(A)Wry Views: Anamorphosis, Cervantes, and the Early Picaresque

Introduction

1 Introduction I In this study, I connect the perspectivistic drive of several Golden Age texts with the aesthetics of anamorphosis, also known as the curious, magic, or secret perspective. The term anamorphosis has been utilized in several disciplines, including physics, geometry, architecture, music, decorative and fine arts, and graphic design. As far as I know, Ernest Gilman has to be credited with the first serious appropriation of the concept for the field of literary studies. His book on seventeenthcentury English literature, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (1978), is an engaging example of interdisciplinary research. In our field there is very little done on the topic, with the exception of a pioneering book by César Nicolás entitled Estrategias y lecturas: las anamorfosis de Quevedo (1986).1 In his study, Nicolás provides a descriptive definition of the term: La anamorfosis es, pues, un fenómeno óptico producido por un cambio en la perspectiva o punto de vista con que nos aproximamos a una figura; la imagen es distinta según la veamos horizontal o verticalmente, de forma lateral o directa. En cualquier caso, una variación del ángulo de mirada transforma el objeto: la imagen “deforme” supone un doble proceso de apertura y reducción del modelo, de desestructuración y reestructuración sucesivas. (17) Nicolás follows E. H. Gombrich’s conceptualization, which focuses on the impact that such an act of perceptual oscillation may have on the spectator. Faced with unstable and changing images, the spectator is invited to distance himself or herself 2 Introduction from fixed interpretations, and to reflect on the uncertainty and artificial or constructed nature of meaning. It is important to note that the secret perspective was anything but secret in the early 1600s. Thus, Nicolás recalls that in El donado hablador, Jerónimo de Alcalá speaks of a depiction of a skull that, seen from two different oblique angles, would alternately appear as a woman and as a young man. In a book by Culteranist Félix Espinosa y Malo entitled Ocios morales, Julián Gállego finds a reference to a similar portrait of a man who becomes a lion and then an eagle as the spectator moves from the front of the painting toward the margins (113). Gállego goes on to note that these anamorphoses (he calls them “pinturas simultáneas”) were widely known in the first quarter of the seventeenth century: “[la] pintura simultánea, que pudieramos creer muy de nuestro tiempo […] era no sólo conocida , sino desdeñada por pasada de moda, ya que esas obras, pintadas sobre ‘ciertas varillas,’ según Alcalá, ‘al principio dieron mucho gusto y se estimaron; pero después, por la abundancia dellas y tenerlas todos, vinieron a valer en muy bajo precio’” (54). According to Nicolás, not only painters and graphic artists but also well-known authors such as Tasso, Marino, and, in Spain, Góngora and Quevedo frequently experimented with anamorphosis. I am not attempting to establish a genetic line of contact between the literature of the siglo de oro and the developments of the secret perspective. Rather, in focusing on the appearance of multiperspectival forms of discourse in the 1500s and early 1600s, my intent is to contribute to a contemporary understanding of their common aesthetic and historical horizon. Thus, I intend to argue that the anonymous Lazarillo de Tormes, Francisco López de Úbeda’s La pícara Justina, and Don Quixote and Persiles—among other Cervantine texts—challenge wellestablished beliefs about the world in much the same way that certain forms of perspective anamorphosis reveal the arbitrariness and incompleteness of any total view. In my research, I draw from traditional and avant-garde approaches to the Spanish Golden Age, and also from cultural criticism, art theory, and the history of mentalities and institutions ; yet, my aim is to engage in the close reading of certain 3 Introduction passages and texts characteristic of siglo de oro literature while trying not to lose sight of the broader historical and aesthetic developments of the period. In addition, I shall emphasize the significance of today’s Golden Age studies in the context of the ongoing debates in the humanities and the social sciences regarding the function of language in the construction of reality , the place of the subject in the practices of authority, and the...