Shades of Significance in Quevedo’s Internal Hades: Orphic Resonance and Latin Intertexts in the Love Poetry

SHADES OFSIGNIFICANCE IN QUEVEDO'$ INTERNALHADES:ORPHICRESONANCE AND LATININTERTEXTS INTHE LOVEPOETRY Isabel Torres The Queen's University of Belfast I In a recent study of Quevedo's sonnet collection CantasolaaLisiya la amorosa pasi6nde su amante,Ignacio Navarrete states that the "crucial lesson of the cycle is the absence of an authentic poetic voice and ,the breakdown of Petrarchan rhetoric" (205). In a book which charts the self-conscious response of Spanish Renaissance poets and theorists to Petrarchism, it is not surprising that his analysis should culminate with an examination of Quevedo's minicanzoniere . However, considered within the narrow confines of the Lisi cycle, his conclusions, while valid, are somewhat misleading. Quevedo's search for an "authentic poetic voice" is not restricted to the Lisi poems, but is an artistic concern which manifests itself throughout the entire amorous corpus. The focus of Quevedo's poetic assault is not exclusively Petrarchism. His amorous lyric constitutes a subversive manipulation of Petrarchan forms and themes in order to condemn the artificial conventions of courtly love; and, within this tradition, the Neoplatonic ideal which became grafted onto it in the sixteenth century. Andree Fahn Blumstein has emphasised the consequences of the courtly code for women: "The ideals of 'courtly love' with the restrictions and limitations they force upon women who must live up to them, reduce women to objects, abstract[ion]s, public figures, whose private emotions are not permitted honest expression" (3).In the courtly arena of the Spanish cancioneros women were victims at an elevated stake. They were victims of a genre over which they had no control, for it had little or nothing to do with them really. Their emotions were not permitted because they were irrelevant. However, the consequences of the code for the men, for whom the poetry was "relevant," are rarely considered. Can they not also be CAL[OPEVol. II,No. 1 (1996): pages5-35 6 ..i-IsabelTorres ~ considered "victims," but "victims" of their own creation? By the seventeenth century these male poets had begun to realise that they too had become no more than dehumanised symbols, subject to the rigid codes of their own work. The Spanish poet of the late Renaissance felt himself encarcerated on the one hand by a rigid erotic code of confused Petrarchism, (an impure blend of traditional Spanish and Italianate forms and motifs), and on the other hand by the poetic achievements of overwhelming predecessors. Garcilaso de la Vega is the obvious example in the vernacular. Through skilful imitation and reworking of Italian and Classical models, Garcilaso managed to liberate an authentic poetic voice within the codified convention, a voice which would echo through the subtextual chambers of subsequent Spanish lyric. For a seventeenth~century poet such as Francisco de Quevedo, "honest expression" in such a restrictive poetic environment was as illusory as the illusive and elusive damawhose love he apparently craved. Quevedo's poetry demonstrates his recognition that the conventions of courtly love involved not only a suppression of sexual desires and an idealisation of sexual urges, but also a paradoxical denial of truthful articulation through poetry. As Olivares points out', the entire code may have become a "burden" by the seventeenth century (ch. 3, ii, 57-64), but the concept of forced silence weighed most heavily upon the mind of the eloquent Quevedo. In the work of a poet so intensely aware of the potehtial dismemberment of his artistic persona under the weight of established canonic forces, amorous discreci6nacquires a more sinister artistic significance . Through the elastic confines of his sonnet form he searches for a means of communicating the reality of passion; a means through which the poet/lover might ~chieve humanisation of the male symbol at least. Quevedo's poetie quest, apparently, does not feature the Thracian bard whose significant subtextual presence in the work of both Petrarch and Garcilaso is crucial to any metapoetic interpretation of their amorous lyric.1 Indeed we might say that Orpheus is conspicuous by his absence.2 I would dare to suggest that that is the whole point. Poetic triumph for Quevedo could never involve an Orphicinspired act of poetic metalepsis which worked so well for Garcilaso in Eclogue III. Rather than assume an...