The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation: 391 (Monografías A, 391) 1855663414, 9781855663411

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Colección Támesis SERIE A: MONOGRAFÍAS, 391

THE SPANISH BAROQUE AND LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY MODERNITY

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Tamesis Founding Editors †J. E. Varey †Alan Deyermond General Editor Stephen M. Hart Advisory Board Andrew M. Beresford Zoltán Biedermann Celia Cussen Efraín Kristal Jo Labanyi María E. López José Antonio Mazzotti Thea Pitman Julius Ruiz Alison Sinclair Isabel Torres Noël Valis MONOGRAFÍAS ISSN: 0587-9914 (print) ISSN 2633-7061 (online) Monografías publishes critical studies covering a wide range of topics in the literature, culture and history of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America from the Middle Ages to the present day. It aims to promote intellectually stimulating and innovative scholarship that will make a major contribution to the fields of Hispanic and Lusophone studies. Work on un- or under-explored sources and themes or utilising new methodological and theoretical approaches, as well as interdisciplinary studies, are particularly encouraged. Previously published books in the series may be viewed at https://boydellandbrewer.com/series/monografias-a.html

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THE SPANISH BAROQUE AND LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY MODERNITY WRITING IN CONSTELLATION

Crystal Anne Chemris

TAMESIS

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© Crystal Anne Chemris 2021 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Crystal Anne Chemris to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2021 Tamesis, Woodbridge ISBN 978 1 85566 341 1 (hardcover) ISBN 978 1 80010 124 1 (ePDF) ISBN 978 1 80010 125 8 (ePUB) Tamesis is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620-2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate

A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library

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In memory of my parents, Walter and Rose, and of my sister, Robin

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments viii Introduction: The Baroque, Symbolism and Hispanic Modernity: A Benjaminian Meditation on the Construction of History

1

1. Góngora and the Colonial Body Politic: Moriscos, Amerindians and Poetry as Protest

29

2. Violence and the “Tremulous Private Body” in Lazarillo de Tormes, Fuenteovejuna, and the Soledades

55

3. Trauma, Body and Machine in Don Quijote

73

4. Góngora and Darío in Constellation: On the Poetics of Rape, Colonialism and Modernity

87

5. Pilgrimage into the Trauma of History: Continuities of Góngora in Carpentier, Rulfo and Vallejo 6. Signposts in a Genealogy of Post-Symbolism in Latin American Poetry Afterword

103 123 143

Appendix I: On Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de dés”

149

Appendix II: The Annales School and Maravall’s La cultura del barroco

153

Works Cited

161

Index

189

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the editorial board, the commissioning editor, Megan Milan, and all the staff of Tamesis for their generous attention to my manuscript, as well as the many colleagues who have supported my research and teaching. In this regard, I honor the retirement of mentors who were pioneers in North American hispanism, in leading a shift towards theory-centered criticism and new fields which incorporated the voices of women and minorities: John Beverley, Emilie Bergmann, and Julián Olivares. I thank the department chairs who have set the highest model for me as a teacher: at the University of Pittsburgh, John Beverley; at Reed College, Sharon Larisch; and at the University of Iowa, the late Tom Lewis. I thank Ivonne Del Valle for the invitation to present my work on the Quijote at Berkeley and Ariadna García Bryce for her invitation to present my research on the Baroque at Reed College. I thank Julio Ortega for mentoring my transatlantic scholarship and Joaquín Roses for integrating me into projects on Góngora, now housed at the center he directs in Córdoba, Spain. I am also most grateful to many other colleagues who have offered generous correspondence with me on my research. These include Francisco A. Ortega, Christian Fernández, Daniel Waissbein, Carolyn Dean, Lisette Balabarca, Christina Lee, Carmen Bernand, Marie Tanner, Rachel Schmidt and Kenneth Brown, Colbert Nepaulsingh, Julián Jiménez Heffernan, and last but not least, David Hildner, who I thank for sharing his opinion and advice on my reading of some of Góngora’s sonnets, a crucial foundation for my interpretation of the poet’s views on the Morisco expulsion. I acknowledge my gratitude for the support of family and of my current colleagues at the University of Virginia and the University of Oregon. Finally, some of the material in this book appeared in an earlier version in the sources listed below. Permission to reprint has been granted by the following publishers and is gratefully acknowledged. “Moriscos, Amerindians and Góngora’s Soledades in Context,” eHumanista/ Conversos, Vol. 6, No. 1–2, 2018, pp. 284–305. (Chapter 1) “The Pilgrimage Topos and the Problem of Modernity: A Transatlantic View of Some Hispanic Texts.” Romance Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, April 2008, pp. 136–49. (Chapter 5)

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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“Violence and the Trajectory of Early Modern Subjection in Lazarillo de Tormes, Fuenteovejuna, and the Soledades.” Symposium, Vol. 64, No. 2, 2010, pp. 105–25. (Chapter 2) “Continuities of Góngora in Darío’s Swan Poems: On the Poetics of Rape, Colonialism and Modernity.” Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Poetry, Vol. 16, No. 2, 2010, pp. 75–94. This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press, © 2010 Pennsylvania State University Press. (Chapter 4) Lionel Lienlaf’s poems “Rebelión” and “Camino” and Graciela Huinao’s poem, “Simulacro de biografía” from Cecilia Vicuña ed, Ül: Four Mapuche Poets: Elicura Chihuailaf, Leonel Lienlaf, Jaime Luis Huenún, Graciela Huinao, Bilingual ed. Trans. John Bierhorst, Pittsburgh: Latin American Literary Review Press, 1998. (Chapter 6)

The author and publisher are grateful to all the institutions listed for permission to reproduce the materials in which they hold copyright. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders; apologies are offered for any omission, and the publisher will be pleased to add any necessary acknowledgement in subsequent editions.

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Sainte A la fenêtre récelant Le santal vieux qui se dédore De sa viole étincelant Jadis avec flûte ou mandore, Est la Sainte pâle étalant Le livre vieux qui se déplie Du Magnificat ruisselant Jadis selon vêpre et complie: A ce vitrage d’ostensoir Que frôle une harpe par l’Ange Formée avec son vol du soir Pour la délicate phalange Du doigt que, sans le vieux santal Ni le vieux livre, elle balance Sur le plumage instrumental, Musicienne du silence. Stéphane Mallarmé, Poésies, 1887

“Solía escribir con su dedo grande en el aire: ‘¡Viban los compañeros! Pedro Rojas.’ […] ” César Vallejo, “III,” España, aparta de mí este cáliz, 1939

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INTRODUCTION The Baroque, Symbolism and Hispanic Modernity: A Benjaminian Meditation on the Construction of History “par avance retombée” “beforehand fallen back” —From Stéphane Mallarmé, “Un Coup de dés” (Trans. Brian Coffey; Caws 107–27)1 A. Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time (263). —From Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

The trajectory of Hispanic modernity can be seen as one of constellations, parallel moments of conjuncture, in which the origins of the modern come into a kind of synchrony with later turning points. Using this model of historical 1 The presentation of Mallarmé’s “Sainte” as a frontispiece and this epigraph from his “Un Coup de dés” are intended to introduce examples of Symbolist poetics to the general reader. Good close readings with English translation of Mallarmé’s poems

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2 INTRODUCTION

conjuncture—imaginatively portrayed in the writings of Walter Benjamin—I propose to study literary manifestations of Hispanic modernity in the earliest glimmers of the Baroque and to observe its repeated dynamics in modernismo and in the future expressions of the avant-garde. In so doing, it is my hope to also address the theoretical issues raised by different concepts of history2 and to develop an approach to literary texts based on a problematic of the body within the Hispanic body politic. The terrain of this book will be transatlantic, with a primary focus on the Peninsular Baroque and its trajectory into the Latin American modern. Throughout this study I will diverge somewhat from the traditional disciplinary boundaries which define national and generational notions of canon in an effort to develop broader perspectives.3 For example, while I will take into are available in Burnshaw and in Robert Cohn’s work. See Appendix I for a brief explanation of “Un Coup de dés.” Note that the term “retombée” is later used by Sarduy in his work Barroco to describe the effect of the Neobaroque (OC 1196–1261). Specifically, in his frontispiece, he defines it as “causalidad acrónica, isomorfía no contigua, o, consecuencia de algo que aún no se ha producido, parecido con algo que aún no existe.” In referencing Sarduy from the beginning, I acknowledge the importance of his theoretical work on the Baroque, which is an implicit point of departure for subsequent formal studies. In addition to Barroco, his essay “El barroco y el neobarroco” (OC 1385–1404) presents a semiotic codification of the term “barroco” in its application to Latin American art, detailing its characteristic structures. For a contrasting view, see John Beverley on the Baroque as a literary ideologeme associated with cultural mestizaje and as a form of Neo-Arielism (Essays 150) 2 This chapter can be construed in part as a response to John Beverley’s chapter on Baroque historicism as well as his dialogue with Fernando Gómez Herrero on Golden Age Studies in his Essays. I also take Francisco A. Ortega’s classic essay, “History of a Phantom,” updated in Spanish as “Regresos del barroco o la historia de un fantasma” as a point of departure as well as Kate Jenckes’s monograph on Borges and Benjamin. In addition I am inspired by other essential studies of the Baroque such as those by Christine Buci-Glucksmann, David Castillo (Baroque Horrors), William Egginton, Roberto González Echevarría (Celestina’s Brood), Gregg Lambert, José Antonio Maravall (La cultura del barroco), Severo Sarduy, and Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín Estudillo. Many of the more recent critics among these are in turn inspired, implicitly or explicitly, by Fredric Jameson’s discussion of historicism in his opening chapter, “On Interpretation,” from his The Political Unconscious, whose ideas I will take up more directly later in this chapter. 3 In this endeavor I build on the work of Christopher Soufas, Stephen Hart, John Beverley and others. See, for example, Hart’s transatlantic approach to modernismo/ modernism (Spanish, Catalan and Spanish-American Poetry 17–26), Soufas’s detailed discussion of the problem of Spanish nationalism in canonical definitions of avantgarde and modernism in Peninsular letters (especially 1–50) and Beverley’s questioning of the paradigm of national literature and canonicity raised in his recent dialogue on the Baroque with Gómez Herrero (Essays 149–85). See also the more general questioning

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account the canonical writers of the Neobaroque, my primary focus will not be on what is commonly understood as Neobarroquismo, the cultivation of features of Baroque aesthetics associated with Cuban writers such as Severo Sarduy, Lezama Lima, Alejo Carpentier, and their disciples in the 1960s and 1970s. Rather I will examine an earlier phenomenon in the avant-garde and its development into more subtle manifestations which can broaden our understanding of the impact of the Hispanic Baroque. With this goal in mind, I propose to study Symbolism as an avant-garde thread which runs through modernismo into what is considered canonically to be the Latin American avant-garde and beyond. A key moment in this trajectory will be the modern resurgence of the Baroque poetry of Luis de Góngora under the influence of the French Symbolists, whose self-referential language games seemed to continue the Gongorine project.4 “Cervantes wrote the first open novel as if he had read Mallarmé” —Carlos Fuentes, “Cervantes or the Critique of Reading” (Rev. Eng. ed.; Myself with Others 70)

Symbolism and the Hispanic Baroque:The Case of Góngora and Mallarmé The Symbolist-inspired revival of the Hispanic Baroque begins as an initial modernista wave represented by the Nicaraguan poet, Rubén Darío, and continues at the tercentenary of Góngora’s death marked by the Spanish Generation of 1927. There is a substantial critical literature on the modern revival of Góngora, including essential contributions by Alfonso Reyes, Elsa of these notions by Barbara Fuchs (“Golden Ages”) and David Porter, referenced at the end of Chapter 6. Also relevant is the recent dialogue, “Repositioning Modernity” / “Restituar la modernidad” (Herrero-Senés and Larson). 4 César Augusto Salgado calls this the “Symbolist Neobaroque vogue” (81). For a detailed discussion of the Góngora-Symbolist parallel, see Chapter 5 of Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades, especially 104–08. There are also a number of collections which address Góngora and the group of ’27: Joaquín Roses Lozano, ed., Gongora Hoy IV as well as other volumes recently supported by the Junta de Andalucía, including Andrés Soria Olmedo, ed., Una densa polimorfía de belleza: Góngora y el grupo del 27, and Rafael Bonilla Cerezo and Giuseppe Mazzocchi, eds, La hidra barroca, varia lección de Góngora, which includes an essay on Góngora and the group of ’27 by José Lara Garrido. I do not address this work in depth, as my aim in this book is to create a transatlantic sense of constellation by shedding light on the specifically Latin American avant-garde projection of Góngora.

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4 INTRODUCTION

Dehinnin, members of the Generation of ’27 such as Dámaso Alonso and Federico García Lorca, as well as more recent material.5 Scholars have noted that the debates over culteranismo and conceptismo were replayed by Jorge Luis Borges in his critique of modernismo, with Borges, at least in his youth, upholding Francisco de Quevedo’s poetics over Góngora’s apparently superficial cultivation of form.6 I have discussed some of this in an earlier study and will return to the nature and history of the Gongorine resurgence in more depth in future chapters. For now, however, I would like to describe the issue of the aesthetic dimensions of the relationship between Góngora—as exemplar of the Hispanic Baroque—and French Symbolism as a prelude to a discussion of Borges’s role in an early and parallel case of Neobaroque in the Latin American avant-garde.7 The association of Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry and Luis de Góngora has been controversial, seen by some as simply a superficial and anachronistic projection on the part of youthful writers dazzled by two iconoclastic “poètes maudits.”8 Yet certain formal similarities do obtain. Both produce poetry of exhaustion, Góngora writing at the end of the Renaissance and Mallarmé writing after the decline of Romanticism (Milner 286). Various critics have cited technical similarities. The most important of these is Gabriel Pradal Rodríguez’s identification of Góngora’s “A si no B” formula with Mallarmé’s use of absence to evoke a multitude of possibilities (276).9 Indeed, by negating, by alluding, and by cultivating figures of choice and doubt, in a context of what John Beverley has seen as generic and teleological indeterminacy (Aspects 69, 105–06), Góngora creates an early version of that evocative “hovering” or suspension of the definite that is characteristic of a Mallarméan poem. Other, less compelling, formal similarities have been noted (e.g. their common use 5 See Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades (103–08) for a more detailed discussion of the origins of the ostensible parallel between Góngora and Symbolism, which I reprise here in the next few paragraphs. 6 See Rodríguez Monegal, Maurer and Roses Lozano, Soledades habitadas (“Borges hechizado por Góngora”) (307–45), as well as García Bryce, “Borges criollista,” for example. 7 A more complete history of the Latin American Neobaroque has yet to be written, but Julio Ortega has suggested the possible extent of its parameters: “Escritores tan distintos como Martí, Rubén Darío, Vallejo, Neruda y Borges tienen en común ese intertexto del barroco, que afecta en uno y otro la dimensión central de su escritura” (“De Lezama Lima a Severo Sarduy” 200). 8 See Dámaso Alonso’s essay “Gongora y la literatura contemporánea,” in his Estudios (527), as well as more recent commentary by Andrés Sánchez Robayna, Tres estudios (61–89) and “Bajo el signo de Góngora,” and by Jean Pierre Étienvre in Roses, ed., Gongora Hoy IV. 9 Paiewonsky-Conde (66–69), while never referring to Mallarmé, also discusses Góngora’s use of absence and negation to evoke possibility.

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of neologisms and disruption of syntax), similarities which Andrés Sánchez Robayna reduces to a “común concepción del lenguaje como ‘diseño’ (o como ‘arquitectura’)” (Tres estudios 66). In a more fundamental sense the work of both poets is marked by a common, almost ascetic zeal to create a subjective vision which would attain the stature of the absolute. Both evince the same obsessive pattern of aspiration and failure, the same oscillation between the power and the impotence of the human mind and its language. Both create a poetry which is involuted in an effort to “name naming.” If Góngora metaphorizes metaphor, Mallarmé seeks to name “fleur,” that elusive flower absent from all bouquets.10 While Góngora employs the technique of self-reference to a lesser degree than does Mallarmé, both produce poetry which performs the process of its own writing. There are, of course, obvious dissimilarities between the two poets, given the temporal distance. Góngora never approaches the Symbolists’ attempt to escape the denotative function of language. Hugo Friedrich points out further differences. Góngora wrote for a specific class of readers who could, albeit with difficulty, decipher his poetry by referring to a tradition of mythology, symbolism, rhetoric, etc. Mallarmé, on the other hand, wrote for no actual reader, and his symbols are unique and self-sufficient (89; see also Sánchez Robayna 71). In sum, it would prove to be more accurate to view the relationship between Gongorism and Symbolism to be one of trajectory rather than one of comparison per se. While it would be a mistake to consider the relationship between the two poets to be one of comparison, it would be equally mistaken to ignore the parallel. As Sánchez Robayna has pointed out, the parallel between the two poets has been realized creatively. Góngora was only successfully translatable into French after the appearance of Mallarmé’s poetry (Pradal Rodríguez 279), and Giuseppe Ungaretti’s translations of Góngora were mediated by his reading of Mallarmé.11 To this I would add the obverse: Octavio Paz has admitted to his reliance on Gongorine language to translate Mallarmé into Spanish (“Stéphane Mallarmé” 25). The creative and critical function of the parallel has been such that Sánchez Robayna asserts that the revival of Góngora was, in the final analysis, impossible without the advent of Symbolist language (Tres estudios 83). Historicism and Symbolism: “Pierre Menard” in Context Sánchez Robayna’s assertion sets the stage for a broader discussion of the problems of historicism evoked by the modern revival of Góngora, issues which are captured in Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story, “Pierre Menard, 10 The phrase “l’absente de tous bouquets” is from Mallarmé’s essay “Crise de vers” (OC). 11 Buxó, as cited in Sánchez Robayna, Tres estudios (84).

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6 INTRODUCTION

autor del Quijote” (1939). In the tale, Borges grapples with questions of presentism and reception in his imaginary depiction of the eccentric and minor Symbolist poet, Pierre Menard, who sets out to write the Spanish Baroque novel, Don Quijote, not by transcribing it mechanically, but by producing it anew out of his own historical experience. He intends his replica to coincide, word for word, with the original text in a literal reconstruction, born of his own quixotic ambition. In the process, Borges writes, Menard (acaso sin quererlo) ha enriquecido mediante una técnica nueva el arte detenido y rudimentario de la lectura: la técnica del anacronismo deliberado y las atribuciones erróneas. Esa técnica de aplicación infinita nos insta a recorrer a la Odisea como si fuera posterior a la Eneida y el libro Le jardin du Centaure de Madame Henri Bachelier como si fuera de Madame Henri Bachelier (482).12

The story thus ends by proclaiming the technique of deliberate anachronism, a practice which allows for the reading of texts in a variable historicity and which renders all readings specular constructs.13 One could interpret the text rather facilely as a tongue-in cheek cautionary tale on anachronistic readings and as a reflection of Borges’s early education in French Symbolism.14 One could delve deeper and view the story, as I have suggested, as a more general meditation on the avant-garde revival of the Baroque occasioned by the resurgence of Góngora by the Symbolists.15 In this regard Steven Boldy’s observation is most pertinent; he notes that the opening catalog of Menard’s works includes a translation of Quevedo’s “Aguja de navegar cultos,” the point of which only becomes clear in the light of the second part of the title, which is “con receta para hacer Soledades en un día,” curiously evoked by its omission (75). Sophie Kluge has explored the figuration of the battle between Góngora and Quevedo’s poetics as a

12

All references to Borges are from the Emecé edition of his Obras completas. Kate Jenckes reads “Pierre Menard” in terms of Walter Benjamin’s notion of the “afterlife” of works of art. As she writes, “Linguistic difference and, as Jorge Luis Borges’s story ‘Pierre Menard’ purports to demonstrate, a difference intrinsic to time and writing interrupts any one-way descendance from the original. Indeed, the recognition of such manifold difference infects the very notion of the original, which loses its privileged status as an autonomous work outside of time, and is shown to be part of what Benjamin calls linguistic life and the ongoing life (or afterlife) of artworks” (xi). 14 Steven Boldy has documented Borges’s early studies of French Symbolist poetry at the Collège Calvin in Geneva (9). 15 See Chemris, review of Joaquín Roses Lozano, Soledades habitadas. See Roses Lozano, Soledades habitadas 307–45 and Vindel Pérez on Borges and Góngora. 13

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palimpsest in another Borges tale of the same period, “El Aleph,” and as a feature which appears more generally in Borges’s work.16 Yet Daniel Balderston’s reading of “Pierre Menard” attests that even more is at issue than aesthetics in this early case of Neobaroque in the Latin American avant-garde. In a painstaking analysis of the references to literary and historical context, Balderston demonstrates that the story is an oblique approach to the modern version of the “arms and letters” debate of the Quijote, as it is played out among Menard’s contemporaries, including pro-fascist intellectuals of the Symbolist camp such as Paul Valéry, over the problems of European militarism in 1914–39 (1–55). Balderston describes the paradigm shift which allowed him to read Borges against the grain of “high structuralism” and its isolation of purely textual dynamics (15). Here, he refers to a story which features the scarring of a traitor to the Irish liberation struggle, positing more general implications for the whole of Borges’s work: The turning point came … in “The Mark of the Knife,” when I worked on the motif of the scar in “La forma de la espada”… The scar in the story is a textual mark, to be sure, but an irreducible mark referring beyond narrative (and narrativity) to the experience of personal and political violence (16).

These “textual marks” which are also bodily signs of political violence— what Sylvia Molloy refers to as “written scars” (Signs 46)—resonate, as will be shown in the course of this study, with my own sense of the aesthetic expression of violence in Góngora’s oblique criticism of empire. In Góngora’s highly imbricated, ornamental Soledades, evocative hints of the imagery of rape, war and apocalyptic destruction bleed through in a subtle appeal to his readers, for whom literature, based on classical models, was the language in which the political debates of the day were figured.17 Borges’s “written scars” are a modern recycling of this feature of Gongorine poetics; they suggest a 16

See especially Kluge n. 2. Kluge’s notion of gongorism as a kind of “secular mysticism” (304) which aspires to “fix the changing universe in a finite poem” (294) is interesting and might be even more applicable to Sor Juana, whose lyric speaker laments in the Primero Sueño: “Y por mirarlo todo, | nada vía” (480). That Borges might evoke a later re-elaboration of Góngora would be even more suited to his avantgarde project of recycling the Baroque. The ambition Kluge attributes to Góngora, “to fix the changing universe in a finite poem,” is very suggestive of Mallarmé’s poetic ambition; Kluge’s work, without explicitly making the claim, reinforces the notion of Borges as an exemplar of the parallels between the Hispanic Baroque and Symbolism, and suggests the possibility of an early modern case of the “secular re-enchantment of the world” Landy attributes to Mallarmé. 17 Beverley, Aspects (7–8), Sasaki (157, 163) and Rivers, “Góngora and his Readers” deal with the role of reception as a factor in the composition of the Soledades. On the figuration of the battlefield in the poem, see Spitzer, “On Góngora’s Soledades” (97);

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politicization of the aesthetic parallel between Symbolism and the Baroque and also, if one bears in mind Molloy’s elegant study of the “signs of Borges,” a new politicization of the aesthetic dynamics of Symbolism itself. Molloy has pointed to the multifaceted meanings and appearances of the “rubric” as figure in Borges’s work. She signals its significance as a seal or flourish of a signature—a writing of the body upon the course of history—, as a red marker in a liturgical book or ecclesiastical calendar—reinforcing the Symbolist project of the religion of art—, and as a reference to blood spilled to testify to some truth.18 The notion of testimonio here is especially poignant. Balderston suggests that Borges’s method of connoting, his way of suggesting, obliquely, circumstances which are not named directly, serves to signal the silences of history, the violence of war, the voices which cannot be heard (13, 55).19 In this sense Borges reframes the Symbolist project, away from the obfuscations and magic show of bonapartist false consciousness. The “invisible work” of Symbolism, suggested by Mallarmé’s mime or his “Sainte,” Saint Cecilia, paused to evoke all musical combinations before on war, see Beverley, Aspects (93, 99–100); on rape and Apocalypse, see Chemris, Chapters 2 and 5 of Góngora’s Soledades. 18 Molloy, Signs (39). Cases of the use of the term which Molloy cites (in the texts under discussion) include: “con esa media luna de acero le rubriqué en la cara, para siempre, una media luna de sangre” (“La forma de la espada” 529); “Kilpatrick juró colaborar en ese proyecto, que le daba ocasión de redimirse y que rubricaría su muerte” (“El tema del traidor y del héroe” 533): see Molloy, Signs (38, 46). Balderston cites the study of the effect of war trauma on the handwriting of soldiers in the book on graphology by the real Pierre Menard, a work evoked by its absence in the catalog of the writer’s publications in the beginning of the tale. This is significant in its suggestion of the early forces which shaped the founders of the Annales school, as will be discussed shortly; see Balderston (37). Interestingly, the figure connects to another image, that of “la sangrienta luna” which occurs in Borges’s poem, “A un viejo poeta.” According to Christopher Maurer, Borges borrows the phrase from a Quevedo sonnet to depict both the image of the Turks (the red crescent) at the Battle of Lepanto as well as death in an ontotheological and historical sense: Apocalypse, the end of history. In this case, the “written scar” recurs as the return of the Baroque in the violence of history. See Maurer’s study of Borges’s “glossing” of Quevedo as well as Oviedo on Borges’s strategy of self-reference and self-citation within his body of work. 19 Kate Jenckes, in her evocative study, Reading Borges after Benjamin: Allegory, Afterlife and the Writing of History, makes a similar point, from a different perspective. She observes that Borges’s work allows “the voiceless forces of history” “outside of representations of linearity and identity” to destabilize dominant narratives (100). In this sense she sees a parallel between Borges’s writing of history and Walter Benjamins’s notion of allegory. She also puts forward a Benjaminian reading of the scar motif in Borges, informed in part by deconstructionist theory, including Paul De Man’s essay on autobiography as de-facement (54–57; 64–65). See also notes 2 and 13 of this chapter and the Afterword, including n. 1.

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playing a note, is now elevated into a political gesture which brings the textual theatre, and its play with possibility, onto the stage of history with a partisan and liberating agenda. The notion that Borges addresses historical violence obliquely in such a play with possibility has been remarked in a very suggestive earlier study by Ariel Dorfman,20 who describes the reaction of the reader to Borges’s tales as one of an audience before a magician. Dorfman then asks, “¿Pero qué hay del conejo?” “[La] crítica se ha fijado poco en […] quiénes son los hombres que sufren esa burla, quiénes son los que padecen el laberinto, quién es el que muere, devorado por el ludus ingenioso y ennubecedor, quién el conejo que se deshizo bajo la mano del mago” (38). For Dorfman, the violence of Latin American political history subtends the labyrinthine course of the text, with death arriving as a revelation which retroactively, and perhaps illusively, defines the identity and narrative of its protagonists (40–46). Like Mallarmé’s evocation of the possibilities of the poetic word on the brink of falling into silence, Borges’s forking paths, lotteries, masks and proliferation of identities finally defined by death constitute a type of Symbolist enactment, played out on the terrain of the multiple possible directions of human lives and the course of history. “Tema del traidor y del heroe” and The Symbolist Return of the Baroque Borges’s later story, “Tema del traidor y del héroe,” which complicates the dynamics of both “Pierre Menard” and “La forma de la espada,” merits closer attention.21 In this tale Borges restages the plot of the English Baroque drama, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, referencing its ancient and modern variants, as part of a meditation on the cycles of tyranny, mob rule and heroic myth in the theatre of human history. The story begins by announcing, with an intentional indeterminacy, its own performance as text, a Symbolist gesture,22 but also 20 Ariel Dorfman’s work on violence and Latin American literature is an important precursor to Balderston’s and Fiddian’s “historical turn”; as Dorfman argues, “Fuera cual fuese el disfraz utilizado para esconder esas situaciones violentas, los ropajes arcaicos, geográficamente pretéritos, parajes musulmanes, ingleses, chinos, persas, los que mueren y matan en esos cuentos son latinoamericanos, llámense Rufus o Dunraven o Dahlmann” (51). 21 Efraín Kristal, refining previous critical judgment regarding the allusion to Chesterton at the beginning of the tale, calls “Tema del traidor y del héroe” “a Baroque version” of G. K. Chesterton’s story, “The Sign of the Broken Sword” (130). 22 Molloy cites parallels with Symbolist aesthetics in her discussions of Borges’s stories in her essential study, translated by Oscar Montero as Signs of Borges. For example, she cites their “hesitation” (Signs 2) and “indeterminacy” (31). She writes,

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one which recalls the prologues of the Quijote. The narrator proposes a plot: “he imaginado este argumento, que escribiré tal vez,” which is to take place in a generic oppressed country: “Digamos (para comodidad narrativa) Irlanda; digamos 1824” (531). The narrator in this interpolated23 tale is contemporary, dubbed Ryan; the historical moment he studies is from the early nineteenth century, the time of nationalist revolutions and their betrayal of the democratic principles upon which they were founded, an archetypal impasse embodied in the figure of Napoleon,24 but repeated most poignantly in those countries whose democratic and national consolidation was most frustrated: “Polonia, Irlanda, la república de Venecia, algún Estado sudamericano o balcánico” (531). Like any detail in a Borges story, the references are not fortuitous; Robin Fiddian, continuing the strategy of reading Borges “out of [his] context” pioneered by Balderston, has identified a web of historical and literary intertextuality which structures the tale, noting that the references to the dates in the body of the story are to historic moments in the battles for Latin American independence, themselves marked by intrigue, conspiracy, and heroic rebellion.25 The entire tale, written in the wake of a pro-Axis military coup in Argentina, could thus be considered, in Fiddian’s words, “a two-fingered riposte to the nacionalista agenda: answering the call to treat a historical theme, for sure, but doing so ironically, in disregard of monolithic myths affirming the noble origins of the nation and in defiance of the junta’s cultural politics” (756). Nor is Borges’s selection of Ireland as the main stage of the story’s action accidental (Boldy 107–9; Sheehan). The tale is structured as a detective story26 “Nostalgia for names, the tempting magic of names and finally, the failure of names— simulacra the very moment they are uttered—are constants in Borges (83). She writes of the avoidance of the “fixity of names” (83) in Tlön: “In Tlön the mere act of naming, of classifying ‘implies a falsification’ (L10) … In Tlön there are neither names nor numbers; there is no moon because an effort is made to have no moon. Like l’absente de tous bouquets, it goes unnamed, alluded to and convoked by a divergence—a “transposition,” as Mallarmé called it—that eludes direct naming” (85). 23 Molloy states that “The entire story functions through deferral and interpolation” (Signs 37). 24 Daniel Balderston, Faculty Colloquium, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa, 2007. 25 Fiddian states, “Romantic nationalism of the early and mid-nineteenth century supplies both the broad historical matrix and the rationale behind the range of plot locations put forward by the narrator of “Tema del traidor y del héroe” (752) and “From a historical perspective, the interleaving of ‘algun estado sudamericano’ in among a list of countries or states including Ireland, Poland, Venice, and Greece points faithfully to a wider context of struggle, in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, for independence from a host of imperial powers: Great Britain, Russia, France, Austria, the Ottoman Empire and lest we forget, Spain” (753). 26 This is Ana María Barrenechea’s observation, as cited by Armando Zubizarreta

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in which the initial epigraph is the first clue and one which anticipates, indeed necessitates (as a case of “la armonía preestablecida”), the seemingly casual choice of Ireland “(para comodidad narrativa)” in the second paragraph. The epigraph is a quotation from William Butler Yeats—a modernist disillusioned with the violence of his own country’s belated struggle for independence and democracy. The quotation is taken from the poem “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” written by Yeats in reaction to the failure of the 1916 Easter Rebellion, in which a secret group of Irish nationalists, including the poet Padraig Pearse, seized the Dublin General Post Office and other official buildings. In response, as Stephen Burt writes, “British administrators reacted harshly, executing sixteen of the rebels and incarcerating other nationalists— thus creating martyrs, as Pearse had hoped, and turning Irish opinion sharply toward the more radical nationalist party, Sinn Fein” (1). Communal violence intensified, leading to the deaths of acquaintances and family members of Yeats’s patron, occasioned by both sides of the conflict (2). Thus the Yeats epigraph mourns the descent of history into barbarism:27 So the Platonic Year Whirls out new right and wrong, Whirls in the old instead; All men are dancers and their tread Goes to the barbarous clangour of a gong.

Borges’s tale echoes elements of the Easter uprising lamented by Yeats, in its depiction of an Irish nationalist conspiracy. In the story, the narrator, Ryan, is writing the biography of his great grandfather, the hero Fergus Kilpatrick. In the process he discovers a number of disturbing coincidences with other historical events, amounting to cyclical repetitions or recombinations of the same features. In particular, the specific parallels he finds with the history of Julius Caesar’s death led him to posit una secreta forma de tiempo, un dibujo de líneas que se repiten. Piensa en la historia decimal que ideó Condorcet; en las morfologías que propusieron Hegel, Spengler y Vico; en los hombres de Hesíodo, que degeneran desde el oro hasta el hierro. Piensa en la transmigración de las almas…. (537)

Here the initial parallel suggested by the introduction of the Yeats quote (13, n. 13). 27 Yeats’s disillusion led him to support Ireland’s Blueshirts, “fascist or quasifascist militias” (Burt 5), suggesting an association with Peronist bonapartism and to the phenomenon of a fascist avant-garde. This relates to Balderston’s discussion (24) of right-wing modernism as a context for Valéry and others, citing Frederic Jameson’s Fables of Agression: Wyndham Lewis, the Modernist as Fascist.

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branches into multiple “scripts”—teleological schemes—for the design of history: Hegel’s vision of progress, Spengler’s notion of an alternation between rise and decline, Vico’s concept of a repeating cycle of three ages, Hesiod’s idea of the four ages of man, Condorcet’s mathematical formulas for the guarantee of democracy, Platonic cycles of civilization and barbarism, and the doctrine (favored by modernists like Yeats) of the transmigration of souls. The question of whether history might indeed follow a script is then itself problematized; as Ryan is soon to learn, indeed it might. He discovers the recurrence of lines from Shakespeare’s Macbeth in words spoken to Kilpatrick: “Que la historia hubiera copiado a la historia ya era suficientemente pasmoso; que la historia copie a la literatura es inconcebible…” (532). Here, as Rebecca Sheehan points out, Ryan’s foundering in these “laberintos circulares” of thought themselves repeat the musings of Yeats’s “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen: “A man in his own secret meditation | Is lost amid the labyrinth that he has made | In art or politics”.28 Soon Ryan is able to piece together an explanation. Kilpatrick’s associate, James Alexander Nolan, had the makings of a scriptwriter. He had translated Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar into Gaelic and had written on the Swiss Festpiele, massive theatrical pieces which staged historic episodes in the towns where they had occurred. These skills in dramaturgy were enlisted when he discovered that Kilpatrick had betrayed the cause, and a Shakespearean plot is scripted to execute the traitor in a staged assassination, designed, like the Easter Rebellion, to create a martyr for the cause of national liberation. The conspiracy introduces an element of prophetism into the tale; Kilpatrick’s murder in a theatre is said to prefigure the assassination of Lincoln, and some curious loose ends, apparently intended to suggest the truth to some future historian, are left in the script. After deciphering the real events behind the scenes, Ryan then intentionally silences his discovery and publishes his biography dedicated to the glory of the “hero.” There the story ends—in

28 See Sheehan on the influence of Yeats’s poem, its concept of history, and its use of the figure of the labyrinth in Borges’s story. See Boldy for further discussion of the parallels between Borges and Yeats, and in particular on the similarities between Kilpatrick and Parnell (107–9). Of interest also is Borges’s poem, “La luna,” which combines the reference to “La luna sangrienta de Quevedo” of his “A un viejo poeta” with “la hechizada dragon moon que da horror a la balada.” The references to the dragon as a symbol of violence occur in Yeats’s “Nineteen Nineteen,” significantly just before the quotation from which the epigraph to “Tema del traidor y del héroe” is taken. See Ariadna García-Bryce, “Borges criollista,” on the violent, apocalyptic imagery of “La luna” in light of Maurer’s study of “A un viejo poeta” referenced in n. 18. The poems reinforce the effect of the “written scar” circulating within history and the Baroque as a marker of that historical wound.

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fulfillment of its own prophetic beginning—with the comment, “también eso, tal vez, estaba previsto” (534). As Gregg Lambert points out, Borges’s own definition of the Baroque as a style defined by self-exhaustion and parody could well be applied to the tale in its elaboration of a mise en abîme, composed of multiple variants of the original historical plot to murder Cesar, the prototype for the hero who betrayed his own republican cause.29 The replication of the literary plot of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar further defines the mise en abîme as a kind of face-off between history and literature, representing within modernity the epistemological tension of the Baroque as a period, in which history and literature begin to separate out as disciplines, within a more general project of the secularization of knowledge. These tensions are in evidence in early modern royal genealogies and chronicles as well as in their literary parodies— the Quijote being a prime example. In a display of literary virtuosity, “Tema del traidor y del héroe” raises the dynamics of the earlier story, “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote,” to the second power, by representing the rewriting of a Baroque drama as its own performance. This move on Borges’s part is suggestive of Cervantes’s technique of a later “staging” of a problematic portrayed at an earlier point in the Quijote. In this effect Borges also realizes the Symbolist return of the Baroque. When Nolan’s staging of Kilpatrick’s assassination is said to prefigure the assassination of Lincoln, we are presented with a case of the secularization of Judeo-Christian eschatology in the assignment of a scriptural function to literature. This feature of Symbolism, what Joshua Landy has termed its “secular re-enchantment of the world,” continues onward from modernismo into the Latin American Neobaroque, in such plays with temporality as that typified by Gabriel García Márquez’s Crónica de una muerte anunciada. By inserting the absurd notion that Kilpatrick’s assassination prefigured Lincoln’s (“que la historia copie a la literatura es inconcebible”), Borges leaves his own loose end for his readers, thereby engaging the technique of deliberate anachronism described in “Pierre Menard” in a mise en abîme of authorial performance. But beyond such avant-garde Neobaroque theatrics, he also performs a literary rendition of a debate which develops among modern historians over the ostensibly prophetic function of history and over the degree 29 112–13, citing Borges’s introduction to La historia universal de la infamia (117–18). The notion that the story is structured as a mise-en-abîme has also been noted by Boldy (112) and García-Bryce (Diss. 183), who views the tale as an example of how Borges moves between “allegorical and concrete history” (182). As she writes, “History and metaphysics are brought together and juxtaposed in an endless series of mises-en-abîme” (183). Not all critics have taken a historical turn; most recently, Lindsay Kerr and Bill Richardson return to a philosophical reading of Borges, locating the comparison with Góngora in their common approach to the limits of knowledge.

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to which narrative as a form constricts its telling by imposing a pre-ordained teleology.30 In so doing, Borges’s tale opens the door to questions of historicism both specifically related to the Baroque and, as Balderston suggests, to more general issues related to the changing conceptions of history as a discipline. Balderston matches Borges’s oblique approach to “de Certeau’s observations on newer kinds of history writing,” citing De Certeau as follows: The historian is no longer a person who shapes an empire. He or she no longer envisages the paradise of global history. The historian comes to circulate around acquired rationalizations. He or she works in the margins. In this respect the historian becomes a prowler. In a society gifted at generalization, endowed with powerful centralizing strategies, the historian moves in the direction of the frontiers of great regions already exploited. He or she “deviates” by going back to sorcery, madness, festival, popular literature, the forgotten world of the peasant, Occitania, etc., all of these zones of silence (79, emphasis in original, as cited by Balderston 9).

De Certeau is suggesting the methods which become key in the “history of mentalities,” pioneered by the Annales School of historiography, so-called for its association with the French journal which promoted a new “history from below,” of which the Spanish historian of the Baroque, José Antonio Maravall, has been considered an exemplary Hispanic practitioner.31 Toward the Political Unconscious Recent scholarship on the genealogy of history’s engagement with psychology, notably in the recent memoir on the Annales School by André Burguière, casts the imprecision of the study of the so-called “spirit” of the historical age (“Zeitgeist”) in sharp relief. On the one hand, the Annalists reacted against a narrative model of historiography with its teleology of progress and introduced a valuable consideration of psychological factors in mass culture, reflecting in part the personal experience of its leading figures Marc Bloch and Lucien 30 Hayden White made this argument in his application of Northrup Frye’s genre theory to the narration of history. André Burguière notes similar ideas expressed by Paul Veyne and later by Paul Ricoeur (243). I thank Brian Gollnick for raising the relevance of White’s theories to the tale (Faculty Colloquium discussion, 2007). Balderston, in his defense of his new strategy for reading Borges in historical context, refers to the mutual scandals history and literature create for each other, and references Hayden White regarding “the scandal that narrative fiction—and theory—constitute for history” (17). Venegas, Malaver Cruz, and Alonso all remark on the relevance of Hayden White’s work to this story. 31 See Appendix II for a detailed discussion of the Annales School and Maravall’s La cultura del barroco.

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Febvre in World War I combat (Burguière 30–31, 32); on the other hand, the vocabulary of mentalities often seems to imply a direction to the course of time as a kind of Bildung of the individual subject projected onto the fabric of history—for example, in terms such as “the social unconscious” or “the collective unconscious.” Such anthropomorphism is implicitly deconstructed by Louis Althusser’s later admonition that history is a process without a subject. As John Beverley writes (voicing concerns also held by Anthony Cascardi), “The time of the individual subject was not commensurate with the time of history. That was Althusser’s attack on historicism, on the remnants of Hegel in Marxism.”32 Cascardi’s and Beverley’s signaling of the importance of Althusser’s work recalls the essential and earlier critique of Fredric Jameson, whose essay “On Interpretation” in his study The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act clarifies Althusser’s position. Jameson argues for “a provisional qualification of Althusser’s antiteleological formula for history (neither a subject nor a telos), based as it is on Lacan’s notion of the Real as that which ‘resists symbolization absolutely,’ and on Spinoza’s idea of the ‘absent cause’” (35). As he writes, We would […] propose the following revised formulation: that history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious” (The Political Unconscious 35).

In looking at literature as a form of symbolic resolution of unresolvable political and social contradictions, Jameson defines the political unconscious within a Marxist hermeneutic as “that which cannot be thought,” “what the texts seeks to repress,” the silenced voice in an ongoing class dialogue (79–80; 49; 85). Jameson’s theory elucidates the critical imperative expressed by critics such as Dorfmann, Balderston, and Molloy to read the “written scars” in 32 Essays (184); see also, again, Beverley’s essay on Baroque historicism (especially 139, 142), as well as Lambert (8–9) on the relationship of the Baroque to the notion of cultural Bildung. Jenckes implies an earlier version of Althusser’s position when she points to Benjamin’s “nonorganic” model of history, elaborated in his translation essay and elsewhere (73). Anthony J. Cascardi asserts the importance of Althusser’s work on ideology in a critique of the notion of mentalities, suggesting that Hispanists use the theoretical writings of the Spanish Althusserian, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, to go beyond Américo Castro and Maravall. As he writes, “The existential historicism of Castro and the socio-economic analyses of Maravall can be supplemented by Althusserian models of subject-formation, and these in turn can benefit from an awareness of the process of fractured mimesis in the production and re-production of Spanish/colonial identities” (“Beyond Castro” 156).

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Borges’s play of ostensible master narratives. Put most simply, in Jameson’s words, “History is what hurts” (102). Formulations such as Jameson’s “political unconscious” or Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling,” within the context of the interpretive framework in which they arise, do not imply an organic model of history, but rather point to a collective and political solution to human suffering. Yet the terminology relies on the language of poetry, specifically metaphor, to express that which cannot be conceived in language proper to the social sciences. In its application to the Baroque, this critical vocabulary at times drifts beyond the simply metaphysical into metaphors of illness in the body politic or of archaic theology, in particular in its characterization of the Baroque and its impact on the modern. Thus for John Beverley, the Baroque is a persistent neurosis; for Christine Buci-Glucksmann, “Baroque reason” “has never ceased to haunt our present age.”33 Severo Sarduy associates the Baroque with Lacanian notions of the phantasmatic and the residual;34 this approach is nuanced by Francisco A. Ortega, who argues that the Baroque is the history of a phantom; it is spectral, because it ultimately signals “that which remains to be thought,” a yet unimagined future beyond the impasse which modernity represents (“Phantom” 194). If the vocabulary used here to describe the “emotional culture” of history tends towards the archaic, the mythopoeic, and the spiritual, this, then, is bound up with the historical frustrations of modernity, its psychic consequences, and with the Baroque as a marker for this frustration. To make a case for this dynamic of embedded aporias, I will begin a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” a document which anticipates Althusser in its critique of Stalinist and Social Democratic “stagist” conceptions of history.35 The “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: Benjamin’s Anti-Historicism in Context Benjamin’s “Theses,” written in 1940 shortly before his suicide in the face 33 Beverley,

Una modernidad obsoleta (25); Buci-Glucksmann (29). See Francisco A. Ortega, on Buci-Glucksmann and Bolívar Echevarría (“Regresos” 22–24). 34 As Sarduy writes, “El objeto (a) en tanto que cantidad residual, pero también en tanto que caída, pérdida o desajuste entre la realidad (la obra barroca visible) y su imagen fantasmática (la saturación sin límites, la proliferación, ahogante, el horror vacui) preside el espacio barroco. El suplemento…interviene como constatación de un fracaso: el que significa la presencia de un objeto no representable…” (OC 1402). 35 Jameson suggests that Benjamin’s “Theses” are similarly “coded” in a language which avoids such specific political references (The Political Unconscious 69 n. 48; Cf. 27 n. 12).

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of Nazi persecution, is a materialist response to the triumphalist historicism which the Annales School associated with nationalism and hegemony36. The first appendix to the eighteen theses is an especially poignant reprise of Benjamin’s position: A. Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the “time of the now” which is shot through with chips of Messianic time (263).37

Benjamin thus rejects a historicism based on a secularized version of Christian eschatology and instead secularizes Jewish messianism to describe the “revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past” in which the continuum of history explodes in moments of uprising (263).38 Benjamin’s opposition to reading history as a pilgrimage of beads rejects the carving up of history into teleological schemas of the sort Borges mentions in “Tema del traidor y del héroe.” Indeed, in an essential monograph, Kate Jenckes has argued eloquently for a more generalized parallel between Borges and Benjamin’s “allegorical” concept of the writing of history.39 Yet Benjamin’s anti-historicism should not be understood in absolute or idealist terms; for example, as the perpetual escape of the complexity of the past from the illusions of reification40 or as 36

On this feature of Annales School thought, see Burguière (36). All citations from Benjamin’s “Theses” are from Harry Zohn’s translation in Illuminations. 38 See Löwy’s study for a detailed discussion of Benjamin’s appropriation of Jewish theology for his materialist reading of history. 39 Sheehan also associates Borges’s mediations on history with Benjamin (36–7). 40 Here I will express a difference with Kate Jenckes, whose observations on the parallels between Borges and Benjamin can at times suppress the particularity of Marxist notions of anti-historicism and idealism. As she writes, “The sense of containment professed by idealism reached particularly dangerous heights in the twentieth century. Borges suggests that the belief that the world can be contained, comprehended, or represented without remainder is the basis of totalitarian movements, such as fascism and Stalinism. It is also the basis of what Benjamin calls historicism” (101). Such statements tend to ignore the centrality of Benjamin’s critique of Social Democracy which I describe in the following pages. Despite this difference, I find 37

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a rejection of “grand narratives” avant la lettre. Benjamin’s anti-historicism must be appreciated in context. Benjamin’s critique of the Social Democratic conception of history as an inevitable unfolding of progress, parodied in the opening image of the automaton of the first thesis, develops out of the experience of the historic failure of the Spartakusbund in 1919, the repression of the revolutionary uprising led by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxembourg by the Social Democratic government. For Benjamin, the uprising exposed the difference between the Social Democracy’s servile reformism and a historical materialism, which saw in 1919 a Jetzeit or “now time”: a revolutionary moment of identification with the ancient Spartacus rebellion and the radical wing of the French revolution. He describes the moment as one marked by a new sense of time, signaled by the firing on the clocks by the French revolutionaries and their introduction of a new calendar. This notion of temporal conjuncture appears under the sign of a different political perspective in Yeats’s gong, ringing out a return to barbarism, and the anachronistic appearance of a seventeenth-century clock in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar meant to underscore the playwright’s political message to his contemporaries.41 The languages of literature and politics mix in the project of the creation of national myth, which recycles the revolutionary imagery of the past in the service of “the invention of tradition.”42 Borges parodies this in his tale;43 Benjamin and Marx react to it as revolutionaries: The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution. (Thesis XIV, 261)44

The suppression of the Spartakus uprising by Social Democracy paved the way for the rise of fascism in Germany, in whose shadow Benjamin wrote her book to be outstanding for its meticulous reading of Benjamin in the original and for its incorporation of recent Latin American theoretical writings on Benjamin, all used to produce a creative new model for reading Borges. 41 This case of contaminatio is mentioned in the introduction to the play by Douglas Trevor, xxxvii. 42 This is Hobsbawm and Ranger’s term. 43 Balderston see the Borges story as enacting a case of the invention of tradition. Faculty Colloquium, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Iowa, 2007. 44 Here, Benjamin may be suggesting Marx’s comments on the citation of the imagery of the French Revolution in his introduction to The Eighteenth Brumaire. See the concluding pages of my chapter on Darío for further discussion of this point.

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the “Theses.” Indeed, the “Theses” are to a large degree an attempt to draw the lessons of the defeat of the Spartakists in order to rearm the working class against fascism. As Benjamin states, “One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm” (257). Michael Löwy writes that the French version of the “Theses” includes a reference to his comrades as “a defeated generation”; 45 this mood of revolutionary pessimism is perhaps the impetus behind Benjamin’s famous depiction of the angel of history: A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (Thesis IX, 257–58).

Benjamin’s view of history is conditioned by his familiarity with oppositional Marxist thinkers such as Rosa Luxembourg, whose work he knew via Luckás, and Leon Trotsky (Löwy 79, 82, 85; Eagleton 173–79).46 Löwy points out that Benjamin had read Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and was thus familiar with his contention that “development was uneven and combined” and that “the movement of history was necessarily heterogeneous” (85). Terry Eagleton writes Twentieth-century Marxism contains an anti-historicist theory that speaks like Benjamin of amalgamating archaic with more contemporary forms, and which grasps historical development not as linear evolution but as a shocking 45

Löwy (84). Terry Eagleton makes a case for some elements of parallel between Benjamin and Trotsky, particularly in their opposition to Social Democratic or popular frontist illusions in progress (173). Yet he is quick to note, “What remains an image in Benjamin becomes a political strategy in Trotsky” (178). Jameson, via Poulantzas, notes that “every social formation or historically existing society has in fact consisted in the overlay and structural coexistence of several modes of production all at once, including vestiges and survivals of older modes of production” (The Political Unconscious 95) and later refers to the struggle between these modes as “permanent,” their coexistence constituting “a kind of metasynchronicity” (97). Here he reprises, apparently unaware, Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. 46

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20 INTRODUCTION constellation of disparate epochs. It was this hypothesis—the hypothesis of Trotsky’s Results and Prospects … which … [was] generalized as the theory of permanent revolution … (178).

