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Notes
1. For a brief survey of the treatment of time in Spanish literature before and during the Baroque, see Otis H. Green, Spain and the Western Tradition, IV (Madison, Milwaukee, London 1966), 22–38. For an examination of the ideological basis of the Spanish Baroque and, particularly, of ascetic literature as a key to the sense of time subsequently communicated by seventeenth-century authors, see Stephen Gilman, ‘An introduction to the ideology of the baroque in Spain’, Symposium, I (1946–47), 82–107.
2. Within the ample body of scholarship devoted to El príncipe constante, the following studies are among those in which the problem of time figures most prominently: Bruce W. Wardropper, ‘Christian and Moor in Calderón's El príncipe constante’, MLR, LIII (1958), 512–20; Robert Sloane, ‘Action and rôle in El príncipe constante’, MLN, LXXXV (1970), 167–83; and Robert ter Horst, ‘The economic parable of time in Calderón's El príncipe constante’’’, RJ, XXIII (1972), 294–306.
3. La nave del mercader (1674) is the only other Calderonian auto in which time is personified. In La nave, however, the rôle of Tiempo is developed more conventionally along the lines of the nucleus of motifs to which I have referred. Further, the rôle has neither the extension nor the structural complexity it comes to acquire in El día mayor.
4. The Allegorical Drama of Calderón (Oxford and London 1943), 86–90. My understanding of Calderón's autos in general, as well as my study of El día mayor, is indebted to this work.
5. On the varying significance of Ingenio and Pensamiento in Calderón's autos, see Eugenio Frutos Cortés, La filosofía de Calderón en sus Autos sacramentales (Zaragoza 1952), 165–82.
6. All citations of Calderón's autos are from Obras completas, III, ed. Angel Valbuena Prat, 2nd edn (Madrid 1967).
7. Parker, to whom the discovery of the identity of Ingenio and Calderón is owed (86), makes no statement about the uniqueness of this device within Calderón's collected plays. But Emilio Orozco Díaz, citing a passage from El día mayor, maintains that it is ‘bien significativo que Calderón … la única vez que podemos decir se puso en escena fue para recibir la suprema enseñanza del tiempo’ (Temas del Barroco [Granada 1947], 1). It should be pointed out, however, that in the autos Calderón frequently uses his characters to voice his observations on dramatic art and technique. In the comedias these observations may be more generally literary or artistic and, especially in the cloak-and-sword plays, may also take the form of ironic self-reference or self-parody. Of course, a character who incidentally or temporarily assumes the dramatist's point of view or ‘identity’ is different from one who, like Ingenio, represents a deliberately sustained projection of the dramatist throughout the play. But it ought to be borne in mind that this sustained ‘self-portrait’ is not intended to disclose anything about Calderón as a person, but rather only to impart to Ingenio Calderón's identity as a dramatist. To this end the word ingenio is aptly chosen, for it was common in the Siglo de Oro, as the title pages of many published plays attest, to refer to a dramatist or poet as an ingenio. And later on, the Diccionario de Autoridades likewise tells us in its definition of the word that ‘se suele decir de las comedias de un ingenio, de dos o tres ingenios’. Further, as we shall see, the word ingenio also helps bring into focus a key aspect of Calderón's allegory since, through its association with the creativity of the poet, it is the source of the verbal, conceptual wit which, in the Baroque theoretical treatises of Gracián and others, can perceive correspondences even in opposite objects.
8. Frutos, 101.
9. The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, trans. L. E. M. Lynch (New York 1960), 190.
10. Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth 1961), XI. 12, 262. References indicate book and chapter, together with the page of the translation used.
11. Augustine uses this phrase to describe man in the City of God, XII. 15, 489. The reference is to the translation by Henry Bettenson (Harmondsworth 1972).
12. Georges Poulet writes that in the Middle Ages a creature's ‘tendance au néant (habitudo ad nihil) était compensée par une tendance opposée, une tendance à la cause première (habitudo ad causam primam)’. Though, as for Aristotle, tempus facit distare, for the Christian of the Middle Ages, ‘Le temps avait une direction. Le temps finalement emportait le chrétien vers Dieu’ (Etudes sur le temps humain [Edinburgh 1949], ii–v).
