SOURCE: Beverley, John R. “Introduction” and “Góngora's ‘Carta en respuesta.’” In Aspects of Góngora's Soledades, pp. 1-8, 11-25. Amsterdam: John Benjamins B. V., 1980.

[In the first excerpt below, Beverley argues that the Soledades was written in response to Hapsburg absolutism, Spanish decadence, and impending imperial decline. In the second excerpt, he examines the language in the Soledades, which, he notes, is so complicated that it was often condemned in its own day as incomprehensible.]

INTRODUCTION

It was no accident that Dámaso Alonso found it necessary to incorporate in his work on Góngora's poetic language some of the concepts of Saussure's structural linguistics. The nature of any linguistic sign, Saussure had suggested, proposed a relation between two relata: signifier and signified, speaker and hearer, intention and understanding, language rule and language use, convention and invention. The attack on the Soledades in the early seventeenth century was directed against Góngora's deviations from what were regarded as the permissible norms of poetic communication. It maintained that in the Soledades language, in effect, had ceased to signify, that Góngora in wanting to create a utopia of language had fallen instead into the sin of Babel. Recently, in an aphorism bearing on what I take to be the formalist canon on the Soledades, Maurice Molho has remarked: “Il convient donc de lire les Solitudes comme un essai de reconstruction du langage—d'un langage—à partir du langage, et des rapports sur lesquels il se fond.”¹

But the problem of the creation of language in the Soledades is not something peculiar to language alone. Linguistic formalism can tell us a great deal about the poem, show its precise mechanisms of imagination and construction. It leaves, however, a number of questions “in parenthesis”: Why this particular act of linguistic invention? What is its relation to the historical time and space in which it signifies? Why the enormous effort and dangers it involves? Why the central figure of the pilgrim? Why his restlessness, his failure to find consolation? Góngora's language, like any language, is an act of communication that implies the social urgency of a message that must be communicated. To borrow Saussure's metaphors, the Soledades compose not only a langue, as if their purpose was to be an autonomous and self-referential formal system, but also a parole, a way of being and acting in the social and historical world that circumscribes Góngora's practice as a poet.

One should find it strange that a work which is supposed to be an absolute poetry—a “territory” of language accessible only to an aristocracy of aesthetes—displays such a detailed and reiterated interest in the ways ordinary people make their living. Let me note only two of many examples in the Soledades. The goatherds who shelter the pilgrim after the shipwreck offer him a cup of milk:

y en boj, aunque rebelde, a quien el torno
forma elegante dió sin culto adorno,
leche que exprimir vió la Alba aquel día
—mientras perdían con ella
los blancos lilios de su frente bella—,
gruesa le dan y fría,
impenetrable casi a la cuchara,
del viejo Alcimedón invención rara.

(I, 145-52)

Some days later the pilgrim comes upon a party of fishermen who invite him to join them as they cast their nets:

Dando el huésped licencia para ello,
recurren no a las redes que, mayores,
mucho Océano y pocas aguas prenden,
sino a las que ambiciosas menos penden,
laberinto nudoso de marino
Dédalo, si de leño no, de lino,
fábrica escrupulosa, y aunque incierta,
siempre murada, pero siempre abierta.

(II, 73-80)

The simple curve of a wooden cup turned on a lathe, the “invención rara” of a spoon, the freshness and thickness of curded milk, the different sizes and weaves of the nets are observed here with an obvious attention to forms of elaboration and use. This is hardly a language which “alludes” to reality only to escape it in spirals of embellishment. It rejects the merely “decorative” (“forma elegante … sin culto adorno”) and the pretentious (“redes que … mucho Océano y pocas aguas prenden”). It seems more a language whose own concern with technique is bound up in the qualities of the simple objects of labor or consumption it is describing, objects which, like Góngora's images, are devices for capturing and containing.

If the Soledades are an anthology of lyrical descriptions and episodes, what binds these together is that they serve to index a group of social forms which correspond to the technologies portrayed in passages such as the two above.² The poem presents at least four different types of human community: an Arcadian society of goatherds and hunters living in the mountains; a country village, apparently the center of a region of cultivated fields, where the pilgrim is a guest at a wedding; a coastal island inhabited by a single family who depends economically on fishing, artisanry, and garden farming; a feudal estate and its castle which form the background to a description of a hawking expedition. An epic narrative interpolated in the Soledad primera by an old shepherd recounts the discovery and conquest of Spain's overseas empire in the sixteenth century and pictures the enterprise as a misfortune, an act of tragic vanity. (R. O. Jones once described the Soledades as “anti-imperialist pastoral.”)³ Throughout the poem there are notes on the contemporary life of the Court and the great cities which serve as a counterpoint to the pastoral landscapes and rustic huts the pilgrim passes through. The pilgrim himself is someone who has lost touch with his own society, an exile sometimes consumed by nostalgia, sometimes hoping to find in his journey a new homeland. The places he encounters in the Soledades confront him with images of natural economies and societies where men and women live in close intimacy with manual labor and with the variety of nature, where production is for use rather than personal profit, where equality and generosity still reign.

Who is this pilgrim? In part, of course, Góngora; in part, the reader who is “addressed” by the poem. Christopher Caudwell described the English poets who were Góngora's near contemporaries as “shy, proud men writing alone in their studies—appealing from court life to the country or heaven”:

Poetry, drawing away from the collective life of the court, can only withdraw into the privacy of the bourgeois study, austerely furnished, shared only with a few chosen friends, surroundings so different from the sleeping and waking publicity of court life that it rapidly revolutionises poetic technique. … Language reflects the change. Lyrics no longer become something that a gentleman could sing to his lady; conceits are no longer something which could be tossed in courtly conversation. Poetry is no longer something to be roared out to a mixed audience. It smells of the library where it was produced. It is a learned man's poetry: student's poetry. Poetry is read, not declaimed: it is correspondingly subtle and intricate.⁴

With due allowance, this can stand also as a portrait of the Soledades and their author. Góngora, as Robert Jammes has shown, belonged to the lower orders of the Andalusian provincial aristocracy, orders which had not fared well under the economic changes and inflation imposed by Hapsburg centralism and imperialism. This implied two things: the poet's lack of extensive property in land or other forms of nobiliary wealth like the censos or juros issued by the Court against its income from the colonies, and a special love for and knowledge of his native region combined with a barely concealed distaste for Madrid and the intrigue of power and money-making.⁵ Like so many other titled but impecunious letrados in the Golden Age period, he will have to seek a position in the state and ecclesiastical apparatus erected by Hapsburg absolutism and the Spanish Counter Reformation. After his studies at Salamanca, he is awarded a prebend at the Cathedral of Córdoba which provides him with a meager income. But there is little in his life or work which suggests anything more than the most nominal attachment to the Church, and his heterodox tastes and pursuits place him more than once in conflict with his superiors. His real ambition is to gain fame and influence through his poetry. He begins his literary career as an apprentice of Herrera's Sevillian school; around 1585, when he is barely into his twenties, he seems, however, to have achieved his own style and following. His poetry and friends, which include some important figures in the Hapsburg ministries like the Count of Villamediana, allow him to try his hand at intervals as one of the hundreds of talented petty hidalgos jockeying for recognition and reward in a court which, after Philip II's death in 1598, is less and less able to oblige them. (In this, he shares the frustrations and financial difficulties Cervantes experienced after his return from captivity in Algeria.) In 1609 he finds himself in a legal tangle in Madrid, the victim, apparently, of his own indiscretions at the Court and the growing animosity of literary rivals like Quevedo and Lope. Between 1610 and 1618 he lives in a sort of semi-exile from Madrid in a small country estate near Córdoba, the Huerta de Marcos. Here he dedicates himself to the creation of the Polifemo and the two cantos of the Soledades. The Andalusian countryside shapes the form and theme of these poems; they reflect a disenchantment with the Court and the political destiny of Spain, a desire to construct something that can be posed against an oppressive authority. On his departure from Madrid, he writes this ironic valedictory:

Dichoso el que pacífico se esconde
a este civil rüido, y litigante,
o se concierta o por poder responde,
sólo por no ser miembro corteggiante
de sierpe prodigiosa, que camina
la cola, como el gámbaro, delante.
¡Oh Soledad, de la quietud divina
dulce prenda, aunque muda, ciudadana
del campo, y de sus Ecos convecina!

(Millé 395)

But the temptation of the Court is always with him, and the poems of his rural “soledad” are also shaped by its tensions and promises. In 1618 Góngora returns to Madrid, seduced by the offer of a position as chaplain to the royal family. He seems at the height of his fortune and artistic powers, only to find himself suddenly caught up along with his friends and patrons in the precipitous collapse of the Duke of Lerma's ministry and the rise of the new favorite, Olivares. He spends the remaining decade of his life struggling against debt, the animosity of his many enemies and rivals, and his own failing health and sanity. In 1627 he dies in Córdoba; in the same year, the Inquisition prohibits the sale of the first public edition of his poetry, Juan de Vicuña's Obras en verso del Homero español.

