1 - Garcilaso de la Vega (c.1501–1536): Transfiguration and Transvaluation

Summary

Introduction: [not] out in the cold

Roland Barthes' insistence on the death of the author (1968), closely followed by Michel Foucault's equally provocative interrogation of the writing subject (‘What is an Author?’ 1969), have been elaborated, qualified, denigrated and newly historicised in almost half a century's literary theorisings. Common sense alone suggests that in denying a critical need to relate the individual subject (whether author or reader) to a larger cultural, historically specific field of operations, Barthes' theory of textual construction went too far. But whatever its implicit contradictions (and current memory studies have identified several), there is no denying that the post-structuralist critique of authorship that became prominent in the late 1960s paved the way for several ground-breaking transformations in literature, art and in critical activity itself.

It was exactly at this time, coincidence or not, that the reception of Garcilaso de la Vega's lyric poetry experienced a sharp textual turn away from the dominant school of sentimental biography, an approach that had its roots in the Renaissance, but that acquired dimensions of almost iconographical stasis in the wake of Hayward Keniston's 1922 biography. For some time belief in a central love story blocked complete analytical engagement with Garcilaso's poeticised story of love in all its diverse manifestations, until studies by Ter Horst (1968) and Woods (1969), and subsequent articles by Goodwyn, Darst and Waley a decade later, resulted in a recognition among critics that Garcilaso's poetry was finally a moving target for interpretation.