Shipwreck as Heresy: Placing Gongora's Poetry in the Wake of Renaissance Epic, Fray Luis, and the Christian Kabbala

Abstract

OF the scholars who have promoted the reading of Gongora's long lyric poem Soledades by publishing new editions in the twentieth century, only John Beverley has presented an interpretation which clearly links the Soledades to theoretical concerns of the contemporary literary scene.1 Instead of setting up the main questions facing readers as philological problems or problems of appropriate comprehension, which has the effect of drawing the scholar into an exclusive world of commentaries and debating gongoristas, in his Against Literature Beverley opens up a paradox the heart of the Spanish Baroque which merits further exploration: Gongorism, resisted and denounced as heretical in the metropolis (the Inquisition prohibited the sale of the first commercial edition of Gongora's poetry in 162, becomes in the colonies a quasi-official aesthetic manner for more than a century and continues to be celebrated even today as a marker of Latin American cultural identity. (27) Beverley argues that in the Spanish colonies, Gongora's poetry became central to an institution of Literature used to culturize and to develop aesthetic sense and character. In short, it took part in what became the dominant pedagogical reason for being of humanism: humanists themselves, with their foundation in the revival of classical rhetoric, were always aware that the purpose of their pedagogy was to produce the subject form of the ruling class (or classes) (31). This essay is a response to one of the questions Beverley's paradox elicits: how could Gongora's censored poetry, attacked as fragmentary and harshly critical of Spanish colonial glory at its first appearance, come to appear orthodox and allied with the projects of an elite humanism in the colonies? The unique qualities of the poetic voice in the Soledades suggest strong resistance to such an appropriation: the vaguely defined protagonist/pilgrim problematizes the representation of a rational subject, and the work itself contains no claim to an enduring existence as a text which would extend Gongora!s fame and authority as a model poet.2 Yet, undoubtedly the phenomenon of gongorism, which imitated Gongora's conspicuous use of forms, figurative language, and intertexual references, exceeded and overshadowed the implications of his poetry's subtler qualities. In order to suggest reasons for both the denunciation of Gongora's poetry, and the ease with which it becomes a quasiofficial aesthetic manner, one would have to return to the metropolis and closely investigate the peculiar characteristics of his poetic heresy. I would like to do this in two overlapping contexts: first within the context of Renaissance imitation of Classical epic, and secondly among some of the multiple poetic discourses, both religious and secular, circulating within Spain around the turn of the seventeenth century when Gongora!s texts were being produced. When Gongora's work is examined in its milieu it becomes clear that classical, humanist, and theological threads are intersecting there with a complexity which frustrates any desire for monological discourses. But perhaps the most surprising quality of Gongora's texts is their representation of poetry's failures: the foregrounding of poetry's relationship to violence, irrationality, linguistic difference and failed attempts at representation. Gongora was known during his lifetime as the best poet of his generation in Spain, comparable to Tasso in Italy, whose work he knew and drew from, and Edmund Spenser in England. All three wrote innovative and influential works in the pastoral mode. But what clearly differentiates Gongora from the other two is that both Tasso and Spenser went on from their pastoral works, Aminta and The Shepheardes Calender, to write monumental, allegorical epics, following the model for progression through the genres set up by medieval readings of Virgil. Their Gerusalemme Liberata and The Faerie Queen combine definitions of national identity with Christian and chivalric themes, just as Camoes immortalized the Portuguese discovery and conquest with his Os Lusiadas. …