Visualizing a New Metropolis: : Emblematic Shifts in Balbuena’s Grandeza Mexicana

V I S U A L I Z I N G A N E W M E T R O P O L I S : E M B L E M A T I C S H I F T S I N B A L B U E N A ' S GRANDEZA MEXICANA Linda E g a n University of California, Davis Before filling out its birth certificate in legitimating acts of set ting-forth, a nation must first exist as an "imagined commu nity" of interests (Franco). This in turn requires a prior assertion of belonging that also springs from the imagination: the psychic election of cultural identity. I want to explore an instance of this willful realization of self through an emblematic reading of a poet who first imagined himself Mexican and then pictured his cultural homeland as the center of a new cosmos, swirling out of Nowhere to become Someplace in the language constructing his vision of Grandeza Mexicana? Bernardo de Balbuena was born in Spain while his father was briefly visiting there, but by education and conviction he was in fact a novohispano whose loyalties and creative energies separated him from those other Spaniards he calls "cachopines" (Balbuena 13) and made him one of Mexico's earliest nationalist visionaries.2 Balbuena follows an example set by conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo at the inception of the nation's literary culture; born in Spain, Bernal arrived in the New World at an impressionable 19, only a few years before the captain he followed imagined himself conqueror of Tenochtitlan's splendor and governor of a redefined state called New Spain. By the time Bernal died in 1584, while still amending his great Historia verdadera de la conquista, he had become guatemalteco by choice, Mexican by extension and a novohispano compatriot of Balbuena, who had lived most of his then 23 years in Mexico and begun a priestly career that would, like the soldier Bernal's before him, eventually acquire a literary aspect that overshadowed his workaday identity. A contemporary of Luis de Gongora (both of them born 1561 and deceased 1627), Balbuena has been credited with writing the first American novel (Leal) and giving birth to a truly American poetry, conceived in the context of the "extraordinary spiritual tension" of the seventeenth century (Eco 178) and nurtured in the exuberant sensuality of the Mannerist mode (Rama 13-14), a style described as transitional between Renaissance classicism and the monumental granCALIOPE Vol. 7, No. 2 (2001): pages 51-66 52 «5 Linda Egan diloquence of the Baroque (Carilla 21-25). Balbuena's long epistolary poem of 1604, Grandeza Mexicana, emphasizes three of the Mannerist lyric's themes: panegyric praise, the ornamentation of art-for-art'ssake and links with emblem-books.3 Julian Gallego's study of the seamless intertwining of symbolic imagery in painting, poetry and emblem books of the seventeenth century supports an emblematic reading of Balbuena's Grandeza, for, during the years of literary formation he spent in Spain, he would surely not have been immune to the "apasionamiento extraordinario" (Gallego 116) throughout Europe, but especially in Spain, for verbal hieroglyphs that insistently pointed to an invisible world of hidden and multifaceted allegory (188-91). As I hope to demonstrate here, Balbuena indeed does consistently found his discourse upon visual and concrete bases, favoring especially the painterly trope to create an overall impression of disproportion, paradox and polysemousness. Grandeza Mexicana's emblematic traits include hyperbole (in this case exaggeration of symbolic features of a larger picture which cannot be seen entire with the naked eye), juxtaposition of the real and the fantastic, and the incongruity of a poem presenting simultaneously as epistle, autobiographical chronicle, history and journalistic report of Paradise Found. Grandeza most overtly declares itself to be a letter to a Mexican noblewoman who, on entering a nunnery, has begged a report from Balbuena on news of the capital. No request could be more pleasing to a university-educated cleric "quien tantos anos arrimado estuvo / al solitario pie de un roble bronco," suffering "azares y desgracias" (Balbuena 66) as a rural priest: "Cansado de la soledad y la pobreza en que ha vivido como...