Gongora's Soledades and the Problem of Modernity

Colección Támesis SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 254

Góngora’s Soledades and the Problem of Modernity Combining philological rigor with a capacity to engage the most contemporary transatlantic and comparatist concerns, this work situates Luis de Góngora’s Soledades within the problematic evolution of Hispanic modernity.   As well as offering an insightful analysis of the Soledades as an expression of the Baroque crisis in all its facets -epistemological, ontological, cultural and historical - the author reads the fragmented lyric subject of Gongorist poetics back against Renaissance precursors [Rojas’ Celestina and the poetry of Boscán and Garcilaso] and in anticipation of the truncated and isolated subject of modernity. The study concludes with an examination of the interaction between the legacies of Gongorism and French Symbolism in the work of selected poets of the Latin American vanguard [Gorostiza, Paz and Vallejo]. Crystal Anne Chemris  is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Iowa.

Tamesis

Founding Editor J. E. Varey General Editor Stephen M. Hart Editorial Board Alan Deyermond Julian Weiss Charles Davis

crystal anne chemris

Góngora’s Soledades and the Problem of Modernity

TAMESIS

©  Crystal Anne Chemris 2008 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Crystal Anne Chemris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2008 by Tamesis, Woodbridge ISBN  978–1–85566–160–8

Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

CONTENTS Foreword

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Acknowledgments

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Preface

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Introduction: Renaissance and Solitude

1

1 Crisis and Form

21

2 Violence, Eros and Lyric Emotion

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3 Self and World: The Crisis of Perception in the Soledades

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4 Time, Space and Apocalypse: The Falconry Scene as Disruption of Prophecy

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5 Góngora and the Modern: “New Poetry”?

104

Works Cited

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Index

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To my mother, who beat the odds

Era del año la estación florida   en que el mentido robador de Europa   (media luna las armas de su frente,   y el Sol todo los rayos de su pelo),   luciente honor del cielo,   en campos de zafiro pace estrellas,   cuando el que ministrar podia la copa   a Júpiter mejor que el garzón de Ida,   náufrago y desdeñado, sobre ausente,   lagrimosas de amor dulces querellas   da al mar, que condolido,   fue a las ondas, fue al viento   el mísero gemido   segundo de Arïón dulce instrumento.  (I. 1–14) Luis de Góngora y Argote, Soledad primera

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Stephen Hart, Ellie Ferguson and my anonymous reader at Tamesis Books for their support and assistance in the publication of this book, as well as the Program for Cultural Cooperation between the Spanish Ministry of Culture and United States Universities for a research grant. I would also like to thank my family, friends and colleagues. I acknowledge the inspiration, advice and example of my fellow Gongoristas, in particular the late Andrée Collard, Antonio Carreira, and especially John Beverley, who has given generously of his time and support. I also thank Denah Lida and Alberto Sandoval for their gentle encouragement during the writing process, as well as Emilie Bergmann, Michael Ugarte, Jim Iffland, Sharon Larisch, Electa Arenal, Amanda Powell, Analisa Taylor and Leah Middlebrook for their ongoing endorsement of my work. I would like to thank colleagues at Smith College, the University of Pittsburgh and Reed College for various forms of assistance; at Smith: Harold Skulsky, Marina Kaplan and Harry Berger Jr.; at the University of Pittsburgh: Elizabeth Monasterios, Hermann Herlinghaus, Paul Bové, Ignacio López Vicuña, Kathryn Flannery and Valerie Krips; at Reed College: the Spanish Department as well as poets Lisa Steinman and Jim Shugrue. I acknowledge the advice and comments of Diane Wolfthal, Emily Umberger and Margaret Greer on the earliest version of Chapter 2. I thank Tony Geist for his generous assistance in obtaining Visiting Scholar status for me at the University of Washington. I also thank Mario and María Elena Valdés for taking the time to encourage my work in modern Latin American poetry, and Jorge Panesi, who allowed me to audit courses at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. I gratefully acknowledge the advice of Luis Áviles on issues of textual definition in Garcilaso’s poetry as well as the support of Tom Lewis in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Iowa. Finally, I thank my friends in the Latin American exile community who have taught me much about voice and courage.



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Some of the material in this book appeared in an earlier version in the articles listed below; permission to reprint has been granted by the following publishers who hold the copyright to these articles: “Time, Space, and Apocalypse in Góngora’s Soledades,” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures 43.3 (1989): 147–57. (Chapter 4) “Self-Reference in Góngora”s Soledades,” Hispanic Journal 12.1 (1991): 7–15. (Excerpts appear in Chapters 1 and 2) “Violence, Eros and Lyric Emotion in Góngora’s Soledades,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 37 (2003): 463–85. (Chapter 2) “A Note on Female Agency and the Éfire Figure in Góngora’s Soledad segunda,” Studies in Honor of Denah Lida, Mary G, Berg and Lanin A. Gyurko, eds (Potomac MD: Scripta Humanistica, 2005). (Excerpts appear in Chapter 2.) “A Reading of Octavio Paz’s ‘Himno entre ruinas’ in Light of the Góngora– Symbolist Parallel,” Cincinnati Romance Review 25 (2006): 149–58. (Excerpts appear in Chapter 5.)

The author and publishers are grateful to the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities for assistance with the production costs of this volume.

PREFACE Important critical readings of Góngora’s Soledades have emerged since the classic studies by Robert Jammes, R. O. Jones and Andrée Collard of the late sixties. Influenced in part by newer theoretical approaches, such as semiotics, structuralism, deconstructionism and feminism, these include the work of Giovanni Sinicropi, Maurice Molho, John Beverley, Mary Gaylord, and Paul Julian Smith. Since that time, additional readings within this new wave have been developed by myself, Ted McVay, Pedro Ruiz Pérez, Betty Sasaki, Emilie Bergmann, Lorna Close and others, and significant contributions in the areas of interdisciplinary and source studies have been produced by Alfonso Callejo, Marsha Collins, and John McCaw. European production remains vibrant; especially noteworthy is the ongoing work of Nadine Ly and Enrica Cancilliere, among others, who have participated in a small boom of Góngora studies on the continent in honor of Robert Jammes’ retirement, and subsequently in symposia and publications coming out of the University of Córdoba. The journal Calíope produced an entire issue on Góngora, where articles on the Soledades by Carroll Johnson and Frederick de Armas reflected renewed interest in the relationship between the poet and his patrons. New resources for textual work are now available. Alfonso Callejo and María Teresa Pajares published a concordance of the poem; the Chacón edition now exists in facsimile edition; and Antonio Carreira has provided new editions of Góngora’s works and letters (with another one planned for Francisco Rico’s series). Ana Martínez Arancón published a popular (if not definitive) collection of documents of the original critical debate over the  Collard’s Nueva poesía anticipates Beverley’s notion of the frustration of generic teleology in the poem; she also lays the basis for future readings of the work as a case of incipient modernity, in its break with Horatian concepts of didacticism and as an early defense of artistic autonomy before the French Querelle. Written only five years before Beverley’s 1972 PhD thesis, Collard’s work can be seen as transitional to the newer wave of Soledades scholarship influenced by contemporary theory (see Chapter 1). References to all studies mentioned appear in “Works Cited”.  See also Bergmann, “Sounds and Silences,” for a contribution on the teaching of ­Góngora’s Soledades as well as her scholarship on the poem (“Optics”).  Sliwa has also produced a new edition of Góngora’s letters. Carreira includes his edition of Góngora’s “Respuesta” in his more recent Obras completas of Góngora, which is the edition cited in this study.

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Soledades; Pedro de Valencia’s Carta as well as Jáuregui’s Antídoto have been reedited; and these are complemented by a new critical study of the debate itself by Joaquín Roses Lozano (see Pérez López and Rico García). Spanish production is quite prolific in the wake of European integration; in this context I will suggest that attention be paid to bringing out scholarly editions of some of the unpublished commentaries – by Salcedo Coronel, Angulo y Pulgar and Díaz de Rivas – , as well as to reissuing Fernández de Cordoba, the Abad de Rute’s “Examen del Antídoto” and Pedro de Valencia’s Escritos sociales. One of the strengths of the Spanish academy is teamwork; in this regard I have found Begoña López Bueno’s collection of studies on the silva, particularly Juan Montero Delgado and Pedro Ruíz Pérez’s contribution, to have been quite helpful for understanding the Soledades in the context of the evolution of that form, as well as Elías Rivers’ American seminar on classical genres in Spanish poetry (Muses and Masks). Robert Jammes’ monumental edition of the poem is now the scholarly standard, while the Beverley Cátedra edition remains an important and affordable resource for students and has wide distribution. It remains the sole vehicle for the dissemination of Beverley’s analysis of the Soledades in Spanish, although perhaps in the future his book, Aspects of Góngora’s Soledades, which is for me the definitive critical study of the poem to date will be translated. Perhaps one of the more original contributions of Beverley’s study is his argument that the Soledades form a completed text. I will briefly reprise Beverley’s argument as elaborated in Aspects. The Abad de Rute, in his contemporary defense of Góngora against Jáuregui’s criticism of the Soledad primera, suggested that Góngora had  See Melchora Romanos, “Las Anotaciones,” regarding her work in editing Díaz de Rivas for publication.  Beverley’s thesis was accepted by Maurice Molho and is also supported by Callejo’s study on the artistic value of the Soledad segunda; the second canto was criticized by Jones and Jammes as an indication that Góngora had abandoned his initial project of critique to the demands of patronage (Jones, “Poetic Unity” 203; Jammes, Études 586). Jammes has more recently expressed uncertainty on the issue as well as an openness to other hypotheses (“Presentación” 25–26; ed. Soledades 44–45). Ruiz Pérez, like Beverley and Alonso, tends to discount the theories of the early commentators; as he states, “Las argumentaciones extrínsecas al poema, más o menos historicistas, apoyadas en la credibilidad de Díaz de Rivas y Pellicer, valen tanto para cuestionar como para confirmar la exactitud de esta atribución y se mueven en el territorio de la hipótesis a pesar de su aparente carácter documental” (El espacio 236). He further notes, in the context of Carreira’s study of the attribution issues surrounding the “Carta en respuesta”, that “las afirmaciones de los comentarios pueden ser tan resbaladizas y equívocas como sus juicios estéticos, máxime en el contexto de una lucha con mucho de personal y en la que se recurrió a todas las armas de este tipo de polémicas, incluyendo las máscaras, los anónimos y las atribuciones ficticias. En este sentido, la verisimilitud de los panegiristas debe ser, cuando menos sometida a contraste” (236–37). Interestingly, Ruiz Pérez adopts a further aspect of Beverley’s thesis, acknowledging that “el texto conocido de las Soledades presenta ya la posibilidad de una subdivisión tetramembre” (241). See Carriera, “La controversia.”



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planned to finish the poem with three more cantos. According to Díaz de Rivas, these were to have formed an allegorical progression through four landscape stages: the soledad de los campos (which Beverley identifies with the Soledad primera), the soledad de las riberas (which he identifies with the Soledad segunda), the soledad de las selvas and a final soledad del yermo (Gates, Documentos 86). Pellicer combined this scenario with the traditional allegory of the human life cycle as the four seasons of the year, a progression which Angulo y Pulgar saw as metaphorical. Dámaso Alonso and García Lorca, participants in the 1927 revival of Góngora, rejected the four-soledad hypothesis of the early commentators, suspecting, as Beverley notes, that it was “contaminated by the Post-Tridentine taste for didactic allegories” such as that elaborated by writers like Calderón and Gracián, the Christian topos of the peregrinatio vitae (Aspects 84–85; see also Hahn). Rather than leaving the Soledades incomplete, Beverley argues, Góngora in fact intentionally telescoped the anticipated four cantos into what he calls a “binary pastoral/piscatory, comic–tragic two canto form,” combining the imagery of the myth of the ages of metal and of four landscape stages of social organization in a progressive movement from the primitive Golden Age, Spring, towards the bleak violence and devastation of the contemporary Hapsburg crisis (Aspects 93). For Beverley, the suspended ending, the appearance of the text as ruin, is an intended effect, and the tricked identity of end and beginning is the product of “an age where both the genesis and the decadence of Spain’s empire were simultaneously visible” (Aspects 131 n. 9). “The effect of Góngora’s truncation of the Soledad segunda,” as Beverley writes, “is to alienate the reader from the poem, to force him to complete it somewhere else in another language” (Aspects 112), to respond to the concluding vision of Spain’s crisis on the stage of history. I support Beverley’s thesis and would like to qualify it with some of my own observations. There is no reason to insist that the four-ages schema had to be expressed linearly; indeed the ages coexisted in a more spatial form of organization in other allegorical works of the early modern period. Its open but potentially circular structure is also not unprecedented; the form of the Soledades recalls the Baroque canon, with its finale that suggests a return to the beginning. Hardly an unfinished piece, the poem has a structure, as Elena Río Parra points out, that is as integrated as a musical score, with even a coda added to the Chacón manuscript to complete it, as Beverley has construed the final lines (Aspects 104, Río Parra, “La escritura”). Perhaps  I made this argument in my 1987 doctoral thesis, “Soledades: Bleeding Jewel (Preface xii; 142–43); since that time, Ruiz Pérez has adopted a similar position, arguing “la apertura del texto condice con la apertura del espacio que representa y por el que discurre el peregrino, un espacio ilimitado y no finito, tanto en el plano de la naturaleza como en la historia, que reclama necesariamente un texto igualmente abierto” (El espacio 241–42).

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even more compelling evidence for Beverley’s thesis can be found in the parallel between the Soledades and Virgil’s ten Eclogues, which can be read in their composite as an integrated macrotext. Looking at the ten Eclogues as a unitary work, Claudio Guillén has made compelling observations about its structure. As Guillén writes, Virgil’s eclogues follow a “sequence of different stages or levels of poetic fiction,” beginning with the tragedies of contemporary history which are the setting of the First Eclogue and ascending to “the triumphant harmony of the spirit” in the Fifth (181). In contrast, he maintains, in the second half of the eclogues, it appears that this progression is reversed. The two halves are highly symmetrical; as he writes, “The threshold (the First Eclogue) and the final stage (the Ninth and the Tenth) dramatize the conflict between contemporaneous history and song. The outer covering of the poetic structure is historical, and the reader must journey through it” (182). Guillén’s model of the plan of Virgil’s Eclogues has clear relevance to the structure of the Soledades as proposed by Beverley. Both works involve a progression from ascent to descent, both works evince symmetries between the two halves, and both end with a gesture towards beginning again; both are also framed by the contradictions of history and both appeal to the reader to complete the work outside the text. This structural parallel with the Eclogues, as I will show later in this study, is reinforced with similar ideological concerns on the part of these imperial poets regarding agrarian policy and succession. Beverley’s work on the Spanish Baroque and on colonial Gongorism, found in his important but poorly distributed Una modernidad obsoleta, remains essential, as does González Echevarría’s essay on Espinosa Medrano in Celestina’s Brood (149–69). Important Latin American theoretical contributions on Góngora and the Baroque come from Severo Sarduy and Jose Lezama Lima, and a key poet-critic from Spain, Andrés Sánchez Robayna, stands out for his association with Sarduy and for his work on Góngora and French Symbolism, embracing a comparatist and – avant la lettre – transatlantic approach, mediating his reading of Gongorine poetics through the prism of its trajectory into the modern. My own reading of the Soledades builds upon this legacy of critique by situating the poem within the problematic evolution of Hispanic modernity. I look at this evolution not as a smooth linear progression, but as a series of starts and retreats and mixed social structures, what postcolonial theory  Such a structure would be similar to what Howard Wescott has observed in Garcilaso’s three eclogues.  See Chapters 1 and 4. Beverley has noted the parallel with Virgil’s other pastoral work, stating that Góngora sought to recreate in the Soledades “a Hispano-Andalusian Georgics” (Aspects 46).



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might describe in terms of discontinuities and mixed temporalities, or what a Marxist might describe as combined and uneven development. The literary texts at the origins of Hispanic modernity parallel this irregular course on the road to Góngora’s radical poetics, beginning with the Celestina, which announces an aesthetic of fragmented bodies, speech and genres that lays bare the process of literary idealization, often through the conflicted representation of woman and gender relations. But as I said, there are stops and starts, continuities and discontinuities, expressed as moments of defamiliarization alternating with moments of institutionalization. I trace these through selected poems of Boscán and Garcilaso, here making use of Richard Seybolt’s work on Petrarchan fragmentation and more recent studies on idealization and violence, all within the sense of trajectory suggested by the early but still quite useful work of Rafael Lapesa. My choice is to respectfully disengage from the large body of biographical and historical research on Garcilaso as subject generated in the wake of New Historicism, as I prefer to look at these texts with a broader lens, more diachronically than synchronically, and more in aesthetic terms. Having said this, lest I be misunderstood, I will also acknowledge – in a more general sense – the importance of George Mariscal, Anne Cruz, and Carroll Johnson’s materialist studies on the literature of the period, precisely because they are able to locate their analysis of the historical moment within a broader understanding of the development of history. I see the Soledades as continuing this legacy of aesthetic response to the crisis of early modernity, what Ted McVay10 has viewed in Foucauldian terms as epistemic break, what Sinicropi11 has seen as ontological, what Beverley12 has seen as political and historical, and what Ruiz Pérez has described in broader cultural terms.13 I expand their understanding of this cultural crisis as it develops in the Baroque as a function of the breakdown of the previous sacerdotal conception of knowledge (Rossi x), drawing on the work of José Antonio Maravall, Paolo Rossi and others. Like Beverley, I look at levels of  See Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects, Cruz, Discourses of Poverty, and Johnson, Cervantes and the Material World. 10 Both Ted McVay and Alfonso Callejo have produced important dissertations which rank in importance, in my opinion, with the published studies available to date. 11 As Sinicropi writes, “La profonda cesura fra realtà ed ideale in Cervantes era il segno vivente di una crisi che sigillava bensì il tramonto definitivo di una certezza ontologica, ma allo stesso tempo inaugurava la confusa aurora di una coscienza critica della realtà. Le Soledades sono il segno della stessa crisi” (135). 12 See Beverley, Aspects 2–8, 99–102. 13 My original doctoral dissertation, “Soledades: Bleeding Jewel” (1987), and my articles “Time, Space and Apocalypse in Góngora’s Soledades” (1989) and “Self-Reference in Góngora’s Soledades” (1991), in their treatment of the issues of space, the Baroque subject, and selfreferential writing in Góngora’s poem, anticipate Ruiz Pérez’s analysis of the Soledades in El espacio de la escritura (1996), which treats the work of Gracián, Cervantes and Góngora.

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contradiction in the text as a function of this crisis. I examine genre, theme, syntax, tone and semantics; in all cases we witness a “loss of center,” to use Marjorie Nicolson and Severo Sarduy’s cosmological analogy, a loss of certainty and purpose, what Collard and Beverley have considered a breakdown in teleological function.14 I look at the experimentation with genre in the poem as embodying Nadine Ly’s paradoxical remark that Góngora’s aesthetic modernity rests on his imitation of ancient poetry in the vernacular;15 thus I include new observations on the response of Góngora to the estate poem variant of pastoral identified with Statius as well as to the Virgilian eclogue tradition. The fragmentation of the text occurs in the context of what Spadaccini has called “shattering mimesis” and its replacement with poesis, the creation of the “self-made world.”16 This subjectivism in the poem tends towards the solipsistic and is expressed in intriguing cases of self-reference in the work, which anticipate modern meditations on reflexivity such as the paradoxes elaborated by the mathematician Kurt Goedel. The fragmented structure of the Soledades is thus an expression of the Baroque crisis, a function of a breakdown of a worldview based on absolutes – whether expressed as Medieval Scholasticism or in the Neoplatonic idealism of the Renaissance – and its replacement with a creative but problematic subjectivism. This crisis in worldview is expressed on deeper levels, extending to the relationship between self and other, where it is played out in the figure of the peregrino as subject. Here, Góngora continues the trope of psychic fragmentation of his Renaissance precursors in a text which is ridden with images of failed communication, frustrated anagnorsis and the idealization of pain. The solitude of the courtly lover becomes the agony of the Baroque monadic subject, told as a sexual and textual fable of violation and fragmentation. Rape imagery becomes key in Góngora’s project; indeed, Mary Gaylord’s study of such imagery can be expanded to include an examination of the ideological significance of the aestheticization of erotic violence in the poem. As feminist art historians Diane Wolfthal and Margaret Carroll have shown, representations of divine “heroic” rapes – the classical Ovidian tales of the rapes of Europa and Danaë, for example – were used in the visual arts to glorify the exploits of the Hapsburgs. Góngora enacts a symbolic critique of such artistic glorification of imperial conquest in his

14 See Chapter 1; Nicolson, The Breaking of the Circle; Sarduy, Barroco; Collard 102; Beverley, Aspects 69, 105. 15 Ly states, “el homenaje más eficaz que se le podía rendir a la tradición culta era traicionándola” (“Tradición” 359). 16 See Chemris, “Self-Reference in Góngora’s Soledades”, regarding expressiveness replacing mimesis in Góngora’s aesthetic (11). Cf. Ruiz Pérez, writing of the Soledades, “el poeta ya no enfrenta una simple mimesis imitativa, sino una verdadera y vertiginosa poesis creativa” (El espacio 242).



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wedding chorus, in a subtle identification with the transgression of Arachne, who dared to depict the rapes of Jupiter. He echoes this critique throughout the text in various eroticized descriptions of the hunt, in which the loftiness of poetic language contrasts sharply with the living, bleeding body. The cumulative effect of such a defamiliarized linking of eros and violence, naturalized in Petrarchan commonplace, is to call into question the ideological purpose of the idealizing function of imperial art. The Baroque crisis is also expressed in the relationship between the self and the phenomenal world. The Soledades depicts a crisis of perception anticipating that of Sor Juana in the Primero Sueño, reflecting a moment in which a worldview based on universal analogies, “correspondences”, has broken down, yet the “new science” has yet to take hold. For Sánchez Robayna, the numerous references to writing highlight Góngora’s efforts not to interpret, but to remake, the Book of the World through the autonomous activity of the artist (Tres estudios 51–52). For Beverley, the dialectic of confusion and construction in the work suggest a pre-Cartesian exercise of the mind (“Confusion” 312). And yet neither of these hallmarks of modernity has fully taken hold in the poem. Reflecting the epistemic breech in which it was written, the Soledades is filled with images of shifting boundaries of perception verging on the phantasmagoric17 and abyssal alongside an almost scientific lexicon of recorded observation. Plays with perspective, echoes and maps which become autonomous, category transgression, the grotesque and the monstrous populate the Soledades along with mechanical imagery. The many tensions in the poem converge in the falconry scene. There, birds of prey associated with various nations, types of weaponry and astronomical bodies display their hunting prowess, culminating in the stalking of a crow, described in an apocalyptic image of a world that explodes. Beverley has read this passage as an allegory of European war. I concur and will suggest that the scene serves to debunk the millennial pretensions of the Hapsburgs by counterpoising the real history of European conflict, marked by references to contemporary armaments, to the pseudo-history of divinely ordained rule, the predicted establishment of a new Christianized Holy Roman Empire, said to be inaugurated by the portents of Apocalypse. The scene may represent the Spanish body politic driven by greed, caught between future military threats to the North and South, a realistic political prophecy which disrupts the theocratic prophecy of Hapsburg apologetics. Under a broader lens, the episode could also be read as a response to the entry of infinite space into the previously secure cosmic order of the past, the culmination of Góngora’s experiments with temporal and spatial boundaries outside the structure of

17 Carlos Alberto Pérez uses the term “fantasmagoría” in an early article which treats the play of perception in the Soledades (160).

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Judaeo-Christian eschatology. Góngora’s play with apocalypse may be read as a projection of the courtly lover’s death wish onto the natural world, as a figurative discharging of the frustrated immensity of the spatial appetite of the Baroque. The scene is evocative in its depiction of the peregrino as subject, who registers the destruction of the crow passively, even mechanically, as implied by the use of the verbs “registra” and “cuenta.” As Michael Perna points out, here “spectacle replaces complex or conflicting emotions”; “the cruel elements of the scene cause no reaction, the beautiful elements do” (166– 67). We may well be observing in the youth’s response (or non-response) the construction of false consciousness, the collusion of the spectator in the idealization of bodily pain, the cooperation necessary in the construction of a social myth of subjugation which Góngora was perhaps trying to address in his guarded protest against the abuses of empire. In this sense, it is possible we are being given a critical glimpse into the process of interpellation itself. We are also presented with a nascent bourgeois interiority of the most truncated sort, a kind of trauma-induced detachment in the face of corporeal pain. As L. J. Woodward has shown, Góngora deconstructs whatever tragic pathos this scene accumulates by recourse to farce (778), as the recent events are referred to as “pendientes agradables casos”, suggesting both an element of self-parody by the poet and a kind of axiological nihilism not unlike the sort Stephen Gilman identified in the Celestina (“Intro.” 14). Standing back we can see reflected in the Soledades the outlines of an unresolved historical, epistemological, and ontological crisis at the origins of Hispanic modernity. I think we perhaps too much look for the birth of the modern subject in Spanish Renaissance and Baroque texts, ignoring the fact that the triumph of modern subjectivity is more clearly announced in literatures of countries, like our own, where the bourgeoisie decisively triumphed as a class during what Hobsbawm has called “the age of revolution”. To this I would add that what we seek to celebrate may well, in the end, have found its own constraints; here I cite the insights of Francis Barker, who has shown the tentativeness and emptiness at the heart of incipient bourgeois subject formation in the literature of more successful transitions to modernity such as occurred in England (38). Perhaps we ought more to emphasize the creativity of the Hispanic difference, for indeed what makes Spanish early modern literature so interesting is the way it traces out a future modernity which fails at its very origins, a dynamic expressed textually in the works of more critical writers such as Góngora and Cervantes as the frustration of teleology: the frustration of pilgrimage, the aesthetics of the fragment and the truncation of subjectivity. In signaling these features in the Soledades, I am clearly building on the legacy of Collard and Beverley; I also share Beverley’s view on the baroque as “una forma de neurosis cultural de América Latina en su etapa – no



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completada – post-colonial” (Una modernidad 25).18 Yet I feel his insights can be extended beyond the anticipated reading of Góngora’s legacy into the Neobaroque, by tracing the trajectory of Gongorine poetics through French Symbolism into modern Latin American poetry. I believe such a transatlantic and comparatist approach is vital to understanding Góngora’s poem not only in the context of his historical moment, but also in a contemporary sense. Put another way, the dynamics of the Soledades are cast in sharper relief with the benefit of a degree of historical and aesthetic hindsight. The modern revival of Góngora, as González Echevarría has pointed out, began in Latin America before his celebrated resurrection by the Spanish generation of 1927; indeed one could say that the Gongorine resurgence was a transatlantic phenomenon, one in which there was significant interaction between European vanguardism and both Spanish and Latin American letters (Celestina’s Brood 195). While the ostensible parallel between Góngora and French Symbolism should be recognized as one of trajectory rather than of comparison per se, the parallel has served a creative function, as Sánchez Robayna has pointed out, in the work of both peninsular, and perhaps to an even greater degree, Latin American poets.19 A case in point is a particular succession of modern Mexican poems. In “Himno entre ruinas,” Octavio Paz marks the exhaustion of the modern lyric with references to both French Symbolist and Gongorine poetry. José Gorostiza’s Muerte sin fin typifies this poetics of exhaustion in its sterile quest for pure form, in its repeated failure to name the absolute, to transcend the inherent anthropomorphism of human thought and language. As in the Soledades, aesthetic failure gives rise to temporal implosion, self-reflexivity, a degradation of woman and the erotic, and to apocalyptic self-destruction. In Blanco, Paz responds to this solipsistic and futile quest for the absolute with a new affirmation of the poetic word, an affirmation which is rooted in the function of language as a bridge between self and other. The shipwreck of the modern, expressed in its earliest moment in Góngora’s Baroque poetics and in its ultimate incarnation as Symbolism,20 is finally transcended in Paz’s poetic space, rendering Blanco, one of the great constellation poems since Un coup de dés, a kind of utopian imaginary. 18 The notion of the Baroque as a form of cultural neurosis of modernity has been noted as well by Jay, who refers to the Baroque as “a permanent, if often repressed, visual possibility throughout the entire modern era” (187), and Castillo, who argues that “it is possible to think of the Baroque as a period concept (à la Maravall) and also as an ongoing ‘condition’ of modernity triggered by a paradoxical longing for the absolute” (“Horror vacui” 87). For recent useful bibliography on Baroque theory, see Spadaccini and Estudillo, as well as Lambert. 19 Tres estudios 68; see also his “Bajo el signo de Góngora” in Roses, ed., Góngora Hoy I, II, III, 316. 20 Beverley calls the poem “a shipwreck of language itself, Un coup de dés” (Aspects 112).

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Yet Paz’s poem effects this transcendence in the space of a myth of social and sexual harmony, what Doris Sommer would call a “foundational fiction,”21 a less extreme, but nonetheless related form of idealization akin to the heroic rapes of Hapsburg art which decorate the Soledades. Blanco depicts a kind of erotic hortus conclusus beyond the tragedy of history, where the myth of the primitive functions, much like the pastoral often functioned within Renaissance epic, as a utopian counterpoint in ideologically nationalist literature. A counter-example to Paz’s hegemonic appropriation of the Góngora–Symbolist parallel is its elaboration by César Vallejo through the prism of an indigenist Marxist poetics. In his early poem “Nostalgias imperiales,” Vallejo, like Góngora, describes the fall into an Iron Age of a primitive agrarian communal way of life, the end of a millennial sun age emanating from the defeat of the Incan people. The poem repeats Góngora’s theme of the failure of epic aspiration, marked with allusions to Symbolist poems, and evinces a similar pattern of temporal collapse, a similar juxtaposition of languages and mythic traditions (which Nadine Ly has called intradiscursive heterogeneity) and a similar expression of historical trauma and despair in self-parody (Ly, “Las lenguas” 193). Vallejo’s later Spanish Civil War poems continue the parallel; “Pedro Rojas,” which mourns the death of a Republican soldier, combines imagery of Icaran aspiration reminiscent of passages from the Soledades with the deictic gesture towards possibility of Mallarmé’s “Sainte,” now recast in political terms. Vallejo takes us full circle in his treatment of the ideological and aesthetic problems of Hispanic modernity as they were first confronted by Góngora; the problem of the frustration of Spanish development, transferred to the colonial world and intensified there, is seen by Vallejo on its home soil. If, in the words of Vicens Vives, the Castilian “bourgeois meteor” burnt out (308–9) before the institutions of Spanish modernity could coalesce, that legacy of “the dead star of distant tomorrows” – to use Mallarmé’s image – made a profound mark on the eclipsed possibilities of the Hispanic cultures of the future. And in poetry, Góngora’s legacy of frustrated pilgrimage and historical tragedy resonates in the more socially conscious and innovative voices of the Latin American modern.

21

See Sommer, Foundational Fictions 29.

Introduction: Renaissance and Solitude “la soledad empieça a selle nueva” Juan Boscán, “Soy como aquel”

The Soledades cannot be understood without an appreciation of its heritage in the forces which shaped Renaissance literature. The breakdown in the feudal order gives rise to new literary forms which reflect the evolution of subjectivity, as society develops more modern social norms of inner life under the impact of what Norbert Elias has called the “civilizing” process. In general terms, writers begin to reframe their aesthetic goals, moving beyond imitation toward increased creativity, autonomy and expressiveness. This movement toward greater innovation and subjectivity in art is accompanied by a problematic subjectivism. The loss of the Medieval worldview gives rise to ontological insecurity; during the Renaissance, the individual begins to experience a modern sense of uncertainty before the phenomenal world as well as a growing sense of isolation; the collective bond which the old order provided has been broken. These problems of subjectivism, uncertainty, and the isolation of individual consciousness, together with the Renaissance spirit of innovation, undergo a process of development which intensifies in the Baroque. I propose to isolate a particular succession of Renaissance writers whose works function as signposts in this process. Fernando de Rojas, Juan Boscán and Garcilaso de la Vega stand out as the creators of works which are pivotal to understanding the literary background of the Baroque ontological crisis, and thus to understanding the Soledades as a product of that crisis. In the Celestina (1499), the touchstone for treating the ontological problems of the Renaissance is the theme of courtly love. The tradition of courtly love as Rojas receives it is a contradictory phenomenon. The courtier who pays service to a lady, who seeks pleasure in a love which will never be  For other theories of early modern subjectivity, see Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity, Dollimore, Radical Tragedy, and Eagleton, “Self-Undoing Subjects.” For a more recent study on modernity in a global sense, see Jameson, A Singular Modernity.  See Darst’s study on the different types of imitation which coexisted in the early modern period.



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consummated, is engaged in a ritual which reverses the normal social order of man over woman. Huizinga points out that the ritualistic vassalage of the courtly lover idealizes a brutal reality; the worship of woman, modeled in part on the cult of the Virgin, was but the obverse of the degradation of woman in feudal society. In a world where marriage was arranged to unite properties, women were virtually sold with their dowries, and love could only be incidental to matrimony. In literature the pain which such a suppression of the erotic entailed is contained, as Salinas suggests, through poetic will, or what could also be termed aesthetic idealization (Jorge Manrique 15). The characterization of courtly love as “dolor en que hay alegría” – to use Manrique’s words – is but an attempt to resolve the contradictions of life through art. Rojas approaches the courtly love tradition with a critical eye. As critics such as Kassirer and González Echevarría have shown, Rojas realizes the commonplaces of courtly love poetry, and in doing so, creates an irony which undermines that poetic tradition (Celestina’s Brood 15–19). In courtly love poetry, love is equated euphemistically with madness and death. Thus, in the beginning of the Celestina, Calisto’s lovesickness is portrayed as comic madness, and he refers to his love as “mi muerte” (66). The irony is that his pursuit of Melibea indeed results in his death, and in a grisly manner he is, in fact, left “sin sesos.” As George Shipley has shown, the facile rhetorical equation of love and pain which Calisto inherits from the courtly love tradition is challenged by the reality of the experience of human suffering. Rojas makes explicit the inherent contradictions of the courtly code; the “poetic will” of which Salinas speaks is broken as Rojas radically defamiliarizes the conventional literary representation of sexual and social relationships. Rojas’ treatment of Melibea provides further insight into this dynamic. When Celestina compares prostitutes and upper-class women such as Melibea, she suggests, in the guise of affirming the difference, the similarity in their positions (Rojas 147). Through irony, she reveals the harsh reality  As Huizinga states, “To formalize love is […] a social necessity, a need that is more imperious as life is more ferocious” (108). Costa Fontes sees Celestina as a parody of the Blessed Mother, reading the entire work as a parody of Christian ritual from the alienated perspective of a converso.  Citations from the Celestina are from Fernando de Rojas (“Y Antiguo Autor”), La Celestina: Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Francisco J. Lobera et al. (Barcelona: Crítica, 2000). Page numbers corresponding to this edition will appear in parentheses after the passage cited.  González Echevarría cites this as an example of the “repulsive literalization of the body” which arises out of the tendency in the Celestina for words to “mean too much what they say” (16).  Martin (113), sees love in the Celestina as a leveler of social classes. If ­ Calisto’s “courtly love” activities are equated with his servants’ whoring, so too is Melibea’s ­position equated with the lower-class prostitutes. Celestina essentially argues that the difference is



INTRODUCTION: RENAISSANCE AND SOLITUDE



of woman’s status in feudal society. When Celestina parodies the Petrarchan characterization of love as “una agradable llaga,” she is accurately portraying Melibea’s feelings of ambivalence and pain before the courtly codes of honor and virginity. The palpable cruelty of the code is realized in Melibea’s suicide. Through his technique of ironic “literalization,” to use González Echevarría’s term, Rojas exposes the reality of solitude behind the courtly ideal of love (Celestina’s Brood 16; Cf. Gilman, The Art 123). The isolation of self from other which characterizes the portrayal of courtly love informs all other human relationships in the Celestina. Friendship is reduced to a pact of mutual self-interest in the alliance between Calisto’s servants and the bawd. Similarly, Calisto’s servants humor their master only to be able to better exploit him. All relationships are characterized by what Gilman has termed “pseudocompañerismo” (“Intro.” 17); despite an exterior of domestic security, the individual is spiritually alone. The most intimate family ties only mask what Gilman terms “la soledad cotidiana” (“Intro.” 18); Melibea’s parents are painfully ignorant of her true feelings. Finally, language, which has the potential to bridge the gap between the individual characters, essentially fails as a vehicle for communication; as M. K. Read observes, “behind the constant garrulousness of the work, one is conscious of a deep silence” (175). As the Celestina moves toward Pleberio’s closing soliloquy, language passes from verbiage and deceit to emptiness and pain beyond words. Isolation of self from other becomes isolation within the cosmos. The world becomes strange to man; Gilman notes the poignancy of Rojas’ opening verses (“Intro.” 21), in which the very air that man breathes is described as “ajeno y estraño” (9). The Medieval order is challenged by the infinity of merely rhetorical: “Que a quien más quieren, peor hablan; y si así no fuese, ninguna diferencia habría entre las públicas que aman, a las escondidas doncellas, si todas dijesen ‘sí’ a la entrada de su primer requerimiento, en viendo que de alguno eran amadas” (147).  Rojas, through the skillful juxtaposition of Alisa and Melibea’s thoughts, provides a powerful example of “la soledad cotidiana”: Alisa  – ¿Qué dices? ¿En qué gastas tiempo? ¿Quién ha de irle con tan grande novedad a nuestra Melibea, que no la espante? ¡Cómo! ¿Y piensas que sabe ella qué cosa sean hombres, si se casan o qué es casar, o que del ayuntamiento de marido y mujer se procreen los hijos? ¿Piensas que su virginidad simple le acarrea torpe deseo de lo que no conoce ni ha entendido jamás? […] No lo creas, señor Pleberio […] que yo sé bien lo que tengo criado en mi guardada hija. Melibea  – Lucrecia, Lucrecia, corre presto, entra por el postigo en la sala y estórbales su hablar; interrúmpeles sus alabanzas con algún fingido mensaje, si no quieres que vaya yo dando voces como loca, según estoy enojada del concepto que tienen de mi ignorancia.  (298)  For an alternative view of language in the Celestina based on the application of a model of commercial exchange to the circulation of desire, see Gaylord, “Fair of the World,” especially 25, note 4.



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space; the old systems of determining causation and value are no longer a refuge. As Gilman points out, “la caída tradicional y alegórica de la Fortuna se nos presenta aquí como caída real en el espacio por pura casualidad” (“Intro.” 21). The Medieval topos of the fall of the mighty and the proud from the Wheel of Fortune is undermined; as Gilman observes, “en la Celestina no hay ninguna sugerencia de sanción moral” (“Intro.” 21–22) The old moral order is no longer available to make sense out of experience; Calisto’s fall is a meaningless accident which can not be explained in terms beyond those used by Melibea: “puso el pie en vacío y cayó” (333). Space replaces Fortune as the great leveler of human time; value loses its meaning where space engulfs each moment equally. As Gilman observes, Rojas articulates an axiological nihilism which leads him to deny the importance of that which his society values, including such historic events as the conquest of Granada (“Intro.” 14–15). Gilman cites Sempronio’s argument as illustrative of this axiological nihilism, in a passage which certainly suggests the alienated perspective of Rojas’ converso status, but also more (“Intro.” 15): Cada día vemos novedades y las oímos, y las pasamos y dejamos atrás. Diminúyelas el tiempo, hácelas contingibles. ¿Qué tanto te maravillarías si dijesen: “La tierra tembló” o otra semejante cosa que no olvidases luego, así como “Helado está el río,” “El ciego vee ya,” “Muerto es tu padre,” “Un rayo cayó,” “Ganada es Granada y el rey entra hoy,” “El Turco es vencido,” “Eclipse hay mañana,”“La puente es llevada,” “Aquel es ya obispo,” “A Pedro robaron,” “Inés se ahorcó.” ¿Qué me dirás, sino que a tres días pasados o a la segunda vista, no hay quien de ello se maraville? Todo es así, todo pasa desta manera, todo se olvida, todo queda atrás.  (97–98)

The fall of Calisto can thus be seen as emblematic of the age. In the wake of the breakdown of the epistemological security of the Medieval edifice of beliefs, all human events – whether the fall of Calisto or the fall of Granada – regardless of any emotional, religious, or social importance, are equally insignificant, equally met with cosmic indifference. This crisis in worldview is expressed in a crisis in literary form. As Gilman has noted, The Celestina defies the limits of established genres; it is written completely in dialogue, yet strains beyond drama toward the novel; he thus deems the work “ageneric,” a term which aptly describes Rojas’ perspective on his problematic creation (The Art 194–206). Rojas introduces the Celestina as a “tragicomedia,” coining the term as a sort of marriage of convenience amid the different possible interpretations of the work. In an even more profound 

As Rojas writes in his preface to the Celestina: Así que cuando diez personas se juntaren a oír esta comedia en quien quepa esta diferencia de condiciones, como suele acaecer, ¿quién negará que haya



INTRODUCTION: RENAISSANCE AND SOLITUDE



sense Rojas’ term fits the Celestina because it truly moves beyond tragedy; Pleberio’s closing speech denies any faith in a moral order which would make what Krutch calls “the tragic fallacy” possible (234). When Pleberio cries “Turbose la orden del morir” (338), we know we are witnessing a world turned hopelessly upside down. As Gilman points out, the mythic redemption available to Tristan and Isolde is lost to Calisto and Melibea because the universe of Rojas is bereft of any integrating order (“Intro.” 25). In his treatment of self in relation to other and in relation to the world, Rojas expands the courtly love problem into a canvas of his own conflicted age. His prologue establishes a spirit of exile in a world of conflict; in terms which will be repeated in the Soledades, Rojas elaborates a catalogue of elements and species within a framework of struggle. Citing Petrarch, he states, “sin lid y ofensión ninguna cosa engendró la natura,” and later remarks, “Pues entre los animales ningún género carece de guerra” (15).10 He cites the violence done by birds of prey, in words which will be echoed in the falconry scene of the Soledades: “Hasta los groseros milanos insultan dentro en nuestras moradas los domésticos pollos y debajo de las alas de sus madres los vienen a cazar” (18).11 To illustrate the epitome of such conflict in nature, he describes the viper, who kills her husband in mating and is in turn killed by the birth of her young, and then remarks, “¿Qué mayor lid, qué mayor conquista ni guerra que engendrar en su cuerpo quien coma sus entrañas?” (17). His rhetorical question foreshadows Pleberio and Alisa’s parental grief, but more significantly suggests the specter of a world consuming itself. By ending his work with the suicide of a young girl, Rojas portrays a world bent on self-destruction. Human aspiration ends in meaningless failure; the portrait of the age Rojas has depicted, as Gilman suggests, is Breughel’s rendition of the fall of Icarus (The Art 130). A moral order which could provide meaning to human events is gone, and the individual is left to grieve alone; as Melibea tells Pleberio, “en gran soledad le dejo” (330). Pleberio’s solitude is that of the solitude of individual consciousness naked to the cosmos, and this solitude, complete with the iconography of the fall of Icarus and the symbolism of the sacrifice of a woman, will become a point of departure for the Soledades. The formal innovation which marks Rojas’ depiction of this new solicontienda en cosa de tantas maneras se entienda? Que aun los impresores han dado sus punturas [...]. Otros han litigado sobre el nombre, diciendo que no se había de llamar comedia, pues acababa en tristeza, sino que se llamase tragedia. El primer autor quiso darle denominación del principio, que fue placer, y llamóla comedia. Yo viendo estas discordias, entre estos extremos partí agora por medio la porfía, y llaméla tragicomedia.  (20–21; emphasis mine) 10 Here the Lobera edition cites Petrarch’s De remediis, a well-recognized source for Rojas’ maxims in the Celestina. 11 The Lobera edition cites Petrarchan origins of these lines in the De remediis.



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tude is continued in the Petrarchan poetry of Boscán and Garcilaso (1543). The Catalan poet Joan Almugavèr Boscà, known in Spanish as Juan Boscán, introduces the new Italianate forms to the peninsula in the prologue to the second book of his works, written as a letter to his patroness, the Duquesa de Soma. Ignacio Navarrete and other critics have analyzed it as a kind of anti-manifesto, deliberately understated in a gesture of courtly nonchalance or sprezzatura (Orphans 70). Boscán avoids a systematic and explicit exposition of Italian theories of poetic genre and verse form, according to Javier Lorenzo, in order to encode his arguments for a select elite (32). As Navarrete states, Written with Castiglione’s indirection, its primary purpose is to secure the composition of Italianate poetry as an aristocratic activity, and the only fitting mode for a courtier. It does so by associating the old poetry, and its proponents, with lower social classes of unknown origins, while the new poetry is wrapped in the mantle of its Greco-Roman-Italian heritage, and in the social prestige of known members of the imperial court.  (70)

Boscán is particularly careful to appeal to his patroness as a woman of culture, citing his detractor’s lack of appreciation for the more subtle rhythms of the new hendecasyllable line (“Otros decían que este verso no sabían si era verso, o si era prosa” [Ruiz Pérez 167]).12 Still others, he argues, feel the new forms sacrifice substance for beauty: Otros argüían diciendo que esto principalmente había de ser para mujeres, y que ellas no curaban de cosas de sustancia, sino del son de las palabras y la dulzura del consonante.  (167)

Boscán dismisses these arguments with a polemical zeal: ¿quién ha de gastar tiempo en respondelles? Tengo yo a las mujeres por tan sustanciales, las que aciertan a sello, y aciertan muchas, que en este caso, quien se pusiese a defendellas, las ofendería.  (168)

It is apparent that Boscán is defending more than his patroness or educated women here; in terms which will be defined in the dispute over Gongo12 Citations from Boscán’s letter to the Duquesa de Soma and from his poetry are from the Ruiz Pérez edition of Boscán’s works. Page numbers corresponding to the Ruiz Pérez edition will appear in parentheses after passages cited from Boscán’s work, unless otherwise indicated. Regarding Boscán’s appeal to a female patroness, Lorenzo notes, “Al igual que los personajes de Castiglione, Boscán construye su identidad como miembro de la élite cortesana a partir del reflejo o respuesta favorable de una mujer noble y utiliza este reflejo para aristocratizar y dignificar su programa de innovación poética” (28).



INTRODUCTION: RENAISSANCE AND SOLITUDE



rism, Boscán is in effect using a gender-based argument to assert the right of the poet to create a subjective vision, to place the “deleitar” above the “enseñando” of the Horatian formula.13 His mocking contempt of the vulgar presages Góngora’s aristocratic defense of artistic freedom and ambition; of the worn-out Castilian verse form he comments, “Pero él agora no trae en sí cosa por donde haya de alcanzar más honra de la que alcanza, que es ser admitido del vulgo” (170). Finally, to substantiate his use of the hendecasyllable, Boscán marshals an impressive list of ancient and modern precedents, foreshadowing Lope’s manifesto on the comedia in his ebullient defense of innovation.14 In a more profound sense, Boscán is heralding the beginnings of increased interiority in poetry. In essence he is defending the role of subjectivity; reading between the lines, one senses that that which is so easily dismissed as “para mujeres” is, in fact, lyric emotion. Indeed, the forms which Boscán chooses are of value precisely because they lend themselves so well to the expression of emotion. The sonnet forces the poet to concentrate the feeling conveyed, and the hendecasyllable, which more closely parallels the effect of natural speech, offers greater expressive value. Boscán’s sonnet “Soy como aquel” (299) is emblematic of this new lyric capacity. In this sonnet, an expanded simile, the speaker compares himself to a man who lives in solitude and who one day is visited by a long-lost friend. He enjoys the visit, thinking of the past “con nuevos sentimientos muy despierto.” After the departure of his friend, these feelings which have been stirred prevent him from resuming his previous routine as a solitary; “la soledad empieza a selle nueva.” With hindsight, Boscán’s sonnet can be seen as depicting the sub­jectivity of the Renaissance; new emotions have been awakened in poetry. In his treatment of the courtly love theme, Boscán, albeit to a far lesser degree than Rojas, seeks to make patent the inherent contradiction in the merger of love with suffering and death. He aims to depict the emotions of the lovestruck, claiming “Las llagas que de Amor son invisibles / quiero como visibles se presenten” (174).15 As Richard Seybolt has pointed out, he does this by taking the innovative step of personifying the emotions of the

13 I made this argument in my 1987 doctoral dissertation. Since that time Bianchini (1988) also observed a parallel with the debate over Góngora’s new poetry, connecting Boscán’s “Carta” to the “doctrine of elegance” found in “Góngora’s poetic practice” (5). See Paul Julian Smith, “Barthes, Góngora and Non-Sense,” for a discussion of such gender-based terms of critique in the dispute over Gongorism. 14 The essential discussions of Boscán’s “Carta” as literary manifesto can be found in Navarrete’s Orphans of Petrarch (58–72) and “Boscán’s Rewriting of Petrarch’s Canzionere.” See also more recent articles by Bianchini, López Suárez and Lorenzo. 15 Seybolt cites these lines as those in which “se anuncia el impulso que dio origen a la creación de sus primeros setenta y seis sonetos” (268).



