Embracing Hercules / Enjoying Ganymede: The Homoerotics of Humanism in Góngora’s Soledad Primera

E M B R A C I N G H E R C U L E S / E N J O Y I N G G A N Y M E D E : T H E H O M O E R O T I C S O F H U M A N I S M I N G O N G O R A ' S SOLEDAD PRIMERA Frederick A. d e A r m a s University of Chicago In his manual on grammar and rhetoric titled Elocuencia espanola en arte (1604), Bartolome Jimenez Paton discusses the five levels of meaning in a "fabula" —the literal, the moral, the allegorical, the anagogical, and the tropological—giving as example the myth of Perseus slaying the Gorgon. Curiously, he shifts myths when discussing the anagogical level. Instead of focusing on Perseus, he turns to Ganymede: "Anagogicamente es cuando por el rapto de Ganimedes entendemos el arrobado espfritu en contemplation de cosas celestiales, y que la sabiduria humana es ignorancia con Dios" (232). With one stroke of the pen, Jimenez Paton makes this youth from antiquity an apt subject of Counter-Reformation Spain, something that fits well with a treatise "de acusado corte contrarreformista"(Martin 11). Any hint of pagan otherness is censored, absented. The reader may know that Ganymede was abducted by Jupiter because of his beauty, but Jimenez Paton does not mention this. Mythographers such as Natale Conti had taken great care to transform Ganymede's bodily beauty into spiritual greatness: "En efecto, Ganimedes es el alma de los hombres, a la que, segiin hemos dicho, Dios lleva junto a si debido a su notable prudencia. ... Pero, realmente, el alma mas hermosa es la que no esta en absoluto contaminada por las suciedades humanas y con las acciones vergonzosas del cuerpo" (695-96). Conti, then, counteracts any hint of sodomy, or what he calls the shameful actions of the body, with the spiritual beauty of the soul. While mythographers create lengthy apologies for Ganymede, rejecting his physical beauty in favor of spiritual splendor, Jimenez Paton simply eliminates all previous argument. The anagogical meaning is gathered from the youth's ascent to the heavens , regardless of cause. No longer do we have a text that condemns the event, like the fourteenth-century Ovide Moralise, where the abduction is seen as: "Against law and against nature" (Saslow 42); nor do we have the Neo-Platonic apologetics of Conti. In Jimenez Paton, it is as if the erotic abduction never happened. This brief statement says CALIOPE Vol. 8, No. 1 (2002): pages 125-140 126 • BO Frederick A. de Armas more about the anxiety over Ganymede in seventeenth-century Spain than the many of the lengthy apologies of the period. The antique tale of Ganymede touched upon at least four main Christian anxieties: the uses of metamorphosis, the existence of a plurality of gods, the tangled relationships between gods and humans, and the consequent divinization of sexual practices between two males. In this myth, Jupiter had transformed himself into an eagle in order to take the handsome Ganymede to the heavens to abide with him. This event was not just an erotic abduction in antiquity; it also had imperial implications. As Leonard Barkan reminds us: "At the opening of the Aeneid, the boy is revealed to be a pivotal cause of the Trojan War" (19). Juno's hatred of the Trojans, then, has as much to do with Venus's triumph and the abduction of Helen as with the presence of Ganymede in the heavens, next to her husband Jupiter. In Virgil's Aeneid, the fall of Troy leads to the birth of Rome. This new empire has Jupiter's blessings and is watched over by the god and his Trojan cupbearer. This imperial history, like Ganymede's sexuality, had to be explained or erased during the Christian era. While Helen continued to be seen as the cause of the war, Ganymede became an allegorical figure, a NeoPlatonic device, anything but himself, and nothing to do with eros or the Roman empire. With the Renaissance, Italian artists began to remove the allegorical garments that hid the beauty and allure of the Trojan...