SOURCE: “Derealizing the Present: Evasion and Madness in El tragaluz,” in Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, Winter, 1994, pp. 141–50.

[In the following essay, Aggor uses a psychoanalytical approach to deconstruct El padre's madness in Buero Vallejo's El tragaluz.]

Un estudio riguroso de la locura en El tragaluz de Antonio Buero Vallejo abre paso a una nueva interpretación del estado psíquico del personaje enigmático, El Padre. La locura de El Padre nace, primero, porque no logra expresar abiertamente su dolor producido por la muerte de Elvirita, y segundo, porque la familia no quiere discutir aquella tragedia. Tanto el empeño de El Padre por revivir el trauma a través del tragaluz como sus actos violentos, deben entenderse como un mecanismo, si bien paradójico, que le permite defenderse contra la difícil realidad de su estado patológico. Su regresión metafísica al pasado representa un proceso catártico que evoca y cumple con el objetivo central subyacente en El tragaluz: es preciso volver incesantemente a investigar el pasado para enhebrar con el presente una realidad fundada en la verdad. El loco, al intentar redescubrir el pasado, hace resaltar factores sociológicos importantes que ayudan a explicar mejor su condición demente y a tener una visión más completa de la España de la posguerra.

Michel Foucault, in Maladie mentale et psychologie, makes an important contribution to the understanding of mental illness by illuminating some inner dynamics which were previously overlooked. According to Foucault, mental illness is much more than regression (when the patient attempts to relive the past through fantasies) because, if this were the case, madness would be an innate tendency in each of us by the very movement of our evolution.¹ “Regression is not a natural falling back into the past; it is an intentional flight from the present. A recourse rather than a return” (Foucault 33). He points out that the past is invoked only as a substitute for the present situation, and that process is realized only to the extent that it involves what he calls “a derealization of the present” (33). Derealizing the present in illness means reliving the past, and that implies a need for the patient to defend himself or herself against the present (Foucault 35). It is a defense mechanism.

Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, in their studies on hysteria, show that the psychical trauma that produces hysterical phenomena is not the kind whereby the trauma “merely acts like an ‘agent provocateur’ in releasing the symptom, which thereafter leads an independent existence” (7). On the contrary, the memory of the shock acts like “a foreign body which long after its entry must continue to be regarded as an agent that is still at work” (7). Breuer and Freud indicate that the origin of the pathological condition needs to be brought into consciousness if the patient is to be cured. Thus, they propose catharsis as psychotherapy for hysteria. They claim that the abnormality usually stays because it has been denied “normal wearing-away processes” by means of vital reactions related to the precipitating cause: reactions such as tears, speaking (confession, utterances), revenge, etc. They caution that if the reaction is suppressed, the emotion remains attached to the memory and the condition persists (8).

The complex problems raised by El Padre's madness in El tragaluz (1967), Antonio Buero Vallejo's famous play, can be better understood in light of these psychoanalytic ideas. In this article, I focus on the causal relationship between the lack of an effective reaction on the part of El Padre to his trauma and the collective evasion of the facts surrounding that trauma, on the one hand, and, on the other, his madness. I will also argue that El Padre's lunatic regression is an attempt to “derealize” the present as a cathartic antidote to his disorder.²

One question that needs to be addressed is whether El Padre's madness is pathological, that is, if he is truly mad, in the modern, clinical connotation of the term. As one evaluates the lunacy of mad characters, it becomes essential to determine what kind of abnormality they suffer, since madness is often employed in literature for different purposes. El Padre is a man who cannot recognize his own sons, thinks his wife is his mother, tries to eat through his eyes instead of through his mouth and therefore has to be fed by his wife, likes to go out through the wardrobe instead of through the doorway, asks a priest if the parishioner in his company is his spouse, etc. Kenneth Brown contends that everything the father says in El tragaluz is actually reasonable and meaningful (255), but it is not far-fetched to realize that what the madman says at times is wrapped in complete absurdity. The instances of incoherence and delusions cited above are indications of an ailment bordering on severe psychosis. It is important to understand this fact because only then can we fully appreciate El Padre's persistent struggle to free himself from mental captivity.³

Mario, who best seems to identify the family's problems, explains to Encarna the incident leading to his father's lunacy, by concluding this way:

La nena murió unos días después. De hambre … Nunca más habló él de aquello. Nunca. Prefirió enloquecer.

