Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation by Vincent Crapanzano (review)

74Rocky Mountain Review sins. In choosing God's love over earthly desire, women found their best defense against the rigid social structure of the Renaissance. The passive resistance to which Navarre refers recurs as a major female theme of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Cholakian names Marie de Gournay and Madame de Lafayette as two of the authors who seconded Navarre's recommendation. Novella 72 is perhaps most exemplary of the author's intention. In that story, a young nun who has been raped by a monk meets by chance the duchess ofAlençon (Marguerite herself). The duchess reveals her identity to the nun and determines to rectify the situation. In so doing, she actually diverts the nun from seeking advice from the Pope. The duchess writes her version of the nun's story to the bishop and thereby obtains revenge. In this new ending to a time-old story of rape which dictated that virtuous women did not denounce their attackers and that men's versions made their victims guilty of sin, the woman writer is the new champion. In fact, by participating both inside and outside of the discourse, whether as narrative voice subverting standard themes, as occasional actor, or as commentator, Marguerite de Navarre creates that " 'view from elsewhere' that inserts female subjectivity into the story" (218). Cholakian concedes that while the Heptaméron's primary subject is not rape, Navarre's personal experience seems to have fired her desire to retell stories from a new perspective and to fuel a "disruptive effort to impose a feminine subject on the masculine grammar of narrative desire" (217). The abundant textual evidence provided in this study is supplemented by references ranging from Freud to Hélène Cixous and by some sixty pages of notes, all of which complement this carefully constructed re-reading. In spite ofthe long distance which separates us from her, Navarre's voice may, at long last, be audible. VICKI L. HAMBLIN Western Washington University VINCENT CRAPANZANO. Hermes' Dilemma and Hamlet's Desire: On the Epistemology of Interpretation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. 386 p. Vincent Crapanzano has written a very big book, born, as he tells us, in "conceptual anguish" (1), and driven by two problematic and problematically related interpretative concerns: 1) how the human sciences, particularly anthropology and psychoanalysis, articulate their fields of study, and 2) how one defines the self, both in its individual and collective representations . Crapanzano's method is to address these issues in a series of thirteen loosely connected essays—he self-consciously evokes the etymological sense of the term as a "trial" or "probe" that allows for intellectual play, irony, and critical awareness—eleven of which appeared separately over a fifteen-year period from 1975 to 1990. Book Reviews75 Something of the nature of Crapanzano's critical stance may be gleaned from his association of the professional anthropologist with Hermes, who is both messenger and trickster. Like Hermes, the anthropologist must unsettle the receivers of his message, disrupting their prejudices and destroying their old frames of reference. This situation is, according to Crapanzano, inherently paradoxical, since "the messenger must first create disbelief and then destroy it without destroying the anguish and concern the disbelief triggered" (3). Such a condition is fraught with political and moral consequences , and herein lies the messenger's "dilemma"; for "if he takes the alterity he posits seriously" and conveys it accurately, he undermines the assumptions of his society. But at the same time he also risks undermining his own discipline since it is itself a product of the societal assumptions that he as an anthropologist threatens: hence "built into anthropology's project is its own subversion" (6). Similarly problematic, according to Crapanzano, are basic Western assumptions regarding the representation of the self, a point epiphanically clarified for him as a result of his extensive field work as an anthropologist in Morocco. (Some of the most compelling essays in the book are those on Moroccan culture and its relationship to the formation of the self.) What Crapanzano advocates here is a more "ironic" understanding of the self— that is, one that recognizes the extent to which any single approach to the problem is victimized...