Barthes, Gngora, and Non-Sense Author(s): Paul Julian Smith Source: PMLA, Vol. 101, No. 1 (Jan.

, 1986), pp. 82-94 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/462537 Accessed: 16/11/2010 01:25
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PAUL JULIAN SMITH

Barthes,Gongora,and Non-Sense
R and OLAND BARTHES Luisde G6ngora:
at first the conjunction seems perverse,even preposterous. After all, Barthes himself expresses little interest in European literatures and languages other than the French, still less in Spanish poetry of the Golden Age. Yeton closer examination the conjunction seems more plausible. Commonplaces about both writers tend to coincide: thus Barthes is a professed hedonist, the theorist of "pleasure" in its various forms, and G6ngora is the poet of the senses, the eulogist of pagan luxury and bodily delight. Yet both couch pleasure in the language of difficulty, and both are attacked by their contemporaries for their use of "jargon." G6ngora's extreme linguistic disruption, his separation, say, of noun and adjective, of article and noun, is as radical as the disintegrative poetics championed by Barthes in the experimental works of a Robbe-Grillet or of a Sollers. In particular the formal characteristics of Barthes's and G6ngora's jargons have much in common: a love of neologism and Latinism, a reliance on the figures of contrast and disruption: antithesis, asyndeton, anacoluthon. Like the modern text praised in Le plaisir du texte, G6ngora's formal difficulty exacts a reading that is leisured, or, in Barthes's word, "aristocratic."And like the modern text again, G6ngora's later works are "writerly," requiring the active participation of the reader in the reproduction of syntax, viewpoint, and (eventuallyand provisionally)meaning. The perspective they offer the reader is multiple and discontinuous, an aspect enhanced by the learnedness of Gongora's verse, by its saturation in erudite reference and allusion. The space of these poems is (in Barthes's image again) the echo chamber, of a generalizedand constantly deployed "citation without speechmarks," that remains both anonymous and highly tangible. If all writing may be seen as the intersection of a multiplicity of discourses, then few poets have foregrounded this intertextuality as emphatically and knowingly as G6ngora.1 Barthes, like G6ngora, raids the texts of the past in the production of his works, which typi82 cally take the form of a collection (or "circle")of fragments. The poems I treat by Gongora might be seen as equally fragmentaryand discontinuous. The Soledades, or Solitudes (written around 1612-13),perhaps G6ngora's greatest achievement, are unfinished and (arguably) ill-defined works. They consist of two poems (of what may have been a projected four) of about one thousand lines each, framed in a loose and flexible meter, the silva.2 The narrative is elliptical: in the first poem the (nameless) hero is shipwrecked on an unnamed island and is welcomed by the local rustics, one of whom delivers a lengthy oration on the perils of navigation. He witnesses a marriage and the games by which it is celebrated. In the second, he is entertained by a fisherman who tells of his daughter's exploits in the catching of marine monsters; there follows a song sung alternately by two amorous sailors, and the work ends, abruptly, with the description of a hawking party. Pleasure, difficulty, intertextuality, discontinuity-these are general areas that Barthes and G6ngora seem to have in common. There is one point, however, at which Barthes refers explicitly to G6ngora in his own writing. It is a fragment in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes entitled "Actif/passif": Viril/non viril:ce couple celebre,qui regnesur toute la Doxa, resumetous les jeux d'alternance: jeu parale du digmatique sens et le jeu sexuelde la parade(tout sens bien forme est une parade:accouplement mise et a mort). Virile/nonvirile: famouscouple,whichreignsover this all the Doxa, comprehends kindsof the play of alall ternation:the paradigmatic play of meaningand the sexualplay of the parade(all well-formed meaningis a parade:couplingtogetherand puttingto death).
(136)3

The transgression of the deadly coupling of opposites is fraught with danger: thus in "Arab countries" (unnamed) the practice of homosexuality, potentially transgressive and libertarian,

Paul Julian Smith merely reinscribes the subject in the tyrannical paradigm of performance and acceptance: active/passive. There remains, nevertheless, the possibility of escape, both sexual and textual: est Cependant,des lors que l'alternative refus6e(des est lors que le paradigme brouille),l'utopiecommence: le sens et le sexe deviennentl'objet d'un jeu libre, au et sein duquelles formes (polys6miques) les pratiques de (sensuelles),lib&eres la prisonbinaire,vont se metinfinie.Ainsi peuventnaitreun tre en etat d'expansion texte gongorienet une sexualit6heureuse. is once the alternative refused(once the parHowever, utopia begins:meaningand sex adigm is scrambled), become the object of free play,in the midst of which (polysemic)forms and (sensual)practices,freed from the binaryprison, will reacha state of infiniteexpansion. In this way there can be born a Gongorinetext and a happy sexuality. (137) The transgressionthat will transcend transgression itself and free the subject from the binary prison is thus given a name: happiness, or G6ngora. Barthes's use of the name here is no doubt (to use his term) "reactive."It serves a rhetorical function in his argument, by denoting the exclusion of the term he rejects. The "Gongorine" text is implicitly opposed to the supposed characteristicsof French classical writing attacked in Le degre zero de l'ecriture (32-40) and in the essays on La Bruy&re (Essais critiques 221-37) and La Rochefoucauld (Nouveaux essais critiques 69-88): continuity, metonymic progression, closure. French "clarity," ridiculed by Barthes in Critique et verite, is superseded by Spanish "baroque" convolution, whose obscurities are supposedly more open to the free play of sense, or meaning. Barthes is not alone in equating G6ngora and non-sense. In Lacan's Ecrits, when the "Freudian object" speaks, it claims to be present in those things that Doxa, or common opinion, would deny the name of truth: Je vagabonde dansce que vous tenezpouretrele moins vrai par essence:dans le rave, dans le defi au sens de la pointe la plus gongoriqueet le nonsensedu calembour le plus grotesque, dansle hasard,et non pas dans la loi, mais dans sa contingence .... I roamaroundin the thingsthatyou taketo be the least truthfulby theirverynature: dream,in the challenge in to meaningposed by the most Gongorineconceitand

83

the nonsenseof the most outrageouspun, in chance, and not in the law, but in its contingency.... (209)