(101)⁴

As Newman says, the reason for El Padre's silence is that he probably wants to avoid an outburst of violence on his part against Vicente (71). The crucial point Mario makes is that El Padre's condition is directly connected with the lack of an effective means of “energetic reaction” on his part. As Foucault reminds us, even language—a verbal complaint of some sort—is a powerful tool under such circumstances in wearing away the shock (8). By internalizing the stress caused by the loss and by refusing to discuss the blow, to ventilate his pain, El Padre paves the way for his own tragedy.⁵

He is not alone, however, in promoting the silence. There is a collective effort that sustains his derangement by evading direct confrontation with the fact of its origin. Let us begin with Vicente. He intentionally misrepresents the facts by maintaining, without any clear foundation, that his father's delusions are a result of arteriosclerosis, an effect of old age; but the audience cannot accept his reasoning. For if Vicente truly believed that his father's problem is old age, we would consider Vicente to be foolish, yet his cleverness at outwitting others and the way he readily takes advantage of circumstances show that he is astute. When his mother asks him why he remembers the incident, he emphatically replies with a rhetorical question: “Pero ¿cómo iba yo a olvidar aquello?” (72). The answer suggests that he has been feigning ignorance of any possible link between the train incident and his father's constant reference to the train. He has simply chosen to dodge the problem and pretend that his father's aberration is entertaining, until he finally gets caught. If Vicente can be forgiven for deliberately running away with the family's provisions, he deserves no pardon for lying about it.

The mother's role in contributing to El Padre's state is even more significant. Not only does she endorse Vicente's misinformation about the death of Elvirita, she also supports his claim that El Padre's troubles are a mark of old age: “Son cosas de la vejez, Mario …” (94), she insists. And yet at the same time, she bans from the household any mention of Elvirita and of the word “tren.” When Vicente finally comes to talk about the episode with Mario, she fiercely intervenes, forbidding any reference to it:

La Madre.—¡No, hijos!
Vicente.—¿Por qué no?
La Madre.—Hay que olvidar aquello.

(99; my emphasis)

To Mario's question as to whether she thinks much of Elvirita, she whispers: “Todos los días” (52). Like the madman, she prefers silence over the whole case: “Y tú [Mario] no le hables a tu padre de ningún tren. No hay que complicar las cosas … ¡y hay que vivir!” (54), she whispers. For the mother, silence is an expedient remedy for the family's worries because it offers the only guarantee, even if temporary, against a revival of distressing memories. Silence, however, is an uncertain flight from the past, since that past continues to invade the present and to make life increasingly complicated and unbearable for everyone in the household. As Felman recalls, “Our past is not what is past. It is something that never stops coming to pass, and to pass us by; it is what never ceases to be repeated as a vanished Present” (69).

Mario is the only one who attempts to pursue the truth about the event. But even he is prepared to do so only in the absence of his father. This is why when El Padre appears during the dispute and asks, “¿Pasa algo en la sala de espera?,” he lies to him: “Nada, padre. Todos duermen tranquilos” (100). As for Encarna, all she says on hearing the story told her by Mario is: “Hay que olvidar, Mario” (45; my emphasis).

All these references to evasion and denials go directly against the commentaries of the narrators: “Durante siglos tuvimos que olvidar, para que el pasado no nos paralizase; ahora debemos recordar incesantemente, para que el pasado no nos envenene” (88). Since the entire family has chosen the path of pretext and has failed to probe the source of its discontent for years, it is able to survive, but in a hopeless and miserable way. The family must now consciously recollect its painful history in order to ensure peace. In Buero Vallejo's quest for a rediscovery of the past, what becomes imperative is a search for the truth, a turn-around from evasion and fear, no matter how bitter the reality may be: “… siempre es mejor saber, aunque sea doloroso” (87). So indispensable and so pertinent has the message been to post-war Spain that it was echoed in a statement made in 1968 by Ildefonso-Manuel Gil:

Hacer imposible que algo semejante vuelva a repetirse es la mejor justificación de nuestras vidas y eso no se logra desde el olvido, sino desde el recuerdo obsesionante. Hay que volver una y otra vez sobre el examen de aquellos hechos, detalle sobre detalle y hasta lo más hondo, porque es necesario dar a conocer aquello cuya repetición es necesario evitar.

