problemas de género en el siglo de oro. rivers. 1987.pdf

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Problems of Genre in Golden Age Poetry

Author(s): Elias L. RiversSource: MLN, Vol. 102, No. 2, Hispanic Issue (Mar., 1987), pp. 206-219Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2905685 .

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Problems f Genre nGoldenAge Poetry*EliasL. Rivers

We cannothelp coming backagain and again to thesameold ques-tions: What is literature?What is poetry?What are the differentkinds of poetry? do thinkthat there has been some progressto-ward giving tentative,historically ircumscribed nswers to thesequestions,but ever sinceAristotle's oeticsprogresshas been rela-tively low, and there s certainlyno end in sight:therewillalwaysbe some unborn Borges looming ust beyond the horizon. Andthere has been, in myopinion, some retrogression, ed by Ro-mantic ndividualists,ikeCroce, forexample, whotry ofly ntheface of pragmaticreality, he materialreality f catalogues and li-braries withinwhich the reader-writer indshis wayfromhistoryto literature, from plays to novels to poetry,from Petrarchansonnets to Horatian odes to dramaticmonologues. It seemshighlylikelythat the reader and thewriter, erhaps even the text tself,depend on some such categories as they organize their differentactivities nd passivitiesof reading,of writing, f being read. Inthispaper I can hardly hope to scratchthe surfaceunless I sim-plify ome basic questions; I willdo so by taking pragmaticpointof view,based on the social functions f literary iscourse.

Within our sociolinguisticworld we are constantlynvolved indifferentypesof speech act, as first emonstrated nalytically y* This paper has been writtenwiththe help of a fellowshipfrom the NationalEndowment for the Humanities; an oral versionwas delivered on 29 December1986 at theModern Language Association convention n New York City.


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M L N 207J. L. Austin in his 1955 lectures entitledHow to Do ThingswithWords Cambridge: Harvard University ress, 1962). MaryLouisePratt, n her 1977 book entitled Toward SpeechAct Theory fLit-erary iscourseBloomington: Indiana University ress, 1977), hasshown some of theways n which iterary enrescan be relatedtodifferent ypesof speech act, or of illocutionary orce; she drawsher examples primarilyfrom prose fiction. Stanley Fish andothers' have shownhow usefulAustin's categoriescan be for theanalysisofclassicaldrama; in fact,Fishclaims not onlythat Shake-speare's Coriolanus s based on performativepeech acts successfuland unsuccessful), ut also thatthe central heme ofthatplay actu-ally has to do with a pre-Austinian theoryof social discourse.Novels and plays do oftenseem to draw upon everyday ypesofsociolinguistic activity: gossip and story-telling,requests andorders and bets. In conversationwe are sometimesfully ware ofAustiniancategories, s for example in the wittyAmerican retort:"Is that a threator a promise?"This sortofmetapragmatic hrasecan easilybe found in thedialogue of novelsand plays.But it seems thatfewifany literary heoristshave tried to findfor yricpoetry basis in the pragmaticsof language. There maybe anthropologicaland historicalreasons for thisapparent diffi-culty: with the invention of the Greek alphabet twenty-fivehundred years ago, and with the subsequent development ofwritten rose as theprimarymediumofculturaldiscourse,theuseof versificationthat we associate with poetry has been losingground constantly.Verse epic has almost everywhereyielded toprose romance and the novel; verse drama, opera, and musicalshave lostmuch of the modern Western theaterto informal ollo-quial dialogue. Everydayconversation tself, t least in modernAmericanEnglish, fnotinJapanese orArabic or Spanish,has lostmuchofitsarchaicritualistic one, manyof itstraditional hythmicaphorisms.In attempting o define written oeticdiscourseand some of itsgenresan analogous to oral speech acts, willcite evidencedrawnfrom ncient as well as modernsources. AlbertLord's TheSinger f

' Stanley Fish, "How To Do Things withAustin and Searle: Speech-Act Theoryand LiteraryCriticism," irst ublished in MLN, 92 (1977), and reprinted n his IsThere Text n This Class?: TheAuthorityf nterpretiveommunitiesCambridge: Har-vard University ress, 1980), pp. 197-245. See also ThingsDone WithWords: peechActs nHispanic Drama, ed. Elias L. Rivers, Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta,1986.




