Chrystal Ann Chemris. The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation

Abstract

The best way to appreciate The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation is not as a study of the historical trajectory of the Hispanic Baroque, as one might expect in light of its transhistorical scope, but as a collection of informative yet only loosely interconnected essays on selected canonical writers and works from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain (the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, Luis de Góngora, Miguel de Cervantes, Lope de Vega as well as the Peruvian-born Inca Garcilaso) followed by essays on writers and works from the “long” Latin American twentieth century, beginning with modernismo (Rubén Darío) and moving through the avant-garde and the Neobaroque (Jorge Luis Borges, César Vallejo, Juan Rulfo, Alejo Carpentier) to post-symbolist poetry (Delmira Agustini, Alejandra Pizarnik, Roberto Sosa, and contemporary Indigenous poets Leonel Lienlaf and Graciela Huinao). This study builds on the now-canonical thesis of the Baroque as the alternative modernity of the Hispanic world, which connects Spain to Latin America and the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries as twin sites and successive stages of a continuous trajectory of an uneven process of modernization. From among the key proponents of this claim, it is specifically John Beverley’s version that Chemris draws on, extending Beverly’s claim that “the Baroque is the cultural form of the impasse in the transition from feudalism to capitalism” (25). Chemris’s comparative framework gives equal weight to both shores of the Hispanic Atlantic world, balancing early period Spanish works with modern Latin American works, and devoting the first three chapters to the former and three more chapters to the latter. The six chapters are intended to present successive “frames for understanding the Baroque as a transatlantic phenomenon” (26).In the early chapters, Chemris’s argument on the Baroque as the expression of the “impasse of modernity” (87) takes a familiar direction, revisiting landmarks of the Baroque (Góngora’s Soledades, Cervantes’s Don Quijote, and Lope’s Fuenteovejuna). At the relay station where the seventeenth-century Baroque gives way to the twentieth-century Neobaroque, however, Chemris’s account veers off on a surprising turn. Sidestepping germinal Neobaroque fiction and theory by Cuban writers Alejo Carpentier, Jose Lezama Lima, and Severo Sarduy, Chemris instead focuses on Symbolism as the heir of the historical Baroque’s pioneering articulation of Spain’s eccentric modernity. Chemris’s intervention draws on the established role of Góngora as an inspiration for the Hispanic avantgarde, invoking the Generation of ‘27’s Góngora revival to announce her focus on “the modern resurgence of the Baroque poetry of Luis de Góngora under the influence of the French Symbolists, whose self-referential language games seemed to continue the Góngorine project” (3).The architecture of this study resulting from this marriage of the historical Baroque to modern symbolism in a Latin American key is structured in discrete, independent sections. For one, it leads to the unexpected gesture of Mallarmé’s elevation in the Hispanic Baroque canon as a modern successor of sorts to Góngora function as a central connecting node in the Baroque intertextual network. In Chapter 6, for example, Mallarmé takes the place of Góngora as a connecting hub: Latin American post-symbolist poets from Agustini to contemporary indigenous poets Lienlaf and Huinao, nominally cast as “Darío’s successors,” are grouped together by virtue of their adaptation of the “Mallarmean topos of self-contemplation in a mirror” (130). Here, the Baroque has dropped from direct view, and the threads that connect this chapter to the book are strictly indirect channels (such as the theme of rape as a sexualized form of imperial domination, which had appeared in the discussion of Góngora’s Soledades in Chapter 1 as well as that of Darío’s modernista swan poems in Chapter 4). To make up for this gap, and to shore up Mallarmé centrality to this study’s professed focus on the Hispanic Baroque, a short discussion of “The Poetic Process of ‘Un Coup de Dés’” is offered in an appendix. But this is actually a symptom of this study’s overall organizational shortcomings. One might say that this study enacts the baroque figure of elliptical displacement as described by Sarduy: in the elliptical structure of the book’s scholarly argument, Mallarmé occupies the occluded virtual second center or focus, while the main and visible center is filled by Góngora.Góngora, in turn, is the principal hub of the argument in the first chapters on the historical Baroque. He figures at the center of Chapter 1 (which develops the theme of “the broken colonized body politic—indigenous and Morisco” [26] in Góngora and his humanist circle). According to Chemris, the “reverberating mourning of the serrano, who grieves a son lost to Spain’s sea ventures” (34) is emblematic of “Góngora’s