As we shall see, it is precisely a lack of meaning that G6ngora himself is accused of and is forced to deny. But Lacan's appeal to G6ngora as exemplum of the alogical truth of the unconscious adds a certain resonance to Barthes's libertarian ideal. The "third term" that will scramble the paradigm and unfix meaning recurs under different names in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes: it is the "perversion"that, quite simply, brings happiness (68); the "pluralism"that transcends "natural" dualities (73); the "exemption" of meaning that is reached, paradoxically, by following to its very end "le chemin du sens" 'the road to, or of, meaning' (90). It is, finally, neither female nor male, but neuter: the only category capable of lifting "la marque intolerable du sens affiche, du sens oppressif" 'the intolerable mark of signposted meaning, of oppressive meaning' (128). Elsewhere in Barthes, as here, this nonmeaning is associated with "utopia" (later "atopia," the neologism less "literary" and hence less compromised by the oppressive weight of value): thus Raymond Queneau's Zazie is a "utopian character," triumphantly external to the exchange of linguistic values (Essais critiques 130); Japan is defined as absence itself, all wrapping paper and no substance, its Zen antilogic "scrambling the paradigm" once more (L'empire des signes 95); Jules Verne'sIle mysterieuse is the empty space in which the heuristic and hermeneutic codes (discovery and interpretation) may range freely, independent of their author (Nouveaux essais critiques 155). I suggest later that the space of the Soledades is also that of the "mysterious island," unknown, yet strangely familiar,shuttling between sense and non-sense. The fragment "actif/passif" itself, however, suggests a heuristic or exploratory movement, which I employ in my reading of G6ngora. First, the construction of the paradigm: the conventional gendering of language and discourse in which culture causes sex and text to lie down together in an apparentlynatural and eternal union; second, transgression: the ways in which G6ngora's reproduction of gender roles and observation of genre rules might be seen as "scram-

84

Barthes, Gongora, and Non-Sense and strong But let this ornamentbe manly ["virilis"] and holy, and not seek effeminatesmoothnessand the lying color of cosmetics, but shine with blood and (8.3.6)5 strength. The male text is authentic and true, the female counterfeit and mendacious. The former is like a male athlete who has developed his muscles by exercise: handsome, yet well equipped for competition (8.3.10). This image of eloquent discourse as the rivalry of trained men recurs in a passage in which figures of speech are likened to weapons: the orator will defeat his opponent with the devious thrusts and counterstrokes of the linguistic sword (9.1.20). By the sixteenth century, literary genre is divided according to gendered conceptions of matter and form. Scaliger's Poetices libri septem (1561) states succinctly that the subjects of the epic, the highest genre, are "dux, miles, classis, equus, victoria" 'the commander, the soldier, the fleet, the cavalry,victory' (45). By contrast, the inferior lyric treats the matter of love: "curas amatorias" (47). The status quo is supported, as ever, by an appeal to nature, changeless and eternal guarantor of meaning and value. The virtues required of the text are abstracted from an idealized nature and projected back onto art as concrete realities. Thus Tasso, in the Discorsi dell'arte poetica (1587), seeks to defend the epic's unity of plot from the wayward violations of Ariosto's romanzo: Thosethingswhicharefoundedimmediately upon Naare ture,and whichin themselves good and praiseworwhatsoever custom .... to thy, have no relationship Such is the unity of plot, whichbringsby its very naturegoodnessand perfection the poem,just as in evto ery past and futurecenturyit has giventhem and will give them. (Weinberg 647) But the object of this "natural" imitation in its highest mode is unequivocally masculine: "The illustrious of the epic poet is founded on the deeds of a supremely virtuous warrior, on acts of courtesy, of generosity, of piety, of religion" (Weinberg 648). But this masculine prestige is also that of the epic poet who seeks to coerce his audience into belief by the recitation of manly exploits: The poet ... seeksto persuade the thingstreated that by him are worthyof belief and of authority,and he

bling" the paradigm constructed above; third, recuperation:the "reading out" of these apparent innovations in the light of contemporary poetic practice outside Spain; fourth and last, evacuation: the provisional and hazardous attainment of a state of nonmeaning or indeterminacy immune to the coercive policing of generic determinism. This journey through signification ("le chemin du sens") is exemplified in a passage in the first Soledad on a wrestling match, to which I give particular attention. But an initial question remains to be resolved: why the association of sex and text? There is some anxiety in modern criticism that genre is trivializing and external. Indeed, Barthes himself makes this objection at one point (Degre zero 42). The attempt by a theorist such as Todorov to claim speech acts as the origin of genre forms reflects the desire to upgrade genre by associating it with the supposedly natural and authentic spoken word. Yet I would suggest that genre needs no justification, for its very name reveals an essential and often repressedcondition of writing: that language is always already gendered, that sex is never absent from discourse or value. The play I make on gender and genre (frequent now in feminist criticism)4 is of course impossible in Romance languages, where one word designates both concepts: the Spanish genero, Italian genero, or French genre. The common origin of these words, the Latin genus, is cognate with gignere, "to produce (of plants and animals)": nature supplies the language of culture. Quintilian uses the same word for genders and genres in the phrases "genera nominorum" 'genders of nouns' and "genera dicendi" 'kinds of discourse.' The slippage between sex and text is almost imperceptible, because of its very omnipresence. If language is a system of differences, then the sexual distinction is uniquely efficacious, because uniquely "natural." Thus Quintilian, again, speaks of a "natural order" that precedes rhetorical invention: "men and women, day and night, sunrise and sunset" (9.4.23). In classical rhetoric (as in Barthes), text or discourse is a body: the figures of speech articulate the oration as the movements of the limbs do the body (2.13.9). But the virtues of this body are male: "a solid and robust eloquence" (10.1.2). A typical passage in Quintilian treating a delicate subject (ornament) hedges it about with appeals to male virtue and attacks on female vice:

