Nautical Votive Offerings and Imaginative Speculation in Góngora's Soledad primera

Abstract

With a particular focus on lines 29–33 and 477–80, this article analyses the motif of the ex-voto or votive offering in Góngora's Soledad primera. In relation to Golden-Age ex-votos more generally, both in popular practice and in literary convention, it identifies three characteristics that are central to Góngora's development of the motif. These are the ex-voto's capacity to signify in a metonymic mode, its fragmentary and ephemeral nature, and its sacralizing potential when exhibited beyond the bounds of the conventional sanctuary. The discussion suggests ways in which close attention to Góngora's techniques in developing votive imagery can enhance a reading of the ‘grillo torneado’ conceit in lines 849–53 of the Soledad segunda, and can ultimately shed light on the imaginative, persuasive force that Góngora perceived in the votive artefact and its poetic analogues.

Notes

¹ Legislación pesquera vigente: régimen jurídico de la pesca marítima (Madrid: Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación, 1990), 102 [on CD-ROM]; Boletín Oficial del Estado, 229 (24 September 1993), 27827–37, Anexo: Censo de Buques, Ministerio de Agricultura, Pesca y Alimentación (27833). The present article could not have been completed without the estancia de investigación that I undertook at the Universidad de Sevilla in June 2012, at the generous invitation of Dr Inmaculada Murcia Serrano and Professor Antonio Molina Flores of the Departamento de Estética e Historia de la Filosofía.

²Enrica Cancelliere, ‘Estrategias metaliterarias en las Soledades de Góngora’, in Góngora Hoy X: Soledades, ed. Joaquín Roses (Córdoba: Diputación de Córdoba, 2010), 61–80 (p. 61).

³There have been relatively few studies on ex-votos as a cultural phenomenon in early modern Spain. The neglect is probably due, in part, to the rather thin and scattered primary documentation of votive praxis in the Golden Age. It also reflects biases towards other geographical and historical areas of research, as Joan de Déu Domènech has observed (‘Cocodrils i balenes a les esglésies’, Locus Amœnus, 5 [2000–01], 253–75 [p. 255]). Most studies of votive offerings have focused either on the votive artefacts of ancient Mediterranean civilizations (predominantly in archaeological surveys) or on twentieth-century and present-day Latin-American ex-votos (predominantly in anthropological and folkloric approaches). Even those studies, like David Freedberg's The Power of Images (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989), which do consider the early modern period, omit early modern Spain from their analyses. Only two studies have featured sustained discussion of the Golden-Age ex-voto: the anthropologist William Christian, Jr's Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1981) and Elizabeth B. Davis’ pioneering essay on the lyric treatments of the topic, ‘La promesa del náufrago: el motivo marinero del ex-voto, de Garcilaso a Quevedo’, in Studies in Honor of James O. Crosby, ed. Lía Schwartz (Newark: Juan de la Cuesta, 2004), 109–23. These studies build upon Julio Caro Baroja's brief but suggestive treatment of the subject in Las formas complejas de la vida religiosa: religión, sociedad y carácter en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII (Madrid: Akal, 1978), 109–11. A full-length, scholarly study of ex-votos in Spain's Golden Age remains to be written. A monograph on the subject could cover votive rites as targets of Reformist critiques in the sixteenth century, their relationship to the origins of public museums and cabinets of curiosities, their propagation in the New World, and their status as objects of metaliterary reflections, as in Lope de Vega's Sonnet 149, ‘Cadenas desherradas, eslabones’.

⁴ Miscelánea primera de oraciones eclesiásticas (Murcia: Diego de la Torre, 1606), Mm8^r.

⁵Jaime Prades, Historia de la adoración y uso de las santas imágenes, y de la imagen de la Fuente de la Salud (Valencia: Felipe Mey, 1597), Ff3^r.

⁶Prades, Historia, Hh4^r

⁸‘As for me, a votive tablet on his temple wall records that I have dedicated my drenched clothes to the deity who rules the sea’, lines 13–16, in Odes and Epodes, ed. and trans. Niall Rudd, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 2004), 34–35.

⁷Davis, ‘La promesa del náufrago’, in Studies in Honor of James O. Crosby, 109–23.

