Bulletin of the Comediantes

HANDSOMELY ILLUSTRATED AND ENGAGINGLY written, the book under review analyzes the role of ekphrasis in Luis de Góngora's Soledades (1613), Hernando Domínguez Camargo's San Ignacio. Poema heroico (1666), and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's Primero Sueño (1692). In doing so, Castellví Laukamp seeks to illuminate how criollo authors Camargo and Sor Juana deploy verses of an empathically visual nature to (circum)vent the aesthetic and ideological issues that bound them to their European models and readership (12). In this context, the term ekphrasis encompasses various types of poetic descriptions akin to the rhetorical figure enargeia. The book is less about establishing a typology of unequivocally ekphrastic objects or procedures and more about how and why Góngora, and the writers drawn to his poetics, embed digressive and rhetorically ornate sequences in longer works. This approach to ekphrasis enables the incorporation of ancillary concepts and allusions to works of art to explain the importance of such sequences (10).

Chapters 1 and 2 examine scenes where the lovelorn peregrino of the Soledades is prompted by a goatherd and a fisherman to contemplate land and seascapes, respectively. The interplay evidenced in these passages between ekphrasis and teichoschopy, the trope whereby nature is viewed from "a high vantage point" (23), serves a proleptic function and yields an abbreviated vision of totality. In combining these procedures, a sort of paragone or artistic comparison is established: a minute description of nature, using language that evokes painting techniques (ekphrasis), competes with descriptions informed by iconographic conventions aligned with cartography and epic poetry (teichoschopy) (23). As a result, both protagonist and readers of the Soledades have to imagine what lies beyond sight. Nature is thus doubly bracketed, first by the interlocutors who lead the peregrino to see a river view or the seashore and then by the spatiotemporal coordinates that condition each viewing. Each episode becomes an anticipation of things to come in the poem and a metaliterary meditation on the power of language to convey all of nature.

San Ignacio. Poema heroico benefits from discussion in chapters 3 and 4. Camargo's overwrought renditions of a sculpted crucified Christ that Ignatius [End Page 163] of Loyola contemplates and the saint's eight-day long ecstatic rapture incited by the image are read as an attempt to navigate the challenges posed by doctrinal compliance, Bloomian anxiety of influence, and the poet's sense of belatedness as a New World author. The result is a poem Castellví Laukamp finds steeped in diglossia, following Walter Benjamin's definition in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928): an illustration of the tensions that arise between artistic intent and adherence to Counter-Reformation values (86). Treating Ignatius's ecstasy as "a special category of ekphrasis" (101) convincingly underscores a guiding thread throughout the book: in each of the cases studied, ekphrasis bridges the gap between an unfathomable reality and the perception of that reality by poetic protagonists who remain silent while actively engaged in contemplation. In that sense, Camargo's decision to poeticize the unknown contents of Ignatius's mystical experience, similar to his recreation of an unidentified crucifix, upholds the historicity of both events while delving into stylistic experimentation (95). Chapter 4 explains with great insight why Camargo's treatment of the hagiographical subject sets him apart from his literary predecessors.

Sor Juana's most famous silva takes up chapters 5 and 6. The main hypothesis asserts that ekphrasis in her Primero Sueño goes beyond Góngora and Camargo's apposite experiments by trying to render abstract concepts and intellectual constructs (132). The simile in which the soul's fantasía is compared to the legendary lighthouse of Alexandria is read in relation to Hermetic texts, positing a fragment of the thirteenth-century Arabic grimoire Picatrix—disseminated among Neoplatonist and Hermetic circles—as a possible inspiration (146–47). The Egyptian pyramids described in Primero Sueño get a reading richly documented with sources in support of the idea that...