Conclusion: The End of Petrarchism in Spain

Within the Quevedo canon, the Canta sola a Lisi occupies a special place, seemingly distanced from the pessimism of many of his other works. Yet its emphasis on death and decay makes it thematically similar to his metaphysical poetry, while his reliance on the rhetoric of absence results in its having much in common with his burlesque works. In the latter one can see, in a harsher light, the same insistence on the meaninglessness of amatory rhetoric, as well as his attempt to explode its privileged position in the imperial literary system by introducing into the sonnet the un-Petrarchan, but otherwise prevalent discourses of anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia (see Mariscal, 38).

Many critics have observed the community of style between the poems in the second half of the Lisi cycle and Quevedo's so-called metaphysical poetry, including his earlier macrotextual collection, Heráclito cristiano (1613).^[34] The similarities include the emphasis on thirst, death, and decay, along with the technique of ending or beginning a poem with a striking agudeza . Moreover, these coincidences do not exist only because Quevedo consistently wrote similar poetry over the course of twenty years; there are enough specific verbal echoes of the Heráclito in the Lisi cycle to show that the poet was imitating and cannibalizing his own earlier poetry as much as he was that of Petrarch, Boscán, Garcilaso, Góngora, and others. The coincidences also exist because the Heráclito was Quevedo's first attempt at a reformed Petrarchist poetry collection: that is to say, in the Heráclito , as in the final poems of the Lisi cycle, he attempted to

use motifs drawn from the Petrarchan tradition toward moral rather than erotic ends. Perhaps the most striking instance is the opening of Psalm 9, "Cuando me vuelvo atrás a ver los años / que han nevado la edad florida mía (when I turn back to see the years that have snowed upon my florid time, B21.1–2). In the context of the Rime sparse alone, the topics of life as a journey and youth as the floral season of one's life are merely recognizable; in the context of subsequent Spanish Petrarchist poetry, they are paramount, canonized as such by Garcilaso and Herrera.^[35] Yet he also introduces his own variation, the notion of the years falling like snow on the flowers of his youth. On the textual level, the image combines reminiscences of flower petals gently falling on Laura in "Chiare fresche et dolci acque" (Rime sparse 126) with Laura "più bianca et più fredda che neve" (whiter and colder than snow) from "Giovene donna" (Rime sparse 30.2). The image shifts the focus away from spring and youth to winter and old age, but it also suggests the snow of Quevedo's own cold style blanketing over the poetry of his florid Spanish predecessors so that there will be no trace of it, thus allowing him to return to the original Petrarchan image-hoard. Through techniques such as these, Quevedo attempts to locate his Heráclito in the Petrarch/Garcilaso tradition, but the discontinuities are too great, and as an effort to reform that tradition the collection failed. Moreover, such obvious allusions to Petrarch and Garcilaso are relatively rare in the Heráclito , composed before the widespread circulation of Góngora's great poems and before the publication of Herrera's Versos , at a time when Quevedo perhaps felt less keenly the challenge of reclaiming literary history.

Less often noted than the resemblance of the Lisi cycle to the moral poetry is its approximation to the satirical verse.^[36] Many of these poems are constructed using the very techniques of metaphorization associated with Góngora and culteranismo . For example, the famous poem about a nose, "Érase un hombre a una nariz pegado" (There once was a man stuck to a nose, B513), consists of a series of metaphorical elaborations of a large nose: it is a sword, a sundial, an elephant lying on its back, a pyramid, and so forth. Only the metonymic eleventh line, "los doces tribus de narices era" (twelve tribes of noses was it), reveals that his true intention was not only to impress the reader with his wit but to impugn someone's (Góngora's?) purity of blood.^[37] Similarly, the poem about a woman

in a large dress, "Si eres campana, ¿dónde está el badajo?" (if you are a bell, where is the clapper, B516), likewise consists of a series of metaphorical vehicles based on a single tenor: she is a bell, a pyramid (again), a sugar loaf, a capital, a surgeon's case, and so on (see Lerner, Metáfora ). Other poems deal with metaphor in a more oblique and deconstructive manner:

