SOURCE: McCaw, R. John. “Introduction: The Soledades in Cultural Context.” In The Transforming Text: A Study of Luis de Góngora's Soledades, pp. 4-12. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 2000.

[In the following essay, McCaw seeks to explain why the Soledades has been the object of so much confusion and criticism, and goes on to argue that the poem is about life and death in the natural world.]

In his Soledades Luis de Góngora (1561-1627) makes use of complicated structural devices, subtle imagery, and witty techniques of allusion in order to reveal the transient character of the reality of this world, and to depict the favorable consequences of a human's proper moral conduct in the face of this reality. The deliberate intricacy with which Góngora renders humanity and nature in the Soledades demands a method—a commentary-style explication de texte—that may seem unsophisticated and outdated when measured against more current approaches and interests such as New Historicism and cultural studies, but only a sustained, close reading can attempt to capture and articulate the embeddedness of the poem's protracted, nuanced texture. By offering such a reading, this study does not pretend to explain all meaning in the Soledades, nor does it claim to have the final word in interpreting the poem's agudezas (witticisms) or conceptos (conceits). Instead, this study hopes to show that, among other things, the poem contains a finely crafted philosophy of life and moral vision compatible with seventeenth-century Counter-Reformation values—particularly the life-transforming values related to death, decay, desengaño (undeception), humility, and mediocritas (moderation). As this study is meant to supplement—and not replace—Góngora's poem, and as the process of reading and comprehending the Soledades constitutes an intellectual and moral pilgrimage, insight gained about the poem is gradual, cumulative, and—in theory—transformative.

The concepts and iconography of life and death commanded much popular attention and respect during early modern Spain's struggles with war, famine, disease, and social upheaval.¹ By the time Imperial Spain entered a period of unprecedented economic growth, territorial expansion, diplomatic prestige, and artistic dynamism, its people had developed ways of perceiving new levels of abstraction in concrete examples of death:

En etapas anteriores la muerte […] se presentaba normalmente subrayando lo que el tránsito tiene de individual […]. Durante el siglo XV, sin embargo, se generaliza la meditación sobre el hecho genérico de la muerte […].

(Deyermond 340)

The popular fascination with the danse macabre imagery so common throughout Europe, coupled with a renewal of scholarly interest in classical philosophy and patristic theology, fueled Spain's artistic and cultural preoccupation with the universal significance of an individual's death.² Yet alongside Spanish society's increasingly abstract understanding of mortality, a traditional characteristic of humanity's perception of life and death continued to capture the popular imagination:

El concepto de la vida […] como un camino del hombre hacia su morada auténtica, predominante en el pensamiento cristiano medieval, condujo así, naturalmente, a la consideración de la muerte como el pórtico del cielo […].

(Deyermond 341)

In Spain, the combination of these two intellectual currents—the generalized understanding of death through contemplation of specific people and things, the allegorical vision of life as a pilgrimage that ends in man's ultimate confrontation with mortality—originated during the late Middle Ages, and culminated during the seventeenth century.³ One of the most well-known, and misunderstood, products of the culmination of this cultural vogue was Góngora's Soledades.

Góngora's poem, comprising two meticulously crafted cantos of slightly over two thousand lines, is generally recognized as a prime achievement of baroque art on account of its tightly knit rhetoric and densely packed imagery.⁴ But as important as these characteristics are in situating the Soledades within a tradition of literary style, they do not do full justice to the aesthetic, philosophical, and moral messages that lie beneath the convolutions and spectacles of the poem's appearance. When the challenge of deciphering the poem's many conceits (conceptos) is patiently abided, the poem's strange labyrinth of antitheses, juxtapositions, symbols, images, and allusions reveals the central role of life and death in the poem. The subtle presentation of life and death in the Soledades occurs literally (in the portrayal of plants and animals) as well as symbolically (in the portrayal of contrasting images and processes—light and dark, ascent and descent—ritually and philosophically associated with life and death).⁵ Throughout this study, Góngora's artistic rendering of life and death is frequently referred to as “mutability” and mudanza—terms that testify to the poet's recognition of life and death as processes determined by the passing of time, processes from which fixed, static instances of life and death can be (and sometimes are) isolated.⁶

