Between Scylla and Charybdis: The Paradoxical Poetics of Empire and the Empire of Poetics in Cervantes' Viaje Del Parnaso‪.‬

CERVASTES' VIAJE DEL PARNASO (1614) towers as an elaborately conceived work that serves asa compelling and fascinating mirror of the literature, society, and politics of his time. A veritable hybrid in which numerous literary models and genres are interwoven into the textual fabric of satire, the Viaje presents an inexhaustible source of seemingly endless interpretations. (1) While Cervantes never wrote a formal poetics or a conventional epic, he did write a mock epic in which he disperses literary reflections on the poetry of his day, particularly on what may have seemed to him to be the monopoly of degraded poetry in the elitist circles of the Spanish academies, or poets' societies. (2) Yet beyond the myriad appraisals on the state of Spanish poetry, Cervantes incorporates into his Viaje subtle observations on the Hapsburg imperialist politics, which serves as an innovative response to the socio-political and cultural establishment in the Spain of his time. Through the highly entertaining literature of paradoxical folly, which embraces and celebrates the liberating power of laughter, satirical parody, ironic wit, and a propensity for the burlesque and carnivalesque, Cervantes offers in his Viaje a sui generis mock epic fiction that questions and challenges both the poetics of empire and the empire of poetics in seventeenth-century Spain. The Cervantine mock epic no doubt offers a challenge to any reader who must discern the embedded meanings and veiled humorous references in its paradoxical praise of both contemporary poetry and poets, along with its whimsical flights of fancy that gesture toward its underlying satire at every step of the journey. (3) In the Viaje's vast mare magnum of paradoxical poetics, the reader must navigate between the craggy contours of a virtual Scylla and Charybdis, one whose treacherous strait entices with the reward of witty satire, ironic ambiguities, and burlesque paradoxical folly. (4) In the mock epic's conglomeration of seemingly disjointed episodes, Cervantes interweaves diverse narrative strands into a vast web of cohesive episodes that contain an array of tangential anecdotes, burlesque vignettes, and wondrous dream-visions. (5) While the fabula may be the soul of poetry, according to the neo-Aristotelian precept, Cervantes iconoclastically shatters such poetic conventions by creating a labyrinthine poetic artifice composed of truly fabulous fabulae with ornate trappings, each distinctly juxtaposed in stark and startling fashion, yet intricately connected by the narrative plan of their inventor, Cervantes himself. (6) The satirical poem seems to contain a series of multifaceted fabulae that may be seen as mini-mock-epics, all of which are subordinated by Cervantes' fictional self-fashioning and artistic self-advertising in a series of ostensibly autobiographical self-portraits or poetic personae. (7)