Against Apollo:

Gngoras Soledad primera and

the Mapping of Empire
Ricardo Padrn

And these so manifold regions of the world (says Plinius in the second
book of his Natural History) . . . this is the substance of our glory, this is its
habitation, here it is that we fill positions of power and covet wealth, and
throw mankind into an uproar, and launch even civil wars and slaughter
one another to make the land more spacious! And to pass over the collective insanities of the nations, this is the land in which we expel the tenants
next to us and add a spade-full of turf to our own estate by stealing from our
neighboursto the end that he who has marked out his acres most widely
and banished his neighbours beyond all record may rejoice in owninghow
small a fraction of the earths surface? or, when he has stretched the boundaries to the full measure of his avarice, may still retainwhat portion, pray,
of his estate when he is dead?Pliny

hese words from the second book of Plinys Natural History appear
on the reverse of the world map that accompanied each of the
myriad editions of the first modern atlas, the Theatrum orbis terrarum
of Abraham Ortelius (1570) (fig. 1).1 As far as we know, Pliny did not
prepare maps to accompany the Natural History. Thus the deixis of this

1 See Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp, 1570). The portion
of the epigraph before the ellipsis is taken from Marcel van den Broeckes English
translation of the text as it appears in Ortelius. See Marcel van den Broecke and
Deborah van den BroeckeGnzburger, Cartographica Neerlandica Map Text for
Ortelius Map No. 1, www.orteliusmaps.com/book/ort_text1.html (accessed January
15, 2007). The balance follows the less awkward translation in Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1949), 2.68.

Modern Language Quarterly 68:3 (September 2007)

DOI 10.1215/00267929-2007-002 2007 by University of Washington

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Figure 1. Ortelius, Typus orbis terrarum, in Theatrum orbis terrarum. Reproduced by

permission of Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

passage (these so manifold regions of the world) remits us to a geography that readers of Plinys original text would have come to know
exclusively through his verbal descriptions. In this way the Natural History follows the pattern of much of the geographic writing of ancient
and medieval times. It privileges the word over the image, the rhetoric
over the iconography of descriptio. Although it betrays, at times, familiarity with maps and even access to maps, it assumes that these maps
are not available to the reader, and it does not think to redress that
lack with maps of its own.2 So when Ortelius appropriates Plinys words
for his map of the world, he twists their deixis toward something that
played no part in Plinys writing, toward a geography made available to
the reader through cartographic rather than strictly verbal representation. Readers of the Natural History would have had to imagine, on the
2 O. A. W. Dilke, Itineraries and Geographical Maps in the Early and Late Roman
Empires, in Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, vol. 1 of The History of Cartography, ed. J. B. Harley and David Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 24243.

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basis of Plinys description, the manifold regions of the world referred

to here. Readers of the Theatrum orbis terrarum find them depicted right
before their eyes.
The difference is not just a matter of improved clarity or convenience. It embodies a broader shift in the relative priority assigned to
word and image, a shift that took place during the sixteenth century
and that the early modern cartographic revolution facilitated. While
the readers of the Natural History construct mental images from words,
the readers of the Theatrum orbis terrarum find words corralled on the
back of a map, as its explanation, its extended caption. Although these
readers continue to idolize ancient writers like Pliny, they occupy a very
different world, in which representations of space, particularly those
mediated by mathematical abstraction, have achieved a previously
unknown prominence. With the newfound hegemony of visual representations of space comes a new conjunction of vision, knowledge, and
power. Yet the skepticism about political striving that is evident in Plinys
words continues to speak to this new world, whose new cartographies
support and are supported by ambitious projects of commercial and
political expansion. His references to the fleeting glory of humanity, to
its avarice, its rampant enmity, its violence, and its inevitable mortality,
organize his passage as a rhetorical relative of an early modern vanitas
painting, in which arms and globes appear with other objects to remind
us of the futility of this-worldly striving. Written during the plenitude of
an earlier empire, Plinys words now admonish Europes new aspirants
to empire about the vanity of their own endeavors. Ortelius pairs Plinys
admonition with a Ciceronian quotation placed in a cartouche on the
face of the map: Who can consider human affairs great, when he comprehends the eternity and vastness of the entire world?3 In this way
the map as a whole, image and word together, announces an emerging
modernity even as it voices its discontent.
The Theatrum orbis terrarum is certainly not the only text in which
we can identify the ambivalence of the early modern new world order of
things. The new conjunction of vision, knowledge, and power is a running theme in early modern letters, both cosmographic and literary. A
number of recent studies explore the previously uncharted worlds of
3 Cicero,

Tusculan disputations, 4.37.

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early modern literary cartographies, particularly as they pertain to the

mapping of empire and the visualization of new worlds. Rabelais and
Descartes, Shakespeare and Spenser, Columbus and Donne are only
some of the writers whose texts have been scrutinized for cartographies, imperial or otherwise. From my perspective as a Hispanist, one
text stands out in its marginality to the discussion, the Soledades of the
Spanish baroque poet Luis de Gngora y Argote, specifically the socalled diatribe against navigation in verses 366502 of the 1,091-verse
Soledad primera. It is not that the passage has never been studiedfar
from itbut that its cartographic dimensions have never been analyzed through the critical cartography that has emerged from the
work of J. B. Harley and others.4 For scholars working in this vein,
maps and mapping are no longer considered transparent representations of territories but are regarded as complex figurative projects shot
through with ideology and embedded in particular cultures. I propose
to enmesh the diatribe against navigation in a larger intertextual web
of crucial literary precursors and successors, as well as key Renaissance
maps, and to consider the whole within an interpretative framework
provided by critical cartography. I thereby hope to unlock how this
passage, long considered an island of sense in a sea of poetic complexity, engages questions of vision, knowledge, and power with the same
ambivalence about the new age of the world picture that I have sketched
in Ortelius.
The Diatribe against Navigation: A Map in Verse?

The Soledades tells the story of a young aristocrat who is shipwrecked

along an unnamed piece of shoreline and who journeys inland to find
the company of goatherds, village folk, and fishermen. The poetic
mode is predominantly bucolic and the narrative skeletal. Rarely does
the young pilgrim speak, and even more rarely does he act in any but
the most passive sense of the term. Indeed, he does little more than
provide a mute gaze through which the poem converts his pastoral
surroundings into the intricate tableaux of the learned verse for which
4 For an introduction to the subject see Jeremy W. Crampton and John Krygier,
An Introduction to Critical Cartography, ACME 4, no. 1 (2005), www.acme-journal
.org/Volume4-1.htm (accessed January 15, 2007).

