E. Michael Gerli. Cervantes: Displacements, Inflections, and Transcendence. Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2019. 266 pp. ISBN-13: ISBN-13: 978-1588713377.

Abstract

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 misdirection 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.