Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest 9780822392521

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 Baroque New Worlds   

 

1 Baroque New Worlds 4 Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest Edited by

Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup

Duke University Press Durham and London 2010

© 2010 Duke University Press All rights reserved printed in the united states of america on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by jennifer hill typeset in arno pro by tseng information systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

To collaboration

  Sonnet 152  

Verde embeleso de la vida humana, loca Esperanza, frenesí dorado, sueño de los despiertos intrincado, como de sueños, de tesoros vana; alma del mundo, senectud lozana, decrépito verdor imaginado; el hoy de los dichosos esperado, y de los desdichados el mañana: sigan tu sombra en busca de tu día los que, con verdes vidrios por anteojos, todo lo ven pintado a su deseo; que yo, más cuerda en la fortuna mía, tengo en entrambas manos ambos ojos y solamente lo que toco veo.

 Green fascination of humanity, Mad hopefulness, frenzy in gold ornate, Dream of the ones awake so intricate, As is with dreams, the treasures vanity. Soul of the world, abloom senility, Decrepit greenness in imagined state, Today for all the happy ones in wait, Tomorrow that the hapless long to see: Let trail your shadow in search of your day Those who, with lenses green for glasses plain, To their desire see things drawn totally; For I, in fortune mine more wise today, In my two hands both of my eyes retain, And only what I touch do I then see.

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz  Translated by Carl W. Cobb

  Contents  

Illustrations  xi Acknowledgments  xiii Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, “Baroque, New World   Baroque, Neobaroque: Categories and Concepts”  1 Part One  Representation Foundational Essays on Baroque Aesthetics and Ideology The European Baroque

Editors’ Note to Chapter One  41 1 Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Baroque” (1878)  44 Editors’ Note to Chapter Two  46 2 Heinrich Wölfflin, Excerpt from the Introduction to Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (1915)  49 Editors’ Note to Chapter Three  55 3 Walter Benjamin, Excerpts from The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928)  59 Editors’ Note to Chapter Four  75 4 Eugenio d’Ors, Excerpts from “The Debate on the Baroque   in Pontigny” (1935)  78 Editors’ Note to Chapter Five  93 5 René Wellek, Excerpts from “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship” (1945, rev. 1962)  95 Editors’ Note to Chapter Six  115 6 Mario Praz, “Baroque in England” (1960)  119 Editors’ Note to Chapter Seven  136 7 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Chapter 2 from La folie du voir, “The Work   of the Gaze” (1986)  140 The New World Baroque and the Neobaroque

Editors’ Note to Chapter Eight  161 8 Alfonso Reyes, Excerpt from “Savoring Góngora” (1928)  165 Editors’ Note to Chapter Nine  179 9 Ángel Guido, Chapter 1 from Redescubrimiento de América en el arte,   “America’s Relation to Europe in the Arts” (1936)  183

 

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Editors’ Note to Chapter Ten  198 10 Pedro Henríquez Ureña, “The Baroque in America” (1940)  200 Editors’ Note to Chapter Eleven  209 11 José Lezama Lima, Chapter 2 from La expresión americana,   “Baroque Curiosity” (1957)  212 Editors’ Note to Chapters Twelve and Thirteen  241 12 Alejo Carpentier, “The City of Columns” (1964)  244 13 Alejo Carpentier, Excerpt from “Questions Concerning the   Contemporary Latin American Novel” (1964)  259 Editors’ Note to Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen  265 14 Severo Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque” (1972)  270 15 Severo Sarduy, Chapter 3 from Barroco,   “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler” (1974)  292 Editors’ Note to Chapter Sixteen  316 16 Haroldo de Campos, “The Rule of Anthropophagy:   Europe under the Sign of Devoration” (1981)  319 Part two  Transculturation Colonial Practice 17 Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, “Góngora in Spanish American Poetry,   Góngora in Luso-Brazilian Poetry: Critical Parallels”  343 18 José Pascual Buxó, “Sor Juana and Luis de Góngora:   The Poetics of Imitatio” (2006)  352 19 Timothy J. Reiss, “American Baroque Histories and Geographies from   Sigüenza y Góngora and Balbuena to Balboa, Carpentier, and Lezama”  394 20 William Childers, “Baroque Quixote: New World Writing and the   Collapse of the Heroic Ideal”  415 21 Dorothy Z. Baker, “Baroque Self-Fashioning in Seventeenth-Century   New France”  450 22 Leo Cabranes-Grant, “The Fold of Difference: Performing Baroque   and Neobaroque Mexican Identities”  467 Part three  Counterconquest Postcolonial Positions 23 Gonzalo Celorio, Chapter 2 from Ensayo de contraconquista,   “From the Baroque to the Neobaroque” (2001)  487

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24 Irlemar Chiampi, Chapter 1 from Barroco y modernidad, “The Baroque   at the Twilight of Modernity” (2000)  508 Editors’ Note to Chapter 529 25 Carlos Fuentes, “The Novel as Tragedy: William Faulkner” (1970)  531 26 Roberto González Echevarría, “Góngora’s and Lezama’s Appetites” (1978)  554 27 Maarten van Delden, “Europe and Latin America in José Lezama Lima”  571 28 Christopher Winks, “Seeking a Cuba of the Self: Baroque Dialogues   between José Lezama Lima and Wallace Stevens”  597 Editors’ Note to Chapter Twenty-nine  622 29 Édouard Glissant, “Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World” (1990)  624 Bibliography  627 Notes on Contributors  645 Index  651

  Illustrations  

2.1 Gerard Terborch, The Concert: Singer and Theorbo Player, ca. 1657  52 2.2 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647–52. Cornaro Chapel, S. Maria della Vittoria  53 3.1 Belvedere Torso, Greco-Roman period, ca. 50 BCE  64 4.1 José de Churriguera, altar, 1692–94. San Esteban Monastery, Salamanca  90 4.2 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, St. Bartholomew, ca. 1657  91 6.1 Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, Blenheim Palace, 1705–24. Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England  122 6.2 Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622–25, Rome  124 6.3 Sir John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, Castle Howard, 1699–1712, North Yorkshire, England  132 7.1 Tintoretto ( Jacopo Robusti), The Vision of St. Peter, ca. 1555, Madonna dell’Orto Church, Venice  142 7.2 Tintoretto ( Jacopo Robusti), The Martyrdom of St. Paul; or, The Decapitation of St. Paul, ca. 1556, Madonna dell’Orto Church, Venice  143 7.3 Tintoretto ( Jacopo Robusti), The Miracle of St. Mark Freeing the Slave, 1548,   Accademia, Venice  145 9.1 José Kondori, façade, Church of San Lorenzo, 1728–44, Potosí, Bolivia  188 9.2 José Kondori, San Lorenzo Potosí (detail)  189 9.3 José Kondori, San Lorenzo Potosí (detail)  189 11.1 Anon., The Holy Child’s First Steps, seventeenth century, Cuzco, Peru  230 11.2 The workshop of Basilio de Santa Cruz Pumacallao, attr., Return of the Corpus Christi Procession to the Cathedral, ca. 1674–80, Cuzco, Peru  231 11.3 Lorenzo Rodríguez, Sagrario Metropolitano, 1749–68, Mexico City  232 11.4 Narciso de Tomé, El Transparente (high altar), 1721–32, Cathedral of Toledo, Spain  233 11.5 Cathedral of Puebla, Mexico, North Portal, 1575–1768.  234 11.6 Cathedral, 1748–77, Havana  235 11.7 Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa), Church of São Francisco de Assis, 1766–94, Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil  237 11.8 Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa), Pilgrim Church of Bom Jesús do Matosinhos, 1758–1805, Congonhas do Campo, Brazil  239 11.9 Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa), “Daniel,” 1800–1805. Pilgrim Church of Bom Jesús do Matosinhos, Congonhas do Campo, Brazil  239 12.1 Columns, Havana  248 12.2 Wrought-iron gates, Havana  250 12.3 Guardacantón (iron wheel guard), Havana  252 12.4 Mampara (glass door screen), Remedios, Cuba  253 12.5 Medio puntos (fanlights), Havana  255

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12.6 Church of San Francisco Acatepec, ca. 1730, State of Puebla, Mexico  257 13.1 Codex Borgia, plate 57, Six Supernatural Couples, Mixteca-Puebla, central Mexico  263 13.2 “Guaco,” Moche culture, 200 BCE–700 CE, Peru  263 13.3 Rosary Chapel, Angelic Choir, 1650–90, Church of Santo Domingo,   Puebla, Mexico  264 13.4 Church of Santo Domingo, Oaxaca, Mexico, ceiling of the sotocoro (below the choir loft), Genealogical Tree of the Guzmán Family (Santo Domingo’s family)  264 14.1 Aerial view, School of Plastic Arts, 1961–65, Havana. Architect: Ricardo Porro  274 14.2 School of Plastic Arts, Fountain La Papaya, 1961–65. Architect: Ricardo Porro  274 15.1 Caravaggio, The Entombment of Christ, 1602–4  295 15.2 El Greco (Domenico Theotokópoulos), The Feast in the House of Simon, 1610–14  298 15.3 Peter Paul Rubens, The Exchange of the Two Princesses from France and Spain upon the Bidassoa at Hedaye, November 9, 1615, 1622–25  299 15.4 Diego de Silva Velázquez, Las meninas, 1656  309 16.1 Oscar Niemeyer, Church of São Francisco de Assis, 1940,   Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil  331 16.2 Oscar Niemeyer, Church of São Francisco de Assis, 1940,   Candido Portinari, mosaic  331 18.1 Andrea Alciato, Emblem XXXVI “Obdurandum adversus urgentia”   (“One Must Persist against Oppressions”), Book of Emblems, 1531  355 18.2 Andrea Alciato, Emblem CLXI “Mutuum auxilium” (“Mutual Support”),   Book of Emblems, 1531  359 18.3 Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558  368 18.4 Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea de un príncipe político cristiano representada por cien empresas, 1640, Empresa XII: Excaecat candor  380 18.5 Diego de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea de un príncipe político cristiano representada por cien empresas, 1640, Empresa XIII: Censurae patent  380 21.1 Annibale Carracci, Lamentation; or, Pietà with St. Francis and St. Mary Magdalen, 1602  460 23.1 Leonardo da Vinci, The Last Supper (pre-restoration), ca. 1495–98,   Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan  491 23.2 Tintoretto ( Jacopo Robusti), The Last Supper, 1592–94, Venice  491 23.3 Church of Santa María Tonantzintla, eighteenth century, State of Puebla, Mexico, polychrome stucco, detail of interior wall  496 23.4 The Jesuit College of San Ildefonso, eighteenth century, Mexico City  498 23.5 Church of San Francisco Xavier Tepotzotlán, eighteenth century, State of Mexico  506

  Acknowledgments  

Our largest debt of gratitude is to our contributors and translators, several of whom played both roles, translating foundational essays and also contributing essays of their own. It is appropriate to give special thanks for such multitasking to Maarten van Delden and Christopher Winks (each of whom contributed two translations and an essay), Dorothy Z. Baker and William Childers (a translation and an essay), Michael Schuessler (three translations), and Patrick Blaine and Rose Dutra (two translations). Patrick Blaine deserves special thanks for his invaluable help with reconstructing Severo Sarduy’s labyrinthine line art. John Ochoa also contributed an essay and a translation, but his book, The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity, which includes his excellent essay on Carlos Fuentes’s Neobaroque, came out before this volume, so readers will find it there. Wendy B. Faris translated two essays, and though one ended up on the cutting-room floor, she, too, is to be counted among our dedicated group of multitaskers. To José Pascual Buxó, Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, and Gonzalo Celorio, all at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, we are grateful for their essays and for their ex cathedra classes on the intricacies of their parts of the Baroque New World; and we are indebted to Roberto González Echevarría for his pioneering work in this field. To all of our collaborators, including the several whose work has outlived them: thank you! The present volume is, indeed, a work of collaboration. Anthologies of this sort require years to consolidate and complete. Not only patience but also faith and constancy are required. Reynolds Smith and Sharon Torian at Duke University Press have offered us these gifts in abundance. Reynolds expressed his enthusiasm for our idea in 2001 at a crowded MLA book exhibit, and he has been behind the project ever since. In addition

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to his wise counsel, he secured the advice of four anonymous readers early in the process. Our editors, Neal McTighe and Petra Dreiser, have been extraordinarily attentive to the many moving parts of this anthology. We are grateful to all of you. The University of Houston and the University of Washington have contributed to the cost of permissions to translate and/or reprint foundational essays and to reproduce images, thus making it possible for us to shape this volume as we wished. The Martha Gano Houstoun Endowment in the English Department at the University of Houston also provided financial support for production costs. In several cases, our contributors or their heirs have given us permission to use essays or images without charge, an act of generosity toward academic inquiry that merits our special thanks. They are Lilia Carpentier, Gonzalo Celorio, Carlos Fuentes, Paolo Gasparini, the family of Eugenio d’Ors, and the Visual Resources Collection in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Washington. Many colleagues, friends, acquaintances, and strangers have also participated in this volume. They include Antonio Barrenechea, Marc Blanchard, Marshall Brown, Bruce Buck, Socorro Cano, Alessandro Carrera, Luchín Castañeda, Marjorie Chadwick, Deborah Cohn, William Egginton, Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, Donald Gilbert-Santamaría, Amanda Harris Fonseca, Elisabeth Garrett, Antonio Gidi, Nicholas Halmi, Juliane and Hans-Josef Kaup, Gregg Lambert, Marie-Pierrette Malcuzynski, Patricia Merivale, Brian Reed, Rolando Romero, Jon Smith, Daniel Torres, Sandra Vivanco, Camille Zamora, and Peter Zamora. Ryan Jensen at Art Resource, New York, and Heather Seneff at the Visual Resources Collection in the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Washington helped us secure many of the images reproduced in this volume. To Stephen Zamora, who has followed the trail of the Baroque from Salta to Tunja and Tonantzintla, from Puebla to Querétaro and Rome, and to Robert Mugerauer, for his generous support and advice, especially during the final stages of composition and compilation: our gratitude for these reasons—and many others.

  Introduction  

Baroque, New World Baroque, Neobaroque Categories and Concepts

Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup

The Cuban writer José Lezama Lima begins his essay “Baroque Curiosity” in Baroque fashion, with a parody, quoting the globalizing claim of a critic he does not name: “The earth is Classical and the sea is Baroque.” Lezama’s purpose is to suggest that by the time of his own essay, published in La expresión americana in 1957, the Baroque had emerged from two centuries of oblivion (and opprobrium), only to become overexposed, overextended, whatever-you-please. For Lezama, the Baroque had been appropriated and generalized to the point of meaninglessness. Of course, Lezama’s own project was also vast—not quite planetary perhaps, but certainly hemispheric—and it also involved appropriation: he would reclaim the Baroque for the New World, place it in its historical American contexts, and then make his own generalizing claims. Take this one, for instance, in the same essay, translated from the Spanish and included in our volume: “The literary banquet, the prolific description of fruits of the earth and sea, is rooted in the jubilant Baroque. We shall attempt to reconstruct . . . one of those feasts, as Dionysian as dialectic, ruled by the desire to possess the world, to incorporate the exterior world through the transformative furnace of assimilation” (BNW 222).1 This statement is hardly less hyperbolic than that of the nameless critic whom Lezama parodies; at Lezama’s Baroque table, we are again offered both earth and sea. And why not? Self-parody, too, is characteristic of the Baroque, as is excess, exaltation, exuberance. Lezama’s style, as well as his subject, is Baroque: “as Dionysian as dialectic,” overflowing and yet articulated; globalizing and yet also specific to Latin American cultural and historical realities. To share in Lezama’s Baroque banquet and help define it, we have selected twenty-nine essays that trace the reemergence of Baroque traditions and

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forms of expression over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. In all cases, their purposes are distant from the monarchical, Catholic, colonizing origins of the Baroque, and yet they are also necessarily connected to those origins; they variously follow the Baroque from a colonial mode to a postcolonial one, from a seventeenth-century instrument of empire to a contemporary instrument of cultural revision and renewal. Historical continuity is balanced against historical rupture: our European authors engage seventeenth-century models to critique twentieth-century political and poetic practices, and our American authors weigh Old World Baroque forms against their New World uses. In large part, their concern is literature and literary culture, but their methods are interdisciplinary because, in their different ways, each engages Baroque aesthetics to define his or her subject. Some discuss visual and verbal arts specifically, others address historical cultures more generally, but all of them treat the multiple media of the Baroque as linked cultural formations. Our title, Baroque New Worlds, is intended to call attention to these multiple formations and to theorize a new set of possibilities in Europe and the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and again in the twentieth and twenty-first. Baroque, New World Baroque, Neobaroque: we have organized our essays into three sections—“Representation,” “Transculturation,” and “Counterconquest”—that correspond to these categories, but only loosely, because the boundaries of their forms and histories cannot be neatly drawn. The competing etymologies of the word baroque will give an idea of the definitional difficulties. René Wellek summarizes various possibilities at the beginning of his essay in this volume: a three-syllable nonsense word (baroco) coined to represent and remember the structure of a particular scholastic syllogism;2 a Portuguese word (barrôco) describing pearls that are lumpy and irregular; and a Tuscan term (barocco, barrocolo, or barrochio) referring to a medieval system of financial transactions, and more particularly to a usurer’s contract. These different usages are well documented, but which one branches into art history, and then into literature, in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth? Bruno Migliorini, Marie-Pierrette Malcuzynski, and Gerhart Hoffmeister favor the irregular pearl theory, arguing that this meaning moved gradually into the realms of artistic and aesthetic form; on the other hand, Erwin Panofsky and George Kubler prefer the scholastic syllogism, noting that baroco had become pejorative by the end of the sixteenth century, meaning pedantic and convoluted, thus coinciding with the depreciation of the Baroque style in eighteenth-century Europe.3 (No one seems to

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favor the usurer’s contract, though it is often cited—probably because of its baroque far-fetchedness.) Panofsky and Kubler have textual confirmation on their side, but for our purposes, the metaphor of the irregular pearl is useful because it suggests our critical categories. In fact, we might think of the Baroque, New World Baroque, and Neobaroque as a single, rather large, eccentric pearl with excrescences and involutions corresponding to their overlapping histories and forms in Europe and the Americas. Here at the outset, we offer an overview of these histories and forms.

The Baroque The Baroque flourished in seventeenth-century Europe as a Catholic response to the Protestant insurgency. It was rooted in Rome and adapted throughout Catholic Europe as a recognizable style and content in art, architecture, and literature—that is, as a recognizable Counter-Reformation aesthetic and ideology. In Protestant Europe, Baroque opulence, with its elaborate ecclesiastical and celestial hierarchies, was objectionable to Reformation sensibilities, and over time a more sober Baroque developed in Northern Europe alongside (and sometimes combined with) Counter-Reformation forms.4 During the seventeenth century, the Baroque thus reigned in Europe in different modes and measures, and we include foundational essays by Heinrich Wölfflin, Walter Benjamin, René Wellek, and Mario Praz that describe the related media of European Baroque painting, literature, and architecture. Preceding each of these essays and the other foundational essays in this volume, we provide an introduction and a brief bibliography to place the authors in their historical and cultural contexts. Reading these introductions consecutively will signal their particular contributions to the revalorization of the Baroque, and often an overview of the process as a whole. The Baroque was exported wholesale to areas of the world colonized by Catholic Europe throughout the seventeenth century, and well into the eighteenth. It is one of the few satisfying ironies of European imperial domination worldwide that the Baroque worked poorly as a colonizing instrument. Its visual and verbal forms are ample, dynamic, porous, and permeable; thus, in all of the areas colonized by Catholic Europe, the Baroque was itself eventually colonized.5 In the New World, its transplants immediately began to incorporate the cultural perspectives and iconographies of the indigenous and African laborers and artisans who built and decorated Catholic structures. Cultural heresies (and heretics) often entered unnoticed, or were ignored

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for reasons of expediency.6 There were also Asian influences, arriving on the fleet of ships known as the Nao de China (the Manila galleon) with art and artifacts from Japan, China, the Moluccas, and the Philippines, destined for Europe but portaged across New Spain, thus joining the diverse cultural streams that over time came to constitute the New World Baroque.7 And in turn, the European Baroque was transformed in Europe: its materials (silver from Mexico and Peru, ivory from the Philippines), its motifs (fauna and flora, often imaginary, from the Caribbean, the Orinoco, the Amazon), and its methods (artistic, doctrinal, indoctrinating). So the reciprocal relations of Europe and Latin America are the necessary starting point for any discussion of the Baroque. Baroque and New World Baroque: both designate a historical period that mediates a vast complex of cultural encounters, and both were overshadowed and eventually eclipsed by the Enlightenment neoclassicism that followed. Beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth, the Baroque went underground. In Latin America, it lasted longer than in Europe—through the third quarter of the eighteenth century and in some places into the first years of the nineteenth. But in Latin America, too, Baroque art and artifacts were sometimes destroyed and replaced by structures of a more sober neoclassical style; thus the supposed obscurantism of Baroque reason was supplanted by the supposed lucidity of Enlightenment reason. The literary masters of the seventeenth century— Spain’s Golden Age writers (Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Miguel de Cervantes), Mexico’s greatest poet (Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), the English metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists (John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, John Webster), the German playwrights of the Trauerspiel (Andreas Gryphius, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, Johann Christian Hallmann)—were excoriated and buried, or simply forgotten. Baroque’s dynamism ceded to neoclassicism’s restraint, and the optical exuberance and illusionism of the former to the realist and positivist perspectives of the latter. In the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, however, writers and art historians—working simultaneously and influencing each other—began to (re)discover in the Baroque certain strategies of figuration and fragmentation that suited their own aesthetic and ideological purposes. The Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío offered the first explicit (re)cycling of Spanish Baroque poets, referring to Góngora and Quevedo in his 1896 prologue to Prosas profanas.8 In Spain, Federico García Lorca, Dá-

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maso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, and others were also rereading Góngora and Quevedo (the name of their group, the Generation of ’27, recognizes the tercentenary of Góngora’s death), and in Mexico, another “generation” of experimental writers, the Contemporáneos, also studied these Spanish Baroque poets anew.9 Moreover, the great Mexican literary intellectual Alfonso Reyes had been writing about Góngora for fully a decade, and he was well aware of the parallel efforts of the Generation of ’27 to revalidate Baroque poetics, as we note in our introduction to Reyes’s essay from 1928, “Savoring Góngora,” included here. In Germany, Walter Benjamin was studying Baroque drama known as the Trauerspiel; his book-length study was published in the same year, 1928, and we have included an excerpt from it in this volume. In Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges wrote several essays during the twenties, not only on Spanish Baroque writers (Quevedo, Cervantes) but also on English Baroque writers ( John Milton and Sir Thomas Browne—including a translation of a fragment of Browne’s Urn Burial, to which Borges famously refers, twenty years later, in the last sentence of “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”).10 And again, in England, T. S. Eliot was revisiting seventeenth-century English poets and playwrights, and celebrating them for their capacity to “amalgamate disparate experience.”11 The reasons for such widespread interest in revalidating the European Baroque during this period vary according to writer and place, and the foundational essays in our first section reflect (and reflect upon) the differences. It is, however, safe to say that all combine, in relative measures, an increasing skepticism toward Enlightenment rationalism and realism with the desire for formal experimentation. The waning utility (not to say bankruptcy) of the Enlightenment principles of scientific reason, progressive history, individual agency, and stable identity (cultural, national, personal) made alternative modes of expression attractive, and pre-Enlightenment forms again came into view. Even before the writers mentioned above, Friedrich Nietzsche, in his brief essay of 1878 that begins our volume, recognizes the Baroque as rejecting harmony in favor of heterogeneity. In his Genealogy of Morals, written nine years later, he elaborated what he termed a genealogical method to challenge the Hegelian idea of history as linear, teleological, causal. For Nietzsche, the Hegelian model naively projected the outcome of an idea or practice back onto its beginning, imposing an analogy of organic growth from seed to plant to fruit. On the contrary, the object of the genealogical method was to record the accidental arising of things—their trans-

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formations, appropriations, co-optations, and subversions—as they became the raw material for different ideas and practices. The Baroque seemed to respond to Nietzsche’s preference for inconformity and contradiction: its forms exist in “the greatest dramatic tension” (BNW 45). Four decades later, Walter Benjamin engaged this idea as his theme and critical strategy, using Baroque drama to oppose the idea of history as progressive, continuous, and purposeful. The allegory and melancholy of the Baroque Trauerspiel (the “mourning play”) provided the means to critique modernity: for Benjamin, modern history is marked by fragmentation, ruin, loss. T. S. Eliot also saw the wasteland of post–Second World War Europe and, impelled by the desire to renovate figurative language, he looked to Baroque poetics to formulate his modernist aesthetic, as did Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina. Both focused on the operations of metaphor, and both were formalists who privileged tradition over individual talent (i.e., over the personality of the poet). René Wellek addresses this last point: “Subjectivism and baroque rarely go hand in hand. Góngora, though an extremely individual writer, did not therefore in any way become subjective: rather his most characteristic poetry became almost sym­bolistic, ‘absolute’ poetry which could be welcomed and praised by Mallarmé” (BNW 107).12 As it happened, Borges preferred Quevedo to Góngora, but Wellek’s point remains: the different nature of Baroque originality—the brilliant engagement (and influencing) of one’s precursors rather than the projection of idiosyncratic genius—was attractive to both Eliot and Borges as they worked to separate themselves from the Romantic poetry of personal emotion and to (re)establish a formalist poetics. Indeed, Octavio Paz notes the “striking” affinities between the Baroque and the modernist innovations of this period, and above all, the role played by form in both aesthetics.13 In Spain, too, the poets of the Generation of ’27 engaged Baroque aesthetics to distance themselves from the sentimental, declamatory poetry of their precursors and to promote their own poetic innovations. García Lorca’s essay of 1928, “La imagen poética de Don Luis de Góngora” (The Poetic Image of Don Luis de Góngora), surely belongs in this volume, but unfortunately we could not secure the rights to translate it. García Lorca celebrates Góngora as “el poeta padre de nuestro idioma” (the poet father of our language) and points to his strategies of derealization, which remove the poetic image from nature to create an alternative world of words. Góngora’s metaphors do not awaken unknown similarities, but rather create similarities attainable only in language; they depend not on reality but artifice, not on resemblance but dis-

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junctions that are extreme and yet united in the poetic image.14 The Mexican intellectual Alfonso Reyes, in his essay “Savoring Góngora,” invokes Spain and the poets of the Generation of ’27 (Dámaso Alonso and Gerardo Diego) in his own reading of Góngora as a poet of “pure aesthetic contemplation,” even as he also finds Góngora to be a poet of “physical beauty” and “solid materials” (BNW 175). If the poets of the Generation of ’27 engaged Góngora as a figure of controversy and critique as well as a model for a new poetics, Reyes wrote with the future of Latin American literature in mind, a fact that altered his perspective in ways that we note in our introduction to his essay. Nonetheless, in both Spain and Latin America Góngora proved central to the recovery of the Baroque as an alternative poetics that could facilitate the renovation of modernist forms of expression.15

The New World Baroque If the Baroque was first recuperated in the twentieth century as a poetics and an aesthetic in art, it was soon to be recognized as an instrument of cultural politics. Inspired by the cultural regionalism and the emerging climate of decolonization after the Second World War, a new generation of Latin American and Caribbean intellectuals and writers returned to the colonial American Baroque, long neglected and dismissed, and they found new meanings there. We include a number of foundational essays by Latin American writers who, starting in the 1940s, began to reconceive the New World Baroque as an index of cultural identity. Why did the Baroque become newly visible, legible, and theorizable in Latin America during this period? And why did the New World Baroque come to be celebrated as an American expression (to use the title of Lezama’s collection), rather than depreciated as a colonizing imposition? The growing interest in the historical Baroque was motivated by the need to define local cultures against metropolitan norms. The recodification—we might even say the reorigination—of the New World Baroque provided a way to differentiate Latin American forms from European cultural models without denying Europe’s role in creating Latin American cultural realities. The Argentine art historian Ángel Guido is perhaps the first to make this argument explicit. In an essay from 1936, translated and included here, he argues that New World Baroque art and architecture are models of “reconquest,” rebellious forms that take back the New World from its European colonizers. This essay becomes part of his monumental Redescubrimiento de

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América en el arte (The Rediscovery of America in the Arts, 1940), a landmark study of New World Baroque art and architecture. For José Lezama Lima (who had surely read Guido), the New World Baroque becomes a “furnace of assimilation” that transforms European, indigenous, African, and Asian cultures into other ways of being and seeing—American ways. In his “Baroque Curiosity” of 1957, translated and included in this volume, the European Baroque—sign and signature of conquest—becomes the sign and signature of American counterconquest. The coinage is Lezama’s, and for him and many Latin Americans (and Latin Americanists), the transformation of the Old World Baroque by New World realities represents a retort to the colonizers, a declaration of cultural autonomy. Most twentieth-century theories of the New World Baroque celebrate cultural mestizaje and artistic resistance to colonizing norms, thus reclaiming histories and traditions and refashioning them for present use. The capacity of the Baroque to overarch contradictions and include oppositions has made it particularly useful for theorizing cultural difference, as well as for celebrating the hybridity of Latin American cultural products. Surely this is part of what Lezama means when he says that the Baroque feast is “ruled by the desire to possess the world” (BNW 222). Lezama’s paragons of the New World Baroque are Mexican—the seventeenth-century poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and her friend and intellectual equal, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora—but Lezama’s cultural context is transatlantic. His New World Baroque is neither a mere reflection of, nor mere resistance to European colonizing structures—neither simple mimicry nor simple subversion. It is not solely Europe’s story but rather a multidimensional American aesthetic that includes mimicry and subversion, of course, but also the more ambiguous processes of selection, synthesis, exaggeration, sublimation, mediation, and revision—including the revision of European culture itself. Lezama’s American Baroque operates according to the multiple dynamics of confirmation, deformation, and transformation, and the archetypal American señor barroco described in his essay negotiates these dynamics in ways analyzed by Roberto González Echevarría, Maarten van Delden, and Christopher Winks in their essays in part 3 of this volume. Their essays, like Lezama’s, move back and forth between Europe and America, between past and present, asking us to weigh differences by discovering resemblances and relationships, however uneven, eccentric, or unjust. Lezama’s compatriot and contemporary, Alejo Carpentier, defines the New World Baroque in even more broadly comparative and comprehen-

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sive terms. In the two texts that we translate here, Carpentier places the Baroque alongside the Popol Vuh and the Chilam Balam, the Mesoamerican codices and Andean guacos, not to mention classical Caribbean columns, thus making “symbiosis” the basis of his New World Baroque.16 European forms of expression certainly combined with prehispanic forms in America, but our intention is not to argue for an “indigenous Baroque” as stipulated by Carpentier. Rather, we intend to place his claim in the historical and cultural context in which it belongs, as a key part of the twentieth-century recodification of the Baroque as a New World mode. We understand Carpentier’s inclusiveness not as cultural appropriation but as the desire, strongly felt by the 1940s, to engage the Baroque as an instrument “to incorporate the exterior world through the transformative furnace of assimilation,” to repeat Lezama’s phrase. Carpentier’s New World Baroque, like Lezama’s, represents an impulse toward inclusion (itself a Baroque impulse), an effort to bridge historical and cultural rupture, to assemble disparate cultural fragments— past and present, European and non-European. Both Carpentier and Lezama construct theories of cultural becoming that reach across the boundaries of fixed identities toward the formulation of yet uncertain ones. This capacity makes their theories relevant to postcolonial contexts worldwide. Indeed, Lezama’s and Carpentier’s New World Baroque constitutes an Americanist ethnocultural analogue of the earlier vanguardist Neobaroque of Eliot, the poets of the Generation of ’27, and affiliated writer-critics. Carpentier’s direct precursor is the Catalonian art historian and philosopher Eugenio d’Ors, whose study, Le Baroque, published in 1935, showed Carpentier how to transform the Baroque into an American way of becoming. We include an excerpt from d’Ors’s study in which he (re)defines the Baroque as a worldview rather than a period in European art history. For d’Ors, the Baroque consists of a recognizable set of cultural values and expressive strategies that recur throughout history in an array of world cultures; indeed, it may be d’Ors whom Lezama parodies with his “the earth is Classical and the sea Baroque.” D’Ors argues for what we might now think of as a cultural genome project—a kind of Baroque DNA that runs in given cultures.17 Our metaphor is anachronistic, of course, but our point is that d’Ors’s idea of inherent cultural characteristics appealed to Carpentier as he began to intuit a sui generis American Baroque. D’Ors’s relation to Carpentier is seminal and yet also surprising, since the American Baroque never crossed d’Ors’s mind, and his metropolitan context is far indeed from Carpentier’s postcolonial Caribbean. And yet both theorists understood the Baroque as a style, a

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spirit, a human constant, rather than as a particular historical period.18 For both, Baroque temporality overarches discontinuities, and Baroque space is labyrinthine, an ambit in which forking paths diverge, cross, and conjoin.

The Neobaroque If Lezama located the Baroque in Latin American time and space, and Carpentier found Baroque elements in all cultures and periods, the third in the Cuban triumvirate of Baroque theorists, Severo Sarduy, dismissed both views, focusing not on cultural self-definition but on the uses of seventeenthcentury Baroque rhetorical devices in contemporary literature that he calls Neobaroque.19 Sarduy thus reconstituted the American Baroque once again, doing so in France during the 1970s and 1980s, having left Cuba in 1960 after the revolution to study art in Paris, where he stayed. Sarduy’s concerns were neither Old World nor New World Baroque as such, but rather Baroque strategies of “artificialization” in language and literature, and their Neobaroque uses. His essay, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” published in 1972 and included here in a new translation, contemplates tactics of displacement that make Neobaroque literature the site of “dethronement and debate.” Our introduction to this essay assesses the nature and purposes of Sarduy’s Neobaroque, and in part 3, the Mexican novelist and critic Gonzalo Celorio and the Brazilian theorist Irlemar Chiamp place Sarduy’s theory in relation to the evolving forms of the Baroque in the Americas. We also include chapter 3 of Sarduy’s full-length study, Barroco (1974), which focuses on the seventeenth-century astronomer Johannes Kepler, and in particular on Kepler’s dismissal of circular orbits in favor of elliptical ones. The circle, with its single center, is set against the double-centered ellipse and, by extension, Renaissance classicism is set against the Baroque: symmetry is jostled by eccentricity, (en)closure by infinity. Sarduy makes Kepler’s ellipse a metaphor for Neobaroque decentering, and he makes the seventeenthcentury scientist a figure for twentieth-century destabilization. To illustrate how this epistemology operates in all Baroque (and Neobaroque) media, Sarduy moves from astronomy to poetry, and on to painting and architecture: from ellipse to ellipsis (the suppression of one element to highlight another—in Góngora’s work, in Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro, in Velázquez’s erasure of the subject in Las meninas), and then on to anamorphosis (images or spaces that change according to the observer’s angle of vision—in Borromini’s floor plan of the Roman church of San Carlino and, in another essay,

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the oblong skull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors).20 Moreover, as always in Sarduy, the historical Baroque exists on a substratum of twentieth-century (Lacanian) psychology: Baroque ellipsis suggests repression and projection, and anamorphosis reflects the distortions of the unconscious mind, as does the “delirium” of Baroque language, both visual and verbal. The Brazilian poet and literary theorist Haroldo de Campos represents a similar development of the American Baroque. His essay of 1981, “The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devoration,” is included among our foundational essays. As his title suggests, he mobilizes “anthropophagy”—cannibalism—as his metaphor for the transcultural operations of the Latin America Baroque. De Campos parodies Enlightenment reason, positing a “cannibal reason” by which renegade colonial subjects (renegados) appropriate imposed cultural forms, consume and digest them, and then incorporate them into the colonial body. As the lion is made of assimilated sheep, so Brazil feasts at “the banquet of . . . the jubilant Baroque,” to repeat Lezama’s phrase once more. De Campos’s theory of cannibal reason is related to the cultural regionalism of Lezama and Carpentier, but his poetry is aligned with Sarduy’s poststructuralist Neobaroque. In fact, the term Neobaroque seems to have been de Campos’s originally.21 The literary critic Jacobo Sefamí observes that Brazilian concrete poetry, and particularly de Campos’s influential collection of poetry, Galáxias, from 1984, gave crucial impetus to the Neobaroque.22 De Campos’s poetic practice converges with Sarduy’s theory in its extravagant play with the materiality of the signifier, which strives to suspend the referential function of language. This artificialization recalls the appeal of Góngora and Baroque aesthetics to poets in the first part of the twentieth century, but now, in the 1970s and 1980s, the stakes have shifted. In Chiampi’s formulation, such metalinguistic play represents a specifically Latin American postmodernist critique: it is “an intensification and expansion of the experimental potential of the historical Baroque recycled by Lezama and Carpentier, now accompanied by a powerfully revisionist inflexion of the ideological values of modernity. At once modern and countermodern, the Neobaroque functions within the postmodern aesthetic . . . as an archaeological project inscribing the archaism of the Baroque as a way of allegorizing Latin America’s dissonance with modernity” (BNW 517). Chiampi discusses both Sarduy and de Campos in the first chapter of her book, Barroco y modernidad (2000), translated and included here. As is clear in the quotation above, Chiampi’s Neobaroque constitutes a postmodernism

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suited to Latin American cultural and historical experience: “The Baroque, with its historical and geographical, not to mention aesthetic eccentricity, challenges the historicist canon (the new ‘classicism’) constructed in the hegemonic centers of the Western world, thereby functioning to redefine the terms according to which Latin America enters into the orbit of EuroAmerican modernity. The Baroque, crossroads of signs and temporalities, aesthetic logic of mourning and melancholy, luxuriousness and pleasure, erotic convulsion and allegorical pathos, reappears to bear witness to the crisis or end of modernity and to the very condition of a continent that could not be assimilated by the project of the Enlightenment” (BNW 508). The Neobaroque (in Europe as in Latin America) is characterized by its untimeliness. In Latin America, its anachronisms challenge European periodization: Neobaroque texts are “the coming together of heterogeneities, brilliant surfaces where Baroque stylemes shine in an inflated swirl of strata and layers, simultaneities and synchronies that do not achieve unification” (BNW 519). In her essay, Chiampi contrasts the Latin American Neobaroque to Fredric Jameson’s postmodern “cultural logic of late capitalism”: “Unlike the postmodernism discussed by Jameson, this manipulation does not simply array its fragments as so many ‘commodities’ but rather unleashes the figures of a new form of tension” (BNW 520). This “new form of tension” recalls Nietzsche’s early appreciation of the “dramatic tension” of European Baroque forms, the metaphysical “tensions” in Benjamin’s Baroque Trauerspiel, the cultural “tensions” in Lezama’s New World Baroque, and the semantic “tensions” in Sarduy’s Neobaroque signifiers and sequences. All use the word and all show how Baroque forms thrive on oppositions, contradictions, cross-purposes. Not harmony but heterogeneity, not Hegelian historicity but “strata and layers, simultaneities and synchronies.” As Chiampi implies, the Neobaroque has been most useful in cultural contexts with a history of Baroque representation. The application of (Sarduyan) Neobaroque theory to film and entertainment media is rapidly globalizing its purview, as is the extension of (Carpentierian) New World Baroque theory to areas in which the contact of diverse and sometimes conflictual cultures is the norm (William Faulkner’s South, for example, or U.S. Latino culture). In all cases, the strength of these theories remains their engagement of specific cultures and histories. Theories must be appropriate to the contexts they intend to elucidate, and this is particularly so in Latin America, where, since the 1920s, there has been a rich discussion of racial, social, and political structures—a postcolonialist discourse avant la lettre, one devoted

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to particular regions, cultures, and nations. This tradition of cultural analysis in Latin America includes the Neobaroque and also extends beyond it, because there are many writers and theorists in this tradition who do not address Baroque ideology or aesthetics per se.23 The Neobaroque shares with this larger tradition the imperative to address lived experience, and not just in Latin America. The term Neobaroque is applicable to all reconstitutions of the Baroque and New World Baroque as twentieth-century aesthetics and ideologies. Walter Benjamin engages the seventeenth-century German Trauerspiel to collect Baroque fragments into meaningful (Neobaroque) constellations; Christine Buci-Glucksmann engages Venetian paintings to devise an alternative (Neobaroque) theory of seeing; Sarduy analyzes the structures of seventeenthcentury European science to create a transgressive (Neobaroque) poetics of “debate and dethronement.” Indeed, new terms like barroco contemporáneo and brut barroco have begun to appear in newspapers and journals, presaging further recyclings of this tradition—a neo-Neobaroque, as it were—but we leave these evolving concepts for future consideration.24 In this volume, our essays demonstrate that it impossible to theorize the Neobaroque and not be steeped in the cultural formations and historical realities that the theorist or novelist or poet chooses to revisit, reconceive, “recycle.” We will return to this Neobaroque requirement of participation at the end of our introduction.

Neobaroque and Magical Realism There is a related category that should be mentioned before we proceed. Magical realism is akin to the Neobaroque in its European origins and its recent applications to Latin American fiction. As is often noted, the term was first applied to the visual arts in 1925, when the German art critic Franz Roh used it to describe a group of postexpressionist painters. What is less often noted is that Roh studied with Wölfflin, the first European art historian to systematically define the formal characteristics of the Baroque as a style in art history. It cannot be insignificant that Roh was Wölfflin’s student in Munich between 1915 and 1919, nor coincidental that Roh’s theory of magical realism, formulated in 1925, follows Wölfflin’s conception of the Baroque in essential ways. Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History was published in 1915, and we include an excerpt from the author’s introduction to this groundbreaking work. Wölfflin considers the Baroque an anti-objectivist representation

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(the painterly), opposed to classical objectivism (the linear). He also regards Baroque forms to be open, a characteristic that enables the overarching of antitheses, whether nature and artifice, sensuousness and spirituality, surface and depth, or, we might add here, magic and real. Wölfflin’s insistence on the capacity of Baroque aesthetics to accommodate contradictions and generate tensions among disparate elements underpins and impels Roh’s theory of magical realism in art.25 Like the recuperation of Baroque poetics at the same time, Roh’s theory begins as a European avant-garde aesthetics and later evolves into a Latin American instrument of cultural critique. His essay of 1925 was immediately translated from German into Spanish (in the symbolic year 1927) in José Ortega y Gasset’s influential Revista de Occidente in Madrid.26 Roh’s argument about painting interested Ortega and his readership in the Spanishspeaking world for the same reason that Baroque poetics interested Spanish and Latin American avant-garde writers at the time: it offered a means of creating an alternative modernism (if not an alternative modernity, as the cultural theorists would later seek to do). Does Roh’s parallel project make him a part of the Generation of ’27 in Spain, or an honorary Latin American modernista? No, but his aesthetic and cultural ties to the postwar revalidation of Baroque aesthetics in Europe are significant for our purposes, as is the transculturation of his theory in later decades in Latin America. In our view, magical realism may be considered a Neobaroque flowering of the historical New World Baroque, a continuation of the impulse to engage cultural heterogeneities in form and content. Alejo Carpentier’s conflation of the Baroque and lo real maravilloso americano (the American marvelous real) in an essay of 1975 is not without historical justification. We have already mentioned Ángel Guido, the first Latin American art historian to revalidate the American Baroque as a style in art history. He, like Franz Roh, was directly influenced by Heinrich Wölfflin (see our introduction to Guido’s essay of 1936). The same Wölfflinian insistence on the capacity of Baroque forms to supersede objectivism and to accommodate contradictions that inspired Roh’s magical realism also inspired the Argentine Guido’s formulation of the New World Baroque as the integral expression of disparate cultures. The Baroque complementarity of opposites identified by Wölfflin thus flows simultaneously during the 1920s into Roh’s magical realism and Guido’s New World Baroque, and from there to Lezama, Carpentier, Fuentes, Celorio, Chiampi, and Édouard Glissant, with their Neobaroque cultural ideology of inclusion devoid of homogenization. So we locate a

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common German precursor; the subjects and intentions of Roh and Guido diverge from one another, but their shared antecedent, Wölfflin, with his emphasis on Baroque tensions of all kinds, begins to explain why both magical realism and the Neobaroque have proved useful critical categories in the discussion of contemporary Latin American fiction. There are differences, too, of course. Magical realism is now generally applied to only one medium (fiction), whereas the Neobaroque encompasses the several media we have mentioned: literature, theater, music, film, and the media of popular entertainment, which are increasingly discussed in terms of a Neobaroque “aesthetic of astonishment.”27 On the other hand, magical realism covers a far larger geographical terrain than the Neobaroque; novels worldwide have been analyzed in terms of magical realism, whereas Neobaroque theory has remained largely limited to cultural production in areas with a history of Baroque representation, for reasons that we have already suggested. And whereas Neobaroque theory as it applies to Latin America has been produced largely by Latin Americans, magical realism remains a term more applied from outside than from within, a fact that has led to charges of stereotyping and exoticizing. Any critical category can be carelessly applied, of course, but such charges do not vitiate the usefulness of magical realism as a critical category in Latin America, or cancel its historical filiation with the Latin American Neobaroque.

Part 1  Representation: Foundational Essays   on Baroque Aesthetics and Ideology The first section of our volume contains sixteen foundational essays, all but one (Nietzsche’s) written in the twentieth century. Only one was originally written in English—René Wellek’s—and despite Lezama’s complaint in 1957 that the Baroque had been diluted by overuse, nine of our foundational essays are translated into English here for the first time. Our aim throughout has been to make essays available that have circulated widely in other languages but not in English. The first seven essays focus on Europe and, with one exception, were written in Europe (again, the exception is Wellek, who was, by 1945, living in the United States, having left Czechoslovakia in 1939). The nine essays in the second group focus on the New World Baroque and the Neobaroque, and all were written by Latin Americans. (There are four more foundational Latin American writers—Gonzalo Celorio, Irlemar Chiampi, Carlos Fuentes, and Édouard Glissant—whom we have placed in part 3 be-

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cause they contribute to the “postcolonial positions” outlined there.) By gathering these sixteen essays in part 1, we aim to provide historical grounding for the new essays that follow in parts 2 and 3, and also to underscore the topic of this volume: the twentieth-century recovery and reconstitution of the Baroque. This tradition continues vigorously in the twenty-first century, and it remains essential to any discussion of contemporary Latin American literature and culture.28 Part 1 begins with three essays written in German, by Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich Wölfflin, who was Swiss, and Walter Benjamin. Early German scholarship on the European Baroque was profound and prolific, and indeed it goes back further than our first selection (the Baroque often overflows attempts to categorize and contain). We begin with Nietzsche’s essay of 1887, but the Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt precedes him. Burckhardt was Nietzsche’s colleague at the University of Basel, and he was also Wölfflin’s professor there.29 We touch on Burckhardt’s influence on Nietzsche and Wölfflin in our introductions to their essays, but Nietzsche, not Burckhardt, is our starting point because he foresees essential aspects of Baroque theories that were to follow. We then move to Wölfflin, whom we have already mentioned and whose importance in defining Baroque for the twentieth century cannot be overestimated. Until his definitive studies were published, Baroque art was considered merely a late, exhausted stage of Renaissance classicism, so his intellectual daring, as well as his scholarly care, are to be admired. We excerpt a passage from the introduction to his study Principles of Art History (1915); his first book and equally a watershed in the study of European art and architecture, Renaissance and Baroque, was published in 1888. German scholars promoted the reconsideration of German Baroque poetry and theater, and several were forerunners in the revalidation of the Spanish Baroque. Benjamin’s study of seventeenth-century German Baroque drama, published in 1928, refers amply to Spanish Baroque theater of the same period, and the excerpts we include here refer in particular to the plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca. Essays by the Catalonian Eugenio d’Ors, the Czech/American René Wellek, the Italian Mario Praz, and the French Christine Buci-Glucksmann complete our foundational section on the European Baroque. In each case, their essays are interartistic and comparative, allowing us to consider the changing nature of Baroque representation across media, cultures, and centuries. Wellek’s essay of 1945 traces the development of Baroque studies, first in architecture and the visual arts, then in

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music and literature. Referring to Oswald Spengler’s two-volume Decline of the West (1918, 1923), he writes: “Spengler spoke of Baroque painting, music, philosophy, and even psychology, mathe­matics, and physics. Baroque is now used in general cultural history for practically all manifestations of seventeenth-cen­tury civilization” (BNW 96–97).30 To which we may add many manifestations of twentieth- and twenty-first-century civilization as well. Buci-Glucksmann follows Wellek’s interartistic lead, but if Wellek is the  consummate academic historian of the European Baroque, Buci-Glucksmann is its Neobaroque practitioner. In her book, La folie du voir (Madness in Vision, 1986), a chapter of which is translated here, the author concerns herself with Baroque painting, but her purpose is to theorize a Baroque aesthetic that overarches media and modes of perception, “an aesthetic universe of form-forces” (BNW 150). The “madness” to which Buci-Glucksmann refers describes the intention of the artist in, and the response of the viewer to, a particular set of paintings by Tintoretto (figures 7.1, 7.2, 7.3). These intentions and responses reflect the nature of Baroque seeing, and they are encoded in the paintings themselves—in their theatricality, dynamism, illusionism, eroticism, and otherworldliness. For Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque vision (and envisioning) operate across genres and media. “Madness in vision” is not limited to painting, or to Europe, or to the seventeenth century: in other essays in this volume, we will see that such “madness” animates the soledades of Góngora and the sueños of Sor Juana, the façades of Potosí and Puebla, the fiction of Cervantes and Lezama and Faulkner. In fact, BuciGlucksmann theorizes seventeenth-century visual aesthetics by way of two twentieth-century thinkers, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Lacan, and like many Neobaroque theorists, she uses Baroque forms to critique postEnlightenment modernity. The Baroque is still relatively underappreciated in the Anglo-American critical tradition, but essays by René Wellek and Mario Praz remind us that it flourished nonetheless in seventeenth-century England, often under different rubrics. Praz’s essay of 1960 looks back to Eliot’s recovery of seventeenthcentury “metaphysical” poetry (and to his own recovery of those poets during the same period), as well as to Milton, Marvell, and English Baroque architecture. Wellek names the literary critics (largely German) who discuss William Shakespeare’s work in terms of Baroque stylistics, and in his “postscript” of 1962, he calls for greater attention to the Baroque in English literary studies.31 The second section of part 1, “The New World Baroque and the Neo-

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baroque,” traces the reawakening of Latin American writers and critics not only to their own New World Baroque but also to the European Baroque. Here we find the essays by Reyes, Guido, Lezama, Carpentier, Sarduy, and de Campos to which we have already referred, and also an essay by the Dominican literary critic Pedro Henríquez Ureña. Henríquez Ureña was a linguist as well as a literary critic, and he spent years in Mexico, Cuba, and the United States before settling in Buenos Aires in 1925. He studied the varieties of Spanish spoken throughout Latin America, as well as the varieties of its literatures, in part as a response to the pan-Americanism of the time, with its increasing efforts to conceive of Latin America as a geographical, political, and cultural entity that could be defined and defended from within. Theorizing the New World Baroque formed an important part of this project for Henríquez Ureña, as it later would for Lezama, Carpentier, Fuentes, Glissant, and others. For ideological reasons as well as aesthetic ones, then, this category of New World Baroque (barroco de indias, and in its earliest manifestations, barroco indocristiano) was intended to include a vast multihistorical and multicultural territory. The balance between ideological and aesthetic claims is always a matter for critical negotiation, and especially with Baroque literature, since it began as an imperial discourse and was, in varying degrees, complicit with colonizing regimes in the Americas. If, as we have seen, the abstraction and complexity of Baroque poetic language appealed to early twentieth-century poets in Europe, and the discourse of contraconquista appealed to writers in midcentury Latin America, we should also recognize that there are important twentieth-century voices not interested in revalidating the New World Baroque but in exposing its function as an instrument of empire. For example, Ángel Rama, in his seminal work on colonial American literary culture, argues that the same Baroque strategies of artifice and derealization that appealed to modernist and avant-garde sensibilities in the early twentieth century served the purposes of imperial domination in the seventeenth and eighteenth: “One could say that 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 their New World empires, applying rigid principles—abstraction, rationalization, and systematization—and opposing all local expressions of particularity, imagination, or invention. The overbearing power of the order of signs became most intense in those regions that much later received the name Latin America. Gathered together and cloaked by the absolute con-

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cept called ‘Spirit,’ the signs allowed their masters to disregard the objective constraints of practicality and assume a superior, self-legitimating position, where unfettered imagination could require reality to conform to abstract whimsy.”32 It is precisely such “signs,” “unfettered” by reality, that proved attractive and useful to twentieth-century poets and writers as modes of cultural critique and aesthetic renewal. The Mexican writer Rosario Castellanos also looks back to the repressive power of Baroque writing in New Spain, ironizing Lezama’s laudatory description of the American señor barroco as rendered in his essay in this volume. Castellanos writes: Leisure offered the criollo the chance to refine, polish, embellish himself with all the adornments that wealth offers and cleverness can procure: the decorative quality of language, skillful word matches, verbal fencing. Virtuosity is practiced and, in order to demonstrate the multiplicity of recourses, difficulties are also invented. The sentence curls and breaks from its own subtlety. It is the height of the Baroque. . . . The chatterers are too absorbed in the play of words that, to avoid the wind blowing them away, are pinned down, like butterflies, with the pin of writing. Here are the clerks busy at the task of constructing a sonnet that can be read from top to bottom, and bottom to top; from left to right and right to left; an acrobatic acrostic; a metric in which the jungle is petrified in Hellenic marbles. It doesn’t matter that the forest explodes or the stone rots. Words have not been vulnerable, because they were separate from and beyond the reach of stone or jungle. It was an eternal chipping away in the realm of pure sound.33

For Castellanos, Baroque forms were not porous but impervious, not participatory but exclusive, designed solely to extinguish local realities in the service of state power: “The Indian’s tongue was heavy enough already, due to his ignorance, and the mestizo’s because of his timidity.”34 Neither Castellanos nor Rama acknowledges the transcultural processes of mediation and mitigation that were also underway, but neither altogether dismisses colonial Baroque literature either. In a wonderful short text on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Castellanos weighs elitist agendas against aesthetic values and ends by celebrating Sor Juana in twentieth-century terms while lamenting her lot in the seventeenth.35 The essayists in the section that follows, on “colonial practice,” will necessarily negotiate their own balance between ideology and aesthetics, and between the seventeenth century and the twenty-first. They are well aware of the catastrophic consequences of European conquest and colonization

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for indigenous peoples and cultures, but they nonetheless differ from Rama and Castellanos in their view of the colonial American Baroque, treating its forms not as immutable institutional impositions but as dynamic networks of transcultural processes and relations. Their essays trace the movement of Baroque forms between and among cultures as they develop American ways of saying and seeing.

Part 2  Transculturation: Colonial Practice “How do we explain these rival interpretations of the New World Baroque as hegemonic imposition and yet also as the capacious life way argued by Lezama and Carpentier, or the expansive ‘being-in-the-world’ offered by Édouard Glissant in an essay translated in this collection?” (BNW 625). Timothy J. Reiss asks this question in his essay on the Cuban and Mexican Baroque, and then, as if to answer Rama and Castellanos, he gives his response: “Baroque style is not merely a pack of figurative, rhetorical, and narrative conceits, a ‘user’s manual,’ but rather a process that draws together disparate elements and consequent meanings. The New World Baroque develops an imposed history into an overlay, creatively turned by diverse techniques and to diverse purposes” (BNW 398).36 The essays in part 2 are concerned with the process described by Reiss and with the “diverse techniques and diverse purposes” of New World Baroque literature and literary culture over almost three centuries of colonial rule. Baroque poetic practice in New Spain and Brazil is the subject of essays by José Pascual Buxó and Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, respectively. The former addresses the nature of originality in the Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and her Spanish precursor Luis de Góngora, both of whom exercised the Baroque poetics of imitatio, that is, the erudite, elegant, and often veiled allusion to works of “authority,” whether in philosophy, literature, the sciences, or the visual arts. Their strategies of indirection and incorporation depended on their understanding of “originality” as the integration of origins rather than their dismissal—as return in the service of (re)novation. Pascual Buxó focuses on Sor Juana’s inclusion of graphic emblems and other allegorical engravings, a device that attests to the intimate relationship in Baroque representation between seeing and reading, vision and interpretation. The transculturation of European poems and poetic practices in New Spain, and the signifying relations among verbal and visual media, are an essential part of the process that Reiss describes above.

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In Brazil, Ruedas de la Serna follows the gradual neoclassicist curbing of Gongorism in Luso-Brazilian literature as a way of locating an authentic Brazilian Baroque. Góngora was himself the object of imitatio, his work enthusiastically replicated in Brazil until the second half of the eighteenth century, when modernizing reforms were instituted by the Marquis de Pombal in Portugal. (These paralleled the contemporaneous Bourbon reforms in Spain and Spain’s overseas colonies. However, in colonial Spanish America, critics consider that the Baroque was superseded by neoclassical models, not extended by them, as Ruedas argues of the Brazilian Baroque.) To the seventeenth-century gongorine tradition of ornate poetry, Ruedas thus connects eighteenth-century Brazilian poetry of formal restraint, where imagination finds its outlet in daring conceptual and structural designs, rather than in sensuous surface overload. This distinction between an ornate Baroque and a more sober Baroque is also found in European literature, but with the two modes occurring simultaneously rather than serially. In Versions of Baroque, Frank J. Warnke’s classic study of the European Baroque, he writes of “the spare, witty, intellectual, paradoxical trend typified by Donne, Herbert, Marvell, Sponde, Quevedo, Huygens, and Fleming; and the ornate, exclamatory, emotional and extravagant trend exemplified by Crashaw, Gryphius, Marino, d’Aubigny, Góngora, and Vondel.”37 Ruedas draws an analogous, but less familiar line within the Iberian and Iberian-American Baroque, separating Portugal and Brazil from Spain and its territories, not only in literature but also, importantly, in architecture. We have said that the Baroque requires interdisciplinary and interartistic approaches. Ruedas’s discussion of divergent Lusitanian and Hispanic Baroque styles leads him (inevitably, it almost seems) to a comparison between colonial Brazilian architecture and the architecture of New Spain. He refers to Ouro Preto (literally, “black gold”) in Minas Gerais, “the eighteenthcentury Brazilian Baroque city par excellence,” as a way of defining poetic practice of the same period, and subsequent poetic practice as well. In fact, architecture is essential to the transcultural theories of the New World Baroque, and in particular to the work of two eighteenth-century architects: Antônio Francisco Lisboa, a Brazilian mulatto known as O Aleijadinho, “the Little Cripple,” and José Kondori, an Andean known as “el Indio,” or “el Quechua Kondori.”38 Our theorists do not explore the differences between these architects so much as celebrate their similarities, their Latin Americanness, that is, the Indo-Afro-Iberian character of their New World Baroque constructions. But Aleijadinho and Kondori also illustrate the differences be-

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tween the Brazilian and the New Spanish Baroque to which Ruedas refers, so a closer look is warranted here. Spanish architecture was deeply influenced by the Moorish tradition of treating buildings as enclosures facing inward to interior patios, rather than outward to the street, so it resisted the Roman Baroque style of crossing boundaries between inside and outside. Whereas in Rome, Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Francesco Borromini worked to overcome the isolation of individual buildings, developing elliptical plans and undulating walls to integrate structures into larger centralized systems and spaces, architects in Spain and its colonies refrained from translating Baroque dynamism into masses and spaces set in motion. Rather, they preferred to create dynamic effects with elaborately sculpted and painted surfaces, inside and out.39 The Mexican folk Baroque churches mentioned by Carpentier and Celorio—Tonantzintla (figure 23.3), Acatepec (figure 12.6), the Chapel of the Virgin of the Rosary in Puebla (figure 13.3), and the Church of Santo Domingo in Oaxaca (figure 13.4)—are brilliant examples of this aspect of Hispanic Baroque style, but its epitome is Kondori’s sculpted façade of San Lorenzo Potosí (1728–44) in Alto Perú, now Bolivia, mentioned by Guido, Lezama, and Celorio (figures 9.1, 9.2, 9.3). In contrast, the Brazilian province of Minas Gerais followed Rome in developing curved floor plans and façades.40 Structural dynamism, not ornamented surfaces, became the dominant form of Brazilian architectural expression, as witness Aleijadinho’s Church of San Francisco (1766–94) and his sculpted figures, like Bernini’s curving colonnade in front of St. Peter’s, embracing the space in front of the Pilgrim Church of Bom Jesús do Matosinhos in Congonhas do Campo (1796–99) (figures 11.7, 11.8, 11.9). In his essay here, Ruedas de la Serna uses the Afro-Portuguese Baroque of Ouro Preto to predict modern poetry and art, and we would add that it also predicts—or, more accurately, is recuperated in—the modernist Brazilian architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa, and Roberto Burle Marx (figures 16.1, 16.2). Ruedas’s affiliation of architecture and poetry echoes the interartistic comparisons in Haroldo de Campos’s essay and recalls Sarduy’s ellipse, Buci-Glucksmann’s “madness in vision,” and Carpentier’s “city of columns.” Analogies among expressive media characterize Neobaroque theory, as they do the Baroque artifacts they adapt and revise. In fact, Baroque artifacts are almost always mixed media, ars combinatoria in their aesthetic and formal continuities, and often in their materials as well. Baroque artists rarely worked in only one medium, as Kondori and Aleija-

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dinho attest; besides applying themselves to architecture and sculpture, Kondori was a master woodworker and Aleijadinho a painter. The maximum New World Baroque form is the retablo (altarpiece), which fills the apse and side altars in village churches as well as cathedrals. The retablo is a complex architectural structure combining sculpted figures (estofados), framed paintings, silver and gold work, and mirrors, arrayed upon or embedded in elaborately carved wood (or stone, in the stunning case of the Carmelite church in San Luis Potosí, Mexico). The structure as a whole refuses the division between canvas, carving, cornice, and column, one element engendering the next and sometimes moving out into the frescoes or plaster reliefs on adjacent ceilings and walls. The retablo is an emblem of the Baroque compulsion for connectedness and the merging of forms, what Wölfflin calls the “painterly” quality of Baroque compositions, where volumes and outlines conjoin to create “the apprehension of the world as a shifting semblance” (BNW 50). The remaining essays in part 2 address the relations of literary forms and practices in Old and New World Baroques. Timothy J. Reiss, William Childers, and Leo Cabranes-Grant explore how the Baroque facilitated transculturation and its representation in works by writers from Cervantes and Sor Juana to Carpentier and Fuentes. Dorothy Z. Baker’s essay reminds us that French Canada forms a part of Latinate America, if not Latin America as we now use the term. She focuses on the seventeenth century, and more particularly on Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit priest, and Marie de l’Incarnation, a nun of the Order of St. Ursula, missionaries to Quebec who mold the poetic figures of the French Baroque to American purposes. Rhetoric has always been an instrument of empire, and in the letters of Le Jeune and Sister Marie de l’Incarnation, it also becomes a means of “Baroque self-fashioning,” that is, a means of engaging Native American cultures to create a transcultural identity. A detailed comparison of the Baroque self-fashioning of the Jesuits, Franciscans, Augustinians, Carmelites, and other religious orders in French, Spanish, and Portuguese America has yet to be written, and this essay points to one path along which such comparative study might proceed.

Part 3  Counterconquest: Postcolonial Positions Some of the essays in this section continue the discussion of colonial practice, while others focus on the twentieth century, but all are Neobaroque in engaging Baroque formations to critique what Charles Taylor calls the “acul-

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tural theory of modernity.” According to this theory, all cultures go through the same processes of modernization—economic (industrialization, consumerism, etc.), social and political (democratization, bureaucratization, urbanization, etc.), psychological (individualism, etc.)—and depending on where they are in their “transition” to modernity, they can be labeled “developed” or “backward,” “advanced” or “underdeveloped.”41 To the contrary, these essays are decidedly unwilling to detach historical processes from the cultures in which they operate. Gonzalo Celorio and Irlemar Chiampi trace the trajectory from Baroque to Neobaroque in specific Latin American cultural contexts. Both consider the Neobaroque as an alternative modernity produced by, and suited to, cultural and political contexts in Latin America, and both apply Sarduy’s Neobaroque to several works of contemporary Latin American narrative, the better to locate his theory by practicing it. The Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes is also a cultural historian, as his essay on Faulkner attests. Faulkner is widely acknowledged by Latin American writers as an essential precursor, a fact usually attributed to his thematic penetrations into the racism, poverty, decadence, and defeat in the US South. Certainly the thematic and cultural analogies exist, but Fuentes shows that Faulkner’s ornate Baroque style is equally important. Faulkner is the “Dixie Gongorist”—a tag used by Fuentes to emphasize Faulkner’s stylistic ties to Latin America: “Gongorism is the Baroque language of our great literary tradition” (BNW 543). Faulkner’s syntactical opulence and ambivalence, his convoluted narratives that defy linear temporality, the theatrical sound and fury of his characters, the historical spectacle of Yoknapatawpha County: these are Baroque forms with obvious attraction for Latin American writers. In fact, critics are now beginning to recognize Baroque tropes and techniques in Southern literature more generally: comparative literary topics include the proximity of the Southern Gothic to the dark imaginings of the Latin American Baroque; comparative historical topics include the shared racial and cultural structures of plantations, haciendas, latifundios, and their transcultural products.42 The cultural encounters and shifting semblances of the US South are surely related to the New World Baroque as defined by Guido, Lezama, Carpentier, Celorio, and others. Both Faulkner and Fuentes engage Baroque aesthetics for Neobaroque purposes, but Fuentes does so self-consciously in ways that Faulkner does not. Fuentes ironizes Baroque forms (in Terra Nostra and Change of Skin), or uses them as tacit historical substrata for his modern Mexican settings (in Distant Relations, Aura, and parts of The Death of Artemio Cruz).43 His fiction

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depends on the “abundance” of Baroque language even as he interrogates the “absence” created by the European invasion, an opposition he develops in relation to Carpentier and Faulkner in his essay included here. Fuentes refers to the Baroque horror vacui, the “horror of a vacuum,” that leaves no space unfilled: “The Baroque, Alejo Carpentier once told me, is the language of peoples who, not knowing what is true, desperately seek it. Góngora, like Picasso, Buñuel, Carpentier or Faulkner, did not know; they discovered. The Baroque, language of abundance, is also the language of insufficiency. Only those who possess nothing can include everything. The horror vacui of the Baroque is not gratuitous—it is because the vacuum exists that nothing is certain. The verbal abundance of Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World or of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! represents a desperate invocation of language to fill the absences left by the banishment of reason and faith. In this way post-Renaissance Baroque art began to fill the abyss left by the Copernican Revolution” (BNW 543). Fuentes has been essential in propagating Neobaroque theory, in part by describing it in his essays and in larger part by dramatizing it in his own fiction. So, too, Lezama Lima: three essays examine his contribution to the discourse of the Baroque. Roberto González Echevarría, Maarten van Delden, and Christopher Winks show how authors in Europe, the United States, and the Caribbean interacted with Lezama to create their own Baroque new worlds. We conclude our volume with a short essay by the Martinican poet and cultural theorist Glissant. Like Buci-Glucksmann, Glissant privileges vision (and envisioning) as barometers of the Baroque; like Lezama and Carpentier, he makes cultural métissage its banner; and like Fuentes, he emphasizes the suitability of Baroque language (“the art of expansion”) to postcolonial contexts. Indeed, in three expansive, elliptical pages, Glissant tacitly includes the entire tradition we are tracing here. In the “unity-diversity” of his contemporary Baroque, he evokes de Campos’s anthropophagy and Lezama’s furnace of assimilation; in his reference to the “Baroque disturbances” in every culture, he exemplifies the fragmentation and nonlinear “tension” of Nietzsche, Benjamin, Sarduy, and Chiampi; and in his metaphors of “rerouting” and “relation,” he recuperates d’Ors’s idea of a transhistorical Baroque: “Therein lies the movement of the Baroque spreading into the world” (BNW 626). The title of our volume, Baroque New Worlds, intentionally echoes the “brave new world” of Shakespeare’s Baroque play, The Tempest. The phrase is uttered

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by the innocent Miranda, “O, wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!” (IV, i), and it is her father Prospero who conjures this wondrous world. Prospero’s brave new world is also a Baroque New World, with its embodied oppositions, Caliban and Ariel (now famously adopted by Latin American cultural theorists), its supernaturalism and illusionism, its self-reflexive concern for its status as theater and dream, and its themes of imperialism, colonization, enslavement, primitivism, utopia, political legitimacy, and usurpation, themes that embody an acute awareness of the transatlantic exchange fully underway by the time of the play (first performed in 1611). It is known that Shakespeare used contemporary chronicles from the Americas as the basis for his story of shipwreck, deceit, and reconciliation, including the report of a shipwreck off the islands of Bermuda in 1609—a ship on its way to the recently founded English colony of Virginia. As the various subplots of The Tempest move toward calm, Prospero recognizes that his “madness in vision” requires observation as well as epiphany, sensory contact as well as ecstatic imagining. He breaks his imperial staff, dismisses his airy servant, and vows to drown his book of magic “deeper than did ever plummet sound” (V, i). Henceforth he will behold his brave/Baroque New World with everyday eyes. We recommend that you do the same. The Neobaroque cannot be theorized without being experienced, so drown this book, too, and walk instead through New World Baroque cities and villages, circulate in their public spaces and stand in their buildings, study their retablos and paintings and sculptures, touch the stone carvings of their doorways and façades, see how multiple cultures and histories are accommodated, including today’s. Listen for Sor Juana, who in her sonnet (our epigraph) traces a trajectory like that of her fictive forebear Prospero, concluding with her own call to sensory experience: “Que yo, más cuerda en la fortuna mía, / tengo en entrambas manos ambos ojos / y solamente lo que toco veo” (For I, in fortune mine more wise today / In my two hands both of my eyes retain / And only what I touch do I then see).44 Despite the skepticism of the Baroque about the efficacy of the senses, despite its preoccupation with deceptive appearances and recurring themes of illusion and disillusionment—despite these undercurrents and also because of them, the Baroque celebrates sensory opulence, corporeal and material abundance, kinetic exuberance. Baroque forms invite participation; only then do sight and insight, thought and feeling, theory and

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practice converge, as the Neobaroque requires. “Therein lies the movement of the Baroque spreading into the world.”

Notes 1 All references to essays published in the present volume (BNW) will be cited in the

text.

2 Medieval scholastics invented words to recall the three-part structure of a syllo-

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gism: the letter a in a syllable meant an affirmative universal proposition, the letter o an affirmative particular proposition. Erwin Panofsky gives as examples the words barbara and baroco: barbara stands for a syllogism with three affirmative universals (“All men are mortal; all mortals need food; therefore, all men must eat”) and baroco for a syllogism beginning with an affirmative universal followed by two affirmative particulars (“All cats have whiskers; some animals have no whiskers; therefore, not all animals are cats”). Panofsky, “What Is Baroque,” 19; for a further discussion of the implications of this etymology, see Zamora, The Inordinate Eye, 233–35. Migliorini, “Etimologia e storia del termine ‘Baroco’,” 39–54; Malcuzynski, “(Neo)‑  Baroque Effect”; Hoffmeister, Deutsche und europäische Barockliteratur; Panofsky, “What Is Baroque,” 19; Kubler, Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, 128. Migliorini and Malcuzynski go into detail about the theory of the usurer’s contract as a source of the word baroque. For a comparative description of the Catholic and Protestant Baroque in Europe, see Hauser, Social History of Art, 172–225. See Robert Harbison’s chapters on the architecture of “colonial Baroque” and “Neo- and Pseudo-Baroque,” in Reflections on Baroque, 164–221, in which the author moves from New Spain to Portuguese India (focusing on the Goan Baroque), and then to Russia, Japan, and the United States. His final chapter, “Baroque in the Twentieth Century,” focuses on the Neobaroque architecture of Frank Gehry and other architects usually termed modernist or postmodernist. Tequitqui is the term used in Mexico to refer to Christian artifacts made by indigenous artisans. It is Nahuatl for tributario, someone who pays tribute to an imperial ruler, in this case the carvings, paintings, and construction done at the behest of the European colonizers. The term was first used to refer to these syncretic artifacts (productos mestizos) by José Moreno Villa in 1948 in Lo mexicano en las artes plásticas. See also Constantino Reyes-Valerio, Arte indocristiano. Silk, ceramics, ivory carvings, and the like also stayed in New Spain, where vast wealth was being amassed and the market for Asian products thrived. Asian artifacts and media were also widely copied in local modes and materials: for example, painted screens (biombos), lacquer work, Chinese motifs in pottery and textiles (e.g., “chintz,” an inexpensive printed cotton produced in India after Chinese designs and imported into Mexico in great quantities). Then there were the Asian

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artists who worked in the Americas. Namban designates the work of Japanese artists in colonial Mexico at the end of the sixteenth and into the seventeenth century. The word means “barbarians from the south,” referring to Europeans, and is another example of New World Baroque syncretism. See Rodrigo Rivero Lake, El arte namban en el México virreinal. Irlemar Chiampi begins her essay in this volume by tracing four “insertions” of Baroque aesthetics into Latin American literary modernity. We place her essay in part 3 because she focuses on the fourth “insertion,” the Sarduyan Neobaroque beginning in the 1970s, but her account of the twentieth-century “modernization of the Baroque,” beginning with Rubén Dario, provides a useful overview of the “cycles and recycles” that we are tracing here. See Oropesa, Contemporáneos Group, in which the author argues for the Neobaroque aesthetics of the writers in this group, among them Javier Villaurrutia, Jorge Cuesta, and Salvador Novo. Oropesa correctly credits their Mexican precursors Amado Nervo, Ermilo Abreu Gómez, and above all Alfonso Reyes with making Baroque poetry and poetics available to the Contemporáneos. Beyond their Baroque aesthetics are their Baroque thematics: for example, Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana (1946) recuperates and revises La grandeza mexicana (1604), the urban epic by the Mexican Baroque poet Bernardo de Balbuena. For a discussion of Balbuena, see Timothy J. Reiss’s essay in this volume. See Borges’s early collections for his essays on these Baroque writers: Inquisiciones (1925), El tamaño de mi esperanza (1926), and El idioma de los argentinos (1928), which are reprinted together in Textos recobrados, 1919–1929. His story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” was published in 1944, in Ficciones. Eliot, “Metaphysical Poets,” 247. His full quote is as follows: “A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience.” Eliot makes this statement about John Donne and Baroque poetry more generally, with its “conceits” that integrate heterogeneous ideas and images. Donne’s poetry precedes the “dissociation of sensibility,” that is, the separation of thought from feeling, that Eliot considered characteristic of his own times and of Enlightenment modernity. See Mario Praz’s essay in this volume, and our introduction to it, for a further discussion of the English Baroque and Eliot’s relation to it. Federico García Lorca, Alfonso Reyes, Haroldo de Campos, and Octavio Paz also mention the French Symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) in the context of Baroque aesthetics. In her essay in this volume, Irlemar Chiampi explains the repeated linkage of Mallarmé to Góngora (and Baroque poetics generally): “The ‘discovery’ of the Gorgorine metaphor is tied to the postsymbolist critical context in Europe, where the aesthetic revalidation of Góngora begins through the parallel with Mallarmé. . . . It is only after the fin de siècle revolution in poetic language that Góngora becomes legible to modernity” (BNW 510). In this context, see the recent English translation of Góngora’s poems, Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora. Paz’s full statement goes as follows: “This coincidence between baroque and avantgarde poetics is not a question of influences but rather a question an affinity operat-

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ing as much in the sphere of the intellect as in sensibilities. The baroque poet hoped to astonish and astound; Apollinaire proposed exactly the same thing when he extolled surprise as one of the basic elements of poetry. The baroque poet attempts to discover the secret relationship among things, exactly as affirmed and practiced by Eliot and Wallace Stevens. . . . These similarities are all the more remarkable when one considers that the baroque and the avant-garde spring from totally different origins, one from mannerism, the other from romanticism. The solution to this small mystery is perhaps to be found in the role played by form in both baroque and avant-garde aesthetics. Baroque and avant-garde are both formalisms” (Paz, Sor Juana, 53; emphasis added). Evaluating Paz’s parallel discussion of Baroque and avant-garde aesthetics, Irlemar Chiampi asserts that he has provided an “archaeology of modernity in its decisive moments.” Clearly she offers her own “archaeology of modernity” in a similar spirit (BNW 524). García Lorca, “La imagen poética de Don Luis de Góngora.” For an account of the links that García Lorca intended to forge in this “manifesto” between Góngora’s poetic practice and his own, see Hugo Friedrich, The Structure of Modern Poetry from the Mid-Nineteenth to the Mid-Twentieth Century, 110–14. In art, too, Góngora’s poetics of artifice and abstraction became fashionable, controversial, and useful. That Góngora became a kind of totem for the avant-garde is suggested by the fact that in 1948, Pablo Picasso “drew” a selection of Góngora’s poems calligraphically, with illustrations in the margins. An English translation of Picasso’s selections of Góngora now exists with Picasso’s drawings accompanying them (the author being listed as Picasso!). See Picasso, Gongora. In an essay not included here, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” Carpentier asks: “And why is Latin America the chosen territory of the baroque? Because all symbiosis, all mestizaje, engenders the baroque” (100). This metaphor appeared not in reference to d’Ors but to a performance of the Lipizzaner stallions in Vienna; Herbert Muschamp finds the Baroque “still going strong” long after “the Hapsburg dynasty bit the dust in 1918.” “Horse Play in Vienna,” New York Times, March 25, 2007. The argument for the Baroque as a worldview rather than as a period in European art history is reflected in the critical terminology: d’Ors’s recurring cultural “eons,” Lezama’s “imaginary eras,” Carpentier’s “spirit,” Buci-Glucksmann’s “sensibility,” Bolívar Echeverría’s “ethos.” In this regard, see Echeverría, Modernidad, mestizaje cultural, ethos barroco. Why should Cubans play such an important role in theorizing the American Baroque? Cuba has been a port of entry and a principle site of mediation between Europe and Latin America for more than four centuries, and it may be this habit of mediation that explains the Cuban predominance in this area. Lezama and Carpentier take their key examples of the New World Baroque from elsewhere (Mexico, Peru, Brazil), and France, too, plays a major role for Carpentier (the French surrealism of the 1930s) and Sarduy (the Tel Quel group in the 1970s and 1980s). Lezama was the only one of the three who lived his whole life in Havana (he left the island only twice, briefly, for Jamaica and Mexico), but his theory is also impelled by out-

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side influences, namely, the Argentine art historian Ángel Guido, whose essay of 1936, as already noted, introduced the idea of the New World Baroque as a reconquista of American territory by and for Americans. Lezama develops Guido’s reconquista into his own contraconquista, using the same architectural examples given by Guido: the churches of the Andean architect José Kondori in Potosí, Bolivia (figures 9.1, 9.2, 9.3) and the Brazilian architect and sculptor Antônio Francisco Lisboa (Aleijadinho) in Ouro Preto and Congonhas do Campo, Brazil (figures 11.7, 11.8, 11.9). What is being theorized by these Cuban writers, at least in part, is the relation of Cuba to the rest of Latin America, whether to its shared colonial and postcolonial experience (Lezama and Carpentier) or its shared textual strategies (Sarduy). On the Cuban Baroque, see Kaup, “‘Vaya Papaya!’” Sarduy discusses Holbein’s anamorphosis and its rhetorical analogues in his essay of 1981, “La simulación,” in Obra completa, ed. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl (Madrid: ALLCA XX, 1999), 2:1264–344. For a discussion of this spatial/rhetorical trope, see Gallo, “Sarduy avec Lacan.” De Campos, “The Open Work of Art,” 1955, in Novas, 220–22. Sefamí, “El llamado de los deseosos.” The Neobaroque anthology Medusario (which includes excerpts from Galaxias), published in 1996, demonstrates that this movement continues to gather force, including poets from across the American hemisphere, from the Southern Cone (the Argentine Néstor Perlongher, the Chilean Raúl Zurita, the Uruguayan Eduardo Milán) to Latin American exiles in the United States (the Cuban José Kozer and the Uruguayan Eduardo Espina). See Echevarrén et al., Medusario. For an overview of this “transculturalist” tradition, see Spitta, Between Two Waters. See a discussion of Monsiváis as a barroco contemporáneo in a symposium on the occasion of his seventieth birthday; the speakers emphasize his use of verbal play, paradox, and allusion for the purpose of social and political commentary and critique (http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2008/05/08/index.php?section=cultura&  article=a05n1cul, accessed September 3, 2009). For a theory of the brut barroco that focuses on the capacity of texts to chronicle the excesses, extremes, and contradictions of contemporary urban Latin America, and particularly Mexico City, see Zamora, “New World Baroque, Neobaroque, Brut Barroco.” The German Romantic philosopher Novalis, as well as Wölfflin, stands as Roh’s precursor. Novalis first used the term magical realism to describe an idealized philosophical protagonist—a “magical realist”—capable of integrating ordinary phenomena and metaphysical meanings. Novalis envisions such a protagonist in notebook entries in 1799, referring to a “magical idealist” and a “magical realist,” the latter of whom overarches the oppositions of known and unknown, finite and infinite. Novalis, Allgemeines Brouillon, 1798–99, in Werke, ed. G. Schultz (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1969), 479. See Irene Guenther, “Magic Realism in the Weimar Republic,” in Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 34, 64n15. See also Christopher Warnes, “Naturalizing the Supernatural: Faith, Irreverence, and Magical Realism,” Literature Compass, vol. 2 (February 2005): 1–16; and “Magical Realism and the Legacy of German Idealism,” Modern Language Review 101, no. 2 (2006): 488–98.

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26 Roh, Nach-Expressionismus, Magischer Realismus; in Spanish (with the terms of the

title reversed), Realismo mágico, post expresionismo: Problemas de la pintura europea más reciente, trans. Fernando Vela (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1927). In fact, the essay version of Roh’s text published in Ortega’s magazine omits the term post expresionismo altogether. See Revista de Occidente, no. 16 (1927): 274–301. An excerpt from Roh’s essay, “Magical Realism: Postexpressionsm,” is translated by Wendy B. Faris in Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 15–32. Ortega’s theory of the European avant-garde was strongly influenced by German art historians. Roberto González Echevarría, in his essay “Góngora’s and Lezama’s Appetites,” included here, points out that Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraction and Empathy (1907) and Form in Gothic (1912) were important to Ortega. So was Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History, which was translated into Spanish and published by Ortega’s press Espasa Calpe between 1919 and 1926, just before Roh’s essay in 1927. González Echevarría disagrees with René Wellek’s idea (described in note 30, below) that the German revival of the Baroque, and particularly of Góngora, during this period paralleled the taste for expressionism’s chaotic forms: “Góngora is clearly part of a given context, of an entire avant-garde aesthetic that sees him as the champion of a pure and hermetic poetry” (BNW 557). Indeed, Roh’s “magical realist” painters (Henri Rousseau, Giorgio de Chirico, Alexander Kanoldt, Franz Radziwill, George Grosz, Otto Dix, etc.) would seem to reflect the German preference for Góngora in another medium: the hyperrealistic clarity of their painting, like Góngora’s “pure” poetry, was taken as an antidote to expressionism and to the political and social chaos that it reflected. For a further discussion of Roh and Ortega, and the relations of Baroque and avant-garde aesthetics during this period, see Zamora, “Swords and Silver Rings.” 27 Angela Ndalianis connects the cinematic medium and other forms of popular entertainment to Baroque theatricality, Baroque spectacle: “The underlying concern with evoking an aesthetic of astonishment reveals the baroque heritage present in the beginnings of the cinema.” Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, 83. See also James Tweedie, “Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books,” Cinema Journal 40, n0. 1 (fall 2000): 104–26. Neobaroque film has a large and varied repertoire: Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio (1986), Raúl Ruiz’s Life Is a Dream (1986), based on Calderón de la Barca’s play of that title, and Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991), based, of course, on Shakespeare’s The Tempest, to name only three examples. Mainstream films are increasingly driven by Neobaroque illusionist tropes and trompe l’oeil devices, notably those written by Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich [1999], Adaptation [2002], and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [2004]), and others such as Christoper Nolan’s Memento (2000), Alejandro González’ Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), Marc Forster’s Stranger than Fiction (2006), and Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2006). Serge Gruzinski begins his essay on the Baroque imaginary (historical and contemporary) with a list that includes Peter Greenaway, Pedro Almodóvar, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall , and Madonna. See Gruzinski, “From the Baroque to the Neo-Baroque: The Colonial Sources of the Postmodern

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29

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Era (The Mexican Case),” in El corazón sangrante/The Bleeding Heart, 62–89. Also by the same author: La Guerre des images de Christophe Colomb à Blade Runner (1492–2019). There are a number of recent full-length studies of the emergence of this tradition: Calabrese, Neo-Baroque; Pauly, Neobarroco; Calloway, Baroque Baroque; Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco; Armstrong and Zamudio-Taylor, Ultra-Baroque; Harbison, Reflections on Baroque; Chiampi, Barroco y modernidad; Lambert, Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture; Spadaccini and Martín-Estudillo, Hispanic Baroques; and Zamora, The Inordinate Eye. Burckhardt’s contribution is unquestionable. As senior colleague to Nietzsche and a mentor to Wölfflin, Burckhardt set the terms, whether to depart from them (in Nietzsche’s case), or to elaborate them (in Wölfflin’s). In his tour of Italian art, The Cicerone, Burckhardt presents sections titled “Architecture and Decoration of the Baroque,” “Sculpture of the Baroque,” and “Modern Painting,” the last of which includes discussions of Caravaggio and Rubens. In each medium, the Baroque appears as a negative foil to the Renaissance, symptomatic of a cruder sensibility and a decline in quality. Burckhardt never overcame his classicist’s prejudice against the Baroque, but he nonetheless offered detailed observations on Baroque styles. That Burckhardt, Nietzsche, and Wölfflin were at the University of Basel together begs for further consideration of a “Basel Baroque.” Surely these men would have discussed the Baroque from their different perspectives, as we imagine Alfonso Reyes, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and Jorge Luis Borges to have done in Buenos Aires in the late 1920s, and as we now think of the Cuban triumvirate Carpentier, Lezama, and Sarduy, revising the New World Baroque and reacting to and against each other’s work. Thus we may also think of this Basel triumvirate—a historian, a philosopher, and an art historian—(re)defining European aesthetics against received norms and each other. More generally, Wellek addresses the early German enthusiasm for the Baroque: “I would be hesi­tant to dogmatize about the exact reasons for this revival of German baroque poetry; part of it may be due to Spengler, who had used the term vaguely in The Decline of the West, and part is due, I think, to a misunderstanding. Baroque poetry was felt to be similar to the most recent German ex­pressionism, to its turbulent, tense, torn diction and tragic view of the world induced by the aftermath of the war; part was a genuine change of taste, a sudden comprehension for an art despised before because of its conventions, its sup­posedly tasteless metaphors, its violent contrasts and antitheses” (BNW 98). As stated in note 26, González Echeverría disagrees, but the overarching point here is the rich exchange between Germany and Spain; artists and theorists in both countries worked to recuperate and reconstitute Baroque forms for reasons described in the foundational essays of our volume, and in our introductions to them. The dismissal of the Baroque has also characterized Anglo-American art historical studies, where the heightened naturalism of Baroque painting has been treated as unattractive or unseemly, and its vertiginous movement, chiaroscuro depths, and densely decorated surfaces as overstated and melodramatic. Fortunately, this at-

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titude is changing before our eyes, with several recent exhibitions in the United States and England on Baroque and New World Baroque art, each with a splendid catalogue. They include Horacio and Artemesia Gentileschi and The Colonial Andes: Tapestries and Silverwork, 1530–1830, both originating at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; at the London Royal Academy of Arts, The Genius of Rome, 1592–1623; at the Denver Art Museum and traveling to the Meadows Museum in Dallas, Painting the New World: Mexican Art and Life, 1521–1821; at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Splendor of Ruins in French Landscape Painting, 1630–1800, The Grandeur of Viceregal Mexico: Treasures from the Franz Meyer Museum, and Inverted Utopias: Avant-Garde Art in Latin America; and most recently, at the Philadelphia Art Museum, then traveling to Mexico City and Los Angeles, Tesoros/Treasures/Tesouros: The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820. It is worth noting a parallel trend in Baroque opera, which is now experiencing a major revival; operas by Claudio Monteverdi, Georg Friedrich Handel, and Henry Purcell are being performed as never before in the United States and Europe, often using period instruments or period performing styles. And in Mexico, interest in Baroque instrumental music has grown exponentially in the past ten years as scores for chamber orchestras, smaller ensembles, organ, and voice have been recuperated from ecclesiastical archives and recorded beautifully by a number of groups and individual musicians. Rama, Lettered City, 10. José Antonio Maravall’s classic study of seventeenthcentury Spain supports Rama’s contention, showing how Spain appropriated the historical Baroque for the Counter-Reformation’s universalizing mission to restore Catholic dominance in Europe and the New World. See his Culture of the Baroque. Castellanos, “Language as an Instrument of Domination,” 251, 252. This essay appeared in Mujer que sabe latín (1973), a collection of essays primarily on women writers and feminist issues. The title of the collection comes from a rhyming jingle: “Mujer que sabe latín / Ni encuentra marido / Ni tiene buen fin” (A woman who knows Latin / won’t find a husband / or come to a good end). This particular essay is an exception in finding Baroque language oppressive with respect to class and race rather than gender. Ibid., 251. Castellanos, “Once Again Sor Juana.” Reiss’s statement is made in response to the following Latin American colonial historians, who focus on the oppressive nature of the institutional Baroque and are discussed at the beginning of his essay: Picón-Salas, “Baroque of the Indies”; Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico; Acosta, “El barroco de indias”; and Beverley, “Barroco de estado.” Warnke, Versions of Baroque, 12. These branches of Baroque style, known in the Spanish tradition as culteranismo and conceptismo, respectively, are discussed in several of the essays included in this volume. Guido, Lezama, and Celorio refer to these architects in their essays included here. Carlos Fuentes, in his chapter “The Baroque Culture of the New World” in The Buried Mirror also writes about them, echoing Lezama’s description of the façade of

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San Lorenzo Potosí (see figures 9.1–3): “In the Indian quarter of the great mining capital of Potosí, hearsay has it, there once lived an orphaned Indian from the tropical lowlands of the Chaco. According to myth, he went by the name of José Kondori, and in Potosí he learned to work wood and the crafts of inlaying and furniture building. By 1728, this self-taught Indian architect was constructing the magnificent churches of Potosí, surely the greatest illustration of the meaning of the baroque in Latin America. Among the angels and the vines of the façade of San Lorenzo, an Indian princess appears, and all the symbols of the defeated Incan culture are given a new lease on life. The Indian half-moon disturbs the traditional serenity of the Corinthian vine. American jungle leaves and Mediterranean clover intertwine. The sirens of Ulysses play the Peruvian guitar. And the flora, the fauna, the music, and even the sun of the ancient Indian world are forcefully asserted. There shall be no European culture in the New World unless all of these, our native symbols, are admitted on an equal footing” (196). As for Aleijadinho, Fuentes focuses not on his façades but on his life-size statues of Old Testament prophets (see figures 11.8, 11.9), deployed along the steps of the Pilgrim Church of Bom Jesús do Matosinhos in Congonhas do Campo: “In the same way that a Spanish American baroque came into being, from Tonantzintla in Mexico to Potosí in upper Peru, through the encounter of Indian and European, so the fusion of black and Portuguese created one the greatest monuments of the New World: the Afro-Portuguese baroque of Minas Gerais in Brazil, the most opulent gold-producing region of the world in the eighteenth century. There, the mulatto Antônio Francisco Lisboa, known as Aleijadinho, wrought what many consider the culmination of the Latin American baroque. The son of a black slave woman and a white Portuguese architect, Aleijadinho was shunned by both his parents, and the world: the young man suffered from leprosy. So instead of seeking the society of men and women, he joined a baroque society of stone. The twelve statues of the prophets he carved in the staircase leading to the Church of the Good Child Jesus in Congonhas do Campo reject the symmetry of classical sculptures. Like Bernini’s Italian figures (but how absolutely remote from them geographically!), these are three-dimensional, moving statues, rushing down toward the spectator; they are rebellious statues, twisted in mystical anguish and human anger” (200–201). 39 In his study of the Iberian-American Baroque (Portuguese and Spanish America), Yves Bottineau affirms that in Spanish America, “there is a marked scarcity of curved plans and undulating walls.” Iberian-American Baroque, 90. Nevertheless, in “Baroque Curiosity,” Lezama refers to Borromini’s influence on the cathedral in Havana and its relation to the surrounding streets (BNW 234). As these contradictory assertions suggest, no single trajectory of influence or argument suffices to encapsulate the proliferating forms of the New World Baroque. 40 After 1755, as a consequence of the gold and diamond rush that brought sudden wealth to the province of Minas Gerais, this region “monopolized building activity in Brazil” (Kubler and Soria, Art and Architecture, 117). On the Brazilian Baroque of Minas Gerais, see Smith, “Colonial Architecture of Minas Gerais in Brazil”; Tribe,

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“Mulatto as Artist and Image”; and the various essays in the section titled “Baroque Brazil” in Sullivan, Brazil, 112–309. Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” in Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 172–96. See, for example, Patricia Yaeger, “Circum-Atlantic Super-abundance”; and Jon Smith and Deborah Cohn, eds., Look Away! The U.S. South in New World Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004). See John Ochoa’s discussion of Fuentes’s ironized Baroque in his “Threats of Collapse.” Cruz, Sonnets of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, 26, 27.

1 Part One 4 Representation Foundational Essays on Baroque Aesthetics and Ideology

  Chapter One  

On the Baroque Friedrich Nietzsche

Translated by Monika Kaup

He who knows that he is not born or trained to master dialectic and the unfolding of ideas as a thinker or writer will unconsciously resort to rhetoric and dramatic expression, for after all his goal is to make himself understood and in this way gain in forcefulness; he does not care whether he honestly guides the hearts and minds of his fellow men, like a shepherd, or whether he captures them by surprise, like a robber. This also applies to the visual arts and music, where a feeling of deficiency in dialectic, or expression and narration—accompanied by an urgent, overwhelming will to form— ­produces that species or style known as the Baroque. Only the ignorant and arrogant, by the way, will immediately associate this word with something to be disparaged. The Baroque always arises with the decline of great art, when the demands of classical expression become too great. This natural process will be observed with melancholy on the one hand, for it is a harbinger of the night, but also with admiration, for it possesses unique compensatory skills of expression and narration. The Baroque comprises, first, the choice of material and subjects of the greatest dramatic tension, which make the heart tremble even without art, because heaven and hell are too close to the emotions. Then, the oratory of strong passions and gestures, of the uglyand-sublime, of great masses, of sheer quantity (as is already announced in Michelangelo, the father or grandfather of Italian Baroque artists); the lights of dusk, transfiguration, or conflagration playing on these strongly molded forms; ever new risks in instruments and intentions, strongly accented by artists for artists, while the layperson must fancy that he witnesses a constant and unconscious overflowing of primitive nature—art’s horns of plenty. All these characteristics, which constitute the greatness of the Baroque, are neither possible nor permissible in earlier, pre-classical and classical periods

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of art. Such delicacies have long been forbidden fruit hanging on the tree. In our own time, as music is passing into a final phase, we may become familiar with the phenomenon of the Baroque in its unique splendor and find much that is instructive about earlier periods, for the Baroque has often recurred since the time of ancient Greece: in poetry, in oratory, in prose, in sculpture, and—as is well known—in architecture. Although the Baroque falls short of the highest nobility—an innocent, unconscious, and triumphant perfection—it has nevertheless given pleasure to many of the best and most serious minds of its time. As mentioned above, this is why it is arrogant simply to vilify the Baroque, though we may be glad if it does not desensitize our taste for the purer and greater style.

Editors’ Note to Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art,   Excerpt from the Introduction, by Heinrich Wölfflin

Like Nietzsche, the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) was influenced by Jacob Burckhardt at the University of Basel. Wölfflin was Burckhardt’s student there, and the latter’s discussion of the Baroque in The Cicerone (1855) influenced the former in ways that we note below, but Wölfflin would also depart radically from Burckhardt’s negative judgments to propose a far more resonant conception of Baroque art and architecture. After studying for periods in Berlin and Munich and spending two years in Italy, Wölfflin completed his doctoral studies in 1888. He taught for five years at the University of Basel as a lecturer and then, in 1893, at the age of twentyeight, he was appointed to succeed his professor and mentor Burckhardt. He taught at the University of Berlin from 1901 to 1912, the University of Munich from 1912 to 1924 (as we have had occasion to note in our general introduction). He then returned to Switzerland to the University of Zurich, where among many other projects, he reedited the works of Burckhardt. Wölfflin was the first to offer a systematic, value-neutral definition of the Baroque as a distinct art historical period and style. His 1888 study, Renaissance and Baroque, prepared the way for his major work, Principles of Art History (1915), which was translated into Spanish by José Ortega y Gasset’s influential press, Espasa-Calpe, between 1919 and 1926. For much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Baroque had been synonymous with decadence, aberration, and disease, and it was Wölfflin who, with his sober, formalist analysis, began the process of recovery and revalidation. He argued that the Baroque was not inferior to Renaissance classicism but a radically different and equally valuable aesthetic, and his analysis is structured as a series of oppositions by which he weighed and measured the differences between the two.

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The excerpt that follows, from the introduction to Principles of Art History, is Wölfflin’s synopsis of his five antithetical paired categories, with Renaissance classicism corresponding to the first term and Baroque art to the second: linear versus painterly; plane versus recession; closed versus open form; multiplicity versus unity; absolute versus relative clarity. The five chapters of Principles discuss these oppositions in turn, moving across different media, from painting to sculpture and architecture. The first chapter, “Linear and Painterly,” argues that Renaissance classicism “represents things as they are,” whereas Baroque art represents things “as they seem to be” (Principles 20). Classical “linearity” defines things by their edges (lines and outlines), whereas the Baroque “painterly” style shifts attention toward masses, color, and light. In chapter 2, “Plane and Recession,” Wölfflin finds that Renaissance classicism treats perspective as a sequence of static planes, whereas the Baroque emphasizes depth and restlessness. In chapter 3, “Closed and Open Form,” Wölfflin argues that Renaissance classicism is characterized by a closed, balanced, self-contained composition that “points everywhere back to itself,” whereas the Baroque prefers an asymmetrical and open composition that “everywhere points out beyond itself ” (Principles 124). Chapter 4, “Multiplicity and Unity,” treats the relationship between parts and the whole. In Renaissance classicism, according to Wölfflin, parts are coordinated into a “multiple whole” without losing their independence. In contrast, “the Baroque no longer reckons with a multiplicity of coordinate units, harmoniously interdependent, but with an absolute unity in which the individual part has lost its individual rights” (Principles 157). Chapter 5, “Clearness and Unclearness,” expands on the subject of clarity already raised in the first two principles (and chapters). Renaissance classicism subordinates everything to the ideal of an objective definition of forms and things, whereas the Baroque liberates color and light from the priority of line, preferring the play of light and shadow (tenebrism, chiaroscuro): emotion rather than clarity characterizes Wölfflin’s Baroque. Because we are interested in the conceptual genealogy of the Baroque, it is interesting to note that Burckhardt prefigures the first two of Wölfflin’s principles, the “painterly” style of the Baroque and its “recession,” or, as Burckhardt put it, its “simulation of perspectival depth.” Wölfflin has been criticized, as well as celebrated, for his formalist analysis, which disregards social and cultural factors, and depends on diametrical oppositions between Renaissance classicism and the Baroque. The German art historian Erwin Panofsky, in his own landmark essay “What Is Baroque?,”

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accuses Wölfflin of ignoring artistic production between “roughly speaking,  the death of Raphael in 1520 and the full-fledged seventeenth century,” thus creating the mistaken “impression of a straight, diametrical contrast be‑  tween Baroque and Renaissance where, in reality, a much more complex development had taken place” (20). Arnold Hauser seconds this critique in Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque (1957). Indeed, art historians now generally agree that classicism is implicated in the Baroque, rather than oppositional to it, and they also stress the cultural complexities in which diverse Baroque styles flourished. Nonetheless, Wölfflin’s formalist account remains the indispensable paradigm shift in the process whereby over the course of the twentieth century, the Baroque would be recuperated for modern use.

Bibliography By the Author

Wölfflin, Heinrich. Excerpt from the Introduction to Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. 1915. Trans. M. D. Hottinger. New York: Dover, 1950. 1–17; 13–17 included here. ———. Renaissance and Baroque. 1888. Trans. Kathrin Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Additional Readings

Brown, Marshall. “The Classic Is the Baroque: On the Principle of Wölfflin’s Art History.” Critical Inquiry 9, no. 2 (1982): 379–404. Burckhardt, Jacob. The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy. Trans. A. H. Clough. New York: Garland, 1979. Hauser, Arnold. “The Concept of the Baroque.” In The Social History of Art. Vol. 2, Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque. 1957. New York: Vintage, 1985. 172–82. Martin, John Rupert. Baroque. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Panofsky, Erwin. “What Is Baroque?” 1934. In Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. 19–88.

  Chapter Two  

Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art

Excerpt from the Introduction Heinrich Wölfflin

The Most General Representational Forms This volume is occupied with the discussion of these universal forms of representation. It does not analyse the beauty of Leonardo but the element in which that beauty became manifest. It does not analyse the representation of nature according to its imitational content, and how, for instance, the naturalism of the sixteenth century may be distinguished from that of the seventeenth, but the mode of perception which lies at the root of the representative arts in the various centuries. Let us try to sift out these basic forms in the domain of more modern art. We denote the series of periods with the names Early Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Baroque, names that mean little and must lead to misunderstanding in their application to south and north, but are hardly to be ousted now. Unfortunately, the symbolic analogy bud, blood, decay, plays a secondary and misleading part. If there is in fact a qualitative difference between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in the sense that the fifteenth had gradually to acquire by labour the insight into effects which was at the free disposal of the sixteenth, the (classic) art of the Cinquecento [sixteenth century] and the (Baroque) art of the Seicento [seventeenth century] are equal in point of value. The word classic here denotes no judgment of value, for Baroque has its classicism too. Baroque (or, let us say, modern art) is neither a rise nor a decline from classic, but a totally different art. The occidental development of modern times cannot simply be reduced to a curve with rise, height, and decline: it has two culminating points. We can turn our sympathy to one or to the other, but we must realize that that is an arbitrary judgment, just as it

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Wölfflin

is an arbitrary judgment to say that the rose-bush lives its supreme moment in the formation of the flower, the apple-tree in that of the fruit. For the sake of simplicity, we must speak of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as units of style, although these periods signify no homogeneous production, and, in particular, the features of the Seicento had begun to take shape long before the year 1600, just as, on the other hand, they long continued to affect the appearance of the eighteenth century. Our object is to compare type with type, the finished with the finished. Of course, in the strictest sense of the word, there is nothing “finished”: all historical material is subject to continual transformation; but we must make up our minds to establish the distinctions at a fruitful point, and there to let them speak as contrasts, if we are not to let the whole development slip through our fingers. The preliminary stages of the High Renaissance are not to be ignored, but they represent an archaic form of art, an art of primitives, for whom established pictorial form does not yet exist. But to expose the individual differences which lead from the style of the sixteenth century to that of the seventeenth must be left to a detailed historical survey which will, to tell the truth, only do justice to its task when it has the determining concepts at its disposal. If we are not mistaken, the development can be reduced, as a provisional formulation, to the following five pairs of concepts: 1 The development from the linear to the painterly, i.e. the development of line as the path of vision and guide of the eye, and the gradual depreciation of line: in more general terms, the perception of the object by its tangible character—in outline and surfaces—on the one hand, and on the other, a perception which is by way of surrendering itself to the mere visual appearance and can abandon “tangible” design. In the former case the stress is laid on the limits of things; in the other the work tends to look limitless. Seeing by volumes and outlines isolates objects: for the painterly eye, they merge. In the one case interest lies more in the perception of individual material objects as solid, tangible bodies; in the other, in the apprehension of the world as a shifting semblance. 2 The development from plane to recession. Classic art reduces the parts of a total form to a sequence of planes, the Baroque emphasizes depth. Plane is the element of line, extension in one plane the form of the greatest explic  “Klassisch.” The word classic throughout this book refers to the art of the High Re-

naissance. It implies, however, not only a historical phase of art, but a special mode of creation of which that art is an instance.—Trans.

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itness: with the discounting of the contour comes the discounting of the plane, and the eye relates objects essentially in the direction of forwards and backwards. This is no qualitative difference: with a greater power of representing spatial depths, the innovation has nothing directly to do: it signifies rather a radically different mode of representation, just as “plane style” in our sense is not the style of primitive art, but makes its appearance only at the moment at which foreshortening and spatial illusion are completely mastered. 3 The development from closed to open form. Every work of art must be a finite whole, and it is a defect if we do not feel that it is self-contained, but the interpretation of this demand in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is so different that, in comparison with the loose form of the Baroque, classic design may be taken as the form of closed composition. The relaxation of rules, the yielding of tectonic strength, or whatever name we may give to the process, does not merely signify an enhancement of interest, but is a new mode of representation consistently carried out, and hence this factor is to be adopted among the basic forms of representation. 4 The development from multiplicity to unity. In the system of a classic composition, the single parts, however firmly they may be rooted in the whole, maintain a certain independence. It is not the anarchy of primitive art: the part is conditioned by the whole, and yet does not cease to have its own life. For the spectator, that presupposes an articulation, a progress from part to part, which is a very different operation from perception as a whole, such as the seventeenth century applies and demands. In both styles unity is the chief aim (in contrast to the pre-classic period which did not yet understand the idea in its true sense), but in the one case unity is achieved by a harmony of free parts, in the other, by a union of parts in a single theme, or by the subordination, to one unconditioned dominant, of all other elements. 5 The absolute and the relative clarity of the subject. This is a contrast which at first borders on the contrast between linear and painterly. The representation of things as they are, taken singly and accessible to plastic feeling, and the representation of things as they look, seen as a whole, and rather by their non-plastic qualities. But it is a special feature of the classic age that it developed an ideal of perfect clarity which the fifteenth century only vaguely suspected, and which the seventeenth voluntarily sacrificed. Not that artistic form had become confused, for that always produces an un-

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

Terborch, The Concert: Singer and Theorbo Player, ca. 1657. Dutch. The Louvre. Photograph: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York

2.1  Gerard

pleasing effect, but the explicitness of the subject is no longer the sole purpose of the presentment. Composition, light, and colour no longer merely serve to define form, but have their own life. There are cases in which absolute clarity has been partly abandoned merely to enhance effect, but “relative” clarity, as a great all-embracing mode of representation, first entered the history of art at the moment at which reality is beheld with an eye to other effects. Even here it is not a difference of quality if the Baroque departed from the ideals of the age of Dürer and Raphael, but, as we have said, a different attitude to the world.

Imitation and Decoration The representational forms here described are of such general significance that even widely divergent natures such as Terborch and Bernini—to repeat an example already used—can find room within one and the same type (figures 2.1, 2.2), The community of style in these two painters rests on what,

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

2.2  Gian

Lorenzo Bernini, The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647–52. Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. Photograph: Scala/ Art Resource, New York

for people of the seventeenth century, was a matter of course—certain basic conditions to which the impression of living form is bound without a more special expressional value being attached to them. They can be treated as forms of representation or forms of beholding: in these forms nature is seen, and in these forms art manifests its contents. But it is dangerous to speak only of certain “states of the eye” by which conception is determined: every artistic conception is, of its very nature, organized according to certain notions of pleasure. Hence our five pairs of concepts have an imitative and a decorative significance. Every kind of reproduction of nature moves within a definite decorative schema. Linear vision is permanently bound up with a certain idea of beauty and so is painterly vision. If an advanced type of art dissolves the line and replaces it by the restless mass, that happens not only in the interests of a new verisimilitude, but in the interests of a new beauty too. And in the same way we must say that representation in a plane type certainly corresponds to a certain stage of observation, but even here the schema has obviously a decorative side. The schema

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certainly yields nothing of itself, but it contains the possibility of developing beauties in the arrangement of planes, which the recessional style no longer possesses and can no longer possess. And we can continue in the same way with the whole series. But then, if these more general concepts also envisage a special type of beauty, do we not come back to the beginning, where style was conceived as the direct expression of temperament, be it the temperament of a time, of a people, or of an individual? And in that case, would not the only new factor be that the section was cut lower down, the phenomena, to a certain extent, reduced to a greater common denominator? In speaking thus, we should fail to realize that the second terms of our pairs of concepts belong of their very nature to a different species, in so far as these concepts, in their transformations, obey an inward necessity. They represent a rational psychological process. The transition from tangible, plastic, to purely visual, painterly perception follows a natural logic, and could not be reversed. Nor could the transition from tectonic to atectonic, from the rigid to the free conformity to law. To use a parable. The stone, rolling down the mountainside, can assume quite different motions according to the gradient of the slope, the hardness or softness of the ground, etc., but all these possibilities are subject to one and the same law of gravity. So, in human psychology, there are certain developments which can be regarded as subject to natural law in the same way as physical growth. They can undergo the most manifold variations, they can be totally or partially checked, but, once the rolling has started, the operation of certain laws may be observed throughout. Nobody is going to maintain that the “eye” passes through developments on its own account. Conditioned and conditioning, it always impinges on other spiritual spheres. There is certainly no visual schema which, arising only from its own premises, could be imposed on the world as a stereotyped pattern. But although men have at all times seen what they wanted to see, that does not exclude the possibility that a law remains operative throughout all change. To determine this law would be a central problem, the central problem of a history of art. We shall return to this point at the end of our enquiry.

Editors’ Note to The Origin of German Tragic Drama,   Excerpts, by Walter Benjamin

​“Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. This explains the Baroque cult of the ruin,” remarks Walter Benjamin in his famous interpretation of Baroque allegory in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, 1928). The same could be said of Benjamin’s critical study. A dense consideration of the language and form of the seventeenth-century German Baroque Trauerspiel (mourning play), Origin’s fragmentary critical method emulates the discontinuous Baroque aesthetics it describes. Benjamin valued Baroque Trauerspiele for the same reason that the Romantics rejected them—their artifice and antiorganicism. He saw in the Baroque a kind of self-deconstructive art—severe, iconoclastic works that, instead of proposing escapist visions of permanence without change, formally encode the inevitable corrosive work of history as decay and ruin. Baroque allegories are thought ruins, memento mori, selfconsciously unbeautiful. Written as a Habilitationsschrift (second dissertation) in 1923–24 and submitted to Frankfurt University, Origin was Benjamin’s final (and failed) attempt at an academic career. The work still bears the traces of its inception as a collection of about six hundred quotations from Baroque dramas and their critical commentaries, culled during his archival work in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek (National Library); the first draft consisted almost exclusively of quotations torn from their contexts and rearranged according to Benjamin’s conceptual framework. Of the following excerpts, “Setting” is taken from the first part of Origins, “Trauerspiel and Tragedy,” to introduce Benjamin’s conception of Baroque nature and the ways that, in Baroque art, “history merges into the setting” (BNW 60)—in emblems, allegories, images,

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objects, and in the space of the stage itself. The excerpts following “Setting” are taken from the second part of Origins, “Allegory and Trauerspiel,” to illustrate Benjamin’s most significant contribution to the understanding of the Baroque—his theory of allegory. Benjamin conceived the sections of the second part of Origins in the manner of allegories or emblems (related structures that Benjamin did not distinguish). Just as an emblem is a montage of image and text, so any section in part 2 of Origin (“Antinomies of Allegorical Interpretation,” “Allegorical Soullessness,” and above all, “The Ruin”) is a montage, an assemblage of openly discontinuous structures. (José Pascual Buxó discusses Baroque emblems in his essay in this volume.) In Benjamin’s study, quotations from Baroque plays take the place of the emblematic image and are juxtaposed to his theoretical statements and aphorisms, which echo the interpretive poem or motto of the emblem. The components mounted together do not unify into a seamless whole, but are merely set side by side; as in the emblem, a textual relation is established, but at the level of meaning, the links remain a puzzle to be completed by the reader. Far from being unscientific, this allegorical method represented for Benjamin a way of theorizing Baroque discontinuity and antithesis without imposing a false sense of literary critical (narrative) continuity. Furthermore, the Baroque sense of history as decay and ruin impelled Benjamin’s subsequent development of a materialist (and Marxist) conception of history. In his work on Charles Baudelaire and nineteenth-century mass culture, he encountered the same shattering of the object world as in seventeenth-century plays, but in contrast to Baroque allegory, decay no longer appears as a natural fact of life’s transitoriness (to be mourned in memento mori), but rather as the result of capitalist commodification. In nineteenth-century culture, “emblems return as commodities” (“Zentralpark” 675). The Trauerspiel study seeded Benjamin’s theory of history as catastrophe, expressed fully in the renowned 1940 essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” published posthumously in Illuminations, with its famous allegory of the angel of history. Structured as textual reaction to an image (Paul Klee’s painting of a disheveled angel), Benjamin’s critical allegory unmasks history as a “storm that we call progress,” practicing the emblematic strategies (visual and verbal) of Baroque form that he recognized as profoundly modern, as well as revolutionary. The critical, deconstructive Baroque theorized by Benjamin is akin to Marxist dialectical historiography: history looks

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backward rather than forward, at the heap of rubble left behind by modernity, the material record of destruction wreaked by so-called progress. Ruin, the watershed dividing past from present, exposes historical continuity as a deceptive illusion. Benjamin’s quarrel over critical method, first with the conservative German academic establishment in the 1920s, and later with Theodor Adorno and the left-oriented Institute for Social Research in the 1930s, may be explained through the difference between classical concepts and Baroque conceits: whereas Adorno demanded that Benjamin utilize high theory (concepts) and critical rigor, Benjamin produces emblematic structures that are intellectual but also mobile and unpredictable, arbitrary acts of interpretation that do not conceal their constructed quality. Benjamin’s Baroque is dialectical and antithetical, a mode consonant with Marxist historiography because both share an understanding of the past through the experience of present destruction (modernity as shock)—an illuminating destruction that extinguishes the false harmonies of progressive history and reveals the past as irrevocably other. Thus it is fully intentional that seventeenth-century Baroque Trauerspiele should be available in Benjamin’s critical study only in broken form, as verbal “ruins.” Benjamin’s concept of the allegorical work as a “consciously constructed ruin” (Origin 182) has often been compared to the avant-garde, although Benjamin himself never did so. Nonetheless, the literary critic Peter Bürger theorizes the avant-garde “nonorganic work of art” via Benjaminian allegory. He enumerates the extensive parallels between fragmentation and the extraction of material from its original function and context; the combination and assemblage of discontinuous material into new, artificially constructed wholes; the arbitrary imposition of new meaning without consideration of the original setting. Subsequent critics of Latin American neo–avant-gardes (the avant-gardes of the sixties and beyond) like Nelly Richard employ the Benjaminian insight into allegory’s demystifying, critical function, as well as the notion of an anti-institutional, oppositional Baroque, to illuminate the critical edge of avant-garde production in the wake of the right-wing dictatorships that engulfed Latin America in the 1970s. Both Benjamin and Latin American antidictatorship writers forged their Neobaroque poetics under the shadow of fascisms; both used them for the critical purpose of demystifying the false harmonies of official state discourses.

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Bibliography By the Author

Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John Osborne. London: Verso, 1985. 91–95, 174–85 included here. ———. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1969. 253–64. ———. Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Berlin: Rowohlt, 1928. ———. “Zentralpark.” In Illuminationen: Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 1, ed. Siegfried Unseld. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974. 230–51.

Additional Readings

Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989. Bürger, Peter. “Benjamin’s Concept of Allegory.” In Theory of the Avant-Garde. Trans. Michael Shaw. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1984. 68–73. Kelley, Theresa M. Reinventing Allegory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Lambert, Gregg. “The Baroque Angel of History: Walter Benjamin.” In The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture. London: Continuum, 2004. 67–76. Lindner, Burkhardt. “Allegorie.” In Benjamins Begriffe, vol. 1, ed. Michael Opitz and Erdmut Wizisla. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2000. 50–94. Richard, Nelly. Cultural Residues: Chile in Transition. Trans. Alan West-Durán and Theodore Quester. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Smith, Gary, ed. Benjamin: Philosophy, History, Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. Witte, Bernd. Walter Benjamin—der Intellektuelle als Kritiker: Untersuchungen zu seinem Frühwerk. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976.

  Chapter Three  

The Origin of German Tragic Drama Excerpts

Walter Benjamin Setting (from Part I: Trauerspiel and Tragedy) The creature is the mirror within whose frame alone the moral world was revealed to the Baroque. A concave mirror; for this was not possible without distortion. Since it was the view of the age that all historical life was lacking in virtue, virtue was also of no significance for the inner con­stitution of the dramatis personae themselves. It has never taken a more uninteresting form than in the heroes of these Trauerspiele, in which the only response to the call of history is the physical pain of martyrdom. And just as the inner life of the person has to attain mystical fulfilment in the creaturely condition, even in mortal pain, so do the authors attempt to impose the same restriction on the events of history. The sequence of dramatic actions unfolds as in the days of the creation, when it was not history which was taking place. The nature of the creation which absorbs history back into itself, is quite different from the nature of Rousseau. It is touched upon, though not fundamentally, in the following statement: “The tendency has always arisen from contradiction. . . . How are we to understand that powerful and violent attempt by the Baroque to create some kind of synthesis of the most heterogeneous elements in gallant pastoral poetry. An antithetical yearning for nature in contrast to a har­monious closeness to nature certainly explains this too. But the form of life opposed to it was something else; it was the experience of the destruc­tive effect of time, of inevitable transience, of the fall from the heights. Remote from high things, the existence of the beatus ille must therefore be beyond the reach of all change. And so for the Baroque, nature is only one way out of time; and the Baroque does not know the problems of subse­quent ages.”1 On the contrary: what is peculiar about the Baroque enthusiasm for landscape is particularly evident in the pastoral. For the decisive factor in the

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escapism of the Baroque is not the antithesis of history and nature but the comprehensive secularization of the historical in the state of creation. It is not eternity that is opposed to the disconsolate chronicle of world-history, but the restoration of the timelessness of paradise. History merges into the setting. And in the pastoral plays above all, history is scattered like seeds over the ground. “In a place where a memorable event is said to have taken place, the shepherd will leave commemorative verses in a rock, a stone, or a tree. The columns dedicated to the memory of heroes, which can be admired in the halls of fame erected everywhere by these shepherds, are all resplendent with panegyric inscriptions.”2 The term “panoramatic”3 has been coined to give an excellent description of the conception of history prevalent in the seven­teenth century. “In this picturesque period the whole conception of history is determined by such a collection of everything memorable.”4 If history is secularized in the setting, this is an expression of the same meta­ physical tendency which simultaneously led, in the exact sciences, to the infinitesimal method. In both cases chronological movement is grasped and analysed in a spatial image. The image of the setting or, more pre­cisely, of the court, becomes the key to historical understanding. For the court is the setting par excellence. In his Poetischer Trichter (Poetic Funnel) Harsdörffer has assembled a multitude of suggestions for the allegorical—and, indeed, critical—representation of courtly life, the form of life which is more worthy of consideration than any other.5 While in his interesting preface to Sophonisbe Lohenstein actually asserts: “Kein Leben aber stellt mehr Spiel und Schauplatz dar, | Als derer, die den Hof fürs Element erkohren” (“Nowhere are action and setting richer than in the life of those whose element is the court”).6 And this, of course, remains true where heroic greatness meets its downfall, and the court is reduced to a scaffold, “und diss, was sterblich heisst, wird auf den schauplatz gehn” (“and that which is mortal will enter the setting”).7 In the Trauerspiel the court represents the timeless, natural décor of the historical process. Following Vitruvius, it had been laid down since the Renaissance that for the Trauerspiel “stattliche Paläste / und Fürstliche Garten-Gebäude / die Schauplätze (sind)” (“stately palaces and princely pavilions are the setting”).8 Whereas the German theatre usually adheres rigidly to this prescription—in the Trauerspiele of Gryphius there are no outdoor scenes—the Spanish theatre delights in including the whole of nature as subservient to the crown, creating thereby a veritable dialectic of setting. For on the other hand the social order, and its representation, the court, is, in the work of Calderón, a natural phenomenon of the highest

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order, whose first law is the honour of the ruler. With his characteristic and ever astonishing sureness of touch, A. W. Schlegel gets to the root of the matter when he says of Calderón: “His poetry, whatever its apparent object, is a never-ending hymn of joy on the majesty of the creation; he celebrates the productions of nature and human art with an astonishment always joyful and always new, as if he saw them for the first time in an unworn festal splendour. It is the first awakening of Adam, and an elo­quence withal, a skill of expression, and a thorough insight into the most mysterious affinities of nature, such as high mental culture and mature contemplation can alone bestow. When he compares the most remote objects, the greatest and the smallest, stars and flowers, the sense of all his metaphors is the mutual attraction subsisting between created things by virtue of their common origin.”9 The dramatist loves playfully to re­arrange the order of creation: in La vida es sueño (Life Is a Dream) Segismundo is described as a “courtier . . . of the mountain,”10 and the sea is called a “coloured crystal beast.”11 In the German Trauerspiel, too, natural setting intrudes increasingly into the dramatic action. Only in the translation of Vondel’s Gebroeders (Brothers), it is true, did Gryphius make any concession to the new style, allotting one chorus to the river Jordan and its nymphs.12 In the third act of Lohenstein’s Epicharis, however, there are choruses of the Tiber and the seven hills.13 In the Agrippina the setting intervenes in the action in the manner of the “dumbshows” of the Jesuit-theatre, so to speak: the Empress, dispatched by Nero on a ship which, thanks to a concealed mechanism, falls apart at sea, is rescued, in the chorus, thanks to the assistance of the sea-nymphs.14 There is a “chorus of sirens” in Maria Stuarda by Haugwitz,15 and there are a number of similar passages in the work of Hallmann. In Mariamne he causes Mount Zion itself to give a detailed explanation of its participation in the action. “Hier / Sterbliche / wird euch der wahre Grund gewehrt / | Warumb auch Berg und Zungen­lose Klippen | Eröffnen Mund und Lippen. | Denn / wenn der tolle Mensch sich selber nicht mehr kennt / | Und durch blinde Rasereyen auch dem Höchsten Krieg ansaget / | Werden Berge / Flüss’ und Sternen zu der Rache auffgejaget / | So bald der Feuer-Zorn des grossen Gottes brennt. | Unglückliche Sion ! Vorhin des Himmels Seele / | Itzt eine Folter-Höle! | Herodes! ach! ach! ach! | Dein Wütten / Blut-Hund / macht / dass Berg’ auch müssen schreyen / | Und dich vermaledeyen! | Rach! Rach ! Rach!” (“Here, mortals, will you learn the true reason why even a mountain and tongue-less cliffs open mouth and lips. For when man rages and no longer knows himself and in blind fury declares war on the Almighty, then are mountains, rivers and

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stars urged to vengeance as soon as the fiery anger of the great God blazes. Unhappy Zion! Once the soul of heaven, now a torture-chamber! Herod! Alas! Alas! Alas! Thy raging, bloodhound, causes even the mountains to cry aloud and curse thee! Vengeance! Vengeance! Vengeance!”).16 If, as such passages show, the concept of nature is the same in both the Trauerspiel and the pastoral, then it is hardly surprising that, in the course of a development which reaches its climax in the work of Hallmann, the two forms should have tended to converge. The antithesis between the two is only a superficial one; they have a latent impulse to combine. Thus it is that Hallmann takes “pastoral motifs into the serious drama, for instance the stereotyped praise of the shep­herd’s life, the satyr-motif from Tasso in Sophia und Alexander, and on the other hand he transposes tragic scenes like heroic farewells, suicides, divine judgments of good and evil, ghost-scenes, into the pastoral play.”17 Even outside dramatic histories, in poetry, there is the same expression of chronological progression in spatial terms. The collections of the Nuremberg poets, like earlier scholarly Alexandrian poetry, use “Towers . . . fountains, orbs, organs, lutes, hour-glasses, scales, wreaths, hearts”18 to provide the graphic outline of their poems.

Antinomies of Allegorical Interpretation   (from Part II: Allegory and Trauerspiel ) This brings us to the antinomies of the allegorical, the dialectical discus­sion of which is essential if the image of the Trauerspiel is to be evoked. Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive but just verdict is passed on the profane world: it is characterized as a world in which the detail is of no great importance. But it will be unmistakably apparent, especially to anyone who is familiar with allegorical textual exegesis, that all of the things which are used to signify derive from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, which raises them onto a higher plane, and which can, indeed, sanctify them. Considered in allegorical terms, then, the profane world is both elevated and devalued. This religious dialectic of content has its formal correlative in the dialectic of convention and expression. For allegory is both: convention and expression; and both are inherently contradictory. However, just as Baroque teaching conceives of history as created events, allegory in particular, although a convention like every kind of writing, is regarded as created, like holy scripture.

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The allegory of the seventeenth century is not convention of expression, but expression of convention. At the same time expression of authority, which is secret in accordance with the dignity of its origin, but public in accordance with the extent of its validity. And the very same antinomies take plastic form in the conflict between the cold, facile technique and the eruptive expression of allegorical interpretation. Here too the solution is a dialectical one. It lies in the essence of writing itself. It is possible, without contradiction, to conceive of a more vital, freer use of the revealed spoken language, in which it would lose none of its dignity. This is not true of its written form, which allegory laid claim to being. The sanctity of what is written is inextricably bound up with the idea of its strict codification. For sacred script always takes the form of certain complexes of words which ultimately constitute, or aspire to become, one single and inalterable complex. So it is that alphabetical script, as a combination of atoms of writing, is the farthest removed from the script of sacred complexes. These latter take the form of hieroglyphics. The desire to guarantee the sacred character of any script—there will always be a conflict between sacred standing and profane comprehensibility—leads to complexes, to hieroglyphics. This is what happens in the Baroque. Both externally and stylistically—in the extreme character of the typographical arrangement and in the use of highly charged metaphors—the written word tends toward the visual. It is not possible to conceive of a starker opposite to the artistic symbol, the plastic symbol, the image of organic totality, than this amorphous fragment which is seen in the form of allegorical script. In it the Baroque reveals itself to be the sovereign opposite of classicism, as which hitherto only Romanticism has been acknowledged. And we should not resist the temptation of finding out those features which are common to both of them. Both, Romanticism as much as Baroque, are concerned not so much with providing a correc­tive to classicism, as to art itself. And it cannot be denied that the Baroque, that contrasting prelude to classicism, offers a more concrete, more authoritative, and more permanent version of this correction. Whereas Romanticism inspired by its belief in the infinite, intensified the perfected creation of form and idea in critical terms,19 at one stroke the profound vision of allegory transforms things and works into stirring writing. Winckelmann still has this penetration of vision in the Beschreibung des Torso des Hercules in Belvedere zu Rom (Description of the Torso of Hercules in the Belvedere in Rome):20 it is evident in the unclassical way he goes over it, part by part and limb by limb (figure 3.1). It is no accident that the subject is a torso. In the field of allegorical intuition the image is a fragment, a rune.

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

3.1  Belvedere Torso, Greco-

Roman period, ca. 50 BCE. Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, New York

Its beauty as a symbol evaporates when the light of divine learning falls upon it. The false appearance of totality is extin­guished. For the eidos disappears, the simile ceases to exist, and the cosmos it contained shrivels up. The dry rebuses which remain contain an insight, which is still available to the confused investigator. By its very essence classicism was not permitted to behold the lack of freedom, the imperfection, the collapse of the physical, beautiful, nature. But beneath its extravagant pomp, this is precisely what Baroque allegory proclaims, with unprecedented emphasis. A deep-rooted intuition of the problematic character of art—it was by no means only the coyness of a particular social class, it was also a religious scruple which assigned artistic activity to the “leisure hours”—emerges as a reaction to its self-confidence at the time of the Renaissance. Although the artists and thinkers of classicism did not concern themselves with what they regarded as grotesque, certain statements in neo-Kantian aesthetics give an idea of the ferocity of the controversy. The dialectic quality of this form of expression is misunderstood, and mistrusted as ambiguity. “The basic characteristic of allegory, however,

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is ambiguity, multiplicity of meaning; allegory, and the Baroque, glory in richness of meaning. But the richness of this ambiguity is the richness of extravagance; nature, however, according to the old rules of metaphysics, and indeed also of mechanics, is bound by the law of economy. Ambiguity is therefore always the opposite of clarity and unity of meaning.”21 No less doctrinaire are the arguments of a pupil of Hermann Cohen, Carl Horst, who was restricted by his title, Barock­­-probleme (Problems of the Baroque), to a more concrete approach. Notwithstanding, allegory is said “always to reveal a ‘crossing of the borders of a different mode,’ an advance of the plastic arts into the territory of the ‘rhetorical’ arts. And,” the author continues, “such violation of frontiers is nowhere more remorselessly punished than in the pure culture of sentiment, which is more the business of the pure ‘plastic arts’ than the ‘rhetorical arts,’ and brings the former closer to music. . . . In the unemotional permeation of the most varied human forms of expression with autocratic ideas . . . artistic feeling and understanding is diverted and violated. This is what allegory achieves in the field of the ‘plastic’ arts. Its intrusion could therefore be described as a harsh disturbance of the peace and a disrup­tion of law and order in the arts. And yet allegory has never been absent from this field, and the greatest artists have dedicated great works to it.”22 This fact alone should have been enough to produce a different attitude to allegory. The undialectic neo-Kantian mode of thought is not able to grasp the synthesis which is reached in allegorical writing as a result of the conflict between theological and artistic intentions, a synthesis not so much in the sense of a peace as a treuga dei between the conflicting opinions.

The Ruin When, as is the case in the Trauerspiel, history becomes part of the setting, it does so as script. The word “history” stands written on the countenance of nature in the characters of transience. The allegorical physiognomy of the nature-history, which is put on stage in the Trauer­spiel, is present in reality in the form of the ruin. In the ruin history has physically merged into the setting. And in this guise history does not assume the form of the process of an eternal life so much as that of irresis­tible decay. Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty. Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things. This explains the Baroque cult of the ruin. Borinski, less exhaustive in his argument than accurate in his account of the facts, is aware of this. “The broken pediment, the crumbling columns are

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supposed to bear witness to the miracle that the sacred edifice has withstood even the most elemental forces of destruction, lightning and earthquake. In its artificiality, how­ever, such a ruin appears as the last heritage of an antiquity which in the modern world is only to be seen in its material form, as a picturesque field of ruins.”23 A footnote adds: “The rise of this tendency can be traced by examining the ingenious practice of Renaissance artists in setting the Birth of Christ and the Adoration in the ruins of an antique temple instead of the mediaeval stable. In Domenico Ghirlandaio (Florence, Accademia), for instance, these ruins still consisted simply of impeccably preserved showpieces; now they become an end in themselves, serving as a pictures­que setting representing transitory splendour, in the plastic and colourful Nativity-scenes.”24 What prevails here is the current stylistic feeling, far more than the reminiscences of antiquity. That which lies here in ruins, the highly significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact, the finest material in Baroque creation. For it is common practice in the literature of the Baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal, and, in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification. The Baroque writers must have regarded the work of art as just such a miracle. And if, on the other hand, it seemed to be the calculable result of the process of accumulation, it is no more difficult to reconcile these two things than it was for the alchemist to reconcile the longed-for miraculous “work” and the subtle theoretical recipes. The experimentation of the Baroque writers resembles the prac­tice of the adepts. The legacy of antiquity constitutes, item for item, the elements from which the new whole is mixed. Or rather: is constructed. For the perfect vision of this new phenomenon was the ruin. The exuberant subjection of antique elements in a structure which, without uniting them in a single whole, would, in destruction, still be superior to the harmonies of antiquity, is the purpose of the technique which applies itself separately, and ostentatiously, to realia, rhetorical figures and rules. Literature ought to be called ars inveniendi. The notion of the man of genius, the master of the ars inveniendi, is that of a man who could manipu­late models with sovereign skill. “Fantasy,” the creative faculty as con­ceived by the moderns, was unknown as the criterion of a spiritual hierarchy. “Dass bishero unsern Opitius niemand in der teutschen Poeterey nur gleichkommen, viel weniger überlegen sein können (welches auch ins künftige nicht geschehen wird), ist die vornehmste Ursache, dass neben der sonderbaren Geschicklichkeit der trefflichen Natur, so in ihm ist, er in der Latiner und Griechen Schriften sowohl belesen und

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selbe so artig auszudrücken und inventieren weiss” (“The principal reason why no one in German poetry has yet been able even to approach our Opitz, let alone surpass him [which will not occur in the future either], is that, apart from the remarkable agility of his excellent nature, he is so well read in Latin and Greek writings, and he himself possesses such powers of expression and invention”).25 The German language, moreover, as the grammarians of the time saw it, was in this context, only another nature, alongside that of the ancient models. Hankamer explains their view as follows: “Linguistic nature, like material nature, is a repository of all secrets. [The writer] brings no power to it, creates no new truth from the spontaneous outpourings of the soul.”26 The writer must not conceal the fact that his activity is one of arranging, since it was not so much the mere whole as its obviously constructed quality that was the principal impression which was aimed at. Hence the display of the craftsmanship, which, in Calderón especially, shows through like the masonry in a building whose rendering has broken away. Thus, one might say, nature remained the great teacher for the writers of this period. However, nature was not seen by them in bud and bloom, but in the overripeness and decay of her creations. In nature they saw eternal transience, and here alone did the saturnine vision of this genera­tion recognize history. Its monuments, ruins, are, according to Agrippa von Nettesheim, the home of the saturnine beasts. In the process of decay, and in it alone, the events of history shrivel up and become absorbed in the setting. The quintessence of these decaying objects is the polar oppo­site to the idea of transfigured nature as conceived by the early Renaissance. Burdach has demonstrated that this latter concept was “quite different from our own.” “For a long time it continues to remain dependent on the linguistic usage and the thinking of the middle ages, even if the evaluation of the word and the notion ‘nature’ does visibly rise. However, in artistic theory from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century, the imita­tion of nature means the imitation of nature as shaped by God.”27 But it is fallen nature which bears the imprint of the progression of history. The penchant of the Baroque for apotheosis is a counterpart to its own particular way of looking at things. The authorization of their allegorical designations bears the seal of the all-too-earthly. Never does their transcendence come from within. Hence their illumination by the arti­ficial light of apotheosis. Hardly ever has there been a literature whose illusionistic virtuosity has more radically eliminated from its works that radiance which has a transcendent effect, and which was at one time, rightly, used in an attempt to define the essence of artistry. It is possible to describe the absence of this

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radiance as one of the most specific charac­teristics of Baroque lyric. And the drama is no different. “So muss man durch den Tod in jenes Leben dringen / | Das uns Aegyptens Nacht in Gosems Tag verkehrt / | Und den beperlten Rock der Ewigkeit ge­wehrt!” (“And so one must go through death to enter into that life which transforms Egypt’s night into Gosen’s day, and grants us the pearly robe of eternity!”).28 This is how Hallmann, from the point of view of the stage ­manager, describes eternal life. Obdurate concentration on requisites frustrated the depiction of love. Unworldly voluptuousness, lost in its own fantasy, holds the floor. “Ein schönes Weib ist ja, die tausend Zierden mahlen, | Ein unverzehrlich Tisch, der ihrer viel macht satt. | Ein unverseigend Quell, das allzeit Wasser hat, | Ja süsse Libes-Milch; Wenn gleich in hundert Röhre | Der linde Zukker rinnt. Es ist der Unhold Lehre, | Des schelen Neides Art, wenn andern man verwehrt | Die Speise, die sie labt, sich aber nicht verzehrt” (“A beautiful woman, adorned with a thousand ornaments, is an inexhaustible table that satisfies many. An eternal spring from which water always flows, or rather love’s sweet milk; as when sweet sugar runs in a hundred canes. It is the devil’s doctrine, the way of squinting envy, to deny others the food which refreshes, but which is not consumed”).29 Any adequate masking of content is absent from the typical works of the Baroque. The extent of their claims, even in the minor forms, is breathtaking. And they lack any feeling for the intimate, the mysterious. They attempt, extravagantly and vainly, to replace it with the enigmatic and the concealed. In the true work of art pleasure can be fleeting, it can live in the moment, it can vanish, and it can be renewed. The Baroque work of art wants only to endure, and clings with all its senses to the eternal. This is the only way of explaining how, in the following century, readers were seduced by the liberating sweetness of the first Tändeleyen, and how, in the rococo, Chinoiserie became the counterpart to hieratic byzantinism. In speaking of the Gesamtkunstwerk as the summit of the aesthetic hierarchy of the age and the ideal of the Trauerspiel itself,30 the Baroque critic provides a new confirmation of this spirit of weightiness. As an experienced allegorist, Harsdörffer is, among many theoreticians, the one who spoke out most radically for the synthesis of all the arts. For this is precisely what is required by the allegorical way of looking at things. Winckelmann makes the connection abundantly clear when, with polemical overstatement, he remarks: “Vain . . . is the hope of those who believe that allegory should be taken so far that one might even be able to paint an ode.”31 More disconcerting is the question of how the literary works of the century are introduced: dedications, prefaces and epi-

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logues, by the authors themselves or by others, testi­monials, acknowledgments of the great masters—these are the rule. Without exception they provide an elaborate surrounding framework to the larger editions and the collected works. For it was only rarely that the eye was able to find satisfaction in the object itself. It was expected that works of art could be absorbed in the midst of ordinary everyday affairs, and devotion to them was far less a private matter, for which account did not have to be given, than it was later to become. Reading was obligatory, and it was educational. The range of the products, their intentional bulki­ness and lack of mystery should be understood as a correlative of such an attitude among the public. It was not felt that these products were inten­ded to spread by growth over a period of time, so much as to fill up their allotted place here and now. And in many respects this was their reward. But for this very reason criticism is implied with rare clarity in the fact of their continued existence. From the very beginning they are set up for that erosion by criticism which befell them in the course of time. Beauty has nothing inalienable for the uninitiated. And for such people nothing is less approachable than the German Trauerspiel. Its outer form has died away because of its extreme crudity. What has survived is the extra­ ordinary detail of the allegorical references: an object of knowledge which has settled in the consciously constructed ruins. Criticism means the mortification of the works. By their very essence these works confirm this more readily than any others. Mortification of the works: not then—as the romantics have it—awakening of the consciousness in living works,32 but the settlement of knowledge in dead ones. Beauty, which endures, is an object of knowledge. And if it is questionable whether the beauty which endures does still deserve the name, it is nevertheless certain that there is nothing of beauty which does not contain something that is worthy of knowledge. Philosophy must not attempt to deny that it reawakens the beauty of works. “Science cannot lead to the naïve enjoyment of art any more than geologists and botanists can awaken a feeling for the beauty of landscape”;33 this assertion is as incorrect as the analogy which is sup­posed to support it is false. The geologist and the botanist can indeed do just this. Without at least an intuitive grasp of the life of the detail in the structure, all love of beauty is no more than empty dreaming. In the last analysis structure and detail are always historically charged. The object of philosophical criticism is to show that the function of artistic form is as follows: to make historical content, such as provides the basis of every important work of art, into a philosophical truth. This transformation of material content into truth content makes the de-

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crease in effectiveness, whereby the attraction of earlier charms diminishes decade by decade, into the basis for a rebirth in which all ephemeral beauty is completely stripped off, and the work stands as a ruin. In the allegorical construction of the Baroque Trauerspiel such ruins have always stood out clearly as formal elements of the preserved work of art.

Allegorical Soullessness Even the story of the life of Christ supported the movement from history to nature which is the basis of allegory. However great the retarding, secular tendency of its exegesis had always been—seldom did it reach such a degree of intensity as in the work of Sigmund von Birken. His poetics give, “as examples of birth, marriage, and funeral poems, of eulogies and victory congratulations, songs on the birth and death of Christ, on his spiritual marriage with the soul, on his glory and his victory.”34 The mystical instant [Nu] becomes the “now” [ Jetzt] of contemporary actuality; the symbolic becomes distorted into the allegorical. The eternal is separated from the events of the story of salvation, and what is left is a living image open to all kinds of revision by the interpretative artist. This corresponds profoundly to the endlessly preparatory, circumlocutious, self-indulgently hesitant manner of the Baroque process of giving form. It has been quite correctly observed, by Hausenstein, that, in paintings of apotheoses, the foreground is generally treated with exaggerated realism so as to be able to show the remoter, visionary objects more reliably. The attempt to gather all worldly events into the graphic foreground is not undertaken only in order to heighten the tension between immanence and transcendence, but also in order to secure for the latter the greatest con­ceivable rigour, exclusiveness and inexorability. It is an unsurpassably spectacular gesture to place even Christ in the realm of the provisional, the everyday, the unreliable. The Sturm und Drang provides strong sup­port;  Merck writes that it “cannot in any way detract from the great man if it is known that he was born in a stable and lay in swaddling clothes between an ox and an ass.”35 Above all it is the offensive, the provoca In German literary history, Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress; 1767–85), an expres-

sion of European pre-Romanticism—characterized by a turn toward the emotions, the protest against authority, and a freer, more original use of language—is the intervening period between the Enlightenment and Romanticism.—Eds.

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tive quality of the gesture which is Baroque. Where man is drawn toward the symbol, allegory emerges from the depths of being to intercept the inten­tion, and to triumph over it. The same tendency is characteristic of Baroque lyric. The poems have “no forward movement, but they swell up from within.”36 If it is to hold its own against the tendency to absorption, the allegorical must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways. The symbol, on the other hand, as the romantic mythologists have shown, remains persistently the same. How striking is the contrast between the uniform verses of the emblembooks, the “vanitas vanitatum vanitas,” and the fashionable bustle with which they appeared, on each others heels, from the middle of the century onwards! Allegories become dated, because it is part of their nature to shock. If the object becomes allegorical under the gaze of melancholy, if melancholy causes life to flow out of it and it remains behind dead, but eternally secure, then it is exposed to the allegorist, it is unconditionally in his power. That is to say it is now quite incapable of emanating any meaning or significance of its own; such significance as it has, it acquires from the allegorist. He places it within it, and stands behind it; not in a psychological but in an ontological sense. In his hands the object becomes something different; through it he speaks of something different and for him it becomes a key to the realm of hidden knowledge; and he reveres it as the emblem of this. This is what deter­ mines the character of allegory as a form of writing. It is a schema; and as a schema it is an object of knowledge, but it is not securely possessed until it becomes a fixed schema: at one and the same time a fixed image and a fixing sign. The Baroque ideal of knowledge, the process of storing, to which the vast libraries are a monument, is realized in the external appearance of the script. Almost as much as in China it is, in its visual character, not merely a sign of what is to be known but it is itself an object worthy of knowledge. The romantics were the first to begin to become conscious of this aspect of allegory too. Particularly Baader. In his Über den Einfluss der Zeichen der Gedanken auf deren Erzeugung und Gestaltung (On the Influence of the Signs of Thoughts on Their Genesis and Formation) he writes: “It is well known that it is entirely up to us whether we use any particular object of nature as a conventional sign for an idea, as we see in symbolic and hieroglyphic writing, and this object only then takes on a new character when we wish to use it, not to convey its natural charac­teristics, but those which we have ourselves, so to speak, lent it.”37 A note to this passage contains the following commentary: “There is good reason for the fact that everything we see in external nature

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is, for us, already writing, a kind of sign-language, which nevertheless lacks the most essen­tial feature: pronunciation; this must quite simply have come from somewhere else and been given to man.”38 “From somewhere else” the allegorist then takes it up, by no means avoiding that arbitrariness which is the most drastic manifestation of the power of knowledge. The wealth of ciphers, which the allegorist discovered in the world of the creature with its profound historical stamp, justifies Cohen’s charge of “extrava­gance.” It may not accord with the authority of nature; but the voluptuous­ness with which significance rules, like a stern sultan in the harem of objects, is without equal in giving expression to nature. It is indeed characteristic of the sadist that he humiliates his object and then—or thereby—satisfies it. And that is what the allegorist does in this age drunk with acts of cruelty both lived and imagined. This even applies to religious painting. The “opening of the eyes,” which Baroque painting makes into “a schema quite independent of the situation as conditioned by the subject in hand,”39 betrays and devalues things in an inexpressible manner. The function of Baroque iconography is not so much to unveil material objects as to strip them naked. The emblematist does not present the essence implicitly, “behind the image.”40 He drags the essence of what is depicted out before the image, in writing, as a caption, such as, in the emblem-books, forms an intimate part of what is depicted (see figure 18.1). Basically, then, the Trauerspiel, too, which grew up in the sphere of the allegorical, is, in its form, a drama for the reader. Although this says nothing about the value or the possibility of its stage-performance. But it does make it clear that the chosen spectator of such examples of the Trauerspiel concentra­ted on them with at least the same thought and attentiveness as the reader; that the situations did not change very frequently, but that when they did, they did so in a flash, like the appearance of the print when a page is turned; and it explains how it is that, in a hostile and grudging intuition of the inner law of these dramas, the older school of research persisted in the view that they were never performed.

Notes 1 Arthur Hübscher, “Barock als Gestaltung antithetischen Lebensgefühls. Grundle-

gung einer Phaseologie der Geistesgeschichte” (Baroque as the Formation of an Antithetical Outlook on Life: Towards a Phaseology of the History of Ideas), Euphorion, XXIV (1922), 517–62, 542. 2 Julius Tittmann, Die Nürnberger Dichterschule. Harsdörffer, Klaj, Birken. Beitrag zur

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3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20

21 22

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deutschen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (The Nuremberg School of Poets, Harsdörffer, Klaj, Birken: Contributions to a Literary and Cultural History of the Seventeenth Century) (Kleine Schriften zur deutschen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte, I), Göttingen, 1847, 148. Herbert Cysarz, Deutsche Barockdichtung. Renaissance, Barock, Rokoko (German Literature of the Baroque: Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo), Leipzig, 1924, 27 (fn.). Cysarz, op. cit., 108 (fn.); cf. also 107–8. Cf. Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, Poetischer Trichter: die Teutsche Dicht- und Reimkunst ohne Behuf der lateinischen Sprache in VI. Stunden einzugiessen. Dritter Theil (Poetic Funnel: How to Pour German Arts of Poetry and Rhyme without Recourse to the Latin in Six Hours. Part Three), Nuremberg, 1653, 265–72. Daniel Caspar von Lohenstein, Sophonisbe, 10 (of the unpaginated dedication). Andreas Gryphius, Trauerspiele, ed. Hermann Palm, Tübingen, 1882, 437 (Carolus Stuardus, IV, 47). Harsdörffer, Vom Theatrum oder Schawplatz (Of the Theater or the Setting), Für die Gesellschaft für Theatergeschichte aufs Newe in Truck gegeben, Berlin, 1914, 6. August Wilhelm Schlegel, Sämtliche Werke (Collected Works), VI, 397. (A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, 504.) Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Schauspiele (Dramatic Works) (trans. Gries), I, 206 (Das Leben ein Traum, I). (Life Is a Dream, ed. cit., 24.) Calderón, Schauspiele (Dramatic Works) (trans. Gries), III, Berlin, 1818, 236 (Eifersucht das grösste Scheusal, I). (The Greatest Monster: Jealousy.) Cf. Andreas Gryphius, ed. cit., 756ff (Die sieben Brüder, II, 343ff ). (The Seven Brothers.) Cf. Lohenstein, Epicharis. Trauer-Spiel, Leipzig, 1724, 74–75 (III, 721ff ). Cf. Lohenstein, Agrippina, 53 ff. (III, 497ff). Cf. August Adolf von Haugwitz, ed. cit., “Maria Stuarda,” 50 (III, 237ff ). Johan Christian Hallmann, Trauer-, Freuden- und Schäferspiele (Tragedies, Comedies, and Pastoral Plays), “Mariamne,” 2 (I, 40ff ). Kurt Kolitz, Johann Christian Hallmanns Dramen. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Dramas in der Barockzeit (Hallmann’s Dramatic Works: A Contribution to the History of German Drama of the Baroque), Berlin, 1911, 158–59. Tittmann, op. cit., 212. Cf. Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik (The Concept of Art Criticism), 105. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Versuch einer Allegorie besonders für die Kunst (An Essay on Allegory Especially in regards to Art). Säcular­ausg. Aus des Verfassers Handexemplar mit vielen Zusätzen von seiner Hand, sowie mit inedirten Briefen Winckelmanns und gleichzeitigen Aufzeichnungen über seine letzten Stunden, ed. Albert Dressel. Mit einer Vorbemerkung von Constantin Tischendorf, Leipzig, 1866, 143 ff. Hermann Cohen, Ästhetik des reinen Gefühls (Aesthetics of Pure Feeling), II (System der Philosophie, 3), Berlin, 1912, 305. Carl Horst, Barockprobleme (Problems of the Baroque), Munich, 1912, 39/40; cf. also 41–42.

