Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain ed. by Marina S. Brownlee, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (review)

~REVIEWSC!8 117 Brownlee, Marina S., & Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, eds. Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 325 pp. ISBN 08010 -4936-5. Cultural Authority in Golden Age Spain is a collection of fourteen exciting and thought-provoking articles that successfully provides a framework for reconceptualizing. Golden Age culture. The introduction by. Marina Brownlee and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht is invaluable as it prepares readers for comprehending the complexity of a given culture's representation of authority, informs readers of the goal of the text-to explore cultural authority and literary continuation in the literary enterprise of Golden Age Spain-and addresses the parallels between our own postmodem claims of continuity and authority and the proximity of the "untamable complexity " (xvi) of the Golden Age. In the first of three sections, "Questions of Authority," both Edward Friedman's and Mary Malcolm Gaylord's articles are impressive examples of Golden Age scholarship. Truly a pleasure toread, the two·are the most challenging ofthe group and offer articulate, provocative readings of two of Góngora's poems. Friedman focuses on the ideologies of discourse and postulates that Góngora, in rewriting the love story of Galatea and Polyphemus, struggles with Garcilaso, with Carillo, and also with the process itself of decoding and recoding verbal messages. "Góngora," Friedman explains, "reinvents discourse, just as he reinvents story" (63). Polifemo, then, becomes a representation ofnew poetry defined byhis competition with Acis who is Renaissance poetry. In analyzing "De un caminante enfermo que se enamoró donde fue hospedado," Gaylord asserts that Góngora's elusive lyric voice embodies the problem of language as a vehicle of expression. She, like Fríedman, maintains that Góngora takes language to its limits and goes further to suggest that "the route through the twisted path of verse form is the route of and to his poetic persona" (99). In exploring inherited linguistic orders and codes, Góngora bears witness to the fact that we can only,communicate through shared language. Gaylord concludes that "the absence of a single voice signals not the absence of voice altogether, but rather the presence ofmany voices" (102). In illuminating the nature and role of Góngora's elusive lyric subject, Gaylord partakes in his celebration of the mystery of language. The remaining three articles provide excellent guideposts for postmodem direction for Golden Age literature. Brownlee, for example, illustrates similarities between postmodemism and Baroque cultural currents . Her article explores the use of exempla as "metacritical tool(s) to comment on the deceptive nature of language itself" (110). She also argues that an author like Zayas cannot be categorized simply as realist, exem- 118 ro REVIEWS 03 plar, or feminist apologist because she is in fact much more complex than any one category would admit. José Regueiro reminds us that Reichenberger's structure of order-disturbed to order-restored does not necessarily reflect social harmonization in the comedia and actually points to opportunities to reassess social and historical norms. Lia Schwartz Lemer's article offers a compelling analysis of imitation theory and the appropriation of various treatises including literary, philosophical, and medica! in shaping the amorous discourse of the Golden Age. "Representations of the Self," Paul Julian Smith's article on absent homosexual pretexts and repressive homosocial pressures in Garcilaso's First Eclogue, raises sorne provocative questions: how does homosocial pressure work to exclude women in writing? What is the relationship between metaphor and metonym in distinguishing between self and other? And finally, how will homographesis continue to contribute to our understanding of cultural authority and literary continuance? Similarly, Robert Ter Horst's essay presents stimulating ideas on the early Spanish novel that merit further exploration: the disturbed relationship between father and son in early Spanish narrative, colonial and imperial figuration in the early Spanish novel, and problems of closure for the novel. But his claim that "Spain is the stepfather or stepmother to the novel in England" (174) is not wholly substantiated. 1 finished the article with the sense that Ter Horst was enticing his readers with only one part of a more extended argument of a complex literary relationship. Both Ter Horst's essay and Harry Sieber's article on...