Against Apollo Gongoras Soledad Primera

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364 MLQ September 2007

passage (“these so manifold regions of the world”) remits us to a geog-

raphy that readers of Pliny’s original text would have come to know

exclusively through his verbal descriptions. In this way the Natural His-

tory follows the pattern of much of the geographic writing of ancient

and medieval times. It privileges the word over the image, the rhetoric

over the iconography of descriptio . Although it betrays, at times, famil-

iarity with maps and even access to maps, it assumes that these maps

are not available to the reader, and it does not think to redress thatlack with maps of its own.2 So when Ortelius appropriates Pliny’s words

for his map of the world, he twists their deixis toward something that

played no part in Pliny’s writing, toward a geography made available to

the reader through cartographic rather than strictly verbal representa-

tion. Readers of the Natural History would have had to imagine, on the

2 O. A. W. Dilke, “Itineraries and Geographical Maps in the Early and Late Roman

Empires,” in Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterra-

nean , vol. of The History of Cartography , ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chi-

cago: University of Chicago Press, ), – .

Figure . Ortelius, Typus orbis terrarum , in Theatrum orbis terrarum . Reproduced by

permission of Special Collections, University of Virginia Library


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Padrón Góngora’s Soledad primera and Empire 365

basis of Pliny’s description, the “manifold regions of the world” referred

to here. Readers of the Theatrum orbis terrarum find them depicted right

before their eyes.The difference is not just a matter of improved clarity or conve-

nience. It embodies a broader shift in the relative priority assigned to

word and image, a shift that took place during the sixteenth century

and that the early modern cartographic revolution facilitated. While

the readers of the Natural History construct mental images from words,

the readers of the Theatrum orbis terrarum find words corralled on the

back of a map, as its explanation, its extended caption. Although these

readers continue to idolize ancient writers like Pliny, they occupy a verydifferent world, in which representations of space, particularly those

mediated by mathematical abstraction, have achieved a previously

unknown prominence. With the newfound hegemony of visual repre-

sentations of space comes a new conjunction of vision, knowledge, and

power. Yet the skepticism about political striving that is evident in Pliny’s

words continues to speak to this new world, whose new cartographies

support and are supported by ambitious projects of commercial and

political expansion. His references to the fleeting glory of humanity, to

its avarice, its rampant enmity, its violence, and its inevitable mortality,organize his passage as a rhetorical relative of an early modern vanitas

painting, in which arms and globes appear with other objects to remind

us of the futility of this-worldly striving. Written during the plenitude of

an earlier empire, Pliny’s words now admonish Europe’s new aspirants

to empire about the vanity of their own endeavors. Ortelius pairs Pliny’s

admonition with a Ciceronian quotation placed in a cartouche on the

face of the map: “Who can consider human affairs great, when he com-

prehends the eternity and vastness of the entire world?”3 In this way

the map as a whole, image and word together, announces an emerging

modernity even as it voices its discontent.

The Theatrum orbis terrarum is certainly not the only text in which

we can identify the ambivalence of the early modern new world order of

things. The new conjunction of vision, knowledge, and power is a run-

ning theme in early modern letters, both cosmographic and literary. A

number of recent studies explore the previously uncharted worlds of

3 Cicero, Tusculan disputations , ..


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early modern literary cartographies, particularly as they pertain to the

mapping of empire and the visualization of new worlds. Rabelais and

Descartes, Shakespeare and Spenser, Columbus and Donne are onlysome of the writers whose texts have been scrutinized for cartogra-

phies, imperial or otherwise. From my perspective as a Hispanist, one

text stands out in its marginality to the discussion, the Soledades of the

Spanish baroque poet Luis de Góngora y Argote, specifically the so-

called diatribe against navigation in verses – of the ,-verse

Soledad primera . It is not that the passage has never been studied — far

from it — but that its cartographic dimensions have never been ana-

lyzed through the “critical cartography” that has emerged from the work of J. B. Harley and others.4 For scholars working in this vein,

maps and mapping are no longer considered transparent representa-

tions of territories but are regarded as complex figurative projects shot

through with ideology and embedded in particular cultures. I propose

to enmesh the diatribe against navigation in a larger intertextual web

of crucial literary precursors and successors, as well as key Renaissance

maps, and to consider the whole within an interpretative framework

provided by critical cartography. I thereby hope to unlock how this

passage, long considered an island of sense in a sea of poetic complex-ity, engages questions of vision, knowledge, and power with the same

ambivalence about the new age of the world picture that I have sketched

in Ortelius.

The Diatribe against Navigation: A Map in Verse?

The Soledades tells the story of a young aristocrat who is shipwrecked

along an unnamed piece of shoreline and who journeys inland to find

the company of goatherds, village folk, and fishermen. The poetic

mode is predominantly bucolic and the narrative skeletal. Rarely does

the young pilgrim speak, and even more rarely does he act in any but

the most passive sense of the term. Indeed, he does little more than

provide a mute gaze through which the poem converts his pastoral

surroundings into the intricate tableaux of the learned verse for which

4 For an introduction to the subject see Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier,

“An Introduction to Critical Cartography,” ACME , no. (), www.acme-journal

.org/Volume-.htm (accessed January , ).


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Góngora became so well known.5 The poem has proved as enigmatic as

it is beautiful, spawning interpretations across a wide range of critical

possibilities. Some of this interest has fastened on the diatribe against

navigation.6 Góngora puts the diatribe in the mouth of an old moun-

taineer whom the young pilgrim encounters. From the salt stains on

the pilgrim’s clothes, the mountaineer knows that he has been ship-

wrecked, and this fact recalls the mountaineer’s son, who has died in

a shipwreck in the faraway Indies. The recollection elicits from the

mountaineer an extended denunciation of the art of navigation, par-

ticularly as it relates to the voyages of discovery.

