Mirabile Visu: The `Wonderful' World of Calderon

Aristotle's discussion of thaumaston in the Poetics had a great impact on Renaissance, baroque, and neoclassical theoreticians and preceptists, and it continues to inspire modern critics who find in that concept the essence of baroque art. In his highly influential book on the German Trauerspiel, Walter Benjamin cites Karl Borinski's study on classical antiquity in poetics and art theory in order to underscore the concept of thaumaston as a key to European art of the period: "The Aristotelian idea of thaumaston [wonder], the artistic expression of the miracle (the Biblical semeia [sign]), is what dominates [art and architecture too] in the period after the counter-reformation, most especially after the Council of Trent." (234) In the field of Spanish letters, E. C. Riley has also recognized the fact that "[n]unca llego a ser la admiracion mas importante que en la epoca llamada barroca." (183) Unlike Benjamin, Riley mentions the dual nature of admiratio as an aesthetic idea that integrates both emotion and cognition, although he does not develop the latter aspect of this concept. My aim in this paper is to briefly outline the intellectual function of thaumaston in the context of baroque thought and poetics, as exemplified on Calderon's stage. Riley's important article on admiratio sets the scene for a broader understanding of this concept, and it has served as the point of departure for further inquiries, especially among cervantistas, such as Eduardo Urbina and Jaime Fernandez. However, Riley was fundamentally interested in the difficult relation between admiratio and verisimilitude, which concerned contemporary preceptists like Tasso and El Pinciano. This problem is also what grounds Professor Urbina's distinction of three different types of admiratio in Don Quixote (21-22). While this question was universal in baroque art in general, it does not illuminate the original multifaceted sense of thaumaston, which serves as both a structural and aesthetic support for Calderon's dramatic art. Chapter 4 of Aristotle's Poetics seems to be the starting point for the discussion I have proposed, for here the author sketches an epistemological theory of aesthetics in which sensual pleasure takes a back seat to the enjoyment of recognition and learning provoked by mimesis: Learning things gives great pleasure not only to philosophers but also in the same way to all other men, though they share this pleasure only to a small degree. The reason why we enjoy seeing likenesses is that, as we look, we learn and infer what each is, for instance, "that this is so and so." (15) This relation between understanding and wonder outlined in the Poetics may also be found in book I of the Rhetoric, where understanding is deemed pleasurable because it fulfills man's nature, and wonder because it involves a desire to learn: And to learn and to admire are usually pleasurable; for in admiration there is desire, so the admirable is desirable, and in learning there is the achievement of what is in accordance with nature. (95) We may trace the "Aristotelian" connection between learning and wonder back to Plato, who placed one of the most famous formal statements on thaumaston into the mouth of Socrates in his dialogue with Theaetetus: "This sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy indeed has no other origin, and he was a good genealogist who made Iris the daughter of Thaumas." (860) In this sense, thaumaston depicts an intellectual manifestation of the desire to know that generates not only philosophy but also the creative world of story-telling or myth, as Aristotle would write in his Metaphysics: "it is through wonder that men now begin and originally began to philosophize .... thus the myth-lover is in a sense a philosopher, since myths are composed of wonders." (13) Calderon carries on this tradition in works like La estatua de Prometeo, which fuses philosophy and myth, artistic creation and intellectual search, through an allegorical representation of the dialectic between the ignorant soldier and the studious thinker. …