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Prepared by Janet Pérez92

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Peninsular Literature

Burton, David G. The Legend of Bernardo del Carpio from Chronicle to Drama. Scripta Humanistica 47. Potomac, Maryland: Scripta Humanistica, 1988. xi + 82 pp.

Although not so described in the text, this monograph is apparently a somewhat revised version of the author's Ph. D. thesis, submitted to the University of Kentucky in 1983 and directed by John Lihani, who provides a brief foreword here.

Burton considers in detail Juan de la Cueva's Comedia de la libertad de España por Bernardo del Carpio, thus making a modest contribution to the reexamination of Cueva's work which has been undertaken in the 1970's and 1980's, notably by Anthony Watson and José María Reyes Cano.

After an opening chapter on Cueva's life and works discussion turns to (1) the relationship between the play and the stories told about Bernardo in chronicles and certain ballads; (2) plot and style; (3) characters; and (4) Cueva's view of drama «as a didactic tool through which he could make political, moral, and religious statements while, at the same time, entertaining the public» (55-56). Burton insists that Cueva's plays exerted a major influence on the work of other dramatists, especially Lope (still a debatable point, particularly in the case of Lope, and only affirmed, not proven, here). The message of the play is dual: (a) political -Watson's thesis that the drama warns Philip II against invading Portugal is accepted; (b) moral and religious- an exhortation to observe the virtues of temperance, fortitude, justice, and prudence, with the assurance that God's promise of grace and salvation rewards such virtues. This last portion (61-69), the thesis of this thesis, has already been published almost verbatim in Bulletin of the Comediantes, Vol. 38, No. 1 (1986), 219-29.

Moments of carelessness and ingenuousness mar the monograph; some of them could have been eliminated by intelligent editing, especially with respect to punctuation, which wholly ignores the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses.

Juan de la Cueva's family may have been Old Christian (8), but converso origins are possible in view of the number of physicians in the family and the confusion about his father's first apellido, Núñez, appearing in a document of 1543 (4) but soon dropped entirely or replaced by López. Relying on Reyes Cano's new discoveries about Cueva's biography, Burton correctly states that the dramatist died in Granada in 1612 (7) yet still says that Cueva spent the last two years of his life in Cuenca (6).

The discussion of Cueva's rhetorical devices gives the impression that many of them were innovations, whereas most were the by-then trite practice of cancionero and Petrarchist poets. Cueva is commended for cleverly using hyperbaton to insure that all his lines contain the appropriate number of syllables (32); however feeble a poet Cueva may have been, he did not have to employ hyperbaton to maintain proper syllable count or the rhyme scheme. Also praised are the numerous instances of polyptoton (33-34), that repetitive scheme which Cervantes ridiculed in the work of Feliciano de Silva (DQ I: 1).

Most puzzling is the author's apparent belief that the character Carlo Mano is different from the historical Carlomagno: he is called a «thinly disguised Charlemagne» (26); the name is «transparent pseudonym» (47). There is no such disguise. Cueva wrote indifferently gn or n, but the pronunciation was simply n. Appendix A (72), «Examples of Juan de la Cueva's Spelling Style», does not pick up this common practice, though there are frequent occurrences in the play text edited by Anthony Watson (Exeter, England: Exeter Univ. Printing Unit, 1974): see, e. g., sinificaros (vs. 505), manificencia (vs. 1311), but benigno (vs. 501), rhyming with camino (vs. 499).

Finally, what reader of this monograph needs to be reminded of the Church's dominant social role in Cueva's time or of the history of the Inquisition (7-8), or of the definition of the neo-Aristotelian dramatic unities (39)?

Despite these flaws it is gratifying to have a consideration of a Cueva play little treated by critics. Cueva is a central figure in the group of dramatists following the model of Seneca in the 1580's. This short monograph usefully reminds us of his accomplishment.

Willard F. King

Bryn Mawr College

Ricapito, Joseph F., editor. Hispanic Studies in Honor of Joseph H. Silverman. Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta, 1988. xxxiv + 379 pp.

The publication of this collection of twenty-five articles by students, collaborators and friends of Joseph H. Silverman preceded his death (March 23, 1989) by only a few months. The list of his publications through most of 1986 number almost three hundred items, many of them co-authored with several of the contributors to this book, especially with Samuel G. Armistead; the latter is probably the most enduring and most productive collaboration ever in the field of Hispanic studies. The contents of this volume match closely those of Silverman's own research, with emphasis on Romancero, Sephardic, other Medieval and Golden Age topics, often in combination.

Several articles focus on the importance of certain lexical or metrical elements in literary works or in general usage. Armistead provides examples of paragogic -e- and -d- to bolster his neo-traditionalist —90→ theories of the oral origins of Medieval epic and its relationship to the Romancero. Manuel da Costa Fontes argues that Rojas's ironical use of limpieza and its congeners in La Celestina constitutes a slightly veiled attack on the limpieza de sangre concept. Manuel Alvar discusses the multiple meanings, many not ecclesiastical, of clerc and related terms in Gower's Confessio Amantis and of clérigo and related words in its fifteenth-century translation by Juan de la Cuenca. Francisco Márquez Villanueva traces through Hispanic literature the erotic symbolism of pan (bread) and related terms, then analyzes their thematic-structural importance in the first two acts of Lope de Vegas Los españoles en Flandes. Dwight Bolinger charts the drift toward the usage of the plural in both English and Spanish for the concept of one each.

Besides those of Armistead and da Costa Fontes, there are other articles on Judeo-Hispanic topics. Diego Catalán supports his conviction that the modern Sephardic romance of Don Bernax is identical to the story of the fall of Álvaro de Luna. Iacob M. Hassán makes a detailed comparison of and a tentative filiation between a variety of poetical versions in Mediterranean Sephardic tradition of the story of the mission of Moses. Israel J. Katz does a musicological study of the contrafact technique in the Judeo-Hispanic Romancero tradition. Elena Romero provides a critical edition of a poem by the eighteenth-century poet Hayim Yom-Tob Magula.

There are still more studies on other Medieval and Romancero subjects. James T. Monroe interprets Ibn Quzman's prologue and additional data to conclude that the zajal was an ancient Andalusian genre of popular oral origin which literate poets began to imitate several generations before Ibn Quzman (died 1160) himself. John E. Keller explains the discrepancy between the number of titles and the number of actual narrations in Medieval Spanish exempla collections, then briefly comments on one of the last stories included in El conde Lucanor. J. Richard Andrews remarks on five cases in which Montalvo manipulated the plot of Las sergas de Esplandián to downplay Amadís de Gaula in favor of his son. Marsha Swislocki finds in the romance «En las almenas de Toro» more a presence of the assertive Urraca than of the passive and little-known Elvira, and likewise an amorous rather than a political rivalry between the Cid and Alfonso. Paul Benichou traces the history of early nineteenth-century French translations of Spanish romances, especially the Cidian ones, and comments on their influence on the development of the short epic genre in French Romanticism.

Márquez Villanueva's article and one by the late Stephen Gilman give valuable insight into plays by Lope. Gilman demonstrates that linguistic and visual imagery form a tragic poem which flows beneath the comic surface of El rey don Pedro en Madrid o el Infanzón de Illescas.

The pieces on Cervantine themes offer new approaches to familiar problems. Luis A. Murillo shows how Cervantes distributed narrative units over ten days and nights, moving from eclogue to novel in La Galatea. Thomas A. Lathrop uses analogies to emphasize the separate identities of the fictitious narrator in Don Quijote, Cide Hamete and the author Cervantes. For Carroll B. Johnson the Ricote episode in Don Quijote embodies Spain's economic crisis of the time as well as religious considerations. Donald Bleznick draws an idealized parallel between Don Quijote and Calderon's Segismundo. Ricapito reexamines Cervantes's use of some picaresque elements and his rejection of others in four of the Novelas ejemplares. Albert Sicroff sees a diminishing degree of exemplarity from the first to the last of the Novelas ejemplares in the order in which Cervantes had them published.

There are a few items on twentieth-century topics. Antonio Sánchez Romeralo reproduces and comments on the poetic correspondence between Rubén Darío and Juan Ramón Jiménez. Ricardo Gullón offers an intimate lyrical account of his adolescent discovery of the poetry of Darío, Jiménez and Antonio Machado. Benito Brancaforte considers Américo Castro's texts in light of Michel Foucault's filosofia del sospetto. Seymour Menton finds progress in the open treatment of female and family in recent works by the Cuban playwright Freddy Artiles.

There are numerous errata; the most serious is the omission of part of note 7 on page 249. But most of them are minor irritants, and they are more than compensated for by the pleasing features of Juan de la Cuesta Press's quality printing, stylized initial letters for each article and attractive hard cover. Many of the essays, but not all, will find their place in the corpus of obligatory background reading for the subjects with which they deal. The book merits a good recommendation.

Sydney P. Cravens

Texas Tech University

Pérez, Louis C., editor. The Dramatic Works of Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán. Valencia: Albatros Hispanófila, 1988. 362 pp.

Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán's is not a household name even among specialists in Golden Age drama. She is not accorded mention in Francisco Ruiz Ramón's Historia del teatro español or Henryk Ziomek's more recent A History of Spanish Golden Age Drama. While Carolyn Galerstein (Women Writers of Spain: An Annotated Bio-bibliographical Guide. NY: Greenwood, 1986, p. 98) dedicates a paragraph to her, the only full-length critical study is Santiago Montoto de Sedas's Doña Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán (Seville: Imprenta de la Deputación Provincial, 1915). Until now, biographical data and the first part of her Tragicomedia de los jardines y campos sabeos with its entreactos has —91→ been most readily available in Manuel Serrano y Sanz's Apuntes para una biblioteca de escritoras españolas desde el año 1401 al 1833 (Madrid: Sucesores de Rivadeneyra, 1903). The second part was not republished after the author's second edition in 1627.

Pérez introduces his study with the little information known about the author's life -her two marriages and her two sisters, Doña Carlota and Doña Madalena, nuns in the convent of Santa Inés, to whom Doña Feliciana dedicated Part 1 of Los jardines y campos sabeos. Part 2 of Los jardines is dedicated to her brother-in-law Lorenzo de Ribera Garabito. The two-plays contain much tantalizingly autobiographical material. Pérez tells us: «In a sense, these plays may be viewed as a poetic biography of the author's life. Though not highly dramatic, they are highly appealing aesthetically: filled with songs, symbols, metaphors, word play, mythological figures, literary references, ballads and proverbs. Together with the arrangement of the different elements (i. e., Preambles, Interludes, etc.) they invite much cerebral discovery and reflect an intelligent and very artistic mind. Without doubt they produced in the audience more of a poetic experience than a dramatic one» (24).

