Ficciones entre mundos is a collection of fourteen eclectic essays dedicated to Cervantes's last major work. While the division of the anthology into three sections lends a certain structural coherence to the project, what stands out most in this new book is the diversity of critical perspectives on display. Taking Jörg Dünne and Hanno Ehrlicher's introduction as a guide, one discovers important parameters for understanding this diversity. Referencing the book's title, their opening essay traces the Cervantine usage of the term vagamundo to a defining hypothesis that functions as a unifying trope for the diverse collection of articles that will follow: “a more detailed analysis of the use that Cervantes makes of the term ‘mundo’ leads us to affirm that, in the Persiles, vagar por el mundo contains within it the possibility of conceiving other worlds” (5). What stands out is their insistence on the novel's open-endedness, on its availability for all manner of possible readings. The linkage here to the critical tradition is made explicit a few pages later, when Dünne and Ehrlicher, citing the “endless readings, spontaneous and naïve, as well as professional and erudite” (9) inspired since the Persiles’s first publication in 1617, suggest that the contributions in the present volume may be read as following in this same tradition.
At the same time, to those looking for structure, the explicit division of this new anthology into three sections suggests a general if not wholly consistent interest in something akin to influence studies, as suggested by the title of the first section (“De Heliodoro a Cervantes”) and the third (“El Persiles y otros textos del Siglo de Oro”). Referencing Renaissance notions of imitation, which she compares to the contemporary concept of intertextuality (22), Mercedes Blanco provides the most direct consideration of the relationship between Heliodorus and Cervantes, while other contributors push beyond this central axis of interest to include the analysis of a range of early modern texts from the “novela barroca” (Christine Marguet), to Inca Garcilaso's Comentarios Reales (Fernando Nina), to Spanish theatrical adaptations of the Aethiopica (Hanno Ehrlicher), among others. Yet it is the middle section, “Lecturas del Persiles,” that most clearly exemplifies the open-endedness that Dünne and Ehrlicher cite as the driving intellectual spirit of the collection as a whole. Read against the background of the editors’ introduction, these nine essays on topics ranging from geography (Dünne) to religion—especially as filtered through comparisons with the biblical story of Jacob and Esau (Walter Marx; Xuan Jing)—to love (Gernot Kamecke) and music (Susana Sarfson and Rodrigo Madrid) underscore the richness of Cervantes's work as a source of interpretative inspiration. The most successful essays in this section, I would suggest, are those that adhere closely to the text and direct their interpretative enthusiasm toward concrete ends. Blanca Santos de la Morena, for example, in her brief examination of the representation of suicide and dueling in the Persiles against the backdrop of the Council of Trent, employs careful close readings to construct a historicized interpretation of these two very specific aspects of Cervantes's novel. Equally impressive, albeit far more theoretical, is Dünne's analysis of what he describes as “la poética cervantina del lugar” (“the Cervantine poetics of place”), in which he explores the notion of “place” both in connection with the rhetoric of inventio and through a special consideration of the phrase “da lugar” as it relates to human actions (112).
It would be impossible in a short review to address all of the critical perspectives on display in this new anthology. Taken as a whole, however, the essays that make up this collection underscore the continued relevance of the Persiles both for its peculiar place in the historical trajectory leading from Heliodorus through the Spanish early modern period and for its unique potential as a source of interpretative inspiration.
