines attempted to arrive at consensus as to the significance of the term baroque to Hispanic and European culture. In vain. Wardropper states the outcome precisely; "Se han hecho grandes esfuerzos par definir el barroco...Pero hasta hace poco tiempo la relacion entre ideologfa y estilo ha permanecido borrosa" (Great efforts have been made to define the baroque. But until recently the connection between ideology and style has remained murky) (Francisco Rico, Historiay critica de la literatura espanola. 3:6). Sidney Donnell, in a long article on Luis Bufiuel's The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, does not use the idea of the baroque with exactitude but does offer an often penetrating account of the Bufiuel film. Bunuel's relation to the picaresque is also a problem her e. It is nearly impossible to fit the date of the Lazarillo (1554) into the time frame of the baroque, nor can I accept the notion that Don Quijote is "an upper-class picaro" (93). Donnell's excellent analysis of Bufiuel really does not profit from the seventeenth-century association.

Antoine Fajardo makes, in "Abjection's Tapestry," a strong case in support of a discerning reading of Don Quijote in the epistle-cum-ode "La Chambre du debausche" by Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant, a seventeenth-century French free-thinking and free-living, or libertin, poet who introduces into his verse a series of scenes from the Cervantes novel, scenes projected onto the walls of the poet's room much as those wonderful visions are projected onto a blank wall in the "Retablo de las maravillas." Antoine Fajardo convinces one that Saint-Amant understands Don Quijote exceptionally well, whereas James Parr's "Comparative Anatomy" largely measures the gulf that separates Don Quijote from Furetiere's Roman bourgeois of 1660, despite some very suggestive parallels or Parralels. "Comparative Anatomy" is an amusing and urbane article, one that is a pleasure to read. Nor is the comparison of the greater Cervantes to the lesser Furetiere at all invidious. It is instructive.

Gender is basic to the structure, positioning, and process of Garcilaso's lyric, in which the male self, feminized and softened by suffering, attempts to possess a female object hardened into total obduracy by pursuit itself. This impossible quest produces partial transgendering of male subject into female, and of female object into male. But mystical poetry is where transgendering enjoys the fullest play, according to Anne Cruz in "Transgendering the Mystical Voice," especially in the female poet. Cruz, arguing with and against Jacques Lacan, would convince us that San Juan, but, even more Santa Teresa, Luisa de Carvajal, and the Italian Angela de Foligno appropriate the very godhead or, better, the son, in a rapture that transcends the language that would communicate this experience, the very language outside of which any speaker who identifies as a woman cannot exist. The immense perplexities of gender in mystical discourse can, I think, very profitably and even lucidly be probed without the opacities of J acques Lacan, but Cruz does make these serviceable and almost intelligible in her highly accomplished essay.

A very useful and straightforward account of that peculiar eighteenth-century English phenomenon, female versions of Don Quijote, is propounded by Amy Paul in "Feminine Transformations of the Quijote," in which she presents Charolett Lennox's romance/novel The Female Quijote as the work most akin to Cervantes, its successors in the play Polly Honeycomb by George Colman, in Maria Edgeworth's novella "Angelina," in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, in Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism, and in Eaton Stannard Barret's The Heroine (these last two American works of the early nineteenth-century) as less in the spirit of their presumed model. I don't quite see how Northanger Abbey belongs in this genealogy, for Catherine Morland's delusion that she is a heroine derives pretty directly from Ann Radcliffe and the poets. She has not read Cervantes, although she does experience a desengano not unlike that undergone a generation later by Scott's Edward Waverley, who indeed had devoured Don Quijote. Even so, Paul is most hel pful with her various fictions, especially as they deal with the problem of the social restrictions on female action and power. These ladies are not Doroteas.

Thomas Finn, in "Comedia Contributions to a Moliere Masterpiece," juxtaposes Le Bourgeois gentilhomme and Tirso de Molina's Don Gil de las calzas verdes, an unlikely pairing that he makes plausible by investigating the issue of identity as a struggle between what society imposes and what the individual disposes. His conclusion, that M. Jourdain achieves an impasse between his sense of himself as a nobleman and society's insistence that he is and will remain a bourgeois, a persistence that contracts with the relinquishment of persona and role as individual invention by the time the comedia comes to an end, is fresh and original.

His title both amusing and precise, William R. Blue does not compare but rather views both Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors and Calderon's La dama duende in the light of Freud's brief essay, "Das Unheimliche," in "The Unheimlich Maneuver," a characteristically thoughtful essay that deftly deflates received ideas about Shakespeare and Calderon both while placing the two plays in the strange but yet recognizable terrain of the uncanny, which bears a considerable resemblance to the Brechtian Verfremdungseffekte. Blue ably delineates both the stylized farcical aspects and the fearful depths of his Freudian topography and so enriches one's understanding of each play.

I think that Diana Wilson's main point in her extensive "Rethinking Cervantine Utopias," is to expand Antonio Maravall's frame of reference for his Utopia y contrautopia en el Quijote (1976; Eng. 1991) to include the New World. The whole subject is exceedingly difficult of direct demonstration, for Maravall to begin with, and for Wilson in critical continuity, but there can be no doubt that the Quijote is altogether compenetrated by visions of worlds both better and worse, with inevitable political consequence. Moreover, for an entirely landlocked narrative, Quijote has an extraordinary maritime ambit, openly encompassed through the stories of the Captive and of Ana Felix and her Don Gaspar Gregorio but subject also, one feels, to the great oceanic rhythms and tides that girdle El celoso extremeno. If that tale has its Peru, then why cannot Quijote's Insula Barataria be both metropolitan and colonial, but, more particularly, colonial? Wilson persuades me that it and other recintos in the novel do reflect, for better and for worse, the Spanish experience of the Americas. But proof is even more elusive here than it usually is in literary studies. I missed in this essay Wilson's customary verbal brio and verve. But it is a rich and substantial preface.

