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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 63.4 (2002) 537-539



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Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World. By Diana de Armas Wilson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xv + 254 pp.

With their creative genealogies, loaded metaphors, and interested claims, stories of the origins of the novel are fictions in themselves. Diana de Armas Wilson's achievement in this broadly conceived study is to rewrite the story from a decidedly more catholic perspective. Her focus is the confluence of two phenomena during the sixteenth century: the rise of the New World in European consciousness and the appearance of Cervantes' markedly heteroglot novels. Wilson relocates canonical Old World texts—primarily Cervantes' Don Quijote and the Persiles but also the constellation of texts that influence them or are influenced by them—squarely in a transatlantic and imperial context. Her study is impressively far-reaching: it transcends the stubborn division in Hispanic studies between Peninsular and Latin American literature and engages with comparatists and classicists, as well as scholars of English literature, to negotiate the place of the Cervantine novel. However, its postcolonial and transatlantic dimensions will extend its importance far beyond the confines of Cervantes studies.

Even if direct references to the Americas are sporadic in Cervantes' novels, Wilson argues, the texts are permeated by the discourse of the New World. Wilson analyzes this discourse along generic lines, examining the connections between Cervantes' novels and chivalric romance, utopian fiction, New World epic, and ethnohistory. This generic paradigm, which in some ways follows Roberto González Echevarría's pioneering work on the transatlantic dimensions of the picaresque, serves Wilson well. She convincingly shows how, through his dialogue with Thomas More, Alonso de Ercilla, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and the legion of Spanish cronistas, Cervantes manages to "ironize, de-idealize, and even reappraise Spain's imperialist history" (9). Don Quijote's mad imperial longings, Sancho's governorship of the Insula Barataria, or the barbarians' cult of a future world conqueror in the [End Page 537] Persilesall appear in a new light, as not-so-veiled criticisms of Spain's messianic imperial project—an increasingly untenable but still powerful ideology in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Fascinating as Wilson's reading of Cervantes can be, I find her metaliterary discussion even more compelling, as she examines the politics behind Ian Watt's famous history of the novel and the Anglo-American tradition it represents, exposing both its masculinist investment in genealogy and its "fetishization of national identities" (59). Instead of replacing Defoe with Cervantes as "father of the novel," Wilson proposes a cross-cultural account that does justice to the supranational connections between such figures. She begins this account by exploring Coleridge's claim about Defoe's indebtedness to Cervantes: "In his Persilis [sic] and Sigismunda, the English may find the germ of their Robinson Crusoe" (quoted on 61). Wilson teases out the claim in a wonderful discussion of "the novel as 'moletta'" [mulatto], in reference to Crusoe's own use of the Spanish term. The broken Spanish in Defoe's novel, Wilson argues, locates the novel's linguistic hybridity—what Mikhail Bakhtin would call its "extranational multi-languagedness"—in an actual transatlantic context. Thus Wilson reconceptualizes the Russian critic's "dialogic imagination" as a historical, transnational phenomenon.

By comparing the early modern transatlantic world to the Mediterranean of antiquity, Wilson makes the intriguing argument, following Bakhtin, that the novel "rises with special vigour in locations of culture that tolerate, and sometimes even value, hybridity" (78). Wilson's own detour into a discussion of the fictional Moorish author of Don Quijote, Cide Hamete Benengeli, however, brings up a problem with her argument: if we consider that 1492 marks not only Columbus's arrival in the New World but the expulsion of the Jews and the fall of Granada, is it really possible to argue that Spain is more of a hybrid space after that date than it was before? It seems to me that one could as easily argue that the novel arises in response to the repression of hybridity. This leads...

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