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208 ELIAS L. RIVERSTales Cambridge: Harvard University ress,1960) and EricHave-lock'sPreface oPlato (Cambridge: Harvard University ress,1963)largely coincide in their cultural models for the archaic socialfunctions f versifieddiscourse.Both of these scholars,Lord andHavelock, relatethe primitive se of verseto a purelyoral culture,whichdepended on mnemonicdevicesotherthan writing or gen-erating public verbal performances.Versification rovided a sortof mentalwritingavant a lettre):ccordingto Lord, rhythmic at-terns of syllablesconstituted lots in which to fit the traditionalformulaicphrases thatwere associatedwiththe traditionalmotifsand plotsof epic action,bothin Homeric texts nd in improvisedYugoslavian performances.Havelock, as he moves towardPlato'sprose dialogues,providesa moreradicalpragmatic nd ideologicalanalysis: the oral recitationof Homeric verse induced audienceparticipation n a mimesisof heroicaction,constitutingn aristo-cratic pedagogy that permittedno criticaldistance between thesingerand thelisteners nd thesong,betweentheknower nd theknown. Plato, on the other hand, coming aftercommercialandculturalrevolutions n the Greek city tates,uses newly nventedwriting o imitate verydaydialogues and to questiontheoral for-mulas of Homeric verse; he and other Greek philosophersestab-lished a dialecticalmode of analysis,a rationaldistancebetweenthe knowerand the known.The age-old link betweenversificationnd poeticdiscoursemayseem to have been broken in the nineteenth nd twentieth en-turieswiththe developmentof so-calledfree verse. ButJonathanCuller begins his "Poeticsof the Lyric" Chapter 8 of StructuralistPoetics,thaca: Cornell University ress,1975) with brilliant em-onstrationthat in modern timeswe tend to read textsas poeticdiscourse,and not as prose,simplybecause ofa typographical on-vention that reminds us of versification:you may recall how heconvincesus of thisby rearranging n everydaynewspaper clip-ping about an automobile accidentand by showinghow the samewords acquire differentmeaningswhen marginalspaces induce usto read them as poetry.Versification,whetheraurallyor visuallyperceptible, s an indicationthat n poetic discoursewordshave adifferent ragmatic nd semanticweight.UsingSaussurean termi-nology,we can say that n poetic discourse the signifiantr mate-rial signifier s stressedor foregroundedby meter,rhyme,andother devices, and thatthe signifieor conceptual meaning is per-ceived in an archaic, pre-rationalmode as inseparable from the




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M L N 209signifier.The rationalist s inclined to believe that philosophicalprose can be used to translatepoetry nd can itselfbe translatedadequately fromone language to another;thepoet is a magicma-terialistwho knows that his "words are thingsbefore theybecomewords"2and that, fone syllable s changed, meaning is lost.Historyprovides us withspecific oncrete examples of how po-etic discourse, traditionallymarked n all oral culturesby versifica-tion of some sort,has been used in the past: in pre-Socratic hilos-ophy and Attictragedy,for example, in Old Testament psalmsand Christian hymns, n epistles by Horace and by AlexanderPope, in operas by Verdi and in songs by Bob Dylan. Music em-phasizes the materiality f the poetic signifier,ts versification; utnotall of the above examples are lyricsneither he Classical or themodern sense. The verse epistle s a genre of poetic discourse thatmust have come into existenceafter he invention f writing, or timitates the familiar letter between friends. It is probable, ofcourse, that before the use of writing,versified messages werememorized and transmitted y oral messengers, ut I findno traceof this n Horace's verseepistles: they re likeprose letters n theiropenings and closings, nd in betweentheyusuallycontainbitsofwisdom gleaned fromwritten hilosophy,whetherStoic or Epicu-rean. More important s the fact hat,whether r not Horace actu-ally sent verse epistles to his friends,he gatheredand publishedthem fora much wider readership.And this s relatedto the factthat he wrote them nverse in dactylichexameters, o be specific).Verse had long been associated withpre-scriptural ublication,thatis with oral recitation;Horace maynot have recitedhis ownepistlesin public,but he did expect themto be read out loud inliterary ircles, nd he knew that at least his more aphoristic inescould be easilymemorized and repeatedin a literature ulturethathad notyet ostthemnemonic habitsoforal tradition.And some-thing ike thiscontinued to be the eighteenth-centuryocial con-textof Pope's verse epistlesor essays, whose coupletswere (andare) stillmemorized:

TrueWit sNature oadvantage ress'd,What ftwasthought,utne'er o well xpress'd.Romantics have called Pope the best prose-writer f his age, but

2 From Michael Westlake'sOne Zero nd theNightController,s quoted by AnthonyEasthope, Poetry s Discourse London: Methuen, 1983), p. 3. Easthope's suggestionsconcerning the materiality f versification ave been useful to me.




