The Golden Thread and Other Plays by Emilio Carballido (review)

Reviews 69 American poetry, than a short review can suggest. A challenging and exciting book, it attempts formally to make sense of the panorama of our times, and as such takes its place alongside The Cantos, Paterson, and The Bridge. R. P. D ic k y , Southern Colorado State College The Golden Thread and Other Plays. By Emilio Carballido. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden. (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1970. 237 pages, $6.50.) One of Mexico’s prominent authors, Emilio Carballido (b. 1925) in­ itiated his highly successful career as a playwright in 1950. His dramatic production demonstrates a wide range of themes and techniques; however a permanent vein of fantasy is visible throughout. Margaret Sayers Peden states in the book’s informative introduction that she has chosen to represent in translation six works which illustrate Carballido’s evolution as a dramatist as well as his handling of the non-real in varying aspects and degrees. The short plays in the trilogy, The Time and the Place, are, according to the dramatist himself, “horror stores,” spine chillers whose characters are dead or drying, rejuvenating or disintegrating. Time is distorted, mean­ ingless, or nonexistent, which lends a magical, and at times nightmarish, tone to the works. The Intermediate Zone, a longer one-act play, classified by the play­ wright as an “auto sacramental” (a traditional one-act religious play) takes place, as the title suggests, in a mysterious region between life and death, where four “non-humans” or characters recently deceased await final judg­ ment, contingent upon proof that they were indeed true human beings. As one of the attendants asserts: “Man is potential. If for some reason he becomes stationary, he ceases to be.” Moreover, if the non-humans fail to merit judgment, there awaits another choice; i.e., a gradual disintegration or acceptance of the Devil’s offer to spend eternity in hell. Unlike the trilogy, this is a charming work with touches of light humor, but the underlying theme of man’s freedom of choice and self-fullfillment is a serious one. The three-act play, The Golden Thread, combines fantasy with reality in its portrayal of two aged, middle-class women living under the illusion that their grandson, long since disappeared, will return to them. The arrival, via radio beam, of a stranger endowed with the ability to re-create time serves as a device to recall past events, including the lives of the two pro­ tagonists and the grandson’s death. The play is replete with action, time changes, violent audial and visual effects and transformations of diaracters and scenery. Through total appeal to the senses, the audience experiences the reality of the characters. The Clockmaker from Córdoba, a two-act play set in colonial Mexico, deals with a clockmaker’s troubles when his idle boast of having robbed and killed a man turns out to be true. The work, which at times has a farcical 70 Western American Literature tone, explores man’s pretenses, his options, and his often belated regret at having chosen wrongly. Theseus is a modern version of the classical legend in which Carballido's hero makes his own decisions, often vain or cruel ones, rather than submitting to fate or the gods. Along with the problem of fantasy versus reality, Carballido seems ex­ tremely concerned with man’s options and his responsibility in choosing wisely. In his more realistic works, the setting is Mexico, and he frequently employs Mexican motifs and mythology (a case in point being the appear­ ance of the mythical Aztec “Nahual” in The Intermediate Zone). This back­ ground adds interest and color to his plays, but is not essential to his message. Carballido’s successful treatment of universal rather than purely social themes makes his dramatic work innovative and provocative. M a r io n F. H o d a pp, Colorado State University Colorado: A Literary Chronicle. By W. Storrs Lee. (New York: Funk & Wagnals, 1970. 485 pages, $10.00.) A travel agent’s itinerary, a Baedeker, or a motel guide limits the de­ mand upon a reader to position or direction; a book purporting to be a “literary...