Introduction

Even the most radical imitative text works because it represents its revolution within a recognisable frame. The reader of Luis de Góngora’s Polifemo negotiates meaning in a textual arena that revolves around fixed points of reference. A recognisable repertoire of mythological characters, epic resonance, Petrarchan and Neoplatonic codes of writing and reading, and (as we saw in the previous chapter) a Renaissance pastoral environment that recalls most specifically the bucolic world of Garcilaso’s Eclogues, provide the reader with familiar signposts towards meaning that turn out to belong to a defamiliarised textual landscape. A constant dismantling of carefully constructed expectations forces Góngora’s readers to reconstitute their own horizon of expectations, both within the text and beyond it. The devastational attitude that the Polifemo demonstrates towards Renaissance aesthetics indicates a rupture between two conflicting world views, but the reader cannot realise effectively the implications of this rupture for the individual subject in Baroque society, without acknowledging the collective authority of the cultural continuum. Góngora’s original poesis, therefore, emerges from a critical interrogation of established literary codes and traditional genres. The author of the Polifemo not only presupposes the literary competence of his readers and their knowledge of the conventions of genre, but to some extent invents a new type of reader, one who is simultaneously liberated and constrained by the way in which the author reconceives literary tradition. A complex imitative text like the Polifemo reminds us that the author/text/reader triangle is an incomplete paradigm of the signifying process and needs to be ‘squared’ at least to include tradition. Within the Renaissance rewriting project, tradition and imitation stand in a dialectical relationship with one another. In Góngora’s Polifemo, the self-conscious exploitation of literary models and a self-conscious application of language, freed from the obligations of referentiality, straddle this dialectic.

At the heart of Góngora’s ‘new art’ is the way in which the reader must accept enhanced responsibility for the production of meaning. This is an approach to the Polifemo that I have developed in more detail elsewhere, but it is useful to summarise the main line of argument again as it will inform my rereading of the Galatea section of the poem.