4 - Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627): Into the Dark

Summary

Introduction

Herrera's heliocentric formulations fixed the linguistic aspirations of the late sixteenth century upon the iconic authority of natural and perfect form, the circle. In a post-Copernican allegorical system, the vernacular ‘sol’ was figured as the ideal centre around which not only the fates of individual poets, but the destiny of the Spanish empire itself could, and should, revolve in conterminous motion. Notwithstanding the anxieties and ambivalences which, as we have seen, complicated this correlative arrangement, other paradoxes would ultimately destroy the illusion of centric stability. Firstly, the allegorical frame itself was intrinsically flawed. Herrera's new brand of collective cultural heroism, conveyed as the audacious transformation of tradition by an individual poet on his own terms, was designed to promote progress (that is, linguistic renewal) over stasis, but the symbolic activity of its conceptual schema furnished allegiance to a fixed point of conventional transcendental reference. To engage creatively with the problem in poetry would inevitably involve some shattering of the representative system in which the upwardly mobile aspirations of the language were forged. This was a strategy adopted by Luis de Góngora, whose response to the exhausted generic, modal and metaphorical possibilities of Spanish post-Petrarchan lyric was to refocus it in the direction of a new kind of beauty. Góngora opted not to resist the limitations placed on self-expression by language, or the ironies of timeless assertions that are caught up in the stream of time, but rather to embrace the deceptions embedded in language and to encourage a carefully crafted violence.