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lyric speaker.16 In the sonnets of Boscán, Seybolt maintains, the intimate feelings of the speaker are exteriorized, portrayed as independent beings. He cites the following example: Delante van las penas que en mí siento, dando nuevas de mi desasosiego y en las manos llevando el vivo fuego do ardiendo está mi triste pensamiento.  (176)

As Seybolt argues, here the speaker sees his emotional life fractured into a series of independent facets; the pain of his solitary state is depicted as such that it produces a dissociation within the self, which extends to the point of depicting the veritable disintegration of the poet’s body: ¿Dó están mis ojos, que su luz no veen? ¿Dó está mi lengua, que a mi bien no cuenta mi tanto mal y mi gran tormenta, que ya por mis pecados no me creen? ¿Dó están mis pies? ¿Dó irán, que se paseen por el lugar do comenzó mi afrenta? ¿Dó está mi cuerpo, que no se presenta a donde sus sentidos le recreen?  (258)

The sonnet continues with the speaker wondering about the location of the various emotions he feels in love: “¿Dó está el andar con ansia todo el día,? […] ¿Dó e sobresalto?” The speaker’s sense of separation from his body and his emotions, together with their personification, reveal that solitude has led him to an estrangement from his own self. Boscán’s poetic process is contradictory; he portrays the emotional detachment and numbness created by the pain of solitude, in effect depicting the “emotion” of estrangement from the emotions. His use of the technique of personification has a similarly paradoxical effect. As Seybolt observes, “Por una parte destaca la soledad del poeta, víctima de sus emociones. Pero por otra parte el proceso desintegrador implica necesariamente cierta objetividad creadora del poeta” (272). The creativity Boscán derives from this phenomenon of self-objectification is striking, and foreshadows a similar develop-

16 Seybolt offers the following evidence to substantiate his claim: “De los noventa y dos sonetos de Juan Boscán podemos encontrar ejemplos de personificación de las emociones en más de cuarenta de ellos. Es por lo tanto un tropo usado de manera consciente y con frecuencia en sus sonetos. Cabe señalar además que es un recurso estilístico que apenas existe en los sonetos de Petrarca ni en los del Marqués de Santillana” (270).



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ment in the poetry of Góngora, if not the “desgarrón afectivo” of Quevedo.17 Yet this same phenomenon engenders an agonic, unstable poetic statement. Imitating the end of Petrarch’s Rime Sparse, Boscán resolves the contradictions of courtly love in religious conversion; reconciling himself with Reason and with Christ, his lyric persona experiences a reintegration of the self.18 The agonic forces of Renaissance solitude have been temporarily checked by this spiritual resolution; in the poetry of Garcilaso which follows, the resolution will be more aesthetic. Garcilaso’s eclogue cycle has been read as an integrated macrotext; Claudio Guillén has observed a similar type of integration in Virgil’s eclogue series, and Garcilaso may well have been imitating that aspect of his classical model (181). In Howard Wescott’s view, the three eclogues illustrate various possibilities on a “hypothetical Neoplatonic scale of love” with the Second Eclogue illustrating exemplary courtier behavior, celebrating the marriage of Garcilaso’s patron Fernando de Toledo, whose military exploits are also extolled in what Inés Azar has characterized as an interpolated praise poem (Wescott 76, 77; Cf. Azar 129–31). While, as Sanda Munjic has shown, there is an intertextual relationship between the Second Eclogue and the Soledades,19 as Góngora borrowed from many sources, albeit in fragmentary form, my investigation of Garcilaso as a precursor will focus on the problems of lyric emotion and representation, so I will restrict my analysis to the first and third of his eclogue series. In his First Eclogue, Garcilaso’s shepherds attempt to come to terms with the painful experience of loss associated with unrequited love and with the death of the beloved. Garcilaso effects such a reconciliation through an aesthetic based on sublimation, as Rafael Lapesa has suggested, or, in Pedro Salinas’ words, on a process of “idealistic dissociation,” “by creating from the facts given in human reality a second and higher poetic reality” (Lapesa, Garcilaso 126; Salinas, Reality 91).20 My focus here is not on the biograph17 Note that Quevedo wrote a sonnet based on the same catachretic image of selfestrangement used by Boscán: “Cargado voy de mí.” 18 Boscán describes this experience of reintegration in the 21st stanza of his “Conversión”: “Dejando de ser ageno/ Fui hecho como en un punto” (609), and later in his sonnet “De una mortal y triste perlesía,” where “El casto Amor, que Dios del cielo envía” (315) cures him. 19 See Munjic, “Patriarchal Love,”, ch. 4, especially 230–62 regarding structural similarities and an ostensibly parallel didacticism in the two poems. For a thorough analysis of this long and complex work, see Inés Azar’s classic study. 20 Navarrete and Hermida-Ruiz argue persuasively for the continued relevance of Lapesa’s classic study in their introduction to a recent volume of the journal Calíope dedicated to Garcilaso studies. While my concern is limited to presenting dynamics which later resurface in the Soledades, I direct the reader to Rivers, Anne Cruz and Heiple’s subsequent and essential works as well as to the other contributions mentioned in this chapter, for further study of Garcilaso.

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ical trajectory of the poet, but rather on a problematic of aestheticization.21 Through a Platonizing aesthetic of the pastoral, Garcilaso creates a purified, archetypal world, one where the attributes of woman and nature are reduced to ideal types; for example, hair of gold, lily white skin, rosy lips and green meadows, forming a kind of hortus conclusus in which the discord and pain of human experience are brought to harmony. In the First Eclogue, this harmony is not achieved through Christian conversion, as was the case in Boscán’s poetry, but through a Platonic idealism which is essentially classical. The poem ends with a vision of the lovers’ ascent to the sphere of Venus, forever to enjoy ideal beauty. The creation of such a poetic ideal requires a high degree of artifice, yet this does not prevent Garcilaso from figuring a kind of lyric emotion, creating an apparently seamless aesthetic illusion of immediacy, what has been called “l’effet du naturel” (Ly), “presence” (Smith, Writing in the Margin 43–77), or in terms of Renaissance rhetoric, enargeia.22 Lapesa has argued that in the First Eclogue Garcilaso achieves, to an extent which will not be repeated in later works, “(una) estrecha union del sentimiento y la forma” (Garcilaso 140). I believe that Lapesa’s argument, while still an essential point of departure, should be recast to take into account more recent criticism on the eclogues, such as the above-mentioned studies by Paul Julian Smith, Nadine Ly and others, who demonstrate a continuity in the series and an appreciation of the artifice inherent in the careful construction of the illusion of naturalized lyric expression. The trajectory between the two eclogues should thus be reframed as a movement from an apparent seamlessness to a more selfconscious type of representation in which the tensions implicit in the first are allowed to surface in the third, in this sense tipping the balance towards a cultivation of the aesthetic. This being said, it should be maintained that the illusion of seamless lyric expression Garcilaso achieves in the First Eclogue is quite compelling. In his creation of Salicio and Nemoroso, Garcilaso moves beyond Boscán’s comparatively abstract personification of the emotions, by presenting distinct lyric speakers who personify in their being two different moments of the experience of love. 21 Here I will acknowledge the importance of Carroll Johnson’s article “Personal Involvement and Poetic Tradition in the Spanish Renaissance” as well as Bryant Creel’s remarks (55–56) as a cautionary note on the tendency to read the eclogues through the biography of the poet; what I find useful in Lapesa’s notion of trajectory is his sense of increasing aestheticization, not his biographical approach, although, as will be demonstrated at the end of this chapter, I recast this notion in terms of an increasing quality of defamiliarization. 22 See Orobitg (especially), Barnard, Ly, Smith and Navarrete regarding Garcilaso’s cultivation of an apparently seamless, harmonious poetic creation within the practice of sprezzatura and dissimulatio artis. Smith argues for deconstructing the notion of “presence,” a position echoed implicitly by Ly when she refers to naturalism as an “effect” of Garcilaso’s eclogue.



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The integration of feeling and form extends beyond these personifications to the imagery and rhythm of the shepherds’ songs. A beautiful sensorial interplay between the speakers’ feelings and their surroundings, and ultimately with the form of the poem itself, is announced in the prelude to Salicio’s lines:    el, con canto acordado    al rumor que sonaba    del agua que pasaba, se quejaba tan dulce y blandamente  (Morros 49–52)23

The water which runs softly in the adjacent stream like a basso continuo connects to the tears that Salicio sheds when he is overcome with emotion, those which he beckons in the estribillo: “Salid sin duelo, lágrimas, corriendo.”24 This water is also “el agua fugitiva” (125), the symbol of the shepherd’s frustrated search for erotic union, which becomes embodied in the experience of alienation from his own self: “de mí mismo me corro agora” (66). The water running to the end of Salicio’s song parallels the speaker’s own death wish: those who would comprehend his pain would be “con llanto deshaciendo/ hasta acabar la vida” (138–39); of himself he says, “derritiendo/ m’estoy en llanto eterno!” (194–95). Finally, he closes his song as if bleeding to death: Aqui dio fin a su cantar Salicio, y sospirando en el postrero acento, soltó de llanto una profunda vena;  (Morros 225–27)25

Here Garcilaso depicts the traditional desire for self-annihilation of the courtly lover, but in a harmonious and naturalized fashion. The literal, shocking, graphic realization of a poetic commonplace such as has been seen in the works of Rojas and Boscán is unthinkable in Garcilaso’s classical poetry. Garcilaso contains this Dionysian emotion in the harmony of art. The containment and resolution of the pain experienced by Salicio is 23 Anne Cruz has described this interplay in great detail in her reading of the eclogue (98–99). 24 Cesare Segre notes, without suggesting the musical analogy I observe, that “the stream which crosses the meadow leads to the metaphor of the stream of tears alluded to by Salicio” (316). Cf. Anne Cruz: “Las aguas ‘corrientes cristalinas’ se intercambian con las lágrimas del poeta, pues las aguas recuerdan la pérdida que ha sufrido, mientras que sus lágrimas son causadas por esa misma pérdida” (98–99). 25 Dámaso Alonso, in his notes on the Soledades, refers to the popular notion that tears are formed from blood, a belief which seems to be alluded to here. See Dámaso Alonso, ed., Soledades 155.

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presented in the lament of Nemoroso. Without any sense of contradiction, Nemoroso finds beauty in his suffering. He compares his song to that of a nightingale whose nest has been spoiled and focuses on its melodiousness:    y aquel dolor que siente,    con diferencia tanta    por la dulce garganta, despide, que a su canto el aire suena,  (330–33)

This beauty, introduced as “el dulce lamentar de dos pastores,” points to the resolution of suffering, as do continued references to the lover’s death wish. Nemoroso recognizes that his suffering is the product of consciousness: no me podrán quitar el dolorido    sentir si ya del todo primero no me quitan el sentido.  (349–51)

He resents his tie to the corporeal: “lo que siento más es verme atado/ a la pesada vida y enojosa” (292–93) and longs for death to reunite him with his beloved: “hasta que muerte el tiempo determine/ que a ver el deseado/ sol de tu clara vista m’encamine” (321–23). Finally he envisions his ascent from the material to the ideal, where the lovers are together for eternity: ¿Por qué de mí te olvidas y no pides que se apresure el tiempo en que este velo rompa del cuerpo y verme libre pueda,    y en la tercera rueda,    contigo mano a mano,    busquemos otro llano, busquemos otros montes y otros ríos, otros valles floridos y sombríos donde descanse y siempre pueda verte    ante los ojos míos, sin miedo y sobresalto de perderte?  (397–407)

In this anticipated Neoplatonic ascent, the shepherd thus finds a mythic resolution of the pain of experience, a resolution which is paralleled in the ordering function of Garcilaso’s art. In the Third Eclogue the seamlessness of lyric emotion of the First Eclogue gives way to a more self-conscious cultivation of the aesthetic; this shift in the direction of greater artifice is evident in the structure of the work. Garcilaso abandons the alternation of heptasyllables and hendecasyllables which had such expressive value in the First Eclogue, producing an effect similar to the



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variations of the human voice, and instead adopts the more formal versification of the octava real. The stanzas thus appear more perfectly constructed and contained, like the set pieces of the shepherds’ songs or the tapestries of the nymphs which are featured in the poem. The fact that the nymphs’ tapestries and the shepherds’ songs assume such importance in determining the structure of the poem is an indication that, as Rivers points out, artifice itself becomes the subject of the work (“The Pastoral Paradox” 143). Under the aegis of defending rustic simplicity, the poet asserts mas a las veces son mejor oídos el puro ingenio y la lengua casi muda,  (Morros 45–46)

Here he is, in essence, rebelling against the formal constraints of his medium in search of a pure lyric voice. Garcilaso seeks to expand the aesthetic capacity of poetry by assimilating the functions of the sister arts of music and painting. The nymphs’ tapestries are poetic cuadros frozen in time,26 realizations of the Horatian formula Ut pictura poesis. While continuing to highlight the figure of Elisa, as Lapesa argues,27 Garcilaso transforms the tragedy of Elisa into an object which can be contemplated visually. Similarly, Garcilaso attempts to duplicate the effect of counterpoint and variation in music when he ends the poem with the shepherds’ singing contest. In both cases, Garcilaso is turning from the expression of emotion in favor of the cultivation of the aesthetic. This movement away from lyric emotion, in Lapesa’s opinion, represents an impulse towards escapism in Garcilaso’s art (Garcilaso 158). The songs of the shepherds have lost the confessional quality of those of Salicio and Nemoroso. As if to erase the mood of melancholy produced by the cuadro of Elisa, Lapesa suggests, the amoebean song shifts to a display of musical virtuosity; as Lapesa writes, en los versos de los pastores no hay ya recuerdos doloridos, sino exclusivo deleite artificio. El artificio de las correlaciones antitéticas con que responde cada estrofa a la anterior origina el placer de la dificultad vencida. (Garcilaso 163)

26 Gallagher, “Locus Amoenus”, 65, notes Garcilaso’s use of time-arresting techniques to reinforce the effect of ekphrasis. 27 Lapesa, Garcilaso 161–62; note that in this revised edition of his work on Garcilaso, Lapesa retracts his original position that in the Third Eclogue Elisa becomes one of several “lamentables cuentos” (“La trayectoria” 168).

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The deliberate flight from feeling suggests that a Neoplatonic resolution is no longer available to the poet. There is, in fact, a suggestion that the Neoplatonic aesthetic is becoming worn in this work which seems to have as its goal the ultimate in artifice. The setting of the poem is not exactly the abstract Platonic locus amoenus. As Lapesa points out, No se trata del “campo y soledad” abstractos, sino de los lugares donde en otro tiempo se recreó la dama: la vega toledana, al pie de la “ilustre y clara pesadumbre” de la ciudad.  (La trayectoria 167)28

The conventions of the pastoral begin to be undermined; Garcilaso’s use of the colloquial word “somorgujar,” which Dámaso Alonso associates with the speech of hunters and fishermen, presages Góngora’s controversial use of popular language.29 Further, as Giannina Braschi points out, the final amoebean song heralds the Baroque in its use of hyperbole and sensual imagery, and in its defense of innovation.30 The eclogue’s concluding focus on the competitive display of artifice foreshadows the important role of play in Baroque art. The fact that this poem ends with a game rather than with a consoling vision of eternal love in the heavens is a statement about the exhaustion of the Neoplatonic ideal. The Third Eclogue reveals one final hint of discord beneath its architectonic surface. Curiously, it appears at the very center of the poem’s edifice of containment. As Rivers observes, the description of Elisa, despite its quality of aesthetic detachment, betrays in one word the “underlying violence of

28 Anne Cruz correctly notes that the historic and particular situation of the landscape was often a feature of both Classical and Italian Renaissance pastoral poetry, and that contaminatio operates in the mixture of history and myth in the description of the Tajo (143, note 17; 107). The evolution in the eclogues to a greater sense of contemporary history does, however, indicate a move away from Platonic idealism in this eclogue. 29 Alonso also points to the effect of abruptness produced by the verb “somorgujar,” and cites Lope’s criticism of the term: “aunque es significativo, es áspero” (Poesía española 80). Anne Cruz cites the use of the verb “somorgujó” as a case of “la influencia petrarquista del mito implícito,” noting the subtle associations of the verb with Classical myths (of Aesacus and Hesperia as well of Eurydice), which reinforce the elegant interconnections between the poetic cuadros (108). 30 Braschi sees the shepherds’ songs as announcing “la nueva poesía,” and in particular, Góngora’s poetry. Of lines 329–36, she writes; “Tensiones y discordias parecidas serán las de Góngora, más de medio siglo después” (24). She also speculates: “Tal vez Flérida sea la abuela de la Galatea gongorina” (24). Braschi places the Third Eclogue in the context of the debate between Ancients and Moderns, arguing that it is an early defense of modernity, an early celebration of industry, innovation, and nationalism. She thus locates Garcilaso’s final eclogue within the framework in which Andrée Collard analyzed the polemic over Gongorism (21). See also Collard, esp. 51.



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her death”: Elisa is a “ninfa degollada” (“The Pastoral Paradox” 145).31 One may interpret the word “degollada” to refer to the graceful loss of tension in her dead body; she is lying with the loose neck of an expired swan. Yet the adjective, as critics have observed, may also be graphically referring to Elisa’s death by hemorrhaging in childbirth.32 If we accept Darío Fernández Morera’s argument that the eclogues form a trilogy with a continuous system of imagery (The Lyre 112), the significance of Garcilaso’s use of the term becomes clearer. As I have pointed out, in the First Eclogue, Salicio experienced the loss of his beloved as a bloodletting. If the emotion of the lyric speaker’s grief is exteriorized in images of bleeding in the First Eclogue, this anticipates the more graphic and literal loss of blood of the beloved in the third and the pain this evokes in the lover. The description of the “ninfa [...] degollada” is startling. The Platonic artifice encasing the death of Elissa does not, in the end, totally absorb the discord of reality; the sharpness of the pain, if only in a word, seems to break through.33 Garcilaso’s art of pastoral containment and its progressive evolution 31 Bienvenido Morros’s newer critical edition suggests that the word “degollada” of the first edition is a translation of a poor transcription of “igualada,” written as “iugulada” (“herida en la vena yugular) and has restored “igualada” to the text. This remains a controversy in the critical literature, as discussed by Navarrete, Orphans of Petrarch 252, note 34, who refers to the studies by Zimic, Martínez López, and Lapesa (199–212) to support the authenticity of “degollada.” I have maintained the “degollada” reading of the Rivers edition (226–30), and I thank Luis Áviles for his generous advice on this issue. See also Lapesa, Garcilaso 204–9. 32 Alberto Porqueras Mayo cites this interpretation of the word, noting that it was first made by Herrera in his Anotaciones of Garcilaso’s works. He lists the common meanings of the verb “degollar” as given in Cobarruvias’ dictionary of 1611; these amount to two: “to behead” or “to bleed to death.” Porqueras Mayo then offers his own interpretation. Garcilaso, he argues, was recalling Piero di Cosimo’s painting of Cephalus and Procris, in which the nymph’s body is depicted with a neck wound. Porqueras Mayo’s findings imply that Garcilaso’s application of Ut pictura poesis is not only specific, but multiple. The poet’s imitation of a painting within the eclogue’s central tapestry suggests a continuum of layers of containment through artifice similar to that observed by Gallagher and Spitzer. Nonetheless, these levels of aesthetic detachment conflict with the startling, graphic nature of the word “degollada.” An excellent study by Terrence O’Reilly suggests a further layer of significance in the use of the term “degollada”; figuratively it suggests the silencing of Elisa’s voice. O’Reilly argues that Garcilaso subverts the portrayal of female voice in Ovidian and Virgilian precedent “by making his Elisa inarticulate and retailing her lover’s speech instead,” highlighting the lyric speaker’s Orphic “voz a ti debida,” thereby imitating, and indeed, surpassing, a Petrarchan convention (96). Of related interest is Lipmann. Regarding the concentric structure of the eclogue, see Gallagher, “Locus Amoenus” and Leo Spitzer, “Garcilaso, Third Eclogue,” 247–48. 33 Anne Cruz argues that all the myths in the eclogue subtly imply a similar sense of violent rupture; in her words, “Y a pesar del virtuosismo paliativo de la égloga, todo mito conlleva un elemento chocante de violencia que rompe la estética de su superficie para dejar espacio al dolor vivo” (117). She suggests, for example, that the description of the death of Adonis foreshadows that of Elissa (113, 117–18).

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toward greater degrees of artifice can be read as an illustration of a consensus among different critics that Renaissance aesthetics functioned as a kind of sublimation, not only of grief as a subjective experience, but of political and epistemological violence in an historicized sense. Anthony Cascardi sees the soldier-poet Garcilaso as divided between a pastoral repression of warlike instincts and the need to figure war and imperialism as poetic, since cultural prestige was tied to the empire which supported his work; thus he retreats to the pastoral ocio between military campaigns, alternating, as he states in the opening of the Third Eclogue, between the sword and the pen (“Instinct and Object” 268–70). John Beverley argues that the locus amoenus of pastoral poetry, such as that created by Garcilaso, functioned as the Imaginary of feudal idealism, as a space where aristocrats could indulge the alienated consciousness which arose out of the experience of dominance (Del Lazarillo 73). Harry Berger Jr. locates the aesthetic expression of such violence and alienation more generally, in the “misanthropic, misogynistic and somatophobic symptoms of the prosthetic desire to transcend or escape nature,” whose traces are covered over in the illusion of sprezzatura (“Second World Prosthetics” 109, 129). Put another way, the “civilizing” impulse was also an imperialist impulse, and the violent underside of the lofty idealized poetry of the Renaissance was the reality of ethnic strife, witch burnings, religious war and New World conquest, a fact not unnoticed by the modern Latin American writers who celebrate the aboriginal figure Caliban from ­Shakespeare’s pastoral of colonization.34 The fragmentation of the body in the Petrarchan poetry of Boscán and Garcilaso, expressed both as a fetishization of female attributes and as a selfdissolution of the lover, reveals another aspect of this violence, one which has been noted by Lacanian and feminist critics. Cynthia Marshall argues that in the early modern period, the subject experiences an “undertow that pulls against the drive Greenblatt identified as ‘self-fashioning,’ ” what she terms “self-shattering” (12). This impulse toward self-dissolution, in her opinion, is equally constitutive of identity, a function of the “gaps within the subject caused by the misfit between ego constructions and unruly desires” (20, 31). The drive toward “self-shattering,” she maintains, was encouraged in mass culture in violent spectacles of dismemberment as well as by their imaginative portrayal in the arts, and served to foment both religious militancy as well as submission to authority. In the reception of creative works, it allowed for a “regressive pleasure in emotional dispersal,” a relief from the “burdens” of a newly acquired sense of self, of what becomes the supposed jouissance of sadomasochism in modern culture (34, 30, 103). She notes the sexual politics of self-shattering, also recognized by Sanda Munjic, who sees maso-

34

See, for example, Fernández Retamar’s essay “Calibán.”



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chism as a form of masculine subjectivity available to aristocratic poets such as Garcilaso (Marshall 82; Munjic 134).35 The female side of this dynamic has been analyzed as well. The fragmentation of the beloved in Petrarchan poetry, the reduction of her attributes to the ubiquitous ideal types, has been read by Nancy Vickers as an aggressive and defensive gesture by the male lyric speaker, who fears self-dissolution as a form of sanction against the male gaze akin to the fate of Acteon, whom Diana subjects to dismemberment by his own hounds. For Berger, Petrarchan “obscene connoisseurship” of the female body, its reduction to such idealized and fetishized parts, relates to the practice of dissection as a precursor to the “mimetic idealism” of Renaissance painting (“Collecting” 3; “Second World Prosthetics” 129, 126, 132). He argues that the classical, perfected bodies of Renaissance art were constructed in a process which parallels the “selective amputation” of Zeuxis, the painter who composed an ideal female body from the various ostensibly perfect parts of different virgins (“Collecting” 9).36 Berger cites a case of the parodic obverse of this process in Vasari’s Lives, where Leonardo Da Vinci is said to have composed the likeness of Medusa from the parts of various insects, lizards and other animals from the catalogue of the grotesque (“Collecting” 16–19). These poles of idealization, the sublime and the horrific, both created out of a process of fragmentation and reconstruction, are useful terms with which to view the trajectory of the Petrarchan antecedents of the Soledades. Petrarch closes the Rime sparse with a conversion poem, celebrating the Virgin as the antithesis of his secular love, Laura, whom he finally terms a “Medusa.” In John Freccero’s view, Petrarch closes his series of courtly love sonnets with an ambiguous repentance for the idolatry implicit in his celebration of autonomous art, where the sign is freed from its determination by the Divine Logos. While his lyric speaker laments his love for Laura, who as Medusa, turned him to stone and away from his “vera beatrice,” the Virgin, he paradoxically continues to celebrate his artistry, monumentalizing his poem while gesturing toward surpassing his predecessor Dante (40). The reference to Medusa here is playful and contained by a religious frame, but it is nonetheless evocative of the fears of transgression associated with artistic self-affirmation. 35 For additional studies of the construction of masculinity in Garcilaso, see Paul Julian Smith, “Homographesis”, and Martínez Góngora. For a complementary reading of the psychodynamics of masochism in early modern culture, see Creel’s study. 36 Darst cites Zeuxis’ process, as described in Pliny’s Naturalis historiae xxv, 64, as an example of the type of imitation known as “electio” (forming a composition superior to what might be found in the objective world through a process of selection), which was sometimes combined with the concept of “correctio” (improving upon nature by choosing the most correct parts, in aesthetic and moral terms) (12–13; 39–41). The cultural implications of such practices are well noted by Berger.

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As Berger suggests, “Medusa embodies a male fantasy of woman’s, and nature’s, phallic revenge; and […] her power to petrify and immobilize expresses the fear that lurks within the desire of artists to master, use, and dispense with nature” (“Collecting” 18). The creation of a subjective vision, what Spadaccini, on a more positive note, has referred to as “shattering mimesis” and its replacement by the “self-made world”, indeed had its dark side. Berger elaborates: [T]he triumph of the visual sign entails the sacrifice of the referent […]. [T]his may be merely ritual sacrifice, merely symbolic, merely (with certain exceptions) imaginary; but like all sacrifices it’s vibrant with traces of lethal violence to nature’s body and the bodies she produces. If the body is to be resurrected in the transcendence of art, it first has to be encrypted, repositioned, consumed, assimilated, and reborn in the beautiful sarcophagus or flesh eater of art. The sarcophagus is adorned not only with Christian triumphs but also with ancient fragments – torsos, heads, limbs, dug out of the ground along with parts of old stories, all of them reborn in the second nature of art.  (“Collecting” 7; Cf. “Second World Prosthetics” 136)37

Such perverse construction evokes a parallel between Da Vinci’s creative assembly of body parts and the activities of the protagonist in the work of his contemporary, Fernando de Rojas. Celestina’s workshop is not so different from Leonardo’s cave, filled with a similar odd assortment of grotesque “body parts” from nature, the medicinal herbs and animals associated with both folk medicine and witchcraft, including the bits of pig bladder with which she recreates hymens. Mary Gossy has read Celestina’s hymen mending as representative of her subversion of patriarchal discourse, an exposé of the lies upon which it is founded and an emblem of the unassimilated remainder that resists entry into the patriarchal symbolic: “the untold story” (148).38 But the suturing and artificial construction of the hymen also evoke the lies which must be sutured over in the idealizations inherent in an artistic process whose ambition is to create an autonomous artistic vision founded on an ideological position of dominance. In Rojas’ work, gender relations become the locus of a more general social critique which arises in the tensions between the “ancient fragments” and “parts of old stories” Berger identifies as the constituents of the new “second nature of art.” In Boscán and Garcilaso’s Italianate lyrics, these tensions are held in check by a sort of compromise between the drive for artistic autonomy and 37 In a parallel with Berger’s attribution of an affinity between the “second world p­ rosthetics” of Renaissance art and contemporary cyber reality, Enrica Cancilliere suggests that Góngora creates virtual reality in the Soledades (“La realidad virtual”). 38 See Swietlicki for a complementary feminist reading of the Celestina.



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the demands of a Christian and Platonizing aesthetic of the sublime. Yet they resurface in the Baroque among artists such as Góngora, who returns to the fragmented, desolate sense of solitude and loss portrayed by Rojas. Góngora will expand his predecessor’s innovations in form, realizing the freedom of the artist to create a subjective vision to a degree previously unimaginable. At the same time Góngora will, to a far greater extent than either Boscán or Garcilaso, express the crisis entailed in the birth of modernity and its profound effect on the individual. The emotional estrangement which Boscán is able to resolve through Christianity, and which Garcilaso is able to contain in a moment of classical equilibrium, resurfaces unbridled in the Soledades. Góngora returns to the bleak, agonic vision of Rojas, to the broken worldview, broken gender relations, and the broken forms of the Celestina. The pain of Renaissance solitude announced by Rojas, probed by Boscán, and checked by Garcilaso lays the basis for the Baroque crisis of the self.

1

Crisis and Form And new philosophy calls all in doubt, The element of fire is quite put out; The sun is lost, and the earth, and no man’s wit Can well direct him where to look for it. And freely men confess that this world’s spent, When in the planets, and the firmament They seek so many new; then see that this Is crumbled out again to his atomies. ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone; All just supply, and all relation. John Donne, “Anatomy of the World”  (1611)

The Baroque culture which informed Góngora’s creation of the Soledades represents a further development of the crisis at the origins of modernity. Severo Sarduy and Marjorie Nicolson relate the advances in astronomy in the early seventeenth century, such as Kepler’s notion of elliptical orbits and the discovery of planetary imperfections revealed by the new optics, to a de-centered notion of the cosmos with broader epistemological implications (Sarduy, Barroco; Nicolson). The growth of the “new science” indeed represented a challenge to the established organization of knowledge. Europe experienced what Paul Hazard has termed a “crisis of consciousness,” foundering in a limbo between Platonism, as well as the earlier Scholastic-­Aristotelian forms of knowledge, and the Rationalist view of the world. The notion that the phenomenal world can be measured against universal archetypes or essences is challenged as things begin to be evaluated in the light of experience and observation. Paolo Rossi describes this change in the progressive re-estimation of the mechanical arts. As he argues, the “sacerdotal conception of knowledge” based on notions of the arcane, eternal wisdom of the ancient auctores, the conception of nature as a “rigid hierarchy of forms”, begins to be displaced by an appreciation of knowledge as an historical construct, based on empirical skills which could be mastered, shared by all and systematized to continuously extend the cultural horizon (x, 15). This shift occurs  Ruiz Pérez characterizes Góngora’s peregrino’s situation in similar terms: “Lo que éste encuentra ya no es un cosmos ordenado del pensamiento organicista o idealista ante-

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as a gradual response to the needs of growing cities and commerce, to the requirements of navigation in the age of exploration, and to the military and technical demands of empire (see Rossi, especially 35–42). The Spain of Góngora’s day was clearly not isolated from the new science; advances in cartography and navigational instruments associated with Seville’s Casa de Contratación facilitated the voyages of exploration funded by the Hapsburgs; references to the magnet and the compass, extolled by utopian thinkers like Campanella, figure in conceits in the Soledades. Agricola’s famous metallurgical treatise, De re metallica, was used by the Spaniards as a reference in the exploitation of the mines of Potosí. The ideas of the Enlightenment are being introduced but are not yet hegemonic, and the scientific worldview identified with the rise of Rationalism has not yet constituted itself as an episteme; these exist alongside the Aristotelian conception of knowledge in a confusing mixture, as the new discoveries in the sciences destabilize the security of the earlier structure of beliefs. Thus José Antonio Maravall sees the Baroque subject as caught between “desengaño” and “confusión”; the alternatives are either to embrace the desperate orthodoxy of the Counter-reformation, finding some ontological security through an ascetic devaluation of the material world, or to deal with a confusing reality alone (397). The task of orienting oneself to an uncertain reality entailed an essentially solitary struggle. As Maravall has pointed out, during the Baroque, man was viewed as an agonic being, in conflict with himself as well as with his rior, sino el universo conflictivo abierto por los viajes, la ciencia y la manufactura” (El espacio 242).  Rossi 65.  It bears mentioning that Agricola’s treatise, despite its impassioned defense of the dignity of miners and other workers, was actually placed as a reference book on altars in Potosí while indigenous people were subject to forced labor in the mines (Rossi 47, citing Nef, La naissance de la civilisation industrielle 115; see also Rossi 57).  See McVay, “Gongora’s Soledades,” for a reading of the Soledades in Foucauldian terms; see especially his citation of Foucault in suggesting that Góngora wrote in a moment of “discontinuous epistemes” (20).  The historians, literary critics and philosophers of the Baroque whom I cite often use “Man” in a generic sense. I am aware of the possible (but not necessarily) sexist implications of this usage, and I have made an effort to use gender neutral constructs where possible in order to balance this concern with the need to accurately report the critical consensus I have drawn upon. The use of the masculine pronoun seems appropriate in some cases, as it reinforces the notion presented in the Introduction that the appetite to create a “second world” based on human perception and artifice is associated with patriarchal drives of dominance. However, I resist any essentialist implications of this stance, particularly in reference to a poem which explores precisely the breakdown of such essentialism (e.g. in the male identification with female abjection suggested by the Ganymede figure, or the possibility of female enactment of patriarchal violence suggested by the Éfire figure, which I describe in Chapter 2).



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brethren, egotistical in his various strategies to accommodate to a transitory world (328–29, 334, 415). This crisis of the self is accompanied by the historical and economic crisis of Spanish empire, which stifled the very infrastructure it needed to capitalize on the wealth it had extracted from the New World. Spain’s spectacular decline, including widespread famine, poverty and national debt, despite the image of ships laden with precious ore in her ports, creates a culture which is marked by a striking disjuncture between appearances and reality. In the work of the more critical artists and writers of the period, these conflicts of the age – ontological, epistemological and historical – are played out in what Beverley, writing of the Soledades, has examined as textual contradictions, what Mary Gaylord has termed “ambivalence”, or what Sinicropi has cast as binary oppositions in his semiotic analysis of the poem. In Frank J. Warnke’s view, the contradictory structure of Baroque writing suggests a change in the way representation is figured in literature. As he observes, The deeply rooted symbolic habit of mind which the Renaissance had inherited from earlier ages enabled its poets to speak of the ultimately real in terms of the phenomenally immediate, and one result was a poetic style which relies strongly on simile and its extension, allegory.  (21–22)

In contrast, he argues, Baroque literature displays an obsessive concern with the contradictory nature of experience. In poetry, for example, simile largely gives way to metaphor and allegory to symbolic narrative, and the texture of that poetry, purged of the representational sensuousness of the Renaissance, is permeated with the figures of contradiction – conceit, paradox, antithesis, and oxymoron.  (22)

Warnke’s general description of the contradictory structure of Baroque literature can well be applied to the structure of the Soledades. However, Warnke’s claim that allegory is displaced by symbolic narrative should be qualified here, as the term has acquired special resonance through Walter Benjamin’s writings on the Trauerspiel. For Benjamin, Baroque allegory, figured for example in the emblem by a division between image and text, is actually  See Elliot, especially 281–316, and Vicens Vives regarding the historical and economic causes of the decline of the Spanish empire; see Beverley, Aspects 5–8, regarding these in relationship to the Soledades. The “ser–parecer” dialectic is a commonplace in the art and literature of the period.  Beverley, Aspects, passim; Gaylord, “Metaphor” 112, note 20; Sinicropi, Saggio, passim.

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more modern; it is “device baring,” revealing the seams of its own construction as representation. It is in precisely this sense that the more innovative writers of the Baroque, such as Góngora, disrupt the seamless illusion of immediacy such as the enargeia we observed in Garcilaso’s First Eclogue. Before examining the wealth of such “figures of contradiction” which can be found in the Soledades, I propose to focus on the presence of one of the particular forms highlighted by Warnke, the metaphor, for Góngora’s special treatment of metaphor constitutes the building block of his quintessentially Baroque style. The innovative use of metaphor by Baroque poets was recognized and studied by their contemporaries, in particular by Gracián in Spain and Tesauro in Italy. Their fascination with conceits, with wit, and with the marvelous is grounded in a new poetics, in which mimesis is replaced by expressiveness as the goal of art. The artist is no longer to imitate nature but, through the use of his imagination, to improve upon it. Metaphor clearly surpasses simile in expressive power. If one looks at even the conventional metaphor, “her lips are roses,” at face value, one becomes aware of the fact that the equation implicitly calls into question the meaning of the two terms and the capacity of language to represent them. As Eugenio Donato has pointed out Metaphorical language in a way destroys not only the reality of the object but also the function of the language which expresses it, since basically it operates independently of, if not against, the conceptual reality that makes language possible. At the most fundamental level, the metaphor, instead of being a restatement of essential relations contained within reality itself, seems rather to be an epistemological tool to explore this same reality.  (22)

Classic Renaissance metaphors (such as “her lips are roses”) do not, however, generally function as such “external epistemological tools” because they are frozen into conventional formulas. The Baroque poet restored this power to the metaphor by compounding it, or by turning it back on itself in a meta As Terry Eagleton states, regarding Benjamin’s theories, “Baroque allegory lays bare the device, posing motto and caption in blunt, obtrusive relation to the visual figure, defeating the mystifications of symbolism. In the dense hieroglyphics of the genre, writing comes to receive all its material weight” (22). Cf. Ruiz Pérez, El espacio: “Góngora se escapa del corsé retórico de la alegoría entendida de manera reduccionista, como un símbolo continuado, que la relega a una significación unívoca e inequívoca, para apuntar […] a una modernidad representacional, característica del barroco, pero también propia de la modernidad” (50); “la alegoría se convierte por esta vía en el cauce y expresión de la conciencia barroca de la escritura, que es decir la primera conciencia de la misma” (86).  For a discussion of Góngora’s poetics in the light of Gracián’s theories, see Cancilliere, “Góngora y Gracián”; Dehennin, “Gracián,” 613–22, and “Du Baroque espagnol.” See Donato and also Ernest Gilman, 67–87, regarding Tesauro’s theories.



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phorization of metaphor, what Severo Sarduy has referred to as metaphor raised to the second power (Escrito 55–60).10 The compounded metaphor further enhanced the expressive power of the poet, now freeing his imagination to “improve upon nature,” to create a second world of aesthetic reality. In order to illustrate the novelty of Góngora’s Baroque poetics, I propose to focus on an example of one particular method employed by Góngora to intensify metaphor, hypallage, or what Dámaso Alonso has called “un trastrueque de atributos” (Poesía española 378). I refer to the following lines at the beginning of the Soledad Primera: No bien pues de su luz los horizontes, que hacían desigual, confusamente, montes de agua y piélagos de montes, desdorados los siente,  (Jammes, ed., I. 42–45)11

Here the phrase “montes de agua y piélagos de montes” represents the interweaving of two metaphors: “las aguas son montes” and “los montes son piélagos.” The attributes of “montes,” specifically the external shape of the mountains, and of “piélagos,” the external form of the sea, are interchanged. The concrete identities of the mountains and the sea are obliterated; the terms are related metaphorically through the selective vision of the poet.12 The words “montes” and “piélagos” are manipulated not to mean the entities they signify objectively but to be perceived as pure form. Eugenio Donato, writing of the Baroque metaphor, observes: The metaphor, through this process of mutation of objective reality, empties the concrete of its essential qualities and creates a new reality which can no longer depend on the intellect. This mode of comprehension – in fact an apprehension – is most often expressed in terms of visual experience.  (24)

Indeed, Góngora communicates to the reader, in a highly visual manner, the experience of the peregrino. We become aware of the feelings the peregrino has as he climbs a cliff, caught between a sea of mountainous forms above 10 This process was described by Jáuregui. Collard cites his complaint from his Discurso poético: “Aun las mismas metáforas metaforizan” (36). As Gaylord has pointed out, the question of metaphor has occupied a prominent position in the critical controversy surrounding the Soledades, its use denigrated by Cascales and Jáuregui and praised by Lorca (“Metaphor” 97–99). 11 All citations of the Soledades refer to the Jammes edition, unless otherwise indicated. 12 As Dámaso Alonso has observed, referring to Góngora’s “complicado juego de metáforas,” “con él, no sólo se borra la individualidad del objeto sino que este entra dentro de una categoría a la cual cubre y representa una metáfora” (Estudios 72).

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and below, at a point where the horizons of land and sea merge (their differences obscured by the twilight and, presumably, by the exhaustion of the shipwrecked youth) into one confusing reality. For Góngora, as for Boscán before him, the complexity of reality as a subjective experience becomes communicable through the development of form. However, the use of the compounded metaphor is fraught with contradiction. As Donato points out, the Baroque poet, using this new form of metaphor, addressed the breakdown of an ordered or “rational” cosmos by “moving towards a reality which is centered on the I and oriented by the I” (24). Yet, Donato continues, Inasmuch as he takes upon himself to found the rationality of the real upon himself, he does indeed assume the function of God, and yet inasmuch as he himself is part of the same world to which he has denied any rationality, his whole creation is bound to crumble in ashes and smoke.  (28)

With these words Donato captures what I believe to be the central contradiction which Góngora faced in creating the Soledades, a contradiction which is repeated as an obsession throughout the poem. Góngora, it would seem, is trapped in a vicious circle: the creation of a subjective vision by the poet requires as its point of departure its own negation, the positing of an objective reality. Metaphor begins with the things of this world. Faced with the demise of his aspiration to remake the world in his mind’s image, the poet aspires anew, only to meet defeat at each attempt. As further chapters in this study will attempt to prove, the Soledades is not a display of the triumph of art over nature, but rather, manifests the repeated failure of an art which achieves momentary flashes of beauty only to crumble into “ashes and smoke.”

Ambivalence in Genre Crisis conditions the structure of the Soledades on broader levels beyond the technique of the compounded metaphor. Lorna Close, responding to John Beverley’s work, speaks of “Góngora’s consistent transgression, inversion and subversion of canonical patterns and structures at every level in the Soledades” (185). Genre is one of the major sites of contradiction in the poem, a function of a process of modernization in literature which parallels the shift from a sacerdotal conception of knowledge in the sciences. The Spanish Erasmian humanist Juan Luis Vives, writing a generation before the polemic over Gongorism, illustrates this parallel in his writings. In works such as De tradendi disciplines and De causis corruptarum artium he upholds the direct observation and experience of nature by artisans and peasants over the ancient book knowledge of philosophers and schoolmen, inviting the learned



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to develop a respect for common knowledge and the mechanical arts of the workshops and factories (Rossi 5–6). As he argues, Enraged against nature about whom they knew nothing, the dialecticians have constructed another for themselves; that is to say the nature of formalities, of individualities, of relations, of Platonic ideas and other monstrosities which cannot be understood even by those who have invented them. They attribute a name full of dignity to all these things and they call them metaphysics. If someone has an intelligence which is wholly ignorant of nature, which has a horror of her, a mind which instead has a bent for abstruse things and foolish dreams, they say that such a person possesses a metaphysical intelligence.  (De causis corruptarum artium 410, as cited by Rossi 6)

In his De ratione dicendi he defends a similar autonomy from the Ancient precepts in rhetoric and poetics: Tampoco puede sostenerse la antigua división del estilo en sublime, medio o ínfimo, como si se tratara de hacer alguna división de los ciudadanos mediante el censo. Las virtudes del estilo son muy variadas: unas dependen de la elección de las palabras, otras del contexto y del número, otras de las figuras y schemas, otras de la fuerza y agudeza de la argumentación, otras de la gravedad de la sentencia: por consiguiente, no pueden ser tres los géneros de estilo, sino infinitos, pues bajo cada uno de estos respectos pueden señalarse más de tres maneras de escribir. Y estos infinitos estilos intermedios conviene estudiarlos y clasificarlos porque hay muchos colores intermedios entre el blanco y el negro. (Menéndez y Pelayo II, 153, as cited by Egido 75)

Beyond this general shift towards autonomy in constructing the archive of knowledge, there were also more specific dynamics involved in the evolution of genre into the Baroque. Recent studies on the silva, the astrophic “forest” of eleven- and sevensyllable verses in which the Soledades was written, situate the development of the form within the crisis of genre in Spanish letters during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Elias Rivers, Aurora Egido, Begoña López Bueno, Juan Montero Delgado and Pedro Ruiz Pérez have all identified the development of new and “mixed” forms in the context of the decline of Petrarchism and the rise of the vernacular translation and incorporation of the genres of ancient poetry such as the eclogue and the silva.13 In Montero 13 See Rivers, Muses and Masks, “La problemática silva española,” “Problems of Genre in Golden Age Poetry,” and especially “El problema de los géneros neoclásicos y

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and Ruiz’s view, the Gongorine extended silva is the culmination of a paradoxical process of modernization in which Petrarchan genres were gradually displaced under the pressure of the new classical models, while at the same time, precisely because the Spanish lyric had assimilated Italian verse and strophic innovations, Spanish poetry, in such a rewriting of the classics, was unable to systematically adhere to the norms of the Latin lyric. Ironically, Góngora’s radical modernity in adopting such a free and open form is a function of his efforts to emulate the ancients, but to do this – and herein originates his formal innovation – within the constraints imposed by the linguistic and literary heritage of the Spanish language. This paradoxical dynamic of homage to the classics expressed as ebullient national self-affirmation (or vice versa) is well summarized by Nadine Ly’s apt commentary on Góngora’s textual innovations: “el homenaje más eficaz que se le podía rendir a la tradición culta era traicionándola” (“Tradición” 359). The related destabilization of the traditional precepts regarding the hierarchy of genres and styles, as critics such as Andrée Collard and Joaquín Roses Lozano have shown, becomes a key factor in the polemic among Góngora’s contemporaries over his new poetry.14 Central to Jáuregui’s arguments against Góngora is the charge that he used the high style of epic to treat themes beneath epic stature. As he states in his Antídoto, Digno es V.m. de gran culpa, pues habiendo experimentado en tantos años cuán bien se le daban las burlas, quiso pasarse a otra facultad tanto más difícil y tan contraria a su naturaleza […]. Debiera Vm., según esto, ponderar las muchas dificultades de lo heroico, la constancia que se requiere en continuar un estilo igual y magnífico, templando la gravedad y alteza con la dulzura y suavidad inteligible, y apoyando la elocución al firme tronco de la buena fábula o cuento, que es el alma de la poesía.  (Rico García 79–80)

Indeed, the Soledades incorporates only fragmentary aspects of epic poetry. Jáuregui was correct to suggest that the poem contains no real epic narrative; the pilgrim’s actions are hardly heroic “hazañas.” María Rosa Lida de Malkiel has observed a parallel between the activities of the peregrino and the obscure narrative thread of one of Dio Chrysostom’s Discorsi, The Hunters of Euboea.15 Yet deeds as such assume little importance in comparison with the sentimental state of the pilgrim’s inner exile. la poesía de Garcilaso.” See also, Egido, “Sin poética,” and two essays from the excellent collection La silva, ed. López Bueno: López Bueno, “De la historia externa de este volumen”, and Montero and Ruiz, “La silva entre el metro y el género.” 14 Collard 99–112; Roses Lozano, Una poética 121–41; see also McVay, “Góngora’s Soledades”, passim, and Callejo, “La Soledad Segunda” 11–38. 15 See Cruz Casado for further discussion of narrative models for the Soledades. See



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In his Examen del Antídoto in defense of Góngora, Francisco Fernández de Córdoba, the Abad de Rute, noted the mixed quality of the Soledades, its inclusion of a veritable “anthology” of “the whole range of Classical and Renaissance forms,” to use Beverley’s characterization (Aspects 43, 69). Thus the Abad de Rute argues, Dexando pues varios pareceres, supuesto que no es drammático, tampoco puede ser épico, ni la fábula o actión es de Heroe, o persona illustre, ni acomodado el verso; menos es romançe, por más que tenga dél mixto, porque demás de no aiudarle el verso, ni introduce Príncipes por sujeto del Poema, ni Cortes, ni guerras, ni aventuras, como el Ariosto, el Tasso Padre y el Alemani; Bucólico no es aunque en el entren Pastores, ni Haliéutico, aunque pescadores; ni Cinegético aunque caçadores; porque ninguno destos es sujeto adequado y trata o a de tratar juntamente de otros; pero porque introduce a todos los referidos es necesario confesar que es Poëma, que los admite y abraza a todos: quál sea este, es sin duda el Melico, o Lyrico llamado así por ser canto, que esto es Melos, al son de la Lyra.  (Artigas 424)

If the poem was essentially lyric, why then did Góngora adopt some of the formal characteristics of epic? According to Roses, the Abad de Rute’s defense amounts to an argument against “la concepción tradicional de que la magnificencia poética es patrimonio lírico del poema heroico o épico. El hecho de que las Soledades sean de género lírico no limita su riqueza expresiva” (Una poética 132). He continues, “Para el autor del Examen, el poema de Góngora procura gloria a la nación” (Una poética 132). Góngora’s aspiration that “nuestra lengua a costa de mi trabajo haya llegado a la perfección y alteza de la latina” (Respuesta, in Carreira, Obras 297) could thus be realized through lyric. For Roses, Góngora’s application of the sublime style of epic to lyric brought equal dignity to the Spanish language. The anxiety over the Soledades’ generic ambivalence suggests a comparison with the Celestina and recalls the sort of invective directed towards Boscán’s experiments with Italian meter. As Paul Julian Smith has shown, Spanish critics of the Renaissance and Baroque tended to exalt epic, virtue, utility, and the Castilian, associating these with masculinity, while often denigrating lyric, decoration, sensuality, and the Italian, associating these conversely with femininity. Quevedo, as Smith points out, attacked Góngora’s poetry for not being properly manly (“Barthes” 85–87); his gender-based abuse parallels the rejection of Boscán’s lyric as “para mugeres.” Beverley has related the conflicted synthesis of varied literary forms in also the discussion and notes to the section on arbitrismo in this chapter for further thoughts on the significance of the reference to Dio Chrysostom’s Euboean discourse.