Regarding this trajectory, Jammes observes: “On peut dire que la carrière de Góngora est exemplaire, car elle suit la même courbe descendante que l'ensemble de la monarchie espagnole durant la même periode.”⁶ In the eyes of the arbitristas whose company and advice Góngora valued, the Spain of Lerma and Philip III is a nation undergoing a general crisis, deluded by the glitter of precious metals and a false dream of imperial grandeur and aristocratic sublimation. González de Cellorigo suggested the Cervantine image of “una república de hombres encantados, que [viven] fuera del orden natural.”⁷ The vast empire so quickly and confidently gained begins to acquire the aspect of a labyrinth or ruin. The great Indian civilizations of America lie in rubble; the population which survives the Conquest is reduced to the servitude of forced labor in the mines or the encomiendas of the colonial elite. The exhaustion of the gold and silver lodes, the depopulation of both America and parts of Castile, the fiscal crisis of the state and the domestic economy assume alarming proportions in the years following the death of Philip II.⁸

Góngora reflects the crisis of the empire in his own vision of the New World:

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 dió marinería
a España en uno y otro alado pino,
interés ligurino
su rubia sangre hoy día,
su medula chupando está luciente.

(Millé 404)

The “ligurina marinería” refers to Columbus and the Discovery; the “interés ligurino” to the profits of the Genoese banks on the loans they extended to the Hapsburgs: America, 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.) The gold and silver extracted at such enormous human cost from the American mines pass into Spain, consolidating the power of a leisured aristocracy and church, creating new cities like Madrid whose sole function is to house and service a huge state and ecclesiastical bureaucracy. The policies of the Hapsburgs leave a heritage of economic and political repression (the defeat of the Comunero revolts); excessive taxation of the productive sectors of the Spanish economy (the aristocracy remains exempt from this obligation); increasing national debt; unproductive investment in government censos and juros, military and luxury goods, or gifts to the church; periodic fiscal crises; and rapid inflation. What Vicens Vives called the Castilian “bourgeois meteor”—the rise of a prosperous manufacturing and trading bourgeoisie in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—burns out. Much of the American gold and silver finds its way out of Spain to the banks of Amsterdam and Genoa, to the merchant and manufacturing ports of England, northern France, and the Hanseatic League. There it stimulates the newly emerging capitalist franchise. As the flow of precious metals to Spain declines towards the end of the sixteenth century, the country discovers it has nothing to put in its place. In the decades following the defeat of the Armada, Spain's military and naval hegemony fades as the other emerging nation states of Europe and the Ottoman Empire step forward to compete for colonies, trade routes, and subject populations. The empire begins the process of contraction which will culminate in 1898. The Netherlands continue to press their century-long war of national liberation, posing the bourgeois ideal of a free merchant republic against the feudal absolutism of the Hapsburgs. It is a war that Spain cannot win, but cannot seem to lose decisively either. Beyond it, with the rise of Olivares' ministry, lie the further depredations of the Thirty Years' War. By 1640, the regions of Hapsburg Spain itself—Catalonia, Andalusia, Portugal—attempt to break away from the weakened Castilian center. Portugal succeeds in freeing itself; the other regions are crushed. Spain remains a power, but only at the cost of subjecting its own population and resources to strains and sacrifices that will severely retard its possibilities for growth. The social classes which form the backbone of the Puritan revolution in England—the manufacturing bourgeoisie, the peasants and small landowning gentry of the municipios, the artisans and the members of the professions—are the sections of the population most damaged by the emerging crisis. The masses—the urban Lazarillos of the picaresque novel and the peasants of the comedias and entremeses—find their conditions of life deteriorating. The rise of the cities in the sixteenth century dislocates the traditional patterns of life and production in the countryside; a “marginal” population appears, living off petty crime, beggary, odd jobs, fraud: the floating world of Quevedo's Buscón. Unemployment, corruption, the cult of appearances, and bureaucracy are rife. Lope notes cynically:

Todos andan bien vestidos
y quéjanse de los precios,
de medio arriba, romanos,
de medio abajo, romeros.

In this setting, schizophrenia seems to be a prerequisite of enlightenment: Cervantes' Vidriera and Quijote, Quevedo's Sueños, Góngora's “soledad confusa.” The sturdy humanism of the early sixteenth century has yielded to a “national” culture characterized by conformism, chauvinism, and religious and intellectual pedantry. The Court, dominated by the conflicting parties of the great nobility and by a spirit of petty Machiavellianism, is incapable of staking the country to policies that might begin to reverse the decline and restore the freedom and well-being of the people. To deflect popular discontent, it contrives acts of ill-considered opportunism like the expulsion of the Moriscos of Andalusia and Valencia in 1610. The capacity to think through the problems of the country has not been lost; if anything the critiques and reform projects of the arbitristas like González de Cellorigo show an unexpected economic sophistication and realism. But the capacity to act on these suggestions seems paralyzed, perhaps because they threaten to undermine the power and privileges of the aristocracy. L. J. Woodward has noted Góngora's close friendship with Pedro de Valencia, a utopian humanist in the tradition of Thomas More and his Erasmist colleagues in Italy, Spain, and the Netherlands. Valencia served as a sort of editor of the Soledades, and what survives of his correspondence with Góngora shows him as a refined literary connoisseur and a rigorous critic of errors of taste in the poem. But he is also someone who, as Woodward explains, “advocated the break-up of the large estates and their distribution among the peasants, the construction of an economy based on service and as far as possible free from the evils of money and credit.” He shares with Góngora that respect, curious in two men who are both letrados and aristocrats, for the processes of manual labor we have observed in several images of the Soledades. For Valencia, “… the rich are objects of contempt, the manual laborers, especially those who work on the land, are properly the masters of society.”⁹

The Soledades, I want to argue, are as much a way of posing the problems of Spain's crisis in the early seventeenth century as the work of the arbitristas. To pose these problems correctly, to show that there may be alternatives still present in the life of the country, to reeducate himself and his readers, the poet has to escape from their immediate pressure to “another world.” The retreat into art is a pilgrimage: the search for the image and quality of a possible utopia that can be placed against the experience of history as disaster, blind fate. 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. The retreat should come back into time in the form of a plausible redemption. But it does not. The Soledades end with an image of uncertainty and horror: “y a la estigia deidad con bella esposa.” This is what makes Góngora and his art finally different from Caudwell's account of the Puritan poets. These address a class which, in the seventeenth century, is beginning to exercise its ideas and institutions with increasing authority. Their poetry reflects and in turn helps to form the values and aspirations of the class, its images of community and history, its morality and personal style, its sense of revolutionary legitimacy. Beyond their withdrawal to the scholar's study and their attacks on the vanity of the Court, they are able to intuit the advent of a “new Jerusalem,” and they bend their art and their lives to serve its birth.

Góngora has neither this confidence nor this possibility. The crisis of Hapsburg absolutism is a sterile one. Pierre Vilar has summarized it best: “El imperialismo español ha sido en realidad ‘la etapa suprema’ de la sociedad que él mismo ha contribuido a destruir. Pero en su propio solar, en Castilla y hacia 1600, el feudalismo entra en agonía sin que exista nada a punto para reemplazarle.”¹⁰ The Soledades are an attempt to understand and humanize the force of history in a society history has turned against. They are directed not to an emerging class which has, or is in the process of developing, the power to effect a reconstruction of the social order, but rather to a diminishing elite capable of understanding Góngora's inventions and intimations. These readers are, like the poet himself, isolated and contradictory figures, aristocratic radicals who sometimes challenge, sometimes celebrate the authority of the social class that nurtures them. To the extent that they understand what has to be done, they are powerless to act on that understanding, compelled to hold it as a secret shared in conversations, allusions, letters. Lucidity—the “claridad” Dámaso Alonso found in the Soledades—yields not a new ethics but instead aestheticism and a private ideology of stoic tacitism.

The Soledades are both a reflection and a symptom of the Spanish Decadence. In this sense they are a failure, something that falls short of its promise, that has to be abandoned to a disillusion Góngora felt more intimately than we can understand. What is lasting in them, however, and what allows them to be recommenced is his willingness to embrace and express the deepest contradictions in himself and the concrete moment of history in which he lives and works. The loneliness of this task—the construction of solitude—conceals a communion with other human beings and other possibilities of life and art which extend beyond this moment and its terrible knot of determinations.

