Writing in the Margin: Spanish Literature of the Golden Age (review)

222BCom, Vol. 42, No. 2 (Winter 1 990) impressed by the information presented here to allow one to compare and contrast performances then and now. No translation is perfect because there is no single ideal of what a translation should be. Michael McGaha's version of El esclavo del demonio, accompanied by Ruano's superb introduction, is an excellent example of what a translated text can be. It is at once a performance text, a key that unlocks a foreign text for nonSpanish speakers, an instrument for teaching the play, a solid work of scholarship , and, frankly, a good read. All the individuals who were involved in this effort , and the Carleton Renaissance Plays in Translation series in general, are to be commended for this addition to the growing body of truly worthy translations of baroque Spanish plays. Matthew D. Stroud Trinity University Smith, Paul Julian. Writing in the Margin: Spanish Literature of the Golden Age. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1988. 219 pp. In this stimulating but occasionally irritating book, Paul Julian Smith attempts to challenge the assumptions of traditional Golden Age criticism while rereading canonical works in the light of post-structuralist theory. Smith's principal objective is to break what he sees as humanism's grip on Hispanic literary studies. Humanism is defined in the post-structuralist sense as a philosophy committed to a faith in the individual as the source and arbiter of meaning, and wedded to belief in the existence of natural and universal human values. Smith's more immediate targets within Golden Age studies are New Critical formalists, who would impose an illusory artistic and psychological continuity on a literary text; and British School moralists, who would claim universal validity for the Counter-Reformation theology of Spain's classical literature. The "corrective" readings Smith offers reflect the strengths and weakness of the deconstructive approach. On the one hand, he ably demonstrates the slipperiness of language that frustrates our attempts to find totalizing coherence and documents how literary "history" is a product of a particular cultural moment. On the other hand, he tends to reduce complex socio-historical issues to linguistic metaphors of dubious generality and to make exaggerated claims for deconstruction's validity as a new ontology. Smith's preferred deconstructive reading strategy is the dissolution of oppositional pairs: two terms assumed to be rigorously antithetical are shown to be Reviews223 mutually defining, one implicit within the other. For example, by examining preceptiva of the period, he proposes that Baroque excess is implicit in Renaissance clarity (which includes the notion of ornamental brilliance). By exposing Juan de Valdés's blindness to the inseparability of writing from natural oral language, Smith dismantles the oppositions between figurative and literal, and finds confirmation for Derrida's hypothesis of universal figuration. By attending to the contradictions in such rhetorical figures as evidentia, he exposes the artificial distinction between authenticity and imitation in lyric poetry. A challenging chapter on the picaresque argues that the genre calls into question the binaries "inside" versus "outside" in narrative representation. In "The Rhetoric of Inscription in the Comedia" Smith characterizes comedia criticism as a field split between British School moralism and vulgar Marxism. This picture does not quite jibe with the enthusiastic theoretical pluralism observable on this side of the Atlantic, but one suspects that even within the British context, Smith is guilty of flogging moribund horses. He begins by noting the collaborative nature of dramatic creation that makes "authorship" an especially problematic concept: "Generally, there can be no possibility of access to an 'authentic' or 'primary' text, for any printed version of a comedia will be to some extent a palimpsest, bearing the traces of radical emendation at each stage of the dramatic process" (128). Comediantes, familiar enough with the practices of borrowing, reworking, plagiarism, and textual corruption that frequently make attribution a nightmare, would readily agree. But Smith goes on to make the leap from collaborative (or undeterminable) authorship to the "death of the author"; 'Lope', 'Tirso,' and 'Calderón' are entombed in quotation marks, converted into "shorthand" for "a body of text and its multiple determinants" (128) . Here he falls into the dichotomous thinking he...