Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context

Afterword: Redressing the Baroque

283  Afterword: Redressing the Baroque Edward H. Friedman Like most literary and theoretical issues, approaches to the Baroque have changed over the last decades. Students traditionally—a word that also changes according to context—have been exposed to the concept of the Baroque as mediated through the world of the plastic arts. Baroque cathedrals and architecture adorned to the maximum catch the eye and affect the senses. One may think of gold on silver trimmed with colored tiles, topped by the richness of paintings , each of which holds a complex treasure of symbols and associations. The Baroque seems to aspire to more than the eye can behold and more than the mind can synthesize. Complexity and obscurity, arguably, are its driving forces. Eva Perón sums up the baroque attitude in the song “Buenos Aires” from Evita when she proclaims, “All I want is a whole lot of excess.” The emphasis on excess can be contemplated, and defended, in several ways. The richness of texture adds depth. Rhetoric, when heightened, gains formal and conceptual strength. The more that the artist can work (and play) with the tools of the trade, be they words or another medium, the more room for creative expression. The more difficult the process of comprehension may be, the more involved and engaged the reader, listener, or spectator. The Baroque tends to raise the bar for the artist and for the consumer of art, and this may be seen as good or bad, 284 EDWARD H. FRIEDMAN challenging or elitist. The playwright Lope de Vega’s interest in pleasing the general public, the vulgo, stands in stark contrast to the poetic aims, and the implicit politics, of Luis de Góngora or Francisco de Quevedo, who sought a readership of educated and subtle thinkers and who brought the social and theological politics of ostracism to bear on literature. In this essay, I would like to look at the Baroque from the perspective of the methodologies and focal points of the contributors to this volume and from my own reading of the Baroque, the term and the texts classified as such, as a means of continuing the dialogue. One conclusion, which I will reveal at this early juncture, is that the Baroque used to be far simpler, and more contained, and that, appropriately, the theoretical boom of recent decades has opened the doors for further investigation of a phenomenon already marked by open doorways. The fact that I also believe that the Baroque as a label has become so overdetermined as to render it flexible to a fault does not nullify its appeal or, ultimately, its value as a means of access to the intersections of art and life. To a degree, baroque sensibility is predicated on the idea that the medium is the message. The Baroque can be seen, although debatably, of course, as a victory of form over content, or of form as content. Poetry, as the predominant genre of the early modern period, certainly accentuates verbal proficiency and inventiveness, but the rhetoric of baroque poetry honors imaginative gifts in language and wit. The baroque style combines floridity, embellishment, ardor, and mental acuteness; culteranismo, conceptismo, and agudeza figure among its operative terms. As David Castillo underscores, the Baroque pursues the extreme . Culteranismo realizes the objective through ornamentation on the formal level, whereas conceptismo seeks the density of the conceit through brevity. The categories obviously are not mutually exclusive, given that rhetoric, in its multiple manifestations, lies at the center of each. The Baroque may seem to convey an illusion of emptiness, of form for its own sake, but that was never the case, and one may note, in a Borgesian (or Pierre Menardian) fashion, that it is less so in the new millennium. Perhaps the most lasting and the most steadfast lesson of poststructuralism—and some may attribute this to other sources—is that every statement and every set of signs have an ideological thrust and a broad array of subtexts, often contradictory. By virtue of its intricacy, its intensity , and its innate sense of competition, what might be called the nature of the Baroque hinges on the topos of rivalry, enacted at every stage of the act of creation and replicated in critical and theoretical discourse. It is possible, and fairly conventional, to cast baroque art as a response to the Renaissance. The moderation, symmetry, and attention to proportion of the Renaissance ideal cede to violent oppositions, distortion, and calculated [18.224...