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César Vallejo’s breakout book of poetry, Los heraldos negros [The black heralds] (Lima, 1918), gives off shock waves that convulse a received, stable world picture into an “ultranervous axis” (68). Los heraldos negros leads off with a section entitled “Plafones agiles,” which I loosely translate as “Agile Platforms.”1 Rather than grounding the cosmos , Vallejo’s platforms inaugurate an offensive that swirls it into incoherence . The poet proceeds to execute a full-scale assault on the “virgin plenitude of the 1,” the sublime unity of a God-ruled universe “that is one / for all” (65). Claiming that the Inca race forges itself and smolders in his words (41), Vallejo hurls literary and philosophical thunderbolts at a once serene, intelligible world. Los heraldos negros decenters the universe, defaults from unity to multiplicity, lacerates lyricism with cacophony, wounds hope and pleasure with a serpent-ridden flow (65) of disillusionment and melancholy. “But Lord,” the poet implores in a piece entitled “Absolute,” “can you do nothing . . . against what is ending?” (65). From his wartime, avant-garde moment, Vallejo mourns the loss of one world picture and heralds the advent of a new, more complicated one. His words echo the derangement of the received world that emanates from Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, painted as the “discovery” of a previously unknown New World was sending shock waves through Europe.2 Then, as in Vallejo’s transitional moment, previously stable platforms lost their bearings to become agile: supple, shifting, transitive, nervous, contingent, electric. This chapter considers a broad array of the agile early modern platforms that bear on the Spectacular City, each of which constitutes a launching pad for our subsequent investigations. The first half of the chapter travels across colonial Spanish America to place the concrete elements of the Spectacular City—the New World creole, city, and fesOne AGI L E PL AT FOR M S OF T H E SPECTAC U L A R CI T Y The New World and the Old 14 The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture tival—in their historical contexts. It sketches the force fields of the historical contexts and the strains on those force fields, the stuff of their kinetic agility. Entering the territory of the Spectacular City’s other matrix, wonder, then draws us pointedly to Spain and into its fraught transactions with the New World. Via wonder we board the platforms by means of which Old World Spain labors to contend with the menacing tides of change. These tides had bombarded its stable, harmonious world pictures with very much the same kinds of thunderbolts that Los heraldos negros fires at the “virgin plenitude of the 1” that had, in fact, long ago lost some of its innocence. Never ceasing to yearn for harmonious unity and singularity, the metropolis constantly seeks means of salvaging them, or at least of salving the crises. Ongoing efforts at damage control (with an emphasis on control) profoundly imprint the epistemes and esthetics of the early modern period. The several such palliative efforts that the chapter investigates lay the scaffolding for the quietistic machinery of the Renaissance Ordered City and for the breakout agility of the Baroque Spectacular City. I. The Period of Stabilization and the Creoles By the second half of the sixteenth century, Spanish America’s so-called “period of stabilization” (Vidal 25) after the conquest had commenced. With all of the major colonial structures in place, all of the great colonial cities founded, and the Indians achieving a slow but sustained demographic recovery from the devastations of conquest, the colonies had reached a plateau that allowed for the vigorous, often tempestuous, creation and consolidation of a new society. The old tendency to view the era as inert or lethargic has fallen away, displaced by awareness that defining aspects of present-day Latin America took shape during the approximately 150-year period of stabilization. Rather than as a hiatus of calm, scholars now recognize the era as one of ferment, consistently jarred by tensions and uprisings. Economic issues stood at the epicenter of storms on both sides of the Atlantic. Even as the Spanish empire’s dependency on New World wealth grew, its capacity to monopolize New World resources diminished . By the end of the sixteenth century, Mexico had entered into independent trade with Manila and had evolved into the preeminent broker of intracolonial trade with Peru. Huge quantities of goods, espe- [3.141.31.240] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 20...

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