La Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea (The Fable of Polyphemus and Galatea), or simply the Polifemo, is a literary work written by Spanish poet Luis de Góngora y Argote. The poem, though borrowing heavily from prior literary sources of Greek and Roman Antiquity, attempts to go beyond the established versions of the myth by reconfiguring the narrative structure handed down by Ovid. Through the incorporation of highly innovative poetic techniques, Góngora effectively advances the background story of Acis and Galatea’s infatuation as well as the jealousy of the Cyclops Polyphemus.
The Polifemo was completed in manuscript form in 1613 and was subsequently published in 1627 after Góngora’s death (see 1627 in poetry). The work is traditionally regarded as one of Góngora’s most lofty poetic endeavors and is arguably his finest artistic achievement along with the Soledades. The Polifemo, in sum, realizes the final stage of Góngora’s sophisticated poetic style, which slowly developed over the course of his career. In addition to the Soledades and other later works, the Polifemo demonstrates the fullest extent of Góngora’s highly accentuated, erudite and impressionistic poetic style known as culteranismo.
As made evident in the opening of the poem, the Polifemo was dedicated to the Count of Niebla, a Castilian nobleman renowned for his generous patronage of 17th century Spain’s most preeminent artists.Hanak 3 The work’s predominant themes, jealousy and competition, reflect the actual competitive environment and worldly aspirations that drove 17th-century poets such as Góngora to cultivate and display their artistic ingenuity. Góngora wrote his Polifemo in honor of Luis Carillo y Sotomayor's Fabula de Acis y Galatea, which was a contemporary poem depicting the same mythological account. Additionally, the poem of Carillo y Sotomayor was in deed dedicated to the very same Count of Niebla. Luis Carrillo y Sotomayor was both Góngora’s friend and a fellow “culteranist” poet who died at the age of 27 in 1610, three years before Góngora's Polifemo was completed. The premature death of a promising pupil in a sense prompted the creation of the Polifemo.
Conventional restraints; the Polifemo and poetic liberation in the Spanish Baroque
The Polifemo is unprecedented for Góngora in terms of its length, its florid style, and its ingenio (artistic ingenuity or innovation). Regarding its literary form, the poem develops in a manner that is distinctively unmindful of the mediating artistic clarity outlined in Aristotle’s Poeticssee Aristotle's Poetics (Quotation Pending)
Contemporary critics such as Luis Carrillo y Sotomayor would come to see these Aristotelian precepts as artistically stifling. In his Libro de la Erudición Poética, Carillo formally denounces both clarity and straightforwardness, particularly when such artistic ideals placed parameters on poetic expression in an effort to make "oneself intelligible to the half-educated."see Carillo's Libro de la Erudición Poética (1611) Though culteranismo maintained this elitist and aristocratic quality well after Carillo's death, this seemingly haughty comment on the part of Góngora's pupil was actually a jibe at Góngora's fiercest critics whose periodic vitriol sought to discredit the artist and his work. This fundamental debate between artistic clarity, intelligibility, lyricism, novelty and free expression first outlined in the Poetics of Aristotle and debated in the literary circles of posterity would never cease to divide artists throughout the modern era. Culteranismo, which was particularly fond of playful obscurity, has consequently incurred the disdain of several critics for its liberal artistic outlooks, which critics lampooned as frivolous and pedantic.see Jauregi's "Discurso poético contra el hablar culto y oscuro" (1624) and "Antídoto contra la pestilente poesía de las Soledades" (1624)
The primacy of ingenio contradicted the claims of more traditional critics who sought to tame instinct by imposing a rigorous aesthetic framework of poetic regulations derived from the ancients in order to establish a more coherent dialogue with the audience or reader. Critics such as Juan Martínez de Jáuregui y Aguilar and Francisco de Quevedo, for reasons related to their obscure lyricism, saw culternanist poets as highly affected, superficial and purposefully obscure with the intention of masking poetic mediocrity with highly ornate phraseology.see Quevedo's "Aguaja de Navegar Cultos"
Regardless of the charges levied against his style, Góngora would remain one of the most influential poets of the Spanish Baroque and would influence in turn the styles of even his most malicious critics.See "Nueva Poesía. Conceptismo, Culteranismo en la Crítica Española" by Collard (in Progress) The sophisticated metaphors displayed in the Polifemo would later inspire French symbolists such as Paul VerlaineWarshaw 1 as well as modern Spanish poets such as Federico García Lorca and fellow members of the Generation of '27. Culteranismo has always retained a highly arcane and esoteric quality throughout the centuries which would eventually inform the mystical nostalgia definitive to the poetry of other 20th century modernist poets. Along with conceptismo, culteranismo largely defined Spanish Baroque Poetry. Culteranismo, as a 17th-century artistic movement, sought to elevate pure ingenio over the ideal of imitatio (Latin term for artistic imitation), a tendency that dominated Renaissance poetry (see ad fontes). The ambiguity of culternanists would continue to incur criticism from more conservative Spanish poets and thinkers for centuries.
