Beyond Romantic Nature: the Baroque

I am really enjoying The Poet and the Natural World in the Age of Góngora because Michael Woods is shifting away from a purely (or naively) Romantic conception of Nature.  He follows Emilio Orozco's Paisaje y sentimiento de la naturaleza en la poesía española, to argue that a form of the pictorial landscapes (e.g. Nature qua esthetic category) begins in the 16th century.

The difference between a Romantic Nature and Baroque Nature is precisely its sentiments towards the nonhuman world.  In Góngora, for instance, these sentiments are infamously "nebulous".  To quote Dámaso Alonso:

Everwhere...there flows an awed spirit of exaltation in natural forces: beneath the most precise lines, beneath the most splendid words, there lies the vital flame of creative and regenerative nature, like a passionate ebullience" (71).

As Woods points out, there are several aspects of this marvelous sentence that should be read with care.  For me, what it might mean to suggest a "vital flame" of regeneration.  On whose part?  Woods takes us in an interesting direction on this point, to suggest that it is the sincerity of the poem that might lead us the particular constructedness of a natural poetics.

Pirenenqes // Pirenaicas

After a late evening filled with baroque poetry and a morning of modernist poetry, these lines from Maragall stand out -- as far as the etching of landscape is concerned.

I em vaig tobant tan bé an allà entremig
i em ba invadint com una immensa pau,
i vaig sent un troç mès del prat suau
ben verd, ben verd sota d'un cel ben blau.

Y cada vez más a gusto en este entorno
me ba invadiendo una inmensa paz,
me voy sintiendo parte de este prado
tan verde y suave bajo el cielo azul. (55)

The Spanish translation from the Catalan slightly displaces suau and misses the repetition at work in the last lines, which emphasizes a sort of continuity between the color (verd), its adverb (ben) and a texture (suau).  To speak a bit more on the translation, there is also a cool discrepancy between entorno and entremig.  The former implies the surroundings of a single point, where the latter actually gestures at a space between two different points (spatially or temporally).  This last point is crucial in the dissection of landscape poetics because one text emphasizes a singular viewpoint, whereas the other (the Catalan original), thinks between at least two points.

This last point plays out significantly in the poem's situation because in the previous sections, Maragall moves from an isolated mountain landscape, which is etched out through a series of negations ("les flors són esblaimades / les flors són d'un blau clar, / blavoses o morades;") to a more humanized environment.  This is carried through the mediating metaphor of the child (la niña mimada / la nina aviciada), a figure he likens to the mountain mist.  This movement (in the immobile mountain range) transports us to a coded environment that seems like a town.  The intricacies of the poem play out between these two places.

Quevedo aiding Alonso

Elena González Quintas provides a lot of helpful analysis of metaphoric values (de la naturaleza y la mujer) in Quevedo.  She makes an excellent point in her concluding paragraph on natural metaphors: Quevedo's revamp of baroque metaphors accomplishes two things -- 1) Distancing the imaginary term from the real (signifier from the signified) 2) to magnify the qualities of the referent (164).  This seems to be Alonso's suggestion about real objects returning "with a vengeance".  It also seems to be Tim Morton's suggestion on what Derrida's "sin of omission" might look like.  Agreed.  Agreed.

Realzar: A fascinating entry in DRAE

This verb fascinates me.  Predominantly because of the fourth definition and the work I have done on light and causality.

1. tr. Levantar o elevar algo más de lo que estaba. U. t. c. prnl.

2. tr. Labrar de realce.

3. tr. Ilustrar o engrandecer. U. t. c. prnl.

4. tr. Pint. Tocar de luz algo.

Real Academia Española © Todos los derechos reservados

Eugeni d'Ors avoiding the flash points of contrapunteo

There should be little mistake about d'Ors noucentisme project.  He wants to make life like his conception of the work of art: ordered, harmonious, and serene in all of its "realización plástico-literaria", as he puts it in the prologue to La ben plantada.  This literary-plasticity, speaking of a text that has been chiseled away into visual symmetry, represents what Cataluña looked like (read should look like) in the eyes of D'ors.  It predicates from an insulated landart, built to shut out too much Nature (we have the Romantics to thank for that move, according to D'ors), and too much urbanism.  These esthetic pieces are whittled down into nubs so that they might fit together.  Any conceivable excess is boiled off (or carved out, to continue the sculpture analogy).

