Hispanic Baroques: Reading Cultures in Context

Chapter 6. From Hieroglyphic Presence to Representational Sign: An Other Point of View in the Auto Sacramental

107  6 From Hieroglyphic Presence to Representational Sign: An Other Point of View in the Auto Sacramental Bradley J. Nelson A working hypothesis of much current criticism of Spanish Golden Age literature is that the Baroque is a modern or even post-modern cultural phenomenon.1 Recently, religious and political festivals and celebrations have come to occupy a rather privileged place within such studies due in part to the tension that arises when these massive and guided politico-religious spectacles (Maravall) encounter a heterogeneous public whose diverse energies are thought to challenge the conservative message ostensibly conveyed by participatory rituals such as the annual Corpus Christi celebrations (Moraña; Schumm). There are two main currents of criticism in this inquiry into festive culture: on the one hand, critics such Antonio Bonet Correa and José María Díez Borque, following the work of José Antonio Maravall, study what Díez Borque has termed “la alteración dramática de la calle” (“Relaciones” 21) (the dramatic alteration of the street); on the other hand, much work in the area of Colonial Studies focuses on the conflict between this centripetal drive for political and cultural hegemony and the resistance to or appropriation of festive cultural practices by marginal or subaltern subjects and groups. In neither case, however, has a serious attempt been made to consider the modern or postmodern persistence of what we might 108 BRADLEY J. NELSON call “the theatrical fabrication of presence” as manifested in public celebrations such as the auto sacramental.2 Since most critics agree that the main theme, or asunto, of the auto is the dramatic embodiment of religious signs with a transcendental or hypostatic substance, it stands to reason that a focused consideration of the status of such signs in Counter Reformation Spain would be useful in understanding the particular modernity of the auto and, conversely, the persistence of presence in modernity. The emerging field of emblematics provides a useful framework for such a study.3 Emblematics involves the study of what Peter Daly has termed the “emblematic mode of representation,” which is to say, the multifarious symbolic practices that combine visual symbols with verbal commentary in by and large morally based and exemplary games of wit. Both in theory and practice, the emblem configures a series of hybrid discourses. This hybridity is found in the aforementioned visually and verbally constructed form; the use of multiple languages; the ingenious combination of classical, religious, and popular motifs, sentencias, proverbs, symbols, and so on; its multiplicity of concrete forms—hieroglyphics, enigmas, devices, imprese, etc.—and, finally, its central rhetorical role in virtually every literary and artistic genre of the Renaissance and Baroque. More to the point, the emblem occupies a transitional place in historical and paradigmatic terms, with one face turned toward the Middle Ages and the profound iconicity that characterizes the symbolic and “artistic” practices of medieval religious rituals,4 while the agile and changeable allegorization employed by its renaissance and baroque practitioners anticipates and extends the fragmentation and ambiguity that characterize modern modes of symbolic expression (Russell). It is this “marginal” status that most concerns this emblematic study of the auto, as my hypothesis is that the emblem appears in theatrical representation in moments of heightened dramatic tension in order to evoke the impression that one is witnessing a transcendent event, i.e., the transubstantiated sacramental body. Both canonical as well as more recent studies of Golden Age theater have recognized the importance of the emblematic modes of representation for understanding the aesthetic conventions as well as the ideological embeddedness of allegorical and mythological tropes and motifs in early modern festive culture . Walter Benjamin, Mario Praz, Fernando R. de la Flor, Peter Daly, and Maravall have all noted the formal and thematic homologies between the construction and reception of emblems and the way in which theater involves the spectator in the staging of imaginary actions. According to John T. Cull, the theatrical use of emblems would include the following: FROM HIEROGLYPHIC PRESENCE 109 the invention of original word emblems, the emblematic argument in dialogue, the epigrammatic maxim, the emblematic character, the emblematic backcloth, the inclusion of actual emblems in the dramatic action, the use of emblematic stage properties, the use of chorus to provide emblematic commentary, and the extended emblematic portrayal conveyed by such dramatic forms as the dumb-show, the masque, pageants and processions. (“Emblematics” 115) Further use of emblems include...