Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities (review)

David R. Castillo's Baroque Horrors aims to trace the roots of the literary fantastic to the Iberian Renaissance and Baroque. The group of works brought into the discussion ranges from the exemplary and baroque novelas of Miguel de Cervantes and María de Zayas to earlier works by Antonio de Torquemada (Jardín de flores curiosas, 1570), Miguel de Luna (Historia verdadera del rey don Rodrigo, 1592), Julián de Medrano (La silva curiosa, 1583), Juan de Piña (Casos prodigiosos y cueva encantada,1628) and Cristobal Lozáno (La cueva de Hércules, 1667). Underlying the book's arguments are the notions that the fantastic springs from the tension between rational and analogic views of the world during the early modern period (46) and that the fantastic is used to subvert social codes.

Chapter 1 analyzes a host of miscellanies written in Spain, as this successful genre reflects not only the curiosity of Renaissance readers but also the transformation into literary material—"literary curiosities"—of numerous myths and stories inherited from the classics and from folkloric sources (40). Castillo, completing Giovanni Allegra's work on the Jardín de flores curiosas, asserts that the folkloric tales included in the miscellanies are a more convincing origin of the fantastic than classical myths and histories, "but the miscellanies often come closest to the unsettling quality of modern fantasy when they incorporate contemporary folkloric material" (40). The second connection between miscellanies and the fantastic is "the oscillation between the acceptance of the marvelous" and rational analysis of the case (42). The third link is the fact that the early modern culture of curiosities relates to "forms of epochal melancholia and profound anxiety about the openness and chaotic structure of the universe" (43). Castillo invokes the notion of the vacuum in Giordano Bruno's work and in Galileo's "nocturnal horror" as two early modern products of such visions of chaos. But, according to Castillo, all this unsettled thinking became productive in fantastic ways: "Galileo brought with it not just new walls of reason but also new windows of imagination and, with them, brand new vistas of nightmarish landscapes as well as utopian dreams" (46). To prove his point, Castillo studies folkloric tales included in the three miscellanies Jardín de flores curiosas, La silva curiosa, and La cueva de Hércules.

In chapter 2, Castillo links the sensationalistic representation of "awesome forces (whether natural, preternatural, or supernatural)" to exaggerated moralism and moral uncertainty in the Baroque (92). One of the most exciting points of this chapter is Castillo's observation that some morbid baroque stories, told through devices of epistemological relativism and ethical uncertainty, address the fact that "raw life content ... makes no sense" (95). As a result unjustified violence and the macabre express the anxiety caused by new scientific epistemology and knowledge.

In chapter 3, the author explores the interconnections between household, female horror, physical violence, subversive pornography, and body politics in Maria de Zayas's Desengaños amorosos (1647). These sensationalistic "baroque tales of kinship and terror" abound with monsters that "come with the house" (118). If the code of honor in the house is a "death trap" for women, their bodies occupy the role of the scapegoat (118). Zayas's representations of women tortured by their kin imitate an aesthetic of martyrdom with "graphic close-ups of the intimate act of violence" unparalleled in the works of contemporary canonical male writers. This detailed exhibition of violence against women might be labeled pornography. According to Angela Carter's study of the Marquis de Sade, pornography helps to preserve the social status quo, as time and space are irrelevant to the narrative, as well as to reinforce universals of sexual behavior and the moral of the political establishment. Following Carter's ideas, Castillo argues that the pornographic images in Zayas are subversive because her descriptions of mutilated, tortured, and murdered female bodies are situated in very specific...