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THE last century has left us with three main views of Gongora's Fabula de Polifemo y Galatea. In the first-which characterizes both Damaso Alonso's (186-207) and A. A. Parker's (111-6) interpretations-the poem is said to concern opposing dualisms (monstrosity/beauty, darkness/ light, love/jealousy) united and balanced in an organic whole.1 According to the second view, the positive values in this dualism are celebrated; for R. 0. Jones, these are beauty and life (36-7), while for Robert Jammes, they are love and other pastoral ideals (533 54). The third holds that the negative values of the dualism triumph; for instance, Melinda Eve Lehrer interprets much of Gongora's poetry, including the Polifemo, as "beautiful pastorale[s] ... built up and then shattered" (57). Along similar lines, R. John McCaw's recent article treats the poem's subversion of pastoral: "The contradiction between Polyphemus's words and deeds, then, signif[ies] the triumph of instinct over intellect, and, generally, the deflation of the integrity of pastoral ideals" (32).
In what follows, I will support the third view by providing a new reading of the poem: the Polifemo is not a celebration of love, but rather a representation of love's destruction by jealousy. Gongora found in jealousy a representation of sublime experience, anticipating one of the dominant topics of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury aesthetics, and this sublime power of jealousy, the destroyer of love, is the true focus of the poem.
The human emotion of jealousy is often described in literature in the most hyperbolic terms, reflecting perhaps the actual strength of the affective experience. Calderon and Lope de Vega, among others, provide good examples of this; hence the title of the former's play, El mayor monstruo los celos and Lope de Vegas horrific realization in Sonnet 56 of the Rimas that "ver otro amante en brazos de su dama" (13) is life's worst torment, worse than the tortures suffered by the Danaids, Tantalus, Ixion, Sisyphus and Prometheus. However, Gongora's use of hyperbole raises the theme to its Olympian zenith, indeed, beyond the bounds of conceptuality. Whereas the poetics of the day described an harmonious beauty in which the poet was encouraged to amaze the reader with admiratio or maraviglia, Gongora surpasses these tropes. I will show here how jealousy gave Gongora the opportunity to speak...