Transnational Cervantes (review)

Reviews  william childers. Transnational Cervantes. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. 310 pages. One of my graduate students working in modern Latin American literature recently asked me how she might write a term paper for a course on Cervantes that would at least in part deal with modern Latin American literature. Until last year I might have dismissed her request as merely an attempt not to write about seventeenth-century Spanish literature. But that was then. This time I was able to refer her to William Childers’s innovative book that presents a convincing reading of Cervantes as a forerunner of what is now being theorized as postcolonial literature, specifically the magic realist tendencies of Latin American literature of the late twentieth century. The book is organized into three sections, which stage a progressive distantiation first from Cervantes’s traditional location at the acme of Spanish canonical literature and second from the theoretical insistence on strictly historicist reading as an antidote to a supposed presentist fallacy. Against this critical tendency, well established in Cervantista circles, Childers’s reading of ‘‘Cervantes now’’ depends on his view that, as he puts it, when dealing with the thorny issues of immigration and the relations between Christians and Muslims in today’s Spain, ‘‘an even longer cultural memory needs to be cultivated’’ (168). But what do we learn about Cervantes by advocating a memory that reads him from the present, offering urgent insight into today’s most pressing concerns? Childers is particularly eloquent on this front: ‘‘When we take up the question, today, of the Moriscos in Cervantes, the expulsion need no longer be the primary focus of our attention. Here I will concentrate, instead, on the convivencia between Christians and Muslims (or former Muslims) as it is represented in the texts themselves: a complex relationship characterized by a mixture of desire, nostalgia, anger and fear. Now that the time has come to splice back together the broken thread (‘anudar el hilo roto,’ as Cervantes says in the prologue to Persiles), the main thing is to see how certain aspects of the cultural past can be useful for understanding and responding to the current situation. Can Cervantes help us learn to recognize the new immigrants as the descendants of Spaniards long ago expelled, now returned to claim their rightful place within the nation (171)? Note, in particular, the designation Childers uses in the last line quoted above. When a nation or state expels a people from its borders in the practice now known as ethnic cleansing, that people is invariably designated as a cultural or ethnic other and hence as specifically not belonging to the nation, and the denomination tends to stick even in purportedly neutral reporting or historical documentation of that practice. That reading Cervantes today can remind us 216  Revista Hispánica Moderna 61.2 (2008) that some of today’s ‘‘enemies’’ in the supposed ‘‘clash of civilizations’’ (Childers is particularly critical of Samuel Huntington in his last chapter) are but the ‘‘descendants of Spaniards long ago expelled’’ also reminds us, forcefully, of the extent to which reading can be a political act in its own right. The way to this third and last section is elegantly prepared in the first two, in which Childers first uncouples Cervantes from the often unquestioned location we place him in as the canonical king of Spain’s literary Golden Age, and then focuses on the neglected masterpiece Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda for the critical pièce de résitance of his reading. The first move is in no way a denigration of Cervantes as deserving of such high honors, but instead subtly questions what insight into his creation we give up by blindly accepting the work’s exclusive pertinence to that tradition. Do we not learn something new about Cervantes as well as about literary tradition per se when we read his work as not merely stemming from and informing the literary tradition of the Spanish Golden Age canon or his later appropriation by European Enlightenment criticism, but as finding a natural home in the counter-traditions it has inspired in, for instance, contemporary Latin American fiction? I find this move particularly inspiring...