Benjamin’s anti-historicism is thus a product of a Marxist tradition of opposition to a stagist and nationalist view of history such as that defended not only by Social Democracy but by the Third International under Stalin. Benjamin’s contribution lies in his tying this oppositional tradition to both a secular and revolutionary interpretation of Jewish messianism and to the intellectual project of the literary critic. Benjamin and Symbolism Curiously, Benjamin’s methodology has been identified not only with Marxist but also with Kabbalistic and Symbolist hermeneutics; in these latter features, he parallels Jorge Luis Borges.47 Charles Rosen calls Benjamin “the last great Symbolist critic—and the first, too, in a way—certainly the first to apply the poetic theory to historical criticism” (12).48 Interestingly, Borges and Benjamin are linked by a common friendship with Gershom Scholem.49 Eagleton describes a most poignant aspect of Kabbalistic thought: For certain Jewish mystics, indeed, there is no written Torah: the controlling text is radically decentered, grasped as always already mediated through oral tradition, viewed as no more than one crystallization of meanings that the tradition always holds in solution. For some Kabbalists, the scroll of the Torah used in synagogues […] is an allusion to the original Torah […]. When the Messiah comes, God will annul the existing Torah and compose its letters into other words; the text itself will not materially change, but God will teach us to read it in accordance with another scripture arrangement. For the anonymous author of the Kabbalistic Book of Configuration (c. 1250), in every shemittah (cosmic cycle) men and women will read something entirely different in the Torah, as its letters ceaselessly exchange and combine (116).

Beyond Menardian parody, Benjamin’s enactment of a Symbolist criticism combines such a ritual celebration of the text with a Marxist understanding of historical conjuncture. In this sense Benjamin corresponds politically to an aesthetic avant-garde, refunctionalizing an outmoded religious discourse 47

See Carilla (519) and Alazraki on Borges and Kabbala; see Jenckes on Benjamin and Borges. 48 Charles Rosen’s study is cited by Eagleton (117, n. 31). 49 Benjamin’s friendship with Scholem is well known; Borges’s is not. Alazraki cites a conversation with Borges in which he admits to have read and re-read Scholem’s The Kabbala and its Symbolism and to have considered Scholem a friend (6).

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in the service of revolutionary politics in a way analogous to Mallarmé’s use of it to celebrate language.50 Eagleton describes Benjamin’s sense of the task of the critic before the text, which shares a sacred quality with Scripture in its autonomy from authorial intention: “As non-intentional constellations, texts may be deciphered only by the equally ‘sacred’ pursuits of critique and commentary” (117). In Benjamin’s hermeneutics, the model of constellation operates simultaneously in the registers of poetry and of history. Trauma and the Haunting of History Christine Buci-Glucksmann has linked Benjamin’s concept of historical catastrophe with its aesthetic expression, as a kind of alienation effect which runs through Baroque allegory into fin de siècle decadence and the twentiethcentury avant-garde. She defines Benjamin’s “archeology of modernity” as an attempt to trace the “excess” of history: Such is the concept of catastrophe, as a way of thinking history and art, with its many variants: trauma, shock, Baudelairean spleen, surrealist and then Brechtian montage, melancholy, distancing, states of emergency and—the final representation of the non-representable—death (48).

Her allusion to trauma here could be considered a reference to Benjamin’s application in 1939 of Freud’s writings on trauma to the phenomenon of “shock” in Baudelaire (Illuminations 160–65). Yet Benjamin’s interest in trauma and its aesthetic expression—from the Baroque onward—links him to a series of cultural interventions of the early twentieth century which relate the experiences of war and imperialism to the expression of “historical” trauma. I have already mentioned that the founders of the Annales school were moved to develop the concept of mentalities in part out of their experience of trauma as soldiers in World War I. Recent interest in the application of trauma theory to literature has focused on a similar problematic in Virginia Woolf’s work; her Mrs. Dalloway (1925) juxtaposes, implicitly, Woolf’s own experience of sexual trauma (a product of “the war at home”), channeled productively into art, with the destructiveness of trauma in the returned World War I veteran, Septimus (De Meester). Freud’s writings, published by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, discuss such sexual trauma in his famous work on hysteria, which become a focus for Iris Zavala in her studies of Darío’s swan poems as a reaction to colonial trauma in the context of the rise of imperialism. While this period—marked by Freud’s studies on hysteria, the Spanish 50 See Jameson on the compensatory autonomization of that which is fragmented in the process of capitalist reification, whether it be “the older unities” such as features of religious ritual or language itself (The Political Unconscious 63).

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22 INTRODUCTION

American War, the publication of Lenin’s Imperialism and the onset of world war, with its legacy of communal violence—is a key moment for the study of trauma and modernity, war and rape link colonial trauma from the Hispanic Baroque into the contemporary era. The sweep of this brief sampling of the cultural expression of the relationship between trauma and modernity is broad, and the theoretical tools to investigate it are problematic at best. George Mariscal has warned of the implicit anachronism in using the terms of modern psychoanalysis to critique texts of the early modern; such applications, he argues, assume a trans-historical and universal human subject by failing to take into account historical variations such as differences in family structure (Contradictory Subjects 71).51 One way around this might be to follow the example of Cynthia Marshall, whose work on early modern masochism remains historically cogent; for her, early modern cases of “self-shattering” render, in their own specificity, what Freud would later recognize in his own context as masochism (36–7). Perhaps something similar could be said regarding the relationship between aspects of early modern European subjectivity and the modern Western concept of trauma. The colonial dimension of the issue presents further complications; Francisco A. Ortega’s work on el Inca Garcilaso’s narrative suggests that theorizing indigenous trauma of the colonization, given the cultural differences, would be much more complex.52 Mariscal raises another fundamental objection: because psychoanalytic theory is itself socially-constructed, it is also markedly flawed in its treatment of the problem of gender (61, 71). The early case studies of trauma in hysterics have been met with intense criticism in recent years. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s book, The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory validated feminist critiques with the authority of documentation from the Freud Archives. As leading feminist law professor Catherine A. MacKinnon put it,

51 There may be a case for a deeper structure of “the trauma response” in the evolution of the human species, which also could be historically inflected. Here Mariscal agrees, implicitly, with Jameson’s contention that “the structure of the psyche is historical, and has a history” (The Political Unconscious 62); in this regard Jameson points to Lacan’s characterization of hysteria as the “original sin of psychoanalysis” (The Political Unconscious 62 n. 40). 52 See Francisco A. Ortega, “Trauma and Narrative,” especially 398 n. 16. Drawing on the work of Kai Erickson (Caruth 185), Ortega argues that in addressing trauma in colonial texts, “we move from an individual and clinical notion of trauma to a collective and interpretative one, from one anchored on a modern psychological rationality to a non-psychological one” … “that allows us to grasp the workings of trauma in its cultural and historical specificity” (399, 400). Nb also his “Writing the History.”

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Originally a challenger of this nineteenth-century tradition, Freud at first believed that adult women who told him they were sexually abused as children were telling the truth. When he revised his view and decided that women were not, he became tradition’s heir. […] Jeffrey Masson has argued that Freud changed his mind for reasons that were ultimately obscure but appeared far more personal, ideological, and professionally pressured than clinically based. […] Masson’s book was more than iconoclastic; it threatened the ground on which psychoanalysis stands: more than Freud’s credibility, women’s lack of it. […] Once one realizes that the abuse is real, it is the doctor’s elaborate alibis for the perpetrators, and their fantastic theoretical reconstructions of the victims’ accounts, that require the “lively imagination.” The fantasy theory is the fantasy. (“Preface” xiii-xiv)

If one accepts Masson’s and MacKinnon’s arguments, as well as the other objections I have mentioned, one can only use the terminology of psychoanalysis “under erasure,” recognizing its use but also its limits in unraveling “the untold story” of the traumas of history.53 That being said, I do find some applications of modern trauma theory to early modern Hispanic texts to be compelling and evocative, and will rely on various contributions on the topic of trauma in Hispanic literature—by Francisco A. Ortega (on Inca Garcilaso), by María Antonia Garcés (on Cervantes), and Benjamin Cluff (on transgenerational haunting in Pedro Páramo) in my approach to the issue in this study.54 The Body and the Body Politic In drawing attention to issues of gender, I hope to continue the focus developed by Paul Julian Smith in Writing in the Margin and The Body Hispanic. While much early modern feminist scholarship has been directed to expanding the canon by recovering the lost voices of women writers, I will argue that it is also important to continue to apply an engagement with “the Woman Question” to new readings of the older canonical works by male authors. With this in mind, I will build upon my study of rape imagery in Góngora’s Soledades, in which I drew on Mary Gaylord’s writings as well as on the pioneering scholarship of feminist art historians such as Margaret Carroll and Diane Wolfthal.55 53 The term “untold story” is from Mary Gossy. See also Catherine Belsey’s wellelaborated argument for the use of Lacan’s terminology in feminist critique. 54 See also other important essential bibliography of trauma theory applied to literature: Geoffrey Hartmann, Cathy Caruth, Dominick La Capra, Ruth Leys, Marianne Hirsch, Hernán Vidal, as well as the essential Freud writings, and Francisco A. Ortega’s anthology of major critical essays on trauma translated into Spanish (Trauma, cultura). 55 See Chapter 2 in Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades.

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24 INTRODUCTION

Wolfthal’s now classic study, Images of Rape: The “Heroic” Tradition and Its Alternatives, provided me with the basis for developing an interpretation of Góngora’s use of idealized Ovidian rape imagery—what Carroll terms “an erotics of absolutism”—in the context of ideological critique. Wolfthal has pointed to the importance of the image of the rape of the Sabine women in early modern art, commonly used as an emblem on wedding banners. Because some of the Sabines had accepted the rape, they became models of female self-sacrifice; as the mothers of the first Romans, they represented female compliance with civic duty in the interest of the nation. The idealization of the rape of the Sabines, the camouflaging of the brutality of sexual violence in this emblem of Renaissance and Baroque art, is an early modern case of what Doris Sommer calls a “foundational fiction”: marriage portrayed as a myth of social and sexual harmony at the origins of the nation (29). This feminist scholarship linking sublimated sexual politics and nationbuilding provides me with a basis for developing a problematic of the body and of gender as a component of the crisis of modernity. The idealization of classical “heroic rapes” signaled by Wolfthal56 is implicated in the construction of the patriarchal state as a prototype for colonial domination. Historically, Zeus’s rapes are said to refer to the conquest of the shrines of the Goddess of earlier matriarchal cultures (Graves I.14.1); his rapes are in essence rapes of the Goddess as she was manifested in the form of one of her sacred animals (Daly 85). In a seductive form of syncretism, the iconography of Goddess worship is reversed to entice the submission of the newly conquered; the rapist of the new religion is given the attributes of the old, resonant with nostalgia for a previous harmony between the sexes and with nature. The mythic glorification of rape becomes paradigmatic in the construction of state ideology and national identity. The rape of the Sabines thus becomes a parallel myth to the Aeneid in the epic of the founding of Rome; the violence of conquest is camouflaged; a false consciousness is established which eroticizes the subordination of woman to man and the indigenous to the conquerors. None of this is irrelevant to the political project of the Hapsburg court, which enshrined its imperial aspirations in the myth of a Christianized Roman empire established by the supposed “last descendant of Aeneas” (Tanner). The lofty idealized rapes in Hapsburg art are sustained by a traumatic underside of the mass rape of indigenous women in the New World. As I will demonstrate, the recurrence of the Baroque in Hispanic Symbolism and its successors will revisit the political significance of rape imagery in poetry. It will reprise its idealization, its defamiliarization, and finally give rise to the construction of an oppositional voice in the new poetry of the indigenous woman. The critique of gender relations will supplement the avant-garde

56

Wolfthal notes that this term was coined by Susan Brownmiller (7).

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project in other Hispanic texts as well, drawing on the fact that the oppression of women functions as the most primal and naturalized model of dominance. The repetition of cycles of violence within the telos of the nation-state, which Borges associates with the history of Latin America (“algún estado sudamericano”), and which Borges and Benjamin cast as a succession of Cesars, can be linked to what Virginia Woolf described in Three Guineas, as “the procession of educated men” (62). I interpret her protest as a suggestion that feminism has a role in “the fight for the oppressed past,” to redeem the psychic and social trauma within the body politic, beyond the impasse of modernity. Reading the Body Hispanic through the Prism of the Transatlantic In composing this monograph, my hope has been to overcome the disciplinary division between Peninsular and Latin American literary studies by analyzing texts from both sides of the Atlantic, at times together within the same chapter, at other times through the broader, panoramic effect of their juxtaposition. My intention is to develop an understanding of the recurring topic of modernity as an impasse in Hispanic culture, as has been argued by John Beverley, through an engagement with Baroque and modern literary texts, highlighting in particular the relationship between the peninsular Baroque and variants of the Latin American avant-garde. For Beverley, the Baroque is the cultural form of the impasse in the transition from feudalism to capitalism (Essays 12), but also the first cultural form of the modern, or even more, “una forma de neurosis cultural de América Latina en su etapa—no completada—post colonial” (Una modernidad obsoleta 25). In this sense, Góngora and his readers anticipate future expressions of “paralyzed dialectics” as “isolated and contradictory figures like the anti-bourgeois bourgeois intellectuals of post-1848 Europe” (Essays 71) and beyond. While building upon Beverley’s Benjaminian thesis,57 I also propose to continue the strategy of Paul Julian Smith’s writings by enlisting different theoretical tools in each chapter in order to complement this interdisciplinarity with new critical approaches. Proceeding chronologically, Chapter 1 will address a colonial topic, expanding Beverley’s argument that Góngora and his humanist circle constituted an early case of avant-garde, by showing how they used the imaginary of hermeticism to address the frustrated national ambitions of colonized peoples within the Spanish empire, the Moriscos and Amerindians. Engaging the anthropologist Carmen Bernand’s work, I will also consider Góngora’s involvement with Inca Garcilaso and the humanist Pedro de Valencia in the 57 Beverley continues, implicitly, Benjamin’s concept from his “Konvolut N” of The Arcades Project of constellation as an image of “dialectics at a standstill.” (463). Beverley contrasts his view of the Baroque to that of those who see in it a disruptive and revolutionary potential, such as Bolívar Echeverría (The Failure 131).

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26 INTRODUCTION

context of changing historiographic practices evoked by the Sacromonte debate. In so doing, I cast the broken colonized body politic—indigenous and Morisco—as the necessary first frame for understanding the Baroque impasse as a transatlantic phenomenon. Chapter 2 will use Francis Barker’s work, The Tremulous Private Body, as a theoretical framework for the examination of violence and subjection in three canonical texts of Spanish Golden Age literature; the anonymously written picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes; Lope de Vega’s play, Fuenteovejuna; and Luis de Góngora’s long lyric poem, the Soledades. While Fuenteovejuna affirms hegemony by incorporating the rebellion of peasants and women, the Soledades does so obliquely by incorporating the critique of the agrarian aristocracy who were Góngora’s patrons. In contrast, the Lazarillo stands out as the most radical of the three in its subversion of the official discourse of church and state. Termed a case of “parody of Erasmian parody” (Rufinatto) and written in the wake of the suppression of the Comunero uprising, the novel is an early case of the impasse of modernity which anticipates the dynamics of the Baroque. All three texts are contradictory works of transition that depict a common violence toward the body—the violence toward the older sacramental body that Barker saw as a marker for the development of early modern subjectivity—and anticipate creatively both the birth of the modern subject and its negation. Chapter 3 examines trauma, body, and machine in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote, applying Wolfgang Kayser’s theory of the grotesque to a reading of the spectacular display of the body in the second prologue. In this short but essential text, Cervantes grapples with topics of trauma, violence and subjection, evincing transatlantic parallels in the advent of the mechanization of labor, whose model is most fundamentally that of the indigenous mine worker, the broken indigenous body that subtends imperial production in the early modern. In this chapter I also apply recent studies of the portrayal of early modern science in the novel as well as of what Francisco A. Ortega, drawing on Ivonne del Valle’s work, has understood as the “technologies of the self” (“Phantom”188; Valle, “Jesuit Baroque” 144). The next three chapters will examine modern Latin American texts, moving from modernismo, through the avant-garde and Neobaroque, to Post-Symbolism in poetry. We will explore the topic of Symbolism as a marker for the impasse of modernity announced by the Baroque, beginning with the constellation between Góngora and Rubén Darío. Chapter 4 studies continuities of Góngora’s poetry in Rubén Darío’s famous swan poems, examining the political significance of rape imagery in the modernista appropriation of Symbolist figures. Here I expand my work on the Góngora-Symbolist parallel, applying theoretical writings on modernismo, postcoloniality, and the political unconscious. Chapter 5 will focus on the topic of pilgrimage in a transatlantic view of Baroque and modern texts. Here I will again use Góngora’s Soledades

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as a Baroque prototype, arguing that the poem can serve as a base from which to examine failed pilgrimage as a recurring topos in Latin American texts which confront the Baroque legacy of frustrated modernity. Alejo Carpentier’s “El camino de Santiago,” Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, and César Vallejo’s “Trilce LXV” constitute a sort of progeny of this Gongorine topos, contrasting in their different relation to the messianic. While Góngora, Rulfo and Carpentier present historical repetition as a form of paralysis, Vallejo presents the frustration of historical progress in equally graphic terms, but also offers hope in his engagement with possibility from a socialist perspective. His poem, in its focus on the maternal body, suggests the “weak Messianic power” of which Benjamin writes, one which engages the future without a pre-established teleology, locating pilgrimage instead in the collective and open space of human potential. The final chapter develops my exploration of the response to Symbolist poetics in Darío’s successors, leading into the avant-garde and more recent poetry, again with a focus on the political function of the imagery of rape. A guiding theoretical text will be Joshua Landy’s recent reading of Mallarmé’s poetry as a case of the “secular re-enchantment of the world.” Signposts in this genealogy of Latin American Post-Symbolism will include poems by Delmira Agustini, Alejandra Pizarnik, Roberto Sosa, and the contemporary indigenous poets, Leonel Lienlaf and Graciela Huinao. My hope is that the chapters in their aggregate will develop a broader view of the trajectory of Hispanic modernity at its most poignant junctures, cast in sharper relief by a focus on the relationship between the body and the body politic and by the application of innovative critical approaches.

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1

Góngora and the Colonial Body Politic: Moriscos, Amerindians and Poetry as Protest In this chapter I will address a colonial topic, expanding Beverley’s argument that Góngora and his humanist circle constituted an early case of avantgarde, by showing how they used the imaginary of hermeticism to address the frustrated national ambitions of colonized peoples within the Spanish empire, the Moriscos and Amerindians. I will also consider Góngora’s specific engagement with Inca Garcilaso and the humanist Pedro de Valencia in the context of changing historiographic practices within the empire, which were evoked by the Sacromonte debates. Literary critics have long recognized that Luis de Góngora’s great lyric poem of the Spanish Baroque, the Soledades, engages with the problem of imperial expansion and domestic agrarian crisis, citing the influence of the humanist Pedro de Valencia upon the poet. While the critique of the voyages of exploration is a well-remarked feature of the poem, aspects of the impact of imperial history and its literature upon the work continue to be elucidated. Most importantly, Mercedes Blanco has identified an encoded critique of the South Pacific expansion, specifically of Fernández de Quirós’s aspirations for the colonization of Australia (Góngora heroico, 321–27; 331n). Recently, I have suggested that on the domestic side, the poem incorporates symbolic criticism of the expulsion of the Moriscos (Chemris, “Falconry Scene”; “Biblical Architecture”). I will now propose a global integration of these concerns, focusing on the transatlantic incorporation of humanist and utopian thought in the Soledades—and in some of Góngora’s other poems—via Pedro de Valencia’s writings and the Comentarios reales of Inca Garcilaso. I will argue that Valencia’s writings on social issues and on the Moriscos should be considered in concert with his lesser known work on the American and Pacific colonization, given his appointment as Royal Chronicler for not only Castile but the Indies (1607–1620) (Magnier 6). I will also engage with the anthropologist and biographer Carmen Bernand’s provocative assertions, which locate Góngora, Pedro de Valencia, and Inca Garcilaso within conflicted humanist circles that grappled with the status of national minorities and with new Biblical and Eastern studies, in the context of emerging early modern disciplines of history, anthropology and archeology. In doing so, I will draw

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THE SPANISH BAROQUE AND LATIN AMERICAN LITERARY MODERNITY

on Mercedes García Arenal’s work in collaboration with Fernando Rodríguez Mediano, as well as upon a new volume of essays on Inca Garcilaso edited by Sara Castro Klarén and Christian Fernández.1 Góngora, Valencia and the Morisco Expulsion Before turning to colonial writing as a possible source for Góngora, I will briefly reprise the impact of Valencia’s social writings and of his treatise on the Moriscos.2 As Grace Magnier has pointed out, Pedro de Valencia was a student of the mystic and evangelist Juan de Ávila and continued his teacher’s concern for laborers in his support for a type of agrarian reform which included the Roman model of a public granary (21, 186–89, 240). Such a collective project was conceived within a concept of kingship in which the Christian monarch served as a “rey pastor” who protected his subjects from poverty (Magnier 367). John Beverley has pointed to the impossibility of effecting agrarian reform under feudal auspices, labelling Valencia’s program a form of “feudal socialism” and “avant-garde hegemony,” whose contradictory aspects engaged Góngora’s poetic ambitions (Essays 66–67; Against Literature 59, 20). Indeed, Góngora expressed various aspects of Valencia’s political program in the Soledades, in utopian models of rural community and in the famous “discurso contra navegaciones” of the first canto, in which an old serrano tearfully laments the loss of his son in the context of voyages of exploration driven by Codicia, greed (I. 360–506).3 Valencia had been a strong opponent of overseas expansion,4 arguing instead that Spain needed to focus on internal reform—promoting an economy driven by labor and agriculture rather than 1

García Arenal and Rodríguez Mediano’s work has been recently expanded by Seth Kimmel, who studies Spanish intellectual history in the context of early modern Church debates on evangelization. I thank John Beverley for suggesting the new volume on Inca Garcilaso to me, as well as for encouraging, along with Lisette Balabarca and Melissa Figueroa, the line of inquiry of this chapter. 2 In the discussion of Valencia, Góngora, and the Morisco expulsion which follows, I draw upon and summarize my article, “Góngora, the Moriscos and the Falconry Episode of the Soledades.” 3 See, for example, Woodward; Beverley, Aspects (6–8, 101, n. 15) and Essays (54–71); Blanco, “Valencia” and Chemris, “Arbitrismo.” Rivers discusses the serrano’s lament as emblematic of losses to Andalusian families caused by Spanish sea ventures (“Nuevo mundo” 857). 4 The one exception to Valencia’s opposition to overseas expansion was his support for conquering ports on the North African coast, a mission in which Góngora’s patrons, the Dukes of Medina Sidonia, participated, and which Góngora praised in his poetry. See Valencia’s “Consideraciones acerca de enfermedades y salud del reino” (c. 1618) (“Consideraciones” 515), and Morocho Gayo’s comments (“Introducción” 59). Dates for Valencia’s works are from the Universidad de León definitive edition

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on the influx of American silver; here he has been seen as anticipating the Physiocrats (Magnier 382–84). He also advocated for national integration, through evangelizing those Moriscos who were “flacos en la fe” rather than supporting the calls for their mass expulsion (269). While Valencia’s writings on agriculture and witchcraft have been seen by historians such as José Antonio Maravall5 as anticipating Enlightenment thinkers like Gaspar Melchor Jovellanos, his meditation on the problem of the Moriscos is implicated in a feudal communalist vision. Pedro de Valencia’s perspective on the Moriscos was conditioned by the particular experience of the regions of Valencia and Andalusia, where the Morisco population had a strong history of resistance, including the Revolts of the Alpujarras in Granada (1499–1500; 1568–1570). There the Moriscos were feared as a fifth column in the face of possible Ottoman incursion, and the Spanish nobility suppressed the revolts with a brutality similar to that of the conquest of the Amerindians.6 The stirrings of democratic revolution in the region were historically compromised by communalism; the germanías of Valencia, for example, included forced baptisms of the Moors, laborers on the estates of an aristocracy which defended them (Elliott 153). Valencia himself had ties, via the Duchess of Feria, to the “Congregación de la Nueva Restauración,” supporters of Lucrecia de León, a visionary who had advocated for the poor, in the anti-Habsburg tradition of the germanías, but who also voiced an anti-Islamic millenarianism (Magnier 80). Valencia justified the expulsion of the Jews and abhorred Islam; his defense of the Moriscos was thus not predicated on a modern notion of religious tolerance, but on the faith-based, contemporaneous grounds that they were baptized Christians.7 Valencia’s solution to communal strife entailed a combination of measures designed to weaken, control and disperse the Morisco population, as well as “permistión,” the assimilation of the Moriscos through intermarriage (Tratado 118–27).8 Trained in the late days of the School of Salamanca, of his complete works, overseen by Gaspar Morocho Gayo and referenced in Grace Magnier’s essential monograph on Valencia. 5 See his “Reformismo.” 6 See, for example, García Arenal and Rodríguez Mediano (113). It bears noting that the young Góngora wrote a laudatory sonnet for the prefatory pages of Juan Rufo’s La Austriada (1584), an epic poem praising the suppression of the Alpujarras revolt (Góngora y Argote, Sonetos 91–92). 7 Valencia, Tratado (107); Magnier (18, 292–93). 8 Valencia specifically opposed sending the Moriscos to the Americas, out of fear of the example their false conversion might pose for the newly converted Amerindians, as well as of the possibility their common cause might present to the Spanish: “harían daño en los indios con la doctrina, y en la paz de la tierra con la falta de lealtad” (Tratado 108; Paniagua Pérez, “Intro” 88–89). See Hutchinson and Martínez Góngora, “Política,” on the colonial aspects of Valencia’s “assimilationism.”

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Valencia advocated the suppression of Arabic, the exemplary education of select Morisco children under hostage-like conditions, and the shifting of Morisco laborers into sedentary work to weaken them (Paradinas, xxiii; Valencia, Tratado 100, 135–36).9 Such measures make the case for Mercedes García Arenal’s characterization of the Spanish post-Reconquista assimilation of Granada as “una empresa colonial” and the parallels with the treatment of the Amerindians, signaled in her pioneering essay, stand out (“Moriscos e indios” 169). Under such a transatlantic optic, the contradictions that Beverley has identified in Valencia’s program are laid bare within an alternative form of both domestic and overseas colonialism. I agree with Seth Kimmel’s argument that Valencia-—relative to pro-expulsion zealots like Ribera—was an apologist for “other kinds of religious instruction and social control” (151). Yet it would be a mistake to ignore the more critical aspects of Valencia’s thought, implicit in its dual nature as a form of “avant-garde hegemony” or loyal opposition. While Valencia never approximates a modern view of religious equality, he did oppose the notion of second class citizenship for New Christians and clearly opposed the expulsion in his Tratado acerca de los Moriscos de España (1606) (104–07; 123–35). In his passionate arguments against the expulsion, he specifically signals codicia and avaricia, greed and avarice, as the measure’s true motives cloaked by religion, given that Morisco property was to be confiscated under the plan: “Si se les quitan las haciendas, infámase todo el hecho, como procedido de aquesta codicia, aunque se le dé otro color” (104). He also protests, quite movingly, against the proposals to take Morisco children from their parents: Volviendo a la consideración de la justicia, ¿cómo se puede justificar con Dios ni con los hombres, ni qué corazón cristiano había de haber que sufriese ver en los campos y en las playas una tan grande muchedumbre de hombres y mujeres bautizados y que diesen voces a Dios y al mundo que eran cristianos, y lo querían ser, y que les quitaban sus hijos y haciendas por avaricia y por odio, sin oírlos ni estar con ellos a juicio, y los enviaban a que se tornasen moros?” (Tratado 106).

I have argued that Valencia’s compelling protest against injustice to the Moriscos found its way into Góngora’s poetry, and in particular, into the Soledades. In a subtle concatenation of literary imagery, parental grief at the hands of Codicia reverberates from the lament of Góngora’s serrano to signal also the parallel grief of Morisco parents, who indeed at the time of the

9 For a postcolonial reading of Morisco resistance, see Mary Elizabeth Perry. Conversely, Trevor Dadson writes of Christian tolerance, especially in regions where Moriscos had been long assimilated.

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expulsion suffered the confiscation of their belongings, and, in many cases,10 most tragically, of their children. Góngora’s literary protest against the expulsion was covert. Góngora rarely mentions the expulsion explicitly in his poetry; when he does, as in his 1609 tercets and in the ending of the Panegírico al duque de Lerma (1617), his meaning is ambiguous. The Panegírico ends abruptly, stopping the praise poem of the highlights of the duke’s career just after the peace treaty with the Dutch, but just before the order for the expulsion of the Moriscos. As Beverley argues, this may have been for an intended effect, a form of “strategic incompletion” characteristic of Góngora’s production (Essays 50–52). Indeed, the historians John Elliott and Antonio Feros both point to the timing of the expulsion order as an attempt to mitigate the unpopularity of the peace treaty with the Protestant “heretics” in the Netherlands and thus to appease the advocates of Catholic militancy (Elliott 301; Feros 203–04). By ending the Panegírico where he did, Góngora may have meant to critique the expulsion, using ambiguity as camouflage.11 In less explicit literary treatments of the topic of the Morisco expulsion, Góngora also evinces a critical pose. In his approach to the romance morisco, Góngora avoided the turn to chivalresque appropriations, which coincided with agitation on the expulsion and, in his more esteemed examples of the genre, elevates Andalusian Islamic hybridized culture through association with classical antiquity (Ball 260, 263; Jammes, Obra poética 324–34, 391). Mar Martínez Góngora has construed Góngora’s romances africanos “Entre los sueltos cabellos” (1585) and “Servía en Orán al rey” (1587) as positive representations of the North African “other” (“Los romances” 82–83) and interprets the interfaith relationship between a Spanish soldier and a Moorish lady of the second romance as a gesture of sympathy with Pedro de Valencia’s project of permistión (89). Here Góngora’s literary attention to the family as a microcosm for addressing national divisions recalls Cervantes’s defense of the intermarriage between Zoraida and the captive in the Quijote (see Gerli 40–60). In a related vein, Trevor Dadson, like Rosilie Hernández, has contextualized the novel’s Ricote episode within a narrative of Christian tolerance in regions where the Moriscos had been assimilated for generations (112).12 10 Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent (181, 185–87, 195). See also Perry’s eloquent and compelling examples (69–70, 98, 119, 147–49, 153–54, 172–74) and Henry Charles Lea (321–24). The expulsion occurred in various waves from 1609–1614 (Dadson). 11 Martos Carrasco suggests this possibility but retreats from adopting the position himself (Carreira 108; Martos Carrasco 24–26). 12 Hernández argues that in the Ricote episode, Cervantes exceeds Valencia’s program by showing the reader “the Moor amongst us,” the “Moor that need not disappear under the guise of assimilation” (124).

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In the Soledades, Góngora’s literary protest against the expulsion is developed through subtle, fragmentary allusions to Claudian’s Rape of Proserpine, a poem which highlights the theme of parental grief in Ceres’s loss of her daughter.13 While the fact that the major patrons of the arts, the duke of Lerma and his son in law, the count of Lemos, included the principal architect, beneficiaries and supporters of the expulsion14 of necessity limited the possibilities for criticism of the event in Góngora’s poetry, his regional patrons depended upon artisanal, agricultural and other types of Morisco labor as well as upon their ground rents, and had much to lose by the expulsion.15 Góngora not only mirrors Valencia’s protest but that of one of his principal Andalusian patrons, the Seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia, Alonso Pérez Guzmán el Bueno. Medina Sidonia was vested in maintaining Christian and aristocratic control of his Morisco vassals; like the Marqués de Priego and Inca Garcilaso (who was anxious to earn recognition of military and aristocratic status), he fought in the suppression of the Alpujarras rebellion.16 Nonetheless, within that feudal context, he protected his Morisco vassals as part of a bloc of nobles who depended upon their labor (Dadson 111). Most significant is the fact that Medina Sidonia questioned the theological basis of the expulsion, and specifically the question of the breaking up of families (Dadson 130; Dec 1609). Once the expulsion began, Medina Sidonia defied the king’s orders, patrolling the coasts in his capacity as Capitán General, refusing to track and apprehend Moriscos bent upon returning (Álvarez de Toledo 92). Thus, while Góngora’s critique conflates the regional self-interest of his patrons with his own ambitions for their support, he was not silent in the face of historical tragedy. In the reverberating mourning of the serrano, who grieves a son lost to Spain’s sea ventures, and in the subtly evoked desperation of Ceres, 13 The work has been recognized as a source, but not for the symbolism I suggest; see Micó. See Chemris, “Falconry Episode” for textual references and developed argumentation. More recently, I have signaled the use of allusions to arguments from Valencia’s Tratado in the poem as well as to sections of the Odyssey that extol hospitality to strangers, reinforcing my position that the poem encodes opposition to the expulsion. See Chemris, “The Greek and Biblical Architecture.” 14 Lerma and his son, the Duke of Uceda, his daughter, the Countess of Lemos, and Lemos himself, all received extravagant shares of the confiscation profits from the expulsion (Lea 373). 15 On the great productiveness of the Morisco population as agricultural and artisanal labor, especially in Valencia and Andalusia, see Lea (5–7, 327, 346). It is significant that the Duque de Béjar, father of the dedicatee of Quijote Book 1 and of the Soledades, protested against the second displacement of the Granada Moriscos of the 1580s as they were necessary for his harvest (Perry 131). A later Medina Sidonia even tried to get the Hornachos Moriscos who had settled in Rabat-Salé to return if they would convert (Salas Almela 164). 16 Salas Almela (241); Greene (203 and n. 27).

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Góngora also memorializes grief over the loss to and of Morisco families, bearing witness to the cruelty of what a number of historians now recognize as an early modern form of ethnic cleansing. Pedro de Valencia’s Colonial Writings Pedro de Valencia’s advocacy for the Moriscos roughly coincided with his appointment as Royal Chronicler, replacing Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, who had been imprisoned for participation in a court faction opposed to the powerful favorite, the Duke of Lerma (Kagan 197). With this appointment, Valencia became part of the Habsburg colonial bureaucracy, the intellectual cadre the Spanish court required to systematize information about the new territories; for this task, they drew upon a pool of humanists such as Valencia who had been trained in ancient history, some of which were also active in researching Spanish natural history and anthropology; Ambrosio de Morales, for example, documented peninsular ruins and folk traditions for his history of Spain (Paniagua Pérez, “Intro” 91; Bernand, “Hebreos” 12). Valencia was charged with compiling similar “relaciones geográficas” on the colonies based on a questionnaire the Count of Lemos had distributed to American informants while head of the Council of the Indies in 1604 (Paniagua Pérez, “Intro” 82). As Jesús Paniagua Pérez, in his introduction to the relaciones geográficas argues, Valencia sought to influence the policy of his patron through a kind of “muda crítica,” organizing the material in light of his own economic and social theories (87, 90). Specifically, he devoted relatively little attention to mineral resources relative to the number of questions devoted to these (87); instead he emphasized natural history (hydraulic basins, rivers, animals, plants, especially curative herbs) as well as ethnographic history, artisanal and commercial production (84–85, 87). He thus projected his Physiocratic sentiments onto his catalogs of natural wealth, regarding minerals as simply one other feature of natural resources (87). Conversely, his compilation also served him as research. Paniagua Pérez points to Valencia’s interest in land distribution practices by the Inca empire to possibly inform his views on agrarian collectivism (87–87). Thus he notes that Valencia, in his “Discurso sobre el acrecentamiento de la labor de la tierra” (c. 1607) counterpoises to Spanish laziness the cultural example of state encouragement of laboriousness among the Amerindians (89, citing Valencia, Escritos sociales 69–70; cf. Valencia, “Discurso sobre el acrecentamiento” 153). Yet, in the same discourse,—evincing a prejudicial attitude towards colonials of North African descent,—he condemns the Morisco’s industriousness in physical labor and farming; as Seth Kimmel points out, he “even argued […] that in order to rebrand agricultural work as

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honorable, Moriscos should be prevented from working in the fields” (171).17 Mar Martínez Góngora has expressed the contradiction in Valencia’s program best, claiming that his ideal of distribution of the land to those who worked it “resultaría incompatible con una visión de la comunidad morisca como clase subalterna” (“Política” 28). While Valencia’s own position was cast as honorific, he did have other assignments, one of which he refused for political reasons (Paniagua Pérez, “Cronista” 241). He would not produce a panegyric history of the Araucanian conquest, citing Spanish “injusticias, avaricia y crueldades” which he would have been obliged to report.18 He also criticized “la doctrina de la fuerza” advocated in Alonso Sánchez’s submitted history of Jesuit missions in China and the Philippines, as well as its lack of historiographic rigor (Jones 140). He did, however, grant “aprobaciones” authorizing publication to a small number of critical and ethnographic histories. These included his friend Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola’s La conquista de las Molucas, which Mercedes Blanco has shown to be a source for Góngora’s “discurso contra navegaciones” in the Soledades.19 The other major aprobación he issued was for Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Historia general del Perú (1617),20 the second part of the Comentarios reales (Paniagua Pérez, “Intro” 79), the 1609 work whose impact I will now investigate. Góngora and Inca Garcilaso: The Case for Acquaintance and Influence It is well known that Inca Garcilaso and Góngora were related, coincided in Córdoba, and shared acquaintances in humanist circles. Joaquín Roses has demonstrated this meticulously in a recent essay.21 We have little specific documentation of their interaction, however, with the exception of negotiations by Góngora to sell Inca Garcilaso his share of an annuity paid on 17 Here, Kimmel cites OC IV.1, 1994, 157–58; cf. Chemris, “Falconry Scene” (20, n. 4), where I cite the same point in Valencia’s Tratado (135–36). 18 AGI Memorial 17 de septiembre de 1616 (Paniagua Pérez, “Cronista” 240). 19 Góngora heroico (319–22; 331n); on their friendship: Paniagua Pérez, “Intro” (78). 20 Christian Fernández’s essential essay, “Política y mecenazgo” describes the steps taken by Inca Garcilaso to ensure the publication of this volume, documenting his relationships with the political and ecclesiastical powers of the time. 21 Roses maps out common routes for the writers along the streets of Córdoba, and documents, in concert with Carmen de Mora’s work, some common relationships with Diego de Mardones, Francisco de Castro, Francisco Fernández de Córdoba (Abad de Rute) and Bernardo de Aldrete. He also reprises the textual relationships he explored in his earlier article on Góngora and the Americas which I cite in this chapter (“El Inca”; “Ara”). On both issues, he continues the original observations of Aurelio Miró Quesada (178–83).

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their relative the Marqués de Priego’s debt. The early biographer John Varner suggests that there were ongoing tensions between the two regarding outstanding funds Inca Garcilaso owed Góngora related to this censo, and also that Góngora was “caste-conscious” and therefore reticent to bond with the half-indigenous mestizo.22 Roses shares these suspicions, but, like Aurelio Miró Quesada, also suggests the possibility, if not of friendship, that the two writers might have interacted in greater depth (“El Inca” 341–42; 353–54). Góngora’s father had been an interlocutor with Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, the staunch opponent of Bartolomé de las Casas’s advocacy for the indigenous in the church debates on evangelization. However, Robert Jammes, a leading authority on the poet, tends to discount this as an indicator of Góngora’s own attitudes (“Retrogongorisme” 47). Indeed, the notion of Góngora’s “castemindedness” is problematic; Enrique Soria Mesa has now decisively proven that Góngora was of judeoconverso origin, undoing the legacy of Francoist historiography which had appropriated Góngora as a national, Old Christian poet. Soria Mesa affirms that Góngora’s converso heritage was vox populi among his contemporaries and also suspects that Góngora was himself (like Inca Garcilaso) illegitimate.23 None of this guarantees Góngora’s sympathy with Inca Garcilaso, but, following Carmen Bernand’s intuition of a common bond based on being alienated and covertly critical New Christians, might point in that direction (Un Inca 187, 287). It bears noting that Ambrosio de Morales, the antiquarian who testified to Góngora’s “limpieza de sangre” (Old Christian heritage) to support his candidacy for his ecclesiastical position as racionero of the Cordoba cathedral, was also a main protector and mentor to Inca Garcilaso (Bernand, “Hebreos” 24). In any case, we should consider that “caste-consciousness” and much worse were inherent features of the estates we are discussing: Góngora’s family, Pedro de Valencia and Inca Garcilaso, for example, all owned slaves (Magnier, 44; Jammes, Obra poética 202, n. 34; Fuchs, Mimesis 74, Varner 249–50). It is in this context that Gongora used “black talk” in a sonnet attacking Lope de Vega, thereby undermining black African voice (Kelley). Regardless of whether or not Góngora might have harbored any animus towards Inca Garcilaso, there are significant indications of a common context and confluence of projects which might have led to some structural homology in their writings. Most critics acknowledge Aurelio Miró Quesada’s early speculation about Góngora’s knowledge of Inca Garcilaso’s work: 22

Varner (351), Jammes, Obra poética (22, n. 28). Jammes and Miró Quesada (180) note that the Marqués de Priego himself was an old enemy of the poet, using the charge of Jewish ancestry to delay an appointment of one of Góngora’s relatives. 23 Soria Mesa, “Góngora judeoconverso,” El origen judeoconverso de Góngora, and “El catedrático.” Bernand notes that Homer, “hijo de Hermes,” to whom Góngora was compared, was also illegitimate (“Soles” 5).

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A pesar de la falta de datos concretos al respecto (la relación de amistad entre Góngora y el Inca Garcilaso) puede conjecturarse también que la relación directa o indirecta que ha de haber mantenido Góngora con el Inca Garcilaso y el indudable conocimiento de su labor de historiador, contribuyeron a que el ilustre cordobés hiciera varias de las referencias al Perú que se encuentran en su obra poética (181; cf. Cancelliere, “Las rutas” 81 and Mora 114–15, n. 37).

Continuing the reasoning of a more recent biographer, Christian Fernández, John Beverley makes a similar point (as does Roses), pointing to an overlap in the publication of the Comentarios reales (1609) and the first drafts of the Soledades (1612) which might indicate Inca Garcilaso’s work as a source for Góngora’s allusions related to the Incas in the poem (Castro Klarén and Fernández 364 n. 6).24 Of these, the most remarked by critics seems general and decorative; for example, the Inca princess’s pearl necklace formed by the sea foam surrounding the prow of a boat: éste, con perezoso movimiento, el mar encuentra, cuya espuma cana su parda aguda prora resplandeciente cuello hace de augusta Coya peruana, a quien hilos el Sur tributó ciento de perlas cada hora. (Soledades II. 62–68)

The other direct reference to the Incas in the Soledades occurs after the American raptor, the Aleto, is addressed in the parade of national birds of the falconry scene: ¿debes por dicha cebo? ¿Templarte supo, dí, bárbara mano al insultar los aires? Yo lo dudo, que al precïosamente Inca desnudo y al de plumas vestido Mejicano, fraude vulgar, no industria generosa, del águila les dio a la mariposa. (Soledades II. 776–82)

In a recent and original contribution, Muriel Elvira attributes the references to “aleto” and to “fraude vulgar” to very specific descriptions by Inca Garcilaso 24 Jammes dates the composition of the Soledades in several stages from 1612–1617, with the final 43 verses composed 1619–26 (Soledades 20–21). On the dating of Inca Garcilaso’s work, see Fernández (“Biography” 28–29). See Roses, “El Inca” (347).

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of the Peruvian aleto falcon and of the use of green netting to trap birds by the Incas.25 Here, the attribution of “fraude vulgar” to the exoticized indigenous might be an example of “caste-consciousness,” but given the praise of artisanal technique among the cabreros earlier in the poem, this might more likely be ironic commentary (as Alfonso Callejo has implied), or a defensive display of orthodoxy.26 The Physiocratic Parallel Beyond these cases of reference to Inca culture, there are more substantive conceptual parallels between the writers which influence the imagery of the Soledades. Here I build—critically—on Carmen Bernand’s sense of a common ground between Pedro de Valencia’s theories on agrarian reform and on exchange value and the political views of Inca Garcilaso (Un Inca 286). Góngora’s “Égloga piscatoria en la muerte del Duque de Medina Sidonia,” written in 1615 during the composition of the Soledad segunda, is especially revealing in this regard. The poem features two fishermen commenting on statues decorating his patron’s tomb, in which the first of these is identified as an allegorical representation of America: […] Aquella ara del Sol edades ciento, ahora templo de quien el Sol aun no es estrella, la grande América es, oro sus venas, sus huesos plata, que dichosamente, si ligurina dio marinería a España en uno y otro alado pino, interés ligurino su rubia sangre hoy día, su medula chupando está luciente. (31–39; Canciones 219–20).

In this passage, Góngora celebrates the evangelization of America, but attacks its material basis: the mining which bled the American land of its riches only to end up being diverted to Spain’s rivals, here turned cannibals of what Beverley has called the continent’s “sacral body.”27 This sacral body is a feature of what 25 Elvira, “L’episode” cites Comentarios reales Bk IX, Ch 14 and Bk VIII, Ch 13, respectively (28–30; n. 42–43). See also Roses, “El Inca” (348–53). 26 Alfonso Callejo suggests that the reference could rather be praise for the indigenous people’s simplicity of resources, which, given their success in capturing eagles, might even be construed to be more efficient (130–31). The term “alarde de ortodoxia” is from Américo Castro (256). 27 Beverley explains, “The ‘ligurina marinería’ refers to Columbus and the

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José Antonio Mazzotti has called the Andean “humanization of the earth” that shapes Inca Garcilaso’s description of his land in the Comentarios reales, and through which he suggests that the “Spanish invasion and colonization interrupted and even mutilated a natural body” (98). In this regard, Mazzotti points to Inca Garcilaso’s portrayal of an emerald as a fruit of the earth, harvested before it could ripen by its premature extraction, as an image of truncated potential. Such imagery of truncation is then applied to architectural possibilities cut short, emblematic of the Inca culture at large.28 This notion of the life of a buried emerald relates to the indigenous belief in the life of metals, what Orlando Betancor has called “Andean vitalism” (37–39), expressed in Inca Garcilaso’s representation of the silver-rich Potosí hills as father and son (Bk VIII, Ch 25, as cited by Mazzotti 106).29 In Góngora’s protest against the mining of America’s “sacral body,” the Physiocratic sentiments of his eclogue dovetail with such Andean vitalism. Yet while Góngora indicts the greed driving the American colonization in the decline of the Spanish empire, Inca Garcilaso implicates the Spanish for their conquest of his people. Thus, their confluence is not founded on identical ideological interests or worldviews. While Góngora evokes the haunting by the American colonization of the Spanish body politic, Andean haunting is of a different order, in the “ghost complex” of traumatic memory so compellingly described by Francisco A. Ortega (“Writing the History”). Nonetheless, the confluence of Góngora’s Physiocratic sentiments and Inca Garcilaso’s Andean vitalism is an important conjunctural parallel and it informs the imagery of Góngora’s longer poem. Mazzotti describes the ethos of the Comentarios reales as a subtle protest against “earth tortured through exaggerated extraction of minerals and indiscriminate hunting of game” (109), citing Inca Garcilaso’s allusions to exploitation in the mines as well as to the pillage of native fauna to the point of scarcity (Bk VI, Ch 6). In this context, Discovery; the ‘interés ligurino’ to the profits of the Genoese banks on the loans they extended to the Hapsburgs: America, now given to Spain ‘dichosamente,’ is a sacral body now bled to death by greed and exploitation. (The phrase ‘ara del Sol edades ciento’ may be read as either ‘ara de cien edades del Sol’ or ‘de cien Soledades’ – in both cases, that is, as a utopian space) (Aspects 5.) Roses adds, “La primera noción es la de la evangelización americana, que ha convertido un extenso territorio en que se adoraba al sol desde hacía tiempo en un templo de Dios a cuyo lado el Sol no vale ni siquiera lo que cualquier estrella menos brillante” (“Ara” 362). Both base their reading on Alonso (409). José María Micó provides an excellent explication in his well-annotated edition of the poem (Góngora y Argote, Canciones). 28 Mazzotti (98–104), referencing Comentarios reales Bk VIII, Ch 23. 29 Orlando Betancor’s arguments are similar to those of Carmen Bernand, who argues that in an Andean context, “Le prix exprimé en argent nous apparaît ainsi comme une nouvelle interprétation de cette force vitale inhérente aux êtres et aux choses, contrôlée désormais par les Espagnols” (“Circuits réels” 276).

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the excesses of hunting of the Dedicatoria of the Soledades, seen by critics as suggestive of a battlefield, might also be a displaced protest against the mass destruction of American fauna, here under the bark of the imago belli topos.30 Similarly the framing of the works—the binary structure moving from golden to iron age—is also a possible parallel if one considers both parts of Garcilaso’s commentaries. In both authors historical epochs (“Sol/edades”) are set against mourning31 and end with an opening to historical possibility. Góngora’s effect of an “unfinished” ending to his poem, theorized by Beverley (Essays 51–53), can be juxtaposed with Mazzotti’s theory of a “fifth age,” the gesturing toward a possible future of the “overcoming of colonial chaos” in Inca Garcilaso’s Historia general del Perú (81). World Unity and the Crowned Serpent Another point of congruence lies in their approach to the topic of the unity of the world, addressed in the very first chapter of Inca Garcilaso’s Comentarios reales: “Si hay muchos mundos. Trata de las cinco zonas.” As Sara Castro Klarén writes, “The possibility of sustaining that the world was always one […] was a point of keen interest to Garcilaso in light of the disputations concerning the origin and nature of the New World in Spain as well as the rapidly growing notion that Amerindians were not quite the same as, were lesser than, the inhabitants of the Old World” (“Single World” 197). Shifting the critical focus from his translation of León Hebreo, she suggests that Inca Garcilaso was influenced by Plato’s Timaeus and Symposium, as well as by Marsilio Ficino’s commentaries on them, which advance the idea of natural religion as a universal and equalizing attribute of all peoples and nations (220). It is in this context that Inca Garcilaso states in his opening pages: “Se podrá afirmar que no hay más que un mundo, y aunque llamamos Mundo Viejo y Mundo Nuevo, es por haberse descubierto aquél nuevamente para nosotros, y no porque sean dos, sino todo uno” (Bk I, Ch 1). In Góngora’s poem, the idea of world unity is expressed through imagery of cartography in the discourse of navigation. Here the ship Victoria discovers the strait of Magellan, revealing that the ocean has always been but one: Zodíaco después fue cristalino a glorïoso pino, émulo vago del ardiente coche del Sol, este elemento, 30

Dedicatoria 5–21. In this regard, Mazzotti has signaled Inca Garcilaso’s “tragic view of history” (98), while Beverley has read the Soledades in light of Benjamin’s writings on the Trauerspiel (Essays 68). 31

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que cuatro veces había sido ciento dosel al día y tálamo a la noche, cuando halló de fugitiva plata la bisagra (aunque estrecha) abrazadora de un Océano y otro, siempre uno, o las colunas bese o la escarlata, tapete de la Aurora. (Soledades I. 466–76)

In an earlier image in the discourse, Góngora envisions world unity obliquely, in his depiction of the massive, singular ocean divided by the isthmus of Panama: el istmo que al 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. (Soledades I. 425–29)

Mercedes Blanco has teased out a number of sources Góngora plays with in this passage: traces of the Homeric “river-ocean” which encircled the world, Lucan’s allusions to the isthmus of Corinth in the Pharsalia, Horapolus’s first entry in his Hieroglyphica of the ouroboros, the snake biting its tail, as a symbol for the world, and the cartographer Stradanus’s image of this same ouroboros aside a map of the Americas (Góngora heroico 353–60). Yet Góngora’s sources may also include Andean iconography. I will suggest that Góngora might be playing with images from the heraldic shield Inca Garcilaso used to introduce his Comentarios reales, recently analyzed in elegant detail by Christian Fernández. Fernández notes the use of the crowned amaru (serpent) as an Inca royal symbol; he argues that Inca Garcilaso combined this image with a figure of European hermeticism, Mercury’s caduceus, his staff of intertwined snakes, both as protective cover for a risky display of a banned Inca icon and for its own symbolic suggestion of prudent speech, with the intention of interpellating, cautiously, an Andean audience (Imaginación 96–127). Góngora’s image obliquely suggests both features of Inca Garcilaso’s heraldic figure. It hints at the crowned amaru by its reference to “sierpe…coronada” which is also, by inference, “sierpe antártica,” while simultaneously employing the cover of European hermeticism in its emphasis on the ouroboros figure. While this appropriation by Góngora is subtle, it does point to a sympathetic incorporation of a symbol of Inca Garcilaso’s work, cultural heritage and identity as a fellow writer, in keeping with the poet’s typical use of heraldry and belying any appearance of decorative citation in the spirit of imperial trophy.