GóNGORA'S “CARTA EN RESPUESTA”

Francisco Cascales, the typical humanist of the literary Counter Reformation in Spain, commented on his reading of an early text of the Soledades:

¡Oh diabólico poema! Pues ¿qué ha pretendido nuestro poeta? Yo lo diré; destruir la poesía. … ¿En qué manera? Volviendo a su primer caos las cosas; haciendo que ni los pensamientos se entiendan, ni las palabras se conozcan con la confusión y desorden.¹¹

The Cartas filológicas dealing with Góngora and the Soledades suggest again and again that the poem and the positions taken by its defenders imply a kind of atheism in questions of poetics. (Three centuries later Vicente Gaos writes: “La poesía de Góngora es constitutivamente atea, en efecto.”)¹² The Soledades are a Babel, the delirium of a language which seeks to function independent of religious doctrine and pedagogy, which is motivated only by the vanity of its creator. Góngora's celebrated enigmas uncover no principle of truth, no mysteries of nature, religion, or morality, only an artificial riddling and unriddling of puns, allusions, images, and tricks of syntax: “son indisolubles, inútiles y nugatorias, que sólo sirven de dar garrote al entendimiento.” To Cascales, therefore, the Góngora of the Soledades is a “Mahoma de la poesía española.”

What is evident here is that the debate over the Soledades in the literary circles of the Court of Philip III quickly escalated beyond questions of literary taste and decorum. The suggestion of the heretical status of Góngora's new manner (compare Quevedo's “Yo te untaré mis versos con tocino”) meant not so much that the “Microcósmote Dios de inquiridones” was actually a converso. (Robert Jammes has laid this much-debated issue to rest.)¹³ Rather it was more a charge that Góngora's way of doing poetry departed from the canons of the prevailing poetics in which questions of this kind would have to be posed.

Cascales' remarks posit themselves along the thin and increasingly strained line that separated the rhetorics and literary theory of the Spanish Counter Reformation from the actual practice of the poets and writers. (One sign of this separation between theory and practice is the appearance in the early seventeenth century of statements on poetics by the writers themselves: Lope's Arte nuevo de hacer comedias, Carrillo y Sotomayor's Libro de la erudición poética, Cervantes at intervals in the Quijote, Tirso in Los cigarrales de Toledo, etc.) Andrée Collard has recently argued that in Góngora's major poetry of the Soledades period (roughly 1610 to 1621) the didactic concept of the poet as vates or prophet crucial to a pedagogic poetics is abandoned in favor of a “hedonistic” concept of the poet as pure artificer derived from the exercises of literary connoisseurship. “En realidad,” she writes, “Góngora inventa un nuevo género poético en que la ‘utilidad’ desaparece frente al arte descriptivo. … Reúne rasgos de la poesía tradicional épica, lírica y dramática, quitándoles su antigua función.”¹⁴ The point is to agree in a certain sense with Cascales and the denigrators of Góngora who come to be known as the detractores that the Soledades are heretical, that they no longer belong in the context of a religio-moral determination of subjects and forms of imitation. Where for Cascales the poem and not the integrity of the normative poetics must therefore be condemned to non-sense, the revision of Góngora in the twentieth century has tended, inversely, to a celebration of poetic formalism. For the Alonso of the seminal “Claridad y belleza de las Soledades” (1927), the value of Gongorism was predicated on a sense of the crisis of the realist novel and the new attention (Cubism) to a “puro placer de formas”: “Contra el interés novelesco, el estético. En lugar del interés novelesco—alimento de las actividades espirituales de orden práctico—la densa polimorfía de temas de belleza.”¹⁵ The source to which the poet-Gongorists of the Generation of '27 referred was the Apologético en favor de Don Luis de Góngora by the Peruvian humanist Juan de Espinosa Medrano, a work which dismissed the “doctrinal” objections of Cascales and the traditionalist school as irrelevant to the specific nature of poetic creation and enjoyment.¹⁶

These definitions are not without their point; formalist poetics, both in the seventeenth century and in our own, have served to rescue Góngora's major works, especially the Soledades, from the oblivion to which they have been repeatedly condemned. Collard's notion of the poet-artificer, in particular, touches on the common theme of Góngora's defenders in the Madrid Court who were given to opposing an aristocracy of aesthetes versed in subtleties of poetic theme and technique, to the pedants and “vulgarizers” of didactic poetics. There is a problem, however. Góngora, in his own defense of the Soledades, the “Carta en respuesta de la que le escribieron” (Millé, Epistolario 2), rather explicitly activates the traditional poet-vates topos. “Pregunto yo,” he asks at the beginning of his reply to the charges made against his poem, “¿han sido útiles al mundo las poesías y aun las profecías (que vates se llama el profeta como el poeta)? Sería error negarlo.” If we accept Collard's definition (which summarizes a formalist poetics of the Soledades), Góngora's language here has to seem paradoxical.

The “Carta en respuesta” was addressed by the poet in his semi-exile in Córdoba as an open letter meant to accompany the manuscript copies of the Soledades which were being distributed in Madrid by his friend Mendoza. It responds to an earlier “Carta de un amigo de Don Luis de Góngora que le escribió acerca de sus Soledades” (Millé, Epistolario 127), possibly by Lope and/or his literary cohorts. The “Carta de un amigo,” as it has come to be known, is the opening move in the long and complicated debate over the Soledades that was to occupy Spanish writers and critics on both sides for the next ten years.¹⁷ It sketches the image which was to become the common currency of the detractores: “muchos se han persuadido que le alcanzó algún ramalazo de la desdicha de Babel.” If it was Góngora's intention, the anonymous writer continues, to merit a special achievement for being “inventor de dificultar la construcción de el romance,” he should in the Soledades, if they are indeed his at all, recognize a cardinal error. “Mostrar agudeza” is one thing, but the consequent production must attend to the Horatian norm of the useful “wrapped in” the pleasing; the Soledades ignore this in favor of verbal fireworks. The letter ends with the demand “y pues las invenciones en tanto son buenas en cuanto tienen de útil, honroso y deleitable, lo que basta para quedar constituidas en razón de bien, dígame V.m. si hay algo en esta su novedad. …”

Góngora, in recovering the sense of the poet-vates concept in his “Carta en respuesta,” intends to meet this demand head-on. He pushes away with ironic ingenuity the charge of creating a Babel:

Al ramalazo de la desdicha de Babel, aunque el símil es humilde, quiero descubrir un secreto no entendido de V.m. al escribirme. No los confundió Dios a ellos con darles lenguaje confuso, sino en el mismo ellos se confundieron, tomando piedra por agua, y agua por piedra. … Yo no envió confusas las Soledades, sino la malicia de las voluntades en su mismo lenguaje halla confusión por parte del sujeto inficionado con ellas.

The Soledades are to be considered useful in the same sense as the intricate obscurity of Ovid in the Metamorphoses; the difficulty of language and conceit is meant to construct the poem as an exercise which the reader must work his way through in order to arrive at a keener faculty of mind. (And not of mere wit: “digo a V.m. que ya mi edad más está para veras que para burlas.”) Góngora poses in relation to the poet-vates concept an image of allegorical and eschatological exegesis: the surface of the text as a shell or “corteza” which contains a hidden kernel of meaning:

… da causa a que, vacilando el entendimiento en fuerza del discurso, trabajándole (pues crece con cualquier acto de valor) alcance lo que así en la lectura superficial de sus versos no pudo entender; luego hase de confesar que tiene utilidad avivar el ingenio, y eso nació de la obscuridad del poeta. Eso mismo hallará V.m. en mis Soledades, si tiene capacidad para quitar la corteza y descubrir lo misterioso que encubren.

Orozco Díaz explains that “la duplicidad de valores, de esa corteza, o sea de complicados planos verbales de figuras, y de ese sentido oculto o misterioso, supone algo característico de la obra barroca, que procura, de una parte, actuar sensorialmente deslumbrando con luces, colores y sonidos, y después nos inquieta en busca de un fondo o sentido oculto.”¹⁸ But what is the nature of this hidden sense?

Serrano de Paz, around 1636 in his Comentarios on the Soledades, represents one rather bizarre consequence of Góngora's apparent invitation to a hermeneutic reading. As Dámaso Alonso pointed out, the Comentarios were meant to rival the canonic exegeses of Pellicer and Salcedo Coronel. Where these had unriddled the Soledades line by line in the manner of Herrera's studies of Garcilaso, Serrano de Paz wanted to show that the poem was a systematic allegory on the order of Dante's Divine Comedy, even at the cost of inventing meanings which Góngora himself might not have intended:

… nunca entendí que el intento del Poema se acortasse en lo literal solo, antes siempre juzgué que el Poeta escondió otro sentido mayor del que muestra la letra, y assí fui discurriendo las alegorías que en el propósito se podían dar. Y no quiero que crea alguno que doy éstas por las intencionadas del Poeta, que acaso escondió otras muy diversas, pero en cosa tan oculta valga a cada uno su juyzio.

