Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean by Paul Michael Johnson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean by Paul Michael Johnson Steven Wagschal Johnson, Paul Michael. Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean. Toronto: U Toronto P, 2021. 328 pp. Affective Geographies: Cervantes, Emotion, and the Literary Mediterranean explores affectivity—broadly construed as affects, passions, emotions, feelings, and behaviors associated with these—in the works of Miguel de Cervantes as a way of understanding how early modern individuals made sense of the Mediterranean world they inhabited. Analyzing selected works of Cervantes’ prose, poetry, and drama, Paul Michael Johnson reveals how the complexity of emotions and their modes of expression are often central to interpreting important Cervantine passages or even entire works. Developing the ideas of Fernand Braudel, Johnson argues that the early modern Mediterranean World is a constructed space—an imagined community, to invoke Benedict Anderson, as Johnson does—and that one of its main modes of construction is the literary field. This leads to a greater claim that the Mediterranean World and affectivity in Cervantes’ works are not simply thematically related, but interdependent, bolstering the importance of studying and understanding each of these independently. Johnson’s engagement with affects and what he calls “the microliterary” is a turn away from a Braudelian “macrohistorical landscape” (5). By focusing on one single author who has had an unparalleled influence on later literature, Johnson argues that Cervantes’s work “not only reflects the historical conditions in which it was engendered but also plays a part in generating these very conditions” (5–6), thus impacting the construction of what we have come to understand as the early modern Mediterranean world and its recovery today. The book is divided into three sections of two chapters each that focus on different works by Cervantes as well as different emotions. In the first section, “Casting Off,” Johnson explains his view of affectivity and examines historical accounts centered in Spain’s early modern period as well as some contemporary theoretical notions of emotion in psychology and philosophy. Johnson then explores historical analyses of the Mediterranean and the construction of the literary Mediterranean. This section discusses a number of Cervantes’ narrative works and also some works of poetry and drama, mining these for both examinations of the intermingling of cultures and dialects so prevalent in Cervantes’ works and in the historical Mediterranean, as well as for Johnson’s view of “visual and corporeal grammar of affect” (38). In this way, Johnson indicates for the reader how he will argue throughout the book, that is, by subtly drawing attention to facial expressions and other bodily indicators of emotions such as sighing and crying that are mentioned in narrative. These indicators are so important according to Johnson that “[e]motions constitute the expressive precondition of the act of storytelling or writing itself ” (40). In Section Two, “Quixotic Passages,” Johnson turns to a specific discussion of Mediterranean honor versus shame through a novel and enlightening reading of Don Quixote’s encagement at the end of Part I as an example of shaming practices, and more particularly, to offer a nuanced reading of Don Quixote’s “characterological manifestations” of shame as an emotion. Arguing for the presence of shame, Johnson convincingly relies on “physiognomic qualities of shame” (74), such as [End Page 423] blushing, to reread this important and often studied episode. Following this, Johnson examines the importance of laughter in the Ricote episode, set against a nuanced and well-informed backdrop of the historical situation of the Moriscos in which he draws on secondary texts like Pedro Aznar Cardona’s account of the 1612 expulsion. Johnson compellingly adds much to the discussion and interpretation of the Ricote episode, demonstrating that “laughter encodes transculturation and modulates the seemingly less ambiguous feelings of maurophobia and maurophilia” (127). In Section Three, “Other Ports of Call,” Johnson explores in Chapter Five the emotion of wonder (and related phenomena such as awe and surprise) in La española inglesa (1613). Here, the author calls attention to the emotional aspects of admiratio and related concepts, in light of the lengthy critical history of studying admiratio within the framework of the Horatian dictum on exemplarity through aesthetic pleasure, as Johnson convincingly shows how a...