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Gngora became so well known.5 The poem has proved as enigmatic as

it is beautiful, spawning interpretations across a wide range of critical
possibilities. Some of this interest has fastened on the diatribe against
navigation.6 Gngora puts the diatribe in the mouth of an old mountaineer whom the young pilgrim encounters. From the salt stains on
the pilgrims clothes, the mountaineer knows that he has been shipwrecked, and this fact recalls the mountaineers son, who has died in
a shipwreck in the faraway Indies. The recollection elicits from the
mountaineer an extended denunciation of the art of navigation, particularly as it relates to the voyages of discovery.
The passage stands out from the rest of the poem dramatically.
With it, history and epic intrude suggestively into Gngoras bucolic refuge. The diatribe appears, moreover, as an island of sense in a sea of
obscurity, in the words of Mary Gaylord Randel. Perhaps more than
any other verses in the poem, Randel adds, these seem bent . . . on telling a story and communicating a clear message (100). That message came
through loud and clear to some of Gngoras contemporaries, who
identified the passage as an unpatriotic assault on Spains providential mission to bring Christianity to the New World through conquest.7
Iberian epic poems, at least on their face, celebrate this mission, but
the mountaineers epic poem in miniature turns their ideology upside
down: Greed personified captains every ship, bringing distant lands
together only to violate them. As Randel points out, the text exploits
the phallic implications of one of its poetic motifs, ships referred to by
way of their erect masts, and so makes Greed double as Concupiscence,

5 I

use the word tableaux to allude to the intensely visual nature of much of the
Soledades. For an extended discussion of this topic, with specific reference to the
poems theatricality, see Marsha Suzan Collins, The Soledades, Gngoras Masque of
the Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002).
6 See Elizabeth M. Amann, Orientalism and Transvestism: Gngoras Discurso
contra las navegaciones (Soledad primera), Calope 3, no. 1 (1997): 1834; Dana C.
Bultman, Shipwreck as Heresy: Placing Gngoras Poetry in the Wake of Renaissance
Epic, Fray Luis, and the Christian Kabbala, Hispanic Review 70 (2002): 43958; and
Mary Gaylord Randel, Metaphor and Fable in Gngoras Soledad Primera, Revista
hispnica moderna 40 (197879): 97112.
7 See the remarks of Garca de Salcedo Coronel (1629) and Joseph Pellicer
(1630) quoted in Luis de Gngora y Argote, Soledades, ed. Robert Jammes (Madrid:
Castalia, 1994), 27880, 59697.

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searching for territories figured as virgins ready to be despoiled. The

Age of Discovery becomes the age of rape and plunder.8
The diatribes condemnation of epic striving reiterates the poems
manifest attitude of celebrating country life and denouncing the vanities of the court. Empire building, it would seem, is nothing but courtly
ambition writ large, all the more vain because it is all the more ambitious. John Beverley, however, reminds us that the thematic contrast
between the mountaineers epic in miniature and the bucolic subject
matter of the rest of the Soledades is no isolated matter: it encapsulates
the tension that runs through the poem. The Soledades is not just a
bucolic text that contains a fragmentary epic poem; it is a bucolic
poem set in an epic register. Seventeenth-century readers immediately
detected, and often vociferously criticized, what they considered the
appalling contradiction between Gngoras subject matter and his high
poetic style. For Beverley, the tension between the two signals a cultural
crisis. In his analysis, Gngoras text becomes a symptom of Spanish
decadence. It is the product of a time and place suspended between
an imperial heyday and a dawning sense of disillusionment and even
melancholy. The Soledades therefore attests to the bankruptcy of epic
while grasping nostalgically at its fading possibilities. The poem rejects
the old epic of imperial expansion but attempts to fashion a new epic
grandeur from the humble stuff of pastoral.9
The diatribe itself reproduces such tension, and a similar ambivalence, with regard to other issues. It is not just a condemnation of
empire tinged with nostalgia for Spains glory days but also a map of
the world, of sorts, and a sophisticated reflection on maps and mapmaking as they were codified by the Renaissance. Its cartographic quality is a function of its discursive form. The diatribe maps the world
the way that language often figures places and spaces, by tracing an
itinerary through them. Greed does indeed captain every ship, but he
does so in the form of historical explorers, along their actual routes.
8 The upright tree serves as a double synecdoche, alluding not only to the ship with
its mast, but to the man whose erect form suggests most powerfully the eagerness of
his desire. The story of conquest is nothing less than the story of violation or rape;
Codicia plays the role of Concupiscencia (Randel, 104).
9 John Beverley, Aspects of Gngoras Soledades (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1980),
5969.

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Thus the diatribe makes discrete, identifiable allusions to the voyages

of Columbus, da Gama, Magellan and mentions, albeit obscurely, real
places along their routes:
Abetos suyos tres aquel tridente
violaron a Neptuno,
conculcando hasta all de otro ninguno,
besando las que al Sol el Occidente
le corre, en lecho azul de aguas marinas,
turquesadas cortinas.
[And now three floating pines the trident wrest
From Neptunes very hand,
Reaching a hitherto untrodden land,
To kiss the turquoise hangings which the West
Draws round the azure couch on which the sun
Rests when the day is done.]
(41318)10

Gngoras three floating pines, of course, are the Nia, the Pinta, and
the Santa Mara, and his hitherto untrodden land is the New World.
Through such allusions the manifold regions of Plinys history and
Orteliuss map, including the islands of the Caribbean, the isthmus of
Panama, the mines of Peru, the Strait of Magellan, the Cape of Good
Hope, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, the east coast of Africa, the
Spice Islands, the Red Sea, Egypt, and Greece, appear on Gngoras
pages. These references have led other critics to recognize the cartographic quality of his writing. Robert Jammes has called the diatribe
against navigation the poetic equivalent of one of the ornate world
maps for which Renaissance cartography is so well known, while Enrica
Cancelliere includes Gngoras cartography among the many forms of
iconicity engaged by the Soledades, although her remarks about this particular passage are brief.11
10 All Spanish quotations are from Jammess edition of the Soledades. The English
translations are taken from The Solitudes of Luis de Gngora, trans. Gilbert Farm Cunningham (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), except where otherwise
noted.
11 Robert Jammes, Etudes sur loeuvre potique de Don Luis de Gngora y Argote (Bordeaux: Institut dEtudes Ibriques et Ibro-Amricaines de lUniversit de Bordeaux,
1967), 602; Jammes, Historia y creacin potica: Gngora y el descubrimiento de
Amrica, in Hommage Claude Dumas: Histoire et cration, ed. Jacqueline Covo (Lille:

