Góngora, the Moriscos, and the falconry episode of the Soledades

ABSTRACT

Among scholars of Spanish Baroque poetry, the dominant opinion has been that the writer Luis de Góngora was silent, indifferent, or even supportive in the face of the forced exile of the Moriscos, the “New Christian” descendants of converts from Islam. This essay instead takes the minority position that Góngora opposed the expulsion, thus mirroring his Andalusian patrons and his humanist mentor Pedro de Valencia. Specifically, in his long lyric poem the Soledades, Góngora encodes opposition to the expulsion in the falconry scene and reinforces the connection between the cantos through the theme of parental grief, elaborated as well in his fragmentary but systematic allusions to Claudian's Rape of Proserpine.

KEYWORDS:

• Claudian
• De Raptu Proserpinae
• falconry
• Luis de Góngora
• Moriscos
• Soledades
• Pedro de Valencia

Notes

1. Muriel Elvira uses the terms “héroï-comique” and “epopée attenuée” (67).

2. See, for example, Beverley, Aspects (6–8, 101n15) and Essays (54–71); Blanco, “Góngora y el humanista Pedro de Valencia”; Chemris, “Las Soledades de Góngora y el arbitrismo”; and Woodward.

3. Magnier 18, 292–93; Valencia 107. Here, I concur with Antonio Feros's admonition that literary scholars not so readily ascribe to early modern Spanish writers a modern sense of liberal tolerance (“Rhetorics” 100).

4. In the cause of the assimilation of the Moriscos, Valencia advocated the suppression of Arabic, the exemplary education of select Morisco children under hostage-like conditions, and the shifting of Morisco laborers into sedentary work to weaken them (Valencia 100, 135–36). See also Hutchinson. For a postcolonial reading of Morisco resistance, see Mary Elizabeth Perry.

5. Antonio Domínguez Ortiz and Bernard Vincent describe the varying policies on the confiscation of the Morisco children and note that prebendas were charged with placing them (181, 185–87, 195). How might this have impacted Góngora? While a blanket decision to confiscate young children was ruled out as impractical, children en route to “infidel” countries were seized and placed with Christian families, and there were many cases of abuse that led to the separation of Morisco children from their parents. See also Perry's eloquent and compelling examples (69–70, 98, 119, 147–49, 153–54, 172–74) and Henry Charles Lea (321–24). The expulsion occurred in various waves from 1609 to 1614 (Dadson).

6. Lerma and his son, the Duke of Uceda, his daughter, the Countess of Lemos, and Lemos himself all received extravagant shares of the confiscation profits from the expulsion (Lea 373). Johnson suspects that Góngora makes some sort of reference to Lemos in the scene, reflecting disillusion over events of 1609 (119).

7. See Ponce Cárdenas on the epicureanism of Góngora's Andalusian patrons (131).

8. On the great productiveness of the Morisco population as agricultural and artisanal labor, especially in Valencia and Andalusia, see Lea 5–7, 327, 346. It is significant that the Duque de Béjar, father of the dedicatee of Quijote Book 1 and of the Soledades, protested the second displacement of the Granada Moriscos of the 1580s as they were necessary for his harvest (Perry 131).

9. Beverley, Aspects 7–8; Rivers, “Góngora and His Readers”; Sasaki 156, 163.

10. Erasmus 81; Letter 180 to Jean Desmarez, February 1504, 43–48 and cited by Feros, Kingship 166n15. Feros signals the development of an Erasmist “politics of compliment,” in which flattery could be a vehicle for criticism of the favorite for writers during Philip III's reign (166–67). As Beverley notes, “Góngora and his readers were isolated and contradictory figures [. . .] who sometimes challenge, sometimes celebrate the authority of the social class that nurtures them” (Aspects 7–8). In a similar vein, Rafael Carrasco, in his introduction to the Tratado, notes Valencia's use of an Erasmian “estrategia del doble discurso” (Valencia 35, 39, 60).

11. The most recent annotated edition of the “Canción” is in Góngora y Argote, Antología poética.

12. On the first sonnet, Salcedo Coronel comments, “tanto moro, que se disimulaba entre nosotros, y que expelió de España con ardiente generosidad. Uno de los mayores sucesos que ha tenido España fue la expulsión de los moriscos . . .” (291, spelling modernized). He also mentions: “Alude a las dos fuerzas de Alarache, y la Mamora” (290). Of the second, he writes, “Que echó de España las reliquias que habían quedado de los moros, con que vivimos seguros en nuestras casas de sus traiciones. Alude a la expulsión de los moriscos, que hizo este católico, y piadoso rey con justos motivos” (763).

