Quehaceres con Góngora by Julio Baena (review)

I was immediately intrigued by Quehaceres con Góngora, a scholarly monograph that, in its approach to a writer who could arguably be classified as one of the most esoteric of Spanish poets, Luis de Góngora y Argote, made reference to such purveyors of popular culture as Pink Floyd and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. In this sense, one of forging unimagined connections, Julio Baena’s reading of Góngora’s poetry (and of Góngora, in both metonymical and literal fashions) does not disappoint.

The author defines his study as an attempt to read Góngora “por primera vez.” He uses the term “quehaceres” to refer to an encounter with Góngora that, unlike the work of Hispanists who have attempted to explain the poet’s difficult language for students and scholars, proposes an engagement with the poet that is intuitive and intimate, one that would open up interpretative possibilities that can only be realized by the individual. Baena likens his approach to reading Góngora to performance. Its interplay of the fixed and the fluid would allow readers to appreciate the musicality and the suggestive utterances of a writer who tests the limits of language during a time when the very notion of “boundary” was increasingly dubious.

The author divides the body of his study into enumerated “quehaceres,” a reference to the book’s title. The first three “quehaceres” establish the theoretical angle of the study, state its goals, and define the role that notions of solitude and the mystical tradition will play in his approach to Góngora’s poetry. The last section includes five separate “quehaceres” that examine the Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea and Soledades, giving particular attention to issues of exchange, consumption, acquisition, music, rhyme, and death. The monograph also includes a preface (“Nota preliminar”), an appendix indicating poems in which the image of the shore (la orilla) figures, as well as an index of names. The manuscript has been well edited and is relatively free of typographical errors.

Baena addresses scholarship by established Hispanists—such as Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, Dámaso Alonso, and José Antonio Maravall—as well as more recent readings of Góngora by critics such as Dana C. Bultmann and Crystal Chemris. His post- (or anti-) structuralist approach bears the theoretical traces of such writers as Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari. Cynical but committed, the span of Baena’s critical voice reminds me very much of Slavoj Žižek’s work (although Baena does not explicitly reference Žižek in his monograph).

The book’s strengths are many. The critic’s close readings and wordplay emerge as particularly engaging, as we see in his study of the Soledades, which spans the second and third “quehaceres.” In these sections, Baena develops the thesis that Góngora subverts power structures (most obviously that of language) by participating in them, and consequently, stretching them to the point of disintegration. From this we come to understand the importance of the notion of soledades and sentidos (plural) versus soledad and sentido (singular). While the latter presupposes a single objective, the former suggests a constellation of infinite possibilities. As a work in progress, the construction of soledades and sentidos is a liberating endeavor, a means by which the poet (and, by extension, perhaps readers) seek freedom, but also one that demands that we resign ourselves to being transported to unintended (even erroneous) destinations. I was also intrigued by the connection Baena makes between the early modern criticism of culteranismo and the contempt in which intellectual pursuits are held in contemporary society. As an outgrowth of this discussion, his observations about the commercialization of academia resonated deeply with me as well.

In reading Baena’s suggestion that readers would relate to Góngora’s poetry in more profound ways if they were to experience it without the burden of centuries of textual explication, however, I could not help but remember my own...