SOURCE: Friedman, Edward H. “Creative Space: Ideologies of Discourse in Góngora's Polifemo.” In Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, edited by Marina S. Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, pp. 51-78. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Friedman argues that Góngora's retelling of familiar stories in Polifemo y Galatea is indicative of the poet's literary competition with past and contemporary authors.]

There are a number of ways of looking at the question of continuity in literature, including a focus on discontinuity. To an extent, we have put aside—marginated—literary history in favor of difference. We look for markers of distance, of separation, of inexplicability. We seem to want meaning to elude us, yet we hope creatively to describe the indeterminacies, the scissions, the ungrammaticalities that defer and divert us as we read texts. The autonomous work that was the object of North American New Criticism and of other formalist modes has all but disappeared. Current approaches tend to stress the interplay and the interdependence of texts. The direct borrowing suggested by source studies has been superseded, or, one might say, subsumed, by the concept of intertextuality, which argues that every text is a response to previous texts and traditions and that the textual past is an inevitable presence in all literature. If New Criticism separates the author from the work, newer models show that invention is but innovative refurbishing, however ingenious the recasting may be. Michel Foucault's essay “What Is an Author?” relegates the author to “author-function,” one of the numerous discourses in a text, a voice among many voices and many echoes. Despite the link to the past, the writer enjoys what may be termed a creative space, a space in which to express subjective thoughts, to become an artist, to rewrite history, to confront predecessors. In The Anxiety of Influence and other studies, Harold Bloom elaborates the mechanisms by which poets seek to surpass their predecessors. The dominant imagery in this case is death; the poet will kill off those who precede him by displacing and vanquishing them.

Creation is, above all, competition. Continuity in art is not only progression but rivalry, appropriation, change. The baroque period in Spain is a time of intense social, political, and religious conflict, and art reflects and becomes an arm of these struggles. Baroque cathedrals, for example, compete with outside, earthly distractions. Their adornments—more than the eye can see and more than the mind can capture in two or three or twenty visits—maintain the interest of churchgoers and bring them back to observe and to pray. Architects and artists thus join the theological establishment in fostering the faith. The Inquisition and other agents of censorship promote adherence to institutionalized thought, as does the studied conservatism of individual writers. Francisco de Quevedo makes Pablos, the protagonist of La vida del buscón, a more sinful, more delinquent picaro than Lazarillo de Tormes and Guzmán de Alfarache. As narrator, Pablos is more given to conceits, and he is more articulate, as well, in his ultimate acknowledgment of the hierarchical system of social justice. Expanding upon Lope de Vega's model, Calderonian drama reaches new conceptual and linguistic heights in the sphere of the court. Perhaps the most obvious form of literary competition is the writer's decision to tread familiar ground, that is, to retell a story attributable to another author or to a recognizable tradition. This is direct confrontation, in which the writer invites comparison through a dialectics of revision and rejection, reverence and disrespect, continuity and discontinuity.

No matter how brilliant the work of art or how impressive the victory over the past, there is no way to eradicate the predecessor. Like the picaresque antiheroes who cannot succeed in denying their bloodlines, the writer cannot sever ties with convention. The very act of emulation, albeit with an air of superiority, prohibits even the illusion of originality. The locus of inscription is not the tabula rasa, but the palimpsest. Competition, as contest, must refer—if not defer—to an ever-present “other” and must accept, however reluctantly, a lineage upon which it grafts itself and which finally becomes the graft. The “other” is part of the writing and part of the reading. The sense of alterity, of alteration, allows the reader to examine creation in context. It would be difficult to consider Luis de Góngora's carpe diem sonnet “Mientras por competir con tu cabello,” whose opening verse is blatant in its competitive spirit, without glancing backward—if not to Ausonius—to Garcilaso de la Vega's “En tanto que de rosa y azucena” (and forward to Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's “A su retrato”). Góngora does not merely force a contest between his love object and nature, thus breaking Garcilaso's balance of feminine beauty and the beauty of nature, but he breaks with the symmetry and tone of his predecessor. Garcilaso restates the carpe diem theme through the paradox of mutability: one can be certain only of the passage of time and of the changes time will bring. In the second tercet of his sonnet, Góngora goes beyond coaxing to remind the lady that after old age lie death, destruction, nothingness. Disjunction replaces equilibrium, in form and content. Góngora moves to obliterate the initial premise, challenging not only Garcilaso's poem but the poet, the movement he represents, and the historical moment over which he presides. Carpe diem is the medium, not the message. Góngora's sonnet is about competition, about composition. Competition is a key to the structure of the text and is its principal conceit as well. Rhetoric merges with ideology, a conventional topos with a metapoetic macrostructure.

Góngora's Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea offers an extended view of writing as competition. The baroque poet vies with a classical tradition and with Renaissance neoclassicism. The idea of writing as rewriting touches questions of subject matter, of form, and of language. Poetic skills notwithstanding, how does one contend with the authority of the classic text, and how can the vernacular triumph over the classical status of the mother tongue? How does one deal with the “perfection” attained by Renaissance masters and with the success of contemporaries? How does one establish a voice, within and beyond the poem? In the Polifemo, I would submit, Góngora addresses these points and defines his own creative space. Far from the disengaged, “absent” poet, he enters the text in order to exert control, to claim authority. He chooses a fable that he can use to replicate his situation as poet and that he can revise as a vehicle for his particular poetics.

The baroque in Spain, and in general, is notable for its resistance to a precise definition. The difficulty stems, in part, from the transference of the term from the plastic arts to other realms and from nation to nation. The baroque is often discussed as counterpoint to the Renaissance, the most apparent point of departure, and the classification covers the elements that we tend to place under the rubric of culture: the arts, society, and the institutions of the state. Designations such as mannerism and metaphysical poetry, together with attempts to subdivide the baroque into discrete categories, may yield fascinating results, but the groupings are nonetheless problematic. Every generality seems to lead to exceptions, to differences among the media and among artists who seek their distinctive signatures. How does one weigh the factors that link Góngora, Quevedo, Gracián, and Calderón against those that mark variation? The writers contribute to what may be called a baroque project, and it is relatively easy to indicate points of intersection within their writings. It is equally easy, and arguably more profitable from a critical perspective, to differentiate between the writings. Paradoxically, a common recourse of baroque artists is the use of binary oppositions (the technique of chiaroscuro, for example), which, by their very nature, foreground the dissimilar: culteranismo and conceptismo, diversion and didacticism, personal and professional rivalry.

