Broaching the Void: Reconsidering Góngora's Indeterminate Poetics

Abstract

Góngora's indeterminate poetics fuelled a controversy of extravagant antithetical positions. This article argues that (a) we do the original participants, and Góngora's poetry, little justice, if we fail to take account of the epistemic and politico-ideological factors which informed these interferential acts of reading and writing; (b) the diachronic imperatives of Góngora's poetics, its strategies of aemulatio, gain sense only when perceived in tension with the synchronic space of contingency invaded by imperial failures. The argument focuses on the following: how Gongora's poetic language is bound up with ideologies that legitimized colonization, but challenges the idea of history as smooth narrative; how accusations of semantic hollowness, and/or violations of similitude, participate in a less than benign discourse of power; how non-conformism is figured in defamiliarization of Castilian and deliberate gestures of indeterminacy. Textual analysis centres on: passages from the Soledad primera (the peregrino's creative acts of seeing); Góngora's carta en respuesta (the Babel reference); the sonnet ‘Las tablas del bajel’ (1600). Ultimately, Góngora's poetics are read against Benjamin's account of ideal language, as a regression to progress; a mobility that is productive, but marked by passion and signs of the past. Ethics (aesthetic, political, moral) are indeterminate, but not absent.

Notes

¹ Soledad primera, ‘Dedicatoria’, ll. 1–4, in Luis de Góngora, Soledades, ed. John Beverley (Madrid: Cátedra, 1980). All references to the poem are from this edition.

²The interpenetration of courtly and pastoral features in the linguistic environment of the Soledades suggests that there is more at stake than a rewriting of the Renaissance topos ‘menosprecio del corte y alabanza de aldea’. The relationship between the poem's elaborate language and pastoral setting has preoccupied commentators since early detractors, such as Juan de Jáuregui, commented on it in terms of disjuncture. Closer to our own time, María Robertson-Justiniano develops the views of Woods, Gornall, Beverley and Collins (among others) to argue that the marginalized world of the court invades the pilgrim's and reader's imagination, becoming a displaced centre that defines the poem and reflects the shifting perspectives of its conflicted moment of origin. See ‘Reading from the Margins in Góngora's Soledades’, Modern Language Notes, 119:2 (2004), 252–69. See also M. J. Woods, The Poet and the Natural World in the Age of Góngora (New York: Oxford U. P., 1978), arguably the first commentator to offer a sustained argument demonstrating the points of contact and collision between the two worlds; J. F. G. Gornall, ‘Soledades “alabanza de aldea” without “menosprecio de corte”?’, BHS, LIX:1 (1982), 21–25; John Beverley, Aspects of Góngora's ‘Soledades’ (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1980), Chapter 5, ‘City and Countryside’; Marsha Collins, The ‘Soledades’, Góngora's Masque of the Imagination (Columbia/London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2002).

³Nadine Ly suggests that the pilgrim's silence in the Soledad primera is a deliberate subversion of the conventional ‘amante prolijo’; and lends considerable counter weight to the ‘métrico llanto’ (invocation to the sea), in the Soledad segunda. See ‘Tradición, memoria, literalidad. El caso de Góngora’, Bulletin Hispanique, 97 (1995), 347–59 (especially p. 358).

⁴See, respectively, Robert Jammes, Études sur l'oeuvre poétique de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote (Bordeaux: Féret et fils, 1967), 619; Maurice Molho, Semantique et poétique. À propos des ‘Soledades’ de Góngora (Bordeaux: Féret et fils, 1969), 35-36; Ly, ‘Tradición, memoria, literalidad’, 359; Paul Julian Smith, ‘Barthes, Góngora, and Non-Sense’, PMLA, 101:1 (1986), 82–94 (especially pp. 86–87).

⁵See R. John McCaw, The Transforming Text: A Study of Luis de Góngora's ‘Soledades’ (Potomac: Scripta Humanistica, 2000), 6.

