Introduction Excerpt for Barroco and Other Writings

Introduction

Alex Verdolini

Sarduy spent a month in Madrid and then traveled on to Paris. On the eve of the Revolution, he had been a medical student with ambitions as a poet and a part-time gig in advertising. In February 1960, filling out the paperwork to exit Spain for France, he could give “writer” as his profession and keep a straight face.² Nonetheless he was green. That month in a letter to his parents he floated a “book of poems, which I might call Here, where I talk about the Francoist dictatorship and the marvels of Spain, in particular the cooking.”³ Soon after, he took a short trip to Amsterdam. Back at the Cité Universitaire, he declared, “I know that what I’m writing, the poems that the ‘presence’ of Anne Frank inspired in me, in her house damp with the flowers of Holland, is going to be read by many people.”⁴ But in June already he was writing “poems of a different kind, and a novel without characters that seems to be turning out well.”⁵

Later that year, the scholarship recipients were summoned home. The Cuban Ministry of Culture could no longer afford to support them. Sarduy, so the story goes, marked his decision to stay behind by burning his guayabera in the courtyard behind the Maison de Cuba.⁶ His letters from the time betray more by way of ambivalence. He breaks the news to his family only gradually, by means of repeated postponement. In June he wants to stay a few more months, to finish his novel and see it to press. This “would be of great utility to Cuba, and of course to me as well.”⁷ In October he pleads for their patience, in the name “of this double and difficult project [. . .] the salvation of Cuba and the publication of my novel.”⁸ Then another deferral—this time to May, for the sake of his course at the École du Louvre.⁹

In the meantime Sarduy was consolidating his position in Paris. He lunched with the likes of Nathalie Sarraute.¹⁰ François Wahl, soon to be the editor behind Lacan’s Écrits, became his lover, and Roland Barthes befriended him. In the years that followed he would attend Barthes’s seminars assiduously, Lacan’s sporadically. Gestures, his novel “without characters,” came out in both Spanish and French in 1963, then later in Danish, Italian, Polish, and German, the first in a series of successes. His role was increasingly that of a relay point between French and Latin American literary scenes, as an editor at Seuil, then the director of its Latin American section, and as a host of “Literatura en Debate” on Radio France Internationale. By the second half of the decade, he was a fixture in the groups associated with Emir Rodriguez Monegal’s Paris-based Mundo Nuevo and Philippe Sollers’s Tel Quel.

It was in Tel Quel that Sarduy’s first significant theoretical effort appeared, a 1966 essay on figurality in the poetry of Luis de Góngora.¹¹ The theme that gives “Metaphor Squared: On Góngora” its subtitle is an old one in Góngora criticism. Góngora’s disparager Juan de Jáuregui complained already in 1624 that the Cordoban poet had not been content to conceal his literal meaning under a layer of metaphorical language; even his metaphors get buried beneath metaphors.¹² Góngora’s world is, in Sarduy’s telling, a world with no fixity of reference, a world of ceaseless fungibility, incessant refiguration. In this world, language never mirrors nature. It shatters nature into shards and recomposes these shards, if at all, in its own image: landscape as language. In this, Sarduy proposes, the Baroque Góngora is “the most contemporary of all poets.” His sketch of the Baroque as artifice and excess is thus also the statement of a program. This maneuver—the vindication and analysis of Góngora, pressed into service as a manifesto—was in no way a new one. Sarduy was working in the rich vein of the Generation of ’27 and, more ambiguously, his Cuban precursor José Lezama Lima, who in an incandescent 1953 essay had described the Gongorine metaphor as “a metaphor that advances like a hunt and then self-destructs in the light of a relief more than that of a meaning.”¹³ But performed in an exquisite Tel Quel French, with a vocabulary drawn from semiotics and a syntax more Mallarmean than Gongorine, the maneuver had new meaning.

Landscape as language, place as text. This is what Barthes, in an enthusiastic review, saw as the principle of Sarduy’s 1967 novel From Cuba with a Song (De donde son los cantantes, Écrit en dansant). In its original title—“where the singers are from”—the novel poses something like a question, one it answers only periphrastically. The name of Sarduy’s native island never appears.¹⁴ Barthes, for his part, insists that “this book has come not from Cuba [. . .] but from the Cuban language, from that Cuban text (cities, words, drinks, clothes, bodies, odors, etc.) that is in itself an inscription of various cultures and epochs.”¹⁵ To designate the nature of this language, the nature of this Spanish and the hidden “face” of French that its translation into French reveals, he takes recourse to a “provisionally useful word”—“Baroque.”¹⁶

“Severo Sarduy’s text,” Barthes writes, “merits all the adjectives that form the lexicon of literary value: it is a brilliant, agile, entertaining, inventive, surprising text and yet it is clear, even cultural, and continuously tender.”¹⁷ But it surpasses these as pure écriture: it is a “hedonist and therefore revolutionary text.”¹⁸ In Cuba the Revolution had different ideas about the relation obtaining between itself and such pleasures, and by the end of the decade Sarduy had earned the outright hostility of literary critics on the island. “Franco-Cuban writer”: such was the slur with which Ambrosio Fornet, “setting himself up as a border policeman,” sought to tar him.¹⁹ For Roberto Fernández Retamar, Sarduy’s writing was nothing but “neo-Barthesian butterflying about [mariposeo],” a term whose homophobic tenor Fernández Retamar would later attempt to deny.²⁰ These insults had their official counterpart in a bureaucratic silence. When around the time of the Góngora essay the replacement passport he had requested failed to materialize, Sarduy thought at first that the reason for this must be “a paper lost at the bottom of a drawer, a young lady doing her lipstick while she reads Françoise Sagan or Marx, etc.”²¹ He realized only gradually that it had “to be considered the rejection, on the part of Cuban bureaucracy, of my status as citizen.”²² This state of affairs furnished the material for another form of epithet. The critic Leonardo Acosta writes of “the affected inanities expounded by the mediocre and stateless novelist Severo Sarduy.”²³