Stephen Gilman finds in the artistic minority, the cultos, a rejection of shared values and beliefs and a consequent deviation from the various orthodoxies fostered by the state, which he sees as signs of a desperate search for individuality, as an assertion of “their own distinctive soledad.”¹ José Antonio Maravall speaks of solitude as an aspect of the seventeenth-century “crisis of individualism,” adding, “but let us not forget that it is always ‘solitude’ in the midst of ‘competition.’”² The cultivation of individual talent in this period demands a willingness to isolate oneself from the mainstream and to defend oneself against detractors.³ Góngora becomes a practitioner and defender of the new poetry. To justify his break from the norm, he needs to demonstrate the validity and, to a certain degree, the superiority of his creative method. In the center of the debate stands Góngora's poetry, complemented by his “Carta en respuesta,” an open letter distributed in Madrid with manuscript copies of the Soledades.⁴ The poet must account for the obscurity of his work on literary and ideological grounds. In an essay entitled “The Production of Solitude: Góngora and the State,” John Beverley notes that the poet, coming from a titled but economically modest Andalusian family, is a marginalized aristocrat, who “must insert himself in the circles of power from the outside.” As he proves himself to the community of literati, he may gain honor and status in society. Poetry is the means by which he can distinguish himself, that is, set himself apart from his literary predecessors and above those of his social class. He epitomizes an aristocracy of letters that seeks entry into the upper echelon of the sociopolitical hierarchy, the aristocracy of blood.⁵

Given the critical judgment which views Góngora's poetry as formally intricate but emotionally empty, there is an irony of sorts in the notion of a poet poised to climb the social ladder by virtue of his verbal ability. One is reminded of the prologue to Lazarillo de Tormes, which frames a hard-luck story with the Ciceronian adage that art brings honor, that the artist can cross social barriers. Or of Velázquez, as presented by Jonathan Brown in an essay on Las Meninas, whose aspirations to knighthood are intimately related to his commitment to the artistic enterprise. Velázquez imposes himself onto the canvas to show “the painter as worthy, because, not in spite of, his art.”⁶ Perhaps a more relevant analogy would be to the third chapter of Quevedo's Buscón, which describes Pablos's tutelage under the licenciate Cabra. The episode is noteworthy, among other reasons, for its remarkable juxtaposition of hunger and verbiage. The narrator satiates the reader with a richness of words and witticisms that depict gastronomical penury. The discourse is complex, but it signifies nothing, nothingness. It is insubstantial. The reader may fill up on words and then feel empty; the words are consumed, in the double sense. This is language that distances the reader, and, for some, it is empty language. Quevedo makes his presence known, but his own feelings seem to be absent. And this is precisely the detachment that directs critics to appraise Góngora as “the poet of personal absence.”⁷

A major presupposition of Michael Riffaterre's Semiotics of Poetry is that a poem is a puzzle to be solved. The reader must overcome a series of linguistic and conceptual obstacles in order to capture the significance of the text. Spanish baroque poetry lends itself to the imagery of combat, in that the reader must struggle with the mysteries of the text and must use all resources available to decode and recode verbal messages. Góngora and his contemporaries carry rhetoric to extremes, and it seems clear that they relish the task of creating linguistic edifices that can be brought down only by an ingenious elite. Figurative language is the product of an active mind, and these minds are set on outdoing their predecessors. They employ an abundance of words. They make words work double- or triple-time in elaborate conceits. They elevate language through verbal play. They put language on display. They seem to say, with Eva Perón in the song “Buenos Aires” from Evita, “All I want is a whole lot of excess.” Within this ideology of excess, baroque poets are open to objections based on the difficulty and on the vacuousness of their discourse.

The question of difficulty is at once an aesthetic and an ethical matter. The cultivation of obscurity can be rewarding for the creator and for the consumer; it can be, for both, mind expanding. The exercises in wit, in rhetoric, and in linguistic invention challenge the writer to explore subtleties of thought and of expression, which the reader must attempt to match, and to comprehend. Fueled by sixteenth-century Italian mannerism, the pursuit of expressive majesty and of verbal mastery helps to legitimize difficulty for its own sake. Baltasar Gracián and others document and dissect the process in their anatomies of wit. Mental sharpness and ingenuity serve as guidelines and as goals of the undertaking. The creative space seems to broaden, the result of a progressive shift from mechanical, prescriptive writing—and from passive, predetermined reading—to a spirit of openness. Ways of perceiving the world become more secularized, and the relation of res and verba becomes more flexible, less bound to a scholastic past.⁸ When liberated from theology, the word may move in infinite directions. The figurative reading of the universe consists of a spiritual model, whose meaning is preordained, and a secular model, grounded in aesthetics. This is the difference between finding a path and forging a path, between a symbolic system and a self-defining system, between language as means and language as end. The signifier loses authority as the signified becomes more comprehensive in scope, more variable, and more dependent on an immediate context. Centralized authority is lost, to the advantage of the individual imagination. In short, the writer gains increased power over words.

The release of discourse from codified meaning may lead to a type of artistic freedom, but the openness of representation threatens not only the theological hierarchy but the didactic mission of literature as propagated by the Council of Trent, among other agents of faith. By endangering what one might call the allegories of reading, by daring to admit a manipulation of meaning, the new poetry places erudition and imagination above dogma. Emphasis on wordplay at the most elevated level suggests that the lessons—the utility—of fiction can be subordinated to aesthetic pleasure. For advocates of the liberated signifier, intellectual contortions lead to knowledge. For linguistic fundamentalists, creativity usurps a moral space. Freedom has a price, for the new discursive paradigm may be construed as distracting or atheistic.⁹ What John Beverley refers to as “the exclusionary character of Góngora's defense of difficulty” becomes an ennobling gesture, a way of attaining nobility while requiring that the reader be equally honorable, that is, capable of honor, worthy of access to the text. This intense form of mental activity is the antithesis of manual labor, and only the most learned, the best educated, the cream of the cultured aristocracy will merit entry into the literary circle.¹⁰ A counterpart to the intricacies of discourse is the self-consciousness of writers who become absorbed in the mirror images of art.

In Trials of Authorship, Jonathan Crewe detects in recent Renaissance scholarship, “often boosted by deconstruction,” a desire “to produce large, synthesizing representations of counterontological innovation, displacement, gender-reversal, theatricality, positional mobility, power-shifting, dispersal, and cosmic remodeling.” He notes that, in these representations of the Renaissance, Vergil and Ovid tend to overshadow Horace and Seneca, and he cautions us, in our revisionary zeal, “to recall that a good deal of Renaissance writing invokes the figure of the Stoic … and is thus by no means dominantly committed to translation and metamorphosis.”¹¹ The admonition accepted, one may find an Ovidian thrust in the Spanish baroque, essentially a rewriting—revision, metamorphosis—of the Renaissance. The Renaissance search for symmetry, for equilibrium, for direct contact between the word and the world may lead to a faith in union—a oneness with nature, for example—which can never be achieved. Conscious of difference, of the misdirected attempt at mimesis, baroque literature faces the deceptive truth and finds a consolation of sorts in disillusionment. While abject depression is one response, a filling-in of gaps is another. At times, the world seems too much with the voices of the baroque; at others, the literary text seems to encompass the so-called real world, to bring the world into the text.

