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

BOOK REVIEWS Beverley, John. Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America. Rochester, NY and Suffolk, UK: Tamesis, 2008. HB. x + 191pp. ISBN: 978-1-85566-175-2. Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America is a collection of John Beverley’s major articles on the Baroque, including some which were previously published, some which have been long unavailable (given the limited distribution of his Una modernidad obsoleta) and others which represent new material. The essays, compiled at the close of his career, are a meditation on Beverley’s trajectory from a focus on Góngora and other authors of the Golden Age canon, through colonial gongorism to Latin American subaltern studies and finally coming full circle to return to the Baroque. The collection is elaborated across a series of binaries: it is transatlantic, bilingual (alternating essays in Spanish and English), and approaches the Baroque as a liminal, Janus-faced phenomenon in its relationship to feudalism and modernity. This double-sidedness is also mirrored in the personal history of the author. Beverley was born in Caracas, Venezuela, the son of an oil executive, and was raised as a bilingual child in Latin America until returning for his education in the U.S. as a teenager. With his Ivy League undergraduate education at Princeton University, one might have expected him to have assumed a profession typical of his social origins, yet he instead distinguished himself early on as a Hispanist who supported Third World revolutions, dedicating his 1984 Cátedra edition of the Baroque lyric poem by Luis de Góngora, the Soledades, to the memory of Walter Benjamin and Ernesto Guevara, “dos que murieron en la frontera.” The first essay summarizes Beverley’s major theoretical arguments on the Baroque, drawing a sharp distinction from what he calls the “protonationalist” position, in which the colonial Baroque is seen as a form of counterconquest, an early form of transculturation “at the level CALÍOPE Vol. 18, No. 1, 2012: pages 199-202 REVIEWS 200 200 of high culture” which develops ultimately into the criollo struggle for independence (143). Rather, he argues, “the appropriate model of the colonial Baroque might be something more like the culture of apartheid in South Africa than the benevolent process of ‘mestizaje cultural’ envisioned by the dominant school in Latin American literary criticism” (1). He also clarifies his views on Góngora and the peninsular Baroque, too often read as a simple celebration of Góngora as an anti-imperialist. For Beverley, the Soledades is one of those Baroque texts which “affirm the hegemony [. . .] not so much by their coincidence with the official representations of power and authority, as Maravall is wont to argue, but often precisely by their defamiliarization of these” (10). The next two essays treat the Soledades proper, the first presenting an English version of the essentials of his introduction for the Cátedra edition. Here, Beverley presents his controversial argument that the Soledades were strategically left incomplete to produce a sort of early modern alienation effect. He also presents a scheme for the sequencing in the Soledades of models of different modes of production which become a template for works of the Neobaroque, in particular for Carpentier’s Los pasos perdidos. These essays serve as a reminder that Beverley’s original doctoral thesis, which was revised as Aspects of Góngora’s Soledades (John Benjamins, 1980), remains a classic in the field whose arguments have gained increasing support internationally, including, gradually, acceptance by some of the Góngora scholars of the French and Spanish academies. Like one of his predecessors, Andrée Collard, who followed her classic book on gongorism, Nueva poesía: Conceptismo, culteranismo en la crítica española (Madrid: Castalia, 1967) with a translation of Las Casas, Beverley’s focus after Aspects shifted to the colonial Baroque and the problem of the destruction of indigenous cultures. In an essay on Bernardo de Balbuena’s poem, La grandeza mexicana and colonial gongorism (and here I will quote his corrected Spanish version), he writes, “El decorado metafórico se vuelve en La grandeza [mexicana] y después en el gongorismo colonial una especie de teoría de acumulaci...