Plot summary and analysis
The Polifemo is composed of 63 stanzas, each of which are composed of 8 lines in total. In its entirety, the Polifemo comprises 504 lines. Throughout the poem there is an abundance of poetic correspondences (i.e. organic or interior referencing), which contrast sharply with the abstruse quality of the cultismos (i.e. highly idiosyncratic linguistic modifications, classical lexicon and scholarly references) themselves. Additionally, the ornamentality and detail of the work is further complicated by a profuse usage of classical symbolism and external referencing (i.e. relevant mythological accounts communicated through metaphors and anecdotes). A cultismo, though often intuited as an umbrella term for a particular display of culteranismo, can be thought of as a poetic device that abandons the precision of ordinary language for the sake of artistic expression. Within the poem, parallelism, proportionality, dissonance and intricate array of puns involving both similitude and antithesis also give the poem greater complexity than that of its classical predecessors.
Opening (dedication to the Patron of Niebla) – Stanzas 1–3
The elaborate summoning of the Sicilian Muse Thalia celebrates antiquity and the pastoral genre. Furthermore, this introduction involving a Grecian muse emphasizes ingenio itself over that of a more rudimentary imitation delineated by regulations and set expectations. Imitatio (the reverential imitation of the art of the ancients) was prevalent in Renaissance poetry as seen in the verse of the highly influential Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega who in turn borrowed heavily from the Italian Dolce Stil Novo poets, such as Petrarch, who revolutionized the poetry of the 14th and 15th centuries.
The Cave and the World of Polifemo – Stanzas 4–12
Contrary to the tranquil and idealized settings typical of the pastoral genre, Góngora maintains a fluctuating Background–Foreground dynamic throughout the Polifemo, which makes itself apparent at the very beginning of the poem. Given his fondness for convoluted and self-fashioned metaphors in addition to his profuse use of hiperbatón, the quality of the lyrical poetry defamiliarizes and reconfigures all aspects of the original narration (see ostranenie). The presence of contrasts, of antithesis and dissimilitude reflects a veritable lack of aesthetic concentration as well as deficient narrative unity deemed necessary in traditional Aristotelian aesthetics. Instead, Góngora juxtaposes conflicting images of beauty and ugliness, harmony and discord to hint at an underlying dichotomy of erotic love as both prolific and destructive.
The interspersing of the unsavory and the melancholic with the idyllic deviates from the Renaissance ideal, which differentiated forms by establishing boundaries, namely foregrounds and backgrounds where central objects or figures displaced the prominence of other things. Within the art of the Renaissance, there is a higher degree of hermetic focus, concentration and stability of form. “In contrast to the classical delineation of boundaries”, which gives precedence to forms with greater density and texture, the Baroque style sought to dissolve the divisions between the ‘intended figure’ and ‘unintended background’ or apeirion “in favor of a vision characterized by ‘a mysterious interflow of form and light and colour.’”.Dolan 225
In Góngora's description of the scenery and the characters of the Polifemo, the descriptions themselves become the focus and take on an existence of their own. No longer are properties subordinate to the objects from which they emanate. No longer is there the subjugation of form required in Renaissance art. Instead, the Baroque is often characterized by a breakdown in such distinctions and the deterioration of these established ideals. As with Baroque visual art, within the Polifemo, there is a genuine lack of easily recognizable forms. In turn, this new awareness and appreciation of form in-itself became the chief artistic concern for culteranists, a group of like-minded poets who furthermore celebrated and, at the same time, critiqued the Western Humanist and Hermeneutic traditions of this epoch.
The figures of the Polifemo themselves are often depersonalized by their metaphoric descriptions, by anecdote and by the portrayal of their circumstance or immediate environment in which they are blended. In the context of Baroque aesthetics, depersonalization in this sense is not the complete abandonment or deterioration of the individual as a distinguishable entity, but emphasizes instead the justification of those characters as forms themselves. The objective individual exists as both a series of phenomena as well as an aspect of the overall representation. Conversely, it is the subject who is the ultimate arbiter of artistic experience though they also limited to merely reflect a bundle of individual perceptions and privately held associations. Using this understanding, the distinction between Polyphemus and his cave is no longer deemed relevant as an overarching sympathy exists between the two.
All of these forms serve an aesthetic purpose of preeminent importance as both capture the melancholic sense of longing and neglect that Góngora attempts to develop and incorporate into the overall narration. Ultimately, it is the poet who goes beyond the mere resemblance and commonality of things as orchestrator of inter-subjectivity to both imagine and project a kindred will. This issue of similitude and the underlying perception of persistent sympathies that arise between two separate entities was an idea deeply rooted in the 16th century épistémè, as Michel Foucault exposes in his highly influential work Les Mots et Les Choses.see Foucault's "The Prose of the World", second chapter within The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970)
Galatea described – Stanzas 13–17