The Theater of Truth: The Ideology of (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics

The Theater of Truth

The Theater of Truth the ideology of (neo)baroque aesthetics

William Egginton

stanford university press Stanford, California 2010

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2010 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Egginton, William. The theater of truth : the ideology of (neo)baroque aesthetics / William Egginton. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-6954-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1.  Spanish literature—Classical period, 1500–1700— History and criticism.  2.  Baroque literature—History and criticism.  3.  Spanish American literature—20th century— History and criticism.  4.  Truth (Aesthetics).  5. Aesthetics, Modern.  I.  Title. pq6066.e39      2010 860.9'1—dc22 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Typeset at Stanford University Press in 10/13.5 Galliard

2009022164

For Sebastian

Acknowledgments

This book was made possible by a leave generously granted by the University at Buffalo and its Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, for which I thank Maureen Jameson, Uday Sakahtme, Charles Stinger, and Martha Malamud in particular, and by the Johns Hopkins University, for which I thank deans Adam Falk, David Bell, and Gregory Ball. Thanks are further due to my editors at Stanford University Press, especially Norris Pope, Emily-Jane Cohen, Sarah Crane Newman, and John Feneron; to Julio­ Baena and Marina Brownlee for making the book better; to Ludwig Nagl and the Institut für Philosophie at the University of Vienna and to Elisabeth Bronfen and Christian Kiening at the University of Zürich for the invitation to present some of the ideas developed here to a broader audience; to Cristina Moreiras for the invitation to present an earlier version of chapter two at the colloquium she organized at the University of Michigan in 2005; to Christian and Eva of Café Phil in Vienna for the perversely ethical book presentation and the office away from home; to Gregg Lambert for the consistently enriching exchange of ideas; to Kevin Heller for editing and advice, and to replace thanks elsewhere neglected; to David Castillo, for eternal collaboration and friendship, as well as for the invitation to write for his and Massimo Lollini’s issue of Hispanic Issues; to Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo, for their kind invitation to take part in the Hispanic Issues Baroque/Neobaroque symposium at the University of Minnesota, and to the rest of the participants of that conference for the excellent exchange of ideas; to Joachim Küpper for the invitation to present chapter five at the Freie Universität in Berlin, and to Meg Greer for bring-

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Acknowledgments

ing me to Duke University to present chapter four; to Sepp Gumbrecht for continuing to be the best of friends as well as teachers; to Robert Harrison for surviving and being an inspiration for me and so many others; to David E. Johnson and Lisa Block de Behar, for making me think about Borges even more; to Galen Brokaw, for unwavering support and for broadening my horizons; to Bob Davidson, for always opening up new horizons for thought and conversation; to Eduardo González for inspiring conversations; to Stephen Nichols for his leadership and keen intellect; and to all my colleagues at the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at the Johns Hopkins University, for their welcome and for providing me a new intellectual home. I would also like to pay special regard to my graduate students at the University at Buffalo, at Cornell, and at Johns Hopkins, who have been consistent sounding boards for the ideas and arguments I present here. If it is a truism that one never works in a vacuum, it is doubly true in my case, where even in the seclusion of my home and office my thoughts are continually inflected and infected by the extraordinary world of knowledge my wife, media theorist and filmmaker Bernadette Wegenstein, brings in and radiates out. Her presence ensures that, no matter how distant the time period I am considering, I never let go of its relevance to the present. Earlier versions of chapters one and two were published respectively as “Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds,” in Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo, Hispanic Issues 31 (2005): 55–71, and “The Baroque House of Reason (Cervantes, Master Architect),” in Reason and its Others, ed. David Castillo and Massimo Lollini, Hispanic Issues 32 (2006): 186–203. A translation of the latter into Spanish by Virginia Gutierrez appeared in Insula (2006). An earlier version of chapter five has appeared as “The Corporeal Image and the New World Baroque,” in Latin America, in Theory, ed. David E. Johnson, South Atlantic Quarterly 106.1 (2007): 107–29, copyright 2007, Duke University Press, and is reprinted by permission of the publisher. A shorter version of the introduction was published as “The Baroque as a Problem of Thought,” PMLA 124.1 (2009): 143–49, and is reprinted here by permission of the copyright owner, The Modern Language Association of America. I am grateful to these publications for permission to use this material.

Contents

Introduction: The Baroque as a Problem of Thought  1

1. Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds  11



2. How to Build a Baroque House (Cervantes, Master Architect)  26



3. The Theater of Truth  39



4. The Opacity of Language and the Transparency of Being: On Góngora’s Poetics  56



5. The Corporeal Image and the New World Baroque  69



6. The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges  85



7. The World Well Dressed: The Later Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar  107

Epilogue: A New Distinction  127 Notes  131 Works Cited  149 Index  163

The Theater of Truth

Introduction: The Baroque as a Problem of Thought We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality— judiciously, if you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. Aide to George W. Bush, quoted by Ronald Suskind1

Why the Baroque? Why now? As many have argued, the general aesthetic trend of the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries, often called postmodern, can perhaps more usefully, more substantively, be labeled as neobaroque.2 But why? Is the neobaroque turn of the twentieth century something akin to the Neoclassicism of the sixteenth century, or the NeoGothicism of the nineteenth? Or, on an even more condensed scale, is it similar to the rapid returns of previously dismissed fashion decades, as evidenced by the proliferation in the early years of this century of those beads and bellbottoms associated with flower children and the age of Aquarius? The Baroque’s return, if it is a return at all, has nothing to do with the recycling of culture that these examples represent. Instead, the Baroque must be understood as the aesthetic counterpart to a problem of thought that is coterminous with that time in the West we have learned to call modernity, stretching from the sixteenth century to the present.3 A problem of thought, however, is not yet a philosophical problem. A problem of thought is a problem that affects or unsettles an entire culture in the largest possible sense, that permeates its very foundations and finds expression in its plastic art, in its stories and performances, in its philosophy as well as in its social organization and politics. Western culture since the sixteenth century has been entangled in a particular problem of thought, and if the



Introduction

baroque aesthetics of the seventeenth century are the sign of its inception, the neobaroque aesthetics of the present and recent times are the sign, if not of its demise, then of the exhaustion of all previous attempts to solve, undo, or otherwise remove this problem. The problem is in some sense ideal. It is the principle of organization of a culture and age, but it only exists in the expressions it engenders. For without its terms, without its forms, the problem itself is nothing. In the case of modernity, to begin our task of putting it into terms, the problem of thought concerns the relation of appearances to the world they ostensibly represent. The philosophical paradigm that emerges slowly out of centuries of wrestling with this problem is modern epistemology, as epitomized in the works of Immanuel Kant. But the problem is not exclusively philosophical; as I have argued elsewhere, it imbued the skills and practices of generations of people who learned to express this problem in the way they enacted spectacle, read literature, viewed art, organized political power, and thought of space.4 Let us stipulate, then, a definition: modernity’s fundamental problem of thought is that the subject of knowledge can only approach the world through a veil of appearances; truth is defined as the adequation of our knowledge to the world thus veiled; hence, inquiry of any kind must be guided by the reduction of whatever difference exists between the appearances and the world as it is. The problem, or why the problem remains a problem, is that the subject of knowledge only ever obtains knowledge via his or her senses, via how things appear, and hence the truth thus sought will itself always be corrupted by appearances.5 It is precisely in this sense that the title of this book, the theater of truth, emerges as the paradoxical name for the baroque as a problem of thought: the Baroque puts the incorruptible truth of the world that underlies all ephemeral and deceptive appearances on center stage, making it the ultimate goal of all inquiry; in the same vein, however, the Baroque makes a theater out of truth, by incessantly demonstrating that truth can only ever be an effect of the appearances from which we seek to free it. The philosophical language I am using here is borrowed from Immanuel Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1789) and later works, Kant institutionalized the distinction between appearances and the things they represent, and claimed that a philosophy that does not make this distinction must ultimately fall into error. While he argues, on the one hand, that this distinction means that certain domains will remain eternally veiled to human knowledge, on the other hand he shows with intricate precision how



The Baroque as a Problem of Thought

maintaining this difference allows us to have an exact science of appearances and thus be able to say things with certainty about how appearances interact with one another in time and space. Furthermore, the maintenance of a realm that is out of bounds for human knowledge allows Kant, as he famously states in his introduction, to “make room for faith” (Kant 115) and to allow for human freedom—faith and freedom being concepts that would otherwise have no place in a world in which the human mind could plumb the depths of how things are in themselves. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, some two hundred years before Kant systematized this distinction, European culture developed a general strategy for expressing the problem we have just touched on in its philosophical form. This strategy, which I call the major strategy of the baroque, assumes the existence of a veil of appearances, and then suggests the possibility of a space opening just beyond those appearances where truth resides.6 In painting and architecture this strategy corresponds to the well-known baroque techniques of trompe l’oeil, anamorphosis, and what Heinrich Wölfflin referred to as the painterly style (Wölfflin 30), in which the borders between bodies are blurred and spaces in the painting are left unclear.7 By way of these techniques, along with other versions of what José Antonio Maravall designated as the trope of incompleteness (Maravall, Culture 212), the recipient is drawn in by a promise of fulfillment beyond the surface, his or her desire ignited by an illusory depth, always just beyond grasp. It is this strategy that accounts for Maravall’s seemingly exaggerated claim that the Baroque corresponds to an enormous apparatus of propaganda deployed by an alliance of entrenched interests in early modern Europe and the colonial world, dedicated to entrancing the minds of a newly mobile populace with the promise of a spiritual fulfillment to be had in another life for the small price of identifying with the interests of powerful elites in this one. It is insofar as I take up this argument about the political effect of baroque aesthetics that this book can be properly understood as concerning the ideological value of those aesthetics. Nevertheless, and as I will go into in greater detail below, it is crucial to differentiate between the strategies, major and minor, with which baroque aesthetics are deployed. For just as the historical Baroque was not a monolithic organ of state propaganda, it would be hopelessly naïve to believe that neobaroque expression is exclusively dedicated to the liberation from such centralizing discourses. Given this account of the culture of the historical Baroque, born of one





Introduction

global empire, one can certainly see grounds for comparison with the politics of representation practiced by a contemporary political class with its own aspirations to empire. The epigraph for this introduction comes from a New York Times Magazine exposé of some of the key advisors to the administration of George W. Bush, and it is clear that their attitude toward “reality” had profound similarities to that underlying the Baroque. The use of the media to rally support behind policies that would founder without that support is a clear case of a baroque manipulation of appearances for the purpose of political gain, for the potential voters and taxpayers who lent their support to “the war on terror” and the war in Iraq in the early years of the twenty-first century did so largely and often because of their belief in a certain reality projected beyond the appearances. The Bush representation apparatus, for example, was successful in convincing vast swaths of voters that behind the necessary and lamentable apparatus of representation—the poles, the concocted photo ops, the faked newscasts and staged “town hall” meetings—president Bush was a man of “character.” Indeed, as was widely reported and fretted about, many Americans cited issues of character and value as the reason they voted for him in 2004. The paradox is that no one is (or very few are) actually taken in by the performance, in the sense of not realizing that it is a performance; the Baroque becomes pertinent when, in the very midst of the performance, and in full knowledge of its artifice, the viewer becomes convinced that the artifice in fact refers to some truth just beyond the camera’s glare. This effect is not limited to outright political representation such as campaign programming or the manipulation of the news media that was so prevalent during the lead-up to the Iraq war. The entertainment industry in general can be counted on to produce contents for television and film that cohere with the overall message coming from the centers of political power. As Slavoj Žižek wrote in an article in The Guardian, for instance, the wildly successful Fox series 24, in which Kiefer Sutherland plays a government anti-terrorism agent, abetted in certain, very specific ways the administration’s efforts to minimize criticism of its handling of terror suspects (Žižek, “Depraved”). The show’s hook is that it plays in “real” time and that each of the season’s 24 hour-long episodes corresponds to an hour of one continuous day in the life of agent Jack Bauer. While the show is obviously fiction, and no one among its producers or probably anyone watching it would argue the opposite, nevertheless, precisely in its function as artifice it refers implicitly to a reality that is “out there,” beyond representation, inde-



The Baroque as a Problem of Thought

pendent of its fictitious message. Because everyone can comfortably agree that this is the case, we the viewers end up being force-fed a “neutral” and “independent” reality that is in fact a very specific political version of reality. In the case of 24, the “real time” of the narrative (which, as Žižek points out, is augmented by the fact that even the time for commercial breaks is counted among the 60 minutes) contributes to the sense of urgency that, for instance, if Jack and his well-meaning colleagues don’t get the answers they need, by whatever means necessary, millions of innocent people will die in a catastrophic terrorist event. In such circumstances we obviously have to have some flexibility around issues like the torture of detainees. Of course, as I have just said, the show is fiction. Still, our knowledge of that in no way stops us from importing the plot structure—urgency of threat requires unscrupulous means—into the neutral and independent reality beyond our television screens. This is precisely how major baroque strategies function: the viewer is faced with a screen that is apparently separated from a reality veiled by it; the images on the screen suggest a certain vision of that reality; and the viewer believes he or she goes on to occupy that real space, a space independent of the screen, when in fact he or she is merely operating within another version of the original representation. To take a classic example from the seventeenth-century theater, an audience of commoners for a performance of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna in Hapsburg Madrid would go to the theater to witness the story of a popular uprising against an abusive nobleman. When the normally cowering villagers rise up against the nobleman they do so in the name of their honor: “You lot have honor?” he asks them in shock, and the plot of the play clearly requires that the audience be unified in saying, yes, these men have honor (Lope, Fuenteovejuna 146).8 The viewers certainly know they are watching a play, but it cannot escape them that they too are commoners, and if the commoners in the play have honor, then why not they themselves? Thus the reality hiding behind the play, supposedly independent, gets colored by a very specific set of presuppositions that, in this case, help the commoners leaving the theater to feel more invested in a system that taxes them in order to maintain a landed elite and gives them very few rights, privileges, or protections against that elite. This, then, is the basic structure of baroque representation. But this is not the entire story. Once the fundamental architecture of baroque representation has been established, we see that another strategy becomes possible. This second, minor strategy does not take the obvious path of denying





Introduction

the reality behind the veil. This would be a lot like the reporter who is the target of the Bush advisor’s ridicule in the above epigraph answering that he doesn’t buy any of that reality stuff either. Instead, what the Baroque’s minor strategy does is take the major strategy too seriously; it nestles into the representation and refuses to refer it to some other reality, but instead affirms it, albeit ironically, as its only reality. This strategy, then, rather than accepting the presupposition of two opposing levels—a representation and a reality independent of that representation—undermines our ability to make this distinction in the first place. Not, however, in order to lead us further astray from “reality itself,” but rather to make us aware, to remind us that we are always, at any level, involved with mediation.9 In Miguel de Cervantes’s interlude The Stage of Wonders, two traveling confidence artists set up an empty stage in a village and invite the villagers to come witness their marvelous magical theater (Cervantes, Entremeses 86–100). As the townspeople gather around, the lead conman Chanfalla explains to them that the stage of wonders works according to certain simple rules. Only those of pure blood and unstained honor will be able to see the marvelous visions playing on its boards. With this, the musician begins to play and Chanfalla starts to narrate an extraordinary spectacle that, of course, no one present can see. Each and every one of the spectators, however, makes sure that everyone else believes he or she is seeing something, and they all thus contribute to their own fleecing. Toward the end of the performance, they are joined by an officer who demands, as is his legal right, that the commoners give up their homes for the king’s troupes. At this point, as he does not acknowledge seeing anything on the stage, the villagers try to accuse him of being a converso (a converted Jew), and the play ends with them being beaten by the soldiers.10 By comparing this interlude with Lope’s classic drama, we get a clear sense of how the minor strategy works within and against the major strategy. The major strategy posits a separation between a representation and the reality hidden behind it in order to smuggle certain presuppositions into yet another representation that it will try to sell as reality itself. The minor strategy, in contrast, takes a representation of the major strategy as a starting point: in this case the very claim to honor among commoners that Lope’s play smuggled into the representation of reality. Next, it lets that represented reality play itself out according to its own rules. What the villagers in the interlude as well as any commoners watching the interlude are forced to confront is that the reality of their honor is nothing but a play



The Baroque as a Problem of Thought

they are putting on for one another, in other words, itself a representation referring to no other reality than itself. This last revelation occurs when the villagers try to import the honor and purity they are representing to one another into the “real” world of the soldiers’ demands on their homes, at which point their honor gets treated like the fantasy scenario it really is. Despite the obvious differences, then, there is much in common in the way culture works between our present time and the time of the Spanish empire. This argument cannot be made via a laundry list of similarities and differences; if that method were followed, the differences would always win. Instead, recognizing these similarities depends on unearthing the ways in which a culture’s most fundamental presuppositions, its problem of thought, inhere in specific cultural products and configurations. The Spanish empire of the seventeenth century had a different principal language, a different belief system, different military possibilities, and different media at its disposal (to tick off only a few differences from a potentially infinite list) than those of the present-day U.S. American empire. Nevertheless, the deployment of available media for the purpose of attracting and shaping compliant subjects relied upon and continues to rely on profoundly analogous means. And just as artists and thinkers developed strategies for undermining those means in the age of the historical Baroque, artists and thinkers are doing the same today, and the aesthetic forms they are producing share in the strategies deployed by their forebears. Still, this Neobaroque is not, as I said before, a return.11 Those who promoted the minor strategy in the seventeenth century were in a tiny minority. The promise of a truth just beyond the veil of appearances proffered by the major strategy was powerful, and it has held western culture in its grasp for four hundred years. This grasp has been weakening throughout the last century, though, and the ascendance of the minor strategy in philosophy, in art, in literature, is a sign that the major strategy may be vulnerable. It is certainly not gone, as can be seen in the chortling rhetoric of Bush’s yes men. However, the minor strategy offers an alternative to those who despair that the control of the media by the few and the powerful ensures that their power cannot fail. Many see this despair as going hand in hand with postmodern cynicism, relativism, and the denial of truth. Is not, then, the very kind of thought and aesthetics I am describing merely the flip side of the political denial of reality exhibited in the epigraph? Does the minor strategy of the Baroque not lead to even further despair, as we give up all anchor holds on the real and are swept





Introduction

away on a tide of relativism, in which no source is more trustworthy than another, and no way out is to be found? The truth, I would claim, is the opposite. The minor strategy offers no comfort to the enemies of reality. The enemies of reality think they can determine reality, because they can control the media. The minor baroque response is not merely to insist on yet another reality, which we know can only come to us in a mediated form. Instead, the minor strategy focuses on the concrete reality of mediation itself and hence produces a thought, an art, a literature, or a politics that does not deny the real, but focuses on how the media are themselves real even while they try to make us believe that their reality, the reality in which we live, is always somewhere else. The seven chapters that follow were written as case studies of the major and minor strategies of baroque aesthetics. They are intended to showcase how these aesthetic strategies can work at different times and through different media. To that end I have tried to incorporate examples from a number of different media and genres, including poetry, philosophy, theology, narrative, theater, and cinema. Each of the seven chapters, while often engaging with a number of different authors and works, focuses its attention on one central author. Thus, while chapter one deals with the problem of folds and holes as theorized by Deleuze, it engages in particular some passages from Baltasar Gracián’s monumental philosophical rumination El criticón. And whereas chapter five analyzes the Latin American Neobaroque as a cultural phenomenon, I ultimately draw back to focus on specific aspects of Sor Juana’s analysis of the concept of fineza in her Carta atenagórica. The reason for this is essentially methodological. As a student of literature, I believe there is value in close rhetorical analysis, and that this value can and should balance the broad historical view necessary for the accurate portrayal of history, or the condensations needed for such a wide-ranging philosophical discussion as is required by this topic. While these choices must therefore be somewhat arbitrary, I propose them as salvos into the current, important, and fascinating critical debate around baroque and neobaroque culture. I hope that the framework I suggest of distinguishing temporally between baroque and neobaroque, and ideologically between major and minor strategies, will prove useful in ironing out certain terminological confusions that have plagued these discussions. Finally, as this debate has largely taken place in the Hispanic realm, I have focused my analyses in that area as well. This is not to deny the trans-



The Baroque as a Problem of Thought

cultural nature of baroque aesthetics, nor is it meant to deprive Dutch baroque painting, the architecture of Bernini’s Rome, or contemporary manifestations of neobaroque art in the United States (to take a few random examples) of their due attention. Nevertheless, the Spanish empire was the world’s principle superpower when the historical Baroque flourished, and therefore the dynamic between that center and the colonial periphery that the Hispanic New World became provides the logical framework for a discussion of baroque and neobaroque ideologies. Ultimately, a book about the Baroque must leave out far more than it includes. So it is my hope that the works I study and the aspects of baroque style I undertake to analyze, while not by any stretch of the imagination exhausting the baroque repertoire, will nonetheless present a coherent thesis about the relation of this aesthetic production to the historical period of modernity, and provide some insight into its essential problem of thought.



chapter one

Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

The purpose of this chapter is to test a philosophical hypothesis about a historical period against literary evidence. The hypothesis belongs to Gilles Deleuze, and it concerns his description of the Baroque taken as a cultural and philosophical whole, albeit based on his reading of the works of Gottfried Leibniz. The literary evidence against which I wish to test this hypothesis comes from the seventeenth-century Spanish author Baltasar Gracián, in particular from several passages of his Criticón that deal with artifice and its relation to human being. In the chapter’s first section I argue for describing the Baroque in philosophical terms as a problem concerning the separation between the space of representation and the space of spectatorship. I then explain this claim historically with reference to changes in the theater and painting from the late Middle Ages to the Baroque, and support the claim by way of a discussion of baroque spatiality in literature and visual arts. In the next section I outline two philosophical strategies—a major and a minor one, which I respectively call, with Deleuze, holes and folds—for negotiating the fundamental separation of baroque space, and then indicate where these strategies are at work in a variety of baroque artifacts. In this section I also confront and ultimately reject Deleuze’s appropriation of baroque cultural production exclusively for a philosophy of folds in order to claim, in the chapter’s last section, that baroque cultural production—and here I work specifically with Gracián’s writing—has, from the outset, created the possibilities of a minor strategy that undermines the pretenses of the major strategy.

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Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

two spaces José-Antonio Maravall famously argued that the Baroque should be considered as a historical structure rather than more specifically as a stylistic descriptor. Moreover, for Maravall the Baroque had to be understood as an international phenomenon; analysis that remained too focused on a single national context risked missing the forest for the trees (Maravall, Culture xvii). For the purposes of this discussion, I will assume the basic truth of these claims, but regarding the former I will expand the discussion and regarding the latter I will remain somewhat more specific. On the one hand, in respecting the notion of the Baroque as structure, I want to move beyond what for Maravall remained a mostly sociological view of the Baroque—and a largely functionalist one at that—and open up a philosophical perspective on the Baroque; on the other hand, although I will draw on some examples of baroque production outside of Spain, for the purposes of this discussion the emphasis will remain on the Spanish context. Insisting that the Baroque be understood philosophically means that there is at work in everything we recognize as baroque an effort of thought to deal with a common problem. This problem of thought was not such an issue prior to the period of dominance of those artifacts we call baroque, and will have undergone some significant change in order for the dominance of baroque production to have waned. The common problem I identify at the heart of baroque phenomena is widely known, has been called by many names, and has been described in bewildering variety. For the moment let me borrow the term used first by T. S. Eliot and more recently by Geoffrey Thurley to describe a problem they associated more with Romanticism than with any earlier period: namely, “the dissociation-of-sensibility” (Thurley 18).1 Dissociation-of-sensibility refers principally to the modernist critique of the Romantic and realist tendencies of the nineteenth century, and specifically to the subordination of art to something outside of, greater than, or more important than art—such as the absolute, for Romantics, or the world as it is in itself, for realists. But as Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things, and Martin Heidegger, in his entire oeuvre but specifically in his classic essay “The Age of the World Picture” (Heidegger, “Age” 115–54), have argued, dissociationism is perhaps the fundamental characteristic of a European modernity dating to more or less the beginning of the seventeenth century—to the period, in other words, known as the Baroque.



Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

As I have argued elsewhere,2 if modernity can be characterized philosophically by a sort of generalized dissociation of the world of the senses from an interior world of the knowing subject, the model of this essentially spatial organization can be found in the thoroughgoing structural changes undergone by spectacle in the time leading up to the Baroque. This change in the organization of spectacle and its ramifications for conceptions of space are illustrated by the emergence during the sixteenth century of a technique in the staging of spectacle called “the theater in the theater.”3 For a modern theater-going audience, it goes without saying that a theater scene could be part of what is represented on the stage in a theater. The modern audience, for instance, can be expected to negotiate the complexities of a performative action taking place on that stage within a stage—such as a wedding ritual or a religious conversion—without losing track of the several levels of reality being represented. To take an example from Lope de Vega’s 1608 play, Lo fingido verdadero, Ginés, actor to the Roman emperor Diocletian, performs the conversion of a pagan to Christianity in which he himself, pagan actor, is converted to Christianity. At this point in the play one of the spectators within the play, a member of Diocletian’s entourage, exclaims in admiration, “There’s no difference between this and the real thing!” (Lope de Vega, Comedias 275). At first glance this might seem unproblematic. Upon closer examination, however, an apparent paradox creeps in. How, to be specific, are we to understand that there is “no difference” between Ginés’s performance and a real conversion? On the one hand, if the spectator is speaking truly, and there really is “no difference,” how do we as spectators even begin to understand the reference of the sentence, namely Ginés’s performance, which we must be able to distinguish from “reality” for the sentence to make any sense at all? On the other hand, if the spectator is lying, and there really is a visible difference between Ginés’s acting and his real conversion, then his real conversion could not take place, and the play’s plot becomes impossible. What is happening here is, in fact, neither of the above options. Rather, what occurs is that the spectators in the real world fluently project the very distinction that constitutes them as spectators into the space thereby distinguished from theirs: that is to say, they override the paradox with ease because they are accustomed to dividing the world into a world on the stage and a world off the stage without applying the rules of the one to the other. This division of the world, however, is not limited to cases where our skills as spectators are called upon in the theater or, today, in front of

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Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

televisions or at the cinema. The point to grasp is that once entire populations became fluent in assuming and projecting this division in order to function correctly as theater spectators, that fluency became a generalized spatial structure for conceptualizing the world as a whole.4 It is for this reason that the paradigmatic philosophical text of the early modern period, Descartes’ Meditations, ultimately posits the division of being into two fundamental substances: a thinking substance that looks out onto a world of extended substances. As Richard Rorty, another contemporary critic of dissociationism, claims, prior to Locke and Descartes there was no “conception of the human mind as an inner space in which both pains and clear and distinct ideas passed in review before a single Inner Eye” (Rorty, Philosophy 50).5 But this conception has a clear cultural model: spectators watching actors performing before them as characters. Look at what Descartes says in his Meditations on the subject of what can and cannot be false: “Now as to what concerns ideas, if we consider them only in themselves and do not relate them to anything else beyond themselves, they cannot properly speaking be false; for whether I imagine a goat or a chimera, it is not the less true that I imagine the one rather than the other” (Meditations III, 6).6 Descartes’ formulation is clearly derived from the model of the stage, for the distinction between ideas that do not relate to anything beyond themselves and ones that do is precisely the distinction between the world of actors and that of the characters they portray: although I can doubt that what I am seeing on the stage is a true representation of reality, I cannot doubt that I am seeing something. As I said at the outset, if the Baroque can be described in philosophical terms, it is because there is at work in everything we recognize as baroque an effort of thought to deal with a common problem. With reference to the modernist critique of previous artistic attitudes, I have called this common problem dissociationism, and have located its roots in the spatial practices of early modern spectacle. I have furthermore pointed to the origins of Descartes’ paradigmatic act of dissociationism—the separation of being into thinking and extended substance—in the theatrical division of space into that of the spectator and that of the representation. Now let us look at the problem of dissociationism as it emerges in several examples of baroque cultural production. Heinrich Wölfflin is often credited with having rescued the Baroque from its almost universally negative perception among art historians, a perception revealed in the fact that (in his time) the term baroque “in general



Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

use [. . .] still carries a suggestion of repugnance and abnormality” (Wölfflin 23). Recognizing a series of stylistic innovations common to painting and architecture in the period following the Renaissance, Wölfflin proceeded to provide a theory for a period and style that did not have one of its own.7 The core of his theory is what he calls “the painterly style” as applied to architecture: If the beauty of a building is judged by the enticing effects of moving masses, the restless, jumping forms or violently swaying ones which seem constantly on the point of change, and not by balance and solidity of structure, then the strictly architectonic conception of architecture is depreciated. In short, the severe style of architecture makes its effect by what it is, that is, by its corporeal substance, while painterly architecture acts through what it appears to be, that is, an illusion of movement.  (Wölfflin 30)

This distinction between what something is—its corporeal substance—and what it seems to be is essential for Wölfflin’s theory the Baroque and is essential as well, I would argue, for any understanding of the Baroque. It is perhaps unnecessary at this point to note that the language Wölfflin uses to characterize baroque architecture is precisely the language of dissociationism, the language that pits appearances against corporeal substance. The point of his description and its generalization to baroque art, however, is that what we identify as stylistically baroque—and what shared a dominance in the historical period known as the Baroque—depends on the play of appearances in relation to a corporeal substance assumed to exist beyond that play of appearances. Furthermore, the play of appearances is very much the effect of the basic spatial configuration I outlined above, because baroque space produces an effect of depth on surfaces, just as theatrical space provokes the possibility of mise en abîme, where characters inhabit characters inhabiting characters. The production of depth on surfaces is most evident in the baroque, painterly technique of trompe l’oeil, used to great effect by such architects as Balthasar Neumann in his Würzburg Residenz—where only our knowledge that no real dog could actually stand for so long on the narrow molding bordering the ceiling to the grand staircase can convince us that what appears to be a dog standing outside the painted ceiling is not real—or Johann Michael Rottmayr’s frescoes in the Palais Liechtenstein in Vienna, where what is pictured is indistinguishable from its architectural framework. In its most extreme form, anamorphosis, the painterly manipulation of perspective can make images appear or disappear entirely on the basis of

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Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

the viewer’s position.8 As Rémy Saisselin writes, “it was precisely this love of illusion, of the pleasure of surprise, of enchantment, coupled with the blurring of the distinction between illusion and reality, which was essentially baroque” (Saisselin 46, qtd. in Ndalianis 171). The Spanish cultural historian Emilio Orozco Díaz also defines the Baroque generally in terms of the increased fluidity between spatial levels or strata: It responds to a conception and vision of spatial continuity that views the immense work as occupying a continuous space, as if situated on an intermediate plane in relation to the other planes that exist in front of and behind it, within which we the spectators can be found. . . . This expressive, spatial interpenetration is essential to the artistic conception of the Baroque; it produces the authentic incorporation of the spectator into the work of art.  (40)

This last sentence is of great importance because, as I suggested with the example of Neumann’s dog, one of the effects of baroque trickery is to engage or compromise the viewer in the represented space—to try to blend or bleed the distinction between the space of the spectator and that of the representation.9 The play between the frame or border separating these two spaces and the dissolution of that frame is paramount in baroque artifacts, and represents what is perhaps most recognizable about baroque style, what Orozco Díaz calls the overflowing of borders. Take what is probably one of the most famous examples of baroque painting, if not of European painting in general, Diego Velazquez’s Las meninas (1656–57). As Foucault’s influential reading has shown (Foucault 3–16), all the play and paradox of the age of representation are caught up in the intricacies of this painting, which questions the viewer’s relation to the viewed space, to the point of view of the painter, and to that of the center of political power itself. In Foucault’s words, “[a]s soon as they place the spectator in the field of their gaze, the painter’s eyes seize hold of him, force him to enter the field of their gaze, assign him a place both privileged and inescapable, levy their luminous and visible tribute from him, and project it upon the inaccessible surface of the canvas within the picture” (5).10 Foucault’s reference to assigning the viewer a both privileged and inescapable place points to the implication of baroque spatial play in conceptions of power—and perhaps in the very idea of political agency—prevalent in the societies of early modern Europe. Such an idea of political agency is clearly at work in Baltasar Gracián’s writings, especially in his manuals of



Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

advice for courtly politics.11 For Gracián, life at court is a relentless battle for influence or power. One’s greatest weapon in this battle is knowledge: the knowledge one has of others and the control one wields over what and how much others know about oneself. The powerful man is, for Gracián, one who knows how to manipulate public knowledge about him. He cultivates an intimate core, which Gracián calls his caudal, his capital or resources. And if there were a leitmotif among his strategies for how to get ahead in the dog-eat-dog world of early modern society, it would be best expressed in the motto incomprensibilidad de caudal, or incomprehensibility of resources. This has nothing to do with actually having infinite resources at one’s command. The point is rather that the depths of one’s resources should never be made known to others. What others do not know about your hidden resources they will respect and desire, and the result will be more power for you. The most powerful person in any society is the one who manages to convince all others that his inner resources are the most unfathomable, and hence infinite in terms of social capacity: “greater affects of veneration are inspired by public opinion and doubt as to how deep one’s resources go, than by evidence of them, as great as they may be” (Oráculo manual maxim 94). It should be clear that this image is thoroughly theatrical, and hence thoroughly baroque. We only have caudal insofar as we present ourselves socially in the person of a character. Or, to put it another way, a persona— which, as is well known, derives from the Greek word for mask—both serves as Gracián’s figure for the ultimate goal of personal development12 and at the same time implicitly imports into that figure all the trappings of the stage. What distinguishes the persona is his ability to stay within character, to convince the greatest number of people possible that his character is his character all the way down—that there is no other self, or actor, behind it to ground it in the world and limit the eternal sounding of its resources: “As much depth as a man has, so much is he a persona” (Oráculo, maxim 48). What distinguishes this person, what makes him persona, in other words, is his ability to use the spatial play of the baroque to entice the participation of his fellow players as participants in his representation, to capture their commitment, their belief, and ultimately their libidinal investment through the manipulation of strata and appearances that we have identified as baroque.13 What we should retain from these examples of baroque production in written and visual culture is a sense of how, in every case, what we iden-

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Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

tify as baroque—namely, the play of appearance against the backdrop of an ostensibly inaccessible corporeal substance—can be understood as an effort of thought to deal with a common problem. This problem stems from the dissemination of certain assumptions concerning the nature of the space in which people interact, assumptions that themselves support the skills and practices related to a new kind of spectacle in early modern Europe: the theater. The theatricalization of space ultimately means that, in whatever medium is used for expression, a fundamental separation is assumed between the space occupied by the viewer and the space occupied by the represented reality. This separation, later theorized as the dissociation-of-sensibility, is the common problem at the heart of a philosophical understanding of the Baroque.14

two solutions Thought’s effort, in the theatrical world of the baroque, is to breach a divide. Such an effort was clearly underway in all of the cases we have considered so far, but there would also seem to be a profound similarity to the strategies adopted. Imagine, for example, the experience of dissociation as being like inhabiting a house. Everything within the confines of the house pertains to one substance; everything outside its walls pertains to another. The communication between substances in such a scenario must take place through a wall or, more specifically, through some sort of hole in a wall, like a window or door. The soul is a house that looks out on the world through its windows and doors. It is not difficult to see how baroque artifacts can be mapped onto this image of thought. In painting, both exterior and interior frames serve as windows through which spectators look out on or into other worlds15; in architecture, real windows and doors are paired with painted borders that are made to play the role; Gracián’s persona takes on the model of a house containing a veritable mise en abîme of concentrically organized rooms. In all cases, the play of the Baroque involves a bleeding of borders, an invitation to the spectator to step into another reality. According to this model, the basic problem of the Baroque seems profoundly Cartesian: a world of holes offering us multiple, more-or-less successful means of communicating between substances. But in 1984 (trans. 1993) the philosopher Gilles Deleuze published The Fold, in which he ar-



Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

gued that this image was seriously flawed.16 Descartes, he claimed, was not a baroque thinker, but rather a leftover from the Renaissance17; the Baroque, rather than being characterized by Cartesian holes, is more properly understood under the figure of the fold. Folds, as Deleuze writes, replace holes: The monad is a cell. It resembles a sacristy more than an atom: a room with neither doors nor windows, where all activity takes place on the inside. The monad is the autonomy of the inside, an inside without an outside. It has as its correlative the independence of the façade, an outside without an inside. Now the façade can have doors and windows—it is riddled with holes—although there may be no void, a fold being only the site of a more rarified matter.  (28)

Yes there are holes, but these holes are not the open passages between substances that a Cartesian world would require. They are rather sites of relative rarification in a façade, which emphatically do not lead through to some interior. What appear to be holes are in fact folds, a case of invagination in a plane that for some point of view may appear to be a hole.18 The passage from inside to outside is further inhibited by the fact that, for Deleuze—and for the thinker who is the focus of Deleuze’s study, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz—there is no absolute distinction between interior and exterior space, but only one relative to point of view. What traditional thought interpreted as the play of appearance against immobile, corporeal substance, Deleuze (through Leibniz) understands as the inevitable result of the monad’s embedded perspective, its point of view. The separation between thinking and extended substance is translated into one between endogenous folds (organic matter) and exogenous folds (inorganic matter) (7). Because every point of view is a monad, the “external world” is folded into the walls of its cell: “The world is an infinite series of curvatures or inflection, and the entire world is enclosed in the soul from one point of view” (24). This translation of exteriority and interiority into an effect of point of view obviates the language of dualism and leads Deleuze to a reinterpretation of baroque architecture: Baroque architecture can be defined by this severing of the façade from the inside, of the interior from the exterior, and the autonomy of the interior from the independence of the exterior. . . . A new kind of link, of which pre-Baroque architecture had no inkling, must be made between the inside and the outside, or the spontaneity of the inside and the determination of the outside. . . . What makes the new harmony possible is, first, the distinction between two levels or floors, which resolves tension or allots the division. The lower level is assigned

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Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds to the façade, which is elongated by being punctured and bent back according to the folds determined by a heavy matter, forming an infinite room for reception or receptivity. The upper level is closed, as a pure inside without an outside, a weightless, closed interiority, its walls hung with spontaneous folds that are now only those of a soul or a mind.  (29)

This severing of façade from inside, which translates into the division between two floors, serves, according to Deleuze, to resolve a tension, and it is not too difficult to see which tension needs resolution. The common problem at the heart of baroque culture emerges clearly here as well, in the “spontaneity” of the inside and the “determination” of the outside. The difference is that Deleuze’s Leibniz has come up with an image of thought that refuses the separation of being into the two worlds “common to the Platonic tradition” (29), an image, moreover, that is echoed in baroque art and architecture, as well as in its mathematics and its music. If Descartes is, for Deleuze, a Renaissance thinker, this is because Deleuze wants to reconstruct an alternate history of thought, a hidden, minor one suppressed by the philosophical tradition that calls Descartes its father and that reduces the question of knowledge to that of the relation between fundamentally incompatible substances.19 This history—which Deleuze recounts throughout a series of interventions on philosophers from the medieval Duns Scotus20 through Spinoza,21 Nietzsche,22 and finally Leibniz— attempted to show that beneath or alongside a tradition that had banished the world to some unattainable outside of sensation, there was a tradition of thought at least as rich that had refused such a nihilistic gesture. Against a Cartesian world characterized by fundamentally incompatible substances, Deleuze argues with Scotus for the univocity of being, and with Spinoza for a notion of a single substance that manifests itself in various attributes (Expressionism 42). In light of this trajectory, Deleuze’s attraction to the German mathematician and thinker Leibniz is not hard to explain. Inventor of a form of calculus more or less simultaneously with Newton,23 Leibniz added to the latter’s achievements an entire literary, philosophical, and theological dimension in harmony with his mathematical insights. Although Leibniz’s thought is too extensive to treat in any detail here, much of the force of Leibniz’s vision for Deleuze is contained in this sentence, quoted at the outset of Deleuze’s considerations: “The division of the continuous must not be taken as of sand dividing into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper or a tunic in folds, in such a way that an infinite number of folds can be produced, some smaller than others, but without the body ever



Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

dissolving into points or minima.”24 An ontological vision more in tune with the insights of differential calculus would be hard to imagine. Refusing the atomistic world view of the Cartesians, in which analysis would indeed eventually resolve around points or minima—and in which objects are conceived of as occupying points in a space measurable and mappable in terms of three-dimensional coordinates—Leibniz’s monad does not look out onto an independent world composed of atomistic unities, but engages in a kind of sounding of the infinitesimal, a process in which space opens or unfolds out of ever-receding, ever-diminishing folds within folds. As we have already seen, Deleuze’s interpretation incorporates the basic tenets of baroque architecture: rather than the façade playing appearance off against a hidden corporeal substance, façade and sacristy are now situated as part of the same building. Extension and receptivity are the attributes of an exogenous folding specific to façades; mind and spontaneity becomes the attributes of endogenous folding, of organicism, and are likened to a room walled with folds, but with no windows or doors. In the chiaroscuro of baroque painting Deleuze sees what he calls the “effacement of contour” (32), a differential undermining of Cartesian linearity and atomism. And certainly we need not go far into the world of baroque sculpture to find excessively eponymous illustrations of Deleuze’s theme. If Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Theresa (1647–52) is among the most luxuriant examples, it is for Deleuze still one among many: “In every instance folds of clothing acquire an autonomy and a fullness that are not simply decorative effects. They convey the intensity of a spiritual force exerted on the body, either to turn it upside down or to stand or raise it up over and again, but in every event to turn it inside out and to mold its inner surfaces” (122). This molding of inner surfaces into the infinite complexity of the fold lies at the heart of Deleuze’s interpretation of all baroque culture. If baroque culture reveals an effort of thought for the philosopher, what it reveals for Deleuze is the force of the fold itself—as the churning difference within the univocity of being— against the gestures of Platonism and the abstractions of epistemology, to impart itself to the world in a material way. According to Deleuze, then, it would seem that the alternate history of philosophy he resurrects represents not an effort of thought to deal with the problem of a fundamental separation of space, but rather an image of thought in which the problem is not really a problem. And yet in some of Deleuze’s formulation he would seem to acknowledge a kind of pre-existing tension, as if Descartes’ Renaissance issues were not merely throw-

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Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

backs, but were somehow still at work disrupting the univocity of being and provoking the thought of the fold. If the latter scenario has truth to it, however, then we cannot agree that Descartes is to be disregarded in favor of models of baroque thought that are somehow truer or closer to the mark, for Descartes’ formulation would have to be seen as responding to the same fundamental problem that provoked the thought of Spinoza and Leibniz, the painting of Velazquez and Caravaggio, or the architecture of Bernini and Neumann.25 These problems, as I have argued, stem largely from the emergence of basic assumptions necessary for negotiating the complexities of theatrical space. While both holes and folds can be understood as more or less successful, more or less failed efforts of thought to deal with the problem of dissociationism, there are clues, in the writing of Baltasar Gracián, to another way of thinking through the apparent paradoxes of theatrical space.26

artifice and theatrical space In his Criticón, in a chapter titled “Las maravillas de Artemia” (The Marvels of Artemia), Baltasar Gracián explores what we have identified as the basic problem of the Baroque—that is, dissociationism—but does so as if fully cognizant of its indebtedness to theatrical structures of spatiality. The episode recounted in the chapter deals with the attempts of Critilo—one of the heroes of the book and a clear allegory for man’s critical capacity—to rescue his young and naïve traveling companion, Andrenio, from the snares of illusion and deceit set by Falibundo, master of lies and de facto ruler of the world. What is fascinating about the chapter is that this salvation from deceit can only come about through the intervention—in the form of a good and wise goddess—of artifice. As the narrator explains: “Art is nature’s complement and another second self. . . . This was doubtlessly man’s purpose in paradise when the Creator endowed him with the presidency of the entire world and his presence there in order to cultivate it; that is, that with art he should keep it in order and cleanliness. In this way we say that artifice is nature’s regalia, the splendor of its sincerity; it always works Miracles” (Criticón 173). That is to say, art begins already in a precarious position. Is it to be distinguished from nature, or is it rather part of nature? It is, for Gracián, a complement or, we might add, a supplement, very much in the sense used by Jacques Derrida in his reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.



Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

At first glance, it seems that Gracián’s description of the relation between art and nature confirms a hierarchy also at work in Rousseau: art cultivates nature; it dresses it up; it adds splendor to nature’s sincerity. According to Derrida, however, Rousseau’s dismissal of culture as merely supplemental to nature—to something that would be, independently of the supplement of education, complete in itself—reveals that nature must itself contain some lack that culture in turn comes to fill. The something, in other words, to which a supplement is added can never be complete in itself; for something that is complete will not bear being added to. Rousseau’s natural man, therefore, could not be complete if culture’s supplement of education could later come and add to him in any way.27 But we need not subject Gracián to much pressure, or indeed to any at all, for his text to come to strikingly similar conclusions. Speaking of the goddess or witch, the narrator goes on to say: “She was called, who denies neither her name nor her deeds, the wise and discrete Artemia. . . . So different from the other Circe, because she did not convert men into beast but on the contrary beast into men. She did not enchant people, but rather disenchanted them. . . . And they even say that she truly taught the beasts to speak” (Criticón 172). Sorceress, witch, her powers however do not enchant, but rather disenchant, which fact can only lead us to assume that the enchantment was there to begin with. She does not change men into beasts, but beasts into men; and she teaches the beasts to speak, which means that her power must be aligned with the power of language. But again, in adding language to nature she would appear to be disenchanting, that is, to be taking something away, not adding something inessential. The image becomes clearer when Critilo actually witnesses Artemia’s creation of a human being: “But what most astonished Critilo was to see her take a stick, a trunk in her hands, and start chiseling away at it until she made of it a man, who spoke such that he could be understood; he reasoned and was worth something, in the end, what was needed for him to become a persona” (178). As we saw in our earlier discussion of Gracián, persona is something to which one aspires; to be persona is itself an art—the art, in fact, of appearing to be natural, through and through, to be real. For Gracián, in other words, the nature of human being is to be naturally incomplete; there is an originary lack, as Derrida would say, that allows the supplement of artifice to emerge as a kind of natural corrective force.28 In the same way that Artemia must remove material from nature in order to

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form a human being who reasons and speaks, the cultivation of persona requires the careful removal of something natural to human kind as Gracián and his society encounter it. But that something, also a kind of original lack, is primordial deceit. In order to save mankind—whom Gracián represents by the character Andrenio—Artemia sends an agent to the land of lies where he has been drawn by his folly: “And he got on with his work: he dressed himself according to the manner of that land, in the same livery of Falimundo’s servants, which were made of many doublets, folds, linings and counter­linings, breasts, pockets, overlappings, pleats and cloaks for all things” (177). Artifice, in other words, adopts the duplicity and all the trappings of deceit in order to save man from its allures. Indeed, the final instrument needed to break Falimundo’s spell is nothing other than a mirror; not because it mirrors nature as it is, but rather because, by forcing us to look at nature awry or in a denatured way, nature is revealed in its primordial deceit: “the things of the world must be seen backwards, turning one’s back, in order to see them straight” (182). Finally, there is what Andrenio sees in the mirror: “I see a monster, the most horrible I have seen in my life, because it has neither feet nor a head; what a disproportionate thing, its parts do not correspond” (182). The mirror, which allows Andrenio to look at the world backwards—twisted around from his normal, natural perspective—reveals to Andrenio nature as it is in itself: distorted, foul, deceitful. It is important that we not just write this off as a case of typical baroque morbidity. The comparison with Rousseau, at least as interpreted by Derrida, is insightful: what Derrida’s reading shows is that under Rousseau’s proto-romantic faith in nature lies a deep-seated suspicion of nature’s propriety, its natural and undisturbed self-identity. Gracián shows us the same thing, but with a clarity of insight that requires little commentary. All that is left is to situate Gracián’s insight in our discussion of the Baroque’s philosophical description, which also means to link it to the problem posed to modernity by theatrical dissociationism. As far as the latter is concerned, what is privileged in Gracián is quite simply his proximity to the constitutive theatricality of baroque interaction. If deceit is primordial, that is because, in a profound or ontological sense, being is at heart deceptive; or, rather, deceit is primordial for the baroque mind because the baroque mind negotiates space according to theatrical assumptions. Everything, people included, are posited as being engaged in a constant and thoroughgoing play of appearances over against some core being of corporeal substance—a



Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds

model borrowed freely from the stage. If Gracián describes base reality in such terms, that is merely because reality, for the Baroque, was in some sense clearly caught up in this dynamic, a dynamic covered up by the efforts of later cultural production. As far as the former question is concerned—namely, Gracián’s relation to our current discussion of folds and holes—his insight is simultaneously simple and profound: what Gracián shows us, already from his seat in a nascent modernity, is that the choice of the Baroque is perhaps a false one. The claim of holes is that we are separated from truth; the claim of folds is that we have always known, always been our own truth. The marvel of Artemia, of Baroque artifice, is the revelation that neither claim stands on its own; rather, the truth hidden by holes and revealed by artifice is that the truth we have always known and been is folded, duplicitous, artificial all the way down. Better yet, we are connected to our truth by folds; but the truth we are thereby connected to is a fundamental separation from our most intimate and other self that no folding can ever overcome.

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chapter two

How to Build a Baroque House (Cervantes, Master Architect)

The Baroque is the cultural expression of a deep and abiding anxiety regarding the nature and extent of human reason. In its philosophical expression, this anxiety takes the form of a paradox that hinges on the problem of truth as a function of appearances. Does the veil of appearances that besieges the senses represent in some altered form a truth, a reality that in itself persists in an unaltered and hence different form? If so, does piercing the veil of illusion give one access to this unadulterated truth? Or does the very access to the truth pervert it yet again, in that, in appearing to us, it is reduced to appearance and hence to the very thing that hides from us its essence? Modernity has hung haplessly on the horns of this baroque dilemma since the perfection of its cultural expression in the seventeenth century, and perhaps every age or movement since can be read as an attempt—more or less successful in propagating itself as the final answer—to transcend or at least circumvent its grasp.1 Conceiving of baroque cultural artifacts as in some profound way responding to the original provocation of this dilemma suggests at least two strategies for the construction of those artifacts. According to the first strategy, such artifacts can be seen as affirming the promise of appearances, that they are indeed the way to the uncorrupted truth, and that perseverance along this path will lead to glory. At the apex of this tendency lies a neoPlatonic religious discourse, embraced by Reformation and Counter-Reformation representatives alike, that equated terrestrial life with appearance and hence with deception and degeneracy and proposed that the truth lay in another dimension altogether. The tempting mistake to make here has



How to Build a Baroque House

been to associate the baroque style exclusively with the Counter-Reformation. The fact is that the radical negation of the ephemeral espoused by the reformist churches is not opposed to the superficial opulence of CounterReformation ritual; the two stylistic tendencies are responding to precisely the same urge. Both Reformation and Counter-Reformation ideology confront the conflation of life itself with the suspect world of appearances that is at the heart of the baroque, but while the one responds by negating the lived world, the other responds by emphasizing its theatricality, and hence ultimate emptiness, in relation to a determining but previously unknown ground.2 The other strategy is less common, the necessary but often unnoticed inverse to this major strategy of modern reason. It is what we have been calling a minor strategy, borrowing the term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theorization of a minor literature. Minor literature is writing that “deterritorizalizes” the ordinary use of language, leaving behind the normal structures of sense by following the “lines of flight” or escape that such language inevitably carries with it (Kafka 21). Unlike the Baroque’s major strategy, which affirms the promise of appearances whether by negating the world or ostentatiously theatricalizing it, the minor strategy suggests that the promise of purity behind the veil of appearances is itself already corrupted by the very distinction that gave birth to it, and hence that reason’s house is built on shifty ground, was in some sense always already baroque(n). The shearing away of appearances is, from this perspective, an infinite process, once one buys the initial premise that appearances are deceptive and hide from us a purer, uncorrupted truth. The insight of the minor strategy would thus seem to correspond to the central insight of deconstruction, which the late Derrida posed in the apparently paradoxical formulation “essential corruptibility.”3 Corruption is not a secondary, belated process that attaches onto a pristine subject; rather, essence is at heart already corrupted by time, change, decay. In a similar way, according to the minor strategy, the truth hidden by the veil of appearance is already corrupted by the appearances, is itself nothing but appearance, but without the ultimate support of an ever-receding ground of unmitigated self-identity. I want to emphasize, however, that the identification of such a strategy at the heart of the Baroque should not be discarded as the merely ahistorical imposition of a late twentieth-century fad on seventeenth-century cultural artifacts. One should not, properly speaking, ever “apply” deconstruction

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to anything; rather, deconstruction can be shown to be already at work in texts. But one of the reasons it can and is so often shown to be working in the texts of modernity is that modernity is organized philosophically around the baroque dilemma, whose minor strategy is a relentless deconstruction of its major strategy’s pretensions. Just as “every text of metaphysics carries within itself, for example, both the so-called ‘vulgar’ concept of time and the resources that will be borrowed from the system of metaphysics in order to criticize that concept” (Derrida, “Ousia” 61), in the same way every baroque text carries within itself both the major strategy and the resources that will be borrowed from the baroque system in order to criticize that strategy. This is not to say, however, that the texts are therefore subject to the sort of leveling reading that would make them all minor in the same way and to the same extent. Nor are we led to claim the opposite, that a cultural product somehow depends for its strategic position vis à vis major baroque culture on the explicit intention of its author. Here lies, as Julio Baena has already indicated, the one weakness in the important discussion between himself and David Castillo on the subject of the aesthetic value of Cervantes’s Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda. The Persiles, Baena had argued in his El círculo y la flecha, “fails as a novel where it intends [pretende] to triumph as a utopia.”4 In his review of Baena’s book, Castillo countered this claim at the level of its content with an equally agile reversal, arguing rather that it “triumphs as a novel where it intends [pretende] to fail as a utopia” (“Reseña” 146, qtd. in Discordancias x). It does not, in other words, claim or intend to be a utopia, but is rather a full-blown critique of utopia,5 and therein lies its literary value. Literary value, therefore, is associated with irony, self-awareness, and distance from the model it imitates, in this case the Byzantine novel. The difference between Baena’s and Castillo’s positions comes down to whether that distance is there or not, the presence or absence of which they both implicitly equate with whether Cervantes intends, pretende, it to be there: Castillo says he does, Baena says he does not.6 In what concerns an evaluation of the Persiles, I ultimately come down agreeing with Castillo. Whereas Baena says of the Persiles that it is a novel he likes “less each time he has to read it” (Discordancias xii), I think the Persiles is a marvelous novel, and my reason for thinking so is based on the same reasons Castillo argues for: namely, that it subverts the genres it appears to be imitating rather than merely imitating them. Nevertheless, in my view this subversion has absolutely nothing to do with what Cervantes intends. If Persiles is a great novel



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it is because it really, objectively subverts the genres it imitates; but unlike the new critical, objectivist notion of irony I am recalling here, the objective subversion of Cervantes’s text relies entirely on its immersion in historical context. Here I may quote again either Baena’s or Castillo’s typically cogent formulations: Persiles exhibits “the necessary eccentricity of the desired centrality,” or “an anamorphic mirror that inverts or . . . distorts the symbols of Counter-Reformation culture.” In my view, the pretensión implicit in Baena’s formulation is not Cervantes’s but that of the major strategy, with which Cervantes’s texts are in a relation of structural eccentricity. Cervantes’s texts, in other words, are subversive in that they consistently deploy the minor strategy in a structural relation to the Baroque’s major strategy.7 I could demonstrate what I mean using the Persiles, but I think both Castillo, in (A)wry Views, and Baena in his books have done that in a decisive way,8 regardless of their surface disagreement. Instead, I will look at several of the Novelas ejemplares in which Cervantes, master architect of the Baroque, shows us what is involved in making, and unmaking, the baroque house of reason.

the house and its walls A baroque house, Deleuze writes in his analysis of Leibniz, has neither windows nor doors (Fold 28). This is because the Leibnizian house, the monad that is the soul, inflects the entire world in the folds of its walls. Its walls are expressive of the world; no change goes unregistered in the universe that laps up against its walls. But this house, we should recall, is multi-layered. It has an upstairs that corresponds to the monad proper; but it also has a foyer downstairs that would correspond to the monad’s form of communicability with the world. It is a paradoxical communicability, at once blind and omniscient, hermetically sealed and vibrantly exposed to the world. A baroque house, Cervantes explains in his novella El celoso extremeño, has more than one set of walls.9 he bought [a house] for twelve thousands ducats, in a good part of the city, which had running water and a garden with many orange trees; he closed all the windows that looked out on the street and gave them a view up to the sky, and he did the same with all the other windows in the house. In the entryway to the house, which in Seville they call the casapuerta, he made a stall for a mule, and

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How to Build a Baroque House above it a straw loft and apartment where the one who would care for it could stay, who was an old, black eunuch, he raised the level of the terraced roofs such that one who entered into the house would have to look directly at the sky without being able to see anything else; he made a gate going into the patio to correspond with the casapuerta.  (103–4)

The idea of this plan recalls to some degree Deleuze’s reconstruction, in that the doubled structure of the walls and the space separating them guarantees simultaneous communicability and insulation. That the inhabitant of the intermediate space is black and castrated guarantees in Carrizales’s mind that the very means of necessary communication—namely the entryway for provisions—be facilitated by one who’s being and status hinders or makes impossible communication. As a black man Luis represents the most culturally alien being for Extremadura’s provincial society; as a eunuch Luis represents the deadening of that most dangerous of forces, sexual desire. The doubling of Carrizales’s walls resonates throughout the text in the word that more than any other characterizes his condition as celoso, or jealous man: recato. A word popular both to Cervantes and the writing public of his time as a mode of description for the care one should take for all things regarding one’s honor, recato takes on a doubly important role for Carrizales. Recato (the first recorded usage of recatado was 1605), defined as honesty or modesty, results itself from the doubling of cato, of what one does when one sees, is aware, or pays attention. The redoubling of this awareness is at the same time a reflexive, self-constituting act, as self-consciousness is to consciousness, or the ego to the libidinal investment that first cathects objects, in Freud’s telling. Recato also connotes something like a recinto, the (second) wall formed by surrounding something, wrapping or taping it. According to the dynamics of a baroque house, however, all these efforts at reinforcement are to naught. The physics of baroque architecture would seem to work contrary to those laws we are comfortable with, and with which the jealous worries of a man like Carrizales consoles himself. For these laws suggest that what one wants to protect one should hide from the outside world with the redoubled protection of re-cato, an awareness turned back onto itself; but the physics of baroque architecture decree that the very walls that one doubles up, in the interest of protecting an interior purity, have the intensely disturbing effect of rendering that interior space impure, and of doing so, apparently, to an extent exactly proportionate to the intensity of the protection.



How to Build a Baroque House

Carrizales’s plan would seem to be perfect: build a house with two walls; let the interior space be inhabited only by virgin women10; let no man ever pass beyond the interior wall; and let communication between the walls be mediated by a man with no contagions, either cultural or sexual. As Cervantes writes regarding the extent of Carrizales’s banishment of masculinity from the inner recesses of his house: he did not even consent that animals enter in his house if they were male. No cat ever chased the rats of the house, nor was the barking of a dog ever heard in it; all were of the feminine gender. By day he pondered, by night he did not sleep; he was the watch and sentinel of his house and the Argos of what he loved. No man ever entered the door to the patio. With his friends he did business in the street. The figures on the clothes that adorned the rooms and stalls were all females, flowers, and woods. All his house smelled of honesty, seclusion, and recato.  (106)

And yet despite—or better, precisely because of—Carrizales’s supreme recato, his greatest fear is realized, and his prize possession, the virgin child he calls his wife, is spoiled. (Albeit not technically, as Leonora’s honesty ultimately exhausts even her young, energetic suitor; but it is enough that he be found in the inner sanctum, if not in flagrante delicto.)11 The difference between “despite” and “because of,” however, is a great one, and it thus makes sense to pin this point down. When we first meet the undoer of Felipo’s honor, Cervantes gives us a clue as to his motivation: “One of those young men who among themselves is called virote, bachelor [the word emphasizes his virility], who calls the recently married mantones [shawls], began to watch the house of the recatado Carrizales, and seeing it always locked, got the urge to know who lived inside; and he did his work with such enthusiasm and curiosity that he came to know everything he desired” (107). The tension between two explanations is clear: either the threat is entirely external, the virote who ridicules the institution of marriage; or it is due to the very fact of Carrizales’s recato, which gives birth to the curiosity and desire to enter a house defined by its state of permanent closure. While the major strategy of baroque mores demands the former (and thus Don Juan’s shadow haunts a society built on women’s honestidad), Cervantes’s minor proclivity keeps upsetting the show. His way finally cleared through his picaresque seduction of el negro Luis’s social and musical desires, el virote Loaysa sings in his first performance to the gathered virginity of the inner sanctum the following verse:

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How to Build a Baroque House Mother my mother, you put guards on me, but if I don’t guard myself, you won’t guard me. They say it is written, and it is certainly true, that privation is the cause of appetite; it grows to be infinite, enclosed love; that’s why it’s better not to close me in; since if I don’t etc.  (125)

Although these lines could be simply read as the persuasive rhetoric of our energetic virote, we should not fail to note that the choice of songs is not his own but is rather that of the dueña—the older woman ultimately responsible for safeguarding Leonora’s honor, whose own desire for Loaysa will eventually be the key to delivering her ward to his clutches—and is enthusiastically seconded by the audience of damsels. The damsels, in other words, are perfectly aware of what Freud would theorize somewhat later as an inherent transgressiveness to desire, when he remarked, for example, in his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality that the “sexual instinct in its strength enjoys overriding” (18) such social and somatic barriers as disgust or, in the case at hand, the honesty of virgins. But as Freud also argued in his later treatise on prohibition and its discontents, Totem and Taboo, the desire to transgress taboo (of which the honor code is a clear example), is fundamentally an ambivalent one: “the people of the taboo thus have an ambivalent attitude toward their taboo; they would like nothing more than to transgress it, but they are also afraid of it; they fear precisely because they would like to, and the fear is stronger than the desire” (323). Now it is clear in what sense the honor code in literature does not function like a taboo in Freud’s sense: in literature the fear of breaking a taboo is always overridden by the pleasure thereby produced. Nevertheless, Freud’s emphasis on the ambivalence of affect produced by the taboo resonates suggestively with Cervantes’s architectural imagination. According to the major strategy, virginal purity must be guarded, and doubly so, against its corruption through external forces. But Cervantes’s minor strategy reveals a desire in relation to prohibition as always ambivalent: purity



How to Build a Baroque House

at once fears intrusion and desires it. But if such desire coexists with its enclosure, purity can hardly be called pure. The minor strategy often emerges to greatest effect in Cervantes in the narrative voice, which by and large confines itself at the level of its utterance to aping the conventional dictates of the genre or social mores in which the narrative finds its context. But what is offered in the utterance, in classic Cervantine irony, is immediately undermined in the enunciation, as in this case in which the narrator discusses Carrizales’s hypothetical discovery of his honor’s destruction12: It would be good at this moment to ask Carrizales, if we didn’t know he was sleeping, where are now his well warned recatos, his suspicions, his warnings, his persuasions, the high walls of his house, the not having let in even the shadow of one who would have the name of male. . . . But we’ve already said that there was no reason to ask him, because he was sleeping more than necessary; and if he heard it, and perhaps responded, he couldn’t give a better answer than shrug his shoulders and arch his eyebrows and say: “All this was brought down to its foundations by the cleverness, I believe, of a pleasure-seeking and vicious youth and the malice of a false governess, along with the carelessness of an importuned and persuaded girl! . . .” God free us from each of these enemies, against whom there is neither shield of prudence that defends nor sword of recato that cuts.  (129)

The paragraph is a masterful example of the master architect’s style, its tropological dynamics reinforcing his architectonics at every turn. The entire paragraph is hypothetical, because, as he reiterates, Carrizales was sleeping and hence completely out of the loop. And yet we are treated to both what we might ask him, and what he might respond, were it the case that he were not so soundly asleep. This next level, then, contains both the “tuttut” of the conventional narrator’s admonitions, and the accusations toward the usual suspects in cases of honor’s deceit. This litany, however, is not only undermined by the narrator’s own repeated observation that the question and answer are irrelevant, insofar as Carrizales is sleeping, but also by the apparent affirmation his last words lend to the charges against these “enemies, against whom there is neither shield of prudence that defends nor sword of recato that cuts.” That there can be no defense against these enemies is perhaps, then, the entire point, because the sword of recato is one that cuts both ways, its reflexive return inscribing in the purity of its defendant the ambivalence so fundamental to all objects of taboo.

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It turns out that Carrizales—at least when awake—does not answer in the same way the narrator of convention would have him answer. Although foolish in life, his fatal sorrow has learned more wisdom than that. Instead of the bloody revenge for which the honor code provides as the appropriate response to its violation, Carrizales blames only himself, as having “myself been the maker of the poison that is now taking my life, and having, like the silkworm, made the house in which I will die” (133). And is this not the answer that the narrator in some sense seeks when, appearing for the first time in first person in the last paragraph of the story, he declares himself stumped by Leonora’s silence as to her ultimate innocence? For her innocence was, in fact, never the point. Carrizales built himself a baroque house, and now he must die in it.

the force of baroque blood It may strike us as readers of Cervantes’s fiction that his work—and his Exemplary Novels are exemplary of just this—shuttles back and forth between the conventional (or even downright conservative) and the subversive. We modern literary critics naturally appreciate the latter, and feel somewhat embarrassed by the former. Hence the debates over the value of the Persiles I cited above, and the tradition of apologies for Cervantes’s first foray into fiction, the pastoral Galatea. Even within the frame of the novellas this distinction appears to be at work, with more or less openly critical works like El celoso extremeño and El Licenciado vidriera facing off against more modest and seemingly traditional fare like La fuerza de la sangre.13 It would seem counter­intuitive to call subversive a story that seems to extol the force of blood in a society obsessed with the discriminating potential—in terms of class, religion, and overall privilege—of that force. But if what I have claimed about Cervantes as being the producer of a work that is structurally minor in relation to a major cultural context has validity, then evidence of the minor strategy’s preeminence must be apparent to a greater or lesser degree in all his work, especially that work dating from the same period. La fuerza de la sangre is the tale of a young woman of a good but poor family who is raped by a young nobleman and gives birth to his son, unbeknownst to either the nobleman or his parents. At the age of seven, the boy, having already shown signs of his noble heritage, is hit by a horse in the street and suffers a serious head wound, from which his noble blood



How to Build a Baroque House

flows. The boy and his blood are seen by none other than the boy’s paternal biological grandfather, who is moved by his semblance to his own son who has been living in Italy for these last seven years. The denouement is obvious for any reader of Golden Age literature: the boy’s mother is reunited with his biological father, and her honor thereby repaired. In this way, it seems, the distinction of blood is reaffirmed, and the crime of rape overlooked, if not justified. And perhaps this reading would suffice, were it not for Cervantes’s architectonics, which are at work laying out blueprints even in a story that is not explicitly about building houses. Judging from the frequency of expressions relating to it, if there is a central concept or theme to this story it is secrecy. On more than twenty occasions Cervantes uses the word secreto or some variant suggesting the hidden, the feigned, the dissimulated. The motive of the secret is the safeguarding of honor, and it is the role of the force of blood to pierce the secret by restoring honor to its rightful place. Blood’s force, then, is equated to honor; it restores what has been dishonored, and what for that very reason has required secrecy. But the minor structure of Cervantes’s story never ceases to upset and question this dichotomy, and to interrogate that very honor that would seem to be the source of blood’s force. In this way it is not too far off to draw again a parallel with Derrida’s thought, and suggest that the title The Force of Blood be read in much the same vein as Derrida’s “Force of Law,” namely, as a demonstration that the force underlying the rule of any set of conventions is never pure, self-identical, but rather itself an effect of the conventions it apparently founds.14 And just as the force of law, justice, is a force that must “disrupt with its precipitating violence the symmetry of the legality it (in an essential ambivalence) sustains” (256), the force of blood that is honor also turns out—in the hands of Cervantes’s minor strategy—to be the disruptive force of that very legality it sustains. This is what the minor strategy reveals precisely by way of honor’s own essential ambivalence. Although it would appear that everything in this story is a secret—beginning with the name of the perpetrator, “whom we will for the time being, for reasons of respect, covering his name, call with that of Rodolfo” (77)—the secret at the heart of all the others is that of the dishonor that serves as the story’s source and motive. Already on the second page, Leocadia’s parents (as that is the name we are told to call her) hide the fact of her abduction from the forces of justice, “fearful that they would be the principal instruments in publicizing their dishonor” (78). The theme of the publicity of dishonor

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is a common one in Golden Age literature, with variants gracing the titles of several theatrical standards of the age. With Cervantes’s minor strategy, however, the theme is treated to its full paradoxical extent. In the darkness of the room into which she has been secreted, Leocadia wishes the darkness to become her eternal resting place, “since dishonor that goes unknown is better than honor exposed to the opinion of people” (79). The same theme is developed in slightly different language later in the story, when her father counsels her to keep the story of her violation a secret: “And beware, daughter, that more damage is done by an ounce of public dishonor than by a sack full of secret infamies. And since you can live in public in an honored way with God, don’t worry about being dishonored with yourself in secret: true dishonor is in sin and true honor is in virtue” (84). The paradoxical nature of the honor code achieves its full expression in these two sentences, and is displayed in even greater detail when they are mapped against the preceding formulation. The final sentence of the above quotation corresponds to the major strategy of what we could call, borrowing a term from Barbara Fuchs, baroque transparency.15 According to this strategy, the world of appearances is denigrated with respect to the true world of sin and virtue, damnation and salvation. Honor is translated out of its worldly context and into its otherworldly context, and thus made dependent on these truths known to God and to our souls. The sentence immediately preceding it, of course, expresses exactly the opposite sentiment; an ounce of public dishonor is worse than a sack full of secret dishonor. The second, in this light, becomes merely the overt justification for the first. In other words, precisely because public dishonor is such a bad thing, let us use the language of virtue and vice to justify keeping your dishonor secret. Here we witness one possible trope of the minor strategy: simply taking the major strategy at its word and letting it work against itself. While both the sentences are examples of common pieties of the major strategy, in laying them out side by side Cervantes allows them to draw a “line of flight” leading to their mutual dissolution. In a similar way, aligning the two sentences dealing with the relative damage of public and private dishonor precipitates a line of flight toward the very disintegration of any coherent notion of honor. a) dishonor that goes unknown is better than honor exposed to the opinion of people b) more damage is done by an ounce of public dishonor than by a sack full of secret infamies



How to Build a Baroque House

As the argument is somewhat complex, I will present it in schematic form, as follows: a) [−H] > H or, hidden dishonor is better than exposed honor (honor exposed to the danger of its own loss) b) −H < [−H] or, exposed dishonor is worse than hidden dishonor What we see from this schematic treatment is that, while the value of hidden dishonor remains the same in both equations (namely, as “better than” or at least “not so bad”), the side of the equation carrying the negative value reverses its charge without thereby changing its value relative to the other side. What this means is Cervantes has established a relative equality between honor and dishonor insofar as what is assumed is its exposure. There is, in other words, no such thing as honor, only the fear of exposure, a fear, obviously enough, coterminous with enclosure, secrecy. As in the case of Carrizales’s baroque house, the house Cervantes has built for honor has a distinctly minor feel. Its walls are made of secrecy, dissimulation, as if to hide, to protect an honor whose redemption through the force of blood will render those walls obsolete. Inside the walls is innocence, virtue, nobility. But the minor strategy undoes all that. Within its walls we are treated not to innocence and purity; instead, piercing those walls reveals to us the theater of how the promise of purity was dependent all along on its very enclosure, just as its corruption was a function of our desire to protect it from corruption. For that reason it cannot be a mere coincidence that the scene of Leocadia’s dishonor is referred to in theatrical terms. Upon returning to her parents, “she told them what she had seen in the theater where was represented the tragedy of her misfortune” (83). But more than that, her very tragedy was a masterpiece of acting. As she tells Rodolfo as he prepares to rape her for a second time, “when I was in a faint you stepped on me and destroyed me; but now that I have my wits about me, you’ll have to kill me before conquering me: because if now, awake, I were to concede to your so abominable desire without resistance, you might imagine that my faint was put on when you dared to destroy me” (81). In other words, in the very moment of resisting a second violation, what Leocadia fears is not the violation itself, but the impression her failure to resist might give her attacker about the nature of their first encounter: that her faint was, well, a feint. Like deconstruction, the minor strategy works from the inside of a textual and social tradition, undermining the established models of truth that support its idea of reason. If honor as the force of blood constituted a pow-

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erful ideologeme of the day, a tool in the box of a powerful propagandistic effort to promote the interests of an entrenched elite (Maravall), the major strategy was one that sustained and supported that effort, and it did so primarily through a kind of myth of eventual transparency (Fuchs). This is the strategy of sustaining the promise of essence against the ephemera of appearances. In this view, the force of blood is driven by a truth not subject to the whimsy of appearance, the necessary secrets and dissimulations of social life. In this view, innocence is guarded against corruption, which approaches from outside the walls of a baroque house. But the minor strategy churns away at the heart of this pretension. This strategy feeds on these illusions, not in order to carve them away and reveal, at last, that long-sought truth; rather, the minor strategy reveals only a minor truth, a truth with a small t. That truth is the other side of baroque reason, the shifty ground on which the modern house is built.

chapter three

The Theater of Truth

The Baroque is theater, and the theater is baroque. From the moment of its inception in the late sixteenth century, the modern European theater, that institution coterminous with the division of the world into an audience and a stage, has been driven by the same troubled relation that has prodded its historical fellow traveler, modern philosophy: the relation between truth and illusion. But where the aporia born of that dialectic becomes philosophy’s nemesis, haunting thinkers from Descartes to de la Rochefoucauld, from Kant to Derrida, it was and has always been theater’s plaything, the crucible out of which aesthetic enjoyment in the theatrical age—and this includes innumerable medial forms, from traditional theater to the novel to the aesthetic possibilities of film and new media—is forged. The reason for this, as I said above, is that the Baroque is theater, and theater is baroque. If modern reason, according to the method announced by Descartes, sticks to the straight and narrow path, allowing itself to be led only by clear and distinct ideas, its search for truth through the labyrinth of appearances that theatricality calls its playground is bound to error and frustration. For in a theatrical world the seeker is constitutively rent by appearances, and appearances promise an unspoiled ground that is only ever encountered as yet another theatrical space; or, rather, the ground on which we stand, so sure of its reality, is revealed again and again to be yet another of illusion’s snares, to be explained away yet again in the service of an ever receding truth. The theater cannot solve this problem; nor does it try to. Instead, it enjoys it. It makes use of it. It weaves countless plots around it and uses them to orient our desires and identifications to the ways of theatricality. In this

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sense the theater, and theatrical practices of public representation, can be and have been accused of being instrumental in the capturing of desires and the structuring of subjectivities in the service of established political interests. This structuring, following the lines of what we have been calling the major strategy, involves the indefinitely renewed promise of presence just beyond the next veil of mediation, and it is endemic to theatricality in all its forms of expression. But the beauty of the Baroque is that—as the aesthetic imprint of the opening and closing of the theatrical mode—it can always swing both ways. So if the classics of the baroque stage are largely structured according to the major strategy, and have been accurately, I believe, portrayed as participating in a guided culture (Maravall), a careful analysis of their architectonics reveals that they are never far from their founding aporia, and are therefore always open to a minor reading. Let us be clear about this: in Cervantes the minor strategy is dominant, undoing again and again the pretensions of ideologies based on myths of racial essences and sexual purity. The stage, on the other hand, reveals the minor strategy because it is the very essence of the Baroque and can do nothing else. Because the Baroque is theater, the theater of the Baroque offers the most vivid expression of its core; in the elements of its basic design we see the seams of its construction, and the traces of its ultimate undoing. This aspect of modernity’s self knowledge is present in all the early-modern theatrical institutions, in the plays of Shakespeare and Jonson, of Corneille and Molière, of Machiavelli and Guarini; but it is in the sustained and massive production of the Spanish theatrical institution that it receives its most obsessive and varied treatment. In the following pages I will examine three examples of the baroque Hispanic theater (deliberately chosen for their canonicity) with an eye to how the aporia of truth and appearances, and of presence and its mediation, is at constant play in the theater of truth that is the Baroque.1 If the relation between truth and appearances is at stake, there is perhaps no better place to start than Juan Ruiz de Alarcón’s justifiably admired play La verdad sospechosa (The Suspect Truth). Direct source for Corneille’s Le menteur and Goldoni’s Il bugiardo (both translated as The Liar), its indirect influence on both the theater of its time and the tradition since then has been immeasurable. Nevertheless, it is insofar as La verdad sospechosa gives us insight into the fundamentally theatrical structure of the Baroque and its play of truth that it is of interest here.