The context in which this appears is instructive. What Acosta is calling “inanity” is a piece by Sarduy in La Quinzaine littéraire heralding the French translation of José Lezama Lima’s magnum opus, Paradiso. Sarduy begins by proclaiming the novel “baroque—for once here the word [. . .] has its pertinence.”²⁴ Acosta, for his part, wants to exonerate Lezama from what Sarduy had intended as a compliment. The Baroque, for the critic on the island, is “a style imported by the Spanish monarchy as part of a culture closely bound up with its imperialist ideology” and thus worse than unserviceable as the prototype for any “decolonizing” aesthetics.²⁵ The “political, economic and cultural” liberation of Latin America demands “new forms [. . .] forms that will, in a series of aspects, be the dead opposite of the Baroque.”²⁶ The literary eminence Lezama, still resident in Cuba, thus should not receive the moniker. Over the course of the 1960s, “baroque” had become increasingly current as a byword for anything intricate, luxuriant, or difficult in Latin American writing; by 1972 it was taking on the power of a shibboleth.

If Acosta had waited to publish his essay until later in the year, he would have found much more in Sarduy to excoriate. “The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque,” Sarduy’s contribution to a UNESCO survey of Latin American literature, announces already in its title his ambition to declare a new era and give it its name.²⁷ He proposes to reduce the Baroque to a “precise operating schema” and to prove the “pertinence of its application to contemporary Latin American art.” What results is an ambitious “semiology of the Latin American Baroque,” illustrated by readings of a set of Sarduy’s contemporaries (Lezama Lima, Carpentier, Cabrera Infante, García Marquez . . . ). The essay culminates in something like a slogan. After praising the syntactic subversions of “the Neo-Baroque sentence—Lezama’s, for example,” he evokes a Baroque in whose power it is to subvert “logocentr[ism],” to undermine authority, a Baroque that “metaphorizes the order disputed, the god called to judgment, the law transgressed. Baroque of the Revolution.”²⁸

Sarduy’s third novel, Cobra, published the same year, is revolutionary in just this anti-logocentric sense. In its first part, a drag queen named Cobra and her mini-me Pup—Pup =

, in one of the novel’s mathematizing flourishes—head to Tangier for her sex-change operation at the hands of a Moroccan Lacan stand-in, Dr. Ktazob (more or less Darija for “dick-cutter”). Later Cobra will reappear elsewhere, among drug-dealing bikers and Tibetan monks. The novel ends with a travelogue—Sarduy’s “journal” from a recent trip to India—with excerpts of the diary of Christopher Columbus spliced in. Barthes greeted Cobra as “a paradisiac text, utopian (without site), a heterology by plenitude: all the signifiers are here and each scores a bull’s-eye.”²⁹ The French version, a co-translation with Philippe Sollers, earned Sarduy the Prix Médicis étranger. This meant big sales and TV interviews. The waiters at one place where the writer was a regular chanted “Champion!” when he came in. To his family in Cuba he wrote that if “the gods kept smiling” a “movie in color” would come of it.³⁰ His next major prose work, Cobra’s conspicuous anagram, was the text at the heart of the present volume: Barroco.

For a reader adopting a customs officer mentality, the contents of this book will at first blush be as inscrutable as the young Sarduy, dubious document in hand, must have been to the actual border police. The term neobarroco, introduced in the UNESCO survey essay, would go on to make its fortune as the watchword for a “New World discourse of countermodernity.”³¹ But in Barroco Sarduy turns away from the New World to articulate a planetary—in a certain sense cosmic—Baroque. This concept, he will argue, belongs intimately to the history of cosmology: the canonical Baroque is for Sarduy the age of Kepler, the age of a cosmos whose single center has split in two, into the twin foci of the orbital ellipse. Kepler’s kinematics is subjected, in Sarduy’s hands, to a series of prestidigitations. Its split center reappears in Gongorine ellipsis as the split subject of language. The curve of the planets’ paths dictates the secret law of Baroque paintings. The Neo-Baroque, in turn, will be defined in terms of the “new instability” of twentieth-century cosmology.³²Barroco thus mixes cosmology, art history, and literary theory indiscriminately, to name a few of its discourses. Sarduy subjects Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas to a kind of critical pastiche. Cassirer’s symbolic forms lurk as a latent presence. Lacan appears, sometimes butchered.³³ The technique is novelistic, in Sarduy’s sense: set pieces assembled into a whole more mandalic than narrative.

In this assemblage, Latin America is conspicuous by its absence. Sarduy’s gaze is fixed upon the cosmos, whose patterns are the same in Paris and Havana. And when this gaze returns to earth, the objects that it favors are overwhelmingly European. The colonial Baroque goes very nearly unmentioned, and Sarduy draws more examples of the Neo-Baroque from France (Philippe Sollers), Spain (Luis Feito), and the United States (Robert Morris) than he does from Latin America. At the same time, as we will see below, the present volume represents a kind of clandestine maneuver with regard to the two major authors who, together with Sarduy, form the “Cuban triumvirate of Baroque theorists.”³⁴ In redefining the “founding Baroque” of the European seventeenth century, Sarduy will seek to exclude Alejo Carpentier from the Neo-Baroque and to establish himself as the rightful heir to José Lezama Lima, whose Paradiso stood for Sarduy as the Neo-Baroque work par excellence.

