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Abstract
This article focuses on the concept of metaphor as metaphorai, as varied means of transfer and transport, specifically on Góngora's innovative development of the metaphor as a vehicle for experiential transformation and epistemological exploration; ultimately emphasizing a hitherto neglected valorization of affect in the liberation of the imagination. Although Góngora's use of metaphor became a major source of controversy in the debate unleashed by the Polifemo and Soledades during his lifetime, the Generation of 1927 looked to Gongorine metaphor as model and inspiration for their cultivation of imaginary worlds through poetry. By examining the models and concepts that nourished Góngora's innovative engagement with metaphor, shaped readers' responses to the poet's imaginary worlds of metaphor, triggered the recovery and reframing of Gongorine metaphor as springboard for the poetic imagination in the twentieth century, and sheds light on the power of Góngora's metaphor to transform and transmute the world through the exercise of the imagination.
Notes
1 David Constantine, Poetry, The Literary Agenda (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2013), 3.
2 Constantine, Poetry, 3.
3 Constantine, Poetry, 2.
4 Ernesto Grassi (1902–1991) advocates a return to humanism and argues for pre-Platonic notions of metaphor as a basis for the human being’s understanding of the world. According to Grassi, rational epistemological paradigms are based on Platonic, fixed, objective realities, and his return to humanism (and prioritizing of metaphor as the originary act of signification and interpretation) is an attempt to restore non-rational, imaginative thought. See Ernesto Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy: The Humanist Tradition, trans. Timothy W. Crusius (Carbondale: Southern Illinois U. P., 1980).
5 Isabel Torres, Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age: Eros, Eris and Empire (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2014), 104–21.
6 The past few years have seen a dramatic surge in Góngora scholarship, especially with the recent quadricentenary celebration of the appearance of the Polifemo and Soledades. For an excellent analysis of some of the major issues and contributions of these studies, consult Crystal Chemris, ‘Highlights and Issues of the New Wave of Góngora Studies’, Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 38:3 (2014), 419–41. The following, selected, books give some idea of the importance, and variety, of approaches encompassed by this ‘new wave’: Julio Baena, Quehaceres con Góngora (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2012); John Beverley, Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008), 23–84; Mercedes Blanco, Góngora heroico: ‘Las Soledades’ y la tradición épica (Madrid: Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2012); Mercedes Blanco, Góngora o la invención de una lengua (León: Univ. de León, 2012); Rafael Bonilla Cerezo & Paolo Tanganelli, ‘Soledades’ ilustradas: retrato emblemático de Góngora (Madrid: Delirio, 2013); Enrica Cancelliere, Góngora: itinerarios de la visión, trad. Rafael Bonilla & Linda Garosi (Córdoba: Diputación Provincial, 2007); Crystal Chemris, Góngora's ‘Soledades’ and the Problem of Modernity (Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2008); Laura Dolfi, Luis de Góngora: cómo escribir teatro (Sevilla: Renacimiento, 2011); El poeta soledad: Góngora 1609–1615, ed. Begoña López Bueno (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2011); A Poet for All Seasons: Eight Commentaries on Góngora, ed. Oliver Noble Wood & Nigel Griffin (New York: Hispanic Seminary of Medieval Studies, 2013); Essays on Góngora’s ‘Polifemo’ and ‘Soledades’, ed. Terence O’Reilly & Jeremy Robbins, BSS, 90:1 (2013); Víctor Pueyo Zoco, Góngora: hacia una poética histórica (Barcelona: Montesinos, 2013); Joaquín Roses Lozano, Góngora: ‘Soledades’ habitadas (Málaga: Univ. de Málaga, 2007); El universo de Góngora: imágenes, textos y representaciones, ed. Joaquín Roses Lozano (Córdoba: Diputación Provincial, 2014); Góngora hoy X: ‘Soledades’, ed. Joaquín Roses Lozano (Córdoba: Diputación Provincial, 2010); and Torres, Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, Chaps 4 & 5.
7 See Philip Davis, Reading and the Reader, The Literary Agenda (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2013), 122.
8 Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy.
9 The following editions have been used throughout: Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea in Góngora y el Polifemo, ed. Dámaso Alonso, 3 vols, 6th ed. (Madrid: Gredos, 1980), III, 13–34; Luis de Góngora, Soledades, ed. & intro. de Robert Jammes (Madrid: Castalia, 1994).
