Symbolism is the Rosetta Stone of modernist hermeticism and its literary and theoretical sequels. Darío and his followers shaped and continued its legacy; Borges's aesthetic is informed by it, and Charles Rosen has called Walter Benjamin “the last great Symbolist critic—and the first, too, in a way— certainly the first to apply the poetic theory to historical criticism” (n.p.). Benjaminian anti-historicism as well as Derridean and Lacanian theory are modeled on the Symbolist flight from reification. Symbolism is indeed the very fabric of deconstructionism, the prime example of an aesthetic which admits to no world outside the text. Throughout this study I have underscored the significance of Symbolism, using it as a tool to investigate the parallel between the literary Hispanic Baroque and avant-garde as a transatlantic phenomenon, considered in its various theorizings within currents of historiography and political thought.

Both Symbolism and the more critical currents of the Hispanic Baroque (while still quite Catholic) explore the powers of the mind as a possible substitute for religious transcendence. Góngora and Cervantes cultivate artistic ingenuity in the context of the rise of science, Góngora affirming the role of poetry over prophecy in a “pseudosacerdotal” enterprise. In a latter day parallel, Symbolism, in its association with religious mystery, attempts to perform in poetry what Joshua Landy has called the “secular re-enchantment of the world,” a kind of elite magic show of the precious and highly imbricated production of sublime illusion (128–29).

In these endeavors, both Symbolism and the “critical” Hispanic Baroque evince the qualities of decadence and impasse. Drawing implicitly upon Benjamin's notion of constellation as an image of “dialectic at a standstill,” John Beverley writes that the dialectic of Gongorism is “una dialéctica paralizada.