Experiencia y representacion en el Siglo de Oro

Abstract

Experiencia y representacion en el Siglo de Oro. By Jorge Checa Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y Leon, 1998. 218 pages. In the volume, Jorge Checa expands three earlier essays and adds a fourth in order to explore the themes-and the interdependence-of and representation in the literature of the Golden Age. The focal figures of the study are Hernan Cortes, Santa Teresa de Jesus, Baltasar Gracian, and Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Checa opens with a fifteen-page Introduction, El dominio de la experiencia, in which he calls experience the fundamental element in determining the link between reality and representation, and the common denominator of the literary dramas that he will examine. Representation is textually and ideologically mediated. In Early Modern Spain the time is ripe for continual discoveries, for new ways of perceiving the world, for processing change, and for addressing issues of subjectivity and alterity. In his commentary, Checa alludes to sources as varied as Vives, Huarte de San Juan, Machiavelli, Panofsky, and Maravall as means of access to the forms of mimesis that he will describe in the four chapters. The deep structure, as it were, of the analyses is based on the interplay of space (be it geographical, political, spiritual, or philosophical), and rhetoric, that is, on the dialectical between textual and extratextual concerns. y el espacio de la Conquista: la Segunda carta de relation looks not only, via Stephen Greenblatt, at the self-fashioning of the conqueror/ author but also at his refashioning of the enterprise, including the depiction of his principal adversary, Moctezuma. The system operates on a number of strategic (i.e., rhetorical) levels: military, political, lexical, and symbolic, among others. Cortes's actions, and his writings, can be associated with the Machiavellian concept of virt? and its ties to the protean skill of adaptability. Intelligent behavior is inseparable from ingenuity and astuteness, and from the ability to maneuver the playing field, the ability to transgress consistency. In his reading of Comes, Checa accentuates the performative aspects of historiography. Carlos V is, of course, the narratee, the one to whom the discourse is directed and the raison d'etre of the subject positionings. The Prince gives Comes a model, from which he diverges on occasion, notably in terms of the underlying vision of history and the role of providence in that vision. Checa shows Comes negotiating his own interests-in the New World and on the page-in order to satisfy the interests of the king. From Comes before Charles V, Checa moves to Santa Teresa before her sister nuns and, more importantly, before God. …