Paul Julian Smith

triesto obtainthis belief in the minds[of his audience] throughthe authorityof historyand throughthe fame of illustrious benevolence towards names,and to acquire himself throughthe praiseof virtueand of valorous men. (Weinberg 686) Compare the example of "mediocrita lirica" taken (like the passage above) from the Discorsi del heroico (1594): poema La verginella simile a la rosa e ch'in bel giardinsu la nativa spina mentresola e sicurasi riposa ne greggen6 pastor se le avvicina. The coy maidenis like the rose which in a beautifulgardenon her nativethorn while she remainsalone and in safety al ann whfle r she pn set. no flock or shepherdwill approachher. (Tasso197) Lyric is a lady is a flower: gender, genre, and nature link hands once more. And the floral motif recurs on the following page: Ma lo stile del lirico non e pieno di tanta grandezza ma quantasi vede nell'eroico, abondadi vaghezzee di ed i leggiadria, e molto piu fiorito:perch6 fiori e gli ornamentiesquisitisono propridella mediocrita. But the style of the lyric does not contain as much greatnessas is found in the heroic,but it aboundsin lovelinessand grace,and is far more flowery:because flowersand exquisite ornaments appropriate the are for mean style. (Tasso198) The gender paradigm constructed under the auspices of nature is (of course) in no way innocent, not merely a case of "separate development." When male, utility, virtue, and epic are contrasted with female, decoration, sensuality,and lyric, then each contrast is one not of true opposition but rather of deprivation. In scholastic terms, the female elements are not species relativa (different but equal and even mutually constituting) but species privata (different because of a lack in the second term of the defining characteristic of the first).6 Thus lyric irredeemably lacks the gravity of the epic, while epic (if necessary) can encompass the delightfulness of the lyric: Tasso's examples (224), tellingly, are Vergil's depictions of Dido and Venus as huntresses in the Aeneid. Classification is always already valoriza-

85

tion. And this sense of woman as deprivation is a commonplace of other disciplines of the period. Physiologically, woman is held to be an imperfect version of the male: while man is hot, woman is cold. She consequently lacks the moral qualities associated with high body temperature: courage, liberality, honesty (Maclean 32). Ethically, too, woman lacks mans powers of judgment (Maclean Where woman possesses a quality unknown ^50). in man, it is always a failing, such as the love of ornament and decoration with which she is charged both by theologians (Maclean 15) and, as we have seen, by rhetoricians. The final element in the paradigm, and one peculiar to Gongora and his time, is that of nationality. The poets of sixteenth-century Spain borrowed and assimilated both verse form and poetic lexicon from Italy; yet, in spite, or perhaps ', ' . . because, of this indebtedness, there remained a persistent anxiety about the enervating influence of the florid Tuscan on the severe Castilian. For the poet and rhetorician Fernando de Herrera(in a work published in 1580) the terms of this relation are implicitly gendered: Porquela [lengua]toscanaes muy florida,abundosa, blanday compuesta; pero libre,lasciva,desmayada y demasiadamenteenternecida y muelle y llena de afectaci6n.... Pero la nuestraes grave, religiosa, honesta, alta, magnifica,suave,tierna, afectuosisima . . . es mas recatada observante, ningunotiene y que autoridadparaosar innovaralgunacosa con libertad. . . . is Forthe Tuscan copious,soft, [language] veryflowery, and smooth; but free, sensual, shameless,and excesand sivelyemotional pliantand full of affectation.. . . But oursis serious,moral,noble,high,magnificent, affectionate,and full of feeling ... it is morecautious to and and circumspect, no one has the authority make libertineinnovations. (GallegoMorell313) Where Italian has the feminine vices (sensuality, promiscuity), Spanish has the manly virtues, canonic already in Quintilian's prescription for robust and solid eloquence: virility, nobility, religiosity. The slippage between aesthetic and moral evaluation is particularly emphatic in Herrera's vituperation of the rhetorical features characteristic of the Italians: the lascivious accumulation of words (congeries, polysyndeton) or the unnatural mutilation of them, as with the diminutive:

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Barthes, Gongora, and Non-Sense of epic. As one of G6ngora's contemporary critics complained, he is merely a "mir6n" or "watcher." One object of his gaze is indeed woman: concealed in the trunk of a tree he watches the country girls dancing and singing (262-65). But in one other scene at least (that of the wrestling, to which I return later), the display of male bodies is offered explicitly for the gaze of women. Likewise, when the protagonist visits the fisherman in the second Soledad, gender roles seem at first to be firmly in place: the meal is served by the latter's six daughters on linen tablecloths woven by the women themselves: "Sentados, pues, sin ceremonias, ellas / en torneado fresno la comida / con silencio sirvieron" 'All seated without ceremony, they / The meal, which turned ashen vessels bore, / Served to the guest and father silently' (339-41). Yet the father goes on to narrate the heroic fishing exploits of two of these women. The amazons set out on frail barks on raging seas, deaf to their father's entreaties. The first lands a sea-bull, a feat described in mock epic terms: Rindi6seal fin la bestia, y las almenas de las sublimesrocas salpicando, las pefas embisti6pefia escamada, en rios de agua y sangredesatada. And when the brutehad given in at last The battlementsof the tall rocks it splashed In streamsof blood and water,the hard stone (434-37) Attacking,and itself a scaly stone. Female huntress triumphs over male beast. The second plunges her harpoon into a strange "monster," whose kind (or gender: "g6nero")is significantly indeterminate. Female activity here makes a piquant contrast with male inaction: the father watches fearfully from the shore. More frequently, female and male attractions are counterpoised: "tanto garz6n robusto, / tanta ofrecen los alamos zagala" 'So much sturdy youth / So many maids the poplars could display' (1.643-44); "virgenes bellas, j6venes lucidos" 'splendid youths and lovely maidens' (1.732); "del galan novio, de la esposa bella" 'Of handsome lover and of lovely bride' (1.1043). In such typically elegant and balanced parallelisms, the antitheses of gender difference are subsumed and neutered by aesthetic equilibrium. It is the movement that G6rardGenette proposes as the "struc-

