‘Toda la tristeza de España’: The Tragic Sense of Life in Antonio Buero Vallejo's Las Meninas

Abstract

Buero's mastery of stagecraft would qualify Las Meninas to be considered among his best works, though it has not received the critical acclaim accorded to his other plays. The thesis of this article is that the appeal of Las Meninas consists in its profound reflection on large existential questions similar to those explored by Miguel de Unamuno. For Buero, Las Meninas powerfully captures the atmosphere of impermanence and pretence which surrounds the regime of Philip IV. It thereby encourages audiences, and, more particularly, readers of the text, living under a regime of censorship, repression and false appearances, to see themselves as participants in the collective tragedy of the nation, and by extension of human life in general.

Key words:

• Antonio Buero Vallejo
• Las Meninas
• Miguel de Unamuno
• repression
• tragedy
• resistance
• artificiality
• mortality
• identity
• isolation

Notes

1 Thanks are due to Professor David Johnston and Dr Catherine O'Leary for their helpful comments on the draft of this paper.

2 Antonio Buero Vallejo, Las Meninas, ed., intro., notas & apéndices de Virtudes Serrano (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 2005 [1^st ed. 1999]), 220. All subsequent references to the play, and to other material included in this edition, will be incorporated in parentheses in the main text of the article.

3 Quoted in Ricardo Doménech, El teatro de Buero Vallejo (Madrid: Gredos, 1973), 155. Doménech also quotes remarks made by Buero when interviewed by Luis Mayo in 1955: ‘[Velázquez] me causa un asombro inagotable. Parece de otro planeta y, sin embargo, no lo hay más humano’ (150).

4 Quoted in Luis Iglesias Feijoo, La trayectoria dramática de Antonio Buero Vallejo (Santiago de Compostela: Univ. de Santiago de Compostela, 1982), 264. Ramón Sierra, writing in ABC on 19 January 1961, professed to detect in the play ‘instintos revolucionarios tan fáciles de despertar y tan difíciles de contener’ (quoted in Iglesias Feijoo, La trayectoria dramática, 264).

5 Robert L. Nicholas, ‘The History Plays: Buero Vallejo's Experiment in Dramatic Expression’, Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2:1 (1969), 281–93.

6 This is not to say that Buero was unaffected by censorship. Catherine O'Leary has given an excellent account of Buero's skill in navigating a careful course between the reefs of conformity and provocation: ‘Essentially, posibilismo is what Buero considered to be the role of the artist or intellectual in a repressive society […]. He rejected the stance of those who conformed to censorship and said nothing worthwhile, instead churning out frivolous entertainment; he also rejected the position of those who created work so provocative and controversial that they courted the wrath of the censor and condemned themselves to silence’ (Catherine O'Leary, The Theatre of Antonio Buero Vallejo: Ideology, Politics and Censorship [Woodbridge: Tamesis, 2005], 250). Buero's Velázquez may be said to have proceeded in the same way.

7 In a comparable way, ‘it becomes obvious that the proper spectator for Velázquez's sketch is not a mere recipient of visual images, but an active agent perceiving, ordering, interpreting, and actualizing the work of art’ (Dennis Perri, ‘Las Meninas: The Artist in Search of a Spectator’, Estreno: Cuadernos del Teatro Español Contemporáneo, 11 [1985], 25–29 [pp. 27–28]).

8 Velázquez's daughter, the wife of his apprentice Juan Bautista del Mazo, does not appear in the play, and is not mentioned, but it may be relevant to note that she had died two years before the execution of the painting.

9 For Buero, Velázquez ‘es hombre de comportamiento insólito en su época y parece estar, internamente, desengañado de las mismas vanidades que solicita y desapegado de la propia realeza que lo sostiene’ (Antonio Buero Vallejo, ‘El espejo de Las Meninas’, Revista de Occidente, 92 [1970], 136–66 [p. 164]).

10 One needs only to mention his portraits of the court dwarves Sebastián de Morra and Francisco Lezcano, plus his depiction of working-class characters such as El aguador de Sevilla.

11 In addition, the references in the play to the ongoing war with France would remind some alert spectators or readers that the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659) marked the moment when Spain's hegemony in Europe was decisively lost to its northern neighbour, which after the death of Charles II was to provide Spain with the dynasty which would rule almost continuously for over 200 years.

12 A full discussion of the much-debated question of Velázquez's use of mirrors in Las Meninas lies outside the scope of this paper. The common assumption that the King and Queen reflected in the mirror at the back of the room must be standing in the position of the spectator (see, for example, Enriqueta Harris, Velázquez [Oxford: Phaidon, 1982], 172) has been questioned by Ramiro Moya (‘El trazado regulador y la perspectiva en Las Meninas’, Arquitectura, 25 [1961], 3–12), and by Buero himself, who is convinced that ‘lo que [en el espejo] vemos es un reflejo del lienzo del primer término’ (‘El espejo de Las Meninas’, 151). The difficulty about the latter interpretation is the disproportion between the size of the image in the mirror and the dimensions of the canvas on which Velázquez is working, and which the spectator cannot see. Furthermore, no record survives of any such double portrait of the royal couple. The evidence with regard to the painting is inconclusive, but Buero's strategy in the play has been acutely characterized by Gwynne Edwards: ‘[…] plantea una pregunta mucho más fundamental sobre la fe que damos a la apariencia de las cosas […] Vale la pena señalar, además, que la imagen de Felipe IV y de la reina Mariana en el espejo se caracteriza por su indefinición y por su calidad fantasmagórica’ (Gwynne Edwards, ‘El espejo de Las Meninas’, in El teatro de Buero Vallejo: homenaje del hispanismo británico e irlandés, ed. Victor Dixon & David Johnston [Liverpool: Liverpool U. P., 1996], 57–70 [pp. 59–61]).

