Perspective and the Eye of the Beholder in Luis de Góngora’s Minor Poems

Abstract

Perspective and the Eye of the Beholder in Luis de Góngora’s Minor Poems Natalia Fernández He serves only as a watcher… The relevance of the way of looking An anonymous contemporary of Luis de Góngora acidly commented on his Soledad primera. To his mind, the poem revealed as incoherent, plotless, illogical: Sale un mancebito, la principal figura que Vm. introduce, y no le da nombre. Este fue al mar y vino de el mar, sin que sepáis cómo ni para qué; él no sirve sino de mirón, y no dice cosa buena ni mala, ni despega su boca… (Qtd. in Smith [87]) This perception of Góngora’s poetic style, which derived from the astonishment of the readers at a “monster that appears to transgress the constrictive paradigm of sixteenth-century poetics” (Smith 88), became perpetuated through centuries. And, even the most remarkable researchers—and supporters—on the Cordovan’s work have felt uneasy at the frequently alleged human emptiness which characterizes his poetry: “With Góngora, we can’t imagine the poet behind the poem; we can’t take his pulse, hear his voice” (Gaylord 236). This blurred subjectivity, which has been highlighted as an aesthetic Baroque survival in twentieth-century poetry (Martín Estudillo 11), can be pointed out as a direct effect of a new way of looking that came to substitute the [End Page 320] centralism and linearity of Cartesian perspective—because, as Erwin Panofsky clearly showed, perspective encloses a symbolic meaning: Si la perspectiva no es un momento artístico, constituye, sin embargo, un momento estilístico y, utilizando el feliz término acuñado por Ernst Cassirer, debe servir a la historia del arte como una de aquellas formas simbólicas mediante las cuales un particular contenido espiritual se une a un signo sensible concreto y se identifica íntimamente con él. Y es, en este sentido, esencialmente significativa para las diferentes épocas y campos artísticos, no solo en tanto tengan o no perspectiva, sino en cuanto al tipo de perspectiva que posean. (Panofsky 24) At this light, Martin Jay (1993) and Christine Buci-Glucksmann (1994) have set the bases for the understanding of the link between aesthetic expressions and scopic trends. And, even more recently, Kirsten Kramer (“Einleitung” 16) has insisted on the absolute interconnection between cultural practices and visual regimes: Visualisierungstechniken sind in dieser Perspektive stets auf eine umgebende Kulturelle Ordnung bezogen, wie auch umgekehrt jede Kulturelle Formation in ihrer Entstehung und Durchsetzung auf konkreten visuellen Repräsentationssystemen und Bildpraktiken beruht, die sie in soziale Ablaufprozesse integriert und im Hinblick auf die Erlangung spezifischer Handlungsziele funktionalisiert.1 The general context of crisis which emerges in seventeenth-century Spain explodes into an epistemical crisis which dramatically affects the approach to reality and to the Self and, consequently, plays a decisive role concerning mimesis as a means of representation.2 This is at the base of the emergence of a scopic regime—according to Martin Jay’s concept—which rules uncertainty and, as a result, theatricality: “If life is a dream, the world is truly a theatre, and theatre is that ‘intermediate world,’ the metaphor for an invisible visible and a visible invisible, for an inganni gli occhi, to use the italian expression” (Buci-Glucksmann 60). The vague limits between observed and observer, reality and appearance, memory and perception, along with the indeterminacy of the subject of enunciation, reveal themselves as the rhetorical and [End Page 321] aesthetic responses to a way of looking which unavoidably pervades artistic expression. Moreover, the visual act itself, with all its possible nuances, becomes a thematic motif in a number of artistic expressions, both pictorial and literary. It is the ultimate consequence of a cultural paradigm which privileges the view—deceitful as it could be—over any other sense. It is not thus a coincidence that, according to the passage which I mentioned above, the figure of the Soledades is precisely a mirón, a watcher, a silent observer whose eyes work as a reality filter. The major works by Luis de Góngora, the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea and the Soledades, both published in 1613, are extreme and...