The portrait of Góngora by Velázquez is meant as an allegory of dialectical intelligence: ‘arte de agudeza e ingenio’. It presents the poet's head in threequarters profile. The right and larger section of the face is bathed in a flood of golden light which models the high dome of the forehead and extends in a curving line down the long bridge of the nose; the left quarter face is barely visible in deep shadow. Like the Polyphemus, the portrait stares fixedly at the spectator from the right eye. But by looking closely one can make out the form of a second eye on the left, staring out of (or at) darkness. The zones of light and shadow are mediated in the furrows of the brow between the eyes and along the curve of the thin mouth, which seems at once cruel and amused. Like Don Quixote, the figure is someone who lives at once in an age of iron and an age of gold.

Góngora and Spain

It was no accident that Dámaso Alonso found it necessary to incorporate in his dissertation on Góngora's poetic language the concepts elaborated in Saussure's structural linguistics. The nature of language, Saussure had suggested, involved a reciprocity between two relata: signifier and signified, speaker and hearer, intention and understanding, language rule and language use. The attack on the Soledades in the early seventeenth century was directed against Góngora's deviation from what were regarded as the permissible norms of poetic signification. It maintained, in effect, that language had ceased to signify in the Soledades, that Góngora had fallen into the sin of Babel. Recently, Maurice Molho has remarked that ‘il convient donc de lire les Solitudes comme un essai de reconstruction du langage —d’un langage— à partir du langage, et des rapports sur lesquels il se fonde’. But the problem of a possible language in the Soledades is not something peculiar to language itself. True, the ‘action’ of the Soledades is the action of words and grammar. Formalist criticism can tell us a great deal about the precise mechanisms of this.