10 Davis reflects upon Murray’s essay on ‘Embodiment and Incarnation’ in poetry to suggest that we can have literature repeatedly, but never steadily (see ‘Reading and the Reader’, 120–22). First delivered as the ‘Aquinas Memorial Lecture’ in 1986, Murray’s essay was subsequently published as: Embodiment and Incarnation: Notes on Preparing an Anthology of Australian Religious Verse, Eremos Newsletter Vol. 7, Occasional Essay Supplement (Newton: Eremos Institute, 1987).
11 Marsha S. Collins, The ‘Soledades’: Góngora’s Masque of the Imagination (Columbia/London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2002); Isabel Torres, The Polyphemus Complex: Rereading the Baroque Mythological Fable, BHS, 83:2 (2006).
12 Socrates, Plato’s mouthpiece in the Republic (c.375 BC) calls for censorship of the existing literary canon in his imagining of an ideal polis. He identifies the types of passages that he considers to be morally corrupting and untrue, particularly passages stimulating pleasure or pain (378c–402e). What is in fact a suppression of Homer and the tragedians is made explicit through the citing of four passages from the Iliad and Odyssey to make the case, before a complete ban on Homer is called for (see Plato, The Republic, ed. & trans G. M. A. Grube, revised by C. D. C. Reeve, 2nd ed. [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993]).
13 Max Black, Models and Metaphors (Ithaca/London: Cornell U. P., 1962); by the same author, ‘More about Metaphor’, in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1979), 19–43; Paul Ricoeur, ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, New Literary History, 6 (1974), 95–110 (especially p. 110) and, by the same author, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin & John Costello (London/New York: Routledge, 1978).
14 Ragnhild Tronstadt, ‘Could the World Become a Stage? Theatricality and Metaphorical Structures’, SubStance, 31:2 (2002), 216–24.
15 What is often termed classic cognitive metaphor theory is represented by the work of the following theorists, among others: George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980); Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reading (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987); and Mark Turner, Death is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987). The development towards blending theory is demonstrated in Gilles Fauconnier & Mark Turner, The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
16 Tamar Yacobi, ‘Metaphors in Context: The Communicative Structure of Figurative Language’, in Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory: Perspectives on Literary Metaphor, ed. Monika Fludernik (London: Routledge, 2013 [1st ed. 2011]), 113–34 (p. 114).
17 Yacobi, ‘Metaphors in Context’, 132.
18 J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. J. O. Urmson & Marina Sbisá (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1962). For a definition of ‘performative utterances’, see pp. 5–8.
19 Jo Labanyi, ‘Doing Things: Emotion, Affect, and Materiality’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 11:3 (2010), 223–33.
20 Luis Cernuda, ‘Góngora y el gongorismo’, in Luis Cernuda, Obras completas, ed. Derek Harris & Luis Maristany, 3 vols (Madrid: Siruela, 1993–1994), Prosa, ed. Luis Maristany, 2 vols (1994), II, 137–47 (p. 145).
21 Joaquín Roses, ‘El rayo y el águila: verdades y abstracciones en un soneto de Góngora’, RILCE, Revista de Filología Hispánica, 26:1 (2008), 168–86; for Roses’ view of the construction of ‘frialdad’ in Góngora as a critical misreading (a platform from which he seeks to demonstrate Góngora’s understanding of the ‘truths’ of fiction), see pp. 168–70. See also W. Pabst, ‘Góngoras Schöpfung in seinen Gedichten Polifemo und Soledades’, Revue Hispanique, LXXX (1930), 1–299 (p. 1) (translated by Nicolás Marín: La creación gongorina en los poemas ‘Polifemo’ y ‘Soledades’ [Madrid: CSIC, Patronato ‘Menéndez Pelayo’, Instituto ‘Miguel de Cervantes’, 1966]), as cited by Antonio Carreira, in ‘El yo de Góngora: sus máscaras y epifanías’ in Gongoremas (Barcelona: Ediciones Península, 1998), 121–59 (p. 121).