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More can be said about the ways that this episode engages early
modern maps and mapping, especially near the end of the diatribe,
when Greed crosses the Pacific and arrives at the islands of Southeast
Asia, including the Moluccas. De firmes islas no la inmvil flota / en
aquel mar del Alba te describo (Of anchored isles, a stationary fleet /
In southern oceans, little need I say), we read (48182).12 In rhetoric, of
course, descriptio refers to the verbal depiction of visible things. At one
time, descriptions tended to be preceded by a promise not to describe
or by a claim, much like the one we see here, that a description could
not or need not be rendered. But by Gngoras time, words like describir and descripcin designated much more than a rhetorical practice.
Renaissance geography had appropriated such terms to refer to its own
figuring of places and spaces, both verbal and cartographic, and early
modern Spanish assimilated this semantic innovation. In his earlyseventeenth-century dictionary of Castilian, Sebastin de Covarrubias
defines describir as narrar y sealar con la pluma algn lugar o caso
acontecido, tan al vivo como si lo dibujara (narrate and signal with
a plume some place or past event, as vividly as if one had drawn it)
and a descripcin as la tal narracin o escrita o delineada, como la
descripcin de una provincia o mapa (such a narration, either written
or delineated, as the description of a province or map).13 Gngoras
assurance that he need say little about the islands of the eastern seas,
therefore, should yield to a description of those very islands that contemporaries could have interpreted as a verbal map, more or less interchangeable with an iconographic one.
The verses that follow, however, represent nothing of the sort:
De firmes islas no la inmvil flota
en aquel mar del Alba te describo
cuyo nmero, ya que no lascivo,
Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1990), 61; Enrica Cancelliere, Stereotipie iconiche
nelle Soledades di Gngora, in Da Gngora a Gngora: Verona, 2628 ottobre 1995, ed.
Giulia Poggi (Pisa: Edicioni ETS, 1997), 23641.
12 Edward Meryon Wilsons translation of the Soledades preserves the crucial
verb but renders these and other verses rather awkwardly (Solitudes, trans. Edward
Meryon Wilson, rev. ed. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965]).
13 Sebastin de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o espaola, ed.
Felipe C. R. Maldonado, rev. Manuel Camarero (Madrid: Castalia, 1994), 412; my
translation.

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por lo bello, agradable y por lo vario

la dulce confusin hacer poda
que en los blancos estanques del Eurota
la virginal desnuda montera,
haciendo escollos o de mrmol pario
o de terso marfil sus miembros bellos,
que pudo bien Acten perderse en ellos.
[Of anchored isles, a stationary fleet
In southern oceans, little need I say,
Whose numbersthough they wake not lustdisplay
Such charm, such beauty, such variety
Stirring to soft bewilderment, as when
The limpid waters of Eurotas greet
The naked virgins of Dianas train,
Their lovely limbs like burnished ivory
Or cliffs of Parian marblefor whose sight
Actaeon well might hazard life and light.]
(48190)

If this is description, if this is mapping, then it is clearly not of a

conventional kind. Descriptions, like maps, are often associated with
the representational transparency that lies at the heart of the sciences
of measurement. When we map things out in todays English, as it was
done in early modern Spanish, we lay them out as clearly as possible. We
reduce and control complexity for the sake of comprehensibility. But
here the places in question are not even named, much less described,
made present to the minds eye. Instead, they are at once figured and
displaced by an allusion to Actaeons fateful discovery of Diana and
her nymphs bathing in the Eurota. The fragmented geography of the
Southeast Asian archipelago becomes the scattered white body parts
(miembros [limbs]) of the women in these waters. By implication,
Greed becomes the hunter Actaeon, stumbling upon the virgin goddess
and her companions, only to lose first his heart and then his life. Thus
Greeds rapine voyage takes a decisive turn. Disaster looms as Greed
finally encounters a virgin who is also a femme fatale.
What emerges from this description? Not a visual image of the
Spice Islands, certainly, but a claim about their moral significance as
the source of that seductive but dangerous commodity that will destroy
those who make it the object of their quest. So, too, does one purpose

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of the diatribe against navigation come to light. It not only maps the
world with words but engages its eras understanding of maps and
mapping.
Epic Mappaemundi and Renaissance Maps

One way to show how the diatribe does so is to compare it to the socalled mappamundi episode, a geographic or even cosmographical interlude that appears in much Iberian heroic verse narrative from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.14 Such episodes usually take the form of
a supernatural vision of the whole earth made available to a privileged
observer in a dream, through a magical device, or on a winged mount.
This observer sees the world as we do on a map. As readers, we have it
mapped for us by a discursive itinerary built from a list of place-names
and occasional descriptive or historical observations. In the Araucana
of Alonso de Ercilla (1578), for example, a Chilean sorcerer, Fitn, conjures a vision of the world in his crystal ball, designating locations as
they appear with place-names predicated to verbs of vision, ver and
mirar, and uttered in the imperative mode. In the following excerpt,
the Araucanas cartography spans Chile from north to south and then
crosses the Pacific to the Spice Islands:
Vees la ciudad de Penco y el pujante
Arauco, estado libre y poderoso;
Caete, la Imperial, y hacia el levante
la Villa Rica y el volcn fogoso;
Valdivia, Osorno, el lago y adelante
las islas y archipilago famoso
y siguiendo la costa al sur derecho
Chilo, Coronados el estrecho
14 By beginning my account in this way, I hope to contribute to a trend on the
part of scholars of early modern Spain to pay close attention to texts and issues once
considered the exclusive province of colonial Latin American studies. See, e.g., Elizabeth B. Davis, Myth and Identity in the Epic of Imperial Spain (Columbia: University
of Missouri Press, 2000); Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam,
and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Barbara
Simerka, Discourses of Empire: Counter-epic Literature in Early Modern Spain (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003). For the development of the mappamundi episode, with special emphasis on Cames and Ercilla, see James Nicolopulos,
The Poetics of Empire in the Indies: Prophecy and Imitation in La Araucana and Os Lusadas (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 22169.

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por donde Magallanes con su gente

al Mar del Sur sali desembocando,
y tomando la vuelta del poniente
al Maluco gui norduesteando.
Vees las islas de Acaca y Zab enfrente,
y a Matn, do muri al fin peleando;
Bruney, Bohol, Gilolo, Terrenate,
Machicn, Mutir, Badn, Tidore y Mate.
[See the city of Penco and thriving
Arauco, a free and powerful state;
Caete, the Imperial City, and toward the east
Villa Rica and the fiery volcano;
Valdivia, Osorno, the lake, and farther on
the islands and the famous archipelago
and, following the coast straight south,
Chilo, Coronados, and the strait
through which Magellan with his people
flowed out into the South Sea
and, taking a westward turn
toward the Moluccas, sailed northwestward.
See the islands of Acaca and Cebu ahead,
and Macan, where he died in the end fighting;
Brunei, Bohol, Gillolo, Terenate,
Machicn, Mutir, Badn, Tidore and Mate.]15

Names, a discursive itinerary, and a privileged observer: these are the

building blocks of verse cartography in Iberian epic.
For Jammes, passages like these from Ercilla represent only dry
and prosaic rhymed history, not true poetry. Not until Gngoras diatribe against navigation, Jammes argues, do we find a truly poetic cartography in verse (Historia y creacin, 59). Ercilla himself might have
disagreed. Successive editions of the Araucana attest to the intensity
with which he revised this episode, apparently eager to get the musicality of these octaves just right (Nicolopulos, 91). Nonetheless, there
is no denying that Ercillas cartography and others like it fall flat as
poetry, at least for the modern reader. One reason is the way that the
sorcerors commands to look and see implicate the reader, arousing a
desire to participate in the vision enjoyed by the observer. But while the
15 Alonso

de Ercilla y Ziga, La Araucana, ed. Isaas Lerner (Madrid: Ctedra,

1993), 27.5051.

