Barthes, Góngora, and Non-Sense

Abstract

A fragment in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes suggests that any attempt to transgress the binary prison of male and female (active and passive) tends to invert the traditional terms without disrupting their oppressive and spurious authority. Barthes proposes a neutral and utopian “third term,” or “non-sense,” that will transcend transgression itself and that he identifies with a “happy” sexuality and a “Gongorine” text. The poetics of Golden Age Spain are underwritten by implicitly gendered conceptions of the rhetorical body: ornamental style, lyric genre, and Italianate ethos are associated with the “female” text and hence made subordinate to their “higher” male equivalents. In the Soledades Góngora stresses the “female” terms, but his usage may not be transgressive: generic confusion (sexual and textual) was already widespread elsewhere. He tends, rather, to a nomadic indeterminacy that displaces author as active origin and reader as passive recipient of authoritative and authoritarian meaning.