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Góngora’s work to the Quijote, arguing that “it is the example of the novel, of its status as a ‘mixed genre’, which bears most closely on the Soledades” (Aspects 69). The Baroque term “mixto,” defined by Ricardo del Turia as an entity in which “las partes pierden su forma y hacen una tercera materia muy diferente,” was applied by Turia to the tragicomedia,16 but, indeed, aptly describes the Soledades,17 as well as the Quijote. Góngora’s violation of classical precepts at the service of his own ingenio parallels Lope’s violation of the Aristotelian unities and Cervantes’ exploration of such questions as poetic truth. As Andrée Collard has argued, Góngora and his contemporaries, regardless of their overt position in the dispute surrounding the Soledades, all participate in the broader conflict between Ancients and Moderns, significantly before the famous Querelle occurs in France, as innovators to varying degrees (60–61). In Collard’s opinion, in the Soledades Góngora creates a new poetic genre, gathering features of traditional epic, lyric and dramatic poetry while gutting them of their traditional function (102). Beverley sees a similar loss of teleological design in the poem, with forms becoming fragmented under the pressures of history. As he writes, The patriotic epic and the epic hero per se are no longer a genuine possibility for Góngora as an artist who writes in the midst of a growing sense of crisis and decadence in Spain and from a personal stance which is antagonistic to the ideology of Christian and national despotism which sustains the imperialist epics of the sixteenth century. There is still a fascination with its possibilities but, at the same time, the necessity of rendering it as a fragment. The traditional value of the pastoral as a fiction outside the contingencies of history has also become problematic in the Soledades. It can no longer distinguish itself absolutely from the tensions of the reality it escapes nor, in what amounts to the same thing, maintain itself as a unified literary mode.  (Aspects 69)18

The tensions within Góngora’s pastoral are not, however, exclusively the product of historical crisis. Rather, one response by writers to the crisis of the age was to unleash the tensions inherent in the pastoral as a genre. Gaylord, citing Góngora’s reference to peasant women as “bárbaras […] moradoras” of Parnassus (I. 891–92), suggests that “Góngora is enjoying a jest at the expense of the pastoral tradition and what Elias Rivers has termed 16 17

Maravall 324, note 56. NB. Jáuregui’s characterization of the Soledades as “una ensalada y mezcla tan disonante de estilos, de voces y sentencias” (Rico García 53). 18 It was a possibility, however, for some of his Counter-reformation contemporaries. See Elizabeth Davis’s classic study.



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the ‘pastoral paradox’ of natural art.”19 She compares Góngora to Cervantes, claiming that both “unmasked in their versions of the pastoral a contradiction inherent in the entire tradition” (“Pastoral Paradox” 85). Beverley summarizes the nature of this contradiction when he argues that the “Soledades are not [...] nature poetry,” but rather “an irradiation of the bucolic by an urban (and historical) intelligence” (Aspects 77–78). Thus Beverley sees the poem as textured by a “modal friction” between epic and pastoral, a friction which is echoed in thematic dichotomies of menosprecio de corte / panegyric, country / city and nature / artifice (62). There is certainly ample evidence for R. O. Jones’ assertion that the theme of the Soledades resembles the traditional theme of menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea. As Jones argues, in the poem, Góngora is praising the purity of the country life as opposed to the corruption of cities. He is asserting that the artificial is transient and that only natural values are permanent in a changing world.  (“Poetic Unity” 190)

Indeed, there are numerous examples of praise of the simple attributes of rural living over those of the court: No moderno artificio borró designios, bosquejó modelos, al cóncavo ajustando de los cielos el sublime edificio: retamas sobre robre tu fábrica son pobre, do guarda en vez de acero la inocencia al cabrero, más que el silbo al ganado.  (I. 97–105) Limpio sayal (en vez de blanco lino) cubrió el cuadrado pino  (I. 143–44) Sobre corchos después, más regalado sueño le solicitan pieles blandas que al Príncipe entre Holandas púrpura tiria o milanés brocado.  (I. 163–66)

In addition, there is a strong current of condemnation of the artifice of civilization, which reaches its most strident expression in the old man’s speech against seafaring. Yet, as Jammes and Jones have pointed out, this theme of

19

Gaylord, “Pastoral Palimpsest” 84, citing Rivers, “The Pastoral Paradox.”

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menosprecio de corte is far from consistent, given that the poem ends in the panegyric mode, praising the skill of aristocrats engaged in falconry.20 As Beverley argues, The model Góngora is elaborating is not, as in Jones’ idea of a Neoplatonic gnosis, the order of nature posed against the corruption of history; nor is it the static harmony of bucolic mediocritas, as in Jammes’ reading of the poet’s Andalusian “aristocratism.” Both are certainly present, but they serve as terms of a dynamic model, the poem itself, which invites the city to be more like the countryside, the countryside more like the city. (Aspects 77–78; see also xi)

A brief look at the text reveals any number of illustrations of the dynamic Beverley has observed. The condemnation of industry in the serrano’s diatribe against seafaring paradoxically depicts the art of navigation in a positive light. The compass is described as an object of wonder (I. 379–92). As Spitzer, referring to the serrano’s speech, writes, Al mismo tiempo que niega el valor de esta codicia, de la cual derivan todas las hazañas gloriosas, Góngora las adereza con los colores más deslumbrantes y más atrayentes de su paleta: actitud barroca característica, que dora de belleza un desengaño profundo.  (“Notas” 165)

Gaylord, in a similar vein, asserts that the serrano “evokes the very beauty against whose charms he cautions, chronicles the same exploits he condemns” (“Metaphor” 107). Conversely, Nature is praised with references to the very civilization to which it is ostensibly opposed. Natural phenomena are no longer described with simple epithets as in the poetry of Garcilaso (e.g. “verde hierba,” “blanco lirio,” “fresco viento,” etc., but are portrayed in more vibrant, often visual terms, often by virtue of their association with the rich and lofty attributes of courtly life. Jewels are a common metaphorical term in the Soledades: an island is described as “esta esmeralda bruta/ en mármol engastada siempre undoso” (II. 367–68). Despite the explicit attack on seafaring, the exotic treasures of foreign trade are also terms of metaphor and comparison. The wedding couple is to possess beehives so rich in honey that their cork trees are to exude the golden liquid “cual la Arabia madre ve de aromas/ sacros troncos sacar fragrantes gomas” (I. 922–23). Similarly, a rooster’s head is not bound with gold, “sino de púrpura, turbante” (I. 295–96). 20 Jammes, Études 586; Jones, “Poetic Unity” 203; see Callejo, “La Soledad Segunda”, for an opposing view, defending the artistic value of the Soledad segunda and its integral role in the Soledades as a two-canto, elegantly symmetrical and complete work.



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The use of such exotic points of reference cannot simply be attributed to an intent, as Jones puts it, “to show that richness is not lacking to country life,” that “spiritual peace in Nature is better than all the illusory riches of the Indies (“Poetic Unity” 195). The consistent cultivation of these exotic metaphorical terms is simply too dazzling to serve as an illustration of moral corruption. This contradiction is a concrete manifestation of the criticism Beverley observes in the Antídoto, namely, the “dissonance between Góngora’s complication of language and image and the rustic simplicity it is supposed to represent and celebrate” (Aspects 76). Paradoxically, the historically-inflected, self-critical elaboration of the pastoral mode in the Soledades may also be a function of Góngora’s attempts to imitate classical precursors. Two works of Latin bucolic poetry stand out as models for Góngora’s compositional technique (the “modal friction” Beverley has observed) as well as for his expression of social and political criticism. Statius’ Sylvae and Virgil’s Eclogues, which both enjoy a certain revival in Spanish letters at this time in the context of the increased popularity of more flexible and “mixed” forms,21 figure as important precedents for a pastoral shaped by the contingencies of history. Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue is a well recognized source for Góngora’s sonnet, “Alegoría de la primera de sus Soledades,” seen as a template for his masterwork. In the sonnet, Góngora’s poem, likened to a caged bird, is exhorted to flee to its original “mudo horror divino,” a Virgilian forest of retreat from the court. The bird is addressed as “Prudente Cónsul, de las selvas digno,” reversing Virgil’s “si canimus silvas, silvae sint consule dignae,” thereby reframing Virgil’s original political prophecy as contemporary protest.22 In Carole Newlands’ view, the exhortation in the eclogue to sing of woods worthy of a consul “provided a directive for the later involvement of pastoral with politics and the court” (143). For Annabel Patterson, this directive becomes, over time, a “politics of Virgilian quotation”, which becomes especially marked in the poetry of early modern empire in the context of the struggles over the transformation of the feudal estates.23 Interestingly, Góngora’s use of Virgil reverses the Christian interpretation of the Fourth, 21 See Rivers, Muses and Masks, “La problemática silva española,” and “Problems of Genre in Golden Age Poetry” regarding the history of the silva in Spain, and López Bueno (“De la historia externa” 8) on the reception and dissemination of the eclogue. 22 Beverley, Aspects 79; see also Alatorre, “Notas” 95–97. Molho, Semántica (63–81), offers an excellent reading of the sonnet, while indicating an admiration for the variant the Millés’ edition uses, in which verse 13 reads as “sorda queja” rather than the “sorda oreja” of other editions. Note Carreira’s important correction of the Millés’ edition: “dicha lectura es una simple errata que ningún manuscrito apoya. Millé no hizo anotaciones a este soneto” (“Los sonetos” 1025). 23 See her “Pastoral versus Georgic” as well as Raymond Williams’ classic study The Country and the City.

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so-called “Messianic” Eclogue associated with Petrarchism, as described by Patterson, and returns it to its original classical function as commentary on imperial destiny.24 Other eclogues in the cycle, as we shall see, also figure as influences. Statius’ Sylvae have an important impact on the Soledades; both from the standpoint of compositional technique as well as in the expression of ideological criticism, Statius’ work, roughly contemporaneous with that of Virgil, shaped Góngora’s poem in fundamental ways. Critics have argued that Góngora set out to best Quevedo and exalt the genre; where Quevedo had more directly imitated Statius by writing a book of silvas, a collection of medium-length occasional poems, Góngora wrote “a silva to end all silvas” (Rivers), a “silva book” of generic fragments which becomes a kind of countergenre or new genre, the “soledad” (Montero and Ruiz; see also Rivers, and Ly).25 Statius’ original poems were written to celebrate his patrons’ estate, a villa not unlike the setting of the Soledades, which Wickersham Crawford has identified with the country palace of Góngora’s patrons, the Marquis and Marchioness of Ayamonte. For Newlands, the estate poem genre26 represents a further reinvention of the pastoral mode, one variant of different forms of pastoral including the more idyllic locus amoenus of sentimental song as well as the poetry of agrarian technique elaborated by the Georgics. The characteristics of Statian villa poetry, as will be shown, are congruent with many of the controversial features of the Soledades. In a parallel with the Soledades, the Sylvae have been stereotyped as “ ‘mannerist’ works that exalt artifice over sense” (Newlands 3).27 Yet, as Newlands maintains, “the contrast between small-scale form and often exuberant style in the Sylvae allows Statius, who claims to have spent twelve years upon his epic Thebaid (Theb. 12. 811–12), to play with epic motifs in a new and dynamic fashion, a practice he defended in the preface to Book I (“stilo remissiore praeluserit” (Sylvae praef. I. 10; Newlands 4, note 13; 78, 218). Thus the Sylvae become a counterpart to epic where the poet can both praise and critique the technological progress evidenced in the wellappointed estates of his patrons (5). Frederick Ahl has argued that the poems use panegyric to encode oppositional points of view, “addressing aristocratic 24 The Fourth Eclogue was called the “Messianic Eclogue” because it was read as a pagan anticipation of the birth of Christ. See Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology 19–59. 25 The idea that the Soledades constituted a new genre begins with Salcedo Coronel (López Bueno 8), is articulated by Andrée Collard (Nueva poesía 102), and has been reelaborated by Montero Delgado and Ruiz Pérez (50–51), Rivers (Muses and Masks 105), and Ly (“Las Soledades” 41). 26 See Pavlovskis’ and Fowler’s essential studies of the ‘estate poem’ genre. 27 Góngora’s detractors associated him with this quality in Statius (Collard 71). See Collard 70–72 regarding the comparisons (both positive and negative) made between Góngora and Statius in the seventeenth century.



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rulers in the presence of an attentive audience trained to analyze rhetorical argument” (Newlands 19). This classical notion of palam, which Newlands defines as “meaning one thing but implying another, quite different meaning”, resonates with Betty Sasaki’s work on the Soledades and reception theory,28 in which she portrays the reading of Góngora’s poem as a kind of decoding of embedded meanings by an elite audience (Newlands 19; Sasaki 163, 157). The Sylvae function as a pastoral interlude in which the violence of epic can be contemplated; they serve as a “mirror of princes,” elaborating “a cautionary narrative of dynastic failure and corrupt monarchy” (Newlands 27). Thus, the devastation of war is critiqued symbolically, in scenes of cutting down a sacred grove or in images of the reckless destruction of Phaeton, the quintessential image of the bad king, or in references to a future of conquest rather than to a new Golden Age (Newlands 149, 315). The sibyl is featured in one of the later sylvae; the prophetess, associated with “riddling speech,” is extravagant in her praise of the emperor “almost to the point of ridicule,” suggesting a “gap between fiction and reality” “so wide as to activate doubts and anxieties in the reader” (Newlands 323). All of these features of the Sylvae again coincide with similar symbolic elements which appear, albeit in fragmentary form, in the Soledades, and which figure in a parallel “mirror of princes” which Beverley and Sasaki have observed in Góngora’s poem.29 As will be shown in the course of this study, Góngora’s defamiliarization of violent imagery, along with his plays with hyperbole and excessive speech, will become a key feature of his social and political critique. Virgil’s Eclogues evince similar tensions; as Claudio Guillén has suggested, they also “dramatize the conflict between contemporaneous history and song” (181). Michael Putnam notes that Virgil wrote during the mood of crisis and social upheaval around the time of the death of Julius Caesar. Virgil himself lost his ancestral estate near Mantua as a result of land divisions and allotments to pay Roman soldiers returning from service in campaigns of imperial expansion. The First Eclogue, which features the lament of the expropriated shepherd Meliboeus, is thus seen as “an indictment of Augustus’s agrarian policy” (68, citing MacKay). For Putnam, in the First Eclogue, pastoral myth is destroyed by the tragedy of history, and Virgil’s own sympathies are subtly revealed in the contrast between Meliboeus’ preparation for exile and his fellow shepherd Tityrus’ insular and impassive bucolic contentment. As Putnam argues, “[I]n revealing the tension through the words … of ­Meliboeus, Virgil sides with the sufferer, deliberately underscores the callow, sheltered idealism of Tityrus, and allows the reader to see the meaning of the juxtaposition” (81). As we will see in the following chapter, Góngora also 28 See also Isabel Torres’ elegant application of reception theory to the Polifemo in her study of the Baroque mythological fable, especially 14–15 and 69–75. 29 See Sasaki, “Góngora’s Sea of Signs” 163, 157, and Beverley, Aspects 102, 7–8.

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crafted his protest against Spanish agrarian policy and imperialism through telling juxtapositions and frustrated anagnorisis, all designed to provoke a response in his readership on the terrain of political action. Beverley associates Góngora with the radical wing of the Spanish arbitristas and the agrarian aristocracy, citing the poet’s friendship with Pedro de Valencia, an outspoken advocate of a utopian program of dividing up the large estates among the peasants and reviving agriculture. Regarding Góngora’s relationship to Pedro de Valencia’s arbitrista project, it is important to note that his use of Dio Chrysostom’s The Hunters of Euboea as a seemingly inconsequential narrative thread actually evokes political elements of the discourse which are not explicitly figured in the poem, but which would have been a factor in its reception precisely around the issue of agrarian reform. In the tale, a hunter of Euboea is summoned to the city for squatting on public land without paying taxes. A citizen who had been succored by the hunter, like the peregrino in Góngora’s poem, defends him and suggests that public land be distributed to those who would work it, at first with no rent and later with rent in kind; the people of the court respond by voting to repay the hunter’s virtue by granting them the land free of rent in perpetuity (Dio Chrysosotom I. 301–3; 305–9; 317–21; see also C. P. Jones 56–61). This context, as well as Chrysostom’s own polemic against the idleness of the rich and the corruption of the cities, suggests that Góngora was evoking Pedro de Valencia’s arbitrista sentiments in his fragmented incorporation of this tale, using literature, in the manner Beverley describes, as a political discourse which could not be elaborated in its own language.30 Yet as Beverley points out, Góngora’s protest was necessarily limited, given the implicit contradictions of such a project of agrarian reform in the hands of the aristocracy.31 What Valencia was proposing was, in Beverley’s words, a kind of impossible “feudal socialism”:

30 Dio Chrysostom I. 351, and generally the second half of the Euboean discourse; Beverley, Aspects 69. 31 See Beverley, Aspects 7, where he builds on Woodward’s observations (784), and Aspects 101, where he cites Pierre Vilar’s Crecimiento y desarrollo (113–36; see especially 134). Beverley points to the examples of González de Cellorigo, Navarrete, and Valencia as arbitristas who opposed the idea of an economy of rent and mercantilism based on precious metals (los “bullonistas”) with all that this implied in terms of colonization, and instead argued for a strong agricultural base in the manner of the French physiocrats. Valencia was a voice of moderation regarding the treatment of witches and of the Moors, yet he did argue for the forced dispersal of the Moors (as opposed to expulsion or outright genocide) out of fear of an internal Islamic enemy, in the context of the history of war with the Turks. Thus even with the more radical arbitrista Valencia there were clear limits to his plans for social justice. See Valencia, Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España and Escritos sociales as well as Anne Cruz, Discourses of Poverty 177–78.



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To be genuinely national feudal socialism would have to concretely ally peasant and aristocrat against the absolutist center. Such an alliance is not finally possible because it would entail the need for the aristocracy to attenuate or abandon the feudal relation of production in which their income and status depends on the exploitation of peasant labor....Góngora’s cultivation of difficulty is rather a substitute for a direct political practice which is no longer possible.  (“The Production of Solitude: Góngora and the State” 57–58)

The more conservative arbitrista González de Cellorigo specifically entertains the dilemma Beverley mentions, in his Memorial, 3ra parte (“Del desempeño y restauración de las casas ilustres de la nobleza de España”): Y el querer dar a entender, como algunos pretenden, que el igualar los titulados con los demás es conveniente cosa, sería hacernos creer un error muy al descubierto que aún a los más ignorantes no puede engañar. Antes por el contrario, se puede afirmar que no habría cosa más perniciosa que el continuar el intento desta igualdad, así por muchas razones que haciendo evidente demostración se podrían dar, como porque no hay cosa más asegurada al bien de la República y a la obediencia del Príncipe cuanto que los titulados y nobles de España tengan fuerzas y valor para engrandecer la monarquía; siendo ellos los que han de hacer andar a raya al pueblo, que a la voz de uno o de muchos suele descomponer los estados y dar en sediciones y guerras civiles.  (180–81)

While González de Cellorigo indeed encourages an economy founded on labor and agriculture, he also advocates introducing slavery and reinforcing the large estates, supports the expulsion of the Moors, and recapitulates the Medieval doctrine of the king’s body (Memorial). Beverley notes the contrast in political possibilities, with the English situation, where the Puritan poets addressed a class with increasing authority (Aspects 7). In the absence of such possibilities for change, he concludes, Gongorism becomes a kind of sterile gesturing: Por todo su esplendor, por todo su “vuelo atrevido” sintáctico-alusivometafórico, la dialéctica del gongorismo es una dialéctica paralizada. Bajo el pretexto de crear una nueva forma de trascendencia, su cultivo de la dificultad revela una vacuidad mecánica y ostentosa: un discurso frustrado y frustrante. Sarduy correctamente ve en esto la posibilidad de un “neobarroco del desequilibrio, reflejo estructural de un deseo que no puede alcanzar su objeto” (Barroco 103). Pero esto se debe a que el movimiento interno de la frase gongorina – ese desplazamiento continuo del signifi-

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cante que constituye su particularidad y placer – refleja una conciencia de clase contradictoria y perversa, incapaz de totalizar su relación con la historia.  (Beverley, “Sobre Góngora y el gongorismo colonial” 43–44)

A similar limitation can be observed in Virgil’s protest. MacKay suggests that Virgil’s negative portrayal of Tityrus reflects resentment over the supposedly incompetent farming practices of recently emancipated slaves, hardly the sentiments of an advocate of a program of “land to the tiller” (157). Both imperial poets write from the conflicted position of oppositional poetics of an empire in crisis. Succession anxiety figures into this oppositional imperial poetics. Góngora wrote the Soledades early in the new century, during the decline of Felipe III (died 1621), while Felipe IV (born 1605) was still a youth.32 Beverley implies that Góngora was concerned about the fate of the empire at the point of succession, and describes the prince and the peregrino as the “archetype of future political authority” (Aspects 109).33 Virgil had similar concerns about the political future. He wrote his Fourth Eclogue to optimistically mark the end of the civil strife following the death of Julius Caesar, predicting peace for the new ruler of the empire; the eclogue celebrates the marriage of the future Augustus’s sister, Octavia, to his rival Antony.34 Newlands notes that Statius’ ruler, Domitian, was childless, and suggests that fear of civil war also would have been a concern of this poet. Thus succession anxiety figures into the parallel with Statius as well (318–19). In Góngora’s poem, the contradictions which arise from the various manifestations of political crisis (whether expressed as anxiety over succession, over agrarian reform or over imperial expansion), as well as from the broader “crisis of consciousness” of the Baroque, are further paralleled within the text, beyond the problem of genre, as contradiction on the levels of tone, syntax, and semantics. 32 The exact composition dates are unknown, but Jammes reports that the first canto was sent to the poet’s friend Pedro de Valencia in 1613, and that the final lines of the second were added somewhere between 1619 and 1626 (ed., Soledades 14–20). 33 Beverley stops short of suggesting that the peregrino represents the future Philip IV (although the case could be made, particularly in light of his association with Ganymede; he is figuratively at the mercy of older, more powerful men: by 1615 Olivares had been appointed gentleman to the prince’s chamber [Elliot 320]). My tendency is to concur with Beverley’s reading of the peregrino as an archetypal figure whose significance both includes and transcends the immediate political situation. Beverley expands his reading of the identity of the peregrino to include Góngora, the reader, and “the form of consciousness which makes its way through the world in a condition of perpetual homelessness,” related to the pícaro, the sentimental hero, and the flâneur (Aspects 3, 65–67). See also Vilanova, “ El peregrino de amor.” 34 Their anticipated child, celebrated in the eclogue, was, despite the Christian Messianic prophecies associated with the work, a girl (Goold ed., Virgil I. 2–3; Putnam 142–43).



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Ambivalence in Tone Robert Jammes, in his survey of burlesque elements in the Soledades, asserts the presence of a rather modern “variedad contrastada – y hasta contradictoria – de tono” in the work (“Elementos” 109). Like the Celestina, the Soledades contains formulations in a low register which parallel greater themes. In the Soledades, the ambivalence in the thematic divisions between country/city, Nature/artifice, and peace/war is echoed on the level of tone. Such is the case with war imagery, which in various contexts is used to create different, often opposing, tones. The use of military images in pastoral settings is often lighthearted. The groups traveling to the wedding are described as “la femenil tropa” (I. 525), “la dulce escuadra montañesa” (I. 541), “hermosa escuadra” (I. 639), “el lento escuadrón” (I. 642), etc. The chimneys in the peaceful village are described as “atalayas del Ocaso” (I. 640). Similarly, the wedding guests who return home by ship are referred to as “la marítima tropa” (II. 55). Their nets are called “Mallas […] de cáñamo” (II. 91); the fish they catch are “de escamas fáciles armados” (II. 103). Though war imagery could interject a sinister tone in a pastoral setting, this does not seem to be the case in these instances, at least not overtly, since the concrete meanings of the military terms are suppressed at the service of playfulness. We begin to see a change in the tone with which war imagery is presented in the description of fireworks, which are called “luminosas de pólvora saetas” (I. 650). The use of the word “saetas” here initially suggests the same playful use of war imagery as we have seen previously. Yet the report of the old man’s concern over their potential destructiveness introduces the concrete specter of a “landscape of war and exhaustion”: “miserablemente/ campo amanezca estéril de ceniza/ la que anocheció aldea” (I. 656–58). Here as well as in the scene of the wedding games, Góngora exploits the social significance of certain public displays and athletic contests, a topos of classical epic, as a collective sublimation of the competition of war.35 As Beverley points out, these sublimated tensions accumulate in the poem, building towards their realization in the falconry scene (Aspects 109–10). Thus the description of the mountain youths who appear as rapacious crows in their zeal to compete in the high jump, while playful and lighthearted in tone, acquires greater

35 Such displays are indeed part of the historical context of the Soledades. Maravall (494–98), discusses the political importance of the royal fiestas in attracting a massive audience for patriotic displays of power. In particular, he describes the staged combats of miniature armadas in the ponds of the Retiro, as well as the frequent public fireworks shows. The playful imitation of war served as part of the “mass psychology” of the monarchy; its favorable reception conditioned a more conducive climate for the real thing. See also Vidal.

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significance as the poem progresses. Compare the initial and later uses of this imagery:36 Arras del animoso desafío un pardo gabán fue en el verde suelo, a quien se abaten ocho o diez soberbios montañeses, cual suele de lo alto calarse turba de invidiosas aves a los ojos de Ascálafo, vestido de perezosas plumas.  (I. 985–91; emphasis mine)37 Más tardó en desplegar sus plumas graves del deforme fiscal de Proserpina, que en desatarse, al polo ya vecina, la disonante niebla de las aves: diez a diez se calaron, ciento a ciento, al oro intüitivo, invidïado deste género alado, si como ingrato no, como avariento, que a las estrellas hoy del firmamento se atreviera su vuelo, en cuanto ojos del cielo.  (II. 891–901)

By the end of the poem, the same imagery has become part of an apocalyptic vision.38 In the final scene of falconry, war imagery becomes associated with the concrete brutality of birds of prey, who vicariously act out the bellicose drives of their aristocratic masters. Both the concreteness and the immediacy of the violence as well as its greater allegorical significance instill the tone with which the imagery is presented with increased seriousness; the tone appears to be one of striking alertness to the horror of war. The flycatcher bird’s feathers are described as “filos” and “cuchillo,” which “esgremirán” (II. 838, 840). Its flight is faster than the departure of an arrow (II. 844–48). The hunters are depicted as “el escuadrón atento” (II. 872). The saker is described as drilling the air as if with bullets from the weapon which shares its name (II. 910–11). A crow which is grazed by the saker descends “fulminada en 36 Both Spitzer 175, note 2, and Sinicropi 59, note the parallel between these passages, without attributing to them the significance I discuss. 37 Cf. also I. 585–87, in which the serranas “se abaten […] cual simples cordonices al reclamo,” and I. 633, in which the “escuadra” of wedding guests “cual de aves se caló turba canora.” 38 The falconry scene, particularly in its relation to apocalyptic imagery, will be studied in greater detail in Chapter 4.



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poco humo” (II. 916). Later, the crow is described as a “breve esfera” which explodes when it is caught by a claw encased in “fatal acero” (II. 933–36). In this passage, the tone of horror before a world engulfed by war appears established. Yet this tone is immediately undermined, as the poet’s comment proceeds to deny the horror; with the lines “Destos pendientes agradables casos” (II. 937), Góngora begins the final passages, which he appended to the poem. Góngora, the bitter satirist, has led us into the realm of farce, through the use of exaggerated, riddling speech.39 He continues to employ a burlesque tone in his description of the chicks as an “infantería,” who seek refuge in the “muralla” of their mother’s wings and the “trompeta” of her voice (II. 963– 65). A return to the playful tone of the pastoral setting of the first Soledad after war imagery has been presented in such a violent tone, undermines the earlier playful yoking of the pastoral with the horrors of war. The farcical tone which appears in these final stanzas is actually presaged in the falconry scene itself. As L. J. Woodward points out, the tragic becomes farcical when the plight of the crow becomes a game; the crow is transformed into a ball in a tennis match (780). Indeed, it is this sense of experience as a game which lies at the root of the ambivalence in tone in the Soledades. In the context of the ontological insecurity of the Baroque, sport is one means of accommodation. As Maravall states, Con las cosas, con los hombres, los cuales aparecen en nuestra vida dotados de la indeterminable y apenas aprehensible realidad de la ocasión, la manera de operar no puede ser otra que el juego. La moral casuística, la política maquiavélica, la economía de las ganancias en el gran comercio, las incipientes especulaciones bursátiles, la técnica del trompe-l’oeil en el artista, la guerra entre príncipes, etc. —todos ellos, productos bien típicos de la cultura barroca—, son juego.  (393)

This cultural fascination with the ludic is perhaps the basis for the perception of the Soledades as what Beverley considers to be a wager or play with possibility (Aspects 23; see also Paiewonsky Conde, and McCaw, “Daphne”). In his production of ambivalence in tone, Góngora reveals an inability to sustain a coherent moral statement. The juxtaposition of opposing tones, the creation of farce alongside the production of the tragic, leads the Soledades 39 Paul Julian Smith makes observations on the poem which can well be applied to this passage in which panegyric and burlesque are both conflicted and undermined: “In burlesque, the literary is deflated by the real; in panegyric, the real is elevated by association with the literary. In Góngora’s twilight zone of generic indeterminacy both terms float in an evaluative void, and the status of each is called into question” (“Barthes, Góngora” 89).

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to the very “axiological nihilism” which was observed in the Celestina.40 Ambivalence in tone produces a leveling effect; values appear arbitrary, as if determined by a roll of the dice. In the final analysis, there are no clear values, only a game which is the poem itself, caught between a gesture towards a protreptical function and a Derridean “play of différance” (see Close). Thus the Soledades, as Smith, Close and others have pointed out, is ultimately “self-reflexive” and self-critical.41 Given this, the extent to which the poem, in Beverley’s view, displays a “partisan ambition” is problematic, perhaps, because as Beverley readily admits, Góngora speaks to a crisis for which there is no apparent solution (Aspects 102). Robert Ball locates the trajectory of self-imitation in the Soledades in the phenomenon of self-parody found in Góngora’s “Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe” (“Imitación y parodia” 92). Yet self-parody, the ultimate expression of textual contradiction, is already present in the farcical tone marking the end of the Soledades. At the opposite end of the spectrum from Counter-reformation zealotry, the Soledades undermines any statement beyond its own process, bringing us close to a mechanical vision of the modern, in which, as Ernst Jünger puts it, “technics and ethics become synonymous.”42

Syntactical Ambivalence: The “Si no” Constructions In his detailed semiotic analysis of the syntax and semantics of the poem, Sinicropi demonstrates that the Soledades replaces the norms of logical discourse with its own internal norms determined by context. As he maintains, il discorso poetico delle Soledades é caratterizzato, a tutti i livelli —fonologico, semiologico e sintattico— da un indebolimento delle funzioni intensive a favore di un rilevante rafforzamento delle funzioni estensive.  (114)

40 Paul Julian Smith, as noted above, refers to the notion of an “evaluative void” in the Soledades. His term, despite its superficial similarity to Gilman’s concept of “axiological nihilism,” in fact describes something rather different. It connotes freedom from “the reified, ‘congealed’ values of […] topos”: “atopia,” Barthes’ “dépouvoir.” The phrase “axiological nihilism” refers instead to the obverse of this freedom: passive despair before the arbitrary workings of chance (“Barthes, Góngora” 92). 41 Smith, “Barthes, Góngora” 92, Close 197. Gaylord, “Metaphor and Fable” 112, makes essentially the same point when she refers to the Soledades as “a poem which declares itself to be a poem about poetry.” Robert Ball , “Imitación y parodia,” has written on the phenomenon of self-imitation in the poem (47–49). Jammes, “Elementos burlescos” 117, referring to the Soledades, notes Góngora’s modern technique of integrating into a work of art its own negation. See also Chemris, “Self-Reference.” 42 Kahler 205, citing Ernst Jünger, “Uber den Schmerz,” in Blätter und Steine; translation is Kahler’s.



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He associates the breakdown in the hierarchy of logical discourse with the breakdown of the hierarchy of Medieval cosmology (120–22). He sees this rupture with the old order as liberating, claiming that the Soledades offer una nuova visione della natura, della realtà, vista in una coesione sincretistica e sintetica dei suoi elementi constitutivi, non piú scanditi ed ordinati nelle instituzioni gerarchizzate dalla logica, ma solidamente imbricati in un equilibrio di necessaria interdipendenza.  (131)43

The complex “coesione sincretistica e sintetica” of which Sinicropi speaks can be observed in the syntactical ambivalence of the poem. C. Colin Smith, in his dispute with R. O. Jones concerning Neoplatonism in the Soledades, lists as one of the “anti-Platonic indications of Góngora’s poetics, Góngora’s habit of presenting an apparently simple fact or scene as less certain or more unstable than we had imagined it. He does this with antitheses or ‘constructions of choice and doubt’ which manage to express […] two equally real facets of Nature.  (“An Approach” 236–37)

As Sinicropi has shown, in the Soledades the gongorine “Si no A, B” formula, along with the use of other similar conjunctions, break from a simple adversative function to become descriptive (92–96), in essence becoming examples of the very “construction of choice and doubt” which Smith describes. Variations of the “Si no” construction express two alternative views of the same phenomenon, offering yet another illustration of ontological confusion in the poem. The type of “Si no” construction which presents an ambivalent description often fits into the symmetrical form which Dámaso Alonso has called “un trastrueque de atributos.”44 A classic example of one of these constructions from the Soledades is the following: “si Aurora no con rayos, Sol con flores” (I. 250). This passage received an early and insightful analysis by Diaz de Rivas:

43 It should be noted that this argument, in essence, is taken up by Severo Sarduy, who associates the loss of an objective center in Baroque art with Baroque cosmology. Sarduy, for example, relates Góngora’s use of ellipsis to the discovery of elliptical orbits. See Sarduy, Barroco 67–78. 44 See Dámaso Alonso, La lengua 135–56, for an early discussion of the various forms and functions of the “Si no” construction. See also Carreño, “Of Orders and Disorders” 145–46.

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quando dize: si no Aurora con rayos, no diçe con certidumbre que no es Aurora, sino dudando, por virtud de la condición sí. Por donde haze este sentido: O es Aurora con rayos, o Sol con flores: o éste: Si no me concedéis que es Aurora con rayos, es Sol con flores. De modo que sienpre va el Poeta devaxo de duda.  (Gates, Documentos 112, note 44)

Yet the doubt the poet evinces is not, as Alonso implies, simply ornamental (Góngora y el Polifemo 156–61); as Sinicropi has argued, Góngora presents us with a complex, synthetic vision, offering two alternative ways of viewing reality which are equally valid. Which will prevail is a function of subjectivity, of choice rather than of objective truth, and the choice is left open. The type of construction represented by this passage is repeated throughout the poem.45 Another, perhaps more complex example of a “construction of choice and doubt” within the “Si no” category can be found in the much-admired description of birds in flight in the Soledad primera. These are portrayed as: volantes no galeras,

(Term A)

sino grullas veleras

(Term B)  (I. 605–6)

The construction is formally adversative; the first line is corrected by the second; Term A is ruled out and is replaced by Term B. Yet the terms are virtually equivalent; attributes are interchanged symmetrically: flight connects “volantes” and “grullas,” while sailing connects “galeras” and “veleras.” Thus, inasmuch as Term B’s existence is affirmed, Term A’s existence must be asserted as well. According to the rules of syntax, Term A is negated, yet through the workings of Góngora’s poetics, Term A is affirmed: Term A simultaneously exists and does not exist. At the same time, the assertion that Term B exists uniquely is undermined. With a dazzling blend of contradiction and doubt, two equally valid views of reality are presented through the subversion of the norms of syntax. In his description of the aristocratic hunting party at the end of the Soledad segunda, Góngora displays yet another striking manipulation of syntactical structure. The troop of falconeers lisonja, si confusa, regulada su orden de la vista, y del oído su agradable rüido.  (II. 717–19; emphasis mine)

The “Si (no) A, B” formula is often used by Góngora in concessive construc45

See also II. 115–18; II. 435–36; II. 652–53, etc.



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tions, essentially as the equivalent of “B, aunque A.” Dámaso Alonso points out several examples of such concessive constructions in Góngora’s poetry (e.g. “robusto, si no galán,” “aves/ que en voces, si no métricas, suaves,” etc.)46 and one expects a similar pattern after “si confusa” in the passage from the Soledades. Despite the detraction of “confusa,” the troop should evince some positive quality which redeems this detraction. This positive quality is syntactically proscribed from being the opposite of “confusa,” yet it is precisely from this prohibited lexicon that Góngora selects his second term. It is easier to see the radical nature of Góngora’s selection by substituting “si confusa” with “si no regulada”; the resulting statement “si no regulada, regulada” is the essence of paradox. In actuality Góngora is describing two alternative ways of viewing the same event. However, by subverting normal sentence structure (and, hence, its internal logic), Góngora portrays these alternative views as simultaneously equally valid and mutually exclusive. The perception of order or disorder is not portrayed as an absolute, but as a matter of perspective. Góngora’s manipulation of syntax to portray ambivalence in the perception of reality is technically similar to the response of his contemporary, Cervantes. Like the narrator of the Quijote, the poet of the Soledades is not omniscient; the writer can no longer describe the phenomenal world with certainty. As reality fractures into alternative “realities,” the vehicles for representation in literature also break down. The narrator splits into different personae; the normal connections between words splinter. The fragmentation of a once ordered reality is all-pervasive, and its expression in literature finally extends to the most fundamental level: ambivalence within the poetic word.

Semantic Ambivalence As Maurice Molho has pointed out, Góngora’s poetic language es […] una búsqueda de plurivocidad, en la que el criterio selectivo, cuando interviene, lejos de atentar contra la ambigüedad de la expresión, tiene por función anunciarla y, anunciándola, preservarla.  (Semántica 37)

Indeed, in the Soledades and elsewhere, when Góngora recharges words from the Renaissance poetic lexicon (such as “nieve,” “cristal,” “oro,” etc.) so as to expand their normal meaning, he increases the potential for ambiguity. Luis Rosales, drawing on Dámaso Alonso’s studies, describes this tendency:

46

Alonso, La lengua 138.

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la palabra “nieve” se convierte en un duende, en un ser mudadizo y aparencial que en ocasiones representa la misma nieve: bates los montes que de nieve armados, pero también puede representar los manteles de blanco lirio: nieve hilada; la blanca pluma de las aves: volante nieve; los bellos miembros de unas serranas cubiertos por sus coloreados vestidos: en nieve de colores mil vestida; los azahares de la virginidad en el desposorio: flechen mosquetas, nieven azahares, y en fin, los blancos lirios que alegrarán el suelo en la primavera: fragantes copos que ha nevado el mayo.  (272; see Alonso, Estudios 72–73)47

The fact that “nieve” can assume such a variety of meanings, Rosales argues, means that the word’s semantic value has become less fixed (272). Dámaso Alonso describes this semantic dynamism, stating, Vemos […] cómo no sólo desaparece lo individual dentro de una idea genérica, sino cómo dos conceptos distintos de materia real ascienden a ser un solo concepto estético, una sola imagen.  (Estudios 72)

He then adds, regarding the word “nieve,” that “la última diferencia se la dan sólo el contexto o los determinativos que a la palabra misma acompañen.” Alonso’s analysis has been refined by Sinicropi, who sees this process as one of semantic neutralization and syncretism, which he places in the general framework of the increased importance of context in the Soledades.48 While Góngora disrupts a clear, linear correspondence between sign and signified,49 the semantic ambiguity he creates has its limits. The meaning of the word “nieve,” while not restricted to snow itself, is restricted to objects which share at least one of the common attributes of snow (e.g. whiteness, delicateness, etc.). Góngora’s manipulation of semantics can thus be viewed as a shift – albeit a limited one – from a denotative meaning towards a connotative meaning of words. As Maurice Molho argues, “La poética gongorina consiste, en realidad, en generalizar los objetos que percibe en un concebir abstracto que es un campo extensivo de relaciones (Semántica 25). Meaning is not an inherent, immutable function of Góngora’s words, nor is it totally relative; rather, it is the product of the interaction of the semantic heritage of

47 See his n.45 for further examples. Rosales’ references to the Soledades are from Dedicatoria, 7; II. 343; II. 836; I. 627; I. 797; and II. 335–36, respectively. 48 See Sinicropi 63–68, in which he traces the variants in meaning of the word cristal in the poem. 49 Basing his argument on Foucault’s theories, McVay sees the destabilization of the relationship between sign and signified as a function of epistemic rupture in the poem, which he identifies as the basis for Jáuregui’s attacks (“Góngora’s Soledades” and “The Epistemological Basis for Jáuregui’s Attacks on the Soledades”).



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words with the context which Góngora, through the workings of his imagination, establishes. With this discussion of ambivalence in semantics we complete our picture of the Soledades as a work rent by crisis on all levels of organization. Góngora’s creative use of metaphor, and his innovative break with the restrictions of genre, syntax, and semantics, are testimony to the opportunity to explore new aesthetic grounds which the Baroque crisis afforded. Fundamentally, the Baroque “crisis of consciousness” gave Góngora the freedom to present reality as a subjective experience. It is in perhaps this sense that the debate over the obscurity of the Soledades can best be understood, as an index of the incipient modernity of the poem in its heralding of a new artistic autonomy, one which also demands a new level of engagement of the reader, who, as Góngora’s letter in defense of his new poetry suggested, must respond to the poet’s efforts to “avivar el ingenio.”

Obscurity and Modernity As critics such as Roses, Vilanova and McVay have demonstrated, the notion of obscurity was a central factor in the debate over Góngora’s iconoclastic poetics.50 The concept of obscurity as an aesthetic factor originates in the patristic writings of the Middle Ages and is refined by Saint Augustine in his De Doctrina Christiana.51 Augustine and other saints defend obscurity as intended by God to tame human pride and enhance the appeal of the sacred mysteries. As Augustine states, “Quod totum [referring to textual difficulty] provisum divinitus esse non dubito ad edomandam labore superbiam et intellectum a fastidio revocandum, cui facile investigata plerumque vilescunt.” He also argues that difficulty enhances the pleasure in deciphering God’s word: “Nunc tamen nemo ambigit, et per similtudines libentius quaeque cognosci, et cum aliqua difficultate quaesita multo gratius invenire” (De Doctrina Christiana VI. II, as cited by Roses 69–70). Petrarch then transfers these ideas to the field of literature in his Invective contra medicum (1353), a first step in the humanistic appropriation of patristic writings to defend poetic obscurity (Vilanova 668, Roses 70). Góngora’s defense of obscurity in his “Carta en respuesta” should be seen as a response to this tradition. Góngora uses patristic rhetoric to defend the enigmatic in poetry for its capacity to exercise the mind: “tiene utilidad avivar el ingenio y eso nació de la obscuridad del poeta. Eso mismo hallará vuesa merced en mis Soledades, si tiene capacidad para quitar la corteza y descu50

Roses Lozano, Una poética 66–75; Vilanova; McVay, “Góngora’s Soledades” 35–

131. 51 Roses Lozano, Una poética 66–75; Vilanova 666–72; See Huppé 3–47 for a discussion of Augustine’s text.

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brir lo misterioso que encubren” (Carreira, Obras 296; see Vilanova 667). Later he repeats Saint Matthew’s admonition, widely quoted in Renaissance defenses of poetic obscurity, “pues no se han de dar las perlas preciosas a animales de cerda,” defining his poetics as an elite, hermetic practice (Roses 104, Vilanova 666–72). Yet Góngora’s evocation of the arguments of the Church Fathers, like his appropriation of literary conventions, is fragmentary and gutted of its original teleological function. As Orozco Díaz and Vilanova argue, Góngora uses the terms of his interlocutor in debate as grist for the mill for his own project, specifically in his references to prophecy.52 In his Parecer, the Abad de Rute cites Saint Jerome’s defense of obscurity in prophecy, but insists that the saint’s arguments cannot apply to Góngora’s poem: “Pues no es este poema misterios de religión ni profecía, de que no deben hacerse participantes muchos” (Pariente 35). Góngora then responds, “Pregunto yo: ¿han sido útiles al mundo las poesías y aun las profecías (que vates se llama el poeta como el profeta)? Sería error negarlo” (Carriera, Obras 296). Interestingly, like Augustine’s response to Petrarch’s assertion, in the Secretum, that his love for Laura had led him to God, namely, that he had inverted the true order,53 Góngora reverses the order of importance of poetry and prophecy: ¿“han sido útiles al mundo las poesías y aun las profecías […]?” (Carreira, Obras 296). Góngora continues the process of secularization begun by Petrarch to affirm the subjective vision of the poet, using the language of the scholastics to go beyond them. In this sense Góngora’s arguments are pseudosacerdotal, and his reference to Augustine’s sententia (Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te) should be read as the same sort of defensive display of orthodoxy which Américo Castro notes in Cervantes’ otherwise subversive text (Castro 256).54 The Peruvian defender of Góngora, Juan de Espinosa Medrano, was the 52 Vilanova writes, “el autor de las Soledades hizo suyos, en más de una ocasión, los argumentos del Abad de Rute, modificando su verdadero sentido” (Vilanova 667, citing Orozco III, 126–27). 53 See Estrin 43. 54 Indeed, Dana Bultman has maintained that Góngora’s usurpation of exegetical functions previously reserved for theologians was part of what was behind the attacks on his poetry as heresy (452). For an opposite reading of Góngora’s “Carta” within Scholastic orthodoxy, see Collins 1–51, especially 6–7. Carreira’s description of the context of the writing of Góngora’s “Carta en respuesta,” indicating that some of these more commented passages were added by a disciple under Góngora’s name and that the arguments themselves came from a stockpile routinely available to the “taller cordobés,” suggests that the letter originates in an odd mixture of feudal and proto-modern forms of artistic production. Here “Góngora” operates less as a biographical author than as an “author function” in a Foucauldian sense, his avant garde manuscript culture operating as an unusual conflation of mixed temporalities, part of what Carlos Gutiérrez has analyzed, using Bourdieu’s theories, as a “literary field.” See Carreira, “La controversia,” and Gutiérrez, “Las Soledades” and “Narrador.”



