Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822346427 ISBN 13: 9780822346425

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2010

Synopsis

Baroque New Worlds traces the changing nature of Baroque representation in Europe and the Americas across four centuries, from its seventeenth-century origins as a Catholic and monarchical aesthetic and ideology to its contemporary function as a postcolonial ideology aimed at disrupting entrenched power structures and perceptual categories. Baroque forms are exuberant, ample, dynamic, and porous, and in the regions colonized by Catholic Europe, the Baroque was itself eventually colonized. In the New World, its transplants immediately began to reflect the cultural perspectives and iconographies of the indigenous and African artisans who built and decorated Catholic structures, and Europe’s own cultural products were radically altered in turn. Today, under the rubric of the Neobaroque, this transculturated Baroque continues to impel artistic expression in literature, the visual arts, architecture, and popular entertainment worldwide.

Since Neobaroque reconstitutions necessarily reference the European Baroque, this volume begins with the reevaluation of the Baroque that evolved in Europe during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Foundational essays by Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich Wölfflin, Walter Benjamin, Eugenio d’Ors, René Wellek, and Mario Praz recuperate and redefine the historical Baroque. Their essays lay the groundwork for the revisionist Latin American essays, many of which have not been translated into English until now. Authors including Alejo Carpentier, José Lezama Lima, Severo Sarduy, Édouard Glissant, Haroldo de Campos, and Carlos Fuentes understand the New World Baroque and Neobaroque as decolonizing strategies in Latin America and other postcolonial contexts. This collection moves between art history and literary criticism to provide a rich interdisciplinary discussion of the transcultural forms and functions of the Baroque.

Contributors. Dorothy Z. Baker, Walter Benjamin, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, José Pascual Buxó, Leo Cabranes-Grant, Haroldo de Campos, Alejo Carpentier, Irlemar Chiampi, William Childers, Gonzalo Celorio, Eugenio d’Ors, Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, Carlos Fuentes, Édouard Glissant, Roberto González Echevarría, Ángel Guido, Monika Kaup, José Lezama Lima, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mario Praz, Timothy J. Reiss, Alfonso Reyes, Severo Sarduy, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Maarten van Delden, René Wellek, Christopher Winks, Heinrich Wölfflin, Lois Parkinson Zamora

About this title

About the Author

Lois Parkinson Zamora is John and Rebecca Moores Distinguished Professor in the Departments of English, History, and Art at the University of Houston.

Monika Kaup is Associate Professor of English and Adjunct Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington, Seattle.

From the Back Cover

""Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest" is an important and often captivating anthology that brings together key thinkers and formative writings on the aesthetic, political, and cultural dimensions of the Baroque. Embracing a transhistorical approach, Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup develop a rich understanding of the labyrinthine and slippery nature of the Baroque--from its European origins, to its adaptation within a New World context, to its Neobaroque metamorphosis in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is a meticulously edited work that promises to become a key text on the Baroque and Latin American culture."-- Angela Ndalianis, author of" Neo-Baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment"

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Baroque New Worlds

Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2010 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4642-5