22 See Carreira ‘El yo de Góngora’.
23 See respectively: María Rosa Lida, ‘Review of B. Croce, Studi su poesie antiche e moderna’, Revista de Filología Hispánica, II:1 (1940), 83–84; Jorge Guillén, Lenguaje y poesía (algunos casos españoles), 2nd ed. (Madrid: Alianza, 1962), 46 where he states, ‘para Góngora la poesía, en todo su rigor, es un lenguaje construido como un objeto enigmático’; and, more recently, Pedro Ruiz Pérez, Entre Narciso y Proteo: lírica y escritura de Garcilaso a Góngora (Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo, 2007), 110–17 (p. 114).
24 See Robert Graves’ poem ‘From the Embassy’ (1953), in Robert Graves, Collected Poems, 1975 (London: Cassell, 1975), 153. The poem opens with a declaration of the extra-territorial dimension which is poetry’s domain and the poet’s privileged mediatory role within it: ‘I, an ambassador of Otherwhere / to the unfederated states of Here and Thee / Enjoy (as the phrase is) / Extra-territorial privileges’.
25 The full quotation from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream reads: ‘And as imagination bodies forth / the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / a local habitation and a name’. See A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Trevor B. Griffin (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1996), 5.1, 14–17.
26 As representative of this argument see the following: Arthur Terry, Seventeenth-Century Spanish Poetry: The Power of Artifice (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1993), who acknowledges that metaphor may appeal to the senses, but works against visualization as even mental pictures are ‘disintegrated [ … ] in the kind of verbal play induced by the images’ (81); Terence O’Reilly, ‘A. A. Parker and the Polifemo’, in Golden-Age Essays in Commemoration of A. A. Parker, ed. Terence O’Reilly & Jeremy Robbins, BSS, 85:6 (2008), 69–78 (pp. 72–75); and, more recently (and radically), Lucia Binotti’s reading of the Polifemo as an erotic painting (‘Visual Eroticism, Poetic Voyeurism: Ekphrasis and the Complexities of Patronage in Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea’, in her Cultural Capital, Language and National Identity in Imperial Spain [Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2012], 95–125 [especially pp. 113–19]).
27 See Ricoeur, ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, 107.
28 Torres, Love Poetry in the Spanish Golden Age, 137.
29 The quotation is taken from Peder Jothen’s observations on ambiguity in aesthetics in his book Kierkegaard, Aesthetics and Selfhood: The Art of Subjectivity (Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 26.
30 Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric and the Making of Images 400–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1998), 7.
31 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), 56, and Paul Hetherington’s perceptive article, ‘The Past Ahead: Understanding Memory in Contemporary Poetry’, New Writing, 9:1 (2011), 102–17 which reflects critically on Bachelard’s observations (103–04).
32 The quotation in its original form refers to the Aymara language in which, according to Nicholas Evans, the ‘metaphorical flow of time runs the other way’. It has been creatively applied above to temporality in Quevedo. See Nicholas Evans, Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 169, as cited in Hetherington, ‘The Past Ahead’, 112.
33 Teresa Scott Soufas, Melancholy and the Secular Mind in Spanish Golden Age Literature (Columbia/London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1990), 142.
34 Aristotle, Topics, trans. E. S. Forster, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1939), 6.2 139.b.32.
35 For the full text of Góngora’s Carta de don Luis de Góngora en respuesta de la que le escribieron’, see Don Luis de Góngora, Obras completas, ed. Juan Millé y Jiménez & Isabel Millé y Jiménez (Madrid: Aguilar, 1961), 894–98.
36 See Luis Rosales, ‘La imaginación configurante (ensayo sobre las Soledades de don Luis de Góngora)’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 257–58 (1971), 255–94.
37 See Elizabeth Amann, ‘Floridas señas: Góngora and the Petrarchan Tradition’, BSS, 90:6 (2013), 929–47 (p. 930), and her related article, ‘The Myth of the Heliades in Góngora: Poplars, Poetics and the Petrarchan Tradition’, BHS, 89:8 (2012), 831–47. José Ángel Valente claimed that every poem is ‘un conocimiento haciéndose’. See his Poesía última, ed. Francisco Ribes (Madrid: Taurus, 1969), 87.