The Theater of Truth

The story, in simplest terms, is of a young nobleman with a penchant, or rather a pathology, for lying. Driven to greater and greater prevarication by his love for a woman about whose identity he is confused, his lies ultimately deprive him of the very goal of his affections. At first glance, then, it would seem that this is a classic morality tale, in which the sinner is punished by the sin itself. But a closer look reveals that the complexity and beauty of the plot and character construction depend on and engage with the very fabric of theatrical consciousness underlying baroque society. To begin with, it is not enough that Don García, the young nobleman and main protagonist, is a liar. The plot also depends on a series of chance errors, such that the first thesis we are led to posit is that if characters can lie about reality, reality itself is not necessarily telling the truth to begin with.2 The nature of the first and fatal error is itself highly theatrical. After his first encounter with his beloved, Doña Jacinta, and her best friend, Doña Lucrecia, in which he flirts with her and tells her his first lie—that he has been in love with her for the entire year since he returned from the Indies, when in fact he has only arrived the previous day from university—García discusses the women with his servant, the gracioso Tristán. Tristán, for his part, has bribed the women’s coach driver for information, which he delivers to García by quoting him: Tristán:  “Doña Lucrecia de Luna is how the more beautiful is called, who is my mistress; and the other lady who is accompanying her, I know here she lives, but not her name,” This is what the coachman said. D. García:  If Lucrecia is the more beautiful one, there’s nothing else to know, for she is the one who spoke and the one I love. . . .  (Alarcón I. 551–60)3

García, lost in his reveries, pays no heed to the fact that the judgment of beauty is (a) quoted from another, (b) biased, as the other is in the service of the lady he judges to be more beautiful, and (c) that the inherently subjective (and hence subject to error) nature of the judgment is immediately performed by Tristán, who disputes his own judgment of beauty—not, this time, with reference to the name, but rather with reference to who spoke the most. García, faced with a completely indeterminate choice of whom the coachman might have meant—whether his tastes agree with García’s

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or with Tristán’s—randomly assumes one position, with disastrous consequences. The theatrical nature of this error is evident in its composition as well as in its inherence in theatrical media from the early stage to film. In Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, for example, the entire plot springs from Cary Grant’s character, Roger Thornhill, being misrecognized as a spy. This misrecognition, as Žižek has stressed in his analysis, itself depends on the ultimately indeterminate nature of symbolic interpellation (Žižek, For They 135). Thornhill happens to be in the wrong place when the name George Kaplan is called (he raises his hand to signal a waiter at exactly the moment when a call is announced for a Mr. Kaplan) and as a result he finds himself forced to assume the identity attached to that name. When it turns out that there never was an original Kaplan, that is, that the name was itself invented, a subterfuge intended to throw the enemy off, Thornhill has effectively fulfilled his destiny and become that character. In both the film and La verdad sospechosa, the original error is theatrical because the interpellation essentially asks one to play a role. In North by Northwest, Thornhill is interpellated into the role of Kaplan; in La verdad sospechosa, Jacinta is interpellated into the role of Lucrecia. In both cases, interpellation fails because the original character is either not ready to play, or unwilling to play, or unaware that she is playing that role. Moreover, the error is theatrical because the failed interpellation leaves room for, and even becomes the motor of, desire; just as Thornhill ultimately wishes to become the mysterious and desirable Kaplan, so does Jacinta desire to fulfill the role of García’s beloved. Finally, the error is theatrical because in both cases the original character is capable of being interpellated only because he or she is already in some sense a character, already playing a role. In both the play and the movie, in other words, the structure of the play within the play is in operation; interpellation, whether failed or successful, takes place insofar as an interior audience is established to witness and ratify the speech act. In the case of the film, Thornhill’s act of raising his hand is witnessed and misinterpreted as a response to the call for Kaplan; this misinterpretation can only function insofar as another, exterior audience, recognizes it as such. In the case of the play, the identification of Jacinta as Lucrecia depends on exactly the same split between an interior audience that falls for the misidentification and an exterior audience that gets it right. This split between interior and exterior audience, and the concomitant negotiation and play between those levels, is perhaps the single most pow-



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erful marker of baroque aesthetics. It is the trope that at one and the same time establishes the notion of base reality as that which is independent of the language we use to describe it, and sets up the possibility of its elision into the secondary realities that are distinguished from it.4 The trick to how theater can play with these distinctions lies in the variability of the notion of base reality. Ultimately the reality of the audience has to serve as the grounding frame, but for the fiction of the play to work, the secondary reality, the one marked by the border of the stage, must take on the characteristics of base reality in reference to a further, tertiary reality. In the case of La verdad sospechosa, this tertiary reality comprises the theater of García’s lies. The efficacy of the play, as well as the enjoyment it produces, is due to how the truth of the play’s base reality is itself in turn rendered suspect. In this light, then, the play is full of references to the daily practice of prevarication, dissimulation, and distortion common to the court life of seventeenth-century Spain.5 These are not, we should note, instances of characters distancing themselves from such practices, but rather of them exhorting each other to the adoption of such practices in order to better secure their desired ends. The gracioso Tristán, for example, begins an extended tutelage of the same master whose outright lies so shock him by saying: Dissimulate and be patient, for showing oneself to be in love rather damages than helps one’s cause. . . .  (I. 784–86)

To which he later adds: Until you know extensively her state, do not hand yourself over so truthfully; for he who throws himself, believing in appearances, tends to find himself in a bog covered with green, deceitful weeds.  (I. 798–804)

Tristán nevertheless questions the wisdom of the lies with which García presents himself to his peers in the court, for which García provides the following justification: Who lives without being noticed who only augments the number and does what all others do,

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The Theater of Truth in what does he differs from a beast? To be famous is a great thing, No matter what the means.  (I. 857–62)

One the one hand, then, there is a commonplace practice of deceit that, far from being looked down upon, is recommended above all in questions of love. This recommendation is phrased in a quasi-philosophical idiom that stresses the fallibility of appearances, a popular topic in baroque thought that achieves its apogee in Descartes’ formulation of the basic problems of modern epistemology. The lover is exhorted to hide his own feelings so as to save himself from becoming caught in the deceitful tangle of appearances covering a treacherous but invisible reality. On the other hand, the liar is chastised for his outlandish stories, which will certain earn him a bad reputation, and he answers that fame is an end that should be attained regardless of the means. In this confrontation we have, it seems to me, the core problem of the baroque theory of society. Society is deceitful, and therefore one must be deceitful oneself in order to survive. Reputation, however, and specifically honorability, must be prized and protected above all, and few reproaches stain one’s honor more than the charge of lying, a charge that brings into question the value of one’s word. This becomes clear when García’s father, Don Beltrán, is informed of his son’s tendency to “not always tell the truth,” and he responds, “Jesus, what an ugly thing in a man of obligation” (I. 156–58). Needless to say, it is the obligation that is foremost in Beltrán’s mind, and the ugly appearance of lying in light of one’s obligation to society, rather than the sin of lying per se. This is evident in his first reaction to the news that his son has a character flaw: “Something that would be damaging to his quality in Madrid?” (I. 153–54). These terms, obligation and quality, are shorthand for the essential character trait of baroque society, one’s honor, a trait entirely derived from external appearances. 6 Being true to one’s word, then, is one of the inherent characteristics of a man of quality or obligation, in short, of an honorable man, principally because these terms share the distinct trait of not corresponding to any substantially verifiable element within a person’s character or being, but are rather always constructed externally, by the public gaze. One can always be true to one’s word in private—which is ultimately what Kant in the eighteenth century will posit as one of the ultimate markers of an ethical act—but it is in the nature of a word to be public, to be a mark one shares with the



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world, and hence to be true to it is intrinsically to make a show, a theater of truth. One’s truth to one’s word is only as good as one’s audience’s belief in it, and should the audience change its mind, then all is lost. As Tristán adds when Beltrán expresses astonishment and horror at hearing that “in the space of an hour he told five or six lies”: “What are you surprised about? / the worst is yet to come: / because they are such lies / that he could be caught by anyone” (II. 1251–55). García’s greatest fault, then, is not that he lies so much; it is that he is so bad at it. If the play’s plot turns around the truth of one’s public word, then it is no surprise that it should culminate around the written word, the concretization of that aspect of the letter that Derrida noted in response to Jacques Lacan’s opposite claim: namely, that it can always not arrive at its destination (Derrida, Resistances 65). But as the denouement demonstrates, the truth of that truth is in fact what Lacan himself had originally intended, for even when going astray, a letter always does arrive at its destination, insofar as the destination is determined by the arrival of a letter.7 In order to convince her of his love, a love he truly feels, García writes Jacinta a letter, which of course is addressed not to Jacinta but to Lucrecia. When Tristán and he are led to where the two ladies are meeting to discuss the letter, in order to observe them from a distance, the servant guiding them identifies Lucrecia as the one with the letter in her hand. The scene is described in such a way, however, that only the servant sees the two ladies at the moment of his description. As he leaves to allow García to take his place and observe the scene, the women exchange the letter, and thus Jacinta’s identity as Lucrecia is once again confirmed by her being in the wrong place, for us, or the right place, as concerns García’s expectations. The letter is a declaration of love for Lucrecia, but also an offer of marriage, the very enunciation of which, in Spain at the time, would signify the act of marriage if accepted and witnessed. Of crucial importance, of course, is that the declaration, signed and sealed, as it were, is a first person speech act that escapes the moment and person of its enactment: “by way of this [letter], my Lucrecia, which I give you signed by my hand, I say that I am already your husband don García” (III. 2456–59). This declaration, by claiming to speak in García’s name and simultaneously erring, as the letter will do, in time and place, both fails to arrive and succeeds in arriving at its destination, because the new destination, Lucrecia, becomes so by virtue of having been named in the letter. And in fact it is Lucrecia whom García will wed, trumped by his own letter:

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The Theater of Truth D. García:  What do you mean, Lucrecia? D. Beltrán:  What is this? D. García (to Jacinta):  You are my mistress, my lady. D. Beltrán: Another one? D. García:  If erred in the name I did not err in the person. You are the one I proposed to, and you the one my soul adores. Lucrecia: And this deceitful letter (she takes out a letter) Which is from your own hand, does it not unsay what you are saying?  (III. 3077–85)

Although a bit ungainly, I translated desdize in the last line as unsay in order to maintain the symmetry of Ruiz de Alarcón’s beautiful verse, in which the letter is both received as deceitful and as undoing or unsaying the lying words of García. The letter lies, in other words, but in doing so, it tells the truth. But the letter does even more, for in having inscribed the declaration of García’s hand, in his hand, it determines the deed as already done. Whether or not he erred in the person, García cannot have erred in the name, for the name is what is named in the letter, and it is to the letter, to his word, however much it errs, that he must be true. For that is the lesson of the theater of truth: because the letter can’t lie, reality has to. It is notable that, in this play as in so many of the classics of the Golden Age stage, if a truth is eventually attained, it is only attained by way of a dissimulation, prevarication, and deceit. In this sense, truth, as Lacan also said, is structured like a fiction.8 Another classic comedy of manners from seventeenth-century Spain, and one that had a similar influence to that of La verdad sospechosa on the European theater in general, was Agustín Moreto’s El desdén con el desdén.9 Wielding a far simpler structure than Ruiz de Alarcón’s masterpiece, Disdain With Disdain is the now classic story of how a woman’s rigid resistance to love, her disdain, is conquered by her suitor’s corresponding performance of the same disdain. As such, it is one of the first great theatrical reflections10 on the problem of desire’s relation to the forbidden, and it explores the problem precisely as a function of theatricality.11 Much of the reflection on the problem of the inherent perversity of desire—that it increases when faced with obstacles and wanes in the face of acceptance12—takes place in the exquisitely crafted dialogues between two of the main protagonists: Carlos, the Count of Urgel, and Polilla, his man-



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servant and the play’s gracioso. In a long speech toward the beginning of the play, Carlos complains bitterly to Polilla about the perversity of his own desire, which has of late become fixated on a woman who, before she spurned him, was of no interest to him at all: Well, in order that be known the most unworthy vileness of our nature, that same beauty that I so freely observed before with so much indifference, when I saw her disdainful, seemingly impossible, she whom I had seen as common seemed to me a pilgrim. Oh, lowness of desire! For even if that which is coveted and attained is of greater value than that which is kept away, merely because of the privation it is imagined to be of greater value, and greater worth is given to the difficult, which its very being diminishes.  (Moreto I. 253–70)

It is important to note that the language with which Carlos describes the problem is entirely organized around seeing and appearances. Carlos sees this woman as disdainful, impossible “a la vista”—“seemingly,” but more accurately, “to his eyes”—which changes her appearance from common to pilgrim-like, or almost holy. In the next sentence he compares these appearances to the actual worth of an object, which difficulty and privation distort by causing the viewer to imagine a greater worth in its place. The theatrical screen, then, which allows an appearance to not correspond to its object, has a direct and causal relation to a subject’s desire for the object. Desire’s object, to put it another way, is not the object itself but the theatrical projection of the viewer of the object as either easy or difficult to attain; and this screen is what can be manipulated by those who play at the game of love. Carlos’s ploy, then, to win the love of the aptly named Diana, is merely to convince her that he himself, like she, is incapable of love. That a man not be susceptible to her charms is too much for Diana’s vanity to bear, and she determines to break his resistance, in the process of which, natu-

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rally, she herself falls in love. The key scene in their courtly dual, however, is a dialogue in which the interplay and relation between appearance and truth, between play and reality, is explored and simultaneously troubled. The scene begins as Diana, frustrated by her ostensible non-suitor’s feigned disinterest in her, determines to hook him by way of his pride. It has been agreed between the two protagonists that, given that neither is capable of love, they will nevertheless go through the motions of courtship because it would be unseemly and uncivil not to. Using this agreement as the basis of her attack, Diana reproaches Carlos for his inability to perform convincingly as a lover. Carlos, who for his part is putting all his effort into masking his real passion with a performance of indifference, takes this reproach as a sign of Diana’s desire for him (as opposed to her desire to control his desire), and lets his guard down. Diana: One can well see in your indifference that it is a violence to love, and since you would need to pretend to, not knowing how to is not a lack of Love, but of intelligence. Carlos:  If I had to pretend I wouldn’t be so remiss, for where there is no feeling the tongue is more spry. Diana:  So, you are in love with me? Carlos:  If I were not, this fear wouldn’t tie me down. Diana:  What are you saying? Are you speaking for real?  (II. 1537–52)

Having assured herself that he is indeed “speaking for real,” Diana then exults in her victory and returns at once to her disdainful posture. Carlos, however, realizing that he has been tricked into revealing himself, saves his face and pulls Diana back into the game by pretending that this admission of truth, of speaking for real, was itself nothing other than fine playacting, exactly what, in fact, Diana had been reproaching him for not doing well enough. His finesse, in other words, is to claim that the base reality Diana had thought to glimpse was in fact the very best of acting, a façade for which Diana, only moments before, had reproached him as not having the intelligence to put on.13 The pivot on which his finesse turns is nothing other than the very same



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question with which Diana believes herself to have won the first round. As Diana crows over her victory, Carlos suddenly asks, “Wait, you’re speaking for real?” to which Diana, derailed and disoriented, can only ask in return, “You mean you don’t love for real?” At this point Carlos resumes his feigning not to be in love at the same time as he positions his revealed passions as if they had been acted, thus deftly reversing inner, true feelings and outer, feigned ones. When Diana continues to question, somewhat stupefied, how he could have said all the things he said without meaning them, he responds, rather smugly, Well that’s feigning well. You want me to be so foolish that when I get to feigning I feign it without appearances?  (II. 1623–26)

The brilliance of this response lies in its deconstruction of the basic dichotomy around which the play, and in fact the entirety of modern epistemology turns, namely, that between truth and appearances. For if pretending is only pretending on the condition that it is distinguished from truth, the revelation of that distinction makes it fail as pretense, and the failure of pretense is nothing other than truth. If, on the other hand, pretense does not fail, then it is indistinguishable from truth, and is no longer pretense. But once we have shown that pretense is an appearance, and appearance a pretense, as Carlos does in this final finesse, then the founding distinction of modern epistemology is threatened with ruin, threatened, that is, by the very mise en abîme that is at the heart of theatricality itself. Where Moreto distinguishes himself is in the manner with which El desdén con el desdén captures the relation between this theatrical aporia—between the mediation of appearances and presence to self, the truth they purport to represent—and the perversity of desire. For in the case of each protagonist, not only is his or her desire inflamed to love by the appearance of love’s lack, it also becomes perfectly clear that love and desire, for Moreto, are nothing but the attraction engendered by an appearance that indeed has no truth to refer to. If Diana is eventually led to declare her love for Carlos, it is not a love that was in any way already there, lying beneath the surface of her disdain. Rather, her love, her desire, is a desire for his disdain, for an appearance that promises that which it cannot possibly have, namely, an ultimate truth that is simultaneously other and the same as that which it appears to be.14

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This becomes clear in the suite to the above-discussed repartee, when Carlos, recovered from his nearly fatal slip, pretends to believe that Diana’s belief in his love was itself a pretense, a courtesy intended to flatter his abilities as a performer: Diana:  It is true that you are very clever, and you feign in such a way that I took it to be true. Carlos:  It was your politeness to pretend to be fooled such as to favor me that way, for in that way you have fulfilled both your nature and your obligation today, since by feigning the caution of being fooled, in order to give me more credit for it, you favor the ingenuity and disparage the act of love.  (II. 1635–48)

Crucial here is how we read fineza, which is here being positioned against ingenio as the ostensibly true, and hence unrefined, passion of love. For if fineza can also be read as a sign or act of love, something that a person does as opposed to what one might feel, juxtaposing it to ingenio in this context lends it the weight of a disavowed truth in contrast to the ingenuity of pretense. Carlos, then, pretends to believe that Diana was herself pretending to believe he is really in love, and that her pretense was for the purpose of politely praising his acting—for which he thanks her because in so doing she favors his ingenuity or skill over the sentiment of love. At this point the folds of theatricality have become convoluted indeed, for now each character is perfectly aware that the other is playing with him or her, and the desire is openly expressed in the asides—which is to say clandestinely expressed—as a desire to defeat the other in this game of deceit. The way to win, however, is to draw the other into the folds of your performance to the point where there is no longer any discrepancy between what he or she says and what he or she feels. Both pursue this goal precisely by affirming the most recent or outermost layer of theatrical performance. In Diana’s case this means that she urges Carlos to continue his pretense—claiming that in this way he will oblige her to greater esteem with his cleverness—in the hopes that his real desire will eventually succumb to the fictional desire



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he is presenting her. In Carlos’s case this means that he, understanding the nature of her intent, pretends to refuse to play along further, explaining that he is afraid that such esteem as he might arouse in her could easily turn to love, which he would be horrified to have awakened in her when he can never return it. The irony is that by affirming the “false,” performative level of appearances, Carlos inflames Diana’s desire to see him stripped of these appearances to the point that this desire becomes indistinguishable from desire tout court, that is, from love, an indistinction that Polilla is quick to theorize: She loves you, my lord, and says that she abhors you, but what seems to her to be rage is the quintessence of love; for when a woman is offended by disdain, she may well call it rage, but it is a rage for love.  (III. 2076–87)

The last line I quote, “mas es rabia por querer,” is almost impossible to render in all its richness, and is the clause that carries the impact of Polilla’s analysis. The “por” in the sentence implies causality in both directions, such that the rage both leads to love and is caused by love. At the same time, the word “querer,” an infinitive and hence usable as both a noun and a verb, signifies both love and desire, or wanting. The full meaning of the speech, then, requires one to read both that the rage of having been disdained leads to love, but also that the rage of love is produced by, or is in fact identical to, the desire produced, induced, or simply implied by disdain. Disdain, the representation of the absence of a corresponding desire, is itself desire, the desire to be desired. It is the famous “desire of the Other” that we always desire and that, Lacan says, is desire itself. Theatrical characters, characters like ourselves, then, produce desire in other characters insofar as they fail, interminably and necessarily, to be what they say they are. That they do anything else is impossible, for this gap, this deceit, is the very truth of their being. The structure of truth, for the Baroque, is theatrical. But this theatrical nature of truth produces profound problems, problems that the baroque theater makes its business to explore. If the locus of truth in a theatrical world is what is mediated by the stage—a presence indicated by the char-

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acters whose bodies we may perceive with certainty, but the truth of whose statements, the stories these bodies refer us to, is always subject to correction—then that truth as presence must be a constant theme of the theater, even as it helps construct it as an impossible goal of inquiry. The theme of truth as self-presence, as the presence to oneself of one’s word, for instance, is rampant on the baroque stage, especially in the specifically Hispanic problematic of honor. Honor is, on the one hand, pure mediation, in that its indicators are all external: what others know, what they think they know, about one’s deeds, about the sexual purity of the women in one’s family. On the other hand, honor would seem to claim the status as ultimate indicator of self-presence, as its standard is a kind of purity against external temptations of any stripe. A seventeenth-century forebear to Kant­ ian ethics, honor accrues to me when I do what is right, augmenting my eternal fame in the face the ephemeral rewards of the flesh—when my actions are autonomous as opposed to heteronomous, when, in other words, I am true to my word. So if honor is the ultimate indicator of mediality, because always determined by the gaze of others, it is simultaneously the guarantor of presence, as it claims its roots in the inviolable self-identity of the given word. The plays of the Spanish Golden Age that are built around this theme and its possible vicissitudes are legion. One of the most classic examples is the anonymous—albeit attributed traditionally to Lope de Vega and more recently to Andrés de Claramonte—La estrella de Sevilla (The Star of Seville).15 This play recounts the tragic outcomes of a King’s dishonorable behavior, and how he is shamed and taught the value of honor by the people of Seville, and in particular by one man, Sancho Ortiz de las Roelas. The two main protagonists, the king and Sancho Ortiz, are portrayed in a mirrored relationship to one another, a relationship captured even in their names, as the play is set in thirteenth-century Seville under the reign of Sancho el Bravo. Whereas Sancho the king is weak-willed, underhanded, and false, Sancho Ortiz is strong, honorable, and perhaps almost pathologically true to his word. The conflict arises when the king, aroused by the beauty of Estrella, sister to Sancho’s friend Busto Tavera, and having offended Busto’s honor by entering his house in secret, secures Sancho’s promise to personally execute Busto, before revealing to him the name of his victim. In asking him to do this deed, the king promises Sancho that he will personally take responsibility for the act should Sancho be caught, and indeed signs a paper to that effect. But Sancho destroys the paper, calling



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it a slight on his honor to suppose that he would need anything other than the king’s spoken word: I am amazed that your majesty has such a low opinion of me. For me, a seal! For me, a paper! Treat me more straightforwardly, for my nobility confides more in you than in a piece of paper. If your words are worth a value that carves out mountains, and they do what they say, giving me here your word, my lord, papers are superfluous.  (Claramonte II. 1555–66)

The key to Sancho’s harangue, of course, is that words, his own but especially a king’s, do what they say. They are the enactment of their own value and cannot be devalued or lost or misplaced like a mere piece of paper, a paper that, as he goes on to say, “in part discredits / your word” (II. 1575–76). As if to hammer home this point of the paper’s fickleness, instead of speaking out loud the name of the man to be killed, the king gives Sancho another paper, which he only opens and reads after they have parted. In this way, Sancho’s promise to commit an act and the revelation of the nature of the act are separated temporally by the displacement of the paper, as if to suggest that in the spoken voice lies a nontemporal, nondeferrable presence that both guarantees the honor of men like Sancho and confounds the sorts of errors produced by the vagaries of writing.16 If the first part of the play sets up the murder and sees it through, the second part is about Sancho’s refusal to explain his act in order to exculpate himself, the king’s various attempts to avoid keeping his word, and his eventually capitulation and admission of guilt in the face of the example provided by Sancho and the Sevillian nobility. For Sancho’s character, the rift opened between the idea of kingship as the very source of honor and the law and the actual behavior of the king precipitates him into a state of insanity, a breakdown of the coherence of his symbolic world. At the end of a sequence in which he is described by those around him as having “lost his mind,” and as “crazy,” Sancho explains his state in these words: I, if I fail my own pleasure, I keep the law.

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The Theater of Truth This, sir, is being king, and this, sir, is not being it. To understand and not understand it is important, for I do not speak. I killed him, there’s no denying it; but the why I will not say: let another confess the why, for I confess to killing him.  (II. 1872–80)

The source, then, of Sancho’s breakdown is not merely the horror of having been forced by duty to kill his good friend, but more crucially that the very justification for that act, namely the source of the order to do so, the word of the law, belies, in the king’s failure to uphold his word, its very nature as word, as ultimate source of self-presence. That one Sancho keeps his word makes him king; that another does not makes it impossible that he be king; and yet it is the being of the king, the source point of word and law, that is the only possible justification for Sancho’s act. This is the reason why Sancho cannot confess the cause of his crime: were he to do so, it would irreparably confirm the failure of the king to keep his word and hence the nonroyalty of the king, his word, and the law Sancho followed in committing his act. It would condemn Sancho to having committed a dishonorable act, and hence Sancho’s person to infamy. By not speaking, Sancho keeps open the breach between act and cause, and at the same time suspends judgment on the king’s fidelity to his word; for if the king reclaims his lost word and accepts responsibility as the cause, the word and law are reunited, and Sancho’s honor is preserved. This is why, in the final scene, when the king asks Sancho to reveal who ordered him to kill Busto, he answers, “a paper.” When he asks from whom Sancho answers: If the paper could talk, it would say it; which is an evident and clear thing; but broken papers give confused words.  (III. 2933–39)

The last two lines are of special interest because of the chiasmus they suggest, for if it is true that broken papers (papeles rompidos) yield confused words (palabras confusas), words that do not keep their word, it is even more true that palabras rompidas, broken words, yield papeles confusos, or confused roles. For it is in the confusion of the two men’s roles that the



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theatrical structure of the promise is revealed as entailing a certain commitment to playacting. In the theatrical world of baroque society, every player has a role to play, and yet all are at least somewhat enlightened to the fact that roles are just that: like papers or letters they move from player to player, and can change their meaning depending on context or receiver. The great uncertainty of identity in the baroque world as stage, however, is only tenuously held in check by a certain fiction, an almost desperate belief that if roles can and will change, and words can and will be broken, there is at least one role that does not, and one word that remains whole. This papel que queda entero (paper/letter/role that remains whole) is the fictional, theatrical pivot on which the baroque system turns, an element in the apparatus of mediation claiming a status that nothing within mediation can offer, that of immediacy, of the presence to itself that the theater of truth never ceases to seek, even if it was never really there.

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chapter four

The Opacity of Language and the Transparency of Being: On Góngora’s Poetics

It has often been said that the United States at the turn of the twentieth century is in the midst of a culture war. Although one may certainly argue with the bellicose terminology, as well as with the specificity of the claim to this time and place, the focus on culture is quite apt. The political divisions registered in the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections often seemed less about specific policy difference between two parties that are, for the most part, entrenched and beholden to elites to relatively the same degree, than about what kind of culture each party claims as its constituency. For all the necessary debunking the notion of red and blue states has undergone, for instance, the geographical association of “America’s heartland” with a certain kind of culture, and the coastal and northern urban centers with another, continues to hold the popular imagination. The heartland culture is, as its vociferous champions proudly proclaim, conservative. Its constituents uphold “traditional” values like family, religion, and nation, and disdain the people they call “liberals” for betraying these core values. The so-called liberal culture is supposed to be, in contrast, progressive, inclusive and tolerant of otherness, and dedicated to social equality. If one pays attention to the basic structure of the rhetoric, however, one can discern another undercurrent, and perhaps a more fundamental basis of conflict. Conservative culture is captivated by the idea of simplicity. Underneath the multiplicity of appearances, conservatives believe, are a few very simple truths: freedom is preferable to tyranny; the traditional family is the foundation of a functional society; there is good and there is evil, and very little in between. It can be no surprise that a film like Forrest Gump, about



The Opacity of Language and the Transparency of Being

how a simple but good man triumphs over adversity and complicated political interests, had such powerful appeal in middle America. Those whose basic belief system is built on such presuppositions look with suspicion on those who believe the world to be inherently complex. They think that people who constantly point to complexity are muddying up the issues, failing to look at the big picture. Worse, they may be purposely obfuscating in order to pursue their own narrow interests. Liberals, for their part, really do tend to believe that the world is more complicated than conservatives imply, and decry the tendency on the right to view reality in such starkly simplified terms. This rhetoric has dominated political life in the United States over the last decades, as the right has used it to greater and greater political effect. The Republican Party’s success in casting John Kerry as a “flipflopper,” for instance, more interested in “nuance” and other French sounding values than in core issues of right and wrong, was a key factor in the 2004 presidential race. But the crucial point to recognize is that the binary of simplicity versus complexity extends to all areas of the current cultural conflict. The academic “theater” of the culture war, for example, pits those who feel that the basic drive of the human and natural sciences is the pursuit of a single, unified truth against those who ostensibly waste their time obscuring that truth with pointless distinctions and deviating from it in the service of narrow political interests. The so-called postmodern tendency in the humanities has been endlessly criticized for this perceived failing, in blatantly right-wing books like Tenured Radicals, The Closing of the American Mind, and Illiberal Education, as well as in attacks by self-proclaimed leftists, such as Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense. It was in this spirit that Jonathan Kandell’s roundly criticized obituary in The New York Times for Jacques Derrida in October of 2004 refused to mention him as a philosopher, referring to him instead as an “abstruse theorist.” There is, of course, nothing new about the basic structure of this culture war; in fact, a similar conflict was under way in Spain’s intellectual world at the turn of the seventeenth century, when a group of cultural conservatives set their sights on a new kind of writing that was going around under the name of “culteranismo,” and on the poet who was most responsible for its dissemination, Luis de Góngora. As Andrée Collard writes in her seminal study of the controversy, “Góngora is accused of being confused and obscure, insinuating that ‘he has not participated in the grace of Pentacost’ [the descent of the Holy Spirit in order to flatten the diversity of

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languages and facilitate the apostolic work], but rather ‘that he had been touched by some trace of Babel’s misfortune’ [the confusion of languages]” (Collard 331). Indeed, the metaphor of Babel is apt for the accusers, since it presumes a prior harmony of languages and meanings that God then covered over with a plurality of tongues as a way of punishing man’s hubris. Góngora reacts to this metaphor himself in his published response to his accusers, the Carta en respuesta (Letter in response), in which he writes of Babel, “God didn’t confuse them by giving them confused language, but rather they were confused in their own selves, taking stone for water and water for stone” (qtd. in Beverley, Aspects 173, Gaylord 244). In other words, where the accusers find Góngora guilty of obfuscating and see in his language touches of Babel, Góngora essentially pleads no contest, because the confusion of Babel was not imposed from the outside by God but is inherent to human being. As Collard points out, the attacks on Góngora’s notorious difficulty were more often than not couched in crypto-ethnic, political, and religious terms, such that a mere critique of obscurantism—such as Lope’s typically pithy remark that Góngora “takes away from the meaning what he adds in difficulty” (Collard 332 n14)—rapidly transmogrified into accusations of racial and religious impurity. The most aggressive and famous offender in this regard was Francisco de Quevedo, who insults him in his poetry and writings as, for example, “dirty,” “unclean,” “of bad lineage,” and “long in the nose” (Collard 336), epithets that, according to Collard, Quevedo uses to accuse the converso (from a formerly Jewish family) Góngora of being an unreformed Jew. Difficulty, then, is associated with ethnic and religious otherness, or at least with openness to otherness and to the crossing of boundaries in some way. As Francisco de Córdoba wrote of his poetry, “because he introduces all the referred to it is necessary to confess that it is a poem that admits and embraces all” (qtd. in Collard 333). The difficult poet fails to discriminate, muddies the waters, and is therefore unclean, just as the converso is tachado, stained by the proximity of another religion or race. In his maliciously yet deliciously titled Antídoto para las Soledades (Antidote to the Solitudes), Jáuregui inveighed against Góngora’s failure to conform to any recognizable rules in composing his Soledades, finally exclaiming “may God damn the law to which you subjected yourself in composing these Solitudes of yours!” (qtd. in Collard 333). The formulation is curious, and not only for the reason that Collard gives, namely, that in



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asking God to condemn the law behind the Solitudes, Jáuregui is implying that Góngora follows a different law than the one he should, a law that the very choice of the term “law” associates invariably with Judaism. What is even more telling for our context is how the formulation contrasts the text to the law of its composition, and asks God to condemn the latter. This is particularly fascinating given that the whole controversy around Góngora’s style hinges on what the text represents, on whether, in other words, there is any reality behind the ornate façade of his words. Just like a represented reality, the law of a text’s composition underlies that text, supports and guarantees it. By condemning that law, Jáuregui is in some sense refusing the version of reality that Góngora presents with his poetry, or denying it any reality whatsoever. The lack of a referent to Góngora’s poetry, the seeming emptiness of his verses, is a common complaint of modern critics as well. As Mary Gaylord has documented, even ostensible praise of Góngora’s technique can hide an implicit tone of disappointment over his frivolity in failing to express real, human emotion (Gaylord 236). For example, one of Góngora’s modern editors Biruté Ciplijauskaité laments of Góngora’s sonnets that “We are not able to imagine behind them the poet . . . None of the sonnets comes close to the passion directly transmitted by Lope or Quevedo . . . , and if we were to judge from the sonnets, we would be inclined to affirm that the poet was never in love” (qtd. in Gaylord 235). We are accustomed, of course, to these complaints. They echo the romantic frustration with formalisms of any kind, or the mistrust of politically committed artists toward the apparently empty experiments of high modernism. Indeed, one of the claims of Collard’s essay is that we need to recognize in Góngora a kind of forerunner to the typically modernist notion of art for art’s sake, reason enough for the recuperation of his poetry by members of Spain’s “Generation of ’27” such as García Lorca, Pedro Salinas, and Dámaso Alonso. Such a celebration of “ingenio” for its own sake would constitute a definitive break with the renaissance tradition of valuing art for its moral and instructive utility (Collard 333). John Beverley counters this argument by suggesting that, far from giving up on science, or a relation to the real, “the formation of language and image in Góngora’s poetry itself presupposes a kind of ‘misterio scientífico,’ an attempt in an expanded and technified linguistic structure to absorb and materialize the new phenomenology and psychology which had elsewhere emerged out of the Renaissance sciences” (Beverley, “Soledad” 234). I think this is

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exactly right, and would only add that it is precisely in Góngora’s rejection of utility—that is, in his investment in the opacity of language over against a reality that it should somehow serve—that we best see how his writing materializes the new phenomenology. According to the new phenomenology that Góngora’s words materialize, appearances stand in for a reality made absent to us by the appearances themselves. This constant referral to reality by appearances poses a problem for thought that expresses itself in language, and that becomes highly visible in that purest, most detached deployment of language that is lyric poetry. Poetry can express this problem in one of two general ways. First, poetry can attempt to make reality accessible, which it does by positing a representation as a relation to something simple. Of course, this positing is an empty promise, as the result of a listener’s or reader’s quest for that simple referent will necessarily be another representation, and hence a complex. Nevertheless, this first, or major strategy always promises that under the guise of the complex exists a simple, attainable, singularity. The contrary strategy for poetry’s expression of the problem requires that language reflect on this very problem. Rather than promising the simple behind the veil of the complex, poetry that deploys this strategy tends to reveal the idea of the simple as part of the complexity of language itself, and hence reality as inherently complex, imbued already with the relations constituting representation. Whereas references to a coming reality that will upset the current one—even if ostensibly opposed to the realm of representations—ultimately serve to bolster the contentions of the major strategy, the minor strategy as expressed poetically disturbs and threatens the very foundations of the Baroque’s major strategy and those institutions deploying it. It is for this reason, I would suggest, that Góngora’s unabashed embrace of complexity for its own sake sparked such vitriol from open defenders of establishment aesthetics, as well as from those who, like Lope, claimed to have little regard for institutionalized poetics.1 If, then, there can be nothing less political than Góngora’s verses—because apparently empty of all utility—there can at the same time be nothing more political than Góngora’s verses—because their emptiness calls into question the reference to a hidden reality that underlies baroque political discourse. So, what is it about Góngora’s use of language that has this power? The analysis of Góngora’s semantics by Mauricio Molho provides an excellent insight into the specific ways in which the poet’s unique style deploys the minor strategy. For Molho, as for Beverley, Góngora’s poetics are an ex-



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pression of the new phenomenology of his time and culture: “The schema A if not B is nothing other than a symptom or model of an intellectual posture that is not limited to Góngora, but that Góngora makes his own with the specifically poetic purpose of apprehending the experiential world in all its plenitude. What A if not B declares is precisely that conceptual hiatus that grounds the phenomenon” (Molho 246). The schema A if not B is the poetic trope Molho identifies, following Dámaso Alonso’s analysis in Lengua poética, as most characteristic of Góngora’s style, and is exemplified by such formulations as “A repeated barking, if not near/different, he heard of a dog.”2 Molho’s point in claiming that this structure represents Góngora’s poetic apprehension of the experiential world, the world as appearance or phenomenon, is that this experiential world is founded on a conceptual hiatus, on the minimal difference determining a concept as a concept, and that this gap expresses itself poetically in the juxtaposition of terms that are simultaneously equated and opposed.3 The A if not B structure, then, posits a fundamental similitude between concepts that, as separate terms, must also be opposed. The intellect, Molho then argues, is nothing other than the space where similarities perceived by the senses are brought together by analogy, and metaphor is the expression of such analogies in language (247). In this sense, then, Góngora can be said to be a realistic poet, in that his verses capture the essentially metaphorical nature of the real itself: that the intellectual apprehension of reality can only occur through the mediation of metaphor, of words that are simultaneously similar and different to other words. Reality, then, from the perspective of Góngora’s poetics, cannot be some being of which we can hope to gain knowledge through the relative opacity and transparency of the appearances that veil it and the language we use to represent it. Rather, implicit in Góngora’s poetics is the idea that reality, far from being separated from us by mediation, is indistinguishable from the very mediating opacity of the language that represents it. As Molho describes it, “Proper to Gongoran poetic semantics is the enunciation of the phenomena through a mediated discourse, in which beings and things are not apprehended as immediate representations of what they are or appear to be, but rather by way of the multiple webs of similarities and analogies in which they are inserted, and which in the last analysis open access to the knowledge of their essential reality” (Molho 249). Essential reality, in other words, lies not in the immediate representation of what things are, the simple; rather, the essential reality of beings and things is their very insertion

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in multiple webs of similarities and analogies that Góngora’s metaphors express. Góngora’s poetics, in other words, in the opacity of their metaphoric density, deny the transparency of being in order to express the world in its inherent complexity.4 One paradox of Góngora’s poetics is that despite the apparent exclusion of reality in favor of the play of phenomena and surfaces, the epithet of superficial fails to stick, for in his verses the surfaces are multiplied to the point that they produce the very experience of depth. Kathleen Dolan has noted this multiplication of surfaces and attributes it to what she calls Góngora’s “cultivation of perceptual doubt and ambivalence [. . .] presenting alternative perspectives of the same scene, visual paradoxes, and objects that simultaneously conceal and reveal their identities” (Dolan, “Figures” 250). Indeed, Dolan offers many examples of perceptual doubt in Góngora’s poetry, but one could also claim that the A if not B structure analyzed by Alonso and Molho is already the transmitter of doubt par excellence. In fact, the schema is implicitly, if not explicitly present in many of the examples Dolan cites, such as the couplet, “. . . the hypocrite apple, which fools, not in its pallor, in its redness” (Góngora, Polifemo 83–84).5 The choice of the apple is fortuitous and certainly not innocent, as its role in the fall of man has lent it a certain association with deception in western culture. What is beautiful on the outside can hide great evil on the inside, a message the apple has born from Genesis to the tales of the brothers Grimm. In the manuscript for a fourteenth-century French mystery play based on the legend of Saint Genesius, for example, the phenomenology of the apple is used as an analogy to explain the mystery of the Trinity to an unbelieving emperor Diocletian. In this version, one apple can simultaneously be three: its color, its smell, its taste.6 In the epistemology ushered in by Descartes, in contrast, such secondary attributes as color, smell, and taste could never be confused with the apple in itself; for modern epistemology, there is something inherently deceptive in the phenomena, and this inherent deceptiveness is expressed by Góngora in his description of Polyphemous’s apple. That apple deceives, in its redness, not in its pallor. The apple’s surface deceives us as to its essence, to what it is inside, and this deception is attributed to its color. Its color, in turn, is registered as a play of two opposing terms, the negation of one and the installation of the other in its place. But this play of opposites—the metaphorical expression of analogy that is, in Molho’s analysis, the intellect itself—is not resolved in favor of a decisive answer; redness and pallor alternate with one another, but both deceive, the apple remains a hypocrite.