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Góngora’s poetic mapping itself feeds the concept of the world as one. Mercedes Blanco has demonstrated a play of borders and their erasure in Góngora’s focus on global points of connection and separation vital to world trade (Góngora heroico 366–69). She argues that Góngora, in his engagement with mapmaking convention, demonstrates how imperial naming is provisional, illusory, a product of Codicia, or simply subject to perspective in motion, —as in the moving horizon of the sun’s bed, made of water, covered by the sea’s curtains, in turn also dissolving into water (366–69; 350–52). In such terms Góngora describes the transit of Columbus’s ships: Abetos suyos tres aquel tridente violaron a Neptuno, conculado hasta allí de otro ninguno, besando las que al Sol el Occidente le corre, en lecho azul de aguas marinas, turquesadas cortinas. (Soledades I. 413–18)

Góngora’s poetic engagement with mapmaking points to a greater utopian humanist context, which included the “cordiform projection,” the world mapped as a great heart, as Blanco notes, evoking ecumenist principles such as those of the Familia Charitatis (340). Here the projects of Góngora and Inca Garcilaso intersect again, but with the great difference that Inca Garcilaso wrote from a lived experience of indigenous practice. As Sara Castro Klarén argues, the Platonic principles of the unity of all creation were but utopia for Europe, while Inca Garcilaso “shows how these principles actually worked in a real, historical society” (“Single World” 218). Inca Garcilaso Outdoes the Arbitristas Indeed, the long, interpolated section of Book V, Ch 1–16 of the Comentarios reales reads like an implicit critical commentary on contemporary Spanish reform projects, with Inca Garcilaso consistently offering the counterexample of Inca practice to the ills of Spanish empire. This interpolated section, occurring in the center of the book, stops the action of the history of Inca hegemony in medias res, at the point of highest tension and reader involvement, to describe Inca governance and economic organization. Here Inca Garcilaso parallels Cervantine technique not only in the dramatic diversion to the interpolated discourse, but also in its dialogic32 structure, in which Inca Garcilaso’s direct testimony is then corroborated by 32

Castro Klarén calls Inca Garcilaso’s structure dialogic (“Single World” 211); the notion of Cervantine dialogism is Bakhtin’s (413).

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lengthy citations from Padre Blas Valera, which repeat and reinforce the facts of Inca social history. This strategy of exposition clearly indicates that Inca Garcilaso intended to center the reader’s focus on this section. Carmen Bernand claims that Pedro de Valencia’s proposals for agrarian reform and an economy based on exchange of services rather than of money could have only pleased Inca Garcilaso (Un Inca 286). Yet here she inverts the dynamic. In this central interpolated section, Inca Garcilaso affirms, insistently, the ingenuity of what Inca civilization had already achieved, in establishing a system in which there was no alienable private property, no dowry system, no parasitic ecclesiastical or military classes, no conspicuous consumption, no hoarding, no idleness, no burdensome taxation and no want, all Spanish problems Valencia had or would shortly address in his social and economic writings,33 and which were engaged in Spanish arbitrista reform projects of the day. In his carefully crafted exposition, Inca Garcilaso does not mention the fact that Spain suffered from such ills; he simply counterpoises Inca practice to these problems, describing the creation of a system of tribute in the form of labor, of a planned economy which allowed provinces to share resources, and of a government which organized a communal cultivation of land and production of basic goods that met its subjects’ needs, especially those of the most vulnerable, as its first priority. Garcilaso’s presentation of Inca social and political ingenuity is highlighted by a subtle but devastating indictment of Spanish imperial ignorance and brutality. To the Inca empire’s accomplishments, Garcilaso juxtaposes, in simple and occasional statements of fact, brief but poignant references to their destruction by the Spanish conquerors. Garcilaso gives testimony to the Spaniards’ decimation of the Inca’s system of irrigation and flocks of wool-producing animals, to the disappearance of the Inca network of public craftsmen, to their conversion of public granaries and storehouses into inns and taverns, and in a later section, to their destruction of monumental buildings

33 The dates for Valencia’s social writings are listed by Paradinas in his introduction to volume IV.1 of Valencia’s Obras completas. A few of Valencia’s social writings antedate the finalization of the Comentarios reales; Nb his letters to the king’s confessor ”Sobre el tributo de la octava del vino y aceite y sus inconvenientes” and “Sobre conferir empleos a los poderosos y evitar sus injusticias” of 1603. However, most follow the Comentarios reales, being written in 1605–1608, eg: “Discurso sobre el precio del trigo (1605), “Discurso sobre el precio del pan” (1605), “Discurso contra la ociosidad” (1608), and “Algunas réplicas” (1605) (1993, xxxvii–xxxviii). According to Christian Fernández, the manuscript of the Comentarios reales was completed, and granted aprobaciones, in 1604 (“Biography” 28); thus, before the bulk of Valencia’s writings, which (except for one legal treatise) were not published in his lifetime (Paradinas xxxvi). Many of Valencia’s writings were letters to the king or his confessor; influence is difficult to establish in a manuscript culture.

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just to extract the gold used as mortar. Garcilaso celebrates Inca empire while holding the mirror to imperial Spain obliquely, in a form of “indirection” which Sara Castro Kláren has termed a parallax view (“Single World” 211).34 Patterns of Displacement, Fragmentation, and Critique Inca Garcilaso’s oblique criticism evokes a similar strategy in Góngora, whose features suggest a parallel in structural patterns of displacement,35 the fragmented incorporation of sources, and the use of rhetorical strategies of ambiguity and critique. I will now attend to these structural patterns in greater detail. If, as I have suggested, the hunting scene of the Dedicatoria of the Soledades might be considered a displacement of the landscape of conquest, Mercedes Blanco makes a similar claim for the portrayal of peasants in the poem. She suggests that Góngora used Pedro de Valencia’s political theories to construct a counterargument to the messianic conquest project by redirecting that utopian impulse toward the homefront instead, played out in a pastoral countryside populated by noble Spanish peasants labelled “bárbaros,” a term normally reserved at the time for the indigenous (“Entre Arcadia” 168). She also mentions some intriguing symbolism in Góngora’s play, Las firmezas de Isabela, in which the city of Toledo is associated with a recurring hieroglyph, a ring of water surrounding a hill (Invención, 269, 279). I have suggested that this figure is reminiscent of an indigenous city glyph (“Falconry Scene” 16) and Javier Irigoyen García has noted that the figure at one point also becomes a turban, evoking the recently expelled Moriscos and reinforcing the dialogue among the Christian cast of characters staging their foundational hybrid identity (386). The fact that the turban is superimposed upon the form of what might be construed to be an indigenous city glyph illustrates, quite literally, Carmen Bernand’s contention that Góngora’s humanist circle read Spain’s history through the prism of the conquest (“Hebreos” 20). It also represents visually Pedro de Valencia’s claims about the indigenous nature of the Moriscos as original Spaniards: “son españoles como los demás que habitan en España, pues ha casi novecientos años, que nacen y se crían en ella” (Tratado 81). Here displacement operates on multiple levels, identifying Moriscos as the Amerindians of Spain through a hieroglyph, with Homeric resonances, suggestive of the world as one. 34

Fuchs uses the terms “oblique” and “indirection” regarding a similar strategy in the second part of the Comentarios reales (Mimesis 79). 35 Here I follow the example of Diana de Armas Wilson, who has signaled the displacement involved in Cervantes’s use of Inca Garcilaso’s American “partes septentrionales” as the “germ” for his own “historia setentrional,” the Persiles (240, 248). Armstrong-Roche uses the term “reverse ethnography.”

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These multiple levels of displacement point to the intentional ambiguity of the setting of the Soledades, remarked by Martin John Devecka in his dissertation on the literary representation of classical and Mesoamerican ruins (220). Devecka considers the ruins depicted in the Soledad primera in the lament of the cabrero: “Aquellas que los árboles apenas dejan de ser torres hoy —dijo el cabrero con muestras de dolor extraordinarias—, las estrellas nocturnas luminarias eran de sus almenas, cuando el que ves sayal fue limpio acero. Yacen ahora, y sus desnudas piedras visten piadosas yedras, que a rüinas y a estragos sabe el tiempo hacer verdes halagos.” (I. 212–221)

He asks, “where is this ruin?” and argues that “[i]t is at once in America and Europe,” the “desnudas piedras” evoking the pillaged gold plating of Inca monuments, the “estragos” highlighting the etymological sense of the Latin strages, “massacre,” and the “almenas” representing fortresses in Spain (215–16). For Devecka, the Soledad primera is “a fictive […] version of one of Europe’s encounters with the New” (221). Devecka’s analysis underscores Beverley’s notion of a structural tension between history and poetic myth (Aspects) and also very much anticipates Blanco’s writings on the representation of colonial dynamics (“Entre Arcadia”). His understanding of the ambiguity of the setting reinforces the critical consensus on the function of various levels of allusion in interpellating the poem’s readership. Indeed, the creation of a mosaic of allusions appealed to rhetorical strategies common among humanist writers. While one could argue that searching for covert critique behind layers of ambiguity is the bread and butter of early modern literary analysis, recent Inca Garcilaso studies have given fresh life to this pursuit by reinvigorating scholarship on the mestizo writer’s appropriation of classical and patristic rhetoric. Sara Castro Klarén draws on Sears Jayne’s explanation of the “Renaissance practice of encipherment” as a “version of ancient practices” (“Single World” 210), in which readers were “attuned to Platonic non-discursive techniques” and expected to negotiate “several other meanings running confluently with the surface discourse” (210, citing Jayne 17). Similarly, Christian Fernández has placed Inca Garcilaso’s Comentarios reales within the model of the critical commentary developed by St. Jerome, in which a multiplicity of interpretations is offered to the prudent reader to judge (“Imaginación” 47–48). All of this is consonant with what Góngora scholars have observed in the poet’s appeal to elite readers trained to decipher his meaning (Beverley, Aspects 7–8; Sasaki 163, 157; Rivers, “Readers”).

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Both authors evince an oblique literary engagement with history; thus, Castro Klarén’s notion of Inca Garcilaso’s cultivation of the parallax view dovetails with Blanco’s idea of Góngora presenting to us the other side of the tapestry (Góngora heroico 184). There is an important difference, however, in the cultivation of ambiguity by the two writers, in Inca Garcilaso’s fractured representation of subaltern voice. Gonzalo Lamana, for example, has associated Inca Garcilaso’s “double speak” with the divided oppressed subject described by W. E. B. Dubois and Antonio Cornejo Polar. Francisco A. Ortega has also identified a special aspect of Inca Garcilaso’s fragmented presentation. Far from extolling Inca Garcilaso’s participation in the struggle for historiography to liberate itself from “una mitología de orígenes,” as Carmen Bernand has done, citing the writer’s ostensible rejection of the “fábulas historiales” he reports (“Hebreos” 4, 6), Ortega points to the more profoundly historical function of such “fábulas” drawn from oral history as a record of the “phantasmatic” trauma of the conquest (“Writing” 246–47). In both cases, Inca Garcilaso’s double speak points to a very different dynamic of reception. Inca Garcilaso exploits the possibilities inherent in Ficino’s model of multivalent rhetoric—“to say one thing to the initiates and another thing to the general public”—to interpellate indigenous mestizos of Peru,36 an agenda clearly far removed from that of Góngora. The Sacromonte Context Yet the issue Carmen Bernand raises, that of a vogue for a mythology of origins among Góngora and Inca Garcilaso’s humanist circle, is crucial, however, for understanding the context of the relationship between the two writers. Bernand implicates Inca Garcilaso in the syncretic ambitions associated with the Sacromonte falsifications, noting his ties to Pedro Vaca de Castro, archbishop of Granada and principal defender of the forgeries.37 As she points out, Castro was the son of the governor of Peru who had befriended Inca Garcilaso’s father (“Hebreos” 17). Góngora, on the other hand, also had some connection with the defense of the Lead Books. He wrote a sonnet, “Este monte, de cruces coronado” (1598), praising the Sacromonte discoveries, the “láminas” purported to be gospels written in Arabic by disciples of St. James. These were celebrated as evidence of an early Arab Christianity, vindicating the Christian heritage of Granada’s once Islamic population as well as the sacred origins of the city.38 Mercedes García Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez 36

Castro Klarén (“Single World” 210), citing Jayne (17). “Hebreos” (esp. 16–18). Barbara Fuchs analyzes the Sacromonte discoveries as a case of “found syncretism” (Mimesis 99–117). 38 García Arenal, “De la autoría” and García Arenal and Rodríguez Mediana (13–34); Fuchs (Mimesis 99–117). 37

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Mediano have identified the authors of the forgeries, representatives of the Morisco elites who were well connected to government and cultural circles: Alonso del Castillo, translator, spy and propagandist for the Christian side in the War of the Alpujarras,39 and Miguel de Luna, a veteran of the suppression of the comuneros revolt who participated in a crypto-Islamic network while working as a translator at the highest levels, including service to Góngora’s patron, the Duke of Medina Sidonia.40 While Pedro de Castro would draw upon a regional tradition of antisemitism (for example, in his persecution of Fray Luis de León),41 a myth of origins associated with the Sacromonte discoveries which Castro championed paradoxically recurred to the Jewish heritage of the Old Testament for validation. In their relationship to this Hebrew myth of origins, as we shall see, Inca Garcilaso and Góngora will again interact, in their approach to the figure of the Temple of Solomon. In this regard, I will consider Carmen Bernand’s suggestion that Inca Garcilaso might have had some sympathy for the theories of Spain’s Jewish origins proposed by Pablo de Céspedes (“Hebreos” 15). Pablo de Céspedes, a close friend of Luis de Góngora from adolescent days in the novitiate, had written on the Cathedral of Córdoba, arguing that it was the site of the temple constructed by the first settlers of the Peninsula, who had been direct descendants of Noah, and later became a temple to the Roman god Janus (Jammes, Obra poética 213 n. 17; Rubio Lapaz 166). He thus tied Jewish sacred architecture, specifically the Temple of Solomon, to the Cathedral of Córdoba, part of a larger project placing Spanish “sacred imperialism” on Jewish foundations, thereby bestowing upon Spain “una preeminencia de origen divino que lo colocaba por encima del resto de países en el contexto contrarreformista” (Rubio Lapaz 166). Spaniards, according to this newly discovered Hebrew genealogy, become a latter day chosen people (Rubio Lapaz 89). This Christian appropriation of Jewish messianism was not unique to Spain—Marie Tanner mentions a similar claim of descent from Noah in the

39 According to García Arenal and Fernández Mediano, Castillo worked for the Christians because he thought it was madness to rebel against the feudal order. As they note, Castillo did not refer to the rebels as Muslims or apostates, “but as vassals who have taken arms against their legitimate monarch” (109; 108–110). The attitude of Arias Montano, Valencia’s teacher, toward the revolt: death to the rebels (114). 40 See especially Ch 4, 5, 7 and 8; on Luna and the comuneros (162); on Luna and Medina Sidonia (189). They also note that Castillo served as one of the translators for the Larache negotiations, in which Medina Sidonia was involved (134). Both coincided with humanists in the libraries; Luna and Castillo frequented the Escorial and Castillo worked with Morales at the Cathedral of Córdoba library (106). Luna may have participated in the Granada Venegas literary tertulia (91) and Céspedes consulted with him (365). 41 Morocho Gayo, “Estudio introductorio” (221-23).

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German monarchy—or to Córdoba (Tanner 73). Granada’s founders were also said to be Jews, its Cathedral also identified with the Temple of Solomon, in what García Arenal calls “un emblema de la ‘Nueva Jerusalén’ rescatada al Islam” (“De la autoría” 581). García Arenal links the vindication of an original Jewish population in the local histories of Granada, Toledo and Córdoba, in the context of expulsion and “Limpieza de Sangre” statutes, to the project of the Sacromonte discoveries (581). As she writes, “La solución, que viene proporcionada por los hallazgos sacromontanos, radica en incorporar a esos judíos y musulmanes despojándolos de su identidad religiosa: haciendo a los árabes cristianos y a los judíos españoles, enraizándolos con aquellas Tribus Perdidas que no habían podido participar en la condena de Cristo” (581; García Arenal and Rodríguez Mediano 7). Here the traces of confessional minorities are incorporated into national myth after the fact of their expulsion or violent assimilation. Paradoxically, these new myths of origins, on the one hand, validated Spanish empire, while on the other, offered an undercurrent of cover to regional New Christians. It is in this alternative form of hegemony42 that Góngora may have affirmed his converso identity, for example, in his poetry on Old Testament themes, or perhaps even in his early sonnet to Córdoba (1585) modelled on the psalm to Jerusalem, as noted by Colbert Nepaulsingh (128–38). Daniel Waissbein has explored this possibility by locating syncretic and ecumenist sentiments “under the bark” of another Góngora sonnet, “Si ya la vista de llorar cansada” (c. 1593–1594).43 It is not impossible that Góngora in some way addressed the ghosts of collective memory of Jewish and converso trauma. Carmen Bernand puts forward what would seem to be a parallel dynamic, in Inca Garcilaso’s appropriation of the features of Solomon’s Temple in his description of Coricancha, the Inca temple of the sun, in the Comentarios reales. Bernand points out that Garcilaso could not have seen the temple first hand, as it had been destroyed in the Spanish conquest, but that he would have learned of the temple’s architecture through oral reports (Un Inca 275). Yet he describes the temple with an explicit allusion to tabernacles, thereby placing, in Bernand’s words, “un vernis judaïque sur la religion des Inca” (279). She relates this not only to León Hebreo’s humanist syncretic and ecumenist aspirations in the context of the mood of the Quattrocento and the Florentine Council, including an appreciation for the ancient prefiguration of Christianity in solar cults—classical, Eastern, and now, American—but also to later utopian projects (“Soles” 2–4, 13; Un Inca 279). She connects Inca 42 Syncretism was also a feature of the Spanish ideological consolidation of the Amerindian conquest; Mercedes García Arenal associates syncretism on the part of both Moriscos and Amerindians with Serge Gruzinski’s concept of “occidentalization” (“Moriscos e indios” 174). 43 The date for the sonnet is from Waissbein.

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Garcilaso’s imagery of Solomon’s Temple to the project of a New Jerusalem. As she writes, “Si Cuzco es una nueva Jerusalén, entonces comparte con la ciudad sagrada la dimensión mesiánica y construye una réplica del proyecto divino, réplica antártica pero no menos venerable” (“Soles” 12). Within the context of this appropriation of what Bernand calls “la moda salomónica” (“Soles” 11), Inca Garcilaso decorated his burial chapel with a painting linking Solomon’s Temple, Coricancha and the mosque-cathedral of Córdoba (“Hebreos” 15). Yet Inca Garcilaso’s syncretic burial chamber, also decorated with his heraldic shield, has been interpreted as well in more directly Andean terms. It is what Christian Fernández calls a “tumba mestiza de un lugar sagrado mestizo” (Imaginación 110). As he maintains: La mezquita-catedral de Córdoba era lo más cercano que tenía el peruano de las tumbas de sus antepasados incas a las cuales los primeros cronistas llamaban mezquitas. Así cumplía de manera simbólica con una costumbre ancestral de sus antepasados andinos y con su cristianismo. Así lo hacían en el Perú los indígenas sepultándose en las nuevas iglesias que habían sido construidas sobre antiguos templos incas (110).

The implication of Góngora and Inca Garcilaso in the syncretic ambitions associated with the invented genealogies for Andalusian cities and their New Christian descendants44 poses an interesting contradiction regarding the writers’ association with Pedro de Valencia, as Valencia was one of the early and leading critics of the claims made for the falsifications. He assisted his teacher Arias Montano in drafting an evaluation of the initial forged parchment in 1593 (Morocho Gayo, “Estudio introductorio” 226–27) and authored his first treatise on the topic, “Discurso sobre el pergamino y láminas de Granada,” in 1607. His later collaborator was Francisco de Gurmendi, whose Arabic teacher, Diego Urrea, according to Bartolomé de Argensola, had accused Miguel de Luna of creating the Sacromonte hoax (García Arenal and Rodríguez Mediano 231–33). On the other hand, there were additional figures in Góngora’s orbit associated with the defense of the books. There was, for example, Martín Vásquez Siruela, a defender of Gongorism and a commentator of Góngora, who became canon of the Abbey of Sacromonte in 1625, participating in the circle of Trillo y Figueroa and frequenting the house of Pedro Soto de Rojas on the Albaicín hill (327, 330). And there were similar endeavors by other writers. Rodrigo Caro wrote a falso cronicón legitimizing the sacred foundations of

44 Mercedes García Arenal and Fernando Rodríguez Mediano credit Javier Castillo Fernández for his observation of a parallel between both the fabrications of lineages by Morisco families and of the Lead Books, as illustrative of a type of syncretism (68, 68 n. 9, citing Castillo, “Luis Enríquez Xoaida” 244).

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Jaén, backed by Ambrosio de Morales and another commentator and supporter of Góngora, Pedro de Rivas (222). It may be that Góngora and Gongorists asserted some regionalist interest in their defense of these sorts of falsifications. If this is true, it might be possible that the religious vocabulary of the Lead Books debate and disputes around ecumenism influenced the vocabulary of the Gongorism polemic in ways we have yet to appreciate,45 for example, in the famed derisive phrases aimed at Gongorists such as “culterano/luterano,” or “secta de Mahoma.” But how the Lead Books controversy interacted with literary circles is not so clear cut; indeed, the Church debate seems to have been as contentious and murky as the Gongorism polemic. At one point Pedro de Castro even used his minion, the same Padre Juan de Pineda who censored Góngora, to place Arias Montano’s works on the Index of the Inquisition (Morocho Gayo, “Estudio introductorio” 222). The art historian Jesús Rubio Lapaz explicitly identifies Góngora as a supporter of the Lead Books, citing his Sacromonte sonnet, a poem Góngora chose to include in his final collected works, the Chacón manuscript (57–58, 62). Yet our documentation of the relationship between Góngora and Pedro de Valencia, as with Inca Garcilaso, is limited; we don’t have any records of Góngora’s interaction with Pedro de Valencia before their correspondence over the draft of the Primera Soledad, although we could assume that Góngora would have spent time getting to know Valencia and his writings before submitting his poetry to him for his evaluation. Rubio Lapaz suggests that Pablo de Céspedes was the intermediary who brought Góngora and Valencia together (152); Céspedes and Valencia were both disciples of Arias Montano (García Arenal, “De la autoría” 578). Despite what we don’t know, we do know that when Pedro de Valencia died in 1620, Góngora was unstinting in his eulogy, essentially hailing him as the intellectual pride of the Spanish nation.46 We can conclude that Góngora found inspiration in much of Pedro de Valencia’s writings for his poetry, but on the question of the Sacromonte discoveries, if Rubio Lapaz is correct, the apparent breach between the two would be noteworthy. Muriel Elvira has argued that Góngora more likely recognized the fallacies at the heart of the discovered parchment, given his ardent efforts to revive the Latin roots of Spanish, a project inherently at odds with the notion of a Christian apostle already preaching in the language on 45 Muriel Elvira has begun to investigate this topic in the reception of Góngora’s poetry by contemporaries who were historians and antiquarians (“La recepción”) and in correspondence of the Abad de Rute (“Góngora, Dextro”). 46 In his letter to Don Francisco del Corral of 14 April 1620, Góngora wrote, “Nuestro buen amigo Pedro de Valencia murió el viernes pasado: helo sentido por lo que debo a nuestra nación, que ha perdido el sujeto que mejor podía ostentar y oponer a los extranjeros” (Oc “Epistolario” 39.9, 954).

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the Iberian peninsula at the time of Nero (“La recepción” 98–99; cf García Arenal and Rodríguez Mediano 184).47 It could be that Góngora’s—and Inca Garcilaso’s48—regionalist response was tied to the contingencies of Andalusian patronage, while also focused on the possibilities of the aesthetic, exploiting the ambiguity of the literary to promote their own political agendas as representatives of minority elites on opposite sides of Empire. We could thus posit that Góngora and Inca Garcilaso embraced the imaginary of hermeticism in its contradictory aspects, both aesthetic and political. Both draw on hermeticism to engage utopian thought in the context of national projects which were frustrated by the assertion of the ancien régime.49 Góngora recurs to a more inclusive myth of imperial messianic destiny within a feudal paradigm of the Spanish nation, while Inca Garcilaso (as Beverley has argued) interpellates the aspirations of the indigenous masses, anticipating a mestizo colonial nationalism which would ultimately face its own truncated destiny in the defeated aspirations of José Gabriel Condorcanqui (“Afterword” 362–63). From History to Archetype Sara Castro Klarén has written that Inca Garcilaso’s history in the Comentarios reales elicited “severe critiques from empirical historians and ethnohistorians” 47

Elvira also references Aldrete’s treatise on the origins of Spanish from Latin. As noted previously, the humanist Bernardo José Aldrete was a mutual friend of Góngora and Inca Garcilaso. See Elvira, “Góngora, Aldrete” and Cárdenas Bunsen, La aparición (251–332). 48 Recently José Cárdenas Bunsen has studied the development of history writing practices within the context of the antiquarian and humanist circle around the archbishop of Granada, Pedro de Castro. He argues that Inca Garcilaso incorporated his case for promotion within the ecclesiastical ranks in his Comentarios reales, and signals parallels between Inca Garcilaso and Miguel de Luna’s histories in affirming the legitimacy of their respective communities, and in their use of Mary Immaculate as a figure of restorative justice (La aparición 333–406; 410, 405 and “Garcilaso as Sexton.”) 49 See Beverley on the role of the ancien régime in effecting the impasse which blocked Iberian democratic revolutions (Essays 148). Rather than homogenizing all forms of domination into a “coloniality of power” (see Beverley, “Afterword”), I will posit that race, communalism and colonialism add a special aspect to what might be considered an early case of the dynamics of Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. Here I build upon Beverley’s use of Armando Muyolema’s notion of the anticolonial “imposture” of the criollo elite (Beverley, “Afterword”). See Blanco on hermeticism as a feature of Góngora’s poetic language (Invención) as well as Marasso. Castellví Laukamp makes a related contribution regarding hermeticism in Sor Juana’s Primero sueño.

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(211). Yet she then counters that Inca Garcilaso’s “fragmented and dialogic renditions of a sustained truth has also enabled him to survive the vagaries of the passage of time and history-bound demands of specific communities of readers” (211). Perhaps something similar could be said of Góngora. Scholars have noted Góngora’s technique of erasure, his removal of identifying referential traces, in the Soledades (Callejo 70–71; Jammes, “Vulgo” 156). While his vagueness certainly supplied cover for critique, it may also have been an intended effect.50 In this spirit, arguing that the poem was structured by a tension between history and poetic myth, John Beverley often drew on the methodology of archetypal criticism to describe features of the poem (Aspects). Since Beverley’s landmark study, new scholarship—on Góngora, in Morisco studies, and in intellectual history—has historicized much in the work that was previously conceived in archetypal terms, now filling in the outlines. Yet new scholarship has also refined our understanding of Góngora’s use of mythic elements. Mercedes Blanco has studied how Góngora united classic motifs with primitive folkloric practices of the Spanish peasantry, citing Pedro de Valencia’s writings on witchcraft as contemporary bacchanals (Invención 355, 369); perhaps Góngora also was influenced by Ambrosio de Morales’s studies of Spanish folk traditions. In the same vein, Blanco reconsiders Góngora’s sacrilegious reference to the billy goat of the wedding parade, killed by a rival who thus “redimió con su muerte tantas vides” (I. 160). Here, she argues, Góngora manifests a humanist anthropological curiosity which contemplates similarities between Christian and Dionysian ritual (385–86), a gesture very much in accordance with Inca Garcilaso’s own affirmation of parity between classical and indigenous culture.51 It may be that the most historicized criticism of the Soledades is in fact one which returns to the archetypal, drawing on the poet’s contemporary understanding of how history exposes the nature of the world as one, in the repetition of archetypes preserved in the myths of different cultures and ages. In this regard, Inca Garcilaso may have enhanced Góngora’s capacity to respond to Spain’s efforts to understand its own cultural history, in the mirror of the consequences of its ruin of indigenous peoples, the Amerindians, and its expulsion of the Moriscos.

50

Devecka locates the Soledad primera on a trajectory of the literary erasure of the violence of conquest in what he calls a “greening rhetoric” (210), tainted by irruptions of the catastrophic real (224); cf. my own work on idealized violence in the poem (Góngora’s Soledades, Ch 2). 51 Castro Klarén discusses parity between classical and Amerindian indigenous culture in Inca Garcilaso (“Single World” 200).

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2

Violence and the “Tremulous Private Body” in Lazarillo de Tormes, Fuenteovejuna and the Soledades The early modern was a time of early capitalist development, national consolidation, and colonialism. Thus it was also a time of enormous violence. How might we theorize this violence on a more discrete level to read canonical texts of the “Golden Age”? How might we relate this violence to the emergent subjectivity of the early modern? I propose to examine the trajectory of violence and subjection in a small group of canonical texts of the Spanish early modern period: the anonymously written Lazarillo de Tormes (c. 1554), Lope de Vega’s play, Fuenteovejuna (c. 1612–1614), and Luis de Góngora’s long lyric poem, the Soledades (c. 1613–1626). I will define “subjection” as the creation of the subject characterized by “interiorized self-recognition” in both an historical and a political sense, along the lines suggested by Francis Barker in his classic work of British materialist criticism, The Tremulous Private Body (31). Barker locates the features of modern subjectivity as they evolved out of the medieval concept of the body as a political and social entity. In Barker’s words, “pre-bourgeois subjection does not properly involve subjectivity at all, but a condition of dependent membership in which place and articulation are defined not by an interiorized self-recognition […] , but by incorporation in the body politic which is the king’s body in its social form” (31). In contrast, he asserts, modern subjectivity entails the birth of the private sphere, although this bourgeois interiority is controlled from its inception through the assertion of mind over body, self-discipline and self-censorship, and a clinical, mechanistic and patriarchal mode of corporeal experience. The medieval sacramental body, subject to displays of spectacular punishment, is thus reduced to the modern, functional body of the worker and ultimately to a pseudo-organic, artificial, warlike body (“Preface” v–x). The process Barker describes should not be understood as simply teleological; both medieval and modern concepts of subjection vied for dominance in the early modern period, existing in a conflation of temporalities. Similarly mixed phenomena exist today, as in the example of the use of torture, a

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primitive mode, which is nonetheless employed in contemporary military prisons and improved by modern techniques of medicine and mechanization. Indeed, as Barker argues, it is precisely such a mixture of emergent and residual1 regimes which produces a special violence towards the body, an aesthetic of corporeal fragmentation in much of early modern artistic production. As Barker writes, “If the once-full body is so often presented as a shattered wreckage of disarticulated fragments, it is because the disintegration of this world and its signification is already upon it. As modern subjectivity begins to emerge, it turns destructively on that old body from which it struggles to free itself” (41). Cynthia Marshall locates the origins of contemporary culture’s pleasure in “imaginative involvement with violence” in such early modern displays of “self-shattering” (55). In Marshall’s view, spectacles of dismemberment and martyrdom, as well as their imaginative portrayal in the arts, served to foment religious militancy and submission to authority. In the reception of creative works, the vicarious experience of violence allowed for a “regressive pleasure in emotional dispersal,” a relief from the “burdens” of a newly acquired sense of self (34, 30, 36). This fracturing of the body which Barker and Marshall signal has its parallel in emotional trauma—psychic fragmentation—in the face of the destructive violence of an age of religious warfare, ethnic strife, displacement, and poverty. Trauma can be seen as the obverse response to the indulgence in violent fantasy as a social safety valve or vehicle for interpellation, functioning instead as a potential site of resistance, a point at which the psyche ruptures rather than integrates into the symbolic order. Such trauma, while not understood in the psychoanalytic terms of today, nonetheless was portrayed in the art of the Golden Age. Its subtle appearance in early modern texts seems to reveal glimpses into the tensions between the changing regime of subjection and the representational strategies of literature. This shearing between literary representation and modes of subjection can be a fruitful point of departure from which to analyze aspects of some of the more studied and canonical texts of the early modern period. I will begin with the earliest example of the picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes. The critical reception of this work has converged on its contextualization within the debates of the period over the Poor Laws, which centered on the question of social responsibility for attending to the dramatic increase in the number of indigents in the urban centers at the time. In telling the story of the child of this new socially rootless population, Lazarillo de Tormes becomes, in John Beverley’s words, “the novel of primitive accumulation,” in which the impasse at the origins of Spanish capitalism is given aesthetic expression (“Lazarillo” 39).

1

These are Raymond Williams’s terms (121–127).

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As Beverley argues, the influx of displaced peasants and bankrupt hidalgos into the cities was a function of the normal development of early capitalism, which required a population of disentailed, potential proletarians to form the basis of a flexible work force. Yet, as he points out, this availability of labor was not met with the nascent industry to absorb it; the “bourgeois meteor”2 of the sixteenth century burnt out quickly in the face of entrenched absolutism, with native capital invested unproductively in royal war and bureaucracy and the early hopes for bourgeois democracy lost in the defeat of the Comuneros. Thus, he explains, the pícaro Lazarillo ascends from marginalized “subproletarian” to a proletarian water-seller who finally saves enough to buy the clothing of an hidalgo with which he can gain access to the lowest levels of the royal bureaucracy.3 Lazarillo’s road to survival ranges from the limited options of petty crime and begging (which is then banned by the new Poor Laws), to work as a day laborer, to a position in the theocratic bureaucracy contingent on his collusion in covering up Church corruption (“Lazarillo” 36–39). Various critics, most notably Francisco Sánchez and Juan Carlos Rodríguez, have approached Lazarillo de Tormes as nascent bourgeois literature.4 While I would agree in a general sense that the novel develops an early concern for the subjective consciousness of a plebian character during the period of bourgeois mercantilism in Spain, the bourgeoisie is conspicuous by its absence and its failure in the Lazarillo. Lazarillo’s final occupation reflects a confluence of the urban market economy with the ancien régime (he hawks both the sale of wines and the public castigation of prisoners), what Giancarlo Maiorino terms a divide between the medieval caste and modern class systems (“Picaresque Econopoetics” 9) and what Víctor Pueyo associates with the Jamesonian notion of the vanishing mediator (“Mediador evanescente”). His earlier positions connect the feudal estates, child abandonment and abuse, and the marginal criminal underworld of what would become the

2 This is Jaime Vicens Vives’s term (308–9). Beverley’s thesis parallels Claudio Guillén’s observation that “Generally speaking, the rise of the novel in sixteenthcentury Spain seems to have been rooted not in the triumph but in the frustration of the bourgeoisie” (Guillén, Literature 144). 3 See also Rodríguez Puértolas (194). 4 Molho argues that Lazarillo, the picaresque swindler of the ancien régime, in his negation of the heroic mode, anticipates the robber baron of bourgeois society and in this sense confirms Alberto Del Monte’s characterization of the pícaro as a “borghese mancato” (“El pícaro” 201, 222). See R. W. Truman’s argument that the work is a parody of the homo novus topos. See also Maiorino’s study, which reads the Lazarillo in the context of Renaissance visual culture, within the theoretical approach of “econopoetics.”

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lumpenproletariat; his association with prostitution, a vestigial practice of slave society,5 can be read as a kind of sexual commodity fetishism which becomes more generally emblematic of wage slavery. The political impasse evoked by this murky conflation of nascent and outmoded class structures translates into what Maurice Molho sees as an aesthetics of negation or what Edmond Cros terms an endless dynamic of inversions; the work deconstructs a veritable anthology of cultural forms in a circulation of reversible signs which parallel the circulation of human labor, now reduced to a replaceable commodity on the market.6 As Peter Dunn writes of the structure of the novel, “We can find all the current exemplary models of writing, from confessional memoir to heroic fiction, being raided for ideologically encoded key words, phrases, or negative strategies, with the purpose of composing a story and a self that negate them all” (42). This quality of negation marks the Lazarillo as an essentially transitional text in the terms Barker has described, expressing the clash between modern and pre-modern regimes in a deconstructive impulse. Antonio Gómez Moriana has noted the “subversion of ritual discourse” in the novel, citing its parody of inquisitorial, hagiographic and sacramental confessional discourses (9). This subversion extends to other religious practices and writings, in the ironic imitation of documents of the debate over the Poor Laws, of Good Friday processions, Erasmian treatises, and sacred scripture.7 Central to the religious parody in the text is the subversion of the notion of pauperes Christi, the concept raised by one of the major figures of the debate, Domingo Soto, that the poor are imitators of Christ on earth.8 Thus the story of Lazarillo mimics biblical narrative in a lower register, with its use of figura, anticipating the triumphal final events from the beginning: the story of a life foretold (Deyermond 37). In this debasement of Christian eschatology, the picaresque becomes a degraded, secularized version of the peregrinatio vitae topos, a circular journey of social frustration and historical impasse.9 This frustration of teleology relates to the pattern of Eucharistic parody which has been observed in the text, its denial of the climactic apotheosis of 5 On this point see Aline Rouselle. As Maiorino suggests, some of Lazarillo’s jobs combine elements of “gift economy,” “medieval work obligations,” and “even economic practices typical of slavery” (At the Margins 85, 69). 6 Molho, Introducción (58); Cros, “Semántica” (83); he also uses the term “reversibilité des concepts” (“Le folklore” 15); Beverley “Lazarillo” (37); see also Julio Rodríguez Puértolas (160). 7 See especially Anne Cruz, Discourses, Pilar del Carmen Tirado, and Javier Herrero, “Rennaisaance Poverty” on this point. 8 See especially Cruz (Discourses 21–29). 9 As Dunn remarks, “nothing redemptive can be read into the circularity of its plot” (42). Fernando Lázaro Carreter calls the narrative “una peregrinación inútil” (95).

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sacramental theatre (Iarocci 336). The various levels of Eucharistic parody in the novel (e.g. the bread and wine as food which is denied, equated with sex, or commodified, as well as the burlesque allusions to redemption)10 point to a broader symbolism for the sacrament which is contained in the liturgy of the consecration from the biblical account of the Last Supper.11 The reference to the sacramental foods as representing a “new covenant” between God and Man repeated at the time of consecration, evokes, in the secular context of the novel, the problem of the social contract here on earth, and specifically society’s responsibilities to the poor and towards the child. It also evokes, in the burlesque and sexualized enactment of the spearing of Christ’s side in the description of the wounding of the arcaz, the pain of Christ’s passion, which will be recast as the story of the suffering of an impoverished boy (Rabell 26). Lazarillo de Tormes is, in B. Sifuentes Jáuregui’s words, “the story of an abandoned child” who is physically as well as sexually abused.12 The boy’s passage through a series of masters constitutes an anti-Bildungsroman avant la lettre (Cruz, Discourses 36) in which violence becomes an alternative form of pedagogy in the process of subjection, creating the pícaro through the progressive destruction of the child (Ferro 2). In this perverse education, new knowledge is associated with pain and with the simultaneous “disociación o fragmentación del ya no-sujeto, devenido en objeto,” Lazarillo (Ferro 2). This objectification of Lazarillo, as Carmen Rabell has argued, occurs within a culture of prostitution and commerce protected by the clergy, in which the boy substitutes “la comunión con el cuerpo y la sangre de Cristo por la comunión con el cuerpo social,” which is brought about “mediante el robo y el sexo” (27). Lazarillo’s initiation into a world in which he is victimized sexually by adults appears to begin in his dealings with the guests at his mother’s inn and continues in the veiled but poignant references to sexual trauma inflicted by the ciego and to homosexual prostitution and pandering in the service of the Fraile de la Merced.13

10 Benjamín Torrico (most recently) and Rabell (on the sexual connotations), among many others, discuss different aspects of this Eucharistic parody. 11 George Shipley notes that the water-seller comes from the biblical account of the Last Supper, yet he circles the city repeatedly for mercenary purposes without ever signaling that sacred ritual; here the text evinces its tendency, as Dunn has noted, to replicate its overarching structure in miniature. See Shipley, “Lazarillo and the Cathedral Chaplain” (232–35), citing Mark 14: 13–18; See Luke 22:10–13; and Dunn (36). Such “self-miniaturization” has been noted by Beverley in Góngora’s Soledades as well (Aspects 37). 12 Sifuentes Jáuregui (128). 13 See Dorothy Severin on Tratado I (26); See Sifuentes (133), Harry Sieber, B. Bussell Thompson and J. K.Walsh, and Shipley, “Otras cosillas” on Tratado IV (45–58). Janis A. Tomlinson and Marcia L. Welles contextualize this sexual abuse

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The latent images of sexual abuse in the first Tratado are encoded in the fragmented discourse of trauma which has been observed in the novel; they are the “cosas nunca vistas ni oídas” behind the surface discourse (Ferro 6, Sifuentes Jáuregui 129–30). As Sifuentes Jáuregui points out, when the blind man breaks the jug on Lazarillo’s face, a parallel performance of trauma occurs in the text in which language and speech are broken; as the boy becomes unconscious, “the subject ‘I’ becomes split or traumatized and becomes ‘el pobre Lázaro’” (130). The explosion in the boy’s face is preceded by the suggestion of a sexual scene in Lazarillo’s pilfering of the wine: he huddles between the blind man’s legs, eyes half-closed, to receive the fountain of liquid in his mouth.14 This sexual suggestiveness is repeated in the episode of the sausage, signaled by Javier Herrero, in which the blind man’s nose enlarges by a palm’s length “con el enojo” and reaches into the boy’s throat.15 Vomiting up the sausage and severely beaten, Lazarillo at first justifies the abuse; his dissociation is such that he blames his own gullet (Wolfenzon 11): “Y esto bien lo merecía, pues por su maldad me venían tantas persecuciones” (La vida de Lazarillo 166). Immediately after the abuse Lazarillo joins the crowd which had gathered to witness the “fiesta” in laughing at the blind man’s witty account of the events. In Lazarillo’s commentary about the episode, he oscillates between identification with his abuser and the most violent of revenge fantasies: mas con tanta gracia y donayre contava el ciego mis hazañas, que, aunque yo estava tan maltratado y llorando, me parecía que le hazía sinjusticia no se las reýr. Y en quanto esto passava, a la memoria me vino una covardía y floxedad que hize, por que me maldezía, y fue no dexalle sin narizes, pues tan buen tiempo tuve para ello que la mitad del camino [estava andado], que con solo apretar los dientes se me quedaran en casa, y, con ser de aquel malvado, por ventura lo retuviera mejor mi estómago que retuvo la longaniza, y no pareciendo ellas, pudiera negar la demanda. ¡Pluguiera

within the visual culture of the period and summarize nicely the history of the criticism on this issue (78). 14 Sifuentes Jáuregui, citing comments by Paul Julian Smith (Writing 139 n. 10). In sixteenth-century iconography of brothels, a jug or a pitcher symbolized a sexual receptacle; its shattering here might be taken to refer to the homosexual rape/defloration of Lazarillo. The coding of the description of sexual abuse is consistent with the use of an exclusionary marginal language of sexuality by Lázaro throughout his ostensible confession in an effort to ridicule his inquisitor, which Rabell has observed (20); see Aldo Ruffinatto’s discussion of “heroismo y erotismo subversivos” (359–70). 15 Herrero, “The Great Icons” (14–15); in this article Herrero elaborates on the sexual lexicon used in the work, later treated by Rabell. Ruffinatto notes the sexual connotations of this passage in a discussion of symbolic defloration and penetration (369).

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a Dios que lo uviera hecho, que esso fuera assí que assí! (La vida de Lazarillo 166)

The admiration for the blind man’s wit, the objectification of his own body (his treacherous throat)16 paired with that of his master (the nose as concealed evidence) evince a distancing from corporeal experience that stands in marked contrast to his anger. Margarita Ferro, building implicitly on Molho’s early observations, aptly comments on the significance of this type of contradiction. In her words, the novel reveals a “violencia del discurso, que debe enmasacararse con el discurso del poder expresado. Pero queda lo no-dicho, la brecha entre el lenguaje aún no consolidado (el del pícaro en esta primera novela picaresca) y uno que sí está legitimado, el de “vuestra merced” (4).17 This anger, revealed in the description of trauma, is a glimpse into the unsaid, the not yet consolidated language of a figure representative of the subaltern, mediated as it is through the writing of a culto author. This subjectivity thus involves a “doble enmascaramiento”, a “double masking,” as Ferro argues: “El escritor culto, crea un narrador picaresco, que se doblega y adopta el discurso del amo-receptor, hombre letrado y aristócrata … ‘vuestra merced’” (5). This “mask within a mask” narrative strategy should be understood not so much as the failure to represent a cohesive, modern subjectivity, but as an intentional and laudatory effect of what Claudio Guillén has termed “pseudoautobiography” with a social agenda.18 The narrative’s self-reflexivity and secularization of the confessional mode feed into the deconstruction of the public religious and legal performance of confession which is the pretext for the novel (Guízar, Gómez Moriana 56). Thus Rabell argues, “La confesión de Lázaro actúa, pues, a manera de boomerang. Cada pecado confesado pregona 16 This objectification of his throat is later echoed by the notion of his mouth as a purse (Wolfenzon 11). Rico notes in his edition the critical consensus that the source for this passage is Apuleius (42 n. 128); María Rosa Lida de Malkiel cites the folkloric origins of the sausage episode (5), and Del Monte lists many suggested precedents (30–31); see also Lázaro Carreter (120–21). As Molho points out, the author may borrow from various sources but uses the material for different ends through the device of artful juxtaposition (Introducción 30). 17 Molho, “El pícaro,” states: “el pícarismo español es un discurso antiseñorial que se enuncia desde un enfoque y mediante un lenguaje claramente señoriales” (207). For Molho, self-parody in the text reveals the ideological perversion of the dominant discourse. See Sieber: “Saying something prohibited but not accepting responsibility for having done so requires a mode of discourse that is made to appear severed or dissociated from the speaker by the speaker himself” (48–49). See also David Castillo, Awry Views, who calls Lazarillo de Tormes “an anamorphic picture puzzle that unveils the real within the Law, and therefore, the arbitrariness and violence of the mechanisms of reproduction and transmission of authority” (134). 18 Guillén, “Introduction” (13); see Dunn (174–75).

