Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence by E. Michael Gerli

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence by E. Michael Gerli Bradley J. Nelson (bio) E. Michael Gerli. Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2019. 266 pp. ISBN-13: ISBN-13: 978-1588713377. E. Michael Gerli begins his latest book with a prologue entitled “Cervantes and I,” in which he describes his personal and professional relationship with Cervantes as a journey that has led him to the realization that the best teacher and most reliable authority for the Cervantine oeuvre are the works and author, themselves. Rejecting “the existence of a science of literature and philology,” Gerli follows Américo Castro’s discovery that “Don Quijote’s radical contribution to narrative consisted in representing the on-going processes of human experience in the characters that inhabit the novel and in readers of it who seek to know their own world” (9). The rest of the book develops the textual bases for his claim, beginning with a theoretically-informed deep reading of the eruption of competing narrative voices in part one of Don Quixote, when the narrator interrupts the battle between Don Quixote and the Vizcaino with the subtly uproarious history of the lost Arabic manuscript, its translation, and the myriad problems and perspectives of interpretation that it drops into unsuspecting readers’ hands. Gerli links Castro’s recognition of the “problematical nature of the representation of truth” in Cervantes with Foucault’s concept of linguistic heterotopias (19–20), offering a productive and agile analytical framework for the complex linguistic games that Cervantes plays with his readers. The latter’s self-conscious presentation of the missing manuscript provides Gerli with prima facie evidence of the intentional and systematic production of textual and narrative lacunae and mis-direction that generations of philologists have peddled as signs of Cervantes’s supposed carelessness or lack of formal aesthetic training: justification, in other words, for their continued attempts to correct the text in ways that suit their own vision of an ex post facto editio printemps. Gerli’s ironically serious discussion of philology is reminiscent of Julio Baena’s sustained critique of what he calls the science’s “rigor mortis,” on the [End Page 223] one hand, and Tom Lathrop’s spirited defense of Cervantes’s artistic control over his intentionally error-filled texts, on the other. More importantly, it allows the critic to dive into the rhetorical gamesmanship of Cervantes while, at the same time, enriching his analyses with important contributions to our understanding of the literary and historical contexts with which Cervantes dialogues. Gerli’s readings demonstrate how Cervantes’s works not only communicate and model a productively ironic approach to history and truth, they also show how the metaphysical positing of a stable truth and reality beyond language, what David Castillo and William Egginton call the “major Baroque strategy,” both perpetuates and disguises systemic violence along caste, gender, ethnic, and cultural frontiers. In chapter 2 Gerli juxtaposes his analysis of “El curioso impertinente” with Francis Bacon’s “rehabilitation of curiosity” and the rise of scientific empiricism, showing, in effect, how the metaphysics of honor attempt to appropriate the early modern drive toward scientific certainty. In this perspectival analysis of the tragedies that ensue from Anselmo’s drive towards absolute knowledge, “Cervantes signals the need for an ethical basis to all belief [...] and [...] that the search for truth [...] requires moral agency,” situating judgment in relation to values as opposed to knowledge. Chapter 3 continues in this vein through an insightful analysis of Cañizares’s analogously impertinent desire to preserve his young wife’s chastity—albeit through enclosure as opposed to temptation—in the entremés El viejo celoso. Gerli reminds us that the interludes should not be detached from their performative placement as entr’actes in the comedia nueva, which foregrounds their critical relationship with the socio-economic apparatuses surrounding early modern theatrical institutions. The author reads Cervantes’s purpose in these pieces as the production of “critical insight regarding the representation of the long-established conflict between honor, morality, and individual desire that lies at the heart of the Spanish drama at the start of the seventeenth century,” specifically the ways in which the comedia nueva obfuscates...