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

The Spectacular City is an erudite work that brings together multiple cultural issues around the idea of the colonial city. The work epitomizes the centrality of spatial considerations in today’s scholarly agendas; it scrutinizes the city not only as a historical development, but also as a social phenomenon. Angel Rama’s lettered city (La ciudad letrada) is a catalyst for Merrim to piece together the genealogy of the colonial city and the episteme that supports it. Festivals, wonder and cities are central themes; they exist in different variations in the seventeenth century and give shape to the spectacular city. Merrim weaves her arguments subtly through textually constructed cities, visual art, and a continuum that connects the Old World and the New. Chapters one, two, three, and five open with reproductions of a piece of art, which Merrim calls “visual epigraphs.” These visual epigraphs serve as one of several texts that are integrated into the discussion of each chapter’s subject.

The Spectacular City consists of seven chapters. The first one provides the historical context for the platforms that sustain the spectacular city, and primarily involve the Creole population. St. Augustine’s City of God appears for the first time in the book as a key reference that describes urban space “as the apex of civilization,” particularly in the colonization of the Americas (19). Festivals are mentioned and briefly considered as important elements in the state’s control of the population, but wonder is the element that becomes the focus of Merrim’s analysis of the city. She traces the concept historically and philosophically—from Aristotle’s Poetics to Columbus’s Diary—and she links Oviedo’s Sumario to Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, the visual rendering of the Baroque esthetics of amazement and exoticism with which she opens the chapter. Baltasar Gracián’s poetic treatise Agudeza y arte de ingenio, however, provides Merrim with the necessary tools to theorize the New World Baroque, which is the ultimate purpose of the book. Gracián’s concept of Agudeza allows for the monstrous, disorderly, and different New World to arrive at the “manageable world of poetics” (44).

Chapter two, “Order and Concert,” draws on the visual rendering of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to trace the sixteenth-century textualized rendering of the city. As Merrim explains, before the spectacular city there was the “ordered city,” constructed textually throughout the century beginning with Hernán Cortes and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, continuing with Alonso de Zorita and Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, and ending in the last quarter of the sixteenth century with the works of Juan de la Cueva and Eugenio de Salazar y Alarcón. The epistemic violence of the colonialist discourse is made evident by analyzing the usage of resemblance as the resource that minimizes chaos and brings order, and denies the New World’s identity.

Chapters three and four center on Bernardo de Balbuena’s “La grandeza mexicana;” chapter three is devoted to the crisis of the ordered city and the advent of the spectacular city. Merrim promises to offer unexplored aspects of “La grandeza Mexicana,” and she delivers with an elegant scholarly analysis. She places Balbuena’s poem in the context of Balbuena’s own literary pursuits as a Renaissance poet and his connections to the New World Baroque, and in the larger context of Mexico as a developing colony that is implicated in the demise of the ordered city and the shaping of the spectacular city. Merrim gives attention to Balbuena’s elitism and use of material artifacts as a form of wonder, which also serve as examples of the nascent capitalist order. Chapter four delves into the “Creole cause” and reads “La grandeza mexicana” as a departure from this cause, and a sublimation of the colonial regime with his usage of proto-Baroque rhetorical excess. Merrim weaves two more works from Creole authors into the spectacular city of “La grandeza,” which itself functioned as a platform to...