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first to understand the poet’s accomplishments in creating such a secular notion of art (Giordano 231).55 As Andrée Collard has noted, Espinosa Medrano es el único en contestar el cargo según los principios gongorinos: el descubrimiento de Góngora es haber comprendido la diferencia esencial entre el arte sagrado y el arte secular. Góngora […] supo divorciar la función del poeta de la del profeta.  (103; emphasis mine)

She also maintained that Góngora, in creating his own subjective and secular vision, subverted the Horatian paradigm binding utility to aesthetic pleasure (“deleitar enseñando,” “utile dulci,” “Docere/Delectare”): “En realidad Góngora inventa un nuevo género poético en que la ‘utilidad’ desaparece frente al arte descriptivo, vehículo de una visión del mundo bien personal” (102; see also Soufas 147–48). For many critics, the utility of the poem is not didactic on the level of ethics, but rather lies in its capacity to exercise the mind in a pre-Cartesian sense, in its capacity to function as an epistemological journey.56 Elias Rivers has constructed an elegant argument that Góngora, in the Soledades, expressed what he calls the “rhetoric of absence,” carefully removing deictics from the “narrative mode of the poet” (Muses and Masks 108). This quality of erasure has been noted by others in its various aspects: in the removal of the referential world associated with the poem’s epithalamium,57 in the removal of identifying traces of classical imitations,58 in allusion and elusion,59 in generic fragmentation and loss of teleological and didactic function.60 One could look at this removal of identifying and orienting traces as a kind of coding related to an aesthetic of obscurity61 and subversive speech,62 or as part of Góngora’s efforts to display aesthetic virtuosity over

55 See González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood 149–69 and Beverley, “Máscaras de humanidad” regarding Espinosa Medrano’s defense of Gongorism. 56 Roses Lozano, Una Poética 144–45; Beverley, “Confusion” 312; ´Soledad primera” 248; Aspects 15–17, 35; Rivers, Muses and Masks 108; McVay, “Góngora’s Soledades” and “The Epistemological Basis.” 57 Callejo, “La Soledad segunda” 70–71. 58 Jammes, “Vulgo lascivo erraba,” especially 156. 59 Alonso, Estudios 11; see also Sarduy, Barroco (67–78) on elision. 60 Beverley, Aspects 69, 105; Ly, “Las Soledades” 41–42; Collard 102; Bradley Nelson, “Góngora’s Soledades” 609; Roses Lozano, Una poética 144, 189; Sinicropi writes, “il vero aspetto ultimo, finale, delle Soledades dovesse appunto consistere nella frammentarietà dell’opera classicamente mutila – si discopre in quell’ aspirazione alla libertà che ne pervade tutto il tessuto” (132). 61 Roses Lozano, Una poética 66–141; Jammes, “Vulgo lascivo erraba” 153. 62 Sasaki 163, 157.

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the most minimal scaffolding,63 or as an attempt to glorify Spanish reality in the reified world of myth. Yet Nadine Ly, I believe, hits the mark, as Rivers suggests, when she argues for an understanding of the Soledades as one of the first modern poems (Muses and Masks 105). As Ly writes, Este poema, que no encaja en ningún molde preexistente, es, a mi parecer, el primer poema ‘moderno’ o sea el primero que no se pueda definir sino como poema. Sólo habrá que dar un paso más hacia la destrucción de la red asociativa o metafórica, para que a la desaparición de los límites genéricos, correspondan un lenguaje o una escritura fundados en analogías nuevas, desligadas a su vez de un ritual discursivo llevado por las Soledades gongorinas a los extremos de la belleza y de la sofisticación.  (“Las Soledades” 41–42)64

Ly’s observations resonate with remarks made to me by Andrée Collard about her interpretation of the poem. She put her argument this way: What if you wanted to express a modern subjectivity, a kind of Romantic “I,” but you lived at the end of the Renaissance? Well, you would use the tools you had, as in the case of the Quijote: fragments of your inherited literary tradition, to craft something new.

I believe this is what Antonio Carriera meant when he said that Góngora, like Mahler, with the methods of the past anticipated the future (Gongoremas 225). Yet I will qualify Collard’s remarks by noting that, precisely because of the “rhetoric of absence” in the Soledades, the poem could not be further from a Romantic notion of subjectivity. Rather, as will be shown in the next chapter, Góngora anticipates late Romanticism and Symbolism in his enactment of the erasure of the subject, what Wylie Sypher refers to in his study of modern art and literature as “loss of self.” As we shall see, this paradoxical representation of the possibilities of the subject is the singular achievement of Góngora: like one of his own Baroque metaphors of historical frustration, he traces out the failure of modern subjectivity at the very moment of its inception.

63

Alonso, “Claridad y belleza en las Soledades” in Estudios 66–91; García Lorca

1328. 64 Cf. Sinicropi: “Le Soledades ci si presentano dunque come un modello semasiologico della nuova realtà, di un nuovo universo ontologico, in cui poesia si pone come riscatto dell’esperienza immediatamente sintetica della realtà; da esse prende pertanto inizio la poesia moderna” (135–36). Similarly, Ruiz Pérez writes of “la emancipación del discurso artístico de las obligaciones clasicistas de didacticismo y su camino hacia el territorio autónomo y moderno” in reference to the Soledades (El espacio 243).

2

Violence, Eros and Lyric Emotion    Al oro de tu frente unos claveles veo matizar, cruentos, con heridas; ellos mueren de amor, y a nuestras vidas sus amenazas les avisan fieles. Rúbricas son piadosas y crueles, joyas fascinadoras y advertidas, pues publicando muertes florecidas, ensangrientan al sol rizos doseles. Francisco de Quevedo, “A Flori, que tenía unos claveles entre el cabello rubio”

The mythological rape imagery with which the Soledades opens may, at first glance, appear purely decorative; the time of year is denoted by an indirect reference to Taurus: “el mentido robador de Europa” (I. 2), and the pilgrim’s exemplary male beauty is evoked by his introduction as “el que ministrar podia la copa/ a Júpiter mejor que el garzón de Ida” (I. 7–8). Similarly the appearance of an owl at the closing falconry scene occurs through allusion to Ascalaphus and thus to the rape of Persephone: “el deforme fiscal de Proserpina” (II. 892; cf. II. 974ff.). Such uses of epithet and periphrastic allusion direct us toward Góngora’s typically Baroque display of virtuosity, to such an extent that Pamela Waley has argued that “allusions to mythology lie thick upon the ground in the Soledades, but they are intrinsic to his expression rather than to his matter. They illustrate and emphasize his meaning but are not in themselves part of his subject” (Alonso, Estudios 99; Waley 197–99). Yet critics have recognized that more is at issue in Góngora’s use of rape as a figure throughout the Soledades. John Beverley has argued that “the Soledades are framed by the counterpoint of a myth of ascension and a myth of descension. As an idyl they are Europa: enchantment, sensual intoxication, vertigo; as a history they must be abandoned like Persephone to despair and illusion” (Aspects 112). The counterpoint formed by these different representations of mythological rape can be seen as a function of the modal friction which Beverley observes in the merger of pastoral and epic in the poem

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(Aspects 62). While the protagonist is cast as a lovesick pilgrim, lamenting his unrequited passion in the wilderness, he is also depicted in a classical epic context in which the violence of contemporary Spanish imperialism is described. This modal friction which informs the situation of the pilgrim shapes the imagery of the poem, filling the landscape of the Soledades with a mixture of erotic and violent images, alternately combined or juxtaposed, at times achieving an idealizing effect, at other times an effect of discord. It is my intention to examine this dynamic more closely, and in the process to reveal the significance of rape imagery not only to the historical dimension of the Soledades, but also to the initial stirrings of modern lyric emotion, what Mary Gaylord has called Góngora’s “footprints of the voice” (“Góngora”). The process of idealization of rape imagery in the Soledades has not been adequately explored by critics; indeed, those interpretations which have been ventured are problematic from a feminist perspective. A case in point is the reading of sexual imagery in the first Soledad, which opens with the references to divine rapes and closes with a pastoral wedding. Critics have interpreted this sequence of erotic events as a progression from erotic freedom to sublimation in the domesticity of a socially sanctioned marriage. Steven F. Walker, in his characterization of the initial emblem of rape, cites “the magnificent evocation of the divine bull’s erotic freedom.” Góngora’s “mentido robador” is, in his words, “the embodiment […] of the triumphant force of pagan sensuality” (374). Beverley is clearly more conscious of the violence inherent in the divine rapes, particularly in his sensitive reading of Ganymede as a violated and traumatized adolescent (Aspects 29, 32). Yet elsewhere his argument parallels Walker’s: Jupiter represents “free […] untrammeled energy,” a function of the lack of sexual constraint which allegedly prevailed during the Golden Age; his act is “the primeval dance of matter” (Aspects 35, 28). The marriage, on the other hand, is associated with a later form of social organization, in which “the civic and erotic are […] yoked”; “the bridal couple,” Beverley writes, “stands for the domestication of instinct, adaptation to the economic and social order of a community” (Aspects 96). Walker, from a different perspective, also construes the marriage as an endpoint in a trajectory towards sublimation; in the wedding, he argues, sacred love is reconciled with the profane (380). Finally, Jacques Issorel conflates all references to sexuality in the first Soledad into one sensual eroticism; what these critics share, to varying degrees, is a tendency to view, with insufficient scrutiny,

 

See Vilanova’s classic studies on the peregrino de amor in the Soledades. Beverley’s view stands in contrast to that of Frederick de Armas, whose important contribution on the presence of homoeroticism in the text does not recognize violation as an issue in the reference to Ganymede. Cf. Wolfthal’s comments on Saslow’s book (Images 4, 200, note 21).



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the representation of rape by Góngora in these cases as sensual, grand and free. Yet it should be maintained that the terms which Beverley and Walker establish may accurately reflect those that Góngora himself envisioned in the context of the traditional iconography of his time; indeed, if one considers recent feminist scholarship in art history, the progression they describe may reflect on actual contemporary social practice. Diane Wolfthal has pointed to the role of rape imagery in the illustration of marital doctrine in a cultural context in which marriages were arranged to unite properties. She describes the Renaissance custom of carrying wedding chests decorated with classical divine rapes in a quasi-military procession from the father’s house to the husband’s, to be kept in the couple’s bedroom as a reminder of feminine “virtue” (i.e. sexual acquiescence in marriage). Another popular emblem she identifies (in this case for use on wedding banners) was the rape of the Sabine women; because some of the Sabines had accepted the rape they became models of female self-sacrifice. As the mothers of the first Romans, they represented female compliance with civic duty in the interest of the nation (Images 9–17; “Sixteenth”). The integration of rape imagery into actual social customs functions as the sort of sublimation which these critics have described, a sublimation that is different in some respects from the aesthetic dynamics of the text, to which we shall return. Yet what is being camouflaged in such notions of sublimation? (Whose “erotic freedom”? Is it freedom?) The implicit assumption behind this view of marriage as a socially desirable accommodation of male sexual violence is highly questionable. The notion that rape is the primal, instinctual act which civilization must of necessity moderate may reflect patriarchal attitudes from Plutarch to Freud, but it hardly reflects an essential reality. Men are not by nature rapists; sexual power relations are socially constructed, perhaps originally in the foundation of the patriarchal state. Historically, Zeus’s rapes are said to refer to the conquest of the shrines of the Goddess of earlier matriarchal cultures (Graves I.14.1); his rapes are in essence rapes of the Goddess as she was manifested in the form of one of her sacred animals (Daly 85). In a seductive form of syncretism, the iconography of Goddess worship is reversed to entice the submission of the newly conquered; the rapist of the new religion is given the attributes of the old, resonant with nostalgia for a previous harmony between the sexes and with nature. The mythic glorification of rape becomes paradigmatic in the  Molho’s position is a notable exception; he views the first Soledad as a progression from a transgressive to a more normative sexuality, defined, presumably, in conventional seventeenth-century terms (“Una variante” 160). At the other extreme is John McCaw, who sees a redemptive element in rape to the extent that it results in paternity; he reads the mythological rapes as allegories of fall and restoration, with Christian overtones, within Góngora’s “vision of material transcience on earth” (The Transforming Text 18).

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construction of state ideology and national identity. The rape of the Sabines thus becomes a parallel myth to the Aeneid in the epic of the founding of Rome; the violence of conquest is camouflaged; a false consciousness is established which eroticizes the subordination of woman to man and the indigenous to the conquerors. None of this is irrelevant to the political project of the Hapsburg court, which enshrined its imperial aspirations in the myth of a christianized Roman empire established by the supposed “last descendant of Aeneas” (Tanner, The Last Descendant). Góngora’s allusion to the rape of Europa constitutes a particular order of such false consciousness; pain and violation are camouflaged, idealized, represented as ornamentation. Góngora’s initial figure of divine rape belongs to a Renaissance tradition of iconography which Wolfthal, basing her opinion on the work of Susan Brownmiller, has classified as “heroic rapes,” or images of rape by a god or a hero in which “heroic grandeur overshadows the depiction of sexual violence,” in which “rape is viewed through rose colored glasses” (“Sixteenth”). When Beverley identifies the rape of Europa with “enchantment, sensual intoxication, vertigo” (Aspects 112), he is, in fact, describing the effect of Góngora’s use of precisely this kind of idealization. Such idealization is clearly related to the ideology of the Hapsburg empire; as Wolfthal has maintained, heroic rape imagery functioned not only to “elucidate marital doctrine” and “to serve as erotic stimulation,” but also “to assert the political authority of aristocratic patrons (Images 10).” Rape

 John Beverley does well to remind us that the social surplus which funded the flowering of the “Golden Age” of Spanish literature was accrued through the exploitation of indigenous Americans as well as Spanish Jews and Moors, and that aspects of contemporary literature functioned to camouflage this fact. As he states: “Metaphorical and mythological décor, the Baroque’s peculiar verbal and iconographic alchemy, constitutes a kind of ‘theory of magical accumulation’ that masks the real primitive accumulation of capital in the colonies and in the confiscation of Jewish and morisco property, making it appear harmonious with the religious and aristocratic assumption of the state’s imperialist ventures” (Beverley, “Spanish Literary Baroque” 59). Regarding the camouflaging of violent conquest in the New World, the Virgin of Guadalupe is the classic example of syncretism, incorporating features of an Aztec goddess to entice the submission of the newly conquered. Bartolomé de las Casas, in his contemporary history of Spanish colonization, provides numerous examples of the sexual violence of the conquistadors. The following passage is particularly illustrative: The next day, the Indians, enraged at seeing their wives and daughters taken in slavery, assembled and attacked the Spaniards from the rear […]. The Indians gave their terrible war cry and wounded many Spaniards, and the Spaniards, seeing themselves in a bind and unable to enjoy the women, killed them all by ripping open their bellies with the sword. The Indians recoiled in horror and frustrated pain shouting, “Oh Christians, evil, cruel men, killers of iras.” Ira means “woman” in that region, which shows that they hold the killing of women as a sign of bestial conduct, abominable and cruel.  (Trans. Andrée Collard 205)



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imagery proliferated in Hapsburg art in what Margaret Carroll has called an “erotics of absolutism.” Marsha Collins has most recently located the poem within the fertile climate of interaction between the visual arts and letters of early modern Spain. The dual role of the Duke of Lerma as both the implied second patron of the Soledades and the preeminent patron of Spanish painting suggests an incentive for Góngora to fill his poem with poetic imitations of actual works and currents in contemporary visual arts, and there was certainly opportunity for exchange between artists and writers of his time, given common academies and poetry contests held amid the masterpieces on palace walls (Brown 102; Collins 35–37). Establishing specific sources for Góngora’s rape imagery in the visual arts is difficult, but it can be assumed that he relied on a long tradition of iconography in Hapsburg collections. The fact that Góngora refers to divine rapes in three terrains suggests the decorative program of one of the princes of the empire of Charles V, Federigo Gonzaga, in which the rape by Jupiter of Europa, by Neptune of Amymone and by Pluto of Proserpina were meant to symbolize various aspects of the prince’s domain and power (Carroll 6). Titian’s Rape of Europa was particularly esteemed by the Hapsburgs; the painting was presented to Philip II in 1562 when he was still a prince, completing his commission of a series of Ovidian myths including other divine rape themes such as Diana and Acteon and Danaë (Brown 52). As Marie Tanner writes: “In Titian’s emphasis on the navigational aspects of the Europa myth, the painting may refer to Philip’s conquest of Europe. We may assume that Philip is identified with Jove who conquered Europa” (“Titian” 162). Before its suggested appearance in Velázquez’s Las meninas and Las hilanderas (“The Spinners” or “The Fable of Arachne”) in the reign of Philip IV, Titian’s painting was repeatedly copied, both as a tapestry and as a painting by Rubens (Brown 184; Umberger 105), indicating that it enjoyed

 For an investigation of how the “erotics of absolutism” is played out in mass culture, see Marcia Welles, who has applied Wolfthal’s work to the portrayal of rape in ­seventeenth-century Spanish theatre and prose works. Welles associates Cascardi’s application of Jameson’s notion of “strategies of containment” to the problem of gender in canonical, honor code plays of the comedia.  Collins 87–101 cites various possible examples.  After displacing Triton; note the allusion to the “marino dios” (II. 463) in the piscatory section.  Tanner observes that Titian planned for the paintings to be hung as a group, citing his letters, but states that the exact room intended has not been determined (“Titian” 141). Yet Jay Williams is less circumspect, claiming that Philip, while a religious zealot, “was a private voluptuary who selfishly concealed the Danaë and other Poesie that Titian created in a room designed for his personal pleasure” (Jay Williams 145). Indeed, regardless of their disposition, it does not seem impossible that the paintings were both in the tradition of didactic allegory as well as sources of erotic stimulation for their patron.

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sufficient popularity in the various Hapsburg courts so as to have been known by Góngora. Given this context of the court production of heroic rape paintings and their apparent imitation in the poem, a passage in the wedding chorus of the first Soledad, whose significance has heretofore gone unnoticed, is especially intriguing:       Coro II Ven, Himeneo, y tantas le dé a Pales cuantas a Palas dulces prendas ésta, apenas hija hoy, madre mañana. De errantes lirios unas la floresta cubran, corderos mil que los cristales vistan del río en breve undosa lana; de Aracnes otras la arrogancia vana modestas acusando en blancas telas, no los hurtos de Amor, no las cautelas de Júpiter compulsen: que, aun en lino, ni a la pluvia luciente de oro fino, ni al blanco cisne creo. Ven, Himeneo, ven; ven, Himeneo.  (I. 832–44)

This passage is remarkable as a replica of the artistic process, set, as a “Chinese box” structure, in successive levels of displacement even more elaborate than a Velázquez painting. The chorus wishes that the hypothetical daughters of the bride excel in weaving, outdoing Arachne, not by depicting divine rapes, an arrogant gesture toward authority which got her changed into a spider, but by depicting the transgression of the artist herself. All of this displacement is contained in a frame of commentary by the lyric speaker, who intervenes into the chorus in one of only a few rare instances of the first person in the poem10 and insists, “ni […] creo,” a further complication by amphibology, meaning both “I do not believe” (the more recognized sense) as well as “I do not create.” The Soledades’ tendency towards self-miniaturization noted by Beverley (Aspects 37), and common in other poems of the European Baroque, is here realized in an ironic self-reflexivity as a lyric speaker, apparently representing the poet, proclaims (amid the various replicas of himself) that he neither believes nor participates in the creation of divine rape imagery. One could interpret this passage, with good reason, as an example of the  See Schmidt (172) for an interpretation of this passage as an ironic moral injunction against Icarian hubris. 10 Ly, “Las Soledades” 267; cf. Rivers, “Góngora y el Nuevo Mundo” 860.



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Derridean “play of différance” in the poem; meaning is endlessly deferred in a virtuoso cultivation of form (Close 191). Yet other critics, with equally good reason, have found in this sort of play a response to Spain’s historical crisis. As John Beverley has argued, the Soledades opens a space in which the crisis of Spanish imperialism can be explored by an educated elite of aristocratic readers: These readers are, like the poet himself, isolated and contradictory figures, aristocratic radicals who sometimes challenge, sometimes celebrate the authority of the social class that nurtures them. To the extent that they understand what has to be done, they are powerless to act on that understanding, compelled to hold it as a secret shared in conversation, allusions, letters.  (Aspects 7–8)11

As has been noted, Betty Sasaki, using reception theory, has explored ­Góngora’s appeal to this sort of audience, portraying the reading of the Soledades as a kind of decoding of embedded meanings (163, 157).12 Góngora’s ironic commentary on the Arachne tapestry should be seen in this light; Góngora critiques the imperial policies of his king, but must, in the context of repression and in the absence of a political solution (Beverley, Aspects 7), question and bury his vision in code: “señas mudas” (II. 42). In this sense Góngora creates a modern version of the embedded acrostics of the neoterics with which he was identified, and which can be seen in the tradition of Fernando de Rojas, whose work emerged at an earlier point of historical, ontological and aesthetic crisis. Góngora’s construction of the Arachne tapestry can be seen as a model for the weaving of erotic violence within the Soledades, a shuttling between presenting and undermining the topos of heroic rape and all that it implies. A close examination of various instances of idealized sexual violence in the text reveals variations which critique Góngora’s own aesthetic process. As will be shown, by juxtaposing the language of idealization with graphic depictions of pain and violence, Góngora allows us a glimpse into the process of idealization itself. Góngora’s idealization of sexual violence is carried out to varying degrees. At one extreme is idealization presented without any overt sense of contradiction, reaching a kind of limit in which the irreconcilable is reconciled in poetic form. An example of this type of idealization would be the tradi11

See Rivers, “Góngora and His Readers”, for further discussion of Góngora’s reader-

ship. 12 Like Sasaki, Bradley Nelson sees an irony in the poem that leads the reader to critique cultural codes. He cites Bakhtin’s concept of destabilizing heteroglossic elements which lead the reader to become estranged from his [or her] own worldview (“Góngora’s Soledades” 608).

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tional discordia concors of the love between Venus and Mars, imitated in the coupling of the newlyweds at the end of the first Soledad: los novios entra en dura no estacada: que, siendo Amor una deidad alada, bien previno la hija de la espuma a batallas de amor campos de pluma.  (I. 1088–91)

There is no more sexual violence here than in a pillow fight; in a playful version of the Ovidian topos of “amor est militia,” the attributes of war are applied to love without any sense that violence and eros are inherently counterposed. In other situations, however, Góngora reveals certain cracks in his edifice of poetic containment, drawing the reader to question the harmonious linking of sexuality and violence. A case in point is the contradictory presentation of erotic imagery in the serrano’s speech on the voyages of colonization. As Gaylord has shown, in this speech navigation is linked to rape through phallic symbols (e.g. the synecdoche of the upright tree which represents the erect masts of the ships) and by a series of active verbs (“Metaphor” 103). She cites, for example, the ships of Columbus which “violaron a Neptuno […] besando las que al Sol el Occidente/ le corre, en lecho azul de aguas marinas,/ turquesadas cortinas” (I. 414–18) (“Metaphor” 104). Similarly, she notes the reference to Vasco da Gama’s voyage, of which it is said, “los reinos de la Aurora al fin besaste” (I. 457) and “La aromática selva penetraste” (I. 461) (“Metaphor” 104). The object of this sexual aggression tends to be marked as feminine. As Gaylord writes, “Exotic places and hidden treasures wield the seductive force of virginal anatomy”; the Pacific islands are compared to the beautiful virgin nymphs of Diana (“la virginal desnuda montería” [I. 487]), and their explorers to the trespassing hunter Acteon (“Metaphor” 103).13 While all of this imagery serves to enshrine the deeds of Spanish imperialism in the glory of heroic rape, the status of heroic rape is ultimately called into question by the critical tone of the speech as a whole. The mountain man’s grief over his son’s tragic death at sea emerges as a sober reminder of the body as a final arbiter of experience. Referring to the temptations of the exotic forest of clove in the Moluccas (Cf. “La aromática selva penetraste” [I. 461]), the serrano states,

13 Sasaki suggests the reference to Acteon is a subtle allusion to Magellan’s death in battle at the hands of the inhabitants of the island of Cebú, evoking a “darker reality beneath the mask of myth,” played out in the arrival of his crew in the Spice Islands, “the clove spice being a stimulus, or spur, to unbridled appetite or greed” (161, 162).



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  “[…] quédese, amigo, en tan inciertos mares,   donde con mi hacienda   del alma se quedó la mejor prenda,   cuya memoria es bueitre de pesares”. En suspiros, con esto,   y en más anegó lágrimas el resto   de su discurso el montañés prolijo,   que el viento su caudal, el mar su hijo. (I. 499–506)

The truth of the body, with its pain and its mortality, undercuts the aesthetic construction of heroic rape.14 The contrast between idealization and the graphic depiction of pain is even sharper in the imagery of the hunt, where the figure of idealized rape is displaced onto the animal kingdom. Such a displacement echoes the animal aspect of the Goddess as she is presented in the divine rapes, and forms a point of convergence for erotic and violent, even martial, imagery in the text. If the hunt, as Beverley has suggested, can represent a sublimation of military deeds (Aspects 65, 99), it also realizes sexual aggression by venting it upon the animal world. The topos of the amatory chase is given a revealing twist in Góngora’s descriptions of hunted animals. Well before the heroic rape of Europa is presented, Góngora offers a startling image which calls into question such heroism. In the dedication Góngora exalts the duke’s prowess as a hunter and describes a bear run through by his javelin as “kissing” the blade which exits from its mouth: “oso que aun besaba, atravesado,/ la asta de tu luciente jabalina” (Dedicatoria 20–21).15 The use of the verb “besar” in such a context is discordant, even perverse; the phallic blade, the bleeding mouth, the body penetrated to the point of death are the signs of the punishment and annihilation of the erotic. The harmonious identification of eros and belicose violence, which was observed in the discordia concors of the wedding night, is here supplanted by a figure which 14 Regarding Elizabeth Amann’s interesting clarification of this passage, I would like to suggest that Góngora is actually displacing his critique of Spanish imperialism onto the Portuguese, and to concur with Callejo’s (“La Soledad segunda” 81) and Sasaki’s (162–63) insistence on the importance of the narrative frame of the father’s grief. Further, I will note that Wolfthal’s work suggests that gender role reversal is frequently associated with a deflation of the heroic in the art of the period (Images 89–91), and Smith makes a compelling case for this in the Soledades. 15 In this passage, as elsewhere, pathos is partially deconstructed by the option of a satirical reading. Harry Sieber, citing the seventeenth-century historian Cabrera de Córdoba (91), discusses this passage as a reference to the failure of Góngora’s first patron, the Duke of Béjar, to get an appointment as cazador mayor. Here, Collins suggests, “Góngora encodes an insider’s joke into the work” (206). Spitzer writes of the aestheticization of violence in this piece as “a conversion of the horrific and bloody into beauty and serenity” (“On Góngora’s Soledades” 97).

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reveals the real horror of equating violent conquest with love. The inherent contradiction of combining eros and violence, suppressed in the commonplace, is now made painfully explicit. A parallel image occurs in the hunt of a large sea creature, which struggles to dislodge the spear thrust between its scales: Onda pues sobre onda levantada, montes de espuma concitó herida la fiera (horror del agua) cometiendo ya a la violencia, ya a la fuga el modo de sacudir el asta, que (alternando el abismo o discurriendo el Océano todo) no perdona al acero que la engasta.  (II. 489–95)

Here, in Dámaso Alonso’s reading of the passage,16 the harpoon which pierces the fish is described as being mounted like a jewel (“engasta”) by the steel of the fish’s scales. This figure of the bleeding jewel makes patent the contradictions inherent in heroic rape imagery. While we are presented with an object meant to be contemplated aesthetically, we are also made aware of the futility of this process of objectification. The loftiness of the poetic language, with its lapidary register, contrasts sharply with the living, bleeding body. The phallic shaft and gaping wound form a shocking emblem of sexual violence which belies all attempts at idealization. The contrast between the pain described and its re-creation as an ideal, suppressed in the figure of heroic rape, is unveiled in these scenes of hunting; the violence here is too graphic to contain. As we saw in the discussion of Góngora’s ambivalence in tone, the accretion of such conflicted images ultimately calls into question the efficacy of the process of idealization even in those cases where it appears most successful. The portrayal of the rape of the natural world reveals the underlying sexual violence of idealized rape. Góngora’s presentation of this image of a wound as a bleeding jewel and similar examples of the aestheticization of bodily pain (e.g. descriptions of the bear’s blood as “espumoso coral” (Dedicatoria 12) or the seals’ blood as “livor aún purpúreo” (II. 688) belong to a particular aesthetic tradition within the early modern lyric, although Góngora’s relationship to this tradition has, up to this point, not been recognized. Mario Praz describes a counter-reforma16 My reading of this passage is based on Dámaso Alonso’s prose translation, as follows: “Pero el arpón, aunque la fiera alborote todo el abismo del mar, aunque recorra todo el océano, permanece fijo entre las láminas de acero en que va engastado” (Soledades, 162). It should be noted that Jammes disagrees with Alonso, reading “acero” as a reference not to the scales of the sea creature, but rather to the metal hook of the harpoon (Soledades, ed. Jammes 488–89).



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tion aesthetic in Jesuit poetry written in Latin, which includes rather sensual, sumptuous description of the bloodier aspects of Christian iconography, in particular, of the sacrifice of martyrs. This imagery emerges in secular form in the poetry of Marino, an immediate source of influence upon Góngora, who then renders it as vestigial, fragmentary, a version of the “cruel decorativeness” Harold Skulsky has observed more generally in poetry of the European Baroque.17 Similar imagery is present in Quevedo’s poetry; one need only consider the bloody carnations, cruel and jewel-like, which spatter Lisi’s hair.18 If the bleeding jewels of Quevedo’s sonnet can be seen as exteriorizations of the psychic pain of the courtly lover, eruptions of a “desgarrón afectivo” (Alonso), then something similar could be said to be operating in the Soledades. Quevedo’s affective eruptions are born of a conflict, in Mariscal’s opinion, between an exhausted aesthetic, a political climate which repressed a new lyricism of individuality (“singularidad”), and a form, the sonnet, which required emotional expression (110–31).19 In like manner, Góngora’s images are equally eruptive expressions of subjectivity within a context of repression and generic crisis. But what is so intriguing about Góngora’s use of this type of imagery is its role as a startling counterpoint to idealized depictions of suffering, its participation in a dynamic of both expression of, and aesthetic detachment from emotion, of both the revelation and the idealization of psychic pain. This dynamic, as will be shown, is also realized thematically. The conflation of eros and violence associated with cruel decorativeness, which is observed in descriptions of the hunt, continues throughout the poem, linked with increasingly destructive tendencies. The gargantuan aspirations of the hunters and the voyages of exploration which literally map the world parallel the traditional death wish of the courtly lover, now exteriorized on a cosmic scale: “urna suya el Océano profundo/ y obeliscos los montes sean del mundo” (II. 161–64). These destructive tendencies, as will be shown, culminate in the falconry section, which is presented both as an allegory of European war and as a play with apocalypse, as the pilgrim witnesses the 17 Skulsky (52) suggests the term in reference to Ovid; in conversation he has shared with me the idea of applying it more generally to European Baroque poetry. 18 See Olivares (65–67) for a translation and discussion of Quevedo’s Sonnet 339 (Blecua). 19 It seems appropriate to mention here the work of Juan Carlos Rodríguez, who adopts a similar post-Althusserian approach. In his brief references to the Soledades, he argues that while Góngora was a representative of “substantialism,” the ideology of a “hierarchy of blood” associated with the feudal nobility, he produced “animist” poetry, poetry which ideologically privileged the notion of a “hierarchy of souls” favored by the mercantilist bourgeoisie and represented in Petrarchism and Platonism (94, 98, 79). My own view, as will be shown, is that Góngora went beyond Petrarchism and Platonism, and I chose to rely instead on Mariscal’s more precise and historically specific study.

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death of a crow, portrayed as a “breve esfera” (II. 923), under attack by birds of prey of various nationalities, set into motion in the aristocratic hunting game of Góngora’s patrons (Beverley, Aspects 93, 99–100; Chemris, “Time” 153–54).20 The destruction of the crow is contemplated passively by Góngora’s youth; his observations are cast in quantitative, almost scientific language (Degraye 240): “registra”21 and “cuenta” (II. 859, 860). The passive registering of the youth’s eyes seems mechanical; in Michael Perna’s view, “Spectacle replaces complex or conflicting emotions”; “The cruel elements of the scene cause no reaction, the beautiful elements do” (166–67). We may be observing in the youth’s response (or non-response) the construction of false consciousness, the collusion of a spectator in the idealization of bodily pain, the cooperation necessary in the construction of a social myth of subjugation which Góngora was perhaps trying to address in his guarded protest against the abuses of empire. Yet the youth’s identification with Ganymede (I. 7–8) offers an additional possibility; in his numbness before the spectacle of “the body in pain,” of what Elaine Scarry calls “the unmaking of the world,” he displays the characteristics of the trauma one would expect of a rape victim: dissociation and psychic fragmentation. Góngora quickly deconstructs whatever tragic pathos this moment accumulates by recourse to farce (Woodward 778), as the narrative continues with a description of the shoreline, referring back to the display of falconry as “pendientes agradables casos” (II. 937). This reference to the horrific scene of war and apocalypse as “pleasant” suggests ambivalence toward the diversions of Góngora’s aristocratic patrons;22 it may also be a rather bleak form of self-parody (Chemris, “Time” 157, note 25). In any event the reader is left “hanging,” questioning the narrator’s choice to view suffering through rose colored glasses. There are further episodes in the text which, while devoid of any erotic content, display a similar aesthetic detachment from psychic pain. Moments in which the pilgrim is about to voice a sense of recognition or communion with others are thwarted at the last opportunity, significantly by crowds which 20 A further possibility, as we will see, is that Góngora is debunking Hapsburg millennial pretensions, the notion of the “last descendant of Aeneas” ushering in Apocalypse and the Golden Age (Tanner), by an implied juxtaposition of the real history of European war with the pseudo-historical myth of the emperor. 21 Registrar at the time meant “to record” or “to observe intently” (Covarrubias). 22 See textual notes in Beverley, ed. (164), and Jammes, ed. (576–77) as well as Callejo, “La Soledad segunda” 134–37. Carroll Johnson’s recent insightful contribution reads the falconry scene as an “allegory of the brilliant, intellectual poet” (symbolized by the peregrino) “protected from his detractors” (symbolized by the crows, who according to Covarrubias represent bad poets) by Góngora’s patron Niebla (as represented by the falconer prince). He suggests that the ambivalence of the scene reflects the poet’s later “insecurities concerning his own identity and character, and his relation to the literary culture of the Court” (121).



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overtake him23 and by a display of artistry. When the goatherd reflects on the ruins and on his past life as a soldier, “con muestras de dolor extraordinarias” (I. 214), we anticipate the youth’s identification with his feelings. Yet, suddenly, his speech is cut short, as he is whisked away by a hunting party. The youth is left admiring the skill of the goatherd and the music of the mountain girls (I. 233–42). In a similar encounter, as Gaylord has shown, the pilgrim is unable to respond to the mountain man who recognizes on him the stains of the sea which had taken his own son (I. 507–13), as he is distracted by the wedding guests and their choruses (I. 531ff.) (“Metaphor” 110). Finally, the pilgrim’s painful memory of his beloved, triggered by his sight of the bride, is also denied an outlet: víbora pisa tal el pensamiento, que el alma, por los ojos desatada, señas diera de su arrebatamiento, si de zampoñas ciento y de otros, aunque bárbaros, sonoros instrumentos, no en dos festivos coros, vírgenes bellas, jóvenes lucidos, llegaran conducidos.  (I. 747–54)

Here the expression of emotion is literally blasted away by rustic instruments, including one hundred “zampoñas,” shepherd’s pipes of the kind traditionally played in pastoral poetry. With this sort of hyperbole, Góngora is self-consciously dramatizing the exhaustion of the pastoral aesthetic of the resolution of grief through music and art. The theme of failed communication, of muteness, is also expressed through a system of key words in Góngora’s poetic lexicon: “señas,” “mudo,” “vozes,” “sordo,” and “desatar,” analogous to what Gaylord has shown so compellingly regarding the use of “dar voces” in Sonnet 80, “Descaminado, enfermo, peregrino” (Ciplijauskaité 138), and which seem to be part of the “forging of the Soledades from Góngora’s previous body of work” (Gaylord, “Góngora and the Footprints”; Micó). “Mudo” figures in Sonnet 159, “Alegoría de la primera de sus Soledades” (Ciplijauskaité 234), and connects both to the theme in the Soledades of the muteness of nature and natural art versus the noise of the court, as well as to a dialectic of silence and the poetic voice.24 “Señas” abound in the Soledades: signs of remains 23 Grace Burton (iii, 25–28) and Zimmermann, less extensively (57), also note these cases of stifled communication without ascribing to them the same significance. 24 Regarding the concept of natural art, see Rivers “The Pastoral Paradox”; regarding the application of the term to the Soledades, see Wardropper 48. Regarding the dialectic of silence and poetic voice, see Molho, Semántica 66; Gaylord, “Góngora and the Footprints,” 231; Zimmermann 58. Góngora’s treatment of muteness can be seen as both an

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(of the hunt, of the explorers, of the courtly lover), signs of emotion and recognition, sign language. “Desatar” refers to fragmentation, both general and psychic, and “vozes” appear in warnings, which may or may not be heard.25 All appear to be functioning as the “operations of subjectivity” that Gaylord has described (“Footprints” 244), which assume a symbolic importance beyond their immediate contextual function; they suggest the conflict between an emergent subjectivity, a hostile political climate, and an aesthetic which, for Góngora, has reached its limits. Gaylord is correct when she argues that Góngora’s cultivation of form does not preclude emotional expression, but rather becomes the terrain in which such subjectivity is forged (“Footprints”). In this respect she is perhaps building on the intuition of Andrée Collard, whose arguments on the modernity of the Soledades, studied in the previous chapter, offer insight into this dynamic: En realidad, Góngora inventa un nuevo género poético en que la “utilidad” desaparece frente al arte descriptivo, vehículo de una visión del mundo bien personal. Reúne rasgos de la poesía tradicional épica, lírica y dramática quitándoles su antigua función.  (102; emphasis mine))

Here, Collard argues for an understanding of Góngora as a defender of secular art, devoid of moral didacticism, and this argument has been construed to define her as a formalist (Beverley, Aspects 12), which was not entirely her position. Her insistence on his creation of poetry as a “vehicle for a personal vision of the world” also defines Góngora as a poet of a new subjectivity. Mariscal’s documentation of the pejorative use of the term “singularidad,”26 individualism, in discourses of the period, and its equation with heresy, are highly suggestive; perhaps it was indeed Góngora’s expression of an indiamplification and a transformation of the “established trope of mute speech employed by Ovid, Petrarch and Garcilaso” which Navarrete (Orphans 200) discusses. 25 Examples of this lexicon in the Soledades include: “mudo” – of nature: I. 54, 242, 687; II. 171, 179, 297, 535; of natural art or graciousness: I. 197, 726, 801, 945; II. 42, 484; versus noise of the court: II. 720; “señas” – of remains: D. 19, I. 440, 441, II. 561; of emotion and recognition: I. 363, 528, 749 (see Zimmermann 57, regarding I. 749); sign language: II. 244; “Vozes” – in warnings: II. 453; in laments: II. 119; unheard: (“sorda”): II. 465; “desatar” – psychic fragmentation: I. 748; II. 552. More general imagery of dissolution is widespread (see Chemris, “Time” 153–54, note 23). Callejo and Pajares’excellent concordance supplies further references. 26 Mariscal cites the preacher Alonso de Cabrera’s contemporary definition of the term: “La singularidad es esta de los herejes: aquel no pasar por lo que pasan los otros, aquel sacar novedades a las plazas, nuevas doctrinas, opiniones de su propio cerebro, nunca por nadie hasta ellos inventadas” (92). He also cites Covarrubias’ 1611 definition which equates “singularidades” with an heretical and disruptive freedom of consciousness.



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vidual vision, crafted amid the interstices27 of exhausted canonical forms, which lay at the heart of the virulent attacks against his new poetry. Beverley’s Benjaminian notion of the breakdown, under the pressures of history, of the various “anthologized” genres in the Soledades can be generalized to posit an aesthetics of the fragment, of a poem composed of forms which, like the epico-lyrical ballad, are broken off from their original teleological design (Aspects 69, 105).28 Thus the fragmentary uses of mythological allusion, the startling cruel decorativeness extracted from Jesuit poetry, the embedded signs and unusual juxtapositions are all used to construct the beginnings of what Nadine Ly, again, has called the first modern poem (“Las Soledades” 41). Similarly, the mini-dramas of frustrated anagnorisis, (with their interruption of voice), the hyperbolic parody of pastoral convention, and perhaps most importantly, the way Góngora allows the traditional aesthetic to speak through its failure illustrate Carreira’s contention that Góngora, like Mahler, used old forms to anticipate something new (Ly, “Tradición” 359; Carreira “La novedad” 79). In many of these instances, rape imagery is key, perhaps because it lends itself well to various Gongorine projects: the critique of politics, of sexual and social relationships, and of the artistic process. Regarding the specific question Gaylord raises concerning the footprints of Góngora’s “voice” in the Soledades, my bias is to question, like Zimmermann, the necessary conflation of the lyric speaker with the poet (52).29 I suggest instead the possibility of the expression of lyric emotion beyond recourse to a lyric subject, even one displaced onto other lyric speakers (Gaylord, “Footprints” 250), although certainly these “subject positions” exist. Beverley has in essence argued as much, when he cites the collapse of the division between foreground and background in Baroque painting as a model for the trajectory of the pastoral in the Soledades. In Baroque painting, “individual pathos” is no longer “set against a static social and natural background”; rather, all the details of the work “are caught up in the drama of the historical ‘actor’ ” (Aspects 87). Similarly, in the Soledades,

27 Ruiz Pérez voices a similar sense of the interstitial as the locus of the origins of modern subjectivity: “Frente a la unidad sin fisuras del discurso organicista, la aparición del individuo como sujeto agente y/o consciente se traduce en la escisión. [...] El espacio que apunta a la modernidad está surcado de grietas e intersticios, se construye de manera excéntrica y saca a la luz sus márgenes y su liminalidad” (El espacio 253–54). 28 Bradley Nelson’s application of Bakhtin’s work can be seen as a further elaboration of Collard and Beverley’s ideas. As he states, “Soledades evokes the echoes of allegorical poetic forms, while at the same time submitting these genres, or these generic skeletons, as Bakhtin would have it, to the exigencies of the chaotic world of the silva” (“Góngora’s Soledades” 609). See also Close (192) and Chemris (“Soledades” xiii). 29 See Molho’s classic reading of the opening of the poem regarding the identification of the peregrino’s steps with the tempo of the poet’s own writing process (Semántica y poética 40–63).

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The pastoral landscape is no longer, as in Garcilaso, a conventional and vaguely Platonized locus amoenus against which the pain of exile or despair is posed, but rather the necessary product of this pain, the secretion of nostalgia and desire.  (Aspects 87)

Lyricism can thus be expressed directly through imagery (such as Góngora’s “bleeding jewels”); emotion is exteriorized onto the entire fabric of the poem. I do agree, however, with Gaylord’s assertion of Góngora’s radical displacement of the subject, and with her insistence, based on Roland Green’s suggestion, that we suspend “our concern with the unified subject positions of singular authors” of Golden Age texts (“Footprints” 251). In the Soledades the subject itself is expressed through the aesthetics of the fragment; the various hypothetical and negated subjects in replica of the Arachne section are like reflections in a fragmented mirror endlessly at play. The ironic selfreflexivity voiced in that passage presupposes a radically unstable30 lyric subject, whose aspiration to stand outside his own poetic process is even more suggestive of Symbolism than of an incipient Romantic sensibility. The fragmentation of the subject, the collapse of the subject into the text, are symptoms of a breakdown in mediation which occurs on various levels (authorial, temporal, spatial) within the poem (Chemris, “Time”). Góngora’s presentation of rape imagery correlates with this destabilization; he allows us to critique the act of mediation itself, to see the pain as well as the elaborate aesthetic edifice designed to contain it, to see the rift between the idealizing language of art and the disruptive process of the body. This collapse of mediation, which is expressed aesthetically in the Soledades, has its origins in the breakdown of Platonic idealism, and is manifested throughout European Baroque writing in a reconfiguration of the conventional representation of woman as symbolic of that ideal. The critique of the notion of woman as mediatrix is a function of the social program of the late Renaissance. As noted in our discussion of the Celestina, Huizinga maintains that the ritualistic vassalage of the courtly lover to his lady idealized a brutal reality; the worship of woman, modeled in part on the cult of the Virgin, was but the obverse of the degradation of woman in feudal society (108). Cervantes made these contradictions patent in his satirical portrayal of Dulcinea. Góngora’s evocation of the rapes of Europa and Persephone is a parallel critique of woman as platonic ideal, elaborated instead 30 The notion that self-reflexivity implies an unstable subject is suggested by Hühn (236); for a more extensive discussion of this issue, see Chemris, “Self-Reference”; also Ly, “La grande clarté” 72. Regarding the related issue of the “fragmented protagonist,” as epic hero, see Close 193, and Chemris, “Soledades” 70, 85. See also Sarduy, Barroco 77–78, on the elision of the subject in Góngora’s work.



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as tragedy; in this sense, they more closely resemble the figure of Elizabeth Drury, the object of John Donne’s elegiac poem “Anatomy of the World,” written close to the time of the Soledades (1611). In her “untimely death,” Donne wrote, “the frailty and decay of this whole world is represented” (98, note 1). Góngora’s tragic female figures, while couched in mythological allusion, are similarly emblematic of a world in crisis. Beverley is correct to suggest a counterposition of erotic possibilities as a corollary to the play of historical possibility in the poem. Not only is there the contrast between the sensuality of the wedding and the association of rape with “war and exhaustion” (Beverley, Aspects 102, 112; cf. Issorel, “Sobre amor” 123), but there is also a play with gender roles (Smith, “Barthes”). The portrayal of the protagonist as Ganymede both deconstructs epic heroism (Smith) and suggests the possibility of male identification with female sexual abjection; the serrano’s grief over the death of his son could be seen as a related image of male vulnerability and of the leveling of sexual difference in death. The presentation to the bride, during the wedding games, of the spectacle of two male bodies coupled in a wrestling match, whose embrace is described with the emblem traditionally associated with marriage, suggests the possibility of female desire in her anticipation of her wedding night (Smith, “Barthes, Góngora” 91–2) and also speaks to a modern intimation of the relativity of gender and even of sexual orientation (see Armas). These suggestions of sexual freedom in the Soledades evolve, a generation later, into the self-conscious articulation of the possibilities of female subjectivity in the poetry of the other great Gongorist poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. What opportunities for female agency indeed existed in the social structures of Counter-reformation Spain? The Éfire figure in the Second Soledad may offer an additional meditation on historical and erotic possibility. As John Beverley has remarked: Like Cervantes, Góngora seems to feel that the answer is marriage, although things come apart again in the Soledad segunda; see especially the discourse of the widowed father fearing that his daughter Éfire may be violated by a marine creature. That falling apart again is interesting – maybe it points beyond marriage?  (Written correspondence, January 2003)31

The passage describing Éfire’s exploits is indeed evocative and merits closer study. The passage occurs in the old fisherman’s soliloquy, which begins with a reference to the ruins of ships bound for the New World and continues with a description of the fishing prowess of two of his sons and Éfire’s sister Filódoces. Éfire sets off, and her father laments:

31

Remarks by John Beverley used with permission.

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¡Cuántas voces le di! ¡Cuántas (en vano) tiernas derramé lágrimas, temiendo no al fiero tiburón, verdugo horrendo del náufrago ambicioso mercadante, ni al otro cuyo nombre espada es tantas veces esgrimida contra mis redes ya, contra mi vida, sino algún siempre verde, siempre cano Sátiro de las aguas, petulante vïolador del virginal decoro, marino dios que, el vulto feroz hombre, corvo es delfín la cola!  (II. 453–64)

But Éfire continues, “Sorda a mis voces pues, ciega a mi llanto” (II. 465), finally spearing a fish: “deidad dirigió amante hierro agudo:/ entre una y otra lámina, salida/ la sangre halló por do la muerte entrada” (II. 485–87). The giant fish struggles, its wound portrayed as jewel-like in imagery we have studied as an example of “cruel decorativeness”: Onda pues sobre onda levantada, montes de espuma concitó herida la fiera (horror del agua) cometiendo ya a la violencia, ya a la fuga el modo de sacudir el asta. que (alternando el abismo o discurriendo el Océano todo) no perdona al acero que la engasta.  (II. 488–95)

Her fishing line breaks, but the next day, the monstrous fish she had hunted beaches up on the shore: y aun el siguiente Sol no vimos, cuando en la ribera vimos convecina dado al través el monstro, donde apenas su género noticia, pias arenas en tanta playa halló tanta rüina.  (II. 507–11)

At first glance, this scene could be construed to suggest that Éfire represents the possibility for female economic and physical self-sufficiency, beyond the convent or marriage. But, like Joan of Arc, her worth is still defined by the “virginal decoro” her father is so anxious to protect; her emergence as an Amazon type assumes a repressive social structure. And yet more is also at issue.



