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There's a great deal of writing about the neobarroco in Spanish beyond Sarduy, though he and the Brazilian Haroldo de Campos seem to have invented the term. Sarduy's description of the neobarroco is largely an extrapolation from the practice of Lezama Lima, whose poetry and essays have been the major reason for the neobarroco's prestige in Latin America. For those with sufficient Spanish that's the place to go. Of the very few translations of Lezama into English, those by James Irby in the UC Press Lezama volume are by far the best. The rest of that book can be safely ignored. There's an interview in it (translated by Irby) that's helpful to any discussion of the neobarroco, though Lezama never used the word. His collection of essays, La expresion americana, screams out for translation, though I pity the poor soul who undertakes it. Again, for those with Spanish, the enormously influential poetry anthology Medusario (last I looked copies were still lurking around, even on Amazon), edited by Roberto Echaverren, Jose Kozer and Jacobo Sefami, has a good intro by Echavarren; other essays of his on the subject are at various websites. On the prose primarily, Celestinas Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature, by Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, is sound and has the advantage of being in English. I've written a few brief summaries of the neobarroco, as applied in poetry. It's focused on Lezxama, but, except for the specifically Catholic content, is broadly descriptive of the aims of neobarroco poets. Here's a snip from my forthcoming Cuban anthology. Conversacionalismo roughly corresponds to what we usually call mainstream. Padilla was one of its important Cuban spokesmen. Like most forms of thought, poetry usually requires that the overwhelming amount of language and other phenomena that are always present be radically filtered. For conversacionalistas, as well as for their English-language counterparts, that filtering is in the service of the presentation of a logically coherent argument that should be understandable by any competent reader. As such, its focus is on the end to be reached–an end known to the poet beforehand– rather than on what’s encountered in the process of getting there. Since 1937, when his first book was published, but reaching its fulfillment in his poetry of the 40s and thereafter, Lezama elaborated a very different practice. Taking his cue not from the poetry of another culture but from Spain’s Baroque, out of which had grown its New World colonies, and particularly from the work of Luis de Góngora, he brought attention back to the world of undifferentiated phenomena which we all inhabit. So, in his major poems, the reader confronts an unfiltered glut of information, presented without syntactic or ideational hierarchy–in the “Ode to Julian del Casal,” for instance, details of Casal’s Havana and the Havana of Lezama’s day; obscure, sometimes private, references; allusions to the crónicas; objects from Casal’s, as well as Lezama’s, collection of art and oddities; inner thought and outer experience presented without boundaries or inhibitions; appear to be thrown at us helter-skelter, by means of an enormous vocabulary borrowing from the idioms of different trades, times, dialects and places. Padilla was to tell us in his memoir that reading Lezama “I found myself violently dispatched to a realm of pure language, his one and only kingdom.”[i] From the beginning Lezama had confronted the accusation that his work was obscurantist, hermetic, a mere construct of language, disengaged from ordinary life, disinterested in social reality. He would answer, famously, that “sólo lo difícil es estimulante,”[ii] only the difficult stimulates growth (which I find myself recasting as a statement at once Darwinian and from the realm of religious and therapeutic practice, “only hardship begets change”), but also that “understanding” was beside the point–the poem was to be experienced as a thing in itself, not as a subject for paraphrase. An analogy that comes to mind is a first encounter with a forest or any complex ecosystem. One can deconstruct the forest, catalogue its species and their interactions, but it can’t be paraphrased, one has to experience it as simply there. The Lezamian moment is of that order of reality–all the confusion of the unfiltered moment present at once. As such, he claimed, it was a more profound engagement with everyday life than the clarified narrative of conversacionalismo.[iii] There is no way to cope with this except to submit oneself to the moment and be carried along in a fugal current, where words, references, and motifs recur and recombine in changing, progressive guises, creating an inexorable propulsive force. Haroldo de Campos and Sévero Sarduy were to name this kind of art neobarroco,[iv] a term that Lezama and his companions never used, but it’s apt enough that it’s become the term of choice, not only, I think, because Lezama had invoked the Baroque masters, but because behind his practice is the central metaphor of the Baroque, the neoplatonic concordia discors, harmony out of discord. To paraphrase a large body of theology, out of the apparent chaos of the disjunct phenomena of a moment, a life, the natural world and all of human history arises a harmony only perceivable to the mind of their maker, who alone is capable of simultaneous awareness of all things. To approach that state (and it is the function of the immense polyphonic structures of Baroque music, art and architecture to help us do so) is to approach the state of profound, endless ecstacy of the saved, who in the afterlife are joined to the mind of god, recapturing the harmony of the paradise garden from which humans were expelled for their discordant sin.[v] Lezama thought of himself as a Catholic, but his version of Catholicism scandalized the more orthodox members of his circle. Hell, he thought, didn’t exist, or if it did, it was and had always been empty.[vi] He seems also not to have had a strong personal sense of a sinful nature to be overcome. And he apparently wasn’t willing to consign paradise to the next life, pointedly naming his autobiographical novel Paradiso, in Italian, rather than the Spanish paraíso, so that his reference to the final book of Dante’s allegorical Divine Comedy would be unmistakable. The ecstatic moment for Lezama was in the full experience of the garden of this world, not the next.[vii] [i] Ibid., p. 169. [ii] José Lezama Lima, “Mitos y cansancio clásico,” in La expresión americana (Santago, Chile: Editorial Universitaria, (1969), p. 1. The first edition, published in Havana in 1957, is extremely scarce. [iii] For an early statement of what became the standard objections to Lezama and the neobarroco, and Lezama’s customary answers, see Jorge Mañach, “El arcano de cierta poesía nueva. Carta abierta al poeta José Lezama Lima” (Bohemia, September 25, 1949), and José Lezama Lima, “Respuesta y nuevas interrogantes. Carta abierta a Jorge Mañach” (Bohemia, October 2, 1949). [iv] Haroldo de Campos, “A obra de arte aberta,” Diário de São Paulo, July 3, 1955. Sarduy wrote exhaustively about the Baroque and the neobarroco for several decades. Of special importance is his “Barroco y neobarroco,” in César Fernández Moreno, América Latina en su literature (Mexico City: Unesco/Siglo XX, 1972), pp. 24-27. D e Campos (1955) [v] There are useful discussions of the concordia discors in C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1964); Robert E. Stillman, Sydney’s Poetic Justice (Lewisburg PA: Bucknell University Press, 1986); and, for the concept’s neoplatonic origins, Andrew Scholtz, Concordia Discors: Eros and Dialogue (Washington: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2007). [vi] Recounted by David Huerta, in “Trece motives para Lezama,” the introduction to his selected Lezama, Muerto de Narciso: antología poética (Mexico City: Era, 1988), p. 9. [vii] For an important reading of the Baroque and the neobarroco, though for the most part focused on prose, see Roberto González Echevarría, Celestina’s Brood: Continuities of the Baroque in Spanish and Latin American Literature (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), particularly the last chapter. Lezama elaborated a complex metaphysical system of the image, the poem and history, not dealt with here. For an introduction in Lezama’s words, see “Interview with José Lezama Lima,” by Armando Álvarez Bravo (translated by James Irby), in Ernesto Livon-Grosman, editor, José Lezama Lima: Selections (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 122-137. For a concise summary of Lezama’s system, see Emilio Bejel, Gay Cuban Nation (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 117-120. At 07:12 AM 12/13/2008, you wrote: >Speaking of Muse, here's a free article. > >Kaup, Monika. The Neobaroque in Djuna Barnes > >http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modernism-modernity/toc/mod12.1.html