The passage stands out from the rest of the poem dramatically. With it, history and epic intrude suggestively into Góngora’s bucolic ref-

uge. The diatribe appears, moreover, “as an island of sense in a sea of

obscurity,” in the words of Mary Gaylord Randel. “Perhaps more than

any other verses in the poem,” Randel adds, these seem “bent . . . on tell-

ing a story and communicating a clear message ” (). That message came

through loud and clear to some of Góngora’s contemporaries, who

identified the passage as an unpatriotic assault on Spain’s providen-

tial mission to bring Christianity to the New World through conquest.7

Iberian epic poems, at least on their face, celebrate this mission, butthe mountaineer’s epic poem in miniature turns their ideology upside

down: Greed personified captains every ship, bringing distant lands

together only to violate them. As Randel points out, the text exploits

the phallic implications of one of its poetic motifs, ships referred to by

way of their erect masts, and so makes Greed double as Concupiscence,

5 I use the word tableaux to allude to the intensely visual nature of much of the

Soledades . For an extended discussion of this topic, with specific reference to thepoem’s theatricality, see Marsha Suzan Collins, The “Soledades,” Góngora’s Masque of

the Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, ).6 See Elizabeth M. Amann, “Orientalism and Transvestism: Góngora’s ‘Discurso

contra las navegaciones’ (Soledad primera ),” Calíope , no. (): – ; Dana C.

Bultman, “Shipwreck as Heresy: Placing Góngora’s Poetry in the Wake of Renaissance

Epic, Fray Luis, and the Christian Kabbala,” Hispanic Review (): – ; and

Mary Gaylord Randel, “Metaphor and Fable in Góngora’s ‘Soledad Primera,’ ” Revista

hispánica moderna ( – ): – .7 See the remarks of García de Salcedo Coronel () and Joseph Pellicer

() quoted in Luis de Góngora y Argote, Soledades , ed. Robert Jammes (Madrid:

Castalia, ), – , – .


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searching for territories figured as virgins ready to be despoiled. The

Age of Discovery becomes the age of rape and plunder.8

The diatribe’s condemnation of epic striving reiterates the poem’s

manifest attitude of celebrating country life and denouncing the vani-

ties of the court. Empire building, it would seem, is nothing but courtly

ambition writ large, all the more vain because it is all the more ambi-

tious. John Beverley, however, reminds us that the thematic contrast

between the mountaineer’s epic in miniature and the bucolic subject

matter of the rest of the Soledades is no isolated matter: it encapsulates

the tension that runs through the poem. The Soledades is not just a

bucolic text that contains a fragmentary epic poem; it is a bucolicpoem set in an epic register. Seventeenth-century readers immediately

detected, and often vociferously criticized, what they considered the

appalling contradiction between Góngora’s subject matter and his high

poetic style. For Beverley, the tension between the two signals a cultural

crisis. In his analysis, Góngora’s text becomes a symptom of Spanish

decadence. It is the product of a time and place suspended between

an imperial heyday and a dawning sense of disillusionment and even

melancholy. The Soledades therefore attests to the bankruptcy of epic

while grasping nostalgically at its fading possibilities. The poem rejectsthe old epic of imperial expansion but attempts to fashion a new epic

grandeur from the humble stuff of pastoral.9

The diatribe itself reproduces such tension, and a similar ambiv-

alence, with regard to other issues. It is not just a condemnation of

empire tinged with nostalgia for Spain’s glory days but also a map of

the world, of sorts, and a sophisticated reflection on maps and map-

making as they were codified by the Renaissance. Its cartographic qual-

ity is a function of its discursive form. The diatribe maps the worldthe way that language often figures places and spaces, by tracing an

itinerary through them. Greed does indeed captain every ship, but he

does so in the form of historical explorers, along their actual routes.

8 “The upright tree serves as a double synecdoche , alluding not only to the ship with

its mast, but to the man whose erect form suggests most powerfully the eagerness of

his desire. The story of conquest is nothing less than the story of violation or rape;

Codicia plays the role of Concupiscencia ” (Randel, ).9 John Beverley, Aspects of Góngora’s “Soledades” (Amsterdam: Benjamins, ),

– .


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Thus the diatribe makes discrete, identifiable allusions to the voyages

of Columbus, da Gama, Magellan and mentions, albeit obscurely, real

places along their routes:

Abetos suyos tres aquel tridente

violaron a Neptuno,

conculcando hasta allí de otro ninguno,

besando las que al Sol el Occidentele corre, en lecho azul de aguas marinas,

turquesadas cortinas.

[And now three floating pines the trident wrest From Neptune’s very hand,

Reaching a hitherto untrodden land,

To kiss the turquoise hangings which the West

Draws round the azure couch on which the sunRests when the day is done.]

( – )10

Góngora’s “three floating pines,” of course, are the Niña , the Pinta , and

the Santa María , and his “hitherto untrodden land” is the New World.

Through such allusions the “manifold regions” of Pliny’s history and

Ortelius’s map, including the islands of the Caribbean, the isthmus ofPanama, the mines of Peru, the Strait of Magellan, the Cape of Good

Hope, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the east coast of Africa, the

Spice Islands, the Red Sea, Egypt, and Greece, appear on Góngora’s

pages. These references have led other critics to recognize the carto-

graphic quality of his writing. Robert Jammes has called the diatribe

against navigation the poetic equivalent of one of the ornate world

maps for which Renaissance cartography is so well known, while Enrica

Cancelliere includes Góngora’s cartography among the many forms of

iconicity engaged by the Soledades , although her remarks about this par-

ticular passage are brief.11

10 All Spanish quotations are from Jammes’s edition of the Soledades . The English

translations are taken from The Solitudes of Luis de Góngora , trans. Gilbert Farm Cun-

ningham (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), except where otherwise

noted.11 Robert Jammes, Etudes sur l’oeuvre poétique de Don Luis de Góngora y Argote (Bor-

deaux: Institut d’Etudes Ibériques et Ibéro-Américaines de l’Université de Bordeaux,

), ; Jammes, “Historia y creación poética: Góngora y el descubrimiento de

América,” in Hommage à Claude Dumas: Histoire et création , ed. Jacqueline Covo (Lille:


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More can be said about the ways that this episode engages early

modern maps and mapping, especially near the end of the diatribe,

when Greed crosses the Pacific and arrives at the islands of Southeast Asia, including the Moluccas. “De firmes islas no la inmóvil flota / en

aquel mar del Alba te describo” (Of anchored isles, a stationary fleet /

In southern oceans, little need I say), we read ( – ).12 In rhetoric, of

course, descriptio refers to the verbal depiction of visible things. At one

time, descriptions tended to be preceded by a promise not to describe

or by a claim, much like the one we see here, that a description could

not or need not be rendered. But by Góngora’s time, words like descri-

bir and descripción designated much more than a rhetorical practice.Renaissance geography had appropriated such terms to refer to its own

figuring of places and spaces, both verbal and cartographic, and early

modern Spanish assimilated this semantic innovation. In his early-

seventeenth-century dictionary of Castilian, Sebastián de Covarrubias

defines describir as “narrar y señalar con la pluma algún lugar o caso

acontecido, tan al vivo como si lo dibujara” (narrate and signal with

a plume some place or past event, as vividly as if one had drawn it)

and a descripción as “la tal narración o escrita o delineada, como la

descripción de una provincia o mapa” (such a narration, either writtenor delineated, as the description of a province or map).13 Góngora’s

assurance that he need say little about the islands of the eastern seas,

therefore, should yield to a description of those very islands that con-

temporaries could have interpreted as a verbal map, more or less inter-

changeable with an iconographic one.