The results of this enterprise (for example, an interpretation of the fishing scenes of the second Soledad as, detail by detail, an allegory of the search for knowledge) Alonso properly makes fun of.¹⁹ But the Comentarios suggest, on the other hand, the kind of reading of the Soledades Sor Juana might have done in preparation for her Primero Sueño. They illustrate too that the defense of the Soledades in the Baroque period was not made solely on the grounds of the legitimacy of a formalist poetics, that in Calderón and Gracián, for example, elements of Góngora's style and imagery would be drawn into the service of precisely that which Cascales thought they offended, Catholic pedagogic allegory.

More conventionally, Góngora's “misterioso” has been taken as referring to the presence in the poem of the theme of “menosprecio de corte, alabanza de aldea” so dear to the poets of the Renaissance. In the early commentaries, like Pellicer's, this was joined with a sense that Góngora had intended his poem in its finished state as a narrative in four cantos or soledades of the stations of an aristocratic disillusion with life which would culminate in a hermitage or solitude of the desert. The late R. O. Jones, basing himself also on this point in the “Carta en respuesta,” undertook to explain the poem as a Neoplatonic gnostic allegory, a kind of Spanish and Baroque reworking of the Enneads. He read the Soledades as a philosophical pastoral which furnished around the narrative device of the pilgrim a series of didactic emblems of natural and cosmological harmony and providence. These emblems operate to organize the cornucopia of scenes and impressions that appear in tumultous and often contradictory profusion in the surface of the poem's language. Their compositional model was to be found, according to Jones, in Neoplatonic musical theory, specifically the idea of reality as a musica mundana, a world of order and stability behind the texture of sensory appearances. “Embodied in the proliferating images of life and beauty in the Soledades,” he concluded, “is a theme which is nothing less majestic than the principles on which, for Góngora, the world is founded.”²⁰

I will have occasion to return many times in the course of this study to the issues raised by Jones. For the moment, however, let me simply note that what Jones saw as a hidden content in the poem is also a feature of its form, of its texture of language and meter. What I want to develop here is a sense in which the achievements of a formalist analysis, like Dámaso Alonso's “Función estructural de las pluralidades,” and a hermeneutic or thematic study must be brought into relation. Consider a perhaps intentional ambiguity in the passage from the “Carta en respuesta” we have been dealing with. Góngora claimed that the usefulness of his manner consisted in its being an exercise of wit. But an exercise to what end? Serrano de Paz's allegorical kernel, Jones's Neoplatonic gnosis? In part yes. But the language of the passage also indicates that this exercise would be somehow valuable in itself as a form of mental recreation required by the difficulty of the writing. Góngora's formula “trabajar el discurso” seems to equate the poet's labor in composing the “tropos” and the reader's in deciphering them. It is an invitation to have the reader “complete” a text which Góngora will leave (at the end of the Soledad segunda) strategically incomplete.

Góngora is close to the idea of difficoltà which had been advanced earlier in the aesthetic theory of the Mannerists as a justification for their tendencies towards formal and thematic hypercomplication. They held that a special pleasure or vertù was to be had through the ability of mind (acutezza) to experience and understand an artifact as a labyrinth, an intricate space of signification. There exists an implicit affinity between such a view and the pre-Cartesian concepts of mind and language use which begin to appear in late sixteenth-century psychology. In Spain, Juan de Huarte's popular Examen de ingenios (1575), a book there is every reason to suppose that Góngora knew as intimately as did Cervantes (who used it for El licenciado Vidriera), had emphasized the capacity of intelligence, operating through language, to “speak such subtle and surprising things, yet true, that were never before seen, heard, or writ, no, nor ever so much as thought of.”²¹ Tasso's legitimization in his Discorsi of meraviglia, “impossible” metaphors, followed a similar logic in suggesting that poetic language not only represents something in the world but also creates realities proper to the imagination. On the other hand, the leitmotif of Cascales and the detractores was, precisely, that the Soledades betrayed a contradiction of form and content, of language and that which language represents—the Scholastic entailment of res and verba. Hence they saw the catachresis, the figure of rhetoric in which language is strained beyond its ability to communicate, to make sense, as the paradigm of Góngora's poetry. By seeming to posit conceptual wit (ingenio) as the primary basis for aesthetic appreciation, they felt, Góngora was immoral, producing a poetics which embodied neither the pleasing nor the useful.²²

Góngora in return, however, seems in the “Carta en respuesta” intent on making this problem of representation, of the way in which language signifies, the major theme of this defense (and his major instruction to the reader). He admits that the Soledades are unreadable in an ordinary sense. They can only be approached through a process of speculation, a process that holds its own pleasure:

Deleitable tiene lo que en los dos puntos de arriba queda explicado, pues si deleitar el entendimiento es darle razones que la concluyan y se midan con su contento, descubierto lo que está debajo de esos tropos, por fuerza el entendimiento ha de quedar convencido, y convencido, satisfecho; demás que, como el fin del entendimiento es hacer presa en verdades, que por eso no le satisface nada, si no es la primera verdad, conforme a aquella sentencia de San Agustín: Inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in te, en tanto quedará más deleitado cuanto, obligándole a la especulación por la obscuridad de la obra, fuera hallando debajo de las sombras de la obscuridad asimilaciones a su concepto.

(Millé, Epistolario 2)

Discussing the final clause of this passage, Jones took the “su” of “asimilaciones a su concepto” to refer to “la primera verdad.” Thus, he read the clause as “asimilaciones al concepto de la primera verdad,” which, in association with the tag from Augustine, yields God and, for Jones, the idea of the poem as a Platonic mimesis of “the principles on which the world is founded.” But this “su” is syntactically ambiguous. The “fin del entendimiento” Góngora is claiming for the reader laboring over his “tropos” may be reflexive; that is, the “asimilaciones a su concepto” which intelligence is to find in the exercise the figures require may also be, in one sense, “asimilaciones al concepto que el entendimiento tiene de sí mismo.” The conceit involves an amphibology, characteristic of Góngora's style in other contexts, which equates with “su concepto” both “la primera verdad” and “entendimiento.”²³

“Deleitar el entendimiento”—the concept prefigures the Neo-Scholastic aesthetics later worked out by Gracián in the Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1642). Gracián grants that intelligence pleases itself both in the construction and deciphering of conceits; but in this ability and activity it tacitly mirrors the nature of a divinity which makes itself, like the conceit, “manifiesto y escondido” in its creation. For Gracián, the artifice of poetic invention and conceptual wit always has the value of revealing in its estrangement of ordinary discourse the esoteric text of a scripturas Dei. The conceit, no matter how fanciful or artificial, reads out the theological book of creation in a relationship of microcosm (mind and language use) to a macrocosm (God, sufficient reason) which sustains its being and its truth. The intelligence of the poet has an active role to play in creation by showing the hidden resemblances God has “written into” the nature of things.

There remains, however, an important difference between the calculated ambiguity of Góngora's letter and Gracián's theological formalism. Unlike Cascales and the defenders of post-Tridentine poetics, Gracián can accept the idea of poetry as a spectacle of wit because wit is a natural property of mind and mind is always the semblance of its creator and the means of apprehending the subtle logic of his creation. The point of an “arte de ingenio” is to learn how to know (and therefore be like) the idea of God. Góngora touches on this position in his “su concepto” amphibology, but the Soledades are not an exercise in religious enlightenment. Rather the problems they pose and the attitude of mind that is required to solve them seems a rigorously secular one, and Gracián's appreciation of Góngora a belated attempt to win for Christian dogmatics a poetry that seems quite content, at least in the Soledades, to leave matters of religion “in parenthesis.”²⁴

The influence of Mannerist theory and example was already evident in Spain in the poetry of Herrera and his school and the new tendencies in painting and music represented by figures like El Greco or Luis de Victoria towards the end of the sixteenth century. Góngora must have read with special care, however, the slim Libro de la erudición poética (1611) by his fellow Andalusian Luis Carrillo y Sotomayor. The treatise is a meditation on the relation of poetry and philosophy, which Plato, notably in the Republic, had posed as a contradiction. Carrillo y Sotomayor wanted to construct a defense of poetry as a specific form of knowledge, an “erudición.” He recalls in the Libro the Greek poiein—to make or construct—hence poeisis as creative power, creative act. “Filósofos fueron los Poetas antiguos, y despreciando animosamente después las cosas naturales, emprendieron a las que la misma naturaleza no se atreve.”²⁵ (This recalls Juan de Huarte's etymological argument that wit—ingenio—and engendrar have the same root in the Latin genere: hence wit as a “generative power.”) Lucretius' De rerum natura serves as an example. In his account of the creation as material accident, Lucretius, claims Carrillo y Sotomayor, ignores the Christian (and so dogmatic) understanding of the origin and order of nature: “Notable atrevimiento le dió el arte, pues con ella quiso confundir la cosa más evidente de la naturaleza, negava la providencia. …”²⁶ But this error, which is after all the very principle of Lucretian mimesis, does not invalidate the poem, which remains a model of “doctas dificultades.” The point is that poetry in itself constitutes for Carrillo y Sotomayor a legitimate mode of understanding the world (an “acto del entendimiento,” to use Góngora's phrase) which may produce a true knowledge of things in ways independent, because of the free nature of poetic inspiration and creation, of matters of dogma, common sense, or verisimiltude in its strict sense. By definition, poetry is necessarily “para los pocos,” those few spirits with the special intelligence and sensitivity to read it on its own terms. Góngora seems to derive directly from this aristocratic humanism when he claims in the“Carta en respuesta”:

… honra me ha causado hacerme escuro a los ignorantes, que esa [es] la distinción de los hombres doctos, hablar de manera que a ellos les parezca griego; pues no se han de dar las piedras preciosas a animales de cerda: y bien dije griego, locución exquisita que viene de Poeses, verbo de aquella lengua madre de las ciencias. …²⁷

I want to turn for a moment from this exposition of the literary problematic addressed in the “Carta” to study two passages from the Soledad primera by way of showing the relation between the kind of positions Góngora takes there and his actual practice in the poem. The first represents the cellular level of the Soledades: Góngora's construction of a single syntactic and imagistic period, a “tropo.” The example I have chosen is a burlesque periphrasis in the dinner the pilgrim shares with the goatherds of the “bienaventurado albergue”:

El que de cabras fué dos veces ciento
esposo casi un lustro—cuyo diente
no perdonó a racimo aun en la frente
de Baco, cuanto más en su sarmiento—
(triunfador siempre de celosas lides,
lo coronó el Amor; mas rival tierno
breve de barba y duro no de cuerno,
redimió con su muerte tantas vides)
servido ya en cecina
purpúreos hilos es de grana fina.

(I, 153-62)

The passage typifies Góngora's recourse to effects of mordant irony as a relief from the elevated epico-lyrical mode of the poem. It is built on two coextensive hyperbatons. One is the dilation of the normal predication form of the sentence, rendered in italics above, by the double parenthesis (“cuyo diente” to “sarmiento” / “triunfador” to “vides”), a dilation which is further complicated by the allusion to Bacchus. Second is the formation of the sentence as an enigma: the identity of the initial subject “el que”—the goat—is not disclosed until the end when it has been transformed into an object, the slices of meat eaten by the pilgrim and his hosts. As Spitzer pointed out in a classic note on this passage, the semantic metamorphosis takes us from the sexually potent live goat (the “esposo”) devouring plants to the dead goat himself devoured as “purpúreos hilos.”²⁸ Once the absent center of the figure becomes evident, that is, the idea of a “macho cabrío,” the dilated period abruptly composes itself. The spiral of the double parenthesis, which involves an intricate amplification of the theme by drawing in the myth of Bacchus and the scene of the old and young goats fighting over a mate in “celosas lides,” terminates neatly in “servido ya en cecina.” But the old goat receives in his sudden fall from erotic plenitude a kind of ennobling epitaph: “purpúreos hilos es de grana fina.” Spitzer took this cyclical invention on the prosaic datum of the goat meat as typifying, in its disjunction of linguistic apparatus and topical content, Góngora's sense of the “corteza”-“misterioso” relation. “Se trata aquí de un juego puramente intelectual de relaciones percibidas entre la carne y el animal,” he noted. “El barroquismo de Góngora se complace en dorar con una belleza facticia un espectáculo que por sí mismo desilusiona [italics mine]. …”²⁹

But this “system” is precisely artificial because it is discrete. In contrast, I want to move now to one of the most extended metaphoric periphrases in the poem, the variations on the “breve esplendor de mal distinta lumbre” which occupy lines 52 to 94 of the Soledad primera. Briefly, the context of this passage is that the pilgrim, having rescued himself from the shipwreck, ascends a cliff along the coast and at the summit spies a distant glimmer of light towards which he directs his footsteps in the gathering darkness. R. O. Jones saw this as an allegory “representing, in fact, a passage from error to truth.”³⁰ The first vision of the light appears after the confusion of the first scenes of the poem (the storm, shipwreck, and twilight):

Vencida al fin la cumbre
—del mar siempre sonante,
de la muda campaña
árbitro igual e inexpugnable muro—,
con pie ya más seguro
declina al vacilante
breve esplendor de mal distinta lumbre.

(52-58)

The subsequent movement towards the light will be inland, forming an anabasis which will continue until the pilgrim reappears on the shore at the beginning of the Soledad segunda. Jones: “the imagery changes—naturally, one might say, since he leaves the sea behind.”³¹

The light seems first to the pilgrim a “farol de una cabaña.” The bucolic image is, however, immediately metamorphosed into a piscatory or nautical context, as if it were a light anchored (“que sobre el ferro está”) in a gulf of shadows, like the beacon of a lightship signaling a port. This movement of the image refers us back to the initial scene of the shipwreck. Góngora extends it in the following verses in which the pilgrim addresses the light, speaking in his own voice for the first time in the poem:

“Rayos—les dice—ya que no de Leda
trémulos hijos, sed de mi fortuna
término luminoso.” …

(62-64)

The construction is what we have learned to recognize from Dámaso Alonso's studies as Góngora's characteristic “si no A, B.” The “ya que no de Leda” alludes to the fire of Saint Elmo which makes the masts and rigging of a ship glow with static energy (there is a famous scene in Moby Dick describing this), here associated with Leda's sons, Castor and Pollux, and the star constellation of Gemini named after them. In nautical lore, the sons of Leda signify a providential presence in the midst of a storm. But as the pilgrim is now on land, he intends the nautical allusion as a metaphor for what he hopes the light will reveal, a “de mi fortuna / término luminoso.” (Spitzer speculated that a double sense of “fortuna” is intended here: the ordinary fate or fortune and the secondary meaning of “fortuna” in Spanish as storm.) As the pilgrim moves towards the source of the light, this ambiguity between nautical and terrestrial contexts will be kept alive by phrases like “golfo de sombras,” “norte de su aguja,” “la arboleda cruja” (like rigging in a storm). As Spitzer pointed out, “El fuego de San Telmo tiembla como todo en un barco, el ‘término’ participa de la solidez y fijeza del continente.”³²

The next section, 64-83, begins to transpose the image of the light into its proper context, that of the land. (The shift is marked by the caesura forced by the period in line 64.)

                                                            … Y—recelando
de invidïosa bárbara arboleda
interposición, cuando
de vientos no conjuración alguna—
cual, haciendo el villano
la fragosa montaña fácil llano,
atento sigue aquella
—aun a pesar de las tinieblas bella,
aun a pesar de las estrellas clara—
piedra, indigna tiara
—si tradición apócrifa no miente—
de animal tenebroso, cuya frente
carro es brillante de nocturno día:
tal, diligente, el paso
el joven apresura,
midiendo la espesura
con igual pie que el raso,
fijo—a despecho de la niebla fría—
en el carbunclo, norte de su aguja,
o el Austro brame o la arboleda cruja.

The “tal-cual” construction marks an inner periphrasis in this involuted period. Where before, the light had seemed a port beacon in a storm, now it has become a “carbunclo” or ruby, that is, an artifact drawn from the depths of the earth, which the pilgrim follows like a hunter or peasant “midiendo la espesura.” The “animal tenebroso” could be the tiger shining in the night (as in Blake's ballad), the mystic stag whose antlers form a candelabra in the moonlight, or “carro brillante de nocturno día” in a nocturnal inversion of the myth of Phaeton. The analogy of the pilgrim and the hunter suggests also his character as a Petrarchan hero, the lover “shipwrecked” in his affections and abandoned in a night of solitary despair, now striving towards the beams of light emitted by the distant beloved.³³

A dog suddenly appears to accompany the wanderer. The “mal distinta lumbre” of the beginning now reveals itself to be an oak trunk burning in the center of a rustic shelter where he will find the domestic repose (“cabaña”) prefigured in his mind when he first glimpsed the light. As in the smaller case of the inventions on the goat meat, the closure of the whole sequence is again, after the elaborate syntactic and allusive metamorphosis which must have sent more than one reader back to his library, abrupt and epitaphic:

El can ya, vigilante,
convoca, despidiendo al caminante;
y la que desviada
luz poca pareció, tanta es vecina,
que yace en ella la robusta encina
mariposa en cenizas desatada.

(84-89)

Why this taste for periphrasis? I want to suggest that it is not only an aesthetic decor—a “puro placer de formas”—but also a way of establishing the narrative context of the pilgrim and the psychagogic task of the reader which Góngora outlines in the proposition of the Soledades:

Pasos de un peregrino son errante
cuantos me dictó versos dulce musa:
en soledad confusa
perdidos unos, otros inspirados.