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observer may see the world in Fitns crystal ball, the reader sees only
words on a page. Can the musicality of the verses compensate for the
poverty of the episodes ekphrastic power? Perhaps, but while rhythm
and meter can stir ones emotions, they cannot convert place-names
into pictures for the imagination. The reader is left with the difficulty
noted by Polybius in his Histories, that place-names are meaningless
to people who know nothing about the places they name, that their
meanings are limited to those that the reader brings to them or that
the historian invests them with:
I am of the opinion that as regards known countries the mention of
names is of no small assistance in recalling them to our memory, but
in the case of unknown lands such citation of names is just of as much
value as if they were unintelligible and inarticulate sounds. For the
mind here has nothing to lean upon for support and cannot connect
the words with anything known to it, so that the narrative is associated with nothing in the readers mind, and therefore meaningless to
him. We must therefore make it possible when speaking of unknown
places to convey to the reader a more or less real and familiar notion
of them.16

For the reader who knows little or nothing about the places named in
Ercillas mappamundi, the episode collapses into dry nomenclature,
whose interest was exhausted when the New World ceased to be new.17
Why, then, would it occur to Ercilla and others to compose their
verse cartographies in this way? One could answer that the toponymic
obsession so evident in their mappamundi episodes was by no means
unique to these poets. Ptolemys Geography bequeathed to the Renaissance a cartography centered on the toponym and on the accurate
location of named places in the abstract space of a coordinate grid.
This cartography suited a culture only then becoming curious about
terrae incognitae and the possibilities they offered for commercial, political, and cultural expansion.18 To name and locate a place was to make
16 Polybius, The Histories, trans. W. R. Paton, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 197579), 3:36.
17 Alphonse Royer, Etude littraire sur lAraucana dErcilla (Dijon: Arantire,
1879), 190.
18 Nomenclature, Christian Jacob argues, became over time one of the essential components of cartography. The toponym, the principal information conveyed
by the map, supported the activities of travel and administration that governed the

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it part of the known world and thus render it available for trade, missionary work, conquest, governance. It was also to experience, on some
level, the thrill of exotic novelty, the excitement of an ever-expanding
geographic copia. Thus it should come as no surprise that Peter Apians
instructions for using the new maps, in his popular Cosmographia (1524),
are limited to procedures for locating places on maps by means of grid
coordinates. In one illustration, the city of Prague is pinpointed in an
almost empty cartographic space with intersecting threads held by four
disembodied hands. Only a few hills in profile, set off in a corner, share
the space with that and other named locations (fig. 2).19 Nor should it
come as a surprise that in subsequent editions of his influential map of
Europe, Gerardus Mercators success was measured by the number of
place-names he added without sacrificing elegance or legibility.20 The
history of verse mappaemundi shows a similar logic of accumulation.
With each successive map, the list of place-names grows longer, and
presumably so does the sense of wonder and power.
The analogy between epic mappaemundi and Renaissance mapmaking is borne out in another central feature of these episodes: their commanding point of view. Denis Cosgrove, who calls this godlike point of
view Apollos eye, characterizes it as a synoptic and omniscient, intellectually detached gaze that looks down on the earth. Verses prefatory
to the Theatrum orbis terrarum, for example, place Ortelius himself in
Apollos chariot and compare him to Phoebus, who sees all things.21
Indeed, the Apollonian perspective has been put to various purposes
on maps and in geographic writing throughout history. In some cases,
as in Orteliuss Typus orbis terrarum, the view of the earth from on high
triggers a Stoic recognition of the insignificance of human affairs. In
others, this view is part of the hermetic, totalizing vision associated
with the Platonic or Neoplatonic ascensus. In still others, the view of

production of so many Renaissance maps (Lempire des cartes: Approche thorique de la cartographie travers lhistoire [Paris: Michel, 1992], 27778; my translation).
19 Peter Apian and Frisius Gemma, Cosmographia Petri Apiani (Antwerp, 1545), 27.
20 Nicholas Crane, Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet (New York: Holt,
2003), 123.
21 Denis Cosgrove, Apollos Eye: A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western
Imagination (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 23.

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Figure 2. Illustration from Cosmographia Petri Apiani. Reproduced by permission of

Special Collections, University of Virginia Library

the world from on high magnifies certain human accomplishments,

particularly imperial ones; the complex of geographic object and privileged observer celebrates an emerging conjunction of vision, knowledge, and power. For instance, in the anonymous thirteenth-century
Libro de Alexandre, an important precursor of early modern verse cartography, Alexander the Great enjoys the seductions and satisfactions
of the maps panoptic illusion:

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Alexandre en ella lo podi perebir

quanto avi conquiso, quant podi conquerir;
non se le podi tierra alar nin encobrir
que l non la supiesse buscar e combatir.
[Alexander could perceive on it
all he had conquered, all he could conquer;
no land could rebel against him or hide from him
so that he would not know how to find and combat it.]22

With the sixteenth century came the intensification of such panoptic

fantasies. The rediscovery of Ptolemy, the Age of Discovery, and the
advent of the printing press changed the nature of European mapping, not least by making maps more prevalent. Ptolemys Geography,
Jean-Marc Besse reminds us, explicitly associated cartography with
the privileged onlooker.23 Medieval mappaemundi, what few there were,
had only implied the presence of such an onlooker; in many ways they
tended, like other types of medieval maps, to bring the onlooker down
to earth and have him or her adopt the grounded perspective of an
itinerary.24 Citing a French edition of Ptolemy, Besse calls attention to
an image that demonstrates how clearly the new, elevated point of view
was understood in the Renaissance: an all-seeing, otherworldy eye looking down on the cosmos. Much of the work of making the new maps
was sponsored by the state, poised to advance its own interests. What a
fictional Alexander had once done in the pages of a medieval romance
was now a real possibility for ambitious rulers. They could acquire
access to maps that beckoned to all sorts of commercial, administrative, and military endeavors or that advertised the majesty of those who
would undertake them. Gridded maps were particularly useful. Depicting worlds unknown to the ancients and drawn in an idiom unknown to
the Middle Ages, they boasted of modern sophistication. When drawn

22 Jess Caas Murillo, ed., Libro de Alexandre (Madrid: Catedra, 1988), st. 2587;
my translation.
23 Jean-Marc Besse, Les grandeurs de la terre: Aspects du savoir gographique la
Renaissance (Lyon: ENS, 2003), 12526.
24 Ricardo Padrn, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early
Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 4591.