The verses that follow, however, represent nothing of the sort:

De firmes islas no la inmóvil flota

en aquel mar del Alba te describocuyo número, ya que no lascivo,

Presses Universitaires de Lille, ), ; Enrica Cancelliere, “Stereotipie iconiche

nelle ‘Soledades’ di Góngora,” in Da Góngora a Góngora: Verona, – ottobre , ed.

Giulia Poggi (Pisa: Edicioni ETS, ), – .12 Edward Meryon Wilson’s translation of the Soledades preserves the crucial

verb but renders these and other verses rather awkwardly (Solitudes , trans. Edward

Meryon Wilson, rev. ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ]).13 Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española , ed.

Felipe C. R. Maldonado, rev. Manuel Camarero (Madrid: Castalia, ), ; my

translation.


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por lo bello, agradable y por lo vario

la dulce confusión hacer podía

que en los blancos estanques del Eurotala virginal desnuda montería,haciendo escollos o de mármol pario

o de terso marfil sus miembros bellos,

que pudo bien Acteón perderse en ellos.

[Of anchored isles, a stationary fleet In southern oceans, little need I say,

Whose numbers — though they wake not lust — display

Such charm, such beauty, such variety

Stirring to soft bewilderment, as whenThe limpid waters of Eurotas greet

The naked virgins of Diana’s train,

Their lovely limbs like burnished ivory Or cliffs of Parian marble — for whose sight

Actaeon well might hazard life and light.]

( – )

If this is “description,” if this is “mapping,” then it is clearly not of a

conventional kind. Descriptions, like maps, are often associated with

the representational transparency that lies at the heart of the sciencesof measurement. When we “map things out” in today’s English, as it was

done in early modern Spanish, we lay them out as clearly as possible. We

reduce and control complexity for the sake of comprehensibility. But

here the places in question are not even named, much less described,

made present to the mind’s eye. Instead, they are at once figured and

displaced by an allusion to Actaeon’s fateful discovery of Diana and

her nymphs bathing in the Eurota. The fragmented geography of the

Southeast Asian archipelago becomes the scattered white body parts

(“miembros” [limbs]) of the women in these waters. By implication,Greed becomes the hunter Actaeon, stumbling upon the virgin goddess

and her companions, only to lose first his heart and then his life. Thus

Greed’s rapine voyage takes a decisive turn. Disaster looms as Greed

finally encounters a virgin who is also a femme fatale.

What emerges from this “description”? Not a visual image of the

Spice Islands, certainly, but a claim about their moral significance as

the source of that seductive but dangerous commodity that will destroy

those who make it the object of their quest. So, too, does one purpose


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of the diatribe against navigation come to light. It not only maps the

world with words but engages its era’s understanding of maps and

mapping.

Epic Mappaemundi and Renaissance Maps

One way to show how the diatribe does so is to compare it to the so-

called mappamundi episode, a geographic or even cosmographical inter-

lude that appears in much Iberian heroic verse narrative from the Mid-

dle Ages and the Renaissance.14 Such episodes usually take the form of

a supernatural vision of the whole earth made available to a privilegedobserver in a dream, through a magical device, or on a winged mount.

This observer sees the world as we do on a map. As readers, we have it

mapped for us by a discursive itinerary built from a list of place-names

and occasional descriptive or historical observations. In the Araucana

of Alonso de Ercilla (), for example, a Chilean sorcerer, Fitón, con-

jures a vision of the world in his crystal ball, designating locations as

they appear with place-names predicated to verbs of vision, ver and

mirar , and uttered in the imperative mode. In the following excerpt,

the Araucana ’s cartography spans Chile from north to south and thencrosses the Pacific to the Spice Islands:

Vees la ciudad de Penco y el pujante

Arauco, estado libre y poderoso;

Cañete, la Imperial, y hacia el levantela Villa Rica y el volcán fogoso;

Valdivia, Osorno, el lago y adelante

las islas y archipiélago famoso

y siguiendo la costa al sur derecho

Chiloé, Coronados el estrecho

14 By beginning my account in this way, I hope to contribute to a trend on the

part of scholars of early modern Spain to pay close attention to texts and issues once

considered the exclusive province of colonial Latin American studies. See, e.g., Eliz-

abeth B. Davis, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain (Columbia: University

of Missouri Press, ); Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam,

and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); and Barbara

Simerka, Discourses of Empire: Counter-epic Literature in Early Modern Spain (University

Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, ). For the development of the mappa-

mundi episode, with special emphasis on Camões and Ercilla, see James Nicolopulos,

The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in “La Araucana” and “Os Lusía-

das” (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, ), – .


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por donde Magallanes con su gente

al Mar del Sur salió desembocando,

y tomando la vuelta del ponienteal Maluco guió norduesteando.

Vees las islas de Acaca y Zabú enfrente,

y a Matán, do murió al fin peleando;Bruney, Bohol, Gilolo, Terrenate,

Machicán, Mutir, Badán, Tidore y Mate.

[See the city of Penco and thriving Arauco, a free and powerful state;

Cañete, the Imperial City, and toward the east

Villa Rica and the fiery volcano;

Valdivia, Osorno, the lake, and farther onthe islands and the famous archipelago

and, following the coast straight south,

Chiloé, Coronados, and the strait

through which Magellan with his people

flowed out into the South Sea

and, taking a westward turn

toward the Moluccas, sailed northwestward.See the islands of Acaca and Cebu ahead,

and Macan, where he died in the end fighting;Brunei, Bohol, Gillolo, Terenate,

Machicán, Mutir, Badán, Tidore and Mate.]15

Names, a discursive itinerary, and a privileged observer: these are the

building blocks of verse cartography in Iberian epic.

