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Chapter 8. Revisiting the Culture of the Baroque: Nobility, City, and Post-Cervantine Novella
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162 8 Revisiting the Culture of the Baroque: Nobility, City, and Post-Cervantine Novella Nieves Romero-Díaz The variety of approaches that has characterized the study of the Spanish Baroque throughout history reveals the complexity of the period and its attraction for critics. The homogeneity apparently imposed by a dominant authority falsi- fies the conflictive reality of a culture that otherwise has been continually adapting before forces of control and resistance. Indeed, the so-called “crisis” of the Baroque arises from the negotiation between power relations of containment and freedom and is represented in the cultural products of the time. The postCervantine novella (novela corta) is one cultural practice in which this crisis is debated.1 The novella, then, will be characterized not by its discursive unity (an expression of a dominant ideology) but by dominant and subversive discourses that converge and contradict each other. As we will see in this article, the novels become fundamental in the understanding of the culture of the Baroque. Despite the oblivion into which the short story has been cast in the last two centuries, recently there has been an incipient interest in its study. The number of reeditions and of monographs dedicated to specific authors have dramatically increased, particularly those involving Lope de Vega and María de Zayas, two of the most well-known masters of the genre.2 In the last three years no fewer than four monographs have been published on the genre itself: REVISITING THE CULTURE OF THE BAROQUE 163 Rogelio Miñana’s La verosimilitud en el Siglo de Oro: Cervantes y la novela corta (2002), Carmen Rabell’s Rewriting the Italian Novella in Counter-Reformation Spain (2003), Isabel Colón’s La novela corta en el siglo XVII (2001), and my own, Nueva nobleza, nueva novela: Reescribiendo la cultura urbana del Barroco (2002).3 In this essay, I wish to insist on a sociological approach to the study of the post-Cervantine novella.4 In my view, the proliferation of this genre canonized by Cervantes can only be understood in connection with its historical context.5 Hence it is necessary to study the novella as an essential component of the culture of the Baroque. My main contention is that the short novel constitutes the cultural space in which one of the most important ideological debates of the time is negotiated and discussed: the redefinition of a new urban nobility. The conflicts that arise from the relations between the young ladies and gentlemen who wander through the pages of the novels translate symbolically into the conflicts of a social group trying desperately to redefine itself. In order to do so, principles and categories that had traditionally determined status are questioned. On the one hand, I will discuss the way this genre is determined by contextual factors, specifically, the ideological discourses at play in the novels. On the other, I will argue that the short novel can also actively shape the reality in which it takes part. As Raymond Williams explains it, it is not that the relation between literature and society is an abstraction but, rather, that “the literature is there from the beginning as a practice in the society” (“Base and Superstructure ” 27; my emphasis). Literature and society establish an inseparable relationship, impossible to extract from the cultural process in which they both participate.6 As a first step toward comprehending the importance of the post-Cervantine novella, we have to be clear about our understanding of the culture of the Baroque. My approach engages in dialogue recent historical and literary works that reject the idea of the Baroque as a “guided culture” (cultura dirigida), the nomenclature dominant since José Antonio Maravall’s Culture of the Baroque, first published in Spanish in 1975.7 I am referring to literary studies by Marina Brownlee and Hans Gumbrecht, Anne Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, George Mariscal and Paul Julian Smith among others, and works by Ignacio Atienza, Mauro Hernández, Henry Kamen, I.A.A Thompson, and Bartolomé Yun Casalilla , for example, all of which draw upon history and sociopolitics. Cultural materialists, building upon the work of Raymond Williams, have questioned the traditional concept of culture. First in his Culture and Society: 1780–1950 and then in Marxism and Literature, Williams breaks with the idea of culture as a monolithic and static unity and defines it instead as “a consti- [3.235.243.45] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10...