Prince Clarisel, Part 1, separated from his beloved Princess Belidiana, remains faithful to her for three years until he learns that she has married another. In Part 2, Prince Clarisel is ultimately successful in his quest for the hand of Princess Maya, who has always loved him. References to Doña Feliciana's second husband, Francisco de León Garabito suggest that Clarisel and Maya are alter-egos of this couple of companion writer spouses.

Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán, author of poetry, plays, choruses and interludes, published her works in Coimbra, 1624, and again in Lisbon, 1627. By her own admission, she wrote for a cultured, aristocratic audience in whose palaces and drawing rooms her works were staged. The popular theater of the masses was not for her. She also opposed the practices of the comedia nueva by adhering to the Aristotelian precepts as she understood them. Her defenses of classicism, expressed in the prologue of Part 1 and again in the «Carta Executoria» appeared only in the second edition and may have been composed in reply to her critics who pointed out that her plays fail to adhere completely to the rules she herself sets forth (10). In contrast to her lyrically languorous plays, the three prose and one verse interludes, which put Bacchus, Apollo, Midas and Cupid on stage with contemporary crippled beggars, feature rapid action and witty dialogue.

Pérez provides a summary of the plays and of the interludes that follow Acts 2 and 3 of each work. He describes the 1624 and 1627 editions and adduces possible reasons for their publication in Coimbra and Lisbon instead of in the author's native Seville. Pérez bases his edition on the second edition (Lisbon, 1627) because he believes it to be the author's preferred version. Significant differences between the first and second editions are indicated in the notes. The present edition differs from both of the earlier ones in that the editor has wisely chosen to separate the choruses and interludes from the body of the text. By printing them at the end of the plays, he helps the reader experience the works in a more unified and direct manner.

Pérez has made Feliciana Enríquez de Guzmán's plays readily available to students and scholars for the first time. The works' very existence reminds us that even in the heyday of the corrales, an aristocratic lady could cultivate drawing-room drama as a testimonial of her love, talent and imagination.

Ann E. Wiltrout

Mississippi State University

Molina, Tirso de. Diálogos teológicos y otros versos diseminados. Edited by Luis Vázquez. Kassel: Edition Reichenberger, 1988. 261 pp.

Although modern collections of the «complete works» of Golden Age poets and dramatists abound, research scholars realize that they are mostly incomplete. A good portion of what these authors produced, when it did not circulate in manuscript, was in its time often published in collected miscellanies with the works of others and, thus, still remains hidden. In this edition of several scattered works by Tirso de Molina, Luis Vázquez demonstrates that it is yet possible to find significant Golden Age literary documents not just in Spain, but in archives and libraries throughout the world.

Although no single work collected and edited here by Vázquez would be sufficient to stand alone, as a whole the two theological dialogues and eleven occasional poems published by him are valuable in that they help to flesh out further both Tirso's human face and his intellectual profile. The theological dialogues, for example, deal with familiar tirsian concerns (the existence and nature of evil, and the question of sin, free will, and predestination) and reflect major doctrinal issues debated by Tirso's Neo-Scholastic contemporaries. However, they also show a side to Tirso which, though there, is not always so easily discerned in his narrative and dramatic works-his mastery of the formal techniques of disputation, and his familiarity with topical theory and dialectic. Though Vázquez fails to note it, these dialogues provide important evidence linking not just dogma but formal logic to imaginative literature in seventeenth-century Spain. As revealed in them, Tirso's knowledge of topics and rhetorical distinctions confirm an intrusion of dialectic into his creative processes and point to a potentially fruitful field of investigation.

In addition to the two dialogues, Vázquez brings together and edits several other short pieces of occasional verse dispersed in seventeenth-century —92→ collections. Each of these is chosen for publication and commentary because it either provides further clues to Tirso's scant biography, or it helps place him within the literary feuds and polemics of his time. In one of these, for example, we see the merciless Mercedarian attack the physically handicapped Juan Ruiz de Alarcón («porque es todo tan mal dicho / como el poeta mal hecho» [199]); while in others dedicated to different individuals we can follow his search for patronage and piece together the circle of his literary friends and acquaintances. The circumstances surrounding the fate of his verses «A San Isidro Labrador», submitted for the junta poética convoked to celebrate the saint's canonization in 1622, reveal that he was denied a prize by the unofficial judge, Lope de Vega, who, despite dedicating his Lo fingido verdadero to Tirso, was probably less than delighted by his disciple's resounding success. Each text edited here, hence, has its own anecdotal history and helps individually to place Tirso within the larger context of seventeenth-century Spanish literature.

Despite this laudable accomplishment, however, the edition's introduction and texts are seriously weakened by flaws unbefitting scholarly publication: inconsistent and inaccurate bibliographical reporting (cfr. the citation of E. R. Curtius on p. 16 with the one on p. 33, also the incomplete reference to an article by Antonio Vilanova on p. 16), careless proofreading (cfr. 21, 33, and passim), and vague, impressionistic statements about the quality of Tirso's verse, among them. Similarly, the section titled «La lengua poética de Tirso» lacks critical depth and is, at best, no more than a fragmented catalogue of the figures of speech Tirso employs in this collection of some of his scattered works.

In short, Vázquez's edition compiles and comments upon some of Tirso's dispersed minor works and is, thus, useful for placing him within the context of seventeenth-century Spanish literature. At the same time, however, greater attention might have been paid to the presentation and discussion of the texts.

E. Michael Gerli

Georgetown University

Howe, Elizabeth Teresa. Mystical Imagery (Santa Teresa de Jesús and San Juan de la Cruz). New York: Peter Lang, 1988. 360 pp.

Elizabeth Teresa Howe, en su extensa obra Mystical Imagery, se ha adentrado en el rico mundo de imágenes literarias utilizado por los grandes místicos carmelitas, Santa Teresa de Jesús y San Juan de la Cruz.

Consciente de la pluralidad de acepciones y acercamientos al fenómeno místico, la autora establece en el primer capítulo los parámetros de su trabajo. Parte de la definición de misticismo como el anhelo de algunas personas, avanzadas en su camino espiritual, de experimentar ya en esta vida terrena la unión con el absoluto: Dios. Acoge las declaraciones de los místicos, especialmente Teresa y Juan, sobre sus dificultades para comunicar las vivencias unitivas con la divinidad y la necesidad que experimentan de utilizar «figuras, comparaciones y semejanzas», en palabras de San Juan de la Cruz, para superar la insuficiencia del lenguaje al tratar de verter en palabras los secretos y misterios de sus experiencias místicas.

Enmarcada en estos principios, la doctora Howe ha concentrado su investigación en el análisis de las imágenes utilizadas por los dos grandes carmelitas para comunicar lo inefable. Ha distribuido la abundante materia en capítulos donde recoge imágenes -teresianas o joaninas-relativas tanto a la flora, fauna, y fenómenos naturales, a los objetos y actividades cotidianos, como al cuerpo en su aspecto físico y social. Repite un esquema claro y sencillo en cada capítulo: búsqueda de las fuentes bíblicas, clásicas o tradicionales de cada imagen; análisis de su sentido, siempre dentro del contexto místico, y estudio del uso y significado de esa imagen concreta en escritores como Garcilaso, Fray Luis de León, Lope de Vega, Góngora, Quevedo, Calderón y Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

A lo largo de las 360 apretadas páginas queda patente que la doctora Howe domina la materia que investiga. Se vale de una extensa y variada bibliografía (donde se incluyen las obras más recientes sobre aspectos lingüísticos y literarios de los místicos carmelitas), que ella maneja con independencia crítica y selectiva. Muestra, al mismo tiempo, un profundo conocimiento de los textos de Santa Teresa y San Juan de la Cruz. Consecuente con sus propios parámetros teóricos, centra el análisis de las imágenes y se ciñe al contexto místico de la expresión de las relaciones con la divinidad. Señala repetidamente las diferencias en el uso y significado que cada autor les atribuye, así como la complejidad y ambivalencia de sentidos con que ciertas imágenes, «ocio-negocio», «beso», «mano», «disfraz», aparecen en las obras de los dos carmelitas.

Aunque la presentación de estos contrastes, repetidamente subrayados y la acumulación de imágenes, en especial las corporales en el largo capítulo dedicado al cuerpo social y físico, pueden llegar a la saturación y perder su eficacia, Mystical Imagery constituye una excelente aportación al estudio del lenguaje místico.

Nos unimos al profesor Bruce Wardropper cuando afirma que «This book is fundamental for an understanding both of how mystics wrote and of what their contribution was to the expansion of literary possibilities».

Maria Paz Aspe

Fordham University

Nieto, José C. San Juan de la Cruz, poeta del amor profano. Navacerrada (Madrid): Editorial Swan, 1988. 414 pp.

Literary history and criticism now and then tend —93→ to enshrine works of creative genius. This is particularly true of religious and mystical poetry which generates more reverence than rigorous scrutiny. Menéndez y Pelayo felt that it would be sacrilegious to analyze the poetry of Spain's greatest mystical poet, San Juan de la Cruz, as we would an ode by Pindar or Horace. Therefore San Juan's poem, «Noche oscura», traditionally has been read, consistently and exclusively, as an allegory of the mystical union of the soul with God. The value of Nieto's book is the simply stated, carefully argued declaration that should have been made generations ago, that San Juan's poem is primarily and directly a song of erotic human love.

An unbiased reading of the lyric makes it clear that the poem celebrates the episode of a young woman who slips out of her house at night to find her lover in the woods and there consummate their sexual passion. None of the images or metaphors, Nieto argues convincingly, are religious or mystical in nature and therefore the poem is not primarily an allegory. The culprit responsible for this literary sting is San Juan himself who composed a lengthy prose commentary on the poem, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, which transforms the human sexual encounter of two lovers into an ascetical treatise on the theology of mystical union with God.

With faith in San Juan's infallible commentary, literary critics such as Menéndez Pelayo, Dámaso Alonso and Jean Baruzi have dealt with «Noche oscura» as essentially an allegory of divine mystical love. Credit Nieto with making the obvious observation that the poem in its structure and imagery, has nothing at all to do with God, theology or mystical union. Nieto escapes the trap of previous critics who read San Juan's poetry as biography and therefore wince at the thought of a Carmelite saint celebrating sexual intercourse. Failing to separate the poet from his persona, traditional criticism camouflages the erotic images with allegorical symbols of divine spiritual love.

