Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America (review)

There are relatively few scholars who maintain the combination of productivity and innovation over a long career sufficient to merit the epithet visionary. To my mind John Beverley is one such scholar for the field of Spanish and Spanish American literary studies. I have long been familiar with Beverley's work, in the area of his earlier contributions, Spanish Golden Age studies, as well as in that of Latin American literary and cultural studies. While Beverley's work in both fields is rather ubiquitous and thus hard not to stumble up on no matter what one is working on, my having begun graduate work with what I suppose we should now call the Minnesota School of Spanish and Latin American literature made that acquaintance even more likely.

By the time I arrived at the University of Minnesota in 1992, the Journal Ideologies and Literatures had been phased out and replaced by the now still vibrant Hispanic Issues, which Nick Spadaccini continues to edit and where I still contribute occasional pieces. The emphasis on socio-historical criticism, however, and the tendency to study literature among discourses both political and aesthetic that had marked the scholarship of Ideologies and Literatures continued to form the backdrop for those of us pursuing our graduate work in that department. While I went to do my doctoral degree in comparative literature at another university, I have never lost the bond of common concerns and methodologies I formed with my colleagues from those two short years, especially David Castillo and Brad Nelson. Beverley's work had been a staple of Ideologies and Literatures, and his take on literature is part of our scholarly heritage.

I preface this review with this brief historical remark both as disclosure and stage setting; for reading this book by John Beverley could only ever be a kind of rereading for me, one that transports me to questions and debates from my graduate school days that remain pertinent and pressing all these years later. Of course, this book is not only a rereading for me. It is a collection of essays Beverley wrote over some thirty years, and hence I and other readers are certainly quite literally rereading many of these pieces. Nonetheless, for someone as close and indebted to his work as I am, it is also a kind of retrospective. So in that light, let me take the opportunity to say some words about what I appreciated most and least about this retrospective—at the risk, I suppose, of parts of this review becoming a review about the book that did not get written, but that could have been.

When Essays on the Literary Baroque first landed on my desk last spring I was a bit dismayed. I had just finished correcting the proofs to my book on baroque and neobaroque aesthetics, and felt I had missed an opportunity to include potentially important new work from a leader in the field. I saw John shortly thereafter, when he came to Hopkins to give a talk at a conference Sara Castro-Klarén organized on El Inca Garcilaso, and he quickly quelled my concerns. Indeed, I had read much of the relevant material already, referenced in its original form. That said, there were some finds for me as well. While I had read much of Beverley's early work on Góngora, for example, I had not read his "Sobre Góngora y el gongorismo colonial," an essay that in some ways marked his own transition from peninsular Hispanism to his work in Spanish American studies. Since my own work attempts to think the Baroque as a trans-Atlantic cultural phenomenon, there is no doubt that his take on the particular influence of Gongorism on the intellectual production of neobaroque theorists like Sarduy would have created a further point for dialogue. I think, for example, of his concluding remarks on the ultimate failure of Gongorism in either its new or old form to fulfill any truly revolutionary...