El discreto (review)

With Aurora Egido, at last, Baltasar Gracián has met his match, and then some. He was a highly intelligent and extremely learned scholar of the seventeenth century; she has mastered his world of learning, plus an ample modern bibliography of relevant studies, and by the power of her wit she is able to decipher and illuminate his most cryptic and elliptical phrases, each one an example of “discreción.” Her edition of El discreto, based on the first edition (Huesca, 1646), leaves all previous editions far behind; this reviewer can only stand back in awe. Her 70-page introduction, followed by 50 pages of notes in smaller type, provides the reader with a reasoned synthesis of the treatise and a wealth of background information. Gracián’s text itself, now with Egido’s substantial notes added at the foot of each page, was divided by the author into twenty-five “realces”; each one of the first twenty-four is labeled according to its rhetorical genre, and the final one, entitled “Culta repartición de la vida de un discreto,” serves as a programatic peroration. Anyone capable of reading El discreto in this edition can master the thought of Gracián; any reader who, in addition, can fully absorb Egido’s voluminous commentaries, has all the keys needed to open doors into the labyrinth of seventeenth-century Spanish humanism.

The author of many impressive volumes on Baroque literature, Aurora Egido published in 1996 La rosa del silencio: estudios sobre Gracián (Madrid: Alianza Universidad); now, a year later, in the more popular series entitled “El Libro de Bolsillo,” she provides the reading public with a practical application of her vast learning. Can she be accused of over-kill? No way: she, if not sui generis, participates in the unique category of a Robert Jammes, with his studies on Góngora, which culminate in his edition of the Soledades. She has done a comparable service for the readers of Gracián, whose prose she knows to be no easier to understand than Góngora’s verse. (She appropriately cites M. J. Woods’s Gracián Meets Góngora: the Theory and Practice of Wit [London, 1995].) As the twentieth century draws to its close, Hispanism can point with pride to our renewed intellectual and esthetic comprehension of two Baroque giants; Aurora Egido promises to project well into the new century her remarkably productive career as a scholar, a discoverer and decipherer of richly complex texts.