Early in the book, Sarduy sets about dismantling the concept “baroque.” His aim, he writes, is to “motivate the sign barroco, to give it a foundation.”³⁶ But first this sign must pass through purifying fire. Writing in the structuralist koine that characterizes his theoretical writings, Sarduy announces a stringent semantic asceticism: the suppression of any possible signified (which is to say, any version of lo barroco) in favor of a direct encounter between the signifier—the word’s form—and its referents. Thus, for example, the vowels a and o—sparkling in the word barroco like gems in their setting—are made to correspond to the light set, gem-like, into the black marble cupola of the Chapel of the Holy Shroud. Such onomastic games serve to shake up the concept “baroque,” to break it up into a field of floating realia: poems, paintings, chapels. This field will then crystallize into an order under the catalytic action of a second concept: retombée.

In Sarduy’s hands, retombée names something like an echo—specifically, echoes of cosmological models (Plato, Copernicus, Kepler . . . ) in works of literature, art, and architecture. Wending his way from Plato and Aristotle to the twentieth century, Sarduy traces a double history, mapping events in the history of science onto events in the history of styles. Thus he will see reflected in the single-centered composition of Renaissance paintings the form of the Copernican cosmos. In the ellipses that structure the paintings of Rubens, in the ellipsis that governs the poetry of Góngora, he will detect echoes of Kepler’s cosmology, in which the single center splits, giving way to the double focus of the orbital ellipse. These two histories will be coupled together—the periodizations internal to each allowed to play off against one another—in accordance with a logic not of mere analogy but rather of reciprocal and repercussive causality.

Sarduy’s decision to introduce a French term as his text’s central methodological concept—along with his statements in subsequent texts and interviews that he could not find an “effective” Spanish equivalent—has endowed this concept with the mystique of untranslatability.³⁷ Thus mystified, some readers have resorted to forced explanations, seeking the meaning of the term in Mallarmé or etymology.³⁸ The gnomic, poem-like definition that Sarduy himself offers (“Achronic causality, / non-contiguous isomorphism / or, / consequence of something that has yet to occur, / resemblance to something that has yet to exist”) has not always helped to clarify matters. What is clear is that retombée does not only name a correspondence (a likeness, say, between ellipse and ellipsis). It involves a sense of causality—a curious kind of causality in which cause and effect can get shuffled (se barajan) like playing cards.³⁹ This is Sarduy’s central wager in the game that is Barroco:⁴⁰ to refer the “Baroque effect,” as he will put it in a later interview, to a causality—without, however, reducing it to a state of dependence on a single heteronomous cause.⁴¹ Everything depends, then, on pinning down what he means by this concept, one on whose value and whose irreducibility to other adjacent terms he will insist for the rest of his career as a theorist of the Baroque.⁴² Faced with these apparently paradoxical formulations, some of Sarduy’s more sober readers have sought refuge in common sense, either playing down causality in favor of echo or likeness or reframing retombée in terms of a more orderly pattern of causation. In a book partly indebted to Sarduy’s, The Poetic Structure of the World (1987/1990), Fernand Hallyn chooses the latter alternative, writing, “Less paradoxically it seems to me that retombée can be defined as the production of analogous effects from common presuppositions forming part of the anonymous intertext [. . .] two noncontiguous positions, not influencing each other directly, but sustained by the same presupposition.”⁴³ Less paradoxical—but lacking in the specificity on which its author insists.⁴⁴

It may be useful, then, to trace in a few schematic steps how the term acquires the meaning with which Sarduy invests it. Three English words—fallout, upshot, feedback—serve well to specify the scope of retombée.

Fallout. The usage upon which Sarduy draws is not an old or esoteric one. Retombées (plural) simply names what in English is called “fallout”: nuclear fallout, retombées radioactives; fallout shelter, abri anti-retombées. Then, as in English, the term receives a derived sense. It comes to name the diffuse set of indirect effects arising out of a given event: e.g., the fallout (les retombées) of a political scandal.⁴⁵ At first approximation, Sarduy’s claim would seem to be that the artistic, architectural, and literary phenomena gathered under the name “Baroque” form, together, the fallout of a detonation elsewhere—the collapse of the Galilean circular cosmology in favor of Kepler’s ellipses.

Upshot. “Fallout” is grammatically singular. In ordinary usage, the French term is plural. But for this very reason, it becomes possible, by speaking of something as une retombée, to pick out a distinct and singular indirect effect against a background of causal diffusion. This usage is attested in the shoptalk of mathematicians from the 1960s on. Thus one speaks of the retombée in theory B (the implication, the upshot) of a development in theory A. That is, a specifiable instance of—possibly reciprocal—fallout as a relation obtaining between two formal structures (for instance, between the space of perspectival figuration and the space of Copernican cosmology). In the late 1960s, a similar usage appears in Sarduy’s immediate French-language “speech community”: in the notoriously mathematizing language of the Tel Quel milieu.⁴⁶

Feedback. Here the term passes out of the history of common or coterie language and into Sarduy’s personal parole. Another word is audible beneath the French word retombée—its Spanish cognate, retumbo. Boom or rumbling, as of thunder: a resounding. And indeed wherever Sarduy speaks of retombée he speaks always in the next breath of acoustic phenomena. In Barroco’s “Chapter 0,” devoted to a preliminary explication of retombée, Sarduy takes up the conceit of the echo chamber, one in which the echo “sometimes comes before the voice,” in order to name the discursive space that, in subsequent chapters, he will set about constructing. Commenting on this passage in a 1975 interview for Le Monde, Sarduy states that he had been “much influenced” by the technical language of radio production.⁴⁷ Later, in the 1979 interview that contains his clearest elaboration of the concept, he will explain that one aim of retombée is to place “on a single plane [. . .] the effects of a given [e.g., cosmological] model and the model itself as affected dialectically by those effects, absent temporal, conceptual, or spatial priority”:⁴⁸ that is, to set up a feedback loop. So, for example, Sarduy will seek to show how the moon as seen by Galileo, pockmarked, corruptible, passes over into the realm of fine arts (Cigoli’s fresco in the Pauline Chapel, which shows a Virgin with the Galilean moon beneath her feet); how this disruptive image worms its way under the iconographical signifier (the moon’s image) to undermine its signified (the moon as the immaculate); and how it thus saps the theological foundations of Galilean cosmology (the circular as the natural), preparing, indirectly, its collapse—preparing the ground for the ellipse of Kepler (or Rubens, or Borromini), for Góngora’s ellipsis, for the eccentric world of the Baroque.

