Baroque literature

The baroque literature belongs to a large movement European, not only literary but more generally artistic, the Baroque. As baroque literature is in the literary history since about 1800 the literary production in EuropeHowever, in France the literature of this era is considered classic or classicistreferred to, although she uses similar stylistic devices. Baroque stylistic devices are also used in 17th century European literature. A distinction must therefore be made between a concept of the baroque era coined and a concept of style for special characteristics of literature (metaphors, religious and mythological allegories) of other phases.

Due to its “artificiality”, baroque literature mostly eludes immediate empathy; Because of its lack of “naturalness” it is little appreciated by early and middle enlightenment literary critics.

Overview
Baroque literature manifested itself in different ways, from the Euphism of English poets, Preciousness in France, Marinism in Italy, the First and Second Silesian schools in Germany, and Conceptism and Culteranism in Spain. Among the Baroque writers are, in Spanish Luis de Góngora, Francisco de Quevedo, Sor Juana, Bernardo de Balbuena Miguel Hidalgo; in Catalan, Francesc Fontanella, Francesc Vicenç Garcia, Josep Romaguera; in PortugueseAntónio Vieira, Gregório de Matos, Francisco Rodrigues Lobo; in English, the metaphysical poets John Donne, George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Henry Vaughan, and in German Andreas Gryphius and Angelus Silesius.

In Spain the Baroque coincides with the Golden Age. The themes of love, honor, religious (with the counter-reform in progress) and satire dominate. In poetry, the controversy between Conceptism and Culteranismo alternates with the discovery of new strophic forms and the continuation of the Renaissance sonnet. The novel lives a time of maximum splendor, with the works of Cervantes and a large number of sub-genres (where the picaresque novel stands out). In the theater dominated by comedies and ” Auto Sacramental ” or dramatizations of biblical passages.Pedro Calderón de la Barca mixes the rules of comedy with serious themes and evolves the Hispanic tragedy.

At the beginning the term baroque was used only for the plastic arts, it is in the 1820s when it began to speak of literary baroque, although its period of influence is located between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries giving the idea that the movement affected not only to the plastic forms, but also to the literary ones. Even more importantly, assuming the existence of a literary baroque supposes assuming the baroque as an ideological movement, not only formal and seeing its deep relationship with the Counter-Reformation. However, this took some much further, denying their relationship to the Renaissance and presenting it as a confrontational movement, which is also not true.

The baroque brings with it a renewal of techniques and styles. In Europe, and especially in Spain, the Counter-Reformation greatly influences this movement; the Italian expressions that came from the Renaissance are assimilated but at the same time they become Spanish and the techniques and styles adapt even more to the Spanish tradition.

The baroque poets of the 17th century mixed traditional stanzas with new ones, thus cultivating the trio, the quartet, the sonnet and the redondilla. They used copious rhetorical figures of all kinds, looking for an ornate formal disposition. It does not mean a break with Renaissance classicism, but rather the stylistic resources of Renaissance art are intensified, in search of an ornamental complexity and an exaggeration of the resources directed to the senses, until reaching a formal entrenchment. It is the characteristic century of the Spanish literary baroque.

In this seventeenth century in which the Baroque movement appears, the topics that were already occurring in the Renaissance intensify, but especially the most negative ones: fleetingness of life, speed with which time flees, disappearance of joys, complexity of the world that surrounds man, etc.

The Literature of the 16th century was expressed in a serene and balanced style; the baroque of the 17th century destabilizes this serenity and various forces come into conflict. These characteristics occur throughout Europe and in each country they take a different name:

Euphism is called by English poets
Preciousness in France
Marinism in Italy

Content
Taking up the character of mannerism, this current favors emotion and is sensitive to the intellect or the rational. As in music, architecture and painting, the baroque in literature focuses on effect and ostentation. It offers representative commonplaces: mixing opposites (the real and the illusory, the grotesque and the sublime, lies and truth); develop the imagination; appeal to allegories; express feelings and sensations; transcribe with an abundance of color, shape, flavor and fragrance details. Death is a central theme in Baroque works, intimately linked to the field of escape, mythology and fairyland. The baroque aesthetic claims its exuberance, its profusion and its ornamental overload. The writing is dominated by the rhetorical still and the multiplication of figures of style like the metaphor. The use of hyperbola and neologism is also notable.