In Don Quijote, Cervantes manipulates the concept of historical truth in order to bring the real world into the literary text. Literature recreates life, in consummately ironic fashion, by inverting the traditional macrocosm/microcosm dichotomy. The historical record is a mediating factor in the story of Don Quijote. The knight-errant contemplates his role in history, that is, in the historical record. The reader is aware of several versions of that history, at least one of which has been projected into the real world (as contemplated within the fiction). A tangible version of the history validates the metafictional game. The battle between Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda's spurious sequel of 1614 and Cervantes' second part of 1615—and, most notably, the presence of the former in the latter—becomes an emblem of the reversal of fortune that incorporates the real into the imaginary, the world into the text. A few years earlier, Mateo Alemán avenges a literary theft in the pages of Guzmán de Alfarache. He punishes Juan Martí, the author of a false continuation, in print. He administers justice in the text when society will not come to his aid. In similar fashion, the baroque poet breaks the Renaissance balance by adding to the world what the world cannot do: represent itself figuratively, duplicate (and reduplicate) itself verbally, critique itself.

Pedro Salinas indicates the manner in which Góngora seeks to remedy “the poetic insufficiency of reality,” a concern which dates from classical antiquity: “Telling and describing what one sees is not poetry. What must be done to convert it to poetry? Raise it, intensify its characteristics to an extreme degree, elevate it above its natural forms and extract from the latter all their esthetic content by means of the imagination and fantasy. Reality must be transformed, transmuted into another kind of poetic reality, material, sonorous, plastic.”¹² Paul Julian Smith offers a variation on this reading by suggesting that “what we find in Góngora's career is not a progressive absenteeism, both cause and effect of an irresponsible excess of words, but rather the linguistic infilling or supplementing of a nature found increasingly to be lacking in substance.”¹³ Creation may be seen, then, as a double-edged sword. The poet supplements with words the deficiencies of nature, and, it may be argued, in order to find these words he moves inward, through mental deliberation and through a rewriting of the intertext. As he expands the field of vision and adds a poetic graft onto reality, he follows Cervantes (and, I would submit, the picaresque writers) in granting a privileged status to commentary on the creative process.

In Culture of the Baroque, Maravall notes that “the Spanish mentality of the baroque epoch had the general quality of deriving satisfaction from all artifice, from whatever ingenious invention that appeared, in terms of the novelty it offered.”¹⁴ The poet engages a literary past and a natural world in a search for a novel representation of the realm of shepherds and nymphs. Nature made artificial, artifice demands excess, in the best sense of a term that has positive as well as negative connotations in the period. The signifier is ever distant from the objects of nature as signified; the points of reference are words, not things. This is a dimension of what Elias Rivers calls “the pastoral paradox of natural art.” In an attempt to clarify and to harmonize the forces of nature, poets resort to words, which may become increasingly unintelligible as their goals shift from explaining nature to outshining other words. The idealization of nature often produces a refinement of the bucolic world, and linguistic and rhetorical flourishes intensify this detachment. Convention overtakes—if not reality—a primary creative urge. Defining nature may be poetic, while poeticizing the lives of shepherds may not be natural, verisimilar. The cultured pastoral setting is a mediating factor between the harsh realities of nature and the artificial discourse of poetry. The literary pastoral is a metonymical center, evoking a visual presence and a verbal presence, both of which symbolically must be absented for the sake of novelty. If there is something akin to an original pastoral equation, the poetic history of that equation bears little nostalgia for the bleating of sheep and the smells of the countryside. The source, however real, is obscured by story, or myth, and by a defamiliarizing discourse.

Góngora's Polifemo is about nature and about the relation between nature and art,¹⁵ but perhaps more than anything it is about the relation between words. The poem concerns the literary repertory and an implicit mandate to depart from tradition. It can hardly be coincidental that Góngora chooses to rewrite an episode from the Metamorphoses, which celebrates and reiterates acts of transformation, or that the bigger-than-life Polyphemus becomes a standard bearer for the aesthetics of excess. The course of literary development depends on the idea of movement, which Maravall considers to be “the fundamental principle of the world and human beings” in the culture of the baroque.¹⁶ Time and change have always been with us, but the baroque gives special prominence to variety, restoration, modification, and disjunction. The impact is particularly strong with respect to processes of signification. The liberation of the word—of the signifier from a finite number of signifieds—offers a unique freedom of movement for the writer. Michel Foucault describes this phenomenon in The Order of Things: “At the beginning of the seventeenth century, during the period that has been termed, rightly or wrongly, the Baroque, thought ceases to move in the element of resemblance. Similitude is no longer the form of knowledge but rather the occasion of error, the danger to which one exposes oneself when one does not examine the obscure region of confusions.”¹⁷ The altered perception of the universe and of language affects the contiguity of the Renaissance and the baroque. The second may define itself not as an offshoot of the first, or even as an exaggerated continuation, but as the dark underside of a secure, controlled vision of the world. One would expect to find—and does find—an abundance of examples of antithesis, oxymoron, and catachresis, among other figures of opposition, in baroque poetry, but perhaps the most notable consequence of the ideological shift, from the perspective of rhetoric, is its impact on metaphor, conventionally a figure of similitude yet commonly regarded as the guiding trope of baroque poetry.

One way to divest metaphor of similitude is to convert the comparison into an unequal contest, as in Góngora's reworking of Garcilaso in “Mientras por competir con tu cabello.” Another, more complex, more nuanced denial of similitude within a metaphorical framework is the metaphor derived from catachresis. Catachresis is a figure marked by the use of a term beyond its traditional contextual field, often in a paradoxical manner. In Góngora's sonnet which begins “En este occidental, en este, oh Licio, / climatérico lustro de tu vida”¹⁸ [Lycius, in these most western years—these five / Climacteric—of your waning day (Singleton)], the phrase “¡Ciego discurso humano!” (v. 11) [Blind human speech!] is an example of catachresis. The roots of the word discurso, which means reason or judgment but which also means speech, lie in rhetoric, where rational discourse has persuasive powers. Discurso is on one level incompatible with the adjective ciego and on another level quite compatible; thus, the paradox. Beverley notes that enemies of the new poetry—“claiming to represent an orthodox Aristotelian discipline of the rules”—cite catachresis, associated with implausible connections, as the paradigm of Gongorism. The far-fetched analogies separate res and verba; they direct the reader toward the unraveling of conceits and away from meaningful content.¹⁹ This would be obscurity without purpose. It seems, rather, that Góngora revises the figure of catachresis in order to establish more precise correspondences between elements.

In stanza 13 of the Polifemo, the poetic speaker describes Galatea as follows:

Son una y otra luminosa estrella
lucientes ojos de su blanca pluma:
si roca de cristal no es de Neptuno,
pavón de Venus es, cisne de Juno.

[Stars be her eyes in lucent bold relieve / on pinion's white—such snow doth Beauty don, / for though of Neptune she is no milky reef, / Pavone she is of Venus, Juno's swan.]

