(A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque by David R. Castillo (review)

104 Reviews D Indeed, if pushed to identify a weakness in this study, I would say that Nadeau is too modest in her aims and her scope. She is clearly a skillful and subtle reader, alert to the contradictions and the difficulty of the text. The least convincing section of her analysis is the last chapter, where she herself admits that the figure of the female enchantress, as embodied in Circe and Calypso, is scarcely to be found in Don Quixote I. And yet, is it not possible that the enchantress is present in Don Quixote II, where the Duchess and Altisidora seek their own pleasure by entrapping the knight errant and his squire in their elaborate fictions? RachelSchmidt University of Calgary Castillo, David R. (A)wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures 23. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP, 2002. xiii + 182 pp. 5 ills. HB. ISBN 155753 -227-3. David Castillo’s provocative study of Cervantes and the picaresque unfolds between a Shakespearian epigraph and an (almost) closing quote from Joan Copjec: (WS) “Like perspectives which, rightly gaz’d upon / Show nothing but confusion, -ey’d awry / Distinguish form!” . . . (JC) “ . . . a society could be founded on a non-recognition of the contradictions it contains.” In Castillo’s case the question of an “awry” perspective allows him to uncover the hidden form of CounterReformation Spain, while the second quote points toward a Derridean poststructuralism that he utilizes to uncover gaps in the ideological field of Golden Age thought. I suspect that not everyone will be supportive of his challenging agenda, but it should be stressed that all scholars focused on Golden Age studies owe Castillo a good hearing. For one thing he disagrees with uncommon courtesy and tries to give an honest view of both sides. There is no demonizing of the opposition. In fact, he usually leaves open the possibility of alternate interpretations of a text, although he does privilege a counter-utopian reading of the Persiles. In this sense, he transfers Maravall’s vision of Spanish history to the texts that are the actual product of the era. Castillo is not alone, nor the first literary critic to do so, but he constructs a theoretically coherent reversal of the Christian romance readings of several distinguished Cervantistas. He is on safer ground with the picaresque texts with which he opens his study since the genre expectations are not challenged, but even here his oblique perspective brings forth fresh rereadings of well-worked material. Reseñas D 105 It should be noted that Castillo’s critical stance has its roots in the methodologies of art history. What is important to recognize is that anamorphic studies were already well-known in the sixteenth century, both in Spain and abroad. Ergo Castillo is not guilty of applying a current critical fad to writings innocent of what was at risk. In fact, he is recovering both the writer’s intent and the original readers’mode of reception. Renaissance readers knew that perspective studies had uncovered secret meanings, many of them political. Castillo cites the celebrated anamorphic portrait of Carlos V in the Cathedral of Palencia, and he provides five illustrations of anamorphic art from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: a general view of Hans Holbein’s “The Ambassadors” along with an enlarged detail of the distorted skull, then two extravagantly anamorphic woodcuts by Erhard Schön and Velázquez’s Las meninas. In the Holbein painting the startling anamorphic skull floating in the opulent study of the two distinguished diplomats adds a hidden level of meaning to a secular scene. In this way, the anamorphosis undermines the otherwise triumphal tone of the painting. This is a visual exemplar of Castillo’s own critical procedures. The introduction addresses two essential problematics: (1) a working definition of anamorphosis and (2) an excellent discussion of why the role of anamorphosis was a central issue for the Renaissance. Castillo’s definition is taken from César Nicolás’s Estrategias y lecturas: las anamorfosis de Quevedo, in which anamorphosis is an optical phenomenon that transforms the identity of the object observed according to the perspective from which it is observed. As...