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When Descartes deployed doubt, he did so in the service of the major strategy. His doubt—the opacity of the senses, led him to certainty—the transparency, the distinctness and clarity, of the doubting being who must exist. Góngora’s cultivation of perceptual doubt, in contrast, leads him to a “frequent posture of hesitation before the singular, which he is so often inclined to elaborate into the multiple, or even to dissolve altogether” (Dolan 251). The singular, or the simple, is what the major strategy holds out as a reward for those who enter the folds of the Baroque; Góngora’s verses double back on themselves, revealing only further folds of complexity where the simple is expected. The failure of complexity to collapse into simplicity, of suspended opposites to resolve themselves definitively, is a common theme in all critical assessments of Góngora’s poetics. Mary Gaylord analyzes the couplet quoted above—“A repeated barking, if not near / different, he heard of a dog”—in a particularly dazzling way, by suggesting that the voice that would potentially underlie the written lines multiplies possible meanings instead of limiting them. Voice, then, far from being coterminous with an original, singular intention, would already have—as Derrida famously argued in his readings of Husserl and later of Saussure and Rousseau7—the kind of duplicity traditionally associated with writing. When read as if voiced, Gaylord argues, it is not illegitimate to read “si no vecino” (if not near) as “sino vecino” (proximate destiny), and “distinto oyó” (he heard as different) as “distinto yo” (different I, or self) (Gaylord 246). The critics of Góngora, past and present, as we have seen, have been unified in questioning whether, in his poetry, there is any “there” there. If Góngora himself responded in a rather classical vein that his critics ought to read better, that they need to “remove the bark to discover the mysterious core that it covers” (Beverley, Aspects 170, also discussed in Gaylord 143), there is a sense in which his poetry resists this exegesis and suggests instead that the mysteries of the core (meollo) might be engendered by the very movement of a reader through the multilayered bark. A contemporary of Góngora’s intimated as much when he asked whether “Góngora is one of those writers that Cicero mocked for affecting obscurity in order to deceive others and even themselves into believing they possess some superior knowledge, out of reach of the common man” (Gaylord 241). But this technique, theorized by Lacan as that of the le sujet supposé savoir (the subject supposed to know), is not merely about hiding a lack of knowledge. In the psychoanalytic context, for example, the supposition of a hidden knowl-

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edge on the part of the other, the analyst, acts as an operative mechanism in producing knowledge in the analysand (Lacan, XX 131). Again, a preexisting, waiting-to-be-discovered reality is rejected in favor of a dynamic notion of reality, a reality that is produced by the very movement of its discovery. In a similar vein, a number of critics have commented on the way Góngora deals with the traditional pastoral distinction between the court and the country, between urban and rural life. According to the popular tendency of the day, known as “praise of town, disparagement of the court,” urban courtly life is often represented as a parasitic, artificial perversion of the purer, simpler country life. But as such critics as John Beverley, María Robertson-Justiniano, Kathleen Dolan, and Paul Julian Smith have demonstrated, Góngora’s treatment of the subject in his epic Soledades fails to conform to this expectation. As Julian Smith writes, “even nature in its primal, virgin state is a deceit, an imitation no less mendacious than the fictions of classical myth” (“Barthes” 91, see also Robertson-Justiniano 265). Or, as he argues elsewhere, “what we find in Góngora’s career is not a progressive absenteeism, both cause and effect of an irresponsible excess of words, but rather the linguistic filling-in or supplementing of a nature found to be lacking in substance” (Smith, “Rhetoric of Presence” 244). For his part, Beverley comments on nature’s tendency in the Soledades to mimic the city (Beverley, Aspects 76); and Robertson-Justiniano quotes the following lines from Soledades I: “The morning, then, sees these trees as they simulate groves and emulate streets, which the urban architecture walled with crystal fluids” (Soledades I. 701–4), and goes on to argue that “the natural world becomes the ‘imitator,’ the ‘impostor,’ that ‘counterfeit[s] groves,’ and the configurations of the city, therefore, represent the ‘true’ model of construction within the bucolic landscape of the poem” (Robertson-Justiniano 258). If Derrida found that Rousseau’s ideology of nature was built on a supplemental logic, in that the purity of man in his natural state reveals a lack that culture needs to fill through education, what these critics have noticed in Góngora’s pastoral poetry is that this supplemental logic is an explicit aspect of the text. In Góngora’s case, in other words, we don’t need Derrida to show us how nature is primordially lacking; the lyrical descriptions of the landscapes through metaphors drawn from urban architecture do that work for us. But what is the implication of this insight? That Góngora is deconstructive before its time? Or is this not yet again a case of imposing



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contemporary theoretical trends on unsuspecting poets of the past? Neither, in fact is the case. Rather, if Góngora’s work exhibits this apparently deconstructive character, it does so because deconstruction is one of the philosophical names we give today to the Baroque’s minor strategy. Like the minor strategy, deconstruction resides in the texts of the major strategy, riding their assumptions out to their extremes and revealing the impossibilities they construct for themselves. It is this revelation of impossibility, then, that is the key to the obscurity of Góngora’s text. Góngora’s poetics, in other words, are nothing other than the poetic expression of language foundering on the impossibilities posed by the baroque problem of thought, and all of the trends and commonalities identified above by critics and admirers of Góngora alike are a symptom of this fact. To demonstrate this, I will now turn to a passage of the Soledades in order to show how the various elements and characteristics we have traced in the critical discourse on his work can be explained by reference to the baroque minor strategy. The following stanza expresses the reaction of the stranded pilgrim upon his arrival at a rustic inn, where he is offered refuge for the night. Oh happy Inn at any time, Temple of Pallas, hut of Flora! Not modern artifice Erased designs, sketched models, To the vault adjusting of heaven The sublime edifice; Vine on an elm Are your poor product, Where guards, instead of steel, Innocence the goatherd, Better than the whistle the herd. Oh happy Inn at any time!  (Soledades I. 94–108)

Speaking to the inn in the vocative register of encomiastic poetry, the pilgrim immediately associates albergue—a word that, as the Autoridades dictionary registers, was used indifferently for any house, inn, or in general form of shelter that people would use to rest or defend themselves from the elements—and emphasizing its nondiscrimination, a cualquier hora, at any time, with, on the one hand, the alquería, or worker’s hut, of the Ro-

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man goddess of plants, Flora, and, on the other hand, with the Temple of Pallas Athena, goddess of the city, war, handicraft and practical reason. The most general term for a human structure, for the protection of the human against nature, is thus nominated, in the same line, as the extreme of natural simplicity and the epitome of culture and urbanity. The next clause, extended over four lines, begins by negating the intervention of modern artifice, no moderno artificio, in erasing designs and sketching models, a trope which, in a movement that Lisa Block de Behar calls preterition, affirms in the very act of negating (Block de Behar 107–21)—for what if not artifice erases designs and sketches new models, models that are hence modern by virtue of their very novelty? It continues, then, by elevating the base building to a sublime edifice, adjusted (the work of artifice) to the, again natural and hence non-artificial, arch of the heavens. Fábrica, in the next line, could either be the product of this work, that is, of the design and modeling above, or it could also mean in the idiom of the time a sumptuous house, albeit modified, across the hyperbaton, by the adjective pobre, poor. This poor product of work or sumptuous house is likened to the vine-like rétama growing on a robust elm tree—once again, natural while not ceasing to be somehow superfluous. There, instead of the steel blade, innocence guards the goatherd, much as, or even more than the whistle guards the herd itself. Innocence, purity, lack of artifice thus hides at the center of the stanza. However, just as with the naturalness of the inn wherein this innocence is on guard, it is a lack of artifice that is artificial in the extreme, owing to the very architecture of urbanity, technique, and artifice referenced and required in order to achieve that protection. Innocence, moreover, that guards as opposed to being guarded is already an innocence lost, an innocence no longer ignorant of the ways of the world. We should also note, finally, that the structure of the last clause is an example of Alonso’s and Molho’s A if not B schema, in which innocence is invoked en vez de acero, instead or in the place of steel, marking the hiatus where pastoral innocence and urban warfare are both dissimilar and yet alike enough to ground their metaphorical linking in the intellect. If innocence is to be found at the heart of the pilgrim’s refuge, it is an innocence wrought from the steel of war, a nature eked from the court of artifice. This encomium proceeds in this vein for two more stanzas, and then the poem goes on to describe the pilgrim’s welcome and his eventual sleep. The final two stanzas of Soledades I describe the pilgrim’s departure from the inn



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and occupation of a lookout point over the terrain he will now set out to explore. Grateful, then, the pilgrim Abandons the inn and leaves accompanied By one who takes him where, lifted up, Only a few steps from the path, Imperiously watches the countryside A cliff, pleasant gallery That was once the festive theater Of those who stepped, fauns, upon the mountain. He arrived, and, before such view Obeying his hesitating foot. Immobile he remained upon a mastic tree, Green balcony of the pleasant crag. If it is much that a bit of map unfolds for him, It is much more that which, untying mists, Confuses the sun and distance negates.  (184–99)

The term Góngora chooses for the rock formation the pilgrim will climb, escollo, is normally reserved for the hidden shoals that so endanger sailors, and that, we presume, are responsible for this pilgrim’s having been stranded on this particular shore. The rock, then, that he climbs to view the countryside and his future is, much like the rock whose impact brought him here, partially hidden, but it is one from which he now has a view. The view, in turn, is a view onto nature but is explicitly described in terms of artifice, as a gallery onto a theater, and as a balcony. The final three lines, separated from the rest, is a studied masterpiece of poetic ambivalence. If the little, poco, that his map unfolds for him is, in fact, much, then much more is what is out there. But what is much more is left unfathomable by the verbal structure and the flexible word order inherent to Spanish. For what is much more can either be the subject or the object of untying mists, confounding sun, and negating distance. In other words, the sailor, surprised by the shoal made invisible to him by the sea, now occupies that shoal, the invisible, the hidden, as seat of his vision. But rather than clarity, simplicity, as he now looks out from the core of his adventure, he is once again beset by obscurity, complexity. His little map shows him much, but so much more is not revealed that it remains unclear whether that which remains hidden is hidden because of the sun’s confusion, the unraveling mists, and the negating distance, or whether, in contrast, the vastness of

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what is hidden is such as to confuse the sun, be the source of the mists’ unraveling, and negate distance itself. In short, what we are confronted with, at the heart of the obstacle and the place of expected clarity and in a natural place worthy of our expectations of simplicity, is the revelation that the obstacle of opacity is not to be cleared away, that opacity is in some profound sense constitutive, not secondary to transparency. It is this revelation, constant and ineluctable in the poetics of Góngora, that expresses the logic of the Baroque’s minor strategy, the strategy that takes the promise of Being’s transparency at its word, explores the folds of its architecture to their extremes, and finds there, in the place of its hoped for salvation, the desperation of an opacity without end.

chapter five

The Corporeal Image and the New World Baroque

In practically all attempts to theorize the Baroque, the same dilemma is encountered: when we use the term Baroque are we speaking of a universal style or a historical period? The dilemma is by no means a mere problem of nomenclature, easily dismissed by footnote or parenthetical commentary; rather, it is a consistent problem that haunts the work of theorists from Wölfflin to d’Ors, Maravall to Deleuze. Alejo Carpentier, borrowing from Eugenio d’Ors, encountered it in his identification of the Baroque as “a transformative force of ‘life’ that recurs through history as the Manichean counterpart of the ordering force of ‘reason’” (Kaup, “Becoming” 129).1 D’Ors himself tried to finesse the problem by calling the Baroque a recurrent eon, “independent not only of the period of the historical European Baroque but also of European culture as a whole” (129). Whereas Maravall stipulates that he is speaking strictly of a historical period, and thus begs the question of what distinguishes that period’s stylistic choices from those of any other (Maravall, Culture 3–6), Deleuze claims a philosophical universality for the Baroque, in which “classical reason [is] toppled under the force of divergences, incompossibilities, discords, dissonances” (Deleuze 81) all the while basing his analyses on the historical Baroque. In my view, the historical Baroque is part of a complex that includes both the colonial and neo-baroque periods, what we could call, risking a neologism itself smacking of baroque excess, coloneobaroque. The Coloneobaroque is not a return to the historical Baroque but rather a persistent option or possibility or strategy of the aesthetic configuration ushered in by the historical Baroque; its aesthetic possibilities, in other words, transcend

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the particularity of seventeenth-century Europe, but are historically and philosophically informed by the specific problems of Euro-American modernity.2 In this sense, then, Deleuze’s argument remains pertinent, since his project is essentially one of recuperating an underrepresented or “minor” undercurrent of modernity’s thought. This approach is shared by a growing body of recent scholarship, which takes as its cue, in Monika Kaup’s words, that “the recovery of the Baroque is linked to the crisis of the Enlightenment and instrumental reason. The 20th-century crisis of Enlightenment rationality opens the way for the rediscovery of an earlier, alternate rationality and mode of thought (Baroque reason) that had been repressed and vilified as an aberration beginning in the 18th century and continuing through the 19th” (107). Or, as Brazilian theorist Irlemar Chiampi puts it, shifting the emphasis explicitly to the Americas, If the Baroque is the aesthetic of the Counter-reformation, the Neo-Baroque is the aesthetic of counter-modernity [. . .]. It is no accident that precisely the Baroque—pre-Enlightenment, pre-modern, pre-bourgeois, pre-Hegelian—should be appropriated by this periphery, which only enjoyed the leftovers of modernization, as a strategy for inverting the historicist canon of the modern.  (Chiampi 37–38, qtd. in Kaup 109, her translation)

Chiampi is also cited by Mabel Moraña, who further insists that what she calls “the logic of baroque disruption,” which would appear to be an ahistorical marker, must be understood “with respect to the discourses that accompanied the entrance of Latin America into the successive instances of globalized modernity.” This implies what she refers to as the “constitutive paradox of baroque aesthetics,” namely, that it refers both to the imperial imposition of continental norms and forms of control and to the potential construction of “differentiated cultural identities” (Moraña 242). On the one hand, then, the Baroque stands for an alternate mode of rationality to the dominant trends of modernity, one that is centrifugal, disruptive vis à vis modern rationalism; on the other hand, though, the very same Baroque would seem to represent a centripetal force of power, of control over the periphery, as argued by Maravall in the Spanish,3 and Angel Rama in the American context: The American continent became the experimental field for the formulation of a new Baroque culture. The first methodical application of Baroque ideas was carried out by absolute monarchies in the New World empires, applying rigid



The Corporeal Image and the New World Baroque principles—abstraction, rationalization, and systemization—and opposing all local expression of particularity, imagination, and invention.  (Rama 10, also discussed in Kaup 119)

The point to grasp, when faced with this apparent dilemma, is that the Baroque cannot be exclusively identified with either the one or the other option, but is rather the expression of what Lezama Lima characterized as the tension of the Baroque (Lezama 79), a tension between two directions or strategies, as I have called them in the context of the Spanish Baroque: a centrifugal versus a centripetal force, a major versus a minor strategy, a molar versus a molecular vector. The last two formulations borrow explicitly from Deleuze and Guattari, and indeed both I in my work on the Baroque to date, and Monika Kaup, in her work on the New World Baroque, have found this idiom particularly useful for thinking through the problems posed by baroque aesthetics. In Kaup’s words, “the Baroque is neither a historical period or style, nor a genre, nor a human constant that recurs throughout history, but rather the process of becoming-minor” (128). Nevertheless, this tension cannot be the whole story, for in that case the term Baroque would turn out to be nothing more than the incorporation into one side of an eternally oscillating opposition—the Classical versus the Baroque—of another version of that same oscillation, perhaps in this case between the Apollonian and the Dionysian (Lambert, Return 52). As so many of these theorists have insisted, the historical specificity of the Baroque is key to analyzing it as an aesthetic phenomenon; but what has been missing has been an explanation for what joins the historical specificity of the Baroque to the aesthetic descriptions of its characteristic tension. If this tension is not universal, then why is it baroque? What about it, in other words, owes its existence to a particular time in the history of Europe and the Americas? If the centrality of the colonial experience to modernity has already been emphasized by Mignolo, the consensus of scholars has been to emphasize the centrality of the colonial experience to the Neobaroque; the Neobaroque, it seems, has become the quintessentially American expression of a postcolonial aesthetics.4 While fully accepting this consensus, I would nevertheless argue that something is missing, namely, the underling experience of spatiality that characterizes early modern European culture, which I have called theatricality—a model according to which the perceiver, analogous to a spectator in a theater, synthesizes raw data through the medium of the

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stage and its characters. I will now try to show how this concept is implicitly at work in attempts to think through the Coloneobaroque by analyzing some of the ideas of one of the most influential theorists of the Neobaroque, José Lezama Lima, and working backward in time to the colonial American texts that inspired his formulations. Lezama Lima begins his monumental La expresión americana with the following words: Only what is difficult is stimulating; only the resistance that challenges us can engage, provoke, and maintain our power of knowledge, but what, in truth, is the difficult? What is submerged, alone, in the maternal waters of the obscure? The original, without causality, antithesis, or logos? It is the form in becoming in which a landscape moves toward a direction, an interpretation, or a simple hermeneutics, in order then to move toward its reconstruction, which is what definitively demonstrates its efficacy or desuetude; its ordering force or its extinguished echo that is its historical vision. A first difficulty in its direction. The other, the greater, the attainment of a historical vision. Here I have, then, the difficulty of direction and of historical vision. Direction or encounter of a causality granted by historicist valorizations. Historical vision that is the counterpoint or tissue bestowed by the imago, by the image that participates in history.5

Lezama Lima, quintessential intellectual of mid-twentieth-century Cuba, instills his notion of imago with a sophisticated understanding of contemporary psychoanalytic thought, and perhaps even of the teachings in France of his contemporary Jacques Lacan.6 But in a typically and eponymously neobaroque fashion, it is incorporated into an American expression. Lacan, for his part, develops his concept of the imaginary under the influence of Kant, for whom the imagination, or Einbildungskraft, represented the cognitive faculty responsible for synthesizing into objects of cognition the manifold of sensory input that besets the perceiving subject. Einbildungs­ kraft is literally the power of making into one picture, to make one picture out of a dispersion of input. The verb, einbilden, moreover, intimates the inclusion of a certain representation of the imagining subject into the object so imagined, as in the German expression, Was bildest du dir ein for “Who do you think you are?” In Lezama’s American version, the imago, or America, is the image that the colonizers wove together out of a dissident, disperse, unknown reality, terra incognita, in order to make the fabric of history. But as the American—as seen from the perspective of the imago, and the criollo, in particular—occupies in some sense both the place of the perceiver and that of



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the imagined object, the American consciousness is capable of producing a very different view of the world, replete with its own aesthetic forms. The theme of the operativity of the unknown, of terra incognita, finds resonance as well with another great Cuban author and theorist of the Neobaroque, Alejo Carpentier.7 For Carpentier, “the Baroque is engendered by the need to name things” (Carpentier, “Problemática” 26, qtd. in Kaup 139). Or again, as Carlos Fuentes reports, The Baroque, Alejo Carpentier at one time was telling me, is the language of peoples, who, ignoring truth, seek after it eagerly. Góngora, like Picasso, Buñuel, Carpentier, or Faulkner, did not know: he encountered. The Baroque, language of abundance, is also the language of insufficiency: only those who possess nothing include everything. Their horror of vacuity is not gratuitous; it is due to the certainty of the fact that one is in emptiness, that one lacks security.  (Fuentes 3, qtd. in Kadir 89–90, his translation)

In his essay Lezama traces the imago to the experience of the chroniclers of the Indies, and his concept of the Neobaroque is in part indebted to the reassessment of the colonial period in the 1940s by historians of colonialism such as Mariano Picón-Salas, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Irving Leonard (Kaup 109). Lezama finds expression of the imago in the new meanings of the chroniclers of the Indies, the baroque dominion, the rebellion of romanticism. There the image acts as a quantos which is converted into a quale by the discovery of a center and the proportionate distribution of the energy. Exile and captivity are the very root of these images. The chronicler of the Indies brings his already-formed images, and the new landscape bursts them open.  (Kadir 31)

It should be clear that with the concept of the imago Lezama is focusing in on the moment of transition between the unknown, the unassimilated input of the world, and the synthesizing functions of language and cognition that allow known and knowable objects to spring forth. Certainly the problem of being on the border of the unknown was a central theme for baroque thought. As Ndalianis puts it, “Dominant belief systems were rocked, and advances in optical technologies merely supported the belief that nothing was as it appeared to be on the surface” (Ndalianis 174). In a passage that Ndalianis goes on to quote, Barbara Maria Stafford describes the effects of the New Science on the European imagination: “The earth, apparently, was a mere speck of dust whirling in an immensity. The telescope and microscope probed untold galaxies filled with a chaos of com-

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peting particles that the viewer had to labor to reconcile. The ever-expanding solar system gradually inspired humanity both to think about life on other planets and to question prevailing concepts of the unity of God, man, and the universe” (Stafford 5). The imago, then, is the image of this world; and for the specifically colonial imagination, the imago is America. But in Lezama’s version of this now classic and classically modern epistemological model, the pivot of the imago can turn both ways. Whereas the epistemological model focuses exclusively on the intake of schematism—how the chaos of the unknown, the yet-tobe-synthesized, becomes a viable object of knowledge—the American perspective, for Lezama, allows one to occupy the pivotal point such that one experiences both the convergences of knowledge and its dispersions, the bursting of the image onto the landscape of the unknown. This is a kind of knowledge, a form of expression, therefore, for which the American consciousness can claim a privileged access. I should point out that, despite the acuity of Lezama’s insight, I disagree with his tendency to exclude from the European Baroque access to this knowledge (Lezama 75–77); as I argue in other chapters of this book, the European Baroque is full of such examples, and the possibility of deploying the minor strategy is part and parcel of the Baroque, even if more widespread in the American context. The renowned materiality of baroque aesthetics, for example, has much to do with the minor strategy and is equally represented on both sides of the Atlantic. The emphasis on materiality can even be traced to centripetal, continental forces, such as the Council of Trent, which “gave the Baroque a degree of legitimacy and impetus when, in trying to counter the secularizing influence of the Renaissance, it baptized the numinous energy of sensory experience, notably, the religious iconography of the Roman church” (Kadir 101). This thoroughgoing materiality in the service of religious sentiment and control is what Lacan referred to when he famously described the Baroque as “the regulation of the soul by a corporeal viewing” (XX 105), where scopie corporelle is at once a viewing of the body (Buci-Glucksmann) but also an embodied viewing, a sinking into the materiality of perception. This Baroque with its taste for folds, poetry of the senses, chapels of bones and other mementi mori is clearly ready for Carpentier’s rebuttal of Cartesian rationalism in his El recurso del método: “Siento luego soy” (I feel therefore I am) (309).8 The imago, then, would not only be a pivot on the schema of perception, on the trajectory of discovery, but also on the dialectic distinguishing



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the spiritual from the material.9 As pivot to the key modern conceptual models, the imago occupies the paradoxical point of baroque architectonics, where the truth is contained and produced by the illusion that conceals it. Like the frame in a trompe l’oeil fresco, it marks the illusory border separating the viewer from a promised glory in a nonexistent space beyond. The viewer constructs the imago; but what is the imago’s view of itself, its own scopie corporelle? As the point of illusion/dissolution of the self ’s image, the image of the self from that image constitutes a radically different perspective than the view onto that image. Hence the apparently paradoxical duplicity of the Coloneobaroque, that it should be both centrifugal and centripetal, both molecular and molar. But the activation of the minor strategy is more specific and more complex than mere deterritorialization, the movement toward the dissolution of the illusion. Deleuze and Guattari write the following in their book Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature: “Language stops being representative in order now to move toward its extremities or limits” (23), which is to say, the minor strategy is a way of residing in the major strategy without accepting its fundamental assumptions. The major strategy of the Baroque, and the founding trope of modern epistemology, is to assume that the coherence of the image is in a representative relation to some thing that, itself unknown, grounds that relation. The minor strategy does not merely ride out the “lines of flight” linking the imago’s coherence to its dissolution, its bursting onto the shores of terra incognita; rather, the minor strategy treats those limits as ends in themselves, and thereby cuts off the relations constitutive of representation. The copy, in other words, no longer serves the interest of the original thing it was ostensibly meant to represent, an exact correlate to that aspect of the Baroque, noted by Severo Sarduy, whereby the copy “is not inferior to the original, but is rather situated in its own self-supporting epistemological space” (Moraña 253). Or, as Borges writes in the preface to the 1954 edition of La historia universal de la infamia, “I would say that the Baroque is that style that deliberately exhausts (or wants to exhaust) its possibilities and that verges on its own caricature. . . . I would say that the Baroque is the final stage of all art when this art exhibits and dilapidates its means” (Borges I, 291, trans. in Moraña 254). The Baroque, as Moraña writes about the same passage, “is the expression of the limit: an expressivity situated at the abyss of representability” (254). Or, as she goes on to describe in the work of Sarduy, “it constitutes, at the same time, a process that transforms the negativity of what is missing—the lack, the

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desire, the abnormality—its original impulse, [into] the locus of the initial suppression/repression that can be hyperbolically filled with meaning and saturated with signs” (260).10 In Sarduy’s own words, “baroque language takes pleasure in the supplement, in the excess, and in the partial loss of its object. Or rather, in the search, by definition frustrated, for the partial object” (qtd. in Kadir 86). If lack, loss, desire is the occasion for an excess of pleasure, this is because in the minor strategy lack, or more specifically, finitude, is no longer perceived as derivative of an eternal plenitude separated from us by temporality; rather, the minor strategy fills out the finitude of language and inhabits it and the world as essentially lacking, for all objects are by definition only partial, and all searches by definition frustrated. Kadir describes the experience of one of Carpentier’s characters, Ti Noël from his El Reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World), in the following words: “With ineluctable immediacy, the concrete phenomena of sensorial experience are already artificial, even before their rhetorical depiction, by virtue of their contrivance as ornamental displays in shop windows” (96), a state of affairs that cannot help but remind us that the New World, parceled out and displayed in the cabinets of curiosities or Wunderkammern of the old world, could never really be new, in the sense of unmediated and unspoiled.11 “Not in vain but with much cause and reason is this called the New World,” writes Vasco de Quiroga in 1535, “not because it is newly founded, but because it is in its people and in almost everything as were the first and golden ages,” leading Kadir to comment, “what he sees in the New World of Europe’s future is Old Europe’s Arcadian past, the mythological golden age” (14). Nature is already artifice, or as we saw with Gracián, “the things of the world must be seen backwards, turning one’s back, in order to see them straight” (Criticón 182). What does this mean in practical, narratological terms? It means that minor baroque texts—texts like those that reveal the artifice inherent in the natural, for example—will often seem to be taking the major strategy too seriously, at face value, as it were, and hence riding the material language of its figurative assumptions out to their absurd extremes. Leonardo García-Pabón recounts a story published in the Corónica moralizadora of 1638 by the Bolivian criollo friar Antonio de la Calancha, in which another friar, Martínez de Biedma, at first widely respected for his sermons, succumbs to temptation and becomes a terrible sinner. A popular treatise on piety of the time by Luis de Granada advises that, according to San Isidoro, “nothing is more beneficial to tame the force of carnal appetite than to consider what



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will happen, after death, to that which we love so much while alive” (qtd. in García-Pabón 226). But in the minor baroque spirit of taking the major discourse at face value, Friar de Biedma doesn’t just think on death; he digs up a corpse and takes it to bed with him, a clear case in the realm of sexual perversions of swallowing the spider to catch the fly. Perhaps even more exemplary in this regard is another tale, this time catalogued by Bartolomé Arzans de Osúa, in which the protagonist, Juan de Toledo, walks the streets of Potosí for twenty years with a skull in his hands, in apparent and even extreme fulfillment of a religious attitude toward this world and the next. Upon his death, however, a letter is discovered in the skull that contains a strange and terrible confession. Far from being a saint, Toledo is a killer who so hated the man he slayed that he mutilated his corpse, ate his heart, and carried his skull with him for the rest of his life, because “I was sorrowful to see him dead, for had he risen again a thousand times, I would have killed him again as many times” (qtd. in García-Pabón 230, his translation). This tale not only literalizes (to the point of realizing its very opposite) the image of the hermetic religious attitude, it incorporates European fears about cannibalism in the New World. As Sara Castro-Klarén has noted in her analysis and critique of Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto antropófago,” cannibalism is not a trope that can be dialectically incorporated into the stable European ideal; “anthropophagy does not construct integrated subjects. Rather it is an endless voyage toward an infinite and indeterminate alterity” (312). Or, as García-Pábon observes in his analysis of the tale, “what is represented in this manner is not something that can be held fast. Like a mirage, the reflected image cannot be grasped, or even clearly seen, indeed, it can only be located between levels of representation” (231). We do not need to search the annals of obscure chronicles to find examples of the minor strategy in colonial writings. As canonical a writer as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz deploys the strategy in abundance in her poetic, theatrical, and essayistic work. Let us take as an example her renowned Carta atenagórica (Letter Worthy of Athena), dismissed by Octavio Paz as mere theological entelechy and scholastic construction (Marín 207).12 The content of this letter—published by the Bishop of Puebla, without Sor Juana’s knowledge, with a preface written by him under the pseudonym of Sor Filotea recommending that Sor Juana dedicate her remarkable intellect to sacred matters (Marín 206)—is a carefully argued refutation of a sermon by the Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira. At first glance, the solidly scholastic

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style of her argumentation makes it less than obvious how Sor Juana could be classified according to a rubric stressing the immanence of corporeality to spirituality. As Paola Marín notes, comparing Sor Juana with Teresa de Avila, “in Sor Juana, the body as a basis for feminine theology has disappeared and is replaced by the intellect. Her mind is described as feminine only to the extent to which it makes the lesson of humility even more difficult for presumptuous men” (209). Nevertheless, as we shall see, it is not in her recourse to corporeal experience that Sor Juana deploys the minor strategy; rather, the minor strategy is revealed through her identification with the object position of knowledge rather than with the position of the knowing subject, an identification that permits her access to an expression denied to the knower according to the major model of modern epistemology. This identification, moreover, is not the mere projection of the subject position, but is the realization of the means of representation as an end, beyond which there is no other. As this sounds not only counter-intuitive, but even counter-theological, let us turn to some of the relevant fragments of Sor Juana’s treatise. The general trope of the carta is to demonstrate that each time Vieira tries to refute the position of one of three church fathers on the question of Christ’s greatest gift to mankind, he is positing a cause for a representation, a cause about which he can in fact have no knowledge. Thus when Vieira criticizes Chrysostom’s claim that Christ’s greatest gift was to wash the feet of his Apostle’s, saying “the greatest act of love of Christ was not to wash the feet but rather the cause that moved him to wash them,” she defends Chrysostom’s position, writing, “Chrysostom wants that we infer from the effect the greatness of the causes, without expressing them, because he could not find a more living expression than to refer to such a humble ministry in such sovereignty” (Cruz 814). As Marín writes, commenting this passage, “separating cause from effect implies separating acts from consequences, creating a world of abstract law disconnected from our experience—a dogmatic world very similar to the one promulgated by the Counter-Reformation” (212). The creation of another world underlying this one, a “world of abstract law disconnected from our experience,” is of course exactly what the major strategy of modern epistemology does. In Richard Rorty’s words from his Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, it creates a “mirror world” to ours, one to which our senses and the knowledge we glean from them must constantly strive to adequate. Sor Juana, while appearing to engage in scho-



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lastic squabbles, at the same time manages to deflate this abstract world by deconstructing, in the exact sense of the word, the elevated status of an otherworldly cause to earthbound, perceptible effects. If Christ washed the feet of his Apostles, the wonder, the fineza—the index of love but also of the purity of the act—lies not in its reference to some extramundane cause but in the act itself, beyond which we can find no greater living expression. If this is a denial of pretensions to metaphysical knowledge, as it undeniably is, it is also an affirmation of finitude, of existence as expression of itself, pointing only to itself and to no beyond. It is in this sense, then, that one can speak of identification with the object; not as a subject who represents how that object must be in its reality, but as a speaking from the position of the representing itself, which thereby enjoys an unobstructed view of its own finitude, of its own dissolution. In Sor Juana’s own words, “I believe it to be true that if there is anything accurate in this paper, it is not the work of my own understanding, but rather that God wishes to punish with such a weak instrument the seeming elation of that proposition: that there could be no one [other than the author] who could finesse his argument” (816).13 Here Sor Juana turns Vieira’s own language against himself by collapsing the two uses of the word fineza: one, an act of love, the greatest of which is the matter of the debate at hand; and the other, to finesse an argument, to win a point in a debate. The irony of Sor Juana’s collapsing of the two meanings is that Vieira’s whole position depends on a radical distinction being maintained between fineza as a representation and the cause of that representation, whereas his own use of the term as a way of comparing his own argumentation with that of Aquinas, Augustine, and Chrystomom depends precisely on the ultimate nature of the finesse itself. In other words, a finesse is only a finesse if a better one doesn’t come along; it is coextensive with its own finitude, and is always subject to finessing. By collapsing the uses of the word into one, Sor Juana is taking Vieira’s discourse at face value, refusing to exchange a term for its promised value but instead reading it as representative of only itself. In this reading, Vieira’s discourse performs its own dissolution, for if he is right that the purity, the fineza of a fineza, consists of its being unsurpassed, then Christ’s act was, as Sor Juana said, the ultimate finesse, and owes nothing to any cause Vieira or anyone else might attribute to it. If it is to be surpassed, then it is God’s own doing and only He has knowledge of it, and Sor Juana’s very intellect, that spirit suspended above matter, is nothing but the instrument, the object, the material of the dissemination of this knowledge.

