Góngora, lo difícil y el mal gusto: flujos alternativos de un botín ancestral

Abstract

In a particularly savage review of Julio Baena’s book Quehaceres con Góngora, Antonio Carreira admits not to understand the book, but criticizes many specific philological points, and attacks the author’s bad taste. Baena does not respond to the philological points (he is not interested in philological rigor (mortis) at all), but takes the opportunity to point out how Góngora himself is the epitome of bad taste, and of how, then, it is ironic that the defenders of good taste are also the defenders of Góngora. Gusto is ‘taste’ but also ‘pleasure’ in Spanish. Leaving Góngora to the philologists takes all the pleasure out of it. It is by the way of bad taste that Góngora can be recuperated and returned to its legitimate users (not “owners”). Even though Robert Jammes also closes in with an attack on Baena with his own vitriolic lack of understanding, Baena accepts the role of his article in this journal as matter for laughing-at, in the hope that one reader among 1000 may actually read poetry as poetry, and not as literature or as philological cannon fodder.

Keywords

• taste
• pleasure
• bad taste
• Bourdieu
• cultutal desappropriation
• distinction