Yet I have just stumbled across an interesting text of his, Poussin y el Greco, which provides a contrast between Poussin, "the artist of the philosopher" from el Greco, "the artist of the spirits (which d'Ors connects to poetry).  What interests me is the countervalence he establishes between the two painters.

La tierra nos atrae.  Parece que de esta atracción la vida puede emanciparse de dos maneras: volando o manteniéndose en pie.  Volar es más poético; pero mantenerse en pie es más noble.

El Greco: pintor de las formas que vuelan.  Poussin: pintor de las formas que se mantienen en pie.  (16)

The distinction here develops from different types of movements.  Demonic forms in a flux of flight patterns and others that are allowed to remain "backdrops".  There are a variety of reading strategies that should highlight the flash point between these forms as focus points and forms as backdrops.  The result would produce more instability than d'Ors would care to admit.

D. Alonso on Flowers in Spanish Poetry

In his essay "Flores en la poesía de España" Dámaso Alonso speculates on the nonexistence of a Spanish Generation of the flowers.  For Alsono, this is a symptom of Spanish Romanticism's deficiency.  Its height never reached the legacy of Wordsworth, for instance.

The Generation of 98 was the Generation of landscape but failed to focus on the flora inhabiting (or not) those endless terrains.  It is only with Juan Ramón Jiménez that the reader again encounters a focus on flower tone poems.

Alonso then returns to a brief reflection on the Baroque and barroquismo (the recycling of baroque style) and gives a rather interesting definition of the baroque relationship to nonhumans.

Nóstese, porque es importante, que el procedimiento de muchos de estos retratos hay humor, es decir, que son un tipo de «caricatura».  Así, el barroquismo llega a la realidad, por la elusión de la realidad, por la hiberbólica imagen.  En arte lo real tiene siempre su venganza. (284)

What I like about this description is its avoidance of stronger claims made about baroque esthetics concerning the distance  between things and language (Foucault).  Instead, a similar argument is released: language approaches reality through "elusión" and the hyperbolic image but "lo real" is not simply a phantom, but rather an etched out shadow image, lying in wait with vengeance.  So much for the simple loveliness of flowers...

Unamuno

Teaching Unamuno's San Manuel always draws me into different speculations.  This was the first Spanish novel I read years ago, and in many ways, a text that haunts me.  This admission itself has become somewhat of a disciplinary oddity.  Most Hispanists want to either avoid, dismiss or comfortably forget about Unamuno and his "Generation's" España oscura.  (This tendency is curious in light of what one professor recently told me: a specialist in Latin American literature said it was a tragedy that Unamuno has become so overdetermined in the peninsular tradition.  Geographical issues aside, I wonder what would happen if Latin Americanists attempted to claim him?)    For practical reasons, I do not have this luxury of forgetting.  One of my exam questions departs from the obsessive trope of landscape in the Generation of 1898.  I have looking into their own roots in the Insitución Libre de Enseñanza, krausismo and the political atmosphere of the 19th century.

As a sort of pretext to switch from the short story to the novel, we discussed several descriptions of the novel from Kundera, Vargas Llosa, J. Goytisolo and Borges.  So throughout this reading, I returned again to the peculiar framing at work in San Manuel.  Ángela begins to narrate her memories of San Manuel and slowly disappears into the dialogues and anecdotes of her text.  Her voice fuses into a multiplicity of narrators and audiences.  Put differently, other voices and objects seep into her text, calling attention to their own presences and projects.  Among these latter entities, the final authorial voice is not Ángela's but Unamuno's.  He shifts her "confesión íntima" into a sort of confusion.  She concludes:

Y al escribir ahora, aquí... cuando empiezan a blanquear con mi cabeza is recuerdos, está nevando, nevando sobre el lago, nevando sobre la montaña....  Y no sé lo que es verdad y lo que es mentira, ni lo que vi y lo que soñe. (129)

This passage again calls attention to landscape.  Not so much as a discrete collection of external entities, but rather as a dimly lit interior terrain.  Yet this interiority is not completely sealed away but forced to touch a community of voices, those of her narrative.  The same might be said of Unamuno's rurality.  Despite Unamuno's presentation of a rural ambience untouched by modernization or History (en mayúscula).  It cannot remain pure and outside of History.  Instead, Ángela herself causes them to touch and repel from one another (her education in Renada and, of course, her brother's rhetoric).

