Lope de Vega'sLa gatomaquiaand Positive Parody

Abstract

I Luis de Gongora mastered the art of the bizarre correspondence. His favourite ‘A si no B’ formula appears to reject classical notions of representation based on similitude1, foregrounding instead two oppositional subjects as interchangeable components of a structure that is perversely analogical. In Gongora’s poetic universe linguistic and conceptual correlations are often dependent upon the potential reconcilability of the apparently irreconcilable.2 But we shouldn’t underestimate his rival Lope de Vega’s own capacity for linguistic experimentation, an equally problematic approach to the processes of signification which, though not as disproportionately envisaged, symphonically-charged, or as conceptually complex as in Gongora’s longer poems, certainly demonstrates its own defiant response to the idealistic connections that are so often manipulated to support hierarchical models of authority. Nowhere does Lope offer such a sustained liberation of the word than in the burlesque epic published towards the end of his life, La gatomaquia (1634).3 The parodic power of Lope’s tale of the passionate and jealous love of the ‘gato romano’ Marramaquiz for the beautiful and treacherous Zapaquilda, is fuelled by the poem’s resistance to and rejection of the illegitimate parallels, correspondences and relations that normalise out-moded heroic codes of behaviour and depend upon the increasingly invalid objectivity of epic. In the Gatomaqiua the essential paradox at the heart of all parody, that is, that even in degrading there is elevation, and in rejection there is reinforcement (Hutcheon 75), is itself a target of parody; and this has inevitable aesthetic and ideological implications. The poem acknowledges a disintegrating faith in the mystical bond between word and thing,4 but communicates this disconnect within an overarching framework of absurd identification: what we might term, gato, si no hombre (mujer). Within a heightened context of over-determined meta-artistry, the reader’s supension of disbelief with regard to this central unifying correspondence is rarely threatened. And yet, throughout the poem, a syncopated series of ruptured engagements with generic, mythical/