13 ‘Antonio Buero Vallejo habla de Unamuno’, Primer Acto, 58 (1964), 19–21 (p. 19); quoted in Iglesias Feijóo, La trayectoria dramática de Antonio Buero Vallejo, 59. According to David Johnston, ‘[l]a perspectiva más profunda del teatro de Buero refleja la de Unamuno’ (‘Buero Vallejo y Unamuno: la maldición de Caín’, in El teatro de Buero Vallejo: homenaje del hispanismo británico e irlandés, ed. Dixon & Johnston, 85–110 [p. 86]). See also David Johnston, ‘Posibles paralelos entre la obra de Unamuno y el teatro histórico de Buero Vallejo’, Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 386 (1982), 340–64. Johnston remarks that: ‘En un sentido amplio, el uso dramático que hace Buero del cuadro presenta un ejemplo sutil de la síntesis entre historia e intrahistoria que Unamuno y Buero conciben como lo esencial de todo verdadero progreso histórico’ (‘Posibles paralelos’, 345–46). As will become obvious, however, my own interest in the connection between Buero and Unamuno focuses more on the existential issue of personal identity in the face of death.

14 Miguel de Unamuno, Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos y Tratado del amor de Dios, ed. Nelson Orringer (Madrid: Tecnos, 2005), 164.

15 Quoted in José Luis Abellán, Unamuno a la luz de la psicología (Madrid: Tecnos, 1964), 199.

16 Quoted in Abellán, Unamuno a la luz de la psicología, 75.

17 Abellán speaks of the nervous movements of Unamuno's hands, which parallel Velázquez's habit of clutching one hand in the other (Unamuno a la luz de la psicología, 202).

18 Dawson Carr, with reference to the painting, says that: ‘The presentation of the Spanish royal family in such a casual context was unprecedented, and by showing himself in their company, Velázquez made a claim for the nobility of his art and for himself’ (‘Painting and Reality: The Art and Life of Velázquez’, in Dawson Carr, Xavier Bray et al., Velázquez [London: National Gallery, 2006], 26–53 [p. 48]). Buero, however, goes further, and suggests that Velázquez appears with more imposing dignity in the painting than even the figures of the King and Queen. This, indeed, is the basis of one of the accusations made by his enemies: ‘EL MARQUÉS. —Lo más intolerable de esa pintura es que representa la glorificación de Velázquez pintada por el propio Velázquez’ (128).

19 Doménech, in my view, is unfair to Juana, who has some claim to be a tragic figure in her own right: ‘Puritana, celosa, víctima de una educación represiva, Doña Juana resume un tipo muy común de mujer española, trátese del siglo XVII o de nuestra época’ (El teatro de Buero Vallejo, 168–69). It could equally well be claimed that Buero's Velázquez is typical of the dominant Spanish male.

20 Miguel de Unamuno, Tres novelas ejemplares y un prólogo (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1964), 13.

21 Unamuno, Tres novelas ejemplares, 19. A similar preoccupation is reflected in Buero's El tragaluz, where the father constantly asks, as he pores over old photographs cut from magazines, ‘¿Quién es ése?’

22 ‘Given its position across the room and our position at the front of the scene, we would have to see ourselves in the mirror, but we see only the royal couple’ (John R. Searle, ‘Las Meninas and the Paradoxes of Pictorial Representation’, Critical Enquiry, 6 [1980], 477–88 [p. 485]). ‘[…] [T]his painting menaces the fabric of reality and the illusion of identity with its consummate game of mirrors. Do kings and queens exist only in the eyes of others? And if that is true of monarchs then who on earth are you and I, transported uneasily by Velázquez into the skin of royalty?’ (Jonathan Jones, The Guardian, 2 October, 2013, <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2013/oct/02/portrait-of-an-enigma-diego-velazquez-las-meninas> (accessed 23 January 2014).

23 Dawson Carr has remarked that: ‘as we approach the canvas, the marvellous illusion […] dissolves into paint […] The elusiveness of Las Meninas suggests that life, and art, are an illusion’ (Carr, ‘Painting and Reality’, 48). This is probably true of most large-scale paintings, but it acquires a particular thematic relevance in Buero's play. Indeed, even as a painting, Las Meninas is not entirely a stable and reliable object. It was damaged by fire, partially repaired in 1734, and cleaned in 1984, so we cannot be altogether sure that what has come down to us is exactly what Velázquez painted.

24 Nevertheless, not only do the events of the play reflect what could plausibly have happened in the court of Philip IV, but various details, even some of those that most strain credulity, are historically attested in Avisos de Jerónimo de Barrionuevo, 1654–1658, ed. & estudio preliminar A. Paz y Meliá, BAE 221 & 222, 2 vols (Madrid: Atlas, 1968–69), frequently quoted in Virtudes Serrano's edition of the play. For example, María Teresa's statement to the King, ‘¿Sabéis que hace tres días nadie comió en Palacio salvo nuestra familia?’ (130), is confirmed by Barrionuevo's assertion that ‘Dos meses y medio ha que no se dan en palacio las raciones acostumbradas’ (130, n. 27). The far-fetched rumours about buried treasure in Balchín del Hoyo are similarly authenticated (93, n. 13).

25 Buero Vallejo, ‘El espejo de Las Meninas’, 158.

* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.