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Figure 3. Map of the world from Cosmographia Petri Apiani

by or for the Spanish Hapsburgs, they could easily serve the ideology of
world empire. On the map that accompanied Apians Cosmographia, for
example, Charles V takes his place astride the world alongside Jupiter
rather than Apollo (fig. 3). The world is literally at the emperors feet.
Iberian verse cartography developed in tandem with this vein of
neo-Ptolemaic cartography. There is no doubting the imperial politics
of the mappamundi episode in the tenth canto of Camess Lusadas,
and however possible it may be to interpret the equivalent episode of
the Araucana as a parody of verse mappaemundi, it seems on its face to
offer a similar celebration of imperial might. The poem is dedicated
and addressed to Philip II. It is he, its ideal reader, who is implicated in
the sorcerors commands to look and see. It is he who is invited to enjoy
the panoptic fantasies of Ercillas map.

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Cartographies and Countercartographies in the Diatribe

Some of Gngoras critics, comparing the Soledades with early Flemish

landscape paintings, find in it the intricate variety of a painting by the
elder Brueghel and thus a similar visual clarity and beauty.25 Others,
however, question its lucidity, comparing its aesthetics with the chiaroscuro of Italian baroque painting.26 Working in this vein, Humberto
Huergo Cardoso and Enrica Cancelliere fasten on the verses that introduce a landscape description at the moment when the pilgrim is taken
to a rocky crag by another old mountaineer and is invited to look out
across the countryside (182211). The pilgrim climbs to the top, only
to find the perspective confounded by the mist, the glare of the sun,
and the distance:
Si mucho poco mapa les despliega,
mucho es ms lo que (nieblas desatando)
confunde el Sol y la distancia niega.
[Much as the little map he sees displays,
Still more, in cloud or sunshine ill-defined,
Is hid in distance or concealed by haze.]
(19496)

Huergo notes how this passage scratches out the two emblems
par excellence of visionthe map and the sun. What this map does
not show is greater than what it reveals. What the sun illuminates is
greater than what the dissolving mists conceal. Despite his perspective, the pilgrim does not dominate the landscape, but is dominated
by it (228).27 According to Huergo, the chiaroscuro aesthetics of this
passage is characteristic of the Soledades as a whole. Here we see how
the pilgrim assumes what should be the Apollonian height of the car25 Jammes resuscitates this comparison, originally proposed in the seventeenth
century by Francisco Fernndez de Crdoba (see introduction to Gngora, Soledades,
12629).
26 For the comparison with painting see Humberto Huergo Cardoso, Las Soledades de Gngora: Lieno de Flandes o pintura valiente? La Torre 6, nos. 2021
(2001): 193231.
27 Cancelliere, who construes the passage similarly, interprets its elaboration of
the rhetoric of pictorialism in ways that point toward metarepresentational issues
(23941).

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tographic observer but instead finds himself in competition with the

sun for visual mastery of the landscape. The glare of the sun in the
dissolving mists, however, denies the pilgrim the optical clarity typical
of cartographys claims for itself.28 Furthermore, it is the highlander
who must draw his attention to the ruins of fortifications that dot the
landscape spread out beneath him. Half obscured by vegetation, these
ruins hint of epics all but forgotten (21221). What is visible, then, can
be only half seen, and that, in turn, can be only dimly understood. The
pilgrim may be a spectator, but he does not watch with Apollos eye. In
this way the passage marks Gngoras purpose, not to reproduce the
visible clarity of Brueghel (or of his friend Ortelius) but to bring into
question the conjunction of cartographic vision, geographic knowledge, and imperial power.
The diatribe against navigation also subverts claims to clear optical mastery. For one thing, the pilgrim does not enjoy the privileges
accorded his predecessors in epic poems. No marvelous beast bears
him aloft. No magical device allows him to see what he could not other
wise see. He encounters Gngoras poetic cartography strictly as language. Readers are not invited to imagine what he would see if he were
indeed riding a hippogriff, and thus they, like him, must deal directly
with Gngoras words. There, moreover, several solar images continue
the work begun by the image at the outset of the landscape description. Just as the pilgrim on the promontory has sought to rival the suns
Apollonian command of the countryside, so Greed seeks to attain that
same optical mastery. The sun rises from and sets in the ocean every
day, but it does not want to know los trminos (the boundaries) of
Oceans monarqua (realm) (405, 409). The Apollonian point of view
becomes something to which even Apollo does not aspire.
Greed nonetheless captains a ship, Magellans Victoria, which manages to emulate Apollos chariot:
Zodaco despus fue cristalino
a gloroso pino,
mulo vago del ardiente coche
del Sol . . .

28 See

also Huergos (228) and Cancellieres (239) accounts of this passage.

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[Next, water made the crystal zodiac

Where, in its wandering track,
A glorious pine rivaled the burning flight
Of Phoebus axle-tree]
(46669)

When the Victoria becomes the new solar chariot, tracing its way along
the crystalline zodiac of its maritime route, Greed has in some measure achieved the very perspective that has eluded the pilgrim and that
the sun itself has shunned. But that measure is not Gngoras. The
route of the Victoria emulates that of Apollos chariot only insofar as it
encompasses the earth. It remains seabound, crystalline rather than
celestial. In Gngoras mulo vago (wandering rival) it is easy to
identify both the adjectives connotation, wandering, and a telling
denotation, the vain of en vago or in vain. The definition offered
by the eighteenth-century Diccionario de la lengua castellana is particularly noteworthy: En vago . . . vale sin firmeza, ni consistencia, o con
riesgo de caerse (In vain . . . means without strength or consistency,
or with risk of falling).29 The panoptic fantasies of cartographic vision
appear as vain desires in the service of base ambition.
But neither the refusal to adopt a privileged point of view through
fictional, supernatural device nor the jibes at Apollonian pretension
through bits of solar imagery represent Gngoras principal strategy for
emulating and subverting the optical mastery encoded by both Renaissance maps and epic poems. No, Gngoras principal strategy revolves
around his treatment of place-names, the building blocks of Renaissance maps and verse mappaemundi, and the ways that that treatment
raises questions about seeing and not-seeing. The contrast between
Gngoras diatribe and his epic precursors could not be more striking. While mappaemundi like Ercillas are built out of lists of toponyms,
Gngoras diatribe does not provide a single place-name outside the
Greco-Latin world ( Jammes, Historia y creacin, 5657). Rather
than submit names to the exigencies of rhyme and meter, Gngora
refers to placesfor instance, the isthmus of Panamaby means of
erudite allusions and elaborate circumlocutions:

29 Real Academia Espaola, Diccionario de la lengua castellana . . . , vol. 6 (Madrid,

1739), 410.