  Si no duerme su cara con Filena,
ni con sus dientes come, y su vestido
las tres partes le hurta a su marido,
y la cuarta el afeite le cercena;
  si entera con él come, y con él cena,
mas debajo del lecho mal cumplido
todo su bulto esconde, reducido
a chapinzanco y moño por almena,
  ¿por qué te espantas, Fabio, que, abrazado
a su mujer, la busque y la pregone,
si, desnuda, se halla descasado?
  Si cuentas por mujer lo que compone
a la mujer, no acuestes a tu lado
la mujer, sino el fardo que se pone.
(B522)

If Filena does not sleep with her face, nor with her teeth eat, and if her clothing robs three-fourths of her from her husband while the rest her makeup shears away, and if she eats whole with him and with him dines, but beneath the unconsummated bed all her bulk is hidden, reduced to a shoe heel with a wig for a roof, why does it frighten you, Fabio, that embracing his wife, he looks and calls for her if, when she is naked, he finds himself unmarried? If you count as woman what woman is made of, don't lay a woman next to you, but instead the bundles that she wears.

One could read this sonnet as the intersection of two common themes in Quevedo's satirical poetry: on the one hand, derision of women who wear too much makeup, which, when removed, reveals ugliness (see Mas, 34–41); and on the other, a critique of marriage wherein husbands are generally victims of their wives' deceptions (Mas, 85–124). Filena's disappearance, however, also turns this into a poem about absence, and features such as the Latinate names, the hyperbatons, and the genre itself suggest that it be read in terms of the Petrarchan tradition. What causes her husband to seek and call out to her is that when her ornaments—her clothes and her cosmet-

ics—are removed, he finds neither a naked beauty, as he expects, nor an ugly woman, as the reader of Quevedo's other poems on the same theme would expect, but instead nothing at all. The very terms used here to describe Filena's behavior, painting her face and overdressing, resonate in the critical debate over lyric poetry, for they were also used, metaphorically, by the opponents of a style they found excessive, ornate, even effeminate. When Filena removes her adornments, she is revealed as the ultimate figure of absence, leaving her husband unmarried and frustrated, reduced to the status of a Petrarchan lover. Like Góngora's poetry she is all signifier and no signified, all verba and no res . By satirizing these practices, Quevedo seeks to rescue lyric poetry from the feminized realm of decorative poets to the sinewy world of masculine action and empire.

The need to redeem poetry from mere verbal beauty is a constant in much of Quevedo's lyric, and his violent anti-Petrarchism often takes the form of de-idealization of language, of love, and of the body. In the Lisi cycle, it was expressed, as we have seen, through a parodic subversion that forced the reader to question the very nature of love poetry. In other poems, the attack is much more direct as Quevedo violates the stylistic and thematic registers associated with the sonnet. Petrarchism's ur -myth is upended when Apollo, chasing Daphne, is reminded that Danae raised her skirt for a shower of gold, and advised that "si la quieres gozar, paga y no alumbres" (if you want to enjoy her, pay up instead of shining, B536.4).^[38] All women become whores, good for nothing but sex in return for pay ("¡Oh barata y alegre putería!" [Oh cheap and delightful whoredom!]; see Mas, 30–31, 134–36); poems about prostitution and ugliness lead to poems in which the body, tenor of the most famous Petrarchan metaphors, is revealed in all its corporality (see Read). There are sonnets about eating food and sonnets about worms eating dead bodies; sonnets about farts and assholes, sonnets about sodomy. Every time Quevedo uses words like ojo de culo and pedo, puto and coño , he transgresses the rules of sprezzatura and decorum and soils the genre of Castiglione, Boscán, and Garcilaso. This technique is especially clear in a poem such as "Este cíclope, no sicilïano" (This Cyclops, not Sicilian, B832), which begins with ten lines of Gongorine stylistic devices and mediates through "esta cima del vicio y del insulto" (this mountaintop of vice and insult, 11) to a conclusion, "éste, en quien hoy los pedos son sirenas, / éste

