Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

Goya’s deafness, as the play contains several instances of absolute silence in
which the audience is plunged into Goya’s mind. 123
But the sounds and voices are not merely a scenic representation of
Goya’s hallucination or madness. Rather, they translate into dramatic language
the nightmares and fantasies of Goya’s visual realm, his etchings, drawings and
paintings. Likewise, Buero exploits the narrativity and dramaticality of Goya’s
titles, mostly from the Caprichos and the Desastres de la guerra, many of which
appear as fragments of a dialog (cf. Monti 779). Especially during the two central
scenes I will discuss below in more detail, in which Goya is first attacked by
imaginary creatures and then by five “Royal Volunteers,” a troop sent by the king,
the quotation of titles from the Caprichos and the Desastres de la guerra such as
“Trágala, perro” (“Swallow it, dog”) or “Y son fieras” (“And they are wild”)
functions as a dramatic means of verbally evoking and reinforcing visual images
of horror, violence and fear.
Although the only visual images that are directly shown are the fourteen
Pinturas negras which are projected onto the background, the drama on the whole
functions like an ekphrasis of the Capricho etching which gives it its title, El
sueño de la razón, which is also dramatized in a key scene. In other words,
Buero’s play on the whole can be seen as a dramatic ekphrasis which contains
another dramatic ekphrasis within it. The drama represents a socio-political
nightmare in which reason sleeps and unreason and terror, embodied by the
123 This “efectos de inmersión” was first discussed by Ricardo Doménech, El teatro de Buero
Vallejo (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1973), 49-52. However, as Holt indicates, “Buero himself had
already referred to the procedure by the more encompassing term “interiorización” (xv). On this
effect specifically in El sueño de la razón, see Silvia Monti, “Goya en las tablas. El sueño de la
razón de Buero Vallejo,” Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea 23.3 (1998): 778.
94