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23 Karl Borinski, Die Antike (The Ancient World), I, 193–94. 24 Borinski, op. cit., 305–6 (fn.).

25 August Buchner, Wegweiser zur deutschen Tichtkunst (Guide to German Literature),

Jena, n.d. [1663], 80ff; quoted from Borcherdt, Augustus Buchner, 81.

26 Paul Hankamer, Die Sprache. Ihr Begriff und ihre Deutung im sechzehnten und sieb-

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

35

36 37

38 39 40

zehnten Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur Frage der literarhistorischen Gliederung des Zeitraums (Language, Its Concept and Its Interpretation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: A Contribution to the Question of the Structure of the Period in Literary History), Bonn, 1927, 135. Konrad Burdach, Reformation, Renaissance, Humanismus. Zwei Abhandlungen über die Grundlage moderner Bildung und Sprachkunst (Reformation, Renaissance, Humanism: Two Treatises on the Foundations of Modern Education and Expression), Berlin, 1918, 178. Hallmann, Trauer-, Freuden- und Schäferspiele (Tragedies, Comedies, and Pastoral Plays), “Mariamne,” 90. Lohenstein, Agrippina, 33–34 (II, 380ff). Cf. Kurt Kolitz, op. cit., 166–67.­­ Winckelmann, op. cit., 19. Cf. Benjamin, Der Begriff der Kunstkritik, 53 ff. J. Petersen, “Der Aufbau der Literaturgeschichte” (The Structure of Literary History), Germanisch-romanische Monats-schrift, VI (1914), 12. Fritz Strich, “Der lyrische Stil des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts” (The Poetic Style of the Seventeenth Century), Abhandlungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Franz Muncker zum 60. Geburtstage (Essays on German Literary History: Franz Muncker on his 60th Birthday), dargebracht von Eduard Berend (et al.), Munich, 1916, 26. Johann Heinrich Merck, Ausgewählte Schriften zur schönen Literatur und Kunst. Ein Denkmal (Selected Writings on Literature and the Arts), ed. Adolf Stahr, Oldenburg, 1840, 308.­­ Strich, op. cit., 39. Franz von Baader, Sämmtliche Werke (Collected Works), hrsg. durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten: Franz Hoffmann (et al.), I. Hauptabt., II, Leipzig, 1851, 129. Baader, op. cit., 129. Hübscher, op. cit., 560. Hübscher, op. cit., 555.

Editors’ Note to “The Debate on the Baroque in Pontigny,”   Excerpt, by Eugenio d’Ors

The Catalonian philosopher and art critic Eugenio d’Ors (1881–1954) occupies a key role in the twentieth-century recovery and reevaluation of the Baroque. D’Ors’s theory of the Baroque was first presented in 1931, when he led a seminar on the Baroque at the Abbey of Pontigny in France. The following selection is taken from the landmark text that came out of that seminar, Lo barroco (The Baroque), published in French in 1935 and in Spanish in 1944. During d’Ors’s visits to Heidelberg and Munich in 1908 and 1910, respectively, at the height of the German enthusiasm for the Baroque, he encountered the work of the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, who then taught at the University of Munich. Taking up Wölfflin’s insights, d’Ors defined the classical and the Baroque as opposing forms of the human spirit—opposing “eons,” as he called the metaphysical and stylistic forces that impel artistic production in every age and culture. D’Ors’s opposition between classicism and the Baroque weighs reason against instinct, unity against rupture. In the following excerpt, notice Wölfflin’s influence on d’Ors’s account of the shift from classical clarity to Baroque dynamism and dramatic subjectivity. Another important influence, also cited by d’Ors though not in the excerpt translated here, is the 1878 essay by Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Baroque Style” (included in this volume), which precedes d’Ors in claiming that the Baroque recurs cyclically in all art forms. D’Ors famously counts twenty-two distinct Baroques, including a Macedonian, a Nordic, a Buddhist, and a fin de siècle, among others, and finds shared attitudes toward nature in Romanticism and the Baroque. Clearly, his conception of the Baroque transcends any particular period, setting, or at-

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tendant social meanings; rather, he makes the Baroque available for rearticulation in myriad cultural contexts. Perhaps José Lezama Lima is referring to d’Ors when, at the beginning of his essay “Baroque Curiosity,” translated in this volume, he comments wryly that “one critic goes so far as to claim that the earth is classical and the sea Baroque” (BNW 212). This vast amplification of the Baroque has been as influential as it has been controversial. On the one hand, Anglophone critics wary of the Baroque, such as René Wellek, have pointed to d’Ors’s ahistorical essentialism, arguing that such abstract generalizations turn the Baroque into a meaningless category. On the other hand, d’Ors’s work proved indispensable to the Cuban writers Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima as they worked to elaborate their theories of the Baroque in Latin America. Carpentier repeatedly cites d’Ors as his inspiration in his own landmark essay, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” and his presence is also palpable in Carpentier’s essays “The City of Columns” and “Questions Concerning the Contemporary Latin American Novel,” translated in this volume. D’Ors’s dissociation of the Baroque from the absolutist regimes of Counter-Reformation Europe was the precondition for historical subjects (including the colonized) to engage Baroque forms to express their antagonism toward those same absolutist regimes (what John Beverley and José Antonio Maravall call “barroco de estado”—“state Baroque”). In the act of moving the Baroque beyond seventeenth-century Europe, d’Ors revised its political and social function. Rather than a style aimed at imposing and conserving European values, it could now be understood as a potentially dynamic, destabilizing force embracing multiple cultures and periods. As such, d’Ors’s revision underpins a number of the essays in this volume.

Bibliography By the Author

d’Ors, Eugenio. “La querella de lo barroco en Pontigny.” 1935; 1944. In Lo barroco, ed. Ángel d’Ors and Alicia García Navarro de d’Ors. Madrid: Tecnos, 2002. 63–101; 78–91 translated here.

Additional Readings

Beverley, John. “Barroco de estado: Góngora y el gongorismo.” In Del Lazarillo al sandinismo: Estudios sobre la función ideológica de la literatura española e hispanoamericana. Minneapolis: Prisma Institute, 1987. 77–97. Carpentier, Alejo. “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real.” In Magical Realism: Theory,

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History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. 89–108. Maravall, José Antonio, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Trans. Terry Cochran. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Wellek, René. “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship.” In Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols Jr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. 69–127.

  Chapter Four  

The Debate on the Baroque in Pontigny Excerpt from Lo barroco Eugenio d’Ors

Translated by Wendy B. Faris

The Essence of the Baroque: Pantheism, Dynamics If we can invoke the name of Nuno Gonçalves, then Rembrandt and Rubens are also appropriate touchstones. The Catholic Counter-Reformation translates into Baroque style but so, too, does the Lutheran Weltanschauung, which expresses itself stylistically in Baroque forms, as does the sensibility that dominated Portugal’s overseas territories (a sensibility initially inspired by the Franciscans, as Jaime Cortesano and I have repeatedly insisted). To some extent, then, the Franciscans and Lutherans coincided with the Counter-Reformation in their expressive forms, and it is impossible that such formal similarities would not correspond to certain similarities of spirit. What were these similarities? What was the common denominator of the Counter-Reformation, Lutheranism, and the Franciscan Order? If we can clarify this issue, we will probably be close to discovering the secret that governs the general tendency of all forms of the Baroque, in all countries and in all periods. How many people would accept that there are “constants” in the realm of intellectual history? And among those, how many would accept a relation A Portuguese painter (1450–72) whose only known work is the altarpiece of St.

Vincent, now in the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon. In the paragraph preceding this excerpt, d’Ors mentions this painter as a precursor to the Baroque—to the “modern soul, that sense of interior life, individuality, and the free inspiration of disorderly nature, inventor of a certain ‘oceanic tenderness’ . . . of the saudade [soulfulness] that chiaroscuro would bring to modern painting.” D’Ors’s reference to a fifteenth-century painter immediately suggests the amplitude of his conception of the Baroque.—Eds.

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ship between the Franciscans and the Lutherans? How many would admit that both orders take an equally conciliatory position with respect to man’s place in nature, a kind of absolution of nature by man? If one begins by considering nature good, it follows that one will venerate it and conclude by considering it more or less divine, according it a status that almost inevitably makes the writer feel like capitalizing “Nature.” At first glance, it seems more difficult to include the Counter-Reformation—the Council of Trent, the Jesuits, who are a Catholic reactionary force—in a category that implies something close to pantheism. Is not the Counter-Reformation currently understood as a movement with markedly ascetic leanings, a kind of “black tide” that extinguishes the brilliant multicolored lights of the Renaissance whose party it crashed, replacing Carnival with Lent? However, if we want to discover the true character of the Counter-Reformation, we should not contrast it to the Renaissance. Rather, we will do better to contrast two ideological movements, one of which—Jansenism—was its contemporary, the other of which is ours, and seems to complete the Counter-Reformation’s cycle of influence. The relationship between the Jesuits and the Jansenists was not an isolated phenomenon, and it marks the meeting of two distinct historical trends. The truly ascetic viewpoint that distrusted nature and arrogantly dominated it, the belief in the objective nature of sin and, consequently, the duality and contradiction between the spiritual and the natural, was represented by the Jansenists, not the Jesuits. Remember Pascal’s Provinciales; remember the Jansenists’ repeated accusations against the Jesuits of laxity, compromise, and pragmatic accommodation to the times. Above all, remember how Jansen and his disciples insisted on considering themselves part of the idealist, intellectualizing, classical tradition associated with Saint Augustine, emphasizing their position by accusing their adversaries of Pelagianism. The battle between Augustine and Pelagius is already an episode in the battle between the classical and the Baroque.ii We have to admit that, for our part, ii Pelagius (354–ca. 418), a Celtic monk and contemporary of Saint Augustine, who

followed the Greek Stoics in arguing for free will and against original sin, a position that put him at odds with Augustine’s argument for the necessity of divine grace for salvation. The “Pelagian controversy” on human nature and human agency resulted in the charge of heresy against Pelagius, who was first acquitted, then found guilty. Pelagianism was crushed, and Augustine’s understanding of fallen human nature prevailed, an outcome that permanently influenced Christian doctrine. D’Ors finds that Pelagius follows dynamic nature whereas Augustine follows codified institutional

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when we spoke of the Baroque “eon,” we were thinking more of Pelagius than of Bernini. The ideological ferment surrounding Pelagius at the turn of the sixth century was fueled by far-reaching discussions of the nature and consequences of original sin, a discussion permeated by a strange and moving strain of naturalistic optimism, a resurgence of grace, and a waning of the idea of evil. The same features that characterized the Augustinian polemic against Pelagius (which have caused us on occasion to maintain that Pelagius anticipated the secular Jean-Jacques Rousseau) also characterized Jansenist rigidity with respect to the Jesuits and, more generally, toward the Catholic revival that emerged from the Council of Trent. The sectarian violence of the controversy does not mean that it was entirely misguided. We will ignore the question of orthodoxy here to examine the accuracy of their positions. The Jesuits were inspired in large part by the idea of harmony with nature and sympathy with life forces, concepts that allied them to the Reformation (with Lutheranism, of course, not with Calvinism, the latter being, in its way, the Protestant version of Jansenism) and with the order of the Franciscan Friars Minor [Porciúncula]. The Franciscans, the Protestant Reformation, and the Jesuits were united on intellectual grounds, in a spirit embodied by Baroque expressive forms. This is the first of the ideological trends to which we referred. The second, the “liturgical springtime” of our own era, offers us the valuable opportunity to perceive a modification of certain attitudes within an already secularized Catholicism whose principles date from the Council of Trent. Everyone realizes that the propaganda and ideas of Maria Laach Abbey and so many other Benedictine monasteries in southern Germany and elsewhere are not limited to advocating the strict observance of rituals. Put another way, precisely because it is a question of the strict adherence to ritual, it is also something else: a question of ideology, thanks to which the period of Catholicism begun by the Counter-Reformation is coming to a close. Romano Guardini has begun to articulate this ideology of “liturgical springtime.” In my opinion, the term could be broadened, as I asserted when a French edition of Carl Schmitt’s book Political Romanticism was published at the same time as several studies of Leonardo da Vinci’s aesthetics. structures; hence, for d’Ors, the former represents the Baroque spirit, the latter the classical spirit. Interestingly, Jorge Luis Borges also invokes this controversy in his essay “The Doctrine of Cycles” (in Historia de la eternidad, 1936).—Eds.

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In any case, we now have sufficient ingredients for this study. Guardini’s texts emphasize his opposition to the prior Catholic position that concedes the supremacy of logos over ethos and “the world as will” over “the world as representation.” Guardini takes advantage of many forces in the New Catholicism, challenging the regressive preference for logos over ethos, because where ethos rules, pathos is also enthroned, and thus an eloquent sense of revelation. Guardini does not hesitate to point out the liturgical eclipse of Jesuit methodologies and principles, nor does he forget to acknowledge the Jesuits’ predominant pragmatic and pathetic concerns. During the CounterReformation, the widespread antirationalist climate led to piety and, in a broader sense, to a whole religious life, to a kind of Romanticism. Rubens, the ultimate Jesuit painter, brings with him—the example is a powerful one—a vivid sense of miracles that initiates a new iconographic style. On the occasion of the Decade of Pontigny,iii we were able to see this superhuman, cosmic character—the widening of the pantheistic impulse achieved by Rubens and Baroque painters generally in their portrayal of miracles. We said that “when a painter before the Renaissance paints a miracle, at the most, the sky opens; when a Baroque painter paints the same thing, the sky goes into convulsions.” The sky and all the rest of nature. A huge apocalyptic wind shakes it and carries it off theatrically. And I will add another revealing distinction to this observation: the impatient modernity of Baroque artists, which does not wait for slow glorification through secular devotion before awarding the supreme consecration of sainthood. The Jesuit Flos Sanctorum and Baroque iconography expanded rapidly with beloved saints of the time, in whom one can still discern the traces of a full reconciliation with nature.iv Saint Ignatius, Saint Alphonse Maria of Ligouri, Saint Francis Xavier, Saint Teresa, Saint Philip Neri: these were saints whom the artists might have iii The Decade of Pontigny (sometimes called the entretiens or “conversations” of Pon-

tigny) refers to the ten-day seminars held every summer between 1910 and 1939 (excepting the years 1915 to 1921) in the Abbey of Pontigny, a Cistercian monastery in Burgundy that was converted into a meeting place for European intellectuals to gather to discuss selected topics. In August of 1931, d’Ors led the discussion at Pontigny “on the Baroque and the irreducible diversity of taste, according to peoples and epochs.”—Eds. iv Flos Sanctorum is a hagiography in several versions, of which the following is most frequently cited: Alonso de Villegas, Flos Sanctorum, y historia general, en que se escrive la vida de la Virgen Sacratissima . . . y de los antiguos santos (Toledo, 1534–1603).  —Trans.

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seen and known. This memory of their corporeal life would not seem to fit at all with the tendency to glorify them by passionate apotheosis, but the Counter-Reformation spirit included a kind of belief in the naturalism of the supernatural, in the identity between nature and the spirit, beliefs that were to some extent opposed to Pauline and Augustinian intellectual dualism, as well as to the dualism that has been revived today in the rational nature of our new liturgical awakening. We do not have to leave the realm of the senses to maintain that such identification with nature, such naturalism, cannot occur without a certain immersion in pantheism. Again, Franciscan spirituality, Lutheran spirituality, and Tridentine spirituality coincide in their use of Baroque forms of expression. The farther we go in the understanding of cultural history, the more we can see that pantheism is not a philosophical school like the rest, but rather a kind of common denominator, a generic background toward which the spirit gravitates as soon as it abandons the difficult and always precarious positions of rigorous distinctions and pluralism, and the jealously guarded, combative taste for discontinuity and rationality. The historian of Spanish heterodoxy, Menéndez y Pelayo, has already warned us—once again discovering a cultural constant—that our thinkers seem only to understand the opposition between orthodoxy and pantheism. Even though Menéndez y Pelayo’s observation is conceptually correct, it lacks generosity because this is not just a Spanish characteristic but a universal law that can be applied not only to Catholicism but to all relations between logical and emotional thought—in other words, to all relations between mind and life. Scarcely does the mind relax its laws than life takes over. Discipline loses its sacred character and spontaneity takes on a kind of divinity. Classicism is inherently intellectual; it is necessarily normative and authoritarian. But since the Baroque is vitalist, it is freedom-loving; it entails self-abandon, and honors strength. That is why classicism is also called humanism and is considered practically synonymous with it. The cosmic sensibility of the Baroque, on the other hand, reveals itself definitively by its perennial attraction to landscape. To landscape and folklore. I have repeatedly compared the relationship between the classical “eon” and the Baroque “eon” to the relationship that allows philologists to distinguish between what they call a “language” and a “dialect”—a comparison that strikes me as useful in clarifying the complexities of our definitional problem. The raw material of language, any language, is dialect; just as dialects are “natural languages,” the Baroque is the natural language of culture, through which culture imitates natural

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processes. The Baroque tends intrinsically toward the rural, the pagan, the peasant. Pan, the god of the fields, the god of nature, rules over all authentic Baroque works. Everyone recognizes that pantheism, the common foundation of the three great religious ideologies that initiated the modern age, likewise constitutes the secret underpinnings of other cultural movements and periods. We have just recalled Pelagian optimism. But much earlier, did not Alexandrian culture already show a pantheistic spirit, if one considers it in the context of its religious, philosophical, literary, and even its political and artistic products: the founding of syncretic museums, the taste for eclectic bodies of work, the introduction of landscape in bas relief? And does not Eastern Buddhism sound this very note in its knowledge of Greek science, and at the same time that the West is devoting itself to the rationalism characteristic of the classical “eon”? And does not prehistoric culture generally, with its constant tendency toward animism and even hylozoism, appear to us as a huge and pristine fountain of pantheism, of natural divinity? Closer to our own times, everybody knows that nineteenth-century Romanticism likewise contains an implicit tendency to sanctify nature, a tendency that expresses itself most radically in fin de siècle practice, at the moment when Wagner’s music (inherently pantheistic) and impressionist painting (methodologically pantheistic) arrive on the scene. Furthermore, we should note that during what we continue to call the “postwar” period,1 humanity has experienced a kind of regression, a pantheistic return to the nineteenth century (“everything is relative . . .” “there’s no good or evil . . .” “no beauty or ugliness . . .” “no sin . . .”) that is tinged with an Alexandrine color as well. But before attempting to list the stages of the Baroque, as we might call this historical overview of pantheism, we need to mention one of its most basic and well-known features, one that is closely allied to it, and is really a corollary of pantheism. We are thinking of the dynamism that characterizes all Baroque texts, whether artistic or intellectual: the tendency toward movement, the blessing, legitimization, and canonization of movement, as opposed to the parallel tendency toward stasis, rest, reversibility that characterizes rationality and everything classical. This dynamism signals the transition between my discussion of the spirit of the two “eras” just mentioned, and my discussion of their respective forms.  The philosophical doctrine holding that all matter has life, that life and matter are

intrinsically connected.—Trans.

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Perhaps we can compare, without irreverence, the passion of Christ in the moral evolution of humanity to Zeno of Elea’s formulation of his famous “aporias,” difficulties, conflicts, sufferings, and agonies. In the history of science, Zeno’s formulation can be seen as reason’s passion. (I have suggested elsewhere the possibility of obtaining an eventual and supreme reconciliation, a kingdom of the Holy Spirit, in these heretofore irremediable aporias, but that assertion need not concern us here.) In Zeno’s aporias, nature was crucified and the INRI of absurdity hung on it as an insult to its divinity. Nature is life; it is activity, change, flux. Nature carries movement inside itself; it is movement. But movement by its very nature remains outside the realm of reason; movement is absurd. Any introduction of movement into human affairs, if it is to be successful, requires the abandonment of reason. If the amount of movement admitted is minimal, marginal, or episodic, if it is limited to a slight faire la part du feu [devil’s advocacy] or a strategic oportet haereses esse,vi it requires mere tolerance. But if the movement is substantial, if its invasion is serious, if it usurps the foreground and accentuates or prolongs its power, it requires extreme abasement. The attitude of the classical spirit fits the first case: it is willing to tolerate a minimal amount of movement ironically, accepting it, whether reluctantly or smilingly, as a lesser evil necessary to escape death. The Baroque attitude, on the contrary, wants the abasement of reason. So, then, confronted with the inherent aporias in Zeno’s arguments—and whatever applies to Zeno also applies to other scientific arguments, which duplicate the same crisis, like Carnot-Clausius’s law, for example, which rebels against the rational idea of the “conservation of energy”—the Baroque spirit desperately cries out, “Long live movement and down with reason!” In other words, “Long live Life and down with Eternity!” Because you have to choose, choose and burn your boats. You have to choose between Life and Eternity. Everyone, every spiritual worker, every artist, every school, every country, every epoch, duplicates the myth of Faust in its own mind and finds itself facing the pact with Mephistopheles—who is Pan—in agony on Easter’s spring night. Ah, youth; ah, immortality. Ah, cool land; ah, crisp sky. Ah, the intensity of the present, which we enjoy passionately; ah, the hope of future bliss. The Baroque imitates Faust; it sells its soul to the devil. And the bloody mark that seals the pact already contains the sign of movement in its calligraphy; it is a mark of Baroque style. vi “It is fitting for heresies to exist.” From the Latin Vulgate, 1 Corinthians 11:19. 

—Trans.

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Forms of the Baroque: Multipolarity, Continuity Several years ago a theory was proposed to help us understand classical and Baroque forms comparatively, a theory that fortunately found a sympathetic audience in the literary circles of Spain and France. The theory contrasted “flying forms” and “heavy forms,” not only in the tectonics of a façade or a painting but also in a musical composition, a scientific theory, or a political institution. Here the analysis proceeds by dominant characteristics, of course; the Baroque style does not totally lack weight, despite its formal preference for flight, nor does the classical style obey only the force of gravity. Obviously the presence of these dominant characteristics must be analyzed according to the basic rules of each cultural realm. Music, for example, an art of time in which the role of movement is of utmost importance, obeys gravity in its own way, and architecture can only depart so much from its necessarily static mode of visual representation. In this context, I myself have used another theory, limited to the arts, that I am calling a theory of “attraction” [gravitación]. It works by positing that in the series of art forms—music, poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture— each medium occupies an unfixed position and, depending on the times, trends and artists, tends to adopt the characteristics of the neighboring art form. Thus, in classical periods, music becomes poetic, poetry graphic, painting sculptural, and sculpture architectural. In Baroque periods, the attraction works in the opposite direction; the architect sculpts, sculpture paints, and painting and poetry take on music’s dynamic tones. Since all Baroque style tends toward pantheism, all Baroque calligraphy tends toward music. However, before generalizing further about this formal matter, we need to clarify one point: whether there is a necessary relationship between a given style and a given calligraphy during a given “age.” Remember, this is a necessary relationship only insofar as a moral law can be ascertained; it is necessary like a statistical probability, not like a law of physics or mathematics. In the realm of individual experience, a discernible and predictable connection between psychological or temperamental characteristics and the forms that express them has been observed in various guises. This is the basis for what is called graphology. Graphology is the study of the formal repertories that correspond to different types of minds, to different mental states. Can this be the object of genuine scientific study? Not if we understand graphology in the way that it is generally understood, but yes, if it is interpreted in a more restricted and objective way. What prevents the graphology

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practiced in salons and private sessions from being taken seriously is, first of all, its brutal determinism, its insistence that a particular law always be applied in the same way to each and every case. In reality, a particular law, when it is applied to the realm of moral realities, can only be verified by statistical probabilities based on large numerical samples; it may or may not be confirmed in isolated cases. Also undermining the credibility of graphology is the tendency to attach fixed ethical labels to psychological traits, a practice that results from the necessities that inspire and drive a particular discussion. But an ethical label has a social, not a psychological, origin. How can we distinguish, in pure psychological terms, economy from avarice, imitation from envy, generosity from prodigality? All these labels are a function of public opinion, which dictates moral judgments. A certain rate of monetary interest is considered usury in a given time and place; in another, it is what the law calls a “good fatherly” arrangement. Even cruelty and indifference to the suffering of others, which are vices in a teacher or a writer, may be regarded as a duty, even a virtue, in a butcher or a surgeon. How can the graphologist legitimately play a part in the game of love, how can he know whether a certain thick curve of ink in the handwriting he is interpreting can be traced to “love’s genius” or “the devil’s lust”? And in aesthetic disputes, how can he tell whether a preference for flourishes in one’s handwriting should be called “artistic taste” or “bad taste”? Whoever dares to proclaim what we call “a person’s character” from graphology, or draw practical conclusions about love, friendship, or business from it, is setting out on a more or less seductive road, but one that has nothing to do with science.2 It would be an entirely different story if instead of looking high and low in the realm of moral qualities and trying to calibrate precise amounts of vice and virtue, we were content to note objectively the impulses and tendencies that writing can reveal—their presence but not their intensity, and even less, their social value; if, in a spirit of scientific objectivity and integrity, we would stop studying individual cases, which may lead to mistakes, and devote ourselves to the study of series and statistical probabilities to verify a given law. Within those parameters, how can we deny or even doubt that a whole range of formal preferences, some of which rule a writing style, correspond to a certain cast of mind or mental state? Who has not noticed, in himself or in others, that handwriting slanting to the right corresponds to discouraging or depressed times, whereas handwriting slanting upward corresponds to occasions that are confident, optimistic, proud? What observer has not guessed why capital letters copied from printed texts are considered a sign of higher

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education, a proof of great devotion to reading that has left an indelible trace on the reader’s eyes? Just as graphology leads to the study of individual states of mind in different kinds of people, the study of cultural forms discovers and explains stylistic manifestations of the collective spirit, the Weltgeist and its “ages.” A preference for a given repertoire of forms corresponds to a dominant communal spirit. Each reincarnation is a metarhythm and a metamorphosis, and if history has its constants, then styles have theirs, too; every “age” will have its telling calligraphy. Let us try to define the Baroque, in contrast to the classical, in these terms. “Human reason is a force that tends toward unity,” said Saint Augustine in a brilliant formulation. And nowhere, we might note in passing, is the basic classicism of the great theologian and philosopher clearer or more comprehensive. This statement is from De Ordine, which constitutes a kind of manual of style; it is a book that the modern world could profit from remembering, rather than searching for romantic nourishment in the Confessions. A second part could be added to this definition: “Human reason is a weakness that requires discontinuity,” or as we have sometimes said, “Human reason is always looking through bars.” A tendency toward singularity [unidad ] and a demand for discontinuity: these characteristics mark the formal repertory of the rational spirit, the classical spirit. Inversely, the Baroque spirit can be recognized by its adoption of multinuclear patterns that exclude reason’s dual demand: multinuclear patterns rather than singlecentered ones, their elements merged and continuous rather than discontinuous and separate. When a musical movement says, for example, that “it aspires to infinite melody,” we are in the presence of the Baroque because the principle of unity no longer dominates. Likewise, when a mathematical theory affirms that “three-dimensional space is only an individual case in an infinite series of possible spaces with infinite dimensions,” the Baroque is present, and for the same reason. When a school of painting declares that “we impressionists don’t paint objects but rather the air and light that bathe and unite objects,” we are in the presence of a flagrant denial of the rationalist demand for discontinuity. So, too, when a biologist claims that “we aren’t concerned with species, which are just conventions, but with the stream of life that passes from one being to another, linking them in the mobility of Werden, of devenir [becoming].” We are standing in front of a wrought-iron grille in a church in Salamanca. A Baroque angel crowns the finely worked grille. The angel’s arm is portrayed in a strange position: while the forearm is raised as if to pick up something,

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to grasp it, the hand is lowered as if to put it down. There is a muscular paradox, the coincidence of two opposing impulses of the same body part, two opposing directions of the same design. But if the figure’s arm obeys a double purpose, this is because the mind directing it is in a state of inner fragmentation, a broken mind, divided within. Broken, absurd, like nature—recall Zeno of Elea and Carnot-Clausius—not logical and unitary, like reason. The “age” that inspires this gesture is a Baroque “age” in which the mind imitates natural processes, far from the classical “age,” in which the mind imitates mental processes. The latter corresponds to the style that transforms a tree into a column, a living form into a geometrical figure, like the Doric mode, the former to quite another style in which, on the contrary, a column becomes a tree, as in Bernini’s or Churriguera’s works (figure 4.1; see also figure 2.2). Is not this duality, this multiplicity of simultaneous intentions, this inner mental fragmentation expressed by opposing forms, the basic characteristic of a whole series of different kinds of artworks, of human products, that are often vastly separated in time but joined by the same desire for pantheism and a dynamic perspective? We have noted several times two examples of this desire, one in a literary genre’s local variations, the other in an individual writer’s style. We have talked about the Russian novel and Proust’s syntax. The same kinds of parallels and contrasts can be seen in other studies devoted to the techniques of Goya, Rembrandt and Watteau, to Linnaeus’s system of classification, to the formal meanings of the dome and the bell tower, to Lavoisier’s chemistry as compared to de Stahl’s, to Poussin’s compositional style in contrast to El Greco’s, to the theory of relativity versus the theory of finitude, to the question of color in painting, to Paul Cézanne’s and Pablo Picasso’s art, to certain chapters in the history of fashion. Always, always, in all these studies, works that jar with the classical style seem to me to exist in a state of internal fragmentation, to exhibit a tendency toward multipolarity. This is the case of the Russian novel, where the characters’ intentions are not consistent or unified: they don’t know what they want. This is the case of Proust’s syntax, where clauses, far from subordinating themselves to the principal discourse, follow an independent path, in the course of which they create new centers of attraction that extend in ellipses, that wind in spirals. This is the case of El Greco’s distortion of the human body. And Kepler, who replaces ancient astronomy’s globes with ellipses when he describes the movement of the stars. In Pontigny they noticed the connection between Baroque disorder and inner disintegration; historical efficiency, however, tried to relegate this observation to the realm of modern man, “born,” as someone said, “during the

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turmoil of the Counter-Reformation. . . .” But could we not already see this state of mind and its formal manifestations in the ancient world? The comic playwright who puts the tormented self onstage, or tragic Medea, delivering the famous line “Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor” (I see, approving, things that are good, and yet I follow worse ones).vii What are they doing, after all, but anticipating both the moral world of the Russian novel and, we might note in passing, Rembrandt-like chiaroscuro (figure 4.2). An important theory developed by Professor Pierre Janet, whose psychology has long since been forgotten in the glorification of Freudian ideas and which might be useful to revive, can be directly applied to our problem, and I refer to it at every opportunity. In studying human personality and its disturbances, Janet points to man’s precarious vital state, in other words, to his consciousness of unity and his frequent tendency toward mental disintegration when the life force is weakened. Pathological states of personality loss or doubling, multiple personality disorders, and the like already exist in embryonic form when the higher state, which we could call classical consciousness, is suppressed, giving free rein to a multiple and uncontrolled flowering of the self, the Baroque alternative to the single self. If we recall the comparison that we suggested earlier in the philological realm, according to which a central and unified “language” can be distinguished from the peripheral spontaneity of “dialects,” it is easy to see the similarity to the psychological pattern we have just mentioned. A Weltgeist also has its tone, with its higher and lower levels. When mankind is at a higher tone, the classical “age” prevails; at a lower tone, the Baroque “age” comes to the fore. The first produces a kind of synesthesia of forms; the second abandons itself to a multipolarity that allows the rich and turbulent sources of the unconscious to overflow. In the first case, the object has an outline and a center; in the second, it is continuous and multipolar, lacks an outline of its own, and obeys an attraction outside itself. It is useful to note that in the artistic realm, classical forms prefer what in musical terms is called counterpoint, a closed system that gravitates around an internal nucleus, whereas Baroque forms prefer the pattern of the fugue, an open system that follows an attraction to an external point. Here again, under a different guise, we have the same contrast between “heavy forms” and “flying forms.” The arts incorporated what have been called “academic” sets of rules vii Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book 7: “Jason and Medea,” trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloom-

ington: Indiana University Press, 1974), p. 154.—Trans.

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

4.1  José

de Churriguera, altar, 1692–94. San Esteban Monastery, Salamanca. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, New York

and groups of conventions in which the static and rational ideal of classical beauty—Beauty!—was reduced to exact rules, daughters of secular experience. The fact that these conventions have been forgotten does not mean that they have lost their value, and certainly not their meaning. Formerly, students at schools of fine arts knew that in figure painting, no figure should hide the logical meaning of the outline belonging to other half-hidden ones. Rhetorical scholars were initiated into the rule of the three unities for writing tragedies and judging those written by others. Poets were taught to conform to metric patterns. Architects worked to deepen their understanding of the canon of ancient monuments. What did it matter if these rules were arbitrary? That was no surprise, given that reason itself is arbitrary and does not follow or allow the free exploration of nature. During certain periods, further rules were added to these public and generally accepted ones. Today, intense curiosity and many extremely serious studies follow these developments and speculate about what the famous Golden Rule, the holy secret of the triangle, the ideal of pyramidal composition, could have meant to the initiates of other times: a whole collection of studies, some originating with Pythagoras, some arising from the Masonic tradition, some the result

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4.2  Rembrandt

Harmensz van Rijn, St. Bartholomew, ca. 1657. The Putnam Foundation, Timken Museum of Art, San Diego

of solitary speculations. The theory of pyramidal composition that caused Andrea del Sarto to be known to his contemporaries by the well-deserved and laudatory name Andrea senza errori (Faultless Andrea) has become the essential principle of classical painting for many modern critics. And even in the middle of the Baroque, treatises like the one by Mengsviii or the aphorisms in Ingres’s style do not fail to mention these eternal rules. In Pontigny, I was surprised to see how the knowledge of such traditions has been lost, even by French critics. Did we not hear that the rule of the “three unities” required by tragedy originated with the controversy precipitated by Corneille’s The Cid, as if all European humanism before The Cid had not already been ruled by Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Horace’s Art of Poetry? By contrast, it seemed fruitful to me to bring up the issue of caricature, always opportune when discussing the Baroque. The taste for caricature (in effect, for character), as opposed to the cult of regular and canonical beauty—Beauty viii Anton Rafael Mengs (1729–79), Bohemian painter, also practicing in Spain, Italy,

and Eng­land, whose treatises on art championed an eclectic combination of styles.—Trans.

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again!—is one of the most authentic signs of the presence of Baroque culture. The modern world has experienced that attraction, and the examples of Bernini, Callot, and Hogarth were very appropriately cited. But it is the case that this same taste, so easily observed in Gothic art (choir stall sculpture, gargoyles) had already flourished in Greek and Roman sculpture of the decadent age: fauns, mermaids, monsters, comic goings-on, stylized and caricaturized busts of individuals. Oriental art had also experienced this tendency, as had primitive and prehistoric art. During a conversation in Pontigny, when Monsieur Hagar was reluctant to consider the Baroque and the classical as “ages” and, recalling that classicism has always modeled itself on ancient civilization, he asked me what I considered the historical origin of the Baroque. The answer was easy. If the precursor of classicism is called antiquity, then the precursor of the Baroque could be called prehistory. Rationalism, stasis, the circle, the triangle, counterpoint, columns, mental processes that imitate the mind, all these already belong, of course, to Greek and Roman civilization; but pantheism, dynamism, the ellipse, the fugue, the tree, the mind taking its cue from nature are integral to the primitive world. And just as at the beginning of the Renaissance, certain Byzantine scholars came to Italy to initiate others into the secrets of classical philology, at the moment when the Baroque was being reborn in an immediate yesterday, so to speak, we have seen blacks and the fetishes of savages disembark in Paris to restore elemental symbols to a civilization tired of refinements and rationalities. Children of instinct, directly inspired by instinct, they are doubtless incapable of creating immortal works, but in their own way they are inherently endowed with another kind of immortality.

Notes 1 Through a revealing antonomasia, I once proposed to call this period “between two

wars.”

2 On this topic, see my Teoria de los estilos y espejo de la arquitectura (Madrid: Aguilar,

1945).

Editors’ Note to “The Concept of Baroque in Literary   Scholarship,” Excerpts, by René Wellek

Born in Vienna in 1903 and educated in Vienna and Prague, René Wellek immigrated to the United States after the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939. He was head of the Department of Comparative Literature at Yale University from 1946 until his retirement in 1972, during which time he shaped the theory and practice of comparative literature as an academic discipline. He was a leading proponent of the New Criticism and coauthor, with Austin Warren, of the influential Theory of Literature (1949), an early attempt to regularize of the work of literary criticism and the teaching of literature in the United States. We include the first and final sections of “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship” (69–88; 108–14), a seminal essay published in 1945 and reissued with a 1962 postscript in Concepts of Criticism (1963). Wellek writes as a comparatist intent on surveying the European Baroque as a literary phenomenon exceeding the boundaries of any single national literature, and also intent on exposing numerous pitfalls and inconsistencies in the twentieth-century use of the term. In a section of his essay not excerpted here, he rejects the understanding of the Baroque as an ahistorical style found in all ages and cultures, arguing instead that the Baroque should not be dissociated from its European historical context. When understood as an ahistorical “type,” such as Eugenio d’Ors and Alejo Carpentier had proposed (although Wellek does not name Carpentier or any other Latin American theorist), the Baroque becomes “so broad and vague . . . that it loses all usefulness for concrete literary study” (92). Opposing such vagueness, Wellek provides a rigorous historical account. He cautions against reducing the Baroque to a Catholic Counter-Reformation ideology that would exclude the Protestant Baroque of Germany, Bohemia, and England. Nor can the Baroque be reduced to a repertory of stylistic de-

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vices (conceit, antithesis, hyperbole, etc.), because such devices are not exclusive to the Baroque. Furthermore, it is a “misunderstanding” to consider the Baroque a precursor to Romanticism and German expressionism, and thus correlated to ideas of modern subjectivity. For Wellek, the Baroque is a transgressive formalism closer to the “absolute” poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé; he reminds us that the French symbolists played a key role in the rehabilitation of Luis de Góngora. Wellek also notes the early importance of German critics and art historians in the revalidation of the Baroque. In his 1962 “Postscript” (not included here) he refers to German “instigators,” some motivated by “indiscriminate enthusiasm,” who created a “vogue” for the Baroque during late nineteenth century and the early twentieth (122). Such faint praise may be symptomatic of an Anglophone critic, but Wellek soon shows how the Baroque established its usefulness with the transfer of the term from the plastic arts to literature, which “occurred on a full scale in Germany early in the nineteen twenties and . . . radiated thence to the other countries” (“Postscript” 117). Once the sins of immaturity (indiscriminate German enthusiasm and ahistorical typological generalizations) are overcome, the Baroque may be correctly understood as a permanent feature of European literary history. In his “Postscript,” Wellek urges a greater recognition of the Baroque in English literary history, where it continues to be perceived as an alien continental imposition. He observes that the Baroque is a term “sufficiently general to override the local terms of schools” (Spanish culteranismo and conceptismo, German Schwulst, French preciosité, English metaphysical poetry, etc.); it is a term capable of overarching “the unity of a Western literary and artistic period” (127).

Author’s Bibliography Wellek, René. “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship.” 1945, updated 1962. In Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols Jr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. 69–114; 69–88, 108–14 included here. ———. “Postscript 1962.” In Concepts of Criticism, ed. Stephen G. Nichols Jr. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. 115–27. Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. New York: Harcourt, Brace   and World, 1949.

  Chapter Five  

The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship Excerpts René Wellek Section 1 All students of English will realize that the use of the term “Baroque” in literature is a recent importation from the con­tinent of Europe. A full-scale history of the term, which has never been attempted,1 would be of considerable interest, even though I do not believe that the history of any term needs to be decisive for its present-day use, and though I realize that a term cannot be returned to any of its original meanings; least, of course, by the dictum of one man. “Baroque” as Karl Borinski and Benedetto Croce have shown by convincing quotations,2 is derived from baroco, the name for the fourth mode of the second figure in the scholastic nomenclature of syllogisms. It is a syllogism of the type: “Every P is M; some S are not M, hence some S are not P”; or to give Croce’s example: “Every fool is stubborn; some people are not stubborn, hence some people are not fools.” This type of argument was felt to be sophistical and far-fetched as early as 1519 when Luis Vives ridiculed the Parisian professors as “sophists in baroco and baralipton.”3 Croce gives several examples of the use of such phrases as “ragioni barrochi” from 1570 on. The etymology found in the NED and elsewhere which would derive the term from the Spanish barrueco, an oddly shaped pearl, must appar­ently be abandoned. In the eighteenth century the term emerges with the meaning of “extravagant,” “bizarre.” In 1739 it is used thus by the Président de Brosses, and in the sense of “decorative, playfully free” by J. J. Winckelmann in 1755.4 In Quatremère de Quincy’s Dictionnaire historique de l’architecture (1795–1825), it is  A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles (NED) was the original title of the

Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

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called “une nuance du bizarre” and Guarino Guarini is considered the master of the Baroque.5 Jakob Burckhardt seems to have stabilized its meaning in art history as referring to what he considered the decadence of the High Renaissance in the florid archi­tecture of the Counter-Reformation in Italy, Germany, and Spain. In 1843 he had used the term rococo in exactly the same sense as he later used Baroque and suggested that every style has its rococo: a late, florid, decadent stage.6 This sug­gestion of Burckhardt’s of an extension of the term was taken up by Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the famous classical philol­ogist, who in 1881 wrote about “ancient Baroque,” i.e. Hel­lenistic art. L. von Sybel, in his Weltgeschichte der Kunst (1888) has a chapter on ancient Roman Baroque.7 The same year is the date of Heinrich Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Barock, a detailed monograph chiefly concerned with the development of architecture in Rome. Wölfflin’s work is highly important not only because it gave a first reliable tech­nical analysis of the development of the style in Rome in appreciative terms, but because it also contains a few pages on the possibility of applying Baroque to literature and music. With Wölfflin began the revaluation of Baroque art, soon taken up by other German art historians such as Gurlitt, Riegl, and Dehio, and soon to be followed in Italy by Giulio Magni and Corrado Ricci, and in England by Martin S. Briggs and Geoffrey Scott. The latter wrote a fervent defence, oddly enough called The Architecture of Humanism (1914).8 After the first World War, admiration and sym­pathy for even the most grotesque and tortured forms of Baroque art reached its peak in Germany; there were a good many individual enthusiasts in other countries, such as Eugenio d’Ors in Spain, Jean Cassou in France, and Sache­verell Sitwell in England.9 In art history, today, Baroque is recognized as the next stage of European art after the Ren­aissance. The term is used not only in architecture, but also in sculpture and painting, and covers not only Tintoretto and El Greco but also Rubens and Rembrandt. Baroque is also fully established as a term in the history of music. It was apparently well known in the eighteenth century, as Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de Musique (1764) lists it as a term for music with “confused harmony” and other vices.10 But the Czech music historian August W. Am­bros seems to have been the first to use it as a period term, in 1878.11 Today it is the current label for seventeenth-century music and seems to be applied widely to Schütz, Buxtehude, Lully, Rameau, and even Bach and Handel.12 There are now also Baroque philosophers: Spinoza has been called Baroque and I have seen the term applied to Leibniz, Comenius, and even Berkeley.13 Spengler spoke of Baroque painting, music, philosophy, and even psychology, mathe­

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matics, and physics. Baroque is now used in general cultural history for practically all manifestations of seventeenth-cen­tury civilization.14 So far as I know, Wölfflin was the first to transfer the term Baroque to literature. In a remarkable page of Renaissance und Barock (1888)15 he suggests that the contrast between Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1516) and Tasso’s Gerusa­lemme liberata (1584) could be compared to the distinction between Renaissance and Baroque. In Tasso, he observes a heightening, an emphasis, a striving for great conceptions absent in Ariosto, and he finds the same tendency in Berni’s reworking of Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato. The images are more unified, more sublime; there is less visual imagination (Anschauung), but more mood (Stimmung). Wölfflin’s sug­gestions do not seem to have been taken up for a long time. A search through a large number of writings on Marinism, Gongorism, Euphuism, preciosité, and German Schwulst has failed to produce more than one or two passages where a literary work or movement is actually called Baroque before 1914, though Baroque art was discussed as a parallel phe­nomenon under that name.16 This seems to be true of the writings of Benedetto Croce before the first World War. In Saggi sulla letteratura italiana del seicento (1910), the liter­ature is never called Baroque, though Croce discusses the parallel with Baroque in the arts and even warns against the “exaggeration” in the appreciation of seventeenth-century literature “to which the present fashion which in the plastic arts has returned to the Baroque could easily seduce us.”17 In 1914, however, a Danish scholar, Valdemar Vedel, published a paper “Den digteriske Barokstil omkring aar 1600.”18 He draws there a close parallel between Rubens and French and English poetic style between 1550 and 1650. Literature is, like the art of Rubens, decorative, colorful, emphatic. Vedel lists favorite themes and words in literature which he considers applicable to the art of Rubens: grand, high, flourish, red, flame, horses, hunt, war, gold, the love of show, swelling bombast, mythological masquerade. But Vedel’s article, possibly because it was in Danish, was com­pletely ignored. The radiating point for the spread of the term was Germany and especially Munich where Wölfflin, a Swiss by birth, was a professor. His colleague in German literature, Karl Borinski, wrote a long book, Die Antike in Poetik and Kunsttheorie (1914), with the subtitle for Vol­ume I, Mittelalter, Renaissance und Barock, where he dis­cusses especially the conceptist theories of Gracián and sketches the history of the term in a learned and substantially accurate note.19 In 1915 Wölfflin published a new book, Kunstgeschicht­liche Grundbegriffe,20

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where Renaissance and Baroque are contrasted as the two main types of style, and criteria for their distinction are worked out very concretely. This book made a tremendous impression on several German literary historians struggling with the problem of style. It seemed to invite imitation and possibly transfer to literary history. In 1916, without mentioning Wölfflin, Fritz Strich gave a stylis­tic analysis of German seventeenth-century lyrical poetry which he called “Baroque.”21 Oskar Walzel, in the same year, followed with a paper which claimed Shakespeare as belong­ing to the Baroque.22 In 1917 Max Wolff rejected Walzel’s claim but admitted Baroque in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, in the Rape of Lucrece, and in Lyly.23 In 1918 Josef Nadler published the three-volume edition of his Literatur­geschichte der deutschen Stämme and Landschaften,24 an original attempt to write the history of German literature “from below,” from the local literature of the German cities and provinces. Nadler, whose orientation was then strongly Austrian and Roman Catholic, used the term Baroque very prominently to describe the Jesuit Counter-Reformation literature of southern Germany. But all these items I have described up till now are com­paratively isolated. The enormous vogue of Baroque as a literary term arose in Germany only about 1921–22. In 1921 Rudolf von Delius published an anthology of German Baroque poetry and in the next year no fewer than four such anthologies were issued.25 Josef Gregor wrote a book on the Vienna Baroque theater26 and Arthur Hübscher started the long line of philosophers on the Baroque with a piece, “Barock als Gestaltung antithetischen Lebensgefühls.”27 Herbert Cysarz, one of the most prolific and pretentious of the German writers on literary Baroque, published his first large, boldly conceived book, Deutsche Barockdichtung, in 1924.28 Since then interest in the German seventeenth cen­tury has risen by leaps and bounds and produced a large literature permeated by the term Baroque. I would be hesi­tant to dogmatize about the exact reasons for this revival of German Baroque poetry; part of it may be due to Spengler, who had used the term vaguely in The Decline of the West,29 and part is due, I think, to a misunderstanding. Baroque poetry was felt to be similar to the most recent German expressionism, to its turbulent, tense, torn diction and tragic view of the world induced by the aftermath of the war; part was a genuine change of taste, a sudden comprehension for an art despised before because of its conventions, its sup­posedly tasteless metaphors, its violent contrasts and antitheses. German scholars soon applied their newly found criterion to other European literatures. Theophil Spoerri was, in 1922, I believe, the first to carry

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out Wölfflin’s suggestions as to the difference between Ariosto and Tasso.30 Ariosto is shown by Wölfflin’s criteria to be Renaissance; Tasso, Baroque. Marino and the Marinists appeared Baroque. Spain was also easily assimilable, since Gongorism and conceptism presented clearly parallel phenomena which had but to be christened Baroque. But all other Spanish literature, from Guevara in the early sixteenth century to Calderón in the late seven­ teenth century, was soon claimed as Baroque. Wilhelm Michels in a paper on “Barockstil in Shakespeare and Calderón” (1929) used the acknowledged Baroque character­istics of Calderón to argue that Shakespeare also shows the same stylistic tendencies.31 There seems to be only some disa­greement among the German writers as to the status of Cervantes: Helmut Hatzfeld as early as 1927 had spoken of Cervantes as “Jesuitenbarock” and had argued that his worldview is that of the Counter-Reformation.32 In a later paper, “El predominio del espíritu español en las literaturas del siglo XVII,”33 Hatzfeld tried to show that Spain is eter­nally, basically Baroque and that it was historically the radiating center of the Baroque spirit in Europe. The perma­nently Spanish features which are also those of Baroque were only temporarily overlaid by the Renaissance. Ludwig Pfandl, however, who wrote the fullest history of Spanish literature during the Golden Age,34 limits Baroque to the seventeenth century and expressly exempts Cervantes. Both Vossler and Spitzer, however, consider even Lope de Vega Baroque (in spite of Lope’s objections to Góngora).35 French literature was also described by German scholars in terms of the Baroque. Neubert and Schürr talked, at first somewhat hesitatingly,36 of Baroque undercurrents and features in seventeenth-century France. Schürr claimed Rab­elais as early Baroque and described the précieux, the writers of the sprawling courtly novels and of burlesques, as Baroque, a style which was defeated by the new classicism of Boileau, Molière, La Fontaine, and Racine. Others advo­cated the view that these French classics themselves are Baroque. Apparently Erich Auerbach, in 1929, was the first to voice this view.37 Leo Spitzer endorses it with some qual­ifications. In a brilliant analysis of the style of Racine,38 he has shown how Racine always tones down Baroque features, how Racine’s Baroque is tame, subdued, classical. Though Hatzfeld does not completely deny the obviously striking distinctions of French classicism, he is the one scholar who most insistently claims all French classicism as Baroque. In an early paper he discusses the French religious poetry of the seventeenth century, showing its similarity to Spanish mysticism and its stylistic similarities to general Baroque.39 In a long piece in a Dutch review he

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has accumulated many observations to show that French classicism is only a variant of Baroque.40 French classicism has the same typi­cally Baroque tension of sensuality and religion, the same morbidity, the same pathos as Spanish Baroque. Its form is similarly paradoxical and antithetical, “open” in Wölffin’s sense. The discipline of French classicism is simply a uni­versal characteristic of the “rule over the passions,” recom­mended by the CounterReformation everywhere. English literature, even outside of the attempts to claim Shakespeare as Baroque, was also soon brought in line. As far as I know, Friedrich Brie’s Eng­ lische Rokokoepik (1927) is the first attempt of this sort.41 There Pope’s Rape of the Lock is analyzed as rococo, but in passing a contrast to the Baroque Garth and Boileau is drawn. Fritz Pützer in “Pre­diger des englischen Barocks stilistisch untersucht” (1929) then claimed almost all English pulpit oratory from Latimer to Jeremy Taylor as Baroque.42 F. W. Schirmer in several articles and in his Geschichte der englischen Literatur uses the term for the metaphysicals, Browne, Dryden, Ot­way, and Lee, excluding Milton from the Baroque expressly.43 This was also the conclusion of Friedrich Wild who called even Ben Jonson, Massinger, Ford, and Phineas Fletcher Baroque.44 The idea of an antithesis of sensualism and spirit­ualism in English seventeenth-century poetry was in the meantime carried out in a rather mechanical fashion by Werner P. Friederich,45 a work which was accepted as a Harvard Ph.D. thesis under J. L. Lowes. There are a good many other German theses on English literary Baroque: Wolfgang Jünemann compared Dryden’s Fables with their sources to show how Dryden translated, e.g. Chaucer into a Baroque style;46 Wolfgang Mann examined Dryden’s heroic tragedies as an expression of courtly Baroque culture.47 A Zurich thesis by Elisabeth Haller analyses the Baroque style of Thomas Burnet’s Theory of the Earth in comparison with its Latin and German translations.48 The view that all English seventeenthcentury civilization is Baroque has been pushed farthest by Paul Meissner,49 who includes also Milton and who has devised a whole scheme of contraries covering all activities and stages of the English seventeenth century. In a piece which stresses the Spanish influence in England, Hatzfeld goes so far as to call Milton “the most hispanized poet of the age, who to the foreigner appears the most Baroque.”50 Bernhard Fehr finally has extended the frontiers of English Baroque by finding it in Thomson and Mallet and even tracing it in the verse form of Wordsworth.51 Thus all literatures of Europe in the seventeenth century (and in part of the sixteenth century) are conceived of by German schol­ars as a unified movement. E.g. in Schnürer’s bulky vol-

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ume, Katholische Kirche and Kultur der Barockzeit (1937),52 Spain, Portugal with Camões, Italy, France, Germany, Aus­tria, but also Poland, Hungary, and Yugoslavia are treated as Baroque. It is a coherent view which needs discussion, acceptance, refutation, or modification. I have reviewed the Germans first because they were the originators and instigators of the movement (if one ignores the isolated Dane, Vedel). But the idea was taken up soon by scholars of other nationalities. In 1919 the term made its first conquest outside Germany. F. Schmidt-Degener published a piece on “Rembrandt en Vondel” in De Gids where Rembrandt is made out an opponent of Baroque taste,53 while the poet Vondel, Flemish by descent and a convert to Catholicism, is drawn as the typical representative of the European Baroque. The author looks with distinct disfavor on the Baroque, its sensual mysticism, its externality, its ver­balism in contrast to the truly Dutch and at the same time universal art of Rembrandt. To judge from a little book by Heinz Haerten, Vondel und der deutsche Barock (1934),54 the revaluation of Baroque has also triumphed in Holland. There Vondel is claimed as the very summit of Northern, Teutonic Baroque. In general, seventeenth-century Dutch literature seems by the Dutch themselves to be now described as Baroque. The next country to succumb to the invasion was Italy. Giulio Bertoni had reviewed Spoerri without showing much interest;55 Leonello Venturi early expounded Wölfflin.56 But late in 1924 Mario Praz finished a book, Secentismo e Mari­nismo in Inghilterra,57 which, in its title, avoids the term Baroque, but in its text, actually two monographs on Donne and Crashaw, freely refers to Baroque in literature and to the literary Baroque in England. Praz studied especially the con­tacts of Donne and Crashaw with Italian and neo-Latin literature, and he knew the work of Wölfflin. In July 1925 Benedetto Croce read a paper in Zurich on the concept of the Baroque which was then published in German transla­tion.58 There he discusses the term without, it seems, much consciousness of its newness in literature, though he vigorously protests against many of the current German theories and pleads for a revival of the original meaning of Baroque as a kind of artistic ugliness. Though Croce tried again and again to defend his negative attitude to the Baroque, he himself adopted the term as a label for the Italy of the seven­teenth century. His largest book on the period, Storia dell’età barocca in Italia, has the term on the title page.59 After 1925 he discussed even his beloved Basile in terms of Baroque.60 Baroque thus seems victorious in Italy. The history of the penetration of the term into Spain is not so clear to

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me. Eugenio d’Ors in an extravagant book, Du Baroque (1935), known to me only in its original French edition,61 includes reflexions and aphorisms which are carefully dated but of which I have no means to find out whether they were actually printed at that time in Spanish. One piece, dated 1921, calls Milton’s Paradise Lost Baroque, and in the later sections d’Ors finds Baroque all throughout history in Góngora and Wagner, in Pope and Vico, in Rousseau and El Greco, in the Portugal of the fifteenth century and today. A less fanciful application of the term has appeared in Spain since 1927, the tercentenary of Góngora’s death. There was an anthology in honor of Góngora which spoke of him as a Baroque poet.62 Then Dámaso Alonso published an edition of the Soledades which has a page on Góngora’s barroquismo with an express recognition of the novelty of the term.63 In the same year, Ortega y Gasset, in reviewing Alonso, called “Góngorism, Marinism, and Euphuism merely forms of Baroque.” “What is usually called classical in poetry is actually Baroque, e.g. Pindar who is just as diffi­cult to understand as Góngora.”64 Another famous Spanish scholar, Américo Castro, has also begun using Baroque, first I believe for Tirso da Molina, but also for Góngora and Quevedo. In an unpublished paper on the “Baroque as Lit­erary Style” Castro rejects the view that Rabelais or Cer­vantes are Baroque, but accepts Pascal and Racine as well as Góngora and Quevedo.65 France is, I think, the one major country which has almost completely refused to adopt the term. There are a few ex­ceptions. André Koszul calls Beaumont and Fletcher Baroque in 1933, and refers in his bibliography to some of the German work.66 A French student of German literature, André Moret, wrote a good thesis on the German Baroque lyric adopting the term as a matter of course.67 The one French book I know which makes much of the term is de Reynold’s Le XVIIe Siècle: Le Classique et le Baroque.68 M. Reynold recognizes a conflict between the Baroque and the classic in seventeenthcentury France: the temperament of the time, its passion and its will seem to him Baroque; Corneille, Tasso, and Milton are called so, but the actual French classicists appear as victors over something which endangered their balance and poise. One should note that Gonzague de Reynold is a professor at Fribourg, where the late Schnürer was his colleague, and that he taught for years at the University of Bern, to which Strich had gone from Munich. Most French literary historians, such as Balden­sperger, Lebègue, and Henri Peyre,69 have raised their voices vigorously against the application of the term to French lit­erature; I have not found any evidence that even the new French defenders of preciosité and its historical importance, such as Fidao-

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Justiniani, Mongredien, and Daniel Mornet,70 have any inclination to use the term even for their protégés. Recently, Marcel Raymond in a volume in honor of Wölfflin has tried to distinguish Renaissance and Baroque elements in Ronsard with subtle, though extremely elusive results. Madame Dominique Aury edited an anthology of French Baroque poets which elicited a fine essay by Maurice Blan­chot.71 Baroque as a literary term has also spread to the Slavic countries with a Catholic past. It is used in Poland widely for the Jesuit literature of the seventeenth century, and in Czechoslovakia there has been a sudden interest in the half-buried Czech literature of the Counter-Reformation which is always called Baroque. The editions of Baroque poets and sermons and discussions became especially frequent in the early thirties. There is also a small book by Václav Černý (1937) which discusses the Baroque in European poetry, in­ cluding in it even Milton and Bunyan.72 The term seems to be used in Hungarian literary history for the age of Cardinal Pasmány, and by Yugoslavs to denote Gundulić and his great epic Osman. I have found no evidence that the Scan­dinavians speak of any period of their literature as Baroque, though Valdemar Vedel, the Danish scholar who wrote the first article on poetic Baroque back in 1914, has since written a book on Corneille which analyzes his style as Baroque, and though there is recent Danish work on German Baroque drama.73 To England and America the term, as applied to litera­ture, came late, much later than the revival of interest in Donne and the metaphysicals. Grierson and T. S. Eliot do not use it, though Eliot apparently spoke of a Baroque period in his unpublished Clark lectures on the metaphysical poets.74 In an epilogue to a new edition of Geoffrey Scott’s Architecture of Humanism (1924) the parallel between Donne and Thomas Browne on the one hand and Baroque architecture on the other is drawn expressly, though the lit­ erature itself is not called Baroque.75 A rather flimsy essay by Peter Burra, published in Farrago in 1930, is called “Baroque and Gothic Sentimentalism” but uses the term quite vaguely for periods of luxuriance as an alternative for Gothic.76 The more concrete literary use seems to come from Germany: J. E. Crawford Fitch published a book on Angelus Silesius in 1932 which uses the term occasionally,77 and in 1933, the philosopher E. I. Watkin, a close student of Ger­man Catholic literature, discussed Crashaw as Baroque.78 Watkin, of course, must have known the book by Mario Praz. Crashaw is again, in 1934, the center of a study of the Baroque by T. O. Beachcroft.79 In 1934 F. W. Bateson pub­lished his little book English Poetry and the English Lan­guage,80 where

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he applied the term Baroque to Thomson, Gray, and Collins. He uses Geoffrey Scott’s Architecture of Humanism quite independently, without being aware of the Continental uses, and without realizing that Scott is dependent on Wölfflin. Since then the term Baroque occurs in English scholarship more frequently, but not, it seems to me, prominently. Recently F. P. Wilson used it to characterize Jacobean in contrast to Elizabethan literature,81 and E. M. W. Tillyard applied it in passing to Milton’s epistolary prose.82 In the United States, as early as 1929, Morris W. Croll christened a very fine analytical paper on seventeenth-century prose style “Baroque.”83 Before, in several papers on the history of prose style, he had called the same traits of the anti-Ciceronian movement “Attic,” a rather obscure and misleading term. Croll knew Wölfflin’s work and used his criteria, though very cautiously. In the next year George Williamson, in his Donne Tradition, singled out Crashaw as “the most Baroque of the English metaphysicals” and calls him a “true representative of the European Baroque poet, contrasting with Donne therein.”84 Williamson, of course, had read Mario Praz. Since then Helen C. White in her Metaphysical Poets used the term for Crashaw,85 and Austin Warren’s book on Crashaw has the subtitle: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (1939).86 Quite recently the term seems to be used even more widely and broadly. Harry Levin has applied the word to Ben Jonson, Wylie Sypher included the metaphysicals and Milton, and Roy Daniells, a Canadian, has argued that the later Shakespeare is Baroque as well as Milton, Bunyan, and Dryden.87 The term is also used for the echoes of English seven­teenth-century literature in America. Zdeněk Vančura, a Czech scholar who visited Mr. Croll’s seminar in Princeton, applied his description of Baroque style to seventeenthcentury American prose,88 to Nathaniel Ward and Cotton Mather. Austin Warren finally has brilliantly analyzed the newly discovered early eighteenthcentury American poet, Edward Taylor, as Colonial Baroque.89 Thus Baroque is widely used today in the discussion of literature and is likely to spread even more widely.

Section 7 The most promising way of arriving at a more closely fitting description of the Baroque is to aim at analyses which would correlate stylistic and ideological criteria. Already Strich had tried to interpret them in such a unity. The ideo­logical conflicts, the “tensions of the lyrical motion,” find expression in

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stylistic antitheses, in paradoxes, in syntactic contortions, in a heaving up of the heavy burden of lan­guage.90 Américo Castro derives the style of the period from the division of the man of this age which he perceives in himself. The precious and rare style of the Baroque artists is an expression of aggression, a sublime form of independence, of the conflict between the individual and the insecure world.91 But all these and similar formulations, while true as far as they go, lack the requirement of specific application exclu­sively to the Baroque. Conflicts between the ego and the world, conflicts within the individual combined with a tortu­ous or precious style can be found all over the history of literature from Iceland to Arabia and India. Some more concrete analytical studies seem to me more convincing. In a paper on the Baroque style of the religious classical lyric in France,92 Helmut Hatzfeld has made an attempt to inter­pret stylistic characteristics such as gemination, “chaotic” asyndeton, and a phenomenon which he calls “veiled antith­esis” in relation to such attitudes as the melting together of heaven and earth, the glorification and exaltation of God, the morbid eroticism of the time. One can be critical of Hatz­feld’s conclusions as to the Baroque nature of French class­icism, as his material is confined to a very specialized genre, the religious lyric and within it to modernizations of medieval hymns, the psalms, and the Song of Songs, but it is scarcely possible to doubt the skill with which style and mind, device and spirit are brought together. It seems to me that the later articles which expand Hatzfeld’s analysis to the whole of French classicism and finally to the whole European move­ment of the Baroque conceived by him as dominated by the Spanish spirit, never achieve again the same admirable con­creteness and close integration of formal and ideological analysis. Austin Warren in his book on Crashaw also suc­ceeds in closely correlating aesthetic method and religious belief. Crashaw’s imagery “runs in streams; the streams run together, image turning into image. His metaphors are sometimes so rapidly juxtaposed as to mix. The effect is often that of phantasmagoria. For Crashaw, the world of the senses is evidently enticing; yet it was a world of appearances only—shifting, restless appearances. By temperament and conviction he was a believer in the miraculous: and his aesthetic method may be interpreted as a genuine equivalent of his belief, as its translation into a rhetoric of metamor­phosis.”93 For many other writers it will be possible to see an indubitable connection between the emblematic image and their belief in the pervasive parallelism between macrocosmos and microcosmos, in some vast system of correspond­ences which can be expressed only by sensuous symbolism. The prevalence of synaesthesia which

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in the Renaissance apparently occurs only under such traditional figures as the music of the spheres, but during the Baroque boldly hears colors and sees sounds,94 is another indication of this belief in a multiple web of interrelations, correspondences in the universe. Most Baroque poets live with a world picture sug­gested by traditional Christian gradualism, and have found an aesthetic method where the imagery and the figures “link seemingly alien, discontinuous spheres.”95 Such analyses will be most successful with poets like Crashaw where the integration of belief and expression is complete. But it seems to me impossible to deny that this connection is frequently very loose in the Baroque age, pos­sibly more so than in other ages. In Hatzfeld’s long piece on French classicism a peculiarity of Baroque literature and all Baroque art is seen in the “paradoxical relation of content and form.” “French classicism with its noble and simple language which disguises the passions burning behind it” is proved Baroque on the basis of this tension between content and form.96 Leo Spitzer characterizes Racine in similar terms and stresses elsewhere, in connection with an analysis of Lope de Vega’s Dorotea, the Baroque artists’ sceptical atti­tude toward language. He comes to the conclusion that Baroque artists were conscious of the “distance between word and thing, that they perceive the linkage between meaning and form at the same time as they see its falling-apart.” To quote Spitzer’s paradoxical formulas: the Baroque artist “says something with full consciousness that one cannot actually say it. He knows all the difficulty of translation from intention to expression, the whole insufficiency of linguistic expression.”97 That is why his style is precious, cultist, recherché. A case in point seems to me also German Baroque poetry which by many Germans since its rediscovery has been interpreted as expressing a turbulent, torn, con­vulsed soul struggling with its language, piling up asyndetons and epithets. Strich considers even antithesis, word play, and onomatopoeia as evidences of an intense lyrical impulse.98 But surely the attempt to see an anticipation of Romantic subjectivism in the Baroque is doomed to failure. The figures and metaphors, hyperboles and catachreses frequently do not reveal any inner tension or turbulence and may not be the expression of any vital experience (Erlebnis) at all, but may be the decorative overelaborations of a highly conscious, sceptical craftsman, the pilings-up of calculated sur­prises and effects. We may solve this final difficulty by distinguishing two main forms of Baroque: that of the mystics and tortured souls such as Donne and Angelus Silesius, and another Baroque which must be conceived as a continuation of

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rhetorical humanism and Petrarchism, a courtly “public” art which finds its expression in the opera, the Jesuit drama, and the heroic plays of Dryden. Possibly this dualism is not so sharp as it has been stated just now. It can be argued that the autobiographical content of even such an extremely unusual artist as Donne has been very much exaggerated by critics like Gosse and that even the most ardently mystical poets like Crashaw or Angelus Silesius share in a communal, tradi­tional, and ritualistic religion.99 Even their description of personal experiences and conflicts are symbolic of man and would be misinterpreted if seen as anticipations of the ro­mantic ego. Thus Faguet seems to me mistaken when he interprets French poetry around 1630 by comparisons with Lamartine.100 Similarly Viëtor sees the seventeenth century too much through the spectacles of Goethe’s subjective poetry, when he discovers a trend toward modern subjectiv­ism and irrationalism in German Baroque poetry which, after all, culminated in the very impersonal art of the second Sile­sian school.101 A poet such as Fleming has been shown to have developed toward a more personal, subjective expression, but stylistically he broke away from the Baroque antithetical, hyperbolical style and tended toward the simple, the con­crete, and the popular.102 Subjectivism and Baroque rarely go hand in hand. Góngora, though an extremely individual writer, did not therefore in any way become subjective: rather his most characteristic poetry became almost sym­bolistic, “absolute” poetry which could be welcomed and praised by Mallarmé. The question of the correlation be­tween style and philosophy cannot be solved, it seems to me, by the fundamental assumption of German stylistics that a “mental excitement which deviates from the normal habitus of our mental life, must have coordinated a linguistic devia­tion from normal linguistic usage.”103 One must, at least, admit that stylistic devices can be imitated very successfully and that their possible original expressive function can disappear. They can become, as they did frequently in the Baroque, mere empty husks, decorative tricks, craftman’s clichés. The whole relationship between soul and word is looser and more oblique than it is frequently assumed. If I seem to end on a negative note, unconvinced that we can define Baroque either in terms of stylistic devices or a peculiar worldview or even a peculiar relationship of style and belief, I would not like to be understood as offering a parallel to Arthur Lovejoy’s paper on the “Discrimination of Ro­ manticisms.” I hope that Baroque is not quite in the position of “romantic” and that we do not have to conclude that it has “come to mean so many things, that by itself, it means nothing.”104 In spite of the many ambiguities

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and uncertainties as to the extension, valuation, and precise content of the term, Baroque has fulfilled and is still fulfilling an important function. It has put the problem of periodisation and of a pervasive style very squarely; it has pointed to the analogies between the literatures of the different countries and between the several arts. It is still the one convenient term which refers to the style which came after the Renaissance but preceded actual neoclassicism. For a history of English litera­ture the concept seems especially important since there the very existence of such a style has been obscured by the exten­sion given to the term Elizabethan and by the narrow limits of the one competing traditional term: “metaphysical.” As Roy Daniells has said, the century is “no longer drawn apart like a pack of tapered cards.”105 The indubitable affinities with contemporary Continental movements would stand out more clearly if we had a systematic study of the enormous mass of translating and paraphrasing from Italian, French, and Spanish which was going on throughout the seventeenth century even from the most Baroque Continental poets.106 Baroque has provided an aesthetic term which has helped us to understand the literature of the time and which will help us to break the dependence of most literary history from peri­odisations derived from political and social history. Whatever the defects of the term Baroque—and I have not been sparing in analyzing them—it is a term which prepares for synthesis, draws our minds away from the mere accumulation of obser­vations and facts, and paves the way for a future history of literature as a fine art.107

Notes 1 J. Isaacs, “Baroque and Rococo: A History of Two Concepts,” Bulletin of the Inter-

2 3 4

5 6 7 8

national Committee of the Historical Sciences 9 (1937), 347–48, is only a very brief abstract of an unpublished lecture. Karl Borinski, Die Antike in Poetik and Kunsttheorie 1 (Leip­zig, 1914), 199, 303; Benedetto Croce, Storia della Età barocca in Italia (Bari, 1929), 20ff. Quoted in Gustav Schnürer, Katholische Kirche and Kultur in der Barockzeit (Paderborn, 1937), 68, from In pseudodialeticos. Charles de Brosses, Le Président de Brosses en Italie, ed. R. Colomb, 2 (Paris, 1885), 15; J. J. Winckelmann, Sendschreiben (1744), 113, quoted by Borinski, Die Antike, 303, and Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke (Dresden, 1756), 87. Quoted by Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock (Mu­nich, 1888), 10. Ibid., refers to Burckhardt’s “Über die vorgotischen Kirchen am Niederrhein,” in Lersch’s Niederrheinisches Jahrbuch (1843). See n. 5. Cornelius Gurlitt, Geschichte des Barockstils in Italien (Stutt­gart, 1887); Geschichte

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9

10 11 12

13

14

15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22

23

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des Barockstils und des Rococo in Deutschland (Stuttgart, 1889); Alois Riegl, Barockkunst in Rom (Vienna, 1908); Guilio Magni, Il Barocco a Roma (3 vols. Turin, 1911– 13); Corrado Ricci, Baroque Architecture and Sculpture in Italy (London, 1912); Martin Shaw Briggs, Baroque Architecture (London, 1913); Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism (London, 1914 [2nd ed. New York, 1924]). Eugenio d’Ors, Du Baroque (Paris, 1935); Sacheverell Sitwell, Southern Baroque Art (London, 1931), Spanish Baroque Art (London, 1931), German Baroque Sculpture (London, 1938); Jean Cas­sou, “Apologie de l’art baroque,” in L’Amour de l’art (September, October, 1927). 1 (Amsterdam, 1769), 62 (1st ed. 1764). August W. Ambros, Geschichte der Musik, 4 (Breslau, 1878), 85–86. E.g. in Oscar Thompson’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians (New York, 1943). Leichtentritt, Paul Lang, McKinney and Ander­son, and apparently most other current histories of music have sec­tions on the Baroque. Cf. also Robert Haas, Die Musik des Barocks (Potsdam-Wildpark, 1929). Carl Gebhardt, “Rembrandt and Spinoza, Stilgeschichtliche Betrachtungen zum Barockproblem,” Kant-studien 32 (1927), 161–81, argues that Rembrandt and Spinoza are both Baroque and closely similar. Karl Joel’s Wandlungen der Weltanschauung, 1 (Tübingen, 1938) has a chapter on Baroque philosophy. See Hermann Schmal­enbach, Leibniz (Munich, 1921), especially 11–18; Dietrich Mahnke, “Der Barock-Universalismus des Comenius,” Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Erziehung 21 (1931), 97–128, and 22 (1932), 61–90; “Der Zeitgeist des Barock and seine Verewigung in Leib­nizens Gedankenwelt,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Kulturphilosophie 2 (1936), 95–126. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1 (Mu­nich, 1923), 400 (1st ed. 1918); Egon Friedell, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, 2 (Munich, 1929); Willi Flemming, Deutsche Kultur im Zeitalter des Barocks (Potsdam, 1937); Schnürer, Katholische Kirche. Pp. 83–85. Corrado Ricci, Baroque Architecture and Sculpture in Italy (New York, 1912), calls Marino “the Baroque poet par excellence” (1). This would be the first use of the term applied to literature known in English. Bari, 1910, cf. xix, xx, 404, etc. In Edda 2 (Kristiana, 1914), 17–40. See n. 2. Munich, 1915. Eng. trans. M. D. Hottinger, Principles of Art History (New York, 1932). “Der lyrische Stil des 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Abhandlungen zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte, Festschrift für Franz Muncker (Munich, 1916), 21–53. “Shakespeares dramatische Baukunst,” Jahrbuch der Shake­spearegesellschaft 52 (1916), 3–35, reprinted in Das Wortkunst­werk, Mittel seiner Erforschung (Leipzig, 1926), 302–25. “Shakespeare als Künstler des Barocks,” Internationale Mo­natsschrift 11 (1917), 995– 1021.

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24 Regensburg, 1918.

25 Die deutsche Barocklyrik (Stuttgart, 1921); Max Pirker, Das deutsche Liebeslied in Ba-

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39 40 41 42 43

44 45

rock and Rokoko (Zurich, 1922); Fritz Strich, “Die deutsche Barocklyrik,” in Genius 3 (Munich, 1922); W. Unus, Die deutsche Lyrik des Barock (Berlin, 1922); R. Wiener, Pallas und Cupido. Deutsche Lyrik der Barockzeit (Vienna, 1922). Das Wiener Barocktheater (Vienna, 1922). “Grundlegung einer Phaseologie der Geistesgeschichte,” Eu­phorion 24 (1922), 15; Ergänzungsheft, 517–62, 759–805. Leipzig, 1924; see his earlier article, “Vom Geist des deutschen Literaturbarocks,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissen­schaft und Geistesgeschichte 1 (1923), 243–68. Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Munich, 1923), 236, 308, 399–400, etc. Renaissance and Barock bei Ariost and Tasso. Versuch einer Anwendung Wölfflin’scher Kunstbetrachtung (Bern, 1922). Revue Hispanique 85 (1929), 370–458. Don Quixote als Sprachkunstwerk (Leipzig, 1927), 287. In Revista de Filología Hispánica 3 (1941), 9–23. Geschichte der spanischen Nationalliteratur in ihrer Blütezeit (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1929), 289. Karl Vossler, Lope de Vega and sein Zeitalter (Munich, 1932), 89–105 especially; Leo Spitzer, Die Literarisierung des Lebens in Lopes Dorotea (Bonn, 1932). V. Klemperer, H. Hatzfeld, F. Neubert, Die romanischen Lit­eraturen von der Renaissance bis zur französischen Revolution (Wild­park-Potsdam, 1928); Friedrich Schürr, Barock, Klassizismus and Rokoko in der französischen Literatur. Eine prinzipielle Stilbetrach­tung (Leipzig, 1928). Reported by Leo Spitzer, “Klassische Dämpfung in Racines Stil,” in Romanische Stil- and Literaturstudien 1 (Marburg, 1931), 255n. In talking with me Auerbach repeatedly denied Spitzer’s report. Cf. n. 37. The paper appeared first in Archivum Romanicum 12 (1928), 361–472. “Der Barockstil der religiösen klassischen Lyrik in Frank­reich,” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch der Görresgesellschaft 4 (1929), 30–60. “Die französische Klassik in neuer Sicht. Klassik als Barock,” Tijdschrift voor Taal en Letteren 23 (1935), 213–81. Munich, 1927. Diss. Bonn, 1929. “Die geistesgeschichtlichen Grundlagen der englischen Barock­literatur,” Ger‑ manisch-romanische Monatsschrift 19 (1931), 273–84; “Das Problem des religiösen Epos im siebzehnten Jahrhundert in England,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 14 (1936), 60–74; Geschichte der englischen Lit­ eratur (Halle, 1937). “Zum Problem des Barocks in der englischen Dichtung,” An­glia 59 (1935), 414– 22. Spiritualismus and Sensualismus in der englischen Barocklyrik. Wiener Beiträge 57 (Vienna, 1932).

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46 Drydens Fabeln and ihre Quellen, Britannica, No. 5 (Hamburg, 1932).

47 Drydens heroische Tragödien als Ausdruck höfischer Barock­kultur (1932). Diss. Tübin-

gen.

48 Die barocken Stilmerkmale in der englischen, lateinischen and deutschen Fassung von

49 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58

59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

Dr. Thomas Burnets Theory of the Earth, Swiss Studies in English 9 (Bern, 1940). See my review in Philologi­cal Quarterly 21 (1942), 199–200. Die geisteswissenschaftlichen Grundlagen des englischen Lit­eraturbarocks (Munich, 1934). Revista de Filología Hispánica 3 (1941), 22. “The Antagonism of Forms in the Eighteenth Century,” Eng­lish Studies 18 (1936), 115–21, 193–205, and 19 (1937), 1–13, 49–57. See n. 3. 83 (1919), 222–75. A German translation by Alfred Pauli was published as Rembrandt und der holländische Barock / Studien der Bibliothek Warburg, no. 9 (Leipzig, 1928). Disquisitiones Carolinae. Fontes et Acta Philologica et His­torica, ed. Th. Baader, 6 (Nijmegen, 1934). In Giornale storico della letteratura italiana 81 (1923), 178–80. “Gli schemi del Wölfflin,” in L’Esame 1 (1922), 3–10. Florence, 1925. The preface is dated November 1924. Cf. 94, 110n, 113. Der Begriff des Barock. Die Gegenreformation. Zwei Essays (trans. Berthold Fenigstein), Zurich, 1925. Practically identical with Chapters 2 and 1 of Storia dell’età barocca in Italia (Bari, 1929). Storia (above). Introduction to Basile’s Lo Cunto de li Cunti (2 vols. Bari, 1925). The paper on Basile in Saggi sulla Letteratura Italiana del Seicento (Bari, 1910) does not use the term. The English translation by N. M. Penzer, introducing the Pentamerone of Giambatista Basile (2 vols. London, 1932), contaminates the two pieces. Paris, 1935. [Du Baroque was translated into Spanish only in 1944.—Eds.] Gerardo Diego, Antología poética en honor de Góngora (Madrid, 1927). Reviewed by Dámaso Alonso in Revista de Occi­dente 18 (1927), 396–401. Madrid, 1927, especially 31–32. “Góngora, 1627–1927,” in Espíritu de la Letra (Madrid, 1927), quoted from Ortega y Gasset, Obras, 2 (Madrid, 1943), 1108–9. “El Don Juan de Tirso y el Molière como personajes bar­rocos,” in Hommage à Ernest Martinenche (Paris, 1937), 93–111. “Beaumont et Fletcher et le Baroque,” Cahiers du Sud 10 (1933), 210–16. Le Lyrisme baroque en Allemagne (Lille, 1936). Cf. also “Vers une Solution du Problème du baroque,” Revue Germanique 38 (1937), 373–77. Montreal, 1944. Fernand Baldensperger, “Pour une Révaluation littéraire du XVIIe siècle classique,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 44 (1937), 1–15, especially 13–14; Raymond Lebègue, Bulletin of the International Committee of Historical Sciences 9 (1937), 378; Henri Peyre, Le Classicisme français (New York, 1942), cf. 181–83.

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70 F. Fidao-Justiniani, L’Esprit classique et la préciosité (Paris, 1914); Georges Mon-

71

72

73

74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

84 85 86 87

gredien, Les Précieux et les précieuses (Paris, 1939); Daniel Mornet, “La Signification et l’évolution de l’idée de préciosité en France au XVIIe siècle,” Journal of the History of Ideas 1 (1940), 225–31, and Histoire de la littérature française classique, 1600–1700 (Paris, 1940). “Classique et baroque dans la poésie de Ronsard,” in Concin­nitas: Festschrift für Heinrich Wölfflin (Bâle, 1944); Dominique Aury, Les Poètes précieux et baroques du xviie siècle (Paris, 1942). Maurice Blanchot, “Les poètes baroques du XVIIe siècle,” in Faux Pas (Paris, 1943), 151–56. Julius Kleiner, Die polnische Literatur (Wildpark-Potsdam, 1929), uses the term, e.g. of Casimir (Sarbiewski), the neo-Latin poet, 15; studies and editions by J. Vašica (e.g. České literární baroko, Prague, 1938), V. Bitnar, Zdeněk Kalista, F. X. Šalda, Arne Novák, etc.; Vaclav Černý, O básnickém baroku (Prague, 1937). Deux Classiques francais: Corneille et son temps—Molière. French trans. by Mme. E. Cornet (Paris, 1935); cf. 6, 7, 189, 190, 235; cf. also Erik Lunding’s Tysk Barok og Barok forskning (Copenhagen, 1938), and Das schlesische Kunstdrama (Copen­ hagen, 1940). See Mario Praz, “Donne’s Relation to the Poetry of his Time,” in A Garland for John Donne, ed. T. Spencer (Cambridge, Mass., 1932), 58–59. New York, 1924, 268. Reprinted privately, London, 1931. Angelus Silesius (London, 1932). In The English Way: Studies in English Sanctity from St. Bede to Newman, ed. Maisie Ward (London, 1933), 268–96. “Crashaw and the Baroque Style,” Criterion 13 (1934), 407–25. Oxford, 1934, 76–77. Elizabethan and Jacobean (Oxford, 1945), 26. John Milton, Private Correspondences and Academic Exer­cises (Cambridge, 1932), xi. “The Baroque Style in Prose,” in Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, ed. K. Malone and M. B. Ruud (Minneapolis, 1929), 427– 56. Cf. “Juste Lipse et le mouvement anticicéronien à la fin du XVIe et au debut du XVIIe siècle,” Revue du seizième siècle 2 (1914), 200–242; “Attic Prose in the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in Philology 18 (1921), 79–128; “Attic Prose, Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon,” in Schelling Anni­versary Papers (New York, 1923), 117–50; “Muret and the His­tory of Attic Prose,” PMLA 39 (1924), 254–309. Cambridge, Mass., 1930, 116, 123. New York, 1936, 84, 198–99, 247, 254, 306, 370, 380. Baton Rouge, 1939. Roswell Gray Ham, Otway and Lee: Biography from a Baroque Age (New Haven, 1931), 70; Harry Levin, introduction to Ben Jonson: Selected Works (New York, 1938), 30, 32; Wylie Sypher, “The Metaphysicals and the Baroque,” Partisan Review 11 (1944), 3–17; Roy Daniells, “Baroque Form in English Lit­erature,” University of Toronto Quarterly 14 (1945), 392–408.

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88 “Baroque Prose in America,” Studies in English by Members of the English Seminar of

Charles University 4 (Prague, 1933), 39–58.

89 “Edward Taylor’s Poetry: Colonial Baroque,” Kenyon Review 3 (1941), 355–71, re-

printed in Rage for Order (Chicago, 1948), 1–18.

90 See first n. 21. 91 See n. 65. 92 See n. 39.

93 See n. 86.

94 Albert Wellek, “Renaissance- and Barock-synästhesie,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift 95 96 97

98 99 100

101

102 103

104 105 106

107

für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesge­schichte 9 (1931), 534–84. Austin Warren, “Edward Taylor’s Poetry,” Kenyon Review 3 (1941), 356. See first n. 40, above. Hatzfeld quotes Fritz Neu­bert, “Zur Wort- and Begriffskunst der französischen Klassik,” in Festschrift für Eduard Wechssler (1929), 155. Die Literarisierung des Lebens in Lopes Dorotea (Bonn, 1932), 11–12. Spitzer refers to Franz Heinz Mautner’s “Das Wortspiel and seine Bedeutung,” Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 9 (1931), 679. See n. 21. Cf. e.g. Allen R. Benham, “The Myth of John Donne the Rake,” Philological Quarterly 20 (1941), 465–73. Emile Faguet, Histoire de la poésie française de la Renaissance au Romantisme (Paris, n.d.), 2, 145, 171ff; 3, 185, and Petite Histoire de la littérature française (Paris n.d.), 100–101. K. Viëtor, “Vom Stil und Geist der deutschen Barockdichtung,” Germanischromanische Monatssschrift 14 (1926), 145–84, and Probleme der deutschen Barockliteratur (Leipzig, 1928); E. R. Curtius, “Mittelalterlicher und barocker Dichtungsstil,” Modern Philology 48 (1941), 325–33. Hans Pyritz, Paul Flemings deutsche Liebeslyrik (Leipzig, 1932), in Palaestra 180, especially 209ff. Leo Spitzer, “Zur sprachlichen Interpretation von Wortkunst­werken,” Neue Jahr­ bücher für Wissenschaft and Jugendbildung 6 (1930), 649; reprinted in Romanische Stil- and Literaturstudien 1 (Marburg, 1931), 4. PMLA 39 (1924), 229–53, especially 232. See n. 87 (407–8). The edition of Drummond of Hawthornden by R. Kastner (Manchester, 1913), his scattered papers on his sources; R. C. Wal­lerstein’s “The Style of Drummond in its Relation to his Transla­tions,” PMLA 48 (1933), 1090–177; the work of Mario Praz and Austin Warren on Crashaw (see Notes 57, 86), of Pierre Legouis on Marvell (André Marvell, Poète, Puritain, Patriote [Paris, 1928]); Mario Praz’s “Stanley, Sherburne, and Ayres as Translators and Im­itators,” Modern Language Review 20 (1925), 280–94, 419–31; H. Thomas, “Three Translators of Góngora and other Spanish Poets during the Seventeenth Century,” Revue Hispanique 48 (1920), 180–256, are some of the studies which would be useful for such a monograph. For surveys of scholarship, mostly German, see Leonello Vin­centi, “Interpretazione del Barocco Tedesco,” Studi Germanici 1 (1935), 39–75; James Mark, “The

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Uses of the Term baroque,” Modern Language Review 33 (1938), 547–63; Erich Trunz, “Die Erforschung der deutschen Barockdichtung,” Deutsche Vierteljahr­schrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 18 (1940), Referatenheft, 1–100. See also two unfavorable discussions: Hans Epstein, Die Metaphysizierung in der literaturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung and ihre Folgen, Germanische Studien 73 (Berlin, 1929), and Hans K. Kettler, Baroque Tradition in the Literature of the German Enlightenment, 1700–1750. Studies in the Determina­tion of a Literary Period (Cambridge [1943?]).

Editors’ Note to “Baroque in England”   by Mario Praz

The Italian literary critic Mario Praz (1896–1982) was educated in Italy and taught in England from 1923 until he returned to Rome in 1934. In 1925, under the influence of Heinrich Wölfflin’s discussion of Baroque art and architecture, he began a series of publications on the Baroque that would span five decades. The following essay, published in Italian in 1960 and in English in 1964, underlines the fluidity of Baroque categories until fairly recently. Praz expresses his awareness of the danger, first, of imposing what was originally an art historical category on literature and, second, of imposing what was originally a Catholic Counter-Reformation practice on Protestant England. Nonetheless, he proceeds to do both, with many a caution and caveat, and with characteristic brilliance. Praz moves from English architecture to painting to literature, and from the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth. Not surprisingly, he finds the English Baroque to be sparser and sparer than the Continental Baroque, and different in ways that often impel him to invoke the characteristics of Mannerism and rococo, the artistic styles and periods that precede and follow the Baroque in Italy and elsewhere on the European Continent. Praz, as an Italian comparatist, never forgets that the Baroque is marked by the aesthetics and ideology of the Catholic Counter-Reformation; thus he concludes his essay by finding that the Baroque was “alien to the spirit” of England, even as he also finds William Shakespeare’s late plays and Richard Crashaw’s poetry to be masterpieces of Baroque literature, and the Puritan poet John Milton to be representative of the Baroque in its various phases. Praz’s discussion of the Catholic convert Crashaw draws on his longer essay from 1925 (“The Flaming Heart: Richard Crashaw and the Baroque”), calling Crashaw’s religious poetry “a literary counterpart, though in lesser propor-

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tions, to Rubens’s apotheoses, Murillo’s languors, and El Greco’s ecstasies” (BNW 131). Beyond the Catholic (and more particularly, the Jesuit) influence considered by Praz to be necessary for the English Baroque to be fully Baroque (that is, to conform to the Continental Baroque), he emphasizes a certain “sensibility” that is capable of overarching oppositions and integrating divergent energies. Referring to Shakespeare, Praz writes of the “deep unity and organic character that are the hallmark of the masterpieces of Baroque art” (BNW 129). And referring to T. S. Eliot’s recuperation of the seventeenthcentury English “metaphysical” poet John Donne, Praz writes that Eliot’s theory of “unified sensibility, a poetry of the inclusion of all reality, are formulas that seem to fit Baroque art well” (BNW 126). For Eliot, these poets had not yet suffered the “dissociation of sensibility”—the modern separation of intellect and emotion—that had begun, Eliot felt, during their time and had continued into his own. For Praz, as for Eliot, the highlighting of irreconcilabilities is the basis of the sensibility he addresses; the Baroque brings unlike things together without canceling their differences, unifies without homogenizing, integrates feeling and intellect to achieve “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling” (Eliot, “Metaphysical Poets” 246). The Baroque impulse to engage oppositions (coincidentia oppositorum) is allied to metaphysical “wit” in Eliot’s description of Donne’s poetry as “constantly amalgamating disparate experience” to form new wholes (Eliot, “Metaphysical Poets” 246). This essay foregrounds the intertwining arguments and complementary roles played by Praz and Eliot in the twentieth-century recovery of the English Baroque. Eliot’s groundbreaking essay, “The Metaphysical Poets,” was written in 1921 in response to an extensive anthology of seventeenth-century poetry compiled by Herbert J. C. Grierson and published that same year. In 1925, Praz published his inaugural work on the English Baroque Secentismo e Marinismo in Inghilterra (The Seventeenth Century and Marinism in England, which contained the essay on Crashaw echoed here). Praz’s book was enthusiastically reviewed by Eliot in the London Times Literary Supplement, and Eliot would later say that it had influenced him as he elaborated his Clark lectures on John Donne, Richard Crashaw, and Abraham Cowley in 1926 (see Ronald Schuchard’s introduction to Eliot’s The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry.) If Praz influenced Eliot, the reverse is also true. Praz would engage Eliot’s definition of metaphysical poetry from the seventh Clark lec-

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ture in his own essay of 1931, “Donne and the Poetry of his Time,” in 1937 in “T. S. Eliot and Dante,” and again in the essay from 1960, included here. Praz’s and Eliot’s recovery of the English metaphysicals parallels the revival of the Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Góngora by the Generation of ’27 in Spain and by Alfonso Reyes and the Contemporáneos Group in Mexico, and the recuperation of German Baroque drama by Walter Benjamin (see the essays by Benjamin and Reyes in this volume, both published in 1928). This resurgence of interest in Baroque forms reflects a shared disillusionment with modernity (and modernism) and suggests an affinity between Baroque forms and the avant-garde movements flourishing at the time. The aesthetics of fragmentation, the heterogeneity of materials, the energy of disparities and oppositions, the emphasis on the image: Eliot’s and Benjamin’s poetics of fragmentation, Jorge Luis Borges’s Ultraist emphasis on metaphor, and Ezra Pound’s imagist visualizations are related to Baroque poetic practices, as are cubism and surrealism to the Baroque embrace of irreconcilabilities as ways of seeing and knowing. In this essay, Praz struggles to define the English Baroque, and we sometimes feel that he is trying to put a square peg into a round hole. In fact, the Baroque has been almost totally eclipsed in English literary studies by local categories (Elizabethan, metaphysical, Jacobean, Caroline, Cavalier), a practice that reflects Protestant and Anglophone resistance to Catholic and Continental influences, and also echoes the major political upheavals of the time. The Puritan Revolution of 1640–60, the Restoration of 1660, and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 fractured the English seventeenth century into three political and artistic periods, and Praz acknowledges these and other factors in English historical periodization in his essay: the Renaissance came late to England and was already tinged with Baroque elements (Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare); in turn, the English Baroque was already tinged with later Mannerist elements (Donne, George Chapman); and so on. Despite these undeniable historical disjunctions, the literary historian René Wellek, in his essay in this volume, calls for greater attention to the comparative connections between seventeenth-century English literature and the Continental Baroque. Wellek writes: “For a history of English litera­ture the concept [of the Baroque] seems especially important since there the very existence of such a style has been obscured by the exten­sion given to the term Elizabethan and by the narrow limits of the one competing traditional term: ‘metaphysical’” (BNW 108).

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Bibliography By the Author

Praz, Mario. “Baroque in England.” Translated in Modern Philology 61, no. 3 (1964): 169–79. ———. “The Flaming Heart: Richard Crashaw and the Baroque.” 1925. In The Flaming Heart: Essays on Crashaw, Machiavelli, and Other Studies in the Relations between Italian and English Literature from Chaucer to T. S. Eliot. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958. 204–63. ———. Secentismo e Marinismo in Inghilterra: John Donne—Richard Crashaw. Florence: La Voce, 1925. ———. Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery. Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura, 1964.

Additional Readings

Eliot, T. S. “The Metaphysical Poets.” 1921. In Selected Essays: 1917–1932. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1932. 241–50. ———. The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926, and the Turnbull Lectures at the Johns Hopkins University, 1933. Ed. Ronald Schuchard. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1994. Miroslav, John Hanak. “The Emergence of Baroque Mentality and Its Cultural Impact on Western Europe after 1550.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28, no. 3 (1970): 315–26. Warnke, Frank J. “Appearance and Reality.” In Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972. 21–51. ———. “Marino and the English Metaphysicals.” Studies in the Renaissance, no. 2 (1955): 160–75.

  Chapter Six  

Baroque in England Mario Praz

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6.1  Sir

John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, Blenheim Palace, 1705–24, Woodstock, Oxfordshire, England. English Heritage, National Monuments Record. Photograph: Henry Taunt. HIP/Art Resource, New York

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Lorenzo Bernini, Apollo and Daphne, 1622–25. Galleria Borghese, Rome. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, New York

6.2  Gian

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6.3  Sir

John Vanbrugh and Nicholas Hawksmoor, Castle Howard, 1699–1712, North Yorkshire, England. Spectrum Color Library. Photograph: Leslie Ball. HIP/Art Resource, New York

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Editors’ Note to “The Work of the Gaze,”   from La folie du voir by Christine Buci-Glucksmann

Christine Buci-Glucksmann’s work conjoins Baroque visual aesthetics with Neobaroque and poststructuralist theory. The rehabilitation of the Baroque is a transatlantic phenomenon, and European cycles of recovery are linked in complex ways to their Latin American and Caribbean counterparts. Whereas New World intellectuals rearticulate the Baroque as a postcolonial formation (the New World Baroque), French philosophers Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Christine Buci-Glucksmann work out poststructuralist versions of the Neobaroque. In exploring alternatives to Enlightenment rationality, Buci-Glucksmann’s study Baroque Reason (1984) parallels Deleuze’s treatise on Gottfried Leibniz, The Fold, and Foucault’s on Baroque representation in The Order of Things. Her volume La folie du voir (Madness in Vision) of 1986 highlights Baroque visual culture: her concept “madness in vision” represents a Neobaroque theory of Baroque seeing and its consequent modes of visual representation. We translate chapter 2 from this work. Buci-Glucksmann contests the Cartesian model of vision—the detached, disembodied spectator who knows the world from afar, for whom the Platonic tradition of specular knowledge equates “to know” (savoir) with “to see” (voir). By critiquing the rationalist fiction of disembodied consciousness and its equation of the thinking “I” with the all-seeing but unseen “eye,” Buci-Glucksmann joins French philosophers and poststructuralists Georges Bataille, Foucault, Guy Debord, and Jacques Lacan. Indeed, her Neobaroque theory of visual culture is a piece in the larger mosaic of the twentieth-century movement that Martin Jay calls “anti-ocularcentrism,” or the dethronement of the disembodied eye from its traditional position of sovereignty in Western philosophy.

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Influenced by phenomenology, Buci-Glucksmann’s phrase “madness in vision” comes from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s late work, “Eye and Mind” (1961), and his posthumously published study, The Visible and the Invisible (1964). In striving to overcome the separation of mind and body, phenomenology proposes that perception is embodied perception, and consciousness embodied consciousness. Studying the work of painters such as Paul Cézanne and Paul Klee, Merleau-Ponty urged the rejection of conceptualmathematical perspective in favor of a primordial, “lived” perspective. He argued that space is no longer a panorama to be surveyed by the distanced, unseen I/eye: “It is, rather, a space reckoned starting from me as the zero point or degree zero of spatiality. I do not see it according to its exterior envelope; I live in it from the inside; I am immersed in it. After all, the world is all around me, not in front of me” (“Eye and Mind” 178). In replacing the dualism of the active viewer and the passive viewed with the triad of the seer, the visible, and the invisible, Merleau-Ponty structures the visual field in a nonhierarchical way, allowing for the reversibility of the first two terms. The human I/eye, both seeing and visible, enters the visual field to encounter the preexisting spectacle of the world. The I/eye perceives only sections of the world, conditional on the fundamental nontransparency of the world’s immanent structure (not constituted by the mind)—its “wild logos”—which in turn renders the world visible and according to which we see (Visible and Invisible 151). Following Merleau-Ponty, Buci-Glucksmann’s theory of Neobaroque vision hinges on the return of the body and the emotions to the visual field. She begins her essay with a reading of two paintings by the Mannerist Italian painter Tintoretto, each of which depicts a supernatural vision and thus juxtaposes two seemingly conflictual spaces, the rational and the suprarational, the visible and the invisible. Here, vision is not addressed to the rational cogito, as René Descartes thought; rather, “vision—such as that of Saint Peter—dispossesses the subject from himself, disappropriates him, and absents him in a series of metamorphoses, movements outside of the self” (BNW 146). For Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque modes of seeing, of which Tintoretto’s paintings are a harbinger, unveil the possibility of MerleauPonty’s lived perspective. Embodied vision—Baroque vision—is dazzling, dynamic, wondrous, ecstatic, and ultimately unreadable. It is sublime because it overwhelms rational comprehension and transports the viewer beyond the limits of representation. She shares Merleau-Ponty’s conception of embodied vision and the enigma of the “seeing-visible body”: “He who

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sees cannot possess the visible unless he is possessed by it, unless he is of it” (Visible and Invisible 134–35). In her discussion of Baroque visual culture as the reassertion of lived vision via the recuperation of the materiality of body and world, Buci-Glucksmann covers standard topoi of the Baroque: for example, the Keplerian ellipse, a distortion of the classical circle (see Severo Sarduy’s essay, “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler,” in this volume), and the anamorphic mirror (convex or concave), which draws attention to the “materiality of the medium of reflection” (Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity” 187). Finally, she integrates Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of vision with Lacanian psychoanalysis, following Lacan’s own critical appropriation of Merleau-Ponty in his analysis of the split between “the eye” of the subject and “the gaze” of the Other (see Evans and translator’s note 6 below). If phenomenology and Merleau-Ponty have been criticized for ignoring the social, cultural, and linguistic structures in which subjective perception is embedded, Lacanian psychoanalysis provides a counterbalance. Buci-Glucksmann concludes by associating her conception of madness in vision with a Lacanian aesthetic that resonates “with the great treatises of seventeenth-century rhetoric, searching for a connection between vision and speech” (BNW 156).

Bibliography By the Author

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity. Trans. Patrick Camiller. London: Sage, 1994. ———. “Le travail du regard.” In La folie du voir: De l’estétique baroque. Paris: Galilée, 1986. 66–89. ———, ed. Puissance du Baroque: Les forces, les formes, les rationalités. Paris: Galilée, 1996. ———. Tragique de l’ombre: Shakespeare et le maniérisme. Paris: Galilée, 1990. ———, Remo Bodei, and Francisco Jarauta Marión, eds. Barroco y neobarroco. Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes, 1993.

Additional readings

Bataille, Georges. Story of the Eye. Trans. Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Urizen, 1977. Certeau, Michel de. “The Madness of Vision.” Enclitic 7 no. 1 (1983): 24–31. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

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Descartes, René. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Evans, Dylan. “Gaze (Regard).” In An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge, 1996. 72–73. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage, 1973. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. ———. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In Modernity and Identity, ed. Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992. 178–95. Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Karnac, 2004. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “Cézanne’s Doubt.” In The Essential Writings of MerleauPonty, ed. Alden L. Fisher. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969. 233–51. ———. “Eye and Mind.” 1961. In The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964. 159–90. ———. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968.

  Chapter Seven  

The Work of the Gaze

Chapter 2 from La folie du voir Christine Buci-Glucksmann

Translated by Dorothy Z. Baker

Imagine that you are in Venice at the Church of the Madonna dell’Orto, looking at a painting so large that it initially covered part of the organ pipes. It is Tintoretto’s The Vision of Saint Peter (1555) (figure 7.1). What does Saint Peter see, looking sideways, recoiling backward, holding a book, and staring as if dumbfounded, dazzled? Surely it is a supernatural Apparition: this great spiraling column of angels carrying the cross. They are fixed and almost carried away in the play of forces of the undulating line (the serpentina), and floating suspended, frozen in the theatrical moment of corporeal tension that is dramatized, quasi-sensual, and hardly “angelic.” To see these angels is to see him seeing them, if the angel is truly a figure of

The author takes the title of her book from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phrase “la folie du voir” in The Visible and the Invisible, ed. Claude Lefort, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1968), 75. All other references to this work by Merleau-Ponty will be cited in the text as VI. The phrasing, “madness in vision,” suggests the generative capacity of seeing and signals the visionary aspect of all vision.—Trans.  In her essay, Buci-Glucksmann calls the painting The Vision of Saint Paul, but in fact she describes The Vision of Saint Peter, Tintoretto’s painting of 1555 in the Church of the Madonna dell’Orto in Venice. The Vision of Saint Peter, also called The Apparition of the Cross to Saint Peter now hangs on the left side over the main altar. The painting directly over the altar is Tintoretto’s The Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple, and Tintoretto’s The Martyrdom of Saint Paul, also known as The Decapitation of Saint Paul (figure 7.2), is on the right of this painting. So, the works by Tintoretto flank the central painting, and in a certain sense respond to each other. Throughout the essay, references to Paul have been silently changed to Peter.—Trans.

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apparition, irruption, encounter, the pure surprise of a visio disparans that blazes in beauty and creates a bridge, a passageway toward the invisible, a madness that confounds every limit. But does he really see angels? Or in his delight and rapture, is he actually seeing an extracting space, a confusion of space, a purely qualitative site that displaces and unseats him? A pure opening and explosion of yellow, a light that surges from the interior of the painting, invades it, and disturbs the composition with two parallel, diagonal lines across the work. The angels, who are the power of day, according to Augustine, grant the vision, presentify it, and transfigure any naming. These angels are only colored dynamics, light that expresses color and contextualizes them in a whirlwind of chiaroscuro. An orange pink angel aloft at the bottom, a brown angel appearing in the shadows above, already held in the green radiance, which is even more disturbing. The yellow that adds brightness is the “illuminated and emphatic side” of paint, which according to Goethe dilates the heart and brings joy to the soul.ii This yellow is the radiance of the painting, the perception of the perceived, the vision of the envisioned. In fact, Saint Peter sees nothing: a simple radiance, the “suspense” of a miracle that erases forms and compositions by its exalted luminism. And yet I look once more. This yellow opening persists in reuniting and separating two surfaces, fusing them like a fractured joint or rib, inviting me to reconstruct the totality of the visual. Because of the yellow opening, two spaces coexist: a “real” space of Peter’s sight or what Tintoretto paints, and another irreal and phantasmatic space opened by the angels. An imaginary space to which Tintoretto was especially attached. Consider The Miracle of St. Mark Freeing the Slave (1547) (figure 7.3). The inverted angel, painted from behind and from underneath with a striking foreshortening of the golden body, appears so suddenly that the slave, as the image of a shadow, is knocked to the ground.iii Thus there are two spaces: the possible, and this sort of madness of the impossible that is the phantasm of the Apparition. In The Vision of Saint Peter, does the “gaze of the painter” watch us, a gaze “at work,” doing battle with its own madness? As a result, in its Baroque mannerism, Tintoretto’s ii The author quotation is found in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Theory of

Colors, trans. Charles Lock Eastlake (London, 1840), 307.—Trans.

iii The Miracle of St. Mark Freeing the Slave depicts not an angel but Saint Mark descend-

ing headfirst from the sky to rescue the slave who is devoted to him.—Trans.

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7.1  Tintoretto

( Jacopo Robusti), The Vision of St. Peter, ca. 1555. Madonna dell’Orto Church, Venice. Photograph: Alinari/Art Resource, New York

painting stages the madness in vision, releases a fictional body, and inhabits two bodies at once within the compositional perspective in which the visual multiplicity leads to a je ne sais quoi, a revelatory appearance.iv I suspect that the vision of Peter is none other than a form of persecution gilded by light, a martyr dazzled by the gaze, the “miracle”: the advent

iv The author invokes Vladimir Jankélévitch’s term, the je ne sais quoi from Le je-ne-sai-

quoi et le presque-rien, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1980), 1:43–54.—Trans.

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7.2  Tintoretto

( Jacopo Robusti), The Decapitation of St. Paul, ca. 1556. Madonna dell’Orto Church, Venice. Photograph: Cameraphoto/Art Resource, New York

and event of the other (figure 7.2). I suspect that in this moment of difficulty, the form enacts its autoanalysis, that this gigantic fracture of luminous color, sustained by its own internal dynamic, defines the empty space of the painter: the schema of the impossible. Can we see this seeing? Can the eye see itself without resorting to the remarkable artifice of the mirror and all its  The author here refers to Tintoretto’s The Martyrdom of St. Paul, which is also in the

Church of the Madonna dell’Orto. The author appears to conflate this work with The Vision of Saint Peter. See note ii.—Trans.

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mythologies? Doesn’t the eye retract in the night, a blind spot of disappearance, something that the Greeks call aphanismos: to vanish, to escape the self, to wrest the self from the self, to lose consciousness. In response to this very question, Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “Vision” and Lacan’s “Seeingness” bring the visible closer to the Gaze and its “work” by giving weight to the imaginary.vi In this common ground shared by philosophy and psychoanalysis, Vision is understood to exceed sight, to be an aspect of the visual that is liberated from the context of the optic-representative, which could prompt here the initial step toward a reinterpretation of the Baroque. To initiate a dialogue with Merleau-Ponty on the topic of his posthumous book, The Visible and the Invisible—a work that is “both an end and a beginning,” vii and pushes the limits of any phenomenology of seeing—Lacan from the outset based his developments on the schyze [split] of the eye and the Gaze under the sign of a meeting, a Tuché (Lacan 53–64). The sight of the visual finds itself related to the construction of form, to the seeing eye, and to what he himself called “the seer’s ‘shoot’ (pousse)” (Lacan 72). The seer’s “shoot” is a sort of in-sensate preexistence in which, even before taking place, “I am looked at from all sides” (Lacan 72). Does this “omnivoyant” spectacle that engenders the first scopic pleasure (to be seen without showing this) not circumscribe a situational madness in which I am always and already mired? viii To see and always be seen, to be offered to, exposed to, and vi Merleau-Ponty’s term, Voyance, which I translate as “Vision,” denotes insight into

intelligible forms. This term was suggested by Arthur Rimbaud’s “Lettre du voyant.” Lacan’s term, Voyure, is translated by Alan Sheridan as “Seeingness.” See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Karnac, 2004), 82. All further references to Lacan are from this text. Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of chiasm, which he develops in The Visible and the Invisible, is the intertwining of two elements (such as seeing and being seen) that, though reciprocal, are nonetheless divergent.—Trans. As Martin Jay reports, Lacan “critically appropriated Merleau-Ponty’s chiasmic ontology of the visible and the invisible, which he redescribed in terms of ‘the eye’ and ‘the gaze.’” Just as for Merleau-Ponty, the visible preexists the advent of the seeing subject, so for Lacan the gaze preexists the subject’s eye. However, Lacan rejects Merleau-Ponty’s “search for a primordial voyure, anterior to the split between the eye and the gaze” (Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993], 353–64, 353, 360).—Eds. vii The author quotes Lacan’s statement on Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous publication (Lacan 71).—Trans. viii The author here mirrors the language of Lacan, “the gaze that circumscribes us . . . makes us beings who are looked at, without showing this” (Lacan 75).—Trans.

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( Jacopo Robusti), The Miracle of St. Mark Freeing the Slave, 1548. Accademia, Venice. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, New York

7.3  Tintoretto

constituted by “that which makes us consciousness constitutes us by the same token as speculum mundi” (Lacan 75). Speculum, mirror, omnivoyant world—all the topoi of the Baroque determine the point of departure for the incomplete ontology of Merleau-Ponty’s final work in which madness in vision creates Being: “There is a sort of madness in vision such that with it I go unto the world itself, and yet at the same time the parts of that world evidently do not coexist without me” (VI 75). Such madness is the “enigma” even of visibility, which is seated in my seeing-visible body, in the originating chiasm where there is “the dehiscence of the seeing into the visible and of the visible into the seeing” (VI 153).ix There is a “devouring vision” beyond the visual, such as the interior, pictural

ix See also Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Eye and Mind,” trans. Carleton Dallery, in The

Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History, and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 168, in which Merleau-Ponty declares, “I am seeing-visible [voyantvisible].” All other references to this essay will be cited in the text as EM.—Trans.

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eye that gives “the imaginary texture of the real” and effects the passage from the visible toward the invisible, according to Klee, as Merleau-Ponty states (EM 165). In this respect, Visioning—by which things absent become present to us—defines simultaneously the place of art and the access to Being, the simultaneous appearance of an aesthetic and an “ontology,” whether it be negative, fractured, or exploded. “Vision is not a certain mode of thought or presence to self; it is the means given me to be absent to myself, to participate in the fission of my Being” (EM 186). Contrary to any metaphysics of the subject and the Cogito as self-presence in re-presentation, vision—such as that of Saint Peter—dispossesses the subject from himself, disappropriates him, and absents him in a series of metamorphoses, movements outside the self. The goal of the movement toward and inside is a seduction that ravishes the self as a narcissistic economy, a mirror that offers an ontological structure of “nonrapport” with the self: “Not to see in the outside, as the others see it, the contour of a body one inhabits, but especially to be seen by the outside, to exist within it, to emigrate into it, to be seduced, captivated, alienated by the phantom” (VI 139). On the stage of the mirror of dispossession, “flesh”—that which is neither mind, nor body, nor substance—seats itself in the vision of the vision, in the gaze of the gaze, resulting from a first redoubling of body and being. To feel one’s self as a bodily being is already to know the image of one’s self, which is certain to be fragmentary and partial in the extreme. Moving from a phenomenology of perception to an ontology of Seeing blocks every subject, every prereflexive Cogito. In the chiasm of vision, seeing all, as in mythic transparency and, similarly, seeing nothing prove impossible: I lose myself, I lose myself there, I am and am not there. In this, I resemble those who flee in Baroque poetics and opera. Being is passage and change, silhouette: “He who sees is both of it and in it,” without a geometrical and punctiform subject appearing like Archimedes’s point in the structure. “Vision encounters, as at a crossroads, all the aspects of Being” (EM 188). A position of finitude. To be is to be seen, as in the image of those towns that are dear to Leibniz, towns with multiple places of entry, decentered, without a fixed identity. Yet I am never in front of—as in the space of modernity—“conceptions of the world” where Being is parceled into the double certainty of the requisite subject and object in order to re-present the self. To the contrary, here Being gives itself (es gibt) only to be in, already given to a visible to the sec-

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ond power, included in an interworld in which the horizon is near and far, ubiquitous inherence, and in the “palpation of the things” (VI 83). “The integral being [is] not before me, but at the intersection of my views and at the intersection of my views with those of the others” (VI 84). In summation, Being is plural sight that is subjected to “points of view,” to the realities of intersections and encountering sights, Baroque Being without a God of sorts to regulate these sights in a preestablished harmony (Leibniz) or to decode the game of constituent signs (Gracián and Leibniz). How to ground the madness in sight in a sort of Leibnizianism without Leibniz, but with Heidegger and Husserl, on a field of visibilia incomposibles: that is the fundamental paradox of Merleau-Ponty’s reasoning. Moreover, we recognize the paradox and system of philosophical equivalences: “The In der Welt Sein relation will take the place held in Leibniz of the relation of reciprocal expression of the perspectives taken on the world, and hence god as the unique author of these diverse perspectives” (VI 222). This could not be more explicit. With the demand to see “in perspective,” Being “becomes a system with several entries.” As in endless labyrinths, the opening creates rupture and coincidence, a maze of viewpoints in the absence of an author and in search of a site for an omni-view. This is undoubtedly why fission, the detonation and dehiscence of Being, relates to aesthetic experience that invents a theoretical discourse close to Cézanne’s painting. This “painter of perception and not of the perceived” himself wrote, “The stuff of our art is there in what our eyes are thinking.”1 In Michel de Certeau’s words, the thinking performed by eyes makes perception a “foundational myth” that situates philosophical discourse on the platform of irremediable ontological loss. Such is, without question, the exemplary impact of Merleau-Ponty’s reasoning, which sheds light on our understanding of a Baroque aesthetic of ontological “insecurity,” in search of tangible universalia and mythological reason. The inverse of the entire Platonic and neo-Platonic tradition in which art exemplifies Being or the Good, aesthetics interprets the objectives of truth of the philosophical Logos, and beauty reflects Ideas, one might instead say that aesthetics establishes and instills a theory of physical effects, a philosophy of manners and modalities of being in an oblique fashion. For if the visible does not exhaust itself either in a transcendent objective or in proximate thought from a position partes extra-partes, if it is pregnant with the invisible, then “to see is to not be” (VI 76). The first theorem of the Baroque:

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the more one sees, the less one is; the more one is, the less one sees. Because the gaze is never objectifiable, it floats, and “loses its place” (Lacan). The gaze is a surprise and is surprised, linking matter and manner, consistent with Gracián’s rule: “Substance alone is not enough; appearance is also at issue.”2 To achieve this, to realize “elegant manners,” is a rare happiness. Beauty loves to embellish itself, to adorn itself with a thousand trinkets. It plays at guises and disguises without exhausting its own desire. Thus sight induces a loss of ontological qualities and qualifications of the “subject” outside the self, much as the object is elevated to a state of perpetual change, to anamorphosis and metamorphosis. The Baroque enforces a “retreat from Being,” an “insufficient Reason,” in the sense of the high classical period. In this way, the Baroque ruptures a unified episteme. Because this form informs what affects me, this law and its proliferating variations exhibit the pure state of materiality. Whether speaking of the sensual use of color in this Venetian painting or in Vivaldi’s frenetic beat, energetic and moving at rapid tempo, the same sensory and sometimes sensual logic penetrates and organizes these subjects that radiate from their own consummation. Odyssey of a mad form of itself as in Tintoretto’s paintings in San Roco, The Glory of Paradise and The Massacre of the Innocents in which terror becomes a spiral, an ellipse, an ellipse of ellipses, whirling bodies, sacrificed and martyred to vanish in infinite space, unbounded by radiance and pleasuring luminism.xi A dazzling dioptric that might have welcomed the darkness of suffering and violence. Still there, always there, we long “to see at the interior of the spiral,” as Lezama Lima described it in Orphic Vases.3 Painting manifests itself only as “madness in vision.” Thus, painting gives consistency and credibility to Merleau-Ponty’s ontology. According to his philosophy of figured appearances, it constitutes the hyperbolic proof of knowing. His position on aesthetics is so radical that it shows the transition from inert sight to the “work of the gaze,” the active-passive genesis of seeing. The thought of sight announces itself in the simultaneous construction of an ontology of topological space and a hermeneutics of color. Baroque  Gracián uses the Italian term bel portarse for this impulse (Oracula manual y arte de

prudencia 157).—Trans.

xi Tintoretto’s The Massacre of the Innocents is found in the Scuola Grande de San Roco

in Venice, and his The Glory of Paradise is in the Palazzo Ducale, also in Venice. On the subject of the ellipse, see Severo Sarduy’s complex play with the words ellipse and ellipsis in Barroco (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1974). Sarduy’s “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler,” chapter five of Barroco, is translated in this volume.—Trans.

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movement would be initiated in the juncture of these two, given a rhetorical, Lacanian displacement. Distinct from a homogenous, geometrical, and substantialist Cartesian space, the open, serial, Baroque spatiality, in the process of becoming, and in a metamorphosis of forms, derives from recovery, coexistence, the play of light and forces, the engendering of beings from the undulating line and the ellipse. Every aspect of a topological space that refuses identification and fixed localization of the object remains, as Francastel demonstrated, in “the ambivalence of pairings: similar/opposite, identical/different, part/ whole.”4 Topological perception of the world privileges changes of state over changes of objects, as a qualitative mathematics. Yet the Baroque is based on a Keplerian cosmology that substitutes the teleologically perfect circle, with its unique center point for the ellipse, with its double foci, of which one is virtual and absent.5 The ellipse that one finds in church design and in the paintings of Tintoretto, Rubens, or El Greco ties the geometric space of the body to a rhetoric of the visible and the spoken, indicating a double process of infinitude and ex-centration of space and writing. The capaciousness of the Baroque form derives from this. Can we not see the design of the Borromini’s church of San Carlino as an anamorphosis of the circle?6 The question is, does not Bernini’s great architecture create an “unstable” viewer, a cinematography of the visible? This dynamic space in morphogenesis and permanent “catastrophe” with neither center nor fixed focus will correspond to a geometry distinct from that of architectural design: Desargues’s, Pascal’s, and Leibniz’s geometry of conic sections, in which the circle is never merely a particular case of the curved line. Projected on different planes that are secants of a cone, it becomes a point, a parabola, or a hyperbola. It migrates outside itself, even when from an elevated “perspective” (above the cone) one can see the law of variations and correspondences operating between the original and its representations. Consequently, Nicéron’s Perspective curieuse immediately acknowledges “Monsieur Desargues, who created a general method.”7 Of course, this is true because an entire model of engendering appearances is constructed between law and variation, the one and the many, form and its projections. As Michel Serres wrote about Leibniz, “to construct is to see.”8 Whether a circle becomes a hyperbola or a parabola, whether it becomes at the same time finite and infinite, the same or different, this notion traces the Baroque’s restless wandering in the absence of a center that cannot—for

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Pascal or Leibniz—be determined other than by God. For Leibniz, seeing and creating coalesce in the mind of the great architect and divine mathematician in a point of light without shadow, in a “madness” that becomes wisdom: “God produces different substances according to the different views he has of the universe.”9 Even greater, he is Sight of all sights, mirror reflecting and expanding his glory. “Moreover every substance is as it were an entire world and a mirror of God, or rather of the whole universe, expressing it in its own way, somewhat as the same town is variously represented according to the different positions of an observer. It can even be said that every substance bears in some way the mark of the infinite wisdom and omnipotence of God, imitating Him as far as it is capable.”10 Yet man must reckon with the system of phenomena, the plurality of perspectives, the darkness and the shadow. We understand, then, how Pierre Charpentrat, in his various works on the Baroque, might detect in architectural motifs (a column that is a screen and an obstacle, the effects of perspectives, confusion of décor or monuments, formal abundance . . .) a Leibnizian space where everything is full of life and vision: “This space—which is never an a priori given and which the architects and sculptors of eastern Europe are beginning to weave unrelentingly with an accumulation of objects and relationships—is but an image of ‘the order of coefficients’ that Leibniz opposed in Cartesian thought. ‘There is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe.’ More to the point, space ‘is nothing without bodies’; ‘bodies are everywhere.’”11 Leibniz’s influence on the Baroque is clear. So, too, is the incorporation of the Baroque mathematician and vitalist: monads—even if they are “substances”—are endowed with a triple nature: sight as perceptive being, formforce as spontaneous being, and memory of traces and signs as an alphabet of everything that happens to them. Sight, form-force, and writing in palimpsest are three elements of seventeenth-century Baroque sensibility. The world is simultaneously a mirror of mirrors, a book of books, and an aesthetic universe of form-forces in permanent equilibrium/disequilibrium. The idea of expression rules as the master of this world. There remains one ambiguity that Yves Bonnefoy identified in L’improbable et autres essais concerning the conflict between Bernini and Borromini. Must one explain the visible (Bernini), the form-spectacle, at the risk of detecting therein an unconscious and infinitesimal mathematics? Or might one allow the visible its interior force, its point of rupture and spiritual chaos, its resonance in the spiraling void of a restless, sublimating spirituality where

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“the force envelops a center that is simultaneously close and inaccessible” (Borromini).xii Baroque “philosophies” produce such ambiguities. On the side of a philosophy of continuum, the expressive gushing of vision, forces, and forms, there is theatricalized order. However, in comparison to the interexpressive perspectivism of overabundance and affirmation of Being, which we find in Leibniz, there is an entirely different optic. In this more Nietzschean perspectivism, nothingness—Il Niente, emptiness, La Nada—crops up everywhere, exudes the profusion of forms, and reveals their limited reality. This is the perspectivism of Italian rhetoricians and epistemologists who sing Le Glorie del Niente, that of a Gracián, and even that of a Pascal in his scientific work on the void and his impassioned rhetoric of the extremes found between Being and Nothingness. Without delving into the whole of seventeenth-century Baroque mysticism, we recognize its scenography of loss and annihilation, its strategies of unspeakableness as a “staging” of the wounds of love, or of an absent or retreating God. The resort to nothingness—the art of nothingness—coincides with a crisis of “mimetic” models of knowing and statements of Platonic origin. The empty interval, like the articulatory silence in Baroque music or the compelling opening in a painting by Tintoretto, permits artifice, dramatization and the advent of form, the power of antithesis, metaphor, and metamorphosis, above all referent or signifier. A true oxymoronic practice of nothingness delights in its sophistry against Platonism. Thus it is with all Graciánesque strategies of ostentation: “Knowing how to show oneself,” “playing with appearance,” “exploiting absence,” masks and secrets, “continually acting before witnesses,” acting as if. Yet when we privilege the manner of showing oneself as a modality of being, paradoxically we imply how little there is of reality, an infinite production of ontological illusions, a true nihilism of appearances. “The art of display fills up many voids and offers a second being.” xiii The “second being,” which is fictive and born of the imagination, can only be rhetorical and the imposer of a rhetoric—a rhetoric of seeingness. This paradoxical pronouncement can be found in Gracián’s axiom: “Ah, how vast is nothingness!”12 This statement can be easily compared to an entirely different axiom from Scholastics and Cartesians: nothingness has no properties. xii Yves Bonnefoy, L’improbable et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).—Trans. xiii The author does not identify this quotation.—Trans.

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Nothingness is vast because within it and because of it is found the very possibility of Gracián’s ontological perspectivism, as well as his preNietzschean and even pre-Baudelairean pursuit of a heroic philosophy. One is always seen from a particular point of view (which is the rationale for keeping up appearances) to the extent that a superficial awareness “is not awareness of one’s self, but of others.”13 Understood from a certain perspective, the world is plural, diverse, beautiful. Yet this sort of polymorphic and pleasuring perversity of reality, of random happiness and of movement is permanently reduced to the figure of double, ambidextrous knowledge, the inverted world, and the antithesis of illusion/disillusion. As Benito Pelegrín noted, “In Gracián, double meaning, ambiguity, is the desired minimum for a bold mind, longing to unravel it into a multiplicity of meanings with a semantic hydra.”14 From multiplicity to a scene of duality: such is the dark, melancholic truth of the Criticón. At the end of the novel, Andrenio and Critilio, taken captive by allegorical figures, encounter “a Queen,” a divided character with a divided countenance. Who is she? A ndrenio: Critilio: A ndrenio: Critilio: A ndrenio: Critilio:

How ugly she is! No, how beautiful! What a monster! What a marvel! She wears black. No, green . . . (985)

The minister’s lesson: “Because you see her from different perspectives, you find different countenances, producing different effects and affects” (985– 86). Referring to the anamorphic gaze, he says, “the type of painting in which an angel appears on one side and a demon on the other” (986). We understand that this Queen, to whom all appearances are equivalent, who is fearful and free, sad and happy, this Queen is Death: “Everything is all the same to me” (987). The allegory of death, which is common to all forms of the Baroque, tempers its hedonist abundance. It is hardly alone in this. If “nothingness is vast,” are all forms overwhelmed? Consider, too, the other Allegory of Nothingness, the famous and feminine “Cave of Nothingness”—la cueva de la nada—where the characters find themselves. Men of great merit are worth nothing there; nobility, beauty, courage, and beautiful lives are dulled; all “substance” reveals itself as “appearance”: “Where you see substance, there

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is only appearance; what appears to be solid is hollow, and what is hollow, empty” (881). Nothingness, hollowness, emptiness, death. The great “Wheel of time” crushes everything, shatters appearances, and calls out to immortality. But returning to the persistent question of the Baroque: can we think simultaneously of emptiness and wholeness? In vision itself and its “work,” can we structure a capacity of absence that would be the basis of a rhetoric of the visible and the inter-sections of seeing, of plural and anamorphic seeing? This question, this attempt to contemplate “nothing” and “nothingness” on the basis of the Gaze as the power of decentering, demands, according to Merleau-Ponty, “a complete reconstruction of philosophy” (VI 193). So complete that, from the difference of the Hegelian negation of the Concept or Sartre’s essentialist Nothingness, Merleau-Ponty seeks an understanding of nothingness outside a philosophy of reflection and the metaphysics of the subject, from the interior of “perspective multiplicity” (VI 187). From this we understand the priority of research that concerns the existentials of Vision pertaining to topological space, these providing the framework of the invisible world that “is given originally as non-Urpräsentierbar” (VI 180). In summary, from the perspective of the Gaze, let us reconsider the links between phenomenology and ontology that bind them to Sein und Zeit: “Phenomenology is our way of access to what is to be the theme of ontology, and it is our way of giving it demonstrative precision. Only as phenomenology, is ontology possible.”15 This project led Heidegger directly to an understanding of phenomenology as “the meaning of being In Itself ” bearing on “existentials” as “characters of being In Itself ” (VI 248, 252). Merleau-Ponty takes up the Heideggerian terminology of “existentials” and develops it for his discussion of single sight and perspective multiplicity. Presentiment, structures of nonperceived perception, the framework of the world, these existentials “organize” topological space. Effectively, unlike a homogenous, representative, mapped space, topological space includes and fragments, joint and membrane, and allows the Gaze to do its work to the very limit without a totalizing snapshot. Such space impacts “the branches of Being” that are encroachment, veins, juxtaposition, light (EM 188). Everything that breaks up the single form-spectacle by overturning the pronominal construction of sight (Where am I? I who see and who or what that sees me?) and by disturbing the visual referents that are part of representation: content/form, hierarchized horizon, scale and perspective. Uncertainty, the state of floating, rechannels vision to mount the stage of form, to its Appa-

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rition. This is what Kant terms exhibitio and what underlies the visual anamnesis of the Baroque. From this comes the deployment of a form that is entirely specific to nothingness and is successively termed erasure and replacement, ambiguity, divergency, latency, and lacuna—and finally difference. As in the Criticón, “Nothingness (or rather non-being) is hollow and not hole” (VI 196). More accurately, things are “non-beings, divergencies” (VI 180). It remains, then, in this field where a form takes form in the intersection of multiple visions, to circumscribe the existentials of vision, which are neither categories in the sense of Aristotle or Kant, nor concepts. At the very most, they are figurative and metaphoric concepts, a priori scenographies, a sensible and material “transcendental.” In fact, these “transcendentals” become thinkable only on the basis of aesthetics, and particularly in painting, which would be ontologically primary: “The aesthetic world to be described as a space of transcendence, a space of incompossibilities, of explosion, of dehiscence, and not as objectiveimmanent space” (VI 217). As in the Baroque, aesthetics is the paradigm of all ontology of “Being” in defeat, flight, and retreat, this on the basis of what we know of the great symbolic matrices of the Gaze. Merleau-Ponty explores this entirely new distinction between topology and aesthetics in two domains, which bring into consideration the ontological primacy of color and “flesh” for the visual, representative form. First, of course, is that of a dynamic specific to vision and close even in its terms to plastic, Baroque vision. Thus the core that is common to “subject” and “object” approaches “being as undulation,” the “flexuous line” that inevitably suggests the “linea serpentina” (EM 183).xiv Moreover, divergence— morphological nothingness—presents itself as a “ray”: objects lose their stable, fixed identity and move around us “like the stars” (VI 86).16 Finally, we understand that not only “the line is a vector, that a point is the center of forces” (VI 195), but that its being is “Apparition”: “The Gestaltung is not being by definition, essentialization—It is [verbal] Wesen, the operation of essence, the apparition of an Etwas existing by radiation” (VI 206–7).xv These xiv Merleau-Ponty’s term, flexuous line, is borrowed from Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise

on Painting. See also EM 183 and VI 194, where he discusses “serpentement,” which is translated in VI as “winding.”—Trans. xv Etwas can be understood to mean the “thing” in the sense of the “existential.”  —Trans.

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terms converge in a reprise of the Husserlian notion of the “ray of the world” (VI 247) as an axis of equivalences, as a “page of the being” (VI 242). Form-force, “undulating line” (EM 183), etwas existing by radiation: in these ideas we recognize the spatial matrices of a pictoral Baroque taken in the “chiasm of the eyes,” in a configuration of matter (EM 183). In fact, this radiating Etwas appears to the “flesh” as a sort of ontology of colors found throughout Cézanne or Klee. Because this “flesh of the world” that is continually pursued by the Baroque is neither reality nor a representation of reality, neither a psychological nor a strictly physiological fact (VI 255). The “prototype of Being” is in these vibrations, modulations, color—such as the red “concretion of visibility” (VI 133, 136). Colors that have no pure identity take their value in constellation, in context: “It is by the same virtue that the color, the yellow, at the same time gives itself as a certain being and as a dimension, the expression of every possible being” (VI 218). One might even speak of a nonempirical sensibility: “As soon as it becomes the color of illumination, the dominant color of the field, it ceases to be such or such a color, it has therefore of itself an ontological function” (VI 217). We know that when Rembrandt painted a gold helmet, he did not paint gold. I give myself over to the presence of what is not me by the light and shadows of color, everything that is interpretive, uncertain and in flux in vision, the entire philosophy of shapes, presenting and staging colors in their “visual quale” as revealed in a painting (EM 187).17 I give myself to an ontological and nonhuman alterity, which constitutes the world and its existentials. However, therein is somewhat of an initial methodological circle. If the ontology of Being-in-the-world in Vision depends on aesthetics, then, inversely, topological space as a paradigm of Being has substance only because of the visual arts, particularly painting, which makes the invisible visible. Yet “nothingness is nothing more (nor less) than the invisible” (VI 258). A “circle” of this kind is not stripped of a difficulty, which is readily apparent when Merleau-Ponty broaches the rather problematic status of “ontological psychoanalysis” and connects two types of “transcendences”: that of the thing and that of the phantasm. If the sensible is not observable, must we not admit that “there is no absolute contrast” between “thing” and “phantasm” (VI 192)? But where do their specific constructions begin? If we take painting as a “hermeneutic” that offers us a pre-sense, a philosophy of the universal that is “beneath us,” to search in the perceived world for “the core of the senses that are invisible” to constitute a stylistic of expression, we

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remain without question in a “logic of the senses,” xvi though it would be incomplete, blank, and silent. Perhaps we must agree to radicalize the movement of such analysis, to pursue this “topology” within a broader rhetoric and epistemology free from every phenomenological quest of an archaic Being, savage and primitive? Perhaps the work of the Gaze leads to a “Borromean” construction in the madness in vision, in this knot of semblance-dissemblance that links Lacan to Merleau-Ponty.xvii A knot to untangle so that Vision, which becomes Seeingness, opens to the phantasmic eye.xviii Baroque nothingness with its mad exhibition of pleasuring, obscene bodies, eroticism, and morphogenesis could find here complementary outlines of an aesthetic—a “Lacanian” aesthetic resonating with the great treatises of seventeenth-century rhetoric, searching for a connection between vision and speech. In this very place, the Being in dehiscence, given over to the work of the Gaze, to the visual chiasm, to divergency, to the unrepresentability of Vision, turns out to be a rhetorical Being, for whom to say is to see.

Notes 1 Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne: A Memoire with Conversations, trans. Christopher

Pemberton (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 161.

2 Baltasar Gracián, Oraculo manual y arte de prudencia, in Obras completas (1647), ed.

Artura Del Hoyo (Madrid: Aguilar, 1967), 157. [All quotations from Gracián are from this collection and are translated by Lois Parkinson Zamora.—Trans.] 3 José Lezama Lima, Introducción a los vasos órficos (Barcelona: Barral Editores, 1971). [The author quotes from the French edition, Introduction aux vases orphiques, trans. Albert Bensourran (Paris: Flammarion, 1983).—Trans.] 4 Pierre Francastel, La réalité figurative, éléments structurels de sociologie de l’art (Paris: Gonthier, 1965), 143. [Francastel’s statement is the following: “The topological representation of space rests on the ambivalence of a limited number of certain pairings: similar and opposite; identical and different; part and whole; localized and ubiquitous.”—Trans.] 5 See Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1974). [The author refers xvi The author borrows this language from Gilles Deleuze, La logique du sens (Paris:

Minuit, 1969).—Trans.

xvii Lacan discusses the significance of the figure of the Borromean knot in “Rings of

String,” chapter 10 of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX: Encore, on Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998).—Trans. xviii Merleau-Ponty’s “Vision,” Lacan’s “Seeingness.”—Eds.

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9

10

11

12

13 14 15 16 17

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to the French edition translated by Sarduy and Jacques Henlic (Paris: Le Seuil, 1975).—Trans.] See Sarduy for an analysis of the Baroque cosmology and the role of the ellipse. [See note 13.—Eds.] Jean François Nicéron, Perspective curieuse, ou, Magie artificielle des effects merveilleux de l’optique (Paris: Jean du Puis, 1663), 3. Michel Serres, Le système de Leibniz et ses modèles mathématiques, 2 vols. (Paris: Presses Universitares de France, 1968), 1:168. [Serres’s statement is the following: “One could even say ad libitum that to see is to construct or to construct is to see; vision is analyzed in architecture or we analyze the vision of the those who construct.”—Trans.] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics and Related Writings, 1846, ed. and trans. R. N. D. Martin and Stuart Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 53. [The author cites the French edition, Discours de métaphysique (Paris: Vrin, 1974), 37.—Trans.] Ibid., 47. Note that Leibniz dedicates La monadologie to the first patron of Fischer von Erlach and Hildebrandt. [Leibniz, Mondatology (1714), ed. Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991).] Pierre Charpentrat, Baroque: Italie et Europe centrale (Fribourg: Office du Livre, 1964), 133. [Charpentrat quotes from Leibniz’s The Monadology. I use here Robert Latta’s translation in The Philosophy of Leibniz, ed. R. C. Sleigh Jr. (New York: Garland, 1985), 257.—Trans.] Baltasar Gracián, El criticón in Obras completas, 947. [Gracián makes similar statements throughout the novel. See 898 and 912. All subsequent quotations from Gracián in this essay are from El criticón.—Trans.] Vladimir Jankélévitch, Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque-rien, 3 vols. (Paris: Seuil, 1980). Benito Pelegrín, Éthique et esthétique du baroque: L’espace jésuitique de Baltasar Gracián (Arles: Actes Sud, 1985), 190. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQarrie and Edward Robinson (London: Blackwell, 1978), 30. See VI 203 on divergence (écart). On color as “quale,” see VI 135. [Here Merleau-Ponty uses the language of Robert Delaunay in Robert Delaunay: Du cubisme à l’art abstrait, ed. Pierre Francastel (Paris: S.E.V.E.P.E.N., 1957).—Trans.]

14 The New World Baroque and the Neobaroque

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Editors’ Note to “Savoring Góngora,”   Excerpt, by Alfonso Reyes

One of Mexico’s most distinguished and prolific men of letters, Alfonso Reyes (1889–1959) devoted his life to negotiating between Old and New World cultures, the better to understand nuestra América, as he liked to call Latin America as a whole. Along with several academics and intellectuals in Mexico City, he founded the Ateneo de la Juventud (Atheneum of Youth) in 1909 to challenge reigning positivist and technocratic values and to initiate vital cultural and educational reforms. Reyes was the youngest member of the Ateneo, and there he established an essential friendship with Pedro Henríquez Ureña, a literary scholar from the Dominican Republic who was five years his senior. The two shared a passion for the Greco-Roman tradition and its European Renaissance, as well as for the Spanish Baroque and its refractions and revisions in Latin America. Henríquez Ureña’s essay in this volume postdates Reyes’s, but his imprint on Reyes is clear; these two monumental Latin American literati should be read side by side in their reassessment of the Baroque, both in Spain and in nuestra América. In 1913, Reyes received his degree in law from the National Autonomous University of Mexico and joined the Mexican diplomatic corps in Paris. A year later, he left his post to establish himself in Madrid, where he worked as a journalist and studied and wrote about literature at the Centro de Estudios Históricos (the model for the Colegio de México that Reyes would later help found). Here, he participated in the reevaluation of the Baroque literature of Spain’s Siglo de oro (Golden Age), focusing on the poet from Córdoba, Luis de Góngora (1561–1627). This reevaluation would also be impelled by the Generation of ’27, a group of Spanish writers whose collective name recognizes and honors the tercentenary of Góngora’s death. In particular, Dámaso Alonso, Federico García Lorca, and Gerardo Diego follow Reyes in revivify-

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ing Góngora. From Paris, Reyes corresponded with Diego on preparations for the Góngora tercentenary in 1927 and contributed to new editions of Góngora’s works coordinated by the poets of the Generation of ’27. In the essay included here, “Savoring Góngora,” Reyes refers specifically to Dámaso Alonso, whose prose translation of and commentary on Góngora’s poem Soledades (Solitudes) had recently been published. In translating complex poetic structures into linear prose, Alonso was able to demonstrate that Góngora’s infamous obscurity was based on a perfect poetic logic that, while hermetic, could be decoded into clear and unequivocal prose. The title of one of Alonso’s essays, “Claridad y belleza de las Soledades” (Clarity and Beauty of the Solitudes), summarizes his argument and his intention to turn disdain into admiration by presenting Góngora as a newly discovered cerebral logician-poet. Reyes also mentions Gerardo Diego, who celebrated Góngora from the vantage point of the vanguardist poetic practitioner. Diego’s essay, “Un escorzo de Góngora” (A Foreshortening of Góngora) presents Góngora as an inspiration for the autonomous creative poetic act, which invents an alternative poetic world distinct from that of reality. Alonso’s critical elucidation and Diego’s creative appropriation complement each other, marking the two poles of the recovery of Góngora by the Generation of ’27. Significantly, it was practicing poets acting in the role of critics, who, along with Reyes, a Mexican public intellectual, impelled the revival of Góngora and the Spanish Baroque. It was only after they had rehabilitated Góngora by popular acclaim (so to speak) that official criticism followed suit, modifying its long-standing antagonistic posture. In 1927, not coincidentally, Reyes published Cuestiones gongorinas, a collection of his essays and bibliographic studies of Góngora, researched and written between 1915 and 1923 while he was living in Madrid. “Savoring Góngora” was written in 1928 and partially published in La Nación in Buenos Aires, where Reyes had been posted the year before by the Mexican government. (We offer sections six through ten, the tenth concluding the essay.) The extent to which Reyes and the poets of the Generation of ’27 went against the cultural hegemony of the time is notable. In the first comprehensive anthology of Latin American poetry (the four-volume Antología de poetas hispano-americanos, 1893–95), edited in Spain to celebrate the fourth centenary of the so-called discovery of America, Spain’s most important literary critic, Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (to whom Reyes refers also in this essay), called the Baroque an “epidemic” that had had a lethal effect on colonial Latin American literature. The ornate, extravagant Baroque style—

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of which Góngora’s Latinate Spanish poetry is the quintessential example— was still suspect, but Reyes, along with the Generation of ’27, managed to accomplish for literature what Heinrich Wölfflin had for art and architecture, defending the Baroque by offering formalist analyses of an aesthetically independent form, but one equal in importance to Renaissance classicism. Reyes continued in the Mexican diplomatic corps, leaving Paris in 1927 to spend the next twelve years in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro. In Paris, he had already met the young Alejo Carpentier, and during his subsequent period of americanía andante (American wanderings), he carried his enthusiasm for Baroque literature with him to Buenos Aires, becoming a model and friend to Jorge Luis Borges, and to Brazil, where he fueled the growing awareness of the Baroque literary tradition there. His permanent return to Mexico in 1939 coincided with the exile of intellectuals from Franco’s Spain, and Reyes became the president of the newly founded Colegio de México, a private institution for advanced study and research in the humanities that welcomed refugee scholars from Spain and has become one of Mexico’s foremost universities. Beyond its revalidation of Góngora, Reyes’s project was more ambitious yet: he aimed to reclaim Baroque literary traditions throughout Latin America, and he knew that to do so, he had first to reclaim its maximum metropolitan practitioner, Góngora. The following essay does not explicitly treat the influence of Góngora on Latin American poetics (as do the essays by Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, José Pascual Buxó, and Roberto González Echevarría in this volume), but we nonetheless intuit Reyes’s interest in Góngora’s legacy, that is, in what Latin American writers could and would eventually engage, revise, and make their own: Góngora’s sensuousness, his Adamic impulse to name and describe, his capacity to subvert received meanings with “ambiguity, circumlocution, and paraphrase,” his will to create works of “mixed parentage” by combining elite and popular forms, and most important, his amplification of the Spanish language itself (BNW 175; 172). In 1929, one year after “Savoring Góngora,” Reyes published his essay entitled “Góngora y América.”

Bibliography By the Author

Reyes, Alfonso. Cuestiones gongorinas. 1927. In Obras completas, vol. 7, ed. Ernesto ­Mejía Sánchez. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958. 10–167.

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­———. “Góngora y América.” 1929. In Obras completas, vol. 7, ed. Ernesto Mejía   Sánchez. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958. 235–45. ———.“Sabor de Góngora.” 1928. In Obras completas, vol. 7, ed. Ernesto Mejía   Sánchez. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958. 171–98; 183–98 translated here. ———. “The Tenth Muse of America.” 1948. In The Position of America and Other Essays by Alfonso Reyes. Trans. Harriet de Onís. New York: Knopf, 1950. 117–27. ———, and Pedro Henríquez Ureña. Correspondencia, 1907–1914. Ed. José Luis   Martínez. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultural Económica, 1986.

Additional Readings

Alonso, Dámaso. “Claridad y belleza de las Soledades.” 1927. In Estudios y ensayos gongorinos. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1955. 66–91. Diego, Gerardo, ed. Antología poética en honor de Góngora: Desde Lope de Vega a Rubén Darío. 1927; Madrid: Alianza, 1979. ———. “Un escorzo de Góngora.” Revista de Occidente 3, no. vii (1924): 76–89. ———. La estela de Góngora. Ed. Julio Neira. Santander, Spain: Servicio de Publicaciones Universidad de Cantabria, 2003. García Lorca, Federico. “La imagen poética de Don Luis de Góngora.” 1928. In Obras completas, ed. Arturo de Hoyo. Madrid: Aguilar, 1972. 62–85. Góngora, Luis de. Selected Poems of Luis de Góngora: A Bilingual Edition. Ed. and trans. John Dent-Young. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. ———. Las soledades. Ed. Dámaso Alonso. 3rd ed. Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1956. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. “Warum gerade Góngora? Poetologie und Historisches Bewusstsein in Spanien zwischen der Jahrhundertwende und Bürgerkrieg.” In Lyrik und Malerei der Avantgarde, ed. Rainer Warning and Winfried Wehle. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1982. 145–91. Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino. Antología de poetas hispano-americanos. Vol. 1. 1893; Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1927. Morelli, Gabriele, ed. Gerardo Diego y el III cententario de Góngora: Correspondencia inédita. Valencia, Spain: Pre-textos, 2001. Zea, Leopoldo. Positivism in Mexico. Trans. Josephine H. Schulte. Austin: University   of Texas Press, 1974.

