César Rengifo (1915-1980), an artist who ventured not only into dramatic art, as a playwright and director, but also into painting, sculpture, poetry, journalism and essays, is considered within the Venezuelan theatrical panorama as the playwright who made a leap towards a modern conception of the country's genre, leaving behind the costumbrista precepts of the years between 1920 and 1940. Having begun as a playwright during those years with Why the people sing (1938) and Yuma or When the Earth is Green (1940), he imposed the current of social realism in these works and in the future ones he would write.
The Towers and the Wind (1956), a work of interest for analysis, is written in two acts and a prologue. The theme of oil is reflected within a dramatic structure in which a present and a past act in counterpoint, both being dramatized as present, although some pasts are not dramatized but evoked. Present and past are simultaneously and respectively real and imaginary planes. The present—a time that is realistically dramatized in the prologue—is further symbolized in the protagonist, the traveler, a young guerrilla who, in the first act, within the same real plane, arrives wounded at a hellish place with social connotations. As Marta, the innkeeper, informs him:
“This is where mining began: Didn't you see the abandoned towers and balancing machines and still-lit torches on the slope? At night, they look like the candelabras of hell.”
As Rengifo notes, the play's action takes place in a region near Mene Grande between 1914 and the final decades of the twentieth century. Through Marta, who, like the traveler, symbolizes the present, both being realistic characters, the historical fact is conveyed to us, but Rengifo turns it into a fictional fact when Marta tells the Traveler that this town:
"It's the site of the crosses. This town was talked about for a long time years ago, during the Indian massacres."
All of this—death, pain, and destruction—initiates the painting of a devastating social hell. In this first act, the descent into the unconscious is brought about by a hallucination, that of the traveler, which is the consequence of a very high fever caused by a wound. This hallucination is the bridge that introduces us to a hellish past; it alludes, according to the author, to the collective fever produced by oil exploitation and, behind it in time, to the one that launched the Spanish conquistadors in pursuit of El Dorado, an act already ignited by a flowering of paradisiacal mythical figures, refined in the indigenous imagination, as well as in the medieval and Renaissance Spanish imagination.
The central axis of the hellish historical past runs through the characters of the Stranger and Luciana Pantoja, united by the same Indian origin.
Luciana and the Stranger confront without hesitation and fiercely the political forces symbolized by Doll I (civil leader) and Doll II (representative), and the economic forces represented by Doll III (Yankee imperialist), titanic figures belonging to an unconscious drama much more than to a historical truth. The logic of the collective unconscious presides over the construction of the characters of the Double Traveler in the Stranger and of Marta in Luciana Pantoja; the two characters from the past are inhabitants of the collective shadows active in the characters of the present, all of which is describable in the terms of the archetypal Masquerade. In Renginfian figurative intuition, they portray ancestral presences, racial and indigenous essences, in the same way that a profound Attica could be portrayed in the drama of the House of Argos. They exist in the minds of the Traveler and Martha because they are archetypes, figures who, while walking the world, were devoured and resurrected, like Osiris, Perseus, like the dead and fragmented hero of all mythologies. The mythical matrix fulfilled in this plot is, therefore, that of the Belly of the Whale. Joseph Campbell tells us:
«The image of the Belly of the Whale constitutes a universal symbol (…) That is why throughout the length and breadth of the world those men whose function has been to make visible on the face of the earth the mystery of the death of the dragon that allows the renewal of life have incarnated in their bodies this great symbolic act, disseminating their flesh, just as it happened with the body of Osiris, for the sake of the renewal of the world»,
Behold, from this mythical flesh the Stranger is made. Whether he existed historically or not is of little importance. Already during his lifetime, he was consubstantiated with a mythical figure and lives among men, incarnating in one of them after his death:
“The Stranger isn’t dead… He’s on the wind…! Do you hear him? He’s running through the village! Through the jungle!”
Thus says the guerrilla, who is precisely the present incarnation of the old myth. Antonio María, who is the archetypal wise old man, transmitter of history, Tiresias, is the one who tells us this. He is the shaman of our cultures.
Antonio María is pessimistic:
Luciana: Every tower will sit on a grave!