⁶The ‘foot-printed poetic path’, this ‘very material path’, has been explored insightfully for us by Gaylord in terms of Góngora's complex troping of imitative poetry's fraught relationship with cultural continuity. See Mary M. Gaylord, ‘Góngora and the Footprints of the Voice’, Modern Language Notes, 108:2 (1993), 230–53 (p. 233).

⁷Carlos Gutiérrez has suggested that the emergence of modernity in Gongorist poetics is directly linked to the way in which the reader is involved in decoding the linguistic and conceptual difficulties of the text. See ‘Las Soledades y el Polifemo de Góngora: distinción, capitalización simbólica y tomas de posición en el campo literario español de la primera mitad del siglo XVII’, Romance Languages Annual, 10:2 (1998), 621–25.

⁸See Grace M. Burton, ‘Metaphor and the Articulation of Doubt in the Soledad primera’, Romance Languages Annual, 4 (1992), 396–403. The pilgrim's absence from the beloved as ‘sun’, figures a movement away from the Platonic ontological limit which found its theological counterpart in the writings of St Thomas Aquinas (396–97).

⁹Beverley engages the Benjamin passage in question in Aspects of Góngora's ‘Soledades’, 25.

¹⁰Smith, ‘Barthes, Góngora, and Non-Sense’, 89.

¹¹For a detailed discussion of these issues see Carlos Gutiérrez, ‘The Challenges of Freedom: Social Reflexivity in the Seventeenth-Century Spanish Literary Field’, in Hispanic Baroques. Reading Cultures in Context, ed. Nicholas Spadaccini and Luis Martín-Estudillo (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2005), 137–62.

¹²I develop this argument in more detail with reference to the distinctive poetics of Garcilaso de la Vega, Fernando de Herrera, Góngora and Quevedo in a forthcoming study: Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age. Eros, Eris and Empire (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2013). Góngora's elliptical poetry is read in terms of a response to the heliocentric formulations of Herrera's symbolic schema that fixed linguistic aspiration upon the iconic authority of natural and perfect form, the circle.

¹³See the following representative sample of literature on the topic: Documentos gongorinos, ed. Eunice Joiner Gates (México D.F.: Colegio de México, 1960) which contains Jáuregui's text (83–140); Emilio Orozco Díaz, Lope y Góngora frente a frente (Madrid: Gredos, 1973); Ana Martínez Arancón, La batalla en torno a Góngora (selección de textos) (Barcelona: Antoni Bosch, 1978); David H. Darst, Imitatio: polémicas sobre la imitación en el siglo de oro (Madrid: Orígenes, 1985), 51–82; Antonio Carreira, ‘La controversia en torno a las Soledades. Un parecer desconocido, y edición crítica de las primeras cartas’, in Hommage à Robert Jammes, ed. Francis Cerdan, Anejos de Criticón 1, 3 vols (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1994), I, 151–71.

¹⁴Pabst expressed a concern that we might lose the figure of the poet himself in our negotiation of this wrangling. See Walter Pabst, La creación gongorina en los poemas ‘Polifemo’ y ‘Soledades’, trad. Nicolás Marín (Madrid: CSIC, 1966), 6–8.

¹⁵In a study of the Polifemo, I sought to establish the context which would allow us to accept the centrality of the fábula in the defence of gongorismo, and explored the contradictory parameters of a reconceived aemulatio which is inextricably connected to that defence. It was my contention then that by interrogating the metaliterary markers and the function of literary allusion in the fable, and by implicating the reader in this process of signification, we can recreate potential meanings which extend beyond the surface-searching investigations that have traditionally characterized source studies. See Isabel Torres, The Polyphemus Complex. Rereading the Baroque Mythological Fable, Special Monograph Issue, BHS, LXXXIII:2 (2006), ‘Introduction’, 3–22.