Maurice Molho, in a detailed analysis of this proposition, sees it as constructed on two parallel planes of reference—that of the poet-creator, that of the pilgrim-actor—both of which, in turn, invoke the tertium quid of the reader. The amphibology between these two planes creates four relations of equivalence between a total of eight semantic elements: (1) the pasos of the pilgrim and the versos of the poet (e.g., meter as “pies” in many figures of the poem); (2) the poet and his persona, both “peregrino errante”; (3) the “soledad confusa” of the poem-poet (its obscurity and the silva form itself) and of the hero, lovesick and abandoned in a wilderness or “selva”; (4) the pasos and the versos, alternately perdidos (“en soledad confusa”) or inspirados (by the “dulce musa”). The last relation suggests a kind of auto-criticism: some of the passages of the poem are “logrados,” finished, others (the whole poem itself) are not.³⁴

The “versos” or script (the “corteza” of the letter) move in the sequence of variations on the light exactly as the pilgrim towards its source. The syntactic complication of 64-83, created by the proliferation of relative clauses, mimics the difficulty the pilgrim has in walking on a wild and uncertain terrain and losing sight of the light through an “invidiosa bárbara arboleda interposición” and the evening fog. The development, in other words, takes place along two axially related poles. The periphrasis defines the implicit psychology of the pilgrim, compounding around the visual datum a whole trajectory of memory, anxiety, and hope (“recelando”). It also follows a spatial logic in which the progressive metamorphoses of the light correspond to its changing visual character as the pilgrim approaches it. (In line 82, for example, it has become a ruby that has acquired something of the redness of the dying fire disclosed at the end.) The “luz poca” becomes in this double process emblematic of luminosity—the Platonic image of the numinous—in the expanding network of metaphors and allusions made possible by the relativity of the pilgrim's spatial and sentimental perspectives. This expansion finds its necessary closure in the recognition of the actual source of the light which involves yet another metamorphosis, that of the tree into flame and ashes. This recognition, in turn, is isochronic with the pilgrim's arrival at the albergue and the end (in “mariposa en cenizas desatada”) of the sequence which had begun in the confusion of land and sea and the “trémulos hijos.”

As he will throughout the poem, Góngora has taken care to mark within this process the line of movement in space and time of his hero: “con pie ya más seguro / declina …,” “cual, haciendo el villano / la fragosa montaña fácil llano,” “midiendo la espesura / con igual pie que el raso,” “y la que desviada / luz poca pareció, tanta es vecina,” “Llegó pues, el mancebo. …” This movement is homologous with that of the reader who has been treading through the “selva” of the poem's language. These images are, on the one hand, part of what the reader must understand and, on the other, a representation of what he is going through in coming to this understanding: “vacilando el entendimiento en fuerza del discurso, trabajándole (pues crece con cualquier acto de valor), alcance lo que así en la lectura superficial de sus versos no pudo entender” (Millé, Epistolario 2).

In the two passages we have considered, the obscurity Góngora produces is dependent not only on the difficulty of interpreting the images and allusions, but also on the complications of the syntax in which they are framed. There is a section in the “Carta” where Góngora takes up the question of the possible extent of syntagmatic freedom in discourse. The critic(s) of the “Carta de un amigo” had spoken of him as “inventor de dificultar la construcción de el romance,” suggesting that this effort had been a “disparate.” Góngora replied to the effect that he had not transgressed but rather enriched the system of rules affecting the mental coherence of language:

[Es] lance forzoso venerar que nuestra lengua a costa de mi trabajo haya llegado a la perfección y alteza de la latina, a quien no he quitado los artículos, como le parece a V.m. y esos señores, sino excusándolos donde no necesarios: y ansí gustaré me dijese en dónde faltan o qué razón de ella no está corriente en lenguaje heroico (que ha de ser diferente de la prosa y digno de personas capaces de entendelle); que holgaré construírselo, aunque niego no poder ligar el romance a esas declinaciones. …

(Millé, Epistolario 2)

In Scholastic rhetoric the term for hyperbaton as a figure of syntax is transgressio. The problem Góngora is addressing here is a technical one: how can one expand the signifying capacity of language within its rules? What is the limit beyond which language ceases to signify, becomes Babelic?³⁵ But this problem is also a feature of the thematic content of the Soledades which is everywhere a posing of images of overabundance, chaos and violence against the reiterated convention of a golden mean of synthesis and harmony, the bucolic mediocritas. Góngora presents not only language alone but language which has been invested with the capacity to contain an ethical, political, and ecological meditation on the proper relation of nature and society, of authority and freedom, of love—a meditation conducted through the prism of the historical crisis he lives through in his own fortune as a poet and courtier.

Piloto hoy la Codicia, no de errantes
árboles, mas de selvas inconstantes,
al padre de las aguas Ocëano
—de cuya monarquía
el Sol, que cada día
nace en sus ondas y en sus ondas muere,
los términos saber todos no quiere—
dejó primero de su espuma cano,
sin admitir segundo
en inculcar sus límites al mundo.

(I, 403-12)

A passage like this (which is taken from the epic fragment on the explorations and conquests of the sixteenth century which Góngora interpolates in the Arcadian scenery of the first Soledad) strategically intertwines the event that is being represented and the mode of language that is doing the representing. “Saber términos,” “inculcar límites”: these are the problems Góngora must struggle with in his construction of the Soledades, his own “selva inconstante.” The danger, as in the crisis of empire itself, is that ambitious desire will produce transgression and perversion. But the other side of the wager is the possibility of a language of discovery. The economics of art replace here the economics of an imperial project that has become problematic, no longer yields the expected wealth and power.³⁶

Góngora mentions three languages or modes of language in the letter: (1) Latin and Greek, (2) a “lenguaje heroico”—poetic (or prophetic) language, and (3) “el romance”—prose or ordinary language. Spanish, like the other European national languages of the Renaissance, would be, in the judgement of Góngora's aristocratic humanism, a language fallen from grace, from the “perfección y alteza de la latina.” Góngora's labor (and by extension the reader's) is to have sublimated ordinary Spanish by incorporating into it the complicated periods of Latin syntax. “El romance” thus attains the status of a sublime discourse in the Soledades because it has now become, Góngora is implying, an instrument for knowing and feeling the many contingencies and alternatives of Spain's social and national destiny: an “imperial” language which expresses an anti-imperialist ethics. The poet's work, fashioned in exile from the Court and the centers of wealth and power, “causarme ha autoridad” because it is, like the Latin political essay or ode, a formal paradigm of the measured subtlety and innovation required by civic policy. (Milton will make the same claim for his Paradises.)

The equation which is implicit throughout Góngora's self-defense is of the mastery of language and of the mastery of government. The poet-vates is the poet as legislator. The danger of excess, of a “fall” into nonsense, is its necessary risk, the poet's gamble on the page, just as the adventure in the space and time of the world pictured in the interpolated epic involves the risk of death or disaster. But Góngora is posing his poem against the disaster of Spain's imperialism. His language is expanded (“los términos saber no quiere”) to represent the nature of a complex historical time and space; but it is also salvaged before it disintegrates into chaos. Góngora begins by placing before the reader/pilgrim a datum, then amplifies it in a geometric play of figures of identity and difference, so passing continually from the cornucopia—the world as a spiral of illusion, confused variety—to the linear sequence of the “pasos” to, finally, the moment when the sense of the whole reveals itself, the moment of enlightenment, of the “misterioso,” but also of the closure or representation: to the figure as a tomb.

“Túmulo tanto debe
agradecido Amor a mi pie errante;
líquido, pues, diamante
calle mis huesos, y elevada cima
selle sí, mas no oprima,
esta que le fiaré ceniza breve,
si hay ondas mudas y si hay tierra leve.”

(II, 165-71)

The Soledades are not allegory in the sense of being a presentation of details which mechanically convert, point by point, into a second order of signification; to assume this was the mistake made, for example, by Serrano de Paz in his Comentarios. On the other hand they are not a “puro placer de formas” either. Rather they are a process where the questions of “making poetry” have become involved with the historical reality this making reflects, both as a means of representation and as a process in which a poetics transforms itself into an ethics. This landscape of world exhaustion, of the death of the signifier, predicts again and again in the individual “tropos” the ultimate self-exhaustion of the poem itself in the terminal epitaph “y a la estigia deidad con bella esposa.” This dialectic of freedom and necessity, of historical tragedy and the precarious grace of poetry to oppose it, forms the inner sense of one of the most extraordinary passages in all of Góngora's poetry, the description of a river viewed by the pilgrim from a mountain lookout, as it appears in the earliest manuscript copies of the Soledad primera:

Si mucho poco mapa le despliega,
mucho es más lo que, nieblas desatando,
confunde el sol y la distancia niega.
Muda la admiración, habla callando,
y, ciega, un río sigue, que—luciente
de aquellos montes hijo—
con torcido discurso, si prolijo,
tiraniza los campos útilmente;
orladas sus orillas de frutales,
si de flores, tomadas, no, a la Aurora
derecho corre mientras no revoca
los mismos autos el de sus cristales;
huye un trecho de sí, y se alcanza luego;
desvíase, y, buscando sus desvíos,
errores dulces, dulces desvaríos,
hacen sus aguas con lascivo juego;
engazando edificios en su plata,
de quintas coronado, se dilata
majestuosamente
—en brazos dividido caudalosos
de islas, que paréntesis frondosos
al período son de su corriente—
de la alta gruta donde se desata
hasta los jaspes líquidos, adonde
su orgullo pierde y su memoria esconde.