Gustavo Guerrero proposes one way of resolving the contradiction: to read “The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque” as a manifesto concealed within an ecumenical survey: a “secret palimpsest in which we must read, between the lines, the radical opposition of Sarduy to the thesis of the Carpenterian Baroque.” Instead of “openly attacking Carpentier’s ideas,” Sarduy takes as his target “their source: Eugenio d’Ors.”⁵¹ Indeed the presence of d’Ors is a red thread running through the postwar Cuban engagement with the Baroque.

To the received idea of the Latin American Baroque as imposed and derivative, both Carpentier and Lezama respond with variations on the same retort. Lezama: the Old World Baroque is deficient and the New World Baroque its fulfilment. Carpentier: the genuine home of the Baroque, its “chosen territory,” is none other than Latin America.⁵² When Carpentier first sketched the contours of this argument, it was not the Baroque he had in mind but Surrealism with its manufactured marvels—costume jewelry in contrast to the gems of the Americas, where the marvelous is real. The New World is marvelous, first of all, for its history. Carpentier writes that he had his “first inkling” of the marvelous real in Haiti in 1943, on a visit to the “poetic ruins” of Henri Christophe’s kingdom.⁵³ The New World is Baroque, by contrast, for its nature: its botanical excess and, associated to this by a kind of semantic contagion, the “fecund mestizaje”⁵⁴ that eventuates in the syncretism of its art forms. It is in regard to nature in the sense of the land that d’Ors becomes relevant.

In a short 1926 text on the theme of “History and Geography” d’Ors writes that “in the secret logic of its forms [. . .] the Baroque can be summed up as the deformation brought upon the great lines of European tradition by the illusion and enchantment of the vegetation of the tropics.”⁵⁵ Baroque columns, twisting like tree trunks or braided like vines, hail not from the forests of Europe but from another landscape, an ultramar “half-glimpsed in a daydream, or recalled.”⁵⁶ D’Ors thus introduces a significant wrinkle into the idea of the New World Baroque as an imposed and derivative style: “It was Europe, to be sure [. . .] that brought the Baroque style to the Indies; but before that the Baroque had already encountered the secret of its rhythms in a diffuse influence exercised by the Indies upon Europe.”⁵⁷ In a French version of the same text published later that year, d’Ors spells the thought out more explicitly: “Because every colonization is always reciprocal.”⁵⁸

The Baroque as influx and reflux of form: this idea, and others like it, were beginning to be formulated in Latin America as well. The year before d’Ors’s little text, the Argentinian architect Ángel Guido had published a small volume on Hispano-Indigenous Fusion in Colonial Architecture, the first in a series of efforts culminating in The Rediscovery of America in Art.⁵⁹ Guido saw in the history of Latin American aesthetics an alternating pattern of Old World conquest and New World reclamation. The imposed European Baroque was the first aesthetic conquista; the reconquista came with the “inoculation of indigenous sap,” the pre-Columbian forms worked into Baroque façades by the likes of the Quechua sculptor Kondori.⁶⁰ Not dissimilarly the Hungarian-American art historian Pál Kelemen would later glorify a Latin American Baroque invigorated by hybridity, “[j]ust as the tulip bulbs we brought from Holland produced within a few years a changed flower in our Florentine garden.”⁶¹

This botanical picture of cultural mixing—sap and soil—prepared the subsumption of the mestizaje theme under the d’Orsian theme of the Baroque as the return to nature, to prehistory, as “secretly animated by nostalgia for the Lost Paradise.”⁶² Carpentier’s theory depends on the identification, adumbrated already in d’Ors’s 1926 text, of this Lost Paradise with the New World, and on the thesis that the nature of the New World is, in its intricate proliferation, itself already Baroque. On a page of the 1962 novel Explosion in a Cathedral that echoes more than one d’Orsian passage, Carpentier writes of the coral forests of the Antilles as preserving “the earliest barroquismos of Creation [. . .] a figuration, close by and yet inaccessible, of the Lost Paradise.”⁶³ From this premise Carpentier arrives at the necessity of the Baroque by two forms of argumentation. The more straightforward is the argument from mimesis: “the description of a baroque world is necessarily baroque.”⁶⁴ The more interesting—because it endows the verbal Baroque with a distinct stylistic content—is the argument from Genesis. Baroque language is language faced with a world unnamed, or a nature in excess of any imaginable lexicon. “The Baroque is engendered by the need to name things,” writes Carpentier; and since, like Adam, “we Latin American writers, too, have to name everything,” it follows immediately that “legitimate style of the contemporary Latin American novelist is Baroque.”⁶⁵

Characteristically, the Sarduy of “The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque” will affirm just the opposite. The polyglot New World, in the wake of the Conquest, is marked by a “trop plein of the word,” an excess of language, “an abundance of the naming in relation to the named.”⁶⁶ Baroque language comes as “the solution to this verbal saturation.”⁶⁷ More generally, insisting that the Baroque is not nature but “on the contrary, [. . .] the apotheosis of artifice, the irony and mockery of nature,”⁶⁸ the Sarduy of the 1972 essay is seeking to cut Carpentier’s Baroque off at the root. In Barroco he repeats the gesture, cutting deeper. Carpentier goes unmentioned here: Lezama is the only Latin American writer who figures in the book. Nor does d’Ors come in for explicit criticism. But in the conceit that gives Barroco its structure—the ellipse of Kepler as the emblem, the diagram, the fundamental form of the Baroque—Sarduy silently takes up an idée fixe of d’Ors, in the process inverting its significance.

