Baroque Poetics and the Logic of Hispanic Exceptionalism by Allen E. Young A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures in the GRADUATE DIVISION of the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY Committee in charge: Professor Francine Masiello, Co-chair Professor Michael Iarocci, Co-chair Professor Robert Kaufman Fall 2012 Abstract Baroque Poetics and the Logic of Hispanic Exceptionalism by Allen Young Doctor of Philosophy in Hispanic Languages and Literatures University of California, Berkeley Professors Francine Masiello and Michael Iarocci, Chairs In this dissertation I study the how the baroque is used to understand aesthetic modernity in twentieth-century Spain and Latin America. My argument is that the baroque, in contemporary Hispanic and Latin American studies, functions as a myth of cultural exceptionalism, letting critics recast avant-garde and postmodern innovation as fidelity to a timeless essence or identity. By viewing much contemporary Spanish-language as a return to a baroque tradition—and not in light of international trends—critics in effect justify Spain and Latin America’s exclusion from broader discussions of modern literature. Against this widespread view, I propose an alternative vision drawn from the work of Gerardo Diego, José Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy. These authors see the baroque not as an ahistorical, fundamentally Hispanic sensibility located outside the modern, but as an active dialogue with the wider world. In very different ways, they use the baroque to place the Hispanic world decidedly inside global aesthetic modernity. In contrast to most contemporary scholarship on the topic, I do not take the baroque to be a predefined aesthetic practice, readily identifiable in seventeenth- or twentieth- century authors. Rather, I see it as a conceptual tool that can be, and has been, put to an array of different uses—among other things, to situate Spain and Latin America in relationship to the rest of the world. My approach thus highlights the term’s ideological valence, focusing on what it does instead of what it designates. The baroque’s current function, as a way to sideline the Hispanic world from a larger understanding of international aesthetic modernity, came about slowly and in response to political events (particularly the Spanish Civil War and the Cuban Revolution). Other visions of the baroque—other uses of this tool—offer more productive models of cultural dialogue and inclusion. These more compelling visions are what I find in the work of Diego, Lezama and Sarduy. In chapter one I examine contemporary criticism and underline the contradictions inherent in viewing the baroque as an alternative, regional modernity. In the second chapter I trace the concept’s genealogy from nineteenth-century art history to contemporary Iberian and Latin American studies, in order to explore how it acquired its current functions. Diego and the 1927 group form the basis of the third chapter, in which I consider the baroque as a site of struggle over Spain’s cultural legacy, both before and 1 after the country’s Civil War. In chapter four I read Lezama Lima’s baroque in light of his teleological, future-oriented poetics, while in the fifth and final chapter I study how Sarduy theorized the baroque as epistemic groundlessness, arguing that it became for him—and for many others—a literary or cultural substitute for revolution. These three writers present visions of the baroque that do not exclude the Hispanic world but make it an integral part of what it means to be modern. 2 Contents Preface and Acknowledgments iii Introduction v The Baroque on the Map of Modernity 1 When Spain and Latin America Became Baroque 22 Gerardo Diego and the Taming of the Avant-Garde 52 José Lezama Lima’s Poetics of Teleology 91 Severo Sarduy’s Alternative Revolution 129 Conclusion 160 Bibliography 162 i For Dean ii Preface and Acknowledgments In this dissertation I attempt to make sense of the concept of the baroque as it is used in contemporary Hispanic and Latin American studies, and specifically to understand how writers use it to relate Spain and Latin America to a larger narrative of modern art and literature. The project arose first of all out of sense of confusion: I have long been fascinated by a handful of twentieth-century writers commonly called “baroque” or “neobaroque.” But I never quite understood what exactly this label meant, and the definitions I most often came across—a certain exuberance or excess, a convoluted style or a subversive spirit—seemed to me hopelessly vague. Pinning down the term seemed all but impossible, so I soon turned to my attention to a different (and ultimately more interesting) set of questions: Why does the baroque loom so large in discussions of twentieth-century Spanish-language writing? What does this concept do? And why does it remain so unfamiliar among English speakers, even scholars of contemporary literature? In the pages that follow I seek to answer those questions, first by examining the often very troubling ways the concept functions in contemporary