  Chapter Eight  

Savoring Góngora Excerpt

Alfonso Reyes

Translated by Rosa Dutra

Section 6 It is worth contemplating a fact so elementary that we may notice it and yet miss its significance altogether. Góngora straddles two centuries: he turned forty as the seventeenth century began. Each literary epoch has its own spirit. If the fifteenth century in Spain presents us with the spectacle of a constant debate between the poets of The Songbook of Baena (Cancionero de Baena), as well as with the confusion of classes in which the literary forefather Gómez Manrique vies with the tailor Antón de Montoro (also known as the haberdasher), the sixteenth century is an era of the most profound and bountiful ideals, of an ambience of stately brilliance. Its writers are captains, ambassadors, influential prelates, courtiers of noble lineage, and the most erudite humanists: Lebrija, Valdés, Garcilaso, Hurtado de Mendoza. Literature itself is an aristocracy, and though belated compared to the rest of Europe, it asserts itself decisively in its determination to acclimate Spain to the Renaissance; it is a cultural revolution from above, enacted by the privileged. Meanwhile, the Crown achieved political unity, expelled the Moors, and established Spanish rule in the New World. Literature was widely enjoyed. Even its controversies were inspired by vast ideals. Remember the Anotaciones to Garcilaso by Fernando de Herrera, an ambitious poetic manifesto. Only Cristóbal de Castillejo, the belated enemy of the hendecasyllabic line (he was still very much a man of the fifteenth century), is anomalous in this ensemble of aristocratic men of letters. But everything changes in the seventeenth century. The precipitate geographic discoveries and great economic impact of America has begun to transform the relations of social classes and the distribution of wealth in

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Spain. These changes also affect the world of literature. Above all, it is the immense popularity of Spanish theater that lends a new character to the literary world. The writing of plays becomes a lucrative enterprise. The people are enamored of the theater with a passion that borders on obsession. Literature is rife with improvisers, quick-witted laymen who knock out plays in a few hours, sometimes working in teams so as to write more quickly. Specialized studies are hardly necessary to become a writer; the language is ready-made so that whatever falls from the writer’s lips is lauded as a work of art by the people. It is fair to say that literature is somewhat debased, but at the same time writers become more agile. Hence, theater begins to serve a function comparable to that of journalism. Amid allusive scenes and verses, poets air personal matters and address events of the day—the latest scandal at court, news of the fleet from the Indies, stories about fiestas, and so on. Little by little the realm of letters is transformed into an insufferable place of gossip, a field of free-for-alls. Poets purvey rumors and caustic quips: Lope fights with Góngora, Góngora with Quevedo, Quevedo with Ruiz de Alarcón, and Ruiz de Alarcón with Lope. The most noteworthy names of the epoch attempt every conceivable permutation, combination, and equation, as a mathematician would say, with the certainty that their innovations correspond to reality, that is, to this astonishing thicket of quarrels. It is a nervous, frenetic world in which everything rushes to become literature: an astounding spectacle of vitality and verbal rapture, seemingly lawless and profligate. Góngora, whose education belongs to the sixteenth century, is, by intellectual lineage and spiritual resources, a traditional man of letters, comparable in this respect only to Quevedo. But let us imagine that this gentleman becomes impoverished and, now destitute, enters, along with the seventeenth century, into another era of Spanish literature and henceforth must live embroiled in a continuous struggle like all the rest. The prince is now a pauper. He is a humanist with respect to poetry, apart from being a poet of formidable intuition and matchless aesthetic divination; when forging popular art, he stylizes it, makes it exquisite, as Cervantes did in his ingenious Gitanilla. He truly probes the mysteries of a refined art, following the path of GrecoRoman antiquity. Lope de Vega, a man of the lower classes, was accustomed to respecting the hierarchy. (If I make note of these differences in social station, nowadays so unnecessary, it is because they were important in this social ambit.) He knew how to be an affectionate secretary of noblemen, and he was certainly deferential to Góngora. Moreover, he was somewhat intimidated by him—

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the dour humanistic poet, so flawless and finished, so erudite and filled with singular narratives, so proud and so capable of crucifying an enemy poetically. At times Lope celebrated Góngora and at others, he attacked him with cunning verses to which a response was not long in coming. He also resorted to writing him pseudonymous, tragicomic letters imploring him with witty epigrams to accept his peace offering, which the haughty Cordovan would, of course, refuse. This battle between Lope and Góngora was the inevitable clash between a master of simplicity and a master of difficulty, to borrow the fortuitous expression of Gabriela Mistral.

Section 7 To economize effort, people sometimes discuss Góngora and other poets of the time according to two successive models. It is said that Góngora began as an unambiguous poet and ended as an obscure one. Examining his poetry, now that the chronology of his work has been largely established, we can be sure that Góngora always maintained two palettes; sometimes he paints with watercolors and sometimes with oil, though he ultimately insists on oil. He has two facets, two ways of seeing and portraying the world in verse: the minor tone and the major tone. For the first, he generally uses the shorter lines of eight or fewer syllables, and for the second, the heroic hendecasyllabic line. In the first, there is no room for fundamental aesthetic revolution; it is in the second that the Gongoran revolution primarily manifests itself. This revolution is comparable only to that which Garcilaso brought about, whose legacy Góngora modifies appreciably. The day comes when Góngora pleases equally those who prefer the old style and those who prefer the new. While the former audience celebrates his roundels, his décimas, and his romances, the latter recites his songs, silvas, sonnets, and octavas reales.

 An eleven-syllable line in the tradition of Petrarch. In the late fifteenth century, Juan

Boscan and his disciple Garcilaso de la Vega adapted Italianate poetic structures to Spanish, an adaptation that would find its maximum expression in the sonnets of Francisco de Quevedo and Góngora. In the following sentences Reyes contrasts the longer Italianate line to the shorter lines, based on older Spanish oral poetic forms. These opposing poetic forms, which came to be known as arte mayor and arte menor, reflect the social distinctions that Reyes mentions at the outset of this excerpt, distinctions expressed both formally and thematically in much Spanish Golden Age literature. Examples in prose include the emerging genre of the picaresque novel, most notably Cervantes’s Don Quixote.—Eds.

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The new Gongoran aesthetic develops in full force only when the poet is ready, around 1612, when he sends a copy of his latest poems to Pedro de Valencia, asking for his authoritative opinion. Nevertheless, from his early years, watercolors alternate with oils; the sonnet “Upon the Sun’s Sinking behind the Mountains, My Nymph,” written in 1582, is already imbued with a certain “foreboding.” I would like to recognize an error that I risk committing in my haste. I have stated that Góngora undertakes his revolution primarily in the longer lines. Here, I am referring to what is generally known as the Gongoran revolution. For my part, I count myself among those who believe that his “Fable of Pyramus and Thisbe,” written in octosyllabic lines, still holds surprises for us, as do certain other brief poems that presage or accompany it. Góngora himself felt a special predilection for “Thisbe,” with its combination of popular and erudite elements, which comprises yet another revolutionary move on Góngora’s part, one that deserves a separate study, apart from the cultismo that concerns me here.ii

Section 8 Very little has been said about Góngora’s simpler style when, in fact, there is much to say. Apparently it can defend itself unaided; moreover, its sins are venal when compared to the mortal ones of his more obscure style. Hence this mischievous, simpler poetry, as precious as the other though quite different in form, slips through the gates of the critics without anyone levying a toll. For now let us do as everyone else does, and allow it to pass unnoticed. As for Góngora’s more obscure style, I will save you a tedious examination of its precursors and antecedents. There is throughout the period a certain hyperstimulation of ornate styles that, though they converge in Gongorism, should not be mistaken for it. (Gongorism, thanks to antonomasia, refers to an obscure, formidable style that is also known as cultismo.) Herrera loans ii Reyes is referring to what is usually termed culteranismo (originally a deprecatory

term referring obliquely to the heresy of Luther and luteranismo). See the definitions provided by Michael Schuessler and Ashley Lapin, translators of the essay by José Pascual Buxó, note xvi, and Maarten van Delden, translator of the essay by Gonzalo Celorio, note vi. The seventeenth-century English analogue to culteranismo is Euphuism, but we choose not to confuse the definitional issue by translating a Spanish style with an English literary term. Reyes gives his own definitions below.—Eds.

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something of his accent to Góngora’s beginnings, as does Carrillo y Sotomayor, his most immediate (and most interesting) precursor, but their work does not fit within the scope of this essay. Nor do I wish to discuss Gongorism in relation to what transpired outside Spain or, for now, to know if, from time to time, the deity responsible for supervising the world’s literature sows seeds of revolutionary disquiet that set ablaze an entire hemisphere of our planet, like the rush of blood caused by a change of seasons. In the great controversy that covers the entire seventeenth century, the field is divided into two schools: cultismo and conceptismo. They are two enemies when seen at close quarters, and nearly twins when seen from the distance of centuries. Hence these falsely coupled stars that our vision arbitrarily joins together are, in their own time, as distant from one another as we are from the sun. Let us try to distinguish them to the extent possible in a few words. Cultismo, contemptuously dubbed culteranismo by its adversaries, is so called because it endeavors to create poetry by means of culture, a poetry nourished by the recondite content of grammar and erudition. The master Góngora, as if foreseeing the formula proposed by Walter Pater in his essay on style, attempts to employ every word philologically. “Attic style, Roman erudition,” he says. The difference between this attitude to that of simply following popular whim without thought or reflection: is it not revealing? “I hope to have created something that is not for the masses,” he was heard to say in his final days. . . . In this statement, do we not encounter once again the man of the sixteenth century, the man of the Renaissance, determined to graft Spain onto the tree of Mediterranean culture? The man besieged by the tenacious assault of populism, by the sheer energy of the masses that appears so eloquently and indomitably throughout the entire history of Spanish thought? The intellectuals of the sixteenth century failed in their attempt to create in Spain a theater inspired by the ancients, based in humanism and the classical model, such as was founded in the rest of Renaissance Europe. They failed, and on the crest of the populist wave that arose in irascible response from the heart of ethnic Spain, Lope de Vega was lifted to the stars. A new battle, which parallels to a certain degree the previous one, is waged by Góngora. Although his contemporaries believed otherwise, the most significant aspect of these innovations lies not in being part of a humanistic campaign, but in Góngora’s personal and almost indescribable aesthetic. In the name of this aesthetic, and not for the sake of classical humanism, the twentieth cen-

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tury—after two centuries of detours, vacillation, or fear—turns once again to Góngora. Does this phenomenon of poetic “culturization” remind you of anything? For my part, it vividly recalls the medieval reaction of clerical practice (mester de clerecía) to the practice of the troubadours or minstrels (mester de juglaría),iii the reaction of clerics or, in the language of the day, the learned scholars who counted syllables, created symmetrical stanzas, made use of the regular consonants of the cuaderna vía and cited authorities and texts. In contrast, the troubadours or wandering poets went about to festivals reciting great feats to the sound of simple music, or accompanied pilgrims and assuaged their fatigue. Hence their verses were essentially irregular, or at least not fundamentally regular, changing as they traveled from mouth to mouth, adapting to the specific time and place, flowing along much like a river follows the lay of the land. Cultismo, represented by Góngora, was developed primarily in lyric poetry. The preacher Paravicino brought it into the cathedral, where it would continue to decline until the days of “Fray Gerundio,” its turbid waters eventually draining toward America. Cultismo barely reached the stage; in the theater, the populist school triumphed. Góngora himself attempted some comedies that have yet to be analyzed. Cultismo did excel in royal theatrical celebrations such as those of Antonio de Mendoza or Villamediana; certain ostentatious plays were performed at the palace, quite apart from those of the populist theater with its smattering of magical enchantment, lyric opera, and even music hall revue. In contrast to cultismo, Quevedo comes to represent conceptismo, which will be developed primarily in prose and will later become codified in Gracián’s Agudeza.iv It is understandable that, from a distance, we should confuse these two tendencies that so resemble one another in their affectations and defects. Even in their own time, it can be argued that they were employed by the same writer, as in the aforesaid Gracián. Nevertheless, while cultismo may be characterized by a certain verbal provocation, conceptismo is iii Again, Reyes contrasts learned poetic practice to vernacular practice. The mester de

clerecía refers to a Spanish poetic tradition in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, exercised by learned poets and characterized by its religious and mystical subjects and its use of the cuaderna vía, a stanzaic pattern consisting of four rhyming lines. The mester de juglaría, on the contrary, was an anonymous, oral poetry of epic themes; the Cantar de mío Cid belongs to this tradition.—Eds. iv Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Wit and the Art of Genius), Madrid, 1648.—Eds.

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an ideological provocation. Cultismo is a linguistic preciosity whose external mechanisms consist in the systematic use of classical erudition and mythological metaphors, in twisted or elliptical phrases, and in the use of Latinate neologisms. Meanwhile, conceptismo, though respecting traditional language, consists of a dialectical effort, a way of guiding thought, a certain machinery of ideas, that proceeds by means of riddles, antitheses, perspicacity, and unusual associations, and it is most assuredly innate to the literary mind of Spain, having taken root in all periods. It is like the bastard child of scholastic education, the final despoiling of Aristotle.1 This tendency is manifest in its choppy, nervous syntax, which lurches and crackles and whose secrets, after being explored by Quevedo, will be taken even further by Gracián. Cultismo never expressed an opinion on conceptismo, but it nearly always availed itself of its methods. On the contrary, conceptismo caustically ridicules cultismo, in Quevedo’s La culta latiniparla (The Latin-Speaking Cult), Aguja de navegar cultos (The Compass for Navigating Cults), and elsewhere. In this, Quevedo echoes the middlebrow literature of his day, which generally remains free of the two divine epidemics: thus, for example, Lope de Vega, a rather crafty man, stays above the fray in this discussion thanks to his populist instinct, a symptom of his maddeningly healthy common sense. To attack cultismo, Quevedo casts aside some of his own exquisite conceptismo and joins the masses. We do not know if his contemporaries noticed this strategy. At least no one mentioned it to him. To confront the prevailing evils, and in the guise of being its antidote, Quevedo published the works of Fray Luis de León for the first time, as well as those of Francisco de la Torre. In all of this, the arts emerged the true victor, which was no small service. Nonetheless, Quevedo’s gibes served to discredit cultismo, reducing it to is surface contours.

Section 9 Góngora’s quest to Latinize the Spanish language has a long history. With Antonio de Lebrija, the first Spanish grammarian, who searched the vernacular for a structure similar to that of Latin—that is to say for rules, for a grammar—begins a great movement of elucidation and defense of the “vulgar,” to use the term employed by Joachim du Bellay in France. It was a Renaissance movement par excellence, one that tried to impart a certain dignity to the Romance languages, in contrast to the inertia that persisted in considering them merely decadent, corrupted forms of Latin. Imagine that the learned

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friends of Malón de Chaide reproached him in the mid-sixteenth century for writing about weighty matters in the vernacular, which was said to be good enough only for the “tales of spinners and silly girls”! From this tendency to ransom the common tongue are born essays of mixed parentage, at once Latin and Spanish, the pastime of such intellects as the Cordovans Fernán Pérez de Oliva and Ambrosio de Morales, the nephew of Pérez de Oliva and the teacher of Góngora. These grammatical and Latinizing concerns were characteristic of Cordovan thought. Here, Góngora first intuited the possibility of infusing the Spanish language with Latin. He would doubtless have discussed this matter at length with the grammarian Bernardo Aldrete, a countryman of his own age. Thus armed, he entered the arena of poetry. On the one hand, he distorted his syntax, creating surprising effects that pleased his sensibility and, indeed, sometimes ours as well.2 He began to enrich Spanish with new words from Latin, and to refresh literary voices by giving them a new idiomatic bath, drawing them nearer their etymologies, as when he gives the ya of Spanish the same connotation as the Latin jam. This contribution of new words is one of the definitive triumphs of Góngora. Entire lines that were incomprehensible to the average person of his time are now understood by everyone. Remember the sonnet by Quevedo in which he puts forth a recipe for refinement; there we find a number of words (and these are only the beginning, mind you!) to which Góngora granted citizenship, whether by using them for the first time or by simply naturalizing them once and for all. Quevedo attempts to detain the course of these words, making his stand as the customs official on the frontiers of language: radiance, to arrogate, youth, to foretell, candor, to construct, metric harmony, a little a lot (poco mucho), if not (si no), purplish (purpuracía), neutrality, to trample, to erect, mind, to press, to show off, to free, adolescent, to transfer, to frustrate, signs, pyre, harpy, to cede, to impede, petulant, arena, to sip, goal, silver, to alternate, although, to dissolve, rival, melodious, liquid, errant, nocturnal, cavern, pore, and so on.

Section 10 The seventeenth-century commentators concerned themselves only with Góngora’s verbal surface. They wanted to resolve the syntax, clarify the metaphors, explicate the role of mythology, and with that they were content. They amassed textual authorities with such fervor and abundance that at times just one of Góngora’s stanzas would generate a brief encyclope-

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dia of Latinate items. I suspect that they found mere coincidences that they would then attribute to direct influence or imitation. Indeed, in those times the engagement of authoritative sources was as greatly respected as it is now depreciated and even despised. Góngora’s eulogists endeavored to rob the author of his originality, exactly the opposite of what we would do today. At times I have preached the humble practice of returning to these same commentators if we want to understand what Góngora is addressing in certain places in his poetry. But one must know how to read his critics; one must know how to offer them a bit of resistance, approaching them with caution and levity, finding the narrow pathways through the quaking bogs of so much rambling, foolhardy erudition. I know that this exercise is cruel and drives many people away. Sometimes the learned allusion seems so interwoven with poetic thought that if we ferret out the allusion, we kill the enchantment of the poetry in the process. The current neglect on the part of the humanities helps us savor Góngora because it obliges us to think anew about phenomena that the aged Rengifo had already classified. Likewise, we must seek in mathematical similes related to the tangent and the fourth dimension what already had the dry and inscrutable title of “Poetic Preceptive.” I know that our amnesia with regard to antiquity also helps us enjoy Góngora because we may believe ourselves to be sailing on an indecisive sea of beautiful words imbued with an emotion similar to that which symbolist poetry produces in us. In reality the poet does nothing more than recall an ancient fable or make reference to a classical subject that we no longer recognize! The Argentine Borges is quite sincere when, on reading a certain sonnet by Góngora about the dawn, and having surrendered himself to the delight of his first impression, he discovers the reverse side of the erudite tapestry and exclaims: “Here truly there is no dawn in the mountains, but only mythology. The sun is the golden Apollo, and Aurora is a Greco-Roman girl, not the morning light. What a shame! They have stolen from us that simple three-hundred-year-old Andalucian morning we thought we possessed.”  Fleeing from such pitfalls, others like Gerardo Diego would defer completely to the contemporary connotations of Góngora’s words, even to the  Reyes quotes Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “Examen de un soneto de Góngora” (Analysis

of a Sonnet by Góngora), in El tamaño de mi esperanza (The Measure of My Hope), Borges’s second collection of prose, published in 1926.—Eds.

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point of uprooting isolated lines from their contexts and thereby sacrificing their meaning to enjoy them in and of themselves, like some natural resource, or an optical illusion that we know deceives us. Such a method, one which he calls “a foreshortening of Góngora,” is dangerous for the gullible and not recommended as a norm, but offers him, a true poet, a double utility.vi First, it will inspire him in distinctive ways to wax poetic. Second, he will become convinced of the immense qualities of Góngora, qualities elemental to all poetry: the physical beauty, the verbal enchantment, and the solid materials from which the work is constructed. This discovery is not trivial. Perhaps it was this physical appeal that seduced even those who had ample cause to repudiate Góngora. Such an example may be seen in Francisco Cascales. When, for ideological reasons, Menéndez y Pelayo felt obliged to condemn Góngora, he could not conceal how much he also understood and admired him.vii In the seventeenth century, those who attacked Góngora explained themselves well: they attacked his stylistic affectations. Those who defended him, if they were academics, explained themselves poorly. And if they were writers, the situation was far worse because they contented themselves with exclamations and empty disquisitions on the Andalusian Homer or the Swan of Betis. Matters of sensibility are not easy to defend. Góngora himself never wished to make any sort of poetic manifesto or explain his intentions. (Now I recall that the mere act of writing a beautiful funeral sonnet in honor of El Greco is something of an aesthetic manifesto.) In a letter to Lope de Vega he seems to raise the veil and imply that the pleasure of probing what is obscure constitutes part of the aesthetic pleasure, that it does us good by enlivening our spirits, so to speak, because the poetry that begins with the poet can only be completed within us! This is neither the vi Reyes refers to Gerardo Diego’s essay, “Un escorzo de Góngora” (A Foreshortening

of Góngora), Revista de Occidente, vol. 3, no. vii (1924): 76–89, in which Diego argues that it is legitimate for modernist poets to extract fragments from Góngora’s poetry for their own creative purposes, even though it might violate Góngora’s original meaning.—Eds. v ii Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo (1856–1912): Spanish literary historian whose voluminous work defined the Spanish literary canon from the medieval period to his own; it was against the authority of his writings, which condemned Góngora, that modern Spanish (and Latin American) poets, first the Generation of 1898 and then the Generation of ’27, initiated the revalidation of Góngora and Baroque poetry and prose in general. Here Reyes makes implicit reference to Ménendez y Pelayo’s conservative Catholic perspective.—Eds.

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entire essence of Góngora nor is it exclusive to him; nonetheless, it is useful to acknowledge it here.3 What use is the comparison, however fashionable, between Góngora and Mallarmé if not to suggest that both are creators of postpoetry, or poetry posterior to the word, in whose elaboration both persisted until they had gone beyond what most readers would accept.viii Góngora’s obscurity dissipates as soon as one explains his erudite allusions and untangles his syntactical knots. Mallarmé’s obscurity persists even when submitted to the same rigors, as has been done by Camille Soula and Emilie Noulet, because it is an intentional obscurity; as he himself stated, he wanted to restore to things their proper confusion, to return them to the vague and convulsive state in which the soul receives them before they are ambushed by logical constraints. Let us press the issue and attempt to see Góngora through today’s lenses. The irreproachable Dámaso Alonso says it well: Góngora is a great Spanish poet of the Greco-Latin tradition, but he is not the poet, nor yet our poet. His philosophy of life is not useful to us today. Apart from the fact that an entire beat of historical consciousness separates us from him, Góngora is not a poet of the spirit but a poet of the senses. In him we will encounter technical secrets and delights and pleasures of form, but never sentimental shudders or elevated advice. We should study him exclusively, perhaps, as an object of pure aesthetic contemplation. The technical revolution to which Góngora commits himself implies a fatigue in the sensibility of his era. As with all great innovators, Góngora is at the same time a culmination and a final liquidation. Like round, smooth pebbles, words become worn; they no longer mean anything, or they slide over our attention without generating sufficient electricity. The poet, to remedy this torpor, explores anew his perception of things, and thereby subtly modifies the meaning of words. On the one hand, he attacks the object obliquely, with ambiguity, circumlocution, and paraphrase, letting the noun fall away like a broken handle that no longer serves to grasp the jug. The hearer, wooed by this unexpected aggression, reacts to it and hurries to viii In the essay by Borges on Góngora cited above, Borges evinces the “fashionable”

comparison to which Reyes refers, comparing Mallarmé and Góngora, but for different reasons, and with different conclusions. Octavio Paz also invokes Mallarmé in his discussion of the Mexican Baroque poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as both José Pascual Buxó and Irlemar Chiampi point out in their essays in this volume.  —Eds.

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take possession of the object proffered by the poet to his mental hunger. In short, his senses are reawakened. On the other hand, the poet employs the word with a certain degree of malice. He diverts it slightly from its customary inflection, drawing it as if with a magnet to the right or the left of its customary meaning, thereby managing once again to please the palate, giving to the already delicious food a new flavor with his spices. Or perhaps the poet simply displaces a word in the sentence, thereby changing the natural gravitation of one’s thoughts, which, having been disrupted and reordered, awake from their slumber. Finally, the ellipsis, leaping over transitions, accelerates the rhythm and keeps us alert to surprises, clearing the pathways of language and removing the redundant underbrush that the negligence of daily living had allowed to grow. This aesthetic revolution operated in many ways. Quevedo, as we know, undertook it as well, albeit by other means. Góngora’s weapons are the senses; his poetry travels along the sensuous quality of objects, hence his use of paraphrase, at least when the poem is not exclusively about ideas. A poet of the senses, Góngora is a great simplifier. Enamored of color, which he reduces to a few fundamental hues, he constructs a heraldry of color. It is well known how he loved to combine white and red. Objects themselves are grouped for him into poetic categories. Dámaso Alonso has wittily enumerated all that Góngora summarized under the word “gold,” the word “snow,” the word “crystal.” Acis, tired and thirsty, arrives at a fountain beside which a nymph is sleeping: “His mouth gave—and his eyes—as much as was possible / To the sonorous crystal—to the mute crystal” (“Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea,” stanza 24). The sonorous crystal is the water he drinks, and the mute crystal is the white skin of the nymph he beholds. By means of such common denominators, Góngora can perform the scales of a virtuoso, and hang suspended among various unrelated terms. For him mythology represents the classification of natural things, stripped of incidentals and elevated to a higher level of mental dignity. Góngora is naturally inclined to use a profusion of precious stones and flowers—emeralds, rubies, diamonds, jasmine, stock, carnations, violets— making the precious stone and the flower a synthesis of color and object, an image of supreme splendor, supreme purity, supreme rigidity, or supreme tenderness, a round figure, a shield where nature may concentrate its forces. In his longing for fixity or crystallization, his metaphors may even refer to adages, as long as they are of noble Latin lineage. Or they may refer to scientific objects capable of serving as poles or ideological centers.

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This same velocity, this yearning for synthesis, this precipitate impulse toward the absolute carries Góngora to the superlative image, to a hyperbolic excess that, we now recognize, distances him from our taste. He is also distanced by excessive ornamentation, which is more seventeenth century than sixteenth, and by his desire to stereotype reality, to embalm it with the perfumes and oils of a dying tradition. With respect to musicality, Góngora takes us from the chiming of modest dancing meters to the murmur of the organ in the octavas and silvas. At times he invites us to dance with his measured feet, and at others he intoxicates us with a cloud of diffuse, dynamic sonority. If earlier he drew his reader’s eye to two or three metallic touches so the effect would not dissipate, now he also manages to attract the reader’s ear by means of various devices, whether rhythm, the sound of the word, alliteration, or the reiteration of sounds, the accent on which the entire line hangs, by means of what is pleasurable as well as what is purposefully disconcerting, or even by that syntactic melody whereby a caesura or articulation of a verse is joined to another. Verses are strung together, a stanza approaches or moves away from the one that follows, and the entire poem acquires an expressive beat, whether changing or not, whether in a flood or an ebb and flow, whether continuous or in successive waves. We have noted that Góngora’s primary means of seduction is the physical material of his work, the words with which he narrates and the way in which he weds them: good clay and good baking. Apart from their physical value, so pure and “dehumanized,” ix Góngora’s words contain a savory feast for the senses. The realms of nature parade in them as in Brueghel’s meticulous paintings: animal, vegetable, mineral, sensuously portrayed in his poetry as they are in the scientific experiments of Jagadish Chandra Bose. Air, fire, earth, and water: all are bathed in radiant light and luminosity, or else beneath two gleaming flashes of lightning—one that nails the real object and the other that produces an instantaneous poetic metamorphosis. Since the day that Adam named all creatures in order to assert his dominion over them, language has epitomized human sensuousness.

ix This is a reference to the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, whose 1925 essay

“The Dehumanization of Art” describes and defends counterrealism and abstraction in modern art. Reyes’s use of the term suggests his sense of Góngora’s contemporaneity and implies a connection between Góngora’s verbal strategies and early twentieth-century avant-garde poetics.—Eds.

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At the beginning of the twentieth century, great scholars like FoulchéDelbosc and Thomas prepared critical materials that would permit the reevaluation of Góngora. Nonetheless, he was still so overlooked that a learned North American could write a treatise on Ovid in Spain without ever mentioning the grand master of the Spanish Ovidians. Some of us raised voices crying in the desert. Góngora remained in exile. Now his muse returns and he is carried on shoulders more robust than ours. Indeed, the time has arrived to salute his muse with a verse in which the poet concentrates the entirety of his sensuous experience, voracious and full of sacred pleasure: “Enjoy, enjoy the color, the light, the gold!” (Sonnet 150). Buenos Aires, 14-6-1928

Notes 1 It takes no effort whatsoever to find cultista temptations in Santillana and Garci-

laso.

2 I must ask forgiveness of my fellow Gongorans, but I do not believe in the elegant

theory regarding the Greek accusative case, which seems to me to be more an Italianism, just as I feel that some of Góngora’s atrocious synalephas are influenced by Italian phonetics, that is, when they are not the effect of a motley Andalusian pronunciation, which also left its mark in Góngora’s aspirated h. 3 This doctrine already appears in The Courtier, by Castiglione.

Editors’ Note to “America’s Relation to   Europe in the Arts,” from Redescubrimiento de América en el arte by Ángel Guido

That Ángel Guido—the Argentine architect, sculptor, painter, engraver, poet, and art historian—should be included in this collection of foundational essays on the New World Baroque and Neobaroque is not self-evident. His influence on José Lezama Lima’s pathbreaking essay, “Baroque Curiosity” (translated into English in this volume for the first time), is largely ignored, but it is crucial to understanding the development of the New World Baroque as a decolonizing ideology. Lezama Lima’s famous coinage of the New World Baroque as the art of “counterconquest” (contraconquista) is not simply a transposition of Werner Weisbach’s 1921 thesis of the Baroque as the “art of the Counter-Reformation,” as mainstream scholarship (including Lezama’s editor Irlemar Chiampi) assumes. In fact, Lezama certainly read Guido’s pioneering argument for the New World Baroque as an instrument of “reconquest” in Latin America, an argument that precedes Lezama’s essay by two decades in opposing the established thesis that the Baroque was nothing but a European transplant on Latin American soil. We translate the first chapter from Guido’s magisterial (three hundred-plus pages) illustrated history of Latin American art, Redescubrimiento de América en el arte (1940; Rediscovery of America in the Arts). It is evidence that the articulation of the New World Baroque as an anti-imperial mode has a longer lineage than previously recognized. In 1925, Guido began his investigation of the New World Baroque by applying the ideas of the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin and the German Wilhelm Worringer to the American Baroque. In particular, Wölfflin’s recovery and destigmatization of the Baroque in Renaissance and Baroque (1888) and Principles of Art History (1915, an excerpt of which is included in this volume) had a transatlantic impact on the theorizing of the New World

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Baroque. Guido applied Wölfflin’s idea of the “painterly” Baroque and the “linear” classical to an extensive sampling of colonial and pre-Hispanic works of art and architecture. Guido’s work was also shaped in the intellectual climate of Latin American cultural nationalism. He was a close collaborator of Ricardo Rojas (whom he invokes twice in this essay); Rojas was the author of Eurindia (1924), a study like José Vasconcelos’s contemporaneous La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race, 1925), which advocates mestizaje as the basis of an authentic Latin American culture. In fact, Guido was the first to use the term mestizo to describe the transculturated products of the New World Baroque. In his treatise of 1925 cited below, written in support of Rojas’s Eurindia, he discusses the ornate architectural decoration that flourished in the southern Andes in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth. “America’s Relation to Europe in the Arts” was delivered as a lecture in 1936 before it was published as the first chapter of Guido’s Redescubrimiento. In this essay, Guido contests European structures of progressive history, formulating instead a model of history as a spiral, meandering through noninear digressive turns and folds. He proposes two cycles of European “conquest” and Latin American “reconquest.” The first conquest, beginning in 1492, is well known, but Guido argues that a “reconquest” was enacted during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by means of the indigenous forms of the New World Baroque; then, in a second cycle, the New World Baroque was itself “conquered” by the rationalism and materialism of the European Enlightenment and its nineteenth-century sequels, and now, in the first decades of the twentieth century, Neobaroque forms again constitute an American “reconquest.” Guido’s spiraling model links the historical forms of the New World Baroque to the twentieth-century Neobaroque in what he calls the first and second “American reconquest in the arts” (BNW 184). Although not translated here, we also want to draw attention to chapter 4 of Redescubrimiento, “El espíritu de la emancipación en dos artistas americanos” (The Spirit of Emancipation in Two American Artists), which was first given as a lecture in 1931. This chapter focuses on the work of José Kondori, the Quechua Indian sculptor of the façade of the Church of San Lorenzo Potosí, and Antônio Francisco Lisboa (ca. 1738–1814), known as “O Aleijadinho” (the Little Cripple), a Brazilian mulatto architect and sculptor, whose work represents the apex of the Brazilian Baroque (see figures 9.1, 9.2, 9.3, 11.7, 11.8, and 11.9). In his political reading of the New World Baroque as anticolonial rebellion, Guido makes these artists into emblematic twin

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agents of an insurgent transculturation of the Iberian colonial Baroque. Kondori and Aleijadinho respectively Indianize and Africanize imported Spanish and Portuguese Counter-Reformation art and architecture, transforming European models into local forms of expression. Guido’s pairing of Kondori and Aleijadinho has been taken up not only by Lezama but also, importantly, by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano. In his essay “Colonialidad del poder” (“Coloniality of Power”), Quijano proposes a nonlinear historical schema much like Guido’s, in which Kondori and Aleijadinho figure as pioneers of anticolonial cultural subversion during the very tenure of the colonial period. Perhaps Guido’s most significant innovation was his coinage of the term indiátide (indiatid), a permutation of the European term caryatid, to refer to the anthropomorphic columns fashioned in the likeness of indigenous (rather than European) women. In a section dedicated to this concept in chapter 4 of Redescubrimiento he argues that Kondori’s indiátides on the façade of San Lorenzo are the artistic equivalent of Túpac Amaru’s armed insurrection against Spanish colonial rule. They adapt the connotation of forced labor already inherent in the original Greek caryatids (the women of Caryae were condemned to forced labor for siding with the enemies of Greece), deforming European models to say something specific about American historical realities. The naive grace of Kondori’s indiátides contains and recalls the brutal exploitation of Indians in the mita system of tribute labor that the Spaniards used to operate the silver mines of Potosí. Guido’s study has long been out of print and is almost forgotten today, but it is one of the most passionate and original documents of the new cultural theory of the New World Baroque created by twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals. Guido’s work is visionary and refreshingly unorthodox: his notion of the twentieth-century American reconquest is hemispheric in scope, as he includes Louis Sullivan’s Chicago skyscrapers and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright among the new vernacular art “made in the Americas” through which, he argues, twentieth-century artists, writers, and intellectuals “reconquer” the arts from European hegemony.

Bibliography By the Author

Guido, Ángel. “América frente a Europa en al arte.” In Redescubrimiento de América en el arte. Rosario: República Argentina, 1940. 15–36.

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———. La arquitectura hispanoamericana a través de Wölfflin. Rosario, Argentina: Cruz del Sur, 1927. ———. Fusión hispano-indígena en la arquitectura colonial. Rosario, Argentina: Editorial La Casa del Libro, 1925.

Additional Readings

Kelemen, Pál. Baroque and Rococo in Latin America. New York: Macmillan, 1951. Kubler, George. Mexican Architecture of the Sixteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948. Morales Benítez, Otto. “El mestizo y el barroco.” In América Latina: Integración por la cultura, ed. Mariano J. Garreta. Buenos Aires: Fernando García Cambeiro, 1977. 29–50. Quijano, Aníbal. “Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en América Latina,” Anuario mariateguiano 9, no. 9 (1997): 113–21. ———. “Coloniality of Power and Eurocentism in Latin America.” International Sociology 15, no. 2 (2000): 215–32. Toussaint, Manuel. Arte colonial de México. Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1948. Tribe, Tania Costa. “The Mulatto as Artist and Image in Colonial Brazil.” Oxford Art Journal 19, no. 1 (1996): 67–79. Weisbach, Werner. Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation. Berlin: P. Cassirer, 1921. [El barroco, arte de la contrareforma. Trans. Enrique Lafuente Ferrari. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1942.] Worringer, Wilhelm. Form in Gothic. Trans. Herbert Read. London: Alec Tiranti, 1957.

  Chapter Nine  

America’s Relation to Europe in the Arts

Chapter 1 from Redescubrimiento de América en el arte Ángel Guido

Translated by Patrick Blaine

M u c h h a s b e e n w r i t t e n about America´s historical relations to Europe, including our social, religious, and economic structures, and our conduct of war. Everything that can be captured in writing has been archived on the old shelves of the colonies. But it is worth recalling that in the other history—the unwritten history that Unamuno calls “intrahistory”—we may discover a foreshortened reality between the lines that is subjective and, on many occasions, more real in the strict sense of the word than our descriptive or external history. In this history and intrahistory of which I am speaking, we have largely overlooked the fact that alongside the arc of our social evolution, another arc of singular importance has been taking place: the evolution of art. This oversight is understandable. With few laudable exceptions, historians are not knowledgeable about art. The craft of “classifying styles,” says José León Pagano, “is always a thorny and difficult task.” It requires singular discipline and constant gymnastics to capture aesthetic climates. It is not fair, then, to expect that a historian—especially one from the nineteenth century—be so disciplined, since he will reasonably focus his energy on accumulating reliable information about accomplished facts, rather than penetrating the rocky terrain of aesthetic phenomena. Since historians have largely ignored the relations of American and European art forms, it is time for me to address them today. Speech given on the occasion of the inauguration of university courses in the Ceremonial Hall of the Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina, March 21, 1936.

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On this excursion, which is both panoramic and cinematographic, I will address the nature of aesthetic attitudes in America since the conquest. These attitudes have taken shape in four stages: the first European conquest and American reconquest, and then the second European conquest and American reconquest. The first European conquest of American art took place alongside the European conquest of the social realm. Europe subjugated indigenous American art in an energetic and exclusionary way. For a century and a half, indigenous art succumbed or lay moribund under European aesthetic dictatorship. In the eighteenth century, however, a Creole reaction takes place.ii In the great centers of American Indian culture—Anahuac in the north and Tahuantinsuyu in the south iii—an aesthetic rebellion runs parallel to the underground social resistance, a rebellion that I will call the “first American reconquest of the arts.” This insurrectionary art did not spread far or last long, and it was dwindling by the beginning of the nineteenth century. The cosmopolitanism of that century destroyed the aesthetic climate that had given a Creole flavor to American art. I will call this destruction the “second European conquest of America in the arts.” The European hegemony in our art survives even today. Until recently, we have invariably had to express our American identity in a European voice, which, to put it bluntly, reveals little or nothing of our authentic identity. However, in the last few years, a new generation of American thinkers and  “Reconquest” is a literal translation of reconquista, referring to the Catholic recon-

quest of the Iberian peninsula from Islamic populations. The official Spanish edict of expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula was issued in 1492, though the process of expulsion was begun long before. To transfer this charged term from Spanish-Arabic relations to Spanish–indigenous American relations is to borrow connotations of a self-justified, militant offensive in the name of religious and cultural hegemony. Guido will turn this concept against Spain, arguing that the colonized Americans reconquered their own territory by converting European art and architecture into American forms of cultural self-expression.—Eds. ii The Spanish criollo has a meaning distinct from Creole in English. Criollo refers to persons of Spanish origin born in the colonies—American-born Spaniards, as distinguished from Spaniards born in Spain (peninsulares). While they jointly constituted the small white ruling caste of Spain’s overseas colonies, criollos and peninsulares were historical antagonists in a fratricidal struggle for power throughout the colonial period, where American-born subjects, in practice excluded from social advancement and the highest colonial offices, steadily gained ground in legitimating their claims until they eventually gained their independence from Spain.—Eds. iii Anahuac and Tahuantinsuyu refer to the Aztec empire in the central valley of Mexico and the Inca empire in the Andes, respectively.—Eds.

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artists has begun to notice, with dramatic expectation, the birth of a new and genuine American accent of unsuspected extent, though it is not yet possible to specify more than a few unmistakable milestones. I call this eagerness to articulate our identity in a nonderivative voice the “second American reconquest of the arts in relation to Europe.” A group of American artists already exists who are conspiring to accomplish this American reconquest of the arts, this rediscovery of America, as Waldo Frank would say.

The First European Conquest of American Art I am not going to describe the initial European conquest of America. I am speaking to an extremely educated audience, so I am spared a digression that would detract from the main idea that I want to present today. I will simply remind you of the principal populations of America at the time of the conquest: the Inca in Tahuantinsuyu and the Aztec in Anahuac. Small or large, important or ephemeral, the cultures of this American Man were by any measure complete, because “culture” implies a whole repertoire of concomitant values: religion, politics, economics, philosophy, language, and—most important for us—art. Whether from Anahuac or from Tahuantinsuyu, the American Man had a precise and profiled way of viewing the world, his “Weltanschauung.” From his worldview or cosmovision, he felt and watched the passing of life, simultaneously as actor and spectator, since this and nothing else is every man’s attitude toward his own space and time. A pantheist and an astrologist, this American Man raised magnificent temples like those of the sun and the moon in Teotihuacan, or in Cuzco. He constructed stupendous palaces like those of Mitla and Palenque. He founded cities with a surprisingly advanced concept of urbanism. He laid out roads, drainage canals, and irrigation systems. A consummate agriculturalist, he improved the species of corn: he transformed teozintle, or wild corn, into what we use today. In his organization of labor, he was collectivist and communist. In his distribution of land, he was generous; he did not recognize the latifundio.iv Now our American Man, who cannot be thought of without this repertoire of activities of hands and spirit, was surrounded by an extraordinary landscape to which he had become acclimated, physically and spiritually. In the Yucatán tropics dwelled the Maya, in the mild and generous valley the iv Latifundios are large estates or plantations in Latin America.—Eds.

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Aztec, and in the Andes the Inca. The tropics: hostile in vermin, ineradicable overgrowth, malarial illness, but generous in pulpy fruits, gigantic flowers, and black, moist, fervently germinating earth. Such is the landscape of the Mayan Indian. The high Andes: yellowish brown, arid, frigid, swept by harsh and ceaselessly howling winds, the tropical yungas on the slopes of the Andes where pineapple and banana grow within sight of snowcapped peaks—the abysmal Andes, overwhelming, immense, that penetrated the Indian spirit so deeply. All the toponymy of the Andean landscape is indigenous. Such is the landscape of the Inca. It does not seem strange, then, that this indigenous American Man, consummate pantheist and inserted into his own stunning landscape, should have created the extraordinary art with which all of you are familiar. Then the Spanish conquistador arrives, and the first chapter of European conquest unfolds. American art succumbs and the tragedy of the American Man begins, as described by Ricardo Rojas, master of American realities (americanidad).vi The Spaniard arrives, and to the extent that he subjugates the Indian—sword and cross in hand—he destroys the aesthetic order of vernacular indigenous art. In the sixteenth century there are almost no examples of indigenous influence in colonial art. In America, cathedrals and churches are built, enormous canvases are painted, huge altarpieces are sculpted, but all are “imported” in the same way, we might say, that wheat, the guitar, the horse, and the harquebus were imported. Such, then, is the first tragedy of American art, which is conquered by European forms of expression. But if we examine the process of this artistic subjugation further, we soon notice a kind of rebellion, that is, an American reconquest of aesthetics that will have extraordinary results.

The First Creole Reconquest Despite the infamous cruelty of slavery and the death throes of indigenous cultures, Indian art survived underground in the form of a moan. It persisted through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in the eighteenth cen  Yungas are valleys on both sides of the Andean cordillera.—Eds. vi Ricardo Rojas (1882–1957) was a notable Argentine writer who produced critical

essays, poetry, and biographies. He is best known for the essay “La restauración national” (National Restoration) (1910) in the Arielist tradition of a hemispheric Latin Americanism arising in response to 1898 and critical of US neocolonialism in the Americas.—Eds.

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tury, this unheard, concentrated, choked moan grows surprisingly energetic, eager to escape, to live, to have its say in insurrectionary American art. Surely this spirit of artistic rebellion during the 1700s has a fervor identical to the spirit of social rebellion of the time, which would culminate in our independence from Spain. While Túpac Amaru caused part of America to tremble by rousing his Quechua and Aymara supporters to rebellion, the Quechua Indian José Kondori sculpted the sun and moon, indigenous flora, and his extraordinary indiatids (indiátides) on the façade of the San Lorenzo Cathedral in Potosí (figures 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3).vii In the too often ignored eighteenth century, this aesthetic rebellion was mounted against the art of the metropolis. In my work titled “The Spirit of American Emancipation in Two Creole Artists,” which I read on this same honorable platform in 1931, I examined the origins of this process. I demonstrated how elements of indigenous flora and fauna displaced the European Baroque unities of decoration. The sun, the moon, and the sidereal conception of the Incan cosmos are introduced heretically onto the façades of Catholic churches. Indiatids replace European caryatids, and Indian pathos flourishes on the ornate façades of the 1700s. This aesthetic rebellion is not satisfied with invading only the areas of ancient Tahuantinsuyu or legendary Anahuac. It reacts against Spain itself. For example, the Sacristy of the Carthusian monastery in Granada, Spain (1730– 60), is constructed in the purest Mexican mestizo style. (Mexico’s influence on Spain—this said in parentheses—is newly present in the undeniable impact of Rivera’s and Orozco’s social paintings, murals, and posters on convii Indiátides serve the same purposes, but they are distinguished by indigenous Ameri-

can rather than European features and iconography. For Guido, aesthetic form is inextricably tied to social context: the humanoid stone columns that Kondori sculpts on the façade of San Lorenzo are seen as a symbol of—and rebellion against—the official, legal quasi enslavement of Indian communities through the mita, colonial compulsory labor laws used to justify forcing Indians to work up to thirty-six hours at a time in the silver mines of Potosí. Guido imagines Kondori’s artistic response to this epic of injustice: “Such was the scenario in Potosí—part terrible tragedy, part overwhelming opulence—when Kondori sculpted in live stone the image of the subjugated Indian, the symbolic effigy of the mita: the indiatid. Each of the two stone cornices is supported by Indian figures, as if this unyielding burden were the destiny that the white men had bequeathed the American Indian. Moreover, if the Greek caryatids represented those enslaved women prisoners whom the artist transfigured into Attic beauty in the Erechtheum [420–415 BCE, on the Acropolis of Athens—Eds.], the Quechua Kondori similarly transfigured all his bitterness at the bloody enslavement of the mita, and all his stifled impulse to rebellion, into criollo beauty” (173).—Eds.

9.1  José

Kondori, façade, Church of San Lorenzo, 1728–44. Potosí, Bolivia

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Kondori, San Lorenzo Potosí (detail)

temporary painters of the Spanish Republic.) The scope of this presentation prevents me from discussing in all its multiple and complex expressions this eighteenth-century Creole rebellion of Indian and mestizo artists.viii I will say simply that for the first time, after almost two centuries, art reincorporates the American landscape and the American man. This outlook, this “Weltanschauung” of the eighteenth-century American man, achieved its own authentic aesthetic expression and apotheosis in art. It is no exaggeration to say that I am passionate about this first American reconquest of the arts from European domination. Its mestizo climate provided an admirable harvest of major and minor works in the plastic arts and music, but it did not last beyond the beginning of the nineteenth century. Only in popular culture and at great distances from the large cities, as we have extensively demonstrated on other occasions, did this splendid American aesthetic order persist. But in the cities viii Here, Creole (criollo) is extended beyond the limits of Spanish ethnicity (see note

ii) to comprise all American-born individuals.—Eds.

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with an energetic European cosmopolitanism, official art, as we will see, categorically rejected marvelous Creole forms of expression and thus begins what I call “the second European conquest of the arts in America.” Let us examine this moment with care, because it is crucial for the artists of our own time.

The Second European Conquest of American Art In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the spiritual breadth of our political struggle occupied too much space in the life of the American man to permit him the peace necessary for the gestation of historically significant art. An energetic assimilation of European culture was doubtless necessary to our economic and political progress. Hegel, the author of the monumental Philosophy of History, described that time (1820) with the following words: “America is no more than the echo of the Old World,” reinforcing his comments with a concept useful to remember today. “Its life is the reflection of a foreign life.” ix In the realm of the arts, populous and cultured places saw a lapse into classical imitation, a useless and anemic pseudoclassicism. In architecture, Vitruvian classicism, neo-Herreranism, Italianism, and the like were poorly executed because they were incorporated into the neoclassical style, which was at its height in Europe at the time. Architects of official renown such as Tresguerras in Mexico, who is erroneously admired by some historians, broke with vernacular art (the only authentically American art) by means of ix Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York:

Wiley, 1944), 87. The lectures that constitute this book were first delivered in 1822– 23, again in 1824–25, and then in 1831, the year of Hegel’s death. Guido’s quotations come from Hegel’s introduction and appear in the following context (to cite Sibree’s translation): “It is for America to abandon the ground on which hitherto the History of the World has developed itself. What has taken place in the New World up to the present time is only an echo of the Old World—the expression of a foreign Life; and as the Land of the Future, it has no interest for us here, for . . . our concern must be with that which has been and that which is” (87).—Eds.  Juan de Herrera (1530–97) was the architect and principal designer of the monumental Escorial palace for King Philip II of Spain, a structure of the sober Baroque. Herrera’s design for the Valladolid Cathedral became the model of the cathedrals of Mexico and Lima. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (first century BCE), a Roman architect, is the author of the celebrated treatise De architectura (On Architecture).—Eds.

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a pompous, academic, orthopedic classicism. The neoclassicism of the first decades of the nineteenth century was a derivative caricature of the authentic greatness of European classicism. At this point, we should note a significant fact about American art. As long as Europe is classical (Renaissance, Plateresque, Herrerian, neoclassical), America limits itself to aping European art, whereas during the Baroque period of the seventeenth century, and even more during the Ultrabaroque period of the eighteenth (a time of aesthetic liberty and open conspiracy against the classical order), American art achieves its most beautiful forms of self-expression, and is liberated from European hegemony. The necessary process of incorporating European culture was intensified during the last decades of the nineteenth century by cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism clearly engendered a climate highly conducive to inauthenticity in American art, but I say this without reproach because, despite of the spectacle of American life unable to express itself in its own voice, circumscribed by its counterfeit spirit, an extraordinary mental and spiritual agility was nonetheless achieved—a kind of constant watchfulness for a better rendering of an integrated European life. Of course, there were authentic American voices such as our Argentine poem Martín Fierro by José Hernández (1872),xi and the engravings of the Mexican José Guadalupe Posada,xii but the lack of recognition by their own contemporaries suggests that the average outlook of the late nineteenth-century American man was oriented more toward Europe than toward America. Unfortunately, this Eurocentric climate has survived almost to the present day. In 1929, Ortega y Gasset was not afraid to classify us as (perhaps rather cruelly) trading posts. In this ambit, the artistic products from such outposts of empire do not know how to express themselves in their own voice. They require a borrowed voice to articulate their message; they make use of foreign honey to sweeten their own flavorless pot. Such borrowing does not xi The long gaucho poem Martín Fierro, by the politician and journalist José Hernán-

dez (1834–86), is a social-protest poem exposing the neglect of the countryside by Argentine central government and metropolitan culture. It is frequently named the greatest Latin American poem of the nineteenth century.—Eds. xii The Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada (1851–1913) was influential in the development of twentieth-century Mexican art. He is best known for grotesque and macabre engravings and illustrations in the popular press that depict calaveras, or death skulls, in the Mexican tradition of Day of the Dead celebrations.—Eds.

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mitigate the artistic fraud, a fraud, I repeat, so habitual that it has become acceptable to us, reasonable, almost logical. Thus I complete my outline of the second European conquest of American art, a process that has continued almost to the present. Despite the disconsolate tone of certain prophecies about our American future, we must carefully attend to the tone of recent European art, and also to the representation of this painful American moment by the young generation of Latin American artists who feel viscerally what Ricardo Rojas has called the present tragedy of the American man.

Modern European Art You are all familiar with the process that has been called the dehumanization of art.xiii The turn of the twentieth century was a crucial time in European art. For approximately four hundred years, beginning in the Renaissance, the aesthetic climate in Europe was more or less classical. According to the inflections of its historical-artistic arc, the revolt against classicism was merely a local revolution, as evidenced by the Baroque and Ultrabaroque during the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth, and later by Romanticism, from 1815 to 1840. The ups and downs of classical art in the four centuries just mentioned were not extreme. Beneath Baroque proliferation and ostentatious ornamentation, classical order lies hidden; Ingres and Delacroix lived during the Romantic period. It is precisely at the beginning of the twentieth century that a risky and audacious process is initiated. After four centuries, the lesson of Athens’s Acropolis reaches the end of its immense artistic hegemony. Since the days of the monks of Cluny and the initiated priests of the Gothic cathedrals, to whom the Parthenon suggested wickedness and heresy, such a nihilistic and iconoclastic attitude as that of the young European generation of artists had not been seen. Their iconoclasm was accompanied by an undisguised retreat from individualism in the arts and, instead, an homage to a populist, collectivist renaissance. This collectivist renaissance reached across a night of four hundred years, back to the time before the Renaissance discovered the xiii See José Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays in Art, Cul-

ture, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968). In the title essay Ortega discusses abstraction in modern art; Guido alludes here to the absence of human figures in this art.—Eds.

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individual, as Burckhardt said so correctly. Yet until 1900, this individualizing mode predominated in the arts. History, however, teaches us that classicism and individualism in the arts are invariably thrown out of the window when they confront the great force of spirit. The monks of the Gothic cathedrals took no notice of the Parthenon because their religious faith, supported by scholasticism and heightened by mysticism, abundantly filled the vacuum left by the default of classicism. The Counter-Reformation of the seventeenth century, which contributed by favoring the Baroque and conspiring against classicism, was mystical and energetically spiritual. Even Romanticism, which intended to rehabilitate the Gothic (in eminent figures like Viollet-le-Duc xiv), was imbued with immeasurable spirit and vigorous religiosity. In the case of present-day Europe, what hidden religious feeling will fill today the absence left by this new revolt against classicism? (For Dvořák as for Scheller, all art rests on religious and mystical foundations.) Is there a presentiment in Europe of a strong, historically transcendent art? Will European art find a myth capable of filling with spirit the immense void left by the failure of classicism? From Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky to Unamuno, there have been prophetic voices that signal the tragic feeling of life emerging in the new man, whose new voice will sound more like the lamentation and pain of Golgotha than Olympian and Hellenic serenity. Does such a myth of singular greatness, capable of galvanizing an entire aesthetic movement, exist in Europe today? Let us examine more closely the ideas of contemporary art. Perhaps in them we will find the answer to this pressing question about the New Art.

The Rehumanization of the Arts The process of dehumanization or deanthropomorphization or dehellenization of art had various ramifications. On the one hand, it involved an unswerving tendency toward introspection. In this egocentric adventure, an attempt was made to create an almost separate life, derealized, disconnected from the flow of the everyday—in other words, a life manufactured in images, like an homage to the liberty consummated by the rupture of relations with classicism. Picasso, Proust, Kaiser, Joyce, and so many others discovered unxiv The French Gothic revival architect Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–

79).—Eds.

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known strata in our own spiritual intimacy. They were the great conjurers of foreshortened life, the life that avoided itself, that found narcissistic fulfillment in ecstasy, admiring itself in a supercivilized, supercultured art. Another group of European artists with dissimilar ideas stated the problem of the New Art in another way. Followers of Darwinism and positivism in philosophy, they were convinced that they were living in the ambience of “homo economicus.” With a distinct, almost religious fervor, they believed in historical materialism and Marxism. Confronted with the void left by the overthrow of classicism, they hastened to fill it with a sort of economic mysticism of an aesthetic nature, if one may put it that way. This group created mechanism and functionalism in the arts. Champions like Le Corbusier and Gropius proclaimed that imagination in the arts was ridiculous, an absurdity of the spirit. Convinced that contemporary man is “homo economicus,” they promptly launched the machine as the myth of the New Art. Yet at this very moment, the spiritual and aesthetic scenario that I have described seems to be undergoing energetic changes. Already the watchword can be heard: rehumanization of art. Those sybaritic voices, narcissistic and in love with themselves, begin to sound in the void. The tendency toward introspection seems to have been arrested. The artist who lived to hear himself, shut in by the four walls of his self, begins to hear the clamor from the street. In the end, pure art is absurd. Art for art’s sake is driven back into the small pockets of aristocratic minorities and fatally devalued. The fate of the other aesthetic current does not seem to be any less dramatic. Historical materialism begins to be scientifically disproved. Functionalism, founded on the techno-genetic theory of art, historical materialism, and Marxism, begins to be discredited by its own creators. Frank Lloyd Wright, the forefather of mechanism in architecture, who twenty years before Le Corbusier, in 1903, gave his memorable speech in defense of the machine, today is embarking on a theory of architecture “born of the ground,” a return to nature that amounts to a repudiation of mechanism. What is more, there is something really sensational in the following confession by Walter Gropius. Listen to him: “Despite the strong emphasis on technical and economic questions, I do not want to finish my lecture without stressing the spiritual part of architecture. Architecture does not content itself with simply satisfying material needs; it is necessary, above all, to look toward the needs of a higher order, those of the spirit.” He concludes by saying, “To see economy as the only purpose is a great danger, especially understood as we do today. The crisis that the civilized world is suffering is

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perhaps none other than the revenge of the enchained spirit” (Lecture given by Walter Gropius in the Residence of the Students of Madrid, 1931). As you can see, the spirit, the imagination—guilty of being deeply bourgeois according to the most passionate disciples of mechanism—are again admired, and by the very creator of functionalism. To summarize what is readily perceived: European art is undergoing a critical moment of total renovation. Put another way, the new art exists more in a climate of expectancy—of birth anxiety—than a comfortable rehabilitation of defeated values. It is not necessary to possess a highly developed historical instinct to appreciate that the modern art on view in exhibitions today is an art of transition. It is “bridge art” toward a vigorous new aesthetic movement with a keen historical sense. This climate of genesis, of birth fervor, of primordialism, as Keyserling would say, requires, as a fundamental element of the new artist’s worldview, a landscape that is undiscovered. In culture, a discovered landscape is that which has been deeply incorporated into the social, spiritual, and artistic evolution of a people. An undiscovered landscape is that which has not yet been painted or sung in its own idiom. In recent years the demand for virgin landscape is evident in European art: “Gauguinism,” African colonialism, Negro art, the jungle paganism of Lawrence, the novelist-tourists, urbanism. It appears superficially in “tourism,” caricature, and “nudism.” I beg your indulgence for this roundabout way of exposing the tone of the New Art and reaching a major question: What are America’s relations with Europe at this crucial moment for Western art? Are we witnessing the emergence of a great hope emerging for a second reconquest of American art over European art?

The Second American Reconquest in the Arts In this crucial time of the rehumanization of art, European man appears to be reduced in spirits. He seems more disposed to a comfortable and nontranscendental art than to the adventure of the New Art. In this regard, one notices a surprising indecisiveness, unknown in European history. While eminent thinkers (Berdiaef, for example) believe that we have crossed the threshold of a neo-medieval historical moment—one remembers the great admiration of the Middle Ages of recent years—others, no less eminent, announce the birth of a sort of neohumanism or neoclassicism. But these tendencies are so obstinately antagonistic that not even the most unorthodox understanding allows for their reconciliation. Similarly, other thinkers (Mas-

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sis and Maritain, for example) argue that a transcendental neo-Christianism will save Europe, while still others (Lawrence, for example) believe the exact contrary, that a revitalized, updated paganism will save Europe. In addition, there are the worlds of those converted to historical materialism and those unconverted—the furious Marxists and the no less agitated anti-Marxists. Clearly, the myth that the New Art needs to proclaim its authenticity is slipping through the fingers of contemporary European Man, or jumping from the left hand to the right with disconcerting facility. This is dangerous for aesthetic creation, because weakened faith is fatal to what we call the adventure of New Art. Something else, something fundamental, also conspires against the greatness of this adventure: the European landscape is a “discovered” landscape, worn and sullied by tourism and overpopulation. European man and his landscape suffer from something like oversaturated civilization, which is very useful for some aspects of human life but fatal for the New Art, which requires a climate of primitivism and primordialism, a virginity propitious for birth. In this Robinsonian conquest, as Ortega y Gasset would say, America is better endowed than Europe. In their particular primitivisms, the tropics, highlands, pampas, and the Andes possess a rare greatness. Any landscape acquires not only the physiognomy of the meteorological phenomena imprinted on it but also the humanization of the man who lives in it. In areas colonized by Europe, the tropical African will never acquire the visceral, hidden feeling that the indigenous American possesses, and that is fundamental to art. The European, to his chagrin, lives as a nomad in his colonies, whether he is an educated man or a laborer. Neither will he acquire this profound telluric sensibility. The man of the American tropics is rooted in his land, and the history of his dense forests, immense coffee plantations and soil burnt by a merciless sun, permeates the nation’s history. Likewise, the frigid highlands, beaten by harsh winds, permeate the Andean man. And our pampas, generous in the breadth of their infinitude, are also undiscovered. We know only that they have defined the Creole sensibility by means of folk songs that have invaded the cities, but a historically significant art has yet to be created in their honor. In view of this spectacular landscape and its relation to the American man, is it not an auspicious moment to achieve the second reconquest of which I have spoken? Cannot the following be counted among the milestones— albeit still indistinct—of this second reconquest: the populist painting of the young Mexican muralists, the giant skyscrapers of North America, Don

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Segundo Sombra by our Ricardo Güiraldes (1926), La vorágine by the Colombian Eustasio Rivera (1924), Doña Bárbara by the Venezuelan Rómulo Gallegos (1929), the spread of Creole music, the invasion of the great metropolises by folk music? Prophesied by eminent Americanists—in our country by Ricardo Rojas—this dramatic awakening of our American authenticity beats in the hearts of young Latin American artists, who now conspire to speak of America in its own voice. All this may still be embryonic, a sketch, a glimpse, but there is such faith invested in this great hope that we are not guilty of recklessness if we affirm that today we effectively find ourselves at the beginning of the desired second reconquest of Americanness in our art. In this new affirmation of America’s relations to Europe, the intimate drama of the young generation of American artists is taking shape. The hope invested in this project is as wide as the pampas, and when true greatness is at stake, destiny never pays in the coin of ingratitude.

Editors’ Note to “The Baroque in America”   by Pedro Henríquez Ureña

Pedro Henríquez Ureña (1884–1946) was born in Santo Domingo and lived for a number of years in the United States, Cuba, and Mexico before establishing himself permanently in Argentina in 1925. His residence in Mexico City from 1906 to 1914, and again from 1921 to 1924, was crucial to the process of the recovery of New World Baroque literature. In 1909, along with the Mexican intellectuals José Vasconcelos and Alfonso Reyes, he established the Ateneo de la Juventud (Atheneum of Youth), a group that led the opposition to European models of modernization and development that had been adopted by newly independent Latin American nations over the course of the nineteenth century. In their opposition to positivism, the Ateneo de la Juventud was influential in creating an awareness of the need for alternative conceptions of modernity. Henríquez Ureña remained a lifelong friend of Reyes, and with Reyes and Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, he became a leading proponent and interpreter of New World Baroque literature. (The work of Méndez Plancarte is discussed by José Pascual Buxó in his essay in this volume, and one of Reyes’s essays on Góngora is included here.) During the first half of the twentieth century, historians of colonial Latin America looked to art and architecture, rather than literature, for their definitions of the New World Baroque. Literature had been seen as closely associated with the viceregal court and its aristocratic culture, produced by an elite group of urban intellectuals dependent on state sponsorship (Ángel ­Rama’s “lettered city”), and was thus considered “esoteric and alien” to the continent where it was produced (Picón-Salas 95). Henríquez Ureña opposed this position, arguing against the idea that colonial literature was slavishly imitative of metropolitan models. For him, the work of the seventeenthcentury Mexican poet Bernardo de Balbuena was as monumental as New

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World Baroque architecture: “His Bernardo . . . is, by its sheer magnitude, the poetic equivalent of Tepotzotlán; La grandeza mexicana [Mexican Grandeur] is the equivalent of the Sagrario Metropolitano” (BNW 201). Furthermore, Henríquez Ureña notes that the Baroque lasts much longer in Latin American than in Spain—throughout the eighteenth century and beyond— simultaneous with the Enlightenment in Europe but presenting another face altogether to its “academic classicism.” Thus he challenges the applicability of European historical categories to Latin American cultural realities, celebrating instead the intertwinings and disjunctions of the Baroque and the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Mexico, and citing a number of now largely forgotten poets who extended the Gongorist tradition of Baroque expression even into the early nineteenth century. (Gonzalo Celorio’s essay in this volume also addresses the unexpected overlappings of Baroque and Enlightenment ideas and forms of expression in viceregal Mexico.) Mexico’s “Baroque Enlightenment” eventually gave way to neoclassicism, which was unevenly adopted throughout Latin America, replacing Baroque styles and structures that were increasingly discredited over the course of the nineteenth century.

Bibliography By the Author

Henríquez Ureña, Pedro. “Barroco en América.” 1940. In La utopía de América, ed. Ángel Rama and Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1978. 116–19.

Additional Readings

Méndez Plancarte, Alfonso. Poetas novohispanas: Segundo siglo (1621–1721). Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1944. Picón-Salas, Mariano. From Conquest to Independence: A Cultural History of Spanish America. Trans. Irving A. Leonard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962. Rama, Ángel. The Lettered City. Trans. John Charles Chasteen. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996. Reyes, Alfonso. Letras de la Nueva España. 1948. In Obras completas, vol. 12. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1960. Salgado, César Augusto. “Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory.” Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (1999): 316–31.

  Chapter Ten  

The Baroque in America Pedro Henríquez Ureña

Translated by Rose Dutra

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Editors’ Note to “Baroque Curiosity,”   from La expresión americana by José Lezama Lima

The Cuban poet, novelist, and essayist José Lezama Lima (1910–76), together with his compatriot and contemporary Alejo Carpentier, popularized the notion of a transhistorical Latin American Baroque that extends from pre-Columbian cultures to contemporary arts and literatures. As Irlemar Chiampi points out in her essay in this collection, Lezama participates in two successive but distinct stages of the twentieth-century revalidation of the Baroque. The first stage is his modernist avant-garde poetry; Lezama profited from the post-1927 revival of Luis de Góngora’s poetry by crafting his own hermetic Neobaroque poetics in Muerte de Narciso (Death of Narcissus, 1937) and Enemigo rumor (Hostile Murmur, 1941). The Baroque character of Lezama’s early poetry is limited to aesthetic experimentation, though formal complexity remains a hallmark of his prose as well. Lezama’s most important work of fiction, Paradiso (1966), is a monument of Baroque prose—opulent, involved, extravagant, difficult—as is the prose of the essays collected in La expresión americana (1957), one of which follows. The second stage of Lezama’s engagement of the Baroque unfolds in these essays, where he addresses the cultural and ideological dimensions of the Baroque. Independently but in close parallel with Carpentier, Lezama elaborates a conception of an American Baroque that links indigenous and colonial forms to the postcolonial present. The second of the five essays in La expresión americana, “Baroque Curiosity,” is the intellectual core of this farranging historical discussion. Lezama explicitly rejects Werner Weisbach’s limited definition of the Baroque as the art of the Counter-Reformation (contrareformista), substituting his own formulation: the Baroque as the art of contraconquista (counterconquest)—that is, the art of colonized subjects

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who appropriate and modify European forms to represent their own distinct cultural identities. Lezama’s sources were Latin American art and architectural histories of the 1930s and ’40s—in particular the Argentine art historian Ángel Guido’s study, Redescubrimiento de América en el arte (Rediscovery of America in the Arts), from which we have included an essay in this volume, published in 1940. With the exception of isolated critics such as Ester Gimbernat de González, commentators have largely ignored Lezama’s debt to Guido, but it is beyond doubt. He echoes Guido’s early appreciation of the cultural mestizaje that characterizes the New World Baroque, restating almost literally Guido’s analysis of two virtuosi of the eighteenth-century New World Baroque, both architects and sculptors, the Bolivian José Kondori and the Brazilian Antônio Francisco Lisboa (known as Aleijadinho). Lezama clearly reflects Guido’s understanding of the New World Baroque as the art of “reconquest” of America by American-born colonial subjects. “Baroque Curiosity” proposes a theory of culture that is also a theory of history. According to Lezama, cultures take shape as a result of the infinite image (creative power as such), which realizes itself in finite history through “metaphorical subjects” (poets and artists) who are capable of mediating differences—in the American case, the differences among indigenous, European, and African forms of expression. A culture’s specific “image” is created by means of appropriation, transformation, and reorganization, a process of poetic recycling that Lezama describes as “plutonism”—“an originary fire that breaks the fragments and unifies them” (BNW 213). Pluto, god of the underworld, represents the artist’s infernal task—the destruction of established formations and the forging of fragments into new cultural wholes. Latin America’s “metaphorical subjects” appear in the seventeenth century. Lezama embodies them as an archetypal señor barroco—the first who feels himself to be an American and to enjoy America’s spiritual and material wealth. El señor barroco is modeled on the criollo landowning class (of European descent born in the New World), but his persona also embraces criollo poets and intellectuals (Lezama’s examples are Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora) and Indian, mestizo, and mulatto artists (such as Kondori and Aleijadinho). These “metaphorical subjects” are positioned to create cultural correspondences across class and race divides, and they are also individualized authors; a culture’s “image” is an overarching historical process created and signed by particular artists. Carpentier brings Lezama’s señor barroco to life in his 1974 novel Concierto barroco, but he refrains from subscribing to Lezama’s strong sense of the individual author-creator. Car-

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pentier’s character is never named but is referred to throughout the novel as el amo, the master. Lezama’s theory of history envisions a succession of so-called imaginative eras—periods in which cultures are consolidated by the authentic expression of the poetic image. Absorbing influences that cannot be traced with any precision, Lezama himself demonstrates his theory of plutonism, drawing on an eclectic selection of sources including Romantic and symbolist traditions, philosophers of history such as Giambattista Vico, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Oswald Spengler, and on his own Catholic beliefs. Irlemar Chiampi observes in her essay in this collection that for Lezama, Latin America constitutes one such “imaginary era in which the Baroque becomes the shaping paradigm and authentic beginning of a truly American reality” (BNW 512).

Bibliography By the Author

Lezama Lima, José. “La curiosidad barroca.” 1957. In La expresión americana, ed. Irlemar Chiampi. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993. 79–106. ———. Las eras imaginarias. Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1971. ———. “Image of Latin America.” 1972. Trans. Mary G. Berg. In Latin America in Its Literature, ed. César Fernández Moreno, Julio Ortega, and Ivan A. Schulman. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980. 321–27. ———. “Summa Critica of American Culture.” Trans. Mark Schafer. In The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays, ed. Ilan Stavans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. 244–59.

Additional Readings

Bejel, Emilio. José Lezama Lima: Poet of the Image. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1990. Gimbernat de González, Ester. “La curiosidad barroca.” In Coloquio internacional sobre la obra de José Lezama Lima. Vol. 2. Poitiers: Centro de Investigaciones Latinoamericanas, Université de Poitiers, 1984. 59–64. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. “The Strut of the Centipede: José Lezama Lima and New World Exceptionalism.” In Do the Americas Have a Common Literature?, ed. Pérez Firmat. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990. 316–32. Weisbach, Werner. Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation. Berlin: P. Cassirer, 1921.

  Chapter Eleven  

Baroque Curiosity

Chapter 2 from La expresión americana José Lezama Lima

Translated by María Pérez and Anke Birkenmaier

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11.1  Anon., The

Holy Child’s First Steps, seventeenth century. Museum and Monastery of Santa Catalina, Cuzco, Peru

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workshop of Basilio de Santa Cruz Pumacallao, attr., Return of the Corpus Christi Procession to the Cathedral, ca. 1674–80. Arzobispado del Cusco, Peru. Photograph: Daniel Giannoni

11.2  The

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11.3  Lorenzo

Rodríguez, Sagrario Metropolitano, 1749–68. Mexico City

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11.4  Narciso

de Tomé, El Transparente (high altar), 1721–32. Cathedral of Toledo, Spain. Photograph: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York

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11.5  Cathedral

of Puebla, Mexico, North Portal, 1575–1768. Photograph: Scott Sebastian

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of Havana, Cuba, 1748–77. Photograph: Bruce Buck

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11.7  Aleijadinho

(Antônio Francisco Lisboa), Church of São Francisco de Assis, 1766–94. Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil

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11.8  Aleijadinho

(Antônio Francisco Lisboa), Pilgrim Church of Bom Jesús do Matosinhos, 1758–1805, Congonhas do Campo, Brazil. Visual Resources Collection, CAUP (Norman Johnston original) © University of Washington

11.9  Aleijadinho

(Antônio Francisco Lisboa), “Daniel,” 1800–1805. Pilgrim Church of Bom Jesús do Matosinhos, Congonhas do Campo, Brazil

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Editors’ Note to “The City of Columns” and   “Questions Concerning the Contemporary Latin   American Novel,” Excerpt, by Alejo Carpentier

The Cuban novelist and cultural historian Alejo Carpentier (1904–80) asserts that contemporary Latin American literature belongs to the tradition of Baroque representation in the Americas. His collection of essays Tientos y diferencias (Theme and Variations, 1964), from which the following texts are taken, is a landmark statement of New World Baroque aesthetics and ideology. Working with a fluid conception of culture, Carpentier borrows freely from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, philosophy, music, urban planning, and architecture, as well as literature and the plastic arts. He follows Ángel Guido, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, and José Lezama Lima in his understanding of the New World Baroque as a rebellious rearticulation of metropolitan forms. America’s transculturated Baroque contests Europe’s imperial ideologies and transforms colonized peoples into resistant political subjects. The historical Baroque, imposed “from above,” was revised “from below” during three centuries of colonial rule and continues to serve a decolonizing (postcolonial) function in Latin America. The first essay included here, “The City of Columns,” is Carpentier’s homage to the Cuban Baroque in general, and the urban Baroque of Havana in particular. He contrasts the Caribbean to mainland Latin America where, especially in Mexico and the Andean highlands, indigenous traditions combined with European models to produce great monuments of colonial Baroque architecture. These monuments were located in densely populated areas and formed part of a campaign to Christianize Indian populations. In contrast, Caribbean indigenous populations were quickly exterminated by invading Europeans. Nonetheless, Carpentier insists that the Caribbean is also Baroque: “The Baroque spirit, legitimately Antillean, mestizo, forged by processes of transculturation in these islands of the American Mediter-

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ranean, is translated into an irreverent and offbeat replay of classical forms” (BNW 257). The key concept is mestizaje: Carpentier links the New World Baroque to the sociohistory of racial and cultural mixing in the Americas. The convergence of African, European, and American cultures makes the Cuban Baroque, in Carpentier’s words, a “superimposition of styles . . . a style without a style that in the long run, through a process of symbiosis and amalgamation, became a peculiar kind of Baroque that functioned as style and inscribed itself in the history of urban behavior” (BNW 246). In “The City of Columns,” this historical process of accumulation and accommodation is exemplified by the proliferating columns of Havana and several other architectural elements, all of which suggest that the originality of the New World Baroque is not original in any usual sense but rather originative, generative, transformative, growing out of cultural collisions, permutations, and creative recyclings. The second text by Carpentier is the penultimate section of his essay, “Questions Concerning the Contemporary Latin American Novel,” where he argues that the realism of Baroque prose—its abundance of detail, it richness of texture and color, its weight and size, its (dis)proportion—is necessary to represent untold New World landscapes, cultures, and experiences. Here Carpentier also develops his conception of the Baroque as a timeless, ahistorical (or transhistorical) “type,” a human spirit that manifests itself in all cultures and periods. This idea would seem to contradict his emphasis on the historical development of a specifically Latin American style, but, in fact, the two arguments are complementary in their intention to affirm the transcultural continuity of the New World Baroque. Adapting Eugenio d’Ors’s theory (see d’Ors’s essay in this volume), Carpentier claims that Latin American “art has always been Baroque, from our splendid pre-Columbian sculpture and our códices, to our best contemporary novels, passing through our continent’s colonial cathedrals and monasteries” (BNW 262). Carpentier’s theories have come under fire for several reasons. First, for the reason mentioned above: Carpentier dehistoricizes the Baroque at the same time that he makes it an essential expression of Latin American history. Second, if the New World Baroque is an amalgam, a mixture of styles, then it cannot be an Adamic act of naming, but rather must constitute an act of renaming (González Echevarría 223–34). Third, Carpentier ignores the idea, begun with Heinrich Wölfflin and continued through Oswald Spengler and d’Ors, that the Baroque alternates with classical types, and indeed, defines

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itself against classical types (Pauly 44; Chao 51). For Carpentier, classicism (like virtually everything else) is subsumed into the Baroque, and thus into a dynamic relational mode of being and becoming. In his essay from 1975 titled “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” Carpentier clarifies and generalizes his position of 1964; the Baroque remains a privileged Latin American expressive style, but it is also a larger “creative impulse” that “arises where there is transformation, mutation, or innovation” (90, 98). Beyond Carpentier’s desire to universalize his understanding of the New World Baroque, this later essay seems intended as a response to Severo Sarduy’s poststructuralist analyses of the Neobaroque, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque” and Barroco, published in 1972 and 1974, respectively. (The former is included here in its entirety, and from the latter, chapter 3, “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler.”) Carpentier does not mention Sarduy explicitly, but his reaffirmation of the New World Baroque as a (postcolonial) realism was probably motivated in part by Sarduy’s antirealist theory of the Neobaroque.

Bibliography By the Author

Carpentier, Alejo. “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real.” Trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora. In Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Wendy B. Faris. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. 89–108. ———. “La ciudad de las columnas.” In Tientos y diferencias, 1964. in Obras completas, vol. 13, Ensayos. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1990. 61–73. ———. “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana.” In Tientos y diferencias, 1964, in Obras completas, vol. 13, Ensayos. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1990. 11–44; 37–41 translated here.

Additional Readings

Chao, Ramón. Palabras en el tiempo de Alejo Carpentier. Barcelona: Editorial Argos Vergara, 1984. González Echevarría, Roberto. Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. Márquez Rodriguez, Alexis. Lo barroco y lo real-maravilloso en la obra de Alejo Carpentier. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1982. Pauly, Arabella. “Das barocke Amerika.” In Neobarroco: Zur Wesensbestimmung Lateinamerikas und seiner Literatur. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993. 45–115. Wakefield, Steve. Carpentier’s Baroque Fiction: Returning Medusa’s Gaze. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2004.

  Chapter Twelve  

The City of Columns Alejo Carpentier

Translated by Michael Schuessler

1 “The view of Havana when seen from the harbor,” wrote Alexander von Humboldt at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is one of the most pleasant and picturesque sights on the equinoctial coastline north of the equator. This city, celebrated by travelers from all nations, lacks the luxuriant growth of the banks of the Guayaquil River or the savage majesty of the rocky coasts of Rio de Janeiro, both ports in the southern hemisphere. But Havana has a poise that, in our climes, beautifies the landscape of cultured nature. Here the majesty of vegetal forms is mixed with the organic vigor that characterizes the Torrid Zone. When beckoned by such charming impressions, the European visitor forgets the danger lurking in the heart of the populous cities of the Antilles. He attempts to understand the diverse elements of a vast landscape, contemplating the fortresses crowning the rocks east of Havana harbor (an interior lake) surrounded by villages, haciendas, and palm trees rising to prodigious heights; this city, half hidden by a jungle of masts and ships’ sails.

However, two pages later, when referring to the Calle de los Mercaderes (Street of the Merchants), Goethe’s friend adds: “Here, as in Europe’s most ancient cities, only very slowly is one able to correct the poor layout of the streets.” Urbanism, urbanizers, urbanization. We recall the forms of the word urban, This text was written to accompany an album of one hundred twenty photographs by Paolo Gasparini of an array of stylistic motifs in Cuban architecture. The essay was included in Carpentier’s volume of essays, Tientos y diferencias, first published in 1964.  —Trans.

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printed in boldface in the now classic articles that Le Corbusier published in the pages of Esprit Nouveau more than forty years ago. Since then, so much has been said about cities that we have come to believe that an urban vision, or at least an urban instinct, had never before existed. In his epoch, Humboldt complained about the poor layout of Havana’s streets. But today one asks oneself if that layout did not conceal a great wisdom, apparently dictated by primordial necessity—the tropical necessity of playing hide-andseek with the sun, snatching surfaces, extricating shadows, fleeing from the torrid twilight with an ingenious multiplication of esquinas de fraile that are still in great demand even today in old Havana, itself intramuros until the beginning of the century. There was also a lot of embadurno ii—dark saffron, sepia blue, light chestnuts, olive greens—until the beginning of this century, but since such embadurnos have remained only in provincial towns, we now realize that it was a type of brise soleil,iii a neutralizer of reverberations, as were, for so long, the medios puntos,iv which are again found as defining artistic constants in the work of the painters Amelia Peláez or René Portocarrero. The streets of Havana that Humboldt saw might have been poorly designed, but those that remain give a sense of peace and coolness that would be difficult to find where methodical urbanists exercised their science. The old city, long ago referred to as intramuros, is a city of shadows, designed for the exploitation of shade. It embodies shadow itself when considered in contrast to all that began to germinate and grow around it to the west at the beginning of the century. There, the superimposition of styles, the innovation of styles good and bad, more bad than good, created for Havana a  According to the Diccionario del español de Cuba, edited by Günther Haensch and

Reinhold Werner (Madrid: Gredos, 2000), an esquina de fraile (literally, “friar’s corner”) is defined as, “On a street, the corner through which a narrow wind blows.” This situation was exploited in Cuba by the architecture itself, which was designed in such a way as to encourage breezy passages, in a constant search for what Carpentier calls a “cool spot.”—Trans. ii Embadurno: both a technique and a material for painting buildings, probably imported from the Mediterranean, where the paint is applied in thick layers of plaster, creating a rustic effect much imitated in the American Southwest.—Trans. iii Brise soleil, literally, “sun break”: usually installed in the lower part of the window to protect the room from direct sunlight at eye level—hence its name. Below, Carpentier distinguishes this Cuban architectural element from the brise soleil designed by the French architect Le Corbusier, which is normally made of cement.—Trans. iv In architectonic terms, the medio punto is a half arch. The Cuban half arch is a colorful semicircular stained-glass window often found at the top of a window or a door in fine Cuban homes.

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style without a style that in the long run, through a process of symbiosis and amalgamation, became a peculiar kind of Baroque that functioned as a style and inscribed itself in the history of urban behavior. Because, little by little, out of the variegated and interwoven forms that had been inserted into different realities, certain visual constants began to emerge, thus distinguishing Havana from cities on the continent.

2 First came the mason, the man of the plumb line and mortar, whose early passage to the New World is documented in the registry of the Passengers to the Indies from the House of Commerce of Seville. (Six masons arrived on the island of Hispaniola before the colonization of Cuba had even begun.) Leaving aside the legendary Havana before Havana, which a handful of colonizers raised on the banks of the Almendares River, we must seek the true generating nucleus of the city in the humble and gracious vestiges found on one of the patios of the ancient convent of Santa Clara, close to the harbor’s classic taverns of ill repute. The convent is dominated by a small market, a public bathhouse, and a municipal fountain, but despite its modesty, it offers an evident nobility of workmanship. All of this was the work of masons, like the more ambitious “Sailor’s House” that may still be distinguished at a slight distance from what was at one time an agora among mangroves, a plaza in the underbrush. When revealed to the public during the days of our adolescence, after a long reclusion imposed by the enveloping growth of a Clarissan convent, it still bore a weathered sign identifying it as the “House of Bread.” It is not our intention—and this should be mentioned early on—to provide a historical outline of Cuban architecture, a project that would require a scholarly apparatus, but rather to take the reader by the hand through some of the constants that have contributed to the expression of an original, unmistakable style, to lead the reader through Havana, a city apparently without a style (if we stick to academic notions of style), looking at elements that may be considered specifically Cuban in all that the island encompasses. In the beginning was the mason, but houses began to grow and large mansions completed the layout of plazas, and the column—no longer the conquistadors’ gallows—appeared in the city. But it was an interior column, born elegantly in shadowy patios, garnished with vegetation, where the trunk of the palm tree coexisted with the Doric shaft; consider the image of the haughty

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patio of the San Francisco monastery as an eloquent illustration. At the outset, in houses with a solid layout (a bit rough in their exteriors), like the one in front of Havana’s cathedral, the column resembled an object of intimate refinement, destined to uphold the arcades of interior porticoes. Except for the cathedral’s plaza, the Plaza Vieja where buildings devoted to the island’s administration were erected, this was logical in a city whose streets were intentionally narrow; narrowness is a propitiator of shadows, where neither twilight nor dawn blinds the pedestrian with direct sunlight. Thus, in many of Havana’s old palaces, in a few affluent mansions that have still preserved their original layout, the column is an element of interior decoration, luxury, and ornamentation. This was before the nineteenth century, when the column moved to the street, thus creating—even in days of evident architectonic decadence—one of the most extraordinary constants of the Havana style: the incredible profusion of columns in a city that is an emporium of columns, a jungle of columns, an infinite colonnade, the last city to possess columns in such amazing excess, columns that, moreover, having abandoned original patios, began to retrace the column’s decadence through the ages (figure 12.1). It is unnecessary to recall here that, in Havana, a pedestrian could leave the perimeter of the harbor’s fortresses and walk to the city’s outskirts by crossing through the center of town, surveying the ancient avenues of Monte or De la Reina, crossing the avenues of Cerro or Jesús del Monte, following the same, constantly renovated colonnade, where all the column’s styles are represented, conjoined or hybrid ad infinitum. Half Doric half Corinthian columns, dwarf Ionic columns, cement caryatids, timid copies and decadent versions of Vignola built by any number of overseers, contributing to the extension of the city at the end of the nineteenth century. Not to mention the occasional existence of a certain modern Parisian style since the beginning of the nineteenth century, or of certain musings of Catalonian architects. And the residents of this first neighborhood who wanted to replace yesteryear’s ruined mansions with more modern buildings (there are two notable examples of this type at the corners of the ancient Plaza Vieja, almost made beautiful over the years) imitated the confectionary innovations of the “Gran Vía style” of Madrid.  Jacome Barozzio da Vignola (1507–73): author of the influential architectural treatise

titled Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura (Rules of the Five Orders of Architecture), published in Italy in 1562.—Trans.

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12.1  Columns,

Havana. Photograph: Paolo Gasparini

3 The Cuban street was always animated and garrulous, with its town criers, officious peddlers, candy sellers announced by bells bigger than the fruit stand itself, the fruit carts with their headdresses made of palm fronds like a Palm Sunday procession, the hawkers of everything known to man, all in a farcical atmosphere à la Ramón de la Cruz.vi This was before the cities themselves engendered their own Creole archetypes,vii so successful on the comic stage, as was, later on, the vast imagery—mythology—of the mulatas,

vi Ramón de la Cruz (1731–95): Spanish poet active in Madrid. He wrote more than

three hundred pieces for the stage, many of which called on the actors to improvise their actions and dialogue.—Trans. v ii According to Esteban Pichardo, the author of the classic Diccionario provincial casi razonado de vozes y frases cubanas (Provincial Dictionary of Cuban Words and Phrases), first published in 1836 and reedited on multiple occasions, criollo is defined as “par excellence a white person born in Cuba who is related to the Europeans, and the blacks born here of African parents, because they are criollos as well.” Essentially, Carpentier is referring to a style created by these new inhabitants of the island, thus distinguishing them from Cuba’s original indigenous population.—Trans.

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Baroque both in temper and build; witty Negresses and presumptuous gossips, perfectly alike, buttocks in the air, haunches protruding, flamboyantly haggling with the vegetable seller; the collier with the covered carriage in the Goyesque manner; the ice cream man who does not bring strawberry sorbet the day he has a surplus of mangos; or the vendor who raises—as if it were the holy sacrament—a prickly mast of green and red candies in exchange for bottles. And because the Cuban street is loquacious, indiscreet, nosy, the Cuban home increased its means of isolation to protect the privacy of its dwellers as much as possible. The traditional Creole house—and this is even more visible in the provinces—is an abode closed in on its own penumbra, like the Arabic Andalusian home that long preceded it. A face appears only at the nail-studded doorway after being called by an enormous knocker. Only rarely are the windows on the street open, even a crack. And to keep a greater distance from the street, incredibly lavish grilles are found everywhere in Cuban architecture. We have said that Havana is a city with more columns than any other city on the continent, and that could be an advantage. But we would also have to make an immense inventory of grilles, an inexhaustible catalogue of wrought iron, to fully define the always implicit Baroque that is present in the urban metropolis (figure 12.2). In the houses of El Vedado, Cienfuegos, Santiago, and Remedios, it is the white grille, with its profusion of metal ribbons entangled like vegetation, ensnaring figures of lyres, flowers, and vaguely Roman vases in the middle of infinite volutes that often frame the initials of the woman’s name given to the villa she ruled over, or a date or a succession of dates (frequently in El Vedado from some year in the 1870s), although on some grilles the chronology of the ironwork goes back to the first years of the French Revolution. There are also the residential grilles with their large roses, peacock tails, and interwoven arabesques, or in the prodigious butcher shops on Del Cerro Road with their enormously luxurious displays of metalwork, entanglements ensnaring themselves in search of a cool spot that, over the centuries, we had to solicit from breezes and island winds. Then there is the severe grille, hardly ornamented at all, that is inserted in the wooden façade of row house, or the one that tries to stand out with an embossed gothic engraving of impossible vases or a surprisingly Sulpician style.viii At times viii Saint-Sulpice: Parisian church originally built in the thirteenth century, whose

façade was redesigned in the mid-eighteenth century by Jean-Nicolas Servandoni, a noted Rococo artist.—Trans.

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12.2  Wrought-iron

gates, Havana. Photograph: Paolo Gasparini

the grille is accompanied by vigilant marble lions, balustrades that multiply a motif of Wagnerian swans, by sphinxes like some to be seen in Cienfuegos that combine the purest Mucha aesthetic with the 1900 Exposition,ix creating an indefinable flavor between pre-Raphaelite and Wildean. The Cuban grille might imitate the goat motif to be found on those of El Greco’s house, evoke an abode in Aranjuez, or reside in windows that imitate those of a castle on the Loire. (Nor is Cuba lacking in Moorish citadels, constructed like medieval castles of recent manufacture, and unexpected allusions to Blois or Chambord.) The peculiar thing is that the grille encompasses all the rungs on the architectonic-social scale (palace, row house, residence, tenement house, shack) without losing the charm that is so particular to it, and that may take the surprising form of a single forged volute that closes the portcullis of a door made from a meager unpainted board. In this century, when balconies began to sprout from façades (note that ix Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939): A Moravian artist and one of the most representative

practitioners of art nouveau.—Trans.

 Blois and Chambord: châteaux in the Loire Valley of France.—Trans.

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in old colonial mansions the balconies, in general, are scarce and narrow, except for those having a balustrade and a canopy made of wood), they were connected and continuous from one corner of the building to another, and there appeared the guardavecinos,xi essential elements of Cuban iron work, installed to mark the boundaries of the aerial world of the upper municipal quarters of this or that citizen. The guardavecinos was like a decorative border, placed at the edge of a house or an apartment building, repeating and multiplying the decorative material of the grilles on the street level, and rising along with it, the Baroque style of the architectonic elements already accumulating in the Creole city at street level. There on high were born new lyres, novel keystones made of sun, innovative rose motifs, thus rejuvenating the art of ironwork that was in danger of extinction with the last lampposts (in Havana there are still some very beautiful and original ones) that used to extend an arm over the arch of the main door, and whose wheel guards (guardacantones xii) were also integrated into a peculiar world, contemporaneous with metal-wheeled coaches (figure 12.3). A few guardacantones still remain in Cuban cities, greened by saltpeter, covered in iron rust, between whose decorative arabesques the revealing camera of Pablo Gasparini has discovered an unexpected world inhabited by solar signs, coarse ornamental motifs offered as stellar configurations, vague petroglyphs that add their personality while at the same time blending into the façade of the building. With the column, the grille, the guardavecinos and the guardacantón, the occasional decorative motif on the finial of a window, the lace made of wooden fretwork, the large masks, a gargoyle’s mouth in the corner of a roof, we have defined the Cuban style from the outside; now we must become acquainted with the Baroque interior.

4 In the same way that the early colonial Spanish masons tried to ensure that the cities of this “key and antechamber of the New World” had the greatest possible number of esquinas de fraile (indeed, there was once the impossible xi Guardavecinos (literally, “protection from your neighbor”): a spoked, semicircular

wrought-iron construction that makes it impossible to cross from one balcony to another.—Trans. xii Guardacantón (literally, “edge protector”): a metal plaque installed on the corners of a house to protect the façade from the metal wheels of carriages.—Trans.

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12.3  Guardacantón

(iron wheel guard), Havana. Photograph: Paolo Gasparini

idea that all intersections should be esquinas de fraile, so on more than one occasion they resorted to the artifice of the five-street intersection), the interior of the Cuban house was, over the centuries, traditionally the protector of penumbra and the invitation to breeze by means of the judicious utilization of its spaces. In the days of my childhood, there was not a house in which the “cool spot” was not perfectly located; it used to change place from spring to summer, and its confines were astutely taken advantage of by its dwellers who, in a display of intimacy, would reveal their secrets to select visitors. Moreover, the “cool spot” broke the rules of urban convention. If it was to be located in a corner of the back patio or next to the kitchen, the inhabitants did not wait long (after a customary conversation in the great hall, which was always, as if by chance, the warmest place in the house) to move chairs and settees to the spot where the nine o’clock breeze began to descend or, in certain months, the “Cojímar breeze,” which brought its breath of distant rains from above the harbor. The ensuing multiplication of mamparas was a result of this obsession with domesticating the “cool spot” (figure 12.4). If we consult the definitions included in an ordinary dictionary, the word

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12.4  Mampara

(glass door screen), Remedios, Cuba. Photograph: Bruce Buck

mampara would be defined as “a movable screen made of a wooden frame, cloth, leather, etc. . . .” In truth, this is a very different idea from the ever so important decorative and architectonic element that inserted itself in the Cuban residence centuries ago, performing a function that determined the style of the dwelling. Because the mampara—swinging half doors the height of a man, which protected privacy while allowing ventilation—was for hundreds of years the true inner door of the Creole home, thus creating a peculiar concept of domestic relations and, in general, of communal life. The classic mampara of the Cuban middle class, in the days of my adolescence, was attached by hinges to the door frame; the real door never closed except during times of illness or the death of the room’s occupant, or when the winter’s northern winds were blowing. Its lower section was made of wood in residential homes (not the case in offices) and the upper section was usually adorned with two pieces of opaque glass, frequently ornamented with stencils and finished on the uppermost part with a slightly oval wooden molding whose divisions were brought together in a wooden knot resembling a pomegranate. Depending on the dweller’s taste, the stencils represented bouquets of flowers, miniature landscapes, or humorous street scenes—flir-

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tatious mulattoes, carousing seamen, a stubborn mule—or would employ geometric themes (frets, astragals, arabesques) purchased by the yard in some well-stocked shop. In houses with many children and relatives, the screen, which isolated the dwellers well enough so they could not see one another, originated the habit of conversing in shouts from one end of the house to the other to better inform the neighbor about frequent family squabbles. The problem of “incommunicability,” brought up so many times by recent novelists, did not present itself in homes with screens, with vibrating glass panes that transmitted every bit of news from the intimate shadows of the patio, with its palm trees and basil plants. In the manorial home, on the other hand, the screen was majestic and heavy. It was adorned with abundant woodcarvings inspired by plant motifs that in many cases evoked Borromini’s curlicues.xiii In the days when mamparas were still alive and expressive and made by the artisans of the day, the screen of a residential dwelling was not the same as that of a school, which sometimes exhibited a JHC or a Saint James the Apostle.xiv Different was a screen open on the lower part, where pedestrians passing by a tavern were meant to see a neighborhood lady seated, well gartered, with her legs casually exposed. By the screen’s appearance, one knew where one was, who the owners were, and what kinds of manners were expected. The screen was part of the furniture, the interior design, heraldry, and even the mansion’s ethics. It was halfway between the plants on the patio and the polychrome border between sun and shadow that was the medio punto, a fundamental element of the Cuban Baroque.

5 The Cuban medio punto is an enormous glass fan opening over an interior door, a patio, a vestibule in homes ribbed with Venetian blinds, its only illumination from the inside, like the dazzling windows of palatial structures; it is an intelligent and adaptable brise soleil, invented by the sound reasoning of Cuba’s colonial masons long before certain problems related with light

xiii Francesco Borromini (1599–1667): Italian sculptor and architect of the Baroque

period.—Trans.

xiv JHC is a Christogram: a monogram or combination of letters that forms an ab-

breviation for the name of Jesus Christ, traditionally used as a Christian symbol.  —Trans.

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puntos (fanlights), Havana. Photograph: Bruce Buck

and the penetration of light would preoccupy a famous French architect in Rio de Janeiro (figure 12.5). But it is worth mentioning that Le Corbusier’s brise soleil does not cooperate with the sun—it shatters the sun, fractures the sun, alienates the sun; in our latitudes the sun is a sumptuous presence, frequently bothersome and tyrannical, of course, but a presence that must be tolerated on a level of mutual understanding. We must try to get along with it and domesticate it as much as possible. To dialogue with the sun, we must give it the proper spectacles, sunglasses of the sort that induce it to be gentle with us. Hence the Cuban medio punto, which has been the mediator between sun and man—the Discourse on the Method vying for reciprocal intelligibility.xv If the sun was so conspicuous, so noticeable that at ten o’clock in the morning its reality was blindingly bright to the women of the house, one had to modify, to attenuate, and distribute its resplendence. One had to install an enormous glass fan in the house that would break up the brilxv The Discourse on the Method is a philosophical and mathematical treatise published

by René Descartes in 1637. Its full name is Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences.

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liant rays streaming through a too-yellow, too-golden sidereal fire, a toodeep blue, an ocean green, a mild orange, a pomegranate red, an opalescent white that provided relief from so much sun, sun, and more sun. The Cuban screens grew and put forth, as their finials, fans made of glass, and the sun understood that to penetrate old mansions—at that time new—it had to begin by going through the custom house of the medio punto. These were the duties of light. Here the sum was paid in the form of attenuation, the sun’s import tax. But the Cuban medio punto, as seen from a critical perspective, is no more than a widely divided piece of stained glass; it is not adept at the details of storytelling and in fact does not favor narration at all. Sometimes the figure of a flower insinuates itself in the half arch, a heraldic motif, a Baroque headdress. But it never achieves figurative representation. The flat construction, made of panes of glass pierced by a diminished, domesticated sun, was an abstract composition before anyone thought of systematic abstractionism. Composite triangles, entwined ribbing, the unfurling of pure colors, a hand of enormous cards, defined and shuffled in a hundred Havana homes that explain, through their simultaneously ancient and active presence, certain characteristics of contemporary Cuban painting. In the scenes those paintings represent, the light comes from inside, which is to say, from the outside. From the sun placed behind the canvas, behind the artist’s easel. Regarding the thousands of columns that modulate in the area of Havana (modulate: to create modules and determine measures), we detect a singular expression of the American Baroque in their extraordinary proliferation. Cuba is not Baroque like Mexico City, Quito, or Lima. Havana is closer, architecturally, to Segovia and Cádiz than to the prodigious polychromes of San Francisco Acatepec in Cholula (figure 12.6).xvi Except for one or two altars or altarpieces from the beginning of the eighteenth century, where Saint Georges peek out with their dueling dragons and are depicted with festooned doublets and half-legged boots that Louis Jouvet compared to the costumes of Racine’s heroes, Cuba did not achieve compelling Baroque

xvi In the Spanish original, Carpentier erroneously refers to this church as San Fran-

cisco “Ecatepec.” In fact, the façade he describes is that of San Francisco Acatepec, a church located in the state of Puebla, Mexico, celebrated for its lush, syncretic Baroque motifs, both exterior (polychrome tiles) and interior (decorative gesso work).—Trans.

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12.6  Church

of San Francisco Acatepec, ca. 1730. State of Puebla, Mexico. Photograph: Ichiro Ono

carvings, images, or buildings. But fortunately, Cuba was mixed blood, as were Mexico and Upper Peru, and as with all hybridity, through a process of symbiosis, addition, and admixture, it engendered a Baroque spirit. The Cuban Baroque consisted in accumulating, collecting, and multiplying columns and colonnades in such an excess of Doric and Corinthian, Ionic and composite capitals, that they ended up making the pedestrian forget that he lived among columns, that he was accompanied by columns and observed by columns that measured his stride and protected him from wind and rain, and that he was even watched over by columns in his dreams. The multiplication of columns was the result of a Baroque spirit that did not manifest itself except occasionally in spiraling Salomonic pilasters dressed in golden vines that shaded sacred niches. The Baroque spirit, legitimately Antillean, mestizo, forged by the processes of transculturation in these islands of the American Mediterranean, is translated into an irreverent and offbeat replay of classical forms that creates the illusion of orderly and tranquil cities. Nevertheless, the cyclone’s wind always threatens to ambush that order, to disrupt the order as soon as the summers, becoming Octobers, begin to

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lower their clouds over roofs and rooftops. Havana’s colonnades, escorting a marble Charles III, emblematic lions, an Indian woman reigning supreme over a fountain of Greek dolphins, bring to mind the tree trunks of imagined jungles, shafts of rostral columns, unimaginable forums, as they are referred to in Baudelaire’s verses: “Le temple où de vivants piliers / laissant entendre parfois de confuses paroles” (the temple where the living pillars / sometimes murmur vague words).xvii

xvii As pointed out by Anke Birkenmaier, Carpentier does not recall Baudelaire’s verses

with precision. The original verses of “Correspondances” are: “La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers / Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles” (Charles Baudelaire, Les fleurs du mal [Paris: Gallimard, 1975], 11). “In Nature’s temple living pillars rise, And words are murmured none have understood” (“Correspondences” is reprinted from The Poems and Prose Poems of Charles Baudelaire, ed. James Huneker [New York: Brentano’s, 1919].) I would like to thank Anke Birkenmaier of Columbia University, whose careful reading of my translation led to significant and invaluable changes to the final draft of Carpentier’s essay.—Trans.

  Chapter Thirteen  

Questions Concerning the Contemporary   Latin American Novel Excerpt

Alejo Carpentier

Translated by Michael Schuessler

On Style ​“The Kitchen at Combernon, a vast room, a large fireplace with an emblazoned hood, a long table in the middle and all the utensils, as in a painting by Brueghel.” Thus states Paul Claudel at the beginning of the first act of The Tidings Brought to Maria to set the stage. . . . “As in a painting of Breughel,” Claudel writes. This says it all. We are familiar with Breughel’s kitchens; we have them in our mind’s eye. They form part of our inherited culture, as we are familiar with the fireplace in the guard’s chamber at Blois Castle, even though we have only seen it in photographs. On the other hand, we lack a sophisticated imagery that speaks to us of what were, for centuries, the kitchens of La Paz, Bahia de Todos Santos, Chillán, Guanajuato. These kitchens have a significance that goes far beyond the picturesque: they play a complementary social role in the culinary contexts that distinguish great cultures: olives and wheat in one place, corn and cassava, generally, in our latitudes. We have been told about olives and wheat ever since the Bible, and about corn since the Popol Vuh and the books of the Chilam Balam. Cuisines differentiated and engendered their own styles, but in international painting, dishes made of olives and wheat became the subject of high art, while those of corn were left on the margins, anonymous. . . . Occasionally, Heinrich  Paul Claudel (1868–1955): French poet, playwright, and diplomat. This citation is

taken from Wallace Fowlie’s translation of The Tidings Brought to Mary (L’annonce faite à Marie) (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960), 25, though I have changed his translation of hotte armoriée from “emblazoned basket” to “emblazoned hood.”—Trans.

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Heine mentions a pine or a palm tree, forever planted in grand universal culture because they are familiar to all.ii The word pine is enough to show us the pine; the word palm is enough to define, paint, and illustrate the palm tree. But the word ceiba (an American tree that Afro-Cubans call “the mother of all trees”) does not suffice to give people of other latitudes an appreciation of the resemblance of that colossal tree to a rostral column: upright, austere, and solitary, of sacred lineage, like an apparition from other times, whose horizontal, almost parallel branches, offer a handful of leaves to the winds, as unreachable as they are incapable of rustling. There it is, on the top of a hillside, alone, silent, motionless, uninhabited by birds, piercing the earth with its enormous scaly roots. Hundreds of meters away (because the ceiba is not a tree of cameraderie or company) grow some papaya trees, herbaceous plants that emerged from the first bogs of creation, their bland bodies covered with gray medallions, their leaves open like beggars’ hands, their udder-fruits hanging from their necks. Those trees exist. They are American trees that, by right and presence, form part of the American novel. But they are not fortunate enough to be called pine or palm or walnut or chestnut or birch. Saint Louis of France never sat in their shadow, nor did Pushkin dedicate a verse or two to them. For this reason, one must mention the ceiba; one must talk about the papaya. But here there is a discursive problem that obliges me to evoke the great voice of Léon-Paul Fargue, the most Baroque of this century’s French poets (Vulturne, a work of art whose implications have not yet been plumbed, nor have those of the poetry of Raymond Roussel, or certain allusions to our sensibility only now appearing in Saint-John Perse.)iii Fargue once told me: For a writer who knows how to write, describing the Battle of Waterloo is an easy task. The scenery is known. The characters are known. You have all the resources of military vocabulary to make the description realistic. Those charges, those handto-hand combats, Grouchy who fails to arrive, the artillery abandoned, Cambronne’s apostrophe to provoke the gallery’s applause. . . . But take any object that I have never seen before: it can be a paperweight on your tabletop. It can be a sample of ii Heinrich Heine (1797–1856): Influential German Romantic poet whose lyrics in-

spired such composers as Felix Mendelssohn, Franz Schubert, and Robert Schumann.—Trans. iii Pseudonym of Alexis Saint-Léger Léger (1887–1975), a Nobel Prize–winning francophone poet and diplomat born on Saint-Léger les Feuilles, Guadaloupe, in the West Indies.—Trans.

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some beautiful mineral. It can be a rare butterfly, an exotic knickknack, a piece of carved crystal, a snail. If you can give me the sensation of color, density, weight, size, texture, and appearance of the object in a few words, you will have passed the ultimate test of the true writer. Show me the object: make it with your words so that I can touch it, value it, feel its weight.iv

This is only possible through the accurate placement of various adjectives, or by avoiding the adjective altogether through the adjectification of certain nouns that, in this case, become part of a metaphorical process. If you are lucky—literally speaking, in this case—the goal is reached. The object lives, is seen, lets its weight be felt. The prose that gives it life and consistency, weight and measure, is a Baroque prose, a forcefully Baroque prose, as is all prose that surrounds detail, breaks it up, colors it, promotes it, in order to provide detail and define it. Observe just how Baroque the engraving of a rhinoceros turns out to be in the work of Dürer, master of parsimony. This is because the rhinoceros was, in his time, a new, foreign animal emerging from the unknown, belonging to the heraldry of an unknown jungle and unimaginable landscapes. Therefore Dürer had to detail it, illustrate it with all its armor and plates, and even connect it vaguely to the dragon and the serpent of medieval masquerades. In his magisterial engraving, Albrecht Dürer pictorially named the rhinoceros, as William Blake’s Adam would (much later) name the animals of creation according to the biblical verses. We Latin American writers, too, have to name everything, everything that defines us, surrounds us, encircles us, everything that operates on the energy of its context, so that we may place it in a universal realm. Gone is the age of novels with glossaries to define curiaras, polleras, arepas, or cachazas. Gone is the age of novels with footnotes to explain that the tree with a certain name is covered with scarlet flowers in the month of May or August. Our ceiba, our trees (covered or not with flowers), will become universal through the operation of words that belong to a universal vocabulary. The German Romantics were very clever about informing a Latin American what a snow-covered pine tree was, even though he had never seen a pine nor had any notion of the snow that fell on i v Carpentier’s italics.—Trans.  Although Carpentier argues that footnotes and glossaries will one day become un-

necessary in Latin American literature, a definition of such idiosyncratic Americanisms may nonetheless be worthwhile: curiaras (boats made from a single tree trunk); polleras (women’s skirts); arepas (corn cakes prepared on a griddle); cachazas (liquors made from sugarcane).—Trans.

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it. No one in our countries would tolerate reading ten pages of dialogue in racy French slang—appealing, however, and rich enough so that Pierre de Vaulx was able to translate one of Bossuet’s Funeral Orations with twenty footnotes explaining afnaf, la daronne, les nougats—all expressions of contemporary slang, alive and characteristic of the Parisian underworld. Our art has always been Baroque, from our splendid pre-Columbian sculpture and our códices (figure 13.1),vi to our best contemporary novels, passing through our continent’s colonial cathedrals and monasteries. Even physical love becomes Baroque in the crisp obscenity of the Peruvian guaco (figure 13.2).vii Let us not fear the Baroque in our style, in our vision of contexts, in our vision of a human figure entwined in the word and the world, placed in the incredible angelic concert of a certain chapel (white, gold, vegetation, convolutions, unheard-of counterpoints, the defeat of Pythagoras) that may be seen in the city of Puebla, Mexico (figure 13.3); or in a disconcerting, enigmatic tree of life, blossoming with images and symbols in Oaxaca (figure 13.4). Let us not fear the Baroque, our art, born from trees, timber, altarpieces, and altars, from decadent carvings and calligraphic portraits, and even from late neoclassicisms. The Baroque is engendered by the need to name things, even though at the same time we depart from the techniques currently in vogue—those of the French nouveau roman, for example, which, on close observation, go from the big to the small, narrowing the focus instead of opening it up, in an attempt to search for something inside the object: the fork, the knife, the bread, the quotidian and palpable, the piece of furniture, apparently ignored for so long. On the contrary, so present are they that in an Ionesco comedy, the furniture determines the vital space of the man who acquired it to give himself meaning. The legitimate style of the contemporary Latin American novelist is Baroque.

vi Códices: Prehispanic screen-fold manuscripts of Mesoamerican provenance, with

pictographic and ideographic representations detailing the astronomical, theological, and calendrical wisdom of the Nahua and Maya peoples.—Trans. v ii Guaco, also spelled huaco or waku, means “ceramic” in Quechua; here, Carpentier refers to prehispanic clay vessels that portray erotic forms and scenes. For the ancient Andeans, the world was composed of conjoining opposites understood as masculine or feminine. The union of these opposites organized and energized the world and unleashed the mysterious vital force of all of existence. Scenes of sexual union thus have ritual significance and involve the regeneration and perpetuation of the cosmos.—Trans.

Borgia, plate 57, Six Supernatural Couples, Mixteca-Puebla, central Mexico. Vatican Library, Vatican State. Photograph: Archivo Fotográfico Manuel Toussaint/Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas/Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

13.1  Codex

13.2  “Guaco,”

Moche culture, 200 BCE–700 CE, Banco Central de Reserva del Perú

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

13.3  Rosary

Chapel, Angelic Choir, 1650–90, Church of Santo Domingo. Puebla, Mexico

of the sotocoro (below the choir loft), Genealogical Tree of the Guzmán Family (Santo Domingo’s family). Church of Santo Domingo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Photograph: Ichiro Ono

13.4  Ceiling

Editors’ Note to “The Baroque and the  Neobaroque” and “Baroque Cosmology:  Kepler” by Severo Sarduy

Severo Sarduy (1937–93) is the third of the Cuban triumvirate including Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama Lima who articulated the Baroque as a characteristic of Latin American literature. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Sarduy opted for exile. Unlike Carpentier, who became part of Fidel Castro’s government, serving as the Cuban ambassador to France from 1968 until his death in 1980, and unlike Lezama, who remained in Cuba despite strong reservations about Castro’s regime, Sarduy decided to stay in Paris after completing a Cuban fellowship to study art history at the École du Louvre in 1960. There he established a close affiliation with the Tel Quel group and its poststructuralist circle (Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and others), intellectual associations that gave him a distinct theoretical vantage point from which to reread Carpentier and Lezama and their theories of the New World Baroque. In “The Baroque and the Neobaroque” (1972), Sarduy elaborates the term Neobaroque, which he is generally credited for coining, although Haroldo de Campos had already done so in 1955, as we note in our introduction to de Campos’s essay included here. In his 1972 essay, as his title suggests, Sarduy presents his central concept of both the Baroque and the Neobaroque: “artificialization,” extreme artifice. He writes that the Baroque “appears to us . . . as the apotheosis of artifice, the irony and mockery of nature” (BNW 272). He introduces this concept by way of an attack on Eugenio d’Ors’s notion of the Baroque as a return to primordial nature, but his real target is the realism of d’Ors’s follower, Alejo Carpentier. Sarduy’s argument with Carpentier occurs over the definition of Baroque dynamism, heterogeneity, and transgression. Both writers identify these Baroque characteristics, but Carpentier grounds them in the cultures and histories of Latin America, whereas Sarduy

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understands them in purely linguistic terms. For Sarduy, the Baroque sign is conventional and without any direct link to extralinguistic referents; for Carpentier, on the contrary, the relations of analogy and resemblance that underlie the realism of his Baroque perform the task of naming New World realities. Sarduy’s concept of Baroque “artificialization” foregrounds the contingent nature of meaning as such and uncovers the arbitrariness of the relations between signifier and signified, between words and what they are supposed to represent. In the second essay included here, “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler,” he claims that “it may also be said that Baroque writing, in its abundance in the service of a repression, is the truth of all language” (BNW 308). This statement extends his antirealist definition of Baroque artificialization, suggesting that all linguistic structures are meaningful only as artifice, only as the play of formal elements within the verbal structure. So he takes language on a journey into itself and away from the social and historical world. For Sarduy, as for Carpentier, procedures of mixing and borrowing are central to the Baroque, but Sarduy’s mixtures are limited to the domain of semiotic codes and are discussed in terms of intertextuality. Sarduy, like Carpentier, understands the Baroque in terms of deformation and permutation, but again his focus is on texts rather than contexts. His Neobaroque novel De donde son los cantantes (From Cuba with a Song, 1967) may be illuminating in this regard. A novel about Cuban cultural hybridity, it is an antirealist parody that reconfigures Carpentier’s theory of cultural mixing as a stylized performance of various cultural codes. As Sarduy puts it in his first collection of essays, “Cuba is not a synthesis, a syncretic culture, but a superposition. A Cuban novel must make visible all the strata of that superposition” (Written on a Body 56). “The Baroque and the Neobaroque” concludes with a clarification of Sarduy’s idiosyncratic reformulation of the Baroque topos of excess. The Baroque overabundance of signifiers rejects any realistic purpose or function. In his juxtaposition of “Baroque as play” to “classical work as labor,” Sarduy, like some French poststructuralists of the 1960s, is influenced by George Bataille’s notion of expenditure (BNW 288). Writing an anarchist critique of capitalism, Bataille targets capitalism’s ethics of utilitarianism and functionalism and its objectification of the world as a resource to be utilized for profit and products. In contrast, Bataille urges a return to nonproductive values, the prodigal wasting of resources, and other impulses outlawed by utilitarianism such as nonreproductive eroticism and pleasure. Sarduy’s revolution-

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ary Baroque follows Bataille in its celebration of nonutilitarian sexual and textual pleasure. In a final section of “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” titled “Eroticism,” Sarduy reformulates the Baroque as a queer aesthetic— one that underlies his own Neobaroque fiction. The second text, “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler,” is from Sarduy’s book Barroco (1974). Comparing developments in European literature and art with developments in the history of science, Sarduy proposes the so-called retombée: the similarity of rhetorical and astronomical structures—a similarity that exists in both the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. For Sarduy, the Baroque arises in the seventeenth century from the rejection of Renaissance symmetry, and more specifically, from the elimination of the classical symbol of self-contained perfection: the circle. He links the geometric ellipse, a centerpiece of Johannes Kepler’s Baroque astronomy, to the rhetorical ellipsis, a centerpiece of Luis de Góngora’s Baroque poetics. Kepler replaces the circle with the ellipse in his famous laws of the planetary orbit of Mars. Unlike the circular orbit with its single center, Mars’s elliptical orbit has two centers or foci, only one of which is visible (the sun), whereas the other is occluded, invisible, a virtual mathematical point. Unlike Galileo’s heliocentrism, which preserved the theory of circular orbits, Kepler’s displacement of the single center of the sun, Sarduy argues, had profound ideological repercussions for the social analogues of the sun—God and king. Emphasizing the subversive social impact of the elliptical “dethronement” of the single, centered signifier, Sarduy moves to the elliptical designs in canonical works of European art and architecture by El Greco, Peter Paul Rubens, Francesco Borromini, Diego Velázquez, and Luis de Góngora. He also discusses Góngora’s rhetoric of circumlocution and digression, using Dámaso Alonso’s prose rendition of Góngora’s Soledades (Solitudes) of 1927 to support his argument. In this way, Sarduy links his Neobaroque poetics of artifice and abstraction to the avant-garde poetics of the Generation of ’27 and recalls the formalist claims that impelled the twentieth-century recovery of Baroque poetics in the first place. Taking up the historical correspondence between seventeenth-century Baroque and twentieth-century Neobaroque, Sarduy proposes that the latter is an intensification of the decentering and destabilization of the universe begun by the former. In “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” he writes: “As we have seen, the European Baroque and the early Latin American colonial Baroque present themselves as images of a mobile and decentered but still harmonious universe. . . . On the contrary, the contemporary Baroque,

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the Neobaroque, reflects structurally the disharmony, the rupture of homogeneity, of the logos as an absolute, the lack that constitutes our epistemic foundation” (BNW 289). The “occluded center” of the elliptical designs of the seventeenth-century Baroque gives way to the “empty center” of the twentieth-century Neobaroque. Sarduy’s examples are again taken from both cosmology and art: “Big Bang” theory posits an ever-expanding universe originating in the explosion of an ur-atom; Lacanian psychoanalytic theory posits the decentered subject (see Barroco, chaps. 4.3 and 5). As did Baroque science, Neobaroque science continues to have repercussions in the humanities and social sciences, not least in Sarduy’s own literary work. His last essay on the Neobaroque, written in 1987, is titled “Nueva inestabilidad” (New Instability).

Bibliography By the Author

Sarduy, Severo. “El barroco y el neobarroco.”1972. In Obra completa, vol. 2, ed. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl. Madrid: Galaxia Gutenberg; Nanterre, France: ALLCA XX, 1999. 1385–404. ———. Cobra and Maitreya. Trans. Suzanne Jill Levine. Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 1995. ———. “La cosmología barroca: Kepler.” 1974. In Barroco, in Obra completa, vol. 2, ed. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl. Madrid: Galaxia Gutenberg; Nanterre, France: ALLCA XX, 1999. 1223–530. ———. Ensayos generales sobre el barroco. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987. ———. Nueva inestabilidad. 1987. In Obra completa, vol. 2, ed. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl. Madrid: Galaxia Gutenberg; Nanterre, France: ALLCA XX, 1999. 1345–82. ———. Obra completa. 2 vols. Ed. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl. Madrid: Galaxia Gutenberg; Nanterre, France: ALLCA XX, 1999. ———. La simulación. 1982. In Obra completa, vol. 2, ed. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl. Madrid: Galaxia Gutenberg; Nanterre, France: ALLCA XX, 1999. 1264– 344. ———. Written on a Body. 1969. Trans. Carol Maier. New York: Lumen Books, 1989.

Additional Readings

Alonso, Dámaso. “Claridad y belleza de las Soledades.” 1927. In Estudios y ensayos gongorinos. Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1955. 66–91. Bataille, Georges. “The Notion of Expenditure.” In Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl et al. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 116–29.

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Derrida, Jacques. “From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve.” In Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 102–38. Gallo, Rubén. “Sarduy avec Lacan: The Portrayal of French Psychoanalysis in Cobra and La Simulación.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 60, no. 1 (2007): 35–60. ———. “Severo Sarduy, Jacques Lacan y el psicoanálisis. Entrevista con François Wahl.” Revista Hispánica Moderna 59, nos. 1–2 (2006): 51–59. González Echevarría, Roberto. “Interview/Severo Sarduy.” Diacritics 2, no. 2 (1972): 41–45. ———. La ruta de Severo Sarduy. Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1987. Méndez Rodenas, Adriana. Severo Sarduy: El neobarroco de la transgresión. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1983. Pauly, Arabella. “Das poststrukturalistische Modell: Barock und ‘Neobarock’ in der Poetik Severo Sarduys.” In Neobarroco: Zur Wesensbestimmung Lateinamerikas und seiner Literatur. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1993. 116–89. Santí, Enrico Mario. “Sobre Severo Sarduy: El efecto barroco.” In Escritura y tradición. Barcelona: Laia, 1987. 153–57.

  Chapter Fourteen  

The Baroque and the Neobaroque Severo Sarduy

Translated by Christopher Winks

The Baroque It is legitimate to transpose the artistic notion of the Baroque to the literary terrain. These two categories furnish a remarkable parallelism from various points of view: they are equally indefinable. A. Moret , Baroque Lyricism in Germany

From birth, the Baroque was destined for ambiguity, for semantic diffusion. It was the thick irregular pearl—in Spanish barrueco or berrueco, in Portuguese barrocco—the rocky, the knotted, the agglutinated density of the stone—barrueco or berrueco or, perhaps the excrescence, the cyst, something that proliferates, at once free and lithic, tumorous, warty; perhaps the name of a hypersensitive, even mannered pupil of the Carraccis—Le Baroche or Barocci (1528–1612); perhaps—fantastic philology—an ancient mnemonic device of Scholasticism, a syllogism—Baroco. Finally, in the denotative catalogue of dictionaries, those heaps of codified banality, the Baroque is defined as “shocking bizarreness” (Littré) or as “outlandishness, extravagance, and bad taste” (Martínez Amador). A geologic nodule, mobile and muddy construction, of clay, a syllogistic structure or pearl, of this agglutination, this uncontrolled proliferation of signifiers, this dexterous transmission of thought, was needed by the Council of Trent to counteract the arguments of the Reformation. This need was answered by the pedagogical iconography proposed by the Jesuits, literally an art of tape-à-l’oeil (garish decoration), which placed at the service of teaching and faith every possible means of negating discretion and the progressive shading of sfumato, in favor of adopting theatrical brilliance, the unexpected emerging from chiaroscuro, banishing the symbolic subtlety incarnated by

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the saints and their attributes in favor of a rhetoric of the demonstrative and the evident, punctuated by beggars’ feet and rags, peasant virgins and calloused hands. We shall not follow the displacement of each element resulting from the explosion that provoked a genuine fault line in thought, an episte­mological break whose manifestations are simultaneous and explicit.1 The Catholic Church complicates or fragments its axis and renounces a preestablished course, opening up the interior of its (irradiated) edifice to various possible trajectories, meanwhile presenting itself as a labyrinth of figures. The city decenters itself, loses its orthogonal structure and its natural signs of intelligibility—moats, rivers, walls; literature renounces its denotative level, its linear enunciation; the single center of the stars’ orbits, previously supposed as circular, vanished, only to double itself when Kepler proposes the ellipse as the figure of this displacement; Harvey postulates the circulation of the blood; and finally, God himself no longer seems to be a central, unique, given, but rather the infinity of certainties of the personal cogito, dispersion, pulverization that announces the galactic world of monads. Rather than amplifying the concept of the Baroque—uncontainable metonymization—we would, on the contrary, prefer to restrict it, to reduce it to a precise operating schema that eschews interstices and the abuse of terminological casualness from which this notion has recently suffered, especially among us, and instead try to codify the pertinence of its application to present-day Latin American art.

Artifice If, by means of its best Spanish-language grammar—the work of Eugenio d’Ors—we attempt to arrive at a more precise conception of the Baroque, we shall see that one notion sustains all definitions, explicitly or not, and is their foundation: the Baroque as return to the primordial, as nature. For d’Ors,2 Churriguera “recalls primitive chaos,” “voices of turtle doves, voices of trumpets, heard in a botanical garden. . . . There is no acoustic landscape with a more characteristically Baroque emotion . . . the Baroque is secretly animated by nostalgia for the Lost Paradise.” The Baroque “seeks the ingenuous, the primitive, the naked.” For d’Ors, as Pierre Charpentrat points out, “the Baroque is, above all and as is well known, liberty, confidence in a (preferably disorderly) nature.”3 The Baroque as immersion in pantheism: Pan, god of nature, presides over all authentic Baroque work.

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On the contrary, the Baroque feast appears to us, with its repetitions of spirals, arabesques and masks, wide-brimmed hats and gleaming silks, as the apotheosis of artifice, the irony and mockery of nature, the finest expression of that process J. Rousset has recognized in the literature of an entire “age”: artificialization.4 To call falcons “swift whirlwinds of Norway,” islands in a river “leafy parentheses / to the period of its current,” the Straits of Magellan “of fugitive silver / the hinge, though narrow, embracer / of one Ocean and another,” is to indicate artificialization, and this process of masking, of progressive enveloping, of mockery, is so radical that to “dismantle” it, an operation analogous to the one Chomsky calls metalanguage becomes necessary.5 Metaphor in Góngora is already in and of itself metalinguistic; that is, it raises to the second power an already elaborated level of language, that of poetic metaphors, which is in turn a presumptive elaboration of an initial denotative, “normal” level of language. The deciphering practiced by Dámaso Alonso in his commentary envelops in turn—Russian dolls—the Gongorine process of artificialization.6 This ever-multipliable commentary—this very text is now commenting on Alonso’s, perhaps another (one hopes) will comment on this one—is the finest example of this successive envelopment of one writing by another that constitutes—as we shall shortly see—the Baroque itself. The extreme artificialization practiced in some texts, above all in some recent texts of Latin American literature, would thus suffice to show the presence of the Baroque in them. We shall distinguish three mechanisms within this artificialization.

Substitution

When in Paradiso José Lezama Lima calls a male organ “the stinger of the leptosomatic macrogenitome,” Baroque artifice manifests itself through a substitution that we could describe on the level of the sign: the signifier corresponding to the signified “virility” has been purloined and replaced by another, totally removed from it semiotically and functioning only in the erotic context of the story, that is, it corresponds to the first in the process of signification. We could formalize this operation as follows:

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An analogous process may be seen in the Baroque (in the strictest sense of the word) work of the painter René Portocarrero. If we look at his paintings of the Flora series, for example, and even his recent drawings, like the one illustrating the cover of the Era edition of Paradiso, we see that the process of artificialization through substitution is operating in the same way: the visual signifier corresponding to the signified “hat” has been replaced by a motley cornucopia, a floral scaffolding fashioned on a boat; only in the drawing’s graphic structure can this image occupy the place of the signifier of “hat.” We find a third example—the démarche of these three Cuban creators is isomorphic—in the architecture of Ricardo Porro (figure 14.1). Here, the functional elements of the architectonic structure are sometimes replaced by others that serve as signifiers only when inserted into that context as mechanical supports: a drainpipe is converted not into a gargoyle—which has been its codified signifier since the Gothic period—but into a flute, femur, or phallus; a fountain assumes the form of a papaya, a Cuban fruit (figure 14.2). This last substitution is particularly interesting, because it is not limited to a simple permutation; rather, by expelling the “normal” signifier of the function and putting another, completely alien one in its place, what occurs is the eroticization of the totality of the work—novel, painting, or building—and in Porro’s case, by means of linguistic cunning: in Cuban slang, papaya also designates the female sexual organ. With respect to the traditional mechanisms of the Baroque, these recent works from Latin America have preserved and at times widened the distance between the two terms of the sign that constitutes the essence of their language, as opposed to the close proximity of these terms, pillars of classical art. An opening, a fault line between namer and named and the emergence of another namer, that is, metaphor.7 An exaggerated distance, the entire Baroque is merely hyperbole, and, as we shall see, the erotic character of its “wastefulness” is not accidental.

Proliferation

Another Baroque mechanism of artificialization consists in obliterating the signifier of a given signified without replacing it with another, however distant the latter might be from the former, but rather by a chain of signifiers that progresses metonymically and that ends by circumscribing the absent signifier, tracing an orbit around it, an orbit whose reading—which we could call a radial reading—enables us to infer it. Implanting itself in America and

14.1  Aerial

view, School of Plastic Arts, 1961–65. Havana, Cuba. Architect: Ricardo Porro. Photograph: Paolo Gasparini

14.2  School

of Plastic Arts, Fountain La Papaya. Architect: Ricardo Porro. Photograph: Paolo Gasparini

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incorporating other linguistic materials—I refer to all languages, verbal or not—the Baroque made use of frequently heterogeneous elements from other cultural strata bestowed on it by acculturation, which makes the functioning of this Baroque mechanism more obvious. Its presence is constant, above all, in the form of absurd enumeration, the accumulation of diverse nodes of signification, the juxtaposition of hetero­geneous units, various lists and collages. On the level of the sign, proliferation could be formalized as follows:

Thus, in chapter 3 of Explosion in a Cathedral, Alejo Carpentier, to connote the signified “disorder,” traces around its (absent) signifier an enumeration of astronomical instruments used in nonsensical fashion and from whose reading we infer the prevailing chaos: “The sundial in the patio had become a moon-dial, marking topsy-turvy hours. The hydrostatic balance was used for weighing cats; the little telescope, projecting through the broken glass of a skylight, made it possible to see things in nearby houses, which brought an equivocal laugh from Carlos, a solitary astronomer on top of a wardrobe.”  The visual isomorphism of this mechanism may be found in the “accumu­ lations” of the Venezuelan sculptor Mario Abreu.8 In Objetos mágicos, a juxtaposition of diverse materials—a horseshoe, a spoon, four clothespins, four jingle bells, a brooch, and a keychain—all these, as in Carpentier, are used in topsy-turvy ways, that is, emptied of their functions; what the sculptor manages to convey to us, to codify by means of accumulation, is the signified “chalice,” but without the normal, denoted signifier of “chalice,” without any form, however metaphorical, present at any time. At other times, the heterogeneous grouping of “emptied” objects does not lead us, even in a subtly allegorical way, to any precise signified; the radial reading is deceptive in the Barthesian sense of the word: enumeration   A  lejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral, trans. John Sturrock (Boston: Little,

Brown, 1962), 26.—Trans.

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is presented as an open chain, as if an element might complete the hinted-at meaning, conclude the operation of signification, and accomplish its closure, thus finishing the orbit traced around the absent signifier. In Mampulorio, also by Mario Abreu, we are presented with another accumulation: six spoonfuls, a glass, perhaps a plate . . . but this first nucleus of meaning remains disrupted, that is, it disappoints the reading “pre­paration of a meal,” for example, because next to these semantically coherent objects there appears an eye superimposed on a symmetrical surface shaped like an animal hide. The reading leads only to a contradiction between signifiers, which instead of completing each other, negate and cancel each other out. Thus “Banquet” / “Prophylactic Eye” / “Primitivism” / “Rituality” / and so on do not function as complementary units of meaning, however vast, but rather as executors of its abolition which with each new attempt at constitution, at plenitude, manages to invalidate it, retrospectively revoking the blossoming meaning, the always inconclusive, unrealizable project of signification. The enumerations, the brusque and surprising juxtapositions of Residence on Earth, by Pablo Neruda, provoke this same reading, as do the semantic constellations—pulverization, dispersion of meaning—of Canto general: Guayaquil, sílaba de lanza, filo de estrella ecuatorial, cerrojo abierto de las tinieblas húmedas que ondulan como una trenza de mujer mojada: puerta de hierro maltratado por el sudor amargo que moja los racimos, que gotea el marfil en los ramajes y resbala a la boca de los hombres mordiendo como un ácido marino.9 Guayaquil, syllable of lance, blade of equatorial star, open bolt of the moist darkness undulating

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like a wet woman’s tress gate of iron corroded by the bitter sweat drenching the grape clusters dripping from the ivory in the branches sliding onto the mouths of men biting like a marine acid.

In the Baroque exuberance of Grande sertão: Veredas (The Devil to Pay in the Backlands), by João Guimarães Rosa, the two previously mentioned procedures are detectable, like oratorical supports, but fused in a single rhetorical operation: all direct denomination of the signified “Devil” has been excluded from the text—substitution; the onomastic chain designating him throughout the novel—proliferation—permits and provokes a radial reading of attributes, and this variety of attributes gradually enriches our perception as we become aware of the signified. To name him in any other fashion is to insist on his satanic panoply, to amplify the register of his power. Finally, in proliferation, the metonymic operation par excellence, there is the best definition of what every metaphor is: the realization on the level of praxis—of the deciphering that all reading is—of the project and vocation that the etymology of that word reveals to us: displacement, transfer, trope. Proliferation, foreseen route, orbit of abbreviated resemblances: to make conjectural that which it obliterates, to brush its periphrasis against the excluded, expelled signifier, and to sketch the absence it indicates, the Baroque mechanism demands transfer, a route around what is missing and whose absence constitutes its meaning: a radial reading that connotes, like no other, a presence that in its ellipsis indicates the mark of the absent signifier, that to which the reading, without naming it, makes reference in each of its insinuations, each of its swerves, to the expelled, to that which displays the traces of exile.

Condensation

Analogous to the oneiric process of condensation is another practice of the Baroque: permutation, optical illusion, fusion, interchange among elements—phonetic, visual, and so on—of two of the terms of a signifying chain, collision and condensation, from which emerges a third term that summarizes the first two semantically. A central figure of Joyceanism, of all ludic work, the coat of arms of Lewis Carroll’s descendants, condensation

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and its rudimentary meaning, phonetic permutation, which on the level of the sign we could formalize as follows:

Condensation and permutation have found their best exponent among us in the work of Guillermo Cabrera Infante—Three Trapped Tigers, Cuerpos divinos (Divine Bodies)—in which these forms, these distortions of form, constitute the plot, the scaffolding that structures the feverish proliferation of words. “Meaning cannot emerge if freedom is total or null; the regime of meaning is that of freedom under guard,”10 Roland Barthes has written; in Cabrera Infante’s work, the function of these operations is precisely that: to limit, to serve as support and armature for the overwhelming production of words—for the insertion, which can be infinitely prolonged, of one subordinate clause into another—that is, to make the meaning emerge precisely at the point where everything is an invitation to pure play, to phonetic chance, that is, to non-sense. Permutations like 0 se me valla un gayo, condensations like amosclavo or maquinoscrito, to cite the simplest, watch over on every page the freedom of the author (complete, these days—rhetoric has disappeared). To this “censorship” the work of Cabrera Infante owes its ­meaning. This same game of condensation, which in the visual arts was classically represented by the different variants of anamorphosis, finds new possibilities today in the incorporation of movement into art (cinematic painting and film proper). Through a process of vertical incisions in wood, using three different colors to fill each of these hollows, Carlos Cruz-Díez manages to compose three distinct paintings depending on whether the spectator is to the right, to the left, or in front of the panel. The displacement of the spectator—a process in this case comparable to reading—condenses all the visual units into a fourth element—­the definitive painting, chromatically and geometrically “open.” We gain access to the “definitive painting” of Julio Le Parc through condensation as well. The flexible metallic bands that reflect the light and constitute the visible support of the painting project with their movements various luminous drawings onto the background. None of these instantaneous drawings, which only become unified through perception, constitutes the

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work; rather, it consists in the condensation of all these reflections and their relationship to the central metallic band, an element also animated by a complex movement that resists all reduction to elemental forms. Each reflection is like an ephemeral diagram, an uncapturable “moment” of the work or its equation; a work whose substance is variation and time, a mechanical modulation of a schema X of multiple articulated variables and their selfcombinations, without at any moment revealing the individual elements. But, of course, the ideal field for condensation is cinematographic superimposition: superimpositions of two or more images condensing into a single one—that is to say, synchronic condensation—as frequently practiced by Leopoldo Torre-Nilsson, and also superimpositions of various sequences that fuse into a single unit of discourse in the spectator’s memory—diachronic condensation—a frequent procedure with Glauber Rocha. However, it must be specified that we are not speaking here of a simple artifice of cinematographic writing, as is encountered more or less in all auteurs, but of a certain deliberate stylistic use of this procedure; in TorreNilsson the superimposed figures have (as in Eisenstein) value, not of a simple linkage, but of metaphor; insisting on their analogies, the auteur creates a tension between two signifiers from whose condensation emerges a new signified. Likewise, with Rocha it is not simply a matter of a variation of structurally analogous sequences (as in the films of Robbe-Grillet) but the creation of a tension between very different and distant sequences that a sign obliges us to “connect” in such a way that they lose their autonomy and exist only insofar as they achieve fusion. If in substitution the signifier is concealed and replaced by another, and in proliferation a chain of signifiers circumscribes the absent signifier, in condensation we witness the “mise-en-scène” and unification of two signifiers that come together in the exterior space of the screen, the painting, or the interior of memory.

Parody Commenting on Góngora’s parody of a ballad by Lope de Vega, Robert Jammes concludes: “To the extent this ballad by Góngora is the disfigurement (démarquage) of a previous ballad which must be read in filigree in order to enjoy it completely, it can be said that it belongs to a minor genre, since it exists only in reference to the earlier work.”11 If this assertion refers

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to the Spanish Baroque, it already seems debatable to us, but if it refers to the Latin American Baroque, a “painterly” Baroque, as Lezama Lima calls it, a Baroque of syncretism, variation, and coinage, we would succumb to the temptation to broaden it, albeit inverting it totally—a Baroque operation— and affirming that only insofar as a work of the Latin American Baroque is the disfigurement of a previous work which must be read in filigree to enjoy it completely does it belong to a major genre, an affirmation that will gain in validity every day, since the vaster the references and our knowledge of them, the more numerous will be the works in filigree, themselves disfigurements of other works. To the extent that it enables a reading in filigree and conceals beneath the text—the architectonic, visual artwork—another text, another work, that this reading reveals, discovers, and enables to decipher, the recent Latin American Baroque partakes of the concept of parody, as defined in 1929 by the Russian formalist Bakhtin.12 According to this author, parody derives from the ancient “serio-comic” genre related to carnivalesque folklore—hence its mixture of gaiety and tradition—and utilizes contemporary speech seriously; but it also freely invents, plays with a plurality of tones, that is, speaks about speech. The substrate and foundation of this genre—whose high points have been Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire—is the carnival, a symbolic and syncretic spectacle in which the “abnormal” reigns, in which confusions and profanations, eccentricity and ambivalence are multiplied, and whose central action is a parodic coronation, that is, an apotheosis concealing mockery. The Saturnalia, the masquerades of the sixteenth century, the Satyricon, Boethius, the mystery plays, and of course Rabelais, but above all Cervantes’s Don Quixote: these are the finest examples of this carnivalization of literature, which the recent Latin American Baroque—it is no accident that carnival is so important to us—has inherited. Carnivalization implies parody to the extent that it is equivalent to confusion and confrontation, to the interaction of different strata, different linguistic textures, to intertextuality. Texts that establish a dialogue in the work, a theatrical spectacle whose text-bearers—the actuants that Greimas speaks of—are other texts; hence the polyphonic character (we might say stereophonic, adding a neologism that Bakhtin would surely have liked) of Baroque works, of every Baroque code, literary or not. A space of dialogism, polyphony, carnivalization, parody, and intertextuality, the Baroque thus presents itself as a network of connections, of successive filigrees whose graphic expression would not be linear, two-dimensional, flat, but instead voluminous, spatial, and dy-

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namic. Into the carnivalization of the Baroque is inserted a specific trace, the mixture of genres, the intrusion of one type of discourse into another—a letter in a story, dialogues in these letters, and so on—in other words, as Bakhtin pointed out, the word Baroque is not just that which figures but also that which is figured, and this is the material of literature. Confronted with the intertwining languages of America (the codes of pre-Columbian knowledge), Spanish (the codes of European culture) ­ found itself duplicated, reflected in other organizations, other discourses. Even after annulling them, subjugating them, certain elements survived in the Spanish language that correspond to its own elements; the process of synonymization, normal in all languages, was accelerated because of the necessity to regularize the absurd vastness of nouns on the level of the signifying chain. The Baroque, superabundance, brimming cornucopia, prodigality, and wastefulness—hence the moral resistance it has provoked in certain cultures of economy and moderation, like the French—a mockery of all functionality, of all sobriety, is also the solution to this verbal saturation, the trop plein of the word, the abundance of nouns in relation to what is named, what can be enumerated, the flooding of things by words. Hence also its mechanism of periphrasis, of digression and detour, of duplication and even tautology. The Word, squan­dered forms, language that because of its excessive abundance no longer designates things but only other designators of things, signifiers enveloping other signifiers in a mechanism of signification that ends up designating itself, revealing its own grammar, the models of that grammar and its generation in the universe of words. Variations, modulations of a model that the totality of the work crowns and dethrones, displays, deforms, duplicates, inverts, strips, or overloads until it fills the void, the (infinite) space available. A language that speaks of language, Baroque superabundance is generated by the synonymic supplement, the initial “doubling,” the overflow of the signifiers that the Baroque artwork, Baroque opera, catalogues. Of course, the work will be properly Baroque to the extent that these elements—synonymic supplement, parody, and so on—are found situated at the nodal points of the structure of the discourse, that is, to the extent that they guide their development and proliferation. Hence the need to distinguish between works on whose surface float fragments, minimal units of parody, as a decorative element, and works belonging specifically to the parodic genre and whose entire structure is constituted, generated, by the principle of parody, by the sense of carnivalization.13 To escape facile generalizations and the careless application of the crite-

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ria of the Baroque, it would be necessary to codify the reading of the textual units in filigree, which we will call grams following the nomenclature proposed by Julia Kristeva.14 We will have to create, then, a system of deciphering and detection, a formalization of the operation for decoding the Baroque. Let us now venture a few elements toward a semiology of the Latin American Baroque.

Intertextuality

In the first place, let us consider the incorporation of an alien text into the text, its collage or superimposition onto the text’s surface, an elementary form of dialogue that modifies none of its elements, nor alters its voice: the quotation. Then we shall discuss the intermediate form of incorporation in which the foreign text melds indistinguishably with the original, without instilling its characteristics, its authority as a foreign body on the surface, but constituting the most profound strata of the receptor text, tinting its networks, modifying its geology with its textures: reminiscence. Quotation

Among other Baroque gestures, Gabriel García Márquez carries out one like this in One Hundred Years of Solitude when, contrary to the homogeneity of classical language, he insists on a sentence taken directly from Juan Rulfo, incorporating into the story a character of Carpentier’s (Victor Hugues from Explosion in a Cathedral ), another one from Cortázar (Rocamadour from Hopscotch), another from Fuentes (Artemio Cruz from The Death of Artemio Cruz), as well as a character clearly belonging to Vargas Llosa, not counting the work’s multiple quotations—characters, sentences, contexts—referring to the author’s previous works. The visual quotations that Antonio Seguí practices in his recent panels, breaking their homogeneity and reworking the forms of collage, of “borrowing” or transposing, stem from graphic art— typo­graphies, various tracings, and so on—and from various urban codes— ­arrows, hand signals, dotted lines, traffic signs, and so on. The quotations that make up almost all the engravings of the painter Humberto Peña derive from other visual spaces, or from ones functioning as such in the graphic structure—anatomical grids that interrupt the drawing of a body with their exaggerated detail and minute visceral precision, North American comicstrip balloons that point out to the brain the banality of the emergent sentence. The detectable quotations in Alejandro Marcos’s engravings possess, in

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addition to a parodic quality, a tautological aspect. It is the visual code itself that serves here as a field of extraction, of quotable material: perspective, light and shadow, geometry, all the conventional signs denoting space and volume and that have been naturalized over centuries are used here, but only to show them as arbitrary, as purely formal simulacrum. Quotations are inscribed in the field of the Baroque precisely because in the act of parodying, deforming, emptying, dismissing, or distorting the code they belong to, they refer only to their own facticity. Distance, the scale of objects in perspective, volume: everything “fails” here, where only the falsely natural procedures we use to convey the illusion of distance, objects in perspective, or volume, to deceive, manage to show themselves, causing the flat two-dimensional space of the canvas to appear as a “window,” that is, an opening onto a depth. The parodic use of the code to which a work belongs—its apotheosis and mockery (Bakhtin’s coronation and dethronement) in the interior of the work itself—are the best means for revealing these conventions, that deception. Finally, let us point out, in another space, the quotations with which Natalio Galán breaks the serialist syntax of his musical compositions, introducing into them, unexpectedly, certain measures taken from contradanzas, habaneras, and sones. Reminiscence

Without appearing on the surface of the text, but always latent, determining the archaic tone of the visible text, Cuban colonial chronicles, reviews and notices of that period, books and documents—archival research—are present, in the form of reminiscence; for example, a plain Spanish, recently implanted in America, punctuated with classical words, in certain fragments of La situación, by Lisandro Otero. It is also the reminiscence of the arabesques, the stained-glass windows, and colonial Baroque ironwork that structure Amelia Peláez’s still lifes; the scaffolding, the armature of the painting are determined by the volutes of Creole grille work and the circles of the “medio-puntos,” without these ever appearing on the canvas other than as a formal reminiscence that guides the volumes, accentuating or muting the colors according to the glass circles, dividing or superimposing the fruit.

Intratextuality

Under this heading, let us group the texts in filigree that are not inserted into the smooth outward surface of the work as allogenic elements—quotations and reminiscences—but instead are intrinsic to the production of writing, to the operation of encoding—tattooing—of which all writing consists;

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they become an integral element, whether consciously or not, in the act of creation itself. Grams that slip, or that the author slips, between the visible traces of the lines, writing within writing. Phonetic Grams

On the same level as letters, which establish a meaning in the linear, fixed, “normal” scan of the page, but forming other possible constellations of meaning, quick to cede to other readings, other decipherings, allowing their voices to be heard by whoever wishes to hear them, other possible organizations of these letters exist. The typographic lines, parallel and regular—determined by our linear sense of time—for whoever wishes to transgress it, offer their phonemes to other radial, dispersed, fluctuating, galactic readings: a reading of phonetic grams whose ideal practice is the anagram, the operation par excellence of onomastic hide-and-seek, of underhanded satire discernible by the initiate, of laughter destined for the hermeneut; but also the crossword puzzle, the acrostic, the boustrophedon, and all the verbal and graphic forms of anamorphosis, dual and incompatible viewpoints, cubism—forms whose deceptive practice would be alliteration. Alliteration that “posts” and unfolds, that displays the traces of a phonetic work but whose result is nothing more than the display of the work itself. Nothing, no other reading is necessarily hidden beneath the alliteration; its trail leads to nothing other than itself, and what is masked by its mask is precisely the fact of being merely a mask, an artifice and a phonetic diversion that are its own goal. An operation, then, that in this sense is tautological and parodic, that is, Baroque. Chromaticism, the sharp play of textures of the Portuguese language, explored by the Gongorine poet Gregório de Matos, has served as a basis for the phonetic mosaics of Haroldo de Campos’s Galáxias (Galaxies), alliterations that go on for mobile pages and that refer only to themselves, so feeble is the “semantic vertebra” that unites them: mesma e mesmirando ensimesma emmimmesmando filipêndula de texto extexto / por isso escrevo rescrevo cravo no vazio os grifos dêsse texto os garfos / as garras e da fábula só fica o finar da fábula o finir da fábula o / finíssono da que em vazio transvasa o que mais vejo aqui é o papel que / escalpo a polpa das palabras do papel que expalpo os brancos palpos.

In Three Trapped Tigers, whose title is already an alliteration and one of whose characters is even named Bustrófedon, the writing’s thrust emerges precisely from the attention given the phonetic grams. If this work—like

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Queneau’s—manages to be humorous, it is because it takes seriously the work of the grams. The palindrome DÁBALE ARROZ A LA ZORRA EL ABAD has been quoted by Cabrera Infante. We recall his commentary on another one, popular in Cuba: ANITA LAVA LA TINA. Semic Grams

The semic gram is decipherable beneath the line of the text, behind the discourse, but neither the transgressive reading of its phonemes nor any combination of its marks, its body on the page, will lead us to it: the signified to which the manifest discourse refers has not allowed its signifiers to ascend to the textual surface: repressed idiom, a sentence mechanically cut off in oral language and perhaps for that reason inaccessible to the page, rejected, incapable of emerging into the night of ink into the white cube that excludes it, into the volume of the book, but whose latency somehow disturbs or enriches all innocent reading. Hermeneutics of the signified, manteia of the seme, detection of the unit of meaning. “In that town they still remember the day King Lulo drew out the evil of death that had suddenly come over a calf praised by someone who usually would choke on a single kind word.” ii The popular expression evil eye—a curse provoked in the victim by the praise bestowed on him by the unconscious repository of evil—is “hidden” beneath this sentence from Paradiso. Two semantic indicators lead to this idiom: “mortal sickness” and “stumble over their praise.” The “repression” Lezama practices frequently seems to us exemplary: all Baroque literature could be read as the prohibition or exclusion from scriptural space of certain semes (in Góngora, for example, the name of certain allegedly maleficent animals) that the discourse codifies by appealing to the typical figure of exclusion: periphrasis. Baroque writing—antipodal to spoken expression— would have as one of its pillars the function of con­cealment, the omission, or rather, the utilization of tacit nuclei of signification, “undesirable” but necessary, and toward which the arrows of indicators converge. The anagram (to which a semiology of phonetic grams leads us) and the repressed idiom (to which a semiology of semic grams leads us) are the two most easily detectable periphrastic operations, but perhaps all linguistic operations, all symbolic production, impede and conceal, since to name is no longer to point out but rather to designate, that is, to signify what is absent. Every ii This is a quotation from José Lezama Lima, Paradiso (1968), trans. Gregory Rabassa

(Normal, Ill.: Dalkey Archive, 2000), 28.—Eds.