¹⁶Please note the following very useful exceptions: Dana Bultman, ‘Góngora's Invocation of Prudente consul: Censorship and Humanist Doubts about His Lyric Language’, Hispanófila, 142 (2004), 1–19 and Juan Vitulli, ‘Polifemo reformado: imitación, comentario y diferencia en la poética de Góngora’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 41:1 (2007), 3–26.

¹⁷See Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1980).

¹⁸See Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974), 10.

¹⁹Góngora died in 1627 without having published his poetry. The first printed edition, by López de Vicuña, appeared the following year, but was withdrawn by the Inquisition in June 1628. Salcedo Coronel published his Polifemo comentado in 1629, and then in 1630 Pellicer de Salas y Tovar's edition was published with the title Lecciones solemnes a las obras de don Luis de Góngora y Argote, Píndaro andaluz, príncipe de los poetas líricos de España.

²⁰See John Beverley, Against Literature (Minneapolis/London: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993), 50. See also Elías Rivers, ‘Góngora and His Readers’, in The Image of the Baroque, ed. Aldo Scaglione with Gianni Eugenio Viola (New York: Peter Lang, 1995), 109–21.

²¹See Dámaso Alonso, Góngora y ‘El Polifemo’, 2 vols (Madrid: Gredos, 1961), I, 62–63; Manuel Pérez López, Pedro de Valencia. Primer crítico gongorino (Salamanca: Ediciones Univ. de Salamanca, 1988).

²²Dana Bultman argues that analysis of the differences between two existing drafts of Valencia's letter to Góngora reveals that (a) he was ‘initially hesitant’ to praise Góngora's works and that (b) this hesitancy was due in great part to his sense of frustration with a linguistic obscurity which challenged even the most learned. See ‘Góngora's Invocation of Prudente consul’, 7–10.

²³See Luis de Góngora y Argote, Obras completas, ed. Juan Millé y Giménez and Isabel Millé y Giménez, 5th ed. (Madrid: Aguilar, 1961), 1084. Relevant to this argument is Roses’ analysis of Gongorist poetics and their reception. See Joaquín Roses Lozano, Una poética de la oscuridad. La recepción crítica de las ‘Soledades’ en el siglo XVII (London: Tamesis, 1994).

²⁴Alonso, Góngora y ‘El Polifemo’, I, 257.

²⁵Curtius reminds us that ‘cultismo’ is actually a Latinism, used for instance by Quintilian (VIII 3. 6) and Ovid (Ars Amatoria, III, 341, where his poems are called ‘culta carmina’). See Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Pantheon Books, 1953), 294, n. 56. Affinity between Spanish and Latin is, therefore, at the core of the ‘cultista’ movement in Spain. Initiated in the fifteenth century, it is not surprising that it would gather momentum in the Imperial context of the sixteenth, galvanized by Herrera. As most commentators have noted, the elements of Góngora's ‘culto’ style were not new, nor indeed was his promotion of obscurity as a hallmark of distinctive and distinguishing language. Carillo y Sotomayor writes in a similar vein in his El libro de la erudición poética in 1611.

²⁶See María Rosa Menocal, Writing in Dante's Cult of Truth. From Borges to Boccaccio (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 1991), 3: ‘For literary history is itself not diachronic but rather synchronistic: time is all jumbled up everywhere, authors from different centuries and different mindsets sit one next to another and shape each other's work, both proleptically and retrospectively’.

²⁷Patricia Palmer's analysis of how language and power move into alignment in the context of conquest in early modern England is a useful point of reference and contrast here. See Language and Conquest in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2001), Chapter 1.

²⁸Richard Waswo's study, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1987) demonstrates how a ‘generally altered consciousness of language’ (113) was the outworking of a process set in motion by humanist philologists such as Lorenzo Valle, whose analysis of the flux of Latin in/through time revealed language to be a socio-historical construct.

²⁹Curtius encapsulates the dichotomy. His observations on the complexity of the literary tradition conclude that: ‘Like all life, tradition is a vast passing away and renewal’ (European Literature, 393).

