La genealogía en cuestión: Cuerpos, textos, y reproducción en el Quijote de Cervantes by Clea Gerber

Abstract

Reviewed by: La genealogía en cuestión: Cuerpos, textos, y reproducción en el Quijote de Cervantes by Clea Gerber William H. Clamurro (bio) Clea Gerber. La genealogía en cuestión: Cuerpos, textos, y reproducción en el Quijote de Cervantes. Alcalá de Henares: Universidad de Alcalá, Servicio de Publicaciones, 2018. 316 pp. ISBN: 978-84-16978-67-0. The book under review is a fascinating work that combines erudition and imagination. Gerber takes up the implications of the well-known and playful meta-fictional statements in the prologue to the 1605 Don Quijote wherein Cervantes begins the subtle game of seemingly denying authorship of the book that is being presented, as he confronts his alleged case of writer's block before the task of writing what he is in fact deftly writing. In the process, of course, no reader is "fooled" by this pose. But rather, by means of this crafty feint, Cervantes opens up the question of the locus of authority. Gerber, however, is intrigued by the idea of paternity and non-paternity, the concept of the book being the offspring of the supposed author, and from this she traces and teases out the possibilities of human-biological generation in juxtaposition to the authoring and thus to the generation of literature. As she states on the first page of the "Introducción" (section one), "esta investigación propone un acercamiento al campo semántico que asocia cuerpos humanos y textuales en torno al eje vida-muerte-reproducción en la novela cervantina" (15). The book is then structured as follows: section two, "El programa del primer prólogo," centers on this crucial premise, the intentionally ambiguous statement or game that Cervantes himself sets forth, that he is not the father but only the step-father of the book being offered up to the public. The key point is that Gerber takes the idea of authorship, or "literary paternity," and continues to link it intimately with the plausible associations to biological paternity. This perspective becomes the basic theoretical and critical procedure of her study. After this introduction and section two, which clearly set out the book's thesis and critical approach, section three—"El Quijote de 1605: Construir un cuerpo textual"—pursues the suggestions of the instances of bodies in life and in death as they are presented in the story and thus as they suggest the dynamics of the creative, authorial process. As Gerber points out, there is a paucity of references to actual human birth in Don Quijote; rather, we find an abundance of creations in the literary (oral and textual) realms: "proliferan personajes e instancias ficcionales, orales o escritas, atribuidas a distintos personajes e instancias narradoras" (76). [End Page 203] The next section (four) deals with the 1614 Avellaneda part two of Don Quijote, which Gerber prefers to call a "continuación alógrafa," although the familiar terms "espuria" and "apócrifa" are also occasionally used in reference to the 1614 book. What is of special value in Gerber's treatment of the Avellaneda sequel is not only a detailed reading of the ways in which it differs from the Cervantine version and Cervantes's vision, but also how the intrusion of this unwanted (by Cervantes) continuation influenced what the authentic Part II of 1615 contains and how, as Gerber sees it, important elements of the 1615 second part developed as a reaction to the Avellaneda. In line with the basic and initial premise of textual creation and the familiar concept of biological reproduction, Gerber notes that "El libro de 1614 es de hecho el primero en intentar construir a partir del Quijote de 1605 una 'familia textual' (156). This concept is explored and elaborated in great detail in section five, "De 1605 a 1615: La construcción de una familia textual." In general, one of the strengths of Gerber's study is the sensitive and imaginative manner in which she juxtaposes the first and second (1605 and 1615) Cervantine texts—as different as they are, one from the other—with the intervening 1614 Avellaneda sequel. In brief, Gerber stresses the notion that the 1614 intervention seems to have either missed or consciously...