This weekend I'm reading Octavio Paz's marvelous book on Sor Juana, full of wonderful digressions - truly baroque!. Here's a taste. (The criollo was the Mexican-born Spaniard who, as a second class citizen, was neither fully Spanish nor Mexican. Sor Juana was one.)
Although the baroque and romanticism are mannerist, the similarities between them cloak very profound differences. Each, reacting against classicism, proclaimed an aesthetic of the abnormal and the unique; each presented itself as a transgression of norms. But while the romantic transgression centers on the subject, the baroque transgression focuses on the object. Romanticism liberates the subject; the baroque is the art of the metamorphosis of the object. Romanticism is passionate and passive; the baroque is intellectual and active. Romantic transgression culminates in the apotheosis of the subject or in its fall; baroque transgressions lead to the appearance of an unheard-of object. Romantic poetics is the negation of the object through passion or irony; the subject disappears in the baroque object. Romanticism is explosion; the baroque is implosion. The romantic poem is spilled time; the baroque is congealed time. (53-54)
The goal of the baroque was to astonish and astound; that is why it sought out and collected all extremes, especially hybrids and monsters. Conceit and cleverness are the sirens and hippogriffs of language, the verbal equivalents of nature’s fantasies. In such love for the strange we find both the secret of baroque art’s affinity with the criollo sensibility and the source of its fruitfulness. … In the seventeenth century the aesthetic of the strange expressed with rapture the strangeness of the criollo. In such enthusiasm it is not difficult to find an act of compensation; psychic insecurity lies at the root of this attitude. Ambiguous fascination: the exact opposite of the Frenchman of the same century, the criollo saw himself not as a confirmation of the universality represented in every human being but as the exception each of us is. (58)