Nieto strips away from the poem the accumulated layers of allegory, theology and spirituality that have hidden the original poetic experience and takes a fresh, untrammeled look at the lyrical celebration of human sexual love that creates an ingenuously erotic adventure. The author forces the reader to return to an elementary aesthetic idea -that the poetic experience is primary, anterior to any subsequent artful manipulation of the experience in the service of hermeneutics, allegory or theology. Readers of «Noche oscura» seem to have taken a quick, flushed glance at the erotic beauty of the poem and then have chastely draped it with ascetical and mystical speculations.

Nieto correctly argues that the traditional interpretation of «Noche oscura» as «la peregrinación del alma, la llegada y el anuncio de la unión mística, y la escena de la unión mística» (44) cannot in any sense be based on a simple, unprejudiced reading of the poem. Most critics have taken as a starting point for their understanding of the poem not the original poetic experience but the later prose commentary of «Noche oscura» written by San Juan and have made the commentary primary in a classic example of figure/ground reversal.

Nieto compares «Noche oscura» to San Juan's admittedly allegorical poem, «Cántico espiritual», proving clearly that the two poems differ as expressions of human and divine love. «Noche oscura» has been treated as a mystical allegory because critics identify its images with those of the «Cántico», a mistake that Nieto wittingly calls «cantificación», the unscrupulous process of forcing upon «Noche oscura» the allegorical and mystical imagery of the «Cántico». Nieto also compares San Juan's poetry to that of two other Renaissance poets, Garcilaso de la Vega and Sebastián de Córdoba, in an effort to determine to what extent San Juan was influenced by these two pastoral poets in the creation of some of his basic images such as «noche», «fuente», and «búsqueda».

Once Nieto has established definitively that «Noche oscura» is an autonomous and atypical lyric of human love, why belabor the point of possible literary Renaissance sources? Such an enterprise can at best arrive at dubious speculation and, worse, dilute the originality of San Juan. Now that Nieto has demonstrated the «amor profano» of «Noche oscura», why not also declare San Juan's relative independence as a poet? Other doubtful preoccupations of Nieto are his questions about where San Juan wrote the poem and why. His clear and logical prose is often marred by an aggravating use of hyphens, as in this example: «carencia de rebuscamiento temático-teológico-bíblico-alegórico parece tener la prioridad genético-estética» (189).

To help the reader appreciate the originality of San Juan, Nieto includes an anthology of all the major poetry of San Juan plus the eclogues of Garcilaso and Córdoba and some selections from St. Teresa of Ávila. A basic bibliography of works related to San Juan and to Renaissance philosophy and aesthetics and an Index round out this valuable new one of San Juan, a study that has been long overdue and that restores to San Juan the originality he deserves as a poet «de carne y hueso».

Eugene A. Maio

The University of Akron

Murillo, L. A. A Critical Introduction to «Don Quixote». New York: Peter Lang, 1988. 270 pp.

In this superbly organized and lucid text, L. A. Murillo presents an excellent guide for critical readings of the Quixote. Although originally conceived as an introduction for the uninitiated, Murillo offers numerous insights and uncovers interconnections new to more experienced readers of Quixotic fiction. His analysis unfolds in three main sections that are further subdivided by thematic headings and chapter indicators roughly parallel to Cervantes's text. In «The Exemplary Story», the first —94→ of the three sections, Murillo defines the exemplary quality of Cervantes's fiction as that which is psychologically true in writing and which, in Quixote's case, will trace the course of the hidalgo's literary transformation along with the alterations in his social and psychological alienation. Particularly useful for students in this section, covering Chapters 1-27 of the Quixote Part I, are the introductory subdivisions providing background on chivalric literature and the subsections con textualizing Quixote's madness within the early modern theory of the humors.

In the second major section, «The Quixote Fiction», Murillo begins his analysis of Cervantes's world of illusion maintained by interlocking fictions in the remainder of Quixote Part I and in Chapters 1-30 of Part II. The interpolated tales, Murillo maintains, are not genres or modes but orders of fiction interlacing with that of the hidalgo yet contrasting with the fiction of Quixote's madness by their serious treatment of life. Quixote's madness, is the «nuclear force» capable of «setting in motion an entire chain-reaction of proliferating fictions» (83). Always conscious of Cervantes's reliance on the ancient art of storytelling and frequently recognizing the interfacing between the oral and the written, Murillo shows how Cervantes transforms the old artifice for creating fiction-in-fiction into a novelistic art. He also demonstrates how Cervantes transforms dramatic modes into the novelistic ones and how his Quixotic fiction often seems compelled from within, beyond the reach of a narrator.

In «The Mythical Don Quixote», the third and final section, Murillo skillfully analyzes the convergence of two paths in the process of fictionalization: the consummation of the hidalgo's exemplary story with the emergence of the mythical Quixote. Both aspects are played out as two simultaneous redemptive roles, one in society and another in fiction. In the case of Doña Rodríguez, the Clavileño episode, and other events contrived by the Dukes -surrogate authors along with their mayordomo- Quixote undergoes a purification and mortification endowing his fictional efficacy with a mythical significance. Murillo aptly situates Unamuno's characterization of the Christlike Quixote within a literary and critical context: Quixote, the mythified yet mortified and comically humiliated saint/hero, ponders his efficacy between wisdom and foolishness. Alonso Quijano -as a rational and reintegrated self- dies an exemplary and expiatory death while leaving the mythical intact in fiction.

Murillo's Critical Introduction was meant as a companion to his Castalia edition and critical bibliography of the Quixote, and for that reason he does not include a bibliography in the present text. While an index and a bibliography would have been helpful additions, the eighty-four endnotes will guide the researcher to many of Murillo's sources. Studies by Foucault, Bakhtin, and others are not to be found among the notes, but Murillo's analysis and his cited sources exemplify the most outstanding in traditional textual and historical Cervantine criticism. Murillo's final synthesis transcends the boundaries between «soft» and «hardline» critics of the Quixote and opens to the reader an approach to the «orders» of fiction in Cervantes's text without suppressing their social significance. His Critical Introduction is clearly the fruit of dedicated research and of extensive knowledge and experience in studying and teaching the Quixote.

Catherine Swietlicki

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Spitzer, Leo. Representative Essays. Edited by Alban K. Forcione, Herbert Lindenberger, and Madeline Sutherland. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. xx + 484 pp.

It is a treat to reread some essays included in this book and read for the first time other studies written by one of the giants of literary scholarship in this century. The editors reprint fifteen timeless essays from among the hundreds Spitzer wrote, and in their judicious selection reveal this comparatist's extraordinary erudition, his splendid scholarship and the broad range of interests he had in several genres of Italian, Spanish and French literatures from the medieval period to this century. Also included is the fascinating essay «American Advertising Explained as Popular Art» (1949), in which he applies a minutely-detailed linguistic analysis to an advertisement extolling Sunkist orange juice. This review will focus on the five essays devoted to Spanish literature: «Two Essays on Góngora's Soledades» (1930, 1940), «The Spanish Baroque» (1944), «Linguistic Perspectives in the Quijote» (1948), and «A Central Theme and Its Structural Equivalent in Lope's Fuenteovejuna» (1955).

In the first essay on Góngora's Soledades, Spitzer had already abandoned his biographical-biological approach for one that studied the work in itself and began to treat a literary work as an organic whole, which he thought was best understood through an analysis of its parts. His penetration of Góngora's dense poetry focuses on the «Dedicatoria al Duque de Béjar». In this carefully wrought analysis of the poem, he compares the poet's obscure style to Velázquez's paintings, which represent the baroque «domination of the world through art» (95). The other essay on Góngora (1940) is a line-by-line commentary on Góngora's first Soledad, done by Spitzer and his students at Johns Hopkins. In these two essays, Spitzer builds on and refines Dámaso Alonso's ground-breaking editions of 1927 and 1936.

«The Spanish Baroque» was originally a lecture delivered at Middlebury College in the summer of 1943. It was written in French and translated into —95→ Spanish by the poet Pedro Salinas. In this cogent interpretation of the time in which some of Spain's greatest writers flourished -Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo, Calderón and Góngora-, the critic makes this key statement: «The human, concrete, primordial phenomenon of the Spanish baroque is the awareness of the flesh coming together with the awareness of the eternal» (131). He sees this dualism in the omnipresent desengaño, «dreaming against living, disguise against truth, temporal grandeur against transience» (132). It is found in such painters as Murillo, Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán and Ribera as well as in Calderón, Lope de Vega, Góngora, Cervantes, Quevedo and Gracián.

Spitzer's long study on linguistic perspectivism in the Quijote, one of the finest and most enduring pieces of his literary criticism, was influenced by Américo Castro's El pensamiento de Cervantes. In his brilliant analysis, Spitzer posits that the artist Cervantes «knows that the transparence of language is a fact for God alone» (264), and goes on to say that Cervantes himself is the hero of the novel, the «almighty overlord» who directs all that occurs by combining «a critical and illusionistic art according to his free will» (265).

Finally, the essay on Fuenteovejuna makes a convincing case for the relationship between love and musical harmony as the central theme of Lope's play. Spitzer states that the play starts and ends with harmony, which is analogous to the usually accepted view that the Golden Age comedia goes from order disturbed to order restored, which presupposes the original existence of peace or harmony before a problem arose.

The editors' selection of essays shows the versatility, skill, enormous erudition and brilliance of Leo Spitzer. He was an important resource for this reviewer's generation, and his methodology and insightful analyses still have significant relevance to those who pursue the craft of literary scholarship today.

Donald W. Bleznick

University of Cincinnati

Walter A. Dobrian, editor. Poesía española: Neoclasicismo y Romanticismo. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1988. 379 pp.

Walter Dobrian's Poesía española: Neoclasicismo y romanticismo represents a welcome addition towards bridging the great «abyss» which separates Calderón from the Romantics. Even though several critics (Gies, Sebold, Zavala) have recently recovered and reinterpreted this much maligned period, it remains largely ignored by students of Spanish Literature. In fact, what makes this book exciting is Dobrian's reading of the major poets in their generic, social and political context. This critical orientation is present in the opening sentences: «El desarrollo de la literatura en general y de la poesía en particular durante el siglo XVIII en España está estrechamente vinculado a la situación política y social del país» (19). Accordingly, each of three major sections, classicism, preromanticism, and romanticism plus the introductions to each poet are framed by the social and political history within which each poet lived as well as by an analysis of the poetic language in which he chose to express himself. Thus the editor establishes a continuum in the development of Spanish poetry, from the didacticism of the Iluminados to the lyricism of the Romantics.

The first section, given over to Neoclassicism, covers Nicolás Fernández de Moratín's costumbrista poetry, Félix María Samaniego's Fábulas morales, Tomás de Iriarte's Fábulas literarias, and Juan Meléndez Valdés's various Odes and Romances. Following the combination of close readings within an historical context, the selections emphasize compositions which reflect the brilliant life of the court and literary salons of Charles III as well as the profoundly un-Spanish neoclassical aesthetics of clarity, harmony, and measure acclimatized in Spain through the writings of Luján.