Contents

Illustrations....................................................................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments..................................................................................................................................................xiiiLois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, "Baroque, New World Baroque, Neobaroque: Categories and Concepts".........................................................1Editors' Note to Chapter One.....................................................................................................................................411 Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Baroque" (1878)...................................................................................................................44Editors' Note to Chapter Two.....................................................................................................................................462 Heinrich Wlfflin, Excerpt from the Introduction to Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (1915).....................49Editors' Note to Chapter Three...................................................................................................................................553 Walter Benjamin, Excerpts from The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928)........................................................................................59Editors' Note to Chapter Four....................................................................................................................................754 Eugenio d'Ors, Excerpts from "The Debate on the Baroque in Pontigny" (1935)....................................................................................78Editors' Note to Chapter Five....................................................................................................................................935 Ren Wellek, Excerpts from "The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship" (1945, rev. 1962)..................................................................95Editors' Note to Chapter Six.....................................................................................................................................1156 Mario Praz, "Baroque in England" (1960)........................................................................................................................119Editors' Note to Chapter Seven...................................................................................................................................1367 Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Chapter 2 from La folie du voir, "The Work of the Gaze" (1986)......................................................................140Editors' Note to Chapter Eight...................................................................................................................................1618 Alfonso Reyes, Excerpt from "Savoring Gngora" (1928)..........................................................................................................165Editors' Note to Chapter Nine....................................................................................................................................1799 ngel Guido, Chapter 1 from Redescubrimiento de Amrica en el arte, "America's Relation to Europe in the Arts" (1936)..........................................183Editors' Note to Chapter Ten.....................................................................................................................................19810 Pedro Henrquez Urea, "The Baroque in America" (1940)........................................................................................................200Editors' Note to Chapter Eleven..................................................................................................................................20911 Jos Lezama Lima, Chapter 2 from La expresin americana, "Baroque Curiosity" (1957)...........................................................................212Editors' Note to Chapters Twelve and Thirteen....................................................................................................................24112 Alejo Carpentier, "The City of Columns" (1964)................................................................................................................24413 Alejo Carpentier, Excerpt from "Questions Concerning the Contemporary Latin American Novel" (1964)............................................................259Editors' Note to Chapters Fourteen and Fifteen...................................................................................................................26514 Severo Sarduy, "The Baroque and the Neobaroque" (1972)........................................................................................................27015 Severo Sarduy, Chapter 3 from Barroco, "Baroque Cosmology: Kepler" (1974).....................................................................................292Editors' Note to Chapter Sixteen.................................................................................................................................31616 Haroldo de Campos, "The Rule of Anthropophagy: Europe under the Sign of Devoration" (1981)....................................................................31917 Jorge Ruedas de la Serna, "Gngora in Spanish American Poetry, Gngora in Luso-Brazilian Poetry: Critical Parallels"..........................................34318 Jos Pascual Bux, "Sor Juana and Luis de Gngora: The Poetics of Imitatio" (2006)............................................................................35219 Timothy J. Reiss, "American Baroque Histories and Geographies from Sigenza y Gngora and Balbuena to Balboa, Carpentier, and Lezama".........................39420 William Childers, "Baroque Quixote: New World Writing and the Collapse of the Heroic Ideal"...................................................................41521 Dorothy Z. Baker, "Baroque Self-Fashioning in Seventeenth-Century New France".................................................................................45022 Leo Cabranes-Grant, "The Fold of Difference: Performing Baroque and Neobaroque Mexican Identities"............................................................46723 Gonzalo Celorio, Chapter 2 from Ensayo de contraconquista, "From the Baroque to the Neobaroque" (2001)........................................................48724 Irlemar Chiampi, Chapter 1 from Barroco y modernidad, "The Baroque at the Twilight of Modernity" (2000).......................................................508Editors' Note to Chapter.........................................................................................................................................52925 Carlos Fuentes, "The Novel as Tragedy: William Faulkner" (1970)...............................................................................................53126 Roberto Gonzlez Echevarra, "Gngora's and Lezama's Appetites" (1978)........................................................................................55427 Maarten van Delden, "Europe and Latin America in Jos Lezama Lima"............................................................................................57128 Christopher Winks, "Seeking a Cuba of the Self: Baroque Dialogues between Jos Lezama Lima and Wallace Stevens"...............................................597Editors' Note to Chapter Twenty-nine.............................................................................................................................62229 douard Glissant, "Concerning a Baroque Abroad in the World" (1990)...........................................................................................624Bibliography.....................................................................................................................................................627Notes on Contributors............................................................................................................................................645Index............................................................................................................................................................651

Introduction

Baroque, New World Baroque, Neobaroque CATEGORIES AND CONCEPTS

Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup

THE CUBAN WRITER Jos Lezama Lima begins his essay "Baroque Curiosity" in Baroque fashion, with a parody, quoting the globalizing claim of a critic he does not name: "The earth is Classical and the sea is Baroque." Lezama's purpose is to suggest that by the time of his own essay, published in La expresin americana in 1957, the Baroque had emerged from two centuries of oblivion (and opprobrium), only to become overexposed, overextended, whatever-you-please. For Lezama, the Baroque had been appropriated and generalized to the point of meaninglessness.

