Latin American Neo-Baroque: Senses of Distortion by Pablo Baler (review)

Pablo Baler's Latin American Neo-Baroque: Senses of Distortion weaves both literary and visual art into an exploration of distortion as a thread between the Latin American Neo-Baroque and the Spanish Baroque. This study strengthens our understanding of the Neo-Baroque through three of its tropes: metaphor, hyperbaton, and anaphora. These rhetorical devices are linked to three periods in Latin American literature, the avant-garde, the New Narrative, and the postmodern. Baler distances his analysis of artworks as mere simulacra and examines aesthetic epistemology in order to demonstrate how distortion causes instability for the audience. While acknowledging both disparities and similarities between the baroque and neo-baroque, he cohesively and meticulously zigzags between what appear to be disparate works.

In the introductory chapter titled "Senses of Distortion," Baler aptly bastes together the Albertian linear theories of foci, as applied to painting, and its distortion (by varying the perspective of images). Thus, anamorphosis illustrates the myriad perspectives that question the stability of representation in verbal or visual art. An analysis of Don Quixote and Las Meninas illustrates how anamorphosis can unstitch or loosen the metaphysical space, in both novel and painting, from any reference to the physical world. In addition, Baler skillfully sews together Jorge Luis Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" and Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors to, once again, emphasize the instability created by seeing new and varying perspectives. This chapter is dense and remarkably original in unifying image and word as unstable, distorted devices that demonstrate the problems in the epistemology of representation.

No less fertile is the second chapter that draws upon theories of the metaphor by Baltasar Gracián, who views the trope as the ingenious writer teasing out secret connections between seemingly dissimilar items. In a subsection of the chapter "Epistemology of the Metaphor," Baler explores the difference between the Renaissance worldview in which metaphor disclosed the uncommon correlations, as he phrases it "the world as legible text," and the Baroque view of the world as "open, relative, arbitrary (the world as writable text)." As metaphor can enlighten understanding by comparing the unknown to the known, it can also destabilize by expanding or continuously mutating meaning to oblivion. Vicente Huidobro's Altazor and Quevedo's poetry serve as examples, when readers are led from metaphor as enlightening to metaphor as dislocating and subverting meaning. Unlike the other chapters, this one does not offer a representative examination of a visual art form, preferring to use music as another reference point.

The next chapter, "Hyperbaton: The World as Syntax," begins by exploring displacement and indeterminacy, as themes of the baroque. As the title suggests, syntax in baroque terms presents problems. Baler postulates the poetics of epistemology (he names it poetism) by suggesting that epistemology itself is conceived in terms of theoretical time and space. Thus, neither time nor space provide a stable anchor for syntactical analysis. First, by appropriating Mieke Bal's term preposterous history, a collapse of past and present, Baler underscores that sequential syntax becomes impossible under such conditions. He illustrates this point with Borges's "El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan." This story presents us with multiple outcomes of a particular choice. Secondly, by subverting the Renaissance notion of locus amoenus, the baroque multiplies and deconstructs notions of a fixed space. Baler argues that both Borges's story and Góngora's Soledades construct multiple spaces by presenting us with a type of mise en abîme. Hence the two works disarticulate notions of time and space. Both of the literary works allude to gardens, and Baler offers the plans for a garden labyrinth as the visual representation of this trope. The conclusion to this chapter is that the world itself is labyrinthine; thus, neither work can "describe the world but explores its uncontrollable and multiple power" (88). This chapter offers an original, well-conceived and tightly woven argument.

The fourth chapter is titled "Anaphora: Poetics of Laceration" and investigates...