Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Baroque, Symbolism and Hispanic Modernity: A Benjaminian Meditation on the Construction of History
- 1 Góngora and the Colonial Body Politic: Moriscos, Amerindians and Poetry as Protest
- 2 Violence and the “Tremulous Private Body” in Lazarillo de Tormes, Fuenteovejuna, and the Soledades
- 3 Trauma, Body and Machine in Don Quijote
- 4 Góngora and Darío in Constellation: On the Poetics of Rape, Colonialism and Modernity
- 5 Pilgrimage into the Trauma of History: Continuities of Góngora in Carpentier, Rulfo and Vallejo
- 6 Signposts in a Genealogy of Post-Symbolism in Latin American Poetry
- Afterword
- Appendix I: On Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de dés”
- Appendix II: The Annales School and Maravall’s La cultura del barroco
- Works Cited
- Index
5 - Pilgrimage into the Trauma of History: Continuities of Góngora in Carpentier, Rulfo and Vallejo
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: The Baroque, Symbolism and Hispanic Modernity: A Benjaminian Meditation on the Construction of History
- 1 Góngora and the Colonial Body Politic: Moriscos, Amerindians and Poetry as Protest
- 2 Violence and the “Tremulous Private Body” in Lazarillo de Tormes, Fuenteovejuna, and the Soledades
- 3 Trauma, Body and Machine in Don Quijote
- 4 Góngora and Darío in Constellation: On the Poetics of Rape, Colonialism and Modernity
- 5 Pilgrimage into the Trauma of History: Continuities of Góngora in Carpentier, Rulfo and Vallejo
- 6 Signposts in a Genealogy of Post-Symbolism in Latin American Poetry
- Afterword
- Appendix I: On Mallarmé’s “Un Coup de dés”
- Appendix II: The Annales School and Maravall’s La cultura del barroco
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim.
Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (254)The Baroque impasse which figured in Darío's poetic representation of the catastrophe of imperialist domination informs later manifestations of the Latin American avant-garde, the Neobaroque, and the Boom. In Sarduy's grammar of the literary Baroque, he identifies the category of “escritura/Odisea” as one of its primary “syntagmatic grama” or structures (1401). Góngora's Soledades, like the Quijote, is an odyssey of its own writing process, and could well fit Sarduy's category, but as a special case, the pilgrimage topos, in its capacity as a marker for historical impasse. How so?
Pilgrimage is a staple of national and religious myth. It lies at the heart of epic, which chronicles the trials of a wandering and exiled hero as he progresses to triumph, typically by founding his homeland's city of origins. In its religious version it is the story of the human subject's trials on earth, his or her growth as a spiritual exile whose telos is reunion with the divine, a journey rehearsed in miniature in ritual pilgrimages to sacred shrines. Pilgrimage in literature, whether secular or religious, often represents the unfolding of history according to plan, as the fulfillment of prophecy or mission. The crisis at the origins of Spanish modernity, expressed aesthetically in the Baroque, provoked a parallel crisis in the representational function of literature, disrupting, in certain works, such a messianic function of the pilgrimage topos. Thus the breakdown of Spain's imperial mission apparent in such events as Lope de Aguirre's foundering in the jungles of Latin America was expressed in the novel by the failed “post-auratic” (or disenchanted) pilgrimage of Don Quijote. Góngora's Soledades, roughly contemporaneous with Cervantes's famous novel, belongs to such an order of failed pilgrimage, a failure that marks the transition to the modern.
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- Information
- The Spanish Baroque and Latin American Literary ModernityWriting in Constellation, pp. 103 - 122Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2021