The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes (review)

This is a frustrating volume, whose review I kept postponing. It has some good essays, but it is sloppy and unbalanced, not on the level of the Suma cervantina or the MLA's Approaches to Teaching Don Quixote. One misses the presence of the most distinguished and influential of Anglo-American cervantistas, such as Allen, Avalle-Arce, Close, Mancing, Murillo, Parr, or Riley.

Melveena McKendrick provides one of the best chapters, "Writing for the Stage," surveying thoroughly his theater and identifying some of its uniqueness and shortcomings. For Cervantes, content has primacy over form; Cervantes was a storyteller and told stories in his drama (143). Mary Gaylord provides an unbiased and informed survey of "Cervantes's Other Fiction," including a sympathetic reading of La Galatea, pointing out the varied topography of the Novelas ejemplares, and how Persiles shares with La Galatea a treatment of multiple versions of love. All of his fiction teaches that "irony comes in many shapes and guises" (125). I believe she overstates Persiles's popularity with its first readers (none of the six publishers of the 1617 editions brought out a second edition), and since she cites El Saffar, it surprises that Ruth is not mentioned as someone who has addressed the question of the Novelas ejemplares' ordering (127 n. 23).

Fred De Armas studies "Cervantes and the Italian Renaissance" and in the process deals intelligently and sensitively with Cervantes's views on love and literature; it is the article that best examines Cervantes's thought. Cervantes's longing for Italy is a longing for the Renaissance. Anne Cruz reviews recent psychoanalytical studies of Cervantes in "Psyche and Gender in Cervantes," and also provides briefer comments on Cervantes's female characters. Barry Ife's "The Historical and Social Context" provides a history of early modern Spain, focusing on political history and to a lesser extent on economics. That there was a Moorish "invasion" (15) is rather an old-fashioned view, and it is surprising to see Isabel la Católica's expulsion of Jews presented as a step toward strengthening the power of the Church (16).

My only issue with Adrienne L. Martín's "Humor and Violence in Cervantes" is that she tacitly equates Cervantes and Don Quijote; there is humor and violence in "El licenciado Vidriera" and "Rinconete y Cortadillo," for example. On Don Quijote her essay is persuasive: "Cervantes's genius lies precisely in the ambiguities and profundity of his exploration of the literary relationship between humor (madness), comedy, and seriousness of purpose and meaning" (166). This is precisely what Avellaneda does not "get," she accurately notes. "The author teaches us the truth through laughter" (167). She concludes with an exploration of the different relationships between humor and violence in Cervantes's day and ours.

Some essays are disappointing. Diana de Armas Wilson, in "Cervantes and the New World," starts on the wrong foot by calling La Galatea "unreadable," full of "classical furniture." The exaggerated links she finds between Cervantes and the Western hemisphere I have commented on elsewhere, in a review of her Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (http://users.ipfw.edu/jehle/deisenbe/reviews/wilson.pdf, 9 June 2005). The most inadequate is that of Alexander Welsh, "The Influence of Cervantes"; his only concern, as he himself says (80), is the influence of Don Quixote, primarily on British novelists. This ignores, for example, the influence of the "Coloquio de los perros" on Freud, the political use made of La Numancia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the influence of Persiles in England and Germany, that of the Novelas ejemplares in France, influence on Mark Twain and Góngora (La Galatea), and so on. Influence of Don Quixote does not even touch on the work's influence in Spain, its role in burlesquing the libros de caballerías and preventing them from being revived under the more tolerant reign of Felipe III. A better alternative is Anthony Cascardi's "Don Quixote and the Invention of the Novel." He points to an increased...