In a short 1918 Catalan-language text, d’Ors adopts the Keplerian ellipse as a heraldic device for his own philosophical position—for the form of synthetic, ironic intelligence that he advocates as a restoration of the nous, the “living reason” of the ancients, a reason that would include and sublate the irrational. Faced with the destruction of the circular cosmos, with a nature apparently inimical to geometry, Kepler, as ventriloquized by d’Ors, responds: “The overly simple regularity of the ancients, no: but nevertheless a certain regularity; a rigid symmetry, no: but yes, a more elastic, more flexible harmony; Pythagorean circles, no; but, if you please, graceful ellipses.”⁶⁹ In 1947, d’Ors will still be writing of his intellectual venture as the attempt at a “Keplerian reform [i.e., as opposed to Kant’s Copernican revolution] in philosophy.”⁷⁰

In the intervening years, however, the ellipse of Kepler comes to serve, for d’Ors, as a kind of key to the Baroque. In several texts of the late 1920s he takes up the language of Heinrich Wölfflin, for whom the terms tektonisch and atektonisch (the third major opposition in Principles of Art History) characterize, respectively, the classical and the Baroque. D’Ors calls for a “tectonic [elsewhere “structural”] explication of the Baroque”:⁷¹ a theory of the Baroque that would bring out the structure concealed beneath its “atectonic” chaos. This structure will turn out to have, as its shorthand, the Keplerian ellipse:

If, then, the unity of design that governs any composition—any tectonic realization—in which the classical spirit prevails can be represented symbolically by the circle, it is proper to Baroque composition to be representable, in its essence, by the ellipse. What, in [classical] composition, is unity of design, appears to us, in the second, as duality, obeying the double rule of a double center. Logic, which is reason, which is spirit, establishes beyond doubt the absolute authority of the principle of contradiction. But the inspiration of the Baroque does not come from the spirit, it comes from nature. Nature does not know the principle of contradiction. She mocks it, mocks it with her Werden, her dynamism, her movement. Nature, to use a vulgar expression, does not know what she wants.⁷²

As Kepler finds in the orbital ellipse the form of what seems to be formless, so d’Ors finds in the ellipse of Kepler the form of a Baroque that, in its imitation of nature, inherits nature’s apparent formlessness.

For d’Ors, then, the ellipse is a symbol of the Baroque as subdued, the Baroque as mastered by the ironic intellect. According to Enric Jardí, his biographer, he liked to repeat the claim that “European culture is polarized between two essential nuclei, Greece and Portugal,” the former standing for the classical and the latter for the Baroque;⁷³ d’Ors regarded himself as Greek in outlook, as an Odysseus to the “delicious siren” of the Baroque.⁷⁴ The political pendant to this aesthetic attitude is encapsulated neatly in the preface he wrote in 1935 (the same year he published his major work on the Baroque)⁷⁵ for the Spanish edition of a book of interviews with the Portuguese dictator Salazar: “to achieve a civilized decorum, a Baroque people with a tendency to abandon itself to the disorder of nature must come into opposition with itself.”⁷⁶ Hence the necessity of Salazarism, whose coming Spanish incarnation he heralds as “our best collective hope for decorum”—hence the necessity of a “missionary politics” that “in operating upon a civilized country, even upon a country with a long cultural tradition, does so in the manner of a missionary engaged in redeeming a barbarous people from its barbarity.”⁷⁷

Where Carpentier excerpts from the d’Orsian dialectic the characterization of the Baroque as the idiom “by means of which culture imitates the procedures of nature,”⁷⁸ revalorizing it in the light of a very different politics, Sarduy, seeking the basis for a “Baroque of the Revolution,”⁷⁹ takes up the dialectic as a whole and reverses it. Sarduy follows d’Ors in identifying Kepler as the Baroque moment in the history of cosmology, and he takes the conceit of the ellipse as the “tectonic” key to the Baroque more seriously, perhaps, than did d’Ors himself. But for Sarduy the ellipse does not formalize nature in her double intentions, nature that makes a mockery of the principle of noncontradiction and that “does not know what she wants.” It stands instead for artifice—the ellipse as anamorphic circle⁸⁰—and, through the equation of Kepler’s ellipse with Góngora’s ellipsis, it comes to formalize the split subject (in orbital terms: one luminous center, occupied by the sun, and another one “elided, excluded, obscure”) as the subject of language.

