Discourses of Empire: Counter-Epic Literature in Early Modern Spain (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 247 Discourses of Empire: Counter-Epic Literature in Early Modern Spain Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003 By Barbara Simerka This groundbreaking study establishes "counter-epic" as a category that mediates between literary genres by placing them in contact with historical reality. As Simerka explains, the mock-heroic poetry, comedies with indiano characters, and history plays on military subjects that she brings together here have in common their engagement with the political and social consequences for Spain of rhe Hapsburg empire. She brings historians' accounts to bear on a rich array of under-studied texts by both major and minor authors (Lope, Tirso, Cervantes , Quevedo, Rojas Zorilla, and González de Busros), producing a series of readings rhat amply demonstrate her main thesis, that seventeenth -century writers inscribed their responses to Spanish imperialism into their texts in innovative ways, even where overt content does not address rhose circumstances directly. The book culminates with an insightful examination of mock-epic aspects of Don Quixote, confirming that this approach sheds new light on the complex interaction berween literature and the historical circumstances under which it is produced. In methodological terms, however, Simerka promises more than she delivers. Pursuing a "materialist poetics of genre," she claims to emulate Leonard Tennenhouse's juxtapositions of Shakespeare's plays and non-literary texts (9). Yet in practice, she relies exclusively on the reconstructions of a few modern historians , mainly Pagden, Elliort, and Lynch. Though she tenaciously pursues connections berween literary representations and historical realities, Simerka questions neither the underlying positivist assumptions of the historiography she appropriates nor the techniques for reading imaginative writing she has inherited from literary studies. The kind of historicism with which Simerka wishes to align herself could announce itself as new because it embedded the literary text in discursive networks of irs own time, rather than reading it as part of the modern European canon. In Power on Dispky, (Methuen, 1986), Tennenhouse is quite explicit in saying that he turns to speeches, proclamations, and reports as a way of breaking down reading habits that make older texts look like post-Romantic ones: I have resorted to other kinds of writing mainly to prevenr my reading Shakespeare as a novel. Whenever I felt myself caught within a developmental narrative [...] [that] seemed to take on the logic of personal motivation, I have interrupred my reading and sought reference to another kind of Renaissance text. [...] On these occasions I have interposed a royal speech or a proclamation , information concerning a ledger report or parliamenrary debate [...] to disrupt our conventional logic of explanation and identify some important differences berween it and the cultural logic which organized Shakespeare's plays. (14-15) In this view, traditional literary studies, even before New Criticism, tore early modern imaginative writing from its discursive context and anachronistically recontextualized it as "literature ." Reversing this practice highlights strategies for represenration (not just thematic concerns ) that cut across genres, and thereby shows power operating in and through works of the imagination, rather than seeing them only as responses to power. Such issues, arguably the hallmark of cultural-studies approaches to older literature, are not addressed in Discourses of Empire. This is nor to deny the value of work that does not take such an approach. A case in point is Quint's Epic and Empire (Princeton, 1993), cited several times by Simerka. Distancing himself from the critical technique of linking literary texts with "almost any other text of the culture ," Quint prefers to privilege "the text's own 248 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies explicit allusive network" (14-15). His impressive romp across two millennia of epic attests to the continued vitality oÃ- literary studies. Further , rhe ideological functioning of the poems remains central to his readings. Despite her own positioning of herself, I would argue rhat Simerka is actually closer methodologically to Quint than to the cultural materialism she espouses . In sum, Discourses of Empire should occupy a prominent place in the growing body of work that looks at early modern Spanish literary production in relation to outward colonial expansion and its internal consequences. Less sophisticated theoretically than Barbara Fuchs' Mimesis and Empire, with which it will...