The Persistence of Presence: Emblem and Ritual in Baroque Spain (review)

Itself emblematic of the theoretical eclecticism characterizing much recent scholarship on early modern Spanish literature, this book ingeniously interprets “emblematic structures” in works by Juan de Borja, Juan de Horozco, Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, Baltasar Gracián, and Miguel de Cervantes “for their presence effects” (4). That these structures, whether in a didactive emblem book, a transgressive comedia nueva, or an ironic Byzantine novel, at once cultivate and frustrate such effects reveals a great deal, Nelson argues, about the social and political roles literature played in seventeenth-century Spain. “[T]he emblem, in its many cultural and social contexts and mutations, is best understood as a medium in which conflicting modes of presence and aura are articulated and questioned in baroque Spain” (4). Yet, as the book contends throughout, it cannot strictly be said that Baroque writers themselves author such “conflicting modes”; rather it is the myriad, often conflicting currents of Baroque ideology, together with a dense network of literary criticism and recent theory that (re)write these emblematic scenes.

Indeed, if José Antonio Maravall’s much-debated interpretation of the Baroque as a “cultura dirigida” tends to guide Nelson’s readings of emblematics as one of many “competencias in which subjects become active participants in their own (re)formation” (17), then so does scholarship by William Egginton, Jacques Lezra, and other acute, theory-rich interpretations of Baroque literature. In the Introduction we are told that emblematic writers exercise some “self-determination” even as their texts effectively “redeem the hegemonic field” (18). But by the time Nelson has finished straining literary works through the refined filters provided by Maravall and company, a more ambitious thesis emerges: “In the emblem’s transduction of the world of bodies into the world of souls, images into meaning, we recognize that signs themselves exhibit an analogous otherness with respect to meaning due to a material presence and incorrigibility that simultaneously exceeds and contributes to the mystification of knowledge whose reality comes about through a ritual process of selection, assemblage, and framing” (236). Thus the alterity lurking in emblematic signs is seen as subverting their epistemological promise, a subversion Nelson reads as epitomizing larger cultural, social, and intellectual-historical currents.

The book consists of three parts. In the two chapters of Part One: The Emblem, the theory and selected practice of Borja and Horozco are contemplated to adduce “a theory of emblematic reception” (23). Close analysis of a few emblems and the distinction between the didactic emblema and the more personal empresa help reveal the revisionist but also the potentially liberating, transformative aspects of emblematics. Nelson, that is, rehearses how traditional hermeneutics moves between the image’s “body” and the gloss’s “soul” only to resist himself such historicist approaches to emblem studies. Instead, he would uncover the “ideological unconscious” of Borja’s Empresas morales (40) and Horozco’s “narrative of Spanish dominance” (71). This sets the stage for Part Two: Applied Emblematics whose three chapters find ritual, spectacle, exemplarity, orthodoxy, and marginalized subjects by reviewing emblematic moments in Lope’s El nuevo mundo descubierto por Cristóbal Colón, Calderón’s El gran mercado del mundo, and his El alcalde de Zalamea. Finally, the two chapters of Part Three: Bodies and Signs argue that Gracian and Cervantes resist Baroque desengaño by constructing, respectively, an “organized body of taste” (183) challenging the emblematics of Court and Church and by “[t]he short-circuiting of the emblem’s drive towards transcendence . . . through the evocation of that which the emblem tries so hard to control: the grotesque nature of historically anchored, dynamic, and speaking bodies and/or signs” (204). (Five of the seven chapters, the Acknowledgments note, are revised versions of journal articles.)

As this summary suggests, Nelson’s readings for all their brilliance, attention to philological detail, and engagement with a variety of critical approaches, often verge on the programmatic. Whether scrutinizing Lope’s “emblematic parade” staged...