³⁰See Severo Sarduy, Barroco (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana 1974), Chapter 3.

³¹See, among others, Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England 1640–1785 (Baltimore/London: The Johns Hopkins U. P., 1977), 25.

³²See Palmer, Language and Conquest, 25.

³³Bryant Creel, The Voice of the Phoenix. Metaphors of Death and Rebirth in Classics of the Iberian Renaissance, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 272 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2004).

³⁴See Waswo, Language and Meaning.

³⁵Waswo discusses this split between theoretical observations (referential) and language practice (constitutive) in Language and Meaning, 80.

³⁶See Darst, Imitatio, 72, where he sums up the main thrust of the argument of Góngora's detractors (from Cascales through Lope de Vega to Juan de Jáuregui) as ‘una crítica contra la presencia exclusiva de palabras sin fin doctrinal’.

³⁷Aurora Egido comments: ‘[…] la batalla gongorina no es sino un reflejo de la crisis que en los inicios del siglo xvii enfrenta a los defensores de la imitación renacentista y a los que tratan de desvincularse de ella. Pero unos y otros, áticos y llanos, buscan en el pasado modelos que justifiquen su postura’. See ‘La hidra bocal. Sobre la palabra poética en el barroco’, in Fronteras de la poesía en el barroco (Barcelona: Crítica, 1990), 9–55 (p. 41). See also Darst, Imitatio, 51–52 who notes a radical change of emphasis in Spanish poetic theory post 1610, the date of publication of Carrillo y Sotomayor's treatise Libro de la erudición poética and the date of composition of Góngora's first cultista poems. Prior to that date, Spanish poetic theorists were ‘comentadores’ who aimed to construct a poetic system based on imitation of the ancients. Post 1610, all theorists were ‘defensores’ of specific poetic styles, using ancient texts as justification for their arguments.

³⁸See Antonio Carreño, ‘Of “Orders” and “Disorders”: Analogy in the Spanish Baroque Poetry’, in The Image of the Baroque, ed. Scaglione, 139–56 (p. 152). See also, Chemris’ insightful analysis of the impact of the ‘new science’ on Góngora's poetics in Crystal Anne Chemris, Góngora's ‘Soledades’ and the Problem of Modernity (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008), Chapter 1, ‘Crisis and Form’, 21–50.

³⁹An insightful, succinct account of the issues involved in this is provided by Bultman, ‘Góngora's Invocation of Prudente consul’, 1–3, with reference to Ralph Penny, A History of the Spanish Language (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1971).

⁴⁰See J. H. Elliott, Spain, Europe and the Wider World 1500–1800 (New Haven/London: Yale U. P., 2009), 6.

⁴¹See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man. The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnography (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1987) who writes: ‘Not only was the concept of “barbarism” in origin a linguistic one, but […] the evaluation of Indian languages played a crucial role in assessing the status of their users’ (70).

⁴²See Bultman, ‘Góngora's Invocation of Prudente consul’, 3.

⁴³Benedict Anderson's seminal study, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London/New York: Verso, 1983), locates the ‘thinking’ of nationalism post the early modern, but its arguments are suggestive for nation-making in the earlier period. The quote is taken from p. 13.

⁴⁴Criticism of obscurantism and deviation from poetic norms, from Jáuregui through to Quevedo, was often expressed in terms that suggested Góngora's allegiance to Judaism and exposes the intricate dialectic between language and ethnicity that was pervasive in the period. See Andrée Collard, ‘La “herejía” de Góngora’, Hispanic Review, 36:4 (1968), 328–37.

⁴⁸See Antídoto contra la pestilente poesía de las Soledades por Juan de Jáuregui, ed. José Manuel Rico García (Sevilla: Univ. de Sevilla, 2002), 7 (emphasis added).