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Éfire’s hunting, while for food and not for sport as in the case of the aristocrats, is marked by a surplus of violence which parallels the exploits of the duke in the Dedicatoria; as Beverley points out, it involves an excess (Aspects 98). She mimics the peregrino’s stunted epic furore, taking on the role of son to her widowed and retired (hence “feminized”) father; the inversion of sexual roles is throughout the broken family unit. The “phallic” shaft which wounds the sea creature is in the hands of a woman, and like the duke who spills great quantities of blood on the snowy landscape, so she stains the waters. She has merely traded the confines of one gender for another. If the figure of the peregrino as violated, traumatized adolescent points to the possibility of male identification with female sexual abjection, Éfire suggests the grim possibility of female sexualized violence in a negative amplification of the lighthearted use of female figures in military formations, of the Primera soledad.32 The broken body of the sea creature, grotesque foil to her own gargantuan exploits and category transgression (“el monstro/ donde apenas su género noticia” presages the broken bodies of the birds in the falconry scene. Éfire, like the peregrino in his depiction as Ganymede, represents an instance of gender-bending in the Soledades whose significance bears examination. Sometimes plays with gender in Baroque poetry are purely formal, different registers for almost musical variations, or they may be “insider’s jokes,” referring to the dalliances of the poet’s patrons, or they are imitations of classical or Italian precedent like the Venus armata (see Amann 25–31). Góngora may well be modeling Éfire’s exploits on the hunting activities of his patrons such as he describes in his poem “De un retrato de la Marquesa de Ayamonte”;33 certainly the violent spectacle of tuna fishing was popular on the coast near the Medina Sidonia estate.34 From a psychoanalytic perspective one could make a case for the monstrous surfacing of repressed female power in the figure of Éfire the huntress. Yet another interpretation is possible. Beverley’s notion of the reader’s role in constructing a vision of a possible culture and society that transcends the Spanish historical crisis could be applied to the problem of gender as well. But these possibilities, like those for social revolution, are exhausted at the very moment of their emergence, running beyond their full course, collapsing into failure before they can be realized. The “woman question” in the Soledades contains the odd permutations of a text at the threshold of the solitude of bourgeois individualism; early modern subject formation looks a lot like late modern subject breakdown, which is why I have privileged 32 See Beverley, Aspects 29, 32, regarding the peregrino as violated and traumatized adolescent. 33 See Bergmann, Art Inscribed 209–25. 34 See Maravall 336.

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the analogy to Symbolism over Romanticism in my analysis of lyric expression in the poem. Perhaps like Milton, whose pamphlets on divorce posited marriage as the cornerstone of the republic, Góngora and Cervantes saw “marriage as the answer,” but there was some ambivalence. Both writers, to a certain degree, will deconstruct the anticipated progression towards reconciliation in marriage. Marcela’s rejection of marriage – the failed marriage of Marcela and Grisóstomo in the first book of the Quijote – is notable, and Cervantes closes “La fuerza de la sangre” by leaving the final epithalamium in the hands of a hypothetical future narrator, implying that he himself would not commit to reconcile the irreconcilable in a fairy tale ending (Welles). Góngora, on the other hand, offsets the harmonizing effects of marital union, expressed in the pastoral wedding and piscatory betrothal, through various figures of sexual violence, enclosing the Soledades in emblems of mythological rapes, most striking in the final powerful allusion to the violation and forced marriage of Persephone. Góngora could not have foreseen the frustration of women’s rights in the Napoleonic Code, i.e. the limits and the ultimate failure of bourgeois democracy for women, but in a sense he traces that trajectory by evoking both the possibility and the defeat of female sexual freedom, the latter made most poignant when he completes the Soledades with a reference to rape in marriage. It would be fruitful to close with the recognition that the problem of female freedom posed by Góngora and Sor Juana remains very much on the modern, indeed postmodern, agenda. We, as literary critics, have inherited a tradition which sees rape through rose colored glasses. The brilliant manifesto of marvelous reality, “lo real maravilloso,” a key document of one of the most important movements of the Latin American Boom, magical realism, enshrines its mission in the language of rape. Carpentier writes: Hay todavía demasiados “adolescentes que hallan placer en violar los cadáveres de hermosas mujeres recién muertas” (Lautrémont), sin advertir que lo maravilloso estaría en violarlas vivas.  (53)

If writing is defined as a phallic act, then avant-garde writing is cast in terms of ever more violent rape. Less than twenty-five years later, Roland Barthes adopts a similar position, relying on the example of Sade in his otherwise fascinating writings on the pleasure of the text.35 Given this context, Derrida’s critique of the Lacanian model of “phallogocentrism,” posing instead a “hymeneal fable” of meaning, appears to be an improvement (Spivak lxvi). Derrida’s notion of the hymen (“Double Session”), of “sexual union forever 35 See Dworkin for a feminist critique of the acceptance of Sade by intellectuals, including Barthes.



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deferred,” (Spivak lxvi), is indeed suggestive of the hovering of meaning in the Soledades (the term’s origins in Mallarmé’s corpus reinforces the parallel with Symbolism celebrated in the 1927 revival of Góngora) and may even be particularly apt given Góngora’s treatment of pain and its idealization. Yet deconstructionists, with good reason, imagine a more “polymorphous,” less gender-specific paradigm of meaning.36 In the end, it might be better to let the Soledades stand as its own sexual and textual fable. For it is through unveiling a pain that is marked as sexual and female that Góngora voices a Baroque agonism, evokes the historical possibilities of social and sexual freedom, and out of the exhausted forms of his inherited aesthetic, inaugurates the expression of modern lyric emotion.

36

Caputo 156; Derrida, “Choreographies” 105–8.

3

Self and World: The Crisis of Perception in The Soledades no de otra suerte el Alma, que asombrada de la vista quedó de objeto tanto, la atención recogió, que derramada en diversidad tanta, que aun no sabía recobrarse a sí misma del espanto que portentoso había su discurso calmado, permitiéndole apenas de un concepto confuso el informe embrïón que, mal formado, inordinado caos retrataba de confusas especies que abrazaba —sin orden avenidas, sin orden separadas, que cuanto más se implican combinadas tanto más se disuelven desunidas, de diversidad llenas—, ciñendo con violencia lo difuso de objeto tanto, a tan pequeño vaso (aun al más bajo, aun al menor, escaso). Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Primero sueño

The critique of sexual violence in the Soledades relates to a more encompassing critique of the process of epistemological and aesthetic mediation. If one accepts Bradley Nelson’s observation that the peregrino constructs his relationship to reality in an atmosphere of contingency, the journey through the labyrinth of the poem can be seen as a persistent engagement with the cracks in the symbolic order (“Góngora’s Soledades” 611). These tensions arise, again, in the breakdown of the Aristotelian–Scholastic, as well as Platonic, views of the world and the “epistemic and moral vacuum” (to use Spadaccini and Estudillo’s term) left in its wake (xxx). The textual mani-



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festation of this hiatus, which we have studied in the contradictory formal elaboration of the poem as well as in the relationship between self and other can also be observed in the relationship between the self and the phenomenal world, as a crisis in perception. One point of departure from which to examine this crisis of perception in the Soledades is Martin Jay’s discussion of competing visual subcultures in the “modern scopic regime” which begins with Renaissance notions of perspective (179). Jay identifies three visual subcultures of modernity: (1) “Cartesian perspectivalism,” which he calls the “monocular” view, identified with both the absolutist gaze and the scientific worldview; (2) “Baconian empiricism,” which he associates with the private space of bourgeois prosperity in the Dutch “art of describing”; and (3) the Baroque visual experience. Jay, citing the work of Christine Buci-Glucksmann, identifies “the explosive power of baroque vision,” with its “dazzling, disorienting, ecstatic surplus of images,” as “the most significant alternative to the hegemonic visual style we have called Cartesian perspectivalism” (187–88). The Soledades, for the most part, develops a scopic regime which contrasts with a Cartesian or Albertinian perspective, although, as I will demonstrate, the poem contains pre-Cartesian elements. As Bradley Nelson, writing of the silva, argues, The form itself contributes to an atmosphere that could be described as contingent as opposed to allegorical or teleological. Think, for example, of a forest and the sensations that accompany the entrance into the trees, especially in a big forest whose limits cannot be immediately perceived. Without an Albertinian, or ideal perspective from above – from outside of this reality – one has to concentrate on immediate clues in order to determine one’s place in this closed but limitless world: in other words, signs whose relationship to each other and to the subject change along with their spatial and temporal coordinates, alternately taken-up and discarded in this immanent position in a reality that could be described as monadic.   (“Góngora’s Soledades” 610)

The poem does, however, contain elements of the scopic regime Jay associates with Baconian descriptiveness. The Abad de Rute likened the Soledades to “un lienço de Flandes,” for its proliferation of details of the life of the folk, within a broad canvas. The intimate descriptions of the grounds and people which color the Soledades are also reminiscent of Dutch genre painting, what  Francisco Fernández de Córdoba (Abad de Rute), Examen del Antídoto (Artigas 406), Parecer (Pariente 30); see Collard (83–84) and Huergo Cardoso for a discussion of the use of painting theory in the debate over Gongorism as well as Jammes, ed., Soledades 126–28.

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could be seen as the visual correlative of the estate poem. Yet as Nelson implies, the scopic regime which dominates the Soledades is unquestionably that of the Baroque. Michel Foucault has identified a shift from an episteme based on resemblances to one based on representation, in the first half of the seventeenth century; both Ted McVay, in his study of the polemic over Gongorism, and Teresa Soufas, in her study of Baroque melancholy, have applied Foucault’s observations to the Soledades. The notion of resemblance is expressed in the Medieval view of correspondences between macrocosm (universe), geocosm (world), and microcosm (Man). How different is the depiction of correspondences in the opening of the Soledades. A correspondence is established between land, sea, and sky in such metaphors as “campos de zafiro” and “una Libia de ondas,” yet these do not serve the didactic function one observes in the Medieval episteme. Góngora seeks instead to present a subjective vision which will delight the reader. The correspondence in the presentation of “montes de agua y piélagos de montes” is a statement of disorder; the boundary between land and sea dissolves, as does their distinction. The description does not aim to present an objective truth of universal analogy, but the confused perspective of the peregrino. Objects are depicted as a result of their interaction with the subject; rather than being portrayed as static entities in themselves, they become a product of perception. Góngora’s poetics bear out Maravall’s contention that “El hombre del Barroco […] se ve instalado en un mundo que es, como dice Suárez de Figueroa, ‘todo perspectiva’ ” (399). Góngora’s description of correspondences can be understood as a creative response to the Medieval topos of the Book of the World. The relationships and analogies Medieval man discovered in nature were believed to belong to an order imposed by God, who set them down, as if part of one vast book, when he created the universe. Sánchez Robayna has interpreted Góngora’s use of the imagery of writing as part of an attempt to remake this Book of the World (Tres estudios 55). Góngora aspires to impart to his subjective vision the status of the absolute; he seeks to take the place of God in his efforts to create a world through the act of writing. The imagery of writing, as Sánchez Robayna argues, bolsters this aspiration to create a new, autonomous reality  Foucault, The Order of Things; McVay, “Góngora’s Soledades,” and “The Epistemological Basis”; Soufas, Melancholy; see also Antonio Carreño’s article, “Of ‘Orders and Disorders’,” regarding correspondences and analogy in the Soledades (143–49). Cf. Beverley: “Passed beyond in the labyrinthine conceits of the Soledades is the idea of language reading out passively a content established and guaranteed by Nature or divine will – the signatura rerum of Renaissance gnosticism” (Soledad primera” 248) and Ruiz Pérez: “La representación microcósmica del organicismo se sustituye por la imagen de conflicto y oposición cuando la heterogeniedad ocupa el lugar de la identidad” (El espacio 254).



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through art. As Sánchez Robayna states, “La realidad nueva, autónoma, de la obra, exige dotar al mundo de las características de una escritura para cerrar de este modo la concepción de la obra como mundo” (Tres estudios 52). Thus the Soledades includes several images of writing, which Sánchez Robayna lists: the flumen orationis of the first draft, the reference to birds as “caracteres tal vez formando alados/ en el papel dïáfano del cielo” (l, 609I0), the “anales dïáfanos del viento” (II. 143), and the inscriptions of love on bark, stone, and sand (I. 697–700; II. 605–8, 598–99; II. 566–69), as well as imagery drawn from other types of representation: theatre, mapmaking, weaving, and embroidery (40–53). The incorporation of the act of writing into the text is part of the phenomenon of self-reference which critics have observed in the poem. As Sánchez Robayna asserts, what is particularly striking about Góngora’s re-creation of the Book of the World is the artistic self-consciousness of this endeavor. For the achievement Sánchez Robayna attributes to him, that of establishing a reversible equation of book and world, calls into question the difference between the “real” and the “represented,” anticipating the sort of “referential slippage” which Leslie Bary has observed in the avant-garde poetry of César Vallejo (Sánchez Robayna, Tres estudios 52; Bary, “Sign” 55). Gates has pointed out cases where Góngora juxtaposes the “literal and metaphorical acceptation of a word” (The Metaphors 59). She cites the poet’s call for the duke to rest his lance against an ash tree: “arrima a un fresno el fresno” (Dedicatoria, 13). She also points to the description of the seal wounded by Filódoces’ harpoon: “las peñas embistió, peña escamada” (II. 443). In each case the juxtaposition of identical words, “fresno/fresno” and “peña/peña,” has the effect of giving equal status to the plane of the “real” and the plane of “artifice.” Art governed by mimesis (represented by the “literal,” strictly denotative meaning of the word) is not held up as a norm; rather, it is used to highlight a new aesthetic goal of expressiveness (represented by the meaning of the word as determined by Góngora’s own poetic context). By equating the “real” with the “represented,” Góngora seems to be raising the plane of artifice to the level of reality. Yet the opposite is also true. Góngora lowers the plane of reality to the  Regarding theatre imagery, he cites I. 624, 981; regarding mapmaking, I. 194; and regarding weaving, I. 540, 717, and II. 95. The reference to embroidery is from the first draft.  As Ruiz Pérez states, regarding Góngora’s cultivation of “el espacio de la escritura” in the Soledades, “Es un juego especular, el texto metaforiza el mundo, pero el mundo también se presenta bajo la metáfora del texto. Metáfora de metáforas, el espacio creado por el texto es el de la reflexión sobre la escritura y sobre las propiedades de expresión de la misma” (El espacio 244). Echoing Sánchez Robayna, he states, “En términos de la metáfora tradicional, el escrito barroco deja de leer el texto del mundo, para escribir un mundo en su texto” (El espacio 272).

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level of artifice. In cases such as those described above, Góngora implies that the “literal” use of a word may be as artificial as its metaphorical use. In a more general sense, Góngora seems to suggest the inherent artifice of all human thought. As Sánchez Robayna points out, in the Soledades reality is consistently apprehended through the mediation of culture. In the poem, he writes, “la realidad vista [...] ya no es la realidad ‘natural’, que, a través de la visión de la cultura, la misma realidad natural es una imitación, un artificio, un libro (Tres estudios 52).” Góngora’s reinvention of the Book of the World suggests that the only reality apprehensible to Man is artificial, constructed and configured by his own mind. The cultivated style of the Soledades levels all reality, the represented and its representation, into one common body of artifice. The Soledades thus portrays human thought, our capacity to perceive and to represent, as inherently solipsistic, revealing more about the nature of the self than about the reality it attempts to apprehend. The reflexivity of the Soledades intensifies, reaching extremes as Góngora aspires to a godlike inclusivity. The paradox of Góngora’s efforts to create his own poetic vision is that the poem must deny the very subjectivity which engendered it. The drive to create a world of the self which is simultaneously beyond the self can be observed in one of Micón’s speeches in the amoebean song of the Soledad segunda. Addressing the boat in which he is riding, he sings, “el doliente, si blando/ curso del llanto métrico te fío,/ nadante urna de canoro río” (II. 553–55). The “canoro río,” as Alonso points out, is the river of his verses. The boat is said to contain the very verses Micón is singing; this is the essence of a modern Goedelian paradox. Like the modern poet who seeks to watch himself write, Micón attempts to stand outside his own creative process. In his description of this fisherman poet, Góngora provides an early version of the radical attempt to break from the inherent anthropomorphism of human thought which characterizes much of modern art and science. Góngora’s re-creation of the Book of the World thus contains a dual aspect. On the positive side, his attempt to remake reality manifests the enormous creativity associated with artistic autonomy. On the negative side, the quest for the absolute is necessarily defeated by its very subjectivism. The subjective vision becomes frustrated in solipsism, and the solitary nature of this impossible quest for the absolute produces a certain agonism which, as will be demonstrated, is played out aesthetically. These two aspects of Góngora’s  Sypher (101–2), discusses Goedel’s studies. One example of a typical Goedelian paradox which he cites is the following: “the map of a city in which the map itself is located, which must show the map within the city.” Enrica Cancilliere locates another sort of anticipation of modern mathematics in the Soledades: the self-similarity of Mandelbrot’s fractal theory, a tendency towards “self-miniaturization,” the repeated generation of itself in miniature which Beverley has observed in the poem (Cancilliere, “La realidad virtual” 261; Beverley, Aspects 37).



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play with correspondences, of his attempt to remake the Book of the World, can be observed in the crisis of perception in the Soledades. The dazzling creativity of Góngora’s vision will be explored first, in an examination of the variety of ways in which the poet manipulates perspective. Góngora manipulates perspective in his descriptions in a variety of ways. In one case, he reverses the normal order of perception. He adopts a reversed perspective when he refers to evening as “cuando a nuestros Antípodas la Aurora/ las rosas gozar deja de su frente (I. 636–37). The reversal in his description of nature’s response to the music of the wedding party is even more significant: el eco (voz ya entera), no hay silencio a que pronto no responda; fanal es del arroyo cada onda, luz el reflejo, la agua vidrïera.  (I. 673–76)

Reflected light and echo acquire the intensity of the original light and sound. The poet here suggests his own process; Góngora’s poetics is not concerned with passive imitation of reality but with the creation of a subjective vision. The breakdown in the distinction between the real and the reflected, here described in its positive aspect, signals the empowering of the imagination to create reality anew. Góngora also manipulates perception by varying focus, by exploiting the potential for relativity in the perceived distance between subject and object. As Gates observes, At times, depth is gained by successive points of view, first with the object in the distance dimly outlined, and then with a close-up that by its startling metaphor contrasts the two points of view. In the following passage, a fire that was small when viewed in the distance is so magnified at close range that a strong oak consumed by it is a mere moth of ashes: y la que desvïada luz poca pareció, tanta es vecina, que yace en ella robusta encina, mariposa en cenizas desatada. (I. 86–89, as cited by Gates, “Góngora’s Polifemo” 69)

 Paiewonsky Conde (76), notes the phenomenon of inversion of relations in the Soledades, and cites this passage as an example.  See Close (195–96) for a different reading of this passage.

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The fire casts the branches of the oak in relief, so that they appear like the venation in a butterfly’s wings. The figure of the moth drawn to light thus becomes incorporated into a play on focus and perception. Such manipulation of focus relates to the “widening or narrowing” effect which Gates has observed in Góngora’s metaphors (The Metaphors 125). Such widening and narrowing constitute an oscillation in focus which is expressed on a larger scale as telescopic and microscopic vision, reflecting the rise of the new optics. The Soledades depicts entire land and sea masses as if from an aerial view, as well as portraying objects close up in order to reveal their most minute details. These two types of vision can be seen as the product of the breakdown of the previous notions of microcosm and macrocosm. The ordering of scale is no longer a function of a hierarchical system of correspondences, but is appropriated by the human subject. The poet is not looking for smaller reflections of the divinely-ordered macrocosm, but is creating his own micro- and macrovision. Thus there is a preponderance of map-like views in the Soledades, reflecting in part the Virgilian tradition of teichoskopia. The peregrino, standing with the goatherd on a cliff, surveys the scenery displayed as a panorama before them (“Si mucho poco mapa les despliega” I. 194). He traces a river from its origins to its end: “un río sigue […] de la alta gruta donde se desata/ hasta los jaspes líquidos, adonde/ su orgullo pierde y su memoria esconde” (I. 198–211). The descriptions of the voyages of exploration also include the mapmaker’s perspective. The Atlantic and Pacific oceans become a “sierpe de cristal,” its head divided from its tail by the isthmus of Panama (I. 42529). The fishermen’s island is also described as a small unit seen on a map or from a telescope; it is an “esmeralda bruta/ en marmol engastada siempre undoso” (II. 367–68). Conversely, the Soledades depict tiny details as if they were seen through a magnifying lens. Degraye points to the following passages, which she main Colin Smith 237; See also Bergmann, “Optics.” Since these ideas were originally expressed in Chemris, “Soledades: Bleeding Jewel” 99–100, Elena Río Parra has also discussed the alternation of microscopic and telescopic, microcosmos and macrocosmos, and the panoramic map-like visions in the poem (Una era de monstruos 222–25).  Enrica Cancilliere has related the imagery of mapmaking in the poem to scientific advances in Renaissance cartography and the discourses of the voyages of exploration, portraying the Soledades as a kind of iconographic library, elaborating the qualities of the Wunderkammer of the studiolum, while anticipating the creative combinations of the surrealists (“Stereotipie iconiche” 236, 239, and “Las Soledades” 111–12; see also Collins regarding the Soledades as Wunderkammer [19–20]). One could also argue that Góngora’s catalogs of images occupy a transitional space between the studiolum and the encyclopedia (see Rossi for a description of the mixture of Medieval bestiary, heraldic emblems and the like, in the “encyclopedias” of the early modern [49–50]). See Roses, “Ara del sol” (137), on the relationship of mapmaking iconography to Medieval cartographic topoi. For a general description of the role of cartography in Baroque culture, see Padrón.



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tains offer a “microscopic view,” again, not unrelated to the invention of new optical instruments in Góngora’s time (Degraye 239). When the sun dries the peregrino’s clothes, “con süave estilo/ la menor onda chupa al menor hilo” (I. 40–4I). Similarly, the peregrino, while watching the falcons hunt, is able to count “los juncos más pequeños” (II. 862). Góngora thus provides additional evidence for Woods’ assertion that “The awareness of nature in miniature [...] is one of the original features of seventeenth century poetry” (105). Woods’ further observation that Pascal was to reflect on the infinitely small and the infinitely large suggests the underlying importance of Góngora’s use of the microscopic and the panoramic visions, namely, that the prospect of infinite expanse beyond and within the phenomenal world calls into question the established order of things, and ultimately the boundaries of perception (105). Beverley has identified an oscillation between “confusión” and “studied figures” in the poem’s language and organization, an oscillation which can be observed in the depiction of perception as well (Aspects 35). In this context the wall motif identified by Woodward acquires an additional significance; the image of a shifting, changing or half-open wall is an emblem for the fluctuation of the limits of perception. The limits of all regions are no longer fixed; the sea is bounded by “la incierta ribera” (II. 27), “muros líquidos” (II. 927) are formed in the air, and the ocean erodes the beach “Muros desmantelando” (II. 9). Boundaries appear and disappear, delimiting and dissolving like the fishermen’s net, which is “siempre murada, pero siempre abierta” (II. 80).10 This oscillation in the limits of perception is expressed in imagery of assimilation and disintegration. Warnke defines the imagery of assimilation as the backdrop which reveals the unreality of the phenomenal world. In Shakespeare’s plays, he explains, the individual, sensing the illusory quality shared by his own individuality and the entire phenomenal world, perceives experience as a shifting flux of phantasmagoria, perpetual metamorphoses, behind which lies the single reality figured in such images of assimilation as the sea, the night, love, and music.  (47)

Spitzer implies that the sea serves this function in the Soledades. As he writes, 10 Beverley sees this image as emblematic of the movement of the reader of the “unmapped” silva of the poem, “in which language appears in the guise of the disordered variety of nature and language as technique, a method of assimilating nature to human utility” (“Confusion” 312). Thus he sees the Soledades “as a special Spanish contribution to the development of scientific method and production” (“Soledad primera” 247).

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Se comprende por qué la escena de estas Soledades […] está situada al borde del Océano. Era el vasto marco adecuado a ese retiro en la soledad negadora de todas las cosas exteriores […] libre para poder recrearlas artificialmente por entero.  (“Notas” 165)

In fact, the sea merges with sky and land in an even vaster and more amorphous image of assimilation: blank space, the ultimate “soledad negadora.” The imagery of assimilation is created when the divisions which define perception are overridden. The Strait of Magellan is referred to as “la bisagra (aunque estrecha) abrazadora/ de un Oceano y otro siempre uno” (I. 473–74); in this metaphor, the separation between the two greatest oceans is revealed to be false, and the oceans are made one. The divisions separating the various spice islands are also portrayed as illusory; they are but one forest: “El bosque dividido en islas pocas” (I. 491). Conversely, in the imagery of disintegration the divisions between things become absolute. In a metaphor describing the isthmus of Panama, the two oceans are now portrayed as hopelessly divided, as a snake whose head is forever kept from merging with its tail (I. 425–29). Góngora portrays the fragmentation of vision in such images as “pedazos de cristal” (I. 545), series of “espejos” (I. 661–62; II. 704), and the multiplication of eyes in the leaves of a tree (I. 1063–64).11 The proliferation of these fragments suggests that reality is now divided into multiple perspectives; in these images Góngora portrays the “potentially infinite texture of alternating perceptions” which Beverley, in a different context, has observed (Aspects 53–53).12 The imagery of assimilation and of disintegration are obverse responses to the isolation of the Baroque subject; in the first case an awareness of the relativity of perception dissolves the old boundaries; in the second, the estrangement the subject experiences in a world no longer safely delimited is exteriorized as a vision of disintegration. The breakdown of the boundaries of perception can also be observed in Góngora’s violation of established categories. The categories of human, animal, plant, the inanimate, and the mechanical are not fixed in the Soledades. Woods has defined Góngora’s technique of describing one element in terms 11 I am following Alonso’s reading of I. 1064: “Que si Hercules hubiera sido árbitro y tuviera que juzgar en sus propios árboles, dudo que ni aun él mismo hubiera podido decidir el caso, aunque todas sus hojas se hubieran convertido en ojos del más agudo lince” Alonso, ed., Soledades 144; (emphasis mine). 12 Beverley explores Góngora’s use of number in his description of the fishermen, examining the “theme of division” elaborated in the groups of two, three, and six (e.g. “[el] sol en seis luceros dividido,” the pairs of daughters and suitors, etc.). Beverley then observes, “Góngora’s fascination with the idea of number (“de muchos pocos numeroso dueño”) makes the limited world of the island appear to be a potentially infinite texture of alternating perceptions. The profusion is ‘confusing’ but at the same time contains its own internal logic and order” (54).



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of another as one of creating “transelemental imagery” (118; see also, Close 189). Building on Woods’ observations, one can recognize in the Soledades the interchange between categories of perception, brought about through the technique of category transgression. Human, animal, and inanimate categories mingle in metaphors such as “que azules ojos con pestañas de oro/ sus plumas son” (I. 807–8). The animal and the mechanical are merged in the description of birds: “de pluma leve/ engañada su oculta lira corva” (II. 354– 55). The animal and two categories of the inanimate (water and the mineral) are linked in the image of “sabandijas de cristal” (II. 829). The fact that the merger of categories, a natural result of the cultivation of metaphor, is ubiquitous in the Soledades is a clear indication that the organization of perception is in flux, the imagination empowered. Perhaps the most striking case of Góngora’s play with the limits of perception occurs when the peregrino watches the spectacle of falconry. In this instance the peregrino’s vision is simultaneously panoramic and microscopic: No sólo, no, del pájaro pendiente las caladas registra el peregrino, mas del terreno cuenta cristalino los juncos más pequeños, verdes hilos de aljófares risueños.  (II. 858–62)

Here the peregrino’s perception of the distant and the minute collapses into one field of vision, anticipating, as Enrica Cancilliere suggests, the total vision of the surrealists (“Las Soledades” 111–12).13 The peregrino bursts human limitations in a moment of omniscience created by Góngora’s poetic imagination. Góngora celebrates the power of mind in an imaginary transcendence of the restrictions of the human condition upon knowledge. This elevation of artifice to the level of divine creation is repeated in almost magical imagery throughout the poem. A false night is created by the crows (II. 883–87) or by the gyrfalcon’s hood (II. 904–6). A mountain disappears and becomes a flower garden: “que deja de ser monte/ por ser culta floresta” (II. 693–94). In the description of the palace, architecture transcends the formal constraints of geometry (II. 669–70). As if to mirror the excitement of the age of exploration, art is charged with a sense of new horizons; the normal limits of perception are broken in seemingly impossible acts of human creation. Yet, as we have earlier suggested, the wonder of Góngora’s play with perception is offset by horror. The freedom to create new boundaries of perception 13 Cancilliere notes a similar dynamic in the Polifemo, which she also associates with the rise of modernity (Góngora 168–69).

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has its sinister side, as Beverley implies when he argues that Góngora risked “transgression and perversion” in his construction of the Soledades (Aspects 23).14 Fear of the unknown is expressed in the grotesque, what Wolfgang Kayser has called “the expression of our failure to orient ourselves in the physical universe” (185). The grotesque, while functioning as a major motif in the Polifemo, assumes a less prominent role in the Soledades. Nonetheless it has its importance, operating as a symbolic pole which stands for the fear of the Baroque subject before the solitary task of making sense out of a universe which has lost its order. The grotesque takes many forms in the Soledades. In the first case, Góngora extends transelemental imagery to the point of the monstrous, producing a sense of unease where wonder was once produced. The point where ocean and estuary meet (“medio mar, medio ría” I. 11) identifies the ocean as a centaur (II. 10). The sphinx is another image of the monstrous (“en vulto comenzando humano/ acaba en mortal fiera” I. 112-14). The fish which Éfire wounds is called a “monstro” (II. 509),15 and appears in yet another manifestation of the grotesque, what Kayser has termed “the objectification of the ‘It’ ” (185): the fish is of indeterminate gender (“apenas/ su género noticia” II. 509–10). Structurally, the grotesque is expressed in the obsessive quality of proliferation in the poem (which will be discussed in the following chapter); the abundant generation of compounded metaphors resembles the production of arabesques, grottesche, the elaborate manifestation of a phenomenon which we shall examine in further detail shortly, horror vacui.16 If Góngora achieves the effect of the grotesque through transgressive 14 Beverley sees “transgression and perversion” as one possible direction of the crisis of language in the Soledades as well as in its parallel in the crisis of empire. The “transgression and perversion” of language would thus be “the limit beyond which language ceases to signify” and “becomes Babelic” (23). The “transgression and perversion” of Spain’s political role, in Beverley’s schema, would then be the course of war and exhaustion (see Aspects 101–2). In my discussion of the grotesque in the Soledades, I am attaching an existential meaning to the notion of “transgression and perversion.” 15 It should be noted why the reference to Góngora’s use of the term “monstruo” in I. 374–78 (where the first ship is called “marino/ escamado de robustas hayas”) is omitted from this list. There the term is related to a sense of cosmic order; the ship is monstrous because it represents a transgression of Man’s role in the world; it is associated with the expression of hybris. As Kayser writes, “If we were able to name these powers [i.e. the monstrous, the demonic – C.C.] and relate them to the cosmic order, the grotesque would lose its essential quality” (185). Because the ship’s identification with the monstrous is in the context of a (at least literally) moralistic argument, it cannot be cited as an example of the grotesque. 16 Spadaccini and Estudillo see the “excessive formal density” of the Soledades as an expression of horror vacui (xxviii–xxix). Ruiz Pérez sees the monstrous in the Soledades as a function of the alienation of the Baroque subject before his position in space: “Al problematizar su posición en el espacio, es el sujeto que se coloca fuera de él, en su exte-



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combinations in imagery, the same can be said of his transgression of literary categories. Sánchez Robayna notes the presence of the theatrum mundi topos in the poem (Tres estudios 53); both scenes of country life as well as scenes of conquest are described as spectacles of theatre. The serranas form a “teatro dulce” (I. 624) and the countryside is called a “festivo teatro” (I. 188). Similarly, the ocean which devours the ships of the explorers is called a “teatro de Fortuna” (II. 40I). In these cases the topos is used, as it was by Calderón, to reinforce the notion of a moral order, here implied in the menosprecio de corte theme. However, its use in a comic, arbitrary manner undercuts this sense of moral order. The tale of the death of the young man, included in the description of the borní, illustrates the detachment of the satiric grotesque: el Borní, cuya ala en los campos tal vez de Melïona galán siguió valiente, fatigando tímida liebre, cuando intempestiva salteó leona la melionesa gala, que de trágica escena mucho teatro hizo poca arena.  (II. 764–71)

This is farce jokingly portrayed as tragedy in a gratuitous exercise of black humor. The violent death becomes an arbitrary occasion for theatre; the ludic detachment in the creation of spectacle from pain (which we have witnessed on other occasions) has a leveling effect, disrupting the order created by the previous, normative use of the theatrum mundi topos in the poem. The grotesque thus becomes another occasion for Bary’s notion of “representational slippage” as Góngora defamiliarizes literary commonplace (“Sign” 55). In a similar manner, Góngora transgresses the norms of another literary convention. Góngora plays with the boundary between the sublime and the grotesque in some of his metaphors. The image of the bleeding jewel combines the sublime and the grotesque, as does the portrayal of a spring as a serpent vomiting pearls: Ella pues sierpe, y sierpe al fin pisada, (aljófar vomitando fugitivo en lugar de veneno), torcida esconde, ya que no enroscada, las flores que de un parto dio lascivo rioridad, convirtiéndose en ajeno, monstruoso o peregrino, con una alteridad que llega a cuestionar el espacio mismo” (El espacio 260).

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aura fecunda al matizado seno del huerto, en cuyos troncos se desata de las escamas que vistió de plata.  (II. 320–27)

The use of the word “vomitar,” much maligned in the Neoclassical reaction to Góngora,17 signals the transgression of lexical norms and relates to the violation of the accepted notions of genre by the poet. The disruption of literary categories, as Kayser has shown, has been historically associated with the grotesque; Montaigne, he notes, identified his essays as “grotesque and monstrous bodies, pieced together of the most diverse members, without distinct form, in which order and proportion are left to chance” (24).18 The grotesque in the structure of the Soledades can thus be seen as a marker of aesthetic crisis, as, if one can extrapolate from Paul Ilie’s analysis of the function of the grotesque in Machado’s poetry, a sign that the poet is approaching some kind of transition (209–16). While the grotesque emerges as a symbolic pole representing the crisis of perception in its elaboration of the insidious fear of epistemological chaos, the poem points to one possibility for re-imposing order. Beverley observes that the Soledades is concerned with the prospect of “a new order of consciousness” which would involve a “collaboration between the possibilities of creation, the capacity of technè, and the world which surrounds and contains the activity (Aspects 52). The social questions raised by the prospect of creating a world which would harmoniously contain this dialectic between possibility and technique are, as Beverley observes, left by Góngora to be decided by history (Aspects 35). Yet the poem’s concern with the capacity of technique reflects the actual historic evolution of the crisis of the Baroque. Technique in and of itself begins to govern a new order of perception. This occurs in the rise of Rationalism, in the reorganization of perception based on a view of the world as mechanism, a view which is foreshadowed in the Soledades. Hints of the mechanistic worldview appear in Góngora’s use of the vocabulary of human industry. Woods has observed that Góngora was familiar with the theories of natural magic and suggests that he used this knowledge 17 See Jáuregui’s Antídoto, where he admonishes Góngora for mixing “lo plebeyo” with “lo bizarro,” for his use of “modos muy viles y bajos,” and where he explicitly sanctions the use of the word “vomitado” (Rico García 33–34, 24, 25, and 53). Regarding the use of “vomitar,” see also Pedro de Valencia’s letter, where his criticism is through negative example (Millé 1089, 1076; Pérez López 66, 80). E. M. Wilson cites “ el horror a los plebeyismos” as a factor in the attacks on the Soledades (“La estética” 172–75). See also Gaylord Randel, “Reading the Pastoral Palimpsest” 84; Jammes, “Elementos burlescos” 105–6, and Études 605–17; and Beverley, Aspects 59–60. 18 Cf. also Kayser, where he paraphrases Schlegel’s assertion that “grotesqueness is constituted by a clashing contrast between form and content, the unstable mixture of heterogeneous elements, the explosive force of the paradoxical, which is both ridiculous and terrifying” (53).



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in the description of the magnet in the Soledades (187). Jammes points to the curious modernity of Góngora’s use of a technical lexicon (“Elementos” 113–17). Indeed, one is struck by the number of times a word associated with human industry, or in particular, a mechanical device, is used as a term of metaphor. The sun’s rays are identified with the action of an “estilo” (I. 34–41), the Strait of Magellan is called a “bisagra” (I. 472–74), a boat is “cosido con la playa” (II. 939), and the baharí seeks to “cardar el vuelo” of the doral (II. 864). A waterfall and birds become musical instruments (“tiorba” and “lira” II. 350, 355), and the falcons’ acts are described in terms of human sports and warfare (II. 868; 910–11; 923–29). Góngora’s use of such terminology is conflicted; one could view this type of imagery, in part, as a reflection of the old correspondences. However, the poet’s fascination with the lexicon of industry, particularly in his use of unusual, mechanical terms such as “estilo” or “bisagra,” suggests that the poet at times attempts to impose a sense of mechanism on the phenomenal world. A further manifestation of the entry of the mechanistic worldview lies in Góngora’s descriptions of measuring and empirical observation. The seal caught on the line of Éfire’s harpoon races back and forth, measuring and momentarily defining areas of the sea: “bufando mide el campo de las ondas” (II. 430). The peregrino’s admonition to the fisherman, “Del pobre albergue a la barquilla pobre/ geómetra prudente, el orbe mida/ vuestra planta” (II. 380– 82) is a paradoxical affirmation of the power of measuring. While his words are literally a call to return to a prior state of integration and correspondence between man and his surroundings, they include an implicit recognition that this correspondence no longer holds as an assumed order of things, but must be imposed by mind. Finally, as Degraye points out, the peregrino’s observation of the baharí presages the scientific method in its emphasis on recording, in quantifying perception (240). Despite the freedom of the imagination revealed by the peregrino’s “total” vision, his sight is portrayed in narrow and objectifying terms by the verbs “registra” and “cuenta” (II. 859, 860). The passive registering of the peregrino’s eyes seems mechanical. This mechanical “registering” of the peregrino’s vision is akin to the aesthetic detachment before emotion which has been examined in previous discussions of this study. As Kahler observes, the “objectification of self ” is ultimately expressed in an attitude of “objectification of life”; the “mechanization of the psychic process” is inevitably reflected in a shift from sympathy to abstract measuring (89–90; 92). It is in this sense that the peregrino’s malaise, the estrangement between self and other, dovetails with the rise of the mechanistic worldview. The scientific vision is predicated on man’s ability to separate himself from the cosmos as a passive observer. The peregrino’s psychic disintegration is connected to a breakdown in the organic correspondence between man and the cosmos, a disintegration which lies at the foundation of modern existence.

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It is for this reason that the rise of the mechanistic view of the world, however tentative in the Soledades, does not represent a true resolution of ontological crisis. If Rationalism is to offer a new order of perception, it will be a conflicted one, first because the breakdown of the sacerdotal worldview carried with it the loss of the absolute authority of an integrated universe. Yet another source of conflict lies in the fact that Man, despite his freedom to respond to reality subjectively, now loses his position as a privileged creature; if Man is no longer a little copy of the divine, the inevitable fear will be that he, too, is but mechanism. This conflict suggests the entry into Baroque consciousness of “cosmic fear,” a term which David Castillo has appropriated from the lexicon of horror stories, where it was meant to describe a reaction against scientific positivism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, but which he considers an apt characterization of one of the features of the Baroque mentality (“Horror” 90). As Castillo writes, “the notion seems to capture the essence of the baroque response to the objectification of the world, the increased monetarization of the economy, and its accompanying mechanization of human relations” (“Horror” 90). One version of this fear which Castillo has studied, horror vacui, as we shall see in the next chapter, becomes a focal point for the tensions of the rise of modernity in the Soledades, as the aesthetic expression of the crisis in the relationship between the self and the phenomenal world extends to the limits of time and space.

4

Time, Space and Apocalypse: The Falconry Scene as Disruption of Prophecy En Signorelli, sólo hay tiempo, o más bien, un tiempo inasible en lucha con un espacio, como el universo mismo, en dilatación. La novedad es tan espantosa que el pintor, huérfano melancólico, se ve obligado a transformar ese tiempo y ese espacio en los del fin de todo tiempo y todo espacio: el apocalipsis, el juicio final. Carlos Fuentes, Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura

The breakdown in the boundaries of perception which arises out of the Baroque crisis of consciousness relates to an even more profound challenge to the sacerdotal, ordered worldview of the past. During the seventeenth century, the established perception of the very limits of time and space is called into question. The Baroque subject is stripped of a past sense of integration into the cosmos and faces the threat of dissolution in the indefinite expanse of the universe. Eternity and infinity seem to engulf him, and he projects his fear of self-dissolution onto the phenomenal world; he envisions the world engulfing itself. While Reformation theologians saw the portents of Apocalypse in the findings of the new astronomy, the intimation of Apocalypse is ultimately rooted in the Baroque response to the idea of infinity (Nicolson 119). As Frank J. Warnke states, The popularity of the topos of the end of the world is based on a feature of sensibility more widespread than either devotional fervor or concern over the new science. It is […] based on the expansive nature of the Baroque imagination as a whole, that feature […] which stresses the unreality of the phenomenal world and, discontent with the classical conception of an ordered and enclosed world, is incapable of imagining a world without imagining also its dissolution.  (214–15; see also Nicolson 177)

In its treatment of time, space, and the Baroque presentiment of Apocalypse, the Soledades is a true artefact of the consciousness of its age. As will be shown, the poem’s time structure reflects the explosion of the normal

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limits of chronology under the impact of the eternal. The wide expanses of the poem – the sea, the mountain vistas, etc. – as well as its encyclopedic quality, are objective correlatives of the entry of the infinite, what Nicolson has called the “new space” (168). Finally, the falconry scene realizes thematically the topos of the end of the world, the end of this time and space, with an image of dissolution which is paralleled throughout the work in Góngora’s poetics. The Soledades is thus built on a dynamic of expansion and dissolution, a dynamic which can be best understood by beginning with an examination of the poem’s approach to time. While Georges Poulet’s classic Études sur le temps humain has largely been ignored by Hispanists, the work provides an important theoretical basis from which to analyze the dynamic. Poulet implies that the conception of time in the seventeenth century is a result of the solitude of Baroque man, the monadic subject described by Maravall. According to Poulet, the isolation which the individual experiences as a result of the demise of the Medieval worldview translates itself into a sense of separation from the modes of time. The human subject now experiences instants without any sense of their integration into the limits of a natural order; his existence is no longer identified with duration, but rather, “is always of the present moment” (13). Eternity and the moment begin to coexist without mediation; human consciousness is now left to define its own duration through repeated acts of creative will which connect the series of instants of human time (14). The contradictions inherent in the seventeenth-century concept of time are exploited by the poet. As Lowry Nelson, in his study of Baroque lyric poetry, writes, A fundamental paradox results from the double view of time, under a finite and under an infinite aspect [...]. If all events may be considered simultaneous, “finite time” need not be strictly observed according to our empirically chronological habit.  (80)

Critics such as Sinicropi and Gaylord have noted examples of Góngora’s  As Poulet asserts, “the seventeenth century is the epoch in which nothing is interposed between divine eternity and each human moment” (18).  Sinicropi notes a quality of “unidimensionalità” in Góngora’s depiction of time. As he writes, “Nelle Soledades, la metamorfosi non implica il passaggio, sulle dimensioni del tempo e dello spazio, da un piano ad un altro, bensì la coesistenza unidimensionale simultanea delle forme e degli aspetti plurimi delle forme. Pertanto, essa non è irreversibile: il pioppo riporta il profilo della sorella di Fetonte, ma può anche accadere l’inverso; il gufo riporta ad Ascalafo, ma anche viceversa; cosi com’è reversibile il passaggio da Clizia alla vela. Nel presente lievita il ‘senso’ del passato, e nel passato il ‘senso’ del presente” (132).  Gaylord Randel (97–112). Gaylord, like Beverley (Aspects 83–102), observes a tension between history and poetic myth in the Soledades. In Gaylord’s view, the repeated



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creative break with linear chronology in the Soledades. Yet more is at issue. The loss of mediation between the eternal and the moment becomes the source of intriguing and conflicted time structures in the poem. As will be shown, Góngora realizes in poetic language the obverse sides of that “fundamental paradox” that rises out of the Baroque view of time. The first technique of time manipulation to be investigated here occurs in the passage in which the peregrino is reminded of his lady by the sight of the bride: Digna la juzga esposa de un héroe, si no augusto, esclarecido, el joven, al instante arrebatado a la que, naufragante y desterrado, lo condenó a su olvido. Este pues Sol que a olvido le condena, cenizas hizo las que su memoria negras plumas vistió, que infelizmente sordo engendran gusano, cuyo diente, minador antes lento de su gloria, inmortal arador fue de su pena.  (I. 732–42)

Nadine Ly has drawn attention to the many layers of ambiguity in this passage and has, quite elegantly, pointed to the possibilities for alternative readings of some of the verb tenses that are used (Ly, “Poétique”). This study, however, proposes to focus less on the tenses themselves than on an unusual pattern of alternation of past and present tenses, which is similar to the phenomenon that Nelson has observed in the Polifemo and other Baroque poems. This phenomenon of tense alternation – a practice that extends well beyond customary rhetorical license – has proved problematic for readers of the Soledades. Even bearing in mind that two time frames are involved, the peregrino’s present reaction to the bride, who is reminiscent of his beloved, and the peregrino’s past experience with the beloved herself, the tenses cannot be made to correuse of myth counters the structuring of the poem on the basis of linear chronology. For example, the historical event of Columbus’s voyage is “troped” into the myth of the sun’s daily birth and death (II. 407–8); thus, the time of the voyage is telescoped into a single day (106). For Gaylord, such telescoping of time is frequently associated with “capsule histories of life and death erotic struggles” (109), which mirror the greater oedipal concerns of the text (as in the contest between the old goat and his rival, evoked by the description of cecina (I. 153–62). As will be seen, I also observe an erotic aspect in Góngora’s treatment of time, albeit in different terms.  See Alonso, ed., Soledades 133–34 and note 184, for different readings of this passage by Alonso, Díaz de Rivas, and Pellicer. In the second sentence, the appearance of the present tense (“condena,” “engendran”) seems out of place and has tended to be reworded in the preterit by the commentators.

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spond to a logical sequencing of events. For example, the action of “fue” is clearly subsequent to that of “engendran,” although the chronology of the tenses which correspond to these actions is precisely the opposite. As Nelson maintained in regard to the Polifemo, so here “the alternation of tenses cuts the reader adrift from any common-sense orientation in time” (61). This play with tenses is not without meaning, however. The seemingly illogical insertion of the present tense amid past tense actions is a fruitful paradox. As Nelson has demonstrated, when the action of a poem exists simultaneously in two time planes, this action, “which, according to common sense, took place at a more or less definite time in the past is set open to the possibility of recurring indefinitely” (79). Such is indeed the case in this passage of the Soledades, where the odd present tense can be read as an eternal present. Viewed in its entirety, the passage describes the interaction of psychic, inner time with the time of external events. The peregrino, once he is “arrebatado/ a la que [...]/ lo condenó a su olvido,” feels that condemnation occur in the present and feels that worm of anxiety being born anew. Góngora’s creative alternation of tense complements the effect of the imagery of the phoenix cycle; both set the stage for the eternal recurrence of an emotionally charged moment of human time. It is noteworthy that Góngora only employs the negative aspects of the phoenix cycle. Traditionally, the life cycle of the phoenix is viewed as a myth of redemption, a myth of eternal and inevitable rebirth. But here the cycle of the phoenix is an exercise in futility; the peregrino’s aspirations are revealed to be false from their inception (“las que su memoria/ negras plumas vistió”; emphasis mine), reduced to ashes, and reborn as an eternally eroding pain. Góngora’s presentation of this broken myth reflects the lack of an integrating mythos which could relate the eternal and the moment. This empty repetition suggests the nihilism behind the breakdown of the traditional Judeo-Christian view of time. As Helmuth Plessner writes, If faith in the revealed meaning of the eschatological order of time succumbs to doubt, if the transcendent meaning of the rectilinear course of the world is lost, time becomes barren, a “low grade” infinity of succession without beginning or end (243). The peregrino’s repeated memory of failure in love occurs in such a barren, “low grade” infinity.