es el culo, en Góngora y en culto, / que un bujarrón le conociera apenas" (this one, in whom today farts are sirens, this is the asshole, in Góngora and in cultish, which even a Sodomite would scarcely recognize, 12–14). What is shocking here is the quick transition from cultismos to obscenities. Yet the theme of homosexuality (an Italian vice; see Mas, 185) in the final line resonates back through the entire poem, in the various allusions to Italy and in the metaphorical disguising of the anus, suggesting that Góngora too obscures the same vice. This attribution of concealed homosexuality has implications on both the biographical level, as an insult, and the rhetorical, as a denigration of Góngora's style (recall Morales's complaints about effeminate men). The violation of the decorum is only more obvious here because of the context of the cultismos , but it is present whenever obscene language was used in a sonnet, the privileged genre of Petrarchism and of imperial culture.^[39] Moreover these violations are not merely lexical; they are ideological as well, for however prevalent the social attitudes they represent may have been, they had no place in the Petrarchist tradition.

Although both Góngora and Quevedo satirized the court in verse, they were also ambitious courtiers who used their fame as poets to advance their careers (the former rising to the post of honorary royal chaplain to Philip III, the latter enjoying a diplomatic career until the fall of his patron, the duke of Osuna, in 1621). They also experienced a similar reversal of fortune, their ultimate desengaño motivated in part by personal poverty and disappointment. As Bloom expressed it (Breaking , 13), the struggle to rewrite one's predecessors is parallel to the quest for wealth, for professional advancement, and for sexual fulfillment; all four, directly or indirectly, are the objects of Góngora's and Quevedo's poetic desire. Petrarchism, however, privileges the relationship of eros with poetry, expressing other desires through metonymy. Thus we return to the quotation from Kerrigan and Braden at the end of the introduction, equating sex and poetry: "Artistic and sexual ambitions are interchangeable; they can be substituted for each other in the course of reaching countless bargains. A solitude stocked with images may be preferable to having an amorous partner. The value of postponement, hedonistic as well as moral, is considerable" (188). By throwing out the Petrarchan sexual myth, Quevedo throws out with it the particular historical form of the Renaissance search for priority.

From Boscán's profeminist writing to Herrera's love for the countess of Gelves, the legitimacy of lyric love, on its own terms, went unquestioned because it was part and parcel of a system of legitimization that included classical and Italian literature, Spanish culture, and even the state. If implicit in the Petrarchan pose there was a plea for fulfillment, autonomy, and priority, it was also quite clear that these desires could only be attained within the privileged grounds of the poems themselves. Góngora tested the system as far as it would go, but his intention was not to destroy it. Quevedo does take that step, calling into question all forms of legitimacy, sexual, literary, cultural, and political (see on this point McCallum and Zahareas); and by merging Petrarchism and the burlesque he tosses out one of the few vehicles for establishing one's legitimacy as a lover and as a poet. By making the Petrarchan erotic dream seem illegitimate, he dismisses other fantasies as well. The sonnet about verbal and mineral wealth, "Tú, que la paz del mar" (L4/B445), is particularly instructive in this regard: read with the proper irony, it teaches that words do not create wealth, only the blood and labor of the mines do, and Spain's gold now comes from abroad, not from the sands of the Tajo. Quevedo is not opposed to the Spanish empire per se, but he wants it seen for what it is. Finally, by undermining the Petrarchan sonnet, Quevedo also calls off the cultural competition with Italy, which in the age of Philip IV he deems irrelevant. Read symbolically, the split between Quevedo's amorous sonnets and his satirical ones is neither as great nor as inexplicable as it might seem: his women are garrulous because of the logorrhea with which the muse infected Góngora (and, truth be told, Quevedo himself); they are wanton because the muse has given herself to every male poet for 150 years: to Encina, to Boscán, to Garcilaso, to Herrera, even to celibate churchmen like Fray Luis de León and to rhetorical pederasts like Góngora. But Lisi is cold and hard because the muse is to him always diamondlike and stony, because language always resists, and because poetry is always a struggle.