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If finezas are, as Sor Juana explicitly states, not love itself but “las demonstraciones de amor” (the demonstrations of love) (813), then even the purest act of love, “la mayor fineza” is but a sign, for in the act of speaking, comparing, knowing it, we cannot help but turn it into the material of our knowing—finite, referential, impure. The Saint, she says, referring to Chrysostom, is not speaking of love, but of the fineza, the sign of Christ’s love, and therefore “there is no reason to argue with him, because the Saint has already implicitly said what they are trying to claim as new” (813), namely, the cause. The cause, in other words, is already inherent in the effect (814), and Christ’s great love is not to be distinguished from the signs whereby we come to know it. González-Echevarría has assessed the Latin American Baroque as being defined by “the uneasy relationship between representation and that which is being represented or expressed” (González-Echevarría, “Colonial” 205). This judgment conveys that tendency of the Baroque that I have been calling minor, according to which the major strategy of modern epistemology is parodied, ironized, its lines of flights followed to their extremes.14 It is precisely this mode or strategy that harbors the Baroque’s centrifugal, molecular potential. But one ought not forget that this strategy was forged in the crucible of the Spanish Empire and its Counter-Reformation, and that the techniques of spectacle and fascination so recognizable in the Baroque were also elements of a massive apparatus for the coupling of mobile desires and identifications to the newly centralized mechanisms of state power (Maravall, Culture 14). This is a lesson that is easily forgotten in the move to baptize the aesthetics of postmodernism as the Neobaroque.15 The impulse toward this connection is clearly justifiable. As observed by many theorists, but most recently and most thoroughly by Angela Ndalianis, the commonalities between baroque and postmodern aesthetics are legion. As she writes, Contemporary entertainment media reflect a dominant neo-baroque logic. The neo-baroque shares a baroque delight in spectacle and sensory experience. Neobaroque entertainments, however—which are the product of conglomerate entertainment industries, multimedia interests, and spectacle that is often reliant upon computer technology—present contemporary audiences with new baroque forms of expression that are aligned with late-twentieth- and early-twentyfirst-century concerns. The neo-baroque combines the visual, the auditory, and the textual in ways that parallel the dynamism of seventeenth-century baroque form, but that dynamism is expressed in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in technologically and culturally different ways.  (Ndalianis 5)



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Indeed, the parallels Ndalianis explores are numerous and impressively catalogued. Identifying the historical Baroque in terms of polycentrism and seriality, inter- and hypertextuality, labyrinths and trompe l’oeil, Ndalianis persuasively argues that the same characteristics have returned to dominance in a cultural landscape dominated by an entertainment industry with enormous technological means at its disposal. These means, historically analogous to the news technologies of vision and representation introduced in the seventeenth century, infiltrate our consciousness through film and video, computers and the Web, and video games and theme parks, all of which Ndalianis analyzes with an eye to their repetition of fundamentally baroque aesthetic tropes. What is curiously absent, however, in her otherwise convincing portrayal, is a discussion of the sociopolitical dimension of this aesthetic dissemination, despite the fact that it is at the heart of many of the theoretical oeuvres she cites, and is central to much of the theoretical efforts to come to terms with postmodernism, in particular the most famous analysis of all, Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. While it is undoubtedly the case that baroque sensibilities are closely linked to epi­ stemic disruption, opening of horizons of knowledge, and the introduction of new modes of representation, what keeping the historical baroque in mind allows us to do is to recognize the ever-present potential of baroque aesthetic expression for centripetal identification strategies, as well as for their dissolution. It is only by forgetting or ignoring this potential that a theorist like Ndalianis can end such a well-wrought analysis in such an uncritical, celebratory tone: Yet comprehending such entertainment forms from the perspective of Descartes’ “aesthetics of wonder,” it is possible also to understand that new technologies, no matter how advanced, need not rob us of our humanity [. . .]. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, we increasingly experience the world through multiple and new technological mediations. Like other entertainment media, though in different ways, theme park technologies reaffirm our connection with the basics of our being: our ability to scream hysterically, to feel intense joy and exhilaration, to suffer nausea or terror, and to experience danger to our material selves.  (256)

Indeed, these new technologies and media use “effects” to induce “affects” in their viewer/participants, as Ndalianis argues; and certainly the new techniques of the early modern stage, of trompe l’oeil painting and architecture, of chiaroscuro and the total art of opera, of the becoming

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opaque of language and the opposing transparency of motive and soul—all of these techniques or effects of the Baroque induced affect among the audiences gathering in the urban centers of the newly minted early modern states. But does this comparison not also suggest another point of contact, another scale of analogy? If theorists and historians such as Maravall and Angel Rama have emphasized that this effusion of spectacle tended to be deployed for the advantages of specific political and class interests, should we not at least attend to the possibility that our affect and enjoyment, in the hands of what Timothy Lenoir has called the military-entertainment complex, might also have a specific sociopolitical function? It is not a question of worrying, in a tired repetition of Luddite concerns, that technology will rob us of our humanity; we are perhaps never so human as when we are being robbed of our humanity. Rather, it is a question of attending to how particular forms of aesthetic enjoyment structure and position their subjects or end-users. By failing to distinguish between a critical aesthetic such as that of the minor strategy, and the major baroque strategy of subjection to an ever-deferred truth, Ndalianis effectively robs the Neobaroque of its disruptive potential. For the very symptoms of epistemological disruption she catalogues are all examples of a commercialized culture naturally selected, as it were, to construct us recipients in the image of the ideal consumer. If it can be said, in the context of an amusement park attraction or a film or a video game, that “while we are immersed in the exhilarating kinetics and illusion of the ride, it becomes difficult to fix the boundaries that frame the illusion and distinguish it from the space of reality” (254–55), is this blurring of boundaries to be described in the same theoretical idiom that we use to speak of Cervantes’s parodies of seventeenthcentury standards of sexual and racial purity, or Sor Juana’s deconstruction of a theology of abstract rules? Or can we not rather see that the rubbing of boundaries—one of the primary techniques of whatever we recognize as baroque—can rub both ways? There is a blurring—favored by the military-entertainment complexes of new and old empires alike—that suggests to the participant that the borders distinguishing base reality from a given representation are fungible, only insofar as the base reality is taken as sacrosanct. I have elsewhere called this illusionism, and its operative mechanism is the naturalization of an otherwise conventional ground-frame in order to relativize a technologically constructed secondary frame (“Reality is Bleeding”). For example, a theme park attraction like The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman may dazzle



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our senses and send our stomachs surging up to our throats, but it only does so insofar as we have accepted, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that “reality” is that unquestioned place in which I and my family can pay to enter a theme park and enjoy an attraction that we know of because of the movie we have also paid to see and the action figures we have bought for my son in droves because they constantly break, and even if they didn’t he would pester us to buy another one each time he sees it. Likewise, the illusionism of the seventeenth-century Spanish stage presupposes an implicit acceptance and integration of conventional frames concerning the role of women in society, of race and blood purity in determining social hierarchy, and the monarchical state in determining the place of the individual. These two examples of illusionism, I would suggest, are more similar to one another than each would be to a contemporary rubbing of boundaries that rubs in another, minor direction. In the case of the baroque stage, as I argued in the introduction, Cervantes’s marvelous entremés, El retablo de las maravillas, has as its very purpose to demonstrate that the engagement with and participation in the entertainment institution of the theater requires the adoption of absurdly arbitrary and illusory conventions within the audience’s practice of everyday life. In the case of current technological practice, one could cite many examples of artists, authors, and filmmakers (one of whom is the subject of the last chapter) whose work problematizes the bracketing of certain conventional frameworks as somehow natural and foundational. These practices are examples of minor baroque strategies insofar as their operation consists of revealing the ostensibly unrepresented as still being a function of representation. All the examples of coloneobaroque production I have cited have this trope in common, but they share it with the performances of the Austrian performance artist Elke Krystufek,16 the films of Pedro Almodóvar, the novels of Roa Bastos, or the work of many of the artists exhibited in Salamanca, Spain, between October 2005 and January 2006, in the show called Baroque and Neobaroque: The Hell of the Beautiful.17 To lump the films of Almodóvar together with the novels of Roa Bastos is certainly a mistake; but my point is that it is a far greater mistake to lump both of these uncritically together with the monster from Alien or the fashion industry, as the press release for the Salamanca exhibit essentially does. The force of this distinction, I want to stress, is not mere snobbery, a defense of higher, more literary and artistic production against popular culture; rather, it is based on the observation that the illusionism of Hol-

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lywood cinema and the spectacle of the fashion industry, no matter how worthy of admiration their techniques might be, both function ultimately as lures for the production of docile consumers; the bait of difference, of individuality, is proffered in the service of mass commodification. Art and literature that deploy the minor strategy of the Baroque cannot be co-opted by this commodification (although they can certainly be consumed as commodities, which is different), because the very function of the strategy undermines the basis for identification necessary for mass commodification. The impulse to locate ourselves as consumers of spectacle, in other words, relies on the bracketing of an agency ostensibly untouched by that choice: the viewer who can choose to be frightened by Alien or don these designer jeans in order to fit a certain standard of beauty or desirability can be free to have made another choice without having undergone any essential change. The art and literature of the Coloneobaroque challenge that basic assumption by attacking the foundational distinction between the unquestioned base reality and its multiple representations. Such art and literature goes beyond the mere excitement of affect to affect the core of our being, since it leaves us with the uncanny sense that this core is at play in the world of representations. The ultimate finesse, to return one last time to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, is that there is no greater love than the sign of love itself, and hence no other world to buttress our fragile selves against the tumult of signs and senses in which we find ourselves immersed.

chapter six

The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges

When Calderón dreamt, in the middle of the century of novelty, his dream marked the new space of modernity’s relation to the possibilities of its own knowledge; when Borges dreamt, his dream imagined the closure of that space. That space, opened by Calderón and closed by Borges, is the Baroque. Or, better said, what we call the historical Baroque corresponds to the opening of that space, and what we call the Neobaroque to the closing of that space. In Calderón’s dream—and it is only one dream we are speaking of, magisterial, the ultimate work of theatrical theology—the insecurity of our own relation to the real is grounded on an undreamt world, unknown and unfathomable as well, perhaps, but one whose very unfathomability bequeaths our dreamt world the stability it would seem to require, for personal control as well as for social order. In Borges’s dreams—and they are practically innumerable, a leitmotif that never ceases to resurface in his works—the dreamer who dreams us is in constant danger of discovering that he, too, is living a dream, in an abyssal cascade that never permits an end point to the situatedness of knowledge. If the former is the hallmark of what we have been calling the major strategy of the Baroque—itself a foundation of the modern epistemology whose groundwork and limits are explored by Kant at the end of the eighteenth century—the latter is one of the exemplary expressions of the minor strategy, which, in the hands of Borges, takes the major strategy at its word, never ceasing to reveal the interstices and inconsistencies of the world we have dreamt.1 Calderón de la Barca’s La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream) is doubtlessly one of the masterpieces of the Spanish Golden Age theater and of western

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theater in general. I have called it a theatrical-theological work because in many ways it epitomizes the encounter and negotiations between modern epistemology and Counter-Reformation theology, in that its guiding question can be phased as: how can we continue to live according to Christian, moral precepts in a world in which God has become invisible?2 The play tells the story of Prince Segismundo of Poland, whose father, King Basilio, has locked him in a tower since birth, in a vain attempt to avoid an astrological prediction in which the son overthrows the father. Following the classical pattern, his very attempt to avoid this fate in fact enables it, but it is the specific nature of the test to which Basilio puts Segismundo that is of interest. Regretting to some degree his decision, and hoping that the prophecy can be proven false, Basilio decides to free Segismundo on a kind of probation. The caveat is, however, that the prince will be drugged and then awakened in his new surrounding. Should he prove to be violent and rebellious, as the prophecy forewarns, he will be drugged again, returned to the tower, and told upon awakening that his experience in the palace was itself nothing more than a dream. The first awakening naturally inspires a questioning that goes to the heart of the prince’s identity: I in sumptuous palaces? I in fabrics and brocades? I surrounded by such bright and shining servants? I awaking from my sleep in such an excellent bed? I, in the middle of so many people helping me to dress? To say that I am dreaming is a mistake; I know well that I am awake. I, am I not Segismundo?  (Calderón II. 1228–38)3

Convinced by his own perceptions that his new surrounding must indeed be valid, and now endowed with privilege and power that have been withheld from him his entire life, Segismundo becomes a virtual tyrant within minutes of awakening, pursuing whatever urge befalls him, and ultimately threatening to take revenge upon his father for the deprivations inflicted on him. And even if you repent, it will do you no good:



The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges I know who I am, and you will not, even if you sigh and show sorrow, take from me my having been born to inherit this crown; and if you first saw me rendered to the prisons, it was because I did not know who I was. But now I am informed of who I am and I know who I am: a composite of man and beast.  (II. 1536–47)

The first thing to note in this speech and the previous one is what we could call the Cartesian problematic: the awakening in different circumstances prompts a questioning of Segismundo’s being; his declaration of rebellion toward his father is in turn based on a newfound certainty in his identity.4 Identity, or being, is thus in a tenuous relationship with the world of appearances. On the one hand, appearances ground certainty (“I know I am awake”); on the other, the apparently radical fungibility of appearances requires grounding in identity (“now I am informed / of who I am and I know who I am”). What is nevertheless missing at this point is an equivalent to Descartes’ experiment in radical doubt, his attempt to doubt everything that fails only at the paradoxical point of doubting his own doubting, his own thought. Calderón, instead, introduces doubt as a sort of inevitable outcome of this conflict between appearances and being; and doubt, if it emerges necessarily from the conflict, is also the means to its solution. As Basilio adverts his son one last time before putting his failsafe plan into action, And although you know who you are and are undeceived, and although you find yourself in a place where you are preferred above all others, pay attention to what I tell you: be humble and soft, because you may be dreaming, although you see that you are awake.  (II. 1524–31)

The possibility that our waking perception can turn out to have been a mere dream, and therefore a fundamentally incorrect perception about the world, is for Descartes a fundamental step in the project of systematic doubt that will ultimately end in a proof of the certainty of thought and hence of being. For Calderón, in contrast, that our waking perceptions can

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turn out to have been dreamt is already a kind of solution; for what concerns him is not so much the foundation of our knowledge of being as the foundation of our knowledge of the good, and how we are to be convinced to follow it. “Because you may be dreaming,” then, is the ultimate justification for self-control and moderation, for the deference of the will to duty and, finally, to God’s law.5 The argument for this justification may seem a bit tenuous. After all, could one not take the fact that our life as we know it may be merely a dream as justification for exactly the opposite conclusion? Could we not use this argument to justify unabated hedonism, for example, with the excuse that after all, it is only a dream, so why not enjoy it and damn the consequences, as they will be nil anyway? In fact, Segismundo considers this option, and when confronted with the absolute vulnerability of Rosaura, his object of desire, he waivers: “This is a dream; and since it is, let us dream pleasures now, as later they will be sadness.” But this very conclusion reminds him of the resulting desengaño (disillusionment), which in turn dissuades him from this course: But I finally convince myself of the opposite by my own reasoning. If it is a dream, if it is vainglory, who will, for human vainglory, lose out on divine glory? What past good is not a dream? Who has had heroic delights who does not say to himself, when he relives them in his memory, Doubtless all that I saw was a dream? Because if this touches on my honor, if I know that pleasure is a beautiful flame that is turned to ashes by whatever breath touches it, let us rather turn to the eternal; for it is life-giving fame where not even delights sleep nor greatness rests. Rosaura is without her honor; but to a Prince corresponds more the giving of honor than its removal.  (III. 2963–88)

In short, if the knowledge that one may be dreaming is the distance that modern, theatrical epistemology imposes between theology and its source



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and goal, in his model Calderón turns this same knowledge back to theology’s service, and to the service of political and social control as well. For if our ignorance as to the ultimate nature of being cuts us off from a direct knowledge of God’s will, it is also this very ignorance that recommends a specific form of obedience and moderation. As Segismundo puts it in one of the most fabled sequences of Spanish literature, as life is so short, let us dream, my soul, let us dream again; but it must be with attention and the counsel that we will awake from this pleasure at the best moment; and knowing this, the disappointment will be less; for to be forewarned is to lessen the damage.  (III. 2358–67)

Here we have, in its major poetic expression, the baroque doctrine of the deceptiveness of appearances and its concomitant ethical stance: if appearance are deceptive, then beware of appearances; act always as though at any moment you could awaken from a dream, and therefore control your actions and submit your desires to regulation. Not merely, to be sure, because of the consequences they might bear in another life—although this is inherent in Calderón’s other great moral allegory, El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theater of the World)—but rather and more profoundly because the very force of desengaño (disillusionment, in both senses the English word conveys) can in this way be controlled and dissipated. The result is the ultimate ethical formulation of the major baroque strategy: the real is out there, and the knowledge of its predominance, that it will at some moment replace, explain, or justify our current existence, must govern our actions in the here and now, in this ephemeral world of appearances.6 How far is this imperative from the justification that Kant gives to his own work at the outset of his Critique of Pure Reason, namely, that “I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith” (Kant 117)? Certainly Kant’s own explanation of the place of morality in his system, in the preface to the second edition of his Critique of Pure Reason (1787), would seem to support this similarity: “the doctrine of morality asserts its place and the doctrine of nature its own, which, however, would not have occurred if criticism had not first taught us of our own unavoidable ignorance in

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respect of the things in themselves and limited everything that we can cognize theoretically to mere appearances” (116). Is not this “unavoidable ignorance in respect of the things in themselves” at some level on a par with the Calderonian doctrine that life is, or can always turn out to have been, a dream? Indeed, insofar as Kant’s ultimate point is to limit what we can say with certainty about the world to appearances, as opposed to the things these appearances represent, the parallel would seem to hold; and it is precisely the rift between appearances and the world they represent that allows us to have, for example, a trustworthy science of appearances. For the inherent indeterminacy of appearances—that they may incorrectly represent something—is deferred to their relationship with something else—the world; but in doing so we have also saved the appearances, as it were, for science. This is because the laws that govern the relation of appearances—laws of causality in space and time, for example—can now be shown to have a priori validity for precisely this limited realm; whereas these laws are now held to have no relevance for the “real” world, that is, for the world of things as they are in themselves, independently of how they appear. The real, then, would seem likely to fall off the map for Kant, if it were not for the insistence, throughout the Critique of Pure Reason but further formalized in his ethical philosophy, that it is precisely this exclusion of the real that allows a place for “the doctrine of morality” as well as for faith. It is here that the Kantian model seems both to institutionalize and transcend Calderón’s postulation. For Calderón, the uncertainty of the relation between appearances and the real—that is, the fact that we always may be dreaming—suggests a specific course of action: we are to limit the pursuit of our desire precisely in order to mitigate the displeasure that would accompany the revelation that the attainment of that desire is illusory. The possibility of an outside to our dream life, in other words, acts as a kind of guarantee that we follow the rules of the game; our deference to a possible outside of the dream guarantees the dream’s coherency, in the form of the potential displeasure accompanying a disruption of that coherency. Kant’s system, while markedly more detailed in its theorization, follows a similar outline: the coherence (laws) of the world of appearances is only guaranteed by a realm transcending that world, about which we can have no theoretical knowledge. Practical reason, however, demands that in our actions we pay heed to that external world, and that paying heed has precisely the structure of maintaining coherence. As far as practical reason is concerned, what is at stake is freedom. If all



The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges

there is are appearances, then I am ultimately determined by the mechanisms of nature, which is a presupposition of the astrological divinations that Basilio engages in, and that ensure his downfall. If, on the contrary, the world of appearances merely represents a world that transcends those appearances, then although my actions all take place in a mechanistically determined world, at all times my will—what I desire to be the case, which is not an aspect of the world of appearances—is free. And it is only insofar as I have a free will that I can be said to be capable of morality, of choosing to do the right thing or the wrong thing. Now, Calderón justifies the choice of action within the world of appearances, of the dream, in terms of the pleasure or displeasure that results from a potential desengaño, from disillusionment with the world. This would be out of the question for Kant­ ian ethics, which clearly specifies that pleasure and displeasure are not permissible guides for ethical action. Nevertheless, in Calderón, pleasure and displeasure are taken as indicators of the dream world’s coherence—in that displeasure arises from sudden incoherence—and in this regard, Kant’s system can been seen as an elaboration of Calderón’s insight. For it is precisely the coherence of the world of appearances that serves as guide for knowing the moral law. Here is how this works. For Kant, we can only be acting morally if we are acting autonomously, that is, in freedom from the heteronomous influences of the world of appearances. The only way we can hope to act morally, then, is to purge the maxims of our actions of reference to individual, or pathological, desires. Hence the categorical imperative: act only in such a way that the maxim of your actions can be made into a universal law. The point of universalization, however, is not that the maxim in question would be desirable to universalize, but rather that it would not be contradictory to universalize it. In the famous example of the depository who decides to keep for himself a deposit left in his charge, Kant’s point has nothing to do with the desirability of depositories doing so or not, but rather, as he says, that there is “no deposit without a depositary equal to his charge,”7 in other words, that the very coherence of the notion of a deposit depends on depositories doing what all depositories are supposed to do. The imperative to universalize maxims, then, is a precise correlate of Calderón’s injunction to temper the will to blandness and humility: both base the justification of right action on the ideal of maintaining a coherent system of appearances. One question to ask is whether the system of appearances actually requires the sort of maintenance that leads to the sort of moral codes posited

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by Calderón and Kant. Without a doubt it is a presupposition of the major baroque strategy that it does. For the major strategy, the world of appearance is always threatening us with its dissolution; moral systems, like laws and states and official religions, offer stability and refuge against this threat. As I discussed above, for Calderón, Counter-Reformation virtues such as obedience and humility arise directly out of the postulation that life is a dream. Likewise, Kant’s certainty that we inhabit a world of appearances leads him ineluctably to conclude that the only possibility for human freedom is a radical submission to the moral law, which takes the form of an imposition of universal conformity on the maxims of our actions. When confining his reflections to the field of knowledge, however, Kant is much more circumspect about the utility of any notion of a world that transcends appearances. In the chapter of the “Transcendental Analytic” of the first Critique entitled “On the Ground of the Distinction of All Objects in General into Noumena and Phenomena,” Kant takes care to define the noumenon, which he says is “a thing that is not to be thought of as an object of the senses but rather as a thing in itself ” (350), in a purely negative way—as a “boundary concept” for what the understanding can cognize—as opposed to its having a positive, existential meaning. This meaning, he argues, emerges necessarily from the idea that we live in a world of appearances, as “it also follows naturally from the concept of an appearance in general that something must correspond to it which is not in itself appearance, for appearance can be nothing for itself and outside of our kind of representation” (348). This something, from which he says arises the concept of noumenon, “however, is not at all positive and does not signify a determinate cognition of any sort of thing, but rather only the thinking of something in general, in which I abstract from all form of sensible intuition” (349). This concept, then, can only ever be used “problematically,” as opposed to “assertorically,” in that it is only ever a “boundary concept, in order to limit the pretension of sensibility, and therefore only of negative use. But it is nevertheless not invented arbitrarily, but is rather connected with the limitation of sensibility, yet without being able to posit anything positive outside of the domain of the latter” (350). To translate this into the dream language of Calderón and Descartes, by realizing that our senses can be fooled, as when we dream, we necessarily posit a waking state in which our senses are not fooled. Because we are always using our senses, however, there is nothing positive we can say



The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges

about this ultimate waking state, and it remains merely a boundary concept to our dreamt world. Despite the apparently inoperative nature of the real world to the dreamt, in Calderón’s model we saw that the possibility of the dream state eventually being revealed to have been a dream has ethical consequences in the dream world. Similarly, despite his insistence on the merely “problematic” role of the noumenal, Kant will return, even in the first Critique, to a far more substantial, active, and effective concept of noumenon. Later, in a subchapter of the “Transcendental Dialectic” called “The possibility of causality through freedom unified with the universal law of natural necessity,” Kant posits a distinction between two types of causality, which he labels “as intelligible in its action as a thing in itself, and as sensible in the effects of that action as an appearance in the world of sense” (535). The reader certainly has reason to be confused, given that in the “Analytic” Kant had promised an exclusively problematical or negative use of noumena, a use that would seem to exclude saying of something how and to what extent it can act on the world of appearances as a cause. But Kant goes even further. Calling the law of every effective cause its “character,” Kant claims that there are both empirical and intelligible characters, and then goes on to catalogue quite a list of qualities for the latter, despite having insisted that there is nothing we can attribute to things as they are in themselves without perilously extending the understanding beyond the bounds of sensibility. For one thing, the intelligible character of a cause would be atemporal, “for time is only the condition of appearances but not of things in themselves” (536). In case one were to object that this attribution is itself merely negative, denying the extension of temporality to the intelligible, we might hasten to point out that there are few more outlandishly positive things one can say about something than to say it is timeless, a descriptor that places our object neatly in the realm of divinity. Secondly, the intelligible character of a cause, unlike its empirical character, is free of all influences of sensibility and determination by appearances; and since, in it, insofar as it is a noumenon, nothing happens, thus no alteration requiring a dynamical time-determination is demanded, and hence no connection with appearances as causes is encountered in its actions, this active being would to this extent be independent and free of all the natural necessity present in the world of sense.  (537)

In other words, the very concept that, in the discussion about what we can know, served as a boundary to the understanding’s pretensions to

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knowledge—in that it designated that about which we can know nothing, not even that it exists—now seems to sport all kinds of substantive descriptions. Not only is it eternal, it is also free of external influences and hence ultimately self-determining, in that it “begins its effects in the sensible world from itself” (537). Now something eternal and self-determining sounds an awful lot like a human soul in the classical Christian theological description, and here it becomes clear to what extent Kant’s and Calderón’s projects are still connected, albeit across almost a century and a half of cultural history: Kant, much like Calderón before him, is still determined to save room for faith from the encroachment of knowledge—where faith is based on the supposition of an ultimate truth beyond the façade of appearances—and thus Calderón’s major baroque strategy, in which the appearances are affirmed only at the expense of their ultimate deference to the real, lives on in the apogee of modern philosophy. If Kant’s use of the major strategy is most evident in his ethics, a reading can be made of his epistemology that is more conducive to the minor strategy, thus suggesting a surreptitious presence in the height of modern thought of modernity’s philosophical undercurrent. I have argued elsewhere for this reading of Kant as being explicit in Heidegger and implicit in Borges,8 but it is here, in the consideration of the dream motif, that Bor­ ges’s deployment of the minor strategy is perhaps best revealed. If I say that Borges’s reading of Kant is implicit, that is because for a writer who quotes and refers to philosophers as frequently as Borges does, Kant is not a name that appears often in his works. Nevertheless, in a key moment, Borges cites Kant’s name among those who have correctly grasped the dreamlike nature of the world. In his essay “Avatars of the Tortoise” he writes, “Let us admit what all the idealists admit: the hallucinatory character of the world. Let us do what no idealist has done: let us look for unrealities that confirm that character. We will find them, I believe, in the antinomies of Kant and in the dialectic of Zeno.” Then, after quoting Novalis’s encomium of the enchanter powerful enough to convince himself of the truth of his enchantments, Borges continues, “we have dreamt the world. We have dreamt it resistant, mysterious, visible, ubiquitous in space and firm in time; but we have left in its architecture tenuous and eternal interstices of unreason, so that we know it is false” (I, 258). The crux of Borges’s Kantianism, then, is Kant’s demonstration of unrealities that confirm the hallucinated or dreamt nature of the world. These unrealities, exemplified by the antinomies,9 are at the same time the tenu-



The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges

ous and eternal interstices of unreason that reveal to us that the world is false, that is, that it is always merely a world of appearances. Borges, in other words, is of a mind with Kant as to the assertion of the fundamentally dreamt nature of the world. And where Kant’s philosophy proves this by way of showing the unrealities of the world—namely, that we fall into paradox when we think of phenomena as though they were the world in itself—Borges has nothing but approval. Where Borges would refuse to accompany Kant, however, is where he extends the negative limitation of the dream motif—what we experience is not the real—to its positive conclusions—the real is out there and directly determines the phenomenal world. Although Borges does not debate Kant on this issue in so may words, that this is the case becomes clear when we delve into the ubiquitous dream motif as it appears in Borges. Borges’s use of the dream motif is the exact inverse to that of Calderón.10 Whereas for Calderón one lives in a dream and risks disillusionment upon awaking in a real world, Borges’s dreamers presuppose a waking, real world as a backdrop to their dreams, and their disillusion is to find out that that real world is also the effect of a dream. Their disillusion, in other words, is itself an illusion, or the abyssal realization that the illusion has no end. A classic example (and because of the sheer volume of examples I will have to be selective) of this structure is to be found in Borges’s story Las ruinas circulares (The Circular Ruins).11 This is the story of a magician who sets out to dream a man in all his intricate details. Along the way he discovers that “the task of modeling the incoherent and vertiginous matter of which dreams are composed is the most arduous that a man can undertake, even if penetrates all the enigmas of the superior and inferior order: far more arduous than knitting a cord of sand or minting the faceless wind” (I, 452). Borges’s similes are worth noting here. The prime material of dreams, which we could suppose is reality, or its memory, is not only incoherent, it is vertiginous, which is to say that it has the structure of mise en abîme. A distinction is made between superior and inferior orders, like that of gods and men; but then an equivalence is drawn between them, for it does not matter if the man penetrates these orders, his task remains just as arduous. Finally, the task is said to be more arduous than knitting a cord of sand, or minting, pressing into a coin, the faceless wind. Both of these are metaphors for putting into form, and even into an acceptable human form, something that resists that imposition. For cord (cuerda) is a homophone of the adjective cuerdo/cuerda, meaning sane; and to stamp a coin is to put

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a human face on metal. The shifting sand and the blowing wind make both of these impositions of human form impossible, and suggest an abyssal, vertiginous withdrawal of the very material of representation. This vertiginous withdrawal is precisely what awaits the dreamer at the end of his task. For when he has finally completed his work, he has before him a man, like all others in every way except one: made of the spirit, only fire would recognize him as such, and would never burn him. The magician worries about this fault, concerned that this little unreality will some day be discovered by his son, who will then realize that he is not real: “He feared that his son would meditate on the abnormal privilege and discover in some way his condition of mere simulacrum. Not to be a man, to be the mere projection of another man’s dream: what incomparable humiliation, what vertigo!” (I, 454). This vertigo is realized, of course, at the tale’s denouement, when the magician himself is engulfed by flames that, to his astonishment, do not burn him: “With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was an appearance, that another was dreaming him” (I, 455). One could expect, of course, that if another is there to dream me, then he might, after all, have a footing in the real. But nothing in Borges’s work ever suggests that this might be the case, and example after example augur against it. Whether creating his own dream mythologies, or finding them elsewhere, Borges is fascinated by the idea of the dream within a dream. In his Historia universal de la infamia (Universal History of Infamy) for example, he quotes a tale from the 1001 Nights in which a man from Cairo, inspired by a dream in which he finds his fortune in another city, travels there only to be taken for a thief and beaten. When he tells the police captain who has beaten him about the dream and why he came, his captor laughs at him, and tells him that he himself has dreamt three times of a treasure buried in a garden in Cairo, but has never been credulous enough to actually go there. The garden he describes is, of course, that of the man from Cairo who, upon returning to his house, finds the treasure exactly where his tormentor described it (I, 340). There can be no doubt but that the attraction for Borges of this tale lies in the intercalation of the dreams. Rather than one dream finding its goal in the real, its content refers to another dream; and the very reality in which a man dreams turns out to be the content of another dream. The treasure is to be found in one’s own reality recognized as a dream, the dream of another. A variation on this structure is to be found in a short prose poem



The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges

collected in the 1981 volume La cifra (The Cipher). The poem, titled simply “Un sueño” (A Dream), is a mere four sentences long, and describes a man seated at a wooden desk in a circular stone cell, writing a long poem about another man in a circular cell writing a poem about another man: “The process has no end and no one will be able to read when the prisoners write” (III, 320). In the middle of the poem Borges writes that the man “looks like me,” an observation that positions Borges, as writer and dreamer, within the abyssal scheme of the poem. Borges, in other words, writes a dream that positions him within an endless series of writers simultaneously writing and being written by other writers. As Lisa Block de Behar has noted on several occasions, “if Borges quotes innumerable authors in his works, it should not surprise us that innumerable authors continue to quote Borges” (Block de Behar 1). The abyssal structure is at the very heart of what we could call the experience of anguish, of Angst, that generalized undercurrent of rootlessness or Unheimlichkeit, not-being-at-homeness, that Heidegger identified as being of an existential order (Heidegger, “What Is” 90). Lacan, influenced by both Heidegger and Freud on this issue, specified that the experience of anguish (angoisse) registers not the perception of nothing, but rather the perception of something where there ought to be nothing (Lacan, X 53). It is interesting to note, in connection with the previous chapter on Góngora and simplicity, that at this very juncture Lacan admits that he is a “gongorizer”: “That may strike you as a trick, a concetto, well at home in my style, about which everyone knows that it gongorizes. Oh well, I don’t care” (53). The point is more than a mere coincidence, however. Angoisse is an affect produced by the lack of lack, the appearance of a something where there should be nothing or, to put it in the exact terms of the discussion around Góngora’s style, it is the affect produced by the revelation of further complexity where we expect simplicity. And why do we expect simplicity? Lacan’s answer is that the expectation of simplicity emerges from the unitary trait (le trait unaire) of language, from the fact that in naming we combine two heterogeneous objects in space or moments in time into one, thereby imposing simplicity on complexity, unity on multiplicity (31). The major strategy of the Baroque projects this simplicity into the real beyond representation; the minor strategy focuses on it as an everreceding effect of language. Thus, as one of the principle philosophers of the minor strategy, it is in some sense to be expected that Lacan speak in the style of Góngora.

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To come back to Borges, where there should be no further dream, no representation but rather the simplicity of naked reality, we find nothing but further representations, further dreams, and the effect is one of anguish. As Borges reports in a brief text called “Una pesadilla” (A Nightmare), he dreamt one night of an encounter with a very tall man dressed in a long black coat covered with white disks. When Borges asks the man why he is thus dressed, the man smiles ironically and unbuttons his coat to reveal another, identical coat underneath. Borges ends the description by writing, “In that precise moment I tasted the unmistakable flavor of the nightmare and I awoke” (III, 426). The Borges who writes this dream is now an old man (Atlas is published in 1984, two years before his death), and we can certainly conjecture that the coming of his own death is an element in such a scene. What is fascinating, though, is that Borges’s vision should give us precisely such a rendering: what causes him anguish, and reveals itself as “the unmistakable flavor of a nightmare” is a man who has something where he ought to have nothing. What there “should” be, then, is finally an absence of representation. The very notion of representation, of dream, of appearance, requires that, at some level, this absence ultimately crop up. The anguish Borges testifies to is the product of the failure of this absence, the lack of lack. Perhaps this is the reason why Borges so often evinces a wish for total self-annihilation. As he writes toward the end of a poem titled after a line from Shakespeare, “The Thing I am,” “I am he who knows he is no more than an echo,/who wishes to die entirely. / I am perhaps the one you are in a dream. / I am the thing I am. Shakespeare said it” (III, 197). As he adds in a note to the title, the line comes from All’s Well That Ends Well, and one hears in it “the echo of the tremendous name Soy El Que Soy, that in the English version is read I am that I am” (III, 203). If on the one hand, then, Borges’s poetic voice claims to be nothing but an echo, a repetition, the product of dream who wishes to die entirely, the same voice could appear to claim deific parentage in quoting God’s proclamation of self-identity to Moses. But Borges further notes, in his explanation of the title, that Swift was said to have wandered around his room in a delirium on the eve of his death, repeating this line, and that the creature, like the Creator, “is what it is, even if only in an adjectival way” (III, 203). So the same words that signify absolute self-identity are also applicable to the creature, to Swift on the eve of his death, to Borges, the writer who wishes to disappear. They are the words of tautology, of non plus ultra, but



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also of termination. The echo ends here; I am nothing but a dream. Certainly, moreover, we cannot fail to notice the irony of the presentation as well; that in the moment of uttering the tautology of self-identity, Borges immediately attributes it to another. As Lisa Block de Behar reports, when she once asked Borges what, of his many writings, he would choose to remain after his death, if he had to choose one, he answered first that it would be his 1958 poem “El golem,” and then, on second thought, that it would be only the first stanza, and if possible only the last word of that stanza (Block de Behar 133). The stanza goes like this: If [as affirms the Greek in the Cratylus] the name is the archetype of the thing, in the letters of rose is the rose and all of the Nile in the world Nile.

