Caimán: Antonio Buero Vallejo's Intermedial Collage in Homage to Max Ernst

ABSTRACT

Spanish dramatist Antonio Buero Vallejo (1916–2000) has been called an intermedialist for his incorporation of visual art, music, and intertextual references in his theatrical works. The present study focuses on Buero's inclusion of Max Ernst's painting Los dioses oscuros (1957) in his play Caimán (1981). To date, interpretations of the painting's role in the play have been limited to its dark and somber tone and its foreboding presence, with scant attention being paid to how Ernst's artistic vision might have affected the drama. A thorough investigation of Ernst's collage aesthetic will reveal how the artist's influence on Caimán goes beyond the apparently superficial mention of one of his paintings to become part of the constructive principle of the play. In fact, Ernst is the reason why Buero's Caimán could be termed an intermedial collage.

KEYWORDS:

• Buero Vallejo
• Caimán
• collage
• Max Ernst
• intermedial
• Los dioses oscuros

Notes

1. Sánchez defines intermediality as follows: “Se trata de alejar con determinación las letras del logocentrismo y de amalgamar los estímulos de la percepción sensorial, para conciliar (e hibridizar) las artes, en un proceso sinestésico, y hacer converger (en procesos semióticos de mediación) una red de sonidos, colores, ritmos, y formas” (22).

2. See Martha Halsey's “Caimán” 171–74 and María Fernanda Santiago Bolaños 144–46 for interpretations of the two reproductions in Caimán. Regarding the negative aspects of Los dioses oscuros, Halsey states: “The painting with its strange bird figures is disturbing. Buero uses the painting […] to suggest the horrible sense of foreboding produced in Rosa's mind by Néstor's words” (173).

3. The works used in this study to provide an overview of the artist's biography and artistic production include John Russell's Max Ernst: Life and Work, Ernst's Beyond Painting, and Julia Drost's “Biographical Notes.” For a definition of frottage, see Russell 82–83.

4. An investigation of the similarities between Buero and Ernst with regard to the use of myths in their works is beyond the scope of this study. For information on this topic, see Elizabeth Legge 2–3 (regarding Ernst) and Ricardo Doménech 321–24, 355–64 (regarding Buero).

5. These collage techniques are drawn from a variety of sources, most notably articles by Lucy Lippard, Charlotte Stokes, and Renée Riese Hubert. Stokes defines “condensation” as “the pushing together of two or more elements into a new word or phrase so that each original element retains its own character while effectively interacting with the others” (199).

6. See Gabriele's “The Case.” See also Thomas Brockelman for an extensive explanation of the place of collage within postmodernism.

7. All quotations from Caimán are from Buero's Obra Completa, vol. 1, and will be referenced by page number in the body of the essay.

8. Halsey refers to the “dialectical opposition” between Néstor and Dionisio and Néstor and Rosa (“Caimán” 168, 174).

9. The combination of these two ways of seeing the world is reminiscent of Carola Giedion-Welcker's description of Ernst's “double role” as “the aggressive revolutionary […] and the dreamer” (106). Both Ernst and Buero believed that a combination of the inner subjective world and the outer objective world was necessary to be able to affect change or transformation.

10. Lippard also speaks of the “latent theatricality” of collage (13).

11. Giedion-Welcker writes that in Ernst's works, “All boundaries are gone; everything exists only in permanent metamorphosis” (105).

12. This quote, referring to Ernst's art, appears in Max Ernst Life and Work (337), and is attributed by the editor, Werner Spies, to the catalog of the 1975 exhibition, Max Ernst, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, written by Diane Waldman.

13. See Spies's Max Ernst Loplop for a comprehensive study of Ernst's alter ego. Spies says that Loplop was an “autobiographically tinged bird-creature” that was “part of [Ernst's] private mythology” (10). See also Stokes's “Surrealist Persona.”

14. Another aspect of the unreliability of the Dama's narration is her omniscience. Although she was a participant in the events of the story of the caimán, she was not present for the majority of the conversations she conveys. Her narration is a series of fragments of memories and secondhand accounts of what transpired. Through characters like the Dama, Iglesias Feijoo explains how Buero “impone el punto de vista de un personaje sobre todo lo demás […] el escenario está situado en el cerebro de estos personajes y lo que el público ve no es la realidad, sino la forma en que ellos la perciben, con todos sus defectos y limitaciones” (111).

15. A type of second “reading” is also required of viewers of collage. Brockelman, quoting from “an avant-gardist manifesto on collage from the 1970s,” notes, “In collage ‘each cited element breaks the continuity or the linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading: that of the fragment perceived in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole, a different totality. The trick of collage consists […] of never entirely suppressing the alterity of these elements reunited in a temporary composition’” (2).

16. See Stokes's “Collage as Jokework” where double entendres are discussed as well as juxtapositions, which Stokes says are an “example of Freud's principles of organizing jokes” (200). For Ernst, however, the most important point he took from Freud's writings on jokes was that they “spring from the unconscious” (201). See also Lippard who says that “Ernst […] lent a stringent literacy, even erudition, to a poetic irrational art that amounts, at times, to play” (13).

17. Maurer explains this play on words in “Images” 42.

18. Another obvious pun in Caimán is the word “caimán,” which refers to many things at once: It is the title of the play we are reading; it is the story of the American Indian chief who was swallowed by a caiman; it is Rosa and Néstor's story; it is a chapter in the Dama's autobiography; and it is a metaphor for the societal ills of the 1980s (see Halsey, “Caimán” 161).

19. The following quote from Caimán has been explained by Halsey as highlighting Néstor's role as advisor and guide to Charito (“Caimán” 167), but its implications are more far-reaching when considered in relation to the story of the Nestor parrots that attack the docile sheep that represents passivity in the face of oppressive social or religious institutions. Describing Charito and her boyfriend's behavior, Néstor says: “Creyendo hacer lo que os da la gana y dóciles a la falsa moral, a los vicios tontos que os imponen los dueños de todo” (1775; emphasis mine).

20. Russell states that “Ernst's art is never merely destructive […] there has always been somewhere an element of re-constitution” (170).

21. Maurer explains, “Ernst warns the reader that Marceline-Marie's visual identity will change during the course of the novel and that only rarely does she appear in the guise of a young girl […] Marceline-Marie is most often portrayed as a mature woman” (“Images” 72). This observation is reminiscent of the split identity of Dama–Charito as a mature woman and a young adolescent.

22. Charito tells Rosa: “Usted es más madre para mí que la mía” (1769).

23. See Legge's Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytic Sources and Kavky's “Dream Work.”

24. These valid worlds are not meant to represent what is, but what could be. Halsey says that “the audience must dream of a better Spain or a better world but without deluding itself into believing […] it already exists or that it can be achieved without a concerted, sustained effort in solidarity with others” (“Caimán” 176), and Spies speaks of Ernst's art as representing “an imagination of things that might possibly come into being” (Max Ernst Loplop 114).

25. Just as Buero was able to create a world that was “increíble y cierta” (1719), Ernst managed to visualize what was invisible. Stokes explains: “Ernst found in scientific images a fresh way of seeing, and he used them to help make visualizations of the invisible” (“The Scientific” 453).

26. See Halsey's “Women as Author Surrogates.”

27. Spies uses the word “polyphonic” to describe collages (Max Ernst Loplop 16).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alison J. Ridley

Alison J. Ridley is a Spanish professor at Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. Her current scholarly work focuses on the theatre of Antonio Buero Vallejo. She also serves as a translator of literary works from Spanish to English.