La lenguatoscanaesta llena de diminutoscon que se afeminay hace lascivay pierdela gravedad; pero tiene La con ellos regaloy dulzura suavidad. nuestra los no y recibesino con muchadificultady muy pocas veces. The Tuscanlanguageis full of diminutives that make it effeminateand lascivious and lack gravity;but it gains with them smoothness,sweetness,and softness. Ours does not allow them exceptwith greatdifficulty and most infrequently. (GallegoMorell512)7 The Spanish poet of the late sixteenth century is thus uniquely bound in the discursive prison of binary, reactive oppositions. But this constriction is not experienced as such; indeed, it is attributed to nature and assumed to be eternal. And these oppositions are the enabling conditions of writing: epic gravity is read for its difference from lyric sensualism; Spanish severity for its manly divergence from the genetically effeminate Italian (and the Italian for its divergence from the Spanish). Such hierarchic taxonomies are not extrinsic to the practice of writing but, rather, constitutive of it. Hence their extraordinary prestige. Virile/nonvirile: as Barthes suggests, this is indeed the archdistinction, enforcing value throughout the doxa. How, then does G6ngora appear to transgress the (extended) paradigm constructed above? First, in the reproduction of gender roles. Spanish poetry of the period is massively male: man is the viewer and speaker; woman the object of his gaze and of his amorous discourse. There is no Spanish equivalent of Louise Lab6 or Gaspara Stampa, a woman poet to speak in praise of man as object of desire. G6ngora'spresentation of women and of men seems nonstandard when taken in this context: they tend not to conform to the codes of expectations by which they are conventionally defined. The anonymous protagonist is curiously nonvirile, led apparently at random from one incident to another by the rustics he meets on his way.8 The supposed cause of his wanderings (misfortune in love), revealedonly belatedly, plays no part in the narrative. His sole defining characteristicis an unmanly one: beauty. When tossed naked by the waves onto the island in the opening lines, he is defined with reference to the most common of homosexual myths, that of Ganymede: "el que ministrar podia la copa / a Jiipiter mejor que el garz6n de Ida" 'fitter cupbearer than Ganymede / For Jupiter' (6-7).9 Such passivity is hardly compatible with the hero

Paul Julian Smith

tural poetics" characteristic of French baroque: difference becomes contrary; contrary, symmetry; and symmetry, equivalence. The play of alternatives offered by the paradigm (either male or female) becomes a reconciliation of opposites lent equal status by the poet's ornamental superfluity (both male and female). The rhetorical "body" of the Soledades is characterizedby the facile aestheticism and gratuitous decoration enacted in such antitheses and chiasmuses. Its promiscuous ornament is emphatically female, based primarily on verbal patterning rather than on conceptual coercion. In rhetorical terms, the stress is on figures of speech rather than on figures of thought. In particular, G6ngora favors the linguistic strategies condemned by the rigorous Herrera:the piling up of nouns or adjectives for cornucopian display, as in the catalog of birds of prey in the final hawking scene; the affective emotionalism of the diminutive, so compromising to masculine gravity: the calves and kids of domestic animals; the "bunny rabbit" ("conejuelo") that here need not fear humankind. And these features are, as we have seen, associated with Italian language and poetry. For all its classical reference,the immediate precursors of the Soledades are Italian: Guarini's tragicomedy and Sannazzaro's piscatorial eclogues.'0 G6ngora, then, seems consistently to valorize the traditionally negative, privative side of the gender paradigm: woman, ornament, lyric, Italy-these are the emphases of a work that aspires nevertheless to the highest regions of cultural prestige and to the utmost limits of linguistic complexity. To what genre, then, do the Soledades belong? Not surprisingly, the question is an intricate one and was the source of much controversy at the time of their appearance. G6ngora is immediately attacked for treating matter more suited to lyric in an epic style (see Martinez Arancon 32). The plot is said to be inconsequential and incoherent: Sale un mancebito,la principalfigura que Vm. introduce,y no le da nombre.Este fue al mar y vino de el mar,sin que sepaisc6mo ni paraqua; 1lno sirvesino de mir6n,y no dice cosa buenani mala, ni despegasu boca. ... Tampocodice Vm. jamas en que Pais o Provincia pasabael caso: todo lo cual es contraraz6n. Entera youth, the main figureyou introduce, you and don'tevengive him a name.This youthwentoff to sea

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and came back fromthe sea, withoutanyoneknowing how or why;he servesonly as a watcher, saysneiand ther good nor bad, indeed doesn't open his mouth. . . . Nor do you eversay in whichcountryor province the action took place:all of whichis quitecontrary to
reason. (Martinez Aranc6n 156)11

The plot lacks the "natural" unity required by Tasso, say, in which amorous adventure is safely subordinate to heroic purpose and civic utility. If place is uncertain, then so is time: one critic complains (perhaps unfairly) that at one point the rustics huddle over a log fire as in winter and at another drip with sweat as in high summer. The poet is unequal to the demands of the heroic style; he lacks la constanciaque se requiereen continuarun estilo igual y magnifico,templandola gravedad altezacon y la dulzura y suavidad inteligible, y apoyando la elocuci6na ilustres sentencias noblesy al firmetronco y de la buena fabula o cuento, que es la alma de la Poesia. the constancythat is required keepingup a consisin tent and magnificent and style,tempering gravity highness with sweetness intelligible and and founding grace the style on illustriousand noble thoughtsand on the solid trunkof a good story or plot, which is the soul of poetry. (MartinezAranc6n 189) Note once more the natural, organicist metaphor: "the solid trunk." Like the flighty female of Italian lyric or the mendacious cosmetic abused by Quintilian's unmanly oration, Gongora's text is promiscuous, inconsistent, and insubstantial. This rhetoric of abuse is of course blindly and unknowingly gender-based. G6ngora's improper mixture of languages produces a "hermaphroditic" text whose lack of unity is inevitably compared to Horace's exemplum of the unnatural imitation in the Ars poetica: the torso of the handsome woman that ends in the tail of a black fish. For Quevedo, G6ngora's great enemy, G6ngora's verses are "per-verses," an "adulteration" of "chaste" poetry (Martinez Aranc6n 84). The prudent poet (that is, man) will scorn reckless ornament and sing (in Propertius's much quoted phrase) "things that any girl can understand" (Martinez Aranc6n 103). Lyric is here assimilated to seduction, the male speaker overcoming the female listener by the force and