38 Rosales, ‘La imaginación configurante’, 272.
39 Within CMT Zoltán Kövecses’ research is primarily concerned with context as this impacts upon variation. He has discussed the influence of different types of context on metaphorical conceptualization in several studies, including, Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (New York/Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2005); Language, Mind, and Culture: A Practical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2006); and ‘Metaphorical Creativity in Discourse’, Insights, 3:2 (2010), 1–13.
40 For quotations, see Samuel L. Guyler, ‘Góngora’s ‘Polifemo’: The Humor of Imitation’, Revista Hispánica Moderna, 37 (1972), 237–52 (p. 243). On the structural similarities between the song and the poem’s dedicatory stanzas, see Anthony J. Cascardi, ‘The Exit from Arcadia: Reevaluation of the Pastoral in Virgil, Garcilaso and Góngora’, Journal of Hispanic Philology, 4 (1980), 119–41 and, developing upon that, Torres, The Polyphemus Complex, 64–68.
41 See Julio Baena, ‘What Kind of Monster Are You, Galatea?’, in Writing Monsters: Essays on Iberian and Latin American Cultures, ed. Adriana Gordillo & Nicholas Spadaccini, Hispanic Issues On Line, 15 (2014), 26–41.
42 Baena, ‘What Kind of Monster Are You Galatea?’, at pp. 36 and 35
43 When a ‘re-presented’ quote is framed in a different key, Yacobi identifies the operation of ‘perspectival montage’, defined as follows: ‘Quoting thus subordinates the quote to the communicative aims of the quoter, through recontextualizing, and often also recontextualizing strategies [ … ] Interference by the quoter can take the form of ellipsis, addition, reordering, commentary, summary, or that of the mixture of voices and viewpoints entailed by direct, indirect, or free indirect discourse. The result is a perspectival montage between the voices and/or views apparently involved, which we as readers have to disentangle as best we can’ (Metaphors in Context, 118; emphasis retained from the original).
44 Murray Krieger, ‘Poetic Presence and Illusion: Renaissance Theory and the Duplicity of Metaphor’, Critical Inquiry, 5:4 (1979), 597–619 (p. 599).
45 W. R. Johnson, The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1982), at pp. 37 and 176–77.
46 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Plato and the Simulacrum’, in Gilles Deleuze: The Logic of Sense, ed. Constantin Boundas, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (London: Athlone, 1990), 253–66. The key Platonic text in question is Sophist, 263b /264c (Sophist, ed. & trans. Nicholas P. White [Indianapolis: Hacket, 1993]).
47 Stathis Gourgouris, ‘Poiein—Political Infinitive’, PMLA, 123:1 (2008), 223–28. Gorgouris defines a ‘gesture of poiein’ in terms of what he sees as ‘essentially poetic’ (referring somewhat provocatively to the transformation of disciplinarity into interdisciplinarity), by which he means: ‘not merely the art of making but the art of forming (thereby, in the domain of history, of transforming). [ … ] The oldest notion of poiein, present in Homer—while it does not arbitrate the ambiguity between forming and making—pertains primarily to working on matter, shape or form [ … ] It is especially interesting to consider that the root reference to creativity (dēmiourgia) is instrumentalist [ … ] From a modern point of view, then, poiein is characteristically a notion of creative action—creative and destructive’ (225).
48 Collins, The ‘Soledades’, 112–70.
49 José Ortega y Gasset, La deshumanización del arte, in Obras completas, 12 vols (Madrid: Alianza/Revista de Occidente, 1983), III, 351–86 (pp. 372, 373).
50 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Las dos grandes metáforas’, in Obras completas, II, 387–400 (pp. 390, 391).
51 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1988), 115.
52 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Rendall, 117.
53 Quotations from the Soledades are cited by section of the poem and by verse numbers.
54 Ortega y Gasset, ‘Las dos grandes metáforas’, 400.
55 Pablo Maurette, ‘Plato’s Hermaphrodite and a Vindication of the Sense of Touch in the Sixteenth Century’, Renaissance Quarterly, 68:3 (2015), 872–98 (pp. 873, 874).
56 Maurette, ‘Plato's Hermaphrodite’, 895.
57 Brian Boyd states: ‘Just as a live metaphor in poetry creates an aura of suggestion rather than a pinpoint illumination, meaning in story more open-ended than fable tends to radiate out’ (On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction [Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard U. P., 2009], 372–73). See Boyd (392–98) on the integral relationship between art’s power to compel attention and its impact on humans, in which he notes the power of metaphor, among other elements and strategies, to draw attention.
