La espada, el rayo y la pluma: Quevedo y los campos literario y de poder (review)

Carlos M. Gutiérrez’s La espada, el rayo y la pluma: Quevedo y los campos literarios y de poder is a sociocultural analysis of the literary milieu of the first few decades of seventeenth-century Spain, specifically of Madrid and its court. Its dual purpose is to demonstrate that the first Spanish literary field appears in this period and to examine the particular trajectory of the writer Francisco de Quevedo. Even though the title may be misleading, since the part dedicated to the study of Quevedo occupies less than half of the project, the aim of the book is very well accomplished.

Gutiérrez describes in the first chapter Bourdieu’s “action theory,” which he then applies in his exhaustive investigation of the social literary practices and of the social literary intrahistory of the time. Clearly, this sociological approach based on the concept of agency, or the capacity of agents to interact with social institutions and practices, can be much more productive and complete than reductive studies that dismiss the social-cultural aspects of writers and their works. In chapters 2 and 3, Gutiérrez superbly expounds on the interaction of writers with the literary field and with other social formations, especially with the field of power. The explanations in these chapters are arranged around the main notions of the Bourdieunian model: interrelation of structures, strategies of agents (position-taking), symbolic capital, symbolic violence, distinction, legitimacy, space of possible, and habitus. Gutiérrez’s arguments are well supported by numerous historical, sociological, and critical studies and prove convincingly that a literary field existed in Spain around 1600.

The objective of the last two chapters — to investigate Quevedo as an agent in his social action and to read his works contextually “en el momento histórico y en la trayectoria del escritor” (165) — is informed by Bourdieu’s concept of trajectory. In the theory of the French sociologist the word trayectoria means the successive positions of writers in their relations with other agents in their own habitus (understood as individualized set of practices of differentiation and position-taking) and with the forces present in the field to which they belong. In order to accomplish his objective Gutiérrez examines Quevedo’s “acción literaria,” or his position-taking in the literary field, in chapter 4, and describes the writer’s “acción política,” or his diverse positions in relation with power structures, in chapter 5.

We appreciate the ambitious and demanding endeavor Gutiérrez undertakes in his project, and the abundant and informative data he revises in order to illustrate the literary field present in the Madrid court and the vital and professional trajectory of a complex writer like Quevedo. Having said that, we find in this book a general problem with the organization and redundancy of materials, which sometimes makes it difficult to follow the main arguments. This situation is particularly accentuated in the last two chapters. For example, in section two of the fourth chapter Gutiérrez explains Quevedo’s action in his literary relations through his use of “el ingenio burlesco” as a way to obtain “fama, nombre y capitalización simbólica” (180). But nineteen pages later in the same chapter, after explaining other aspects of his literary relations and environment, the author revisits the same topic in a division entitled “la práctica satírico-burlesca.” This redundancy happens again in section 4.4, “acción literaria y campo del poder,” which is the topic of chapter 5. Perhaps the overlapping found in these cases has to do with his attempt to explain in different chapters two enmeshed characteristics of the production and life of Francisco de Quevedo, the literary and the political. This difficulty does not diminish the fact that this book is an...