Marsha S. Collins. The Soledades, Gongora's Masque of the Imagination.

Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002. xvi + 270 pp. index, bibl. $37.50. ISBN: 0-8262-1363-4.

The latter part of the twentieth century saw a reevaluation of seventeenth-century Baroque Spanish poet Luis de Gongora's Soledades in terms of theme, content, and cultural context. Critics like Michael J. Woods, John Beverley, R. John McCaw, and Jeremy Robbins have connected Gongora's work to the cultural currents of his time, stressing its social milieu, moral vision, and aesthetic, philosophical, and didactic messages. For these critics conceits are more than merely sensuously appealing, as the Generation of Twenty-seven critics like Damaso Alonso apparently believed, but reflect a deeper philosophical universe of relationships among things in the material world and beyond. For modern critics, the Soledades, while still dazzling the senses with mannerist metaphor, is a fundamentally intellectual work.

Marsha Collins' thoroughly researched and densely written study fits squarely into the late-twentieth-century tradition of reevaluation. It is an examination of the many Renaissance and Baroque cultural artifacts which, like the Soledades, involved hidden meanings and required interpretation by the courtly or elite intellectual society. Each chapter is densely packed with contextual information and textual analyses.

For Collins the clue to the meaning of the Soledades can be found in pansophy, an exaltation of language and literature as the key to the hidden mysteries of the universe, and in the Augustinian system of signs and correspondences uniting sensory images with a higher order of divine Truth--in other words, Renaissance Neoplatonism, and specifically the ideas of Marsilio Ficino. She also considers the importance of Renaissance games, including the contests of literary academies, and enigmas, both reflecting the popularity in that epoch of mental challenges designed to interpret hidden truths, a goal which for Collins is the essence of the Soledades. She subsequently reinforces her argument with an appeal to the "Carta en respuesta" attributed to Gongora (46).

She next considers the Soledades as pastoral literature, positing an influence of Counter Reformation devotional works like St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises, again drawing on St. Augustine as well. She particularly sees the Soledades'prologue as an invitation to meditate of a type common in religious manuals of the time, a "composition of place" which "concentrates the meditator's mind on a certain subject by creating an imaginary scene in which dramatic mental activity can unfold" (60). The sensory vividness of the rest of the poem may reflect as well an Ignatian/Augustinian influence, just as it suggests a familiarity with the Greco-Roman "arts of memory"--also a type of dramatic interior visualization.

Collins' third chapter treats admiratio (wonder), the relation of art and nature, the structure of Gongorine conceits, and emblems, all themes already well explored by Woods or McCaw. Her own additions to the topics include a fairly convincing argument for a direct or indirect influence of Longinus' On the Sublime on Gongora's ideas about wonder, although she doesn't overstate her case, suggesting the possibility rather than insisting that Gongora had in fact read that work.

The fourth part, and Collins' most original offering, "The Masque of the Imagination," studies the possible effect of Italian and Spanish Renaissance gardens on the gestation, setting, and individual scenes of the Soledades. Again, like the other cultural artifacts the author examines, these gardens were replete with "imprese, conceits and mnemotechnic theater" in their "iconographic and spatial deployment" (172), with the intention of producing admiratio, as well as beauty and sensory delight. Although she encounters some difficulty with the question of how the untraveled Gongora could have been familiar with Italian gardens, she concludes that in addition to probably knowing the accounts of numerous foreign travelers, he was no doubt well acquainted with such Spanish imitations as the palace gardens of Aranjuez and with the elaborate Moorish gardens of Southern Spain which in turn had served as models for Italian versions. She makes a convincing case, analyzing a number of similarities in representations of space in Gongora's poem and Renaissance gardens.

Collins concludes her study with a similarly thorough examination of court masques, like the Soledades hybrid structures "composed of music, dance, drama, narrative, and spectacle" (199). Her fairly detailed textual analyses are interspersed with a consideration of classical, Baroque, and modern theories of visualization. Her line of inquiry was sparked by the "marked theatricality" of the Soledades (192), and includes studies of parallels between masques and specific episodes in the poem, as well as a consideration of its theatrical references and imagery. The strongest and most original argument in Collins' book, her discussion of gardens and masques, among other things, resolves the problem of how the Soledades is simultaneously a depiction of peasant life and a reflection of court society.

Collins' study, while thorough and on the whole convincing, does leave a few unanswered questions. It would strengthen her case for the influence of the occult philosophy of Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, for example, if she could discuss how Gongora would be likely to have encountered their ideas. And while the relation the author posits between meditative devotional literature and the Soledades prologue is suggestive, one wonders whether that parallel precludes a simple invitation to otium and to literature as a retreat from action. More discussion of how and why religious literature could influence such a non-Christian poem would probably also be valuable.

Throughout the book Collins shows a slight tendency to substitute rhetoric for logic, as in some of her discussions of theatricality. She refers to "contrived rusticity" (207), but hasn't shown that it is contrived. She occasionally indulges in turns of phrase more suitable for holding the interest of an undergraduate lecture audience than for a scholarly study: "Gongora bashing" (21), "the goatherds' bed-and-breakfast" (118), "a new career as a marriage broker" (118), "free, fraternal publicity stunt" (140), "the busy-bee Hymen" (210), "symbols of yin and yang" (210).

But these are quibbles about an otherwise excellent contextual study. Throughout, Collins' analyses of cultural artifacts, though not always easy reading, convince the reader that the Soledades, if not directly influenced by each and every one of the literary and social phenomena she mentions, at the very least is an artifact of the same enigmatic type as many others which were favored by the elite, courtly intellectual culture of seventeenth-century Spain.

MARY LEE COZAD

Northern Illinois University