Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context

Chapter 1. On the Notion of a Melancholic Baroque

3  1 On the Notion of a Melancholic Baroque Fernando R. de la Flor (Translated by Luis Martín-Estudillo and Nicholas Spadaccini) A Baroque of Hispanic Melancholy Can an epoch or a certain chronological space (or, a geographical one) be melancholic ? Would it be possible to speak of the high temporality of history and events as one does about a person and the state of his/her soul? Can one attribute to them what might properly be called a passion that lives as the dark manifestation of a conflicted interiority? Can one ascribe it to the long time of common and general history, or even to what has completely disappeared? These questions are now being brought to life in an imaginary debate expressed through an abusive figure of language to define early Spanish modernity. One wonders whether or not it is possible to say that the classic prestige of the concept (melancholy) covers, in an imperialistic way, the symbolic and material determinations of a “modern” national culture, to the point of becoming its master, defining it as if it were its most precise and exclusive emblem.1 Might it be possible to speak about the secular “state of sadness” of a whole nation (of an “illness of Spain,” as was put by Juan Caramuel, one of its most important ideologists)? Can we do so in the same terms as when we speak about the disease of melancholy in a man, an occasional lover, a sorrowful clergyman 4 FERNANDO R. DE LA FLOR willing to come together with divinity, or even a nobleman attacked by the malady of remembrance in his winter quarters? Is this within our reach today or, to put it differently, do we have an obligation to define a melancholic ethos of the Hispanic Baroque?2 Certainly, epochs are not melancholic even when they are lived in extreme tension. Thus, one cannot say that the Hispanic Baroque was melancholic despite the fact that neo-stoic ethics had preached abstention from the world and had guaranteed some kind of disinvestment of libidinal energies from it, or if Christian neo-platonism had trusted in the values of contemplative suspension, setting itself free from all that might have appeared as given to the senses. The well-known Spanish hostility toward the criterion of utility and its refusal to develop economic and technical know-how for its own material profit could not disrupt the equilibrium of a society which was, after all, mercantilist and imperial. It would be somewhat extreme to subject the production of Spain’s “classical age” (often referred to as Golden), with its formal achievements and the impressive aesthetic display of its representations, to the tyranny of a restrictive metaphor, that of “tenebrous humor.” Such metaphor cannot be allowed to stand as a final image of the period, for in the end, Melpomene, the muse of tragedy , does not completely control the space of representation. And neither can a country be melancholic, even if one is talking about imperial Spain, regardless of the dismantling of the libidinal social energies and the decline of its fortune or even if one were to consider the burden placed on it by the “heaviness of its Majesty,” as the poet Medrano put it. Spain could not be melancholic, despite the tendency on the part of some of the more notable intellectuals of the time to effectively surround the nation with a fatal aura and a bitter destiny that would eventually bring about a “republic of wind” (Bocángel) or, in contemporary parlance, a “maniacal Spain” (Loureiro) where we could find what W. Frank called “the spiritual drama of a great people.” Such fatal destiny would operate regardless of a real expansion of material culture which historians nowadays have considered a sign of a certain “Spanish normality,” one which must be balanced with the notion of a “común tristeza que atormenta a la España” (Alfonso de Palencia 352) (common sadness which torments Spain), and which was the object of so many representations. Fortune and caducity always seem to be superimposed on the game of politics, which, eventually, had the mission of overpowering them. It could be argued that the spiritual sadness, the figures of melancholy, and the exacerbated Augustinism (which became so extreme as to be almost antihumanistic and psychologically pathetic) were to be identified with the Spanish ON THE NOTION OF A...