(Cf. Millé, I, 194-211)

Góngora's mentor and friend, Pedro de Valencia, had him censor this passage when he prepared the canonic text of the Soledades.³⁷ But the ingenious equation of the course of the river with the figuration of a rhetorical period and the consequent isomorphism of the sentence and that which it describes may stand by itself as a miniature of the poem, of a language of time: Gracián's “el curso de tu vida en un discurso,” Joyce's “riverrun past Eve and Adam.” The scene is something apprehended as a totality, a map, just as the linguistic territory of the Soledades is meant to be mapped by the critical work of the reader. Walter Benjamin saw the Baroque conception of history as a Trauerspiel, a representation, at once a tragedy or funeral procession and a triumph, in which the world passes in review and is petrified into signs under the organizing gaze of melancholy.³⁸ In the Soledades, Góngora deploys a language which seeks to be reconciled and find consummation with an object of desire—the pilgrim's alienated mistress, the receptive intelligence of the reader, the mind of his country. The spatial frontier of exile, the wilderness which is the landscape dimension of the pilgrim's search, is also the boundary between the poem as a utopia of language and Cascales' Babel, the disintegration of language and mind, the descent of discourse into madness.

Notes

1. Maurice Molho, Sémantique et poétique: à propos des “Solitudes” de Góngora (Bordeaux: Ducros, 1969), p. 13.

2. “Technology discloses man's mode of dealing with Nature, the processes of production by which he sustains his life, and thereby also lays bare the mode of formation of his social relations and of the mental formations which flow from them”—Karl Marx, Capital, I (Moscow: Foreign Languages, 1961), p. 872, n. 3. This may serve to indicate one of the differences that separate my conception of the Soledades from R. O. Jones's seminal “Neoplatonism and the Soledades,” BHS, 40 (1963), 1-16, as well as from C. Colin Smith's rebuttal to Jones in “An Approach to Góngora's Polifemo,” BHS, 42 (1965), 217-38. Both argue that the Soledades are a “nature poem,” Jones seeing a sort of Baroque Enneads, Smith arguing instead that Góngora's representation of nature approximates Darwinian evolutionism. I have preferred to follow the lead of Jones's own earlier “The Poetic Unity of the Soledades of Góngora,” BHS, 31 (1954), 189-204, which portrays the poem as a study of the relation between nature and technology. On this point see Bruce Wardropper, “The Complexity of the Simple in Góngora's Soledad primera,” The Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 7 (1977), 35-51.

3. In “The Poetic Unity,” noted above. Elsewhere Jones wrote: “Part of the underlying theme of the poem is the vanity of opposing Nature, which destroys artifice and punishes presumption. … The youth joins a party bearing gifts to a marriage feast. The gifts are common birds and beasts, but all described in terms of exotic splendour: coral, gold, mother-of-pearl, sapphires, rubies. The point seems clear: this is the wealth of Nature, better than all the illusory riches of the Indies”—Poems of Góngora (Cambridge: The University Press, 1966), p. 26.

4. Christopher Caudwell, Illusion and Reality: A Study in the Sources of Poetry (New York: International, 1967), p. 80.

5. Etudes sur l'oeuvre poétique de Don Luis de Góngora (Bordeaux: Féret et Fils, 1967). Jammes's introduction, especially the section titled “Idéal de Don Luis” (pp. 26-35), gives an excellent summary of Góngora's conflicting loyalties and perceptions as a provincial aristocrat without means and of the general economic dislocation threatening the status of the petty aristocracy in Spain during the reigns of Philip II and Philip III, including the problem of the “inflation of honor” (the acquisition of titles of nobility by the nouveaux riches) which contributed to the marginalization of old noble families like Góngora's.

6. Etudes, p. 31.

7. Martín González de Cellorigo, Memorial de la política necesaria y útil restauración de la república de España (Valladolid, 1600), 2.^a parte, fol. 25^v. In the same essay he writes: “… el no haber dinero, oro ni plata, en España, es por averlo, y el no ser rica es por serlo: haziendo dos contradictorias verdaderas en nuestra España, y en un mismo subjecto” (1.^a parte, fol. 29^r).

8. “Pues si la palabra crisis define el paso de una coyuntura ascendente a una coyuntura de hundimiento, no hay duda de que entre 1598 y 1620—entre la ‘grandeza’ y la ‘decadencia’—hay que situar la crisis decisiva del poderío español, y, con mayor seguridad todavía, la primera gran crisis de duda de los españoles”—Pierre Vilar, “El tiempo del Quijote,” in his Crecimiento y desarrollo: Reflexiones sobre el caso español, Spanish trans. (Barcelona: Ariel, 1964), pp. 431-32. On the Spanish crisis of the early seventeenth century and its implications for the Soledades I have also found useful Vilar's “El problema de la formación del capitalismo” in the same volume; Eric Hobsbawm, “The General Crisis of the European Economy in the Seventeenth Century,” Past and Present, 5 and 6 (1954), 33-53, 44-65; Jaime Vicens Vives, Manual de historia económica de España, 4th ed. (Barcelona: Editorial Vicens-Vives, 1965), pp. 375-479; and, as a survey, Chapters 8 and 9 of J. H. Elliott's Imperial Spain: 1469-1716 (New York: New American Library, 1966), especially pp. 296-320. Until Jean Vilar's long-promised study of the arbitristas appears in print, a useful introduction to the themes of decadencia and declinación in the political and economic thought of the day is J. H. Elliott's “Self-perception and Decline in Early Seventeenth Century Spain,” Past and Present, 74 (1977), 41-61. On the disastrous situation of the Spanish countryside (a reality counterposed in the images of an agricultural utopia in the wedding day of the Soledad primera), see Noël Salomon, La campagne de Nouvelle Castille à la fin du XVI^e siècle (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1964); the same author's Recherches sur le thème paysan dans la “comedia” au temps de Lope de Vega (Bordeaux: Féret et Fils, 1967); and the sections on agriculture in Bartolomé Bennassar's brilliant reconstruction, Valladolid au siècle d'or (Paris and The Hague: Mouton, 1967). On the depopulation of America as a consequence of the ravages and forced labor imposed by the Conquest and the colonial crisis which developed as a result, see Woodrow Borah, New Spain's Century of Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), who estimates a population decline of 90٪ on the central plateau of Mexico between the years 1519 and 1607.

9. L. J. Woodward, “Two Images in the Soledades of Góngora,” MLN, 76 (1961), 784. Arbitristas like Pedro de Valencia or González de Cellorigo, according to Vicens Vives, “son los que, siguiendo las directrices de la escuela cuantitativa de Salamanca …, reaccionaron contra el ideal de acumulación de moneda y abogaron por la reconsideración del trabajo productivo como elemento básico de la riqueza” (Manual, p. 412). Pierre Vilar cites the following from one of Valencia's essays:

   El daño vino del haber mucha plata y mucho dinero, que es y ha sido siempre … el veneno que destruye las Repúblicas y las ciudades. Piénsase que el dinero las mantiene y no es así: las heredades labradas y los ganados y pesquerías son las que dan mantenimiento. Cada uno había de labrar su parte: ahora los que se sustentan con dinero, dado a renta, inútiles y ociosos son, que quedan para comer lo que los otros siembran y trabajan.

   (Crecimiento y desarrollo, p. 204)

10. Crecimiento y desarrollo, p. 441.

11. Cartas filológicas, I (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1930), p. 220.

12. In Temas y problemas de la literatura española (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1959), p. 150.

13. In his Etudes, pp. 28-29 and Appendix II: “… on peut admettre que Góngora a eu dans ses veines, comme beaucoup d'autres Espagnols des milieux urbains, un peu de ‘sang-juif’; mais tout indique … que lui-même ne fut jamais amené à se considérer comme descendant de ‘conversos.’” On the other hand, “il faut dire aussi que ses origines andalouses ne pouvaient que le rendre très sceptique—comme beaucoup de citadins de son temps—sur le chapitre de la ‘limpieza de sangre.’”

14. Andrée Collard, Nueva poesía: conceptismo, culteranismo en la crítica española (Madrid: Castalia, 1967), p. 102.

15. Cited from the version in Dámaso Alonso, Estudios y ensayos gongorinos (Madrid: Gredos, 1960), p. 87. As is well known, the article had something of the character of a manifesto for the “poesía pura” of the Generation of '27.