13. Cf. the discussion of ‘Creation and Time’ which comprises Chapter III of Erich Frank's Philosophical Understanding and Religious Truth (London, New York, Toronto 1949), 55–85.
14. Frutos accurately identifies Pensamiento's rôle in El día mayor with imagination. He does not, however, link imagination with the rôle of the dramatist or with the theme of time, other than to note that ‘El Ingenio se vale del Pensamiento para ser discípulo del Tiempo’ (169).
15. Cf. Frank Herbert Brabant, Time and Eternity in Christian Thought (London, New York, Toronto 1937), 63–91.
16. For an excellent study of Gracián's use of the terms ingenio, concepto, agudeza and correspondencia in his Agudeza y arte de ingenio, see T. E. May, ‘Gracián's idea of the concepto’, HR, XVIII (1950), 15–41.
17. See Frank, op. cit., 71.
18. See Parker, 86–87.
19. See Donald Thaddeus Dietz, The ‘Auto Sacramental’ and the Parable in Spanish Golden Age Literature (Chapel Hill, N.C. 1973), 110–17. These two autos (which Dietz also studies in his monograph) are La siembra del Señor and La viña del Señor. In both works the figure of God (the Father) actually appears on stage as an allegorical Padre de Familias. As such, he is a version of one of Calderón's stock allegorical characters, whom Valbuena Prat has classified as El Eterno. ‘El Eterno, Dios Padre’, writes Valbuena, ‘representado generalmente por un viejo venerable, suele llevar en sí las ideas de paternidad y de poder. No aparece a veces como padre de Cristo, sino de la Humanidad. Tal ocurre en Los alimentos del hombre, y La vida es sueño ms. donde corresponde al rey Basilio de la comedia. Como mayoral o padre de familias se halla en La siembra y La Viña del Señor. Como creador del Universo, en El gran Teatro del Mundo’ (‘Los autos sacramentales de Calderón: clasificación y análisis’, RHi, LXI [1924], 23–24). However, considering the nature of the dramatic inquiry of El día mayor, Calderón deliberately chooses not to portray the figure of El Eterno of the earlier autos (the first Padre de Familias mentioned by Pensamiento), but rather only to refer to him and to personify time as an analogous but ultimately incomparable Padre de Familias.
20. Meaning in History (Chicago 1949), 166.
21. For a discussion of the principles of Heilsgeschichte, or the Christian interpretation of history which stresses God's salvific acts in a historical process whose focal point is the Christ event, see the following books by Oscar Cullmann: Christ and Time, trans. Floyd V. Filson, rev. edn (London 1962); and Salvation in History, trans. Sidney G. Sowers and SCM Press (New York and Evanston 1967). For a Catholic view in substantial agreement with Cullmann's, see Jean Daniélou, S. J., The Lord of History, trans. Nigel Abercrombie (London and Chicago 1958).
22. Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, trans. Philip Mairet (New York 1961), 169–70.
23. Daniélou, 32–33. 1 have transliterated the Greek terms. On the concept of kairos in general, see also Cullmann, op. cit. For an application of kairos and chronos to criticism of Spenser, Shakespeare and modern literature, see Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (London, Oxford, New York 1966), 46–89 et passim.
24. Henri Yaker, ‘Time in the Biblical and Greek worlds’, in The Future of Time: Man’s Temporal Environment, ed. H. Yaker (Garden City, N.Y. 1971), 26–27.
25. Cullmann, Salvation in History, 318. See also Francis Martin, O. S. C. O., ‘Day of the Lord (Eschatology)’, New Catholic Encyclopedia (1967), q.v.
26. See Parker, 60 ff.
27. El día mayor begins with the singing of these verses: ‘Aunque del Señor son todos/los días, el que hoy celebra/la Fe el Día del Señor/se llama por Excelencia’ (1636a).
28. Eliade underscores the fact that ‘Christianity entered into History in order to abolish it: the greatest hope of the Christian is the second coming of Christ, which is to put an end to all History’ (172).
