Crítica de los géneros literarios en el Quijote: Idea y concepto de género en la investigación literaria (review)

Jesús G. Maestro undertakes an ambitious project here. An extraordinarily prolific scholar, he hopes to devise a way of looking at texts from the perspective of genre, viewed historically and then updated. In the first sentence of his study, Maestro notes that the objective of literary theory is to make texts intelligible. He differentiates between readers, who interpret for themselves, and critics, who interpret for others. He finds in recent theory, specifically postmodern theory, a willingness to sacrifice clarity and rationality for the esoteric, for the impractical, for the unscientific, and ultimately for an exaltation of the indecipherable. In a sense, postmodernism is what could be termed a false center for Maestro's approach, which includes, on one end, a reverence for the standards and the practices of classical antiquity and, on the other, a faith in renewal and regeneration of the past that can enliven criticism and theory in the present, and that can redeem theory from the excesses that have attached themselves to contemporary models and thereby jeopardized the validity of interpretive acts. The signs are out there, Maestro contends, but they must be recognized, grasped, synthesized, and expanded. The material that he presents has been solidly formulated and is based on a systematic survey of previous treatment of literary genres, of broader classifications of genre, and new findings from the particular directions and methodologies of the investigation. The aim is not simplicity, and the book demands careful attention and concentration. One might feel the urge to cry out on occasion that "it's all Greek to me," but the progression is calibrated and controlled.

The study opens with a section on literary genres per se. A tone of dissatisfaction pervades the tracing of the historical record, which has culminated, in the author's opinion, in a kind of theoretical nihilism in which theorists, with no bearings, no clear markers, and no desire to reconstruct what has been deconstructed can declare that anything goes. Maestro's attempted correction of this flaw, or gap, depends on Plotinus's theory of essences, among other sources. Combining concepts of formal and material logic, Maestro sets forth a group of nine predicates for literary genre, and, in the next section, which consists of some three hundred pages, he applies the categories to Don Quijote. The analysis is comprehensive, covering such key issues as the depiction of the narrator, characterization, the parodic structure, integration of genres and types, the theme of madness, the Avellaneda sequel, the dialectics of politics and religion, autobiographical allusions, and the varieties and function of humor and irony. Genre provides a valuable frame for a consideration of Cervantes's novel, given that the narrative is, in many ways, an exploration of the motif of prototypes, primarily literary and artistic, but also socio-cultural, political, philosophical, and theological. The plays with perception, with the relative nature of truth, and with the multiple and mutable areas of subjectivity (vis-à-vis agency, identity, and conceptualization) become connecting threads in Don Quijote and in the examination of genre. Maestro cannot accept the defeatist attitude of postmodernism, with its renunciation of striving toward totality, toward plenitude, on the part of the critic. Postmodern interpretations of the Quijote perforce can only lead to conclusions that are, paradoxically, it would seem, "absolutely relative," but the resignation is unnecessary. Genre separates and finally brings elements together into a unified whole. In this de-facto deconstruction of postmodernism, the text remains open to critical analysis—Maestro does not refrain from using the word interpretation—yet the major concern is not what Jorge Luis Borges refers to as the "partial magic of the Quijote" but rather the big picture, the macrocosm that becomes inseparable from the microcosms that sustain and define it. The challenge, thus, is to overturn the irrationality that...