The poem's most visible and lasting embodiment of mutability is the unnamed protagonist, the wandering peregrino. From the beginning of the Soledad primera to the end of the Soledad segunda, the pilgrim journeys from one community to another, and in so doing he exemplifies man's lifelong journey towards death. During his journey, the pilgrim sees many sights and listens to many sounds that celebrate life and monumentalize death. The reader, living vicariously through the errant pilgrim's journey, conducts a labyrinthine journey of his own, as he is faced with the same sights and sounds that face the pilgrim, and many more besides. Each individual object, and each unique utterance, evokes the general concept of death, as well as the concomitant concept of life. The reader must not merely imitate the peregrino's journey through the text; he must emulate it. Every concepto and every image, every contrast and allusion, whether part of the pilgrim's intelligible world or not, must be dealt with and made intelligible to the greatest extent possible, and it is the lone reader's task—in his soledades—to attempt this. The peregrino, who—as Góngora's detractor Juan de Jáuregui notes—never has a truly solitary moment to himself, cannot rise to this challenge. But for the diligent reader, the reward for untangling Góngora's engaño is, not surprisingly, desengaño: disillusionment achieved through the comprehension of the poem's nuanced display of mutability.⁷

As primarily concerned with abstract meditations on life and death, by way of the display of individual people and objects during the reader's tortuous pilgrimage, the Soledades embodies the late medieval principles of generalized death, and of life as a journey towards death. But Góngora's poem does not reflect the paradigm completely. One major ingredient of late medieval art, which is also a major ingredient of Spanish baroque art, is absent from the Soledades: spirituality.⁸ But the Soledades are not necessarily “atheistic,” as Francisco de Cascales has charged, due to their lack of explicitly or suggestively divine concerns; they are “nontheistic.”⁹

The perceived lack of any conventional telos—religious or mundane—in the Soledades may understandably lead a student to conclude that the poem is little more than a self-indulgent exercise in aesthetics:

To young people, notoriously serious-minded, whose habit it is to indulge in vast arguments about the great unknowables of life, Góngora and poésie pure may not be enough. While they expect short lyrics to be about a moment in nature or the tremor of an emotion and nothing more, they expect long narrative poems to have some heroic tale to tell, or some great national ideal to enshrine, or something about the Christian cosmos to impart. This is natural when the classics held up for their admiration are the Aeneid, the Lusiads, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost […].

(Smith 219)

The early detractors of the Soledades judged Góngora's work on the basis of traditional expectations, and thus began their misunderstandings of Góngora's poetic experiment. The Soledades is not a tale of heroic deeds; it is a tale of quintessential man's everyday existence. The Soledades does not enshrine a great national ideal; it enshrines the mundane global reality of life and death. And the Soledades does not impart anything specifically associated with the Christian cosmos, but rather it imparts a moral wisdom rooted in human conduct. Unlike the Aeneid, the Lusiads, the Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, the Soledades is a poem of the earth.¹⁰ There is no Heaven, no Hell, no God, no Satan, no angels, and no saints. The only sign of the supernatural in the Soledades rests in the many mythological gods and demi-gods, but their purpose in the poem is linked to worldly concerns, not to religious piety. The subject matter of the poem is, in a word, matter. The anonymity of the peregrino makes him a generic Everyman, just as the anonymity of his surroundings makes the country traveled a generic Everywhere. But both actor and stage in Góngora's poem are ultimately subject to the material forces of mutability.

The mundane world of physical bodies—of appearances—is the principal concern of the poet. Within a poem whose rhetorical complexity structurally exemplifies the deceptiveness of appearances, Góngora provides us with a panorama of life and death, of rise and decline, on earth. The Soledades reflect a Lucretian world, a world eternally charged with the natural cycle of birth, growth, maturity, dying, death, and rebirth:

haud igitur redit ad nilum res ulla, sed omnes
discidio redeunt in corpora materiai.
[…]
haud igitur penitus pereunt quaecumque videntur,
quando alid ex alio reficit natura nec ullam
rem gigni patitur nisi morte adiuta aliena.