⁹See Fray Luis de León's close adaptations of this ode, ‘¿Quién es, ¡o Nise hermosa!’ (in Poesías completas, ed. Cristóbal Cuevas [Madrid: Castalia 2000], 258–59), and ‘¿Quién tiene la cavida?’ (attributed to Fray Luis in the Cartapacio de Francisco Morán de la Estrella, ed. Ralph A. DiFranco, José J. Labrador Herraiz, et al. [Madrid: Patrimonio Nacional, 1989], 422). Ronald Storrs’ Ad Pyrrham: A Polyglot Collection of Translations of Horace's Ode to Pyrrha (London: Oxford U. P., 1959) includes four additional versions from the Spanish Golden Age: those of El Brocense, Vicente Espinel, Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola and Francisco de Medrano.

¹⁰In addition to Garcilaso's Sonnet VII, these sonnets are Juan de Morales’ ‘Jamás el cielo vió llegar piloto’; Diego de Bienvenides' ‘Amor, en tus altares he ofrecido’; and Quevedo's ‘Tuvo enojado el alto mar de España’ and ‘¡Qué bien me parecéis, jarcias y entenas!’.

¹¹In Luis de Góngora, Romances, ed. Antonio Carreño (Madrid: Cátedra, 2000), 210–16.

¹³Luis de Góngora y Argote, Soledades, ed. Robert Jammes (Madrid: Castalia, 1994), 203–05.

¹²John R. Beverley, ‘Soledad primera, Lines 1–61’, Modern Language Notes, 88:2 (1973), 233–48 (p. 244).

¹⁵Jáuregui, Antídoto, 12.

¹⁴Juan de Jáuregui, Antídoto contra la pestilente poesía de las ‘Soledades’ por Juan de Jáuregui, ed. José Manuel Rico García (Sevilla: Univ. de Sevilla, 2002), 11–12.

¹⁶‘Examen del Antídoto o Apología por las Soledades de Don Luis de Góngora contra el autor de el Antídoto’, Apéndice VII in Miguel Artigas, Don Luis de Góngora y Argote: biografía y estudio crítico (Madrid: Revista de Archivos, 1925), 400–67 (p. 409).

¹⁷ Góngora vindicado: Soledad primera, ilustrada y defendida, ed. María José Osuna Cabezas (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2009), 186–88. The author of this defence is anonymous, but the editor convincingly attributes authorship to Fray Francisco de Cabrera and dates the manuscript to c.1620.

¹⁸ Góngora vindicado, 185–86.

¹⁹José Pellicer de Salas y Tovar, Lecciones solemnes a las obras de don Luis de Góngora (Madrid: Imprenta del Reino, 1630), Aa2^r–Aa2^v; José García de Salcedo Coronel, Soledades de D. Luis de Góngora comentadas (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1646), C6^r–C8^r.

²⁰See David Lodge, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 73–81. Erasing the distinctions between metonymy and synecdoche, or treating synecdoche as a subtype of metonymy, accords as well with some Golden-Age treatments. See, for example, Luis Alfonso de Carvallo's definition of metonymy in Cisne de Apolo (1602), ed. Alberto Porqueras Mayo (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1997), 330: ‘La metonimia es cuando nombramos la parte por el todo, como llamar a las naves, popas, o las nombramos con el nombre de su causa o inventor, como llamar a la guerra, Marte. O con el nombre de su efecto, como llamar obscuridad a la noche, o con el nombre de sus insignias y señales, como al imperio, ceptro, a la victoria, palma. O con el nombre de lo que en sí contiene’. Bartolomé Jiménez Patón's Elocuencia española en arte (1604) likewise treats metonymy broadly as a trope that relies on contiguity and association: ‘la metonimia, o hipálage (como la llamaron los retóricos), no es otra cosa sino una transmutación de los significados por vecindad de unas cosas a otras […], y en los antecedentes y consecuentes […] Digo más, que no hay metonimia donde no se hallen estos antecedentes y subsecuentes, unos tomados por otros; y así no hay necesidad aun de hacer modo distinto en la metonimia, y de ninguna suerte es sinédoque [sic]’. See Elocuencia española en arte, ed. Francisco Javier Martín (Barcelona: Puvill, 1993), 141.