(108)

The latent paradox in this statement—to expose the fearful—is central to Buero Vallejo's purpose in creating the dementia of El Padre. It constitutes the cathartic cure that Breuer and Freud propose as a formula for correcting mental pathology, although obviously El Padre's case is acute. El Padre's attachment to the past through the skylight is a painful return to a horrible episode; and yet it is a vital means by which he is able to “derealize” a present of psychological agony. Unfortunately, the failure of those around him to open a dialogue with him frustrates the process of regression and prompts him to enter into monologue with himself. Consequently, his apparently lunatic question, “¿Quién es ése?,” signifies a yearning for a historical bond with the past, a past full of mystery, lies and catastrophe that need to be revealed:

Él.—Hemos aprendido de niños la causa: las mentiras y catástrofes de los siglos precedentes la impusieron como una pregunta ineludible.

(87)

There are several ways in which El Padre concretely derealizes the present. The principal one is the special relationship he maintains with the tragaluz, the skylight. He is completely obsessed with it because, through it, he perceives the presence of the train, symbol of the journey back to Elvirita. As the narrators tell us, the train is a state of mind; its sound serves to evoke events of a traumatic past, to open up old wounds: “Lo utilizamos para expresar escondidas inquietudes que, a nuestro juicio, debían destacarse. Oiréis, pues, un tren; o sea un pensamiento” (15). It is clear, then, that the madman's fascination with the skylight is, in part, a burning desire to uncover hidden grievances that he was unable to communicate while sane.

The “escondidas inquietudes” may be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, they refer to the gamut of social and ontological problems being faced by a society. When Vicente at last agrees to observe the skylight with Mario, this is what they discover: a group of run-away children smoking cigarettes; a man hurrying to the pharmacy, apparently in response to an emergency situation; an old house-maid with varicose veins carrying left-overs; a dejected, common-looking lady carrying a suitcase made of cardboard boxes; and finally, Beltrán. The appearance of Beltrán in particular is of high dramatic consequence, since in the play he is presented as an absent character. He does not appear on stage, but thanks to the “tragaluz” one is reminded of the need to broadcast the injustice perpetrated against him.⁶ The very basement experience is created by the dramatist to disclose what Pennington calls a “self-destructive force” (1980–1981: 150) in a society unwilling to admit its existence. Thus, along with seeing the “semisótano” life (darkness) as a self-imposed evasion from the truth (external light), as Martha T. Halsey suggests (1972: 285), one can also consider it as a manifestation of the hypocrisy of a society that spurns and shuts out its problems—such as madness—and buries them from public awareness.

Secondly, by “escondidas inquietudes” the playwright points specifically to El Padre's personal problems, whose remote causes are rooted in the past. In this case, the madman's fixation on the “tragaluz” symbolizes the critical necessity to expose a concealed, yet indelible, past in order to challenge and rectify a disturbing present. In other words, El Padre's obsession represents Buero Vallejo's resolve to draw attention to a dark history that needs to be re-examined in light of the present. That resolve, according to Luis Iglesias Feijoo, restores to the theatre a tragic tone that cost Buero Vallejo “no pocas acusaciones de pesimismo y amargura” (3). But Iglesias Feijoo also shows that the tragic tone reflects Buero Vallejo's desire to distance himself from the theatre of evasion amidst “un panorama escénico como el español de posguerra, en el que se rehuía cualquier aspecto conflictivo en beneficio de una imagen sin problemas de la realidad” (3). What distinguishes Buero Vallejo is precisely this competence to revive a tragedy evaded by others as an instrument to question and judge history and thereby awaken consciousness to a precarious social reality.

