Dreams of Reason Create Monsters of Culture: La vida es Sueño

Abstract

This essay explores how the life that Calderón equates metaphorically with the work of the dream in La vida es sueño coincides less with the life of nature than with our contemporary understanding of character and culture in the secular order. It coincides, in other words, with the quasi-poetic undertakings of personal and collective identity or with the human world that we fashion out of the natural one, in response to our physical and psychological requirements. The framework for my analysis derives from the title of Francisco de Goya's celebrated etching, El sueño de la razón produce monstruos . For, like Goya after him, Calderón portrays the absurdity of granting sovereignty to discursive reasoning that lacks any real basis in sense experience, including the eminently reasonable experience of passion and appetite. When judged from within such an analytical framework, Calderón's most renowned drama reveals how rationalistic dreams—or the fantasmagoria of unbridled reason—beget what I argue to be the necessary, evolving monstrosities of character and culture in a fallen yet redeemable world.