The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora by Felipe Valencia

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora by Felipe Valencia María Cristina Quintero Keywords Melancholy, Lyric Vs. Epic Poetry, Lyric Theory, Poetic Self Fashioning, Lyric Victimization Of Women, Garcilaso De La Vega, Alonso De Ercilla, La Auracauna, Fernando De Herrera, Miguel De Cervantes, La Galatea, Juan De Arguijo, Luis De Góngora, Fabula De Polifemo Y Galatea, Soledades, Felipe Valencia, María Cristina Quintero valencia, felipe. The Melancholy Void: Lyric and Masculinity in the Age of Góngora. U of Nebraska P, 2021, 352 pp. In this lucidly written book, Felipe Valencia examines poetic practice in early modern Spain through the prism of what we might call gender and genre trouble. He is concerned with articulating a theory of the lyric by contesting the binary view of lyric and epic as opposing practices: the first associated with effeminacy, and the second with manly pursuits. He explores the intrinsic connection of melancholy, masculinity, and the depiction of victimized women in works by Garcilaso de la Vega, Fernando de Herrera, Juan de Ercilla, Miguel de Cervantes, Juan de Arguijo, and Luis de Góngora. The extensive introduction immediately displays the author’s impressive erudition and interpretive skills, as Valencia traces the philosophical and medical views of melancholy from Classical times to the present. Other topics include the impact of the print market on the production of poetry, the prestige and availability of certain genres and traditions, and the professionalization of poetry. The better part of the introduction is dedicated to new readings of poems by Garcilaso, including “A Boscán, desde la Goleta,” “Ode ad florem Gnidi,”and the first Eclogue. He analyzes the central function of myth (especially that of Apollo and Daphne) in the depiction of physical and psychological violence against women as a prerequisite for the fashioning of a lyric self; this is the theme that will be repeated throughout the book. While not a new topic—feminist critics since Nancy Vickers have exposed the need for a subjugated woman in the construction of male lyric subjectivity— Valencia goes beyond the usual psychoanalytical approach to undertake a more ambitious project, one that traces a chronological trajectory in the development of lyric practice and theory during the “age of Góngora.” [End Page 140] Chapter One, on Alonso de Ercilla, offers an original reading of the Araucana, a work that ostensibly addresses the heroic, masculine exploits associated with the epic. Valencia demonstrates that, in fact, Ercilla is repeatedly “tempted” by the lyric. This paradigmatic epic poem, written by a man who embodied the ideal of armas y letras, contains numerous tropes associated with the lyric: the praise of the beloved, the avowal of sincerity on the part of the poet, and songs of longing and grief. The latter are voiced by the Araucanian women who mourn the absence and death of their lovers during the Spanish conquest of Chile. There is, then, a displacement of the male poetic “I” associated with amatory poetry onto female voices. This gendered ventriloquism, in Valencia’s words, “constitutes a virile mastery of the feminine and thus suppresses the specter of effeminacy that haunted the lyric poet in the Renaissance” (80). Furthermore, Valencia offers the intriguing insight that the ventriloquism of the female voice embodied by the “barbaric” Araucanian women constitutes a form of colonial violence. The second chapter builds on Leah Middlebrook’s notion that Fernando de Herrera’s work represents a poetics of masculinity. According to Valencia, Herrera wants to restore virility to lyric by composing verse that is heroic (manifested in Icharian osadía), despite depicting the “lighter” themes of love and desire. Algunas obras and the Anotaciones on Garcilaso develop a theory of the lyric in dialectic with the epic. Through allusions to both Orpheus and Apollo, Herrera fashions a forceful lyric persona that subtly subverts Garcilaso in order to place himself “at the summit of the canon” (110). After a careful overview of the Orpheus myth in Classical and Renaissance texts, Valencia maintains that Herrera accentuates the psychological violence inflicted on Euridyce in order to mitigate the association of effeminacy found in some homosexual versions of the myth. Finally, through close and...