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210 ELIAS L. RIVERSPope himself xplains in his"Design" whyAnEssayonMan inFourEpistles.. was written n verse:3

I choseverse, nd evenrhyme, or woreasons.The one will ppearobvious: hat rinciples, axims,rprecepts,owritten,oth trike hereadermore tronglytfirst,ndaremore asily etained yhim fter-wards: heothermay eemodd,but t strue: found couldexpressthemmore hortlyhisway han nprose tself..What about thebasic category hat we nowcall lyricpoetry?Asused by the Greeksand Romans,the word "lyric" eferred o themusical instrument sed to accompany the singingor chantingof

certaintypes of stanzaic verse. But we look in vain to Aristotle'sPoetics r to Horace's ArsPoeticafora definition f lyric n a moregeneral sense; it is obvious that both of these theoristswere con-cerned primarily with epic and dramatic poetry. Horace doesmention as a special category,forexample, elegiac poetry,whichhe identifieswitha certaintypeof couplet or distichthat he sayswas used primarily or amentations.As forpoetry ung to the ac-companimentof the lyre,Horace identifies he following hemes:the gods and theiroffspring, ictoriousboxers and race horses,youthful ove affairsand free-flowingwine. Aristotle imply g-nores lyricpoetry at his most comprehensivemoment, when hedistinguishes narrativefromdialogue, or dramatic poetry,andsees narrative nd dialogue combinedin epic poetry.Our modernsystem of oppositions among drama, narrative, and lyricseemsto be a refinementntroduced yMinturno nd generally c-cepted sinceGoethe. But Horace's distinctions fgenre,based pri-marilyon different ypes of versification,re typicalof Classicaland Renaissancepoetictheory; ambs for atire; elegiac distichs orlamentations, pitaphs,and epigrams;differenttanzaicformsforsongs, forhymns,forvictory elebrations.This veryspecificem-phasis on thelinguisticmaterialityfversificationeads to a corre-lationbetweenverse formsand subject-matterhat s highly on-ventionaland language-specific; t is arbitraryn the synchronicSaussurean sense, that s, impossible to understandunless studiedhistorically.

From the point of viewthatI have chosen,based on the use oflanguage as socially ituatedaction, t s helpfulto turnfromClas-3 Pope's couplet is fromAnEssayonCriticism11.97-98).The prose is takenfromAn OxfordAnthologyf EnglishPoetry, d. H. F. Lowry and W. Thorp (New York:Oxford University ress, 1935), p. 443 (n. 45).




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sical poetics to Classical rhetoric. n the more numeroustreatiseson thissubject we findcategories of love poetry, orexample, thatwe can relate formallyto Austin's categories of performativespeech acts. These rhetorically efined genres of poetry seem atfirst lance to be over-specific nd chaoticallyheterogeneous, ikeBorges' listofChinese animals: thereare, forexample,lovepoemsthat have the formofwrittennvitationso dinner, or of legal ad-vertisements or the god of love as a runawayslave, love poemsthat are cross-examinationson the symptoms of love, or pro-phecies that are veiled threats the "carpe diem" argument),orritual insults,ritualcurses,etc. FrancisCairns' studyentitledGe-nericCompositionn Greek nd RomanPoetryEdinburghUniversityPress, 1972) does not provide any clear theoretical ynthesis, utCairns does set up his own rules forestablishing he existence ofany ancientpoeticgenre (p. 83):

1. The social customunderlying he hypothesized enre mustbeclearly emonstrable..2. The primarylements fthegenre houldbe distinctromhose fanyother enre.3. The correspondencesfthe econdary lementstopoi) hroughouttheexamples fthegenre houldbe such s toexclude andom oinci-dence ndthe opoi, s a body, hould erecognizablyistinctromhetopoiofanyother enre ..When I read theserules I am struckbytheanalogieswithAustin'srules formakingspecificperformative peech acts (pp. 14-15):