Extending over the enlightened despotism of Charles IV and the tyranny of Ferdinand VII is the preromantic period. A turbulent time which witnessed the extremes of the trienio liberal (1820-23) and the década ominosa (1823-1833), it is mostly responsible for the tardiness of Spanish Romanticism. Instead, its most representative writer, Manuel José Quintana, misspends his considerable talent in a highly patriotic but deplorably rhetorical verse that was to haunt most Romantic poetry until Bécquer and Rosalía de Castro.

Spanish Romanticism triumphed with the return of the exiled writers, following the relaxation of Ferdinand VII's harsher strictures. Whether liberal or conservative, all were affected by historical events, including their readings. For instance, the well-known influence of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper as well as Alexander Dumas, Victor Hugo and Lord Byron on the preromantics and romantics (160) is seen as a consequence of the exiles' reading while abroad. Paradoxically, however, even the two conservative representatives of Spanish Romanticism, the Duque de Rivas and José de Zorilla, have as their underlying theme Spanish history, with a peculiar emphasis on the Medieval and Renaissance periods. The former's Romances históricos look back wistfully to a better time in Spanish history, while Zorrilla's Leyendas foreshadow the mixture of fact and fiction which characterizes Bécquer's prose. Of some interest to feminist critics is that Zorrilla's narrator, somewhat like Blake's Milton who was secretly on Satan's side, displays an undisguised sympathy with the heroine(s) in the legends here presented. Additionally, the rebellious and titanic aspects of liberal Spanish Romanticism are represented by José de Espronceda, whose Canciones and, to a lesser extent El estudiante de Salamanca, are ample testimony —96→ to his liberal beliefs and struggle against tyranny. The underlying theme of much of this poet's work, the irreconcilable conflict between reality and desire, not only confirms Espronceda as a European poet, but also as a representative, along with Larra, of a philosophical romanticism rooted in historical events.

The footnotes to the poetic text deserve special mention as they are not only copious but also provide historical, social, and formal explanations which would otherwise be lost on the reader. In fact, numerous comments on the evolution of poetic form and language, together with a glossary of poetic terms at the end of the book, make it possible for the reader to trace the evolution of Spanish poetry during the Neoclassical and Romantic periods from the elusive quintillas and redondillas to the beginnings of the rebirth of the romance. Likewise, the edition is immaculate, surprisingly free of typographical errors. Exceptions include suspense for suspenso (305) and hombres for hombre (310).

Eugene Francis Del Vecchio

University of Maine

Altisent, Marta. La narrativa breve de Gabriel Miró y Antología de cuentos. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1988. 319 pp.

El debate sobre Miró como novelista, surtido por Ortega y Gasset y mantenido a través de los años por una larga serie de lectores, a veces ha eclipsado otros aspectos de la obra mironiana. Relativamente poca atención crítica se les ha prestado a los cuentos suyos, los cuales constituyen un tesoro literario que revela muchísimo acerca del prosista y su estilo tan comentado. En este libro Marta Altisent se dedica al estudio de este género en Miró-inclusive todas las viñetas, «estampas» y otras narrativas breves de su corpus literario -de una manera cuidadosa y cabal, tanto para organizar y clasificar como para explicar y apreciar. Puede ser que exagere al aseverar que «el cuento y otras formas afines fueron los géneros que mejor se adaptaron» al talento único de Miró (225). No es necesario minimizar el éxito que éste logró como novelista para hacer destacar su arte «mínimo». Altisent examina el cuento mironiano dentro del contexto de la historia y teoría del género, mostrando así lo tradicional y lo innovador de la estética suya. Aunque la autora ha comentado ciertas fuentes en cuanto al trasfondo literario del arte de Miró, hubiera sido de valor elaborar más a fondo sobre los cuentos y otras narrativas similares del alicantino a la luz de sus muchas posibles relaciones específicas con los de Pardo Bazán, Flaubert, Maupassant y otros a quienes Miró leyó asiduamente. Además, Altisent estudia las narrativas breves de Miró según su orden cronológico para ilustrar el desarrollo de las varias dimensiones de su estilo. Clarifica los temas para ilustrar que hay ciertos hilos temáticos constantes en todos sus cuentos. También ha investigado la temática de su novelística para señalar las concurrencias y diferencias entre los dos géneros en Miró. Es de especial interés el comentario de Altisent sobre la novela corta y el cuento del autor alicantino. También se estudia aquí la muy mentada cualidad poética de la prosa de Miró, comparando su obra con varios géneros poéticos y dramáticos. Muchos autores ya han escrito sobre lo poético del estilo mironiano, pero lo que dice Altisent vierte una nueva luz sobre esta cuestión: concluye que Miró no escribió lo que se llama «poema en prosa» (aunque hubo cierta innegable influencia de esta forma en su ficción).

La autora también subraya aspectos de la «atmósfera» que Miró ha creado en su narrativa, pero nunca sucumbe a la tentación de verlo como mero paisajista o creador de bellos ambientes impresionistas. Además, señala la intriga y la acción que muchas veces han caracterizado su ficción (no sólo la breve), desmintiendo así a los muchos críticos que le habían tachado de un estilo demasiado fino y hasta «paralítico» que aburría al lector con una falta de acción y de interés. Otro aspecto destacado del libro de Altisent es su investigación de lo que ella llama «el didactismo» de Miró, es decir, las compenetraciones entre los cuentos, artículos literarios y ensayos suyos y la alegoría, la parábola, los exempla y otras formas parecidas. Otro enfoque bien logrado e importante para los estudios mironianos es la sección que trata la simbología de su amplio bestiario. Altisent tiene mucho que decir sobre la zoofilia de Miró, igual que su ambivalencia (y la de Sigüenza, su alter ego) ante la crueldad humana para con las bestias. Además, es notable lo que dice la autora sobre «el afán perfeccionista» que caracteriza la técnica mironiana. Las últimas sesenta y seis páginas del libro abarcan una antología de diecinueve cuentos de Miró no recogidos en ninguna versión de sus Obras completas. Algunos de ellos son de los mejores suyos, revelando mucho acerca del desarrollo de su personalidad artística. Vale la pena reunirlos aquí para hacerlos más asequibles a los lectores. Esta última sección, al igual que las anteriores del libro, será una grata adición a lo mironiano, alumbrando y amplificando este campo para los expertos y los aficionados de este autor tan frecuentemente malentendido.

Kevin S. Larsen

University of Wyoming

Stock, Margaret Pol. Dualism and Polarity in the Novels of Ramón Pérez de Ayala. Serie A, Monografías, 127. London: Tamesis Books Limited, 1988. 153 pp.

This study explores Pérez de Ayala's progression from early dualism to polarism in the middle novels to the integration of the poles in his last novels. In the early tetralogy of Alberto Díaz de Guzmán, contrasting pairs abound. In Tinieblas en las cumbres, Alberto and Rosina contrast with others of their social classes; pastoral life with the corruption —97→ of Pilares; cultured language with crude speech. In A. M. D. G., the «dualism of duplicity or hypocrisy» (25) is emphasized. The most important antithesis in La pata de la raposa is that between voluntad and abulia. Throughout Troteras y danzaderas there are many pairs -of painters, actors, aristocrats, tragedy and melodrama, occult and Christian mysticism, Rosina (the materialistic trotera) and Verónica (the danzadera representing the spiritual world) [38].

The transitional poematic novels abandon autobiography for problems of national importance. In Prometeo, the thinking man fathers the man of action-the dichotomy so popular with the generation of 1898 (45). Luz de domingo includes good/ bad, art/ life, and old age/infancy. Finally in La caída de los Limones, binary oppositions include aristocrats/ plebeians, past/ present, birth/ death, day/ night, light/ darkness (59). Stock views the leveling effect of all boarders eating at a circular table -the symbol for wholeness- as Ayala's first attempt to bring dualistic elements together into a polaristic relationship (60). Similarly, the combination of poetry and prose in all three novels which unites «the real and metaphorical worlds» is viewed as a major development in Pérez de Ayala's literary career (72).

While many contrasts in Belarmino y Apolonio are well studied here, this is arguably the least original section of the book, for Stock relies heavily on previous studies. Her contribution is a new interpretation of polarities. Beginning with this novel, she observes, the key will be that the protagonist alone must integrate reality (77). The clear-cut dualisms of early novels have evolved into interchangeable polarities, both depending upon and constantly changing positions with the other, e. g., Belarmino and Apolonio (philosopher vs. actor, but each manifesting characteristics of the other avocation).

The novels of Urbano and Simona are studied as two complementary genres (tragedy and romance), two styles (classical and romantic), two myths (Daphnis/ Chloe and Adam/ Eve), nature versus culture, ideal versus real, and male versus female. Pérez de Ayala opines that the latter pair must integrate characteristics traditionally attributed to the other gender into their own personalities, in order to achieve a happy marriage.

In his last two major novels, Pérez de Ayala interrelates two Spanish myths, Don Juan and honor, within the framework of the character's quest for self-knowledge. Especially in El curandero de su honra, the male-female and patriarchal-matriarchal are fused by love. For Stock, this is the culmination of Ayala's search for harmony in both his life and his works.

As often happens, Pérez de Ayala's lesser-known novels are ignored. It would be interesting to discover whether they embody the stages outlined by Stock. Despite this drawback and heavy reliance on other critics, the study offers a new, useful approach to the main corpus of Ayala's longer narrative fiction.

Eunice D. Myers

Wichita State University

Spires, Robert C. Transparent Simulacra: Spanish Fiction, 1902-1926. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1988. 178. pp.

This is an important book. It is the first study in English to trace the development of the Spanish novel in the early twentieth century -the period that corresponds to high modernism in the rest of Europe-, and it is the first in any language to approach this particular body of fiction through detailed analyses that draw on the insights of recent narrative theory. Spires magisterially enlists close textual scrutiny to revise literary history, demonstrating that the vanguard in Spain (at least as far as fiction is concerned) began in 1902 rather than in the 1920s as has been commonly averred. In Spires's revisionist view, the earliest fiction of the century emerges as more interesting and revolutionary than many of the canonical works of vanguard fiction.