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el istmo que al Ocano divide,

y, sierpe de cristal, juntar le impide
la cabeza, del Norte coronada,
con la que ilustra el Sur cola escamada
de antrticas estrellas.
[That isthmus, whose dividing barriers break
Into two seas the Oceans crystal snake,
So that its head, crowned with the northern light,
Joins not the tail, which the Antarctic night
Studs with its starry scales.]
(42529)

Panama and Darin appear only by way of the common noun isthmus rather than by way of their proper names. Meanwhile, the Atlantic
and Pacific Oceans, known to Spaniards as the Mar del Norte, or North
Sea, and the Mar del Sur, or South Sea, appear only by way of a complex metaphor.
In at least one instance, however, a toponym from the wider world
almost appears in the text. This instance allows us to glimpse what
Gngora does with the place-names so fundamental to Ercilla and others. When the diatribe reaches da Gamas voyage around the Cape of
Good Hope, we read:
El promontorio que Eolo sus rocas
candados hizo de otras nuevas grutas
.................................
doblaste alegre, y tu obstinada entena
cabo lo hizo de esperanza buena.
[That cape within whose rocky caverns lie
New prisons for Aeolus servants,
.............................
Your stubborn prow doubled with ready skill,
And by the words Good Hope men name it still.]
(44752; my emphasis)30

The English translation imposes a toponym where, according to

Jammes, there is none. Instead, a periphrasis draws our attention not

30 A

hope.

more literal translation is your obstinate mast / made it a cape of good

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to any geographic location but to the historical act of its discovery and
naming (introduction, 290). Jammes is right, but there is more to be
discovered here, by way of contrast with Ercilla. Although Ercillas mappamundi is built primarily out of a list of place-names, it also rests on the
sort of circumlocution that we see in Gngora. The Araucana maps the
Strait of Magellan as the estrecho, the strait, through which Magellan with his people flowed out into the South Sea. Like Gngoras
passage on the Cape of Good Hope, Ercillas avoids the proper name
but includes the crucial common noun. Like Gngora, Ercilla gives
meaning and particularity to this noun by referring to the historical
voyage that gave it its name. But in Ercilla the pressure of the list of
names compels us to identify the circumlocution as a part of the series,
an alternative toponym. We have no doubt that the Strait of Magellan
has been named, just as the places in the series before and after it are
also named. In Gngora, by contrast, the absence of the list keeps us
from reducing his circumlocution to the toponym it replaces. It is not,
then, that we have an event rather than a place, or an event that names
a place. Instead, we have an event haunted by the place-name that it
creates. The place-name Cape of Good Hope is there, tempting us
to catch a glimpse of it but never becoming fully present. The same
could be said of other place-names, like the isthmus of Panama or
the Spice Islands, that appear only by way of elaborately allusive circumlocutions. They too have been reduced to phantasms, albeit even
more ethereal than the Cape of Good Hope, barely visible but not
entirely exorcised.
To put it another way, Gngoras text, unlike Ercillas toponyms,
insists on a presence of its own: it refuses reduction to the indexical
function, and therefore the transparency, of the toponym. And the
insistence of the text on its own presence consigns its referents to a
semiotic limbo, neither there nor not-there, neither present nor absent.
Like the love objects of Petrarchan poets, Gngoras world appears as
a series of parts, the places along Greeds itineraries. Like the bodies
of those women, the world becomes visible when we reach the end of
the series and sum them up in a complete image. But is that world, like
those bodies, ever captured by summing up the parts? And how are the
inherent tensions intensified by the way that Gngoras text dissolves
the descriptions of the parts into the at best translucent and at worst

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opaque waters of his complex circumlocutions and recondite allusions?

If description, as Nancy Vickers argues, following Roland Barthes,
is ultimately no more than a collection of imperfect signs that, like
fetishes, affirm absence by their presence, how much richer must the
play of presence and absence become when we encounter not the clichs of Petrarchism but the innovations of Gongorism, at once more
intense in their grasping at the objects of representation and emptier
of representational content?31 This hyperbolically rich play of opposing
tendencies is precisely what certain contemporary Gngora critics discover in the Soledades. Betty Sasaki, for example, writes of the constant
need to constitute a history that never gels into a linguistic picture.32
Crystal Chemris writes that the proliferation of images in certain cosmological moments of the Soledad segunda exists in a dialectic with
the engulfing void and that each creative moment is countered by its
inevitable dissolution.33 Huergo finds even Gngoras most apparently
ekphrastic moments pregnant with absence. The pleasure of seeing,
he concludes, is in Gngora inseparable from the pain of not seeing
(231). Working in this vein, I argue that Gngoras mapping does not
make places present in the manner of a true description, but neither
does it erase them altogether. Places are invoked rather than evoked,
by a poetry whose invocations are often more evident than what they
try to conjure.
In this way the diatribe against navigation stands in marked contrast to maps and mapmaking as the Renaissance understood them.
Just as early modern cartography celebrated the Apollonian perspective offered by its world maps, so it made certain assumptions about
the transparency of cartographic representation. These assumptions are manifest in Renaissance statements about the relationship
between geography and history. A primary purpose of maps and geographic descriptions was to help us understand where historical events
unfolded. Thus they enhanced our understanding of historical writing
31 Nancy Vickers, Diana Described: Scattered Women, Scattered Rhyme, in
Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 105.
32 Betty Sasaki, Gngoras Sea of Signs: The Manipulation of History in the
Soledades, Calope 1, nos. 12 (1995): 155.
33 Crystal Chemris, Time, Space, and Apocalypse in Gngoras Soledades, Symposium 43, no. 3 (1989): 152.

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and aided us in remembering those events (Besse, 29596). Ortelius

himself called maps the eye of histories and insisted on their usefulness in helping us imagine historical events as if we had witnessed
them.34 And so, if we were to speak of da Gama within the parameters
of these assumptions, parameters that often inform approaches to history and cartography in our own day, we might say that he rounded the
Cape of Good Hope.35 In so doing, we would assume that the Cape of
Good Hope was already there when da Gama arrived, and the toponym,
in our account, would merely mark the place he reached. That place is
there, on the map, waiting for us to trace his journey. The place-name
and the geography that goes with it, in other words, are taken as ontological givens, as a preset stage on which to trace the story of exploration. The map simply represents that stage; it plays no role that could be
understood as inventive or constructive.
Thus the assumptions of Renaissance geography support the sort
of imperial cartography that Paul Carter identifies at the heart of metropolitan histories that legitimate colonial expansion. This kind of history pays attention not to the historicity of space, Carter claims, but to
events unfolding in time alone.36 Places are already there, for imperial
history; one has only to find them and occupy them, not produce them.
Gngora, by contrast, confounds this relationship between history and
geography, inviting reflection on the made rather than on the given
quality of place and space. As we have seen, the Cape of Good Hope first
appears in the poem as a common noun, el promontorio (the cape),
and it is da Gamas voyageor rather, his phallic strivingthat makes
it into the Cape of Good Hope. These verses figure not an event instead
of a place but, rather, the making of a place. They thereby expose the
made rather than the given quality of all the places Gngora mentions.
34 Theatro

de la tierra universal de Abraham Ortelio. . . . (Antwerp, 1588), 3.