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el pecado de la comunidad eclesiástica que exige la confesión” (27). The text, as much as describing the genesis of a pícaro, describes the formation of an ecclesiastical and political bureaucrat and the system which he serves.19 Subjectivity in this novel is not represented as a function of a newly autonomous individual subject; rather it is diffused in the text more generally and more ambivalently. I agree with those20 who locate character in the novel within the medieval tradition of the exemplum, but to apply Dunn’s observation, like every other literary form raided by the author, the exemplary type is emptied out of its canonical function in order to be molded to the author’s own ideological purpose (42). The glimpse into subaltern experience afforded by the subversive use of dominant discourse suggests instead a subjectivity which anticipates what Marxism would come to call the collective subject. This subversiveness stands in ironic contrast to the humanist tradition of hermeticism, in which, as Karen Pinkus observes, incipient subjectivity is cloaked judiciously by “prudent” silence (11, 36). The Lazarillo has been read as a parody of the Confessions of St. Augustine, and the work indeed appears to mirror, in a lower and critical register, the cruelty of Augustinian pedagogy.21 The emblem tradition offers a fitting iconography for the Lazarillo in this regard, in Achille Bocchi’s depiction, addressed to the pope, of naked schoolboys being whipped by their masters, mouths gaping mask-like in pain: the so-called “Dédaliques.” Perhaps as revealing, in its shearing between image and caption (“Hold your tongue!”) is Hadrius Junius’s emblem of harpocratic silence: another boy banished from the town like a scapegoat, who holds his hands over his mouth and his genitals.22 In parody and subversion of the dominant discourse, the Lazarillo depicts the pain of the scapegoat’s body and dares to give that experience, albeit obliquely and intermittently, voice.23 In this sense the work, contrary to its reception as an early bourgeois novel, actually exceeds the possibilities of what would become bourgeois subjectivity. In Fuenteovejuna and the Soledades one can discern two Baroque expressions of the evolution of the historical impasse first announced by Lazarillo de Tormes. While the Lazarillo is an obliquely but strongly subversive text, Fuenteovejuna is utterly hegemonic in its response to a later period of Spanish national crisis, creating a myth of national origins in its idealization of the 19

Clark Colahan (54); see also Rodríguez Puértolas (195). See Dunn (162) and Michael Iarocci. 21 On the parody of the Confessions, see H. R. Jauss as cited by Gómez Moriana (32); on Augustinian pedagogy, see El Saffar, “The I” (180); see also her “The Making of the Novel.” 22 Here I am following Pinkus’s readings of these emblems (1–6, 14–15). 23 See Cruz (Discourses 20) on the pícaro as pharmakos and Castillo (29) on the oblique quality of Lazarillo’s viewpoint. 20

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communal life of the peasantry at a time of agricultural devastation.24 Where the Lazarillo ironically concludes with Carlos V’s entry into Toledo, his triumphant Cortes highlighting the crushing of the Comunero revolt, Fuenteovejuna celebrates the cooptation of a local peasant uprising. The play proclaims the victory of the monarchy over an earlier feudal order, in part achieved over the peasant subjects’ collective experience of torture and murder. In the Soledades, as will be demonstrated, Góngora confronts the crisis of agriculture and empire more critically, in the depiction of a wandering youth, who while aristocratic, shares with Lazarillo the experience of trauma and rootlessness, as the violence of imperialist war, juxtaposed with erotic violence, informs the fabric of the youth’s own experience of subjection (Beverley, Aspects 65). As critics and historians have pointed out, Fuenteovejuna presents to its urban audience, many of whom had migrated from the countryside, an idyllic view of a challenged but heroic peasant society, exemplary in its loyalty to the norms of social hierarchy (Childers 10–11; 32–33). Yvonne Yarbro Bejarano notes that “a salient factor in the idealization of rural life, especially of the rich farmer, is a program of reform that saw in the return to farming and the countryside the possibility of economic salvation within the context of hegemonic values condemning all but inherited wealth or wealth obtained from the earth as dishonorable” (219). The rise of the city, the depletion of the countryside which gave rise to the culture of the pícaro, thus provokes an idealizing reaction in Lope’s theatre. This idealization of peasant life, as many critics have argued, is evident in plays such as Fuenteovejuna which develop the theme of menosprecio de corte y alabanza de aldea.25 The play celebrates the culture of the folk, evincing a pseudo-orality in its integration of cancionero poetry into its dialogue, which includes commentary on the clash between oral and print culture.26 The creation of Fuenteovejuna as rural idyll relates to a broader political purpose at work in Lope’s dramaturgy. As William Blue has noted, Felipe III replaced his father’s bureaucracy, based on university trained men of the lower nobility, with privados, royal favorites from the higher nobility. In shifting from a merit system to an aristocratic client system, the king unfairly favored the Military Orders (300). Blue suggests that Lope used the play to critique this flawed system of governance, proposing instead the “myth of the Reyes Católicos,” who “unify their ravaged country […] through practical politics” 24

See Blue, Noël Salomon, and Gasta. Gasta (“The Politics” 12), José María Díez Borque (311), and Walter Cohen (261–63, 319). Chad Gasta’s original contribution has since been updated as a book chapter in Imperial Stagings (58–99). 26 Walter Cohen points out that Lope converted the chronicles which are the source of the play back into popular poetry (182); Connor discusses the work’s incorporation of commentary on the clash between oral and print culture (50). 25

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(313). In this sense, the play confirms George Mariscal’s characterization of the comedia as an “ideological ritual aimed in part at the resolution of practical problems which were taking shape within the dominant class itself” (“Symbolic Capital” 166). The play models not only kingship but subjection, as a Baroque case of theatre as a school for the people. As David Castillo and William Egginton point out, “the theatre of the Baroque can be seen as a forum for the continuous reworking of that society’s ideological field in order to consolidate control precisely when real political authority was losing its grip” (427). A number of peasant secessionist revolts occurred in the periphery not long after the publication of the play from 1624–1648, although rural rebellion failed to extend to Castile (Walter Cohen 263, 348). One “strategy of containment” for revolt was the interpellation of the peasantry by the honor code, the notion that honor was a universal “patrimony of the soul,” regardless of class.27 This notion of peasant honor, highlighted by the Comendador’s question to the townspeople, “¿Vosotros honor tenéis?” (McGrady ed., II. 989) creates an “illusion of autonomy to reproduce the ideology of the Absolutist State,” the notion of a private sphere of the subject protected by the King (Castillo and Egginton 427). In short, it is around the notion of honor that the King’s subjects in Fuenteovejuna defend their subordination, expressing more consistently their obedience to the social hierarchy than their superiors. As Frondoso asserts to the Comendador in the face of the latter’s violation of his own feudal obligations: “Yo me conformo con mi estado” (I. 852–53).28 The honor code unites monarch and old Christian peasants on racial lines, “limpieza de sangre,” against the suspicion of Jewish ancestry in the Comendador.29 The political and economic outrage against the encomienda system is also channeled on the basis of honor associated with gender in the preservation of female sexual virtue. The Comendador, by raping the village women, offends male property rights and female honor based on premarital virginity and marital sexual fidelity. He represents, as critics have pointed out, an earlier feudal order in which the droit du seigneur (the right of the first night, or in Spanish, el derecho de pernada) was observed.30 Laurencia, 27

Anthony Cascardi (17), Castillo and Egginton (422). Walter Cohen (323); see also Cascardi on the willful self-domination of the masses (“The Old and the New” 23). 29 Yarbro Bejarano sees unity among males of different classes on the basis of race, but this unity extends to the old Christian women as well; note Pascuala’s antisemitic remarks in I. 249–64 (221). See Juan Ignacio Gutiérrez Nieto (502) and William Childers (33). 30 Walter Cohen cites Friedrich Engels on a 1486 uprising against serfdom in Catalonia, in which peasants won concessions from King Ferdinand against the right of the first night (324); see Cañadas (142). 28

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after suffering rape by the Comendador and possibly by his soldiers as well (Aaronson)31, goads the men’s council into the uprising, impugning their honor as men for failing to rise to the defense of the town’s women against the Comendador’s sexual predation (see Baena). The fact that Laurencia leads the revolt has given rise to various affirmations of the play’s incipient feminism. For example, Walter Cohen states, a concern with sexual politics, indeed a feminist consciousness, runs through the play, manifest in an attack on the exploitation of women in extramarital intercourse, in an insistence on female rights in choosing a partner, in the formation of an effective military brigade of peasant women, and most strikingly, in Laurencia’s heroic leadership of the villagers, which begins with a challenge to the peasant men who run Fuente Ovejuna (324).

Ivan Cañadas calls Laurencia “one of the most heroic women in the early modern theatres of either Spain or England, and she is explicitly no lady, but a proudly plebian heroine” (138). Yet what must be made clear here is that Laurencia is continually affirming her loyalty to the social hierarchy, in which a woman owes obedience to her male relatives, who are obliged, in turn, to protect her (husband or father, depending on technicalities she hastens to specify), much as the peasants assert their loyalty to their feudal obligations. Similar to the example of Frondoso, she also conforms to her position. She is more obedient to the seigniorial-patriarchal order than the village patriarchs themselves; hence her shaming them on the basis of inadequate masculinity. Her soliloquy is a case of one of those “key dramatic moments” signaled by Mariscal, in which a character from a subordinate group “speaks the dominant ideology more forcefully than any of those socially superior characters against whom he is ostensibly opposed” (“Symbolic Capital” 156). The assertion by Cañadas that the collective uprising, with its male and female regiments, represents a type of androgyny should also be questioned; while both sexes participate, their segregation underscores that each have their place in the social hierarchy, even if the women temporarily take on, as Yarbro Bejarano argues, “masculine” roles (Cañadas 146; Yarbro Bejarano 221). The emphasis on a female character like Laurencia suggests that the play was meant to appeal to the audience, including its women members, on the issue of the family. The family is idealized much as is peasant society, 31

Aaronson, based on Diane Wolfthal’s understanding of rape iconography, argues convincingly that Laurencia’s disheveled hair identifies her as a rape victim and I have modified my interpretation accordingly. In contrast to a reading of the play as an affirmation of an alternative form of hegemony, Aronson asserts, “The requisite restoration of order in Fuenteovejuna is attained by a radical revisioning of the rape script by an understanding of a more fluid concept of virtue” (45).

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reflecting perhaps the breakdown of families in the process of migration to the urban centers, which was poignantly described in the Lazarillo. The focus on Laurencia parallels the increased emphasis on the feminine in Spanish society. As Mariscal has pointed out, this is the period of the great flowering of the cult of Mary, the estimation of the national importance of St. Theresa, and the influx of convent orders into Madrid (“Symbolic Capital”153). This attention to the feminine and to the family structure may be related to the gradual change from the feudal dynastic family to the bourgeois nuclear family, which was conceived of as a cornerstone of the nation by Enlightenment writers such as Leandro Fernández de Moratín. In this regard Fuenteovejuna is transitional; Laurencia makes a point of her willingness to marry someone besides Frondoso if her father mandates it, while her father permits her to marry the man of her choice. The message here is that the family, as a microcosm of society, functions better if its lord shows benevolence to his subjects.32 Laurencia represents a case of female interpellation into the dominant order along the model proposed by Mariscal; here “social power is allowed to pass through marginal and subordinate figures […] so that once on the other side aristocratic power is reasserted in a newly configured and revitalized form” (“Symbolic Capital” 145). Laurencia’s assertiveness mirrors that of the peasant uprising as a whole, as a case of cooptation rather than of liberation. The different treatments of violence in the play illustrate the channeling of the peasant’s revolutionary impulse. The murder of the Comendador is graphically described in gory detail; as Alan Smith has suggested, it conforms to the topos of sparagmos, of frenzied ritual dismemberment of the scapegoat in folk culture. This spectacular display of the violent destruction of the body recalls Marshall’s assertion that this sort of imaginative involvement with violence in the early modern period served to foment submission to authority, here functioning as a kind of social safety valve, one which vicariously “disarms” the “inner violence” and “caste insecurity” of the Spanish comedia audience (Smith 158–9; trans. mine). In order for the rebellious impulse to be successfully channeled, the reciprocal violence of the torture of the citizens must be portrayed less graphically, naturalized. Thus the torture of the weakest citizens is punctuated by commentary on their heroism, and offset by a parallel, celebratory feasting after Mengo, and the town with him, triumph in their refusal to confess to anything but a united and collective action. The “double or triple theatrical effect” of the torture, obtained when the collective ruse is rehearsed by the townspeople in anticipation of their role in 32 In her classic essay, “The Evolution of Psyche under Empire,” El Saffar suggests that in Fuenteovejuna the “rule by king over the modern state” “encourages […] the parallel power of every man over his wife” (177). El Saffar’s essay is enhanced by an understanding of the function of the female face of hegemony.

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the state “theatre of terror,” has led to speculation on the curious aftermath of the events (Blue 307). William Blue, while arguing that the scene reinforces the mythic quality of the play, comments that Frondoso and Laurencia’s subsequent “black humored” jesting gives one pause: “turning torture into a joke flies off the face of the interpretive map” (308). Melveena McKendrick sees the torture scene as more “harrowing,” arguing that its effectiveness is doubled by the on-stage commentary upon the off-stage responses and screams of old men, women and children on the rack. The detached professionalism of the anonymous judge, the resigned attitude of the villagers to the whole process, and then the judge’s disinterested praise for their courage and his matter-of-fact advice to the King and Queen—all serve to intensify rather than to dilute the impact of state machinery in motion (181).

Clearly staging is an issue here, but the text itself gives no indication that the play in its era would have been staged as anything less than an affirmation of the monarchy. The repeated cries of “¡Vivan los reyes!,” the replacement of the Comendador’s head with the royal coat of arms, and the admiration of Laurencia and Frondoso for the example of the royal married couple all support this assertion. The relative lack of description of the violence of the King’s pesquisidor, compared with that carried out against the Comendador, as well as the easy recovery of Mengo, with the comic repetition of the parallel rewards of wine in exchange for his testimonials on the rack, contribute to the creation of this false consciousness of the self-willed individual who heroically submits to the torture required by the monarchist order. There is no early modern “alienation effect” in operation here. Fuenteovejuna is a school for the subject of the Spanish nation in its formative stages. A loosely historically based33 pseudo-genealogy of kingship, a myth of national origins, it is constructed upon other myths: the myth of the subject whose will can always triumph over the most violent torture, the myths of the essential natures of the male and female sexes, the myths of the autonomous individual and of harmony between classes. That this play, minus its monarchist ending, was adapted for representation in the Soviet Union, Republican Spain, and as a form of resistance in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile testifies to the revolutionary spirit it might evoke when indeed staged along a Brechtian model, or to the idealist myths of heroism it might reinforce in the service of a later modern nationalism: the Stalinist myth of socialism in one country or the myth of the popular front.34 33 See A. Robert Lauer, “The Recovery,” Walter Cohen and Blue on the play’s historical underpinnings. 34 See Paul Larson, Teresa Kirschner, and Christopher Weimer on modern refundiciones of the play.

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Góngora’s Soledades responds to Spain’s agricultural and political crisis with an idyllic representation of country life interspersed with images of devastation produced by war and conquest. This vision of the Spanish landscape is mediated by the poem’s central figure, the lovesick, wandering peregrino, who, while evincing the attributes of a noble personage, is depicted, like Lazarillo, as a lost, homeless and, in his association with Ganymede, sexually traumatized youth.35 The poem’s opening lines, the dedication to the poet’s patron, begin with an introduction to the peregrino’s journey and then quickly shift to a panegyric to his patron’s hunting prowess. The duke’s aspirations suggest the imagery of the battlefield; the shattered bodies of the hunter’s prey testify to a violence so ambitious it challenges the mountains. His assault leaves a field of corpses so extensive that it stains the river Tormes with blood, blood which is aestheticized as coral and precious purple (Dedicatoria 5–21). Such imagery recalls the sensual depiction of the bloodier aspects of Christian iconography, found in secular form in Giovan Battista Marino’s poetry, which emerges as a kind of “cruel decorativeness” in the courtly love sonnet tradition (consider, for example, the bloody carnations, cruel and jewel-like, which spatter Lisi’s hair in Francisco de Quevedo’s poetry).36 Yet here the aestheticization of bodily pain, a sublimated version of the sort of violent shattering of the body Barker observes in transitional texts of the early modern period, is projected more generally onto the landscape as a political statement against the devastation of imperialist war. This play between the aesthetics of epic and that of courtly love poetry continues in the peregrino’s sentimental plaint. The hunter’s aspirations, the enormity of the drive to map the world which Góngora evokes in his descriptions of the voyages of exploration, is mirrored by the death wish of the peregrino at his failures in courtly love. He wanders vast terrains: “solicitando en vano | las alas sepultar de mi osadía | donde el Sol nace o donde muere el día” (II. 148–50). He hopes his grave will be of a size proportionate to his failed aspirations, calling on the ocean to be his funeral urn, and the mountains of the world to be his monument. In essence, he asks nature to correspond to his own death wish by serving as a great sepulcher for his failed love: tan generoso fe, no fácil onda, no poca tierra esconda: 35 See Beverley, on the political implications of the “modal friction” between epic and pastoral in the Soledades and on the trauma of the peregrino (Aspects, 29, 32, 62). Frederick De Armas locates Góngora’s use of the Ganymede figure within a humanist tradition of homoerotic imagery, which could play a role in the poetic celebration of empire as well as of the poet’s patrons. See Chemris (38). 36 The term “cruel decorativeness” was shared with me in conversation by Harold Skulsky; see also Mario Praz on this point. Spitzer comments that in this passage, “we witness a conversion of the horrific and bloody into beauty and serenity” (97).

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(II. 161–64)

Such cultivation of his own suffering, an epic expression of the pattern of male “self-shattering” of courtly love poetry, represents a development of the masochistic subjectivity which Marshall has associated with the early modern period. As Sanda Munjic has suggested, Góngora builds on a “masochistic sensibility that has been exploited in patriarchal amorous literature as a prototype of an exemplary nobleman’s subjectivity” (“Patriarchal Love Discourse” 242). In particular, she identifies the imagery of crow hunting, a topos in the Georgics tradition, as a locus for the development of a model of “male suffering subjectivity,” pointing to Garcilaso’s second eclogue as a source for Góngora. There, Garcilaso depicts a crow which is pinioned to the ground sadistically by the shepherd Albanio and his unresponsive lady Camila as a way of ensnaring the other birds, drawn to wrestle on top of it. This image of entrapment, which has its origins in the pastoral poetry of both Sannazaro and Ariosto, becomes a figure of male erotic suffering, when Albanio, after being abandoned by his shepherdess, prostrates himself as if he too has been nailed to the ground (Boase 41–42). Thus, as Munjic maintains, “the birdhunting scene appears as an extended metaphor that displaces the shepherd’s own feelings and fantasies, indicating Albanio’s own position of a victim in a masochistic hunting game, where the unresponsiveness of the sublimated lady, the huntress Camila, becomes his choice instrument of torture” (242). For Munjic, this poetic tradition of male suffering subjectivity culminates in the falconry scene of the Soledades, in which the peregrino is a passive witness to a symbolic display of military violence, presenting a stark contrast to the affirmation of the heroic model of male subjectivity found in the panegyric to the Duke of Alba in Garcilaso’s hypotext (261–62). I agree, but suggest that more is at issue. The display of falconry begins with a parade of birds of prey identified with various nations, many associated metaphorically with military weapons and astronomical signs. The scene is an allegory of European war, as Beverley has suggested (Aspects 93, 99–100), one which is decorated with the Apocalyptic imagery of Hapsburg theocratic prophecy, in which the Spanish monarch, the “last descendant of Aeneas,” was said to usher in the new Christianized Holy Roman Empire and with it the Last Judgment and the end of history (see Tanner). The image of the trapped crow is repeated, as Munjic points out, when a cloud of crows greedily surge toward the gold of an owl’s eyes and one becomes caught between a gyrfalcon and a saker in a cosmic battle. One possible reading of the scene would be to look at the crow, a figure of political cooperation in emblem books of the period (Boase 48), as a symbol for the

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Spanish body politic infested by greed, caught between the twin threats of North (the rebellious Netherland provinces) and South (the Cypriot saker symbolic of the military threat of the Turks).37 Given that Spain was in a period of truce with the Dutch at the time of composition,38 the scene might be read as prophetic, but counter to the glorious terms of Hapsburg apologetics. The final transformation of the crow into a world which explodes (“breve esfera” II. 923–37) forms a spectacle of Apocalypse which debunks the millennial pretensions of the Spanish monarchy by counterpoising the real history of European war to the pseudo-history of divinely ordained empire. The peregrino views the aerial war passively, continuing the muteness of the crow-hunting topos. The description of his gaze is cast in quantitative, almost scientific language (Degraye 240): “registra” and “cuenta” (II. 859, 860). The passive registering of the youth’s eyes seems mechanical; in Michael Perna’s view, “Spectacle replaces complex or conflicting emotions”; “The cruel elements of the scene cause no reaction, the beautiful elements do” (166–67). We may be observing in the youth’s response (or non-response) the construction of false consciousness, the collusion of a spectator in the idealization of bodily pain. His reaction suggests the construction of a social myth of subjugation which Góngora was perhaps trying to address in his guarded protest against the abuses of empire. Yet the youth’s identification with Ganymede (I. 7–8) offers an additional possibility; in his numbness before the spectacle of “the body in pain,” of what Elaine Scarry calls “the unmaking of the world,” he displays the characteristics of the trauma one would expect of a rape victim: dissociation and psychic fragmentation. Góngora quickly deconstructs whatever tragic pathos this moment accumulates by recourse to farce, as the narrative continues with a description of the shoreline, referring back to the display of falconry as “pendientes agradables casos” (II. 937) (Woodward 778). This reference to the horrific scene of war and apocalypse as “pleasant” suggests Góngora’s ambivalence toward the diversions of his aristocratic patrons; here we are reminded that the poet’s ties to the antiimperialist agrarian aristocracy necessarily placed limits on his critique.39 It may also be a rather bleak form of self parody. In any event the reader is left 37 Beverley,

in his edition of the Soledades, cites Góngora’s contemporary Pellicer’s suggestion that the gyrfalcon represents Holland (155–56). Munjic has demonstrated a parallel between this passage in the Soledades and Books Two and Eleven of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, suggesting that Góngora reworks Ovid’s treatment of greed as political critique, associating “the greed involved in commercial navigation with the greed punished in the falconry scene”(“A Reflection on Greed” 263). 38 Jammes argues that the Soledad segunda, absent the final 43 lines, was completed shortly after 1617 (ed. Soledades 19–20); J. H. Elliot dates the twelve-year truce at 1609 (287). 39 Beverley (Aspects 7); see also Chemris (36–38).

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“hanging,” questioning, as in moments of the Lazarillo, the speaker’s choice to view suffering through rose colored glasses. The mechanical gaze of the peregrino, an expression of his traumatic detachment, corresponds to the objectification of the bird’s bodies; the crow is reduced metaphorically into a tennis ball, while the birds of prey become weapons which volley it in a battle turned game. In this parallel representation of the peregrino and the object of his gaze as mechanism, we see the trajectory of the specular relationship between lover and crow in the pastoral of Garcilaso and his Italian sources. In the spectacle of the crow’s demise, the pathetic fallacy of the identification between the subject and his double in nature is transformed into a manifestation of the mechanical grotesque. This dehumanization of the subject parallels similar imagery in the Lazarillo40 (e.g. the reversible equation of body and thing: the mouth as purse, the bed as skeleton, etc.) which hints at the reduction of the subject into mechanism which Barker sees as the endpoint of modern subject formation. Yet here the parallel with the traumatized Lazarillo ends; the gaze of the noble peregrino at the tableau vivant of the falconry scene suggests another sort of pedagogy in the context of Hapsburg political crisis: the spectacle is a “mirror of princes” whose message would yet be deciphered on the stage of history (Beverley, Aspects 100, 102). Góngora’s poem joins the others as contradictory works of transition. Fuenteovejuna looks backward to create a myth of national origins, while it interpellates on the issue of individual honor to effect subjection into the King’s body. The Soledades and the Lazarillo, on the other hand, more critically anticipate both the birth of the modern subject and its negation, each in the deconstruction of a compendium of previous literary forms and through the frustration of patterns of Christian teleology. A gutted version of the epic hero (Paul Julian Smith), Góngora’s mute, dissociated peregrino, predicts the emptying out of the sentimental subject: the superfluous man of late Romanticism and nihilism, the man without qualities. Lazarillo anticipates the collective subject of what would become the proletarian novel or testimonio. The Soledades and Lazarillo de Tormes represent two different literary trajectories of the development of modern subjectivity in literature, its emergence out of both the Petrarchan and the patristic-confessional modes.  The three works we have examined all offer different examples of early modern subjection while engaging with the political issues of the time as well as with the dynamics of violence, and in particular, sexual violence, to make their case. In depicting the peasantry’s response to the Comendador’s sexual predation and exploitation, Fuenteovejuna functions as a school for the 40 See A. D. Deyermond on the imagery of dehumanization in the Lazarillo (68); such imagery could be viewed more generally as what Rodríguez Puértolas calls “la cosificación” (188, 147–68).

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subject of absolutism in the emerging Spanish nation. Góngora’s Soledades, by using figures of mythological rape such as Ganymede, in the case of the peregrino, and the framing figures of Europa and Persephone, emblematic of the military rape of Europe, questions, symbolically, imperial policies and their devastation of the countryside.41 While Fuenteovejuna affirms hegemony by incorporating the rebellion of peasants and women, the Soledades does so obliquely, by incorporating the critique of a more educated opposition, the agrarian aristocracy who were Góngora’s patrons.42 In contrast, the anonymously written, self-published Lazarillo de Tormes stands out as the most radical of the three works, using the hidden discourse of prostitution to reveal the exploitation of the child and of all who must subject themselves to the new urban market, while subverting the official discourse of the church and state. Despite their differences, these works depict a common violence toward the body, the violence toward the older sacramental body which Barker saw as a marker for the development of early modern subjectivity. All engage creatively the development of subjectivity, both as emergent interiority and as political subjection, as it is engaged by violence and displayed in its myriad contradictions in literature.

41 Here, also, there may be a parallel with the Lazarillo. As Del Monte states, “su aventura es la de España, tal como ésta se le aparecía al anónimo escritor del siglo dieciséis, una España derrotada en Gerba, olvidada de la propia misión de guerra cristiana contra los moros, y encaminada, por el contrario, en la guerra contra otras tierras cristianas, a una gloria aparente y a una auténtica ruina” (56). Del Monte assumes the reference to Lazarillo’s father fighting the Moors is meant to be an Erasmian assertion of Spain’s mythic Reconquista past (against its contemporary decline through war in Europe). However, if one takes the position, à la Ruffinatto, that the work is a parody of Erasmian parody, the meaning of this passage might be taken more critically (see Ruffinatto 328). This tension between a kind of “axiological nihilism,” to use Stephen Gilman’s term in reference to the Celestina, and a reforming impulse is also evident in the Soledades; (see Gilman, Introduction 14 and Chemris 41–42). Arturo Marasso’s conjecture (Estudios 159), that the reference to Carlos V’s triumphant entry into Toledo at the end of the novel was modeled on the ending of the Georgics suggests a possible further parallel with the Soledades in the use of Virgilian pastoral to encode a political agenda of agrarian reform. See Chemris on the relationship of the Soledades to arbitrista reform projects (33–38). Regarding the issue of sexual violence, Góngora suggests the possibility of a transcendence of gender in the combination of male identification with female abjection evoked by the Ganymede figure and the possibility of female enactment of patriarchal violence evoked by the Éfire figure. See Chemris (Góngora’s Soledades 67–70). 42 See Beverley, Against Literature on the notion of the Soledades as a private sphere and defamiliarizing affirmation of hegemony (59).

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Trauma, Body and Machine in Don Quijote The “tremulous private body” has a different expression in the second prologue of Don Quijote. In this short but essential text, Cervantes grapples with topics of trauma, violence and subjection, evincing transatlantic parallels in the advent of the mechanization of labor, whose model is most fundamentally that of the indigenous mine worker, the broken indigenous body that subtends imperial production of the early modern. While much ink has been spent on interpreting the prologue Miguel de Cervantes wrote for the first volume of Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605), fewer critical studies have been dedicated to the prologue of his Book II (1615), constructed as a defense by Cervantes against the spurious sequel to Book I circulated by his rival Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, the ostensible Segundo Tomo del Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (1614). Nonetheless I will suggest that there is still more to be gleaned from this text, particularly if one takes to heart Américo Castro’s assertion that Cervantes’s prologues are more like epilogues whose meaning “No se revela sino a quien posea noticia muy cabal del libro” (Hacia Cervantes 231). As I hope to demonstrate, the second prologue is a window into the greater problem of the interaction of body and machine in Don Quijote, one in which different notions of the grotesque come into play. Henry Sullivan has associated Book II of Don Quijote with the grotesque mode, portraying the cave of Montesinos episode as a descent into the grotto of the psyche, with Quijote’s cure following a Christian pattern of purgation.1 He further argues that the grotesque, by evoking the terror of bodily fragmentation, contributes a “dark solemnity” to the novel which offsets its comic aspects (62–63, 59). As he writes of Book II: “It is the grotesque of the body subjected to pain, contextualized within a mock ceremonial order, that raises the uncertain smile” (66). I agree with Sullivan on these points but I will suggest a refinement of these arguments which incorporates more recent work in trauma theory as it has been applied to Cervantes’s life experience. In Cervantes’s figuration of the body as mechanism, the comedy of the satiric grotesque—in the Bakhtinian, carnivalesque sense much explored by

1

See especially 49–66.

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critics2—is shadowed by its darker side, the “estranged world”—in Wolfgang Kayser’s more negative understanding of the fantastic grotesque3—of psychic trauma. Such portrayal of trauma, as will be shown,—in a way which differs from Sullivan’s specifically psychoanalytic approach4—gestures towards a modern appreciation of psyche as a vehicle for interpellation at the threshold of new social forms. Like Isabel García Adánez, I see the value in applying both major theories of the grotesque to Cervantes’s novel and in particular in relation to the topics of trauma and mechanization, but I will elaborate these applications differently, in contrast to her impulse to unite the theories in a problematic of transgression and comic catharsis.5 In order to enter into a discussion of these broader issues, it is necessary to attend first to a detailed analysis of the second prologue. The prologue is introduced with a series of requisite aprobaciones, certifying the propriety of the book’s content before civil and ecclesiastical powers and authorizing its publication. The second aprobación was written by a friend of the author, the Licenciado Márquez Torres, and has been deemed by critics to be so organic to the prologue that it has even been suggested that Cervantes himself wrote it, or perhaps assisted in its composition (Mayáns

2 Here I refer to studies by Cros, Iffland, and Molho, “Raíz folklórica” among others. 3 For Kayser, the grotesque is “the estranged world,” “a play with the absurd,” and finally, “an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world” (179–89). Kayser defines the fantastic grotesque and the satiric grotesque as the two principal currents in the mode (173, 186, and 189). While the satiric grotesque evokes laughter, the fantastic grotesque evokes fear. Although Sullivan never mentions Kayser, his view of the grotesque, particularly his reference to it as “an affective mode” (156) or an “encounter with the strange world” (63), seems to fall loosely within Kayser’s definition of the fantastic grotesque. 4 Anne Cruz’s Lacanian reading of Don Quijote, “Mirroring Others,” in Ruth El Saffar and Diana de Armas Wilson’s anthology of psychoanalytic readings of Cervantes is a precursor to Sullivan’s; see also De Armas Wilson’s essay in the same collection on the Cave of Montesinos episode as a dream sequence. A. Robert Lauer has recently studied the Altisidora episode of Book II in Lacanian terms (“Altisidora”). 5 As García Adánez writes, “Desde el punto de vista de la función artística de lo grotesco entendido como subversión o transgresión que persigue la liberación de algo traumático u opresivo – uniendo así las teorías de Kayser y Bajtín, pero también de Freud –, cabría interpretar la transgresión de la norma literaria al uso que hallamos en el Quijote en múltiples niveles como una forma de subversión por parte de su autor” (“Lo grotesco” 387). In her entry on the grotesque for the Gran Enciclopedia Cervantina, García Adánez points to the importance of notions of mechanization and “cosificación/animalización” of human beings as part of the effect of the grotesque in the novel, drawing on Henri Bergson’s 1900 study of laughter, issues I will treat via other critical studies and against her bias towards the comic aspects of this topic.

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i Siscar 65–66 as cited by Rivers, “Prefatory Pages” 215; Rivers 216 n. 3). Were this the case, the constructed aprobación would represent an example of a common tactic in the novel, in which something might be discussed in one section and then “staged” or realized in another. If in the prologue to Book I the narrator Cervantes is counseled by a friend to consider making up what he needed to “authorize” his work, in the prologue to Book II he has the “friend” write the authorization, apparently in his own pen. This trope of constructed authority continues within the prefatory pages. As Elias Rivers notes in his foundational article on the second prologue, the argumentation of the aprobación recounts truthful anecdotes about the author’s fame which anticipate fictional ones developed immediately afterwards in Cervantes’s Dedicatoria to his patron, the Conde de Lemos (“Prefatory Pages” 215–16). The most significant passage of Márquez Torres’s aprobación is the section on certain (un-named) bad authors who fail to strike the Horatian balance of utility and pleasure in their writing. Such writers are said to imitate the lesser qualities of the Cynic philosophers: “no pudiendo imitar a Diógenes en lo filosófico y docto … le pretenden imitar en lo cínico” (Don Quijote 529). Here, Márquez Torres illustrates his point with an exemplary metaphor drawing on folk wisdom; bad authors are like bad doctors, who try to cure an abscess with a lance and cautery, not realizing that gentle and mild medicine, “las blandas y suaves medicinas,” achieve better results (529). He then contrasts these bad authors with Miguel de Cervantes, citing in particular “la suavidad y blandura de sus discursos,” thus associating him with the gentle and mild medicine of the cautionary tale (530). Márquez Torres’s aprobación, as Rivers aptly maintains, offers Cervantes the opportunity to confront Avellaneda indirectly through the displacement of his voice onto his friend’s, with the exemplary tale of the violent and tempered medicine representing, in camouflaged form, Cervantes’s own critical judgment (215, 218).6 As Rivers reads the passage (reinforcing Stephen Gilman’s position), Avellaneda is the first doctor, a brutal Dominican, while Cervantes is “an Erasmian Christian, a Renaissance libertarian, forced to develop protective coloration, to ‘sugar his pill,’ by the hostile environment of the Spanish Counter-Reformation” (“Prefatory Pages” 220, referencing Gilman). Thus Avellaneda’s novel is simplistic and crude while “Don Quijote establishes a literary form in which ironically shifting and balanced points of view provide a subtle complexity of shadings and perspectives” (220). The text of the second prologue proper is modeled on an earlier prologue written by Mateo Alemán, whose Guzmán de Alfarache was also the target of an apocryphal sequel (Porqueras 82). As critics have noted, Cervantes begins the prologue itself by again relying on displacement, this time to the reader, 6

Other critics in a similar vein point to Cervantes’s “indirection” (Díaz-Solís) and “dialogism” (Strother) in the second prologue.

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whose purported righteous indignation at Avellaneda serves as a foil against which Cervantes can strike a pose of equanimity and distance (Porqueras 81–82, Díaz-Solís 126): ¡Válame Dios, y con cuánta gana debes de estar esperando ahora, lector ilustre, o quier plebeyo, este prólogo, creyendo hallar en él venganzas, riñas y vituperios del autor del segundo Don Quijote, digo, de aquel que dicen que se engendró en Tordesillas y nació en Tarragona! Pues en verdad que no te he de dar este contento; que puesto que los agravios despiertan la cólera en los más humildes pechos, en el mío ha de padecer excepción esta regla. Quisieras tú que lo diera del asno, del mentecato y del atrevido, pero no me pasa por el pensamiento: castíguele su pecado, con su pan se lo coma y allá se lo haya (535).

If in the first prologue Cervantes conjures up the introduction he will not write,7 here he elaborates the counterattack he will not, at least ostensibly, make. Cervantes continues his introduction with allusions to rivalries within his literary field as well as to the tensions between patronage and the market.8 He further bolsters his self-defense with a reference to the mutilation of his hand, the sign of the fragmentation of his body which was also referenced in the first prologue. This motif of corporeal trauma undergoes a fantastic-grotesque transformation in yet another sequence of cautionary tales at the center of the text, the two harrowing stories of madmen and dogs which Cervantes requests that his reader recount to Avellaneda. The tales pick up a thread from Márquez Torres’s aprobación, the allusion to Diogenes, representative of the Greek Cynic philosophers, the kynikoi, so-called because they were doglike, roaming the streets, freely defecating and not washing, like wandering madmen.9 Cervantes repeats the strategy of the didactic exemplum of the aprobación, splitting these two aspects of the kynikoi (they are like both dogs and madmen) and then doubling the tales as two related parables. The first of the two stories describes a madman in Seville who inflates a dog he captures from the street by inserting a tube, whose end has been sharpened, into the animal’s anus and blowing into it. Once the dog has been blown into a round ball, he slaps its belly and lets it go, asking his audience, “¿Pensarán vuestras mercedes ahora que es poco trabajo hinchar un perro?” (537). Cervantes the narrator then comments, inquiring indirectly of Avellaneda, “¿Pensará vuestra merced ahora que es poco trabajo hacer un libro?,” thereby comparing Avellaneda’s artistry with that of the madman: 7

See Charles Presberg, “This is not a Prologue,” in his Adventures in Paradox. See Baker’s and Carlos Gutiérrez’s studies on patronage and the market in early modern Spain. 9 Desmond, Cynics 3; I also acknowledge Julio Baena for his discussion with me of the Cynics. 8

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cruel, sensationalistic and crude, pandering to the worst instincts of the crowd. Thus John Beusterien’s recent study casts the prologue as an amplification of a conceit identifying Cervantes’s book as a dog, designed to better make the case against Avellaneda’s abuse of the novel by eliciting the reader’s sympathy towards the animal.10 The madman’s (or Avellaneda’s) inflation of the dog is an inversion of the divine afflatus, the “tentación del demonio” to write a book for profit (536). Where in the first prologue Cervantes develops the “golem” figure,11 announcing the birth of his artificial creature, the fictional madman which is the stepchild of his shriveled brain, here he ridicules Avellaneda’s devilish creation, which as Javier Herrero points out, is born out of as much inspiration as a dog fart (584).12 This symbolic representation of Avellaneda’s artistry appropriates only superficially the carnivalesque trope of inversion; most notably—and here I apply the thesis James Iffland develops in his extensive study of Cervantes and Avellaneda—it lacks its regenerative quality, approaching instead what Bakhtin called “grotesque realism” in its degradation of the body (Bakhtin, Rabelais 53, Iffland 183). The swollen belly of the dog recalls the carnival fool’s sceptre of inflated pig bladders—primitive balloons—but it also is an emblem of the reduction of the corporeal to mechanism, a source of what David Castillo has termed “Baroque horror.” The transgressive merger of body and machine suggest the “estranged world” of Kayser’s notion of the fantastic grotesque, thought by Bakhtin to be more applicable to modern literature, but emergent here, nonetheless, in this transitional work of the early modern period (see Bakhtin, Rabelais 51). Recent pioneering scholarship on Cervantes’s experience of trauma and abjection as a Christian slave in Algiers—by Fernando Arrabal, María Antonia Garcés, and Julián Jiménez Heffernan, as well as an earlier study by Helena Percas de Ponseti (which Sullivan references)13 —offers the possibility 10 Although Beusterien contextualizes the tales within contemporary protest against spectacles of animal abuse, he argues that Cervantes does not follow Alemán in presenting the tale as a moral lesson about animal suffering, nor does he present it as biographical commentary on his own experience (68, 70). Beusterien explains the trope as follows. Avellaneda abused Cervantes’s dog-book, blowing it out of proportion, and not working hard to do this, while Cervantes had labored long and hard to write his volumes. Cervantes’s dog, his book, is then hit with the stone of Avellaneda’s lifeless “insensitive tomes” (71; 69–71). Bonnie L. Gasior and Anahit Manoukian, in contrast, read this tale as veiled social criticism, considering the cultural history of the insane asylum in Spain at the time. 11 See Óscar Hahn’s evocative essay on the golem figure. 12 Clea Gerber relates such imagery to the unnatural birth of Avellaneda’s novel in the context of Cervantes’s defense of his “derechos de autor.” 13 I refer here to Percas de Ponseti’s 1975 monograph, 503–49, as referenced by Sullivan 46.

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of combining theories of trauma and of the grotesque to develop a deeper appreciation of the importance of these “dog tales.” As María Antonia Garcés has noted, the Christian slaves Cervantes depicted were referred to by their masters as “dogs,” subjected to sexual predation as well as to psychological and physical violence, —to horror on a most intimate level (139–41). The spectacular display of the sexualized abuse of the dog in the prologue mirrors this history of abjection,14 and thus points to the greater issue of trauma as a structuring force in the novel. Garcés sees in the displacements and fragmentation of authorial voice, in “doubling” and the Babelic features of the narrative, a reflection of Cervantes’s experience as a captive and the survival strategies of trauma (146–47, 153, 160–61). These qualities are very much at issue, as we shall see, in the second tale “de loco y de perro” (Don Quijote 537). The second tale is of another madman, this time in the twin city of Córdoba, who had the habit of dropping a slab of marble on unsuspecting dogs, who would then flee, barking and howling in pain. When the madman dropped his load on the head of a dog belonging to a hatter, his master rushed forward and beat the madman with a measuring stick, repeating with each blow, “Perro ladrón, ¿a mi podenco? ¿No viste, cruel, que era podenco mi perro? “(537). The madman, having learned his lesson, forever held still his rock whenever a dog approached, warning no matter what the breed, “Este es podenco, ¡guarda!” (537) On this note, Cervantes refers the cautionary tale to the good offices of his reader, with the following admonition, again indirectly delivered to his rival: “Quizá de esta suerte le podrá acontecer a este historiador, que no se atreverá a soltar más la presa de su ingenio con libros que, en siendo malos, son más duros que las peñas” (537–38). This second tale picks up on Avellaneda’s claim, in his own prologue, that he was justified in writing his own Quijote as much as other authors were in writing their own “Angélicas, Arcadias y Dianas”(53 n. 14). Cervantes’s insistence on the podenco as sacrosanct is in part an allegorical defense of an author’s rights over his original invention: the Quijote by analogy is no generic: it has a pedigree, it is a name brand. The punishment for Avellaneda is poetic justice, and in this sense we do see an assertion of the liberating force of carnivalesque inversion of the sort of which Molho and Iffland have written. The cruel madman is subjected to the beating he himself once meted out, and becomes a victim of the very terror he once inspired, to the point of enacting his own traumatic repetition. He now will repeatedly signal the prey he denies himself, like a podenco hunting dog who is disciplined to point to the prey shot by its master. This signaling, a type of sign language, connects to the trope of mute speech and the confusion of tongues: animal and human, mad and prophetic, 14

Clea Gerber points out in her essay on the prologue that “perro” was used to demean the marginalized, including Jews, Moors and heretics.

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which Cervantes cultivates throughout the Quijote. The parody of voice continues in the satirical treatment of his competitor in Book II; in the air which inflates the dog and in the blow of the ill-inspired tomes, these tales presage the hot air and repetitive hitting of Avellaneda’s book in the devil’s tennis match later witnessed by Altisidora (1043).15 In the hatter’s rebuking of the madman, Cervantes effects another sort of verbal doubling, playing with the line between res and verba; the madman is “perro ladrón”, while the dog is “perro podenco”; the figurative “perro” is the madman/kynikos; the literal “perro” is the flesh-and-blood dog that is held above the debasing epithet. The howling and corporeal signing in the tale have a significance in the imagery of the novel beyond their immediate function in Cervantes’s sanction of his rival; as images they are testimony to suffering outside of official speech; they represent the truths to which Cervantes alluded when he stated, “será forzoso valerme por mi pico, que aunque tartamudo, no lo será para decir verdades, que, dichas por señas, suelen ser entendidas” (Prologue to Novelas ejemplares I. 50; cited by Arrabal 17). The Babelic atmosphere of Algiers, evoked by María Antonia Garcés, is suggested in these games of multiple signs which Cervantes sets into motion with a kind of ventriloquy, a word whose etymological meaning is literally “a speaking through the belly” (Websters New Collegiate Dictionary). These two cautionary tales have always haunted me in their graphic description of violence and cruelty towards the dogs. In their striking impact, the scenes foreshadow the harrowing beginning of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which a peasant savagely beats his horse to death. I could speculate that perhaps Dostoyevsky was inspired here by Cervantes; perhaps, indeed, in ways Bakhtin may not have anticipated, Cervantes is the great ancestor of Dostoyevsky. Yet Cervantes’s tales clearly lack Dostoyevsky’s post-Romantic pathos. There is a minimalist, sketchy quality to the slapstick violence of the second tale, one which brings to mind Helena Percas de Ponseti’s assertion that Cervantes often represents the functions of a puppet show, even at times baring his authorial strings (51). The Punch-and-Judy violence of the dog tales is mechanical, stiff, as bereft of representation of facial expression as some of the documents of the era’s visual culture; for example, some of drawings which depicted dismembered indigenous victims of the conquest or contemporary continental martyrology engravings, both informed by conventional European representational styles of the time.16 The rift between the extreme cruelty of the violence depicted and the absence of sympathetic subjective detail is striking to the modern reader, trained 15 Iffland associates this passage with the inflated pig bladders of the fool (505). Javier Herrero relates metaphors associated with empty vessels of air to a larger pattern of ridicule of bad poets in Cervantes’s work (“La metáfora del libro”). 16 See Cynthia Marshall’s depiction of early modern martyrology engravings (120).

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to identify and respond to heavily laden appeals to subjectivity. If pain is expressed, it is in the Babelic speech of the howling of the Cordovan dog. Those cries retroactively cast a critical light on the representation of his twin from Seville, who has been quietly reduced to the mechanical, his sides transformed into a set of bellows, his belly an inflated balloon. This critique beneath the surface, this possibility for reading between the lines which many have observed in the multi-faceted texture of the Quijote, could be considered a kind of early modern alienation effect at the origins of an emergent subjectivity, arising in the interstices of exhausted canonical forms.17 The testimonial voice of Cervantes, the truth of his trauma, works its way to the surface—via the grotesque—as a corporeal haunting, an unassimilated remainder, a return of the repressed. As Julián Jiménez Heffernan aptly comments, Nos preguntamos: ¿le seguía doliendo a Cervantes en España su mano atrofiada en Lepanto? ¿Y en Lepanto o Argel su mano nunca amputada en España, le dolía, ese daño puramente fantasmal? ¿Y sus otros miembros corporales, castigados en batallas y cautiverios, posibles laceraciones, golpes, sodomizaciones, torturas, a las que pudo ser sometido, cuánto cuerpo lesionaron, y cuántas almas asociadas se llevaron, y cuánto dolor persistió tras su retorno fracturado a España, cuánto dolor fantasmal, espectral, pero dolor? ¿Acaso no es el Quijote la resurrección mecánica del cuerpo cervantino, marioneta golpeada, que echa a cabalgar y a chocar, en una suerte de delirio maquinal, por eso que Ortega llamó “abierta llanada manchega”? (189)

Jiménez Heffernan describes Quijote’s repeated collisions throughout the novel as puppet-like and mechanical; if he is a “marioneta” repeatedly beaten in a “delirio maquinal,” this is because, in Jiménez Heffernan’s view, he exemplifies the transitional moment between a medieval view of the body as the home of the spirit and a Cartesian sense of the body as an autonomously functioning system. The breech between the two epistemes is expressed as a deconstructive impulse, in which the residue of history is expressed as a legacy of broken bodies, of which Don Quijote is its most singular representative (192–99). The repeated smashing of Quijote’s body could thus be seen as another expression of the violence towards the sacramental body of the disintegrating feudal regime of which Francis Barker has written. Kayser has identified the mechanical grotesque as the experience of the mechanical entering our world as alien; E. T. A. Hoffmann’s animated doll Olympia is his classic example of such a phenomenon (71–73, 183). Cervantes’s dog turned bellows or balloon merges the mechanical grotesque 17

See Chemris (65) and Ruiz Pérez (253–54) on the interstitial.

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with a traumatic response to spectacular punishment and the mechanization of the body. Cervantes depicts the rise of the machine at various points in the Quijote, in the knight’s encounters with windmills, fulling mills, printing presses, and curious automata such as Don Antonio’s enchanted head (Reed 173). As Cory Reed has argued, Don Quijote’s encounter with this technology represents his struggle with a modern world he eventually learns to accept, “as empiricism and observation replace his scholastic reliance upon textual authority as a basis for the determination of reality” (182). Yet I will argue that Cervantes’s depiction of the mechanical also expresses symbolic anxiety over the mechanization of the body and human spirit, their reduction to mechanism.  Jiménez Heffernan cites Marx’s classic reference to Maritornes to signal the resistance to the commodification of the body in the Quijote (180). Indeed, the novel continues one of the projects of the Lazarillo, the body’s resistance to objectification, “cosificación” (Rodríguez Puértolas). Don Quijote’s efforts to liberate the galeotes illustrate this continuity, in the novel’s engagement with the ecclesiastical debate over the status of the poor and the enslaved, in the episode’s incorporation of the juridical defense of the indigenous—as Bernard Teuber has argued— and in the implicit reaction to the problem of the mechanization of labor.18 While galley slaves were certainly a feature of Roman imperialism, their intense use during the period of Spanish mercantilism and early modern imperial expansion does suggest the mechanization of the body in the context of the rise of industry, and as Orlando Betancor has argued, the conversion of the body of the Indian into a living tool of the amalgamating machine of the imperial mining project (269). This mechanization of the body, in turn, is paralleled by new forms of mechanization of behavior and subjection, evoked in the “training” of the madman of the second dog tale. Indeed, “training,” pedagogy on a global scale, becomes the theme of the final pages of the second prologue, as it develops the debate of the initial aprobación over cruel and benign forms of medical treatment. The Quijote abounds with references to the contemporary “pedagogy of fear,” to use Augustin Redondo’s phrase, the whippings administered to discipline laborers like Andrés and the self-flagellation used, at times fraudulently, in religious processions which is mimed by Sancho.19 In his concluding “Dedicatoria al Conde de Lemos,” Cervantes offers in contrast a more benign type of pedagogy. In a humorous vein, Cervantes claims that of all those who have clamored for his long-awaited second tome, none could have been more eager than the Emperor of China, who had begged him to send the sequel so that it might be used as a textbook for teaching the Spanish language in his new 18 On the relation of the galeote episode to ecclesiastical debate, see Bernardo Teuber’s essay. 19 See Redondo’s “De vapulamientos y azotes en el Quijote.”

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school, where he hoped Cervantes would consent to be headmaster. In this bit of whimsy, itself a parody of one of Columbus’s fantasies,20 Cervantes allows us to glimpse the educational project of Spanish imperial consolidation, its need to train and control soldiers, missionaries, the peninsular masses as well as its newly colonized indigenous population, not always through a “pedagogy of fear,” but also through a more physically benign pedagogy based on internalization. Ignatius of Loyola’s experience illustrates the rise of such a pedagogy of interiority as it is explored in the Quijote. Loyola’s reading in sick bed was spiritual life narratives, sought as a substitute for his requested novels of chivalry; upon recovery he conflated the two, setting off on a pilgrimage to found a new spiritual order of knights errant, the Society of Jesus (Genelli 11). Cervantes’s novel implicitly parodies this foundational moment of Jesuit subject formation in its depiction of Don Quijote’s own self-fashioning prompted by literary models. Here, Sullivan’s suggestion that “The chivalric project of Part I becomes a salvific project in Part II” (what he later refers to as the “theme of sainthood”) is quite pertinent (54, 56). Ivonne del Valle, analyzing Loyola’s textual description of his spiritual exercises, claims that these were designed as a “mechanism of self-conquest,” fashioned, paradoxically, to interpellate the practitioner as an individual in order to forge him as a “spiritual automaton” (142). As she states, the end-product of the exercises was an almost automated mechanism that represented the autonomy of an individual who was sure of himself and ‘armed’ with a powerful will. This, combined with the independence demanded of any person who carried them out […] made necessary a mechanism of control sufficiently powerful to harness in the same undertaking subjects who were otherwise ‘manufactured’ to be independent (144).

Like Mariscal, who qualifies Foucault in light of the Hispanic experience, Del Valle homes in on a powerful contradiction in early modern subject formation which is most relevant to the problem of pedagogy in the Quijote. Indeed, it is Quijote’s will which sends him forth as an automaton out of sync with contemporary norms, smashing his body in an endless chain of collisions which Jiménez Heffernan compares to a billiard ball in perpetual motion.21 The anachronism driving this repetitive colliding is, in Jiménez Heffernan’s view, Quijote’s fidelity to the notion of heroic trial over the more 20 De Armas Wilson, Cervantes 2. See also Ed Baker’s comments on this passage (116–17; 122). 21 Jiménez Heffernan, drawing on Spinoza, points to the radical isolation of the Cervantine body, referring to the “movimiento constante, automático, mecánico, autónomo de la bola de billar que es el Quijote” (191, 196).

