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Garcilaso's Poetics of Subversion and the Orpheus Tapestry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mary E. Barnard
Mary E. Barnard*
Affiliation:
Pennsylvania State University, University Park
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Abstract

The Orpheus tapestry in Garcilaso's third eclogue is an intertextual construct, a rewriting of the myth through a dismembering and reconstruction of classical and Italian models. Revisionary and corrective, Garcilaso's creative imitation of his antecedents involves a deliberate act of subversion; his text not only remakes its sources but seeks to overcome them. Thus Garcilaso's version of Orpheus and Eurydice rivals its predecessors by its own accuracy of presentation; it depicts exquisite, fragile beauty violently destroyed and a brooding, solipsistic lover deprived of his lyric power. By subverting the ancient artist-magician, Garcilaso appropriates the Orphic power of song for the lyric speaker's self-presentation as poet, providing the speaker, in the process, with a rite of passage into the mythological world of the nymphs. Finally, an elaborate game of voices, anchored on the Orphic, reveals the text both as an artifact and as a product of an act of rewriting.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 102 , Issue 3 , May 1987, pp. 316 - 325
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1987

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