Quevedo's moral reading of Petrarch is not necessarily superior to previous ones, and if it seems superior, that is only because its very belatedness allows it to subsume the linguistic, thematic, generic, and stylistic readings of his predecessors. At the same time Quevedo uses his moral deconstruction of Petrarch to invalidate all

of those previous readings. In contrast to Góngora, whose stylization was inclusive, Quevedo's parody highlights difference and breaks down the tradition into its components. He thus challenges the validity of a stylizing metalepsis; in contrast to Garcilaso and Góngora, he is come not to fulfill the Petrarchan tradition but to destroy it. His own aim is to effect a retrospective clinamen stronger than Góngora's metalepsis, which would allow the pretense of a direct return to the source. In his more mundane moments, this desire takes the form of an attempt to reclaim Petrarch and Garcilaso as his own, rather than as Góngora's, predecessors, by rewriting literary history through activities such as editing the poetry of Fray Luis de León. On a more fantastic level, the intention is to replace Boscán, Garcilaso, Herrera, and Góngora and to set himself up at the head of the Spanish Petrarchist tradition (hence perhaps the unseemly obsession in the Lisi cycle with the second-rate Boscán). The fantasy can be seen in a satire, written after purchasing the house where Góngora lived, in order to evict him:

Y págalo Quevedo
porque compró la casa en que vivías,
molde de hacer arpías;
y me ha certificado el pobre cojo
que de tu habitación quedó de modo
la casa y barrio todo,
hediendo a Polifemos estantíos,
coturnos tenebrosos y sombríos,
y con tufo tan vil de  Soledades ,
que para perfumarla
y desengongorarla
de vapores tan crasos,
quemó como pastillas Garcilasos:
pues era con tu vaho el aposento
sombra del sol y tósigo del viento .
(B841.121–35)

Quevedo pays for it because he bought the house in which you lived, that mold for making harpies; the poor lame man has certified to me that your bedroom, like the house and the entire neighborhood, reeked of stagnant Polifemos, dark and shadowy buskins, and with such vile fumes of the Soledades , that to perfume it and degongorize it of such crass vapors he burned pills of Garcilasos: for the room was, with your breath, a shadow of the sun and a poison for the wind .

Burning Garcilaso like incense may produce a better perfume than Góngora's feet and breath, but it also sacrifices and destroys him, leaving a direct conduit from the great Italian father to this the last of his orphans. This is how Quevedo would have written himself into literary history; whether he achieved it is a different question, to which one can only give a historically conditioned answer. Different ages have held different evaluations of Góngora's, Quevedo's, and even Garcilaso's relative stature. Any judgment rendered on Bloom's strategies is ultimately dependent on the historical process of canon formation; for indeed, the Bloomean paradigms are in the end only models for trying to describe and understand the hermeneutically circular process of canonization. Aesthetic and historical evaluation are ultimately the same; canonized poets are read as strong, because strong poets constitute the canon. To an amazing degree, Spanish Renaissance poets succeeded in writing themselves into the canon as they saw fit, such that what we think of them today is what they wanted us to think; this determination is the sign of their strength. This very strength, however, can interfere with their being read as anything but our own poetic fathers. Only with conscious effort can we displace ourselves to see them again, like Herrera, as orphans excluded from the shade of the laurel tree. Only then can we appreciate the enormous hermeneutic freedom derived from their status as orphans, to sidestep proximate models and to use the cultural belatedness of the Renaissance humanists as a defense against poetic belatedness vis à vis their most immediate predecessors.