Reviews277 are surely effective models. In a word, one hardly need be a Nebrija to compose flowery language. Charles F. Fraker University ofMichigan Reed, Cory A. 77te Novelist as Playwright: Cervantes and the Entremés nuevo. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Hardcover. 212 pp. $43.95. Cory Reed's work, the first book-length study devoted exclusively to Cervantes's entremeses, is shaped by a long tradition of critical discomfiture with the novelist's failure as a playwright. Traditionally, the entremés, with its single plots, stereotyped characters, clear themes, and strong celebratory closure devices, admirably fulfilled a very simple dramatic function : to provide satisfying, undemanding intermission entertainment. The thesis of Reed's study is that the commercial unviability of the Cervantine interlude is due to Cervantes's "novelization" ofthe genre, a process he defines via a Bakhtinian theoretical model. By injecting elements of parody, satire, irony, suspense, literary polyphony, and metatheatrical structure into the simplistic interlude form Cervantes created a structural complexity and thematic indeterminacy that directors evidently felt would place too many demands on the audience and distract them from the surrounding play. Put in terms of the cinema, the modern cultural equivalent of the comedia, the thesis of this book is very simple: Cervantes tried to sell his moviegoers health food and fruit juice when all they wanted was popcorn and soft drinks. Reed's effort to valorize Cervantes's short drama as something other than dramatic, quite successful in itself, nevertheless begs the whole question he raises at the beginning of his book: "Were Cervantes's entremeses bad theatre?" (5) What he does, in effect, is turn Cervantes's inability/unwillingness to produce commercially successful plays into evidence of his greatness as a novelist and then use that acknowledged status to defend the plays. There are two unspoken premises underlying such an endeavor: first, the totalizing view that everything produced by a great author's pen should be great, and second, a conception ofliterary history as competitive, figured here in the rivalry between Cervantes and Lope, producers respectively of high/serious/complex/critical work whose value is somehow ensured by its lack of commercial appeal, and low/comic/simple/celebratory work whose very success with the vulgo makes it suspect. This artificial and erroneous 278BCom, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Winter 1994) opposition of the Cervantine and the Lopean has been largely superseded, as Reed's own thoughtful readings ofthe individual plays demonstrate. In the central two chapters of his book, Reed skilfully analyzes the eight entremeses, divided into "plays of choice" (Eljuez de los divorcios, El rufi án viudo, La elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo, La guarda cuidadosa) and "plays of deception" (El vizcaínofingido, El retablo de las maravillas, La cueva de Salamanca, El viejo celoso). He presents them as hybrids, partaking not only of an emerging novelistic discourse but also of a traditional carnivalesque one. Holding these very different discourses together is the playwright's interest in structural openendedness and thematic indeterminacy , seen, for example, in the recurrent festive theme of "uncrowning" and regeneration in El viejo celoso or El rufián dichoso, the repeated deferments ofLa elección de los alcaldes de Daganzo, or the incomplete closure of Eljuez de los divorcios. Here again Reed draws heavily on Bakhtin, as well as Peter Burke, Northrop Frye, and the recent excellent criticism by Molho, Kenworthy, Spadaccini, and Canavaggio. Unfortunately, this approach does not solve the case of the mysterious failure of Ocho comedias y ocho entremeses, published in 1615 but never performed during Cervantes's lifetime and not even reprinted until 1749, a fact that continues to nag at the conscience of Cervantes scholars (perhaps in empathetic response to the author's own expressed bitterness). Perhaps the Bakhtinian framework Reed has chosen is not the most apposite for his project. On the face ofit, a Jaussian perspective would have served him better ; audience response is what is really at issue here, not authorial command of genre. Furthermore, there is the anachronistic application of Bakhtin's theory of novelization; one simply cannot consider the early seventeenth century as "an era when the novel reigns supreme [and] almost all the remaining genres are to...
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Apr 1, 1998
A Morales 
Open Access