The aim of this article is to place Francisco Ayala's collection of short stories Los usurpadores (1944) in a context of interpretation that brings to light its juridico-political underpinning. This context is a sociological field of speculation where the critique of the baroque championed by Walter Benjamin, T. S. Eliot, and Ayala unfolds under the auspices of the German jurist Carl Schmitt. By focusing on the role of community, sovereignty, emergency, and decision in stories like “San Juan de Dios” and “El hechizado,” this article establishes a new connection between Ayala's fiction, his political theory, and his reading of Spanish baroque writers like Saavedra Fajardo, Cervantes, Calderón, and Quevedo. This connection reveals both the rationalism and the sustained anti-essentialism that shape Ayala's literary and critical production.
This article examines the centrality of the motif of the hand in Samuel Richardson's Pamela. By underscoring the structural salience of the hand-derived notions of maintenance, command, manumission, manufacture and manners, the article seeks to prove that the novel plots a political transit from barbarism to civilization. This claim is advanced through the convergence of three interpretive strategies: a close reading of the novel that tracks the literal and figurative presence of the hand; direct confrontation with texts of political theory, with special emphasis on Thomas Hobbes and John Locke; and the use of contemporary phenomenology on touch by Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida. The resulting interpretation identifies Pamela as a “chiropractress” who resorts to the religious violence of the miracle in order to neutralize the patriarchal hand and obtain political intangibility. Still, the true miracle in the novel is the reformation caused by the girl's superfluous writing. By thus staging a fable of domestication through verbal manners, Pamela contributes, decisively but problematically, to the consolidation of domestic fiction. Both the residual omnipresence of the patriarchal hand and the exorbitance of the handmaid's manners attest to the defective containment of the political by the domestic.
The significance of the Waterloo episode in Vanity Fair remains somewhat obscure. Early reviewers of the novel either ignored it or suggested its downright insignificance: “The battle of Waterloo, it is true, is introduced; but as far as regards the story, it brings about only one death, and one bankruptcy, which might either of them have happened in a hundred of other ways” (Rigby 79). Furthermore, when compared to Stendhal's La chartreuse de Parme and Hugo's Les misérables, two novels where a report of the battle is at least attempted, Vanity Fair looks exceptional. The novel's mimetic elusiveness vis-à-vis the battle has been a source of puzzle and the object of some critical contention. In line with John Carey, who argued that “Vanity Fair is built round a thunderous void” (189), John Sutherland suggested that “Thackeray's battlefield reticence” impinged on the novel's “historical fabric” producing “gaping, but evidently carefully placed, holes” (15), the larger being (no pun intended) Waterloo. Some critics explained away this omission by invoking Thackeray's anti-heroic restraint, a position best expressed by Tolstoy: “For an historian considering the achievement of a certain aim, there are heroes; for the artist treating of man's relation to all sides of life there cannot and should not be heroes, but there should be men” (1309). Other readers blamed the silencing effect of an elegiac trauma – an “agony of glory,” in Coleridge's terms – not uncommonly affecting the winning side in a violent conflict. One could also adduce reasons of epistemological honesty, in line with Tolstoy's blunt assertion that “in every description of a battle there is a necessary lie” (1310).
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