13. The final stanza can be read “a dos luces”: as affirmation of the peace treaty (i.e., it is no sign of weakness to lay down weapons at times, or as a prelude to their future use, in anticipation of the expulsion). See Martos Carrasco's edition in his dissertation (255).

14. See Jammes on the tercets (109–10), on the imminent departure of Lerma (491, 244–45), and on the theory by an early biographer of Lerma's rejection (244–45). A more recent theory that the Panegírico was incomplete because Góngora was dismayed by Lerma's incomprehension was suggested by Carreira, Gongoremas (216).

15. Waissbein builds implicitly on the work of Colbert Nepaulsingh, and his scholarship has the ring of testimonio (see Waissbein's comments, 323–24). The suggested dates for the sonnet are Waissbein's.

16. Medina Sidonia was Capitán General de las Costas de Andalucía, aided by his son, Niebla, who was groomed to inherit the post with the dukeship upon his father's death in 1615. Medina Sidonia also participated in the suppression of the Alpujarras revolt (Salas Almela 241). Thus, his defense of the Moriscos, as for Valencia, was tied to their assimilation.

17. Feros associates Lerma with reason of state (Kingship 195); he cites Elliott as describing Spain at the time as a “composite monarchy” of competing regional powers (Kingship 158). See Magnier on Valencia's anti-Machiavellianism (301, 311, 331–33, 347–52). Beverley argues that the court at the time was dominated by “a spirit of petty Machiavellianism” (Aspects 6).

18. Blanco also notes this (Góngora o la invención 273).

19. Serpents were also part of the Guzmán heraldic shield, which according to Ponce Cárdenas, consisted of “sierpes y calderos en un campo azul” (126). The image of “sabandijas” released by the flooding Nile builds upon a recognized classical source (Waley 203).

20. Gates (26) compares Sol. I. 3 with De Raptu I. 127–29, in which Claudian portrays Ceres's love for Proserpine to that of a fierce mother cow for a calf “whose growing horns curve not yet moonwise over her forehead” “vitulam non blandius ambit / torva parens, pedibus quae nondum proterit arva / nec nova lunatae curvavit germina frontis.”

21.

haeserunt lacrimae; nec vox aut spiritus oris

redditur, atque imis vibrat tremor ossa medullis;

succidui titubant gressus; foribusque reclusis,

dum vacuas sedes et desolata pererrat

atria, semirutas confuso stamine telas

atque interceptas agnoscit pectinis artes.

divinus perit ille labor, spatiumque relictum

audax sacrilego supplebat aranea textu.

  Nec deflet plangitve malum; tantum oscula telae

figit et abrumpit mutas in fila querellas:

attritosque manu radios proiectaque pensa (356: 151–61).

adspectum, precor, indulgete parenti (366: 302)

nosti quid sit Lucina, quis horror (366: 307)

pro genitis et quantus amor […]

haec una mihi. (368: 308–09)

22. “Sobre” 308, 310. Sánchez Robayna makes a case for a “non finito” aesthetic in early modern texts, which imitate a similar phenomenon in classical literature, thus offering an alternative explanation for the incompletion of the Soledades which is not explicitly political.

23. “antra procul Scyllaea petit canibusque reductis / pars stupefacta silet, pars nondum exterrita latrat” (447–48).

24. See Chemris on this topic and its critical history (“Continuities” 83; Góngora's Soledades 56–57, 60–64). Various critics have also associated Ascalaphus, figured at the end of the poem, with testimony.

25. In Góngora's Soledades, I make a similar point on Góngora's “ambivalence in tone” (39–42, 83, 85–86, 101n14).

26. Close looks at the Soledades in Derridean terms (191).

27. See Rauchwarger on the importance of the story of Job to conversos.

28. Feros argues that “the Twelve Year's Truce indicated Spain's declining influence” (Kingship 205). Góngora's falconry scene demonstrates some textual parallels with the Count of Lemos's El buho gallego (1620), which opens with a parody of Góngora's controversial style. The text evokes the atmosphere of regional and political strife of the final period of Góngora's composition of the Soledades, as well as some of the ethnic and homophobic ridicule of the anti-Góngora polemic (see Fernández de Castro).

29. Jammes suggests that the falconry scene was finished in 1617, with the final forty-three lines completed for the Chacón manuscript, destined for Olivares's library, in the period 1617–26 (Soledades 19–20).

30. Dadson 193. Dadson reports that even toward the end of the reign of Phillip III, particularly under the new favorite, there was “a significant lessening of the pressure on the Moriscos” to leave (189).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Crystal Chemris

Crystal Chemris is Visiting Assistant Professor of Spanish at Kansas State University and author of Góngora's Soledades and the Problem of Modernity (Tamesis, 2008). She edited a special issue of Calíope on the Hispanic Transatlantic Baroque (2013) and also publishes on Modern Latin American poetry.