From another angle, El Padre carries out the process of rediscovery through Encarna. Ricardo Doménech comments on El Padre's failure to distinguish between Encarna and Elvirita: “no es casualidad que El Padre la confunda con la hija muerta,” for “desde su lúcida demencia, reconoce en ella una nueva víctima inocente” (35). One can say that, besides considering Encarna as an addition to Vicente's victims, the mistaken identity is perhaps studiedly created by the playwright to establish a special connection, through the madman's eyes, between the past and the present. El Padre can by means of Encarna—a concrete reality of the present—reach out to his desires for peace and tranquillity. Like the imagined sound of the train, Encarna's presence becomes a cathartic medium (because she recalls Elvirita) by means of which El Padre is able to transcend the present in order to attain a level of sanity impossible in that present. Seeing Encarna as an offshoot of Elvirita is further grounded on the prospects a future child could bring by filling the gap left by Elvirita. La Madre seems assured when she stresses this fact before Mario: “Vendrá [Encarna] … y traerá alegría a la casa, y niños …” (54), though as Kessel Schwartz warns, “the chance for a better world creates a tragic possibility for man [because it is] based on a future hope which may not provide a solution” (818); no one can predict when El Padre's situation will be normalized.

There are also two symbolic acts by El Padre that need elucidation. The first is related to his destroying the television set brought home by Vicente; the second to his murder of Vicente. It is worth noting that El Padre destroys the television set not because he dislikes it in general, but because of the commercials that interfere with the programmes. The act is symbolic, firstly, because it signals a rejection of Vicente's world of corruption and exploitation, a world that is associated with commercialism (the audience knows well that the money used in buying the television set is, in the first place, not “clean”). Secondly, it prepares the way for the eventual violent murder. The almost instinctive manner in which the destruction is carried out is shocking. On close observation, however, El Padre's violent behaviour can be taken as an expression of self-liberation from a perturbed state. In a way, his action is therapeutic. For the first time, he is able to display the inner contradictions that rack his existence. The “private world” of his fantasies is all too familiar (paper dolls, trains, etc.); the other, the “real world” of doom and constraints in which he lives (the world of the supposedly sane), is unveiled.⁷

El Padre kills Vicente because in spite of the latter's confession, he remains adamant about the need to continue his exploitation of others: “Pero ¿quién puede terminar con las canalladas en un mundo canalla?” he asks. And his father surprisingly responds: “Yo” (103). To prove his determination, Vicente is resolved to leave, that is, symbolically to climb onto the train, which, in turn, means maintaining the status quo. As Vicente is eliminated, Mario is allowed to triumph, and in that way, the drama glorifies the principles of Beltrán: honesty, morality, justice.⁸ Still, the lunatic murder presents no assurance that the father will regain sanity. It is not clear whether he is aware of the atrocity he has committed by murdering his own son.⁹ In fact, by killing Vicente, he complicates the crisis of his family, for another member is dead; the sole bread-winner is gone. But even if the father does not recover, his act is momentous for two reasons: it successfully converts tragedy into hope by enforcing justice;¹⁰ but, even more importantly, it represents an “energetic reaction” on El Padre's part to displace effectively the psychical trauma suppressed for three decades.

Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor, shows that madness:

reflects in the most vehement way the contemporary prestige of irrational or rude (spontaneous) behaviour (acting-out), and of that very passionateness whose repression was once imagined to cause TB, and is now thought to cause cancer.

(36)

What Sontag implies is that irrational acts of madness can be explained as evidence of liberation from repressed conditions. In a sense, El Padre's act of murder, like his crazy destruction of the television, voices his longing to free himself not only from the chains of mental upset but also from the burden of wretched existence in general. There is a common element that unites all of El Padre's specific reactions (his obsession with the skylight, his identifying Encarna with Elvirita, his destroying the television, and his killing Vicente): they all involve the experience of some form of stressful test to confront adversity. But, in Freudian terms, that paradoxical process is imperative for El Padre's recovery.

