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Castillo, David R. Baroque Horrors: Roots of the Fantastic in the Age of Curiosities. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. 177 pp. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-472-11721-5. $60.00.
David Castillo's Baroque Honors starts out promisingly with a quote from Walter Benjamin referencing his always chewy concept of historical materialism. Castillo's goal, like Benjamin's, is to view the past through the lens of the present. After all, as the cliché goes, hindsight is 20-20, and when we recognize remnants or revenants of the past in present cultural texts, history reveals itself as a series of failed attempts at "progress," however each era conceives of it.
To this end, Castillo identifies his book as a "gallery of horrors," a constellation of "miscellany collections, sensationalist news, exemplary narratives, folktales, and legends" (xi). If this sounds a bit hodge-podge, it is; in the book's introduction, four chapters, and very brief afterword, Castillo looks at a wide variety of cultural texts produced during the Spanish Golden Age, from miscellanea like Antonio de Torquemada's Jardin de flores curiosas (1570) and Julián de Medrano's La silva curioso (1583) to morality tales like Cristóbal Lozano's La cueva de Hércules (1667), narratives of ambiguity like Miguel de Cervantes's Novelas ejemphres (1613), and lurid narratives of violence like María de Zayas's Desengaños amorosos (1647). As should be obvious by now, the book's title is somewhat misleading. Not only does it omit the fact that this is primarily a study of literature, but it skirts around the particulars of Castillo's chosen set of texts, which are from Spain's Golden Age (from 1550-1680).
The book's introduction - which seems more like chapter 1 since a short preface serves as the introduction - uses Günther von Hagens's controversial "Body Worlds" exhibits as a jumping-off point for discussing blurred boundaries between art and science, spectacle and education, and curiosity (a term he parses out in some detail) and wonder. Von Hagens's "plastinicated" corpses demonstrate our contemporary need for authenticity, Castillo argues, but this is certainly not a new idea; on the contrary, "humans were reflecting on the problematic status of the boundaries between art(ifice) and nature . . . long before the recent proclamation of our postmodern and posthuman conditions" (15). Although he lets a substantial quote from Omar Calabrese's...