If the project of twenties vanguardism was to renovate the realistic novelistic tradition by exposing rather than concealing its artifices, the four novels of 1902 -Baroja's Camino de perfección, Martínez Ruiz's La voluntad, Unamuno's Amor y pedagogía and Valle-Inclán's Sonata de otoño- all anticipate that endeavor in important ways. Spires finds Camino de perfección a less radical break from realistic conventions than the other four. Employing Genette's distinction between voice and vision, extradiegetic and intradiegetic narrators and the concept of double-voicing (all these phenomena are fully explained for the uninitiated), Spires reveals what he calls a «subjective realism» in Baroja's early novel. Martínez Ruiz's La voluntad is a more daring attack on realistic conventions. Its shifting narrative perspective effaces the protagonist and removes the focus of the novel from character to art itself, a maneuver common to much vanguard fiction.

The innovations of Amor y pedagogía differ markedly from those of Camino de perfección and La voluntad. Drawing on Bakhtin's notion that authoritative discourse cannot be represented, Spires finds that Unamuno creates the illusion of represented authorial discourse by fictionalizing the author in the prologue. And Sonata de otoño defies reader expectations about religious conventions and romantic heroes and heroines through a confessional mode cum self-caricature, whose comical distortions destroy the romantic illusion. Unmasking this double-voicing confirms the dimension of social criticism which the Sonatas have often been denied.

1916 marks a second pivotal moment in Spires's map of the Spanish novel's evolution toward twenties —98→ vanguardism. He focuses on Unamuno's Nada menos que todo un hombre and Pérez de Ayala's Caída de los limones as representative of this middle period in which narrative devices are «extensions and refinements of techniques already exhibited by the previous generation» (49). Unamuno's characters increasingly assume the role of the posited author, leaving the reader with no authoritative voice upon which to rely for a verifiable truth. And Pérez de Ayala in Caída de los limones intricately refracts the narrative through the interpolated poems.

The third section of the book covers the years 1923-1926, a period more traditionally associated with vanguardism. Demonstrating that earlier writers continued to develop into full-blown vanguardists, Spires begins the section with two late novels by members of the Generation of '98, Azorín's Doña Inés and Valle-Inclán's Tirano Banderas. Doña Inés, fully within the vanguardist aesthetic, subverts its ostensible love theme to concentrate on art. In fact, it parodies the romantic heroine and also mocks the pastoral and epic genres. And Spires uncovers the structural complexities of Tirano Banderas to disclose Valle's own ambivalence toward his subject. Paradoxically, Valle's most antirealist novel is also his most socially committed.

The three novels selected to represent the traditionally designated vanguardist movement are Ramón Gómez de la Serna's El novelista, Benjamín Jarnés's El convidado de papel and Pedro Salinas's Víspera del gozo. There are several levels of metafictionality in El novelista, one of which is a surprising parody of Unamuno, but ultimately Spires believes that Gómez de la Serna's experiment is less radical than Unamuno's own. And Spires demonstrates that Jarnés in El convidado de papel, while toying with the concept that art is reality, is, in fact, defending material reality. And Salinas's Víspera del gozo achieves the seemingly impossible, allowing the reader to enjoy both the window (the artifice) and the garden (reality); Spires aptly invokes Ortega's famous example of La deshumanización del arte.

There are always aspects of any book, no matter how good, that a particular reviewer finds wanting. I take very little issue with the texts selected to represent the several stages of the novel's progress toward vanguardism (chosen for their «canonicity» according to Spires), but I lament Gabriel Miró's omission on the grounds that «his novels [do not seem] to fit the focus of this study» (xii). Surely the elusive narrators of works like El humo dormido, Nuestro Padre San Daniel and El obispo leproso are unique experiments. And I disagree that Baroja's fiction after 1902 «intensified his commitment to realistic canons» (2), a statement belied not only by the obvious Paradox, rey but by many of the novels, which parody earlier genres, especially romantic adventure fiction.

I would have appreciated a fuller description of the realistic tradition against which the vanguardist and protovanguardist novelists were rebelling. How, for example, do Baroja and Martínez Ruiz's shifts in narrative voice differ from those of nineteenth-century realists (e. g., Clarín's free indirect style)? How does the ambiguity about reality posited in Unamuno's nivolas differ from that of Galdós in El amigo manso or Misericordia? And I do not think Spires has completely come to terms with his attempt to demolish the traditional generational categories. On the one hand he asserts that «the very thesis of this study reflects the present tendency to discredit the concept of literary generations and to speak in the much broader terms of modernism and postmodernism» (146), but early on he carefully defines the Generation of '98 and the Generation of '14, and then identifies writers with one or another category.

But these minor reparos aside, the reader who follows Spires's tightly argued analyses will be richly rewarded, and will return to these novels with new eyes and a greater appreciation for their narrative subtleties and complexities. Transparent Simulacra is a model for how applied literary theory can inform traditional, chronologically ordered literary history, by coaxing the texts themselves to reveal their hidden meanings and their own place in the comprehensive picture.

Roberta Johnson

Scripps College

Villalón, Fernando. Obras [Poesía y prosa]. Edición de Jacques Issorel. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 38. Madrid: Trieste, 1987. 363 pp.

In this handsomely printed and presented volume Jacques Issorel of the University of Perpignan has reproduced the original editions of the three volumes published by Fernando Villalón (1881-1950) in his all too brief writing career: Andalucía la Baja (1926), La Toriada (1928), Romancero del 800 (1929). This volume also contains a number of uncollected poems from the years 1927-1930 and a few others brought out posthumously by Gerardo Diego and others. A brief section of prose pieces includes three short stories, one of which, «Mañana de San Juan», is a masterful prose poem.

With this volume Jacques Issorel, the undisputed authority on this neglected member of the Generation of 1927, completes more than ten years of meticulous and discriminating scholarship devoted to his work. The present edition of Villalón's published work complements that of the numerous Poesías inéditas pioneered by Issorel in the same collection in 1985 and his exhaustive critical study recently published: Fernando Villalón ou la rebellion de l'automne (Université de Perpignan, 1988). We are thus finally able to view as a whole the surprisingly varied production of this highly distinctive figure, known heretofore principally through limited anthologies of his work.

—99→

The distinctiveness of Villalón resides in the directness of his experience of the country life of Lower Andalusia, which in one form or another forms the substance and provides the themes of practically all his work. Of aristocratic background, brought up in country towns and at family cortijos, Villalón receives a solid education but eventually abandons his law course at the University of Seville and becomes a ganadero. Though for a living he raises bulls for the ring, he is much more a taurófilo for whom the bull is a quasi-mythic embodiment of Nature's power, than a devotee of tauromaquia. Indeed, as Issorel points out in his substantial and informative critical introduction, the sheer stature and strength of the bulls he raises become a problem when bullfighting evolves toward styles of more pronounced elegance and grace, and he dies bankrupt. La Toriada is a miniature epic in which a lovingly evoked setting of paradisiac marismas, described with decidedly Gongorine echoes, is violated by human agents who ensnare a few bulls from the wild herds and lead them off ignominiously to captivity and the ring. The «llanuras sin confín» are faintly suggestive of the plains of Venezuela in the novels of Gallegos or the pampas of the gauchesco writers but the «vientos marineros» and the aura of myth reaching all the way back to Atlantis and Tartessos give them a distinctive Andalusian and Old World cast.

Though here and in the other collections the mood is often nostalgic and the confrontation with modernity ambivalent, Villalón is in no sense a pastoralist. His is not a city-nurtured perspective on the land. An observation of Pedro Salinas in respect to the ballads in Andalucía la Baja and Romances del 800 is relevant to much more in these collections: «Momentos del campo», «Países», «Bodegones», «Figuras», the different groupings of gacelas -«contrabandistas», «marineras», «jardineras», «garrochistas»... This is, namely, «un tipo de poesía de gracioso penduleo entre to popular y to culto... [que] disimula to que tiene de retrospectivo y hechizo con la gracia natural, de raíz de pueblo, que el poeta llevaba dentro».

Villalón was groping his way toward surrealism, still rather uncertainly to judge by the samples included here, at the end of his life. This carefully annotated volume -which contains a thorough chronology; an exhaustive bibliography; annotation ample, succinct and judicious; and, among other indices, a useful one of the first lines of all Villalón's work, both published and unpublished- should go far toward settling him in his proper niche within the Generation of 1927.

Alan S. Trueblood

Brown University

Díez de Revenga, Francisco Javier. Poesía de senectud. Guillén, Diego, Aleixandre, Alonso y Alberti en sus mundos poéticos terminales. Barcelona: Editorial Anthropos, 1988. 286 pp.

This is a rather novel book (though not quite original by the author's own admission) which explores the old age writings of the above-mentioned poets. Initially, as a sort of background, consideration is given to the poetry also composed in the advanced age of three outstanding writers of earlier generations: Unamuno, Juan Ramón Jiménez and León Felipe. To be sure, Díez de Revenga makes it eminently clear that the concept of old age has changed from generation to generation. Thus the works of the precursors might have appeared while the authors were only in their sixties, whereas the compositions of the ones featured in this book were produced while their authors were in their seventies or even in their eighties in some cases. Nonetheless, be they in one or another decade of their lives, so long as it is established that they are experiencing an autumnal period, they represent an age which has distanced itself from what is commonly considered to be «the prime of life».

The intent of the author of Poesía de senectud is to search for a common ground that identifies poetry written in old age or at least pinpoints the distinct attitude of each poet towards the preoccupations that beset (according to Díez de Revenga, himself a youthful man of forty-two) old poets, namely such themes as death, friendship and the intransigent march of time. Not surprisingly, a common bond is established; in some cases, as with the poetry of Dámaso Alonso, Guillén and Gerardo Diego, the link is quite strong. Still, the mode of expression, naturally, remains unique in each case. While concerns in old age expectedly appear to coincide among poets, as with non-poets, Díez de Revenga has effectively described specific stanzas which in some cases are minutely analyzed stylistically. All in all, the reader has received a convincing perception of the unity of themes which exists among all the poets considered in this study. Perhaps more significantly, the author has established that old poets do not merely fade away before they die. In fact, Díez de Revenga emphasizes the artistic values of poetry written even when poets are in their eighties. The suggested admonition on the part of the author focuses on the unnecessary haste to write off a poet's contribution after a certain age. The author insists on not being premature in classifying or cataloguing a poet's achievement until «all chips have been cashed», so to speak. Each creative period in an accomplished poet's life has much to offer, he tells us.

Poesía de senectud unquestionably constitutes an excellent contribution to the study of some great Spanish poets of this century, especially those who continued to write in their old age. In a sense, Díez de Revenga has made us aware of the need to strive for a panoramic view, a cosmovision, of all forms of literature. Yet, the immanent value of this book rests on a profound knowledge of the poets included. The reader should be more than just simply acquainted with the works mentioned —100→ and duly studied. The book is serious, and often detailed in its expatiations on fragmentary selections. It would be well to have at hand the works examined. Undoubtedly, Díez de Revengas monograph would add a great deal to a class of 20th-century Spanish poetry. There is one caveat, however: the frame of reference for scholarly studies cited, as well as the bibliography, is founded virtually entirely on books published in Spanish, and by and large books published in Spain. There are very few exceptions, unfortunately. Therefore, it becomes obvious that Poesía de senectud does not achieve in its transcendence the meaningfulness it displays in its inner structure, as a critical treatment of poetic themes that bring together not only poets within one epoch but also one generation with another.