Nilo, as Block de Behar goes on to note, cannot fail to evoke the Latin word for nothing. And so Borges, asked to choose one work to represent him after his death, chooses precisely nothing. But more pertinently, perhaps, the context of his riddle is a poem about the relation of a creature, a created being, to the words out of which it is created. For after quoting Plato on the idea of the archetypes, and referring to Cabalistic doctrine on the power of the tetragrammaton, the poem tells the story of the Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague, who pronounced the name of God and gave birth to a being, the Golem. But instead of creating a being in God’s image, like man, he creates something subhuman and uncanny, incapable of speech: Perhaps there was an error in the writing or in the articulation of the Sacred Name; despite such high witchery, man’s apprentice did not learn to speak.  (II, 264)

Perhaps if the Rabbi had spoken the real word, had gotten it right, he would have succeeded; but the sacred word cannot be spoken, for a repetition takes place in time, and time is degeneration, parasitism, failure. As the Rabbi laments, gazing at his perverse creation with “tenderness and some horror,” Why did I decide to add to the infinite series yet another symbol? Why to the vain skein that unravels in the eternal did I add another cause, another affect, another care?  (II, 265)

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Through the brilliant play on vain (vana) and unravel (devenar), Borges captures the cause of the Rabbi’s anguish: wishing to create something eternal, pure, unconfused, he instead adds to the confusion and repetition of the vain world of appearances, the tangled skein of causes and effects that in the eternal is unraveled and unmasked, shone in its simplicity, in its nudity. The Rabbi, in other words, wishes to attain the absence of appearances, of symbols, of repetition; instead he creates yet another, and the result is “angustia,” anguish (III, 265). But is this the Rabbi’s fault, this mispronunciation, this slip of the tongue that changes the sacrum verbum into yet another “thing that I am,” a monstrosity out of the purity, out of the nothing we so long for? If God created the cosmos through arrangement, order, speaking the first word and separating, as Genesis says, light from darkness, it is no less true that this original cosmos—from the Greek kosmein, to arrange or adorn—is an adornment, a cosmetic alteration of some more primordial form or formlessness that, for its part, would belie the temporality of that alteration.12 In the search for the naked truth, the unadorned origin and absence of representation, we are destined, so Borges intuits to the depths of his anguish, to run ever up against one appearance more. Borges’s anguish at the apparent infinity of representations, and his concomitant expressions of a desire for finitude, span his life’s work. Already in an early poem like the 1924 “Mi vida entera” (My Entire Life) we can see evidence of this desire. After a series of reports of what the poet has seen and done in his brief life, ranging from the abstract and philosophical to the banal and concrete, he writes, “I believe profoundly that that is all and that I will never see and never do things/that are new./I believe that my days and my nights are equal in poverty and richness / to those of God and those of all men” (I, 70). The insistence on the impossibility of novelty, despite his young age and the corresponding insistence, in previous lines of the poem, on the infinity of experiences, suggests that what is at stake is precisely not that there will never be new experiences, but that there will be nothing other than new experiences, namely, as appearances, in never ending succession. As he writes some forty years later, in a poem titled “El despertar” (Awakening), Ah, if only that other awakening, death, would grant me a time without memory of my name and all I have been! Ah, if only on that morning there would be forgetting!  (II, 272)



The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges

This hopeless hope, this lament for what cannot be, is expressed at the end of a poem that compares awakening from a dream with the shared dreams of world history and daily life. We are no more present to our own memories, in other words, than we are to the fading memories of our dreams or to the cultural memories of “Rome and Carthage” that we read about in books. That our waking experience grants us not a whit of difference from our dreams, that we never obtain a full presence to distinguish from the ever-fading past, causes an anguish whose only possible correlate is a yearning for oblivion. In another poem published in the same volume, Borges explores the paradox of the present as that which is both “tenuous and eternal” in that it is all that is and at the same time nothing at all. This paradox he again associates with the dream: Where can the centuries be, where the dream of the swords dreamt by the Tartars, where the great walls they flattened, where the Tree of Adam and the other Wood? Only the present is here. Memory erects time. Succession and deception is the routine of the clock. The year is not less vain than vain history. Between dawn and night there is an abyss of agonies, of lights, of cares; the face that looks at itself in the wasted mirrors of the night is not the same. The furtive today is tenuous and is eternal; expect no other Heaven, and no other Hell.  (II, 295)

The key to this expression of finitude is its affirmation of temporality as aporia. There is no way out of this, expect no other heaven or hell. Moreover, the finitude expressed in the affirmation of the temporal aporia is simultaneously an affirmation of the infinite nature of appearances, which, like Arnold Toynbee famously described history, are just one damn thing after another. These appearances are no more likely to be justified by an eventual, unproblematic awakening than our dream life is. What fails to appear, again, is an end to appearances, the nothing instead of that ever recurrent something that is succession and deception, memory and forgetting. The dreamer dreams, and there is no way out of the dream. The base reality from which he dreams turns out to be yet another dream, and so he longs, impossibly, for an end to dreaming, for a nothing that would

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ground, justify, make sense of the never-ending succession of appearances. As Borges writes describing a dream he dreamt in the city of Edinburgh, in which he has encountered a massive building lined with chalkboards inscribed with an (only) seemingly endless series of signs and numbers, The entire path of your life is in those signs. There is no other who is not himself corroding a series. You will exhaust the number that corresponds to the flavor of ginger and you will continue living. You will exhaust the number that corresponds to the smoothness of glass and you will continue living for a few days. You will exhaust the number of heartbeats that have been fixed for you, and then you will have died.  (III, 480)

There is no other who is not corroding a series, or, to put it in a Lacanian language, we are not-all, and there is no one who is excluded from this fact, no absolute father who speaks from a position of ubiquitous, atemporal mastery.13 And yet the desire for that position remains. For what are the numbers (cifras, in Spanish signifying written numbers as well as ciphers, what remains to be deciphered) if not what he calls in another story the “writing of the god,” that knowledge that no other can have but that somehow exists, describing and prescribing the exact place and time of everything that must undergo change, decay, death. This utopia, a nonplace par excellence, is the epitome of what I have called the philosopher’s desire: the fundamental presumption of epistemology that realism is vindicated by the certainty, upon which all of us will agree without hesitation, that there will be an exact number of times you have blinked in your life, although no one will ever know it, or, in Daniel Dennett’s whimsical version, an exact center in universal spacetime to every sock you have lost in your life. This place determines us from outside the set of appearances, determines the flavor of ginger, the smoothness of glass, and the moment of our death. At least, that is what Borges says he dreams of. If the succession of appearances that is our life is determined from without, written in an indecipherable language, to de-cipher that language, to speak the word or read the code that structures the dream world would mean the destruction of that world. For timelessness does suffer true repetition, only the feeble attempts at repetition offered up by mortal appearances. Thus in the “Parable of the Palace,” when the poet pronounces the words of the poem, What is certain, what is incredible, is that in the poem was the enormous palace, entire and miniscule, with each illustrious porcelain and each drawing on



The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges each porcelain and the darknesses and lights of the dusks and each unhappy or joyful instant of the glorious dynasties of mortals, of gods, and of dragons that had inhabited it since the interminable past. All were quiet, but the Emperor exclaimed: “You have destroyed the palace!” And the executioner’s steel blade sealed the poet’s life.  (II, 179–80)

Why is it that reality, lived or imagined, cannot withstand a perfect representation, its expression in a poem that captures everything there is to say, every moment in time, every difference in perspective? As the narrator speculates, “In the world there can not be two identical things; it was enough [they tell us] for the poet to pronounce the poem in order for the palace to disappear, as if abolished and fulminated by the last syllable” (II, 180). The doctrine of the identity of indiscernibles—according to which two objects all of whose properties are indiscernible are identical, that is, they are the same thing and thus not two different objects at all—was proclaimed by Leibniz. It is refuted by Kant, who points out that this doctrine is the result of Leibniz’s intellectualization of the world, his failure to distinguish adequately between the world of appearances and that of things as they are in themselves. As long as we realize that the properties of objects are perceived in space and time, then we see that even indiscernible properties are different from one another insofar as they precede or follow one another: “difference in place already makes the multiplicity and distinction of objects as appearances not only possible in itself but also necessary” (Kant 373). Leibniz’s doctrine, then, would only hold in a noumenal world, a world where time and space were null, a world in which we had stepped out of the dream. And so Borges, positing the annihilation that the Leibnizian doctrine would permit, ends his story by saying, “Such legends, of course, do not transcend literary fictions. The poet was the slave of the Emperor and died as such; his composition fell into oblivion because it deserved oblivion and his descendents are still searching, and will not find, the word of the universe” (II, 180). The word of the universe, futile as our search for it may be, never ceases to tantalize Borges’s many narrators.14 If they find it, it silences them, or destroys them, as in “The Writing of the God,” or at times, it remains an ever-receding goal, like the index to the “Library of Babel.” In the story called “UNDR,” Borges’s narrator actually hears the word of words, the one word of which all poetry is composed. He said the word Undr, which means marvel. I was buffeted by the song of the man who was dying, but in his song and its

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The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges consonance I saw my own travails, the slave who gave me my first love, the men I killed, the mornings of cold, the dawn on the water, the oars. I took the harp and sang a different word. “It is well,” said the other and I had to draw near to hear him. “You have understood me.”  (III, 51)

If the word of words means marvel, it is the wonder in the face of what is to come, it is the openness to the ever-changing future that time brings without fail. For when the narrator takes his turn at the harp and finally sings the one word of which all poetry is composed, what he sings is, simply, a different word. The one word is another word, a paradoxical wisdom that makes the word Undr a precarious precursor to Derrida’s differance, the word that signifies the nonidentity to self at the heart of all identity. Because we dream the world, a constant theme of our dream is the undreamt world, a world whose rigor, whose laws, we strive to attain so as to give order to the constant change of our dream life. The drive to give order and its ultimate failure is without a doubt among the most persistent motifs in Borges’s writing, and in many ways can be seen as the key to his closure of Calderón’s baroque space. In an essay on John Wilkins, the seventeenth-century philosopher and founding member of the London Royal Society, one of the first scientific organizations, Borges discusses the Philosophical Language that was one of Wilkins’s last great enterprises. Wilkins’s idea was to create a language that would not suffer from the arbitrariness of natural language, a language that could express the world rationally, with each word corresponding in its construction to the way its referent is constructed. Thus, as Borges explains it, whereas “the word salmon does not say anything to us; zana, the corresponding expression, defines [for the man versed in the forty categories and the genii of those categories] a scaly river fish with reddish meat” (II, 86).15 Borges goes on to take this system to task, in the most famous part of the essay, by comparing it to patently absurd classification systems, such as that of the supposed Chinese encyclopedia that later so startled and provoked Foucault, in which animals are categorized according to such qualities as “drawn with a fine camel hair brush” and “having just broken the pitcher” (II, 86). The problem, Borges concludes, is that there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is [. . .]. We can go even further; we can suspect that there is no universe in the organic, unifying sense of that ambitious word. If there is, we are unable to conjecture its purpose, the definitions, the etymologies, the synonyms, of God’s secret dictionary.  (II, 86)



The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges

Whereas Kant eventually decided that the unifying conjecture was necessary, and in fact uses it to connect epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics into one coherent system (what he calls the teleological principle in the third Critique is nothing other than this conjecture), Borges resists this urge.16 What Borges seems to allow is that the conjecture is at once inevitable, and impossible. That is, our attempts to say anything about the world on the basis of that conjecture are always doomed to failure. Moreover, to engage in such attempts is not without a certain risk. I have been heard to say, when teaching Borges, that his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” is the greatest short story ever written. This is an assertion I will not even pretend to be able to defend here. Nevertheless, this extraordinary story (whose complexity cannot be exhausted in a chapter or even a book, much less in a chapter’s few closing paragraphs) holds the key to the argument I am making here. The narration turns on an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica brought to Borges’s attention by his friend, the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. The entry, which Borges is unable to find in any other edition than Bioy’s, tells of the nation of Uqbar, in whose mythology appears the planet of Tlön. After several permutations it is revealed that Tlön is actually the invention of a secret society dating to the seventeenth century whose members took on the gargantuan task, not merely of inventing an imaginary society, but of drafting the existence of an imaginary world. While each of the numerous details Borges describes concerning the specifics of Tlön’s belief system is worthy of individual consideration, what is of essence for my purposes is the fascinating “Postdatum” that Borges dates 1947, or seven years after the original “report” is ostensibly composed (the story itself was in fact published in 1941). In this postscript, Borges writes that over the previous six years since he published his report, the literature on Tlön has abounded: Manuals, anthologies, résumés, literal versions, authorized copies and pirated copies of the Greatest Work of Men flooded and continue to flood the Earth. Almost immediately, reality gave way on more than one point. What is certain is that it desired to give way. Ten years ago whatever symmetry with an appearance of order was enough—dialectic materialism, anti-Semitism, Nazism—to enchant men. How not to submit to Tlön, to the meticulous and vast evidence of an ordered planet? It is useless to respond that reality is also ordered. Perhaps it is, but according to divine laws—I translate, inhuman laws—that we never end up perceiving. Tlön may be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth carved by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

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The Dream Life of Calderón and Borges The contact with and habits of Tlön have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets and forgets again that it is a rigor of chess masters, and not of angels.  (I, 442–43)

A world is imagined, and reality gives way. This is the very essence of the Baroque, the fading of frames, the loss of bearings when looking upon a representation. And yet, Borges goes on to tell us, it is certain that reality desires to give way. Why? Afloat in the dream life of appearance, humanity dreams of an ordered world, a world where what we see is not the appearance of something else, but is itself the thing, determined according to rules that we have at hand, that we can control. Borges, writing in the early years of the second world war, reports from a fictional future that ten years earlier, which would be around 1937, whatever symmetry with the appearance of order was enough to enchant mankind, and then he cites three great political evils of the twentieth century as examples of this enchantment. The message is clear. For Borges totalitarianism is the symptom of the universalizing conjecture, of its application to the society, to the ordering of men. Of course reality gives way when presented with the stupefying fictions of order; we want it to give way. But it is this desire that we must be aware of, this tendency we have to forget the limits of our own knowledge. We forget, and forget again, that the rigor we so desire, the beautiful system that promises to reveal itself at the end of our dream life, is a rigor born of the dream life of chess masters, not that of angels. Borges’s neobaroque fiction, by taking the dream life at face value, by riding it out to its extremes, never ceases to remind us that the end of the dream is also a dream, a dream without end, but a dream nonetheless.

chapter seven

The World Well Dressed: The Later Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar

In his seminal essay “The World Well Lost,” philosopher Richard Rorty inveighs against a model of knowledge he terms epistemological, according to which the knowing subject gains, through various knowledge schemas, a more or less accurate picture of the world, a world that, in itself, is forever veiled to him or her (Rorty, “World” 15). Rather than obsessing over the accuracy of the correspondence of one picture or another to this supposed world out there, he recommends that philosophy would do better to lose this world altogether. The point is not to deny the existence of the “outer” world in the service of some “inner” world, like thought, or subjectivity; rather it is to suggest that the very distinction lacks coherence to begin with. In the very moment we assume the existence of two separate worlds, we condemn philosophy to an impossible and ultimately purposeless quest for a perfection it will never attain, since its very goal is an illusion. According to Rorty, such thinking is a philosophical error, a manner of thinking we would be better off without. While I agree with his claim that the philosophical debate between representationalism and non-representationalism is a nondebate, it is and has been my contention that representationalism, or epistemology, is not merely a philosophical mistake—in the sense of a mistake that only philosophers make; rather, it is my claim that the theatrical structure of modern knowledge has been culturally learned and disseminated, and has widespread social and political ramifications. The cultural aspect of representationalism is what I have been calling the Baroque, for it is in the moment of the historical Baroque that modernity developed the theatrical structure of knowledge, and it is the Baroque that

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manifests its incumbent aporias in the most concrete possible ways. Given this parallel, it makes sense to align a critique like Rorty’s—along with much of the philosophy that has come to be labeled somewhat sloppily as “postmodern”—with what we have been calling neobaroque or, more specifically, with the Baroque’s minor strategy. We can do this precisely because Rorty, rather than denying one side or the other of the baroque distinction between the world and the veils of illusion that hide it, takes the claim at face value, rides it out to its extremes, and proposes a way of thinking that valorizes appearances for themselves instead of as stand-ins for some ever-receding truth. Hence his gesture of losing the world is in fact an affirmation of the very world we are immersed in at all times and in all places. I present this schematic rendering of Rorty’s thought in order to frame better the discussion that follows, in which I argue that one of the best examples in contemporary cultural production of neobaroque aesthetics, or better, of an aesthetics oriented according to the Baroque’s minor strategy, is the cinema of Pedro Almodóvar. Drawing on Rorty’s famous title, I see in Almodóvar’s cinema an imagistic rendering of the world that subtly undoes major baroque presuppositions concerning the relation of appearances to the world out there. According to such presuppositions—which imbue our quotidian affairs with a tenacity that inspires me to call them the metaphysics of everyday life—individuals go about their lives in greater or less ignorance of their “true selves,” and their psychic suffering derives largely from this self-alienation. “This above all: to thy own self be true” ranks among the greatest platitudes that Shakespeare ever put into any character’s mouth, and yet for the modern individual in the post-industrial west such platitudes constitute the deepest philosophical insights. Multimillion dollar industries are dedicated to pursuing the “return” to one true self, a self lost in the world of products, choices, and workaday doldrums those very industries grind out day by day. From over-the-counter cosmetics to cosmetic surgery, for example, the discourse of self-help and self-improvement is explicitly expressed in terms of recapturing or rediscovering one’s true self; makeover is required only insofar as the true self has gone out of focus, has lost its original luster.1 The fundamental presupposition of the metaphysics of everyday life, then, is that the self in its truth is naked, pure, unadorned. Only insofar as the self degenerates—over time, through distraction, stress, lack of attention—does it need the help of some cosmetic alteration to return to its



The World Well Dressed

original state. Like the cosmos, however, which shares with “cosmetic” the etymological heritage stemming from kosmein, to organize or adorn, the self in its original state is already the result of a cosmetic alteration. There is no pure naked self, but always a self-in-alteration, a self constructing itself out of countless layers of adornment, for itself but always and especially for the gaze and expectations of others.2 Otherness, then, inhabits the self from the outset, and any return to self must in fact be played out as a return to something else, something foreign, something other. The self, rather than naked at its core, is already dressed; and as far as we can strip it, it is dressed all the way down. To my mind there is no other contemporary artist who better reveals how well dressed the world really is than Pedro Almodóvar. In what follows I make the case for why this is true, and do so with reference to his four latest films as of this writing: Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother), Hable con ella (Talk to Her), La mala educación (Bad Education), and Volver (Return). In the context of his insightful study of Americans’ obsession with what have come to be known as enhancement technologies, Carl Elliott quotes a line from Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre, in which the transsexual Agrado says, “a woman is more authentic the more she looks like what she has dreamed for herself ” (qtd. in Elliott 30).3 It is a marvelous line, not least because it is spoken by a male to a female transsexual who, at that moment in the film, has taken the stage to announce the cancellation of a performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, and has offered to entertain those who wish to stay with the story of her life. The monologue she performs for an increasingly appreciative audience is all about the effort, the performance, in fact, required to become authentic, to become what Carl Elliott refers to as one’s true self. Elliott’s point in quoting the line is, correctly, I believe, to defend the notion that an authentic self can indeed be something quite other than what one has been born as, or trained by one’s culture to believe one actually is. Drawing on the work of Lionel Trilling and others, Elliott describes a history of authenticity in which the idea of what one is in one’s most intimate core has changed from a series of characteristics that were viewed as in some sense unchanging, and was known as “character,” to a more pliable, fungible ideal, namely “personality.” Unlike a person’s character, which is principally a moral entity, personality, which began to emerge in self-help literature in the early twentieth century, is something that can be cultivated (Elliott 59–60). To the extent that the index of the true self changes from a given character to a constructed or

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performed personality, Elliott argues, it becomes natural for technologies that at another time might be seen as secondary or accidental to authenticity, technologies dedicated to enhancing the self rather than, say, restoring what was already there, to become accepted aspects of finding or achieving the true self. That said, Elliott finds objectionable the trend in philosophy he associates with such thinkers as Judith Butler, and which he associates with postmodernism in general, that implicitly or explicitly argues against any viable notion of true self (47). These thinkers—whose ideas, according to Elliott, stem in part from the mid-century sociological work of writers like Erving Goffman—assume that because personality is composed of layers of performance, human being must therefore be nothing but performances, and that we would therefore be better to do without any notion of true self or authenticity whatsoever. I find Elliott’s understanding of this philosophical trend, to the extent that a coherent trend can be identified, somewhat misleading. In the case of Butler, for instance, it has been a widely spread misconception of her thought to read “performativity” as meaning that identity can be donned and doffed like a costume or a mask. In fact, Butler’s theory is much more concerned with how identities, often acquired through identification with culturally acceptable forms of behavior and desire, can be so damnably hard to change or undermine. According to Butler, the identities we acquire through performance are deep and abiding aspects of selfhood, and we develop toward them what she calls a “passionate attachment” whose rupture, if even possible, can come at the cost of great psychic suffering (Butler, Psychic Life 7). Butler’s thought, it seems to me, is another example of a philosophical analogue to what we have been calling neobaroque or minor baroque aesthetics. Again, rather than denying a true self in the service of a series of surface-deep performances, the theory of gender performativity argues that the true self, while produced through the sedimentation of performances of culturally sanctioned roles, is a powerfully attractive and persistent entity. The difference from the classical notion of character lies not in the denial of that self, but in the refusal to acknowledge the independence of that self from performance, from relations, and from the gazes and desires of others. Perhaps no other contemporary director has engaged with this problem as effectively or in as emotionally powerful a way as has Almodóvar.4 Todo sobre mi madre is the story of a woman, Manuela, who, upon the



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sudden death of her 17-year old son, Estéban, journeys back from Madrid to Barcelona in search of his father. There she reunites with an old friend, the transsexual prostitute Agrado, and becomes close with a young nun, Rosa, who has dedicated her life to ministering to the women of Agrado’s circle: prostitutes, transvestites, and transsexuals living at risk of disease and violence. There she also falls in with the famed actress Huma Roja, a middle-aged lesbian who has taken her performance of A Streetcar Named Desire from Madrid to Barcelona. It was after one of these performances in Madrid that Estéban, hoping for Huma’s autograph, chased her taxi in the rain and was run over by another car. Shortly after Manuela arrives in Barcelona, Rosa discovers that she is pregnant and HIV positive. The father, it turns out, is Lola, the very same male to female transsexual who fathered Manuela’s son 17 years before. In his inimitable style, Almodóvar weaves out of these various threads a brilliant tapestry of emotion and philosophical insight into the nature of identity and desire. From the beginning, the problem of the identity of a person, a woman, a mother is at stake. When Estéban and Manuela sit down together to watch the classic Bette Davis film, All About Eve, Estéban comments that the translation into Spanish, Eva al desnudo (Naked Eve), gets it wrong. It should be “Todo sobre Eva,” he insists, and writes this in his notebook, at once engendering the idea for the title of the piece he is trying to write on his mother, Todo sobre mi madre. It is telling that the distinction should be made between telling, writing, or showing the nudity of Eve or of his mother, and telling, writing, or showing “everything about” her. The objection, or course, is based on the insight that a person’s nudity is not, in fact, everything; the revelation of the person under the clothes does not tell all. It tells us something, of course, but not everything. Everything is much, much more. It is a portrait of that person, clothed as well as naked, in her interactions with others as well as alone. If indeed we wish to know everything about a person, a woman, a mother, we need to know her not in her nudity, but as she is when dressed in the clothing of her real existence: the relatedness to others that define her emotions, desires, and ultimately self. The mother, of course, is no innocent choice of topics. Almodóvar ends the film with a dedicatory text imposed over the closed satin curtains of a stage. The film, it reads, is dedicated to “all actresses who have played actresses. To all women who act. To men who act and become women. To all the people who want to be mothers. To my mother.” The mother,

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in the popular imaginary and in the annals of classical psychoanalysis as well, is assumed to be the origin of identity. Yet in Almodovár’s presentation, the figure of the mother is indelibly associated with acting.5 How can this be? Can being a mother be reduced to mere performance? Is there not a fundamental difference between being a mother and performing the role of mother? Indeed, I would suggest that in Almodóvar’s world, being a mother consists of the various performances that constitute mothering, which in no way detracts from the idea of mother. Rather, it means that mother as the core or origin of identity must always be seen as the result of a series of performances in the sense of acts—acts of love, of giving, of nurturing.6 It is no surprise, then, that in the film Rosa’s biological mother has to learn how to be a mother from Manuela, a woman who has lost her own son and in some (wrong) sense hence ceased to be a mother. In Almodóvar’s world, a woman without a child who offers herself to another, who offers to care for that other person in her time of weakness and need, is more a mother than a woman with a child who refuses that charge.7 At first Manuela resists taking on the role of mother for others. She has been a mother, and the loss of her son is almost more than she can bear. When Rosa asks her to take her in, so that she can undergo her pregnancy and illness in secret, Manuela refuses at first, telling her “you have a mother. Go to her.” Later she arranges to have Rosa’s mother visit the house. But when she asks Manuela what she should do, if she should take her back to her own house, Manuela replies, “You are her mother. But I think Rosa is better off with me.” Rosa’s mother, for her part, who is also called Rosa, has a fixed notion of what a mother is. She assumes she has done something wrong in raising Rosa, such that she should have made such a mess of her life. For Rosa the mother, her daughter’s passionate attachment to others at the expense of even her own life is an illness, a rejection of her family and ultimately her self. After Rosa’s death, Manuela moves into her house for a time to raise the baby boy in his grandmother’s house. She names the boy, as Rosa has asked her to, after her own son, Estéban, but also after both boys’ father, whose name had been Estéban as well before he changed it to Lola. When Rosa the mother sees her in a café introducing the boy to Lola before he returns to Argentina, where he will himself soon die of AIDS, she is scandalized that Manuela would bring her grandson to “that monster who murdered my daughter.” But for Manuela, Lola is a father, despite his actions, despite his sex change. He is a father because he has always



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wanted a son, and had never been permitted to see his own. He is a father, in Almodóvar’s world, because a mother like Manuela allows him finally to be one. The result of Manuela’s version of mothering is that motherhood itself becomes contagious. When she returns to Barcelona after two years with the young Estéban, she rejoins Huma at the theater to find that among the photos adorning her dressing room is one of her own Estéban, taken shortly before his death. Huma tells her it was given to her by Lola before he died, and she has been saving it for Manuela. Huma, vain, perpetually self-absorbed, has contracted from Manuela something of the primordial dedication to others that defines her as a mother. Rosa’s mother has also changed, has learned in the wake of her own child’s death something about what being a mother is all about. The simple version of Almodóvar’s paean to motherhood would seem to be, then, that mother is as mother does. And maybe this is enough. But taken in the context of Agrado’s monologue, the lesson is perhaps more subtle, more powerful than that. A woman is never more authentic, Agrado tells us, than when she is striving to be what she has dreamed of. The line has its humor, coming from a transsexual who, despite her desired femininity, has never “completed” her sexual makeover, has never had her penis removed. We could certainly read this monologue as a defense of the performance of gender in its more popularly accepted form: that there is no true self, that a woman is nothing other than the breasts, the shape, the makeup and outward appearances. But the truth of the sentence, along with the truth of a mother’s identity, lies not in the appearances we strive to make over in the service of an authentic self, but in the desire that guides those efforts. It is the desire, Almodóvar seems to be telling us, that determines our identity, not the reverse. And that desire is not a whim, not a mere disguise to be doffed and donned as the urge hits us; rather, it is the result of a profound and passionate attachment to a self who is never more real, never more authentic, than when reaching out to the myriad others who, in turn, have mothered it. If in Todo sobre mi madre he examined the idea of mother that underlies our core sense of self, in Hable con ella Almodóvar turns his attention to relations that exist between sexual partners and those that exist between friends. Hable con ella is the story of the friendship that grows between two men, Marco and Benigno, each of whom is in love with a woman in a per-

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sistent vegetative state. In Marco’s case, Lydia—a female bullfighter who lies in a coma after having been brutally gored in the ring—was his lover up until the day of her fatal fight. He only learns later from her former lover that she had in fact decided to return to him, and was planning on telling Marco on that very day. Benigno, a male nurse working in an upscale clinic in a wooded suburb of Madrid, has maneuvered to become the primary caretaker of Alicia, a young dancer who was put in a coma by a car accident. Benigno’s character is in many ways the pivotal one, as it is his act around which the plot ultimately turns. Benigno is a man of uncertain sexuality. Javier Cámara gives his character certain stereotypically homosexual mannerisms, and when asked by Alicia’s psychiatrist father what his sexual preference is, Benigno tells him at first that he has never been with anyone, and later that he prefers men. In fact, Benigno has spent the last twenty years of his life taking meticulous care of his mother, until her death, and now lives alone in her former apartment. The apartment is across the street from the studio where Alicia dances, and it is there that he first sees Alicia and develops his romantic obsession for her. Sometime after his mother’s death, Benigno contrives to meet Alicia, and then to enter her house via a trumped-up appointment with her father. His actions—despite the benignity suggested by his name and his own protestations later in the film—are uncomfortably suggestive of a stalker, which is more or less what Alicia seems to think of him. After the accident it is Benigno who takes care of her, just as he cared for his mother. For four years he bathes her, manicures her, changes her beddings, and disposes of her wastes. During this time he tries to become more like her, adopting interests that were hers. It is during a Pina Bausch performance he attends—with which the film opens—that he first sees Marco, who is sitting next to him in the theater, tears streaming down his face. After going out to the movies one evening to see a silent film—another of Alicia’s passions—he is inspired by the movie’s plot and commits his act: raping Alicia and, as it turns out, impregnating her. The nature of the film Benigno sees is not irrelevant to the story. It is a classic piece of Almodóvar camp, in which the lover of a woman scientist tests her new diet potion for her, with the result that he begins to shrink. He runs away in disgrace, but she rejoins him after several years hidden away at his mother’s house only to find that he is now the size of one of her fingers. She nevertheless declares her love for him and spirits him away. In



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a hotel room that very night, as she sleeps, he climbs around on her breasts as if on two great hills, and then strips and enters her vagina with his entire body, as she climaxes in her sleep. What is it that Benigno sees in this silent film that inspires him to his first ever sexual intercourse, that prompts him to have intercourse with the comatose woman he loves? Certainly he cannot fail to notice similarities to his own case. The protagonist is small and alone, and living in the house of his mother. He is taken from this house by another woman, whom he loves. She is massive in her size, but also in her silence. The film is silent; and in the moment of the act, the woman is asleep. Entering her becomes the ultimate act of self-sacrifice for the protagonist, a complete rendering of the self to an immutable, inscrutable other. As they develop their friendship during their respective bedside vigils, Benigno tells Marco to talk to Lydia. Not because she is in a coma, however, but because she is a woman. Benigno clearly associates woman with an overwhelming silence that pulls one in and demands that one speak, that one act. The philosophical import of the film, it seems to me, lies in the nature of the impulse, of the affect that pushes Benigno to his act. Is it an evil act, a perverse violation of a brain-dead woman; or is it ultimately an ethical act, an act of purest love? Almodóvar seems to be suggesting that to decide between the two is not possible; or, rather, that the two explanations are somehow synonymous. Benigno’s act is wrong and perverse, and at the same time an act of pure love, an expression of absolute affect in the face of a voiceless other. This relation of affect to voicelessness is also the key to Marco’s relation. On several different occasions we see Marco break into tears (in fact, Almodóvar said he wanted to call the film “The Man Who Cried,” but the title was already taken). In the first two cases, he cries when watching a performance of extreme beauty: first the dancing of Pina Bausch, and then later, with Lydia, a concert by Caetano Veloso. When Lydia asks him later why he cries, he tells her it is because of the impossibility of sharing that experience with the woman he loved before Lydia. When she eventually takes the place of that woman in his heart, she also becomes incapable of sharing what he sees and feels. His relation, in other words, continues to be to an absence, a silence, and the point of contact with that silence becomes a motive of affect. The last time he cries in the film is when he rushes to the prison where Benigno is being held, only to arrive too late to prevent his suicide. Marco

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has seen Alicia; she has miraculously emerged from her coma and is rejoining the world of living. On the advice of Benigno’s lawyer, he has not told him the news, and Benigno kills himself before Marco has a chance to tell him. Benigno’s crime, as turns out, has also saved Alicia’s life, but his separation from her costs him his. In the end, the criminal has made the ultimate sacrifice: his life for hers. And Marco, carrying news that could save his friend’s life, but facing only the silence of his death, cries for the last time. How does Almodóvar’s film relate to the question with which I opened this chapter, the question of the “true self ” and the metaphysics of everyday life? Almodóvar shows, through the intricate unwinding of these intertwined relationships, that at the heart of each individual, reduced to the most essential aspect of his or her being, the true self is always the result or product of some further relationship, of some inhabitation by another. The choice of having women in a coma—in the “persistent vegetative state” that was introduced to the U.S. popular consciousness by the Terri Schiavo case—is inspired, precisely because, in some sense, there is no way to strip a human being down any further. A comatose human being is an example of what Agamben calls bare life: life without any of the attributes usually associated with it, but which nevertheless remains behind to haunt the living (Agamben, Homo Sacer). It is the “indivisible remainder” (Žižek), the paradoxical supplement of life itself—life devoid of any of its attributes—which would explain the passion that Terry Schiavo’s body aroused and the greed with which politicians struggled to make her case their own. By grasping for the “bare life” exhibited in the comatose body, the politicians believe (or wish to be seen as believing) they are protecting and ensuring the “dignity” of life itself, while in fact they are exhibiting their own absolute affect, their incommunicable drivenness in the face of otherness in its barest form. In a similar way, Almodóvar chooses to have the objects of these men’s love fall into comas, into persistent vegetative states, precisely because this state, this exemplification of bare life, reveals that a life stripped of all its attributes is never truly bare. Lydia, when Marco calls her after their first meeting and asks, “¿Cómo estás? (How are you?), answers, “desnudita” (naked), but she is wearing a towel. Likewise, for Almodóvar, when the human life is stripped naked, it is always still fully dressed. This is why the confrontation with the silence, of the coma, of absence, of death, forces these men to articulate, to feel. As Almodóvar puts it in his own commentary to the film, “I think that situations that embody moments of unexpected and extraor-



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dinary beauty can make tears spring to your eyes, tears that more approximate pain than pleasure. Tears that occupy in our eyes in the place of absent ones.”8 Like Hamlet jumping into Ophelia’s grave and spouting words, these men strive to fill a hole in the real with words, in Lacan’s formulation of mourning.9 But a hole in the real is not a naked thing, it is nothing other than the radical protrusion of otherness into our phenomenal existence. It is the experience of what Nancy termed “infinite exposure” (Nancy 155), the “extimate” core of our most internal, intimate self.10 Benigno, upon speaking to Marco for the first time since his imprisonment, tells him that he thinks of him often, but mostly at night. When Marco, somewhat shocked, inquires as to why, Benigno tells him that it is at night that he reads the travel books Marco has written, and that he likes the book on Cuba best, since it is there that, having nothing, “they have to invent it for themselves, like me.” This having nothing that serves as the basis for further creation is a precise analogue to the comatose body that, apparently having nothing, is revealed to be the basis of relationality per se. Out of every radical impasse is born a new relation, and every bare self is shown to be dressed with otherness at its very core. This, then, is the reason for the extreme subtlety and ultimately humanity with which Almodóvar portrays his characters. When faced with a crime, the viewers, versed in the metaphysics of everyday life, expect to find a criminal, according to the implicit maxim we’ve learned from Kantian ethics, that the notion of a deposit depends on a depository equal to his charge. Just so, according to our presuppositions, there can be no crime without a criminal equal to his charge.11 But this presumption depends on the notion of a world that can be stripped down to its naked self, where criminals and heroes underlie their actions in bright, beautiful colors, and politicians are elected and deposed on questions of a “character” that ostensibly inhabits the world beyond their public representations. In Almodóvar’s world, on the contrary, the crime is an act, not of a criminal, but of a person, a person who, in his truest self, is always constituted by the myriad relations that form his past, his present, and whatever future will come upon him until the moment of his death. The readings I have presented of these two films might give the mistaken impression that Almodóvar is an exclusively “feel good” kind of director, devoted to making movies that present uplifting perspectives on characters who would normally merit society’s opprobrium for their choices and actions. Almodóvar is not without his darker side, however, and his neoba-

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roque aesthetics is as much in evidence whether his characters are ultimately redeemed or not. His darkest film since his early Matador (a campy thriller in which the main protagonists are serial killers who long to die at one another’s hand in an orgiastic Liebestod) is certainly La mala educación: the story of a young man, Juan, who murders his drug-addicted older brother and takes over his identity in order to further his acting career. Of course, by relating the story in this fashion, I have all but destroyed it, as the film’s narrative is entirely comprised by the slow revelation of Juan’s identity and this deed. In fact, we do not know that Juan is really Juan until the last reel; instead, we encounter Mexican actor Gael García Bernal’s character under the name of Ignacio, as he enters the office of director Enrique Goded (played by Fele Martínez) looking for work. Ignacio and Enrique have not seen each other for 16 years, since they were fast friends and each others’ first loves at a religious school run by a sexually abusive priest. Ignacio, who insists on being called by his stage name, Ángel Andrade, presents Enrique with a story he has ostensibly written called “La visita” (The Visit), partly based on memories of their time at school. Enrique takes the story but eventually has Ignacio ushered out of his office, repulsed at how much his old friend has changed.12 At home he begins to read the story, and the film’s diegetic space shifts frames. Now García Bernal is playing another version of Ignacio, a transvestite homosexual who performs in a night club under the name Zahara. There he is seen by an Enrique Serrano (not, however, played by Fele Martínez), who turns out to have been his old friend and first love. After making love to Enrique, who has passed out from drinking too much, he leaves him a letter revealing who he is and telling him of his plan to blackmail the priest who molested him at school. The next day he approaches the priest, Father Manolo, claiming to be the sister of Ignacio Rodríguez and presenting him with a story, “La visita,” written by her brother before he died in a car accident. The story, as she tells him and as he verifies by reading parts of it, details his own molestation of Ignacio as a young boy. At this point the film opens its third diegetic frame, this time 16 years earlier, during the time when Father Manolo molests Ignacio, and Ignacio and Enrique fall in love. Back in our “base reality,” Enrique Goded finds himself moved by the story and calls Ángel to tell him he wants to direct it. Ángel is delighted, and immediately informs him of his desire to play the role of Zahara, to Enrique’s dismay. They eventually fall out over this disagreement, and



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Enrique, more and more disturbed by Ángel’s dissimilarity to the boy he remembers, journeys to Galicia to investigate. There he meets Ignacio’s mother, and learns that the real Ignacio has died of a heroine overdose; he also learns that the man who has been pretending to be him is his younger brother Juan. Back in Madrid, he reconciles with Juan without letting him know that he now knows his real identity, and agrees to “audition” him for the role of Zahara—which essentially consists of, as Enrique puts it in his voice over during this part of the film, “penetrating” him for several months. In the end, Juan takes the role of Zahara, and the sequence we witnessed when we first saw García Bernal in the role turns out to have been the film Enrique makes of “La visita.” The ending is different from the story, however, and, as it turns out, more in keeping with “real events.” During the production, Enrique is visited by the real Father Manolo, now defrocked and working as an editor at a publishing house in Valencia under his laic name of Manuel Berenguer. He reveals to Enrique that Ignacio, a transsexual and a junkie, had indeed tried to blackmail him with a story he wrote called “La visita.” At the time, Juan was living with his brother in Valencia, and Berenguer fell passionately in love with him. At this point the film enters its fourth diegetic frame, and we witness the events that led to Juan’s presenting himself as Ignacio to Enrique: frustrated by his brother’s heroine habit, and convinced that it will ruin his mother’s finances and his own aspirations, Juan conspires with the love-struck Berenguer to supply Ignacio with heroine of lethal purity. The question that guides the film’s narrative, then, would seem to be the one that I answered with the simple sentence at the outset of this plot summary: who is the man claiming to be Ignacio Rodríguez? The brilliance, and the Baroque, in Almodóvar’s treatment is that answer lies not in the stripped down identity, in the brief “truth” of Juan’s identity and deed, but in the various layers and diegetic frames we have to dig through in order to get to that truth. If we discard those layers in search of that bare truth, in other words, we have discarded the very key to the mystery of Juan’s identity.13 According to the major baroque strategy, then, Juan’s identity would exist behind and independent of the various roles he plays and stories we decipher in the search for that identity. He would be the murderous younger brother aspiring to be an actor and willing to go to any length to achieve his dream. He would be a heterosexual, more or less banal young man who

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has pretended to be gay, pretended to be a writer, pretended to be someone he is not. Almodóvar, however—and I would argue that this is the key to the film—has created a film that refuses the simplicity of this strategy. Rather than deny the appearances, the various disguises that Juan dons throughout the story, the film’s narrative and cinematic structures affirm those appearances as contributing in fundamental ways to Juan’s true self. “Soy actor” (I am an actor), Juan repeats at various moments in the movie. On the one hand this claim states his ambition, but on the other hand it emphasizes the blurriness of the line separating Juan’s real identity from the roles he is playing, for to be an actor is to be always someone else, to recognize at the heart of one’s identity the constant intrusion of otherness. Likewise, the cinematic structure of the film corroborates this experience for the viewers, because we are only able to access this knowledge of Juan’s identity via the very mise en abîme of narrative frameworks in which the director has ensconced that knowledge. When we first encounter the transvestite performer Zahara, she is wearing a sequined gown made to look like a naked female, replete with pubic hair and nipples. This presentation of a nudity that is already clothed suggests that the distance to the skin, to the naked truth, can never be entirely bridged. In her nudity, Zahara is already clothed by the complexity of her history, her identifications, her desires. It is furthermore telling that the camera’s gaze, in the same moment as refusing or failing to reveal the “woman’s” body in its full nudity, also fails to encompass it in its totality. Instead of ever treating the viewer to a full body shot of García Bernal’s character, the camera slowly pans up the body, following the movement of a flower as Zahara brings it toward her lips. Woman, presented by the baroque minor strategy, is, as in Lacan’s theory of sexuation, not-all,14 shown only as a series of angles, perspectives, whose sum total is ultimately a façade of femininity dressed in a façade of nudity. The great brilliance of La mala educación, like Almodóvar’s other films, is that the neobaroque aesthetics of the writing is part of a typically baroque “total artwork,” in that the very construction of the cinematic artifact—with music, moving images, actors’ bodies, and sets—works in tandem with the narrative to produce the neobaroque effect. For instance, the different color schemes Almodóvar uses in the various diegetic spaces serve to create the material experience of depth in time and space. The silent film, with jittery images and filmed in black and white, does not convince us of its reality, but rather reminds us of the created nature of our other realities. Likewise,