Lezama, here as elsewhere, cuts a more ambivalent figure.⁸¹ His seminal 1957 lecture “Baroque Curiosity” begins with a mild mockery of d’Ors as “a critic who, outdoing himself in the art of generalization, claimed that the earth is classical and the sea is Baroque.”⁸² This ought not to be read as an outright dismissal; Lezama is in any case as inveterate an exaggerator as d’Ors. He is more adept, however, in the arts of dialectical specification. Two years later we find him writing in the pages of Lunes de Revolución that “in the landscape of the Americas, and now we insist again on this, what is baroque is nature.”⁸³ But what he means is different. He is commenting here on the “Baroque treatment of fruit.” Góngora, faced with a pippin, belabors the preliminaries (the cutting of the fruit), exaggerates its subtleties (the yellow that fades), and thus betrays a “lesser encounter.”⁸⁴ The “excess,” here, is in verbiage. Not so in the Americas, where the fruit is already rhetorical: “if a papaya, butter among fruits, or a guanábana, silvered haunch of sweetness, were to receive the trident of baroque hyperbole, this would make for a grotesque.”⁸⁵ The American Baroque is instead in “the festival of the fruit’s excessive brouhaha [. . .] the opulent subject in his gourmandise.”⁸⁶ Nature, here, is no longer code for innocence or fecundity, nor is the theme of mestizaje folded into it. This is instead a nature saturated with excess and artifice; it appears not as Eden or jungle but under the double guise of the fruit seized at the banquet and the landscape worked over by leisure (“the art of enjoying a landscape and filling it with artificial, metrical and voluptuous instruments”).⁸⁷ Its order is less one of reproduction than one of simulacrum and squandering.

Hence Lezama’s enthusiasm—derived from Roger Caillois and passed on to Sarduy—for phenomena of hypertely among plants and insects, instances in which mimesis exceeds any purpose of seduction or camouflage, in which the “excessive drive to simulation” can become a “lethal supplement”:⁸⁸ moths so adept in the imitation of leaves that others of their kind attempt to feed on them. What for Lezama serves as the model for a poetics of excess becomes in Sarduy’s hands the proof that nature itself is not natural. Where the Baroque, for d’Ors, evokes the Eternal Feminine of Goethe and the “hot moaning of turtledoves” in the Jardim Botânico in Coimbra,⁸⁹ Sarduy’s own free associations lead him from the Botanic Gardens of Kandy, in Sri Lanka, where he remembers having seen an “orchid that simulates a butterfly,” to the premature death of Candy Darling, Warhol’s trans superstar.⁹⁰ It is to this “series of excessive and lethal phenomena” that the Baroque, for Sarduy, belongs.

Notes

1. François Wahl, “Biography of a Few Paintings (For Rubén Gallo),” trans. Richard Sieburth and Françoise Gramet, The Princeton University Library Chronicle 73, no. 3 (2012): 443.

2. Severo Sarduy, Cartas, ed. Manuel Díaz Martínez (Madrid: Editorial Verbum, 1996), 29. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine.

3. Sarduy to his family, February 17, 1960, Severo Sarduy Family Correspondence, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

4. Sarduy to his family, March 26, 1960, Severo Sarduy Family Correspondence, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

5. Sarduy to his family, June 17, 1960, Severo Sarduy Family Correspondence, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

6. Sarduy, “c’est chez nous . . .” in Severo Sarduy, Obra completa, vol. 1, ed. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl (Madrid: ALLCA XX, 1999), 29.

7. Sarduy to his family, June 30, 1960, Severo Sarduy Family Correspondence, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

8. Sarduy to his family, October 10, 1960, Severo Sarduy Family Correspondence, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

9. Sarduy to his family, May 21, 1961, Severo Sarduy Family Correspondence, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

10. Sarduy to his family, November 20, 1961, Severo Sarduy Family Correspondence, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

11. Included in this volume, alongside another essay of the same period, “Cubes.” Both appeared in the 1975 French edition of Barroco.

12. Juan de Jáuregui, Discurso poético, (Madrid, 1624), 9.

13. José Lezama Lima, “Serpent of Don Luis de Góngora,” in A Poetic Order of Excess: Essays on Poets and Poetry, trans. James Irby and Jorge Brioso (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2019), 236.

14. Roberto González Echevarría, La ruta de Severo Sarduy (Hanover, N.H.: Ediciones del Norte, 1987), 102.

15. Roland Barthes, “The Baroque Face,” trans. by Susan Homar, Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas 53, no. 1 (2020): 22; translation modified.

16. Barthes, “The Baroque Face,” 22.

17. Barthes, “The Baroque Face,” 23.

18. Barthes, “The Baroque Face,” 22.

19. Roberto González Echevarría, “Severo Sarduy (1937–1993),” Revista Iberoamericana (1993): 757.

20. Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Calibán,” Casa de las Américas 68 (1971): 146; Roberto Fernández Retamar, “Una aclaración necesaria a propósito de unas palabras de Roberto González Echevarría,” Revista Iberoamericana 60, no. 168–69 (1994): 1179–82.

21. Sarduy to Manuel Díaz Martínez (undated) in Cartas, ed. Manuel Díaz Martínez, 35.

22. Sarduy to Manuel Díaz Martínez, April 24, 1967, in Cartas, ed. Manuel Díaz Martínez, 37.

23. Leonardo Acosta, “El ‘barroco americano’ y la ideología colonialista,” Unión 11, no. 2–3 (1972): n. 37, 63. The essay was later included as “El barroco de Indias y la ideología colonialista,” in El barroco de Indias y otros ensayos (Havana: Casa de las Américas, 1984), n. 37, 51. For a different valorization of this state of affairs, see the striking image of Sarduy’s passaporte ausente as stamped with the “authentic seal” of a “chthonic tattoo” in Haroldo de Campos, “Para um tombeau de Severo Sarduy,” in Severo Sarduy, Obra completa, vol. 2, ed. Gustavo Guerrero and François Wahl (Madrid: ALLCA XX, 1999), 1723.

