Celestina's Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature.

This fine collection of essays by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria demonstrates that early modern and more contemporary texts can and should be read through each other for the mutual enrichment of scholarship in both fields. Gonzalez Echevarria shows this approach is particularly beneficial when exploring the literature and broader culture of the Baroque and Neobaroque. His point of departure is Fernando de Rojas's Celestina (1499), a unique yet fundamental text in Spanish literary history little-known outside Hispanic letters. Although usually considered a late medieval work, Gonzalez Echevarria finds a "Baroque excess" avant la lettre in the Celestina, a stylistic and ideological exorbitance occurring long before similar developments in seventeenth-century Spanish and Spanish-American texts. His non-traditional reading of the Celestina underscores its profound pessimism, its critique of representation, and the subversive discourse of the title character and her world. He finds in these aspects of the Celestina a "modern core" and demonstrates how contemporary Latin American writers have recognized and reconstructed that basic kernel of excess in their Neobaroque texts. In effect, his collection of essays reveals the modernity of the Hispanic literary tradition and explores the Baroque as an expression of the modern.

His effort produces instructive readings of some of the most canonical Spanish writers from the early modern period. Using a somewhat deconstructive probe, Gonzalez Echevarria pulls out Baroque threads in selected texts by Miguel de Cervantes, Pedro Calderon de la Barca, and Lope de Vega Carpio. His study of the baroque excess in these writers' texts complements a contemporary current in Hispanic criticism that undermines an orthodox view of early modern Spanish literature as monolithically Catholic, monarchist, militaristic, and machista. For Gonzalez Echevarria, the baroque incongruities and exorbitance of their texts reveal cultural contradictions and permit a multiplicity of readings not accessible through more canonical literary studies. In the case of Lope's El castigo sin venganza, he finds a turn toward modern aesthetics when the play's imagery of mirrors and reflections problematizes the very nature of representation. Cervantes's explorations of the picaresque in El casamiento enganoso and El coloquio de los perros are shown to make authority itself part and parcel of the work's fictionality. In two essays on La vida es sueno, Gonzalez Echevarria sees Calderon questioning some of the ideological commonplaces of his era and intentionally eluding precision and coherence in logical and poetic discourse. Calderon's sense of intense artificiality as an expression of intense feeling is a technique that will find resonance in Neobaroque poetry. Especially notable, however, is the dramatist's treatment of monstrosity and of the role monsters play in mocking mimesis, in calling attention to the contradictions of identity and marking the rare in all. The role of the monstrous is of major significance in literature about the Americas and, above all, the American identity as a monstrosity of racial mixes, geographic chaos, barbarity, and exorbitance - a topic examined in Gonzalez Echevarria's studies on colonial writers Jose de Espinosa Medrano and Silvestre Balboa y Troya de Quesada.

Gonzalez Echevarria's essays on twentieth-century Spanish American writers explore their baroque treatment of marginality, alienation, resentment and self-acceptance. Writing on Alejo Carpentier, Jose Lezama Lima, and particularly Nicolas Guillen, Gonzalez Echevarria explains how the Baroque incorporates the strangeness of Otherness and reveals the Other's monstrosity to be the Otherness of Being itself. With his study on Severo Sarduy, he brings his analysis of the Baroque and Neobaroque full circle, showing how Sarduy's difficult and radical text Cobra rewrites the Celestina and explaining why the letter has been perhaps the most suppressed classic of Spanish literature and certainly one of its most subversive. The alterations of sexual identity in Cobra and the Celestina ultimately expose gender as a construction and challenge the dominant machismo of their respective societies. Such readings reveal a baroque sense of writing and culture and confirm the need to re-read the old through the new.

Although these essays were originally published separately, their collection constitutes a coherent literary history and demonstrates the abundant pleasures and practical benefits of discovering and rediscovering Hispanic letters.

Catherine Connor UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON