SOURCE: “Plays of Impasse: The Recent Tragedies of Antonio Buero Vallejo,” in Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporanea, Vol. 18, No. 3, 1993, pp. 539–52.

[In the following essay, Halsey discusses four of Buero Vallejo's plays from the late 1970s and 1980s, asserting their prominence as tragedies of personal and social impasse.]

Paramount in Buero's tragic theater is the idea of individual responsibility. In his drama the ethical and the social are inseparable. He explains the apparent emphasis on the former: “Hay, pues, en mi teatro—creo—una problemática ética más ostensible que la social, pero porque la problemática social debe ser, en mi opinión, casi siempre implícita, aunque no menos básica e importante. Es cuestión de estructura artística” (Bejel 75–76). The personal responsibility of the individual is foregrounded. Buero deals with social problems “intentando penetrar en cuestiones más oscuras, relacionadas con la interioridad de unos seres humanos, y su conducta dentro de esa atmósfera social” (“Buero Vallejo gana …”). The emphasis is therefore on the inner self of the individual; and the action focuses on the necessity for confronting the consequences of past actions that necessarily determine the present, entrapping those who cannot rectify, or at least acknowledge, them and in so doing win the battle within. Indeed, drama from the time of the Greeks on has often assumed the form of an investigation that culminates in the trials and verdicts so common to the plays of the transition period now under consideration.¹

The deceptions and errors Buero sees as typical of the Spain of the 1970s and 1980s² are represented by protagonists who are brought to judgment; and this judgment constitutes the key moment of each tragedy. The earlier El tragaluz (1967), especially, contains a climax that constitutes a trial. Such trial scenes become very frequent in the transition tragedies as hidden errors committed in the past and sometimes continued into the present (a pattern also seen in El tragaluz) are revealed, as lies lived by the protagonists are exposed and judged. Since the errors that the protagonist must confront are ones that Buero obviously considers characteristic of the times, it is not only the individual but also society that is judged. The latter obviously includes the audience.

Lukács has used the phrase “day of reckoning” dramas to describe those where a protagonist has reached the point in life where past accounts must be settled (101). This term is highly appropriate to many Buero plays but especially to the recent Jueces en la noche (1979), Diálogo secreto (1984), Lázaro en el laberinto (1986), and Música cercana (1989)—as it is also to the earlier El tragaluz. “Called to account” (102) for failing in their responsibility vis-à-vis society, for rejecting their duty to history, these individuals must “settle accounts,” that is, discover and face the truth about themselves. Lukács notes that in drama, as in life, the consequences of earlier deeds and, especially, of the general attitude toward others that occasioned these deeds, often multiply to the point that they obsess those who are guilty, threatening them with virtual destruction (101). The play's action thus focuses on the protagonist's handling of this crisis. It is significant that in most of Buero's recent plays the errors for which the protagonist must account—often involving the deception of others by pretending to be something he is not—have continued into the present as he goes on living a lie. Of course consequences of past deeds may affect the protagonist long after the latter changes his pattern and leads a seemingly exemplary life—as is true in the case of Lázaro. Such is not usually the case in Buero's recent tragedies. This settling of accounts, or reckoning, has obviously been a central idea from Oedipus Rex to the plays of Ibsen.³

The struggle to settle accounts is waged within the protagonist's mind; therefore, the action must be interior or psychological. In a last-ditch effort to achieve a breakthrough, to confront the guilt and fear of discovery that imprison them, the protagonists wage a battle that is necessarily inner. The inward nature of the struggle, however, makes it no less dangerous or difficult than those fought on the battle field. Yeats once stated, “A man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself” (Mack 58). Tragedy is a search for truth and, as Cleanth Brooks emphasizes in Tragic Themes in Western Literature, this truth or knowledge to which the tragic hero or protagonist aspires includes, in a special way, the truth about the self (5). Such is the case in Buero's tragic universe. As Mariano de Paco notes, this search has become increasingly important in recent plays—“quizá por advertirnos que la sociedad únicamente será libre y justa, por encima de las palabras, si es recto y moral el comportamiento de sus miembros” (“La verdad” 43).⁴ The revelation attained by Buero's protagonists is what Brooks, in his discussion of Oedipus, calls a “damning vision”—which in the latter's case, cost him his very eyes (6).

Tomás, the young political dissident of La Fundación, unable to face the fact that he broke under torture and gave information that led to the arrests and death sentences of his cellmates, takes refuge in the delusion that they are all professionals, living in a beneficent research foundation that has awarded them grants. He thus protects himself with a lie, which the older prisoner Asel helps him to uncover so that he can face and confess the truth. We, like Tomás, also discover the truth which we have been unable to see at the beginning and come to realize that it is our truth, as well as Tomás's.

In La detonación Buero's Larra likewise confronts truths about himself. Asel's role is now played by Pedro, Larra's servant-valet from the latter's essay “La nochebuena de 1836”—a piece that itself constitutes a public confession of guilt. Pedro forces Larra, even against his will when necessary, to face his intellectual pride and inability to understand the very populace he defends publicly but whose suffering he has never shared; before his suicide the writer confesses that he, no less than others, has always worn a mask and never known his real self.

Like La Fundación (1974) and La detonación (1977), the four following plays—Jueces en la noche, Diálogo secreto, Lázaro en el laberinto and Música cercana—are tragedies of inauthenticity. Nevertheless, there are significant differences. In the latter four plays, unlike the first two, the deceptions to be confronted are long-standing ones. Moreover, the protagonists are no longer youths like Tomás of La Fundación or even Larra of La detonación—who, were it not for probable execution, in the former's case, or suicide, in the latter's, would have time to build a new life. Juan Luis, the ex-Franco minister of Jueces, Fabio, the renowned art critic of Diálogo, Lázaro the book dealer, and Alfredo, the successful financier of Música, all look backward and discover that the lives they have lived are lies. In the cases of Juan Luis and Fabio it is the fear that this lie will be discovered by others and, in Lázaro, the protagonist's own reluctance to face it that occasion the need for a reckoning. In Música it is Alfredo's fear of old age and loneliness together with the growing realization that, behind the façade he sees on the video screen, he is nothing. Politician, art critic, book dealer and financier—all are figures in Victor Dixon's words, “dominadas por experiencias vividas por los mismos en un pasado bastante lejano pero silenciadas durante ańos, cuyo recuerdo y revelación los atormentan y destrozan en el presente” (121). In Fabio and Alfredo's cases, these experiences—these deceptions of others—continue into the present; the fiancé of the former's daughter and the latter's daughter herself will become their victims.

In Jueces, the first of these four tragedies, Juan Luis, a member of Congress in transition Spain who pretends to embrace democracy, is tormented by fears of losing his wife if she learns how he deceived her into leaving her former fiancé, the student arrested for anti-Franco activities and who later died in prison. The protagonist's “day of reckoning” is precipitated by the arrival of the ex-policeman friend who knows the truth of this deception. When Juan Luis learns the latter has come to direct the assassination of an important general in order to discredit the Left and provoke a coup, he must choose between denouncing the plot—which will result in the revelation of his deception of his wife—or remaining silent. Also to be accounted for on his “day of reckoning” is his vote, while a cabinet member in the Franco era, to execute an important prisoner for unproved war crimes. To denounce the assassination would thus be to break with the lies, deceptions, and other crimes that have characterized Juan Luis's personal and political life, to prove himself capable of change.

Like Juan Luis, Fabio, the art critic of Diálogo, lives in terror that his readers, but especially his wife and daughter, will learn his secret—in his case the fraud he has perpetrated by concealing the fact that he is color blind. His “day of reckoning” is precipitated by his guilt over the death of his daughter's fiancé, the young artist whose use of color he has harshly criticized, and by the terror he feels upon suspecting that his daughter has intuited his secret. The latter, Fabio believes, will punish him, just as Minerva punished Arachne for the lies—he imagines the goddess tells the girl—she wove about the gods. Fabio's fear of discovery is thus no less than Juan Luis's. Both are men in torment. For Fabio, to acknowledge publicly his deception would be to win the inner battle.

In Lázaro en el laberinto the protagonist's culpability, or probable culpability, is limited to a single action in the past. As in the case of Jueces, the incident that torments him involves a woman, in his case a student who was fatally beaten by ultras after a political demonstration in the 1960s. Lázaro remembers the incident in two different ways: in one, he intervened to try to save her and, in the other, he stood by paralyzed by fear. The labyrinth in which Lázaro is lost is not his bookstore (which bears that name) but the doubts and fears that prevent him from discerning the truth. Iglesias Feijoo speaks of the “agónica perplejidad que obsesiona [a Lázaro] que ya no puede siquiera saber cuál fue realmente su actuación” (“El último teatro” 116). Although Lázaro's memory loss is not willful, like Tomás's delusions it enables him to avoid accepting what is no doubt an unpleasant reality. Indeed, Mariano de Paco calls Lázaro's conduct during Silvia's beating “un suceso, muy probablemente negativo, cuyas particularidades se silencian por un miedo egoísta” (“Introducción” 21). What intensifies Lázaro's fears as the tragedy begins is a friend's statement that he has seen the former student, Silvia, whom Lázaro does not know died shortly after being beaten. The protagonist now assumes she will contact him if she has returned. He thus awaits the telephone call that can either condemn him or give him new life like his Biblical namesake.

Música cercana follows the same pattern of discovery and disclosure of past errors as do the preceding tragedies. However Alfredo, the ruthless bank executive, shows no signs of remorse until the very end, when the results of his immoral investments in drug operations hit home. What brings about Alfredo's examination of his past life is not so much guilt but loneliness and fear of old age and of the passage of time as he realizes that his immense fortune from the sordid deals of which he chooses to feign ignorance and his life of privilege are not enough. Having sacrificed everything for wealth and power, he returns to his childhood home and attempts to build a new life with his estranged daughter, Sandra, and even dreams of sharing the remainder of his time with a woman he once thought he loved.

Frye speaks of tragedy as a “plunging down to catastrophe through a series of recognitions, usually of the inevitable consequences of previous acts” (25). This progressive discovery pattern is striking in Música cercana. A series of concatenated discoveries will reveal to the protagonist—and to us—the results of a life of wrong choices, of lost opportunities. Alfredo's egoism condemns him to an existence that is totally empty. It is only the final discovery involving the stabbing of his daughter, Sandra, that produces remorse or change. Alfredo is responsible for a death, just as Lázaro most probably is; however, since this discovery comes just minutes before the final curtain, the tragedy focuses only briefly on his reaction.

Since the action of all these tragedies centers on the moment in which the protagonist must finally face the consequences of past (and continuing) errors, it covers only a part of the story, beginning just prior to the climax—the tragic recognition or anagnorisis: “It is especially characteristic of drama not to portray the slow and gradual amassing of consequences, but to take usually a relatively brief and decisive period of time, in fact, that dramatic moment in life itself, in which the accumulation of consequences is transformed into action” (Lukács 102).

In A Structural Approach to the Analysis of Drama, Paul Levitt quotes Clayton Hamilton who points out that the main events in such plays with a late “point-of-attack” do not emphasize the future but look backward to the results of past actions (24). In plays where the viewpoint is distanced, that is with an early “point-of-attack,” the protagonists still have time to make their own futures. On the other hand, the fate of protagonists such as Juan Luis, Fabio, Lázaro, and Alfredo is mostly, to use Paul Levitt's words, “stamped in prior actions and decisions” (27). In Jueces and Música cercana we have a close-up view of the moment in which the protagonist's actions result in irreversible catastrophes that the latter cannot ignore: Julia's suicide in the first play and Sandra's murder in the second. In Diálogo secreto and Lázaro, on the other hand, such catastrophes as the young artist's probable suicide, in the first, and Silvia's death resulting from the beating, in the second, are past; and whereas in the first case Cosme's suicide is recent, Silvia's death is not. Both plays, nonetheless, focus on the moment, long delayed for various reasons in Lázaro's case, when these consequences are faced. Alan S. Downer states that in late “point-of-attack” plays “the hero's doom is decreed before he is permitted to assume the role” (Levitt 27).⁵ Nevertheless, the inner battle remains: to discover and accept oneself. This is precisely what tragedy depicts.

Since the events depicted on stage result from choices made before the curtain rises, there is necessarily a heavy emphasis on exposition. The past is gradually uncovered as we discover stories of culpability and responsibility not apparent to us as the play begins. In theater such exposition normally is accomplished through objective scenes involving discussion and debate, although, of course, flash-backs, dreams and other techniques are common. For example, in Tragic Drama and Modern Society, John Orr states: “The theatre invariably imposes a distance between the spectator and the hero. … It has no equivalent of the novelist's ‘point of view’ which can lead us, through indirect speech, into the mind and sensibility of the character” (52).⁶ As we have seen, Buero uses the “immersion effects” first analyzed by Doménech to establish a subjective point of view that Iglesias Feijoo calls “first person”; it is through such subjective scenes that Buero provides expositions, as he enables the audience to perceive the recollections or fantasies of the protagonist, which are dramatized before our eyes, and to share their guilt and fears (La trayectoria dramática).⁷

The sense of guilt suggested by the subjective scenes is real even if the anguished protagonist does not manifest it on the conscious level; otherwise there would be no imaginary dialogues, unreal telephone rings or secret windows to the past. Within his delusion Tomás of La Fundación has conversations with an absent fiancée, Berta, whom he claims visits him, and with a dead cellmate whose demise the others conceal to get his rations. Both figures act as Tomás's alter ego, questioning the reality of the comfortable “Foundation” he invents when unable to face his guilt. The delirium of a suicidal Larra contains two phantasmagoric dreams where he sees himself forced to participate in firing squads in the Carlist War and to witness the death of his servant Pedro's son in the conflict. Both dreams evince the satirist's sense of guilt and impotence vis-à-vis the war in which he did not participate personally.

The sequence of four nightmares in which Juan Luis of Jueces summons his victims, and through them, accuses himself and, at the same time, tries to justify his past, represents an anguished inquiry into the truth. The first of the three judges—who assume the form of musicians of a trio to play at his forthcoming wedding anniversary—the young student his wife once loved, recalls how the politician got his policeman friend to pretend to arrest her for implication in her fiancé's subversive political activities and then pretended to save her. The second judge, the prisoner he voted to execute for unproved war crimes, recalls the double standard of the times when crimes by the other side were ignored. For these crimes—and for the assassination he now sees himself execute personally and which in “real life” he fails to denounce—Juan Luis passes sentence on himself, judging himself unworthy to play any role in Spain's new democracy. His punishment is the loss of his wife, who commits suicide before his final dream. In the latter she will take her own place as the third member of the trio. These dreams—as well as the hallucinations in which Juan Luis sees Fermín's father—immerse us in the tormented mind of the protagonist so that we not only serve as his jury but at the same time identify with him and, to the extent that we do so, judge our own actions.

In Diálogo secreto Fabio's imaginary conversations with his father fulfill the same function as Tomás's delusion, Larra's delirium, and Juan Luis's nightmares, as the art critic attempts to discover why he ever launched a career so unsuited to a person blind to color. When his father rejects Fabio's accusations that he encouraged his son's aspirations, it is clear that Fabio is accusing himself in much the same manner as does Juan Luis. These “secret dialogues,” that are preceded by moments in which the reproduction on the wall of Velázquez's Las hilanderas loses its brilliant colors, permitting us to share the critic's handicap, constitute trial scenes similar to those in Fabio's dreams. The father's phantom which appears, also, outside the “immersion effects,” like Fermín's father in Jueces, comes to represent Fabio's conscience. The secret dialogues, hallucinations, and also a flashback in which the critic explains to his young daughter the complementary theory of color all represent the materialization of Fabio's thoughts in his anguished search for inner truth.

Lázaro's case, of course, is different from Fabio and Juan Luis's given his perplexity over past events. The critic's secret dialogues and the nightmares where the politician renders his own verdict and passes sentence on himself make clear that they accept their culpability. The bookseller's doubts are manifested in an initial “immersion effect” as he tells Amparo, the young writer who has come to take the place of the dead Silvia in his affections, the two ways he remembers the latter's beating. Lázaro, Amparo (in the role of Silvia) and the two masked ultras reenact the two versions, in which Lázaro first intervenes to defend Silvia and then stands by overcome by fear. In a later scene Lázaro imagines—and we see—the same masked figures rain blows on Amparo (who now appears as herself). In his nightmare, after Amparo finally rejects his marriage proposal and leaves him, the two figures reappear to torment him. The imaginary rings of the telephone that Lázaro—and the audience—hear on various occasions as he awaits the call from Silvia, who he believes may be in Madrid and who can tell him the truth, represent the voices of his conscience; they are summons to confront the truth. Moreover they enable the audience to enter the labyrinth of doubts and fears where the protagonist is lost. After Lázaro learns of Silvia's death, telephone rings sound throughout the entire theater as the audience is called to examine its own past conduct—both individually and collectively.

In the case of Alfredo, the middle-aged bank executive of Música cercana who has spent his life acquiring wealth, this concern for the past is evinced by the video cassette he has made of himself at various ages and which he often stops at an image of him as a young man of twenty. Looking at this image and listening to the same music from across the patio that he heard as a youth, he attempts to go back in time, to recover what might have been had his priorities been different. The melodies that come from the window where he used to see Isolina, the young girl he once loved, sit and sew—the same ones that her father once played on his phonograph when she was a child—are usually objective and, at times, commented on by other characters. Sometimes, however, when we hear them, the protagonist may only be remembering them. In effect the melodies introduce two “immersion effects,” in which we see the window across the patio opened by a pretty girl of seventeen, who sits down to sew and shyly glances at Alfredo. In a second effect the magical window in Alfredo's mind opens again as he dreams of still winning the woman, now middle-aged, who might have been his and who still lives across the patio. Two additional effects reveal to us Alfredo's fears of losing his daughter, Sandra, who now loves a young South American dedicated to winning for his country a freedom and justice that she contrasts with the corruption and hypocrisy of her father. In these prophetic nightmares, she leaves her father despite his pleas for a second chance, as we hear the funeral march from the Eroica.

Ruiz Ramón explains the result of the “immersion effects” in such earlier plays as El sueño de la razón, Llegada de los dioses, La Fundación and La detonación as follows: “El ojo que mira, juzga e interpreta desde fuera la acción vivida por los personajes ha sido desplazada al interior del drama” (8). In the present plays these subjective scenes are much less extensive. The relative brevity of these scenes, in recent plays, makes them no less important: “Sólo si oímos el teléfono y vemos a los enmascarados con el librero y sentimos la presencia de Isolina joven ‘que cose en el pasado’ con el padre de Sandra, podremos percibir la dimensión cabal del drama y la auténtica condición de sus personajes principales” (De Paco, “La verdad” 45).

The transition tragedies are plays about human inadequacy. Like Oedipus and other tragic heroes, Buero's recent protagonists, although they search for truth about themselves—a search the subjective scenes allow us to share—fail to do what, in Richard B. Sewall's words, ancient Greek heroes do: “gain sufficient grasp of themselves and their universe to make, at a given point in time, permanent, heroic commitments between well-understood alternatives” (Sewall 110).

Tomás's commitment, after he accepts his situation, to attempt the tunnel to freedom is the exception, while Larra's suicide represents the ultimate rejection of commitment. Juan Luis of Jueces fails to denounce the assassination he knows is planned. Even though he may see his life in a new perspective as the result of his confrontation with his conscience, he lacks the inner reserves, the hidden potential to change—to leave the errors of the past behind him. The result is the loss of his wife, who acts as his final judge, sentencing him to expiate, alone, a life of deception and lies.

Fabio of Diálogo secreto wins a very limited victory after the death of the young artist he unjustly attacked, as he resolves never to judge another's use of color again; but the critic is unable to make public his terrible secret. Without his lies, explains Gaspar, who condemns Fabio's deception and acts, in effect, as his judge, the critic would be nothing: “Tú eres tu mentira. Si precindes de ella ¿qué serás?” (117) Fabio is fortunate in that he retains the love of Teresa, who now saves him from suicide, explaining she has always known his secret and shared his suffering: “Yo he compartido día tras día la prisión donde te sientes encerrado, la desesperación de no ver lo que ven los demás” (129).

The ringing of the imaginary telephones at the end of Lázaro en el laberinto make clear that the bookseller remains prisoner of his doubts and fears, as he fails to confront the truth that he says escapes him but which he probably knows yet cannot face. Just as fear prevented him from loving Silvia enough to save her when she was attacked, so fear prevents him confessing the truth to Amparo, whom he asks to judge him in his victim's name. The loss of Amparo, who turns down his proposal of marriage, is no less Lázaro's fault than was his loss of Silvia. If Fabio is coaxed by Teresa out of the locked room where he contemplates suicide, Lázaro is left alone in the labyrinth he cannot exit—as the ringing before the final curtain demonstrates. Despite his seemingly impeccable life subsequent to his victim's death, he is incapable of confronting his past.

Alfredo of Música cercana, who attempts to examine the past through the video cassette he makes, represents and has helped to create the moral corruption against which his daughter Sandra rebels and of which she is finally an innocent victim. Involved in laundering drug money as well as manufacturing arms, the now middle-aged executive, who has sacrificed all for wealth and power, is led by loneliness and fear of time to confront his past. However, the images he recovers—which remind us of the holograms projected by the Investigators of El tragaluz—in his case are “meras apariencias en un espejo que sólo recoge sombras” (De Paco, “La verdad” 45). Alfredo, as M. de Paco states, does not really want to illuminate a life of errors any more than he wants to know the details of the sordid financial transactions he leaves to his son (45). Alfredo's experiment with his video cassette brings about no tragic anagnorisis. Only after Sandra dies, knifed on the sidewalk by an addict, and René renders his verdict—“en la punta de la navaja estaba usted”—does Alfredo order his son to withdraw their money invested in the firm involved in drugs. The telephone call from the bodyguard Sandra eluded, although real and not imaginary like the calls Lázaro hears, summons Alfredo to examine his conscience. For Sandra, it is too late. At the end, therefore, Alfredo like Lázaro is left alone to expiate a lifetime of deception, “atrapado por el tiempo, castigado y vencido por su egoísmo” (45).

In Alfredo's case, as in the cases of other recent protagonists, a kind of implacable fatality seems to be at work within him which proves stronger than his will.⁸ The result is final isolation and the “irreparable loss” that Raymond Williams considers the essential tragic experience (56–61)⁹: the murder of Sandra, which corresponds to Silvia's death from the beating in Lázaro, to Julia's suicide in Jueces, as well as to the departures of the art critic's daughter Aurora in Diálogo secreto and of Amparo, the young woman who has come to fill Silvia's place but who leaves Lázaro when she realizes that his basic egoism precludes real love for another.

Buero's recent protagonists who fail to make the ultimate commitment between alternatives and let themselves be shaped by events rather than help shape these events, stand in contrast to previous individuals in his tragic theater who show their greatness: their integrity and refusal to compromise. Although defeated by events, they reveal their human potential, and the tragedies in which they appear become affirmations of the human spirit. Buero's Goya in El sueño de la razón is a clear example.¹⁰ The protagonists of Jueces, Diálogo secreto, Música cercana, and to a lesser extent, Lázaro en el laberinto, are not victims of tragedy but its catalysts. They share responsibility for the problems that post-transition Spain must solve.

John Orr states that what characterizes the “social” mode of modern tragedy (as opposed to the “divine” mode of Greek, or the “noble” mode of Renaissance tragedy) is alienation from bourgeois society. From Ibsen to García Lorca, Orr states, the “social” mode of tragedy evinces the estrangement of the protagonist from the values of the bourgeois order (xvi). Ignacio of En la ardiente oscuridad, David of El Concierto de San Ovidio, Buero's Velázquez in Las Meninas, and his Goya rebel against the established values of their time, denouncing lies and hypocrisy—as does Buero's Larra. The opposite is the case in Buero's recent plays. Juan Luis, Fabio, Alfredo, and, in part Lázaro, represent the very values against which the earlier protagonists rebel; they reflect the errors the playwright denounces and cause the catastrophes that result. None of these protagonists prove capable of real change, of freeing themselves from their chains to the past.

The unifying image of Buero's recent plays is thus that of “impasse”—the impasse of protagonists trapped in situations where they prove powerless to initiate any action that would free them.¹¹ In all of these plays we see a radical closure of the tragic space within; the plot is concerned with bringing about the ending that is inevitable or fore-doomed because of their inability to act, to struggle for the only victory possible in their situations: the victory within. The controlling symbol is thus the prison, the tomb, the labyrinth.

This symbol of the prison is at the same time individual and collective. Raymond Williams states that the “deepest crisis in modern literature is the division of experience into the social and personal” (121). He notes the pressure to depict the controlling reality presented as either ultimately personal—in which case “the crises of civilization are analogues of a psychic or spiritual maladjustment or disaster”—or ultimately social—in which case “the destructive loneliness, the loss of reasons for living are symptoms or reflections of a disintegrating or decadent society” (121). In Buero's tragic theater this division disappears, as we see the protagonist in the context of transition Spain. The lies, hypocrisy, and façades of this world extend into the life of the individual, who lives them as personal experience, even as his own errors contribute to this process in society. Impasse or entrapment is thus personal and social at the same time; and the same set of symbols is applicable to both the individual and the collectivity.

Notes

1. Iglesias Feijoo, for example, calls the recent plays “indagaciones, búsquedas, revelaciones, procesos judiciales a través de los cuales los protagonistas habían de encararse con la verdad, rechazando, en consecuencia la mentira” (“El último teatro” 115).

2. In effect, Buero's theater of the transition of the 1970s and 1980s represents a radical criticism of the reality—both individual and collective—of the period, with its myths of democracy, justice and prosperity. He shows a society in which content is converted into empty form, façade, or mask—which ultimately can serve only to immobilize, to perpetuate a certain order of things rather than to change it. Buero's theater still constitutes the investigation into, and the judgment of, Spain about which Pérez Minik spoke back in 1961 (381–95).

3. Victor Dixon emphasizes the importance of these models in his “Los efectos de immersión en el teatro de Antonio Buero Vallejo: una puesta al día.”

4. Mariano de Paco calls Lázaro en el laberinto, “una indagación de la verdad personal”—as is, he notes, also Jueces en la noche and Diálogo secreto (“La verdad” 43).

5. Levitt states that early “point-of-attack” plays “panoramically survey life” whereas late “point-of-attack” is “close-up” because the play commences just before the climax (27).

6. Orr says that Strindberg's expressionism, for example, led “into the more abstract and more objective forms of German expressionism, which in turn reached a theatrical impasse and provoked, in counter-response, the epic theater of Picator and Brecht” (52).

7. Iglesias Feijoo states: “Se trata, siempre, de ‘el pasado que vuelve,’ para decirlo con el título de una obra teatral de Unamuno. Y ahora nos explicamos la razón de esas escenas subjetivas, que transmiten eficazmente el irreprimible desasosiego interno de quienes se han negado a encararse con la verdad y han basado su vida en el engaño y la mentira” (“El último teatro” 117).

8. See Buero's own recent comments in Mauro Armiño.

9. On this idea, see also Orr, Tragic Drama and Modern Society, xii, and Tragic Realism and Modern Society, 20–23.

10. Of course, as we have seen, there are weak protagonists like Juan of Las cartas boca abajo, whose only victory is the recognition of his mistakes, as well as such negative types as Valindin of El Concierto de San Ovidio and Vicente of El tragaluz.

11. Carol Rosen has used the word “impasse” in her discussion of modern drama. Although Rosen discusses plays that are set in confining institutions (hospitals, prisons, asylums, etc.), she notes that the “mode of impasse” is seen also in plays which are not set in such institutions: “This dramatic form has become so central that it is now an underlying assumption of most plays: the givens of a play of impasse are as much taken for granted, I would argue, as were the five-act divisions of French classical drama.” … Indeed, in plays by virtually all the major contemporary dramatists, beginning with O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, characters are lost, reacting to an overwhelming situation rather than instigating action themselves (23). Rosen cites Beckett's Endgame as the most extreme play of “impasse,” noting that it begins with the words, “Finished, it's finished, nearly finished, it must be finished” (269).