Patriarchy, Sexuality and Oedipal Conflict in Buero Vallejo's El concierto de San Ovidio

Patriarchy, Sexuality and Oedipal Conflict in Buero Vallejo's El concierto de San Ovidio BARRY JORDAN Over ten years ago, in his edition of the play, Ricardo Domenech argued that Buero's El concierto de San Ovidio (1962) seemed to address a "double problem: that of man's exploitation by man and that of man's struggle for freedom," adding that this double problem was located and worked out "on a level which until then Buero Vallejo had not dealt with explicitly: that of the class struggle...1 In the following considerations I would like to examine very briefly the adequacy of Domenech's position, in particular its reliance on the notion of class struggle as the play's broad frame of reference, and mention in passing the historical context (the Spain of the early 1960s) which may have initially encouraged this view2 Also, using Domenech's argument as a point of departure, I want to explore in more detail other related forms and levels of struggle, which emerge from a reading of the play in terms of the discourses of patriarchy and sexuality, and which seem to hinge on the mechanism ofOedipal conflict. The latter, hitherto virtualJy ignored in Buero criticism, may be regarded, in my opinion, as an important site on which the play's imputed class matrix is mediated and worked out in the dramatic action3 Buero locates his drama historicalJy in France in 1771, eighteen years before that famous revolutionary moment whose consequences would radically alter the economic direction and political framework of French society. Through different characters, the major constituents of the pre-revolutionary social hierarchy - nobility, Church, bourgeoisie, peasantry - are represented in the play in one form or another. But it is not in terms of the tensions and contradictions among these dramatized historical forces that the play is centred and constructed. Rather, history is recast to meet the demands of parable, and as perhaps befits this notion (by which El concierto is subtitled), the conflicts of the present are addressed and prefigured in terms ofthose ofthe past. In effect, the historical struggles between bourgeoisie and aristocracy, their class contours and negotiated alliances, are rerepresented, newly inflected for the 432 BARRY JORDAN present according to the division between capital and labour. The class struggle ofEI concierto is thus a largely "stand-in" contest, shifted and telescoped onto that historically inspired but fictive terrain ofthe bourgeois employer versus the symbolic surrogate of the labouring masses: the socially marginal grouping of the blind. In the light of Domenech's argument, the role of the blind men as class symbol seems justified when we take into account the historical context in which the play was originally produced and consumed, i.e. , those highly conflictive years of the early 1960s in Spain.4 In his well-known review of EI concierto of 1962, couched in the thinly disguised left-wing idiom of the time, Domenech seemed to link the pre-revolutionary setting of the play with a potentially similar historical moment in Spain. He also interpreted David's actions as those ofan inspirational revolutionary figure out to change the world, "not only for himself, but for those who are exploited like him."s Viewed with hindsight, however, the class framework ofEI concierto seems rather more blurred and diffuse than hinted at in Domenech's 1962 review. If Valindin can be seen as representing the thrusting, upwardly mobile class antagonist, the blind men as a group are far from symbolizing the poor and oppressed engaged in collective struggle against him. Ifanything, they seem to stand for the downtrodden in chains, for whom survival and the satisfaction of basic material and emotional needs form the outer limits of their claims on society. The transcending of this economics by a new (class?) consciousness, and the challenge to the entrepreneur's project and the established order, are undertaken by the lone and unique figure of David. This individuation of the contending sides in the struggle might appear to expose EI concierto to the danger of Manichean simplicity, reducing its range of meanings to a moral condemnation of exploitation and its dramatic potential to a violent scrap between binary opposites: blind and sighted...