Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The language of contradiction: Aspects of Góngoras Soledades
- 2 The production of solitude: Góngora and the State
- 3 Sobre Góngora y el gongorismo colonial
- 4 Lazarillo y la acumulación originaria: notas sobre la picaresca
- 5 La economía política del locus amoenus
- 6 Gracián, or politics
- 7 Sobre la supuesta modernidad del Apologético de Juan de Espinosa Medrano
- 8 Baroque historicism: Then and now
- 9 Are Golden-Age studies obsolete? A conversation with Fernando Gómez Herrero
- Index of Names
1 - The language of contradiction: Aspects of Góngoras Soledades
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 The language of contradiction: Aspects of Góngoras Soledades
- 2 The production of solitude: Góngora and the State
- 3 Sobre Góngora y el gongorismo colonial
- 4 Lazarillo y la acumulación originaria: notas sobre la picaresca
- 5 La economía política del locus amoenus
- 6 Gracián, or politics
- 7 Sobre la supuesta modernidad del Apologético de Juan de Espinosa Medrano
- 8 Baroque historicism: Then and now
- 9 Are Golden-Age studies obsolete? A conversation with Fernando Gómez Herrero
- Index of Names
Summary
En dos edades vivimos
los proprios y los ajenos
…
a mis soledades voy,
de mis soledades vengo.
Lope de VegaThe portrait of Góngora by Velázquez is meant as an allegory of dialectical intelligence: ‘arte de agudeza e ingenio’. It presents the poet's head in threequarters profile. The right and larger section of the face is bathed in a flood of golden light which models the high dome of the forehead and extends in a curving line down the long bridge of the nose; the left quarter face is barely visible in deep shadow. Like the Polyphemus, the portrait stares fixedly at the spectator from the right eye. But by looking closely one can make out the form of a second eye on the left, staring out of (or at) darkness. The zones of light and shadow are mediated in the furrows of the brow between the eyes and along the curve of the thin mouth, which seems at once cruel and amused. Like Don Quixote, the figure is someone who lives at once in an age of iron and an age of gold.
Góngora and Spain
On peut dire que la carrière de Góngora est exemplaire, car elle suit la même courbe descendante que l’ensemble de la monarchie espagnole durant la même période. (Robert Jammes)
It was no accident that Dámaso Alonso found it necessary to incorporate in his dissertation on Góngora's poetic language the concepts elaborated in Saussure's structural linguistics. The nature of language, Saussure had suggested, involved a reciprocity between two relata: signifier and signified, speaker and hearer, intention and understanding, language rule and language use. The attack on the Soledades in the early seventeenth century was directed against Góngora's deviation from what were regarded as the permissible norms of poetic signification. It maintained, in effect, that language had ceased to signify in the Soledades, that Góngora had fallen into the sin of Babel. Recently, Maurice Molho has remarked that ‘il convient donc de lire les Solitudes comme un essai de reconstruction du langage —d’un langage— à partir du langage, et des rapports sur lesquels il se fonde’. But the problem of a possible language in the Soledades is not something peculiar to language itself. True, the ‘action’ of the Soledades is the action of words and grammar. Formalist criticism can tell us a great deal about the precise mechanisms of this.
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- Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2008