From: Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America
19.1 (1999): 138-41.
Copyright © 1999, The Cervantes Society of America
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Lezra, Jacques. Unspeakable Subjects: The Genealogy of the Event
in Early Modern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. vi
+ 413 pp.
In Unspeakable Subjects, Jacques Lezra
explores the origins, the nature, and the “consequences” of an
essential theme in post-modern critical discourse: the
“incommensurability” between materiality and the aesthetic principles
that inform history, between accidents of nature and their
“sublimation” in language as “events.” Lezra's central
chapters focus on Descartes's Second Meditation (chapter 2), Cervantes's
Don Quixote (chapters 3 and 4), and Shakespeare's Measure for
Measure (chapter 5). In these and other texts contemporary to them, Lezra
explores the divergence between language as rhetorical strategy and truth.
The scope of the book, however, reaches much farther, from Lucretius, Aristotle,
and Plato to Freud, Derrida, Foucault and Lacan, embracing in-between writings
by a host of the main figures of the Western intellectual tradition. The
selection of secondary sources on Descartes, Cervantes, and Shakespeare is
equally comprehensive, as are his copious endnotes, covering pp. 297-375.
The extensive bibliography (35 pp.) completes the abundant detail of this
intertextual tour de force.
If remarkable breadth is one of the defining
characteristics of Unspeakable Subjects, another is the stylistic
and conceptual density. Lezra's introductory chapter, “Eventful
Reading,” lays out the scope and the aim of his project with references
to Lucretius, Virgil, Pico, Ficino, Nietzsche, and Foucault framing his approach.
In Lezra's words, Unspeakable Subjects “traces the movement between
the ‘singularities’ of material history —the documents of
official and nonofficial history and proclamation, the institutional setting
and conditions for literary and philosophical speech acts, the graphic
constraints of the author's historical body— and the
‘singularities’ of textual events, their impasses and
over-determinations. . . . More: it seeks to understand
the status of that ‘tracing’ itself as neither an act nor
an event alone —as itself a habitual ‘principle of
singularity’ whose paradox properly constitutes our contingent
post-modernity” (33). Lezra speaks to a select readership, one fully
initiated to post-modern literary and psychoanalytic theory and willing to
follow the author on an astonishing
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intellectual voyage. Readers with a closer horizon will find this book approaches
the limit where the investment of effort may outweigh the reward.
In chapter 1, “Freud's Sickle,” Lezra
discusses “the discursive conditions under which any thought about
events comes to us today in the wake or in the throes of philosophical
and discursive revolutions . . .” (37). His metaphor,
“Freud's Sickle,” describes “the knot of discursive impasses
that mark for us . . . the inadequacy of the speculative act to
its object” (37). The distinction between “act” and
“event” allows Lezra to explore the contingencies of discourse
which separate them: “Certain occurrences thus may or may not have the
status of events for reasons intrinsic, not to them but to the system
of symbolic and material exchanges in which they occur or at which they
arrive. . . . Events are what was silently predicted
in the system to which they come” (40). In Freud's Interpretation
of Dreams Lezra finds the material on which to construct an understanding
of this “impasse” or “knot.” As the dreams studied by
Freud, so too all “linguistic events” take “the form of improper
‘naming’ of what has no proper name, as the pseudo-trope of
catachresis,” which in turn “structures the effort to tell as an
allegory of resistance the relation between ‘events’ and their
transformations” (70). The “sickle” is also Lezra's chosen
metaphor for “omission,” for the “cutting out” of what
language fails properly to name. The inadequacy of discourse to link act
with idea, matter with language, comprises the “unspeakability”
of events to which Lezra refers. His study of Descartes, Cervantes, and
Shakespeare focuses on their discovery and their struggle with this incapacity
of language.
“The Ontology of the Letter in Descartes's
Second Meditation,” chapter 2, pursues the problem of
“unspeakability” in terms of Descartes's epistemological proposition
of “reading like a novel.” In the novel, “fabula” accompanies
and complements “historia”; questions of memory, knowing, and doubt
which arise in the process of reading are resolved by continuing without
stopping and allowing the flow of narrative and the context to fill in gaps
or discrepancies. On this path to truth, intuition and deduction become
“structurally and functionally indistinguishable” (92). Lezra
identifies this “Cartesian paradox” with three linguistic and
rhetorical patterns, which he maps out in detail: “the metonymic passage
from opinion to certainty, the proleptic structuring of metaphor's
liberalization, [and] the deictic positioning of the figure of the reader
in the place of such pre-metaphor's existing term” (100-01). Thus,
“the relation between these three strategies for articulating thought
and reading . . . can be conceived paradoxically as a way of reaching
intuitive truth deductively, by invoking momentarily one or the other of
these correlative strategies” (100-01). Lezra joins the linguistic and
rhetorical patterns of Descartes's writing with his attempts to understand
the phenomenon of perception, especially Descartes's dissections and diagrams
of the human eye, where he seeks to understand the relation between eye,
spirit, understanding, and written language.
Chapter 3, “The Matter of Naming in Don
Quixote,” engages the epistemological problems posed by Cervantes's
novel and the rhetorical and stylistic structures Cervantes uses to exploit
these problems. For Lezra, Cervantes offers
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| 140 | ROBERT M. JOHNSTON | Cervantes |
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a most subtle and accomplished laying bare of the “failure” of
language to “reconcile an act with its representation” (135-36).
In Don Quixote Lezra finds a “combat” or play of discrepancies
between “events and the various languages deployed to name them
. . .” (137). The analysis begins with the
“reflective” game involving the position and function of the reader,
who Cervantes names “Desocupado lector” in the Prologue to Part
I. This self-critical play and the “impasses” it reveals repeat
themselves in various forms throughout the novel: “the various figurations
and materializations of names (‘reader,’ ‘Knight of the Sad
Countenance’), bodies and organs (the first narrator's ear, Don
Quixote's hand, Sancho's mother . . .), institutions
(the law, the Inquisition, the Monarchy) and events (the publication of Don
Quixote, the loss of Cervantes's arm in the battle of Lepanto, etc.)
