Poiesis and Modernity in the Old and New Worlds

5. From the Bibliotheca to the Garden and the Graveyard: Origins of the Poiesis of the Fantastic in Late Sixteenth-Century Miscellanea

87 u 5 From the Bibliotheca to the Garden and the Graveyard: Origins of the Poiesis of the Fantastic in Late Sixteenth-Century Miscellanea David R. Castillo A few years ago, Lina Rodríguez Cacho drew a suggestive picture of the trajectory of sixteenth-century miscellanea, from the early Silva de varia lección by Pedro Mexía, first published in 1540, to Antonio de Torquemada’s Jardín de flores curiosas (1570), to Julián de Medrano’s La silva curiosa (1583), and Varia historia, written by Luis Zapata around 1590. The critic noted that within the pages of Mexía’s Silva, we never really get the impression of having left a medieval bibliotheca; yet, when it comes to Torquemada’s Jardín, we may feel more like guests in a private backyard gathering than like readers at the library. In the case of La silva curiosa and Varia historia, Rodríguez Cacho imagines herself standing before a group of casual conversationalists at a café.1 For her part, Asunción Rallo Gruss looks at the development of the genre from the perspective of its evolution from the encyclopedic display of ancient erudition in the tradition of classical compilations, to the more personal or personalized miscellanea that will proliferate in the last three decades of the sixteenth century. Beginning with Torquemada’s Jardín, miscellany literature will open the door to contemporary sources and folkloric material, as well as personal experience, in an effort to engage the new groups of readers that had emerged with the printing press. While most critics, including Rallo Gruss, focus on the works of Mexía, Torquemada, and Zapata, it is perhaps the protonovelistic 88 DAVID CASTILLO second part of Medrano’s La silva curiosa that best exemplifies the subjective impulse of late sixteenth-century miscellanies. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo mentions the miscellanies in discussing the genesis of the modern novel in his classic Orígenes de la novela (1905). But only recently do we find critics who examine miscellany literature in the context of a discussion about the origins of the fantastic. To my knowledge, Giovanni Allegra’s introduction to his 1982 edition of Torquemada’s Jardín is one of the first critical statements that show a full understanding of the key cultural significance of these texts, which are both old (antiguos) and new (modernos ). In effect, sixteenth-century miscellanies stand at the crossroads between the ordered and meaningful cosmos of antiquity and the chaotic and infinite universe first announced by Giordano Bruno. As Allegra remarks, these works served as warehouses or textual galleries in which the myths and symbols that once anchored the old world would be compiled and inventoried to satisfy the curiosity of new cultural consumers: De la fragmentación de este universo mítico es el Jardín de flores curiosas como un almacén o un museo . . . Nos encontramos con una “lectura” degradada de mitos, debida especialmente al nivel de laicización en que ya habían entrado los nuevos tiempos . . . Última fase de lo mítico medieval y entre los primeros éxitos de lo fantástico en literatura, el Jardín debe tomarse como registro o inventario de una sabiduría oscurecida en que los símbolos, sin desaparecer completamente, se ofrecen al hombre de los tiempos nuevos en su versión fabulosa, a veces espeluznante, siempre “curiosa.” (79–80) (The Garden of Curious Flowers is like a warehouse or museum of the fragmentation of this mythical universe . . . We find a degraded “reading” of myths mainly as a result of the level of secularization that the new times had brought. . . . At the last phase of the mythical medieval, and among the first successes of the fantastic in literature , the Garden must be taken as a register or inventory of an obscured knowledge whose symbols do not completely disappear but are passed on to the man of modern times in their fabulous version, sometimes terrifying, always “curious.”) One can certainly sense the end of the old world as the mythical topoi of antiquity are converted into “curious inventions” to be exhibited in these eclectic literary cabinets, alongside the sensational products of folkloric hearsay and pseudo-autobiographical anecdotes. The transformation of the sense-making myths and symbols of the ancient world into literary curiosities may very well be a first step in the direction of the modern fantastic—as Allegra suggests in the quoted passage—but the miscellanies often come closest to the unsettling [3.17...