For Jammes, passages like these from Ercilla represent only dry

and prosaic “rhymed history,” not true poetry. Not until Góngora’s dia-

tribe against navigation, Jammes argues, do we find a truly poetic car-

tography in verse (“Historia y creación,” ). Ercilla himself might havedisagreed. Successive editions of the Araucana attest to the intensity

with which he revised this episode, apparently eager to get the musi-

cality of these octaves just right (Nicolopulos, ). Nonetheless, there

is no denying that Ercilla’s cartography and others like it fall flat as

poetry, at least for the modern reader. One reason is the way that the

sorceror’s commands to look and see implicate the reader, arousing a

desire to participate in the vision enjoyed by the observer. But while the

15 Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, La Araucana , ed. Isaías Lerner (Madrid: Cátedra,

), . – .


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observer may see the world in Fitón’s crystal ball, the reader sees only

words on a page. Can the musicality of the verses compensate for the

poverty of the episode’s ekphrastic power? Perhaps, but while rhythmand meter can stir one’s emotions, they cannot convert place-names

into pictures for the imagination. The reader is left with the difficulty

noted by Polybius in his Histories , that place-names are meaningless

to people who know nothing about the places they name, that their

meanings are limited to those that the reader brings to them or that

the historian invests them with:

I am of the opinion that as regards known countries the mention of

names is of no small assistance in recalling them to our memory, butin the case of unknown lands such citation of names is just of as much

value as if they were unintelligible and inarticulate sounds. For the

mind here has nothing to lean upon for support and cannot connectthe words with anything known to it, so that the narrative is associ-

ated with nothing in the reader’s mind, and therefore meaningless to

him. We must therefore make it possible when speaking of unknown

places to convey to the reader a more or less real and familiar notionof them.16

For the reader who knows little or nothing about the places named inErcilla’s mappamundi , the episode collapses into “dry nomenclature,”

whose interest was exhausted when the New World ceased to be new.17

Why, then, would it occur to Ercilla and others to compose their

verse cartographies in this way? One could answer that the toponymic

obsession so evident in their mappamundi episodes was by no means

unique to these poets. Ptolemy’s Geography bequeathed to the Renais-

sance a cartography centered on the toponym and on the accurate

location of named places in the abstract space of a coordinate grid.

This cartography suited a culture only then becoming curious about

terrae incognitae and the possibilities they offered for commercial, politi-

cal, and cultural expansion.18 To name and locate a place was to make

16 Polybius, The Histories , trans. W. R. Paton, vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, – ), :.17 Alphonse Royer, Etude littéraire sur l’“Araucana” d’Ercilla (Dijon: Arantière,

), .18 “Nomenclature,” Christian Jacob argues, became over time “one of the essen-

tial components” of cartography. The toponym, “the principal information conveyed

by the map,” supported the activities of travel and administration that governed the


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it part of the known world and thus render it available for trade, mis-

sionary work, conquest, governance. It was also to experience, on some

level, the thrill of exotic novelty, the excitement of an ever-expandinggeographic copia . Thus it should come as no surprise that Peter Apian’s

instructions for using the new maps, in his popular Cosmographia (),

are limited to procedures for locating places on maps by means of grid

coordinates. In one illustration, the city of Prague is pinpointed in an

almost empty cartographic space with intersecting threads held by four

disembodied hands. Only a few hills in profile, set off in a corner, share

the space with that and other named locations (fig. ).19 Nor should it

come as a surprise that in subsequent editions of his influential map ofEurope, Gerardus Mercator’s success was measured by the number of

place-names he added without sacrificing elegance or legibility.20 The

history of verse mappaemundi shows a similar logic of accumulation.

With each successive map, the list of place-names grows longer, and

presumably so does the sense of wonder and power.

The analogy between epic mappaemundi and Renaissance mapmak-

ing is borne out in another central feature of these episodes: their com-

manding point of view. Denis Cosgrove, who calls this godlike point of

view “Apollo’s eye,” characterizes it as a “synoptic and omniscient, intel-lectually detached” gaze that looks down on the earth. Verses prefatory

to the Theatrum orbis terrarum , for example, place Ortelius himself in

Apollo’s chariot and compare him to Phoebus, who sees all things.21

Indeed, the Apollonian perspective has been put to various purposes

on maps and in geographic writing throughout history. In some cases,

as in Ortelius’s Typus orbis terrarum , the view of the earth from on high

triggers a Stoic recognition of the insignificance of human affairs. In

others, this view is part of the hermetic, totalizing vision associated

with the Platonic or Neoplatonic ascensus . In still others, the view of

production of so many Renaissance maps (L’empire des cartes: Approche théorique de la car-

tographie à travers l’histoire [Paris: Michel, ], – ; my translation).19 Peter Apian and Frisius Gemma, Cosmographia Petri Apiani (Antwerp, ), .20 Nicholas Crane, Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet (New York: Holt,

), .21 Denis Cosgrove, Apollo’s Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western

Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ), – .


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the world from on high magnifies certain human accomplishments,

particularly imperial ones; the complex of geographic object and privi-

leged observer celebrates an emerging conjunction of vision, knowl-

edge, and power. For instance, in the anonymous thirteenth-century

Libro de Alexandre , an important precursor of early modern verse car-

tography, Alexander the Great enjoys the seductions and satisfactions

of the map’s panoptic illusion:

Figure . Illustration from Cosmographia Petri Apiani . Reproduced by permission of

Special Collections, University of Virginia Library


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by or for the Spanish Hapsburgs, they could easily serve the ideology of

world empire. On the map that accompanied Apian’s Cosmographia , for

example, Charles V takes his place astride the world alongside Jupiter

rather than Apollo (fig. ). The world is literally at the emperor’s feet.

Iberian verse cartography developed in tandem with this vein of

neo-Ptolemaic cartography. There is no doubting the imperial politics

of the mappamundi episode in the tenth canto of Camões’s Lusíadas ,

and however possible it may be to interpret the equivalent episode of

the Araucana as a parody of verse mappaemundi , it seems on its face tooffer a similar celebration of imperial might. The poem is dedicated

and addressed to Philip II. It is he, its ideal reader, who is implicated in

the sorceror’s commands to look and see. It is he who is invited to enjoy

the panoptic fantasies of Ercilla’s map.