It can be affirmed that El Padre's madness stems primarily from his futile attempt to block out of his memory anxiety-provoking situations related to a traumatic event, as well as from a deliberate effort, on the part of his family, to evade any debate over that tragedy. As Breuer and Freud have pointed out, the trauma that produces the psychological problem remains effectively attached to the memory of the patient. This means that a blockade of thoughts or a lack of active reaction to the shock leads the patient to suffer an internal conflict between silence (the failure to discuss the blow) and turmoil (the reality of the pain). In effect, El Padre and his family's insincerity about the Elvirita incident shut out any meaningful avenues by which he could react in order to purge himself. As the bitter memory remains vivid, however, El Padre must necessarily regress to relive the trauma as protection against his present predicament. Thus, in Foucaultian terms, the regression by way of the “tragaluz” can be viewed as a process in which El Padre attempts to “derealize” the present of insanity to attain a room for coherence. As the precipitating sociological factors involved in his condition are taken into account, it becomes apparent that the lunatic, personal process of derealization is also a collective call to the rest of the characters to probe their past. As a result, an investigation into the origins of El Padre's madness becomes a medium for exposing a society's ills. If the sound of the train is what sparks that journey, then it is a harsh but indispensable healing mechanism for El Padre; and for the rest of the players too, because it represents an invitation to open a dialogue on history so that legitimate identity with the present can be attained.

Notes

1. It should be noted that, strictly speaking, Foucault uses the term “regression” meaning a recourse to childhood. However, the idea is perfectly applicable to any such resort to the past to recapture the hidden origins of an illness.

2. In 1973, John W. Kronik made a brief reference to Freud's “repetition-compulsion” theory in explaining El Padre's condition (391–92). Eric Pennington, in his excellent study of 1980, applied psychoanalysis in explaining Vicente's psyche, especially his rationalizations. However, the most extensive study on Buero Vallejo dealing with psychoanalysis is Jean Cross Newman's Conciencia, culpa y trauma en el teatro de Antonio Buero Vallejo (1992).

3. It must be stated that there is debate surrounding the criteria used in determining what constitutes mental illness. Thomas S. Szasz, for example, argues that there is no such thing as mental illness. In The Myth of Mental illness, Szasz maintains that the term “mental illness” is a myth aimed at disguising what he calls “the problems of living” (the stresses and strains of existence). For Szasz, only a disease of the brain qualifies to be called “mental illness.” However, the American psychologist, David P. Ausubel, challenges Szasz's ideas and reaffirms the psychopathological basis of abnormal behaviour by proving that “personality disorder ‘is’ disease” (69–74). From a philosophical perspective, Shoshana Felman recalls that it is not easy to determine where “reason stops and madness begins, since both involve the pursuit of some form of reason” (39). According to Felman, what characterizes madness is “a blindness ‘blind to itself,’ to the point of necessarily entertaining an illusion of reason” (36).

4. All references to the play are to Editorial Espasa-Calpe's 1987 edition of and are given in parentheses in the text.

5. Newman cites other possible causes of El Padre's madness: “la traición moral implícita en la conducta de Vicente” (that is, Vicente's failure to live according to the “religión de la rectitud” so strictly upheld by his father); El Padre's “falta total de satisfacciones en la vida profesional, sufrida como consecuencia de contarse entre los vencidos de la guerra”; and El Padre's personal guilt for failing, as a parent, to save Elvirita (69–74).

6. Eugenio Beltrán is a writer whose works used to be published by the press that Vicente works for, until the latter is asked to stop publication of the former's work. Vicente collaborates with the publishing house to sabotage Beltrán, for no plausible reason other than that Beltrán is known to stand firmly for justice and high moral standards amidst a societal proliferation of ethical degeneration.

7. So vital is the sociological element in mental illness for Foucault that he sees schizophrenia, for example, as a product of the existential conditions under which we live:

   … when man remains alienated from what takes place in his language, when he cannot recognize any human, living signification in the productions of his activity, when economic and social determinations place constraints upon him and he is unable to feel at home in this world, he lives in a culture that makes a pathological form like schizophrenia possible; a stranger in a real world, he is thrown back upon a “private world” that can no longer be assured of objectivity; subjected, however, to the constraints of this real world, he experiences the world in which he is fleeing as his fate.

