Seduction and Sacrilege: Rhetorical Power in Fray Gerundio de Compazas (review)

Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 279 agents in events of macrohistorical significance. Rather, they are a set of individual consciousness, with their respective voices, of the everyday struggle for survival in a very turbulent society. Auyero underscores the "quest for recognition" of their consciousness and their voice as women, but their experiences are made all the more eloquent because of their class position and their standing on the periphery of the Argentine geographic imaginary. David William Foster Arizona State University Seduction and Sacrilege: Rhetorical Power in Fray Gerundio de Compazas Bucknell University Press/Associated University Presses, 2002 By Rebecca Haidt Today, students of the Spanish eighteenth century hardly think of José Francisco de Isla's Fray Gerundio de Compazas (1758-1768) as a "hot" novel. But perhaps they should, or more to the point, perhaps they will once they read Haidt's impressive study of this best-seller (it sold more than eight hundred copies the first day). Isla's biting satire of bad rhetoric and slovenly educational practices among the Spanish clergy clearly touched a nerve in his society, and the novel provoked an outcry of protest, laughter, and condemnation. But historical anecdote isn't the only reason to rediscover Fray Gerundio. We might ask ourselves, "How important is this novel?" Haidt's book is a response to that question, for she not only rehearses its historical importance but also demonstrates its relevance for todays critic and reader. In her reading , it is "a narrative mapping tensions that still inform contemporary culture." Chapter 1, "'Anything is Possible:' Fray Gerundio, Don Quijote and the Seduction of Language ," addresses Isla's stated hope that his novel would do for the eighteenth century what Cervantes's did for the seventeenth, that is, gain popularity and purge the country of a certain type of literature (in Cervantes's case, the noveb de cabalkrÃ-as; in Islas, conceptista preaching and bad sermons). Isla counted on his readers' familiarity with the great Cervantine novel in order to engage them in debates concerning rhetoric, reality, and learning. Haidt's first chapter is an important preamble to the rest of the book, since it sets up a discussion of the classical rhetorical srrategies, which both authors drew upon. Chapter 2 engages the thorny issue of baroque vs. rococo rhetoric. "Gerundian Preaching and Rococo Seduction" is fresh, fascinating, and convincing in its claim diat Gerundian rhetoric is not baroque, as some critics have observed, but something new, something we might call "rococo" ("cultivated, lavish, and excessive" 46). Haidt links this language to the eighteenth-century concept of luxury, stating, "Gerundios intent to play and seduce rather than guide and instruct references a feminized disorderliness long linked to luxurious desire by theorists of rhetoric, moralists, and theologians" (63). The chapter reveals brilliant and utterly original insights into eighteenth-century luxury, feminization , and language. Chapter 3 rehearses rhe debate between the Ancients and Moderns ("The Wisdom of Age, die Imprudence of Youdi: Sacrilege and the Quarrel of Ancients and Moderns") and ties it to Isla's understanding of the general lines of the discussion. As has been noted by Sebold in slightly different terms, the Ancients for Isla could be as much Fray Luis de Granada as Cicero. For Isla's Gerundio, though, the debate was not necessarily between Ancients and Moderns, but rather between the Old and the Young. Haidt cleverly reveals this bizarre dichotomy and discusses how subdy Isla handles it in the novel. Thus in Fray Gerundio, at stake in die Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns is above all the power to direct meaning through language" (102). Chapter 4, "Scheming and Spending: The Politics of Becoming a Preacher," addresses the subject of money and fame, which Gerundio (against the tenets of his mendicant order) covets. Haidt sets his desires, and those of his co-conspirator, Bias, against the wider background of popular religious celebrations and practices in the Spanish eighteenth century. A she notes, "In their manipulation of rhetorical power, Gerundio and Bias engage in disobedience, greed, envy, lying, and hypocrisy, 280 Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies violating most all the standards of the religious life" (119). What could be more modern? This is an...