24. Sarduy, “Un Proust cubain,” La Quinzaine littéraire, no. 115 (April 1971): 3.

25. Acosta, “El ‘barroco americano,’” 59.

26. Acosta, “El ‘barroco americano,’” 59.

27. Severo Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” trans. Christopher Winks, in Baroque New Worlds: Representation, Transculturation, Counterconquest, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 270–91. Originally included in César Fernández Moreno, ed., América Latina en su literatura (Paris: UNESCO, 1972), 167–84. Haroldo de Campos has claimed priority as the originator of the term on the basis of his 1955 essay “A obra de arte aberta.” There he uses neo-barroco, without developing its possible significance, as an alternate name for Pierre Boulez’s “conception of the open artwork as a ‘modern Baroque.’” Haroldo de Campos, “A obra de arte aberta,” in Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, and Haroldo de Campos, Teoria da poesía concreta (São Paulo: Edições Invenção, 1965), 33.

28. Sarduy reused the closing section of “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” with additions as Barroco, 1.V. I quote from this passage as translated in the present volume.

29. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1975), 8.

30. Sarduy to his family, November 30 & December 12, 1972, Severo Sarduy Family Correspondence, Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

31. Monika Kaup, “Neobaroque: Latin America’s Alternative Modernity,” Comparative Literature 58, no. 2 (2006): 128.

32. See Severo Sarduy, Nueva Inestabilidad in Obras III: Ensayos (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2013), 343–95.

33. See, for example, Barroco, 50–59 in the present volume, where Sarduy repeatedly treats repression and foreclosure as equivalent.

34. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Monika Kaup, “Baroque, New World Baroque, Neobaroque: Categories and Concepts,” in Baroque New Worlds, 10.

35. Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” 271; Eugenio d’Ors, Lo barroco (Madrid: Tecnos, 1993). On Sarduy’s engagement with d’Ors, see the third section of the present introduction.

36. See Barroco, 10 in the present volume.

37. Severo Sarduy, Nueva Inestabilidad, in Obras III: Ensayos, 377–78, n. 1; Severo Sarduy, “El barroco après la lettre,” interview by Alberto Cardín and Biel Mesquida, Diwan, no. 5–6 (1979): 89.

38. See for example Rolando Pérez, “Entre literatura, artes visuales y ciencia: la imagen de pensamiento de Severo Sarduy y Ramon Dachs,” in Cámara de eco. Homenaje a Severo Sarduy, ed. Gustavo Guerrero and Catalina Quesada (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018), 140.

39. Nueva Inestabilidad, in Obras III: Ensayos, 377–78, n. 1.

40. “What strikes me,” writes Alain Badiou, “without denying the comparative and metaphorical exuberance of Sarduy’s prose, is the extraordinary discipline of his project. This is a discipline that we can rightfully compare to that of children, when they agree on a game’s rules. As a matter of fact, to change everything sordid into a superior game is certainly one of Sarduy’s ambitions. And it is to the abstract complexity of the rules of composition of this game that we should assign the word ‘baroque’, certainly not to the proliferation of images.” (Alain Badiou, The Age of the Poets and Other Writings on Twentieth-Century Poetry and Prose, trans. Bruno Bosteels (New York: Verso, 2014), 184).

41. Sarduy, “El barroco après la lettre,” 90.

42. See, e.g., Obras III: Ensayos, 345; 377–78, n. 1; 383–84.

43. Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (New York: Zone Books, 1990), 58.

44. For some typical readings of retombée, see Catalina Quesada, “Vagabundas azules y enanas blancas: principios de astronomía aplicada,” in Cámara de eco: Homenaje a Severo Sarduy, ed. Gustavo Guerrero and Catalina Quesada (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2018), 32; Omar Calabrese, Neo-Baroque: A Sign of the Times (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 10–11; Rolando Pérez, Severo Sarduy and the Neo-Baroque Image of Thought in the Visual Arts (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2012), 54–56; Rolando Pérez, “Entre literatura, artes visuales y ciencia: la imagen de pensamiento de Severo Sarduy y Ramon Dachs,” in Cámara de eco, 140–41; Françoise Moulin Civil, “Invención y epifanía del Neobarroco: Excesos, Desbordamientos, Reverberaciones,” in Obra completa, vol. 2, 1655.

45. The “untranslatability” of retombée is hence local to Spanish and easily explained. For obvious reasons the corresponding Spanish expression—lluvia (radioactiva), (radioactive) rain—is not available for the same semantic development undergone by its French and English counterparts. The translator of the 1980 Italian edition had no difficulty finding a more or less workable equivalent: ricaduta, whose history tracks with that of fallout and retombée(s).

46. E.g., “La signifiance est une opération dont la structure n’est qu’une retombée décalée.” Julia Kristeva, Sēmeiōtikē: recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1969), 279; see also the characterization of existentialism and the Nouveau Roman as “retombées culturelles” in the unsigned introduction to the collective volume Théorie d’ensemble (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), 8.

<47. Françoise Wegener, Entretien avec Severo Sarduy (“Le baroque? Une guerre entre le cercle et l’ellipse”), Le Monde, March 7, 1975, 16. Sarduy worked for Radio France and wrote a number of radio plays, translated into English by Philip Barnard in Sarduy, For Voice (Latin American Literary Review Press, 1985). See also Anke Birkenmaier, “Severo Sarduy y la radio,” in Cámara de eco, 234–55.

48. Sarduy, “El barroco après la lettre,” 89.

49>. Quoted in Jorge Brioso, “Introduction,” José Lezama Lima, A Poetic Order of Excess, 9. See José Lezama Lima, Letter to Carlos Meneses (August 3, 1975), in “Homenaje a Lezama Lima,” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba José Martí 29, no. 2 (May–August 1988): 91.

50. Severo Sarduy, “Las estructuras de la narración,” interview by Emir Rodríguez Monegal, Mundo Nuevo, no. 2 (August 1966): 24.

51. Gustavo Guerrero, “Algunas notas sobre Sarduy y su Neobarroco,” in Le néo-baroque cubain (Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1998), 91.

