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

sequence is thus very similar in these three media, all of which begin with a scene
of internal, private nightmare mirrored by a scene that implies an external, socio-
political torment. Likewise, all three refer to the painter’s own verbal “ekphrasis”
in the captions to the preparatory drawings and the final image, as well as to
subsequent art historical interpretations. And finally, in all three cases, it is
implied that the artist, either the writer-speaker or the painter-protagonist, needs
to awaken from his own “sleep of reason”: In Kunert’s poem, the speaker, from
his dream of his power and superiority over the painter, in Buero’s drama, Goya
from his political blindness and his lack of self-knowledge, and in Saura’s film,
Goya awakes from the sleep of his reason when his own paintings make him
aware of his suppressed fears and provoke his social commitment in the
subsequent flashbacks that animate his Desastres de la guerra. 152
“The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters” thus has a personal as well as
political meaning in the poem, the drama and the film. But while in Kunert’s
poem and Buero’s drama the public and social aspect of the interpretation
dominate, in Saura’s film the personal, private nightmare is the main focus.
Similarly, whereas the texts of Kunert and Buero interpret the Sueño de la razón
as skeptical or ambivalent towards enlightenment through reason (in unison with
current art historical interpretations of that aquatint), Saura’s film portrays a more
optimistic and affirmative attitude when the drawing of the spiral symbolically
152 Hence, perhaps, the reversal of chronology in the film with regard to the Pinturas negras and
the Desastres, which in the film function as culmination of Goya’s artistic career although in
reality they preceded the Pinturas negras. Likewise, the scene in which Goya comments on his
Caprichos underscores their intimate, personal function for the artist, rather than their sarcasm and
social satire, an interpretation which highlights all the more the need for a political awakening of
the artist during the dramatic ekphrasis of the Sueño de la razón.
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