(A.1) There must xist n accepted onventionalrocedure avingcertainonventionalffect,hat rocedureo nclude heutteringofcertainwords ycertain ersonsncertainircumstances,ndfurther,(A.2) theparticularersons ndcircumstancesna given ase must eappropriate orthe invocation f theparticular roceduren-voked ..Cairns,ofcourse, does notmentionAustin. But thecoincidenceis certainlynot accidental: legalisticprocedures and ritualsun-derlie much of Austin'stheory nd much of Classical rhetoric swell. The pre-existenceof a "social custom" or of an "acceptedconventionalprocedure" is requiredbothbyCairnsand byAustin.Cairns distinguishes etweenpoeticgenresthat have labels drawnfromancient rhetoricaltreatises and those that have labels in-ventedbymodernliterary ritics, uthe recognizesthatthismightwell not have been considered by ancient theorists o be a valid




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212 ELIAS L. KIVLKS

distinction:for themthe poet Homer was a master of rhetoricalprocedures long before these procedures had been codified byrhetoricians.This idea can be further xtended by drawingagainon Havelock, accordingto whomsome of thedactylichexametersof Homer were themselves ctuallyused in archaic politicalandjudicial discourse: the speeches of the Homeric heroes must thushave been the speech-actmodels pedagogically memorized andthen re-preformedby the appropriate aristocratic iguresof au-thority. he advent ofwriting,whichbroughtthe systematicepa-rationofthe law from he udge's memory, f theknown from heknower, made possible an alienationof theoryfrompractice; butpoetry ended to keep theconcretewholenessoftheoral tradition,which made no distinction etween the speech acts of courtshipand the rhetoric f love.All thismay remind us of the critique that Derrida made ofAustin'sspeech-acttheory n the firstnumberofGlyph1977, pp.172-197: "Speech Event Context"). In this essay Derrida seesAustinas requiring"theconsciouspresenceof theintention f thespeaking subject in the totality f his speech act" (p. 187), a re-quirement that leads Austin explicitly o rule out jokers, actors,and poets. Derrida does have solid evidencethatthisview was heldby Austin. But we can also find in Austin evidence foranotherview,as when he says p. 10): "Accuracy nd morality like are onthe side oftheplain sayingthat our word s ourbond," hat s,that averbalpromise s binding,regardlessof covert ntentions. or anyspeech act to function, s Sandy Petreyhas shown in a recent ar-ticle,4 heremust be a social community hatuses an appropriateconventional and public procedure; speech-act theorydoes notallow forradical private ndividualism. imilarly, ccordingto oneRoman Catholicdoctrine, hereal presence ofChrist n the sacra-ment does not depend on the privatebeliefs or disbeliefsof theindividualpriest,who impersonatesChrist implybyrepeatingtheinstitutionalwordsof theLast Supper. The iterability f thesigni-fier, as Derrida has shown, is intrinsic o any Saussurean code,regardlessof intendedmeanings. We mightentitlethisprinciple"the rhetoricof presence," a phrase coined recentlyby a BritishDerridean (P.J. Smith,"The Rhetoric of Presence in Poets andCriticsofGolden Age Lyric:Garcilaso,Herrera,Gongora,"MLN,

4 Sandy Petrey, Speech Acts n Society:Fish,Felman,Austinand God," Texte,(1985), 43-61.




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100 [1985], 223-246). Withoutrecognizing ome such principle,find it hard to account for poetic discourse as a set of genericcodes. In anycase, classicalpoets ofthepast followed hisprincipleas theyworkedwithin onventionalgenres,that s withinwell de-finedverbalproceduresthatoften toodin a metaphorical elationto otheracts of discourse,whetheroral or written, oeticor legalor religious.And ancient poets, according to Cairns, establishedsecondary associationsof meter,formulaicdiction,and topoi toreinforce he primary hetorical r speech-act tructure f a givengenre.5Poetic discourseas a whole,thoughno longer so privilegedtoday as it was in pre-literateultures, tillfunctions s one ofourmanymodern sociolinguistic iscourses,anotherone of whichisstillphilosophicalprose discourse,recently trippedof itsPlatonicprivilegesby Derrida.