52. Alejo Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 100.

53. Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris, 84.

54. Carpentier, “On the Marvelous Real in America,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris, 88; translation modified.

55. Eugenio d’Ors, “Historia y Geografía,” ABC Madrid (May 21, 1926): 4, 7.

56. D’Ors, “Historia y Geografía,” 7.

57. D’Ors, “Historia y Geografía,” 7.

58. Eugenio d’Ors, Coupole et monarchie: Suivi d’autres études sur la morphologie de la culture (Paris: Libraire de France, 1926), 64.

59. Ángel Guido, Fusión hispano-indígena en la arquitectura colonial (Buenos Aires: El Ateneo, 1925); Redescubrimiento de América en el arte (Buenos Aires: El Ateneo, 1944).

60. Guido, Fusión hispano-indígena en la arquitectura colonial, 92.

61. Pál Kelemen, Baroque and Rococo in Latin America, vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1967), x.

62. D’Ors, Lo barroco, 35.

63. Alejo Carpentier, El siglo de las luces: Obras completas de Alejo Carpentier, vol. 5 (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1990), 214. See also Steve Wakefield, Carpentier’s Baroque Fiction: Returning Medusa’s Gaze (Woodbridge, U.K.: Tamesis, 2004), 34, and Guadalupe Silva, “Contrapunto cubano: Teorías del barroco en Alejo Carpentier y Severo Sarduy,” Zama: Revista del Instituto de Literatura Hispanoamericana, no. 6 (2014): 155.

64. Carpentier, “The Baroque and the Marvelous Real,” in Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, ed. Zamora and Faris, 106.

65. Alejo Carpentier, “Questions Concerning the Contemporary Latin American Novel,” trans. Michael Schuessler, in Baroque New Worlds, 262.

66. Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” 281; translation modified.

67. Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” 281.

68. Sarduy, “The Baroque and the Neobaroque,” 272.

69. Eugenio d’Ors, La vall de Josafat: Obra catalana d’Eugeni d’Ors, vol. 11 (Barcelona: Quaderns Crema, 1987), 196.

70. Eugenio d’Ors, El secreto de la filosofía (Barcelona: Editorial Iberia, 1947), 136.

71. Eugenio d’Ors, Goya (Madrid: Libertarias/Prodhufi, 1996), 255.

72. D’Ors, Goya, 257.

73. Enric Jardí, Eugeni d’Ors: Vida i obra (Barcelona: Aymà, 1967), 186.

74. D’Ors, Lo barroco, 24.

75. The Spanish original of Lo barroco was published only in 1936, but it appeared in French translation the year prior. See Eugenio d’Ors, Du baroque, trans. Agathe Rouart-Valéry (Paris: Gallimard, 1935).

76. António Ferro, Oliveira Salazar: el hombre y su obra (Buenos Aires: Editoriales reunidas, 1942), 20.

77. Ferro, Oliveira Salazar, 20–21.

78. D’Ors, Lo barroco, 80.

79. See Barroco, 78 in the present volume.

80. See Barroco, 47–49 in the present volume.

81. The crucial texts are “The Serpent of Don Luis de Góngora” (1953) and “Baroque Curiosity” (1957), in Baroque New Worlds, 212–40. Together they form a diptych. “Serpent” shows the loss of landscape in Góngora: “The circumstance of the Counter Reformation makes of Góngora’s work a Counter Renaissance. It removes the landscape whose center his luminosity might occupy. The Jesuit baroque [. . .] had already surrounded him with [. . .] a landscape in plaster” (Lezama Lima, A Poetic Order of Excess, 227). “Curiosity” shows a landscape regained in the Americas. There, when “the tumult of the Conquest and the colonizer’s parceling out of the landscape have receded into the distance,” Gongorism transcends its merely “verbal character” to become a form of life, “a second nature,” for the “Baroque gentleman [. . .] now established in his own landscape” (Lezama Lima, in Baroque New Worlds, 214; translation modified). In the rather paternalistic conceit with which “Curiosity” closes, this “gentleman [. . .] participates in, watches over and protects the two great syncretisms at the root of our American Baroque, the Hispano-Incaic and the Hispano-Negroid” (Lezama Lima, Baroque New Worlds, 238; translation modified: I restore here Lezama’s original and unpleasant expression). Lezama’s quip in “Curiosity” about the New World Baroque as contraconquista needs to be read in the full context of the development beginning with the similarly structured and much less frequently quoted statement in “Serpent.” For a careful consideration of the Baroque for Lezama, see Maarten van Delden, “Europe and America in José Lezama Lima” in Baroque New Worlds, 571–92.

82. José Lezama Lima, “Baroque Curiosity,” 212. The reference is to d’Ors’s statement that “The sea is sublime. This, in the language of the arts, is equivalent to saying that it is Baroque; Wölfflin has noticed the essential Baroque quality [barroquismo] of the pictorial genre known as ‘marine.’” D’Ors, Lo barroco, 108.

83. José Lezama Lima, “Corona de las frutas,” Lunes de Revolución, vol. 40 (1959): 22.

84. Lezama Lima, “Corona de las frutas,” 22.

85. Lezama Lima, “Corona de las frutas,” 22–23.

86. Lezama Lima, “Corona de las frutas,” 23.

87. Lezama Lima, “Baroque Curiosity,” 222; translation modified.

88. Sarduy, “El barroco après la lettre,” 99.

89. D’Ors, Lo barroco, 35.

90. Sarduy, “El barroco après la lettre,” 99–101. For Sarduy’s analysis of transvestism and transsexuality as hypertelic undermining of naturalized femininity, see La simulación in Obra completa, vol. 2, 1267–69.