Este . . . Cíclope: Góngora’s Polifemo and the Poetics of Disfiguration

Abstract

This essay argues that Góngora’s Fábula de Polifemo y Galatea operates in a skeptical mode, responding to an epistemological crisis that dominated seventeenth-century Spanish intellectual and artistic production. In dialogue with skeptical intellectual trends, particularly Montaigne’s brand of Pyrrhonism, Góngora’s elliptical, anamorphic poetics renders language nearly indecipherable. Underlying its monstrous appearance, however, is an elegant symmetry and intelligibility, a circumstance analogous to the cosmic incoherency of the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems resolved by Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbits. Similarly, Polyphemus’s monocular view distorts his picture of the world, a narcissistic condition exposed by the anamorphic pictorial practice Góngora translates into verse. Góngora’s poem enacts, both in plot and method, a process of desengaño in which a literary figuration becomes disfigured, creating a new figural expression of the world and exposing the contingent nature of perception and interpretation.