In this paper, the comedy Los intereses creados by Jacinto Benavente will be analyzed from two points of view: inversions and investments. On one hand, I will analyze the substitution or the inversion of dramatic and thematic concepts; and on the other, I will focus on the financial investments. The theoretical approaches to irony by Plato, Booth and Peter Roster will be used to analyze substitutions and investments. The complementary parts—substitutions, investments, irony and the characters—place this play in the rich tradition of the comedy and, even more specifically, in the context of commedia dell’arte.

Benavente and the Spanish Discourse on theater

Inversiones en Los intereses creados, de Jacinto Benavente

This paper proposes a study of contrasts and ironies in Jacinto Benavente’s play La ciudad alegre y confiada. They produce stylistic and comical effects that are typical of the Spanish drama in the first decades of the 20th century. However, they also define the ideological structure of the play and justify its outcome. The contrasts and the ironies of this play will be studied in three sections. In the first one, the personal characteristics and roles will be examined. Their contradictions and incoherencies contribute to the unpredictable nature of the play. In the second section, the analysis of the socioeconomic structure of the society will provide the bases for individual and collective conflicts. The last section focuses on the relation between life and death. The key protagonists Crispin and Desterrado are convinced that death is the only way to purify the people and to save their town. Soren Kierkegaard, Wayne Booth and Peter Roster provide the theoretical approaches to irony that will be used in this study.

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Los contrastes y las ironías en la ciudad alegre y confiada de jacinto benavente

Jacinto Benavente’s Los intereses creados (1907) offers a cultural cartography of Spain’s maturing capitalist society. While for most critics the play either portrays the cultural milieu’s moral relativism, or love’s triumph over venality, my study begins with the thematization of interest to show how Los intereses creadosstages the fin-de-siecle crisis as a clash of moral codes, only partially involving moral relativism, self-interest, and venality. While posing as a triumphant love story, I argue, the play traces instead the integration of the social body into a monetary economy through a performance masterfully orchestrated by a bourgeois dramatist (Crispin), sanctioned by modern institutions of power and discourse, and carried out through sophisticated cultural and ideological devices (theatri-cality, objectivity, and consensus). Love, honor, kinship—previously treated as incommensurable values—are displaced or converted into measurable assets. Like Simmel’s “life detail,” economic transactions occurring in the play make visible the ideological architecture and mechanisms of power that inform a new understanding of personal and societal bonds, one where pecuniary exchange agglutinates the social body and performs as a vehicle for desire, where speech and bodies circulate like money, and where interests, consensus, and theatricality bind in a more (allegedly) democratic fashion than love, honor, biology, and kin-ship, successfully resisting the never-ending ethical temporality opened by the gift.

Not All Ladders Are for Climbing: Money, Gifts, and the Social Body in Los intereses creados

A collection of manifestos originally published in 1938, The Theater and Its Double is the fullest statement of the ideas of Antonin Artaud We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theater, the only value of which is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger, he wrote He fought vigorously against an encroaching conventionalism he found anathema to the very concept of theater He sought to use theater to transcend writing, to break through the language in order to touch life "

Benavente and the Spanish Discourse on theater

Citations

Inversiones en Los intereses creados, de Jacinto Benavente

Los contrastes y las ironías en la ciudad alegre y confiada de jacinto benavente

Not All Ladders Are for Climbing: Money, Gifts, and the Social Body in Los intereses creados

References

The Theater and Its Double