16. In the late seventeenth century the Portuguese critic Faría y Sousa maintained that Góngora's poetry lacked what he called a “misterio scientífico.” Espinosa Medrano replied that it was not the business of poetry to constitute a science or corpus of natural doctrine. The novelty of the dispositio, not of the materia, was what should be appreciated in a work like the Soledades; Góngora had nothing to do (nor should he) with the Neo-Scholastic poetics of an “arte docente.” A. A. Parker notes a similar distinction in Gracián's Agudeza y arte de ingenio: “Since the object of ingenio is beauty, not scientific truth, its agudeza de artificio is distinguished from the agudeza de perspicacia which characterizes philosophers and scientists—the clarity of mind that can perceive and analyze relations and differences that are logical and objectively true”—Polyphemus and Galatea: A Study in the Interpretation of a Baroque Poem (Austin: University of Texas Press; Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1977), p. 38. Espinosa Medrano's Apologético was reprinted by Ventura García Calderón in Revue Hispanique, 65 (1925), pp. 397-538.

17. Emilio Orozco Díaz has collected a number of his studies on the beginnings of the debate over the Soledades in Lope y Góngora frente a frente (Madrid: Gredos, 1973). Pages 168-88 deal with the two initial letters, giving slightly different texts than those in Millé. Andrés Mendoza, Góngora's agent in Madrid, also replied to the “Carta de un amigo” in a letter which Orozco Díaz reproduces and which is of great interest. Lope and/or his cohorts counterattacked with a long “Respuesta.” Millé (Epistolario 128) has a “Carta echadiza” of around 1613 by another enemy of the Soledades, but this is of lesser importance.

18. Lope y Góngora, p. 185. The French Baroque poet Saint-Amant noted similarly about his heroic idyl Moise Sauvé: “Il y a un sens caché dessous leur écorce qui donnera de quoi s'exercer à quelques esprits” (italics mine). But he cautions too that “dans le recherche qu'ils en pourront faire, peut-être me feront-ils dire des choses à quoi je ne pensai jamais”—cited in Gérard Genette, “D'un récit baroque,” Figures II (Paris: Seuil, 1969), p. 200.

19. For the text of Serrano de Paz's proposition see “El Doctor Manuel Serrano de Paz, desconocido comentador de las Soledades,” in Alonso, Estudios, pp. 518-30.

20. R. O. Jones, “Neoplatonism and the Soledades,” p. 15. See also C. Colin Smith's critique of Jones in “An Approach to Góngora's Polifemo” and Jones's rejoinder “Góngora and Neoplatonism Again,” BHS, 43 (1966), 117-20.

21. As cited by Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), p. 8, who adds: “The reference here is to true creativity and exercise of the creative imagination in ways that go beyond normal intelligence and may … involve a ‘mixture of madness.’”

22. The claims of both Tasso and Góngora may derive from the same source, Zuccari's concept of a disegno interior (a modern rendering might be “inner form” or Gestalt) in the artwork. As Erwin Panofsky detailed, Zuccari and the Mannerists wanted to shift the notion of mimesis away from a representation of the mere phenomenal appearance of an object or action. The disegno interior in effect platonized Aristotle. What Aristotle termed the dianoia or idea in mimesis was in his Poetics simply a contingent aspect of the mythos or plot-form, not the organizing principle of the work itself. Zuccari argued instead for an art which represents the generative mental intuition or anamnesis of the artist in composing the work and of the viewer or reader in decoding it. See Panofsky's Idea: A Concept in Art Theory (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968). In this sense, for example, the “action” of the Soledades is on one level that of poetic intelligence itself, as Góngora suggests in the equation of “pasos” and “versos” in his proposition (see n. 24 below). A. A. Parker adds: “Góngora's culteranismo was not a bolt-from-the-blue in 1613 but the cultivation of a steadily developing aesthetic. … Beginning with Fernando de Herrera's Commentary (1580) on the poems of Garcilaso, this development constitutes a Platonic poetic stressing the ‘divine madness’ of the poetic imagination against the Aristotelian discipline of rules” (Polyphemus and Galatea, p. 10). On Góngora's relation to Mannerist theory and the Spanish theoretical debates on aesthetics of his time see, for example, Antonio Vilanova, “Preceptistas españoles de los siglos XVI y XVII,” in Historia general de las literaturas hispánicas, ed. Guillermo Díaz-Plaja, III (Madrid: Editorial Barna, 1953), 281-580; Cedomil Goig, “Góngora y la retórica manierista de la dificultad docta,” Atenea, 142 (1961), 168-78; C. Colin Smith, “On the Use of Spanish Theoretical Works in the Debate on Gongorism,” BHS, 39 (1962), 165-76; and Helmut Hatzfeld, “El manierismo de Góngora en la Soledad primera,” in his Estudios sobre el barroco (Madrid: Gredos, 1964), pp. 264-71.

23. “Góngora seems to be claiming that the mind, puzzling over the multitudinous images, allusions, and tropes of the Soledades, is led to an understanding of the source of all truth, which, in terms of seventeenth-century orthodoxy, one might suppose to be God. And yet God is nowhere mentioned in the poem; and even here, in the letter, Góngora seems to be studiously avoiding a name in favor of a philosophical abstraction” (Jones, “Neoplatonism,” p. 2).

24. Gracián himself suggested as much when, after praising Góngora in the Sea of Ink episode towards the end of the Criticón, he noted that his “plectro” lacked a string, that of “moral enseñanza.” On the relation of Góngora's poetic practice to Gracián's later theory of the conceit, see in particular Parker's careful study in Polyphemus and Galatea, pp. 30-50.

25. Libro de la erudición poética, facsimile ed. (Madrid: C.S.I.C., 1946), pp. 11-12. Parker (Polyphemus and Galatea, pp. 10-11) mentions a Cisne de Apolo by Luis Alfonso de Carballo (1602) as a precedent for the Libro.

26. Libro, p. 25.

27. Millé, Epistolario 2. Américo Castro took the reference to “animales de cerda” as an irony mocking Lope and his cohorts in the “Carta de un amigo” as dolts and would-be cristianos viejos or “pork-eaters”—Hacia Cervantes (Madrid: Taurus, 1967), p. 23.

28. In “La Soledad primera de Góngora: notas críticas y explicativas a la nueva edición de Dámaso Alonso,” RFH, 2 (1940), 159.

29. “La Soledad primera,” pp. 159-60, n. 1.

30. In “The Poetic Unity,” p. 193. Jones's intention throughout this article is to study the “parallel between the physical and moral order” that Góngora, he thinks, is drawing in the Soledades.

31. “The Poetic Unity,” p. 193.

32. “La Soledad primera,” pp. 154.

33. “La Soledad primera,” pp. 155-56.

34. Molho, Sémantique et poétique. Spitzer noted (“La Soledad primera,” p. 151): “Hago mía la sugestión de Hermann Brunn … de que ‘en soledad confusa’ se refiere en común a ‘perdidos unos y otros inspirados’ y que confusa significa ‘salvaje’ (dicho de la maleza) en cuanto se relaciona con perdidos unos (pasos) y ‘confusa, oscura’ en cuanto se relaciona con otros inspirados.”

35. Noam Chomsky identifies the main tenet of what he calls Cartesian linguistics as “the observation that human language, in its normal use, is free from the control of independently identifiable external stimuli or internal states. … The language provides finite means but infinite possibilities of expression constrained only by rules of concept formation and sentence formation. … The finitely specifiable form of each language … provides an ‘organic unity’ interrelating its basic elements and underlying each of its individual manifestations which are potentially infinite in number”—Cartesian Linguistics (New York: Harper, 1966), p. 29. On areas of Renaissance linguistics which touch on Góngora's concerns in his letter, see also Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), especially Chapters 2 and 3; Claude-Gilbert Dubois, Mythe et language au seizième siècle (Bordeaux: Ducros, 1970); and Oreste Macrí's sketch of Herrera's “preocupación científica” in Fernando de Herrera (Madrid: Gredos, 1959), pp. 99-117.

36. Rudolf Geske argues that the interpolated nautical epic should be read, in essence, as an allegory of the process of writing itself—Góngoras Warnrede im Zeichen der Hekate (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1964).

37. See the two versions of his letter to Góngora (1613) in Millé (Epistolario 126 and 126 bis) and Dámaso Alonso on the matter in Estudios, pp. 297-310. I reproduce here the “primitive” text of the ecphrasis on the river as reconstructed by Alonso, “La primitiva versión de las Soledades,” in his Góngora, Obras mayores, I: Las Soledades (Madrid: Ediciones del Arbol, 1935), 370-71.

38. On Benjamin's sense of Baroque art as Trauerspiel, see Fred Jameson, “Walter Benjamin; or, Nostalgia,” in his Marxism and Form (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 68-73. An English translation of Benjamin's thesis on German Baroque tragedy has recently appeared: Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (London: New Left Books, 1974).