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word would have a figure as its ultimate support. To speak would already be to participate in the ritual of periphrasis, to inhabit that place (like language without limits) that is the Baroque scene. Syntagmatic Grams

Discourse as syntagmatic enchainment implies the conden­sation of sequences that reading brings about, partial and progressive deci­pherings that advance by contiguity and refer us retrospectively to their totality as closed meaning. This nucleus of signification between quotation marks, which is the meaning of totality, presents itself in the Baroque artwork as the specification of a vaster space, the agglutination of a nebulous and infinite material that sustains the Baroque as a category and whose grammar the work “posts” as a procedure of guaranty, as an emblem of belonging to a constituted and “greater” class. A condensed reflection of this tautology consists in pointing out the work within the work, repeating its title, recopying it in reduced form, describing it, employing any of the known procedures of mise en abîme. These tautologists forget that these procedures were effective in Shake­speare or Velázquez, but more recently have not been. As Michel Foucault points out, for Velázquez it was a matter of the representation of a vaster content than had been explicitly figured, specifically, in the case of Las meninas, of that of “representation” itself.15 In our own time, however, the work within the work, the mirroring, the mise en abîme, or the “Russian doll,” have been changed into a clumsy ruse, a formal, fashionable game that has preserved nothing of its original significance. The form of tautology represented by syntagmatic grams is less evident. Here the “indicators,” present in the enchainment of the sequences or their interior articulations, in the greater and massive units of discourse, do not refer to any other work or even, of course—ingenuous tautology—­to the work itself, but only to the grammar that sustains it, to the formal code that serves as the foundation, to the theoretical grounding of the recognized artifice that supports it as practice of a fiction and thus confers on it its “authority.” In Adán Buenosayres, Leopoldo Marechal modulates the largest units of discourse according to how they are configured, emphasizing their belonging to the category “writing/odyssey.” The primary sequencing structure here is, of course, the one postulated in Joyce, whose “authority” as a model refers to the entire Homeric tradition, the tradition of a story whose orthogonal axes would be “book as journey / journey as book.” But the cate-

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gory is never made explicit; rather, only its overarching networks are marked, an expanding universe whose points-events (which determine the resumption of the sequences and their coordination) gradually configure possible routes: readings of a city, an entire day, or a book-journey that, once written, establishes “surreptitiously” the following meaning: all meaning is a pathway. The large units of theatrical discourse in the stagings by Alfredo Rodríguez Arias—Goddess, by Javier Arroyuelo, or Drácula, by Rodríguez Arias himself, for example—also function as indices of a space exterior to the performance and ensure the authority of a performance by virtue of their distance and priority. But in this case, the code of authority, which would be the one constituted by the explicit theatrical situations, is negatively indicated. If in these stagings the freezing of gestures serves to emphasize certain key situations that constitute the lexicon of “the theatrical” in the bourgeois tradition—letters containing declarations of love, characters who enter onstage just when someone says they are expected, chains of calamities and news leading abruptly to the “happy ending”—it is precisely to show such situations to be dead letters and, stretching them to ludicrous lengths through the practice of “slow motion” or “disruption” by means of a contradictory musical accompaniment (Dracula’s messages are read against a background of pop music), to take renewed advantage of them as nuclei of theatrical energy, as secure terminology, institutionally histrionic. The clichéd signs of the code are thus converted into models recovered and criticized by parody. It is not a matter of a humorous theater whose easy satirical themes would be mere quotes from boulevard theater, but rather the staging, in explicit terms, of a grammar whose parodic enunciation is revealed in its hyperbole, its deformation. This procedure makes use of that grammar at the same time as it censors it, crowns it, and then dethrones it in the space, carnivalesque for Rodríguez Arias, of the stage. That is, it uses the existing grammar to achieve both its apotheosis and its subversion, as all Baroque artists do with the lexicon that precedes them.

Conclusion Eroticism

Baroque space is superabundant and wasteful. In contrast to language that is communicative, economic, austere, and reduced to its function as a vehicle for information, Baroque language delights in surplus, in excess, and in the partial loss of its object. Or better yet, in the search, frustrated by definition,

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for the partial object. The “object” of the Baroque can be specified: it is what Freud, but above all Abraham, called the partial object: maternal breast, excrement, and its metaphoric equivalent: gold, constituent matter and symbol of all Baroque—gaze, voice16—a thing forever alien to everything man can comprehend, assimilate from/to the other and oneself, a residue we could describe as (a)lterity, to mark the contribution to the concept made by Lacan, who precisely terms this object (a).17 Object (a) as residual quantity, but also as fall, loss, or discrepancy between reality (the visible Baroque artwork) and its phantasmal image (unlimited saturation, asphyxiating proliferation, horror vacuí) presides over Baroque space. The surplus—another spiral, that “yet another angel!” of which Lezama speaks—intervenes as confirmation of a failure: that which signifies the presence of a nonrepresentable object, and resists crossing the line of Alterity (A: bi-univocal correlation of (a)), (a)lice which irritates Alice because the latter cannot manage to make the former pass over to the other side of the looking glass. The confirmation of failure does not imply the modification of the project, but rather the contrary, the repetition of surplus; this obsessive repetition of a useless thing (given that it does not have access to the ideal entity of the artwork) is what determines the Baroque as play, in contrast to the determination of the classical work as a labor. The inevitable exclamation to which a chapel by Churriguera or Aleijadinho, a verse by Góngora or Lezama, or any other Baroque act gives rise, whether it belongs to the art of painting or pastry making, is “So much work!” an exclamation that implies the barely concealed adjective, so much wasted work! So much play and squandering, so much effort without purpose! It is homo faber’s superego, the being-for-work which is here being enunciated impugning the dalliance, the voluptuousness of the gold, the pageantry, the immoderation, the pleasure. Play, loss, squandering, and pleasure, eroticism as an activity that is always purely playful, no more than a parody of the function of reproduction, a transgression of the useful, the “natural” dialogue of bodies. In eroticism, artificiality, the cultural, is manifested in the game with the lost object, a game whose objective is within itself and whose intention is not to convey a message—in this case, reproduction—but of their waste as a function of pleasure. Like Baroque rhetoric, eroticism presents itself as the total rupturing of the denotative, direct, and natural level of language (the somatic); as the perversion implied by every metaphor, every figure. It is not

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historically accidental that Saint Thomas, in the name of morality, advocated the exclusion of figures from literary discourse.

Mirror

If the Baroque game has zero usefulness, this is not true of its structure. The latter is no mere arbitrary and gratuitous appearance, no pointless structure that expresses only itself; on the contrary, it is a reductive reflection of what envelops and transcends it; a reflection that repeats its attempt—to be at once totalizing and meticulously detailed. But, like the mirror centering and restating Van Eyck’s portrait of the Arnolfinis, or the Gongorine mirror, “faithful though concave,” Baroque structure does not succeed in capturing the vastness of the language that circum­scribes it, the organization of the universe: there is something that resists it, opposes it with its opacity, refuses its image. But this incompleteness of all Baroque structures on the level of synchrony does not impede them from functioning as a signifying reflection of a certain diachrony (on the contrary, their constant readjustments facili­tate it): as we have seen, the European Baroque and the early Latin American colonial Baroque present themselves as images of a mobile and decentered but still harmonious universe. They set themselves up as carriers of the homogeneity and rhythm of the external organizing logos that preceded them, even though this logos is characterized by its boundlessness and the inexhaustibility of its deployment. The ratio of the Leibnizian city resides in the infinite number of points from which it may he seen: no image can exhaust this infinitude, but a structure may potentially contain it, indicate it as a power, which does not mean it can carry it as a residue. With its authority and balance, this logos marks the two epistemic axes of the Baroque century: the Jesuit god (the word of infinite power) and its terrestrial metaphor, the king. On the contrary, the contemporary Baroque, the Neobaroque, reflects structurally the disharmony, the rupture of homogeneity, of the logos as an absolute, the lack that constitutes our epistemic foundation. Neobaroque of disequilibrium, structural reflection of a desire that cannot attain its object, a desire for which the logos has organized only a screen to conceal this lack. The gaze is no longer infinite: as a partial object, it has converted itself into a lost object. The route—real or verbal—no longer simply leaps over innumerable divisions; we know it attempts something that constantly escapes it, or rather, whose route is divided by the very absence around it, which it displaces. Neobaroque: a necessarily pulverized reflection of a knowledge

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that knows it is no longer “calmly” closed on itself. An art of dethronement and dispute.

Revolution

Syntactically incorrect from including incompatible allogenic elements, from multiplying the unlimited artifice of subordinate clauses until “the thread is lost,” the Neobaroque sentence—the sentence of Lezama—reveals in its incorrectness (false quotations, infelicitous “graftings” from other languages, etc.), its failure to “land on its feet,” and its loss of concordance, our loss of the single harmonious—in sum, theological—ailleurs in agreement with our image. A Baroque that, in its sway, its fall, its painterly language, at times strident, motley, and chaotic, metaphorizes the contestation of the logocentric entity that formerly structured it and us with its distance and its authority; a Baroque that rejects all instauration, that metaphorizes the disputed order, the judged god, the transgressed law. A Baroque of the Revolution.

Notes 1 This concerns a shift from one ideology to another, and not from an ideology to a

2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

science, that is, an epistemological break like that which occurred, for example, in 1845 between Ricardo’s ideology and Marx’s science. Eugenio d’Ors, Lo barroco (Madrid: Aguilar, 1964). Pierre Charpentrat, Le mirage baroque (Paris: Minuit, 1967). Jean Rousset, La littérature de l’âge Baroque en France (Paris: J. Corti, 1953). Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures (The Hague: Mouton, 1957), chap. 6n4. Dámaso Alonso, Versión en prosa de “Las Soledades” de Luis de Góngora (Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1956). I proposed the elements of a study of the metaphorical mechanisms in Paradiso, although not from the point of view of the sign, but from that of the explicitly metaphoric sentence, the one that uses the como (like), in “Dispersión / Falsas notas (Homenaje a Lezama),” Mundo Nuevo 24 (1968): 5–17 (Paris, 1968), reprinted in Escrito sobre un cuerpo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1969). In “Aproximaciones a Paradiso,” Imagen, no. 40 (1970) Julio Ortega has analyzed this metaphorical distance from a superior lexical point of view: the “aperture” between subject and predicate. Zona Franca 3, no. 47 (1967). Pablo Neruda, Canto general, part 14, Poem 13 (Santiago: Pehuén, 2005), 429. Roland Barthes, Systéme de la mode (Paris: Seuil, 1967). Robert Jammes, Etudes sur l’oeuvre poétique de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote (Bordeaux: Institut d’Études Ibériques, 1967).

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12 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: Minnesota Uni-

13 14 15

16

17

versity Press, 1984). See the summary of this work by Julia Kristeva in Critique (1967). In Borges, for example, since the parodic element is central, the quotations, external indicators of parody, are allowed to be fake, apocryphal. Julia Kristeva, “Pour une sémiologie des paragrammes,” in Tel Quel, no. 29 (1967). Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); quoted from the Spanish translation, Las palabras y las cosas, trans. Elsa Cecilia Frost (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1968), 25. Sight and voice = to the partial objects already designated by Freud, Lacan adds these two: see his course on the object (a), unpublished, at the École Normale de Paris. [Available in English as The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York/London: Norton, 1981)]. On (a)lterity and the relations between A and (a), see Moustafa Safouan, Qu’est-ce que le structuralisme? (Paris: Seuil, 1968); Spanish translation Qué es el estructuralismo?, trans. Ricardo Pochtar (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1975).

  Chapter Fifteen  

Baroque Cosmology: Kepler

Chapter 3 from Barroco Severo Sarduy

Translated by Christopher Winks

Such is the theological connotation, the iconic authority of that natural and perfect form, the circle, that when Kepler, after years of observation, discovers that Mars describes not a circle but an ellipse around the Sun, he tries to deny what he has seen: too faithful to the conceptions of ancient Cosmology to deprive the circular movement of its privilege.1 Kepler’s three laws,2 altering the scientific foundation on which rested the entire knowledge of the age, create a reference point in relation to which all symbolic activity, explicitly or not, is situated. Something is decentering itself, or rather, duplicating, dividing its center; now, the dominant figure is not the circle, with its single, radiating, luminous, paternal center, but the ellipse, which opposes this visible focal point with another, equally functional, equally real, albeit closed off, dead, nocturnal, the blind center, the other side of the Sun’s germinative yang, that which is absent. This dual focalization is carried out within a limited space—through the sphere of fixed stars—a cavity where the Earth, the Sun, and the planets are found, a space as distant as the last visible star, finite; the thought of infinity, of the noncentered, without precise location or density, the thought of Baroque topology, borders it, logical limit.3 The thought of the finite demands the impossible thought of infinity as the conceptual closure of its system and the guarantee of its functioning. The menace of the nonexistent exterior—for Kepler, the void is nothing, space exists only as a function of the bodies occupying it—the exterior of the universe and of reason, the unthinkable nature of nothingness, rules, then, at the same time, the closed economy of the universe and the finitude of the logos; on

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the contrary, the “empty, immense center, the vast hole” of our visible world, where planets trace around the Sun the concentric ellipses of their orbits, requires its physical closure in the “vault” of the fixed stars. Rather than consider the ellipse as a concluded, paralyzed form, its geometry must be assimilated to a given moment in a formal dialectic: multiple dynamic components, capable of being projected into other forms, generative. The supposedly definitive ellipse could in turn decompose, convert itself into other conic figures, reduce itself to an interaction of two nuclei or the division of a single, central one, that disappears, to the dilation of a circle, and so on. By definition, these moments lack closure; the geometrical form, in this reading, would function as a “moving gram.”4 We shall situate the retombée of the ellipse not only as a representable sign, limiting ourselves to its constitutive register—geometry and figuration— but also projecting it into another space, Rhetoric, to show, thanks to this displacement, the coherence of the logos that, as difference, generates the two versions of the figura. A projection of the conic sections, their insertion into another discourse— Rhetoric—would show this coherence in the grammar of the Baroque: ellips(e/is), parabola, and hyperbol(a/e) correspond to the two spaces: geometrical and rhetorical. It is not by chance that the Aristotelian tradition names and distributes these figures that affirm, in the nominal coincidence of their two versions, the compactness of an identical logos.5

Decentering: Caravaggio/The Baroque City The retombée of Keplerian cosmology may be situated, if we read the ellipse as a decentering and “disturbance” of the circle, with all implicit theological resonances, at a precise moment: the geometrical organization of the painting, its frame, are decentered, ex-centered; gestures, in their excess, can no longer conform to the circle of the limbs’ rotation on their axes, in solidarity  Sarduy defines retombée in an epigraph to the collection Ensayos generales sobre el

barroco (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultúra Económica, 1987), 144 as: “Timeless causality, noncontiguous isomorphy, or consequence of something yet to be produced, similar to something that does not yet exist.” Another definition, given by Sarduy in an interview, “El barroco après la lettre (entrevista con Alberto Cardín y Biel Mesquida),” Diwan, nos. 5–6 (1979): 87–109, is “epistemological solidarity between geometric and rhetorical figures” (87).—Trans.

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with Galilean cosmology, with the circle of the rotation of the planets; they have broadened, expanded, their curves are as “imperfect” as the porous, lunar matter of the bodies that make them a reality. Starting from the top— from the upper-right angle, for example, in Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ (figure 15.1), an abrupt movement unbalances and forces the figures toward the lower-left angle—Bouleau indicates the connotations of the word sinistra; weight degrades them, gravity drags them downward. The solar center (the circular charpente ii), golden, unique, no longer magnetizes and orders them; they drift, fall or rise, flee toward the edges. Now, “lowered,” they inhabit our space: calloused feet, hindquarters, rags; the sound of coins and a whiplash assail us. Theological decentering and fall: the saints are incarnate in the Roman plebeians, the scene of the miracle is a tavern, the corpse of a dropsy victim serves as the model for the Virgin’s lifeless body. Decentering—the annulment of the single center—reverberates in the symbolic space par excellence: urban discourse. The Renaissance city is Galilean, capable of being inscribed in a circle; its plan alludes to an explicit anthropomorphic metaphor, as well as to the cosmological metaphor that serves as its substrate: the heliocentric universe. On the level of the Renaissance episteme, the displacement from Earth to Sun matters little; something unifies both systems and imparts to them its infallibility and balance: the full, structuring presence of Man. For the architect theorists of the Italian Renaissance, buildings and cities had to be conceived on the basis of the model of animate bodies, of which man’s represents perfection. Its organization, then, would be dictated by the same harmonious relationships and the same rules of proportion that bind the parts of the body to each other and to the entire human form. The center of the body, the place that confers meaning, could not as yet be the heart, the motor of an organization that was not apparent and discovered much later, but the navel. For F. di G. Martini, the navel of the city was formed by the main plaza, around which were grouped the cathedral, the Prince’s Palace, and a series of institutions. Alberti and Filarete also compared the city to the body, with its bones, flesh, skin, and limbs. In all these neo-Pythagorean authors, the city center, ideally inscribed in a circle, is equally valued for its geometric properties as for its metaphysical properties.6 The centered space is semantic; it supplies redundant information that ii Frame (in French in the original).—Trans.

[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

15.1  Caravaggio, The

Entombment of Christ, 1602–4. Vatican Museums. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, New York

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refers to the known ensemble of social structures, and favors integration into them. In the umbilical city, accommodation, etiological insertion, is also a dwelling, symbolic insertion; the Galilean city functions, in regard to its semantic space, like the primitive village: the location of the hut confers and enunciates an economic status and ritual activity and even regulates the possibilities of conjugal selection. The village and the pre-Baroque city are not only limited to situating man in the interstices of its circular and motivated network, but in so doing, they also guarantee him a relation to the universe—or with the space of the dead—and insert him into a signifying topology, a spatial realm where the distance from the umbilicus, from the constitutive maternal anchor, is emblematic: where to live is to speak. Pre-Baroque urban discourse, even at its most critical and reformist, always operates in terms of “centering,” distributes in terms of motivation; thus, the Sistine reform arranges the signifying buildings in relation to a single monument—Santa Maria Maggiore—and merely “adapts the utopians’ radiocentric scheme to an orographically complex situation conditioned by the pre-existing ones”;7 the Baroque city, on the contrary, presents itself as an open argument, not referable to a privileged signifier that magnetizes and confers meaning on it. Pietro de Cortona “extends the architectonic discourse into the surrounding urban scene and thereby expresses, in the clearest possible way, the new conception of the monument as an element in a continuous fabric with which it blends dialectically.”8 Decentering: repetition. Let nothing disturb the persistence, the uniformity of the façades and ornaments in flight, straight, as in the perspective of Renaissance landscape painters, toward the line of the horizon, let nothing interrupt the syllogistic continuity of the urban text, of sidewalks and cornices, as if nothing should fracture, from the smallest to the largest degree, the lithic continuity of measurable space, nor that of time, perpetual succession of identical moments, without any relationship to the experience of life: a clock marks it off in every bourgeois living room. Perspective, time, money: all is measure, quantity, repetition: all is analyzable, fragmentable: the body into organs, morality into individual cases (codified by the Jesuits), trade into calculation and accounting, gold into uniformly calibrated and minted coins, the earth into States with precise frontiers, architecture into orders, the city into fragmentary units, reducible to geometrical figures, avenues that move forward, without twists and turns, regardless of destination; what counts are the series, the obsessive align-

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ment, the repetition of columns, moldings, and even men who, identical, imperturbable, and mechanized as well, move up and down the avenues, dressed in their Sunday best for the military parades. “The act of passage is more important than the object reached: there is keener interest in the foreground of the Farnese Palace than in the gawky façade that caps the hill.”9 But the insistence on rectilinear uniformity is not only a sign of contempt for the final monument—reduced to a triumphal arch or a sign of the meeting of the lines on the horizon, or to a confirmation of the perspective’s functioning—but a suggestion of movement, of speed. The baroque: a space of journey, a traversal of repetition. The city, which establishes the quantifiable and repetitive, which in the urban phrase makes a metaphor of an infinity that can be articulated in units, also establishes the surprising, quasi-scenic rupture of this continuity, insisting on the uncanny, valorizing the ephemeral, threatening the perpetuity of every order. Everything may be prolonged—the nature of things allows that—and hence inspires boredom. An almost hysterical apotheosis of the new, even of the outlandish: obelisks, grotesque fountains to detract from the monotony of the avenues, ruins, or fake ruins, to go deeper into and negate the silent course of the past, whose history, as Lewis Mumford points out, may be found more in the traces it has left in living forms.10 Newspapers outdate yesterday’s event with the galaxy of today’s events, completely unconnected to each other save in their simultaneity; fashion, ever changing, mocks the style of dress already seen: it is impossible—there is no zero degree of clothing—not to follow it. Baroque urban space, a phrase of decentering as repetition and rupture, is also semantic, but in a negative way: on receiving man into succession and monotony, it does not guarantee him a symbolic inscription; on the contrary, it dis-locates him, makes him stumble, deprives him of all reference to a unique and authoritarian signifier, points out to him his absence in this order, which at the same time displays dispossession as uniformity.

Double Virtual Center: El Greco The ∫ reflection (∫ ∫) with which Lomazzo traces the secret monogram of perfection, structures several of El Greco’s works (figure 15.2).11 A serpentine line, he calls it: “Each movement must be represented in such a way that the

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15.2  El

Greco (Domenico Theotokópoulos), The Feast in the House of Simon, 1610–14. Chicago Art Institute. Photograph: The Art Institute of Chicago

body resembles a serpent, to which nature easily lends itself.”12 The frenzy of figures: their ascent twisting them, forcing them to organize themselves, to fit into a rigorous ornament contrasting with their gestures, helices. Two virtual centers—of the upper curves—in specular correspondence to each other, magnetize the composition. Only the invisible scaffolding of the canvas reveals them; no figure occupies them: the personages turn toward them, crossing point of gazes. In this dual specular and negative focalization, in this monitored symmetry in the void, we may read a “moment of passivity” in the generative dialectic of the ellipse, a gram of retraction and absence. A virtual, feminine—metonymic—moment in the figure’s germination: the unoccupied centers do not limit themselves to totalizing the composition in an alternative way, to displacing the gaze from one level to another,

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.] Paul Rubens, The Exchange of the Two Princesses from France and Spain upon the Bidassoa at Hedaye, November 9, 1615. From the Medici Cycle, 1622–25. The Louvre. Photograph: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York

15.3  Peter

contiguous one, but rather mark the function of the organizing deficiency within the interior of the signifying chain, the importance of the rejected focalization in the metonymic network of representation.13 Its dialectical reversal: real, masculine—metaphorical—may be found, perfectly legible, in Rubens’s painting.

Double Real Center: Rubens Rubens’s The Exchange of Princesses literally illustrates the moment of dual positive focalization, a possible constituent of generating the ellipse (figure 15.3). Two sturdy helmeted lads—allegories of Spain and France, the same figure in its two solsticial positions—rotate, forming a careful open ellipse—their hands do not manage to touch: a naked figure, barely visible, angel or zephyr, tries to close it.

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At the upper level, a whirlwind of angels, a wave closed by held hands, materializes a perfect, celestial ellipse, and frames a cornucopia—the gold it scatters descends on the princesses. The upper ellipse duplicates, in the allegorical space par excellence—the heavens—the rotation carried out by the earthly allegories—Spain and France—just as the latter duplicate on Earth, in the elliptical tracing of their displacements, the order of the astronomical heavens, the trajectory of the planets, Earth itself among them. The organization of the real astronomical heavens—the Keplerian orbit— is reflected in the allegorized figuration on Earth, the curve traced by the lads, just as the latter is reflected in the symbolic cycle, the spiral of the ­angels. Two real centers—occupied by figures—those of the earthly ellipse: with these the exchanged princesses coincide. One is luminous, svelte, and glowing—solar; the other, of course, is smaller, more sober, and discreet.

Anamorphosis of the Circle: Borromini Among the ellipse’s generative possibilities, one possesses especial geometrical verisimilitude: that which confers on the circle the power of elasticity, and on its center—as with a cellular nucleus—the capacity of splitting. Dilation of the contour and duplication of the center, or rather, a slippage programmed by the point of observation, from a frontal position to that maximum laterality enabling the real construction of another regular figure: anamorphosis. The process Borromini probably followed in his drawing for the plan of San Carlino retraces these dynamic possibilities of the circle. The original design of the Michelangelesque Saint Peter’s—a central circle inscribed in a Greek cross whose arms end in circles—undergoes an initial mutation according to Portoghesi, when all the elements of pause are eliminated, that is, the rectangular arms that delay contact between the central space and the curvilinear endings of the apses. The resulting design is deformed longitudinally through a process of anamorphosis that confers on the material a kind of elasticity: the semioval apses are derived from the projective transformation of the semicircular apses of the initial design; here, the emblematic ellipse of the Baroque, the Borrominian ellipse, central form of the final plan, renders explicit one of its probable etiologies: the anamorphosis of the circle.

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Generated on the basis of the circle, through longitudinal dilation, the planimetrical ellipse, formal basis of the pheno-plane in Borromini’s practice, may serve to illustrate the validity of this figure in the Baroque projective; the ellipse cannot be considered as a derivation of the circle, as does the idealist tradition from Plato to Galileo, or as a “reduction,” an anomaly or residue of a prior perfect form. Derivation is used here in the lexicological sense of the term: the forms obtained, which we call secondary only out of prejudice, possess equal “performative” power to the supposedly basic infinitives that (temporal) priority has endowed with priority (used here as a blue-chip term): a “stock” privileged above the others. Chronological precedence—arbitrary: we could generate the circle by contracting the ellipse— has been granted authoritarian normativity in a hierarchy of values whose maniacal reference is that of origin.

Ellipsis: Góngora Ellipsis prepares the terrain, the ground of the Baroque, not only in its mechanical application, according to the prescription of the rhetorical code— suppression of one of the elements necessary to a complete construction— but in a broader register: suppression in general, theatrical occultation of a term to the advantage of another that abruptly receives the light. Caravaggianism: reduction, rejection to the darkness of the background/zenithal raising up of the object: “Góngora’s light is an elevation of objects and a time where incitement is empowered. In this sense one may speak of a Gothic quality to his elevated light. That light which gathers up the object and then produces irradiation.”14 Ellipsis operates as the refusal of one element and metonymic concentration of the light in another, a laser that reaches its maximum intensity in Góngora: “His luminosity, the most concentrated beam of light ever manifested in any Romance language.”15 Or if you like: suppression, drought, or deficiency of the landscape/joyous

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exaltation of the still life occupying the foreground: “The circumstance of the Counter-Reformation makes Góngora’s work into a Counter-Renaissance. It suppresses the landscape in which that luminosity of his could have occupied the center. The Jesuit Baroque, cold and ethical, voluntarist and sparingly ornamental, is born and develops in the decadence of its poetic word, but even before that, the cold circle and the plaster landscape had been made for it, opposing its javelins with cardboard hands . . . , a banquet where light displays the fishes and the turkeys.”16 On provoking the momentary incandescence of the object, its crackling spark before one’s eyes, abruptly extracting it from opacity, dragging it into its complementary dark night,17 Baroque discourse, respecting thereby the didactic slogans of Aristotelianism, reproduces a practice for sharpening vision, which Lezama locates in falconry: “Sometimes Góngora’s treatment of the poetic line recalls the laws and customs for the treatment of falcons. The heads of these birds are covered with a hood that fashions a false night for their senses. Released from their cunningly fashioned nocturnal caps, there yet remains with them the memory of their adjustment to night vision, so that they can see in the distance the incitement of the crane or partridge.”18 The apogee of the ellipsis in the symbolic space of rhetoric, its Gongorine exaltation, coincides with the imposition of its geometric double, the ellipse, in the discourse of astronomy: Keplerian theory. In the rhetorical figure, in the economy of its signifying power,19 is privileged, in a process of dual focalization, one focal point to the detriment of the other. An ellipsis, in its two versions, appears to be drawn around two centers: one of them visible (the marked signifier / the Sun) shining in the Baroque phrase; the other occluded (the hidden signifier / the virtual center of the planets’ ellipse), elided, excluded, obscure.20 The notion of lack, of defect, can be found in the etymology of the term and anticipates the prejudices to which it will be subjected: “Ελλει�ις, which means lack or defect, is applied to ellipsis, since in it something has been suppressed, and also to the ellipse, since it lacks something that would make it a perfect circle: from εν and λείπείνε, to lack.” In Baroque rhetoric, the ellipsis is identified with the mechanism of darkening, the repudiation of a signifier expelled from the symbolic universe. As is known, this occultation, in Gongorine poetry, is not fortuitous; it corresponds, as in all organized discourse, to inflexible though unformulated laws: “The ugly, the uncomfortable, the disagreeable” disappear by means of a “clever sleight-of-hand” that enables the flight of “the gross name and the

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horrid detail.”21 This work of repression and the projection of the metaphorical ray of light onto the substitute for the repressed word is obvious when we consider the corrections made between the first edition of the Soledades and the final version. Thus, in the passage 291–96 of the first Soledad, the words gallinas (chickens: ill-omened animals) and Medicina (which carries a disagreeable connotation) are elided: First version: iii Quien las no breves sumas de pendientes gallinas baja a cuestas —si corales las crestas azabache las plumas—, tan saludables en edad cualquiera que su borla creyera les dio la Medicina a ser gualda la que es púrpura fina. Whoso with the no slight sum of fowl dangling from his back descends —if coral their crests jet-black their feathers—, of such good health, recking not age that their tassel, i’faith, by Medicine could be bestowed, were’t golden, though ’tis finest purple.

Final version (ll. 291–96): Cuál dellos las pendientes sumas graves de negras baja, de crestadas aves, cuyo lascivo esposo vigilante doméstico es del Sol nuncio canoro, y—de coral barbado—no de oro ciñe, sino de púrpura, turbante. Whoso of them wi’the heavy hanging sum of black, of crested birds descends, iii Translations of Góngora are mine.—Trans.

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whose lustful spouse, watchful, domestic is o’the Sun melodious herald and—of coral bearded—not of gold is crowned, but of purple, its turban.

Alonso’s paraphrase: “Of these chickens with crests fiery as coral and feathers black as jet, I could think they owed their health to their medical knowledge (that their crest was the doctoral tassel, if it were yellow instead of purple).” iv Elision is frequently practiced on names of animals considered ill-omened or vulgar; the turkey is signified as (11309–14): Tú, ave peregrina, arrogante esplendor—ya que no bello— del último Occidente: penda el rugoso nácar de tu frente sobre el crespo zafiro de tu cuello, que Himeneo a sus mesas te destina. Thou, pilgrim bird, arrogant splendor—though fair th’art not— thy wizened pearly brow doth hang upon the curléd sapphire of thy neck, of th’ultimate West: Hymenaeus for his tables hath thee destined.

Alonso’s paraphrase: “Oh turkey, oh thou! bird that arrived to us on pilgrimage from the West Indies, arrogant splendor of theirs because of your size (since by your form you cannot be called fair), you can let hang (as they say you do when you get angry) the wrinkled, pearly skin of your brow upon your bluish, curly neck, but all that will be useless, because the god of weddings, Hymenaeus, has already destined you for the nuptial repast.” Finally, second Soledad, ll. 723–31: iv Dámaso Alonso, a poet and member of the Generation of ’27, was a distinguished

scholar of Luis de Góngora’s work. Alonso gives a full prose rendering of Góngora’s two Solitudes in Alonso, Las Soledades (Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1956). For the second prose extract, Sarduy cites page 126. For the first prose extract, he cites Alonso’s essay, “La primitiva versión de las ‘Soledades,’” Estudios y ensayos gongorinos, 276–85, 280.—Trans.

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Al Sol levantó apenas la ancha frente el veloz hijo ardiente del céfiro lascivo —cuya fecunda madre al genitivo soplo vistiendo miembros, Guadalete florida ambrosía al viento dio jinete—, que a mucho humo abriendo la fogosa nariz, en un sonoro relincho y otro saludó sus rayos. To the Sun scarcely had raised the broad brow the swift ardent son of the lascivious zephyr —whose fecund mother the genitive breath clothed in limbs, Guadalete flow’ry ambrosia to the wind gave a rider—, than he, to much smoke opening his fiery nostrils, with a sonorous neigh and another greeted its rays.

conceals, beneath its luster, mares and horses, as Alonso notes: “hardly had the fecund Andalusian mare (the mother of horses that are the wind itself), her hide multicolored like the rainbow, conceived by means of the purest breath of the engendering wind, horse and mother alike (he panting fire, she smoke) champed at the golden bit.” The grass on the shores of the Guadalete River is like ambrosia, the food of the steeds of the Sun, according to Ovid. The classic mechanism of ellipsis is analogous to that which psychoanalysis knows by the name of suppression (Unterdrückung/repression), a psychic operation that tends to exclude from consciousness a disagreeable or untimely content. Suppression, like ellipsis, is an operation that remains within the consciousness system: the suppressed signifier, like the elided one, passes into the domain of the preconscious and not into that of the unconscious: the poet will always have more or less present the signifier that has been expelled from his legible discourse. In the extremely cultured universe of the Baroque, the mechanism of metaphor is raised to what we have called its power squared;22 while other poets depart from the linear, informative statement, Góngora does so from

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a basic terrain composed of an already metaphorical stratum equipped with those figures of Renaissance tradition that have constituted discoveries for the preceding poetry, which he considers to be “healthy” and “natural” statements, and those which, through a new metaphorization, would provide access to the specifically verbal surface. We may consider that the absent and doubly remote term of these metaphors is “ignored” by the Baroque poet in his work of codification,23 which belongs to a cultural unconscious hidden beneath the process of naturalization and to which not even the codifier himself has access; in this case, the Baroque metaphor would identify itself with a radically different mode of suppression, which consists in a change of structure: repression (Verdrängung/refoulement). It is on the level of the Unconscious system that this operation is fully developed, by means of which the representatives of representations linked to certain pulsions find themselves thrust aside or maintained.24 To the extent that it identifies itself with an organization of deficiency, and above all as an “originary” deficiency, repression sets in motion a metonymical functioning that implies the indefinite flight of an object of pulsion; but, to the extent that through the symptom it allows a return of the repressed to be partially discerned—the symptom is a signifier in the economy of neurosis,25 it is confused precisely with metaphor.26 Baroque language, re-elaborated by the double work of elision, acquires, as does the language of delirium, the quality of a metallic surface, a reflector without an apparent other side, in which the signifiers (such is the degree to which their semantic economy has been suppressed) seem to be reflected in themselves, to refer to themselves, to be degraded into empty signs: metaphors, precisely because they encounter each other in their own space, that of symbolic displacement (also something to which the symptom resorts) lose their metaphorical dimension. Their meaning does not precede their production; it is their emergent product, the meaning of the signifier, which connotes the relation of the subject to the signifier. This is how Baroque language, like delirium, functions: “These verbal allusions, these kabbalistic relationships, these games of homonymy, these puns . . . and, I would say, this accent of singularity whose resonance in a word we must know how to listen to in order to detect the delirium, this transfiguration of the term into ineffable intention, this fixation of the idea on the semanteme (which in this case tends precisely to be degraded into a sign), these hybrids of vocabulary, this verbal cancer of the neologism, this glutinization of syntax, this duplicity of the statement, but also this coherence equivalent to a logic, this characteris-

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tic which, from the unity of a style to stereotypes, marks every form of delirium: through all this the alienated person, through spoken or written word, communicates with us” (167–68). The elided terms—in both discourses— are few in number: those “representatives of representation” linked, directly or not, to certain pulsions: death, not accidental in the Baroque, which, out of denial, multiplied the funerary ornament; and the scatological, which has already been stated in that abundance of gold. The symbolic resources of elision, on the contrary, are as unlimited as language—there are a vast number of synonyms for “expulsion”; however, it is the constitutive character of symbols that brings them closer and reduces them; just as prime numbers are found in the matrix of all the others, so do symbols of a discourse underlie all these semantemes; a discreet investigation—that is, attentive to discontinuity, difference, the breaking points in the signifying chain, thanks to which meaning emerges—of its interferences, following the thread of a metaphor whose symbolic displacement would neutralize the second meanings of the terms with which it associates, would restore to the word its full evocative value (295). Lacan adds that “this technique would require, both to teach us and for us to learn from, a profound assimilation of the resources of a language and especially of those that are concretely realized in poetic texts” (295). In both discourses, the signifying burden of the terms, their capacity to refer to the dark center—the “ugly, uncomfortable, disagreeable” signifier, the “ghastly detail” of the Baroque/psychoanalysis’s “pathogenic knot,” obeys neither the work of textual elaboration to which they have been subjected, nor its almost always deceptive semantic dependency in relation to the virtual center, but simply its position with respect to it, that is, its insertion into the specifically symbolic topology of the ellips(e/is): thus, discreet musical listening (deciphering of the discourse on the basis of sound), the truth of hearing, enables the radial detection of the presence of the “pathogenic knot,” or of the elided signifier, and its proximity: Lacan writes that the metaphor of this detection, of Freudian origin, “evokes the pentagram in which the subject unfolds ‘longitudinally,’ to use Freud’s term, the chains of his discourse, following a score whose leitmotiv is the ‘pathogenic knot.’ In reading this score, resistance is manifested ‘radically,’ a term opposed to the preceding one, and with a development proportional to the proximity of the line in the course of being deciphered, to that which liberates, by concluding it, the central melody” (371–72). These radii are isomorphs of the axes of the ellipse and of the longitudinal

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discourse, of the line it describes, assumed to be uniform, around the double center. In appearance, only the manifest (solar) center imparts its signifying brilliance, carefully orders the distribution of figures and gold; in reality, if we listen discreetly, there immediately appear preaudible and hence locatable points in which the theme reappears, points regularly repeated, errors, defects in the orbit, marks that must be traced, moments in which the word vacillates, or on the contrary, relapses, in the unfolding of the same signifying elements. “Luxuriant parentheses in the period of the current”—like the islands of a river in Las soledades—mirage, anagram, tympanal labor. In this functioning of the discourse, what remains to be elucidated is a site: that of the subject. This, if in fact it is about him (the entire Lacanian topology does no more than test it), is because he is not where he is expected to be, in the site where an Ego visibly governs the discourse being enunciated, but in the place where no one knows where to look for him—beneath the elided signifier which the Ego had believed it had expelled, from which the Ego believes itself expelled. Thus, in the very moment in which the subject “emerges” as meaning in a given place in the text—for which he must already be a minimal element of the language, a “unary trace” in the field of the Other—it vanishes in another place, fading, where something is lost or falls from language: the representative of representation. In this sense, the two centers of the ellipse perfectly illustrate the subject in his constituent division. More: it can be seen how metaphor, by causing the emergence within a signifying chain of a term coming from another chain, is, as Lacan says, a metaphor of the subject: not only does it refer to another register of meaning but also to another site in which to find the subject. On this level, it may also be said that Baroque writing, in its abundance in the service of a repression, is the truth of all language. The object of repression is not meaning itself (nor the affect, which would simply be displaced), but an (overdetermined) signifier, which, because it is a representative, Lacan compares to an ambassador. To the extent that the subject circulates beneath the chain, to the extent that it shines in the path of the orbit as its supposed center, it appears alien to the dark center, but when a signifier of more or less weight comes to mark the deficiency—detectable in the representative of the representation—the   F  ading is in English and italicized in the original.—Trans.

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

15.4  Diego

de Silva Velázquez, Las meninas, 1656. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Photograph: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York

chain then lets the subject fall from its unique place, sends him out of orbit, and then he comes to situate himself, like the inverse of his shining, within the night of the second center.

Ellipsis of the Subject: Velázquez Las meninas has a place in all this, presenting the spectator, condensed in the moment of the gaze, first in that the painting structures itself as a totality, with the entire process—the elevation to the power squared—of Baroque metaphor: its double elision, its insistent labor, and then, in the brevity of a reflection, in the fortuitous coincidence of the eye and the specular image, the frontal revelation, albeit at a virtual meridian, of the elided subject, its extraction (figure 15.4). A double ellipsis: absence of the named, erasure of that invisible exterior that the painting organizes as a reflection, erasure of that which the canvas reproduces and one looks at, one turns around to look at: an absence here

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underscored by the very structure of the work and that, invading its halffaded center, the mirror restores: that which in the painting, Foucault notes, is twice necessarily invisible, a metathesis of visibility. But on the basis of this ellipsis, at once inherent in the picture because of its existence as a painting, and constitutive of this picture because of its particular composition, another one is produced that raises the work to a Baroque level, as one would raise a number to a power, and that designates it as a model of the Baroque ciphering of codification: the subject (theme) elided here is also the subject, the foundation of representation, he “whom the representation resembles, he in whose eyes representation is only a resemblance”; the organizing center of the logos in its solar metaphor; the king, around whom everyone revolves and whom everyone sees; his metaphysical correlate—the master who represents, the gaze that organizes, he who sees. Put simply, the possibility of a frontal (nonradial) reading, the emergence of the subject, doubly elided, as a specular image, its conception as an indivisible entity and its extraction without residues, fully situates us in an idealist reading whose own admirable functioning would suffice as a guarantee of fallacy: such a deciphering, by offering up its clarity, reveals its precise function, that which the dream, as a screen, uses to conceal while displaying. Venturing another interpretation of Las meninas can only be carried out under the ever-stammering rubric of the hypothesis “what if . . .” What if Velázquez, in Las meninas, were not painting, as the theory of specular reflection has it, the portrait of the static, admired sovereigns but, in an emblematic Baroque tautology, precisely Las meninas? What leads us to this hypothesis is the fact that the dimensions of the represented painting coincide with those of the real painting seen from the distance at which the spectator finds himself—the empty site of the models; the frames of both canvases also visibly correspond. Proof by analogy: one day in Alcaná de Toledo, in the portfolios and old papers that a boy is about to sell to a silk merchant, Cervantes becomes interested in a manuscript written in characters that he knows to be Arabic; thanks to a Christianized Moor and an allusion to Dulcinea (the hand she uses to salt pork), he discovers that it is the Quixote itself, in its original version, written by the Arab historian Cide Hamete Benengeli (I, IX). Cervantes is disconcerted to know that its author, the author of El ingenioso Hidalgo, “was a Moor, according to that name of Cide, and from Moors one

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must never expect truth, because they are all liars, deceivers, and fabulists” (II, III).vi The Quixote finds himself in the Quixote—like las meninas in Las meninas— reversed: of the painting in the painting we see only the frames; of the book in the book, its reverse: the Arabic characters, to be read from right to left, invert the Castilian ones; they are its mirror image; Islam and its “liars, deceivers, and fabulists” are also the reverse, Christianity’s Other, Spain’s frame. A supplement: a mirror “placed so that, seen from the point at which its frame and the frame of the picture itself coincide, it conveys an astonishing perspectival effect” that comes to occupy, in the room of the Prado and to achieve this effect, the site in which, to realize the tautological work, Velázquez had to set up an identical mirror; to take advantage of this surprising effect, we must turn our backs on the painting and renounce its looking at us. We have said nothing, then, about the reflection, including that of the work in the work, while we see in it a displaced double. This does not involve a return of what is absent in the mirror; there is also a mercurial aspect, a reversal of the painting, a sense of writing; the reflection is not produced without something being lost, without something slipping from the exposed center to the dark center. Every reflection has its opaque double, which collides with the act of deciphering. We have asked ourselves very little about what Velázquez is painting in Las meninas or about the false innocence of the mirrors. This curious matter would have made us understand that the subject does not return as unique, unified, complete, to a precise point; that we cannot apprehend it frontally. And what if the painting’s structure—another analysis coincides with ours here—and its perspectival arrangement did not withdraw, as it were, toward its vanishing point, toward the mirror (and the king), but toward two noncoincident points? On the one hand, that door through which a man who has observed the scene and the characters being represented “flees” toward the outside. This man, homonymous with the man organizing the representation—his name is Nieto Velázquez—is the one who has seen the reversal of what, as an absent person, he is looking at. More than the models in the room, he contemplates the Gongorine internal design, more than the scene, the reversed plane of the painting represented in the painting. The one who vi This quotation is from Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha

(Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2005), 566.—Trans.

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leaves, says Lacan, is the one who sees himself and who has seen; the one who stays—Velázquez—is the other vanishing point; it is the gaze he will come to paint in our place, the place of sight, but to the extent that the latter does not contain the gaze; the master leaves it on the canvas. In primitive painting, the painter is present as a donor; in classical painting, as the center of perspective, the eye that organizes the coincidence of the lines at the vanishing point—the code of representation; in Las meninas, as alternately a represented gaze and presenting act (vision). The painting, adds Lacan, is a trap: it asks the eye to deposit that partial object, the gaze— vision’s interior—which “collides with the brush on the canvas so that you can bring to light your own gaze before the painter’s eye.”27 And if everything could be read in terms of an interstice, a groove, a constitutive fault line of the subject whose metaphor reverberates in each illusion of unity, that of the author, that of the spectator, that of the logos, a groove of the eyelid, a doubling of the name and even—unable to be specularized, hidden beneath the shining skirt, the Infanta’s sex; Lacan creates a play on words between Infanta and fente, groove. By showing itself in reverse, the representation rotates and duplicates itself—two spaces, split subject (the author and his homonym), double ellipsis, half of the representation in the representation (since the upper part of the painting is occupied solely by other paintings and a window that, though an invisible frame of diffused light, is sufficient to be identified as such), half of what is represented in the representation (the lower part of the painting, occupied by the represented characters, including the master representing them); painting—almost the whole of the picture—and nonpainting; the very painting quoted that only shows the armature of representation, its base. This double scene only points out its defect: the impossibility of gaining access to the elided, not even as a specular image, an irreducible tautology without remainders: the work is in the work, true, but—as in the Quixote and Las meninas—to underscore its alterity, an untranslated work, reversing itself, forever illegible.

Notes 1 Attachment to a form always veils an attempt at an ideal totalization: a master

identity is postulated, a conformity of primary tangible structures, static or dynamic, to a model or common generative force, promoted thereby to the rank of an ulti-

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mate and hence ontological meaning. If today the reduction to the circle appears clumsy to us, the temptation of a positivist reading, in a purely formal code of interaction—in other words, forgetting, avoiding, or rejecting the instance of the subject, its insertion in the symbolic field where the enunciation of these forms is carried out—is omnipresent. Today, a decipherment of this sort would lead us to assert that if a figure traverses us, models the cosmos vertically, it is doubtless a helix: the DNA chain is configured as a double helix; the Milky Way has spiral arms. The helicoidal mannerism that postulates the contraposto, which deforms and propels the figures, as well as the Borrominian baroque outlining the helical towers of San Ivo alla Sapienza, would have caused the emergence into reality, the passage into the space of representation, of the elemental paradigmatic structure. But rather than confirm or invalidate the previous isomorphy, the logocentric foundation of every isomorphic reduction would have to be investigated; this investigation, this going beyond isomorphic thought, must pass through the negation/ integration of formal models, just as the transgression of metaphysics implies that its limits are always active; going beyond metaphysics is carried out—as Derrida affirms—as an aggression and transgression supported by a code to which metaphysics is irreducibly linked. (1) The planets describe ellipses, one of whose centers is the center of the sun; (2) the radius joining the center of the sun to the center of the planet travels through equal areas in equal times; (3) the relationship of the cube of half of the major axis to the square of the period is the same for all planets. “This thought—of the universe’s infinity—conveys I know not what secret horror; indeed, one finds oneself wandering in the midst of this immensity without limit and without a center and, for this very reason, without a fixed location” (Kepler). As is well known, Pascal felt the same horror, but with a difference: for him, the vertigo of the infinite engenders its vortex: it is precisely where there is no place, or where place is absent, that one encounters the subject. One of the possible “tabular models” would consider the “decentering,” the “double center”—a manifest center that could be assimilated to the signifier and a virtual center that could be assimilated to the signified—and so on. I apply to this figure a textual operation proposed by J. Kristeva, Semeiotikè (Paris: Seuil, 1969). A future text should investigate the retombée of the parabola and the hyper‑  bol(a/e); the present study is limited to disseminating the ellips(e/is), foundation of the Baroque. Françoise Choay, Connexions (Paris: H. C., 1970). Paolo Portoghesi, Borromini nella cultura europea (Rome: Officina Edizioni, 1964), 11. Ibid. Lewis Mumford, The City in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961), 365. I take from the same author the notion of the simultaneity of historical occurrences. Such as The Feast in the House of Simon, in the Art Institute of Chicago.

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12 Lomazzo, book 5, chap. 4.

13 I use here a Lacanian definition of metonymy as specified by François Wahl, Dic-

tionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage (Paris: Seuil, 1972), 442.

14 José Lezama Lima, “Sierpe de Don Luis de Góngora,” in Los grandes todos (Monte-

video: Arca, 1968), 192–93.

15 Ibid., 215.

16 Ibid., 196.

17 Writing on Las soledades, Lezama projects the metaphor of the dark night into what

18 19

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he considers a textual complementarity: Góngora/Saint John of the Cross: “What was lacking in this penetration of luminosity was Saint John’s dark night, since that ray of light of poetic knowledge without its accompanying dark night could only show the lightning flash of the falconress acting on the plaster cast. Perhaps no other people has had such a concentrated exposition of its poetry as in this Spanish moment, in which Góngora’s metaphorical ray of light, displaying painful incompleteness, needs and clamors for that enveloping and friendly dark night. . . . The survival of Baroque Spanish poetics will consist in the ever-contemporary possibilities of Góngora’s metaphorical ray of light enveloped by Saint John’s dark night.” Lezama Lima, “Sierpe de Don Luis de Góngora,” 204, 209. The function of the positive along with the negative—of the object and its night—as complementarity and alternation, may be assimilated, more than to any other aspect of classical thought, despite the Aristotelian contradictions we have pointed out, to a system of antagonistic dualities in whose juxtaposition is a back-and-forth movement that would be legible through the Hegelian dialectic or through its origins in Renaissance thought: Bruno. Lezama Lima, “Sierpe de Don Luis de Góngora,” 200. Another economic reading of the ellipse, a new approach to the figure: “Its development, which makes the commodity appear as a thing with two faces, use-value and exchange-value, does not make these contradictions disappear but rather creates the form in which they are able to move. On the other hand, it is the only method for resolving real contradictions. For example, it is a contradiction that a body should constantly collide with another and yet be in constant flight from it. The ellipse is one of the forms of movement through which this contradiction simultaneously resolves and realizes itself.” Philippe Sollers, Names, 2.98 (Paris: Seuil, 1968). The dialectic governing the appearances of the centers is comparable to that which opposed Port-Royal’s hidden god to Versailles’s solar god, and it exceeds the aesthetic, moral, or sociopolitical meaning usually conferred on it. Dámaso Alonso attributes this eliding function to the metaphor as such. My use of ellipsis, which goes beyond the strictly rhetorical, can include this as one of its particular cases. See Dámaso Alonso, Las soledades (Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1956). Severo Sarduy, “Sur Góngora,” Tel Quel, no. 25 (1986): 91–93, and in Escrito sobre un cuerpo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1968), 55–60. These quotation marks are more than necessary; of course, it matters little whether the poet knows it or not—the trap of psychologizing; on the contrary, what does

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matter is whether it is inscribed in a decipherable form in the signifier, whose chain, if it can be called that, “knows” the poet well. The definition of these Freudian concepts is taken from Jean Laplanche and J. B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967). Of course, this concerns a symptom that functions as a signifier; in other words, that differentiates itself from the “natural index” that constitutes the notion of symptom in medicine. Lacan insists on this total identification “Si le symptôme est une métaphore, ce n’est pas une métaphore que de le dire” (“If the symptom is a metaphor, speaking it is not.” Tr.). Écrits (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1966), 528. “Du regard, ça s’étale au pinceau sur la toile, pour vous faire mettre bas le vôtre devant l’oeil du peintre” (“There is in painting a certain dompte-regard, a taming of the gaze, that is to say, that he who looks is always led by the painting to lay down his gaze”). Jacques Lacan, “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras du Ravissement de Lol V. Stein,” Cahiers Renard-Barrault, no. 52 (December 1965). [I cite the translation of this phrase from another essay by Lacan, “What Is a Picture?” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York/London: Norton, 1981), 109; the English translation of “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras” is found in its entirety in Duras on Duras, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987).—Trans.]

Editors’ Note to “The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under   the Sign of Devoration” by Haroldo de Campos

The foremost Brazilian Neobaroque poet-critic Haroldo de Campos is a key figure in the recovery of the Brazilian Baroque, as well as a founding member of the Brazilian concrete poetry movement of the 1950s. Baroque features appear in de Campos’s poetry before and after the minimalist phase of concrete poetry in the 1950s: his volume of poetry from 1984, Galáxias, which comprises prose poems of vertiginous wordplay composed between 1963 and 1976, is a defining work of Neobaroque poetry. The Baroque is also the subject of several key essays by de Campos. In “A obra de arte aberta” (“The Open Work of Art,” 1955), de Campos coins  the term Neobaroque and argues for the decentered, “open work of art as a kind of modern Baroque” (Novas 222). In attempting to define the fragmentary poetics of Stéphane Mallarmé, James Joyce, e.e. cummings, and Ezra Pound, de Campos coins Neobaroque, a term for which Severo Sarduy is generally given credit, and properly so, because he will explicate it more fully in his essay of 1972, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” included here, and will popularize it in his subsequent fiction. Another important essay by de Campos, which has recently been translated into English, is “O sequestro do barroco na formação da literatura brasileira: O caso Gregório de Matos” (“Disappearance of the Baroque in Brazilian Literature: The Case of Gregório de Matos,” 1989), in which the author recuperates the Brazilian Baroque poet Gregório de Matos (1636–95), a contemporary of the Mexican poet Sor Juana de la Cruz. De Campos argues that Matos’s nonlinear, ludic, experimental poetry has been excluded from Antonio Candido’s influential linear-teleological account of Brazilian national literature. For further consideration of these forking branches in Brazilian literary history, see Jorge Ruedas de la Serna’s essay in this volume.

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The essay that we include here by de Campos was written in 1981. It extends and complicates the Brazilian contribution to the postcolonial debate by recuperating the influential essay of 1928, “Manifesto antropófago” (“Cannibalist Manifesto”), by Oswald de Andrade, the foremost polemicist of the Brazilian vanguarda. Andrade’s metaphor of anthropophagy, or cannibalism, contested (and ridiculed) the Romantic primitivism inherent in European modernism: Andrade envisioned a “bad savage” (as opposed to the “noble savage” of European lineage) who devoured his strongest enemies to acquire their strengths, a figure that both summoned and overturned the European discourse of civilization versus barbarism. In turn, de Campos associates this transcultural process, this “antitradition” of “devoration,” with the Brazilian Baroque—the first instance of Brazilian anthropophagy. De Campos recognized the hybrid origins of Brazil in the Baroque. Lacking the vast indigenous civilizations of the Andes and Mesoamerica, Brazilian culture (like the cultures of the Caribbean) emerged from a process of assimilative transformation whereby things initially alien were appropriated (cannibalized) to become Brazilian. De Campos’s account is comparable to that of the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier, for whom the symbiosis of cultural mestizaje is basic to the New World Baroque (see Carpentier’s essays in this volume). The formative role that de Campos establishes for the Baroque in Brazilian culture generally is confirmed by the Brazilian Neobaroque architectural modernism of Oscar Niemeyer (figures 16.1 and 16.2), Lúcio Costa, and Robert Burle Marx, who famously blended the International Style with a return to the architecture of Brazil’s colonial Baroque. Furthermore, de Campos establishes important links between the historical hybridity of the Baroque and the decentering strategies of twentieth-century Neobaroque literature, referring to an array of recent Latin American writers, including Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, João Guimarães Rosa, and Sarduy. De Campos’s “cannibal reason” begins as a decolonizing strategy for New World writers and then becomes a “planetary redevoration.” If, for Andrade, Brazilian writers “fed upon” European metropolitan texts and traditions to create their own, for de Campos, all writers must now do the same. Thus de Campos recannibalizes his precursor, transforming Andrade’s metaphor into a Neobaroque banquet of “digestive rumbles,” “carousing ancestral ruminations,” and “cultural mastication” to show that “to write means, more and more, to rewrite, to re-chew.” Leaving off his metaphoric gourmandizing, de Campos concludes that “Otherness is, above all, a necessary exercise in selfcriticism” (BNW 338).

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Bibliography By the Author

Campos, Haroldo de. “Anthropophagous Reason: Dialogue and Difference in Brazilian Culture.” Trans. Odile Cisneros. Novas: Selected Writings. Ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 157–77. ———. “Barroco literario brasileño.” In Barroco, ed. Pedro Aullón de Haro. Madrid: Verbum, 2004. 1109–16. ———. “Da razão antropofágica: A Europa sob o signo de devoração” Colóquio/ Letras, no. 62 (1981): 10–26. ———. De la razón antropofágica y otros ensayos. Ed. Rodolfo Mata. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 2000. ———. “Disappearance of the Baroque in Brazilian Literature: The Case of Gregório de Matos.” In Novas: Selected Writings, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 178–93. ———. Galáxias. Rev. ed. São Paulo: Editora 34, 2004. ———. “The Open Work of Art.” In Novas: Selected Writings, ed. Antonio Sergio Bessa and Odile Cisneros. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007. 220–22. ———. O sequestro do barroco na formação da literatura brasileira: O caso Gregório de Matos. Salvador, Bahia, Brazil: Fundaçao Casa de Jorge Amado, 1989. ———. “The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devoration.” 1981. Trans. Maria Tai Wolff. Latin American Literary Review 14, no. 27 (1986): 42–60.

Additional Readings

Andrade, Oswald de. “Cannibalist Manifesto.” 1928. In “Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Cannibalist Manifesto,’” by Leslie Bary, Latin American Literary Review 19, no. 38 (1991): 35–47. Campos, Augusto de, Haroldo de Campos, and Décio Pignatari. Galaxia concreta.   Ed. Gonzalo Aguilar. Mexico City: Artes de México, 1999. Candido, Antonio. Formação da literatura brasileira. São Paulo: Martins, 1959. Sefamí, Jacobo. “El llamado de los deseosos: Poesía neobarroca latinoamericana.”   Siglo XX/Twentieth Century 12, no. 1–2 (1994): 219–37. Underwood, David K. “Toward a Phenomenology of Brazil’s Baroque Modernism.” In Brazil: Body and Soul, ed. Edward J. Sullivan. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2001. 526–38.

  Chapter Sixteen  

The Rule of Anthropophagy:   Europe under the Sign of Devoration Haroldo de Campos

Translated by Maria Tai Wolff Genuine polemics approach a book as lovingly as a cannibal spices a baby. Walter Benjamin

1. Avant-Garde and/or Underdevelopment The question of the national and the universal (especially the European) elements in Latin American culture, a question which involves more specific topics, such as the relationship between a universal cultural heritage and distinctive local elements or, even more precisely, the possibility of an ex­perimental literature, an avant-garde, in an underdeveloped country, is one I first addressed in an article written in 1962.1 In that paper, I made use of Engels’s considerations on the problem of the division of labor in poetry, found in that famous letter to Conrad Schmidt (October 27, 1890): “But the philosophy of every epoch, since it is a definite sphere in the division of labor, has as its presupposition certain definite thought material handed down to it by its predecessors, from which it takes its start. And that is why economically backward countries can still play first fiddle in philosophy.”2 Here, for Engels the supremacy of the economic is not registered directly, but in the “conditions determined by the particular sphere itself,” that is, indirectly, mediated by the intellectual material transmitted. Engels criticized those who were incapable of taking into consideration the complexity of this This article was originally published in Colóquio/Letras, no. 62 (1981): 10–26, under the title “Da razão antropofágica: A Europa sob o signo da devoração.” This complete translation is reprinted from Latin American Literary Review.

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movement at the level of culture: “What these gentlemen lack is dialectics.” It was Engels, as well, who gave us the image of the “infinite group of parallelograms of forces,” which results in the historical event and which, in spite of the postulated economic supremacy in the final determination, cannot be the ob­ject of a simple, mechanistic study, as if it were the case of solving a mere “single-variable equation.” It has always seemed to me that this complex law of the transmission of a cultural legacy also operates in the case of literary work; it is a law from which poetic production cannot escape, and one which would allow us to identify the emergence of the new even within the conditions of an underdeveloped economy.3 Especially at this time, as we witness the real confirmation of what Marx and Engels foresaw: “In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.”4 Goethe’s idea of a Weltliteratur is thus reread in what can be defined as an inter-semiotic praxis: it is the world of communica­tions, the dialogical pressure of general intersubjective communication, which orders and configures the universal sign as an “ideological sign” (in the sense intended by Voloshinov—and/or Bakhtin—in the twenties, as he tried to for­mulate his “sociological semiotics” with a Marxist foundation).5 A point of intersection of discourses, a necessary dialogue and not a xenophobic monologue, a parallelogram of forces in dialectic tension and not a mimetic—pavlovian equation. Thus, I have always seen as a sociologically ingenuous fallacy any mechanistic reduction, any self-punishing fatalism, which affirms that to an economically underdeveloped country there must correspond an underdeveloped literature, as if by conditioned reflex. Later, in Octavio Paz’s “Invention, Underdevelopment, Modernity” (in Alternating Current, 1967), I found illuminating observations which, coming from an intellectual of another Latin American country, confirmed my own reflections on the problem of the Brazilian poet’s situation before the Universal: A number of Mexican critics use the word “underdevelopment” to describe the present situation in Hispano-American arts and letters: our culture is “underdeveloped,” the work of X or Y represents a breaking away from the “underdevelopment of the novel in our country,” and so on and so forth. As I see it, the word refers to

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cer­tain currents that are not to these critics’ liking (or to mine): chau­vinistic nationalism, academicism, traditionalism, and the like. But the word “underdevelopment” is a United Nations euphemism for backward nations. The notion of “underdevelopment” is an off-shoot of the idea of social and economic progress. Aside from the fact that I am very much averse to reducing the plurality of cultures and the very destiny of man to a single model, industrial society, I have serious doubts as to whether the relationship between eco­nomic prosperity and artistic experience is one of cause and effect. Cavafy, Borges, Unamuno, and Reyes cannot be labeled “underde­veloped” writers, despite the marginal economic status of Greece, Spain and Latin America. Moreover, the rush to “develop” reminds me of nothing so much as a frantic race to arrive at the gates of Hell ahead of everyone else.6

I believe that in Brazil, with Oswald de Andrade’s “Antropofagia” (“An­ thropophagy”) in the 1920s (taken up again, in the 1950s, as a cosmic philosophical-existential vision, in the thesis “A crise da filosofia messianica” (The Crisis of Messianic Philosophy), we get a strong sense of the need to consider the national element in a dialogical and dialectic relationship with the universal. Oswald’s “Anthropophagy”—as I have written elsewhere7—is the thought of critical devoration of the universal cultural heritage, formulated not from the insipid, resigned perspective of the “noble savage” (idealized within the model of European virtues in the “nativist” line of Brazilian Romanticism, by Gonçalves Dias and José de Alencar, for example) but from the point of view of the “bad savage,” devourer of whites—the cannibal. The latter view does not involve a submission (an indoctrination), but a transculturation, or, better, a “transvalorization”: a critical view of History as a negative function (in Nietzsche’s sense of the term), capable of appropriation and of expropriation, de-hierarchization, deconstruction. Any past which is an “other” for us deserves to be negated. We could say that it deserves to be eaten, devoured. With this clarification and specification: the cannibal was a polemicist (from the Greek polemos, meaning struggle or combat) but he was also an “anthologist”: he devoured only the enemies he considered strong, to take from them marrow and protein to fortify and renew his own natural energies. For example, Oswald de Andrade was inspired, to a certain extent, by the poetic-itinerant cubism of Blaise Cendrars (on whom, conversely, he also had some influence, in the heroic phase of the creation of “Poesia pau-brasil” [Brazilwood Poetry] in 1923–24). Yet, instead of the “pirate of Lac Léman’s” traveler’s snapshots, taken with the goal of recording the pictures­que and exotic elements he came across during his wanderings

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in Brazilian lands, the “lens” of Oswald’s minute-poem catches a satiric note in the ossified national customs, sets off a grenade of desacrilizing humor, not found in Cen­drars’s touristic Brazilian poems, collected in Ocean Poems. With Oswald, in the 1920s, we are clearly closer, by anticipation, to the antiillusionism of Brecht’s laconic poetry, of the late 1930s (the poems written in “Basic Ger­man” and sharpened with critical barbs) than to Cendrars’s des-engagé color slides. The Swiss poet thought he had rediscovered Brazil and scalded his Brazilian friend in a cosmopolitan fondue pot. Oswald borrowed his camera and returned the favor by eating him. Strategies of the great Indian leader Cunhambebe: “Here comes our dinner, striding along,” as the Tupinambás said on seeing the European Hans Staden. The case to some extent parallels that of Huidobro and Reverdy. Bracketing that idle polemics over who came first, which of Reverdy’s poems can match the force and originality of Altazor’s aero-epic synthesis?

2. Modal Nationalism vs. Ontological Nationalism I believe that to an ontological nationalism, patterned on the organic/biological model of a plant’s development (a model that inspires and underlies any literary historiography seeking to identify a “national classicism,” a moment of perfection of a slow blossoming, nourished by the “claim of objec­ tivity” or by the “immanent theology” of nineteenth-century historicism),8 we can oppose (or, at least, to “ventilate” this dominance, contrapose, in the musical sense of the word “counterpoint”) a modal, differential nationalism. In the former case, one seeks the origin and the parousic itinerary of a national Logos, seen as a point. This is an episode of the Western metaphysics of presence, transferred to our tropical latitudes, one that does not take into account the final meaning of this transfer. A chapter to be added to the Platoniz­ing logocentrism that Derrida, in Of Grammatology, submitted to a lucid and revealing analysis, not insignificantly at the instigation of two excentrics, Fenollosa, the anti-sinologist, and Nietzsche, the shatterer of certainties. In this instance, one seeks to locate the moment of incarnation of the national spirit (logos), obscuring the differential (the disruptions and infractions, the margins, the “monstrous”) to better define a certain privileged course: the straight line this logophony traces across History. The moment of this zenith (comparable to the organic blossoming of the tree) coincides with that of the Parousia of this logos, in full flower within the domestic courtyard. Yet, when it comes time to describe this entified substance—the

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“national character”—one is reduced to a “half-portrait,” watered-down and conven­tional, where nothing is characteristic and the reconciliatory patrocentrism must resort to hypotheses to sustain itself. Machado de Assis, for example. The great and unclassifiable Machado, swallower of Sterne and of innumerable others, he gives us the metaphor of the head as a “ruminator’s stomach,” where, as Augusto Meyer recalls, in a subtle source study, “all sug­gestions, after being broken down and mixed, are prepared for a new remastication, a complicated chemistry in which it is no longer possible to distinguish the assimilating organism from these assimilated materials.” Well, Machado—our nineteenth-century Borges—whose works mark the zenith of that Parousia in the suma homogenea of these logophonic readings, is national because he is not national. Like Fernando Pessoa’s mythological Ulysses, who “foi por não ser existindo” (was opposed to existing) and “nos creou” (created us). Hence the necessity to consider the difference, to consider nationalism as a dialogical movement of difference (and not as the Platonic apotheosis of the origin or as a homogenizing leveler of sameness): the dis-character, instead of the character, the rupture instead of the linear course; historiography as the seismic graph of fragmentation rather than the tautological homologation of the homogenous. A refusal of the essentialist metaphor of gradual, harmonious, natural evolution. A new idea of tradition (antitradition) to operate as a counter-revolution, as a countercurrent opposed to the glorious, prestigious canon. That thesis of Adorno’s, quoted by Jauss: “There we encounter the true theme of the meaning of tradition: that which is relegated to the edge of the road, scorned and suppressed, that which is collected under the name of relics: it is there, and not in that group of works which supposedly defy time, that what is truly alive in tradition takes refuge.”9 Mário de An­drade, creating Macunaíma, the national anti-hero “without a character,” de­nouncing, perhaps subliminally (or, we could say here, Oswald-ianly), the logo-centric fallacy which lurks in any ontological nationalism. The Macunaímic search, seen from this radical perspective, de-fers (in the Derri­dean double meaning of divergence and delay) the talismanic moment of monological plenitude; it suspends the dogmatic investiture of a single, unique character which would be found at last, in the end (thus the danger of re-Christianizing the savage, cannibalistic nature of the Macunaímic project, glorifying it with a religious aura of the Grail, the danger of putting the servile and saintly Indian, the knightly Guarani made fun of in Oswald’s Manifesto, in the place of our anthropophagic trickster:

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an error—or an attempt to ward off a spell—made by the European missionaries who translated the name of Macunaíma—the “Great Evil”—of the Roraima natives—by the holy name of the Christian god . . .). From this difference, the disconcerting, “carnivalized,” never punctually resolved, dialogical movement of sameness and otherness, of what is native and what is foreign (European). A paradoxical cultural space, instead of the doxa: the ever renewed, insistent interrogation, instead of the calming prescription of a Boy Scout manual. With regard to this logophonic materialism, there is little distinction to be found between the two major models of reading tradition proposed by contemporary Brazilian literary historiography: the dysphoric and the euphoric. That of Antonio Candido (Formação da literatura brasileira [The Formation of Brazilian Literature], 1959) and that of Afrânio Coutinho, An Introduction to Literature in Brazil, 1959; Conceito de literatura brasileira [The Concept of Brazilian Literature], 1960; A tradição afortunada [The Fortunate Tradition], 1968). The first, economically omitting, in practice, the Baroque, on the basis of a sociological argument (absence of printed works and of a reading public) and finding in pre-romantic Arcadianism the inaugural “formative moment” is mounted, with the elegance and internal coherence of a mathematical formula, on the scheme of transmission of referential messages (thematic/nativist); privileging, in the process, the communicative and emo­tional (expressing “profound inconstancies”) functions of language and, by extension, of literature. On the other hand it also contributes to a certain ironic skepticism with regard to the arbitrariness of the critical justice of objec­tive interpretation and esthetic profitability of the model thus constructed (which thus makes it, in this sense, a dysphoric model). The second, capable of recuperating the Brazilian Baroque without any great critical restrictions or debatable methodological inhibitions, through the stylisticjournalistic criteria which mold it, latu sensu (this important recovery constitutes its principal merit), is dedicated to the reconstruction of a supposedly “fortunate” tradi­tion, an ascending evolutionary scale (not without traces of boasting) in which the Baroque is naturally integrated, as an early blossoming; it is less concerned with the rigorous definition of its semiological model of reading, which seems to depend on the fortune itself, axiomatically defined as such, of this tradition (thus, I call it an euphoric model). Both models, nonetheless, are dedicated to the same parous-ic effort (albeit with different, and even antagonistic, ideological overtones): the institution of

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the national spirit (or conscience); Machado de Assis as the terminus ad quem of this ontological course, as its culmination, in both cases. In both, on more rigorous analysis, we find historiographical realization (with the expected theoretical refinements and the attempt to “normalize” the disturbing interference of Machado de Assis) of the fundamental project of Brazilian Romanticism, seen by Antonio Candido as a “process of genealogical construction,” a “linear process of Brazilianiza­tion.” The critic illustrates this process’s infancy (with Machado, Romanticism will become adult and critical) in this picturesque manner: “The result would be a kind of spectogram in which the same color would pass from the faintest shades to the strongest and densest, to the triumphant nationalism of the Indigenist school.”

3. The Baroque: The Non-Infancy Any logo-centric question of an origin, in Brazilian literature (and this could also be said about the other Latin American literatures, excluding the problem of the great pre-Columbian cultures, which should be considered as a special case) runs up against a historiographic obstacle: the Baroque.10 I will say that for us the Baroque is the non-origin, because it is a non-infancy. Our literatures, which emerged with the Baroque, had no infancy (infans: he who does not speak). They were never aphasic. They were born adults (like certain mythological heroes), speaking an extremely elaborate international code: the Baroque rhetorical code (with late medieval and Renaissance traces, already distilled, in the case of Brazil, by Camoenian Mannerism— this last, moreover, a stylistic influence in Góngora). To articulate itself as a difference, in rela­tionship to this panoply of universalia: this is our “birth” as a literature, a sort of parthenogenesis without an ontological egg (we could say—the difference as origin or the egg of Columbus . . .). Mário Faustino, a memorable colleague of my generation, wrote, in the late 1950s, “The Italian or Spanish Baroque of the 1600’s is, indeed, the first great organized drive in Western poetry toward creating an ‘organic poetry,’ that is, one that grows from the lines of power of the very materials from which it is made, a poetry in which the poem reflects a detailed vision as it composes another world, microscopic and materialized. The true poetry of the seventeenth-century Baroque is evidently, above all, a refined and sophisticated poetry.” And, with regard especially to the Brazilian case: “We emphasize yet again the high technical level” at which poetry in all its forms

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began in Brazil. Among us, poetry began as an art, as something that could be taught by the skilled, and learned and practiced by those who had a basic level of talent for the goals in question. In Portugal as in Brazil, in the seventeenth century, one learned to write poems from manuals like the famous El arte de trobar (The Art of Verse-Making): the older poets taught the less experienced, and the academies began to flourish. Thus it is not at all shocking (considering that they either came from Europe already skilled in the art, or would go there to study it) that one finds in our first poets, greater and lesser, a high technical level.”11 To speak the Baroque code in the literature of colonial Brazil was to try to extract difference from the morphosis of sameness. As the allegorical style of the Baroque was an alternative speech—a style in which, in extreme cases, anything could symbolize anything else (as Walter Benjamin explained in his study on the German tragic drama)—the “alternating current” of the Baroque brasilica was a double speech of the other as difference: to speak a code of otherness and to speak it in a state of otherness. Gregório de Matos, a Brazilian educated in Coimbra, a white man among mulattos and mestizos, enemy of the nobles of the country and of those born in the kingdom of Por­tugal, because of his irresponsible hybrid spirit unable to be either one thing or another, neither a judge in the kingdom nor a lawyer in the overseas colony, divided, like Brazil, in his situation of dependency, explodes, cursing, as the “Voice-of-hell”: the same transforming mechanism of the Baroque courtly rhetoric lends itself to the defiant virulence of the critic; the ingenious style of courtly praise and worship is the same one that makes possible the bruising mental play of satire and the unrestrained corporal play of eroticism. Gregório is already our first cannibal, as Augusto de Campos notes (“the first ex­perimental cannibal in our poetry”) in a provocative poem/study, in 1974.12 Our first transculturator, Gregório translated, with a strong personal, dif­ferential trace, revealed in the ironic handling of the topical combination, two sonnets by Góngora (“Mientras por competir con tu cabello” [To compete with your hair] and “Ilustre y hermosísima María” [Remarkable and most lovely Maria]) into a third “Discreta e formosíssima Maria” (Refined and most lovely Maria), which took apart and explicated the secrets of the Baroque sonnet-making machine. Furthermore, this sonnet, being twice “by” Góngora, was also by Garcilaso de la Vega, by Camões and, more remotely, by Ausonius (for all these poets, in turn, provided the Cordoban with his paradigmatic sonnets, which Gregório, the Bahian, re-

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sonnetized in a tertius so mysterious and particular in its unexpected dialectical synthesis that even today the academic commentators are unable to approach that monstrous product without sanctimoniously murmuring the protective charm of the word “plagiarism”). Sor Juana, in Mexico, is another example. About her differen­tial Baroque, I will only say—as does Octavio Paz (Children of the Mire, 1957)—that at her highest moment, in the “Primero sueño,” she does not res­pond to Góngora but, in a single gesture, anticipates German Romanticism and the Surrealistic dreamworld, working from the confinement of the convent that served her, for the flights of her creative imagination, as a free ter­ritory within the colonial space, repressive in that it was an exile from the more cultured centers and a mark of the masculine isolation of a woman scholar and poet. Speaking difference in the gaps of a universal code, the Latin American writers of the Baroque evolved among themselves a dialogue which has only now begun to be re-established. A dialogue that is sometimes ex­plicit: Sor Juana discusses the theological constructions of Padre Vieira, the great prose writer of the Brazilian Baroque, in her polemical communication, “Crisis sobre un sermón” (Crisis about a Sermon) in 1690 (thus while Vieira was still alive). And she discussed his constructions to devour them and their author, to impose her feminine wit on the parenetic Vieiran ingenuity, to avenge herself for the arrogant masculine grandiloquence by the artful path of this castrating strategy (in Ludwig Pfandl’s spicy psychoanalytic interpretation).13 Today, we are surprised to find in Borges a reference to Euclydes da Cunha’s Rebellion in the Backlands, nothing more than a remote memory of reading. Indeed, we have become more distant in spiritual geography than Sor Juana and Vieira, who operated differentially a common code. And there was, in ad­ dition, the implicit dialogue: Gregório, the Bahian, Sor Juana, the Mexican, the Peruvian Caviedes—all participated in a discourse that moved back and forth tropologically, even though there was neither exact contemporary nor direct allusion. This discourse was extended also as a symposium that went back in time: to it came Góngora, Quevedo, Lope, Garcilaso, Camões, Sá de Miranda, Petrarch. . . . Literature, in the colonies as in the metropolis, was made from literature. Except that in the colonies, it had the chance to ar­ticulate itself as a double difference. The difference of the different. Sor Juana dreaming her pyramidic pre-Surrealist dream. Gregório de Matos strumming his barroom viol, precursor of the electric guitar of the “tropicalist” Bahian Caetano Veloso (as James Amado, the most recent editor of

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Gregório’s poetic manuscripts, sees it). Caviedes biting into the composure of the sophisticated style, in the defiant Rabelasian satires of his Diente del Parnaso (Tooth of Parnassus).

4. The Baroque and the Rule of Anthropophagy Already in the Baroque a possible “rule of anthropophagy” develops; it deconstructs the logocentrism we inherited from the West. Differential within the Universal, it began in the Baroque distortions and contortions of a dis­ course that could disentangle us from sameness. It is an anti-tradition which passes through the gaps of traditional historiography, which filters through its breaks, which edges through its fissures. This is not based on a directly derived anti-tradition—for this would be the substitution of one linearity for another—but on the recognition of certain marginal paths or patterns alongside the preferred course of normative historiography. In prose, at a certain point in this meandering process, within a specific configuration, it would produce the seam of the “romance malandro” (novel of the rogue), as it was baptized by Antonio Candido in “Dialéctica de Malandragem” (The Dialec­tics of Roguery), an essay which, to me, in a certain way represents the critic’s deliberate “disreading” of the privileged path mapped out in his For­­mação da literatura brasileira. Another mode of thought, skillfully projected over the first chronographic trace, de-linearizing it on behalf of a new possibility for a meaningful section of the same space, now reorganized in a different constellation. Here, history comes to be the product of a construction, of a re-configuring appropriation, “monadologic,” in Benjamin’s terms. Distinguishing the “novel of the rogue” from the European picaresque, Candi­do recognizes in it archetypical elements of a folkloric matrix and a lively energy of popular realism. Ancient and extremely modern, the genre is first represented in Brazil by Manuel Antônio de Almeida’s Memoirs of a Militia Sergeant (1852–53), out of place, almost a relic, in the preferred series of novels of our canonic Romanticism (which runs from Joaquim Manuel de Macedo to José de Alencar). It is not by chance that this new possibility of reading the tradition appeared at the moment of the re-evaluation of the novels/inventions of Oswald de Andrade, especially Seraphim Grosse Pointe, 1933 (an experiment in the semiologic transgression of order, in the question­ ing of established legality and legibility, in eternal disorder and anar­chic versatility).14

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The “rogue tradition” would be another name for “carnivaliza­tion”; it op‑  erates retroactively on the Baroque, on the Baroque seen by Severo Sarduy as a Bakhtinian phenomenon par excellence: the ludibrious space of polyphony and of language in convulsion.15 Let us not forget that Quevedo, the Quevedo of the conceptualist sonnets, is also the author of The Swindler (1626). Our first roguish hero (anti-hero) is the cannibal Gregório de Matos (as Antonio Candido himself admits, from this new point of view, in a nearpostscript to his Formação, a work where Gregório, excluded by the barrier of a sociological argumentation, has neither time nor place of entry). The “Native Muse,” the “Muse of Curses.” The first cannibal-rogue. Here, I am not discussing a biography. This is the case of a biographeme preserved in the oral tradition and dispersed in the reproductions of manuscripts. Of a persona behind which a text echoes. A text of texts. Universal and differential. Parodic. Parallelographic. A “parallel song” of a translator/devourer: decentered, ex-centric.

5. Concrete Poetry: An “Other” Constellation In contemporary Brazilian poetry, Concrete Poetry can also announce this “anti-normative” tradition, for reasons of another specific redistribution of the available configurative elements. This redistribution must also be reconstructed through castings and recastings. From Gregório to Sousândrade, from the “voice of hell” of Baroque Bahia to the “maudit” Romantic of Maranhão, singer of “O Inferno de Wall Street” (Wall Street Inferno). From Gregório to Sousândrade and from the latter to Oswald, from the mocker of “armadillo-blood” nobility to the officiator of the Tatuturema (a black mass of the Amazon Indians) to the Brazilwood re-teller of the chronicles of discovery.16 From Oswald to Drummond and Murilo. From all of them to João Cabral de Melo Neto, engineer of “Mondrianesque” struc­tures. A different pattern. An “other” constellation. The anti-discourse geometrizing Baroque proliferation. Padre Vieira and Mallarmé, both chess-players of language, both syntaxiers. The sonoric Tupi poetry and the praise of conciseness (the vocation of Japanese haiku) in Oswald’s Manifestos: “Catiti Catiti / Imara Notiá / Notiá Imara / Ipeju . . .” or: “Somos concretistas” (We are con­cretists).17 Concrete Poetry represents Brazilian literature’s moment of absolute syn­ chrony. It not only can speak the difference in a universal code (like Gregório

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de Matos and Padre Vieira in the Baroque; like Sousândrade re-combining the Greco-Latin heritage, Dante, Camões, Milton, Goethe and Byron in his “Guesa Errante” [“The Wandering Guesa”]; like Oswald de Andrade, “Brazil­ woodzing” Italian Futurism and French Cubism). Metalinguistically, it rethinks its own code, the poetic function itself (or the operation of this code). With Concrete Poetry, the difference (the national) came to be the operating space of the new synthesis of the universal code. More than a heritage of poets, this is the case of assuming, criticizing and “chewing over” a poetics. In some sense, Max Bense is correct when, discussing Brazilian Concrete Poetry, he first makes a distinction between a traditional (classic) and a progressive (non-classic) concept of literature. To the former, according to Bense, would corres­pond a work like that of Curtius on European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, in which past and present converge for a “unity of meaning”; to the second, the Noigandres group’s “Pilot Plan for Concrete Poetry,” which an­nounces the end of a “historic cycle of verse.”18 Actually, what takes place here is the radical change of the register of dialogue. Instead of the old ques­tion of influences, in terms of authors and works, a new process is opened up: authors of a supposedly peripheric literature suddenly appropriated the whole code, reclaimed it as their patrimony, like an empty shoe, waiting for a new historical subject, to rethink its function in terms of a generalized, radical poetics, of which the Brazilian case comes to be the differentiating optics and the condition of possibility. The difference could now be thought of as a foundation. Beneath the linearity of conventional history, this gesture, constella­tionally—by means of an almost subliminal solidarity—“quoted” an other: that of the German Romanticism of Jena, with its dialectical conception of the “universal progressive poetry”: which emerged in Mallarmé and produced, in the West, the spiritual limit of “Un Coup de dés” (“A Throw of the Dice”) (where the Orient already begins to break through with its synthetic analogic model of ideogrammatic writing, to trouble the logical-Aristotelic monologicality of Western discursive verse). This is the re-cannibalization of a poetics. The moment (the decade of the 1950s) was, furthermore, inter-semiotic: in Europe the new post-Webernian music (Boulez, Stockhausen) was being produced; in the United States, Cage, the beginnings of aleatory indeterminacy on the prepared piano; in Brazil, in popular music, were blossoming the conditions that prepared us for the bossa nova of João Gilberto (our pointillistic Webern of the “one note sam­ba”). In architecture, Niemeyer, and in urbanism Lúcio Costa re-

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Oscar Niemeyer, Church of São Francisco de Assis, 1940. Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais Brazil. Visual Resources Collection, CAUP (Norman Johnston original) © University of Washington

16.2  Oscar

Niemeyer, Church of São Francisco de Assis, 1940. Candido Portinari, mosaic. Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Visual Resources Collection, CAUP (Norman Johnston original) © University of Washington

sponded, for our purposes, to Le Corbusier and to the Bauhaus (figures 16.1 and 16.2);i in painting, the “Bienal” Expositions of São Paulo. And our generation rediscovered and renewed Volpi, our “thirteenth-century Mondrian” (Décio Pignatari); with his little flags, his striped masts and his serialized façades, with his structural “color-light,” who seemed to us more of a painter than the Swiss Max Bill. i The presence of curvilinear forms and undulating walls, the trademark of Oscar

Niemeyer’s Brazilian modernist architecture, reflects the influence of the historical Baroque of the capital of Minas Gerais, Ouro Preto. In particular, Niemeyer’s São Francisco Church in Belo Horizonte, the new modern capital of Minas Gerais, looks boldly Baroque, all curves and waves in concrete. It is adorned with a mosaic by

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Concrete Poetry, Brazilianly, formulated a new poetics, national and universal. A planetarium of “signs in rotation,” whose points-events were named (like the signs on a map) Mallarmé, Joyce, Apollinaire, Pound, cum­mings or Oswald de Andrade, João Cabral de Melo Neto and, further back, retrospectively, Sousândrade—the rediscovered and reevaluated Sousândrade of the dizzying ideogrammatic “Inferno” of the New York Stock Exchange . . . (a Pound avant la lettre, with his financial Hades ruled by the sinister Mammon). Significantly, this new poetics was accompanied, soon afterward, by new reflections on the Baroque. My 1955 article (published several years before Umberto Eco’s book) was called “A Obra de Arte Aberta” (“The Open Work of Art”) and proposed a neo-Baroque rather than the finished, “jewel-like,” work.19 In 1955, in Ulm, by chance, Décio Pignatari met up with Eugen Gom­ringer, at that time Max Bill’s secretary in the School for Design. From this coincidental meeting came a mutual discovery. There were many shared ele­ments in the poetic program of the Brazilian Noigandres group and that of the Swiss poet, author of the Konstellationen (Constellations). At that moment, a movement was outlined, on an international basis, after Gomringer accepted, in 1956, the general title proposed by the Brazilians: “Concrete Poetry,” which henceforth entered universal circulation. In 1956, as well, in São Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art, the first world exhibition of Concrete Poetry took place; in that event only Brazilian artists—poets and painters—participated: the innumerable international shows followed this pioneering event. Another fact to be noted: despite its divestiture and voluntary limitation of means (the search for the poem as a collective, anonymous project, the “dis­parition élocutoire du je” as in Mallarmé, the basic structures, as in Oswald and Webern), Brazilian Concrete Poetry, for its critics and observers

Candido Portinari, a historical citation of blue and white colonial Portuguese tiles. Niemeyer’s San Francisco church recalls the church of the same name designed by the artist Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa) in Ouro Preto, the old Baroque capital, which Belo Horizonte was built to replace (see figure 11.7). Brazilian modernist architecture is Neobaroque: its major proponents (Niemeyer as well as Lúcio Costa) explicitly advocated the recovery of Brazil’s Baroque architectural heritage. The crossing of the minimalist functionalism of the International Style (with its characteristic rectangular, hard-edged, spare design) with the Brazilian historical Baroque in Brazilian modernism constitutes a magnificent example of the insurgent anthropophagy discussed by de Campos.—Eds.

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(and therefore, for its adversaries) seemed irrevocably Baroque, pluralist, poly-faceted, in comparison with the austere orthogonality of Gomringer’s Konste­llationen, clear and pure like a composition by Bill. Our “difference” produced an other result in the chemistry of the poem, although the overall char­acteristic of the new poetic program was shared elements. Beyond the poems with multiple readings (the poems in colors/voices of Poetamenos [Poetless] by Augusto de Campos: Boulez saw them in São Paulo, 1954, in a gathering at the home of the painter Valdemar Cordeira, at which we all discussed en­thusiastically, Webern and Mallarmé; in the “Troisième Sonate,” 1957, Boulez uses different colors to distinguish certain alternative trajectories in the score); beyond the peculiarities of a more ludibrious syntax, the semantic dimension: the contextual, even political, satire, an element present from the beginning (“coca-cola,” by Décio Pignatari, for example, written in 1957), the erotic ele­ment, in the corporal path of our Baroque ancestors. Nothing could be farther from the neutrality or the asepsis of the Zurich School (which is not to deny the merit of the latter, in its own setting—or is this the case, with new protago­nists, of another round of the confrontation between the Brazilian Oswald and the Swiss Cendrars?). Contact with the new music was essential, as was the encounter with the young São Paulo composers (Cozzella, Duprat, Medaglia; later Willy Correa de Oliveira and Gilberto Mendes). I remember, in the mid-1950s, in Cologne, the surprise and interest of Stockhausen on seeing copies of the magazine Noigandres. At that moment, despite his encouragement of Hans G. Helms’s experiments, he preferred to compose the texts he needed in the style of montage (see, for example, Gesang der Jünglinge [Song of the Youths], with lines taken from the Book of Daniel); in Brazil, a group of poets worked on texts that intersemiotically incorporated into the syntax of poems parameters absorbed from the theory and practice of the new music which was being developed. (Shortly afterward, speaking on “Musik and Graphik” in the Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, Darmstadt, Stockhausen would record an echo of this contact: cf. Darmstädter Beiträge zur neuen Musik [Darmstadt Contributions on the New Music], Schott, 1960). Later, this path of avant-garde (serious) poetry/music would turn back to an important Brazilian group: Augusto de Campos would be the major defender and theorist of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil’s new music (for whose instrumental arrangements, at decisive moments, Rogério Duprat and Júlio Medaglia would compete). The “prodossumo,” as Décio Pignatari put it: the poetry of innovation in mass consumption, beyond Adornian

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skepticism. . . . Let us imagine, just as a comparison and demonstration this ideal reunion: the Beatles composing in direct contact with John Cage on texts by e.e. cummings. . . . (It is true that there was Yoko—oh! Yoko!—the Orient. . . .) Once again, nevertheless, in this universalia, the difference. Listen to “Araçá Azul,” by Caetano.

6. The Alexandrian Barbarians: Planetary Redevoration Uprooted and cosmopolitan, Hispano-American literature is a return and a search for a tradi­tion. By seeking, literature invents it. Octavio Paz

It is an attempt to give oneself a past a posterio­ri, out of which one would want to come, in place of that out of which one does indeed come. Nietzsche

I believe that Oswald de Andrade’s “Coup de Dents” in its Marxilary (Marxist + maxilary) dialects,20 in the way it confronts the legacy of Euro­pean civilization (the first date of his Anthropophagic revolution in the history of Brazil would be the year of the devoration of Bishop Sardinha, a Por­tuguese missionary dignitary, in 1556), points to a new element in the Europe/Latin America relationship: already, at this moment, the Europeans must learn to live with the new barbarians who, for some time, in an alternative and other context, have been devouring them and making them flesh of their flesh and bone of their bone, who have been resynthesizing them chemically by means of an impetuous and unrestrainable metabolism of difference (and this is not only true of Europeans: Oriental, Hindu, Chinese and Japanese ingre­ dients have entered into the “synpoetic” distillery of these neo-alchemists: in Tablada and Octavio Paz; in Borges’s “forking paths” and in the rites of initia­tion of Elizondo’s Farabeuf; in Lezama and Severo Sarduy; in Oswald and in Brazilian Concrete Poetry, for example). They are Alexandrian barbarians, supplied with chaotic libraries and labyrinthine card catalogues. The library of Babel could be named the Biblioteca Municipal Miguel Cané and be provisionally installed on a modest block in Buenos Aires (“a sad and dingy place, in the southeast of the city”), where Borges worked as an obscure functionary, and where, in the building’s basement, he would escape from the daily pettiness, furtively devoting himself to infinite readings. . . . Or this library could settle itself down, complete, in the boat-shaped capilla of Alfonso Reyes, in Mexico City, a libraryhouse

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where a well-traveled and insatiable reader shut himself up for nearly twenty  years. . . . Or, perhaps in São Paulo, on the Rua Lopes Chaves, in the neighborhood of Barra Funda, where Mário de Andrade filled out his reading note cards and crowded musical notes into the margins of the books he perused, between scores of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, portfolios of German Expressionists, volumes of Freud and tracts on folklore. Or, finally, the Library could pro­liferate in a house in old Havana, where the “Etruscan” Lezama Lima, after a polishing plunge into the attics of the Cuban used-book dealers, spun his im­mense de-centered, changing, fabulous ringed sphere of readings, like a hieroglyphic orb hatched by the Rock Bird. For some time, these new barbarians’ devouring jaws have been gnawing at and “ruining” a cultural heritage that is ever more global, in relationship to which its ex-centrifying and deconstructing attack functions with the marginal impetus of the carnivalesque de-sacralizing, profaning anti-tradition, evoked by Bakhtin in counterpoint to the privileged course of Lukacsian epic positivism, to monological literature, to the closed, single-voiced work. In contrast, the combinatory and ludibrious poly-culturalism, the parodic transmutation of meaning and values, the open, multi-lingual hybridization, are the devices responsible for the constant feeding and re-feeding of this Baroque soulmoment, the carnivalized transencyclopedia of the new bar­ barians, where everything can coexist with everything. They are mechanisms which crush the material of tradition with the teeth of a tropical sugar-mill, changing stalks and protective coverings into husks and cane syrup. Lezama creole-izes Proust and inter-communicates Mallarmé with Góngora: his quota­tions are truncated and approximate, like the remains of a diluvian digestion. Adán Buenosayres, by Leopoldo Marechal (with its “Viaje a la oscura ciudad de Cacodelphia” [Trip to the Dark City of Cacodelphia]) and Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar, dialogue, in various twists and planes, with Joyce’s Ulysses, without losing the mask of Argentinian conditions (even when, in the case of Cortázar, they are transmigrated with traces of porteño nostalgia to the Paris of the Rive Gauche). The Bustrófedon of Cabrera Infante’s Three Trapped Tigers passes through Lewis Carroll’s mirror to rub elbows with the “seman­ticist” Humpty Dumpty and with Shem, the Penman. Dyonélio Machado, in Os Ratos (The Rats), re-creates the day of Leopold Bloom in the stark, debt-ridden day of a Brazilian, urban John Doe of the 1930s (a luckless Nazarene, fighting for our daily milk . . .). Guimarães Rosa riddled the sertão of Minas Gerais with metaphysical paths: his jagunço is a Mephistaphilologic Faust, enabyssed in the intrigues of language like a caboclo Heidegger. Of

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Carpen­tier, Carlos Fuentes, and Vargas Llosa, we could say just as much: other decoctions, other arabesques, various and singular assemblages. For the major writers of Latin America, the “nightmare of history,” with all it implies for the most militant spirits in terms of participation and strug­ gle, has been a Baroque and obsessive nightmare of writing (taken to an oxymoron-like paroxysm when writing becomes aware that it is in forced and painful cohabitation with the writing-less world of the large segments of the populace that are illiterate). “The masses will still taste the ritzy crackers I bake,” prophesized Oswald de Andrade, in a pun enlivened by the “Prinzip Hoffnung” like that which prepares the nutritious marrow, the amniotic meal for the Anthropophagic future. Octavio Paz, going back to the first decades of this century, glimpsed an unsuspected and fascinating convergence: while Pound and Eliot “discovered” Laforgue and fed on him, on his ironic “logopeia,” for the renovation of poetry in English, Lugones, in Buenos Aires, and López Velarde, in Mexico, through different paths which cross, ideally, in space and time, turned to the same marginal symbols. All of them rewrote, in different ways—independently—the same unfinished universal poem. In Brazil, Pedro Kilkerry, an obscure Bahian day dreamer, with an Irish last name, a poor, polylingual mulatto dead at thirty-two in 1917, contributed, unknown, to the spinning orbit of these universal signs: he translated and digested Tristan Corbière (in the same “coloquial-ironic” line of Laforgue) and thus developed a very specialized diction, which approximates him as a forgotten pioneer in his beautiful poem “É o silêncio” (“It is the silence”) to the elocutory subtleties of a Fernando Pessoa.21 In summary: all these digestive rumbles, all this carousing ancestral rumination, already lost in the mysteries of time, could not remain forever unknown in Europe. The “Boom,” a recent and skin-deep phenomenon, on the level of the mass media, served as a shouted warning—something between frightened and too late—for the Europeans (and for the Americans; for their omnivorous pragmatism in terms of cultural mastigation, the vis paideumica of Ezra Pound could be the most characteristic example of our time, as Whitman’s universality was in the past). It was a frantic warning of the insidious and explosive turbulence of a new dialogical relationship which had been developing undercover, only made to disappear by the monolingual selfsufficiency of those who used the “imperial” language (such as French, ever less, and English, ever more), of a relationship that was undermining and rusting away the bases of the literary koiné, predefined in terms of “older” and “greater” literatures, of “trunks,” “main branches” and “secondary twigs.”

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At a certain moment, with Borges, at least, the European discovered he could no longer write his world prose without the increasingly devastating contribu­tion made by the voracious Alexandrian barbarians. The books he read could no longer remain the same, after being chewed and digested by the blind Homerian of Buenos Aires, who even dared to rewrite the Quixote under the pseudonym of Pierre Menard. Without Borges, what would be new in Robbe-Grillet’s nouveau roman? Who could now read Proust without admitting Lezama Lima? Read Mallarmé today, without taking into consideration the intertextual hypotheses of Vallejo’s Trilce and Paz’s Blanco? Contribute to the “continuing universal poem” without redigesting the Brazilian Concrete Poetry of the Noigandres group? Once, in the mid-sixties (I recall that Ungaretti, weighed down by Brazilian memories on a trip to São Paulo, par­ticipated in the same encounter), Nathalie Sarraute remarked to me in conver­sation that the trends in French writing did not include a Joycean experiment. I asked her, in response (vivid in my mind, as equals and fellow neo-Latins, the examples of Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma and Guimarães Rosa’s The Devil to Pay in the Backlands) if she did not consider Rabelais a French author. Since 1963, I had begun to write and publish my Galáxias (Galaxies) a “barro­qulous ibericain fatalepic,” intoned in countervoice in the “feldorado eldorido latinoamargo” (“latinagonican heldorado eldorongdo”). Since the late 1960s (“Sur Góngora,” 1966), Severo Sarduy had begun to Baroque-ize, through his presence, the cartesio-valerian space of Tel Quel. Fragments of the Galáxias appeared in German (Versuchsbuch/Galaxien [Experimental book/Galaxies], edited by Max Bense and E. Walther [Stuttgart: E. Walther, 1966]). Also in 1966: Compact by Maurice Roche, a writer-musician who never had any doubts about the re­newed viability of the Rabelaisian heritage in his language. Fragments of the Galáxias, translated into French, appeared in Change in September 1970 (“La Poétique de la mémoire” [The Poetics of Memory]). A remark by Octavio Paz: “I would like to choose the end of the last fragment as a motto: el vocablo es mi fábula” (“le vocable est ma fable” [“the word is my tale”]). One might now look at the Joycean and galactic Paradis by Philippe Sollers. I have recorded this story and traced this route, in more detail, in “Sanscreed Latinized: The Wake in Brazil and Hispanic America” (Triquarterly 38 [1977], “In the Wake of the Wake”). Today, in both Europe and Latin America, to write means, more and more, to rewrite, to re-chew. Oi barbaroi, for a long time, now the Vandals have crossed the borders and sacked the senate and the agora, as in Cavafy’s

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poem. The logocentric writers, who imagined themselves to be the privileged masters of a proud one-way koiné, prepare themselves for the increasingly urgent task of recognizing and redevouring the differential marrow of the new barbarians of the polytopic and polyphonic planetary civilization. After all, we might well call to mind Goethe’s very relevant warning: “Any literature, closed upon itself, finally lapses into tediousness, when it is not renewed and revivified by means of a contribution from without.” Otherness is, above all, a necessary exercise in self-criticism. São Paulo, Brazil; February-March, 1980

Notes 1 Haroldo de Campos, “A poesia concreta e a realidade nacional,” Tendência 4 (1962).

2

3

4 5 6 7

8

9 10

See also: “Avanguardia e sincronia nella letteratura brasiliana odierna” [AvantGarde and Syn­chrony in Modern Brazilian Literature], Aut-Aut 109–10 (1969). The translation is from: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, ed. Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, trans. Stefan Morawski (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1973), 90. We can also recall this passage from Marx: “It is well known that certain periods of highest development of art stand in no direct connection with the general development of society, nor with the material basis and the skeleton structure of its organization. Witness the example of the Greeks as compared with the modern nations or even Shakespeare.” From: Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, trans. N. I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1904), 309. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Paul M. Sweezy (New York: Modern Reader Paperbacks, 1964), 8. I am referring especially to Voloshinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, published in Leningrad in 1929, and attributed by some scholars to M. Bakhtin. Translation from: Octavio Paz, Alternating Current, trans. Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 19. See, for example, my introductory study to Oswald de Andrade, Trechos escolhidos [Selec­tions] (Rio de Janeiro: Agir, 1967). See also a more recent essay, “Oswald de Andrade” in Europe 599 (March 1979). See Hans Robert Jauss, “Geschichte der Kunst und Historie” [History of Art and Pragmatic History], in Literaturgeschichte als Provokation [Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory] (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970). Theodor Adorno, Thesen über Tradition [Theses on Tradition] (1966) and Jauss, op. cit. Here, I would like to make brief mention of the thesis on the possible identification of a pre-Columbian “indigenous Baroque,” characterized by a “language of signs and symbols, based on the myth.” This idea (which retains some affinity with

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12

13

14

15

16

17

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Eugenio d’Ors’s concept of a pan-Baroque) was suggested by Alfredo A. Roggiano in a talk presented to the XVII Congress of the Instituto International de Literatura Iberoamericana, Madrid, 1975. Roggiano used examples from the case of Mexico, and took the concepts of Paul Westheim, in Ideas fundamentales del arte prehispánico en México [Basic Ideas of Mexican Pre-Hispanic Art] (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1967), as a point of departure. Mário Faustino, “Evolução da poesia brasileira—Gregório de Matos e Manuel Botelho de Oliveira” [Evolution of Brazilian Poetry . . .], Sunday Supplement of Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro (August 14, 1958 and August 28, 1958). Augusto de Campos, “Arte final para Gregório,” in Bahia/Invenção (Salvador: Propeg, 1974). J. Miguel Wisnik also discusses this idea in his introduction to Gregório de Matos, Poemas escolhidos [Selected Poems] (São Paulo: Cultrix, 1976). Ludwig Pfandl, Die Zehnte Muse von Mexico, Juana Inés de la Cruz: Ihr Leben, ihre Dichtung, ihre Psyche [Mexico’s Tenth Muse, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Her Life, Her Works, Her Psyche] (Munich: H. Rinn, 1946). See Haroldo de Campos, “Serafim: um grande não-livro” [Seraphim: A Great NonBook] and “Serafim: análise sintagmática” [Seraphim: A Syntagmatic Analysis], Literary Supplement of O Estado de São Paulo (December 14, 1968 and March 8, 1969). Also see my introduction to the re-issue of Oswald de Andrade, Serafim Ponte Grande (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Civilização Brasileira, 1971). See my essay, “Structuralism and Semiotics in Brazil: Retrospect/Prospect,” Dispositio 7–8 (1978).There, I pointed out, in reference to the article “Dialéctica da Malandragem,” that the peculiar narrative structure which Candido calls the “novel of the rogue” (the picaresque novel) is close, in some ways, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s thesis on “carnivalizesque” literature, as well as to certain of Northrop Frye’s typological speculations. See also Severo Sarduy, “El barroco y el neobarroco” [“The Baroque and the Neobaroque”] in América Latina en su literatura [Latin America in its Literature] (Mexico City: Unesco/Siglo XXI, 1972), and the excellent critical summary in Emir Rodríguez-Monegal, “Carnaval/Antropofagia/Parodia,” Revista Iberoamericana 108–9 (1979). I am referring to the sonnet in which Gregório de Matos mocks the progeny of the Brazilian “new nobility” (the “descendants of armadillo blood”) who invoked the privileges of genealogical nobility. He uses the example of the Portuguese Captain D. Diogo Álvares Correia, the Caramuru, who married the daughter of an Indian leader, as a starting point. “Tatuturema” (1868), part of Sousândrade’s long poem Guesa errante, is a satyric-orgiastic sarabande of Indians, mis­sionaries and colonizers, based on the model of the Walpurgisnacht, in Goethe’s first Faust; Pau Brazil (Brazilwood, a certain kind of wood from which a red dye, much appreciated by the Europeans, is taken) is the title of Oswald de Andrade’s first collection of poems, published in 1925, in which he uses pieces of the chronicles and the written reports on the country at the time of its discovery and on the beginnings of the process of colonization, in the form of a montage. Taken from Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto antropófago” (available in French, in the issue of Europe cited in note 7).

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18 Max Bense, “Konkrete Poesie” (Anlässlich des Sonderheftes Noigandres zum zehn-

jährigen Bestehen dieser Gruppe für “Konkrete Poesie” in Brasilien), in Sprache im technischen Zeitalter [Language in the Technical Age] 15 (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1965). Also in Brasilianische Inte­lligenz [Brazilian Thought] (Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1965). 19 Haroldo de Campos, “A obra de arte aberta” [The Open Work of Art] (1955), in Teoría da poesia concreta: Textos críticos e manifestos, 1950–1960, 3rd ed. (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987). I am referring here to Umberto Eco, Opera aperta [The Open Work] (Milan: Bompiani, 1962). For the preface to the Brazilian edition of his work, Eco wrote the following observations: “It is indeed curious that a few years before I wrote Opera Aperta, Haroldo de Campos, in one of his articles, anticipates its themes in a surprising way, as if he had reviewed the book I had not yet written and later wrote without reading his article. But this means that certain problems appear in an insistent way at given historical moments, arising almost automatically from the work in progress.” 20 Oswald de Andrade signed articles in his Revista de Antropofagia (1928–29) with the punning pseudonym “Marxilar.” 21 The dispersed poetry and sparse prose of Pedro Kilkerry (1885–1917) was collected and posthumously analyzed by Augusto de Campos in Re/Visão de Kilkerry [Review of Kilkerry] (São Paulo: Fundo Estadual de Cultura, 1971). The study by Octavio Paz to which I refer is “Literature y literalidad” [Literature and Literality] in El signo y el garabato [The Sign and the Scribbling] (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1973).

  Chapter Seventeen  

Góngora in Spanish American Poetry, Góngora   in Luso-Brazilian Poetry: Critical Parallels Jorge Ruedas de la Serna

Translated by Patrick Blaine

One might propose a study of the mysterious crossroads of literary history, a study that would lie at the outskirts of criticism but might nonetheless illuminate the destiny that seems to impel the work of great writers. Because such crossroads are not visible to mortal eyes, they conceal mysterious creatures and, indeed, in some cases, the roads do not cross at all, but run parallel, remaining proximate but separate. The histories of literature written in Spanish and Portuguese are an instance of parallel trajectories that nonetheless occasionally cross in unexpected ways. The crossings of Spanish and Portuguese Baroque poetry, both in Europe and America, are the subject of this essay and, more particularly, the role of the Spanish poet Luis de Góngora at their intersections. Portugal was the European country in which Góngora’s influence was most prolonged and pronounced, despite the wariness of the Portuguese toward their imperial neighbor. The great Luíz Vas de Camões invoked the “heroic” resistance of the Portuguese against the powerful and fearsome menace of the Castilians: “And against the Castilian so feared / [Portugal] always received the favor of the serene heavens, / So always, in the end, through fame and glory / Its trophies were pendants of victory!”1 This historic resistance notwithstanding, the Spanish language imposed itself on the Portuguese world, largely through the poetry of Góngora. Góngora penetrated the taste of poets and readers, and the best Portuguese writers of the seventeenth century expressed an appreciation so dazzling that Góngora was rapidly instituted as the sublime model for their poetics. It is possible that the proGongorine treatises written in Portugal outnumbered those in Spain, all ar-

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guing for the need to ornament poetry with the “pomp and brilliance” of “rich jewels of erudition, silver, baubles, tropes, and flowers.”2 One of those most captivated by the style of culteranismo was the famous Francisco Manuel de Melo (1608–66). In his Hospital das letras (1657), which may be translated as the “hotel” or “hostel of literature,” five characters converse, including the author himself and the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo, who consecrate Góngora as the lyrical favorite of Apollo. The critic António Correia de Oliveira writes: “In Hospital das letras, Góngora is the elegant aristocrat, the artist of impeccable virtuosity, master of the most extravagant flourishes of expression, whose style was accepted and imitated by all, though few succeeded in mastering his style. Most were cast down like demons from the resplendent darkness, as Quevedo himself puts it.”3 So it was that Portuguese and, by extension, Brazilian poets assiduously imitated Góngora’s style through the middle of the eighteenth century. Through Góngora, the Spanish language gained so much prestige that it was considered, even by the Portuguese, to be the noblest tongue among people of culture. But this enormous Spanish influence also began to seem like a political liability. During the reign of King João V (1706–50), the king himself took steps to neutralize it by establishing close ties with Italian men of letters and becoming the greatest patron of the Arcadian Academy of Rome, founded in 1690 to combat Baroque ornamentation and other forms of “bad taste.” ii The  The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines culteranismo as follows:

“Culteranismo, originally a satirical term implying literary heresy (like luteranismo, Lutheranism) and used to attack the new style of poetry of Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627), or Gongorism, is best understood in relation to conceptismo. In Spanish literary history, culteranismo traditionally describes a poetic style in which learned words, Hispanized from Latin or Greek, are prominent. Conceptismo, on the other hand, is a style in poetry or prose characterized by ingenious or ‘precious’ ideas. In other words, according to this view, culteranismo concerns poetic vocabulary, whereas conceptismo concerns the expression of thought.” The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 261–62. Melo was a Portuguese writer, historian, and soldier who served in the Spanish army of Phillip IV in Flanders and Catalonia. The work mentioned here is considered to be the first instance of literary criticism in the Portuguese language.—Eds. ii The Arcadian Academy of Rome was founded at the end of the so-called Baroque century under the patronage of Queen Christina of Sweden, a Catholic who took refuge in Rome after abdicating her throne. The academy favored pastoral settings for its meeting and adopted the reed pipe of Pan as its symbol. The academy attracted writers and musicians, among them Arcangelo Corelli and Georg Friedrich Handel—ironically, composers now considered the epitome of the Baroque style in

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Arcadian Academy of Lisbon, founded in 1755 and modeled on the one in Rome, would declare unconditional war on Gongorism, which had become identified with the parasitic luxury of the aristocracy. At this time, Pombal’s reform curtailed the privileges of the old nobility, transformed the scholastic and Aristotelian curriculum of the university, expelled the Jesuits, promoted change in literary practices, and worked to stamp out Gongorine influence like the plague.iii But this influence had so deeply soaked into poetic language that, in the second half of the eighteenth century, the great Brazilian poet from Minas Gerais, and one of the best sonneteers in the Portuguese language, Claudio Manuel da Costa, would confess that “even though he understood modern poetics, he failed when it came to writing accordingly.” Thus, the “de-Gongorization” of Portuguese poetry was slow to overcome old patterns, but as I have suggested, Góngora eventually came to represent the opposite of good taste, moderation, and aesthetic equilibrium—values that have impelled the careful cultivation of form in Portugal and Brazil until the present day. One might venture the claim that contemporary Brazilian Neobaroque poets are formally neoclassical, even as the content of their poetry strives toward the elliptical and conceptual; that is, they combine aspects of culteranismo and conceptismo. Perhaps, as the Brazilian literary historian and theorist Antonio Candido argues, this is because the Brazilian literary system was established during the heyday of Arcadianism,iv which, in addition to promoting a rigorous formalism, ruled out stylistic extravagance.4 Hence Brazilian Romanticism did not confuse its claim of liberty with formal freedom or carelessness. And the modernism of 1922, where the “Neobaroque” concrete poets originated, also emphasized formal innovation such as games of polyphonic geometry and ironic rhyming, all the while mainmusic. In 1725, King João V of Portugal gave land in Rome to the academy, where a permanent open-air theater was established.—Eds. iii The modernizing reforms in Portugal enacted by the Marquis de Pombal (whose rule as first minister lasted from 1750 to 1777) parallel those of the Bourbons in Spain in several ways, including their destructive reaction against Baroque art, architecture, and literature.—Eds. iv Arcadianism: related to the Arcadian Academies described above. In Brazilian literary history, the term refers to the eighteenth-century reaction against Baroque ornamentation in favor of an “Arcadian” aesthetic of idealized pastoral simplicity. As the author notes below, Candido argues that Arcadianism is the starting point of Brazilian literature; he thus excludes the earlier Baroque period from Brazilian literary history, conceiving it as a mere extension of metropolitan Portuguese literature in colonial America.—Eds.

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taining the ideal of formal control and concentration (sometimes carried to the limits of meaning) and opposing sumptuous, expansive ­fervor. I remember that on one occasion, Haroldo de Campos (a concrete poet who is considered Neobaroque)  showed me a painting that he presented as a visual ideal: a blank canvas. Nothing could be more antithetical to the Baroque of the seventeenth century. However, the classical Brazilian Baroque, the eighteenth-century Baroque from Minas Gerais, is more restrained than the earlier Spanish Baroque because it is in permanent tension with the classical models to which it eventually submits, obeying their principles of aesthetic equilibrium through formal and geometric discipline. This may be why many modern geometric artists have found inspiration in the architecture of Ouro Preto, the eighteenth-century Brazilian Baroque city par excellence. Perhaps for the same reason the greatest Brazilian Baroque poet of the seventeenth century, Gregório de Matos e Guerra (1636–95), from the state of Bahia, was buried in oblivion for nearly three centuries. In Brazil, the recovery of the Baroque was slow. In contrast to the Hispanic world, where the revaluation of Góngora’s poetry, beginning with Alfonso Reyes in Mexico and the Generation of ’27 in Spain, was effected by both writers and critics, in Brazil, until recently, this project has been almost exclusively the province of academic criticism. There were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholars who studied Gregório, such as Tristão Araripe Jr., who edited and anthologized part of his work in 1910.5 But the majority of texts about the “mouth of Hell”—his nickname during his lifetime—only serve to re-create the romantic legend of an outrageously scandalous poet. As recently as 1983, the learned historian Pedro Calmón published a study titled A vida espantosa de Gregório de Matos (The Horrifying Life of Gregório de Matos).6 The case of Gregório reflects the situation of the Brazilian Baroque, which was long considered a mere extension of European literature, and not Brazilian in any culturally authentic way. According to Candido, Brazilian literature begins only at the end of the eighteenth century, with Arcadianism. It was then that a convergence between writers and readers began to develop, whereby a new code of shared semiotic values could be said to constitute a  See de Campos’s essay included in this volume. Ruedas de la Serna differs sharply

with de Campos and the so-called Neobaroque poets in their claims for an amplified Baroque in Brazil, preferring a more historically and culturally circumscribed definition of the Baroque.—Eds.

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literary tradition.7 The recovery of Gregório thus became a labor of literary archaeology, and a pioneer in this area was Sergio Buarque de Holanda, in his Antologia dos poetas brasileiros da fase colonial (Anthology of Brazilian Poets of the Colonial Era), published in 1952–53. Buarque de Holanda disagreed with the romantic image of Gregório as a symbol of Brazilian identity, especially the Gregório in his satiric phase. Rather, he returned to study Gregório rigorously, relating him to the pattern of the Hispanic Baroque, and he discovered that many of his techniques reflected Quevedo or the polemical Italian satirist Trajano Boccalini (1556–1613), the author of Ragguagli di Parnaso.vi Because of Boccalini’s bitter satire of the Spanish after the capture of Naples, Lope de Vega called him “mouth of Hell” as well,8 and certainly Boccalini’s fame in Portugal would have been partially explained by the fact that his satires of Spanish imperialism resonated with Portuguese experience. In Melo’s Hospital das letras, Boccalini is one of the five characters whom Melo includes among his conversationalists. The “mouth of Hell” from Bahia must have been familiar with this “mouth of Hell” from Tuscany. As Gregório has come to be studied in the cultural context of his time, the myth identifying him as some sort of repository of transhistorical Brazilianness has been deconstructed, even though the Neobaroque poets continue to claim him as such to this day. Buarque de Holanda’s anthology rescued colonial Baroque texts in a literary historical sense and also in a literary critical sense, contextualizing them and giving them back to the culture of the seventeenth century. This anthology, then, is comparable to the first two volumes of Poetas novohispanos (Poets of New Spain) by Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, which cover the second century (1621–1721); vii they were published in 1944 and 1945, respectively.9 The dominant impulse in both the Brazilian and the Mexican anthologies is restorative; they represent a new, demystifying, historiographic vision that vi Translated literally as Information about/from Parnassus and published in Venice in

1612 and 1613, Boccalini’s satires influenced Baroque literature in both Spain and Portugal, and especially Quevedo, who settled in Italy in 1613 and read the Italian’s work long before it was translated into Spanish.—Eds. v ii The “second century” here refers to the second century after the fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica (Aztec) empire, to Hernán Cortés’s invading army in 1521, that is, the second century of Spanish rule in Mexico. The term is also used in LusoBrazilian literary history to indicate the same general period, that is, the seventeenth century.—Eds.

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demands a rigorous reading of the texts themselves and refuses the prejudices of earlier critics. These anthologies cleared the path for serious research. Their authors’ literary culture allowed them to move from classical sources to modern poetry, and from the domains of history and philosophy to literature, making their work a fundamental threshold of change in colonial Baroque studies in their respective countries. In their wake, rigorous studies based on solid historical footing have begun to emerge. Yet it was only in 1989 that a fundamental, demystifying analysis of Gregório appeared in Brazil: A sátira e o engenho: Gregório de Matos e a Bahia do século XVII (Satire and Wit: Gregório de Matos and Bahia in the Seventeenth Century), by João Adolfo Hansen.10 In Mexico, the history of contempt for Baroque poetry extends into the mid-twentieth century and beyond. Ironically, Méndez Plancarte, in his seminal anthology Poetas novohispanos, enumerates many of these negative judgments while at the same time pointing to the critics’ errors and confusions, and demonstrating their limited knowledge of the works in question. José Pascual Buxó explores this deeply engrained anti-Gongorine prejudice in Góngora en la poesía novohispana (Góngora in the Poetry of New Spain),11 a study that is pioneering in many ways. He names this prejudice “official criticism” and calls instead for textual criticism, that is, for an analysis of the Gongorist techniques employed by the poets of New Spain. Much of the difficulty of unraveling the poetics of Baroque texts by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, among others, derives from the confusion between the Baroque as a historical epoch and the Baroque as an aesthetic category, a confusion noted in the Third International Congress of Humanistic Studies in 1954 in Venice. The great diversity of definitions of the Baroque was discussed, including the inexact use of the terms Baroque and barroquismo, as well as the overlappings among the terms barroquismo, culteranismo, and gongorismo.12 The general identification of the Baroque with Gongorism is due to this lack of precision. Moreover, even though Góngora’s Soledades (Solitudes) and La fábula de Polifemo (The Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea) had been recovered and admired, the work of his followers and imitators has been depreciated, making it difficult still to evaluate post-Gongorine Baroque poets. In his study, Buxó proposes to examine the imbalanced judgments against Góngora and his followers in New Spain, judgments that continued in Mexican literary histories from Francisco Pimentel to mid-twentieth-century lit-

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erary historians such as Carlos González Peña.viii Buxó notes that amid the pejorative judgments used by critics to justify dispensing with any serious discussion of the Baroque poets of New Spain, the work of Méndez Plancarte stands out: “One man, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, rescued practically the entire corpus of colonial Mexican poetry from oblivion, studying it with dedication and intelligence. He alone spoke to us of Góngora and his Spanish American imitators without the usual ignorant scorn.”13 Concluding his survey, Buxó explains that even early scholars of Góngora’s influence in America concentrated only on superficial similarities, without glimpsing other aspects, stylistic ones that would reveal much more than superficial similarities: the absolute comprehension of each of his fundamental resources and tactics, each of his aesthetic intentions, and the corresponding reply of his overseas disciples. Buxó adopts other criteria to view the poets of New Spain not as servile imitators but as original re-creators who enriched Baroque literature through the perspective of their own culture, as is the case of Sor Juana and Sigüenza y Góngora. In Gongóra en la poesía novohispano, Buxó examines lexicon, syntax, stylistic formulas, and rhetorical figures in a wide range of poems, along with numerous variants. Concluding his meticulous analysis, he claims that “Gongorism in New Spain displayed all the characteristics of a literary movement, and its practitioners were perfectly conscious of the stylistic resources and aesthetic purposes of their precursor.”14 There are surprising parallels between Buxó’s study and the contemporaneous Góngora y la poesía portuguesa del siglo XVII (Góngora and SeventeenthCentury Portuguese Poetry) by the Portuguese critic José Ares Montes, an equally pioneering study.15 In the introduction, Ares Montes describes the same situation in Portugal that Buxó describes in New Spain: “The most intransigent of the problems I had to confront in beginning this study was the near absolute absence of a critical bibliography concerning the subject. To this day no one has taken the trouble to investigate thoroughly the influence of Góngora’s works on Portuguese poetry—where it manifested itself, and how.”16

viii Francisco Pimentel (1832–93), a Mexican literary historian, was a pioneer in the

study of indigenous languages in Mexico, most importantly in his study Cuadro descriptivo y comparativo de las lenguas indígenas de México (Descriptive and Comparative Context of Indigenous Mexican Languages, 1874–75). Here, the author refers implicitly to Pimentel’s Historia crítica de la poesía en México (1885).—Eds.

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Ares Montes begins by offering a broad review of Portuguese Gongorism, from Camões’s culteranismo and rhetorical figures, which were precursors of the movement, through the entire seventeenth and up to the advent of anti-Gongorism in the eighteenth century. He also describes principal critical positions, particularly of Portuguese Romanticism, which, like Hispanic Romanticism, found Góngora antithetical to their aesthetic. He then proceeds to a meticulous examination of the poetic language of Portuguese Gongorists (paralleling Buxó’s), while separating (like Buxó) poor copies from great imitations. He concludes: “Despite Gongorine servitude, or rather, because of it, Portuguese Gongorism is one of the richest and most interesting strains in Portuguese literature. To ignore it out of prejudice (movement-related or otherwise) would be to turn one’s back on reality and dismiss some of the most beautiful poems in Portuguese literature.”17 A more detailed comparison of Buxó’s and Ares Montes’s studies, published almost simultaneously, affirms the need to attend to the influence of Góngora in Portuguese, Spanish American, and Luso-Brazilian literature. Without a doubt, these are complementary studies with respect to motivation, sources, and, above all, in response to the need to reexamine Gongorine imitatio as it was understood by Góngora himself and by his Baroque progeny in Portugal and the New World.

Notes 1 See Hernani Cidade, Lições de cultura e literatura portuguesas, vol. 1 (Coimbra, Por-

2 3 4 5 6 7

tugal: Coimbra Editora Limitada, 1975), 376. [The quoted stanza is from Os Lusíadas (The Lusiads), canto 1, stanza 26, an epic poem in ten cantos by Luiz de Vas Camões (1524–80). First published in 1572, this epic concerns itself with Portugal’s imperial expansion from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries and is considered one of the greatest works of Portuguese literature.—Eds.] Cidade, Lições de cultura e literatura portuguesas, 429. António Correia de A. e Oliveira, ed., As segundas três musas: Francisco Manuel de Melo; Ensaio crítico (Lisbon: Livrarioa Editora, 1945), 19–20. Antonio Candido, Introducción a la literatura de Brasil (Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1968). Tristão de Alencar Araripe Júnior (1848–1911), Gregório de Matos, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro, Paris: Garnier, 1910). Pedro Calmón, A vida espantosa de Gregório de Matos (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1983). Antonio Candido, Introduction to Formaçao da literatura brasileira (Momentos decisivos), 2 vols. (Belo Horizonte: Editorial Itatiaia, 1981).

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8 Sergio Buarque de Holanda, “Em torno a Viera,” Diário Carioca (Rio de Janeiro),

9 10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17

January 13, 1951. Reprinted in O espírito e a letra: Estudios de crítica literaria, vol. 2, 1848–1959, ed. Antonio Arnoni Prado (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996), 322–26. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, Poetas novohispanos, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1944–45). João Adolfo Hansen, A sátira e o engenho: Gregório de Matos e a Bahia do século XVII (São Paulo: Secrectaria de Estado da Cultura: Companhia de Letras, 1989). [Engenho in Portuguese, and ingenio in Spanish, are variously translated as “ingenuity,” “wit,” and “genius.” In the context of Baroque aesthetics, the term refers to invention or imagination in balance with critical judgment, and it privileges the poet’s capacity to bring unlike things into conceptual relation by means of metaphor, metonymy, paradox, irony, and so on. See the entry on “wit” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger and T. V. F. Brogan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 1374–75.—Eds.] José Pascual Buxó, Góngora en la poesía novohispana (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1960). Retórica e barroco: Atti del III Congreso Internazionale de Studi Umanistici (Roma: Fratelli Bocca, 1955). See Maria de Lourdes Belchior Pontes, “Gôngora e os cultos, segundo e retórica conceptista, de Francisco Leitão Ferreira—Nova arte de conceitos,” in Actas del V Colóquio Internacional de Estudios Brasileiros, vol. 3 (Coimbra, Brazil: Coimbra Editora Limitada, 1965). Buxó, Góngora en la poesía novohispana, 9. Ibid., 111. José Ares Montes, Góngora y la poesía portuguesa del siglo XVII (Madrid: Gredos, 1956). Ibid., 13. Ibid., 472.

  Chapter Eighteen  

Sor Juana and Luis de Góngora: The Poetics of Imitatio José Pascual Buxó

Translated by Michael Schuessler and Ashley Lapin

Why undertake another study of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s “Sueño” (“Dream”) if so many eminent critics have already delved into its multiple thematic and stylistic difficulties?  Having surpassed anti-Baroque prejudices at least a half century ago, the intricate plot of this great poem has been studied with perseverance and perspicacity and would seem to conceal little from today’s readers. However, what is not so widely discussed is the conception of artistic originality that impelled the poetic practice of Sor Juana and her contemporaries. Luis de Góngora’s Soledades (Solitudes) and Sor Juana’s “Dream” constitute the finest examples of this poetic practice, which combines vast erudition, the subtleties of the conceit, and Latinate expressive elegance to create a new kind of beauty. It is this seventeenthcentury conception of beauty, poetic creation, and its modes of performance that will concern me in the following pages.

I It will be useful here at the outset to cite several passages from Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Wit and the Art of Genius, 1648) in which Baltasar Gracián formulates the principles and describes the resources of this new aesthetic: ii  The poem is also known as the “Primero sueño” (First Dream), a title created by Sor

Juana’s early editors, who were doubtlessly influenced by Góngora’s first and second “Soledades” (Solitudes). In her “Respuesta a sor Filotea de la Cruz” (Reply to Sor Philothea de la Cruz), Sor Juana herself refers to the poem simply as the “Sueño” (Dream). I use both versions in this translation, as does the author. All translations of original Spanish texts are mine unless otherwise noted.—Trans. ii Baltasar Gracián (1601–58) was a Spanish Jesuit philosopher, scholar, satirist, and

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“The conceits were more the product of the mind’s effort than of artifice. . . . The [spontaneous] imitation [of nature] was replaced by art.” If a syllogism is created by rules, so, too, with rules “a conceit is forged” because “understanding without wit or conceits is a sun without light or rays . . . genius does not content itself only with the truth, as judgment does, but it also aspires to beauty” (emphasis added).iii To state the matter with abusive brevity: in an era of exploration and discovery, poetry did not have to pretend to be the result of chance but was, rather, the result of the planned exploration of new and unknown correlations between the judgments of understanding and the artifices of invention.1 Thus Gracián proposes in his Wit and the Art of Genius: “The subject upon which one reflects and ponders . . . [is] a kind of center from which lines of contemplation and subtlety are distributed to the entities that enclose it; that is, to the accoutrements that crown it, which are its motifs, effects, attributes, qualities, circumstances of time, place, mode, etc. . . . it relates one subject to another, moving amongst them; and in discovering some conformity or convergence with the principal subject or among various subjects, it extracts the relation, ponders it, and therein lies the subtlety.”2 As an example of “conceits by correspondence and proportion,” Gracián cites the sonnet that Góngora dedicated to Cristóbal de Mora, the Marquis of Castel-Rodrigo. The sonnet begins with an analogy between his noble protector’s surname and the tree of the same name, el moral, the mulberry tree. Following the model of Alciato’s Emblems,iv he establishes a correspondence between Mora and the mulberry tree, a symbol of prudence, as well

epigrammatist, whose various works helped codify Baroque poetic structures and strategies.—Trans. iii These fragmentary citations are to be found in “Discourse I” of Gracián’s Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Madrid, 1648). I have translated them from Gilberto Prado Galán’s critical edition, published in 1996 by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. All following citations are translated from this edition.—Trans. iv Andrea Alciato was an Italian jurist who settled in France in the early 1500s. He wrote a number of legal treatises, but he is most famous for his Emblemata, published in dozens of editions from 1531 on. This collection of short Latin verse texts and accompanying woodcuts created an entire European genre, the emblem book, which attained enormous popularity throughout Europe and the Spanish New World. The emblem is essentially a hieroglyphic or symbolic figure, a pictura (picture), accompanied by a mote (motto), as well as an epigrammatic text. For a complete reproduction of his work, see the Web site developed by the Department of English at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, http://www.mun.ca/alciato/index.html.—Trans.

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as the palm tree, a symbol of perseverance, and the laurel, a symbol of virtue (figure 18.1).3 Góngora continues, as Gracián notes, to “combine his poetic devices with the moral virtues of his patron—here, in particular, the pun on his patron’s name: “a singing bird or a swan in its boughs, spinning like the silkworm . . . nourishing itself on the mulberry tree [el moral ]: the poet—a solitary pilgrim—concludes by devoting his pilgrimage to his patron.” He solicits his patron’s protection, offering to compose a song that will exalt his deeds and virtues (thus obscuring those of others less illustrious than he) and swearing to dedicate his life to the service of his long-awaited ­protector: Gusano de tus hojas me alimentes, pajarillo sosténganme tus ramas y ampáreme tu sombra peregrino. Hilaré tu memoria entre las gentes, cantaré, enmudeciendo ajenas famas, y votaré a tu templo mi camino. That the worm of your leaves nourish me, a small bird, that your branches support me and that your shade shelter the pilgrim. I will spin your memory among people, I will sing, silencing other fames, and devote my pilgrimage to your temple.

Gracián describes varieties of poetic relations that produce figures of wit. Some of them are familiar to us, such as those of “proportion” or “nonproportion and dissonance” established between the “extremes” of the subject at hand; or those reached through “mysterious contemplation” (ponderación misteriosa), that is, by “creating a mystery between the connection of the extremes or correspondences with the subject”; “conceits that accommodate ancient verse or other texts or authorities,” a type of wit that demands “subtlety and erudition”; and “wit through allusion.” Other figures are constructed by means of “extraordinary erudition” (docta erudición) and “the sources from which it comes,” as well as from “the ingenious application and use of informed erudition” (erudición noticiosa). I will briefly outline the nature and intention of two types of wit that will be useful for our examination  All translations of Spanish poetry are mine unless otherwise noted.—Trans.

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18.1  Andrea

Alciato, Emblem XXXVI “Obdurandum adversus urgentia” (“One Must Persist against Oppressions”), Book of Emblems, 1531

Emblema XXXVI Obdurandum adversus urgentia

Emblem 36 One must persist against oppressions

Nititur in pondus palma, et consurgit in arcum, Quomagis et premitur, hoc mage tollit onus: Fert et odoratas, bellaria dulcia, glandes, Queis mensas inter primus habetur honos. I, puer, et reptans ramis has collige: mentis Qui constantis erit, praemia digna feret.

A palm-tree struggles up against a weight, and rises in an arc; the more it is pressed down, the more it lifts its burden. It bears fragrant nuts, sweet desserts, to which first honour is given among courses. Go youth, and crawling amidst the branches, gather these things. He who is of constant mind will carry off worthy prizes.

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of Sor Juana’s “Sueño”: “allusion” and the “ingenious application and use of informed erudition.” The “formal artifice” of allusion consists “in establishing a relationship with some term, account or circumstance, not extracting it but mysteriously referring to it,” by means of which the poem acquires an enigmatic character that invites the reader to discover the missing referent. Gracián mentions, among others, the example of a ballad (romance) by Don Antonio de Mendoza dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which begins by alluding to her attributes, that is, by the “account or circumstances” that correspond to her: Hermosa, fecunda estrella del mar, donde en vez de puerto, naufragante el sol humano buscó tierra y tomó cielo ... Cuya tierna planta hermosa pisa del dragón más fiero, el voraz, rugiente, altivo, sañudo, erizado cuello. Beautiful, fecund star of the sea, where instead of a port the shipwrecked human sun searched for land and took the sky ... Whose tender, beautiful foot treads upon the fiercest dragon’s voracious, roaring, arrogant, furious, bristling neck.

By not declaring the identity of the subject to which Mendoza refers, Gracián concludes that the “conceit completes itself and enhances the pleasure of the person who understands it.” In fact, before reaching the end of the ballad, where the author reveals the name of the subject to whom he has been “mysteriously” referring, the informed reader (and in this matter, all Spaniards were informed) has discovered to his or her satisfaction the theological identity of that “star of the sea” whose foot treads the neck of Satan, the “fiercest dragon.” However, one cannot always explain wit by allusion, as if it were a case

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of lexical paraphrase within which, to cite Dámaso Alonso, “imagination draws a circle, and in the center, through intuition, inserts the unspoken predicate.”4 Between the paraphrase of the “crested fowls whose mate / The watchful herald of the Sun, with bold / And tuneful note awakens every home” (Solitudes, I 292–94),vi that is, the garrulous hens, and the allusion to different attributes of the “Empress of Paradise” from the ballad I just cited, there are more substantial differences than formal resemblances. In the case of the “wives of the cock,” all lexical components conspire to reveal the significance of the absent subject, whereas in the case of the Virgin, we must recognize that such components form part not so much of a clever lexical paraphrase as of an underlying Marian discourse of symbolic attributes. In other words, what is elided in the ballad is not only a name but an entire text or, if you will, fragments of an ideological discourse repeated in multiple textual instances, glossed incessantly in sermons and whose invariable referent is a doctrinal paradigm with perfectly established symbolic analogies, faithfully reiterated in sacred art and oratory. In short, wit through allusion is, in many cases, a concentrated form of what Gracián refers to as the “ingenious application of informed erudition”; it is a reconstructed paraphrase of an authorized, canonical text that underlies (as a kind of hypotext) its innumerable glosses.5 The author of Wit and the Art of Genius writes that erudition “consists of a universal record of sayings and facts that serve to illustrate the material at hand.” In cases where “the elevated nature of the subject, the wit of invention and the diverse relations of the selected erudition [come together], they make a perfect and acceptable whole.” He adds that, as in the stories of antiquity, one must also employ current topics because these “flatter with their novelty”; otherwise the reader may become annoyed with undue repetition (Discourse LVIII). Nevertheless, in the subsequent discourse, Gracián cautions that “wise and select erudition is not sufficient; that which is most ingenious and necessary is the correct application.” Thus the poet attempts to establish a “correlation that is consistent with the subject or material that it treats, and the story, event or proverb that applies to it.” But this type of wit does not consist only in the discovery of some likeness between the circumstances of the subject vi Translations of both of Góngora’s Solitudes are taken from The Solitudes of Luis de

Góngora, trans. Gilbert F. Cunningham (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968). The Roman numerals refer to Góngora’s first and second Solitudes respectively.—Trans.

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and its terms of comparison; it is necessary to enhance it ingeniously, that is, to illustrate or ennoble the likeness in an unusual way. For example, the poet Luis Carrillo “transformed in identity” the lover and the salamander, both of which can endure fire. Given the double meaning of “flame or ember” and its figurative meaning, “ardor that rouses the passion of love,” the igneous heart of the lover is substantially transfigured in the animal of fable: De la salamandra dicen que en el fuego viva está; por mi corazón lo digo, que a más fuego, vive más.

Of the salamander they say that he can endure fire; I declare the same about my heart, that the hotter the fire, the more it lives.

This comparison is based on a “saying” or, more precisely, on a “universal idea of words and deeds” that is textually fixed and transmitted and that, as a whole, constitutes the science and knowledge of things such as defined by the Diccionario de Autoridades (Dictionary of Authorities).vii Gracián expressed it well when he said: “There are many books that are like warehouses of erudition or, to phrase it better, stacks [ fárragos] of sayings, apothegms and maxims piled high; these soon become annoying; better are those that minister erudition in a witty, clever, and diligent manner” (Discourse LVIII). And what were those books that, contrary to the “warehouses of erudition,” engaged in wit, brevity, and polish, as well as information about everything in the world? I am sure that Gracián was thinking of books of emblems, an artifice on which he himself relied in chapter 21 of El discreto (The Complete Gentleman, 1646) to interpret with caustic irony Alciato’s Emblem CLXI, titled “Mutuum Auxilium,” whose pictura is a blind man directed by a cripple whom he carries on his shoulders (figure 18.2). In my judgment, the textual source from which Carrillo established the erudite application of the igneous salamander might have been one of the Emblemas morales [Moral Emblems, 1610] by Sebastián de Covarrubias y Orozco,viii in particular the one vii The Dictionary of Authorities is the name used to refer to the Diccionario de la

lengua castellana (Dictionary of the Castilian Language) (1726–39), the first dictionary published by Spain’s Real Academia (Royal Academy) in six volumes. This is the reference work normally consulted by scholars of Spain’s Golden Age, for it provides definitions that reflect the usage and meaning of words at that time.— Trans. viii Sebastián de Covarrubias y Orozco (1539–1613) was a Spanish lexicographer and chaplain to Phillip II. In 1611 he published the Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (Treasury of the Castilian or Spanish Language), the first monolingual dictionary

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18.2  Andrea

Alciato, Emblem CLXI “Mutuum auxilium” (“Mutual Sup‑ port”), Book of Emblems, 1531

Emblema CLXI Mutuum auxilium

Emblem 161 Mutual support

Loripedem sublatum humeris fert lumine captus, Et socii haec oculis munera retribuit. Quo caret alteruter, concors sic praestat uterque: Mutuat hic oculos, mutuat ille pedes.

A lame man is carried upon the shoulders of one who has lost his sight. With his eyes, the lame man repays this service of his friend. In what one lacks, it is agreed, the other is superior: one man borrows eyes, the other man borrows feet.

titled “Where You Live, I Die,” and whose pictura represents a satyr and a salamander surrounded by flames. The subscriptio concludes: En un serao [sic] de noble ayuntamiento, al vil abrasa el fuego de la dama, y al bueno su amorosa llama. In a celebration of noble government, the lady’s fire burns the scoundrel as well as the good man with her loving flame. in Spanish and a virtual encyclopedia of seventeenth-century Castilian. He is also

the author of the Emblemas morales (Moral Emblems) (1610).—Trans.

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Evidently Carrillo did not ponder the differences between ignoble and honest love, or the moral capacity of the contrasting lovers, as de Covarrubias y Orozco did: rather, he enhanced the intensity of their passion with a hyperbolic image. In fact, the discovery of this possible emblematic source “enhances the pleasure” of the reader, who might even take pride in his own memory or perspicacity. Like many others classified by Gracián, these examples of wit by “allusion” or “informed erudition” normally refer to exercises that professors of rhetoric assigned to their students so that they might increase their copia rerum ac verborum, that is, their lexical resources as well as their ability to practice imitatio in the “varied and modified reproduction of literary models.” This was combined with the development of their competence in establishing similtudines rerum, images enlivened by fantasy that possess expressive and plastic strength.6 What the students learned was complemented by orators and professional poets, who would take these resources to an extreme in search of original aesthetic effects. Such imitation is to be understood as a process of apprenticeship and emulation,7 not as something to be reproached but rather as an act of professional engagement with a prestigious author to bring one’s own work to greater expressive capacity and ideological complexity.8 This intellectual and cultural practice is essential to an understanding of the rhetorical mechanisms, as well as the aesthetic and psychological motivations of the literature of Spain’s Golden Age.9

II In the case of Sor Juana’s “Dream,” it may be useful to reconsider the meaning of the term imitation employed so liberally by her editor and the humanist priests who wrote the “approbations” of her works.ix The section of lyrical poetry included in the Segundo volumen de las obras de soror Juana Inés de la Cruz (Second Volume of the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Seville, 1692), begins with the “Primero Sueño, que así intituló y compuso la Madre Juana Inés de la Cruz, imitando a Góngora” (“First Dream, thus entitled and com-

ix In books published during the Spanish Golden Age, one normally finds both an

ecclesiastical aprobación (approval) and a censura (censure) at the beginning of each text. While the definition of the former is quite straightforward, that of the latter is more complicated, as it does not signify a “reproach” but rather the dictum or pronouncement regarding the contents of the work in question.—Trans.

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posed by Mother Juana Inés de la Cruz, imitating Góngora”). In his “censure,” which introduces the Fama y obras póstumas del Fénix de México (Fame and Posthumous Works by the Phoenix of Mexico, 1700), Father Diego Calleja stated, referring to this poem, that its meter “is a silva, and thus free of the need to limit consonantal rhymes to a certain number of verses, approximating the form arbitrated by the princely spirit of Luis de Góngora in his Solitudes, whose imitation, doubtless, inspired this Dream of Sister Juana.”  Not only was Father Calleja referring to the formal imitation of the Solitudes and to Sor Juana’s explicit intention to write a poem in open competition with Góngora, but also to the profound differences that exist between the texts, particularly in terms of their subject matter. If the subjects of the Solitudes “allowed Góngora’s pen to soar more freely,” the subjects chosen by Sor Juana “are by nature so arid that to make them flourish in this way indicates marvelous fertility in their cultivation.” Stated in contemporary terms, the radical originality of Sor Juana’s great poem was not lost on Calleja. First of all, the “Dream” is not the narration of a shipwrecked youth’s pilgrimage, scorned by his beloved and disillusioned by the falsehoods of courtly life, who enters the land of shepherds and fishermen, and whose natural ingenuity allows him to rediscover the moral values of a primitive and uncorrupted golden age. Rather, it is an account of a more arduous journey, one disinclined to be shaped by a beautiful and demanding poetic form. It is the voyage of a soul during a dream, which contemplates itself in the mirror of its own intelligence with the desire, says Calleja, “to understand all the things of which the universe is composed,” but awakes disillusioned by the predictable failure of this imagined undertaking of human understanding. In fact, Calleja provides the key to the subjects that are woven into Sor Juana’s poem, from astronomy, physics, medicine, psychology, and mythology to profane and natural history, as well as theological and discursive knowledge. He emphasizes her attitude of emulation and competition, because she was “inspired” to imitate the “Cordovan Apollo” by establishing her own aesthetic model,xi but she also chose subjects traditionally less appropriate to poetic development, that is, subjects usually discussed by means  Father Calleja’s censure is fully reproduced in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz ante la historia

(Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz before History), ed. Francisco de la Maza and Elías Trabulse (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1980), 139–53.—Trans. xi Góngora was known in poetic and intellectual circles as the “Apollo from Córdoba” in recognition of his great poetic prowess and the Spanish city of his birth, Córdoba, in Andalucía.—Trans.

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of rhetorical devices, or ornatus, which is exactly what Calleja alluded to in this statement: “To make them flourish thus indicates marvelous fertility in their cultivation.”10 Certainly, one must not condemn Sor Juana for conforming to the principles of aemulatio. Góngora, too, like all the cultured poets of his time, employed the artifice of the transformative imitation of prestigious models. Commentators of his works have noted recurring allusions to, or the re-creation of passages from, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Claudianus, and the like. Moreover, according to María Rosa Lida, the plot of Góngora’s Solitudes seems to be directly inspired by the Historia del cazador de Eubea (The Story of the Hunter of Eubea) by Dión Crisóstomo.11 But how has modern criticism understood this type of imitation? I will address only two of Sor Juana’s most renowned twentieth-century critics, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte and Octavio Paz, although it would be unjust not to mention a pioneering article by Eunice Joiner Gates, published in 1939,12 in which she presents a comparative catalogue of the lexical and thematic similarities, or “reminiscences,” from the Solitudes and the Polyphemus in certain passages of the “Dream.” For Gates, who bore Father Calleja’s “censure” in mind, the “Dream” “is a poem written by Sor Juana in open imitation of Góngora,” and even though the theme is very different from Góngora’s, “its elaborate structure imitates the style and poetic diction of Góngora.” In fact, the comparison of certain passages of Sor Juana’s poem to those of Góngora leaves no room for doubt; both on a lexical and syntagmatic level, the “reminiscences” are evident. Even so, in my opinion, Gates seems to have limited the concept of poetic “imitation” to the evident similarities of the texts, without proceeding to examine semantic questions of greater significance, for example, the amplification and transformation of the topical elements by means of which the imitating text must establish its distance from the one it is imitating. In other words, the obvious textual evocation of the chosen model must follow a consistent pattern of transformation on deeper semantic levels. From the numerous passages discussed by Gates, let us consider an example from the second “Solitude.” While describing a falconry contest, verses 881 to 890 state that after a falcon has caught a small bird, a flock of crows appears whose black hue “insults” or obscures the greenery of the meadow. Such is the darkness provoked by the outspread wings of those innumerable birds that, believing nighttime has arrived, an owl awakes and unfolds its immense wings, landing on a nearby hillock. In the peculiar Gon-

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gorine universe in which ordinary objects must be arranged in accordance with mythological paradigms, the owl would inevitably bring to the reader’s mind the image of Ascalaphus, Pluto’s henchman, who in turn recalls the fact that Ascalaphus was transformed into a bird of ill omen by Persephone as punishment for falsely accusing her of having eaten the fruits of Hell. This was done so that she not be reunited with her mother Ceres. The allusion to Ovid’s Metamorphoses is not a fundamental element of Góngora’s narrative, but rather a conventional nod that he offers to his erudite readers: Y con siniestra voz convoca cuanta negra de cuervas suma infamó la verdura con su pluma, con su número el Sol. En sombra tanta alas desplegó Ascáfalo prolijas, verde poso ocupando ... Más tardó en desplegar sus plumas graves el deforme fiscal de Proserpina, que en desatarse, al polo ya vecina, la disonante niebla de las aves. (II vv. 883–94) He summoned every crow with grating call, And soon their black array Soiled with their wings the green and hid the day By force of numbers. Darkness seemed to fall, And, opening monstrous vans, Ascalaphus Flew to a mound of green ... Persephone’s grotesque accuser spread His prodigious wings so slowly, he allowed The birds, who now detached their raucous cloud From the high pole to swoop upon his head. (Cunningham 137)

On the contrary, in verses 53 and following of Sor Juana’s “Dream,” Ascalaphus is not a mere mythological analogue to the common owl but an indispensable reference to Pluto’s duplicitous henchman, who plays an essential symbolic role in the scene found in the first part of the “Dream” that is now customarily referred to as “the invasion of the night.” In Sor Juana’s version,

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Ascalaphus is not placed in the context of a hunting party under the open sky, but in the morally sinister realm of a solar eclipse, forming part of a group of birds (barn owls, bats, and screech owls) through which the gravest of offenses are symbolized. These birds, along with . . . el parlero ministro de Plutón un tiempo, ahora supersticioso indicio al agorero (vv. 53–55) . . . Pluto’s telltale one-time henchmen, now an omen to superstitious persons xii (Trueblood 172)

comprise a “terrifying choir” whose notes (“high, black, and long”) contribute to what Méndez Plancarte aptly translates as “the grave nocturnal chorus.” In the startling silence of that dark realm, dominated by “black vapors” emanating from terrestrial matter abandoned by sunlight, the notes emitted by that baneful choir are all that can be heard, their dissonance harmonized with the phlegmatic rhythm of the wind. In the “accommodation” of her verses with canonical texts, Sor Juana maintained the poetic principles recommended in Discourse XXXIV of Gracián’s Wit and the Art of Genius, that “all authoritative elements [cited or alluded to] must be made to fit the circumstances of the case,” that is, those of poetic invention itself.xiii In 1951, the year in which the third centennial of Sor Juana’s birth was officially commemorated, Méndez Plancarte published a modernized prose edition of the “Dream,” with extensive commentary under the rubric of “Explanatory Notes.” xiv In his introduction, he dedicates a paragraph to the “admiration and emulation of Góngora,” in which he notes that only in xii All translations of Sor Juana’s “Dream” are taken from A Sor Juana Anthology, trans.