⁴⁵The full reference reads: ‘También siguiendo esta novedad, usa de vocablos peregrinos italianos, y otros del todo latinos, que los antiguos llaman glosas, lenguas, y ahora llamamos así a las interpretaciones de los tales y de todo lo oscuro. Estos conviene moderar y usar pocas veces; y no muchas tampoco […]’(see Góngora, Obras completas, ed. Millé and Millé, 1085–86). Bultman draws our attention to the ‘semantic imprecision’ of the word ‘peregrino/a’ itself, its difference from the more concrete ‘cultismo’, and the request for transparent poetic language which underpins Valencia's use of it (‘Góngora's Invocation of Prudente consul’, 8–9).

⁴⁶In fact Valencia is explicit on these two points: he warns that even the most erudite readers (in an earlier version of the letter he refers to himself as the frustrated reading subject) will find Góngora's obscurity frustrating; and he observes that the extreme defamiliarization of the poet's style does not sit easily with the natural structures of Castilian (Góngora, Obras completas, ed. Millé and Millé, 1085).

⁴⁷See Francisco Cascales, Cartas filológicas, ed. Justo García Soriano, 3 vols (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1969), I, 188. See also, Mary Gaylord Randel ‘Metaphor and Fable in Góngora's Soledad primera’, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 40 (1978–79), 97–112 who situates metaphor at the heart of the controversy and as central to Cascales’ defence of more conventional humanistic poetics.

⁴⁹See ‘The Play of Difference: A Reading of Góngora's Soledades’, in Conflicts of Discourse: Spanish Literature in the Golden Age, ed. Peter W. Evans (Manchester/New York: Manchester U. P., 1990), 184–98 (pp. 191–92).

⁵⁰The Diccionario de Autoridades offers the following as its primary definition of ‘peregrino’: ‘que se aplica al que anda por tierras extrañas o lejos de su patria’. Its currency in the controversy derives, however, from the following: ‘por extensión se toma algunas veces por entraño, raro, especial en su linea, o pocas veces visto’.

⁵¹Defenders of Góngora do assign a more positive value to the ‘peregrino’ concept. Pedro Díaz de Rivas, in his textual commentary on the Polifemo, transforms transgression into a celebration of autonomy, identifying in Góngora's ‘wandering wit’ a capacity for distinction rather than dissonance. See Melchora Romanos’ useful study of the Anotaciones, ‘Los “tan nuevos y peregrinos modos” del Polifemo. Ponderación de la poética gongorina en los comentaristas del siglo XVII’, in Góngora Hoy VII: Actas del Foro de Debate Góngora hoy celebrado en la Diputatión de Córdoba. VII: El ‘Polifemo’, ed. Joaquín Roses, Colección de Estudios Gongorinos 5 (Córdoba: Diputación de Córdoba, 2005), 215–31.

⁵²René Descartes conceptualizes rational enquiry as the movement from the unstable ground of the physical world (‘rejeter la terre mouvante et sable’) to the rock that is the solid, certain, idea. See Discours de la méthode (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 145. William Egginton reminds us that ‘escollo’ is normally the term reserved for the hidden shoals that endanger sailors. This is, therefore, another trace of the trauma that brought the ‘peregrino’ to the island. See ‘The Opacity of Language and the Transparency of Being: On Góngora's Poetics’, in Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi and Leah Middlebrook (Nashville: Vanderbilt U. P., 2012), 257–71 (pp. 270–71).

⁵³Robertson-Justiniano considers some of the implications of these theatrical cues (including the co-extension of time and space) (see ‘Reading from the Margins’, 262). The ‘balcón’, of course, also suggests the prow of a ship (possibly evoking the contemporary vessels of exploration) (McCaw, The Transforming Text, 35).

⁵⁴Interestingly, Renaissance maps were often seen as enactments of the shifts taking place on the world's stage. A sixteenth-century Flemish atlas was entitled: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (Ortelius, 1569).