Keeping in mind that obstacles that prevail in the exegeses of lyrical compositions, the rendering of poetic meaning into prose, it can be stated that Díez de Revenga has surmounted the barriers of translation. Poesía de senectud is a fine study, worthy of being a reference in the appropriate classes. Certainly, the reviewer learned a great deal from this book.

Robert Kirsner

University of Miami

Jiménez Lozano, José. El grano de maíz rojo. Barcelona: Anthropos, 1988. 172 pp.

José Jiménez Lozano is a historian of ideas, cultural critic, novelist and short-story writer with a growing reputation in Spain. He has just been awarded the Premio de las Letras de Castilla y León, the Premio de la Crítica and was a finalist more than once for the Premio Nacional de Literatura. His essays -ranging from the highly erudite to the popular and autobiographical- explore, in the spirit of Américo Castro and liberal catholicism, the cultural heritage of the so-called «Other Spain». Much of his fiction likewise centers on the personal anguish of marginality, particularly the Jewish or heretic consciousness, and his stories are peopled with intellectual and religious rebels both historic (Spinoza, Savanarola, Olavide) and imaginary, as well as ordinary outcasts, the poor, the mad, and the defeated. El grano de maíz rojo, a collection of short stories, is an excellent sampler of the talents and vision of Jiménez Lozano.

The narrative technique is historical, dramatic and lyrical. The author's linguistic and rhetorical register ranges from the highly impersonal document, undermined by the implied author's corrosive irony, to the most humble and colloquial expressions of Castilian peasants.

In between these extremes are the passions, religious crises, brutality and haunting memories of clergy (Protestant and Catholic), students, prostitutes and lonely spinsters, among others, spanning the past five hundred years of European history. Thus, a «report» to a Grand Inquisitor includes a list of expenses incurred in the burning of heretics and a complaint about the quality of the wood. In another «document», a court physician informs His Excellency of Savanarola's much-debated sexual identity. In the story «El maniquí», a grotesque wooden Christ, abandoned in a church attic, is fated to become first a scarecrow and finally a target in the village circus. The author is at his best at reworking Biblical legends and characters by mixing the existential, the highly idiosyncratic, the shocking and the grotesque.

Not all the stories have an identifiable historical setting or religious context. «Casa de muñecas», for example, with its shifting focalization and time frames, reveals the stiffling, morbid life of three generations of young women confined to a hothouse existence. In «La noria» the suicidal plunge of a young nun into the sea serves as a mnemonic device to a student of civil law, who thanks to the tragedy passes his second attempt in the «oposiciones». The irony of the first person unreliable narrator, the juxtapostion of the trivial and the tragic, the bizarre imagery -a mixture of Brueghelian allegory («The Fall of Icarus» comes to mind) and the surreal spaces of Di Chirico lend this three-page story a distinctly modernist air and an eerie mood.

A recurrent theme in the work of Jiménez Lozano is the individual's spiritual struggle against total despair in the face of an absent God and the faceless, demonic power of institutions totally alien to Christian values. He is equally adept at evoking the most pathetic and delicate strains of his characters' inner worlds of personal anguish, illusion, and spiritual desolation. El grano de maíz rojo should consolidate the author's position as an outstanding figure in contemporary Spanish fiction.

Thomas Mermall

Brooklyn College and

Graduate Center, CUNY

Segura, Isabel, Helena Alvarado, Anna Muriá, Carme Arnau, M. Àngels Anglada, Geraldine Nichols y M. Mercè Marçal. Literatura de dones: una visió del món. Barcelona: laSal, 1988. 155 pp.

Este volumen constituye el decimosexto de la colección «Clàssiques Catalanes» de la editorial feminista laSal, editorial que se propone la consecución de un doble objetivo. Por un lado, recuperar la obra de las escritoras catalanas para llenar el vacío en que la historiografía oficial, incluyendo la autóctona, ha sumido a las obras escritas por mujeres, y por otro, revaluar los textos por ellas escritos a través de parámetros críticos alternativos a los que condujeron a la formación del canon literario vigente. El proceso de marginación sufrido por estas escritoras obedece a la acumulación de un doble razonamiento excluyente: el ser las autoras mujeres y el hecho de escribir en una lengua que no ha podido ser oficial en Catalunya desde la guerra —101→ civil (1936-1939). Por ello, el esfuerzo realizado por laSal es significativo tanto para la revalorización del catalán como lengua literaria, como para la difusión de la obra de escritoras poco o mal conocidas.

La colección de artículos que componen el volumen decimosexto de «Clàssiques Catalanes» es, en su mayor parte, un producto de los trabajos presentados en las Jornadas de Literatura Femenina de la Universidad de Verano Menéndez Pelayo, celebradas en Barcelona hace unos años. Con un texto introductorio de la coordinadora de la colección, Isabel Segura, cuatro artículos se dedican al análisis de las obras de escritoras específicas: Carme Monturiol, Mercè Rodoreda, Rosa Leveroni y «Víctor Catalá», mientras que los dos restantes tratan grupos de escritoras. Anna Muriá recupera la memoria histórico-literaria femenina evocando a las autoras que publicaron en el periodo anterior a la guerra civil. Geraldine Nichols realiza un análisis diacrónico y temático de las obras de las escritoras catalanas desde la postguerra, tanto si publicaron en catalán como en castellano.

La multiplicidad de los enfoques críticos presentes en el volumen nace de las diferencias de formación técnica, de profesión y de nacionalidad de sus autoras. Esta disparidad se unifica, sin embargo, con el común denominador feminista presente en todos los artículos y que se manifiesta en la afirmación de una tradición femenina literaria, en la consideración de «Víctor Catalá» como autora «motriz/ matriz» dentro de esta tradición (Alvarado); en el apuntamiento de las innovaciones técnico-estilísticas presentes en la poesía y en el teatro de Carme Monturiol (Anglada); en el estudio del tratamiento específico de temas recurrentes en la poesía catalana (el itinerari marí [...] d'Ulisses en Rosa Leveroni) con la singularidad procedente del género de la poeta (Marçal), o el análisis del tratamiento de los mitos bíblicos del Génesis y la Expulsión del Paraíso en las escritoras catalanas de la postguerra (Nichols).

Continuar elaborando trabajos como el presente podría ayudar a profundizar en el análisis de aspectos tales como la articulación de la tradición literaria femenina catalana, el papel modélico de ciertas autoras o el uso generalizado del pseudónimo masculino, cuestiones embrionarias en el estado actual de la investigación. La afirmación de una tradición femenina en la literatura catalana, por ejemplo, saldría reforzada con el estudio de la relación de estas escritoras, a pesar de todo canónicas, con aquellas otras realmente desconocidas. Dada la precariedad del esfuerzo ginocrítico en el conjunto de la producción peninsular, es más que deseable la aparición de textos como los que componen esta colección, de interés para todos aquellos, escolares o no, que deseen una aproximación a la literatura producida en Catalunya.

Cristina Enríquez de Salamanca

University of Minnesota

Latin American Literature

Souza, Raymond D. La historia en la novela hispanoamericana moderna. Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1988. 199 pp.

El presente estudio de Souza investiga la estructura interna de la imaginación histórica, tal como se manifiesta en la novela latinoamericana entre 1961 y 1984, con enfoque especial en la manera como utilizan los escritores contemporáneos los acontecimientos históricos o los patrones culturales del pasado como inspiración para escribir sus novelas. Las bases teóricas del estudio fueron tomadas de varias obras, sobre todo Metahistory de Hayden White, Rhetorical Poetics de Donald Rice y Peter Schofer, World Hypotheses de Stephen Pepper, y finalmente Structuralism and Hermeneutics de Thomas K. Seung.

El tomo consta de las siguientes partes: una valiosa introducción que ofrece una historia global del papel de la historia en la literatura latinoamericana de imaginación, ocho capítulos que estudian novelas históricas publicadas a partir de 1961, un capítulo final de síntesis, y una bibliografía de obras citadas y estudiadas. Tercer Mundo Editores publicó este libro para asociarse a la celebración del quinto aniversario de la fundación de la Asociación de Colombianistas Norteamericanos, que preside Souza, y a su asamblea en Cartagena de Indias durante la primera semana de agosto de 1988.

Los primeros cuatro capítulos presentan sucesos históricos que ocurrieron antes del siglo XX y estudian El siglo de las luces de Alejo Carpentier, El mundo alucinante de Reinaldo Arenas, La guerra del fin del mundo de Mario Vargas Llosa, y Sobre héroes y tumbas de Ernesto Sábato. Los últimos cuatro capítulos atañen a la experiencia revolucionaria en el siglo XX. Incluyen estudios de La muerte de Artemio Cruz de Carlos Fuentes, Pepe Botellas de Gustavo Álvarez Gardeazábal, El guerrillero de la nicaragüense Rosario Aguilar, e Historia de Mayta de Vargas Llosa. En un análisis bien razonado, Souza examina los distintos mecanismos empleados por los novelistas citados quienes, por distintas vías, indagan si el ser humano es un instrumento de la historia o si la historia es una creación del ser humano, una cuestión todavía discutida en Latino América. Plantea la separación entre la narrativa y la historia, pero apoyándose en White, afirma que esta separación existe sólo en teoría. —102→ Hace hincapié en las estrategias epistemológicas y tropológicas que se utilizan en las varias novelas y en las semejanzas entre la historia y la ficción en vez de las diferencias. Siguiendo a White, afirma que la imaginación tropológica es uno de los elementos que las vincula. Identifica los modos predominantes observados en cada texto y la variedad de perspectivas representadas por los personajes en cada novela.

Souza llega a la conclusión de que la historia continúa siendo una pesada carga en Latino América, y que en muchos países el pasado no ha sido aún dominado ni adecuadamente asimilado en el presente. No obstante, el crítico cree que la intensificación de los intereses históricos en la novela contemporánea latinoamericana es un signo saludable y que los problemas no pueden ser resueltos si no han sido reconocidos y articulados. Asevera que novelas como El mundo alucinante, Sobre héroes y tumbas, y La muerte de Artemio Cruz sugieren la necesidad de modificar los modelos culturales indeseables que representan el más amargo legado del pasado al presente y al futuro. Otras novelas como Pepe Botellas e Historia de Mayta indican que un benéfico cambio social vendrá de varias modificaciones internas así como la resistencia contra la imposición de sistemas extranjeros en Latino América. Cree que las novelas examinadas en este volumen ofrecen luces de esperanza para una futura conciencia histórica en el mundo contemporáneo de esa región.