Alan S. Trueblood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). Note that as Trueblood does not employ verse numbers, page numbers have been used instead.  —Trans. xiii All translations of Gracián’s work are taken from the following Spanish-language source: Agudeza y arte de ingenio (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996).—Trans. xiv Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, El sueño, prose ed., ed. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (Mexico City: Imprenta Universitaria, 1951). It should be noted that at the time, it was believed that Sor Juana was born in 1651. Later investigations have demonstrated that she was actually three years older, having been born in 1648.—Trans.

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the “Dream” and in a contemporaneous text, the “Epicinio gratulatorio al Conde de Galve” (“Encomium to the Count of Galve,” 1691),xv did Sor Juana “give free rein to her very understandable desire to be on equal footing with Góngora in her Latinate hyperbaton,xvi the erudite complexity of her allusions, the abundance of her scholarly references, and the vast structuring of her solemn lyricism, in other words, in the poem’s refined and erudite features.” In the paragraph titled “Latinate and Gongorine Imprimaturs,” Méndez Plancarte registers the “plethora of erudite references,” hyperbaton, and other syntactical “circumlocutions” that appear throughout Sor Juana’s poem, interpreting such devices as apt mechanisms for the realization of the “poetic ideal of an aristocratic language radically separated from normal speech.” In this way her poem responds stylistically to the desire to “escape from the spent word and substitute others that open a window onto a world of fantastic color, that of Greco-Latin tradition,” as Alonso has also argued about Góngora in his celebrated essay, “Claridad y belleza de las Soledades” (“Clarity and Beauty in the Solitudes”). In her “Dream,” Sor Juana not only engages Góngora in her choice of vocabulary, syntax, and metric form but also in her manifest homage to the Cordovan bard, taking the “truly implicit quotations” from the Solitudes, to which Méndez Plancarte refers in his erudite commentary on the “Dream.” xvii The erudition that unfolds in the poem, as he puts it, “beautifully possesses and compresses the entire reality xv Besides the “Dream,” this is the only known silva composed by Sor Juana; it is

dedicated to the Count of Galve in celebration of a victory of Spain’s Armada de Barlovento (Windward Fleet) over the French.—Trans. xvi Hyperbaton is a term used to describe the disruption of normal syntax for poetic effect. Góngora employed it generously in an attempt to restore the glory of classical poetry to that written in the Spanish of his day. As Latin is an inflected language, word placement has no bearing on meaning, which, of course, is not the case in Spanish. It was precisely this technique that earned him the adjective culterano, or “cultivated,” to characterize his poetry. Culteranismo has traditionally been opposed to conceptismo (conceptualism), a term often used to describe the poetics of his great rival, Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645). Like all binary categories, it has its critical limitations: Góngora is at times conceptista and Quevedo is sometimes culterano.—Trans. xvii Here the author is referring to Méndez Plancarte’s critical edition and prosification of The Dream, originally published in 1951, the tricentenary of Sor Juana’s (assumed) birth, and reprinted by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in 1995. The information referred to here is found in section V of Méndez Plancarte’s edition, titled “Sello latinizante y gongorino.”—Trans.

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of creation” in a candid display—we would add along with Gracián—of her “extraordinary erudition” (docta erudición) and the diversity of “the sources from which it is inspired.” In its “magnificent cornucopia” of images (Méndez Plancarte’s metaphor for the multitude of cultural references that “abound and accrue” in the “Dream”), this critic suggests that Sor Juana’s astronomical, geographical, anatomical and, above all, mythological references serve to construct an encyclopedic repertory of scientific and literary motifs. Not only do they fulfill the goal of culteranismo to amaze the reader by a display of references at once prestigious and enigmatic, but they also—contrary to the ornamental character that seems to have been attributed to them by Méndez Plancarte—play a principal role in the structure and significance of the poem. They are not mere ornaments superimposed on the philosophical argument of the text, nor are they simply erudite and elegant digressions; rather, they are vigorous iconic-literary incarnations of the arduous subjects that made Sor Juana’s poem “flourish.” In fact, in the narrative structure of the “Dream,” which Méndez Plancarte insightfully separates into thematic-conceptual divisions, these colorful and impressive images are the consequence of one of the essential devices of Baroque poetics: the construction of ekphrastic images. Like those used by rhetoricians in their simulated theaters of memory, in the imagined space of a theater, orators envisioned the expository order of their discourse for the purpose of memorizing it. Sor Juana’s images, too, are constructed in conformity with the iconic representation of visually perceived objects; such poetic images provide the necessary stimuli for profound intellectual reflection, as well as the sensuous pleasures of form, light, and color.

III In his celebrated essay on Góngora, Dámaso Alonso emphasizes the principal stylistic characteristics of Gongorine imagery, that is, the intense evocation of light and color in the description of the natural motifs, the most remarkable lyrical feature of his greatest poems.13 For no matter how much the voyage of the young castaway to unknown lands is the focus of the Solitudes, Góngora’s poem is not epic but rather lyrical and descriptive. What is important is its “juxtaposition” (careo) of nature and the unpretentious occupation of farmers and goatherds to other elements of greater aesthetic magnitude, thus creating images of unexpected beauty. The stylistic refinement of the metaphorical descriptions of human and natural phenomena

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creates the illusion of color, sound, and touch, and it accomplishes other semantic intentions as well. One is to create perceptual effects comparable to those of pictorial representation. That Góngora always had in mind pictorial models and the diverse techniques from the visual arts may be observed in innumerable passages in the Solitudes. The following example from the “First Solitude” describes the mountain girls who stop to rest in the shade of some trees: Ellas en tanto en bóvedas de sombras, pintadas siempre al fresco, cubren las que Sidón, telar turquesco, no ha sabido imitar verdes alfombras. (I, vv. 612–15) Under the painted vaults of grateful shade The maidens lingered still On carpets greener than, with all their skill, The Turkish looms of Sidon ever made. (Cunningham 47)

The cupola formed by the shade trees is compared to an architectural vault painted al fresco with muted colors, and the grass on which the mountain girls lie is compared to the rugs woven on the famous looms of Sidon, “celebrated in antiquity for their purple-dyed fabrics and now for their Turkishstyle rugs,” as the commentator Díaz de Rivas has noted.xviii The illusion of vivid and colorful objects that impels Góngora’s poetry is expressly emphasized by the Abbot of Rute (Fernando Fernández de Córdoba), who in his Examen del antídoto (Examination of the Antidote) writes that “poetry, in general, is painting that speaks, and if any poem does just that, it is [the Solitudes]; in them, as in a painting from Flanders, one sees a thousand types of rustic pursuits, hamlets, huts, mountains, valleys, meadows, forests, seas, estuaries, rivers . . . land animals, water animals, and animals of the air, all ingeniously and very beautifully painted.” In the introduction to his critical edition of the Solitudes,14 Robert Jammes observed that the “paintings from Flanders” mentioned in the passage just xviii Pedro Díaz de Rivas was Góngora’s first commentator, and a defender of the poet’s

culterano style. In 1627 he published his Anotaciones (Annotations) to the Solitudes.—Trans.

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558. Musée d’Art Ancien, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, New York

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quoted from the Abbot of Rute could well be identified as one of Peter Brueghel’s paintings, such as The Fall of Icarus (painted around 1558), in which a great variety of natural elements appear on the first and second planes: a farmhand with a powerful ox pulling the plough, a shepherd with his sheep, ruins, cliffs, a boat near the coast, and still others navigating between islands that, as a whole, constitute a tranquil landscape, removed from the tragedy of the mythological figure who dares fly too near the sun on enchanted wings (figure 18.3). And where is Icarus? His presence is implied by the synecdoche of two tiny feet that, far in the distance, protrude from the ocean’s foam, and by the blinding brilliance of the sun that covers the vast horizon and alludes not only to the tragedy of Icarus but also, perhaps, to that of Phaëton.xix This would seem to confirm the use of a method equally suitable for poetry and painting: the “disjunction or disparity” of subjects and images through which one may “discover” some circumstantial analogy. As Gracián noted, this artifice xix In Greek mythology, Phaëton was the son of Helios and the nymph Clymene. He

attempted to drive his father’s golden chariot but could not control it. The chariot fell to earth, burning Mount Oeta and drying up the Libyan Desert. If Zeus had not killed him with a thunderbolt, the universe would have been destroyed. It is relevant to note that Sor Juana compared her own failed intellectual and poetic endeavors to those of this pair of mythological figures.—Trans.

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of extreme dissimilarity “is more extraordinary” than witticisms of similarity because in the former “the comparison is made against the grain, that is, to demonstrate the differences to be discovered between the estranged subject and the term that it is made to resemble” (Discourse XIII). In other words, the semantic function that in emblems (emblemas or empresas) is carried out by the motto corresponds to the title of the painting, whose principal subject would otherwise be lost among the multitude of elements that surround it. Viewed as a whole, the Solitudes might be compared to those Flemish canvases that depict the collection of an artist, dealer, or connoisseur: a room with a great number of paintings and statues of diverse themes, arranged in an apparently whimsical fashion. Such paintings within the painting represent, for example, historical figures (popes and kings), mythological figures (Apollo and Daphne), and biblical figures (Christ on the cross, the holy shroud, or Virgins framed by splendid floral arches). At times, the paintings within the painting are being scrutinized by a collector or a curious buyer depicted in the painting. This genre responded to a particular taste of the European bourgeoisie: the curiosity cabinets, by imitating those of Alexandria described by Strabo, gave origin to modern museums. Together with the taste for collecting, the representation of innumerable varieties of natural phenomena increased and, in particular, the depiction of earthly edibles and the implements used to serve and prepare them—the so-called still lifes (bodegones) that the Diccionario de Autoridades defines as “canvases on which pieces of meat or fish and foodstuffs of the lower classes are painted.” Through their abundance and verisimilitude, still lifes attempt to simulate the aesthetic delight produced by the persuasive and sometimes disquieting imitation of the gourmand’s pleasures. The deployment of verbal paintings in Góngora’s greatest poems is exemplified by a passage from the “Second Solitude,” where we find the likeness to pictorial still lifes. Góngora’s pilgrim accompanies some fishermen who, after casting their nets into the estuary, pull them out full of fish and other assorted marine life: Liberalmente de los pescadores al deseo el estero corresponde, sin valelle al lascivo ostión el justo arnés de hueso, donde lisonja breve al gusto, mas incentiva, esconde

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Contagio original quizá de aquella que, siempre hija bella de los cristales, una venera fue su cuna. Mallas visten de cáñamo al lenguado, mientras, en su piel lúbrica fïado, el congrio, que viscosamente liso las telas burlar quiso, tejido en ellas se quedó burlado. Las redes califica menos gruesas, sin romper hilo alguno, pompa el salmón de las reales mesas, cuando no de los campos de Neptuno, y el travieso robalo, guloso de los Cónsules regalo. (II, vv. 81–101) Freely the estuary satisfies The fishermen’s aspirations; uselessly The lusty oyster strives, in mail encased Whose bony panoply Conceals a short-lived taste Of flattering piquancy. Perhaps the daughter of the crystal wave The first infection gave, Cradled among the swell In a venereal shell. The fluke with hempen meshes they invest, While, trusting to his lissome body dressed In slippery skin, the conger thinks the net Merely a jest, and yet, Quickly involved, himself becomes the jest. The grace the nets of finer mesh, whose cords Unbroken all remain, The salmon enters, pomp of regal boards, If not indeed of Neptune’s watery plain, And wanton perch, long able To furnish dainties for a gourmand’s table.15 (Cunningham 83, 85)

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And the banquet served at the wedding of the young farmers is no less varied and succulent, a splendid, mountainous still life described in verses 858 to 882, in which melted cheeses, quinces, walnuts, and tasty olives are served “to calm the orgiastic flood” and “stamp out” the fire of the wine. In the passage from his Examen del antídoto cited above, the Abbot of Rute addressed the trope of ut pictura poesis, that is, the substantial similarities that, since Aristotle, have been noticed between poetry and painting as mimetic arts. Consider the well-known Diálogos de la pintura (Dialogues of Painting) by Vicente Carducho, published in Madrid in 1633, and in particular chapter 4, “Of Theoretical Painting, the Practice and Simple Imitation of That Which Is Natural, and Its Likeness to Poetry.”16 Here, following the lessons of Aristotle and Horace, which were taken up by such Italian treatise writers as [Gian Paolo] Lomazzo and [Federigo] Zuccaro, Carducho assures us that in the same years in which the manuscripts of the Solitudes circulated among friends and foes, the “resemblance, union, and shared intention is so great” between painting and poetry that they should imitate one another. Painters, he continues, will listen to Homer with admiration and will imitate in their own mimetic language, that is, with drawings and colors, “how nobly and skillfully angry Achilles or the strong Ajax are painted ”; for their part, poets will imitate this pictorial strategy in their verbal representations of natural objects and human figures. Among his contemporaries, Carducho admiringly mentions [ José de] Valdivielso, whose “divine Eucharist plays (autos sacramentales) paint so many affections with superior ingenuity, exercising the pen as if it were a paintbrush.” He also ponders the skills of the doctor Juan Pérez de Montalbán, whose poetic “paintings” are incomparable “as his verses are like paintings in which the ears act like eyes” (emphasis added). And he confers his highest praise on Góngora, “in whose works is to be admired the greatest science, because in his Polyphemus and Solitudes he seems to vanquish painting, for a veritable paintbrush could never accomplish what his pen depicts.”17 There is no doubt about the conviction of Mannerist and Baroque painters and poets with respect to the close proximity of the sister arts and, consequently, the possibility of transferring pictorial techniques to poetry and, conversely, of engaging the rhetorical resources of poetry (the models of descriptio, for example) in painting. This reciprocal influence was not limited to the genres that we call landscape, still life, or portraiture, where objects represented through iconic signs in the visual arts or by rhetorical devices

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like evidentia or ethopoeia in poetry should maintain their resemblance to the beings and objects they represented. Engravings and emblems enact an even more explicit relationship between the plastic and literary arts, where the figural and semantic correlation of an image, or pictura, is revealed through an annotated text that describes the image formally and relates it to a determined philosophical perspective, whether moral, political, or religious. The addressee of these peculiar semiotic structures is led to both visual and intellectual contemplation through the perception of certain figures that, while referring to their objective referents, exhibit a determined, conceptual content, as indicated by the accompanying text, that is, by the laconic verses inserted below the pictura, and by the epigrams that may also be included as elements of the image itself. We know that the Emblemata (1531), by the inventor of the genre, Andrea Alciato, was, for the humanists of Spain’s Golden Age, their most influential work. In Europe, many iconographic handbooks followed his model, and poets and painters frequently alluded to them, whether in an explicit or “mysterious” manner. Furthermore, emblems (whether created by the Italian Alciato or by Spaniards Juan de Borja, Sebastián de Covarrubias y Orozco, Hernando de Soto, Diego Saavedra Fajardo, etc.) served as source of inspiration for many poetic and pictorial compositions. For example, in the “First Solitude” we can see several instances of the relationship between Góngora’s poetic images and their corresponding emblematic hypotexts. Saved from shipwreck, the young pilgrim is met “without ambition, without pomp of words” by the goatherds; scorned by his lover, he has learned a lesson from his failures in courtly life, and he finds the occasion to sing a hymn about the rustic and innocent life of the countryside, focusing his song on two classic motifs: the “temple of Pales” and “Flora’s cottage,” that is, the goddesses who protect livestock and spring, respectively. The abhorred vices and snares of the court have not managed to penetrate the pilgrim, that “blessed and accommodating” villager: No en ti la Ambición mora, hidrópica de viento, ni la que su alimento el áspid es gitano; no la que en vulto comenzando humano, acaba en mortal fiera, esfinge bachillera

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que hace hoy a Narciso Ecos solicitar, desdeñar fuentes. (I, vv. 108–16) Here is no lust for power, No thirst for windy fame; No envy, to enflame Like Egypt’s aspic race; Nor she who, sphinx-like, wears a human face Above her bestial loins, Whose wily voice enjoins Narcissus’ modern seed To follow Echo, and despise the well. (Cunningham 13)

A hasty reading of these verses might lead us to believe that the poet has limited himself to mere abstract allusions to ambition, envy, ignorance, and self-love, in this case represented by Narcissus. A closer reading, however, reveals that every one of the attributes or circumstances mentioned by Góngora alludes to Alciato’s Emblems, numbers LIII (“On Adulators”), LXXI (“Envy”), CLXXXVIII (“Ignorance Should Be Banished”), and LXIX (“SelfLove”), as some early commentators have already noted. In fact, Góngora describes ambition, characteristic of adulators, as “thirst for the wind,” conforming to Alciato’s epigram LIII that describes a symbolic chameleon, permanently yawning because he is nourished by the vain air. He describes the concept of envy, not entirely hidden behind an enigmatic paraphrase, “No envy, to enflame / Like Egypt’s aspic race,” following Ovid’s illustration of envy in the Metamorphoses, and in turn, Alciato’s description of envy as a tattered old woman who lives on vipers that gnaw at her heart. In Alciato’s version, the Sphinx displays “the candid face of a virgin, wings of a bird, and paws of a lion,” figures representing “assumed ignorance” that make men recognize to the rudeness of their understanding, or their lasciviousness or arrogance. Regarding Narcissus, example of self-love, Alciato says that “self-love has ruined many a learned man who, spurning the method of the ancients, searches for new dogmas and only transmits his own fantasies.” Clearly Góngora did not evoke the aforementioned emblems—and still others, to which he alludes a little further on—with the sole intention of delighting informed readers. On the contrary, he introduces intentional modifications to those

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emblematic texts. For example, Góngora’s Narcissus is not defined solely by the vain contemplation of his own image in the watery mirror; he also solicits the adulation of his adored nymph Echo, whom he has disdained and who is now transformed into another “chameleon” courtesan. Sor Juana, like Góngora and the other poets of her time, exercises the “ingenious application and use of informed erudition” to construct a system of emblematic images that displays the abundance of her inherited humanistic knowledge and puts before the mind’s eye a pictorial representation of the intellectual concepts on which her daring, philosophical dream is based.

IV In his well-known and controversial book on Sor Juana, Octavio Paz asks how the “First Dream” might be considered an imitation of Góngora’s Solitudes. It is, he concludes, “because of its Latinisms, mythological allusions, and vocabulary” and through “the repeated use of hyperbaton, which reverses the normal order of phrases in an attempt to accommodate them to the pattern of Latin.”18 However, between the two poems, “the differences are greater and more profound than the similarities” (358). Paz argues that Góngora is a “poet of the senses” who excels in the description of “things, figures, beings and landscapes, while Sor Juana’s metaphors are intended more to be grasped intellectually than to be seen” (358; emphasis added). He adds: “The language of Góngora is aesthetic; that of Sor Juana, intellectual. . . . In Góngora, light triumphs; everything, even shadows, is resplendent; in Sor Juana black and white prevail. Replacing the profusion of objects and forms in the Solitudes is the uninhabited world of celestial spaces. . . . In Góngora’s poetic scheme an ideal reality replaces seen reality; the Andalusian poet does not question reality, he transfigures it. The Mexican poet proposes to describe a reality that is by definition invisible. Her theme is the experience of a world that lies beyond the senses. Góngora: a verbal transfiguration of the reality perceived by the senses. Sor Juana: a discourse on a reality not seen by the senses but by the soul” (358).19 Let us examine Paz’s radical but suggestive assertions to determine the nature of originality in Sor Juana’s poem, and its relation to Góngora’s text. First, it is important to consider that the differences pointed out by Paz between the “Dream” and the Solitudes respond to a previously established exegetic decision: to convince us of the modernity of Sor Juana’s poem. Paz

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argues that the “Dream” extends the tradition of Hispanic Baroque poetry in its stylistic strategies and mythological paradigms, while at the same time separating itself from this culterano tradition by means of its independent intellectual content (the “Dream” was directly inspired by neo-Platonic hermeticism and, more precisely, by the “dreams of anabasis” described in Kircher’s Iter extaticum coeleste xx) and also by its poetic procedures, which predict modern poetic practice: “The First Dream is strangely prophetic of [Stéphane] Mallarmé’s poem Un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance),20 which also recounts the solitary adventure of the spirit during a journey through outer and inner infinities” (358). Paz adds that “the resemblance is even more striking if one notes that both voyages end in a fall: vision resolves into non-vision” (358).21 Here, Paz seems to have interpreted the term imitation (employed by Father Calleja in the “censure” cited above) in the limiting sense of the timid imitation of a literary model, and not as emulation, that is, as imitation impelled by the goal of surpassing the model. Aemulatio produces a new text that is the result of an extreme tension between formal compliance with the work that serves as its model—a text that will surely be recognized by all— and the striving after originality: the simultaneous subjection to and departure from the model text. This is what Father Calleja was referring to when he affirmed that if “Don Luis de Góngora’s spirit is appropriately praised for the reason that two topics so lacking in action are adorned with such copious elegance of fantasies and periphrases,” how much more Sor Juana, who attempts “to understand all the things that comprise the universe” by engaging “an enormous amount of erudition, subtlety, and elegance that obliges her to be profound.” xxi While it is true that by dealing with materials prone to poetic display—that is, the topoi of bucolic poetry—“Don Luis had a great advan xx Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit polyglot and contemporary of Sor Juana, was a propo-

nent of universalism as he tried to unite cultures of both Old and New Worlds and those of East and West under the banner of an essential Truth. He was the author of numerous works inspired by hermeticism and neo-Platonism that normally included complex engravings to illustrate his ideas. Sor Juana admired him so much that she coined the verb kirchear (to do as Kircher), and she also referred to him and his inventions in her poems.—Trans. xxi These sentences are taken from Diego Calleja’s biography of Sor Juana, originally published in a posthumous anthology of Sor Juana’s poetry titled Fama y obras póstumas (1700). See note x for information about a modern edition of this text.  —Trans.

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tage,” Sor Juana was able to elevate her “Dream” to the same heights as the Solitudes by relying on the precepts of culterano poetry. Simply put, Sor Juana dared to compete with Góngora, and if she did not defeat him—for Father Calleja to affirm as much about the oeuvre of a Mexican nun would have been scandalous to many Spaniards of the epoch—at least no one could deny “that both poems soar in the same sphere,” that they share the same qualities and conditions. Having clarified this matter opens the way to a consideration of Paz’s ideas about Sor Juana’s “First Dream,” in particular those aspects that, in his opinion, differ from, or are opposed to the Solitudes. I have quoted Paz as saying that “in Góngora, light triumphs; everything, even shadows, is resplendent; in Sor Juana black and white prevail.” Surely the world of the Solitudes, that is, the world of fields, forests, and riverbanks described by Góngora is one of bright color and sumptuous luminosity; even the “cabin’s lantern” that serves the castaway as a guide shines like a precious stone in the nocturnal “gulf of shadows.” To substantiate Paz’s assertion of the absolute lack of light and color in the “Dream,” one might point out that he concentrates exclusively on the verses that initiate the description of the night: the pyramidal shadow that the earth projects on the face of the moon, which, though it dims the sublunar atmosphere with deep shadows, fails to obscure the distant stars. Not only does darkness prevail, but silence takes over the penumbral earth. In this silent “empire,” one perceives only the brooding cry of certain illomened birds, an extended likeness of the “baleful nocturnal bird” (“infausto pájaro nocturno”) that the lovers chase away in Góngora’s “First Solitude” (v. 800) so its sad “scream” will not tarnish their happiness. Beyond her synthesis of Gongorine elements, Sor Juana describes the night from two complementary perspectives: astronomical/scientific and allegorical/moral. On the one hand, she alludes to the natural features of nocturnal phenomena, and on the other, she employs certain mythic figures that provide the cultural paradigms capable of demonstrating—that is, of making visible—the world awaiting all beings (fishes, birds, beasts, and men) who yield to slumber. Thus begins the “Dream”: Piramidal, funesta, de la tierra nacida sombra, al Cielo encaminaba de vanos obeliscos punta altiva, escalar pretendiendo las Estrellas; si bien sus luces bellas

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—exentas siempre, siempre rutilantes— la tenebrosa guerra que con negros vapores le intimaba la pavorosa sombra fugitiva burlaban tan distantes, (vv. 1–10) ... quedando sólo dueño del aire que empañaba con el aliento denso que exhalaba; y en la quietud contenta de imperio silencioso, sumisas solo voces consentía de las nocturnas aves, tan obscuras, tan graves, que aun el silencio no se interrumpía. (vv. 16–24) Pyramidal, lugubrious, a shadow born of earth pushed heavenward its towering tips like vacuous obelisks bent on scaling stars, although those splendid lights forever free, aglow forever, spurned the shadowy war which the dreadful moving shade was waging in gaseous blackness, so far below. ... There was left it as sole domain the air it kept defiling with each dense breath exhaled, within which soundless purview of its silent realm, it brooked none but the muted voices of the birds of darkness, sounds so deep and dim as not to break the silence. (Trueblood 171)

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Here it should be noted that emulation does not always establish strict similarities with the chosen model, but may sometimes create subtle reminiscences in opposition and contrast to certain passages from the model. Góngora’s main topic in the Solitudes is the recounting of the formative years of a man in close and innocent conjunction with nature, so he begins his “First Solitude” with a spare but densely allusive description of spring in which the sun is represented by the constellation of Taurus and at the same time evokes the metamorphosis of Zeus in the myth of the abduction of the nymph Europa: Era del año la estación florida En que el mentido robador de Europa (media luna las armas de su frente y el sol todo los rayos de su pelo), luciente honor del cielo, en campos de zafiro pace estrellas. (I, vv. 1–6) In the sweet season decked with vernal flowers, When the feigned bull that stole Europa’s love (Armed with the crescent moon upon his brow, His hide resplendent in the solar beams), The pride of heaven, seems Upon the stars in sapphire fields to graze. (Cunningham I: 1–6, 7)

Sor Juana, on the other hand, commences the oneiric adventure of the dormant soul in the “First Dream” with an elaborate description of the night, as her topic requires. In contraposition to the dazzling, sunlit landscape of the “First Solitude,” Sor Juana applies the pictorial technique of chiaroscuro to the nocturnal landscape, which does not mean the privation of color, but rather the contraposition of light and shadow. I have already considered this topic in detail,22 but I mention it here to demonstrate that Sor Juana, like Góngora, relied on “wise and selective informed erudition,” that is, on the allusion to, or gloss of, authorized works on which to base the originality of her text. On a scientific level, Sor Juana’s description of the night transcribes the information contained in Pliny’s Natural History into literary terms: “Neither is the night anything else but the shade of the Earth. Now the figure of this shadow resembeleth a pyra-

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mis, pointed forward, or a top turned upside down, namely, when as it falleth upon it with the sharp end thereof, nor goeth beyond the heights of the moon. . . . Above the moon all is pure and lightsome continually.” xxii On the symbolic-moral level, she employs birds that flock in the night: barn owls (evoked by Nyctimene, who was metamorphosed as a result of the incest she committed with her father), bats (represented by the daughters of Mynias, punished for having refused to participate in the Bacchic festivals),23 and screech owls (alluded to by Ascalaphus, the false-hearted denouncer of Persephone). All these figures are taken from Ovid’s Metamorphosis and other mythological repertories, as well as from certain emblems or symbols in which such figures are employed as the prototype for different vices or sins.24 Using the same resources of “elegant erudition” and “mysterious contemplation” with which Góngora engaged Alciato’s diverse emblems to provide visible figures for the concepts of adulation, ignorance, and self-love, Sor Juana also engages emblematic figures to make visible the “metaphorical ideas” of incestuous love, impiety, and denunciation, figures whose shameful crimes prevent them from appearing in the light of day. Elsewhere I have pointed out the unquestionable influence on those passages of the empresas XII (“Excaecat candor”) and XIII (“Censurae patent”), images described in Idea de un príncipe político cristiano representado en cien impresas (Idea of a Political Christian Prince Represented in One Hundred Empresas, 1640) by Diego Saavedra Fajardo (figures 18.4 and 18.5).xxiii I describe the first of these empresas as follows: “[It] has as its body a radiant Sun that, upon directing its light over the Earth’s Eastern Hemisphere, projects a dense shadow toward the West in which bats, screech owls, and barn owls flutter. The ‘body’ of Empresa XIII represents a shadowy pyramid that, begot from the Earth, darkens the lower part of the Moon with its apex, but isn’t able to obscure the light of the stars.” xxiv In his commentary, Saavedra Fajardo describes the intended moral application of these figures: “Nature placed the human heart in the deepest part of the chest so that, finding itself hidden and without witness, xxii The History of the World Commonly Called the Natural History of C. Plinius Secun-

dus, trans. Paul Turner (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1962), 31.  —Trans. xxiii The author is referring to chapter 3 of his book Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Amor y conocimiento (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996).  —Trans. x xiv Ibid., 137.—Trans.

18.4 Diego

de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea de un príncipe político cristiano representada por cien empresas, 1640. Empresa XII: “Excaecat candor”

18.5 Diego

de Saavedra Fajardo, Idea de un príncipe político cristiano representada por cien empresas, 1640. Empresa XIII: “Censurae patent”

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it would not work against reason. The native and natural color or flame of blood remained exposed so that shame might ignite the face, thus accusing it when it strays from the truth.” xxv Through a subtle application of such figures and their symbolic content, we may fully understand the verses in which Sor Juana describes, first, the threatening pyramidal shadow with which terrestrial matter, as opposed to the sun, readily contaminates the shining stars and the inhabitants of this obscure zone with its “darkened vapors”: la avergonzada Nictimene acecha en las sagradas puertas los resquicios, ... y sacrílega llega a los lucientes faroles sacros de perenne llama, que extingue, sino infama, ... Y aquellas que su casa campo vieron volver, sus telas hierba, a la deidad de Baco inobediente, ... éstas, con el parlero ministro de Plutón un tiempo, ahora supersticioso indicio al agorero, (vv. 39–55) shamefaced Nyctimene keeps watch by chinks in sacred portals ... to desecrate the brightly shining holy lamps perpetually lit, extinguishing, even defiling them, ... And those women who saw their house become an out-of-doors; their weft, the grass; defiant of Bacchus’ godhead— ...

xxv My translations of Diego de Saavedra Fajardo are from his Empresas políticas: Idea

de un príncipe político-cristiano (Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1976), 161.—Trans.

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They, with Pluto’s telltale one-time henchman, now an omen to superstitious persons, (Trueblood 172)

Given these and many other examples, Paz’s assertion that “Sor Juana’s metaphors are better contemplated than seen” is questionable. In fact, the poet attempts with notable success to ensure that the abstract realities of thought become visible by conferring on them the characteristics of allegorical paintings, which are as attractive to the senses as they are provocative to the intellect. By alluding to known passages from mythology and books of emblems, Sor Juana reveals their conceptual substance to the cultured reader. Altering Paz’s sentence, it may be said that her images are not dark sketches in black and white, but are, rather, illuminated by a peculiar light, that of fantasy, which I will consider later. Here it will be useful to reflect on what Sor Juana herself thought about the visual nature of the images she employed to communicate intellectual material, that is, her conception of the nature and condition of her images, charged with ancient wisdom and adapted to the expression of precise semantic content. Seeking the answer in the poet’s own work, I will utilize the loa of the Divino Narciso (Divine Narcissus).xxvi After the military conquest by the Spanish, at the end of scene 4, America and Occident are finally ready to receive the truths of the Christian faith. In particular, they request a plausible explanation of the mystery of the Eucharist, which could be seen as prefiguring or simulating the Aztec sacrifice called Teocualo, “the God [that] is eaten.” It is Religion who discovers the most adequate means to respond to this difficult question: en una idea metafórica, vestida de retóricos colores, representable a tu vista te la mostraré; que ya conozco que tú te inclinas a objetos visibles más que a lo que la Fe te avisa por el oído; y así, es preciso que te sirvas xxvi A loa is a conventional introduction to the dramatic genre of the Auto Sacramental,

or Corpus Christi play, and combines poetry with theology.—Trans.

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de los ojos, para que por ellos la Fe recibas.25 (vv. 401–12) in a metaphorical idea, dressed in rhetorical colors, I will present it to your eyes representable to sight; for I already know that you are inclined more to visible objects than that which Faith advises you in words: and thus you must use your eyes, so that through them Faith will be received.

Obviously the theme and objectives of the “First Dream” are different from those of the Divine Narcissus, but like the allegories of the Nativity plays, in the poem, “the people introduced / are no more than / abstract (themes) / that paint what is meant to be said” (introducidas / personas no son más que / unos abstractos,26 que pintan lo que se intenta decir; Divino Narciso vv. 464–67). I concur with Paz that Sor Juana attempts to describe a reality that is by definition invisible, and for this reason she employed allegorical colors in both the Divine Narcissus and the “Dream,” so that the ideas she wished to express would be fittingly “representable,” or visible. (One of the most common definitions of representation, as registered in the Diccionario de Autoridades, is “applied to the figure, image or idea that substitutes for reality.”) It is precisely this intent, at once aesthetic and cognitive, to embody or give form to the concepts of the intellect, that inspires Sor Juana to represent this “experience of a world that is beyond the senses,” not always or necessarily through abstract enunciations, but frequently by means of “representable ideas dressed in metaphorical colors,” objectified in figures that at once present themselves to the eyes and the intellect or, to state it in her own words in another passage of the Divine Narcissus, by means of allegorical images that “paint / what they mean” [pintan / lo que quiere decir]. Having said this, what ideas or beliefs did Sor Juana turn to in order to represent those visions of the soul in its oneiric trajectory, not in black and white, as Paz argues, but entirely formed and colorful? How did she give scientific substance to the illumination of the figures and landscapes that parade before the intellectual eyes of the soul in its journey through the king-

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doms of nature filled with the inhabitants of water, air, and mountains? How did she represent the detailed anatomical map and physiological functions of the human body, the crucial passage regarding the pyramids—more than an archaeological “intermezzo,” it contains the central key to the poem—and the soul’s ascent to the apex of its intellectual power and its hazardous vision of the universe? With the arrival of dawn and awakening, this last vision is already illuminated by the natural light of day. The section of the poem that Méndez Plancarte titles “The Dream of the Cosmos” follows the description of the night and its emblematic figures, and the slumber to which the inhabitants of all natural kingdoms must submit (all of these creatures—marine, terrestrial, and aerial—are illustrated by emblematic images: Halcyon, Acteon, and the eagle, a symbol of God, always vigilant); and, most important, the slumber of mankind, about which Sor Juana digresses to discuss the phenomenon of sleep viewed from two perspectives, physiological and mythological-emblematic, with their corresponding moral application. así, pues, de profundo sueño dulce los miembros ocupados, quedaron los sentidos del que ejercicio tienen ordinario ... si privados no, al menos suspendidos y cediendo al retrato del contrario de la vida que—lentamente armado— cobarde embiste y vence perezoso ... desde el cayado humilde al cetro altivo, sin que haya distintivo que el sayal de la púrpura discierna: ... y con siempre igual vara (como, en efecto, imagen poderosa de la muerte) Morfeo el sayal mide igual con el brocado. (vv. 166–91) the limbs, then, all were occupied by deep and welcome sleep,

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leaving the senses for a time if not deprived, relieved of their customary labor— ... the senses, I say, had yielded to the likeness of life’s opponent, who, slow to arm and cowardly in attack, with sleepy weapons is a lazy victor over lowly shepherd’s crook and lofty scepter and all that stands between, purple and sackcloth being all one for him. ... with one unvarying measuring-rod (Morpheus being, after all, a powerful image of death) he graduates brocade and sackcloth. (Trueblood 175–76)

Sor Juana then explains the natural causes of sleep and, as a result, the soul’s capacity to abandon temporarily bodily governance to focus on its own contemplation, or to be more exact, on optical images through which the substance of thought takes shape. It is worth recalling here, along with André Chastel and Robert Klein, that one of the great innovations of the Renaissance, sustained and intensified in the Baroque, “was the inclination toward the ‘rupture of barriers’ amongst disciplines” in such a way that for humanists, science became fused with art.27 Certainly Góngora and Sor Juana shared this attitude. The creation of poetic images in the “Dream” is not based solely on the literary and iconological wealth transmitted through classical mythology and natural history but also through scientific knowledge, be it that inherited from antiquity or the result of modern discoveries. Every reader of the Solitudes will recall the passage in the “First Solitude,” in which the “political mountain dweller,” on recognizing the clothing of the pilgrim, sees traces of the castaway, giving a speech, at once erudite and full of moralizing implication. He argues that ancient navigations, similar to the contemporary ones carried out by the Portuguese and the Spanish, are tasks defined by insatiable greed, an assertion that leads to an extensive historical-geographical digression encompassing Palinurus, Christopher Columbus, Núñez de Balboa, Vasco da Gama, and

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Magellan, in which many optical images are employed, doubtless inspired by the cartography of the period. Thus, for example, the celebrated description of the Isthmus of Panama is represented by Góngora as a “crystalline serpent” that approximates the American continent’s narrow belt and prohibits its immense head located toward the north from joining the scaled tail that ends in the vicinity of the Antarctic: el istmo que Océano divide, y, sierpe de cristal, juntar le impide la cabeza, del Norte coronada, con la que ilustra el Sur cola escamada de antárticas estrellas. (I, vv. 425–29) That isthmus, whose dividing barriers break Into two seas that Ocean’s crystal snake, So that its head, crowned with the Northern light, Joins not the tail, which the Antarctic night Studs with its starry scales. (Cunningham 33, 35)

Leo Spitzer assumed that the metaphor of the “crystal snake” recalled Emblem CXXXIII (“Ex litterarum studiis immortalitatem acquiri”) by Alciato.28 Neither the theme, which is the fame achieved by humanists through their studies, nor the figure of Ouroboros, the snake that bites its tail, sign of eternal time, explains the image employed by Góngora. A more likely stimulus could have been some of the stunningly printed “geographical tables” from the works of Gérard Mercator or Cornelius Wytfliet. The figures employed by Sor Juana to represent the weakened activity of bodily organs during sleep had to conform not only to the evanescent or anamorphic images of the hermetic treatises but also to the anatomical and physiological knowledge transmitted through Galen, Aristotle, and their infinite group of commentators, represented graphically at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Leonardo da Vinci and Andrea Vesalio in the anatomical illustrations included in his Humani corporis fabrica.xxvii The same xxvii

De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (On the Fabric of the Human Body in Seven Books) is a textbook of human anatomy written by Andreas Vesalius (1514–64) in 1543.—Trans.

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model continued to be used in the seventeenth century by Athanasius Kircher, an author whose presence in the libraries of New Spain is certain and whose encyclopedic Musurgia universalis contains, among many other illustrations, a human head from which the skin and muscles have been removed to reveal the complex structure of the auditory organ. Francisco Álvarez de Velasco Zorilla, a poet from New Granada (now Colombia) who was Sor Juana’s contemporary, clearly perceived in this passage of the “Dream” its quality of physiological illustration by recognizing how one may discover in dreams “the internal / order of the natural / functions with which the body and soul / tacitly understand one another” (el interno / orden de las naturales / funciones con que alma y cuerpo / se entienden sin declararse) by means of the “industriousness” or ingenuity of the poet who found “with new gracefulness art / to reverse / the visual blinders” (con nuevos primores arte / para poner al revés / las tuniquillas visuales). In this way, Sor Juana provided direct and surprising testimony to “that anatomy” of the soul “divided into parts.”29 She states that, invaded by sleep, the immobile human body resembles a “cadaver with a soul,” even though the heart gives signs of tenuous vitality, similar to a “human watch” whose vital volante, que si no con mano, con arterial concierto, unas pequeñas muestras, pulsando, manifiesta lento de su bien regulado movimiento. (vv. 206–9) vital wound-up state, wound not by hand but by arterial concert: by throbbings which give tiny measured signs of its well-regulated movement. (Trueblood 176)

And if the heart is represented through the analogy with clocks (whose strings and hands are given as a metaphor of the pulse), the lungs—the magnets that attract the air—are compared to a “breathing bellows” (respirante fuelle) and the stomach to “a scientific office / benevolent dispenser to the limbs” (una científica oficina / próvida de los miembros despensera), and also to a “moderate bonfire of human warmth” (templada hoguera del calor humano) where food is cooked and from which humid digestive vapors are later sent to the brain. But as may be read in Méndez Plancarte’s prose rendition of Sor Juana’s poem, “in this case the vapors were so clear that they did not

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fog or dim the daytime sensory images transmitted by the ‘estimative’ faculty . . . to the ‘imaginative’ faculty, which in turn clarifies and delivers the images so that memory may store them more faithfully.” Memory not only guards the images tenaciously but also presents them to fantasy, so that this faculty may give shape to new imaginary creations. As I explain in my essay titled “The Art of Memory in Sor Juana’s ‘First Dream,’” the poet follows Aristotle’s treatise On Sleep and Waking: “When nourishment arrives to the heart converted into blood, heat is produced in every animal toward the top of its body, filling it with a ‘very abundant and thick’ moisture; when this moisture descends and expels the heat concentrated in the head, ‘slumber is caused, and the animal sleeps’ until the parts of blood are separated and the lighter parts ascend and the heavier parts descend. Once this separation has taken place, the animal awakes. But during sleep, the imagination may preserve ‘all its vivacity,’ and thus there are individuals who ‘although asleep move and execute acts belonging to consciousness, but this never occurs without the intervention of an image or sensation, because dreams are a type of perception.”30 Curiously, the perception of the images of certain objects during sleep does not come from the direct experience of such objects, but from images preserved in memory and evoked or recalled, perhaps in an involuntary manner. The preceding paragraphs allow us to understand better the physiological and psychological lesson presented by Sor Juana in the following passage, and especially the provenance and quality of the images or simulacra of the objects that fantasy presents to the soul for contemplation: al cerebro enviaba húmedos, mas tan claros los vapores de los atemperados cuatro humores, que con ellos no sólo no empañaba los simulacros que la estimativa dio a la imaginativa y aquésta, por custodia más segura, en forma ya más pura entregó a la memoria que, oficiosa, grabó tenaz y guarda cuidadosa, sino que daban a la fantasía lugar de que formase imágenes diversas. (vv. 264–66)

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was sending to the brain vapors from the four well-tempered humors, humid but so clear it not only failed to cloud with them the images which the estimative sense furnished to the imaginative and the latter, for safer keeping, passed on in purer form to diligent memory to incise retentively and store with care, but also offered the fantasy a chance to put together further images. (Trueblood 177–78)

In her desire to explain the nature and significance of the images presented in the “Dream,” Sor Juana would not have limited herself to the previously mentioned physio-psychological theory, but aesthetic and cultural obligation would have compelled her to include historical or mythological analogies as well. Those images that during sleep were represented to the soul for contemplation might have a correspondence with, or a similarity to, the portentous mirror of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, on whose polished surface illuminated by fire one could distinguish all the ships that sailed throughout Neptune’s realm. Regardless of their distance, their number and size can be seen, and also the fortune or misfortune of their navigation, as in that prodigious mirror called fantasy: . . . iba copiando las imágenes todas de las cosas, y el pincel invisible iba formando de mentales, sin luz, siempre vistosas colores, las figuras no sólo ya de todas las criaturas sublunares, mas aun también de aquéllas que intelectuales claras son Estrellas, y en el modo posible que concebirse puede lo invisible, en sí, mañosa, las representaba y al Alma las mostraba. (vv. 280–91)

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so the fantasy was calmly copying the images of everything, and the invisible brush was shaping in the mind’s colors, without light yet beautiful still, the likenesses not just of all created things here in this sublunary world, but those as well that are the intellect’s bright stars, and as far as in her power lay the conception of things invisible, was picturing them ingeniously in herself and displaying them to the soul. (Trueblood 178)

In the verses we have contemplated, there would seem to be a contradiction in Paz’s assertion that in Sor Juana’s poem black-and-white images prevail. How is it that fantasy’s invisible brush created the figures of things with “mental colors, luminous albeit without light?” as Méndez Plancarte says in his periphrasis? The answer originating in classical theories on vision is to be found in Plato’s Timaeus. There one reads that the gods place the organs that serve as “the Soul’s providence” on the human face, principally the eyes, which “give light,” that is, a pure fire that “resides within us and that is the brother of external fire . . . [and] colors through our eyes with a subtle and continuous form.” Plato continues: “When the light of day surrounds the stream of vision, then like falls upon like, and they coalesce, and one body is formed by natural affinity in the line of vision, wherever the light that falls from within meets with an external object. And the whole stream of vision, being similarly affected in virtue of similarity, diffuses the motions of what it touches or what touches it over the whole body, until they reach the soul, causing that perception which we call sight. But when night comes on and the external and kindred fire departs, then the stream of vision is cut off; for going forth to an unlike element it is changed and extinguished, being no longer of one nature with the surrounding atmosphere which is now deprived of fire: and so the eye no longer sees, and we feel disposed to sleep.”xxviii When rest is complete, “a sleep almost without dreams” takes over, but when “more notable movements survive within us . . . from them xxviii Plato’s Timaeus is available at http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html. 

—Trans.

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  391

images of nature are formed, more or less intense, similar to interior or exterior objects” (emphasis added), which are, mutatis mutandis, those mental figures of visible creatures and intellectual concepts of which Sor Juana speaks. Sor Juana could have taken the comparison with the fabled mirror of the Lighthouse of Alexandria, to which I have already referred. In the same Platonic dialogue, immediately following the passage above, Plato describes the “images that mirrors and all polished and brilliant surfaces create,” in a phenomenon parallel to that of the direct vision of objects, for in this case as well, “the vision’s fire is joined to a brilliant and smooth surface.” From this surface—the illuminated mirror of intelligence—the soul may contemplate the showy simulacra of the universe with “probing gaze, by lenses unencumbered” (“la vista perspicaz, libre de anteojos”; v. 440; Trueblood 182).

Notes 1 Góngora declared the same thing in a letter to those who censured his Solitudes:

2 3

4 5

6 7

8

“To delight the mind is to give it reason to assess and measure itself; discovering what lies underneath those tropes, understanding necessarily convinces, and once convinced, satisfies.” See Ana Martínez Arancón, ed., La batalla en torno a Góngora (Barcelona: Antoni Bosch, 1978). Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio, ed. Gilberto Prado Galán (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996), 42. See Alciato, Emblemas, ed. Santiago Sebastián (Madrid: Akal, 1985), emblem numbers CCX, XXXVI, and CCXI. [Alciato’s emblems, including English translations, may also be viewed on the Internet at http://www.mun.ca/alciato. There is no translator named on the Web site.] See Dámaso Alonso, “Alusión y elusión en la poesía de Góngora,” in Estudios y ensayos gongorinos, 93. Here, I allude to the works of Gérard Genette collected in Palimpsestes (Paris: Seuil, 1982). The concept of architextuality or hypertextuality (that is, the implicit or explicit relationship of a literary text to another or to other texts that precede it and serve as a source or model) implies that those sources and models form a hypotext, or a text on which a new text, or hypertext, is based. Heinrich Lausberg, Manual de retórica literaria (1960; Madrid: Gredos, 1967). See numbers 1092 and following. Alicia de Colombí Monguió points out that “in the poetics of imitatio, imitation calls for the clear presence of a well-known model so that the new poetic triumph cannot be ignored.” See her “Estrategias imitativas en el Siglo de Oro de Balbuena,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 66, no. 3 (1989): 227–39. See Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española (1611; Madrid: Castalia, 1995), 465. “Emulator: contestant or opponent, that is, the envious person

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9

10

11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19

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in the same art and exercise who tries to surpass [the other] and many times does so when the emulation is of virtuous or reasonable things.” In his thesis concerning the Teoría de la imitación poética en el Renacimiento (Madrid: Complutense University, 1988), Angel García Galiano opportunely observes that even if “the word ‘imitation’ does not have an excessive relevance in the vocabulary of the contemporary critic . . . in the seventeenth century, imitation was still the characteristic and distinctive feature of the arts,” at least of painting and poetry, and not only in the Platonic or Aristotelian sense of the mimesis of nature and human passions, but also in the humanistic concept of the appropriation of the classical world by means of the rhetorical imitation of its literary models. Fama y obras póstumas del Fénix de México (Madrid: Manuel Ruiz de Murga, 1700). There is also a facsimile edition by the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Faculty of Philosophy and Letters, Mexico City, 1995. María Rosa Lida de Malkiel, “El hilo narrativo de las Soledades,” in La tradición clásica en España (Barcelona: Ariel, 1975). Gates, “Reminiscence of Góngora in the Works of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” See Alonso’s edition of Luis de Góngora, Obras mayores: Las Soledades nuevamente publicadas por Dámaso Alonso (Madrid: Biblioteca Árbol, 1935). Luis de Góngora, Soledades, ed. Robert Jammes (Madrid: Castalia, 1994), 127–28. Here is Jammes’s prose version: “The estuary where they had cast their nets corresponds to the fishermen’s desire. The tight shell that hides his flesh did not help the lascivious oyster to escape, a small delicacy but a very strong aphrodisiac. . . . The sole remains dressed in nets of hemp, while the conger that, viscous and smooth, trusting its slippery skin and wanting to outwit the fabrics of the trammel nets, finds himself woven into them and at the same time outwitted. Prisoners they remain in the thinnest strand of the trammel nets, enobling the nets, and without breaking a single fiber, the salmon . . . and the nervous bass, a sweet-toothed gift from the ancient Consuls” (ibid., 433–35). Carducho’s texts are cited from Teoría de la pintura del Siglo de Oro, ed. Francisco Calvo Serraller (Madrid: Cátedra, 1991). At this point it is worth referring to the definitions given by the Diccionario de Autoridades of the verb to paint in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century usages. “To Paint: When an image of a visible thing appears on a page with the use of a paintbrush and colors”; “Metaphorically it signifies the description of something through writing or words.” Painting, then, is understood as the extension of a narrative or written description. Paz, Sor Juana, 357–58. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the running text. “vencido / no menos de la inmensa muchedumbre / de tanta maquinosa pesadumbre / (de diversas especies conglobado / esférico compuesto)” (“Primero Sueño” vv. 470–74). For Sor Juana, the celestial space that the soul contemplates in the mirror of fantasy is not empty, but filled with diverse “species” or images that exceed her understanding. Thus she recognizes having been “overcome / no less by the immense agglomeration / of congeries so weighty / (a globe compounded / of

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20 21

22

23

24

25

26 27 28

29 30

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multiple species densely packed)” (Trueblood 183) as by the “qualities” of each one of these innumerable objects (vv. 469–73). “Strangely prophetic” is an ambiguous phrase that implies both doubt and surprise: the surprise of the critic himself at his unexpected intuition. In reference to Paul Valéry, José Gorostiza, Vicente Huidobro, and “above all” Mallarmé, Paz writes: “It is prophecy not of the poetry of the Enlightenment, but of the modern poetry that centers on the paradox at the heart of her poem: the revelation of nonrevelation” (Sor Juana, 381). See José Pascual Buxó, “Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz en el conocimiento de su Sueño,” in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Amor y conocimiento (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1996). Alciato dedicated two emblems to the bat or vespertilio (a type of fruit bat), numbers LXI and LXII; the epigram contained in the latter states that the “bird that only flies at sundown” symbolizes, among other things, men “of ill repute who hide themselves from and fear the judgment of others.” Plato’s Timaeus provides a classical source that explains these figures’ dramatic transformation: “He who lived well during his appointed time was to return and dwell in his native star, and there he would have a blessed and congenial existence.” But he who persists in evil will be “changed into some brute who resembled him in the evil nature which he had acquired, and would not cease from his toils and transformations until he followed the revolution of the same and the like within him.” Plato, Timaeus, http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/timaeus.html (accessed September 9, 2009). As Méndez Plancarte opportunely recalled, “to take advantage of the eyes, along with the ears, is the beginning and the objective of ‘audiovisual education.’ . . . This pedagogy inspired all popular and didactic Christian art: the frescoes of the catacombs, the stained glass windows and porticoes of medieval Cathedrals . . . and in the dramatic arts, the mystery and morality plays of the Middle Ages, as well as our Eucharistic plays [autos sacramentales].” Méndez Plancarte’s commentary, in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Obras completas, 3:510. The Diccionario de Autoridades says, “Abstract. Philosophical term. That which signifies a form with the exclusion of the subject.” André Chastel and Robert Klein, El humanismo (Barcelona: Salvat Editores, 1964). See Leo Spitzer, “La Soledad primera de Góngora: Notas críticas y explicativas a la nueva edición de Dámaso Alonso,” Revista de Filología Hispánica, no. 2 (1940): 151–76. See José Pascual Buxó, El enamorado de Sor Juana (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1993), 196. See José Pascual Buxó, “El arte de la memoria en el Primero sueño de Sor Juana,” in Sor Juana y su mundo: Una mirada actual, ed. Sara Poot Herrera (Mexico City: Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana, 1995). For Aristotle, see Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams, ed. David Gallop (Warminster, Wiltshire, UK: Aris and Phillips, 1996).

  Chapter Nineteen  

American Baroque Histories and Geographies from Sigüenza   y Góngora and Balbuena to Balboa, Carpentier, and Lezama Timothy J. Reiss

It is the purpose [of histories] to make present the past as it was then. Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora

Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700), a Mexican astronomer, mathematician, cultural historian, and man of letters, embodies the señor barroco described in José Lezama Lima’s essay, “Baroque Curiosity,” translated in this collection. Sigüenza’s life project was to create a history specific to Mexico, a goal shared by the equally “typical” representative of the American literary Baroque, the Mexican poet Bernardo de Balbuena (1562–1627).1 The histories created by these Mexican men of letters differed from those of other writers and thinkers of the Americas, and especially those of Cuba and the Caribbean who, more than their Mexican contemporaries, were compelled by a deep sense of local geography. By “history,” I mean temporal narratives used to explain and situate oneself and one’s culture; by “geography,” I mean an understanding of oneself and one’s culture as primarily marked, and made, by one’s situation relative to place. These modalities of cultural creation are not a choice, even as they imply differing personal and cultural identities; they are grounding emphases, not foundational absolutes. Ángel Rama caught this difference in recalling how the Venezuelan writer Andrés Bello, in his Allocution to Poetry of 1823, “proposed two great American themes: Nature and History,” adding: “But only history attracted wide attention from Latin American poets in the ensuing years.” In the comments that follow, Rama implies that Bello’s emphasis differs from Caribbean concerns, referring to “the sumptuous descriptions of José María Heredia” and José Martí’s unusually “tenacious defense of natural themes.”2 Rama does not mention that Heredia and Martí were Cubans, a fact explaining the greater

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imaginative weight of geographical place in their writing. The contrast goes back to the different European conquests in the Caribbean and the Latin American mainland: in the Caribbean, the Conquest destroyed local cultures and with them their histories. There is, then, not one American Baroque but several, depending on the relative emphasis on history and geography. In Sigüenza y Góngora’s construction of Mexican history, in Paraíso occidental (Western Paradise, 1684) and other works, the author reckons with an indigenous past no less than a colonial present; furthermore, he considers Spanish, French, and English strife in his own era and in earlier decades, and he engages past and present debates about state, religion, philosophy, and science. In all of these arenas, Sigüenza held that Americans had their own role because they had their own history, different from, if overlapping, Europe’s. In this, he would have agreed with Severo Sarduy and Lezama, for whom the Baroque is set in distinct histories, and he would have disagreed with their compatriot, Alejo Carpentier, that “America, a continent of symbiosis, mutations, vibrations, mestizaje, has always been baroque.”3 For Carpentier, the American Baroque is transhistorical, even ahistorical, “recurrent, timeless, relating this to that, yesterday to today.”4 Saying so, he may distort cultural histories and their geographies, because Mexican writers like Sigüenza and Balbuena offer very different cultural creations from those of Carpentier and his Cuban precursor, the poet Silvestre de Balboa (1563–after 1608). These different attitudes toward geography and history also mark modern theories and critical debates on the Baroque, grounded as these last are in those attitudes.

Theoretical Stories of the American Baroque Given this collection’s place of publication, I shall start with the U.S. scholar Irving A. Leonard, the “godfather” of the cultural study of the New World Baroque in the United States. Leonard was working during the 1950s, when efforts to transport Heinrich Wölfflin’s theory of Baroque art into literary analysis were the rage among European literary historians. Leonard saw the Baroque as the disastrous result of the Counter-Reformation’s oppressive ideology, notably in Spain and its colonies, where, after enjoying “the emancipation of a fecund humanism, the distraught spirit now fell prey to a deep despondency on finding its medieval chains restored.”5 This oppression, Leonard claimed, bred “an extraordinary vitality and a forward thrust of energy which found no adequate outlet or satisfying release. Unlike the

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Promethean spark of the Renaissance, [the Baroque] was a vitality which denied life and expended itself in trivia” (29–30). Writing became “a crowded spectacle rather than a vehicle of thought, and the repressed vitality of the age produced a lush foliage which choked out much of the fruit of true inspiration” (31). This “Baroque retreat from life,” according to Leonard, was due in large measure to the “great poet of Spain, Luis de Góngora (1561–1627), [who] cast so deep a shadow over the artistic expression of the Creole gentry that it extinguished all but the faintest glimmer of light” (145). Góngora’s “baneful influence” was abetted by the Spanish playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), epitome “of the Baroque spirit and . . . tutelary genius of Spain’s decadence” (167). Leonard mirrors the earlier argument of the Venezuelan cultural historian Mariano Picón-Salas, whose groundbreaking study of the New World Baroque, A Cultural History of Spanish America: From Conquest to Independence, was published in 1944 and translated into English in 1962 by Leonard. Picón-Salas deplores that the “empty pomp of the Baroque was substituted for the reality of indigenous rural life in Spanish America,” a topic that New World writers had initially embraced, as they had the hard but bold realities of the Conquest.6 According to Picón-Salas, these early American topoi had produced a literature of “action inspired by the many deeds performed in the century of the Conquest”; now, however, action and its grave narrative is replaced by a literature of “contemplation,” pure form, “picturesque detail,” “delight and intoxication” (95–96). For Picón-Salas, as for Leonard, this new preference for artifice came directly from the Counter-Reformation and its centralized sovereignty: “Royal decrees and the policies of the Inquisition” (83). The vacuous echo of imperial(ist) courtliness was worsened by the “semibarbaric immensity of the land” (94). In short, Picón-Salas saw the colonial Baroque as an effect of political, theological, and geographical forces, as well as of local fears: “The colonial intellectual would hide in the tortuous meanders of baroque prose,” whose “formalistic labyrinth” concealed meaning; writers censored themselves, unable to take the risk of seeking “new truths” or sharing in the scientific advances of the time (83). Geographical and historical actualities vanished in an abyss of stylized escapism tottering toward vacuity. Other literary historians agree that the Baroque is a willful colonizing tool. The Cuban critic Leonardo Acosta argues that creating the Baroque in America is a “mere extension of Spain,” like naming the land “New Spain” and raising “architectural monuments” as “formal” signs “of [Spain’s] imperial

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will.”7 Seeds of Europe, to reword Walter Benjamin, were “scattered . . . over the ground” in America in the form of Baroque art and architecture—fragmentary allegories of European history, and real marks of European power.8 The seventeenth-century Spanish American Baroque provided the means “to mythologize the conquest and make it eternal, give it validity—not legal validity, which had been the task of theologians and jurists, but artistic and cultural validity.”9 In the Americas, according to Acosta, the Baroque served to deny local history; it was the “expression of the will to assimilate nature and to negate nature for the sake of an ideal world, made by the luxurious European courts in their image and likeness.”10 John Beverley notes that after Góngora’s death in 1627, Gongorism “spread in Spain, Portugal, and the colonies as a quasi-official aesthetic discourse,” providing “a technique, an arte de ingenio, an exercise able to work as a form of indoctrination into the new ideological practices elaborated by and in the bureaucratic apparatus of the Court and the Viceroyalties.”11 Beverley considers that Gongorism is “an essentially historicist form of [Baroque] representation,” deeply “conscious of historical change,”12 even as, in another essay, he argues that the “colonial Baroque . . . constructs the social space of the colony as a utopia, in principal harmonious and beautiful, where any dissident or unruly element necessarily appears as an emanation of evil, of ugliness, that threatens to undo its order.”13 The cultural historian José Antonio Maravall precedes Beverley in reading the Spanish Baroque as the radical effect of centralized monarchical polities, designed to uphold an ideological myth of a well-ordered society in an era of economic, political, and cultural crisis.14 So it also hid and suppressed local histories. As Leonard wrongly or rightly states: “The Indian majority had, in fact, lost its historical past, while the mixed elements resulting from racial fusion had not yet made any history” (32). Such is the Baroque paradox: even as it imposes a particular history, when displaced to America, it sows architectural, literary, theatrical, and pedagogical seeds that enable new historical constructions. Indeed, the Mexican theorist Bolívar Echeverría finds that the Counter-Reformation spirit was intensely creative,15 and even Acosta observes an “opening on the infinite, traversed by an immanent force, by a cosmic divinity,”16 echoing Severo Sarduy, who also sees the Baroque as reflecting a sense of infinite expansion.17 José Lezama Lima, too, urges a vitality separating the European from the American Baroque, particularly in his conception of the “plutonism” that creates new forms from old fragments.18 And for Carpentier, a way of life

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is born, experienced, and voiced from an American need “to name things.”19 How do we explain these rival interpretations of the New World Baroque as hegemonic imposition and yet also as the capacious life way argued by Lezama and Carpentier, or the expansive “being-in-the-world” offered by Édouard Glissant in an essay translated in this collection? Seventeenth-century American Baroque artists and writers negotiated tensions between a hierarchy, supposedly in harmony with all levels (divine, human, and natural), and a ripe sense of historical change and social disarray.20 Old harmonies had been breached. The world of the historical Baroque was unsure and anxious, and its expressive forms reflected a need for new ways of knowing and depicting social, political, and spiritual structures that, by the late sixteenth century, were felt to be in deep crisis. Thinkers like Francis Bacon, Galileo, Thomas Hobbes, and René Descartes reacted explicitly to this wide cultural anxiety, and their search for new methods of analysis and expression was not foreign to the devices of Baroque writing. In the colonies of the Americas, even more tensely uncertain than the European lands of their colonizers, Baroque writing was revolutionary in producing—and seeking to produce—new cultural creation(s) made from, and for, particular histories and/or geographies. Baroque style is not merely a pack of figurative, rhetorical, and narrative conceits, a “user’s manual,” but rather a process that draws together disparate elements and consequent meanings. The New World Baroque develops an imposed history into an overlay, creatively turned by diverse techniques and to diverse purposes. Carpentier’s contention that the American Baroque is a timeless affirmation in “our style . . . throughout our history” replies to the claims of lost and unmade histories by the cultural historians I just cited.21 But if Carpentier’s Baroque evacuates history, it does so from a Caribbean place marked, says Acosta, “by an almost total indifference toward history,” a Cuba whose “historical vocation . . . was less than non-existent.”22 I shall argue, especially in my discussion of the Cuban poet Silvestre de Balboa, that history is replaced by geography, but first I take up the issue of who writes history and why.

Making Baroque Histories in Mexico Sigüenza’s historical Baroque was revolutionary in seeking to forge from multiple histories interlaced elements composing a new, local history. Sigüenza knew the Indian majority had not “lost its historical past,” as Acosta and

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Leonard would say, nor was Sigüenza overly restricted by Spanish policies and ideology, as Picón-Salas implies (although he indeed was by a lack of funds). On the contrary, Sigüenza sought a Mexican history whose parts and form differed from the moralizing exemplarity and linear time of the European model, the suceder (successive happening) of events by which the plans of God and humans unfolded. Published in 1684, his original Parayso occidental, plantado y cultivado por la liberal benefica mano de los Católicos y poderosos Reyes de España Nuestros Señores en su magnifico Real Convento de Jesus Maria de México (Western Paradise, planted and cultivated by the liberal and beneficent hand of the Catholic and powerful Kings of Spain our Lords in their magnificent Royal Convent of Jesus Mary in Mexico City) stresses an inextricable imbrication of European and American histories, especially those of Spain, England, Mexico, and the Catholic Church, whose recombined product was Sigüenza’s American paradise. About events in the year 1536, he writes: “His Holiness Pope Paul III then ruled the Catholic Church, the most glorious emperor Charles V the kingdoms of Spain, and his first viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza those of North America.”23 The year was famed not just for the birth of Mother Marina de la Cruz, the founder of the Real Convento de Jesús Maria, but “because in that year Anne Boleyn, wife of Henry VIII, king of England, had her head cut off, being earlier convicted of incest with her brother, and also because Calvin began then to teach his false creed to the people of Geneva, and the two deadliest plagues of the universe, Bucer and Martin Luther, agreed [with him]” (122). Anne had usurped Catherine of Aragon’s place as England’s queen, and Sigüenza links it all—incest and Protestantism, the English rejection of Spain and ongoing hostilities, colonial rivalries (a constant theme of Sigüenza’s writings), and these sexual, religious, military, and imperial clashes—to Mother Marina’s person, the namesake, he recalls, of Cortés’s violated and cast-off mistress La Malinche, offered here as Mexico’s founding mother, on whose very land the Real Convento had been built (101). The immediate point is Sigüenza’s historical reasoning—from a reflection on history to a deliberate mingling of histories. Of the sixteenth-century convent in Mexico City, patronized by the King of Spain, the seventeenthcentury writer makes a synecdoche for Mexico as paradise, seed and signal of a new criollo and Baroque history, as Kathleen Ross argues.24 Illicit sex,  writes Sigüenza, was why King Philip II of Spain lent his patronage to the Mexico City convent, saying that a letter from Mexico’s archbishop to King

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Philip gained this result with startling rapidity because the prelate’s “niece,” twelve-year-old Doña Michaela de los Angeles, living in the convent, was in fact the king’s natural daughter (Paraíso 74). Doña Michaela joins Doña Marina Tenopal (La Malinche) in denoting a sexualized founding of Mexico, as Mother Marina denotes its political intricacies. They further denote a racialization on which Sigüenza insists. He says that he housed Mother Marina’s relics honorably, using money from her great-grandnephew Juan de Alva Cortés, and states that he wrote the Paraíso to “perpetuate [his] memory” (223). Juan de Alva, Sigüenza adds, was the grandson of Ana Cortés, Mother Marina’s nephew’s wife. Ana, in turn, was the granddaughter of “Francisco Verdugo Quetzalmamalitzin, cacique of S. Juan Teotihuacan,” and of Fernando Cortés Ixtlilxochitl, great-granddaughter of “Nezahualpiltzintli, king of Texcoco” (224), and so a cousin of Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, the chronicler of indigenous history and the “Cicero of the Mexican language” (52). And Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s ancestor was the Texcocan king honored for his alliance with Cortés. Sigüenza details these relationships to emphasize the ongoing importance of these indigenous nobles’ political and cultural actions and, as crucially, the continuity and vitality of native tradition and its memory. Like La Malinche, these figures embodied New Spain’s political mestizaje and a specifically Mexican history and its telling, which Sigüenza had portrayed in his Teatro de virtudes políticas (680) and planned to expand on in other works using original documents. Like these, Paraíso occidental incorporated an Indian past, making indigenous peoples, Europeans, mestizos, and criollos equally essential to a local Mexican history. In Paraíso occidental, then, Sigüenza joins politics, sexuality, race, military and legal acts, events, and relations basic to a properly American—Mexican—history. In these many grounds were to be found history’s estrechas leyes, its rigorous laws, to which Sigüenza refers in my epigraph: “Es el fin de [las historias] hazer presente lo pasado como fue entonces” (Paraíso 45). Many critics see Sigüenza as a first modern historian: scientific, methodical, self-critical, factual, and aiming at truth. But these standards are not everywhere and always the same. In fact, Sigüenza’s interlaced history drew on sundry experiences more often protean than settled in their effects, and it aimed not just to explain the past but to guide and judge the present. Like the fundamental Baroque genre of theater, history was to offer “universal” representations of human nature and human actions. In this regard, Aristotle, whose Poetics had been rediscovered, translated, and glossed since the

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mid-sixteenth century, gave a reliable standard. Here, poetic truth was not the truth of historical fact and event but of things as they ought to be, and so of what was necessary, usual, or probable—expectable, that is. But if historiography’s goal was to judge and guide, then it was to be seen (1) as a testing place for such probable universals, a “safe” place to trace and discover consequences of certain conjunctions of event, character, and behavior; (2) a place to show these consequences to others; and (3), above all here, grounded in local context, since expectation related to the life ways of those reading and knowing the particular context. If Baroque theater was understood as a transient test of (hi)story, action, and event—of trying out new things, experimenting with possible and probable phenomena, putting unknowns to the proof—so, too, historiography was experimenting with actual events, institutions, and personages. In 1604, the poet Bernardo de Balbuena, writing in Mexican Guadalajara, also addressed realities of Mexican history, limning the bustle of Sigüenza’s beloved Mexico City–Tenochtitlan in his urban epic poem La grandeza mexicana (Mexican Grandeur), to which, after his dedication to Doña Isabel de Tobar y Guzmán, he adds the explanatory subtitle: Describiendo la famosa ciudad de México y sus grandezas (Describing the famous city of Mexico City and its grandeur). He sets his American city in a European history via a long clichéd analogy with Venice, but in an indigenous one, too, for his description of its causeways, streets, and people directly echoes the conquerors’ wonder on first seeing Tenochtitlan: Tiene esta gran ciudad sobre agua hechas firmes calzadas, que a su mucha gente por capaces que son vienen estrechas; que ni el caballo griego hizo puente tan llena de armas al troyano muro, ni a tantos guió Ulises el prudente; ni cuando con su cierzo el frío Arturo los árboles desnuda, de agostadas hojas así se cubre el suelo duro como en estos caminos y calzadas en todo tiempo y todas ocasiones, se ven gentes cruzar amontonadas.25

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This great city has paved roads built over water, which despite their size are narrow for its many people; neither did the Greek horse make a bridge over the Trojan wall so full of weapons, nor did skillful Ulysses lead so many; nor, when cold Arcturus strips the trees, does he so cover the hard ground with so many dried leaves as always and ever on these roads and highways do people mingle in masses.

Like Sigüenza’s Mexican paradise, Balbuena’s Homeric terms abstract real place, making the city a blend of histories. Like Sigüenza, Balbuena does this by design, for the mainland had not lost its cultures and peoples as had the Antilles.26 Balbuena came to Mexico from Spain in 1584 at the age of twenty-two to join his father, who had come twenty years before. After two years in the capital, he went to Guadalajara to take holy orders and begin religious studies. (Returning to Spain in 1606, he earned a doctorate in theology, and lived out his life as a high church official in the Caribbean.) In 1590, he won a prize in a poetry competition to celebrate the arrival of the new viceroy Luis de Velasco in the capital and, although living in Guadalajara, he went often to Mexico City. So when a friend asked him about the capital’s wonders, he was well placed to recount them. He did so in a way that he explained in two prefatory texts setting out how to read his poem. In a short prologue to the reader, he begins with two clichés of his age: that of the writing of books there is no end, and that human beings are endlessly varied, by “talents and professions, estates, ways of reasoning, skills, inclinations and appetites” (5). The first, from Ecclesiastes 12, stresses writing itself as historical process; the second, echoing the famed Juan Huarte de San Juan’s Examen de ingenios (1575, 1594), reminds readers of the diversity of peoples, actions, and events, and thus of their histories. Balbuena takes up these themes in the second text that precedes the poem, a long prefatory letter to Don Antonio de Ávila y Cadena. Here, Balbuena explicates a poem he had written honoring the arrival of the archbishop of Mexico, García de Mendoza y Zúñiga, so as to set his poetic description of “Mexican grandeur” in its proper literary and urban history. He explains that he modeled his poem on Petrarch’s final great poem of the Canzoniere, “Virgine bella.” Its opening apostrophe—“Divina Garza que a la blanca nieve / y al cisne altivo del Meandro helado / en canto vences y en pureza igualas” (divine heron whose purity equals white snow and whose song defeats that of the haughty swan of frozen Meander)—uses the word garza (heron), “not so much for its similarity with García [the

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archbishop’s name] as for the mystery and connotations of the crane’s attributes,” for, said Saint Bernard, there is never so rare and precious a bird as “the good prelate.” So the new archbishop was welcomed with metonymic flattery: García / garza / good prelate (18–19). The word’s “mystery” is further explained by reference to Virgil, and its context is given by Ovid, backed by Cicero, Basil, and others (19–21). The wealth of meanings and sources that Balbuena explores in the opening stanza of his poem to Archbishop García matches the rica ciudad, the city of riches, that opens the second stanza of his poem. Echoing Horace, he names nine Greek cities (Delphi, Thebes, Corinth, Ephesus, Athens, Memphis, Ionia, Rhodes, and Argus) to embody the glories of Mexico City (35–49).27 Balbuena ends his prefatory encomium by saying that time, “judge and author of truths,” will make this “simple, humble, and tender” song last through the ages (17). The familiar envoi embodies, I propose, a quite different sense of time, one that uses older writers (Latins, church fathers, more recent Italians) to create new poems, as it uses older cities to construct “all the most known glories for which this Mexican city stands out” (35). These two sets of history—literary and urban—are part of the setting Balbuena experiences and elaborates. “Ruins” by which “history merges into the setting,” they nonetheless are not as Benjamin has it, a mere ceaseless piling of fragments marking “a process of decay” (BNW 60; 67). Rather, Balbuena engages his precursors as a way of knowing the multiple histories of both his story of the city and the city’s reality. They become part of its (new) history because they are part of its setting. Roberto González Echevarría follows Picón-Salas in arguing that Balbuena’s “great poem” was “remarkable” for the mixture of elements taken from “the Old and the New World,” whose “plants, animals, and mythology” were incorporated in its descriptions.28 Both the critic and historian quote the following tercets from Balbuena’s Canto 3 (“Horses, Streets, Manners, Behavior”): La plata del Pirú, de Chile el oro viene a parar aquí y de Terrenate clavo fino y canela de Tidoro. De Cambray telas, de Quinsay rescate, de Sicilia coral, de Siria nardo, de Arabia encienso, y de Ormuz granate;

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diamantes de la India, y del gallardo Scita balajes y esmeraldas finas, de Goa marfíl, de Siam ébano pardo. . . . Silver from Peru, and from Chile gold comes to lodge here and from Ternate fine clove and cinnamon from Tidore. From Cambrai fabrics, from Kinsai ransom, from Sicily coral, from Syria nard, from Arabia incense, and Ormuz garnet; diamonds from India, and from valiant Scythia fine rubies and emeralds, from Goa ivory, from Siam dark ebony. . . . (77)

Seven more tercets continue the list of wealth brought to the city from around the world. This capítulo (as Balbuena called his cantos) ends by stressing Mexico City as the center of the imperial trading world, “the exact meridian,” says Picón-Salas, “where the most exotic regions overlap and . . . from which they radiate.”29 What is actually remarkable in this passage is that it contains hardly any  indigenous elements. The city does assemble peoples “diferentes en lenguas y naciones” (of different languages and nations; 65), but these differences are not indigenous. The city was a trading center greater than Venice (70, 80)—which may be why Kinsai, their Chinese lake counterpart, is named, despite its abstract product (rescate, ransom). Kinsai also signals Mexico’s commerce with the Far East; the poet sings his refrain of the city as a treasury of Indian ivory, Arabian perfumes, Biscayan steel, Dalmatian and Chilean gold, Peruvian silver, Moluccan spices, Japanese silk, South Sea pearls, Chinese mother-of-pearl, Tyrian purple, North African dates. Here, “Spain joins with China, / Italy with Japan, and in sum / a whole world in traffic and science [disciplina]” (90–91). Mexico was the new trading center for treasures from India, Malabar, Japan, China, the Moluccas, Africa (122). Balbuena recognized in his “Compendio apologético en alabanza de la poesía” (“Apologetic Epitome in Praise of Poetry”), a text following the poem, that the land’s first peoples had their histories, “poems and songs in which they preserve from memory to memory the ancient and famed deeds of their ancestors”—the goal shared by “the ancient romances of our Spain” (135). Indigenous peoples were of no overt interest in the “Compendio” or in La

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grandeza mexicana, whose last tercet indeed names “el feo indio” (the ugly Indian)—in which phrase Beverley sees a dominant ideology hiding “the real base of wealth and consumer goods in the [Indian] masses’ labor.”30 The global city overlies local geography. Balbuena’s Canto 4 (“Literature, Virtue, Variety of Works”) on Mexico’s “eternal spring,” catalogues flora and fauna at length, including fallow deer, hedgehogs (!), pheasants, and nightingales (95), before summarizing in a kind of paroxysm at the end of the canto: . . . palms, ivy, elms, walnuts, almonds, pines, poplars, laurels, beeches, grapevines, cypress, cedars, mulberries, fir, box, tamarisk, oaks, holm oaks, vines, strawberry trees, medlars, service trees, citrus flowers, poppies, carnations, roses, pinks, iris, lilies, rosemary, stocks, white roses, sloe, sandalwood, clover, lemon balm, verbena, jasmine, sunflower, myrtle, broom, bayberry, chamomile filled with gold, thyme, hay plant, watercress with sprouting branches, basil, jonquils and ferns, and all the many more flowers April scatters. (99)

Again, what surprises here is the absence of native plants. It is as if Balbuena sought to bury local geography under a frenzied torrent, less of European plants than of an abstract floral dictionary. Introducing an edition of La grandeza mexicana, Luis Adolfo Domínguez proposes that Balbuena yields either to nostalgia, or to readers’ ignorance of local flora (xxvii). It may be something else. If Balbuena’s material city echoed descriptions of the indigenous city made by Cortés and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, now infused with European and global geographies, its time was at once that of a sixteenth-century global entrepôt and, as important, of Balbuena’s (and Sigüenza’s) cornucopian primavera mexicana: Mexican spring tide creates something whose grandeur, at least, was new to history. Balbuena may refer implicitly to Mexican historical traditions submerged in the poem, but they are recalled in the “Compendio” after it. Tenochtitlan

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as a meeting place of peoples was a trope in pre-Conquest Nahuatl poetry. So was primavera, no less than in European poetry. I think of a poem by Nezahualcóyotl (1402–72), the ruler of Texcoco, recorded in the second half of the sixteenth century, “Xopan cuicatl” (“Song of Springtime”), whose “flowers” are both nature’s renewal and the birth of poetry. Revealing, too, is a poem by Nezahualcoyotl’s younger contemporary, Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin of Tecamachalco (fifteenth to sixteenth century), which Miguel LéonPortilla gives under the title “Let the Earth Forever Remain!” (“Ma huel manin tlalli!”): Let the earth forever remain! Let the mountains stay! Thus spoke Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, in Tlaxcala, in Huexotzinco. Flowers of toasted maize, flowers of the chocolate tree, may they be scattered. Let the earth forever remain!31

These poets emphasize a sense of geographic place, as if this were almost all the tradition that remained to the speaker after the invasion, for these poems as we have them postdate the Conquest. I say almost, because there also remain, after all, poetry and its language. They exist, though, as the exotic ethnographic presence of a people whose voice depends on Spanish interpreters. Oral tellings continued, but in Mexico this geography for centuries lost its literary telling. Indigenous and mestizo chroniclers no less than Spanish ones tell mostly histories. Such were the traditions taken up by Balbuena, Sigüenza, and others. If indigenous traditions are occluded in Balbuena’s poem, they are yet there. We should read the “Compendio” as we read the two prologues: as instructions for reading pasts in which we are buried to the knees. If ancient Rome and Greece are central to La grandeza mexicana, so are poems and songs of earlier Mexico, no less than echoes of the conquerors’ accounts of Tenochtitlan and their comparisons of Mexican and European cities. No list of European flora and fauna signals this indigenous presence, but Balbuena’s deep sense that in Mexico City “el aire más sereno nos convida / a un inmortal verano” (the serener air invites us / to an eternal summer) (14). He urges us to read this not as a ruin of a regretted, lost past, and still less as inflicted monuments, but as giving life to a great city and its global culture. A good part of this greatness derives from its rivaling empires of the European

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past and present, even as it retains an indigenous past, incorporating it as its past and so setting itself in a multiple history that it continues and climaxes. Doing so, he establishes a new sense of history.

Making Baroque Geographies in Cuba This historical remaking (one element of a barroco de Indias) was balanced by a different usage, with geography, not history, as the grounding element in the Antilles, where even an émigré chronicler like Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo accentuated place and the creation of criollo culture by establishing a geography.32 Maybe this different usage concerned a presence of indigenous peoples who were of such geography. In the Antilles, indigenous groups were rapidly almost eradicated, rendering the geography that of those who arrived from elsewhere, whereas on the mainland, geography remained that of the original peoples. History did not, and could thus be told by others making mainland culture from a story (or stories). These attitudes are not exclusive of one another but demarcate different aesthetic and epistemological emphases. The difference is found in an odd meeting of fictive imaginings. In his prologue to El reino de este mundo (The Kingdom of This World ), written in 1949, Carpentier depicts the seekers of “the Fountain of Eternal Youth . . . [and] the Golden City of Manoa” as marking a new American reality.33 Expanding on the idea in 1964, he made “Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s great chronicle” the site of a fantastic geography, where “one finds the only honest-to-goodness book of chivalry that has ever been written—a book of chivalry where the evil doers are lords [teules] one could see and touch, where unknown animals are real, unknown cities are discovered, dragons are seen in rivers and strange mountains in snow and smoke.”34 Lezama echoes the idea.35 It is true that Bernal Díaz’s sighting of Tenochtitlan has become a critical cliché: “And we said that it seemed like the enchanted things told in the book of Amadis, because of the great towers and temples and buildings standing in the water.”36 But the remark is the exception, not the rule. This was not how Bernal Díaz imagined Mexico and the Americas in the Historia. His story was Cortés’s: one of opposing powers facing off over an urban landscape that the Spanish undertook to transform. His conquerors used superior military technology and manipulated political conflicts to impose themselves on a landscape and its history. They did so as a tale of two cities; from his tale’s start, Mexico City/Tenochtitlan was Venice: “Some curious readers

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and other people who have been in New Spain have heard it said in Spain that Mexico is a very great city and built in the water like Venice; and it had a great lord who was king there over many provinces and ruled all these lands of New Spain that are more than twice as large as our Castile.”37 According to Bernal Díaz this prince, Moctezuma, was always seeking greater power and over more lands. He ruled an empire entirely comparable to Spain’s or Italy’s (whose cities were also constantly in comparison). The clash of empires required that the defeated be told differently. Like Cortés, Bernal Díaz tells of renaming towns, cities, and people—starting with Doña Marina, the first indigenous person to be a named participant in the invaders’ new story of the Americas. Carpentier’s idea differs. So does Balboa’s in his Espejo de paciencia (Mirror of Patience) of 1604–8, whose creation of place outweighs his creation of history. Balbuena’s Grandeza mexicana and Balboa’s Espejo—contemporary texts and foundational in their respective cultures—self-consciously stress, mingle, and alter aspects of the Baroque in interestingly different ways, just as they themselves were taken up and altered by later writers. For Lezama, Balboa’s brief epic Espejo signals the “birth of Cuban ways and styles of being, which in spite of Spanish influence must be understood as something Cuban working to attain its contour and essence.”38 Perhaps this may be called Antillean rather than just Cuban. Balboa was born in Gran Canaria in 1563. It is not known when he sailed to Cuba and settled in Santa María de Puerto Príncipe (today Camagüey), but the prefatory verses to his poem imply that he was by then long established by marriage and career. In two cantos, the poem recounts the true story of the kidnapping and ransom of the Cuban bishop Juan de las Cabezas Altamiro by a French pirate, Gilberto Girón, and the vengeance wreaked on the latter and his men by the locals of Bayamo, who ambush and kill them all, beheading their leader and setting his head on a pike, events that occurred in 1604 and whose story anticipates the anti-French theme also common in Sigüenza. The first canto tells of the bishop’s capture and hardships en route to the pirate’s ship, his “patience” and forbearance, his release, and the celebration held in his honor—a joyous encomium of the island’s tropical flora and fauna. The second relates the muster of a troop of twenty-four men to avenge the crime (each given a stanza or half stanza for name and description), dwells on the Lutherans’ evil, the ambush, the Cubans’ bravery—above all that of the black slave Salvador who killed the pirate (and would be given his freedom in return)—and ends with quieter celebrations

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and a church mass. Indeed, this canto concludes with a motete that Balboa had almost certainly written in 1604 to be sung in the church in thanksgiving for the victory.39 Lezama speaks of the Spanish influence in this poem, whose most “remarkable and frequently commented on” aspect, González Echevarría adds, is its “admixture of elements from classical mythology and the description of the Cuban landscape.”40 But the poem’s familiar myths, epic enumerations, and pastoral opening make something new. In his prologue, “Al lector” (“To the Reader”), Balboa justifies the celebration of tropical fruits that ends the first canto by saying that thus he describes “the gladness and joy that the whole island had from [the bishop’s] return and freedom, and the rejoicing with which not only the townspeople of Bayamo came out to greet him but also the nymphs of mountains, springs and rivers, so as to accent the need of good in a commonwealth, and the joy and gladness that not only rational humans show at its coming but also even brute animals and insensible things” (44). Here he urges a sort of social, political, moral, and geographical symbiosis. In his edition’s introduction, Ángel Aparicio Laurencio observes that the poem’s hero is “collective.” If the bishop is central, his role is passive; he is the object of collective ransom, collective celebration, collective revenge, collective mass. Nuestro, the plural possessive pronoun, always tops Balboa’s thought: “the twenty-four valiant islanders” are “our people,” “our islanders,” “our squadrons,” “our strong troop.” Aparicio Laurencio adds that in this collectivity the victor over Girón was actually the black Salvador, while the only Cuban soldier to die of “a penetrating wound” was an “indio de los nuestros” (one of our Indians; 24, 86). The troop is mixed and criollo. Indeed, the Cubanness of the “we,” “our,” “us” is signaled even before the poem begins. Lezama notes that Balboa’s friend, the captain Pedro de las Torres Sifontes, refers to his own poem as “este soneto criollo de la tierra,” a sonnet native to the land, a Cuban sonnet written by a Cuban (the pleonasm of criollo and de la tierra stressing the fact).41 It is the captain’s sonnet that Balboa put first of the six that preceded the longer poem (47). In the Espejo de la paciencia itself, Girón’s victor is praised as “¡Salvador criollo, negro honrado!” and the poet names Bayamo and its eponymous river as “el ameno lugar que tanto amo” (the delightful place [locus amoenus] that I so love; 84, 89). It is this sense of home, of collective, of geographically embedded place, that Balboa celebrates in the closing carnival of the first canto. Unlike the Mexican poet Balbuena, whose flora is European, Balboa readies his reader to know the festival’s tropical fruits, trees, flowers, animals,

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birds, and fish as central to “us,” “our” being, and “our” place. They draw the reader into a second canto that stresses this grounded collectivity. Balboa brings out the local citizens, satyrs, fauns, wood nymphs, and deities to offer “soursops, jijiras, and star-apples,” baskets of “mehí y tabaco, / mameyes, piñas, tunas y aguacates, / plátanos, y mamones y tomates” (mehí and tobacco, mameys, pineapples, prickly pears and avocados, / plantains and papayas and tomatoes). Hamadryads leave their trees with siguapas, macaguas, cacti, and other fruits, goddesses emerge from the forest, wood nymphs come with bounty. River nymphs add varieties of local fish and a thousand other “cosas peregrinas” (fleeting things, things coming and going); nymphs from the springs come crowned with sweet-smelling herbs, their hair waving and “more brilliant than Arabian gold,” to welcome the bishop “with sweet and joyous conversation”; yet others bring tortoises, “a thousand unusual kinds of game,” various animals and “many iguanas, hooved animals, and hutías” (67–70). The victory fiesta ends with a joyous dance to the sound of “flutes, panpipes, and rebecs,” “maracas, cymbals, drums, tipinaguas, and tambourines” (71), a wild celebration to be repeated in the riotous jam session of Carpentier’s Concierto barroco (1974), whose Filomeno is a descendant of Salvador and who retells for his criollo master the events of Espejo de paciencia, an echo of Balboa’s cultural mingling.42 For, as Balboa says in his prologue, his aim is to emphasize the symbiosis of people and place, cultures and geography. González Echevarría again expresses surprise at “the curious mixture of figures from classical mythology and exotic tropical plants,” but only its earliness is “remarkable.”43 The mixture itself, the gathering of what later writers call the shards and remnants of different histories and cultures into a local geography, is utterly usual in Caribbean writing. To compare Balboa and Balbuena is instructive. Balboa’s Cuban poem offers the reader a culture in process, building history in and from locality. Balbuena’s Mexican poem offers many places explicitly represented in manufactured goods, gems, and other valuables, products brought as objects to traffic, but its globalizing exchanges depend on revivifying many histories. It proposes an ideal of incorporating others’ wealth and their histories, a great trading center expanding songs of past imperial stories in a new major key. This differs utterly from Balboa’s poem, which speaks of the use value of gifts—fruits of the land to the people, people’s labor and joy to the land (“this place that I love”), the voluntary contributions of the bishop’s ransomers, the valor of his avengers—all of which affirms the wholeness of the community

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in its locality, Balboa’s community of peoples of three continents, Spaniards, Africans, Indians, and criollos building one history from a mutually recognized, and made, place. This community specifically replaces the European spring of the poem’s opening, with its piratical theft and trade. As Lezama says about Balboa’s poem: “The European imagination, the Greco-Latin no less than the medieval, passed in its entirety into a new circumstance.”44 If Balboa gifted European culture to the land, Balbuena takes it as one part of a land made of many histories—a new historical combinatoria. In another essay, Lezama tells of a contemporary chronicler’s efforts to name and explain local fruits to European readers and perhaps to himself.45 He shows how, in his very comparisons, the writer finds himself emphasizing what was “distinct and different,” drawn into a “nueva naturaleza” (a new kind of nature) that makes him see things “con nuevos ojos fabulosos” (with new, marveling eyes) opening to a new geography. Echoing his other claims about the nature of the Baroque, Lezama’s statement has not a little in common with the remolded columns of Havana in Carpentier’s essay “The City of Columns,” translated in this volume. One could say the same of Balboa; he does not make the land his; rather, the land makes him its. Balboa’s flora, fauna, musical instruments, and peoples are not motley but, related by and to place, report a reality. The poem’s presentation insists on this, its first criollo sonnet and other prefatory poems setting Balboa in a wide criollo family. This “packaging” leads the reader into the grounded collective the poem depicts as it inaugurates the poetry of a different place, where a people could have a deeply internalized sense of being-there. “After this poem was written,” says Lezama, “one could speak of Cubanness, more than in outward appearance in poetry’s complex presence.”46 The poem’s Cubanness is also its Caribbeanness, its Creolity. It evokes a place in which a European history has become one fragment of many, one shard to be joined to others in ways governed by memories embedded in and organized by local topographies. Perhaps remembering Balboa, Carpentier captures this sense of embeddedness in locality as the protagonist of another of his novels, El siglo de las luces (translated as Explosion in a Cathedral ) wanders through Guadeloupe: “[Esteban] breathed in with delight the delicate fragrance of the anonas, the grey acidity of the tamarinds, the fleshy softness of all these fruits, with their red and purple pulp, concealing in their most recondite folds sumptuous seeds with the texture of tortoise-shell, ebony or polished mahogany. He buried his face in the white coolness of the xorozos; he tore at the amaran-

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thine star-apple, searching with avid lips for the crystalline droplets secreted in the depths of its pulp.”47 Thus is Esteban home again after his journey into European history, its pieces to be mingled with those of other histories grounded in and projected by topography or, in terms of the teller rather than the told, histories trammeled in the body. Balboa’s, Carpentier’s, and Lezama’s stories, no less than those of Balbuena and Sigüenza, turn others’ (Europeans’) stories on their head, find diverse ones elsewhere, and forge their own. They do so with shared formal “Baroque” devices: proliferating lists, constant repetitions, hyperbole, violent colors and contrasts, utopian pastoral—all elements of the crowded and lush spectacle that Leonard and Picón-Salas criticized. From these formal techniques they create their own cultural realities according to local geographical and historical imperatives.

Notes

1 2

3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

I thank Monika Kaup and Lois Parkinson Zamora for their careful attention to both my original proposal and the penultimate version of this essay, to say nothing of their generous patience. Acosta, “El barroco de Indias y la ideología colonialista,” 29. Rama, Lettered City, 60–61. The Heredia-Martí connection is also Lezama’s, emphasizing their Cubanness: “Conferencia sobre José María Heredia,” in Fascinación de la memoria: Textos inéditos, ed. Iván González Cruz (Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1993), 90. He notes that Bello was himself, in his Silva, an exception among Latin American writers in not ignoring geography. Lezama Lima, “Conferencia sobre ‘otros románticos,’” in Fascinación, 144. Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” 98. Alejo Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” trans. Tanya Huntington and Lois Parkinson Zamora, in Zamora and Faris, Magical Realism, 84. Leonard, Baroque Times in Old Mexico, 30. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. Mariano Picón-Salas, A Cultural History of Spanish America: From Conquest to Independence, trans. Irving A. Leonard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 62. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. John Beverley also writes of a loss of “epic” subjects “in the context of seventeenthcentury imperial decadence” in his “Barroco de estado,” 86. Acosta, “El barroco de Indias y la ideología colonialista,” 23. Benjamin, Origins of German Tragic Drama, 92. This passage is found in the excerpt from Benjamin’s Origins included in this collection (BNW 60). Acosta, “El barroco de Indias y la ideología colonialista,” 24. Ibid., 49. Beverley, “Barroco de estado,” 85, 89.

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12 Ibid., 93, 95.

13 John Beverley, “La economía política del locus amoenus,” in Del Lazarillo al sandi-

14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25

26

27

nismo: Estudios sobre la función ideológica de la literatura española e hispanoamericana (Minneapolis: Prisma Institute, 1987), 75. Benjamin finds the archetypal German Baroque genre of the Trauerspiel (mourning play) essentially suited to “the historical subject” (Origins, 120; emphasis added), its characteristic allegory defined chiefly by “the decisive category of time,” a “history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful,” a history that is a “natural history” of human “subjection to death” (166). Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, e.g., 71–74. Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco, 218; Echeverría writes of a “baroque ethos” that parallels the idea of a transhistorical “Baroque spirit” proposed by Eugenio d’Ors, Carpentier, and others. See also the essays in Echeverría, Modernidad, mestizaje cultural, ethos barroco. Acosta, “El barroco de Indias y la ideología colonialista,” 26. Sarduy, Barroco, in Ensayos generales sobre el barroco, 163. Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” 30. Translated by María Pérez and Ange Birkenmaier in this volume (BNW 213). Carpentier, “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana,” 33; emphasis original. Translated by Michael Schuessler in this volume (BNW 262). Timothy J. Reiss, The Meaning of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 10–69. Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” 83. Acosta, “El barroco de Indias y la ideología colonialista,” 35–36. Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, Paraíso occidental (Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes, 1995), 122. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. Ross, Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, 87–91. Strictly, the word criollo, Creole, originally named people of European descent born in the Americas and their cultural, political, and other creations. I also use it, however, to shade into claims (as in Balboa, we shall see) of a particularly and peculiarly American culture. Bernardo de Balbuena, La grandeza mexicana y compendio apologético en alabanza de la poesía, ed. Adolfo Domínguez (1971; Mexico City: Porrúa, 1990), 64. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. I have not attempted a verse translation of these four tercets because I could find no way to make English lines correspond with the Spanish. I provide a prose translation. Debates about Mexican and Latin American cultures have always been couched in terms of mixed histories. See Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), chap. 11, from which part of what follows is revised and expanded. Horace’s poem praises Tibur (now Roman Tivoli). It opens with, “Let others praise fair Rhodes or Mytilene / or Ephesus or two-sea-ed Corinth’s / walls or Thebes for Bacchus or Delphi for Apollo / famed, or Thessalian Tempe.” Horace, The Odes and

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28 29 30 31 32

33

34 35

36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

J. Reiss

Epodes, ed. and trans. C. E. Bennett (1914; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1947), 22. Roberto González Echevarría, “Reflections on the Espejo de Paciencia,” in Celestina’s Brood, 144–45; Picón-Salas, Cultural History of Spanish America, 95–97. Picón-Salas, Cultural History of Spanish America, 96; see also Acosta, “El barroco de Indias y la ideología colonialista,” 29. John Beverley, “Sobre el gongorismo colonial,” in Una modernidad obsoleta, 90; see also his “Económica,” 74. Miguel León-Portilla, ed. and trans., Fifteen Poets of the Aztec World (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 94–96, 218. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Historia general y natural de las Indias, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela Bueso, 5 vols. (1959; Madrid: Atlas, 1992). While this great work (first edition 1537) also gives information about the mainland, Oviedo wrote it in Santo Domingo, and the sense of island place seems overwhelming, to this reader anyway. Alejo Carpentier, The Kingdom of This World, trans. Harriet de Onís (1957; London: André Deutsch, 1967), [xii]. The prologue, translated by Heather Martin, has no pagination. Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” 83. José Lezama Lima, “Image of Latin America,” in Latin America in Its Literature, ed. César Fernández Moreno, Julio Ortega, and Ivan A. Schulman, trans. Mary G. Berg (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980), 323. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia de la conquista de Nueva España, ed. Joaquín Ramírez Cabañas (1955; Mexico City: Porrúa, 1994), 159; see also Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” 104. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia, 23. José Lezama Lima, “Prólogo a una antología,” in Obras completas, 2 vols. (Mexico City: Aguilar, 1977), 2:1004. Silvestre de Balboa y Troya de Quesada, Espejo de paciencia, ed. Ángel Aparicio Laurencio (Miami: Universal, 1970), 84–85, 90–91. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. González Echevarría, “Reflections,” 128. Lezama Lima, “Prologo,” 2:1004. Alejo Carpentier, Baroque Concerto, trans. Asa Zatz (London: André Deutsch, 1991), 68–74, 39–44, 52–53. González Echevarría, “Reflections,” 131. Lezama Lima, “Prologo,” 2:997. José Lezama Lima, “Paralelos: La pintura y poesía en Cuba (siglos XVIII y XIX),” in Obras completas, 2:936–37. Lezama Lima, “Prologo,” 2:1003, 1004. Alejo Carpentier, Explosion in a Cathedral, trans. John Sturrock (1963; New York: Noonday, 1989), 161.

  Chapter Twenty  

Baroque Quixote: New World Writing   and the Collapse of the Heroic Ideal William Childers

Después del Renacimiento la historia de España pasó a la América. (After the Renaissance, Spain’s history moved to America.) José Lezama Lima , La expresión americana

The Baroque emerged from a crisis in Renaissance values and institutions. Colonial expansion and the modern state—parallel processes, certainly—entailed the creation of an administration capable of regulating increasing flows of money and power. This centralized administration frequently ran counter to the humanistic values that had permeated the European aristocratic and mercantile classes by the mid-sixteenth century. Through readings of several New World narratives and Don Quixote, this essay examines the clash between an aristocratic ethos of independent action, which I will refer to as the “heroic ideal,” and an expanding bureaucracy more concerned with legal privileges and obligations than with ethical issues. The heroic ideal manifested itself in exemplary narrative. In history and fiction, the figure of exemplarity served to represent in a single individual the qualities needed to govern well: the “virtues” of liberality, prudence, and courage. This heroic form of exemplary narrative provided the pattern for humanist biographies such as Petrarch’s Viri illustri and formed the ideological foundation, two centuries later, of the chivalric romances that drove Don Quixote mad. In the course of the sixteenth century, as new schemata rendered familiar patterns of knowledge obsolete, exemplarity began to break down.1 In place of the limited repertoire of exempla, modern and colonial power generated a “demand for narrative,” for the accumulation and ordering of information about its subjects to better control them.2 This demand

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took place within institutional frameworks such as legal proceedings and royal surveys. Rather than approaching Cervantes’s masterpiece in the traditional way, as a landmark in the self-contained history of fiction, this essay groups Don Quixote (1605, 1615) with New World writings, including Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (1569, 1578, and 1589) and the Inca Garcilaso’s Comentarios reales (1609, 1617). These texts have in common a productive tension between exemplary heroism and the legalistic or “archival” approach to narrative that responds to colonial and imperial administrative demands. They also share, I believe, a critical perspective on the political changes accompanying the expansion of the Hapsburg Empire. One consequence of my argument is to establish an independent genesis for the Latin American Baroque, parallel with or even prior to the emergence of the Baroque in Spain. Another, perhaps equally controversial, is to situate Cervantes as a Baroque writer.

Cervantes and the Uses of the Term Baroque When Don Quixote wishes to impress the marvelous enchantment of chivalric romance upon his hearers, he has recourse to an elevated style that exhibits such undeniably baroque traits as emphasis on decorative imagery, competition between artifice and nature, parallel construction, correspondence among the senses, and the tension between order and disorder: Allí le parece que el cielo es más transparente, y que el sol luce con claridad más nueva; ofrécesele a los ojos una apacible floresta de tan verdes y frondosos árboles compuesta, que alegra a la vista su verdura, y entretiene los oídos el dulce y no aprendido canto de los pequeños, infinitos y pintados pajarillos que por los intricados ramos van cruzando. Aquí descubre un arroyuelo, cuyas frescas aguas, que líquidos cristales parecen, corren sobre menudas arenas y blancas pedrezuelas, que oro cernido y puras perlas semejan; acullá vee una artificiosa fuente de jaspe variado y de liso mármol compuesta; acá vee otra a lo brutesco adornada, adonde las menudas conchas de las almejas con las torcidas casas blancas y amarillas del caracol, puesta con orden desordenada, mezclados entre ellas pedazos de cristal luciente y de contrahechas esmeraldas, hacen una variada labor, de manera que el arte, imitando a la naturaleza, parece que allí la vence.3 There it seems to him that the sky is more translucent and the sun shines with a new clarity; before him lies a peaceful grove of trees so green and leafy, their verdure brings joy to his eyes, while his ears are charmed by the sweet, untutored song of the

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infinite number of small, brightly colored birds that fly among the intricate branches. Here he discovers a brook whose cool waters, like liquid crystal, run over fine sand and white pebbles that seem like sifted gold and perfect pearls; there he sees a fountain artfully composed of varicolored jasper and smooth marble; over there he sees another fountain fashioned as a grotto where tiny clamshells and the coiled whiteand-yellow houses of the snail are arranged with conscious disorder and mixed with bits of shining glass and counterfeit emeralds, forming so varied a pattern that art, imitating nature, here seems to surpass it.4

Though not by any means the only style he cultivated, such elegantly overwritten passages are frequent in his prose, especially in the posthumous Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda. At the level of formal composition, Severo Sarduy rightly draws attention to the parallels between the canvas with its back to the viewer in Velázquez’s painting Las meninas and the fictional Arabic manuscript of which the novel is a “translation” in Don Quixote: both are characteristically Baroque incorporations of the work’s own mimetic processes into its very structure.5 Like Luis de Góngora, Cervantes follows a trajectory leading from Mannerist imitation of Renaissance forms—Cervantes’s first book was La Galatea, a pastoral romance—to an unequivocally Baroque composition in his posthumous romance The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda (1617). Yet the association of Cervantes with the Baroque remains problematic, and there exist few sustained discussions of Don Quixote in this context.6 The primary reason for this oversight, I would argue, is the narrow ideological function traditionally attributed to Baroque art. In Spain, two competing interpretations of the Baroque have predominated: Werner Weisbach’s art of the Counter-Reformation and José Antonio Maravall’s theory of the Baroque as a tool for consolidating the absolutist monarchy.7 These two approaches share a view of the Baroque as encoding a new relationship between power and art. The practices typically associated with the Baroque, as Maravall demonstrated in The Culture of the Baroque, constitute a culture directed from above (cultura dirigida) for the purpose of shaping public opinion and generating a protonationalist sense of collective identity. Anthony Cascardi and John Beverley have extended Maravall’s thesis, emphasizing how Baroque literature and art aimed at forming, in Cascardi’s words, subjects desirous of control.8 Critics have difficulty incorporating Cervantes into this model, finding instead that his ironic, ambiguous writings resist the ideological closure of

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Counter-Reformation Spain. He seems to understand, and at the same time to reject, the new role of art, for example in his ongoing critical appraisal of Lope de Vega.9 This ambivalence has lead to a tendency to view him as a belated Renaissance humanist, someone out of step with his times. For my treatment of Don Quixote, I will draw instead on Latin American theories of the Baroque for a suitable model of Cervantes’s practice. As Ángel Guido and José Lezama Lima have shown, in Latin America the Baroque served both as an instrument of colonial domination and as a form of resistance (see their respective essays in this collection). They view the indigenous artisans who introduced elements of pre-Columbian religious imagery into the decoration of the façades and interiors of colonial churches as a crucial instance of reclaiming cultural terrain within a Baroque aesthetic. In this model, equally valid for Spain itself, the Baroque constitutes an ideological hinge for the seventeenth century, swinging either toward new forms of domination or away from them. There would thus be two broad types of Baroque, both resulting from the crisis of the Renaissance. In the dominant line, the artist defends the new order as the best way to achieve stability, even while recognizing its artificiality. In the other line, the artist’s opposition to the new order manifests itself as nostalgia for Renaissance values and institutions, or in any case, such values and institutions are held up against the current situation as an implicit critique. Don Quixote belongs, along with most of Cervantes’s writings, to this second, critical variety of Baroque literature. As we will see, so does Ercilla’s epic of the conquest of Chile, La Araucana. In a recent essay (translated in this collection), Gonzalo Celorio also views the Latin American Baroque as an expression of mestizo cultural resistance. He discusses the Spanish Baroque as an attempt, only partially successful, to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of Renaissance certitude. For Celorio, post-Tridentine orthodoxy is really only a cover for a deeper skepticism: “As paradoxical as it may appear . . . the abandonment of the values of this world in favor of those of the next [in the works of the Spanish Baroque . . . ,] far from testifying to the triumph of Catholicism and religious faith, are in fact a product of the religious void left in Spain by the Renaissance and the crisis of the church” (BNW 493). The Baroque thus constitutes the crossroads caused by the loss of old certitudes, and it can either lead to the construction of an artificial replacement or, as in Cervantes’s case, endlessly defer this very dogmatism.10 Further, the deployment by monarchical and ecclesiastical authorities of cultural practices intended to inculcate an orthodox, national Catholic iden-

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tity amounts to an instance in Spain of “coloniality of power.” Aníbal Quijano introduced this term to refer to the continuation of colonialist political structures long after de facto liberation from the metropolis.11 Despite the coercive nature of this form of power, Quijano recognizes in it a tension between imitation and subversion. Those forced to submit to its operation often find ways to strategically combine the practices imposed on them with others that refer to their former identities. He specifically mentions two examples to which Lezama also gives prominence as defining moments of the Latin American Baroque: the work of the Brazilian sculptor Aleijadinho and that of the Bolivian artist José Kondori (see figures 11.7, 11.8, 11.9, 9.1, 9.2, and 9.3). Quijano suggests that, like the Baroque, coloniality of power is a form of domination that carries within itself the possibilities for resistance to it. In Local Histories/Global Designs, Walter D. Mignolo, insisting that “there is no modernity without coloniality,” sees coloniality of power operative in the local histories underlying all nation formation in “the modern/colonial world.”12 In the “Third Space” in which Homi K. Bhabha locates modern culture, relationships to coloniality of power are negotiated in response to the “demand for narrative” imposed by colonial authority.13 This modern space of culture first takes shape in the Baroque, and it exhibits the same ambivalence of function on either side of the Atlantic.

Crisis of Exemplarity and Coloniality of Power   in the New World Chronicles In the opening sentence of his monumental Historiografía indiana, Francisco Esteve Barba explains that “during the Spanish expansion in America, the discipline of history was advanced enough to be able to follow day by day the introduction of Christian civilization in the New World.”14 This deceptively simple statement elides the difference between the “discipline” of Renaissance historiography and the “discipline” (in the Foucauldian sense) to which the crown subjected the agents of its empire, a constant looking over the shoulder of its overseas representatives. From the first, narrative discourse in the New World was divided between these two contradictory impulses: on the one hand, the exemplary myth of the conquistador as hero, and on the other, the practical demands of the colonial regime. The quest for adventure had to compete with the need for a smooth-running, well-organized bureaucracy. While the idealized vision of the Conquest, burdened by the weight of its own irreality, soon gave way to the pressure of colonial admin-

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istration, a nostalgic attachment to the myth of the conquistador as heroic individual persisted. Out of this matrix of fading idealism and the imposition of coloniality of power, a new sensibility emerged that no longer belonged either to the Renaissance nor to the “directed culture” of the Baroque forged in Spain. Traces of the colonial demand for narrative appear frequently in the chronicles, in first-person acknowledgments of the writer’s self-interest or in truth claims based on having witnessed events or spoken directly with participants. Enrique Pupo-Walker has shown, however, that Renaissance historiography placed a premium on supposedly more literary qualities, such as descriptive verisimilitude, learned references, and classical topoi, rather than factual details or eyewitness accounts.15 Humanist models of elegant style in historical writing treated exemplary moral figures from a disinterested remove. In her recent book, Territories of History, Sarah Beckjord examines the tension between this humanist tradition and concern with selfinterested bias and reliability in three of the major New World chroniclers: Gonzálo Fernández de Oviedo, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Bernal Díaz del Castillo.16 In Myth and Archive, taking up the role of legal discourse in colonial Latin American narrative, Roberto González Echevarría points out that most of the texts we today lump together under the loose heading of “chronicles” where written as relaciones, formal documents addressed directly to a royal official or to the king himself.17 An antecedent for all such narratives is the fictional prologue of Lazarillo de Tormes, addressed to a mysterious “Vuestra Merced” (Your Grace) who has demanded that Lazarillo “relate el caso muy por extenso” (explain his case at length).18 As González Echevarría puts it, “The novel and the history of the New World . . . are like letters written to a central authority, because legal rhetoric always implies a textual exchange or dialogue, a petition or appeal or an answer to some sort of accusation.”19 An extreme instance of this self-interested rhetoric is offered by an exasperated Díaz del Castillo in his True History of the Conquest of New Spain: Y digo otra vez que yo, yo y yo, dígolo tantas veces, que yo soy el más antiguo y lo he servido como muy buen soldado a Su Majestad, y diré con tristeza de mi corazón, porque me veo pobre y muy viejo y una hija para casar y los hijos varones ya grandes y con barbas y otros por criar, y no puedo ir a Castilla ante Su Majestad para representarle cosas cumplideras a su real servicio y también para que me haga mercedes, pues se me deben bien debidas.

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And I say once more that I, I, and I, I say it over and over, that I am the one who has been here the longest, and I have served His Majesty as an excellent soldier, and I say it with pain in my heart, because I find myself poor and old, with an unwed daughter and grown-up sons with beards, and others I still have to raise, and I cannot go to Castile and present myself to His Majesty to represent before him things he ought to know for his own good, as well as the reasons why he should reward me, for truly I am owed a great debt.20

Like Bernal Díaz, many of the soldiers who had participated in imperial projects wrote such personal accounts in order to “cash in” on their services. In New World writing, criteria for judging the truth-value of historical narrative in accordance with Renaissance notions of exemplarity thus collided with criteria for evaluating legal testimony. Hernando Cortés was both the first and the last to successfully balance these contradictory demands. In his celebrated Second Letter, he invented a fictional character named Hernán Cortés, the embodiment of the Christian hero who brings together the virtues of service to God and king, prudence, and courage.21 Despite his initial defiance of Diego Velázquez’s authority, he successfully portrayed himself as a loyal subject of the crown, whose personal valor brought the entire Aztec empire under Charles V’s rule. The first-  person singular aids in “the presentation of Cortés’s undeniable personal valor as the sole factor leading to the success of the enterprise, to the exclusion of all others.”22 In emblematic episodes such as that of the burning of his ships to cut off any possibility of retreat, Cortés places himself on the level of an epic hero; as a result, popular ballads were composed about his exploits.23 Yet the same letter reveals Cortés’s anxiety concerning the need for independent verifiability of his account when he asks the king to “send a trusted person to inquire into and investigate everything and report back to your sacred majesty about it” (enviar una persona de confianza que haga inquisición y pesquisa de todo e informe a vuestra sacra majestad de ello).24 In his Fourth Letter, Cortés represents himself as an ideal lawgiver and judge, the founder of a new society, which he characterizes as a model of justice, peace, and order.25 Particularly significant for my discussion of the decline of the heroic ideal is the fact that in the early consolidation of colonial rule in New Spain, Cortés could act with extraordinary freedom, daring to defy all authority but the king’s own command. The larger-than-life figure Cortés had created quickly became a contested site for representations of Spain’s colonial project in the New World. He would have defenders (Fran-

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cisco López de Gómara), detractors (Las Casas), rival claimants for glory (Díaz del Castillo), and a few who claimed to give a neutral account (Oviedo). No conquistador has been as vilified and admired as Cortés, whose name appears synonymous with the Conquest itself. His refracted image anticipates the later fragmentation of the heroic ideal and is at the center of polemics regarding New World historiography.26 This image of the conquistador, unfettered from any colonial administration not of his own creation, would be short-lived. Forty years later, Lope de Aguirre, after participating in a mutiny during Pedro de Ursúa’s expedition in 1560 into the Amazon jungle in search of El Dorado, openly rebelled, killing members of the expedition who refused to abjure allegiance to Philip II.27 By the second half of the sixteenth century, however, the Spanish empire was too well coordinated for a renegade hero to challenge its authority. Aguirre could not be captured alive, but his corpse would be drawn and quartered by colonial authorities and exhibited as a lesson concerning the fate of “traitors.” Thus the figure of Aguirre, “the tyrant,” unmasks the truth of the Conquest, “a reality founded on the exercise of violence and the abuse of power.”28 The time when conquistadores could operate as free agents, as Cortés had largely succeeded in doing, had passed, and the scope for “exemplary” action became radically restricted by the colonial administration. Later writers of autobiographical New World narratives would struggle more visibly to balance exemplarity with the necessity for satisfying the administrative requirement of accuracy of detail. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega wrote his Comentarios reales as an exemplary history of the two sides of his family: the first part tells the story of the Inca emperors from whom he claimed descent on his mother’s side, while the second narrates the history of the Conquest of Peru, in which Garcilaso’s father participated. In this stylistically heterogeneous and culturally hybrid discourse, as Roberto González-Casanovas has shown, two mutually canceling exemplarities meet: Renaissance humanism acquired through study and an indigenous tradition of Inca utopian thought, absorbed in childhood by listening to the oral histories that still circulated in Garcilaso’s community.29 Moreover, Garcilaso writes to vindicate his father, who had been disgraced in an incident in which he was supposed to have helped the rebel Gonzalo Pizarro win the battle of Huarina by giving him a horse.30 “In this sense,” González Echevarría notes, “the book is actually a relación, a letter of appeal to the Council of the Indies to have Sebastián [Garcilaso de la Vega]’s name cleared and Garcilaso’s petitions granted.”31 Garcilaso exhibits his erudition and humanist training freely

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in the Comentarios reales, where he often employs the high Renaissance style. Yet the reality of the Inca’s situation imposed on him “compliance with the discourse of the State,” and he so frequently gives detailed accounts with names and dates that in the end it is the legal rhetoric that “dismantles the other [i.e., Renaissance exemplary historiography] and predominates in the Inca’s discourse.”32 Thus his Baroque text, in addition to being divided by his mestizo identity, is also pulled apart by this need to satisfy mutually contradictory criteria for truth. In the chronicles, then, remnants of exemplary Renaissance historiography and a legal defense elicited by the colonial demand for narrative interpenetrate, producing a situation of enunciation in which every version of events in the New World becomes suspect, a performance meant to persuade a certain reader or group of readers who act as judges not of the virtue or heroism reflected in the discourse but of its very legitimacy. It is never a question of simply accepting an account at face value, but always one of considering its hidden face, the aspect of its author’s circumstances that he is not telling, however much he may declare openly. By the same token, today’s author is himself tomorrow’s reader, and he will view the performances of other would-be heroes with suspicion, just as they viewed his. In the attempt at defining oneself (or anyone else) as a hero, precisely the first quality needed—the magnanimity to act with conviction, not according to the way others might see you—is lacking. Under these conditions, which reflect the mirror structure of Baroque representation, heroism is never anything more than a heroic pose, a grandiose gesture; the “authentic” virtue of one who is reputed a hero is simply unknowable. On the other hand, the ideology of morally exemplary action cannot simply be discarded, since that would make it impossible to establish any difference between, say, an Aguirre and a Cortés. The outcome is a permanent play of mirrors in which each participant tries to gain a reputation for virtue and use it to enhance his status. How can an epic, the heroic genre par excellence, be written under these circumstances? Ercilla attempted to do so, and the unconventional result is the first literary manifestation of the contraconquista model of the Latin American Baroque. La Araucana, based on events of the 1550s, in part witnessed by Ercilla himself, was published in three parts, in 1569, 1578, and 1589, with the entire poem in one edition in 1590, and the posthumous addition of the expedition to southern Chile in 1597. It presents as idealized an image of heroism as any of the chronicles, not excluding Cortés’s or Gómara’s versions of the conquest of Mexico; but here, startlingly, the heroes are the

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indigenous resistance fighters rather than the Spanish conquerors. Ercilla announces early his intention to subordinate praise for the Araucos (that is, the Mapuche Indians of southern Chile) to the larger project of elevating the Spaniards: “Pues no es el vencedor más estimado / de aquello en que el vencido es reputado” (since the esteem in which the victor is held does not exceed the reputation of the vanquished).33 Yet in the event, he is unable or unwilling to carry out his declared intention. Over the course of the poem’s three parts, the subordinating structure fails to materialize. Instead, the narrator’s direct intrusions become more frequent, even as his doubts concerning the Spaniards’ actions increase, revealing “a profoundly divided and tormented consciousness.”34 The climactic moment of this moral perplexity comes immediately prior to the description of a terrible massacre in which the Spanish forces lure the Araucos into their fort and then mow them down with artillery fire at close range. Horrified by the slaughter, though the Araucos are his nation’s enemies, Ercilla does not know how to write his way out of the contradiction: No sé con qué palabras, con qué gusto este sangriento y crudo asalto cuente, y la lástima justa y odio justo, que ambas cosas concurren juntamente; El ánimo ahora humano, ahora robusto, me suspende y me tiene diferente, que si al piadoso celo satisfago, condeno y doy por malo lo que hago. (canto 31, stanza 49, 837–38) I know not with what words, what disposition, I could tell of this bloody, cruel assault and of the righteous sorrow and righteous hate (for both come together). My spirit, at times humane, at other times resolute, suspends me and divides me against myself. If I wish to satisfy the pious heavens, I condemn that which I do as evil.

David Quint correlates the poem’s shaky commitment to empire with the frequent interruptions and digressions at the level of plot: “The poem’s resistance to formal closure is thus thematically linked and built around the

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undying resistance of the Indian defenders.”35 Such a convergence of formal ruptures and ideological ambiguities makes La Araucana, or at least its third part, published in its definitive form in 1597, a candidate to be considered the first major Baroque poem in Spanish. Of course, La Araucana is generally regarded as a masterpiece of the Spanish Renaissance, and numerous studies document the influence on Ercilla of writers from the age of Charles I such as Garcilaso, Ariosto, Erasmus, and even Las Casas.36 Yet the poem takes shape during the formative years of the Spanish Baroque, following the Council of Trent, when the humanist culture Ercilla absorbed as a young man was abruptly displaced by the Counter-Reformation. As Juan María Corominas acknowledges in his study of Baldassare Castiglione’s influence in La Araucana, Ercilla, like Cervantes, faced the dilemma of whether to “abdicate his Renaissance humanism and turn Baroque, or abandon the court and atrophy in private life.”37 Although Corominas views Ercilla as choosing the latter option, the fact that he continued to work on his poem, introducing an increasingly critical perspective and disillusioned tone, may be interpreted as a refusal of the choices presented. Instead, he forged a different path, that of a critical Baroque, which he pioneered even before Cervantes.38 That La Araucana belongs to the Baroque stands out more clearly by comparison with the anonymous romance El Abencerraje (first published in 1561), a quintessentially Renaissance text. The two texts share a similar fundamental concern: to depict Spanish Christians’ subjugation of another cultural group, even while representing the supposed enemy in a favorable light.39 Yet in El Abencerraje, abundant praise for Moorish characters is contained by a balanced, symmetrical composition that places an exemplary Christian knight, Rodrigo de Narváez, at the apex of a definite hierarchy of values. Antonio Villegas opens the prologue he wrote for the version of El Abencerraje he included in the Inventario, his 1565 miscellany, with the metaphor of a portrait: “Este es un vivo retrato de virtud, liberalidad, esfuerzo, gentileza y lealtad” (This is a living portrait of virtue, liberality, strength, gentility, and loyalty).40 Thus he presents the text as a composition in which each element has its particular place, in perfect accord with Heinrich Wölfflin’s definitions of Renaissance principles of linear design and the multiplicity of compositional elements (see the excerpt from his Principles of Art History in this collection): each character is a separate, autonomous individual, yet each contributes to the exemplification of the virtues listed. Within the self-contained world of El Abencerraje, Narváez functions as an

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autonomous executor of justice, taking and releasing captives and settling the dispute between Abindarráez and Jarifa’s father. Narváez, technically only the warden of a fortress and the mayor of a frontier town, comports himself like a medieval lord, negotiating directly with the king of Granada, consulting with no higher power. The authority regulating relations among the characters is entirely contained within the fiction, a narrative equivalent to the formal closure Wölfflin also associates with Renaissance composition. As we saw in the case of Cortés, such a judicial role corresponds more closely to the political structure of feudalism than to the early modern absolutism of the author’s own day. An evasive nostalgia pervades El Abencerraje, which looks back to the fifteenth century for a harmonious and apparently stable order that abruptly ceased to exist with the conquest of Granada in 1492, leading to a period of ethnic conflict involving the descendants of the very Moors the text idealizes. Yet not the faintest glimmer of that tension disturbs the complacent serenity of the narrative.41 The narrator of La Araucana frequently plays a judicial role as well. In several scenes involving indigenous women who have been widowed or separated from their beloveds, he spontaneously acts as a judge, improvising decisions according to his own sense of justice, mitigating the cruelty of the Spanish regime. Yet these interventions take place at night, with few witnesses, and constitute digressions from the main narrative. When he tries openly to intervene to save Galvarino from execution, “de la cruda sentencia condolido” (moved by the severity of the sentence; canto 26, stanza 23, 643), he is overruled by those in charge. Absent when Caupolicán, one of the principal heroes of the poem, is sentenced to death, he chooses to believe that “if I had been there at the time / the cruel sentence would have been suspended” (si yo a la sazón allí estuviera / la cruda ejecución se suspendiera; canto 34, stanza 31, 812). In criticizing the severity of colonial justice, the narrator arrogates to himself the task of evaluating the decisions of the crown’s representatives. He blames the savagery with which the rebellion is put down for inflaming even greater resistance. The final canto opens with two hundred lines expounding the doctrine of just war, ostensibly in defense of Philip II’s occupation of Portugal, with no mention at all of Chile. The implication is clear: the repression of the Araucan rebellion, at least as carried out by Pedro de Valdivia and García Hurtado de Mendoza, was unjust. Yet the poem also represents the narrator himself as being evaluated and judged by his peers and by those with authority over him. In canto 26, a certain Juan Ramón, exhorting a reluctant group of Spaniards to charge against

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some Araucos who have retreated into a copse, turns to the narrator and calls on him by name: Oyendo, pues, mi nombre conocido y que todos volvieron a mirarme, del honor y vergüenza compelido, no pudiendo del trance ya excusarme, por lo espeso del bosque y más temido comencé de romper y aventurarme. (canto 26, stanza 16, 722) Hearing, thus, my name recognized, and that everyone turned to look at me, compelled by my sense of honor and of shame, unable under the circumstances to excuse myself, I burst into the thick of the woods, risking my life.

Only in the penultimate canto do we learn that he himself was sentenced to death for dueling, and that the sentence, nearly carried out, was commuted at the last moment to exile from Chile. “Y en un grueso barcón, bajel de trato, / . . . salí de aquella tierra y reino ingrato, / que tanto afán y sangre me costaba” (In a wide ship, a commercial boat, . . . I left that disagreeable land and kingdom, that had cost me so much effort and bloodshed; canto 36, stanza 37, 945). Just as González Echevarría found a tension in the Comentarios reales between humanist historiography and legalistic wrangling, so there is a tension in Ercilla’s poem between the narrator’s sense of empowerment to make decisions, a vestige of the autonomy of the heroic conquistador embodied in Cortés, and his recognition of subject status within the colonial order. This tension gives rise to a nostalgia that includes a critical awareness, something quite different from the evasive nostalgia of El Abencerraje. For instead of idealizing Christian heroes from an earlier time, Ercilla projects his idealization onto another nation, the Araucos, whose sense of honor and warrior ethos make them resemble legendary medieval Castilian heroes. Quint observes: “The Indians’ fight for independence . . . becomes a displaced version of the struggle between crown and nobility in Spain and the reflection of the divided class allegiances of the poet, who is at once the prototypical new royal servant and the nostalgic aristocrat.”42 Ultimately, this division reflects Ercilla’s ongoing negotiation within the poem of his

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relationship to royal power. La Araucana is in fact addressed to Philip II, just as if it were an extended relación in verse. It includes frequent asides directed specifically to the monarch, referring to the king directly or indirectly nearly fifty times, by Frank Pierce’s count.43 Remarking that the epic genre “does not easily admit self-serving motives or petitions of earned royal favor,” Elizabeth Davis has linked the internal divisions in Ercilla’s vision to the fractured subjectivity court life engendered in such clearly Baroque writers as Francisco de Quevedo.44 Unlike El Abencerraje, then, where the authority governing the fictional world depicted is itself part of the composition, La Araucana depends on an authority located outside the text, which it struggles in vain to situate through the second person. To evoke Wölfflin’s terms once more, this dependence on colonial and imperial power is what accounts for the “open” form and “painterly” dynamism of Ercilla’s Baroque poem.45 The young Ercilla spent less than two years in Chile; it took him another thirty to complete his poem. Given the time that passed during the process of composition, it is impossible to attribute the increasing pessimism of each new installment exclusively to his firsthand experience of the Conquest. Rather, it must be thought of as the consequence of thirty years of reflection, influenced by new experiences of the workings of imperial power. The critical, productive nostalgia that characterizes La Araucana is thus the result of coloniality of power in both the Old World and the New World. It embodies more perfectly than any other text the role of Atlantic crossings in the transition from Renaissance to Baroque in Spain. Spanning the Atlantic divide, as well as four decades of Philip II’s reign, this American epic was written and published in Spain by a poet born and raised in Madrid, and buried, as it happens, in La Mancha.46 It found its way into Don Quixote’s library, where it smuggled the spirit of contraconquista writing into Spanish Peninsular literature.47

Don Quixote and the Baroque Public Sphere Like the exemplary self-presentation of Cortés in his letters, Don Quixote’s chivalry is a performance, a simulacrum of heroism created by the rural hidalgo Alonso Quijano. From the moment he decides to take up a lance rather than write a chivalric romance, he views himself as the protagonist of a book he is “writing” by providing the material for a future historian. When he agonizes for days over a “lofty, resonant, and meaningful” name to give

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his horse (“alto, sonoro y significativo”; Don Quixote 42; Don Quijote I.1, 22), he already projects a future reader of the tale of his adventures and tries to calculate how that reader will see him. No chivalric hero had ever thus set out to self-consciously construct an image of himself as a knight, and this is a crucial element of the parody from the start. Turning the will to adventure into a scripted role, rather than a spontaneous impulse, renders the heroic ideal ridiculous. The demand for narrative we saw undermining the heroic ideal in the colonial context of the New World has now penetrated so deeply into the hero’s self-conception that the border between being a hero and writing about one is obscured: heroism no longer pre-exists its representation. In fact, the very first technique Cervantes uses to ridicule Don Quixote when he sallies forth in search of adventures is to make him absurdly selfconscious about the fact that he is creating a narrative that will someday come to be written down: ¿Quién duda sino que en los venideros tiempos, cuando salga a luz la verdadera historia de mis famosos hechos, que el sabio que los escribiere no ponga, cuando llegue a contar esta mi primera salida tan de mañana, desta manera?: “Apenas había el rubicundo Apolo tendido por la faz de la ancha y espaciosa tierra las doradas hebras de sus hermosos cabellos . . . cuando el famoso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha, dejando las ociosas plumas, subió sobre su famoso caballo Rocinante, y comenzó a caminar por el antiguo y conocido campo de Montiel.” (Don Quijote I.2, 46–47) Who can doubt that in times to come, when the true history of my famous deeds comes to light, the wise man who compiles them, when he begins to recount my first  sally so early in the day, will write in this manner: “No sooner had rubicund Apollo spread over the face of the wide and spacious earth the golden strands of his beaute‑  ous hair . . . than the famous knight Don Quixote of Mancha, abandoning the downy bed of idleness, mounted his famous steed, Rocinante, and commenced to ride through the ancient and illustrious countryside of Montiel.” (Don Quixote 25)

As Luis Murillo pointed out years ago, this vehement desire to achieve fame as a knight creates an unbridgeable gap between Don Quixote and the literary figures he wishes to imitate: “He is unable to see that Amadís was never obsessed with the goal of acquiring fame because . . . fame is a generic feature of his literary figuration, like his invincibility or his marvelous birth.”48 The undermining of the heroic ideal was thus as advanced in Spain as in the New World. What changes taking place in Spain precipitated this collapse? Demand for narrative exerted an intense pull in Spain. The range of tech-

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niques used to extract from people what they knew about their neighbors included, notoriously, torture; but the invitation could be benign, and in many instances empowering. It could mean an opportunity to accuse rivals or to defend one’s own reputation and status. But whatever the use to which it was put locally, demand for narrative strengthened colonial and imperial authority, for it served to introduce monarchical power into the everyday lives of its subjects. Thus the colonial or imperial demand for narrative did not always present itself as an external imposition. More than the power to pass judgment, it was an active power to generate stories that penetrated the interiority of the subject. Often, self-interest motivated the colonial subject to tell his tale—but of course, this interest had itself been implanted by the imperial administration. The totality of social effects thereby generated constitutes what I term the “Baroque public sphere.” Before analyzing further its role in Don Quixote, it will be helpful to briefly describe some of the techniques by means of which it was constituted. Though a similar account could be given for other parts of Spain, I will concentrate on La Mancha, for its direct relevance as the setting of Cervantes’s novel. Beginning during the reign of Charles V and continuing through that of his son Philip II, a policy of encouraging judicial appeals increased the number of lawsuits so rapidly that, according to Richard Kagan, Spain soon became one of the most litigious societies in history, possibly even more litigious than the contemporary United States. The goal of this policy was “to promote royal absolutism and, specifically, to increase the power of royal tribunals vis à vis those of the municipalities, the nobility, and the church.”49 Bluntly put, the expansion of the judicial system aimed to establish a royal monopoly on justice. Most of La Mancha belonged to the military orders, for which the court of final appeal was the Consejo de Órdenes in Madrid. Tens of thousands of these appeals are still housed in the Archivo Histórico Nacional. The interrogatorios that accompany them often run to several hundred pages, with dozens of witnesses on each side. Legal proceedings were thus an important part of daily life in rural New Castile, and the average peasant of La Mancha would have been familiar with royal proclamations authorizing the interrogation of witnesses and such processes as swearing to testify truthfully and responding to legal questioning. The Inquisition, as well, subjected the rural population throughout Spain to a constant scrutiny that included regular visits to the towns in each jurisdiction. A visit by the inquisitor usually lasted from ten days to several weeks, during which time he could receive as many as one hundred declarations, all

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of which would be duly recorded and notarized in libros de testificaciones.50 Most of these declarations did not lead to trials, either because the accusations were too trivial or because they lacked corroborating witnesses. The testimony reflects conversations people overheard as recently as the day before, or as long ago as fifteen or twenty years. Many of these conversations concern theological issues and points of religious doctrine such as the existence of hell, the virginity of the Virgin, or comparisons between Christian and Islamic beliefs, surprisingly frequent topics of discussion after a Sunday sermon, on long winter evenings, or even while out cutting wheat. The institutionalized practice of denouncing friends and neighbors to the Inquisition could not entirely eradicate an earlier practice of debate and speculation concerning religious issues. Can we assume people’s memories for heretical statements overheard in casual conversations were particularly sharpened by the knowledge that the Inquisition might take an interest? In any case, visits by the Inquisition inevitably changed the way people spoke their minds—or did not do so—and the way those around them listened to what they said, then remembered and, above all, finally repeated it. Such local interventions by monarchical and ecclesiastical authorities generated an intense demand for narrative, giving rise to a historically distinctive public sphere. Whereas the bourgeois public sphere described by Jürgen Habermas is characterized by transparency of communication, equality of access, and the normativity of rational discourse, the Baroque public sphere was defined by the epistemological ambiguity of rumor, asymmetrical access corresponding to social status, and an agonic use of language, often in combination with violence or the threat of violence.51 Public forms of address were rendered opaque by their hidden or partially hidden relations to power. Coloniality of power thus appropriated the practice of gossip, common in traditional agrarian communities, integrating local knowledge obtained by neighbors’ spying on each other into a centralized administration controlling the population. Knowing that anything one said could find its way into a lawsuit or Inquisition trial led to an awareness of the potential consequences of speaking in front of witnesses and an increased attention to who was present when a given statement was made. This encouraged a calculating, duplicitous approach to interaction and gave the public sphere a distinctly theatrical quality. It also meant that royal power operated not only by getting people to tell their stories but also by getting them to listen to and judge the stories told by others. Power thus became ubiquitous. Ultimately, the Baroque public sphere projected an unattainable limit point at which

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power would be operative in every social interaction, no matter how trivial, but without any single individual actually exercising it. In Don Quixote, this Baroque form of power constitutes the nexus between narrating and ­judging. Frequently in Cervantes’s novel a character or group directly requests that someone tell his or her story, thereby introducing a secondary narrative. It is true that the demand is generally placed in a sympathetic light: tell us your story so we can help you, or at least offer you the consolation of sharing your grief. Nonetheless, the requests take the form of rhetorically elaborate speeches calculated to overcome anticipated resistance by convincing the hearers that sharing their stories is in their best interest. Don Quixote both “supplicates” and “conjures” the wild man Cardenio to tell him who he is and why he has withdrawn into the mountains to die, swearing solemnly to help him, either by remedying his suffering or by lamenting it with him (Don Quijote I.24, 261; Don Quixote 183). The priest exhorts Dorotea in similar terms, promising to advise her in her distress, “for as long as one has life, no ill can be so worrisome or reach so great an extreme that the one afflicted refuses even to listen to well-intentioned advice” (pues ningún mal puede fatigar tanto, ni llegar tan al estremo de serlo, mientras no acaba la vida, que rehúya de no escuchar, siquiera, el consejo que con buena intención se da al que lo padece; Don Quijote I.28, 319–20; Don Quixote 229). Often, these requests take place in the context of quasi-legal proceedings, in which other characters (and the reader) evaluate and judge the person speaking, or those about whom they are speaking. Such “mock trials” include Marcela’s defense at Grisóstomo’s funeral, the galley slaves’ account to Don Quixote of their crimes and the sentences they received, and Dorotea’s pleading of her cause before Don Fernando at the Inn. Another instance is the captive’s tale, which culminates in his reconciliation with his brother, an oidor (the term refers to a high-ranking judge, but it literally means “listener”) about whose judgment he is initially extremely anxious. Thus the demand for narrative in Don Quixote belongs to a thematics of justice and judicial processes, much as it did in the social world of sixteenth-century New Castile or in the relaciones emanating from the New World.52 On numerous occasions, Don Quixote himself exercises this judicial function, behaving more like a local magistrate than a knight-errant. Responding to cries for help, he finds a rich man, Juan Haldudo, whipping his poor servant, Andrés. After questioning them closely, he pronounces his judgment: Haldudo should pay Andrés his back wages, a sentence Don Quixote insists

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he must obey, invoking the legal formula, “so pena de la pena pronunciada” (Don Quijote I.4, 66; “on pain of the aforesaid punishment,” captures the legalistic nuance better than Edith Grossman’s “under penalty of the penalty I have indicated to you”; Don Quixote 38). His speech and actions prompt Andrés to refer to him as “buen juez,” a good judge. At Grisóstomo’s funeral, the dead man’s friend Ambrosio bitterly accuses Marcela of his death, and she delivers an impressive speech protesting her innocence, for she never led him to believe she loved him. Don Quixote responds in a way that clearly frames her discourse as the defense at a murder trial, at the same time as he casts himself as judge: “Ninguna persona, de cualquier estado y condición que sea, se atreva a seguir a la hermosa Marcela, so pena de caer en la furiosa indignación mía. Ella ha mostrado con claras y suficientes razones la poca o ninguna culpa que ha tenido en la muerte de Grisótomo” (Let no person, whatever his rank or state, dare to follow the beautiful Marcela, under penalty of incurring my implacable wrath. She has demonstrated, with clear and sufficient arguments, how little guilt she bears in Grisóstomo’s death; Don Quijote I.14, 156; Don Quixote 101). Deciding such cases on his own initiative, he acts according to a conception of justice similar to the frontier feudalism of Rodrigo de Narváez in El Abencerraje or Ercilla’s narrator when he hears the stories and decides the fates of indigenous women in the Chilean wilderness. In late sixteenth-century New Castile, though, it is absurd to imagine that one can administer justice independently of the centralized judicial system of the Hapsburg dynasty. At no moment is this anachronism more in evidence than in the one instance where Don Quixote directly flouts royal authority by freeing the galley slaves. Once he has heard their stories, in the speech announcing his intention to free them, Don Quixote stresses that the galley slaves have already been punished: “Aunque os han castigado por vuestras culpas” (though you have been punished for your crimes; Don Quijote I.22, 244; Don Quixote 169); obviously he believes the whippings they have received are sufficient punishment for the crimes they committed. It is worth mentioning that, in appeals to the Consejo de Órdenes by those sentenced to the galleys, the years in the galleys are frequently commuted to the same number of years of banishment from the town of residence.53 It is reasonable to assume that these galley slaves have not had their cases heard on appeal; they have been sentenced by a local court, probably the cabeza de partido (equivalent to a county seat). Of his own accord, Don Quixote takes it on himself, then, to hear their appeals and mitigate their punishment. He thus short-circuits the justice system,

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breaking the continuous chain that links the humblest alguacil (policeman) to the highest court of appeal. As Narváez had done in El Abencerraje, Don Quixote dispenses justice independently, like a medieval lord, although that had not been possible in La Mancha for more than one hundred years. To some extent it thus appears that Don Quixote’s nostalgia is not so much for the military activities of the knight-errant as for the political autonomy of the landed gentry of the Middle Ages. Like Cortés in his first years governing Mexico, he looks to a time before colonial and imperial power had disrupted the feudal order. Timothy Hampton believes the chivalric fantasy by which Don Quixote is enthralled served merely to distract members of the displaced class of hidalgos from their marginal political position under the Hapsburgs. In his view, the romance genre provided aristocratic readers with the consolation of “a wistful image of lost power.”54 He sees the inefficacy of exemplary narrative in Don Quixote as a consequence of the fact that “the ideology of centralized authority . . . has displaced the aristocracy on the political stage.”55 Don Quixote’s madness would thus be the result of a split between “words and deeds,” in the sense that he belongs to a social group no longer able to play a role in government and the administering of justice, except in the fantasy world of escapist fiction. José Antonio Maravall’s historical contextualization in his Utopía y contrautopía en el “Quijote” (Utopia and Counterutopia in the “Quixote”) of 1976 is more subtle.56 He shares the view that Cervantes is responding to the failure of the humanist project, but he does not see the chivalric romances as merely the empty, escapist fantasy of a politically irrelevant group. For Maravall, the utopian vision that lies at the foundation of both chivalric and pastoral romance, having lost its transformative orientation toward the future, has been appropriated by a faction interested in reasserting the rigid social hierarchy of the medieval past. Maravall offers a double reading according to which Cervantes uses the mad knight to convey a positive view of the Renaissance ideals of the perfection of the individual and bettering of society, at the same time as he ridicules this utopianism for what it has become in the Baroque: a mere seduction, an evasion by means of which the elite half-knowingly allow themselves to be duped into obedience. More than a mere consolation, then, it becomes a justification of a monarcho-seigneurial order in which the aristocratic class is not excluded from power, but loses its autonomy, occupying an elevated position within absolutism. Through Don Quixote, Cervantes would both caricature the supercilious rural hidalgo who supports the absolute monarchy because it lets him relive the time when his ancestors were

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an autonomous governing class, and also remind readers of how much this complacent attitude differs from the radical reformist spirit that infused the Renaissance utopianism that his character verbally espouses. Maravall see this “utopia of evasion” as an example of the appropriation and redirection of earlier cultural practices in the service of an antimodern immobilizing tendency by “the repressive, chimerical structure imposed in the Baroque period.”57 What has been displaced in the Baroque is thus not the nobility as a class but the ideology of their radical autonomy, an ideology whose roots extend from the Middle Ages through Renaissance humanism. In presenting Cervantes as both renouncing Renaissance idealism and simultaneously resisting the dominant trend of official culture, Maravall positions Don Quixote in the oppositional line associated with the Latin American Baroque. Though he declines to label this cultural practice “Baroque,” preferring to reserve that term exclusively for the repressive cultura dirigida promoted by the absolutist monarchy, Maravall’s reading establishes an unbridgeable gap between Don Quixote and the Renaissance, at the same time as it shows Cervantes elaborating complex strategies for resisting the main, authoritarian line of the Baroque. Let us return for a moment to the scenes that mimic legal proceedings. Though almost all the characters in Don Quixote participate in evaluating others’ discourses (both oral and written), a small group of clerics and highranking aristocrats engage in a special kind of judgment: they decide which stories can and cannot be told, either by means of censorship (the priest, the Canon) or by directly staging them (the priest, Fernando, the Duke and Duchess). Thus they do not merely respond to the demand for narrative and operate within its dictates; they initiate that demand and serve as its intradiagetic agents. They exercise a power over other characters that goes beyond the ability to persuade through a good performance, such as the ones Marcela and Dorotea exhibit. They hold power over the means of representation. In a number of scenes, written narratives, including the different versions of Don Quixote, are treated as the object of legal or quasi-legal inquiry and “sentencing”: the scrutiny of Don Quixote’s library, which parodies an inquisitorial auto de fé; the Canon of Toledo’s discourse on censorship; the debate over the merits and demerits of Cide Hamete’s history at the beginning of part 2, where Sansón Carrasco, who brings the news that the book is already circulating widely throughout Spain, serves the function I have been describing. This function in part 2 is mainly concentrated in the Duke’s palace, which

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becomes the setting for an extended simulacrum of chivalric adventures staged for Don Quixote and Sancho without their knowledge. They move and act in these “adventures”—one of which is Sancho’s governorship of the “Isle” Barataria—as if in reality. Throughout, they are, as Henry Sullivan puts it, “the dupes of aristocratic prestige and carefully constructed lies.”58 The elaborate stagings of the Duke and Duchess provide a perfect representation of the ubiquitous power of the Baroque. Like monarchical power in Michel Foucault’s interpretation of Las meninas, the power they exercise over Don Quixote is above all a mimetic effect, a mirage, produced by Baroque mirroring that refracts, throughout the space they govern, the image of their authority.59 Insofar as Cervantes unmasks this functioning of Baroque power as a simulacrum in which characters have the illusion of acting freely when, in fact, others pull the strings from the outside, Don Quixote can be described as a counter-Baroque work. In part 2, Cervantes is interested in modern power and its limitations. Sancho is the one character who can be enveloped by the Duke’s and Duchess’s simulacrum of power and also step outside it and renounce it altogether, as he does when he leaves behind the governorship. He thus finds an opening through which to assert the self-governing capacity of the peasantry. Suggestively, Sancho, the illiterate peasant, a repository of popular sayings and folk wisdom, here occupies the position of the native artisans in Lezama’s theory of the Latin American Baroque. His imagination is able to take the structures of his master’s fantasy and hybridize them with his own brand of humor and vitality. In that extraordinarily Baroque moment when Sancho persuades Don Quixote that Dulcinea is enchanted, and that only Don Quixote sees her as a rough farm girl with garlic breath, Sancho takes the flesh-and-blood woman he has in front of him and transforms her in accordance with the chivalric style, as he understands it. But the description he offers Don Quixote of her wondrously exotic mole is unlike anything one could find in a romance text: “un lunar que tenía sobre el labio derecho, a manera de bigote, con siete o ocho cabellos rubios como hebras de oro y largos de más de un palmo” (a mole on the right side of her lip, like a moustache, with seven or eight blond hairs like threads of gold, nearly a foot long; Don Quijote II.10, 709–10; Don Quixote 520). Sancho’s energetic optimism at the close of the work seems to suggest that it is to “the people” one must look for any alternative to the monarchoseigneurial order, but to make Cervantes an advocate of the French Revolution nearly two hundred years avant la lettre would be an unpardonable

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anachronism. Still, this is what we do, ultimately, when we assimilate Don Quixote to the modern novel, the literary expression of the European bourgeoisie. In my view, we would do better to adapt at this juncture the epigraph from Lezama at the beginning of this essay and generalize in the following manner: after Sancho, the literary history of Spain passed to America (not to England and France, in spite of Alain René Le Sage and Henry Fielding, Lawrence Sterne, Charles Dickens, and Honoré de Balzac). In the following observations concerning Baltasar Gracián’s El héroe and the roots of the Romantic hero, I hope to at least begin to suggest why such an approach, based on the contraconquista model of the Baroque, could offer— even today—an alternative to our modernity, which is clearly not that of Cervantes.