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modern notion of proof through inquiry.22 The repetitive nature of Quijote’s collisions against contemporary reality lead Jiménez Heffernan to comment, “Nada de Bildung, pues, en este Roman” (190). While I can see his point, I will suggest that there is some “Bildung,” some character development, albeit of an ambivalent sort, in the novel, one which hinges upon, in a comic and secular vein, the same dynamic Del Valle observes in Loyola’s spiritual exercises: the interpellation of an individual in such a way that his very individuality becomes the basis for his assimilation into a culture of control, via a more interiorized mechanism of pedagogy. Here, Sullivan’s contention that the Duchess and Duke’s private “theater of sadism” exhibited a “refined psychological dimension of cruelty,” “tailor made” to exact “person-specific” sufferings of Quijote and Sancho is most germane (56–57). I will hasten to signal a difference between the development of Don Quijote’s subjectivity and that of the sort modeled by Loyola. Don Quijote’s pilgrimage is both a parody of Counterreformation zealotry23 and an example of the effects of the gentler sort of medicine Cervantes upholds in the prologue against the severity of Avellaneda. The contrast in these concepts of character development is explained by both Mariscal and Iffland in terms of differing responses to a period of relaxation of social hierarchy. For Mariscal, Quijote’s assertion that “cada uno es hijo de su obra” “forms the basis of Don Quijote’s exploration of subjectivity and, despite the protagonist’s status as a minor nobleman […] is developed in direct opposition to inherited nobility” (“The Other Quijote” 100). Avellaneda’s text, in contrast, re-imposes an aristocratic notion of social rigidity and decorum (Iffland 328 n. 68). Avellaneda punishes the wayward hidalgo Quijote and the arribista Sancho out of an ambition to castigate “alternative forms of subjectivity” (Mariscal, “The Other Quijote” 107). This punishment through humiliation, Mariscal argues, was “informed by a powerful ascetic inheritance which targeted the individual consciousness as the domain of control to an equal if not greater extent than the body” (100–01). As Iffland points out, Cervantes’s Don Quijote and Sancho ultimately reject such aristocratic ridicule by leaving the Duke and the Duchess towards the end of Book Two,24 rejecting in the process as well the machinery of the theocratic state represented in the duques’ theatrical production of the Inquisition.25 22 Jiménez Heffernan (204). Jiménez Heffernan places the Quijote between Bakhtin’s two stylistic lines of the novel, the novel of trial or Prüfungsroman and the heteroglossic, conflictive model of the novel (207). 23 As De Armas Wilson states, “the text of Don Quijote manages to do what Don Quijote never does in the text – ironize, de-idealize and even reappraise Spain’s imperial history” (Cervantes 9). 24 See Iffland (440–70, especially 441). 25 As Wilson points out, the imperial bureaucracy was referred to as a “máquina” and alluded to as such in the first prologue of Cervantes’s novel. See also Egginton

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If Don Quijote and Sancho’s independence here confirms a sense of individual liberty, that liberty is also configured as a more enlightened form of social control. Quijote’s cure is initiated upon his defeat by the Caballero de la Blanca Luna in what John Beverley calls a “mise en abîme of self-reflection and self-knowledge.”26 Quijote’s psyche—his inner self—is the vehicle for his interpellation and reincorporation into the social order of church and state, and his manipulation, via a staged drama, is a function of direct observation and experimental methods on the part of Carrasco and his cohorts.27 Here I support those critics who argue that the novel anticipates aspects of modern psychiatry and I am also building on Sullivan and Gloria Fry’s sense of Don Quijote passing through a kind of purgation, both symbolic and psychic, aimed at his social reintegration (Sullivan 113; Fry 469–70), a kind of “purgatory in this life” which Sullivan associates with a Loyolan notion of a “self-made salvation” (xi, 80). Sullivan is correct in suggesting that a Catholic sense of free will merges with nascent bourgeois interiority in the disenchantment of Quijote,28 but I will argue that Don Quijote’s re-education also suggests a mechanization of inner life on the horizons of a mechanistic worldview,29 what Francisco A. Ortega, in a Foucauldian reference to Del Valle’s work, describes as the “technologies of the self” (188).  While the duques’ efforts to train the pair represents a case of failed and cruel pedagogy on the part of the aristocrats, Carrasco’s intervention as the Caballero de la Blanca Luna successfully initiates a more private, but equally manipulative sort of cure (Iffland 546). Here, I would diverge from Sullivan’s reading of the salutary effects of what he views as a coherent series and Maravall on the notion of the Baroque “theatre state.” Beverley applies Clifford Geertz’s term “theatre state” to the Spanish Baroque and associated the term directly with Don Quijote in a lecture from his class on the novel at the University of Pittsburgh in 2004, which I attended at his invitation (Essays, 161). 26 Beverley class on Don Quijote. 27 See Iffland on Quijote’s reintegration into the church and state (533–34). Here I agree with Césareo Bandera, who argues that for Cervantes, madness is in the process of losing its association with the sacred and that he increasingly portrays it as essentially human (89). Quijote’s cure, Bandera suggests, evinces the “development of a scientific attitude” regarding mental aberration: “that kind of science becomes possible only when one believes in the possibility of a cure on the basis of a human decision (including the decision to ask God for help…), because the disease in question is also of human, not sacred, origin” (113). 28 Sullivan argues that the Jesuits attempted to appeal to the middle class by stressing the possibility of a “second chance for salvation” by good works (80). This is an interesting notion which suggests the alternative to the Weber thesis posited by the notion of a Catholic road to modernity (see Beverley Essays 3, n. 6). 29 Beverley, class lecture, speaks of the capitalist and Newtonian views of the world as a machine.

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of therapeutic interventions—by characters in and beyond the ducal palace— designed to disabuse the knight of his delusions. Sullivan cites, for example, Carroll Johnson’s observations on Altisidora’s efforts to “deprogram” Quijote, calling her acts “admittedly brutal,” but affirms that they are “blessings in disguise,” workings of divine providence, which put Don Quijote “on the road to recovery” (149, citing Johnson 182). The prologue cautions against such harsh medicine. Bearing in mind Iffland and Mariscal’s studies, I will suggest that the road is less direct, more problematized, and that Cervantes was aiming for a display of “alternate forms of subjectivity” as a kind of play with possibility on the threshold of new social forms. In this regard I reaffirm River’s conclusions about the models of cure in the prologue. Del Valle has described how the Jesuit program was designed to produce a subject who could reproduce within himself the Christian tradition, who would embody within his independent being the institution of the Church. Such reproduction is like a fractal, reproducing the whole recursively in miniature, and this model of fractalic reproduction describes the narrative of Quijote’s character development and the fabric of the novel itself.30 The little theatre of the psyche replicates the big theatre of the state as a vehicle for mass pedagogy, functioning as a structure of containment, as interiorized and private spectacle. Whether this succeeds or not is held up to question for the reader. The intervention of the Caballero de la Blanca Luna, Carrasco’s staged drama, does have the quality of a deus ex machina ending to the series of collisions endured by the mad hidalgo. The instigation of his “rest cure”, followed by his sickbed conversion, disrupts the continuity of the narrative journey, revealing subtly and again, the machinery of the text.31 The staged ending recurs to the mission of the second prologue, negating the possibility of spurious sequels, but also troubles the facile resolution of the novel as a pilgrimage to spiritual cure. The staged ending is the obverse side of the coin to Jiménez Heffernan’s notion of Quijote as a billiard ball in continuous motion, with both undermining a sense of telos and development. In this sense his characterization might be modified to view the novel as a failed Bildungsroman avant la lettre, a contention similar to that which, as we have seen, has also been raised regarding the Lazarillo.32 Cervantes, again, creates a kind of early modern alienation effect here (“Reader, you decide”), displaying the exhaustion of a narrative of subjectivity before it ever gets off the ground, a Baroque structure which might well be characterized as “senil recién nacida,” to use José Gorostiza’s Post-Symbolist Neobaroque metaphor.33 30

See Beverley’s comments on “self-miniaturization” in the Quijote (Aspects 37). Beverley, class lecture, calls the text “a machine of representation.” 32 Anne Cruz calls the Lazarillo “an inverted Bildungsroman” (Discourses 36). 33 The quotation from Gorostiza is from his poem, Muerte sin fin. 31

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The Quijote is a transitional text, but not in the sense in which this is primarily construed. I agree with Iffland and others who argue that Cervantes represents the horizon of a bourgeois consciousness which uses the carnivalesque, a comic form of the grotesque, to question the “natural” superiority of the second estate (Iffland 581). Yet the interiority evoked by Cervantes does not march forward along a smooth synchronic axis. The obverse figuration of the grotesque, its shadow manifestation, follows the pattern of irruption and fantastic containment along the paradigmatic axis of trauma. Modern interiority in the novel emerges not only in the mixed temporalities of social systems but also out of the evolution of human biology, in which trauma remains an unassimilated remainder, glimpsed at striking moments in the text. The trauma which Garcés has identified in the fabric of the novel informs the appearance of the fantastic grotesque, and while this manifestation of the grotesque in the Quijote is not primary, it is significant. Its shadows cast the overarching comic structure in sharper relief, calling attention to the social and psychic consequences of the emerging mechanistic worldview. As before the howling of the pointing dog, we are left at times to consider moments of Baroque horror, in which human subjectivity hovers between animal nature and the mechanical,34 in which the body and spirit are reduced to machine.

34 See Zakiya Hanafi, who defines monstrosity as “the pervasive threat to humanity that looms on the thresholds of our animal past and our machine future” in her book, The Monster in the Machine, which describes the decline of the sacred associations of the monstrous in the context of the rise of the scientific revolution (218).

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4

Góngora and Darío in Constellation: On the Poetics of Rape, Colonialism and Modernity Ya Hugo a Grant lo dijo: “Las estrellas son vuestras”. (Apenas brilla, alzándose, el argentino sol y la estrella chilena se levanta …) Rubén Darío, “A Roosevelt” (1904)

The next three chapters will examine modern Latin American texts, moving from modernismo, through the avant-garde and Neobaroque, to Post-Symbolism in poetry. We will explore the topic of Symbolism as a marker for the impasse of modernity announced by the Baroque, beginning with the constellation between Góngora and Rubén Darío. In this chapter we will study the continuities of Góngora’s poetry in Darío’s famous swan poems, examining the political significance of rape imagery in the modernista appropriation of Symbolist figures. This point of constellation between Darío and Góngora, significantly, anticipates the Gongorine tricentenary. The 1927 revival of Luis de Góngora is an important conjuncture in the modern appropriation of the poet’s work, but our appreciation of the event should not obscure the fact that the Gongorine resurgence on the peninsula had in fact deeper roots in the poetry of Latin America. As Roberto González Echevarría has pointed out, Góngora’s “rediscovery” actually began across the Atlantic in the work of modernista poets José Martí and Rubén Darío and the essayist Alfonso Reyes (Celestina’s Brood 195). Rubén Darío’s participation in French Symbolist circles, together with his exercises in imitation of Golden Age models, well equipped him to contribute to the revival of Góngora in advance of the tricentenary, most notably in his famous “Trébol” sonnets (272–74).1 1 See Joaquín Roses’s essay “La ‘biblioteca’ gongorina de Darío” for a recent study of these sonnets which includes a good summary of the critical history. See also Alejandro Mejías López on the problematic reception of modernismo on the peninsula. All references to Darío’s poetry are to the Mejía Sánchez edition.

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I do not, however, propose to focus on this specific case of Darío’s selfconscious poetic celebration of Góngora; rather, I will attempt to demonstrate how a more general understanding of ideological and aesthetic continuities in Darío’s work can provide valuable opportunities for the contextualization of Góngora’s poetry within the evolution of the modern. Several parallels emerge in comparing the circumstances and concerns of Góngora and Darío. These include a parallel historical positioning at moments in the rise of the city, leading to an aesthetic parallel in the cultivation of the pastoral mode, a similar problematic of subjectivity in the context of parallel avant-garde cultures, a secularization and eroticization of religious discourse, a similar display of proliferation of cultural artifacts, of pastiche, virtuosity and the cultivation of language and the writing process.2 My treatment of these parallels will converge in a discussion on the use of rape imagery by the two poets, in which I will draw upon recent scholarship on Góngora’s major lyric poem, the Soledades, and engage with Iris Zavala’s noted work on Darío’s “swan poems.” My hope is to demonstrate a trajectory of the aesthetic expression of the trauma of colonization, in poetry produced out of obverse experiences of imperialist violence and historical impasse, and in the process offer a new framework for evaluating the modern resurgence of Góngora. I will begin by defining the central dynamic of Góngora’s Soledades, as it is mapped out in his two sonnets on their reception. In each case, Góngora establishes the poem as sign, hieroglyph, elaborated as an allegory of writing through iconic figures, both classic and contemporary. In the first, his initial canto is represented as a statue of Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, in a sustained allegory of its procession through the streets of Madrid. In the second, more definitive sonnet,3 the Primera soledad is represented as a caged bird which flees the court to return to the silent refuge of the Virgilian woods: Alegoría de la primera de sus “Soledades” Restituye a tu mudo horror divino, amiga Soledad, el pie sagrado, que captiva lisonja es del poblado en hierros breves pájaro ladino.

2 Angel Rama addresses these issues in Darío’s poetry in his excellent prologue to the Mejía Sánchez edition. On Góngora and the Baroque city, see Beverley, Aspects (77); see later pages of this chapter for particular discussions of religious discourse and of the avant-garde. 3 Antonio Carreira now lists the first as a probable attribution. References to the Soledades refer to the Jammes edition; references to other poems and letters of Góngora are to the Carreira edition of his Obras completas, except where otherwise indicated.

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Prudente cónsul, de las selvas dino, de impedimentos busca desatado tu claustro verde en valle profanado de fiera menos que de peregrino. ¡Cuán dulcemente de la encina vieja tórtola viuda al mismo bosque incierto apacibles desvíos aconseja! Endeche el siempre amado esposo muerto con voz doliente, que tan sorda oreja tiene la soledad como el desierto. (1615; Antología poética 524–25)

The freed bird, recast as the widowed turtle dove of the ballad tradition, “aconseja apacibles desvíos al mismo bosque incierto,” offering the harmony of art as solace in the face of the uncertainty of the woods. The poem ends with a wish that the dove freely lament her beloved spouse with a mournful voice, “que tan sorda oreja tiene la soledad como el desierto.” These final tercets establish a tension which will define the Soledades as a whole, between the idealizing language of art and the voicing of pain at the center of this edifice of containment, the Baroque “corteza” alluded to by Góngora in his polemical defense of the poem. The political cry for reform of the exiled consul of the woods becomes expressed as a dialectic of muteness and mourning.4 In this ambivalent cultivation of lyric emotion, the Soledades have been read as “an epic amplification of lyric pastoral themes”(Walker 373) but as failed epic, elaborating in the language of poetry an opposition to Spain’s imperial ventures, which had decimated the domestic economy and which had incurred real human costs for Góngora’s fellow Andalusians.5 The aesthetic and ontological manifestations of the Spanish imperial crisis are played out in a dynamic of violence and eros in the poem, which is framed by images of mythological divine rape, symbolic of Hapsburg conquest. As Mary Gaylord has shown, the imagery of exploration is eroticized (“Metaphor and Fable”); so too the imagery of the hunt. The appetites of aristocratic bellicose violence are gargantuan; in the poem’s dedication, the duke’s hunting evokes battlefields stained with blood. Blood issuing from the bodies of animals penetrated 4 See Beverley, Aspects (79), Maurice Molho, Semántica y poética (63–81), Gaylord, “Footprints” , and Dana Bultmann for extensive readings of this sonnet. Robert Jammes, “Retrogongorisme” (71) notes that the “queja” variant discussed by Molho was a typographical error in the Millés’ edition. 5 See Beverley, Aspects (7) and Elias Rivers, “Nuevo mundo” (857). For a full discussion of the generic tensions in the poem, see Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades (26–38).

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by weapons is described in erotic and ornate terms, in a secular version of the “cruel decorativeness”6 associated with the portrayal of martyrs in Jesuit aesthetics, and as was noted in the previous chapter, the death wish of the courtly lover is projected onto the natural world. Yet if the peregrino identifies with the world-encompassing, rapacious appetites of empire, he also is identified with erotic victimization. In an appeal to the sexually transgressive culture of the noblesse de cour who were his patrons, Góngora links his pilgrim to Ganymede, the icon of male homosexual beauty who was abducted by Jupiter.7 The peregrino’s inert gaze upon the violent dismemberment of the crow in the display of falconry suggests the traumatic dissociation of the rape victim. The breakdown of the epic subject, his solitude, parallels the crisis of Spanish imperialism in a poem which allows us to catch a glimpse of the violence at the heart of the cultivation of beauty as a symbol of power.8 Sara Castro Klaren has stated that the narratives of the Spanish invasion, conquest and colonization of America “all drip with blood” (“Writing the Andes” 117–18) and I will argue in turn that this blood surfaces in the Soledades in the “bleeding jewels” of Góngora’s poetry as a kind of negative to the “writing of violence” of the conquest narrative (Rabasa cit. in Castro Klaren 118),9 with Góngora’s defamiliarization of divine rape imagery implicitly highlighting the mass rape of indigenous women as the traumatic underside of epic furor (see Chemris, Soledades 53–54). The trajectory—and obverse side of this dynamic—can be observed in Darío’s poetry. The unresolved consequences of the conquest, as Zavala has argued, are expressed in Darío’s response to the events leading up to and including 1898, a quilting point in which the Spanish-American war defines North America as the new imperial threat facing the former Spanish colonies. For Zavala, the allusion in Darío’s “Caracol” (Darío 289–90) to the rape of Europa can be recast as “el rapto de América,” a symptom of modernity repeated in the imagery of divine rape in his swan poems (El rapto 141). Building on Zavala’s thesis and the work of John Beverley, as well as on the 6 This is Harold Skulsky’s term, shared with me in conversation in 2002 and used with permission. 7 See Frederick De Armas and Paul Julian Smith, “Barthes”, on the significance of the homosexual attributes of the peregrino. On the culture of the noblesse de cour, see Lucien Goldmann (107). 8 For Beverley, the references to the bounty of conquest which decorate the Soledades as metaphors create the effect of “magical accumulation,” a masking of the real relationship of consumption and production between metropolis and colony (Essays 80–82). 9 Carmelo Samonà (124) compared the opening of the Soledades with the Naufragios. “Bleeding Jewel” was the subtitle of my dissertation, a reference to the aestheticization of pain in the poem.

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classic studies of Arturo Marasso, Ángel Rama, and Rafael Gutiérrez Girardot, I will now progress through Darío’s swan poems and related works with an eye to demonstrating parallels with “el cisne andaluz.” The swan in Darío’s poetry is seen as an icon of the Parnassian landscape of the mind, a utopian space which cultivates an avant-garde opposition to bourgeois materialism in a modern pastoral. One vehicle for expressing this anti-materialist sentiment is, paradoxically, the celebration of aspects of the former glory of the older feudal estates, the nobility and clergy.10 Where Góngora reworked the Renaissance revival of antiquity as his cultural capital, Darío cultivates a stylized absolutism of the French court as well as a false Gothic, in a poetic version of the various “neo” revivals in the architecture of the turn-of-the-century city.11 For example, one of Darío’s earlier swan poems, “Blasón,” dedicated to a marquesa, displays the trajectory of the emblem tradition in Góngora in a play on heraldic form:12 El Olímpico cisne de nieve con el ágata rosa del pico lustra el ala eucarística y breve que abre al sol como un casto abanico. En la forma de un brazo de lira y del asa de un ánfora griega es su cándido cuello que inspira como prora ideal que navega. Es el cisne, de estirpe sagrada, cuyo beso, por campos de seda, ascendió hasta la cima rosada de las dulces colinas de Leda. […] El alado aristócrata muestra lises albos en campo de azur, y ha sentido en sus plumas la diestra de la amable y gentil Pompadour. (188)

The swan’s wing is described in sacramental terms: “ala eucarística,” as Darío, in a parallel with Stéphane Mallarmé, cultivates a religion of art and eroticism, continuing the pseudosacerdotal quality of Góngora’s secularization of the 10 See especially Zavala, “Turn of the Century” (290) and Beverley and Zimmermann, Literature and Politics (54–59). 11 Gutiérrez Girardot (113–18) and Rama, “Prólogo” (xxiv) describe this context. 12 See Marasso, Rubén Darío (58) on the heraldic in the sonnet and Ciocchini, Taylor, and Nelson, The Emblematic Mode on the emblem tradition in Góngora.

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poet-vates in his “Carta en respuesta.”13 The swan’s rape of Leda occurs as he ascends the “campos de seda” of her body, echoed in the line “lises albos en campos de azur,” a phrase which combines the heraldic and Góngora’s “campos de zafiro” with the azure of Mallarmé’s own swan poem.14 The figure of the swan is repeatedly transformed as a visual sign: his neck becomes the fluted side of a lyre, the handle of an urn, and a curved prow, in a very plastic form of metalepsis which recalls Gongorine technique.15 A second poem from Prosas profanas, the much-celebrated “El cisne,” further develops the cultural associations of the swan, again in a cultivation of a very Gongorine second degree of metaphor: Fue en una hora divina para el género humano. El Cisne antes cantaba sólo para morir. Cuando se oyó el acento del Cisne wagneriano fue en medio de una aurora, fue para revivir. Sobre las tempestades del humano oceano se oye el canto del Cisne; no se cesa de oír, dominando el martillo del viejo Thor germano o las trompas que cantan la espada de A[r]gantir. ¡Oh Cisne! ¡Oh sacro pájaro! Si antes la blanca Helena del huevo azul de Leda brotó de gracia llena, siendo de la Hermosura la princesa inmortal, bajo tus blancas alas la nueva Poesía concibe en una gloria de luz y de armonía la Helena eterna y pura que encarna el ideal. (213)

While many have identified the various swans Darío builds on to celebrate Richard Wagner’s—those of the Hyperborean Apollo, Horace, Ovid, and the Parnassians—,16 I will suggest a further resonance in the poem, a secondary reading which supplements the conventional one and which can be inferred through amphibology, another Gongorine feature which arises out of the 13 See Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades (48) on Góngora’s letter. The difference is that while Góngora anticipates the scientific “disenchantment” of the world, Darío cultivates its post-Cartesian “re-enchantment.” See Joshua Landy and Michael Saler’s recent anthology of essays on the notion of secular re-enchantment. 14 “Le Vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui”: Stanley Burnshaw provides Henri Peyre’s close reading of this classic sonnet (54–55). 15 On Gongorine metalepsis, see Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades (93). 16 Marasso, Rubén Darío (115–17) is most thorough here. He also suggests Darío was building on his contemporary Pierre Louÿs’ story, “Leda.”

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poetry’s semantic density. The final tercets can be read to predict the birth of Darío’s new poetry, figured like Wagner’s opera and (not incidentally) like the “nueva poesía” of Góngora, as classical revival and reform. If before, Helen emerged from Leda’s egg “de gracia llena,” now “la Helena eterna y pura que encarna el ideal,”—Helen, revived with all her cultural associations to date—will conceive the new poetry under the wings of the swan, renewed with all its cultural connotations from Jupiter to Wagner.17 The swan’s possession of Helen proclaims that this new poetry will be born not only of rape but of incest as well, in a coupling of signs which includes the additional transgression of secularizing the Immaculate Conception and the Annunciation: she is, as in the “Ave Maria”, “de gracia llena.”18 This alternative reading of the final tercets is well within the Symbolist spirit of the profanation of the Catholic liturgy and of increasing degrees of sexual transgression, including incest. Regarding the latter, one need only recall Mallarmé’s “Autre éventail,” which describes both the poet’s daughter holding a fan and, covertly, the quivering space of the vulva, “another fan,” celebrated by Darío as the enigmatic “rosa sexual.”19 The association of the swan with the rape of Leda continues in various poems of Cantos de vida y esperanza: “Leda” (276) where the rape occurs in a pastoral setting, to the voyeuristic delight of Pan, and in “Los cisnes” III and IV (264–65). In “Los cisnes III” the lyric speaker identifies with the rapist: Por un momento, oh Cisne, juntaré mis anhelos a los de tus dos alas que abrazaron a Leda, y a mi maduro ensueño, aun vestido de seda, dirás, por los Dioscuros, la gloria de los cielos. Es el otoño. Ruedan de la flauta consuelos. Por un instante, oh Cisne, en la obscura alameda sorberé entre dos labios lo que el Pudor me veda, y dejaré mordidos Escrúpulos y Celos.

17

Here Darío continues the trope of creation as insemination (Van Meter) from the “Palabras liminares” with which he introduced the collection. 18 The conventional reading is that “la Helena eterna” (a new incarnation of Helen) will be born of the union of Wagner’s “cisne” and “la nueva poesía” (Marasso Rubén Darío 115–17, Javier Herrero, “Fin de siglo” 44; Herrero 43 notes the association of Helen with the Virgin without drawing the same conclusions as I do). The implication is that Darío’s new poetry, following Wagner’s lead, will give rise to the rebirth of Hellenic beauty. 19 While not making this argument, Roger Pearson hints at the presence of the erotic in the “Éventails” (Mallarmé and Circumstance 195 n. 16, 203).

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Cisne, tendré tus alas blancas por un instante, y el corazón de rosa que hay en tu dulce pecho palpitará en el mío con su sangre constante. Amor será dichoso, pues estará vibrante el júbilo que pone al gran Pan en acecho mientras un ritmo esconde la fuente de diamante. (264)

Here the furtive rape in the woods (“la obscura alameda”) recalls the violation of Philomela. In “Los cisnes IV” the rape of Leda is extolled in triumphant terms: ¡Antes de todo, gloria a ti, Leda! tu dulce vientre cubrió de seda el Dios. ¡Miel y oro sobre la brisa! Sonaban alternativamente flauta y cristales, Pan y la fuente. ¡Tierra era canto, Cielo sonrisa! Ante el celeste, supremo acto, dioses y bestias hicieron pacto. Se dio a la alondra la luz del día, se dio a los búhos sabiduría, y melodías al ruiseñor. A los leones fue la victoria, para las águilas toda la gloria, y a las palomas todo el amor. Pero vosotros sois los divinos príncipes. Vagos como las naves, inmaculados como los linos, maravillosos como las aves. En vuestros picos tenéis las prendas, que manifiestan corales puros. Con vuestros pechos abrís las sendas que arriba indican los Dïoscuros. Las dignidades de vuestros actos, eternizadas en lo infinito, hacen que sean ritmos exactos, voces de ensueño, luces de mito. De orgullo olímpico sois el resumen, ¡oh, blancas urnas de la harmonía!

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Ebúrneas joyas que anima un numen con su celeste melancolía. ¡Melancolía de haber amado, junto a la fuente de la arboleda, el luminoso cuello estirado entre los blancos muslos de Leda! (265)

Her rape becomes monumental, creating a ripple effect throughout creation, establishing a new covenant between gods and beasts in a celebration of the artistic process: as Zavala points out, the white thighs of Leda, like the immaculate wings of the swan, represent the blank page (Rubén Darío 127). The epochal proportions of the act dramatize historical conjuncture, suggesting a parallel with Yeats’s famous poem on the mythic coupling. These poems describe the modernista trajectory of early modern pastoral, now no longer a landscape of Platonic amorous plaint, but instead what has been viewed as a more intimate, private sphere garden of sexuality outside bourgeois family norms.20 The cruel woman of Petrarchism is replaced by her successor in the Decadent movement; the freedoms of the noblesse de cour are replaced with a bohemian world of prostitution, pornography and androgyny, including an association with a parallel “Sapphic avant-garde.”21 In poems such as the first “Nocturno” of the collection, Darío, like Góngora, portrays the obverse of the celebration of divine rape in his depiction of the trauma of the rape victim, in this case to describe his own catastrophe of consciousness: Quiero expresar mi angustia en versos que abolida dirán mi juventud de rosas y de ensueños, y la desfloración amarga de mi vida por un vasto dolor y cuidados pequeños. Y el viaje a un vago Oriente por entrevistos barcos, y el grano de oraciones que floreció en blasfemia, y los azoramientos del cisne entre los charcos y el falso azul nocturno de inquerida bohemia. Lejano clavicordio que en silencio y olvido no diste nunca al sueño la sublime sonata, 20 Rama, “Prólogo” (36, 38); Gutiérrez Girardot (56); on Darío specifically, Zavala, “Turn of the Century” (294), Colonialism (69). 21 See Amanda Powell and Dianne Dugaw on the notion of a “Sapphic avantgarde” in the early modern; see Zavala, El rapto (288–92) and Praz (The Romantic Agony 318–19, 374) on the figure of the lesbian in the Decadent movement.

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huérfano esquife, árbol insigne, obscuro nido que suavizó la noche de dulzura de plata… Esperanza olorosa a hierbas frescas, trino del ruiseñor primaveral y matinal, azucena tronchada por un fatal destino, rebusca de la dicha, persecución del mal… El ánfora funesta del divino veneno que ha de hacer por la vida la tortura interior, la conciencia espantable de nuestro humano cieno y el horror de sentirse pasajero, el horror de ir a tientas, en intermitentes espantos, hacia lo inevitable, desconocido, y la pesadilla brutal de este dormir de llantos ¡de la cual no hay más que Ella que nos despertará! (270)

The allusion to the “obscuro nido” suggests, again, the story of Philomela, but here revealing the violence behind the previously heralded sexual conquest in terms such as “desfloración” and “azucena tronchada.” The oblique allusion to Philomela offers another parallel with Góngora; her story, while never explicit in Góngora’s Soledad sonnet or the longer work, hovers over them like overtones in music, in their description of muteness and mourning in the forest or in the woven testimony of the Arachne tapestry embedded in the wedding chorus of the first Soledad (I. 832–44).22 The obliqueness of the reference is itself a feature of a parallel avant-garde project: the invitation behind Góngora’s “apacibles desvíos” and Darío’s “azoramientos del cisne entre los charcos” is to look beneath the “corteza” of poetic language. 22 In Ovid’s telling of the tale, Philomela is raped by her sister Procne’s husband, Tereus, who then cuts out her tongue to silence her and locks her in a tower in the forest. Philomela reveals the truth of her experience in a tapestry embroidered in red and white, which she has delivered to Procne. Procne and the women of her household rescue Philomela, dressed as Bacchantes on the feast of Bacchus. They then devise a plot of revenge, tearing apart Procne’s son Itys, cooking him for dinner, and serving him to his father. Once Tereus has eaten his son’s flesh, Philomela enters with Itys’s head and his wife confesses the plot. As they flee the enraged Tereus, Procne is changed into a nightingale, Tereus into a hoopoe (with its helmet-like head and lance-like beak) and Philomela is turned into a songless swallow, although traditionally poets have associated Philomela with the nightingale (Barry Powell 300). On the Arachne tapestry, see Sánchez Robayna (43) and Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades (55–57). Interestingly, Darío conflates this myth with a poetic allusion to the “Alegoría” sonnet in “Trébol”: “y tu castillo Góngora, se alza al azul cual una | jaula de ruiseñores labrada en oro fino” (274).

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The trauma of consciousness becomes the trauma of imperialist domination in Darío’s explicitly political swan poem, the most famous of the series, “Los cisnes” I, in which the swan’s neck becomes a question mark, sign of the poet’s interrogation of his people’s political future:23 ¿Qué signo haces, oh Cisne, con tu encorvado cuello al paso de los tristes y errantes soñadores? ¿Por qué tan silencioso de ser blanco y ser bello, tiránico a las aguas e impasible a las flores? Yo te saludo ahora como en versos latinos te saludara antaño Publio Ovidio Nasón. Los mismos ruiseñores cantan los mismos trinos, y en diferentes lenguas es la misma canción. A vosotros mi lengua no debe ser extraña. A Garcilaso visteis, acaso, alguna vez… Soy un hijo de América, soy un nieto de España… Quevedo pudo hablaros en verso en Aranjuez… Cisnes, los abanicos de vuestras alas frescas den a las frentes pálidas sus caricias más puras y alejen vuestras blancas figuras pintorescas de nuestras mentes tristes las ideas obscuras. Brumas septentrionales nos llenan de tristezas, se mueren nuestras rosas, se agostan nuestras palmas, casi no hay ilusiones para nuestras cabezas, y somos los mendigos de nuestras pobres almas. Nos predican la guerra con águilas feroces, gerifaltes de antaño revienen a los puños, mas no brillan las glorias de las antiguas hoces, ni hay Rodrigos ni Jaimes, ni hay Alfonsos ni Nuños. Faltos de alimento que dan las grandes cosas, ¿qué haremos los poetas sino buscar tus lagos?

23

Zavala makes a point of Darío’s transcending the Romantic “I” to construct a collective consciousness (“Turn of the Century” 303–4). To this I would add that Darío politicizes the Symbolist project, taking the sort of play between the French homonym cygne/signe noted by Henri Peyre in Mallarmé’s swan sonnet (see Burnshaw 54–55) to another level by representing both graphically in the swan’s neck rendered as question mark.

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A falta de laureles son muy dulces las rosas, y a falta de victorias busquemos los halagos. La América Española como la España entera fija está en el Oriente de su fatal destino; yo interrogo a la Esfinge que el porvenir espera con la interrogación de tu cuello divino. ¿Seremos entregados a los bárbaros fieros? ¿Tantos millones de hombres hablaremos inglés? ¿Ya no hay nobles hidalgos ni bravos caballeros? ¿Callaremos ahora para llorar después? He lanzado mi grito, Cisnes, entre vosotros, que habéis sido los fieles en la desilusión, mientras siento una fuga de americanos potros y el estertor postrero de un caduco león… … Y un Cisne negro dijo: “La noche anuncia el día.” Y uno blanco: “La aurora es inmortal, la aurora es inmortal!” ¡Oh tierras de sol y de armonía, aun guarda la Esperanza la caja de Pandora! (262–63)

In the swan’s pastoral idyll, he proclaims art as compensatory for the failure of history: “a falta de victorias busquemos los halagos,” as Spanish America inherits the consequences of Spain’s defeat in 1898 at the hands of the United States: “La América Española como la España entera | fija está en el Oriente de su fatal destino.” Here, Darío revisits a sentiment he originally voiced from the other side of the Atlantic in his “Trébol” sonnets, in which he offered the “colonia” of Velázquez and Góngora as artistic coloni (i.e. as cultivators of poetry) in compensation for Spain’s loss of colonies.24 An earlier poem, “A Colón” (308–9) sets the stage for “Los cisnes I” by figuring the original European penetration of America as a corruption of indigenous virgin land and pastoral innocence: ¡Desgraciado Almirante! Tu pobre América, tu india virgen y hermosa de sangre cálida, la perla de tus sueños, es una histérica de convulsivos nervios y frente pálida. (308)

24

Dámaso Alonso (542) interprets the “veste obscura” as a reference to “[e]l reciente descalabro colonial.”

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Zavala aptly characterizes its opening reference to the “india histérica” as an image of the Real which arises in trauma, as a symbolic memory of the past which unfolds the future, in the repetition of this original colonial rape of America through Manifest Destiny and the U.S. victory of 1898. Thus she argues—and here I will note a parallel with Góngora—Darío’s effect is to reveal the “symptom,” the pain behind the illusion of progress, and he does so through a subversive enactment of a scene of rape associated with a myth of national origins.25 While I find Zavala’s insights compelling, I will argue that one needs not overstate the case. I disagree, for example, with Zavala’s claims that Darío displays an anti-imperialist appetite, as if to rape the gods, in “Los cisnes III,” where the lyric speaker assumes the transgressing body of Jupiter (Rubén Darío 126–67) or that Darío accentuates hope in “Los cisnes IV” where Góngora accentuates violence (118). While I agree that Darío is aiming for an effect of sublation, in both poems woman is victim, and the portrayal of rape as an allegory of writing works to accentuate female silence, a patriarchal manifestation of the “writing of violence” of which José Rabasa speaks.26 The reading of the “india histérica” should also be tempered; Zavala is correct to associate hysteria with the trauma of rape, but this association was only made by Sigmund Freud in very limited professional circles (in 1896) well after the 1892 composition of “A Colón,” and was hastily retracted in the face of their overwhelmingly negative response to his testimony to the realities and psychic consequences of childhood sexual abuse (see Masson 191). In any case, Darío was not likely to have sympathized with the seduction theory, given his own use of prostitutes.27 But as a quilting point which retrospectively illuminates the contradictions of the moment, the figure of the “india histérica” is indeed as evocative as Zavala suggests. Darío’s characterization of political failure in Latin America is further described in “A Colón” in terms of song, the music of poetry: “día a día cantamos la Marsellesa | para acabar danzando la Carmañola.” The Carmañola (Fr. Carmagnole) was a song of the Red Terror of the French Revolution, but Darío seems to be using it to evoke the White Terror of Thermidorian reaction. He laments that the mestizo masses, despite their aspirations, end up singing to the tune of the revolutionary terror, a repetition of the model of coup 25 Here I am summarizing her arguments in “Darío y el rapto de América,” and “Darío y la histerización del discurso modernista,” two chapters in her book, El rapto de América y el síntoma de la modernidad. See also Beverley’s discussion of “A Colón” and other poems by Darío in Literature and Politics (54–59). 26 Cf. Barbara Johnson, “Muteness Envy”: “Once again, an ‘aesthetics of silence’ turns out to involve a male appropriation of female muteness as aesthetic trophy accompanied by an elision of sexual violence” (136). 27 See Rama, “Prólogo” (9) on this and (44–45) on Darío’s machismo in general.

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d’état and dictatorship. This failure of democracy could not be more visible than on the question of race; the limits of Black Jacobinism in the Caribbean were defined by European and American protection of the slave trade, with the United States’ agrarian revolution delayed as a result until the Civil War, concluded less than thirty years before this poem.28 The constraints on Darío’s own articulation of racial pride were thus not insignificant, and his association of African and indigenous racial characteristics (“la mulatez intelectual”, “la chatura estética”29) with artistic mediocrity should be understood in this light. Góngora’s poetry was similarly constrained but also oppositional, in its camouflaged protest against the expulsion of Spain’s own North African Moors as well as in its also camouflaged solidarity, at least within a poetic respublica of letters, with Inca Garcilaso. Beverley is correct to locate the parallel between the two poets in a similar, but obverse, historical positioning of displaced artisans at different stages of the development of the capitalist market and points of decline of the Spanish empire; Góngora writing in the age of mercantilism and Darío, Spain’s colonized “other”, in the age of imperialism; Góngora expressing the limits of an outmoded agrarian aristocracy, Darío the contradictions of a comprador bourgeoisie caught between an assertive nationalism and entrenched oligarchical interests.30 Their proclamation of the new—“la nueva poesía”—is countered by their aesthetic expression of historical impasse and decadence, their idealization of sexual conquest countered by the poetic expression of pain. Beverley and Zavala characterize the poets’ respective impasses as forms of traumatic repetition within variants of the political unconscious;31 perhaps another way to read their parallel swansongs32 for 28

Sibylle Fischer describes the effect of the international slave trade on the development of Haiti; the American Civil War ended in 1865; see Gutiérrez Girardot (49) on the notion of a U.S. agrarian oligarchy in the south. 29 “Prefacio”of Cantos de vida y esperanza (Darío 243); Rama remarks on “las teorías europeas de la época, mayormente telúricas o racistas, que condenaban sin remisión a los pueblos mestizos de la América tropical” (“Prólogo” xvii). 30 As I have noted, Beverley discusses the notion of impasse in the Hispanic Baroque as well as the parallels between Góngora and “anti-bourgeois bourgeois intellectuals of post 1848 Europe” such as Darío in Essays (12, 71, 84) and Literature and Politics (55). See Beverley, Essays (58) on the competition of the poets of the petty aristocracy for a place in the imperial state/ecclesiastical hierarchy; cf. Gutiérrez Girardot (47) on fin de siècle poets being forced onto the market as journalists, diplomats etc. 31 As noted in the introduction to this monograph, Beverley asks, “¿No sería el barroco una forma de neurosis cultural de América Latina en su época—no completada—post-colonial?” (Una modernidad obsoleta 25). 32 Rama, “Prólogo” 46, characterizes Darío’s afrancesado poetry as a swansong of Spanish metrics, much as Góngora closed a period of Italianate reform. Here I

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a future that never arrives is through the prism of the introduction to Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire. In the opening of his text, Marx states, “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce” (Tucker 594). He is alluding to the coup of Napoleon I of the first French bourgeois revolution and its parody by his nephew fifty years later. Marx argues that while the first revolutionaries found in “the ideals and art forms” of antiquity “the self-deception that they needed in order to conceal from themselves the bourgeois limitations of the content of their struggles” (596), such a recycling of the idealizing imagery of the past to buttress a now decrepit bourgeoisie could only reinforce the effect of its obsolescence. Góngora’s new poetry was born at the end of the Renaissance revival of classical forms, a time when the false consciousness of imperial destiny—the Spanish colonial project—was buttressed with the recycling of the ideals and art forms of antiquity, the Hapsburg emperor cast as the “last descendant of Aeneas.” Darío’s panegyric to the Guatemalan dictator Estrada Cabrera was framed as a celebration of Athenian democracy, complementing the president’s construction of lavish imitations of temples to Minerva as a way of shoring up the image of his decrepit regime (see Gyurko). The ancients they revived were also subject to notions of political and aesthetic decay; remember, Góngora was criticized for reviving the wrong classical poets, those decadent neoterics (Collard 70–72). And so the question arises, is all this revival merely simulacral? Or should a distinction be made across modes of production between ebullient and decadent imitation? Marx closes his discussion of the theater of history by asserting that the next social revolution “cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future” (597). I believe what Marx is saying here is that a truly new poetry would express aesthetically a new mode of production and is hence unimaginable until the revolutionary transformation of society. Indeed, can we imagine the poetry of a society which has transcended oppression and the drama of sexual violence?33 The question of the birth of a new poetry of new social relations is what is finally posed in the meeting of Baroque aesthetics am taking advantage of the double meaning of swansong as both announcement and eulogy, to reinforce the notion of impasse as a form of temporal collapse. Beverley refers to Françoise Perus’s reading of Darío as “the swansong of the nineteenth-century oligarchy in Latin America” (Essays 169). 33 As Sanda Munjic aptly remarks, on the parallels between sexual and historical violence, “It is necessary to examine to what extent these two stages—a private sphere sexual fantasy that reproduces as pleasurable the historical violence in the theatre of the bedroom, and a public stage of history that enacts its own, unfeigned violence— operate according to the same rules” (“Patriarchal Love Discourse” 293).

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and nineteenth-century historicism occasioned by Darío’s revival of Góngora. In the meantime we are left with the contradictions of the avant-garde: the hysterical repetition of ever more frenzied proclamations of the new in the face of the intransigence of the old, a kind of feedback loop in which the most technically sublime poetry is written over the silence of rape and conquest.

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5

Pilgrimage into the Trauma of History: Continuities of Góngora in Carpentier, Rulfo and Vallejo

There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (254)

The Baroque impasse which figured in Darío’s poetic representation of the catastrophe of imperialist domination informs later manifestations of the Latin American avant-garde, the Neobaroque, and the Boom. In Sarduy’s grammar of the literary Baroque, he identifies the category of “escritura/Odisea” as one of its primary “syntagmatic grama” or structures (1401). Góngora’s Soledades, like the Quijote, is an odyssey of its own writing process, and could well fit Sarduy’s category, but as a special case, the pilgrimage topos, in its capacity as a marker for historical impasse. How so? Pilgrimage is a staple of national and religious myth. It lies at the heart of epic, which chronicles the trials of a wandering and exiled hero as he progresses to triumph, typically by founding his homeland’s city of origins. In its religious version it is the story of the human subject’s trials on earth, his or her growth as a spiritual exile whose telos is reunion with the divine, a journey rehearsed in miniature in ritual pilgrimages to sacred shrines.1 Pilgrimage in literature, whether secular or religious, often represents the unfolding of history according to plan, as the fulfillment of prophecy or mission. The crisis at the origins of Spanish modernity, expressed aesthetically in the Baroque, provoked a parallel crisis in the representational function of literature, disrupting, in

1

See Philip Edwards (5–23) and Victor Turner on Christian pilgrimage traditions.

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certain works, such a messianic function of the pilgrimage topos.2 Thus the breakdown of Spain’s imperial mission apparent in such events as Lope de Aguirre’s foundering in the jungles of Latin America was expressed in the novel by the failed “post-auratic” (or disenchanted) pilgrimage of Don Quijote. Góngora’s Soledades, roughly contemporaneous with Cervantes’s famous novel, belongs to such an order of failed pilgrimage, a failure that marks the transition to the modern.3 I propose to use Góngora’s master work as a base from which to examine pilgrimage as a recurring topos in twentiethcentury Latin American texts which confront the Baroque legacy of frustrated modernity, the persistent economic underdevelopment and cultural subordination which began with colonization and which was in part conditioned by Spain’s own belatedness.4 The works I will examine briefly (examples among many possibilities) —Alejo Carpentier’s short story “El camino de Santiago (1958),” Juan Rulfo’s novel Pedro Páramo (1955), and César Vallejo’s poem “Trilce LXV” (1922) —investigate the political implications of the notion of messianic destiny through the trope of “suspended” pilgrimage, a concept I will define as pilgrimage which is left unresolved, teleologically frustrated or indeterminate, in a way which expresses—as in the Soledades—the frustration of historical and economic development. Rather than analyzing these works primarily as cases of imitation or explicit influence of Gongorism, I will instead examine contrasting ways in which the trope of suspended pilgrimage operates in the texts, with a particular focus on the role of representations of gender in constructing (or deconstructing) a sense of national or imperial mission. Góngora’s Soledades has been viewed as a composite of Renaissance genres and structures, used in fragmentary form, stripped of their original teleological function.5 John Beverley has described the structure of the Soledades as textured between epic and pastoral modes, suggesting that Góngora’s peregrino, his unnamed pilgrim, is similarly constructed as a combination 2

Excellent references regarding this history of Spanish imperial crisis include J. H. Elliot, Pierre Vilar, and Jaime Vicens Vives. 3 I define “modernity” as the ideological narrative of economic and cultural development usually associated with the bourgeois democratic revolutions of Western Europe, including the rise of nationalism, industrialization, urbanization, widespread literacy, and other features. I rely in part on Bryan Turner’s useful introduction to Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Baroque Reason, especially (13–14). Regarding the estimated dates of composition of the poem, see Robert Jammes, ed. Soledades (14–20). 4 Carlos J. Alonso describes modernity in Latin America as the “master trope of Western hegemonic authority,” (20) an ideological narrative which sought to naturalize the relegation of the region to the periphery in the wake of the neocolonial penetration of Latin America by European imperialist powers after their emancipation from Spain (19–20). 5 John R. Beverley, Aspects (69, 105); Andrée Collard (102).

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of a fragmented version of the epic hero and an early model of the modern sentimental subject (Aspects 66–67). Antonio Vilanova identifies a parallel combination of heroic and sentimental features in major variants of literary sources for Góngora’s pilgrim, which include the Petrarchan peregrino de amor, the peregrino andante de la novela de aventuras and the ascetic devotee of religious pilgrimage.6 The contradictory terms attributed to the peregrino by critics (heroic or lyric? sacred or secular?) continue in the debate over the significance of the apparently unfinished form of the Soledades, a debate in which Beverley has proposed a controversial, if increasingly more accepted interpretation of the structure of the poem.7 I will briefly review Beverley’s findings and conclusions. The Abad de Rute, in his contemporary defense of Góngora against Juan de Jáuregui’s criticism of the Soledad primera, suggested that Góngora had planned to finish the poem with three more cantos. According to Díaz de Rivas, these were to have formed an allegorical progression through four landscape stages; Pellicer combined this scenario with the traditional allegory of the human life cycle as the four seasons of the year, a progression which Angulo y Pulgar saw as metaphorical. Dámaso Alonso and García Lorca, participants in the 1927 revival of Góngora, rejected the four soledad hypothesis of the early commentators, suspecting, as Beverley notes, that it was “contaminated by the Post-Tridentine taste for didactic allegories” such as those elaborated by writers like Calderón and Gracián, the Christian topos of the peregrinatio vitae (Aspects 84–85).8 Rather than leaving the Soledades incomplete, Beverley argues, Góngora in fact intentionally telescoped the anticipated four cantos into what he calls a “binary pastoral/piscatory, comic-tragic two canto form,” combining the imagery of the myth of the ages of metal and of four landscape stages of social organization in a progressive movement from the primitive Golden Age towards the bleak violence and devastation of the Iron Age of the contemporary Hapsburg crisis (Aspects 93). The imagery with which the Soledad primera begins is repeated in a tragic register by the end of the Soledad segunda, with the pilgrim returning, inconclusively, to the shoreline of his arrival. For Beverley, the suspended ending, the appearance of the text as ruin, is an intended effect, and the tricked identity of end and beginning is the product of “an age where both the genesis and the decadence of Spain’s empire were 6 Antonio Vilanova, “El peregrino de amor en las Soledades de Góngora and “Nuevas notas sobre el tema del peregrino de amor.” 7 Beverley’s thesis has been accepted by Maurice Molho and others. It has also been supported by Alfonso Callejo’s study on the artistic value of the Soledad segunda; see Robert Jammes, “Presentación de las Soledades,” (25–26) and Jammes, ed. Soledades (44–45), as well as Pedro Ruiz Pérez (236–37, 241). 8 On the peregrinatio vitae, see Juergen Hahn.

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simultaneously visible” (Aspects 131 n. 9). “The effect of Góngora’s truncation of the Soledad segunda,” as Beverley writes, “is to alienate the reader from the poem, to force him to complete it somewhere else in another language,” to respond to his vision of Spain’s crisis on the stage of history (Aspects 112). As I have shown elsewhere, the structure Beverley proposes for the Soledades shows significant formal parallels with that of Virgil’s Eclogues, which in turn point to similar political concerns.9 Like Virgil, who framed his Eclogues as a protest against Augustus’s agrarian policy, Góngora brings contemporary historical crisis to bear upon the illusion of pastoral contentment.10 Góngora wrote in a similar context of succession anxiety and, as has been noted, sympathized with the anti-imperialist agrarian aristocracy and the social reformers of his time, the arbitristas.11 His critique, like Virgil’s, involves a text open to history, structured as a meditation on the tragedy of contemporary crisis, his protest crafted through telling juxtapositions and frustrated anagnorisis,12 all arranged to permit a response in his readership on the terrain of political action. The disruption of pastoral myth by the disasters of history that Virgil achieves in the Eclogues is amplified in the Soledades as a more generalized disruption of prophecy. Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, which predicts the return of Astraea and the inauguration of a new Golden Age, was seen as foretelling the birth of Christ and a new era of Christian history, culminating in the founding of the New Jerusalem. In Hapsburg ideology, the dynastic emperor took on this prophetic mission as the ostensible “last descendant of Aeneas.”13 His project was to restore the Roman Empire as Christian and with his victory usher in Apocalypse, the Last Judgment, and the new millennium: the end of history. When Góngora used the Fourth Eclogue as source for his Soledad sonnet, recognized as a template for his master work, he reframed Virgil’s original political prophecy as contemporary protest (Beverley, Aspects 78–79). Góngora expands this protest throughout the fabric of the Soledades, where

9 I make this point in Góngora’s Soledades. Both works involve a progression from ascent to descent, both works evince symmetries between the two halves, both end with a gesture towards beginning again; both are framed by the contradictions of history and both appeal to the reader to complete the work outside the text (xiv; see also xii–xiv and 35–38). See also Claudio Guillén, Literature as System (181). 10 Putnam, (68), citing L. A. Mac Kay (156–58). 11 See especially L. J.Woodward and Beverley Aspects (4–8), as well as Chemris, “Las Soledades de Góngora y el arbitrismo.” 12 See Crystal Chemris, “Violence, Eros and Lyric Emotion,” (473–75). See also Betty Sasaki (150–68); Callejo (61); Marie Claire Zimmermann (57); and Grace Mary Burton (iii, 25–28) regarding the effect of juxtaposition in the poem. 13 See Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas and Geoffrey Parker.