camouflaged political protest in poetry” (145). This chapter establishes the Baroque paradigm of “coded critique” that, on Chemris’s account, is continued by “the Latin American modernista and avant-garde poets” (145) discussed in Chapters 4–6. That said, in light of this study’s Baroque subject—an expression noted for its formal intricacies—it is curious that form does not rank first in the argument, ceding priority to thematic concerns. Indeed, the chapters are organized around recurrent themes rather than forms: in Chapter 2 (“Violence and the ‘Tremulous Private Body’ in Lazarillo de Tormes, Fuenteovejuna, and the Soledades”), the figure of violent subjection connects “the mechanical gaze of [Góngora’s] peregrino” (71) passively observing bloody slaughter in the Soledades’s allegorical hunting scenes to the Lazarillo’s title character’s physical and sexual abuse as well as to the revolutionary violence and its co-optation in Fuenteovejuna. Chapter 3 (“Trauma, Body and Machine in Don Quijote”) discusses the prologue to Book II of Don Quijote, focusing on its “two harrowing stories of madmen and dogs” that depict animal torture. On Chemris’s account, its allegorical meaning as cautionary tales targeting Cervantes’s rival, the author of the counterfeit Quijote, demonstrates “the psychic consequences of the emerging mechanistic world view” (86): the “mechanization of inner life” (84) is also shown to underpin the cure and disenchantment of Don Quijote at the end of the volume.Moving on to the modern Latin American works, the coded violence in Góngora anchors the discussion of rape imagery in Darío’s swan poems in Chapter 4 (“Góngora and Darío in Constellation: On the Poetics of Rape, Colonialism, and Modernity”). Chemris shows Darío reworking the myth of Leda’s rape by the swan to express “the trauma of colonization” (88), while performing complete reversals of value and perspective, from imperialist triumphalism to the expression of the trauma of imperialist domination in “Los cisnes I,” a poem about the Latin American fear of U.S. expansionism. A tour de force of close readings, the argument in this chapter is well-connected and compelling. Chapter 5 (“Pilgrimage into the Trauma of History: Continuities of Góngora in Carpentier, Rulfo, and Vallejo”) shifts from imperial rape to another Góngorine theme, failed pilgrimage, which serves to constellate Carpentier’s story “El camino de Santiago,” Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, and Vallejo’s poem “Trilce LXV.” Here too, theme—frustrated pilgrimage—figures as an allegory of political paralysis. In arriving at the place where he left off, Chemris argues, Góngora’s pilgrim inaugurates a narrative about the impasse of Hispanic modernity—a story about going nowhere.All chapters of the book are meticulously researched and centered on informative close readings. Nonetheless, what emerges in Chemris’s study is a Hispanic Baroque and Neobaroque disappointingly dissociated from the centrality of form commonly assumed to define the Baroque. An eloquent example is the discussion of hermeticism, which is announced as central to the discussion in Chapter 1 of Góngora’s humanist circle: Chemris seeks to show how the former “used the imaginary of hermeticism to address the frustrated national ambitions of colonized peoples within the Spanish empire, the Moriscos and Amerindians” (29). Yet hermeticism drops from view in the ensuing argument. It reappears again in the closing pages of the chapter, in a claim positing that “Góngora and Inca Garcilaso embraced the imaginary of hermeticism [...] to engage utopian thought in the context of national projects which were frustrated” (52). This claim, however, has not been properly defended. Hermeticism next resurfaces in the opening statement of the “Afterword”: “Symbolism is the Rosetta Stone of modernist hermeticism and its literary and theoretical sequels” (143). Here, again, other concerns instantly displace it.Overall, The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary Modernity: Writing in Constellation constitutes a significant scholarly achievement. The study’s shortcomings are rooted in attempting too much and thereby generating a centrifugal dynamic where subordinate concerns multiply and impinge on the central throughline of the argument. The decentered structure of the study is justified by reference to a Benjaminian concept: “the trajectory of Hispanic modernity,” Chemris writes in the opening statement, “can be seen as one of constellations, parallel moments of conjuncture, in which the origins of the modern come into a kind of synchrony with later turning points” (1). Be that as it may, there is a disconnect between the theoretical and the empirical levels of the argument, where clear statements of purpose—such as the proposal “to study literary manifestations of Hispanic modernity in the earliest glimmer of the Baroque and to observe its repeated dynamics in modernismo and in the future expression of the avant-garde” (2)—seem to float unsuitably above critical practice, without being fully grounded in it.