Art of the State: The Academias Literarias as Sites of Symbolic Economies in Golden Age Spain

ARTOFTHESTA TE:THEACADEMIAS LITERARIAS ASSITES OFSYMBOLIC ECONOMIES INGOLDEN AGESPAIN Anne]. Cruz University of Illinois at Chicago The analysis of economic exchanges shows that the notion of the pure symbol, in the sense of a disaffected substitute that can be perfectly arbitrary, conventional, and unmotivated, emerges of its own accord from circulation and thus from the intensification of social exchanges. Jean-Joseph Goux, SymbolicEconomies Estos fueron los versos que se pudieron leer; los demas, por estar carcomida la letra, se entregaron a un academico para que por conjeturas los declarase. Tienese noticia que lo ha hecho, a costa de muchas vigilias y mucho trabajo... Miguel de Cervantes, DonQuixote To Cervantes' likely satisfaction, the academias literarias that proliferated in early modern Spain, and which he gleefully parodied ·under the parochial rubric of the "Academia de Argamasilla," have been all but forgotten by modern academics. Aside from the research carried out by Aurora Egido, who has focused mainly on the Aragonese academies, the last major studies, by Jose Sanchez and Willard F. King, date back more than thirty years. While essential sources of the varieties of literary groups established throughout Spain, these studies in large part neglect the academies' affiliations and associations with the burgeoning centers of power and their competitive positionings during the period. Indeed, while King acknowledges the academies as "a powerful force in the background of the cultural scene," she perceives them as "private" despite their overwhelmingly public function and their patronage by major political figures ("The Academies" 367). In this essay I address the academies' historical and sociopolitical determinants in order to situate them within a more broadly construed cultural field, whose boundaries separating the public CALIOPE Vol.I, Nos. n (1995):pages72-95 ..i-ARTOFTHESTA TE:TI-IEACADEMIASLITERARIAS ... .(.- 73 and private spheres of action were continuously transgressed as much by the significant public roles held by their members as by the political opportunities the reunions afforded them. 1 To apprehend the different aims of poetic production and how it became increasingly controlled in the seventeenth century, the relationship between art and the early modern state-that is, the manner in which the state both regulated and deployed art through the academies -needs to be more fully investigated. This in tum may illuminate more clearly how tlte academies came to influence and inform actual poetic production, and the .degree to which such control in fact delimited its aesthetic qualities as well as its reception. Like all literary practices, the poetic text not only constructs and is constructed by a linguistic subject, but by what Barry Jordan has called "an ensemble of social determinations that establish the conditions within which reading can take place" (27). Among the issues that most vex critics when studying Renaissance literature as a social force are the author's target audience and the text's actual .readership. Therefore, the question posed by Elias Rivers in a recent essay, appropriately titled "La poesia culta y los lectores," remains pertinent: "for whom did Golden Age poets write?" In the case of Garcilaso de la Vega, for example, the answer is that some of his poems were directly addressed to his friends, among them, Juan Boscan, Mario Galeota, and Giulio Cesare Caracciolo. Others were formally dedicated to his patrons: his most mature work, the three eclogues, are all written in honor of the house of Alba. Rivers remarks that besides this immediate circle of readers, by the time Garcilaso's poetry was printed with Boscan's, there was already an audience "out there" eagerly awaiting the new Italianate verses, and it was only a matter of time before his poetry was published separately. Cervantes' glass licentiate would travel with one of the popular pocket-size "Garcilasos" that, like the "Petrarcas viejos," were easy to pack on a trip; we might call them, in fact, the Renaissance versions of librosde bolsillo.In contrast, the extensively annotated edition by Fernando de Herrera, published but once in 1580,most probably ended up on the coffee tables of wealthy Sevillian indianoswho wished to display their recently acquired culture.2 Garcilaso's poetry, then, reached more than one audience: his select readership of friends and patrons, and the broader public, more or less...