Playing on the motif of multiple identities, the theater and the novel stage versatile, double and mysterious characters “wearing a mask” (ex: Dom Juan with fierce duplicity). The theater is the place of illusion par excellence. It accentuates the fireworks effect by frequent changes of intrigue as in L’Illusion comique of Corneille. In the novels, the intrigues are also digressive, changeable or multiple (recourse to embedded narratives, to analepse etc.). This makes them famous examples of drawer novels. There are many types of Baroque novels, including the pastoral novel which takes place in an idealized world (most often a fantasized antiquity like the Gaul of L’Astrée). The picaresque novelis itself halfway between ideal, incredible and social reality of the turn of the xvi th century. In France, the Baroque novel evolves towards preciousness with Honoré d’Urfé and Madeleine de Scudéry among others.

The recurrence of themes is important: inconstancy, illusion, mineral figures, metamorphosis, disguise or disguise, dream, dream (Life is a dream by Calderón de La Barca), sleep, mirror, double, human body or even the vanity of things (“Vanity of vanities, everything is only vanity”). Theatricality and artificiality are also key reasons. A primary place is given to the decor and the recall of fiction to its nature of artifice is common. The baroque productions wear regularly the implementation abyss.

They often have as their subject the staging of a simulacrum. In fact, they seek to make existence a small theater of appearances, the unstable and the ephemeral from which comes the anguish of death which only religion can, at times and according to the authors, alleviate. The Baroque writer wants to be didactic. He sees himself torn between promoting scientific and technical progress of his time and rejecting a world of violence and false appearances. Baltasar Gracián, one of the great representatives of Spanish baroque literature, praised the ostentatious, perceived as a way of acknowledging a defect in reality as soon as the appearance fades

In poetry, loving lyricism flourishes (notably with Scalion de Virbluneau, sieur of Ofayel and Louvencourt, lord of Vauchelles), and we witness the development of the sonnet and Pindaric or Anacreontic odes, with extremely original poets who distinguish thanks to their libertine spirit like Tristan L’Hermite, Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant and Théophile de Viau, considered as free thinkers who refuse dogmas and principles. Some poets associated with the Baroque era, like Paul Scarron, also indulge in a parodic genre called ” burlesque “. It is an irreverent register, ridiculing the dominant literary models like the epic. The mythological figures of antiquity are staged in unfavorable postures, which is particularly noticeable in the Virgil transvestite. These subversive representations are inspired by metamorphic, deformed and hybrid figures of the Roman Domus aurea, considered as the birthplace of grotesque art.

In Europe and more particularly in Spain, two poetic models are distinguished on the aesthetic level: cultism, represented by Luis de Góngora, which is characterized by a profuse syntax multiplying the levels of construction (mixture of registers, labyrinthine sentences etc.), an extreme preciousness of the language and an excess of figures of style and conceptism to which Francisco de Quevedo is attached, sensitive to the complexity of thought but promoting a more synthetic, precise and collected writing. These two models nevertheless come together through style research, linguistic innovations and games on the form and meaning of words. InEngland, John Donne is akin to and simultaneously opposes these conceptions by the development of a metaphysical poetry. This current advocates a greater rigor of composition, a scholarly versification and more or less complex traits of spirit. A certain purity of poetic language emerges, turned towards the intellect and not towards emotion. In France, with the creation of royal academies and the arrival of classicism, the rules of measure, harmony and beauty through a work of the spirit denigrate the literary baroque. The latter is systematically defined as a hybrid genre, bizarre and puffy, between the grotesque satisfied and the redundant ridiculous.

The dark trend taken by certain baroque productions (notably the plays of Shakespeare Macbeth and Hamlet, populated by witches, ghosts and evil medieval lands) influence a particular evolution of the movement called “black baroque” which will feed the themes and the aesthetics, in the following centuries, by authors such as the Marquis de Sade, but also by the Gothic novel and certain romantic writers.

General characters
In the Baroque the intellectual cannot deal with his favorite themes since with the advent of the Counter Reformation the themes used had reduced considerably. Given the reduction of the themes, the main aim of the intellectuals is to make the reader understand the true meaning of their texts. The literati of this period express themselves in a language so refined as to make this their greatest artistic value. This literature differs from the previous mannerism because it is an experimental literature: thanks to it new forms of literature are experimented, which will open the way to the Enlightenment.