(Lucretius 1.248-64)

The perpetual interplay of vitality and decrepitude, and the constant metamorphoses of earthly matter, characterize the poetic terrain that the reader wanders into. The reader journeys through convoluted landscapes of the pastoral, bucolic, piscatory, and venatic traditions, and in the process is confronted with images and allusions that evoke the concept of mutability. The result of this difficult pilgrimage is a traditional example of

the portrayal of educational development as erring, as movement which more often than not gains its meaning in relation to the terrain traversed. While the Renaissance was expanding a rich literary tradition associated with the master-image of the “garden,” it was also elaborating a newer tradition associated with that of the “labyrinth”; thus the further evolution of these poetic means provides important clues to the character of the literature of error of the successor Baroque age.¹¹

Far from communicating a message of rebellion against accepted values of post-Tridentine Spanish society, the Soledades regularly offer moral advice—educational development—for the benefit of any mortal able to negotiate the labyrinthine and symbolically lush wordscape peopled by cabreros, serranos, pescadores, and cazadores. Specifically, the exposure to the natural beauty of life and death guides the poem's reader to an understanding of truth, or desengaño. The reaction to that revelation constitutes the observance of pastoral ethics of humility and moderation (mediocritas), thus avoiding the excessive extremes of luxury and indigence.¹² In effect, Góngora conveys in his art a useful code of conduct entirely compatible with the official goals of Catholic Spain.¹³ Góngora's innovative development of the earthly pilgrimage and worldly mudanza within the literary traditions of the garden and the labyrinth ultimately, if cryptically, obey the Horatian precepts of dulce et utile.¹⁴

The Soledades, and to a lesser extent the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea and the Panegírico al Duque de Lerma, became the protagonist of a bitter controversy that explored the extent to which the individual artist was obliged to conform to the aesthetic and moral expectations held by society's intellectual elite. During Góngora's lifetime, the objections that most critics levied against the Soledades grew out of the poem's perceived violation of the Horatian precepts of beauty and usefulness, the guidelines through which literary decorum was legitimately achieved during the classical revival in Europe. Some detractors, like Francisco de Quevedo, were more openly concerned about Góngora's innovative approach to language and style, a “cacofonía” that departed from conventional conceptismo.¹⁵ Other critics like Francisco Cascales, though disturbed by Góngora's cryptic playfulness with form and structure, were more offended by the poem's apparent lack of useful moral instruction.¹⁶ In an attack on the Soledades for its presumed absence of both Horatian precepts, Cascales says:

[…] lo que no vemos en esta poesía culta, que, sin haber doctrina secreta, sino sólo el trastorno de las palabras, y el modo de hablar peregrino y jamás usado ni visto en nuestra lengua, ni en otra vulgar, […] camina como el lobo, que da unos pasos adelante y otros atrás, para que, así confusos, no se eche de ver el camino que lleva.¹⁷

(187-88)

The charges of incomprehensibility and bad taste raised by Góngora's detractors were met with documents, written by Góngora's supporters, defending the Soledades as a great poem firmly rooted in the classical tradition of “deleitar” and “enseñar.”¹⁸ But Jáuregui, in a scathing comment echoing an observation made by Lope de Vega, suggests that the admitted inability of Góngora's defenders fully to understand the Soledades undermines the poem's credibility:¹⁹

[…] he llegado a enojarme con algunas personas ilustres de España … que leerá[n] los versos de Vm. y por ventura dirá[n]: Esta no es mi profesión, y así, aunque no entiendo palabra, ello debe de ser bueno. Es una superflua y una viciosa modestia; porque siendo un Poema en lengua castellana, y los que lo leen tan elocuentes que admiran el mundo desde un púlpito o suspenden todo un consejo, orando, o en conversación doctas se señalan, ¿por qué razón (si el escrito fuera bueno) no lo habían de entender fácilmente y gustar de él, no obstante que no hayan compuesto verso en todos los días de su vida? La verdad es que no está en ellos el defecto, sino en la pestilencia detestable de los negros versos.

