Re-reading Calderón

FORUM RE-READING CALDERÓN GEORGE MARISCAL University of Wisconsin-Madison In his attempt to initiate a «sustained theoretical challenge to current Calderón scholarship,» Walter Cohen («Calderón in England: A Social Theory of Production and Consumption,» BCom, Summer 1983) fails to adequately convey the complexity of what he is proposing which, if I understand him correctly, is a hybrid approach comprised of Marxist theory, genetic structuralism, and Rezeptionsgeschichte. Let me say at the outset that I share Cohen's desire to «account for the power of the plays in a manner that links them... to the historical crises and contradictions from which they were produced.» What needs to be made clear, however, is that such an account must carefully specify the numerous levels of mediation involved and, more importantly, must make a concentrated attempt at theoretical rigor and clarity. Any materialist reading of Golden Age literature will be a minority one within the academy and is therefore subject to attack and/or facile dismissal for having «devalued» art. My concern is that Prof. Cohen's article has provided the «attackers» with more ammunition. That England and Spain produced incredibly rich national theaters in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is well-known, yet to attribute their development (as Prof. Cohen does) to «basic similarities between Spain and England during this period» is a serious mis-reading of both 131 132BCom, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Summer 1 984) cultures as well as a betrayal of any coherent sociological method. The uncritical acceptance of the equation Calderón = Shakespeare is emblematic of the problem. Even if we merely resort to the old New Critical maxim: «Shakespeare-drama of character, Calderón-drama of action,» it is clear that the two playwrights did not (indeed, could not) write the same kinds of plays. A Marxist reading could hopefully show us how the ideological climate of either society (what in another context, Foucault has called the «discursive constellation») admitted or repressed certain literary practices so that, to cite only one example, the successful«elimination» of bourgeois ideologies in Calderón's Spain precluded the notion of an autonomous subject, a notion which underlies the creation of any «great» fictional individual such as Hamlet, Macbeth, or Lear. Despite the surface parallels cited by Cohen («outdoor, urban, commercial theater,» «encompassing national culture,» «partially absolutist monarchy»), we need to see that England and Spain were not very much alike at all and that similar terminology may refer to entirely different realities. Besides avoiding the construction of false homologies between national literatures, we should also be careful not to oversimplify the whole of Golden Age drama, a drama which when analyzed with care does not comprise a «whole» as much as it reveals diverse literary products and ideological shifts. Prof. Cohen tells us: «Calderón composed his most famous plays... at the moment when the dissolution of the cultural and political unities on which Golden Age drama depended became increasingly evident.» Now, if we read this sentence as saying that the dramatic literature «depended» on cultural and political unity, we may agree that this was so at certain moments of Lope's career even though Castillian hegemony was continually threatened and never really very solid. The same case (that the latercomedia was the product of a stable and unified cultural base) could not be made, however, for Calderón's theater. Indeed , one would have to re-read Cohen's sentence as meaning that the plays «depended» on the dissolution of unity (Is that what he means?), thereby following the lead of Maravall, Diez Borque, and others who have taught us that Calderón's most well-known texts both inform and are informed by the attempt to shore up and salvage an exhausted world-view (i.e., to maintain order if only on the symbolic level). In either case, the lack of clarity can only muddle our attempt to achieve a better understanding of Golden Age literature in its social context. Finally, it seems to me that we must be very careful in how we mix and match reading strategies if we are to achieve the «internal Forum133 coherence» Cohen recommends. A Marxist methodology which «appropriates...