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Barthes, Gongora, and Non-Sense

and the manifest poetic craftsmanship of the text itself. The embarrassment of G6ngora's supporters is in proportion to the generic indeterminacy of his creation, a monster that appears to transgress the constrictive paradigm of sixteenthcentury poetics. There is some evidence, however, that by the early seventeenth century, in Italy at least, the apparently transgressivetraits exhibited by Gongora had already fixed (or in Barthes's word "congealed") into topoi, mirror images of the doxa they replaced. The womanly man is a frequent figure in contemporary pastoral (as indeed in France). The manly woman is prominent even in the drama of relatively conservative Spain.13 These "scrambled"reproductions of gender types find their fullest expression in the work of G6ngora's most famous Italian contemporary, Giambattista Marino, particularlyin his immense epic L'Adone, published in 1623 but in preparation for some thirty years before. Adonis is of course exemplary of the passive male desired by the active female, and Marino gives the reader frequent extended depictions of his rather vapid feminine beauty. Gongora's praise of the male is timid by comparison. The feminization of the male protagonist in Marino is accompanied, as in G6ngora, by a pervasive movement from profit to pleasure and by a subversion of the traditional epic utility by lyric pleasantry. Unlike the Aeneid, say, the Adone is devoid of all civic responsibility. Indeed, in the opening stanzas Marino defines his work with scandalous accuracy as "molli versi e favolosi e vani" 'soft verses, fabulous and vain' (1.10). It seems that the Spaniards were correct in their suspicion of the Italian inclination toward promiscuous sensualism. Gongora's supporters stress his "sweetness" ("dulzura")and tend to repress the profit by which pleasure was conventionally justified. But in Italy the primacy of wonder ("meraviglia") was the very precondition of such modern aesthetics as Tesauro'stheory of "wit," in the Cannocchiale aristotelico. Moreover, this temporary and provisional triumph of pleasure and generic confusion as supreme poetic criteria is no sudden innovation but, rather,an extension of developmentsin the second half of the sixteenth century. The history of poetics in the period is to a large extent the history of the controversy over new genres: Ariosto's romanzo and Guarini's tragicomedy.'4 Tasso himself, defender of heroic unities, is the precedent

subtlety of his eloquence, as before in Quintilian the orator defeats his opponent with the tricky swordplay of his tongue. G6ngora's obscurity, his "jargon," effectively removes him from this standard economy of seduction and domination; his monstrous conjunctions are irreducible to the binary poles of emission and reception (active and passive) implicit in any model of discourse based, like the rhetorical, on the primacy of audience and of communication. G6ngora himself is not insensitive to these charges. In a famous defense he claims the erudition of his poetry sharpens reader's wits. The reader is to take off the "corteza" ("bark" of a tree or "skin" of a fruit) to reveal the mysterious truth within (Martinez Arancon 43). This commonplace of hermeneutic with its organicist metaphor reinserts the text into the general poetic marketplace; the work may be peeled like an orange (albeit with difficulty) and consumed with pleasure and profit by the discriminating reader or gastronome. But if the Soledades are a natural product, their form, substance, and origin (in a word, their genus) are uncertaineven to their admirers. Thus one supporter proposes, with the poet himself, that matter and style are not bucolic but heroic: Su principalasunto no es tratarcosas pastoriles,sino la peregrinaci6n un Principe, de su personagrande, ausenciay afectos dolientesen el destierro, todo lo cual es materiagravey debetratarse con afectuosamente, el estilo gravey magnifico. Theirmainpurposeis to treatnot pastoralmatters but the peregrination a Prince, a great personage,his of lonelinessand sorrowful emotionsin exile,all of which is seriousmatterand shouldbe treatedmovingly,with the graveand magnificentstyle. (MartinezAranc6n 141) The authority cited, as so often, is Tasso's Del poema heroico. But G6ngora's principal commentator, Salcedo Coronel, proposes an elaborate myth of origin based on the poem as natural effusion of the solitary forest that is the poem's subject. The Soledad is a silva, that is, "forest": as the wind moves through the trees, causing them to vibrate in rustic harmony, so the poem flows from the poet, rude and unpolished (fol. lv).12 Such a genesis is evidently incompatible with both the heroic dignity associated with the high style

Paul Julian Smith for the wholesale incursion of lyric into epic, though he feels obliged to justify the amorous adventures of his Christian knights by lending the events an allegorical meaning. G6ngora's defensive strategies are rather similar. But at times in Del poema heroico Tasso's distinction between epic and lyric becomes tenuous indeed. He speculates that "se l'epico e '1 lirico trattasse le medesime cose co' medesimi concetti, adoprerebbeper poco il medesimo stile" 'if epic and lyric were to treat the same subjects with the same ideas they would adopt more or less the same style' (Tasso 227). As Bernard Weinberg explains, the abstracted, Platonic Forms attributed by the moralists to a changeless and eternal nature are superseded by pragmatic literary forms based on individual literary production and the desires of specific audiences: In this modernconception poetry, moralizing of the end
gives way to an end of pleasure. ... The parts of the

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will poem and their interrelationship be seen in the termsof the delight . thattheycan contribute.... and are with [P]ractice precepts in constantinteraction, no fixity or permanence eitherpart. on (1104) There is something of this sense of fluidity in G6ngora's cavalier approach to the generic doxa that he inherits, in his production of a work irreducible to preexistentgenre forms. But just as the potential transgressioninherent in the depiction of a womanly man is largely recuperatedby the congealed status of such self-conscious "perversion" by the time G6ngora is writing, so the release from the repressive demands of utility and civic responsibility may crystallize as the opposite (but equally exacting) requirement to ensure the pleasure of the audience through a constant parade of conspicuous novelty. In other words, pleasure, once it becomes codified as obligation, can be as constrictive as duty. The paradigm is not "scrambled" but simply inverted, and the term that was once negative is now positive. In the short run, audiences in Spain and Italy would soon tire of extravagance and precipitate a "return" to neoclassicism. In the long run, the decline of genre as universalcriterion corresponds to the rise of a repressive tolerance, which will prescribe individualism as the dominant and more insidiously oppressive mode. After construction, transgression, and recuperation comes the final stage of the paradigmatic