Hispanic and Latin American studies, then by tracing its development from art history to literary criticism, and finally—and most centrally—by considering the very compelling, diverse and surprising ways it appears in the aesthetic thought of three twentieth-century writers: the Spaniard Gerardo Diego (1896-1987) and the Cubans José Lezama Lima (1910-76) and Severo Sarduy (1937-93). These writers offer a corrective to the exclusionary, exceptionalist approach of much contemporary scholarship. The details of this argument, along with its polemical stakes, are laid out in the introduction and the chapters that follow. For now I wish only to note that I have two complementary aims: on the one hand, to offer a sort of intellectual history of one of the key tools in the conceptual toolbox of contemporary Hispanism and Latin Americanism (namely, the baroque), and on the other, to advance an argument about the more productive and valuable ways that tool has been and could again be used. This dissertation is part of (and a draft of) a larger project that will eventually include chapters on, perhaps among others, the Catalan art critic Eugeni d’Ors, the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier and the Argentine poet Néstor Perlongher, each of whom has played an important role in the history of the baroque. I hope that the reader will approach it as, if not exactly a work in progress, a work awaiting future expansion and development. Dissertation writing is a long and lonely affair, but I could not have done it by myself, and I am grateful to the many people whose intellectual, moral, and financial support allowed me to see it to the end. First I wish to thank my parents, my sister Amelia and my brother Brian for their loving encouragement and pecuniary assistance over the past years. The University of California, Berkeley and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese provided various fellowships for the completion of this project, and the multi- campus U.C. Cuba research initiative generously funded a research trip to Havana. My dissertation committee, Francine Masiello, Michael Iarocci and Rob Kaufman, have provided invaluable guidance and advice about the project’s argument, scope and style, iii and have above all helped me figure out exactly what I wanted to say. Others at Berkeley and elsewhere have likewise offered feedback at various points of the project, and in particular I would like to thank Anthony Cascardi, Natalia Brizuela, and Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco. Verónica López deserves special thanks for helping me navigate the many administrative labyrinths that completing a dissertation inevitably entails. Among the many friends and colleagues who have commented on or edited chapters, I owe an especially large debt to Karen Spira, J. Bradley Rogers, Mary Lee, Sarah Townsend, Juan Caballero, Paul Norberg, Amanda Doxtater and Laura Horak. But I reserve my deepest gratitude for my loving partner Dean, who has offered boundless intellectual inspiration and moral support, and to whom the following pages are dedicated. iv Introduction to Baroque Poetics and the Logic of Hispanic Exceptionalism “Baroque” might call to mind a handful of associations: St. Peter’s Square in Rome, Velázquez and Las meninas, Bach’s arithmetic fugues, Bernini’s marble sculpture of St. Teresa, pierced by an ecstasy more earthly than divine. More loosely it suggests excess and complication, describing anything overwrought, overdone, overblown. But within the Spanish-speaking world, the baroque carries a very different set of associations, and it does more than name a period in the history of culture or a style of art or music. As this study explores, it frames a way of thinking about Spain and Latin America, their ties to each other, their relationship to their past, and above all their exceptional place inside or outside the modern world. It calls to mind contemporary fiction and poetry as much as seventeenth-century painting, and it is regularly applied the present as well as the past. Understanding how and why the baroque has taken on such a weighty role—and in particular how these concerns manifest themselves in the work of Gerardo Diego, José Lezama Lima and Severo Sarduy—is the aim of the following pages. But to begin with the baroque in the narrower sense: as a period, the baroque extends the length of the seventeenth century, give or take a few decades, and abuts the Renaissance on one end and Neoclassicism on the other, sometimes buffered by mannerism or rococo. In stylistic terms, it points to a number of formal and thematic traits: heightened contrast, lavish ornamentation, asymmetry, extreme passion, a taste for the obscure and the exotic, a fascination with the theatrical, a morbid fixation on death, a flair for the monumental and a horror vacui or “dread of emptiness.” It follows in the wake of a dramatic challenge to, and retrenchment in, religious orthodoxy—the Copernican revolution and the Council of Trent—and it responds by giving the spiritual and metaphorical an unsettling bodily literalness.