Antonio: No one believes that. Not even I. The Indians and the smallholders were stubborn; they were able to negotiate the lands as they did. Anything done against the strong is useless. That's what many people said, and I repeated it and I repeat it.
The structuring of time serves this construction of collective memory: after seeing the Stranger determined to confront the political and economic forces, we will receive him, through temporal and spatial fragmentation (flashback), in a distant past that is related to his Indian origins and in a more immediate past such as his arrival at the inn "El Dorado", run at that time by Luciana Pantoja.
The fight between the Outsider and the Titans culminates in his death and constitutes a relevant action towards the end of the act, which is overshadowed by the author, who only informs us about it through Luciana and the characters of the prayer women.
“Luciana: Was this the very place where he was killed?
Rezandera II: Yes, the shots came from the bushes, but no one saw the people who fired.
Luciana: I did see them!
Rezandera I: (Surprised) You? Weren't you at the inn?
LucianaBut I saw them. They weren't in the bushes, but on the towers…
In this non-dramatized, rather than evocative, manner, one perceives the imprint of Brechtian dramaturgical techniques, aimed at avoiding catharsis; the aim is for this murder to provoke reflection in the viewer rather than, with its dramatized presence, eliciting a painful emotion, which would, on the contrary, be fundamental in Greek theater.
If the death of the Stranger coincides at the end of the first act, with the expression of a symbolic cry "Oil! Oil! Oil!", it will also translate into the transformation of Luciana Pantoja into a fierce fighter, she being the only character in the piece that undergoes a transformation. Antonio María tells the Traveler about Luciana's transformation:
"Yes! Incredible! He learned to handle weapons, shoot arrows, and command mobs! His name has become fearsome!"
Dialogue that refers us to the archetype of Athena, embodied in Luciana Pantoja. Karl Kerényi describes this goddess as
"...the terrible one, the one who raises the noise of battles, the leader of armies, the one who delights in tumults, wars and skirmishes..."
Perhaps there is also an archetypal resonance in the protagonist's relationship with the Stranger, described by Antonio María: "But they will never discover what kind of love there was between the stranger and Luciana! That will always be a mystery."
Let us remember that Athena is a virginal goddess in whom eroticism is not the center of the relationship, but rather communication through the ideal.
Antonio María will communicate with Luciana after her death. In this incident, we perceive a connection with the work of Brazilian playwright Nelson Rodríguez, in which Madame Clessi, after her murder, recounts the details of her murder to Alaide:
Antonio: (Disturbed) I don't know where you're coming from, Luciana! I can barely see your eyes. May I touch your hands?
Luciana: What for? You'll see my skin is burning! I'm standing there, alive! (He touches old Antonio María.) You, on the other hand, are cold, because you're dead and don't know it! A dead man like the others! (Old Antonio María slowly backs away.) I'm going to look for living men to stand in front of the towers! And I will find them, be sure of it!
Female characters, more passive than Luciana Pantoja, Marta, and the Beggar (the voice of outspoken discontent), are the Lugo sisters, romantic young women who only experience love through Luciana Pantoja and the Stranger. Antonio María confesses about them:
"Those Lugo spinsters are constantly on the lookout for anything resembling love. They've reread the letters in that chest more than a hundred times..."
With the death of the Stranger and Luciana Pantoja the conflict of the past is resolved, a conflict that is social and therefore similar, if I may cite it, to that of The invaders by Chilean Egon Wolff, but with a significant difference in its approach: The Traveler does not live, like Lucas Meyer, two lives, in which the exterior is in conflict with the interior, and it is in this internal life where social conflicts reside, creating an interior-exterior dialectic. Quite the contrary, the Stranger and Luciana lack an interior-individual life. With this, Rengifo wanted to exclude the individual-psychological in accordance with the Brechtian formal postulate - a situation that does not occur in Wolffian work. More psychological construction exists in the protagonist of the present, the Traveler. There is a psychology in him, but, let us distinguish, it is not an individual psychology, but rather it refers to an archetypal soul, twin of his own and previous one. Bringing this to Villegas's categories - internal obstacle and external obstacle - we note that there is no internal conflict in the character. The conflict is social, external; he clashes with the government soldiers.