La historia en la novela hispanoamericana moderna ofrece una buena selección de la obra crítica de Souza, organizada y ampliada con la introducción y el capítulo sumario. El estudio está complementado con una extensa y útil bibliografía. El único dato erróneo encontrado en el texto se halla al final de la página 20 donde debiera leerse: «Sarmiento [en vez de Rosas] fue presidente de Argentina entre 1868 y 1874». Este es un libro atractivo que se lee con interés por los datos informativos que contiene y por la manera accesible que el autor emplea en su exposición.

Harley D. Oberhelman

Texas Tech University

Ordóñez, Montserrat, editor. La vorágine: textos críticos. Bogotá: Alianza Editorial Colombiana, 1987. 531 pp.

Walker, J. La vorágine. London: Grant and Cutler, 1988. 108 pp.

The recent centenary of the birth of José Eustasio Rivera (1888-1928) has resulted in both a celebration of his work and a reevaluation of La vorágine. These two books function as part of this dual activity. The stated and implicit objectives of these studies, as well as their scope, are quite different. Nevertheless, a reading of the two together reveals certain points in common.

La vorágine: textos críticos consists of thirty-six articles on La vorágine compiled by Montserrat Ordóñez, preceded by a map of Arturo Cova's route, a preliminary note by Ordóñez, and a 1926 interview with Rivera. At the end of the volume is a poem by Fernando Charry Lara and a selected bibliography of work on Rivera, including items published and not published in this volume. In her «Nota Preliminar», Ordóñez states that this anthology «debe permitir una lectura de señas, de murmullos y de vacíos». After the relatively insignificant interview with Rivera, the reader has access to the thirty-six essays that Ordóñez cogently organizes into five sections, in chronological order: «Primeras reacciones: historia y ficción» (with essays by Luis Eduardo Nieto Caballero, Guillermo Manrique Terán, Eduardo Castillo, Antonio Gómez Restrepo, Luis Trigueros, José Eustasio Rivera, Horacio Quiroga, Miguel Rasch Isla, and Eduardo Neale-Silva); «Reconocimiento y permanencia» (Antonio Curcio Altamar, Jean Franco, Leonidas Morales, Richard J. Callan, Cedomil Goic, Alfonso González, Seymour Menton, Eduardo Camacho Guizado, and Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot); «Estilo y estructura» (Edmundo de Chasca, Otto Olivera, Joan R. Green, Luis Carlos Herrera, Silvia Benso, and Richard Ford); «Devorador Devorado» (William E. Bull, Sharon Magnarelli, Oscar Gerardo Ramos, Luis B. Eyzaguirre, Malva E. Filer, Randolph D. Pope); «Ecos y Espejos» (Roberto Simón Crespi, Juan Loveluck, R. H. Moreno-Durán, Jacques Gilard, Doris Sommer, Sylvia Molloy). All of these studies had been published previously, with the exception of Doris Sommer's «El género deconstruido: cómo releer el canon a partir de La vorágine» and Sylvia Molloy's «Contagio narrativo y gesticulación retórica en La vorágine», both of which are outstanding original publications. In its totality, this ambitious volume fulfills Ordóñez's stated objectives and is a valuable contribution to Rivera studies.

Walker's introductory and pedagogical book is far less ambitious. He proposes several readings of La vorágine, beginning with a reevaluation of the novel as a «novela de la tierra» and as social protest. Walter reads La vorágine as an outstanding psychological portrayal of the protagonist Arturo Cova, a fascinating study of an «unbalanced mind». He emphasizes the «universal» nature of this novelization of the «human condition». Walker's critical apparatus is based fundamentally on the traditional assumptions of New Criticism. His discussion is frequently weighed down with excessive reliance upon other critics.

Both volumes represent an intense dialogue with the Rivera criticism of the past half century, a dialogue perhaps now more interesting than the novel that is its subject.

Raymond Leslie Williams

University of Colorado at Boulder

Unless they are specialists on Colombia, most students of Spanish American literature, myself included, have a limited knowledge of Colombian literature. Indeed, except for María, La vorágine, and García Márquez's works, perhaps no more than fifteen or twenty titles come readily to mind. Gilberto Gómez Ocampo's doctoral dissertation (now published in book form) attempts, with notable success, to fill in a portion of this knowledge gap by discussing some of the important Colombian authors who wrote between the civil war of 1885, which laid the groundwork for the conservative movement known as «La Regeneración», and 1903, when «La Guerra de los Mil Días» had virtually destroyed the aspirations of political liberals.

Gómez Ocampo has divided his book into four chapters. The first deals with Rafael Núñez (1825-1894) and Miguel Antonio Caro (1843-1909), poets whose works are representative of «La Regeneración». Chapter 2 treats the fiction of Juan de Dios Uribe (1859-1900) and José María Vargas Vila (1863-1933), both of whom are associated with the subsequent liberal movement. The novels of Soledad Acosta de Samper (1855-1913) are analyzed as examples of feminist literature in chapter 3, and a volume of stories by the modernist Clímaco Soto Borda are the subject of the final chapter.

The critic views Rafael Núñez's «Himno nacional» as an example of Mikhail Bakhtin's lenguaje monológico; in addition it is seen as an epic that not only poeticizes the Wars of Independence from Spain (dawn becomes a metaphor of freedom), but also strives to unify Colombia during the civil conflicts of the 1880s. Consisting of eleven estrofas and preceded by a «Coro» of four versos, this epic is sprinkled with allusions to historical figures (Bolívar, Colón, José Antonio Páez) as well as to classical and biblical myths. Unlike «Himno nacional», Núñez's poem «Metafísica» exudes a more intimate, lyrical tone expressing the author's pessimism over the world's «carácter incesablemente mutable» (32).

Miguel Antonio Caro's poetry, as exemplified by his Musa militante, is politically more conservative than that of Núñez; Caro rejects Nietzsche's statement proclaiming the death of God and abhors the utilitarian, positivist philosophy so popular at the turn of the century. Moreover, Gómez utilizes Bakhtin's theory of cronotopo, that is, «la conexión intrínseca de las relaciones temporales y espaciales que se expresa artisticamente en literatura» (45) to illuminate Caro's conservative ideology through a series of historical and geographical juxtapositions. Gómez concludes that although Caro is perhaps the more conservative of the two poets, both represent the traditional values imparted by the Constitution of 1888.

Ignored or excoriated by the critics, José María Vargas Vila was perhaps Colombia's most prolific fiction writer of his time. One of his numerous naturalistic novels is Flor de fango, which Gómez analyzes in some detail, pointing out its «tono pomposo, rimbombante» (83) and its use of antithesis «como tropo [que] domina el proceso de caracterización» (87). Juan de Dios Uribe shared some of Vargas Vila's liberal views (both were harassed by government officials, and both rejected the traditional values of «La Regeneración»), but Uribe gained his reputation as a journalist, dramatist and short-story writer and sympathized somewhat less than Vargas Vila with the problems of the lower classes. Both, however, railed against the veneration of Spain so prevalent among many Colombian men of letters.

An early predecessor of the feminist movement, Soledad Acosta de Samper (1855-1913) wrote novels, short stories, and essays, in addition to numerous newspaper articles. Gómez studies above all El corazón de la mujer, a novel consisting of the accounts of six women whose lives exemplify suffering and resignation. Still, the implication conveyed is that women are often stronger and more stable than the men occupying prominent positions in society. In Aptitud de la mujer para ejercer todas las profesiones. Acosta investigates the ability of women to enter the male-dominated professions and concludes that through education they would be fully capable of contributing to a changing and expanding capitalistic society.

The final chapter deals primarily with Polvo y ceniza, a collection of tales by Clímaco Soto Borda (1870-1919). According to Gómez, this book marks the beginning of irony in its modern sense in Colombian literature. An example is «En el aire», about a bricklayer named Basilio who, having boasted of his feat of climbing the tallest tower of a local church, is left dangling from a telephone wire when he slips and falls. In this story Soto not only satirizes human frailties, but also alludes ironically to the relations between man and God, Basilio's climb representing man's absurd emulation of the divinity. In addition to irony, Polvo y ceniza is imbued with nihilism, all of which, Gómez believes, brings to an end in Colombian letters the idea of progress and man's perfectability. And through its «cadencias poéticas rubendarianas» (168), Soto's prose also reveals poetic characteristics of modernism.

Impeccably documented and supplemented by an extensive bibliography, Gómez Ocampo's study of «literatura colombiana finisecular» represents a perceptive examination of the period in question and will, more than likely, serve as a landmark for future researchers. Two minor critical comments: for the non-Colombian reader it would have been helpful to include more historical and political information (perhaps in a series of footnotes) about the seventeen years covered in this study; and, after reading Gómez's comments on José María Vargas Vila's potboilers, I suspect that the —104→ disdain he elicited from the critics was deserved.

George R. McMurray

Colorado State University

Shimose, Pedro. Poemas. Prólogo de Teodosio Fernández. Madrid: Playor, 1988. 411 pp.

La carrera poética del poeta boliviano Pedro Shimose (1940), se extiende sobre un período de veintisiete años. Con la publicación del presente volumen antológico, el número de sus poemarios llega a nueve: Triludio en el exilio (1961), Sardonia (1967), Poemas para un pueblo (1968), Quiero escribir, pero me sale espuma (1972), Caducidad del fuego (1975), Al pie de la letra (1976), Reflexiones maquiavélicas (1980) y Bolero de caballería (1985). Shimose es autor además de un libro de relatos, El Coco se llama Drilo (1976) y de un Diccionario de autores iberoamericanos (1982).

Como tantos otros escritores hispanoamericanos exiliados, Shimose reside en Madrid desde la revolución conservadora de 1971. En su patria había sido periodista y profesor, trabajando para el diario Presencia y la Universidad Mayor de San Andrés de La Paz; en España ha continuado tareas análogas, dirigiendo la colección «Letras del Exilio», de Plaza & Janés, la de «Poesía», del Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana y el periódico cultural Reunión. Es miembro de la Academia Boliviana de la Lengua y de la Asociación Española de Críticos de Arte y, en 1972, ganó en Cuba el «Premio Poesía» de Casa de las Américas.

