SOURCE: Anderson, Reed. “Tragic Conflict and Progressive Synthesis in Buero Vallejo's En la ardiente oscuridad.” Symposium XXIX, nos. 1-2 (spring-summer 1975): 1-12.

[In the following essay, Anderson considers Buero Vallejo's ideas about tragedy and applies them to En la ardiente oscuridad.]

En la ardiente oscuridad first reached the stage in 1950, though it was written in 1946, a year before the prize-winning Historia de una escalera which had launched Buero Vallejo's career as a dramatist.¹En la ardiente oscuridad is a tragedy in the purest sense, and its treatment of conflict is uncompromising. The dramatic action moves compellingly and resolutely toward catastrophe, and the ending suggests the synthetic and affirmative reconciliation of the conflictive principles whose clash is the drama's primary motive force. While it is not my purpose in this article to discuss the concept of tragedy as such, I believe that it is only from the perspective of certain ideas—both Buero Vallejo's and others'—as to what tragedy is about that En la ardiente oscuridad can be most thoroughly understood.

To begin with, Buero Vallejo regards the functional qualities of tragedy as supremely important. He alludes to the dynamic relationship between the spectator and the drama in Aristotle's concept of catharsis. Fundamental to the idea of catharsis is the conviction that human character can be morally refined and perfected through aesthetic experience, and that a profundly integrated and serene outlook may be cultivated through the formal dramatization of the most fearfully catastrophic events. According to Aristotle, the terror and pity aroused in the spectator as he witnesses the dramatic conflict and catastrophe are subsequently purged and altered by the final vision that is projected through the tragedy.

In order to explain the sources of these emotions attributed to the tragic experience by Aristotle, Nietzsche metaphorically characterized the tragic vision by suggesting that the world of tragedy is ruled by the opposed principles of Dionysus and Apollo: the realm of spontaneous and primitive emotion and of victimizing and terrifying chaos, opposed to the sublimely controlled, civilizing principle of formal order, harmony and restraint. The dramatic suggestion of eternal conflict between these two principles is, for Nietzsche, at the heart of tragedy's appeal to the spectator's mind and emotions, and its most significant discovery of truth. The cathartic process, however, refers more accurately to the prevailing emotional mood at the end of the tragic spectacle, and to the final suggestion of what man's understanding of these opposing principles must be. The cathartic effect is achieved through the conciliatory and harmonizing tendency inherent in the formal qualities of classical tragedy. Having experienced the terror of the boundless Dionysiac world of chaos which threatens to return man to an undifferentiated, instinctive level of will-less being, “here, when the danger to his will is greatest, art (the Apollonian) approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing.”² The final reassertion of the Apollonian world of formal and harmonious order as the universal principle that is to prevail purges the strong emotions of terror and pity experienced as the tragic drama unfolds. But these emotions are in no way annulled, weakened or repressed through the cathartic experience of tragedy. Rather, they are sublimated, given an ethical dimension, a human dimension which restores the integrated and tonic will to live, but without ever entirely displacing the annihilating and darkly seductive level of Dionysian insight into the dangerous world of chaos and terror.

This ethical side of the function of tragic catharsis is for Buero Vallejo supremely important; as he sees it, terror and pity, “por obra de los significados del relato trágico adquieren la calidad ética y humana que acaso inicialmente no tenían en el ánimo del espectador. Con lo cual, naturalmente, se desprenden de su cualidad instintiva y casi animal. Se serenan. Mas no porque pierdan fuerza, sino porque ganan nobleza. La catarsis no es ya descarga, sino mejora. La piedad y el terror, dignificados por el asunto trágico, se purifican.”³

It is through the dramatic struggle of the tragic hero that the spectator is led to perceive the fearful dimensions of the tragic experience. The deeply disruptive and dangerous quality of the hero's vision consists in its suggestion that the world of laws and conventions, held by society to be universally valid, is merely an elaborate formal façade which protects man from perceiving the dreadful and amoral nature of the universe which lies beyond the veil of his illusory ethics. Classical tragedy allows the hero's vision to burst forth in all its terrifying and seductive strength, but subsequently (often over the course of a trilogy of plays) shows that tragic vision yielding to the reassertion of the formal social order which it has so seriously threatened to destroy: “it is this final inhibition of tragic vision, this imposition of formal and moral order upon that which threatens it, that allows these dramas to be properly called classical in the best sense.”⁴ The defeat of the hero in classical tragedy does not prove his vision false; it does, however, prompt the spectator to investigate the reasons for that defeat.

