Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes (review)

Reviews383 classical photography to scanning and digitalization, while "Intention and Artifice," "Computer Collages," and "How to Do Things with Pictures" study how ideology exploits electronic hardware. Digital photographs resemble speech-acts: they are studied in respect not to a content but to the ways they serve to create beliefs and desires. Agencies can endow pictures with illocutionary force that varies according to context but always establishes "a powerful orthodoxy of graphic communication" (p. 222). The book suggests that a new ethics needs to account for digital imaging. Three components can be considered. First, heeding Michel Foucault's view that modern science treats facts as impersonal objects where scholasticism had invested them with authority in reference to an origin, we must (1) fancy images as processes that recombine and contort conventions, and (2) use the technology to impugn claims of authenticity. New technologies tell us that truth-effects, like the images that produce them, must be continually scanned. A third component might derive from Mitchell's extraordinary picture on the dustjacket (also fig. 10.1). A pictural variant on a sixteenth-century blason du corps féminin, the image displays the Mona Lisa's left eye in an infinity of sizes, the largest of which resembles a reversed comma laid on its dexter side. The abstract cipher reveals a vanishing point of infinitely smaller pixels of the same eye that reflect the outer world on the upper left side of the lady's pupil. Eyes are within eyes that describe eyes emerging, disappearing, dissolving, but also, when we squint, a unique eye with a sharp outline of a shaded comma. The mass of pixels shows how digital photography, fabricating images from increasingly smaller versions of themselves, yields an effect of visual analepsis (p. 75), implying that no escape is possible from this new panopticism of multiplicity, redundancy, and infinitesimal gridding. To stand clear of digital imaging is to remain unaware of an acceleration and empowerment of ideology. This is a decisive study in the history and philosophy of visual form. University of MinnesotaTom Conley Quixotic Desire: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Cervantes, edited by Ruth Anthony El Saffar and Diana de Armas Wilson; xv & 332 pp. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993, $36.95 cloth, $15.95 paper. Because one of the most striking characteristics of Cervantes's writings is a profound concern with the mysterious workings of the human mind, and because those writings almost uncannily anticipate so many of the theories and insights of modern psychoanalysis (the first chapter in this book, byJuan Luis Grinberg andJuan Francisco Fernández, makes a convincing case for Freud's 384Philosophy and Literature indebtedness to Cervantes), psychoanalytic criticism would seem a particularly appropriate and promising approach to elucidating the nature and meaning of his work. The fifteen essays collected in this volume provide an excellent introduction to the many different types of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism currently being practiced and, at the same time, offer evidence of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the psychoanalytic approach. In my view, the most successful of these essays are those which combine traditional literary scholarship and the heuristic tools provided by psychoanalysis to shed new light upon specific Cervantine texts. Thus, Diana de Armas Wilson shows us how Cervantes's portrayal of Don Quixote's dream in the Cave of Montesinos drew upon the ideas of the second-century Hellenistic dreaminterpreter Artemidorus but at the same time anticipated some of Freud's most important notions about the meaning ofdreams. George Shipley deftly applies Freud's interpretation of the unconscious significance ofjokes to demonstrate that Sancho's story of Lope Ruiz and TorraJba is really an aggressive joke encoding a symbolic humiliation of Don Quixote. Carlos Feal uses Lacanian theory to elucidate the significance ofDon Quixote's encounter with Cardenio. Mary M. Gaylord's essay—a virtuoso close reading of the passage in Don Quixote (1.43) where the knight offers his hand to Maritornes and the innkeeper's daughter at the window of the hayloft—brilliantly explicates the obscene double-entendrewith which Don Quixote unwittingly invests his apparently noble speech, the implications of the scene's iconography, and Cervantes's puns on the figurative language El Pinciano used to describe...