Reason and the Passions in the 'Comedias' of Calderón (review)

220BCom, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Winter 1 983) HILDNER, DAVID JONATHAN. Reason and the Passions in the 'Comedias' of Calderón. Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, Vol. 11. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1982. 119 pp. Hildner's study takes up one of Calderón's primary thematic concerns ; the rivalry between man's reason and the all-too-human passions which often contribute to his downfall. The author departs from those critics who would describe Calderón's «world view» essentially in terms of Thomistic Scholasticism and proposes that Calderón's comedias reveal a more naturalistic philosophical outlook than has been suggested previously. Despite the playwright's use of traditional Scholastic terminology, Hildner offers the view that it is invalid to apply medieval Scholastic principles to Hapsburg Spain, an era that found itself under very different circumstances from those in which the Thomistic doctrines were formulated. Rather than accepting Calderón's Weltanschauung as a mere reflection of the official doctrines of the age as suggested by Parker, Dunn, Entwistle, Wardropper , May and others, Hildner proposes an eclectic Calderón, which he supports by investigating the playwright's use of language. In chapter one entitled, «The Thomistic Scheme of Reason and Passion,» Hildner describes how Calderón loads his characters' language with culteranista metaphors and thus «presents them in a very unThomistic light as characters whose imagination carries them away temporarily from their reasoning process» (p. 13). Hildner thus proposes that the passions in Calderón's characters have a much more active function than has been noted heretofore. The four subsequent chapters treat Calderón's matrimonial, political, philosophical and saints plays which embrace «the four major realms of human life: conjugal honor, the art of statecraft, the obtaining of knowledge, and religious conversion. These in turn embody «the hierarchical priorities of human life as given by Scholastic theology» (p. 8). Instead of attempting to present a catalogue of Calderón's works, Hildner opts for an evaluation of a few representative plays in each of the aforementioned categories. Readers are then invited to expand upon Hildner's commentaries by applying his ideas to other Calderonian dramas. In his study of the matrimonial plays the author investigates various aspects of Thomism as it relates to the honor code, especially judgement, language, and heirarchy. Discussion of the reasoning pro- Reviews221 cesses and the passions which interfere with them is limited to the male characters, specifically, Don Gutierre in El médico de su honra, Don Lope de Almeida in A secreto agravio, secreta venganza, and Herodes, in El mayor monstruo los celos. The analysis of metalanguage is particularly interesting in light of the controversial murders they commit. Hildner demonstrates that the logic employed by the husbands of honor is one in which analogies derived through syllogistic reasoning can hardly be distinguished from poetic metaphors. He thus proposes a new logical basis for the husbands' actions which is not necessarily limited to the rules of Scholastic disputation or Christian ethics. Hildner next examines the political plays through the roles and thought processes of Segismundo in La vida es sueño, Decio and Aureliano in La gran Cenobio and Absalón and King David in Los cabellos de Absalón. These characters are studied in terms of the antiMachiavellian debate as implied by a ruler's razón de estado, a phrase employed by Gradan, Saavedra Fajardo, Quevedo and others to mean the art of statecraft. Hildner emphasizes that it is linguistic agudeza which Calderón's rulers utilize as a means to their end, rather than prudencia, a virtue believed by many current critics to be the model Thomistic virtue in Calderón's rulers. Hildner explores the philosophical plays as they relate to knowledge, especially knowledge acquired through experience as in La estatua de Prometeo and En la vida todo es verdad y todo mentira. Consistent with other chapters, the author censures previous critics whose a priori acceptance of the Thomistic elements in Calderón's works «robs the plays of a great deal of their variety and ultimately of the kernel that distinguishes Calderonian dramaturgy from a mere dramatized Thomism» (p. 73). In the two...