Baroque literature opposes the Renaissance tradition based on codified rules, such as regularity, measure, balance, proposing instead the search for the wonderful, the free invention, the taste of the fantastic. The humanistic- Renaissance thought that was based on the recognition of human dignity and trust in the harmonious correspondence between man (microcosm) and universe (macrocosm) is lacking. Pastoral and mythological formsused for this purpose, they indicate on the one hand the attempt to deepen the fantasy world as a mirror of reality but also of the improbable, and on the other hand the formation of a new worldly reality incapable of penetrating authentically into the fabric of costume. As a consequence of scientific, geographical discoveries that alter the dimension of the world and the known cosmos, the balance present in the Renaissance between man and the universe is altered. Consequently, Baroque literature tends to manifest the sense of precariousness and relativism of known things and their relationships. It is no coincidence that wonder, posed as an aesthetic canon by poetry, and the metaphor express the losses of certainties and of a fixed nature of the objects of the world, replaced by deceptive appearances.

In fact, the poet Giambattista Marino writes: “The wonder is of the poet (I speak of the excellent, not of the clumsy): Whoever does not know how to amaze, go to the curry”. So the two sides of Baroque literature are both the search for an ever more elusive and imprecise reality, and the manifestation of a clear disappointment for the concrete world, and a need to escape to an illusory world. There is an abolition of the hierarchy of literary genres, in fact there is a contamination between them (ex: Aminta di Tasso). The spaces of the arts are widened to include figures, themes and contents traditionally considered not to be tackled in literature (due to the baseness of the contents).

The new reality is therefore, as already mentioned, characterized by new geographical, scientific (microscope, blood circulation studied by William Harvey), astronomical (Niccolò Copernico, Giordano Bruno, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, Keplero) discoveries. In this regard, the critic Giovanni Getto writes that “while the world expands its geographical and astronomical boundaries and nature changes its biological and mechanical principles, while it returns to be a worrying presence God, or strictly guarded in the complicated analogyof the theological systems of Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy or ineffably removed from the depths of the great and complex mystical experiences, man struggles for the possession of this world and this God by refining his philology, arousing and perfecting a technique for each sector of knowledge “.

The critic adds that unlike the Middle Ages and the Renaissance ” the Baroque civilization on the contrary does not have its own faith and certainty. Its only certainty is in the awareness of the uncertainty of all things, of the instability of reality, of deceptive semblances, of the relativity of the relationships between things “. A famous example of this new cultural climate is given by the monologue of Hamlet in the homonymous tragedy by William Shakespeare (“To be or not to be, that is the question”). Hamlet proves to be the hero of doubt, an antihero torn by uncertainty, in a world that has lost all confidence in the cognitive abilities of reason.

In the Baroque there is also a playful component: the work is written with the intent to amaze the reader. In the lyric genre there is an underlying irony, the Petrarchist canons of women as a model of semi-divine beauty dissolve. Furthermore, the idea of the double is emphasized: things never show themselves for what they are, demonstrating the artificiality of human nature. Fiction is the fundamental trait of the literary and artistic genre: man is a set of different masks that he uses according to the occasion.

The idea of the double is present, for example, so evident in the events of Don Quixote of Miguel de Cervantes. Reality and illusion intertwine, the two planes merge with each other so that the relationship between the two dimensions is reversed. And in the second part of Don Chischiotte the protagonist reads the story of his adventures (the first part of the novel) and is therefore both protagonist and reader of the book.

We can then cite illustrious examples in the theater. Calderón de la Barca in his drama Life is dreamshows a story that is a continuous exchange between reality and fiction, without the protagonist being able to distinguish them and the message of the Spanish playwright’s masterpiece is precisely that reality is a dream. Life, like all dreams, is characterized by illusory, fleeting of time, vanity of things. Existence is therefore illusory and inconsistent. In ‘ Hamlet by William Shakespeare come to the court of strolling players who the prince Danish asks to put a story on stage which is that of’ Hamlet himself: viewers can now see the tragedy characters themselves become spectators of the same tragedy in which they are protagonists.

History
The Baroque movement appears at the end of the xvi th century and ended around the middle of the xvii th century.

Although linked from the outset to the Counter-Reformation, the Baroque literary movement found a wider sphere of influence, especially in France. We distinguish on the one hand Protestant writers like Théodore Agrippa d’Aubigné and on the other Catholic writers like Honoré d’Urfé and Pierre Corneille or those who retrain such Jean de Sponde and Théophile de Viau. In Spain, the Baroque current is represented among others by Pedro Calderón de la Barca and Lope de Vega. Andreas Gryphius and Martin Opitzare its most illustrious representatives in Germany, like Giambattista Marino in Italy (its name has given rise to the term ” marinism “). In England, one finds an important imprint of the baroque in euphuism as in certain plays of William Shakespeare on the thematic and formal plan.