(Singleton)

The brilliance of Galatea's eyes against her white skin inspires the imagery. As a daughter of the sea (metonymically evoked by Neptune, the father of Polifemo), her radiant complexion is crystalline, based on the implied metaphor of water as soft crystal. The stars are conventional metaphors for the eyes, and pluma, related to the skin by a two-tiered figure of metonymy (feather for plumage) and metaphor (plumage for the lady's complexion), inaugurates the interplay of peacock and swan. Identified as Venus's peacock and Juno's swan, Galatea enjoys the best of both worlds. As Dámaso Alonso and others demonstrate, the metaphors synthesize the whiteness of the swan, sacred to Venus, with the bright eyes set into plumage of the peacock, sacred to Juno.²⁰ Separately, “pavón de Venus” and “cisne de Juno” may be seen as catachresis, but the parallel structure and the earlier images allow these mixed metaphors (in the most positive sense) to maintain an internal logic. By the same token, roca de cristal suggests skin as soft as crystal in a nymph who is hard as a rock in disdaining her suitors, as the succeeding verses substantiate. When the poem reveals more about Galatea, catachresis is subsumed by metaphor.

In stanza 24, Acis arrives at the spring on a scorching summer day, “polvo el cabello, húmidas centellas, / si no ardientes aljófares, sudando” [dust in his hair—and limbs a sweat / of dripping sparks, if not pearls, indeed, on fire (Singleton; emended by Iarocci)]. The “A, if not B” construction unites the examples of catachresis that describe the beads of sweat running down his face and body. Fire and water become compatible. The “ardientes aljófares” are burning drops of dew and pearls set aflame. The catachresis-turned-metaphor stands between the heat of the dog-day afternoon and the promising coolness of the spring. If Sirius, the Dog Star, is (metaphorically) the sun's salamander, believed to live in fire, the sleeping Galatea is mute crystal, “cristal mudo,” beside the resonant water, “sonoro cristal.” The images of intense heat and refreshing water frame the central metaphor. The allusion to pearls links Acis to Galatea, associated with pearls in stanzas 14 and 47, for example. Galatea's element is now water, but Acis, with the aid of Cupid, will inspire her passion. What begins as catachresis, the joining of unrelated images, becomes the foundation of a linguistic deep structure, a unity built from difference.

Góngora is not denying meaning, or the meaningful, nor is he so absorbed in rhetoric that his images become empty displays of ingenuity. He turns to the dissimilar in order to redefine similitude. In his works, metaphor changes form—undergoes metamorphosis—as a means of moving beyond the poetic past. Góngora takes catachresis, the figure that rhetoricians at times refer to as “the wrenching of words,”²¹ and practices a type of elision. He systematically removes the incongruities, by justifying the uncommon associations and by projecting a rational base for the paradox. No longer a misdirected or illogical metaphor, catachresis may be seen as the first stage of sustained and highly sophisticated metaphors. Despite their integration into the body of the poem, these metaphors never lose an air of difference, a consciousness of origin in the rhetoric of antithesis. In the Polifemo, Góngora reinvents discourse, just as he reinvents story.

In book 13 of the Metamorphoses, Ovid writes of Polyphemus and Galatea in 160 verses. R. V. Young observes that Pietro Bembo's “Galatea,” one of many versions of the story, in 70 verses in Latin, “represents a clear effort to rival a classical poet in the treatment of a traditional theme in a conventional genre. Bembo creates another story like Ovid's in a style and tone reminiscent of his Roman original.”²² Although Young speaks here of rivalry, he recognizes that imitation of the classics takes a radical turn in the seventeenth century. Imitation, for Góngora, is dislocation: “Ovid's Latin style, however intricate and rhetorical, is marked by ease and fluency; when Góngora imposes Ovid's syntax on Spanish, he evokes a sense of strain and linguistic violence which matches the strain and violence of the one-eyed giant heaving the boulder on Acis.”²³ Góngora's version of the story is three times longer than Ovid's. It intensifies what is already hyperbolic. It acknowledges the Latin source and the Latin diction as it disconnects itself from both. It adapts the Ovidian irony into new patterns of irony, and it reconstructs the narrative scheme. Bembo competes with Ovid in order to prove that the Renaissance can match its classical models. Góngora competes with Ovid in order to outmatch his rival.

The Fábula de Acis y Galatea of Luis Carrillo y Sotomayor, a poet, theorist, and decorated soldier who died at an early age in 1610, is remembered for its dedication to the Count of Niebla (to whom Góngora dedicates his poem) and for its difference in other respects from the Polifemo.²⁴ In his Libro de la erudición poética, Carrillo makes a distinction between the poet and the versifier, argues against the notion of pleasing the common reader, praises eloquence, and sees imitation as respect for tradition. The Romans copy the Greeks, with exemplary success, and there is no reason for the Spaniard to shy away from a similar competition. In the treatise and in his poetry in general, Carrillo exercises relative moderation, and, given his intermediate position, it is not surprising that critics laud him both as an early master of culteranismo and as an opponent of poetic excess. The Libro de la erudición poética maintains an interesting balance between the cultivation of difficulty and the dangers of excess, with classical masters as guides.²⁵ The appeal to discretion, to good judgment, and, most notably, to clarity of expression has points of contact with the arguments of Góngora's detractors. In his study of Golden Age preceptists, Antonio Vilanova refers, for example, to the somewhat ironic similarity between Carrillo's views on obscurity and the final chapter of the Discurso poético (1624) of Juan de Jáuregui, a bitter enemy of baroque innovation.

Scholars believe that Góngora had access to the Fábula de Acis y Galatea, since there are several cases of repetition of Carrillo's images in the Polifemo, but it seems evident that the influence is, at best, minor.²⁶ The Fábula de Acis y Galatea is written in ottava rima, as in Góngora's poem, and is exactly half the length of the Polifemo. Carrillo has Galatea narrate to Scylla (before her transformation) the story of Acis's death. The center and longest portion of the poem is the cyclops's lament as retold by Galatea, who in the final stanza mourns her loss alongside the stream into which Acis has been transformed. The borrowings from Ovid are numerous, as Rosa Navarro Durán's notes to the poem, in her recent edition of the complete works, make clear. Approaching Carrillo's text after reading Góngora, one may be struck by the smaller scale of the narrative. As would be expected, the poet takes frequent recourse to rhetorical figures, but the hyperboles seem mild by comparison and the metaphors are far fewer in number and far less audacious. Because Galatea gives her account after the fact, the poem does not create the tension of the Polifemo. Rather than a cyclops claiming to be reformed by love, Carrillo presents, following Ovid, a monster who seems more concerned that another suitor has triumphed. Within the multilayered rhetoric of Góngora's poem, there is an emotional range; the reader knows, to some extent, at least, how each of the main characters views the world, and each of them, if only momentarily, elicits sympathy. Acis y Galatea is, in every sense, Galatea's story, a story that rarely is encumbered, or unduly interrupted, by rhetorical devices. It would be hard to disagree with Dámaso Alonso's use of the adjective sedoso to describe the smoothness and even texture of Carrillo's verse.²⁷ Note, for example, the following passage in which a narrating voice describes Galatea, whose remembrance of an amorous tryst with Acis so fills her with tears that she is unable to continue her story:

Venció, en fin, la memoria, y coronados
de perlas Galatea entrambos ojos,
sobre los hilos de oro derramados,
de aljófar Scila vio varios despojos.