Figure . Map of the world from Cosmographia Petri Apiani


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Cartographies and Countercartographies in the Diatribe

Some of Góngora’s critics, comparing the Soledades with early Flemishlandscape paintings, find in it the intricate variety of a painting by the

elder Brueghel and thus a similar visual clarity and beauty.25 Others,

however, question its lucidity, comparing its aesthetics with the chiar-

oscuro of Italian baroque painting.26 Working in this vein, Humberto

Huergo Cardoso and Enrica Cancelliere fasten on the verses that intro-

duce a landscape description at the moment when the pilgrim is taken

to a rocky crag by another old mountaineer and is invited to look out

across the countryside ( – ). The pilgrim climbs to the top, only

to find the perspective confounded by the mist, the glare of the sun,and the distance:

Si mucho poco mapa les despliega,

mucho es más lo que (nieblas desatando)

confunde el Sol y la distancia niega.

[Much as the little map he sees displays,

Still more, in cloud or sunshine ill-defined,

Is hid in distance or concealed by haze.]

( – )

Huergo notes how this passage “scratches out” the “two emblems

par excellence of vision — the map and the sun.” What this map does

not show is greater than what it reveals. What the sun illuminates is

greater than what the dissolving mists conceal. Despite his perspec-

tive, the pilgrim “does not dominate the landscape, but is dominated

by it” ().27 According to Huergo, the chiaroscuro aesthetics of this

passage is characteristic of the Soledades as a whole. Here we see how

the pilgrim assumes what should be the Apollonian height of the car-

25 Jammes resuscitates this comparison, originally proposed in the seventeenth

century by Francisco Fernández de Córdoba (see introduction to Góngora, Soledades ,

– ).26 For the comparison with painting see Humberto Huergo Cardoso, “Las Sole-

dades de Góngora: ¿‘Lienço de Flandes’ o ‘pintura valiente’?” La Torre , nos. –

(): – .27 Cancelliere, who construes the passage similarly, interprets its elaboration of

the rhetoric of pictorialism in ways that point toward metarepresentational issues

( – ).


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tographic observer but instead finds himself in competition with the

sun for visual mastery of the landscape. The glare of the sun in the

dissolving mists, however, denies the pilgrim the optical clarity typicalof cartography’s claims for itself.28 Furthermore, it is the highlander

who must draw his attention to the ruins of fortifications that dot the

landscape spread out beneath him. Half obscured by vegetation, these

ruins hint of epics all but forgotten ( – ). What is visible, then, can

be only half seen, and that, in turn, can be only dimly understood. The

pilgrim may be a spectator, but he does not watch with Apollo’s eye. In

this way the passage marks Góngora’s purpose, not to reproduce the

visible clarity of Brueghel (or of his friend Ortelius) but to bring intoquestion the conjunction of cartographic vision, geographic knowl-

edge, and imperial power.

The diatribe against navigation also subverts claims to clear opti-

cal mastery. For one thing, the pilgrim does not enjoy the privileges

accorded his predecessors in epic poems. No marvelous beast bears

him aloft. No magical device allows him to see what he could not other-

wise see. He encounters Góngora’s poetic cartography strictly as lan-

guage. Readers are not invited to imagine what he would see if he were

indeed riding a hippogriff, and thus they, like him, must deal directly with Góngora’s words. There, moreover, several solar images continue

the work begun by the image at the outset of the landscape descrip-

tion. Just as the pilgrim on the promontory has sought to rival the sun’s

Apollonian command of the countryside, so Greed seeks to attain that

same optical mastery. The sun rises from and sets in the ocean every

day, but it does not want to know “los términos” (the boundaries) of

Ocean’s “monarquía” (realm) (, ). The Apollonian point of view

becomes something to which even Apollo does not aspire.

Greed nonetheless captains a ship, Magellan’s Victoria , which man-

ages to emulate Apollo’s chariot:

Zodíaco después fue cristalino

a glorïoso pino,émulo vago del ardiente coche

del Sol . . .

28 See also Huergo’s () and Cancelliere’s () accounts of this passage.


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[Next, water made the crystal zodiac

Where, in its wandering track,

A glorious pine rivaled the burning flight Of Phoebus’ axle-tree]

( – )

When the Victoria becomes the new solar chariot, tracing its way along

the crystalline zodiac of its maritime route, Greed has in some mea-

sure achieved the very perspective that has eluded the pilgrim and that

the sun itself has shunned. But that measure is not Góngora’s. The

route of the Victoria emulates that of Apollo’s chariot only insofar as it

encompasses the earth. It remains seabound, “crystalline” rather than“celestial.” In Góngora’s “émulo vago” (wandering rival) it is easy to

identify both the adjective’s connotation, “wandering,” and a telling

denotation, the “vain” of “en vago” or “in vain.” The definition offered

by the eighteenth-century Diccionario de la lengua castellana is particu-

larly noteworthy: “En vago . . . vale sin firmeza, ni consistencia, o con

riesgo de caerse” (In vain . . . means without strength or consistency,

or with risk of falling).29 The panoptic fantasies of cartographic vision

appear as vain desires in the service of base ambition.

But neither the refusal to adopt a privileged point of view throughfictional, supernatural device nor the jibes at Apollonian pretension

through bits of solar imagery represent Góngora’s principal strategy for

emulating and subverting the optical mastery encoded by both Renais-

sance maps and epic poems. No, Góngora’s principal strategy revolves

around his treatment of place-names, the building blocks of Renais-

sance maps and verse mappaemundi , and the ways that that treatment

raises questions about seeing and not-seeing. The contrast between

Góngora’s diatribe and his epic precursors could not be more strik-

ing. While mappaemundi like Ercilla’s are built out of lists of toponyms,

Góngora’s diatribe does not provide a single place-name outside the

Greco-Latin world (Jammes, “Historia y creación,” – ). Rather

than submit names to the exigencies of rhyme and meter, Góngora

refers to places — for instance, the isthmus of Panama — by means of

erudite allusions and elaborate circumlocutions:

29 Real Academia Española, Diccionario de la lengua castellana . . . , vol. (Madrid,

), .


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to any geographic location but to the historical act of its discovery and

naming (introduction, ). Jammes is right, but there is more to be

discovered here, by way of contrast with Ercilla. Although Ercilla’s map-

pamundi is built primarily out of a list of place-names, it also rests on the

sort of circumlocution that we see in Góngora. The Araucana maps the

Strait of Magellan as the “estrecho,” the strait, “through which Magel-

lan with his people flowed out into the South Sea.” Like Góngora’s

passage on the Cape of Good Hope, Ercilla’s avoids the proper name

but includes the crucial common noun. Like Góngora, Ercilla gives

meaning and particularity to this noun by referring to the historical

voyage that gave it its name. But in Ercilla the pressure of the list ofnames compels us to identify the circumlocution as a part of the series,

an alternative toponym. We have no doubt that the Strait of Magellan

has been named, just as the places in the series before and after it are

also named. In Góngora, by contrast, the absence of the list keeps us

from reducing his circumlocution to the toponym it replaces. It is not,

then, that we have an event rather than a place, or an event that names

a place. Instead, we have an event haunted by the place-name that it

creates. The place-name “Cape of Good Hope” is there, tempting us

to catch a glimpse of it but never becoming fully present. The samecould be said of other place-names, like “the isthmus of Panama” or

“the Spice Islands,” that appear only by way of elaborately allusive cir-

cumlocutions. They too have been reduced to phantasms, albeit even

more ethereal than “the Cape of Good Hope,” barely visible but not

entirely exorcised.