A more or less conventional comparison occurs in Perry Gethner's analysis of Marie-Catherine Desjardins' Le Favori with the Tirso play from which it clearly derives, and departs, El amor y el amistad. France in 1665 under Louis XIV, who had ruled absolutely and alone since the death of Cardinal Mazarin, presents a very different court situation from that in Spain in 1621, where until Philip III's death on March 31, 1621, Lerma's successor as privado, the duke of Uceda, wielded great power. The Catholic Monarchs, the Emperor, and Philip II tried not to rely on any magnate for a major part in government. Louis XIV's policy resembles theirs. But instead of keeping the great nobles away from court, he sequestered them under strict surveillance at Versailles. Desjardins' seems very much to accept the current situation, whereas Tirso, an admirer of Philip III, felt that his sovereign had been ill served by Lerma and Uceda. I would guess that the contrast between the two polities and the two plays is a good deal mor e complex than Gethner allows but his treatment of them is most helpful.

Perhaps the greatest problem in homiletics is the question of how to represent that which the rhetor would like to discredit, suppress, or destroy. Attacks on enemies, no matter how carefully crafted, have a distressing tendency to cause them not to decrease but to grow in statue through opposition itself. Thus Tirso's Don Juan, who probably was not yet mayor de edad, attains in El burlador a majority of misdeed in which he reaches outsized proportions, as "el Hector de su tiempo," almost as awesome as those of the Comendador in the shape of a statute. Barbara Simerka's "Eros and Atheism" boldly interrogates Tirso and Thomas Shadwell in his Don-Juan play The Libertine so as to discover in each of them areas for the expression of skepticism and even of atheism. Her case is stronger for Shadwell. His title remits us to Gassendi, a priest but also chief of the French philosophic libertins such as Cyrano de Bergerac and also of course to Hobbes in England. Moliere in France attended lectures of Gassendi, whom Hob bes visited on a continental tour. The "Deux et deux font quatre" of Moliere's Don Juan would have made a fascinating exhibit for this article, which, however, is already too compressed. Even so, Simerka moves with admirable address onto this new ground of the detection of oppositional and subversive ideology in the reception of her two plays, and since the artistry of the playwright helps to create the play's reception, she is not unmindful of the aesthetic, as so many cultural critics nowadays are.

Christopher Weimer's "The Politics of Adaptation," which revealingly examines Isidora Aguirre's reworking of Lope's Fuente Ovejuna under Pinochet in Chile, raises a host of questions about interpretation. It is always a critical misstep to leave the historical and political contexts of a work of art, if these are recuperable, out of the reckoning. But one must also ask what is the historical and political ideology with which one needs to reckon. Fuente Ovejuna has since Stanislavsky attracted the Marxist mind, which, despite a doctrinaire concept of history, is strangely ahistorical. Aguirre appears, likewise, to foster a sense of the pueblo as a timeless entity, an ontology that with the help of her version fibre (y **cuan fibre!) her spectators will discover as the collectivity "de hoy, de ayer, **de siempre!" (239). Such essentialism flies in the face of the major political message of Lope's play, its embrace of monarchy as a dispensation far more liberal than the tyranny of petty local feudal magnates. Po litical theorists regularly distinguish between the tyrannous and the non-tyrannous sovereign, calling, like Montesquieu, absolutist rule despotism. Lope's Catholic Monarchs are not despots. The despot is the Comendador. Thus William Blue is to my mind altogether accurate when he writes that "The dominant political term is monarchy, personal, powerful, active" (243). And not despotic. Aguirre's Fuente Ovejuna would seem to go to great lengths to minimize Fernando and Isabel. That strikes me as being a notable historical blunder which eviscerates Lope's drama. Weimer draws no such conclusions in his excellent article, which ably demonstrates that interpretation is indeed libre.

The awkwardness in dealing with artistic connections between the visual and the verbal is that they are so difficult to demonstrate. One has to rely on conjecture, like that in which Frederick de Armas states, with respect to the stanze of Raphael, that "Cervantes must have visited" them "while serving as secretary for Cardinal Acquaviva in Rome around 1569-1570" (250). Similarly, "to our knowledge Rojas never traveled to Italy" but "he could have known of Giulio's efforts in portraying Spanish imperial rule" (254) in a variety of ways. Thus the evidentiary base here is extremely slight. Even so, de Armas' conjuring of the image of Ganymede in "Numancia as Ganymede" is a fascinating speculation, as well as an ingenious one. The argument for a convergence of the erotic with the political in images of Hapsburg power could have been greatly strengthened by infusion of Battista Franco's Allegory of the Battle of Montemurlo, which is dominated, over the field of battle, by an "exact copy" (Saslow, 167) of Michelan gelo's Rape of Ganymede. In Montemurlo, Cosimo dei Medici is represented as Ganymede and the god who had helped him defeat his enemy as Jupiter, especially in the form of that god's vicar on earth, the emperor Charles V. Accordingly, it is also quite possible to see Numancia as Ganymede with de Armas' learned and judicious help.

UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER

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