(Carrillo, p. 205)

[Then memory was victorious / and Scila saw many nacreous spoils; / Galatea's eyes crowned by pearls / that spilled down veins of gold.]

The language is conventionally metaphorical; tears are pearls, locks of hair are veins of gold. Carrillo reiterates Ovid's image of the nymph too overcome with tears to speak, but changes the tears (lacrimae) of the Latin version to the figurative pearls. The words are affecting, but neither obscure nor radically removed from their source.

When Polifemo pleads with Galatea to accept his love, he is hyperbolic in his praise of her beauty and in his despondency over her hard-heartedness. He tells Galatea,

          “Compite al blando viento su blandura
—de cisne blanca pluma—y en dudosa
suerte la iguala de la leche pura
la nata dulce y presunción hermosa;
en su beldad promete y su frescura
del hermoso jardín el lirio y rosa.
Y si mis quejas, ninfa hermosa, oyeras,
leche, pluma, jardín, flores vencieras.”

(Carrillo, pp. 206-7)

[It [your countenance] competes in softness with the soft wind / —a swan's white feather—, and dubious / is the fortune of the pure milk's / sweet cream, which tries to equal it with lovely presumption; / in its beauty and freshness is the promise of the lily and rose of a lovely garden. / And if you were to hear my pleas, lovely nymph, / milk, feather, garden, and flowers would you surpass.]

The passage represents a middle ground between the symmetry of the Renaissance and the violent metaphors of the baroque. The softness, whiteness, and delicate beauty of the love object rival objects in nature, but there is no fierceness to the competition. If the metaphors are conventional, there is something appealing, and revealing, in the repetition of images at the end. Polifemo injects himself into the world of natural beauty by suggesting that for Galatea to reach fulfillment—that is, to “conquer” the opposition—she needs to hear his plaint, to accept him. He is the supplement, the corresponding part that will justify the gifts nature has bestowed upon her, for he is not only majestic but rich in the fruits of nature. Self-absorbed and blinded by love, he cannot appreciate the differences between them, nor can he comprehend the love of Galatea for Acis. He contrasts the signs of his manliness—his great height and “el vello grueso y duro y barba espesa” (Carrillo, p. 212) [thick, dark hair and abundant beard]—with “el tierno cuerpo de tu dueño amado” (p. 214) [the tender body of your beloved].

One might use the phrase “creative emulation” to characterize Carrillo's achievement in Acis y Galatea. He is faithful to Ovid while developing his own discourse. He gives distinctive voices to Galatea and Polifemo as he articulates the grief of one and the arrogance of the other. By working within the Ovidian frame, he limits himself to retelling, as opposed to reinventing. He accentuates the self-deceptive attitude of the cyclops, who, like a Narcissus bereft of aesthetic judgment, admires his reflection in the water:

No fue naturaleza tan avara,
antes franca conmigo, de sus bienes;
ni es tan rústica, no, mi frente y cara,
ni son tan feas mis valientes sienes.

(Carrillo, p. 211)

[Nature was not stingy, / but rather generous with her gifts; / my forehead and face are not altogether rustic / nor are my bold temples so ugly.]

A unifying element of the poem is the sadness of Galatea, who nonetheless cedes over half the poem to Polifemo's song. In the discourse of the cyclops, Carrillo expands the model through a symmetrically arranged contrastive structure. Polifemo alternates between praise of Galatea's beauty in one stanza and despair over her cruelty in the next, for example, leading to a balance of love and rejection, affirmation and negation, power and vulnerability. The formal elements of Acis y Galatea produce order amid the chaos of the events narrated. Together with the compatibility of theory and practice in Carrillo, this order implies a respect for the classical model, for tradition in general, and for continuity.

Carrillo's version of the story of Polyphemus and Galatea, written only a few years before the Polifemo, is useful as a marker of what Góngora does and does not do. In essence, Góngora is a philosopher of language. He takes liberties with words and experiments with forms of signification. As in the case of Cervantes and Don Quijote, the new is intimately related to the old, to the intertext. Every innovation is a response to precedent, and every break from protocol is an acknowledgment of the norm. Góngora writes in the vernacular, but he re-creates aspects of Latin syntax. He moves away from Ovid's version of the Polyphemus story, but does not elect to write his own myth. He is an avid and perceptive reader of his Spanish predecessors, but he seems determined to implement a new semiotics. He does not reinvent rhetoric, but intensifies the standard tropes in unsurpassed fashion. The emphasis on rhetorical discourse—a discourse that mediates each stage of the reading process—must, in turn, mediate the message systems of the text.

One need not assume that highly figurative language in the baroque is an end in itself. Rhetoric informs the ideology of a text such as the Polifemo, and the rhetorical strategies of the text may be vital commentaries on the act of writing and, more comprehensively, on ways of perceiving the universe. Cervantes recognizes semiosis as plot material, and so, in his way, does Góngora. The fact that Góngora flouts his deviation from the intertext and from conventional rhetorical models—and the fact that whatever comprehension one may derive from the reading comes only after an exhaustive effort—must give the reader pause, in the double sense. Difficulty has a purpose, a purpose deeper than literary and social elitism. A presupposition of the obscure style is the challenge of reading, based on what would seem to be the writer's desire to have the reader reenact the trials of perception. The reader's battle with rhetoric is analogous to the competing narrative voices and variations of truth in the Quijote. The metaliterary devices of baroque texts display a special kind of self-consciousness, which preoccupies the reader and which becomes inseparable from the “content.” The idea of rewriting the fable of Polyphemus bears on story and discourse, just as the purported history of Don Quijote involves a chivalric and writerly (and readerly) quest.²⁸ Góngora narrates the story in the competitive mode. Ovid, Garcilaso, and Polifemo, among many others, are his opponents.

Much of the artistry of the Polifemo stems from what one might call Góngora's traditional poetic skills. An example would be the sustained use of eye imagery and its connection with other images (light, the sun) and with sight (or insight) and blindness. Another would be the foreshadowing of Acis's death, not only in the description of Polifemo's destructive power, but also in the images of animals stalking their prey (the wolf in stanza 22, the eagle in stanza 33). The use of water imagery, linked to the three main characters and ultimately to the metamorphosis, offers an example of the ironic variation of a motif. What differentiates Góngora from other writers is his amplification of poetic recourses. Can there be a more appropriate—a more hyperbolic—subject for him than the cyclops? Or a more natural setting, both land and sea, to adorn with artifice, to remake through metaphor? The story deals with competition, with the pursuit of the exceptionally beautiful Galatea, worshiped by all mankind. The poem becomes an allegory of Góngora's pursuit of recognition, of authority over the material and over other poets.