I would like now to suggesthow we mightmove towardestab-lishinga repertory f neoclassicalgenres in Golden Age Spanishpoetry.6After the experimentsof the fifteenthentury,Boscanand Garcilaso succeeded in foundinga new poetic traditionwiththepublication n 1543 of their ollectedworks, ccompanied byamanifesto in the form of a dedicatory prologue to the secondbook. In his manifestoBoscan mentions talian modelsmoreoftenthan Greek or Latin models; this s, I think,because of his tech-nical emphasison the change ofversification, change made pos-siblebythelinguistic ffinitiesetweenSpanishand Italian. Italianversification,ccordingto Boscain,bringsto Spain with t "a modeof composition ['una disposicion', dispositio]hat is open to re-ceivinganysubjectmatter,whether eriousor subtleor difficultreasy,and also to being combinedwithanyof those styles hatwefindamong the classicauthorsof antiquity".The operativetermshere are "subjectmatter" "materia")and "style,"which togethercome closer to defining genre in our terms hanversification yitselfdoes; the hendecasyllabic ine,or iambicpentameter, imply

5 Since completing he presentpaper I have read the mpressiveworkbyAlastairFowler,KindsofLiterature: n Introductiono theTheoryfGenres ndModes,Cam-bridge: Harvard University ress, 1982. Fowleralludes to Austin'stheories p. 6and note 13), but he drawsmuchmore frequently pon Cairnsand upon ClaudioGuillen.6 For further etails,relevant owhatfollows, ee Elias L. Rivers, El problemadelos generosneoclksicosy la poesia de Garcilaso,"Academia iteraria enacentista,V:Garcilaso, d. VictorGarcia de la Concha (Universidadde Salamanca. 1986). 49-60.




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214 ELIAS L. RIVERSmarked in general a new poetic discoursethat entitself o a widerange of different unctions r genres.But Boscaln'sprimary tresson versification id define the poet, whether he wroteepic, dra-matic,or otherverse.As genres, Boscan himselfmentions only Petrarchansonnetsand canzoni, whichmake up his second book. His widow,in herprologue, mentions only epistles and capitoli in the Italian style.The widow's imperial copyright "privilegio") gives a fullercata-logue, mentioning everal othergenres: "your husband composeda satire against misers,two pastoral eclogues, a canzone and twosonnets on the death of Garcilaso, and another canzone; twoepistles one in replyto anothersenthimbyDon Diego de Men-doza about personal matters and friendship),a capitolo aboutpalace matters, ome sonnets and canzoni bythesaid Garcilaso,anottava rima, an elegyon the death of Don Bernardino de Toledo(theDuke ofAlva'sbrother), notherworkbased on thehistory rfableofLeander (as found in Musaeus, a Greekauthor,and trans-lated into Spanish verse), a tragedybyEuripides (another Greekauthor),and some otherworksbythe said Garcilaso and the saidBoscan . . ." When we compare thisgeneric istwiththe actual po-eticcontentsof the volume'sthirdand fourthbooks,we findthatthe satire,the elegiac canzone, and the translation romEuripidesare missing;but theothers are all there, nd some additionalonesas well. The following s an inventory f Boscaln's hirdbook: theLeandro (the story fHero and Leander, based on Musaeus and onOvid's Heroides, retold as a sentimentalromance in almost threethousand lines of blankverse); twocapitoli or Ovidian love epistlesin terzarima,addressed to ladies); two otherquite differentHora-tianepistles, lso in terzarima; and theOctava Rima, a mythologicalpoem, allegorical and courtly, onsistingof one hundred thirty-fiveoctaves, n which twoambassadors of the god of love addresscertainSpanish ladies. In the fourthbook, containingGarcilaso'spoetry,we find onnets, ome Petrarchan nd othersclassical; fourPetrarchancanzoni, followedby a quite differentHoratian ode, infive-linestanzas, with a generic title in Latin ("Ode ad FloremGnidi"); a funeral elegy addressed to the Duke of Alva on thedeath of his brother, n terza rima; an Ovidian elegy, also in terzarima, confiding n Boscaln the grief caused byGarcilaso'sabsencefrom his lady love in Naples; an Horatian epistle in blank verse,also addressed to Boscaln;and threeeclogues, each headed bya listof the dramatis ersonae one eclogue in canzonestanzas, one in