But if the baroque style was renowned for its time, it was not rediscovered until the end of the Second World War for art, and in the 1930s for literature, with the book by Eugenio d’Ors, Du baroque, then in its wake with the work of many historians of literature such as those of Jean Rousset in the 1950s.

The baroque emerges in a period of crisis (in this case, the wars of religion) and takes place in an era metamorphosed by great discoveries (the Americas) and technical progress (the invention of the compass). This era is also upset by the purpose of certain scientific studies: those among others of Nicolas Copernicus and Galileo which prove that the earth is not at the center of the universe. The baroque movement is opposed to classicism. To use Nietzschean concepts, we could assimilate the Baroque to a ” Dionysian ” impulse (linked to the unstable, to excess, to the senses and to madness), opposed to the ” Apollonian ” movement. »(Turned to the rational, the intellect, the order and the measure) of classicism.

Literary motifs in Baroque
The baroque poetry is essentially shaped by three leitmotifs that describe people’s attitude to life. Against the background of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), people’s everyday lives were determined by violence and destruction. All of these motifs deal with the widespread fear of death and its effects in various ways:

Memento mori (lat. = “Remember that you have to die”). The memento mori motif expresses the agonizing awareness of death. This includes the frequently repeated memory of (near) death. It relates more to death and dying than to life and is therefore in clear contrast to the appealing Carpe diem motif. (Example: Tears from Fatherland Anno 1636 by Andreas Gryphius)

Vanitas (Latin = “vanity”, “nullity”, “failure”, “transience of the world”). The vanitas motif is similar to the memento mori way of life in that they are concerned with death and transience instead of focusing on the life ahead. The focus here is not on death itself, but on the transience and nullity of people. This should also be seen in connection with the high importance of transcendence at this time, that is, the Christian belief in a better life in the hereafter. (Examples: It is all vain by Gryphius and Die Welt by Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau)

Carpe diem (lat. = “Use / Enjoy the day”). This motif, which goes back to the Roman poet Horace, calls for consciously experiencing and enjoying the day and not letting the thoughts of impermanence be too heavy. In its renunciation of transcendence, in particular the assumption of a life beyond, it contradicts the Christian worldview. It is therefore questionable whether carpe diem can be seen as the central motif of the Baroque. The ode I often cite as an example I almost feel a Grawen by Martin Opitz was only published in the 19th century under the title “Carpe diem”.

The three motifs are part of the frequent intention of the poets (see below), which consists in the invitation to enjoy life as well as the admonition to commemorate everything earthly and the resulting recommendation to turn to faith.

The attitude to life in the Baroque was pronounced antithetic (contradictory). Frequent manifestations of this were

On the other side and beyond
Play and seriousness
appearance and reality
Lust and virtue
Eroticism and asceticism
earthly and heavenly life
” Carpe diem ” (lat. “Use the day”) and ” Memento mori ” (lat. “Think that you will die”)

and were also implemented in the lyrical and epic works as well as in the dramas of the time.

Other frequently used materials and themes come mainly from antiquity, but the fate of Christian martyrs as well as the women’s prize and love were often dealt with.

Literature of the Baroque
The authors of Baroque literature include: Martin Opitz, Casper von Lohenstein, Andreas Gryphius, Grimmelshausen, Caspar Ziegler, Paul Fleming, Christian Hoffmann von Hoffmannswaldau and Angelus Silesius.

Poetry Baroque
The preferred form of literature was the poem, especially the sonnet, the usual measure was the Alexandrine with 6-ply jamben with strong caesura, often in the middle of the verse. In the Baroque, the external aesthetics and the pleasant sound played a major role. To achieve this effect, various stylistic devices were used, including anaphors, metaphors, antithetics, hyperbolic, as well as allegories and repetitions. Stylistic devices such as metaphors and symbols were preferred in order to explain elementary things such as this world and the hereafter as well as the role of man through pictorial representations. Metaphors and allegories such as the “port” (in the poem “Evening” by A. Gryphius) for a return to God are typical. Emblems and allegores were also used, which reveal and reveal a deeper, hidden meaning behind names and things.

The pastor’s son Gryphius, for example, had to watch his father’s cardiac death as a child after an arsonous Soldateska entered his church. His poems about vanity – in the meaning of nothingness – and impermanence It is all vain and tears of the fatherland are among the best known baroque poems. The hymns of Paul Gerhardt (1607-1676) as go out, my heart, looking for Freud are assigned to the baroque lyric.