In numerous cases, Góngora expands the structure of metaphor by inserting a third element, or mediating factor, into the equation. This is the element that makes sense of—rationalizes—the mixed metaphor; it is an interpretant, a word or idea that facilitates the making of connections.²⁹ Poststructuralism gives prominence to the middle ground between signifier and signified. It is in this space that the inner workings of fiction take shape, and it is in this space that we see the poet at work. In the Polifemo, the primary marker of the literary allegory is Galatea, caught between Polifemo and Acis. Polifemo has size, strength, and wealth on his side, while Acis has a splendid figure and Cupid on his. Galatea, like the young princess Margarita of Las meninas, may be an enigmatic center, an image that moves us to focus our glance elsewhere. In the Ovidian model, Galatea relates her story, with several brief passages from a third-person narrator. She reproduces Polyphemus's song from memory, as direct discourse. In the Polifemo, Galatea's voice is suppressed; the only speakers are a narrator and the enamored cyclops. Góngora's poem includes an account of the circumstances under which Galatea falls in love with Acis, who in Ovid is present only in his aquatic state.

Galatea is truly an object, a love object and an object of beauty. Her character is defined by disdain for all suitors; she is, ironically, “el monstro de rigor, la fiera brava” (31e). Her transformation is wrought by Cupid's arrow, which wounds her before she sees Acis. When she does catch sight of him, as he pretends to sleep, she is victim of a “deceptive rhetorical silence” (“mentido retórico silencio,” 33c-d), an unknowing player in a plot invented by Cupid. The poem's narrator describes her as momentarily “mute” (“muda,” 32a). The silence of Galatea is significant in light of her role as narrator in Ovid's story and the great attention given to the cyclops's voice in the Polifemo. Góngora's poem is rich in sensory images, as is baroque poetry in general, but aural elements have a special role in the Polifemo, through the frequent antithesis of sounds and silence, through references to musical instruments, and, most importantly, through the discordant oral performance of the cyclops. Polifemo's voice and music seem especially strong when the other members of the love triangle maintain silence. Although inspired by the cooing of a pair of doves (“trompas de Amor,” 40h), Galatea and Acis are ruled by the visual, by physical attraction and the implicit promise of internal beauty.

Polifemo, in contrast, could hardly be louder, or more cacophonous, and he accompanies himself on crude, untuned pipes. The narrator calls his voice thunderous (“el trueno de la voz,” 45g) and horrendous (“su horrenda voz,” 59a). If man and nature cease to function in order to worship Galatea, they are made immobile out of fear of Polifemo. His appeal to Galatea in stanzas 46 through 58 is an extraordinary mix of self-praise and self-deception. He calls her “sorda hija del mar” (48a) [deaf daughter of the sea] and pleads with her to listen to his voice “por dulce, cuando no por mía” (48h) [if not because it is mine, because it is sweet]. The song is a paean to his possessions, to his lineage, to his imposing stature, and to the eye (“un sol en mi frente,” 53e) [a sun in my forehead] that he has seen reflected in the water. At the end of the song, Polifemo calls attention to his new-found sensitivity. Love has taught him to respect life, he declares; his cavern no longer boasts human trophies, but has become a shelter for the wayfarer. Offering Galatea a magnificent bow and quiver from his bounty, he alludes to Venus and to Cupid, as the sound of goats interrupts his song and sets in motion the events that lead to Acis's death. Polifemo's actions disprove his rhetoric. The professed reformation through love is an illusion. The destructive force cannot be contained, nor can violence be averted. Their silent harmony invaded, the lovers invoke divine assistance. The narrator alludes to these cries for help without reproducing them. Sea deities transform the bleeding, lifeless Acis into a stream, where, in a spiritual yet pyrrhic victory, he will dwell at the side of Doris, mother of Galatea. Polifemo, for his part, speaks no more. The figurative conversion, negated by wrath, is overshadowed by the metamorphosis of Acis.

In stanza 4, the narrator describes a huge rock that serves as a gag to the mouth of the cavern inhabited by Polifemo. A far more accurate association is the depiction of Galatea as “mute crystal.” Why would Góngora deprive Galatea of discursive space? The nymph, like the upper nobility, is graced by birth. She haughtily disdains her suitors. Her beauty is distracting; she causes work to go undone, and what is produced is placed as an offering before her. She stands at the center of the poem's conflict, but she does not play an active role in the conflict. Her love for Acis—her metamorphosis—comes at the hands of Cupid as deus ex machina. One could say that love puts Galatea in her place, as the contested object whose fate is determined by those vying for her. Although the suppression of women's voices is common in the Golden Age—the male-inflected discourse of picaresque antiheroines is but one example³⁰—the Polifemo seems to be less about sexual politics than about authority in the realm of art.

With the aid of Cupid, Acis exerts a certain control over Galatea. Proud of his natural gifts, he “shows off his person” (“la persona ostenta,” 38b) during the brief courtship ritual in which he is as much the object of beauty as is Galatea. In the condensed temporal frame of the poem, the courtship progresses to union, in a natural setting transformed into nuptial couch by the love deities. When Polifemo discovers the couple, they are defenseless, and their only recourse is to flee. The cyclops is the outsider, the intruder, unlike anyone around him. He is of exaggerated proportions, and the world appears smaller in his presence. When, moved by love, he strives to follow social decorum, that is, to subdue his destructive instincts, the combative urge wins out. He seeks to blot out, to erase, the enemy. In allegorical terms, Acis may represent Renaissance poetry, or the more comprehensive intertext, and Polifemo the new poetry, a hyperbolic reinscription of the old. Góngora fights for supremacy, but he knows that erasure of the intertext is impossible. Acis dies, to be reincarnated in another form, in another medium, and his presence is a reminder that one cannot escape the traces of the past. Polifemo is defined, in part, by Acis, by the act of competition. Change does not come without sacrifice. Within this scheme, Galatea may represent the public, forced to recognize the inevitability of change and the superiority of the more substantial model. Like the infanta of Las meninas, she directs us to the mirror in the work of art—to the work of art as a mirror—and ultimately to our own reflection as judges of the creative process.