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he enacts a subtle critique of Hapsburg ideology through the deconstruction of imagery associated with the monarchy.14 One such case is Góngora’s treatment of the constellation of the Southern Cross. As art historian Marie Tanner has written: From the moment of Eden, the four stars that formed the cross had been visible to Adam and Eve, but after the Fall they vanished from the sight of man. When the equator was crossed by Iberian navigators, the Southern Cross miraculously appeared again on the horizon… .[T]he heavenly reappearance of the cross was said to signal the Parousia (The Last Descendant of Aeneas 206).

Góngora includes an image of the Southern Cross in the speech against seafaring of the Soledad primera, but buries it decoratively within the ouroboros emblem of medieval mapmaking iconography,15 which doubles, as we have argued, as an allusion to Inca Garcilaso’s heraldic figure. Such oblique representation of this constellation guts the sign of its prophetic function within Hapsburg apologetics. This sort of decontextualization resonates in other fragmented emblems of monarchy,16 and culminates in the falconry scene, with its references to various countries, weaponry and exploding celestial bodies, which has been read as an allegory for European war (Beverley, Aspects 93). Here, Góngora 14 15

See Chemris Góngora’s Soledades (33–34) and Sasaki. The passage reads: El istmo que al 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. (Jammes ed. I. 425–29)

Beverley, in his edition of the poem, notes that this section refers to the constellation of the Southern Cross; see John Beverley, ed., Soledades (93). Joaquín Roses, Góngora Hoy IV–V (137), associates this image with mapmaking conventions of the period which originated in medieval illustrations. See also Cancelliere. 16 Important examples of this pattern are particularly evident in the speech against seafaring of the first Soledad, where the symbols of different moments in the history of the Hapsburg dynasty are reprised, but abstracted from their usual politico-religious association. Charles V’s personal emblem, the columns of Hercules, marked with the motto “Plus Ultra” to emphasize the extension of empire, termed “Europe’s most enduring symbol in the bid for universal theocratic monarchy” (Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas 155) is evoked, but only as “cuyo famoso estrecho | una y otra de Alcides llave cierra” (I. 401–02). The compass is hailed (I. 379–94), but is not associated with the cross with which it was identified in Hapsburg apologetics, through which Philip II’s reign was to extend to the non-Christian world (see Tanner The Last Descendant of Aeneas 204–06). See Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades (96–99).

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debunks Hapsburg millennial pretensions by infusing the violent realities of history into the pseudo-historical myth of the Christian emperor: the mythic Apocalyptic imagery of the Christian Parousia is realized as the horror of world war. As we have noted, however, Góngora’s disruption of theocratic prophecy is contained within an alternative form of feudal hegemony, an oppositional poetics of empire on the margins of Counterreformation print culture, what Beverley has characterized as a private sphere variation on public sphere aesthetics. As he writes, “such a procedure works to affirm the hegemony not by its coincidence with the official representations of power and authority but precisely by its defamiliarization of these” (Against Literature 59). Góngora’s protest against imperialist ventures had its ideological limits within the demands of patronage. Similarly Virgil’s complaints about land expropriation have been traced to both self-interest over the possible loss of his own property as well as some resentment about giving land to newly freed slaves returning from conscription.17 While both poets disrupt conventions of representation to evoke a critique of empire in their readership, this disruption is contained as part of the evolution of literature, its reestablishing itself as hegemonic in periods of crisis and transition. As we will see, this dynamic of rupture and containment will continue as a pattern in the recurring pilgrimage topos. As historians have pointed out, the crisis of Spanish absolutism went unresolved; Spain precociously anticipated the institutions of modernity and quickly smothered them in Counterreformation zealotry. While Spain experienced sporadic bursts of economic development over the next few centuries,18 agrarian reform and other basic tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution continued as problems even at the inception of the Republican government in 1931. Spain’s belatedness reverberated on colonial soil and was repeated in the frustration of a democratic agrarian program in Latin American political struggles. This legacy of frustrated modernity perhaps explains the recurrence 17

In suggesting a sympathy for agrarian reform projects in the poem, as we have noted, Góngora also evinces certain limitations. Beverley argues that the arbitrista program, as articulated by Góngora’s mentor Pedro de Valencia, to revive agriculture by dividing the large estates among the peasantry, was ultimately an impossible proposal for a kind of “feudal socialism.” In the context of such historical frustration, the Soledades becomes, he argues, a narcissistic aristocratic exercise: “Góngora’s cultivation of difficulty is rather a substitute for a direct political practice which is no longer possible” (“The Production of Solitude” 57–58). Regarding the limits of Virgil’s critique, see McKay (157). Woodward (784) and Beverley (Aspects 101) address specifically the relevance of Góngora’s association with the arbitristas to the Soledades. See also Mercedes Blanco’s excellent study on Valencia. 18 See Tom Lewis (252–78) for evidence of the triumph of the bourgeois democratic revolution in Spain in the 1830s (259) as well as on the rise of the revolutionary workers’ movement across Europe, including Spain in 1848 (267).

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of Baroque structures in Latin American literature, as what Beverly has read as the aesthetic expression of historical impasse. If, in the words of Vicens Vives, the Castillian “bourgeois meteor”19 burnt out before the essential features of the modern could fully take hold, that legacy of “the dead star of distant tomorrows”—to suggest Gorostiza’s recasting of Mallarmé’s image20—made a profound mark on the eclipsed possibilities of the Hispanic cultures of the future. Góngora’s pilgrim ends up going nowhere, his pilgrimage both a ruin and a frustrated circuit, a kind of Möbius strip endlessly telling a broken tale of loss, violation and isolation; the poem begins and ends with classical emblems of divine—read imperial—rape.21 The rape of Europa by Jupiter with which the poem opens, emblematic of the rape of Europe by the Hapsburgs, loses its idyllic quality by the end of the Soledades with its dismal allusion to the rape of Persephone.22 The critique of gender relations sustains the critique of Spain’s imperial mission not only in such a defamiliarization of “heroic rape”23 imagery, but as Paul Julian Smith has shown, in the deconstruction of the peregrino as a masculine exemplar of epic heroism (86). A feminized version of the epic hero emptied of his canonical significance, as Smith describes him, he wanders aimlessly—not unlike some of the conquistadors—rather than founding a city (1986: 86). The psychological and social facets of the modern subject are anticipated in the transition from epic to novel implied in the fragmentation of the journey of the peregrino, who foreshadows, on the social side, the collective subject of the uprooted pícaro as well as, in its psychological aspect, the individual subject of the Bildungsroman, Byronic pilgrimage and even Baudelaire’s flâneur.24 Yet all of these aspects of the subject remain suspended in what Smith calls “generic indeterminacy;” (89) the pilgrim and his journey, bereft of an essential telos, become literary expressions of the suspension of historical and economic progress before the promise of the democratic revolution at the origins of modernity. These features—the indeterminacy of the pilgrim’s identity and the 19

Vicens Vives (308–09). See Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades for a discussion of this image in Gorostiza’s poem Muerte sin fin (113–18). 21 See Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades (103) and “Time, Space and Apocalypse” (155). 22 Beverley (Aspects 112); Chemris (Góngora’s Soledades 51–71, 103). 23 The term “heroic rape” is Susan Brownmiller’s; the sense in which I use the term to describe Hapsburg iconography is derived from Diane Wolfthal, Images of Rape; see Chemris “Violence, Eros and Lyric Emotion,” revised and reprinted in Góngora’s Soledades (51–71). 24 See Beverley Aspects 65; see also Bradley J. Nelson, “Góngora’s Soledades: Portrait of the Subject” (608–14). 20

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suspension of his journey—are repeated in modern Latin American texts which engage these figures to explore the historical, economic and aesthetic aspects of their heritage in the Spanish early modern. Gongorism is key in this endeavor, not only because the Latin American avant-garde participated in the twentieth-century revival of Góngora by poets who related his work to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Symbolist aesthetic (in Spain, the Generation of 1927), but because, as we have argued, Gongorism in Latin America never experienced the degree of critical neglect which it suffered on the peninsula. As John Beverley has pointed out, even after Góngora’s influence peaked in the colonies in the work of writers such as Sor Juana or the theorist Juan de Espinosa Medrano, it continued to flourish periodically in the poetry of figures like Andrés Bello and José María Heredia,25 in the Cuban Neobaroque of the 1960s and 1970s associated with José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, and Alejo Carpentier, and extended in Latin America to include writers such as Néstor Perlongher, Carlos Fuentes, and Gabriel García Márquez (Aspects ix, 128 n. 8; Essays 2).26 Thus Beverley construes Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos and García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad as “more or less conscious elaboration[s] of the historico-mythic form Góngora develops in the Soledades” and notes that as such they are “valid readings of the poem” (Aspects 128 n. 8). Carpentier’s reading of the Soledades as elaborated in the structure of his novel inverts the historical progression through different forms of social organization that Beverley observes in Góngora’s work: Carpentier (who borrows his title from the proposition of the Soledades) presents his pilgrim as carried backwards in time from the capitalist metropolis (allusively New York or Paris), past the historical strata of the colonial or peripheral metropolis (Caracas-Havana), the town of the interior, the latifundium, the backlands, primitive tribal society, to a genesis landscape of Adam and Eve at the end (Aspects 128 n. 8).

In his earlier short story, “El camino de Santiago,” Carpentier, without the specific references to Góngora of Los pasos perdidos, offers a different elaboration of this “historico-mythic form” he inherits from the Soledades, exploring 25

See Beverley, “Barroco de estado” regarding the different trajectory and ideological significance of Gongorism on colonial soil. See also Elias L. Rivers (“Góngora y el Nuevo Mundo” 858) regarding the shifting of the center of Gongorist production to the colony by the second half of the seventeenth century. 26 See Mabel Moraña, “Baroque / Neobaroque / Ultrabaroque” for a genealogy of the Latin American Neobaroque. I acknowledge looser definitions of the term to refer to any modern appropriation of the Baroque. As I have noted, César Augusto Salgado, for example, refers to the twentieth-century revival of Góngora, conditioned by the Generation of 1927’s attraction to Mallarmé, as a case of the “Symbolist neobaroque vogue” (81).

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the significance of the colonial Baroque in a variant of the trope of suspended pilgrimage. “El camino de Santiago,” part of a trilogy titled Guerra del tiempo, describes the journey of a sixteenth-century pilgrim, one Juan de Amberes, a drummer who accompanies the Spanish army in its religious wars. The plague arrives with the rats leaving the ships from the New World, and Juan succumbs, enduring Apocalyptic visions. In his delirium he sees the Milky Way, called “El Camino de Santiago” because it marks in the heavens the road to the shrine of St. James, Santiago de Compostela. He takes this as a prophetic sign, and upon recovering from his illness he becomes a pilgrim on the road to Compostela. Now Juan el Romero, he stops on the way and begins to reconsider his conversion. He becomes a pícaro in pilgrim’s clothes and finds himself drawn to the fair of Burgos, where an “indiano embustero” tells him tales of the marvels of the New World, signaling another “Camino de Santiago,” as critics such as Sharon Magnarelli and Emil Volek have observed, for his pilgrimage now takes him to Santiago de Cuba (Magnarelli 75; Volek 16).27 There his dream of utopia is quickly shattered by the hardships of life on the island, and with his fellow exiles grows nostalgic for return, a desire reinforced by another vision of Compostela and the Camino de Santiago. In response to this sign of prophecy, they return to the Old World, where his companions, a Calvinist and a converso, are quickly re-victimized by the Inquisition. Back at Burgos, Juan, now Juan el Indiano, takes the place of the former “indiano embustero” and the original scene at the fair is repeated, in an odd moment of temporal doubling, apparently verbatim. He convinces a previous version of himself, Juan el Romero, of the possibilities of life in the New World and the two set off to cross the Atlantic. The story closes with a final vision of the Milky Way. Although I see no reason to suggest the explicit influence of Góngora, “El camino de Santiago” repeats many of the elements of frustrated pilgrimage we have observed in the Soledades: the apocalyptic context represented by early modern religious war and plagues, the disruption of prophecy, the generic indeterminacy of the protagonist (pilgrim or pícaro?), the binary and symmetrical structure with the end opening up to repetition and to history.28 For Ariel Dorfman the story exhibits a key pattern in Carpentier’s work in 27 Regarding the historical basis for the events on the story, see also Roberto González Echevarría, “Notas para una cronología de la obra narrativa de Alejo Carpentier, 1944–1954,” and Eduardo Barraza Jara, “’El camino de Santiago.” To place this story within the corpus of Carpentier’s work, see Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier and Steve Wakefield. 28 See Magnarelli on picaresque elements of the story, especially 67–70 on the shifting identity of Juan. See also Antonio Benítez Rojo on the resemblance of the structure of the story to a Baroque canon.

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which history operates in the repeated demise of myth, as a series of failed utopias.29 Thus Juan shuttles back and forth between the Camino de Santiago de Compostela and the Camino de Santiago de Cuba, completing neither, his path marked by the repeated yet static appearance of the heavenly Camino de Santiago. This constellation can be read as the figure of historical conjuncture, finally marking a point where the realities of contemporary history explode the pseudo-history of theological imperative. In the end St. James himself intervenes to transform the epic quest for the City of God from a sacred pilgrimage into a quite secular mission of conquest carried out by self-interested and confused pícaros. As Juan and his double prepare to leave for the New World, the saint remarks to the Virgin: “Dejadlos, Señora—dice Santiago, hijo de Zebedeo y Salomé, pensando en las cien ciudades nuevas que debe a semejantes truhanes—Dejadlos, que con ir allá me cumplen” (79).30 For Jorge Hidalgo, the frustration of utopia in the story underscores the continuation of human misery at the moment of the origins of the modern state; in his words, the story is “la representación del engaño y corrupción de un sistema económico-social surgido a fines de la Edad Media y que se perpetúa hasta nuestros días” (390). Yet Carpentier’s notion of historical recurrence is Spenglerian,31 contained within the concept of historical rhythms of ascension and decline, and his disruption of the representational conventions of the pilgrimage topos stops with his depiction of the African women with whom the rogues consort in Cuba; in their portrayal there is no “device baring,” but rather an untold story idealized and obscured. They are magically available, an exoticized other, a kind of sexual primitive accumulation, symbolic of the land and peoples on whose backs the utopian dream would be constructed. The idealization of these women against which the pícaro’s frustrated pilgrimage is dramatized introduces aspects of a national myth of origins into the tale, offering a model of how the Cuban criollo elite might dream of its ancestors. In Rulfo and Vallejo’s works, as we shall see, the use of the trope, particularly in its association with representations of gender, becomes more critical of the notion of national destiny. Rulfo and Vallejo engage the pilgrimage topos in works which are not, strictly speaking, what is commonly regarded as Neobaroque, but which demonstrate, albeit less explicitly, a similar problematic in the Latin American avant-garde. In Juan Rulfo’s novel of the Boom, Pedro Páramo, the sense of historical stagnation of Carpentier’s story is cast as the frustration of the 29 Ariel Dorfman (103–140). Domínguez García reads the story through the optic of dystopia. 30 All citations from the text of “El camino de Santiago,” are from the 1984 Siglo Veintiuno edition of his Obras completas. 31 Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier (130).

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agrarian project of the Mexican revolution. Revolutionary groups change but history continues its empty cycle in the perpetuation of the system of caciquismo, whose prime exemplar is Pedro Páramo. Juxtaposed to this cycle are the glimpses of indigenous life on the margins of history, as radically other. The static repetition of frustrated teleology is played out on all levels of the text, even to the point of tautological sentence structures.32 As Rulfo writes of the landscape around the ghost town of Comala: “Y todavía más allá, la más remota lejanía” (67).33 In this tautology, he creates a figure of stasis reminiscent of similar structures in the work of the poet considered Góngora’s descendant by the avant-garde, Stéphane Mallarmé. Perhaps Mallarmé’s announcement from “Un Coup de dés”—a poem which seems to suggest the same sort of paralyzed sense of historical constellation these works have engaged—is a fitting description of pilgrimage in Rulfo’s novel: “Rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu” ‘Nothing will have taken place but place.’ The son in search of the father and of the Promised Land enacts a ritual epic descent only to discover that his pilgrimage was already doomed from its inception, as the father is already dead.34 As Patrick Dove has written, in the work “the ontotheological conception of history as the progressive work of a subject is flattened out” (149).35 The fragmented text, like the Soledades, ends as a ruin, with Pedro Páramo collapsing into the wasteland he created like a pile of stones. Benjamin Cluff has interpreted Pedro Páramo within an “ethics of haunting,” using trauma theory to argue that Comala “represents the repressed of Mexican history” (52), similar to what Lois Parkinson Zamora, in her work on magical realism, has argued (497). He cites Jo Libanyi’s reading of Derrida: “ghosts are the return of the repressed of history—that is, the mark of an all-too-real historical trauma which has been erased from conscious memory but which makes its presence felt through its ghostly traces.”36 Specifically, Cluff argues that the population of Comala—those “excluded from Mexican history” (48)—manifests “transgenerational haunting,” testifying to the 32

Julio Ortega, suggests that such tautological structures are a function of the merging of time into space in the novel (“La novela de Juan Rulfo” 79). Nb. also the odd juxtapositions in dialogues, a defamiliarizing technique we have seen in Virgil and Góngora, which relates to the frustration of the anagnorisis typically experienced by the epic hero (see Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades 62–64). This sort of juxtaposition is paralleled in Carpentier by the odd literal repetitions of text that function as devicebaring features of typically Baroque self-reference. 33 All citations from the text refer to Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo, ed. José Carlos González Boixo. 34 Ortega “La novela de Juan Rulfo”; as Donald Freeman argues, “La renovación en el sentido mesiánico nunca ocurrirá.” (281). 35 Dove’s elegant work has shaped my thinking on the issues of modernity and representation in literature. 36 Cluff (48), citing Libanyi (6).

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massive incorporation of trauma after inexpressible mourning. In this sense the stagnation of the project of the Mexican revolution in the “quasi-feudal”37 domination of cacquismo continues the legacy of transgenerational trauma which Francisco A. Ortega observed in the Comentarios reales. For Deborah Cohn, this lack of progress is expressed in the melancholia of the characters, their obsessive remembering in an eternity without redemption (258, 263–5), despite the claims made on the present by the past: in the words of Dolores Preciado, “El olvido en que nos tuvo, mi hijo, cóbraselo caro” (65). Curiously, while Carpentier’s story illustrates explicitly the relationship between literature and socio-economic reality through the lens of historical hindsight, both the Soledades and Pedro Páramo are literary manifestations of socioeconomic problems which are all but evaded as explicit themes of the texts: in the Soledades, the American colonization, as noted by Beverley (Del Lazarillo 13) and in Pedro Páramo, the failure of the Mexican revolution (Dove 108). For Dove, such obliqueness on Rulfo’s part is an intentional lapsus in representational strategy that points to the trauma of historic injustice (108–09). Rulfo, like Góngora (and in contrast to Carpentier) uses gender relations to underscore his critique; the figure of Susana San Juan represents those who are marginalized, opposing the patriarchal forces of church and state in her rejection of her cacique husband Páramo and in her sensual, if insane litany in response to the whispered counsels of Padre Rentería.38 Susana’s death announces a latter day pilgrimage which continues the reversal of Catholic orthodoxy. It is marked by the incessant tolling of church bells on December 8, which, as Manuel Ferrer Chivite points out, is the feast of the Immaculate Conception (72). Shortly afterwards Pedro Páramo remarks on her apotheosis, a parody of the Assumption of the Virgin. Susana becomes a kind of alternative goal of pilgrimage to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the national saint of Mexico, whose feast day occurs a few days later39 and to whose shrine Mexican women have journeyed on their knees. In contrast, the

37 Anderson, n.p. Uzquiza González has noted Rulfo’s incorporation of a quotation from the fifth letter of Hernán Cortés in Pedro Páramo’s statement to Fulgor regarding Susana: “Ella tiene que ser huérfana. Estamos obligados a amparar a alguien” (142). As he writes, “Es la coartada político-moral del cacique que convierte en legal cualquier forma de poder concebida como amparo de esa provocada orfandad, pseudolegitimándose así, toda la violencia necesaria para ello. Y es el reflejo de aquella utopía providencialista y autoritaria, surgida en la Colonia desde Hernán Cortés y los franciscanos que ‘legitimaba’ la superioridad e impregnación de unas gentes a otras” (646–47, n. 9). 38 María Elena Valdés; see especially 493; cf. Silvia Lorente-Murphy (149, 151). The oppositional stance of Susana has been well-remarked by critics. 39 Ferrer Chivite (72) points out that the Virgin, according to legend, appeared to Juan Diego shortly after the feast of the Immaculate Conception.

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people converge joyously on Comala for her funeral: “De Contla venían como en peregrinación. Y aun de más lejos. […] poco a poco la cosa se convirtió en fiesta” (171). This communal celebration is countered with Pedro Páramo’s injunction that the town must starve, and with a subsequent fragment which narrates the meaningless cycle of failed social struggle culminating in an oblique reference to the Cristero uprising, which Lorente-Murphy calls “la más dura denuncia al desquiciamiento de la Revolución Mexicana” (86). As Páramo’s man El Tilcuate reports: “Ahora somos carrancistas” […] “Andamos con mi general Obregón” […] “Me iré a reforzar al padrecito” (171–72).40 The communal pilgrimage of the town Pedro Páramo abused, which is sparked by Susana San Juan’s death, is an ambivalent, magical realist evocation of the prospects for social transformation. It suggests Victor Turner’s anthropological notion of communitas, what he defines as a “social antistructure” which functions as “a spring of pure possibility” (250–51).41 However, the degree to which Pedro Páramo represents an authentic engagement with alterity is debatable. Neil Larsen, citing the novel’s iconic reception by figures like Fuentes and Paz, sees the work as an illustration of avant-garde hegemony, and indeed, Susana’s plaza fiesta is suggestive of a Pazian notion of a classless carnivalesque celebration of social communion. It is likewise resonant of the self which Edmond Cros has identified with the ideological foundation of post-revolutionary Mexican nationalism.42 Yet the quick cut to an oblique but pointed reference to the series of failed revolutionary uprisings, as many have argued, suggest that the novel is more critical. As Dove writes, “Rulfo’s text repeats or echoes the myth of lost plenitude, but in so doing it reveals the complicity of this national mythologeme with the self-affirmation project of the modern state”(Dove 113). Susana’s parodic association with the Virgin Mary, who is depicted in Revelations with Apocalyptic imagery (“A woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet” [Revelations 12:1]), points to the possibility of radical transformation in the destruction of the old order as well as the hopes for a voice for the voiceless which the cult of Mary traditionally evokes in order to contain. These aspirations are especially suggested in the syncretic aspects of Marian iconography in the Virgin of Guadalupe and in the explicitly indigenous spirituality that is present in the imagery used to describe Susana.43 As Ferrer Chivite asks, “¿Sugiere Rulfo que nada más morir 40

Juan Pellicer’s recent essay glosses this passage well. Turner (250–01). Cf. María Elena Valdés on the subordination of indigenous communal values to the power of the cacique (495). 42 Edmond Cros, Theory and Practice of Sociocriticism (188); cf. Ferrer Chivite, who explicitly relates the pilgrimage scene to a Pazian notion of Mexican authenticity (30–31). 43 See Victor Turner on the influence of Revelations in the depiction of the Virgin 41

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Susana, en cuanto que representa la patria indígena postergada, se simbolizó como Virgen y protectora de México, desplazada, como estaba ya, del plano humano e histórico?” (72, n. 43). While Ferrer Chivite relates Susana to a Pazian concept of an alternative Mexican nationalism encoded in ambivalent iconic female figures of indigenous conquest such as La Malinche or the Virgin of Guadalupe, the question of containment or rupture of hegemonic representation, as the difference in critical reception suggests, is not clearly resolved (Ferrer Chivite 72–75). As we shall see, the possibilities for transforming a religious notion of redemption into a program for social transformation, while signaled ambivalently in Rulfo’s work, are finally realized in Vallejo’s treatment of the trope of suspended pilgrimage. Vallejo’s avant-garde poem, “Trilce LXV,” describes the lyric speaker’s preparations to return home after his mother’s death, his return described with the imagery of the sacred pilgrimage to Compostela. His pilgrimage gestures toward a social solution to the historical and economic frustration engaged by the previous works, not by any explicit reference to the problems of underdevelopment in his native Peru, but as in Góngora’s and Rulfo’s case, obliquely. The psychological aspect of the pilgrim figure announced in the Soledades reaches full development in Vallejo’s poem, in which the poet’s experience of mourning becomes the occasion for a pilgrimage into historical tragedy in a global sense, outside the paradigm of national or imperial destiny. For Vallejo, the poignant memories of childhood become a utopian space of the socialist imaginary. The greater pilgrimage to liberation from all forms of capitalist oppression which he invokes is suspended only by the uncertainty of the future, an uncertainty reinforced grammatically by a poem written primarily in the future tense and subjunctive mode. “Trilce LXV” is the second of two poems written on the death of Vallejo’s mother; the first, “Trilce XXIII” (“Tahona estuosa de aquellos mis bizcochos”) has been well analyzed by Patrick Dove. Dove describes Freud’s conception of the work of mourning as a dynamic of introjection —the reabsorption of emotional energy that had been previously dedicated to the deceased— and expulsion—the need to expel and bury the remains that might present an obstacle to that recuperation (174–75).44 He reads “Trilce XXIII” as a meditation on the problem of introjection, with political implications regarding the expression of subaltern voice in the context of the “epochal rift” or mixed temporalities which arose out of the combined and uneven development of of Guadalupe (82) and María Luisa Bastos and Silvia Molloy, as well as María Elena Valdés. See also Mario Valdés’s important study on the influence of indigenous culture on the novel, as well as Leal (88–89), Parkinson Zamora (528–30), Cruz, Arce, and Rocha. 44 Dove (174–75). Dove bases his arguments on Freud’s essays “Mourning and Melancholia” (14: 237–58) and “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (14: 109–140).

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Peruvian society. “Trilce LXV” can be read as a complement to this earlier poem, similarly oblique in its evasion of specific references to history and in its treatment of epochal concerns through a psychological exploration, engaging this time a problematic of expulsion and interment. As I hope to show, the poem elaborates—within a more general meditation on human history—a striking interplay between the poet’s identity and that of his mother, as well as an ambivalent monumentalization of the ruins of his mother’s body as its own tomb. The poem begins with the play of identity and difference in the form of reversal, as the son attributes his emotions to his mother. He is in grief, but it is with her tears that he anoints himself. As Irene Vegas García points out, Vallejo associates the place of his birth, Santiago de Chuco, with Santiago de Compostela and the pilgrimage along the Camino de Perfección, evoking implicitly the two elements of his family genealogy, represented by his indigenous mother and grandmother and his Galician grandfathers (121–24). Like a penitent on the road to Compostela, his preparations are marked by old wounds of spiritual emptiness. In the next stanza, three sentences in the future anticipate a return to the architectural features and furniture of his ancestral home, which function as a repository for his family’s past, and as Jean Franco suggests, for the evolutionary past of the human species (César Vallejo 70–71). This conflation of temporalities, marked by a poetic play with tense, recalls Benjamin’s notion of historical conjuncture, of the constellation formed between the present moment and an earlier one, here represented in psychic terms by the moment of the poet’s birth, his first separation from the mother, and her death, the separation which confronts him now. His work of mourning can thus be construed as a re-reading of the events between those two moments in constellation. As Franco points out, his visit home becomes his visit to his mother’s body, his first house, “a womb decked out” to receive him (“el corredor de abajo con sus tondos y repulgos de fiesta”) (69–70). The stanza repeats the catachreses of the first in the personification of emotions, this time the mother’s (Higgins, “On the Socialism” 8). Yet again, the identities of mother and son are reversed; he is the penitent, yet it is her columns that are tonsured. The interplay of bodies and emotions continues. Her anxiety and worries parallel his fears as a child of spankings on the gaping jaws of the “sillón ayo,” witness to the punishment of great-grandchildren, beaten with a strap corresponding to their size: “de correa a correhuela.” The discipline of children, their fears, becomes emblematic of barbarism and fascist victory in Vallejo’s civil war poetry (Higgins, “On the Socialism” 14). The sacrifices and “ansias que se acaban la vida” of the mother, the fears of spanking on the part of the children, are symbolic of the poverty of human history. In the third stanza, the lyric speaker conducts an unflinching evaluation of his own soul, which becomes an imperative for political action based on the

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model of love his mother provided (Higgins, “On the Socialism” 8). He rotates and drops the sounding lead, plumbing the depths of his being; the line, “¿no oyes tascar dianas?” has been read in terms of the triumphant announcement of reveille, but “tascar” means “to endure” more than “to chomp at” (as in “tascar el freno”) and “dianas” are also bull’s-eyes. When a plumb line is dropped, concentric circles surround the sounding lead like those of a dart board; it strikes its object as if hitting a bull’s-eye, which in the context of the poem, suggests that the speaker locates and endures the hard truths he faces in performing his spiritual inventory. The final lines of the stanza are also construed differently, but I find James Higgin’s reading most evocative: “tácitos volantes” are tacit fliers, leaflets yet to be written, the unarticulated message of the mother’s love portrayed as a cry to political action (“On the Socialism” 8–9). This imagery anticipates Vallejo’s later personification of Republican Spain as a mother to the socialist society (10): the “cintas” are typewriter ribbons, the “citas” are the future. Vegas García has pointed to the umbilical associations of the lines, suggesting that the voicing of the mother’s silenced subaltern speech—expressed in the subjunctive as a gesture towards possibility—will provide the impetus for uniting humanity across its divisions (Vegas García 127; cf. Higgins, “On the Socialism” 9). In the next stanza the mother is portrayed as a cathedral, the double arches of her blood suggestive of the vulva, the entry into her body through sexual union with her husband figured as a communion with the sacred. The stanza begins with the lines, “Así, muerta inmortal. Así.” This phrase will continue to be repeated and will end the poem. The phrase, as Julio Ortega notes, is an oxymoron,45 and it also echoes the play of identity and difference which Jean Franco has noted in the phonemic variation between “cintas” and “citas”, here in the juxtaposition of positive and negative values of the same morpheme: “muerta inmortal” (César Vallejo 71). Ortega sees the lines as emblematic of the poem’s increasing self-referentiality, its self-citation (Vallejo, Trilce 310), paralleling Franco’s observation, regarding “cintas” and “citas,” that Vallejo is making a statement about the arbitrariness of the signifier and of all creative acts, apparently even his own (César Vallejo 71). This play of identity and difference in language repeats the primordial play of identity and difference between the son and the mother’s bodies. In the final stanza, the projection of the speaker’s emotion onto his mother suggests an alienation from his own feelings, and becomes the fragmentation of language and of his own poem. Incomplete sentences link adverbial phrases of place, summarized by the deictic “Así,” which almost approaches undifferentiated sound.46 He is the one crying, but it is the colonnade of her bones that is 45

Julio Ortega, ed., César Vallejo, Trilce (310). Stephen Hart, writing of this poem, argues that “Tr LXV… attempts to validate the Name-of-the-Mother, but whereas Tr XXIII had voiced a desire to cross the space 46

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buttressed against the tremors of her own weeping. The speaker hyperbolically extols her immunity from Destiny; her side, unlike Adam’s inert body before the vivifying finger of God or that of the resurrected Christ before the finger of Doubting Thomas, is closed tight against the intrusions of change. As Ortega points out, this is no transcendence of death; she is beyond the hazards of fate precisely because she is irrevocably defined by the finality of her passing (Vallejo, Trilce 310). The womb-like goal of the speaker’s pilgrimage beyond loss is now a temple in ruins, evincing an ambivalent messianism in a Benjaminian sense, the future always in dialectic with possibility and informed by remembrance. The repetition of “Así, muerta inmortal” suggests a mother calming her child; the lyric speaker comforts his dead mother to comfort himself, applying the model of love with which he filled all the holes in the floor of the family house to try to fill the void at his own foundation. Most compelling about Vallejo’s poem of his own process of grief is his ability to render such poignantly articulated psychological events, which must be archetypal, and to associate them with a meditation on history and on poetic language which in turn signals a profound engagement with the ethical, the political, and the ideological. Precisely because he engages language and psyche at the level of the interstitial, before the entry into the Symbolic, he is able to challenge the aesthetic representation of history and ideology at a higher structural level. He accomplishes this in part through a transcendence of gender difference, evincing a different type of generic indeterminacy which approximates the collective subject. The mourning poet adopts all the tenuousness and uncertainty of a mother who—in a gesture towards a future of peace— courageously creates a foundation of security for her child, even when she finds it most lacking in her own conditions. Vallejo’s pilgrimage to Santiago thus becomes more than a journey into the psychodynamics of his own grief; his engagement with the messianic suggests instead a pilgrimage through mourning into historical possibility.47 The pilgrimage into the tragedy of history announced by Góngora’s Soledades thus branches into different but profoundly engaging variants in the Latin American texts we have examined: the Neobaroque tale of Carpentier, the lyric novel of Rulfo and the moving psychological exploration of Vallejo’s poem all testify to the persistent effects of the crisis of the modern. They contrast in their embrace of a different relation to the messianic: against the imperial political prophecy of Virgil’s messianic eclogue or the apocalyptic messianism of the Counterreformation, they offer a view of history separating the Imaginary Order from the Symbolic Order, Tr LXV accepts that space and makes of its necessity a virtue” (The Other Scene 91). 47 David Eng and David Kazanjian argue that Freud’s concept of melancholia has its “creative unpredictable, political aspects” which parallel Benjamin’s advocacy of an active mourning in opposition to historicist acedia or “indolence of the heart” (2–3).

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that is more critical. Often adopting an oblique view which might be seen as characteristic of the avant-garde, these writers, to varying degrees, use literature as ideological critique, a critique which is enhanced where there is a parallel critique of gender relations, given their function as the primal and most naturalized model of relations of dominance and subordination in society. In most cases, however, this critique is contained within certain constraints, defined by the limits of historical possibility and by an ideological commitment to an alternative view of national or imperial destiny. Vallejo, writing at the origins of international socialist consciousness,48 stands out most clearly as an exception to this pattern. Góngora, Rulfo and Carpentier present historical repetition as a form of paralysis; Vallejo presents the frustration of historical progress in equally graphic terms, but also, most explicitly, offers hope in his engagement with possibility from a socialist perspective. Vallejo presents a view of history that is both partisan and indeterminate, not foretold by the star of prophecy, but displayed instead as the conjunctural logic of constellation, in which the untold suffering of the oppressed of all eras approaches the possibility of being voiced and addressed. His poem suggests the “weak Messianic power” of which Benjamin writes,49 one which engages the future without a pre-established teleology, locating pilgrimage instead in the collective and open space of human potential.

48 See Franco (César Vallejo 1–26) and George Lambie on the history of Vallejo’s early intellectual formation and association with socialist politics. 49 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 254.

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Don du poème Je t’apporte l’enfant d’une nuit d’Idumée! Noire, à l’aile saignante et pâle, déplumée, Par le verre brûlé d’aromates et d’or, Par les carreaux glacés, hélas ! mornes encor, L’aurore se jeta sur la lampe angélique. Palmes ! et quand elle a montré cette relique A ce père essayant un sourire ennemi, La solitude bleue et stérile a frémi. O la berceuse, avec ta fille et l’innocence De vos pieds froids, accueille une horrible naissance: Et ta voix rappelant viole et clavecin, Avec le doigt fané presseras-tu le sein Par qui coule en blancheur sibylline la femme Pour les lèvres que l’air du vierge azur affame? Stéphane Mallarmé (Poésies, 1887)

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6

Signposts in a Genealogy of PostSymbolism in Latin American Poetry Invidia convocaba, si no celo, al balcón de safiro las claras, aunque etíopes, estrellas y las Osas dos bellas, sediento siempre tiro del carro, perezoso honor del cielo; mas ¡ay!, que del rüidode la sonante esfera a la una luciente y otra fiera el piscatorio cántico impedido, con las prendas bajaran de Cefeo a las vedadas ondas, si Tetis no (desde sus grutas hondas) enfrenara el deseo. Luis de Góngora, Soledades II. 612–25 SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS Medieval Birthing Charm (“The sower (God) AREPO holds [his] works, the wheels [of heaven]”)1 “Bloy (lo repito) no hizo otra cosa que aplicar a la Creación entera el método que los cabalistas judíos aplicaron a la Escritura. Éstos pensaron que una obra dictada por el Espíritu Santo era un texto absoluto: vale decir un texto donde la colaboración del azar es calculable en cero. Esa premisa portentosa de un libro impenetrable a la contingencia, de un libro que es un mecanismo de propósitos infinitos, los movió a permutar las palabras escriturales, a 1

Paden and Paden (313).

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sumar el valor numérico de las letras, a tener en cuenta su forma, a observar las minúsculas y mayúsculas, a buscar acrósticos y anagramas …” Jorge Luis Borges, “El espejo de los enigmas” OC II, 105

The “weak Messianic power” of which Benjamin writes may be evoked in the Symbolist play with possibility. The Symbolist language game signals impasse: the failure of the poetic word, its fall into reification. But it also points beyond such an impasse, like Mallarmé’s “Sainte,” in its moment of pure evocation. What happens when this moment is politicized, when the fingers gesture, like Vallejo’s Republican hero, Pedro Rojas, beyond the trauma of history?2 Might there be a literary space for a constellation of Benjamin and Mallarmé that points beyond the Baroque legacy of historical impasse? To consider such questions, I propose an investigation into a genealogy of Post-Symbolism in Latin American poetry, using a canonical sonnet by Mallarmé as a point of departure. Joshua Landy’s recent essay, “Modern Magic: Jean-Eugène RobertHoudin and Stéphane Mallarmé” in his anthology with Michael Saler, The Re-enchantment of the World: Secular Magic in a Rational Age, provides an elegant close reading of Mallarmé’s famous sonnet, “Ses purs ongles” (or the “Sonnet en yx,” 1887) which is itself a kind of magical performance. The article suggests that Mallarmé’s sonnet enacts a secular kind of magic, creating an “alternative world” while also providing “a set of implicit instructions as to how to bring aesthetic ordering techniques to bear on the real one” (122). Calling the sonnet both “sublime, in the Kantian sense” and “a magic circle from which all contingency is banished,” Landy leads us through a finely nuanced structural analysis of this masterpiece from the Symbolist canon (120). Landy’s reprise of the poem’s critical history is an evocative reminder of the impact of Mallarmé’s work, and invites renewed attention to the trajectory of Symbolism among Latin American poets. Inspired by Landy’s essay, my hope is to expand my earlier discussion on the Góngora-Symbolist parallel in modern Latin American poetry into an investigation of the genealogy of post-Symbolist lyric in Latin America. For indeed, the imagery and aesthetic concerns of the sonnet, translated by Octavio Paz into Spanish, as well as of Mallarmé’s other works, have a notable trajectory in Latin American poetry from modernismo through Alejandra Pizarnik. 2 Pedro Rojas writes his revolutionary aspirations “con el dedo en el aire” in a poem well studied by Antonio Cornejo Polar as well as Stephen Hart (Religión). See Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades for a discussion of this canonical poem from Vallejo’s book of poetry of solidarity with the Spanish Republic, España, aparta de mí este cáliz, within the framework of the Góngora-Symbolist parallel (137–39).

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Below is the text of the poem, with English translation: Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx, L’Angoisse, ce minuit, soutient, lampadophore, Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphore. Sur les crédences, au salon vide: nul ptyx, Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore, (Car le Maître est allé puiser des pleurs au Styx Avec ce seul objet dont le Néant s’honore). Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or Agonise selon peut-être le décor Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe, Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor Que, dans l’oubli fermé par le cadre, se fixe De scintillations sitôt le septuor. (Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose 48) Her pure nails offering their onyx on high, Anguish, lampbearer, this midnight, upholds Many an evening dream burned by the Phoenix And gathered by no funeral urn. On the credenzas, in the empty room: no ptyx, No abolished bauble of sonorous inanity, (The Master has left to gather tears from the Styx With that sole object in which Nothingness honors itself). But near the vacant crossed panes to the north, something gold Twists in agony according perhaps to the décor Of unicorns rushing in flames against a nymph, She, barely dead, still bare in the mirror while In the oblivion stopped by the frame, suddenly The septet fixes, its stars scintillate. (Composite Trans. Moncy, Landy, Chemris)3

The poem, as Landy notes, is exactly 100 words, its “subject” summarized by Mallarmé in in 1868 letter to Cazalis as follows: 3

Here I mixed and slightly reworked Agnes Moncy (Paz, “Stéphane Mallarmé”) and Joshua Landy’s translation to come up with one that seemed the most accurate.

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une fenêtre nocturne ouverte […] sans meubles, sinon l’ébauche plausible de vagues consoles, un cadre, belliqueux et agonisant, de miroir appendu au fond, avec sa réflexion, stellaire et incomprehensible, de la grande Ourse, qui relie au ciel seul ce logis abandonné du monde. (Mallarmé, Correspondance 392) An open night window, […] no furniture, except the plausible outline of vague consoles, the warlike and dying frame of a mirror hung in the back, with its reflection, stellar and incomprehensible, of the Great Bear, linking this dwelling, abandoned by the world, only to the sky” [Trans. Landy 114].4

Landy describes the sonnet as “an allegory of itself,” exquisitely overdetermined, each part fitting together within “an aura of indispensability,” the poem structured “like two panels of an almost symmetrical diptych,” telling a “twice-told tale: a nymph dies in a fire, and a constellation is born” (117, 119, 115). The tale is elaborated across multiple self-reflecting fragments, which imitate in miniature the mirroring enacted by the text as a whole, a fractal effect which recalls Baroque structure.5 The nymph who dies is Callisto; her constellation is Ursa Major, the Great Bear, or Big Dipper. Critics have recognized Ovid’s rendering of the Callisto myth in his Book II of the Metamorphoses as an important source for the poem6 which clarifies the imagery in a number of important ways. “Ses purs ongles” are the starry bear claws which grow out of the nymph’s hands in her metamorphosis. She was transformed while raising her hands to plead for mercy, face down in prayer to the goddess; hence the raised arms, the supplication, the death agony, the anguish and the silence alluded to in the poem. Her constellation was forbidden to enter the waters of the ocean; she is thus figured as a Big Dipper gone to fetch water which never dips, a water sprite that never swims; negated, indeterminate, and like many of Mallarmé’s images, held in constant suspension. The line “Des licornes ruant au feu contre une nixe” marks her metamorphosis by stellar fire; she is fulminated as a result of her rape by Jove, 4 Landy (114), citing and translating “Letter to Cazalis, July 18, 1868” (Mallarmé, Correspondance 392). 5 Beverley, Aspects, points to “self-miniaturization” as a quality in Góngora’s Soledades and Cervantes’s Don Quijote (76). Enrica Cancelliere has described the generation of metaphors in the Soledades as fractalic (“La realidad virtual” 261). See also Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades (76). 6 This is Christopher Brennan’s observation (Landy 305 n. 46, citing Gardner Davies, 136 n. 19). Davies does not give a reference, but states that Brennan, “Un poète australien,” “avait entretenu une correspondance avec Mallarmé.” It should be noted that fetching water from the Styx has another mythological source in Psyche’s tasks.

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the unicorns here serving as symbols of the phallus and of virginity.7 The curious word ptyx, chosen by Mallarmé for its rhyme as well as for its lack of meaning, has been read as a reference to the conch shell, with its suggestiveness of the folding of the vulva8; the modernista poet Rubén Darío, in his participation in Parnassian aesthetics, seems to have transferred this symbolism to his poem “Caracol.”9 The currently more common reading of ptyx as an allusion to Catholic ritual strikes me as especially valid; the chalice (as Chisholm suggests, the pyx10) is engraved with a symbol for Christ, a long stemmed P with an X superimposed on the base as well as a horizontal bar for the cross; perhaps the “t” added to “pyx” is the cross.11 So beyond the reference to the word “pyx” might be the reference to the 7 Cohn remarks on Mallarmé’s fascination with the unicorn and its association with virginity, as well as with the horn containing dice; as he states, “The idea of an outburst of stars, like dice, from this horn (cornet à dés) is quite possible, as in the Coup de Dés (‘issu stellaire’…) (Toward the Poems of Mallarmé 146 n. 5). 8 Paz quotes Mallarmé in his letter of May 3, 1868, in his letter to Eugène Lefébure: “je fisse un sonnet, et que je n’ai que trois rimes in ix, concertez-vous pour m’envoyer le sens réel du mot ptyx, ou m’assurer qu’il n’existe dans aucune langue, ce que je préférais [sic] de beaucoup afin de me donner le charme de le créer par la magie de la rime” (Mallarmé, Correspondance 386). “I have written a sonnet and have only three rhymes in ix; try to find out the real meaning of the word ‘ptyx.’ I have been assured that it has none in any language, which pleases me greatly, for I would love to have created it with the sheer magic of rhyme” [Trans. Agnes Moncy]. On his choice of ptyx: Paz, who produced the Spanish translation, cites Émilie Noulet as the source for this etymological reading of ptyx, in its Greek origins as conch shell, and credits M. Jean Pierre Richard for the suggestion of the folds of the vulva (Paz, “Stéphane Mallarmé” 16, 20). Robb, citing a conversation with Geoffrey Neate, notes that ptyx can mean “a waxed wooden tablet used for writing,” with the more common “diptych” meaning a pair of these tablets. He concludes, “The ptyx therefore belongs to a group of images, so prevalent in Mallarmé’s poetry, designating isolated elements normally found in pairs—like a wing or a rhyme” (or, I would add, the single horn, found in the unicorns of this sonnet) (63n). Burt discusses the ptyx at length and also includes the nuances of “fold” and, via the synonym coquille, “printing error.” Pearson, Development, mentions the meaning of “mariner’s compass” (161). 9 See Giordano for a discussion of Darío’s use of Mallarmé’s symbolism here. 10 Landy (308 n. 66) cites Chisholm as quoted by Davies (117); Chisholm (232). 11 Cohn has suggested that “Mallarmé’s central epistemological contribution is polypolarity, based on paradox. For example: can a proposition be true and false simultaneously? If you say, as he would, “Yes and no,” you are in a tetrapolar phase of polypolarity, that is paradox squared”… “Now the four seasons can be seen statically as a cross” (“Mallarmé’s Wake” 889). This sense of the cross as a greater epistemological and structuring feature of space-time might inform the cross imagery in the sonnet, the cross suggested by the ptyx which is then mirrored by the cross glazing of the window pane. As Cohn states, “Un Coup de dés” “ends like the sonnet with a

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ptyx as rebus / hieroglyph / icon, all within the play at transubstantiation in imitation of Eucharistic consecration (arms held high), the word incarnated in a poetic black mass. Indeed, incarnation suggests another aspect of the poem. Perhaps Mallarmé found a model in the Latin birthing charm “Sator Arepo,” used in France to calm women in childbirth into the nineteenth century, imitating in the sonnet’s fragmentary mirroring its “multidimensional palindromes”12 on a broader structural level, with its one magic word, “arepo,” replicated in the mysterious ptyx, itself emblematic, in its association with the Eucharist, of a type of incarnation. Robert Cohn observes Mallarmé’s use of anagram in “Les Fenêtres” (“Mallarmé’s Wake” 900); here Mallarmé evokes a broader anagramic structure. The hypothesis that Mallarmé imitated a medieval birthing charm seems especially plausible when one considers Mallarmé’s fascination with poetic production as a form of male motherhood, evinced in poems such as “Don du poème” (1887). The notion that the “Sator Arepo” was an anagram of the “Pater Noster”13 suggests another model for the secular performance of religious ritual as magic, as do the cabbalistic features Mallarmé identified in the repetitive murmuring of the poem.14 But what of the relationship between the poet and the tears? Can poetry redeem suffering? Why is the suffering that of a rape victim? Landy refers to the aesthetic spell of poetry as a way of rehearsing the skills needed to “make life bearable: generating fictions and persuading ourselves that they are true” (124–25). This notion of poetic redemption could be read as the workings of false consciousness. But perhaps Mallarmé also leaves open the political version of the Great Bear seen provisionally through the cross hairs of an astronomical fixing in space-time” (896). 12 Paden and Paden (313). The “Sator arepo” is replicated as an epigraph to this chapter. 13 Paden and Paden (313–15, n. 38). 14 See Cohn, Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (144). Landy points out that cabbalistic rites were used by the French Rosicrucians (111), a known influence upon Mallarmé. Chisholm quotes a relevant passage of Mallarmé’s letter to Cazalis (July 18, 1868) on the first version of the sonnet: “J’extrais ce sonnet… d’une étude projetée sur la Parole; il est inverse, je veux dire que le sens, s’il en a un (mais je me consolerais du contraire grâce à la dose de poésie qu’il renferme, ce me semble) est évoqué par un mirage interne des mots mêmes. En se laissant aller à le murmurer plusieurs fois on éprouve une sensation assez cabalistique” (230; Mallarmé, Correspondance 392). As he remarks, “It has to be noted that the word evoking the seven main stars of the Great Bear is septuor. It is essentially a musical term: the stars are singing. The concluding line thus justifies Mallarmé’s remark about the “sensation cabalistique” that one feels on “murmuring” the poem several times. The images merge into each other, thanks to the multiple mirroring that we have seen. Then they fade right away, and the whole thing becomes an incantation.”

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possibilities of a secular poet vates to signal the pain of the voices forgotten to history. This, for me, might be one of the sites for the Symbolist trajectory into Latin American poetry. I see the wider reverberations of Mallarmé in, for example, Neruda’s “Alturas de Macchu Picchu,” where the chalice held high is reconstituted as social communion, and the Valéryan cemetery by the sea of tears is recast as a Marxist contemplation of postwar ruins. My current project will be to trace two trajectories of the imagery and aesthetic concerns of Mallarmé’s sonnet into Latin American poetry: the first sketching a trail through the modernista and avant-garde appropriation of French Symbolism, the second, delineating a counterhegemonic appropriation of the canonical imagery of Post-Symbolism. In this study and elsewhere I have examined the Symbolist trajectory of the Gongorine Neobaroque in poets such as Rubén Darío, Octavio Paz, José Gorostiza, and César Vallejo; 15 here I would like to focus on poems by Delmira Agustini and Alejandra Pizarnik with counter-examples in the work of Roberto Sosa and recent indigenous poetry by Lionel Lienlaf and Graciela Huinao. In doing so, I do not seek necessarily to demonstrate a definitive, historically documented case for influence or conscious interaction with Mallarmé’s legacy, although given the cosmopolitan nature of Latin American modern poetry, there may well be direct evidence for this. Nor will I exclude the possibility that the recycling of images from Mallarmé into future poetry may also involve some cases of coincidental usage of archetypal or traditional symbols. Rather, my hope is to demonstrate some examples of the metamorphoses of these images within a collective poetic imaginary in which the aura of Mallarmé is as inescapable as it is mutable, as part of a global Symbolist heritage in which Latin American poets were (and continue to be) original, innovative contributors. In this sense my work complements that of Cecilia Enjuto Rangel, who studied the Baroque topos of the contemplation of cities in ruins as a transatlantic projection into modern Latin American poetry. I will begin by establishing the elements of the sonnet’s Ur-scene (primary or original scene) as a point of departure for investigating Mallarmé’s trajectory in a poem by Delmira Agustini on a similar topic. These include the poem’s reflection in the mirror at midnight, the reference to the funeral ashes, the birthing of a poem, the rape resulting in the metamorphosis and constellation of the woman, the poem’s self-negation as silence, and the empty chalice. Mallarmé continued the imagery of the sonnet in his play, Igitur, where the midnight parlor is the scene of Igitur’s self-contemplation in the mirror, a suspended moment of light when “les souffles de ses ancêtres veulent souffler la bougie” (OC) “the breath of his ancestors wants to blow out the candle” (Trans. Caws; Mallarmé, Selected Poetry and Prose 91) and the child poet 15

In Chapter 4 of this study, I discuss Darío; in the final chapter of Góngora’s Soledades, I discuss the other poets.