Neither the hero nor the ethical order of society he seems to threaten can make claims to exclusive authority or truth, then. Buero Vallejo observes that, “la limitación del hombre posibilita que dos verdades parciales puedan oponerse y luchar entre sí, pues en su misma parcialidad reside su fallo.”⁵ The spectator may be inclined to attribute the hero's downfall to unintelligible and capricious blows of fate, extrapolating from such a vision an absurd and amoral universe. But as Buero Vallejo suggests, tragedy, when properly understood, compels us to examine the tragic hero's weakness, and not to see his defeat as the product of forces external to his character or to the nature of his ideas. The function of tragedy, as Buero Vallejo so eloquently defines it, is to strip back the illusion of blind fate and to bring us to confront the true and objective reasons for the hero's fall: “La tragedia intenta explorar de qué modo las torpezas humanas se disfrazan de destino.”⁶ This leads Buero Vallejo to the conclusion that, “El absurdo del mundo tiene poco que ver con la tragedia como último contenido a deducir, aunque tenga mucho que ver con ella como aparencia a investigar.”⁷

As Nietzsche implies, then, what we see at the end of the tragic drama does not suggest a return to a state of “unendangered comfort”; having experienced the relentless vitality and the compelling truth of the tragic visionary, such a return is impossible. The force of the tragic hero's vision (Nietzsche's Dionysian principle) continues to reverberate, even when submitted to the cold and conservative light of reason and order (the Apollonian). A final synthesis of the two conflictive principles is thereby suggested, wherein the vision of the tragic hero may serve to carry the ethical order beyond its former narrow and severe dedication to pragmatic stability and toward a more profound and inclusive sense of the truth.

Now we must ask how this sense of truth is conveyed in Buero Vallejo's En la ardiente oscuridad.

The scene of the drama is restricted to the interior of a school for the blind. In setting the stage, Buero is careful to specify in his directions that, “la ilusión de normalidad es, con frecuencia, completa.”⁸ The opening scenes depict the society of blind students as stable and positive; they are adjusted perfectly to their surroundings, and their surroundings are unchanging. They move unhesitatingly from one place to another without the aid of canes. In such a stable atmosphere the students have developed a high level of confidence and self-reliance. Even the school's language has been adjusted in order to encourage this sense of normalcy: the word “ciego” is prohibited, and has been replaced by the more neutral, “invidente” (literally, ‘non-sighted’).

Appearing in abrupt contrast to this secure and positive social order is Ignacio. His arrival as a new student in the school is marked by the sound of his cane. This cane, which Ignacio refuses to relinquish throughout the play, symbolizes his repudiation of the secure and practical norms imposed on the students by the school, and, in a broader sense, the cane is emblematic of his skepticism concerning the immutably ordered but dangerously hermetic world in which the students live. Ignacio, like the others, is blind; but unlike the other members of the school's society, he refuses to nurture in any way the illusion that he is normal.

Faced with the problem of Ignacio's intransigence, the Director, as representative and defender of the school's social and moral order, offers a facile diagnosis of Ignacio's nonconformity: “Es lo de siempre. Falta de moral … los muchachos de este tipo están hambrientos de cariño y alegría …” (p. 23). He proposes a therapy designed to ensure his happiness by bringing him into conformity with the school's norms of ethics and conduct: “hay que convencerle de que es un ser útil y de que tiene abiertos todos los caminos, si se atreve”; the other students must see to “la creación de una camaradería verdadera, que le alegre el corazón” (p. 23). It is added that Ignacio must be infused with, “nuestra famosa moral de acero” (p. 24). The terminology itself has the fraudulent ring of moral propaganda dedicated to the cultivation of a shared and very particular state of mind and spirit.