 A parallel recurrence of painful memory (without, however, the same unusual alternation of tenses) occurs in the description of the serrano’s thoughts of his lost son. The obsessive return of this painful memory, the “buitre de pesares,” is described by Gaylord, “Metaphor and Fable” (108). See also, Ly, “La République” (174–77).  Plessner cites Hegel regarding the term “low grade,” Ralph Manheim’s translation of “Schlechte Unendlichkeit.”



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The time structure represented in this passage of the Soledades, an explosion of temporal limits by the entry of the eternal, is countered in other passages of the poem by an obverse phenomenon: temporal implosion. In this technique, human time appears to be annihilated under the weight of eternity. Without the mediation of an integrating worldview, the structure of chronology collapses, the future imploding into the past as part of a circular process of negation. Such implosion can be observed in the peregrino’s lament, in which he wonders if his beloved might not shed a tear “antes enjuta que llorada” (II. 157). A similar type of imagery occurs in the plaints of Micón and Lícidas:     Lícidas ¿A qué piensas, barquilla, pobre ya cuna de mi edad primera, que cisne te conduzco a esta ribera? A cantar dulce, y a morirme luego: Si te perdona el fuego que mis huesos vinculan, en su orilla, tumba te bese el mar, vuelta la quilla.      Micón Cansado leño mío, hijo del bosque y padre de mi vida, de tus remos ahora conducida a desatarse en lágrimas cantando, el doliente, si blando, curso del llanto métrico te fío, nadante urna de canoro río.  (II. 542–55)

The song of Lícidas compresses the passage from “cuna” to “tumba” in the journey of the boat; the “edad primera” becomes the final age of youth. In Micón’s song the future death intrudes even more quickly into the present. The boat, “hijo del bosque y padre de mi vida,” is now father to Micón’s death. Each note of his song dies as it is sung, already entombed in the “nadante urna” of the “canoro río” of his verses. The amoebean song continues toward an even greater implosion of time. Lícidas asserts that he was already reduced to ashes when he was still a boy gathering shells: Las rugosas veneras, […] entre crespos buscaba caracoles, cuando de tus dos soles fulminado ya, señas no ligeras de mis cenizas dieron tus riberas.  (II. 556–62)

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It is significant that these passages, which contain unusual time structures, come from courtly love laments. In the amoebean song, temporal implosion is a striking realization of the “death in life” motif of courtly love poetry; time is arrested, made static, in its very process. Conversely, in the peregrino’s recurring memory of loss, the expansion of time realizes the courtly lover’s suffering as a living death. The association of courtly love laments with temporal paradox suggests that frustrated eros has become an emblem for the solitude of the Baroque subject before the task of creating his own experience of duration. In the Soledades, duration is as elusive as erotic fulfillment. The peregrino’s obsession with self-dissolution is paralleled in the text by the recurring spectacle of the dissolution of the moment. Poulet’s observations on the Baroque mind aptly suggest the nature of this parallel: Confined in the moment in which it exists, the consciousness watches its successive modes of existence pass, one after another, and escape it. To feel oneself live is to feel oneself leave behind, in every instant, an instant which was the very self.  (16)

In the seventeenth century, this loss of duration engenders an obsession with mudanza, the movement of time. As Maravall points out, clock-making begins to flourish, perhaps because it affords man the opportunity to measure, and in a sense, to feel control over the passage of time (382). The Baroque preoccupation with mudanza, with the movement of time, is at the core of Góngora’s creation of quick series of momentary poetic images. As in clockmaking, the power of artifice provides Góngora with a chance, however illusory, to capture the moment, to guard, through the agent of subjectivity, the instant against loss to the self. In the Soledades, objects pass through a series of metaphoric transformations. The movement of the wedding guests evokes images of flying ships and gulls with wings like sails. Their shifting then transforms them into waning and waxing moons, and finally their feathered forms become letters written in the sky (I. 602, 11). A similar series of metamorphoses occurs with the light the peregrino sees when he first arrives on the land. As if before several

 Maravall uses this term (366). Beverley views Gongora’s depiction of the momentary as the product of the tension between history and poetic myth in the Soledades. As he writes, “The Soledades […] take us […] into the seeming timelessness of a perpetual Golden Age. But the present constantly intrudes into and contaminates this utopia, the passage of historical time reasserts itself within the ambivalent terms of the pilgrim’s search. The end of each sentence/experience is a “little death” or prison the pilgrim feels compelled to flee into fresh sensations” (Aspects 84).



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clicks of the camera, we watch it change from “farol” to “carbunclo” to “carro” to “norte” to “estrella” (I. 56–83). Such rapid movement and transformations are predominant in the Soledades; they are the natural result of the condensation of description created by the cultivation of metaphor as metalepsis. Occasionally this rapid motion slows to near timelessness. When the peregrino is nestled in the hollow of a holm oak, he seems fused with the eternal present of nature: De una encina embebido en lo cóncavo, el joven mantenía a vista de hermosura, y el oído de métrica armonía.  (I. 267–70)

Admiration in the face of human endeavor also seems to freeze time; for example, before the athletic competition: La admiración, vestida un mármol frío, apenas arquear las cejas pudo; la emulación, calzada un duro hielo, torpe se arraiga  (I. 999–1002)

and before the marble palace: “La admiración que al arte se le debe/ áncora del batel fué” (II. 706–7). In these passages Góngora seems to be offering moments of communion with art as a substitute for nature, in providing a refuge from temporality; time is frozen in a moment of aesthetic arrest. Yet these cases are isolated instances which are contradicted by the overwhelming transience of artistic creation in the poem. Góngora’s proliferation of images exists in a dialectic with an engulfing void; each creative moment is countered by its inevitable dissolution. Góngora attempts a poetic creatio ex nihilo outside the traditional eschatological order of time and can only return to nothingness. The images of artifice in the Soledades dramatize this process; they burst forth for an instant and then self-destruct. The fireworks of the wedding scene are fixed for but a moment like “estrellas fijas,” only to dissolve into nothing like “astros fugitivos” (I. 1080–83). The pearly drops created out of seafoam by the fishermen’s oars are similarly momentary; they are “caduco aljófar” (II. 72). The rhythm of expansion and dissolution  Both Entwistle (128) and Guillén (50) make use of the analogy with photographic technique in describing Góngora’s poetry.  Images like seafoam and fireworks fit into Maravall’s list of “objetos de mutabilidad, inconstancia y fragilidad” which “constituyen materia predilecta del escritor barroco” (372).

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previously observed in the poem’s denial of temporal mediation quickens to a staccato-like pace: Góngora’s strategy toward the moment is a deft flight between creation, dissolution, and obsessive return. In a broader sense, this rhythm of creation and loss reflects the ambivalent position of the Baroque self: man has been posed as a new center of the cosmos, the creator of his own world, yet he lacks the authority of the absolute, and appears diminished by the new awareness of space. The oscillation of time in the Soledades between expansion and dissolution can thus be seen as the expression of this anxiety over the ontological status of man. This anxiety mounts in the poem, giving rise to a similar pattern of expansion and dissolution in Góngora’s treatment of space, and, as will be shown, this pattern will again be associated with the frustration of the erotic. An awareness of space pervades the Soledades. The first Soledad opens with a constellation set into space: “campos de zafiro.” These “campos de zafiro” are soon paralleled by “una Libia de ondas” and “piélagos de montes”; at the water’s edge, sky, sea and land all merge into a great expanse of space. The natural world, as Sinicropi has shown, acquires an autonomous presence, while the importance of the human subject is symmetrically reduced (124, 131–32). The wide vistas in the poem become the terrain for a competition between man and nature. In the Dedicatoria, for example, the mountains loom ominous: they are “de nieve armados,/ gigantes de cristal” (7–8). The duke is said to charge against these mountains, slaying untold numbers of beasts (“bates los montes”; “fieras […] que, al teñido suelo,/ muertas, pidiendo términos disformes,/ espumoso coral le dan al Tormes” [7–12]). Here the hunter’s gargantuan aspirations are matched by the immensity of their geological backdrop. In other passages, nature seems to gain the upper hand. The sea may be challenged by the explorers as they seek to “inculcar limites” (I. 412), yet it remains a threatening “voraz, […] profundo/ campo ya de sepulcros,” devouring the booty of their ships (II. 402–6). In these scenes the vastness of space stands as a challenge to man, and man responds aggressively with what Carlos Fuentes has called the “apetito espacial” of Baroque culture. In his view the Baroque subject is driven by “a hunger for a human space capable of countering the new mute space of the universe” (71; my translation). As Fuentes writes, Todas las cosas han perdido su concierto. En el alba misma de su afirmación humanista y liberadora, el individuo cae fragmentado por la misma crítica, la misma duda, la misma interrogación con que Copérnico y Galileo liberan a las fuerzas dormidas del universo, ensanchándolo hasta empequeñecer al individuo que entonces se despliega en la pasión desbocada, la afirmación del orgullo, los crueles usos del poder, el sueno utópico de una nueva ciudad del sol, la imaginación cronófaga y omniclusiva, el



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hambre de un espacio humano capaz de ser opuesto al nuevo espacio mudo del universo: apetito espacial evidente así en el descubrimiento de América como en los frescos de Piero della Francesca.  (71)

Góngora imbues the Soledades with his own version of this spatial apetite. The enormity of the drive to map the world which Góngora evokes in his descriptions of the voyages of exploration is mirrored by the death wish of the peregrino at his failures in courtly love. He wanders vast terrains: “solicitando en vano/ las alas sepultar de mi osadía/donde el Sol nace o donde muere el día” (II. 148–50). He hopes his grave will be of a size proportionate to his failed aspirations, calling on the ocean to be his funeral urn, and the mountains of the world to be his monument: tan generoso fe, no fácil onda, no poca tierra esconda: urna suya el Océano profundo, y obeliscos los montes sean del mundo.  (II. 161–64)

What is involved here is more than a parallel in scale, for, in essence, Nature is asked to correspond to the peregrino’s death wish by serving as a great sepulcher for his failed love. The projection of the lover’s death wish onto the cosmos suggests a particular resolution of the anxiety inherent in the competitive comparison of Man’s ambition to the vastness of his surroundings: human failure in the face of the infinite is resolved in a destructive impulse. Throughout the poem, the imagery of the lover’s death wish is projected onto the natural world, often following a pattern of expansion and dissolution similar to what we observed in the depiction of time. For example, a bonfire, said to rival the sun in its immensity and brightness, implodes into itself, its logs converted into its sepulcher (I. 68–86). Similarly, a moth’s venation expands to form the branches of a tree, before the creature, fatally drawn to the light, is undone: “en cenizas desatada” (I. 86–89). The pathetic fallacy of Garcilaso’s pastoral is defamiliarized and amplified as the spiritual bloodletting of the lover progresses to the violence of the hunt upon the natural world. While Garcilaso’s shepherd Salicio “soltó de llanto una profunda vena,” the peregrino laments “estas mis quejas graves/ voces de sangre, y sangre son del alma” (II. 118–19); his suffering is both magnified and defamiliarized by hyperbole and then paralleled in the violence with which the seal smashed on the rocks is described: “en ríos de agua y sangre desatada” (II. 444). In some of these cases, the surge towards self-destruction of the natural world (or its violent destruction in the hunt) is marked by key terms (e.g. the verbs “solicitar,” “sepultar,” and “desatar”) used previously to describe the peregri-

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no’s own death wish.10 By projecting the courtly lover’s death wish onto the natural world, Góngora makes it cosmic. This focus on dissolution informs the greater structure of the Soledades; the poem is ultimately constructed as a movement from proliferation to annihilation. The work manifests an epic inclusiveness in its incorporation of the various genres of poetry, in its global inventory of the sites of exploration, and in its various catalogs. Yet despite this tremendous inclusiveness, the poem as a whole evinces the same trend toward destruction which has been observed on various levels within the text. In the final falconry episode of the Soledades, the frustrated immensity of Baroque man’s spatial appetite is resolved in the ultimate expression of the cosmic death wish: Apocalypse. In the falconry scene, the aristocrat’s hunting, expressed through the bird’s predatory activities, is described in political and military terms; the birds of prey, in Beverley’s view, are listed in a procession which forms “an emblematic map of the world known to European mercantilism of the seventeenth century” (ed. Soledades 155; my translation). This has led Beverley to view the episode as an allegory for European war, a view with which I concur (Aspects 93, 99–100). What is interesting is that this political and military imagery is mixed with the astronomical imagery of Apocalypse, suggesting an endpoint of cosmic annihilation within the trajectory I have proposed, as well as a relationship to a tradition of Hapsburg iconography. Indeed, the historical and political dimension of the scene can be appreciated as part of a pattern of the deconstruction of messianic imagery associated with the Hapsburg emperor. Marie Tanner has studied the messianic beliefs associated with the Hapsburg emperor in the art and literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and has identified a Christian tradition of the appropriation of Roman theocratic mythology of imperial destiny. As Tanner has demonstrated, the Christian emperor is seen as destined to fulfill the prophecies of the Cumean Sybil of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, now read as anticipating the entire plan of Christian eschatology, from the birth of Christ to the founding of the New Jerusalem, in a Christianized version of the Pax Augustiana (18–23). The Sybil’s prediction of a second Tiphus and a second Argo is interpreted as a metaphor for Christian military campaigns against the Turks, portrayed as a second Trojan war which would bring about a new Golden Age (6–7). In this reworking of Roman political and religious myth, the Hapsburg emperor is now cast as the last descendant of Aeneas, divinely ordained to defeat the infidel and to unite the hemispheres in the Christian faith in a new Holy Roman Empire 10 Compare II. 148–50 with I. 680–86 and II. 6–8. It should be noted that the dissolution of numerous images in the text is marked by the repeated use of the verb desatar. Callejo and Pajares’ concordance lists sixteen examples of the use of desatar and its variants in the Soledades (75).



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(145). This imperial destiny is enshrined in the imagery of Apocalypse; the final victory of the Christian emperor, it is predicted, will usher in the Last Judgment and the Second Coming of Christ (121). The belief in the Apocalyptic destiny of the Hapsburg emperor plays a key role historically in the projects of the imperial court. Columbus himself, as Tanner notes, comments on the role his own voyages played in the fulfillment of millennial prophecy: “In his Lettera Rarissima (1502–4), an account of his final voyage to the New World, Columbus rejoiced in his belief that the Spanish ruler’s conquest of Jerusalem, as well as his own divinely inspired mission to find a path to Asia, were events that would herald the universal peace and the end of the world” (127–8). Philip II designed the Escorial to conform to imperial conventions of sacred architecture as the rebuilt temple of Solomon, and decorated the palace with Apocalyptic tapestries (181). He assumes the Augustinian attributes of the Sun-King in one of his emblems, illustrating his empire’s achievements in Christianizing the New World as the fulfillment of Apocalyptic prophecy by bringing light to a part of the world which previously had been considered to have been lost to darkness (181). This messianic imagery is ubiquitous in the arts and letters of the various Hapsburg monarchs, and Góngora confronts this tradition in some of the images and classical allusions which populate his poem. Important examples of this pattern are particularly evident in the speech against seafaring of the first Soledad, where the symbols of different moments in the history of the Hapsburg dynasty are reprised, but abstracted from their usual politico-religious association: Náutica industria investigó tal piedra, que, cual abraza yedra escollo, el metal ella fulminante de que Marte se viste, y, lisonjera, solicita el que más brilla diamante en la nocturna capa de la esfera, estrella a nuestro Polo más vecina, y, con virtud no poca, distante la revoca, elevada la inclina ya de la Aurora bella al rosado balcón, ya a la que sella cerúlea tumba fría las cenizas del día. En esta pues fiándose atractiva del Norte amante dura, alado roble, no hay tormentoso cabo que no doble, ni isla hoy a su vuelo fugitiva.

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Tifis el primer leño mal seguro condujo, muchos luego Palinuro, si bien por un mar ambos, que la tierra estanque dejó hecho, cuyo famoso estrecho una y otra de Alcides llave cierra. Piloto hoy la Cudicia, no de errantes árboles, mas de selvas inconstantes, al padre de las aguas Ocëano (de cuya monarquía el Sol, que cada día nace en sus ondas y en sus ondas muere, los términos saber todos no quiere) dejó primero de su espuma cano, sin admitir segundo en inculcar sus límites al mundo.  (I. 379–412)

The compass is hailed (I. 379–94), but is not associated with the cross, with which it was identified in Hapsburg apologetics, through which Philip II’s reign was to extend to the non-Christian world (See Tanner The Last Descendant 204–6). Charles V’s personal emblem,11 the columns of Hercules, marked with the motto “Plus Ultra” to emphasize the extension of empire, termed “Europe’s most enduring symbol in the bid for universal theocratic monarchy,” is evoked, but only as “cuyo famoso estrecho/ una y otra de Alcides llave cierra” (I. 401–2). As Betty Sasaki points out, the references to Typhus, the pilot of the Argonauts, and Palinurus, the pilot of Aeneas, recall the heroic voyages associated with the ultimate founding of Rome, but in such a way as to undercut epic function by drawing attention away from the heroic figures and towards characters which evoke “themes of greed and deception” (in Jason’s manipulation of Medea) and “betrayal and sacrifice” (Palinurus is sacrificed to guarantee safe passage) (156–57). As she also suggests, the reduction of the ships metonymically to “alado roble,” “primer leño,” “árboles” and “selvas” subsumes “epic expeditions into the anonymity of a larger maritime enterprise,” the “scenes of greed-driven voyages of the Spanish empire” (157). The Argo, “el primer leño,” is followed by scores of second “Argos” such as were predicted by the Fourth Eclogue; they extend the empire where the sun never sets, but only to satisfy contemporary mercantilist greed. As Sasaki writes, “Góngora shatters the illusions of epic grandeur by letting history in” (152). This sort of juxtaposition of history and poetic myth, first signaled by Beverley in his study of the poem, as we shall 11 See Ciocchini, Taylor and Bradley Nelson, “The Emblematic Mode,” regarding the relationship between imagery and the emblem tradition in the Soledades.



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see, will become a key factor in the dynamics of the falconry scene (Aspects 83–102). The constellation of the Southern Cross appears later, but buried decoratively within the ouroboros emblem (I. 425–29). The consignment of this constellation to such an apparently ornamental status is significant, because it guts the sign of its didactic function. As Tanner points out: The poet Giovanni Strasoldo assigned the king’s apotheosis to the constellation of the cross that appears in the Southern Hemisphere. From the mount of Eden, the four stars that formed the cross had been visible to Adam and Eve, but after the Fall they vanished from the sight of man. When the equator was crossed by Iberian navigators, the Southern Cross miraculously appeared again on the horizon. This established an eternal resting place for the ruler of the New World that communicated a subtle apocalyptic message, for the heavenly reappearance of the cross was said to signal the Parousia.  (206)

This religious significance is clearly eluded in the poem. Such a deflation of the political and religious imperative behind the imagery of Apocalypse becomes most pronounced in the falconry scene. The spectacle of birds of prey of various nations, many identified metaphorically with military weapons, the astronomical signs, and the final transformation of the crow into a world which explodes, together form a spectacle of Apocalypse which debunks the millennial pretensions of the Hapsburgs by counterpoising the real history of European war to the pseudo-history of divinely ordained empire. Góngora achieves this effect though symbolism from two systems of imagery: the imagery of astronomy and the imagery of war. Astronomical imagery appears throughout the poem. It occurs in the frequent reference to constellations, which is a standard device to establish setting in the pastoral. It is used in plays with perspective in transelemental imagery; hence the references to the antipodes12 and the figurative portrayal of stars on earth: flowers become “mudas estrellas,” and a hill is “de cabras estrellado” (II. 297, 304). Significantly, such references to stars are associated with war imagery in the description of a beehive. Here Góngora, in his portrayal of the queen bee and her colony, uses military images, either negatively or in a lighthearted manner, to convey pastoral innocence: “sin corona vuela y sin espada,” “Dido alada,/ de ejército más casto, de más bella/ república ceñida, en vez de muros,/ de cortezas” (II. 289–93). Here the reference to Dido, like the earlier reference to Palinurus, evokes the sacrifice and betrayal behind imperial heroics.13 A previous description of fireworks at the 12 13

See I. 636, 667–68, etc. See Torres on the transvaluation of Dido’s function as building sacrifice vis-à-vis the empire-builder. As Torres writes regarding this passage, “The Queen Bee is compared

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wedding also uses astronomical imagery in association with the imagery of war, again in a lower register: the fireworks explode as if exhaled by a sacred volcano, as they are shot from a chapel tower: “artificiosamente da exhalada / luminosas de pólvora saetas” (I. 649–50). Yet on a more sinister note, in the same episode, the old man worries about the potential danger of the explosives, fearing that “campo amanezca estéril de ceniza/ la que anocheció aldea” (I. 657–58). The “landscape of war and exhaustion” which Beverley has identified with the falconry scene is foreshadowed by this vision of a burnt out field. The early association of astronomical and war imagery thus lays the basis for their combination as ideological critique in the episode of falconry. The hawking scene represents the culmination of the use of astronomical imagery in the poem. The descriptions of the hunting party, their kept birds, and their prey all include both astronomical and military imagery. The horses of the falconers are speckled with stars (II. 818–19), while collectively the group is referred to as “tropa” (716) and “escuadrón” (872). The neblí is described with celestial images: “relámpago su pluma/ rayo su garra” (745–46), while the saker is described in military terms, compared to the weapon which shares its name: “Auxiliar taladra el aire luego/ un duro sacre, en globos no de fuego,/ en oblicuos si engaños” (910–12). The hunted doral is also described with military images; the feathers it preens are likened to weapons: “filos” of a “cuchillo,” and later “saeta” (838–40; 844), and the reeds in which the bird seeks refuge poorly defend it with “reparos” (868). Astronomical imagery becomes more pronounced in establishing the setting of the hunt of the crows. These birds obscure the sun by their great number, creating a false night. The sight of the gold of the owl’s eyes impels them to surge greedily upward; having attained the height of the earth’s pole (893), they now aim for the stars (899). As L. J. Woodward observes, “Góngora makes the squalid wrestling ground of these birds the whole world and region about the world: ‘Poca palestra la región vacía/ de tanta envidia era [...]’ ” (II. 902–3) (779). Perhaps even more importantly, Góngora realizes the ensuing hunt of the crow as a veritable cosmic struggle. The gyrfalcon literally becomes the zenith above the cloud of crows (907–9). The gyrfalcon and saker which trap the lone hunted crow become the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn; the crow flies “entre los trópicos grifaños” (919) and is itself reduced to a “breve esfera” (923, 933). The participants in this battle have become astronomical figures, and their struggle is given political and military attributes; the saker is a “Tirano” (931) who kills the crow with “fatal acero” to Dido in the ‘Segunda soledad’ v. 285, thus cleverly inverting Virgil’s own comparison of Dido to the bee. Indeed, ‘Dido alada’ is also evoked as a ‘susurrante Amazona,’ a description that depends on the reader’s knowledge of the Penthesilea (Aeneid I)/Camilla (Aeneid VII and X)/Dido association” (148, note 46).



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(934). The crow is, at least in one sense of the word “esfera,”14 a world which explodes, like the latent image contained in the earlier (negative) evocation of bullets: “globos no de fuego” (911): Breve esfera de viento, negra circunvestida piel, al duro alterno impulso de valientes palas, la avecilla parece, en el de muros líquidos que ofrece corredor el dïáfano elemento al gémino rigor, en cuyas alas su vista libra toda el extranjero. Tirano el sacre de lo menos puro desta primer región, sañudo espera la desplumada ya, la breve esfera, que, a un bote corvo de fatal acero dejó al viento, si no restitüido, heredado en el último graznido.  (II. 923–37)

The destruction of war is thus realized on the greatest level as cosmic annihilation, Apocalypse. One possible reading of the scene as historical allegory would be to look at the crow, a figure of political cooperation in emblem books of the period (Boase 48), as a symbol for the Spanish body politic infested by greed, caught

14 The word “esfera” also may be read in a less serious sense as a reference to a tennis ball volleyed in a game by the birds of prey. As noted in our discussion of ambivalence in tone in Chapter 1, this additional sense has special significance; with the introduction of the ludic, Góngora undermines the drama he has created; in L. J. Woodward’s terms, he makes the tragic farcical (780). Góngora further undermines the seriousness of the events by referring to them summarily as “agradables casos” (II. 937). The self-parody which Robert Ball has observed in Góngora’s later work the “Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe” (“Imitación” 92), is already present in the ludic tone adopted in the concluding episode of the Soledades. This juxtaposition of tragic and farcical representations of the falconry scene produces a leveling effect which is as “nihilistic” as the spectacle of Apocalypse itself. By associating cosmic disintegration with sport, Góngora evinces an extreme version of the “axiological nihilism” which Gilman observed in the Celestina (“Intro” 14). Góngora may also be reworking the topos of bird hunting of the Georgic variant of pastoral here, transforming the pathetic fallacy of Garcilaso and Ariosto, in which the lover identifies with a suffering trapped bird, as described by Boase (41–43), into a case of trauma-induced detachment before a display of the mechanical grotesque. Regarding trauma and the interpellation of the peregrino, see Chapter 2; see Munjic for a reading of the scene in terms of conflicting models of male subjectivity (243–62).

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between the twin threats of North and South, symbolized by the gyrfalcon and saker.15 The gyrfalcon may represent the rebellious Netherlands provinces, as Beverley, citing Pellicer’s reading, has suggested, and the Cypriot saker may in turn symbolize the military threat of the Turks; the island of Cyprus, even after the Spanish victory at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, continued as part of the Ottoman empire as an important locus of conflict in the Mediterranean. What is interesting is that this scenario represents anticipated future military threats, underscoring its quality of realistic historical prophecy; during the period of composition of the Soledad segunda (absent the final 43 lines, Jammes argues that it was completed shortly after 1617), Spain was not at war with the Dutch, having signed a twelve-year truce in 1609 in the face of dwindling resources (Jammes, ed., Soledades 19–20; Elliot 287). Thus the scene might be read as prophetic, but counter to the glorious terms of Hapsburg apologetics, predicting not the New Jerusalem but contemporary historical and political threats as a “mirror of princes” in the sense that Beverley has suggested (Aspects 102). In this respect the episode functions to disrupt a Counter-reformation theocratic notion of prophecy, consistent with the more generalized frustration of teleology we have studied on other levels in the poem. The poem draws to a close with an anticlimactic description of the peregrino’s continuing journey, abruptly ending with an allusion to the rape of Persephone, to the negation of Spring. This ending, while seemingly inconclusive, does effect a type of closure, albeit an unusual one. As with portrayals of time within the poem, the Soledades as a whole rebels against traditional progression; organized in the dimension of space, it obviates any linear completion. In one sense, the entire poem represents an exercise in the “temporal implo15 Regarding II. 753–55 (“el Girifalte, escándalo bizarro/ del aire, honor robusto de Gelanda:/ si bien jayán de cuanto rapaz vuela”), Beverley, ed., Soledades (155–56), cites Pellicer’s commentary, which should be weighed as important evidence for how the term might have been interpreted by Góngora’s contemporaries: “Gelanda … una de las [provincias] rebeldes.” Dámaso Alonso also reads “Gelanda” as “Zelanda” (Góngora y el Polifemo 244). However, Jammes notes that “Los gerifaltes proceden, en efecto, del Norte de América y Europa de Norte (Labrador, Islandia, Noruega, etc.) y no sólo de Zelanda” (532). Alatorre, without mentioning Pellicer’s reading, disputes the translation of “Gelanda” as “Zelanda”: “Zelanda o Zelandia es una provincia de Holanda muy al ras del mar (Zeeland en holandés), difícilmente engendradora de gerifaltes […] me parece más verosímil que Gelanda sea adaptación […] de Island (Islandia), donde el escandinavo is ‘hielo’ se tradujo al latín gelu” (94–95). Granted Alatorre’s concerns, the metonymic association of the gyrfalcon with the North and with the imagery of war suggests that the bird represents a Northern military threat, which in the context of Spanish history would seem to imply the rebellious provinces of the Netherlands. In any case, captive gyrfalcons had been well disseminated throughout Europe for use in falconry for centuries by the time of the composition of the poem. See López de Ayala’s medieval classic (71–74), Michell (14–16) and Harting (49) on their cultivation.



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sion” we have observed within the text. The Spring with which the poem opens already contains its own negation; it is identified with the death of eros, the rape of Europa (itself perhaps an early allusion to European war). The poem’s movement is in this sense static – time ends where it begins, and as such, is annihilated. The obverse function, infinite expansion, can also be observed in the greater structure of the poem. The return to Spring’s negation, to rape, at the end of the poem lays the basis for indefinite, obsessive repetition. A “low grade infinity” is established, in which it is not the mythic wholeness of Spring’s return that is celebrated, but rather the ritual disintegration entailed by Spring’s loss. This broken myth of Persephone, like the gutted version of the phoenix cycle observed before, functions as a kind of Möbius strip, a frustrated circuit endlessly repeating a story of loss and ontological isolation.16 It would seem fruitful to close by contemplating the paradoxical nature of the Soledades, a poem which expresses the enormous creativity and the anxiety we identify with modern writing. Perhaps a useful point of departure from which to contemplate this paradox would be Pascal’s famous observations on the nature of man. Pascal described man as a “thinking reed,” a formula which captures both pride in man’s subjectivity, his consciousness, as well as a sense of man’s fragility in the universe. This sense of fragility is perhaps emphasized even more in Pascal’s writings. Fear of the abyss, fear of the “loss of self ” which Wylie Sypher has associated with modernity,17 were the paradoxical consequences of the creation of a world in which the center was man. This fear was easily channeled into the orthodoxy of the Counter-reformation. But for the secularly-minded, other solutions were posed. Góngora’s play with Apocalypse is in part protreptical, as he presents an historically charged scene of world destruction as a disruption of Hapsburg theocratic prophecy. Yet Góngora also responds aesthetically and ontologically to the horror of the void by projecting the fear of self-dissolution into a destructive impulse. Góngora’s response to the new space is to compete with it, and failing to attain the absolute, to destroy it. His experiments with temporal and spatial boundaries are thus both startling and solipsistic, empty, and that emptiness culminates in the end of all time and space. Góngora perfectly fulfills Warnke’s description of the Baroque imagination: he is unable to imagine a world without imagining also its dissolution.

16 Here I am taking inspiration from Nicolson, who in her book The Breaking of the Circle, uses the icon of the broken circle to represent the breakdown of the animistic, sacerdotal worldview of the past, and from Maurice Molho, who has stated that “la representación de la Soledad no es un círculo cerrado, sino la espiral que gira sin fin sobre sí misma sin encontrar su fin” (Semántica 80). 17 See Sypher’s classic study Loss of Self in Modern Literature and Art.

5

Góngora and the Modern: “New Poetry”? Pasos de un peregrino son errante   cuantos me dictó versos dulce Musa,   en soledad confusa   perdidos unos, otros inspirados. Luis de Góngora

     Fable Par ce mot par commence donc ce texte Dont la première ligne dit la vérité. Mais ce tain sous l’une et l’autre Peut-il être toléré? Cher lecteur déjà tu juges Là de nos difficultés. … (APRÈS sept ans de malheurs Elle brisa son miroir.) Francis Ponge

If the ontological crisis of the Baroque has been identified with the first stirrings of the modern, it is not surprising that the Soledades, in its expression of this crisis, announces some of the problems of modern poetics. Góngora’s creation of a “new poetry” has linked him to aesthetic modernity, and this connection can be studied from a variety of angles; the most obvious approach has been to study the revival of Góngora by the Generation of 1927. The influence of Góngora on this circle of poets has been adequately examined in Elsa Dehennin’s major study La résurgence de Góngora et la génération poétique de 1927, and I have no intention of attempting to further develop that topic. The specific question of Góngora’s influence could also be examined by surveying the well recognized use of his work by contemporary Latin  While the idea of juxtaposing these lines of Góngora with Ponge’s “Fable” is my own, I would like to acknowledge Sánchez Robayna’s general observation on the similarity between these two poets. See Andres Sánchez Robayna, “En el texto de Francis Ponge” 65.



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American writers as part of the historical phenomenon of Neobarroquismo, an ebullient assimilation of Baroque aesthetics associated with Cuban writers and their disciples in the 1960s and 1970s. Beverley has cited the influence of the Soledades in particular in the writings of Lezama Lima, Gabriel García Márquez, and Alejo Carpentier, noting that Góngora’s appeal to these writers can be explained in part by their identification with a moment of political crisis similar to their own. Yet my intention is not to trace Góngora’s influence along the anticipated trajectory into the Neobaroque, but to examine the function of the avant garde appropriation of Góngora within a series of examples from twentieth-century Latin American poetry, elaborating in the process a problematic of historicism, aesthetics and modernity. The Latin American and Peninsular revivals of Góngora were in fact never separate; from the beginning the revindication of Góngora was a transatlantic phenomenon. As González Echevarría has pointed out, Góngora’s “rediscovery” actually began in Latin America with modernista poets José Martí and Rubén Darío and in the writings of the Mexican essayist Alfonso Reyes (195). The editor of the first modern Obras completas of Góngora (1921), Raymond Foulché-Delbosc, acknowledges a profound debt to Reyes. As he states, Copié el manuscrito Chacón el año de 1900. Al publicarlo tantos años después, la suerte me deparó la amistad de don Alfonso Reyes —a quien considero como el primer gongorista de las nuevas generaciones— el cual no solamente me ha ayudado en una última revisión del manuscrito sino que ha compartido conmigo la minuciosísima tarea de la corrección de pruebas.  (xvi)

In their participation in the transatlantic and avant-garde revival of Góngora, modern Latin American writers drew on a tradition of Latin American

 I am distinguishing here between “Neobarroquismo” as a specific historical phenomenon associated primarily with Cuban writers of the 1960s and 1970s, most notably Lezama Lima, Sarduy and Carpentier, and with their disciples elsewhere in Latin America such as Perlongher, and a looser use of the term “Neobaroque” which might apply to any modern appropriation of the Baroque. César Augusto Salgado, for example, refers to the twentieth-century revival of Góngora, conditioned by the Generation of 1927’s attraction to Mallarmé, as a case of the “Symbolist neobaroque vogue” (81). For a more comprehensive discussion of the relationship between the Peninsular early modern and the Latin American Neobaroque, see González Echevarría’s classic work, Celestina’s Brood.  See Beverley, Aspects (113, 128, note 8) for a brief discussion of the use of the Soledades by these writers. Roses Lozano’s Góngora Hoy series contains a number of recent articles on the influence of Góngora in modern Hispanic literature.

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Gongorism which emerged from colonial letters and flourished periodically in the work of poets like Bello and Heredia. Beyond the specific question of influence, many associations between Gongorism and various modern movements in the arts have been made (e.g. with Romanticism – Collard (Nueva poesía 123–25); Impressionism – Pabst; Surrealism – Bodini; etc.). It may be that because the Soledades heralds the modern in so many respects (its stress on a subjective vision, its “spatial” organization, its plays with perspective and category transgression, etc.), a given characteristic of almost any modern movement could be read back into it. Yet more seems to be at issue in the celebrated comparison between the poetry of Góngora and that of Mallarmé. The Góngora–Mallarmé parallel is the product of a specific moment in literary history; derided for his Baroque excesses by Neoclassicist criticism, Góngora was first revived in Spain, after 300 years of critical neglect on the peninsula, by poets in or around the Symbolist movement. Dámaso Alonso has associated the Symbolists’ enthusiasm for Góngora with an impressionistic, puerile, and snobbish identification with a fellow “poète maudit,” yet he admits, however tentatively, that Mallarmé, el cual sin haber recibido influjo ninguno de Góngora; más aun, sin haberle conocido, muestra en su poesía algunos puntos de extraña coincidencia con el autor de las Soledades.  (Estudios 527)

Alonso is also quick to observe a parallel between the poetry of Góngora and that of Mallarmé’s disciple Paul Valéry (557–58). Despite the fact that some of the critical studies of the Góngora–Symbolist parallel have been superficial, certain important “points of coincidence” have indeed been elucidated. One of the earliest contributions to the discussion of the parallel between Góngora and Mallarmé, that of Zdislas Milner, signals the analogous positions the two poets occupied with respect to their literary heritage. Both produce a poetry of exhaustion, Góngora writing at the end of the Renaissance and Mallarmé writing after the decline of Romanticism (Milner 286). Various critics have cited technical similarities. The most important of these is Pradal’s identification of Góngora’s “A si no B” formula with Mallarmé’s use  See Beverley, “Barroco de estado: Góngora y el gongorismo” in Del Lazarillo, regarding the different trajectory and ideological significance of Gongorism on colonial soil. See also Rivers, regarding the shifting of the center of Gongorist production to the colony by the second half of the seventeenth century (“Góngora y el Nuevo Mundo” 858).  Warshaw’s article is the most extreme example of such superficial studies. It should also be noted that the earliest French critics read Góngora in poor translations. Note, for example, the low quality of the translations used by Milner. See Étienvre for a discussion of “el paradigma gongorino en la Francia del siglo xx.”



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of absence to evoke a multitude of possibilities (276). Indeed, by negating, by alluding, and by cultivating figures of choice and doubt, in a context of what Beverley (Aspects) has seen as generic and teleological indeterminacy, Góngora creates an early version of that evocative “hovering” or suspension of the definite that is characteristic of a Mallarméan poem. Other, less compelling, formal similarities have been noted (e.g. their common use of neologisms and disruption of syntax), similarities which Sánchez Robayna reduces to “una común concepción del lenguaje como ‘diseño’ (o como ‘arquitectura’)” (Tres estudios 66). In a more fundamental sense the work of both poets is marked by a common, almost ascetic zeal to create a subjective vision which would attain the stature of the absolute. Both evince the same obsessive pattern of aspiration and failure, the same oscillation between the power and the impotence of the human mind and its language. Both create a poetry which is involuted in an effort to “name naming.” While Góngora metaphorizes metaphor, Mallarmé seeks to name “fleur,” that elusive flower absent from all bouquets. While Góngora employs the technique of self-reference to a lesser degree than does Mallarmé, both produce a poetry which is less concerned with any exoteric result than with its own process. There are, of course, obvious dissimilarities between the two poets. Góngora never approaches the Symbolists’ attempt to escape the denotative function of language. Hugo Friedrich points out further differences. Góngora wrote for a specific class of readers who could, albeit with difficulty, decipher his poetry by referring to a tradition of mythology, symbolism, rhetoric, etc. Mallarmé, on the other hand, wrote for no actual reader, and his symbols are unique and self-sufficient (89). Perhaps the greatest difference between the two poets is their degree of historical consciousness. Un Coup de dés is a self-conscious, explicit drama of the shipwreck and transposition of the poetic word, incorporating a modern appreciation of the role of chance in the universe, as well as an explicit effort to escape the confines of anthropomorphism in human thought. The Soledades, on the other hand, passively reflects the problems of modernity at their earliest stage, responding to the epistemological crisis of the breakdown of the Medieval and Renaissance conception of a divinely ordered cosmos: pre-Kant, pre-modern physics. All this is merely another way of stating the obvious fact that the poems are three centuries apart; Mallarmé wrote with the benefit of greater historical experience. In sum, it would prove more accurate to view the relationship between Gongorism and Symbolism as one of trajectory rather than one of comparison per se. While it would be a mistake to consider the relationship between these  Paiewonsky-Conde (66–69), while never referring to Mallarmé, also discusses Góngora’s use of absence and negation to evoke possibility.

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poets to be one of comparison, it would be equally mistaken to ignore the parallel. As Sánchez Robayna has pointed out, the parallel between the two poets has been realized creatively. Góngora was only successfully translatable into French after the appearance of Mallarmé’s poetry (Pradal Rodríguez 279), and Ungaretti’s translations of Góngora were mediated by his reading of Mallarmé. To this I would add the obverse: Paz has admitted to his reliance on Gongorine language to translate Mallarmé into Spanish (“Stéphane Mallarmé” 25). The creative and critical function of the parallel has been such that Sánchez Robayna asserts that the revival of Góngora would have proved impossible without the advent of Symbolist language (Tres estudios 83). Sánchez Robayna’s assertion evokes the intriguing problem Borges presents in his famous story “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote.” In the story, Borges depicts a character, Pierre Menard, who is a French Symbolist poet attempting to write a twentieth-century Quijote, using the exact words as did its original author, Cervantes. The story ends by describing the new technique Menard brings to the art of reading, “la técnica del anacronismo deliberado.” As Borges writes, “Esa técnica de aplicación infinita nos insta a recorrer la Odisea como si fuera posterior a la Eneida y el libro Le jardín du Centaure de Madame Henri Bachelier como si fuera de Madame Henri Bachelier” (59). With these words Borges suggests that there is no unmediated reading of a text, and that diachronic and synchronic readings are but complementary aspects of the same critical process. Bearing this in mind, we should thus not only attempt to reconstruct Góngora (i.e., to understand him within the context of the Baroque), but also attempt to understand him and the Latin American poets who were shaped by him in a more dynamic, contemporary sense, casting Góngora’s achievement in sharper relief with the advantage of historical hindsight. I propose to do this by tracing a trajectory of Góngora’s poetics in modern Latin American poetry from the crisis of Symbolism to its resolution. In keeping with the limits of this study, I have chosen a particular sequence of poems in order to illustrate this trajectory. The central texts which will be studied are Mexican: José Gorostiza’s Muerte sin fin (1939), and Octavio Paz’s Blanco (1966). These works describe a process of crisis and resolution which is announced in Paz’s poem “Himno entre ruinas” (1948), a poem which, significantly, incorporates specific allusions to Góngora ‘s Polifemo and Soledades. I will then conclude by looking at a contrasting use of the Góngora–Symbolist parallel by the Peruvian poet César Vallejo. Paz’s creative incorporation of the Góngora–Symbolist parallel goes beyond his work with translation. In the poem “Himno entre ruinas,” Paz uses allusions to Góngora’s poetry to explore the problems of modernity 

Buxó, as cited in Sánchez Robayna, Tres estudios (84).



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and to mark a turning point in late Symbolist poetics. Paz appropriates the topos of the contemplation of ruins, so popular during the Baroque period, to offer a meditation on the progress of civilization. In this project he joins a long tradition of utopian poetry (the most obvious Latin American antecedent being Heredia’s “En el teocalli de Cholula”), where lamentation over ruins evokes the task of reconstructing a New Jerusalem, a new city of the sun, a future of harmony between humanity, its creations and nature. The opening of the poem merits quoting in its entirety: O Soleil c’est le temps de la Raison ardente apollinaire

HIMNO ENTRE RUINAS donde espumoso el mar siciliano … góngora

Coronado de sí el día extiende sus plumas.    ¡Alto grito amarillo, caliente surtidor en el centro de un cielo imparcial y benéfico! Las apariencias son hermosas en esta su verdad momentánea. El mar trepa la costa, se afianza entre las peñas, araña deslumbrante; la herida cárdena del monte resplandece; un puñado de cabras es un rebaño de piedras; el sol pone su huevo de oro y se derrama sobre el mar. Todo es dios. ¡Estatua rota, columnas comidas por la luz, ruinas vivas en un mundo de muertos en vida! 

“Himno entre ruinas” begins with an epigraph from Góngora’s Polifemo: “donde espumoso el mar siciliano …” Paz uses Góngora’s allusion to the Sicilian coast, the site of the war of the Titans, to present a twentieth-century landscape of destruction: Naples in ruins after World War II. The destructive potential of human reason which Góngora confronted in the seventeenth century has now come to a horrifying climax in the real specter of the world’s self-destruction. Yet the reference to Góngora is not only a statement about the trajectory of human industry; it is also a statement about poetics. Civilization in ruin has produced a poetry of exhaustion, a solipsistic poetry of the mind. Out of the ruins of this poetry of the mind, out of the legacy of Góngora and his modern descendants, Paz will announce a new lyric.  

See Dale, and Enjuto Rangel, for complementary readings of the poem. Citations from “Himno entre ruinas” refer to the text in Paz, Libertad bajo palabra.

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The first stanza begins with midday: Valéry’s moment of aesthetic arrest, “Midi le juste.” The mind is omnipotent, godlike, presiding over the creation of the world, the laying of the cosmic egg. There is no reality outside the self. As Ramon Xirau writes, Aislado y desnudo, alejado de la inmediatez concreta, la fantasía inventa un universo de identidades perfectas. “Coronado de sí,” “imparcial,” son términos que designan esta soledad idéntica a sí misma. Igual a sí mismo el poeta ve un mundo también igual a sí mismo. “Todo es dios.”  (“Himno” 159–60)

This solipsism is identified as both Symbolist and Gongorine. If the reference to midday is drawn from Valéry, the description of the setting suggests the shoreline, crowned by a brooding halcyon, which introduces the “narcissistic moment” of Góngora’s Polifemo,10 while its focus on the boundary of land and sea is an obvious imitation of the motif of the liminal in the Soledades. The play of mind in Góngora’s poem, his use of metalepsis and “transelemental imagery,” is echoed in “un puñado de cabras es un rebaño de piedras” or in the description of the trickling seawater as “araña deslumbrante.”11 A glimpse of the pain beneath outer appearances is caught when the figure of the bleeding jewel surfaces: “la herida cárdena del monte resplandece.” Already, the mind’s creation is eroding. Finally, as in Le Cimetière marin, this privileged moment is decisively undermined by the entry of time; ruins, the memento mori, appear.12 The next stanza shifts to the ruins of indigenous Mexican civilization, and with these, to the exhaustion of Mexican poetry: “guitarras roncas.” The Mexican lyric has self-destructed like Gongorine fireworks: “El canto mexicano estalla en un carajo/ estrella de colores que se apaga.” The poet eschews the addictive, escapist quality of the previous poetry and longs for a new, mythic function for the poetic word: ¿Qué yerba, qué agua de vida ha de darnos la vida, donde desenterrar la palabra, la proporción que rige al himno y al discurso, al baile, a la ciudad, y a la balanza?

10 See Isabel Torres regarding Canto 53 of the Polifemo (72), as well as Mary Barnard, “The Gaze,” especially 77–78. 11 Cf., especially, with the Soledades II. 304: “de cabras estrellado” and II. 829: “sabandijas de cristal.” 12 As Xirau, “Himno entre ruinas” (160), writes, “frente a la soledad luminosa, la alteridad de la muerte en vida, frente a la eternidad fantástica, la alteración del tiempo.”



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He seeks to discover a poetry that would re-establish order among the elements of civilization. He condemns the previous poetry for closing off such an integration. Paz, now alluding to Mallarmé,13 likens the exhausted “canto mexicano” to a dead star; all that remains of its moment of glory is a “piedra que nos cierra la puerta del contacto.” In the third stanza this “puerta del contacto” becomes the realm of the senses: “los ojos ven, las manos tocan.” A list of sacramental objects follows (“uvas con gusto a resurreción,” “vino, pan solar”) together with objects associated with the female side of eros. The sacred is identified with the erotic; the road to mythic redemption is through otherness. A woman appears: “Desde lo alto de su morenía una isleña me mira.” Then the stanza shifts back again to a Valéryan mode; the solitary play of mind is reasserted in further allusions to Le Cimetière marin. Consciousness, “torres de sal,” vies with communion. In the following stanza, the image of “un mundo de muertos en vida” gains full strength. Paz extrapolates from the immediate situation of Naples in ruins in 1948 (the place and date noted in parentheses at the end of the poem) and depicts, in John Fein’s words, “una visión postapocalíptica” (“Himno” 168). The world has reached its terminal era, the shadow of war (Xirau, “Himno” 162) spreading over the landscape of post-nuclear cities: A trechos tirita un sol anémico. Acodado en montes que ayer fueron ciudades, Polifemo bosteza. Abajo, entre los hoyos, se arrastra un rebaño de hombres.