Of course, Lezama's own project was also vast-not quite planetary perhaps, but certainly hemispheric-and it also involved appropriation: he would reclaim the Baroque for the New World, place it in its historical American contexts, and then make his own generalizing claims. Take this one, for instance, in the same essay, translated from the Spanish and included in our volume: "The literary banquet, the prolific description of fruits of the earth and sea, is rooted in the jubilant Baroque. We shall attempt to reconstruct ... one of those feasts, as Dionysian as dialectic, ruled by the desire to possess the world, to incorporate the exterior world through the transformative furnace of assimilation" (BNW 222). This statement is hardly less hyperbolic than that of the nameless critic whom Lezama parodies; at Lezama's Baroque table, we are again offered both earth and sea. And why not? Self-parody, too, is characteristic of the Baroque, as is excess, exaltation, exuberance. Lezama's style, as well as his subject, is Baroque: "as Dionysian as dialectic," overflowing and yet articulated; globalizing and yet also specific to Latin American cultural and historical realities.

To share in Lezama's Baroque banquet and help define it, we have selected twenty-nine essays that trace the reemergence of Baroque traditions and forms of expression over the course of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. In all cases, their purposes are distant from the monarchical, Catholic, colonizing origins of the Baroque, and yet they are also necessarily connected to those origins; they variously follow the Baroque from a colonial mode to a postcolonial one, from a seventeenth-century instrument of empire to a contemporary instrument of cultural revision and renewal. Historical continuity is balanced against historical rupture: our European authors engage seventeenth-century models to critique twentieth-century political and poetic practices, and our American authors weigh Old World Baroque forms against their New World uses. In large part, their concern is literature and literary culture, but their methods are interdisciplinary because, in their different ways, each engages Baroque aesthetics to define his or her subject. Some discuss visual and verbal arts specifically, others address historical cultures more generally, but all of them treat the multiple media of the Baroque as linked cultural formations. Our title, Baroque New Worlds, is intended to call attention to these multiple formations and to theorize a new set of possibilities in Europe and the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and again in the twentieth and twenty-first.

Baroque, New World Baroque, Neobaroque: we have organized our essays into three sections-"Representation," "Transculturation," and "Counter-conquest"-that correspond to these categories, but only loosely, because the boundaries of their forms and histories cannot be neatly drawn. The competing etymologies of the word baroque will give an idea of the definitional difficulties. Ren Wellek summarizes various possibilities at the beginning of his essay in this volume: a three-syllable nonsense word (baroco) coined to represent and remember the structure of a particular scholastic syllogism; a Portuguese word (barrco) describing pearls that are lumpy and irregular; and a Tuscan term (barocco, barrocolo, or barrochio) referring to a medieval system of financial transactions, and more particularly to a usurer's contract. These different usages are well documented, but which one branches into art history, and then into literature, in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth? Bruno Migliorini, Marie-Pierrette Malcuzynski, and Gerhart Hoffmeister favor the irregular pearl theory, arguing that this meaning moved gradually into the realms of artistic and aesthetic form; on the other hand, Erwin Panofsky and George Kubler prefer the scholastic syllogism, noting that baroco had become pejorative by the end of the sixteenth century, meaning pedantic and convoluted, thus coinciding with the depreciation of the Baroque style in eighteenth-century Europe. (No one seems to favor the usurer's contract, though it is often cited-probably because of its baroque far-fetchedness.) Panofsky and Kubler have textual confirmation on their side, but for our purposes, the metaphor of the irregular pearl is useful because it suggests our critical categories. In fact, we might think of the Baroque, New World Baroque, and Neobaroque as a single, rather large, eccentric pearl with excrescences and involutions corresponding to their overlapping histories and forms in Europe and the Americas. Here at the outset, we offer an overview of these histories and forms.

The Baroque

The Baroque flourished in seventeenth-century Europe as a Catholic response to the Protestant insurgency. It was rooted in Rome and adapted throughout Catholic Europe as a recognizable style and content in art, architecture, and literature-that is, as a recognizable Counter-Reformation aesthetic and ideology. In Protestant Europe, Baroque opulence, with its elaborate ecclesiastical and celestial hierarchies, was objectionable to Reformation sensibilities, and over time a more sober Baroque developed in Northern Europe alongside (and sometimes combined with) Counter-Reformation forms. During the seventeenth century, the Baroque thus reigned in Europe in different modes and measures, and we include foundational essays by Heinrich Wlfflin, Walter Benjamin, Ren Wellek, and Mario Praz that describe the related media of European Baroque painting, literature, and architecture. Preceding each of these essays and the other foundational essays in this volume, we provide an introduction and a brief bibliography to place the authors in their historical and cultural contexts. Reading these introductions consecutively will signal their particular contributions to the revalorization of the Baroque, and often an overview of the process as a whole.