Ignacio attacks outright the superficiality of the students' cheerful optimism and accuses them of fleeing from confrontation with the truth of their tragic condition. He tells Juana that her companions are too complacent, insincere and cold, and he declares that he feels himself burning inside, “ardiendo con un fuego terrible, que no me deja vivir y que puede haceros arder a todos … Ardiendo en esto que los videntes llaman oscuridad, y que es horroroso … porque no sabemos lo que es” (p. 30). When Juana cannot comprehend what it is that Ignacio is suffering and searching for, he answers that he is searching for the ability to see. Refusing to adapt himself to the Center's norms, he warns Juana that it is strife that he brings into their midst, and not peace: “tu optimismo y tu ceguera son iguales … la guerra que me consume os consumirá” (p. 30).

The Center's functional illusion of normalcy only obscures certain fundamental truths concerning the material and spiritual condition of the blind; truths which, for Ignacio, are more important than the narrow practical lessons and superficial temper fostered by the school. Behind Ignacio's relentless probing is the notion that man cannot and should not rest until he has become fully aware of his human capacities and until he has discovered his true place in the universal scheme of human society. According to this, until the blind recognize the truth of their inferiority to the sighted, and all the implications of this inferiority, they will be incapable of reaching beyond the condition of shallow and complacent optimism which is the norm that the Center is dedicated to creating and maintaining. The sighted are superior in two basic ways, as Ignacio points out: first, they have power—they can confidently perceive the world which surrounds them with a glance and even at great distances, whereas the blind only know what they can touch and sometimes hear or smell; second, the sighted are the privileged possessors of an aesthetic world of light and color and the sensual visual presence of other people, phenomena which the blind cannot even begin to imagine.

The demoralizing and disruptive effect Ignacio's ideas have on the school are manifested in the second act of the play where it is observed that the students are falling behind in their studies and showing little enthusiasm for their normal learning activities. They no longer abide by the school's code of proper dress; rejection of that norm, indicated all along by Ignacio's comparatively unkempt appearance, is now shared by most of the Center's students. Erosion of the will which Nietzsche perceived as a product of the Dionysian vision achieves concrete expression here. As though hypnotized by the horrowing experience of truth that Ignacio has opened up to them, the students fall into passivity, cease to observe the school's regimen or to struggle for their own individual improvement; they seem to abandon themselves with Ignacio to the seductive and chilling realm of speculation concerning their true nature as blind members of a sighted universe. The formerly stable social order of the Center thus begins to deteriorate.

The extreme position in defense of the Center's traditional moral and social order is led by the Director, and articulated among the students by Carlos. Carlos begins by attempting to defeat Ignacio, “por fuerza del razonamiento,” and expresses absolute certainty concerning the correctness of his position. His concern is with the disintegration of will and morale that he observes in his fellow students; the ethical purpose of his attack on Ignacio is stated directly to his antagonist:

Mis palabras pueden servir para que nuestros compañeros consigan una vida relativamente feliz. Las tuyas no lograrán más que destruir; llevarlos a la desesperación, hacerles abandonar sus estudios.

(p. 47)

tu influencia está pesando demasiado sobre esta casa. Y tu influencia es destructora. Si no te vas, esta casa se hundirá.

(p. 60)

Finally, the struggle is defined by Carlos in terms of the principle of life—the positive social order which allows the blind to live “normally”—against the principle of death—Ignacio's demoralizing insistence on the inferiority of the world of the blind:

¡Yo defiendo la vida! ¡La vida de todos nosotros, que tú amenazas! Porque quiero vivirla a fondo, cumplirla; aunque no sea pacífica ni feliz. Aunque sea dura y amarga. ¡Pero la vida sabe a algo, nos pide algo, nos reclama! … Todos luchábamos por la vida aquí … hasta que tú veniste …

(p. 62)

Carlos' claim to the principle of life is compelling on the surface, and it is his most eloquent expression of the position he intends to defend.

But tragedy consists of the clash between two necessities, and Ignacio upholds the intrinsic truth of his own vision with equal strength. Carlos' contention that the blind can be as capable and secure as the sighted is quickly demolished, as Ignacio submits him to a test of his ability to move about without fear when a single piece of furniture, without Carlos' knowing it, has been moved out of its customary place in the room. Carlos' confidence breaks, and he fails the test. The illusion of security is possible only insofar as the physical world is arranged according to a pattern which the entire community accepts and learns. Ignacio not only refuses to conform to the illusion of normalcy which prevails, but he is dedicated to the open challenge and destruction of that illusion in the name of a higher truth; Ignacio declares that, “La región del optimismo donde Carlos sueña no le deja apreciar la realidad” (p. 44). “Este Centro está fundado sobre una mentira … La de que somos seres normales” (p. 47).