Góngora’s Polifemo yawns over the ruins as men are dragged off by the handfuls; we witness the mechanical operation of genocide. Through Góngora’s giant, the monstrous potential of the free workings of the mind is evoked:14 Fuentes’ “la imaginación cronófaga,” Goya’s painting of Saturn devouring his

13 Paz is implicitly referring to Mallarmé’s image, “1’astre mûri des lendemains” (from his “Tombeau de Paul Verlaine”). He simultaneously parallels a type of imagery we have seen in the Soledades, as my reference above to “Gongorine fireworks” is meant to suggest. Góngora’s description of the bonfire (I. 680–86) evinces a similar sense of implosion; like a fire whose source (the logs) also marked its death (they become the fire’s tombstones), the poetic word of the “canto mexicano” dies at its inception. 14 Kathleen Dolan Hunt sees Polifemo as an illustration of Heidegger’s notion of “the monstrosity of subjectivism” (72, citing “The Age of the World Picture”). Mary Barnard, drawing on the work of Dolan Hunt, has cast Polifemo’s one eye, blind, as a black melancholic sun, symbolic of the giant’s narcissism and frustrated desire, which is finally vented in a destructive impulse (“The Gaze” 81–82). Isabel Torres has read the hyperbolic gesturing of Polifemo as a kind of “futile competition with a frustrated natural world” (72). These observations suggest the continuity Ruiz Pérez observes between the Polifemo and the Soledades in their depiction of an alienated, melancholic modern consciousness (El espacio 43, 235, 253).

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children. The end of time is announced in the flickering of the anemic sun; this dying star, as Xirau observes, is but a reminder of the first, luminous mythic sun (“Himno” 162). In the fifth stanza Paz offers a positive response to this possibility of the end of time: the infinite expansion of the instant. Time can be consecrated, can acquire an eternal presence, in moments of communion between self and other (Paz, El arco 185–97). As Xirau writes, En la soledad reside la “otredad.” Lo que aparecía delineado en las estrofas anteriores se precisa: los sentidos perciben un mundo [...]. La subjetividad se abre hacia las cosas: “extiendo mis sentidos en la hora viva”. (“Himno” 163)

Midday, rather than being a sterile, motionless time of the mind (as in Valéry’s “Midi le juste”), swells: “espiga henchida de minutos,/ copa de eternidad.” In Xirau’s words, “El mediodía empieza a cobrar sentido porque deja de ser un mediodía ensimismado, una conciencia espejeante (“Himno” 163). The next stanza describes one final return to the solipsism with which the poem began. Thought freezes time, hovering godlike over the still water.15 An impasse is reached: “Y todo ha de parar en este chapoteo de aguas muertas?” Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre comes to mind. Indeed, as would be consistent with the entire tenor of the poem, this impasse is not only ontological but poetic. In John Fein’s words, Paz is describing the moment in which “el poeta se ahoga en el lago de su propio esfuerzo vano” (168). The final stanza is one of reconciliation: ¡Día, redondo día, luminosa naranja de veinticuatro gajos, todos atravesados por una misma y amarilla dulzura! La inteligencia al fin encarna, se reconcilian las dos mitades enemigas y la conciencia-espejo se licúa, vuelve a ser fuente, manantial de fábulas: Hombre, árbol de imágenes, palabras que son flores que son frutos que son actos. Nápoles, 1946

The poem has depicted a struggle (reinforced typographically [Xirau, “Himno” 159]) to create a new poetry of communion out of the legacy of

15 As Xirau, “Himno” (163), writes of this stanza, “Río de tiempo sin sentido, la existencia pura regresa a la soledad, a la desesperanza, al ensimismamiento.”



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the exhausted poetry of solitude.16 Reason is joined with passion; Apollinaire’s “temps de la Raison ardente” (which served as the first epigraph to the poem) has arrived. The life of the mind is now merged with the life of the body: “La inteligencia al fin encarna,/ se reconcilian las dos mitades enemigas.” The estrangement between self and other dissolves as “las puertas del contacto” open. As Fein notes, consciousness transcends the barrier of self-­contemplation: “la conciencia-espejo se licúa” (169). The moment of communion surpasses temporal divisions; the anemic sun is transformed into a round, luminous orange whose segments are filled with the same yellow sweetness. The poetic word is freed to evoke the plenitude of things outside a self-contained world of the mind. Ramón Xirau has seen “Himno entre ruinas” as a watershed in Paz’s poetry; with this poem, in Xirau’s words, “Paz termina una primera epoca y comienza la de sus grandes poemas” (“Himno” 159). He has cited an allusion to Gorostiza’s imagery in the poem (the “conciencia-espejo”) and has called “Himno entre ruinas” “el más claro antecedente de Blanco” (“Himno” 163).17 Xirau’s observations can be expanded. Muerte sin fin and Blanco can be identified with the “dos mitades enemigas” which divide “Himno entre ruinas.” Blanco is a fully developed version of the ending of the poem,18 an elaboration of the new poetry of communion which Paz announces. Conversely, Muerte sin fin can be identified with the poetry of solitude, the poetry which Paz defines as both Symbolist and Gongorine. Muerte sin fin, as Paz alludes to it, can be seen to embody the Góngora–Symbolist parallel; in its portrayal of the crisis of Symbolist poetics, the poem represents the trajectory of the ontological crisis presented in the Soledades. This trajectory, suggested in “Himno entre ruinas,” can now be examined in Gorostiza’s poem itself. While Muerte sin fin contains few specific Góngorine allusions, critics such as Pacheco and Rubín have cited echoes of Góngora’s poetry in Gorostiza’s work, a function, perhaps, of the reclaiming of Góngora by the Contemporáneos (Pacheco 82; Rubín 198–204). Rubín briefly discusses the influence of Góngora’s poetry on Gorostiza, arguing “No cabe duda que Gorostiza se inspira en Góngora. El poeta mismo habla con entusiasmo de su admiración por la opulencia, la nobleza y la emoción del lenguaje gongorino” (200). Rubín sees the relationship between Góngora’s and Gorostiza’s poetry as essentially restricted to certain formal similarities (for example, the complication of syntax). Others have cited additional formal parallels: Antonio Alatorre notes the use of catalogs in both the Soledades and Muerte sin fin 16 See Octavio Paz’s essay on these two types of poetry: “Poesía de soledad y poesía de comunion,” in Las peras del olmo (95–106). 17 Pezzoni, in Flores (250), also observes that “Himno entre ruinas” is the precursor of Blanco. 18 As Pezzoni (250) implies.

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and sees both poems, along with Sor Juana’s Primero Sueño, as the three great dream poems of Hispanic literature (“Nada ocurre” 177–78). Anthony Stanton (291) and Gabriel Wolfson (344–46) see Muerte sin fin in the tradition of the Soledades as an extended silva. As will be shown, the parallel between these works is more substantive. Góngora strove to create a subjective vision that would attain the stature of the absolute, the epistemological certainty associated with the Medieval and Renaissance conception of a divinely ordered universe. His aspirations continually failed; the Soledades is a perpetual spiral of self-destruction. In a fundamental sense, Gorostiza’s Symbolist poem is a modern version of the same problem. Gorostiza, in his “Notas sobre poesía,” wrote that la poesía es […] un juego de espejos, en el que las palabras puestas unas frente a otras, se reflejan unas en otras hasta lo infinito y se recomponen en un mundo de puras imágenes donde el poeta se adueña de los poderes escondidos del hombre y establece contacto con aquel o aquello que está más allá.  (Poesía 11)19

Thus for Gorostiza, the poet’s ambition is godlike; he dreams of creating a world of pure images. In Muerte sin fin the writing of the poem is identified with the moment in which God set the universe in motion.20 Yet the world created by the poet is revealed to be but the empty reflection of man’s consciousness, the product of a sterile narcissism. The failure of the poet’s aspiration, as in the Soledades, triggers a ritual of self-destruction which culminates in Apocalypse.21 The world ends as God chokes on his logos; the poetic word is silenced.

19 Page numbers appear after citations from Gorostiza. As I begin this discussion of Muerte sin fin, I would like to take the opportunity to thank Professor Jaime Giordano, whose course on Latin American poetry included a stimulating analysis of this poem. I have found Giordano, Rubín, Gelpí and some of the early poet-critics to have offered the most useful readings of the poem in terms of Symbolist dynamics. Others have tended to focus on the religious or philosophical aspects of the work, on more general comparative issues, or on Gorostiza’s relationship with his fellow Contemporáneos. 20 God himself is portrayed with the attributes of a writer. Gorostiza lists the metonyms of the divine logos, of God’s writing in time: “el tintero, la silla, el calendario” (112) (Giordano: class lecture, 1982). The creation of the world through an act of writing relates to Mallarmé’s concept of poetry as an attempt to write the book of the world, a concept Sánchez Robayna relates to Góngora’s use of the imagery of writing in the Soledades. See Sánchez Robayna, Tres estudios (35–57). 21 The rhythm of proliferation and annihilation observed in the Soledades is echoed in Muerte sin fin in what Dehennin, Antithèse (84), terms a “destruction créatrice.” One passage of Gorostiza’s poem describes this “destruction créatrice” in language which is curiously Gongorine. As Dehennin writes, “Et il faut lire la suite, merveilleuse ‘ficción



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The undoing of Muerte sin fin is a function of the inherent contradictions within Symbolist poetics. The Symbolist effort to name the absolute (what Mallarmé calls “l’unique Nombre qui ne peut pas être un autre,” and what Gorostiza, in an earlier poem, calls, echoing Flaubert, “[la] palabra exacta”22) is ultimately a quest directed towards silence, since only nothingness contains all virtuality. In Muerte sin fin this futile, doomed quest is expressed as a search for pure form, portrayed through the central image of a glass of water. The form provided by the glass which molds the formless matter, water, can be momentarily subtracted from the glass of water. Yet such “pure form” is born only at the moment of its own destruction, when la forma en sí […] se pueda sustraer al vaso de agua; un instante, no más, no más que el mínimo perpetuo instante del quebranto, cuando la forma en sí, la pura forma se abandona al designio de su muerte.  (132)

This moment is quickly identified with the failure of language, with the demise of the poetic word:

del cielo’, toute rhétorique, qui pourrait constituer un bel hommage à Góngora et à ses ingénieuses arabesques” (86). The passage she is referring to reads: Después, en un crescendo insostenible, mirad cómo dispara cielo arriba, desde el mar, el tiro prodigioso de la carne que aún a la alta nube menoscaba con el vuelo del pájaro, estalla en él como un cohete herido y en sonoras estrellas precipita su desbandada pólvora de plumas.  (114) Rubín (60), relates this passage to the Icarus myth, noting that it is also mentioned at the beginning of the poem in the reference to “mis alas rotas” (107). As in the Soledades, the aspirations of the poet are identified with those of Icarus, a notion which, as we will see, was also developed by César Vallejo. Escalante has noted a similar echo of the Soledades in Muerte sin fin, comparing the line “la golondrina de escritura hebrea” with Soledades I. 609–11 (269 note 26). 22 Pozo (144), excerpts the term “palabra exacta” from Gorostiza’s poem “Preludio”: “ausente toda de palabra/ sin voz, sin eco, sin idioma, exacta” (emphasis Pozo’s). Like Dauster (275), she considers that poem to be a prelude to Muerte sin fin. The quotation from Mallarmé is from Un Coup de dés. All further citations of Un Coup de dés are from the 1974 Gallimard edition.

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[…] el hombre descubre en sus silencios que su hermoso lenguaje se le agosta en el minuto mismo del quebranto.  (136)

The poetic word cannot cross over the boundary of silence without dying; intelligence “reconcentra su silencio blanco/ en la orilla letal de la palabra.” The identification of the birth of the poetic word with its death points to one of the key tensions in the work: Muerte sin fin, like the Soledades, is constructed as a time predicament. As Mordecai S. Rubín suggests, Gorostiza echoes Valéry in his portrayal of time (Una poética 185–86). As in Le Cimetière marin, in Muerte sin fin we witness the power of the mind to create an eternal, static moment of absolute time: “el momento justo,” “el tiempo de dios,” “el tiempo paralítico.” This moment, identified with the moment of the poetic word, is immediately undone by the entry of temporality (Dauster 286). The poet’s creation crumbles into ashes as soon as the pendulum of the clock moves: —¡miradlo en la lenteja del reloj, neto, puntual, exacto, correrse un eslabón cada minuto!— cuando al soplo infantil de un parpadeo, la egregia masa de ademán ilustre podrá caer de golpe hecha cenizas.  (129)

Death, the only escape from temporality, occurs as an involution of time. Gorostiza, like Valéry, uses the image of Zeno’s arrow, which, though stilled by the mind, brings death. With the collapse of form, the darkened stars “Han vuelto el dardo insomne/ a la noche perfecta de su aljaba” (133). Such implosion of time occurs in imagery similar to what we have observed in the Soledades; if Góngora writes of a tear “antes enjuta que llorada,” Gorostiza calls the poetry of pure form “senil recién nacida” (128). Time is paralyzed in a stasis which is characteristic of Symbolist poetry. While Mallarmé, in Un Coup de dés, asserted, “Rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu,” Gorostiza repeatedly insists: “no ocurre nada.” This imploded “momento justo” is also portrayed as its obverse; it is not only static but eternal, both no time and all time. Thus, as in the Soledades, Muerte sin fin, as its title suggests, depicts a “low grade infinity.” The moment of pure form evokes the perenially absent word “en un estéril repetirse inédito” (111). In Góngora’s poem, as has been observed previously, these complementary phenomena, temporal implosion and explosion, can be related to the breakdown in the Judeo-Christian concept of the eschatological order of time. In Muerte sin fin, that breakdown is re-enacted as a modern fable. The poem ends with a vision of God’s absence, symbolic of the failure of the poet’s



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godlike aspirations. The force behind the creation and order of the universe has proved to be a mirage; God is presented as a star whose light reaches the earth centuries after it has already died. Where the Baroque encountered a universe which had lost its center, the modern encounters a black hole. The collapse of time is paralleled by the collapse of creation. The catalogs of creatures one observes in the Celestina and in the Soledades23 are repeated in a chain of reverse evolution. Animals, plants, and minerals regress to a final state of nothingness, what Gorostiza calls “el origen fatal de sus orígenes,” “el primer silencio tenebroso” (137). This ritual undoing is, in Xirau’s words, “un eterno retorno sin centro del mundo, sin eje de creencia, sin cosmos que estructure el caos, sin regreso” (Tres poetas). Xirau’s characterization of this “Muerte sin fin” as “un eterno retorno […] sin regreso” illustrates the paradox of the process of the poem. The poem is, like the Soledades, constructed according to a broken mythos; the false myth of return is the product of a broken image of the world. The return to origins is then itself undone. The death of creation moves toward the negation of procreation, a process which Xirau calls “un furioso desnacer” (Tres poetas 18). All categories of matter regress “hasta que todo este fecundo río/ de enamorado semen que conjuga,/ no desemboca en sus entrañas mismas” (141). This image of stagnant fertility is, as Ivania Pozo implies, a symbol of the impotence of the poet’s creative forces (295–96). As in the Soledades, the erotic is identified with death; death is the only route outside the self in this solipsistic enterprise. The poet’s drive to create his own universe is undermined by its very subjectivity. Rubín points out that one of Gorostiza’s obsessions is “el espejismo, el mirarse y proyectar la inteligencia fuera de sí para mirarse en el acto de mirarse” (Una poética 182). Indeed, in Muerte sin fin we are told, “Más nada ocurre, no, sólo este sueño/ desorbitado/ que se mira a sí mismo en plena marcha” (116). Similarly, the water “quiere […] un tálamo de sombra,/ un ojo,/ para mirar el ojo que la mira” (124–25). These passages represent the ultimate aspiration of the poet: to overcome the inherent anthropomorphism of human thought. He can achieve the absolute only if he eliminates the self which is his blind spot; his dream is “inmune a la mácula” (116, and “inmaculada” 119), “desorbitado” (116), and finally realized as an eye which pulls itself out (139–40). This same, futile, destructive effort to simultaneously contain and escape the limits of the creative self can be seen in the reflexivity of the Soledades, in its varied attempts at self-objectification and self-reference, epitomized by the Goedelian paradox of Micón’s verses. In Muerte sin fin, the ultimate failure of the poet’s aspiration is met with a 23 Debicki (105) compares Gorostiza’s catalog of plants to those in Góngora’s Soledades. His observation can be expanded to include the catalogs of other creatures as well.

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flight from the life of the mind. As in Le Cimetière marin, the poet abandons his quest in a headlong descent into the physical world (Rubín, Una poética 181; 187), in this case, identified with the degraded “putilla.” His final choice is but the obverse of his original ascetic vision in which the mind is separate from the body, the intellect solitary and sterile. The latent image throughout Muerte sin fin is that of one pair of eyes gazing, Narcissus-like, into another pair of eyes which are its mirrors.24 Self and other are separated by infinite reflections of solitude. As Xirau points out, El hombre de Gorostiza se encuentra en plena soledad, en “esta oquedad que nos estrecha —en islas de monólogos sin eco.” La palabra es para Gorostiza la hueca expresión de esta oquedad.  (Tres poetas 19)

Yet Gorostiza suggests the possibility of another response. As Paz points out, Muerte sin fin represents “el apogeo de cierto estilo de ‘poesía pura’ y simultáneamente, es una burla de ese mismo estilo” (Las peras 90). The poem is self-critical, denying its own process as it occurs, with a series of negations: “donde nada ni nadie, nunca está muriendo” (141). As in Un Coup de dés, this utter negation has a positive aspect: it signifies imminence,25 virtuality. While the poem fails to name the absolute, it succeeds in another sense by at least evoking infinite possibility: a total, if illusory, vision of the universe.26 Gorostiza’s ambivalence27 establishes a point of departure for future poetry, which will shift its claims from a solipsistic quest for the absolute to a new affirmation of the poetic word, an affirmation which is rooted in the function of language as a bridge between self and other. Blanco28 is a prime example of this future poetry. The epigraphs with which the poem begins, like those of “Himno entre ruinas,” announce a 24 Cf. the “narcissistic self-reflexivity” Mary Barnard observes in Góngora’s Polifemo 53.421–24, in which the cyclops gazes at his one eye in the mirroring waters, in a “specular moment” of endless desire. As she writes, “the mirroring waters offer but a simulacrum of the self, a doubling that undermines knowledge of the self ” (“The Gaze” 78–79). 25 Dehennin, Antithèse, cites 130–31 of Muerte sin fin (“Por un aire de espejos inminentes […] etc.”), noting “Alors que le ‘silence blanc’ se situait ‘en la orilla letal de la palabra’, celui-ci nous échappe, mais il ne s’ouvre pas pour autant sur le néant” (110). 26 As Elizondo observes, the death of creation occurs in an “instante en que la potencia del mundo se concentra en el índice de Dios para actualizarla” (40). One is reminded of the evocative finger of Mallarmé’s “Sainte”; while nothing occurs, infinite possibility is suggested. This deictic gesture will also be a point of departure for César Vallejo. 27 Paz, “Muerte sin fin” (Las peras 90), observes that Muerte sin fin is characterized by a fundamental “ambigüedad poética,” which is expressed by a series of tensions throughout the poem. Of the tensions he lists, the conflict between silence and the word is of particular importance regarding Muerte sin fin’s role as a precursor for future poetry. 28 All citations from Blanco refer to the 1972 edition. Santí’s work, especially Archivo Blanco, is an essential supplement.



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legacy and a direction. The quotation from the Hevajra Tantra signals a reaction to an ascetic tradition, an assertion that the spiritual is attained through matter rather than against it. The ascetic quality of the Symbolist quest, its search for a form whose purity is derived from absence, will be abandoned in Blanco. Yet the subsequent quotation from Mallarmé is an acknowledgment that the Symbolist heritage is not simply negative. Mallarmé is evoked as the quintessential poet of process, the poet who attempted, to the ultimate extent, to make the composition of poetry itself the subject of poetry.29 Blanco, departing from Mallarmé’s work, will be a tantra30 of the poetic process. By naming naming, the text aspires to enter a kind of spirit beyond this; like a tantric adept, the poet works through the material – through words – to create a silence. The legacies of Tantrism and Symbolism also inform the structure of Blanco. Paz, writing of Un Coup de dés, claimed, “Nuestro legado no es la palabra de Mallarmé sino el espacio que abre su palabra” (El arco 276). Blanco is composed as a dispersion of signs in space, a space which is not the immense, engulfing void that Fuentes observes in Baroque art, but is rather, as Jean Franco notes, a field of potential relations (84–86). The reader participates in the organization of the poem by selecting from the alternative readings proposed by Paz. These alternative readings reflect a tantric organization. The emanation of smaller poems from the center of Blanco, as Ruth Needleman points out, parallel the tantric design of the mandala as well as its incarnation as chakras in the human body (42).31 In Blanco, the tantric symbol of the emanation of the one to the many is associated with Mallarmé’s notion of the role of blank spaces in his poem; in Mallarmé’s view, these spaces interact with the text to form the “subdivisions prismatiques de l’Idée.”32 Blanco has a similar relationship to its own poetic space. Blanco begins “en blanco,” blank, and then fans out as “lo blanco,”33 whiteness, the presence of all the colors of the prism. Blanco differs from its Symbolist predecessors, however, in its joyous aspiration to plenitude. While Mallarmé resorted to various measures to restrain the poetic word, to preserve its virtuality through absence, Paz seeks 29 For Paz’s interpretation of the poem from which the quotation from Mallarmé is taken, see “Stéphane Mallarmé.” 30 Various critics have studied the influence of Tantrism in Blanco. See especially Needleman, Callan, Ivask (35–43), Feustle, Poust, and Phillips. For Paz’s own views on tantrism, see Conyunciones y Disyunciones. 31 Needleman (42). Needleman specifically discusses the representation of the mandala as a lotus whose petals emerge from a central corolla. See also Román Odio and Ulacia. 32 Stéphane Mallarmé, “Préface,” (to Un Coup de dés) (405). 33 Octavio Paz, “Notas” following Blanco. My phrasing here refers to the fact that the original editions of the poem are printed on a single page, which is unfolded like a fan during the process of reading.

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to recharge the poetic word by expressing its virtuality in its energetic presence.34 The text of Blanco is generated as a succession of words derived from each other. With this technique of derivatio Paz elaborates upon the tantric concept of bindu,35 positing a seed syllable out of which all words come. Words acquire vitality in their capacity to transform themselves: “el comienzo/ el cimiento/ la simiente” (Poust 472). Yet, like colors, individual words are only a part of the total presence, or whiteness, of language. In Blanco language is portrayed as a ringing of changes of sounds about something which cannot be contained by any one word. The series of transformations which words undergo in Blanco is paralleled in other, musical cycles of transformation. Paz identifies poems of transit between the four major colors, the four elements, and four levels of knowledge. In these cycles of transformation perception is made relative, as one element is transformed into the next. The dissolution of category boundaries, typical of Surrealist art, does not produce the horror we observed in the Soledades. The absence of cosmic order is resolved in an Eastern view of integration. The polar divisions of reality which form the basis of Western thought are overruled. Like words on the pages of the poem, all things are but images, variations generated out of the same central source. The process of generation resembles the architecture of a Hindu temple, which is composed of an exterior depicting millions of images, and an interior representing their source as a symbol of erotic union. In Blanco, the source of all the correspondences between words, levels of thought, elements, and colors, in short, between all things of the world, is this central moment of communion between self and other. Sexual union is described as the nexus of word and thought, and the lovers’ eyes meet as a compenetration of self and other: me miro en lo que miro  es mi creación esto que veo como entrar por mis ojos  la percepción es concepción en un ojo más límpido  agua de pensamiento me mira lo que miro  soy la creación de lo que veo

Gorostiza’s “conciencia-espejo,” as “Himno entre ruinas” describes it, dissolves in this passage of Blanco: the self which begins as constrained by the limits of individual perception (“es mi creación esto que veo”) becomes the creation of the other. Blanco depicts a liberation from solipsism through 34

It is perhaps for this reason that Alazraki refers to Blanco as “un prisma al revés”

(181). 35 As Poust, referring to the disposition of the words “Sí” and “No” on the pages of Blanco, observes, “La ‘agilidad’ de estas palabras monosilábicas nos sugiere la idea tántrica del fonema como gota de energía (bindu)” (478).



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otherness. Where Gorostiza and Góngora channeled fear before the limits of the self into destruction, Paz portrays the dissolution of these limits as release, as a return to a wholeness before individuation. The return of the self to plenitude through de-individuation is paralleled in the return of the poetic word to a silence which is now charged with potential. The poem ends with a reprise – a sort of Indian raga – in which key passages of the poem are shuffled in an arbitrary order. As Enrique Pezzoni writes, this final passage is “una efusión de palabras e imágenes que se oponen, se descartan mutuamente y establecen ecuaciones infinitamente reversibles” (252). The logic and ultimately the chronology which separate language and reality break down so that the poem can be apprehended as a totality which transcends temporal divisions. The journey of the word from “lo ‘en blanco’ a lo blanco —al blanco” becomes a tantric “viaje inmovil.”36 The entire poem is depicted as one full, consecrated moment which is a perpetual present. The time of Blanco resembles the Hindu sense of circular time, in which, as Raimundo Panikkar describes it, there is no conception of the eternal as distinct from the temporal; time is “de-eschatologized.”37 The time predicaments observed in the poetry of Góngora and Gorostiza are notably absent; like the image of the orange in “Himno entre ruinas,” time in Blanco is depicted as one absolute fullness. This fullness is the final silence of Blanco, the transparency left at the end of the poem. This journey of the word from silence to a second, richer silence is explained, in one of the closing statements of Blanco, as the paradox of poetic language: “El habla/ Irreal/ Da realidad al silencio.” Poetic language is unreal in so far as it cannot render, but it can create a silence which is able to communicate what language cannot say.38 As Alazraki, citing Ernst Cassirer (7–8), points out, in language man reduces reality to formulations, formulations which reflect the structure of human thought more than the objects in reality which are being named. Poetry can be a route out of this solipsistic impasse; it can, in Alazraki’s words, “obligarle [al lenguaje – C. C.] a callarse para que de ese silencio —momentáneo, tallado en la materia del lenguaje como su espacio— emerja su mensaje más profundo: un puente de retorno hacia la verdadera realidad” (179–80). Paz has found a way to use the language of the self to get beyond the self, to undermine the inherent solipsism of language. If language stands as a mirror between the self and the phenomenal world, Paz strips this mirror of its silver barrier, imparting 36 Paz uses this term to describe the original edition of Blanco. See Paz, preface to the Ladera este edition of Blanco (145). 37 Panikkar describes Hindu circular time as “desescatalogizado” (219). I am applying his term to time in Blanco. 38 As Alazraki states, regarding the silence Paz creates in his poetry, “Ese silencio es la palabra más genuina de la poesía porque desde ella habla aquello que el lenguaje no puede hacer hablar” (184).

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to language, within the space of the poem, an ultimate transparency: “la transparencia es todo lo que queda.” Blanco is an attempt to address the crisis of the modern: humanity’s loss of a mythos which would integrate us within the cosmos, our sense of exile in an infinite expanse of space. The rise of technology enhanced the perception of the cosmos as mechanism, devoid of any integrating image. If Góngora’s poetic experiment was marked by ontological crisis at the earliest moments of scientific inquiry, this crisis was surely intensified for his successors of the Industrial Age. The subject of modernity becomes a prisoner of his abstractions; so too, the modern poet. Symbolism, like Gongorism, is driven to attain the absolute, yet is consistently defeated by the subjective limits of poetic expression. Mired in the crisis of the poetic word, Symbolism reaches a final impasse in a flight from the life of the mind: Gorostiza’s escape with his “putilla.” Paz, in Blanco, rejects such a flight from the intellect. Rather, he seeks to dislodge poetry from its impasse by reframing the goals of the poet. He abandons the quest for the absolute and its inevitable foundering in nihilism. For Paz, poetic creation does not emerge ex nihilo, only to be immediately and inexorably lost to the void. Instead he draws on Eastern and indigenous beliefs39 to find a positive view of the space surrounding the fragmented universe of the modern era. He sees potential rather than loss in blank space, because it provides a field for new configurations, and identifies a new poetry corresponding to this view of space. As Paz writes, ¿Quién sabe […] cuál es la imagen que se forma en un mundo que, por primera vez, tiene conciencia de ser un equilibrio flotando en pleno infinito, un accidente entre las innumerables posibilidades de la energía? Escritura en un espacio cambiante, palabra en el aire o en la página, ceremonia: el poema es un conjunto de signos que buscan un significado, un ideograma que gira sobre sí mismo […]. En su rotación el poema emite luces que brillan y se apagan sucesivamente. El sentido de ese parpadeo no es la significación última pero es la conjunción instantánea del yo y el tú. Poema: búsqueda del tú.  (El arco 282)

39 In addition to using aspects of Tantrism, Paz employs the imagery of the Aztec water cycle to give his poem the attributes of a mythos. Paz uses the water cycle as a myth of redemption; rain returns and “verdea la palabra.” This use of the water cycle to produce a vision of integration stands in sharp contrast to the stagnant waters which represent the poetry of exhaustion in “Himno entre ruinas” (“este chapoteo de aguas muertas”) and in Muerte sin fin (“este fecundo río/ de enamorado semen que […]/ no desemboca en sus entrañas mismas”). Paz’s use of a complete, mythic cycle also contrasts with the use of a gutted version of the Persephone myth in the Soledades. For a discussion of Paz’s use of Aztec mythology in Blanco, see Feustle, “Una síntesis”.



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The new poetry will not be a poetry of solipsism but of otherness. The poetry of Góngora and the Symbolists is bent on attaining the absolute hegemony of the self, the remaking of the world as subjective expression. The frustration of this quest is expressed as massive annihilation: Apocalypse in the Soledades and Muerte sin fin. Fear of self-dissolution is projected onto the poetic creation, which, in turn, self-destructs. Yet in Blanco self-dissolution does not entail loss of self; in moments of erotic union it signifies a return to wholeness. While Góngora and Gorostiza evince a common asceticism, equating the erotic with death, pain, or degradation, Paz makes eros the center of his poetic vision. The journey of the poetic word past the barrier of self-reflection to a fertile silence is identified with the moment of the union of self and other in erotic love. The reconciliation between self and other creates a harmonious relationship between self and world. While in the Soledades the loss of a mediatrix is a statement of disorientation, Woman in Blanco does not mediate between appearances and ultimate reality. Rather, she is a vehicle to the knowledge of relativism: “el mundo es tus imágenes.” The dissolution of category boundaries, which at times produced the effects of horror and the grotesque in the Soledades, is now for Paz a route to an understanding that all categories are relative, prismatic divisions of a single transparency. If there is an ontological pilgrimage in Blanco, it is not through a “soledad confusa”; it is rather, a “Peregrinación hacia las claridades.” Blanco also achieves a resolution of the problem of time which was so conflictive in the previous poetry. In the poetry of Góngora and Gorostiza, the loss of the Judeo-Christian eschatological framework produces an inability to integrate the planes of the eternal and the temporal. As a result, both poets create works which are stymied in time predicaments; time appears as a Möbius strip, caught in either stasis or sterile repetition. Both Góngora and Gorostiza display a constant failure in their efforts to stop the process of time; their images are continually undone by temporality. In both cases the poets are defeated by their quest for the absolute; they are repeatedly confronted with the subjective limits of human time. In Blanco, on the other hand, the very subjective moments of human contact are the basis for a transcendence of temporality. Time is depicted as pure presence, neither eternal nor temporal, but one absolute time. Blanco’s time of plenitude stands in sharp contrast to the endless, sterile spirals of time which structure Muerte sin fin and the Soledades. Thus Blanco, in its response to the crisis of the modern, is able to transcend the impasse reached initially in the Soledades and later in Symbolist poetry. Yet Blanco remains equivocal. The search announced by “Himno entre ruinas,” for “la proporción que rige al himno y al curso,/ al baile, a la ciudad y a la balanza,” as Paz implies in El arco y la lira, is ultimately beyond the scope of the written word. Harmony between humanity and its creations

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is the social goal of the future, and here I will acknowledge the possibilities for a socio-critical (Cros) and postcolonial reading of Paz, with all that that implies regarding the hegemonic function of colonial Gongorism.40 Paz in the end embraces the Gongorine sublime over the Gongorine agonic. In Paz’s poetry, a combination of myth, the idealization of indigenous culture,41 eastern spiritual beliefs and a variant of Western existentialism combine to compensate through art for what Mexican nationalism cannot resolve in social reality: what García Canclini has termed “modernism without modernization” (67–68), the literary expression of the institutionalization and stagnation of the Mexican revolution. Paz’s poetry lacks the quality of defamiliarization found in that of Góngora and the Symbolists. Edmond Cros, in his analysis of Paz’s prose work El laberinto de la soledad, comments on how the system of metaphors of the work reproduce the deep structure of an ideological code. As Cros writes, One is struck […] by the way in which the table of correspondences I have established reproduces in its own way, Dessau’s description of the foundations of the ideology of the postrevolutionary, Mexican, nationalistic bourgeoisie – the problematics of the individual’s wholeness and quest for the self […], the building of a community – around two essential axes of authenticity and communion.  (188)

He adds: In the formation of this new ideology, Dessau defines two essential points – the reproblematization of the concept of freedom, which will henceforth be defined as a function of national self-interest, and a valorization of the notion of Mexican national character, which obscures all differences in social class.  (162)

Paz’s resolution of the limitations of language in the union of self and other thus has an ideological function; it exists as a form of false consciousness, 40 Beverley, Del Lazarillo (89), notes: “A la pregunta de cómo el gongorismo atacado y censurado como heterodoxo en España durante la vida de Góngora, llega paradójicamente a ser el discurso estético oficializante de la colonia en el siglo XVII, podemos entonces responder: Representa, en esencia, una nueva modalidad de colonización por las letras en vez de por las armas (aunque, por supuesto, éstas quedan en reserva).” Citing Concha (46), he adds: “La memorización de largas tiradas de Góngora hacía que los alumnos coloniales, desde niños, se apartaran de sus circunstancias inmediatas para sumergirse, mediante el espejismo seductor de las palabras, en la distante patria metropolitana.” 41 As Brotherston argues, “gods and myths from Mexico’s Indian culture do little more than decorate Paz’s poems as counterweights or exotica. When this is not true […] then they are as it were self-destructive, self-canceling” (140).



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as a mythic resolution of social contradictions. Paz erects in Blanco a kind of erotic hortus conclusus outside of history,42 where the myth of the primitive functions, much like the pastoral often functioned within Renaissance epic, as a utopian counterpoint in nationalist literature. His mythic space of social and sexual harmony functions as what Doris Sommer would call a “foundational fiction,” a less extreme, but nonetheless related form of idealization such as the heroic rapes of Hapsburg art which decorate the Soledades. Paz’s mythos effects a magical reconciliation of words and things solely on the level of the aesthetic. But if harmony between humanity, its creations and nature is a social goal beyond the province of art, poetry, the hymn amid the ruins, can still point the way. In our response as readers we can appreciate the poem announced by “Himno entre ruinas,” Blanco, one of the great constellation poems after Mallarmé, as a kind of utopian meditation. As Paz wrote in El mono gramático (114), language is “[la] consecuencia (o la causa) de nuestro destierro del universo, significa la distancia entre las cosas y nosotros. También es nuestro recurso contra esa distancia” (Alazraki 184). This paradox of language informs the structure of Paz’s poetic constellation, flashing in space. Paz announces the ultimate aspiration of the modern poet, who, out of the ontological shipwreck of the modern, a shipwreck heralded by Góngora and celebrated by Mallarmé, generates a poem which dares to signal, for an instant, an intimation of wholeness, an “inmanencia de presencia” (El arco 284). A counter-example to Paz’s hegemonic appropriation of the Góngora– Symbolist parallel can be found in the work of a poet who pre-dates 42 To the extent history appears in Blanco, its appearance is brief and the destruction of history is held up for expiation through ritual communion between self and other: […] el jeroglífico (agua y brasa) En el pecho de México caído. Polvo soy de aquellos lodos. Río de sangre,   Río de historias De sangre,   Río seco: Boca de manantial Amordazado Por la conjuración anónima De los huesos, Por la ceñuda peña de los siglos Y los minutos: El lenguaje Es una expiación […] As Malpartida points out, “Frente a este río de la historia y sus múltiples manifestaciones, Paz opone los ríos de otro cuerpo, el cuerpo de la muchacha que es como […un] ‘río dormido’ […]. Pero quien mira es, a su vez otro río que al contemplar al otro se ve a sí mismo a través de lo mirado” (53).

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­ orostiza and Paz, César Vallejo. Vallejo, a Peruvian who spent the later G part of his career in exile in France and in Republican Spain, combines the Gongorine Baroque and various forms of European vanguardism, including French Symbolism, with an indigenist utopian social program: the result is a poetry which continues the entropic, defamiliarizing tendencies of Góngora while looking forward to an historical resolution of the problems of modernity. Vallejo’s use of Góngora’s work is less explicit than that of Paz; as Nadine Ly points out, Vallejo’s absorption of various texts is so original that often traces of influence are quite subtle and more organic than literal (“Las lenguas” 204). We do, however, know that Vallejo consciously worked to incorporate the influence of early Peninsular poetry. According to Jean Franco, Antenor Ornego, one of Vallejo’s first mentors, reported seeing twenty to thirty early compositions by Vallejo influenced by Spanish Golden Age and Medieval literature (César Vallejo 15). Xavier Abril adds that “Vallejo asoció lo nuevo a la tradición clásica, apoyándose en diversos ejemplos, incluso en el de Góngora y Quevedo” (Abril 15). We also know that Vallejo read Fortún and Diez Canedo’s anthology of French poetry in translation, which included poems by Baudelaire, Rimbaud and Mallarmé, as well as selections of avant garde poetry in the Spanish magazine Cervantes (Franco, César Vallejo 15), and the specific question of the influence of Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés on Vallejo has been well documented (Abril). The clearest example of Vallejo’s integration of the combined influences of Góngora and Mallarmé occurs in “Pedro Rojas,” the third poem in Vallejo’s Spanish Civil War series, España, aparta de mí este cáliz. Before embarking on a close reading of that poem, I will attempt to lay a foundation by tracing various manifestations of vanguardist and Baroque concerns within the corpus of Vallejo’s poetry, first by focusing on the topos of the utopian meditation upon ruins in one of his early poems and then by examining the development of a Marxist form of messianism in selections from his Civil War poetry.43 Vallejo’s meditation upon the ruins of Incan civilization, “Nostalgias imperiales,” comes from his first book of poems, Los heraldos negros (1919). The poem has been undervalued as a local-color poem, what Adam Sharman has termed a “modernista exoticization of the pre-Columbian” (“Semicolonial” 198). Yet most critics agree that the poem mourns the destruction of indigenous civilization from a position of political agency. Antonio Cornejo Polar has pointed out that the poem and the others which accompany it are a reaction to specific historical circumstances: the sudden and rapid modernization of Trujillo by international capital during the five-year period of 1913–18. As Cornejo Polar writes,

43

Joan Gilabert (53) refers to Vallejo’s “mesianismo marxista-bíblico” in España.



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Por debajo […] estaba sucediendo […] un proceso económico y social de enorme trascendencia: la concentración monopólica y la desnacionalización de las haciendas e ingenios azucareros de la región, absorbidos por el capitalismo moderno e internacionalizado, con el consiguiente cambio de los modos de producción y de las relaciones sociales, que van de un sistema arcaico, con claros resabios precapitalistas, a otro integrado a la dinámica mayor de la modernidad.  (“César Vallejo” 674)

Like Góngora at the end of the Soledades, Vallejo presents the fall into an Iron Age of a primitive agrarian communal way of life, the Incan empire marked like the Hapsburg as the end of a millennial sun age (“Sol/edad”).44 Thus “Nostalgias imperiales” begins, as does the Soledades, at twilight; the poem is crepuscular, liminal, in an historic as well as in an aesthetic sense. In its liminality the poem reflects the poet’s own “in between” position, the hybridity or border mentality Stephen Hart has identified in Vallejo’s work. To explain the aesthetic function of such a hybridity, Nadine Ly adopts an approach curiously similar to her many readings of generic confusion, innovation and intertextuality in the Soledades,45 arguing that Vallejo projects the diglossia of his mestizo and exile positions (the product of two generations of Spanish–indigenous marriage, he marries a French woman in exile) into “un caso límite de la heterogeneidad intradiscursiva” (Ly, “Las lenguas” 193). Such heterogeneity consists of a series of imbricated tensions between and within languages: Quechua (or French) and Spanish, written and oral, hermetic and mundane, scriptural and vernacular, and, as in Góngora, the creation of a poetic metalanguage from previous literary traditions, ancient and modern (Ly, “Las lenguas”). Perhaps one of the more significant examples of this global diglossia (in essence a form of heteroglossia) in “Nostalgias imperiales” is the juxtaposition of myths of different imperial traditions: the Inca creation myth (the reference to Manco-Cápac), the references to Greek mythology (the Parques, the metamorphoses into trees) and to JudeoChristian texts and rites (e.g. the “opúsculo bíblico”). Such a hybridization makes the different mythological traditions interchangeable, as Hart observes (“César Vallejo” 156), implicitly placing the Incan myth of origins on a par with those of the West, and even further implying that the indigenous myth, like the ancient stones upon which the conquerors built their churches, is indeed even more foundational. The four sonnets which compose “Nostalgias imperiales” seem to describe a static vision of post-Apocalyptic despair. As Jean Franco writes, they are 44 See Beverley, Aspects (100), regarding this sense of “soledad” in Góngora’s poem; the conceit “Sol edades” was used originally by Góngora in his “Égloga piscatoria en la muerte del Duque de Medina Sidonia.” 45 See, for example, Ly, “La grande clarté” and “Las Soledades.”

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structured around images of desacralization and emptiness. There is a closed chapel, a desecrated altar with the bell tolling in the distance, the snow-white eyes of an old woman colored by a ‘blind sun without light’, a lake (of stillness or stagnation) in which the Inca Emperor and SunGod Manco-Cápac weeps as he drowns. Cut off from any possibility of future, the figures and landscapes are bathed in the fading light of what has gone.  (César Vallejo 54)

Yet the traces of the buried Incan past which emanate from the earth paradoxically suggest a reversal of the present order, even at their uttermost point of negation, as the poet on the borderline meditates upon the fall of the indigenous empire into its present state of castration and subjugation: En el muro de pie, pienso en las leyes que la dicha y la angustia van trocando ya en las viudas pupilas de los bueyes se pudren sueños que no tienen cuándo.  (III. 3–4, Ferrari)

In this meditation on the exchange of “la dicha y la angustia,” Vallejo alludes to the quechua concept of “pachacuti,” a revolution or turning around/over (cuti) of time and space (pacha) (Urton 41), a messianic concept which relates not only to indigenous cosmogony but also to the hybrid political theories of Vallejo’s associate José María Mariátegui. According to Cornejo Polar, Vallejo and Mariátegui shared a parallel utopian social vision based on the construction of “una modernidad otra, que desde la marginalidad asalta y se apropia del centro, haciéndolo suyo, a su manera, dotándolo de sentidos imprevistos. De alguna forma, se trata del proceso de construcción de la propia modernidad” (“César Vallejo” 679).46 Thus he sees Mariátegui’s defense of “el indigenismo vanguardista” as a way of constructing a different form of modernity as a socialist future which incorporates the model of primitive communism in Incan culture. Vallejo, he argues, sought to express in the realm of poetry what Mariátegui defended in the language of political theory (“César Vallejo” 677). Thus in the hybridity of “Nostalgias imperiales” Vallejo elaborates an indigenous vanguardism, an “other” experience of modernity, realized as a subversive re-reading of

46 See also Carlos Alonso’s argument regarding “the appropriation of European and American technologies, discourses, and expectations that had not risen organically from the context in which they were nevertheless grafted” (156). As he argues, “But why not see in this appropriation a kind of organicity proper to Spanish American circumstance? Why not argue instead that Spanish America experienced the modernity that was organic to it, without having the latter carry forever the mark of a weakness and an incompleteness that only arise from the comparison with its metropolitan counterpart?” (156)



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Western religion and aesthetics through the prism of the experience of his people. Vallejo’s sub-version of Judeo-Christian religious ritual is the subject of the central stanzas of the first sonnet. An entire biblical tract dies, vanquished in the one “palabra” of “asiática emoción” of twilight in the countryside of Mansiche; here indigenous orientalism bursts the bounds of even spoken language to become a powerful hieroglyph of Incan sacred space or huaca.47 Three “potos”48 sit on a stone bench: Indians who raise their lips to drink maize liquor, chicha, become an altar triptych or retable raising in chorus their golden Eucharist. The Christian sacrament of the Eucharist is thus not only reframed syncretically (González Vigil 106), but parodied, and the suggestion of a superior form of social communion, the prospect of an egalitarian society here on this earth, is evoked, continuing a system of imagery throughout Vallejo’s poetry which many have seen as anticipating liberation theology.49 The pain of Western domination is remembered by the very trees, in the next stanza, as “la rancia pena de esta cruz idiota”: Christian symbolism has been turned into an indictment of those who originally imposed it.50 Vallejo enacts a parallel subversive re-creation of Western poetics in his approach to vanguardist predecessors (and here I am extending the use of the term “una poética de la subversión” applied originally by Julio Ortega to Vallejo’s civil war poetry).51 There are in “Nostalgias imperiales” many fragmentary echoes of French modern and Symbolist poetry; from Baudelaire’s “Harmonie du soir” Vallejo borrows the sunset, the drowning sun, the altar and the sacramental spectacle which also occurs in Mallarmé’s “Toast Funèbre”; from that poem he borrows a chalice, figures of doubt (“Je ne sais pas”) and the solemn movement in the air of words. Perhaps the most important Symbolist source for Vallejo is Mallarmé’s “Le Pitre châtié”: the submersion in the lake, the eyes, the poet as clown, the bounding legs, the zeal for rebirth and the poet’s disappearance into his own sepulchered landscape – a theme developed as well in “Toast Funèbre” – are all clearly repeated in the poem. But to what end? 47 See Rebecca Seiferle’s notes to her translation of this poem regarding the meanings of the words huaco and huaca. See also Urton (40) regarding the translation of huaca as “sacred space.” 48 “Potos” can mean either clay jugs or backsides in Peruvian Spanish. 49 See, e.g., Forgues, Fernández Cozman, González Vigil 109, and Ostria González 226. 50 This supports Stephen Hart’s observation (“Vallejo In Between” 20) that Vallejo can be seen to enact Homi Bhabha’s characterization of hybrid resistance: “strategies of subversion that turn the gaze of the discriminated back upon the eye of power” (34–35). 51 Julio Ortega uses the term “una poética de la subversión” to describe the radical poetics of Vallejo’s civil war poetry. As he states, “a la subversión del orden natural que la guerra impone y demanda, corresponde este radicalismo del discurso subvertido” (267).