The Baroque was exported wholesale to areas of the world colonized by Catholic Europe throughout the seventeenth century, and well into the eighteenth. It is one of the few satisfying ironies of European imperial domination worldwide that the Baroque worked poorly as a colonizing instrument. Its visual and verbal forms are ample, dynamic, porous, and permeable; thus, in all of the areas colonized by Catholic Europe, the Baroque was itself eventually colonized. In the New World, its transplants immediately began to incorporate the cultural perspectives and iconographies of the indigenous and African laborers and artisans who built and decorated Catholic structures. Cultural heresies (and heretics) often entered unnoticed, or were ignored for reasons of expediency. There were also Asian influences, arriving on the fleet of ships known as the Nao de China (the Manila galleon) with art and artifacts from Japan, China, the Moluccas, and the Philippines, destined for Europe but portaged across New Spain, thus joining the diverse cultural streams that over time came to constitute the New World Baroque. And in turn, the European Baroque was transformed in Europe: its materials (silver from Mexico and Peru, ivory from the Philippines), its motifs (fauna and flora, often imaginary, from the Caribbean, the Orinoco, the Amazon), and its methods (artistic, doctrinal, indoctrinating). So the reciprocal relations of Europe and Latin America are the necessary starting point for any discussion of the Baroque.

Baroque and New World Baroque: both designate a historical period that mediates a vast complex of cultural encounters, and both were overshadowed and eventually eclipsed by the Enlightenment neoclassicism that followed. Beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through the nineteenth, the Baroque went underground. In Latin America, it lasted longer than in Europe-through the third quarter of the eighteenth century and in some places into the first years of the nineteenth. But in Latin America, too, Baroque art and artifacts were sometimes destroyed and replaced by structures of a more sober neoclassical style; thus the supposed obscurantism of Baroque reason was supplanted by the supposed lucidity of Enlightenment reason. The literary masters of the seventeenth century-Spain's Golden Age writers (Luis de Gngora, Francisco de Quevedo, Pedro Caldern de la Barca, Miguel de Cervantes), Mexico's greatest poet (Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz), the English metaphysical poets and Jacobean dramatists (John Donne, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, John Webster), the German playwrights of the Trauerspiel (Andreas Gryphius, Daniel Casper von Lohenstein, Johann Christian Hallmann)-were excoriated and buried, or simply forgotten. Baroque's dynamism ceded to neoclassicism's restraint, and the optical exuberance and illusionism of the former to the realist and positivist perspectives of the latter.

In the last years of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, however, writers and art historians-working simultaneously and influencing each other-began to (re)discover in the Baroque certain strategies of figuration and fragmentation that suited their own aesthetic and ideological purposes. The Nicaraguan poet Rubn Daro offered the first explicit (re)cycling of Spanish Baroque poets, referring to Gngora and Quevedo in his 1896 prologue to Prosas profanas. In Spain, Federico Garca Lorca, Dmaso Alonso, Gerardo Diego, and others were also rereading Gngora and Quevedo (the name of their group, the Generation of '27, recognizes the tercentenary of Gngora's death), and in Mexico, another "generation" of experimental writers, the Contemporneos, also studied these Spanish Baroque poets anew. Moreover, the great Mexican literary intellectual Alfonso Reyes had been writing about Gngora for fully a decade, and he was well aware of the parallel efforts of the Generation of '27 to revalidate Baroque poetics, as we note in our introduction to Reyes's essay from 1928, "Savoring Gngora," included here.

In Germany, Walter Benjamin was studying Baroque drama known as the Trauerspiel; his book-length study was published in the same year, 1928, and we have included an excerpt from it in this volume. In Argentina, Jorge Luis Borges wrote several essays during the twenties, not only on Spanish Baroque writers (Quevedo, Cervantes) but also on English Baroque writers (John Milton and Sir Thomas Browne-including a translation of a fragment of Browne's Urn Burial, to which Borges famously refers, twenty years later, in the last sentence of "Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"). And again, in England, T. S. Eliot was revisiting seventeenth-century English poets and playwrights, and celebrating them for their capacity to "amalgamate disparate experience."