There is another symbolic contest in the Polifemo, a competition between two poets: the narrator, representing Góngora, and Polifemo as “author” of the entreaty to Galatea. Samuel Guyler and Anthony Cascardi see the cyclops's song as a parodic imitation of Góngora's verse, and the result is, of course, a poetic composition of lesser merit. Góngora gives Polifemo a distinctive voice, as playwrights give voices to their characters and novelists to first-person narrators. Just as figures in the comedia speak in verse and a narrator such as Pablos in the Buscón employs the language of conceptismo, Polifemo's discourse both resembles his master's style and forms its peculiar idiolect. The cyclops, distracted by love, avails himself of a harsher, more earthy lexicon and on occasion breaks with literary protocol. If he is inferior to Góngora, however, that does not mean that he is not a most accomplished poet. Some of Polifemo's verses reflect the more straightforward approach to poetic diction. He describes his impressive height as follows:

¿Qué mucho, si de nubes se corona
por igualarme la montaña en vano,
y en los cielos, desde esta roca, puedo
escribir mis desdichas con el dedo?

(52e-h)

[Is it surprising that the mountain / crowns itself with clouds in vain in order to equal me, / and that from this peak, I can / write my grief in the heavens with my finger?]

The narrator writes,

Un monte era de miembros eminente
este (que, de Neptuno hijo fiero,
de un ojo ilustra el orbe de su frente,
émulo casi del mayor lucero).

(7a-d)

[An enormous mountain of limbs was / he who—wild son of Neptune—, / illuminates his browed sphere with one eye, / virtual rival of the brightest star.]

(Singleton; emended by Iarocci)

It is fascinating to observe that passages of great beauty, spoken by Polifemo, dim beside analogous passages of the narrator. Consider, for example, the delicacy of the cyclops's use of pearl imagery:

Pisa la arena, que en la arena adoro
cuantas el blanco pie conchas platea,
cuyo bello contacto puede hacerlas,
sin concebir rocío, parir perlas.

(47e-h)

[Step on the sand, for in the sand I adore / the shells that your white foot makes silver; / by its beautiful contact with them, / without conceiving a drop of dew, they bear pearls.]

The narrator says of Galatea,

De su frente la perla es, eritrea,
émula vana. El ciego dios se enoja,
y, condenado su esplendor, la deja
pender en oro al nácar de su oreja.

(14e-h)

[With her brow the pearl of Eritrea / rivals in vain. The blind god angers / and condemns its splendor to gold, / dropping it from the pearl which is her ear.]

(Singleton; emended by Iarocci)

Góngora places Polifemo in the discursive center of the text, between silenced, or remade, traditions and the major advocate of the new poetry. The giant is powerful enough to defeat his symbolic enemy, but he must defer to the artistry of his creator. There is consistency in difference, and therein lies a paradox of the Polifemo. In portraying the hyperbolic, magnified world of the cyclops, who hurls boulders the size of pyramids and who can almost touch the sky, Góngora holds back, reserving for his poetic alter ego—the narrator—the creative extreme, the definitive hyperbole, the competitive edge.

Cascardi finds in the murder of Acis a convergence of the two artists, one as performer and the other as bard. He notes that “as Góngora has Polifemo brutally kill Acis, the destruction of the pastoral world that was begun in the grandiose delusions of the cyclops' song is brought to completion.”³¹ Observing the preponderance of sea imagery throughout the poem, Kathleen Dolan calls the metamorphosis of Acis an inversion of neoplatonic mysticism through affirmation of a marine rather than a celestial source of all forms. Thus, “it is not Acis but Polifemo who is finally effaced by the ecstatic poetics of the fable,” in a fusion of figure and ground.³² Rather than viewing Polifemo as merging with his author or as erased from the text—the true object of metamorphosis, the self-consuming artifact—one may argue, I believe, that the cyclops remains the same; that is, paradoxically, he is a sign of difference, of determination, of overdetermination. Erasure is impossible, and, what is more, erasure is undesirable. In order for creation to take place, the “other” must be present. Acis needs Polifemo. Polifemo needs Góngora's narrator. Góngora needs Ovid, Garcilaso, and Carrillo, and he needs his detractors. Cupid and the sea deities in the Polifemo control, respectively, the amorous feelings of Galatea and the metamorphosis of Acis. They are markers of the presence of the intertext, markers of Góngora's shared authority in the text. The poet must fight tradition and expand upon tradition, must deconstruct in order to reconstruct, must know the enemy. Harold Bloom makes the point that poets “need to know that the dead poets will not consent to make way for others. But, it is more important that the new poets possess a richer knowing. The precursors flood us, and our imaginations can die by drowning in them, but no imaginative life is possible if such inundation is wholly evaded.”³³ Góngora builds into his bellicose text an acknowledgment of the rigors of creation and of the loving and hateful relation between alterity and interdependence.

The Polifemo is, in many ways, an overdetermined text. The fable, however modified, is a known quantity. Even when narrated in the present of experience, the story is perhaps more ironic than suspenseful. Polifemo's song repeats much of the narrator's account; what is new—the professed conversion—turns out to be false. The repetition is hardly superfluous. The cyclops's lament shows us his perspective, his perception of the state of events, his rhetorical strategies. Stephen Gilman remarks that “conceptist tongues do not talk from the heart which feels intuitively the oneness of all things, but from the mind, only concerned with its own advantage, with its own individuality. Thus the desperate artist played with the forms and words of a disjointed world, a world he disjoined further.”³⁴ Góngora gives his monster a heart and a cultured, if bucolic, artistic sensitivity. Polifemo is alterity hyperbolized and hyperbole made relative, a killer and a poet. He exists in the margins, but he is master of what lies between the margins. For all his material wealth and lofty claims, he is willing to settle for less; he is willing to settle for being Acis. Difference mediates and undermines his desire, and he must destroy the antithetical double, who now inhabits the margin. Góngora, recognizing that he cannot be Garcilaso, attempts to overpower his predecessor with words and fights to relegate him to the margin, where he will survive as a trace of the Renaissance.

Góngora's principal mechanism—his strongest arm—is the open signified. Paul Julian Smith refers to a “constantly shifting sign system,” “an unregulated circulation of signs, and, indeed, of sexes” in the Polifemo.³⁵ Malcolm K. Read depicts a Góngora “in battle with the body, his body, his poetic predecessors.” And, he says, in the Baroque, when the parental figure assumes the size of Polifemo, the poet must rise to unknown heights, … violating language beyond all permissible limits.”³⁶ Smith and Read have brilliantly defined the bodily politics of the Polifemo. The poem seems to fit the pattern of what Terence Cave calls the cornucopian text, in which sexuality certainly comes into play. I would suggest that the most evident “cornucopian” aspect of the Polifemo is its link with rhetoric. This would include the duality of the Erasmian copia, both elegant speech and copy, and cornucopia, abundance, productivity. For Cave, “the phrase copia dicendi, or even copia alone, is a ubiquitous synonym for eloquence [and] suggests a rich, many faceted discourse springing from a fertile mind and powerfully affecting its recipient. At this level, its value lies precisely in the broadness of its figurative register: it transcends specific techniques and materials, pointing towards an ideal of ‘articulate energy,’ of speech in action.”³⁷ The cornucopian design of the Polifemo may, in the end, encompass its ideology. Sicilian abundance, abundance in nature, abundant beauty and exaggerated ugliness, abundance of possessions, mercantile abundance, an abundance of words, of images, of figures, of connections, of linguistic and semantic metamorphoses: this is what the poem is about. It is about the means by which the poet reads the world and other texts and about how he can leave his mark—his signature—on the world. It is about what happens when the writer's world expands and about how the expansion orients both story and discourse. It is about the trials of authorship and about the role of the public. It is about profusion and lack, and about the relative nature of signs. It is about change. It is about competition, in the most violent and admiring sense.

