Communicating Myths of the Golden Age Comedia (review)

1 72BCom, Vol. 54, No. 1 (2002) DiPuccio, Denise M. Communicating Myths of the Golden Age Comedia. Lewisburg, PA and London: Bucknell UP/Associated UR 1998. 236 pp. Taking Lope's comment in the Arte nuevo to heart on the advisability of employing anfibiologia in drama, Denise M. DiPuccio invites readers to explore with her the application of various post-structuralist critical methodologies to some canonical and non-canonical mythological plays of the seventeenth century . Among the nine myth plays analyzed, there are three by Lope de Vega (Adonis y Venus [1599], Las mujeres sin hombres [ 161 1-1620], El Amor enamorado [1625-35]), one each by Tirso de Molina (El Aquiles [1611-12]), Guillen de Castro (Dido y Eneas [1613-16]), and Sor Juana and Juan de Guevara (Amor es más laberinto [1689]), and three by the acknowledged master in the subgenre, Calderón de la Barca (Lafiera, el rayo y la piedra [1652], El laurel de Apolo [1658], La estatua de Promoteo [1670{1671?}]). Of primary concern te DiPuccio are the communicative patterns that appear to rest more often on the lack of communication or miscommunication than on any clear or mutual understanding in the plots of the plays. In the Introduction, she criticizes what is labeled "moralistic and didactic interpretations" ( 16) of the plays, a pitfall the author herself proves incapable of avoiding as she criticizes others' sexist and/or misogynystic statements and positions. More troubling to some of us who have taught these myth plays in Spanish classes and courses on comparative and/or Greco-Roman mythology to undergraduate students may be some of the categorical pronouncements that constitute the critical pre-judgments that inform the ideological position of the book, an admittedly feminist one: "The absence of a core truth also shifts the focus from what Lope, Tirso, Guillen de Castro, Calderón, and Sor Juana say to how they tell their tales" (23). DiPuccio challenges readers to confront and accept the traditional dichotomy of form and meaning in literature, but now dressed in new ideological attire. Male writers are generally criticized for lack of insight and chauvinistic prejudices, including Sor Juana's collaborator, Juan de Guevara, whereas the Mexican nun is accorded praise for "real- Reviews1 73 igning traditional gender roles" (183) and afforded the critical licence of a lapse into biographical criticism. For DiPuccio informs us that her "decentered" approach, which in principle "[d]ivest[s] the writer of authority," "removes the author from the subjective center where she or he produces the meaning of the text" (49). Commenting on Joseph Campbell's work on comparative mythology, Bill Moyers offered a more balanced approach to the question of what mythology presents us with, in whatever guise: "What Joyce called 'the grave and constant' in human suffering Campbell knew to be a principal theme of classic mythology . 'The secret cause of all suffering,' he said, 'is mortality itself, which is the prime condition of life. It cannot be denied if life is to be affirmed'" (The Power of Myth xiii). As writers and critics of texts we all participate in the limitation of not knowing the Truth, but mythology as well as art have the capacity to provide us with an experience of it, some insight into the nature of the human condition. This is the realization which informed Campbell's observation that we are not in fact seeking "a meaning for life," but rather "an experience of being alive" (3). There are several statements and opinions that require, in my view, serious qualification: first, that "most Comedia heroines, including those of the mythological plays, are passive objects of desire" (45); second, that Calderón's La estatua de Prometeo "insinuates that enlightenment, as defined in this play, entails erasure of the feminine" (47). Are female characters passive in male-authored plays, whereas, in a female-authored play, such as Amor es más laberinto is in part, are they active? Put differently , does masculine discourse not permit female subjects and deny female characters syntactic empathy by not staging first-person female discourse? I will return to this point later. If Prometeo says anything, then I would suggest that it dramatizes the incorporation...