The Baroque impasse which figured in Darío's poetic representation of the catastrophe of imperialist domination informs later manifestations of the Latin American avant-garde, the Neobaroque, and the Boom. In Sarduy's grammar of the literary Baroque, he identifies the category of “escritura/Odisea” as one of its primary “syntagmatic grama” or structures (1401). Góngora's Soledades, like the Quijote, is an odyssey of its own writing process, and could well fit Sarduy's category, but as a special case, the pilgrimage topos, in its capacity as a marker for historical impasse. How so?

Pilgrimage is a staple of national and religious myth. It lies at the heart of epic, which chronicles the trials of a wandering and exiled hero as he progresses to triumph, typically by founding his homeland's city of origins. In its religious version it is the story of the human subject's trials on earth, his or her growth as a spiritual exile whose telos is reunion with the divine, a journey rehearsed in miniature in ritual pilgrimages to sacred shrines. Pilgrimage in literature, whether secular or religious, often represents the unfolding of history according to plan, as the fulfillment of prophecy or mission. The crisis at the origins of Spanish modernity, expressed aesthetically in the Baroque, provoked a parallel crisis in the representational function of literature, disrupting, in certain works, such a messianic function of the pilgrimage topos. Thus the breakdown of Spain's imperial mission apparent in such events as Lope de Aguirre's foundering in the jungles of Latin America was expressed in the novel by the failed “post-auratic” (or disenchanted) pilgrimage of Don Quijote. Góngora's Soledades, roughly contemporaneous with Cervantes's famous novel, belongs to such an order of failed pilgrimage, a failure that marks the transition to the modern.