Góngora's Soledades and the Problem of Modernity (review)

The mid-twentieth century celebration of Góngora's poetry as pure art, isolated from its historical context, was dispelled by John Beverley's study of the Soledades in the context of political and economic crisis. Chemris's lucidly theorized study expands the scope of this contextualization through a profoundly philosophical view of the poem in terms of the baroque crisis of ontology, perception, and representation. The 'problem of modernity' in the title is, at least in part, that of the uneven development of Spanish modernity, an aesthetic and philosophical problem inextricable from Spanish consciousness of the ambivalent effects of its imperial project. Chemris demonstrates how the loss of a cosmological centre and discursive authority in the early modern period is reflected not only in the poem's fragmentation but also in its experimentation with genre and syntax, voice and text, space and time. In developing her argument, she draws upon a rich comparative background and familiarity with the full range of scholarly approaches to Góngora.

Chemris begins her discussion of modernity with problems of subjectivity exemplified by the ironic treatment of courtly love and the sense of estrangement in the Celestina. She reveals a gender-based argument in Boscán's defence of the poet's subjective vision, which she interprets as implicitly feminized lyric emotion. Highlighting Garcilaso's shift away from emotion towards the aesthetic, she reads his eclogues as precursors to the Soledades. Chapter Two, 'Crisis and Form', addresses Góngora's experimentation with genre in the Soledades and his disruption of the illusions of seamlessness and immediacy. She examines the poet's intensification and exposure of the mechanisms of metaphor through the device of hypallage, exemplified in Soledad primera, line 44: 'montes de agua y piélagos de montes' (25).

The central chapters, two, three, and four, present Chemris's most original contributions to Góngora studies. Her brief reference to gender in Boscán's privileging of the aesthetic becomes central in her approach to the rape imagery of the opening lines of the first Soledad, and the closing scene of the second. Developing Margaret Carroll's concept of the 'erotics of absolutism' in a distinct cultural context, Chemris links the idealization of sexual violence with the political power of the Habsburg Empire (55). She observes that the violent images of hunting in Soledad primera are 'a startling counterpoint to idealized depictions of suffering' in the literature of courtly love; they participate in 'a dynamic of both expression of, and aesthetic detachment from emotion' (61). This observation is key to her brilliant analysis of Éfire's 'gender-bending' fishing exploits in the second chapter, and the falconry scene in the fourth. One of the many strengths of this monograph is its attention to these important passages in the often overlooked Soledad segunda. The chapter between these two explores questions of epistemology and visual perception not only in the context of baroque painting but also in the poem's proto-scientific references to observation, measurement, the field of vision, maps, and global exploration, and to aesthetic transgressions of the boundary between the sublime and the grotesque. Chemris moves from this discussion of spatial references in Chapter Three, to the fireworks of apocalypse in Chapter Four. Here, she addresses the baroque disruption of the classical concept of an orderly world through the poem's references to vast expanses of sea and landscape and its 'conflicted time structures', which result from a 'loss of mediation between the eternal and the moment' (89). Chemris reads the focus on dissolution in the falconry scene in multiple registers: the political geography of the birds' origins, their emblematic significance, Habsburg allegories of messianic prophecy, astronomical references, and the aestheticization of the erotic. She concludes with a view of Góngora as quintessentially baroque, 'unable to imagine a world without imagining also its dissolution' (103).

Góngora's modernity and his influence on twentieth-century writing in Spain and Latin America has become a critical...