The illusion obscures the realities of the blind person's condition, and until those realities are admitted and understood, the positive aspects of Ignacio's idealism cannot be appreciated. Out of the confessed horror and mutilation of his condition as a blind man, Ignacio attempts to project himself through imagination into an understanding of what sight is, what it really means to see. The passion to understand the world of sight transforms itself for Ignacio into a faith that he himself might someday see. For Ignacio, then, Carlos' fanatic dedication to stability and order prevents him from knowing the urgent and passionate desire to understand his own condition: “Y esa es tu desgracia,” he tells Carlos, “no sentir la esperanza que yo os he traído. … La esperanza de la luz. … De algo que anhelas comprender …, aunque lo niegues” (p. 61).

As Buero Vallejo develops the tragic conflict, the two principles which are set against one another seem irreconcilable so long as they are upheld by two antagonists who defend them with equal passion as moral absolutes. Each individual's claims to ultimate authority amounts to a personal blindness, an egotism which precludes any possibility for compromise or accommodation, and therefore, the catastrophe seems inevitable.

But Buero Vallejo does not carry the conflict through exclusively on the level of two opposing ideal principles. Ignacio is the first to expose the fact that much of Carlos' desperate attempt to expel him from the Center is motivated by his fear that Juana has fallen under Ignacio's influence and that he has consequently lost her affection. Moreover, Ignacio's own egotistical need for Juana's understanding and love is likewise a central motivating force behind his struggle against Carlos' attempts to drive him out. Buero Vallejo's protagonists, in other words, suffer the human flaw of egotism, and it therefore becomes evident that the two conflicting principles are not irreconcilable in and of themselves, but that they are irreconcilable insofar as they are upheld in this particular context wherein there is also a conflict of wills between two all-too-human protagonists.

The dramatic catastrophe, then, arises, out of a social order which finds itself threatened with progressive disintegration due to the powerful presence in its midst of a visionary who refuses to compromise his vision, even in the interest of preserving certain traditional and stable social values. Threatened with chaos, the social order—represented here by Carlos, who, as we have seen, is egotistically motivated as well—wields its inherent power to achieve the violent elimination of the subversive visionary.

As he witnesses this conflict of opposing principles, where are the spectator's sympathies directed? In creating his tragic hero, Prometheus, Shelley was careful to show that the rebellious Olympian was without flaw, that his motives were pure, and that the order he was opposing was blatantly tyrannical and violently unjust.⁹ Shelley's tragedy, then, depicts the suffering of a totally blameless hero at the hands of an unreasonable and blind order of authority. Prometheus is the revolutionary hero of mankind, while Zeus represents the rigid order which is to be overthrown. In this case, our allegiance as spectators lies unequivocally with the cause of revolution; we are terrified at the violence with which that revolutionary impulse is punished, and we stand in awe of the hero's transcendent message of uncompromising struggle for the ideal, even as he suffers for his deed.

Buero Vallejo, of course, has set his play among ordinary people. Their physical blindness is paralleled by the blindness of their social order and its ethic; the message of light which Ignacio brings among them reveals the Promethian metaphor lying behind the drama as a whole. But the situation in En la ardiente oscuridad is far less imminently revolutionary than in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, and for that reason, more complex. In spite of the catastrophe which results in the death of the rebellious figure, Ignacio, the play's conclusion forcefully suggests the possibility for reconciliation and synthesis of the two conflictive principles. The spectator's sympathies, therefore, are claimed to some degree at various moments in the drama by both sides of the conflict, and it is precisely this refusal on the part of the dramatist to yield to the categories of romance or melodrama that makes for the authentic complexity of the tragic clash of character and ideals.