Notes

1. Stephen Gilman, “An Introduction to the Ideology of the Baroque in Spain,” Symposium 1, no. 2 (1946): 82-107.

2. Antonio Maravall, “From the Renaissance to the Baroque: The Diphasic Schema of a Social Crisis,” trans. Terry Cochran, in Literature among Discourses: The Spanish Golden Age, ed. Wlad Godzich and Nicholas Spadaccini (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), pp. 3-40.

3. For discussion of polemics regarding the new poetry, see, among other studies, those of Dámaso Alonso, Góngora y el “Polifemo,” 7th ed., 3 vols. (Madrid: Gredos, 1985); Eunice Joiner Gates, “Sidelights on Contemporary Criticism of Góngora's Polifemo,” PMLA 75 (1960): 503-8; Colin Smith, “On the Use of Spanish Theoretical Works in the Debate on Gongorism,” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 39 (1962): 165-76; Andrée Collard, Nueva poesía: Conceptismo, culteranismo en la crítica española (Madrid: Castalia, 1967); David William Foster and Virginia Ramos Foster, Luis de Góngora (New York: Twayne, 1973); Ana Martínez Arancón, La batalla en torno a Góngora (Barcelona: Antoni Bosch, 1978); Emilio Orozco, Introducción a Góngora (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1984); and Angel Pariente, ed., En torno a Góngora (Madrid: Júcar, 1987).

4. John R. Beverley, Aspects of Góngora's “Soledades,” Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, 1 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1980).

5. Ibid., pp. 27 and 29.

6. Jonathan Brown, “On the Meaning of ‘Las Meninas.’” In Images and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Spanish Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 109.

7. Paul Julian Smith, “The Rhetoric of Presence in Poets and Critics of Golden Age Lyric: Garcilaso, Herrera, Góngora,” Modern Language Notes 100 (1985): 239.

8. John R. Beverley, “The Production of Solitude: Góngora and the State,” Ideologies and Literature 3, no. 13 (June-August 1980): 24; Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. xi.

9. Beverley, “Production,” p. 24; Lorna Close, “The Play of Difference: A Reading of Góngora's Soledades,” in Conflicts of Discourse: Spanish Literature in the Golden Age, ed. Peter W. Evans (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 184-98.

10. Beverley, “Production,” p. 25.

11. Jonathan Crewe, Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 9.

12. Pedro Salinas, Reality and the Poet in Spanish Poetry, trans. Edith Fishtine Helman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1966), p. 140.

13. Paul Julian Smith, The Body Hispanic: Gender and Sexuality in Spanish and Spanish American Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), pp. 70-71.

14. Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure, trans. Terry Cochran, Theory and History of Literature 25 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 233.

15. Addressing Colin Smith's “Approach,” M. J. Woods comments that “it is interesting … that Góngora should describe the perfection of his natural setting in terms appropriate to civilized life—carpets, canopies, blinds, and four-poster beds … Góngora sees the beauty of nature as a kind of artifice, which means that he cannot be said to be seeking to establish an antithesis between the untamed natural world on the one hand, and the creations of artifice on the other.” M. J. Woods, The Poet and the Natural World in the Age of Góngora (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 156.

16. Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, p. 175.

17. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 51.

18. Elias L. Rivers, ed., Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1988), pp. 157-58.

19. Beverley, “Production,” p. 24. Paul Julian Smith (The Body Hispanic) points to a “linguistic surface which refuses to be anchored safely to the solid materiality of a pre-existing referent” and notes that “Góngora's catachreses (metaphors deprived of primary terms) … point to an absolute attribute (beauty, femininity) which they necessarily fail to embody” (p. 64).

20. See Alonso, Góngora y el “Polifemo,” 3: 97-100, and Miroslav John Hanak, trans., “The Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea”: A Bilingual Version with a Critical Analysis (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), pp. 39-41. See also Alonso, Poesía española, pp. 370-77.

21. Edward P. J. Corbett, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 445.

22. R. V. Young, “Versions of Galatea: Renaissance and Baroque Imitation,” Renaissance Papers, ed. Dale B. Randall and Joseph A. Porter (Durham: Southeast Renaissance Conference, 1984), p. 62.

23. Ibid.

24. Carrillo has been studied by Dámaso Alonso, Justo García Soriano, Emilio Orozco Díaz, and Fernando de Villena, as well as by Vilanova. An edition of the Libro de la erudición by Angelina Costa appeared in 1987, and Rosa Navarro Durán's edition of the complete works (cited here) was published in 1990 (Luis Carrillo y Sotomayor, Obras, ed. Rosa Navarro Durán [Madrid: Castalia]).

25. See Carrillo, esp. pp. 345, 364-65, 368, 380-81, and Navarro Durán's introduction, pp. 67-90.

26. See Navarro Durán, pp. 55-56, and Antonio Vilanova, Las fuentes y los temas del “Polifemo” de Góngora: Revista de Filología Española, Anejo 66 (Madrid, 1957), 1:237 and 2: 523-24. Melinda Eve Lehrer, in Classical Myth and the “Polifemo” of Góngora (Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1989), devotes a chapter of her study of the Polifemo to a comparison of the two works (pp. 36-51).

27. Alonso, Góngora y el “Polifemo,” 1: 205.

28. For a presentation of the concept of le scriptible, or of the dichotomy lisibilité/illisibilité, see, for example, the introductory sections of Roland Barthes' S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974).

29. The term interpretant is used by Charles S. Pierce to denote the necessary third element that links a sign to its object. See Winifried Nöth, Handbook of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), pp. 43-44. Michael Riffaterre incorporates this term and the concept in The Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

30. See Edward H. Friedman, The Antiheroine's Voice: Narrative Discourse and the Transformations of the Picaresque (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987).

31. Anthony J. Cascardi, “The Exit from Arcadia: Reevaluation of the Pastoral in Virgil, Garcilaso, and Góngora,” Journal of Hispanic Philology 4 (1980): 135.

32. Kathleen Dolan, “Figure and Ground: Concrete Mysticism in Góngora's Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea,” Hispanic Review 52 (1984): 232.

33. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 154.

34. Gilman, “An Introduction to the Ideology of the Baroque in Spain,” p. 107.

35. Smith, The Body Hispanic, p. 66.

36. Malcolm K. Read, Visions in Exile: The Body in Spanish Literature and Linguistics, 1500-1800. Purdue University Monographs in the Romance Languages, 30 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1990), p. 45.

37. Cave, The Cornucopian Text, p. 5.