Cervantes in the Middle: Realism and Reality in the Spanish Novel from Lazarillo de Tormes to Niebla. .

Edward H. Friedman. Cervantes in the Middle: Realism and Reality in the Spanish Novel from Lazarillo de Tormes to Niebla.

Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta--Hispanic Monographs, 2006. 328 pp. index. bibl. $24.95. ISBN: 1-58871-091-2.

The 400th anniversary of the publication of Cervantes's Don Quixote in 2005 triggered the publication of a number major contributions on the subject, ranging from volumes on the architecture of the work as reflective of the opposition between feudalism and modernity (David Quint), on legal writing and the law as complicit with the representations of love (Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria), on Cervantes and the birth of the novel (Cesareo Bandera), on the transformation of drawings and prints of the work throughout the centuries (John J. Allen and Patricia Finch), on how the work has acquired a universal audience and has affected writers and painters from Dickens and Flaubert to Picasso (Jean Canavaggio), and so on. What few have articulated is that the anniversary of Don Quixote came on the heels of the 450th anniversary of the publication of the first picaresque, Lazarillo de Tormes. Taking this as his cue, Edward H. Friedman in Cervantes in the Middle has produced a learned and thoughtful book that uses Cervantes's novel to look back to the origins and development of the picaresque in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to look forward to the quixotic realism of Benito Perez Galdos in the nineteenth century and the experiments with realism and the novel conducted by Miguel the Unamuno at the end of the century.

Friedman's book is rich in insights and perspectives precisely because he uses Cervantes as a vantage point to look at the past and at the future of the novel within Spain. His analysis of these works leads him to posit what he calls a periphrastic realism, the notion that imitation of reality is indirect, mediated by metafiction--and that Don Quixote is about the perception of reality. After a theoretical introduction, Friedman divides his book into four chapters. While the first, "The Picaresque, Don Quixote and the Design of the Novel," is the one that would be of greatest interest to the student of early modern Europe, the other three chapters should also be read with care, since Friedman uses later texts to reflect back on Cervantes's novel.

In chapter 1, Friedman ponders how the Quixote and the picaresque converge and contrast, studying the structure, and the rhetoric, as well as narrative techniques and voices. Taking the chapter of the galley slaves in Cervantes and contrasting it with the Lazarillo, Friedman explains that "Don Quijote plants its realism in the territory of idealism, in a nostalgia for the Golden Age. The picaresque author is less nuanced in his treatment of Renaissance humanism and, for that matter, in his parody of the spiritual confession" (39). Indeed, while Lazarillo corrupts exemplary autobiography, Cervantes deconstructs direct discourse while pointing to a writer behind the pages of the text. Friedman comes to a number of thoughtful conclusions while "meditating on the Quijote with an eye on the picaresque" (58).

It is a pleasure to follow Friedman's arguments as he turn to the importance of prologues, the author-reader dialectic, the importance of doubling and of metafiction, the multiple points of view, questions of authority, distancing, etc. As Friedman moves from Lazarillo to Guzman de Alfarache, and to the spurious sequels of both Don Quixote and Guzman, the reader can appreciate how many of the elements already presented are recast and problematized. I find his discussions of the false second parts of Guzman and Don Quixote particularly fascinating. Here, Friedman argues that both Cervantes and to a lesser extent Aleman contend with the reciprocity of world and text. Friedman ends his discussion of the picaresque with the Buscon in order to argue that "the ideological play of the early picaresque narratives and of Don Quijote is clearly present in the Buscon, where artistry and message systems function dialectically" (73). Here, the main character becomes detached from the author, as the baroque intensity of the language and the author's opposition to his character moves him to the margins. This is not a Cervantes who revels in the disparate and contradictory narrative voices in his novel. While emphasizing partial viewpoints and notions of doubling in the picaresque, Friedman suggests that, starting with Lazaro's case and ending with Pablo's victimized position, these texts prefigure but never achieve Cervantes's multiple perspectives.

Moving forward to Perez Galdos, Friedman focuses his attention on El amigo manso (1882). At first, the choice of this less than canonical text may surprise the reader. But it soon becomes clear that Friedman wishes to investigate how in this novel Galdos seeks "to adapt the poetics of realism to his delineation of a quixotic narrator/protagonist" (112). He also views this novel in terms of the picaresque: "a doubling of characters narrative actors, and time" (145). Indeed, following in the footsteps of Francisco Caudet, Ricardo Gullon, John Kronik, and many others, Friedman examines the quixotic and metafictional frame of a novel which begins with a character who asserts that he does not exist but then proceeds to tell his story. This proclamation and the complex relations between author and character lead to Miguel de Unamuno's later experiments beginning with Amor y pedagogia (1902) and culminating in Niebla (1920). Friedman has produced a complex and thoughtful meditation on Don Quixote and many of its predecessors and progenitors. It is a book that celebrates Cervantes's role in the establishment and development of the modern novel.

FREDERICK A. DE ARMAS

University of Chicago