The Theater of Truth

William Egginton's book fixates on the opposition between appearances and reality that we learned about in Plato and drags it through swaths of the history of Western thought and literature, displaying it under various guises, as literary texts bring to his mind philosophers from Kant to Heidegger, and, of course Deleuze, Lacan, plus the rest of the usual suspects of current critical thought—mostly through the commonplaces that we all know about them. The book's focus is on Cervantes, Calderón, Góngora, Gracián, Moreto, Carpentier, Lezama, Sarduy, and Almodóvar, or what Egginton calls the “historical Baroque” and the “neobaroque.”Egginton's thesis is that the historical baroque presented a world of appearances that presumably concealed behind them a truth about the self and about reality. This is what he calls the “major strategy” of the baroque, while the neobaroque deploys a “minor strategy” by means of which it offers appearances as all that there is, with nothing behind them—a “theater of truth.” The interplay of appearances and reality and the opposition of these two strategies extend all the way to present-day politics, where the ploy of passing off appearances lies, as the truth prevails. In the case of the baroque Egginton argues, credibly, against Maravall's simplistic thesis that the baroque created compliant subjects for the crown, that the “major strategy” is in fact a form of criticism. This is his most valuable contribution, and it is a proposition more fully developed in Antonio Carreño-Rodríguez's recent book about the baroque theater, Alegorías del poder. But baroque and neobaroque are artistic periods, and Egginton makes no attempt at to set the chronological limits of either or to define them. When does the baroque begin and where does it end? His elastic concept of the neobaroque widens to include Almodóvar and even Judith Butler, ultimately replacing the “postmodern” in its improbable capaciousness.Egginton's reading of Calderón's La vida es sueño, complicated by a confused and gratuitous comparison with Kant's critiques, is ultimately simplistic and misleading. Calderón's distinction between dream and reality is classically Neoplatonic, but the overall structure of his thought is neo-Scholastic, one of the few philosophical schools that Egginton fails to mention. Segismundo does realize that he might never be able to distinguish dream from reality, that the world is like a stage, but wills himself to act morally and in accordance with Christian doctrine. The clash in the baroque is between an obsolete system of thought, scholasticism, and a reality that, observed with more modern scientific and philosophical approaches, refuses to submit to its rigid categories. The resulting distortions and convolutions of thought and style in the baroque stem from this conflict, dramatized in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's poem “Primero sueño.” Herein lies the critique of the crown's ideology. That in the neobaroque appearances are the only “reality” is not news, but a commonplace, theorized by Octavio Paz and Severo Sarduy and deployed in fictional works by Carpentier and Lezama (with variations). Egginton fails to provide an explanation as to why Latin American authors espoused the baroque in the twentieth century. There is an ample bibliography on this that he could have cited.There are a number of questionable scholarly practices in the book, of which I will mention four. First, Egginton cites his translations of the texts studied, not the originals. The absence of the Spanish veils crass misreadings. In Moreto's play El desdén con el desdén, for instance, Carlos expresses the commonplace that when he looked at Diana and noticed her indifference to him, “she whom I had seen as common/seemed to me a pilgrim,” in Egginton's mistranslation, who comments that disdain turns “her appearance from common to pilgrim-like, or almost holy” (47). The original reads “La que miraba común / me pareció peregrina” (qtd. in Theater of Truth, 261–62). Any experienced reader of Golden Age literature knows that “peregrina” here means “rare” or “exquisite,” not literally “pilgrim,” and hence has nothing to do with the sacred. Another egregious error occurs in Egginton's analysis of Borges's poem “El Golem.” Egginton mistranslates “devana” in the rabbi's question to himself—“¿Por qué a la vana / madeja que en lo eterno se devana / di otra causa, otro efecto y otra cuita?”—as “unravels,” when in fact it means the opposite, “spools up,” an error he compounds by saying that “through the brilliant play on vain (vana) and unravel (devena [sic]), Borges captures the cause of the Rabbi's anguish” (100). Without the original, or with a partial and incorrect version of it, Egginton can make the texts say whatever is convenient for his interpretations; close readings of one's own “translations” is truly not a fair practice.Second, his corpus of Golden Age works is very limited (a few comedias, a Cervantes nouvelle, a poem by Góngora). This lack is particularly glaring because Egginton makes such overreaching claims about the entire baroque period (“That space, opened by Calderón and closed by Borges, is the Baroque” [85]). This deficiency is even more conspicuous in the chapters on the neobaroque, in which Egginton's command of Latin American literature is simply inadequate. He only cites two essays on the baroque by Carpentier and omits his dazzling novel Concierto barroco. Egginton seems to have only read bits of José Lezama Lima's La expresión americana but disappointingly not his influential essay on Góngora and, it appears, none of his poetry and fiction. Lezama's theory of the señor barroco is never mentioned. He has read an essay on the baroque by Severo Sarduy but shockingly not his book Barroco, nor La simulación, which would have saved Egginton from pawning off clichés as insights in the Almodóvar chapter. And Egginton skips Octavio Paz (one passing, secondhand allusion), whose massive book on Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is crucial for an understanding of her work and of the baroque and neobaroque movements. Quevedo, one of Paz's (and Borges's) favorite baroque poets is mentioned only once.Third, there are many secondhand citations in the book, which suggests that Egginton got ideas from other critics, whose quotations of the authors studied he lifts. Fourth, his grasp of the secondary bibliography on the baroque is insufficient, though he sends kudos to previous critics, including me. Egginton ignores, for example, René Wellek's classic essay on the history of the concept of the baroque, as well as Irving Leonard's foundational Baroque Times in Old Mexico on what has come to be known, thanks to Mariano Picón Salas's classic 1944 study, as the “Barroco de Indias.”Egginton is self-consciously worried about his use of “theory.” He writes, “But what is the implication of all this? That Góngora is deconstructive before his time? Or is this not yet again a case of imposing contemporary theoretical trends on unsuspecting poets of the past?” (64–65). Poets of the past are always unwary of what we might do to them, and reflecting the critical and theoretical climate of one's own time is probably inevitable. But the reward has to be fresh insights into the literature being read, and in my view there are precious few in this book

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Baroque · Criticism · Epistemology · Ideology · Literature · Nothing · Opposition (politics · Politics · Proposition · Early Modern Spanish Literature · Law · Philosophy