The Subversive Tradition in Spanish Renaissance Writing (review)

RESEÑAS Pérez-Romero, Antonio. The Subversive Tradition in Spanish Renaissance Writing . Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2005. 339 pp. Antonio Pérez-Romero can be praised for taking up the task of discerning and amplifying the often muffled and otherwise compromised voice of the underprivileged in early Spanish literature. His efforts will be met with enthusiasm by those who accept the premise that feminist and working-class dissent can be traced in the writing of Renaissance authors. Other readers will continue to question this, along with his assertion that “mainstream academics” tacitly endorse a system of repression through their “hypocritical neutrality” and refusal to acknowledge the liberating “antagonism of ordinary people toward official constructions” in literary texts (15). In either case, PérezRomero ’s book adds to ongoing debates over the nature of satire as a potential mechanism for social change, a safety valve, and a discourse that can be used to reinforce or debunk official ideologies. The author begins by combining the “liberationist” theories of Mikhail Bakhtin with those of Noam Chomsky and others, before reviewing evidence for the “manufacture of consent” and class conflict in the early history of Spain, from the peasant uprisings of the Middle Ages to the sixteenth-century rebellion known as the War of the Communities (“Introduction” and Chapter I: “Historical Discourse and the Subversive Tradition” 13-44). His discussion outlines a history of resistance in which egalitarian workers (often supported by enlightened members of the upper class) unify to overthrow or reform an oppressive regime, only to be systematically undermined and attacked by political and religious authorities. According to Pérez-Romero, this kind of clash between the haves and have-nots is clearly reflected in an anonymous fifteenth-century treatise that he calls the “Dialogue of the King and the Peasant ” (24-27). First discovered by José Amador de los Ríos in the Biblioteca Nacional (in ms. vitr. 17-3), this dialogue records a brief exchange between a monarch and his lowly subject in which the former attempts to rhetorically justify his divine right to rule, while the latter claims that workers should have a more direct stake in their labors. The author posits it as a model for the kind of popular 157 dissent that he outlines in Chapter II (“Literary-Cultural Discourse and the Subversive Tradition” 45-61). Chapter III (“Triunfo de las donas and La historia de Grisel y Mirabella: Idealism and Aristocracy” 62-83) then examines inequality from the standpoint of gender, convincingly arguing for a feminist interpretation of Juan Rodríguez Padrón’s Triunfo (1439-1441) and Grisel y Mirabella by Juan de Flores (1495), works that have previously been accused of belittling or degrading women. From here, the book goes on to compare in Chapter IV (“Carajicomedia: The Erotic Urge” 84-95) the Laberinto de Fortuna (1444) to the Carajicomedia (1519), a poem that artfully transforms Juan de Mena’s allegory into a ludicrous pornography (this chapter was first published in the Hispanic Review 71.1). Pérez-Romero’s central thesis is undeniable – that the Carajicomedia parodies the Laberinto by bringing it down to earth and, more specifically, down to a carnivalesque “lower body sphere,” in keeping with Bakhtin’s influential reading of François Rabelais. However, his secondary claim that the anonymous parody at the same time empowers women will undoubtedly be called into question on the basis of its jocular depictions of sexual violence and mutilation (i.e. Carajicomedia, coplas 47, 63, and others). Chapter V (“La Celestina and Inner Desire for Equality” 96-130) finds that critics have often overlooked subversive elements in the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, in favor of more formal, aesthetic considerations. The author instead shows how Fernando de Rojas exposes a world of class struggle in which servants turn against their masters, and corrupt upper-class lovers throw caution to the wind in the pursuit of selfish desires. More controversial is his attempt to credit Melibea with a spirit of proto-feminist rebellion by completely denying the role of witchcraft in her demise: “we are supposed to believe that Melibea is under a spell, but this is not the case” (119). Critics are likely to...