movement outlined at the beginning: that of evacuation, or the achievementof a potential nonsense, or third term, that transcends the deadly play of alternation. I would suggest that the Soledades aspire to this (unrealizable)ambition to the extent that the space and time they offer the reader is (in Barthes's distinction) a-topian rather than u-topian. As we have seen, commentators are uneasy at the indeterminacy of G6ngora's island, which remains unnamed. Yet for all its classical and Italianate resonance, the rustic topology is not merely literary,not purely reducibleto utopian fancy. Thus the newlyweds are greeted with an epithalamium reminiscent of Catullus, and Cupid and Neptune participate in the narrative;but the speech on the perils of seafaring refers to Columbus, Magellan, and the historical circumstance of Spanish discoveries in the New World.15 The dignity of classical myth is repeatedly disrupted by gratuitous humor in which homely matter and elevated diction are made to clash head on: take, for example, the periphrastic eulogy of the ram: "El que de cabras fue dos veces ciento / esposo casi un lustro" 'He, who for near a lustrum was the spouse / Of twice a hundred shegoats' (1.146-47). G6ngora tells us that the goat's death redeemed countless vines ("vides"), a blasphemous pun on the death of Christ, which redeemed lives ("vidas").16 The burlesque debunking of mythology, whether classical or Christian, is of course common in the period. What seems unusual is the intermittence of this bathetic stance, the inconsequentiality of its effect. In burlesque, the literary is deflated by the real; in panegyric, the real is elevated by association with the literary. In G6ngora's twilight zone of generic indeterminacy both terms float in an evaluative void, and the status of each is called into question. Likewise, praise of the country and vituperation of the town are contemporary topoi, rehearsed at length at one point in the poem (1.88-129). But Gongora's villagers do not live in harmony with nature as one might expect but ravage and despoil it for their very cultured purposes.17 One example, as I demonstrate in a moment, is the chopping down of trees to construct a classically inspired arena for the nuptial games. Once more, it is not that cultured shepherds are infrequent in contemporarypastoral but rather that Gongora's rustics are alternately coarse and sophisticated, that they represent no "gold standard" of immutable and natural good-

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Barthes, Gongora, and Non-Sense sciousness that ensures the irreducibility of G6ngora's atopia and achronia, the impossibility of reducing them to complacent, "literary" abstractions that will collude with the passive reader in confirming his or her illusory sense of wholeness and integrity.18 We come now to a particular passage, the wrestling match at the end of the first Soledad, in which I hope to show that if we follow the path of meaning ("le chemin du sens") to its very end, the conventional values of nature, myth, and gender may be "exempted"or neutralized and the expansive free play of sense and sex achieved, albeit momentarily.The topos itself is a test case, in that the description of games, a setpiece of the epic, comes to G6ngora saturated with the heroic value and resonance of the Iliad and the Aeneid. Los arbolesque el bosque habianfingido, umbrosocoliseo ya formando, despejanel ejido, olimpicapalestra de valientesdesnudoslabradores. Lleg6 la desposadaapenas,cuando feroz ardientemuestra hicierondos robustosluchadores de sus miisculos,menos defendidos del blanco lino que del vello obscuro. Abrazaronse, pues, los dos, y luego -humo anhelandoel que no suda fuegode reciprocosnudos impedios cual duros olmos de implicantes vides, yedrael uno es tenaz del otro muro. Mafiosos,al fin, hijos de la tierra, cuando fuertesno Alcides, derribarse, derribados, y, procuran cual pinos se levantanarraigados en los profundossenos de la sierra. Premiolos honra igual. Y de otros cuatro cifie las sienes gloriosa rama, con que se puso terminoa la lucha. Treesthat beforea feigningforest made, And from the common in the shade; Olympicwrestlingground For valiantnakedmen. And hardlyhad the bride arrivedthere,when Twosturdywrestlers showed Fierceburningsinews,hidden more from sight By bodies' hair than by their linen white. The one embraced other next, and then the -One pantedsmoke,the other fiery glowedThe double knot thwarting theirjoint intent, (Likethe tough elms with clingingvines around)

ness by which the inauthentic deviants of the city may be measured. Nature itself is "denaturalized" and can no longer be taken as the origin and focus of permanent value. The Soledades thus seem to foreground some of the problems raised in Barthes's elusive and paradoxical commentary on reading, Le plaisir du texte. For Barthes the true scandal of textual pleasure is not that it is transgressive but that it is "neutre" 'neutral' or 'neuter.' The text is not a dialogue; rather, II institueau sein de la relationhumaine-courante une sorted'ilot, manifestela natureasocialedu plaisir la (seul le loisir est social), fait entrevoir verit6scandaleusede la jouissance: bien etre,tout qu'ellepourrait de imaginaire paroleetant aboli, neutre. It sets up in the heart of (current) humanrelationsa sort of island,manifeststhe asocialnatureof pleasure (only leisureis social),makesus glimpsethe scandalous truth of rapture: that it could well be (if all linguistic imaginaryis abolished)neuter. (28) The image of the island is peculiarly appropriate for the space of the Soledades, at once within the ocean of social and historical relation and separate from it, emphatically proclaiming its status as a unique and self-conscious work of art. The reader is thus (in Barthes's word again) "cleft," participating simultaneously in the hedonism of culture and in the destruction of that culture. The hedonism that reinforces the subject is known as "plaisir"; the destruction that menaces and voids it is "jouissance" (Plaisir 26). I would suggest that G6ngora's simultaneous and contradictory engagement with and subversion of myth, nature, and gender reproducean analogous bifurcation in the reader. And here history is of the essence. "Jouissance" (like the "atopia" of the scrambled paradigm) is not the effete abstraction of a bourgeois idealism but the result of specific historical determinants: "ce corps de jouissance est aussi mon sujet historique" 'this body of raptureis also my historical subject' (Plaisir 99). Paradoxically, one condition of the "floating" anachronisticsubject induced by the "writerly" text is the inevitaand sociological bility of biographical configuration. Likewise, the historical moment in which the Soledades were written is inscribed both explicitly and implicitly in the text itself. And it is the very intermittence of this historical con-

