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T H E G A Z E A N D T H E M I R R O R : V I S I O N , D E S I R E , A N D I D E N T I T Y I N G O N G O R A ' S FABULA DE POLIFEMO Y GALATEA M a r y E. B a r n a r d Pennsylvania State University Vision was the highest and noblest of the senses for early modern poets and philosophers alike. The eyes—transparent windows of the soul—were master organs of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual transactions (Branna Perlman 113). Gongora's Polifemo, a poem full of eyes and brilliant spectacles, illustrates this primacy of vision. In this essay I will focus on the gaze and the mirror to examine the connection between vision and desire in the fashioning of the identity of the text's three lovers: the monster Polyphemus, his beloved Galatea, and the rival Acis.1 Gongora's text exhibits both the male and the female gaze. The spectator/object relation is reciprocal and fetishization is applied to both sexes.2 Voyeurism, exhibitionism, selfreflexivity , and melancholia are all engaged in the poetics of sight and desire. To explore Gongora's use of vision in its various modes, I bring into my analysis theories of optics from the classical and early modern periods, as well as psychoanalysis, particularly Sigmund Freud's notions of scopophilia and Jacques Lacan's concept of the "mirror stage." The specular play begins in stanza 24 when Acis, all dust and sweat in the midsummer heat, enters the secluded spot where Galatea lies sleeping by the fountain. He looks at her eyes ("ambas luces bellas") closed by sleep and, while drinking from the fountain waters, continues to look at her out of the corner of his eye: "su boca dio, y sus ojos cuanto pudo, / al sonoro cristal, al cristal mudo" (191-92).3 In casting his eyes on Galatea's silent body ("cristal mudo"), Acis enters a world of visual enticement, of woman as erotic spectacle. Laura Mulvey has observed: "In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact. ... Woman displayed as sexual object is the leitmotif of erotic spectacle:... [S]he holds the look, and plays to and signifies male desire" (19). In Gongora's text, Galatea's body is at once a magnet drawing Acis's greedy eyes and an idol to be adored: "El bello iman, el idolo dormido, / que acero sigue, idolatra venera" CALfOPE Vol. 8, No. 1 (2002): pages 69-85 70 so Mary E. Barnard (25.197-98). Spectacle and desire are neatly combined to fashion Acis's identity as idolatrous lover. The "lust of the eyes" has been the subject of extensive theoretical discussion since Plato's Phaedrus. In the early modern period, it is a topos in which seeing and desiring are intimately linked. Marsilio Ficino, for example, in his Commentary to Plato's Symposium, privileges sight as the sense that gives birth to desire: love begins with a visual wounding when gazes engage (161-62). But in the Polifemo, Acis does not engage Galatea's eyes; he is seduced instead by her beauty. The notion that desire is evoked in the singular act of contemplating beauty is a central aspect of the early modern psychology of love. The serious erotic lyric of Gongora's age takes in earnest what Andreas Capellanus offers perhaps in jest in his ironic view of love in De amore (12th C). "Love," writes Capellanus, "results from the sight of, and uncontrollable thinking about, the beauty of the other sex. . . . [I]t arises not from any action, but solely from the thought formed by the mind as a result of the thing seen" (32-35). There are certain echoes of Plato's Phaedrus in Capellanus's text. Plato placed beauty in intimate relation to vision in his discussion of eros: "[We] apprehend [beauty] through the clearest of our senses, clear and resplendent. For sight is the keenest mode of perception" (250 D). Sight is the active agent of desire, as...

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