Prose works of the Baroque
An important prose work is the picaresque novel The adventurous Simplicissimus Teutsch (1668) by Grimmelshausen. In contrast to later texts of the German Baroque, it is by no means boisterous, but written in folk style and with a drastic wit. Accumulations of scholarship or Latinisms are usually ironically exaggerated when they occur occasionally. The same applies to Christian Reuters Schelmuffsky from 1696/97.

Motives that always call for responsible improvement of bad reality arise from the Christian character of the authors. They trusted in a better order and a better life with God.

The Baroque sermon
Fables and fairy tales usually convey a moral lesson. In addition, comparisons, gibberish and proverbs were used frequently. Many preachers used language images and not only used the Bible, but also ancient works. The choice of topics for the sermons was broad. Theological problems were discussed, as were Bible-exegetical statements.

Abraham a Sancta Clara is the most well-known Catholic preacher of the Baroque in German-speaking countries. Georg Scherer, who is less well known today, often fought the Reformation in his baroque sermons.

The Jesuit Piotr Skarga (1536–1612) was the most famous Polish preacher of the baroque period. His most important works are the parliamentary sermons from 1597, the saint stories from 1579 and the military fairs from 1618.

The Baroque comedy
The commedia dell’arte, born in Italy in the sixteenth century and remained popular until the eighteenth century, was a mode of production of shows in which the representation was based on a canvas (which provided a rough narrative indicative of what would have happened on the stage). The performances were often held outdoors with a scenography made of few objects.

This type of theater was essentially improvised and involved the use of masks and therefore of fixed characters (Pulcinella, Pantalone, Balanzone etc.).

Furthermore, within this type of comedy real linguistic confrontations were foreseen, given by the mix of regional speeches of each character, thus giving rise to a real multilingualism. The comedy of art found a real enemy in the reformed church, which opposed a type of representation that was considered blasphemous, where the interpreters were animated by diabolical forces, dangerous disturbers of everyday life.

Baroque literature in Spain and Latin America
The pinnacle of Spanish theater production was the strictly shaped, philosophically inspired, but not very popular pieces by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. About 120 dramas (so-called comedias) and 80 Corpus Christi games (Autos sacramentales) have survived. The Jesuit drama was used as a popular, broad-based instrument for the construction and religious education of the broad illiterate masses; from these pieces hundreds of thousands – e.g. B. Passion or the Corpus Christi games very popular in Mexico.

A specific Spanish-Hispanic-American variant of baroque poetry and prose is Gongorismus (after Luis de Góngora) with its tendency to periphrases, screwed metaphors and extremely complex syntax. Simple meanings should be conveyed in as many words as possible (example: “Era del año la estación florida” (Góngora) – “it was the blooming time of the year”, that is, it was spring). The representatives of Gongorismus were in conflict with those of the conceptismo, namely with Francisco de Quevedo, whose style combined a simple vocabulary with funny word games. Gongorism was also considered by its opponentsCulteranismo (“cultivated Lutheranism”) because it appeared to them as a heresy of the classic rules of poetry.

Criticism of style and control poetics, the end of the period
Liselotte of the Palatinate already criticized the sultry writing style of the late Baroque period, which had become fashionable, in one of her letters in 1721: “I find everything in Germany so different since the 50th that I am in France, that it precompects me like another world. I saw letter… so I struggle to understand. In my day it was probably written when the phrases were short and you said a lot in few words, but now you find it nice if you put a lot of words in it means nothing. This is insane to me, but thank God all those with whom I correspond have not accepted this disgusting fashion; I could not have answered… ”

In 1729, the early enlightener Johann Christoph Gottsched criticized the craft understanding of poetry in French classicism from a rationalist perspective. Its postulate, derived from the rigid regularity of poetry, that the art of teaching and learning poetry and the rhetorically sophisticated imagery as well as the typified expression of emotion appear to him as a lack of originality; they led to stylistic overload. Lessing rejects the idea of baroque rule poetics in a more radical way, and calls for the use of the upscale everyday language.

Gottsched’s rationalist criticism is increasingly accompanied by criticism from the perspective of increasing sensualism and the literary current of sensitivity, which call for a “natural” expression of emotions. The cult of genius, which is based on Shakespeare’s trend-setting model throughout Europe, finally puts an end to the baroque rule poetics.

It was only in the 20th century that the baroque era regained greater interest due to structural similarities with postmodernity, namely the creative exaggeration and reuse of linguistic material.