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Melendez Valdes'' winter ode: enlightenment and expressivism.

Article Excerpt
In an important article on the persistence of the divine analogy (i.e. the Great Chain of Being theory), Earl Wasserman writes that when Bacon sought to separate empirical observation from the "desires of the mind," he "was assenting to that divorce of head and heart, of object and value, that accompanied the approaching end of the Renaissance; the same divorce that the Romantics would later struggle to repair by again wedding outward thing and inward meaning" (39). This separation was always inimical to art, and perhaps impossible for art to assume, since ah is nothing if not a translation of the world of things into the realm of values. And, in fact, almost as soon as the "new science" had wrenched man out of the Great Chain of Being, a labor of reconnection began, where both that Aristotelian world view and the concept of "modern man" would be transformed.

The split was addressed during the eighteenth century by way of such thinkers as Vico, and the followers of Lockean sensationalism and of Condillac, who sought to bridge divisions within man (body/soul) and between man and nature inherited from the great crisis of European consciousness of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Aristotelian world view, reinvigorated by Thomistic philosophy and buttressed by the authority of the Church, had been profoundly shaken by the wave of skepticism that engulfed the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (indeed, Descartes elaborated his méthode as a cure for such skepticism) (see Popkin), as well as by the emergent Galilean-Newtonian view of modern man. Burgeoning scientific thought, together with epistemological doubt, established "a radical separation between the inner realms of mind or consciousness and the external world of matter, the physical world" (Sass 21). The new metaphor that would characterize the bridging of the gap between the Newtonian/Cartesian image of a mechanistic universe and our spirit, or mind, is that of a biological organism. Thus both the external polarization between man and nature, and the internal one between body and mind, were resolved: once the world was conceived as an "organism," it was equally conceivable for man to be in harmony (or disharmony) with it. The result of this process of integration would come to be known as organicism. According to this organicist vision, understanding requires the observer to enter "empathically into the inner and emotional life of the observed" (Sass 24). Intimately related with the "organicist" world view is the complex view that the philosopher Charles Taylor has called "expressivism." In accordance with the organicist world view, expressivism in art and literature rejects divisions within man (of the mind into different faculties, of man into body and mind), and between man and nature (of consciousness and the world). Thus, to complete self-integration the expressivist artist sought the integration of the self with nature, or at least the resonance of the self with natural harmonies. Communion with the surrounding world was desired not in the form of contemplation of a cosmic realm of ideas (as in Fray Luis's "Oda a Francisco Salinas") but rather as a communion appropriate to subjectivities. Self-expression was to be guided by this inner essence and become a matter of self-exploration.

It is important to keep these ideas in mind in order to situate Meléndez Valdés's "Oda. El invierno es el tiempo de la meditación." For one thing, we can no longer take the position that Spain was as much of ah intellectual backwater asit has been common to suggest, and it is not only possible, but probable that these ideas were debated by Spanish intellectuals by the second half of the eighteenth century, if not before. Russell P. Sebold and Jean Sarrailh, (1) among others, have demonstrated that important currents of thought were reaching the Peninsula during the Enlightenment, and that Meléndez Valdés (together with Cadalso and Jovellanos, for instance) was among those who were most receptive to such thought. The poet was familiar with the British and French associationist theories (he says, in a much quoted letter, that Locke was at the foundation of all...