The fate of the scorpion has tired the labyrinths of Mexican politics and the expansive actions of organized crime. He also observed via television the harassment of the President carried out by a poor devil and the image seemed to him the most resounding metaphor of gender violence in our country: in plain sight of everyone and yet, there are those who doubt it, do not notice it, accuse a montage and minimize the abuse. Already out of breath, the scorpion still witnessed a brave feminist gesture by Miss Tabasco-Mexico, candidate for Miss Universe, but he did not stop wondering why beauty pageants still exist and why young women participate in them, when they have always been radical sexist expressions that turn women into objects. Reality is no big deal, the poisonous man thought, and preferred to take refuge in literary criticism, an honest profession (Borges dixit), which he once practiced with some fortune.
Any great book includes in its pages all previous readings and rewrites itself in the reader’s mind with the comments, reflections, criticisms and glosses that arise around it. We read the tragedy of Hamlet as it was read in Elizabethan times, as it was read by the Gothics and the Victorians, the Romantics and readers before and after Freud, the modernists, postmodernists and successors. From the first phantasmagoric readings to the perception of the prince as a madman, from the centrality of the political-court clash to the approaches to crime and justice, and from there to the psychological interpretations of the character’s inner conflict and his transformation into a romantic hero. We then read a Hamlet to the right extent of our reading, critical, professional or study capacity, as work, entertainment or distraction. But the criticism of the book is present in the commentary heard or read, in those who suggest or disdain its reading, and it will also provoke in us a reflection, a gloss, a comment.
Critical studies were carried out on Homer and his classic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey until the Alexandrian period, when the texts could be fixed, captured through writing. Before, the transmission of these poetic stories was oral, carried out by rhapsodes, and above all through special sheets made in each city for local celebrations and their versers’ festivals, which gave rise to the multiplication of variants of the original verses, which, furthermore, also varied when compiled by Homer. They would finally reach school textbooks.
Plato, a reader of Homer, disseminated his ideas about poetry in his extensive work, in addition to perfecting dialogue as a literary form, although, with a kind of critical vision, he left poets out of his ideal Republic for encouraging nonconformity. Aristotle in his Rhetoric investigates the formal aspects of literature and his Poetics represents the first specialized and systematic study of the poetic fact.
Cicero in Rome wrote about eloquence and oratory, while Horace left various advice on the art of writing in his Epistles. Later the concept of Bibliotheca became famous thanks to Photius, patriarch of Constantinople in the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire. Around the year 855, the scholar created a kind of encyclopedia consisting of a collection of comments, news and descriptions of 280 books he had read, with notes and extracts. This exercise of criticism and gloss was widespread in the court of Byzantium, a form of literary Wikipedia.
In the Middle Ages, Petrarch critically studied poetry, especially the literary figure of allegory, while Boccaccio carried out an extensive study of Dante’s poetics. In the 15th century, the Spaniards Juan Alfonso de Baena in his Cancionero, and the Marquis of Santillana in his Letter to the Constable of Portugal, also praised poetry in Romance languages. Literary criticism then has always been expressed and developed, from Athens and Rome to the present day.
A memorable example of the critical literary exercise is that of Alonso Quijano, who, as we know, disturbed by reading chivalric novels, incarnated in Don Quixote to become a knight-errant, righteous paladin, righter of wrongs and in love with Dulcinea. The one with the sad figure “sold many bushels of farmland to buy books of chivalry to read, and thus he took home as many of them as he could get his hands on,” says the first chapter of El Ingenioso Hidalgo. Cervantes immediately describes Alonso’s astonishing reading taste for the stories of Feliciano de Silva and a dozen other books about knights: from Palmerín of England to Amadís de Gaula, from Caballero del Febo to Galaor, from Cid Ruy Díaz to Bernardo del Carpio, from Roldán to Reinaldos de Montalbán.
Faced with this madness of Quijano, his confusion between reality and fiction, plus the first wounds and injuries caused by his warrior foolishness, in the sixth chapter his barber friend, Master Nicolás, and the priest of his town of La Mancha, purge with “gracious and great scrutiny” Alonso’s library, “where they found more than a hundred bodies of large books.” The housekeeper then demands that the priest sprinkle the room with holy water to exorcise from there “one of the many enchanters who have these books,” she says fearfully, and together with Alonso’s niece asks the priest and the barber to make a big fire with all the “harmful” books.
The priest chooses to review all the titles one by one; He then throws some into the fire and saves others according to different occurrences and “critical” considerations (the binding, the cover, the supposed theme of the adventure, the author’s fame). The barber then unexpectedly comes across the book La Galatea, by Cervantes himself, of whom the priest claims to be a friend of many years and for which he reflexively recommends “saving the book to wait for its second part.” In the game between reality, fiction, literary criticism, the humorous wink and Cervantes’ self-reference, there is laughter and the meta-literary journey in which the reader and the scorpion have already been trapped by the genius of Cervantes.