   (84)

   What Foucault proposes here is simple: it is society that makes the mad. Naturally, he is led to conclude that it is wrong to call the sick person schizophrenic, because schizophrenia is the only outlet open for the victim to escape from constraints in our world. In El tragaluz, the social conditions of a brutal war already prepared a high propensity to lunacy, and in the case of El Padre, the train episode, and the resulting evasions, simply exacerbate that state of fragility.

8. Gerard R. Weiss has amply demonstrated that Vicente epitomizes a reality where “man is caught up in his environmental struggle and becomes a victim of the system of which he is part,” whereas Mario exemplifies a reality where “man freely chooses to go on fighting honourably, even though a life of suffering and privation may be the result” (155).

9. Kronik seems more certain when he says that the murder “is not, except in legal terms, an act of madness, but an act of justice. The transgressor is punished, a sentence is carried out” (394). Pennington rejects the view that El Padre's act is vengeance for the past (Elvirita's death), proposing instead that the murder is in direct response to Vicente's refusal to keep and take care of the doll entrusted to him by his father (1986: 117–124).

10. One of the cornerstones of the drama of Buero Vallejo is the celebration of hope as the indispensable product of tragedy; that is, tragedy should not be viewed as an end in itself, but should serve as a catharsis for the betterment of humanity. In that respect, his theatre is anti-romantic and hardly existentialist, in the sense that it celebrates life instead of equating it with death. Kessel Schwartz discusses this point in full detail (817–24). For a comprehensive study on the theme of hope in Buero Vallejo's theatre, see Halsey (1968: 57–66).

Works Cited

Ausubel, David P. “Personality Disorder ‘is’ Disease.” American Psychologist 16, 1961: 69–74.

Breuer, Josef, and Sigmund Freud. Studies on Hysteria. Trans. James Strachey. New York: Basic Books, 1957.

Brown, Kenneth. “The Significance of Insanity in Four Plays by Antonio Buero Vallejo.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 8.2 (1974): 247–60.

Buero Vallejo, Antonio. El tragaluz. El sueño de la razón. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1987.

Doménech, Ricardo, ed. El concierto de San Ovidio. El tragaluz. By Antonio Buero Vallejo. Tercera edición. Madrid: Castalia, 1987.

Felman, Shoshana, Writing and Madness. Trans. Martha Noel Evans and the author. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985.

Foucault, Michel. Mental Illness and Psychology. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976.

Gil, Ildefonso-Manuel. “Sobre la Generación de 1936.” Symposium 22.2 (1968): 107–11.

Halsey, Martha T. “Buero Vallejo and the Significance of Hope.” Hispania 51.1 (1968): 57–66.

———. “El tragaluz: A Tragedy of Contemporary Spain.” The Romanic Review 63.4 (1972): 284–92.

Iglesias Feijoo, Luis. La trayectoria dramática de Antonio Buero Vallejo. Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1982.

Kronik, John W. “Buero Vallejo's El tragaluz and Man's Existence in History.” Hispanic Review 41 (1973): 371–96.

Newman, Jean Cross. Conciencia, culpa y trauma en el teatro de Antonio Buero Vallejo. Valencia: Albatros Hispanófila Ediciones, 1992.

Pennington, Eric. “The Forgotten Muñeco of El tragaluz.” Ulula (Department of Romance Languages, University of Georgia) 2 (1986): 117–24.

———. “Psychology and Symbolism in the Death of Vicente in Buero Vallejo's El tragaluz.” Journal of the School of Languages (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi) 7.1–2 (1980–1981): 141–56.

Schwartz, Kessel. “Buero Vallejo and the Concept of Tragedy.” Hispania 51.4 (1968): 817–24.

Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978.

Szasz, Thomas S. The Myth of Mental Illness. New York: Dell, 1961.

Weiss, Gerard R. “Buero Vallejo's Theory of Tragedy in El tragaluz.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 5 (1971): 147–60.