The confusion of "la confesión íntima" results in a transference from a letter to a novel, a genre that Unamuno determines is "el más íntimo".  This last point is counterintuitive.  How is a novel more intimate than a poem?  The former is often perceived as a packed space, full of voices and story lines while that latter is often a concentrated mediation of the lyric function.  In light of my comments above, it seems that Unamuno's suggestion is precisely about the relations between the various metaphors and narrative layers.  His "novela de tesis" is not some ironic posturing, but a sincere (albeit feigned on certain levels) between different modes of thinking and being.

More on baroque natures

Fernando R. de la Flor’s “On the Notion of a Melancholic Baroque” provides multiple points of convergence between Benjamin’s thesis on German Tragic Drama and the new historiography of the Spanish Baroque, as evidenced in J. Antonio Maravall.  Each work, at once large in scope, but in tune to digging into the human trash heaps of empire, asserts that even if we cleanse our hands of the Baroque, it perpetually returns through a plurality of “ontological crises”. 

This final term deserves clarification.  It is not so much the disappearance of things that shifts in the Baroque, but rather the qualities commonly associated to them.  After an epigone of human reason’s domination of the world, in which science and mathematical formulae not only represent but also encapsulate the world, quotidian objects become weird in their own right.  In the 17^th century, this created a rift between world and the prison cell of human thinking. 

Nature, for instance, was seen as a kind of corollary to the internal mechanisms of human politics.  Alongside “forgotten empires” nature provides some sort of foundational harmony for human actors.  It was a backdrop for predication.  Yet, as R. de la Flor notes, the baroque turns nature into a play of shadow puppets:

Here, one’s attention is directed toward the search for a superior evidence of the mutability of things in nature which is the true ideal “theater” where great changes are worked through, and where nothing ever remains as it is for a long time.  In the words of a modern poet nature is the “temple of caducity”.  (15)

If nature’s world is kept as some sort of corollary for human behavior or psychology, here we find the instability of natural entities demonstrating the rift between human expectation of how a world should function and its actual ontological status. 

Yet a rift does not simply imply complete isolation between the human mind and world but simply a complication in interactions.  For instance, the power of nature’s shadow puppets no longer relies on the hands manipulating shards of light but rather dim personae it creates on distant walls.  That is to say, imaginary crises become as real as real ones.  R. de la Flor suggests as much in his discussion of the imago, which, in my view, projects esthetic objects onto an ontological plane alongside real ones.  

Idearium español, el molinero

This post continues my bewilderment surrounding the dismissal of ideas and thinkers.  This time its tied to el molinero, Ganivet.  According to his epilogue his work might have neither head nor feet but walks around on stilts.  Its object of study, processing forms of regeneracionismo common to the Generation of 1898, is at once removed (it was written abroad) but also re-connects to the earth through a peculiar humor.  Speaking of skies and grounds: "Si no me estrello, voy a llegar hasta las nubes".

This comparison truly become interesting when Ganivet strikes a note with Zubiri on the mysterious inner-workings of objects:

"Cuando yo, siendo estudiante, leí las obras de Séneca, me quedé aturdido y asombrado, como quien, perdida la vista o el oído los recobraba repentina e inesperadamente y viera los objetos, que con sus colores y sonidos ideales se agitaban antes confusos en su interior, salir ahora en tropel y tomar consistencia de objetos reales y tangibles."

This passage describes a tactile contact as an unexpected agitation.  A moment when "the interior" reveals "salir en tropel", an unexpected multitude of things, people and ideas.  The book itself, the Idearium, is that grinds through these ideas like a mill.  It processes instead of proposes.