Rengifo plays with the poetry of testimonial objects, appealing to the marvelous virginity that, to our Western eyes, the indigenous worldview confers upon them, which also has the power of a mythical truth. The wind howls in this infernal Zlumaque of historical hallucination, and the howling is a reading of the moving air common to any culture, but which acquires a special richness when Antonio María says of Luciana: "She wanted to be alone, and he had to leave her. She will speak to him as certain Indians do with their dead, and the wind will wipe away her tears. Do you hear it as it passes this night? I assure you it is howling over the body and blood of the Stranger..."
Thus, the wind becomes a character, allied to the protests of Luciana and the Stranger. The towers, although made of iron, also have a soul, especially powerful due to the indigenous animism that gives them their name. Here, the Todorovian principle of the transgression of the boundary between matter and spirit is fulfilled, which, as stated above, characterizes the disordered imagination. In the dialogues between Antonio and Luciana, this becomes evident:
“Antonio: You see, he didn't want to believe them. But young man, the rooks walked. Shh, I heard them at night. Pan, thump, pan, thump... pan, thump... Under their feet, the stones, the roots, the swamps crunched. And Luciana heard them too.
Luciana: (Anxious) Antonio María. Do you hear? The towers are advancing. They're knocking down trees and crossing us. (The dull metallic noise is heard again) They're crushing towns, cities, roads! Hear them! Soon they'll crush people!
Within this magical vision, the towers are also, like the wind, characters, titanic characters, just as the forces symbolized in the dolls are.
The music that indicates the play's stage directions surpasses reality by exaggerating it, thus recreating a hallucinated reality in keeping with the protagonist's experience, a reality that falls within the aesthetics of Expressionism, to which the dance scene where Uncle Sam bursts in is akin, amid a hysterical atmosphere created by rapid-fire slide projections. Seen in this way, oil is a machine driven by titanic forces that manipulate the national group.
After the hallucinatory reminiscence of a past of ambition and violence into which he has been immersed, a descent into a markedly collective unconscious, the protagonist returns to his present, thus closing a narrative circle. Still wounded, he dies shortly afterward, fulfilling his destiny as Osiris and Perseus, as the Outsider did archetypically in earlier decades.
Rengiferian characters are thus inhabitants of the shadow zone of a character in the dramatic present (the Traveler). It is a collective shadow, as can be deduced from the presence of archetypes such as: Athena, the warrior (Luciana Pantoja); Osiris, the destroyed hero who will be resurrected in the minds of the people (the Stranger); the Titans (puppets I and II); and the wise old man, connoisseur of history and its narrator (Antonio María). The setting, although realistic, is mythologized: certain fires are "from hell." All this material comes from the protagonist's unconscious, composing the archetypal Masquerade, described by Northrop Frye. That is, the theater existing in the mind of a character is dramatized, regardless of whether it may or may not have existed in reality. All of the above implies, of course, following Patrice Pavis's classification, that the action appears mediated by the protagonist.
In this work too, the dramatic text generates great theatricality. But unlike, for example, Three hundred million y Dress as a bride, In this play, the obstacle to overcome lies within the protagonists. In this piece, there is an external obstacle both for the protagonist of the present, who is wounded by a gunshot wound from reality, and for the protagonist of the past. In this evoked plane, a plot develops with well-defined external obstacles that grow in dramatic intensity toward a finale, which is the death of the Stranger and Luciana Pantoja. The descent into the unconscious, the protagonist's hallucination, functions as a delaying effect.
Like Roberto Arlt in his country, Rengifo breaks away from the costumbrista aesthetic in Venezuela. In terms of the descent into hell as a descent into the unconscious, this work executes it frontally, both in the construction of the plot and in the technique, with a structuring of scenes in the line of disordered imagination. However, he does not incorporate this into continental dramaturgy, as Nelson Rodríguez had already done in 1943, with Wedding dress. His central contribution is the creative combination of Brechtian techniques of de-emphasis and avoidance of catharsis with disordered imagination.
