"Mas no cabras alla": Gongora's Early Modern Representation of the Modern Sublime

Abstract

THE last century has left us with three main views of Gongora's Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea. In the first-which characterizes both Damaso Alonso's (186-207) and A. A. Parker's (111-6) interpretations-the poem is said to concern opposing dualisms (monstrosity/beauty, darkness/ light, love/jealousy) united and balanced in an organic whole.1 According to the second view, the positive values in this dualism are celebrated; for R. 0. Jones, these are beauty and life (36-7), while for Robert Jammes, they are love and other pastoral (533 54). third holds that the negative values of the dualism triumph; for instance, Melinda Eve Lehrer interprets much of Gongora's poetry, including the Polifemo, as beautiful pastorale[s] ... built up and then shattered (57). Along similar lines, R. John McCaw's recent article treats the poem's subversion of pastoral: The contradiction between Polyphemus's words and deeds, then, signif[ies] the triumph of instinct over intellect, and, generally, the deflation of the integrity of pastoral ideals (32). In what follows, I will support the third view by providing a new reading of the poem: the Polifemo is not a celebration of love, but rather a representation of love's destruction by jealousy. Gongora found in jealousy a representation of experience, anticipating one of the dominant topics of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury aesthetics, and this power of jealousy, the destroyer of love, is the true focus of the poem. human emotion of jealousy is often described in literature in the most hyperbolic terms, reflecting perhaps the actual strength of the affective experience. Calderon and Lope de Vega, among others, provide good examples of this; hence the title of the former's play, El mayor monstruo los celos and Lope de Vegas horrific realization in Sonnet 56 of the Rimas that ver otro amante en brazos de su dama (13) is life's worst torment, worse than the tortures suffered by the Danaids, Tantalus, Ixion, Sisyphus and Prometheus. However, Gongora's use of hyperbole raises the theme to its Olympian zenith, indeed, beyond the bounds of conceptuality. Whereas the poetics of the day described an harmonious beauty in which the poet was encouraged to amaze the reader with admiratio or maraviglia, Gongora surpasses these tropes. I will show here how jealousy gave Gongora the opportunity to speak about something beyond the phenomena and experience of the world and beyond the poetics of his day: sublime. I am not using the term sublime as it was sometimes used in Renaissance and Baroque Europe as a synonym for or elevated,2 nor in Longinus's specialized sense as referring to phusis being revealed by the poet's effortless concealment of his techne, and having the effect of uplifting the reader's soul.3 Along these lines, the sixteenth century prescribed admiratio in poetry, as canonized in Francesco Patrizi's Della poetica (1586) where he writes on mirabile: Ma doura il poeta pero sempre come di proprio officio suo e come a proprio fine, studiare di fare mirabile ogni soggetto ch'e gli prenda per le mani, comunque la si prendano i leggitori, the non tutti son uguali (qtd. in Weinberg 2: 784-5). Although these uses well describe the kinds of metaphors created by Gongora's precursors and contemporaries, they do not adequately portray the magnitude of don Luis's images. I propose that Gongora's images are sublime in the modern aesthetic sense, as developed by Burke, Addison, and Sulzer in the eighteenth century, and systematized by Kant in the Critique of Judgement (Guyer 258-9). For Kant, the is an experience wherein the subject's reason and imagination are overwhelmed by a scene of such great magnitude or power that it defies the subject's conceptual ability. He distinguishes two types: the mathematical and the dynamic. subjective experience of the mathematical occurs when the enormity of the object defies conceptualization. …