Paul Julian Smith One, ivy, hung upon the other,wall. A dexterousAntaeuseitherbent If no strong Hercules; contrivedto fall, And fallen, like the ruggedpine to rise Deep rooted in the bosom of the Earth. These wererewarded with an equal prize. And soon anotherfour Girdedtheir templeswith the branchof worth, And now was strife no more. (1.932-50) This description may be seen in itself as an "intertext," a space or gap between the successive movements of epic narrative. In the most authoritativeprecedent (Vergil'sAeneid) the games occur in book 5, a necessary interlude between the lyric and heroic high points of books 4 and 6: the love of Dido and Aeneas and the descent into the underworld, respectively. In Vergil, however, the games have a place in the martial and civic vision of the poem as a whole: the same men now competing at sport will soon be engaged in the genuine battles required for the founding of Rome itself, the transcendental mission of the epic. The ethos is patriarchal:the games are a tribute to Aeneas's dead father, a symbol of the values and culture the soldier-athletes are transporting from Troy. In the inconsequential narrative of the Soledades the games have no such function: the participantsare unknown, their motive is derisory: the celebration of a marriage between two (equally anonymous) villagers. Yet the passage occurs in an emphatic, indeed climactic, position at the end of the first poem, and (as G6ngora's contemporary commentators demonstrate) it is sonorous with classical echoes. "Sons of the earth," the wrestlersare inevitably assimilated to Antaeus, opponent of Hercules, who regained his strength on touching the ground. But this is only the most emphatic of heroic resonances: the image of the fallen man as uprooted pine, for example, also occurs in Vergil's boxing match. The appeal to the blind forces of nature (earth and tree) suggests the unmediated closeness of the peasants to their land. But, typically, the space in which they meet is that of classical culture: the colosseum or Olympic palestra formed by the chopping down of the trees. And the trees themselves are by no means innocent: "Treesthat before a feigning forest made." Even nature in its primal, virgin state is a deceit, an imitation no less mendacious than the fictions of classical myth. The wrestlers are naked, but they are clothed by culture: the liter-

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ary reminiscence of a practice (the nakedness of athletes) common in antiquity but unknown in Catholic Spain. Inversely,this classical abstraction and intemporalityis compromised by specific, material detail: the dark body hair ("vello obscuro") that covers their limbs. The wrestlers are at once and alternately natural and cultural, classical and contemporary. This spectacle of the male body is explicitly proposed for the female witness: "Lleg6 la desposada apenas" 'And hardly had the bride arrived there.' The contemporary commentator Salcedo Coronel goes on to suggest that the shady auditorium is intended for the "serranas" 'village girls' and other female spectators to sit in (fol. 185v). At this point, then, Gongora seems to be proposing an alternativeperspectiveto that of the hegemonic male gaze. Salcedo Coronel cites Julius Caesar Scaliger as an authority on classical games. But Scaliger himself notes that Augustus prohibited women from watching athletic contests, lest they be stirred to lascivious thoughts by the naked bodies of the male contestants, smeared with oil and scattered with dust (37). Gongora's insistence on the presence of women at his wrestling match thus seems to carry a particular significance, for it implies that at least the possibility of a female desire can be acknowledged and celebrated within the poem. Moreover, the public display of physicality entailed by wrestling itself is alien to the prudish Spanish male: the commentator refers to bouts he has witnessed in Italy, "donde mas ordinariamente se exercitan en este certamen" 'where they more commonly participate in this contest,' and is anxious to assure the Spanish reader that even there, in dangerously lascivious Italy, contestants wear tunic and shorts (fol. 186v). Another curious transgression of the gender code of representation,this time purely "literary," is the appeal to the images of the elm and the vine and of the ivy and the wall to describe the men clinging together. The traditional meaning of these topoi is generally that of the sexual union of marriage.As a precedent for the first, the commentator cites an epistle from Ovid to his absent wife (fol. 183r). And for the second image he refers the reader to an epithalamium by Catullus (fol. 380r). G6ngora's images are thus deprived of their canonic signification: they cannot mean what they suggest but simultaneously evoke and annihilate the culture from which they are drawn;

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Barthes, Gongora, and Non-Sense it also occurs in Renaissance theorists. Scaliger treats the origin and practice of the classical games under the heading "Historicus" in his Poetices libri septem, affirming that games are mute fictions ("fabulae"), while fictions are speaking games (37). Like the "well-lit body" to which Barthes draws attention in what he styles the small textual "theater" of the marquis de Sade (Sade 137), Gongora's wrestlers benefit from the sensual privilege of enshrinement in desire. The evacuating process is similar to that described by Barthes in the Mythologies, in his famous essay on wrestling. The audience has no concern for an authentic outcome to the spectacle: "Il [le public] se confie a la premiere vertu du spectacle, qui est d'abolir tout mobile et toute consequence" 'They trust to the primary virtue of spectacle, which is the abolition of all causes and effects' (14). Gongora's text, motiveless and inconsequential, embodies the virtue of pure spectacle. In Le_on, the inaugural lecture Barthes delivered on taking up the Chair of Semiology at the College de France (1978), he ponders once more the relation between language and power. His position is extreme:all language is potentially fascist, ever vulnerable to coercion: "L'utopie, bien entendu, ne preserve pas du pouvoir: l'utopie de la langue est recuperee comme langue de l'utopiequi est un genre comme un autre" 'Utopia is, of course, no protection against power: the utopia of language is recuperated as the language of utopia-which is a genre like any other' (25). The would-be utopias of libertariandiscourses of May 1968 (social and sexual) have been fatally compromised by the rigidity of their enunciation. The text itself, by contrast, is the image of "depouvoir" 'un-power,'pushing ever outward or backward to new, unclassified, and atopian positions (34). In this sense of the word, the Soledades can be seen as a "text." Their provisional and intermittent unfixing of nature, culture, and gender tends to displace both writer as active, virile origin of coherent meaning and reader as passive, nonvirile recipient of it. Perhaps Barthes and Lacan were not mistaken in claiming G6ngora as the poet of "non-sense." His great poem might then serve as the exemplary performance of "unpower." 9 Queen Mary College, University of London London