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“Nostalgias imperiales” is both a Symbolist language game and it is not. The Symbolist fall of the word into the reification of language and its final death at its origins become for Vallejo the fall of his people. Sharman’s observation of the “indigenization of symbolist topoi” in other Vallejo poems can be applied here as well (“Semicolonial” 199). The star alphabet, the constellation of writing in the sky, of Mallarmé, becomes for Vallejo, in the opening lines of the poem, a blood star on the surface of muscle, his words fashioning the story of his race out of that corporeal pain just as the twilight, itself a “word of asiatic emotion,” fashions nostalgias of indigenous empire: En los paisajes de Mansiche labra imperiales nostalgias el crepúsculo; y lábrase la raza en mi palabra, como estrella de sangre a flor de músculo. El campanario dobla … No hay quien abra la capilla … Diríase un opúsculo bíblico que muriera en la palabra de asiática emoción de este crepúsculo.  (I. 1–8)

The contrast between the symbolist heritage of these lines and their use by Vallejo is striking. They suggest the “slippage between referential and symbolizing functions of language” and the rejection of a Saussurean notion of the arbitrariness of the signifier which Leslie Bary has observed in ­Vallejo’s poetry (54–55). Put simply, for all the parallels with Mallarmé, in indigenous eyes there really is a word in the sky, and Vallejo introduces the contrast of this “other” sense of language into his poetry. Thus Vallejo engages in a radical re-elaboration of symbolist poetics which both preserves its quality of defamiliarization – its radical critique of language – while reorienting the symbolist quest back into material and historical reality. In so doing, Vallejo parallels Walter Benjamin’s re-estimation of the mimetic faculty and its role in native cultures while imbuing this hieroglyphic view of language, again like Benjamin, with a theological and political imperative.52 In a further parallel with Góngora, who also explored such types of representational slippage,53 Vallejo often achieves the effect of defamiliarization 52 There has been relatively little attention to the parallels between Vallejo and Benjamin. One exception is the brief comparison of their political theories by Gutiérrez Girardo. Peyre provides basic close readings of some of the French texts under discussion in Burnshaw. 53 See Chapter 3, in which I refer to cases in the Soledades identified by Gates (The Metaphors 39) in which Góngora juxtaposes literal and figurative meanings of the same word, e.g.: “arrima un fresno a un fresno” (Dedicatoria, 13), where “fresno” metonymically refers to the Duke’s javelin, as well as to the ash tree against which he is asked to rest it. Compare this with the example Bary cites from Vallejo of the “cuchara” in his poem



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by focusing on the body in pain; in Vallejo’s case, frequently his own.54 The last stanza of “Nostalgias imperiales” continues the identification of the poet with the pain of his race announced at the beginning of the poem: La Grama mustia, recogida, escueta ahoga no sé qué protesta ignota: parece el alma exhausta de un poeta, arredrada en un gesto de derrota. La Ramada ha tallado su silueta, cadavérica jaula, sola y rota, donde mi enfermo corazón se aquieta en un tedio estatual de terracota.  (IV. 1–8)

In this passage, the poet’s body becomes ever more exteriorized onto the landscape like the living monuments which populate the poem: the fossilized anciana, the Incan troubadours metamorphosed into fig trees, the ghostly trace of the sacred coraquenque bird’s song of exile in its own land. The arbor becomes a ribcage for the poet’s heart as he too becomes as resigned and empty as a tomb idol.55 The figures of doubt (“no sé qué,” or previously, “no tienen cuándo”), common in the poetry of Góngora and Mallarmé as figures of the suspension of meaning, become the signs of traumatic loss of cultural memory. The epic song of a vanished empire cannot be sung, so it drowns, like Mallarmé’s punished clown, in its “máscara bufa,” drooling and lurching like a hanging man in the crashing waves of the ocean. Like Góngora, Vallejo repeats the trauma of historical despair in self-parody; the epic singer becomes as degraded as his people when the time of epic has been eclipsed like the sclerotic and mutilated sun-eyes of the Incan holy woman. As in the Soledades, the fragmentation of the body parallels the destruction of the body politic, a body politic Vallejo elaborates as an indigenous pantheism.56 In this failure of epic aspiration, the poem repeats the pattern of temporal “Pedro Rojas”: “Y esta cuchara anduvo en su chaqueta,/ despierto o bien cuando dormía, siempre,/ cuchara muerta viva, ella y sus símbolos.” As Bary writes, “The word ‘spoon’ here refers, without subordinating one level to the other, both to an actual, everyday spoon and to the symbolic valence it is given” (52). 54 See Hart, “César Vallejo: chchascapca nanain,” and Franco, “The Body as Text,” on Vallejo and his treatment of the body and pain. 55 Here Vallejo is continuing a pattern found in the modernista poetry of Darío; cf. his “Nocturno”: “Los que auscultasteis el corazón de la noche,” where he projects the sound of his heartbeat onto the world. Note also the use of “yodo” to describe the watercolor-like sky, similar to the use of “zinc” in “Sinfonía en gris mayor.” 56 O’Connnor (169) relates Vallejo’s use of synesthesia to indigenous pantheism; I am expanding his application of the term to “Nostalgias imperiales” here.

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collapse found in the Soledades and in Symbolist poetry, as the return to the origins of Incan civilization is stymied before their foundational moment. Manco-Cápac, the first man of his race and one of the founders of the imperial city of Cuzco, emerges in the Incan creation myth from Lake Titicaca, a lake formed by the god Inti’s tears. Yet in “Nostalgias imperiales” it is Manco-Cápac who cries, shipwrecked, marooned in a lake where “crude mirrors are forged,” alluding not only to the play of reflected light on the water but also to the presence of buried mirrors in indigenous graves. The founding of the city is thus undone as the anticipated Incan emperor is immobilized in the lake of his origins; he is evoked like the poet only to disappear into a landscape of tombs. In the final lines of the poem, the entire hillside, with its millennial eyes and dreams, is left blindfolded. Like Muerte sin fin, the poem ends in utter negation and stasis. The shipwreck of modernity57 announced in the Soledades and explored in Un Coup de dés, is rewritten by Vallejo through the prism of an indigenist Marxist poetics. Vallejo’s civil war poetry, written towards the end of his life, continues his focus on the writing process (the legacy of symbolism) and his incorporation of Baroque elements, indigenism and Marxism into an original and counterhegemonic poetics. The poem “España, aparta de mí este cáliz,” from his book of the same title, is particularly illustrative in this regard, as are the poems “Pequeño responso a un héroe de la República,” and finally, “Pedro Rojas.”58 Each of these works exhibits different aspects of the parallel between Gongorism and Symbolism, in their sum elaborating a politically committed and aesthetically radical trajectory. The first poem, “España, aparta de mí este cáliz,” continues the topos of the utopian contemplation of ruins of “Nostalgias imperiales” and its sense of historical liminality, as the choice facing war-torn Spain is posed as a conflict between civilization or the impending barbarism of a fascist victory. The contemplation of ruins occurs in the context of the Gongorine and Symbolist figure of temporal implosion, with the apocalyptic specter of a Falangist future collapsing into the present. The future is presented as one of truncated possibility (Higgins, “La revolución” 336–37) and regression, expressed as a frustration of childhood development, from nutrition to dentition to basic literacy and education.59 In Vallejo’s vision of a fascist victory, children will age before they have the opportunity to develop as part of a more general reversal of culture, a bitter commentary, perhaps, on the extinguishing of

57 Beverley, Aspects, refers to the Soledades as “a shipwreck on language itself, Un coup de dés” (112). 58 See Jrade for a different treatment of these three poems. 59 Paoli, España, Higgins, “La revolución”; and Franco, César Vallejo (238–39). The poem has been well studied and these are the more thorough close readings.



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the promise of the Republican literacy campaign at the hands of Francoist educators: ¡qué temprano en el sol lo que os decía! ¡qué pronto en vuestro pecho el ruido anciano! ¡qué viejo vuestro 2 en el cuaderno!  (Vélez)

The imagery of ruins found throughout the poem reinforces this effect of temporal implosion. The references to “pirámides,” “piedras” and “calaveras” predict the ruins of the human body, specifically the body of a child with all her promise, presented as degraded and reduced to the status of an object. The “sienes cóncavas” of childhood malnutrition become the “calavera, aquélla de la trenza,” as the lyric speaker imagines a schoolgirl reduced before his eyes to a skull, which then becomes “las sienes que andan con dos piedras.” “Piedras” are sacred in native cosmogony,60 but here they represent the endpoint in a process of objectification, as the very fabric and foundation of human life is degraded in a reversal of human cultural evolution. The stylistic devices used in “España” are typical of Vallejo’s posthumous poetry; the fragmented, chaotic structure has evoked comparisons with cubism, with its attendant demands on the reader to re-contextualize passages within Vallejo’s body of work in order to make sense of the fragments. Binary oppositions are frequent, as are images of tautology and paralysis, reflecting the crisis of the historical moment, in which the failure of the Spanish revolution and the rise of fascism in Europe appear imminent. The possibility of Spain’s defeat, as Higgins points out, is represented as a fall from the “vertigo y altura” of heavenly ascent (César Vallejo 162): si cae del cielo abajo su antebrazo que asen, en cabestro, dos láminas terrestres.

The portrayal of Republican aspiration in these lines is actually further nuanced; to me they suggest the fall of Icarus. Such an interpretation is reinforced by the slightly less cryptic allusion to this mythological event in texts such as “¡Y si después de tántas palabras …” from Poemas humanos, a poem also evocative of the failure of history (“¡Y si después de tánta historia sucumbimos,”): 60 Cf. the following excerpt from Vallejo’s play La piedra cansada: “¡Dios de piedra es el Inti, hombres de piedra son las quechuas; animales y plantas son de piedra, y hasta las mismas piedras son de piedra! En una piedra, a veces, hay sepultada toda una ciudad. Otra piedra contiene el rayo, otra el eco, otra el olor de la vida, otra el olor de azufre de la muerte” (II. 217).

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¡Levantarse del cielo hacia la tierra por sus propios desastres y espiar el momento de apagar con su sombra su tiniebla!61

By reading such an allusion to Icarus into the above-cited passage from “España,” one finds that the reference to “su antebrazo que asen/ en cabestro dos láminas terrestres,” “its forearm held still in a sling by two terrestrial splints,”62 becomes clearer. The image of immobilization between historical possibilities is expanded to evoke the wings tied to Icarus’s arms, such as those depicted, for example, in Ruben’s famous painting. This allusion to the fall of Icarus will be repeated in “Pedro Rojas,” where, as will be shown, there are further parallels to Góngora’s use of the reference in the Soledades. The image of Spain as a mother and schoolteacher fleeing like a political refugee “con su vientre a cuestas” continues the pattern of Baroque resonances in the poem; Boscán and Quevedo’s catachretic “Cargado voy de mí” comes to mind. The figure of Mother Spain in flight also reinforces the indigenous and Marxist concerns of the poem. As Cornejo Polar has pointed out, the theme of orphanhood so pronounced in Vallejo’s work has its source in native poetry (“César Vallejo” 683). The mother figure represents a model of revolutionary love in Vallejo’s work, her body a source of nourishment and social communion as well as the entrance, through sexual union, into the sacred on this earth.63 The fact that she withholds the birth of the socialist future as she carries her womb out of herself into exile is a striking image of Mallarméan suspension. The portrayal of her suffering and the poet’s as a re-enactment of the Passion underscores, once again, Vallejo’s appropriation of Christian liturgy for his project of liberation. In this poem the frustration of the Spanish revolution is depicted as a frustration of the communicative potential of language (Higgins, “On the Socialism” 14). Vallejo saw the “confusión de las lenguas” (“El arte” 95) to be one of the most telling signs of decadence in bourgeois literature, “proveniente del individualismo exacerbado que está en la base de la economía y política burguesas” (“El arte” 95). As he laments, Nadie dice a nadie nada. La relación articulada del hombre con los hombres, se halla interrumpido. El vocablo del individuo para la colectividad, se ha quedado trunco y aplastado en la boca individual.  (“El arte” 95)

61 See also Malpartida (856) regarding a similar allusion to the fall of Icarus in “Sermón de la barbarie,” also from Poemas humanos. 62 See Ballón Aguirre I. 463 for this translation. 63 See Higgins’ comments on “Tahona estuosa de aquellos mis bizcochos” and “Madre me voy mañana a Santiago” in César Vallejo (57–67).



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Vallejo explores this theme of communication in the poem, as orality descends into the painful language of denial (“digo es un decir”), a lowering of voice even to the point of the quieting of breath (“bajad la voz,” “bajad el aliento”), as the children of this earth are asked to silence the confusion of tongues and to contemplate the historic task at hand. The victory of fascism is portrayed as a paralysis of the writing process: the down stroke of the pen in the middle of a word will be interrupted along with the process of dentition, the little lamb – an iconographic detail of the primary school as well as the Christian symbol of sacrifice – will remain tied to the “great inkwell”: potential will be paralyzed in the monolith of fascist education. The progress through the alphabet will be reversed until this regression to origins stops at a foundational pain: ¡Cómo van a quedarse en diez los dientes, en palote el diptongo, la medalla en llanto! ¡Cómo va el corderillo a continuar atado por la pata al gran tintero! ¡Cómo vais a bajar las gradas del alfabeto hasta la letra en que nació la pena!

As Jean Franco writes, “the tragic possibility” of the fall of Spain “is envisaged as an interruption of the lesson, a moment when pencils are blunted and the text can no longer be written. Even the poet absents himself: si tardo si no veis a nadie, si os asustan los lápices sin punta, si la madre España cae —digo, es un decir— salid, niños del mundo; id a buscarla! …”  (César Vallejo 238–39)

The writing process has here transcended the Symbolist language game, acquiring an existential and political imperative, and the disappearance of the poet into his text transcends the Symbolist quest to escape the inherent anthropomorphism of language. The text gestures instead toward the collective agency of the masses, toward the possibility of transcending individualism (Franco, César Vallejo 238); as Franco writes, “the image of ‘teacher-Spain” […] suggests a didactic text written not by the poet but by the events themselves” (César Vallejo 239). In the poem “Pequeño responso a un héroe de la República,” Vallejo approaches the creation of such a revolutionary text in a graphic and dramatic image of a book sprouting from the body of a Republican hero: Todos sudamos, el hombligo a cuestas,

también sudaba de tristeza el muerto

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y un libro, yo lo vi sentidamente, un libro, atrás un libro, arriba un libro retoñó del cadáver exabrupto.

Like Góngora and Mallarmé, Vallejo has set out to rewrite the book of the world, yet once again he redirects this quest for the absolute back into the material and into its most fundamental expression, the human body. But unlike Paz, Vallejo’s focus on the mythic and the corporeal transcends the cultivation of the self of a spiritual retreat from history.64 Collectivity, in a political sense, rather than being left “trunco y aplastado en la boca individual” (El arte 95), is expressed, as the hero’s mouth enters the breath of the survivors and the air that surrounds them evaporates into the infinite: “Se llevaron al héroe,/ y corpórea y aciaga entró su boca en nuestro aliento” (Ortega 274). Air, the source of breath and voice as it passes through the body, becomes the expression of a Marxist sense of Mallarmean virtuality; poetry always exists in the ellipsis “entre el decirlo y el callarlo” as long as there are heroes to voice it in their history of revolutionary agency.65 For Franco, the body of the fallen hero becomes the utopian text of the progress of the species beyond the struggle for survival (“The body” 125). As she states, “If, in España, aparta de mí este cáliz, the book finally becomes a qualitatively different form of production, it is because it is a text written in a collective, not an individual, hand” (“The body” 126). In creating the image of the chain of books sprouting out of the fallen hero’s body, Vallejo draws on the Medieval iconographic tradition of the genealogical tree which grows from Adam’s umbilicus (Ortega 274), but he also draws on an older myth of origins from his own culture: Cuzco means “ombligo”; it was identified as the foundational city of the Incas precisely because it was the site of the belly button of the earth as mother. The chain of books repeats the original chain of individuals connected by a series of umbilical cords; the comrades who carry the “hombligo a cuestas” just as Mother Spain carried her “vientre a cuestas,” walk in search of the founda64 See Cros (ch. 9, especially 162, 188) for a reading of Paz’s concept of the mythic in socio-critical terms. Cf. Paz in Claude Lévi-Strauss, who writes that in moments of spiritual awareness, “La edad de oro está en nosotros y […] nos sentimos […] como una parte del todo, una palpitación de la respiración universal —fuera del tiempo, fuera de la historia” (125). Paz’s concept of universal breath represents an ideal of the containment of the very social contradictions Vallejo seeks to engage politically. 65 While Gorostiza’s God chokes on his originating logos, Vallejo’s conception of logos is charged with a sense of human possibility. See Bauknecht, who argues that in España Vallejo attempts to “reconstruct metaphorically the Christian logos […] by grafting it onto Marxist theory.” The entry of the hero’s mouth into the breath of his comrades is an inversion of the divine afflatus and parallels similar reversals of Christian symbolism such as have been noted by Hart in “The World.”



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tional city of the socialist future.66 The books, the histories of their struggle, are signposts on the way. The poem “Pedro Rojas” combines the messianic concerns of the previous poems from the collection while also illustrating the most compelling synthesis of Gongorine and Symbolist imagery. “Pedro Rojas” commemorates the death of an assassinated Republican political prisoner, drawing on anecdotes Vallejo received from the front. The poem is based on a testimonial source – a paper found in the pocket of a murdered peasant close to the cemetery of Burgos, which read: Abisa a todos los compañeros y marchar pronto. Nos dan de palos brutalmente y nos matan. Como lo ben perdío no quieren sino la barbaridá.

The poem also alludes to the habit of political prisoners of keeping their spoon in their pocket.67 As Hart and Cornejo Polar point out, the fallen soldier’s name is an archetypal composite: he is called “Pedro” for its symbolic association with the Incan “piedra” as well as with the Christian founding father, Saint Peter, and “Rojas” for its association with communism and the corporeal (Hart, Religión 87; Cornejo Polar, Escribir 236). The spoon plays its role as a harbinger of social communion and resurrection; the scene of Pedro eating with his children could be considered a proletarian version of the Last Supper (Hart, Religión 88). The habit of Pedro Rojas of writing his call to action in the air, repeated in the last lines as a triumph over death, combines the deictic gesture of Mallarmé’s “Sainte” with the imagery of Icaran aspiration and celestial writing of Góngora’s Soledades. The echoes of the previous poems are quite poignant. In both cantos of the Soledades, Góngora describes writing in the sky, in the second making specific reference to the daring flight of Icarus: caracteres tal vez formando alados, en el papel diáfano del cielo las plumas de su vuelo.  (I. 609–11) Audaz mi pensamiento   el Cenit escaló, plumas vestido, 66 By completing the poem with the statement that Rojas’ body “estaba lleno del mundo,” Vallejo reinforces the notion of a comrade–parent of the new socialist society, with a subtle gesture toward surpassing the male textual motherhood of Mallarmé’s “Don du poème” as well as with an element of bilingual punning: “plein(e)” means “pregnant” in French, and as Ortega points out, “pleine du monde” is a common expression which means “full of people.” 67 Vélez and Merino cite Ruiz Vilapana’s Doy fe, a book which circulated among Republican soldiers at the front, for these anecdotal sources of the poem (320–22).

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cuyo vuelo atrevido, si no ha dado su nombre a tus espumas, de sus vestidas plumas conservarán el desvanecimiento los anales diáfanos del viento.  (II. 137–43; Jammes, ed.)

In Mallarmé’s poem, Saint Catherine’s finger is poised to touch an invisible harp formed by an angel’s wing in flight; she is a musician not of real instruments, which she has hidden, but of silence. Her finger moving in the air evokes all the possibilities of musical sound before music is played: À ce vitrage d’ostensoir Que frôle une harpe par l’Ange Formée avec son vol du soir Pour délicate phalange Du doigt, que, sans le vieux santal Ni le vieux livre, elle balance Sur le plumage instrumental, Musicienne du silence.  (Marchal, ed. 26–27)

In borrowing from each of these poets, Vallejo appropriates the quest for the absolute, the sacred display of writing and of possibility, and the totalizing vision of language for a radically different project. Thus he writes: Papel de viento, lo han matado: ¡pasa! Pluma de carne, lo han matado: ¡pasa! ¡Abisa a todos compañeros pronto!

The echoes of “papel,” “viento,” “pluma,” “plumage” and “doigt” underscore a poetic vision which has been refocused. The Icaran aspiration portrayed by Góngora as a failed utopian struggle to surmount the (original) crisis of Spanish modernity continues in Vallejo, as we have seen in his other poems of this period, as the international aspiration to socialism in the face of impending defeat. The writing in the air gestures, mime-like, toward possibility, not as a vanguardist language game with pretensions to sacramental awe, but as the real possibility of remaking the book of the world as a record of the struggles of flesh-and-blood workers like Pedro Rojas, who represented the hopes of so many. Here Vallejo could be seen to be writing against the grain of another Gongorine allusion, the violent, narcissistic gesturing of the melancholic Polifemo, who boasts, “y en los cielos desde esta roca puedo/ escribir mis desdichas con el dedo” (52: 415–16). The writing in the air of



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Pedro Rojas, rather than celebrate the unbridled subjectivity of modern individualism, signs his name after the slogan “¡Viban los compañeros!,” thereby affirming instead the historical agency of the collective human subject: Lo han matado, obligándole a morir a Pedro, a Rojas, al obrero, al hombre, a aquel que nació muy niñín, mirando al cielo y que luego creció, se puso rojo y luchó con sus células, sus nos, sus todavías, sus hambres, sus pedazos. Lo han matado suavemente entre el cabello de su mujer, la Juana Vázquez, a la hora del fuego, al año del balazo y cuando andaba cerca ya del todo. Pedro Rojas, así, después de muerto, se levantó, besó su catafalco ensangrentado, lloró por España y volvió a escribir con el dedo en el aire: «  ¡Viban los compañeros! Pedro Rojas  » Su cadáver estaba lleno de mundo.

As Cornejo Polar has suggested, the incorporation of the element of orality in the quotation of the testimonial lines, with their unlettered spelling (“Viban”) suggesting a liminal space between writing and speech,68 signals a utopian synthesis of language which heralds a vision of an even greater social utopia (Escribir 245). The writing in the air, which points to the possibility of the kingdom of heaven here on this earth, now appears in the skies of Miranda de Ebro much as it glimmered in “Nostalgias imperiales” in the twilight of Mansiche. This “glimmer of utopia” – in Adorno’s sense – becomes Vallejo’s poetic expression of the Gongorine and Symbolist exploration of possibility. In a sense, Vallejo takes us full circle in his treatment of the political and aesthetic problems of Hispanic modernity as they were first confronted by Góngora. Vallejo returns to the Spain of Góngora and Cervantes with the eyes of a conquered and hybridized subject, witnessing the legacy of the failure of Spain to achieve the historic tasks of the bourgeois demo68 Hart, in “Word Play,” writing on betacism in España, sees the switch to “b” as a form of solidarity with popular culture. The description of Rojas’ martyrdom by the “b del buitre” rather than by the classical eagle, he argues, underscores the militiamen’s symbolic function as a working-class Prometheus. See also Ortega (273) regarding orality in the poem.

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cratic revolution: agrarian reform, separation of church and state, political democracy and national consolidation. The problem of Spanish belatedness, transferred to the colonial world and intensified there, is now seen by Vallejo on its home soil. The dream of agrarian reform and development beyond the bounds of absolutism, the utopian vision Góngora shared with the reformers of his day, anticipated the dreams of Vallejo and Mariátegui. The struggles of the workers and peasants of Spain, together with their supporters internationally, raised the possibility of the realization of those dreams in the victory of a socialist Republic. Vallejo and Góngora share not only a utopian vision but also a parallel political and aesthetic hybridity. Vallejo was drawn to an “other” Marxism, which combined the indigenist views of Mariátegui, the appreciation of the subaltern of Gramsci, and the internationalist perspective of Trotsky;69 his hybrid vision of the socialist society extends beyond the construct of national identity. The quality of various levels of diglossia in Vallejo’s poetry parallels a similar dynamic in the Soledades; Góngora’s deconstruction and reappropriation of classical forms are the product of a contest between the Renaissance legacy of imperial Latin culture and a rising, but conflicted, modern Spanish national culture in formation. Góngora’s political affiliations reflect the incompleteness of this project of Spanish national consolidation; his patron Medina Sidonia led the (failed) secessionist revolt of Andalusia and was associated with the anti-imperialist agrarian aristocracy. The aesthetic expression of Góngora’s heterogeneous national consciousness lies in the breakdown of the teleology of established genres, particularly of epic (Beverley, Aspects 69, 105). Góngora, in his construction of the Soledades, like Vallejo, portrays himself as a failed epic poet disappearing into the text of history; while his anti-imperialism may have been admittedly more a function of national and regional self-interest,70 Góngora could not, in the end, sing the praises of a race which vanquished the empire of Vallejo’s people. Góngora’s fragmented lyric subject anticipates the dying and disappearing subject of Symbolism; both articulate a self-referential, solipsistic poetics which is an expression of the truncated and isolated subject of modernity. If, as we have seen, the lyric voice of Gongorism cultivates muteness, the lyric voice of vanguardist poets like Vallejo borders on aphasia (Niebylski 28). In either case, lyric expression is at its most intense when it is most interstitial, as both cultivate a utopian poetics of innovation on the margins.71 Thus Gongorism thrived in the context of aristocratic private connoisseur69

See George Lambie’s excellent articles on the history of Vallejo’s political involve-

ment. 70 Regarding Góngora’s incorporation of references to the New World in the Soledades, see Beverley, ed. (157) concerning lines II. 775–82; Callejo (130–31); Rivers, “Góngora y el Nuevo Mundo,” and Cancilliere, “Las rutas para las indias.” 71 See Chapter 2 and Bary (55).



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ship, circulating in manuscripts outside the emerging Counter-reformation print culture72 and the pressures of censorship, while Symbolism arose in opposition to the pressures of the mass market. In this regard, Vallejo stands out for tying this avant-garde experimentation to genuine commitment to socialist struggle as the expression of a collective subject. The silent spaces in his poetry have been interpreted by some as the space of exclusion from the institution of literature, a space for an emerging subaltern voice (Dove 180). The border between language and silence for Vallejo becomes the border of possible liberation from the stagnation of human potential. The problem of the stagnation of historical progress is examined by the writers we have studied in the contemplation of ruins and in various figures of reprise and panoramic survey. Góngora’s formulaic use of the catalogs of epic evince both the quality of the collections of the studiolum as well as the encyclopedic quality of the archive. This encyclopedic survey becomes a Darwinian accounting in Gorostiza and in Vallejo,73 although Vallejo contextualizes the references to evolution within a Marxist view of history; the specter of historical failure in Vallejo suggests Engel’s comment that the chariot of history ascends a mountain of corpses. Paz appropriates a more traditional symbolism of reprise, suggesting a sense of epic containment, cycling through the four colors, the four elements, etc., to evoke the plenitude of the word in its constant transformation and circulation between self and other. Despite his laments over Mexican (and European) ruins, Paz’s response to the problem of modernity is ultimately individual and mythic, cultivating a temporality outside of history. The other poets do face the problem of modernity in temporalities which are conditioned by history: all, to one degree or another cultivate the figure of frustrated teleology in the various temporal paradoxes we have observed. Thus Mallarmé writes of “l’astre mûri des lendemains,”74 which Gorostiza develops in Muerte sin fin: “senil recién nacida,” Góngora’s fisherman speaks of a tear “antes enjuta que llorada,” and Vallejo witnesses the implosion of historical disaster into the present of Republican Spain. All of these figures of frustrated telos illustrate the failures of modernity, the legacy of the Baroque, 72 See Carlos Gutiérrez, “Las Soledades,” for an application of Bourdieu’s theories to Gongorism. 73 See Hart, Religión (63–72), for an account of Vallejo’s engagement with Darwinism. 74 The citation from Mallarmé is from his “Tombeau” (de Paul Verlaine): Ici presque toujours si le ramier roucoule Cet immatériel deuil opprime de maints Nubiles plis l’astre mûri des lendemains Dont un scintillement argentera la foule.  (Marchal, ed. 39) Here, the scintillation of Mallarmé’s star oppressed by an “immaterial” grief contrasts with Vallejo’s blood star in “Nostalgias imperiales.”

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which Beverley has seen as a repeated trauma in literature, a trauma which is especially poignant in the Hispanic world given the unusually intense contradictions of the Spanish early modern: the rapid and spectacular decline of the Hapsburg empire despite, and indeed because of, the precocious development of some, but only some, of the features of modernity.75 If, in the terms of Vicens Vives, the Castillian “bourgeois meteor” burnt out (308–309) before the institutions of modernity could coalesce, that legacy of “the dead star of distant tomorrows” – to use Mallarmé’s phrase – made a profound mark in the eclipsed possibilities of the Hispanic cultures of the future. The Góngora–Symbolist parallel in modern Latin American poetry thus traces the failure of the modern, the problem of the frustration of human progress, which continues to weigh heavily on contemporary history. The landscape of destruction and war with which Góngora closes the Soledades, or the specter of malnourished and dying children envisioned by Vallejo in his Civil War poetry, are perhaps all too familiar images for those of us who live in the era of twenty-first-century communal and imperialist violence. While the profession of the literary critic may be an unlikely place from which to bear witness to historical disaster, this position is not without precedent; indeed, the role of the public intellectual carries with it an ethical imperative. As critics and as writers, we have a responsibility that comes with vision and the ability to point, even if only in utopian gesturing as we follow the lead of the poets we choose to study, to the possibility of a different future, a future beyond the terrible contradictions of the legacy of modernity.

75 See Elliot, especially 281–316, for a description of the historical reasons for the decline of imperial Spain. Beverley summarizes the crisis of the Spanish Baroque as it pertains to Góngora in Aspects (5–8); he also develops the notion of an aesthetic corollary to the frustration of Hispanic modernity in his book Una modernidad obsoleta. See especially Una modernidad (25) regarding his idea of the Baroque as “una forma de neurosis cultural de América Latina en su etapa —no completada— post-colonial.”

Works Cited Abril, Xavier. “Vallejo y Mallarmé: La estética de Trilce y Una jugada de dados jamás abolirá el azar.” In Dos estudios. Bahía Blanca: Universidad Nacional del Sur, 1960, pp. 7–25 Alatorre, Antonio. “Nada ocurre, poesía pura.” Biblioteca de México, 1 (1991): 6–9. In Ruiz Abreu, Crítica sin fin, pp. 173–79 ——. “Notas sobre las Soledades (A propósito de la edición de Robert Jammes).” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica, 44.1 (1996): 57–97 Alazraki, Jaime. “Para una poética del silencio.” Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 343–45 (1979): 157–84 Alonso, Carlos J. The Burdens of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998 Alonso, Dámaso. “El desgarrón afectivo en la poesía de Quevedo.” Poesía española: Ensayo de métodos y límites estilísticos, 5th edn. Madrid: Gredos, 1976 ——. Estudios y ensayos gongorinos, 3rd edn. 1955; Madrid: Gredos, 1982 ——. Góngora y el Polifemo, 3 vols, 6th edn. 1960; Madrid: Gredos, 1980 ——. La lengua poética de Góngora. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1950 ——. Poesía española: Ensayo de métodos y limites estilísticos, 5th edn. 1950; Madrid: Gredos, 1976 ——, ed. Soledades, by Luis de Góngora. 1927; Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1982 Amann, Elizabeth. “Orientalism and Transvestism: Góngora’s ‘Discurso contra las navegaciones’ (Soledad primera).” Calíope, 3.1 (1997): 18–34 Armas, Frederick A. de. “Embracing Hercules/Enjoying Ganymede: The Homoerotics of Humanism in Góngora’s Soledad primera.” Calíope, 8.1 (2002): 125–40 Artigas, Miguel. Don Luis de Góngora: Biografía y estudio critico. Madrid: Revista de Archivos, 1925 Azar, Inés. Discurso retórico y mundo pastoril en la “Égloga segunda” de Garcilaso. Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, 5. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1981 Ball, Robert. “Imitación y parodia en la poesía de Góngora.” Actas del Sexto Congreso Internacional de Hispanistas, ed. A. M. Gordon and E. Rugg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977, pp. 90–93

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Index

Abad de Rute, see Fernández de Córdoba, Francisco Abjection:  67, 69 Acteon:  17, 58 Adam:  136 Adonis:  15 n.32 Adorno, Theodor:  139 Aeneas:  45, 62 n.20, 96, 98 see also Virgil Aesacus:  14 n.29 Agricola (Georg Bauer):  22 Albertian perspective:  73 Althussser, Louis:  61 Amazon:  68, 99 n.13 amoebean song:  91 Amymone:  55 anagnorisis, frustrated:  xvi, 65 Ancients and Moderns:  14, 30 see also Querelle Angulo y Pulgar, Martín de:  xii, xiii anthropomorphism:  xix, 76, 107, 117 Apollinaire, Guillaume:  113 Arachne:  xvii, 56, 57 arbitristas:  29 n.15, 36–8 and Moors:  36 n.31 González de Cellorigo, Martín de:  36 n.11, 37 Navarrete, Pedro Fernández de:  36 n.11 Valencia, Pedro de:  xii, 36, 38 n.32, 84 n.17 Arc, Joan of:  68 El arco y la lira:  123 Argo:  98 Argonauts:  98 Aristotelianism:  21, 22, 72 arrow:  115 see also Zeno “El arte y la revolución”:  134

Ascalaphus:  51, 88 n.2 Augustus, Cesar:  35, 38, 97 author function:  48 n.54 see also Foucault, Michel axiological nihilism:  xviii, 4, 42 n.40, 101 n.14 Ayamonte, Marquis and Marchioness of:  34, 69 Baconian empiricism:  72 Bakhtin, Mikhail:  57 n.12, 65 n.28 Baroque, theories of:  xix n.18 Barthes, Roland:  42 n.40, 70 Baudelaire, Charles:  126, 129 flâneur:  38 n.33 “Harmonie du soir”:  129 Béjar, Duke of:  59 Bello, Andrés:  106 Benjamin, Walter:  23, 24, 130 see also hieroglyphic view of language bindu:  120 see also tantrism Blanco:  xix, 108, 113, 119–25, 141 body in pain:  62 Book of the World:  xvii, 74, 77 Borges, Jorge Luis:  108 Boscán y Almogáver, Juan:  xxi, 6–9, 18, 19 and Quevedo, Francisco de:  9, 9 n.17, 134 “Carta a la Duquesa de Soma”:  6–7 sonnets:  7–9 Bourdieu, Pierre:  48 n. 54, 141 n. 72 bourgeois democracy:  xviii, 70, 139–40 bourgeois meteor:  xx, 142 Burgos:  137 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro:  xiii Camilla:  99 n.13

170

INDEX

Campanella, Tommaso:  22 Carpentier, Alejo:  70, 105 “Carta a la Duquesa de Soma”:  6–7 Cartesian perspectivalism:  73 cartography:  75 n.3, 78 n.9 Casa de Contratación:  22 Casas, Bartolomé de las:  54 Cascales, Francisco:  25 Castiglione, Baldassare:  6 Castillian (bourgeois) meteor:  xx, 142 category transgression:  69 Celestina, see Rojas, Fernando de Cephalus:  15 n.32 Cervantes, Miguel de:  xv, xviii, 30, 70 86, 108 Don Quijote de la Mancha:  45, 48, 108 chakra:  119 see also tantrism Charles V:  55, 98 Chrysostom, Dio:  28, 29 n.15, 36 “Le Cimitière marin”:  110, 111, 116 civilizing process:  xxi, 16 Claude Lévi Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo:  136 n. 64 Clytie:  88 n.2 colonization:  16, 36, 58, 124 Columbus, Christopher:  58, 89 n.3, 97 Conyunciones y disyunciones:  119 n.30 correspondences:  74, 77, 78 Cosimo, Piero di:  15 n.32 Un coup de dés:  xix, 107, 115–19, 126, 132 creatio ex nihilo:  93 cruel decorativeness:  61 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la:  67, 70 Primero sueño:  xvii, 72, 114 cultural neurosis:  vxii, 142 n.75 Cuzco:  132, 136 cyber reality:  17 Cyprus:  102 Danaë:  xvi, 55 Darío, Rubén:  105, 131 n.55 Darwin, Charles:  141 Da Vinci, Leonardo:  17 death wish:  xviii, 95 derivatio:  120 Derrida, Jacques:  42, 57, 70 see also play of différance “un desgarrón afectivo”:  9, 61

Diana:  17, 58 Díaz de Rivas, Pedro:  xviii, 43, 89 n.4 Dido:  99 dissimulatio artis:  10 Domitian:  38 “Don du poème”:  137 n.66 Donne, John:  21, 67 Dulcinea:  66 Dutch genre painting:  73 “l’effet du naturel”:  10 Éfire:  22, 67–9 Elias, Norbert:  xxi see also civilizing impulse Elisa:  13–15 emblems:  78 n.9, 98 enargeia:  10 encyclopedia:  78 n.9, 141 Engels, Friedrich:  141 erotics of absolutism:  55 España, aparta de mí este cáliz:  xx, 126 “España, aparta de mí este cáliz”:  xx, 132–5 Espinosa Medrano, Juan de:  xiv, 48, 48 n.54, 49 essentialism:  22 estate poem:  xvi, 74 Europa:  xvi, 51, 59, 66, 103 Eurydice:  14 n.29 Fernández de Córdoba, Francisco, Abad de Rute:  xii, 29, 48, 73 Flaubert, Gustave 115 Foucault, Michel xv, 45 n.49, 74 “author function”:  48 n.54 foundational fiction:  xv, 125 Fourth (Messianic) Eclogue:  33, 34, 96 see also Virgil fractal theory:  76 n.5 Francesca, Piero della:  95 Freud, Sigmund:  53 frustrated anagnorisis:  xvi, 65 frustration of teleology:  xviii, 141 Fuentes, Carlos:  111 Galilei, Galileo:  94 Gama, Vasco da:  58 Ganymede:  22, 38 n.33, 52, 62 García Lorca, Federico:  xiii, 25 García Márquez, Gabriel:  105 Garcilaso, see Vega, Garcilaso de la



INDEX

Goedel, Kurt:  xvi Goedelian paradox:  xvi, 76, 117 Góngora y Argote, Luis de “Alegoría de la primera de sus Soledades”:  33, 63 “Carta en respuesta”:  48 n.54 “Descaminado, enfermo, peregrino”:  63 “Égloga piscatoria en la muerte del Duque de Medina Sidonia”:  127 n.44 Fábula de Píramo y Tisbe:  101 n.14 Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea:  13, 108, 109–111, 118 n. 24, 138 Gonzaga, Federigo:  55 González de Cellorigo, Martín de:  36 n.31, 37 Gorostiza, José Muerte sin fin:  xix, 108, 113–18, 141 “Preludio”:  115 n.22 Goya y Lucientes, Francisco de:  111 Gracián, Baltasar:  xiii, 25 Gramsci, Antonio:  140 grotesque:  17, 18, 69, 82–4, 123 as marker of aesthetic crisis:  84 mechanical:  101 n.14 satiric:  83 gyrfalcon:  102 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich:  90 n.6 Heidegger, Martin monstrosity of subjectivism:  111 n.14 Hercules:  80 Heredia, José María:  106, 109 heroic rape:  54 Herrera, Fernando de:  15 n.32 Hesperia:  14 n.29 Hevajra Tantra:  119 see also tantrism hieroglyphic view of language:  130 “Himno entre ruinas”:  xix, 108–13, 118, 125 Horatian didacticism:  7, 49 horror:  17, 81, 86, 123 horror vacui:  82, 86 Huizinga, Johan:  2 hybridity:  127, 140 hybrid resistance:  129 n.50 hybridized subject:  139 see also “una poética de la subversión”

171

hymen:  18, 70 Icarus:  xx, 56 n.9, 115, 137–8 imagery of assimilation and disintegration:  79 transelemental:  81, 82, 110 indigenism:  xx, 124, 127, 130–2, 140 intradiscursive heterogeneity:  xx, 127 Jaúregui, Juan de:  xii, 25, 46 n.49, 84 n.17 Julius Cesar:  38 Jupiter (Zeus):  xvii, 51–3, 55 Kant, Immanuel:  107 Kepler, Johannes:  21 Lacan, Jacques:  16, 170 Lepanto, Battle of:  102 Lerma, Duke of:  55 Lezama Lima, José:  xiv, 105 Lícidas:  91–2 “lienço de Flandes”:  73 liminality:  110, 139 locus amoenus:  14, 16, 34, 66 logos, divine:  17, 114 n.20, 136 n.65 Lorca, see García Lorca, Federico loss of self:  50 low grade infinity:  115 see also time macrocosm:  74, 78 Magellan, Ferdinand:  58 n.13 Mahler, Gustave:  50 Mallarmé, Stéphane:  71, 106, 108, 125 “Un coup de dés”:  xix, 107, 115–16, 118–19, 126, 132 “Don du poème”:  137 n.66 “Le Pitre châtié”:  129, 131 “Sanite”:  xx, 118 n.26, 137–8 “Toast Funèbre”:  129 “Tombeau de Paul Verlaine”:  111 n.14, 141 Manco-Cápac:  128, 132 mandala:  119 see also tantrism Mandelbrot, Benoit:  76 n.5 Mansiche:  139 mapmaking:  75 n.3, 78 Mariátegui, José María:  128, 140 Marino, Giambattista:  61

172 Mars:  58 Martí, José:  105 masochism:  17 Medea:  98 mechanistic worldview:  42, 84–6, 122, mechanical grotesque:  101 n.14 mechanization of the psychic process:  85 mediation:  66, 76, 88 mediatrix woman as:  66, 123 Medina Sidonia, Duke of:  69, 140 “Égloga piscatoria en la muerte del Duque de Medina Sidonia”:  127 n.44 Medusas:  17 melancholy:  74, 111 n.14 mensoprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea:  31, 83 Messianic (Fourth) Eclogue:  33–4, 96 see also Virgil metalepsis:  93, 110 Mexican nationalism:  124 Micón:  91–2 microcosm:  74, 78 microscopic:  75, 79, 81 see also optics “midi le juste”:  112 see also Valéry, Paul Milton, John:  70 mimesis:  xvi, 18 mimetic idealism:  17 Miranda de Ebro:  139 “mirror of princes”:  35 Möbius strip:  103, 123 modern scopic regime:  73 “una modernidad otra”:  128 Moluccas:  58 monadic subject:  xvi, 88 El mono gramático:  125 monstrosity of subjectivism:  111 n.14 monstrous:  82, 84 Montaigne, Michel:  84 Moors:  36 n. 31, 37 mudanza:  92 Muerte sin fin:  xix, 108, 113–18, 141 mute speech:  64 muteness:  63, 140 myth of the primitive:  xx, 125 Naples:  109, 111

INDEX

narcissistic moment:  110, 111 narcissistic self-reflexivity:  118 n.24 Neobaroque:  xix, 105 Neptune:  55, 58 Netherlands:  102 “neurosis cultural”:  xviii, 142 n.75 New Historicism:  xiv Niebla, Count of:  22 nihilism:  90, 101 n.14, 122 “la ninfa degollada”:  15, 15 n.31, 32 “Nostalgias imperiales”:  xx, 126–32 obscene connoisseurship:  17 Olivares, Conde-Duque de:  38 n.33 optics:  78 Orpheus, see Orphic voice Orphic voice:  15 n.32 Ovid:  55, 58, 61 n.17 pachacuti:  128 “la palabra exacta”:  115 palam:  35 Palinurus:  98, 99 Pascal, Blaise:  103 Paz, Octavio El arco y la lira:  123 Blanco:  xix, 108, 113, 119–25, 141 Claude Lévi Strauss o el nuevo festín de Esopo:  136 n.64 Conyunciones y disyunciones:  119 n.30 “Himno entre ruinas”:  xix, 108–13, 118, 125 El mono gramático:  125 “Stéphane Mallarmé: ‘Sonnet in ix’ ”:  119 n.29 “Pedro Rojas”:  xx, 126, 132, 134, 137–9 Pellicer de Salas y Tovar, José de:  89 n.4 Penthesilea:  99 n.13 “Pequeño responso a un héroe de la República”:  132, 135–7 peregrino, identity of:  38 n.33 Perlongher, Néstor:  105 n.2 Persephone (Proserpina):  51, 55, 66, 70, 102, 103 Petrarch:  5, 9, 15 n.32, 17–18, 47–8, 61 Phaeton:  35, 88 n.2 phallogocentrism:  70 Phillip II:  55, 97, 98 Phillip III:  38 Phillip IV:  38, 55



INDEX

physiocrats:  36 piedra:  133 La piedra cansada:  133 n.60 “Le Pitre châtié”:  129, 131 Platonism (and Neoplatonism):  xvi, 9–10, 12, 14–15, 19, 21, 61 play of différance:  42, 56 Pliny:  17 n.36 Plutarch:  53 Pluto:  55 “una poética de la subversión”:  129 n.51 Polifemo (Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea), see Góngora y Argote, Luis de Ponge, Francis:  104 postcolonial criticism:  124 see also hybridity Potosí:  22 Praz, Mario:  60 “Preludio”:  115 n.22 presence:  10 Primero sueño:  xvii, 72, 114 Procris:  15 n.32 Prometheus:  139 n.68 Proserpina, see Persephone pseudosacerdotal:  48 Puritans:  37 Querelle:  xi, 30 see also Ancients and Moderns Quevedo, Francisco de:  9, 9 n.17, 34, 51, 61, 134 Rationalism:  21, 22 referential slippage:  75, 130 reflexivity, see self-reflexivity Reyes, Alfonso:  105 rhetoric of absence:  49–50 Rimbaud, Arthur:  112, 126 Rojas, Fernando de Celestina:  xxi–5, 19, 42, 57 Rubens, Peter Paul:  55, 134 Sabine women:  53 Sade, Marquis de:  70 Saint Augustine:  47–8 Saint Catherine:  138 Saint Jerome:  48 Saint Matthew:  48 Saint Peter:  137 “Sainte”:  xx, 118 n.26, 137–8 Salcedo Coronel, José García de:  xii

173

Sarduy, Severo:  xiv, 105 n.2 Schlegel, Friedrich:  84 n.18 Scholasticism:  21, 48 n.54, 72 second world prosthetics:  17–18 self-fashioning:  16 self-made world:  18 self-miniaturization:  56, 76 n.5 self-parody:  42, 62 self-reflexivity:  xix, 42, 56, 66, 117 narcissistic:  118 n.24 self-shattering:  16 shattering mimesis:  xvi, 18 Signorelli, Luca:  86 silva:  xii, 27–8, 34, 65, 73, 79 n.10, 114 singularidad:  61, 64 sociocriticism:  124 solipsism:  xvi, xix, 76, 117–120, 140 Solomon:  97 Soma, Duchess of:  6–7 Sor Juana, see Cruz, Sor Juan Inés de la Southern Cross:  99 specular moment:  118 n.26 Spice Islands (Moluccas):  58 sprezzatura:  6, 10 n.22, 16 Statius:  xvi Sylvae:  33–5, 38 Thebaid:  34 Strasoldo, Giovanni:  99 strategies of containment:  55 studiolum:  78 n.9 subaltern:  140 voice:  141 subject collective:  136, 139, 141 displacement of:  66 formation of:  69 hybridized:  139 monadic:  xvi, 88 see also subjectivity subjective vision:  26 subjectivity female:  67 male:  101 n.14 modern:  xvii, 50, 64, 65 n.27, 69, 140 truncation of:  xviii see also subject sublime:  17, 19, 83, 124 Surrealism:  81, 106 suspended ending:  xiii

174

INDEX

“el taller cordobés”:  48 n.54 tantrism:  119 bindu:  120 chakra:  119 Hevajra tantra:  119 mandala:  119 Taurus:  51 technique:  42, 79 n.10, 84–5 see also mechanistic worldview teichoskopia:  78 teleology frustration of:  xvii, 141 telescopic:  78 see also optics temporal implosion:  116 see also time Tesauro, Emmanuelle:  24 theatrum mundi:  83 time collapse of:  xx, 117 low grade infinity:  115 temporal implosion:  116 “tiempo desescatalogizado”:  119 Titian:  55 Titicaca, Lake:  132 “Toast Funèbre”:  129 “Tombeau de Paul Verlaine”:  111 n.13, 141 tragic fallacy:  5 tragicomedia:  30 transelemental imagery:  81–2, 110 trauma:  xviii, xx, 62, 69, 101 n.14, 142 Trotsky, Leon:  140 Turia, Ricardo del:  30

Vallejo, César:  108, 115, 126–42 “El arte y la revolución”:  134 España, aparta de mí este cáliz:  xx, 126 “España, aparta de mí este cáliz”:  xx, 132–5 “Nostalgias imperiales”:  xx, 126–32 “Pedro Rojas”:  xx, 126, 132, 134, 137–9 “Pequeño responso a un héroe de la República”:  132, 135–7 La piedra cansada:  133 n.60 Vega, Garcilaso de la:  xxi, 9–19, 32 “Égloga I”:  9–12, 24, 95 “Égloga II”:  9 “Égloga III”:  12–15 Vega, Lope de:  30 Velázquez, Diego:  55–6 Venus:  58 Vicens Vives, Jaime (Castillian) bourgeois meteor:  xx, 142 Virgil Aeneid:  99 n.13; see also Aeneas, Dido Eclogues:  xiv, 33–5, 38 Fourth (Messianic) Eclogue:  33–4, 96 Georgics:  xiv, 33 n.23, 34 Virgin (Mary):  66 of Guadalupe:  54 virtual reality:  18 n.37, 76 n.5 see also cyber reality Vives, Juan Luis:  26

Ungaretti, Giuseppe:  105 Ut pictura poesis:  13

World War II:  109 Wunderkammer:  78

Valencia, Pedro de:  xii, 36, 38 n.32, 84 n.17 Valéry, Paul:  106 “Le Cimitière marin”:  110–11, 116 “midi le juste”:  112

Zeno:  116 Zeus, see Jupiter Zeuxis:  17 n.36