Of Poets and Barbarians: Challenging Linguistic Hierarchies in Cervantes’s Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda
Is style an ornamental feature of writing separate from the content or can it be a vehicle of political and ethical expression? This essay takes as point of departure the incipit of Miguel de Cervantes’s posthumously published epic novel, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda (1617) to argue for a richer understanding of style. More specifically, it shows how through the use of a high epic style in the Persiles Cervantes questions central humanist tenets and assumptions about the relation of language to humanity, of individual speakers and linguistic communities, as well as the expectations of a linguistic chain of being that would unflinchingly equate clarity of speech with civilization. By focusing on the representation of barbarian speech, this essay examines the ways in which Cervantes’s work offers a more ethical alternative to classical and Renaissance epic models that would either deny speech to barbarians or limit barbarian speech to the enabling curse that will get the heroic adventures going. By making the barbarian’s words intelligible through translation and more daringly, by making that very act of translation effect a change in the very texture of the receiving language itself, barbarolalia in Persiles emerges as poetry’s twin.
A Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrews' Edition of Freund's Latin Dictionary
This comprehensive dictionary is a popular and reliable reference work for Classics and Latin scholars; it includes citations from ancient literature, etymological information, and an orthographical index of words with variant spellings.
The Structure of Allegorical Desire
ed from its constituent units, on the other, a clamor of signifiers signifying nothing but themselves. Remembering the sententiousness of allegory, we are entitled to ask whether with such a structuralist description the thematic has not been "structured" out of court. The paradox is, of course, only an apparent one, but I draw it out in this way so as to point to a real difficulty in structuralist poetics: namely, that in order to maintain any thematic meaning at all, structuralism, like allegory, must assume a meaningful connection between metaphoric and metonymic poles. That meaning is either what permits the two to join or the consequence of their juncture. What this means in practice is that Jakobson will pick up the tradition of Pope and Hopkins, or, for that matter, Wimsatt, and argue that sound is echo to sense. Jakobson does not, of course, intend the naive claim that there are different phonemes for different qualities-the notorious murmuring of innumerable bees-though he does accept studies which support Mallarm9's discriminations of 12. Jakobson, p. 109. 13. Ibid., p. 95. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.159 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 04:42:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Structure of Allegorical Desire 53 dark and light vowels. Rather, Jakobson wants to say that the structure of poetic sounds functions in relation to the structure of its poetic signifieds as a kind of Peircean index, a little like that to which it points, or, in negatively contrapuntal fashion, conspicuously, but equally indicatively, unlike. In pointing to themselves, therefore, as in rhyme, the sounds thus also point beyond themselves to the structure of their signifieds. The same goes for the signifieds themselves, which at a semantic and thematic level are again a structure of signifiers pointing both to themselves and to a structure of signifiers beyond themselves, all of them, alone or together, eventually pointing to the structure of language itself. This is the essentially Hegelian assumption that lies behind Jakobson's claim that "The history of a system is in turn also a system," 14 i.e., that historical diachrony, the evolution of a language, reacts structurally upon the synchronic linguistic code. Once the signifier's relation to the signified, i.e., the sign as a whole, is in this way understood to be relatively motivated, rather than utterly arbitrary as in Saussure, it is possible to make the sign itself into an index pointing to the structure it embodies and supports. Thus all the levels of allegory, up through and including the thematic, will display themselves and each other with resoundingly poetic and emphatically structural effect."5 But this harmonious, now Leibnitzian structure, depending as it does on an utter idealization of the structure of the sign, occurs at a significant cost. "The supremacy of poetic function over referential function does not obliterate the reference but makes it ambiguous."16 What this typically unbending aphorism means is that in a structuralist poem every signifier will be simultaneously metaphor and metonymy. Jakobson's example is the girl in the Russian folk tale who comes to be symbolized by the willow under which she walks. Ever after in the poem, girl and tree are metaphors each of the other by virtue of their metonymic intersection, just as the sequential movement of the poem is conditioned by their metaphoric equivalence. In classical rhetoric we would call this a synecdoche: the girl is represented by the tree or it by she in that one possesses the other. But in Jakobson's terms what we have is a metaphoric metonymy and a metonymic metaphor, and the result, not surprisingly, is allegory: Similarity superimposed on contiguity imparts to poetry its thoroughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic essence which is beau14. Jurii Tynianov and Roman Jakobson, "Problems in the Study of Language and Literature," The Structuralists, p. 82. 15. Similarly, because messages about the code are selected from the code, Lacan denies the possibility of a radical concept of metalanguage: "There is the relation here of the system to its own constitution as a signifier, which would seem to be relevant to the question of metalanguage and which, in my opinion, will demonstrate the impropriety of that notion if it is intended to define differentiated elements in language." (Jacques Lacan, "On a Question Preliminary to any Possible Treatment of Psychosis," Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, Norton, 1977, p. 185). 16. Jakobson, p. 112. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.159 on Sun, 18 Sep 2016 04:42:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms