Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics by Anthony J. Cascardi (review)

226 Cervantes Reviews its laurels of canonicity, continues to push the boundaries of critical inquiry, delve deeper into the archives, and interrogate the underlying premises of its own scholarship. In a volume that could have been several times larger— by including other scholars whose contributions to Cervantes studies have been equally worthy—the diversity of disciplinary training, theoretical background , and professional experience of its thirty-nine authors subtly attests to this reality. In fact, Dopico Black and Layna Ranz’s achievement as a whole affirms that this kind of multiplicity—resistant to facile categorizations as it is—remains Cervantism’s strongest quality. Their explicit call to “seguir tendiendo puentes,” “trazar avenidas críticas de ida y vuelta,” and “contribuir a una mayor interacción de intereses cervantinos” on both sides of the Atlantic is one which, in the face of the aforementioned challenges currently confronting academe, we can no longer afford to ignore (14). If this volume is as much a reflection on the past as it is a roadmap for the future, and if the moment is indeed ripe for Cervantes studies to build more transatlantic bridges of mutual cooperation, then USA Cervantes lays a critical cornerstone. Paul Michael Johnson University of California, Irvine pmjohnso@uci.edu Anthony J. Cascardi. Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2012. 351 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4426-4371-0 Anthony J. Cascardi proposes to elucidate the ways in which Cervantes’s literature , especially Don Quixote, can be appreciated as much for its insightful political philosophy as for its literary genius in Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics. Cascardi recognizes that Cervantes is not a political theorist , yet Cervantes, like his humanist predecessors, understood that literature and political discourse were not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, Cascardi does not claim that the political tone of Cervantes’s literature is secondary to its literary value; but, instead, he believes that Cervantes was “centrally engaged ” in answering the question: “What is the place of literature within the (ideal) state?” (3). Cascardi addresses the different ways in which Cervantes approaches this question in a book that reveals as much about early modern political philosophy and thought as it does about Cervantes’s discourse of politics. Volume 33.1 (2013) 227 Reviews In Chapter 1, “Introduction,” Cascardi states that his aim in Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics is twofold: “First, I want to offer a vision of what the discourse of politics might have amounted to had it not been dominated by the methods and concerns associated with the thinkers just mentioned [Hobbes, Lock, Montesquieu, and Rousseau]. How might politics have been otherwise, and yet still fully modern? Second, I want to explore the specific ways in which Don Quixote, by all accounts Cervantes’ most important work, is itself involved in thinking about what the polis and political discourse might be” (3). Cascardi asserts that fiction “provides a platform for a pursuit of the truth, and with it of political ideals, within and through the realm of the manifestly false” (6). Cervantes recognized that fiction was the means by which he could question the disjuncture that exists between political theory and practice. This introduction includes an informative and thought-provoking exposition of early modern political philosophy that prepares the reader to consider the manner in which Cervantes manifests his own political philosophy. Cascardi concludes his first chapter by focusing on Don Quixote. He not only believes that Cervantes’s masterpiece “illuminates the ideological gaps between a utopian vision of politics and the political circumstances of the world at hand” (18), but that it also proposes ways to fill in these gaps. In Chapter 2, “What the Canon Said,” Cascardi centers his discussion on the Canon’s judgment that books of chivalry are “perjudiciales en la república.” Cascardi, though, informs the reader of the oblique nature of the Canon’s words, and, even more noteworthy, he draws a connection between the Canon’s opinion and Cervantes’s view of the relationship between literature and politics: “The evasiveness with which Cervantes approaches these question might itself be a key to the fact that he regards the relationship between literature and politics as...