«Es teatro vuestra oración: Santa Teresa’s Performed Confession in Juan Mayorga’s La lengua en pedazos»

Anne Holloway
«Es teatro vuestra oración: Santa Teresa’s Performed Confession in Juan Mayorga’s La lengua en pedazos»
eHumanista, vol. 32, 2016. Monographic Issue: «Santa Teresa, quinientos años después», ed. María Morrás y Rebeca Sanmartín Bastida

eHumanista | University of California Santa Barbara | Department of Spanish and Portuguese | Santa Barbara | California | ESTADOS UNIDOS


Extracto de páginas 163-165 del artículo en PDF

«In the present article I propose to explore the relationship between Mayorga’s playtext and Teresa’s Libro de la Vida, to suggest that Mayorga’s inclusion of an interlocutor, the device that permits Teresa’s enunciation, evokes the silent presences on the margins of the sixteenth-century text. Mayorga creates an imagined dialogue replete with the tensions the saint adeptly negotiated in her autobiography. The play reflects ongoing lines of inquiry in our evolving understanding of Teresa and other holy women of the Early Modern period.

»Grace M. Jantzen, in inviting us to consider the category of mystic as social construction as well as individual exploration has pointed to the need to view the mystic as housed, embedded in and, to some extent, created by the community. Mayorga’s play-text, then, strikes at the heart of the compositional circumstances of Teresa’s text – staging, and arguably heightening the origins of her rhetorical strategies, the sense of awareness of readership and potential censure we encounter within the Libro de la Vida. [NOTE 4]

»Of course, Mayorga’s play is not an isolated example of the saint depicted in conversation or under interrogation in recent years. Framing the published screenplay of his Teresa Teresa (2003) [all references to Mayorga’s plays come from to: Mayorga, Juan. Teatro (1989-2014). Ed. Claire Spooner. Segovia: La Uña Rota, 2014.], which featured Teresa as a guest on a televised talkshow, the director Rafael Gordon noted that: “Santa Teresa de Ávila solía decir que ‘ningún hombre tiene la audacia de una hormiga’. De esta audacia me he servido para recuperar su voz. Hacer hablar a Santa Teresa en los comienzos del siglo XXI…” (17-18). Gordon’s introduction, founded on an appropriation of the saint’s own words, carries an echo of the coercive genesis of Teresa’s Libro de la Vida, a text authored, at least in part, to account for the saint’s visionary experience. Despite the location of the saint within a twenty-first century context, Gordon’s use of the televisual device lends a somewhat spectral quality to the interaction.

»In contrast, Daniel Albaladejo, who played the role of the Inquisitor in La Lengua en pedazos labelled it “todo lo que quisiste preguntarle a Teresa y nunca pudiste” on the radio show ‘El ojo crítico’, signalling the play’s adoption of an interrogative mode coupled with a sense of a saint approachable, real, contemporary, in a staging devoid of the visual cues associated with sanctity, including her habit. [NOTE 5]

»Like Gordon, Mayorga’s playtext similarly announces its debt to Teresa’s own writings, in particular Libro de la Vida; indeed in this theatrical vision the Inquisitor becomes the very impetus for the authorship of the text. Such creative adaptation of literary texts abounds within Mayorga’s corpus, and the playwright has spoken of his desire to become intimately acquainted with the texts he recasts in his drama: “tener una relación íntima con textos mayores te permite entrar en la cocina de los grandes y uno espera que algo se le pegue de todo eso” [...]. [NOTE 6] The kitchen is precisely where the play situates Teresa, acknowledging the mundane domestic setting as the site for a charged encounter.

»Attempts to recreate the discourse of Santa Teresa de Jesús began soon after her death, with the nuns of the convent of the Incarnation attempting to recapture the gracious and deferential tone with which she assumed the role of Prioress in 1571. Accounts affirming the sanctity of Santa Teresa de Jesús such as that of María de San Jerónimo speak of the transformative effect of conversations with the saint on the most recalcitrant or afflicted individuals, providing abundant examples of the fervour the spirited reformer inspired on her travels, and the value attributed to her written word within her own lifetime. [...]

»However, the earliest examples of theatrical representations of the saint’s life (attributed to Lope de Vega) do not attempt to engage with the complexities of Teresa’s writings, as Barbara Mujica has noted. Indeed there is “no evidence that Lope (or his co-authors) actually read the saint’s own writings”, nor were they interested in portraying the saint’s insecurities (184). [NOTE 8]

»Mayorga’s theatre (particularly plays such as El cartógrafo and Himmelweg has been associated with a “dramaturgia de lo irrepresentable”. He has also spoken of his affinity for ‘teatro pobre’, which gestures towards a sense of the limits of language, envisaging that with successful execution words will have the importance for the spectator that they have in dreams: “El lenguaje de esa nueva poesía estará en algún lugar entre el gesto y el pensamiento, donde las palabras tendrán – ni más ni menos – la importancia que tienen en los sueños” (Mayorga 2001, 43). [...] La lengua en pedazos reveals anxieties which surface elsewhere in the Mayorgan corpus; wherein language itself is repeatedly scrutinised. In Hamelin, for example, the figure of the ‘Acotador’ interprets events on stage, narrating and mediating, insistent that the audience note language as subject and object of the drama: “Ésta es una obra sobre el lenguaje. Sobre cómo se forma y cómo enferma el lenguaje” (Mayorga 2014, 412). [...]

»For Mayorga, Teresa’s text becomes emblematic of the dual challenge, firstly of the translation of ineffable experience into language, and secondly of the inadequacy of the translator, or playwright faced with the idiosyncrasies of Teresian style.

[NOTES]

»[4] Mayorga’s text may be read as a dramatization of the inquisitorial response to the Vida. The first version of the Vida was completed by 1562, with passages excised by the Inquisition. In 1574 a thorough review of the Vida was undertaken and the manuscript was never returned to the saint.

»[5] Romanos, interview for “El ojo crítico” (15.04.2014). Commenting elsewhere on the recreation of the convent space in rehearsals, Mayorga wryly observes that El convento de San José “acabó siendo una mesa de Ikea y dos sillas” (Blanco and Talián n.p.)

»[6] Although her own focus lies elsewhere, Carmen Abizanda Losada’s 2013 doctoral thesis [La obra dramática de Juan de Mayorga (1989-2009): teatro histórico-político y teatro social. Universidad de La Coruña, 2013. Dirigida por José María Paz Gago] notes the abundance of creative adaptations of literary texts within Mayorga’s corpus, including Sonámbulo from Sobre los ángeles by Rafael Alberti, Job (from the biblical source), and Catástrofe, based on the writings of Bartolomé de las Casas. His Palabra de perro is also inspired by Cervantes’ El coloquio de los perros.

»[8] On the divisive potential of theatrical representations of St Teresa, see also Jesús Mª Sanchidrián Gallego, who documents the response in Ávila to the 1906 production ‘La Vierge d’Avila: Sainte Thérèse’, starring Sarah Bernhardt, which led some to take to the streets in protest.»