"Love More Powerful Than Death": Mystic Resonances in Corona de amor y muerte

eeLove More Powerful Than Death": Mystic Resonances in Corona de amor y muerte HAROLD K. MOON Alejandro Casona, even during his lifetime, was repeatedly accused of being out of step with "modern" theatrical practice, and has elicited scornful comments that go so far as to accuse him of insincerity. J. Rodriguez Richart, one of Casona's staunch defenders, answers the critical jeremiad launched by J. M. Velloso following the opening of La barca sin pescador in Madrid's Bellas Artes theater, pointing out several inaccuracies in Velloso's critique and, more to the point, negating many of his allegations.1 Velloso seems to suffer the same shortsightedness in dealing with Casona as the heirs of positivism had in understanding some of the baroque plays of Calderón." Velloso, of course, does not stand alone in his assessment of Casona's theater. Ricardo Doménech unleashed a diatribe in 1964 that aroused a full-fledged polemic between him and Luis Ponce de León. Doménech 's article first appeared in Insula (#209, abril de 1964), and the cross fire between him and Ponce de Leon enlivened several issues of Arriba (Madrid) later that year (Aug. 2, 12, 23); the whole package was later collected in Juan José Plans' Alejandro Casona (Oviedo, 1965, 125-138). Charles Leighton identifies the bone of their contention sucHarold K. Moon teaches at Brigham Young University. 1 Velloso's critique appeared in the weekly, El Español. 2 de marzo de 1963. Richart's article carries the title, "Imaginación y realismo en el teatro: La barca sin pescador de Casona," Boletín de la biblioteca Menéndez Velayo, 39 (1963), 225-51. 2 See Ernest Mérimée and S. Griswold Morley, A History oj Spanish Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1930), pp. 380-81 (on La vida es sueño and La devoción de la cruz) and Gerald Brenan, The Literature of the Spanish People, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian Books, 1957), pp. 288-89 (on La vida es sueño). Both sources represent examples of "enlightened " short-sightedness in their comprehension of the Baroque theater. Charles H. Leighton makes this point in his unpublished doctoral dissertation, "Alejandro Casona and the New Theater in Spain" (Harvard, 1965), p. 199. ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW47 cinctly: "[Doménech] condemns Casona for not being engagé while [Ponce de Leon] praises him for being evasionista." Then he adds, with characteristic acuteness, "[Casona] is much too subtle to be classified as either." 3 What, then, is Casona's theatre, if not engagé or evasionista? Appropriating the terminology devised by David Riesman, et al (The Lonely Crowd, Garden City, New York, 1953), Leighton shows that Casona's hero is traditional, or other-oriented, whereas the hero of the modern social theater is inner-oriented.1 Hence the difficulty that a typical engagé audience would find in grasping the appeal that Casona's plays still hold for those of us who refuse to surrender to social fundaments as the basis for all theater—or most criticism, for that matter. Mircea Eliade states the case for modern man: Modern non-religious man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence. In other words, he accepts no model for humanity outside the human condition as it can be seen in the various historical situations. Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god. It does not fall to us to discuss this philosophical position. We will only observe that, in the last analysis, modern non-religious man assumes a tragic existence and that his existential choice is not without its greatness .5 Quite simply, then, Casona, whose dramatic technique needs no defense, stands as one of the spokesmen for the still numerous traditionalists , or the other-oriented audience. For such, Casona's plays represent anything but the tactics of "evasion" for which Ponce de Leon...