The reasons for such widespread interest in revalidating the European Baroque during this period vary according to writer and place, and the foundational essays in our first section reflect (and reflect upon) the differences. It is, however, safe to say that all combine, in relative measures, an increasing skepticism toward Enlightenment rationalism and realism with the desire for formal experimentation. The waning utility (not to say bankruptcy) of the Enlightenment principles of scientific reason, progressive history, individual agency, and stable identity (cultural, national, personal) made alternative modes of expression attractive, and pre-Enlightenment forms again came into view. Even before the writers mentioned above, Friedrich Nietzsche, in his brief essay of 1878 that begins our volume, recognizes the Baroque as rejecting harmony in favor of heterogeneity. In his Genealogy of Morals, written nine years later, he elaborated what he termed a genealogical method to challenge the Hegelian idea of history as linear, teleological, causal. For Nietzsche, the Hegelian model naively projected the outcome of an idea or practice back onto its beginning, imposing an analogy of organic growth from seed to plant to fruit. On the contrary, the object of the genealogical method was to record the accidental arising of things-their transformations, appropriations, co-optations, and subversions-as they became the raw material for different ideas and practices. The Baroque seemed to respond to Nietzsche's preference for inconformity and contradiction: its forms exist in "the greatest dramatic tension" (BNW 45). Four decades later, Walter Benjamin engaged this idea as his theme and critical strategy, using Baroque drama to oppose the idea of history as progressive, continuous, and purposeful. The allegory and melancholy of the Baroque Trauerspiel (the "mourning play") provided the means to critique modernity: for Benjamin, modern history is marked by fragmentation, ruin, loss.

T. S. Eliot also saw the wasteland of post-Second World War Europe and, impelled by the desire to renovate figurative language, he looked to Baroque poetics to formulate his modernist aesthetic, as did Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina. Both focused on the operations of metaphor, and both were formalists who privileged tradition over individual talent (i.e., over the personality of the poet). Ren Wellek addresses this last point: "Subjectivism and baroque rarely go hand in hand. Gngora, though an extremely individual writer, did not therefore in any way become subjective: rather his most characteristic poetry became almost symbolistic, 'absolute' poetry which could be welcomed and praised by Mallarm" (BNW 107). As it happened, Borges preferred Quevedo to Gngora, but Wellek's point remains: the different nature of Baroque originality-the brilliant engagement (and influencing) of one's precursors rather than the projection of idiosyncratic genius-was attractive to both Eliot and Borges as they worked to separate themselves from the Romantic poetry of personal emotion and to (re)establish a formalist poetics. Indeed, Octavio Paz notes the "striking" affinities between the Baroque and the modernist innovations of this period, and above all, the role played by form in both aesthetics.

In Spain, too, the poets of the Generation of '27 engaged Baroque aesthetics to distance themselves from the sentimental, declamatory poetry of their precursors and to promote their own poetic innovations. Garca Lorca's essay of 1928, "La imagen potica de Don Luis de Gngora" (The Poetic Image of Don Luis de Gngora), surely belongs in this volume, but unfortunately we could not secure the rights to translate it. Garca Lorca celebrates Gngora as "el poeta padre de nuestro idioma" (the poet father of our language) and points to his strategies of derealization, which remove the poetic image from nature to create an alternative world of words. Gngora's metaphors do not awaken unknown similarities, but rather create similarities attainable only in language; they depend not on reality but artifice, not on resemblance but disjunctions that are extreme and yet united in the poetic image. The Mexican intellectual Alfonso Reyes, in his essay "Savoring Gngora," invokes Spain and the poets of the Generation of '27 (Dmaso Alonso and Gerardo Diego) in his own reading of Gngora as a poet of "pure aesthetic contemplation," even as he also finds Gngora to be a poet of "physical beauty" and "solid materials" (BNW 175). If the poets of the Generation of '27 engaged Gngora as a figure of controversy and critique as well as a model for a new poetics, Reyes wrote with the future of Latin American literature in mind, a fact that altered his perspective in ways that we note in our introduction to his essay. Nonetheless, in both Spain and Latin America Gngora proved central to the recovery of the Baroque as an alternative poetics that could facilitate the renovation of modernist forms of expression.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Baroque New Worlds Copyright © 2010 by DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822346427
• ISBN 13: 9780822346425
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 688
• Editor: Lois Parkinson Zamora, Monika Kaup