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

and to reconciliation with his art, his identity, and his surroundings. Reaching
inner enlightenment and self-knowledge, he is now able to acknowledge his own
blindness and to accept responsibility for and take control of his circumstances.
Yet, the final image for the spectator is one of darkness and horror as the
play ends not with the light of reason but with the gloom of the Witches’ Sabbath,
which provides a visual answer to the verbal quote of “Si amanece nos vamos”:
There will be no dawn, and the monsters will not leave. But Buero underlines the
powerful presence of the irrational even in these very voices which announce the
hope for a dawn of enlightenment. In increasing volume, this “confusion de voces
avanza como un huracán sobre la sala entera” (Sueño 213; “the confusion of
voices advances like a hurricane on the entire theatre,” Sleep 64), making palpable
their continuing existence and their threat to hope and reason. The complex
interplay of the visual and the verbal, of various forms of ekphrasis within the
ekphrasis of the Sueño de la razón, then, underscores the central ambiguity of the
play, which critics have so far not recognized. 141 While Buero’s interpretation of
the Sueño de la razón does portray art as personal means of leading to inner
enlightenment, it also stresses art’s ultimate helplessness against the social and
political sleep of reason and the monsters produced by an irrational government
and a superstitious populace.
In both Buero Vallejo’s drama and Kunert’s poem, then, the dramatic
ekphrasis of El sueño de la razón takes up the elusiveness and ambiguity of
141 For example, for Alison Ridley, “[i]t is the progressive vivification and dramatization of art by
way of the painter’s imagination and the ensuing dialectic that evolves between art and artist, that
will reconcile Buero’s Goya with his almost dormant reason and enlighten him to the true meaning
of tragic hope (106).
108