Teodosio Fernández, prologuista de Poemas, señala que su poesía ha evolucionado hasta el punto de que el lector de este libro escucha dos voces: la del poeta comprometido y la de alguien desencantado de su oficio (11). En líneas generales se puede estar de acuerdo: la poesía de Shimose se mueve desde el compromiso socio-político de sus primeros libros hasta la soledad existencial de los últimos. Sin embargo, analizado en más detalle, se observa que esta evolución es más bien un cambio de énfasis. Ambas tendencias estaban presentes en su primer poemario. En Triludio en el exilio, Shimose glosaba los Evangelios en una lengua que se hacía eco de las tendencias vanguardistas y de los experimentos poéticos, al tiempo que expresaba sus profundos sentimientos religiosos, su amor por la naturaleza patria y su ansia de justicia y solidaridad humanas.

Combinando estas preocupaciones sociales con el clima histórico de los 60 -el triunfo de la Revolución Cubana, Che Guevara y la guerrilla boliviana, el antimperialismo- no es extraño que en sus poemarios de esa época predomine la historia. Sardonia, su libro más experimental, refleja la descomposición cultural del mundo occidental. En Poemas para un pueblo, modelado en el Canto general de Neruda, y el vallejiano Quiero escribir, culmina su fervor revolucionario y se agota esta modalidad. Caducidad del fuego está marcado por su doble exilio, físico y existencial. Shimose cuestiona por primera vez la relación lenguaje-historia e inicia la desmitificación de la voz poética, en un tono escéptico y resignado que culmina en Reflexiones maquiavélicas, uno de sus poemarios más logrados. Bolero de caballería, su último libro, cierra el círculo, al volver a la injusticia y falta de solidaridad, evocando figuras y elementos del continente americano. Pero ahora, su lengua, en vez del fervor revolucionario, traiciona la nostalgia desgarrada del exiliado.

Poemas es una edición cuidadosa y bien presentada de las poesías completas de Pedro Shimose. Su valor principal reside en que por primera vez pone a disposición del lector interesado en la poesía hispanoamericana, la obra de uno de sus poetas contemporáneos más destacados.

María A. Salgado

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Agheana, Ion T. The Meaning of Experience in the Prose of Jorge Luis Borges. New York: Peter Lang, 1988. 256 pp.

Through a comprehensive analysis of the philosophies, themes and authors that inform the prose of Jorge Luis Borges, Ion T. Agheana attempts to define the meaning of experience in terms of individuality, literature and chromatic perception. His study demonstrates a breadth of knowledge that ranges from Aristotle to Nietzsche, from Shakespeare to Shaw. Unfortunately, this broad range causes the focus of the book to be somewhat ambiguous. The work would be greatly strengthened by the addition of an introduction, outlining his purpose and defining his approach, and a conclusion, summarizing the main points of his study.

The book is divided into three major sections. Part I, «The Meaning of Experience», treats the question of individuality in Borges's works. The essence of Agheana's argument is summarized by this statement from the third chapter: «Contrary to a widely accepted opinion, Borges does not discard the individual in favor of the species» (35). While many critics have asserted that Borges negates the reality of human experience, Agheana demonstrates the opposite to be true. Borgesian protagonists are not defined in terms of society, but rather by the totality of their lived experiences. The conversation between the mature Borges and himself as a young man in «El otro» illustrates how years of experience can change an individual. The most illuminating chapter in Part I, «Waiting for the Present», shows that in the majority of Borges's stories there is one meaningful moment, one existential act, that defines the identity of the protagonist. This single meaningful experience generally represents the culmination of the story as, for example, when Emma Zunz avenges her father's death.

In Part II, «The Literary Experience», Borges is viewed as both reader and writer. Agheana focuses on six writers who frequently appear in Borges's prose, «names both heading essay titles —105→ and resurfacing in a variety of themes, spanning virtually Borges's entire literary career» (99): Cervantes, Shakespeare, Whitman, Shaw, Quevedo and Valéry. Agheana's critical knowledge of these six authors is interwoven with Borges's references to them providing an in-depth analysis of the way in which they inform Borges's writing. The themes of individuality and meaningful experience, introduced in Part I, are shown to be an outgrowth of Borges's aesthetic relationship with these writers.

«Chromatic Experience» is the subject of Part III. The author explores the symbolism of black and white in several stories, noting that the significance of these chromatic oppositions is dependent on context. White, for example, signifies purity according to Islamic tradition in «El tintorero enmascarado Hákim de Merv», but in «El arte narrativo y la magia» white is associated with fear and evil. Yellow is the most frequently mentioned color in Borges, symbolizing hope and the continuity of human experience. Interestingly, Borges usually avoids the specific naming of colors, alluding to them instead by evoking the reader's chromatic experience with imagery such as «color de la arena», «color de la miel», «color del fuego».

This book encompasses an extensive knowledge both of Borges and of the philosophies and authors that inform his prose. Despite the need for a stronger focus, Agheana's study provides a unique and insightful critical approach. The definition of individuality through an existential act and the allusion to color through imagery based on the reader's experience are aspects of Borges's prose which merit attention. With these insights, Agheana has made a valuable contribution to the field of Borgesian studies.

Mary Rice

Concordia College

Alazraki, Jaime. Borges and the Kabbalah. And Other Essays on His Fiction and Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. 199 pp.

Jaime Alazraki, the author of several outstanding works on Borges, centers this collection of essays on the Kabbalistic traits in Borges's narratives, and expertly deals with fundamental elements of his fiction, poetry and essays. Most of the studies have been published elsewhere; Alazraki brings them together here as «an introduction to key aspects of Borges's oeuvre» (ix). We appreciate the inclusion in one volume of subjects which heretofore have been neglected, and welcome the contribution to significant areas of research which this book -organized in four parts and with an epilogue- represents.

In the Introduction to the first part, Alazraki demonstrates his own interest in the Kabbalah by referring to the course on Jewish mysticism and the Zohar which he had taken at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. One of his teachers, Gershom Scholem, was the author of books on the subject that Borges recommended consistently. In two meticulously written essays, Alazraki shows how the outlook and methods of the Kabbalah influence Borges and constitute a strong generating force in his narratives. Contextual and stylistic resemblances are convincingly established between Borges's works and the Kabbalah; similarities are pointed out in the use of devices which impose upon us the «reality of the unreal». Alazraki's profound knowledge allows him to make enlightening comparisons with the literary language of the Zohar -«the most representative work of many centuries of Kabbalistic exegesis» (32).

It becomes clear that «intrinsic affinities» exist between Borges and the Kabbalists; like them, he strives to overcome the limitations of language and decipher the mysteries of God's secret writing. Alazraki explains how, in turn, Borges forces us to treat his texts «with a rigor similar to the zeal displayed by the Kabbalists in their reading of the Scripture» (40), and we become Kabbalistic readers. We must say that Alazraki himself deals with Borges's writings «as with layers of a text constantly seeking to be unraveled» (11), reminding us of the hermeneutics of the Kabbalists. In addition, the critic provides excellent examples of Borges's familiarity with fundamental texts of several religions which served him in the search of «new forms of perceiving the old, in being creative with respect to the already created literature» (51). The first part ends with an Appendix which is the transcription and translation into English of a lecture given by Borges on the Kabbalah. Alazraki first published the essays included here in 1971 and 1972, when almost no references existed to the subject; since then other works have appeared such as Sosnowski's Borges y la cábala; la búsqueda del verbo (1976) and Aizenberg's El tejedor del Aleph; Biblia, Kábala y judaísmo en Borges (1986); Alazraki's contribution is, without a doubt, groundbreaking.

Part II presents Borges's fiction, the mechanics of his style and the structuring principle of his short stories. A detailed analysis of «The South» demonstrates how the mirror-like structure becomes the metacommentary for the conflict, and how a double solution constitutes a technical achievement when contradictory meanings resolve themselves in «ambiguous paradoxes» (72). In the second of the three essays, Alazraki views language in relation to other levels of meaning, and emphasizes Borges's role in securing a Latin American language with his formula of «total effectiveness and total invisibility» (78). In «The Making of a Style: A Universal History of Infamy», the critic carefully illustrates the constant presence of infamy in Borges's works, concentrating on the parodic approach as well as on the stylistic features -metonymy, oxymoron, hypallage and litotes- which characterize the prose of the Argentine master.

—106→

In the third part, we see the development of Borges as a poet who explored the expressive possibilities of poetry. The function and meaning of several images, particularly the mirror image, are followed in representative collections. In two of the three essays, Alazraki focuses on the later poetry, attempting to determine the implications of a rhetorical device imposed by Whitman, enumerations, and trying to establish the changing voice in the last ten years. What we encounter is Borges's need to evoke the past and reflect upon the present, indexing his poetic production through enumerations; we hear the poet's deepest voice through a language acting as a «musical organism».

Part IV is dedicated to the «Compositional Strategy» of Borges's essays, his impact on Spanish American fiction, and his place in and contribution to modernism. Alazraki analyzes the suspense and tension of the essays, determining the «fictive» quality provided by their oxymoronic structure. He refers to the new critical idiom created by Borges in modern literary theory when he abandons the realistic mode, explores the mechanics of a text, and incorporates his literary ideas into his fiction -becoming the «Guru of modern literary perception» (174).

The Epilogue, inspired by personal reflections on Borges's death, embodies a moving homage to the man and artist. Alazraki shares with us his last visit to Borges, three weeks before his death, and his attendance at the funeral. The closest friends and fellow writers were missing; the sad event is summarized as: «Loneliness at its best» (188). Alazraki's book is essential for our understanding of Borges. Notes, references and bibliographies at the end of each essay support and amplify the author's precise studies making them a most valuable resource for students and scholars as well as inspiring points of departure for new interpretations.

Ludmila Kapschutschenko-Schmitt

Rider College

Meyer, Doris, editor. Lives on the Line. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988. 314 pp.

This varied collection of essays on the double responsibility of Latin American writers to their art and to their societies will be of much interest and use to students and teachers of literature. The thirty personal testimonies, some translated into English for the first time, represent twentieth-century writers from twelve countries, highlighting Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba and Mexico.

The opening chapter provides an overview of Latin American literary history that contrasts the colonial past with the desire for cultural autonomy that began to develop in the nineteenth century. This introduction, while offering a clear and valid interpretation of the writer as architect of national identity, does not fully prepare the reader for the major strength of the book -the range, complexity and suggestive power of the contributors' views on art and society. Well-known essays such as García Márquez's «The Solitude of Latin America» are interspersed with lesser-known ones, like Manuel Scorza's ironic satire on political labels, «List of Errata». Of course not all essays are equally effective; curiously, some of those written expressly for this volume seem narrow, perhaps because their authors had a particular audience in mind. This, however, is a small point; the editor is to be commended for an inclusive approach that welcomes Brazilian women and younger writers into the fold.

Taken together, the