Nevertheless, even granting the complexity of the claims made on the spectator's moral allegiance, the play's hero is, without question, Ignacio; it is not Carlos, nor is it the social order which he represents and violently defends. And the principles which Ignacio represents are heroic by comparison; they are daring, they risk the truth which lies beyond conventional forms, and they enable Ignacio to summon the faith to carry his vision beyond the limits of formal reason as well. These are the admirable weapons with which Ignacio combats the vain practicality, the illusions upon which a society's order is founded. The spectator's sympathies are thus lured into the province of the rebellious visionary, and arrayed against the universal order that cannot accommodate his disturbing and dangerous vision of truth. From this perspective, the spectator is led to share the hero's judgment of the universal moral and social order as both shallow and artificial.

Buero Vallejo takes the situation even farther. Over the course of the repeated confrontations between Carlos and Ignacio, it becomes increasingly apparent that Carlos himself understands quite clearly the force, the attractiveness, and even the fundamental truth of Ignacio's tragic vision. Carlos as an individual is far more capable of accommodating Ignacio's vision than would be indicated by the attacks he directs against Ignacio both out of his egotism and in the name of the Center. After Ignacio's eloquent and moving speech in which he describes the vastness of his longing for vision and for an understanding of light,¹⁰ Carlos is described as having brusquely to shake off “la involuntaria influencia sufrida a causa de las palabras de Ignacio” (p. 62), before confessing to Ignacio that he has understood perfectly: “Te comprendo, sí; te comprendo, pero no te puedo disculpar” (p. 62). And it is with disdainful irony that Carlos observes the superficiality and frivolity of his fellow students who had flocked to Ignacio, fascinated with the poetry of his words, but without ever experiencing their profound and terrifying truth. Only Carlos, who we may believe has experienced that terror, is convinced sufficiently of its moral danger to social order to be willing to take the drastic steps necessary to eliminate the threat from their midst. Once Carlos has acted to remove Ignacio and his seductive and demoralizing vision, the other students quickly express their relief that this disruptive force has been eliminated and that life can return to its normal channels. Carlos, now become a murderer, remarks ironically and bitterly, using the word “ciegos” in the same deprecatory way as Ignacio had:

Muerto Ignacio, sus mejores amigos le abandonan: murmuran sobre su cadáver. ¡Ah, los ciegos, los ciegos! ¡Se creen con derecho a compadecerle, ellos, que son pequeños y vulgares! Miguelín y Elisa se reconcilian. Los demás respiran como si les hubiesen librado de un gran peso. ¡Vuelve la alegría a la casa! ¡Todo se arregla!

(p. 73)

While on a formal social level the moral order of the past is restored with the elimination of the visionary from the community, the play's final scene symbolically achieves the synthesis of opposing principles that had been impossible so long as they were upheld and espoused by two individuals with the egotistical failings of individual human beings.

Through conflict and the ensuing catastrophe, Carlos has come to acknowledge to himself the terrifying truth of Ignacio's ideal vision. His murder of Ignacio has been witnessed by the only sighted member of the Center's community, the Director's wife. Carlos, whose self-inflicted blindness compounds his physical handicap, failed to consider the superior power implicit in this woman's ability to see. Her sight has given her possession of a devastating secret, and regardless of how viciously Carlos attempts to negate the fact, the truth that her sight has afforded her ultimate power over him remains irrefutable, thereby confirming in fact Ignacio's abstract assertion that the sighted hold an arbitrarily vested power over the blind.

Finally, alone with Ignacio's corpse on the dimly lit stage, Carlos is once again only an insecure blind man, as he gropes about and sends the chess board crashing to the floor. And as he delivers his final soliloquy to the stars, after having run his hands over Ignacio's dead face, “en la suprema amargura de su soledad irremediable … [y] con la desesperanza de quien toca a un dormido que ya no podrá despertar” (p. 76)—as Carlos speaks, the final words we hear on stage are not Carlos' alone, but Ignacio's. The tragic vision formerly embodied in the dead hero has come now to inhabit the body and the spirit of his executioner.