Conclusion: Gracián and the Baroque Roots   of the Romantic Hero Near the end of part 1 of Don Quixote, Cervantes places in the mouth of the Canon of Toledo a description of the ideal hero, presented as a fragmentary collage of exemplary features of the heroes of antiquity. Though presented in all seriousness, at least on the Canon’s part, there is something monstrous about the catalogue of a dozen character traits each epitomized by a different historical figure, for the list conveys a Baroque awareness of the impossibility of any one hero’s really possessing them all: Con todo cuanto mal había dicho de tales libros, hallaba en ellos una cosa buena, que era el sujeto que ofrecían para que un buen entendimiento pudiese mostrarse en ellos, porque daban largo y espacioso campo por donde sin empacho alguno pudiese correr la pluma, describiendo naufragios, tormentas, rencuentros y batallas, pintando un capitán valeroso con todas las partes que para ser tal se requieren. . . . Puede mostrar las astucias de Ulixes, la piedad de Eneas, la valentía de Aquiles, las desgracias de Héctor, las traiciones de Sinón, la amistad de Eurialio, la liberalidad de Alejandro, el valor de César, la clemencia y verdad de Trajano, la fidelidad de Zópiro, la prudencia de Catón, y, finalmente, todas aquellas acciones que pueden hacer perfecto a un varón ilustre, ahora poniéndolas en uno solo, ahora dividiéndolas en muchos. Despite all the bad things he had said about those books, he found one good thing in them, which was the opportunity for display that they offered a good mind, providing a broad and spacious field where one’s pen could write unhindered, describing

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shipwrecks, storms, skirmishes and battles; depicting a valiant captain with all the traits needed to be one. . . . He can display the guile of Ulysses, the piety of Aeneas, the valor of Achilles, the misfortunes of Hector, the treachery of Sinon, the friendship of Euryalus, the liberality of Alexander, the valor of Caesar, the clemency and truthfulness of Trajan, the fidelity of Zopyrus, the prudence of Cato, in short, all of those characteristics that make a noble man perfect, sometimes placing them all in one individual, sometimes dividing them among several. (Don Quijote 1.47.549–50; Don Quixote 413)

In a fashion reminiscent of the Canon of Toledo’s description of the ideal chivalric romance, Gracián’s El héroe (1637) parades before the reader a series of great men as illustrations of the qualities that one must cultivate to emulate them. Unlike the Canon’s virtues, however, in Gracián’s Baroque conception of the hero, these qualities are not fixed traits of moral character but strategies for creating an impressive public image. For Gracián, heroism is a simulacrum; being a hero is knowing how to get people to think of you as one. There is no “inner” or “authentic” meaning, no ethical “truth” on which a concept of heroism could be based, only the necessity of pleasing one’s public in accordance with popular taste, to which the successful hero must be attuned. Of course, Gracián’s hero will cultivate many of the same traits as the “virtuous” heroes of the past, such as courage and military prowess. He does so not because they are admirable or desirable in themselves, however, but for the fame it brings. Thus in “Corazón de rey” (“Heart of a King”) danger is said to provide a “setting” for a brave heart in the same way rubies do for a diamond.60 In another section the hero is told to exert himself in deeds that win applause (empeños plausibles), such as feats of arms. This is the reason for the predominance of warriors among the heroes of the past: “Llenan el mundo de aplauso, los siglos de fama, los libros de proezas, porque lo belicoso tiene más de plausible que lo pacífico” (They fill the world with applause, the ages with fame, and books with their heroic deeds, because the bellicose wins more plaudits than the pacific; 23). In Gracián there is no longer any tension between the heroic ideal and Baroque self-presentation. He provides the definitive “Baroquization” of heroism, collapsing exemplarity into strategic positioning. His principle could be summarized as follows: act in such a way that your action is always already a representation of yourself as a hero. Don Quixote follows this principle at the beginning of his first sally when he imagines the written narrative of

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his adventures even before he has had any. The parody depends for its effectiveness on the reader’s sense of the absurdity of such attention to external image in someone who aspires to heroism. In Gracián’s text, that sense of absurdity has disappeared. As we saw above, the critical perspective of the Latin American and Spanish Baroque was maintained by a tension between old and new values. In La Araucana, Comentarios reales, and Don Quixote we have seen how a nostalgic attachment to Renaissance exemplarity keeps the hero from being swallowed up completely by the power plays involved in his representation. But in Gracián, the representation of heroism has been entirely emptied of ethical content, even the ethical tension produced by the parody of a debased ideal. The Duke and Duchess have disappeared and the entirety of Spanish society is now their palace; there is no one who can remember a time when it was any different. We are all dupes of a system of social mimesis in which issues of morality or correspondence with reality are irrelevant. Though two centuries separate their texts, it is instructive to contrast Gracián’s Baroque hero with the Romantic model presented in Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (1840). One could hardly imagine two more divergent approaches to a single concept. For Carlyle, truly heroic stature belongs to those whose exalted struggle against the values of their time ultimately succeeds in transforming humanity’s selfunderstanding: “Alas the Hero from of old has had to cramp himself into strange shapes: the world knows not well at any time what to do with him, so foreign is his aspect in the world!”61 Where Gracián’s hero is a chameleon who adapts himself to changes in the attitudes and expectations of the public on whose adoration his status depends, Carlyle’s must be true to himself despite the world’s incomprehension. This incomprehension during his lifetime means the hero can only be recognized in retrospect, after death. The indispensable quality of every hero for Gracián is wit; for Carlyle, conviction. In this antithetical relationship, however, a basic common element exists: both Gracián and Carlyle recognize a split between public life and the inner, private workings of character, which they nonetheless resolve in opposite ways. For Gracián, interiority is exploited as a resource for the only reality that matters, the public representation of the self. The division between public and private selves is what allows the hero to manipulate his outward image like a mask. Carlyle’s notion of the “hero as man of letters” collapses the distinction the other way: the self that really matters is the “authentic,” inner one, but an external representation is still necessary for the realization

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of its immense value to humanity. The writing of a text thus becomes a heroic act in itself, but one that runs the risk of going unnoticed, since to draw attention to one’s “genius” is already to taint it by participation in the vanity of the world.62 Horrified by what he sees as the hypocrisy inherent in the Baroque definition of the public sphere, Carlyle judges writers on the basis of their ability to refrain from participating in the inauthenticity of its mere appearance. He uses “sincerity” to police the distinction between private feeling and public action, keeping each in its proper role. He looks back on the Enlightenment as a near desert for heroism: “They had lost any notion that sincerity was possible, or of what sincerity was.”63 Robert Burns is the type, within British literature, of the hero as man of letters: “The chief quality of Burns is the sincerity of him.”64 His primary examples of the blurring of the publicprivate distinction are Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Napoleon. On the one hand, Rousseau’s “unhealthy” perversion of the model represents an inappropriate intrusion of intimate feeling into the political: “The French Revolution found its Evangelist in Rousseau. His semi-delirious speculations on the miseries of civilised life, the preferability of the savage to the civilised, and suchlike, helped well to produce a whole delirium in France generally. True, you may well ask, What could the world, the governors of the world, do with such a man? Difficult to say what the governors of the world could do with him! What he could do with them is unhappily clear enough—guillotine a great many of them! Enough now of Rousseau.”65 Napoleon—for Carlyle, “our last Great Man”—is nonetheless no hero because of the “charlatan element,” that is, his unabashed public manipulation of his own heroic image.66 Whereas Rousseau had made the personal too political, Napoleon committed the opposite offense, making the political too personal. Romanticism thus cordons heroism off within a zone of feeling excluded from the political arena per se, one that has become exclusively a locus of rational debate. Within European modernity the category of “literature” serves to regulate this boundary between public and private. Much as Immanuel Kant envisioned in the Critique of Judgment, aesthetic experience shapes the sensibilities of private individuals, preparing them for participation in public life. The irrational, charismatic power of heroism inspires citizens to identify with the nation, even as the exclusion of the heroic from the political public sphere helps to set the limits of “proper” intervention. The heroes of the past cease entirely to function as exemplary guides to action,

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and acquire a purely symbolic function within nineteenth-century nationalism as the “founders of the fatherland.”67 For Habermas, the constitution of the bourgeois public sphere indeed requires such a configuration. Cultural elements, including heroic narratives that inspire powerful emotions, may well provide the foundation of a shared sensibility, but discussion should be regulated by rational argument alone. Despite differences in terminology, Habermas criticizes Rousseau on grounds similar to Carlyle’s: “Rousseau projected the unbourgeois idea of an intrusively political society in which the autonomous private sphere, that is, civil society emancipated from the state, had no place. . . . Rousseau contrasted the dangerous appeals of silver-tongued orators with the harmony of assemblies. The volunté générale was more a consensus of hearts than of arguments.”68 This arrangement, which in any case always favored the privileged classes and always excluded women, began to collapse, as Habermas himself acknowledges, almost as soon as it was established. In his later work he elaborates a broader context for the public sphere, but he continues to insist that a separate form of interaction conforming as closely as possible to his idealized model of communication through rational discourse remains a condition of possibility for “radical democracy.” In the “incomplete project” that is modernity in Habermas’s view, personal narratives and performative identities would still be kept separate from the “political public sphere.”69 As the essays collected in this volume reveal, the Latin American Baroque offers an alternative to this equation of modernity with the rationalization of the political realm that is achieved by relegating narrative and theatrical elements to an ancillary sphere of “culture.” Particularly instructive in this respect is Irlemar Chiampi’s notion of the Latin American Baroque. For Chiampi, once Lezama has demonstrated its meaning as counterconquest, it “ceases to be merely ‘historical,’ a closed book, condemned as reactionary and conservative, and becomes instead our permanent modernity, the other modernity” (BNW 513). In this alternative modernity (which has often been criticized by those who accept the European model as normative), an autonomous cultural realm, separate from the political sphere, is never fully constituted. This has simultaneously meant that “free” speech has not always been easy to establish, but also that literary expression has had a more direct impact on public life. The examination of the evolution of the concept of heroism thus shows the Baroque roots of modernity. These roots necessarily had to be forgotten for

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the rational compartmentalization of social, economic, political, and cultural realms, already begun in the Baroque, to reach the level of differentiation of function that characterizes postindustrial Western European societies. Yet modern culture achieves its much-touted autonomy precisely by forgetting the ideological meaning of this compartmentalization. Gracián’s Baroque reduced Renaissance idealism to one more element in the simulacrum of power. By reversing this reduction, Romanticism could establish a separate realm for the life of the mind. Without disturbing the power of the state to regulate public life, this realm provided a semipublic space of re-creation whose preideological function is articulated most clearly in Kant’s third critique. William Egginton has argued that the recognition of self-interest in Gracián’s morality was precisely what had to be repressed for the Enlightenment ethics of Kantian disinterestedness to come to the fore, thus making Gracián a crucial figure in the emergence of the modern subject, but one whose role had to be eclipsed.70 In similar fashion, Gracián’s incorporation of the representation of “cultural” ideals directly into political life had to be attenuated for the aesthetic realm to be cordoned off from the public sphere. This compartmentalization did not develop to the same degree in Latin America, where the Baroque configuration of society, culture, and politics persisted. As a result, Latin American history includes more than its fair share of quixotic heroes. Rousseauist writers, active in the political process, from Domingo Faustino Sarmiento to Pablo Neruda to Mario Vargas Llosa, join hands with Napoleonic leaders whose egotism is matched only by their ironic self-awareness—among them Simón Bolívar and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, both of whom at one time or another commented sardonically on the futility of their own revolutionary projects in terms that recall the quest of Cervantes’s mad knight.71 Given the current degeneration of Anglo-American political rhetoric and the particular role in that decay, in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, of a debased discourse concerning who “our” heroes are or ought to be, we have much to learn from the performative concept of heroism deployed in the Spanish and Latin American Baroque.

Notes The research for this essay was conducted with the help of grants from the Whiting Foundation and the PSC-CUNY Research Fund. The project of extricating Cervantes from European literary modernity is also central to my book, Transnational

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Cervantes, and to “La modernidad barroca del Quijote,” in El cervantismo en USA, ed. Georgina Dopico-Black and Francisco Layna (Madrid: Polifemo, 2009), 387–419. This sixteenth-century “crisis of exemplarity” is the subject of two important booklength studies: John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990). The phrase is Homi K. Bhabha’s, in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994); see 36–39, 93–101. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico (Madrid: Crítica, 1998), I.50, 569–70. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 429. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. Though I use Grossman’s translation throughout, I have modified the wording in a number of places to emphasize the legalistic nuances of the original. Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1974), 80. Along similar lines, David R. Castillo analyzes Cervantes’s technique as the literary equivalent of anamorphosis, which thematizes the viewer’s perception by intentionally distorting objects so that they must be viewed obliquely. See Castillo, (A)wry Views. René Wellek mentions the problem briefly in his discussion of German scholars’ application of the term to other literatures. See Wellek, “Concept of the Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” 76–77 (see the excerpt from this essay in this volume). Helmut Hatzfeld argued not only that Cervantes was a Baroque writer but that he fully embraced Counter-Reformation ideology, even in Don Quixote (Hatzfeld, Estudios sobre el barroco, 447). As I argue below, José Antonio Maravall can be taken as offering a reading of Cervantes’s novel as Baroque, though his own restricted use of the term prevents him from seeing it this way. See José Antonio Maravall, Utopía y contrautopía en el Quijote (Santiago de Compostela: Pico Sacro, 1976), 237–58; English version, Utopia and Counterutopia in the “Quixote,” 178–93. Weisbach, Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation; Maravall, Culture of the Baroque. Cascardi, “Subject of Control”; Beverley, “On the Spanish Literary Baroque.” The success of Lope’s theater foreclosed on Cervantes’s career as a dramatist, wounding his pride and leading him to ponder deeply the aesthetic issues underlying their fundamentally incompatible approaches. Concerning Cervantes’s rejection of the ideological working of Lope’s theater, see Michael Gerli, Refiguring Authority: Reading, Writing, and Rewriting in Cervantes (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1995), 95–109; Nicholas Spadaccini and Jenaro Talens, Through the Shattering Glass: Cervantes and the Self-Made World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 24–26, as well as my own essay “‘Ese tan borrado sobreescrito’: The Deconstruction of Lope’s Religious Theater in El Retablo de las Maravillas and El Rufián Dichoso,” Bulletin of the Comediantes 56, no. 2 (2004): 241–68.

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10 This is essentially Édouard Glissant’s understanding of the Baroque as a renun-

11 12 13 14 15

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17 18 19 20

21

22 23

24 25 26

ciation of the universal, fixed certainties of the Renaissance (see his essay in this collection). Quijano, “Colonialidad del poder.” Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 43. Bhabha, Location of Culture. Francisco Esteve Barba, Historiografía indiana, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1992), 7. Enrique Pupo-Walker, La vocación literaria del pensamiento histórico en América: Desarrollo de la prosa de ficción; Siglos XVI, XVII, XVIII y XIX (Madrid: Gredos, 1982), 71–95. Sarah H. Beckjord, Territories of History. Humanism, Rhetoric, and the Historical Imagination in the Early Chronicles of Spanish America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). Suggestively, in her conclusion Beckjord speculates that Cervantes may well have had this historiographical problem in mind when he invented Cide Hamete Benengeli (168). As we have seen, Sarduy considered Cide Hamete’s manuscript the most characteristically Baroque feature of Don Quixote. Roberto González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Lazarillo de Tormes, ed. Francisco Rico (Madrid: Cátedra, 1987), 10. González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 69–70. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1962), chap. 210. The most widely available English version is the translation by J. M. Cohen, The Conquest of New Spain (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1963). Here, and throughout, except where otherwise noted, translations are my own. Hernán Cortés, Segunda carta (1520), in Crónicas de Indias: Antología, ed. Mercedes Serna (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000), 211–321. For a detailed reading of Cortés’s writings, see Beatriz Pastor Bodmer, The Armature of Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the Discovery of America, 1492–1589, trans. Lydia Longstreth Hunt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 50–100. Pastor Bodmer, Armature of Conquest, 86–87. Agustín Durán includes four such ballads, two of them anonymous, taken from a collection by Gabriel Lobo Laso de la Vega. Agustín Durán, ed., Romancero general, vol. 2 (Madrid: Atlas, 1945), 145–47. Cortés, Segunda carta, 321. Pastor Bodmer, Armature of Conquest, 214. A case in point are the attacks on Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia general de las Indias y conquista de México. Gómara, who served as Cortés’s personal secretary, wrote a fawning version of events, based partly on what Cortés told him, apparently, as well as on interviews with Andrés de Tapia, a soldier who admired Cortés deeply. See Juan Miralles, Hernán Cortés, inventor de México (Mexico: Tusquets, 2001), 558. Las Casas is openly disdainful and hostile toward Gómara: “Gómara, the cleric,

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30 31 32 33

34 35 36

37 38

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who . . . saw nothing himself, nor ever visited the Indies, and only wrote what Cortés told him, writes many things in favor of him that, in fact, are not true.” Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias (1552–61; Madrid: Atlas, 1957), 239. Oviedo expresses a similar sentiment more discreetly: “I will briefly tell of the death of Hernán Cortés . . . and in this my pen will be terse, for I have seen some accounts by admirers he must have commissioned to write in his praise, or perhaps they did so to please his descendents, or for whatever reason that moved them to do it.” Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535, 1547, 1557; Madrid: Atlas, 1959), 265. Francisco Vázquez, El Dorado: Crónica de la expedición de Pedro de Ursúa y Lope de Aguirre (1562; Madrid: Alianza, 1987), 82–88. Pastor Bodmer, Armature of Conquest, 447. Roberto González-Casanovas, “Historiografía humanista en el Inca Garcilaso: Testimonio, texto y crítica en los Comentarios reales,” in Historia y ficción: Crónicas de América, ed. Ysla Campbell (Ciudad Juárez: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 1992), 201–19. El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Comentarios reales (1609, 1617), ed. Enrique PupoWalker (Madrid: Cátedra, 2001), 239. González Echevarría, Myth and Archive, 73. Ibid., 81. Alonso de Ercilla, La Araucana (1569–89), ed. Isaías Lerner (Madrid: Cátedra, 1993), canto 1, stanza 2, 78. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. Pastor Bodmer, Armature of Conquest, 262. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 166. Isaías Lerner has studied the influence of Garcilaso and Erasmus in two insightful articles: “Garcilaso en Ercilla,” Lexis 2, no. 2 (1978): 201–20; and “Para los contextos ideológicos de La Araucana: Erasmo,” in Homenaje a Ana María Barrenechea, ed. Lía Schwartz Lerner and Isaías Lerner (Madrid: Castalia, 1984), 261–70. For Ariosto, see Frank Pierce, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), 71–74. The influence of Las Casas is discussed in William Mejías-López, “La relación ideológica de Alonso de Ercilla con Francisco de Vitoria y Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas,” Revista Íberoamericana 61, no. 170–71 (1995): 197–217. Juan María Corominas, Castiglione y “La Araucana”: Estudio de una influencia (Madrid: Studia Humanitas, 1980), 36. Beckjord traces a similar decline in exemplary narrative in Oviedo’s work, as he becomes increasingly disenchanted with the results of the Conquest. He adopts a legal phraseology positioning himself as a witness and projecting the reader as judge over the proceedings. Ultimately, however, the only reader-judge capable of sorting out the resulting “contradictory interpretations” is God (Territories of History, 71–73, 85). On similar grounds, Barbara Fuchs compares La Araucana and Ginés Pérez de ­Hita’s Guerras civiles de Granada in Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and

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40

41

42 43 44 45

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47

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European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 35–63. A feature that Ercilla’s text shares with Pérez de Hita’s, however, is the significant role of “first-hand observation,” which Fuchs sees as responsible for the fact that La Araucana “cannot command the authority of epic,” but rather “reveals other more complicated truths.” Ercilla “has seen too much” for his loyalty to empire not to be compromised (49). El Abencerraje, ed. Francisco López Estrada (Madrid: Cátedra, 1989), 103. López Estrada reproduces Villegas’s version, which is generally the most admired by modern critics. The version added to Jorge de Montemayor’s La Diana beginning in 1562 had the widest circulation in the sixteenth century, however. As López Estrada remarks, little is known about Antonio Villegas, remembered today exclusively as the authoreditor of the Inventario (49). Though El Abencerraje is often celebrated as a work of “tolerance,” Israel Burshatin initiated twenty years ago a new line of interpretation that stressed the paternalistic tone and underlying Orientalism of its sugar-coated vision. Laura Bass has more recently added a gender-based reading to this demystifying tendency. See Israel Burshatin, “Power, Discourse, and Metaphor in the Abencerraje,” MLN 99, no. 2 (1984): 195–213; Laura Bass, “Homosocial Bonds and Desire in the Abencerraje,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 24, no. 3 (2000): 453–71. Quint, Epic and Empire, 174–75. Pierce, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, 57–58. Elizabeth B. Davis, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 52, 58. Thus even Lerner, who emphasizes its Renaissance roots and has repeatedly “reminded” readers that La Araucana was primarily written to exalt Spanish imperialism, admits that its engagement with contemporary events renders it an “open text” that grows more ambiguous and critical of the excesses of Spanish colonialism with each installment. Isaías Lerner, “América y la poesía épica áurea: La versión de Ercilla,” Edad de Oro, no. 10 (1991): 127, 139. In keeping with Wölfflin’s definition of painterly composition as a merging of objects that dissolves the “solid, tangible bodies” of the Renaissance into “a shifting semblance” (14), Pierce emphasizes “restless movement” aimed at admiratio as the chief aesthetic quality of the poem (Pierce, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, 111). Ercilla died in Madrid in 1594 and was originally buried there. As Pierce explains, his remains were reinterred in Ocaña, in the modern province of Toledo, after his widow founded a Carmelite convent there in 1595 (Pierce, Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, 10). Lerner and Diana de Armas Wilson have each discussed the intertextuality between La Araucana and Don Quixote. Both focus primarily on the “freezing” of Don Quixote’s duel with the Basque in chapter 8 of part 1, where Cervantes burlesques Ercilla’s suspension of the outcome of the duel between Tucapel and Rengo from the end of book 2 to the opening of book 3 of La Araucana, published eleven years later. Isaías Lerner, “Entre Cervantes y Ercilla: Quijote, I, 8–9,” in El comentario de textos, ed. Inés Carrasco y Gaudalupe Fernández Ariza (Málaga: Analecta

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51

52

53

54 55 56

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Malacitana, 1998), 207–20; Diana de Armas Wilson, Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 161–82. Luis A. Murillo, The Golden Dial: Temporal Configuration in Don Quijote (Oxford: Dolphin, 1975), 145–46. Ibid., 151. Not only did the Inquisition of Cuenca make numerous visits to towns in La Mancha in the late sixteenth century; it also preserved the libros de testificaciones from those visits more scrupulously than other tribunals. They are housed today at the Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca, and what they show about the role of the Inquisition in town life cannot be learned from trial records alone. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989). For a more detailed discussion contrasting Habermas’s model of the bourgeois public sphere with that of the Baroque, see my “Baroque Public Sphere.” In a late essay, Joseph Silverman maintained a strong distinction between “inquisitorial” and “artistic” knowledge of “other people’s lives,” with the former being oppressive and the latter somehow ethically more pure. As he paints it, the distinction, though well intentioned, is hopelessly naive. In principle there is a difference, certainly, but it is not as black and white as Silverman would have it, and none of the many gradations is entirely free of the “taint” of coloniality of power. Joseph H. Silverman, “On Knowing Other People’s Lives, Inquisitorially and Artistically,” in Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 157–75. It is typical of the cases that go all the way to the highest grade of appeal (grado de suplicación) that there is at least some reduction of the sentence. Presumably this acted as an incentive to appeal. Hampton, Writing from History, 244. Ibid., 290. Maravall, Utopía y contrautopía en el “Quijote” (Utopia and Counterutopia in the “Quixote”). One cannot help regretting that Hampton apparently only read Maravall’s earlier version of this study, El humanismo de las armas en Don Quijote (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios Políticos, 1948). Nearly thirty years later, Maravall had changed his view enough to make him decide to give the book a new title. Essentially, the earlier book looked only at Cervantes’s positive evaluation of Renaissance humanism, without seeing the extent to which Don Quixote is also an attack on the debased vestige of humanism in Spain. Diana de Armas Wilson’s account of Maravall’s essay also oversimplifies this argument, making the reading of Don Quixote out to be much more one-sidedly antiutopian than is the case (Cervantes, the Novel, and the New World, 144–53). This is most clear in Maravall’s final chapter, where he argues that “underneath” the counterutopian aspects of Don Quixote “we find genuine utopian thought in its double aspect of criticism and reform” (Utopia and Counterutopia 193). In their otherwise admirable study The Utopian Nexus in “Don Quixote,” Myriam Yvonne Jehenson and Peter N. Dunn unfortunately fall prey to

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57 58 59 60

61 62

63 64 65 66 67

68 69

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a similar misunderstanding of Maravall (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), xiv, 23–24, 96. Maravall, Utopia and Counterutopia, 193. Henry W. Sullivan, Grotesque Purgatory: A Study of Cervantes’s “Don Quixote,” Part II (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 57. Foucault, Order of Things, 3–16. Baltasar Gracián, El héroe, 1637, in Obras completas, vol. 2 (Madrid: Turner, 1993), 1–41. The passage referred to appears on 15. Further references to this will be made parenthetically in the text. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1888), 143–44. As Carlyle himself acknowledges, Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s lectures Über das Wesen des Gelehrten, where the literary man is presented as a modern priest, served as the inspiration for his own concept of the hero as man of letters. “This is Fichte’s notion of the Man of Letters. It means, in its own form, precisely what we here mean” (Carlyle, One Heroes, 145). Carlyle, On Heroes, 158. Ibid., 177–78. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 221. Friedrich Schlegel reserves a place for the artist outside the realm of practical intervention in politics: “The artist should have as little desire to rule as to serve. He can only cultivate [bilden], do nothing but cultivate, and so help the State only by cultivating masters and servants, only by exalting politicians and managers into artists” (“Idea” 54), quoted in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 69; emphasis added. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 97–98. In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas presents a revised model of the public sphere that incorporates the “intertwining” of the political and literary public spheres and the connection of the latter to individual life histories through the “lifeworld.” Though he insists that the threshold between them is not “sealed off,” public debate and the intimacy of private experience remain two distinct “positions” that citizens occupy, separated by the special conditions of rational discourse regulating the former, which “filter” and “synthesize” public opinion. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 359–66. See Egginton, “Gracián and the Emergence of the Modern Subject,” 165–67. Bolívar is often quoted as classing himself with Jesus and Don Quixote as “los tres majaderos más grandes del mundo” (the three biggest half-wits in the world), but this appears to be an invention of the Peruvian writer Ricardo Palma, in a text titled “La última frase de Bolívar,” included in his Tradiciones peruanas completas, ed. Edith Palma (Madrid: Aguilar, 1964), 1053–54. The basis of Palma’s invention of

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an ironic and disillusioned Bolívar is, however, historical, as reflected in his famous acknowledgment, only a few weeks before his death, of the futility of his endeavors: “El que sirve una revolución ara en el mar” (whoever serves a revolution plows the sea). Letter to Juan José Flores of November 9, 1830, in Cartas del libertador, ed. Vicente Lecuna (Caracas: Comercio, 1929), 376. Also shortly before his death, Guevara wrote a farewell letter to his parents in which he explained his decision to join the guerrilla in Bolivia by saying he felt “el costillar de Rocinante” (Rocinante’s ribs) under his heels. Ernesto Che Guevara, Obra revolucionaria, ed. Roberto Fernández Retamar (México City: Era, 1967), 660.

  Chapter Twenty-one  

Baroque Self-Fashioning in   Seventeenth-Century New France Dorothy Z. Baker

In Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant attributes the dizzying extravagance of New World Baroque to métissage, to hybrid modes of seeing and thinking about the world. He writes: “Through its vertiginous styles, languages and cultures hurtled the baroque will. The generalization of métissage was all that the baroque needed to become naturalized. From then on what it expressed in the world was the proliferating contact of diversified natures. It grasped, or rather gave-on-and-with, this movement of the world. No longer a reaction, it was the outcome of every aesthetic, or every philosophy. Consequently, it asserted not just an art or a style but went beyond this to produce a being-in-the-world.”1 Saints and sacraments, relics and rosaries, visions and voices form an integral part of religious life for seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation French Catholics. These are not peripheral but essential elements of their spirituality.2 When these believers find themselves in the New World, with its own highly visible, symbolic, and ritualistic spiritual life, they partially recognize and sometimes sympathize with these otherwise alien religious beliefs and forms—the shamanic priests, music and dancing, dreams and visions, fetishes, totems, and other symbols of tribal religious life. At the same time, they are destabilized by these practices. That is, while they are intrigued by them in part because they are foreign, they cannot dismiss them easily because they are also familiar. The beliefs and forms of French Catholicism are not external to the religious life of seventeenth-century French Catholics but suggest the spiritual identity of the believers. As such, when they witness and respond to the destabilizing religious practices of New France, they experience a métissage of spirituality, which likewise informs their identity.3 In a very real sense, the clerics and nuns of New France evince a Baroque “being-in-the-world.”

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This essay will explore the Baroque self-fashioning illustrated by new poetic figures expressed by seventeenth-century missionaries—Paul Le Jeune, a Jesuit priest, and Marie de l’Incarnation, a nun of the Order of Saint Ursula. They were French compatriots and New French missionary colleagues, and their extensive correspondence from the New World to their religious superiors, relatives, and friends in France reveals their linguistic plasticity in keeping pace with their shifting identities relative to other individuals and to God. While both missionaries arrive in Quebec with a carefully conscribed social and religious identity, drawn from French society, their religious communities, and Scripture, their experiences in Native American society alter both identities in ways that sometimes comfort and sometimes horrify them. In particular, their new roles in the New World complicate their figures of family structure and reveal their Baroque self-fashioning in shifting metaphors of paternity and maternity in New France. In his annual letters to his superiors in France, written from the year of his arrival in Quebec in 1632 until his return to France in 1649, letters which form part of the Jesuit Relations, Le Jeune openly discusses his designs for his correspondence.4 First, he documents his successes in New France, success being defined predominantly as a goodly number of baptisms among the native peoples. Second, and directly related to this, he writes to secure funding, to make the case for continued and even enhanced support from his religious society and from the French lay community. However, Le Jeune devotes much of his correspondence to a rich, graphic ethnographic description of the Native American tribes. At points he argues that his fellow Jesuits in France require this information to prepare them for their mission trips to the New World and suggests that this material will convince his superiors of the missionaries’ hardships and their need for continuing support. However, there is another way to understand the amount of attention Le Jeune devotes to this material. Because of his singular goal of converting the natives, he describes the aboriginal Americans to strategize how then to write them to his fashion. He codifies an identity of the natives in terms of those characteristics that present obstacles to Christianizing and those that predispose the native population to Christianity. From this static and sometimes flawed characterization, the Jesuit author would eventually fashion ways to rewrite the Native American as French Catholic. As Le Jeune does so, he is simultaneously and unwittingly being written and rewritten himself—in profound and often surprising ways. Just as he worked to imprint French culture and

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Christianity on the Native American, he was being imprinted with Native American culture and religious practice, forming a Baroque identity. The self-representation of this colonial writer is tied to the larger colonial trope of hospitality. In early modern writings, scenes of Europeans’ first encounter with indigenous peoples in the Americas are weighty with the expectations of hospitality.5 Giovanni da Verrazzano describes his enchanting the native peoples with gifts of “little bells and mirrors and many trinkets, which they took and looked at, laughing, and then they confidently came on board ship.”6 Christopher Columbus, who often speaks forthrightly of orchestrating his encounters with Native Americans, writes “because I could see that they were a people who could more easily be won over and converted to our holy faith by kindness than by force, I gave to some of them red hats and glass beads that they put around their necks, and many other things of little value, with which they were very pleased and became so friendly that it was a wonder to see.”7 In New England, however, William Bradford complains that “these savage Barbarians, when they met with them . . . were readier to fill their sides full of arrows than otherwise.”8 In each of these accounts, the issue of hospitality—or lack of it—is central, hospitality being a mark of the civilized man. Those who show no sign of gracious welcome toward another are immediately identified as savage, and the party who writes himself as hospitable—whether his motivation for this posture is disinterested kindness or nefarious gain—is cast as superior. Most offerings from the natives to the Europeans—even essential provisions—are seen as expected, of little value, or in the case of a gift of value, they are described as something that the childlike natives do not fully appreciate. Or, in the case of Hernando Cortés, who relishes Montezuma’s hospitality and admires his many artful gifts, the account asserts that Montezuma believes Cortés to be a god and thus undercuts the ruler’s hospitality with the implication that Montezuma would not be as generous with a mere mortal.9 In various ways, colonial accounts work to deny indigenous people the attribute of hospitality to others. The New French narratives reveal a different attitude in this regard. The basis for the relationship between the Hurons and the Jesuit priests is the priests’ goal is to live among these nomadic native peoples, and as such they are beholden to the tribe for food, shelter, fuel, transportation, and protection from enemies. The quid pro quo in the eyes of the missionaries, of course, is that the Jesuits would save the Hurons’ souls. Le Jeune does not denigrate the Hurons’ contribution. To the contrary, he is able to understand their posture toward others as equivalent to that of the European code of

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hospitality. In a letter of 1635, he pauses to reflect on their generosity: “Their hospitality toward all sort of strangers is remarkable; they present to them in their feasts the best of what they have prepared, and, I do not know if anything similar, in this regard, is to be found elsewhere. I think I have read, in the lives of the Fathers, that a Pagan army was converted on seeing the charity and hospitality of a Christian town” (JR 8:178). While he praises the Hurons for their benevolence and marks them as civilized in this respect, he is also mindful that this is the strategy of the Christian missionary effort. The lacuna in his statement is telling. What remains unsaid—if indeed Le Jeune could admit the consequence of his statement—is that he himself is being “converted on seeing the charity and hospitality” of a Huron tribe. In a 1650 epistle, Jérôme Lalement, who worked under the guidance of Le Jeune, speaks of another aspect of Huron hospitality. Traveling from settlement to settlement with a Huron tribe, he writes, We had remained two days at Montreal, where we were received with a heart of Charity truly Christian. . . . It is customary with these Peoples, even with the Unbelievers, that, when a nation seeks refuge in any foreign country, those who receive them immediately distribute them over different households. Therein, they not only give them lodging, but the necessities of life as well, with a Charity savoring in nothing of the savage, which will one day put to shame many peoples who have been born to Christianity. I have very often seen this hospitality practiced among the Hurons, as many times as we have seen nations devastated, or villages destroyed . . . [they] would find, from the time of their arrival, benevolent hosts, who stretched out to them their arms, and assisted them with joy: who would even divide among them a share in lands already sown, in order that they might be able to live, although in a foreign country, as in their own. (JR 35:209)

Like Le Jeune, Lalement does not appreciate that he has placed himself in a position of being welcomed, succored, and assisted, and is thus himself being proselytized. The colonial proselytizer becomes proselyte. Indeed, Le Jeune and his fellow missionaries are captivated by many aspects of the Hurons and life among them. They write, “we live among them with less fear than we would in Paris. For in Paris we can not sleep without having the doors well bolted; but in Quebec we close them against the wind only, and sleep no less securely for keeping them open” (JR 4:84). The Jesuits praise the Huron language for its rich metaphors just as they struggle with its complexity, and Le Jeune finds that their young women are so modest that they “put our little French girls to shame” (JR 11:95).10 Moreover, the

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Jesuits take on the enemies of the Hurons as their enemies, Le Jeune typing the dreaded Iroquois as “devouring wolves” and “half-demons.” Finally, to take a dramatic step in cultural integration, this priest encourages religious vocations among the Hurons and not only accepts but advocates intermarriage between the French and the Hurons (JR 11:52, 14:17–18).11 Writing to Le Jeune, Lalement confesses that the Hurons “have touched and confounded me” (JR 31:213). In tangible ways, the Hurons also “touched and confounded” religious practice among the Jesuits and advanced the métissage of Le Jeune. To encourage baptism, Le Jeune offers a necklace of prized porcelain beads, which he claims will “smooth the difficulties of the road to Paradise” (JR 10:28) and justifies unorthodox baptisms by insisting that “the Sacrament is made for the man, and not man for the Sacrament; and consequently it is better to endanger the Sacrament than the salvation of a man” (JR 11:139). He institutes offerings of corn to Jesus, recites novenas for rain, and proposes that the Eucharist be given to Hurons who are not Christian (JR 10:108, 11:114). Layering Old World Christian ritual with New World practices, and reshaping Old World religious doctrine for New World means, Le Jeune displays remarkable plasticity and orchestrates a Baroque pastiche of religious practices in Quebec.12 James Axtell describes the Jesuit missionaries as “cultural relativists.”13 The plasticity of their cultural framework is, in part, a result of their attitude toward hospitality in the context of European domination. Although they seek to colonize the Hurons with French culture and French religious practice, the Jesuits’ dependent role in Native American societies forces them to reconfigure their metaphoric familial standing. While they act as spiritual fathers, they are also clearly sons. In this way, the Jesuit “cultural relativism” can also be understood in terms of their ability to position themselves within plural metaphoric spheres, which is consonant with Saint Ignatius Loyola’s expressed devotion to the Pauline directive to become “all things to all men in order to win all to Jesus Christ.”14 As the Hurons rewrote Le Jeune’s presentation of Catholic ritual and doctrine, they also influenced the Jesuits’ self-representation in the Relations. Le Jeune casts himself as father, consciously taking on the authority of a metaphorical pater familia, but Huron society does not readily assent to the European self-fashioning of the priest as father, especially as the members of the tribe assume a paternal position toward him in feeding him, protecting him, and sheltering him.15 Conquered by hospitality and initiated into tribal life, he is no longer able to characterize himself as a father but, as we have

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seen, recasts himself in another masculine role, that of a son, while refashioning himself in his religious mission as another son, Jesus. Reflecting on the Jesuits’ plastic identity, François Le Mercier, a later missionary, writes, “as God made himself man in order to make men God’s, a Missionary does not fear to make himself a Savage, so to speak, in order to make them Christians” (JR 51:266). Correspondingly, the priest serves in the place of the God as man, Jesus, in his mission to the Hurons. However, the implications of typing oneself as Christ are far-reaching and ultimately include the passion of Christ as the necessary culmination of Christ’s ministry. So, to refashion Le Jeune’s missionary responsibility under the reconception of his persona as son, he shifts from the agency of leadership to the agency of sacrifice. As such, he assumes the role of Jesus, of the sacrificial lamb. The blood of the martyr—as the blood of Jesus—will save the Huron people. Or in Le Jeune’s words, “the blood of martyrs is the seed [semen] of Christians,” this being a maxim of many of the New French Jesuits (JR 17:17).16 Le Jeune contemplates his role in imitation of the passion of Christ from the moment that he leaves Europe for his missionary assignment; in a first letter written from the ship during his initial crossing, he speaks about his readiness to die (JR 5:13). When martyrdom becomes the essential and final element of one’s mission, one’s mission becomes martyrdom. Captivated by the Hurons, the Jesuits are also captivated by their role as the Jesus figure among the Native Americans and thus strive to fulfill their identity as martyrs. In contrast to the New English captivity narratives in which the master narrative directs the plot from captivity to release, with release coded as redemption for the individual, the master narrative of the New French Counter-Reformation accounts leads from captivity, with death coded as redemption for the self and others. The Jesuits, we are told, “have never paled at the sight of their own blood,” and, to be sure, the Jesuit relations are replete with dramatic, graphic passages that describe the torture, suffering, and death of each Jesuit martyr (JR 43:131). In each martyr drama, graphic and gory images are juxtaposed with assertions of spiritual glory. Maimed bodies are described as a “spectacle of horror,—the remains of cruelty itself: or rather the relics of the love of God” (JR 34:138). The effect on the spectators is likewise oxymoronic: “He died in convulsions, leaving all our hearts full of joy” (JR 42:238). Erwin Panofsky speaks of the “conflict of antagonistic forces merging into a subjective unity” as a “fundamental attitude of Baroque art.”17 Within the plastic arts, Panofsky

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cites the examples of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Ecstasy of St. Teresa and especially martyr scenes such as Giovanni Cerrini’s Wounded St. Sebastian Nursed by the Pious Irene, in which “physical pain intensely felt . . . fus[es] into blissful rapture,” each sensation rendered more acute by its contrary impulse and both fused in subjective excitement (see figure 2.2).18 The Jesuit Baroque self-fashioning fuses death and victory just as it fuses son and father, Huron and French, pagan and Catholic. Yet the complex layering of subjectivities has not reached its climax for Le Jeune of the Society of Jesus. The dénouement of his narrative reveals another contrary impulse that he struggles to integrate. In 1639, after seven years in the New World, he expresses his reservation about his role as a type of Christ and proposes that the physical trials of life in Quebec might be understood as “martyrdom” and will be equally efficacious in the conversion of “barbarians” (JR 17:17). In this, his words are distinct from those of his fellow Jesuits who persist in their personal mission to replicate the passion of Christ.19 Le Jeune leaves New France in 1646, but during his four-year sojourn in France, he expresses no sentiment similar to that of Isaac Jogues who, during his time in France following torture in New France, writes of his longing to return to be killed. During a second posting among the Native Americans, which began in 1646, Le Jeune no longer serves as the superior of the Jesuit mission, and when he leaves his missionary outpost in 1649 to return definitively to France, he aborts his personal narrative in the type of Jesus. Despite early claims of his readiness to die, when he leaves New France, Le Jeune aspires to nothing of the kind, perhaps because he suffered the death of so many of his fellow Jesuits. He has lost his passion for the passion of Christ. As such, he loses another aspect of his masculine identity as the representation of the son of God. Furthermore, Le Jeune, as a procurer in the Society of Jesus is now a recipient of the lengthy, detailed, and often confessional letters from his successors in the Quebec missions. His position as a reader of these narratives is difficult indeed; he neither assents to their self-fashioning as the Christ-like martyr, nor can he fully contest it. Le Jeune reads a narrative that was once his own but is no more. In his final substantive statement, a preface attached to a letter addressed to him by Paul Rageuneau in 1658, he speaks directly to the subject of martyrdom: “Fathers Jean De Brébeuf, Gabriel Lallement, Isaac Jogues, and most of the others who have been burned and eaten by the Iroquois, could have escaped easily enough from the hands and teeth of those cannibals; but their desire to administer the Sacrament of Penance to some Neophytes

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before the death of the latter, and to confer Baptism upon some Catechumens made them prefer the fires and rage of the Iroquois to the sweetness of life. The fate of all our Fathers and all our Brethren at Onnotagué would have been sealed, had they found themselves similarly situated; but, seeing that their death would be of no service to a poor captive Church which they were forsaking, and that their bondage would not afford it any relief, . . . they determined to make their escape” (JR 44:172). While not dishonoring the early martyrs, Le Jeune responds to the rationale of martyr dramas with the logical argument of the procurer who is mindful of his money and his men, and with the mournful voice of the survivor, even as he honors the martyrdom of his fellow missionaries. In this way, he persists in the Baroque self-fashioning of paternity, which accepts complication and contradiction without ­resolution. Even with the Jesuit vacillation between their roles as son and father, it is clear that the missionary’s self-fashioning is gendered. The Jesuit colonial posture with respect to hospitality both is and is not the posture of the female missionary in New France. Marie de l’Incarnation, a French Ursuline nun who worked among the Native Americans in Quebec from 1639 until her death in 1672, had no authority to baptize and colonize native tribesmen and tribeswomen, as a priest would have had. However, she welcomed young female students into the convent school and initiated them into European home life and the Christian religion. Furthermore, the Jesuit life in imitatio Christi both is and is not the purview of the Ursuline sisters in the New World. Marie de l’Incarnation clearly aspires to be Christ-like and at times even longs for martyrdom, a theme in her correspondence that the historian Anya Mali has identified and examined.20 Yet this was only one aspect of the Baroque self-fashioning of this mystic figure. She also speaks of Jesus as her master, her love, and her spouse. Figuring herself also in Roman Catholicism’s strong Marian tradition, Marie de l’Incarnation strives for a life in imitatio Mariae. The role of the Virgin Mary is not only prominent in her correspondence but consistent throughout her epistles. However, to model herself as the mother of God, she must refashion maternity in ways that reflect her position in French society, in her religious community, in Quebec tribal life, and relative to God.21 Well before Marie Guyart entered the convent to become Mother Marie, she already had an intimate understanding of motherhood. Indeed, she had been married, given birth to a son, and been widowed. Convinced of

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her religious vocation, she left her son, Claude Martin, with relatives and entered the Ursuline cloister when the little boy was twelve years old. Thus she shed physical maternity in order to discover her religious identity in maternity. The maternity of the Virgin Mary has critical significance for Marie de l’Incarnation, signaled by her choice of a religious name that celebrates the moment of the Immaculate Conception. Marie de l’Incarnation attributes her life’s path to the guidance of the Virgin Mary. In fact, she claims that Mary directed her to her special mission in New France. While she was in the convent in Tours, she had a vision of the holy Virgin who held her close and showed her a desolate, rocky landscape. The Virgin then whispered to Jesus, her babe in arms, as if she had “designs” on her. Following this vision, once again in prayer, Marie de l’Incarnation recognized that Mary had shown her the landscape of New France and understood then that she was directing her to the mission in Quebec (Corr 42–43).22 At approximately the same time, she exhibited additional signs of dedication to the Mother of God, reporting in 1661 that for more than twenty-three years she has worn a metal chain around her neck to signify that she is a “slave” to Mary (Corr 661). Consistent with her aspiration to live in imitatio Mariae, she accepts the position as Mother Superior of the Ursuline convent in Quebec and, as spiritual mother of the convent, she leads its members to make a solemn vow to be under the special protection of the Virgin Mary, whose grace she feels intensely (Corr 827). Marie de l’Incarnation recounts with considerable pride the devotional practices that center on the Mother of Christ, which include wearing scapulars, saying rosaries to the Holy Family, experiencing visions of the Virgin, and witnessing miracles attributed to Mary and the Holy Family. In a letter to Claude Martin, one member of her congregation observes that Marie de l’Incarnation dedicates herself “with all her heart to the imitation of the holy Virgin” (Corr 284). At the center of her missionary work in Quebec is Marie de l’Incarnation’s role as mother to the Native American girls, teaching young girls being the exclusive charge of the Ursuline convent in France and in New France. As such, Marie instructs girls from numerous tribes in personal hygiene, housekeeping, singing, sewing, the French language, and religious practice. In her words, her goal is to domesticate and acculturate, or “frenchify” ( francizer), her girls so that they will then be disposed to the religion of the French.23 Her metaphorical role of mother becomes her reality such that one of her

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students reportedly claims that “I have no other parents than the Virgin Sisters in black; they are my mothers” (Corr 287). Given that the Ursuline charge is to teach young girls, it is perhaps surprising that Marie de l’Incarnation’s letters highlight her maternal relationship with young men. She recounts with some pride that one young Algonquin convert named Charles calls her “Ningue,” which means “my mother” in his language (Corr 161). Eight years later, she relates a remarkable story that suggests the reason for her special attachment to this male convert: “Of ten Algonquin converts who were murdered by another tribe, one showed particular evidence of zeal and fervor. (He was about twenty-two years old, and he was my spiritual son. He loved me as much or more than his natural mother. For three days and three nights, he suffered horrible torture in defense of his faith, which he professed aloud until his final breath.) The barbarians mocked him by saying: ‘Where is your God? He isn’t rescuing you.’ Then they tortured him again, and mocked him, saying, ‘Pray to your God and see if he will rescue you.’ . . . What do you think? Didn’t I have a fine Son in this young man? I should rather call him my Father and my Advocate before God” (Corr 399). In his martyrdom, Charles resembles the Jesuit martyrs. For Marie de l’Incarnation, Charles, too, dies in imitatio Christi, and her account details those aspects of his death that resemble the passion of Christ, such as the time frame and the specific elements of mockery. Equally important to Marie de l’Incarnation is her maternal relationship to this young man. If her spiritual son dies in imitatio Christi, then she lives more fully in imitatio Mariae, specifically in Mary’s role as the Pietà. Just as imitating the dying Christ is the triumphant identity of the Jesuit priest, imitating the Pietà is the triumphant role for Marie de l’Incarnation. In a study of Annibale Carracci’s Lamentation; or, Pietà with St. Francis and St. Mary Magdalen), a painting in which the mother of God mourns over the body of her dead son, Panofsky notes that this painting is characteristic of the Baroque in that “the mourning figures seem already to revel in their own sorrow, a new decisive factor in the Baroque psychology” (figure 21.1).24 As in Carracci’s portrait of the Virgin, Marie de l’Incarnation’s suffering is her great triumph. The agony of the martyr’s death merges with her intense mourning and expresses itself in ecstasy. She realizes her fullest identity in the experience of horror and grief, and thus transforms pain into bliss. Throughout her correspondence, Marie de l’Incarnation lauds the Jesuit

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this image. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

Carracci, Lamentation; or, Pietà with St. Francis and St. Mary Magdalen, 1602. The Louvre. Photograph: Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York

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martyrs, celebrates every grotesque detail of their torture and death, and awaits the miracles and conversions that each martyrdom will bring.25 To do so is an expression of her Baroque vision, and speaks to the ecstatic fusion of pain and rapture that is encoded in the spectacle and experienced by the spectator. Like the death of Christ, the death of a priest as Christ-figure allows her to juxtapose seemingly contradictory sentiments about these horrific events. In 1640, before she had experienced the loss of a Jesuit priest, she reports, “We are in distress because we were told that the Iroquois captured three of our canoes. If this is the case, the priest was undoubtedly taken and has already been eaten. We could have a Martyr in him, which would make all the others very jealous because they always hope for this great privilege” (Corr 118). In a Baroque move, she hopes for the very experience that gives her distress and promises agony. Marie de l’Incarnation’s account of the death of the Native American man who martyred Father Isaac Jogues provides another layer of complication:

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“Before leading him to the pyre, Father Le Jeune instructed him with the aid of an interpreter, and immediately he was converted and believed in God. We attribute this to the prayers and the virtues of our saint [Isaac Jogues], and so at his baptism, he was given the name of Isaac Jogues. He was put to death by fire, which he endured with heroic patience” (Corr 338). In a confusing intersection of religion and law, the murderer is spiritually saved by the intercession of the victim after which the murderer becomes the victim’s double, then a Christ figure, and finally a criminal who is put to death. The martyrer ends his life in the role of martyr, his dual identity reconciled in the ecstatic subjectivity of the woman who desires to be close to Christ in his passion, wherever she may find Him. Documenting the horrific details of each Jesuit and Native American martyr allows Marie de l’Incarnation to reenact the role of the Pietà, which is to witness and to mourn. While Robert Michel has documented the many ways in which the Ursuline nun invokes the Virgin Mary as a spiritual model and a mediatrix with God, I argue the more extreme position that she attempts to replicate the Mother of God in her role as mater dolorosa.26 This aspect of her self-fashioning, too, has its origins in her mystical experience: “I saw Our Lord in a dream. He was attached to the cross, still alive, but completely covered with wounds on every part of his body. He twitched pitifully and was supported by two young men. I had a distinct impression that he had been looking for a faithful soul to comfort him through his extreme agony. I thought that a woman was approaching him to do so, but shortly afterward she turned her back on him and abandoned him in his suffering. I followed him, constantly thinking of him in this pitiful state and watching him with compassion. I saw little else, but it was my great pain, and I will never forget the strong and vivid image of the holy Savior crucified” (Corr 744). Marie de l’Incarnation works throughout her life to enact in reality a mystical vision that is itself a reenactment of the mater dolorosa at the foot of the cross. The correspondence of Marie de l’Incarnation documents the multiple ways that the nun attempts to replicate the life of the Mother of God. She cherishes a small wax figure of the baby Jesus, makes special note of the crucifix in the Ursuline chapel, and in a remarkable feat of the imagination, casts her work as a teacher of young girls as “collecting the blood of Jesus Christ” (Corr 881, 784, 904). That she describes the crucifix as “ravishing” suggests yet again the fusion of spiritual and erotic longing that she expresses with

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great candor. Her accounts of martyrdom—especially of the young man whom she calls her son—allow her to stage her most exacting replication of the Pietà. To return to her biological maternity, Marie de l’Incarnation’s continuing and intimate relationship with her abandoned son is one of the most curious aspects of her life. The more than two hundred extant letters that she wrote from Quebec to his monastery in France attest to her maternal devotion to him. Nonetheless, several letters respond to his specific request that she explain why she abandoned him as a child, whereas other letters reprise her account of hearing him cry for his mother from outside the cloister walls, these accounts appearing to be unprompted by his demands for explanation or apology. Marie de l’Incarnation’s core message is unwavering: she left her son so that God “would take care of [him] and be [his] Father” (Corr 725).27 Thus she seems to shed the physical evidence of her sexual identity to imitate the spirituality and virginity of Mary.28 Instead, she refashions her relationship with her son as spiritual. She becomes the spiritual mother to her son, prays for his ordination in the Benedictine order at Saint-Maur, and continues to guide his spiritual maturation until her death.29 Because Claude Martin’s role as priest is to serve in imitatio Christi on earth, his biological mother is able to approximate more fully her role as Mary, the mother of Jesus Christ. However, the fullness and even excess of the Baroque subjectivity of this mystic nun demands that she complete this identity. In six letters to her son, she writes of her great hope that he will die as a martyr for the salvation of man.30 As early as 1641, she writes, “If someone told me, ‘Your son died a martyr,’ I believe that I would die of joy” (Corr 133). His painful death would allow her ecstatic union with her spiritual son, Jesus Christ. As in her accounts of the Jesuit martyrs, she relishes each physical detail of her son’s martyrdom—albeit in her hopeful imagination—and writes, “Oh my dear son, how happy I would be if I were told that you lost your life for Jesus Christ. If I found myself in the situation where you were offered this distinction, I hope that our divine Spouse would give me the courage to push you back into the fire or under the hatchet, in case your human weakness led you to want to escape. I would do this because I would be so grateful to help you in this way” (Corr 270). As martyr, Claude Martin would reenact the passion of Christ, allowing his biological mother to reenact the passion of the mother of Christ in her role as the Pietà. She would be covered with the blood of her physical and spiritual son and would realize the vision that inspired her spiritual journey and her Baroque identity. Under the metaphors

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of maternity—mater familia, then spiritual mother to the Native Americans and mother superior, then mater Christi, and finally mater dolorosa—she develops a unified subjectivity that allows her to articulate her varied and contradictory relationships with God and man. Whereas the violence and extremism of classic tragedy elicits horror and release, Walter Benjamin argues that the Baroque Trauerspiel (mourning play) is a literary mode that evokes mourning and melancholy.31 According to Benjamin, the medieval martyr dramas were an expression of a Christian chronicle that wrote the world’s history as a story of redemption.32 However, in seventeenth-century New France, the martyr dramas that are played out before Le Jeune and Marie de l’Incarnation do not culminate in a reign of Christianity, or even in a better social order. Le Jeune’s missionary experience includes a seemingly endless series of martyrdoms—in other terms, a continual reenactment of martyr dramas. Because he is able to personalize the victim, Le Jeune does not complete the dramatic identification of the martyr with Jesus. The tragic drama loses its redemptive clarity for him and is replaced in his writing by Baroque Trauerspiel. At the close of his correspondence, then, he mourns the loss of his martyred Jesuit colleagues, rejects the master narrative of the martyr drama in hopes of saving the present missionaries, and is melancholic vis-à-vis his early vision of a triumphant self in imitatio Christi. Ultimately, he is unable to cast himself figuratively as the son of God or the father to the savages, but he understands himself as the mournful spectator of a tarnished worldview and a diminished self-image. Likewise, Marie de l’Incarnation assumes the posture of the mourner and refashions herself as the Pietà at the feet of an entire cast of victims, both French Jesuits and Native American converts. Though she implores her only son to become a figure of the crucified Christ, she never realizes the extreme and unnatural aspiration to mourn as Mary for her biological son. Marie de l’Incarnation, then, must praise and mourn those who are both victim and victor, knowing that she is neither. Thus the Baroque identity of Le Jeune and Marie de l’Incarnation issues, in part, from the mournful incapacity to see themselves in time and eternity as either the son or the mother of God. Their Baroque self-fashioning also issues from their refusal to disassociate from the role that they cannot perform even as they mourn their inability to replicate their religious ideal of the crucified Christ or the Pietà. Their spiritual longing is heightened by the tension of this seeming contradiction, which the Baroque mind chooses not to resolve because it does not view this as contradiction.

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In this way, both Le Jeune and Marie de l’Incarnation exhibit not only cultural métissage but also a form of spiritual métissage, in which they persist in adhering to their vision of the triumphant self even as their experience belies that self. Thus they evince their Baroque “being-in-the-world.”33

Notes 1 Glissant, “Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World,” 78; Glissant’s essay is in-

cluded in this volume (BNW 625).

2 For an understanding of the spiritual life of post-Tridentine Catholics in rural

3 4

5

6

7 8

France, I am indebted to Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tensions in Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), which explores the broad cultural practices that informed religious life in seventeenth-century France. Anya Mali, Mystic in the New World: Marie de l’Incarnation (1599–1672) (Leiden: Brill, 1996), discusses the ways in which Marie de l’Incarnation’s religious practice in Tours and Quebec reflects this exuberant mode. See esp. 12–28. See also James Axtell, The Invasion Within:The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 112. Le Jeune arrived in New France on July 5, 1632, as superior of the Jesuit community in New France. In 1642, he returned to France for four years and resumed missionary work in Quebec in 1646 until he departed for France in October 1649 on the Nostra Dame to work as procurer for the New French missions until his death. The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents, Reuben Gold Thwaite, ed., 73 vols. (Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1896–1901), is a collection of the annual letters written by the superior of the mission in New France to the provincial superior in France, a letter which Le Jeune authored from 1632 until 1641. Appended to these letters are reports by other missionaries on activities about which they have exceptional information, such as personal accounts of baptism within a specific native community or eyewitness accounts of the martyrdom of a fellow priest. All quotations from the Jesuit Relations are from the Thwaite edition, indicated in each citation by JR, and the translation is his. See James Axtell, Beyond 1492: Encounters in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 64–67; and Cornelius J. Jaenen, “The Role of Presents in French-Amerindian Trade,” in Explorations in Canadian Economic History: Essays in Honour of Irene M. Spry, ed. Duncan Cameron (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1985), 231–50. Giovanni da Verrazzano, “Letter of 8 July 1524 to François I,” trans. Susan Tarrow, in The Voyages of Giovanni da Verrazzano, 1524–1528, ed. Lawrence C. Wroth (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 138. Christopher Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage, 1492, ed. and trans. B. W. Ife (Warminster, UK: Aris and Phillips, 1990), 29. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Modern Library, 1981), 70.

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9 Hernando Cortés, Fernando Cortes: His Five Letters of Relation to the Emperor

10

11

12

13

14 15

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17 18 19

20

Charles V, ed. and trans. Francis August MacNutt, 2 vols. (Glorieta, N.M.: Rio Grande Press, 1977). See his second letter, esp. 233–35. See Peter A. Dorsey’s important study of the Jesuit beliefs surrounding language and authority, “Going to School with Savages: Authorship and Authority among the Jesuits of New France,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 55, no. 3 (1998): 399–420, in which he writes, “Believing that the native languages revealed a divine presence—however obscured—in the tribes they studied, Jesuits remained open to the possibility that native ways had purpose and value” (413). Le Jeune reports that Samuel de Champlain also proposed intermarriage. When Champlain met with an unnamed Native American man, identified only as a captain, who spoke of an alliance with the French as building a “big house” in which they would live together, Champlain replied, “When that great house shall be built, then our young men will marry your daughters, and we shall be one people” (JR 5:211). See Anya Mali, “Strange Encounters: Missionary Activity and Mystical Thought in Seventeenth-Century New France,” History of European Ideas 22, no. 2 (1996): 67–92, esp. 67–75. Axtel, Beyond 1492, 157. Le Jeune also exhibits self-awareness as a cultural relativist: “Oh how weak are the judgments of men! Some place beauty where others see nothing but ugliness. The most beautiful teeth in France are the whitest; in the Maldive Islands whiteness of teeth is considered a deformity, they paint them red to be beautiful; and in Cochin China, if my memory serves me, they paint them black. Which is right?” (JR 5:106). This passage, in 1 Corinthians 9:22, was paramount to the mission of Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order. See Barthel, Jesuits, 182. Marie de l’Incarnation corroborates this claim in Correspondance, ed. Dom Guy Oury (Solesmes: Abbaye Saint Pierre, 1971), 672. She writes that the Jesuits “assure us that these People treated them like their children.” All quotations from Marie de l’Incarnation’s correspondence are from the Oury edition and will be cited in the text as Corr; the translation is mine. The phrase, “Sanguis Martyrum semen est Christianorum” is uttered by almost every correspondent in the Relations. Marie de l’Incarnation also attributes the salvation of the Native Americans to the Christ-like death of Jesuit martyrs and documents the number of conversions that immediately follow instances of martyrdom. See esp. Corr 338, 379, 387. Panofsky, “What Is Baroque?,” 51. Ibid., 68. Throughout this period and throughout Le Jeune’s second mission to New France, the Relations are replete with the statements of many other Jesuits who proclaim, as Charles Garnier does, “eamus et nos et moriamur cum illo” (let us both die as He died) (JR 21:274). For a perceptive discussion of Marie de l’Incarnation’s path of imitatio Christi and unio Christi, see especially Mali, Mystic in the New World, 62–89.

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21 Although scholars have examined Marie de l’Incarnation’s self-fashioning as a

22

23

24 25 26 27

28

29

30 31 32 33

Christ figure and have explored her rejection of maternity, her important path in imitatio Mariae has not been identified and interpreted. Throughout Marie de l’Incarnation’s correspondence, the maternity of the Virgin Mary is an important leitmotif. For example, she notes that as she was preparing to board the ship for New France, the priest asked them to recite prayers, the final one being the Magnificat, in which the Virgin Mary at the Visitation identifies her exceptional relationship with God. Like her Jesuit counterparts, she experienced New World acculturation. As Natalie Zemon Davis puts it in Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 133: “Marie de l’Incarnation degreased the bodies of her ‘savage’ girls, but some of the grease got into her own pores.” Panofsky, “What Is Baroque?,” 38. See especially her account of the death of Isaac Jogues (Corr 338–39). Robert Michel, “Marie de l’Incarnation et la Vierge Marie,” Eglise et Théologie, no. 10 (1979): 207–22. Although her message is unwavering, the conviction of her message develops assurance with time. In her first treatment of the subject in a letter to her son written in 1641, she says that God “gave her hope that he would take care of you” (Corr 130). In later letters, her hope in God is replaced by her “confidence” in God and “promises” from God that He would care for Claude (Corr 725, 837). Zemon Davis interrogates Claude Martin’s curious claims regarding his mother’s devotion to virginity and her lack of memory of the sex act in Women on the Margins, 104–5, 281n157. Greenberg, Baroque Bodies, explores the Freudian implications of Marie de l’Incarnation’s restructuring of familial relations, projecting herself as the bride of Christ, and “impersonating” the figure of Jesus in his passion. See especially his chapter titled “Nunsense: Marie de l’Incarnation, Mysticism, and the Oedipal Trap” (160–208). See Corr 133, 184, 270, 284, and 399. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 230. Ibid., 78. I refer again to Glissant, who argues that the Baroque mode asserts more than form, rather producing identity. See his “Concerning a Baroque Abroad,” 78; BNW 625.

  Chapter Twenty-two  

The Fold of Difference: Performing Baroque   and Neobaroque Mexican Identities Leo Cabranes-Grant

Among the minor works by the Spanish painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–82), there are three small religious scenes whose value has recently been reassessed. For centuries, critics assumed that the three oils were painted on top of black jasper or black marble, but now it is understood that the material is really black volcanic glass, also known as obsidian. Apparently one of Murillo’s patrons, the Sevillian trader Justino de Neve, whose fortune was made in Central America, provided the stones. There is a strong possibility that the slabs were originally so-called smoking mirrors made by the Aztecs. In spite of their small scale, these devotional objects reflect the operations of a vast Circum-Atlantic network that connected and transformed the Old and New Worlds.1 One of the salient qualities of the Circum-Atlantic Baroque lies in the fact that it was a truly global style shaped by an overwhelming diversity of materials, lands, and cultures. The Baroque represents for us the ur-postmodern, the prologue to all our dispersed and unsolved riddles. “All consciousness is a matter of threshold,” says Gilles Deleuze in his 1988 study of the German Baroque philosopher Gottfried Wilhem Leibniz. “In each case we would probably have to state why the threshold is marked where it is.”2 A Christian image painted on an Aztec mirror certainly marks the site of a new consciousness. What kind of threshold are we confronting here? What type of inflection or fold is being exposed by this convergence of obsidian surfaces and Catholic imagery? What kind of episteme was facilitated by the New World Baroque? In Murillo’s obsidian oils, elements from two contrasting traditions have been repositioned in a relational pattern that signifies the intervention of an Other’s presence. The Baroque is far from being the first intercultural aesthetic, but because of its

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emphasis on transitions, kinesis, and liminality, it allows an unprecedented degree of legibility with respect to intercultural exchange. For Henri Focillon, the Baroque is a transhistorical category that is not “reserved exclusively for the Europe of the last three centuries any more than classicism was the unique privilege of Mediterranean culture. In the life of forms, baroque is indeed but a moment, but it is certainly the freest and the most emancipated one.”3 The Baroque “moment” tends to overflow the limits of the frame and conflate form with meaning. According to Werner Weisbach’s distinction, while the classical ideal represents a style of being (“ein Stil des Seins”), the Baroque is better described as a style of becoming (“ein Stil des Werdens”).4 Giancarlo Maorino claims that the Baroque privileges “form as process” in which “the capacity-to-be . . . [is] more attractive than achievement.”5 Heinrich Wölfflin finds in the Baroque the “anticipation of something yet to come, of dissatisfaction and restlessness, rather than fulfilment. We have no sense of release . . . there is no desire for perfection, only for tension.”6 It is precisely the “yet to come” of the Baroque and of its sequel, the Neobaroque, that provides an opportunity for the articulation of intercultural subjectivity. The Baroque—historical and contemporary—elaborates a poetics of becoming in which mediation assumes a central role. According to Raymond Williams, mediation intends “to describe an active process. Its predominant general sense has been an act of intercession, reconciliation, or interpretation between adversaries or strangers.”7 Baroque discourse posits a mediated, processive awareness of self, one that is pertinent to the disclosure of emergent identities. The prologue, or loa, to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s religious drama, The Divine Narcissus (1690), and Carlos Fuentes’s comedia mexicana, Orchids in the Moonlight (1981), will serve as test cases for this assertion.

1. Genealogies of Emergence José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, and Alejo Carpentier all praise the New World Baroque for its capacity to absorb, refine, and detonate a dialectic of colonial and countercolonial drives. Scholarship devoted to the study of the New World Baroque has also tended to emphasize the relational aspects of transatlantic exchange, analyzing how Europe changed America, or how America changed Europe. But a Circum-Atlantic approach also requires that we analyze these reciprocal exchanges in terms of the unequal or asymmet-

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ric circumstances under which most intercultural patterns were articulated. We need to detect identities as objects in the making, not merely as cultures encountering each other. Deleuze and Félix Guattari provide some initial clues for such a project in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) and in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1975), in their discussion of how “minor” languages and literatures emerge within a “major” language. According to Deleuze and Guattari, “major” and “minor” do not describe different languages, but rather two usages of the same language. A “major” language is one that gains its power by setting itself as a normative “constant.” Resistant to change, a “constant” language precludes an accurate rendition of its own history. For Deleuze and Guattari, the conceptual stasis of “constant” models turns them into quasi-empty containers: “The majority, insofar as it is analytically included in the abstract standard, is never anybody” in particular, “whereas the minority is the becoming of everybody, one’s potential becoming to the extent that one deviates from the model.”8 A “minority,” then, reactivates history by contesting dominant cultural discourses, challenging the apparent stability of naturalized, “majoritarian” positions. In this sense, unequal relations are creative spaces in which alternative identities are prone to emerge. In sum: “Majority is never becoming. All becoming is minoritarian.”9 Minoritarian expressions such as the mestizo American Baroque, formed within the majoritarian colonial Spanish Baroque, are neither entirely new nor entirely derivative; minor identities are not produced ex nihilo, but as variations in a generalized practice (grammar, accent, style).10 It remains to be seen if Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualization of the relational links between majoritarian and minoritarian literatures can be used to explain the intercultural transactions that take place between colonizing and colonized subjects, but an accurate rendition of unfolding relationships is fundamental to an understanding of Baroque and Neobaroque discourses. Is the American Baroque a minor literature thriving within the major field of the European Baroque? Which Baroque is the major model for a Neobaroque writer, the American, the European, or some combination of the two? Would it be better to look for a more “local” theoretical frame, one extracted from Baroque and Neobaroque writing itself? Like Deleuze and Guattari’s minor literatures, Sor Juana’s The Divine Narcissus displays an acute perception of cultural encounters as events where identities are not given but worked out. The play is an Auto Sacramental, or

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Corpus Christi play, that transforms the Ovidian myth of Narcissus into a symbolic rewriting of Christ’s sacrifice. It is not necessary to list in full the subtle poetic analogies in the play, but a few highlights are pertinent. Human Nature decides to retell the story of Narcissus (a figuration of Christ), borrowing her ideas from the Jews (the Synagogue) and her tone from Antiquity (Greece and Rome). Satan, disguised as Echo and helped by Arrogance and Self-Love, tries to sabotage this retelling. Grace recommends that Human Nature wait for Narcissus while her own face is reflected in the fountain; as a result, when Narcissus looks at the water, it is Human Nature’s features that he sees and loves. This device serves the purpose of allegorizing Christ’s incarnation. In the loa of The Divine Narcissus, America provides the setting for unfolding events.11 Occident (“a gallant-looking Aztec”) and America (“an Aztec woman of poised self-possession”) meet Christian Religion (“as a Spanish lady”) and Zeal (“as a captain General in armor”). While the Indians are celebrating “the great God of Seeds” with a jubilant tocotín or song-dance, Religion and Zeal discuss how to defend “the holy faith of Christ disgraced” by the Aztecs’ “superstitious rites.” Zeal is more than ready to use the sword, but Religion wants to give the Indians a chance to convert through pacific persuasion. Since America and Occident are resistant to Religion’s arguments, Zeal declares war against them, and wins. Despite their defeat, the Aztecs still worship their own deities. What follows is probably one of the first dramatic renderings of the dynamics of transculturation. Religion instructs the Aztecs in Catholic doctrine by asking them about their cult and then translating their ideas into Christian theology. The model for this operation is Paul’s preaching of the “Unknown God” to the Greeks. Once the Aztecs appear to change their mind, Religion justifies her method by affirming once more a fundamental tenet of the Counter-Reformation: the necessity of visual forms of understanding and “holy images” as a mode of indoctrination: Then come along with me, and I shall make for you a metaphor, a concept clothed in rhetoric so colorful that what I show to you, your eyes will clearly see; for now I know that you require objects of sight instead of words,

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but which faith whispers in your ears too deaf to hear; I understand, for you necessity demands that through the eyes, faith find her way to her reception in your hearts. (31)

Indeed, “a concept clothed in rhetoric so colorful” is a viable definition of the Auto Sacramental itself: a one-act play that exposes, with symbolic language and imagery, the miracle of the mass: An auto will make visible through allegory images of what America must learn and Occident implores to know about the questions that now burn within him so. (33)

But now we learn that The Divine Narcissus will be performed in Madrid. Zeal responds to this piece of information with discomfort: “But does it not seem ill-advised / that what you write in Mexico / be represented in Madrid?” Religion reacts to this by saying: “But tell me: why should it be surprising / that an object fashioned in one place / can also be employed in another place?” Zeal is not convinced yet: “How do you counter the complaint / that after starting in the Indies / now you want to finish in Madrid?” Zeal, seemingly a neo-Aristotelian critic, is slightly disturbed by this abrupt expansion of the so-called unity of place. But Religion has one more card to show: Since the play’s purpose is to celebrate a Mystery and the characters introduced are only abstractions, painted figures that convey what we want to say it is not a problem to carry them to Madrid: intellectual concepts should not be hindered by distances or oceans. (33–37)

As stated by Deleuze and Guattari, a minoritarian language is a variation of a majoritarian language. Minor expressions reintroduce an awareness of change within normative, major models or, to say it differently, subaltern cultures challenge the assumed stability of hegemonic discourses. In Sor Juana’s loa, both Mexico and Spain are deterritorialized and Christianity is shown

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as absorbing elements from other cultures (the Synagogue, Greece, Rome, and now, the Aztecs). This double displacement creates a dramatic frame in which becoming is mutual and reciprocal. Dario Puccini points out that in the loa, Sor Juana manages to suggest that Amerindian religions are, together with Judaism and classical antiquity, a substantial element in the genealogy of the Christian faith.12 Sor Juana inherits from Catholic humanism this conceptualization of Christ as a transhistorical figure capable of absorbing dissimilar cultural elements. Emilio Bejel argues that The Divine Narcissus helped Lezama develop his Neobaroque aesthetic, in which this type of syncretism plays a fundamental role.13 By conflating different chronologies into a transcendental sense of Time, a transhistoric Christ encompasses all spaces in a heterotopia (defined by Michel Foucault as a location “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”).14 And Sor Juana’s loa is not just a heterotopica but also a geochrony, in which space has been marked by the time of memory or, as Walter Benjamin puts it in the excerpt included in this volume, history merges into setting (BNW 60). Edward W. Soja defines this kind of spatial organization as “interpretive geography, one which recognizes spatiality as simultaneously . . . a social product (an outcome) and a shaping force (or medium) in social life.”15 A geochrony is a space of (dis)location in which major and minor languages are depolarized.

2. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: The Limits of Analogy Sor Juana’s inquiry into the relationship of Mexico and Spain dramatizes an intercultural exchange in which rupture and continuity coexist; the text moves in two directions simultaneously. Diana Díaz Balsera describes this process: “The introduction of a specular relationship between opposites is also a way of resisting and sabotaging the hegemonic projects of imperialism, projects in which the other is usually presented as something to be excluded or controlled because of its assumed inferiority, opacity, or lack of subjectivity.”16 Such a specular relationship is deployed at the end of Sor Juana’s loa, when the Europeans dance with the Aztecs and borrow their “language,” praising the God of Seeds. Christianity is recognized as the majoritarian language, but it has nonetheless been modified by its encounter with the Other, the loa thus managing to subvert from within the same Conquest that it claims to justify. Sor Juana contrasts these cultures while also

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disclosing the mutually transformative experience that both distinguishes and unites them. This specular relationship is a subset of allegory, whose main semantic function is to convey a historical event through the vestments of analogy. “Allegory,” argues Angus Fletcher, “says one thing and means another. It destroys the normal expectation we have about language, that our words ‘mean what we say.’”17 Analogical thinking is an intellectual method that profits from disparity, finding symbolic equivalences between unequal elements by recognizing degrees of similarity or dissimilarity between things. But this recognition does not prove that there is an actual link between them. To what extent, then, is analogy a reliable way of describing historical change? Clearly Sor Juana was seriously committed to allegorizing a cultural beginning, the emergence of a new relation. Her emphasis on cultural metamorphosis—the transformation of one form into another—can be grasped more fully if we consider it within the context of the philosophical debates of her time. Michel Jeanneret has shown that during the Renaissance and the Baroque, metamorphosis acted as a metaphor for the theoretical challenges raised by the presence of change in nature and social life.18 At the time, change was associated with imperfection, so it was difficult to address it without questioning the fundamental unity of God’s creation. Even Leibniz, a contemporary of Sor Juana’s and the author of one of the most important analogical systems ever designed, was not able to overcome this conundrum without proposing metamorphosis as an epistemic alibi.19 For the German Baroque philosopher, nature itself is ruled by analogical operations. Leibniz understood analogy as an analytical tool capable of tackling the undeniable diversity of the external world while affirming its internal unity. In Monadology (1714), he states that the basic element of the material world is the monad, “a simple substance that enters into composites. . . . Monads just have no windows through which something can enter into or depart from them.”20 Monads are not permeable: “The natural changes of the monads proceed from an external principle. For an external cause cannot influence their inner make-up.”21 Since monads lack permeability—each one has an outside and an inside, but no doors or windows—they change only by accumulation. Nothing new can be created, because God has already created all there is. Thus the evident diversity of the world is not the effect of any interactive exchange between monads, but rather the manifestation of an inherent complexity that each monad contains: “And as one and the

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same town viewed from different sides looks altogether different, and is, as it were, perspectively multiplied, it similarly happens that, through the infinite multitude of simple substances there are, as it were, just as many different universes, which however are only the perspectives of a single one according to the different points of view of each monad.”22 Leibniz’s monads never react to each other; that would contradict their fundamental singularity.23 The world appears to be a vast array of points that coexist in space. God, of course, sees everything simultaneously, apprehending the universe as a totality and subsuming all its perspectives into an absolute referent. From God’s point of view, all perspectives are coordinated into a shimmering, multiple whole. From these premises, according to Deleuze, Leibniz conceptualizes matter as perpetual continuation, ceaselessly folding and unfolding like waves, becoming “expressive matter, with different scales, speeds, and different vectors (mountains and waters, papers, fabrics, living tissues, the brain).”24 Matter is form in motion. Each fold offers a different perspective on the universe. Deleuze argues that in Baroque architecture, “the problem is not how to finish a fold, but how to continue it, to have it go through the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity” (see figures 14.1 and 14.2).25 In this context, analogies produce a comparative survey of the different inflections of matter, the different points in space: a monad is to substance as a room is to a building. This analogy does not prove that the monad and the room are related; it only calls attention to their similarity. Nothing in the analogy supports a direct relation between its elements, nor does an analogy create anything new. Leibniz’s model does not emphasize the process of becoming something new because monads evolve from within, not in response to other monads: “A created being is said to act externally insofar as it has perfection, and to react to another insofar as it is imperfect.”26 A fold creases, spires, pleats. Deleuze reflects Leibniz’s position when he says that the Baroque “endlessly produces folds. It does not invent things.”27 Leibniz realizes the difficulty of this position when he needs to explain physical growth and decay in Monadology: “Thus the soul changes its body only slowly and by degrees, so that it is never laid bare of all its organs all at once. There is often a metamorphosis in animals. . . . What we call births are unfoldings and growths; even as what we call deaths are unfoldings and diminutions.”28 Since Leibniz takes for granted that monads are never affected internally by their foldings, his system does not include a theory of mediation. Deleuze’s interpretation of Leibniz as a Baroque philosopher hinges on

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this conflict. “But how, then, do monads communicate with one another?” asks Gregg Lambert in his discussion of Deleuze’s study of Leibniz. Lambert claims that Deleuze answers this question for Leibniz by suggesting that “the passage between monads can only be deciphered by the operations of allegory and by the forms of secrecy that are particular to the Baroque artifice. . . . Both the allegory and the secret are founded upon the condition that no direct communication is possible.”29 Metamorphosis is the closest Leibniz and the Baroque ever come to developing an active conceptualization of processive events.30 In Monadology, metamorphosis introduces an allegorical means of visualizing change.31 Leibniz’s use of metamorphosis as a conceptual category, like Sor Juana’s, places these authors on the threshold of a critique that neither was ready to articulate. To the extent that Sor Juana intended in The Divine Narcissus to offer a dramatic rendition of how the New World came to exist, her investment in the binaries of allegorical analogies was a hindrance as much as a recourse. By centering her Auto Sacramental as a whole on metamorphosis and the myth of Echo and Narcissus, Sor Juana both mimics and deconstructs this theoretical impasse. Serge Gruzinski argues that in colonial Mexico, the influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses can be seen in mural paintings where analogical comparisons signal the collaboration between European and indigenous traditions.32 Allegories, secrets, emblems, enigmas, metamorphoses: all call for and enable oblique acts of reading. Metamorphosis is analogy set in motion; for a moment, an either-or relation is presented as a dynamic bothand creature, a hybrid grasped in the process of becoming an other. In The Divine Narcissus, Sor Juana is also invested in dramatizing metamorphosis through a sequence of temporal and spatial configurations. Echo’s incapacity to replicate Narcissus’s language accurately introduces a temporal gap, an interval in which identity can be apprehended as a relational event. Narcissus’s words and Echo’s dysfunctional recycling of them produce a mediatory space, a locus where similarity becomes difference. In the story of Echo, words are constantly being translocated to different meanings through fragmentation and erasure, variation and replacement. This slippage between signifier and signified challenges the mechanisms of analogy so essential to Baroque allegory and raises a series of questions. Is Sor Juana writing as part of a metropolitan continuum, or is she writing against the metropolis, expressing instead the emergence of an intercultural subjectivity? Is she using the Baroque mannerisms of Luis de Góngora and Pedro Calderón de la Barca to mark her own place within a shared culture, or to mark a new

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place between cultures? By manipulating a common imaginary to represent both America and Europe, Sor Juana opens her text to the possibility of an anthropologic outlook in which cultures may be simultaneously similar and different. Thus the nature of transculturation can be exposed and explored. What exactly is happening when the Spaniards celebrate the God of Seeds at the end of the loa, echoing Satan’s distorted imitation of Christ’s sacrifice? If Spaniards and Aztecs are doing the same thing, are Satan and God dancing the tocotín together? The Aztecs and the Spaniards use the same Baroque imagery to denote different—and even antagonistic—perspectives on the numinous, but this apparent sameness is unveiled as an illusion in the Auto when Echo alters the semantic value of Narcissus’s utterance. The language of the loa thus subverts its own rhetoric, occluding its duplicity while also insisting on it. Transcultural enunciation provokes a semiotic crisis; new relations can only be deployed by an act of semantic violence; old words are forced to mean otherwise, while neologisms crack open hegemonic identity to express new identities. “The strange in the Baroque is not the unknown, but the known displaced and blown out of proportion,” says Roberto González Echevarría. “The Baroque assumes the strangeness of the Other as an awareness of the strangeness of Being.”33 Jane E. Ackerman observes that The Divine Narcissus “constantly doubles back on itself.”34 Indeed, Sor Juana’s commitment to allegorical analogies, duplications, and doublings is inherent in her theology, which centers on the paradox of God’s love, his gift of salvation to fallen mankind through grace. It is precisely this paradox of salvation—this divine reversal, this spiritual metamorphosis—that is allegorized in her drama. The God of Seeds can be assimilated into Christ because the miracle of Christ’s love frames human history from the beginning of time. If this is so, then the assimilation of indigenous practice is just another fold in God’s providential plan, and as such it can be translocalized. For Deleuze and Guattari, this is what is fundamental to the American experience: “America reversed the directions: it put its Orient in the West, as if it were precisely in America that the earth came full circle; its West is the edge of the East. (India is not the intermediary between the Occident and the Orient . . . America is the pivot point and mechanism of reversal).”35 “Baroque exoticism generally took the form of views of strange and remote regions, both real and imaginary,” says John Rupert Martin about the European Baroque. “As a rule, exotic details were simply applied as superficial enrichments; the basic fabric of Baroque art remained unchanged.”36

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The American Baroque differs sharply on this point because America was itself often the “exotic detail.” So the “basic fabric” of Sor Juana’s Baroque art contradicts Martin’s assertion, showing that cultures, once translocalized, are indeed changeable. Home is not a place but a process of transformation, a mediation between spaces that create a common language, a within. Neither Hispanic nor American but both, the The Divine Narcissus justifies post-Tridentine Catholic theology and also marks the conflicted space in which Circum-Atlantic performance emerges into literary visibility. The characters of the prologue constantly mean otherwise, echo each other’s intentions, cross a vanishing threshold that leads to the other’s space, an alien space that becomes home. Like mirrors facing each other, Mexicans and Spaniards generate a Baroque fold encompassing a Circum-Atlantic consciousness. This consciousness, the very basis of the New World Baroque, awaits its full critical assessment.

3. Carlos Fuentes: God Goes to the Movies Fuentes argues that “the Baroque in Latin America was the response of the New World to the Old World. It took a form of European culture, the Baroque, and transformed it into a hiding place for Indian culture, for Black culture, for the great syncretism which is the culture of Spanish and Portuguese America . . . and around the whirlpool of the Baroque which is the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico.”37 His play, Orchids in the Moonlight, like Sor Juana’s, stages a Circum-Atlantic heterotopia, a layering of spaces, but while Sor Juana’s loa proposes that there is no relational process without (divine) mediation, Fuentes’s play seems to suggest that a realm comprised only of mediatory gestures reduces the relational event to an empty sign. If the dichotomy of here and there is translocated by Sor Juana, it is dismantled by Fuentes. The inability of Fuentes’s characters to distinguish the specular from the spectacular marks the gap between the Baroque and the Neobaroque. It seems a stretch to compare Sor Juana’s seventeenth-century sacred drama to Fuentes’s twentieth-century parodic cultural critique, but a consideration of the relation of the Baroque to the Neobaroque offers a starting point. Christine Buci-Glucksmann writes about the Neobaroque from a historical perspective, arguing that the Baroque is a mise-en-scène “of alterity (of the divine, the feminine, death),” which makes visible things that are not usually seen.38 The historical Baroque uses trompe l’oeil effects as a trick, but

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it counts on our eventual discovery that the quadratura in the ceiling is, after all, a flat surface expanded into infinity by the hand of an artist trained in the rules of perspective. The verisimilitude of Baroque art becomes a cipher for the transcendental substance of reality: if there is a lie, there must also be truth. On the contrary, the Neobaroque understands that “reality” inheres in the perception of the trick itself. The difference between the ceiling and the painted image, between flatness and depth, is contingent and relational rather than intrinsic or essential. This Neobaroque impulse to neutralize metaphysical arguments leaves us in the midst of a world in which “play” supplants “Being.” For Buci-Glucksmann, the contemporary Baroque, the Neobaroque, facilitates “a world where the creative drive is still viable, even in the absence of a theological imperative.”39 This statement begins to describe Fuentes’s play. Orchids in the Moonlight takes place in Venice Beach, California, the day Orson Welles dies (though Welles was still alive when the play was written). Dolores, dressed “like a stylized Mexican campesina,” and María, who will wear a variety of costumes throughout the play, live together in a space that is both “shared and constantly disputed by the two women.”40 They spend their days trying to avoid the surveillance of “Mamá,” a character who never appears on stage but exercises a strong emotional control over them. Their age fluctuates during the play (they can be either thirty or sixty). Fuentes is particularly interested in keeping their identities unstable, describing his aim as follows: “The physical characteristics of the women are not fixed. Ideally, the roles will be played by María Félix and Dolores del Río. Even more ideally, they will alternate in the roles. In their absence, they can be played by actresses who are like them. . . . This does not prevent the perversion, if necessary, that the roles should be played by two rosy-cheeked, blond, plump women. As a last resort, and in the absence of all the abovementioned possibilities, the protagonists can be two men” (102). Their only common ground is “a vast wardrobe upstage, made up of mobile clothes rails like the ones found in hotels and receptions. Hanging there are all types of clothes imaginable, from crinoline to sarong, from the customary national dress of Mexico to Emmanuel Ungaro’s latest collection” (102). From the start, both characters are defined by their role-playing. More than inhabiting a specific identity, their subjectivity coalesces around the perpetual performance of a wide selection of postures and clichés: film titles, popular song lyrics, newspaper clips, opera.41 Both characters rely on scopic identification to verify their sense of self;

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if they are not recognized by an audience or a fan, they feel lost. Totally incapable of monadic autonomy, Dolores and María are relational beings. While attending a showing of their movies, they relish the double exposure of watching and being watched: “The audience was divided, wondering: shall we watch them on the screen or shall we watch them watching themselves on the screen?” (107). As spectators of their own films, both women derive their subjectivity from a copy, not from an original or essential substance. Their identities are only mediations; they exist between their images on the screen and their physical presence in the movie theater, between their aura as movie stars and their participation as audience members, between their myth, their bodies, and the people that surround them. Dolores and María are simulations; they prefer the signifier over the signified, semiotic value over semantic value. They are creatures of the Neobaroque. Sarduy explains that simulation subverts dualistic pairings; the telos of simulation is not to fake the real, but to enact its own pleasure. Instead of an object of desire, simulation’s object is desire itself, the drive to play, to waste, to lie, to evade final determinations. Simulation is not allegorical; in fact, its resistance to allegorization is one of the trademarks of the Neobaroque. Sarduy writes: “The contemporary Baroque, the Neobaroque, reflects structurally the disharmony, the rupture of homogeneity and of logos as an absolute, the lack that constitutes our epistemic foundation.”42 Fuentes’s play is about the echoes, not the voices; it is what María and Dolores lack, not what they are, that holds the “plot” together. The women linger in a world of extreme fluidity that can only be interrupted by physical death. (It is this vision of death as the interruption of desire that sometimes links the Neobaroque to existentialism and Lacanian therapy.) By means of his characters María and Dolores, Fuentes creates what Irlemar Chiampi, in her book Barroco y modernidad, attributes to the recuperated, revised (Neo)Baroque of Lezama and Carpentier: “an archaeology of modernity,” one that allows us to reinterpret Latin American experience as a “dissonant modernity.”43 When Lanin A. Gyurko insists on seeing the play as “international in scope, and, in its essence, uniquely Mexican,” he denies the text its Neobaroque dispersion, its poiesis: “Fuentes approaches his homeland as an outsider, through the perspective of the chicanas, who defend both their filmic idols and their native country, but within the United States.”44 But in fact, the play contests the dichotomy of inside-outside, in the manner of Deleuze’s fold. Thanks to the circulation of film, María and Dolores are fully translocal; they are nowhere and everywhere. Gyurko reads the play from the standpoint of

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its absent character. Mamá stands for the origin, the “inside” from which a national Mexican identity can be brought to light, “a supernatural force, linked with death.”45 Dolores and María are always concerned about what Mamá will feel, think, or do. But if Mamá—like the Law, invisible and everpresent—represents the conventional standards of Mexican selfhood, her daughters are far from being loyal offspring. They have created their own mother; the vault in which they live and hide, the cave in which they exist as Platonic shadows, the dark movie theater in which they contemplate themselves, are copies of copies. Their apartment is a movable border constantly redefined by the unexpected spaces of film. They do not need to cross the border between Mexico and the United States; they are themselves the vanishing threshold that recedes with each change of costume, each simulation, each movie. In Neobaroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Angela Nda‑  lianis writes that “digital technology, especially as used within the world of computer games, has created more literal labyrinths for players to traverse. Highlighting a crisis in traditional forms of symptomatic interpretation, the multilinear nature of game spaces suggests that our modes of interpretation need to reflect an equally neo-baroque multiplicity.”46 Clearly Ndaliani’s “game spaces” include film, and it is Fuentes’s insight that film has the same mediating function between Mexico and the United States today that the Circum-Atlantic exchange had, after the Conquest, between Mexico and Spain. As Stephen Calloway reminds us in his book Baroque Baroque, the twentieth-century recuperation of the Baroque coincided with the rise of the film industry.47 Under translocal circumstances, identities can only be described by observing their processive flow. For Sor Juana, identities are established by a process of mediation within a spatialized memory that links the echo to the voice. For Fuentes, identities are always in the making, and it is only through their performativity that we can imagine them. Nonetheless, in both plays, identities are dramatized in terms of their processive flow—how they appear, change, remain, vanish. The emphasis of the Baroque and the Neobaroque on movement and contiguity—dynamic folds—enables a critique of current categories of self. The Circum-Atlantic exchange that brought together Aztecs and Christians provided a testing ground in which selves were forced to confront the complexities of historical transformation. Sor Juana faced this challenge with allegorical analogies and found in the idea of metamorphosis a trope that facilitated a processive apprehension of change. While

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Sor Juana stands—like Leibniz and the Baroque itself—at the threshold of a quest for a philosophy of mediations, Fuentes stands at a point in which our awareness of change has been radically naturalized by the intervention of technology into the texture of everyday life. In Orchids in the Moonlight, film serves the same function that allegory fulfills in The Divine Narcissus: movies are now the site where translocality becomes legible. In Fuentes’s world, mediation is the norm, not a theological mystery. Mabel Moraña argues that there is an “Ultrabaroque,” a critical discourse in which the specific devices that identify Baroque and Neobaroque styles are being sublated into a more generalized cultural attitude.48 This Ultrabaroque state of mind conflates all Baroques with the hegemonic energy of the postmodern paradigm.49 Do we really need another beyond, a postNeobaroque? Are we reaching a point of saturation—quite ironic when dealing with the Baroque—or is the Ultrabaroque another point for a Lacanian suturation, a fashionable model for the subjectivities of our global age? Written for television, Jesusa Rodríguez’s play, Sor Juana in Prison: A Virtual Pageant Play (1995), exemplifies this trend. Rodríguez’s play introduces us to a Sor Juana that is writing an electronic letter, “launching a bit into cyberspace” with her “digital pen.”50 The set for the play includes, besides a Macintosh computer, a video screen in which we can see projections of the letter’s text and a photograph of Mexico’s expresident, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, “dressed as Sister (Sor) Philothea” (211). By pressing a single button on her computer, Sor Juana can be automatically encoded and translocated into a rich variety of media(tions). Since the computer opens up a potential window or door to the outside world, Sor Juana’s cell is not exactly a monad, although it certainly looks like a self-contained space, one in which “the Spectacle that you are about to see is the result of years of experimentation with high tech. . . . Any resemblance to real life is purely virtual” (211). Sor Juana’s habitus is thus rendered here as an enclosed cell that can also be easily translocalized, via the television set, into the privacy of any Mexican home. Technology regulates Sor Juana’s presence and absence simultaneously, and her “office” denotes a setting in which identity and theatricality are merged. Is this our next geochrony? Or is the Baroque merely serving here as an ordinary adjective, one that now means everything and nothing at the same time? Maybe we should not worry too much; after all, Sor Juana and Fuentes have already shown that the Baroque has an endless capacity for transformation and inclusion. In this most recent phase of globalization, we can expect an array of interacting neo-Neobaroques. And

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why not? Proliferation, eccentricity, disparity, intertextuality, tension between opposing positions and possibilities, displacement and replacement, direction and indirection: do not these Neobaroque strategies and structures echo the attitudes of our time?

Notes 1 William B. Jordan, “A Forgotten Legacy: Murillo’s Cabinet Pictures on Stone,

2 3 4

5 6

7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

Metal, and Wood,” in Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617–1682): Paintings from American Collections, ed. Suzanne L. Stratton-Pruitt (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002), 63–73. Deleuze, Fold, 88. Focillon, Life of Forms in Art, 58. Werner Weisback, Spanish Baroque Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941), 2–3. Qtd. in Maiorino, Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts, 2. Maiorino, Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts, 3. Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, 38. Wölfflin sees Baroque and classical styles in relational terms; each style enables the other by producing a “negative self-image.” For a more detailed analysis of Wölfflin’s ideas, see Brown, “Classic Is the Baroque.” Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 97. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 105. Monika Kaup engages Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of minoritarian discourse in “Becoming-Baroque.” Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 106. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16. Cruz, Divine Narcissus. All further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. Puccini, Una mujer en soledad, 170. Bejel, José Lezama Lima, 45–69. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16, no. 1 (1986): 22–27. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), 7. Viviana Díaz Balsera, “Mal de amor y alteridad en un texto de Sor Juana: El divino Narciso reescribe a Calderón,” Bulletin of the Comediantes 49, no. 1 (1997): 29; my translation. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 2. Michel Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion: Transforming Shapes in the Renaissance from da

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19

20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

31

32

33 34

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Vinci to Montaigne, trans. Nidra Poller (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 1–7. Leibniz’s dates are 1646–1716; Sor Juana’s are 1648–95. Leibniz’s work was largely published after his death, and Sor Juana was probably unfamiliar with the few texts by Leibniz that circulated before her death. Nonetheless, their similarity with respect to similarity (i.e., their analogical thinking) reveals an important aspect of their shared Baroque sensibility. G. W. Leibniz, Monadology, ed. Nichólas Reseher (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991), 17. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 24. For a fuller analysis of Leibniz’s theory of monads, see Anthony Savile, Leibniz and the Monadology (London: Routledge, 2000), esp. 81–102, 167–85. A good summary of the same ideas is also available in Nicholas Jolley, Leibniz (London: Routledge, 2005), 66–92. A more detailed discussion of Leibniz’s philosophy as a whole can be found in Robert Merrihew Adams, Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). Deleuze, Fold, 34. Ibid. Leibniz, Monadology, 23. Deleuze, Fold, 3. Leibniz, Monadology, 26. Gregg Lambert, The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (New York: Continuum, 2002), 47–48; emphasis original. For an intriguing discussion of the impact of monadic theory on conceptualizations of race and difference, see Peter Fenves, “Imagining an Inundation of Australians; or, Leibniz on the Principles of Grace and Race,” in Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy, ed. Andrew Valls (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 73–88. William Egginton claims that the real problem both Leibniz and Deleuze are trying to solve lies in their need to explain the continuity of matter. The internal space of monads never contacts the external surface of the world, but that should not lead us to think that our reality is dualistic (in the Platonic sense). The fold solves this potential problem by allowing a maximum degree of continual flow between monads. See William Egginton, “Of Baroque Holes and Baroque Folds,” in Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis MartínEstudillo (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 55–71. Serge Gruzinski, The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization, trans. Deke Dusinbere (New York: Routledge, 2002), 79–132. Gruzinski mentions the murals in the Casa del Deán in Puebla, Mexico, and the murals in the Augustinian monastery of San Miguel Arcángel Ixmiquilpan, in Ixmiquilpan, Hidalgo, Mexico. González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood, 164, 198. Jane E. Ackerman, “Voice in El Divino Narciso,” Bulletin of the Comediantes 39, no. 1 (1987): 66.

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35 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 19. 36 Martin, Baroque, 182.

37 Carlos Fuentes, “Carlos Fuentes,” in The Paris Review: Latin American Writers at

Work, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 194.

38 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La folie du voir: De l’esthétique baroque (Paris: Galilée,

39 40

41

42

43 44 45 46 47 48

49

50

1986), 171; my translation. See “The Work of the Gaze,” chap. 2 from La folie du voir, translated by Dorothy Z. Baker in this volume. Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “La manera o el nacimiento de la estética,” Cuadernos del Círculo, no. 2 (1992): 30; my translation. Carlos Fuentes, Orchids in the Moonlight, 1981, in Latin American Plays, ed. and trans. Sebastian Doggart (London: Nick Hern Books, 1996), 102. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. The complex network of echoes that traverse the play has been studied in detail by Eduardo F. Elías, “Carlos Fuentes and Movie Stars (Intertextuality in a Mexican Drama),” Latin American Theatre Review 19, no. 2 (1986): 67–77. Severo Sarduy, Barroco, 1974, in Ensayos generales sobre el barroco, 211; my translation. This passage comes from the “Supplement” that concludes Sarduy’s Barroco; chap. 5 of Barroco is translated by Christopher Winks in this volume. Irlemar Chiampi, “The Baroque at the Twilight of Modernity” (BNW 524; 508). Lanin A. Gyurko, “Cinematic Image and National Identity: Fuentes’ Orquídeas a la Luz de la Luna,” Latin American Theatre Review 17, no. 2 (1984): 3–24. Ibid., 7. Ndalianis, Neobaroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, 27. Calloway, Baroque Baroque, 58–107. Mabel Moraña, “Baroque/Neobaroque/Ultrabaroque: Disruptive Readings of Modernity,” in Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005), 241–81. Two indispensable texts are Armstrong and Zamudio-Taylor, Ultra-Baroque; and Ono, Divine Excess. Although similar in many respects, the definitions of Ultrabaroque in each book emphasize a different historical period. Armstrong and Zamudio-Taylor locate the Ultrabaroque very much amid contemporary artists and theories, but Ono says that the Ultrabaroque found its best displays during the eighteenth century. Both, of course, are right. Jesusa Rodríguez, Sor Juana in Prison: A Virtual Pageant Play, trans. Diana Taylor with Marlene Rodríguez-Cancio, in Holy Terrors: Latin American Women Perform, ed. Taylor and Roselyn Constantino (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 211. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text.

  Chapter Twenty-three  

From the Baroque to the Neobaroque

Chapter 2 from Ensayo de contraconquista Gonzalo Celorio

Translated by Maarten van Delden

The

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Celorio

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490    G o n za l o

Celorio

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da Vinci, The Last Supper (pre-restoration), ca. 1495–98. Santa M aria delle Grazie, Milan. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, New York

23.1  Leonardo

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( Jacopo Robusti), The Last Supper, 1592–94. San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. Photograph: Scala/Art Resource, New York

23.2  Tintoretto

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494    G o n za l o

Celorio

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Celorio

23.3  Polychrome

stucco, detail of interior wall, Church of Santa María Tonantzintla, eighteenth century. State of Puebla, Mexico

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498    G o n za l o

Celorio

23.4  The

Jesuit College of San Ildefonso, eighteenth century. Mexico City

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500    G o n za l o

Celorio

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[Duke University Press does not hold electronic rights to this material. To view it, please refer to the print version of this title.]

502    G o n za l o

Celorio

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504    G o n za l o

Celorio

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506    G o n za l o

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23.5  Church

of San Francisco Xavier Tepotzotlán, eighteenth century. State of Mexico

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  Chapter Twenty-four  

The Baroque at the Twilight of Modernity

Chapter 1 from Barroco y modernidad Irlemar Chiampi

Translated by William Childers

In the 1970s and 1980s, yet another representative group of Latin American writers turned to the Baroque, inscribing the past within the cultural dynamic of the present to confront the enigma of their own future. A past at once Mediterranean, Iberian, colonial, and American is reorganized in our literary modernity. Having escaped marginality and exclusion, having achieved aesthetic legibility, this past attains historical legitimation. The Baroque, with its historical and geographical, not to mention aesthetic eccentricity, challenges the historicist canon (the new “classicism”) constructed in the hegemonic centers of the Western world, thereby functioning to redefine the terms according to which Latin America enters into the orbit of EuroAmerican modernity. The Baroque, crossroads of signs and temporalities, aesthetic logic of mourning and melancholy, luxuriousness and pleasure, erotic convulsion and allegorical pathos, reappears to bear witness to the crisis or end of modernity and to the very condition of a continent that could not be assimilated by the project of the Enlightenment. Starting from the fruitful lessons of the great precursors José Lezama Lima and Alejo Carpentier, such novelists, poets, and essayists as Severo Sarduy, Augusto Roa Bastos, Haroldo de Campos, Luis Rafael Sánchez, Carlos Germán Belli, Octavio Paz, and Édouard Glissant, among others, reappropriated the Baroque, situating it at the forefront of the intellectual debate concerning modernity and postmodernity. The Neobaroque is thus constituted as an archaeology of the modern, one that allows us to reinterpret Latin American experience as a dissonant modernity. To verify the cultural significance of this most recent reappropriation, it is necessary to sketch the history of the cycles and recyclings that inserted

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the Baroque into Latin American modernity. Two tendencies can be discerned in this process: on the one hand, aesthetic legibility, corresponding to modernismo and the vanguardia, the first two moments of insertion of the Baroque in our literary history; on the other, the tendency of historical legitimization, beginning with the “new novel” that gestated in the fifties and arrived during the period of the Boom of the sixties. This tendency comes into its own in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s with the previously mentioned group of novelists, poets, and essayists, on the stage conventionally known as the “post-Boom.” These insertions of the Baroque into the historic sweep of Latin American literary modernity constitute a long trajectory of a hundred years, coinciding, in general terms, with cycles of poetic rupture and renewal every twenty to thirty years: 1890, 1920, 1950, 1970.1 In these cycles, the continuity of the Baroque reveals the contradictory nature of the Latin American experience of modernity, cannibalizing the aesthetics of rupture produced in the hegemonic centers, even as its quest for the new feeds off its own unfinished and incomplete tradition.

Cycles and Recyclings of the Baroque “Como la Galatea gongorina / me encantó la marquesa verleniana” ( Just as by Góngora’s Galatea / I was enchanted by Verlaine’s Marquise).ii These lines from Rubén Darío mark the first, incipient reappropriation of the Baroque. A certain verbal preciosity and an excessive verification of the external world, à la Góngora, might be said to constitute, in Darío’s poetry, the first avatar of aesthetic legibility of the Baroque. Nonetheless, the mixture (and struggle) of Americanism, Gallophilia, and Hispanism in the Nicaraguan poet resulted in a version of the Baroque consistent with the modernist project of aligning our literature with Parnassianism and symbolism. The Baroque evoked by Darío is a thematic re-creation, identified more with lo español than with  Modernismo refers to a Latin American literary movement in the late nineteenth cen-

tury and into the twentieth that is more akin to a late Romanticism than modernism in the European and US contexts, and whose most distinguished poet is Rubén Darío; the vanguardia in Latin America is close to the European and US avant-garde, but I retain the Spanish in both cases to maintain the eccentricity of Latin Anerican movements with respect to homologous movements elsewhere.—Trans. ii Rubén Darío, “Cantos de vida y experanza,” in Laurel: Antología de la poesía moderna en lengua española, ed. Emilio Proados et al. (Mexico City: Editorial Trillas, 1986), 38–39, 38.—Eds.

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the aesthetic practice of rescuing a tradition marginalized in the 1800s. In Darío’s prologue to Prosas profanas (1896), his “Spanish grandfather” appears in a portrait gallery of writers whom the poet admires, alongside Cervantes, Góngora, and Quevedo, not to mention Garcilaso. But in the end, he declares that it is Verlaine who plucks the strings of his inner lyre. The second insertion of the Baroque in Latin American literary modernity is brought about by the poets of the avant-garde through the topical appropriation of this “premodern” aesthetic. Jorge Luis Borges, for example, in the Ultraist manifestoes of 1921, written after his contact with German expressionism in Switzerland, not only celebrates the “joyfully Baroque” tendency of a Ramón Gómez de la Serna, on par with Huidobro’s creationism, but also constantly invokes Quevedo, Gracián, and above all Góngora as precursors of the prismatic transformation of perception of the Ultraist metaphor.2 To the practitioners of the “active aesthetic of the prism,” the Baroque metaphor is a poetic model and a critical reference point in their quest for innovation, directed simultaneously against both the programmatic simplicity of an insipid poetry of direct but banal statement and the trite images of ­modernismo. The experimental and technical insertion of the Baroque by the Latin American vanguardia lacks any serious concern for what we might term the cultural aspect of the problem, that is, an interpretation of the Baroque that takes into account its specific Hispanic or American content. On the contrary, at this time the focus is on the Baroque as a universal aesthetic. In fact, we should recall that the “discovery” of the Gongorine metaphor is tied to the postsymbolist critical context in Europe, where the aesthetic revalidation of Góngora begins through the parallel with Mallarmé, following the former’s three centuries in purgatory. It is only after the fin de siècle revolution in poetic language that Góngora becomes legible to modernity and can thus be definitively recovered, through a synchronic reading, by the generation that created contemporary poetry. José Lezama Lima is undoubtedly the poet who benefited most from this reading, but in taking advantage of the discoveries of the avant-garde, he clearly goes far beyond the rhetorical analysis of metaphor. His poetry, beginning with Muerte de Narciso (Death of Narcissus, 1937), followed by Enemigo rumor (Hostile Murmur, 1941) and La fijeza (Fixity, 1949), illustrates the recovery of the “trademark” of Baroque poetics, obscurity, which he inscribes in a modern version of the inaccessibility of meaning. Presiding here is what Lezama termed the “unconditioned poetic,” or the undoing of the

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causal nexus (logical, recognizable) between the signifier and its culturally defined referent. In Lezama’s poetics, the Baroque metaphor is transformed through unpredictable analogies, creating an extension of the imaginary in the verbal material, in quest of the mysterious sound of the invisible world. The modernization of the Baroque is not fully realized, in my view, until the cultural meaning of this aesthetic undergoes a critical revision. The third cycle of the insertion of the Baroque into Latin American literary modernity only begins when the American “content” is attributed to the formal experimentation of the Baroque. I am referring, of course, to the self-conscious vindication of American cultural identity that makes explicit the ideological implications not spelled out in the metaphoric language of poetry. This historical legitimization is a substantive turn in the reappropriation of the Baroque. It requires a dialectic capable of converting the universal into the particular, and vice versa. Decisive steps in this direction were taken by Lezama Lima in the fifties and by Alejo Carpentier in the sixties.3

The Americanization of the Baroque Lezama captures the specific tone of the Baroque in his review of an exhibition of paintings by Roberto Diago (Havana, 1948): For in speaking of the Spanish or colonial Baroque, we are apt to fall prey to the error of borrowing concepts from the history of European art, inappropriate for evaluating features of our own culture, which are entirely distinct. . . . The true Baroque, our Baroque, is not scholastic [Lezama is referring here to the severe and dogmatic Baroque of the Jesuits], but Spanish. Its ancestor is the ornate, decadent Gothic, and it gives rise in turn to the incessant proliferation of the Churrigueresque. . . . It is this Baroque that still interests us today, forged, not by means of Wölfflin’s and Worringer’s Germanic pedantry but with silver and dreams brought from America, the deformed form, the innermost depth, indeed the very form of inwardness, and yet also through the lightest breath over the surface, the stylized guts of a gored bull, a peasant plowman whose heavy eyebrows meet at the center, ripping open the earth, bloody theatrical props, pornographic dwarves, the fat teardrops of Portuguese pearls, and shameless syllogisms.4

Lezama’s position is clear: the Baroque is “our thing” (cosa nuestra), Iberian and American (Iberian as a consequence of the Portuguese and Spanish colonization of America); there is no room in his conception to speak of an “artistic constant” or “will to form,” as do Eugenio d’Ors, Wölfflin, or Wor-

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ringer. It is not, therefore, a transhistoric phenomenon, or a stage through which all cultures must inevitably pass, or the exhaustion of classicism. It is, rather, the fact of America itself, “the fertile humus deposited by five civilizations”; that is, the Iberian world and the “coming to fruition of a confluence” in the discovery of America. In an earlier essay, Lezama finds the meaning of the distorted forms of the Baroque in this confluence. It is “creation, pain”: “It is not a comfortable situation when one culture assimilates or displaces another . . . but rather a painful birth, equally creator and created.”5 La expresión americana (the American Expression, 1957) is the work that takes up these hypotheses to develop the concept of the destiny of America as an imaginary era in which the Baroque becomes the shaping paradigm and authentic beginning of a truly American reality. It is the aesthetic of “curiosity,” of infernal knowledge, whether Satanic or Faustian—a diabolical poiesis, one could say—that manifests itself as much among the literati of the viceregal elite as among Indian and mestizo artists. The novelty of this formulation does not lie in the identification of the Baroque aesthetic with a nascent “Creole sensibility” or with processes of transculturation. Lezama’s strategy consists in detecting, within the crucible of colonization, two divergent aesthetic categories (in opposition to the European Baroque). The first is Baroque “tension,” a formal marker characterized not by the accumulation of motifs, as in the European Baroque, but by a combination creating a “unitary form.” Thus the tense combination of theocratic colonial motifs with Inca emblems would not be simply a juxtaposition of religious elements deriving from opposing cultures but rather an “impetus driving toward form to seek the fulfillment of its symbol.”6 Here the word symbol is understood in the etymological sense (sum-ballein: “bring together,” “join,” “harmonize”). The colonized subject, then, expresses his cultural dilemma (religious, political) through the impulse to unite autochthonous and Spanish theologies. The second category, “Plutonism,” corresponds to the critical content of the American Baroque, the semantic counterpart of the formal tension. If we keep in mind the Plutonic as the igneous magma from which the earth’s crust is formed, and Pluto as the lord of the underworld, it is comprehensible that Plutonism is referred to as “an originary fire that breaks the fragments and unifies them,” that encompasses the rupture and the unification of fragments of past traditions into a new cultural order. Clearly Lezama’s conceptual metaphor lends itself to the suggestion that this rupture proceeds from

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the diabolical poiesis, already mentioned, particularly when we note that the etymology of diabolical is dia-ballein (to separate, to break). Baroque tension and Plutonism interpenetrate to justify Lezama’s definition of the American Baroque as “an art of counterconquest.” iii Lezama cleaerly intends to attribute a political meaning of implicit rebellion, not only to the tense combinations of religious motifs in artists like the Indian Kondori or the mulatto Aleijadinho but also to the thirst for universal knowledge of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz or Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. The decisive factor in this Americanization of the Baroque is its early modernizing orientation, introducing in a period altogether premodern the concept of revolutionary art. In differentiating our Baroque from the European, inverting Weisbach’s terms (“the Baroque, art of the CounterReformation”), Lezama hopes to reveal a content entirely opposed to the scholastic Baroque, instrumentalized for purposes of propaganda and persuasion to Catholic dogma, in accordance with the Jesuits’ Ecclesia militans.7 Seen from the other side, through its diabolic/symbolic urge, the Baroque operates as a countercatechism defining the subterranean politics and painful, conflictual experience of transculturated mestizos during the colonial period. On the other hand, by revealing in its shaping design the continuity of four hundred years of diabolical poiesis—from the seventeenth century to the twentieth—the Baroque ceases to be merely “historical,” a closed book, condemned as reactionary and conservative, and becomes instead our permanent modernity, the other modernity, outside linear history’s myth of progress, outside the gradual unfolding of the Hegelian logos.8 The Baroque is, for Lezama, our metahistory.9 The most influential and best-known critical revision of the Baroque is Alejo Carpentier’s (Lezama’s remained confined to his island until the seventies). With the Boom in full swing, in an essay in Tientos y diferencias (1964), the Cuban novelist defended what he referred to as “style” in his prose to justify the Baroque description in his novels. Carpentier’s main strategy consists in linking his concept of “American marvelous realism” with a meditation on Baroque style to provide an aesthetic rationale for this discursive mode in prose narrative. Thus the proliferation of signifiers to name one and the same object (natural or historical) is justified as a means for inscribing “American contexts” in universal culture to render them legible.10 This iii BNW 213.—Eds.

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project, in the experimental years of the “new novel,” implied, understandably, the rejection and reworking of the mimetic realism of the regionalist novel that preceded it. Proliferation (naming, describing) is no longer just a matter of recounting or documenting reality but of finding a homology in the form of the content (the marvelous real). Carpentier’s Baroque therefore goes from aesthetic legibility to a legitimization in nature and history, which he synthesizes in the following terms: “Our art has always been Baroque . . . born from trees, timber, altarpieces, and altars, from decadent carvings and calligraphic portraits, and even from late neoclassicisms.” iv The symmetries between Carpentier and Lezama that I have tried to draw out by means of a semiotic explication are nonetheless merely external. Carpentier’s postrealist mimesis is not equivalent to Lezama’s idea of formal tension, and Plutonism corresponds even less to the marvelous real. The essential difference is revealed in their respective discursive practices: the rhetoric of proliferation (the horror vacui ) preserves in Carpentier the “rational” slant of a utopian transparency. The communicative goal of the Baroque in articulating an image of America as the continent of prodigies is not lost, even when his stories include certain verbal extravagances whose ultimate effect is one of ridiculing mimesis.11 By way of contrast, in Lezama, symbolic/diabolic poiesis does not communicate any other meaning than the very mechanism of the “unconditioned poetic.” The relative clarity of the one thus contrasts with the absolute difficulty of the other. While both these conceptions are metahistorical versions of Latin America, Carpentier’s marvelous real is based on sociohistoric facts such as cultural mestizaje or the multitemporal heterogeneity of the continent (which is what is meant, finally, by the “theory of contexts”). The root of Lezama’s idea of “Plutonic” transformation, on the other hand, lies in a kind of imagination he understands to be specifically American, that is, an imagination generated by colonization in the American “gnostic space,” a vortex of diversity that opens a dialogue between man and nature, inaugurated in our history by the emblematic figure of el señor barroco. Carpentier, in sum, elevates the marvelous real to the category of being, whereas Lezama insists on the idea of America as a matter of becoming, of being and nonbeing in permanent mutation. Perhaps this helps explain why Carpentier speaks of the Latin American writers’ return to the Baroque “style” as a consciously chosen means i v BNW 262.—Eds.  BNW 213–15.—Eds.

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for representing “our essences,” whereas Lezama converts the Baroque into an endlessly “transforming form,” a paradigm whose unbroken continuity stretches from the seventeenth century to the present. In a lecture of 1975, Carpentier emphatically insisted that it is “a fundamental error” to consider the Baroque “an invention of the seventeenth century,” his purpose being to define this aesthetic as a “human constant,” a kind of “creative impulse” that cyclically reappears in the course of human history.12 This notion derives from Eugenio d’Ors’s atemporal idea of the Baroque, rejected, as we have seen, by Lezama. Carpentier invokes a multitude of moments of “transformation, mutation, or innovation” (“The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” 98), whose manifestations are as diverse as Russian, Viennese, or Czech architecture, Hindu, Italian, English, or French literature, and so on. Latin America enters the series as “the chosen territory of the Baroque,” because “all symbiosis, all mestizaje engenders the Baroque” (100). Of greater interest than the anthropological validity of his ideas or his differences with Lezama is the way that Carpentier dissolves the specificity of the American Baroque and universalizes it in a sort of transhistorical and transgeographical modernity, countering the negativity that persisted into the sixties and seventies in relation to the Baroque. He associates the Baroque with moments of aesthetic innovation and social change, which he recognizes primarily in peripheral zones, one of which, it goes without saying, is revolutionary Cuba (105). At the same time he disassociates it from those negative interpretations that still prevail in contemporary intellectual circles and, of course, in orthodox sectors of socialist Cuba: an aesthetics of excess, of bad taste, of artifice, and unnecessary verbal complication and, on the ideological plane, a pre-Enlightenment legacy of Spanish Catholicism, an instrument of colonialist ideology.13

The (Neo)Baroque and Postmodernity When reading much of the literature produced in Latin America over the past twenty years, we immerse ourselves in a vast Baroque festival. In Cobra (1972), by Severo Sarduy, the metamorphosis of word and story brought about by the combination of linguistic and pictorial overcodification marks a return to a Baroque conception of the text as the scene of an artificial, organized disorder; that is, a return to a kind of architecture in which the decorative devours meaning (just as in the Baroque church decoration blots out God). Already in Maitreya (1978) the proliferation of detail and the

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richness of figuration in the construction of the circular tale are such that form is finally turned into emptiness, a textual nirvana, though not without recovering, joyfully, the abstract refinements of Baroque wordplay (retruécano).14 Colibrí (Hummingbird, 1988) completes Sarduy’s trilogy, combining preciosity and lexical richness to bring about a perversely ludic re-creation of the Baroque effect.15 In Sarduy’s version of the paradigm, the Baroque and “decadent” modernism confront one another in a virtuosic “war of textualities.” In Luis Rafael Sánchez’s multivocal and multilingual, danceable prose, Baroque divertissement is achieved through the use of paronomastic structures such as those found in Gracián to capture the rhythm of Antillian son, as in La guaracha del Macho Camacho (Macho Camacho’s Beat, 1976). The calmer rhythms of the bolero stir the reader in La importancia de llamarse Daniel Santos (The Importance of Being Daniel Santos, 1989), a novel that captures the popular, kitsch element of our Baroque. Freed from the intellectualism of erudite references, we can give ourselves over to the cathartic pleasure of familiar lyrics that persist in the Latin American collective memory. The verbal orgy of the Baroque is, equally, the temptation to which the narrative vertigo of Yo El Supremo (I, the Supreme, 1974) deliciously succumbs. This novel accumulates references to twenty thousand documents arranged through multilayered puns that articulate the chimerical similitude between words and things. In the imaginative realm of poetry, the Baroque cornucopia pours forth its abundance in Galáxies (Galaxies, 1964–76) by Haroldo de Campos. The Brazilian poet employs a “scriptural pulsation in galactic expansion” to conceive of a book as a (geographic) journey along a narrative continuum that melds prose and poetry. At the same time he stages, in the phonic and semantic materiality of each word, the multiple possibilities for combining Joycean wordplay with the wit of Gracián. The Peruvian poet Carlos Germán Belli, in turn, celebrates the modernization of the historical Baroque with humor and irony in his books ¡Oh hada cibernética! (Oh Cybernetic Fairy!, 1962) and Canciones y otros poemas (Songs and Other Poems, 1982), rescuing poetic forms (the silva, the sestina), metric structures (the hendecasyllable, the bifurcated line), not to mention a lexicon teeming with linguistic hybrids (borrowings from Latin, archaisms, colloquialisms, Peruvianisms, technical terms). It would be incongruous to affirm that Neobaroque literature implies a radical break with the very aesthetic tradition from which it derives. In the fourth cycle of its reinsertion into our literary modernity, the Neobaroque represents a continuation of that tradition. It introduces not a break but

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a renewal of previous experiences (hence the neo). It is not a rupture but an intensification and expansion of the experimental potential of the historical Baroque recycled by Lezama and Carpentier, now accompanied by a powerfully revisionist inflexion of the ideological values of modernity. At once modern and countermodern, the Neobaroque functions within the postmodern aesthetic, as I will try to show, as an archaeological project inscribing the archaism of the Baroque as a way of allegorizing Latin America’s dissonance with modernity. Two fundamental, interdependent categories of modernity are displaced or threatened in the Neobaroque text: temporality and subjectivity. At the level of plot, the ordering of events—and thus the whole temporal orientation of the story—enters into crisis. Neobaroque works present themselves to the reader as collections of fragments, if not unrelated to one another, at least utterly devoid of development. In fact, the very concept of a “work” is no longer applicable here. In Sarduy’s Cobra, there is no verifiable chronology or any linear sequence of episodes; the plot takes the form of a series of metamorphoses undergone by a transvestite from the Doll’s Lyric Opera in 1960s Paris. There is a certain illusion of movement, however devoid of temporality, in the circular structure through which the protagonist’s agony unfolds. At one moment s/he turns into the dwarf Pup, at the next s/he becomes a blackshirt (blouson noire) from St. Germain des Près, then a member of a band of Tibetan lamas, then a tourist in India, and so on. This reiterated change is a mere disguise, and the disguise itself only a pseudochange in the novelistic action. This novel, as the narrator puts it, is “the art of decomposing an order and of composing a disorder”;16 it destroys the notion of the narrative event and thus undoes the two basic supports of narrative temporality, the consecutive (before, during, and after) and the consequential (caused by).17 In Sarduy’s Maitreya the “action” is contained by a peripatetic cycle of characters organized into mirror reflections through a subtle play of spatial alternations that produces a journey back to the starting point. But this fugitive flight is preordained, always leading back again to the very persecutors sent by the Regenta. In Macho Camacho’s Beat, an effect of immobility is achieved by focusing on four characters whose lives are bound together by an eternal present: Wednesday afternoon at five o’clock, during a traffic jam in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Strictly speaking, nothing happens during the twenty-one sections of the story, separated as they are by nineteen fragments of a radio broadcast, repeating the same back-and-forth movement devoid of any chronology, reminding the reader again and again, with the insistence

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of the lyric of the guaracha, “Life is a phenomenal thing / frontward or backward, however you swing” vi (la vida es una cosa fenomenal / lo mismo pal de alante que pal de atrás). And what does the bolero-ized prose of The Importance of Being Daniel Santos narrate but the trials and tribulations of a Caribbean Don Juan immobilized in the popular imagination? The circular tale of Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme is just as static. It begins and ends with the uncertain final resting place of the remains of Doctor Francia, only to entertain us, in the middle, not with the Guaraní epic of his twenty-six years in power, but with an overwhelming collage of texts (themselves “remains”) of the mythical Karaí Guasú. In Carpentier’s novel Baroque Concert (1974), the old-fashioned tempos of harpsichords, organs, and violins (i.e., Vivaldi, Handel, and Scarlatti) merge with the copper drums that the slave Filomeno strikes with spoons, whisks, and beaters. Is not this vast concert a magnificent image of the entropy of history? These texts, so difficult to summarize, neither advance nor retreat—thus the impression of confusion, chaos, disorientation, and even indecision. The rupture they enact of the “good” sense of historical time (the orientation toward the future, whose regressions are in principle anomalies requiring reinsertion into the normal course of history) corresponds to a rupture of subjectivity. Furthermore, the idea of a generative locus of meaning also enters into crisis in these texts, which present themselves as compilations (I, the Supreme), reports (The Importance of Being Daniel Santos), or as the surface on which a series of expansions and transformations takes place, without any generating center (Cobra, Maitreya). In the circular journey created by the unnumbered pages of Galáxias (the first page is repeated, semantically inverted, in the last), the book itself is the voyage. In his demiurgic desire, the Deus conditus of the enunciation fails utterly; the open and shut of the allegorical space of the page thematizes the impossibility of directing the generation and fulfillment of meaning in the act of writing:18 E começo aqui e meço aqui este começo e recomeço e remeço e arremesso / . . . recomeço por isso arremeço por isso teço escrever sobre escrever é / . . . § Fecho encerro reverbero aqui me fino aqui me zero não canto não conto / me desaltero me descomeço me encerro no fim do mundo o livro fina o / fundo19 vi Luis Rafael Sánchez, Macho Camacho’s Beat, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York:

Pantheon, 1980). The phrase serves as epigraph to the novel and recurs throughout.—Trans.

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And here I begin to get this beginning going and beginning again I get agitated and I turn myself loose / . . . I begin again and so hurl myself thus unfurling writing upon writing and / . . . § I shut up close down reverberate I’m ending I’m nothing I don’t sing I don’t count / I unwind I unstart I shut myself up in the end of the world the book to the / last

The death or disappearance of the subject and the crisis of historicity have often been associated with postmodernist texts, just as “decentering” and “posthistory” have been associated with postmodern culture.20 The interdependence of the categories of subjectivity and temporality have been explained by Jameson: “If, indeed, the subject has lost its capacity actively to extend its pro-tensions and re-tensions across the temporal manifold and to organize its past and future into coherent experience, it becomes difficult enough to see how the cultural productions of such a subject could result in anything but ‘heaps of fragments’ and in a practice of the randomly heterogeneous and fragmentary and the aleatory.”21 What interests me in this argument is not the nostalgia for a “genuine historicity” implicit in Jameson’s negative evaluation of postmodernism (which nonetheless reveals a certain fascination). Rather, I wish to pursue the connection Jameson establishes with another feature of texts such as those I have mentioned, which weaken both historicity (i.e., the modern vision of history) and the productive center of meaning (i.e., the modern vision of the subject), a feature that has become the postmodern category par excellence: spatiality. In fact, Jameson speaks of a “culture increasingly dominated by space and spatial logic (25),”22 in terms I wish to associate here with the formal language that Walter Benjamin detected in the Baroque drama, where “chronological movement is grasped and analyzed in a spatial image.”23 It is improbable that Latin American Neobaroque texts constitute a spatial logic identical to the dominant feature of the cultural logic of late capitalism. It is true that they are shot through and crammed to the bursting point with every sort of reference and allusion. Yet if they are spaces of euphoric intensity, they are also the coming together of heterogeneities, brilliant surfaces where Baroque stylemes shine in an inflated swirl of strata and layers, simultaneities and synchronies that do not achieve unification. We could hardly allow that the exaltation of artifice and surface detail in Sarduy aims at the “mastery of the invisible world,” that is, the image as totality and unity sought after in Lezama’s diabolic/symbolic poiesis. But we can confirm that the potential meaning and pathos of the ludic/euphoric manipulation of

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textures of remnants and residues of the historical Baroque have not yet been exhausted. Unlike the postmodernism discussed by Jameson, this manipulation does not simply array its fragments as so many “commodities,” but rather unleashes the figures of a new form of tension, albeit within the same flattening of history and decentering of the authorial function. The aesthetic logic of the Neobaroque articulates itself in the exaltation of spaces, figures, and bodies. The Baroque theater box (palco) of Doctor Francia is his office, a locale from which the symmetries and asymmetries between the pronouns “I” and “he” are smoothed over. From this page/perch (página/palco) the double is visualized and immobilized outside history, and the “Supreme Pelican of Paraguay” offers his ascetic and repressed body as a sacrifice for the good of the people. Melancholy Prince,24 he dictates his endless circulars even as he dreams of a language that would be identical with its object, and plays with the anagrammatical possibilities of words. In the episteme of the Baroque, according to Foucault: “Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge but rather the occasion of error. . . . the chimeras of similitude loom up on all sides, but they are recognized as chimeras; it is the privileged age of trompe-l’oeil painting, of the comic illusion, of the play that duplicates itself by representing another play, of the quid pro quo, of dreams and visions; it is the age of the deceiving senses; it is the age in which the poetic dimension of language is defined by metaphor, simile, and allegory.”25 Sarduy’s Homo (neo-)barocchus lavishes himself most of all in the visible manifestations of this cultural mourning, from the excess of settings (theater, brothel, lunatic asylum, operating room, etc.) to the synecdoche of infinite ornaments, modes of dress, and all sorts of minor details. In Colibrí, for example, this minimalist scopic drive culminates in the painting of tame fleas.26 Sarduy’s characters incarnate (literally) the suffering of a creature subjected to the order of nature, bereft of the state of grace. This exile is staged in the visibility of deformed beings, dwarves, unnatural births (Maitreya), monsters (the Japanese giant in Colibrí), and above all in the transforming fury of the rituals of mortification of the transvestite’s body: makeup, tattoos, implants, transplants, castration, prosthetics of body parts, and a variety of mutilations. In Cobra the martyrdom of the flesh undergone by the transvestite’s sacrificial/voluptuous body involves not only the Baroque tension between the mundane world and the transcendent but also the tension between the copy and the original. As the copy of an original—  a woman—that never existed, the transvestite is a precarious simulacrum, 

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a melancholy Prince, a martyr (etymologically: witness) of exile in a simulating body, lamenting, from the stage of the Doll’s Lyric Opera, her inability to be “absolutely divine” because of her enormous feet, submitting herself to all kinds of physical tortures to reduce their size.27 In the allegorical writing of the Neobaroque there is an accumulation of exploding fragments of words as in Galaxies, of collapsing subway trains as in the poems of Germán Belli, of the ruins and refuse of everyday life as in Luis Rafael Sánchez. In The Importance of Being Daniel Santos, the novelist/flâneur strolls across an immense Baroque observation platform (palco) consisting of the entire geography of “that embittered America, that barefoot America, America in Spanish,” fractured into the multiple topologies of popular life: cabaret, corner store, brothel, prison, local bar. Along the way he collects scraps of the popular idols making up the shared imaginary of the continent. Here, even more explicitly than in Roa Bastos’s Supreme or Sarduy’s transvestite, the melancholy Prince is the author himself, an allegorist who speaks the “other” in the public space of the text through the manipulation of fragments (the most noble materials of Baroque creation). In the visibility of the written word and the audibility of the rhythm of the prose, the writer inscribes the bolero as the emblem of pain and cultural mourning of the embittered America. With its slow rhythm and the sad lyrics that speak of the eternal pangs of love, the bolero serves as a figure for the (under)class system—the “others” who are the socially marginalized, the oppressed masses. Thus the allegorist makes the bolero a refuge against the destructive fury of the economic, political, and social present in Latin America and the axis of his allegorical vision, presented as pageant—worldly, Baroque—of history as a narrative of suffering. One cannot help seeing the incarnation of that pain in the reiterated tale of the phallic excesses of Daniel Santos (a Don Juan type, yet another residue of the Baroque) whose virile body is both exalted and mortified in interminable “genital anarchies.” In the libertine eroticism and exacerbated obscenity of this Neobaroque novel, “passions are unleashed in a wild frenzy,” to the point that “the representation of the emotions is emphasized increasingly at the expense of a firmly defined action.”28

A Pessimistic View of History The spatial, figural, corporeal/sensual writing of the Neobaroque presents itself as an extreme aesthetic exercise articulating the contents of the historical Baroque in the present. Yet the recycling of Baroque themes and stylemes,

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through condensations, displacements, and conversions, is no mere escapist play devoid of cultural meaning. Simultaneously play and reflection, the Neobaroque inverts the pessimistic vision of official history, dramatized by the Baroque in the tyranny and martyrdom of the sovereign, by means of a discursive practice that both weakens historicity and decenters the subject. If the Baroque is the aesthetic of the Counter-Reformation, the Neobaroque is the aesthetic of countermodernity. In the one, the pessimistic vision is incarnated in the Prince who stages melancholy to legitimate his power.29 In the other, this staging is displaced toward the author, in whose act of writing melancholy acquires a critical value through the delegitimizing power of the text. This crisis of authority/authorship is not, however, the entirety of the crisis of modernity that Neobaroque texts ceaselessly represent. The official history that appears so catastrophic today is the same one that set up Progress, Humanism, Technology, and Culture as transcendental categories for interpreting and normalizing reality. These categories, which Lyotard terms metanarratives,30 conform to the Enlightenment project of integrating, according to an explicit order articulated from above, the social, political, economic, and cultural processes of different nations and peoples. These metanarratives, which today are the object of criticism and revision in the postmodern intellectual circles of Europe and North America, were in fact produced in those very hegemonic centers (Germany, England, France, the United States) through the Protestant Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the Democratic-Bourgeois Revolution, and the dissemination of the individualist ethic. Others have analyzed in detail the disasters provoked by the imposition of this flawed and incomplete model of modernization in Latin America.31 It is enough to remember, above all, its demonstrated incapacity for integrating the “non-Western” (Indians, mestizos, blacks, urban proletariat, rural immigrants, etc.) into a national project of consensual democracy. It is no accident, then, that the Baroque—pre-Enlightenment, premodern, prebourgeois, pre-Hegelian—should be reappropriated from this periphery (which enjoyed only the leftovers of modernization) as a strategy for subverting the historicist canon of the modern. The recovery of the Baroque is both an aesthetics and a politics of literature, an authentic paradigmatic shift in poetic forms that implies, among other consequences, the abandonment of the silent presence of the eighteenth century in our mentality. This ideological content renders precarious any attempt to reduce the Neobaroque

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to a retrograde and reactionary Mannerist aesthetic that would be a mere reflection of the logic of late capitalism, as Jameson suggests when he mentions the fashion of the “-neo” in postmodern art. Equally inadequate to account for the Neobaroque are such watered-down notions as a “general atmosphere,” “spirit of the age,” or “abstract principle of phenomena.”32 Even less can it become the salvation of a decadent modernity by means of a “generalized impurity” with which the very cultures that ostracized the Baroque in the name of classical good taste would now, after the “death of the avant-garde,” replenish their store of artistic experimentation and invention.33 The Baroque is not a recent discovery in our literature, as we have already shown. It is, to use Lezama’s phrase, a “visceral form” that the modern Latin American tradition recovered, both aesthetically and ideologically. The critical function of the Neobaroque is not limited, however, to the pessimist vision that marks the entropy of historicist modernity. The aesthetic reappropriation of the Baroque has also been the mechanism for recreating history in the light of new challenges in the present. In the epistemological field, Sarduy faces the challenge of explaining the relations between the science and art of the seventeenth century and the twentieth through the concept of the retombée, that is, “an achronic causal‑  ity” or “noncontiguous isomorphy.” vii Thus the opposition between Galileo’s circle and Kepler’s ellipse, in the cosmological revolution of the seventeenth century, would be isomorphic with the opposition between the recent cosmological theories of the steady state (continuous state) and the Big Bang (expansion). Within a single episteme, figures from science and art would also be isomorphic: for example, in the seventeenth century, Kepler’s ellipse and the rhetorical ellipsis of the Baroque. In the twentieth, galactic expansion “relapses” (recae) in decentered literary works (their meaning expanding endlessly), just as the steady state (of hydrogen) “relapses” (recae) in texts “whose phonetic material lacks all semantic support” (“pure achronic entropy”).34 What is interesting about this theory (to which this crude summary does not do justice) is that it suggests the achronic causality between the Baroque episteme and the postmodern one, as when Sarduy alludes to a certain isomorphic symmetry between the rupture of logocentrism (the Baroque effect) and the mockery of capitalism (the Neobaroque effect): “To squander, to dissipate, to waste language in function only of pleasure [is vii The phrases are Sarduy’s; see his essay “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler,” included in

this volume (BNW 293; 313).—Eds.

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today] an attack on the common sense . . . on which the entire ideology of consumption and accumulation is based” (Barroco, 99). In the end, Sarduy’s Baroque “relapse” (recaída) acquires a double vision to recognize in the episteme of the seventeenth century a “reproducibility” in the artistic and literary present that reveals the incomplete and unfinished energy of the historical Baroque. In the field of literary historiography the present challenge is to revise the canon of the modern and to create, from outside that canon, from its margins and exclusions, the conditions of possibility for an alternative reading of our literature. An exemplary approach in this sense is that taken by Haroldo de Campos, in his O seqüestro barroco na formacão da literatura brasileira: O caso de Gregório de Matos (The Sequestered Baroque in Brazilian Literary History: The Case of Gregório de Matos, 1989), where he deconstructs the metaphysical-substantialist paradigm that organized Brazilian literature as “the incarnation of the national spirit.”35 What the poet from Bahia has managed to recover reveals that this historicist canon of the modern, instituted with Romanticism, served to obscure the reading of the Baroque as an “origin” (in Benjamin’s sense, not as a genesis, but rather as “a leap towards the new”) and, consequently, prevented the recognition of the experimental and ludic as the distinguishing mark in the production of our modernity. In these reassertions of the Baroque, it is not just a question of demonstrating that our literature was born or was formed in the seventeenth century, which is obvious. They provide, rather, an archaeology of modernity in its decisive moments, focusing on the elements in the polyrhythmic profundity of the seventeenth century that allow for a new conception of history. This is not really what Octavio Paz had in mind in his monumental biography of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, but it is nonetheless what results from his close readings of her works, especially of “Primero sueño” (“First Dream”). Paz sets out straightforwardly to explain the enigma of Sor Juana, restoring her to the historical context of seventeenth-century New Spain. He draws the portrait of a Baroque society, premodern, or at least distinct from the one that emerged on the European continent with the French Revolution, or in England and the United States with Protestantism. It is a society characterized politically by inherited rank and privilege, economically by mercantilism and large landed estates, spiritually by religious orthodoxy, and culturally by the rites of the viceregal court. Paz is able to decipher a number of enigmas with his critical insights, but the most decisive, undoubtedly, is that of the (strange) modernity of the Mexican nun—a modernity avant la

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lettre—exercised vitally and spiritually through her experience with the Baroque aesthetic, not outside or against it.36 As restored by Paz, Sor Juana is a “daughter of the mire” (hija del limo) who interweaves the critique of Reason with her personal crisis in the allegory of “Primero sueño.” Like Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés” (“A Throw of the Dice”) or Vicente Huidobro’s Altazor, this poem, which culminates in “the opposite of a revelation,” laboriously weaves the passion for knowledge with the Gongorine model, betrayed and reinvented in the vertiginous cross between the author’s scientific and hermetic studies in her American periphery. The restoration of Sor Juana to her world implies as well our restoration to the Baroque. But does this imply a conversion of prehistory into posthistory, and the elevation of the Baroque as a new canon? No. Neobaroque writing avoids the trap of making the eccentric into a center. The discourse that asserts its claim is more inclined to propose divergences than to impose rules. The Martinican writer Édouard Glissant observes that the Baroque today stands for “a way of living the unity-diversity of the world.”37 But the Neobaroque also aims undeniably at a utopia of the aesthetic, in which the privileged word is that of cultures constructed not through the conjunction of norms erected in the hegemonic centers, but through the multitemporal heterogeneity that launched them into history.

Notes 1 I return, with the relevant inclusions and alterations for my own argument, to the

“three moments of rupture” (1920, 1940, 1960) in Latin American letters (including Brazilian), which for the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal characterized the double movement of a crisis: toward the future in linguistic innovation, and simultaneously toward tradition, in search of a genealogy with which to justify the new. See “Tradición y renovación,” in América Latina en su literatura, ed. César Fernández Moreno (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1972), 139–66. 2 I have consulted the Ultraist manifestoes in the volume put together by Hugo Verani, Las vanguardias literarias en Hispanoamérica (manifiestos, proclamas y otros escritos) (Rome: Bulzoni, 1986), 269–93. In his “Apuntaciones críticas sobre la metáfora,” Borges refers to what he calls the “crucigraphic” verse of the Soledades (Solitudes). 3 Scholarly work on colonial literature and art done in the forties (by Irving Leonard, José Moreno Villa, Alfonso Méndez Plancarte, Pál Kelemen, Marino Picón Salas, etc.) contributed a great deal to this reevaluation of the Baroque, although as far as I can tell none of their work made reference, at that time, to its contemporary aesthetic relevance.

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4 José Lezama Lima, “En una exposición de Roberto Diago,” 1948, in Tratados en La

Habana (Santiago de Chile: Orbe, 1970), 291–92.

5 José Lezama Lima, “Julián del Casal,” 1941, in Analecta del reloj (Havana: Orígenes,

6 7

8 9

10

11

12

13

1953), 63. The aesthetics of pain have here a religious connotation that Lezama associates with the Catholic doctrine of “participation.” At the end of this work we will indicate some of the projections of this doctrine in the Neobaroque. I am quoting from the Mexican edition, La expresión americana (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 83. There have been numerous attempts to reduce the Baroque to processes of authoritarianism, conservatism, and repression—whether of the post—Tridentine Church, the absolutist state, or of monarchical-seigniorial society. Many of them derive from a very biased reading of Werner Weisbach (Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation, 1921, translated into Spanish in 1924), as is the case in José Antonio Maravall’s La cultura del barroco: Análisis de una estructura histórica (Barcelona: Ariel, 1975), available in English as Culture of the Baroque, where each and every cultural manifestation, including artifice and novelty in imaginative literature, is treated as a tool for strengthening the existing authoritarian order. Weisbach, at least, admitted that not all Baroque art had a pedagogical function, recognizing the “immanent aesthetic impulse” dictated by the artist’s subjectivity. El barroco: Arte de la contrarreforma, trans. E. Lafuente Ferrari, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1948), 57–59. [This influential work was published in German in 1920 and first translated into Spanish in 1924.—Trans.] On Lezama’s critique of Hegel, see my study “La historia tejida por la imagen,” published as the introduction to Lezama’s La expresión americana, 9–33. “The Baroque is the utopian style,” affirmed Oswald de Andrade in the same period, with an argument that has close affinities with Lezama’s in various points. See “A marcha das utopias,” 1953, in Obras completas, vol. 6 (Río de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1970), 147–228. See Carpentier, “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana,” 34–38. The “theory of contexts” included in that essay is nothing other than a recasting in sociological and Sartrean terms of the “theory of the marvelous real” that Carpentier had formulated in “De lo real maravilloso americano,” the prologue to El reino de este mundo (1949), based on surrealist postulates. See Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. [Section 6 of Carpentier’s “Problematica” is included in the current volume.—Trans.] I examine this issue in “Barroquismo y afasia en Alejo Carpentier,” a chapter of Barroco y modernidad (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000). See also Rubén Ríos, “Lezama, Carpentier y el tercer estilo,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, no. 10 (1983): 43–59, where he deals with the treatment of the Baroque by both authors. Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” 91–92. [Delivered as a lecture in 1975; published in Razón de Ser (Caracas: Universidad Central de Venezuela, 1976), 53.—Trans.] An example of this line of interpretation can be seen in Leonardo Acosta, “El

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14

15 16 17 18

19

20 21

22

23 24

25

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‘barroco americano’ y la ideología colonialista,” Unión 10, nos. 2–3 (1972): 30–63. This study has been reedited in El Barroco de Indias y otros ensayos (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1984), 11–52. In La ruta de Severo Sarduy, Roberto González Echevarría reconstructs the trajectory of the characters in Maitreya and explains the role of retruécano in the inverse symmetries of symbolic Oriental and Occidental geographies structuring the novel (189). [Retruécano is a specific type of pun, frequent in Baroque texts, formed by inverting the order of elements to produce a contrast in meaning.—Trans.] Enrico Mario Santí discusses the rhetorical effects of the Baroque in “Sobre Severo Sarduy: El efecto barroco,” in Escritura y tradición (Barcelona: Laia, 1987), 153–57. Severo Sarduy, Cobra, 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1973), 20. For a detailed study of the deconstruction of realist representation in Sarduy, see Méndez Rodenas, Severo Sarduy. The term demiurgic as used here derives from Roland Barthes: “La maîtrise du sens, véritable sémiurgie, est un attribut divin, dès lors que ce sens est défini comme l’écoulement, l’émanation, l’effluve spirituel qui déborde du signifié vers le signifiant: l’auteur est un dieu (son lieu d’origine est le signifié)” [The mastery of meaning, a veritable semiurgism, is a divine attribute, once this meaning is defined as the discharge, the emanation, the spiritual effluvium overflowing from the signified toward the signifier: the author is a god (his place of origin is the signified)]. Barthes, S/Z (Paris: Seuil, 1970), 180; the translation is taken from S/Z, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 174. Haroldo de Campos, Galáxias (São Paulo: Ex Libris, 1984). Seven fragments of this long poem have been translated into Spanish by Héctor Olea for the journal Espiral, no. 4 (1978). [Translations in the text are mine.—Trans.] The most complete study to date is by Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988). Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, no. 146 (1984): 53–92. [The point can also be found in Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 25.—Trans.] Jameson suggests that postmodern techniques such as pastiche (“blank parody”), the “cannibalization of all the styles of the past” (the “neo”), the nostalgic mode, and intertextuality run the risk of falling back into aesthetic mannerism; they are all equally incompatible with a “genuine historicity” (ibid., 17–20). Benjamin, Origin of the German Tragic Drama, 92; see also, 81 and 93–95. Benjamin examines the allegorical structure of the Trauerspiel (Trauer: mourning, melancholy; Spiel: play), in which melancholy is staged for the sovereign (tyrant and martyr) as a pessimistic vision of history. My references to this complex philosophical treatise, an authentic if indirect synthesis of Benjamin’s thought concerning modernity, derive from a very personal reading of Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, by means of which I have appropriated his concept of “origin” for my own purposes (see 44–46). Foucault, Order of Things, 51. In Augusto Roa Bastos, Yo El Supremo, 4th ed. (Mexico

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26

27

28 29 30 31

32 33

34

35

36

37

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City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1976), see 9, 15–16, 66–67, 74–75, 91, 102–3, 122, 150, 219, 417– 18, etc. For Lacan the Baroque is “la régulation de l’âme par la scopie corporelle” (the regulation of the soul by corporeal surveillance), in “Du Baroque,” in Le séminaire, vol. 20, 1972–1973 (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 105. Concerning the “scopic drive” in the Baroque, see also Christine Buci-Glucksmann, La folie du voir. Excerpts from La folie du voir are translated in this volume by Dorothy Baker, BNW 140–57. The redemptive suffering in Cobra resembles “la petite historiole du Christ” (the little anecdote of Christ) sensualized in a passional realism of pain and ecstasy. See Lacan, “Du Baroque,” 97, 102. Benjamin, Origin of the German Tragic Drama, 99. See ibid., 88–91, 165. J. F. Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979). See the collective volume titled La modernidad en la encrucijada postmoderna by Aníbal Quijano and Fernándo Calderón (Buenos Aires: CLACSO, 1988), and in particular Aníbal Quijano’s essay, which discusses Europe’s abandonment of the liberation project of the nineteenth century and its consequences: Latin America becomes a “victim of modernization.” See Omar Calabrese, A idade neobarroca (São Paulo: Martins, 1987), 9–12. [In English: Neo-Baroque; see chap. 1, “Taste and Method,” 3–26.—Trans.] Guy Scarpetta’s suggestive book, L’impureté (Paris: Grasset, 1985) does not hide this French feeling of guilt toward the Baroque (see 13–14, 382–83), but at the same time it recognizes the role of the periphery (Lezama, Sarduy, and the Baroque of Minas Gerais) in contemporary art. Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1974), esp. 14–15, 91–98. The concept of the retombée (which appears in the epigraph of Barroco) is taken up again by Sarduy in Nueva inestabilidad (Mexico City: Vuelta, 1987). The Hegelian-sociological historiographic model deconstructed in O seqüestro is focused on Antonio Candido’s monumental A formacão da literatura brasileira (momentos decisivos), 1959. Prior to Galáxias, which assimilates the practice of the Baroque mediated by the constructivist rigor of concrete poetry, Haroldo de Campos used the term Neobaroque to characterize “the cultural forms required by contemporary artistic expression” (“A obra de arte aberta,” 1955, in Teoría da poesia concreta: Textos críticos e manifestos, 1950–1960, 3rd ed. [São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987], 28–31). Although Paz tends to deny the inclusion of “Primero sueño” in the Baroque, as when he calls it “a Baroque poem that negates the Baroque” (Sor Juana, 381), Sor Juana nonetheless rewrites Paz’s earlier study, Los hijos del limo (Children of the Mire, 1972), in which modern poetry, limited to the period between the late eighteenth century and the avant-garde movements of the early twentieth, is presented as the “critical passion” unleashed by the English and German Romantics. Édouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 93.

Editors’ Note to “The Novel as Tragedy:   William Faulkner” by Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes (1928–) is Mexico’s most famous living writer. His early novels, Where the Air Is Clear (1958) and The Death of Artemio Cruz (1962), announce the beginning of the Boom era of Latin American literature and this essay exemplifies Fuentes’s transnational concerns; the essay was published in 1962 in the Mexican magazine Siempre! while he was working on The Death of Artemio Cruz in Havana and Mexico City. Fuentes has commented on the Baroque in a number of his essays, several of which are listed below. Among his novels, surely Terra Nostra (1975) is his most Baroque in both style and subject matter. William Faulkner (1897–1962), a modernist and a US Southerner, is a model for Boom writers like Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez, and for Caribbean writers like Édouard Glissant, who combine modernist experimentation with postcolonial political and cultural analysis. Fuentes, like García Márquez and Glissant, places Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County on the shores of the Caribbean and claims him as an essential precursor and kindred spirit. The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and Faulkner’s many other novels and short stories all dramatize his conviction that, as he said in his University of Virginia lectures, the past is never past. Fuentes would appear to agree. His fiction often centers on Mexico’s tragic history: conquest and colonization, the betrayal of the egalitarian ideals of the Mexican Revolution, and the persistence of structures of oppression in contemporary Mexico. Similarly, this essay relates Faulkner’s artistic achievement to the tragic history of the US South—its legacy of slavery and the defeat of its plantation society by the modernized North. Fuentes takes up the pejorative phrase of a “North American critic” describing Faulkner as a

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“Dixie Gongorist” to correlate the South’s experience of defeat to Faulkner’s hyperbolic style: “The Baroque, language of abundance, is also the language of insufficiency. Only those who possess nothing can include everything” (BNW 543). According to Fuentes, Faulkner’s Baroque style is melancholic, “a desperate invocation of language to fill the absences left by the banishment of reason and faith” (BNW 543). For Glissant, writing about Faulkner in his Caribbean Discourse, it is the haunting memory of the violent past and the “coiled” plot structures that constitute the thematic and structural constants of Faulkner’s fiction. In his novels, Faulkner dismantles the modern master narrative of history as teleological progress by spiraling back to remember, recuperate, and record.

