Theory and History of Ideological Production: The First Bourgeois Literatures (the 16th Century) (review)

Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 285 of the ancient sites of the Middle East, prisoners of war held indefinitely in Guantanamo Bay— what traumas are being suffered today and how will the fragile threads of life be broken and repaired ? George Mariscal University of California, San Diego Theory and History of Ideological Production: The First Bourgeois Literatures (the 16th Century) University of Delaware Press, 2002 By Juan Carlos Rodriguez Translated by Malcolm K. Read As a graduate student in Madrid in the late 1970s, I found myself browsing in a tiny bookstore off the Plaza Mayor when I noticed a book shaped like a gray rectangular box. With hard cardboard covers and published by "Akal," a press whose name I had never heard, the book's contents were even more unusual than its exterior. TeorÃ-a e historia de bproducción ideobgica by Juan Carlos RodrÃ-guez announced itself as part of a four-part series designed to address the "actual function of literary discourses in the interior of bourgeois or modern ideology." I paid my 400 pesetas, and slowly made my way dirough one of the most original and complex interpretations of Golden Age literature I had ever read. Almost three decades later an English translation of Rodriguez's 1974 masterpiece is finally available. Due to the wisdom and perseverance of Professor Malcolm Read of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, Theory and History of Ideological Production: The First Bourgeois Literatures (the 16th Century) appears at a moment when Hispanism is reappraising its flirtation with the most idealist of post-structuralist critical fashions. Rodriguez's text is neither fashionable nor idealist. A rigorous tour de force with its roots more firmly planted in continental philosophy than in literary criticism or aesthetics, Theory and History of Ideological Production will challenge North American readers with its detours and dialectical turns that at times create a dizzying effect with the potential to precipitate a total rethinking of U.S. Hispanism's most commonly held critical (i.e., bourgeois) assumptions . In its new incarnation, Theory and History of IdeobgicalProduction opens with a translator's preface, a prologue, and an audior's preface. Read's preface is a helpful aviso alkctor, alerting us to the fact that the book we are about to begin proposes "the literal ejection through the window of all previous theoretical presuppositions," that it is "a theoretically difficult and demanding text," and that one objective of the translation is to rectify the "(non-) reception" of Rodriguez's work (3-4). The prologue by Carlos Enriquez del Õ rbol, a colleague of Rodriguez at the University of Granada, explains the historical context in which the book first appeared and alludes to the fact that it was essentially "disappeared" by the academic establishment in Spain. Enriquez del Õ rbol discusses the influence of Louis Althusser on Rodriguez's work, and oudines irs four fundamental concepts: "the ideological unconscious, the ideological matrix , internal logic, and the radical historicity of discourse" (8). Finally, Rodriguez himself addresses the English-speaking reader in a cogent condensation of his study, reminding us that every assertion of "I am" is deeply historical and that the "autonomous" subject is always already "enrrapped by an ideological unconscious and by a libidinal unconscious, from the moment of our birth" (15). In light of this final assertion, it strikes us as paradoxical that the voice speaking from the pages of Rodriguez's text exudes such a high degree of self-possession that it inadvertently reinstantiates the myth of the free subject. The analyst's persona ranges confidently from one complex issue to the next, dismissing earlier thinkers who presumably have not understood the meaning of their own work. Statements such as "[Américo] Castro does not realize what the texts he adduces actually say" or "We can conclude that they [Spanish "liberal" historians] are succumbing to a culturalism of the most naive, idealist kind" (205, 277) convey the kind of transcendent perspective Rodriguez himself claims to dismande. Stylistic gestures reinforce a sense of impatience as the analyst leaps from topic to topic—"for a number of specific reasons 286 Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies widi which we need not...