5 - Luis de Góngora y Argote: Out of the Dark – Emulative Poetry in Motion

Summary

Introduction

Neoplatonic love had been presented by Castiglione as the perfect antidote to the darker emotions associated with human passion – jealousy being prominent among the transgressive desires that required suppression. It is not wholly surprising, therefore, that the dismantling of the Neoplatonic aesthetic in Góngora would liberate a revisionary play upon that most illicit, appetitive drive whose cultural history allowed for the interconnection of erotic and emulative poetics. This chapter will explore how motifs of envy and jealousy are interwoven in Góngora's love poetry and forge a metaphoric merger between two complementary attitudes: the will to usurp the forbidden feminine object of desire and the will to trespass beyond established poetic norms. The result is a persistent erotic colouration of the principles of aemulatio, a rhetorical reshaping which includes contingently within it something of the ambiguous moral properties of envy that, as we will see, had infected the literature of both eros and eris from the pre-Hellenistic tradition through to the Renaissance.

Fundamental to Góngora's metatextual schema is the shared, illicit movement of erotic and emulative desire towards appropriation. This enterprise, self-consciously undertaken at the expense of order, is often figured in the texts as an invidious gaze within which, and/or against which, the poetic persona writes and is written, both as active subject (seeking completion and transcendent definition) and passive object (incomplete and limited by dependency).