⁵⁵In the spirit of the text I have taken some liberties here. ‘Admiración’ is generally, and more precisely, read as an allegory for a textual reading that excites wonderment, either because of its style or subject matter. See, among others, Thomas Hart, ‘The Pilgrim's Role in the First Solitude’, Modern Language Notes, 92:2 (1977), 213–26 (pp. 214–15) and Marsha Collins, ‘Mastering the Maze in Góngora's Soledades’, Calíope, 8 (2002), 87–102 (pp. 91–93).

⁵⁶See Grace Burton, ‘Atemporality in the Soledades: The Search for Genre’, Postscript, 5 (1988), 61–68 (p. 66).

⁵⁷See Collins, ‘Mastering the Maze’, especially pp. 87–91. It is worth observing that Góngora's original version of this passage, before making cuts that were advised by Pedro de Valencia, resembles the Ovidian simile much more closely. Beverley includes the omitted verses in his note to the text.

⁵⁸At the opening of Aeneid Book 6, an ekphrastic depiction of the Daedalus/Icarus story exploits etymological play to interconnect the labyrinth, the ‘labor’ of the artist and the heroic enterprise of the epic hero. Ovid may also have Propertian aesthetics in mind when he formulated his extended simile. Propertius (2.34) compares his own version of the tortuous Meander river with expansive forms of literature.

⁵⁹The issue of the text's genre has been a subject of critical debate since the poems first circulated. Again, the bibliography is too vast to record here. One can only hope that, as it continues to unfold, we move away from questions of static classification (is it epic, pastoral, lyric?), towards a more dynamic understanding of the role of genre in interpretation.

⁶⁰McCaw's reading of this passage focuses on the river's role as a symbol of ‘mudanza’: ‘the human course of life and death is metamorphosed by the river's geographically vertical descent from the cavern to the sea’ (Transforming Text, 35–36).

⁶¹Chemris takes the metapoetic dimension in a different direction. Developing Sánchez Robayna's analysis of the Soledades as a creative response to the medieval topos of the Book of the World, she interprets Góngora's prioritization of subjective vision as part of a quest for the absolute which is ultimately ‘defeated by its own subjectivism’ (see Góngora's ‘Soledades’, 74–78). For insightful reflection on the topic of the poem as an ‘espacio de la escritura’, see also Pedro Ruiz Pérez, El espacio de la escritura: en torno a una poética del espacio del texto barroco (Bern: Peter Lang, 1996).

⁶²See Antonio Carreira, ‘La novedad de las Soledades’, in Gongoremas (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1998), 225–37 (p. 233).

⁶³Nemser has recently read the imperial gazing of this passage in positive terms as ‘a cartographic projection of an economic mode of improvement’. The argument is persuasive on the whole, but has to stop short of considering these final verses in order to make its case. See Daniel Nemser, ‘(Re)producing Empire: Góngora's Soledades, Productive Space, and the Reversal of Spanish Decline’, BHS, LXXXV:5 (2008), 639–57 (p. 651).

⁶⁴For the text of Góngora's letter, Carta de don Luis de Góngora en respuesta de la que le escribieron, see Góngora, Obras completas, ed. Millé and Millé, 894–98. Carreira (‘La controversia’, 168–71) argues for the authenticity of Góngora's reply against Jammes’ view that at least part of the text was written by someone else.

⁶⁵Carreira suggests that the letter is ineffective because it was written in response to an anonymous detractor and Góngora found it impossible to harness his satirical wit against an invisible enemy and should have resisted the temptation to do so (‘La controversia’, 170). Most commentators, however, accept that this first letter was written by Lope de Vega.

⁶⁶See Torres, The Polyphemus Complex, ‘Introduction’, especially pp. 7–10. Edward Friedman also places Góngora's poetry at the centre of the Gongorist debate with the carta en respuesta as complementary to it: ‘Creative Space: Ideologies of Discourse in Góngora's Polifemo’, in Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain, ed. Marina Scordilis Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins U. P., 1995), 51–78.

