Transnational Cervantes (review)

The first time I saw windmills —scores of them —around the small town in which I grew up, I had a shock. The sheer size of the metallic beasts swallowed everything that was there before, every perspective, everything big or small of the past. I am speaking, of course, of today's windmills: the gigantic aerogenerators of electricity that dot, from not so long ago, the landscape of Spain. Their bad conscience, I am sure, subconsciously prompted Iberdrola —the company that owns these monsters —to actually create an ad in which a strangely postmodern-looking Don Quixote tells a worried Sancho that "these windmills are not like the old ones," in a pathetic attempt to reassure the troubled squire. For me, the ad resulted in precisely the opposite reaction intended by the admakers: "You are right: they are not like the old ones; they are much worse," I thought.

This book has those windmills beautifully montaged with the old windmills of La Mancha —that tourist attraction of today —not only on the cover, but also in its content. For those of us who write on Cervantes with our focus on the entire planet and our concerns in the only realm of reality that matters —the now, the us —this is a welcome book, a necessary book. The titles of the chapters speak for themselves about the bold goals and elegant refusals for which the author is responsible: "Decolonizing Cervantes," "La Mancha as Borderland," "Cervantes and lo real maravilloso," "Cide Hamete Benengeli: The Other Within," "Cervantes' Transnational Romance —The Persiles," "Remembering the Future: Cervantes and the New Moroccan Immigration to Spain," "Cervantes and Shakespeare: Toward a Canon of Spanglish Literature," and so forth.

The book gives much space —too much space, although this relative amplification follows one of the theses in the book —to Cervantes' less famous Persiles, to the detriment not of the Quixote, but of the Novelas ejemplares, which are, in my opinion, much better representatives and standard-bearers of Chiders's hypotheses than the Persiles. But the relative weight of the Persiles is a matter which I seem to encounter, curiously, with those scholars with whom I best identify in the profession. My best friends seem to have in common this preference for a book that I consider ultimately a glorious but failed attempt. It is curious that Childers, who quotes my work in relation to a matter of secondary importance to his book, chooses not to quote it in relation to the Persiles, if only to take issue with it, as these other wonderful scholars and friends have.

But aside from this difference of opinion on the Persiles, I thank Childers for explaining, in the best detail that I have yet read, what are the implications of such an attempt, how Cervantes is to be rescued from its paean as a Saint of Eternal Catholic Spain and as an embodiment of perfection, of sameness, of territory, of seamlessness. The Cervantes we read in this book is not the Cervantes offered to Spaniards by either mass media or official High Culture —a kind of National Exportable Product, or a sort of Image of Our Identity as (Imperial) Nation —nor is it the object of the fruitless study bound by the constrains of that discipline most resistant to critical theory called Neo-philology, with its rigor (mortis). Transnational Cervantes dares a radical deterritorialization, and is sufficiently sound and sure of itself to allow its proposals to remain open, not fearing but inviting critical engagement. This book refuses to have the last word, being sufficiently content —and Lucifer-like proud —with having the first one in many new —transnational, transterritorial, and transchronological —roads, which also happen to be the old roads that the Iberdrolas would like us to forget and to identify no more as our roads, just like they would like us to believe that their windmills are any different from the old ones in La Mancha. Transnational Cervantes is a magnificent Rocinante...