(Jáuregui 131)

Jáuregui and many other critics reprimanded Góngora for disregarding literary techniques that would reinforce expectations rather than boldly challenge them. Within the intellectual circles of early modern Spain, poetry held an important social role by providing the letrados with a means by which to celebrate each others' erudition and ingenuity. After circulating unconventional poetry such as the Soledades, Góngora threatened the integrity of Spain's intellectual establishment by suggesting that—in the tradition of desengaño—human erudition and ingenuity are fallible: “Demás que 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” (“Carta” 172). By implication, every reader—defender as well as detractor—perplexed by the Soledades would be considered “ignorante.” As virtually every critic fell into this category, Góngora's poetry never substantially divided Spain's courtly intellectual community. This poetry did, however, try to disabuse the intellectuals of their long-standing pride in their own scholarly excellence.

Góngora seemed quite comfortable with his nonconformist role: “Caso que fuera error, me holgara de haber dado principio a algo; pues es mayor gloria empezar una acción que consumarla” (“Carta” 171). Even after detractors' repeated attacks against his sanity and moral character, Góngora chose to respond not by straightforwardly explaining his poetry, but rather by writing satiric poems against his critics, as well as by writing poetically cryptic “explanations” of his poems under attack.²⁰ Indeed, it would seem that Góngora never really wanted his Soledades to be fully understood; his experiment forced all readers to reconsider the value of language and meaning in their lives, as well as to reflect upon their human fallibility in comprehending things. But all the same, in spite of fomenting intellectual insecurity and defensiveness among people who were accustomed to intellectual self-assurance and self-glorification, Góngora stimulated interest in the exploration of innovative literary techniques. The artistic legacy of Góngora has been decidedly structural and distinctly intricate, not to mention deeply influential; even Lope de Vega, Quevedo, and Jáuregui eventually experimented with Góngora's experimental style.²¹

But the superficial appeal of the stylistic mannerism that has come to be known as gongorismo has done much to prevent readers from actually trying to find a substantial message within Góngora's Soledades. A perusal of the seventeenth-century commentaries of the Soledades reveals the obsessive scholarly interest in discovering the classical, medieval, and Renaissance sources of Góngora's many conceptos, instead of trying to understand the Soledades on its own terms. Góngora's contemporaries tried to understand the Soledades by applying to it the same standards of imitatio that were applied to the more lucid writings of Garcilaso de la Vega. Góngora himself suggested that he wanted his poem to be studied for its own intrinsic merits as a classic, not merely “read” as another vernacular patchwork of imitated sources.²²

Like most of Góngora's contemporaries, most of the modern scholars and artists responsible for the renewal of interest in the Soledades, the Polifemo, and the Panegírico warmly embraced the Soledades as a poem exclusively concerned with form. John Beverley has observed that

[t]he formalist revision of the Soledades has, ironically, tended to agree in essence with Jáuregui and the detractores, simply inverting the terms of judgment and celebrating Góngora's artificiality and the hedonistic pleasures of a poetry liberated from didactic canons.

(Aspects 60)

As examples, Beverley cites Dámaso Alonso's interpretation of the Soledades as a pure poetry of forms as well as Andrée Collard's thesis that Góngora's poem represented a new literary genre of “arte descriptivo” eliminating neoclassical conventions of usefulness.²³ Unfortunately, very few studies of the Soledades have tried to reconcile the procedure of formal analysis with the search for “usefulness” through meaning. Supposing that Góngora's poem should be studied as a cohesive work with pretensions of ingenuity and originality comparable—and not inferior—to the Roman classics so greatly admired during Spain's Golden Age, this study aims to offer an interpretation of the Soledades based on a formal, sustained analysis that considers literary sources while emphasizing study of the poem's internal structures and nuances of agudeza.²⁴

The primarily formal approach to the Soledades that this study pursues constitutes an attempt to return to the detailed readings of scholars such as Dámaso Alonso and Leo Spitzer, while making use of more recent strides in Góngora scholarship. Over the past few decades, a remarkable number of interpretations of the Soledades have grown out of scholarly attempts to situate the poem within the interpretative frameworks of historical biographies and seventeenth-century cosmologies, as well as twentieth-century social and political philosophies.²⁵ While these studies have been successful in explaining the circumstances and motives behind Góngora's art, they have been less successful in explaining the art itself.