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M L N 215various verse forms,one in ottava ima tanzas). This is the pano-rama of poeticgenresofferedus by thefamous 1543 volume.In a previousessay7 have triedto group and analyze formallyGarcilaso' poems: his Petrarchan anzoniere, centeredaround themedieval first-person iscourse of the obsessed courtly over; hisHoratian and elegiac experiments,nwhichthepoetic ego situateshimself ocially,historically,nd geographically s he addresses afriend n the second person; and finallyhis not alwaysVirgilianeclogues, in which pastoral figures are presented in the thirdperson to singtheirown lyrics, o tell their own stories, r simplyto be seen as figures n a landscape. A more rigorousdiscourseanalysis could define each poem and genre more precisely insynchronic erms.But we also need to see these poems as thebeginningof an his-toricalprocess: the setofgenres foundintheworksofBoscaln ndGarcilaso is byno means a firmly stablishedsystemwitha stablefuture.This has been shown mostclearlybyClaudio Guillen, whohas centered his attentionupon Garcilaso's epistle and elegies asdefiningthemselvesbyoppositionto the satire,which he sees as acountergenre.8 his mutual definition fpoetic genres s shown tobe partofGarcilaso'sown theoretical elf-consciousness, hichhemakes explicitat thebeginningof the Second Elegy (lines22-24):"But where has my pen takenme? For I'm graduallydrifting o-ward satire, nd thispoem that 'm writing ou is an elegy." "Masedonde me llevo la pluma mia?,/que a saltirame voymi paso apaso, /y aquesta que os escriboes elegia.") Guillensees thispoemas belongingto a period,between 1530 and 1540,whenpoetsandtheorists f severalEuropean countriesweretrying o establish, rre-establishn the modern languages, a group of Classical poeticgenres.Rhyme-schemesnd stanzaicformswerebeingused to re-inforcegenericdifferentiation. arcilaso was in personal contactwithcontemporary talian poets involved n the same experimen-tation.Like Sannazaro and Ariosto,he used terza imaforhis twoelegies; like the elegiac distich, hetercetwas usuallya closed syn-tacticunit. In Garcilaso's Second Elegywe can see tensions mongthe elegy,the satire,and the epistle as genres. For his Epistola

7"Garcilaso y los generos poeticos" in StudiaHispanicain honorem . Lapesa, I(Madrid: Gredos, 1972), 495-499.8 Claudio Guilln, "Sktiraypoetica en Garcilaso,"Homenaje CasaldueroMadrid:Gredos, 1972), 209-233. See also Elias L. Rivers, "The Horatian Epistle and itsIntroduction ntoSpanish Literature,"HispanicReview, 2 (1954), 175-194.




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216 ELIAS L. RIVERSBoscan, as Guillen notes, Garcilaso seems deliberatelyto havechosenblank verse as an innovativemove,to distinguish heHora-tian epistle from the elegy, and from satire, also associated inItalian withterzarima.But lateron Boscan and most subsequentSpanish poets preferredterzarimafor theirown more elaboratephilosophicalepistles.It would not in principlebe too difficult,with the help of Me-nendez Pelayo and of Da'masoAlonso,9 o write riefhistories ftheHoratian epistle and of the Horatian ode in the Spanish GoldenAge. The same mightbe done for the satire and the elegy,theeclogue, and other genres.But let us now considerbriefly moreproblematiccase, that of the silva,whichonly recentlyhas beenexplored by one of Spain's most brilliant and learned seniorscholars,Eugenio Asensio.The silva has longbeen recognizedas apeculiarly Spanish metric form,combining irregularlyrhymedhendecasyllablesand heptasyllablesbeyond the twenty-lineimitof the madrigal.But no one had triedto study he silvaas a defin-able genre. In a paper delivered and published in Madrid in1983,10Asensio examines another importantperiod of poetic in-novation nSpain, at the beginningoftheseventeenth entury.Wehad long been aware of the revolutionheralded by Gongora's Po-lifemond Soledades,but Asensio shows that the latter is not somuch a one-man creationas the culmination f a series of experi-ments,with precedents again in Latin and in Italian. The post-Classical Latin poet Statiushad published in the first enturyaseriesofthirty-twooemsentitled ilvae. Statius xplainsthemeta-phor of his title:a "silva" is an unkempt ungle, in contrastto aformalpark or garden, and he refersto "these pieces of mine,which were produced in the heat of themomentand by a kindofjoyful glow of improvisation"." His poems are in fact heteroge-neous in subject-matternd self-consciouslyasual in manner,typ-

