Mastering the Maze in Góngora’s Soledades

M A S T E R I N G T H E M A Z E I N G O N G O R A ' S SOLEDADES M a r s h a S. Collins The University of N o r t h Carolina at C h a p e l Hill The famous opening lines of the dedication to Gongora's pastoral masterpiece the Soledades (1612-14) articulate the reader's entry into the poems as a plunge into a solitary, confusing path of language: Pasos de un peregrino son errante cuantos me dicto versos dulce Musa, en soledad confusa perdidos unos, otros inspirados. (1-4) These lines have inspired a variety of critical responses over the years, but only Leo Spitzer, one of Gongora's most eloquent and perceptive readers, has recognized that the meandering footstep-verses establish the labyrinth as a paradigm of structure and hermeneutic process in the poems: "The poet's errant course through his sentence-labyrinth— his disappearance in it, his discovery of the way out, his working his way out before our very eyes, his compelling us to work our way out together with him—reflects the very drama of poetic creation, the process of becoming master over the world and imposing order on it" (91).1 Spitzer suggests that the labyrinth image modeled at the beginning of the Dedicatoria resonates throughout the work, generating a conceptual master key to the text and to Gongorine poetics. This study pursues the implications of Spitzer's observation to offer readers a poetic analogue to Ariadne's thread, an imaginary map that will enable them to navigate successfully the Satzlabyrinth, the "sentence-labyrinth " of the Soledades, in a collaborative pact with the implied author. The small circle of elite readers who formed the original, intended audience of Gongora's Soledades knew well the image of the maze.2 References to labyrinths appear frequently in Golden Age literature. For example, Lope's Sonnet I of the Rimas sacras (1614) repeats the first verse of Garcilaso's Sonnet I (1543), "Cuando me paro a contemplar mi estado," and renders explicit the psychological circumstances of the earlier poem, in which the subject alludes to maze-like confusion while contemplating his misguided past. Lope's poetic "I" presents CALIOPE Vol. 8, No. 1 (2002): pages 87-102 88 so Marsha S. Collins himself as a penitent sinner lost in a moral maze, "Entre por laberinto tan extrano," whom God has redeemed from darkness through divine light (Rivers 60,262). Rosaura paints a similar portrait of moral disarray as the curtain rises in La vida es sueno (1636). The heroine searches for her horse, "hipogrifo violento," in a rocky wilderness, " . . . al confuso laberinto / desas desnudas penas," a labyrinthine place seemingly set apart from the laws of God and humankind that captures to perfection her own inner state of chaos and desequilibrium (Calderon 85). According to Huston Diehl, these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century images of the maze eventually spawn the explosion of labyrinths in contemporary literature. He maintains, however, that the alienation and claustrophobia currently identified with such images reveal closer kinship to Protestant rather than Catholic models: "When it emphasized original sin, encouraged mistrust of all external things, rejected good works, and insisted on the central importance of faith, Protestantism , quite unwittingly, sowed the seeds for the alienation, doubt, and impotence that the contemporary labyrinths suggest is the central truth about modern existence" (289). The subjective experience portrayed by Garcilaso, Lope, and Calderon tells a very different story, expressing the conviction that active use of free will allows humans to negotiate the maze of life and make their way to God. Gongora and his peers inherited in the labyrinth an image already invested with centuries of symbolic significance. Long before the maze figured in Christian iconography, or underwent a Protestant/Catholic hermeneutic schism, the symbol embodied a rich tradition grounded in the supernatural and in mythological lore, traceable to prehistoric times. For the educated public of Imperial Spain, as entranced as the rest of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe with the tales of antiquity in Ovid's Metamorphoses, the cuckolding of the Cretan King Minos, Daedalus's design and construction of...