Fortunately, in conjunction with the abundant criticism on the Soledades as a historical testimony or social document, a smaller tradition of Góngora scholarship has maintained an interest in prioritizing the poem's identity as a painstakingly crafted work of art. It is through this scholarly tradition that the poem's treatment of life and death has been previously acknowledged. In his essay “Dark With Excessive Bright,” D. S. Carne-Ross describes the Soledades as a poem of earthly existence:

Violence is present because it is a special form of energy, and death may be admitted because it does not point outside the poetic universe to some other realm but is rather a part of the ceaseless round of life.

(158)

In “Neoplatonism and the Soledades” R. O. Jones recognizes the worldly dynamic of life and death in the poem: “the poetry is a hymn to life and beauty. Death is shown as inherent in the life of the individual, but Life itself goes on” (7). Even more succinctly, but within the context of Neoplatonism, Jones captures the sense of perpetual interplay between life and death in the natural world: “Death is … not extinction but transmutation. Conflict and violence and death do not in any way disrupt the overriding harmony of the universe” (13). In a more recent study, “Metaphor and Fable in Góngora's ‘Soledad primera,’” Mary Randel has explored the poem's “obsession with time and cyclical repetition” in an analysis of the imagery of life (particularly eroticism) and death present in the politico serrano's tale (lines 366-502 of the Soledad primera), and she infers that

[w]ithin Arcadia and without, every creature in the Soledades obeys, willy-nilly, the same law that makes Desire the agent of Mutability. Erotic struggle carries one and all toward death.

(110)

As the following chapters of this study show, however, “erotic struggle” is only one of many dimensions of life that the poem presents in contrast with death. John Beverley has taken note of the wide range of mutability imagery in the Soledades, and his explorations of the poem have led him to elaborate upon Carne-Ross's important observations: “Góngora wants to render the Lucretian vision of world in ceaseless development” (43). Whether or not Góngora has a specifically Lucretian vision, Beverley's statement begs further exploration of the “ceaseless round of life” in the Soledades.

Notes

1. For more on death in early modern Spain, see Florence Whyte's The Dance of Death in Spain and Catalonia and James M. Clark's The Dance of Death in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

2. The Dança general de la muerte tradition in Spain gave rise to a particularly meditative elegiac tradition, such as the ubi sunt poetry of Jorge Manrique, that found its way into mainstream pastoral literature, such as Jorge de Montemayor's La Diana. The Soledades, often thought to be an example of pastoral literature, represents the generalizing characteristics of the late medieval elegiac tradition. At the same time, philological interest in Epicurean and Stoic philosophy, as well as in the Old and New Testaments, was foundational in refining the intellectual perception of existence.

3. For more on the flourishing artistic vogues of pilgrimage, wandering, and meditation of mortality during the seventeenth century, see José Maravall's La cultura del barroco, pp. 309-418. The reader will find a more detailed discussion of the historical development of peregrinatio from the Middle Ages through the Baroque in Juergen Hahn's The Origins of the Baroque Concept of “Peregrinatio.”

   Regarding the Soledades, Hahn claims that the poem's pilgrim follows along a peregrinatio amoris. The “pilgrimage of love” tradition is definitely an important influence in the Soledades, but it is only one aspect of the pilgrimage which, I believe, is created in the poem. In Gerald Gillespie's Garden and Labyrinth of Time, the essay “Erring and Wayfaring in Baroque Fiction: The World as Labyrinth and Garden” provides an informative discussion of pilgrimage in Renaissance and Baroque literature with respect to the pastoral, and with respect to the literary tradition of the “errant wanderer.”

4. Any attempt to read the Soledades reveals the poem's unusual complexity and vivid imagery right away, but Dámaso Alonso's seminal essays on the Soledades still provide some of the best investigations of matters of structure and sensuality. See, in particular, “Claridad y belleza de las ‘Soledades’” and “La correlación en la poesia de Góngora” in Estudios y ensayos gongorinos.

5. I first noticed the cyclical interplay of literal and symbolic life and death in the Soledades after reading Alban Forcione's Cervantes' Christian Romance: A Study of Persiles y Segismunda. Since then, the scholarship of R. O. Jones and Mary Randel have brought my attention to specific details of cyclical imagery and nature's self-perpetuity in Góngora's poem.