9Marcelino Menendez y Pelayo,Horacio en Espania,3rd ed., Madrid, 1926. Da-maso Alonso, Poesia espaniola: nsayo e metodos limitesstilisticos,rd ed., Madrid:Gredos, 1957, and VidayobradeMedrano, vols.,Madrid: CSIC, 1948-58. See also,for the eclogue, Doris Lessig, Ursprung nd Entwicklungerspanischen kloge bis1650, Geneva: Droz, 1962, and Aurora Egido, "Sin poetica hay poetas: sobre lateoria de la egloga en el Siglo de Oro," Critic6n,0 (1985), 43-77.10Eugenio Asensio, "Un Quevedo inc6gnito: as 'silvas' ", Edad de Oro, II, ed.Pablo Jauralde Pou (Madrid: UniversidadAut6noma, 1983), 13-48. Asensio refersus to Karl Vossler,La poesiade la soledad nEspania,whichcontainsa few mportantpages on thesilva and solitude n Spanish poetry. ee also James0. Crosbyand LiaSchwartzLerner,"La silva El suefno' e Quevedo: genesisyrevisiones," ulletin fHispanicStudies, 3 (1986), 111-126.11 n his dedicatorypreface to Book I of theSilvae, d. and tr.J. H. Mozley,Vol. I(Cambridge: Harvard University ress. 1967). p. 3.




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ical of literarymannerism, ccordingto Hugo Friedrich.12 he fif-teenth-centurytalian humanistPoliziano, writing n Latin, haddefended and imitatedStatius'sSilvae; his disciple Lorenzo de'Medici had written n Italian some pastoralSelved'amore.And inSpain the humanist Sanctius (Francisco Sanchez de las Brozas,betterknown as El Brocense) had published in 1554 and in 1596his own editionof Poliziano's Sylvae,with ommentary, or theuseof his studentsat the University f Salamanca. Asensio findstheidea of improvization o be centralto the Latin and Italian tradi-tions, nd thedescriptionofartobjects,or ekphrasis, o be a char-acteristic focus.

For Spanish experimentationwith the silva the crucial decadeseems to have been 1604-1614, precisely he yearswhen in proseDon Quixotewas being written. n 1608 Lope de Vega mentionsthatQuevedo was emulatingStatius. In 1611 Juan Antonio Cal-deron collectedthe second volumeof a famousanthology fcourtpoetry,Floresde poetas lustres,nd in itwe find five metrical ilvasby Quevedo. One of them,entitled Al suefio", s a close imitationof Statius's silva on Sleep; another, entitled "Reloj de arena"("Hourglass"), is a meditationon time and death that s typicalofQuevedo's best metaphysical oetry.At about thesame time,Fran-cisco de Rioja, an Andalusian friendofQuevedo's, gathered ntoasingle manuscript a whole series of his silvas, on flowers, theseasons,and other themes.On the basis of such evidence,Asensioconcludes, the nascent Spanish silva,before 1613, seems to havebeen genre of short poems (less than one hundred lines) devel-oping a singlesimpletheme or motif; t was clearlyopposed to thethematic imitations f Petrarch's losed psychologicalworldor oforthodoxCatholicism nd to themetrical imitationsf the sonnet,the ottavarima, nd other fixed stanzaicforms.Withthe appear-ance of Gongora's Soledad I, in 1613, a silva over one thousandlines long, a major new genre came intoexistence, n open poeticworld of pleasure in the senses and in the intellect, isplayingabaroque variety f nature and culture. Lope de Vega would laterwritea lengthy ilva entitledLaureldeApolo, n poets and poetry,and another entitled Gatomaquia, delightfulmock-heroicpoemabout thecourtships nd fights fcats on the roof-tops fMadrid.Given this diversity f themesand perspectives, an we definethe silva as a complex genre? Or was it simplya relatively ree

12 Hugo Friedrich,"Ueber die Silvae des Statius (insbesondere V, 4, Somnus)und die Frages des literarischenManierismus," n Wort ndText: estschriftfuirritzSchalk Frankfurt:Klostermann,1963), 34-56.