²¹Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991), 101–02.

²²Freedberg, The Power of Images, 157.

²³ Ocios de Castalia en diversos poemas, ed. Cristóbal Cuevas (Málaga: Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 1987), 475.

²⁴Miguel de Cervantes, Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda, ed. Carlos Romero Muñoz, 5th ed. (Madrid: Cátedra, 2004 [1^st ed. 1997]), 471–72.

²⁵Marsha Collins, The ‘Soledades’, Góngora's Masque of the Imagination (Columbia/London: Univ. of Missouri Press, 2002), 197.

²⁶Beverley, ‘Soledad primera, Lines 1–61’, 244.

²⁷See Juan Sebastián de Elcano, ‘Carta de Juan Sebastián de Elcano al Emperador’, in La primera vuelta al mundo, ed. Ramón Alba (Madrid: Miraguano and Polifemo, 2012), 9–12.

²⁸See Enrique Martínez Ruiz, Enrique Giménez, et al., La España moderna (Madrid: Istmo, 1992), 206–07.

²⁹All three quotations appear in Jammes' note on line 479, Soledades, p. 294.

³⁰Note on line 479, p. 294.

³¹Pellicer does not indicate which edition he is citing, but the details of his reference correspond to the 1604 edition (Basel: Henricpetri), in which the relevant information appears in volume 3, NN5^r.

³² Theatri, NN5^r.

³³Antonio de Torquemada, Obras completas, ed. Lina Rodríguez Cacho, 2 vols (Madrid: Turner, Biblioteca Castro, 1994–97), I, 822.

³⁴ Compendio de las historias de los descubrimientos, conquistas, y guerras de la India Oriental y sus islas (Madrid: Imprenta Imperial, 1681), C7^r.

³⁵Pablo Espinosa de los Monteros, Segunda parte de la historia y grandeza de la gran ciudad de Sevilla (Sevilla: Juan de Cabrera, 1630), O5^v.

³⁶Diego Barros Arana, ‘Biografía i viaje de Hernando de Magallanes al Estrecho a que dio su nombre’, Anales de la Universidad de Chile, 24:5 (1864), 404–14 (pp. 412–13).

³⁷For a Golden-Age description of the decay and regular recycling or repurposing of ex-votos, see Andrés Sánchez Tejado, La divina Serrana de Tormes, por otro nombre Historia de Nuestra Señora del Espino (Segovia: Diego Flamenco, 1629), Y3^v–Y4^r; and on the tendency of votive waxworks, paintings, and textiles to moulder in damp shrines, see José de la Justicia, Historia de la Virgen de la Cueva Santa (Valencia: Bernardo Nogués, 1655), N4^v.

³⁸The apt phrase is C. C. Smith's from ‘Serranas de Cuenca’, in Studies in Spanish Literature of the Golden Age Presented to Edward M. Wilson, ed. R. O. Jones (London: Tamesis, 1973), 283–95 (p. 290).

³⁹James Blades, Percussion Instruments and Their History (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 198–200; Thomas D. Rossing, Acoustics of Bells (Stroudsburg: Van Nostrand-Reinhold, 1984), 164; Thomas D. Rossing, Science of Percussion Instruments (Singapore: World Scientific, 2000), 128–36.

⁴⁰This adds another dimension to the auditory image that Dámaso Alonso noted in the potential pun on grillo as both a shackle and as a chirping cricket, ‘por su sonido, monótono’. See Las Soledades, ed. D. Alonso (Madrid: Sociedad de Estudios y Publicaciones, 1956 [1^st ed. 1927]), 179.

⁴¹See Collins, The ‘Soledades’, 45–47.

⁴²These quotations are taken from the most recent edition of Góngora's ‘Respuesta’: Juan Manuel Daza Somoano, ‘Los testimonios de la polémica epistolar Lope-Góngora (1615–1616), con edición de la Respuesta de Góngora’, in El poeta soledad: Góngora 1609–1615, ed. Begoña López Bueno (Zaragoza: Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, 2011), 270–87 (p. 285).

⁴³ Lusíadas de Luis de Camoens […] comentadas (Madrid: Juan Sánchez [sic, i.e. Antonio Duplastre], 1639), col. 403.