It is Carlos, in En la ardiente oscuridad, who has suffered the cathartic experience, and not the society as a whole. Carlos is the only individual in Buero Vallejo's play who is capable of grasping both extremes of this dialectical conflict at once—indeed, his anguish at the end indicates the awesomeness of these extremes when they both take root in a single mind, and when seemingly irreconcilable truths make their claims to authority. Carlos' sense of the final truth about man's tragic nature is made more complex and more profound by the cathartic process of experiencing and acknowledging the validity of Ignacio's tragic vision, while recognizing as well the imperatives of the Center's ethical order for the survival of its society, and for the progress of its legitimate function of enhancing the positive will to live in its members. Murray Krieger has admirably summed up the fundamentals of the process we have seen at work in Buero Vallejo's play:

It is as if the security of the older order wanted to test the profundity of its assurances, its capacity to account for the whole of human experience, and thus bred within itself the tragic vision as its agent provocateur. And by having the rebellion incarnate in the tragic visionary finally succumb to a higher “destructive element”, by purifying itself through the cathartic principle, tragedy is asserting the argument a fortiori for the affirmation of its humanistic and yet superhuman values.

(p. 7)

The play's final hopeful vision is that of a progressive raising of consciousness which increasingly expands the range of human possibility by incorporating more and more synthetically the extremes of human experience and vision.

It is tempting to speculate on the “political” (in the broadest sense of the term) vision that Buero Vallejo implies through his play, En la ardiente oscuridad. His emergence from prison into a culture still paralyzed by a relatively primitive stage of fascist control and whose ethical self-justification was couched in a rhetoric of moral righteousness and a crusading sense of mission—his emergence into such a society must have suggested the metaphor of physical as well as spiritual blindness that is the core of En la ardiente oscuridad.

The spiritually crippling effects of an imposed political and moral order with absolute claims to universal authority must have been immediately apparent to any sensitive intellectual in such times. The genius of Buero Vallejo's vision, however, lies in his literary formulation of the problem, and the deeply humanistic resolution he suggests in this work. The unrelenting opposition of ideals produces the extraordinary emotional pitch of conflict necessary for the catharsis. But Buero Vallejo does not yield to the temptation of replacing the old moral tyranny with another tyranny whose newness and heroic dimensions could, were we confronting a more facile and less complex view of reality, lend this new order the spectacular and daring appeal of revolutionary progress and thereby inspire the liberal and discriminating spectator's wholehearted support. But Buero Vallejo avoids simplistic political categories; rather, in extremely complex times, he perceives the function of his theater as one of effecting a higher level of consciousness in his public. He is thereby able to encourage his public to struggle beyond the political contradictions of the hour toward an ultimately progressive and humane synthesis of the seemingly irreconcilable oppositions which characterized the historical time of the play's creation.

Notes

1. Martha T. Halsey, Antonio Buero Vallejo (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 17.

2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 60.

3. Antonio Buero Vallejo, “La tragedia,” El teatro. Enciclopedia del arte escénico, ed. Guillermo Díaz-Plaja (Barcelona: Noguer, 1958), pp. 66-67.

4. Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 6.

5. Buero Vallejo, “La tragedia,” pp. 70-71.

6. Antonio Buero Vallejo, “Sobre teatro,” Hoy es fiesta, Las meninas, El tragaluz (Madrid: Taurus, 1963), p. 62.

7. Buero Vallejo, “La tragedia,” p. 71.

8. Antonio Buero Vallejo, En la ardiente oscuridad, Colección teatro, núm. 3 (Madrid: Escelicer, 1970), p. 3.

9. As Shelley explains in his prologue, Prometheus is, “exempt from the taints of ambition, envy, revenge, and a desire for personal aggrandizement … [he is] the type of the highest perfection of moral and intellectual nature, impelled by the purest and the truest motives to the best and noblest ends.” Percy B. Shelley, Shelley's ‘Prometheus Unbound’: The Text and the Drafts, ed. Lawrence John Zillman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), p. 37.

10. There are actually three long speeches by Ignacio in this scene of confrontation with Carlos. The second and third of these speeches (pp. 61-62) have all the dramatic majesty of soliloquy. The fact that in this scene with Carlos, Ignacio gradually abandons his polemic tone in favor of the exalted lyricism of soliloquy is the first strong indication of the profound mutual understanding that implicitly links these two protagonists. Ignacio speaks with Carlos present as though he were speaking to himself, and, at the end of the play, Carlos speaks Ignacio's words in soliloquy as though they were his own; as indeed they are, now that we have come to understand the synthesis of the antagonistic principles at work within Carlos.