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218 ELIAS L. RIVERSmetrical form that lent itself o almostany use? To answer thesequestionswe would have to continue Asensio's work,cataloguingas many seventeenth-centuryxamples as possible and trying oanalyze their discourse as a special varietyof poetic speech act.Let us for the time being examine quicklytwowell-known pec-imens taken fromthe beginning and fromthe end of our futurecatalogue: Gongora's PrimeraSoledad and Sor Juana Ines de laCruz's Suefio entitled n its first dition "PrimeroSuefio, que asiintituloy compuso la Madre Juana Ines de la Cruz, imitando aGongora"). Perhaps the implicit onventionsfound in these twopoems willestablish t least one centraltradition f thegenre.The absence of lyricdeictics s a striking haracteristic f Gon-gora's Soledad I: there is no firstperson, and seldom a secondperson, associatedwiththe controlling oice of the poem. In fact,this is not lyricpoetry at all, in the formalsense of the word; asMaria Rosa Lida demonstratedyearsago, the narrative ine of thepoem seems, quite surprisingly, o be taken from a Greek ro-mance.13 The central third-personcharacter is presented as a"peregrino,"an anonymouspilgrimof love, as Antonio Vilanovahas shown, "fed up and disillusionedwiththe world, ookingforthe consolation of forgetfulnessn the solitudeof Nature."''4 But,even so, the pilgrim's ubjective tate ofmindis neverdirectly x-pressed: he serves as an alien observerfrom he city, roviding henarrativewitha moving pointof viewfromwhich to discover theglories of a world closer to nature. Among the occasional apos-trophes, n unidentified oice does once sing of thepastoral ife na series of three irregular "beatus ille" stanzas, beginning andendingwith lyric efrain "1Ohbienaventurado/ lbergue a cual-quier hora "). This is clearly defined sub-genre.Similarly, t thecountrywedding, an antiphonal choir singsan epithalamium,orhymn to the god of matrimony,n six perfectly egular canzonestanzas. The old mountaineernarratesa satiricalaccount of theNew World voyagesof discovery nd exploitation.A countrygirlblesses the newlyweds.But, except in these subordinategenres,there are almost no explicitfirst r second persons. The imper-sonal narratingvoice, as it enunciatesbrilliantlyngenious visualimages focussed by the pilgrim's eyes, is perceiving and inter-preting for the reader a spectacularmaterial world of natureand

13 Maria Rosa Lida, "El hilo narrativode las Soledades," oletin e la AcademiaAr-gentina e Letras, 6 (1961), 349-360.14 Antonio Vilanova, "El peregrino de amor en las Soledades de G6ngora,' inEstudiosdedicados AMenendezidal, III (Madrid: CSIC, 1952), 421-460. See alsoThomas R. Hart, "The Pilgrim's Role in the First Solitude,"MLN, 92 (1977),213-226.




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culture n Andalusia; these images constitute he strange new anddifficultpoetry of the firstSoledad, a poetry rediscovered bySpain's twentieth-centuryost-symbolists.The discursive tructure f SorJuana's Suefios remarkably im-ilar to that of Gongora'sSoledad . It too is a narrativewith third-personcenterof observation hatmoves through he world.This isa verticalvoyageof discovery hat s more intellectual hanpurelyaesthetic:the universeofminerals,vegetables, nimals,and heav-enlybodies is seen as an interlockingystem f ingeniousmecha-nisms analogous to such artifacts s clocks and magic lanterns.Some of the images remindus of Gongora, but theyare held to-

gether by a rational and grammaticalhypotaxisthat firmlyinksthem together n sentencesmany ines ong. The central haracter,identifiedas the Soul, does not appear until line 192, aftertheworld of natureand thehuman body have gone to sleep. The nar-rativevoice does reveal its firstperson in occasional deicticsandmore explicitlyn the verb "digo",used eighttimes e.g., 328, 399,460, and 690) in a rhetorical igureofself-correctionr amplifica-tion.15The protagonistSoul is once identifiedbythe narratoras"myunderstanding" "mientendimiento,"ine617). But otherwisethere s only one climactic assage in whichthe first-personubjectpronoun appears with feminine ingularadjective, nd these arethe lasttwo wordsof the poem; withthe sun's return, he author,thenarrator, nd the Soul allmerge na finalmomentof self-reve-lationat the end of thedream-vision:.... quedandoa luz mds iertaelmundo luminado, yodespierta.

Gongora's Soledad and SorJuana's Suefio re bothepistemolog-ical poems in the form of allegorical voyages, discursiveacts inwhich conceptual codes shape the images of visual perception.Gongora's poem has a social,historical, nd geographicalfocus,asJohn Beverleyhas emphasized'6; it thus seems to be more tradi-tionally iterary han the Mexican nun's poem, which has a focusbased on natural philosophy,outside of any social, historical, rgeographicalpointofdeparture.These twomajorpoems illustrateat least some ofthepotentials fthe silvaas an innovativegenreinSpanish Golden Age poetry.StateUniversityfNewYork t Stony rook

15 See Rosa Perelmuter Perez, "La situacion enunciativadel Primnerouefio,"Re-vistaCanadiense eEstudiosHispebnicos,1 (1986), 185-191.'6John R. Beverley, Aspects f G6ngora's Soledades",Amsterdam: Benjamins,1980.

problemas de género en el siglo de oro. rivers. 1987.pdf

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