. . .” (137-38). Lezra devotes chapters 3 and 4 to his analysis
of the nature and effect of this repetition.
Reading Don Quixote against López
de Velasco's Orthographia y pronunciacion castellana, and El Pinciano's
Philosophia antigua poetica, Lezra situates Cervantes's novel in the
context of debates on grammar and the relation of language to event in the
sixteenth century. The game of naming in Don Quixote both relies on
the medieval idea of the totality of language and matter and at the same
time deconstructs its fallibility, spoiling the relation of language to truth
necessary in a theocratic society. Cervantes “both requires that the
relation between textual and historical events be read as an allegory and
makes it impossible to understand this allegory as representing, relying
upon, or producing the consonance of part and totality, soul and body, matter
and form” (156). Naming emerges as the template for the game in which
Cervantes both reveals and pretends to solve the “formal aporias”
posed in his novel.
“Cervantes's Hand,” chapter 4, explores
“the nature of the bodies that a novelistic reading . . .
can form, and the means and consequences of that formation
. . .” (177). Beginning with the concept of the hand as an
instrument of narration, Lezra expands his psychoanalytic anatomy of the
novel to “the eroticized architecture and topography of La Mancha”
(177). Drawing on Freud and recent psychoanalytic theory, he associates narrative
with “madre” and endows narrative form, limits, and impasses with
maternal and phallic significance:
“. . . ‘man's’ experience of the body is born
and reborn in, and as, the discourse of the novel” (191). The episode
in Part I, where the servant, Maritornes, snares Don Quixote's hand serves
as a window to understand the Lezran principles of Cervantes's novelistic
structure: the “morphology of representation,” the “image
of the body,” and “the law of desire” (199).
Through an examination of the rhetorical,
linguistic, psychoanalytic associations underlying word play in the novel,
Lezra moves the discussion from the ordering principles of narrative to those
of the state. In Quevedo's Política de Dios, the
“semiotics” of the terms “cetro” and “corona”
and the justification for the power and right of monarchy unconsciously reveal
the aporias in the episteme of the theocratic state. Language and materiality
separate at the seam where the monarch is to be the embodiment rather than
the sign of God's truth. Similarly, Cervantes's linguistic structures also
deconstruct the state: “The novel's privileged figures for tropological
systems —the hand, scepter, and
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crown, for instance, that stand in for anatomical, ideological, or semantic
otras cosas . . . lose much of their epistemological and
descriptive power as a result of their systematic liberalization throughout
Don Quixote” (229). Lezra argues that signs in Don Quixote
dissociate from intention and from determinate meaning, that they “obey
a semiotic law that functions independently of human cognition” and
of “any transcendent subject” (248-51). Lezra's analysis leads
him to the conclusions that in Don Quixote:
“. . . there is neither ‘form’ nor
‘matter’ but the permanent and permanently suspended, circle drawn
by the materialization of form, and the formalization of matter. The novel,
and Don Quixote more than any other, ‘Don Quixote’ por
antonomasia, has as its perverse task to tell the story of this
‘exorbitant circling’” (245-46).
Lezra closes Unspeakable Subjects with
his fifth chapter, “The Appearance of History in Measure for
Measure.” With one of the play's minor characters, Barnardine, Lezra
finds Shakespeare's “most probing reflection on the limit of his art
before the materiality, the resistance of events that cannot be made to
speak” (257). As an emblem for both life and history, the head of the
pirate, Ragozine, who is executed in place of Barnardine, achieves the status
of both act and event, only to erase itself necessarily and paradoxically:
“. . . the appearance of Ragozine's head —a part
which no metatheatrical discourse can square with the spectacle it glosses
or with the muzzy, absolute negative whose absence it supplies— calls
for and acquires the status of an act and event. Like criticism, it does
so only to the extent that its consuming reliance on the materiality of the
letter is never raised (again). The mechanism by which the pirate's head,
or any man's, is brought to the block, by which an act such as a proclamation
or the giving of a name inevitably returns to the play, is founded and erased
constantly by this gesture of denial” (294).
Unspeakable Subjects sets for itself
a goal equal to that of seminal works such as Erich Auerbach's Mimesis
or E. C. Riley's Cervantes's Theory of the Novel. In comparison with
them, however, the intellectual and linguistic density of Lezra's construct
will very likely limit its impact. Recognizing the intrinsic inadequacy or
“failure” of language to fuse itself with life, Unspeakable
Subjects seems to surrender deliberately to the game of intertextuality,
self-reflexivity, and open semiosis. Poetic in its own way, intuitive, and
self-conscious, Lezra's book makes the game of language not only the topic
but also the method for spinning an intertextual genealogy in which it also
locates itself. Lezra succeeds convincingly in placing Descartes, Cervantes,
and Shakespeare in the transition between devolutionary and evolutionary
world views, where language begins to be understood as a system of signs
rather than a receptacle for meaning. As such, Unspeakable Subjects
offers a challenging labyrinth of thought, a clever weaving of Classical,
Renaissance, and Modern ideas about the relation of language to truth, matter
to reason, accident to history. It also offers a remarkable example of Cervantine
irony (la razón de la sin razón) compounded exponentially
by the post-modern perspective.
| Robert M. Johnston |
| Northern Arizona University |
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| Fred Jehle jehle@ipfw.edu | Publications of the CSA | H–Cervantes |
| URL: http://www.h-net.org/~cervantes/csa/artics99/johnston.htm | ||