6. In Spanish Poetry of the Golden Age Bruce Wardropper eloquently describes what “mutability” fundamentally refers to:

   Time is the essence of man's life in this world. He will dream of a heaven, in which his soul may live more truly, more fully, in non-time, which is called eternity, but the realities and the values of everyday existence are subject to erosion by time. Beauty, love, marriage, honor, success all vanish with time and its partner, death […]. Man is born to die. But in between birth and death there is much to appreciate, much that is worth holding onto for as long as possible […].

   (75)

   As far as the Soledades is concerned, I would add to Wardropper's description the idea that life and death perpetually co-exist and feed off of each other. In “The Poetic Unity of the Soledades of Góngora” R. O. Jones articulates the eternal presence of mutability in the poem:

   The underlying theme of the Soledades is the vanity of opposing Nature, which destroys artifice and punishes presumption. Only Nature herself is immutable. This theme irrupts into the poem in image after image that are […] irrelevant to the wanderer's journey.

   (194)

   The imagery of life and death so abundant in the poem is, on the contrary, most relevant to the wanderer's journey. But whether the wanderer—the fictional peregrino, the challenged reader—notices the poem's images of mutability and desengaño is contingent upon his desire and ability to take notice.

7. Wardropper's description of desengaño explains the significance of Góngora's strange poem as an embodiment of engaños that must be unravelled before truth in meaning is revealed:

   […] desengaño […] reveals the error (engaño) of man's heedless impressions of the world in which he lives […]. Man is subject to two main kinds of error of judgment. (I) Thinking that he and his world will last forever, he discredits the inevitable erosion of time; he thinks that reality is to be found in the temporal life, whereas to a true believer reality resides only in eternity. (2) Because his senses are fallible, man's apprehension of the temporal world is also impaired. What seems to him to be one thing is another […]. It follows that the wise man strives to recognize error and to recognize the eternal reality behind the temporal fiction so as to correct false judgments and mend errant ways.

   (99)

   It is the second kind of error of judgment that most evidently characterizes meaning in the Soledades, as this study tries to show. Much more difficult to demonstrate is the “eternal reality” that would, in ordinary poems of desengaño, be suggested by the unmistakable presence of a religious figure. In a way, Góngora's poem suggests an immortal, eternal reality in its egalitarian vision of life and death, but there is no evident, logical procedure to see the poem as an allegory of man's life in eternal reality. Such a connection between the earthly world presented and the spiritual world would require the reader to experience a leap of faith, or desengaño, outside of the realm of seventeenth-century logic.

8. No elaboration on the spirituality of cultural life during the Counter-Reformation in Spain is necessary, but it is worth looking at Leo Spitzer's argument in “The Spanish Baroque” (in Leo Spitzer: Representative Essays) that the word “baroque”

   […] signifies a fact of cultural civilization that had its apogee in the seventeenth century in Spain, but that radiated throughout Europe before French classicism set a barrier against it. It consists of the reworking of two ideas—one medieval, the other Renaissance—into a third idea, which reveals the polarity between the senses and nothingness, beauty and death, the temporal and the eternal.

   (138)

   Spitzer's noted that his own essay “is a lecture that now seems […] to suffer from a certain confusion between a religious creed and an aesthetic creed.” But regardless of Spitzer's confusion, the “ideas” clustered around the words “spirit” and “flesh” effectively—if broadly—refer to intellectual trends of Spanish society during (respectively) medieval Scholasticism and Renaissance Humanism. The synthesis of these trends corresponds to the mannerist and baroque Counter-Reformation.

9. In his Tenth Epistle “A Don Francisco del Villar el Licenciado” (in Cartas filológicas), Cascales comments on the Polifemo and Soledades: “En fin, todo esto es un humor grueso que se la ha subido a la cabeza al autor de este ateísmo y a sus sectarios, que, como humor, se ha de evaporar y resolver poco a poco en nada.” (219)

10. D. S. Carne-Ross, in “Dark With Excessive Bright,” (in Instaurations) suggests that “the Soledades are what [Wallace] Stevens calls poems of the earth” (159), and from this statement I borrow the phrase “poem of the earth” to describe the Soledades throughout this study. The idea of Góngora's poem as a poem of the earth—as a self-contained realm where time and matter are in constant flux—was brought to my attention by Alban Forcione.