58 Fauconnier & Turner, The Way We Think, 279–84. Turner and Fauconnier tend to characterize the human process of conceptual integration as metaphorical, at times involving several systems of metaphorical cross-mapping.
59 Federico García Lorca, ‘La imagen poética de don Luis de Góngora’, in Conferencias, intro., ed. & notas de Christopher Maurer, 2 vols (Madrid: Alianza, 1984), I, 85–125 (pp. 96, 97).
60 Pedro Salinas, ‘La exaltación de la realidad: Luis de Góngora’, in La realidad y el poeta, intro. & ed. de Soledad Salinas de Marichal (Barcelona: Ariel, 1976), 155–70 (p. 166).
61 The work was originally ascribed to Longinus, although the actual author remains unknown. On Longinus and Góngora, see Collins, The ‘Soledades’, 124–35; on the primacy of sight in metaphor production see Longinus, ‘On Sublimity’, in Classical Literary Criticism, ed. D. A. Russell & M. Winterbottom, trans. D. A. Russell (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1989), 143–87 (pp. 159–62), and García Lorca, ‘La imagen’, 99–101. On unexpected perspectival and conceptual shifts, in artful words, thoughts, and actions, see Baltasar Gracián, Agudeza y arte de ingenio, ed., intro. & notas de Evaristo Correa Calderón, 2 vols (Madrid: Castalia, 1969), I, 144–51, 188–96, 247–54; II, 141–45. On the Gongorine structure ‘A, si no B’, see Dámaso Alonso, ‘La simetría bilateral’, in Estudios y ensayos gongorinos, 2nd ed (Madrid: Gredos, 1960), 117–73. On the metapoetic net, see: Collins, The ‘Soledades’, 132–34; Marsha S. Collins, ‘Mastering the Maze in Góngora’s Soledades’, Calíope, 8:1 (2002), 87–102; and Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1969), 177–78.
62 Gregory Currie & Ian Ravenscroft, Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 7–13, 192–97.
63 Jorge Guillén, Cántico (1931), in Aire nuestro, 4 vols (Barcelona: Barral, 1977), I, 50.
64 For more criticism related to this poem, consult: C. Christopher Soufas, Conflict of Light and Wind: The Spanish Generation of 1927 (Middletown: Wesleyan U. P., 1989), 41–43; Wifredo de Ràfols, ‘Del cubismo a las circunstancias: el motivo de la mesa en dos momentos de la trayectoria poética de Jorge Guillén: “Naturaleza viva” y “A nivel” ’, BHS, 82:1 (2005), 45–58; and Miguel A. Olmos, ‘Jorge Guillén, lector de Góngora’, Signa, 18 (2009), 365–90.
65 Vicente Aleixandre, in Espadas como labios (1932), in Obras completas, pról. de Carlos Bousoño (Madrid: Aguilar, 1968), 241–318 (p. 252).
66 For more criticism related to this poem consult: C. B. Morris, Surrealism and Spain, 1920–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1972), 58–63, 127, 38; Soufas, Conflict of Light and Wind, 111–13; Antonio Pérez Lasheras, ‘Espadas como labios, forma y ritmo de una cosmovisión’, Revista de Literatura, 49:97 (1987), 115–41 (pp. 119–27); and Anthony L. Geist, ‘ “Esas fronteras deshechas”: Sexuality, Textuality, and Ideology in Vicente Aleixandre’s Espadas como labios’, in The Surrealist Adventure in Spain, ed. C. B. Morris (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 1991), 181–90.
67 Lois Parkinson Zamora & Monika Kaup, ‘Baroque, New World Baroque, Neobaroque: Categories and Concepts’, in Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora & Monika Kaup (Durham, NC: Duke U. P., 2010), 1–35 (pp. 26–27).
68 Severo Sarduy, ‘El barroco y el neobarroco’, in Obra completa, ed. Gustavo Guerrero & François Wahl, con intro. de Gustavo Guerrero, 2 vols (Madrid: ALLCA XX, 1999), II, 1385–404; Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, foreword & trans. by Tom Conley (Minneapolis, Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1993), 3–13, 121–26.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.