‘Language and Silence’: : Performing Friendship and Honor in Calderón’s El Pintor de su Deshonra

' L A N G U A G E A N D S I L E N C E ' : P E R F O R M I N G F R I E N D S H I P A N D H O N O R I N C A L D E R O N ' S EL PINTOR DE SU DESHONRA Charles Oriel N o r t h e r n Illinois University According to a traditional saying, 'a man's word is his bond' Feelings of honor and shame function only when people can face and talk to one another orally; only under such circumstances of physical presence are there genuine speech acts, honorable obligations, or shameful losses of face. —Elias L. Rivers,."The Shame of Writing" 274 Although the above title echoes that of Melveena McKendrick's "Language and Silence in El castigo sin venganza" (1983), the following observations were inspired, at least in part, by "The Shame of Writing in La estrella de Sevilla," an article published some twenty years ago by Elias Rivers, that has furnished the epigraph. Rivers's essay utilizes Walter Ong's work on orality and literacy, as well as J. L. Austin's theory of speech acts, to examine the function of written utterances and their relation to the code of honor. Despite the influence that speech act theory and discourse analysis in general continue to exercise on critical views of Spanish Golden Age (and other) drama, much work remains to be done to articulate the complex relation between the traditional code of honor, that governs so much of the comedia's esthetics, and those speech acts and discursive patterns that both activate and constitute it. This essay attempts to address this question in Calderon's El pintordesu deshonra.1 Since their first publication in How to Do Things with Words (1962)— based on Austin's 1955 Harvard lectures—, a good many concepts derived from speech act theory have been used in increasingly complex variations by linguists and literary critics alike.2 Austin's lectures constitute , among other things, an attempt to dismantle the long-held assumption that the purpose of language is to 'represent' reality (the so-called Descriptive Fallacy). He emphasizes that such verbal acts as promises, threats and orders clearly do not point to or describe a (pre-existing) reality , but rather 'enact' or effect one; such utterances are performative, as opposed to constative (descriptive, referential) utterances. Despite Austin's final rejection, toward the end of his lectures, of this basic opposition, in CALIOPE Vol. 6, Nos. 1-2 (2000): pages 85-102 86