⁶⁷More specifically, the metaphor is exploited to indicate the meticulous exegesis required on the part of the reader to penetrate beyond the linguistic complexity of the poetry in order to open up the layers of interpretation that lie beneath. The ‘fruta’ of Góngora's heretical new poetry might be forbidden to those too ignorant to appreciate it, but would satisfy the intellect of the learned.

⁶⁸See, for instance, Darst, Imitatio, 81; Beverley, Aspects of Góngora's ‘Soledades’, 15. Note, however, a more recent study by Sophie Kluge who argues via a reading of the navigation passage of the Primera soledad (vv. 366–506) that Gongorine allegory does remain within the boundaries of Christian allegory, as suggested in his letter, but stretches that worldview to its breaking point (‘Góngora's Heresy: Literary Theory and Criticism in the Golden Age’, Modern Language Notes, 122:2 [2007], 251–71).

⁶⁹See Beverley, Aspects of Góngora's ‘Soledades’, 16 who takes this view against Jones’ Platonic interpretation.

⁷⁰See for instance Aldrete's grammar of 1606 in which Spanish is considered a corrupt Latin which has to be cleansed from all trace of decadence. Nitsch sets Góngora's Babel reference in this context. See Wolfram Nitsch, ‘Prisiones textuales. Artificio y violencia en la poesía española del barroco’, Olivar, 5 (2004), 31–47, available at:<http://wwwfuentesmemoria.fahce.unlp.edu.ar/art_revistas/pr.3259/pr.3259.pdf>

⁷¹This theological celebration of clear significance, which reduced the ambivalence of poetic discourse through insistence on a deep structure in which true univocal meaning is revealed, is evidenced in El Brocense's attempts to account for ellipsis and other related phenomena. See Malcolm K. Read's discussion in Visions in Exile. The Body in Spanish Literature and Linguistics 1500–1800, Purdue University Monographs in Romance Linguistics 30 (Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990), 17–18.

⁷²See Robert L. Entzminger, Divine Word: Milton and the Redemption of Language (Pittsburgh: Duquesne U. P., 1985). Collard reads Góngora's reference to Pentecost less provocatively, on the basis that he is reacting to insinuations made by his anonymous detractor: ‘se acusa a Góngora de confuso y obscuro, insinuando que “no ha participado en la gracia del Pentecostés” ’(see ‘La “herejía” de Góngora’, 331).

⁷³See Luis de Góngora, Sonetos completos, ed. Biruté Ciplijauskaité (Madrid: Castalia, 1969), sonnet 84.

⁷⁴See Benjamin's essay ‘On Language As Such and On the Language of Man’ (1916), in One-Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Verso, 1997), 107–23, where he posits the genesis of an ideal language as an Adamic, pre-lapsarian, divine gift, not complicated by passion: ‘Man is the namer, by this we recognise that through him pure language speaks. All nature, insofar as it communicates itself, communicates itself in language, and so finally in man. Hence he is the lord of nature and can give names to things. Only through the linguistic being of things can he gain knowledge of them from within himself—in name. God's creation is completed when things receive their names from Man’ (111). The loss of linguistic mimesis, according to Benjamin, is an allegory of a fall into history.

⁷⁵See Read's discussion of Nebrija's project in Visions in Exile, 8–9, where he notes: ‘It should not be forgotten that grammarians lived in the same precarious world as lyric poets, such as Garcilaso de la Vega, who found favourite themes in those of tempus fugit and carpe diem. The grammarian realised that language was sufficiently terrestrial to possess one of the fundamental defects of sublunary things: it was subject to change and the process of generation, growth and decay’ (8).

⁷⁶This is a view compellingly argued by Maurice Molho. See Semántica y poética (Góngora, Quevedo) (Barcelona: Crítica, 1997).

⁷⁷Johnson accepts Beverley's premise but with the caveat that it ‘depends inordinately’ on readers who can convert the poet's ‘hyperbolic currency’. See Christopher D. Johnson, Hyperboles. The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 2010), Chapter 5, 162.