Calderon's Los cabellos de Absalon : A Metatheater of Unbridled Passion

Abstract

his story, occurring in the scene at the beginning of the second act in which Roca is unable to paint the portrait, underlines the connection between the two. The parallel is fully realized at the end of the third act, however, when Juanete completes his story and is rewarded by the Prince. In the scene immediately following, and in close physical proximity, Juan Roca, who is also under the patronage of the Prince, manages at last to complete his "portrait" of Serafina —by murdering her. Alan K. G. Paterson has argued persuasively that central to the play's meaning is the failure of art in the face of beauty, and, by extension, its inability to capture the vitality of human life.8 Both Juanete's and his master's artworks are successful according to the conventions within which they operate. Both achieve, as it were, the desired effects: Juanete's story gets its laugh, Juan Roca's revenge restores his honor. But both works succeed by compromising the truths they purport to encompass. By the conventions of honor, Serafina's death was long since foretold, and it is unlikely that honor's demands would have been satisfied even by the fact of her relative guiltlessness . But in human terms, Roca's "painting" is disturbingly incomplete, his art still inadequate to the complex reality— subjective as well as external — which confronts him. His intuition of this failure gives his final speech and subsequent withdrawal their special poignancy. Juanete, whose art and failure are of less consequence, has no such awareness. He steps forward to utter the conventional platitudes which close the play. But he remains a point of contrast , not a moral norm.9 NOTES ' Susan L. Fischer, "The Functioned Significance of the Gracioso in Calderón's El pintor de su deshrona," Romance Notes, 14 (1972), 334-40 and Edward M. Wilson, "Hacia una interpretación de El pintor de su deshonra," Abaco, 3 (1970), 49-85. 2 Act III, lines 862-4 in the Clasicos Castellanos edition of Angel Valbuena Briones ( Madrid , 1956). All subsequent citations refer to this edition. 3 Wilson, p. 83. * 1972 MLA Abstracts II, 48. 5 Roca blames his failure on his wife's excessive beauty (II, 89). Alan K. G. Paterson anticipates my reading of the line in his "The Comic and Tragic Melancholy of Juan Roca: A Study of Calderón's El pintor de su deshonra ," FMLS 5 (1969), 244-61, 252-3. My own view of the play has been considerably influenced by Paterson's essay. 6 Paterson, p. 252. 7 See III, 871-6. Fischer (p. 336) draws attention to this point. 8 Op. cit. and in a later article, "Juan Roca's Northern Ancestry: A Study of Art Theory in Calderón's El pintor de su deshonra," FMLS, 7 (1971), 195-210. 9 For a fuller discussion of the play, especially the function of subsidiary roles like "painter" and "story-teller," see my "Diversion in Calderón's El pintor de su deshonra," MLN, 91 (1976), 247-63. CALDERÓN'S LOS CABELLOS DE ABSALON: A METATHEATER OF UNBRIDLED PASSION Susan L. Fischer, Bucknell University Thomas A. O'Connor's essay, "Is the Spanish Comedia a Metatheater," is another chapter in the reigning controversy over the uniqueness or universality of Golden Age theater. ' O'Connor 's argument in its totality is difficult 103 to accept because it is based on an a priori view of the comedia as (in his own words ) "an expression of fixed and preconceived philosophical, theological and dramatic notions" (p. 275). Moreover , O'Connor arrives at his "uniquely Spanish view" by invoking a pastiche of philosophical, theological, and ethical thought which he then lumps in two broad categories: on the one hand there is all that is Christian, Aristotelian, Platonic, Neoplatonic, theocentric, Spanish, moral; and on the other there is all that is anthropocentric, metatheatrical , amoral — and — everything else. This plethora of terminological distinctions merely obfuscates his basic premise, namely, that the Spanish comedia has an essentially medieval world view. While the comedia was obviously conceived against the backdrop of seventeenth-century Spain, with its medieval legacy and its Catholic responses, and while several...