The Making of Illusions
Book Review by Dawn Tracey Brandes

Esther Fernández, To Embody the Marvelous: The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2021. 284 pages. $34.95.

In Esther Fernández’s book To Embody the Marvelous: The Making of Illusions in Early Modern Spain, the author uses puppets and performing objects as keys to understanding the tensions characteristic of the Baroque period, like those between faith and reason, fact and fiction, and truth and illusion. With an impressively interdisciplinary scope, Fernández argues that animated objects – from traditional puppets to theatrical trap doors – act as mediators between these conflicting poles, encouraging audiences, worshippers, and readers to revel in the illusions these objects provide even while simultaneously reflecting on the mechanisms required to create them. “These acts of disclosure,” she writes, “marked the transition from the premodern to the modern by attempting to deemphasize preternatural beliefs while exploring the limits of the senses and reason.”

After briefly tracing metaphors of mechanization through the political, philosophical, and scientific writings of the period, Fernández devotes each remaining chapter to a case study of the marvelous. Chapters 2 and 3 take physical animated objects as their subjects – specifically, the jointed Christ figure (or Cristo articulado) and the hagiographic marionette performances on the miniature stages of the máquina real. In both cases, Fernández articulates how the particular qualities of the puppet in performance might engage audiences on both emotional and intellectual levels. The puppet, for instance, “embodies the nexus between reality and wonder,” a liminality that is mirrored in the lives of saints who, like these marionettes, seem capable of stoically withstanding pain and violence.

Fernández argues that in both of these cases “their joints and strings hinted at their artificiality and induced a more reflective, critical devotion.” This is a compelling argument, but it seems to take as a given that Early Modern audiences would experience these visible mechanisms as alienating in the Brechtian sense. In general, speculating about an audience’s response to a material performance from the past is an enormous methodological challenge, and Fernández cleverly meets it by including contemporary iterations of her case studies in each chapter. Describing a 2007 performance using a large Cristo articulado, Fernández briefly touches on reactions from herself, the artists involved, and even the occasional audience member, all to great effect. I would have liked to know more about how the tension between critical distance and emotional involvement was generated in this performance, and how these audience and artist reactions may offer insight into historical audience reception to similar performing objects.

In Chapters 4 and 5, Fernández turns away from physical objects and towards literature involving them – specifically, incidents involving puppets and performing objects in Cervantes’s Don Quijote. Here, the critical distance alluded to in the first two chapters is more clearly wrought - Fernández teases out how Cervantes introduces objects formerly associated with the supernatural or superstitious, like Don Antonio’s oracular bronze head, only to reveal them instead as feats of technology. These revelations encourage rational skepticism, but also “artificial wonder and…futuristic imagination,” invoking both the promise and the dangers of modern technologies.

Finally, Chapter 6 brings together textual analysis and material performance in a compelling reading of the trap door in two plays by Calderón de la Barca. In these plays, Fernández argues, the technology of illusions is harnessed by ordinary characters attempting to (temporarily) overcome limits imposed upon them based on their social statuses. Vestiges of the supernatural are mobilized here metaphorically, naming both the ghostly existences of those forgotten by society and the physical tools (a secret tunnel, a transforming cupboard) used to circumvent the restrictions of that existence. This chapter ends with the book’s most interesting modern-day example: a reflection on the place of the trap doors in contemporary revivals of Calderón’s plays, wherein the social commentary has been downplayed and the comedy emphasized. Here, Fernández successfully shows how attitudes towards an object in performance can shift dramatically over time.

Overall, Fernández’s book is remarkable for its breadth, spanning the historical and the contemporary, the physical and the literary. It is rare that authors balance literature about puppets with physical puppets, finding ways in which the metaphor and the actual performance of puppetry intersect. Fernández makes clear that she sees this work as the beginning of a set of inquiries into the historical performing object and its relation to society, and she succeeds in setting an ambitious model for this vital work.