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the sepia tones of the remembered scenes at first create a sense of nostalgia, but are only later revealed to have been a film within the film. In this sense, the telescoping diegetic frames of La mala educación become the most important element in deploying the minor strategy. Each frame presents itself as a veil, behind which is to be found an answer. In the first frame Juan is Ignacio, trying to make it as an actor with the stage name Ángel. We pierce this frame and enter that of the story he carries, promising insight into his character. In this version Juan is another version of Ignacio, the transvestite Zahara, planning her revenge with the story “La visita.” When we enter this frame, the film suggests through its colors—dominated by a dusty sepia—and tone—that of memory—that we have achieved the most intimate and real of all the frames, and yet this is later revealed to be nothing other than a film within a film (that is itself only a film within the film we are watching). The remembered, apparently “real” father Manolo is merely an actor we later see playing out a campy, melodramatic ending. In fact, Almodóvar’s professed love for melodrama (some time around the release of his La flor de mi secreto he announced he was only interested in making melodrama) must be seen in light of his deployment of the minor strategy.15 For what is melodrama if not the infusion of realism with the excesses of theatricality, a typically baroque maneuver if there ever was? In Almodóvar’s hands, however, this does not come across as an embellishment of reality. Instead, the embellishment itself takes on the status of the real. Like a dream that in the very insanity of its chaos reveals the key to our desire, Almodóvar’s absurdly intricate and comically improbable plot twists press on us time and time again the insight that reality itself does not get any cleaner than this. It is for this reason that we can call Almodóvar the anti-Dogme director, in reference to the Dogme 95 movement founded by Lars von Trier. This group was for a time enchanted by the idea of a cinema that doesn’t lie, and came up with a series of rules barring the use of, for instance, music extraneous to the scene, lighting effects, sets, etc.16 The idea was that by restricting the tricks filmmakers use to represent reality, they could somehow access a deeper, more profound and naked truth. Almodóvar, of course, spends his creative life in flagrant violation of the rules of Dogme, not, however, merely to repeat Hollywood’s institutionalized major strategy of guiding the viewer toward some true insight on the other side of all that representation. (In this sense, Dogme would have to be seen as kind of unwitting intensification of the Hollywood ideal, as if by finally getting rid of

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all the expensive trappings we would arrive at the truth of cinema.) Instead, Almodóvar’s cinematic world embraces the theatrical ebullience of cinema in such a way as to deny that reality is anywhere else. Similarly, the cinema of Almodóvar can be understood as the aesthetic antidote to the dominance of today’s television industry by reality TV. Contestants on reality shows seem to have an unquenchable thirst for publicity and humiliation, in equal doses. But what accounts for their appeal? What drives viewers to watch them and to enjoy such extremes of self-exposure and humiliation? Reality TV, of course, is governed by the logic of the naked self. It unabashedly uses the major strategy to promise the audience access to real people, stripped of the pretensions that they don to protect themselves in their day-to-day relations. The cameras of Big Brother are supposed to show us how people act when the veils of self-presentation have been worn down by 24-hour surveillance. Reality contests like American Idol show us celebrities before they become celebrities, and the countless failures lying behind the success stories we come to lionize. This fascination with the reality behind the screen is also behind one of the most popular genres within reality TV: the makeover show. Starting in 2002 with ABC’s Extreme Makeover, and continuing with such shows as FOX’s The Swan and MTV’s I Want a Famous Face, the genre became controversial because of its use of cosmetic surgery. What is most striking about the makeover show, though, is the way it stages the desire to change as the desire to be true to oneself, to attain some greater authenticity.17 But the fantasy of limitless change that is played out before our eyes in such shows, a fantasy that undergirds capitalism’s fantasy of infinite choice, is itself nothing but an illusion. While the technology of current cosmetic surgery enables customers to undergo myriad transformations, and hence in theory strive for entirely individual and authentic incorporations of selfhood, in practice what makeover shows reveal is a tendency to force the body into tightly established norms. What technology unleashed, society’s models and templates return to bondage, and from a wealth of difference comes a monolithic poverty of beauty. Time and time again the same justification for pursuing physical transformation is given: that the change enables the contestant to find his or her own true self. In the words of a contestant on Extreme Makeover, “I’m me now,” an exclamation that captures the sentiment of the makeover ideology: change oneself in order to better become oneself.18 What is crucial to realize, though, is how this justification—apparently so similar to the



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sentiment expressed by Agrado that a woman is more authentic the more she looks like what she has dreamed for herself—is exactly the inverse of the logic of Almodóvar’s world. For these contestants, becoming me means erasing any and all differences that distinguished me in the first place; it means erasing the marks that time, care, and my life itself have left on my body; it means using media to project the ideal of an unmediated self, independent of media’s influence. For Almodóvar’s world, in contrast, one’s authentic self is nothing other than the borderless history of those marks, wounds, pains, and desires; in Almodóvar’s world, we do not need to get beyond the screens of representation to get to the true self, for those screens are the very stuff our selves are made of. It is the same, then, with Juan. By the time we encounter the “real” Juan, the banal aspiring actor living with his junkie, transsexual older brother, we have already seen that Juan is all of those elements that this bare representation would seem to deny. Juan is also gay, also a woman, also in love with someone other than himself, and also deeply in conflict with this, apparently simple and so unsavory Juan. This is why, when playing the role of Zahara in Enrique’s film, Juan breaks down and cries after finishing the climactic scene of Ignacio’s murder. It is, of course, because he is guilty, but of what? Juan is guilty, as we all are, in some sense, of having gone so far in pursuit of his passion that he becomes some thing, some one, else. “I was curious,” Enrique tells him, when explaining why he agreed to take him on even knowing that he was not Ignacio. “I wanted to know how far you would go.” “I would have gone a lot further,” Juan answers. To which Enrique replies, “I know.” It is passion, after all, that most attracts Almodóvar. For if passion is a state wherein, according to the baroque’s major strategy and to the ethics of high modernity, we are least autonomous, least ourselves, for Almodóvar and the minor strategy, it is in the throws of heteronymous passion—the passive rendering to our desires—that we are also most ourselves. By giving into otherness we become ourselves; authenticity comes from recognizing our own otherness to ourselves. And it is to passion that he returns, in the last line of the film, blown up in text across the screen, from which we learn that Enrique Goded (a name that can’t help but evoke a kind of imperative, “enjoy!”) like his author Pedro Almodóvar, continues to make films “con la misma PASIÓN” (with the same PASSION). Inherent in the metaphysical notion of identity, of a naked and pure, original self that hides below the layers of relations time has built over it,

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is the idea of return, of the undoing of time’s work and the recovery of a previous self. If each of the previous films we have discussed has dealt with some aspect of identity, in his most recent film, Volver (Return), Almodóvar turns directly to this temporal aspect of identity. As Almodóvar writes in his production notes, “Volver represents for me a return in several ways. I returned somewhat more in the direction of comedy. I returned to the feminine universe. I returned to La Mancha.”19 Almodóvar goes on in his notes to connect the return to his roots in La Mancha with a return to his mother, and in turn relates this return to, as he says, “a puzzle piece, whose missing had cost me pain and anguish my entire life.” The missing piece, he goes on to say, was death. “And I mean not only my death and the death of those around me, but I mean rather the ineluctable fleeting of everything that lives. I never accepted or understood death. And that fills one with anguish in the face of time, that flows ever faster.” At first glance, the plot of Volver might strike one as far from an instantiation of the acceptance or understanding of death. In fact, the character who is supposed to be dead for the majority of the film turns out not to have been dead at all. But again, as with the plot of La mala educación, relating the story in such shorthand actually undoes the philosophical work of the film. Volver is a film about a woman, Raimunda, played by Penélope Cruz, who believes her mother to have died in a fire some years previously. The mother, Irene, played by Carmen Maura, is presented to the viewer as a ghost who has been living in the house of her elderly aunt Agustina, and taking care of her in her old age. The film’s preoccupation with death is evident from the opening scene, in which a group of women from the village are seen taking care of the graves of their departed families, sweeping them in a fruitless effort against the ceaselessly blowing dust of La Mancha. As is always the case with Almodóvar’s films, there are countless other twists and turns to the plot, including the accidental murder of Raimunda’s husband by her daughter, and Raimunda’s serendipitous revival of a defunct restaurant in her neighborhood of Madrid, where she makes needed money for herself and other women in the town by hosting a local film crew each evening. But the core of the story is her relation to her past, to her mother, and a mother’s actions to protect her daughter. Raimunda’s principal motivation during the film, her action, is to dispose of her husband’s body in such a way as to hide her daughter’s guilt, after her daughter stabs him while trying to ward off his drunken advances. Unbeknownst to her, this action itself constitutes a kind of repetition of



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the past; Irene, it turns out, set the fire that was thought to have killed her, murdering her lecherous husband and his lover. This murder, however, was not motivated by jealousy but by revenge. For Irene had discovered that Raimunda’s father had raped Raimunda, leaving her pregnant with her own daughter. When the fire has consumed both her husband and his lover, Irene discovers that the town believes the other body to be hers, and so instead of disabusing them of this belief she secretly moves into Agustina’s house and begins to care for her. When Raimunda’s daughter kills the man she has thought all along to be her father, then, this act too functions like a kind of cross-generational expiation: the murder of a man whose incestuous act gave Raimunda her daughter but robbed her of her mother is repeated in the form of the murder of another incestuous father figure, which in turn returns Raimunda’s mother to her. The first thing we should note is that the complexity of this structure undermines the simple nostalgia for origins apparent in Almodóvar’s title and even to a certain extent in his own notes. The father is a father, and also not. The mother is dead and gone, and then again not. By coming back from the dead, as it were, Irene is able to repair a relationship that had been destroyed by incest and misunderstanding; but this is clearly fantasy, is it not? When in real life do we have the chance to set wrongs right, to settle our debts with the dead, and they theirs with us? In fact, in some way Almodóvar’s film would seem to be the furthest thing from a confrontation with death, with the missing piece he identifies in his notes. This ostensible confrontation is the centerpiece of the Heideggerian notion of being-towards-death as an existential aspect of life, the key to which is the idea that the immanent and ever-present possibility of my own death is at the center of my life as existence, a presence that I try constantly and in myriad ways to avoid and to relativize, but particularly through the observation that someone else, or others in general, are the ones who actually die.20 If a confrontation with one’s own death as an ever-present possibility is what is at stake, then Almodóvar’s film would seem to have missed its mark. Yet, as Robert Harrison has so eloquently argued, it may be Heidegger’s analysis that is lacking. Our most primordial confrontation, Harrison claims, is not with our own, necessarily abstract (since it cannot be experienced) death, but with the dead.21 We live among the dead; our relationship to our dead marks the very boundaries of culture; our names remember them, our rituals recall them, the very architecture of our civilizations is built on ground sanctified

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for the preservation of the dead. Culture is grounded on the recognition that others die, and that their death is profoundly meaningful to those who survive them. If this is the case, the missing piece Almodóvar refers to may not in fact be “the death of myself and everyone round me,” as he himself points out, but rather the dead as a constant and living aspect of life itself. What Almodóvar calls “the ineluctable fleeting of everything that lives” is certainly compatible with Heidegger’s notion of death as the ownmost possibility of my own extinction that resides at the very heart of my own life. Nevertheless, what Almodóvar’s treatment brings to this philosophical notion is the realization that death as the fleeting of life is never bare, never a solitary and pure experience, but rather is always mediated through our relations with the dead, and theirs with us. The past that we miss, we look back on, and perhaps try to recapture or return to, is never a monument that can be brushed off, recovered from under the accumulated dust of time. It is, rather, a lattice of relationships, always dying because always living, always being experienced in the very moment of their dissolution, always inalterably different in the very promise of its repetition. When we return, in our memory, or in real life, what we find is never what was there before, because the dead never do, in fact, rest in peace. What we find instead, and what Almodóvar’s films repeat and enact in countless ways, is our living self, dressed in its relations to others, passionately open to a future that is always coming, and inevitably engaged in caring for, and being cared for by, both the living and the dead.

Epilogue: A New Distinction

The Baroque as I have theorized it in these pages may be difficult to recognize for those who thought they knew it well, be it as a stylistic marker or period in art history. When used in the way I do here, has not the Baroque burst out of its boundaries in such a way as to diminish its descriptive value and hence its usefulness as a concept of either criticism or periodization? Indeed, when the concept seems simultaneously to engage with periods after the traditionally recognized historical Baroque and to comprehend phenomena lacking the traits commonly associated with the term, what remains of it at all? What I have argued in this book is that the principal theoretical value of the term “baroque” derives from its relation as an aesthetic category to the historical period we call modernity. The historical Baroque, I claim, owes its distinct fascination with certain aesthetic traits—in particular those of anamorphosis, mise en abîme, and trompe l’oeil, but also the juxtaposition of disparate terms (coincidentia oppositorum) and the proliferation of décor and conscious embrace of artifice—to its privileged position at the dawn of the modern age. The organizing logic of that age is a theatrical one, in which the space of representation is severed into a screen of appearances and the truth presumed to reside behind it, and it is this basic problem of thought that underlies the multiple strategies that baroque aesthetic production puts into play. A problem in recent criticism has been to distinguish the apparent ideological value of these various techniques both during the historical baroque and in the more recent and contemporary manifestations of baroque style

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that have come to be identified as neobaroque. One tendency has been to identify the historical Baroque with a state-organized attempt to deploy spectacle for the purpose of constructing pliable subjects, and the more recent Neobaroque as an opposing tendency, born of the periphery, that works to undermine traditional colonial power structures. The trouble with this tendency, I have argued, is that it overlooks both subversive tenets in seventeenth-century European cultural production and aspects of contemporary baroque style that would seem far from displaying any such critical value. Lois Parkinson Zamora’s and Monika Kaup’s designation of New World Baroque in place of Neobaroque does much to correct the historical imbalance of the traditional terminology, but is not intended as a way of clarifying the ideological difficulties that nestle in both terms. It is in response to these issues that I have proposed the central terminological distinction in this book. As many have also argued, I see baroque and neobaroque aesthetics as historical bookends to the modern period. For negotiating between their old and new world manifestations, I happily accept Parkinson Zamora’s and Kaup’s distinction. What I add here is a new distinction between modalities or strategies of baroque aesthetic production. In that sense, and against Maravall, for example, I do not believe one can generalize about the ideological value of the baroque period in its entirety, although one can certainly identify tendencies, as I do. Instead, we need to see baroque aesthetics on all fronts as engaging with the problem of thought endemic to modernity, and doing so through a deployment of at least one of two strategies: the major or the minor. This distinction frees us to examine both historical baroque and neobaroque phenomena in their full complexity, without on the one hand confounding historical periods and geographical tendencies or, on the other hand, confusing centralizing, ideological discourses with others that work ironically to undermine those discourses. The concept of major and minor strategies, then, is key to a non-reductive historical understanding of both baroque and neobaroque aesthetics. This historical understanding, in turn, should grasp the aesthetic production of the Baroque, both new and old, in relation to modernity’s core problem of thought: the theatrical dissociation between appearances and the truth they hide. For it is ultimately the theater of truth—both the truth that theatrical appearances claim to hide, and the theater that truth depends on for its appearance—that makes sense of the Baroque, both old and new.

reference matter

Notes

introduction 1. See Penny 212 for quotation and discussion. 2. See Omar Calabrese, Angela Ndalianis, José Ortega, and Gregg Lambert, for example. As Marina Brownlee, who is an expert in medieval and early modern culture, writes, “the postmodern bears a strong resemblance to the cultural climate of the baroque” (Brownlee 108). Beverley also cites this connection, in the context of the importance of Cuban writer Severo Sarduy to a postmodern Baroque, in his “Going Baroque?” 29. Lois Parkinson Zamora, in contrast, strongly disputes this association (xvi). See as well the collection of essays in German, Eine barocke Party, which describe current artistic production in the terminology of the Baroque. In her (Neo)Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment Angela Ndalianis argues that the contemporary entertainment industry functions largely according to the logic of the historical Baroque. I have adopted her parenthetical assemblage (neo)baroque to keep my subtitle manageable. See chapter five below for an extended discussion of her thesis. 3. Francesco Guardiani similarly argues for an understanding of the Baroque and Neobaroque as sorts of bookends to, or the opening and closing of, modernity. See Guardiani n.p., qtd. in Ndalianis 22. Bolívar Echeverría, in a classic study, also identifies the Baroque with modernity, specifically in its capitalist manifestation (90). 4. See my How the World Became a Stage chapter 5. 5. As Warnke puts it, “The old symbolic cast of mind, with its assumption of an ordered and hierarchical cosmos, remains operative until well into the second half of the seventeenth century, but an irritable doubt as to the precise relationship between seen and unseen worlds informs the Baroque, in both its typical works and its masterpieces” (Warnke 22). Guillermo Tovar de Teresa identifies the Baroque in

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Notes to Introduction the Hispanic world as spanning the “abyss between what man imagines he is and what he really is” (12). 6. This corroborates to some extent Walter Benjamin’s thesis that modernity is founded on a sense of melancholy for the loss of tradition, the past, and the stability it offers, and that the aesthetic sign and origin of this melancholy is the Baroque. See Benjamin 135–36, and passim, and Buci-Glucksmann, La raison 58. These passages are lucidly commented, along with their relation to the problem of the return of the Baroque, in Lambert, Return 68–73. Christine Buci-Gluckmann’s piece in Eine barocke Party, “Von den Allegorien des Barock zu den Allegorien der Indifferenz,” is especially interesting in this regard. In it she argues that the new Baroque lacks the melancholy sense of loss of the historical Baroque, that its allegories are actually “meta-allegories of appearances” (148), and that today’s “second-order Baroque plays in an ironic way with the real” (152). As I explain in chapter two, I have in part derived the distinction between major and minor from Deleuze and Guatarri’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Spanish texts are my own. 7. By highlighting these techniques, I am obviously not assuming that these are the only markers of baroque aesthetics. Their popularity, however, was specific to the historical Baroque and is indicative of the problem of thought I am outlining here. 8. See Maravall’s reading of these lines in Teatro 117. 9. Indeed, to my mind it is the coexistence of the minor with the major strategy that allows for scholars who essentially agree with Maravall’s thesis of social control and propaganda simultaneously to stress anti-establishmentarian aspects of baroque culture. For instance, de la Flor writes that the Hispanic Baroque exhibits the tendency to “deconstruct and pervert” class interests, at the same time as uphold them (Barroco 19). Mariscal also takes issue with the notion of a monologic baroque culture, and argues for “a wide range of discourses and practices” representing various subjective strategies (Mariscal 5, passim). Finally, Fernando Ordóñez, in a piece that draws on both of these scholars’ work, argues for similarly contradictory meanings in the works of Gracián and Quevedo (Ordóñez 84, passim). 10. See Egginton and Castillo for an extended reading. 11. Although Gregg Lambert titles his study The Return of the Baroque, his thesis is not in fact in conflict with this claim. As he writes, the most provocative implication of his hypothesis “is that there is nothing particularly modern about the postmodern, but that it could be understood, in a certain sense, as a ‘return of the Baroque’” (2). That said, his fundamental hypothesis concerns the existence of “two fundamentally opposing currents of cultural form,” which underlie distinctions between the historical Baroque and previous forms as well as that between postmodernism and previous forms. In this sense, therefore, Lambert’s notion of the Baroque is compatible with a view that understands it as a concurrent possibility of modernity as a whole.



Notes to Chapter One

chapter one 1. I should note that Eliot himself, having coined the term disdainfully, actually focuses on English baroque poetry as an antidote to dissociationism, praising it for its “unified sensibility” (see Malloch). As I will argue in greater detail throughout this book, the reason baroque expression can appear to swing both ways—at times to emphasize dissociation, at times unified sensibility—is precisely because of the two strategies provoked by theatrical alienation. Thurley goes to list as “dissociation-of-sensibility books” Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, Gabriel Josipovichi, The World and the Book, Cleanth Brooks, Modern Poetry and the Tradition, Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind, Peter Ackroyd, Notes for a New Culture. Aside from Eliot, Thurley credits José Ortega y Gasset with having “most brilliantly” articulated the thesis in his The Dehumanization of Art. Benjamin’s thesis from his Origin of German Tragic Drama book is not far from the dissociation thesis, speaking as it does of the separation of “being from meaning” (165), and asserting that, in the Baroque, “any person, any objects, and relationship, can mean absolutely anything else” (175, qtd. in Ndalianis 54). 2. William Egginton, How the World Became a Stage. The following argument is drawn from this book. 3. See Georges Forestier, Le Théâtre dans le Théâtre sur la Scène Française du XVIIe Siècle, and Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play. The Dramatist’s Conception of his Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh. 4. It is not too much of a stretch to extend this general description of spatial division in the literary and plastic arts to music. Arthur Jacobs writes of “the baroque delight in contrasting planes within one piece of music, whether between treble and bass, between voices and instruments, between spatially separated groups of performers, or between successive movements in different rhythm and tempo” (Jacobs 115). 5. Rorty’s assertion is warranted on philological evidence as well. This study is about baroque aesthetics, and not its precursors, but I make an effort in chapter two of How the World Became a Stage to establish how and why the theatrical model only begins to function as of the sixteenth century. That, of course, leaves open the question of classical representational modes and of the Renaissance. My point is not to dismiss the Renaissance as a period of art history or to question the classical influences on baroque aesthetics, but to identify in certain techniques that become endemic in the Baroque the traces of those strategies that arise to confront the modern dissociationism that I have called theatricality. Theatrical dissociationism can be traced to the sixteenth century and in some cases before; but the aesthetic tensions of the Baroque must be explained in its light, and it is those aesthetic tensions I am tracing in this study. It should be noted that I see Descartes as symptomatic here, as opposed to what Jay calls him, “a founding father of the modern visualist paradigm (70).

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Notes to Chapter One 6. Rorty quotes and discusses this passage in Philosophy 56. 7. As Marshall Brown succinctly puts it, Wölfflin “considered himself a morphologist and not a taxonomist of art,” the difference being that morphology “is not the study of forms but of forming powers” (89). As Brown also points out, Wölfflin’s own dedication to clearly drawn distinctions makes his own work on the Baroque a perfect example of classicism, albeit one that redefines and reinterprets it (91–93). It should also be noted that Wölfflin’s theory is far from unanimously accepted. In addition to his own nuanced critique, Brown mentions others, including Gombrich, who distanced themselves from his perspective. For Arnold Hauser, for instance, Wölfflin’s theory constitutes an ahistorical superimposition of impressionist prejudices on the Baroque, and a failure to adequately recognize the continuity between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Hauser 174–75). See also Harbison’s exhaustive study of the Baroque in art history, including his very critical discussions of Wölfflin and Deleuze (218–21). John Rubert Martin’s Baroque is another standard reference form the art historical perspective. 8. See Castillo, (A)wry Views, Baltrusaitis, Anamorphic Art, and Castillo and Egginton, “The Perspectival Imaginary and the Symbolization of Power.” 9. See my “Reality is Bleeding.” 10. See also Lambert, Return 81. 11. See my “Gracián and the Emergence of the Modern Subject,” as well as the other contributions in that volume, especially David Castillo, “Gracián and the Art of Public Representation.” 12. “Everything is now at a crest, and being persona is the utmost.” Oráculo, maxim 1. 13. See Cascardi’s argument that Gracián anticipates Kant’s notion of a moral maxim (Cascardi 158). 14. Castillo’s fascinating theory of the origins of horror in the Baroque is especially relevant here. As he says, “once the ‘magical thread’ that connected words with things has been cut, the real is literally unnamable, and therefore may only be encountered traumatically outside the symbolic order” (“Horror” 89). 15. “A painting always has a model on its outside; it is always a window” (Deleuze, Fold 27). 16. For an excellent exposition of Deleuze’s argument, see Gregg Lambert, The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze 41–72. 17. “It is the relativity of clarity (as much as of movement), the inseparability of clarity from obscurity, the effacement of contour—in short, the opposition to Descartes, who remained a man of the Renaissance, from the double point of view of a physics of light and a logic of the idea” (Fold 32). 18. In a parallel sense, as Castillo points out, emptiness can be just as characteristic of the Baroque as superabundance, “as long as it is perceived to be empty in the extreme” (“Horror” 87). He makes a similar point to the one that I am making here, that such a view of baroque phenomena allows us to see the Baroque at



Notes to Chapter One

once as a period and as a “condition” pervasive to modernity. This may, in fact, be a fruitful way of integrating the apparently opposing aesthetics tendencies of the Latin, Counter-Reformation Baroque with its florid effervescence and the relatively bleak style of northern European and Protestant baroque production. In fact, such a simple contrast is reductive at best and simply unhistorical at worst. It fails, for instance, to take into account such movements as the Dutch Caravaggists who came back to Holland from Italy in the 1620s and produced paintings characterized by their “superb ability to create shadows by the use of color” (van Gelder 448). The English ambassador to the Hague at that time, Sir Henry Warton, himself an amateur of the arts, praised painting precisely for its “baroque” qualities, namely, to “make diverse distinct Eminences appeare upon a Flat, by force of Shadowes, and yet the Shadowes themselves do not appeare” (448). 19. This perspective finds resonance with the recent work of Fernando R. de la Flor, who writes, for example, “the baroque imaginary constitutes a necessary counterbalance to the final triumph of instrumental reason, and it also deconstructs the legitimating foundations of a ‘society of spectacle’” (de la Flor, “On the Notion” 10). 20. See, for example, Difference and Repetition 39. 21. Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. 22. Nietzsche and Philosophy. 23. There seems to be consensus that Leibniz invented the differential form of notation—whereas Newton was using the fluxion form—in or around 1676, although there is controversy as to whether Leibniz did so under the influence of Newton or independently. See W. W. Rouse Ball, A Short Account of the History of Mathematics. 24. From Leibniz’s Pacidius Philalethi, in Louis Couturat 614–15, quoted in Fold 6. 25. As Lois Parkinson Zamora discusses, this assessment is in harmony with Oswald Spengler’s characterization of Cartesian mathematics as representative of the baroque style (Zamora 164). 26. This other way of thinking, to be sure, is not against Deleuze. When he states, for example, that “the essence of the Baroque entails neither falling into nor emerging from illusion but rather realizing something in illusion itself ” (124), this is precisely that other way that I am starting to describe here, and that I will theorize in greater detail as the Baroque’s minor strategy. 27. “Therefore this property of man is not a property of man: it is the very dislocation of the proper in general: it is the dislocation of the characteristic, of the proper in general, the impossibility—and therefore the desire—of self-proximity; the impossibility and therefore the desire of self-presence” (Jacques Derrida, Grammatology 244). 28. “Nature: that there is lack in Nature and that because of that very fact something is added to it” (Grammatology 149).

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chapter two 1. As I made clear in the previous chapter, baroque aesthetics entail attempts in the media of cultural expression to deal with a problem of thought stemming from as early as the sixteenth century. Hence I refer to the proliferation of baroque techniques in the seventeenth century as a kind of “perfection” of those attempts. 2. Suggestions, to the contrary, that Reformation neo-Platonism accounts for the sparseness of Protestant churches and hence of baroque expression in Protestant cultures, while the Thomistic tendencies of the Counter-Reformation cultures explain the exuberant décor of Catholic churches and hence of the Latin Baroque, is a gross oversimplification and, as I noted in the previous chapter, merely wishes away such phenomena as the Caravaggist school in the Netherlands. The fact is that Counter-Reformation thought was influenced by both Thomism and Neoplatonist tenets, which had never really disappeared from circulation and had benefited from a resurgence in the Italian Renaissance, particularly in the work of Marsilio Ficino (see Bono passim, and Collins, e.g., 3–6). Take, for example, this paradigmatic description by Joachim Küpper: “The model derived from Plato according to which the senses play only a minor part in the cognitive process . . . becomes more important again during the fifteenth century, and one can even consider Descartes’s model of cognition . . . as a securalized Christian variant . . . of the Platonic model of cognition” (119). As José Pereira has shown, even the prototypical Baroque system of Francisco Suárez is far from reducible to Thomism and must be seen as a synthesis of a variety of influences, including Augustinian thought (Pereira 14–16; 142). Moreover, such a paradigmatic marker of baroque thought as the coincidentia oppositorum, which allows disparate terms to be juxtaposed with negating their differences, had been cited by the great fifteenth-century Neoplatonist thinker Nicholas of Cusa as a potential definition of God. This technique becomes emblematic of the Baroque—as Warnke says, continental literature of the Baroque offers many examples of poetry “affirming the simultaneous validity of oppose experiences” (64)—precisely because the opposed terms occur at the level of appearances and refer ultimately to an ineffable truth that comprehends them as the same—a paradox explored by Jorge Luis Borges in his story “The Theologians,” in which a theologian who has accused his nemesis of heresy discovers that in the eyes of God they are the same person (Borges, Obras I, 550–56). 3. See Hägglund’s discussion in “The Necessity of Discrimination” 47. Derrida develops the concept in Limited Inc. 77–79. 4. Cervantes, Baena writes, “fastening onto the science of the age, wants his book to be the best ever written, in the same way that any dictator wants to create the perfect society: by controlling its smallest angles. Whether he achieves it or not is another thing: it is precisely the other thing, the necessary eccentricity of the desired centrality, which marks the Persiles as an enormous failure, in precisely that which should have been the seat of its greatness, just as the greatness of the Quijote lies in having roundly failed in its desires” (30).



Notes to Chapter Two

5. As he puts it in his own reading, in (A)wry Views, the “Persiles is a counterutopian narrative . . . an anamorphic mirror that inverts or . . . distorts the symbols of counter-Reformation culture” (94–95). 6. Baena notes in his response in Discordancias that “the weakness in what we each say is in that verb pretender” (xi) and, indeed, begins his whole discussion in El círculo with Cervantes’s own send-up of the intentional fallacy in the Quijote (25). Thus, if I disagree with Baena’s aesthetic judgment concerning the novel, it is in no way via a disagreement with his theoretical articulation of the stakes, which are impeccable. Similarly, in (A)wry Views, Castillo’s reading is anything if not antiintentionalist, focusing on what he specifies as the “effect—if not necessarily the intention—of much of Cervantes’s writing” (106). Indeed, in his extremely positive review of the book, it is precisely Castillo’s distinction between intention and effect that Clamurro identifies as a possible source of controversy for some critics (Clamurro 187). 7. This understanding of Cervantes’s perspective resonates closely with, for example, Joan Ramón Resina’s characterization of Cervantes’s world as one “without ontological guarantee” (Resina 229). 8. As have such critics as Ruth El Saffar, Diana de Armas Wilson, and Amy Williamsen, each in their own way. As regards the Quijote, part 2, Edward Friedman has an excellent reading in which he argues that “[w]hat might be considered the last of the romances of chivalry retains the linear pattern of the model, but the metaliterary thrust is so prominent that satire takes on a whole new dimension. Cervantes takes advantage of the formulaic structure to compel the reader to participate in several journeys, literal and figurative. Don Quixote inscribes himself into the world, treating the textual past as if it were the historical present” (“Making Amends” 4). The “metaliterary thrust” and the “inscription” of Quixote into the world of the text are signs of the minor strategy at work. 9. The house has been at the center of much of the criticism on El celoso extremeño, the eminent Casalduero going so far as to call the house the story’s protagonist (171). Molho discusses the three different versions of the tale in Cervantes’s oeuvre, and analyzes the house in terms of its sexual dimensions: “we find ourselves, then, before a building of double dimensions: horizontal and vertical. Penetration must take place horizontally, but full possession requires that one penetrate the depths of the house, taking ownership of its verticalities” (“Aproximación” 755). Later he refers to “that species of vaginal passage that is the casapuerta, or cazzopuerta”; the latter etymology—suggesting a door for the penis (Ital. cazzo)—is creative, if not entirely confirmable. Forcione focuses on the aspect of “confinement” in the house (35–36). See as well Áviles’s review of the criticism that focuses on the house (71–72). His own argument is that the space of the house “obliges us to think the behavior of language from the perspective of allegory” (72). Percas de Ponseti also reads the novella as an allegory, namely, for “the abyss that exists between absolute truth and individual truth” (137–38).

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Notes to Chapter Two 10. Or at least hermaphroditic. See Molho’s reading of Marialonso’s name (“Aproximación” 743). 11. This represents a change between the Porras de la Cámara manuscript and the 1613 edition, which gave Américo Castro reason to berate Cervantes’s conformism. See Castro 244, quoted and discussed in Williamson 793. 12. Here I agree with Castillo’s emphasis in seeking the anti-ideological (what he calls “anamorphic”) potential of Cervantes’s narrative style in the relation between enunciation and utterance. As he puts it in his reading an apparent “antimorisco diatribe” in Persiles, “[t]he choice of subject of enunciation—which is but the victim himself—forces us to reassess the meaning of the racist statement from an oblique viewpoint” (112). Percas de Ponseti makes a similar claim about the novella’s ending. 13. Forcione sums up at least part of the criticism in referring to the novella as “an example of bad taste and unintelligibility” (328). Slaniceanu mentions its “reputation as a repository of idealistic statements concerning virtue, honor, and marriage” (101), but sees in it herself “strong overtones of social criticism” (102), and finally interprets it as “undermining the authority of those figures normally associated with [marriage’s] formalities” (109). For Welles, critics have admired its form while deploring “its lack of psychological verisimilitude” (240). She herself privileges the “literal level” of the rape itself, and argues that Cervantes has subverted the “typical rape narrative” (241). El Saffar privileges instead the allegorical level and speaks of the novella as presenting an “abstract combination of forces” (128). Howe reads it as a contribution into the debate around honor y honra (64–65), a debate that, as I argue below, I see Cervantes rather as deconstructing in its entirety. Friedman argues that it is the “countergeneric recourses” common in Cervantes that drive the novella, namely “deviation from the norm and from readerly expectations” (147–48), and De Rentiis reads the structure of the novella as ultimately vindicating freedom of perspective (170). Baena focuses his “discordant” reading on the “error” found in the novella’s last lines, in which the couple are said to spend the rest of their days enjoying themselves [gozaron de sí] as opposed to each other, an error that, if taken as “intended,” does much to undo the conventional construction of marriage and the honorable ending (181–82). 14. In one section Derrida describes the problem in the terms of speech act theory, saying, “[i]t is true that any current performative supposes, in order to be effective, an anterior convention. A constative can be juste, in the sense of justesse, never in the sense of justice. But as a performative cannot be just, in the sense of justice, except by grounding itself on conventions and so on other performatives, buried or not, it always maintains itself with some irruptive violence. It no longer responds to the demands of a theoretical rationality. And it never did, it was never able to; of this one has an a priori and structural certainty. Since every constative utterance itself relies, at least implicitly, on a performative structure . . . the dimension of justesse or truth of theoretico-constitutive utterances (in all domains, particularly



Notes to Chapter Three

in the domain of the theory of law) always thus presupposes the dimension of justice of the performative utterances, that is to say their essential precipitation, which never proceeds without a certain dissymmetry and some quality of violence” (256). The mere question of the rightness or wrongness (justesse) of a constative utterance, Derrida argues, must implicitly invoke the dimension of “justice,” which he situates in this essay beyond the stability, the theoretical rationality, of calculable questions of legality. The parallel is also present with Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of minor literature: “Finally, it is not the law that is stated because of the demands of a hidden transcendence; it is almost the exact opposite: it is the statement, the enunciation, that constructs the law in the name of an immanent power of the one who enounces it—the law is confused with that which the guardian utters, and the writings precede the law, rather than being the necessary and derived expression of it” (Kafka 45). 15. See Fuchs’s reading of what she calls Cervantes’s critique of transparency 87–110.

chapter three 1. As certain psychoanalytic perspectives are key to the readings that follow, I recommend Matthew Stroud’s The Play in the Mirror as the book that most thoroughly explores this connection. Another scholar who combines an interest in the comedia and psychoanalytic theory is Henry Sullivan. See in particular his “Lacan and Calderón.” For an outstanding psychoanalytical approach to siglo de oro literature in general, but particularly narrative, see Castillo’s (A)wry Views. For an approach to the comedia that corroborates with my thesis concerning theatrical space, see Jonathan Thacker. 2. See Mary Gaylord’s discussion of lies and errors in La verdad sospechosa, “Telling Lies” 226. 3. In citing plays in this chapter I refer to act and line numbers. 4. See my “Reality is Bleeding.” 5. In her article Gaylord references a whole tradition of criticism that recognizes “that virtually no one in La verdad sospechosa is innocent of lying or deceit” (“Telling Lies” 225). 6. See Castillo and Egginton, “All the King’s Subjects.” 7. See my discussion of the debate in The Philosopher’s Desire chapter 3. 8. “. . . toute vérité a une structure de fiction” (Lacan, VII 21). See also Simone Pinet’s discussion as regards early modern Spanish culture (Pinet 175–76), and Jacques-Alain Miller’s explanation of the dictum as regards schizophrenia. 9. For Moreto’s and specifically this play’s, influence on Molière, see Thomas Finn’s article “Manipulating Identity Across the Pyrenees.” 10. I am not making a claim for the originality of the plot. Moreto usually adapted his plays from other sources, and it is widely thought that this plot was adapted from one of two plays by Lope de Vega (Martel and Alpern 776).

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Notes to Chapter Three 11. See Frances Exum’s argument in her “Another Look at Polilla’s Parable of the Fig.” 12. See my Perversity and Ethics chapter 2. 13. This passage is also a perfect example of the conceptismo that Exum claims is the play’s, and Moreto’s, greatest accomplishment. See her “Conceptismo.” 14. An insight that also approaches Lacan’s theory of love. See Seminar XI 253. 15. The edition I am using attributes the play to Claramonte. See LópezVazquez’s detailed justification 49–69. See also the essays collected in Frederick de Armas’s volume, Heavenly Bodies: The Realms of La estrella de Sevilla, in particular Elias Rivers’s study of writing and orality, which has resonances with my argument here. 16. See Teresa Soufas’s interesting arguments around the comedia and postmodern theory, where she states that “there is a theoretical focus in these plays that centers upon this contradiction and can be understood in terms of a rupture of the communicative code of the mise en scène” (Soufas 222). She further emphasizes what I have been calling the specifically theatrical aspect of the structure of Estrella, and goes on to connect the communication ruptures with this structure: “Interpretation is hindered among the characters by a lack of connection between word and deed, between the verbal and visual signs, the very elements that are the basis for the polysystem of dramatic performance” (228).

chapter four 1. Lope’s claim, of course, forwarded in such canonical works as his “New Art of Making Comedies in These Times,” has to be taken with a grain of salt, given that he pretty much was the literary establishment of the time. Federico García Lorca, one of the poets who embraced Góngora from the rising vantage of a new Baroque, found in his complexity something to admire and emulate: “It is a problem of understanding. You must not read Góngora, you must study him. He does not come looking for us, as do other poets, to make us melancholy; we have to pursue him rationally. Góngora cannot be understood on the first reading” (Deep Song 63). On the centrality of Góngora to both baroque and neobaroque poetics, see Martín-Estudillo 12. 2. Sonnet 80, qtd. in Molho 245, discussed in Gaylord 244–45. 3. Indeed, this may well be the best explanation for the baroque fascination with, as Warnke puts it, “the simultaneous validity of opposed experiences” (64). 4. Here we can refer again to Barbara Fuchs’s excellent thesis concerning the ideology of transparency and how Cervantes (and in this case Góngora) debunk it. 5. See also the discussion in Dolan 250. Góngora’s poetry will be quoted by line number. An excellent collection of Góngora’s poetry, including the text of the Polifemo, can be found online at http://www.poesia-inter.net/indexlg.htm, which includes modern Castillian orthography as well as a facsimile of the Manuscrito Chacón of 1628 of the Soledades.



