Exégesis del “error”: una reinterpretación de la praxis de escritura en Libro de la vida, Novelas ejemplares y Desengaños amorosos by Elena Rodríguez-Guridi (review)

In Exégesis del “error,” Elena Rodríguez-Guridi brings together studies of three works that, as she declares in her opening sentence, “se resisten a ser sometidas a toda clasificación si no es suprimiendo los ‘errores’ y contradicciones que las caracterizan” (1). According to Rodríguez-Guridi, the works in question—Teresa of Ávila’s Libro de la vida, Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares, and María de Zayas’s Desengaños amorosos—have remained largely unclassifiable due to the preponderance of contradictions, paradoxes, ellipses, and other forms of apparent digression that populate their pages.

In her introduction, subtitled “Una re-evaluación de la digresió n,” the author establishes the theoretical basis for her argument. In particular, she views the works in question as reflecting “el mismo estado de contradicción y conflicto que experimenta el individuo del Barroco ante la entrada de un sistema económico de signo capitalista que es imposible de conciliar con la vieja teoría estamental” (1). Linking this notion to Julia Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, Rodríguez-Guridi posits that the texts at issue in her study owe their apparent digressions and contradictions to the tension that they express between the semiotic and the symbolic, as they make plain their own processes of production. Perhaps anticipating questions about the overall coherence of a study that focuses on two sets of novellas and a mystic autobiography, Rodríguez-Guridi attempts to tie the works together by stating that they are all based on “modelos legítimos y avalados por el orden masculino” (3). While this may be true, the observation does little to deflect such questions, for the category seems so broadly defined as to be largely meaningless.

Chapter two, “Pasajes para perderse en el Libro de la vida de Santa Teresa de Jesús,” provides a wide-ranging discussion of Teresa of Ávila’s famed autobiography, placing the work within the context of various sociohistorical crises and transformations (though why the overarching historical contextualization is placed in this chapter rather than in the book’s introduction is rather unclear). Touching on everything from Europe’s transition to mercantilism, to conflicts in the Church, to the rise of print culture, Rodríguez-Guridi views Teresa’s autobiography as reflective of fissures in the symbolic order as it emphasizes the semiotic in a number of ways. By exploring issues such as Teresa’s relationship with various father figures, her incorporation of aspects of autobiography, hagiography, and chivalric literature, her often convoluted and paradoxical style, and the question of the mystic body, Rodríguez-Guridi provides a solid, theoretically informed reading of the autobiography, although at times her approach seems mainly an amalgam of previous critical interpretations of the text.

In my view, the following chapter, “Las novelas ejemplares, una poética del humor,” is the most original of the three studies in the book. Rodríguez-Guridi begins with an examination of the theme of the Novelas’ crisis of the sign, particularly as seen in the prologue’s discussion of exemplarity and in Cervantes’s complex appropriation of the picaresque. She then moves on to a broader discussion of linguistic crisis and its relationship to humor, stating, “Cervantes ataca toda relación dialéctica producida por la lógica económica del lenguaje al poner de relieve mediante las inconsistencias y contradicciones en el discurso los mecanismos que están implicados en el humor y en todo proceso de significación que produce realidad e identidad” (70). The examples that the author cites in support of this idea of the “economic logic of language,” however, often seem a bit cherry-picked and haphazard. Indeed, it is never...