Cervantine Journeys.

Elaborating on the multiple Renaissance meanings of discurso - the Spanish equivalent of discourse - which included travel, writing, speech, thought, and process, Hutchinson's engagingly subtle study takes up the term's pervasive sense of motion to address the varying space/time differentials of Cervantes's "errant" texts: Don Quixote, the Exemplary Novels, and the Persiles y Sigismunda. These moving narratives - my pun is intended, since for Hutchinson the protagonists' desires at once motivate and mobilize their discourse - are construed as well by the reader's interplay of memory, perspective, and anticipation. His analyses thus take into account the chronological distance covered by the texts' sedentary reader while at the same time investigating and tracing the narrative movements that propel many a footloose character from one adventure to another.

The relations between discourse as writing and discourse as motion (which Hutchinson believes are "blocked" by the excessively immobilizing effects of modern structuralist theories), are explained in the first chapter, "Motion in Language, Language in Motion." Focusing on Cervantes's "language of movement," the second chapter deftly associates the insistent digressions of several narratives with a corresponding physical movement (Sancho Panza's tales, Berganza's life story in the Coloquio de los perros), concluding that the Cervantine "maps of verbal discourse are graphed largely by analogy to the space of terrestrial travel" (49). As metaphors can be grouped systematically according to specific experiences or epistemes, the totalizing trope of "life's journey" interests Hutchinson in that its universality paradoxically allows for difference. Cervantes's version - what Hutchinson calls the author's "diverse intonation" - is at variance with other so-called Baroque examples such as Gracian's (and, I would add, with the picaresque), and therefore proves the term's ineffectiveness.

In questioning the Baroque as a literary period, however, Hutchinson de-historicizes Cervantes's "difference" as a writer. While he compares the difficulties of contemporary women's travels with those of their fictional counter parts, he offers little commentary on the relations between fictional journeys and the early modern period's voyages of discovery, with the result that the travel narratives remain strangely dissociated from that period's obsession with imperialism and expansionism. Nor are Cervantine journeys attributed to any compelling psychological causes such as fear or flight; instead, the protagonists are projected as sallying forth in search of adventure, their improvisations pointing to the author's preference for liter ary inventio over imitatio. Of course, any study invoking Nietzsche is expected to resist moral intentions, and Hutchinson's binomial "errancy/loco-centrism" fittingly decenters the conventional view of wandering as truancy. Yet in privileging a protagonist's wanderlust over his desire for homecoming, Hutchinson nonetheless evades his own question as to whether travel involves qualitative change.

Hutchinson's last three chapters build on the linguistic and philosophical premises of the first two. Chapter three follows the movements of numerous Cervantine "traveling types," from Don Quixote to Berganza; chapter four expands on Bakhtin's notion of chronotope to formulate "Cervantine worlds," with Don Quixote as a "mobile chronotope" simultaneously influenced by and exerting influence on his shifting surroundings. At this point, the metaphors begin to exhaust themselves, as most of Cervantes's literary loci (the pastoral, the cave of Montesinos, the Duke's castle, to mention but three), and his geographical borrowings (the Gypsy encampment, the Barbarous Isle, the New World, even the Christian cosmos), are categorized repetitiously in brief subsections according to their temporal/spatial dimensions.

Hutchinson's fifth and last chapter, "Narrative Passages," retained this reader's full attention by returning to the theoretical concerns of the first chapter: the conversion of journey experience into discourse. His explanation of the travel narratives' operation through memory, and his likening of their appositive improvisatory writing to modal music, are truly original and exciting approaches to Cervantes's texts. Indeed, Cervantine Journeys itself follows the discursive trajectories of its narrative subjects; readers are advised to move rapidly past the occasional redundancies and dwell appreciatively on its many innovative points.

ANNE J. CRUZ University of Illinois, Chicago