is precisely what we find in annotations provided by Garca de Salcedo
Coronel, whose edition of the Soledades (Madrid, 1636) is known, among other
things, for the wealth of cosmographic, geographic, and historical information that
it furnishes in reference to the diatribe against navigation. Salcedo Coronel supplies
background information about da Gamas voyage, as he does about other voyages
mentioned in the diatribe, and then states that da Gama arrived at the Cape of
Good Hope (105v).
36 Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History
(New York: Knopf, 1988), xvi.
35 This

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Instead of a periphrasis alluding to da Gamas voyage, we have a fascinating metonym in which tenor and vehicle matter equally, in which
cause and effect, event and place, assume a ghostly codependent presence. The verses, furthermore, cast judgment on this kind of imperial,
geographic productivity. The promontory becomes not just the Cabo
or Cape of Good Hope but the cabo, the end, of good hope. For it
is Greed, not da Gama, who captains this ship, and the good hope of
Greed can be nothing but the despair of goodness.
Other place-names are subjected to similar procedures of lyric
unmaking, or of partial invocation. Arabia, for example, appears later
in the narrative of the da Gama expedition, but it does not necessarily
refer to Arabia itself:
La aromtica selva penetraste,
que al pjaro de Arabia . . .
.......................
pira le erige, y le construye nido.
[To penetrate the aromatic lawn,
That builds both pyre and nest
For the Arabian bird.]
(46165)

Arabia appears as a part of a circumlocution used to name the phoenix.

Although the phoenix and its story come to us from Egyptian mythology, the bird was said to wander around Arabia during its five-hundredyear life span, and so it becomes here the bird of Arabia (462). It
was said to build its nest, in which it was both consumed by flame and
reborn (a pyre erects, a nest constructs [465]), from the plants and
trees of Arabia and East Africa that yielded frankincense and balsam.
This, then, is the aromatic lawn penetrated by da Gama. As Gngora
would have known from Cames, if not from other sources, the region
reached by da Gama was near Mogadishu, in present-day Somalia, not
in Arabia itself. Thus, while the toponym promises to anchor the reading in a safe toponymic port of call, it actually unsettles the sense of
place and its boundaries. Lost in the sea of baroque circumlocutions,
readers who believe that they have arrived somewhere discover that they
are elsewhere. Alternatively, they are left to wonder whether Gngora
considers Somalia part of Arabia and are thereby reminded of the historicity of place-names and the artificiality of boundaries. In either case,

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Gngora transforms the place-name from a referential anchor into a

toponymic phantasm. Arabia is there, but only elusively, and we are
reminded of our own role in conjuring its boundaries.
Near the end of the diatribe, a series of place-names leads us to
discover other ways that the text engages cartography, verse and iconographic. However long modern readers may dwell on the brief appearance of the Americas in the diatribe, it is really the Moluccas, or Spice
Islands, that the text invests with the greatest charge of moral danger
and personal pathos. These islands are the source of the one commodity that makes it back to the Mediterranean point of origin of both the
art of navigation and the diatribe itself, only to contaminate that point
of origin with its corrupting influence. The passage refers to the spices
that pass from the Spice Islands through Egypt to the Mediterranean
world:
El bosque dividido en islas pocas,
fragrante productor de aquel aroma
que, traducido mal por el Egito,
tarde lo encomend el Nilo a sus bocas,
y ellas ms tarde a la gulosa Grecia,
clavo no, espuela s del apetito,
que cuanto en conocello tard Roma
fue templado Catn, casta Lucrecia.
[That forest, spreading over many an isle,
Fragrant producer of the perfume brought
Across the desert with laborious speed,
Till from the mouths of the Egyptian Nile
Luxurious Greece received the sharp-toothed freight
not cloves, but spikes that spur the gluttons greed,
For Rome still boasted, when it knew them not,
Lucretia chaste and Cato temperate.]
(49198)

The toponymy is personified with moral effect. Places become historical agents, devouring mouths, but there is more going on here than
the personification of nations as decadent gourmands. The sequence
Egypt-Greece-Rome, coupled with the verb traducido (translated),
recalls the translatio imperii to which Spain thought itself heir. Gngora
reminds us that not just imperium but the corrupting wealth of empire
is translated westward from one people to the next. In this way the top-

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onyms serve less to name places or trace a physical route than to follow
the course of historical and moral decline and map its implicit endpoint
as none other than Spain. The final verses of the diatribe make clear
that the cost of empire is not only moral corruption but death and loss.
The mountaineer returns to the seas, revealing that they are where his
son has met his death:
qudese, amigo, en tan inciertos mares,
donde con mi hacienda
del alma se qued la mejor prenda,
cuya memoria es bueitre de pesares.
[Leave them, my friend, where all my fortunes rest
Beneath that treacherous sea,
With a still dearer pledge, whose memory
Feeds like a vulture on a fathers breast.]
(499502)

I do not want to dwell on either these place-names or this final reflection on the costs of empire, however, but to consider the verses that
immediately precede them, the ones about the Spice Islands. Once
again, toponyms appear, and once again they disorient rather than
ground the reader geographically even as the passage in which they
appear orients him or her morally or politically. More important, however, the passage confronts head-on the other component of Renaissance cartography: its oculocentrism. Gngoras assurance that he will
not describe the islands should introduce a description, but instead
we receive a scene from mythology, Actaeons intrusion on Diana and
her nymphs. For Garca de Salcedo Coronel, one of Gngoras early
commentators, this mythological allusion is the most difficult one of
the entire poem, although he does not explain why (114). All he can
do is offer the description that Gngora elides, providing in his annotations a list of islands found in the Malayan archipelago, along with
some observations, drawn from an updated edition of Ptolemys Geography (11414v), on the size and location of the largest or most important of them. Salcedo Coronels annotations suggest his belief that the
mythological allusion must be decoded as a recondite description of
the Malayan archipelago itself. He is bewildered, then, because this
is not how it should be decoded. In its allusion to Diana and Actaeon,

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Gngoras text does not describe what these islands would look like but
what looking at them might mean.
We have already glimpsed what one of these meanings might be:
the last of the virgin territories on Greeds itinerary of rapine becomes
a femme fatale, suggesting that his voyages of discovery and conquest
will lead only to his destruction. But Gngoras treatment of the myth is
unconventional. Like Titians 1559 painting Diana Surprised by Actaeon,
a picture executed for the king of Spain and perhaps known to Gngora, the Soledades depicts not the moment preferred by iconographers
and mythographers, that of Actaeons metamorphosis, but the moment
of his intrusion on Diana and her nymphs. 37 According to Leonard
Barkan, when Titian chooses this scene over that of metamorphosis
itself, the exemplary thrust of the myth is blunted. The use of curtains
and architectural elements, moreover, frames the scene in ways that
draw the reader into Actaeons act of transgressive looking. The story of
Diana and Actaeon becomes less about puritanical severity, unbridled
jealousy, or merciless power, as Brooks Otis puts it, and more about
the visual, the voyeuristic, and the visionary, as Barkan characterizes
it (201).38
Likewise, Gngoras allusion to this moment in the myth suggests
that its purpose is not to announce Greeds imminent punishment and
destruction but to reflect on the seductions and the dangers of vision,
knowledge, and desire. Like Titians painting, Gngoras text implicates the audience in Actaeons voyeurism. The passage never mentions
Diana and reserves Actaeons name for the end. After suggesting that
a description will be proffered, the text flirts with the reader, offering
only bits and pieces of the virgin bodies of Dianas nymphs, the fragments of beautiful women fetishized through comparisons with desirable commodities (precious marble) that bring out the whiteness of
37 Titians

image is reproduced in Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986),
200; Filippo Pedrocco, Titian, trans. Corrado Federici (New York: Rizzoli, 2001), 205;
and elsewhere. It is also available online through various sources, including ARTstor,
where it is listed as Diana and Actaeon (www.artstor.org/info).
38 Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1970), 165.

