Reading from the Margins in Gongora's Soledades

As a consequence of the dynamic perspective that characterizes the poetic landscape of the Soledades, many critics have had difficulty pinning down the actual "theme" of Góngora's cryptic poem.¹ Initially, Góngora establishes a striking dichotomy between the pastoral world's simplicity and the court's ornate designs embodied by the modern architecture that defines it. The neatness of the dichotomy has led many critics to reduce the theme of the elaborate poem to a conventional restatement of the town-country contrast familiar in Classical and Renaissance poetry.² However, there are a group of critics who challenge this definition of the poem and argue the antithesis, by suggesting that Góngora's poem—rather than revealing the differences between the pastoral and courtly worlds—sets out to expose the similarities between the two.

For example, Michael J. Woods argues "far from drawing a crude contrast between town and country in the Soledades[,] Góngora is showing us a number of instances where the two meet" (162). In a similar fashion, J. F. G. Gornall, echoing Woods, suggests that the poem critiques the Renaissance theme by giving the readers 'alabanza de aldea' but hardly 'menosprecio de corte'" (25). Gornall concludes that the similarities between the court and country in the poem "[imply] not only a philosophy but also a critique of the aldea/corte theme in Renaissance literature" (25). Similarly, such critics as Paul Julian Smith and more recently Marsha Collins also examine the nexus between the two distinct societies that are purportedly being contrasted. Smith reveals a connection between the rural world and the world that the pilgrim has forsaken by arguing "Góngora's villagers do not live in harmony with nature as one might expect but ravage and despoil it for their very cultured purposes" (89). Collins argues in a similar light by pointing to "the existence of aristocratic underpinnings beneath the edifice of contrived pastoral simplicity" (193) of the poem. All of these arguments are pertinent to my own and will form a point of departure. In what follows, I will argue that despite the incorporation of the popular Renaissance theme of alabanza de aldea, menosprecio de corte, there exists evidence in Góngora's text to justify a subversive reading of the popular theme. My argument will specifically highlight not only a comparison being made between the two societies that separate the poem, but more importantly it will reveal a deliberate undercutting of the pastoral stance and a violent structuring of this world in terms of the courtly world of design, particularly in relation to the architecture of the court.

Although the pilgrim exiles himself from the court in an attempt to lose himself within the pastoral world of the goatherds in the Soledad primera and the piscatorial world of the fishermen in the Soledad segunda, throughout the poem he is constantly being reminded of the world that he has left behind. Noting a pattern of disjunction that continually fragments the poem, many critics have sustained that the difficult form of the poem intentionally undermines its thematic focus.³ John Beverley, for example, maintains that on one hand we expect to find a poetic world that glorifies the simplicity of the rustic landscape to which the pilgrim has fled (1980, 76). However, on the other hand, he continues, "we come against the contradiction noted by Jáuregui, the dissonance between Góngora's complication of language and image and the rustic simplicity it is supposed to represent and celebrate" (1980, 76). I intend to highlight the "contradictory" elements of the poem by focusing on the architectural configurations of the city that shape the pilgrim's journey through the bucolic landscape continually invading his memory and elliptically pointing toward the court.⁴ Indeed, there exists a continual disjunction between the humble structures that characterize the bucolic landscape and the elaborate designs of the court that remain on the...