29. C. A. Patrides, The Grand Design of God (London 1972), 31.
30. The eras’ time-correspondence can be illustrated by the following dialogue among the Leyes just prior to the Zagal's appearance: ‘NAT. Ya que de uno y otro siglo/hicimos que se acabase/El Gran Dia de los Días/… como partes/que compusieron un todo;/bella Ley Escrita, dame/los brazos.//esc. Los dos Preceptos/que de ti heredé me hacen/tan tuya que el Tiempo no/podrá nuestras amistades/romper.//grac. Lo mismo deciros/puedo yo, y aunque se alarguen/a más, en ellos estriba/la esperanza que me trae/a lo que oí.//nat. Eso está/por ver.//GRAC. No será muy tarde,/supuesto que ya llegamos/de Belén a los umbrales’ (1653a). Since Ley de Gracia is a figure of the future, when Tiempo presents her he is ignorant of her identity ( 1644b–45a). The limits of Tiempo's knowledge on the auto’s historical plane thus reflect and parallel the limits of Ingenio's temporal imagination on the auto’s primary plane.
31. The anti-Jewish sentiment conveyed through Calderón's portrayal of Hebraísmo is undeniable, especially in the allegorical Calvary near the auto’s end ( 1656b–57b). This sentiment, of course, requires no explanation to students of the Siglo de Oro. Deplorable though it is, however, Calderón's diatribe in the passage referred to above does not descend to the level of racial slurs but rather is confined to the sphere of religion.
32. Daniélou, 19.
33. ‘Mucho me da que pensar/que con tanta prisa vaya/esta Siembra, y que Semilla, /que en lo Místico es Palabra,/no sea la que cumplida/espero; pues las Semanas/de Daniel … (pero esto aquí/que quede en silencio basta,/hasta mejor ocasión)’ (1644a); ‘… que aparatos en sus señas /no hallo de ser el Fruto que yo espero, /si el cómputo del Tiempo considero’ (1647b) ; ‘Y así, hoy …,/habiendo hecho con Daniel/el cómputo de la cuenta/de sus hebdómadas …/retirado de un trabajo/en que hay duda y no hay creencia /quiero estar para seguir/lo que mejor me parezca’ (1649b).
34. S. B. Frost, ‘Daniel’, The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible (1962), I, 768. Frost goes on to affirm that this ‘failure is part of holy scripture to remind all lesser men to heed the warning of Jesus: "Of that day or that hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father" (Mark 13:32)’.
35. El Barroco o el descubrimiento del drama (La Laguna 1957), 379.
36. ‘Soy quien soy’, NYRFH, I (1947), 113–27.
37. Frank, 72.
38. Erich Auerbach, ‘Figura’, trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (1959, reprint Gloucester, Mass. 1973), 62.
39. When I had nearly completed this essay, it came to my attention that Hans Flasche had published an article entitled ‘El problema del tiempo en el auto El día mayor de los días’, in Hacia Calderón, ed. H. Flasche (Berlin and New York 1976), 216–32 (including a list [226–32], compiled by S. Russel, of the passages in the auto that contain the word tiempo). Upon completing this essay, I read Flasche's article and found it to be of interest chiefly for the critic's analysis of some difficult passages concerning Calderón's poetic dramatization of salvation history. However, while I concur with Flasche on some points of textual commentary, it is clear that our basic approaches to El día mayor, as well as our views on several centrally important aspects of the play, arc quite divergent. Here 1 can refer only to the most fundamental opposition between our studies, which lies in the interpretation of the rôle of Tiempo. For Flasche, Tiempo is indeed identified with God in the sense that the former is a dramatization of ‘Dios que gobierna el tiempo, actúa en el tiempo’ (218). Despite the fact that the critic's phrasing often conveys doubt and conjecture, there is scarcely a page in his text in which the identity of God and Tiempo is not asserted. Since the critic consequently considers Tiempo as both omniscient and omnipotent, he must reconcile Tiempo's ignorance or limitations in various passages with the figure's supposed divinity—reconciliations which to me seem untenable (see especially pp. 221, 223, 224). Finally, since so many of Flasche's judgements hinge on the identity of God and Tiempo, it follows that the rôles of Ingenio as creative artist or dramatist and of imaginative analogy, along with the implications of Tiempo as integral to Calderón's portrayal of human limitations, do not enter into his discussion. Except for this note, I have not revised my essay to incorporate Flasche's findings.