The Construction of Masculinity in Quevedo’s and Borges’s Poetics

This article examines the deployment of masculine affect in the poetics of Francisco de Quevedo and Jorge Luis Borges. Perpetuating the association between good speech and manly prowess endemic in classical political culture, Quevedo conceives of poetry as an exhibition of virile forcefulness. While the mainstream poetic theories of his time celebrate the stylistic sophistication achieved by Spanish verse through its integration of courtly Italian currents and reconcile aesthetic ornament with civic virtue, Quevedo categorizes all artifice as a mark of degenerate effeminacy. His conception of poetry thus adheres in the strictest sense to the logic of executive political rhetoric, grounded in a self-consciously masculine corporeal imaginary. While Borges writes in an epoch in which textual transmission has assumedly been liberated from oratorical models predicated on corporeal contact with the audience, his poetic theory and practice are palpably conditioned by normative body politics. In the early essays of his so-called criollista years, Borges appropriates the gender politics of Quevedo’s antigongorist diatribes in his attacks on modernistas, denouncing their florid compositions as at once inefficacious and emasculated. The traditional connection between agile expression and virile energeia endures in Borges’s later poems which continue to identify the pen with the sword.