Bibliography By the Author

Fuentes, Carlos. The Buried Mirror: Reflections on Spain and the New World. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992. ———. “José Lezama Lima: Cuerpo y palabra del barroco.” In Valiente mundo nuevo: Epica, utopía y mito en la novela hispanoamericana. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990. 213–60. ———. El mundo de José Luis Cuevas. Mexico City: Galería de Arte Misrachi, 1969. ———. “La novela como tragedia: William Faulkner.” In Casa con dos puertas. Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1970. 52–78.

Additional Readings

Faulkner, William. Faulkner in the University: Class Conferences at the University of Virginia, 1957–1958. Ed. Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959. Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989. ———. Faulkner, Mississippi. Trans. Barbara Lewis and Thomas C. Spear. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 1999. Ochoa, John A. The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004. Esp. 143–64. Yaeger, Patricia. “Circum-Atlantic Super-abundance: Milk as World-Making in Alice Randall and Kara Walker.” In “Global Contexts, Local Literature: The New Southern Studies,” Kathryn McKee and Annette Trelzer, eds., special issue, American Literature 78, no. 4 (2006): 769–98.

  Chapter Twenty-five  

The Novel as Tragedy: William Faulkner Carlos Fuentes

Translated by John Ochoa

This is the land: “Profound and peaceful desolation, unplowed, untilled, gutting slowly into red and choked ravines beneath the long quiet rains of autumn and the galloping fury of vernal equinoxes.”  Yoknapatawpha County: 2,400 square miles. Population 15,611 (white: 6,298; black: 9,313). Sole proprietor: William Faulkner. Boundaries: to the north the undulating hills of Mississippi and to the south the black alluvial soil; the dusty roads of the “long hot summer,” the wagons pulled by mule trains, the somber swamps, the “yellow and sleepy” river, the green sadness of the forests, the ancient and ruined plantations, the clapboard shacks where the blacks live, the low-lying, vulgar, and shiny new town of Jefferson. A hard country for a man, says Anse in As I Lay Dying: “Eight miles of the sweat of his body washed up outen the Lord’s earth, where the Lord Himself told him to put it.” ii Old land sold by the Indian chief Ikkemotubbe to the French, to the Spanish, and finally to the Anglo-Saxons, “roaring with Protestant scripture and boiled whiskey . . . changing the face of the earth: felling a tree which took two hundred years to grow, in order to extract from it a bear or a cupful of Fuentes does not give sources or page numbers for any of his citations. All citations from sources in English have been traced to their originals; citations from works written in other languages (G. W. F. Hegel, Honoré de Balzac, Albert Camus, etc.) have been translated from Fuentes’s Spanish versions, except for a few, where standard English translations are cited (Aeschylus, Jean-Paul Sartre). I thank Rose Beasly Dutra, who located most of Faulkner’s English originals, and Lois Parkinson Zamora, who found some difficult stragglers.—Trans.  William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Vintage, 1972), 2–3. ii William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying (New York: Random House, 1964), 104.

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honey.” iii The Indian thought he was selling, the European that he was buying, but, says Faulkner, in reality “[God] created man to be His overseer on the earth and to hold suzerainty over the earth and the animals on it in His name, not to hold for himself and his descendants inviolable title forever, generation after generation, to the oblongs and squares of the earth, but to hold the earth mutual and intact in the communal anonymity of brotherhood, and all the fee He asked was pity and humility and sufferance and endurance and the sweat of his face.” iv Land violated by appropriation, by the “toil, reduced to its crude absolute which only a beast could and would endure.”  Land of masters and slaves that clamored and demanded its own violation, its own defeat, so that it could later tell its story and thus save itself. “It’s because she wants it told he thought so that people whom she will never see and whose names she will never hear and who have never heard her name nor seen her face will read it and know at last why God let us lose the War: that only through the blood of our men and the tears of our women could He stay this demon and efface his name and lineage from the earth.” vi A land that “does not grow old . . . because it does not forget.” These are the men. Farmers with “hard, ruined hands and eyes already revealing a heritage of patient brooding upon endless furrows and the slow buttocks of mules.” vii Blacks who inherit “the long chronicle of a people who had learned humility through suffering and learned pride through the endurance which survived the suffering.” viii The founders: the Sartorises, the Sutpens, the Coldfields, the Compsons, lords of a feudal society destroyed by the Civil War. The usurpers: the Snopes, the mercantilist invaders from the North. And opposite the actors in the visible drama, those secret trustees of dreams, chronicles, and madness, who dare to remember: women, the aged, children, the crazed. These are the places and abodes: the Tallahatchie River to the north, crossed by the railroad that spurs off toward Memphis. Two neighboring iii William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (New York: Vintage, 1950), 89–90. iv William Faulkner, “The Bear,” in The Faulkner Reader (New York: Random House,  vi vii viii

1954), 299–300. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1990), 191. Ibid., 6. Light in August, 192. The Bear, 327.

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mansions, both ruined: Sutpen’s Hundred, and the Sartoris Plantation. Reverend Hightower’s house where the Negro Joe Christmas was murdered. The statue of John Sartoris next to the railroad he built. The courthouse where Temple Drake told the story of her rape and her life in the whorehouse in Memphis. Joanna Burden’s house next to the road, where Christmas murdered the nymphomaniac and where Lena Grove’s son was born. Bayard Sartoris’s bank, robbed by Byron Snopes, and also the one where Flem Snopes became president. The house of Miss Rosa Coldfield, the old woman lost in a past that makes sense only if an insane effort keeps it in the present. Being, in the world of Faulkner, is what is bequeathed: only the legacy will be legible. The sawmill where Byron Bunch knew Lena Grove. The Compsons’ field, sold off as a golf course so that Quentin could go to Harvard. Varner’s store, where Flem Snopes began his fortune. The Yoknapatawpha River to the south, where flooding swept away the bridge and the Bundrens could not cross with their mother’s body. The Frenchman’s Place, where Popeye murdered Tommy. On this painstaking materialization, this detailed geography, rises the world of William Faulkner. This is a world comparable only to one other literary realm, Honoré de Balzac’s, which is equally dense in human connections, genealogical lushness, and tangible presences. As in Balzac, in Faulkner we learn about the large and small details of occupations, customs, homes, lineages, ambitions, about ways of making a living and losing it. From one book to another, we follow the fortunes of Gavin Stevens or Temple Drake, as we follow those of Delphine de Nucingen or Henri de Marsay in the works of Balzac. But the parallels do not end here. In fact, the modern novel appears to trace a perfect circle that begins with Balzac and closes—only to open again—with Faulkner. The novels of Balzac are histories of personal and historical ascension. This ascension is soon divested of its illusions (as with Lucien de Rubempré) and quickly finds its center (as with Eugène de Rastignac) in an ironic acceptance of a new society whose ultimate heroes are not Saint-Just or Byron but rather the powerful banker Nucingen and the upright merchant Birotteau. What other literary form could accommodate these destinies and, furthermore, not only consecrate them but see them? And see them in motion. Balzac’s entire Human Comedy (Comédie humaine) is, on a fundamental level, evidence of the future. The bourgeoisie wanted to see itself, give itself a name, arising as it did from unbearable anonymity

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(Sieyès: “What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has been until now? Nothing.”) It wants to see itself in the dynamic process of perpetrating the future that by rights belongs to it. The very form of the of Balzacian novel, its undulations, intrigues, continual questions, the “thread” of its narrative: all convey a sense of the future, a sensational future. “The world is ours”: this could describe the mission of Balzac’s characters. In the famous advice given to the ingenuous Rubempré, the Abbé Herrera does nothing less than lay out the schemes that are required to conquer the world. A reverse Polonius, the Abbé Herrera (unlike that Shakespearean tutor) does not recommend “to thine own self be true”:ix on the contrary, his decalogue is about roguery in a capitalist world. “What happens now?” is the question raised by every page of Balzac. How will this end? What will be the outcome? Guided by the false Abbé, will Rubempré succeed in the Parisian world? Will Birotteau avoid bankruptcy? Which of the three suitors will get to marry—and enjoy the wealth of— Mlle. Cormon, the provincial spinster? The Comédie humaine moves toward what is yet to come because its inhabitants live in relationship to the future: they are characters who fashion themselves and their society, their fortunes, their destiny. They feel that they hold their destiny in their own hands; they have banished tragedy. The drama of Goriot is not the tragedy of Lear. It might be that both characters have known abandonment and filial ingratitude, but Goriot gets his due in the form of a monthly payment, whereas for Lear there is no compensation. This is why the characters of Père Goriot (Old Man Goriot) can comment on the destiny of the old man within a sociosentimental framework. The tragedy of Lear is not debatable, nor is it the object of easy aphorisms or something correctable with money or good intentions, or even by regret or recognition of the moral corruption of the daughters. Lear exclaims, “None does offend, none, I say none,”  and the ensuing silence provides the true answer: they are all guilty. The goodness of Old Man Goriot, on the other hand, requires a moral procedure through which personal destiny is absorbed into social process. After Lear there is nothingness. After Goriot, the world goes on in its feverish rush toward the future. Lear has fulfilled his destiny. Goriot’s destiny, on the other hand, is ix William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore (Bos-

ton: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1.3.78. References are to act, scene, and line.—Trans.

 Hamlet, 4.5.64.

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fulfilled by society. In Shakespeare, history is for Lear, whereas in Balzac, Goriot is for history. Memory and the past no longer matter. Balzac’s heroes have no origins but they do have a future, and instead of harboring nostalgia, they harbor illusions. And even the loss of these illusions does not stop the progress of a character, who finds a new source of activity in the ensuing cynicism. It is not in vain that the rake Jacques Collin, an ex-con in disguise, guides the world of the Human Comedy, first dressed as the exconvict Trompe-la-Morte, then as the Abbé Herrera, then as Vautrin, and finally as the chief of police of Paris. He is the highest example of the selfmade man, he who thwarts fate and defines his own destiny. Collin-HerreraVautrin can assume any mask because he lacks a past; no one can identify or remember him. The unknown criminal can turn himself with impunity into the defender of the law. It is as if an unknown soldier of the Greek army could replace Achilles before the walls of Troy. But Achilles was known to the gods; no one knows Vautrin. He will be what he decides to be in the new society. That illustrious absentee, Colonel Chabert, is no more than a ghost. No one wants to, or can, remember him. His identity cannot destroy the irreversible fact: his wife, believing him dead, has married Count Ferraud, and both enjoy a privileged position in a bourgeois society. Chabert has indeed died at Eylau; this is a past incapable of inserting itself in the future of the new society, a memory that cannot forestall the future. Destiny has passed from the hands of tragedy into the hands of history. Napoleon Bonaparte, the prototypical man of the nineteenth century, was able to usurp the throne in the same way that Rastignac commandeered a social position or Nucingen a bank. The young Napoleon of the Eighteenth Brumaire, like Vautrin, was a man disguised by the absence of a past; Bonaparte, like Trompe-la-Morte, offered in exchange for that absence all the energy and cunning that the future demanded to be deserved. Once Napoleon returns from Elba, he—like Colonel Chabert—is no longer the face of the future. Like Goriot condemned to a final exile, Bonaparte lives out his destiny in spite of himself, and within history. The rewards and punishments of history are not the ones of tragedy. “The forces confronting each other in tragedy,” Camus explains, “are equally justified. In melodramas or dramas, on the contrary, only one force is legitimate. In other words, tragedy is ambiguous and drama is simple-minded. . . . Melodrama could thus be summed up by saying: ‘Only one is just and justifiable,’ while the perfect tragic formula would

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be ‘All can be justified, no one is just.’” xi Napoleon could only be either a hero or a villain; his success and failure are both absolute. Either he is king or he is prisoner. In contrast, Oedipus is at once king and prisoner, innocent and guilty, free and slave, criminal and victim. Oedipus’s trajectory is double: he walks toward his destiny, but he does so to resolve the enigma of his past and of his origins. He walks westward toward the sun yet against the rotation of the earth: he devours his days. Napoleon—and with him Rastignac, Julien Sorel, Emma Bovary, Becky Sharp, and Nicholas Nickleby—walk forward only to the point of achieving an existence identical to the possibility of their future. The European novel, a democratic form and the bourgeoisie’s organic response to the closed literature of the aristocracy, marshals its infantry— Spanish, French, and English pícaros and rakes like the Lazarillo de Tormes, Jackie Wilton, Gil Blas de Santillane. All are men without destiny who replace Achilles before the walls of Troy. Helen has been transformed into the wench Dulcinea del Toboso, and only in the crazed imagination of an errant knight wearing a barber’s basin on his head can the rights of a captured princess be bestowed on her. And if she manages to flee from La Mancha, this Helen will end up in a whorehouse (Fanny Hill) or a chain gang (Manon Lescaut) or a lavish hotel in Saint Germain (Delphine de Nucingen). From Moll Flanders to the Lady of the Camellias, she gladly exchanges the trappings of love and honor for money; Paris will keep his hold on her or Menelaus will win her back only if they invest wisely in the City of London. The modern novel is both the weapon and the expression of an emerging social class; it developed alongside that class until, in a move of perfect historical symmetry and a literary manifestation of the French Revolution, Balzac consecrated it. Will, energy, and power are the profound themes of Balzac. And being a great writer, he did not limit himself simply to describing social conditions; he pitted them against the resistance of reality and produced literature. From this tension was born La recherche de l’absolu (The Quest of the Absolute), as Balzac titled the crowning achievement of the edifice that is the Human Comedy and which, cruelly and paradoxically, is symbolized by the wild ass’s skin—Balzac’s Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin): an infinity that shrinks with every desire until it fits into the palm of one’s xi Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical, trans. Philip Thody (London: Hamish Hamilton,

1967), 181.

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hand.xii The totalizing aim of the novelist is a heroic (and useless) response to the future, sought by an ambitious society that devours all sense of history. In the end we are left with the charred, clenched fist of society and the lifeline of the writer: the empty hand of Raphael de Valentin and the outstretched hand of Honoré de Balzac. The first time a bourgeois novelist, Marcel Proust, looks back, it is because his society no longer looks forward. If Balzac’s Rastignac lives on the promise of the future, Proust’s Swann can only follow the path of lost time. Rastignac can issue his famous challenge to Paris from Père-Lachaise; he wants to live in a time that is not yet his. Swann can only complain that he has lost his best years in love with a woman who was not his type; he lives in a time that is no longer his. Thomas Mann is the executor of the will of the bourgeoisie; his work is the great intellectual summary of this dying class. (The deep emotional response that Flaubert’s L’éducation sentimentale [Sentimental Education] has always produced in me is, I think, due to the author’s pathetic audacity. When Frédéric Moreau and Madame Arnoux meet one last time, she is withered and lonely, and both dare to look at the past with a nostalgia that is secret, profound, almost criminal. They have violated the forward-looking law of the bourgeoisie, a law embodied in the magnificent days of the July Revolution, and have inaugurated instead the motifs of a new, intimate sensibility with which they will try to erase the bourgeois sins of their vulgar, rapacious, anonymous beginnings. In Flaubert, shopkeepers discover that they, too, have souls.) The resources of the classic novel have been exhausted: Zola’s naturalism and fatalism, Proust’s sensitivity and psychology, Mann’s ideology. The tools of melodrama, intrigue, and prediction have been co-opted by movies, radio, the press, and television. The classic novel, such as it was conceived from Cervantes through Thomas Mann, has been threatened, if not with extinction then with a slow death. For Camus the answer was to chronicle death itself; for Hemingway and Malraux the answer was to search for adventure beyond the limits of the West. D. H. Lawrence went even further, seeking El Dorado, the promised land and a sensual Natural Man deeply aware of his own solar plexus and sexuality, an awareness that would wash away the sins of ugliness, immorality, and deceits of industrial society. xii Fuentes is playing with Balzac’s title, but the English translation The Wild Ass’s Skin,

loses the double entendre of chagrin.—Trans.

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For the greatest writers this was a new encounter, first and foremost, with the shared ground of literature: poetry. James Joyce, Herman Broch, Malcolm Lowry, and William Faulkner, Antaeuses of the novel, forge a new path by grounding the novel in language. Their procedures are different, but at the heart of their work—Ulysses, The Death of Virgil, Under the Volcano, Light in August—the arc of language is deployed over and above an exhausted social, psychological, and ideological lexicon. Poetic discourse displaces descriptive realism, time displaces chronology, simultaneous space displaces linear space, taxonomies and puns displace standard diction, referential writing displaces absolute writing, contamination replaces purity, ambivalence and polyvalence replace monovocal rationalism. Only poetry, in a broad sense, knows how to question, because only poetry can propose simultaneous, conflicting arguments. The encounter between poetry and the novel means the rediscovery of the elemental earth, where the prefabricated response of a society that thought it had all the answers are substituted by the questions of men who, once again, question everything. Only poetry knows how to confront reality in its entirety, without intermediaries or summaries or reductions to an ideological scheme, a clinical diagnosis, political necessity, or historical factualism. This is why for the surrealists poetry was revolution: time and again, in a fusion of identities, they were to shatter all alienations and revel in the integral reality of men, the vital correspondences between what is dreamed and what is done, what is desired and what is real, what is natural and what is personal: all the separate halves.1 It would appear that William Faulkner beholds a concrete and limited reality—a few families living the history of a small county in the American South. Far from displaying any allegorical intentions, Faulkner does not intend (any more than Melville) to turn his characters and situations into a priori emblems or models. Yet in the process of penetrating his characters and situations, he universalizes them symbolically, and he does so, paradoxically, by fleshing out their details and particularizing them. If these characters and situations are singular, it is the language—the poetic expression— that reveals them, uncovers their shared passions in flagante delicto: history, nature, love, eroticism, time. But Faulkner no longer places them in linear time or in the well-lit space of the classic novel. Rather, his work occupies the circular time and empty space of tragedy. In this way he takes to its radical conclusion Melville’s symbolic search. If symbol is the guiding compass of the unknown, it is the unknown itself that is tragic, the unexplored territory of the modern world. It is into this devastated land, depopulated and aban-

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doned by the shared exigencies of Christian revelation and philosophical reason, that Faulkner makes landfall. He arrives tied to the mast, like Odysseus or Faulkner’s protagonist in “Old Man,” tied to the ship’s beams on the tumultuous Mississippi. He will listen to the sirens’ song that provides the chorus of Agamemnon: “[The] family [is] welded to its own destruction.” xiii In a splendid study entitled Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, George Steiner writes that since the nineteenth century two national literatures, those of Russia and the United States, have escaped the dilemma of naturalistic realism, ripped off the veil of positivism, and confronted man’s radical condition, a condition hidden under the deceitful garb of bourgeois morality. As always in his drafty house with two entrances, a house difficult to seal and through which blow the winds of both past and future, Balzac had already foreshadowed this “quest of the absolute” in the novel of that same title, as well as in other philosophical tales, but especially in Louis Lambert, the greatest of them all. An astounding literary prefiguration of Nietzsche, Lambert, locked in a dark room, could pass as a simpleton, but in fact his thoughts move at a speed faster than history. As a result, he cannot find a viable means of expressing the here and now. Like Nietzsche, Lambert knows toward the future, but in the present he is an idiot. It is true that this radical displacement had already been announced by Büchner in his great work Lenz, and Faulkner would conjure it again in the character of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. This strange fascination with the madman, literally a man of the place who is nonetheless without a place, who is both behind and ahead of those firmly planted in the present: he accompanies them with a ruined memory or an unbearable prophecy. The madmen in Büchner, Balzac, and Faulkner at once remember and announce a forgotten land. They know that absolute “reality” is only a fragment of a true reality that contains everything sacrificed, hidden, or rationalized by Western civilization. Poe and Melville, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, each in his different register, searches for the same “absolute” denied or disguised by bourgeois realism. One way to do so is through nature: the “terrible and beneficent” ocean of Melville. For Tolstoy, it is through vast expanses, in exact counterpoint to interior landscapes of terror and loneliness. Poe finds a similar correlative to internal terror in the hideous descent to the frozen underworld in The Narxiii Aeschylus, Oresteia, trans. Peter Meineck (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998), line 1566.

“Old Man” is in Faulkner’s collection The Wild Palms (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970).—Trans.

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rative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Dostoevsky places terror in a world of closed rooms, staircases, and monks’ cells, whose sins can only be redeemed by returning to the immense, natural, and holy Russian land. Likewise in Faulkner, nature upholds a reality. The cow and the dappled horse, the forest, the swamps and the swelling river offer the fertile grounds where Faulkner’s novelistic world takes root. It is defined by the actions of man in nature. The original sin—that is, the sin shared by all—consists of the use and violation of nature. Man is different from God, Faulkner says in “The Bear,” because God contemplates and loves nature directly. Man is not God but merely man, because he hunts fishes and harvests: he uses. But this contains its own punishment. “The woods and fields he ruined and the game he killed will be the consequence and signature of his crime and guilt, and his punishment.” Nonetheless, as a result of this violation, as a result of that responsibility fatally imposed by the need to live, man can still love nature, still love what he has violated. God loves without violation and without responsibility. Man has the opportunity, and the tragic freedom, to redeem himself through loving what he has violated. Man loves nature like Othello loves Desdemona, not wisely and too well. This kind of love is of a different order from divine love; it is not gratuitous, but rather the redeeming answer to a violation. This is why only man and not God can ascribe values to nature: for God, nature is the simple object of eternal contemplation; God is not engaged with nature. Man, on the other hand, once he has violated nature, engages with it by loving and negating it at once. Here we have one of the central themes of North American literature, the theme that begins with Ahab’s struggle with the whale in Moby Dick and culminates with the old man Santiago’s struggle with the fish in The Old Man and the Sea. Faulkner’s protagonists are the bear and the forest. Like Ishmael and Santiago in the novels by Melville and Hemingway, Ike McCaslin in “The Bear” loves nature immediately, understands that the land belongs to all, and that man can only offer “humility and pity and sufferance and pride” to redeem himself from the original violation.xiv In contrast, Popeye in Sanctuary, like Ahab in Moby Dick, fears nature because it does not reflect his own perversion. Popeye, a sexually powerless murderer, sadist, and corrupter, feels impotent before nature because nature denies him; when Benbow invites him to visit the forest, it fills him with dread. Once in the forest, Popeye’s response is an attempt at xiv  “ The Bear,” 300.

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corruption: he spits into the spring, the source of the greenness of the forest. He does not know the proper use of anything; money, nature, and sex are all beyond him. From this natural paradox rises the tragic humanity of Faulkner. To use nature is to violate it; to leave it untouched is to corrupt it. Only God can contemplate it irresponsibly; man, whether through action or omission, introduces evil into the natural order. He introduces history. Where before there had been only contemplation and the condition of being, man introduces sin and, with it, redemption; he introduces violation and, with it, love; responsibility and, with it, grace; pain and, with it, happiness. Once man uses, violates, and loves the land, he divides it—but he also divides himself. Yoknapatawpha comes from two words in the Chickasaw language: yocana and petopha, “the divided land.” Separate land, separate man: nature is transformed into history. The history of the American South on some level provides the key to all American literature. One of its recurrent themes has been the contrast between “American innocence” and “European corruption.” (One would have to enter the little shop of horrors of Dr. Nabokov to witness an inversion of the terms: the innocent European Humbert Humbert is the victim of Lolita, the corrupt American nymphet whose libido is fueled by popcorn and CocaCola.) Hawthorne complained about the lack of mystery, ambiguity, and tragedy in American society: “No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity.” xv Poe, when he did not resort to foreign locales, invented a gothic stage set in New England, closer to Monk Lewis than to Emerson. Henry James turned the Europe–United States opposition into one of the central themes of his work: Daisy Miller, The Reverberator, The Ambassadors, The Portrait of a Lady. In his foreword to Hawthorne’s “The Marble Faun,” James wrote that “it takes such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist.” xvi The plain world of optimism, innocence, and economic success, an elemental form of Manichaeism, self-confidence, and xv Nathaniel Hawthorne, preface to The Marble Faun, ed. Richard H. Rupp (New

York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 5.

xvi Quoted in George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism (New

York: Knopf, 1959), 36.

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democratic bonhomie (“that nation of shopkeepers,” as Stendhal would say) did not provide the elements that James demanded. But this same mediocrity lacking in historical depth, this same pragmatism lacking the fanfare of European legend, because it is so oppressive and poor, forces the American writer to destroy it with more vigor than the European writer. There are two typical postures for the American writer. The first is to translate the environment itself and to turn it into drama thanks to the density of naturalism, fatalism, and ferocity of critical spirit—Crane, Norris, Howells, Dreiser, Dos Passos. The second is to pit Americans against the world, casting them out of their habitat to discover a dramatic dimension in their response to the unknown: Ahab and the whale in Moby Dick, Fredric Henry and the war in Farewell to Arms, Jake Barnes and the bulls in The Sun Also Rises, Dick Diver and European postwar society in Tender Is the Night. William Faulkner is the first American writer for whom the tragic element—that awareness of separation—imposes itself from within American society. The history and societal complexities that drive him are those of the South. Many writers who came after Faulkner were to exhaust that vein and reduce it to the dimensions of the cliché: Tennessee Williams, Erskine Caldwell, Truman Capote. Irving Howe has noted that the South is the only region that has ever existed in the United States: eccentricity and tradition. Like Russia and Spain in Europe, the South is strange and exotic in relation to the line of general development. It represents the survival of a feudal system in an industrial world; Allen Tate writes that “the South clings blindly to forms of European feeling and conduct that were crushed by the French Revolution.” xvii The slave-owning South, which considered itself the repository of grace, taste, and a code of honor, was violently destroyed because its hallowed values could not resist the onslaught of the North. Its way of life, its wealth and bloodlines were violated in the same way that Temple Drake or Popeye or the Compsons were violated by the Snopes. A good portion of Faulkner’s work incessantly repeats the image of rape. This is not to say that Faulkner is merely writing a philosophical version of Gone with the Wind. It is true that in Sartoris he writes about the ideal world of Southern society, at least about its conception of itself as such. What is remarkable is that in Absalom, Absalom! he offers an opposing image—the South defeated by itself. Sartoris is the history of the white South; Absalom, Absalom! is the history of the black South. The defeat of the South is tragic, for though it was xvii Allen Tate, Essays of Four Decades (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1968), 521.

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overwhelmed by the North, it was already defeated internally by the divisive forces within it. Defeat is the central axis of Faulkner’s work, and the defeat of the South is the only defeat that the United States has suffered. In the lands between the mountains of Virginia and the Mississippi Delta, Americans experienced something in common with all men. The title of The Unvanquished, a magnificent collection of Civil War short stories, is not ironic: within defeat there are victories—of recognition, humility, resistance, awareness, an awareness of a shared human condition. This is why we Latin Americans feel the work of Faulkner lies so close to us. In North American literature, only Faulkner stands apart from that closed world of optimism and success and offers us instead a vision shared by both the United States and Latin America: the image of defeat, separation, doubt—the image of tragedy. It is not by chance that the language of Faulkner has been dismissed as “Dixie Gongorism” by a North American critic, since Gongorism is the Baroque language of our great literary tradition. Defeat, misery, insecurity, and historical excess can only be recounted in a language that preserves immediate evidence, an instrument capable of including everything, because in a world where nothing is known for certain everything must be preserved. The Baroque, Alejo Carpentier once told me, is the language of peoples who, not knowing what is true, desperately seek it. Góngora, like Picasso, Buñuel, Carpentier, or Faulkner, did not know; they discovered. The Baroque, language of abundance, is also the language of insufficiency. Only those who possess nothing can include everything. The horror vacui of the Baroque is not gratuitous—it is because the vacuum exists that nothing is certain. The verbal abundance of Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World or of Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! represents a desperate invocation of language to fill the absences left by the banishment of reason and faith. In this way postRenaissance Baroque art began to fill the abyss left by the Copernican revolution. Elio Vittorini, in his Diario in pubblico (Journal in Public), refers to the need for a literary perspective to deal with social and historical fact. The French Revolution did not have its own literature until Balzac and Stendhal, when it was no longer revolutionary, yet they preserved its myths: Chabert has returned from Eylau and Fabrizio del Dongo from Waterloo. Likewise the literature of the Mexican Revolution does not begin with the chronicles of Guzmán and Azuela, but rather with Agustín Yáñez’s Al filo del agua (The Edge of the Storm), which offers a perspective capable of melding both the

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reality and the myth of a historical process. The literature of the Soviet revolution, abruptly frozen by Zhdanovism, is undergoing today the same need to account for everything left unsaid during the dictatorship of Stalinism.xviii So, too, Faulkner can write about the South only when its reality dissipates, and yet—or perhaps because of this—the myths persist. It is irrelevant to ask whether Southern myth is just or unjust; it exists, and as a consequence it is true and valid, literarily speaking. It is the myth of a ruined place, homeland, and traditions, ruined because they already contained the seeds of corruption. Every child of the South is born “with [his] arms spread, on the black crosses” of slavery, which corrupts both master and servant.xix This is a fragmented, obsessive, decaying myth that demands a language and a way of storytelling that are tortuous and obsessive and oftentimes rhetorical because they represent Yeats’s “quarrel with others, not ourselves.” But at the same time, and above all, this language and way of storytelling represent Faulkner’s debate with himself.xx The myth is kept alive only through memory, often irrational, and quite possibly no one believes it, “not even those who narrate stories and repeat them or those who listen as they are told.” Myths, histories, pieces of gossip, “ode eulogy and epitaph, out of some bitter and implacable reserve of undefeat,” says Faulkner in his great chanson de geste of the South, Absalom, Absalom! xxi Memory is an unvanquished reserve for defeat. What is the true time of this mythic memory? Joe Christmas gives us an inkling in Light in August: “It was years later that memory knew what he was remembering.” xxii In The Wild Palms, we read: “Surely memory exists independent of the flesh. But this was wrong too.” xxiii And again in Absalom, Absalom! Faulkner defines the temporality of memory: “That is the substance of remembering—sense, sight, smell: the muscles with which we see and hear and feel—not mind, not thought.” xxiv

xviii Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov (1896–1948), one of the architects of Stalinism,

xix xx xxi xxii xxiii xxiv

formulated the strict control over intellectuals and cultural life in the postwar Soviet Union along nationalistic and anti-Western lines.—Trans. Light in August, 239. Quoted in Allen Tate, Memoirs and Opinions, 1926–1974 (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), 146. Absalom, Absalom!, 6. Light in August, 145. The Wild Palms, 291. Absalom, Absalom!, 115.

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There is no memory without flesh: memory is present. This is the permanent irony of time in Faulkner: all is memory, but everything is remembered in the present. Everything that was, is. The circle closes to open. Balzac’s man without a past who is all future yields to Proust’s man who is pure past, and he, in turn, yields to Faulkner’s man who is all past and as a result, all present, which is to say, immanent future. Quentin Compson, in The Sound and the Fury, does not commit suicide nor will he commit suicide: he commits suicide much like Joe Christmas is murdered, and Jim Bond is born; everything happens on being narrated, everything happens before the narration begins; in reality, everything happens in the narrative present of memory. In Proust, time by definition has been lost; time is really past, even after being lost and found again. In Balzac, time is yet to come, it is always-in-the-future, even in the present, because the present is an activity—an ambition, a commercial transaction, an intrigue—designed for the future. In Faulkner, time is neither lost nor regained: it is always present, and an obsession of burning, carnal memory. Faulkner’s style is born from this union of loss and presence, from the inseparability of history and life, from the “frozen speed” to which Sartre refers.xxv The present event is destiny, the sum of fates past and future that are only accomplished or heralded in the freedom of the present. Quentin Compson destroys the hands of his watch before committing suicide; time is not chronology but a presence. The sense of time makes Faulkner’s novels works of pure weight, pure presence; what matters is not a deceptively static becoming [devenir-estático], nor the plot twists that lead events from a beginning to a dénouement, but rather a dynamic being [estar-dinámico]. History does not develop because it already is. In Absalom, Absalom! four narrators, Miss Rosa Coldfield, Mr. Compson, Quentin, and Shreve, each tell the same story: Faulkner merely discovers it, finding it through a literary procedure, a method capable of laying bare everything at once. Since everything exists in the present, this use of time is what allows the present to distinguish itself from itself and its own gradations. All novelistic work aspires to totality, to a total and self-sufficient universe, to conquer its own time. In the traditional novel, this time develops chronologically and tends toward a temporal resolution that is also the resolution of the plot: the “why” is what matters. In Faulkner, what matters is the “how.” xxv Jean Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. Annette Michelson (New

York: Collier, 1962), 80.

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Faulkner starts out from something that is already present but that the novelist (and the reader) do not know. In other words, the novel exists already; the novelist, along with the reader, searches for and discovers it. For Faulkner and his readers, the novel becomes a search for the novel; his characters are in search of characters, his settings in search of settings, and finally, the novelist and the reader are in search of themselves. The works of Faulkner fold in on themselves; they grow inward. Who are these men and women who, along a painful course of the present, hope to discover what has happened in the past? It is we. Perhaps this is Faulkner’s true greatness: we—him, you, I—are his characters. Nothing in Faulkner is gratuitous, not the tortured rhetoric, not the invented lyricism, not the absolute temporality, not the alternative narratives. His poetic radicalism has that supreme sense: to reveal the identities that we scrupulously hide or deny because we know that they put us at risk and reveal us. This is not about characters in the sense that the nineteenth century got to know them, as lifelike projections of the reader, who afternoon after afternoon would nod in recognition, thankful that the novelist could translate them into written words along with all their psychological, ethical, and social support systems, all in a close approximation to everyday life. The characters of Faulkner are hewn from a different wood; they are cut from tragic cloth, they are masks that say and do what the reader might say and do; they are the deep, secret, extreme possibilities of a reader forced to discover himself or herself. In doing so, we discover the novel along with William Faulkner. Faulkner, like Dostoevsky and Kafka before him, transforms the novel into a form of paradoxical knowledge: Demons, The Castle, and Absalom, Absalom! stand for the knowledge of not knowing. They are novels of tragic epistemology. Within them, the known is no longer known, and the unknown is uncovered; this is the vast, human world that the Christian and rationalist comédies tried to nullify. Between Dante’s Divine Comedy, which closes the theological calendar, and Balzac’s Human Comedy, which begins the financial calendar, tragedy is ejected from modern life, dominated by a double rationality: the reconciliation of man with God in Christianity, and the reconciliation of man with reason in history. Only Nietzsche foresaw that when one comes to believe that everything makes sense, it only takes one exception for nothing to make sense. Christianity and rationalism thus opened the cycle of nihilism. The old tragedy was abolished and absorbed by divine reason and historical reason. But men can only maintain abstract relationships with divinity and history when these latter refuse to allow the operation of con-

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flictive irrationality in human lives. In pagan tragedy, the gods stir up conflicts that are unexplainable and irreconcilable. The tragic hero fights against his destiny in a concrete manner, and he coexists with ambivalent, laughable, and venal gods: the gods are other. In Christianity, a similar materialization would be impossible: God is not responsible for the Fall, but he is the instrument of redemption. Evil is a human project; a guilty God would be a monstrous thing. Man, wandering in the Christian desert, thought he had found an oasis in historical rationality. If he could not converse directly with a conciliatory God, perhaps he could debate with himself behind God’s back about the nature of humanity within the dialectical framework of history. History, for Hegel, proceeded in a rational and ascending manner toward the complete realization of being. It progressed toward liberty. Nietzsche announced that Hegelian dialectics would cease to be optimistic before history itself proved him right. Nothing had guaranteed that man would incorporate himself into a rational totality. Faith in the capacity of reason to explain everything was not only untenable but it also turned out to be undesirable because it removed tragedy from life and, in so doing, converted life into a nihilistic condition. For Nietzsche, tragedy is a proposition of multiple affirmations. We have seen that this is the very quality of poetry. Tragedy expresses the contradictions between the individual and the whole, between suffering and life; its essence resides not in the incompatibilities of conflict, but rather in the paradoxical happiness of contradictory affirmations. If the tragic life is suppressed, it will not take long for it to reappear disguised, contaminating, perturbed to the same degree as the abstraction that attempted to negate it. It was not long before history justified Nietzsche. Once tragedy was expelled from history by history, it hid in the very agent of history: man, “actor and author of his own history,” yes, but capable of erring as a result of liberty itself. Modern tragedy is the error of liberty. Man, believing himself free, discovers that he cannot separate himself from himself; the final challenge of liberty consists in the knowledge that the other who rules me is myself. Believing himself liberated from destiny as a blind, alien, implacable force, man realizes that he is his own destiny and imagines that the load is lighter because of this awareness. Believing himself happy, he quickly discovers the sardonic gaze of misfortune; in every pious corner of positivist progress, a relative awareness of radical insufficiency arises. Believing himself innocent, man confronts his own guilt, because there can only be justice if there is guilt; without guilt there is only injustice. The specter of Oedipus haunts

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modern man; his mystery is our own, and his questions are ours. How can we be guilty if we are innocent, unfortunate if we are happy, slaves if we are free? Faith, silent for a long time now, will not answer. Neither will history, victim of the nihilism prophesied by Nietzsche. History explains everything but the unexplainable, especially the unexplainable that is firmly rooted in the confines of human action. Why do projects of liberty generate slavery, and why do projects of solidarity result in the master-slave relationship? Tragedy does not pretend to answer these questions. It is enough to ask them and in this manner to confront religious and secular optimism with their own insufficiencies. This is the tragi-critical meaning of the great novels of Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Faulkner. Like Hegel, Faulkner believes that destiny “is what man is,” but this refers to man revealed, alienated, externalized: a blind twin. Hegel states: “Destiny is the consciousness of oneself, but an enemy self.” And in Absalom, Absalom!, with its “divided land,” the enemy land of Yoknapatawpha, Faulkner defines fate as “that curious lack of economy between cause and effect which is always a characteristic of fate when reduced to using human beings for tools, material.” xxvi I believe that along this path we approach the tragic sense of Faulkner’s novels. To survive, man violates nature, and this need is a violation of God’s work and also a loss of human innocence. But this abuse forces man to love nature to atone for his sins: guilt generates love, guilt and love unite to create that Faulknerian “I-Am,” that irreducible characteristic of human nature. But man—and this is a big “but”—to love himself and his fellow man, must carry out the process of violation-guilt-redemptionlove within himself and in relation to others. In this way, destiny passes for and is identical to true human action. Max Scheler notes that tragic action can depend on a conflict that resides within a person, as in Phaedra; or on opposing values that condition her achievement, as in Antigone; or on the very character of a person, as in Nero. In all cases, destiny takes place in the character and for the character. Hegel states in his Aesthetics that “the tragic man coincides with what he is or what he wants.” Perhaps the inevitability of William Faulkner’s novelistic technique is clearer now: the literary procedure—the search for history that already exists—is identical to the nature of his characters, who search, through fate, for the ultimate liberty of human creatures. Liberty and necessity converge to become destiny. Faulkner’s liberty is the positive sum of violation-guiltxxvi  A  bsalom, Absalom!, 94.

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redemption-love. Fate is the same liberty, using mankind as tools, negating them. This tragic negation determines the writing of Absalom, Absalom! The tale of the ancient Miss Rosa culminates in an instant of horror. Her brother-inlaw Thomas Sutpen returns from the war to find that his plantation is ruined and his son Henry has murdered a man and fled; Thomas is sixty years old, yet he proposes marriage to the young Miss Rosa and she, horrified, locks herself up forever in her house and forever wears black. Miss Rosa recounts much later that Sutpen proposed marriage to her in front of the mulatto servant Clytie and Sutpen’s own daughter Judith. But this is not what horrifies her; the old woman admits that that night she might have accepted his offer because if he was crazy, so was she: “If I was saved . . . it was no fault, no doing of my own.” xxvii Miss Rosa’s horror actually comes from her tragic separation or, rather, her separation from tragedy. A tragedy takes place before her eyes, and yet its participants forbid her to take part in it. They deny her presence and dehumanize her. The tragedy of Absalom, Absalom! is of two brothers unaware of each other. Both Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon are sons of Sutpen the patriarch. The two brothers do not know that they are brothers, but they love each other. And Charles loves Sutpen’s daughter Judith. Henry opposes the marriage of his sister to Charles because he is already married; he has a morganatic mulatto wife.xxviii When he discovers that Charles is his brother, he opposes the incest on principle, but he eventually overcomes his atavistic prejudice: we are darkly aware that Henry would possess his sister through his own half brother Charles. But Henry will eventually realize that Charles is black. It is this assimilation, this transference, that is unacceptable to Henry; all separations and taboos are redeemable but one. Race is the final separation, similar to death. Henry murders Charles and flees. Meanwhile, Rosa witnesses all of this, but she is isolated from the protagonists. Rosa wanted to love Charles, but her destiny was to witness to tell. Nonetheless, it is not the fact of this unconscious separation that damages Rosa, but rather an instant in which her absolute separation becomes patent, when the old man Sutpen throws her a glance that turns her into a thing, xxvii Ibid., 133. xxviii A “morganatic” marriage is one where a man from the titled class marries a

woman of a lower standing with the understanding that she retain her rank and that any children born to them will have no claim to the father’s title or holdings.—Trans.

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that strips her of her personality and violates forever her individual “I-am.” Sutpen looks at Rosa like “a bitch dog, or a cow, or mare,” and this glance confirms forever her separation.xxix Fate is the disproportion between cause and effect when a person makes use of another person as if he or she were a thing. But Thomas Sutpen is simply projecting on Rosa an experience that he himself suffered as a young man. As an impoverished youth, he was denied entrance through the front door of a plantation house, and he, too, felt the violation of his “I-am.” That black servant had looked on him and spoken to him not as the person Thomas Sutpen but rather as if he were “cattle, creatures heavy and without grace, brutely evacuated into a world without hope or purpose for them, who would in turn spawn with brutish and vicious prolixity.” xxx Instead of reacting with violence, Sutpen reacts with tragic hubris. From this moment on, his life has no other purpose than to “to make that scratch, that undying mark on the blank face of the oblivion to which we are all doomed.” xxxi Sutpen’s pride engenders a world identical to that of the South itself, a world of feudal power, of masters and slaves. But the war castigates Sutpen’s pride, and his world collapses in ruin. The patriarch’s pride goes too far; born of separation, it culminates by inflicting itself on the weakest and the most separate being that it encounters along the devastated path of the South: Miss Rosa, eighteen years old, suffers from Sutpen’s stare as much as he had suffered from the stare of a black servant when he was twenty. Sutpen tragically projects his sense of alienation onto an innocent woman. Between these two glances, between these two fates, is inscribed the destiny of the rise and fall of the Sutpens. Rosa survives to tell the story. Liberty, on the other hand, is divided between nature and humankind, and within humankind it is divided sexually. Both men and women are victims in Faulkner, the former because they succumb and the latter because they withstand. Besides Yvonne in Under the Volcano, there are, perhaps, no more beautiful female figures in modern fiction than Charlotte in The Wild Palms and Lena in Light in August. Lena, always on the road, a wanderer, appears in the novel pregnant and tired of walking the dry fields of summer; she comes in search of Lucas Burch and exits in the company of Byron Bunch. The men have changed, succumbed, whereas she resists, counteracting the weakness x xix Absalom, Absalom!, 136. xxx Ibid., 190. xxxi Ibid., 102.

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of man with an incorruptible motherly force. But by harmonizing the oppositions, she deprives them of sense. Woman in Faulkner is the center of harmony and strength. Man is the center of extreme choices and defeat, the result of an inability to reach goals. Man provides change and extremes in life; woman provides centering and permanence. Charlotte also resists. She is a female Faust who commits her life to the wandering hell of a false Dr. Harry in exchange for limited moments of love. But Charlotte mocks the devil; for her, the instants are an eternity. “‘No!’ she cried. ‘No! No! Jesus God, no! Hold me. Hold me hard, Harry! This is what it’s for, what it all was for, what we were paying for: so we could be together, sleep together every night. Not just eat and evacuate and sleep warm so we can get up and eat and evacuate in order to sleep warm again! Hold me! Hold me hard! Hard!” xxxii Charlotte will pay for her moments of love; Harry himself will kill her by making her have an abortion. We know that the death of Charlotte is identical to the death of Harry without Charlotte. The morality of isolation, of decent, comfortable separation, is destroyed by the freedom of an extreme, passionate, dangerous, and “immoral” union. Like another great novelist of mad love, Emily Brontë, William Faulkner turns erotic passion into the place of encounter between word and flesh, what Octavio Paz calls the “consecration of the instant.” This consecrated (or profaned) instant invokes the appearance of true identity. In Light in August, Joanna Burden, the mature and nymphomaniac lover of the Negro Joe Christmas, screams to him “with her wild hair, each strand of which would seem to come alive like octopus tentacles, and her wild hands and her breathing: ‘Negro! Negro! Negro!’” xxxiii Crucified by his own skin, Christmas rises from the dead, conquers, and discovers himself sexually; he is like a Christ who, in his agony on Calvary, keeps an erect phallus. Joanna Burden is the Mary Magdalene who accepts the crucifixion but kneels to worship at the cursed organ that defines her, gives her pleasure, and provides her with salvation precisely because it belongs to a separate and denied being: a black man. In Absalom, Absalom!, in a society that does not recognize tragic relationships, Thomas Sutpen assigns to himself the powers of a vengeful God: it is he who separates. But tragedy, denied and hidden, reappears in the forbidden union, in the condemned freedom. The black man overcomes the white man because the former is offered the temptation of becoming everything xxxii The Wild Palms, 109. xxxiii Light in August, 245.

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he cannot be in his own society. But if he is an agent of liberty, the black man Christmas experiences this liberty unconsciously, as a limited liberty: “He felt like an eagle: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong. But that passed, though he did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage.” xxxiv Still a cage: the moment has passed and men return to the social prison, to the separation imposed by the moral destiny of the modern world; they return to the separation imposed by the sterile decalogue between an isolating, Protestant capitalism that allows men to commune only within the barracks, the bank, the whorehouse, the circus of sports, sensation, melodrama, racial repugnance, social exploitation, ersatz sexuality, and domestic sentimentalism. Liberty—the human passion—has briefly overcome fate, a human habit. “Don’t make me have to pray yet. Dear God, let me be damned a little longer, a little while.” xxxv Condemned to liberty to avoid the condemnation of fate, Faulkner’s characters discover the tragic nature of both: “Too much happens. That’s it. Man performs, engenders, so much more than he can or should have to bear. That’s how he finds that he can bear anything. That’s it. That’s what is so terrible. That he can bear anything, anything.” xxxvi They endure their fate and paradoxically win liberty, knowing that they are capable of enduring, resisting, and occasionally overcoming that separation; in Faulkner, liberty is tragic because it involves the awareness of both its inevitability and its limitations. The ultimate limitation, the unvanquishable fatality, the final use and abuse, is death. But even death stops being fatal if it is given a name, if it is foretold, known, and awaited: “The reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time.” xxxvii In this fashion, Faulkner’s liberty is of the highest tragic order. The human project—passion, love, liberty, justice—must be enacted and actualized despite the knowledge of its ultimate failure: it will end with death itself. Only through this knowledge may we rescue humanist and revolutionary philosophies from that Judeo-Christian optimism that, by denying people their tragic reality, assumes the inexplicable destiny of imposing newer destinies in the name of impenetrable reason. Thanks to writers like Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Faulkner, who restore tragic warnings, it is possible to engage reason with its limitations without xxxiv xxxv xxxvi xxxvii

Ibid., 150–51. Ibid., 250. Ibid., 283. As I Lay Dying, 161.

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rejecting its illusion. The modern world offers only positivism or nihilism. One feeds on the other; neither allows for the much vaster reality of humankind. Faulkner knew this, and with the last sentence of The Wild Palms, he risked his own destiny and gave the key to his entire oeuvre: “Between grief and nothing I will take grief.” xxxviii Instead of nothing, we have this land, these men, these dwellings, this pain. And because he chooses pain over nothing, Faulkner can affirm: “Man will not merely endure: he will prevail.” xxxix

Note 1 I explore further the implications and extensions of this theme, as well as its effect on

Spanish-language narrative, in my essay La nueva novela hispanoamericana (Mexico City: Joaquín Mortiz, 1969).

x xxviii The Wild Palms, 300. xxxix William Faulkner, “Address upon Receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature,” in

The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley (New York: Penguin, 1977), 724.

  Chapter Twenty-six  

Góngora’s and Lezama’s Appetites Roberto González Echevarría

Translated by Maarten van Delden

José Lezama frequently invokes Luis de Góngora in his essays, and in Paradiso the characters repeatedly refer to Góngora in their literary discussions. In addition, Lezama devoted a long, dense essay, “Sierpe de don Luis de Góngora” (“The Serpent of Don Luis de Góngora”), to the work of the poet from Córdoba, and another essay, “La curiosidad barroca” (“Baroque Curiosity”), to Góngora’s historical context.1 The critics, for their part, have never missed an opportunity to proclaim Lezama a Baroque writer, nor have they stopped using Góngora as a point of reference when confronted with the by now proverbial difficulty of Lezama’s writing. These gestures have almost invariably been of a ritual nature, given that all difficult poetry since symbolism has been compared to the poetry of Góngora—in most cases (for example, Pablo Neruda’s) causing more confusion than clarification. But Lezama’s case appears to be different, and given the insistence with which the Cuban writer refers to Góngora, analyzes his poetry, speculates about his private life, meditates on his poetry’s impact in Spanish America, and mentions the commentary his work has generated over the centuries, the ritual gesture may well be justified. Anyone who reads Lezama cannot fail to notice that Góngora is a key figure in his work, nor can he or she avoid the impression that Lezama’s poetics are in some way linked to Góngora’s. Lezama leaves numerous traces in his essays that allow us to reconstruct the history of his interest in the Baroque, and in Góngora in particular. On the first page of “Baroque Curiosity,” Lezama reminds us that the Baroque (anathema in the nineteenth century) is now used to designate such apparently dissimilar phenomena as the paintings of Rembrandt and the mathematics of Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz and, as Lezama mockingly observes, “one critic, outdoing himself in the art of generalization, went so far

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as to affirm that the earth was classical and the sea Baroque.”2 What Lezama wants to draw attention to with his joke (no doubt aimed at Eugenio d’Ors) is the fact that the Baroque has been turned into a catchall in our century. But as we will see, it is in this catchall that Lezama’s work and his interpretation of Góngora become intelligible. Generally speaking, the renewed popularity of the Baroque in the twentieth century can be traced back to the avant-garde movements (specifically to German expressionism, as René Wellek points out3), which rejoiced in all forms of excess or apparent lack of coherence, seeing them as strategies for opposing the tranquil bourgeois realism of the previous century. More specifically, however, we can identify an increase in interest in the Baroque in the Spanish-speaking world starting in the twenties and manifesting itself not only in literature but also in criticism. All one needs to do is to take note of the references in Lezama’s essays to see that he was an assiduous reader of the Revista de Occidente and of the books published by the Revista’s editorial team; I am referring not only to his allusions to Ortega himself, but also to Oswald Spengler, Max Scheler, G. W. F. Hegel, and Wilhelm Worringer. In the Revista de Occidente Lezama no doubt read some of the best-known exegetes of the Baroque (almost all of them German): Heinrich Wölfflin, d’Ors, Worringer, and Spengler. All these critics and thinkers, whose work was actively promoted by Ortega through the Revista, had an extraordinary impact on the avant-garde in Spanish America, particularly in Cuba.4 This phenomenon ran parallel to that of the Spanish Generation of ’27, which, as is well known, led a revival of Góngora’s work on the third centenary of his death and from among whom there emerged his most assiduous and brilliant critic, Dámaso Alonso. In this context it is worth adding an element that has received relatively little attention, that is, the popularity of the Baroque among contemporary Spanish American writers of different ages (the affinity for Baroque poetry felt by such modernista poets as Rubén Darío and José Martí is, of course, well known). Jorge Luis Borges, for example, devotes pages full of praise to Francisco de Quevedo, and dedicates a poem to Baltasar Gracián. Miguel Cervantes, furthermore, is present throughout his work. Alejo Carpentier declares himself a Baroque writer, repeatedly mentions the Spanish picaresque in his essays, and often cites Lope de Vega. In La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz), Carlos Fuentes quotes from Pedro Calderón on several occasions, and in Aura the young protagonist is transformed in her lover’s arms into an old woman named Consuelo, a moment reminiscent of a scene of Calderón’s El mágico prodigioso (The Pro-

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digious Magician) in which Justina turns into a cadaver in Cipriano’s arms. In Salamandra (Salamander), Octavio Paz writes an entire poem in the form of a gloss on a famous sonnet by Quevedo, “Amor constante más allá de la muerte” (“Love Constant beyond Death”). Lezama himself suggests in “Baroque Curiosity” that the Baroque is the first artistic movement to emerge in what would become America, and his study is rooted in the historiographical tradition initiated in the 1940s by Pedro Henríquez Ureña and Mariano Picón-Salas. And Severo Sarduy established a theoretical bridge between the Baroque and modernity based on the affinities between the cosmologies of these two eras.5 When Lezama mentions Leibniz’s mathematics in “Baroque Curiosity,” it is almost certain that he does so with Spengler in mind. One of the first thinkers to develop a global theory of the Baroque in the twentieth century, Spengler writes that “the brilliant period of the Baroque mathematic . . . lies substantially in the 18th Century and extends from the decisive discoveries of Newton and Leibniz through Euler, Lagrange, Laplace and D’Alembert to Gauss.”6 Spengler established a radical distinction between Greek or classical mathematics, which functioned on the basis of numbers that represented concrete entities, and Western or Faustian mathematics, which aims for the infinite by means of numbers—metaphorical truths—representing abstract relations: “For the Classical mathematic knows only one number between 1 and 3, whereas for the Western the totality of such numbers is an infinite aggregate.”7 The distinction between these two types of representation in Spengler helps explain an apparently surprising affirmation that Lezama makes about Góngora: “Góngora’s light is a rebellion of objects and a time of empowering incitement. In this sense, one can speak of the Gothicism of its rebellious light. The light that absorbs the object and afterward produces an irradiation. The light that has been heard, that appears in the angelical accompaniment, the light accompanied by the transparency of angels rubbing their wings together. Objects in Góngora are raised up in proportion to the ray of empowerment they receive. It is just that the ray and the uprising are forced into Renaissance vicissitudes. The fury of this metaphorical ray is of Gothic propulsion, tamed by a recognition of Greek and Roman fables and customs.”8 In The Decline of the West, Spengler states that the Gothic and the Baroque “are only stages of one and the same style,”9 since for him the Gothic was the first stylistic manifestation of the Faustian soul in pursuit of the infinite (as opposed to the ancient soul, with its focus on the here and now). But the

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source for both Spengler and Lezama is Worringer, whom Lezama follows point by point in the above quotation and in much of the essay on Góngora. Worringer distinguished four types of art: the art of primitive man, which he describes as pure abstraction, the imposition of an order as a way of confronting the terror of the unknown; classical art, which represents the satisfaction of knowledge and therefore the placid acceptance of reality and its forms; Oriental art, which abandons itself to not knowing and to sensuality; and Gothic art. Gothic art is the intermediate phase between primitive and classical art. “And thus,” Worringer writes in Formprobleme der Gotik (Form in Gothic, 1912), “the dualism [of primitive man who fears the cosmos], which no longer suffices for the negation of life, which is already enfeebled by knowledge which nevertheless denies to it complete emancipation, resolves itself into a confused mania of ecstasy, a convulsive yearning to be merged into a super-sensuous rapture, into a pathos, the specific essence of which is a lack of all measure.”10 That is to say, in Gothic art there is a tension between the imposition of an abstract, ascendant, and transcendent linearity, on the one hand, and the presence and strength of the forms of sensuous reality, on the other. For Worringer, as for Lezama later on, the art of the Renaissance, with its burden of classical humanism, momentarily attenuates the complex transcendentalism of Gothic art, but the latter is reborn in the Baroque, which is the art of antihumanism, transcendent once more, aspiring to the pleasures of eternity in the convulsions of ecstasy. The longing for transcendence and a pervasive sensuousness: these are the two elements Worringer identifies as the components of a Gothic dialectics that never achieves a synthesis. They also provide the basis on which Lezama develops his essay “The Serpent of Don Luis de Góngora.” This entire history reverberates in Lezama, in his essays, in his poems and in Paradiso. If we overlook this fact, we risk attributing a false originality to his postulates. And yet this history does not exhaust Lezama’s reading of Góngora. Lezama is not a meek follower of literary or philosophical fashions; on the contrary, if there is anything that stands out in his work, in whatever genre, it is that he rejects all literary habits and defies the best and most tenacious attempts at academic exegesis. Góngora is clearly part of a given context, of an entire avant-garde aesthetic that sees him as the champion of a pure and hermetic poetry. But his role in Lezama’s poetry is even more complex and richly suggestive. Lezama’s reading of Góngora is more critical than is generally the case among the avant-garde. Instead of a

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straightforward acceptance of Góngora’s poetics, it is a loving exegesis that, in the final analysis, allows Lezama to uncover what is missing in Góngora’s poetry. He uses it, in other words, as a springboard for his attempt to forge a new poetics. There is an obscure and suggestive passage in “The Serpent of Don Luis de Góngora” that can serve as a starting point for my argument: “What was missing in Góngora’s penetrating luminosity was the dark night of Saint John of the Cross, because that ray of poetic knowledge without its accompanying dark night can only reveal the falconer’s lightning reflecting on the plaster. Perhaps no other country has seen the situation of its poetry posed in so concentrated a fashion as at this Spanish moment, when the metaphorical ray of Góngora, demonstrating a grievous incompleteness, needs and clamors for that enveloping and luminous dark night.”11 What does Lezama mean when he speaks of “grievous incompleteness”? Is the contrast between Saint John’s faith and Góngora’s supposed nihilism all that is at stake here? Perhaps. But I believe that there is also an intuition that has as much to do with poetry as with faith, though the latter certainly plays an important role in Lezama’s system. To understand what Lezama suggests in this passage, we need to recall briefly some aspects of Renaissance poetry. It is clear that the historical process that culminates in Góngora has its most immediate origin in Petrarch. Petrarchism emerged out of contradictory impulses that resulted in an increasingly wide breach as the Renaissance advanced. Petrarch forged a new poetic language out of certain elements available to him, such as the Provençal tradition that reached him via the dolce stil nuovo and the classical legacy. But these elements are not easy to harmonize. On the one hand, Petrarch’s classicism leads him to create a vernacular poetic language that aspires to the perfection attributed to Latin poetry. This aspect of his work takes him in the direction of a closed poetic codification. On the other hand, he tries to center this language in a concrete presence—in a here and now that expresses the individuality of a lyrical self manifested in language. The formal perfection to which Petrarch aspires makes innovation more difficult, for innovation can produce a lack of harmony, but this disharmony is also the difference by means of which the centralizing presence of the lyrical self is revealed. We now know that Petrarch, in spite of his claims to the contrary, polished his poems with an almost Flaubertian obsessiveness; and that, like Juan Ramón Jiménez, he was never satisfied with the last of the many (and potentially infinite) versions

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of his poems. In reading his poetry today, one notices the tension between aesthetic intentions that can be harmonized only at the highest level of conceptual abstraction: a longing for formal perfection that is of Platonic and classical origin, and the feeling of unfulfilled love, which when it soars to its highest level also achieves a neo-Platonic quality. The fusion between the lyrical self and its code of expression is possible only at this level of abstraction. In Petrarch’s epigones of the sixteenth century, the ever-increasing aspiration to perfect language creates an autonomous code signifying less and less as it frees itself of all centralizing restraint and gives itself over to its own twists and turns. By way of experiment, we may take a sonnet by Petrarch on a given theme and juxtapose it to sonnets by Garcilaso de la Vega, Pierre de Ronsard, Edmund Spenser, and Quevedo, which appear to be nothing other than glosses or playful variations on the “original.” In Fernando de Herrera, as we know, there is already an attempt, expressed consciously and with theoretical authority, to forge an autonomous poetic language. His contemporary, Fray Luis de León, who was no doubt conscious of the problem, resorted to a philosophical-theological formula to anchor this language, as is clear from the following statement in The Names of Christ: “God inspired men’s intelligence in order that its movement and spirit transport them to the heaven from which poetry comes. Because poetry is no less than a communication of the celestial and divine breath.”12 Like the music of Francisco Salinas, the perfection of poetic language comes from heaven and is part of a cosmic harmony—the music of the spheres. The verbal music of the poem emanates from the breath of God rather than from the voice of the poet. Fray Luis presupposes the existence of an external force that encodes his poems, annulling his own presence and voice as a centralizing element. Hence the “cold” tone often attributed to his poems. The process that begins with Petrarch involves an uprooting of poetic language. Faced with the increasing aspiration to perfection in poetic language, to a vernacular that has been mastered by the exigencies of the new classicism, the lyric voice is annulled and no longer recognizes itself in the smooth surface of its own creation. Language rotates around itself and its own limited though vast universe of allusion, like a planet that has gone out of orbit. When we arrive at the Baroque, this language has become a demented, alienated language, pointing to a gap between the poet and the world, and between the poet and his own creation; a language that has lost

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its referential capacity and signifies nothing other than the abyss that separates language from being. It is, therefore, not by chance that many of the figures in the pastoral literature of the Renaissance and Baroque are alienated beings, ones excluded from the harmonious beauty of the locus amoenus in which they generally find themselves, nor is it surprising that the theme of madness is so prominent during both these periods. The “incompleteness” Lezama identifies in Góngora is related to this process, which we can briefly analyze in fragments from two poetic landmarks: the twenty-third canto of Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and a well-known passage from Garcilaso’s Second Eclogue. In the twenty-third canto, as we know, Orlando encounters first a multitude of love letters engraved by Angelica on the trees, and subsequently a cave where she and Medoro have consummated their love. On the walls of the cave, Orlando encounters a poem written in Arabic (which Ariosto takes pains to inform us was “known to Orlando like the Latin tongue”) in which Medoro expresses his fulfillment (I quote from William Stewart Rose’s translation of 1823–31): Gay plants, green herbage, rill of limpid vein, And, grateful with cool shade, thou gloomy cave, Where oft, by many wooed with fruitless pain, Beauteous Angelica, the child of grave King Galaphron, within my arms has lain.13

Hoping that what he suspects is in fact not true, Orlando seeks shelter and finds a hut similarly covered with love letters, no doubt written by Angelica (“this handwriting I recognize, I do not doubt it”), that narrate in painful detail the last thing he wants to hear. The next day, Orlando returns to the cave: Where his inscription young Medoro wrought. To see his wrongs inscribed upon that mount, Inflamed his fury so, in him was nought But turned to hatred, phrensy, rage, and spite; Nor paused he more, but bared his faulchion bright; Cleft through the writing; and the solid block, Into the sky, in tiny fragments sped. Wo worth each sapling and that caverned rock, Where Medore and Angelica were read!14

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Orlando’s madness manifests itself when confronted with writing, emblematically engraved, fixed in marble, singing the unthinkable, that is, the plenitude of love and the coincidence of that plenitude with the inscription of the poem—the plenitude of physical union that cannot be encompassed in Petrarchan terms, that can only be envisioned through the dislocation provoked by means of humor and irony. The passage is full of suggestive elements: the Arabic writing that distances Orlando from this poem of plenitude, the saturation, the interminable repetition of messages engraved on trees, on the walls of the hut, in the cave, on the fountain, as if the real world were incapable of containing this forbidden writing, which is that of satiety. Orlando’s madness is a reaction to this language of abundance; his aggression is aimed at those signs, which surpass reality with messages that close the fissure, the rupture between language and signification. It is only in madness, or in humor and irony, that “incompleteness” can complete itself. In the Second Eclogue, perhaps in emulation of Ariosto, Garcilaso offers an equally suggestive mad scene.15 The eclogue has provoked some negative comments for its excess, its lack of harmony, and its strange complexity.16 The first part relates the misfortunes of Albanio and his mad love for Camila; in the second part, Severo the magician contemplates the entire history of the house of Alba in an urn (a kind of Borgesian Aleph). The two parts of the eclogue mirror each other: the story of young Alba repeats that of Albanio. Given the length and complexity of the poem, there is no doubt that this was Garcilaso’s most ambitious work and, in my opinion, the one that most clearly predicts the work of Góngora, as well as that of Cervantes. Here, I want to draw attention to a scene in the first part of the eclogue that describes Albanio’s madness, a brilliant scene quite unlike the sober and restrained work for which Garcilaso is usually praised by the critics. Albanio encounters Camila after she has already rejected him, and he tries to explain himself to her one more time; but Camila refuses to let him do so and tries to escape. Albanio seizes her by the hand, they struggle, Camila cries out that Albanio is going to break her finger, and finally she escapes, at which point Albanio loses his mind: “I feel relieved of an enormous weight; I seem to be flying, scorning mountains, huts, cattle, milk, and cheese. Are these not my feet? With them I walk. I am beginning to realize that my body has left me; only my soul is still at my command. Has someone stolen it or hidden it while I was looking elsewhere? A rosy-colored figure was sleeping over there: is that perhaps my body? No, for it is very beautiful.”17 The struggle between Albanio and Camila, the strange and somewhat comical allusion

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to the finger breaking: all this disorder could hardly be more shocking given the pastoral atmosphere in which the action takes place. It should be remembered that this eclogue includes in the description of young Alba’s marriage the verse “burning and desiring already to be lying together,” about which an irritated Herrera wrote in his Anotaciones “that it is lacking in [Garcilaso’s] usual modesty and purity, and that it tarnished the cleanliness and honesty of the entire description.”18 And it is precisely in this eclogue that a clear split emerges in Garcilaso’s poetic language. At one point in the course of a dialogue between Albanio and Salicio, the former asks his friend: “What are magnificent words for? / Who made you an eloquent philosopher, / Since you are but a shepherd of goats and sheep?”19 This ironic distancing reveals the fissure, the rupture at the heart of the poetic language that expresses Albanio’s madness within the eclogue. As we have seen, the eclogue is divided into two parts that establish a parallel between a series of contemporary and historical events, on the one hand, and a pastoral fiction, on the other. Harmony is impossible, like Albanio’s love, which leads him to incoherence, aphasia, and in the end underscores the separation between the facticity of language and its abstract image; Albanio’s detached I speaks and names as external to himself that flesh of which he has been robbed, and which he no longer recognizes as his own (after this episode Albanio falls asleep and does not speak again in the poem). The most revealing trait of this great poem by Garcilaso is its disorder. In the distance between Camila’s rosy flesh, which Albanio takes to be his own, and the I that names it—in his inability to negotiate or bridge that distance—we find the source of Baroque poetics. From Garcilaso’s Second Eclogue to Góngora’s Soledades (Solitudes), from Albanio to the anonymous pilgrim, it is but a small step. The process I have been describing can be summarized, I believe, with the help of a brilliant paragraph in Leo Spitzer’s book on Lope’s La Dorotea (Dorotea): Baroque language is nothing other than a language that avails itself of the radical disconnection of all language from beauty. It is a language that expands the abyss between being and appearance and gilds what is ugly or bad with a halo of beauty. I will never forget the reliquary that filled an entire room in a church in Granada, and whose radiance of gold, crystal, and electric light made it look like the dress of an elegant courtesan, while every locket contained the bones and other remains of dead saints. The tinsel of language in the style of conceptismo and culteranismo be-

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longs to this beauty of haloes. The poet himself has a very good knowledge of the pseudowords of this language, and it is for this reason that he can write very well in a Baroque style. Or, what comes down to the same thing, make his characters speak in a Baroque style and have them criticize their own language. The poet understands both what is opportune and what is inopportune about these embellishments.20

The end result of Petrarchism is a language in which the poet’s search for unity and his simultaneous (and contradictory) awareness of rupture lead to the assimilation of diverse, conflicting languages, as we have already seen in Garcilaso’s Second Eclogue. It is the language of failed plenitude, or plenitude pursued through an overabundance and superfluity, that signal the void, the absence of a centralizing voice, just as Albanio points to his body outside himself—a rosy figure, too beautiful to be his own. Saint John of the Cross, as Lezama suggests, represents the opposite pole of this tendency, or perhaps its complement. Saint John is highly conscious of the failure of language and of the impossibility of expressing the plenitude he pursues. In his prologue to the Spiritual Canticle, he writes: It is for this reason that loving souls use figures, comparisons and similitudes to allow something of that which they feel to overflow and from the abundance of the Spirit they pour out secrets and mysteries, rather than explain these things rationally. These similitudes, if they be not read with the simplicity of the spirit of love and understanding embodied in them, appear to be nonsense rather than the expression of reason, as may be seen in the divine Songs of Solomon and in other books of Divine Scripture, where, since the Holy Spirit cannot express the abundance of His meaning in common and vulgar terms, He utters mysteries in strange figures and similitudes. Whence it follows that no words of holy doctors, albeit they have said much and may yet say more, can ever expound these things fully, neither could they be expounded in words of any kind. That which is expounded of them, therefore, is ordinarily the least part of that which they contain.21

  C  onceptismo and culteranismo were two schools of writing and poetry in seventeenth-

century Spain. Culteranismo, whose most renowned practitioner was Góngora, refers to a style in Spanish literature that re-Latinized poetic language and themes, using classical allusions, vocabulary, syntax, and word order. The leader of the conceptismo party was Quevedo, who intensely disliked culteranismo. The conceptistas disapproved of arcane language and believed poetic language should be clear and precise. However, they did favor the use of striking metaphors, expressed either concisely and epigrammatically or elaborated in extended conceits.—Trans.

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The movement toward plenitude leads either to the repetition and accumulation of tropes and metaphors—to nonsense and madness—or, via the opposite and correlative path, to the void, to the unanimous night that erases everything. If, on the one hand, we arrive at a sense of surfeit, of an unreachable plenitude, on the other, we encounter the negation of all appetite. Saint John writes in The Ascent of Mount Carmel: We here describe as night the privation of every kind of pleasure which belongs to the desire; for, even as night is naught but the privation of light, and, consequently, of all objects that can be seen by means of light, whereby the visual faculty remains unoccupied and in darkness, even so likewise the mortification of desire may be called night to the soul. For, when the soul is deprived of the pleasure of its desire in all things, it remains, as it were, unoccupied and in darkness. For even as the visual faculty, by means of light, is nourished and fed by objects which can be seen, and which, when the light is quenched, are not seen, even so, by means of the desire, the soul is nourished and fed by all things wherein it can take pleasure according to its faculties; and, when this also is quenched, or rather, mortified, the soul ceases to feed upon the pleasure of all things, and thus, with respect to its desire, it remains unoccupied and in darkness.22

The smoothness of Saint John’s verses, the lack of adjectives, the reduction of language to verbs and nouns, and sometimes only interjections—all these represent the other side of Baroque heterogeneity. The silence of the heavens in a uniform blue glow, the sparkling of solar light cast into the infinite to overarch the din of stars and constellations; the silence of Albanio’s aphasia after his mad, incoherent speech: both are aspects of a single movement toward the recovery of a poetic voice—negative in Saint John, assimilative in the Baroque. The blank page, the crowded page saturated with signs: counterpoints of silence. The “absent, disdained and shipwrecked” pilgrim of Góngora’s Solitudes wanders like an exile through the opulent landscape that surrounds him.23 As Pedro Salinas accurately observes, his story is a pretext, and the poem has practically no plot.24 What does the reader know about the pilgrim? That he is a shipwrecked person in a strange country (“the youth forlorn”),25 that he is lovesick and, like his precursors in the eclogues, he appears isolated (here in its etymological sense), uprooted: “The Soledades, in the form we have them,” says Alonso, “consist mostly of a succession of pastoral scenes, with a long historical narrative, a country wedding, scenes of fishing and falconry, tied together, like a continuous thread, only through the presence

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of that solitary pilgrim who is suffering from some tremendous misfortune in love.”26 The pilgrim is a passive spectator whose story gets lost amid the complex and meticulous descriptions of the context, the properties of the compass, maritime discoveries—everything—because the four projected “solitudes” were intended as a cosmic, total poem. The Solitudes, which, significantly, were never completed, aspired to be a poem that contained everything, a kind of poetic summa in which everything would be named, in which the entire range of metaphorical possibilities of language would be exhausted. The rupture we have been tracing in the Petrarchan tradition reaches its acutest expression in Góngora’s poem. The overloaded, contorted language is not a language that denotes a presence, but rather a language that searches for plenitude in itself—the pilgrim can only be pretext or context. Isolated as he appears on this unknown island—surrounded by “the dank temple of the ocean god”—the pilgrim projects the perfect image of alienation.27 In Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault discusses the relationship between madness and navigation in terms that appear singularly pertinent to the pilgrim of the Soledades: “[The madman] is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown—as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two countries that cannot belong to him. Is it this ritual and these values which are at the origin of the long imaginary relationship that can be traced through the whole of Western culture? Or is it, conversely, this relationship that, from time immemorial, has called into being and established the rite of embarkation? One thing at least is certain: water and madness have long been linked in the dreams of European man.”28 Recalling James Joyce’s famous neologism for passenger, we might describe Góngora’s pilgrim as a pasencore—an incomplete being who emerges from the waters of a sea that is perhaps not Baroque in itself but seems to be so in a metaphorical sense. In speaking of the Baroque, Lezama occasionally resorts metaphorically to the Aristotelian and scholastic concept of the radically humid (húmedo radical ), to that property, in other words, that gives bodies their elasticity and allows them to absorb the external world. And in “Baroque Curiosity” Lezama offers a kind of poetic-culinary anthology, which he introduces with the following words: “The literary banquet, the prolific description of fruit and seafood, is of a jubilantly Baroque origin. Let us try to reconstruct, with Plateresque assistants from one world or another, one of those festivals

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driven by the urge, both Dionysian and dialectical, to incorporate the world, to take possession of the external world through the transfiguring furnace of assimilation.”29 And in Paradiso, as Emir Rodríguez Monegal has noted, “the rituals associated with food, from its preparation to its practical exegesis, occupy an absolutely central place in the novel.”30 Also revealing is the image Lezama uses in the notorious eighth chapter of his novel, where he describes a coitus per angostam viam between Farraluque and the school’s maidservant: “But the Spanish girl, with the tenacity of a classical potter opening the broad mouth of an amphora with only two fingers, managed to unite the two small fibers of the opposing parts and reconcile them in that darkness.”31 It is worth recalling here that Saint Thomas was faithful to Aristotle in accepting the theory that the creation of a woman could be precipitated by external causes, such as a southerly wind, which is humid,32 as well as the belief that the female body contains more water than the male— from which it is deduced that it is more elastic, like the clay from which it was molded. The Baroque, then, can be defined as an appetite for incorporation, a desire for assimilation. The insufficiency or “incompleteness” Lezama attributes to Góngora is an appetite: “All life in the kingdom of poetry in extremis,” says Lezama, “furnishes the configuration of salvation, paradoxical, hyperbolic, in the kingdom. Thus, the stately, leisurely, indolent, distant and liturgical don Luis was the creator of a life based in an appetite for or impulse towards metamorphosis.”33 For Lezama, Góngora brought poetry to the point where it ceased to be an image of the world and incorporated the world instead: world–word, the image made substance through poetry. The madness, the “incompleteness” of Góngora, derives from the fact that appetite must always be circular and infinite—a serpent that devours itself and makes itself disappear. Like the infinite series of numbers between one and three to which Spengler referred, the permutational possibilities of Góngora’s poetic language are endless: “In Góngora,” Lezama explains, “the hermetic and minstrel-style roots are part of a vast hidden tradition, except at times the ray that has been launched like a comet by the minstrel devours itself in its own parabola, without reaching that dark oracular body, for the signs of the lord of Delphos appear on a nocturnal blackboard that tries insistently to erase them.”34 Góngora’s appetite is not as voracious as Lezama’s, since the latter wants to convert absorption into a sacrament, into a transcendental union: “When this dualism has been overcome and is submerged once more in that gleaming infusion where the sense of life itself will acquire a more sacramental

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form, a mystery revealed in the touch of human flesh, the need for poetry will once again present itself as a nourishment that surpasses the voracity for knowledge and corporeal autonomy.”35 Perhaps the key to understanding Lezama’s project, above all in Paradiso, is not to be found in Góngora but in Quevedo, in that grotesque and sacramental scene in the Buscón in which it is suggested that Don Pablos is about to eat some cakes made from the flesh of his executed and quartered father. This is the type of fusion for which José Cemí is aiming—Cemí, the protagonist of Paradiso whose name, in spite of its orthography, I am inclined to see as deriving from, or as a synthesis of sema, sign, and soma, body. Like the pilgrim of the Solitudes, and like Orlando and Albanio, Cemí is an incomplete being, witness, spectator, perplexed participant in a diffuse story. But the final scene of Paradiso evokes the moment during the mass in which the priest swallows the host and the acolyte sounds the hand bell: “A Negro in a white uniform was moving along with his shovel, picking up cigarette butts and the surrendered dust. He leaned the shovel against the wall and sat down at the coffee bar. He savored his coffee and milk along with some steaming toast. He began to beat his spoon inside the glass, slowly agitating the contents. Driven by the tinkling, Cemí gave body to Oppiano Licario once again. The syllables that he heard were slower now, but also clearer and more obvious. It was the same voice but modulated in a different register. Once more he heard: rhythm of hesychasts, now we can begin.”36 The voice modulated in a different register is that of the absent father, recovered through the mediation of a poem by Licario, eyewitness to the colonel’s death in Pensacola. Now we can begin; we do not begin over again; the text that has been read is nothing but the path leading to that moment of union from which can be postulated the perfect, transcendental text after the transmuting union. In speaking of Gothic cathedrals, Worringer used the phrase “petrified transcendentalism.” Lezama aspires to a miracle in his work—to the incarnation of the verb: “Poetry becomes visible, hypostatized, in the imaginary eras, where life is lived in the image, by anticipation in the mirror, the substance of resurrection.”37

Notes I read this essay at a symposium on the work of José Lezama Lima held at Yale University on April 14, 1972. It was first published in 1975 in the Revista Iberoamericana and was reprinted in 1976 in my book Relectura: Estudios de literatura cubana (Cara-

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4

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cas: Monte Ávila). My contextualization of Lezama’s ideas on the Baroque, particularly the part on his debt to Oswald Spengler, has become such a commonplace in the critical literature that it is no longer attributed to me, which is both a compliment and an affront. I would like to acknowledge here, as I have done elsewhere, my gratitude to my then colleague at Cornell University, Ciriaco Morón Arroyo, who shared with me his expertise on the works of José Ortega y Gasset and the Revista de Occidente and thus made possible my insights. [All translations from Spanish and German without attribution are by the translator, Maarten van Delden.] José Lezama Lima, “Sierpe de don Luis de Góngora,” in Orbita de Lezama Lima, ed. Armando Alvarez Bravo (Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1966), 256–90; “La curiosidad barroca,” in La expresión americana (Madrid: Alianza, 1969), 43–82; translated in this volume by María Pérez. Subsequent citations are from this translation. Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” 46. René Wellek writes the following: “I would be hesitant to dogmatize about the exact reasons for this revival of German Baroque poetry; part of it may be due to Spengler, who had used the term vaguely in The Decline of the West, and part is due, I think, to a misunderstanding. Baroque poetry was felt to be similar to the most recent German Expressionism, to its turbulent, tense, torn diction.” Wellek, “Concept of the Baroque in Literary Scholarship,” 76. (An excerpt from Wellek’s essay is included in this volume.—Eds.) For a more detailed discussion of this topic, see my “Isla a su vuelo fugitivo: Carpentier y el realismo mágico,” Revista Iberoamericana 40, no. 86 (1974): 9–64. In Las eras imaginarias (Madrid: Editorial Fundamentos, 1971), Lezama refutes the historicism put forward primarily by the above-mentioned philosophers. The work on Spengler was incorporated and amplified in my Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home; also published in Spanish as Alejo Carpentier: El peregrino en su patria (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1993; 2nd ed., Madrid: Gredos, 2004). See Sarduy, Ensayos generales sobre el barroco. Spengler, Decline of the West, 1:77–78. Ibid., 1:77. Lezama Lima, “Sierpe de don Luis de Góngora,” 258. Spengler, Decline of the West, 1:202. Worringer’s book appeared in 1912, under the title Formprobleme der Gotik (Form in Gothic). In 1907 he had published a theoretical preamble entitled Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Abstraction and Empathy). In the summer of 1911, Ortega wrote a series of articles on Worringer in El Imparcial, in which he summarized the German thinker’s theories. Years later, Ortega published several translations of Worringer’s work in Revista de Occidente. Apart from Lezama, Alejo Carpentier also refers to Worringer on several occasions in his column “Letra y solfa” which he wrote for El Nacional in Caracas in the 1950s, and in his novel The Chase, the young architecture student thinks of a book that must be Formprobleme der Gotik: “Why didn’t men today have that ancient option of ‘claiming sanctuary’ spoken of in a book on the Gothic?” See Alejo Carpentier, The Chase, trans. Alfred MacAdam (New York:

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13 14 15

16

17 18

19

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Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989), 100. Severo Sarduy has pointed out to me that in the 1950s the writers associated with the journal Ciclón were still talking about “empathy and abstraction.” I am grateful to my colleague at Cornell, Urbain de Winter, for some initial suggestions about Worringer. Quotations are from Worringer, Form in Gothic, 70, 79. Lezama Lima, “Sierpe de don Luis de Góngora,” 271. Fray Luis de León, The Names of Christ, trans. Manuel Durán and William Kluback (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), 112. [The translation has been slightly modified.  —Trans.] Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, ed. Stewart A. Baker and A. Bartlett Giamatti, trans. William Stewart Rose (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 243. Ibid., 245. For a detailed and learned analysis of the relations between Ariosto and Garcilaso, in particular between the Second Eclogue and Orlando furioso, see R. O. Jones, “Ariosto and Garcilaso,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 39, no. 3 (1962): 153–67. Margot Arce de Vázquez writes: “Apart from this [dramatic] interest and from the expressions of vulgar language in which the Second Eclogue abounds, this text offers a wealth of Renaissance themes extremely useful for determining Garcilaso’s ideology. From a poetic point of view, it is true that the work is somewhat uneven.” Margot Arce de Vázquez, Garcilaso de la Vega: Contribución al estudio de la lírica del siglo XVI, 2nd ed. (Río Piedras: Ediciones de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1961), 26. Garcilaso de la Vega, Obras, ed. Rafael Lapesa (Madrid: Clásicos Castellanos, 1963), 70. Garcilaso de la Vega, Las eglogas con las anotaciones de Herrera (Paris: Librería de la Vda. de Ch. Bouret, 1939), 219–20. The quotation is from Herrera’s note to line 1416. The interesting thing here is, of course, not Herrera’s moral censure, but the correspondence he establishes between moral and poetic error. Elías L. Rivers has studied the presence of the myth of Narcissus in the Second Eclogue, and writes the following: “The soul’s mistaken pursuit of the body is thus a frustrating error, for only a beauty at its own, or a higher level can satisfy the soul. This is precisely the division between soul and body which Albanio imagines as, in his madness, he looks at his reflection in the water; and the results are similarly frustrating. It is the carnal nature of Albanio’s love for Camila which Nemoroso says must be cured by Severo’s Platonic lessons concerning the true nature of the soul (11. 1094 and 1127). Unlike the Ovide moralisé tradition, which condemned Narcissus as representing willfully conceited self-love, the Neo-platonic tradition sees him as inadequate selfknowledge, substituting for the soul its inferior reflection, or hypostasis, the body, as the object of true love.” Elías L. Rivers, “Albanio as Narcissus in Garcilaso’s Second Eclogue,” Hispanic Review 41, no. 1 (1973): 303. In the poem, of course, these traditions cannot be separated from each other so clearly. On the contrary, what remains is the error that emerges from the encounter between concrete carnality and the idea of beauty. Garcilaso, Obras, 46.

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20 Spitzer, Die Literarisierung des Lebens in Lopes Dorotea (Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid,

1932), 11–12.

21 Saint John of the Cross, prologue to Spiritual Canticle, in Complete Works, ed. and

22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

trans. E. Allison Peers (Westminster, Md.: Newman Press, 1964), 23–24; emphasis added. [The translation has been slightly modified.—Trans.] Saint John of the Cross, Ascent of Mount Carmel, in Complete Works, 21. Luis de Góngora, The Solitudes of Don Luis de Góngora, trans. Edward Meryon Wilson, rev. and ed. Edward Meryon Wilson (New York: Las Américas Publishing), 25. Pedro Salinas writes: “The narrative part, the story is nothing but a slight pretext. Góngora makes use of it in order to indulge in descriptions of nature, plants, animals, landscape, in order to present dances, festivities, activities like hunting and fishing all of the greatest variety.” Pedro Salinas, Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 138. Góngora, Solitudes, 27. Dámaso Alonso, Góngora y el “Polifemo,” vol. 1, 4th ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1961), 115. Góngora, Solitudes, 53. Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1965), 11–12. Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” 58. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, “Paradiso en su contexto,” Mundo Nuevo, no. 24 (1968): 41. José Lezama Lima, Paradiso, trans. Gregory Rabassa (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1988), 202. Summa, 92, art. 1. Lezama Lima, “Sierpe de don Luis de Góngora,” 275. Ibid., 260. Ibid., 277. Lezama Lima, Paradiso, 617. Lezama Lima, Las eras imaginarias, 30. In sacramentalizing the RenaissanceBaroque hypostasis, Lezama recuperates Narcissus (see note 18). It was this trait of the Hispanic Baroque that attracted Spitzer and his German colleagues, as he indicates in his essay “The Spanish Baroque”: “It is Spanish art that best expresses the Verbo caro factum [Word made flesh], the Second Person of the Trinity. . . . Paganism it may be, but a Christianized paganism that extracts spirituality from man’s voluptuous flesh, that puts to God’s service even flesh itself.” Spitzer, “Spanish Baroque,” 130, 131.

  Chapter Twenty-seven  

Europe and Latin America in José Lezama Lima Maarten van Delden A Tale of Two Continents The relationship between Latin America and Europe is a constant theme in the Latin American (and Latin Americanist) intellectual tradition. Debates on civilization and barbarism, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, and modernity and identity may be seen as expressions of a persistent need to define Latin America’s debt to, and difference from, Europe. These debates have been marked by an ongoing tension between a sense of Latin America’s subordinate status with regard to Europe, on the one hand, and a belief in the continent’s cultural autonomy, on the other. In the past half century or so, the latter view has gained the upper hand, in part as a result of the wave of decolonization that swept the world in the wake of World War II. Discussions of the Latin American Baroque and Neobaroque have played a key role in articulating this sense of the continent’s unique position within Western culture. But before commenting on these discussions—and on José Lezama Lima’s role in them—I will describe four other interpretations of Latin America’s response to European cultural dominance. These interpretations present Latin America as alternately subversive, cosmopolitan, ambivalent, and deconstructive in relation to Europe.

Subversion The notion that Latin American culture overturns, contests, and subverts European models has been expressed by numerous thinkers, but the classic statement of this position is still Roberto Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban” (1971). The Cuban essayist borrows the main characters of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to sketch out a highly polemical reading of Latin America’s position within the global order: Prospero stands for the conqueror and colonizer

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from abroad, Ariel for the intellectual who submits to foreign idols, and Caliban for Latin America itself, the oppressed continent that curses—and thereby defies—its master. What makes Fernández Retamar’s essay especially interesting is that the author himself enacts (rather than merely stating) the Latin American challenge to European paradigms, for the identification with Caliban amounts to a resignification of a label used by the colonizers to denigrate the inhabitants of the New World. Fernández Retamar reminds us that Caliban is an anagram of cannibal and that the latter word, in turn, derives from Carib, the name given to one of the main groups of native inhabitants of the Caribbean at the time of the European invasion.1 Caliban, in other words, registers the European view of the Caribs as savages. By claiming this derogatory designation as the continent’s own, Fernández Retamar proposes to undermine the colonizer’s perception of the native inhabitants of the Americas from within. In effect, he steals one of the colonizer’s symbols and changes its meaning. In the battle against the negative images imposed by the West on Latin America, Fernández Retamar’s strategy is to reverse the content of one such image and in this way to force his reader to recognize the biased and distorted nature of the inherited view.2 This view of the relationship between Latin America and Europe as fundamentally antagonistic in nature has enjoyed much success in recent decades. How pervasive this reading became in the years after the publication of Fernández Retamar’s “Caliban” can be gleaned from the fact that one of its main proponents was the Uruguayan critic Emir Rodríguez Monegal, a man who had serious political differences with Fernández Retamar,3 but who nevertheless developed a similar reading of Latin American culture as engaged in the relentless overturning of European models.4 Rodríguez Monegal backed up his argument with the help of sources overlooked by Fernández Retamar—from the Brazilian poet and critic Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto antropófago” (1928), with its theory of Latin American culture as a cannibalization of European culture, to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of carnivalization, which helped him describe the desacralization of established aesthetic modes that was, for him, a constant feature of the Latin American literary tradition. Yet the underlying argument was similar to the one put forward by Fernández Retamar, even if it was less politicized and placed more emphasis on the playful and comic aspects of the Latin American challenge to the cultural capitals of the world. The agonistic view of the Europe–Latin America relationship has received a further boost in recent years as a result of the vogue for postcolonial theory, with its focus on the role of domina-

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tion and resistance in literature and culture. A good example of a reading informed by postcolonial theory is Peter Beardsell’s Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze, in which he argues that much of Latin America’s cultural production can be defined as a process of “returning Europe’s gaze,” that is, of responding critically to Europe’s self-interested and ideologically motivated constructions of Latin America.5 As such, this process amounts to a strategy for contesting the preeminence of the European view of the world.

Cosmopolitanism In a 1942 essay titled “The Position of America,” Alfonso Reyes argues that because of its colonial heritage, Latin America has, paradoxically, produced a culture that is more cosmopolitan and universal than Europe’s. Whereas the members of the world’s dominant cultures are generally satisfied with the nourishment they receive from their own tradition, the inhabitants of former colonies are accustomed to searching beyond their own borders for the sources of knowledge. The result is that such cultures are far more open to influences from the outside. According to Reyes, the citizens of an excolony often have a broader culture than their counterparts in the metropolis, whose conviction that they are at the center of things frequently generates a provincial mentality.6 This reading, in which Latin American culture exceeds, goes beyond, or surpasses the metropolitan center, has been put forward by many different writers. In Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (1963), the protagonist, Horacio Oliveira, an Argentine living in Paris, is described by another character in the novel as a typical Latin American intellectual, precisely because he is so well read in various literary traditions. He is knowledgeable about Italian literature, English literature, French literature, the Spanish Golden Age—his range, in other words, is much wider than that of a typical French intellectual.7 In a similar vein, Carlos Fuentes once claimed that the difference between a French and a Latin American intellectual was the fact that whereas the former needed to know only René Descartes, the latter had to be familiar with Descartes and Quetzalcóatl.8 Even Fernández Retamar suggests that cosmopolitanism is a characteristic feature of Latin American culture, although it is a feature he does not approve of. He notes that only a Latin American author such as Jorge Luis Borges could put on the kind of scintillating display of universal culture for which his work is known. The typical European author is much more like Charles Péguy, who once boasted that

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he read only French literature.9 Fernández Retamar regards Borges’s cosmopolitan erudition as the symptom of a colonized mentality that needs to be overcome; yet he also acknowledges it is as a mark of the Argentine author’s Latin Americanness.

Ambivalence One of the more interesting by-products of the debate on postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s was the increased interest in the concepts of modernism and modernity. In the field of Latin American studies, this resulted in a number of works that interpreted Latin American culture and society through the prism of its responses to modernity. Several influential critics settled on the view that Latin America’s relationship to modernity was fundamentally ambivalent in nature. One key contribution of these discussions was to reformulate the question of Latin America’s relationship to Europe. The concept of modernity encompasses the perennial question of European dominance, but its focus is less restricted, since there is no doubt that the United States, not just Europe, is one of the great motors of modernity. Furthermore, by organizing the discussion around a concept rather than a geographical location, these critics were able to develop less polarized views of Latin America’s relations to other cultures, since there was no inherent reason why modernity could not be viewed as something interior rather than exterior to Latin American culture. The modernity-centered approach to Latin American culture proved attractive to thinkers in various disciplines, in works such as Identity and Modernity in Latin America by the Chilean sociologist Jorge Larrain and Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity by the ArgentineMexican anthropologist Néstor García Canclini.10 Such studies, even though conducted in very different ways, reach strikingly similar conclusions: that Latin America neither wholly repudiates nor fully identifies with modernity. This is also the thrust of Carlos Alonso’s The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Spanish American Cultural Discourse, the most noteworthy application of the modernity paradigm to Latin American literature. Alonso proposes that a conflicted relationship with modernity has characterized Spanish American cultural discourse from its beginnings. The commitment of Spanish American intellectuals to modernity originated, according to Alonso, in the struggle for independence, when a convergence took place between “the master plot of futurity” used by Spanish America’s Creole elites to support

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their desire for a break with Spain, and the narrative of modernity being constructed in the world’s metropolitan centers.11 The movement away from modernity in turn resulted from the realization on the part of Spanish American writers that “the objective economic and social circumstances of the new continent” (23) failed to conform to the metropolitan “myth” (19) of modernity, and so left them with no ground to stand on. To employ the discourse of modernity in such a situation, as Spanish American writers in fact did, risked undermining their own position, since “Spanish American reality was always in danger of becoming the negative object of Western knowledge, of Western modernity and its discourses” (23). The rejection of modernity that evolved out of these circumstances was a way for writers to safeguard a discursive authority that was constantly threatening to evaporate.

Deconstruction Alonso’s reading presents Latin American culture as a problem—albeit a fascinating and in many ways exemplary one—and thus distinguishes itself from the two other interpretations I have looked at, with their more affirmative stance. The problematizing approach has been taken to an extreme in recent years by a group of US-based deconstructionist critics who take aim at the very notion of a Latin American identity (or any identity, for that matter). As it happens, one of the most forceful and tightly argued presentations of this view appears in a book on Lezama, Brett Levinson’s Secondary Moderns: Mimesis, History, and Revolution in Lezama Lima’s “American Expression.” Levinson begins his argument by noting that Lezama has been read almost exclusively in the light of the master discourse of identity, according to which Lezama’s collection of essays La expresión americana (1957) “forges an expression that is uniquely Latin American; one that is different from traditional Western discourses.”12 Levinson’s view, however, is that Lezama in fact breaks with identity thinking, a point he illustrates in his analysis of the Cuban author’s discussion of the American Baroque in La expresión americana. According to Levinson, Lezama never posits a clear distinction between American and European art. Unlike thinkers such as José Carlos Mariátegui or José Martí, “Lezama refuses to set up any dialectic between America and Europe, one in which America somehow breaks with Europe (or the West) and thus affirms its identity, its relative difference” (50). To

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use such strategies would presuppose the existence of a stable, fixed identity, and this is precisely the kind of thinking Lezama is trying to distance himself from. But what, in this case, is Latin America? Levinson’s somewhat paradoxical answer (paradoxical since he cannot help making assertions about “America” or “Latin America” even as he disputes the existence of such entities) is that for Lezama “America is not a place, but a displace, a transmuter that is always itself transmuted. Better said, it is one of the West’s shifters, a dynamic force that, while part of ‘the tradition,’ forces that tradition into its own endless fluctuations, reconstructions and transfigurations” (19–20). Again somewhat paradoxically (paradoxically because it suggests that even indeterminacy is historically determined), Levinson identifies what he calls “the advent of America” (usually referred to as the discovery of America) as what caused the collapse of the notion of identity. The emergence of a secondary realm (America) over and against a realm considered primary (Spain or Europe), and the ensuing process of translation and retranslation between the two realms, “could not help but effect a radical displacement of the ‘origin’ itself, of the very concept of a transcendental foundation” (89). This view of the New World as a kind of deconstructive agent that causes an enduring epistemological crisis in both Old and New Worlds can be found in the work of other critics as well, most notably that of Djelal Kadir.13 For the deconstructionist who believes in the truth value of this epistemological crisis, the historical argument confers a special epistemological privilege on the New World, which thus reveals the truth about the impossibility of attaining the truth.

The Baroque and Modernity So how do commentators on the Latin American Baroque and Neobaroque portray the relationship between Europe and Latin America? Do they do so in ways that remind us of any of the four positions I have just described? Or do they offer a different interpretation altogether? To mark a path through the vast bibliography on the Latin American Baroque and Neobaroque, I will focus on what critics have said about the relationship of the Baroque and Neobaroque to modernity. I do not presume to be exhaustive. My aim is to identify some significant trends in the debate. In Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure (1975), José Antonio Maravall defines Baroque culture as a conservative reaction to the

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capitalist modernization of society in seventeenth-century Europe.14 The Baroque period is, for Maravall, an all-encompassing social and historical reality, not just an aesthetic category; it is a time of profound crisis and upheaval caused primarily by an unprecedented acceleration of processes of social and economic change that results in a far-reaching sense of insecurity and uncertainty in society. Baroque culture is essentially an attempt to master and redirect the disorienting new socioeconomic developments in ways meant to guarantee the stability of the social order. Maravall’s analysis of Baroque culture through the prism of its relationship to modernity proved immensely influential. Yet most subsequent commentators have moved away from the idea that the Baroque response to modernity was essentially conservative. Rather, the dominant thrust in contemporary discussions of the topic is to depict the Baroque and Neobaroque as subversive assaults on modernity. This assault has sometimes been described as an alternative modernity rather than an outright rejection of it, and it has even established an alliance of sorts with the concept of postmodernity.15 In a sense, this has turned the Baroque and Neobaroque into artistic movements that are more modern than the modern itself. An excellent representative of this position is Irlemar Chiampi in her book Barroco y modernidad. Chiampi describes the Baroque as a “dissonant” or “other” modernity.16 It is both “modern” and “countermodern” (29). The Baroque points to the crisis of hegemonic modernity and the belief in what she calls “Progress, Humanism, Technique, Culture,” all part of an official history that, she claims, has been revealed as a “catastrophe” (37). But what is this alternative modernity that the Baroque represents? Chiampi links it to a dimension of reality that has been swept aside by the forces of instrumental reason. The collapse of the rationalist model of modernity, she argues, is evident from its incapacity to integrate the “non-Western” elements of Latin American society (she mentions Indians, blacks, and mestizos, but also the urban proletariat and rural immigrants) into a consensual and democratic nation-building project (37). Latin American Baroque and Neobaroque aesthetics denounce the failure of modernity and at the same time create a space for what Chiampi calls the “multitemporal heterogeneity” of Latin American society (41). They offer, in other words, a form of artistic expression that is keyed to Latin America’s own mixed and diverse cultural identity. And it is precisely in this affirmation of “American content” that we recognize the modernity of the Baroque and Neobaroque (20).

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But the description of this American identity is a complicated affair. Chiampi views the Baroque and Neobaroque as an antireferential and antifoundationalist aesthetic and suggests that it has an affinity with postmodernism. One of its preferred strategies is that of recycling, a notion Chiampi borrows from Severo Sarduy and one that she describes as “a way of infusing the useless piling up of accumulated knowledge with aesthetic energy; it seeks to create beauty or give pleasure by making use of cultural waste, the obsolete and discredited repertoire of laws and premises, the totality of remains and ruins that the baroque imagination transforms into metaphors” (93). The effect of this technique is to label all discourse as artificial, as “quotation.” Yet even as it subverts the very notion of reference, Baroque and Neobaroque discourse manages to capture a certain truth about America, a continent historically resistant to being comprehended within existing epistemological frameworks. Its rhetoric presents America as “something unrepresentable, an unspeakable, strange, or sinister ghost or monster” (116), but even as such rhetoric undermines itself, it constitutes “the Latin American writer’s fullest and most authentic speech” (117). The same conjunction of the concepts of modernity, antimodernity, and identity can be found in numerous other recent discussions of the Baroque. Octavio Paz describes the Baroque as the product of a society—New Spain—that had turned its back on modernity. And yet, as an aesthetics of estrangement, the Baroque not only looks forward to the artistic innovations of modernity but also offers an ideal vehicle for capturing the sense of alienation and displacement at the heart of New Spain’s criollo experience.17 Carmen Bustillo points out how odd it is that Latin American writers have searched for their identity with the help of an aesthetic that is widely viewed as expressing a profound crisis in the episteme of Western civilization.18 And Roberto González Echevarría argues that the Baroque is both “the expression of the modern” and an aesthetic “aligned with the most retrograde elements of Spanish culture.”19 In sum, it is clear that the debate on the Baroque and the Neobaroque has strong affinities with what I have called the “ambivalent-about-modernity” motif in discussions of Latin America’s relationship to Europe. But there are elements of the other positions I sketched as well. The idea of the Baroque as a critique of modernity links it to the subversion paradigm of Fernández Retamar and others. The notion that the Baroque revolves around a crisis of identity also connects it to certain deconstructionist readings. And in Sarduy and Chiampi’s idea of cultural recycling, we can even hear the distant echoes of the cosmopolitanism paradigm.

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Lezama’s Critics Perhaps no other twentieth-century Latin American writer has been the subject of so many first-rate critical studies as José Lezama Lima. The proliferation of critical interpretations points to the richness and complexity of his work, as well as to the often baffling quality of his writing and the difficulty of reaching agreement on its meaning. The critical approaches to the question of Lezama’s views on Latin American cultural identity, in particular in relation to Europe, provide good examples of this lack of consensus on key aspects of his thinking. One central idea in critical commentaries on Lezama is that Latin American culture is characterized by its creative assimilation of a variety of cultural traditions. Gustavo Pellón argues that “as participants in European culture only through the illegitimate inheritance, American writers are, in Lezama’s view, free to partake of any cultural tradition that attracts them without committing themselves.”20 In a similar vein, Gustavo Pérez Firmat offers the following summary of Lezama’s position: “Unlike his European counterpart, the American artist . . . commands Western culture without being dominated by it. This combination of foreignness and familiarity allows him to play freely, even irresponsibly, with literary and cultural tradition—somewhat as Lezama himself does in many of his texts.”21 Emilio Bejel, too, organizes his reading around the notions of mixture and incorporation, arguing that Lezama views the Latin American writer as someone who creates out of incorporated elements new forms that overcome the regressive and decadent aspect of European culture.22 Such interpretations remind us above all of the cosmopolitanism paradigm of Latin American culture, with its conception of the Latin American writer as someone who manages to extract from his or her marginal situation an expansive sense of cultural mastery. At the same time, the notions of free play and irresponsibility create affinities with the view of the Latin American writer as a subversive figure. The bridge between the two positions is provided by Borges, with his conception of the Argentine writer as someone whose location on the periphery of the Western cultural tradition allows him or her to develop an encompassing view of that tradition, and as someone who has an inclination to approach it in an irreverent manner.23 Even though the process of creative assimilation is a standard topic in critical discussions of Lezama, there are significant differences on how exactly to interpret its meaning. Ben Heller argues that our understanding of Lezama

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has been clouded by “the adversarial descriptions of cultural creation prevalent in some postcolonial theory.”24 He takes issue with Pérez Firmat’s view of Lezama as a writer in the tradition of American exceptionalism, proposing instead to balance the excessive emphasis on “the role of violent incorporation in [Lezama’s] thinking” with a recognition of the role played by “receptivity” in American expression.25 Luis Duno Gottberg, in turn, links Lezama’s idea of creative assimilation to the Cuban discourse on mestizaje, arguing that this discourse, far from being generously inclusive, has in actual fact served to mask and exclude the distinctive contributions of Afro-Cuban culture.26 An especially thought-provoking reformulation of the notion of creative assimilation is put forward by Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, who explicitly rejects the association of the Latin American writer’s marginal status with notions of privilege, freedom, and “infinite possibility.”27 Although he acknowledges that such ideas are present in Lezama, he is more interested in uncovering a different line of thought in the Cuban writer’s work, one that he captures in the image of the “imploring primitive,” a phrase that Lezama used to describe Julián del Casal. To understand the cultural traits of this figure, one needs to compare him with the Calibanesque primitive of numerous other critical writings on the topic of Latin America’s cultural identity. Whereas the Calibanesque primitive parodies and savages European culture from a standpoint firmly outside that culture, Lezama’s imploring primitive searches, from a position characterized by instability and uncertainty, for his own image in the European tradition, experiencing in the process the dissemination of his being in what Cruz-Malavé calls “bedazzlement, imitation, astonishment.”28 The sense of the shifting nature of identity links Cruz-Malavé’s reading to the deconstructionist paradigm sketched earlier, although Cruz-Malavé emphasizes that there is an “essentialist” as well as a “deconstructionist” side to Lezama’s writings on American identity.29 To get a picture of what the pure deconstructionist position looks like, we need to go back to Levinson and his assertion that Lezama had no interest in differentiating Latin American from European culture. Levinson points to the fact that the description of American culture as a “crossroads” does not serve to distinguish it from other cultures, since Lezama says exactly the same thing about Greek culture; he concludes that “Lezama makes no claim for the particular nature of America’s history or of America’s art. Nor does [La expresión americana] attempt to negate (or subvert, parody, transgress, and so on) any European movement. . . . Lezama does not set up his American expression as a means

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to ‘attack’ Europe or the colonizer” (16). According to Levinson, La expresión americana is not about the nature of “American expression” but about its impossibility. A similar rejection of the view that Latin American culture is characterized by its subversive posture with regard to the European tradition can be found in César Augusto Salgado’s From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima. Unlike Levinson’s reading of La expresión americana, Salgado’s book is not dominated by a particular theoretical outlook. Instead, it offers a painstaking historical reconstruction of the many dimensions of Lezama’s relationship to James Joyce. But Salgado does offer an account of the theory of influence that informs his reading of Lezama (and that, we understand, is itself informed by Lezama’s own ideas about influence). He rejects the “evolutionary” model of cultural transmission, which assumes that Latin American literary innovations are normally adopted or appropriated from European examples and argues instead for a view of modernism as “a global phenomenon, a poetics exercised simultaneously in areas politically and geographically remote.”30 By moving away from the straitjacket of the imitation-subversion opposition, Salgado is able to present a nuanced account of the literary links between Joyce and Lezama, links that do have a cultural dimension (and here Salgado differs from Levinson) but that are not culturally predetermined to take one form or another. The flaw in many discussions of Latin America’s relationship to Europe is that the effort to produce a definition of Latin American cultural identity too often results in reductive accounts of European culture. It makes little sense, for example, to build an argument about European cultural identity around the assumption that Péguy is a representative European writer, as Fernández Retamar attempts to do. And when Pérez Firmat closes his scintillating essay on Lezama with the observation that “the American centipede will never be confused with an Old World mole,”31 one feels obliged to ask, after smiling at the author’s witticism, who exactly is this Old World mole? Does it make no difference whether he or she is German or Italian, French or British, Spanish or Dutch? Similarly, the frequent and rather glib comments about European decadence are rarely supported with references to specific historical facts or circumstances. Surely, there must be a way of talking about Latin American culture without making such simplistic claims about European culture. But what about Lezama himself? Does he avoid the trap of reductiveness? And how do we account for the fact that the critics have read him in such different ways?

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How American Is It? On the one hand, we have critics who claim Lezama for the discourse of American exceptionalism. On the other hand are those who argue that Lezama refused to oppose America to Europe, and perhaps did not even care about the question of identity. We have critics who describe Lezama as searching for himself in a European mirror and others who argue that Lezama viewed Europe as a culture in decline. One explanation for this conflict of interpretations is that Lezama himself expresses opposing viewpoints at different moments in the text. Simply put, he contradicts himself. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he approaches the topic of Latin America and Europe from different perspectives, deliberately thwarting any effort to capture such a complex historical relationship in a simple formula. In “Mitos y cansancio clásico” (“Myths and Classical Exhaustion”), the opening chapter of La expresión americana, Lezama calls on Americans to overcome their feelings of inferiority with regard to Europe, arguing that Latin America has everything it needs to create a great culture.32 In fact, he continues, it appears to have an advantage over Europe, since Latin America is not afflicted with the sense of exhaustion that Lezama sees in certain contemporary European works. And yet the same chapter shows that Lezama in no sense repudiates Europe as a whole; on the contrary, his efforts to distinguish Latin America from Europe are constantly paired with references to European works that provide models for Latin American artistic expression or critical thought. Lezama sees a crepuscular quality in European culture, but as an example of this quality, he gives us an essay by an Americanborn writer (T. S. Eliot). Lezama’s alternative to Eliot’s “mythical method,” which he finds too pessimistic and static, is the German critic Ernest Robert Curtius’s defense of the “fictional technique” in historical writing, which, for Lezama, puts the right kind of stress on creation and innovation (58). Throughout the essay, Lezama returns again and again to the idea of the newness of American culture, for example through his repeated invocation of the metaphors of awakening and wakefulness (or vigilance). But his first example of this experience of awakening (and liberation) comes from Peter Brueghel’s The Harvest, a painting that depicts a peasantry no longer in thrall to the feudal master (symbolized in the castle), and instead “given over to the cantabile of its own joy, recreating and extending itself in an ideal time” (50). Perhaps Brueghel’s sixteenth-century Flemish peasants are, in fact, Lezama’s first Americans.

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Lezama’s approach to the American Baroque is similarly complex. In the opening paragraphs of “La curiosidad barroca,” the second chapter of La expresión americana, he contrasts the European Baroque, in which he sees “accumulation without tension and asymmetry without plutonism,” with the American Baroque, which possesses the very “tension” and “plutonism” missing in the European Baroque (79–80).33 The American version of the Baroque is “plenary”; the European “degenerative.” As we read on, however, we realize that, for Lezama, Spain belongs with America, not with Europe (79–80). To add to the confusion, it turns out that Europe north of the Pyrenees also plays an important role in Lezama’s vision of the New World Baroque. It has often been pointed out that Lezama links the Baroque to the non-European dimensions of American culture (African and indigenous). But it is equally true that Lezama ties “our Baroque” firmly to the European Enlightenment (84). Indeed, throughout this chapter Lezama appears engaged in a sustained effort both to link and to differentiate Latin American and European culture. In his discussion of Gongorism, Lezama states emphatically that Luis de Góngora’s followers in the New World were much better poets than his Spanish epigones (86). In a sense, American Gongorism surpasses its source. Yet when Lezama praises the work of Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora, he does so in a way that suggests not only that Sigüenza bested his Spanish precursors but also that Spain provides the standards by which the achievements of others are measured: “Not even in the Spain of his day can one find someone who surpasses him” (90). In a discussion of what Lezama, following Karl Vossler, calls Sor Juana’s “intuitive dilettantism,” he notes that he is referring not to “the dilettantism of the old cultures, or a form of domestic ornamentation,” but to Sor Juana’s “healthy passion of an amateur” (BNW 227). Yet in the very next paragraph Lezama refers to a poetic quality—shared by Sor Juana’s “Primero sueño” (“First Dream”) and José Gorostiza’s “Muerte sin fin” (“Death without End”)—“that can only be surpassed by cultures of greater age and maturity, a poetic perspective and milieu capable of more complex and clearer concentrics” (BNW 228). In sum, on one and the same page, Lezama describes the Old World first as more superficial and then as more mature than the New World. This complex interweaving of contradictory perspectives on Latin America’s relationship to Europe continues throughout La expresión americana. Lezama’s account of the Latin American wars of independence stresses the role of the Catholic clergy in this struggle. The result is that he places as much emphasis on the notion of return as he does on rupture. One of the

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heroes of Lezama’s narrative, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, is described as “very American,” precisely because of his ties to his Hispanic roots: “Just when he thinks he is separating himself from things Hispanic, he reencounters them in himself, enlarged. To reform a previous order, not to break it, but to take up the thread again, Fray Servando makes that which is Hispanic increase and sparkle, he raises it to a reckless level” (112). In his discussion of what he calls “creole expression,” Lezama further develops this link between Americanness and the reactivation of certain traditions inherited from Spain. In his comments on gauchesque poetry, for example, Lezama presents Spain as both a source of inspiration and a model to be repudiated: “In nineteenthcentury Spain, with a few exceptions that occur toward the end of the century, language was in decay, with a prose that lacked vigor and a poetry of artifice and hollow reverberations, but with these gauchesque poems language returns to the true freshness of San Juan and the Romancero” (152). Finally, in the book’s concluding chapter, “Sumas críticas del americano” (“Critical Summas of the American”), Lezama offers his most detailed account of the key features of American art—the fact that it is “a center of incorporations” (178)—but the principal example of this approach to art turns out to be Pablo Picasso. Critics have often focused their discussions of Lezama on his idea of the Baroque as a counterconquest, a coinage that served as a response to Werner Weisbach’s view of the Baroque as the art of the Counter-Reformation.34 In this way, Lezama is aligned with the subversion model of Latin American culture. But it is clear from the preceding discussion that Lezama’s views on the relationship of Latin America to Europe are extraordinarily complex and varied, going beyond any single formula. His construction of the Latin American artist as someone who feeds off a wide range of cultural sources may well remind us of the cosmopolitanism paradigm of Latin American culture. And the sheer contradictoriness of his positions, now emphasizing Latin America’s uniqueness, now merging the continent with Spain or Europe, may point to the same kind of ambivalence about European cultural models as identified by critics such as Alonso. Finally, Lezama’s constant thwarting of the attempt to define Latin American identity may indeed look forward to contemporary deconstructionism, even though Lezama declined to declare that the concept of identity is itself a dangerous illusion.35

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The Banquets of Civilization Contemporary descriptions of the Baroque and Neobaroque as a “dissonant” or “alternative” modernity suggest a stance that combines an adherence to certain aspects of modernity with a repudiation of others.36 Lois Parkinson Zamora pinpoints this element of repudiation when she explains that “the Neobaroque subverts the foundations of Western modernity—realism, rationalism, individualism, originality, homogeneous history.”37 At the same time, the Baroque and Neobaroque are linked to a strain of self-criticism that forms a key element in Western modernity. After all, many of the West’s most significant post-Enlightenment artistic movements—from Romanticism to modernism and postmodernism—have sought to undermine the cornerstones of socioeconomic, political, and philosophical modernity. The Baroque and Neobaroque participate in this self-criticism while searching for alternatives to hegemonic modernity in Latin America’s own cultural traditions. Lezama, however, offers a different twist on this pattern. In his two novels, his masterpiece Paradiso and the posthumously published and unfinished Oppiano Licario, he subverts the foundations of Western modernity, but he also subverts the subverters. Lezama’s aesthetic of difficulty and decentering, of artifice and self-reflexiveness, parallels the wide-ranging European modernist assault on the realm of instrumental reason. Yet he also criticizes the irrationalist strain in modern European culture, not in the name of reason but from the perspective of certain notions of tradition and continuity. When Fuentes points out that Lezama pursues “non-rational and intuitive forms of knowing,”38 it must also be acknowledged that the Cuban author does not subscribe to all such forms of knowing. This is clear from the image of Europe that appears in Lezama’s novels. Lezama’s Europe is not only the continent of Enlightenment reason and bourgeois culture but also its opposite, the Europe of the anti-Enlightenment, the home of primitivist artists and nihilist philosophers. And it is precisely with regard to this other Europe that Lezama adopts a critical distance in Paradiso and Oppiano Licario. I will focus my comments on one episode from chapter 10 of Paradiso: Eugenio Foción’s account of Ricardo Fronesis’s origins. Together with José Cemí, the novel’s protagonist, Foción and Fronesis make up a trio of friends who spend a considerable amount of time analyzing each other’s personalities and the nature of their friendship. Foción’s description of the circumstances of Fronesis’s birth is part of a battle of interpretations in which he

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engages with Cemí over the meaning of Fronesis’s character. Whereas Cemí portrays Fronesis as a robust, serene, mature, and self-confident young man, Foción contends that their friend’s “impassive exterior, his avoidance of jeremiads,” is misleading.39 Foción wants to reveal a darker, more tormented soul. Cemí realizes that Foción’s purpose is “to destroy the classical portrait of Fronesis that Cemí had roughly sketched” (282). Deep down, as we will see, the dispute concerns not just two different versions of Fronesis’s character but two different understandings of the nature of selfhood. Fronesis père (as Foción calls him) lives in Vienna as a young man, the son of a Cuban diplomat. There he divides his time between pursuing women and consorting with famous artists such as Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and Alban Berg. At one point, he befriends Sergei Diaghilev, the Russian cultural impresario who has brought his Ballets Russes to Vienna.40 Foción describes Diaghilev’s fascination with Fronesis’s father’s Cuban background: he “would question him insatiably . . . about Negro rhythms, Yoruba drums, witchcraft and the calling up of the dead” (282). In the meantime a young Viennese woman identified simply as Fräulein Sunster takes up a small role in Diaghilev’s company and apparently falls in love with the Cuban diplomat’s son. Soon they all depart for Paris, where Fräulein Sunster discovers that she’s pregnant and eventually gives birth to Ricardo Fronesis. This “seemingly banal romantic situation” proves to be a “comedy of intrigue and errors” (283). It turns out that Fräulein Sunster is not at all interested in Fronesis’s father; in reality, she is in love with Diaghilev. But Diaghilev is himself a homosexual who is smitten with Fronesis’s father. The confusion comes to an end when Fräulein Sunster’s father, an engineer who belongs to “the best bourgeois Viennese tradition” (283), steps in to offer Fronesis’s father the hand of another daughter, Maria Theresa, who is prepared to raise the child “as if he were her own” (284). The engineer assures his future sonin-law that Maria Theresa is in every way the opposite of her sister. One daughter represents errancy, the deviation from the norm, derangement even; the other embodies stability, dignity, and discretion. Engineer Sunster promises Fronesis père “that his daughter Maria Theresa Sunster would erase her sister’s affront, that she would be a good wife, a good mother, and, above all, that she would govern her house with the marital nobility of the Hapsburgs” (285). The arrangement immediately appeals to the Cuban diplomat’s son, who shortly thereafter leaves Vienna for Cuba, where he settles with his wife and son into the quiet life of a country lawyer in the provincial town of Santa Clara.

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Woven into this narrative are certain key ideas about selfhood and modern culture. The contrast between the two Sunster sisters reflects a broader opposition between two notions of the self: a bourgeois conception that emphasizes wholeness, coherence, and above all adherence to social norms, versus an “adversary” position that rebels against cultural restraints and celebrates a liberated self that breaks through its own boundaries.41 Surprising as it may seem for a writer as unconventional as Lezama, in this particular episode he appears to come down on the side of bourgeois normality. Whereas Foción narrates the story of Fronesis’s birth to demonstrate that “in his blood there is the runaway, the curse” (286)—in other words, to make Fronesis resemble himself—Cemí offers an entirely different interpretation: “In my opinion Fronesis’s real mother was Maria Theresa Sunster. . . . You, Foción, take the side of the runaway ballerina, and look for the labyrinths she may bring out in her son. . . . I’m for Maria Theresa, the mother of a son who isn’t hers, for his father, who replaces his Viennese years with practical vexation in Santa Clara” (286). Significantly, this is also the understanding of his family history that Fronesis prefers. In a climactic scene in chapter 11 of the novel, Fronesis, who is about to depart for Europe, has a confrontation with his father. Fronesis père had earlier attempted to steer Foción—the proverbial “bad influence”—away from his son. The father is worried that Ricardo will “abandon [himself ] to eccentricity . . . dance away from all centers with whims and errant ways” (364). The son in turn charges his father with what he calls the “Diaghilev complex,” the act of flight from one’s destiny, in this case from what he describes as “Diaghilev’s demoniacal seminal synthesis” (367). At this point Maria Theresa joins the conversation: in her view, Ricardo wants to leave home to search for his missing biological mother. However, Ricardo interrupts her, asserting that she, Maria Theresa, always has been and always will be his mother. His father then gives his son his blessing, urging him to go on his trip, an act that, as Ricardo realizes, transforms “the break into an agreement” (369). In Paradiso a young man’s departure from home is preceded by a scene of family reconciliation. The struggle over the nature of selfhood is closely linked in Lezama’s narrative to a certain geocultural conception of the world. It is not coincidental that Fronesis père enjoys his youthful escapades—mixing artistic and erotic pursuits—in one of the capitals of European modernist culture. From the perspective of a young member of the Cuban bourgeoisie, Europe represents freedom and possibility. This is an aspect of the Latin American view of Europe that postcolonial perspectives—with their emphasis on the struggle

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against colonial and neocolonial domination—tend to overlook. In this context, it is worth recalling the brief appearance in Paradiso of a character known as the Colonel-of-Independence Castillo Dimás, the owner of a small sugar plantation, who, we are told, “kept the best for himself, as he was wont to say; three months for the garrets of Paris, where, like an Ophite, he rendered homage to the serpent of evil” (213). Lezama is, of course, well aware of the ironies generated by the views Europeans and Latin Americans hold of each other. Whereas Diaghilev views Cuba as a wellspring of exoticist inspiration, Castillo Dimás and Fronesis père regard life in the capitals of Europe as a perpetual carnival. Each side is interested in the subterranean dimensions of the culture of the other, creating a simultaneous effect of mirroring and incomprehension. The crucial point here is that the famed banquets of civilization that Latin American writers are said to have yearned for have a very different flavor in Lezama.42 For in Paradiso what Europe seems both to desire and promise is in actual fact an escape from civilization.

Lezama and Proust Lezama understood the lure of such an escape. At the same time, his art demonstrates a powerful attachment to the social and spiritual values of family and religion. This appreciation of the values of tradition and community sets Lezama apart from a certain subjectivist and individualist strain in European modernist literature. There is a striking contrast, for example, between Cemí’s adulation of his parents, his affection for all things Cuban, and his respect for Catholic teachings, and Stephen Dedalus’s rejection of family, country, and religion in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.43 But the differences between Lezama and his European precursors are best brought to light through an examination of certain echoes of Marcel Proust in chapter 3 of Paradiso.44 This chapter takes the reader to the summer of 1894 in Jacksonville, Florida, where the Olaya family has gone into exile because of the political situation in Cuba. Rialta Olaya, Cemí’s mother, is ten years old at the time. The chapter describes the family’s relationship with Frederick Squabs, a church organist, and his half-Cuban wife, Flery. It includes a section that takes us back even further in time, describing a number of episodes from the life of Andrés Olaya, Rialta’s father, prior to his marriage. The chapter concludes with the accidental death of Andresito, Rialta’s brother, who, shortly after playing the violin at a gathering of Cuban émigrés, falls from an elevator. One of the

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principal concerns of this chapter is the experience of loss—the loss of home as a result of the Olaya family’s emigration to the United States and the loss of a child as a consequence of Andresito’s accident. But Lezama also shows how the experience of family unity, often expressed in an indirect and almost enigmatic fashion, can serve to transcend such losses. In the opening pages of the chapter, the narrator zeroes in on the family’s attachment to certain “small phrases” endowed by the Olayas with a set of arbitrary yet profoundly resonant associations. More than anything else, these phrases serve to create a sense of solidarity among the members of the family. The first small phrase ( frasecita) is drawn from a comment Flery Squabs’s daughter Florita makes whenever she sees a tapestry hanging in the hallway of the Olaya home. The tapestry depicts a scene from classical antiquity and elicits the following reaction from Florita: “Mama, a scene in Pompeii, a scene . . .” (39). The Olayas seize the phrase and make it their own: “Since then, the phrase yielded paradoxical meanings, and within the family it would reappear mockingly as if it had leaped through the windows in blackface. It had a pleasant gratuitousness for and imperviousness to insertion without development and prelude” (39). Note that there is nothing straightforward about the meanings of the phrase: the narrator underlines the irony with which the Olayas infuse the phrase, as well as certain subversive and theatrical qualities that seem to attach to it. When the narrator describes how the Olayas repeat the phrase in the middle of their daily activities, it is clear that we are dealing with a performance. This playfulness draws attention both to the plasticity of words and their role in forging a sense of community. The Olayas detach Flery’s words from their established meanings, transforming them into markers of a will to create a shared identity. The narrator comments that “more than a custom, it is like the invocation of a deity whom none of us know” (40). There is an element of the nonsensical in the games the Olayas play with Flery’s words; yet these games also gesture toward a sacred realm whose presence—however concealed—serves to bind the family together.45 A few pages later in the same chapter, the narrator mentions another small phrase that has captured the attention of the Olayas. A member of the Squabs family is once again the unwitting source of the phrase. The narrator explains that during church services Mr. Squabs never sits down to play the organ until the minister asks him to do so. Rialta’s brother Alberto witnesses the scene in the church and brings the phrase spoken by the minister to his organist—“Mr. Squabs, do you want to play the organ?” (43)—home with

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him. The Olayas transform this rather banal sentence into another in-joke. In their hands “the phrase was to acquire the burlesque precision of underscoring and threatening to begin something that we have to do out of contingency and pleasure, because of the exigencies of time and taste” (43). The new associations attached to the minister’s small phrase by the Olaya family speak to the resonance and suggestiveness of language itself and at the same time draw attention to the complex nature of sociability. The Olayas mock the rigid adherence to social convention that shapes the organist’s behavior, forging an alternative sense of community based on the same phrase, but through a shared sense of play. It is impossible to read chapter 3 of Paradiso without being reminded of the “little phrase” (petite phrase) from Vinteuil’s sonata for violin and piano that accompanies the story of Charles Swann’s love for Odette in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. For Swann, the phrase is intimately tied to his feelings for Odette. Yet his responses to the phrase change significantly with the passage of time. The first time he hears the phrase it evokes “a world of inexpressible delights.”46 When he hears it again about a year later at Mme. Verdurin’s, he falls in love with the music, sharing his feelings with Odette. Not only does Swann begin to associate the little phrase with his love for Odette; it even seems to enhance that love: “In so far as Odette’s affection might seem a little abrupt and disappointing, the little phrase would come to supplement it, to blend with it, its own mysterious essence” (259). So strong is the link between the music and Swann’s feelings that he begins to think of the little phrase as “the national anthem of their love” (238). But if the phrase serves for a time to make his love fuller and more complete, it eventually captures and reflects the impermanence of all human emotions. In a key scene that takes place at a time when Odette’s love for Swann has already begun to cool, a fact that he has refused to face, Swann attends a social evening at the home of the Marquise de Saint-Euverte. There he again hears Vinteuil’s sonata being played. At first, the music seems to bring about a resurrection of the past, allowing him to recapture “the specific volatile essence” of the happiness he had once experienced with Odette (376). But the music also speaks to him in a different way. The same phrase that had once been the “witness” (378) of his joy now reminds him of the “the vanity of his sufferings” (379). This changing response announces the beginning of a new phase in Swann’s life, one marked by the realization that “the feeling which Odette had once had for him would never revive” (384). Much later in the novel the connection of the little phrase to the theme of impermanence

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is once again illustrated when Swann, now settled down and married, discovers that the music that was so intimately intertwined with his romantic feelings now reminds him not of Odette but of the scenery that surrounded her in those days that he pursued her with such passion. The little phrase now unveils all the glories of that springtime in Paris, which he had failed to notice at the time because his entire being was focused on the woman he loved. What, then, is the nature of the link between Lezama and Proust? First, what Lezama’s frasecita shares with Proust’s petite phrase is a fascination with the shifting and arbitrary nature of the sign. Lezama shows how the meanings of a sentence can change depending on the context, while Proust traces the transformations of a musical phrase in the mind of a single listener. But there are also significant differences between the two: whereas Proust emphasizes the deeply subjective nature of Swann’s apprehension of the world (even Odette does not really share with him the feelings kindled by the small phrase from Vinteuil’s sonata), Lezama focuses on a communal act of semiotic resignification.47 As in Proust, signs are linked to private worlds of meaning and emotion, but whereas for the French novelist the petite phrase reveals an interiorized perception of the world, the Cuban author’s frasecita reinforces and solidifies domestic ties. And given that the Olayas are living in exile in the United States, the home in this chapter of Paradiso stands not only as a symbol of the family but also of the Cuban nation itself. The comparison between Proust and Lezama reveals the difference between a European modernist’s concern with psychological depth and a Latin American Neobaroque writer’s preoccupation with questions of cultural identity.48

Return to the Baroque There is a lingering attachment among contemporary critics to the vanguardist notions of rupture and conflict that has led them to emphasize the subversive dimension of Baroque and Neobaroque aesthetics. Sarduy’s claim that the Baroque is an antibourgeois, anticapitalist, and antireferential aesthetic has been enormously influential in this regard.49 In this essay I have tried to show that Lezama’s approach to the question of Latin America’s relations to Europe does not fit this model. We saw that La expresión americana avoids putting forward a single, all-encompassing theory of the Latin American response to European cultural models, and instead develops a variety of perspectives on the topic, now emphasizing the differences between the two

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continents, now highlighting the resemblances between them. In Paradiso, Lezama breaks away from a conventional conception of Europe as the home of bourgeois culture and Enlightenment reason, focusing instead on an irrationalist and primivitist strain in European culture, on the elements, that is, of avant-garde culture. It is precisely these elements that Lezama treats with a certain critical distance, although he by no means dismisses them. Lezama’s reprise of the motif of the small phrase suggests that he shared Proust’s interest in exploring the arbitrary nature of human sign systems, but that he had a different conception of the relationship between individual and community. But it is one thing to notice this difference and quite another to categorize it in terms of rupture or subversion. Lezama shifts our perspective on certain elements of European culture, and he changes the connotations of some of its themes and motifs. There is no doubt that his treatment of the European cultural heritage is informed by a distinctively Cuban and Latin American outlook, but this hardly implies a rejection of Europe. What, then, is the Baroque or Neobaroque element in Lezama’s work? My argument here is that critics have overemphasized Lezama’s definition of the Baroque as a counterconquest. The idea of a counterconquest is an interesting and suggestive one, and it captures certain aspects of Lezama’s thinking, especially the emphasis on New World cultural mestizaje. But it simply will not do to use it as catchall term for his work. For a different approach to the Baroque that might help us place Lezama in a broader aesthetic and ideological context, I suggest we turn to Claudio Véliz’s discussion of the Baroque as an integrating, unifying, and centralizing culture that placed a “high value on the pleasures and permanence of traditional community (Gemeinschaft) and felt threatened by the mobility and impersonality of modern association (Gesellschaft),”50 or to Pedro Morandé’s view of the Baroque as a key element in a distinctively Latin American cultural ethos that resists instrumental rationality, values intuition over scientific knowledge, and expresses itself in popular religiosity.51 Note that Véliz is an Anglophile critic of Latin American culture, whereas Morandé is what Jorge Larrain calls an organic intellectual of the Catholic Church.52 What they share, however, is a view of the Baroque as an ethos and ideology that cherishes traditional notions of community. If Lezama is a Baroque or Neobaroque writer, it is surely not only because he can be recruited for the contemporary causes of postcolonialism and multiculturalism but also because of his allegiance to this other, more conservative dimension of the Baroque.

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Notes 1 Roberto Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Min-

neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 6.

2 See Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Caliban ante la antropofagia,” in Todo Caliban

3

4

5 6 7 8

9 10

11

12

13 14 15 16

(Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2000), 192, for the author’s explanation along these lines of what he was attempting to do in his earlier essay. For an informative, even if biased, account of the nature and background of the dispute between Fernández Retamar and Rodríguez Monegal, see María Eugenia Mudrovcic, “Mundo Nuevo”: Cultura y Guerra Fría en la década del 60 (Rosario, Argentina: Beatriz Viterbo, 1997). See the following essays by Emir Rodríguez Monegal: “The Metamorphoses of Caliban,” Diacritics 7, no. 3 (1977): 78–83; “Carnaval/antropofagia/parodia,” Revista Iberoamericana 45, nos. 108–9 (1979): 401–12; and, “The Tradition of Laughter,” Review: Latin American Literature and Arts, no. 35 (1985): 3–6. Peter Beardsell, Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Alfonso Reyes, “The Position of America,” in The Position of America, and Other Essays, trans. Harriet de Onís (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 45–62. Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch, trans. Gregory Rabassa (New York: Pantheon, 1966), 133. Carlos Fuentes, “Bajo la nieve,” interview with Alfred MacAdam and Charles Ruas, in Carlos Fuentes: Territorios del tiempo; Antología de entrevistas, ed. Jorge F. Hernández (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), 44. Fernández Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, 28. Jorge Larrain, Identity and Modernity in Latin America (Cambridge: Polity, 2000); Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity, trans. Christopher L. Chippari and Silvia L. López (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). Carlos J. Alonso, The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 10. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. Brett Levinson, Secondary Moderns: Mimesis, History, and Revolution in Lezama Lima’s “American Expression” (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1996), 11. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. See Djelal Kadir, Questing Fictions: Latin America’s Family Romance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 88. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque. However, some critics have identified significant differences between the Neobaroque and postmodernity. See, for example, Lange-Churión, “Neobaroque.” Irlemar Chiampi, Barroco y modernidad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 18, 23. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. Unless otherwise noted, translations from Spanish are mine. The first chapter of Barroco y modernidad is translated in this volume.

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17 Octavio Paz, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz o Las trampas de la fe (Mexico City: Fondo de

Cultura Económica, 1982), 86.

18 Bustillo, Barroco y América Latina, 115.

19 González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood, 4–5.

20 Gustavo Pellón, José Lezama Lima’s Joyful Vision: A Study of “Paradiso” and Other

Prose Works (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 54.

21 Pérez Firmat, “Strut of the Centipede,” 318. 22 Bejel, José Lezama Lima, 124.

23 Jorge Luis Borges, “El escritor argentino y la tradición,” in Discusión (Buenos Aires: 24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

33

34 35

36

37 38 39

40

Emecé, 1957), 151–62. Ben A. Heller, Assimilation/Generation/Resurrection: Contrapuntal Readings in the Poetry of José Lezama Lima (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1997), 109. Ibid., 112. See also 116. Luis Duno Gottberg, Solventando las diferencias: La ideología del mestizaje en Cuba (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2003), 199–212. Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, El primitivo implorante: El “sistema poético del mundo” de José Lezama Lima (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 15. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 52. Salgado, From Modernism to Neobaroque, 27. Pérez Firmat, “Strut of the Centipede,” 332. José Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, ed. Irlemar Chiampi (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 63. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. An English translation of “La curiosidad barroca” is included in this volume (BNW 212–40). Page references are to the Spanish original. I have made some changes to the translation provided in this volume. See Weisbach, Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation. Levinson claims that “any discourse that takes as its focal point the ‘I’ as subject (even if a decentered subject) can only end up blindly catching itself in the most violent and oppressive ideological paradigms.” See his Secondary Moderns, 12. Chiampi uses the term dissonant modernity in Barroco y modernidad, 18. The concept of an “alternative modernity” is developed by Bolívar Echevarría in La modernidad de lo barroco, and by Monika Kaup in “Neobaroque: Latin America’s Alternative Modernity,” Comparative Literature (2006). Zamora, Inordinate Eye, 285. Carlos Fuentes, Valiente mundo nuevo: Épica, utopía y mito en la novela hispanoamericana (Madrid: Mondadori, 1990), 216. José Lezama Lima, Paradiso, trans. Gregory Rabassa (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1974), 281. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. The Ballets Russes had a season in Vienna in 1912. See Ann Kodineck, ed., Diaghilev: Creator of the Ballets Russes (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1996), 121.

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41 See Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (London: Oxford University Press,

1972), for an influential exploration of this topic in modern culture.

42 The reference is to Alfonso Reyes, who once lamented that Latin America always

arrived fifty years late at the banquets of civilization.

43 For an excellent discussion of the many links between Lezama’s Paradiso and Joyce’s

44

45

46

47

48

49

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, see Salgado, From Modernism to Neobaroque, 48–87. Salgado examines the numerous resemblances between the two novels, but he also observes that “while Stephen’s movement toward poetic realization is a trek toward increasing isolation from his family and from insular traditions, Cemí’s apprehension of poetry is attained in the context of connectedness and companionship” (72). For discussions of Lezama’s links to Proust, see Severo Sarduy, “A Cuban Proust,” Review (1974): 43–45; Jaime Valdivieso, Bajo el signo de Orfeo: Lezama Lima y Proust (Madrid: Orígenes, 1980); Pimentel, Metaphoric Narration, vii–xi; Herbert E. Craig, Marcel Proust and Spanish America: From Critical Response to Narrative Dialogue (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 151, 189–90, 221–22. In the Archivos edition of Paradiso, Cintio Vitier refers to the explanation offered by Eloísa Lezama Lima (the author’s sister) regarding the provenance and meaning of the phrase about Pompeii. She states that there was a tapestry with a scene from Pompeii in her grandmother’s home in Havana. And she adds that the family was in the habit of using the phrase “with the ironic connotation of something obvious.” See José Lezama Lima, Paradiso, 2nd ed., ed. Cintio Vitier (Paris: Colección Archivos, 1996), 40. However, the scene may be more complicated than Eloísa Lezama Lima realized. It is worth noting that Florita Squabs is embarrassed by her daughter’s response to the tapestry because she thinks Flery is stating the obvious. But the narrator does not present Florita as an especially astute woman, so what she thinks is obvious may not be so at all. The references to the “young Corinthian lass” and the “flautist from Mytilene” (39) in the tapestry suggest that this may be an Ancient Greek rather than Roman scene. The argument for the idea that Florita is making a mistake when she refers to the tapestry can also be made by suggesting that it is in fact far more intriguing to think of the Olayas as engaged in the resignification of a phrase that is itself already a misrepresentation. Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 1, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), 228. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically in the text. What I call “semiotic resignification” in Proust and Lezama Lima is reminiscent of what Lois Parkinson Zamora calls the device of “metonymic displacement” in Baroque and Neobaroque art. See Zamora, Inordinate Eye, 141–48. Zamora reaches similar conclusions in comparing modernist works from both sides of the Atlantic. See the discussion of Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral and Julio Cortázar’s 62: A Model Kit in her The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 133–55. See Severo Sarduy, Escrito sobre un cuerpo (1968) and Barroco (1974), in Obra com-

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pleta, vol. 2, ed. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl (Paris: Colección Archivos, 1999), 1119–261. 50 Claudio Véliz, The New World of the Gothic Fox: Culture and Economy in English and Spanish America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 86. 51 Pedro Morandé, Cultura y modernización en América Latina (Santiago de Chile: Cuadernos del Instituto de Sociología Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 1984), 142–62. 52 Larrain, Identity and Modernity in Latin America, 151.

  Chapter Twenty-eight  

Seeking a Cuba of the Self: Baroque Dialogues   between José Lezama Lima and Wallace Stevens Christopher Winks

In her collection of essays, Barroco y modernidad, the Brazilian critic Irlemar Chiampi proclaims that modern Latin American and Hispanophone Caribbean writers’ reappropriation of the Baroque involves bringing a specific historical experience—the crossings, clashes, and fusions resulting from the initial European incursion into the Americas—into the present to define a possible future. “The function of the Baroque, with its historical and geographical, not to mention aesthetic eccentricity vis-à-vis the canon of historicism (the new ‘classicism’) constructed in the hegemonic centers of the Western world, enables the reformulation of the terms on which Latin America entered the orbit of (Euro-North American) modernity.”1 By privileging what she sees as the counterhegemonic nature of modern and postmodern Baroque, Chiampi turns this cultural moment into a characteristically Baroque decentering of a “canon of historicism,” which is itself a metaphor for ideological (and doubtless economic) imperialism. Without denying the veracity of Chiampi’s contentions regarding the enduring power of imperialist modernity to draw everything into its orbit, and the dissonant and discrepant cultural forms of alternative modernity developed by historically subaltern regions as modes of resistance, the binary of Latin America versus Euro–North America tends to occlude a range of convergences and divergences entailed by the (necessarily uneven) emergence of an American Baroque. First, the whole idea of a unified “Latin” America has itself recently been called into question beyond its usefulness as intellectual shorthand. Specifically, in Chiampi’s discussion of the Neobaroque, she cites nine writers as major fomenters of this revival, five of whom are from the Caribbean region and two of those five—the Cubans Alejo Carpentier and José Lezama

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Lima—are specified as “pioneering masters.”2 It would therefore seem appropriate at least to pose, if not necessarily provide a decisive answer to, the question why so much of this important turn in Latin American art and literature derives impetus from the Caribbean, a region with its own distinctive historical and cultural trajectories that are not wholly assimilable to a continental schema. The Caribbean, after all, saw the birth of what is called modernity, with the Columbian landfall and its consequences: the near extermination of the native peoples and the harnessing of African slave labor on a massive scale to generate wealth, accumulate capital, build empires, and establish a truly global economic system. But it also saw a movement toward an intermingling of cultures and peoples that would transform the tensions of their initial (and grossly unequal) encounters and their often catastrophic aftermaths into new forms of transculturation, languages, and ways of being in the world. Kamau Brathwaite has formulated the concept of an “alterRenaissance,”3 in which the humanist values associated with unfettered inquiry into the workings of nature underwent a literal sea change into an ethos of domination after reaching the New World, a mutation personified by William Shakespeare’s bookish magus-turned-slavemaster Prospero in The Tempest. Lezama, for his part, speaks of the transformation of the Baroque in the Americas from what the German scholar Werner Weisbach called “an art of the Counter-Reformation” into “an art of the counter-conquest.”4 Specifically locating the rise of this American Baroque in the period between the end of the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth, he cites as artistic exemplars, inter alia, the Cathedral of Puebla in Mexico and the work of the legendary Peruvian Indian sculptor José Kondori, with their incorporation of indigenous motifs into the design, and the library of the poet of New Spain, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, as representative of a scientific curiosity anticipating the Enlightenment. No such syncretic cultural creations were to be found among the mercantilist settlers of the Anglican Caribbean (let alone the fanatically austere colonists of North America), motivated as they were by a protobourgeois urge to accumulate wealth and organize systems of plantation labor, rather than the regimes of sumptuous expenditure in the Caribbean and South America sponsored by the Catholic monarchs of France, Spain, and Portugal. And contrary to the rigidly exclusionary practices of the “Anglicans,” repelled by any kind of mestizaje, the Spanish and Portuguese, for all the undeniable brutality with which their projects of con-

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quest were implemented, did manage to create conditions in which “the two grand syntheses at the root of the American Baroque, the Incan Hispanic and the Negroid Hispanic,”5 could flourish. In this connection, it is worth pointing out that for Lezama, the eighteenthcentury Brazilian mulatto stone-carver of Ouro Preto known as Aleijadinho (the “Little Cripple”) achieved with his art “the culmination of the American Baroque, the union in grandiose form of Hispanic and African cultures” that Lezama views as an anticipation of the liberatory struggles of the nineteenth century, and of the drama of the Cuban poet and revolutionary José Martí in particular.6 By enlivening and deepening, not merely perpetuating, a received European style, Aleijadinho created new, specifically American forms not to be assimilated to any external models. Underscoring the crucial African-derived elements in the American Baroque, Lezama associates this presence with rebellion, a demonic aspect of the “Plutonism”—the crucible in which fragments of shattered totalities are forged into new creations— he finds at the heart of the American Baroque. Closer to the modern era, the work of Lezama’s compatriot and fellow poet Nicolás Guillén, who was, along with the Puerto Rican Luis Palés Matos, among the first to bring the Afro-Hispanic idiom into poetry, provides a further example of how a mastery of both classical and popular verse forms (from sonnet to son and guaracha) expressed in demotic language can articulate a Baroque mestizaje that challenges even as it celebrates. The Martinican poet Édouard Glissant, following Lezama, directly associates the Baroque with expansiveness, mestizaje, and a disruption of settled certainties: “Through its vertiginous styles, languages and cultures hurtled the Baroque will. The generalization of métissage was all that the Baroque needed to become naturalized. From then on what it expressed in the world was the proliferating contact of diversified natures. It grasped, or rather gave-on-and-with, this movement of the world.”7 It follows that, in a United States laboring under the ideological weight of the settler Puritanism that presided over its birth, a Baroque aesthetic would not find ready purchase. However, through the culture created in the United States by the enslaved Africans, the notion of a North American Baroque style takes on a substantive dimension. An early US poet like Phillis Wheatley, whose verses outwardly mimic the heroic couplets and soberly allegorical style of eighteenthcentury English poetry, can be considered Baroque by virtue of how both overt and hidden figurations of her enslaved condition twist and subvert the apparent orderliness of her neo-Augustan rhetoric. The manifestation of an

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African presence in literature, inherently disruptive to the pretensions of official colonial (and postcolonial) US literary culture, can indeed be said to be always already Baroque, if Lezama’s characterization of the Baroque as possessing “first, a tension . . . ; second, a Plutonism, originary fire that shatters the fragments and unifies them; third, it is not a degenerate but a plenary style.”8 Yet precisely because the fundamental contributions of African Americans to whatever is distinctive about US culture have never been fully acknowledged—given that the dominant culinary model of cultural assimilation is the all-engulfing melting pot and not the festively diverse cornucopia of the gumbo or ajiaco, and given the peculiar exclusions and fortresses built by US racism—the Baroque style elaborated by African Americans is either treated with patronizing disrespect or surreptitiously stolen and marketed without identifying attribution (usually both at once). (The performative and linguistic dimensions of African American Baroque are brilliantly discussed by, among others, Zora Neale Hurston in her essay “Characteristics of Negro Expression.”9) And when a high modernist poet like Melvin B. Tolson produces the intricately if not intractably Baroque “Plutonian” summa of African American culture that is Harlem Gallery,10 his work is marginalized as inappropriate, out of place, by the critical gate­ keepers. The initial glimmerings of what could be termed a self-conscious interest in Baroque style in the United States were not manifested until the early stages of literary modernism, a period that coincided in the United States with what the cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg has termed the “incorporation” of the national territory under a central government and a unified capitalist (and subsequently empire-building) ethos.11 José Antonio Maravall’s analysis of the social conditions in seventeenth-century Spain that brought about the rise of the Baroque may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the situation in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, when the erstwhile bard of territorial expansion and interpersonal “adhesiveness,” Walt Whitman, had already begun to express misgivings about the adverse spiritual effects of the Gilded Age of triumphant capitalism. Maravall observes “a consciousness of unrest and uneasiness [that] was accentuated in those moments when serious upheavals in the social sphere became manifest, upheavals that stemmed largely from the intervention of [modern] individuals and their new forms of behavior, from the pressure that they—with new aspirations, ideals, and beliefs, and established in a new complex of social relations—exercised on the social environment.”12 Against an analogous

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backdrop of popular unrest, immense disparities of wealth, and a perception of the inadequacy of dominant cultural values, many Euro-American poets began to look outside the United States for their models (and, with a variety of motives, toward the previously deprecated African American culture, whose linguistic innovations Whitman had already signaled as central to building a new American idiom). This process was accelerated by the increasingly prominent role of the United States in the world economy and its incorporation of other voices, languages, and cultural expressions into its borders. Wallace Stevens was a product of this historical moment: born in Pennsylvania in 1879, only fourteen years after the end of the Civil War, and brought up in the solid Lutheran tradition of his colonial Dutch-German forebears, he had a crucial encounter at Harvard with the Spanish-born philosopher George Santayana, who introduced him to the possibilities of the aesthetic life. In particular, Stevens was fascinated by Santayana’s construction of a fundamental (and somewhat stereotypically formulated) tension between the cold, isolating North, founded on duty and renunciation, and the warm, sensual South, where incarnate beauty and aesthetic form were prized. Though Stevens wrote poetry from his youth onward, he did not publish his first collection, Harmonium, until 1923, when he was in his mid-forties and already a well-established employee of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, where he would work as a claims lawyer for the rest of his life. A year before Harmonium appeared, he took his first trip to Florida, with a quick side visit to Cuba; to celebrate the publication of the book the following year, he and his wife took a cruise to the Caribbean and Mexico. His winter vacations in Florida would become an annual routine until the 1936 publication of his second book, Ideas of Order, following which he returned only once to Key West in 1940, finding the experience sufficiently disappointing never to want to go back. Though Stevens enjoyed his job at Hartford Accident and Indemnity, which by all account seems not to have interfered with his literary and aesthetic pursuits, his work is governed by a fundamental tension that endows it with a peculiarly Baroque quality and reveals that Santayana’s teachings, though never in a formal educational context (Stevens wrote José Rodríguez Feo that “I did not take any of his courses and never heard him lecture”13), had affected him profoundly. He ambivalently situates himself between the Puritan “mind of winter” described in the poem “The Snow Man,” one of the first in Harmonium, and the vibrant imaginings of the would-be sensu-

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alist in search of a locus of tempting plenitude, exotic and tropical, found in “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman”: “The listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is,”14 is juxtaposed to “our bawdiness, / Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last, / . . . equally converted into palms, / Squiggling like saxophones” (47). When discussing the work of Stevens, Severo Sarduy’s observation on the “Baroque feast . . . with its repetition of spirals, arabesques and masks, widebrimmed hats and gleaming silks, [as] the apotheosis of artifice, the irony and mockery of nature, the finest expression of that process that J. Rousset has recognized in the literature of an entire ‘age’: artificialization,”15 resonates with the US poet’s dedication to that particular artifice that constitutes the life and movement of the poem as linguistic object. Here the poet and his language, to paraphrase Stevens’s “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” (51), find themselves more truly and more strange. In particular, the poems in Harmonium frequently deploy onomatopoeic outbursts, macaronic words and phrases, diverse forms of poetic masking, and glittering surfaces—indeed, precisely the “apotheosis of artifice” that Sarduy sees as central to Baroque creation. However, Stevens’s relationship to nature is more complicated than mere mockery; it is closer to what Glissant has in mind when he discusses Baroque art as “muster(ing) . . . anything that flouted the alleged unicity of the thing known and the knowing of it, anything exalting quantity infinitely resumed and totality infinitely ongoing.”16 For Stevens, however, this was not a matter to be celebrated, but a possibly insoluble philosophical problem to be tackled, as instantiated in the opening lines of perhaps his most explicitly baroque poetic meditation, “Someone Puts a Pineapple Together” (693–97), based, incidentally, on a drawing by the Cuban artist Mariano Rodríguez: “O juventes, O fili, he contemplates / A wholly artificial nature, in which / The profusion of metaphor has been increased.” The dissolution of the sensual pineapple, that “husk of Cuba” with its “odor of this core of earth / And water,” into a two-dimensional geometrical artifact whose conic sections take the form of “prolific ellipses” (for Sarduy the quintessentially Baroque figure), creates a situation in which “the total artifice reveals itself / As the total reality.” And yet the actual physical pineapple cannot so easily disappear into the work of art, for it is “an object the sum of its complications, seen / And unseen.” There is, then, a fundamental—and literally fruitful—tension between the ludic act of transforming a natural object into a proliferating verbal or visual image and the stubborn singularity of the object itself, not

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to mention the nature of which it remains a part even as it sits on a table in a room in a house. Part of the heritage of Puritanism involves constructing nature in adversarial terms, as the “howling wilderness” besieging the elect. In the mentality of the original settlers of the territories of the northern latitudes that eventually became the thirteen colonies of the future United States—incapable as they were of surviving without the help of those indigenous inhabitants who by virtue of such assistance and the knowledge of the wilderness it implied were themselves irrevocably damned as heathens and savages—nature had to be tamed, kept at bay. Stevens, therefore, could not uncomplicatedly adopt as his own Eugenio d’Ors’s dictum that “the Baroque is secretly animated by nostalgia for the Lost Paradise” (though such a nostalgia, and its attendant pantheism, does well up in his poems now and then).17 Rather, he was compelled to explore how the hand of man (at once a synecdoche and a metonym for poetic activity, which transforms what it beholds into a work of verbal art) affects the natural environment. The famous “Anecdote of the Jar” (60–61) articulates the problematic quality of this relationship: an artifact, once placed “upon a hill / . . . made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill.” Here is the realization of the Puritan dream: the wilderness tamed by an ordering object that, by virtue of its design, betokens the “higher” art of the human presence. And yet, the final quatrain exposes the jar’s limitations, its aggressive reduction of unordered plenitude, in an appropriately gnarled (Baroque) syntax whose cluster of negatives echoes the repeated and all-encompassing “nothings” of “The Snow Man”: “It took dominion everywhere. / The jar was gray and bare. / It did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee.” An ordering that aims at the primacy of aesthetic creation over nature is a sign of power, but also of trivialization. Note the leap in the second stanza from the doggerel of “the jar was round upon the ground” to the majestic line that follows, “And tall and of a port in air,” as an articulation of this conundrum. As “Tennessee” is a liminal space, part of the southern United States yet outside the tropical South, “Anecdote of the Jar” can be read as a poem of transition toward Stevens’s more explicit engagement, in Ideas of Order, not only with the hedonism he finds in the Caribbean but also with the philosophical implications of tropical landscape and climate on poetic creation. As indicated by the title of the collection, each poem involves an “idea” of order, an instance of Baroque “flouting of the unicity of the thing known and the knowing of it.” An accumulation of ideas of order, rather than definitive

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statements, expresses Stevens’s own penchant for creating what could be called a cubist labyrinth, where the object contemplated vanishes under its repeated scrutiny from diverse angles and aspects. Each poem in Ideas of Order, then, is like the jar in Tennessee, but one that is constantly being removed from its location in the landscape and placed elsewhere to create a different, deliberately transitory effect: an example of the Baroque resource Sarduy calls “proliferation”: “A foreseen journey, an orbit of abbreviated similarities, demands, in order to enable what it obliterates to be guessed at, in order to brush with its periphrasis against the excluded, expelled signifier, and sketch the absence that signals, that passage, that journey around what is missing and whose absence constitutes it: a radial reading that connotes, as no other, a presence, that which in its ellipsis signals the mark of the absent signifier, that to which the reading, without naming it, makes reference in each of its turning points, the expelled, that which displays the traces of exile.”18 The first poem in Ideas of Order, “Farewell to Florida” (97–98), immediately proposes, in an unusually confessional tone for Stevens’s habitually guarded or masked poetic persona, a theme of willed self-exile from an Edenic realm personified by a Belle Dame sans Merci, whose “mind” had aimed to seduce and entrap the first-person narrator (“bound me round”—note the similarity of the rhyme to the jar in Tennessee, “round upon the ground”). Yet the language with which he characterizes the land he is supposedly relieved to have fled betrays a barely suppressed yearning: The palms were hot As if I lived in ashen ground, as if The leaves in which the wind kept up its sound From my North of cold whistled in a sepulchral South, Her South of pine and coral and coraline sea, Her home, not mine, in the ever-freshened Keys.