To put it another way, Góngora’s text, unlike Ercilla’s toponyms,

insists on a presence of its own: it refuses reduction to the indexical

function, and therefore the transparency, of the toponym. And the

insistence of the text on its own presence consigns its referents to a

semiotic limbo, neither there nor not-there, neither present nor absent.

Like the love objects of Petrarchan poets, Góngora’s world appears as

a series of parts, the places along Greed’s itineraries. Like the bodies

of those women, the world becomes visible when we reach the end of

the series and sum them up in a complete image. But is that world, like

those bodies, ever captured by summing up the parts? And how are the

inherent tensions intensified by the way that Góngora’s text dissolves

the descriptions of the parts into the at best translucent and at worst


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opaque waters of his complex circumlocutions and recondite allusions?

If description, as Nancy Vickers argues, following Roland Barthes,

“is ultimately no more than a collection of imperfect signs that, likefetishes, affirm absence by their presence,” how much richer must the

play of presence and absence become when we encounter not the cli-

chés of Petrarchism but the innovations of Gongorism, at once more

intense in their grasping at the objects of representation and emptier

of representational content?31 This hyperbolically rich play of opposing

tendencies is precisely what certain contemporary Góngora critics dis-

cover in the Soledades . Betty Sasaki, for example, writes of the constant

need to constitute a history that never gels into a “linguistic picture.”32

Crystal Chemris writes that “the proliferation of images” in certain cos-

mological moments of the Soledad segunda “exists in a dialectic with

the engulfing void” and that “each creative moment is countered by its

inevitable dissolution.”33 Huergo finds even Góngora’s most apparently

ekphrastic moments pregnant with absence. “The pleasure of seeing,”

he concludes, is in Góngora “inseparable from the pain of not seeing”

(). Working in this vein, I argue that Góngora’s mapping does not

make places present in the manner of a true description, but neither

does it erase them altogether. Places are invoked rather than evoked,by a poetry whose invocations are often more evident than what they

try to conjure.

In this way the diatribe against navigation stands in marked con-

trast to maps and mapmaking as the Renaissance understood them.

Just as early modern cartography celebrated the Apollonian perspec-

tive offered by its world maps, so it made certain assumptions about

the transparency of cartographic representation. These assump-

tions are manifest in Renaissance statements about the relationship

between geography and history. A primary purpose of maps and geo-

graphic descriptions was to help us understand where historical events

unfolded. Thus they enhanced our understanding of historical writing

31 Nancy Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Women, Scattered Rhyme,” in

Writing and Sexual Difference , ed. Elizabeth Abel (Brighton: Harvester, ), .32 Betty Sasaki, “Góngora’s Sea of Signs: The Manipulation of History in the

Soledades ,” Calíope , nos. – (): .33 Crystal Chemris, “Time, Space, and Apocalypse in Góngora’s Soledades ,” Sym-

posium , no. (): .


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and aided us in remembering those events (Besse, – ). Ortelius

himself called maps “the eye of histories” and insisted on their use-

fulness in helping us imagine historical events as if we had witnessedthem.34 And so, if we were to speak of da Gama within the parameters

of these assumptions, parameters that often inform approaches to his-

tory and cartography in our own day, we might say that he “rounded the

Cape of Good Hope.”35 In so doing, we would assume that the Cape of

Good Hope was already there when da Gama arrived, and the toponym,

in our account, would merely mark the place he reached. That place is

there, on the map, waiting for us to trace his journey. The place-name

and the geography that goes with it, in other words, are taken as onto-logical givens, as a preset stage on which to trace the story of explora-

tion. The map simply represents that stage; it plays no role that could be

understood as inventive or constructive.

Thus the assumptions of Renaissance geography support the sort

of imperial cartography that Paul Carter identifies at the heart of met-

ropolitan histories that legitimate colonial expansion. This kind of his-

tory pays attention not to the historicity of space, Carter claims, but “to

events unfolding in time alone.”36 Places are already there, for imperial

history; one has only to find them and occupy them, not produce them.Góngora, by contrast, confounds this relationship between history and

geography, inviting reflection on the made rather than on the given

quality of place and space. As we have seen, the Cape of Good Hope first

appears in the poem as a common noun, “el promontorio” (the cape),

and it is da Gama’s voyage — or rather, his phallic striving — that makes

it into the Cape of Good Hope. These verses figure not an event instead

of a place but, rather, the making of a place. They thereby expose the

made rather than the given quality of all the places Góngora mentions.

34 Theatro de la tierra universal de Abraham Ortelio. . . . (Antwerp, ), .35 This is precisely what we find in annotations provided by García de Salcedo

Coronel, whose edition of the Soledades (Madrid, ) is known, among other

things, for the wealth of cosmographic, geographic, and historical information that

it furnishes in reference to the diatribe against navigation. Salcedo Coronel supplies

background information about da Gama’s voyage, as he does about other voyages

mentioned in the diatribe, and then states that da Gama “arrived at the Cape of

Good Hope” (v).36 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History

(New York: Knopf, ), xvi.


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Instead of a periphrasis alluding to da Gama’s voyage, we have a fasci-

nating metonym in which tenor and vehicle matter equally, in which

cause and effect, event and place, assume a ghostly codependent pres-ence. The verses, furthermore, cast judgment on this kind of imperial,

geographic productivity. The promontory becomes not just the “Cabo”

or “Cape” of Good Hope but the “cabo,” the end, of good hope. For it

is Greed, not da Gama, who captains this ship, and the good hope of

Greed can be nothing but the despair of goodness.

Other place-names are subjected to similar procedures of lyric

unmaking, or of partial invocation. “Arabia,” for example, appears later

in the narrative of the da Gama expedition, but it does not necessarilyrefer to Arabia itself:

La aromática selva penetraste,

que al pájaro de Arabia . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

pira le erige, y le construye nido.