11. The Soledades is an extraordinary example of the tradition of writing that combines pastoral settings with labyrinthine structures, with the effect of placing the reader into the role of errant wanderer, and with the aesthetic and didactic purposes of demonstrating the beauty of the secular world and providing a moral code whereby to handle the beauty's fleetingness. The pilgrim's journey is, fundamentally, a particular example of the “pilgrimage of life” as described by Juergen Hahn:

    [T]he various types of peregrinationes were frequently linked with the concept of peregrinatio vitae, a metaphor which circumscribes man's exile from Paradise and his unstable, wandering sojourn on earth […]. [T]his association was strongest in those works which stressed a profoundly Christian outlook on the world […].

    (114)

    In the Soledades, not only does the errant peregrino's journey develop from a lady's unrequited love, and not only does it become for the pilgrim a journey of desengaño through pastoral societies of mediocritas, but it also becomes a journey of life—of mutability and moderation—for the reader who can understand the symbols and conceits that the narrative's peregrino cannot notice.

12. Countless scholars have pointed out that Horace's epode “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis” stands as the most influential classical text communicating the moral worldview of pastoral humility and moderation. With specific reference to the Soledades, several hispanists have discussed the poem's general treatment of “menosprecio de corte” and “alabanza de aldea”—a popular dichotomy during the Renaissance that developed directly from the “beatus ille” tradition. An extensive study of the court/country conflict in Góngora's poetry, as determined by biographical developments in Góngora's life, is Robert Jammes's Etudes sur l'oeuvre poétique de Don Luis de Góngora. The personal and professional struggles experienced by the poet most likely have contributed—as Jammes claims—to the creation of court/country dichotomies in the Soledades, but this study sets out to explore how this cultural conflict is articulated in the Soledades through the use of imagery and allusions to the moral dichotomy of moderation (mediocritas) and excess. In the poem, the virtues of moderation are associated with the achievement of desengaño by way of an errant pilgrimage through the countryside of mutability imagery.

13. Carne-Ross articulates an understanding that the apparent absence of Christianity in the poem is not necessarily incompatible with prevailing Christian beliefs:

    In a secular age, such work should be understood readily enough. In fact, it may have been more easily accepted in a Christian period […]. The post-Christian reader is in a more exposed position. Whether or not he quite admits it, he lays upon literature the explicatory burden once carried by religion […].

    (159)

    Carne-Ross makes a good point in observing that modern readers approach older literature with Bildungsroman expectations; the cosmologically “self-contained” epic or novel of early modern Europe was exceptional during an age that enjoyed the cumulative didacticism of sermonizing exempla, as well as the intertextual entertainment and moral improvement gained from frame-tale narratives and collections of novellas. If we consider the popularity of the Ovide moralisé tradition during the Renaissance, in which the Metamorphoses were understood as didactic tales in the light of extratextual Biblical literature, it is not impossible to consider the Soledades (which Góngora compared to the Metamorphoses) as a text whose materialistic content could be understood didactically by way of supplementary literature of the Christian tradition.

14. Horace's De arte poetica liber was widely read and revered in late medieval and early modern Spain, and its influence during the late sixteenth century and seventeenth century can be seen in virtually every scholarly commentary and ars poetica.

15. Góngora's perceived abuse of language and style became a source of creative artistic parody and satire for Quevedo and, to a lesser extent, for Lope de Vega. An excellent collection of anti-Góngora and anti-gongorista writings by the two authors can be found in Ana Martínez Arancón's La batalla en torno a Góngora 74-126.

16. Cascales' moral judgment of the Soledades is, in fact, rooted in the poem's linguistic intricacy and obscurity. Cascales' descriptions of the poem and its creator, in the Eighth Epistle of the Cartas filológicas, are revealing:

    Y si acaso (lo que no pienso) habla de veras, y le parece que esta nueva secta de lenguaje poético debe ser admitida, confesaré de plano que, o yo he menester purgarme con las tres Anticiras de Horacio, o él va totalmente fuera de trastes. Entrando, pues, en este crético laberinto, pregunto si la obscuridad es virtud o vicio. Cualquiera responderá … absolutamente que es vicio.

    (178-9)

    For Cascales, Góngora's new poetry isn't merely an infraction of bad taste and established conventions of artistic legitimacy; it is also a spiritual transgression, a sinful—even a heretical—act.