Notes to Chapter Five

6. See my How the World Became a Stage chapter 3. 7. The first reference is to Speech and Phenomena, the second to Of Grammatology.

chapter five 1. As Carpentier writes, paraphrasing d’Ors approvingly, “there is an eternal return of the baroque in art through the ages, and this baroque, far from signifying decadence, has at times represented the culmination, the maximum expression, and the richest moment of a given civilization” (“Baroque” 91). 2. This argument is indebted to the Latin American literary history of theorizing the Neobaroque, especially by such authors as Lezama Lima, Carpentier, and Sarduy, as discussed below, but also by scholars like González-Echevarría who have explained and helped to put this movement into its historical context. Theorization of the Neobaroque as a general late-twentieth-century aesthetic condition is indebted, in addition to these authors, to Omar Calabrese, Stephen Calloway, and most recently Angela Ndalianis, whose thesis I discuss at the end of this chapter. 3. It should be noted that Maravall’s thesis is far from universally accepted by current scholarship. See, for instance, Cascardi’s objections to the overarching thesis of top-down control in his Ideologies of History (112). Lois Parkinson Zamora also emphasizes, in her use of the term “New World Baroque,” that the profusion of this aesthetic in the Latin American context is not limited historically, but rather flourished well after the end of the European Baroque and “continues to enliven contemporary forms of expression” as well (26). 4. See Salgado 317 for a more nuanced view. My one objection to his general argument would be his explicit insistence that Latin American hybridity contrasts with a monologic Baroque on the Spanish imperial side. See also José F. BuscagliaSalgado, who in his Undoing Empire describes his concept of mulataje in the following words: “Accordingly, when I refer to the mulatto subject as the receptacle of the essence of mulataje I am thinking of a social and historical agent that, although inevitably inscribed within the world of the coloniality of power in the most infinitely torturous ways, nevertheless represents the very possibility and describes the vectorial intention of the nonracialized” (xviii). I see this inscription in power that nonetheless represents certain other possibilities as key to the baroque minor strategy. As Galen Brokaw has written in the context of the indigenous historiographer Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, his texts entail an example of what Brokaw calls, paraphrasing Mary Louise Pratt, “textual contact zones: material spaces in which disparate cultural modes and conventions of representation meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (Brokaw 276). In Lois Parkinson Zamora’s view, it is essential to stress the “reciprocal” relation between the old and new world Baroques, because not to do so is to misunderstand the Baroque in both Europe and Latin America” (xvi). According to Zamora, the Cuban theorists of the Neobaroque, Carpentier,

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Notes to Chapter Five Lezama Lima, and Sarduy, “came increasingly to understand the Baroque as a postcolonialist strategy, as an instrument of contraconquista (counterconquest), to use Lezama Lima’s term, by means of which Latin American artists might define themselves against colonializing structures” (120). Gonzalo Celerio takes this term from Lezama for the title to his book Ensayo de contraconquista, in which he declares the New World Baroque as a kind of counterconquest (75). 5. Lezama Lima 9–10. In his own reading of this passage Djelal Kadir goes on to comment, “Imago, then, points to a process of hermeneutical invention, of interpretation; to a landscape fabricated or invented rather than found. In other words, ‘historical vision,’ the ‘fabric’ woven by the mediation of the imago, is the product of a deliberate operation, a technical process which we traditionally associate with the inventive production of texts and textuality, of incunabula. We can now see how incunabula becomes a corollary of terra incognita” (Kadir 22). 6. That psychoanalysis was also in the air in the Cuban 1950s is easy to establish. Here, for example, is an excerpt from Lezama’s intellectual opponent, poet and editor of Ciclón Virgilio Piñera, whose article “Freud y Freud” was originally published in Ciclón 2.6 (November 1956): “Freud is a great artist insofar as he is an interpreter of the obscure psychic life of man. His powerful fantasy, which situates him among the great artists of all times, leads him, with the power of a wizard, to the construction of a world that is just as implacably logical as it is implacably illogical. As if Freud had seen himself constrained by the psychic material with which he operated to recover his findings with the fabulous powder extracted from this very material. Who does not recall, for example, his celebrated interpretation of dreams? If a dream is already amazing in itself, the interpretation which Freud gives of it will be even more amazing” (Piñera 117). 7. Kaup speculates that one reason for the plethora of Cuban authors theorizing the Neobaroque is the relative dearth of “pre-Columbian architectural heritage and languages” in Cuba, meaning that there, “postcolonial thought had no alternative but to work from within the colonizer’s forms and language, folding the master’s tools into minor cultural uses.” Kaup 137. See also Eduardo González’s classic study, Alejo Carpentier: El tiempo del hombre. 8. See Kadir’s discussion on 104. 9. See Buscaglia-Salgado’s description of what he calls the sujeto metafórico in Lezama Lima. 10. See Lambert’s discussion of Sarduy and the Baroque in Return 120–29, as well as Roberto González-Echevarría’s seminal work on the Neobaroque, Celestina’s Brood, especially the discussions on Sarduy 218ff. As Ortega writes of Sarduy, his neobarroquismo “represents a rupture against the crisis of an insecure world” (39). 11. See Ndalianis 137. 12. See also Margarita Peña’s conference on the carta and the respuesta. 13. See Marín’s discussion on 213. Merrim sees the slippage of agency between



Notes to Chapter Six

self and God here as evidence of the instability of the speaking subject in Sor Juana’s writing (47). 14. It is in this sense that I agree with Stephanie Merrim’s assertion of “postmodern” affinities in Sor Juana’s writing. 15. Zamora also expresses unease at this too facile assimilation. As she puts it, “the resemblance is misleading. Unlike the poststructuralist categories regularly imposed by, or imported from the United States and Europe, the Neobaroque is deeply rooted in Latin America’s histories and cultures” (xvi). 16. See Bernadette Wegenstein’s discussion in Getting Under the Skin 62–65. 17. http://www.blogs.ya.com/da2salamanca/200510.htm#46

chapter six 1. For a broader discussion of Borges’s relation to the Baroque, see Lois Zamora 233–84. In particular she discusses the question of Borges’s “limpid” style as regards the Baroque, and the self-conscious move away from his earlier attraction to ultraismo and baroque aesthetics (238–39). As she goes on to say, “Borges’s antiBaroque is also a form of Neobaroque, an ironic engagement of Baroque devices for the purpose of subverting modern hierarchies that privilege reason and empiricism” (241). 2. See my discussion of the play in “Psychoanalysis and the Comedia.” Roberto González-Echevarría has argued that Calderón was even more difficult for later generations to recuperate than was Góngora (who was embraced by the Generation of ’27), largely because of the openly religious nature of his work (Prole 148). 3. Calderón’s play will be cited by line number. 4. The discussion of the problem of skepticism is an important theme in the history of the criticism of La vida es sueño. See, for example, Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, “Calderón y su teatro” 224, in which he argues that Calderón’s play stages a transition from skepticism to dogmatism. José María Valverde, in the introduction to his edition of La vida es sueño (xiii), argues precisely the opposite, claiming that unlike Descartes, Segismundo never escapes from his doubt, and can only proceed by replacing certainty with moral conscience. As will become clear below, Valverde’s interpretation convinces me more. 5. For a discussion of Calderón’s relation to political power structures in his day, see Margaret Greer’s “Art and Power,” in which she analyzes several of his court plays in “close conjunction with the power structures in which they were created” (329). See also her book on the subject, The Play of Power. 6. It is clear, then, that the play’s ideological import is of a conservative nature, as argued by, for example, Cascardi (100). 7. See Lacan’s discussion of this position in “Kant with Sade” 57, along with my more detailed reading in Perversity and Ethics 63. 8. See chapter 4 of my The Philosopher’s Desire.

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Notes to Chapter Six 9. I deal with the exact nature of the antinomies and their relation to Borges’s thought in “Three Versions of Divisibility.” 10. Borges’s relation to Calderón in the context of a theory of the Baroque is discussed in Lambert, Return 116–17. 11. See Guillermo Arango’s analysis of the influences and function of the dream in Borges’s stories, and Lois Parkinson Zamora’s discussion of this story as well as the dream motif in general (268–71). As she writes of Borges’s use of the dreamer/ dreamt structure, it “breaches the frame of narrative realism even more effectively than that of reader/text, because the dreamer is not oppositional to his/her waking self. Dreamer/dreamt may generate themselves endlessly; there is no waking frame” (269). 12. See Bernadette Wegenstein’s discussion in The Cosmetic Gaze. 13. See my Perversity and Ethics chapter 4. 14. In a fascinating and tightly argued reading of Borges’s oeuvre, Carlos Alonso has argued that, in fact, Borges only ever wrote two narratives. The first describes “the attainment of a moment or situation of perfect and absolute intelligibility” (437), the second deals with “the substitution of one category for its opposite” (442). While I find this to be an acute observation, I would only add that, paradoxically, in Borges the two narratives are in fact one. For, as I have been trying to show in this chapter, the slippery relation between reality and representation in Borges’s dreamworld means that whenever the first is attained, the second immediately takes over. The solidity of absolute knowledge, in other words, is always eroded by the referentiality of representation. In that sense, I guess I also hold Borges to be indeed the precursor of the sort of poststructural theory that those whom Alonso lists believed him to be (447). Alonso cites Barth, Fokkema, Rapaport, and Rodríguez Monegal as maintaining that position. In contrast to these scholars, Alonso argues that “Borges proposes to reveal the contingent foundations of our epistemological paradigms by confronting them with their radical contraries and demonstrating the similarity that mediated between them, and not by way of an exploration of an internal difference that would have to have been present from the beginning and that must have been suppressed to produce the simulacrum of meaning in the first place” (450). Part of what I am showing here is that Borges’s writing indeed reveals difference to be internal and primary. For a more detailed argument around Borges’s relation to Derrida and Heidegger, see my Philosopher’s Desire chapter 4. 15. See Sarlo’s commentary (132). 16. Some scholars who have discussed this issue are Juan Nuño (see 114), Víctor Bravo (see 263–68), and W. H. Bossart (see 79–108).

chapter seven 1. See Bernadette Wegenstein, The Cosmetic Gaze. 2. This is the essence of Judith Butler’s notion of “gender performativity” as put forth both in Gender Troubles and Bodies that Matter.



Notes to Chapter Seven

3. The original is: “una mujer es más auténtica cuanto más se parece a lo que ha soñado de sí misma.” 4. It is important to stress that my reading of Almodóvar’s recent work as en example of the Baroque’s minor strategy can in no way be equated to simply associating his cinema with the aesthetics of postmodernism. In some ways, what this entire discussion of the minor strategy advances is an aesthetic model at once more focused and less constrained than the catchall of the postmodern. It is, to my mind, the error of considering Almodóvar’s cinema as merely postmodern that leads Víctor Fuentes, writing in the middle of the nineties, to speculate that “the Almodóvar tide has reached its high water mark” (Fuentes 155), a claim whose irony, in the wake of the extraordinary success of the films discussed here, is rather more than trenchant. 5. In his personal commentary to the film, Almodóvar writes, “My idea at first was to make a movie about the capacity to act of certain people who are not actors. As a child I remember having seen this quality in the women of my family. They pretended more and better than men. And on the basis of lies managed to avoid more than one tragedy. Quoted from: http://www.clubcultura.com/clubcine/clubcineastas/almodovar/esp/peli_madre5.htm. 6. As Paul Julian Smith puts it, “the themes of the film, weighty but not ponderous, point to a cohabitation without limits” (Desire 193). 7. By freeing the idea of mothering form a strict attachment to the biologically female, Almodóvar is also implicitly, pace some criticisms of his work, freeing the figure of woman from that of mother, and indeed from any biologism whatsoever, if one takes his entire oeuvre into account. Thus it goes without saying that I disagree with critics like Barbara Zecchi, who writes that the “patriarchal construct” of “erasing the possibility of freeing female identity from maternal connotations [. . .] can be found even in the work of Pedro Almodóvar—a director who is widely considered (in and outside Spain) the most representative voice of Spanish antipatriarchal transgression” (153). The passage she quotes from Jaqueline Cruz in support of her assertion is telling: “Female sexuality is not present in the movie: it appears either sublimated as maternity or degraded into prostitution and lesbianism. I am saying degraded because this is the way it is represented: the open field in the outskirts of Barcelona where the prostitutes concentrate, and where Manuela goes looking for Lola, is a kind of grotesque Averno, while the lesbian relationship between Huma and Nina is to say the least sickly” (Cruz 162, qtd. and trans. in Zecchi 154). The quotation is so revealing because Cruz herself has to clarify that her qualification of the representations of feminity as “degraded” is objectively the case, and not just her own imposition. Yet it is precisely Almodóvar’s vision that allows us to see the beauty in what others see as degraded forms of humanity. If Cruz sees these representations as degraded, then I believe she has failed to grasp the essence of the film and its maker’s vision. 8. Also from Almodóvar’s website, as well as quoted and commented in Paul Julian Smith, “Emotional Imperative” 366. As he goes on to say (and I completely

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Notes to Chapter Seven agree with this): “Hable is also about ethics. . . . Explicitly, the emotional imperative is that we attempt communication with the other even in the most reduced and tragic of circumstances” (366). What he terms emotional imperative, then, is exactly what I mean by the drivenness to speak on the border of silence, of incommunicability. See also my Perversity and Ethics chapter 3. 9. See Lacan’s reading of Hamlet’s act in his “Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet.” 10. See Miller, “Extimacy.” 11. This is not to mitigate the serious of the crime, which neither I nor, do I think, Almodóvar wishes to do. Most critics feel the need to condemn the crime, some, to criticize Almodóvar for being complicit or insufficiently critical in his portrayal. See, for example, Novoa’s article. Smith, for his part, writes that “Benigno’s rape is hardly consistent with Nussbaum’s ‘reform’ of love. Needy, vengeful, and partial, Benigno has no respect for reciprocity or individuality. Yet presented as his passion is in a social and psychological context, we are tempted nonetheless to understand him intuitively” (“Emotional” 367). Again, I must wholeheartedly agree. 12. In the introduction to Smith’s groundbreaking Desire Unlimited he briefly discusses the short story “La visita,” which Almodóvar had copyrighted in 1975, and which would later turn out to be the basis of La mala educación. 13. This exposition of the minor strategy recalls an observation by Margaret Greer about the location of psychological drama in baroque theater, not, as one may suppose, within a character’s inner self, but between the individual and other members of the social group. Identity, she goes on to say, “is shown as constituted by social processes” (Greer, “Spanish Tragedy,” qtd. in Zamora 215). 14. See my discussion in Perversity and Ethics 131–34. 15. See Kathleen Vernon’s discussion of Almodóvar and melodrama, in which she argues that he turns to American melodrama in particular for “an alternate source of cultural and personal references” to those available in Franco’s Spain (28). 16. In Lars von Trier’s words, “To Dogme 95 the film is not illusion!” (Stevenson 22). 17. See my “The Desire for Limitless Change,” as well as the other articles collected in the same volume. 18. See Brenda Weber, “Beauty, Desire, and Anxiety: The Economy of Sameness in ABC’s Extreme Makeover.” 19. I quote these production notes from the German press brochure created for Volver’s press screenings in the German language market. Thanks to Stephan Grissemann and Isabella Schulmeister for coordinating a viewing for me in time to include Volver in this article. 20. See, for example, Heidegger, Sein und Zeit 391. 21. “For Heidegger it is because no one else can die for me that my resolute being-toward-death individuates me. But death, understood in these abstract terms,



Notes to Chapter Seven

is a universal possibility common to every Dasein. It is purely generic. Yet if in my confrontation with death I am in fact confronted by my dead, and if it from them (my personal, cultural, or freely chosen traditions) that I receive the sum of those repeatable possibilities that I am thrown back upon in anticipatory resoluteness—in other words, if my being-toward-death is in fact a being-toward-the-dead—then authenticity individuates me in a culturally specific, even genealogical way” (Harrison 97).

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Index

Absence: Almodóvar and, 115–17; of representation/appearances, 98–101 Agamben, Giorgio, 116 A if not B structure, 61–62, 66 Alarcón, Juan Ruiz de, La verdad sospechosa (The Suspect Truth), 40–46 Almodóvar, Pedro: as anti-Dogme director, 121–22; cinema of, 107–26, 145n4, 146n15; Hable con ella (Talk to Her), 109, 113–17, 145–46n8, 146n11; La mala educación (Bad Education), 109, 118–21, 123; passion and, 123; Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother), 109–13, 145nn5–7; Volver (Return), 109, 124–26 Alonso, Carlos, 144n14 Alonso, Dámaso, 61 American consciousness, 73–74 American Idol (TV), 122 Anamorphosis, 3, 15–16, 127, 138n12 Anguish (Angst/angoisse), 97–101, 124 Antídoto para las Soledades (Antidote to the Solitudes) (Jáuregui), 58–59 Aporia, 39–40, 49, 101 Appearances: absence of, 100–101; Almodóvar and, 120; in baroque aesthetics/culture, 15–18, 89, 108, 127–28; Borges and, 94–106; Calderón and, 87–94; fallibility of,

44; Góngora and, 60–62; infinite nature of, 101–2; Kant and, 89–95; minor strategies of the baroque and, 27–28; neo-Platonic religious discourse and, 26–27; pretense as, 49; related to what they represent, 2–3; and truth in baroque theater, 39–55 Architecture, baroque, 15, 19–20, 22, 30 Art for art’s sake, 59 Artifice: nature and, 23–24, 76, 135n28; and theatrical space, 22–25; and truth, in the Baroque, 4 Art/painting, baroque, 11, 15–16, 21–22, 135n18 Audience, interior and exterior, 42–43 Authenticity, 109, 122–23 “Avatars of the Tortoise” (Borges), 94 Avilés, Luis F., 137n9 Babel metaphor, 58 Baena, Julio, 28–29, 136n4, 138n13 Baroque, the, 1, 85, 106, 127–28, 131nn2– 3, 131–32nn5–6, 134–35n18; artifice and truth in, 4; as cultural aspect of representation, 107; descriptions of, 11–12, 14–16, 73–76, 81, 134n7, 141n1; dilemma of, 26, 69–71; European, 74; Latin American, 80, 141–42nn3– 4; New World, 69–84, 128; spaces

164

Index of representation and spectatorship and, 11, 128; tension of, 71; theater and, 30–55; understood philosophically, 12, 14 Baroque aesthetics/culture, 1–3, 8, 11, 14–18, 81, 136n1; anti-establishmentarian aspects of, 132n9; constitutive paradox of, 70; ethical stance of, 89–91; ideological value of, 3, 128; interior and exterior audience and, 42–43; materiality and, 74. See also Major baroque strategies; Minor baroque strategies Baroque and Neobaroque: The Hell of the Beautiful, 83 Base reality, 43, 48, 82, 101 Being: division of, 14; univocity of, 20–22 Benjamin, Walter, 132n6, 133n1 Bernini, Pietro, 21–22 Beverley, John, 59, 63–64, 131n2 Block de Behar, Lisa, 66, 97, 99 Blood, force of baroque, 34–38 Borges, Jorge Luis, 75, 85, 94–106, 136n2, 143n1, 144n11; “Avatars of the Tortoise,” 94; “El despertar” (Awakening), 100–101; “El golem,” 99–100; Historia universal de la infamia (Universal History of Infamy), 96; Las ruinas circulares (The Circular Ruins), 95–96; “Mi vida entera” (My Entire Life), 100; narratives of, 144n14; “Parable of the Palace,” 102–3; “The Thing I Am,” 98; “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 105–6; “UNDR,” 103–4; “Una pesadilla” (A Nightmare), 98; “Un sueño” (A Dream), 97 Boundary concept, 92–93 Brokaw, Galen, 141n4 Brown, Marshall, 134n7 Brownlee, Marina, 131n2 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, 132n6 Buscaglia-Salgado, José F., 141n4 Bush, George W., 4 Butler, Judith, 110

Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 85–94, 143n2; appearances and, 87–94; La vida es sueño (Life is a Dream), 85–89, 143n4 Cannibalism, 77 Caravaggio, Michelangelo da, 22 Caravaggists, Dutch, 135n18 Carpentier, Alejo, 69, 73–74, 76, 141n1, 141–42n4 Carta atenagórica (Cruz), 77–80 Carta en respuesta (Letter in response) (Góngora), 58 Cartesian problematic, 87 Casalduero, Joaquín, 137n9 Cascardi, Anthony, 141n3 Castillo, David R., 28–29, 134n14, 134–35n18, 137n5, 138n12 Castro-Klarén, Sara, 77 Caudal, incomprensibilidad de, 17 Causality, Kant and, 93 Celerio, Gonzalo, 142n4 Celoso extremeño, El (Cervantes), 29–34, 137n9 Cervantes, Miguel de, 26–38; El celoso extremeño, 29–34, 137n9; entremés, El retablo de las maravillas (The Stage of Wonders), 6, 83; La fuerza de la sangre, 34–38, 138n13; Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, 28–29, 136–37nn4–7; Quijote, 136n4, 137n6, 137n8 Character, 109–10 Chiampi, Irlemar, 70–71 Chrysostom, 78–80 Cinema, of Almodóvar Pedro, 107–26 Ciplijauskaité, Biruté, 59 Claramonte, Andrés de (attributed), La estrella de Sevilla, 52–55 Coherence (laws) of the world, 90–91, 105 Collard, Andrée, 57–58 Coloneobaroque, 69–70, 72, 75, 83–84 Colonial experience, Neobaroque and, 71–77, 128 Comatose bodies, 116–17 Complexity: Almodóvar and, 120, 125;

binary of, simplicity vs., 57; Borges and, 97; Góngora and, 60–63, 67–68 Conservative culture, 56–57 Contraconquista, 142n4 Converso, 58 Córdoba, Francisco de, 58 Corporeal image, New World Baroque and, 69–84 Corruption, 37; Derrida and, 27 Cosmetic surgery, 122 Counter-Reformation, 26–27, 86, 92, 136n2 Criticón (Gracián), 11 Critique of Pure Reason (Kant), 2–3, 89–90, 92–93 Cruz, Jaqueline, 145n7 Cruz, Penélope, 124 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la, Carta atenagórica, 77–80 Cuba, 142nn6–7 “Culteranismo” writing, 57 Cultural production, baroque, 11, 14–18 Culture wars, 56–57 Death, Almodóvar and, 124–26 Deceit/deception, 24–26, 44, 62, 89 Deconstruction, 27–28, 37, 49, 64–65, 79, 138n13 Degeneracy, 26 De la Flor, Fernando R., 132n9, 135n19 Deleuze, Gilles, 11, 27, 69–70, 75, 135n26; The Fold, 18–22, 29, 134n15, 134n17 Dennett, Daniel, 102 De Rentiis, Dina, 138n13 Derrida, Jacques, 22–24, 27, 35, 45, 57, 64, 135nn27–28, 138–39n14 Descartes, René, 14, 19–22, 62–63, 87, 133n5 Desdén con el desdén, El (Disdain With Disdain) (Moreto), 46–51, 139n10 Desengaño (disillusionment), 88–89, 91 Desire: identity and, 111–13; perversity of, 46–51 “Despertar, El” (Awakening) (Borges), 100–101

Index Disdain, and desire, 46–51 Disillusionment, 88–89, 91, 95 Dissociation-of-sensibility, 12–18, 22, 128, 133n1, 133n5 Dogme 95 movement, 121–22 Dolan, Kathleen, 62 D’Ors, Eugenio, 69 Doubt, Descartes, Calderón and, 87 Dreams: Borges and, 94–106, 144n11; Calderón and, 85–94; vertiginous prime material of, 95–96; waking perception and, 87–91 Dutch Caravaggists, 135n18 Ecstasy of St. Theresa (Bernini), 21 Einbildungskraft (imagination), 72 Eliot, T. S., 12, 133n1 Elliott, Carl, 109–10 El Saffar, Ruth, 138n13 Enhancement technologies, 109–10, 122 Entertainment industry, 80–84, 121–22 Entremés, El retablo de las maravillas (The Stage of Wonders) (Cervantes), 6, 83 Epistemology, 21, 102, 107; CounterReformation theology and, 86, 88–89; Descartes and, 44, 62; Kant and, 94, 105; modern, 2, 49, 75, 78, 80, 85 Estrella de Sevilla, La (Claramonte, attributed), 52–55, 140n16 Ethics, baroque and, 89–93 Expresión americana, La (Lezama Lima), 72 Extended substance, 14, 19 Exteriority, 19–20 Extreme Makeover (ABC), 122 Exum, Frances, 140n13 Façades, baroque culture and, 19–21 Faith, Kant and, 3, 94 Film, see Cinema, of Almodóvar Pedro Fineza (finesse), 49–50, 79–80 Fold, The (Deleuze), 18–22, 134n15, 134n17 Folds, baroque, 11–25; endogenous and

165

166

Index exogenous, 19; as strategy, 18–22 Force of baroque blood, 34–38 Force of law, 138–39n14 Forcione, Alban, 137n9, 138n13 Forrest Gump, 56–57 Foucault, Michel, 12, 16 Freedom, Kant and, 3, 90–93 Freud, Sigmund, 32 Friedman, Edward H., 137n8, 138n13 Fuchs, Barbara, 36, 38, 140n4 Fuenteovejuna (Lope de Vega), 5 Fuentes, Carlos, 73 Fuentes, Víctor, 145n4 Fuerza de la sangre, La (Cervantes), 34–38, 138n13 García Bernal, Gael, 118–20 García Lorca, Federico, 140n1 García-Pabón, Leonardo, 76–77 Gaylord, Mary, 59, 63 Goffman, Erving, 110 “Golem, El” (Borges), 99–100 Góngora, Luis de, 56–68; Carta en respuesta (Letter in response), 58; Lacan and, 97; Soledades, 64–68 González-Echevarría, Roberto, 80, 141n2, 143n2 Gracián, Baltasar, 16–18; El criticón, 11, 22–25 Granada, Luis de, 76–77 Greer, Margaret, 143n5, 146n13 Guardiani, Francesco, 131n3 Guattari, Félix, 27, 75 Hable con ella (Talk to Her) (Almodóvar), 109, 113–17, 145–46n8, 146n11 Harrison, Robert, 125, 146–47n21 Heidegger, Martin, 12, 97, 125–26, 146–47n21 Historia universal de la infamia (Universal History of Infamy) (Borges), 96 Holes, baroque, 11–25; as strategy, 18–22 Hollywood, 121–22

Honor, baroque, 33, 35–38, 44–45, 52–55 House, baroque, Cervantes and, 26–38 Howe, Elizabeth Teresa, 138n13 Identification with the object, 78–79 Identity: Almodóvar and, 111–13, 120, 124; appearances and, 87; descriptions of, 110, 146n13; differance and, 104; of indiscernibles, doctrine of, 103 Illusionism, 82–84 Imagination (Einbildungskraft), 72–74 Imago, Lezama Lima and, 72–75, 142n5 Ingenio, 50, 59 Innocence, Góngora and, 66 Intellect, Molho on, 61–62 Interiority, 19–20 Iraq war, 4 I Want a Famous Face (MTV), 122 Jacobs, Arthur, 133n4 Jáuregui y Aguilar, Juan Martínez de, 58–59 Justesse, 138–39n14 Kadir, Djelal, 76, 142n5 Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Deleuze and Guattari), 75 Kandell, Jonathan, 57 Kant, Immanuel, 72, 89–95, 103, 105; Critique of Pure Reason, 2–3, 89–90, 92–93; morality/ethics/freedom and, 89–93; noumenon and, 92–94 Kaup, Monica, 70–71, 128, 142n7 Knowledge: of the good, foundation of, 88; subjective, appearances and, 2; supposition of hidden, 63–64; that one may be dreaming, 88–94; theatrical structure of modern, 107–8 Küpper, Joachim, 136n2 Lacan, Jacques, 45–46, 51, 63, 72, 74, 97 Lack: of lack, 97–99; in nature, primordial, 23, 135n28 Lambert, Gregg, 132n11

Language: opacity of, 56–68, 82; unitary trait (le trait unaire) of, 97; Wilkins and, 104 Latin America, 70, 80, 141–42nn3–4 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 11, 19–22, 29, 103, 135n23 Lenoir, Timothy, 82 Lezama Lima, José, 71–75, 142n4; La expresión americana, 72 Liberal culture, 56–57 Lo fingido verdadero (Lope de Vega), 13 Lope de Vega y Caripio, Félix, 60, 140n1; Fuenteovejuna, 5; Lo fingido verdadero, 13 Major baroque strategies, 3–5, 7–9, 76, 78, 97, 132n9; Almodóvar cinema and, 108, 119–20, 123; Calderón and, 85, 94; Cervantes and, 26–29, 31–32, 38; Góngora and, 60, 63; holes as, 11, 18–22; Hollywood institutionalized, 121–22; Kant and, 89, 91, 94; theater and, 40 Mala educación, La (Bad Education) (Almodóvar), 109, 118–21, 123 Maravall, José Antonio, 3, 12, 69–70, 141n3 Marín, Paola, 78 Mariscal, George, 132n9 Martínez, Fele, 118 Matador (Almodóvar), 118 Materiality, 74 Maura, Carmen, 124 Media, use and control of, 4, 7–8 Meditations (Descartes), 14 Melancholy, Baroque and, 132n6 Melodrama, Almodóvar and, 121, 146n15 Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino, 143n4 Meninas, Las (Velazquez), 16 Merrim, Stephanie, 142–43n13 Metaphor: of Babel, 58; reality and, 61 Metaphysics of everyday life, 108–10; Almodóvar and, 116–18, 123–24; reality TV and, 122 Military-entertainment complex, 82

Index Minor baroque strategies, 3, 5–9, 27, 97, 108, 132n9; Almodóvar and, 110, 120–21, 123, 145n4, 146n13; Borges and, 85, 143n1; Cervantes and, 28–29, 31–38; coloneobaroque and, 75–80; deconstruction and, 27–28; entertainment industry and, 83–84; Europe and, 74; folds as, 11, 18–22; Góngora and, 60–68; Kant and, 94–95; theater and, 40 Mise en abîme, 15, 18, 49, 95, 120, 127, 140n16 “Misterio scientifico,” 59 “Mi vida entera” (My Entire Life) (Borges), 100 Modernity, 59, 70, 131n3, 132n6; baroque dilemma and, 26, 28, 127–28; dissociation and, 12–13; problem of thought in, 1–2, 9 Molho, Maurice, 60–61, 137n9 Monad, 19, 21, 29 Morality, Kant and, 89–93 Moraña, Mabel, 70, 75–76 Moreto, Agustín, El desdén con el desdén (Disdain With Disdain), 46–51, 139n10 Motherhood, Almodóvar and, 111–13, 145n7 Mulataje, 141n4 Music, baroque, 133n4 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 117 Nature: art/artifice and, 23–24, 76, 135n28; primordial lacking of, 23, 64–65 Ndalianis, Angela, 73, 80–82, 131n2 Neobaroque, the, 7, 70, 85, 131nn2–3, 132n11, 143n15; colonial experience and, 71–77, 128; entertainment industry and, 80–84; theorizing of, 141n2 Neobaroque aesthetics, 1–2, 8, 108, 110, 128; Almodóvar and, 117–18, 120–21 Neo-Platonic religious discourse, 26–27, 136n2 Neumann, Balthasar, 15, 22 New World Baroque, 69–84, 128

167

168

Index North by Northwest (Hitchcock), 42 Noumenon, Kant and, 92–94 Novelty, impossibility of, 100 Obligation, baroque, 33, 44 Opacity of language, 82; Góngora and, 56–68 Ordóñez, Fernando, 132n9 Originary lack, 23, 135n28; Góngora and, 64–65 Orozco Díaz, Emilio, 16 Otherness, dressed with, 109, 117, 120, 123, 126 Painterly style, 3, 15 Palais Liechtenstein (Vienna), 15 “Parable of the Palace” (Borges), 102–3 Paz, Octavio, 77 Percas de Ponseti, Helena, 137n9 Pereira, José, 136n2 Performance: motherhood and, 112–13; self and, 110 Performativity, theory of gender, 110, 113 Persiles (Cervantes), see trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, Los (Cervantes) Persona, 17–18, 23, 134n12 Personality, 109–10 “Pesadilla, Una” (A Nightmare) (Borges), 98 Phenomenology, new, Góngora and, 59–61 Piñera, Virgilio, 142n6 Poetry: of Góngora, 56–68; strategies of, 60 Point of view, interiority and exteriority and, 19–20 Politics/political agency, 16–17; entertainment industry and, 81–84; representation and, 4–5, 17, 107; theater and, 40 Postmodernism, 1, 57, 80–81, 108, 110, 131n2 Power: art and, 143n5; spatiality and, 16–17; spectacle and state, 80 Presence, truth and, in theatrical world, 51–55

Pretense, as appearance, 49 Primordial deceit, 24 Problem of thought: assumptions about nature of space and, 18; Baroque as, 1–9, 12, 127–28 Propaganda, apparatus of, 3 Psychoanalysis, 72, 142n6 Purity, baroque, 30–33, 37, 40, 52 Quality, baroque, 33, 44 Quevedo, Francisco de, 58 Quijote (Cervantes), 136n4, 137n6, 137n8 Quiroga, Vasco de, 76 Racial essences, baroque, 40, 58 Rama, Angel, 70–71 Reality: Almodóvar and, 121–22; base, secondary and tertiary, 43, 82–83, 101; Bush administration and, 4; Góngora and, 59–62, 64; Kant and, 94–95; knowledge that one may be dreaming and, 90–91; metaphor and, 61; perfect representation and, 103 Reality TV, 122 Recato, in Cervantes, 30–31, 33 Recinto, in Cervantes, 30–31 Reformation, 26–27, 136n2 Relationship, identity and, 52, 113, 117, 120, 123, 126 Representation, 80; absence of, 98–100; entertainment industry and, 81; perfect, 103; politics and, 4–5, 17, 107; self and, 123; spaces of, and spectatorship, 11, 16–18, 127; structure of baroque, 4–5 Representationalism, 107–8 Reputation, baroque, 44 Rhetorical analysis, close, 8 Robertson-Justianiano, María, 64 Rorty, Richard, 14, 78, 107–8, 133n5 Rottmayr, Johann Michael, 15 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 22–24 Ruinas circulares, Las (The Circular Ruins) (Borges), 95–96

Saisselin, Rémy G., 16 Salgado, César Augusto, 141n4 Sarduy, Severo, 75–76, 142n4, 142n10 Scopie corporelle, 74–75 Scotus, Duns, 20 Sculpture, baroque, 21 Secreto (secrecy), 35–38 Self, in metaphysics of everyday life, 108–10; Almodóvar and, 116–18, 123–24, 126; reality TV and, 122 Self-presence, in theatrical world, 52–55 Sensibility: “unified,” 133n1. See also Dissociation-of-sensibility Sexual instinct, 32 Simplicity: binary of, vs. complexity, 57; Borges and, 97; Góngora and, 60–63, 67–68 Slaniceanu, Adriana, 138n13 Smith, Paul Julian, 64, 145–46n8, 145n6, 146nn11–12 Soledades (Góngora), 64–68 Soufas, Teresa S., 140n16 Spanish empire, the present and, 7, 9 Spatiality: baroque, 11–18, 71, 133n4; folds and, 21; power and, 16–17; theatrical, 22–25, 127; theatricalization of, 18 Spectacle, 2, 3, 6, 13–14, 18, 128; sociopolitical function of, 80, 82, 84 Spectatorship: spaces of, 11, 16–18; theater and, 13–14 Spinoza, Baruch, 20, 22 Stafford, Barbara Maria, 73–74 Stage of Wonders, The, see Entremés, El retablo de las maravillas Structural eccentricity, 29 Subjective knowledge, 2 Subversion, Cervantes and, 28–29, 33–34 “Sueño, Un” (A Dream) (Borges), 97 Swan, The (FOX), 122 Taboos, desire to transgress, 32–33 Technologies, enhancement, 109–10, 122 Television industry, 122

Index Temporality, as aporia, 101 Terra incognita, 72–73, 142n5 Terri Schiavo case, 116 Theater: baroque Hispanic, 39–55; changes in, 11, 13; space and, 18, 22–25, 39; spectacle/spectators and, 13–14, 18 “Theater in the theater, the,” 13 Theatricality, 71, 127–28, 133n5; error and, 42; honor code and, 37; major strategy and, 40; neo-Platonic religious discourse and, 27; perversity of desire and, 46–51 Theme parks, 82–83 Theology: knowledge that one may be dreaming and, 88–91; theater and, 86–89 “Thing I Am, The” (Borges), 98 Thinking substance, 14, 19 Thomism, 136n2 Thought, problem of, Baroque as, 1–9, 12 Thurley, Geoffrey, 12, 133n1 “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (Borges), 105–6 Todo sobre mi madre (All About My Mother) (Almodóvar), 109–13, 145nn5–7 Tovar de Teresa, Guillermo, 131–32n5 Trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, Los (Cervantes), 28–29, 136–37nn4–7 Transparency: baroque, 36, 38, 82; Góngora and, 56–68 Trompe l’oeil, 3, 15, 127 Trope of incompleteness, 3 Truth: and illusion in baroque theater, 39–55; presence and, 51–55 24 (FOX), 4–5 “UNDR” (Borges), 103–4 “Unified sensibility,” 133n1 Universalization, 91–93, 106 Universe: classification and, 104; word of the, 103–4 Univocity of being, 20–22 Urban and rural life, Góngora on, 64

169

170

Index Valverde, José María, 143n4 Velazquez, Diego, 16, 22 Verdad sospechosa, La (The Suspect Truth) (Alarcón), 40–46 Vernon, Kathleen, 146n15 Vida es sueño, La (Life is a Dream) (Calderón), 85–89, 143n4 Vieira, Antonio, 77–79 Virote, in Cervantes, 31–32 Voice, duplicity and, 63 Voicelessness, 115 Volver (Return) (Almodóvar Pedro), 109, 124–26 Warnke, Frank J., 131n5, 136n2, 140n3 War on terrorism, 4

Warton, Henry, 135n18 Welles, Marcia L., 138n13 Wilkins, John, 104 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 3, 14–15, 134n7 Word of the universe, 103–4 “World Well Lost, The” (Rorty), 107 Würzburg Residenz, 15 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 128, 131n2, 135n25, 141–42nn3–4, 143n1, 143n15, 144n11 Zecchi, Barbara, 145n7 Žižek, Slavoj, 4–5, 42, 116