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Bosque ideal que lo real complica [Ideal forest complicated by reality] Rubén Darío, Cantos de vida y esperanza [Songs of life and hope] (1905) I. Introduction: “Bosque ideal que lo real complica” In the Eighth Eclogue of Bernardo de Balbuena’s pastoral novel Siglo de oro en las selvas de Erífile [Golden age in the forest of Erífile ] (written in 1601, published in Spain in 1608), on his way back from the city to the bucolic forest of Erífile the shepherd Melancio makes a startling discovery. Not far from the road he encounters a cunningly crafted golden globe, an exquisite precursor of Jorge Luis Borges’s universe -encompassing “Aleph.” Sculpted, utterly implausibly, onto the incredibly small surface of Melancio’s globe are all the places and things of the world, so throbbing with life that the land itself seems to be giving birth to them at that very moment. With artifice layered upon artifice to the point of vertigo, the top of the globe boasts a portrait of the god of love surrounded by a squadron of nymphs so tiny that they resemble “ants” (160). Some of the nymphs pester the god, others enter a cave. Every so often there suddenly issues from the cave—that is, in this mad mise en abîme, from within the cave that lies inside the portrait of Cupid that crowns the microcosmic globe—the “celestial voice” (161) of a god who has never before spoken to humans and who prophetically recounts parts of each person’s life. Melancio views the “miraculous globe full Three BA L BU E NA’ S “L A GR A N DE Z A M E X IC A N A” A N D T H E A DV E N T OF T H E SPEC TAC U L A R CI T Y 92 The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture of divine secrets” (161) as the golden apple of poetry for which the gods contended. On closer examination the globe proves to be made not of gold but of the metal of workaday cowbells! His fellow shepherds ultimately concur that, despite its kinship with cowbells, Melancio’s wondrous object is “worthy of not being held in rustic hands” (164). The shepherds awkwardly state a truth of epochal proportions and resonance. Although Garcilaso de la Vega’s Renaissance eclogues display a certain fondness for objects that depict history such as urns and tapestries, the overwrought textualized objects crafted by Balbuena in Siglo de oro, of which the globe is but one, egregiously transgress the natural, limpid, Platonic space of the pastoral. Their wild imbrication and artifice contravene the esthetic and episteme that gird the Renaissance and sustain the Ordered City. Though an impossible object, Melancio’s microcosmic golden globe holds the keys to Balbuena’s poetry and to the tropics of place of the incipient Spectacular City. Like the prophetic voice that emanates from Melancio’s treasure, his globe itself augurs the advent of the Spectacular City in “La grandeza mexicana” (1604), caught as the incipient Spectacular City is between artifice and nature, the city and the countryside , the human and the divine, token and archetype, the reduced and the infinite, speaking and silence, the real and the ideal. And the object is, as it were, the thing, the early heart of the matter. In “La grandeza mexicana,” a paean to mercantile capitalism, textualized objects at once execute and emblematize the disruption of the Renaissance Ordered City. Balbuena’s poem traffics specifically in the luxury items endemic in the mercantile environment of seventeenth-century Mexico City. While unequivocally and self-righteously objects per se, Balbuena’s fetishized commodities inaugurate the optic and texture of particularity and the overpowering demands of local realities that in his works and in those of subsequent authors will shatter the Ordered City, constitute the Spectacular City, and derail the hegemonic Spanish Baroque. Objects, in short, emerge as the agents of the real that complicate the ideal. They will take us from Melancio’s globe (which I challenge anyone to draw) into the particularized world that appears in the visual epigraph to this chapter, Cristóbal de Villalpando’s painting. The Ordered City cleaves to archetypes, containment, knowability, and clarity. The Spectacular City, whether Balbuena’s or Villalpando’s or those to come, is all about unmanageable complexity. Similarly, to tell the story of the advent of the Spectacular City in Balbuena’s par- [18.225...

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