[To penetrate the aromatic lawn,That builds both pyre and nest

For the Arabian bird.]

( – )

“Arabia” appears as a part of a circumlocution used to name the phoenix.

Although the phoenix and its story come to us from Egyptian mythol-

ogy, the bird was said to wander around Arabia during its five-hundred-

year life span, and so it becomes here “the bird of Arabia” (). It

was said to build its nest, in which it was both consumed by flame and

reborn (“a pyre erects, a nest constructs” []), from the plants and

trees of Arabia and East Africa that yielded frankincense and balsam.

This, then, is the “aromatic lawn” penetrated by da Gama. As Góngora would have known from Camões, if not from other sources, the region

reached by da Gama was near Mogadishu, in present-day Somalia, not

in Arabia itself. Thus, while the toponym promises to anchor the read-

ing in a safe toponymic port of call, it actually unsettles the sense of

place and its boundaries. Lost in the sea of baroque circumlocutions,

readers who believe that they have arrived somewhere discover that they

are elsewhere. Alternatively, they are left to wonder whether Góngora

considers Somalia part of Arabia and are thereby reminded of the histo-

ricity of place-names and the artificiality of boundaries. In either case,


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Góngora transforms the place-name from a referential anchor into a

toponymic phantasm. “Arabia” is there, but only elusively, and we are

reminded of our own role in conjuring its boundaries.Near the end of the diatribe, a series of place-names leads us to

discover other ways that the text engages cartography, verse and icono-

graphic. However long modern readers may dwell on the brief appear-

ance of the Americas in the diatribe, it is really the Moluccas, or Spice

Islands, that the text invests with the greatest charge of moral danger

and personal pathos. These islands are the source of the one commod-

ity that makes it back to the Mediterranean point of origin of both the

art of navigation and the diatribe itself, only to contaminate that pointof origin with its corrupting influence. The passage refers to the spices

that pass from the Spice Islands through Egypt to the Mediterranean

world:

El bosque dividido en islas pocas,

fragrante productor de aquel aroma

que, traducido mal por el Egito,tarde lo encomendó el Nilo a sus bocas,

y ellas más tarde a la gulosa Grecia,

clavo no, espuela sí del apetito,que cuanto en conocello tardó Romafue templado Catón, casta Lucrecia.

[That forest, spreading over many an isle,

Fragrant producer of the perfume brought

Across the desert with laborious speed,Till from the mouths of the Egyptian Nile

Luxurious Greece received the sharp-toothed freight —

not cloves, but spikes that spur the glutton’s greed,

For Rome still boasted, when it knew them not,

Lucretia chaste and Cato temperate.] ( – )

The toponymy is personified with moral effect. Places become histori-

cal agents, devouring mouths, but there is more going on here than

the personification of nations as decadent gourmands. The sequence

Egypt-Greece-Rome, coupled with the verb traducido (translated),

recalls the translatio imperii to which Spain thought itself heir. Góngora

reminds us that not just imperium but the corrupting wealth of empire

is translated westward from one people to the next. In this way the top-


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onyms serve less to name places or trace a physical route than to follow

the course of historical and moral decline and map its implicit endpoint

as none other than Spain. The final verses of the diatribe make clearthat the cost of empire is not only moral corruption but death and loss.

The mountaineer returns to the seas, revealing that they are where his

son has met his death:

quédese, amigo, en tan inciertos mares,donde con mi hacienda

del alma se quedó la mejor prenda,

cuya memoria es bueitre de pesares.

[Leave them, my friend, where all my fortunes rest Beneath that treacherous sea,

With a still dearer pledge, whose memory

Feeds like a vulture on a father’s breast.] ( – )

I do not want to dwell on either these place-names or this final reflec-

tion on the costs of empire, however, but to consider the verses that

immediately precede them, the ones about the Spice Islands. Once

again, toponyms appear, and once again they disorient rather than

ground the reader geographically even as the passage in which they

appear orients him or her morally or politically. More important, how-

ever, the passage confronts head-on the other component of Renais-

sance cartography: its oculocentrism. Góngora’s assurance that he will

“not describe” the islands should introduce a description, but instead

we receive a scene from mythology, Actaeon’s intrusion on Diana and

her nymphs. For García de Salcedo Coronel, one of Góngora’s early

commentators, this mythological allusion is the most difficult one of

the entire poem, although he does not explain why (). All he cando is offer the description that Góngora elides, providing in his anno-

tations a list of islands found in the Malayan archipelago, along with

some observations, drawn from an updated edition of Ptolemy’s Geog-

raphy ( – v), on the size and location of the largest or most impor-

tant of them. Salcedo Coronel’s annotations suggest his belief that the

mythological allusion must be decoded as a recondite description of

the Malayan archipelago itself. He is bewildered, then, because this

is not how it should be decoded. In its allusion to Diana and Actaeon,


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Góngora’s text does not describe what these islands would look like but

what looking at them might mean.

We have already glimpsed what one of these meanings might be:the last of the virgin territories on Greed’s itinerary of rapine becomes

a femme fatale, suggesting that his voyages of discovery and conquest

will lead only to his destruction. But Góngora’s treatment of the myth is

unconventional. Like Titian’s painting Diana Surprised by Actaeon ,

a picture executed for the king of Spain and perhaps known to Gón-

gora, the Soledades depicts not the moment preferred by iconographers

and mythographers, that of Actaeon’s metamorphosis, but the moment

of his intrusion on Diana and her nymphs.37

According to LeonardBarkan, when Titian chooses this scene over that of metamorphosis

itself, the exemplary thrust of the myth is blunted. The use of curtains

and architectural elements, moreover, frames the scene in ways that

draw the reader into Actaeon’s act of transgressive looking. The story of

Diana and Actaeon becomes less about “puritanical severity, unbridled

jealousy, or merciless power,” as Brooks Otis puts it, and more about

“the visual, the voyeuristic, and the visionary,” as Barkan characterizes

it ().38

Likewise, Góngora’s allusion to this moment in the myth suggeststhat its purpose is not to announce Greed’s imminent punishment and

destruction but to reflect on the seductions and the dangers of vision,

knowledge, and desire. Like Titian’s painting, Góngora’s text impli-

cates the audience in Actaeon’s voyeurism. The passage never mentions

Diana and reserves Actaeon’s name for the end. After suggesting that

a description will be proffered, the text flirts with the reader, offering

only bits and pieces of the virgin bodies of Diana’s nymphs, the frag-

ments of beautiful women fetishized through comparisons with desir-

able commodities (precious marble) that bring out the whiteness of

37 Titian’s image is reproduced in Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Meta-

morphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, ),

; Filippo Pedrocco, Titian , trans. Corrado Federici (New York: Rizzoli, ), ;

and elsewhere. It is also available online through various sources, including ARTstor,

where it is listed as Diana and Actaeon (www.artstor.org/info).38 Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet , nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, ), .


