The Soledades, Góngora's Masque of the Imagination (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 289 The Soledades, Góngora's Masque of the Imagination University of Missouri Press, 2002 By Marsha S. Collins There is an essential paradox at the heart of Marsha Collins's undertaking. Her study aims to reveal the beauty of a paradigmatic example of baroque poetry and to make it accessible to contemporary readers. This goal would seem to run counter to that of Góngora, the master of exaggerated obscurity, of linguistic intricacies, and of difficulty for its own sake, in short, of inaccessibility. The Sokdades (1614) ostensibly narrates the story of a youthful wanderer, bur in essence the poem represents the trajectory of the authors unrestrained imagination. For Collins, the writer endeavors to cast himself as the purveyor of truth, to recreate the poet-prophet (votes) of dassical antiquity who sought to divine the mysteries of the universe. Like Velazquez, Góngora exalts the artist but, at the same time, he strives to rise above the mundane, through a type of secular mysticism. He synthesizes a vast array of concepts and conventions in order to define a new poetic language, which goes far beyond the technical bravura and pure craftsmanship that critics have accentuated. It is this unique discourse that Collins, through a process that she terms cultural reconrextualization, attempts to delineate. The Sokdades marks the convergence of neoplatonism, humanism, the literature of meditation , the pastoral tradition, and natural philosophy , to cite only part of the intertext. The eternal dialectics of art and nature informs the poem, as does, significantly, the cultural frame of the court of Philip III. Featuting "unmediated and mediated admiratio" (117), the Sokdades wavers between "solitary," contemplative experience and spectacular pastoral stage production. Collins argues that at the center of the competing models lies the court masque, a performance characterized here by a figurative displacement of die monarch in favor of superior readers and spectators. She uses the Renaissance Italian garden as a blueprint for Góngora's poetics: a garden of the mind shot through with theatrical elements and references to theater that upon reflection mold themselves into a court spectacle in the guise of a literary text. This configuration to a remarkable degree assumes the shape of a masque to be performed in the reader's imagination. (199) Góngora invests his poem, designed for a courdy reader, with the hybrid formal structure of the masque. Collins notes that there is no king in Góngora's performance art and explains the absence in an ingenious manner: the author has staged a "quiet revolution in miniature in the Sokdades," replacing the monarch with the ideal reader: the viewei, actor, and interpreter par excellence, the other alchemist who must complete the transmutation of words into golden truths, who must decipher the emblems and conceits to unmask the ideas hidden within their elaborate linguistic disguises. (219) Nonetheless, Góngora reserves the primary position for himself, as poet, musician, choreographer, stage designer, and, ultimately, as spiritual guide. This is a learned, well-elaborared, and highly engaging study. Collins examines critical approaches to the Sokdades and offers a comprehensive new reading, which emulates baroque art in its play of contrasts, most notably through the dichotomy of solitude and spectacle. She combines textual analysis with a consideration of the multiple contexts of the poem, and she proposes a strategy that would justify the diverse field of associations and the constant shifts of direction and focus. More broadly, she projects an innovative view of Góngora as the creating subject, which links her work with recent studies of Cervantes, Velazquez, MarÃ-a de Zayas, and the poet's literary arch-enemy Quevedo, among others. Although my personal vision of Góngora falls somewhat short oÃ- vates—I see him as more interested in language as a source of power, and I believe that his elitism in the artistic sphere has strong social and political analogues—I find Collins's operating premises to be both intriguing and per- 290 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies suasive. Like the object of investigation, the book is nodiing if not richly textured. Edward H. Friedman Vanderbilt University Andares ciárteos: Fábulas del menor en Osvaldo...