The heat of the palms is erotic; recall, from “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” the “bawdiness” that, once given free rein, is transformed into palms. These tropical trees, “squiggling like saxophones,” also conjure up a black presence, conventionally associated in the white mind with unrepressed libidinal energy. What is interred in the “sepulcher” of the South is the “North of cold,” along with its attendant repressions. The poet’s desire to return to that North is motivated by a sense of duty born of abnegation, for “My North is leafless and lies in a wintry slime / Both of men and clouds,

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a slime of men in crowds” and its mind, unlike “hers,” is a violent one. This introductory “idea of order” presents the conflict between the pleasure principle and the reality principle in the starkest possible terms, and this will be the theme on which Stevens will compose his subsequent variations. A plenitude deliberately and consciously abandoned, not forgotten, but also a leave-taking that must be repeated because “she”—the tropics—never really leaves. “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu” (104), the poem immediately preceding the emblematic “The Idea of Order at Key West,” for all its threefold repetition of farewell, concludes on a frankly hedonistic note: “Everjubilant, / What is there here but weather, what spirit / Have I except it comes from the sun?” The Caribbean scene depicted in “The Idea of Order at Key West” (105–6) occurs not in the heat of day but at sundown—a liminal hour in a liminal place (an island shore) in a poem that in many ways is about the liminality of imagination and the ways in which it pulls together a range of observed human and natural forces into a single fleeting moment. As in “Farewell to Florida,” an unnamed female figure acts as catalyst: a solitary beachcomber whose song (not wordless, but whose words and phrases are never present in the poem, except as sounds) transcends the “constant cry . . . / . . . / Inhuman, of the veritable ocean” by incorporating it as a musical element. What results is an interplay among voice, wind, and waves, the intricacies of which the poet attempts to tease out in a language whose rhythmic swells bear the stamp of the “genius of the sea” that he, the philosophizing onlooker, is in his own way trying to “sing beyond.” The ever-skeptical poet perceives “spirit” in the “maker’s” song, but he does not know how to name it or what to attribute it to (the internal rhyme serves to attenuate the apparent finality of the line, “But it was she and not the sea we heard”). He examines the phenomenon from all sides in search of that “more.” Where previously he had heard a “constant cry” in the sea, he now professes to hear “the meaningless plungings of water and the wind.” And he elevates the rhetorical mode into a self-consciously Baroque description that, for all its metaphorical grandeur (“Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped / On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres / Of sky and sea”) is immediately scaled down in the next stanza to the declarative statement, complex in its meaning though straightforward in its address: “It was her voice that made / The sky acutest at its vanishing.” As the rest of the stanza unfolds, the language becomes more direct, apparently reflecting a conclusive interpretation of the relation between singer, song, and scene: “When she sang, the sea, /

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Whatever self it had, became the self / That was her song, for she was the maker.” In other words, the singer creates in her song, however evanescent, a unified (and humanized) world—a fully realized artifact. Yet the final two stanzas complicate matters further. The poet demands of his fellow onlooker and listener, Ramon Fernandez, some insight into why, even though the song had ended, the moment of universal harmony prolonged and deepened itself so that the fishing boats in the harbor “mastered the night and portioned out the sea.” It is deliberately left unclear whether the poet is answering his own question when he exclaims “Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,” or if he is meditating on the “idea” of an order imprinted on his imagination by the song and extended beyond the sea into the entire cosmos. But such an ordering, and the passionate “rage” that animates it, is notable in terms of where it leads: not to a divinity (itself yet another idea of order) but to other words, other poetries of sea, sky, stars: “And of ourselves and of our origins / In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.” There is here an anticipation of an aspect of Lezama’s concept, articulated in his essay “Mitos y cansancio clásico” (Myths and Classical Weariness), of the difficult as “the form in the process of becoming through which a landscape moves towards a meaning, an interpretation, or a simple hermeneutic, in order thereafter to move towards its reconstruction.”19 What endures in the poet’s mind after the singer has passed by and her song has died out is, to borrow a concept from Stevens, a fictive music through which a reconstruction of remembered song and landscape may be effected. The “difficulty” of “The Idea of Order at Key West” resides in the movement of the imagination toward its crystallization into an idea. The existential choice boldly propounded by d’Ors in his essayistic sequence on the Baroque—“one must choose, choose, and burn the boats at one’s back. One must choose between Life and Eternity. . . . Youth or immortality. Warm earth or cold sky. Intensity of the present hour, passionately savored, or hope for an impassive future”20—was one that Stevens recognized and conveyed agonistically in his work. In the end, however, he resolved it in favor of a more contemplative, Epicurean existence proper to an homme moyen sensuel, where, to quote the title of one of his later poems, “the house was quiet and the world was calm” (311–12), far removed from the perturbing temptations of the Caribbean. Yet if he would no longer go to any Caribbean that was not of the mind, the “real” Caribbean would come to him in the form of the young Cuban man of letters José Rodríguez Feo, who in the course of a decade-long correspondence beginning in 1944 would recall to

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Stevens—uncomfortably at times—a part of his world he thought he had put behind him. He dealt with this inner discomfiture by transforming Cuba into less a physical topos—though he vicariously relished Rodríguez Feo’s descriptions of the landscape and people—than a literary trope, what he referred to in the poem “A Word with José Rodríguez-Feo” (292–93) as “the Cuba of the self,” as distinct from the Cuba “full of places that I have never heard of before and shall never see.”21 But Rodríguez Feo himself, enthusiastic correspondent, voracious reader, and dedicated aesthete that he was, incarnated precisely that Caribbean spirit that had proved so attractive to Stevens. In many ways, he is a veritable gracioso in the Baroque tradition, incessantly in motion between Cuba, Canada, and universities in the United States, acting as a translator or mediator between literary worlds, constantly in search of international contributors to the literary journal Orígenes (edited by Lezama Lima and funded by the independently wealthy Rodríguez Feo), and unabashedly exhibiting both breathless dilettantism and melancholic vulnerability, sometimes in a single letter. What emerges from the two writers’ decade-long exchange is precisely the younger man’s talent for intellectual seduction—something of which he was quite aware and which on more than one occasion disarmed Stevens into letting slip the mask of detachment he often donned for his correspondents and speaking with unusual intimacy. For example, when he mentions Cuba for the first time in his correspondence with Rodríguez Feo, Stevens recalls: “When I was [in Havana] alone, on my first trip, I walked around the town a great deal and concluded by wanting in the wildest way to study Spanish, which I really began. . . . Little by little it all got away from me.”22 This regret at not being able to read Spanish will become a recurrent theme in his approach to the texts Rodríguez Feo sends him—notably Lezama’s—which he tries to approach on a metalingual level, as a series of suggestive signs or hieroglyphs. In his reply, Rodríguez Feo favorably compares him to Ernest Hemingway (with whom Stevens got into a drunken brawl during one of his last trips to Florida, something Rodríguez Feo could not have known) and declares: “Your poetry always has had for me a certain evocation of tropical light and colors which I find charming and most unusual.”23 Thereafter, Rodríguez Feo regularly compliments Stevens on his poetic evocations of Cuba (even humorously Hispanicizing his name as “Wallacio” or “Wallachio”), notably at a later stage of their correspondence when he expresses appreciation for Stevens’s generous acknowledgments of the books he has received from Cuban writers: “Those

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fine gestures on your part are what has converted you, my dear Wallachio, to an almost legendary amigo of us Cuban writers. Partly, because I believe the real cause lies in your poetry where our poets discern a certain colour, a certain light—a beauty—which so very much evokes our own delicate paysage.”24 By repeatedly insisting on Stevens’s poetic affinities with Cuba, Rodríguez Feo is not only aiming to entice the older man into acknowledging what is, after all, a major leitmotiv of his work, but also, in a larger sense, he is “writing back” to Stevens as a consecrated representative of the imperial North who, however admirable his work, in a way has become too complacent in denying his own deeper impulses, too ensconced in an everyday routine, and thus a kind of poetic tourist. In a letter addressed to “My dear prisoner of Hartford,” Rodríguez Feo declares, “If I enter the city of Hartford, it shall be at exactly noon so as to trap the poet as he exits from the walled citadel of the insurances,”25 and two years later, he daringly speculates, “I wonder what it would have been like if you had escaped from H. and landed in that lovely Caribbean beach. For instance, its effect on your poetry.”26 When a quarrel finally erupts between the two men—characteristically disguised as a literary dispute—Rodríguez Feo attacks André Gide as a way of retaliating against Stevens: “To my tropical senses all of Gide’s struggles seem a bore. . . . But remember Gide’s search for a climate! This search responded to an atrophied imagination.” And further, this time on an explicitly ad hominem basis: “I find no difference between what I read and what I live. . . . I think a man from your latitude has other intentions when he picks up a book. But then your intentions are all quite different from ours.” Significantly, earlier in the letter he makes a cutting remark about the American military presence in Cuba, as if he were fully aware that the dispute between the two writers had a political as well as philosophical and climatological dimension: “The International American Defense Junta . . . has come down to get a suntan and hear the bongos play; meanwhile they will pretend they need a few naval bases and air bases ‘just in case, you know.’”27 In other words, all Stevens’s protestations about seeing things as they are, about the plain verities of life, about ideas adding nothing to life (all points on which he regularly contradicted himself), are simple evasions (and the younger man’s words must have hit home, as Stevens never responded directly and halted the correspondence for several months). The real truth of Stevens’s work, Rodríguez Feo seems to imply, can only truly emerge in a Caribbean context. Corroborating this is an earlier letter of his to Stevens

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acknowledging receipt of a copy of the collection The Auroras of Autumn: “It is quite incredible how your poetry becomes sharper, younger, more exhilarating with the passing of time. A group of Orígenes readers and collaborators came to my house the other night, and I tried to put across to them the lovely texture and resonance of some of your poems. How wonderfully they understood poems like ‘The Owl in the Sarcophagus’ and the New Haven poem.”28 In this gathering of a new generation of Cuban intellectuals seeking to revitalize their literary culture, Stevens’s words are lovingly transported— transculturated—out of their language and their northern ambience and, in the voice of the translator and medium Rodríguez Feo, who calls his performance “a bit of an improvisation,” become part of Cuban literature. At issue here is an example of what Chiampi calls “the contradictory character of this modern experience, which cannibalizes the aesthetic of rupture”—Stevens’s high modernism—“produced in the hegemonic centers, at the same time as it restores the incomplete, unfinished aspect of its own tradition to nourish its search for the new.”29 The search for a “Cuba of the self”—or, in the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano’s words, “the secret Cuba”—becomes in this context less an intellectual conceit, an “idea of order,” than an attempt to create a more expansive notion of Cuban tradition, one capable not only of dialoguing with the cultural expressions of the “center” but of absorbing, renovating, and transforming them, thereby destabilizing their hegemony through the creation of a mestizaje of multiple origins and confluences. Stevens himself understood this to some extent; his injunction to Rodríguez Feo to “respond to Cuba and make something of it, and help to invent or perfect the idea of Cuba in which everyone has a being just as everyone has a being in a great church,”30 is a remarkable distillation of the catholic, in both the religious and ecumenical sense, ambitions of the Orígenes project. It is on this terrain of a realized Cuba of the individual and collective self, a sort of Lezamian “imaginary era” in which poetic images from different epochs, places, and cultures meld in a dynamic, mutually revelatory force field, that Lezama’s poetics converges with Stevens’s. Although Rodríguez Feo made much of his role as a mediator between the two poets, in his own correspondence with Lezama from the United States he appears to be jealously guarding his personal relationship with Stevens, as he only mentions him in a single letter: “Today I chatted all day with the delightful poet of Hartford, Wallace Stevens,” adding, after several paragraphs of miscellaneous news about other people, the rather banal detail, “Wallace Stevens gave me two astonishing ties: $15 each.”31 Likewise, early in his exchange with Stevens,

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Rodríguez Feo inquires about a Spanish translation of the poem “Academic Discourse at Havana,” which someone informed him had been published in Cuba, only to report in 1950—five years later—that “José Lezama . . . admires you very much—ever since he read your poem about Habana in Avance.”32 According to Beverly Coyle and Alan Filreis, the editors of the Stevens– Rodríguez Feo correspondence, the translation (which they attribute to the prominent Cuban intellectual and editor of Avance, Jorge Mañach) appeared in 1929 (seven years before its publication in book form as part of Ideas of Order), which means that Lezama was nineteen when he first encountered Stevens’s work. So although Rodríguez Feo did much to assure Stevens’s continued presence in Cuba by publishing translations of his poems in Orígenes, and made Stevens aware of Lezama’s writings as well, the affinity of the two poets, at least from Lezama’s standpoint, had long been an established fact. For his part, on receiving a copy of Lezama’s collection La fijeza (Fixity), published in 1949, Stevens wrote the Cuban poet a note in which, apologizing as ever for his lack of Spanish, he states, “I wish I did [read it] because there may well be something in common between your point of view and mine. This is suggested particularly by the Variations On A Tree. The truth is that one gets a good deal from the mere reading of poetry without being able to gather fully the meaning of what one reads.”33 In a later letter of thanks to Lezama for sending him a copy of the 1953 essay collection Analecta del reloj (Analecta of the Clock), Stevens declares, “all your pages tantalize me.”34 Such is Stevens’s poetic sensitivity that the strategy of negative capability— “mere reading”—to which he has recourse to overcome his monolingual handicap is precisely the one best suited to approaching Lezama’s radiantly hermetic poetry and, for that matter, Stevens’s own more intricate works, whatever one’s level of linguistic mastery. As Lezama famously proclaimed, “Only the difficult is stimulating; only the resistance that challenges us is capable of raising, sustaining, and maintaining our power of knowledge.”35 That Stevens should use the word tantalizing to characterize Lezama’s specific mode of difficulty suggests an elusiveness of the sort that emerges from Lezama’s opening poem in his 1941 collection Enemigo rumor (Inimical Murmur): “Ah, that you should escape in the instant / in which you had already reached your best definition,”36 and echoed in Stevens’s own question from “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (329–52): “Does the poet / Evade us, as in a senseless element?” Stevens’s concept of poetry as a “supreme fiction” harmonizes with

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Lezama’s concept of the “poetic unconditioned,” whose fecundating struggle with causality is carried out on the terrain of the individual poem. Yet even as both celebrate the process through which a poem is made, Lezama proclaims the essential corporeality of the poem as it moves toward an image, defined as “the reality of the invisible world”: “The marvel of the poem is that it manages to create a body, a resistant substance situated between a metaphor, which as it advances creates infinite connections, and a final image that assures the survival of that substance, of that poiesis.”37 Stevens, at once attracted to and surfeited with ideas, contemplates the world, those “things as they are” that “are changed upon the blue guitar” of creativity (“The Man with the Blue Guitar,” 135–51), and, ever skeptical of more than momentary fulfillments and completions, seeks new angles and perspectives through which to move toward the supreme fiction. Lezama, a pagan Catholic, is an exponent of poetry as a kind of gaia scienza, a gnosis culminating in a resurrection for which “the poet is the causal being.”38 Though Lezama’s poetic system may appear quite abstract in comparison to Stevens’s variations on the Santayanan philosophy of “skepticism and animal faith,” Lezama is in fact very much concerned with the historical dimension in a way that Stevens, quintessentially American in his refusal to engage directly with history (as distinct from current events), is unable to conceptualize. Referring back to Lezama’s analysis of the difficult as “the form in the process of becoming through which a landscape goes toward a meaning,” the Cuban proposes two levels of difficulty: the first being the meaning itself, and the second being “the acquisition of a historical vision,” which he defines as “that counterpoint or weave bestowed by the imago, by the image participating in history.”39 An example of the two poets’ contrasting approaches to history may be found in Stevens’s concept of the “major man,” which recurs frequently in his poems written during World War II, and Lezama’s archetype of the “Baroque Señor” (el señor barroco). At the outset of his correspondence with Stevens, Rodríguez Feo specifically requested a more precise definition of “major man,” only to receive a rather cryptic and unsatisfying response: “Elsewhere I have at least trifled with the idea of some arbitrary object of belief, some artificial subject for poetry, a source of poetry. And major men are part of the entourage of that artificial object.”40 Pressed for greater precision in a subsequent letter, Stevens replied, “In dealing with fictive figures evasiveness at least supports the fiction.”41 Turning to “Paisant Chronicle” (293–94), the poem that Stevens considered to offer the fullest definition of this avowedly

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“evasive” figure, lightly satirical allusions to martial prowess appear, only to give way to an assertion that “the major men— / That is different. They are characters beyond / Reality, composed thereof.” The obfuscation is compounded by the collapsing of the plural “men” into a singular “man” whom “the baroque poet may see . . . as still a man / As Virgil, abstract. But see him for yourself, / The fictive man. He may be seated in / A café.” The appropriately Baroque contortions undergone in the presentation of this alternately real, alternately fictive man or men are compounded by the mock pedantry of the style. Lezama’s Baroque Señor, on the other hand, is a singular fusion of various individual personalities into a historical archetype that places an indelible imprint on his environment. Bristling with literary allusions and sumptuous descriptions of his apparel, dwellings, and gestures, the composite portrait of the Baroque Señor that emerges is certainly that of a “major man,” an abstraction to the extent that he is larger than life, yet a real presence in that he is situated within a specific constellation of historical circumstances (“[he] appears when the tumult of conquest and the colonizer’s parceling out of the landscape have grown distant”42). Nor is Lezama’s panegyric devoid of satirically inflated rhetoric: “Before reclining at his ease, in that elaborate column which is his right hand, the soconusco, gift of his severe episcopal paternity, was incorporated with Cartesian caution, to avoid the drop of rough amethyst.”43 The Baroque Señor is a paradigmatic imago in Lezama’s sense, an incarnate metaphor proliferating in and through a historical process of mestizaje. Lezama’s historical consciousness, though in the service of the metahistorical moment of resurrection instantiated by “a unity where the metaphor of its connections achieve[s] the totality of an image,”44 remains acutely conscious of the present, as witness the long sequence in La fijeza, “Pensamientos en La Habana” (“Thoughts in Havana”). As Stevens intuited, Lezama is a poet who tantalizes; ever in flight away from a decipherable center and toward the enigma implied in the incarnation of the word in flesh and world, his proliferating images are no easier to grasp than the platter of viands that tormented the mythological Tantalus with its inaccessible proximity. Yet “Thoughts in Havana,” when considered in Relation45 to Stevens’s similarly named “Academic Discourse at Havana” (115–17), the poem that had such a lasting effect on Lezama, can be seen both as developing a chain of metaphors (“thoughts”) that have their proximate origin in a specific place (Havana) and as a native rearticulation of the themes of Stevens’s poem.

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And in such a comparative context, the prepositional phrases in each title speak of the author’s respective positionality—Stevens’s “at Havana” denoting exteriority of address, while Lezama’s “in Havana” manifests interiority, inhabitation—and thus of the contrasting nature of the Relation each occupies with respect to the other. When published in the Cuba of 1929, the “Academic Discourse,” with its governing image of an old, abandoned casino (where “a grand decadence settles down like cold”) with corpses of swans (those emblematic creatures of poetic modernismo) scattered about the grounds, could not have failed to conjure up recent memories of the “Dance of the Millions,” where a dizzying rise in sugar prices produced massive fortunes that just as suddenly collapsed in 1920, with economic consequences foreshadowing (and doubtless contributing to) the Great Depression in the United States a few years later. The scene of vanished splendor, when contemplated from the present vantage point of ruin, assumes in retrospect a faintly comical, absurdist quality: “A peanut parody / For peanut people” who, under the spell of “politic man [who] ordained / Imagination as the greatest sin,” are oblivious to the sensuous beauty of the “serener myth / Conceiving from its perfect plenitude” that springs from their surroundings to “pass . . . like a circus.” The task for the poet, then, is to build precisely on the ruin of the casino, since, as Stevens puts it, “the world is not / The bauble of the sleepless nor a word / That should import a universal pith /To Cuba,” but precisely the domain for the perception and transformation of things as they are. The intimations of resurrection—the advent of a truer opulence that would see the old casino as a metaphor for life, engendered by an active poetic presence shaping the world anew through “dark, pacific words”—could not have been lost on the young Lezama. Although “Pensamientos en La Habana” is too lengthy a poem to be done justice to within the necessarily restricted compass of an essay, it is possible to specify a few elements that seem to have been fashioned in response to Stevens’s poem. A tone of negation is maintained throughout, amid a pervasive atmosphere of decline and thwarted hopes. There are allusions to the European conquest of the indigenous peoples of the island: a recurring image of a horse, and, toward the end of the poem, a lament that clearly refers to the Columbian legacy: “The glass beads they have given us / have fortified our own misery, / but since we know ourselves naked / being will alight on our crossed steps.” Constructing an “imaginary era,” Lezama refracts these aboriginal memories through the latter-day wreckage of Cuba’s

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dreams of independence, constantly thwarted and cheapened by imperial intervention: “Our wood is a terrycloth ox / today the city state is the state and a small forest.” The Baroque sinuosity of Lezama’s phrases, moving without transition from one image to another, is brought up short at the end of almost every verse by an italicized line, sometimes in English, once in French, and several times in Spanish (some of these translated from the earlier English lines). Lezama takes particular aim at “those who decided that being / lives in man.” These matter-of-fact realists are clearly incarnations of Stevens’s imagination-hating “politic man,” perhaps even the oblivious and petty “peanut people” (of US origin, if the poet’s interpellation of them in English is any indication), who are said to repeat . . . day and night with the turtle’s rhythm which conceals time in its shell: you didn’t decide that being lives in man: your God is the moon contemplating like a balustrade being entering man. Since they want to humiliate us we tell them the chief of the tribe descended the staircase.

The function of the multilingual italicized phrases soon becomes evident: they are the last poetic redoubt against the overwhelming pressure of the philistine conquerors down the ages and their project of “humiliation,” where “the naked man intones his own misery.” Just as Stevens in his “Academic Discourse” found that the poet’s speech to the sleepers “may . . . be / An incantation that the moon defines / By mere example opulently clear,” so also does Lezama’s lunar God preside over her beleaguered worshipers, giving them the strength to create an image of dignified authority that, with its allusions to Stéphane Mallarmé and Marcel Duchamp, incarnates the “dissonant modernity” (to recall Chiampi) of a mestizaje that will ultimately triumph over those who would consign the soul to an ashtray. For, as the collective poetic “we” proclaims, asserting that plenitude can flower even in the most reduced circumstances and the most apparently sparse materials: “We know that the canary and parsley are our glory / and that the first flute was made from a stolen bough.” Here is a poem that articulates on every level a project, at once historical and ongoing, of counterconquest. If the native inhabitants of the Caribbean form the thematic substrate of

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Lezama’s “Pensamientos en La Habana,” another long poem in La fijeza, “Rapsodia para el mulo” (“Rhapsody for the Mule,” 143–47), is a metaphorical figuration of the second submerged component of the American Baroque, the people of African ancestry. This poem appeared in an English version made by a committee of three, one of whom was Rodríguez Feo, as part of Dudley Fitts’s 1947 New Directions Anthology of Contemporary Latin American Poetry. Oddly, Rodríguez Feo never mentions it in his correspondence with Stevens, and there is no positive indication that Stevens ever read it. It would have been interesting if he had, because two years earlier, responding to a passing mention by Rodríguez Feo of his life at his country retreat with his “Negro cook who never says a word” and his domestic animals,46 among them his mule Pompilio, Stevens took off on a rather unsettling flight of fancy where he speculated: “Possibly the Negro and Pompilio are interchangeable. . . . Pompilio is the blank realist who sees only what there is to see without feeling, without imagination, but with large eyes that require no spectacles. . . . I take the greatest pride in now knowing Pompilio, who does not have to divest himself of anything to see things as they are.” Stevens then imagined his friend relaxing at his estate, “realizing that the world is as Pompilio sees it, except for you, or that the world is as the Negro sees it because he probably sees it exactly as Pompilio sees it.”47 It is unnecessary to venture much comment on the appalling racism of Stevens’s letter, other than to note that it aroused only an appreciative response from the young Cuban heir to a sugar fortune (“I was delighted to read the little discourse on my animals [they are not worthy of such elegant attention]”48). However, it needs to be situated in the context of Stevens’s work, where indeed he did try to come to grips on a more complexly metaphorical level with the unavoidable implications of the black presence for a US poetics—from the uncannily disruptive, ubiquitous blackbirds in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (74–76) to the “dweller in a dark cabin” whom the poet calls on to “cry hail” (“Hymn to a Watermelon Pavilion,” 71– 72) and the infelicitously titled yet suggestive poetic sequence “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” (121–28), surely Stevens’s most fully realized statement of African American Baroque (“It was when the trees were leafless first in November / And their blackness became apparent, that one first / Knew the eccentric to be the base of design”). Stevens’s meditation on Pompilio and the Negro must be seen not only in terms of the prejudices of his time and place but also as exemplary of the ambivalence with which white American modernists looked on African Americans: a combination of at-

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traction and repulsion, fascination and fear. To make black people cognate with mules was a common rhetorical move—indeed, the word mulatto, in a kind of wishfully racist thinking, is derived from a hybrid beast of burden that cannot reproduce. Having imprisoned the cook in Pompilio’s hide, Stevens can then proceed to express his envy of the mule’s simplicity of perception (much as blacks were deemed more authentic and closer to nature than overcivilized whites) and even encourage his correspondent to “give him a bunch of carrots and swear at him in a decent way, just to show your interest in reality.”49 The black image in the white mind always says more about who is fabricating it than about its object; in fact, it is Stevens himself who yearns to be like his notion of Pompilio, gazing out at the world and taking everything as it comes without any troublesome ideas, or people for that matter, to disrupt his complacent tranquility. He displaces these feelings onto Pompilio to delude himself that they do not belong to him. While Lezama also associates the mule with the African presence, he subverts the racist connotations of that metaphor by turning the animal into a powerful totem of resistance; he aims to exalt, not degrade. In Lezama’s evocation of Aleijadinho, written several years after “Rapsodia para el mulo,” the artist enters the city under cover of darkness, like a guerrilla fighter, to work his occult sculptural magic: “At night, in the twilight of thick and shadowy foliage, he arrives with his mule, which, with fresh sparks, enlivens the Hispanic stone with American silver, he arrives like the spirit of evil, which, led by the angel, works in grace.”50 In this image, the mule is at once the bearer and a kind of Centaurian body of the artist, an incarnation of the triple mestizaje of the American Baroque from whose shod hooves leap the Plutonian sparks of that “originary fire that shatters the fragments and unifies them.” Similarly, the mule of the “Rhapsody,” riderless unless his rider be the God who has bound him with a sash, is repeatedly praised for his “sure pace . . . in the abyss,” a measured tread within an atmosphere of increasing tension and difficulty, conveyed by the gnarled syntax, the almost monotonously weighty rhythms, and the obsessive reiteration throughout the poem of several key words—lead, sash, eyes, abyss, water—and the enigmatic, binding line that admits of only slight variation, “Pace is the pace of the mule in the abyss.” As the mule descends further and further into the depths, he assumes a quality at once holy and demonic, since his mission, which “he does not feel” and seems to unfold in a mythical time akin to a Nietzschean eternal recurrence of the same, involves an ordeal that only an unshakable patience could endure: “He cannot, he neither creates nor pursues, / his eyes do not leap / nor

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do his eyes seek the sequestered shelter / on the bulging brink of the earth.” From his “sure march into the abyss,” which at several points in the poem becomes a repeated (actual or potential) mortal fall into the void, he wrests a creative, implacable resistance that finds love in the steep path down the cliff and redemption in the “filthy tears” that leak from his “glassy” eyes. The mule’s mission also redeems him from sterility, and his silent penetration into the deepening darkness spares him from the “beginnings of the dark negating head” with which his pace is “often confused.” But only toward the end of the poem is the Orphic essence of that mission revealed. Alternating between directly addressing the mule and reverting to a third-person description, as he does at several points in the poem, the poet declares, Your end is not always the vertical of two abysses. The eyes of the mule seem to bestow on the abyss’s entrails, a damp tree. A tree that does not extend itself in green grooves but is closed like the single voice of beginnings.

This tree, which immediately proliferates, becomes the ultimate gift of the mule to every such abyss. Simply by persisting, and perhaps by plummeting into deaths followed by resurrections into his ordained mission, the mule has managed to endow a forbidding and sterile landscape with vibrant life. If the mule is considered as a trope for mestizaje, and his “leaden” burden as the weight of accumulated contempt and denigration by creatively sterile and “darkly negating” forces that condemn him for their own failings, then it can be understood why Lezama considered Aleijadinho’s work to be the culmination of the American Baroque. If the Baroque is born from tension, then the higher the pitch of such tension, the more profoundly rooted and at the same time more capable of fecundation and proliferation the resulting creations will be. The agony and tortuousness of the mule’s travails demonstrate conclusively that Lezama’s intention is not to idealize or rationalize the animal’s suffering, but to pay tribute to his stubbornly indomitable will to persist in his perilous journey. Lezama’s Baroque, then, issues from a Gnostic interplay of darkness and light; commenting on the prevailing misconceptions surrounding his poetry’s apparently willful obscurity, he remarks, “On one occasion, they told me that Góngora was a poet who made clear things obscure and that I, on the contrary, was a poet who made obscure things clear, evident, zenithal.”51 The “obscure things” Lezama seeks to bring to light are not just ar-

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bitrary images intended to confuse and irritate but buried elements of historical and cultural substrates that exert powerful yet still generally occulted influences on the Americas, even on those who profess to be detached from the questions they raise, be it on geographical, linguistic, or cultural grounds. There is much still to be learned—and gained—from exploring the precise routes and detours taken by what Glissant calls “a Baroque abroad in the world,” specifically in how it can help us (paraphrasing Glissant again) to live the unity-diversity of that world. One aspect of this process—not, perhaps, the most immediately vital, but certainly not without importance either— involves learning how to read differently, how to construct a chain or galaxy of “imaginary eras” in which the Lezamian concept of a resurrective poetry could encounter, on terms both “adhesive” in Whitman’s sense and contestational, the creations of North American modernism. Sarduy’s demand for a “Baroque that rejects all instauration, that metaphorizes the debated order, the judged god, the transgressed law. “A Baroque of the Revolution” endows this project with a political significance.52 Sarduy speaks of “that successive enveloping of one writing by another that constitutes . . . the Baroque itself.”53 By speculating on what Stevens may have perceived when trying to puzzle out Lezama’s “Variaciones del árbol” (“Variations of the Tree,” 122–24), the four-part sequence of sonnets that Stevens identified to Lezama as suggesting a commonality with his own poetic preoccupations, certain issues pertaining to the possible construction of an inter-American Baroque might take on more immediacy. Stevens would surely have noted the theme-and-variation approach, the many-sidedness of the poetic apprehension of the tree, the progression toward a supreme fiction or image in motion conveyed by the titles of each sonnet (where his readerly gaze would have strayed first): “Tree and Hand,” “Destruction of the Image of the Tree by the Night,” “Tree and Landscape Destroyed by Night,” and “Artifice Prolongs the Night.” He might have heard some of his music in lines like “This floating, foreboding, marine tree” and “There remained a tree, its image and the night” (the cognates would have helped him do so). Trying to wrap his voice around the words, he might have encountered his own penchant for quirky verbal sound effects in “Un inmenso galope en la bodega de un barco” (An immense gallop in a ship’s hold), but he might not have thought of slaves imprisoned on a slave ship. And as he made his way— likely more than once—through the sequence, he might have found at least a glancing likeness to his poem “Evening without Angels” (111–12), to “that descending sea / Of dark, which in its very darkening / Is rest and silence

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spreading into sleep,” hearing its echoes in Lezama’s “The galloping night extracts opium from the seaflower / rolls round cities, envelops statues / and raises the shoulders of the moistened man.” He might have measured his own diurnal affirmation “Let it be clear that we are men of sun / And men of day and never of pointed night” against Lezama’s nocturnal Plutonianism: “Procession, black snare of drums / which from below the water, fabricates unchanging, / and when it envelops the destroyed lightning / the drum, like a son, rounds its father.” Subconsciously, the “news from Africa” in these lines might have reached him, though he would not have detected the AfroCuban orisha Changó’s presence in the “destroyed lightning,” or the Kongo ritual cosmos shining and echoing below the water. In any case, this other Cuba of other selves might for him have served as an example of what he once defined as the grotesque: “Not a visitation. It is / Not apparition but appearance” (“A Word with José Rodríguez-Feo” [293]). And when he put down his copy of La fijeza, his own meditation from “Description without Place” (296–302) might have come to mind: “Description is revelation. It is not / The thing described, nor false facsimile. // It is an artificial thing that exists / In its own seeming, plainly visible.”

Notes 1 Irlemar Chiampi, Barroco y modernidad (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica,

2000), 17; my translation.

2 Ibid., 18.

3 See in particular Kamau Brathwaite, Magical Realism, 2 vols. (New York: Savacou

North, 2001).

4 Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” 80; my translation. 5 Ibid., 106. 6 Ibid., 105.

7 Glissant, “Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World,” 78. 8 Lezama Lima, “La curiosidad barroca,” 80.

9 See Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expresión,” in Within the Circle:

An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 79–96. 10 See Melvin B. Tolson, Harlem Gallery and Other Poems (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). 11 Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1982). 12 Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 29.

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13 Wallace Stevens to José Rodríguez Feo, January 4, 1945, in Secretaries of the Moon:

14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33

34

35 36

37

The Letters of Wallace Stevens and José Rodríguez Feo, ed. Beverly Coyle and Alan Filreis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1986), 35. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 8; all further references are keyed to this edition and will be made parenthetically in the text. Sarduy, “El barroco y el neobarroco,” 1387; my translation. Glissant, “Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World,” 78. Eugenio d’Ors, Lo barroco, ed. Angel d’Ors and Alicia García Navarro de d’Ors (Madrid: Tecnos, 2002), 39; my translation. Sarduy, “El barroco y el neobarroco,” 1391. Lezama Lima, “Mitos y cansancio clásico,” in La expresión americana, ed. Irlemar Chiampi (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 49. D’Ors, Lo barocco, 84. Stevens to Rodríguez Feo, August 13, 1946, in Coyle and Filreis, Secretaries of the Moon, 85. Stevens to Rodríguez Feo, January 26, 1945, ibid., 39. Rodríguez Feo to Stevens, February 13, 1945, ibid., 41. Rodríguez Feo to Stevens, February 22, [1952], ibid., 190. Rodríguez Feo to Stevens, August 27, 1946, ibid., 87. Rodríguez Feo to Stevens, September 21, 1948, ibid., 154. Rodríguez Feo to Stevens, February 25, [1952], ibid., 193–94. Rodríguez Feo to Stevens, October 3, 1951, ibid., 181. Chiampi, Barroco y modernidad, 18. Stevens to Rodríguez Feo, October 28, 1949, in Coyle and Filreis, Secretaries of the Moon, 166. Rodríguez Feo to Lezama Lima, May 8, [1947], in José Rodríguez Feo, Mi correspondencia con Lezama Lima (Mexico City: Biblioteca Era, 1991), 67–68; my translation. Rodríguez Feo to Stevens, June 17, 1950, in Coyle and Filreis, Secretaries of the Moon, 178. Stevens to Lezama Lima, undated, quoted in Órbita de Lezama Lima, ed. Armando Álvarez Bravo (Havana: Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, 1966), 51. Stevens to Lezama Lima, undated, quoted ibid., 53. Neither this nor the preceding letter is included in Holly Stevens’s edition of her father’s correspondence, Letters of Wallace Stevens (Berkeley: University of Californiaa Press, 1996). Lezama Lima, “Mitos y cansancio clásico,” 49. Lezama Lima, “Ah, que tú escapes,” Poesía completa, ed. César López (Madrid: Alianza, 1999), 29; my translation; all subsequent page references are keyed to this edition and will be made parenthetically in the text. Armando Álvarez Bravo, “Suma de conversaciones,” in Álvarez Bravo, Órbita de Lezama Lima, 31.

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38 Lezama Lima, “Preludio a las eras imaginarias,” in Las eras imaginarias (Madrid:

Fundamentos, 1971), 30; my translation.

39 Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, 49.

40 Stevens to Rodríguez Feo, January 26, 1945, in Coyle and Filreis, Secretaries of the

Moon, 40.

41 Stevens to Rodríguez Feo, February 26, 1945, ibid., 42. 42 Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, 81–82. 43 Ibid., 81.

44 Álvarez Bravo, “Suma de conversaciones,” 36.

45 Glissant defines Relation, with a capital letter, as a process that “does not act upon

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

prime elements that are separable or reducible. . . . It does not precede itself in this action and presupposes no a priori.” Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 172. Rodríguez Feo to Stevens, October 9, 1945, in Coyle and Filreis, Secretaries of the Moon, 69–70. Stevens to Rodríguez Feo, October 17, 1945, ibid., 71–72. Rodríguez Feo to Stevens, October 20, 1945, ibid., 74. Stevens to Rodríguez Feo, October 17, 1945, ibid., 74. Lezama Lima, La expresión americana, 106. Álvarez Bravo, “Suma de conversaciones,” 29. Sarduy, “El barroco y el neobarroco,” 1404. Ibid., 1387.

Editors’ Note to “Concerning a Baroque   Abroad in the World” by Édouard Glissant

T h e M a r t i n i c a n p r o s e w r i t e r , poet, dramatist, and theorist ­  Édouard Glissant belongs to a generation of Caribbean writer-theorists who have challenged binary, nation-oriented models of Caribbean culture and identity (such as negritude) to propose theories of Caribbean hybridity, creolization, and resistance aimed at demystifying fixed identities and univocal myths of origins. In Caribbean Discourse (published in 1981, translated into English in 1989) and Poetics of Relation (published in 1990, translated into English in 1997), Glissant elaborates a cross-cultural poetics founded on processes rather than essences, on unfinished becoming rather than stable belonging. He writes that there is a “difference between a people that survives elsewhere, that maintains its original nature, and a population that is transformed elsewhere into another people . . . and that thus enters the constantly shifting and variable processes of creolization” such as occurred in circum-Caribbean plantation culture, sustained by the African slave trade (Caribbean Discourse 15). Like Alejo Carpentier, whose work is also included in this volume, Glissant’s thought is marked by an intense awareness of Caribbean transculturation and hybridity, the result of the region’s conflictual history—the absence of indigenous populations (exterminated in the first century of colonization) and the repopulation by peoples of disparate origin in plantation societies highly dependent on the metropole. Glissant’s Baroque is a rebellious Baroque, a decolonizing strategy to deform—creolize—the metropolitan standard. Throughout his work, he explicitly relates his cultural theory of creolization to the Baroque. This relation is framed by a discussion of the linguistic dynamics between popular Creole and Martinique’s official language, French. In an essay in Caribbean Discourse titled “People and Language,” Glissant writes: “In the evolution of our rheto-

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ric, the baroque first appears as the symptom of a deeper inadequacy, being the elaborate ornamentation imposed on the French language by our desperate men of letters. . . . But for us it is not a matter today of this kind of excess, which was wrapped around a vacuum. The unconscious striving of baroque rhetoric, in the French colonial world, is dogged in its pursuit of the French language by an intensification of the obsession with purity. We will perhaps compromise this language in relationships we might not suspect. It is the unknown area of these relationships that weaves, while dismantling the conception of the standard language, the ‘natural texture’ of our new Baroque, our own. Liberation will emerge from this cultural composite” (250). Besides creolization, several of Glissant’s core concepts of anticolonial resistance resonate with this “new Baroque” sensibility: retour (the impossible return to a primordial source), détour (dispersion or lateral proliferation), opacité (productive unknowables), and, most important, relation. In the following essay from Poetics of Relation, Glissant’s “Baroque disturbances” are themselves a poetics of relation, offering a means of local cultural mobility and heterogeneous communal identities.

Bibliography By the Author

Glissant, Édouard. “A Field of Islands.” Trans. Jefferson Humphries. In Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, ed. Bainard Cowan and Humphries. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. 165–80. ———. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Trans. J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989. 248–51. ———. “Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World” in Poetics of Relation. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 77–79.

Additional Readings

Britton, Celia M. Édouard Glissant and Postcolonial Theory: Strategies of Language and Resistance. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1999. Chancé, Dominique. Poétique baroque de la Caraïbe. Paris: Karthala, 2001. Dash, J. Michael. Édouard Glissant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

  Chapter Twenty-nine  

Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World Édouard Glissant

Translated by Betsy Wing

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Glissa

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  Bibliography  

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Ross, Kathleen. The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: A New World Paradise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Rousset, Jean. La littérature de l’âge Baroque en France. Paris: J. Corti, 1953. Rubial García, Antonio, ed. Historia de la vida cotidiana en México. Vol. 2, La ciudad barroca. Mexico City: El Colegio de México and Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005. Ruiz, Raúl. Poetics of Cinema. Trans. Brian Holmes. Paris: Éditions Dis Voir, 1995. Sáenz, Pilar. The Life and Works of Eugenio d’Ors. Troy, Mich.: International Book Publishers, 1983. Salgado, César Augusto. “Barroco Joyce: Borges’s and Lezama’s Antagonistic Readings.” In Transcultural Joyce, ed. Karen Lawrence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 63–96. ———. From Modernism to Neobaroque: Joyce and Lezama Lima. Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2001. ———. “Hybridity in New World Baroque Theory.” Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (1999): 316–31. Santí, Enrico Mario. “Sobre Severo Sarduy: El efecto barroco.” In Escritura y tradición. Barcelona: Laia, 1987. 153–57. Sarduy, Severo. “The Baroque and the Neobaroque.” 1972. In Latin America in Its Literature, ed. César Fernández Moreno et al., trans. Mary G. Berg. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980. 115–32. ———. Ensayos generales sobre el barroco. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987. ———. “La simulación.” In Obra completa. Eds. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl. Madrid: Galaxia Gutenberg; Nanterre, France: ALLCA XX, 1999. Vol. 2: 1264–344. Schöne, Albrecht. Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des Barock. Munich: Beck,   1993. Schons, Dorothy. “Some Obscure Points in the Life of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Modern Philology 24, no. 2 (1926): 141–62. Schumm, Petra, ed. Barrocos y modernos: Nuevos caminos en la investigación del barroco iberoamericano. Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1998. Sebastián, Santiago. El barroco iberoamericano: Mensajo iconográfico. Madrid: Encuentro Ediciones, 1990. ———. Contrarreforma y Barroco: Lecturas iconográficas e iconológicas. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1981. Sefamí, Jacobo. “El llamado de los deseosos: Poesía neobarroca latinoamericana.” Siglo XX/Twentieth Century 12, no. 1–2 (1994): 219–37. Segel, Harold B. The Baroque Poem: A Comparative Study. New York: Dutton, 1974. Sillevis, John, ed. The Baroque World of Fernando Botero. Alexandria, Va.: Art Services International, 2007. Sitwell, Sacheverell. Southern Baroque Art. London: G. Richards, 1924. Skrine, Peter. The Baroque: Literature and Culture in Seventeenth-Century Europe. London: Methuen, 1978.

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Smith, Robert C., Jr. “The Colonial Architecture of Minas Gerais in Brazil.” Art Bulletin 21, no. 2 (1939): 110–59. Spadaccini, Nicholas, and Luis Martín-Estudillo, eds. Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. 2 vols. New York: Knopf, 1980. Spitta, Silvia. Between Two Waters: Narratives of Transculturation in Latin America. Houston: Rice University Press, 1994. Spitzer, Leo. “The Spanish Baroque.” 1944. In Representative Essays. Ed. Alban K. Forcione, Herbert Lindenberger, and Madeline Sutherland. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. 125–39. Stöckmann, Ingo, ed. “Barock.” Special issue, Text und Kritik, no. 154 (2002). Sullivan, Edward, ed. Brazil: Body and Soul. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2001. Sypher, Wylie. Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature, 1400–1700. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1955. Tally, Robert Taylor. “American Baroque: Melville and the Literary Cartography of the World System.” PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1999. Telles, Augusto C. da Silva. “Brazilian Baroque Architecture.” In Brazil: Body and Soul, ed. Edward Sullivan. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2001. 138–48. Thun, Matteo. “Neobarocke Masstäbe.” In Design heute: Masstäbe. Formgebung zwischen Industrie und Kunst-Stück, ed. Volker Fischer. Munich: Prestel, 1988. 197–206. Torres, Rubén Ortiz. “Cathedrals on Wheels.” Art Issues, no. 54 (1998): 26–31. Toussaint, Manuel. Colonial Art in Mexico. Ed. and trans. Elizabeth Wilder Weismann. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1967. Tovar de Teresa, Guillermo. México barroco. Mexico City: SAHOP, 1981. Tribe, Tania Costa. “The Mulatto as Artist and Image in Colonial Brazil.” Oxford Art Journal 19, no. 1 (1996): 67–79. Tweedie, James. “Caliban’s Books: The Hybrid Text in Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books.” Cinema Journal 40, no. 1 (2000): 104–26. ———. “The Suspended Spectacle of History: The Tableau Vivant in Derek Jarman’s Caravaggio.” Screen 44, no. 4 (2003): 379–403. Underwood, David K. “Toward a Phenomenology of Brazil’s Baroque Modernism.” In Brazil: Body and Soul, ed. Edward J. Sullivan. New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2001. 526–38. Van Delden, Maarten. Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1998. Varderi, Alejandro. Severo Sarduy y Pedro Almodóvar: Del barroco al kitsch en la narrativa y el cine postmodernos. Madrid: Editorial Pliegos, 1996. Wacker, Kelly A., ed. Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. Wakefield, Steve. Carpentier’s Baroque Fiction: Returning Medusa’s Gaze. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2004. Warnke, Frank J. Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.

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Weisbach, Werner. Der Barock als Kunst der Gegenreformation. Berlin: P. Cassirer, 1921. Weismann, Elizabeth Wilder. Art and Time in Mexico: From the Conquest to the Revolution. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Renaissance and Baroque. 1888. Trans. Kathrin Simon. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. Wollen, Peter. “Baroque and Neo-Baroque in the Age of the Spectacle.” Point of Contact 3, no. 3 (1993): 9–21. Woods, Michael J. Gracián Meets Góngora: The Theory and Practice of Wit. Warminster, UK: Aris and Philips, 1996. Worringer, Wilhelm. Form in Gothic. Trans. Herbert Read. London: Alec Tiranti, 1957. XVII Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana: Sesión de Madrid. Vol. 1, El barroco en América. Ed. Centro Iberoamericano de Cooperación. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica del Centro Iberoamericano de Cooperación, 1978. Yaeger, Patricia. “‘Black Men Dressed in Gold’—Eudora Welty, Empty Objects, and the Neobaroque.” Editor’s Column, PMLA 124, no. 11 (2009): 11–24. ———. “Circum-Atlantic Superabundance: Milk as World-Making in Alice Randall and Kara Walker.” In “Global Contexts, Local Literature: The New Southern Studies,” ed. Kathryn McKee and Annette Trefzer, special issue, American Literature 78, no. 4 (2006): 769–98. Zamora, Lois Parkinson. “Comparative Conclusions: Baroque New Worlds.” In The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 196–210. ———. The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ———. “New World Baroque, Neobaroque, Brut Barroco: Latin American Postcolonialisms.” PMLA 124, no. 1 (2009): 127–42. ———. “Swords and Silver Rings: Magical Objects in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez.” In A Companion to Magical Realism, ed. Stephen Hart and Wen-chin Ouyang. Rochester, N.Y.: Tamesis, 2005. 28–45. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, and Wendy B. Faris, eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995. Zavala, Iris M. “The Three Faces of the Baroque in Mexico and the Caribbean.” In Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History, vol. 3, Latin American Literary Culture: Subject to History, ed. Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 174–79.

  Notes on Contributors  

These notes exclude the authors of foundational essays, whose work is situated historically and culturally in the editors’ notes preceding their respective essays. holds a PhD in comparative literature and is a professor of English at the University of Houston, where she teaches early American literature and translation studies. She is the author of Mythic Masks in Self-Reflexive Poetry (1986) and America’s Gothic Fiction: The Legacy of Magnalia Christi Americana (2007), and is the editor of Poetics in the Poem: Critical Essays on American Self-Reflexive Poetry (1996) and The Soft and Silent Communion: The Spiritual Journals of Sarah Pierpont Edwards and Sarah Prince Gill (2005). D o r o t h y Z . Ba k e r

A n k e B i r k e n m a i e r is an assistant professor of Latin American literature at Columbia University. She is the coeditor of Cuba: Un siglo de literatura (2004) and the author of Alejo Carpentier y la cultura del surrealismo en América Latina (2006). Her articles on contemporary Cuban literature, the avant-garde, and radio have been published in Cuban Studies, Quimera, Revista de estudios hispánicos, Revista iberoamericana, and Modernism/Modernity. Her recent research is comparative in its orientation and focuses on French anthropology and literature in Latin America between the wars. P at r i c k B l a i n e teaches in the Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences Program at the University of Washington, Bothell. He is also a PhD candidate in comparative literature at the University of Washington in Seattle and is writing his dissertation, Recovering Democracy in Post-dictatorial Chilean Film and Narrative. His scholarly interests include the Neobaroque, posthuman narrative, literature and the environment, and literature of the Americas. In the fall 2010, he will begin work as an assistant professor of Spanish at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa. L e o Ca b r a n e s - G r a n t is an associate professor in the Departments of Dramatic Arts and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California in Santa Barbara, where he teaches Spanish, Latin American, and intercultural theater and performance. His articles have been published in Celestinesca, the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, and Profession. He is also the author of Los usos de la repetición en la obra de Lope de Vega (2004). His play The Art of Painting won the Puerto Rican Institute of Culture Award in 2005. G o n za l o C e l o r i o has taught at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) since 1974. He is the author of seven collections of essays, including El surrea-

646    C o n t r i b u t o r s

lismo y lo real maravilloso americano (1976), México, ciudad de papel (1997), and Ensayo de contraconquista (2001); a collection of chronicles, Para la asistencia pública (1984); three novels, Amor propio (1992), Y retiemble en sus centros la tierra (1999), and Tres lindas cubanas (2006); and a book of “varied inventions” titled El viaje sedentario (1994). He was awarded the Premio Nacional de Novela for Y retiemble en sus centros la tierra and the Prix des Deux Océans for the French translation of El viaje sedentario. I r l e m a r C h i a m p i is a chair emeritus of Latin American literatures at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She has had visiting appointments at Yale University, the University of Chicago, and at universities in Montreal. In addition to several articles on contemporary Latin American literature and literary theory, she is the author of El realismo maravilloso: Forma e ideología en la novela hispanoamericana (1984), Fundadores da modernidade (1991), and Barroco y modernidad (2000). In 1993, she prepared the scholarly edition of José Lezama Lima’s La expresión americana for the Fondo de Cultura Económica. W i l l i a m C h i l d e r s is an associate professor of Spanish at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. In his work he seeks imaginative ways of reading literary texts and historical documents, each in the light of the other. He has published over a dozen articles on Cervantes, the Baroque, and other aspects of early modern Spanish culture. He is the author of Transnational Cervantes (2006), which won the MLA’s Katherine Singer Kovacs Award in 2007. His current book project will offer a cultural history of the Morisco question. R o s e D u t r a holds an MA in Spanish from the University of California in Riverside. She has lectured at the university level and is currently teaching advanced-placement Spanish literature at Serrano High School in Phelan, California. She is also busy mothering two exuberant little boys.

is a professor in and the chair of the English department at the University of Texas in Arlington. Her publications include Carlos Fuentes (1983), Labyrinths of Language: Symbolic Landscape and Narrative Design in Modern Fiction (1988), and Ordinary Enchantments: Magical Realism and the Remystification of Narrative (2004). She has also coedited, with Lois Parkinson Zamora, Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995). She is currently working in the field of modern and contemporary interarts comparisons. W e n d y B . Fa r i s

R o b e r t o G o n zá l e z E c h e v a r r í a is Sterling Professor of Hispanic and comparative literature at Yale University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of numerous books, including Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (1977), The Voice of the Masters: Writing and Authority in Modern Latin American Literature (1985), Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative (1990), Celestina’s Brood (1993), The Pride of Havana: A History of Cuban Baseball (1999), and Love and Law in Cervantes (2005). He is the coeditor of the three-volume Cambridge History

C o n t r i b u t o r s 

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of Latin American Literature (1996), the editor of the Oxford Book of Latin American Short Stories (1997), and has written over one hundred articles and reviews in American, Latin American, and European journals and magazines. M o n i k a Ka u p is an associate professor of English and an adjunct associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Washington. She has recently completed a comparative study titled Neobaroque in the Americas, which engages the Neobaroque in modern and postmodern literature, film, visual art, and cultural theory in relation to alternative modernities and postcolonial expression. Her articles have appeared in American Literature, Chasqui, Comparative Literature, CR: The New Centennial Review, MLQ , Modern Fiction Studies, and Modernism/Modernity. She is the author of Rewriting North American Borders in Chicano and Chicana Narrative (2001) and the coeditor of Mixing Race, Mixing Culture: Inter-American Literary Dialogues (2002). A s h l e y Lap i n received a BA in French literature and translation and Spanish language and literature in 2005 from Barnard College. In 2003–4, she studied in Spain and France, and she currently works as a scholarship coordinator at the Rotary Foundation in Evanston, Illinois. J o h n O c h o a , an associate professor of Spanish at the Pennsylvania State University, previously taught at the University of California in Riverside. He is author of The Uses of Failure in Mexican Literature and Identity (2004), which examines several “monuments” of the Mexican canon. He has also published on postcolonial theory, border performance art, and culinary history. J o s é P a s c u a l B u x ó is a professor emeritus in the Institute of Bibliographic Research at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He has been a member of the Academia Mexicana de la Lengua since 1984. His recent honors include the National University Prize for Research in the Humanities in 1995 and the University Prize Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz from the Universidad del Claustro de Sor Juana in 2003. Among his thirty books are Góngora en la poesía novohispana (1960), Muerte y desengaño en la poesía novohispana (1975), Ungaretti y Góngora: Ensayo de literatura comparada (1985), Las figuraciones del sentido: Ensayos de poética semiológica (1984 and 1998), César Vallejo: Crítica y contracrítica (1992), Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Amor y conocimiento (1996), El resplandor intelectual de las imágenes (2002), and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Lectura barroca de la poesía (2006). Ma r í a E . P é r e z is a doctoral student at the Department of Hispanic Studies of the University of Houston. She has published poetry in Lineas desde el Golfo and in Lucero, a literary magazine from the University of California, Berkeley. Her article, “El precio de la revitalización: El desplazamiento de la comunidad Latina de zonas urbanas en Miami,” was published in the book Orbis/Urbis Latino: Los “hispanos” en las ciudades de las Estados Unidos in 2008.

648    C o n t r i b u t o r s T i m o t h y J . R e i s s is professor emeritus of comparative literature and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at New York University. His most recent books are Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange (2002), Mirages of the Self: Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (2003), and the edited collections Sisyphus and Eldorado: Magical and Other Realisms in Caribbean Literature (rev. 2002), and Music, Writing, and Cultural Unity in the Caribbean (2004). He is currently completing a book on Descartes and a collection titled Ngugi in the Americas and working on rethinking the European Renaissance in terms of American and African cultural exchanges.

received his PhD in literary theory and comparative literature from the University of São Paulo and is now professor in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras (College of Humanities) at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He has written several books on Mexican and Brazilian literature of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, including Arcádia: Tradição e mudança (1995), and has translated and edited Marilia de dirceo, by Tomás Antonio Gonzaga (2002). In 2004, he received the Jabuti Prize in Brazil for his work on the Brazilian literary theorist and critic Antonio Candido. J o r g e R u e da s d e l a S e r n a

M i c h a e l S c h u e s s l e r is a professor in the Department of Humanities at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in Mexico City. He is the author of La undécima musa: Guadalupe Amor (1995) and Elenísima: Ingenio y figura de Elena Poniatowska (2003), the latter published in English under the title Elena Poniatowska: An Intimate Biography. His edition and critical study of Alma Reed’s memoir, Peregrina: Mi idilio socialista con Felipe Carrillo Puerto (2007) was simultaneously published in its original English as Peregrina: Love and Death in Mexico. His most recent book is Artes de fundación: Teatro evangelizador y pintura mural en el México colonial (2009). He is also finishing a collaborative history of gay culture in Mexico. Maa r t e n v a n D e l d e n is a professor and chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Carlos Fuentes, Mexico, and Modernity (1998) and the coauthor (with Yvon Grenier) of Gunshots at the Fiesta: Literature and Politics in Latin America (2009). C h r i s t o p h e r W i n k s is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Queens College, CUNY. He holds a PhD in comparative literature from New York University. A scholar of comparative modernisms, with a particular emphasis on Caribbean and Latin American literature and African American studies, he has published numerous reviews and articles, as well as translations from French, German, and Spanish, in journals and anthologies. He was a founding editor of Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, a panAfricanist journal of culture and politics. His book Symbolic Cities in Caribbean Literature was published in 2009, and an anthology of poems by Kamau Brathwaite, edited and translated in collaboration with Adriana González Mateos, is forthcoming.

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L o i s P a r k i n s o n Z a m o r a is John and Rebecca Moores Distinguished Professor in the Departments of English, History, and Art at the University of Houston. Her area of specialization is comparative literature, and more particularly contemporary fiction in the Americas. Her books include Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction (1989) and The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (1997)—both of which have been translated into Spanish. She also has published Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community (1995), coedited with Wendy B. Faris, and Image and Memory: Photographs from Latin America, 1866–1994 (1998), coedited with Wendy Watriss. She frequently writes about the visual arts and their relation to literature; her most recent book is The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction (2006).

  Index  

Italicized page numbers indicate figures Abad, Diego José, 498 Abbot of Rute (Fernando Fernández de Córdoba), 367–68, 371 Abencerraje, El (anon.), 425–26, 427, 428, 433, 434, 446n41, 446nn40–41 Abreu, Mario, 275–76 Achilles, 535, 536 Acosta, Leonardo, 396–97, 398, 494, 497 Adorno, Theodor, 57, 323 Aeschylus, 539 African artisans, Baroque incorporated by, 3–4, 598–600. See also Aleijadinho Aguirre, Lope de, 422 Alberti, Leon Battista, 294 Alciato, Andrea, 353–54, 355, 358–59, 359, 372, 373–74, 379, 386, 393n23 Aldrete, Bernardo, 172 Alegre, Francisco Xavier, 498 Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa): as examplar of Baroque, 21–23, 29–30n19, 599, 616–17; references to, 180–81, 210, 236–37, 496–97, 505–6; works of, 23, 33–34n38, 237, 239 Alencar, José de, 321, 328 Alencar Araripe, Tristão de, Jr., 346 allegory and allegorical representation: ambiguity of, 64–65; antinomies of, 62–65; of courtly life, nature, and history, 59–62; of death, 152–53; in Neobaroque texts, 520– 21; Peter Bürger on, 57; of ruins, 55–57, 67–70; of Sor Juana’s “First Dream,” 525; soullessness and, 70–72; specular relationship and, 473; time and, 413n13. See also Benjamin, Walter; emblems and emblem books Almeida, Manuel Antônio de, 328 Alonso, Carlos J., 574–75, 584 Alonso, Dámaso, 4–5, 102, 161–62, 175, 176,

267, 272, 304–5, 314n21, 357, 365, 555, 564–65 altars and altarpieces, 23, 89, 90, 232, 233, 496 Alva Corté, Juan de, 400 Álvares Correia, D. Diogo, 339n16 Álvarez de Velasco Zorilla, Francisco, 387 Amado, James, 327–28 Ambros, August W., 96 America (Americas): architecture of, 21–23; Baroque and Enlightenment in, 497–502; Baroque inherited and augmented in, 237– 38, 240; Baroque renewed and recycled in, 511–15; conquests and reconquests of art of, 184–97; landscape in (vs. Europe), 195–97; length of Baroque in Spain vs., 199, 201–3; naming in, 261–62; nature of chronicles of, 419–28; as outposts of empire, 191; Spanish Renaissance manifested in, 229–31; trees of, 260, 261 amplification, 271 anamorphosis (distortion), 10–11, 30n20, 300–301, 443n5, 489, 490 Andrade, Mário de, 323, 335 Andrade, Oswald de, 317, 321–23, 328–30, 332, 334, 336, 339n16, 526n9, 572 Angelus Silesius, 103, 106–7 Anonymous Aragonese, 219, 220, 224 anthropophagy (cannibalism), 11, 317, 321–29, 334–38, 572 anti-ocularcentrism, 136 antiquity, 65–70, 92, 173. See also ruins and decay Aparicio Laurencio, Ángel, 409 Apollinaire, 28–29n13, 332 Araucana, La. See Ercilla, Alonso de Arcadian Academies, 344–45, 346 Arce de Vázquez, Margot, 569n16 Archer, Thomas, 122–23

652    I n d e x

architecture: anamorphosis of circle in, 300– 301; artificialization mechanisms in, 273, 274; characteristics of style, 13–14; colonial Brazil and New Spain, compared, 21–23; Cuban elements in, 244–58; decentering in, 294, 296–97; exemplars in Mexico, 200, 232, 506; folds in, 274, 474; International and modern blend in, 317; Lezama on, 210, 216, 230–40; re-cannibalization of poetics and, 330–31; tension and plutonism in, 215– 16. See also churches and cathedrals Arenas, Reinaldo, 504, 505 Ares Montes, José, 349–50 Arethusa, 227 Ariosto, Ludovico, 97, 99, 201, 425, 560–62 Aristotle, 171, 293, 302, 371, 388, 400–401,   566 Armstrong, Elizabeth, 484n49 Arroyuelo, Javier, 287 art and arts: artifice and abstraction in, 29n15; “attraction” theory of, 85–86; Baroque as correction to, 63–65; call for synthesis of, 68–69; characteristics of Baroque, 13–14; classical rules of, 89–91; de- and rehumanization of, 177n, 192–95; historians’ lack of attention to, 183; mechanism and functionalism in, 194, 196; painterly vs. linear, 14, 23, 47, 50, 180, 280, 428, 446n45; quotation and collage in, 282–83; reciprocal influences among, 371–72; science fused with, 385–86; typology of, 557. See also composition; representation artifice and artificialization: of allusion, 356– 60; concept of, 265–66, 271–72; condensation in, 277–79; of dissimilarity, 368–69; mechanisms of, 10, 11, 271–82, 502–6; Nietzsche on, 41–42; openings for, 151–52; proliferation in, 273, 275–77; of ruin, 65– 70; substitution in, 272–73, 274; of Trauerspiel, 55. See also Baroque aesthetics artistic originality, notions of, 6, 20, 41–42, 501–2. See also genius Ascalaphus, 226–27, 363–64, 379 Asian arts, 4, 27n7 assimilation, 1, 8, 222, 476, 489, 549, 563, 566, 579, 580, 600. See also plutonism attachment, implications of, 312–13n1, 588–91 Auerbach, Erich, 99

Aury, Dominique, 103 Ausonius, Decimus Magnus, 326 avant-garde aesthetics, 14, 28–29n13, 29n15, 30–31n26, 57, 117, 319–22, 509–10, 555 Ávila y Cadena, Antonio de, 402 Axtell, James, 454 Ayllón, Juan de, 201 Aztec culture, 184, 185–86, 400, 406, 421–22, 467 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 212, 225 Bacon, Francis, 126, 127, 398 Baker, Dorothy Z.: on Le Jeune, 451–57, 463– 64; on Marie de l’Incarnation, 457–64; references to, 23 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 280, 281, 320, 329, 335, 339n15, 503–4, 572 Balboa, Silvestre de, 395, 398, 408–12 Balbuena, Bernardo de, 28n9, 199, 200–201, 394, 401–7, 408, 409, 410–11 Balzac, Honoré de, 533–34, 535, 536–37, 539, 543, 545, 546 Baroque: abundance and absence in, 24–25, 230–31, 266–67, 281, 543; Americanization of, 511–15; approach to, 3–7; caricature in, 91; Catholic vs. Protestant, 27n4; as cyclical, 9–10, 29n18, 42, 75, 102, 242, 515; definitions and etymologies of, 2–3, 27n3, 95–98, 119–20, 212, 270–71, 348, 417; discourse on, 467–82; Enlightenment overlapping of, 199, 207n, 216–17; essence of, 78–84; genealogies of emergence in, 468–72; global qualities of, 467–68; as historical period, 93–94, 492–94; ideological nature of, 494– 97; length in Spain vs. America, 199, 201–3; multiple, oppositional interpretations of, 20, 136; Neobaroque’s relation to, 477–82; Nietzsche’s vindication of, 5–6, 12, 16, 41, 44–45; oppressive potential of, 18–19, 33n32, 33n36; Portuguese vs. Spanish style of, 31; public sphere in, 430–42; recovery and revalidation of, 1–3, 7–9, 16, 46, 48, 49–54, 209, 591–92; rerouting and naturalization of, 624–26; transformed into American way of becoming, 9–10. See also allegory and allegorical representation; architecture; Baroque aesthetics; classicism/Baroque binary; Eng­lish Baroque; European Baroque; folk Baroque; imitatio;

I n d e x 

New World Baroque; Neobaroque; saints; Ultrabaroque Baroque aesthetics: ambiguity in, 64–65, 151–54, 163, 541; “attraction” theory of, 85–86; characteristics of, 13–15, 487–97, 510–11; dynamism in, 83–84, 148–50, 622–23; flying forms in, 85, 89; foreshortening in, 51, 141, 162, 174; illusionism in, 4, 17, 26, 31n27, 51, 67, 151, 174, 277, 476, 488, 493; inherited and augmented by artisans, 237–38, 240; interdisciplinarity and, 1–3, 385–86; Lezama’s Dionysian feast as, 1, 222; multiplicity and continuity in, 75–76, 85–92; of pain, 512, 526n5; proliferation in, 270–71, 273, 275–77, 515–21, 603–4; as queer aesthetic, 267; Romantic, sentimental poetics distanced from, 5–7; stylistic and ideological criteria specific to, 104–8; wit, ingenuity, genius in, 351n10. See also anamorphosis; architecture; art and arts; artifice and artificialization; beauty; conceptismo (conceptualism); culteranismo; ellipse; ellipsis; Eng­lish Baroque; Jesuit order; literature; mirror and mirroring; music; New World Baroque; poetry; rococo; spatiality Baroque New Worlds, use of phrase, 2, 25–26. See also New World Baroque barroco contemporáneo, 13, 30n24. See also brut barroco barroco de estado (state Baroque), 76 barroco de indias (earlier, barroco indocristiano), 18 Barthes, Roland, 265, 275, 278, 527n18 Bass, Laura, 446n41 Bataille, Georges, 136, 266–67 Bataillon, Marcel, 488 Bateson, F. W., 103–4 Baudelaire, Charles, 56, 218, 258 Beatles (group), 334 Beaumont, Francis ( John Fletcher), 102, 132–33 beauty, 54, 69, 90, 91, 129–30 Beckjord, Sarah H., 420, 444n16, 445n38 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 207 Bejel, Emilio, 472, 579 Bellay, Joachim du, 171 Bello, Andrés, 394, 412n2

  653

Belvedere Torso (sculpture), 63–64, 64 Benítez, Fernando, 487–88 Benjamin, Walter: allegorical method of, 56–57, 62–65, 70–72; on Baroque ideal of knowledge, 71; on Calderón de la Barca, 16, 60–61, 67; on music, 65, 83; references to, 3, 16, 326, 397, 463, 472, 519; on ruin and history, 55–57, 65–70, 328, 403, 413n13; on writing and calligraphy as characteristic of the Baroque, 71–72, 85–88; works: The Origin of German Tragic Drama (excerpt), 55–57, 59–74; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 56–57. See also Trauerspiel Bense, Max, 330, 337 Berni, Francesco, 97 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 22, 52–53, 53, 80, 88, 91, 121, 122–23, 124, 131, 149, 230, 456 Beverley, John, 76, 397, 405, 417 Bill, Max, 331, 332–33 Birken, Sigmund von, 70 Blake, William, 262 Blanchot, Maurice, 103 Blenheim Palace (Oxfordshire, Eng­land), 121, 122, 131 Bocanegra, Matías de, 202. See also Gongorist tradition Boccalini, Trajano, 347 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, 97 Bolívar, Símon, 442, 448–49n71 Bolivia, Church of San Lorenzo in Potosí, 29–30n19, 33–34n38, 181, 187, 188, 189, 216 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 440, 442, 535–36 Bonnefoy, Yves, 150–51 Boose, Jagadis Chandra, 177 Borges, Jorge Luis, 5, 6, 80n, 163, 173, 175n, 291n13, 321, 327, 334, 337, 502, 510, 555, 573–74, 579 Borinski, Karl, 65–66, 95, 97 Borja, Juan de, 372 Borromini, Francesco, 22, 34n39, 123, 149, 230, 234, 254, 267, 300–301, 489 Boscan, Juan, 167n Bossuet, Jacques Bénigne, 262 Bottineau, Yves, 34n39 Bottrall, Margaret, 131–32 Bouleau, Charles, 294 Boulez, Pierre, 330, 333 Bradford, William, 452

654    I n d e x

Brathwaite, Kamau, 598 “brave new world” (Shakespeare), 25–26 Brazil: architecture of, 21–23; concrete poetry of, 316, 329–34; Góngora’s influence in, 343–51; hybrid origins of, 317; Pilgrim Church of Bom Jésus do Matosinhos, 22, 33–34n38, 239; poetry and national development in, 320–21; poetry as highly evolved to start in, 325–28. See also Campos, Haroldo de; Minas Gerais; Ouro Preto Brie, Friedrich, 100 Briganti, Giuliano, 119 Briggs, Martin Shaw, 96 Briggs, Robin, 464n2 Broch, Herman, 538 Brontë, Emily, 551 Brosses, Charles de, 95 Browne, Thomas, 5, 103 Brueghel, Peter (Pieter), 128, 177, 259, 368, 368, 582 brut barroco, 13, 30n24 Buarque de Holanda, Sergio, 347 Büchner, Georg, 539 Buci-Glucksmann, Christine: on apparition, 140–44, 154–55; on Baroque and Neobaroque, 477–78; on Leibniz, 146–47; “madness in vision” concept of, 17, 22, 26, 136–38, 140–42, 145, 147, 148, 150, 156; on Nothingness, 151–54, 155; references to, 13, 17, 22, 29n18; on spatiality, 148–50; on transcendences, 155–56; on vision and seeingness, 140–46; works: Baroque Reason, 136; La folie du voir, 17, 136; “The Work of the Gaze,” 140–57. See also MerleauPonty, Maurice; vision and envisioning Bunyan, 103, 104 Burckhardt, Jacob, 16, 32n29, 42, 46, 47, 96 Burne-Jones, Edward, 120 Burns, Robert, 440 Burra, Peter, 103 Burshatin, Israel, 446n41 Bustillo, Carmen, 578 Buxó. See Pascual Buxó, José Cabezas Altamiro, Juan de las, 408–9 Cabral de Melo Neto, Joâo, 329, 332 Cabranes-Grant, Leo: on Fuentes and cultural critique, 477–82; references to, 23;

on Sor Juana, 472–77; on transatlantic exchange, 467–72; works: “The Fold of Difference,” 467–84 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 278, 285, 335,   502 Cabrera Quintero, Cayetano, 204 Cage, John, 330, 334 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 16, 60–61, 67, 99, 202, 204–5, 228, 396, 475, 555–56. See also Benjamin, Walter; Shakespeare, William Caldwell, Erskine, 542 Calleja, Diego, 216, 361–62, 374–75 calligraphy and writing, 71–72, 85–88 Calloway, Stephen, 480 Calmón, Pedro, 346 Camões, Luíz Vas de, 326, 343, 350 Campos, Augusto de, 326, 333, 340n21 Campos, Haroldo de: on Baroque aesthetics, 28n12, 325–28; on concrete poetry, 329–34; on literature and national development, 319–22; on modal vs. ontological nationalism, 322–25; Neobaroque coinage by, 11, 265, 316, 528n35; on planetary redevoration, 334–38; references to, 22, 284, 346, 524; works: Galáxias, 11, 30n22, 284, 316, 337, 516, 518; “The Rule of Anthropophagy,” 317, 319–40 “camp” style, 505–6 Camus, Albert, 535–36, 537 Candido, Antonio, 316, 324, 325, 328, 329, 345, 346 cannibalism. See anthropophagy Capote, Truman, 542 Caravaggio, 123, 293–94, 295, 301 Caravaggio (film), 31n27 Carducho, Vicente, 371 Caribbean region: as Baroque, 241–42; identity in, 622; role in Latin American culture, 598; Stevens and spirit of, 601, 603–7. See also Cuba; Glissant, ­Édouard Carlyle, Thomas, 439–41, 448n62 carnivalization, 280–81, 324, 329, 339n15, 503– 4, 572. See also Bakhtin, Mikhail; Campos, Haroldo de Carnot, Sadi, 84, 88 Carpentier, Alejo: on architectural elements, 246–58; on Baroque as transhistorical, 395, 397–98; on Baroque writing, 241, 242–43,

I n d e x 

259–62; criticism of, 242–43; decentering in, 317; on geography and history, 407, 408; influences on, 76; New World Baroque conceptualized by, 8–9, 25, 487–88; lo real maravilloso americano concept of, 14, 76, 243, 513–15, 526n10; references to, 9–10, 22, 29n18, 29–30n19, 76, 163, 209, 265–66, 275, 282, 335–36, 502, 514–15, 543, 555, 568– 69n10, 597–98; on urban vision, 244–46; works: “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” 76, 243; “The City of Columns,” 76, 241–42, 244–58, 411; Concierto barroco, 210–11, 410, 504, 518; “On the Marvelous Real in America,” 412n4, 526n10; “Questions Concerning the Contemporary Latin American Novel” (excerpt), 76, 242–43, 259–64; Tientos y diferencias, 241 Carracci, Annibale, 459, 460 Carrillo y Sotomayor, Luis, 169, 358, 360 Carroll, Lewis, 277–78, 335 Casares, Bioy, 502 Cascales, Francisco, 174 Cascardi, Anthony J., 417 Cassou, Jean, 96 Castellanos, Rosario, 19 Castiglione, Baldassare, 425 Castillejo, Cristóbal de, 165 Castle Howard (North Yorkshire, Eng­land), 121, 131, 132 Castro, Américo, 102, 105, 488, 493, 494 Castro, Fidel, 265, 504 Castro, José Agustín de, 204–5 catastrophe, 149. See also fragments and fragmentation; ruins and decay Catholicism and Catholic Church: Baroque as countercatechism to, 513; Marian tradition of, 457–63; Mexican history and, 399– 400; missionaries in New France, 450–64; pre-Columbian myth linked to, 228–29; reconquista of Iberian Peninsula by, 184n. See also Council of Trent; CounterReformation; Protestantism Catholic orders: Baroque self-fashioning of, 23; Benedictine, 80; Cistercian, 75, 81, 91–92; Franciscan, 78–79, 80, 82; Hieronymite, 216; Ursuline, 451, 457–64. See also Jesuit order Cavafy, Constantine P., 321, 337–38

  655

Caviedes, Juan del Valle y, 327, 328 Celorio, Gonzalo: on Baroque and Enlightenment in New Spain, 497–502; on Neobaroque narrative, 402–506; on New World Baroque and counterconquest, 487–97; references to, 10, 24, 418 Cendrars, Blaise, 321–22 Černý, Václav, 103 Cerrini, Giovanni, 456 Certeau, Michel de, 147 Cervantes, Miguel de: carnivalization and, 280; fictional author of, 310–11; Góngora compared with, 166; Gracián’s hero compared with, 438–39; heroic ideal and public sphere of, 416–17, 428–29, 432–38; intertextuality and, 428, 446–47n47; references to, 443n5, 536, 537, 555; uses of term Baroque and, 99, 102, 435; works: Don Quixote, 167n, 280, 337, 415–18, 428–39, 443n6, 444n16, 446–47n47, 447–48n56, 448–49n71; La Galatea, 417; The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, 417 Cézanne, Paul, 147, 155 Chaide, Malón de, 172 Champaigne, Philippe de, 212 Champlain, Samuel de, 465n11 Chapman, George, 129–30 Charles I, 123 Charles II, 225 Charles V, 399, 421, 430, 492n Charpentrat, Pierre, 150, 271 Chateaubriand, François-Auguste-René de, 207 Chiampi, Irlemar: on Americanization of Baroque, 511–15; on cycles and recyclings, 509–11, 578; on modernity and countermodernity, 508–9, 521–25, 577–78, 597; on Neobaroque and postmodernity, 515–21; Neobaroque conceptualized by, 11–12, 441, 479; references to, 10, 24, 28n8, 28n12, 28–29n13, 209, 211 Childers, William: on Cervantes and term Baroque, 416–19; on Cervantes’s Don Quixote and public sphere, 428–38; on exemplarity and power, 419–28; on Gracián and Romantic hero, 437–42; references to, 23. See also Ercilla, Alonso de Christ, 70–71, 84, 228n, 229, 230, 231, 472, 504

656    I n d e x

chromaticism, 284–85 churches and cathedrals: Cathedral of Havana, 234–35, 235; Cathedral of Puebla, 233–34, 234, 598; Cathedral of Toledo, 232, 233; Pilgrim Church of Bom Jésus do Matosinhos, 22, 33–34n38, 239; Rosary Chapel, 215, 264; San Francisco Acatepec, 256, 257, 495–96; San Francisco Xavier Tepotzotlán, 200, 201, 506; San Lorenzo Potosí, 29–30n19, 33–34n38, 181, 187, 188, 189, 216; Santa MaríaTonantzintla, 22, 495– 96, 496; Santa Prisca, 200; Santa Rosa, 200; Santo Domingo, 22, 215, 264, 496; São Francisco de Assis (Ouro Preto), 22, 237; São Francisco de Assis (Pampulha), 331; Virgin of the Rosary chapel, 22, 496 Churriguera, José Benito de, 88, 90, 230, 232n, 271, 498–500, 505 classicism: antiquity as precursor to, 92; arrival in America, 203; Baroque in opposition to vs. continuity of, 488–90; characteristics of, 82–83; decline of hegemony of, 192–93; neoclassical style as reconstituting, 190–92 classicism/Baroque binary: being/becoming in, 468; Benjamin on, 63–65; Carpentier on, 242–43; categories of, 47–52; d’Ors on, 75; Guido on, 191; Nietzsche on, 44–45; Pelagian controversy in, 79–80; repertoire of forms as defining, 85, 87–92; Wölfflin on, 42, 46–47, 49–52 Clausius, Rudolf Julius Emanuel, 84, 88 Clavijero, Francisco Javier, 499–500 Codex Borgia, 263 codices, 262, 263 coincidentia oppositorum. See complementarity of opposites Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 127 collective spirit (Weltgeist), 85, 87–92 Colombí Monguió, Alicia de, 391n7 colonialism and imperialism: Baroque as tool of, 3–4, 18–19, 396–97, 415; rhetoric as tool of, 23. See also conquest coloniality of power: domination and resistance in, 419; myth vs. reality of, 419–28; public sphere and, 430–31, 447n52 color, 131, 141, 148–49, 155, 176, 333 Columbus, Christopher, 452

columns, 88, 181, 236, 246–47, 248, 256–58, 489 complementarity of opposites, 12, 14–15, 351n10. See also heterogeneities; inclusivity; Wölfflin, Heinrich complex simplicity. See Lope de Vega, Félix composition (closed or open form), 47, 51, 85, 87–92, 90–91 conceits, 57, 126, 353, 354, 356–60. See also emblems and emblem books conceptismo (conceptualism): Celorio on, 493; concept of, 33n37, 344n, 365n, 563n; culteranismo vs., 493–94; Reyes on, 169–71; Spitzer on, 562–63; Wellek on, 94. See also Quevedo, Francisco de concettismo, 125, 130–31 condensation, 277–79 conquest: chronicles of, 419–28; European, of American art, 184, 185–86, 190–92; exterminations in, 241–42; fantastic geography of, 407–8; in spiral of history, 180. See also colonialism and imperialism Contemporáneos, 5, 28n9, 117, 227n continuity, 75–76, 85–92 convention of expression/expression of convention, 62–65 Corbière, Tristan, 336 Cordeira, Valdemar, 333 Corneille, Pierre, 91, 102, 103, 133 Corominas, Juan María, 425 Correia de Oliveira, António, 344 Cortázar, Julio, 282, 335, 502, 573 Cortés, Hernando (Hernán), 399, 405, 407–8, 421–22, 444–45n26, 452 Cortesano, Jaime, 78 Cortona, Pietro de, 296 cosmopolitanism, 191, 573–74 Costa, Claudio Manuel da, 345 Costa, Lúcio, 22, 317, 330–31 Council of Trent, 80–84, 82, 270–71, 418, 477, 493 counterconquest (contraconquista): as alternative to modernity, 437–42; American, of art, 195–97; Baroque and New World Baroque as art of, 209–10, 213–14, 487–97, 513, 592; concept of, 8, 23–25, 29–30n19, 179; Creole, of art, 186–90; Ercilla’s epic and, 423–25; in spiral of history, 180

I n d e x 

Counter-Reformation: Baroque as art of, 3, 33n32, 78, 179, 193, 209, 213, 395–96, 417–  18, 584; Baroque dissociated from, 76;   Baroque marked by, 115–16; Indianizing and Africanizing of arts in, 181; literature and, 103, 130–31, 302; naturalism of supernatural in, 82; religious life in, 76, 79–80, 450–51 Coutinho, Afrânio, 324 Covarrubias y Orozco, Sebastián de, 358–60, 372, 391n8 Coyle, Beverly, 610 Crashaw, Richard, 101, 103–7, 115–16, 130–31, 132 Crawford Fitch, J. E., 103 Creoles and creolization: first reconquest of art by, 186–90; homes and archetypes of, 248–49, 253, 283; insurgency of, 184; processes of, 622–23; sensibility of, 196–97, 584; use of term, 184n, 198n, 413n24 criollos and criollo culture: geography of, 407; ironic critique of, 19; in Lezama’s theory, 210–11; use of term, 184n, 248n, 413n24 Crisóstomo, Dión, 362 Croce, Benedetto, 95, 97, 101, 126, 488, 493 Croll, Morris W., 104 Cruz, Marina de la, 399–400 Cruz, Ramón de la, 248 Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la: allegorical analogies and, 472–77, 480–82; birth of, 364n; contemporaries of, 221, 316, 375n, 483n19; cultural encounters understood by, 469– 71; definitions of Baroque and, 348–49; Fuentes compared with, 477–78; library of, 216; Paz on, 327, 362, 374–76, 381–82, 383, 390, 392–92n21, 524–25, 528n36; Pliny the Elder and, 378; poetics of imitatio and, 360–66, 374–91; references to, 8, 19, 201, 203, 216, 223, 231, 327, 598; in Rodríguez’s play, 481–82; strategies and intention of, 20, 228–29; works: The Divine Narcissus, 228–29, 382–83, 468–71, 475–77, 481, 510; “Sueño” (“Dream”), 225–28, 352, 360–66, 374–91, 583 Cruz-Díez, Carlos, 278 Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo, 580 Cuba: Baroque discourse in, 32n29; Baroque geographies of, 407–12; Borromini’s

  657

influence in Havana, 34n39; Cathedral of Havana, 234–35, 235; cultural hybridity of, 266; mediation and cultural role of, 29–30n19; nature and history of, 394–95; overview of Baroque in, 241–42, 257–58; Stevens and spirit of, 601, 607–14; wrought iron ornament in, 249, 250, 250–51, 252, 283. See also Carpentier, Alejo; Havana (Cuba); Lezama Lima, José; Sarduy, Severo Cuban Revolution (1959), 265 Cuesta, Jorge, 28n9 culteranismo: Celorio on, 493; conceptismo vs., 493–94; concept of, 33n37, 344n, 365n, 563n; Henríquez Ureña on, 204–5; Pascual Buxó on, 366; Reyes on, 168–71; Ruedas de la Serna on, 345, 348, 350; Spitzer on, 562–63; Wellek on, 94. See also Góngora, Luis de cultismo. See culteranismo cult of the ruin. See ruins and decay cultural identities and cultural becoming, 7, 9–10, 509–11, 578 culture: definition of, 185–86; kitchens and culinary context of, 259–60; Lezama’s theory of history and, 210–11; national development and expectations about, 319–22. See also geography; history; Latin American culture cummings, e.e., 316, 332 Cunha, Euclydes da, 327 Cunhambebe (Indian leader), 322 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 330, 582 Cuzco school (paintings), 228–29, 230, 231. See also Peru cycles and recyclings: of Baroque in America, 511–15; of Baroque in time, 9–10, 29n18, 42, 75, 102, 242, 515; of Baroque into modernity, 509–11, 578; of Baroque poets, 4–7; in Lezama’s theory, 210; pessimistic view inverted in, 521–25; postmodern aesthetic linked to, 11–12 Cysarz, Herbert, 98 Daniells, Roy, 104, 108 Dante, 126, 546 Darío, Rubén, 4, 509–10, 555 Darwin, Charles, 194 Davis, Elizabeth B., 428 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 466n23, 466n28

658    I n d e x

death and dream, 152–53, 227–28. See also martyrs and martyrdom Debord, Guy, 136 decentering, 268, 293–94, 295, 296–97, 316, 317. See also ellipse; ellipsis Dehio, Georg, 96 Deleuze, Gilles, 136, 467, 469, 471, 474–76, 479, 483n30 Delius, Rudolf von, 98 Della Porta, Giacomo, 234 Derrida, Jacques, 322 Desargues, Gérard, 149 Descartes, René, 136, 137, 150, 216, 255n, 398, 573 Deutschbein, M., 134–35n20 De Vaulx, Pierre, 262 Diaghilev, Sergei, 586–88 Diago, Roberto, 511 Diario de México (Mexican Daily), 206, 207 Díaz Balsera, Diana, 472 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 214n, 405, 407–8, 420, 422 Díaz de Rivas, Pedro, 367 Díaz-Plaja, Guillermo, 488, 493 Diccionario de Autoridades (Dictionary of Authorities), 358, 369, 383, 392n17 dictatorship, 57, 184, 544 Diego, Gerardo, 5, 161–62, 173–74, 218n discontinuity and antithesis, 23, 47, 49–52, 56, 87, 151–52 Dobrée, Bonamy, 135n25 Domínguez, Luis Alfonso, 405 Domínguez Camargo, Hernando, 201, 218–19, 222 Donne, John, 28n11, 101, 103, 104, 106–7, 116, 126–30 Donoso, José, 505 d’Ors, Eugenio: on Baroque as cyclical, 9–10, 102, 242, 515; on cultural “eons,” 29n18, 82–83; on existential choice, 606; multiple Baroques listed by, 75–76; on multipolarity and continuity, 85–92; on nostalgia, 603; on pantheism, 78–84; references to, 42, 75, 96, 102, 119, 265, 271, 555 Dorsey, Peter A., 465n10 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 193, 539–40, 546, 548,   552 Drummond de Andrade, Carlos, 329

Dryden, John, 100, 104, 107, 125, 132–33 Duchamp, Marcel, 614 Duprat, Rogério, 333 Dürer, Albrecht, 52, 261 Echeverría, Bolívar, 29n18, 397, 413n15 Eco, Umberto, 332, 340n19 Egginton, William, 442, 483n31 Eliot, T. S., 5, 6, 9, 17, 28n11, 28–29n13, 103, 116–17, 126–27, 131, 336, 582. See also Praz, Mario ellipse: anamorphosis of circle and, 138, 300– 301; in Baroque art, 88, 92, 134n20; BuciGlucksmann on, 138, 148–49; in conceits and emblems, 357; as decentering and displacement, 10–11, 271, 293–97, 490–92; double real center in, 299–300; double virtual center in, 297–99; economic reading of, 314n19; linkage of ellipsis and, 10, 148n, 267–68, 300–301, 523; scientific laws of, 10, 267, 271, 292–93, 302, 313n2, 490, 492, 523; Shakespeare’s Macbeth as, 134–35n20; in Tintoretto, 148–49; in Velázquez, 309–12. See also decentering; Kepler, Johannes; Sarduy, Severo; Tintoretto ellipsis: in Góngora, 176, 301–9; linkage of ellipse and, 10, 148n, 267–68, 300–301, 523; as repression, 11; as rhetorical device, 314n21, 604. See also Sarduy, Severo emblems and emblem books: of bat, 393n23; ecclesiastical approval and censure in, 360n; on envy, 373–74; examples of, 353– 54, 355, 359; in interpretive methodology, 56–57; Sor Juana’s allusions to, 381–82; uniformity and function of, 71–72, 372; wit by allusion in, 356–60. See also allegory and allegorical representation; conceits empresas, 379, 380, 381 Engels, Friedrich, 319–20 Eng­lish Baroque: in art and architecture, 119– 24; brief period of, 119, 120, 123; discourse of, 103–4; Donne and, 28n11; in literature, 100–101, 119, 124–33; recovery of, 17, 116–17; resistance to concept, 117, 133. See also Praz, Mario; Protestantism Enlightenment: absence created in, 25; absent in Spain, 229, 497; Baroque overlapping of, 199, 207n, 216–17; Baroque supplanted by, 4; critique of, 41, 44–45; in New Spain,

I n d e x 

497–502; renegados as appropriating and digesting, 11; skepticism toward, 5–6. See also rationalism Ercilla, Alonso de, 416, 418, 423–25, 426–27, 428, 433, 445–46n39, 446n46, 446–47n47 eroticism and sexuality: as Baroque, 262, 263; liberation of, 266–67, 287–89; in Mexican history, 399–400 Esteve Barba, Francisco, 419 Euphuism, 97, 102, 125, 168n European Baroque: Catholic countries as focus of, 123; Eng­lish compared with Continental, 115–16; German enthusiasm for, 30–31n26, 32n30, 75, 94, 96; German scholarship on, 16; historical placement of, 93–94; indigenous elements as displacing, 181, 187, 188, 189; ornate and sober juxtaposed in, 21; reawakening to, 18–20; as sign of conquest, 8; transformation of, 4 Evia, Jacinto de, 201 exemplarity, 415–16, 419–28, 443n1, 445n38. See also heroic ideal expressionism, 13, 30–31n26, 32n30, 94, 98, 335, 510, 555, 568n3 eye, 53–54, 136–38. See also gaze; vision and envisioning Fargue, Léon-Paul, 260–61 Faulkner, William: Baroque style of, 24– 25; circular time of, 538–39; criticized as “Dixie Gongorist,” 24, 529–30, 543; Fuentes on, 531–53; knowledge of not knowing and, 546–47; land and people of, 531–33; “quest of the absolute” and, 539–40; time in, 545; tragedy and defeat central to, 540–44; tragi-critical meaning of, 548–53 Faustino, Mário, 325 Faustino Sarmiento, Domingo, 442 Fehr, Bernhard, 100 Fenollosa, Ernest, 322 Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo, 407, 414n32, 420–21, 444–45n26, 445n38 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 571–72, 573–74, 581 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 448n62 Filarete, 294 film and cinematography, 12–13, 15, 31n27, 279, 478–82

  659

Filreis, Alan, 610 Fitts, Dudley, 615 Flaubert, Gustave, 537, 558 Flaxman, John, 120 Fleming, Paul, 107 Fletcher, John (Francis Beaumont), 102, 132–33 Fletcher, Phineas, 100 Flos Sanctorum (hagiography), 81–82 Focillon, Henri, 468 folk Baroque, 22, 82, 257, 264, 496 Foucault, Michel, 136, 286, 436, 472, 520, 565 fragments and fragmentation: intensification in literature and, 66–67; in Lezama’s theory, 210; modernism marked by, 6; multiplicity and continuity in, 87–89; poetics of, 316; proliferation, play, and, 517–21; of torso, 63–64, 64. See also ruins and decay Francastel, Pierre, 149, 156n4 France: Baroque discourse in, 102–3; literature and Baroque in, 99–100, 105, 106, 107, 260; symbolists of, 94; Tel Quel group and poststructuralists in, 265 Frank, Waldo, 185 French Revolution, 214, 249, 436, 536, 543 Freud, Sigmund, 288, 307–8 Frey, Dagobert, 120 Friederich, Werner P., 100 Friedländer, Walter, 125 Fuentes, Carlos: Baroque aesthetics engaged by, 24–25; on Calderón, 555–56; on cosmopolitanism, 573; cultural critique and, 477–82; decentering in, 317; on European novel, 533–38; on Faulkner, 531–33, 538–53; on Gongorism, 24; on Kondori and San Lorenzo Potosí, 33–34n38; on Lezama, 585; narrative techniques of, 502; references to, 282, 336; works: The Death of Artemio Cruz, 529, 555; “The Novel as Tragedy: Faulkner,” 531–53; Orchids in the Moonlight, 477, 478– 80, 481; Terra Nostra, 529 Gainsborough, Thomas, 120 Galán, Natalio, 283 Galileo, 267, 398, 490, 523 Gallegos, Rómulo, 197 García Canclini, Néstor, 574 García Galiano, Angel, 391–92n9

660    I n d e x

García Lorca, Federico, 4–5, 6–7, 28n12, 161–62 García Márquez, Gabriel, 282, 502, 529 Garcilaso de la Vega, 165, 167, 215, 238, 326, 416, 422–23, 425, 445n36, 510, 559–63, 569n16 Garnier, Charles, 465n19 Gasparini, Paolo, 244n, 248, 250, 251, 252, 274 Gates, Eunice Joiner, 362 gaze: apparition and vision in, 140–44, 154– 55; ellipsis and, 138, 148–49; as lost object, 288, 289–90; Nothingness and, 151–54, 155; open, serial, dynamic spatiality and, 148–52; painting and taming of, 315n27. See also Buci-Glucksmann, Christine; eye; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice; vision and envisioning Generation of ’27, 5, 6–7, 117, 161–62, 555. See also Reyes, Alfonso; Spain; specific poets Genette, Gérard, 391n5 genius, 6, 66–67, 351n10. See also artistic originality, notions of; Baroque aesthetics Gentileschi, Orazio, 123 geochrony, 472 geography, 394–95, 404–12 George I (king of Eng­land), 123 Germán Belli, Carlos, 508, 516, 521 Germany: Baroque discourse in, 97–101; Baroque poetry of, 106; critical method in, 57; enthusiasm for Baroque in, 30–31n26, 32n30, 75, 94, 96. See also expressionism; Trauerspiel Gide, André, 608 Gil, Gilberto, 333 Gilberto, Joâo, 330 Girón, Gilberto, 408–9 glass ornamentation, 253, 253–56, 255, 283 Glissant, Édouard: on Baroque aesthetics, 444n10, 602; decolonializing strategy of, 622–26; influences on, 529, 530; on métissage, 599; references to, 25, 398; Relation defined by, 621n45; on “unity-diversity of the world,” 525, 618; works: “Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World,” 624–26; Poetics of Relation, 622–23 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 107, 141, 320, 338 Gómara, Francisco López de, 444–45n26

Gómez de la Serna, Ramón, 510 Gomringer, Eugen, 332–33 Gonçalves, Nuno, 78 Gonçalves Dias, Antônio, 321 Góngora, Luis de: anthropophagy and poetry of, 326–27; as Baroque poet, 7, 102, 163, 176–78; cultismo and, 168–71; ellipsis in, 267, 301–9; historical context of, 165–67; incompleteness of, 566–67; influence in Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, compared, 343–51; influences on, 201, 202; as legible to modernity, 510; paintings mentioned by, 367–69; Quevedo compared with, 166, 493–94; reading critics of, 172–78; references to, 30–31n26, 200–201, 214, 222, 335, 396, 417, 475, 505–6; renewed attention to, 4–5, 11, 94, 117, 161–62; Sor Juana, poetics of imitatio, and, 21, 225–26, 360–80, 385–86; Spanish language and, 171–72; strategies of, 6–7, 20, 29n15, 107, 167–68, 279–80, 314n7, 353–54, 366–67, 391n1; tracings in Lezama, 554–55, 556–58, 560; works: La fábula de Polifemo, 348; Soledades (Solitudes), 162, 226, 267, 303–5, 308, 314n7, 348, 352, 357, 361–62, 365–67, 369, 371, 374–76, 378, 385, 562, 564–65, 567. See also Euphuism; Gongorist tradition; Mallarmé, Stéphane Gongoran revolution, 167–68 Gongorist tradition: artificialization in, 272; chromaticism in, 284–85; disdain for, 174, 218n; Faulkner and, 24, 529–30, 543; Lezama’s tracing of, 217–21; mirror in, 289; parallels of opposition and influence, 343–51; poetry influenced by, 199, 200–208; as quasi-official aesthetics, 397; style of, 168–69; success of, 583 González, Gimbernat de, 210 González-Casanovas, Roberto, 422 González Echevarría, Roberto: on Ariosto and Garcilaso, 560–62; on Balboa, 409, 410; on Balbuena, 403–4; Baroque described by, 578; on displacement of known, 476; on Góngora, 554–55, 556– 58, 560, 566–67; on Lezama, 25, 554–55, 556–58, 560, 566–67; on Ortega and Worringer, 30–31n26; on Petrarch and poetic language, 558–59, 563, 565–67; references to, 8; on relaciones and accounts, 420,

I n d e x 

422–23, 427; on Sarduy, 527n14; on Wellek, 30–31n26 González Peña, Carlos, 349 Gorostiza, José, 227, 392–93n21, 583 Gothic art, 91–92, 193, 213, 556–57, 567, 568– 69n10 Gottberg, Luis Duno, 580 Gracián, Baltasar: on artifice of dissimilarity, 368–69; on conceptismo, 170–71; heroic ideal and, 437–42; poem attributed to, 219–20; references to, 147, 148, 151–52, 217, 555; on wit and allusion, 352–60, 364, 503, 516; works: Agudeza y arte de ingenio, 219–20, 352–60, 364, 503; El criticón, 152, 154, 217; El héroe, 437–42 Gracián, Lorenzo (pseud.), 219n Greco, El: as Baroque, 96, 102, 212; double virtual center of, 297–99; ellipse and elliptical of, 149, 159, 267; excess and ecstasies of, 88, 116, 120, 131; references to, 131, 174, 212, 250; works: The Feast in the House of Simon, 298 Greenberg, Mitchell, 466n29 Gregor, Josef, 98 Grierson, Herbert John Clifford, 103, 116, 125–26 Gropius, Walter, 194–95 Grünewald, Matthias (Matthias ­Gothardt), 120 Gruzinski, Serge, 31n27, 475, 483n32 Gryphius, Andreas, 60, 61 Guardini, Romano, 80–81 Guarini, Guarino, 96, 323 Guattari, Félix, 469, 471, 476 Guido, Ángel: counterconquest coined by, 8; on first Creole reconquest, 186–90; on first European conquest of American art, 184, 185–86; on history and intrahistory, 183; indiátide (indiatid) coined by, 181; influences on, 14–15; on modern European art, 192–93; New World Baroque conceptualized by, 7–8, 418; references to, 29–30n19, 210, 241; on rehumanization of arts, 194–95; on second American reconquest in arts, 195–97; on second European conquest of American art, 190–92; works: “America’s Relation to Europe in the Arts,” 180, 183–97; Redescubrimiento de América

  661

en el arte, 8, 179, 180. See also Aleijadinho; Kondori, José Guillén, Nicolás, 599 Guimarães Rosa, João, 277, 317, 335 Güiraldes, Ricardo, 197 Gyurko, Lanin A., 479–80 Habermas, Jürgen, 431, 441, 448n69 Haerten, Heinz, 101 Haller, Elisabeth, 100 Hallmann, Johann Christian, 61, 62, 68 Hampton, Timothy, 434, 447–48n56 Hansen, João Adolfo, 348 Harbison, Robert, 27n5 Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp, 60, 68 Hatzfeld, Helmut, 99–100, 105–6, 443n6, 494 Haugwitz, August Adolf von, 61 Hauser, Arnold, 48, 490 Havana (Cuba): architectural elements in, 246–58, 248, 250, 252, 253, 255; cathedral and plaza of, 234–35, 235, 247; School of Plastic Arts in, 273, 274; urban vision of, 244–46 Hawksmoor, Nicholas, 121, 122, 132 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 541 Hegel, Georg Wilhem Friedrich, 5–6, 41, 153, 190, 547, 548 Heidegger, Martin, 147, 153, 335 Heine, Heinrich, 259–60 helix form, 312–13n1 Heller, Ben, 579–80 Helms, Hans G., 333 Hemingway, Ernest, 537, 540, 607 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro: on Baroque poetry, 200–208; references to, 18, 161, 241, 556 Henry VIII, 399 Heredia, José María, 394–95 hermeneutics. See signifier and signified Hernández, José, 191 heroic ideal: Baroque roots of, 437–42; in conquest accounts, 419–28; elevated style of, 416–17; models for, 415–16; public sphere of, 428–38 Herrera, Fernando de, 165, 168–69, 559, 562, 569n18 Herrera, Juan de, 190, 233 heterogeneities, 5–6, 11, 14, 116, 519–20. See also inclusivity history: construction of, 180, 183, 283, 328;   cultural theory and, 210–11; definition of,

662    I n d e x

history (continued)  394, 419; genealogical method of, 5–6; geography and, 394–95; making Baroque, of Mexico, 394, 395, 398–407; materialist (Marxist) conception of, 56–57, 194, 196, 319–20, 338n3; in ruin, 56, 65–70; secularized into the (courtly) setting, 59–62; tragedy expelled from, 546–48. See also ruins and decay Hobbes, Thomas, 127, 398 Hoffmeister, Gerhart, 2 Hogarth, William, 90, 123–24 Holbein, Hans, the Younger, 11, 30n20, 123 Holmes, Elisabeth, 128–29 Holy Child’s First Steps, The (anon.), 228–29, 230 Homer, 371, 402 Horace, 371, 403, 413–14n27 horror vacui (the “horror of a vacuum”), 25, 288, 543 Howe, Irving, 542 Huarte de San Juan, Juan, 402 Huidobro, Vicente, 322, 392–93n21, 510, 525 humanism, 82, 131, 420, 421, 422–23, 434–35, 472 Humboldt, Alexander von, 244–45 Hunt, Clay, 127, 131 Huron culture, 452–56 Hurston, Zora Neale, 600 Husserl, Edmund, 147, 154–55 hybridity, 8, 257–58, 266, 317, 326–27, 622–26. See also mextizaje hypertextuality, 391n5 hypotexts, 357, 391n5 Ibargüengoitia, Jorge, 502 Iberian-American Baroque, 21, 34n39 imitatio, poetics of: concept underlying, 20–21, 352, 360; Góngora and, 366–74; Góngora and Sor Juana compared, 374– 91; Gracián’s elucidation of, 352–60; Sor Juana’s “Dream” and, 360–66. See also Baroque aesthetics imitatio Mariae, striving for, 457, 458, 459 imitation: use of term, 52–54, 360, 361–62, 375, 391–92n9 Inca culture, 184, 185–86, 236, 237, 238, 240, 262. See also Peru

inclusivity, 8–9, 15, 622–26. See also heterogeneities indiátide (indiatid), 181, 188, 189, 216 indigenous peoples: Baroque incorporated by, 3–4; Catholic missionaries’ response to, 451–64; European Baroque displaced by, 181, 187, 188, 189; historic cultural centers of, 184, 185–86; occluded in history, 401–7; style inherited and augmented by, 237–38, 240; tequitqui art of, 27n6, 495–97. See also Aleijadinho; Kondori, José Inquisition, 430–31, 447n50, 447n52 intertextuality, 282–83, 428, 446–47n47, 503–4 intratextuality, 283–87, 504 James, Henry, 541–42 Jameson, Fredric, 12, 519, 520, 523, 527n22 Jammes, Robert, 279–80, 367–68, 392n15 Janet, Pierre, 89 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 142n Jauss, Hans Robert, 323 Jay, Martin, 136, 144n Jeanneret, Michel, 473 Jesuit order: architecture of, 200, 201, 217, 234–35, 236, 497–99, 498, 506; Baroque literature of, 103; beliefs about language, 465n10; Enlightenment thought and, 497–502; iconography of, 270–71, 302; ideological context of, 494–97; Jansenism compared with, 79–80; martyrdom and, 455–57, 459–63, 465n16, 465n19; methodologies and principles of, 81–82; missionaries of, 454–57 Jesuit Relations, 451–57, 464n4, 465n16 Jiménez, Juan Ramón, 558–59 João V, 344 Johnson, Samuel, 125 Jones, Inigo, 121 Jonson, Ben, 100, 104 Joyce, James, 193, 277, 286, 316, 332, 335, 538, 565, 581, 588, 595n43 Jünemann, Wolfgang, 100 Kadir, Djelal, 576 Kafka, Franz, 546, 548, 552 Kant, Immanuel, 153, 440–41, 442 Kepler, Johannes, 10, 267, 271, 292–93, 302, 313n2, 313n3, 490, 492, 523

I n d e x 

Keyserling, Hermann Karl von, 195 Kierkegaard, Søren, 193 Kilkerry, Pedro, 336, 340n21 Kircher, Athanasius, 216, 375, 387 Klee, Paul, 146, 155 knowledge: Baroque ideal of, 71–72; beauty as object of, 69; of not knowing, 546–47 Kondori, José: Aleijadinho compared with, 21–23; as Baroque master, 23, 29–30n19, 181; Lezama on, 210, 216, 230, 236, 238, 240, 496–97, 598; references to, 33–34n38, 180– 81; San Lorenzo Potosí, Bolivia, church of, 29–30n19, 181, 187, 188, 189 Koszul, André, 102 Kristeva, Julia, 265, 282 Kubler, George: on baroque, 2–3 Lacan, Jacques, 17, 136, 138, 144–45, 268, 288, 291n16, 307–8, 312, 315nn26–27 Laforgue, Jules, 126, 336 Lalement, Jérôme, 453–54 Lambert, Gregg, 475 Landívar, Rafael, 498–500 languages: artificialization mechanisms in, 10, 11, 271–78; dialect distinguished from, 82–83, 89; different uses of same, 469–70, 471–72; dynamics between popular and official, 622–23; intertwining and borrowing among, 266, 281; resources of, 306–9; surplus and loss of partial object in, 287– 88, 312 Larrain, Jorge, 574, 592 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 420, 444–45n26 Latin America: anti-dictatorship writers of, 57; arrival of classicism in, 203; Cuba’s relation to, 29–30n19; cultural nationalism context in, 180; French Canada as part of, 23; specificity and cultural analysis of, 12–13 Latin American culture: antagonistic approach to, 571–73; attachment and escape in, 588–91; Caribbean’s role in, 598; contradictory views of, 579–84; cosmopolitan approach to, 573–74; differences and resemblances in, 591–92; modernitycentered approach to, 574–78; problematizing approach to, 575–76 Lavardén, Manuel José de, 203 Lebrija, Antonio de, 171

  663

Le Corbusier, 194, 245, 255, 331 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 136, 146–47, 149–50, 212, 467, 473–75, 483n19, 483n31, 554, 556 Le Jay, Gabriel François, 217n Le Jeune, Paul, 23, 451–57, 461, 463, 464n4, 465n11, 465n13 Le Mercier, François, 455 León, Luis de, 171, 559 Leonard, Irving A., 395–96, 397, 399 Leonardo da Vinci, 49, 80, 386, 490, 491, 492 Léon-Portilla, Miguel, 406 Le Parc, Julio, 278–79 Lerner, Isaías, 446–47n47, 446n45 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 207 Levin, Harry, 104 Levinson, Brett, 575–76, 580–81 Lezama Lima, Eloísa, 595n45 Lezama Lima, José: on architecture, 230–  40; on Balboa, 409, 411; on “banquets   of civilization,” 222–25, 595n42; on   Baroque concept, 15, 212–17, 511–12; on   Borromini’s influence, 34n39, 230, 234;   Carpentier compared with, 514–15;   contradictory views of, 579–84; “earth is   Classical and the sea Baroque” parody   of, 1, 9, 76, 212, 487, 555; on geography   and history, 29n18, 395, 397, 407, 408;   on Góngora, 566–67; Gongoran traces   in, 554–55, 556–58, 560; on Heredia and   Martí, 412n2; influences on, 29–30n19,   179; as master of Neobaroque, 209, 597–  98; New World Baroque conceptualized by, 8, 9, 12, 179, 209–10, 418, 437, 472, 496–97; on obscurity, 510–11; on painting, 228–29; on poetry, 217–21; references to, 209, 241, 265, 302, 335, 337, 502, 505–6; on Renaissance in America, 229–31; on Saint Ignatius, 221–22; on Sor Juana’s “Dream,” 225–28; Stevens and, 609–19; strategies of, 1, 222, 272, 285, 502, 504, 575– 76; on surplus, 288; on syncretisms, 210, 216, 230, 236–40; on tension and plutonism, 512–13; works: “Baroque Curiosity,” 212–40, 394, 487–88, 554, 556, 565–66; La expresión americana, 209–10, 512, 575–76, 581, 582–84, 591–92; Paradiso, 209, 214n,   272–73, 285, 502, 504, 554, 557, 566–67,

664    I n d e x

Lezama Lima, José (continued)  585–92, 595n45. See also assimilation; señor barroco (Lezama) Life Is a Dream (film), 31n27 Lisboa, Antônio Francisco. See Aleijadinho (Antônio Francisco Lisboa) literature and literary criticism: alternative readings of, 524–25; aristocratic vs. colonial elite, 198–99; art history categories and, 124–25; artificialization mechanisms in, 10, 11, 271–78; Baroque applied to, 42, 94, 97–108, 241, 242–43, 259–62; carnivalization of, 280–81, 339n15, 503–4, 572; challenging canon of, 508–9; decentering in, 317; dysphoric and euphoric models in, 324–25; ellipsis in, 301–9; ideological and aesthetic claims negotiated in, 18–19; imitation as understood in, 361–62; intensification in, 66–67; intertextuality of, 280–81, 282–83; intratextuality of, 283–87; key text of, 93; national development and, 319–22; parody in, 279–80; proliferation and play in, 515–21; quotation and collage in, 282; radiance absent in, 67–68; revalidation of, 4–7; of US South and Latin American, compared, 24–25, 541–42; work within work of, 286–87 Lobo, Gerardo, 202 Lohenstein, Daniel Caspar von, 60, 61, 68 Lomazzo, Gian Paolo, 297–98, 371 Lope de Vega, Félix, 99, 106, 166–67, 169, 171, 174, 200, 201, 202, 222, 223, 226, 347, 418, 443n9, 555, 562–63 López Estrada, Francisco, 446n40 López Velarde, Ramón, 336 Lugones, Leopoldo, 223, 336 Lusitanian culture. See Portugal; Brazil Lusíades, Os (The Lusiads). See Camões, Luiz Vas de Lutheranism, 78–80, 82, 399, 408 Lyly, John, 98, 125, 129 Lyotard, J. F., 522 Macedo, Joaquim Manuel de, 328 Machado, Dyonélio, 335 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria, 323, 325 Madrazo, Mariano Ignacio, 206 magical realism, 13–15, 30n25, 619n3. See also Neobaroque; transculturation

Magni, Giulio, 96 Malcuzynski, Marie-Pierrette, 2, 27n3 Mali, Anya, 453, 464n2 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 6, 28n12, 94, 107, 175, 316, 329–30, 332–33, 335, 337, 375, 392–93n21, 510, 525, 614 Mannerism, 117, 123–25, 128, 129–30, 489 Manrique, Gómez, 165 Manrique, Jorge Alberto, 499 Maorino, Giancarlo, 468 Maravall, José Antonio, 33n32, 76, 397, 417, 434–35, 443n6, 447–48n56, 503, 526n7, 576–77, 600 Marcos, Alejandro, 282–83 Marechal, Leopoldo, 286, 335 Marie de l’Incarnation, 23, 451, 457–63, 465nn15–16, 466nn22–23, 466n27, 466n29 Marinism, 102 Marino, Giambattista, 99, 109n16, 125, 130 Marot, Jean, 121 Martí, José, 215n, 237, 394–95, 555, 599 Martin, John Rupert, 476–77 Martínez de Lejarza, Juan José, 207 Martini, F. di G., 294 martyrs and martyrdom, 59, 455–57 Martz, Louis L., 130 Marvell, Andrew, 125, 127 Marx, Karl, 320, 338n3 Marx, Roberto Burle, 22, 317 Marxism, 194, 196 Mather, Cotton, 104 Matos e Guerra, Gregório de, 284, 316, 326– 27, 329–30, 339n16, 346–47, 348 Mauburnus, Joannes, 130 Medaglia, Júlio, 333 Medrano, Sebastián Francisco, 222n Meissner, Paul, 100 Melo, Francisco Manuel de, 344, 347 Melville, Herman, 538–39, 540 memento mori, 55, 56. See also Trauerspiel Méndez Plancarte, Alfonso, 198, 347–48, 349, 362, 364–66, 384, 387, 390, 393n25 Mendoza, Antonio de, 170, 356, 399 Mendoza y Zúñiga, García de, 402–3 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, 82, 162, 174, 200, 218n Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 17, 137, 144–47, 153– 56. See also Buci-Glucksmann, Christine

I n d e x 

mestizaje, 180, 210, 242, 399–400, 592, 598–99, 616–17. See also hybridity; transculturation mestizo style, 27n6, 187 metamorphosis, 151–52, 472–77 metaphor, 151–52, 210–11, 277, 305–8, 314n7, 314n21, 315n26 Metaphysical poets. See Crashaw, Richard; Eliot, T.S.; Donne, John; Eng­lish Baroque; poetry; Praz, Mario métissage, 25, 450, 454, 464, 599, 625. See also hybridity Mexico: Baroque and Enlightenment overlap in, 199, 207n; Baroque histories of, 394, 395, 398–407; cathedrals and plazas of, 200, 231–33, 232, 233–34, 234; codices of, 262, 263; culteranismo in, 204–5; folk Baroque churches of, 22, 257, 264, 496; neoclassicism in, 203. See also Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la; Fuentes, Carlos; Puebla Mexico City/Tenochtitlan, 347n, 401–8, 497–98, 498 Michelangelo, 120 Mier, Fray Servando Teresa de, 207 Migliorini, Bruno, 2, 27n3 Milton, John, 5, 100, 102, 103, 104, 115, 127, 131–32 Minas Gerais (Brazil), 22, 33–34n38, 34n40. See also Ouro Preto Mincoff, Marco, 132–33, 134–35n20 mirror and mirroring, 59, 138, 146, 150, 289– 90, 311–12, 423, 467. See also vision and envisioning Mistral, Gabriela, 167 Moche Culture, guaco figure, 262, 263 Moctezuma, 408, 452 modernism and modernity: alternative model to, 437–42; approaches to, 23–24, 161, 198; Baroque and, 574–78, 576–78, 585–88; disillusionment with, 117; markers of, 6; pessimistic view of history in, 521–25; recyclings of Baroque into, 509–11, 578; temporality and subjectivity in, 517–18. See also avantgarde aesthetics modernismo, 509–10 Molina, Tirso de, 102 Monsiváis, Carlos, 30n24, 505 Moore, John, 121 Morales, Ambrosio de, 172

  665

Moraña, Mabel, 481 Morandé, Pedro, 592 Moreno Villa, José, 27n6, 495 Mornet, Daniel, 103 Mucha, Alphonse, 250 multiplicity and multipolarity: of Baroque, 75–76; of columns, 257–58, 489; continuity and merging in, 85–92; of interpretations, 20, 136; of New World Baroque, 394–95; parts and whole in, 47, 51, 64–65, 66–67; of technology, 480 Mumford, Lewis, 297 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, 131, 467 Murillo, Luis, 429 Muschamp, Herbert, 29n17 music: Baroque, 32–33n31, 43, 96–97; concrete poetry and, 330, 332, 333; counterpoint vs. fugue in, 89; folk and Creole, 196–97; Góngora’s use of, 177; quotation and collage in, 283. See also Benjamin, Walter myth and mythological references: Catholicism linked to, 228–29; memory of, 544– 45; of New Art, 194–95; paintings of, 368, 368–69; of pre-Columbian indigenous Baroque, 338–39n10; Sor Juana’s and Góngora’s uses of, 226–27, 363–66, 378–79, 381–82, 389–91 Nadler, Josef, 98 Narcissus, 209, 226, 228–29, 373–74, 382–83, 468–71, 475–77, 481, 510, 569n18, 570n30 nationalism: literature and, 319–22; modal vs. ontological, 322–25 nature: American landscape and, 195–97; literary constructions and, 66–67; pantheism and, 78–85, 271; in Romanticism and Baroque, 75–76; in Trauerspiel and the pastoral, 59–62 Navarrete, Manuel de, 203, 206 Ndalianis, Angela, 31n27, 480 Neobaroque: approach to, 10–13, 22–24; as   archaeology of the modern, 479, 508–9;   Baroque’s relation to, 267–68, 477–82;   coinage of, 11, 265, 316, 528n35; concep‑  tualization of, 10–12, 24, 265, 441; critical   function of, 521–25; disharmony and lack   in, 289–90; embodied vision in, 137–38;   magical realism linked to, 13–15; post‑

666    I n d e x

Neobaroque (continued)  modernity and, 515–21; as reconquest, 180; as revolution, 290, 513; and technology, 480, 481–82; vision and seeing in, 147–56. See also anamorphosis; Baroque; Baroque aesthetics; New World Baroque; Sarduy, Severo; repetition and intensification neoclassicism, 4, 21, 190–92, 195, 199, 203 Neruda, Pablo, 276–77, 442 Nettesheim, Agrippa von, 67 New Art, 194–97 New France, missionaries in, 450–64 New Spain. See America (Americas) New World Baroque: Asian influence in, 4, 27n7; ambivalence in, 574–75; as antiimperial ideology, 179, 180–81; approach to, 7–10, 13, 20, 26; art of counterconquest and, 487–97; conceptualization of, 7–9, 12, 14–16, 25, 179, 209–10, 416; cosmopolitanism of, 573–74; Cuban geographies and, 407–12; deconstruction in, 575–76; as mestizo cultural resistance, 418–19; mestizo style of, 187; Mexican histories and, 394, 395, 398–407; multiplicity of, 394–95, 597– 98; sources of, 3–4, 241–42, 395–98; specular relationship and, 472–77; as subversive, 571–73; transatlantic exchange in, 467–72; use of phrase, 2, 25–26. See also hybridity; mestizaje; transculturation Niemeyer, Oscar, 22, 317, 330–31, 331 Nietzsche, Friedrich: on Baroque forms, 5–6, 12, 16, 41, 44–45; influences on, 16, 32n29; nihilism of, 546–48; references to, 42, 75, 151, 322, 539 Novo, Salvador, 28n9 Ochoa, John A., 232n Oedipus, 536, 547–48 O’Gorman, Edmundo, 499, 500, 507n11 oppositions and contradictions, 116. See also complementarity of opposites; heterogeneities; inclusivity Orígenes (journal), 607, 609, 610 Oropesa, Salvador A., 28n9 Orozco, José Clemente, 187 Ortega, Julio, 290n7 Ortega y Gasset, José, 14, 30–31n26, 46, 102, 177n, 191, 192n, 196, 568–69n10 Otero, Lisandro, 283

Ouro Preto (Minas Geras, Brazil), 21, 22, 237, 238, 331–32n, 346 Ovid, 89, 178, 363, 379, 403, 475 pain, aesthetics of, 59, 455–57, 512–13, 521, 526n5, 528n27, 541, 553, 627 painting: artificialization mechanisms in, 273, 278–79; chiaroscuro, 88, 89, 91; decentering in, 293–94, 295; double real center in, 299–300; double virtual center in, 297–99; ellipsis in, 309–12; within painting, 369; poetry as verbal, 367–72, 392n17; reminiscence in, 283; taming of gaze in, 315n27. See also representation Palés Matos, Luis, 599 palindromes, 285 Palma, Ricardo, 448–49n71 Panofsky, Erwin, 2–3, 27n2, 47–48, 455–56, 459 pantheism, 78–85, 271 Paravicino, Hortensio Félix, 170 parody, 1, 9, 11, 76, 212, 279–82, 291n13, 487, 502–6, 555 Pascal, Blaise, 79, 102, 149–50, 151, 313n3 Pascual Buxó, José: on Góngora, 348, 349–50, 366–74; on Gracián, 352–60; references to, 20, 56; on Sor Juana and Góngora, 374–91; on Sor Juana’s “Dream,” 360–66 Paso, Fernando del, 502 Pater, Walter, 169 Paz, Octavio: on Baroque aesthetics, 6, 28n12, 28–29n13, 578; on Enlightenment, 497–98; on passion and criticism, 500–501; references to, 320–21, 336, 337, 551; on Sor Juana, 327, 362, 374–76, 381–82, 383, 390, 392–93n21, 524–25, 528n36; on tradition and rupture, 489–90 Péguy, Charles, 573–74, 581 Peláez, Amelia, 245, 283 Pelagian controversy, 79–80 Pelegrín, Benito, 152 Pellegrini, Giuliano, 132 Pellón, Gustavo, 579 Peña, Humberto, 282 Pérez de Hita, Ginés, 445–46n39 Pérez de Montalbán, Juan, 371 Pérez de Oliva, Fernán, 172 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 579, 580, 581 Perrault, Jean, 121

I n d e x 

Perse, Saint-John (pseud. of Alexis SaintLéger Léger), 260 Persephone, 363, 379 Peru: Andean Baroque style in, 216, 229, 241, 262; churches in Juli and Puno, 215. See also Cuzco school; Inca culture; Kondori, José Pessoa, Fernando, 323, 336 Petrarch, 128, 130, 402, 415, 558–59, 563 Pevsner, Nikolaus, 120 Pfandl, Ludwig, 99, 327, 488, 493 Philip II, 190n, 233n, 399–400, 422, 426, 428, 430 Picasso, Pablo, 29n15, 193, 584 Pichardo, Esteban, 248n Picón-Salas, Mariano, 396, 399, 403, 404, 556 Pierce, Frank, 428, 446n45 Pignatari, Décio, 332, 333–34 Pimentel, Francisco, 348–49 Plato, 136, 390–91, 393n24 play, Baroque as, 288, 504–6, 515–21 plazas, 231–33, 294, 296 Pluto, 226n, 227, 363, 512 plutonism, 210, 215–16, 512–13, 599–600, 616, 619 Poe, Edgar Allan, 539–40, 541 poetry: Baroque term applied to, 98–104; concrete movement, 316, 329–34; division of labor in, 319–20; Henríquez Ureña’s excerpt on, 200–208; intersections in, 343–51; Italianate vs. Spanish forms in, 167–68; Lezama’s tracing of, 217–25; as painting that speaks, 367–72, 392n17; simultaneity possible in, 538; unified sensibility theory of, 126–28. See also specific poets Polo de Medina, Salvador Jacinto, 214, 218 Pontigny Abbey, 75, 81, 91–92 Pope, Alexander, 100 Porée, Charles, 217 Porro, Ricardo, 273, 274 Portocarrero, René, 245 Portoghesi, Paolo, 300 Portugal: Baroque style in (vs. Spain), 21–22; Catholic monarchs of, 598; Baroque style in colonies of, 78; Góngora’s influence in, 343–51; literature of, 101, 102, 326, 350n; reforms in, 345; and Spain, 21, 238, 240, 426 Posada, José Guadalupe, 191

  667

positivism, 194, 198 postmodernism, 11–12, 467–68, 515–21 poststructuralism, 243, 265, 266–67. See also Sarduy, Severo; signifier and signified Potosí, 187n. See also Bolivia; Kondori, José Pound, Ezra, 126, 316, 332, 336 Poussin, Nicolas, 123, 131 Praz, Mario: on Baroque in Eng­lish art and architecture, 101, 119–24; on Baroque in Eng­lish literature, 100–101, 119, 124–33; on Mannerism, 123–25, 128; references to, 3, 17, 103, 104. See also Eliot, T. S.; Eng­lish Baroque prehistoric culture, 83, 92 primordialism, 195, 196 profane, the, 62–65 Protestantism and the Protestant Reformation, 3, 27n4, 80, 93, 115, 130, 399, 492, 522, 524, 531, 552. See also Eng­lish Baroque; Lutheranism Proust, Marcel, 88, 193, 335, 337, 537, 545, 588, 590–91, 592 Puebla (Mexico), 22, 215, 233–34, 234, 256, 257, 264, 495–96, 496. See also Mexico Puente, Luis de la, 130 Puig, Manuel, 505 Pupo-Walker, Enrique, 420 Pützer, Fritz, 100 Quatremère de Quincy, AntoineChysostome, 95–96 Quetzalcoátl (deity), 573 Quevedo, Francisco de: as Baroque, 102; conceptismo linked to, 170–71; Góngora and, 166, 176, 493–94; influences on, 167n, 201, 202, 347; references to, 172, 200, 214, 218, 329, 344, 555, 556, 559, 567; renewed attention to, 4–5 Quijano, Aníbal, 181, 528n31 Quint, David, 424–25, 427 Rabelais, François, 99, 102, 337 racialization, 399–400 Racine, Jean, 99, 102, 106 Rama, Ángel, 18–19, 198, 394–95 rationalism, 41, 44–45, 87 Raymond, Marcel, 103 real maravilloso americano, lo (the American marvelous real), 14, 76, 243, 513–15, 526n10

668    I n d e x

reconquista, 29–30n19, 184n Reiss, Timothy J.: on Baroque geographies in Cuba, 407–12; on Baroque histories in Mexico, 398–407; on history and geography, 394–95; references to, 20, 23, 33n36; on stories of Baroque, 395–98 Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, 78, 88, 89, 91, 101, 120, 155, 212, 554 Renaissance: alternative version of, 598; architectural theory in, 294, 296; Baroque as rejection of, 32n29, 444n10; crisis of, 415, 418–19; as flight of God, 492; historiography of, 420, 423; manifested in America, 229–31; miracles depicted in, 81; in Spain, 229, 497. See also classicism; humanism repetition and intensification, 66–67, 287–89, 296–97 representation: definition of, 383; forms of, 52–54; overview of, 15–20; painterly vs. linear, 14, 23, 47, 50, 180, 280, 428, 446n45. See also allegory and allegorical representation; self-fashioning retombée, 267, 293, 523–24. See also cycles and recylings; Sarduy, Severo Revista de Occidente (periodical), 555 Reyes, Alfonso: on cosmopolitanism, 573; on cultismo, 168–71; on Gongoran criticism, 172–78; influences on, 5, 117, 161–62; on Italianate vs. Spanish forms, 167–68; on literary periods, 165–67; references to, 7, 28n12, 198, 224, 321, 334–35; on Spanish language, 171–72 Reynold, Gonzague de, 102 rhetoric, 23, 41–42, 44–45, 267, 293, 301–9 Ricci, Corrado, 96 Richard, Nelly, 57 Riegl, Alois, 96 Rivera, Diego, 187 Rivera, Eustasio, 197 Rivers, Elías L., 569n18 Roa Bastos, Augusto, 508, 518, 521 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 337 Rocha, Glauber, 279 Roche, Maurice, 337 rococo, 96, 100, 124 Rodríguez, Jesusa, 481–82 Rodríguez, Lorenzo, 200, 232, 232n Rodríguez Arias, Alfredo, 287

Rodríguez Feo, José, 606–12, 615 Rodríguez Monegal, Emir, 528n1, 566, 572 Roggiano, Alfredo A., 338–39n10 rogue tradition, 328–29 Roh, Franz, 13–15, 30–31n26, 30n25 Rojas, Ricardo, 180, 186, 192, 197 Romanticism, 6, 63, 75–76, 83, 107, 192, 193, 207n, 317, 321, 327, 437–42. See also nature Ronsard, Pierre de, 213, 559 Ross, Kathleen, 399 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 59, 80, 96, 440, 441, 442 Roussel, Raymond, 260 Rousset, Jean, 272, 602 Rubens, Peter Paul, 78, 81–82, 97, 123, 131, 149, 212, 267, 299, 299–300 Ruedas de la Serna, Jorge: references to, 20, 21–23; works: “Góngora in Spanish American Poetry, Góngora in Lusa- Brazilian Poetry,” 343–51 ruins and decay, 6, 55–57, 63–70, 64, 403. See also fragments and fragmentation Ruiz de León, Francisco, 204 Saavedra Fajardo, Diego, 372, 379, 380, 381 Sagrario Metropolitano (Mexico City), 200, 231–33, 232 Saint Augustine, 79–80, 82, 87, 141 Saint Bartholomew, 89, 91 Saint Francis of Assisi, 495 Saint Gonzalo, 238 Saint Ignatius of Loyola, 212, 221–22, 234, 235, 454, 465n14, 493 Saint John of the Cross, 314n7, 558, 563–64 Saint Paul, 82, 140n, 142–43n, 143 Saint Peter, 140–44, 142, 146 Saint Rose of Lima, 229 saints: in Baroque iconography, 81–82; depictions of, 89, 91, 140–44, 142, 143, 145, 229, 231; estofado figures of, 495–96, 496 Saint Teresa of Ávila, 130–31, 132, 229 Saint Thomas, 566 Salas, Francisco Gregorio de, 202 Salgado, César Augusto, 581, 595n43 Salinas, Pedro, 564, 570n24 Sánchez, Luis Rafael, 508, 516, 517–18, 521 San Esteban Monastery, 89, 90 Santa Cruz Pumacallao, Basilio de, 229, 231 Santayana, George, 601, 611

I n d e x 

Santí, Enrico Mario, 217n Sarduy, Severo: on anamorphosis, 10–11, 30n20, 300–301; on artifice, 265–66, 271– 79; on Baroque, 270–71, 490; on Ciclón, 569n10; on decentering, 293–97, 317; on double real center, 299–300; on double virtual center, 297–99; on ellipsis, 292–93, 301–12, 313n2; on eroticism, 287–89; on excess, 266–67; on historical context, 395, 397; on inter- and intratextuality, 282–87; on mirror, 289–90; on mise en abîme, 286; on modernity, 556, 578, 591; Neobaroque conceptualized by, 10–11, 12, 24, 243, 265, 505–6; on parody, 279–82; references to, 13, 22, 29–30n19, 329, 337, 417, 479, 527n14, 604; retombée concept of, 267, 523–24; on revolution, 290, 618; on Stevens, 602, Tel Quel and, 29n19, 265, 337; works: “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” 243, 265– 68, 270–91, 316; “Baroque Cosmology: Kepler,” 266, 267, 292–315; Barroco, 10, 243, 489; Cobra; Maitreya; Colibri (trilogy), 515–16, 517, 520–21; De donde son los cantantes, 266. See also Lacan, Jacques Sarto, Andrea del, 91 Sartorio, Jorge José, 203n Sartre, Jean-Paul, 153, 545 Scarpetta, Guy, 528n33 Scève, Maurice, 128 Schirmer, F. W., 100 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 61 Schlegel, Friedrich, 448n67 Schmidt, Conrad, 319 Schmidt-Degener, F., 101 Schmitt, Carl, 80 Schürr, Friedrich, 99 science, 267–68, 378–79, 385–86, 490. See also ellipse and ellipsis Scott, Geoffrey, 96, 103, 104 sculpture, 63–64, 64, 273, 274, 275–76 Sefamí, Jacobo, 11, 30n22 Segee, Charles, 217n Seguí, Antonio, 282 self-fashioning, 450, 451–64 señor barroco (Lezama): archetype of, 19, 210, 514, 611–12; uses of, 210–11, 213–15, 394 Serres, Michel, 149, 157n8 Shakespeare, William: Baroque stylistics

  669

of, 17, 98, 99, 104, 115, 125, 132, 133; references to, 115, 116, 119, 120, 129, 286; works: Antony and Cleopatra, 133; Hamlet, 534–35; Macbeth, 134–35n20; The Tempest, 25–26, 571–72, 598. See also Calderón de la Barca, Pedro; Eng­lish Baroque Sidney, Sir Philip, 125, 129 signifier and signified: arbitrariness in, 266; condensation in, 277–79; ellipsis and, 301–9; grams in, 282, 284–87; parody and, 279–82; proliferation in, 270–71, 273, 275–77; quotation in, 282–83; substitution in, 272–73, 274 Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de, 8, 216–17, 220–21, 348, 349, 394, 395, 398–401, 402, 583 Silverman, Joseph H., 447n52 Sitwell, Sacheverell, 96, 200 Soja, Edward W., 472 Sollers, Philippe, 314n19, 337 Sontag, Susan, 505 Sor Juana. See Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la Soto de Rojas, Pedro, 218, 219 Sousândrade ( Joaquim de Sousa Andrade), 329, 330, 332, 339n16 Southwell, Robert, 130 Spain: Baroque architecture and literature in, 98–99, 117, 161–62, 190n; Baroque discourse in, 101–2, 417–19; Cathedral of Toledo, 232, 233; demand for narrative in, 429–30; Golden Age of, 161; Góngora’s influence in, 343–51; Inquisition in, 430–31, 447n50, 447n52; length of Baroque in America vs., 199, 201–3; linked to Europe vs. America, 583–84; literary periods in, 165–67; Mexican mestizo style in, 187, 189; reforms in, 21; Renaissance and Enlightenment absent in, 229, 497. See also Calderón de la Barca, Pedro; Cervantes, Miguel de; Generation of ’27; Góngora, Luis de; Quevedo, Francisco de Spanish language, 18, 171–72 spatiality, 148–50, 215, 230, 251–54, 293–97, 519–20 Spengler, Oswald, 17, 32n30, 96–97, 98, 242, 555, 556–57, 566, 568n3 Spenser, Edmund, 127, 201, 559 Spinoza, Baruch, 212

670    I n d e x

spirit, 19, 33n32, 75, 193, 221–22, 257–58. See also nature Spitzer, Leo, 99, 106, 386, 562–63 Spoerri, Theophil, 98–99, 101 Staden, Hans, 322 Stendhal, 542, 543 Stevens, Wallace, 28–29n13, 601–19 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 330, 332 Strich, Fritz, 98, 102, 104–5, 106 Sullivan, Henry, 436 Sullivan, Louis, 181 Summerson, John, 121, 122–23 surrealism, 327, 538 Swift, Jonathan, 121 Sybel, L. von, 96 Sypher, Wylie, 104 Tansillo, Luigi, 130 Tasso, Torquato, 62, 97, 99, 102, 131 Taylor, Charles, 23–24 Taylor, Edward, 104 Tahuantinsuyu. See Inca culture; Peru Tejeda, Luis de, 201 Tenochtitlan. See Mexico City/Tenochtitlan Tenopal, Marina (La Malinche), 399–400 tequitqui (tributario), 27n6, 495–97 Terborch, Gerhard, 52, 52–53 theater and theatricality, 31n27, 41–42, 170, 287. See also film and cinematography; Trauerspiel Tillyard, E. M. W., 104 Tintoretto ( Jacopo Robusti): references to, 17, 96, 137, 148–49, 151, 490–92; vision in paintings of, 140–44; works: The Decapitation of St. Paul, 140n, 143; The Last Supper, 490, 491, 492; The Miracle of St. Mark Freeing the Slave, 141, 145; The Vision of St. Peter, 140–44, 142. See also Buci-Glucksmann, Christine Tobar y Guzmán, Isabel de, 401 Tolson, Melvin B., 600 Tomé, Narciso de, 230, 232, 233 Torre, Francisco de la, 171 Torre-Nilsson, Leopoldo, 279 Torres Sifontes, Pedro de las, 409 tragedy, 59–62, 91. See also Trauerspiel transculturation: agents of, 180–81; of magical realism, 14; metamorphosis, analogy, and, 472–77; overview of, 20–23; processes of,

241–42, 317, 321, 622–26, products of, 27n;6, 180. See also heterogeneities; hybridity transparente, 232–33, 233 Trauerspiel (the “mourning play”): allegorical method applied to, 56–57, 62–65, 70–72; context of writing about, 5, 6, 12, 13; courtly life, setting, and, 59–62; ruin, history, and, 65–70. See also Benjamin, Walter Tresguerras, Francisco Eduardo, 190 Trillo y Figueroa, Francisco de, 218 Túpac Amaru, 181, 187 Tuve, Rosamond, 127 Ultrabaroque, 191, 192, 257, 481, 484n49 Unamuno, Miguel de, 183, 193, 321 unified sensibility theory, 126–28 United States: African presence in, 599–600, 615–16; Baroque discourse in, 103, 104; Puritanism in, 602–3 Uribe, Juan de Dios, 206–8 ur-postmodern, 467–68 Ursúa, Pedro de, 422 Valdes Leal, Juan de, 128 Valdivielso, José de, 371 Valencia, Pedro de, 168 Valéry, Paul, 226, 392–93n21 Vallejo, César, 337 Vanbrugh, John, 121, 122, 122, 132 Vančura, Zdeněk, 104 van Delden, Maarten: on approaches to Latin American culture, 571–76; on Baroque and modernity, 574–78, 585–88; on cultural identity, 582–84; on Lezama, 25, 579–81, 588–92; on Proust, 588, 590–91, 592; references to, 8; on subversion, 571–73 Van Eyck, Jan, 289 vanguardia, 509–10 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 282, 317, 336, 442 Vasconcelos, José, 180, 198 Vedel, Valdemar, 97, 101, 103 Velázquez, Diego de Silva, 267, 286, 309, 309–12, 417, 436 Velázquez de Cárdenas y León, Joaquín, 205 Véliz, Claudio, 592 Veloso, Caetano, 327–28, 333, 334 Verlaine, Paul, 510 Verrazzano, Giovanni da, 452 Vesalio, Andrea, 386

I n d e x 

Vieira, António de, 327, 329–30 Viëtor, K., 107 Vignale, Pedro Juan, 216n Vignola, Jacome Barozzio da, 247 Villamediana (Tassis Peralta), 170 Villaurrutia, Javier, 28n9 Villegas, Antonio, 425, 446n40 Viollet-le-Duc, Eugène Emmanuel, 193 Virgil, 214n, 403 vision and envisioning: embodiment of, 136–38; “madness” in, 17, 22, 26, 136–38, 140–42, 145, 147, 148, 150, 156; Neobaroque aesthetics and, 147–56; Nothingness and, 151–54, 155; Wölfflin on, 53–54. See also Buci-Glucksmann, Christine; eye; gaze Vitier, Cintio, 224 Vitruvius (Marcus Vitruvius Pollio), 60, 121, 190 Vives, Luis, 95 Voloshinov, Valentin, 320 Voltaire, 119, 217 Vondel, Joost van den, 61, 101 Voss, Hermann, 125 Vossler, Karl, 99, 227, 228, 583 Wagner, Richard, 43, 83 Walzel, Oskar, 98 Ward, Nathaniel, 104 Warnke, Frank J., 21 Warren, Austin, 93, 104, 105 Waterhouse, E. K., 123 Watkin, E. I., 103 Webern, Anton, 330, 332, 333 Weisbach, Werner, 179, 209, 213, 221n, 417, 468, 526n7, 584 Wellek, René: on baroque, 2; on Baroque stylistic and ideological criteria, 104–8; on German enthusiasm for Baroque, 30–31n26, 32n30, 555; on historical context, 95–104; on literary terms, 117, 443n6; references to, 3, 6, 15, 16–17, 76, 93, 568n3. See also Eng­lish Baroque Welles, Orson, 478 Wheatley, Phillis, 599

  671

White, Helen C., 104 Whitman, Walt, 336, 600–601, 618 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, 96 Wild, Friedrich, 100 Williamson, George, 104 Wilson, Diana de Armas, 446–47n47, 447– 48n56 Wilson, F. P., 104 Winckelmann, J. J. ( Johann Joachim), 63–64, 68, 95, 207 Winks, Christopher: on conceptualizations of Baroque, 597–601; on Lezama, 25, 597– 600, 609–19; references to, 8; on Stevens, 601–19 Wolff, Max, 98, 134–35n20 Wölfflin, Heinrich: antithetical paired categories of, 23, 47, 49–52; Baroque art style defined by, 13–14, 16, 46, 242, 468; on Baroque literature, 97–98; on imitation and decoration, 52–54; influences on, 16, 32n29; “open form” of, 133; on painterly vs. linear art, 14, 23, 47, 50, 180, 280, 428, 446n45; references to, 3, 14–15, 30n25, 30–31n26, 42, 75, 96, 97–98, 101, 103, 104, 115, 124, 132, 134–35n20, 179–80, 395, 555; on Renaissance, 99, 425–26, 428; works: Principles of Art History (excerpt), 46, 49–54, 97–98, 179; Renaissance and Baroque, 16, 46, 97, 125, 179. See also complementarity of opposites; Roh, Franz Worringer, Wilhelm, 30–31n26, 179, 213, 555, 557, 567, 568–69n10 Wren, Christopher, 121 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 181, 194 Yáñez, Agustín, 543–44 Zambrano, María, 609 Zamora, Lois Parkinson, 27n2, 30n24, 585, 595nn47–48 Zeno of Elea, 84, 88 Zhdanov, Andrei Aleksandrovich, 544 Zola, Émile, 537

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Baroque new worlds : representation, transculturation, counterconquest / edited by Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-4630-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-0-8223-4642-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Arts, Baroque—Latin America. 2. Art, Latin American. 3. Latin American literature. 4. Cultural fusion and the arts. I. Zamora, Lois Parkinson.  II. Kaup, Monika. NX501.5.Z35  2010 709.03′2—dc22 2009050790