Cervantes's Numancia: A Speech Act Consideration

CERVANTES'S NUMANCIA: A SPEECH ACT CONSIDERATION CHARLES ORIEL Washington University, St. Louis "Speech act theory is dead." This, at least, has been the common wisdom , ever since the deconstructionist critique of many of its underlying assumptions , led by Jacques Derrida and others. While recognizing the validity of many of the criticisms aimed at speech act theory (as originally conceived ), one must acknowledge in the same breath that it has led in many cases to fruitful speculation concerning the nature and function of discursive acts in a variety ofliterary works. Since its inception with J.L. Austin's 77ow to Do Things with Words, speech act theory has had a varied and somewhat skeptical reception in the field of literary studies. Stanley Fish, for example, concludes his well-known speech act analysis of Shakespeare's Coriolanus with the admonition that the theory is limited in its uses; Shakespeare's play, he tells us, happens to be a "speech-act play," that is, it appears to be self-consciously concerned with the functionality of speech acts and, therefore, the theory "fits" it: "This fit between the play and the theory accounts for whatever illumination the present analysis has been able to provide, and it is also the reason why we should be wary of concluding from the analysis that we are in possession of a new interpretive key" ("How To" 245). Among the first appearances of speech act theory in the field ofHispanic literary studies is Things Done With Words: Speech Acts in Hispanic Drama , a collection ofessays edited by Elias L. Rivers (1986).1 This collection has been followed by several studies that, ifnot directly inspired by it, have shown the wide-spread influence of several of Austin's (and John Searle's) concepts. Catherine Larson, for example, has successfully utilized speech 705 106BCom, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Summer 1995) act formulations to contextualize discussions of Lope's La dama boba, Rojas Zorrilla's Entre bobos anda eljuego, and Ruiz de Alarcón's La verdad sospechosa, in the first three chapters of her excellent Language and the Comedia? Stanley Fish's warning, it would seem, has not been taken completely to heart. In her introductory essay to Rivers's collection, Inés Azar agrees with Fish's desire to avoid making speech act formulations into a general theory of literature, but nevertheless objects to his all-out restrictions : [Speech act theory] can be used ... to analyze sincerity and lying, duplicity, misunderstanding, responsibility, authority, and power manipulations in any given discourse. It can also be applied to some specific literary questions, such as the reliability ofnarrative voices or the characterization of courtly love, for instance, as a code or system of speech acts. The theory is obviously fitted to the study ofdialogue and more specifically to the analysis of drama, since dramatic action is constituted by linguistic events and the fate of dramatic characters depends significantly on their linguistic behavior. ("Self 12) Jacques Derrida's critique of Austin's theory (and of Searle's after him), is too detailed, nuanced, and lengthy to reiterate in this essay.3 I will grossly generalize—and, admittedly, oversimplify—for my immediate purposes by saying that this critique is aimed at the theory's apparently essentialist and logocentric nature. A metaphysics (the concepts of unified subjectivity and consequent accountability) appears to be at the very heart of Austin's system , allowing for the articulation of a kind of speech act 'ethics.' This ethics is neatly encapsulated by the following well-known and oft-repeated phrase from How to Do Things with Words: "Accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond" (10). Poststructuralist thought, of course, radically contests this ethics by questioning the viability of the very concept of subjectivity: in other words, if there is no such thing as a stable, (self-)consistent, and unified subject, how can accountability , as such, exist? Of the different types of speech acts envisioned by Austin and Searle, it is the commissive4—the promise—that best appears to manifest what I am here calling "speech act ethics": identity, unified subjectivity, and essential self-presence. A promise necessarily involves...