The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture by Stephanie Merrim (review)

In this magisterial overview of colonial literary culture, Stephanie Merrim traces the road that leads from the Ordered City to the baroque Spectacular City. This abstract explanatory concept signifies the ultimate achievement of the Spanish Empire which simultaneously heralds its demise. The book's chapters subsume city, festival, and wonder in order to paint a portrait of a dynamic Baroque that constructively complicates Ángel Rama's notion of a Lettered City. Though it focuses particularly on Mexico, the book offers an enlightening panorama of the urban and intellectual landscape of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish America.

Chapter one presents the city and its importance in the configuration of both the material and social aspects of colonial space. Merrim begins in the main plaza at the center of the city, where celebrations, both festive and disciplinary, could be staged and where all of colonial society could witness and wonder at the power of the imperial state. As chapter two shows, colonial cities were intentionally designed to promote order and concert by effacing the New World's particularities. Likewise, panegyrists of the Ordered City such as Francisco Cervantes de Salazar sought to tame otherness by cataloguing it. However, this seemingly innocuous procedure alienated what it could not accommodate, namely, native culture. Thus, at the heart of these architectural and rhetorical procedures lay a ruthless epistemological violence.

Chapters three and four, on which the book pivots, examine Bernardo de Balbuena's "La grandeza mexicana" which heralds the transformation of the Ordered City into the Spectacular City. As portrayed by Balbuena in 1604, Mexico City is defined by sublime, spectacular excess and the poem aims to put its myriad commodities on display as in a wonder cabinet - with very little room for the ostensibly marginal indigenes. However, Balbuena's effort to consume the whole cityscape results in a panoply of styles that, Merrim suggests, disrupts the episteme of the Ordered City. Ironically, through unconstrained accumulation, the poem's "architexture" (118) undermines the imperial construct that it meant to celebrate, especially when Creole intellectuals appropriate its lavish miscellany to advance their own agendas. In the work of Baltasar Dorantes de Carranza, Balbuena's cornucopia became a source of local pride; while Arias de Villalobos lamented that the Creole nation had not shared in the wealth reflected in "La grandeza mexicana." Creole authors would continue to address these twin concerns throughout the seventeenth century; their efforts map out the Baroque Spectacular City in all its plenitude.

In chapter five, Merrim describes how the intellectual production of seventeenth-century Creoles finally engaged Mexico's plurality, pushing against the imperial hegemony and the Ordered City's semblance of homogeneity. Agustín de Ventancurt's portrait of Mexican society does not gloss over its multiethnic character; on the contrary, it exposes it as one of its defining features. The hegemony's reaction was to aggrandize the spectacle of its power in increasingly wondrous festivals that often included scripted parts for Indians. Creoles, however, turned this powerful apparatus back upon itself by crafting syncretic histories that integrated the Prehispanic past as a cornerstone of cultural nationalism. Merrim uses Sigüenza y Góngora's Glorias de Querétaro and Teatro de virtudes, as well as Sor Juana's Neptuno alegórico and the "loa" to the Divino Narciso, to exemplify this new outwardly inclusive attitude.

Chapter six delves deeper into Creole self-affirmation by exploring the Spectacular Esoteric City. Merrim defines it as "an entity composed of the rarified cultural practices of late seventeenth-century Mexican intellectuals" (196), which were heavily influenced by Athanasius Kircher's totalizing modes of thought. Sor Juana's Primero sueño and Sigüenza's Alboroto y motín, in particular, take the Spectacular City to extravagant heights only to see it brought down in proportionately dramatic fashion when the intellect has to contend with colonial reality. Excess also strikes back in the book's last chapter which surveys works produced...