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prepares to commit suicide, joining his ancestors by lying down in the ashes of stars.16 Agustini’s “El cisne,” from her book Cálices vacíos (1913) continues this Mallarmean topos of the poet’s self-contemplation in the mirror by celebrating a different divine rape, the Parnassian and modernista myth of Leda and the swan. As Sylvia Molloy, Cathy Jrade, and other critics have shown, Agustini reframes Darío’s swan with a poetic voice which celebrates the female side of the mythic coupling.17 The focus on the lake as the pupil of the eye, the imprint of thought in a pastoral landscape of the mind, suggests the self-contemplation and the construction of the female poetic voice which will inhabit the span between Mallarmé and Pizarnik: Pupila azul de mi parque Es el sensitivo espejo De un lago claro, muy claro!… Tan claro que a veces creo Que en su cristalina página Se imprime mi pensamiento. (Agustini 126)

While Mallarmé’s nymph escapes her assault on the frame décor by diving into the mirror, which then depicts her metamorphosis into a constellation against the framing sky, here the mirror/sky becomes a lake, a crystalline page, and the waters of the eye.18 Like Mallarmé she seeks to contemplate herself in the act of writing on the edge of silence, and like Darío, she figures writing as divine rape, a coupling of fleshy rose tones and lily white, with decadent allusions to seductive mallificence and supernatural power:19 16 Cohn and others note the role of this sonnet as a kind of template for Mallarmé’s major works, Un coup de dés and Igitur. 17 Molloy, “Dos lecturas”; Jrade, Modernismo (133–36). Margaret Bruzelius, Tina Escaja, Gwen Kirkpatrick, and Jorge Luis Castillo, among others, have contributed on this topic. 18 In her new monograph on the poet, Jrade writes, “Eye and lake fuse and become the paper upon which the lyric voice writes; it is the surface that reflects her literary context and upon which she projects her personal vistas and sensibilities” (Delmira Agustini 155). 19 Beaupied discusses the self-referential aspects of the poem: “Aparece un lago ‘claro’ como la página en la que el yo escribe, ‘imprime,’ su pensamiento. Este lago es también el espejo cuya pupila azul devuelve la mirada. Aquí estamos ante la idea de la escritura como contemplación narcisista… . De manera que tanto el parque como el lago/espejo en el que la hablante se contempla—como lo será el cisne—son imágenes que el yo imprime para verse escribir” (135–6). Escaja sees the possibility of a lesbian or autoerotic reading of the specular scene (130). Molloy sees precedents in Darío’s poems on the rape of Leda (“Dos lecturas” 64–5) and Jrade observes decadent features in Agustini’s aesthetic (Modernismo 134).

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Flor del aire, flor del agua, Alma del lago es un cisne Con dos pupilas humanas, Grave y gentil como un príncipe; Alas lirio, remos rosa… Pico en fuego, cuello triste Y orgulloso, y la blancura Y la suavidad de un cisne… El ave cándida y grave Tiene un maléfico encanto; —Clavel vestido de lirio, Trasciende a llama y milagro!… Sus alas blancas me turban Como dos cálidos brazos; Ningunos labios ardieron Como su pico en mis manos, Ninguna testa ha caído Tan lánguida en mi regazo; Ninguna carne tan viva, He padecido o gozado; Viborean en sus venas Filtros dos veces humanos! (126)

There is a yet unacknowledged subtext to this case of poetic competition signaled by Molloy. Marasso has pointed to Pierre Louÿs’s tale, “Lêda, ou la louange des bienheureuses ténèbres,” (1893) as a source for Darío’s famous “El cisne,” with its reference to the “huevo azul” (Rubén Darío 118–20). 20 I will argue that Agustini also draws on the Louÿs tale in her efforts to surpass Darío, further complicating the literary charge of the already laden symbol. In Louÿs’s story, the swan penetrates the virginal Leda with his beak, moving his head violently within her. He lays his bloodied beak above her hand, and when she attempts to rise to take a little water in the hollow of her hand to cool her pain, he prevents her. She lies still, falls asleep, and upon awakening sees that she has laid a large blue egg. A satyr comes to explain that she is Night, that she had united with Light, and that she will give birth to Beauty. He proclaims that symbols will be born of symbols, with Helen emerging from the egg. The essential features of the unusual coupling described in Louÿs’s story are represented in Agustini’s poem, with the hand cupping water transformed into 20

Louÿs, curiously, was a member of Pierre Menard’s circle, being the editor of the very journal, Le Conque, referenced in the Borges tale (Balderston 19).

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a gesture of female sexual power (such as Molloy has suggested),21 reversing the aggression of the Louÿs tale in an act of magnanimity: Del rubí de la lujuria Su testa está coronada; Y va arrastrando el deseo En una cauda rosada… Agua le doy en mis manos Y él parece beber fuego; Y yo parezco ofrecerle Todo el vaso de mi cuerpo… (Agustini 128)

The final stanza subtly repeats the imagery of the bird’s neck curved like a question mark of Darío’s swan poems (similar to what Molloy has observed in Agustini’s second “Nocturno” [“Dos lecturas” 69]), and as in the poetry of Darío and Mallarmé, insists on the figuration of the possibilities of poetic silence as one of sexual passion: Al margen del lago claro Yo le interrogo en silencio… Y el silencio es una rosa Sobre su pico de fuego… Pero en su carne me habla Y yo en mi carne le entiendo. —A veces ¡toda! soy alma; Y a veces ¡toda! soy cuerpo.— Hunde el pico en mi regazo Y se queda como muerto… Y en la cristalina página En el sensitivo espejo Del lago que algunas veces Refleja mi pensamiento, El cisne asusta de rojo, Y yo de blanca doy miedo! (128)

The poem ends with, in Gwen Kirkpatrick’s words, “la polarización y luego la disolución de la interioridad y exterioridad, de sujeto y objeto, de presencias masculinas y femeninas (“Prodigios” 191). For Kirkpatrick, Agustini’s aesthetic is profoundly deconstructive; “su insistencia en el cuerpo” moves beyond the repressive constraints of the social body (192). A number of critics have seen Agustini, with good reason, as an exemplar of the feminine subversion of modernismo and particularly of Darío’s model.22 21 22

“Dos lecturas” (67). Beyond critics already cited who have published on this poem, see, for example,

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Yet, unfortunately, failure to take into account Agustini’s original reworking of Symbolist topoi and intertexts has marked much recent scholarship which has focused instead on asserting national and generational boundaries.23 While Agustini may indeed contest Darío, she is also very much a female Symbolist poet, departing in her own original manner from the terrain marked by Mallarmé. Her swan which takes flight, bleeding, in her “Nocturno,” celebrated most elegantly in feminist terms by Cathy Jrade, reacts as well to the imprisonment of Mallarmé’s swan in ice in his “Le Vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui.”24 Her Cálices vacíos continue the empty vessels of Mallarmé Ignacio Ruiz Pérez and Patrick O’Connell. Jrade, “Rubén Darío como el otro fantasmal” provides an updated bibliography on this topic, including an unpublished dissertation on Agustini, Ibarbourou and Storni by Arcea Fabiola Zapata de Aston (U of Iowa, 1992). 23 For example, Ignacio Ruiz Pérez reads into Agustini’s title, Los cálices vacíos “la idea del vacimiento y el desgaste de un símbolo litúrgico y erótico de la imaginería modernista”in his efforts to define her (and perhaps correctly) as postmodernista, seemingly unaware that the empty vessel is a symbolist topos par excellence (189; cf. Molloy, “Dos lecturas” 64). In a similar vein, Beaupied goes to inordinate lengths to interpret the unusual coupling in Agustini’s “El cisne” when access to the Louÿs intertext as well as Symbolist convention might have offered a clearer basis for interpretation (137–40). Víctor Pueyo applies Juan Carlos Rodríguez’s notion of the literary norm in his analysis of Agustini and Darío’s poetics (“Viaje”). For Pueyo, both poets engage in a parallel process of desecularization of the Christian-Symbolist Imaginary as part of an anti-utilitarian response to the confluence of positivism and vitalism. Pueyo’s arguments are interesting, but miss the opportunity to incorporate the relevant Beverley-Pérus debate on Darío (see Chapter 5) as well as features of the broader context of the Symbolist and Decadent movements. Marasso and Giordano stand out as examples of earlier generations of critics of Latin American poetry who incorporated into their scholarship a deep understanding of Symbolist aesthetics. Jorge Luis Castillo is exceptional among recent critics in his mentioning of Agustini’s divergence from Mallarmé, albeit in passing, when he speaks of her self-critical, metapoetical subversion of modernism through evoking the virtuality of the absent space of female writing: “Para denotar esa ausencia, la poesía de Agustini no se aboca a la familiar estética del silencio ni amenaza con abolir mallarmeanamente la función referencial del signo sino que reescribe esa carrera de un espacio poético femenino… metapoéticamente y subversivamente” (81). Escaja relates Agustini’s poem, via Helen Sword’s study, to currents in European modernism (131–42). 24 Jrade, Modernismo 134–35; See Burnshaw for Henri Peyre’s close reading of Mallarmé’s poem (54–55). Jrade further develops her initial reading of “Nocturno” in “Rubén Darío” (71–72) and in her new monograph on Agustini (151–57). While not discussing Agustini’s Symbolist connection in depth, she does note the significance of her opening Los cálices vacíos with a poem in French as well as the Symbolist associations of her use of the nocturne (“Rubén Darío” 60). Margaret Bruzelius briefly alludes to this issue in her discussion of another poem of Agustini’s based on the

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along the road to later incarnations of Symbolism, figured, for example, by the empty glass which signifies the problem of pure form in Gorostiza’s Muerte sin fin (1939).25 As has been explored earlier in this study, Borges represents the avant-garde appropriation of Symbolist dynamics markedly in his prose. But his poetry can often engage in similar exploration. While Borges would come to articulate a traditionalist poetics even to the point of affirming archetypal metaphors against the “excesos barrocos”26 of the avant-garde, and while works such as his “Poema de los dones” are read, with good reason, as examples of classic, restrained stoicism,27 his points of departure include notable Symbolist topoi and favored Baroque models (e.g. Quevedo, Milton’s sonnet, “On his Blindness”).28 In his “Ars poética,” the River Styx becomes the river of time and history—the river of Heraclitus—, introducing, as in Valéry’s “Le Cimetière marin” (or as in Vallejo’s “Tiempo Tiempo” from Trilce, 1922), the problem of time into the process of self-contemplation. In “Poema de los dones,” whose title is an obvious take on Mallarmé’s “Don du poème,”29 this self-reflection in time is problematized by a blindness which stops the chain and collapses identity and temporality. Borges’s “El otro tigre” evinces a similar play on Mallarmé; here, on the Symbolist’s quest to name “fleur,” “l’absente de tous bouquets,”30 Borges raises this ambition to the second power in a gesture of evocation through negation: he will chase “el otro tigre, el que no está en el verso.”31 myth of Leda, stating that in it, “Agustini has written the female answer to the swan written by Darío and the French Symbolists and given a parodic twist to the image of the fatal woman” (62). 25 See Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades, for a reading of Gorostiza’s poem within the context of the crisis of Symbolist aesthetics (113–18). 26 Marina Martín notes this criticism from Borges’s 1969 prologue to his Fervor en Buenos Aires (56). Ruiz Díaz cites Borges’s poem on Baltasar Gracián as an example of Borges’s use of the figuration of Baroque excesses as a critique of those of the avant-garde (244–47). 27 James Higgins makes this argument (“On his Blindness”). Alí Víquez Jiménez reads the poem in Derridean terms; Emilio Carilla offers an earlier philological reading which includes a detailed and useful investigation of Milton’s sonnet “On his Blindness” as a source for Borges. 28 As Stephen Tapscott notes, “some of those early Vanguardist ideals—the primacy of the Symbol, for instance, continued to influence Borges through his long career as a poet” (142–43). 29 Mallarmé’s “Don du poème” appears as a fronticepiece to this chapter; a good close reading with English translation of the poem can be found in Burnshaw (44–45). 30 This phrase is from Mallarmé’s essay, “Crise de vers” (OC). 31 See Balderston for a reading of “El otro tigre” as a model for Borges’s approach to reading history as “an absent cause” (in Jameson’s terms), unreachable through

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Alejandra Pizarnik continues the Symbolist aesthetic which would be engaged by Paz in “Blanco” (1966). Paz’s introduction to her book Árbol de Diana (1962) —whose title signals another figure of rape ending in metamorphosis—, establishes her place in this genealogy.32 The poem “Caminos del espejo” (from her book Extracción de la piedra de la locura, 1966) constitute a “Neosymbolist”33 reworking of Mallarmé’s Ur-scene, described in one of Mallarmé’s letters as a contemplation of a chain of different selves at each instant in the passage of time: Ténèbres, je tombai, victorieux, éperdument et infiniment —jusqu’à ce qu’enfin je me sois revu un jour devant ma glace de Venise, tel que je m’étais oublié plusieurs mois auparavant. J’avoue, du reste, mais à toi seul, que j’ai encore besoin, tant ont été grandes les avaries [sic] de mon triomphe, de me regarder dans cette glace pour penser, et que si elle n’était pas devant la table où je t’écris cette lettre, je redeviendrais le Néant (Mallarmé, Correspondance 342–43). I floated downward until finally one day I looked again in my Venetian mirror and saw the person I had been several months before—the person I had forgotten. I should add –and you must say nothing of this—that the price of my victory is so high that I still need to see myself in this mirror in order to think; and that if it were not in front of me here on the table as I write you, I would become Nothingness again (“Letter to Henri Cazalis,” May 14, 1867” Trans. Bradford Cook; Mallarmé 87).

In “Caminos del espejo” (1962), this chain of selves in the mirror is represented by Pizarnik as a fall into the mise en abyme of a specular well, as a trip through the looking glass34 from which one awakes, embodied. The referential language and narrative. As Ferrer notes, “se agudiza la presencia por su ausencia de ese ‘otro’” (281). 32 Chávez Silverman, “The Poetry of Octavio Paz and Alejandra Pizarnik” is the essential study on the Paz-Pizarnik relationship. 33 I believe Óscar Hahn coined this term. Inspired perhaps by her work as a translator of French poetry, Pizarnik renews Mallarmé’s central dramas of poetic enactment in the 1960s with her own original vocabulary of imagery. See Chávez Silverman’s excellent essay, “Gender, Sexuality and Silence(s)” on Pizarnik’s lexicon (14–15). Regarding Pizarnik’s activities as a translator, see Caulfield’s introduction to Pizarnik’s letters to Antonio Beneyto. 34 Alice in Wonderland is a recognized source for Pizarnik; see Chávez Silverman, “Gender, Sexuality and Silence(s)” 15; Goldberg cites, generally, Lewis Carroll (15).

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gaze pits pupil and mirror in an impossible union, the writer inaccessible to simultaneous interiority and external consciousness, unable to overcome, like Gorostiza’s speaker in his “Muerte sin fin,” the blindspot which is a condition of sight, the anthropomorphism which is the condition of language, or in Graziano’s terms, the contradiction implicit in evoking silence through words (15). Thus the poet (“Peregrina de mí”) is drawn to images of the flight of her self of the recent moment from the dying self of her present gaze. These inform a series of aphorisms, reminiscent of Neruda’s final piece in Veinte poemas de amor in their rhythm of attempt and re-attempt, until the poem ends, “como si no pasara nada, lo cual es cierto”: Caminos del espejo I Y sobre todo mirar con inocencia. Como si no pasara nada, lo cual es cierto. II Pero a ti quiero mirarte hasta que tu rostro se aleje de mi miedo como un pájaro del borde filoso de la noche. III Como una niña de tiza rosada en un muro muy viejo súbitamente borrada por la lluvia. IV Como cuando se abre una flor y revela el corazón que no tiene. […] VI Cubre la memoria de tu cara con la máscara de la que serás y asusta a la niña que fuiste. […] VIII Y la sed, mi memoria es de la sed, yo abajo, en el fondo, en el pozo, yo bebía, recuerdo. […]

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XI Al negro sol del silencio las palabras se doraban. XII Pero el silencio es cierto. Por eso escribo. Estoy sola y escribo. No, no estoy sola. Hay alguien aquí que tiembla. XIII Aun si digo sol y luna y estrella me refiero a cosas que me suceden. ¿Y qué deseaba yo? Deseaba un silencio perfecto. Por eso hablo. XIV La noche tiene la forma de un grito de lobo. XV Delicia de perderse en la imagen presentida. Yo me levanté de mi cadáver, yo fui en busca de quien soy. Peregrina de mí, he ido hacia la que duerme en un país al viento. XVI Mi caída sin fin a mi caída sin fin en donde nadie me aguardó pues al mirar quién me aguardaba no vi otra cosa que a mí misma. XVII Algo caía en el silencio. Mi última palabra fue yo pero me refería al alba luminosa. XVIII Flores amarillas constelan un círculo de tierra azul. El agua tiembla llena de viento. XIX Deslumbramiento del día, pájaros amarillos en la mañana. Una mano desata tinieblas, una mano arrastra la cabellera de una ahogada que no cesa de pasar por el espejo. Volver a la memoria del cuerpo, he de volver a mis huesos en duelo, he de comprender lo que dice mi voz. (Poesía completa, 241–44)

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The poem ends with a beautiful vision of constellation, merging Symbolist and surrealist aesthetics in its play of elements from different natural categories: “Flores amarillas constelan un círculo de tierra azul.”35 She returns to the memory of her body as she leaves the darkness of self-contemplation figured as an endless drowning in the waters of the mirror. While both Agustini and Pizarnik introduce the alterity of female voice into Symbolist aesthetics, some of Latin America’s contemporary revolutionary and indigenous poets evince a more oblique and counterhegemonic appropriation. Roberto Sosa, a lesser known Honduran poet and winner of the prestigious Casa de las Américas prize, draws on his experience as the son of a Standard Fruit Company banana plantation worker to write of the poor: Seguramente ven en los amaneceres múltiples edificios donde ellos quisieran habitar con sus hijos. Pueden llevar en hombros el féretro de una estrella. […] Pero desconociendo sus tesoros entran y salen por espejos de sangre; caminan y mueren despacio. Por eso es imposible olvidarlos.

“Los pobres,” 1969 (62)

The poem is simple and makes use of Symbolist topoi in a skeletal, minimalist fashion. Yet, nonetheless, the references to stars, in sunrise and in buried hopes, continue the imagery of possibility, now given, as in Borges, a historical and political charge. The most powerful image is that of the poor, unconscious of their gifts, who enter and leave through “espejos de sangre.” Here the mirror is figured as historical impasse, in which the poor are a constant despite the passage of continuous generations. Testimony to the possibilities of this other voice remains in the urgencies of memory.

35

Cf. Góngora’s description of “la estación florida”: “en campos de zafiro pacen estrellas” (Soledades I. 1–6).

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There are curious continuities of this sort of primal Symbolist imagery in samples of recent Mapuche poetry, continuities which are not clearly a function of influence but, again, suggest a radically “other” poetics. In Graciela Huinao’s “Simulacro de biografía,” the poet describes her birth at midnight in a parallel moment to the Mallarmean Ur-scene, figured in both his celebrated sonnet and in Igitur. Birth and mirroring are concretized in a statement about cultural loss and the unspoken legacy of the rape of indigenous women, who are joined to nature and her sacred animals, not in the aesthetic transfiguration of myth but in a totemic sense. Birth, for Huinao, is the first step in the separation from her mother and her mother tongue. Identity is as fractured as the broken, deforming mirror of the white school to which her vision of self is subjected: Siempre me ha apasionado el misterio de la media noche. Pareciera que el firmamento dejara caer afilados cuchillos hacia la tierra partiendo la noche en dos. Pienso en mi madre a la media noche de un 14 de octubre de 1956 cuando mi boca se llenó de sur. Fui la hija de un hogar obrero donde había lo justo y necesario. Fue libremente feliz mi andar primero en el que mi padre siempre cantaba con acento del mapudungun. Terminaba el verano del 62 y la campana de un colegio me llamó. Encontré trizados los espejos de la escuela. Mi pelo negro me relegó a los puestos de atrás. La ignorante sociedad escribió en mi cuaderno su veneno: Discriminación. (Vicuña 142)

She migrates to the city like so many displaced indigenous, her roots carried on her shoulders like Vallejo’s Mother Spain in flight, yet her journey is always toward the south, the breathable air of the sacred cardinal point which marked her entry into the world: Ahora, por la esquina de mi vida el tiempo pasa severo en un barrio marginal de Santiago y todos los días echo a cuestas mis raíces mientras mis ojos acarician la distancia entre yo y mi amante: EL SUR. (Vicuña 144)

Here constellation signals not miraculous conjuncture, but sacred direction and the heavens of the ancestors, the parents who watch her as she writes

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poems, and whose presence is thus conjured by the text: “Sé que juntos me miran cuando escribo algún | poema” (Vicuña 144). This conjuring is not the entirely self-referential magic act of Mallarmé, but a shamanic gesture within the ceremonial tradition of her culture. Writing in and out of silence is also enacted by Lionel Lienlaf in a poetry which, despite its nature as writing, —as Claudia Rodríguez M. has noted— gives testimony to the violence of the imposition of the written word on an indigenous oral culture. The lyric speaker’s hand refuses to write his professor’s words: Mi mano se negó a escribir aquello que no me pertenecía Me dijo: “debes ser el silencio que nace”. Mi mano me dijo que el mundo no se podía escribir.

(“Rebelión,” Vicuña 66)

Silence, as in Paz’s post-Symbolist poem, “Blanco,” is a living material presence. Yet this silence goes beyond Paz’s exoticization of indigenous voice;36 in Lienlaf it is the rescuing of a kind of spiritual afflatus, the breath and dreams of his people and the lost expression of his ancestors: “He recorrido a recoger en las llanuras, en la playa, en la montaña, la expresión perdida de mis abuelos. He recorrido a rescatar el silencio de mi pueblo para guardarlo en el aliento […] para que el espíritu sea viento entre el vacío de las palabras. He corrido a recoger el sueño de mi pueblo para que sea el aire respirable de este mundo.”

36

(“Camino,” Vicuña 74)

See Brotherston’s comments on Paz’s use of indigenous imagery in Blanco (140).

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The celestial repository of this lost expression is, to cite the title of one of his poems, “El río del cielo.” For Lienlaf, the river, like Mallarmé’s mythic River Styx, is a river beyond the grave, the river of the souls of the ancestors (“El río del cielo,” Vicuña 72). The Milky Way, the sky river, is the constellation evoked by poetic language, yet returned to the sacred, to the material world outside the text, and appropriated as part of the resistance and testimony of a resurgent indigenous culture. In proposing this trajectory of post-Symbolist poetry, my hope has been to supplement the wealth of excellent critical material written on these Latin American poets with a transatlantic perspective which might begin to expand the critique beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, outside the paradigms of national literature and literary generation. In doing this I do not purport to reinscribe Latin American production within a European “universal,” as a derivative, belated and peripheral modernity.37 Rather I have proposed a postSymbolist poetics organic to Latin America38 and constitutive of Symbolism from its origins, which develops in its own original and dynamic fashion. The possibilities for such a transatlantic approach are most suggestive. The “constellation” of transatlantic collaboration of Latin American and Spanish Generation of ’27 poetics is particularly noteworthy around the nodal point of the Spanish Civil War, encompassing the cosmopolitan project of political (versus “pure”) poetry of solidarity. The incorporation of classics (both GrecoLatin and indigenous) into politicized notions of poetic folk tragedy is still another conjuncture which allows for an evocative comparison of César Vallejo and Federico García Lorca (see Chemris “Vallejo”). New readings of the classics in Latin American political reform projects might lead back 37

Here I take inspiration from John Beverley’s call for a break from the paradigm of national literature in analyzing texts (Essays 176–85). Rafael Gutérrez Girardot makes a related point in his argument that modernismo should not be read as a national, formal or generational phenomenon or as dependent on European modernism in a colonial sense (25, 30). He counters to this the inscription of modernismo as part of the European modern lyric as systematized by his teacher Hugo Friedrich (18). The Eurocentric implications in comparative literature have since been further challenged by postcolonial theory. As Barbara Fuchs has written, “it behooves us to insist on the partial nature of the national version and to seek out instead the more nuanced, historicized and geographically diverse narratives that might challenge powerful histories of teleology and primacy” (326). Although I would disagree with the notion of abandoning absolutely the scaffolding of genre, period and nation (as, for example, points of departure open to interrogation), I do see some usefulness in David Porter’s recent proposal: “What if we began not with the Herderian assumption that every text incarnates the culture of its origin but with the proposition that every text is always already a hybrid product of multiple origins … ?” (253). 38 See Carlos Alonso, The Burden of Modernity (19–20). I am applying here Alonso’s notion of a modernity organic to Latin America.

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to yet other transatlantic perspectives on the parallels between the Spanish Generation of ’27 and the Latin American poets Alfonso Reyes and Gabriela Mistral.39 In all of these nodal points the issue of Hispanic modernity and the repetition of the political impasse announced in the Baroque is again posed, inviting as well studies in the transtemporal dimension of this problematic of the engagement of poetry and history.

39

Here Paz’s essay on Reyes and Molloy’s reading of Mistral would be essential points of departure; see Paz, Puertas al campo and Molloy, “Female Textual Identities.”

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AFTERWORD “Cada sol repetido es un cometa” —Luis de Góngora, “De la brevedad engañosa de la vida” Más que las lunas de las noches puedo recordar las del verso; la hechizada dragon moon que da horror a la balada y la luna sangrienta de Quevedo. —Jorge Luis Borges, “La luna” “Mirando el cielo y las estrellas, maravillándonos con las constelaciones, nos sentíamos absolutamente libres.” —Luis Hernández, Chacabuco concentration camp survivor, Atacama Desert, Chile (qtd. by Patricio Guzmán, dir. “Nostalgia de la luz”)

Symbolism is the Rosetta Stone of modernist hermeticism and its literary and theoretical sequels. Darío and his followers shaped and continued its legacy; Borges’s aesthetic is informed by it, and Charles Rosen has called Walter Benjamin “the last great Symbolist critic—and the first, too, in a way— certainly the first to apply the poetic theory to historical criticism” (n.p.). Benjaminian anti-historicism as well as Derridean and Lacanian theory are modeled on the Symbolist flight from reification.1 Symbolism is indeed the 1 Within a somewhat different argument, Kate Jenckes associates Benjamin and Borges with elements of deconstructionist thought in her reference to Derrida’s description of De Man’s concept of “true mourning”: “‘the tendency to accept incomprehension, to leave a place for it, and to enumerate … those modes of language which, in short, deny the whole rhetoricity of the true (the non anthropomorphic, the non-elegaic, the non-poetic, etc.)’ (31). Benjamin and Borges share this tendency” (Jenckes 103, referencing Derrida, Memoires). In a related line of thought, Daniel Balderston associates Borges’s anti-historicism with Lacanian/Jamesonian notions of that which resists representation, a problematic he sees as elaborated in “El otro tigre,

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very fabric of deconstructionism, the prime example of an aesthetic which admits to no world outside the text.2 Throughout this study I have underscored the significance of Symbolism, using it as a tool to investigate the parallel between the literary Hispanic Baroque and avant-garde as a transatlantic phenomenon, considered in its various theorizings within currents of historiography and political thought. Both Symbolism and the more critical currents3 of the Hispanic Baroque (while still quite Catholic) explore the powers of the mind as a possible substitute for religious transcendence. Góngora and Cervantes cultivate artistic ingenuity in the context of the rise of science, Góngora affirming the role of poetry over prophecy in a “pseudosacerdotal” enterprise.4 In a latter day parallel, Symbolism, in its association with religious mystery, attempts to perform in poetry what Joshua Landy has called the “secular re-enchantment of the world,” a kind of elite magic show of the precious and highly imbricated production of sublime illusion (128–29). In these endeavors, both Symbolism and the “critical” Hispanic Baroque evince the qualities of decadence and impasse. Drawing implicitly upon Benjamin’s notion of constellation as an image of “dialectic at a standstill,” John Beverley writes that the dialectic of Gongorism is “una dialéctica paralizada. Bajo el pretexto de crear una nueva forma de trascendencia, su cultivo de la dificultad revela una vacuidad mecánica y ostentosa, un discurso frustrado y frustrante” (Essays 83).5 Góngora’s readers, he argues, find their doubles in the “anti-bourgeois bourgeois” intellectuals who emerged after the revolutions of 1848; the context, I would point out, for the development of Symbolist aesthetics (84). If—following Beverley’s analysis—Góngora performs an early Cartesianism in his modeling of language as a technique for assimilating the variety of nature imitated in the “unmapped” silva of the Soledades,6 a related dynamic occurs in Mallarmé’s poetry. The creation of constellations out of myriad possible combinations of words “where, in Balderston’s words, “Borges suggests that the writer’s attempt to refer to something is an endless, and constantly frustrated, process” (12–13). I am placing both these arguments within the envelope of the Symbolist model of the flight of the poetic word from reification. 2 Barbara Johnson claims that “what Derrida generalizes and analyzes” is the “‘spacing’ that Mallarmé attempts to maximize,” his attribution of “a signifying function to the materiality…of writing” as well as his tracking of ambiguities in order to generate multiple meanings within a network of relations (“Writing” 346). 3 Maravall distinguishes two responses to the epistemological crisis of the Baroque, one that embraces orthodoxy and another that I refer to here as critical, which embraces “confusión” as an opportunity for creativity (La cultura del barroco 397). 4 See Chemris, Góngora’s Soledades (48). 5 Benjamin, “Konvolut N”, The Arcades Project (463). 6 Beverley, “Confusión” (312); see also his “Soledad primera” (247).

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which mark poems like “Ses purs ongles” revisit Góngora’s “mapping” in the wake of a now decadent Cartesianism. Joshua Landy argues that “Mallarméan reflexivity must be understood as formative, as designed to offer practice in an increasingly vital skill” (128). In Landy’s words, “It is no coincidence that aesthetic self-consciousness becomes dominant just when philosophy begins to recognize the inescapability of ‘necessary illusions’(Nietszche, Vaihinger and company); works like Ses purs ongles […] are training grounds for lucid self-delusion, for the tenacious maintenance of fantasy in the face of the facts. They are what makes possible the re-enchantment of the world” (129). If both moments, the Baroque and the post-1848 avant-garde, represent “paralyzed dialectics,” resorting to ever more elaborate, if empty, figurations of the sublime, this is because they perform aesthetically a political impasse, one which arises out of the impossibility of merging human “capacity or technē” with a new social order which could integrate that capacity (Beverley, Aspects 52, 35). Yet there is a difference between the aesthetic expression of the political dynamics of these two points in literary history. Beverley argues that the Soledades “are as much a way of posing the problems of Spain’s crisis in the early seventeenth century as the work of the arbitristas. […] Góngora’s poetic manner represents the transfer to aesthetics of questions of social ethics and political economy that cannot be ‘thought’ in their own languages” (Aspects 7). Indeed literature, in Góngora’s time, was the language par excellence in which to figure these questions. Even after the bourgeois revolution in England, Cromwell conducted diplomacy through the agency of his Latin Secretary, the poet John Milton. Humanists trained in the classics considered contemporary politics through the mediation of literature. Beverley notes that “[in] the Spanish court and the colonial viceroyalties, art and politics are not yet clearly separate disciplines and activities” (Essays 7); “Poetry—at least a certain kind of poetry, like Góngora’s—is still seen as a legislative discourse, consubstantial with the discourse of power and its ends and means” (“Going Baroque?” 32). Thus literature functions as a vehicle for more covert expression than might be found in the explicit treatises of the arbitristas. Nothing could demonstrate this more profoundly, as we have seen, than Góngora’s camouflaged political protest in poetry, something we now understand more deeply in the wake of historical research which assimilates newer studies of Iberian confessional minorities. The Latin American modernista and avant-garde poets who served as diplomats and other political figures continued this tradition of coded critique, but notably after the decline of the neo-Latin respublica of letters and in the context of the emergence of the essay genre as well as the modern disciplines of the social and political sciences. Thus their politicized aesthetics has the rather different quality of second degree cultivation. But in either case there is a kind of hypertrophy or inflation of the aesthetic which corresponds

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to the impasse which Beverley signals in the application of technē—human capacity—to possibility.7 This inflation is much like the quality of Baroque ornamentation—welldescribed by Sarduy—, the spirals of a Solomonic column covering a void, an arabesque splitting into endless doubles in a dynamic like that of lines hitting a brick wall and curling about into a new and soon frustrated path, what Sarduy describes as “tautología,” “constatación de un fracaso,” and repetición obsesiva” (OC 1400, 1402).8 This frustration is figured in literary terms such as those we have observed throughout this study, as repetitions marking the suspension of a story yet to be written—to recall Francisco A. Ortega’s formulation. Thus we observe the “written scars” signaled in Borges—the “luna sangrienta” of Quevedo’s sonnet repeating as Yeats’s “dragon moon,” the figure of cycles of early twentieth-century political violence.9 Similarly 7 See

Essays (122, 123, 125). The essential source on visual topoi of the Baroque remains Severo Sarduy’s Barroco (OC 1196–1261). His essay, “El barroco y el neobarroco” (OC 1385–1404) offers a semiotic codification of the term “barroco” including the identification of a series of textual/visual “gramas” which I have assumed as a point of departure for a formal description of the figuration of the baroque impasse. 9 Ariadna García-Bryce offers an elegant commentary on the following section from Borges’s poem, “La luna”: 8

Más que las lunas de las noches puedo recordar las del verso; la hechizada dragon moon que da horror a la balada y la luna sangrienta de Quevedo. De otra luna de sangre y de escarlata habló Juan en su libro de feroces prodigios y de júbilos atroces; otras más claras lunas hay de plata. Pitágoras con sangre (narra una tradición) escribía en un espejo y los hombres leían el reflejo en aquel otro espejo que es la luna. De hierro hay una selva donde mora el alto lobo cuya extraña suerte es derribar la luna y darle muerte cuando enrojezca el mar la última aurora. (127, citing Borges, El hacedor 80–81)

As she states, “La sangrienta luna es incorporada a toda una constelación de metáforas, cifras del salvajismo, del espanto, del Apocalipsis. En ellas revive el aura de imponencia militar que encerraría aquella luna triunfal de Osuna. Reemerge todo un campo de

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Carpentier’s tale features repeated sentences and repeated appearances of fixed constellations, underscoring the use of tautological structures we can associate with the disruption of figura and pilgrimage in a number of texts. The Quijote abounds with figures of mechanical repetition. These repetitions are imbued with political and historical significance, voicing a bleak tale of the frustration of human possibilities, from the misery of the new urban poor in the Lazarillo,10 to the failure of agrarian reform projects in Góngora’s time, as well as in the projects of the Mexican Revolution and of the Spanish Republic, and in the powerful legacies of conquest and colonization. These qualities of Baroque repetition resonate with Benjamin’s notion of the Baroque as a moment of foreclosed possibilities that subtend modern notions of power. Kate Jenckes illustrates this quite aptly in her comments on The Origins of German Tragic Drama: Benjamin’s book began with the Ursprung, the dialectical beginning of a nonteleological history, and ends with an Übersprung, a leaping over this possibility, right back into the ontoteleological structure of a Christian history of resurrection. This Übersprung marks the beginning of the modern state: having glimpsed the precarious nature of the world, power learns to assert itself in new ways, taking that precarious nature into account. The metaphor of monarchy is no longer sufficient; the prince himself becomes an allegorist of the sadistic kind, writing his stories into the bodies of his subjects (OGD 184). This is due in part to what Benjamin calls the Baroque’s “theological essence of the subjective” (OGD 233)… . In the end, modern constructions of power would rely on more than hallucinations and trompes d’oeil to govern their constituents, but the fiction of the subject’s centrality would maintain a critical importance (76).

This shift from an opening up of possibility in the demise of Judeo-Christian eschatology to a new point of impasse in the state, based on the interpellation of subjectivity, is a paradoxical change. The power of the state becomes mirrored in the illusion of power of the individual subject, and in a new asociaciones en el que, para quien lo conoce, se transparenta el imaginario cósmico y cristológico del absolutismo español. Esta aglomeración de imágenes es también, por supuesto, una exhibición de referencias canónicas—Quevedo, San Juan, Pitágoras, Lugones” (“Borges criollista” 127). The repetition of the Baroque image is combined with what Pérez Parejo considers to be a postmodern recycling of the avant-garde image of the “clair de lune.” Here, the poet’s quest to name the moon which escapes his writing of the book of the world is a Symbolist move which enacts the sort of resistance to representation signaled by Balderston and Jenckes. 10 Thus Beverley states, “Lazarillo’s predicament is a very current one in the great rings of slums which surround the cities of the Third World” or impoverished areas of the US (“Lazarillo” 39–40).

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corporeal and psychic subordination of the subject within the body politic. It is within this framework that we can locate the subjection of wage slavery (Lazarillo), the mechanization of psyche and of labor (portrayed in the Quijote and realized, as Orlando Betancor and Ivonne Del Valle have shown, by the indigenous) and the profound and intimate sexual abjection portrayed in the recurrent figure of rape as a representation of power relations. In the shift from a theologically ordered cosmos the human subject is de-centered;11 no longer a reflection of the divine, the subject is left to reflect itself and to reflect upon its writing, its history and its destiny in images of mirror-moons, pools, sky and stars: stars of redemption and prophecy or constellations representing myth, impasse, and historical conjuncture. These reflections, when informed by a radical poetics of the sacred, such as Kabbalah, Jewish messianism, the Christian roots of liberation theology, or indigenous spirituality, configure utopian longings in a world of chance and uncertainty. Beyond the illusions of power, beyond the broken mirrors of trauma, beyond the vanishing act of self-reflecting texts, is the hope of new possibilities: beyond the religion of art, in an aesthetics grounded in new social relations that are the task of the future.

11 Much has been written on this epistemological shift; on the notion of de-centering, see Marjorie Nicolson’s and Severo Sarduy’s classic works The Breaking of the Circle and Barroco, respectively.

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APPENDIX I

The Poetic Process of “Un Coup de dés”1 Spatial Form and Anti-Logic Mallarmé’s poetic obsession, that of naming the unconditioned, is expressed in an assault on the specificity of language. This destructive quest intensifies in “Un Coup de dés,” where syntax is broken to the maximum extent short of incomprehensibility, with fragments of sentences arranged spatially on the page. There is no meaning outside the space of the poem; its “meaning” is its own poetic process. This process can be visualized by the image of dice thrown; a myriad of possibilities, of “signs in rotation,”2 finally coming to a stop as a chance constellation of black dots on white space. The concern with chance reflects a modern break from the law of cause and effect, from the attempt to impose the limits of human thought upon reality. Such anthropomorphism is out of step with the universe of modern physics which is founded on uncertainty. Human time and human logic cannot order infinite, eternal space. Mallarmé’s creation is not definitive; the poem is a momentary nexus of connections. Suspension Mallarmé uses various techniques to suspend (“reployer la division”), to 1 This short explication is offered as an aid to the reader and is based on my initial study of the poem under the direction of Luis Yglesias. For an elaborated, scholarly close reading see Robert Cohn’s classic exegesis of the poem; on Latin American continuities of Mallarmé, see my study of Paz and Gorostiza’s post-symbolist poetry in the final chapter of Góngora’s Soledades. “Spatial Form” is a term coined by the new critic Joseph Frank; the term “anti-logic” is used by Wylie Sypher. 2 I use here intentionally the phrase with which Paz titles the epilogue to his book on poetics, El arco y la lira, in which he discusses at some length “Un Coup de dés.” See also his essay on Mallarmé in Cohn’s anthology.

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continue the generation of possibilities, to keep the dice rolling. He uses a lottery of adverbs and adverbial conjunctions which remove the actions described from the present, or make them indefinite, hypothetical, optional, conditional, or absent ( “hors,” “jadis,” “peut-être,” “comme si,” “plutôt que,” “sauf,” “excepté,” “jamais”). He uses characteristic negative words to create absence, thereby preserving possibilities (“contrées nulles,” “nul/humain”). Even the blank spaces on the page play a role; Mallarmé says they are like “a surrounding silence,” and refers in the poem to “cette blancheur rigide.” Fragments of sentences appear and dissipate in the space in a “rhythmique suspens du sinistre.” Tautology and Stasis The suspension of definition produces a kind of hovering (note the frequency of verbs such as “se prépare,” “hésite,” “menace,” “s’agite,” “voltige,” and “scintille”). Progress is stymied in phrases like “par avance retombée”or “très à l’intérieur résume.” This denial of progress relates to the overall structure of the poem; the title is incorporated into the text, and the major motifs (navigation over the ocean abyss and shipwreck, writing poetry on the blank page, the throwing of dice, the formation of a constellation in space) are not presented as clear-cut succession, but are interwoven as if simultaneous. Stasis is expressed in the use of tautology: “Rien n’aura eu lieu que le lieu.” Another case is the phrase “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” which includes an alternative meaning: “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira les dés”; “hasard” means “dice” in Arabic. Nothing takes place except the process of the poem. “Naufrage” The act of writing the poem is identified with shipwreck. The poem is the random constellation which realizes one of an infinite number of possibilities. By precluding the others, it fails. The assertion that the poem is the product of chance is a statement of the impotence of the poet. The lines “cette blancheur rigide | dérisoire | en opposition au ciel | trop | pour ne pas marquer | exigüment | quiconque | prince amer de l’ecueil | s’en coiffe etc.” refer to the powerlessness of the poet before the task of capturing infinite possibility. Paradox The asceticism of Mallarmé’s search for “negative purity,” the nothingness which contains all virtuality, can be connected to the attempt to transcend the limits of human thought. This is a painful, futile obsession, analogous perhaps to the attempt to overcome the condition of having a blind spot by trying to stare at the optic nerve. “Un Coup de dés” is a record of Mallarmé’s

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poetic process in carrying out his self-consciously futile mission. Yet there is the intimation of a kind of success in the poem. The constellation represents a testimony to human creativity, even if it is fixed and limited. The poet, by critiquing his own process, succeeds in assuming a God-like position over himself, even if only to proclaim his impotence. And finally the wealth of possibilities denied by the appearance of the constellation is in fact evoked in the process of the poem. They are, as Mallarmé writes, “the prismatic subdivisions of the idea,” and suggest a point of departure for Paz’s poem Blanco.

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APPENDIX II

The Annales School and Maravall’s La cultura del barroco José Antonio Maravall’s La cultura del barroco (1975) is an obligatory point of departure for any discussion of the Spanish Baroque. Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini assert the importance of Maravall as a historian of the period in a 1994 essay titled “The Changing Face of History,” associating him with the history of mentalities. I propose to reexamine these claims in light of recent critical debate and important new scholarship on the French Annales School of historiography. In the years since the publication of his 1975 book, La cultura del barroco, Maravall has been the subject of debate and criticism, primarily over the degree to which his contention that the Baroque was a controlled, mass culture might have overshot the mark by ignoring the possibility for resistance to absolutism in the reception and staging of its more overt literary manifestations in the Spanish national theatre. George Mariscal and a number of others have eloquently addressed these concerns, with many recognizing that Maravall’s concept of Baroque culture was not entirely monolithic.1 Diana de Armas 1 George Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects, made this point most clearly: “The thesis that the comedia was little more than a well-oiled propaganda machine designed to reproduce and disseminate the ideology of the ruling elites ignores the complicated functioning of the public coral and seriously understates the potential for multiple and even contestatory responses within the performance text itself.” Yet he immediately hastens to note that Maravall did qualify his apparently totalizing view of the Baroque: “Elsewhere, it should be noted, Maravall sensed the impossibility of any “total system” and reminded us that in seventeenth-century Spain […] “Estamos ante una sociedad que se ve vigorizada en sus elementos tradicionales, pero también en circunstancias nuevas … . Ahora, incluso, la tradición restaurada se encuentra en mayor o menor medida discutida, o, por lo menos, no deja de ser puesta en cuestión” (21, n. 24, citing La cultura del barroco 201). See Spadaccini and Martín-Estudillo, introduction and especially the essay by Nieves Romero-Díaz, for continued discussion of Maravall’s representation of the power of absolutism. Two important collections on the topic include a forum from the 1998 Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature (with essays by Donald Gilbert, David Castillo, Julian Weiss, Massimo Lollini, and

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Wilson has produced a most original corrective on still different grounds, pointing to the limits of Maravall’s exclusively peninsular focus in his treatise on utopian discourse in the Quijote. My response to these objections is to note, first, that various critics have suggested that Maravall’s work should be understood as a response to the promotion of the overtly conservative message of many canonical Golden Age plays under Francoism (e.g. Portugal, Solich, Wheeler). Comedia scholarship has been in the process of questioning this conservatism for some time now. As John Beverley has pointed out, Walter Cohen in particular has elaborated an alternative view which highlights the paradoxical aspects of Spanish Baroque culture, “in which the strategies it deploys to repress and recontain modernity produce unintended or unmastered effects” (“Going Baroque?”34). Beverley himself summarizes the complexity of Baroque interpellation as “the paradoxical conjunction of the principle of submission to authority with the practical and theoretical ideal of the self-willed, independent individual” (“Going Baroque?”34). Based on the work that has been done, I will therefore concur that the estimation of Maravall’s work should shift from a defensive focus on comedia scholarship to one of re-evaluating the significance of Maravall’s contribution within innovative currents of historiography of the twentieth century. In this regard I support the central claims of Godzich and Spadaccini’s essay, while advocating a refinement of its position. I do so while acknowledging Aurora Hermida Ruiz’s pioneering work exposing Maravall’s early accommodation to Francoism and his subsequent attempts to erase this in “una secreta palinodia.”2 Wolf Solich) and a most recent special number of the Bulletin of Comediantes on Maravall’s legacy, edited by Laura Bass (including especially essays by Bass, Pérez de León, Portugal and Wheeler). Luis Gonzalo Portugal offers a study of the reception of Maravall as a historian of the Baroque which complements this discussion in its specificity. 2 Aurora Hermida Ruiz has suggested that Maravall’s militancy amounts to overcompensation for his capitulation to Francoism as a young historian. She argues that he later reinvented himself as tides changed, contrasting the politics of his treatment of—curiously enough—the arms and letters debate in his original and revised work on the Quijote. I will not dispute her case for a “secreta palinodia.” But I will argue that if Maravall reinvented himself, he did so well before the fall of Franco. Note, for example, his publication in the Bulletin Hispanique in 1970 on Pedro de Valencia and the problem of agrarian reform, going into the time of Republican Spain. While recently researching Spanish early modern arbitrismo, I was struck by the nationalism and religious fervor articulated in the preface of the Viñas y Mey edition from the 1940s of Pedro de Valencia’s Escritos sociales, a radical tract advocating the break-up and redistribution of the feudal estates, a project not likely to attract the sympathy of falangistas. Here, the display of orthodoxy seems protective of a more noble purpose. Maravall’s capitulation, on the other hand, was more egregious and I certainly would

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Francisco Javier Fresán Cuenca has since demonstrated that the youthful Maravall in post-Civil War Spain was a major fascist ideologue and propagandist, who then changed, he argues, in part by virtue of his experience as a historian. Finally, I will also acknowledge Anthony Cascardi’s critique of Maravall from the left, which argues for a supplementation of Maravall’s historical focus with an Althusserian analysis of the ideological dynamics of subject formation, one which he locates in the work of Juan Carlos Rodríguez (“Beyond Castro and Maravall”). Godzich and Spadaccini define Maravall as a “historian of mentalities,” but choose to distinguish historians of mentalities from “the two other dominant schools of French historiography: the Annalist and the Marxist” (61). Such distinctions require clarification in the light of recent scholarship on the Annales School, so called for its association with the famed journal, Annales d’histoire économique et social. A reprise of André Burguière’s recent book, L’école des Annales: Une histoire intellectuelle, provides a much needed contextualization for the type of historical research for which Maravall was justly regarded, and also problematizes in a fruitful manner the use of history by literary scholars, who in the wake of New Historicism might hold archival material as a seemingly immutable and homogeneous standard against which literary texts should be read.3 Below follows my summary of the essential points of this recent study. As Burguière maintains, the Annales School was never entirely separate from Marxism; its founders were socialists who evinced, from the very beginning, a focus on mentalities. Both the experience of the 1929 financial crash, in which psychological factors in mass culture played a role in economic history, and their personal experience of the social and emotional aspects of WWI combat, impelled Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, the guiding lights of the journal, to develop a historical approach in which the mental universe, the “conceptual mechanism through which society apprehends the world,” was not justify the Nationalist sympathies Hermida Ruiz has cited in Maravall’s early work. As Wheeler notes in his sociohistorical study of Maravall and comedia reception, Fresán Cuenca has now provided even more damning evidence of this. Pending the publication of the second part of Fresán Cuenca’s study, I will suggest that Maravall’s trajectory into left-wing historiography within the context of Francoist dictatorship may have involved an inconsistent alternation of strategies which included elements of early collaboration, dissimulation and a later implicit opposition. 3 Mariscal, working from a cultural materialist perspective, stands out for early on noting the limits of the type of evidence which historical discourse can provide: “It will be argued that my own project is an attempt to totalize Quevedo on the level of the social macrotext, and I would agree that any critical enterprise implies the construction of a unified field. My point is simply that it is society and culture at large from which we must begin to collect our materials,” Contradictory Subjects, 102, n. 4. I quote Burguière’s book in Jane Marie Todd’s outstanding translation into English.

