Knowing Subjects: Cognitive Cultural Studies and Early Modern Spanish Literature

Chapter Six: Contextualism and Performance in Lope's Lo fingido verdadero

177 Chapter Six Contextualism and Performance in Lope’s Lo fingido verdadero Contextualist models of the brain depict perception as a complex cognitive activity that requires conscious and nonconscious processing of multiple streams of information about the reality that surrounds us (Chapter 5). Contextualist cognition can be seen as analogous to the “baroque” preoccupation with the indeterminacy of reality itself (Warnke 69). One of the most striking cultural manifestations of this baroque epistemology is literary reflexivity or meta-art, works that foreground the quandary, how can art hope to imitate a perceived reality when the artist—and his audience—share doubts about the reliability of perception? One of the defining features of baroque (or early modern) literature of all genres is its emphasis on the work of art as a set of arbitrary conventions, rather than as a direct or natural imitation of reality. J.R. Mulryne examines the self-reflexivity of the Dover Cliffs scene in King Lear, which lays bare stage conventions concerning exotic locales, as an illustration of the way that early modern meta-art explores epistemology, presenting the relationship between illusion and truth as a “necessary and mutually sustaining co-presence” rather than as polar opposites (60). William Egginton goes even further, asserting that the metatheatrical “innovation in the practices in spectacle is an integral element in a complex process of change that is not merely linked to an aesthetic or mentality, but is rather constitutive of it” (World 77). Egginton’s valuable study links this new mode of spectacle to the postmodern notions of subjectivity related to performance, the gaze, and surveillance (World 13–20). In this chapter, I, too, seek to relate early modern theatrical aesthetics to contemporary cultural theory, but with a cognitive focus. Although the importance of meta-art in early modern Spanish dramaturgy has been definitively established over the past three decades, far less critical attention has been devoted 178 Chapter Six to the emergence of philosophical skepticism in the seventeenth century, and even less to the synergetic relationship between metatheater and skepticism as an emergent philosophical mode of inquiry (Egginton, World 80–84, 99–104; Simerka, “Early Modern Skepticism” 39–45). This chapter will examine Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero (ca. 1608–10), a martyr play in which the relationship between self-referential dramaturgy, philosophical skepticism, and contextualist cognition is particularly noteworthy and mutually sustaining because the characters ponder not only the liminal spaces between real life and the stage, but also between material existence and the divine. The contextualist model of cognitive functionality has emerged from new discoveries concerning brain structures and interactions, captured via ever-improving imaging technologies (Damasio 14; Sacks 62–63). Back in 1983, early imaging data had led Jerry Fodor to suggest that brain functioning is modular rather than linear in nature, so that the separate modes can process different information streams, or different aspects of the same information stream, simultaneously (37–46). More advanced imaging technologies revealed thought processes to be even more complex than supposed with the modular model; current models indicate parallel processing, interconnectivity, and dynamic interfacing as the key activities in a completely networked brain (Churchland; Karmiloff-Smith; Fuster; Edelman; see Chapter 5 for an extended description of contextualism). Ellen Spolsky was the first literary scholar to recognize the potential of the modular model for studies of early modern literature and philosophy. In her studies of epistemology in Othello and Shakespearean tragicomedy, Spolsky develops connections between contextualism and the search for true knowledge in early modern British texts (Satisfying 80). Spolsky demonstrates that the competing and contradictory information streams encountered and processed by a modular (or networked) brain offer an embodied explanation for the central quandary of skepticism as a philosophical system: the difficulty in determining how to be certain of knowledge in a world of deceptive appearances. Although such a model was not available to early modern skeptical philosophers , they were able nonetheless to create systems and narratives based on the human and social manifestations of a contextualist brain (see Chapter 5 for an expanded introduction to skepticism 179 Contextualism and Performance and contextualism). Historians of philosophy have linked the rise of early modern skepticism to the proliferation of religious discourses : mystic Catholicism, various strands of Protestantism, as well as the new awareness of non-Christian theologies in the east and in the Americas (Kors viii). This competition among theologies could certainly contribute to the conflicting...