17. This attack against the Soledades recognizes, unwittingly, the poem's identity as a labyrinthine path of “appearances” to be arduously travelled. But Cascales does not recognize the conceptual and moral significance of this fundamental and complicated characteristic of the Soledades.

18. Pedro Díaz de Rivas, for example, discusses the extent of “deleitar” and “enseñar” in the Primera soledad: “Y si la enseñanza es como género a muchas artes, el fin especial de la Poesía será enseñar deleitando, y el de la Retórica enseñar persuadiendo.” (“Discuros apologéticos …” in Martínez Arancón, 128) Díaz de Rivas, like many of Góngora's supporters, suggests that the introduction of experimental language and style into Castilian is a useful, as well as a beautiful, function of the Soledades.

19. Admitting to obscurity in the poem, Pedro de Valencia (in his “Carta escrita a don Luis de Góngora en censura de sus poesías”) invokes the wisdom of following Horace's precepts of artistic decorum: “Virtud del decir es la claridad, y muy grande virtud; y una de las cosas para que manda Horacio detener en casa las poesías antes de publicarlas es para enmendar los lugares oscuros.” (5) Francisco Fernández de Córdoba, a longtime friend of Góngora, talks (in his “Parecer …”) about his “sentimiento acerca de la obscuridad de las Soledades” in which he advises Góngora

    [que] resti[tu]ya […] a su casa la claridad, y venustidad antigua, con que han salido y sido tan justamente celebradas por el mundo sus obras. Crea Vm. que muchos ven esto, aunque se lo digan pocos, parte de los cuales lo dejan por no confesarse menos agudos en el entender: parte por no atreverse, parte por mostrarse eruditos defendiendo la obscuridad […].

    (22)

    Fernández de Córdoba's remark not only shows his own ability to comprehend the poem, but also points to the poem's role in problematizing the established self-satisfaction of Spain's intellectual community. Nevertheless, like Valencia, he structures his letter with praise for Góngora and his latest poetic achievements. (Citations from Martínez Arancón.)

20. In particular, see the poems “De los que censuraron su Polifemo” and “Alegoría de la primera de sus Soledades” reprinted in Arancón, 68-69.

21. In Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain, Elias Rivers points out that Góngora's style, “traditionally labelled culteranismo, though widely imitated in Spain, Portugal, and Spanish America, was never surpassed by any of his imitators,” yet most of the poets of the baroque at least appropriated Góngora's techniques for their own purposes:

    It is traditional, though misleading, to list Spain's other seventeenth-century poets either as showy cultista followers of Góngora, or as intellectual conceptistas like Quevedo. As a matter of fact, classical erudition and mythological allusions, the trademarks of culteranismo, were almost universal in seventeenth-century poetry; and most poets used puns, conceits, and other forms of baroque wit.

    (22)

22. In his “Carta en respuesta” Góngora expressed his view that the Soledades should be considered as good as the best of Roman classics:

    […] si la obscuridad y estilo entrincado de Ovidio […], da causa a que, vacilando el entendimiento en fuerza de discurso, trabajándole […], 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 […] si entendida para los doctos, causarme ha autoridad, siendo lance forzoso venerar que nuestra lengua a costa de mi trabajo haya llegado a la perfección y alteza de la latina […].

    (172)

23. See Dámaso Alonso's “Alusión y elusión en la poesía de Góngora” (92-113) in Estudios y ensayos gongorinos, and Andrée Collard's Nueva poesía: conceptismo, culteranismo en la crítica española.

24. The “internal structures” and “agudeza” that I refer to are the subject matter of several literary scholars of the Spanish Baroque, most notably Baltasar Gracián in his Agudeza y arte de ingenio.

25. Jammes's Etudes provides a good discussion of various links between the trajectory of Góngora's life and the trajectory of his literary work. Drawing from Jones' essays on Neoplatonism in the Soledades, Robin McAllister's The Reader as Pilgrim and Poet in Góngora's “Soledades” argues a Neoplatonic identity for the poem. Many socio-political interpretations of the Soledades have appeared over the last two decades, and among the most influential have been John Beverley's writings such as “The Language of Contradiction: Aspects of Góngora's Soledades.”

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