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taken into account (30–31, 32).4 In the context of a post-WWI loss of European hegemony and moral authority, the forces which shaped the school began to coalesce in a critique of “a linear conception of historical evolution” based on progress, in which France’s national history was posed as a model for universal history, in a kind of prophetism and triumphalism of the sort Borges’s story, written towards the end of WWII, addresses (36). The barbarism of the war overturned the notion of progress; as a consequence a group of historians begin to reframe the goals of their discipline. As Burguière points out, in the post-war world, Historical knowledge […] loses its power of prophecy, of prediction even, and rejoins the social sciences in their task of analysis and comprehension. Its proper domain is the instability of human arrangements. The historian, instead of grounding himself in a unitary vision of humanity’s fate, which is only the secularized version of Christian eschatology, has to apply his reflection to the diversity of cultures and societies, by focusing above all on their capacity to transform themselves (37).

By the mid-twentieth century, the Annales School becomes the French version of “the anthropological turn” in history, accompanied by Italy’s microstoria, associated with Carlo Ginzburg and Quaderni storici and the English proponents of “history from below” of the Marxist review Past and Present (in which noted scholars of Spanish history such as J. H. Elliot and Pierre Vilar would publish) (Tackett intro. 6–7). Though neither Burguière nor Timothy Tackett, who wrote the introduction to the English translation of Burguière’s book, ever mention Maravall, it is clear that Maravall represents the Spanish version of the phenomenon, and for this —in keeping with Luis Gonzalo Portugal’s protest against Maravall’s marginalization—should be duly acknowledged. The orientation of Annales was explicitly presentist, accepting the “unavoidable subjectification of the past by our present” and adopted an archeological method of working backward through time within a particular landscape rather than proceeding along the traditional “canonical plotting” of the discipline by period and place (23–24, 289). The school mirrored the impact of various currents in European intellectual history, from Wallonian psychology, the Frankfurt School, the sociologies of Émile Durkheim and Norbert Elias, the economic determinism of Ernest Labrousse, structuralism, German geographical economics, and the philosophy of Michel Foucault, all

4 Burguière further suggests that the Annalists were influenced by the climate of the “theatrical display of power” of the 1920s and by the emergence in WWI of “new technologies for manipulating the masses” (32, 99).

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in the spirit of the rigor and interdisciplinarity required to achieve an understanding of the past in its complexity. After a “Labroussian moment” of the 1960s, in which Annales historians embraced a Stalinist-inspired socioeconomic determinism, the focus on mentalities which marked the school’s origins flourishes in the work of one of its preeminent figures, Fernand Braudel, whose book, La Méditerranée, typifies the aspiration to “total history,” an anthropological history of the slow changes in the relationship between the human and natural environment within a particular geography (157). The broad sweep of the work is a precedent for Maravall’s own La cultura del barroco. Braudel’s dialogue with Immanuel Wallerstein, a sociologist influenced by the Marxism of Rosa Luxembourg, leads to a theoretical interest in the relationship between the central and peripheral spaces of capitalism and the dynamics of border contact, exchanges and cross-pollinations (159). These topics have clearly had an impact in the development of a focus on the circulation of material culture in contemporary Hispanic early modern cultural studies. The work of another prominent Annalist, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, also figures in the re-estimation of Maravall. Le Roy Ladurie’s work represents a shift from Labroussian determinism to Braudel’s “Total history” via such theoretical supports as Vladimir Propp’s Theory of the Folktale and Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques (142). Le Roy Ladurie’s study of peasant carnival and other writings, while borrowing from structural anthropology and what literary scholars will recognize as texts influential in the development of structuralism, remained, in Burguière’s view, true to history as a discipline: Le Roy Ladurie was using the tools of historical anthropology to place political issues within the mental universe of the late seventeenth century. His recourse to the anthropological approach now allowed him to link festive and seditious practices, arguments and emotions, to the cultural and social effervescence of the era, instead of imputing them to a symbolic universe outside time (144).

Yet even while affirming the historicity of Le Roy Ladurie’s approach, Burguière’s description of it evokes the impact of structuralist historiography in Hispanic literary studies. One is immediately led to consider its relation to structuralist readings of the carnivalesque in the sociocriticism of the Quijote and the picaresque and the importance of structuralism as a context for the reception of Maravall by literary critics. Like David Castillo, Massimo Lollini has recognized Maravall’s precociousness here, in an insightful essay in which he distinguishes Maravall’s concept of the Baroque as a “structure of history” as opposed to Heinrich Wölfflin’s view of the Baroque in formal terms as a “style” (Lollini 178, 191; Castillo, “Maravall”). For Donald Gilbert Santamaría, Maravall, in evoking this concept, “effectively maps onto the vocabulary of

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twentieth-century structuralism a vision of the historical epoch that resembles both Burckhardt’s and Wölfflin’s earlier claims for integrated periodization,” their “post-Hegelianism,” using the topos as “the most important practical component of his historiographical method” (332, 335). Here I will suggest that Burckhardt’s and Wölfflin’s influence parallels, but does not necessarily precede, similar forces at work in the development of the Annales School such as have been described.5 Indeed, Maravall’s La cultura del barroco has the quality of a structuralist history of the Baroque, organizing the features of Baroque culture according to what Gilbert Santamaría, in his excellent essay, calls a “litany of topoi” and keywords such as mudanza, juego, el mundo al revés, etc., all of which are ideally suited for use in literary analysis. In this sense, La cultura del barroco is cut from the same structuralist cloth as the work of Severo Sarduy, with his focus on semiotic “gramas” and astronomical topoi (elipsis, decentering) and that of Christine Buci-Glucksmann, whose highlighting of Benjaminian structures (the library, the ruins, the labyrinth) also have had their literary applications in the scholarship of the Hispanic Baroque. What distinguishes Maravall is that his disciplinary training allows him to situate the topoi he proposes within cultural history. In addition, his work with mentalities underscores the Annalists’ dialogue not only with structural anthropology but with the concerns of psychology as well. Burguière traces the Annales School engagement with psychology to the interwar period’s preoccupation with “the ambiguity of states of consciousness” (99). He locates the beginnings of a history of mentalities in the early work of Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges, which influenced the formation of Durkheim’s notion of a “social unconscious” and Bloch’s concept of a “collective unconscious” (74–75). The other Annales founder, Febvre, on the other hand, showed an early focus on individual psychic structure, assimilating the psychology and communism of Henri Wallon, a recognized influence upon Jacques Lacan (47). All the historians of mentalities, however, 5 Donald Gilbert Santamaría argues, “I would insist that an accurate appreciation of Culture of the Baroque requires a return to the primordial link between historiographical subjectivism and the theoretical principles of the post-Hegelian approach to early modern periodization. Ultimately none of the other commonly cited influences— the history of mentalities, the related Annales School, or even Maravall’s own fascination with quantum mechanics—would matter if it were not for Burckhardt’s and Wölfflin’s secularization of the Hegelian paradigm” (339). Yet he points to Burckhardt’s motivation in “on the one hand,”… “a deep distrust of universal narratives of historical progress and, on the other, to a shift from political history to a focus on the emerging field of cultural history” (325, n. 13). Now that Burguière’s memoir is available, the parallel motivations in the Annales School’s “anthropological turn,” described earlier, are apparent (see Burguière 30–37).

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shared a commitment to the deconstruction of the idea of a universal eternal human nature; as Burguière states, “Studies of the societies, past or present, most remote from our own, reveal the historicity or uneven persistence of what essentialist doctrines attribute to psychological or physical characteristics consubstantial with the species” (234).6 By the 1980s, the Annalists are drawn to Norbert Elias’s model of “the civilizing process,” which “subjected the individual psychogenesis to the sociogenesis of the state” (245). By this “return to the political,” the Annalists corrected what was seen as an “explanatory deficiency” implicit in their focus on the “deep structures” of history, whether on the socioeconomic structures (Labrousse) or the spatial (Braudel) (246–47). In this sense, Maravall stands out as a synthesizer ahead of his peers, integrating a focus on mentalities with an analysis of the ancien régime (like the Labroussians) and the state. Thus the new evidence provided by Burguière allows us to reinforce Godzich and Spadaccini’s earlier conclusions: “José Antonio Maravall represents an advanced stage because he seeks to describe the complex interplays between mentalities, institutions, aggregate interests, and the exercise of power” (62).

6 Mariscal, Contradictory Subjects, extols both Braudel (13–14) and Maravall (La cultura del barroco 21) for holding this position and for therefore laying the basis for problematizing the notion of the early modern.

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INDEX

Abad de Rute; see Fernández de Córdoba, Francisco, 36, 51, 105 Aeneas, last descendant of, 24, 69, 101, 107 agrarian aristocracy, 26, 70, 72, 100, 106 agrarian reform, 30, 39, 44, 72, 108, 147 Aguirre, Lope de, 104 Agustini, Delmira, 27, 129–34, 138 Darío; see also Cathy Jrade and Sylvia Molloy, 130–34 “El cisne”; see also Cathy Jrade and Sylvia Molloy, 130–34 Mallarmé, 129–30, 132–34 “Nocturno”; see also Cathy Jrade, 132, 133 Albaicín, 50 Aldrete, José Bernardo; see also Muriel Elvira, 36, 52 aleto; see also Muriel Elvira, 38, 39 alienation effect, 21 early modern, 67, 80, 85 allegorical concept of writing history, 8, 13, 17 Alpujarras, Revolts of the, 31, 34, 48 Althusser, Louis, 15, 16 amaru, 42 ancien régime, 52, 57, 159 Andalusia, 30, 31, 33, 34, 50, 52, 89 Andean vitalism, 40 angel of history, 19 Annales School, 8, 14, 17, 21, 153 Marc Bloch, 14, 155, 158 Lucien Febvre, 14–15, 155 anticolonial “imposture”; see also Armando Muyolema, 54 anti-historicism, 16–20, 143 Apocalypse, 8, 70, 106, 109 Apollo, Hyberborean, 92 Arabic, 32, 47, 50, 150 Arachne, 96

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Araucanas, conquest of, 36 arbitrismo, 30, 106, 154 archetype, 52–53 Argensola, Bartolomé Leonardo de, 36, 50 La conquista de las Moluccas, 36 aristocracy, agrarian, 26, 31, 70, 72, 100, 106 Armstrong-Roche, Michael “reverse ethnography”, 45 Arrabal, Fernando Cervantes’s trauma in captivity, 77, 79 Australia, 29 author’s rights, 77, 79 automaton, spiritual; see also Ivonne del Valle, 82 Avellaneda (Fernández de Avellaneda, Alfonso); see also James Iffland Segundo tomo del ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, 73, 75–79, 83 Babelic, 78–80 Baena, Julio, 65, 76 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 43, 73, 77, 79, 83 canivalesque, 73, 77, 78, 115, 157 satiric grotesque, 73, 74 Balderston, Daniel, 7–11, 14, 15, 18, 131, 134, 143, 144, 147 bárbaros, 45, 98 Baroque Baroque horror, 2, 16, 77, 78, 86, 108 Baroque reason; see also Christine Buci-Glucksman, 16 cultural neurosis; see also John Beverley, 16, 25, 100 impasse; see also John Beverley, 10, 16, 25, 26, 52, 56, 58, 62, 87, 88, 100, 101, 103, 109, 124, 138, 142, 144–48

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190 INDEX Baroque (continued) phantom; see Francisco A. Ortega self-exhaustion, 4, 13, 85 “theatre state”, 64, 84, 85, 101 Baudelaire, Charles, 21, 109 Béjar, Duke of, 34 Bello, Andrés, 110 Benjamin, Walter “active mourning”, 119 n.47 afterlife of artworks; see also Kate Jenckes, 6, 8 allegorical concept of writing of history; see also Kate Jenckes, 8, 17 angel of history, 19 anti-historicism, 15, 16–20, 117, 147 constellation, 2, 21, 117, 124, 144 idealism, 17 “now time” (Jetzeit), 18 “paralyzed dialectics”, 25, 145 refunctionalizing religious discourse, 20–21 social democracy, 17, 18, 20 Symbolism, 20–21, 143 “weak Messianic power”, 20, 27, 119–20, 124 works “Konvolut N” of The Arcades Project, 25, 144 n.5 Origins of the German Tragic Drama, 41, 147 “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, 1, 16–20, 103, 120 Bernand, Carmen, 25, 29, 35, 37, 39, 40, 44, 45, 47–50 “la moda salomónica”, 50 Physiocratic sentiments, 39–40; 40 n.29 Betancor, Orlando “Andean vitalism”, 40, 40 n.29 indigenous miner as “living tool”, 81 mechanization of labor, 148 Beusterien, John, 77 Beverley, John, 1, 2 Althusser, 15 Darío, 90, 91, 99, 100, 101 Baroque ancien régime in Spanish early modern, 52 Baroque city, 88 n.2 Bolívar Echeverría, 25 n.57 Catholic road to modernity, 84 n.28

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cultural neurosis, 16, 25, 100 n.31 impasse, 25, 52 n. 49, 56, 100 n.30, 145, 146 Góngora and Gongorism Colonial Gongorism and magical accumulation, 90 n.8, 110 n.25 “Égloga piscatoria”, 39–40 n.27 Góngora and avant-garde hegemony, 25, 29, 30, 72 n.42, 108 illustration of contradictions of feudal socialism, 30, 32, 108 n.17 parallels between Góngorism and 1848 intellectuals, 25, 100 n.30 paralyzed dialectics, 25, 144, 145 Góngora’s Soledades allegory of European war, 69, 70, 107 archetypal criticism, 53 generic indeterminacy, 4 “mirror of princes”, 71 mourning, 89 modal friction between pastoral and epic, 68, 89, 104 self-miniaturization, 59, 85, 126 n.5 tension between history and poetic myth, 46, 53 theory of strategic incompletion, 33, 41, 105–6 trauma of the peregrino, 63, 68 n.35 Inca Garcilaso and mestizo nationalism, 52 Lazarillo de Tormes, 56–57, 147 Neo-Arielism, 2 n.1 Neobaroque, 110 poetry as language of politics, 7 n.17, 106, 145 Quijote, 84, 85 Big Dipper, 126 Bildungsroman Lazarillo, 59,85,85 n.32, 109 Quijote, 83 billy goat in Soledades, related to Dionysian ritual; see also Mercedes Blanco, 53 bird hunting, 38, 39, 69, 71 birth birthing charm (“Sartor arepo”), 128

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191

INDEX

Graciela Huinao, “Simulacro de una biografía”, 139 Mallarmé, “Don du poème”, 121, 128, 134 Black Jacobinism, 100 Blanco, Mercedes Góngora y Argote, Luis de hieroglyph of Toledo, 45 Soledades, 29, 36, 42, 43, 45–47, 52, 53; billy goat, 53; cartography, 43; ouroborous, 42; representation of Spanish peasants as bárbaros, 45–46; South Pacific colonization debate, 29 Valencia, Pedro de, 30 n.3, 108 n.17 Bloch, Marc Annales School, 14 psychological factors in mass culture, 14 trauma of soldiers in WWI, 14–15 Book of Configuration, 20 Borges, Jorge Luis historical turn, in criticism of; see Daniel Balderston Quevedo, 4, 6, 8, 12, 134, 143, 146, 147 n.9 “written scars”; see Sylvia Molloy works poems: “Ars poética”, 134; “A un viejo poeta”, 8, 12; “El otro tigre”, 134, 143; La luna”, 12, 143, 146, 146 n. 9; “Poema de los dones”, 134 prose: “El Aleph”, 7; “El espejo de los enigmas”, 124; “La forma de la espada”, 7, 8, 9; La historia universal de la infamia, 12 n.29; “Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote”, 4–9, 13, 131; “Tema del traidor y del héroe”, 8–10, 12, 13, 17 bourgeois meteor; see also Vicens Vives, 57, 109 bourgeoisie, comprador, 100 Braudel, Fernand, 157, 159 La Méditerranée, 157 Brecht, Bertoldt, 21, 67 Buci-Glucksman, Christine, 2, 16, 21, 158 Baroque Reason, 16, 104 Burguière, André, 14, 15, 17, 155–59

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L’école des Annales: Une histoire intellectuelle, 155–59 prophecy, 155–56 Caballero de la Blanca Luna, 84, 85 caciquismo, 113 caduceus, 42 Callisto, 126 cannibal, 39 canon, 2, 3, 23, 26, 55, 56, 62, 80, 109, 124, 129, 154, 156 Cárdenas Bunsen, José, 52 Carmañola, 99 carnivalesque, 73, 77, 78, 115, 157 Carpentier, Alejo, 3, 27 “El camino a Santiago”, 27, 103, 104, 110–14, 119, 120, 147 Los pasos perdidos, 110 Carrasco, Sansón, 84–85 cartography, 41, 43 Castillo, Alonso del, 48 Castillo, Javier, 50 invented genealogies, 50 Castro, Américo, 15, 39, 73 Castro-Klarén, Sara, 30, 41, 43, 45, 46, 52, 90 topic of “world as one” in Inca Garcilaso, 41–43, 53 n.51 Cathedral of Córdoba, 37, 48–50 Cazalis, Henri, 125, 126, 128, 135 Certeau, Michel de, 14 Cervantes, Miguel de, 3, 13, 23, 26, 33, 45, 73–76, 104, 126 n.5, 144 Don Quijote de la Mancha (second prologue) authorial strings, 79 Bildungsroman; see also Julián Jiménez Heffernan, 83 grotesque, 26, 71, 73–74, 76–78, 80, 86 language, 78–81 Loyola; see also Ivonne del Valle, 82–84 Moriscos; see also Gerli, Hernández and Dadson, 78 n.14 “pedagogy of fear”; see also Agustin Redondo, 81, 82 mechanization of labor; see also Bernard Teuber and Orlando Betancor, 26, 73, 81

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192 INDEX Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quijote de la Mancha (second prologue) (continued) rise of the machine; see also Cory Reed, 26, 67, 73, 77, 81, 83–85, 85 n.31, 86 Prologue to the Novelas ejemplares, 79 trauma in captivity; see also Arrabal, Garcés, and Jiménez Heffernan, 73–81, 83, 85, 86 Céspedes, Pablo de, 48, 51 Chacón, Antonio, 51 Civil War, American, 100 Civil War, Spanish, 117, 141, 155 civilizing process; see also Norbert Elias, 159 Claudian (Claudius Claudianus), 34 Rape of Proserpine, 34 clock, 18 Cluff, Benjamin, 23, 113 “transgenerational haunting” in Pedro Páramo, 113 Collard, Andrée, 101, 104 n.5 coloniality of power, 52 combined and uneven development; see also Leon Trotsky, 116 Comentarios reales, 29, 36, 39, 40–46, 49, 52 communitas, 115 compass, 107, 127 comprador bourgeoisie, 100 Comunero uprising, 26, 48, 57, 63 conceptismo, 4 Condorcanqui, José Gabriel, 52 Condorcet, Marquis de (Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat) , 11, 12 constellation , 1, 3, 17, 20, 21, 25, 26, 87, 107, 112, 113, 117, 120, 124, 126, 129, 130, 138, 141, 144, 147–51 converso, 37, 49, 111, 168, 184 cordiform projection, 43 Coricancha, 49, 50 Cortés, Hernán, 114 cosificación; see also Julio Rodríguez Puértolas, 71, 74, 81 Cross, Southern, 107 crow, 69–71, 77, 90 cruel decorativeness, 69, 90 Cruz, Anne, 58–59, 62, 74, 85 Bildungsroman and Lazarillo, 59 culteranismo, 4 Cynic philosophers, 75, 76

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Dadson, Trevor, 32–34 Darío, Rubén; see also Beverley, Gutiérrez Girardot, Marasso, Rama and Zavala Cabrera Estrada, 101 “campos de zafiro”, 92 comprador bourgeoisie, 101 Mallarmé, 91–93 poetry racial pride, 101 “A Colón”, 98, 99 “Blasón”, 91 “Caracol”, 90, 127 “Leda”, 91–95 “Los cisnes” I, 97, 98 “Los cisnes” III, 93, 99 “Los cisnes” IV, 94, 99 “Trebol” sonnets, 87, 96, 98 de Man, Paul, 8, 143 dead star of distant tomorrows, 109 Del Valle, Ivonne, 26, 84, 85 automaton, spiritual, 82 Loyola, 82, 83 self-conquest, 82 device baring, 112 Diogenes, 76 Dionysus, 43 “discurso contra navegaciones”, 30, 36 dog tales, 76–79 Dorfman, Ariel, 9, 15, 111–12 double speak, 47 doubling, 76–79, 111 Dove, Patrick, 113–16 oblique criticism in Pedro Páramo, 114 ontotheological concept of history, 8, 113 droit du seigneur, 64 DuBois, W. E. B., 47 Durkheim, Emile, 156, 158 Dutch, peace treaty with Spain, 33, 70 Eagleton, Terry, 19–21 Easter Rebellion, 11 Echeverría, Bolívar, 25 Éfire, 72 Elias, Norbert, 156 “the civilizing process”, 159 Elvira, Muriel, 38, 39, 51, 52 emerald, 40 Empiricism, 81 Erasmus, 26, 58, 72, 75

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INDEX

eschatology, Judeo-Christian, 13, 17, 58, 147, 156 Escorial, 48 Espinosa Medrano, Juan de, 110 Estrada Cabrera, Manuel José, 101 “estranged world”; see also Wolfgang Kayser, 74, 77 Europa, 72, 90, 109 falconry scene, 29, 30, 34, 36, 38, 45, 69, 70, 71, 90, 107 Familia Charitatis, 43 Febvre, Lucien; see also Annales School, 158 psychological factors in mass culture, 14–15 trauma of soldiers in WWI, 15, 155 Feria, Duchess of, 31 Fernández, Christian, 30, 36, 38, 44, 46 heraldic shield of Inca Garcilaso, 42 syncretic burial chamber, 50 Fernández de Córdoba, Francisco (Abad de Rute), 36 Festspiele, 12 Ficino, Marsilio, 41, 47 fleur, 5, 134 Florentine Council, 49 folk traditions, 35, 43, 61, 63, 66, 75 Foucault, Michel, 82, 84, 156 “found syncretism”; see also Barbara Fuchs, 47 “foundational fiction”; see also Doris Sommer, 24 Franco, Jean, 117–18, 120 César Vallejo, “Trilce XLV”, 117–18 Francoism, 37, 154–55 Frankfurt School, 156 Freud, Sigmund,21–23, 74, 99, 116, 119 n.47 Friedrich, Hugo, 5, 141 Fuchs, Barbara, 3, 37, 45, 47, 141 “found syncretism”, 47 Fuenteovejuna, 26, 55, 62–67, 71–72 droit du seigneur, 64 interpellation into dominant order; see also George Mariscal, 66 Fuentes, Carlos, 3, 110, 115 galeotes, 81 galley slaves, 81 Ganymede, 68, 70, 72, 90 Garcés, María Antonia

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Cervantes’s trauma in captivity, 23, 77–79, 86 García Arenal, Mercedes, 30–32, 47–52 García Adánez, Isabel, 74, 74 n.5 García Lorca, Federico, 4, 105, 141 García Márquez, Gabriel Cien años de soledad, 110 Crónica de una muerte anunciada, 13 Garcilaso de la Vega, 69 Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, 25, 29, 34 “Andean vitalism”; see also Orlando Betancor, 40 anticipating mestizo colonial nationalism, 52 confluence with arbitrismo, 39, 40, 43–45 confluence with European hermeticism; see also Christian Fernández, 42, 52 critique of conquest, 40, 44–45 depiction of emerald, 40 depiction of Inca ruins, 44–45 Góngora; see also Joaquín Roses, 34, 37, 38, 43, 45, 47–53 heraldic shield; see also Christian Fernández, 42, 107 ownership of slaves, 37 syncretic burial chamber of; see also Christian Fernández, 49–50 trauma, 22, 23, 47 world as one, 41, 43 works Comentarios reales, 29, 36, 38–46, 49, 52, 114 Historia general del Perú, 36, 41 Generation of ‘27, 3, 4, 110, 126, 141–42 Gerber, Clea, 77, 78 Gerli, Michael, 33 germanías, 31 Ginzburg, Carlo, 156 Golden Age, 2, 3, 26, 55, 56, 87, 105, 106, 154 golem, 77 Góngora y Argote, Luis de; see also John Beverley, Mercedes Blanco, Joaquín Roses Ambrosio de Morales, 35, 37, 51, 53 converso heritage; see also Enrique Soria Mesa, 37 father’s dialogue with Sepúlveda, 37 generation of ’27, 3–4, 87 humanist circle; see also Muriel Elvira,

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194 INDEX Góngora y Argote, humanist circle (continued) 25, 29, 35, 36, 43, 45–53, 62, 68, 145 Inca Garcilaso; see also Muriel Elvira, 25, 29, 34–53 limpieza de sangre hearings, 37 ownership of slaves, 37 Pedro de Valencia, 25, 29, 30–39, 44–53, 108, 154 eulogy for, 51 Physiocratic sentiments, 30–31, 39–41, 44 Sacromonte debate; see also Muriel Elvira, 47–52 secular mysticism; see also Sophie Kluge, 7 technique of erasure, 53 theory of illegitimacy; see also Enrique Soria Mesa, 37 works Égloga piscatoria, 39 Las firmezas de Isabela, 45 Panegírico al duque de Lerma, 53 romances africanos; see also Mar Martínez Góngora: “Entre los sueltos cabellos”, 33; “Servía en Orán el rey”, 33 Soledades: billy goat; see also Mercedes Blanco, 53; covert protest of Morisco expulsion, 29–35, 45, 47–53, 145; falconry scene, 29, 36, 38, 45, 69, 70, 71, 107; frustrated pilgrimage, 103–110; Inca Garcilaso’s heraldic shield, 41–43; “mirror of princes”; see also John Beverley, 71; rape imagery, 23–24, 27, 34, 72, 89, 90, 109 sonnets: “A Córdoba”, 49; “Alegoría de la Primera de sus Soledades”, 88, 106; “Este monte de cruces coronado” (Sacromonte sonnet), 47–52; “Restituye a tu mudo horror divino” and “queja” variant, 88–89; “Si ya la vista de llorar cansado”, 49 Gorostiza, José Muerte sin fin, 85, 109, 129, 134, 136, 149

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Granada, 31, 32, 34, 47–50, 52 granary, public, 30 Great Bear, 126, 128 grief; see also mourning, 32, 34, 35, 117, 119 grotesque; see also Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin, 26, 73, 74, 77, 78, 80, 86 fantastic grotesque, 74, 86 grotesque realism, 77 mehanical grotsque, 71, 80 satiric grotesque, 73, 74 Gruzinski, Serge “occidentalization”, 59 Gutiérrez Girardot, Rafael, 91, 95, 100 Gurmendi, Francisco de, 50 gyrfalcon, 69, 70 Hapsburg iconography, 24, 69, 70, 89, 101, 106, 107–109 Hart, Stephen, 2, 118, 124 “Name-of-the-Mother” in Vallejo, Trilce, 118 n.46 haunting, 21, 23, 40, 80, 113 Baroque Reason; see also Christine Buci-Glucksman, 16, 21 corporeal, 80 transgenerational; see also Benjamin Cluff, 23, 113 Hebreo, León, 41, 49 Hegel, 11, 12, 15, 101, 158 hegemony, 17, 43, 156 alternative hegemony, 26, 49, 65, 66, 72, 72 n.42, 108 avant-garde hegemony; see also John Beverley, 30, 32, 115 Helen, 93, 131 heraldry, 42, 50, 91, 92, 96, 107 Hercules, Columns of, 107 Heredia, José María, 110 hermeticism, 25, 29, 42, 52, 62 Hernández, Rosilie, 33 heroic rapes, 24, 109 Herrera y Tordesillas, Antonio de, 35 Herrero, Javier, 58, 60, 77, 79, 102 Hesiod, 12 hieroglyph, 42, 45, 88, 128 Higgins, James, 134 César Vallejo, “Trilce XLV”, 117–18 historiography, 14, 37, 47, 144, 153–57 history angel of; see also Walter Benjamin, 19

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INDEX

discipline, 13–14, 29, 145, 156–57 “from below”, 14, 156 “is what hurts”; see also Frederic Jameson, 16 literature, 12–14 mentalities, 14–16, 21, 153–58 prophecy; see also André Burguière, 12, 156 stagist conceptions of, 16, 20 teleological schemas, 12, 15, 17, 104, 147 writing of, 8, 14, 17, 35–36, 47, 144, 153–59 Hobsbawm, Eric and Ranger, Terrence “invention of tradition”, 18 Hoffmann, E. T. A., 80 Homer, 37, 42, 45 Horace, 92 Horapolus Hieroglyphica, 42 Hornachos, 34 Huinao, Graciela “Simulacro de una biografía”, 27, 129, 139–40 humanists, 25, 29, 35, 36, 43, 45–49, 52, 53, 62, 68, 145 Hutchinson, Stephen assimilationism and Moriscos; see also Mar Martínez Góngora, 31 n.8 hysteria, 21 india histérica, 98, 99 Lacan, Jacques, 22 seduction theory, 99 Iffland, James, 74, 77–79, 83–86 illegitimacy Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca, 37 Góngora; see also Enrique Soria Mesa, 37 Homer, 37 Inca Garcilaso; see Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca indigenous, 22, 24, 26, 37, 39, 40, 43, 45, 47, 52, 53, 79, 81, 82, 90, 98, 100, 113, 115, 116, 117, 129, 138–41, 148 miner, 73, 81 intermarriage, 31, 33 invented genealogies; see also Javier Castillo, 50 “invention of tradition”; see also Eric Hobsbawm and Terrence Ranger, 18 Ireland, 10–11

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Iron Age, 41, 105 Isthmus of Panama, 42 Jaén, 51 Jameson, Frederic, 2, 11, 15, 16, 21, 22, 57, 134, 143 compensatory autonomization of religious ritual, 21 “history is what hurts”, 16 political unconscious, 2, 14–16, 19, 21–22, 26, 100 vanishing mediator, 57 Janus, 48 Jenckes, Kate, 15, 147 allegorical concept of writing of history, 8 n.19, 17 afterlife of artworks, 6 n.13 Borges and Benjamin, 2 n.2, 20, 143 Jetzeit, 18 Jiménez Heffernan, Julián, 77, 80–83, 85 Bildungsroman vs Prüfungsroman in the Quijote, 83 n.22 corporeal haunting and Cervantes, 80 trauma in the Quijote, 80 Johnson, Barbara, 134 “muteness envy”, 99 Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor, 31 Jrade, Cathy Delmira Agustini “El cisne”, 130–133 “Nocturno”, 133 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, 7, 52, 110 Jupiter, 90, 93, 99, 109 juxtaposition, 25, 61, 106, 113, 118 Kabbalah, 20, 123, 128, 148 Kayser, Wolfgang, 26, 74, 77, 80 estranged world, 74, 77 fantastic grotesque, 74 satirical grotesque, 74 n.3, 4 Kluge, Sophie, 6, 7 secular mysticism in Góngora, 7 Kimmel, Seth, 30, 32, 35, 36 La Malinche (Malintzin), 116 “la moda salomónica”; see also Carmen Bernand, 50 Labrousse, Ernest, 156, 159 Lacan, Jacques, 15, 16, 22, 23, 74, 143, 158 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 157 Lambert, Gregg, 2, 15 parody and the Baroque, 13

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196 INDEX Landy, Joshua, 125–28, 145 “secular re-enchantment of the world”, 7, 13, 27, 92 n.13, 124, 144 Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 37 Lazarillo de Tormes, 26, 55–63, 66, 68, 71, 72, 81, 85, 114, 147, 148 Bildungsroman; see also Anne Cruz, 59, 85 novel of primitive accumulation; see also John Beverley, 56 sexual abuse, 59–62 vanishing mediator; see also Víctor Pueyo, 57 Lead Books; see Sacromonte debates Lemos, 7th Count of (Pedro Fernández de Castro), 34, 35, 75, 81 Lemos, Countess of (Catalina de Sandoval), 34 Lenin, Vladimir Illich, 22 Imperialism, 22 León, Lucrecia de, 31 Lerma, 1st Duke of (Francisco Gómez de Sandoval y Rojas), 33–35 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 157 Liebnecht, Karl, 18 Lienlaf, Leonel, 27, 129, 140–141 “Camino” , 140 “El río del cielo”, 141 “Rebelión” , 140 Lima, Lezama, 3, 4, 110 “limpieza de sangre” statutes, 37, 49, 64 Lorca; see García Lorca, Federico Louÿs, Pierre, 92, 131–33 “Lêda, ou la louange des bienheureuses ténèbres”, 131 Loyola, Ignatius of, 82–84 Lucan Pharsalia, 42 Luckás, Georg, 19 Luna, Miguel de, 48, 50, 52 Luxembourg, Rosa, 18, 19, 157 MacKinnon, Catherine A., 22–23 madness, 14, 48, 84 Madrid, 66, 88 magic, 8, 9, 10, 90, 102, 124, 127, 128, 140, 144 magical realism, 103, 105 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 1–10, 21, 27, 91–93, 97, 109, 110, 113, 121, 124–135, 140–145, 149–51 letters, 125–27, 135

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and naming, 5, 10, 134, 149 Ur-scene, 129, 135, 139 works “Autre éventail”, 93 “Don du poème”, 121, 128, 134 Igitur, 129, 130, 139 “Le Vierge, le vivace et le bel aujour’hui”, 92, 133 “Les Fenêtres”, 128 Ses purs ongles (sonnet en yx), 124–26, 145 Un coup de dés, 1, 2, 113, 127, 130, 149–51 mapmaking, 43, 107 Marasso, Arturo, 52, 72, 91–93, 131, 133 Maravall, José Antonio, 2, 14, 15, 31, 84, 144, 153–59 Annales School, 153–59 Francoism, 154–55 structuralist topoi; see also Gilbert Santamaria, 158 Mariscal, George, 82–83, 85, 153 interpellation into dominant order of marginal figures, 64–66 psyche as historical, 22 Marshall, Cynthia “self-shattering”, 22, 56, 66, 69, 79 Márquez Torres, Licenciado, 74–76 Marsellesa, 99 Martí, José, 4, 87 Martínez Góngora, Mar, 36 assimilationism, 31 romances africanos, 33 Marx, Karl, 18, 81, 101 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, 101 marxism, 15, 17, 19, 20, 62, 129, 155, 156, 157 masochism; see also self-shattering, 22 Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff, 22–23, 99 mechanical grotesque, 71, 80 mechanization of behavior, 81 mechanization of labor, 26, 73, 81 mechanization of the body, 81 Medina Sidonia, 7th Duke of (Alonso Pérez Guzmán el Bueno), 30, 34, 39, 48 Menard, Pierre (the historical personage), 59, 13, 20, 131 Mercury, 27, 45, 52, 104, 119 Messianic, 27, 45, 52, 104, 119 Eclogue (Virgil), 119

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INDEX

messianic time, 1, 17 power, weak, 27, 103, 120, 124 Messianism, 17, 20, 48, 119, 148 Jewish foundation for Spanish sacred imperialism, 48 myth of imperial messianic destiny, 119 mestizaje, 2 metalepsis, 92 microstoria, 156 Milky Way, 111, 141 Milton, John, 145 “On his Blindness”, 134 miner, indigenous, 73, 81 mirror of princes, 45, 53, 71 mirrors, 125–30, 135–39, 147–48 mise en abime, 13, 84 Mistral, Gabriela, 142 modernismo, 2–4, 13, 26, 87, 124, 130, 132, 133, 141 modernity, definition of, 104 Molloy, Sylvia, 116, 142 Agustini’s “El cisne”, 130–33 naming in Borges, related to Symbolism, 9–10 n.22 “written scars” in Borges, 7–10, 15–16 monster, 86 Montano, Arias, 48–51 moon, 147–48 dragon moon, 12, 143, 146 and naming; see also Sylvia Molloy, 10 Moors, 31, 72, 78, 100 Morales, Ambrosio de, 35, 37, 48, 51, 53 defense of Góngora in limpieza de sangre hearings, 37 study of Spanish folk traditions, 53 Moriscos, 29–53 assimilationism; see also Mar Martínez Góngora and Stephen Hutchinson, 31 assimilation of; see also Trevor Dadson, Michael Gerli and Rosilie Hernández, 32–34, 36 confiscation, 33–34 children; see also Mary Elizabeth Perry, 33 n.10, 34 profits of, 34 n.14 property, 32–33 expulsion of, 29, 30–34, 45, 49, 53, 100, 116–17 Hornachos, 34 parallel colonialism of Amerindians;

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see also Mercedes García Arenal, 32, 45, 49, 52 Revolts of the Alpujarras, 31, 34, 48 mourning, 34, 41, 89, 96, 143 “active mourning” in Benjamin, 119 Pedro Páramo, 114 “Trilce LXV”, 116–119 Munjic, Sanda, 70, 101 “male suffering subjectivity”, 69 Muyolema, Armando anti-colonial “imposture”, 52 mute speech, 78 “muteness envy”; see also Barbara Johnson, 99, 174 myth of origins, 48, 112 Name-of-the-Mother; see also Stephen Hart, 118 naming, 5, 10, 43, 149 Napoleon Bonaparte, 10, 101 national literature, 2, 141 Neo-Arielism; see also John Beverley, 2 Neobaroque, 2–4, 7, 13, 26, 85, 87, 103, 110, 112, 119, 129 Neruda, Pablo, 4 “Alturas de Macchu Picchu”, 129 Veinte poemas de amor, 136 New Jerusalem, 50, 106 Noah, 48 noblesse de cour, 90, 95 oblique criticism, 7–9, 14, 26, 42, 45, 47, 62, 72, 96, 107, 114–17, 120, 138 Saint Jerome, 49 occidentalization; see also Serge Gruzinski, 49 Ortega, Francisco A., 26, 47, 84 Baroque as “history of a phantom”, 2, 16, 146 psyche as historical, 22 transgenerational trauma, 40, 114 trauma, indigenous, 22, 23 Ortega, Julio César Vallejo, “Trilce XLV”, 118–19 Neobaroque, 4 Pedro Páramo mythic search of son for father, 113 tautology in Pedro Páramo, 113 ouroboros, 42, 107 Ovid, 24, 92, 96, 97, 126 Metamorphoses, 70

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198 INDEX Pan, 93–94 parallax view, 45, 47 “paralyzed dialectics”; see Walter Benjamin and John Beverley, 25, 113, 145 Parnassians, 92 parody, 13, 20, 26, 57–59, 61, 62, 70, 72, 79, 82, 83, 101, 114 Baroque; see also Gregg Lambert, 13 Menardian, 20 Past and Present, 156 pastoral, 45, 68, 69, 71, 72, 88, 89, 91, 93, 95, 98, 104–06, 130 patronage, 52, 76, 98 Paz, Octavio, 115–16, 129, 142 “Blanco”, 135, 140, 151 El arco y la lira, 149 introduction to Pizarnik, El árbol de Diana, 135 Mallarmé’s “Ses purs ongles” (sonnet en yx), 124, 127 n.8 translation of Mallarmé, 5, 124, 127 n.8 peace treaty, between Spain and the Dutch, 33 pedagogy of fear, 81–82 Pedro Páramo; see Juan Rulfo peregrinatio vitae, 59, 105 peregrino, 68–72, 89, 90, 104–05, 109 periodization, 158 Perlongher, Néstor, 110 permanent revolution, 19–20, 52 permistión, 31, 33 Perry, Mary Elizabeth, 32–34 Moriscos, confiscation of children, 33 n. 10 Persephone, 34, 72, 109 Perus, Françoise, 101 Philomela, 94, 96 Physiocratic sentiments, 31, 35, 39, 40 pícaro, 57, 59, 61–63, 109, 111–12 pilgrimage, 17, 26–27, 82–85, 90, 103–20, 147 Pineda, Padre Juan de, 51 Pizarnik, Alejandra, 27, 124, 129, 135, 138 Árbol de Diana, 135 “Caminos del espejo”, 136–38 campos de zafiro”, 138 n. 35 Extracción de la piedra de la locura, 135 Mallarmé, 130, 135 relationship with Octavio Paz, 135 Plato, 11, 12, 43, 46, 95

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Symposium, 41 Timaeus, 41 podenco, 78–79 poètes maudits, 4 political unconscious, 2, 14–16, 19, 21, 22, 26, 100 Poor Laws, 56–58 Priego, Marqués de, 34, 37 prophecy, 69, 103, 106, 108, 111, 119, 120, 144, 148, 156 prophetism, 11, 156 Propp, Vladimir, 157 prostitution, 58, 59, 72, 95 prudent speech, 42 Prüfungsroman, 83 psyche, 66, 73, 74, 84, 85, 126, 148; see also political unconscious and Sigmund Freud cultural neurosis see also John Beverley, 16, 25, 100 historical; see also George Mariscal and Francisco A. Ortega, 22 “history is what hurts”; see also Frederic Jameson, 16 Jacques Lacan, 56, 119 psychological factors in mass culture; see also Marc Bloch and Lucien Lefebvre, 14 structures of feeling; see also Raymond Williams, 16 ptyx, 125–28 Pueyo, Víctor, 57, 133 “purgatory in this life”; see also Henry Sullivan, 84 Quaderni storici, 156 Quattrocento, 58 Quevedo, Francisco de, 68, 97, 155 “Aguja de navegar cultos con una receta para hacer Soledades en un día”, 6–7 Borges, 4, 8, 12, 134, 143–47 Quirós (Fernández de Quirós), 29 Rabasa, José “writing of violence”, 90, 99 racial pride, 100 Rama, Ángel, 91 rape, 8, 23–25, 60, 64–65, 70–72, 87–102, 127–29, 130, 135, 139–41, 148 Europa, 72, 90, 109 heroic, 24

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INDEX

Persephone, 34, 72, 109 readers, 5, 7, 13, 25, 46, 53, 106, 108, 144 Redondo, Augustin pedagogy of fear, 81 relaciones geográficas, 35 religion of art, 8, 91, 148 Republic, Spanish, 67, 108, 118, 124, 147, 154 retombée, 1, 2, 150 “reverse ethnography”; see also Michael Armstrong Roche, 45 revolts, 64 Alpujarras, 31 germanías, 31 Revolution, French, 18, 99 Revolution, Mexican, 113–14, 147 rey pastor, 30 Reyes, Alfonso, 4, 87, 142 Ribera, 32 Ricote, 33 rights of the author, 77–78 rise of the machine, 81 Rivas, Pedro de, 51, 105 river-ocean, 42 Rodríguez, Juan Carlos, 15, 57, 133, 155 Rodríguez Puértolas, Julio, 57–58, 62, 71, 81 Rome, 18, 24 Rosen, Charles, 20, 143 Roses, Joaquín, 3, 4, 6, 36–40, 87, 107 Rosicrucians, 128 rubric, 8 Rufo, Juan, 27 La Austriada, 31 ruins, 35, 46, 117, 119, 129, 158 Rulfo, Juan Pedro Páramo, 27, 112–16, 119–120 failed mythic search of son for father; see also Julio Ortega, 113 tautological sentences in; see also Julio Ortega, 113 “transgenerational haunting”; see also Benjamin Cluff, 113–14 Sabine women, 24 sacramental body, 26, 55, 72, 80 sacred imperalism, 48 Sacromonte debates; see also Mercedes García Arenal, Muriel Elvira, José Cárdenas Bunsen, 26, 29, 47–51

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sonnet, 47, 51 Saint James, 47, 111, 112 Saint Jerome, 46 Saint Cecilia, 8 saker, 69, 70 Salamanca, School of, 31 San Juan, Susana, 114–15 Sánchez Robayna, Andrés, 4, 5, 96 Santamaria, Gilbert, 153, 157–58 structuralist topoi, 158 Santiago de Chile, 139 Santiago de Chuco, 117–19 Santiago de Compostela, 111–12 Santiago de Cuba, 111–12 Sapphic avant-garde, 95 Sarduy, Severo, 2–4, 16, 103, 110, 146–48, 158 Barroco, 2, 103, 136, 146, 148 “El barroco y el neobarroco”, 2, 16, 146 Sator Arepo, birthing charm, 123, 128 Scholasticism, 81 Scholem, Gershom Benjamin, 20 Borges, 20 Kabbala, 20 secularization, 58, 59, 61, 68, 83, 90, 91, 93, 103, 105, 112, 128, 129 Judeo-Christian eschatology, 13, 17, 20, 156, 158 knowledge, 13 secular mysticism; see also Sophie Kluge, 7 n.16 secular re-enchantment; see also Joshua Landy, 7, 13, 27, 92, 124, 133, 144 seduction theory, 22–23, 99 self self-conquest; see also Ivonne del Valle, 82 “self-made salvation”; see also Henry Sullivan, 84 self-shattering; see also Cynthia Marshall, 22, 56, 69 “technologies of the self”, 26, 84 serrano, 30, 32, 34 Shakespeare, William Julius Cesar, 9–13 Macbeth, 12 shemittah, 20 sign language, 78

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200 INDEX silence, 1, 8, 9, 14, 15, 62, 96, 99, 102, 118, 126, 129, 130, 132, 136, 140, 150 slaves, 37, 78, 81, 108 Social Democracy, 17–18, 20 reformism, 18 stagist conceptions of history, 20 Solomon’s Temple, 49–50 Sommer, Doris “foundational fiction”, 24 Soria Mesa, Enrique Góngora, converso heritage of, 37 Góngora, theory of illegitimacy of, 37 n.23 Sosa, Roberto, 27, 129, 138 “Los pobres”, 138 Soto de Rojas, Pedro, 50 South Pacific, 29 Spanish American War, 90 Spartakus uprising, 18 Spartakusbund, 18 Spengler, Oswald, 11–12, 112 Stalinism, 17, 67, 157 stagist conceptions of history, 16 Standard Fruit Company, 138 star, 107, 109, 120, 125–30, 138, 148 Stradanus, 42 Strait of Magellan, 41 strings, authorial, 79 subject, 26, 47, 55–86, 90, 103, 105, 109, 147–48 collective, 62, 109, 119 history, 15, 22, 113, 155, 159 Sullivan, Henry, 73–74, 77, 82–85 Don Quijote de la Mancha grotesque, 73–74, 77–78 “purgatory in this life”, 84 “self-made salvation”, 84 “theatre of sadism”, 83 syncretism, 24, 47, 49, 50 “occidentalization”; see also Serge Gruzinski, 49 n.42 syntagmatic grama, 103 tautology, 113, 150 “technologies of the self”, 26, 84 teleology, 14, 27, 120, 141 frustration of, 58, 71, 113 progress, 14 telos, 15, 25, 85, 103, 109 testimonio, 8, 71 Teuber, Bernard

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mechanization of labor (galeote episode of Quijote), 81 “theatre of sadism”; see also Henry Sullivan, 83 theatre state, 84 time messianic time, 1, 17 time of the now (Jetzeit); see also Walter Benjamin, 18 Toledo, Spain, 45, 49, 63, 72 Torah, 29 “total history”, 157 transgenerational haunting; see also Benjamin Cluff, 23 transgenerational trauma; see also Francisco A. Ortega, 114 translation; see also Andrés Sánchez Robayna, 2, 5, 6, 15, 17, 41,125, 127, 134, 155, 156 trauma, 21, 25, 26, 49, 74, 77, 78, 80, 81, 86, 99, 148 Benjamin, 21 consciousness, 95 imperial domination, 21, 22, 88, 97 historical, 21, 22, 56, 73, 113–14, 124 indigenous (colonial); see also Francisco A. Ortega, 22, 24, 40, 47, 90 sexual, 21, 22, 59, 60, 61, 63, 68, 70, 90, 99 soldiers in WW I; see also Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, 8, 21 theory, 22, 23, 73 traumatic repetition, 78, 100 tricentenary, Gongorine, 87 “Trilce LXV”; see César Vallejo, 27, 104, 116–19 Trillo y Figueroa, Francisco, 50 Trotsky, Leon, 19 n. 46, 52 “combined and uneven development”, 19 History of the Russian Revoluton, 19 Results and Prospects, 20 theory of permanent revolution, 20, 52 turban, 45 Uceda, 1st Duke of (Cristóbal de Sandoval Rojas y de la Cerda), 34 Ungaretti, Giuseppe, 14 untold story, 23, 112 Ur-scene, 129, 135, 139 Urrea, Diego, 50

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INDEX

Ursa Major, 126 utopia, 29, 30, 40, 43, 45, 49, 52, 91, 111–12, 116, 148, 154 failed, 112 Vaca de Castro, Pedro, 47, 48, 51, 52, 52 n.48 Valencia, Pedro de, 29–37, 39, 43–45, 50–52, 53, 108, 108 n.17, 154 agrarian reform, 30–31, 35–36, 39, 44, 108, 154 aprobaciones as Royal Chronicler, 36 “discurso contra navegaciones” (Soledades), 29, 30, 36 expulsion of Moriscos, 30–35 intermarriage, 31 North African ports, 30 n.4 ownership of slaves, 37 permistión, 31 Physiocrats, 31, 35, 39–40 public granary, 30 rey pastor, 30 works “Algunas réplicas”, 44 “Consideraciones acerca de las enfermedades y salud del reino”, 30 “Discurso contra la ociosidad”, 44 “Discurso sobre el acrecentamiento de la labor de la tierra”, 35 “Discurso sobre el pergamino y láminas de Granada”, 50 “Discurso sobre el precio del pan”, 44 “Discurso sobre el precio del trigo”, 44 “Sobre conferir empleos a los poderosos y evitar sus injusticias”, 44 “Sobre el tributo de la octava del vino y aceite y sus inconvenientes”, 44 Tratado acerca de los moriscos de España, 31, 32, 34, 36, 45 Valéry, Paul, 4, 7, 11 “Le cimetière marin”, 129, 134 Vallejo, César, 4, 27, 124, 129, 139, 141 “Tiempo Tiempo”, 134 “Trilce LXV”, 112, 116–20 see also Jean Franco, Stephen Hart, James Higgins, and Julio Ortega,

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201

“Trilce XXIII”, 116 see also Stephen Hart, “Name-of-the Mother” vanishing mediator; see also Frederic Jameson, 57 Vázquez Siruela, Martín, 50 Vega, Lope de, 33, 37 droit du seigneur, 64 Fuenteovejuna, 62–67 interpellation into dominant order; see also George Mariscal, 66 Velázquez, Diego de, 98 Vives Vicens, Jaime, 57, 104, 109 “bourgeois meteor” of Castille’s economic development, 57 Vico, Giambattista, 11–12 Virgil, 72 Eclogues, 106, 108, 113 Fourth (“Messianic”) Eclogue, 106, 119 Virgilian woods, 88 Virgin Mary, 115 Annunciation, 93 Immaculate Conception, 52, 93, 114 Virgin of Guadalupe, 114–16 Wagner, Richard, 92–93 Waissbein, Daniel, 49 Wallon, Henri, 156, 158 Weber thesis, 84 White, Hayden, 14 Williams, Raymond, 16, 56 witchcraft, 31, 53 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 157–58 Wolfthal, Diane, 23–24, 65, 109 Woolf, Virginia Mrs. Dalloway, 21 Three Guineas, 25 “world as one”; see also Sara Castro Klarén, 43, 45, 53 “writing of violence”; see also José Rabasa, 90, 99 “written scars”; see also Sylvia Molloy, 7, 15, 146 Yeats, William Butler, 11–12, 18, 95, 146 “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen”, 11–12 Zavala, Iris, 21, 88–100 Zeitgeist, 14

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