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their skin. Vickers tells us that the description of a woman through the
enumeration of fetishized fragments of her body, whether in Petrarch
or in Ovid, does less to make the woman present to the reader than to
mark her absence (105). The whole is lost, yet that is what the text struggles to capture and make present. Here that whole is doubly lost. The
stationary fleet of the Indies becomes the dazzling variety of islands,
which in turn become the scattered fragments of desirable women. The
verses may tell us that their numbers wake not lust, but they then work
to incite desire, only to identify the desiring subject (Greed, and the
reader as well) as Actaeon after his fate is already sealed. We do not see
the Spice Islands. They are not made present to us by a map, verbal or
otherwise. Yet it is our seeing, or our desire to see them, to know them,
to possess them, that makes its way onto Gngoras page. Although
Actaeons metamorphosis receives no explicit mention, thus denying
the passage clear possession of the moral high ground, it looms ominously beyond the edges of the picture, allowing little room for doubt as
to the sinister cast thrown over our gaze. Actaeon, who stumbles upon
Diana when the sun is at its zenith, takes the place of Apollo. Greeds
gaze (our gaze) is not that of the god but that of the hunter, not commanding but lascivious, not divine but transgressive. While it seeks the
commanding heights of the sun god, it remains firmly planted among
mortals.
Conclusion

Did Gngora kill the mappamundi episode with his suspicious emulation
of its formal and ideological premises? Perhaps, but it is difficult to disentangle Gngoras effect on the genre from the many other forces that
altered it during the seventeenth century. There is some echo of Gngoras suspicion, however, in a very different composition, the Primero sueo
of Gngoras most important follower, the Mexican nun Sor Juana Ins
de la Cruz. In this lengthy poem, so heavily marked by the influence of
Gngoras mature style, the speaking subject enjoys a dream vision in
which she leaves her body, rises to a great height, and attempts to take
in a commanding view of the natural world:
En cuya casi elevacin inmensa,
gozosa mas suspensa,

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suspensa pero ufana,

y atnita aunque ufana, la suprema
de lo sublunar Reina soberana,
la vista perspicaz, libre de anteojos,
de sus intelectuales bellos ojos
...........................
libre tendi por todo lo crado:
cuyo inmenso agregado,
cmulo incomprehensible,
aunque a la vista quiso manifiesto
dar seas de posible,
a la comprensin no, queentorpecida
con la sobra de objetos, y excedida
de la grandeza de ellos su potencia
retrocedi cobarde.
[At this near immeasurable pinnacle,
joyful, but marveling,
marveling, yet well content,
still, even though content, astonished, the
supreme and sovereign Queen of all the earth,
. . . cast her gaze across all creation;
this vast aggregate,
this enigmatic whole,
although to sight seeming to signal
possibility, denied
such clarity to comprehension,
which (bewildered by such rich profusion,
its powers vanquished by such majesty)
with cowardice, withdrew.]39

The following lines chart the souls failure to occupy this commanding
position, its need to abandon
la vista que intent descomedida
en vano hacer alarde
contra objeto que excede en excelencia
las lneas visuales
contra el Sol, digo.

39 Sor Juana Ins de la Cruz, Poems, Protest, and a Dream: Selected Writings, trans.
Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Penguin, 1997), 43553.

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September 2007

[its immoderate
attempt to vaunt its strength
against the supreme creator of
irradiating beams,
against, that is, the Sun.]
(45660)

The soul is forced to abandon la Apolnea ciencia (Apollonian science) (537) and find new paths to knowledge. There are no references
to cartography, no toponymy, phantasmagoric or otherwise, just the
skeptical treatment of the possibility of totalizing knowledge figured as
a commanding vision. Other intertexts, like the Somnium Scipionis and
various myths, stand out as more likely sources, but there is no denying
that the Primero sueo bears a family resemblance to the diatribe against
navigation as I have read it here.
But what about the tension and ambivalence I promised above? Even
if the diatribe subverts Renaissance cartography, poetic and visual, in
the manner I have described, it asserts itself as an enthralling poetic
accomplishment. It is not that Gngora has written the first truly poetic
cartography, as Jammes suggests, but that he has sacrificed cartography
on the altar of poetry. Ercillas mappamundi episode is lost on contemporary readers. Some nineteenth-century editions of the poem excise
it altogether. However, Gngoras diatribe, his countercartography of
the world, persists and draws attention to this day. One reason it does
so is precisely that it abandons the referential and ocular fantasies of its
cartographic intertexts and asserts itself as an exemplum of rich poetic
language. Jammes is right, then, that the diatribe represents the poetic
analogue of an ornate Renaissance map. Gngora captures not any of
the formal and ideological structures that make that map a map, however, but instead the sense of wonder inherent in its ornament, in the
map as visual spectacle. He subverts the power of the map, but in doing
so he asserts its beauty.
Here, in the end, is the ambivalence of this episode for the conjunction of vision, knowledge, and power in Renaissance cartography. Gngoras verse cartography holds us in thrall. But the diatribe
against navigation also calls attention to its own mapping practices in
ways that signal the contingency and inadequacy of maps, verbal and
iconographic, not to mention the desires and ideologies that subtend

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Gngoras Soledad primera and Empire

393

them. The diatribe subverts the map, but only to remind us of the fascination that maps hold. It abandons the toponym, only to replace it
with a network of allusions and imagery that tell us more, that let us
see more, than any list of half-empty place-names could ever hope to
impart. The diatribe converts places into elusive phantasms, only to
make them objects of desire that we seek among Gngoras verses as
avidly as Greed seeks places to conquer. Finally, it deliberately implicates us in a mythology of vision, knowledge, and desire, only to bring
our looking down to earth, color it with shades of transgression, and
cast the shadow of impending doom on it. Apollos wondrous eye is not
divine at all, but human.

Ricardo Padrn is associate professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia.

His article in this issue builds on the argument advanced in The Spacious Word:
Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (2004). He is working
on Spanish interest in the Pacific and Asia during the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.