Hyperbaton: The World as Syntax

Abstract

This chapter explores another instance of neo-baroque distortion: hyperbaton; that is, the trope of syntactic reconfiguration that figuratively points to the relative and conjectural nature of the universe. In contrast to a common reading of Gongora’s Las Soledades in which the text is seen as a reflection of the world, in this chapter Baler reads Gongora’s meandering writing in light of a metaphor that has still not been sufficiently explored: the metaphor of the world as syntax. This impulse of Góngora to construct a textual organization based on a configuring imagination found meaningful echoes in Borges’s labile universe. From this viewpoint, Borgesian fiction (with its transmutation of the categorical structures of reality and its intrepid conjectural reconfigurations.) appears fundamentally hyperbatic.