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their skin. Vickers tells us that the description of a woman through the

enumeration of fetishized fragments of her body, whether in Petrarch

or in Ovid, does less to make the woman present to the reader than tomark her absence (). The whole is lost, yet that is what the text strug-

gles to capture and make present. Here that whole is doubly lost. The

“stationary fleet” of the Indies becomes the dazzling variety of islands,

which in turn become the scattered fragments of desirable women. The

verses may tell us that their numbers “wake not lust,” but they then work

to incite desire, only to identify the desiring subject (Greed, and the

reader as well) as Actaeon after his fate is already sealed. We do not see

the Spice Islands. They are not made present to us by a map, verbal orotherwise. Yet it is our seeing, or our desire to see them, to know them,

to possess them, that makes its way onto Góngora’s page. Although

Actaeon’s metamorphosis receives no explicit mention, thus denying

the passage clear possession of the moral high ground, it looms omi-

nously beyond the edges of the picture, allowing little room for doubt as

to the sinister cast thrown over our gaze. Actaeon, who stumbles upon

Diana when the sun is at its zenith, takes the place of Apollo. Greed’s

gaze (our gaze) is not that of the god but that of the hunter, not com-

manding but lascivious, not divine but transgressive. While it seeks thecommanding heights of the sun god, it remains firmly planted among

mortals.

Conclusion

Did Góngora kill the mappamundi episode with his suspicious emulation

of its formal and ideological premises? Perhaps, but it is difficult to dis-

entangle Góngora’s effect on the genre from the many other forces that

altered it during the seventeenth century. There is some echo of Góngo-

ra’s suspicion, however, in a very different composition, the Primero sueño

of Góngora’s most important follower, the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés

de la Cruz. In this lengthy poem, so heavily marked by the influence of

Góngora’s mature style, the speaking subject enjoys a dream vision in

which she leaves her body, rises to a great height, and attempts to take

in a commanding view of the natural world:

En cuya casi elevación inmensa,

gozosa mas suspensa,


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suspensa pero ufana,

y atónita aunque ufana, la suprema

de lo sublunar Reina soberana,la vista perspicaz, libre de anteojos,

de sus intelectuales bellos ojos

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .libre tendió por todo lo crïado:

cuyo inmenso agregado,

cúmulo incomprehensible,

aunque a la vista quiso manifiestodar señas de posible,

a la comprensión no, que — entorpecida

con la sobra de objetos, y excedidade la grandeza de ellos su potencia —

retrocedió cobarde.

[At this near immeasurable pinnacle, joyful, but marveling,

marveling, yet well content,

still, even though content, astonished, the

supreme and sovereign Queen of all the earth,. . . cast her gaze across all creation;

this vast aggregate,this enigmatic whole,

although to sight seeming to signalpossibility, denied

such clarity to comprehension,

which (bewildered by such rich profusion,

its powers vanquished by such majesty) with cowardice, withdrew.]39

The following lines chart the soul’s failure to occupy this commanding

position, its need to abandon

la vista que intentó descomedida

en vano hacer alarde

contra objeto que excede en excelencialas líneas visuales

— contra el Sol, digo.

39 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings , trans.

Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Penguin, ), – .


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[its immoderate

attempt to vaunt its strength

against the supreme creator of irradiating beams, — against, that is, the Sun.]

( – )

The soul is forced to abandon “la Apolínea ciencia” (Apollonian sci-

ence) () and find new paths to knowledge. There are no references

to cartography, no toponymy, phantasmagoric or otherwise, just the

skeptical treatment of the possibility of totalizing knowledge figured as

a commanding vision. Other intertexts, like the Somnium Scipionis and

various myths, stand out as more likely sources, but there is no denying

that the Primero sueño bears a family resemblance to the diatribe against

navigation as I have read it here.

But what about the tension and ambivalence I promised above? Even

if the diatribe subverts Renaissance cartography, poetic and visual, in

the manner I have described, it asserts itself as an enthralling poetic

accomplishment. It is not that Góngora has written the first truly poetic

cartography, as Jammes suggests, but that he has sacrificed cartography

on the altar of poetry. Ercilla’s mappamundi episode is lost on contem-porary readers. Some nineteenth-century editions of the poem excise

it altogether. However, Góngora’s diatribe, his countercartography of

the world, persists and draws attention to this day. One reason it does

so is precisely that it abandons the referential and ocular fantasies of its

cartographic intertexts and asserts itself as an exemplum of rich poetic

language. Jammes is right, then, that the diatribe represents the poetic

analogue of an ornate Renaissance map. Góngora captures not any of

the formal and ideological structures that make that map a map, how-

ever, but instead the sense of wonder inherent in its ornament, in the

map as visual spectacle. He subverts the power of the map, but in doing

so he asserts its beauty.

Here, in the end, is the ambivalence of this episode for the con-

junction of vision, knowledge, and power in Renaissance cartogra-

phy. Góngora’s verse cartography holds us in thrall. But the diatribe

against navigation also calls attention to its own mapping practices in

ways that signal the contingency and inadequacy of maps, verbal and

iconographic, not to mention the desires and ideologies that subtend


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them. The diatribe subverts the map, but only to remind us of the fas-

cination that maps hold. It abandons the toponym, only to replace it

with a network of allusions and imagery that tell us more, that let ussee more, than any list of half-empty place-names could ever hope to

impart. The diatribe converts places into elusive phantasms, only to

make them objects of desire that we seek among Góngora’s verses as

avidly as Greed seeks places to conquer. Finally, it deliberately impli-

cates us in a mythology of vision, knowledge, and desire, only to bring

our looking down to earth, color it with shades of transgression, and

cast the shadow of impending doom on it. Apollo’s wondrous eye is not

divine at all, but human.

Ricardo Padrón is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia.

His article in this issue builds on the argument advanced in The Spacious Word:

Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (2004). He is working

on Spanish interest in the Pacific and Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries.


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Against Apollo Gongoras Soledad Primera

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