they flatter the reader by citing a common erudition but threaten him or her by severing that knowledge from the value on which it depends. The pure virility of male contention is displaced by the domesticity of marriage. The commentator, however, cannot make explicit such unwelcome associations. He is more eager to elucidate the result of the contest: Descuidofue de don Luisdezir,que seisluchadores fueron premiados igualmente; luego el palio no le 6 consigui6ninguno? fueronseis los que auiaparasolo este certamen? Don Luismadea mistakein sayingthat six contestants were given equal reward; none of them therefore did gain the prize?or weretheresix prizesfor this contest alone? (fol. 183v) In Italy, once more, the custom is that one fighter will take on all comers until he emerges as the unequivocal winner and gains the prize. The bathos of Gongora's inconclusive ending is immediately apparent and somewhat disturbing. Perhaps, however, the refusal to assert priority ("These were rewarded with an equal prize") is not a mistake but, rather, a symptom of a general process by which heroic language is systematicallydeprived of value and assimilable meaning. The reified, "congealed" values of the topos, ever present in the restricted confines of G6ngora's echo chamber, give way to an indefinite and indeterminate atopia, in which signifier is floated off from signified, while simultaneously proclaiming the absence of the latter. In Pascal's famous formula: "Figure porte presence et absence" 'Figures bring presence and absence,' but nowhere more so than in the resonant void of Gongora's empty epic. The significance of the Soledades, then, is primarily, if at all, literary, self-reflexive. The games are the space of a motiveless versatilityand ingenuity, of a poetic performance in which the textual body flexes its figurative limbs. For Barthes, we remember, meaning is a deadly parade: "tout sens bien form6 est une parade: accouplement et mise a mort" 'all well-formed meaning is a parade: coupling together and putting to death.' In G6ngora, the threat of death is dispersed (the wrestlers' performance is derisory) and evaluative meaning with it. The equation of poetics and gymnastics may seem farfetched, but

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Notes
I The definitive study of G6ngora's use of the citational mode remains Vilanova's monumental Las fuentes y los temas del Polifemo. 2 For a discussion of the nomadic openness of the silva and its relation to the structureof the Soledades, see Molho 79-81. 3 Trans. mine. All quotations from the Soledades, both the Spanish and the English, are from Wilson's edition. Elsewhere, unless otherwise indicated, translations are mine. 4 See, e.g., Kirkpatrick'sstudy of a Spanish woman writer's attempt to transgress "generic" definitions. 5 Here I cite my translation of the Latin, since the published version represses the "bodily" qualities that are vital to my argument. 6 This distinction is treated by Maclean (44-45). 7 Such passages demonstrate that the "female" virtues of sweetness and phonetic play were indeed valued but that their position was always subordinate to their loftier "male" counterparts. 8 See Vilanova's "Peregrino" for a detailed study of G6ngora's impersonal protagonist. 9 See Smith for a study of the divergent representations of male beauty in Spanish and Italian lyric of this period. 10Molho cites Poliziano's silvae and Tasso's Aminta as precedents for the Soledades (44-46). For a modern example of the gendered critical evaluation of G6ngora and his antecedents, see Wilson's contention that G6ngora's world is "more robust, less effeminate" than that of Sannazzaro and Montemayor (G6ngora xv). 11The beginning of this passage is also cited by Beverley in his discussion of G6ngora's conflictive conflation of epic and lyric (Introduction 33). 12 See Molho's discussion of silva as both verse form and physical topography (43-52). 13 See McKendrick for a full-length study of this phenomenon and its importance in Spain. 14 This statement is a drastic compression of what was in

reality a hugely complex situation, minutely documented by Weinberg throughout his study. 15 Beverley gives a suggestive account of the "mediated" relation between text and history, which he claims produces the "intra-historic"landscape of the Soledades (Introduction 55). 16 Wilson sees such passages as "lapses from taste" (G6ngora xvii), but such a judgment assumes, against the evidence of the text itself, that G6ngora shared the bias of some modern critics toward unity of diction and sentiment. 17 For treatments of the relation between town and country in the Soledades see Gornall's essay and Woods 158-66. 18 Unlike more traditional critics (such as Alonso and Jones), who have attempted to prove the "unity" of the Soledades and of G6ngora's poetry in general, Beverleyargues strongly for the openness of the text and its consequent interrogative effect on the reader (Introduction 56-61). 19When this article was written, I had not seen John R. Beverley's excellent full-length study Aspects of Gdngora's Soledades, in which the author treats in greater detail many points he had previously raised in the introduction to his edition of the Soledades. One chapter begins with an epigraph by Lacan in which metaphor is said to derive from the "point at which sense comes out of non-sense" (26); and two others are devoted to areas discussed in my study: "Epic and Pastoral" (59-69) and "City and Countryside" (70-79). Despite his interest in the theory of genre, however, Beverley does not refer to the question of gender that I take to be essential here. This article was first read as a paper at the French Research Seminars of the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary College, London, in 1984, and at the Annual Conference of the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland in 1985. My thanks to those who contributed to the discussions after the paper on each of these occasions and more particularly to O. N. V. Glendinning for his comments on an early version of the article.

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Hero in Some Poets of Renaissance Spain and Italy." Studi secenteschi 24 (1983): 57-66. Tasso, Torquato.Discorsi dell'artepoetica e del poema heroico. Ed. Luigi Poma. Bari: Laterza, 1964. Todorov, Tzvetan. "L'origine des genres." Les genres du discours. Paris: Seuil, 1978. 44-60. Vilanova, Antonio. Las fuentes y los temas del Polifemo de Gongora. 2 vols. Madrid: CSIC, 1957. . "El peregrino de amor en las Soledades de G6ngora." Estudios dedicados a Menendez Pidal. 7 vols. Madrid: CSIC, 1952. 3: 421-60. Weinberg,Bernard.A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 vols. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961. Woods, M. J. The Poet and the Natural World in the Age of Gdngora. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1978.

Torino: Einaudi, 1976. Martinez Aranc6n, Ana. La batalla en torno a G6ngora (seleccion de textes). Madrid: Bosch, 1978. McKendrick, Melveena. Woman and Society in the Spanish Drama of the Golden Age. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1974. Molho, Maurice. Semdntica y poetica (Gdngora, Quevedo). Barcelona: Critica, 1977. Quintilian [Marcus Fabius Quintilianus]. Institutio oratoria. Trans. H. E. Butler. London: Loeb, 1922. Salcedo Coronel, Jose Garcia de. Soledades . .. comentadas. Madrid: Domingo Gonzalez, 1636. Scaliger, Julius Caesar. Poetices libri septem. Lyons: Vincentius, 1561. Smith, Paul Julian. "Descriptio pueri: Praise of the Young