Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context

Chapter 5. Horror (Vacui): The Baroque Condition

87  5 Horror (Vacui): The Baroque Condition David R. Castillo The term horror vacui evokes images of crowded walls and convoluted moldings , the face of the Baroque in its exquisite integration of all artistic crafts. Decorative excess is perhaps the most common—and certainly the most cited— manifestation of baroque expressionism, but one should not lose sight of the fact that baroque architects, artists and authors could also cultivate extreme simplicity . In fact, severe simplicity could be just as effective in making the baroque statement. According to José Antonio Maravall, the defining aesthetic impulse of the Baroque is not superabundance, but the pursuit of the extreme. Whether the writer or artist cultivates exuberance or holds to a severe simplicity of form, the key is to pursue either route to the extreme. Thus, an empty wall would be as emblematically baroque as an excessively decorated one, as long as it is perceived to be empty in the extreme, and therefore, to convey the shock of extreme emptiness. On the other hand, a wall that has been completely covered over might call attention to what is hidden. We could think of the excess material in psychoanalytic terms as the mark of compulsive or idiosyncratic behavior, the “cover-up.” In this sense, horror vacui may be taken to mean something other than a mere cult of exuberance and decorative excess, a more fundamental feeling of attraction/revulsion concerning the idea of absence. This notion makes it 88 DAVID R. CASTILLO possible to think of the Baroque as a period concept (à la Maravall), and also as an ongoing “condition” of modernity triggered by a pervasive sense of loss of meaning and a paradoxical longing for the Absolute. The conviction that the baroque sense of loss is central to the aesthetics of modernity is at the core of Walter Benjamin’s seminal work The Origin of German Tragic Drama. As Bryan Turner has pointed out, the centerpiece of Benjamin’s argument is that “allegory, especially allegories about fate, death and melancholy, is the principle element in the aesthetic of modernity and has its archeological origins in the forgotten and obscured past of modernity—the baroque” (7). In her remarkable book Baroque Reason: The Aesthetics of Modernity (1994), Christine Buci-Glucksmann elaborates on Benjamin’s notions in arguing that baroque aesthetics “testified to the preeminence of the fragment over the whole, of a destructive principle over a constructive principle, of feeling , as an excavation of an absence, over reason as domination” (71, my emphasis ). She noted that baroque melancholy is exemplified in the recurrent images of the “world upside down” that permeate the work of seventeenth-century authors and in their fascination with death and decay.1 In Spain, baroque writers and artists, from Francisco de Quevedo and Calderón de la Barca to María de Zayas and Valdés Leal, seem eager to capitalize on the shock value of all manner of oddities: mutilated and deformed bodies, spectral visions, miraculous apparitions, and so on. They may have found inspiration for their creative endeavors in the local news. The first European “newspapers,” including the Spanish Avisos and Anales de Madrid, were tabloid-like publications that featured stories of miracles, martyrdoms, gruesome crimes, and monstrosities. Maravall sees this passion for outlandish novelties as a sign of the times or, more precisely, as a mark of “a mental atmosphere ” all throughout seventeenth-century Europe (Culture 229). He often focuses on the propagandistic possibilities of visual rarities. On the other hand, in the specific case of optical experiments, Jacques Lacan (1981) and Slavoj Zizek (1989; 2000) have pointed out the destabilizing potential of the visual puzzles associated with the curious perspective, also known in the second half of the seventeenth century as anamorphoses. According to Lacan, the anamorphic form, so dear to baroque painters and authors, is fundamentally unsettling insofar as it reveals the interdependence of gaze and meaning. As Zizek writes: “A part of the perceived scene is distorted in such a way that it acquires its proper contours only from the specific viewpoint from which the remaining reality is blurred [. . .] We thus become aware that reality already involves our gaze, that this gaze is included in the scene we are observing” (The Ticklish Subject 78). In calling attention to the mechanism that HORROR (VACUI ): THE BAROQUE CONDITION 89 makes the picture work, anamorphic puzzles remind us that meaning contains...