The Limits of Illusion: A Critical Study of Calderón (review)

REVIEWS CASCARDl, ANTHONY J. The Limits of Illusion: A Critical Study of Calderón. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1984. («Cambridge Iberian and Latin American Studies»). 181 pp. Joyce's charader Little Chandler decided that in his writings «he would put in allusions». Such a decision can often improve a book, but in the case of The Limits of Illusion the opposite seems to have happened . So much of the book is spoiled when the names of authors or of books usually found in World Masterpieces 200, often accompanied by a banal phrase characterizing them, fall with a thud into each one of its chapters. The reader has to learn to skip the allusions, therefore, and remain with Calderón. Besides the random namings of great authors, there are also in this work a number of philosophical meanderings about authors —Descartes, Spinoza, modern skeptics — of a world alien to or later than Calderón's. Here are likewise passages to skip. It was an original idea to begin with a summary of Vives's Fabula de homine, though it is a complex parable and one might wish that Cascardi had persevered with it as a guide through all the analyses of Calder ón's works that he offers. There are similar refusals to persevere with the ideas of modern writers of great possible interest; Antonin Artaud, Walter Benjamin and Stanley Fish can all provide insights, not just modish names, for the writer on the comedia who wishes to venture beyond comfortable limits. As it is Cascardi states quite early what his standpoint is going to be: «Calderón's best work shows an awareness of the possibilities offered by the theatre for self-criticism and the absorption of illusion» (xii). Here «self-criticism» seems to imply a participation of dramatist and courtly public (if not «Spain») in seeing that a lesson is being taught. «Illusion» is nowhere defined, so it is practically anything Cascardi cares to make of it. Surely it would not have been hard to 147 148BCom, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Summer 1986) search for a definition of it in, say, the works of Suárez and others whom Calderón would have read as a student. The fault with the standpoint quoted above is really that drama as Mirror for Magistrates was one of the conventions of the Renaissance and later, and drama as working out of an illusion — in a simple didionary sense — was another. Cascardi also assumes that the nation-state has already been invented in Calderón's time. This was the «historical agony» of a «culture » — also something which was having to wait to be invented — and the dramatist is seen to have been, or conversely, not to have been, concerned. So, in the rest of the book we shall get a lot of didactic reductionism . When one refuses to begin with the poetry of Calderón, of course, anything goes. Cascardi cuts himself off from the poetry largely by adopting a notion, entirely arbitrary, that there is «a conventional, mistaken assumption about the self-sufficient status and function of the aesthetic object.» One would have thought, from looking about one, that the controversy at least about that «assumption» is doing very well, thank you. Ambiguities in Calderón's language — and one can see them in two of the quoted pieces, spoken by Don Gutierre and by Herodes — are simple missed, but then there are so many mistranslations in the parallel English texts (of desvelos, 85; of vasallo, 111; preste Juana, 44; fuera hacer tú, 75) and even badly fudged Spanish ('una remedia, 79) that one cannot be confident in Cascardi's readings. Before considering what Cascardi says about Calderón's plays, it might be instructive to read his remarks on the works of other dramatists . First, on El burlador de Sevilla. We are introduced to a Don Juan who has «gargantuan lust», who because «his appetite is insatiable», achieves «sexual conquests» which are «dexterously cunning»; he«stalks» women who «trust him, benevolently». One has to remind oneself that this is not in Tirso's text. Don Juan is not — in Tirso — «male energy in perpetual motion, a whirlwind of libidinous...