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Abstract
This article examines the diachronic use of metatheater in Cervantes’s Entremés del retablo de las maravillas (1615) and “La Dolores Rondón,” the second tale in Severo Sarduy’s novel, De donde son los cantantes (1967). Both works are structured as a play-with-in-a-play, including the internal theatrical pieces and the external debates, where the authors problematize literary language/representation in their respective times. This article further explores the organizational differences between metatheatrical Baroque and Neobaroque texts. In the Entremés, two charlatans trick a group of villagers fearful of the “limpieza de sangre” into seeing marvelous scenes. This Baroque play suggests the omnipresence of the Spanish Empire, while criticizing the trendy performance of comedia nueva in Cervantes’s time. “La Dolores Rondón,” by comparison, fails to deliver a coherent piece of theater. Following the tradition of the Cuban “choteo,” the characters humorously demonstrate that all “realities” are fictional and that the text progresses without the guidance of chronological or poetic order. Sarduy’s Neobaroque narrative seeks to break away from authoritative literary discourse and to repudiate the logocentrism embedded in Latin American epistemology.
Notes
Notes
1 Luis de Góngora y Argote (1561–1627) was a Spanish Baroque lyric poet and one of the most prominent Spanish poets of all time. His style, known as Gongorismo, is characterized by ornamental vocabulary and heavy usage of metaphors and complex syntactical order. Sarduy is fundamentally influenced by Góngora’s work: “Góngora es entonces el gran mediador que le permite reconocerse, a la par, en la aventura de Tel Quel y en el barroco seiscentista, en el estructuralismo de Barthes y en la vieja estilística de Alonso, en el psicoanálisis de Lacan y en el legado de Darío” (“Góngora, Sarduy y el barroco” 145).
2 Bartolotto gives a figurative interpretation of Sarduy’s writing as erotic: “Sarduy claims for himself the power to make love with words without any intention to procreate, but only to rejoice in textual games” (23).
3 According to Agustín de la Granja, the Entremés was composed by Cervantes much prior to its first publication, presumably in 1587 (262–63). Among his reasons are: The Entremés was written in prose, a form of comical representation brought to Spain by Italian actors and lost its appeal in los corrales after the rise of the comedy in verse; the mention of the actor Pedro de Montiel, who formed part of Lope de Rueda’s company in 1554. In addition, the years 1586–1587 witnessed the first controversy over the presence of women in theatrical representation: “el 6 de junio de 1586 se prohibió la representación de mujeres […] y el 3 de julio de 1587 Gonzalo de Monzón se dirige al Consejo hacienda constar que los hospitals de Madrid «padescen mucha necesidad por auer cesado el aprovechamiento que tenian los corrales en que se hazian las representaciones, y entiendese que es por razón de auer vedado que representen mujeres»” (Varey 14). In the Entremés, Montiel (Chanfalla) mentions this occurrence: “Yo, señores míos, soy Montiel, el que trae el retablo de las maravillas: hanme enviado a llamar de la corte los señores cofrades de los hospitales, porque no hay autor de comedias en ella, y perecen los hospitales, y con mi idea se remediará todo” (219). Granja also calls attention to the use of puppets and illusions in the Entremés, to compensate for the lack of female in theater companies.
4 “Sainetes” or “Relaciones” refer to staged short satiric dialogues which allowed oppressed minorities in Cuba, such as black people and the poor, to attack the status quo. They are conceived as the original components of Cuban Carnival (Bartolotto 17).
5 I borrow Spadaccinni’s modification to Segre’s mode and add the YOU-receiver at the bottom. Although Spadaccinni uses this scheme to explain Cervantes’ dramatic works, I find it also applicable to “La Dolores Rondón.”
6 In Golden Age Spain, “autor de comedias” refers to the person who led the troupe of actors (Thacker 130). The duo are thus both the authors and the “autores” of the Entremés.
7 Zarabanda, possibly with Arabian origin, is a popular dance form in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Criticized by moralists for its obscene lyrics and movements, the dance was banned in Spain in 1583 but was nevertheless frequently cited in the literature of the period.
8 “Autores intelectuales se trata de un término legal que designa a la persona que ha planeado los actos, pero no los ha llevado a cabo. La frase se puso en boga en la Cuba revolucionaria porque Fidel Castro declaró que José Martí había sido el «autor intelectual» de la revolución de 1959” (De donde son 152–53). This appears as a sociopolitical satire of the time.
9 In Escrito sobre un cuerpo (1969), Sarduy refers to Cuban culture as “una superposición”: “En esta superposición, en eso también cubana, siempre se desliza, por el impacto mismo del collage, un elemento de risa, de burla discreta, algo de ‘choteo’” (69). As observed by Bartolotto, Sarduy uses “choteo” and its parodic nature to undermine the two dominant literal discourses (the propagandistic discourse of the Revolution and the overdefined “Cubanidad”) of his time, and their authoritative claims to a linear and limited definition of Cubanness (21).
10 I refer to Bertolt Brecht’s discussion on the traditional and modern theater. According to Brecht, while the traditional theater underlines feeling and provides the spectators with sensations, the modern theater emphasizes reason and forces the spectators to make decisions (171–73). It is also worth noting that many Cervantine comedies and entremeses are considered precursors to Brecht’s theory of alienation affect (Andrés-Suárez 17).
11 The structure of El retablo de las maravillas resembles Rueda’s Las aceitunas y El convidado as both works adopt the technique “la intimidad sorprendida”: “una situación ridícula, basada en unas premisas absurdas adoptadas por los protagonistas, está conduciendo a su fin inevitable, para deleite del público, cuando de repente surge un nuevo personaje, innecesario para la edificación del público, que se entera del absurdo y lo denuncia” (Johnson 97).
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Yunning Zhang
Yunning Zhang is a first-year PhD student in Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago. She received her MPhil degree in Modern Languages at University of Oxford. Her research primarily focuses on Latin American Neobaroque narrative, and the intersection of critical theory with visual arts and performance studies.